SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, that's brought really saying that money doesn't bring happiness. It doesn't, but it brings your time and options. I had a difficult sort of upbringing. My dad was to save all the AdMS. I felt like I'd started off like three steps behind the ladder than everyone else and I had to work twice as hard. So something in me just snapped. That's when I could set up my first agency. I worked like an absolute idiot for years.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

So you hit 30k a month in your first month for running the agency. Now three years later, about to hit 1.5 million.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

You're ranking in the top three for all of these terms under this category, and I could be looking at another £120,000 per month in organic revenue.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Because in three years, 30 awards, I mean that's more than some agencies get in 30 years. What is digital PR to you? Digital PR, I think, is a What do you guys know that other startup agencies don't?

SPEAKER_00 0:40

If you tick all those three boxes, then you should be able to generate this sort of FOMO effect. But to do that, you need How would you get journalists listed? What we tried to do was say survey. The great thing about that is you don't have to be an expert. Being able to work with the clients and do some of the cool stuff that we've done over the past few years is an absolute dream.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

What advice would you give to an agency that's watching this right now who's inspired by you guys? Luke, welcome to Agency Giants. So you hit 30k a month in your first month of running the agency, and now three years later, about to hit 1.5 million. What do you guys know that other startup agencies don't?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

It's a good question. Uh thanks for having me on as well, first of all. Um yeah, it's a good question. I think this is my second go at running an agency as well. So I think I had the the first instance where I had my stabilizers on, I didn't really know what I was doing, I kept falling off my bike all the time. And then this is my second go. Um, I think that's not the only reason that this is doing better, but it's definitely helped me. Like the initial parts of running a business, you just don't know certain things. I was sort of behind the curve a little bit, not in terms of my ideas when I set up my first agency. I tried to set up an agency in 2016, 2017, which was like an influencer marketing agency. It's probably the only influencer marketing agency that didn't work back in 2016, 2017. Um, so I built a community of influencers, didn't own them, but I got them to agree to be part of this network. Found um I'd found um a different application for it. So I'd found that I could get sports influencers to talk about certain footballers, and then I found a tool that measured the football players' brand value in in terms of their on-pitch stats, but also half of their social media stats. Um, and then I found the agents that use that tool for contract negotiations, so like so like Robin Van Persie, Ayn Robin, Kyle Walker, Jesse Lingard, and then took it to them and said, Look, I can improve your value of your player according to the tool that you use. Um, so I had a great idea at the time, and people weren't really using it for that kind of stuff. Uh I ran out of money within the space of about a year because I didn't have enough money behind me. I just quit my job and thought I'd just go be a millionaire, it'd be easy. Um, and then no one knew who I was outside of the current agency I worked at. So what's different this time is I had sort of another six years' experience behind me, some more savings as well, which helped. Um, and we built up a bit of a profile for ourselves as well, going into that. So I think what I didn't have at the first time was trust. I didn't have any trust really at all. I had a few examples of work. Um, but like I said, no one really knew who I was. And then going into this time, we we were actually in a situation where we when we first launched, we could we could start trading for three months, but we couldn't publicly announce we'd set up an agency due to a legal agreement we had with our previous employers. So on paper, I was like, okay, we're gonna be skint for three months. We can't tell anyone we've launched an agency. Um like going back to how what I'd done six years ago, I was like, it's gonna be tough. Like with my two co-founders. But actually, we won a client before we'd even launched. We'd actually sent a contract to them, said the insert company name because we couldn't legally launch yet. And we said, just trust us. So we we we have little trust really because we had stupid stuff like that we had to do. Um, but at the same time, um, you know, I built probably a bit of a personal brand over the past three years. I'd posted basically everything I'd done at the previous place I'd I'd worked at. So you kind of had that trust level where people associated you with a certain type of work that you've done. There was also three of us, so I think that immediately you're less like I'm a consultant giving this a go. And once I get a few clients, I'll be able to hire a few people. You can service the client straight away. So we had uh myself who's like more of a strategist, Katie, my co-founder, is a PR director, James, my co-founder, is a who manage the creative side. So straight away we can just manage the there's no sort of question marks there around can you actually do this work? Whereas I was showing up to meetings before my pre previous agency had my best suit on, uh, go into a meeting, it'd be just me. And I I remember the first, very first day I did that, I met with a football agent, so that actually went pretty well. There was something there, uh nearly took off. And then I met with a publishing company, I think they're called Dugout, and they were they were growing at the time, while backed, shooting behind-the-scenes content for footballers, and they absolutely destroyed me. Like I was sat by myself, they just destroyed me. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. You know, they were like, What's the the cost per click uh using your influences versus the paid ads we're doing on Facebook? I'm like, I have no idea. Like, I've not done it yet. Um, so I think we had trust because we had a few numbers there in terms of ourselves. We had a plan, we had a proposition which was quite easy to understand. So we it's called bold imagination. We're a digital PR agency, we're more creative than an SEO agency and more measurable than a traditional PR agency. So we're picking up work from both worlds. The actual product itself is easy to understand. It was instead of having bronze, silver, gold packages, we had them in different bottles. So it's something slightly different to perhaps what they'd seen before. Um, or just jazzed up that kind of commercial element when you get to the commercial slide and you're just like, here's three packages you can choose from. We had something a little bit different, or at least looked a little bit different. We launched with an e-commerce style website, so you can actually check out the the products into a into the bag and then contact us through that. So it was almost like a shop on the website. We launched with like a spoof Netflix style documentary trailer. So we did a trailer interviewing ourselves on the agency we're launching. It was kind of satire, but it was quite self-aware. Um, so we had all those kind of three elements. Um obviously that happened sort of three months afterwards, but we were building this throughout, and we could sort of test elements of it in the first three months. Uh, and then look, like any agency owner, if I say look didn't play a part, look in timing to when we left our first agency, uh, our previous agency that we were working at down to the day, probably. We probably had a lead that was about 15 grand a month come in when the email went round that we'd left. And that was just pure chance by the the the look that the timing that we decided to leave on. Um, so I think I think it was that. I think people sort of wanted us to do fairly well at the start as well, which really helped. People referred us work. There was a bit of intrigue at the start during that period, three months we couldn't tell anyone what what had happened, what we were doing, what the plans were, and actually that created a bit more intrigue. Um, and people were like, What are you like, we can't say anything, and actually I quite like that. Um, and I think that probably helped a little bit. Um, so we managed to, yeah, we picked up, I think we had four or five clients in the very first month. This is non-not publicly launched, just trading. Turn over 30k. All the anxiety around, oh my god, can we pay ourselves is is gone. Then it's around we've got to service this work and keep the clients somewhere on sort of three month trials. Um, so we did that, hired our first employee just before the end of the third month. So we managed to hire someone without having a company name as well and winning clients. I don't know what she was thinking. Um, so yeah, it was a pretty crazy time, but I think there's multiple things as to why that why that worked out so well in terms of a launch compared to you know, perhaps previous experience I've got.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

I mean, that's a great story, and definitely that mystique is something that people love. They they they love to buy into something that they can't put their finger on. I really resonate with the um insert company name here. I know I made that mistake again recently, just sent an email to our email list yesterday and it said first name. I was like, awesome, that's great, that's that's awesome. Um sent to 60,000 people. That's what we like. Um but you you mentioned like with the first agency, you um you you ran out of the money and so on. But then this agency, I believe off camera you said that you only spent about a grand to get to get that first client load line, most of which spent on taking them out and and and and boozing them. Um so since then you've been able to grow the business to 1.5 without having to put any more capital into the business being completely bootstrapped from the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we we I think I brought a crappy laptop, which I've still got, uh it still survived um when we first launched, put a grand in the company account, and then our first client um was uh Fennec, the luxury department store, which somehow we managed to win without a company name. So quite a big brand as well.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Where did they come from?

SPEAKER_00 9:02

So it came from a an agency that tried to hire me like six months previously, and I said, look, we've we've we're gonna set up our own thing. Um and they referred a lead to us in in Fennec and we managed to to win them. So it was almost like a referral, uh, a partnership type thing that we set up straight away. Um and then a couple more just by sort of chance, really. Um so yeah, we put a grand in the company account, took, took them out, went to a like a rooftop bar in London, had a few cocktails, chipmunk the rapper was there. It was a very weird experience. Um, spent basically half the money on train fares and everything like that. And then we're like, okay, well, hopefully they pay by the end of the month, that'd be great. Um, which they did. Um, so yeah, that was it. Grand uh grand in at the time. And then we took obviously made profit in the first month. We've made a profit every single month and grown that profit levels quarter on quarter as well. Never taken any sort of outside investment, never had to put any sort of more money in the company. Um, so yeah, we've got it to a level where it's just been completely sustainable in terms of our own profit levels. And we were pretty cautious. I think we didn't pay ourselves what a normal director would pay themselves in the first year or 18 months, maybe even two years really. Um reasoning for that is I wanted to build up or we wanted to build up sort of a buffer in the bank where you know, if you have a rough couple of months or something happens, which anything could happen at the minute as well in the world, um, we're not worried about paying staff or anything like that. So we put that first, and then this past year we've probably pushed what wouldn't be near near a normal foot sort of founder's salary. So um first two years was like, you know, can we create something near? Is there a market fit? Can we maintain profit? Can we build up a buffer in the bank as well, like a runway? Um, and then and then it was like, can we still maintain profit whilst we're paying ourselves what would be a semi-normal salary, which we can? So yeah, that was the kind of thought process behind it, and we just yeah, not really look back since it's flown by. Actually, it's been the fastest three years of my life.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Yeah, three years is amazing, especially considering, and we'll unpack this shortly, but you you've managed to get over 30 awards in the agency in that period as well, so 10 a year, which is which is insane. Um, how much of the early stage growth or just that that ability to just keep growing month on month and you know have that halo story as such is to do with having a really good referral system? And how much do you think is having to do with almost repackaging a previously perceived, maybe even archaic industry of PR? It's kind of similar to SEO. I see a lot of these modern SEO agencies repackaging and and and and putting the the shiny new wrapper on something that is perceived as old. Um do you think that's a fair assumption to make that you've you guys have managed to pull that off with the even digital PR in itself is almost a unique mechanism? Um yeah, the split between having a good referral system and yeah, a bit of both.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

I think digital PR is part of the SEO world. The SEO world doesn't, like you said, that stereotypically maybe hasn't been that sexy. And digital PR is the most interesting it can be the most interesting part of it in terms of talking about a technical audit on a website is quite difficult to make really, really interesting or shareable on social media sometimes. Whereas you can create a campaign in digital PR, the the reasoning for your the reason for doing it is to improve organic search by the backlinks and and coverage you're earning. But it the story itself is interesting on social media, so you can shout louder uh and and get in front of more rivals like that. So I think, yeah, we kind of looked at, you know, we had it'd been a lot easier for us to join the competitors at the start, but I didn't really feel like I wanted to, to be honest, which is also a testament to the agency we're working at. I didn't really want to work for another agency. So we we did look at things and thought, how do we make this a little bit different? Like I said, even just the you we have an e-commerce website, we um we talk about things in a different way. We don't just talk about the results, which is a lot a lot of SEO talk about the results, we talked about how we came up with the idea instead. So, like how we actually did this campaign. Um, so we did change a few bits there and tried to make it perhaps a little bit like sexier than what the the traditional SEO world is. And then referrals I think we uh undervalued how important that was at the start because like we wouldn't have gone anywhere without those kind of referrals at the start, and now what we have is a partnership program, which is incentivized for people to give us referrals as well as just people being nice and referring work to us because they like us and we've got a good relationship with them. We have a bit of both of that. So I think when we first launched, we created this sort of like marketing like flywheel, really. It was like generate hype, generate trust. Uh do good work, sorry, generate hype, generate trust. If you tick all those three boxes, then you're not only gonna help keep your existing clients, but you should be able to generate this sort of a bit of a FOMO effect where people want to find out what's going on there. Um, but to do that, you need good work to start with. So we launched, we needed some interesting work to get us off the ground. But what we would do is do a cool campaign for a client and then take the most interesting part of that campaign, generate hype on social media uh using whatever the most interesting part of that campaign was. Uh, and then trust that came from uh things like awards, case studies, all that, all that kind of stuff. Um, and if we're trying to tick all those boxes, then we thought we'd be able to generate inbound leads, and it kind of does work like that. It's it's a delayed effect. So you want you do it and then you're like, okay, well, where is why is no one getting in touch with us? And that's that I realize the agency will make put you in pain for another couple of weeks and then reward you. So it's usually three or four weeks after you see the kind of impact of that kind of stuff. Um, so yeah, I think you can make make sort of the more traditional SEO type world a little bit sexier in terms of the digital PR side. Um, you've got a slightly more analytical side on the digital PR side than perhaps what you're doing traditional PR. So you can play on sort of both things depending on what you're talking about. Um, and then referrals, yeah, like I said, was a massive part. We wouldn't have even got our first kind of client without that kind of thing. Um, so a bit of both, but I think our sort of process for the inbound lead has been like when we first launched, we were like, we need a we need an example of what we're talking about here. Like, I don't want to just talk about work we've done at previous agencies, that's not cool. Um, so we did we did a campaign which was we it was a gambling awareness campaign. We created a footballer that didn't exist called Jordan Reese. Um, we hired a model from uh down the road, we put him in a kit, lock a brush-dortman kit, did a photo shoot, and then um we paid sort of social media profiles and influencers to say he was 10 to 1 to make the England World Cup squad, Jordan Reese. He's the best striker you mates have never heard of. Uh 10 to 1 to make the England World Cup squad in Qatar, and everyone who clicked through was taken to a page where they were informed that Jordan Reese wasn't real and it was about gambling awareness and researching your bets properly. Uh, and they were giving lots of like different uh advice around gambling awareness because 5,000 people clicked on those those posts uh to go through and perhaps place a bet on Jordan Reese. People were commenting without even reading what without even clicking. They were saying this is why England will never win. I think we overhype average players. So they didn't even know that he was a real footballer. They were it was it was great for the so the interesting part of that campaign was like that we'd done that as a gambling awareness campaign, and so many people had gone through to click. We then went out to press and said 5,000 people went to bet on a football that didn't exist, making the England World Cup squad to got in the Sun and other other publications. So then we've got our example within the first three months of what we mean when we're talking about doing different types of digital PR campaigns, whereas we could have just launched and said we're a creative digital PR agency. I was like, okay, great. Well, like there's no proof of that whatsoever.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

So that so that that that campaign was not on behalf of a gambling aware business.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

It was for a gambling client.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

It was for a gambling client, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

So it would it it's gorilla PR, really. There's a lot of avenues I want to go down right now, but I think it would be good just for the audience for them to get an understanding of how you define digital PR and the way that you're seeing this. Um so what is digital PR to you?

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Yeah, digital PR, I think, is a is it falls under the SEO remit or it has traditionally fallen under the SEO remit. You've got your kind of technical SEO content uh on site, and then you add digital PR, which is more around building authority and trust to the website in the form of creating stories that would earn backlinks to the website and therefore improve the sort of trust of the website in Google's eyes and therefore improve help improve uh rankings and traffic. It's moved slightly from that. I don't think it's just about that anymore. Um you still have your kind of stereotypical link building agencies that would do anything to kind of get a link, whereas Digital PR created this more scalable format. You could create a campaign that could earn 30, 40 links to a website, and it was more of a scalable, scalable way of doing that. Um I think it's changing slightly now, where it sort of sits halfway between both worlds in terms of a traditional PR and SEO. And that's kind of where we sit. And I think there's more to it than just building links now because you're talking about creating campaigns that again into press, which traditional PR agencies would just do anyway. Um that might improve sort of brand perception. Um so we can track things like branded search traffic as well now if there's spikes in branded search traffic after a campaign, all that kind of stuff. So I think you've got the kind of it's more the reasoning why clients might come to you that changes. So you might have your we want to improve our organic search traffic and revenue, we've got technical SEO covered, we've got content covered, we don't have the expertise to do digital PR because it is quite labor-heavy type of thing. Or you might have no, we don't we have a lot of briefs now that don't even mention SEO. It's uh we want to increase brand awareness and we want to get in these types of publications through stories. Um, so I think it it's advancing some some areas of it are advancing, some are sort of being left a little bit behind at the moment. But I think it's a it's an interesting world, and I think it's it's difficult to understand where it's going to go right now, especially with the emergence of AI search and things like that. Um but overall that's kind of how I'd define it. And we've created our kind of packages and bottles that people can buy on site based off their goals. So it's like, I just want digital PR and links and coverage, or I want to grow organic search revenue, or I want cross-channel. I want more than just links and coverage, I want it to work on social media and these campaigns to work across multiple different channels. So we kind of adapt our offering based off that, more on the objectives of what the client wants.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

Um can you still to this day buy off from an e-commerform?

SPEAKER_00 19:25

I mean, it's it it didn't work properly in the first place, but that's the idea. Once you go through, you let you led to the contact form and you've you know what you kind of got in your basket. Ideally, I would have, if I was a bit smarter, I've been out to actually set it up properly. Um so yeah, you can still go on. It's there's a shop there, you can look at the different products and what they're for, and then you kind of know what fine, what was which which which one suits you when you get in touch with us as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

So they're not priced on on the website specifically. No. Uh what what how much do companies spend on this kind of thing? Like went from ranging from X to on the bottom N to Y on top?

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah, our range is it's a quite big range between sort of like £5,000 a month up to £25,000, £30,000 a month. I've had clients before on £50,000 a month. Um so it's quite a big investment. It depends on the kind of the industry and the goal. So if you're in insurance, for example, the difference between ranking fourth and first for car insurance is hundreds of thousands of pounds per month. And digital PI is a part of that. So they tend to invest slightly more than perhaps what um what other kind of uh industries or niches would as well. So yeah, it's a big range and it kind of scales on outputs and outcomes. You might scale it on different regions as well. Um so it's quite a quite simple model, really, in terms of being able to what what you kind of sell into a client.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

So for so let's say a business watching this who is certainly not at that level yet, they're trying to build their company. Is there anything on like a micro level that people can be doing to be putting their best foot forward when it comes to their digital PR presence? Can they get placements and so on? And if so, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Yeah, you can do we do what uh like reactive PR. I mean, like we call it cause and trend PR, where you you basically you can spot a trend in your industry and then spot the cause of that trend and then provide an expert comment and go out to press with that, if you're an authority in that area anyway. And you can pick up coverage and links and improve sort of your expertise in that area just by doing that. And it it doesn't require creating anything. Um, it doesn't require it just requires speed and kind of an expert comment to go out to the right type of people when it's happening. Um and there's loads of instances around that. Like you can do there's certain tools you can have, like Google Trends, for example, you can spot certain trends. There's always something ridiculous happening. So if you're in travel, I think when I think it was Black Panther Wakanda Forever came out, Black Panther uh Marvel series. I think a thousand people per month were searching for flights to Wakanda, like because they thought it was a real place. There's so many things you can do. Like if you're a travel client that you can spot that, you can create a reactive comment and just say, We've got this data and that's interesting. But you can also scale it to we're now offering flights to Wakanda or. Anything like that, we can create something a bit more gimmicky. So there's always something going on. It doesn't matter what the industry is. Um you can find little little bits and then you can go out to the press um with an expert comment or a thought leadership piece if you're an authority in that area.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Nice. So you've built this partnership program, as you said. Um are you happy to dive into a little bit of what that looks like?

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Yeah, I mean I made it sound far more like advanced than what it actually is, which is That's what we do as marketers. Yeah, yeah. Is people come to us and say, if we refer you the sleeve, would you give us some commission? Yeah, it's basically it. Um we tried to we're trying to at the moment we're in the process of building something that's a bit more of a community-led type thing, actually, like a bit more of a club where we're organizing events and we're gonna organise our own. It's not fully defined yet, but I think we want it to kind of be part of that where it's you know an incentive to be able to refer as web only if you want to. Um so that's pretty much what it what it has been. We've had we had a few people refer as leads and w and didn't want anything for it. And we kind of said, like, yeah, we do do this, and you're more than welcome to sort of sign up to it. Um and then bigger agencies who don't do what we do, it's completely rational, uh logical selling there for a big SEO agency who doesn't do digital PR. They're going to be asked about digital PR at some point. Um, they might as well have a partner that they can trust, refer work to um, and earn money off the side of that. We've got conflict-based partnerships. So agencies who do the exact same as us, but they might have conflicts with their current clients if they get approached uh by certain companies, uh, they can refer us those leads and we can refer them any conflicts we get as well. Um, and that we only set those up with sort of agencies we we rate and trust. Um, so yeah, multiple different types of ones. We've had sort of one-two-man band consultancies where you know they might be consultants for numerous different big brands and they're aware that digital PR would benefit that brand. Uh, some of them aren't incentivized whatsoever, they just do it because they want to, you know, as part of their remit to be able to grow the organic search of that website. So, yeah, but it's scaled from yeah, one-two-man bands up to much larger agencies who chase their invoices every single month on the exact day that it needs to be paid, they don't miss a single thing. Um, and consultancies, where it's a bit more sort of like friendship-based type stuff, uh, based off trust. Um so yeah, I think it's it's worked pretty well for us. I think they convert way higher, those leads, obviously, because you've kind of got the backing of someone there. Um, so what we have found is yeah, they're the highest converting type of leads is the ones that have come from a referral, um, a trusted partner. Um, a lot, a lot kind of more straightforward to win than an inbound news inbound who's never really heard of you before.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

I mean, what you're doing is very different to just kind of sitting back passively and hoping business comes to you. You're very proactively pursuing inbound with more effort than many people do outbound. Um, you've taken a lot of ownership over the way that you're perceived online. And like I mentioned earlier, you've got like 30 awards and so on in the business. Um, what is your general approach to making sure that you have the best perception possible for your business?

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Yeah, I think perception is a difficult one, isn't it? Because you never really know. And I think I've something that perhaps struggle with since setting up an agency, I haven't got a clue what you sort of know what people think of you because people are nice to you, but like you don't know that. No. Um luckily I don't really care what anyone thinks of me, which I think really helps, but I think you don't really know and you think people want you to do well, and they probably do up until the point until you start doing well, and then they you know people don't really love people doing well in the UK that much. So I think perception-wise, we we were very cautious. I think the agency we worked at together previously is very loud online, um, and it's a bit like love it or hate it type stuff. Um and I liked working out, I didn't I didn't really care once about what anyone else really thought, but I think I'm not really like that naturally. So when I post on social media, it starts off with something self-deprecating or something sarcastic, and then I go into self-promotion, and then I find it's a bit like less like I'm brilliant at this. Um and that's the only way I can really do it myself. Like I can't uh uh physically do self-promotion without sort of being a bit self-deprecating first. So I think what we added to the to our marketing mix was this is how we're gonna market ourselves, so it's gonna be our primary channels, but also we need some self-awareness there. Um, like I said, if you're just talking about the results you get for the clients, you're talking about how brilliant you are, it's there's not much self-awareness there, and people don't care that much. You care, but other people don't. If you can create a bit more of a human touch within it and create something a bit more that other people can can connect to, even if it's other agency owners or or clients, that that tends to go down a little bit better, I think, and it's a bit it's a bit more relatable. So I'm really cautious about have including self-awareness in our marketing activity. Whenever I do talks on stage, um I've done a few talks recently abroad, so I spoke at in Munich, Lithuania, Greece as well. And you know, in the UK I'll I'll start with the first 10 slides of pre-self-deprecating stuff. I want to get people on my side, I want to get a few laughs, and then I go into the some of the other stuff. I did that in Germany and it was dead for the first 10 slides. Like I was like, they were almost a bit like, why would you say that about yourself? Like it was completely different. I was like, um, so I think you gotta also it's not a great marketing tactic to be too self-deprecating, like you've got to take the work seriously, but not yourself seriously, is probably the the thought process. So perception-wise, you've got to have that trust, you've got to talk about practice what you preach to be able to have an actual authentic perception online. I think um I always think you've got to do the thing and then talk about the thing. You can't just talk about the thing. If someone asks you a question, you don't know the answer, you you're blagging. So I think I I'm any I any poster for feel really comfortable that I'm an expert in it, um, or it's it's something funny that I've spotted, and I can relate that to work. Um, so yeah, it's it's important. I think you'll find that converting business is a lot easier if you've got a good perception. You can go into a room and people sort of know who you are a little bit, they know roughly your story. Um and that that that really helps, I think, having that perception already. Starting from a scratch in a room where no one literally no one's got a clue. It's you've got to generate that in the first 10 minutes, really difficult, isn't it? So um on that side, I think it a positive, self-aware human perception really helps you when it's coming into I love that frame of um kind of prefacing content with uh yeah, some you're almost calling out to the thing that some people are already thinking themselves.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Like when promoting yourself, people are like they're always they're looking for the hole to pick in the thing, and if you pick the hole yourself, then it's they can't do such.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

I think it's probably I don't know if it was sort of being brought with such brutal mates, you know what I mean? Because people just don't you you have a dig at each other. But um I found if you poke a hole in yourself instead of before they get there, they can't really do much. It's a bit like the Eminem mate mile thing when he raps about himself. And like uh so yeah, I think as long as you're not doing it too much, it's not a great marketing strategy just to slag yourself off or or anything like that. But a little bit of that tends to help, I think.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Oh, I agree. And I think I think a great deal of people could do with doing that more, myself included. Um definitely it's something you we're in a we're in a world where people are not shy to shout about how incredible they are. And so people seek those that are as self-aware as they possibly can be so they can actually resonate with them. Because the bigger you grow as an agency, the less relatable you're gonna be. So you've got to you've got to find that.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Yeah, I can and you can easily see how it can like it's a very it can be a small world, the marketing world or even SEO world or Digital BR even smaller. You know, it's quite nice that people know who you are and stuff like that. You can totally see how you lose self-awareness in those sort of instances. Um, so you need to keep sort of real grounded with that sort of stuff, even if you are doing well. I'm and we're probably the worst agency in the world at actually celebrating our achievements.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Um you say that with 30 awards.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Yeah, we've got 30 awards, obviously. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

There's probably logos all over.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

I was gonna line them up like behind that.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

Yeah, let's talk about that. Um the because you've you've dedicated a lot of time to doing that because they don't just come from thin air, presumably. So um, what has been your strategy there? What's the thought process from the beginning? Because in three years, 30 awards, I mean that's more than some agencies get in 30 years.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

So yeah, it's um I think it was a bit of a strategy of it's another way of getting your name out there. The judges who read the awards are uh usually in-house marketers or SEOs, they're sometimes decision makers on their on those budgets. So getting it from front of them from that point of view is is useful. And we've had leads come from judges. So I think from that point of view it's good. I think if you're gonna go to an awards do if you would have been to one before, you sat there, you're having a meal, it's the same meal every time, um, you everyone's having a few drinks, then the awards start, you're not really paying attention unless your own category. So winning an award, don't no one's in the room going, Oh my god, they must be amazing. If you go to them, win we went to the UK Search Awards last time and won six. People were getting a bit like bored of it. It was and it was funny. And I think if you're gonna go, you might as well clean up as much as you can. So our kind of strategy there was like, let's make the night a bit a bit about us, as well as the actual awards. And I think the last one, yeah, we won six, we had no way of carrying the awards around. There was a we asked to ask for a bag from the the cloakroom, and there was a dollar sign on the bag, and I was like, perfect. And I just carried around the awards in that in that bag that rest of the night as like a bit of a joke, but it was just you know, it's it was more fun that way, and uh so I think they they play a part up to a point. I think it's more about how you use them afterwards, then as well. Like it's we entered certain specific awards, um, we entered all the awards relate to creativity, so all the like best use of innovation, best use of creativity, all that kind of stuff. That's what we entered. So that's what we wanted to be associated with, and then we entered best new agency. So we're we want to get our name out there and say we're the best new agency on the block, and we won best new agency at pretty much every sort of digital and traditional PR award that we could. And I think that then it announces you are there as opposed to us saying we are a creative new agency. We literally have awards to say that we are a creative new agency. So I think I'm a a bit like it can be a bit a bit of a shouting factory if you just go into win awards and you say you've won an awards, it's not just for that. The second benefit of it is the team as well. So when I first went to an awards when I was like 24, maybe, I remember thinking, oh, this is amazing. Like free food. Um, I've got my works up for an award, um, and just felt a bit rewarded for what I'd done. And I think now it's interesting being sat there and we took a table of 10 to the UK search awards and just being like, ah, people seem to be having a good time here. That's fun. Like, and we get to actually spend time with them as opposed to working time with them. We're in we're enjoying ourselves, so it almost separates you a little bit, um, and you get to see them go on stage and hold up an award, and it's for their work and not not our work or our idea. So there's a whole sort of secondary part of the reward part of it, which I'm enjoying a lot more than just saying we won an award, for example, or standing on stage. So yeah, I think it's pretty it's proving what you said you were gonna do, and it's like a bit of a tick in that box, yeah. And then it's what you can do with afterwards and also how it impacts the team. I think the kind of reasoning behind that.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

Yeah, a culture piece is massive, like 100%, like people feeling proud about because there's there's a there's a hundred there's well, there's thousands of agencies around. Um, but being able to work somewhere that's being recognized for their success is just that will have a massive impact on the team directly. Yeah, yeah. So you are now you rightfully said that you know these awards are for the team when we're in an agency that the the the people are the you know the product in many cases, uh the people delivering and and getting the client's results. What do you spend your time doing in the business now?

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Excellent question. Yeah. Um it's we're still in that probably flux period. So we're in a we're at 21 people, we've you know got a new, slightly new structure going on at the moment. It's trying to, instead of working like every single day on on client accounts, which to be honest is still large parts of our week. We're not at the period yet where we're removed from any of that at all. And I think you've got to be careful when you do do that because you've it's more about um spending our time on the areas of most impact for the clients now, whether that is supporting the team on you know creative ideas that we need to come up with with this client, helping them show the impact of the work that they're having on the client, or taking care of you know, serious conversations that need to happen with the client, good or bad, those kind of things, supporting them on that. So there's still, I say we're still we're still really involved in the delivery of the work, and we're not quite at that period yet where we're like feet up, this is all taken care of. Because we're still a new agency, and there's still things where you have to kind of you can say things, again, you can say things, you can say we're a creative agency, you can hire someone from another agency, you can say we're more creative than other agencies, we hire someone from another agency, okay. Go away and be creative. They can come back and be like, not like that. Like there needs to be stuff in place that helps them and guides them in terms of what this is. And you've got to kind of reiterate that. That's the boring part of running an agency, I guess. Constant reiteration of, you know, this would have made this slightly better, or this could have helped, or we pitch our ideas in this format for these reasons. And you can kind of like we've hired nine people this year already. You can kind of go, okay, we've got nine people now, but they don't know that yet. We kind of have to come up with the processes. So there is the process part and the reiteration part. Um, under myself, I have probably half the accounts that would escalate towards me if there was a problem. So there's still the kind of account side of being able to develop accountable, so being able to be there if things aren't going quite right. Um, and then I also have the operations of the agency under me. So the you know, the tools we're using to be able to track time, effectiveness, um, all that kind of stuff. And then I also have the uh new business and sales under me as well. So in terms of I don't have to do every single pitch or or sale, but uh I'm responsible for our win rate and if that's good or bad. So we're still wearing quite a few hats at the moment, and I I like I kind of like the thing of this is my job and I'm gonna be the best at it, and it's quite difficult to do when you've got four or five different things you're working on. Um, so we're still probably trying to define who's the best at what. And we do have fairly fairly split roles between the two co-founders that I've got as well. But yeah, I'd say we're not we're not at the not at the place where it's you're always on the business. We are in the business quite a bit at the moment as well. Yeah. And I think the on-the-business stuff, you know, in marketing doing things like this. I said to you before like this started, I'm gonna check Slack and just double check, there's no like fires or anything like that. And it's hard to not do that constantly. Uh I think you have to kind of protect your own time as a founder and not just go on Slack because I could sit on Slack all day and go through all the client channels and see what's going on. I don't need to do that. That's not any use to anyone really at all. So it's trying to imact your time so you can put in what what I've started doing is sort of ranking my the where I'm spending my time, my effective effectiveness on that, and then also whether I enjoy it or not, and then making a list of five things that week. If I do that really well, if I win this pitch, if this retention call with this client goes really well, if I just do those two or three things this week, that's the most value I can bring to the agency. And there's gonna be a hundred things that happen in the day that I can't control and I'm gonna have to jump in on. But if those three things I can do this week, then that's that's gonna have the biggest impact. So I think, yeah, I've got a bit of a bit of a spreadsheet going on of like priorities and things like that. But it is a massive mix of in the business, on the business. Loads of cool stuff I want to do, but can't do yet, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 38:10

Yeah, yeah. Very relatable. I like that frame though, the um the frame of uh picking out because you often it's so easy as a founder to get stuck in, you know, 12-hour days constantly in the odd weekend. And I'd like to get your take on that. But um we do so many things, it's you can quite often for a couple of weeks feel like you're on a treadmill because you're just you're fighting fires, you're jumping around different things, you try a project, it doesn't work out, etc. But picking out a couple of key things in the week, if I just achieved these few things and I would have still added value to the business, it's a nice frame because I think as a founder, more than anyone really, we hold ourselves very harshly accountable for if we don't feel we're maximizing on the time that we're spending. Because there's no doubt that we are, if you are doing it properly, working incredibly hard. But because you're wearing so many hats, you're not always like, Am I moving the needle where I need to be moving it?

SPEAKER_00 39:02

Yeah, and I think you it is a difficult, different transition that is, and that's why I don't think everyone should be a founder. I don't think everyone should run their own agency. It's a it's a very different transition into that because you do when you do have if you have a I say quiet superiors, it's not quiet superior, you're just you're thinking about stuff in that is valuable still. Um, and you almost feel a bit guilty to not be in the rat race. Like, why on earth are I my first business? I used to sit on my laptop and I feel sick if I weren't near it. I weren't doing anything. I was there going, what what should I do? Like, whereas I should have gone on a walk or gone to the gym or something and actually had some proper thoughts then. So I think it's a difficult transition. And yeah, I I'm we've been we've also been sort of almost doing sprints without even really realizing it. Last year we had a because of when we launched, most of our clients were up for renewal at a similar period, and that's also our busiest period for new business. So it's just absolutely like it's rammed in terms of our time over that period, and we've probably just been through one now where we grew a good 50%, hired a good nine people in space of two months. You know, you don't even know what day it is. I haven't got you don't you haven't got a clue, and it's you you're like, okay, well, this is fine, this bit's fine, I've got to work on this. Also, we've got to hire, we've you've got to hire a you've got to have a talent pipeline alongside that matches your new business pipeline. You've got to make sure the operations don't buckle while you're doing it. You've got to make sure all the clients are still, it's very, very difficult. And you you your context switching between all those things is tiring. But if you know it's a sprint and you can do three months of it, and then you've got a couple of holidays, you can just about get by like that. I don't think it's the most sustainable way, but I think it's a way of doing it. And it's a way I've done it in the past probably two years now. Um, this sprint has been a little bit longer than perhaps the last one. That's why I'm desperate for a holiday in about two weeks, I think. So I think it there's a couple of ways being able to manage those things, and one is knowing that there's a there's a deadline on on things, but actually you're lying to yourself there isn't because you come back, it's still the same sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Yeah, yeah, I I think like we would all love to believe as agency owners that you're on complete control all the time, but actually we're we're uh we're a victim to fate, and so we just have to be very comfortable with flowing and just allowing life to happen and to be unemotionally attached to whatever does happen. Um, you know, you've had the the blessing of being like profit after profit growth growth month month to growth month. Some agencies will have a six-month lull and and while simultaneously working crazy than ever and it sorts itself out. But I think with it's always going to be the case in a service-based business when you're juggling so many things. I mean, I truly believe, and I say this, it feels like I say this almost every single pod I do. I feel like if you can run an agency at a good level of scale with a team of above, let's say 20 people, you know, of a of a of a nice six-figure monthly like revenue. God, any other business would feel such a breeze. I know.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

It's it is, it's I think probably the last three months has hit me a bit more like that because I'm like, okay, there is just I've always been like these are the good times, these are the good problems to have, they're all good problems. Okay, but like there's too many good problems now. Like there is there is a lot going on in terms of a a big bump of growth. But yeah, you're right. I'd all I have to do is think of to be honest, all I have to think of is doing it, think of any job I've done before in the past. Will I swap any day for that? No, absolutely not. I would work a year unpaid doing this, and I would do one shift at Burger King and I used to do, like, and I think perspective helps with that. So even if you're busy or you stress or you're context switching, the perspective that I've got has always helped me with understanding that this is a dream. Like I it's an absolute dream. Like the kid who was 16 who dreamt of just leaving the his home and going into do something different. Being able to work with the clients and do the cut some of the cool stuff that we've done over the past few years is an absolute dream, and you've got normal stress, and then almost like fake stress you put on yourself, it isn't real stress, and your body knows it's not real stress and it freaks out because it's not real stress. Um so you it's trying to differentiate between those two things, but you can get lost in it.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

It's an interesting one, the fake stress. It's uh it's that is that's so real. It's uh you stress so heavily about things that you used you would have used to have dreamt to do. You are you you wake up in the morning and you've got this situation, you have these pressures, and you're like, oh my god, this is too much, and you're like, hang on a second, like I wanted this more than anything in the world, and it's it's interesting that that frame. You must have to. I'm interested in the PR side. You must have to, or correct me if I'm wrong, deal sometimes or along the journey with misalignment on expectations with clients because it's not a um, at least from my perception of it, it's very hard to predict exactly what's going to happen. You don't know the exact uptake you're going to get when you when you let's say go to market and you pitch a whole bunch of journalists. Have you ever come into a situation where like a project just hasn't materialized in the way you need to? And and and and is that something that you have to be very consciously aware of the the expectations that clients have and what you can deliver, because you must be subject. More out of control of the end result.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

Yeah, which is mad. Like there's in no other part of marketing, really, especially not the performance side, is it like that? So we're selling to clients that we can do this, there's loads of evidence we can do this. This is the approach we'll use. But you know, it's it might it might get pick, some might get more pickup than others. I think it's a real interest in World PR like that because it's it can be very difficult to sell, it can be a very difficult ongoing relationship if you're not careful. We've got certain systems in place where, because I've worked with clients now over the past sort of 13 years, you can kind of predict the way things are gonna go. So we've got systems in place to kind of prevent problems before they could become problems. So when we pitch ideas, for example, that's your first hurdle. The clients can have ideas, their boss is gonna have ideas. You're pitching an idea, it's completely subjective. They might go with that. We don't like that. Like, so we I've got we've got a process of pitching ideas, which is like, here's some data that suggests that this is gonna be a good idea. Here's a theme that we've explored, here's the idea, because we've seen that data and no one's done this idea yet, but this data shows that this theme's a real, a real good idea. This is around this category on your website. This category on your website, you currently rank around 10th for. If you're ranking in the top three for all of these terms under this category, let's say it's engagement rings, you could be looking at another £120,000 per month in organic revenue. So then you've used money to cancel out any sort of like, why are we doing this around engagement rings and not this other jewellery? You've got proof there in terms of the data of the campaign. You then pitch the creative, and then you've got a bit of a matrix of like what's on brand and what's pressworthy, and then we kind of put it where we think it is. So we say, this is super pressworthy. We put it sort of pretty much on brand. We think it's in that sweet spot. Like, do you disagree with that? Um, so you're actually first sort of like trying to get the ideas over the line, and we've got a bit of a process for that. And then, yeah, you've got your okay, you've put you've done your brilliant campaign, it's in production, it's live, it's gone to the press, you're refreshing on Google to see whether you've got your results yet in terms of it getting pick up and you haven't got anything for a week. What do you do? The client's gonna say what's you know, what's going on? This was we thought this was gonna be amazing. So there's certain ways there, and I think we've got a really good team at that who understand the realism of PR. We had a campaign that we did for Victorian Plumbing, which was um it's called the Final Flush. It's basically around saving the great British public toilet. We found that public toilets were on the decline. So we pulled data and saying they're down X percent by city um across across the whole UK. And then we just forecasted what that would look like in the future. So if that same percentage decline rate happened, when would there be no public toilets left in Britain? Found like Newcastle would be Lulus by 2028 or something. Forecasted that across all the different cities in the UK. Then we created like WWF uh endangered species style posters to say British public toilets were endangered species, um, and did like mock-up designs of all that kind of stuff for each region. Then we created a petition to save the great British public toilet, put that on the government website, got two and a half thousand signatures in 24 hours. Then we created a video which was um David Attenborough voiceover of like a wildlife documentary style, just filming public toilets in Britain, saying that you know they're about to go extinct and they're endangered species. So we went all out on this campaign, made it sort of funny, ridiculous, interesting, data hooks, all that kind of stuff, great. Crickets for about four weeks impressed. And the clients like, this is like this is a good campaign. It's like, we're like pretty sure it's a good campaign, yeah. Um, so you've got to manage that relationship over that four-week period. Week five, a little bit of pickup, week six, it's on loose women, it's on uh all the press in regional press, it's on Huffington Post, you know, and it's like that's a difficult six-week period to be able to manage that expectations with the clients. You've got to have a lot of trust with them and they, you know, a lot of trust with with us, and to be able to to be able to say that it's not 100% in our control, but we're doing all the right things, and that's what we can kind of do. I don't like that side of PR. I don't like that we're selling something that we can't, and there's a bit of ambiguity around whether it'll work or whether it won't. So I'm trying to with even with the ideas, you can you can use that to know it's gonna be an idea that it's got more chance of working than not by using data. So at every stage we're trying to implement stuff that will just move it five or ten percent the other way where it's more more likely to work than not. We went for a period of um we we would create a story and then target readers of the publications we want to get in with MetaRads on Instagram and Facebook with the actual story itself. So we target daily mail readers, and then we'd use the click-through rate and engagement rate as part of the outreach to the Daily Mail and say, look, it's getting two P click to your website already. We've tested it with 20 quid, it's getting X amount of engagements, it's gonna be a good story on your website, and that that kind of stuff where we're trying to move stuff to more of a performance-based model, but incredibly difficult to implement. Um, but yeah, PR is a difficult world in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

There's two parts of that that I want to look at. There's I'd love to understand the ideation process a little bit more. Like, do you have like the whole team, like or a certain few team members, pitch ideas and you you have a meeting together and you're like, right, these are all the ideas we get, and you're like, that's the one. Like, what does what does that usually look like? Um, and then the second part of it is how do you get journalists to listen? Like, how do you make it an attractive? Are you coming to them because so you're coming to them with you've already done a lot of the legwork. You've already you've gone ahead, let's say, using the V Victoria Plum, and you've already gone ahead, you've got the petitions and you've created a pre-story, effectively. It's like this is the seed, and and you're selling the you know where it's going to go. Um so I'd love to explore what that, but let's start off with the idea, because without the idea, this doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Yeah, and I think that's the bit I I sort of I focus on either I focus on the ideas and then reporting success. So I'm not involved in necessarily the promotion, but I'm involved in the ideation process. Um, but I'm aware of what we do in promotion, so I can I can I can give some feedback on that. So the ideation, like I said, it's so subjective. And what we've got in PR and digital PR in particular, you have formats of content and formats of ideas that get used to death. So infographics, for example, 10 years ago, just like everything's an infographic, everything looks the same. Then you've got like maps, so the best cities in the US for X, that's a very traditional digital PR campaign. Like, and what you have is a whole industry that is built on the same formats. They've been taught the same format as the their manager who has done the same format because they know that works, and then you have the exact same type of content being pitched to press all the time. What we tried to do was say, forget maps, forget surveys as much as you can, or whatever the traditional routes are, like stop thinking of the format first, think of the idea first, and then match it to the whatever the best format is. And you might not know what that format is yet. So I think the way we start, we have a process for it which we have a tool that we use called BuzzSumo, and that analyzes themes. So you can put in any key term in that and it'll pull up the most socially shared content around that theme. And the great thing about that is you don't have to be an expert in it. So I don't know anything about public toilets, but I managed to find out information of that campaign through this. I found that they're on the decline. Um, I found that it was a big public health issue, and I managed to pull out two or three things from just that research that we can take into a brainstorm. So anyone who's running a brainstorm should have I've analyzed these key themes and I've found that these kind of things are quite interesting. Um, I did one, I use this exact same process probably five years ago at a previous agency. I found that uh eight out of ten Americans could no longer see the Milky Way or had never seen the Milky Way because of light pollution. I found that Elon Musk had sent more satellites into space and that was causing more light pollution. I know nothing about light pollution, I've just used this process to find out more about it. Um, and then I came up with a campaign for like a it was a map star map company. So if you get engaged, you want to know what the constellations of the stars look like when you got engaged, you can order a star map. Not really my type of thing, but that was where their product was. Um and I just did a campaign, logical research, found that light pollution was a talking point. No one had done anything cool, so I created a campaign which showed 20 of the worst light polluted cities in the world what they would look like without light pollution. So we just imposed the Milky Way and the skyline of New York. It was like a really visual, cool campaign, put it out to press, got on Sky News, and all that kind of stuff. But I didn't know anything about light pollution, not an expert in that. Same with I used to work on Misguided, I know nothing about female fashion, like jack shit about it. But I can use that same process to understand it, and that means that we have a team that don't necessarily have to be working on stuff that they're interested in to understand it. They can, we work with a few sports brands, they can put in the MBA, they can find out what's being talked about in the NBA the last 24 hours to kind of understand stuff. So I think that first part of the process, the whoever's leading the brainstorm, they come in with all this data or a few bits of data and say, I found these interesting themes. They might have half an idea off it. Someone will say a bad idea, someone will say a good idea off the bad idea. So that kind of thing, it just informs it. Whereas if you're in a brainstorm with no data, you sat there and you go come up with an idea about engagement. So I don't know, like what you've got an hour. You're like, it's just not how your brain works at all. I've got this long drawn-out process of I'll come up with ideas and it's it used to be embarrassing, it's not as bad anymore. But I used to do that research first couple of hours of pulling data, do nothing, then just switch off my brain. Like, and then something would come to me in the bath or something, and I'll just be like, oh, that's a good idea, and I'll note it down. So that's my process, but then everyone's different. So I found that that doesn't work for everyone. Some people are geniuses at coming up with ideas and not robots like I am. They can come up with a really cool idea. So then what we do is get them to reverse engineer it and put it through the data process to find if there's any uh evidence that suggests it will work, and also to help them get sign off on the idea with the client. So there's two ways of being able to do that, and we haven't discounted the I had this random idea in a pub, and I think it's great because that's that is where the best ideas come from. Um, so I think for that we reverse engineer it and put it back through the process to find data that that supports it's a great idea. So that's how we kind of do the idea gen stuff. Is there a is there a time span on that that we we try and earmark as much time as we can, like it might be a couple of weeks time span in terms of ideas. When we onboard a new client, for example, we perhaps pitch ideas to them end of the first month. So they've got three weeks to be able to come up with three or four campaign ideas that we're going to pitch to this client. Um so it's a decent amount of time to be able to get your head around stuff. Um at the at the same time, we do reactive PR at the same time, so there's no like quiet periods. So something's happening, we're going out with reactive PR, and it's you don't have to create anything. It's just reactive, like I was talking about earlier. So yeah, we we give it try and give as much time to that as possible. Because I think, but at the same time, we've onboarded execs and managers, I've gone through that process and they've just gone, my brain doesn't work like this at all. So I it's it's not the same for everyone else, but in terms of how we pitch ideas, that needs to be fairly consistent across the teams, else it's it's actually how the agency they they used to work out pitchers' ideas, not us. So we need some sort of process to go alongside the creativity, which we've tried to somewhat get.

SPEAKER_01 55:28

It must be very exciting, being able to have a long thinking period of some really cool ideas and bring that to fruition.

SPEAKER_00 55:33

People still leave it to the last minute.

SPEAKER_01 55:34

Yeah, yeah, I imagine. I wonder if the the the the the part of uh you know certain people not being able to follow the specific framework for creating ideas is is how much of that is to do with their brain and how much of it's to do with you as a founder or just have an incredibly busy brain, so that it's those you need those moments of clarity where you go for a walk, sit in the sauna and be in a bath to just be able to think about something in isolation.

SPEAKER_00 55:55

I've learned more about that over the last few years, I think. Uh and and it sounds like a real crap thing to say what your skill is, but it is taking a large amount of data and making a decision decision off that data is what I do. But I've applied applied that to ideation, which not many people do do, because it's not a n I'm not a naturally creative person, so I had to. So I not everyone's brain does work like that. And I think, yeah, mine I've learned how to to go with mine. I need I don't I don't actually like doing it in groups that much. I like to do my research and then I'm I'll spend time by myself thinking about stuff. But you do have to dedicate time to it as well, particularly at early moments where whereas I think some people think it just comes to you and you but you it's not you've got to create some space in your brain to actually come up with some ideas. Yeah. But after speaking to multiple people, it's not the exact same for everyone else, um, which is understandable now.

SPEAKER_01 56:46

Yeah, 100%. When you so you then you've got a great idea, you're like, well, this is the thing, you've you've you've you've packaged it up when how when you're bringing that to press, like how are you how are you packaging that? That is it like an email with a pitch deck attached, like is it that simple?

SPEAKER_00 57:00

Or it's yeah, we've got a software where you can you can create a relevant outreach list, which will be you know your hit list of the sites you want to get on, sites that are really relevant to the story, the journalists that talk about those sorts sorts of topics as well. So you know your your seeding list is really bang on. The problem though, you've got certain digital PR agencies that might have 5,000 journalists on it, they just spam them, hope they get some pickup. They don't they spam them again. Like it's it's real volume. Like journalists are getting hundreds and hundreds of emails a day. So part of it is you've got to stand out, the headline needs to be right. You've got A-B test, maybe some of the headlines within that seeding list that you're sending out. Then the journalists will get an email with the highlighted points because they're time poor. This is like what this is about, and then they get the full press release with all the information and that links out to drop boxes with the creative and everything like that. So they should have everything they need to write a story on it. And what you'll find is you'll you can track open rates and sort of how certain things are going. You might have multiple opens from certain journalists, you think it's going to get covered, but you'll find they won't reply to you to say it's being covered all the time. They're just too busy, it goes up, you track it yourself. It's become very dis unpersonalized compared to how it used to be PR agencies taking journalists out. I still think that happens probably, but I think when they say they've got a black book of contacts, it's the same black book as everyone else. The story needs to stand out. So it is more about it's all about the story and the relevance of the story that you're pitching to the most relevant journalists still.

SPEAKER_01 58:28

And may and doing as much of the work for them, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 58:31

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If they've got to write X amount of stories per day, they haven't got time to email you back and ask for more information, they haven't got time to like unpick your bad grammar or your poor writing style or anything like that. It needs to be perfect for them so they can just take it and then uh take or take bits out of it that they need for their story.

SPEAKER_01 58:50

Yeah, fine. Yeah. Very cool. I want to zoom like right back for for a minute. And I just want to explore um what brought you into entrepreneurship in the first place because it it's as we've discussed multiple times throughout this chat, like it takes a very specific mind to want to be a founder and to want to go through that. Um, so what was it that was there a catalyst, was there a trigger point in your life that made you think I want to start a business?

SPEAKER_00 59:15

Yeah, there's probably two moments. I think to give a bit of context, I'm I've never described myself as like an entrepreneur. So I, you know all the story, and you might be one of these as well. The kids who were selling stuff in the playground, making a bit of money, and they had the side hustles growing up, and they were like, they always had like 20 quid on them because they'd made some money off selling something. I wasn't like that at all. Like I was just there was I was so average. I was I was okay at football, I was okay at a few other bits, I did okay in GCSEs, I went to sixth form, scraped into uni, got like D's and C's. I think General Studies got me into uni. That like I got an A in general studies or something that got me into uni with my with my PS. General Studies. General Studies. I went 90 out of 90, I remember. And I remember thinking, how have I done that? Um, but that sort of got me into uni. So at this point, I am just like bang average, and I still am. But in that sense, I was just not, I wasn't like I'm a real go-getter or anything like that. I had a difficult sort of upbringing, so my dad was disabled, he had MS, he had that since I was five, so it's not like it was a shock, it's something I always knew. So I had this um I had this perspective growing up where I was I don't think I've changed since I was about 12 or 13. Genuinely I felt like the same person. I was an adult in a kid's body, which sounds great, it's the most frustrating thing in the world because you you know, I couldn't you've got no outlets or anything like that. People sort of didn't have answers to some of the questions I had. Um good things about it is you build up emotional intelligence really quick so you can understand read rooms and all that kind of stuff really quickly. You knew what real problems were, so I'd go I'm going to six forms sitting down and people moaning about stuff and me being like, is that your biggest problem? My God, do you know what I've seen this morning? Like, so I think I had extreme perspective on stuff, um, which was a curse as a kid, like uh, but as an adult, it's been amazing. So I think that was always on my mind, and then I just wanted to I needed to get out from a small town, nothing ever changed, no one really left. So I'm in my head, I just need to get out. So I was that was my first decision, and I weren't discouraged from getting out. Like my parents are you know, my parents are great, it was just very difficult at home life, and I think they're also, you know, they haven't left that town necessarily. They didn't really know anything about going to university. It was always a bit of a rich kids go to uni, don't they? That type of thing. So I wasn't like you can't go to uni, it was more a bit of a like, well, no one else has kind of thing. Um so I I got I got into uni and I remember thinking, I always felt like the world was having a bit of a party and I went invited, and I just in a small town, nothing changed. I just felt like there must be something else going on. Went to uni and there was. I was like, okay, amazing. I knew it. And I sort of backed myself, and then that was the first thing I got right where I was like, there is more going on here. Like, and then I think I had the so the first instance of wanting to become an entrepreneur, I had a year out at uni, I think it was during the recession or just after it. Couldn't get a job like at all anywhere. Um, I was going back to uni that year, I got a house with my mate. I couldn't afford my rent the first month of each the first month of each month, first day of each month I couldn't afford my rent by the end of the month. So I had to figure out a way of getting that money by the end of the month to afford my rent. My parents couldn't be my guarantor on my house because we weren't even a wealthy family to be able to do that. So I think my brother was at one point and he was like 16 and just started working or something like that. So um I I just I think then I was like, oh fuck, I'm poor. Like I didn't realise, like I like as in I have no safety net whatsoever. Like this is what my life could be like. If like I was eating two meals a day, I was having like wheat of bicks and one like ready meal a day or something. I was like, oh my god, like no one can even, no one can help me here. Like no one could pay my rent that month or anything like that. I couldn't go to anyone for help, really. They probably could if they're absolutely desperate. Um, so that was the first one. I was like, oh wow, like so. I started to learn how to do basic WordPress websites. I started writing. So I started like blogging and stuff like that, getting because I used to like writing, learned how to do basic WordPress websites, did a couple for a couple of companies, got paid like 200 quid, paid my rent. Um, started writing for a free website called Sabotage Times, which was quite a big website back then. Used to get loads and loads of readership. That was actually a couple of years after that, but I started writing to get myself into that sort of position. So that was the first instance where I was like, this like I can't have my life like this, this is not what I want at all. This is like I don't want to the worries of what I saw growing up financially. And then the second one was I was 20, probably 25, and I was doing all right. My career was progressing pretty well. I'd I'd started working a lot then, like I did all right at uni, like in the last couple of months anyway, and that got me two one or whatever. And then I'd I was working out of hours, I'd set up, I'd gone self-employed, I was writing for top man Siemens, and I got sort of other like cool bits of work, and then I remember getting my first check, it was like it was a check for managing someone's social media profile for like 200 quid, and I was like, I can earn my own money. Like no one told me that as a kid. I was for a job where I despise at every job, and then they get paid nothing for at the end of the month. So that was a bit like, oh, I found this out. So that was quite late-ish on, probably 22, 23, and then 25. I'd work in an agency, I'd got my own sort of department there. I was tracking profit and loss of that department. I was doing well, I was bringing in new business, I was dead confident. Um, but then I sort of did like a almost like a fast forward of my life in like 10 years. Like my dad was still ill, he would probably be in a care home by then. I, you know, want to do what other people around me were doing, which was going on holidays, travelling, you know, getting married, having kids, and all that sort of stuff. I hadn't done any of that. And I sort of forecast my life what it was like and what it was gonna be like when I'm 35 if I carry on just working like everyone else is. I felt like I'd started off like three steps beyond the ladder than everyone else, and I had to work twice as hard. So I did that and I was like, oh my god, my life's gonna be terrible. Like I've got nowhere near enough money to be able to pay for a care home for my dad. Um, I won't be able to afford kids, really. I don't want the kids growing up in the same sort of situation that I had just around money and fear and stuff like that. So something in me just snapped, and I just that's when I set up my first agency and I worked like an absolute idiot for years. Like, and then when I worked at previous agencies, I worked out before this, that's why I was working 12, 13 hours a day. Um, you know, I was hoping to work my way up and get some shares there, and then when they if they sold it, then I'd get some money. But it was I was working like an absolute moron for for years, and then you know, I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. Didn't quite make that because my nowhere near it. Like the the business didn't work, so I was obviously absolutely nowhere near it. Um, and it took me a good six years to save up enough money to go again. So those two key moments where I'd sort of thought about stuff and you know, sort of almost like realised it's a massive kick up the arse to me of you want this. It wasn't even to have uh a certain lifestyle, it was to have the same life as everyone else. I'm gonna have to work differently, and we have to work smarter. It's not just working hard, I'm gonna have to be dead smart with what I'm doing, and I've got to work hard and outwork everyone else. Um, so I didn't do it in the most sustainable way to start with. Like I said, I work like an absolute idiot. Um, but those two things led me to entrepreneurship, and I think that I I've got a newsletter on LinkedIn called Born or Made because I'm fascinated by it because I'm not a natural entrepreneur, I was almost forced into it. Um, whereas I was inspired by the natural on the natural entrepreneurs who you know did sell sweets in the playground and did become multimillionaires by 25 and all that kind of stuff. But then I met I kind of spoke to them and I realised we're slightly different, or and it's it's just intrigued me as to why I how and also it's not an easy route to go down, is it everyone thinks it's great and glamorous, but it's very difficult. You've got to be mentally strong. Um, and I think I was almost thinking, why am I like this? Like even the last few years I've thought why have I done this sort of stuff and I've managed to have a bit of time and perspective to actually think, Why did why did you do that? And it was because of that. It's those those couple of reasons and my my background that sort of you know made push me into it, and I put unbelievable amounts of pressure on myself, like putting pressure on yourself to like because you in your head you're looking after your parents, and if you don't, you that's it, like your life's over, and their life's gonna be crap. Like, it's too much pressure to put on yourself. So I can do it a lot more sustainably now. So uh this is a completely different sort of scenario. I still very ambitious and sort of pushy and discontent quite a lot, or uncontent, whichever one of those words is the word. Um, but in a more sustainable way than while I was. But that's pretty much the reason why I set up a I set up businesses, I think.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:02

That's amazing, man. I mean, resilience is the single most important trait of any business owner. And so you had been exposed to a life that forced you to build resilience from such a young age, it's inevitable that you're going to be able to approach business in the right way eventually.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:17

Yeah, and it used to be something that, like I said, it was frustrating as a kid that, but then I was like, oh my god, this is a superpower. Like I don't I don't get stressed about stuff much because I know what a real problem is. It's like I can use this, I don't like I can do my uh capacity for stress is far higher than everyone else's, and it's not stress. That's the whole point. I understand that it isn't stress, it's just something that's happening as opposed to you know seeing someone suffer is actual stress, like so it has been a superpower probably to me and my brother, and we've only really started realizing that whereas before it was a nightmare.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

Amazing, man. So you're you say like you worked like an idiot beforehand, your words are not mine. Um how how do you approach work now? Do you are you on all the time? Do you take weekends off? Like what's you know, what's your situation?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:08

Uh it's it's varying, it's a lot better than what it was. I think um you are switched on all the time, you've got to accept that, and you've got to accept that switching off is still being switched on because that you're doing it to help it help yourself when you're switched on. Like, there's no point in lying to yourself. It's not like switching off on relaxing and you're recharging to get back to it. Yeah, you're just like that as well, help me get back, I'll work better. Like you just so you're still just like an absolute like nutter, really. Yeah, and you are just completely different to people around you as well. And my my girlfriend isn't like that, she thank god, like she's a normal person, and she's far better at loads of stuff that than I am in that in that sense. But even she she knows that now, like that it's yeah, I'm recharging, and then I'll be like, I've got a pan, uh pen and paper, I'm just making loads of notes and stuff, or on notes on my phone. So I was dad's really good idea. She's like, I thought you were supposed to be relaxing. I was like, this is relaxing, like I'm able to have this idea because I've I've chilled out next to a pool for a few hours or whatever. So yeah, I've got a lot better. I've gone for a period probably the last three months where we've worked most weekends and stuff, but there's no way around it. Like we were growing, and it's kind of the stuff I quite like being in. And you're almost starting your to-do list at 5 30 p.m. because there's so much happened that day. You've you're starting your actual to-do list later. That's not sustainable, and I know that now. And yeah, I will treat myself now. I've not been good at treating myself over the years at all because I was so sort of pent up of like, oh no, I need sort of money for my parents or whatever. And uh, so yeah, I've gone on a few sort of more adventures over the past sort of year or so. Holidays now are I do switch off. We're in like a spa or on a beach and we're doing nothing. I just go swim in the sea for like four hours. Um, so I enjoy that sort of stuff. And yeah, I went went to New York and Nashville with my friends last year uh last year as well, where it was like that was like a I've set up a business, I've had a pretty good few years, I should go and just do this and not think about anything, think about what I'm spending, or and that was probably the first time I'd done that. I properly not switched off, but appreciated stuff. And so what what's the point in doing what you're doing unless you're actually going to get a reward every now and again? Nice. Um, so yeah, far better now.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:13

I've got a hack for you actually. You might have noticed this that I'm wearing, which is very nice. I wonder what a piece of tech that I've got. I won't mention the company name because if they if they're watching this right now, they can pay me to mention them. But I'll mention, I'll tell you off camera. Uh no, it's called a limitless pendant. It's um it's uh an AI wearable and it's kind of listening 24-7 and and so and it's summarizing conversation. And so and I bought this specifically for those moments where you're I'm a massive nature nut. I go walking all the time, I love hiking, it's just that's where I find get all my best ideas, get all my clarity from and recharge. But I always have so many ideas, and I don't want to be out in nature and picking up my phone, writing stuff down, you know, because that's what you naturally do. Whereas on this, I can just press a button and it'll flash uh yellow like that, which says it's a key moment, and then that that I can highlight and come back to those. But it'll all summarise, put it into a notion document, whatever you need to do, which I think it's a it's gonna be a bit of a boom. Yeah, yeah. But it's nice to be able to just talk and explain. Not being on your phone, like not being on your phone.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:15

Gets it off your phone. I think that's the key, like, because then you're you're drawn into all the other stuff on your phone and you can't get off it. So yeah, I'd be up for wearing something like that. But again, I won't and if they pay me on my sponsor. We'll get them sent out to everyone.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:31

Um so looking to the future now, so you've you've you've got to where you are. Um and uh what what what are you working towards? Are you working towards an exit? Are you are you do you do you do we think you'd be running the business forever? What's the situation? What's the goal?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:45

I think there's there's two things that work in tandem, I think. For me anyway, and like co-founders are similar, we've got similar sort of thoughts on it, but we're all slightly different people. I think me, I've always I want the financial benefits of running a business. I think that's and I you know I've not seen them yet fully. Like I've had a decent year in terms of the business, but a normal year in terms of what would be a director's salary or whatever. I want the the financial, I want my my dream, and I I say this to to my co-founders as well, is I want to take my mum and my brother out for dinner and say, look, I've got this, it's sorted. Like this this has happened. I have we have money now and that kind of stuff, which is crazy because my brother's earning more money than me now. Like he's doing great, they don't need it saving or anything anymore. So, but that in my head is still my sort of purpose, um, you know, and to help the rest of my family out and stuff like that. I want to help people. I don't I'm gonna buy a new car or like anything stupid with my money. I want to be able to just go, here's like I'm helping you guys, don't worry about stuff anymore. And also I have the peace of mind that money does bring you. And you know, I got brought up really saying that money doesn't bring happiness, it doesn't, but it brings you time and options. And the more time I have, the more options I have, the better decisions I make. And I think having a disposable income has always helped me with that, and it helps me breathe about stuff. Um so that for me, and it doesn't really matter what sort of figure that is, really, as long as that it gives me that. Um but I want alongside of it, I want the I did this really cool thing that I'm really proud of. And you might not get both. Um, I think, but I want those two things in tandem. I wouldn't, I wouldn't uh ever sell a business or have an acquisition where I thought I felt like I hadn't done a really good job of it. And likewise I won't just do something I'm thinking I'm doing a really good job of, but be skint. So I want those both of those things, and I think with bottled imagination, I could reel off 10 things we've done the past two years, and I think that's really cool. Like there's so many things we've done, I'm like, that's that's really cool. We interviewed Peter Crouch for a Victorian Plumbing ad that went out to press. We've done a campaign with Roger Federer and on, where we created a bespoke sneaker, and I heard the word Roger Federer sign off any campaign idea. So I'm like, that's really cool. Like, so I'm ticking those boxes at the moment, I think. And then the third one would be you know, our staff and our team and whatever that the future means for them, if that's you know, growing to a certain level. We've never wanted to be the biggest agency because I think it's just more people is more it can bring more problems and more headaches and stuff like that. I was running a hundred person agency. I don't know if it's easier or harder than a 20-person, but um, I've you know done aspects of both, and I know there's certain difficulties within both worlds. So I think it would be case of the team as well, and what's kind of best best for them. And I think we've got no desires to like and you know, we because we've been allowed on social media, you do get approached all the time with people who have loads more money than I do, uh, about different routes you can go down and all that kind of stuff. And but uh we've kept it really simple the first few years as we got a couple of values, use your imagination, do good work, so do different work to everyone else, basically. So we're just sticking by that at the moment and then seeing where that goes. And I'm I'm quite uh target-driven and stuff like that, and I need to sometimes lay off that a little bit, but we'll set targets and I'll do everything I can to try and achieve those targets. Uh and they might be revenue profit targets, but also you know, we want to win X award or do this kind of work, which other agencies haven't done in our industry before. So there's some softer softer stuff there. I think there's the good thing about agencies and also an agency that's doing well, you do have options. I think that's great. You have you have loads of options you can go down, uh, and it just depends on which one is best suitable for all those sort of three aspects, whatever it might be. Um, and that might be running it ourselves for the like next sort of five, six years or something. Um, I think the bold imagination almost feels like a an extension of my career. It doesn't feel like we've run it for three years. I feel like I've been doing this for a long time and now I'm just applying it to the business I've set up. So it doesn't feel like you're only three years old. It's like no, I'm knackered, so I'm not. So it's like you it's just a continuation of my experience. So it doesn't feel like it in one in some senses it feels brand new and fresh, and there's so much you can do with it, like, but at the same time, it's just an extension of what I've been doing for for years.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:03

It's now my own company, and uh it's the infinite game by Simon Sinek that that reminds me of it's it's like a it's a vehicle in that infinite game that you're playing, but it's just one vessel that you're as part of this game that you've been playing for so many years.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:17

Yeah, and and what I used to look at it was you need to be a millionaire or you're a failure. Like as in, I I needed to to build something, Salad, because your life and people are depending on you and stuff like that, it's just ridiculous. Whereas now I'm like, and then it was like you and then you can relax. I was like, you won't because you'll be annoyed, you'll be bored, you won't have anything to do, you'll start right and you get Aggie. So it's like I do see it more now as a continuation of stuff, and wherever that goes, and also the same pe the people you're with. If you I've met people before at previous agencies where I'm like, this is a group of people that I'm gonna work with for a long time. It doesn't matter what that is or what the thing is that we're doing, it's just a continuation of it all, and I can see past that now, and not just a you do this, you get a load of money, you help people out your failure. It's more like you've got all these steps going, and there's gonna be a thing after this, and you're gonna I've got loads of other ideas and stuff like that. So I think it's it's less like a yeah, you you're doing it for a reason, then you're done. I'm not gonna retire at 36. I keep joking that I'll retire at like 38 and then just do what retired people do. So I'll go on day trips to Skegness with them, but with all the old people, yeah. And just be like, yeah, my knees are it and that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:26

Maybe six months will be fun, yeah. Terrorise them a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:29

Just pretend to be retired, just pretend to retire. Just keep talking about my age, keep talking about like how the glory days, yeah, all that kind of stuff. So that's what I keep talking about when it comes to retirement, but I don't think that'll ever happen. Awesome. Um, so yeah, I think it's it's just a yeah, those sort of three things getting in tandem is sort of most important thing, I think, no matter what what really happens.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:47

Nice. Finally, what advice would you give to an agency that's watching this right now, who's inspired by you guys? Maybe they've hit a bit of a brick wall, they want to, they want to grow, they want to scale. What advice would you give to that kind of person?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:59

Um, I think if you've if you've put your product and agency out there, and let's say you're you're new and there's been a bit of feedback and you've got a few clients, and there's you're almost looking for validation of what you put out there. Now you can do that. I did that for probably 18 months in my first agency. There wasn't validation. Like I thought I was a failure for not sort of carrying on going or not succeeding, where it might have done if I'd certain things had landed differently. So you want to try and find like the points of validation that it's something that people want and it's working. And then you have that, you can double down on this sort of things. It I think there's no harm in saying this thing isn't quite working. I think what we did at the start, um we we to differentiate ourselves from the agency, we said this is what we said bottom imagination would be. Is this true? Are these things still true? So you just list out what you thought it was going to be, and then it becomes less like I'm struggling and I'm not very good, as opposed to we set up this thing, we thought it'd be this, is it still that? No, actually, this has changed over the last three months and this doesn't quite fit, or we've had feedback from clients that say this and perhaps why our client churn has gone up uh quite dramatically last three months, and it's because of these reasons, and that that isn't what it we set originally set it out to be. So I think you've got to be quite flexible with and also uh removing yourself from the business so it becomes less personal then on yourself because you can be quite harsh on yourself. You saying this is what we said it was going to be, is that still true? Um, I think you can match those things up there, and then you can see the the bits aren't going quite right. I also think comparing yourself to agencies that are scaling really fast is like it can be crippling. So you you don't know those situations quite often. I've compared myself to them in the past. I've asked a few questions and they're funded by X, and I'm like, okay, that's something slightly different to us. Like, we are not funded by that company, I had no idea. Um, or they're a sister agency of a bigger agency, and you're like, okay, that's how you've been scaling then. Uh so I think don't compare yourself to others, I think is a big is a big thing. There might be aspects where you're you have a a product ready and a business ready, but you're not quite ready. Again, in that case, you've just got to go, we're doing all these things, and this is what I learned from those things, and and not sort of hitting yourself over the head because something hasn't gone quite right, or you didn't win a pitch, or you're losing a few clients. Like, if if person if your personal experience is that you've wanted to go set up a business, you've gone set one up, and it's not going perfectly as you'd hoped, but you're quite young or ambitious or whatever, just don't put so much pressure on yourself. Like, take your time with you with yourself because you're not going to know everything. Um, and every day is gonna be the first time you experienced it, the every day is harsh. Because now I'm I've experienced some of this stuff before, it's not as harsh to me, but it's the first time you were experiencing it. You're like an open nerve, you're like, oh my god, I didn't know this. Like, what like what how no one told me this? It's not in the the LinkedIn post or anything like that, and you put a lot of and then you like you take it, really it can really beat you down, I think. So I think knowing that the first time you experience all your losses is the first time you experience it, it's gonna be the worst, and then after that, you build up layers of sort of that that protect you against it. When you're talking about scaling and things like that, you can measure you, you know, you can go out all out and try and get something, and I had to graft my ass off just to get meet into my first business, like just get get in the room. I did pitch at Sager and football manager. I just remember thanking them for football manager because I just loved it. That was all I kept saying to them. Um, but those sort of things where I did graft to get in that room, and I understand that graft inside of it as well, but you can do that and not get anywhere still. It's gonna be you you've got to have most of the boxes ticked. Trust is the biggest one, I think. Think if you're you put yourself in the position of the clients you're pitching to and say, What would I trust this person who's pitching to me? And there might be very different reasons why you wouldn't. Uh, that might be your own experience, that might be your lack of examples of things you've done. It might be that you're just buy yourself. Like it's quite difficult to invest in an agency that can spend 10 grand a month with someone who's just a one-man band. Um but trust trust is the biggest one. We we we went through, I think our win rate was 50% in the first couple of months when we first launched, which isn't bad. It's probably that's probably what it is now, a little bit higher now. Um, but we were losing pitches. I thought we should have should have won or we should have more chance of winning. And I was I just I completely changed we completely changed how we were pitching after that because I just thought there's a load of questions here I think they want to ask us, but I think they think embarrassed to ask us. So when we were prepping for the questions they would have for the pitch, we'd write them down and we'd put them at the end of the pitch. And we'd say, if we were you, we'd be thinking, Are you gonna be around in six months because you've just launched? Yes. And we'd be like, Here's here's why we're gonna be around in six months. We've got four months runway in the bank. A lot of agencies don't even have that anyway. We're not going anywhere as founders. We've got a team of three people, um, we can service accounts immediately. Um, it'll be like, Are you just like this other agency in the industry, or like what's what what makes you different? Um, although so we just wrote down all the questions they would have, and they might be quite specific to that to that client or brief. It'd be like, We're gonna invest 20 grand a month. There's only six of you. Can you can you service our work? Who's gonna be working on the account? Yes, we can. You'd be one of our biggest clients, but this is where we're gonna go as an agency. Um, so that sort of removed all the kind of like politeness that went with the kind of pitching it might be in Britain, I don't know if it's everywhere, but we answered those questions and therefore it broke the tension in the room as opposed to we have all these questions, you don't really want to ask them here because it feels a bit quite rude to ask if you're still gonna be around as an agency in six months. And that just helped us. I think so. Trust is the biggest the biggest part. Why would they trust you to do this job? Um, and even to the things of you can push against that. So are we only just do a three-month contract because you know we're just new? Like, no, we do six, twelve months, we're gonna scale an agency to two, 15 people in a year. So for that, we want six, twelve month contracts because that helps us forecast ahead and you gives you a team, gives you a guaranteed team for a year. So you can be a bit pushy and confident in that in that sense. You don't have to sort of submit to it in terms of oh, they might not trust us, so let's just reduce our rates or anything like that. That might make you look more untrustworthy, if anything.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:25

So love that. Great advice. Pleasure, man. Thanks for jumping on.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:31

Thanks a lot for having me joining. Appreciate it.