Having grown a news agency into a two-business group over eight or nine years, Nicholls is now confronting a harder question: who holds a founder accountable once the team is too big to run alone.
Ben Nicholls started out as a picture editor for The Sun and the Daily Mail, then spent eight or nine years working for national newspapers before deciding to build his own version of that world from scratch. Around eight or nine years ago, with encouragement from his wife, he launched a national news agency rather than continue supplying stories to newspapers individually. That agency, Jam Press, now sits alongside a separate PR business, Jam Prime, and Nicholls describes the pair as heading toward a broader media group.
The two businesses run on different scales. Jam Press employs around 23 to 24 people across news editing, picture desks, production, writing and research, and Nicholls now leaves most of its day to day leadership to that team. Jam Prime is leaner, with four account managers plus Nicholls himself working largely in sales alongside a colleague, Sanjay, as they build out the firm's growth and sales process. By his own estimate, the group is now the third largest national news agency operating in the UK, still expanding against a small number of larger, longer established competitors.
Nicholls' account of building a leadership layer follows a consistent pattern: he takes on a role himself early, then works to make himself redundant from it by hiring someone better suited to run it permanently. That approach has produced around five managerial positions across the two businesses, several filled by former newspaper colleagues whose work he already trusted. He is candid, too, about the trade-offs of running a fully remote team. It is, in his words, both a blessing and a burden: it has forced the group to get efficient at communicating without face to face contact, but he says morale and culture are harder to maintain at a distance. The main counterweight is an annual gathering the team calls Jam Fest, held near his base in Cornwall, built around surfing and dinner together that he credits with resetting relationships after weeks of terse messages sent under pressure.
A related tension sits closer to home. Nicholls says that in the early years of running the business, he could rely on wearing every hat himself, from writing stories to managing production. As the group has grown and he has stepped further into sales, he has become more conscious of a gap at the top: there is no obvious structure holding a founder accountable once the team below him is handling most of the operational work. He points to a stretch last year, working with an outside advisor between September and February, as a period that helped him stay disciplined about what he and Sanjay were building toward, and says it is something he intends to pick back up.
Commercially, Jam Prime's pitch rests on pairing PR strategy with Jam Press's newswire, which distributes between 40 and 50 stories a day to national publishers. The firm is narrowing its client base toward travel, lifestyle and wellness brands, including ad hoc campaign work for TUI, and has moved toward offering guaranteed results rather than billing for hours, a model Nicholls says larger clients increasingly expect given tighter budgets since the pandemic.
Nicholls says the next phase involves hiring someone to take over sales so he can step back from the role, while the group invests more heavily in publishing its own content and building audiences directly. He describes a three to five year horizon for that work, alongside an acknowledgment that growth, for now, is deliberately paced around time with his family.