In the June-August 2026 issue of NZ Marketing magazine, we asked agency founders to tell us the story behind why they started their agency, their favourite thing, what they’ve learned and their best advice.
Utility
- Founder: Tom Pitchforth
- Year founded: 2018
Tell us the story behind founding your agency.
Utility started from a fairly simple observation: most businesses sitting on genuinely valuable expertise were doing very little with it.
They had deep knowledge their customers actually needed, but their marketing was either missing it entirely or burying it in noise. I wanted to build an agency anchored in information marketing. The idea that earning the right to sell to your customer is a matter of equipping them first.
Clarity, structure and useful content before tactics and pressure. That philosophy sits alongside a genuine love of data, SEO (which is my background) and content creation.
Content that earns trust works a lot harder when it is built on real insight and measured properly. The combination of those two things, substantive content and rigorous performance thinking, is what Utility is built around. We are Wellington-based but service clients across New Zealand and overseas.
What’s your favourite thing about running your own agency?
Choosing the work. Being selective about the clients and problems we take on means the work is almost always interesting.
We look for organisations with genuine expertise and a real desire to share it with their customers. That filter makes the day-to-day feel meaningful rather than just busy.
That said, our clients’ industries vary greatly including energy, ecommerce, industrial, technology, professional services, healthcare and government.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?
That the best marketing thinking almost always starts with listening. Not performing expertise, not filling silence, just paying close attention to what a business actually does and what its customers genuinely need.
The more time I spend observing before advising, the better the work gets. Staying curious and approaching every client as a student first has taught me far more than trying to be the smartest person in the room ever would have.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received or given out?
Know your place in the world and do good work there.
Not in a limiting sense, but in the sense of being clear about what you are genuinely good at, owning that space with confidence, and not trying to be everything.
Anything else we should know?
Utility is growing. We have a new director of performance and growth who joined in July, which lets us sharpen the combination of content, SEO and paid amplification that sits at the heart of what we do. Exciting times!
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 87, June-August 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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