In-house or external...
Studio or agency...
Let's bolster the backbone behind great creative work.
Personal Career Coaching
Flexible sessions are built around supporting creative professionals working within industry-leading environments, including Advertising, PR, Marketing, Design, Film, Video & Games.
Creative Direction
These sessions focus on ensuring your work resonates with audiences and delivers lasting commercial results. Together we guide creative direction, helping projects align ambition and vision with platforms, trends, and audience expectations - ultimately increasing pitch success, impact, and return on investment.
Leadership & Team Culture
These sessions focus on leadership development within the creative industries, including team building dynamics, communication styles and stakeholder management. They also guide conflict resolution, critical decision making and workload prioritisation.
Professional Flow
These sessions focus on time and productivity management, confidence and stepping into yourself, stress management, wellbeing and resilience training.
Career Strategy & Growth
These sessions support your trajectory and speed of progression, focusing on personal brand positioning, networking and career planning. They also guide remuneration strategy, negotiation preparation, finance projections, cash flow management and contract development.
Senior Advisory Services For Creative Agencies & Studios
Clarity:
Strategic Direction & Growth
Mike helps agencies and studios set clear, practical, and future-proof paths for growth.
He works on shaping your positioning, projections, defining ideal clients, and improving conversion - all while helping to support confident decisions about hiring, suppliers, partners, investment, and expansion.
The focus is on creating strategies and workflows that allow your business to scale sustainably without wastage, and stay creatively ambitious in a growingly fragmented and agile market.
Culture:
People & Leadership Dev
Mike strengthens your foundations, helping you attract and retain the right talent, build teams that communicate and collaborate effectively, and foster a culture that supports professional development, personal wellbeing, and a balance of creativity and commercial impact.
Using Myers-Briggs and Insights, he also clarify values and reveals how individuals think, communicate, and perform.
Craft:
Creative Direction & Operations
Mike ensures your work resonates with audiences and drives lasting commercial impact.
He streamlines processes and AI-driven workflows to improve efficiency and scalability, removing bottlenecks, ensuring projects are cost-effective, and optimising how you manage third-party supplier and partner proposals, pitches, and contracts.
He also guides creative direction, helping projects align ambition and vision with platform, trends, and audience expectations - increasing pitch wins, impact and return on investment.
About Mike Buonaiuto
For over two decades, Mike has crafted stories and built companies and studios at the intersection of culture, identity and power.
He understands how stories move people - creating resonant narratives with emotional depth and commercial reach that don’t just entertain, but define and drive cultural conversation and social impact.
Working across advertising, film and games, Mike is an award-winning director, writer and story consultant, helping teams and crews create work rooted in emotion, identity and culture that keeps pace with evolving audience behaviours.
An Impact-Driven Career
In 2015, Mike founded, scaled and has since exited Shape History, the award-winning social impact communications agency, working globally alongside institutions including the United Nations, Atlantic Council, and WHO, and locally with organisations such as The Big Give, My Life My Say, and Amnesty International UK.
He served the agency as its CEO & Creative Director from 2015-2022, remaining a Non-Executive Director until 2024.
Previously, he served as a Creative Director for the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and built the creative studio within Weber Shandwick’s (IPG, Omnicom) EMEA offering.
TEDx: No wonder people are quitting. Business must do better.
Quitting is at a 20-year high. After years of crisis, young people face unprecedented barriers to financial, physical, and emotional security. In response, a generation is voting with its feet - leaving companies that worsen these challenges and joining those that address them. Mike’s TEDx Talk reframes quitting, offering businesses a more human approach and urging founders to take responsibility for solving the defining issues of our time.
Mike is one of the few people I know who really understands what it takes to be a progressive business leader in the world today. Not only has he setup and grown his own successful social impact agency, but he’s taken the time to truly get to grips with the most salient issues impacting people today, such as mental heath in the workplace. If you want to help get your business in better shape for the next decade, listen to what Mike has to say.
Tom Tapper, CEO
Nice and Serious
This support has really helped unlock the next phase for the company. The guidance has been incredibly valuable in running the studio effectively and planning for future growth - from reworking how it's run on the operations side to guiding me through sustainable P&L projections. It's helped me break the cycle and given a clear direction on where I want the business to go moving forward.
Ben Taylor, CEO
Tailored Studios
Mike supported us during a critical phase of scaling our agency. With his guidance, we established in-house procedures that are both healthy for the business and supportive of the team. Mike is not only an experienced business consultant but also genuinely personable and attentive to the people behind the company. It was a true pleasure working with him, and I would highly recommend him to anyone seeking support in scaling their creative business.
Alex Aalto, CEO
AALTO Production
Read more...
Mike's first book Founder Therapy, published June 2023 reaching best-seller status.
Our ‘high-performance’ generation has a problem with burnout. Depression and anxiety are now at record levels amongst founders and leaders. In Founder Therapy, Mike Buonaiuto uncovers why and offers a radical new approach, presenting 50 lessons to start, scale and sell without wounding our wellbeing.
