40 Under 40 2020: Vuki Vujasinovic, Sling & Stone

Vuki Vujasinovic

Founder and CEO
Sling & Stone 
Australia

“Calm” and “stable” are not generally the words to describe 2020—not when the Covid-19 virus has upended lives around the world. But those descriptions seem to fit the year at Sling & Stone, the independent PR shop that Vuki Vujasinovic founded.

Although the agency did not escape the economic sledgehammer of the worldwide pandemic, Vujasinovic made up for it by not drawing salaries for three months—this helped Sling & Stone to keep its entire team without redundancies, agency-wide pay cuts, furloughs or a reduced work week. Over the last year, Sling & Stone also formed 44 new client relationships.

It is rather ironic for the agency to have largely enjoyed business-as-usual throughout a precarious year when it was, in fact, set up to rebel against business-as-usual practices.

Back in 2009, Vujasinovic was pursuing a degree at Sydney University when he was offered the role of a consultant at PPR, then Australia’s largest agency by headcount. Leaping into the opportunity, he found the stint to be eye-opening in both honing his PR know-how and teaching him about inefficiencies within the industry.

He saw how agencies were running on restrictive hamster wheels of laborious processes, hierarchical structures and outdated technologies. Another key gap he saw was that big agencies were overlooking the startup boom in Australia; a mushrooming population of small companies was not getting adequate PR representation.

Hence at the age of 24 Vujasinovic started his own agency, Click PR, in 2010.  It would later be rebranded as Sling & Stone in 2014. The young founder’s focus was on disruptive brands like his own, with Kogan.com coming on board as a foundation client. Vujasinovic threw inefficiencies and gut-feel strategies out the window, relying instead on data-driven insights with the use of technology and automation when running client campaigns.

Vujasinovic hit the industry goliaths squarely between the eyes with Sling & Stone. Within 10 years, the independent agency grew to serve 72 clients. Among the businesses it won: Slack, Stripe and Twitter.

His team also ballooned from one employee to 56, spread across the three markets that Sling & Stone expanded to: Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles.