An office is a peculiar thing to sell. The client wants an idea, a plan, a piece of work delivered properly. Somehow, the transaction can also involve paying for a building, a hierarchy and several meetings about the next meeting. Angie Wiles had spent enough time inside agencies to understand their attractions. She had also helped build one. By 2017, she was ready to see how many of the familiar fittings could be removed while keeping the useful part: people who knew what they were doing.
Her new venture, The Difference Collective, gathered experienced independent consultants into teams assembled for particular assignments. It was deliberately virtual. A shared address would no longer be the entry ticket to shared work. For someone whose earlier business had expanded into New York and Singapore, this was an interesting second act. Wiles had already helped an agency acquire a larger footprint. Now she was exploring how lightly another could stand.
Before the boardroom, the paper round
Wiles grew up in Dudley in the West Midlands, attended four state schools and watched her parents work hard. Financial independence mattered to her. At 13 she took on a paper round; later, shifts on the Waitrose checkouts helped fund university. Her early ambition was to follow Angela Rippon into newsreading. A Languages and Business degree at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and a year in the International Olympic Committee press office, drew her towards communications instead.
There is a pleasing connection between those beginnings and the work that followed. Newsreading depends on a visible person delivering the work of many others. Communications, too, requires a collection of skills that the audience rarely sees. Wiles ended up on the organising side of that arrangement, bringing people together and deciding how the enterprise around them should operate. The paper round is a useful reminder that her interest in earning a living began well before she was responsible for other people doing so.
First, build the agency
Her career included senior roles at Edelman and Burson-Marsteller, building a team at Cohn and Wolfe, and leading the Healthcare Communications Association. These were different vantage points on the same professional world: established consultancies, team building and an industry body. Long before she launched a virtual business, she had experience of the structures it would seek to simplify. Her criticism of agency habits came with practical knowledge of running them.
In 2003, Wiles and Sarah Matthew founded Virgo Health. By July 2012, when GolinHarris announced its acquisition, the London business had 60 people. The deal preserved the Virgo name and kept both founders as joint chief executives. Financial terms were undisclosed. This was a sale with an onward journey attached: the founders would help develop the brand internationally and take senior leadership roles within the acquiring network.
The following February, Virgo opened in New York and Singapore, with Susan Cuozzo and Rachel Norager leading the respective teams. Both locations shared premises with GolinHarris. The arrangement made the practical value of a network visible: an established business could enter new markets with local leadership and somewhere to operate. For Wiles, the experience placed questions of teams, geography and organisational scale directly alongside one another.
Recognition had arrived before the acquisition. In 2007, Wiles and Matthew jointly received the Communiqué Judges’ Award for Outstanding Healthcare Communications. The pairing matters to this story. Virgo was a business built by two founders, and its early achievements belong to that partnership. Wiles’s later venture would have a different structure, but collaboration remained a recurring feature of her working life.
The people leaving were the opportunity
When The Difference Collective launched in June 2017, Wiles identified a loss she had watched across the industry: experienced people departing because working arrangements were too restrictive. Her response was to build a business that could keep drawing on their skills. Consultants would be recommended and vetted, while a digital platform connected them with client projects. Independence would come with access to professional support and resources.
That last detail gives the idea its substance. Freelancing can remove an employer’s rules while introducing other difficulties: finding colleagues, maintaining skills, managing payments and getting the right tools. The launch proposition addressed those practical frictions. A consultant could work independently and still have a route into a wider team. The business had to make collaboration convenient enough that independence did not mean doing everything alone.
The early response gave Wiles something to measure. At the six-month mark in December 2017, she reported more than 40 senior consultant members, over 60 enquiries about joining and more than 75 client enquiries. Fifteen clients had commissioned work that year. The numbers describe an opening period, rather than a permanent size or a forecast. They show that the proposition had attracted interest on both sides of the relationship.
Her account of those first months also emphasised what members valued: learning from other experienced people, working in teams created for a brief, and reducing administrative layers. There was a social proposition inside the commercial one. People who chose independent work could still want demanding colleagues and a sense of belonging. The Collective offered a way to have both, provided the assignments were there.
A good idea still has to survive procurement
Selling the arrangement required Wiles to adjust her language. In 2017 she acknowledged that early messaging about working differently could sound as though the consultants wanted everything on their own terms. She shifted the emphasis towards what clients would receive. It is an instructive admission from a communications professional: even a business built around communication can initially describe its offer from the wrong end of the conversation.
She also encountered a familiar suspicion that remote consultants would spend their days fitting small amounts of work between coffee, exercise and school collection. Her argument challenged the assumption that a building guaranteed productive work. The commercial question was harder and more useful: could a client trust a dispersed team to deliver? A pleasant account of flexibility would only get the business as far as the first serious brief.
“Flexibility is the way forward.”
Angie Wiles, 2018
By 2018, Wiles was publicly arguing that consultants should have room to organise their working lives for many different reasons. The choice should extend beyond one demographic or one stage of parenthood. In her model, experienced people could contribute to projects without adopting every convention of a permanent agency job. Clients, in turn, could draw on particular expertise when an assignment required it.
The meeting just off the M4
A colleague’s recollection provides a less corporate view. In a 2018 essay, writer Julie Kangisser remembered first meeting Wiles at an unprepossessing hotel near Slough, just off the M4. She described feeling inspired by Wiles’s energy and commitment, and somewhat intimidated by her entrepreneurial record. The setting has its own modest charm. An argument about the future of work can begin somewhere considerably less glamorous than a conference stage.
Kangisser credited Wiles’s drive and challenging outlook with encouraging her to push harder in her own business. She also described the fun of working with the Collective and the peers she met through it. These are one colleague’s observations, but they add texture to the business model. A virtual organisation still needs someone to persuade people to join, contribute and keep taking an interest in one another.
A network draws its own map
In January 2019, The Difference Collective formed a transatlantic partnership with RAliance Communications, founded by Reba Auslander. Both businesses used networks of independent consultants, and both retained their separate identities and leadership. They had already worked together on projects. Wiles’s international experience was finding another organisational form: cooperation between independent businesses, alongside the earlier experience of expanding within a larger group.
By March 2020, Wiles described a Collective of more than 90 senior consultants and familiarity with the tools of remote collaboration. That is a historical snapshot of the network, rather than its present membership. It also shows that the virtual structure had become an operating practice. The team already had methods for assembling expertise and continuing projects across locations. The idea had acquired some ordinary, necessary machinery.
Later in 2020, the business made that structure visible in its branding. Wiles described connected nodes that could rearrange into the combination of people a client needed. Collective consultants developed the design, with Michelle Healy Thomas leading the creative vision. It was an apt visual choice for a business whose organisation changed with the assignment. The lines between people were doing much of the explanatory work.
Experience gets another job description
Today the business trades as The Difference. Its current proposition describes a network of more than 50 senior experts and teams matched to individual briefs. A relaunch announcement explains the removal of “Collective” from the name and places greater emphasis on direct access to experienced consultants. It also assigns AI a supporting role in preliminary work, with senior people responsible for judgement and execution.
That positioning gives Wiles’s long-running experiment a contemporary question. If some preparatory tasks can be automated, what should experienced people spend their time doing? Her business is betting on the value of their decisions, their specialist knowledge and their ability to deliver. Those claims will be tested assignment by assignment, just as the original virtual model had to be. The office has receded from the proposition. The obligation to do useful work remains.
For Wiles, the thread runs from building an agency with Matthew to assembling a business around independent expertise. Each approach requires people to trust one another, agree on the work and get it done. Her second venture makes the arrangement more adjustable. The person who once wanted to read the news has spent much of her career organising what happens behind the scenes. She continues to rearrange the furniture. Rather less of it now needs a floor plan.
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