Ryan Olohan is as giddy as a kid starting at a new school. Except, of course, his old school is Google, and his new one is the Klick Group.
Olohan joins Klick as executive vice president for growth. He has spent the last 16 years at Google in a vast range of positions including managing director of healthcare. Over the years, he’s worked closely with the folks at Klick, and, from Day One, he says he knew there was something special and different about the agency.
“I've literally over the years worked with well over 100 agencies, dozens of the biggest agencies, and it was it was one of my first meetings where I actually met with (Klick co-founder/Chairman Leerom Segal) and the Klick team. I flew up to Toronto, and when I left that meeting, I actually went back to our team, and I said, 'there's something special about this agency,'” Olohan said.
The feeling is more than mutual on the Klick side, with Segal praising Olohan’s leadership style, work ethic and ability to really get things going and grow business.
“It's really important that the leadership style resonates, and what we've seen is Ryan turbocharge really everything that he touches—we’ve seen that every team that he's responsible for grow and develop. Over the years he’s spoken for us at Ideas Exchange, and he's really become part of our broader ecosystem but as a partner, and the difference is that now, Ryan is joining the family and he's going to help us really turbocharge the already awesome momentum that we've got in place,” Segal said.
Olohan says he hopes his background in the industry from a digital and media and “Google lens” will bring a different perspective to Klick just the way in the past he hired people from other areas to share their own different perspectives.
Back at Google, he says he’d often ask his team member to name their favorite agency, and 100% of the time it was Klick by a long shot, and that paves the way for opportunity.
“Klick actually in media is not the biggest player in the market, and so I look at that and say, 'while they're the best, they're still not the biggest.' I would love to at least focus in the beginning to see how we expand our media footprint. There's such an opportunity there and the team is just so, so solid, that I think there's a lot of room for growth."