Lisa Eyo Andrews is the founder and CEO of This Is LD, a strategy-led growth agency operating in complex and regulated sectors, with offices in London, Vancouver and Hong Kong. She works with enterprise organisations in healthcare, financial services, technology and education at the intersection of marketing strategy, AI governance and commercial growth.
She has spent over a decade building a company and a team that is globally minded, diverse and talented, and motivated to do its best work for clients in industries where judgement and accountability come first. LD has become one of the go-to agencies for international marketing strategy, complex execution and regulatory compliance.
Lisa is a speaker, writer and board member with a passion for sports photography and a reluctant obsession with running.
Company: This is LD
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Lisa Eyo: Hello! My name is Lisa and I am the founder and CEO of This Is LD. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 18, starting out in the music industry in Australia co-running an artist management company, before moving to Canada and launching the first version of my agency in 2012.
I have never wanted to follow the traditional path in life, and business has let me build my life on my own terms. It has given me the freedom to create my own opportunities, while at the same time teaching me a lot about hard work, sacrifice, and the endless need to pivot in a world that is constantly changing.
LD was built around my skills as a designer and developer early on in my journey, and grew into a full agency very organically as more client partnerships came in and the work became more complex. LD established a strong international footprint through my own travels around the world, and operated across multiple markets and time zones long before the pandemic made location-independent business normal.
After establishing a new HQ in London in 2016, LD doubled down on the healthcare industry, building a strong portfolio with clients from scale-ups to large enterprise, delivering strategic marketing and compliance-aware execution across the US, UK and Europe. As our experience in regulated sectors grew, we expanded into other industries while narrowing in on what we did best: complex, high-stakes international marketing.
LD operates almost entirely on referrals and networking. We are quite selective about the clients we work with, and we are extremely ROI-driven. My own background is in intelligence analysis, and it still shapes how I look at a business: work out what is actually going on first, decide what matters, and only then get to the marketing.
AI has changed the game in marketing very quickly, and not in ways any of us fully understand yet. Our industries are still human-first, but they are increasingly supported by AI-driven automation that allows us to be far more effective and efficient than ever. What AI is really doing is making execution cheap. It isn’t making judgement cheap, and it can’t be held accountable when something goes wrong in a sector where that has consequences. That is where we have put the agency, and it’s why I’m excited about what comes next in our space.
What was the moment you realized that complexity was holding your company back, and how did that shift your approach to product, operations, or strategy?
Lisa Eyo: The honest answer is that it wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was a quiet one. A client we had worked with for years hired another agency to run their marketing, and they didn’t ask us. We were still looking after their website and their IT. Nobody was unhappy with us. What had happened was that the people who brought us in had moved on, and the people who replaced them looked at us and saw only a website supplier. When I went and looked at how we described ourselves, I couldn’t really blame them.
We were a full-service agency. Ten services, every engagement built from scratch, and we described ourselves by channel. We could do anything, which to a buyer can also mean you don’t specialise in anything. The complexity holding us back wasn’t our clients’ complexity. Regulated healthcare, financial services, multiple markets, compliance in every one of them: that’s hard, and it’s exactly where we earn our money. The complexity that was hurting us was our own. We had made it difficult to understand what we were for.
So the shift was really about where complexity is allowed to live.
On strategy, we stopped describing ourselves by channel execution and started qualifying work by sector, scale and how complex the problem actually is. If it isn’t complex and regulated, we’re probably not the right agency, and we say so.
On the offer, we stopped pitching. We don’t walk in with a proposal; we start with a diagnostic, work out what’s actually going on in the business, and only then talk about what we can do specifically for that business. That’s the analyst in me. You don’t simplify the world, you simplify the question.
The principle I took from it is that in a complex industry, simple isn’t the opposite of serious. The work stays complex. The decision to work with us shouldn’t be.
Can you share one specific example of something you simplified (a product feature, process, pricing model, or customer experience) that delivered outsized results?
Lisa Eyo: I want to pick an example here of how we did this for a client, rather than ourselves. This is something that many business owners can relate to.
I’ll talk about a medical training organisation we took on earlier this year. It’s led by a brilliant and well-known surgeon, and the website had grown up around her: a clinic site, a training provider, a press page, a congress, all on one domain.
But great doctors are not marketers. When we audited it, 25 of the treatment pages were dead, more than half the pages in the sitemap weren’t linked from anywhere, and every page still carried the generic placeholder titles the developer had left behind.
That’s what complexity usually looks like in practice. Not a hard problem. Just a business that had never been asked to define itself clearly as it grew, and had taken on a life of its own under someone with a very specific skillset and focus.
So the question was simple: who is this for?
The client wanted to be known as a training platform for doctors. Patients were finding the site and leaving, and doctors couldn’t find the courses. The simplification was fairly brutal. One audience.
We retired every patient-facing page and redirected it to the training pathway it related to, rewrote every title and description for a medical professional, and built a twelve-month content plan around the website and the client’s related channels, where every single piece talks to a practitioner and not a patient.
The business ended up with a clear position and a clear path from first visit to booking. There was nothing clever in it. It was just one decision, made properly, then applied without exception.
What made it outsized wasn’t the SEO we fixed or the website we rebuilt. It was that the client finally had a brand, website and messaging that matched what they actually sell, with every channel pulling in the same direction. And that’s the pattern I see constantly in regulated sectors. The organisation is complex, the audience is specialist, the compliance is real, and none of that is the problem.
The problem is almost always that nobody has decided who the thing is for. Make that one decision and most of the complexity sorts itself out.
How do you systematically identify and eliminate complexity across the organization without oversimplifying in ways that hurt quality or value?
Lisa Eyo: I’d start with a distinction, because in agency world it’s most of the answer.
There are two kinds of complexity. There’s the complexity that is the product: which for us is regulated healthcare, financial services, multiple markets, compliance in every one of them. Clients pay us for judgement inside that, and you never simplify the thing you’re paid for.
Then there’s the complexity nobody decided: how we describe ourselves, how we sell, how decisions get made, how work gets scoped. That’s what we go after, and the test is a simple one. Does this exist because the problem is hard, or because nobody made a decision?
Our approach system has three parts.
First, map the whole business, not specific departments. Most complexity hides in the handoffs and between silos: between sales and marketing, between the website and whoever answers the phone, between what the brand says and what the contract says. If you only look at your own function, you’ll simplify the wrong thing.
Second, a fixed set of questions on a fixed cadence. Who is this for. What are we for. What do we stop doing. We ask ourselves every six to twelve months whether or not anything feels wrong, because the point of a fixed question is that it catches what you didn’t know to look for.
Third, diagnose before you act. We don’t write a client proposal until we’ve truly looked at what problem we are trying to solve, and we hold ourselves to the same standard internally. Every account gets looked at on margin and on fit, not just on revenue, and some work goes because it occupies people without earning.
The guard against oversimplifying is that we simplify decisions, not work. When we rebuilt our own site, the services page went from a list of ten to eight disciplines. We didn’t drop a service; we dropped the burden of choosing from the buyer. The sector pages lost two thirds of their length and none of their substance. The work itself is still built case by case, because the clients are different, and the person accountable for it is still a person, because that’s the part AI can’t be. So the rule is this. If removing something changes what the client gets, leave it alone. If it only changes how much they have to understand, or how long we take to decide, it goes.
Simplicity in our world isn’t fewer moving parts. It’s fewer undecided ones.
What’s the biggest resistance you’ve faced when pushing for radical simplicity, and how did you overcome it?
Lisa Eyo: The honest answer is that the biggest resistance was my own.
When you’ve spent fourteen years saying yes, no becomes expensive. The resistance wasn’t intellectual. I agreed with every argument for simplifying. It was just my own fear of turning away work in a year when nobody turns away work.
What got me past it was making the cost of complexity properly visible. I went through every account on margin rather than revenue, and found the work that kept people busy and earned nothing. Once you can see that, the fear changes sides. And I gave myself a date on making the decision. That six-to-twelve-month cadence I mentioned exists for exactly this reason. A strong business needs to understand where the ‘no’ lies. Where the boundaries are.
I had to learn that real risk can lie in the complexity we keep.
Resistance to simplicity is almost never about simplicity. It’s about who gets blamed when something is missing. If you can answer that question properly, the rest is just good editing.
For other CEOs who struggle with feature bloat, process overload, or confusing customer journeys, what’s the most important principle or first step you would recommend they take?
Lisa Eyo: Don’t start by cutting. Start by finding the decision nobody made. Every feature, every process, every page on a website is the answer to a question somebody once asked. Go and find the question. If nobody can tell you what it was, you’ve found your first cut. Most complexity in a business isn’t a design problem. It’s a backlog of things nobody chose.
Watch a stranger try to buy from you. Someone who doesn’t know your business, your product or your team. Put them in front of your website or your sales team. Sit in their journey and say nothing. Within ten minutes you will see where the complexity lies.
In business, the view from outside is the only honest one, and it’s the cheapest diagnostic there is. Most CEOs have never done it. They’ve reviewed their website or customer funnel a hundred times. They’ve never watched anyone use it.
Next, be clear about what you’re protecting before you touch anything. The customer pays for the hardest thing. What goes is everything they have to understand in order to get to it. Write each decision down with a date on it, because simplicity isn’t something you achieve once. It’s something you maintain.
The businesses that stay simple aren’t the ones that cut the most. They’re the ones that keep deciding over and over what is most important.
