The numbers in this piece come from the Companies House officer records behind 1,794 dissolved UK marketing companies, analysed 13 July 2026. Method at the bottom. It extends our guide to checking whether a marketing agency is legitimate with a check almost nobody runs.
You checked the company. Did you check the person?
Most buyer diligence stops at the company: how old is it, has it filed, does the address exist. Sensible, free, and we have published the numbers behind all of it. But a company is a wrapper. The person behind it carries the actual history, and the register lets you read that history in two minutes. Here is why it is worth the two minutes.
The restart rate: roughly 1 in 10
We took every dissolved marketing company from our register cohort, 1,794 of them with readable officer records, and asked where their directors are now. 17.5% have a director who currently holds another active company appointment. Narrow it to appointments that began during or after the failed venture and it is 10.2%: about one in ten dead marketing companies has a director already trading through another active company.
Which means the “how old is this company?” check has a blind spot. A company incorporated three months ago can be a first venture, or it can be chapter three of a story whose first two chapters closed with the customers’ work unfinished. The company’s age cannot tell you which. The director’s record can.
Say it fairly: a restart is not a scandal
Let us be precise about what this number is and is not. Closing a company that did not work is legal, common and often the responsible thing to do. Serial founders are normal; some of the best operators in Britain have a dissolved company or two behind them, and our own research shows a quarter of new marketing companies do not reach eighteen months. A past venture is not a red flag.
Concealment is the flag. A serious provider talks about a previous company without flinching: what it was, why it closed, what happened to its clients. The pattern to avoid is different: short-lived companies in sequence, each dissolved as customer complaints accumulate, each successor with a fresh name and a clean-looking incorporation date. The register makes that pattern visible to anyone who looks, and almost nobody looks.
The two-minute check
1. Find the company at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. 2. Open the People tab and click the director’s name. 3. Read their appointments: every company they hold or have held office in, with dates and statuses. Dissolved entries are not disqualifying; ask about them. A provider who answers straight has just shown you more about themselves than any portfolio page.
Run it on us while you are there: Mode Marketing Limited, company 16231339. That is the standing invitation on everything we publish.
Method, so you can check it
Cohort: the 29,609 companies with marketing-services SIC codes incorporated at Companies House between 1 January 2025 and 12 July 2026, of which 1,863 had dissolved at analysis time; 1,794 had readable officer records. For each dissolved company we retrieved its directors and each director’s full appointment history from the official register, then counted companies where at least one director holds a currently active appointment elsewhere (17.5%), and separately where such an appointment began on or after the dissolved company’s own incorporation (10.2%). Aggregates only: this study names no company and no individual, and a restart is reported as a fact of the register, not an allegation about any person’s conduct. Data is public and the analysis is reproducible. Corrections welcome at hello@modemarketing.co.uk.
Where Mode fits
Mode publishes the checks because we pass them: one company, filings on time, prices published, and a research desk that would rather show you the register than a testimonial. If you are choosing between providers, run the two-minute check on every one of them, including us.
