SPEAKER_02 0:00

We're in danger of having an industry of people that are in marketing and digital that don't really understand how advertising works.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

So you left Jellyfish and Entsu to start your own agency. What motivated you to jump out of that and into this?

SPEAKER_02 0:11

We've seen it many, many times where clients are being sent an Excel spreadsheet at the end of the month, and that's about as far as reporting goes. What we decided to do was try and build a model that retains that boutique kind of feel where you have genuine transparency and accountability. What's early stage growth been like for you guys? We had that first big client which helped us jump up fairly quickly, and from there it was obviously a much more slow and steady growth. Started working with the Hammerson group who owned a lot of the UK's retail shopping destinations like the Bull Ring and stuff like that, which was another big win. And then last year we started working with the Gorilla Group who owned Gorilla Glue and O'Keefe's skincare. And then as recently as this year, we started working with JD Sports on their third-party brand activity. How did you land that client? Do you think if you were to distill that as a new agency on the scene? We knew what we were talking about. We knew how a bigger agency would approach it because myself and Josh had been at some of the biggest agencies in the world working on very similar clients. So we knew the same sort of processes, the same ways of working. We delivered as good, if not better, strategy and process than anyone else that was involved. What's your mindset surrounding performance models and equity deals? The marketing industry has become addicted to selling based on time in a lot of cases. So hours build, right? AI's come in, all the efficiency that can be created through AI, even if it can't replace tactical creative decisions, if it drives efficiency, then that means that the amount of hours you can charge for will naturally drop over time. Most underrated skill as an agency founder.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

I think. It sounds like you're a very performance-led agency rather than creative driven.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

When you look at media buying at the moment, the way that platforms like Meta and TikTok are moving with updates like Andromeda, what they're now saying is that instead of having this old model where you pick the audience you want to speak to, align that with a creative and execute your campaign, now you have Jack.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Thanks very much for having me. So you left the big agency world, jellyfish and densu, to start your own agency patterns. What motivated you to jump out of that and into this?

SPEAKER_02 2:03

I guess it was a a mixture of good fortune in a sense. And you know, I think like a lot of people, towards the back end of that network career, I was doing some freelance work and you know, generally speaking, just helping a few people out. Um and then all of a sudden got landed with the opportunity to go and pitch for a really big piece of business, um, and spoke to a friend of mine who I'd been on that agency journey with, um, decided to club together, put our best foot forward, go and pitch for this huge client, and ended up winning it. So it was kind of a a fortuitous start to the agency life. Um, but from then on it became this sort of real incentive to go and deliver as good, if not better, work than we were delivering at big network agencies, but delivering that with a much more boutique style to you know, really showing more care and diligence to the clients. I think that's what's what's worked so well for us is the know-how and the scale of bigger network and independence, but delivered at the sort of personal level, which lands really well for clients.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

How did you land that client? Do you think of you to distill that as a new agency on the scene?

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Yeah, that was definitely a little bit of um, you know, fake it till you make it, and maybe the illusion of scale was there to start off with. Um, but at the end of the day, I think we we we knew what we were talking about, we knew how a bigger agency would approach it because myself and Josh had been at you know some of the biggest agencies in the world, you know, working on very similar clients. So we knew the same sort of processes, the same ways of working. Um, and so yeah, I think we we delivered if you know, as good, if not better, strategy and process than anyone else that was involved. Um, we just kind of, yeah, because of the the connections we had, the you know, the intro we had to that client, uh, yeah, we were able to kind of yeah, get get a little bit lucky, I'd say, but you know, I I still think that the strategy we gave was as good as anyone else.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Nice. When you broke away from the bigger agency, did you come into this like and did you have a strategy session thinking like this is how we want to define ourselves in the marketplace and how we're gonna stand out? And if so, what did that look like?

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Yeah, for sure. So when well the way I see it anyway is when you look at those bigger network agencies and some of the larger independents as well, they're geared towards scale. And there is a certain level of scale that you can't compete with as a smaller agency. Um but having said that, what comes with that scale is generally speaking, you know, maybe not the same attention to detail that you would find from a more nimble agile agency. And so, really, what we decided to do was try and build a model that can service slightly bigger clients and you know relies on scale and process, but still retains, like I said, that boutique kind of feel where you have genuine transparency and accountability, and there's not these kind of deals going on with suppliers in the background, and you know, we don't, you know, we saw seen it many, many times where clients are being sent an Excel spreadsheet at the end of the month, and that's about as far as reporting goes, and that leaves a huge hole and a real trust gap between agency and client, and that's where we decided to flip that on its head and give full transparency into account ownership, spend, performance, everything, and then be judged on our ability to improve metrics. Um, and that's not always the case, it's you know a bit of a legacy thing, but some agencies don't operate like that. Um, and so if when we were able to match that scale with a transparent and accountable approach and not you know overinflating sales targets just to win business and then ultimately falling short, we've just been honest with every client we've had to say we either we think we can help you or we don't, and then we stand by those decisions, really. And so I think that that's kind of a refreshing approach to put transparency at the heart of what we do, pair that with a really good process that's backed by you know some of the best agencies in the world, and then yeah, and then let that do the talking.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Nice man. The name Patterns is quite unique or even unusual. Where did that name come from? And what's like the ethos behind the brand?

SPEAKER_02 6:06

Yeah, I mean it's it really just comes from a sort of general feeling that you know when I when I first did uh my first interview at a digital agency, I was expecting it to be a marketing interview and you know, for it to be very sort of yeah, marketing led. And instead it was, you know, we're given a spreadsheet and told, look through this spreadsheet and see what patterns you can find, see what makes sense to you, um, you know, what can you see in the data to pick out, um, which kind of threw me a little bit because you know, you didn't realise, or I didn't realise that marketing had become such a numbers game. Um, and there was no sort of creative instincts test, there was nothing really, it was a purely logical, kind of mathematical thing. And that's kind of just stuck with me since we we launched. Um and yeah, we're we're just kind of interested in pattern recognition and trying to understand, you know, how and where we can spot things. So yeah, it's a it's kind of a a throwback to that.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Does that like I suppose obsession with the numbers and treating it like an algorithm of such like come from you studied economics, didn't you? Uh law. Law. Interesting. Yeah. There's that okay, interesting. We'll talk about this. I'm I'm sure there's a LinkedIn profile with your your base on it, yeah. Oh, right, okay. Very strange. Okay, you studied law, interesting. Um, why not why not pursue law? Why what happened there?

SPEAKER_02 7:27

I mean, I'll be honest, I did a few bits of work experience and it was a lot of old dusty rooms with books in them and a very sort of insular inward-looking industry. Um, and then funny enough, I went and did a a few different jobs, and then when I first interviewed at a digital agency, turned up, had an interview on a ping-pong table. You know, there's just this this culture of sort of a very relaxed way of working, um, very kind of could tell there's a bit more creatively led people there, um, and just generally speaking, a fresher, more vibrant industry. So sort of immediately that attracted me to it. Um, so yeah, I say that's definitely was a big pull factor. Um, I didn't even really understand if I wanted to be in the marketing space, but the general vibe of the industry, and you could tell obviously at the time, this was probably 10 years ago, Google and all these different companies were just in the ascendancy, they were where all of the kind of IP and the investment was, so it made sense to align a career that's close to that.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

It's quite this there's quite the switch out, but carrying across into the agency space, I can imagine. I have a friend his name's Rory, he owns an agency called CSM, and they say that they run their agency like a law firm. Everything so everything is is billable hours and rather than like the conventional route of just uh retainers and so on. So they they they interestingly there's synergy between the two, at least that he has found. What's early stage growth been like for you guys? Getting that first contract under your belt? Like how long did it take to get like initial momentum?

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Yeah, it's a good point. So we when we first won that contract, it was kind of a you know rapid scale thing where we needed to find people and good people really, really quickly. We experimented with a few different models there in terms of outsourcing, freelancers, stuff like that. Um, and that took a while, it took a bit of trial and error. Um, and we've we've tried everything, right? From you know, plug-and-play outsource teams in India, the Philippines, places like that, freelance talent in the UK, and we ultimately settled on a model in South Africa which is working really well. Um but yeah, that early stage is just a lot of hustle, right? You're working with multiple different hats on, you're getting involved in everything, and you don't really there isn't really that much process, and I think that's what gets you away from being that really early stage company where you're you're delivering and you're kind of chopping and changing to when you do have established departments or roles and responsibilities, I think that's when you find that there's actually an opportunity to scale because otherwise it's just kind of chaos, really. I think.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Did you define like a specific ICP that you ended up going for early stage, or are you quite generalist in your approach?

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Yeah, so that's one thing that we we figured out early on. We could either niche down, and you see tons of successful agencies that are really highly specific in the type of work they do, um, or we could go for this more sort of generalist approach. Given the type of work that myself and Josh had been doing all of our careers, really, it made sense that we felt the value of our agency would be the sum of the amount of problems we can solve. And so if we niche down into one specific vertical too much, we remove our sort of opportunity to run into other clients. So that's where we took this fairly generalist approach, which almost is, you know, has media buy-in and you know, performance at its heart, but has bled into consultancy and you know, social, and wherever the opportunities take us, we kind of follow that. So you think in the e-commerce space is really common for people running ads on Shopify or you know, running PPC and meta-ads, things like that. A natural evolution for people like that would be things like TikTok shop. And the more clients we had asking us around things like TikTok shop, it made sense. We we had the decision to even say, nope, that's not our realm, or actually it's something we want to invest in. And so we brought someone on to kind of head up that department. And similarly, it's kind of bled into other things. So we've got a full-fledged social department now, data and data and engineering. Um, yeah, pretty much every service we can we can tackle, we we try to, and then over time those departments grow, and it gives you know diversification in the agency, so we're not completely um exposed to one area of marketing, but it does allow us to again cross-sell in between clients. Um, but that obviously requires you know good setup, really strong account management functions, um, and great process as well.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Have you relied predominantly on referrals or have you built outbound systems as well to get clients?

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Yeah, so I think we've been reliant on referrals, um, which has been a good thing for us really, and again, just goes back to I think the network that we built at all the different agencies that Josh and I have worked at, um, those people go on and go to various places and end up in different roles. And we've found that that's worked really well, keeping in touch with all these different people. Um, the quality of our work then sort of comes through. Um, and then the the you know, because we've done such good work for big clients, that gets us in front of more big clients. We've got great agency partnerships and referral schemes now, not just with individuals, but with tech companies, with media owners. Um, so really that what started off as kind of a personal referral network has now grown into a a company-wide one. But I think we've we'll always have partnerships at the heart of our acquisition or you know, client acquisition strategy rather than sales. Um you know, we see it work really, really well for niche agencies. But again, if we're trying to become more of a digital partner to a company rather than an email or a you know, whatever that kind of individual service is, um, that requires a real partnership. It really needs kind of you know deep connection between the client and agency. Um, and for us to do that, partnerships I think just works really well. So again, if we're implementing data services from supermetrics, being given a credentialed intro from a tech provider, is a really solid way to start building off a partnership, as opposed to a cold outreach, where we found that if someone answers one cold outreach, they're likely to do the same if a better offer comes along and it can be a bit transactional. Um, the type of service we want to give, which is really, really you know, deep and wide, you know, lots of different services really designed around long-term growth. In order for us to do that, we need to make sure that the client and agency fit is really strong. Um, so that's that's why partnerships is and referrals at the heart of our growth strategy.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

I like that. Have you systemised it to the perspe to the point that you let's say, for example, going back to our read you outreach partners, or is it something that's come organically through various introductions and networking and events and so on?

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Yeah, exactly that. So it's more organically to start with, and now we're being more intentional about that. So we've just hired a partnerships director who will come in and oversee our not only our existing partnerships, but then look to new providers. That kind of partner first model is something that we actually saw work really well at Jellyfish. They intentionally went and became the number one Google partner in the UK and and Europe and ultimately in the world in the end. Um, and they did that by aligning really closely to Google's ways of working, and you know, it was really evident that they were one of the top partners out there. Um, so we saw how how lucrative that could be and the the sort of benefits of that, and that's where you know we we we tried to emulate that on a much smaller scale and with different types of partners, but you know, it really is there's no substitute, I don't think, from being close to the media owners themselves. Ultimately, they'll dictate a lot of the direction of travel in the industry, and the closer aligned you are with them, the more access to early, you know, early stage alphas, betas, stuff like that that keeps you ahead of the competition. So being really aligned with your your tech providers and your media owners, I think is crucial for agencies, particularly given how fast everything's changing. You want to make sure you're not left behind the curve. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

What would you say have been the biggest challenges in growth? And can you give us an idea of from five years ago when you launched, like um from a revenue perspective, how quickly you got your feet off the ground as well?

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Yeah, so it's a good point. Um so I guess five years ago we we kind of started in the first few months was really sort of low levels of revenue. Then we had that first big client, which you know helped us jump up fairly quickly. Um, and from there it was obviously a much more considered slow and steady growth. Um, until maybe a year after that, we went and had another big win. We started working with the Hammerson group, um, who own a lot of the UK's retail shopping destinations like the Bull Ring and stuff like that. So, again, that was another sort of enterprise level client for us to plug in. And that's a client we've now built around, um, which was another big win. And then again, looking forward to say last year, we started working with another big group in uh the Gorilla Group, who own Gorilla Glue and O'Keefe's skincare. It was another step forward, another enterprise client to build around. Um, and then as recently as this year, we started working with JD Sports on their third-party brand activity. So the way we've tried to approach that growth is to have this steady stream of our core day-to-day service offering, which is typically e-commerce-led Shopify stores, uh, maybe some B2B clients, but people who have performance media at their heart. Um, but then our sort of growth strategy comes from these high margin, um, you know, bigger tier one clients that have real scale and growth, and that's where we can build, you know, these these really complex solutions. But having that steady stream of smaller retainers that are forecasted, you know, they're they're they kind of give you less exposure to having one or two clients that make up too much of a high percentage of the portfolio, they give us the base to grow and and be confident in our growth, and then we have these kind of marquee sign-ins that we look for, which really align with the way we've set the company up, and that's where we have you know this two speed of growth really.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Nice. The drum nominated you as one of or as part of the drum, one of the top PPC agencies in the UK. What do you think made that up?

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Um I think to be honest, we've our legacy really has come from PPC. Um, both Josh and I first started off working in uh the you know PPC team at Jellyfish where they just had incredibly strong people, you know, that we were learning from and working with. Um, and so we've always had an emphasis on best in class search. I think that's that's kind of evolved in recent years as it's become you know, it used to be a highly manual process with really specific ways of working. As we've been pushed into more of this broad match, you know, automated ways of working, that blurs the lines in terms of what best practice is, how much control do you hand over to Google or any of the PPC providers. Um, and I think the best PPC agencies now know when to relinquish control and they know when to keep it, and that understanding that what the platform suggests and what the reps suggest aren't always in your best interest. Um, you start to read um read between the lines of what the Google reps tell you. Um, and so I think it's that maintaining that balance between control but knowing when to let the platform do its thing. That's the the balance you're always trying to you know work with.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Always trying to get more money out of you, those reps.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Yeah, and uh often those recommendations are automated, they are aligned to the core business goals of Google, which will always be to get you to spend more. Um and you have to again, you have to know when some of those suggestions will be valid and they'll be useful, and other times you have to just know when to push back.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Presumably a lot of your early growth has been dictated around the clients that you've been landing. Um I mean, have you been in positions, presumably, where you've been hiring around a new client that you've just brought on? You're like, well, we need to now build a team surrounding so we can deliver here. Is that would that be a fair assumption?

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Yeah, in some cases, particularly in the early stages, that was how we would approach it. And that's where having really good partnerships with clients is crucial. Because in a lot of cases we'll be open about that and we'll say, This is how we we want to grow things, and this is the type of personnel that you need and that we need to do that. And that's where if we've got that core you know relationship that's really strong, you can have that dialogue with clients and build teams around them, safe in the knowledge that you know the agency partnership you've got is really strong. Um, so yeah, we're not we're not shy about you know talking and being honest to clients about that. We do now have you know, we've got a team that's growing, probably 40, 45 people by the end of the year. That gives us the scale and the the kind of um you know the the space and the resource within the teams to be able to up and downscale as needed, which puts less pressure on that. But particularly again when you're moving into new and exciting areas, you know, the industry changes so quickly. I think everyone's been caught off guard by, let's say, for example, GEO and AI overviews. So where our SEO team would usually get quizzed on rankings, visibility, traffic, that kind of thing. Now every client wants to know about what are we going to do about AI overviews, how do we rank on LLMs, this kind of stuff. Um that may well require a new skill set, a slightly different set of tools and technologies. You know, all these things need to flux, and that's something we can be honest and open with clients about, or you know, particularly in the creative space or in organic social, we've made so much more use of UGC and different styles of content now. We've had to build teams that are capable of sourcing that content, creating that content, which means that again, we have to be honest with clients and say, look, this is where the industry's going. We're gonna go there and you know and keep providing best-in-class service, and our team may need to change and you know be refreshed to do that. Um, but it just means we have really reliable streams of growth that are embedded in really high-quality relationships.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

When I speak to agencies, um I d I very often that there's there's people that are kind of two one of two ways. It's like we are either a creative agency with performance is kind of secondary, and kind of performance comes as a knock-on benefit of the great creative, and it-or we're performance-led, and the creative is just like a a tool in order to serve the performance. Uh, which of those do you think you are in? And if if you're not in either, like how do you picture both? Because to me, listening to you speak, it sounds like you're a very performance-led agency rather than creative driven. How do you then balance between, okay, this is what the needs to happen from a media buying perspective, from a technical perspective, this is what the numbers are saying, but and then also bringing in that creativity inside of the company as well?

SPEAKER_02 21:56

Yeah, it's an excellent question. And I think we are ultimately Ultimately, sort of marketing purists at heart, we understand that ultimately what we're trying to do in the majority of cases is reach the right type of audience with a really high quality piece of creative to encourage short and long-term sales. I think a lot of that performance conversation naturally we do have a lot of emphasis on short-term performance, which puts a lot of our focus on performance media and you know immediate metrics like ROAS and sales and everything else. But we totally understand that creative is not something that's in our wheelhouse from uh capabilities you know generating too much creative, specifically you know, long-form advertising, that kind of thing. But we totally get the importance of it, and that's where we we tend to put a lot of focus is the pairing of those two things. And actually, when you look at media buying at the moment, the way that platforms like Meta and TikTok are moving with updates like Andromeda, what they're now saying is that instead of having this old model where you pick the audience you want to speak to, align that with a creative and execute your campaign, now you have this AI-driven black box model at the targeting level, upload four or five different ad variations, and the platform itself will go and find the relevant person for each one. If that's the case, and if that's the general direction of travel for the industry, what that means is that creative is going to be one of the only levers that you can pull in order to make a difference. So to ignore creative now is is you know is is virtually impossible. Um, so yeah, we we still think it's super important. We talk a lot about creative with clients. Our teams, you know, we make sure everyone's fully upskilled on the importance of creative, how to build long-term distinctiveness and generally speaking, dial into creative effectiveness best practices.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

You talk a lot about data and and your use of data inside of the business. Um, how have you utilized AI within the last couple of years in order to really maximize on understanding on what's going on inside accounts?

SPEAKER_02 24:02

Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, a lot of the the tools that we use are kind of baked into the platform. So the the platforms themselves have done an excellent job of providing layers of AI. Um, we've also done a lot of work around things like dashboarding, where we are starting to use more and more complex sort of ML models and even just kind of basic data engineering, you know, pushing everything into BigQuery or using supermetrics to blend data sets. I think quite often what we're trying to do is make things as simple as possible. The the wealth of data that we've got available is brilliant, but in some cases it can be a little bit overwhelming. Um, particularly again when we're mentioning this kind of long and short-term performance balance, it's so easy to find the short-term performance wins, um, you know, because everyone's looking at ROAS and revenue and clicks and stuff. What we're trying to do is make sure our analysis of campaigns isn't overly focused on the short term, but equally looks long-term. How are we moving brand perception, market share, uh, penetration, all these kind of things. So, from our perspective, it's really making that as simple as we can. In case some cases using MMM models, we're starting to make more and more use of those. Um and so from an AI perspective, yeah, it's it's really sort of early days for us, but we're building the infrastructure now where we do have the capabilities to run more and more uh, you know, ML and AI analysis over our data. So the tech stack's a huge part of that, really making investments in cloud platforms and tech stack really to give us the capabilities to do that when we've got enough data for certain clients.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

It's interesting. I think everyone's kind of tackling everything very differently at the moment based on based on their proficiency and core proficiency in the agency. Most agencies start off in one core proficiency, be that email or PPC or whatever that may be, and then branch out, and then sort of like our perspective on AI and the way it can be applied is is somewhat skewed between each person, which is just interesting to get your your take on that. What is your role within the business? How do you spend your time in the company now, being a team of 35 to 40 people?

SPEAKER_02 26:14

Yeah, it's a good question. So um what we'll typically do between myself and Josh, two co-founders, is we made a deliberate decision uh probably about a year or two ago now to separate our roles as much as we can. Um and what that means is that Josh now takes on more of a an operational delivery focus and handles a lot of the process and you know delivery and almost the project management aspects of running the agency. Um and what I tend to do is focus a little bit more on the brand position, our sales narrative, our actual sales process, um, and really just trying to keep an eye on where the opportunities are for the business and how we can maximize those. Um, which is, you know, it's important to, I think, to do that, especially when you're in a co-founder situation, because quite often, if you cross over too much, it's not clear to either yourselves or the wider team, you know, where you stand and who needs to be the point of contact, especially in small teams as well. It really helps to have clearly well-defined roles and responsibilities. But you know, even in the best case scenario, there's going to be instances where those roles cross over, and especially at smaller agencies, you tend to find people wearing multiple hats. So that will change. But it's I think having clear definitions is really important for us.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Being a team of your size, like how have you found it is paving, hiring people to make sure that you can facilitate the existing clients you've got and then sustaining because I'm I'm always fascinated by the referral model, especially on agencies that are yet to hit that corporate level, because clients there's not it's not predictable when as and when clients are going to be coming into the business, and so therefore it makes it quite hard to forecast, forecast and uh forecast team even more so than just like uh revenue. Have you found any complications on bringing team members in, having clients, and then uh having capacity issues when you've you know need someone else to come in to fill the capacity from a client perspective, but you've really oversubscribed on team. Has that happened inside of business?

SPEAKER_02 28:25

So we used to be fairly risk-off when it came to this, and we would wait until the time arose and then begin the hiring process. What we've now realized over the last couple of years is that we despite the fact that it appears unpredictable, because we've developed quite close relationships with different providers and the network we've got is fairly reliable. We now make these kind of calculated gambles that we know that roughly every three to six months or whatever it might be, we all need another member of client services. And we rigorously follow that that pattern. We'll obviously analyze when that might change, and at some points we might need to speed that up or slow it down, but we commit to that hiring cycle and trust that we will make those new business acquisitions when we do. Um and at the start, you you probably have to be a bit more risk-off, but now we're with the pace that the businesses grow, and we're able to make those investments in non-billable roles, you know, partnerships director and you know new business lines that we know won't be profitable for six months, we can take those calculated gambles. And if we're gonna keep growing at the rate we are, we're gonna have to do that and put a bit of faith in the process. And that's where we are starting to low SFI. And we've made investments in our own website and you know, our own SEO to rank for the things where we're strongest, and then we use our credentials from a referral perspective to back that up. So we are you know starting to again having so many different service lines will help because we are starting to de-risk out of one service line, um, but we have to trust the process really, and that's where it takes that sort of leap of faith to back yourselves that you're gonna keep going at the speed you are. Um, and again, we want to make sure so you know standards don't slip. So if we start to overload people with too many clients, you know, you see right away that that's not the right thing to do. That jeopardizes our relationships, so we just have to we have to trust in that process and hire you know at the right cadence. What are the main culture pillars at so we as we started in 2020, right? It was pandemic era, people still working remotely. Um, we didn't want to build a business where people have to be almost kind of policed, and we didn't want to have any too stringent layers of management involved. Um, so what we've really tried to hire for the whole time is a set of people that are self-motivated, obviously, who you know have that kind of drive, and you know, we've we've hired a lot of people from network agencies and from independence where we've told them that the type of culture we'll have will be as much freedom as you need to get your job done in the way that suits you, but the only thing that might come with that is more of a unpredictable working pattern, you know, there's less kind of rigid process at a smaller agency, and we encourage people to be more entrepreneurial entrepreneurial in the way they think, in the way they act, in the way they spot opportunities. Um and so that yeah, it's really a culture of entrepreneurship within the business and a lot of freedom. So we you know we let the role to work for people if they've got kids or if they need to go to the doctors and stuff. There's no real we don't really care about any of that stuff. As long as you're getting your work done and you're showing 100% commitment, we we couldn't really care less what what you're doing. So that that really works for some people and not for others. We're really open about that when people join. Um and some people love that sort of the fact that the business is in such a as a good rate of growth, but also into various new areas. So we constantly have people who join us in one department, show a real proclivity for a different aspect of the industry, and then we're able to say, look, would you would you rather do this full-time? And we can just transition them, um, encourage people to do what they're good at and give them the freedom and the investment to do that. So yeah, it's really a culture of of growth as a company, but also individually. Um, and we really value sort of curious, uh interested people who are you know just hungry to learn, really, because that's ultimately what what we think keeps our success improving.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Nice. You're obviously a curious business in yourselves, having you know the desire to become a growth partner and have you know your fingers in a lot of different parties and different departments. Have you ever brought in a department and then later retracted that and thought this isn't the direction we want to go down?

SPEAKER_02 32:45

It's a good question. I mean, there's a few things we've started to do and continue to do that we maybe had a little bit of naivety in. And ultimately we've managed to make every service line work, but there are certain things like uh talent and influencer acquisition and management. When we first started to do it, we just thought that would be really simple. And it turns out there's a lot of moving parts and it it can become quite time-intensive, and actually, from a profitability perspective, unless you have a really well-defined process, can be a real drain and it can be difficult and things like that. So there's been a few areas, particularly related to content and production, that when you don't have that as a core speciality, you can become, you know, a real strain. Um, and so in the early stages we found that to be quite demanding. But again, over time we've learned, we've brought in the right people who do understand that as a core competency and and not try to cut make any shortcuts, and ultimately we've now made them into well-functioning parts of the business.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

We've gone down that path ourselves, but we always were at affluent.car performance creative, we're performance creative agency now, but we work with D2C brands. And we always started as a performance agency, meta-led, and then did CRM and email and all sorts of like just pure performance until iOS 14 came along, and then slowly creative started taking over. Like that was like kind of the catalyst to all of those changes that now means like the ad account is like creative is the new targeting. And we had to eat humble pie and completely U-turn the service offering in that instance for for D2C. If we we didn't have a creative offering, we just weren't, we were just gonna fall behind from everybody else.

SPEAKER_02 34:27

Yeah, I think it's it's really interesting you say that, and that's kind of something that we've noticed as well, especially in the last couple of years, that like you said, creative is the new targeting. Um, but again, we we always well not always, but there's still I think a degree of skepticism that needs to be applied to that. Just blindly trusting these black box models um from a kind of incremental perspective can sometimes be a bit misleading. And something again, we're always keen to try and prove is the incremental effect of advertising. You hear the stories all the time of companies switching off their brand PPC and sales flat. What you can see in a dashboard, particularly dashboards that compete, you know, Google Ads and Meta ads can claim the same conversions, they're very short-term focused. What we always try and do is be relentless in terms of optimization and reporting. But when you zoom out, often you can see so much more. Um, and I think that's why when we when you work with people where you don't have this short-term focus on immediate results or you're out the door, you're able to make tests and decisions that can say, you know, is Advantage Plus just selling to the people we already know are going to buy, or is it finding new customers? Because new customers is what drives growth. Um, and that's not always immediately obvious, but quite often agencies, you'll know yourself, you're under pressure from the CMO or whoever it is you're dealing with to deliver results. And as soon as that ROAS number starts dropping in the short term, often people don't care about the what what the potential long-term effects of that might be because it's very difficult to go and get budget signed off or to go back to the CMO and ultimately have a graph that's trending in the wrong direction, even if it's for the right reasons in the long term.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

How do you pave that with clients when because lots of businesses come in, and maybe it's a it's a it's uh a problem that only exists when you're more down market, I suppose, with the or downstream with the ICP that you're working with. But how do you balance clients who want immediate results, but in reality it's a very long-term game that they need to play to get to their desired place?

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Yeah, and it's it's really difficult. Let's start off with that. I mean, it is really difficult. Um we rely, this is where I think having really good understanding of effectiveness principles and you know marketing science really helps because quite often there's there's huge bodies of really good research out there that point to some of the things that you know we're talking about, which is that an investment in more of a brand-led approach ultimately is better for long-term brand performance than overinvestment in performance and short-term sort of thinking. When it comes to speaking to a head of marketing or a CMO about that, often they want to see results, you know, or case studies almost to back that up. And it's quite difficult to get people to buy into almost like the literature and the the established work on that because for their brand they see it being different, and oh, my category's different, or my CEO is just not going to buy it. If I tell them we need to go and start investing in upper funnel channels, you know, it's it's it's difficult. Um, so we try and and use as much as we can from a case study and research perspective. Often there's really useful things that tech partners can provide, um, and you know, media owners we can speak to them about um work that they've done, and so it's really about drawing on a body of evidence and research to say, look, we need you to trust us that this is the right thing to do, and it could be detrimental if you don't change that because we've got clients we can see when you look at things like Google Trends or long-term revenues on a consistent downtrend because they've not invested in their brand for years, and it's quite clear that what made them successful then was a really strong brand, tons of investment, which in the absence of that now they're missing out on. But in order to reclaim that, it might take you know six months, a year of committed brand investment, which might not immediately pay back. So it is no doubt difficult, but it's you know something that we're we we believe in, so it's something we're committed to trying to push through with clients.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

Is there like a minimum client criteria that you'll work with, like a minimum revenue requirement, or is it more based on budget and so on? What how do you quantify that?

SPEAKER_02 38:39

Yeah, we found that I think most agencies find this as you grow, it becomes more and more difficult to service the smaller end. And quite often, again, we're really open with clients in saying that you will get a better service from a freelancer or someone who's just really specialized at PPC because that's what you need is a good PPC manager to take over your body of work. We might be able to work with people like that for a month or two, but ultimately they won't see the value in our retainer size, and it's not a long-term relationship. So it works when you're trying to nick a few quid, but ultimately it's we're not in that that sort of game. So yeah, typically we we we sort of judge it on a case-by-case basis. And again, there might be clients where their PPC spend or their paid media spend might be slightly lower, but we feel like we could cross-sell, you know, dashboarding and analytics solutions or organic social management, um, yeah, tons of different things. And again, if we're working with these really nice sweet spot D2C brands that are of a certain scale, all of those things become relevant and they can all add value. And so that's a really, really great client for us.

SPEAKER_01 39:38

So you're still working D2C as well, bigger, and is that of a certain criteria? Who would you look for as far as let's say if I was a D2C brand that had just got investment but I was pre-revenue, would you still be interested in that?

SPEAKER_02 39:53

Yeah, for sure. We we we kind of work with a lot of clients on that kind of thing. And typically, again, going back to our referral network, it would often be a partnership with a creative agency, like a pure play creative agency, or come and say, look, I'm working on the the brand architecture for this, you know, apparel brand or whatever it might be. Um, we need a launch strategy that covers everything from a measurement framework to media execution to creative performance analysis, the whole kind of you know, specter of marketing. And that's for us an ideal client because yeah, we can work with them on a long-term plan for growth in what we think is a best practice way.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

What's your mindset surrounding performance models and equity deals? How do you mean? D2C brand uh taking a perfor either a performance retainer based on ROAS or a percentage ad spend or uh marketing services for equity in the company itself.

SPEAKER_02 40:52

Yeah, I mean it's an interesting one. We've not done any kind of sweat equity deals, but uh one thing I do think is interesting is that the marketing industry has become addicted to selling based on time in a lot of cases. So hours build, right? You mentioned it about the law firm model. Um, and I think law firms probably need to look at that model too, because AI is coming, right? All the efficiency that can be created through AI, even if it can't replace tactical creative decisions and stuff like that, if it drives efficiency, then that means that the amount of hours you can charge for will naturally drop over time. And if as an industry we can't figure out ways to charge based on outputs and value, I think ultimately that means that even more value will get starched out of billing models that are based on time. So we quite often will use um percentage models and you know have targets around ROAS or performance and try and stipulate long-term achievable targets. Um but yeah, I mean, for from an equity perspective, that's that's an interesting one. But again, it's difficult to forecast around that. Um, we have been offered that a few times, but we've typically stayed clear of it.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

Yeah, why?

SPEAKER_02 42:04

Just because there's inherent risk there, cash flow is really important for an agency. Um, you obviously need to make sure that costs, you know, and um everything is forecastable, and the businesses you're working on sometimes, given your best efforts, may not be as successful as you think. Um it depends on risk appetite. And if you're in a position where you could bring on a client like that in a fairly low risk scenario and see it as some kind of multiplier that's you know 50% win, 50% loss, I think it's a nice way to do it. But we've tried to take a much more rational, forecastable approach to hiring. Like I said, we we're pretty um set in that how we want to work. Having too many variables in that equation starts to make that a little bit more difficult.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. If you were to think back to a or even recently to a client uh campaign that's personal favourite of yours, what would come to mind?

SPEAKER_02 42:59

Good question. Um we've been doing some some really nice work on on JD Sports at the moment. That's been um a really interesting one where we're running a lot of activity that they'll do for their third-party brands. So, for example, Nike will have a new trainer coming out uh and they want to co-brand that you know that launch with their biggest UK partner, which will be JD. So there we've had some really interesting campaigns where you know we're trying to assess not only the needs of that brand, so for example, Nike or Onrunning or Adidas, but also how that fits into the JD customer base, and that gives an interesting strategic dilemma almost of how do we make sure we find the crossover between those two brands and how do we reach those audiences, stuff like that. And we've seen some excellent results um working with kind of talent and really showcasing what a best in class um approach to media buying will do when you pair that with some incredible creative, and so they've been some really exciting characters. Campaigns to work on because yeah, they're they they've got scale, um, they're culturally relevant, and we've produced some really good results that have been really well received. So, yeah, that's a great sort of client to work on for us.

SPEAKER_01 44:12

Nice. Where do you see the agency going over the next five years or so? Are you moving towards a certain trend? Are you trying to secure a certain ICP? Like, what are you what are you working towards at the moment?

SPEAKER_02 44:24

So, yeah, I think the the way we're approaching things is again looking through I guess you call it horizontal expansion and trying to bolt on more service lines potentially. So, again, given our the the way we partner with businesses, all the time people come to us and say, for example, can you handle our Amazon ads? Because we naturally do the rest of their marketing activity, it makes sense to bring that all in one place. That's not currently a service line we have, but we're acutely aware that that fits in really nicely from a sponsored ads perspective and on the DSP side. Um, so our thoughts on you know, now over the last few years where we've built up um capital reserves in the business is now how do we look at things like MA to bring in an established core to the business, which not only gives us that capability, once they're integrated, gives us that capability in a client base, but also then gives us the opportunity to cross-sell into our existing portfolio. Um and so that's kind of part of it, is just again increasing our service area to opportunity, and the more services we can, you know, really strongly serve, the better we can do that. And then from a growth perspective, it means looking into again more investment into partnerships. Um, and again, we do have this two-speed approach where you know a D2C brand that's looking to scale both performance and their brand equity. You know, that's a perfect client for us that we can service at the smaller end of our retainer base, but then we still have an ideal ICP that we can grow on now that we've got experience in so many of these different industries, we can go and legitimately talk to other enterprise-level clients and pitch a very similar solution. Um, and that's a two-speed approach, right? It that they're quite different in the way you attract and secure those clients, but that gives us um yeah, real breadth to the client base.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

So you're more likely to look to acquire other agencies than to look to aspire to be acquired yourself, would that be fair to say?

SPEAKER_02 46:24

Yeah, I mean ultimately the long-term goal for acquisition would be, you know, something we would explore from our perspective. I guess that does you in a way you're right, because anyone that was looking to purchase an agency, you can make the argument that they will diversify themselves. So if you're building a conglomerate of agencies, you know, you may well buy a PPC agency, an email agency, etc. We're approaching it from more of a kind of generalist or a full service agency point of view, which may or may not make us uh more attractive to to an acquisition or a buyer. Um and you know, in certain cases we may need to go down the acquisition route and buy a fully fledged small company. Um, in other cases, it might just be a key hire that that could do the trick for us. In certain industries, you know, we may not need to buy outright and we could just attract really top talent, someone with skin in the game that can go out and build a department for us. And that's again, it's calculated better, that may or may not work, but if we genuinely believe that there's opportunity there, that gives us you know license to go and play in that area.

SPEAKER_01 47:27

How do you approach that trying to snipe a great talent from places? Do you have someone internally who's responsible for that? How do you tackle it from a strategic perspective?

SPEAKER_02 47:37

We again we've met so many good people over the years that quite often we've got our eye on someone that we've either worked with previously or that's become you know introduced to us via someone else. So again, I think that's part of the the success we've had has been because of the amount of relationships we've built in the industry, and especially when you get to the media level of the industry, it's quite an incestuous place. A lot of the you know, the people that work in, particularly in you know the big six and the big independents, they are kind of career media people. Um it's a fairly small circle in that regard. I think you've now got the long tail of agencies which are self-starter, self-taught people that have come along and they're building these great models where they are servicing you know D to C companies and they're doing an incredible job. But when you when you get to the media level where it's a lot bigger and a lot broader, that is a really well-connected space that's been around for a long time, obviously has gone through tons of change. Um, but because of the people we've we've known and we've met, we you know, if I if we needed someone in an area, I'm sure we could pick up the phone and say, look, I'm looking for a really strong head of email or something, you know, that's what we need to set that department up, for example, and we would, I'm sure we'd be able to find someone. If not, like everyone else, we'd be hitting the you know, the the headhunter trail and trying to work with recruiting HCs, which you know can be great and can be challenging as well.

SPEAKER_01 48:59

It's crazy there's such a monumental ecosystem of agencies that fall within that kind of media realm of like people that have been exposed to the big five or six, and so many people that I've had on this show have started agencies from working at one of the big companies. I remember every time I'm like, damn, these guys must be like shit, another one. We've lost another one, and then we've lost this client list as well, because every single time it's like, I'm like, how did you get your first client? Well, we had this relationship of all the other clients, and I'm like, every single time, which is interesting. But then on the flip side to that, you have this kind of new era of agencies, I would say, which which I've been more exposed to. It's kind of how we started. I've never been in the in the kind of corporate agency world, and agencies like you may be familiar with Saw with us, an agency in London. Yeah, yeah. So uh Ollie and Lucas, and Ollie and Joe, who started that agency, they actually started when they were in university with one of my first training programs. We're great friends now and they coach inside of our training programs. But I they've gone down this very new age route. Most of the clients have come from LinkedIn, lots of outbound strategy, lots of PPC, and I just find it very interesting that those I haven't yet to meet an agency where those two worlds have completely collided. It's kind of we're either from this, from the the the media agency space, or it's come from this kind of new age of of online business, I suppose.

SPEAKER_02 50:19

Yeah, and I think those guys have got real advantage because I think quite often, again, like I said, a lot of those big agencies are geared towards, well, as far as I can tell, towards scale, which means that a lot of the ways of working they have and the team structures and again billing everything on time, stuff like that, it becomes a it can become bloated and it could become it's quite a legacy approach. And again, a lot of these media agencies are remnants of an era where TV buys and print and digital, you know, those were the vehicles, and you had to use an agency like that in order to buy media. So you had no choice. If you wanted to be on TV, you had to go to a big network agency that could buy your ads on TV. With the fragmentation of media and the upweighting of digital, you now, especially if you're the smaller end, you don't need to work with a big network. And I think more and more businesses, our sort of ICP at that enterprise level is someone who's at the smallest end of a CARA or an OMD tier list where actually you're the smallest client on OMD's books, but you can be one of the bigger ones on ours. Back in the day, they wouldn't have had a choice of that we have to kind of work with these guys. But now, people that are, you know, businesses that have huge exposure to online, you know, if their audience is primarily online, they they're not forced to work with those agencies anymore, and then they go and work with these new age, you know, digital first agencies that haven't had any of that infection from these ways of thinking from a legacy business, they're able to operate on these brilliant models with a fresh approach, and you know, it's it is genuinely refreshing. I think the the what media agencies and I think potentially what the the legacy people may well have is potentially that sort of better exposure to training. Um, my my worry with a lot of digital first companies is that they're excellent and proficient with digital tools and they really understand the mechanics of media buying, but you know, I think marketing is one of the industries with the least amount of trained professionals in it, and what that I think means is that there's we're in danger of having an industry of people that are in marketing and digital that don't really understand how advertising works. And if you ask most people in marketing how does advertising work, you'd get a lot of different responses, and you know, some of them may well be accurate and some not. But I think in general, in an industry where marketing has become, you know, so tech obsessed and data driven, this the strategic elements are sometimes missing, and I think that's not potentially not good for the long-term health of the industry.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

I think it's a really interesting take, and it's the strategic part that I always take from the people that I speak to in in this room who have come from that media agency background. It's like the guys who have come from digital first have learnt through ruthless trial and error and through repetition of, oh, that worked. Okay, I understand this. But it's not from a deep, deep, deep understanding of strategy. But I think that strategy part comes. I think there's a balancing act somewhere because I also think we can overthink strategy so much that it gets in the way of implementation, and so there's there's we can create too much process in the way between the desired result and everything we do to get there. Um so I think there's definitely a balancing act between the two, but it's interesting you said that because strategy is always a thing that I take from people like, for example, I said to you I spoke this morning to to Lucy from Uncommon, and they are just so strategy-driven in the sense that they get so deep into every single molecular detail of the brand and the architecture behind it, and that I find fascinating, and that's something that you don't see in new modern era agencies.

SPEAKER_02 54:10

Totally, and it's it I think you're right about balance, and what uh an agency like Uncommon and you know, people that you speak to like that, they what they will understand is that particularly again when you're thinking about building brands, you want highly distinctive, fluent, kind of consistent advertising which doesn't change too much, you know, is immediately recognizable, very simple brand codification over the long term that it kind of works really, really well. And traditionally that's been really easy to do because when you're across TV, you can run 30-second ads and you know you can tell these these brand stories over time. What the digital people will know is that a lot of the platforms now are asking for multiple rotations on creative, different experimentation, this one then that one, UGC needs to be constant. Brands are posting four times a day on Instagram. So, what builds brands is long-term, kind of consistent, repetitive advertising that's well codified and entertaining. What works on social is fast-paced, constant change, etc. etc. Trend-driven stuff. And what the industry is still trying to work out is how do we reconcile what we know to be effective? Like how essentially, how do you build a brand on social when all of the principles we know and are used to, from a strategic perspective, kind of are thrown out the window when it gets to an algorithm-based, attention-deprived platform, especially like TikTok. And that's a real challenge that no one really knows the answer to yet, and we're just starting to understand. But it's only with really best in class understanding of how does TikTok, Meta, Snapchat work paired with the understanding that the long-term thing we're trying to achieve is salience and distinctiveness. When you combine those two things, I think that's where the real power is. And if you're too focused on the long-term stuff or the strategic stuff, you're never going to understand how to use the platforms well enough. But if you don't ultimately know what the direction of travel is, you can get caught up in this test and optimize everything thing, which is actually reductive when you're trying to achieve a long-term goal which requires consistency and investment in you know ads that are very similar.

SPEAKER_01 56:16

Yeah, the strategy is what makes people stay. And those ads, there are so many D2C brands you turn off those ads and the the business stops overnight, you know. But there are plenty of companies that the the ads are they're rocket fuel on something that already exists.

SPEAKER_02 56:33

Yeah, yeah, totally. I couldn't I couldn't agree more.

SPEAKER_01 56:36

That's interesting. What advice would you give to agency owners who are starting today going through what you've gone through over the past five years and previous in the in the agencies that you've worked in, would you do anything differently if you were to start today?

SPEAKER_02 56:52

Um really interesting question. And I I think you know, anyone that gets involved in agency has naturally got a sort of tenacity. I think where you can, it's an interesting model. We were speaking about how you model compensation as an agency. The idea behind a performance-based incentive, I think, is one that would be interesting to explore now. Obviously, that means it's pay on results, so not as forecastable, etc. But a lot of the difficulty of being running an agency becomes from when accounts underperform and that may or may not be your fault, that brings a lot of stress because ultimately we're in a service industry, right? And some of the most interesting agencies I've seen recently have this sort of pay on results model, which takes a lot of this the stress out of the account management or the client service in division and puts it on results, and that means you don't have this kind of constant need to service a client because your compensation is all derived from performance, and if you're really confident and you you believe you can drive good performance, it makes it a much more transactional relationship. Now, that probably wouldn't work for us because part of what makes us tick and why we add so much value is that we do intimately understand the business that we're working with and understand how to make you know add value, but in areas like lead gen, in you know, uh more B2B focused areas, I do think there's ways you could set up a business that would be highly profitable and eliminate some of those you know high high stress areas, if you like. Um so yeah, I think that's potentially one thing I'd explore if I was to go again.

SPEAKER_01 58:33

Performance models.

SPEAKER_02 58:34

Yeah, exactly. And I'd be interested in how do you approach that?

SPEAKER_01 58:38

We've gone through multiple rounds of iteration of it. Again, because going back to like what I said, not coming from that deep agency background, it was all just failing forward and testing. We we had our we used to have a model where we would do performance uh based on uh percentage of return on ad spend. So it's percentage of ROAS. Um and uh that worked really well for about six to twelve months until like it would always it would have you had an issue with Chern. So clients would you would retain clients and this would be just D to C focus brand at this point probably doing between 50 and 500k a month we were bringing in. The problem is after a period of time when you actually start scaling these brands, they start paying you a lot of money. And like we would be we'd have a brand that started with us on like 20k, just had proof of concept that all of a sudden, you know, six months down the line, we were billing 50k a month to them. And so they're just like, what is this? This is crazy. So then they either bring things in-house or they go to one of the sea of direct consumer agencies that'll be happy to just take a flat retainer, maybe a percentage on ad spend. I find percentage of ad spend is kind of a bit of a baseline that happens, I see that everywhere. So we retracted the percentage of row ads because it meant sense, it made sense. And I still think to a degree it's a what's a much nicer model than the percentage of ad spend ad spend because percentage of ad spend incentivized the agency to spend as much money as possible. Whereas percentage of ROA ads is like the more money you make, the more money we w we make. And that felt quite nice, but we had to retract it because it wasn't the industry standard.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:15

And how did you do that from what ROAS did you measure in platform or true to business ROI?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:21

Uh true to business ROI, but it would be we would never take off platform, so it would we would use combination of triple whale and then looking at their PL.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:30

Yeah, see, now I think that's a really smart way to do it. Um because again, in platform, it there's do we trust that ROS, you know, how incremental is it? But yeah, I think it's that's a really smart way to do it. And again, I think any way you can structure a business that demonstrates value to the business leader, to anyone read that can look at the PL and see value, that's so much more effective. We've we've honestly we've spoken to people who have invested serious amounts of money in PPC, and people have been looking in Google Ads at the ROS column and making business decisions based on, oh, this is great, we're making tons of money, and then looking in the accounts or in you know, in the the back end or in the PL and realizing that actually this isn't translating into these are all people we were selling to anyway, for example, um, and it could be really detrimental. So I think as closely as possible, that's what again, while we'll try and avoid in-platform metrics alone as much as we can and try and pair that with tangible business outcomes, which again make sure whether you're talking to the CMO or a marketing manager or the CFO, everyone can align on okay, this is the value that we're bringing both in the short and the long term. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:41

I mean, it's so common that you see you might see a favorable cack on uh on on the front end, and then you realise that the LTV has dropped because that profile just isn't isn't purchasing long term.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:53

Yeah, that's a brilliant example. And uh, I think I remember hearing a story once about the uh the guy, head of marketing or something at Barclays, was talking to his counterpart at HP HSBC, and the guy at HSBC said, Oh, we've absolutely slaughtered you in the credit card uptick this this quarter, like we're doing really well. And the Barclays guy was like, Yeah, we figured out who the bottom 30% of customers were that were costing us money, gave them a terrible service, and they all left and they've all gone to you. So you've just acquired a load of rubbish customers, and it you're totally right that up front a CAC that looks great or a ROS that looks brilliant is great, like we've acquired good customers. Are they profitable over the long term? How long does it take for them to turn into a profitable customer? Are you gonna keep them that long? All that kind of business analytics. If you're not looking at that, it's exactly to what to my point and our point, right? Which is in in silos, a ROS number is is kind of can be useless, and in a lot of cases it massively over-indexes in customers you were already going to acquire anyway. So, yeah, I think exactly your the point there is that it speaks to really understanding the mechanics of the business, the financial mechanics of how the business works, payback times. Um, yeah, even there, you know, we try and encourage our everyone in our business to look at not only kind of tech providers' quarterly earnings, but also the businesses. Like, how's the business doing on a on a performance basis? Because it's all very well us going in and saying, Oh, you've done great this month, Rice is up 12x and you're you know, this, that, and the other. And then the business is like in gradual free fall, and you know what I mean? It doesn't you need to make sure those narratives align, and you can't tell that from a Google Ads dashboard or whatever. You need to really understand how the client's business works.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:35

I just think it's going to be increasingly more important over the next five years that agencies are just more connected to the actual end result and to what companies actually need. It's like we see this in the in the lead generation space, which is obviously a completely different model, but the agencies in that space would for a long time be flat retainers, then kind of moved on to a pay per lead model, but then leads don't always equal whatever the desired outcome may be. Let's say it's home services, that might be installations or just appointments and or patients. And so now we see agents do like a pay-per-appointment model, and that means they've got deeper into that to the point that they're now, because they're incentivized to that, they're like, well, let's see if we can increase the lead-to-appointment conversion rate. So they start hiring appointment setters internally to own more of that process. And I think that's just naturally where the industry is evolving in all subsectors, be that D2C or Lee Gen or even probably the corporate space, although I can't speak to that as much, is just being as embedded in the companies as possible and aligning with what their true end goal is, just so important.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:36

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's a crucial part of it is becoming embedded. And and in certain cases, you maybe don't need to, you know, in if if you're a creative agency, you know, there may well be instances where you can accurately diagnose and come up with a brilliant way to encapsulate a brand, and that is your job to create distinctive, really great emotionally led advertising. You may not need to understand the full implications of that. Um maybe that in some cases, again, you said we overcomplicate strategy, and you know, those types of people might not need to know that. But if you are gonna give, if you are gonna become partnered with a brand, you know, not just on acquisition, but on lifetime value and again in a full service capacity, make sure if you're doing email and you're doing acquisition, you're doing branding, and you're doing all these types of things, um, it's crucial that you understand that. And I think that's where we've made a lot of investment recently in data analytics and measurement, because crucially that's that's the source of truth for that. If you if you've got half an eye on lifetime value and you know really well what your acquisition costs are, you know, the incremental impact of media. So again, is like if we switched all of this off, what would be the baseline of sales and what is the net impact of us having run this activity? Understanding what that is is is difficult but crucial. Um, yeah, I think the the more you can understand that, the more embedded you become, the less risk you have from. You know, not provide enough value.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:04

This really applies to agencies who are going full stack and want and and are going down that route. But if you are starting an agency just from the perspective of cash flow and uh and simplicity, like there's definitely something to be said about the really lean agencies that just do one thing and do that one thing really well. Um but there are definitely two routes you go down. It's like, are we going full stack and are we getting as embedded as possible and moving? I think that's probably what you have to do to go really up the market. Um, or uh do we just focus on one thing and do that one thing exceptionally well? Because it's so hard to, and I respect the guys so much who do manage to just do that one thing because it's so hard to turn off your blinkers to all of the opportunity that's around when people are saying, we need this thing and our current agency isn't doing a good job, and you say, sorry, we can't do that. That's very difficult. But on the flip side, it makes it a lot easier to build all those partnership relationships that you spoke about because you're not competition. Exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:58

Yeah, and exactly. And I totally agree. Sometimes I I sort of you think oh, it'd be so much easier if we'd have specialized in something. And obviously, it's kind of a double-edged sword because we we operate in almost sort of a full service capacity, that means we are in direct competition with the agency, you know, giants, is it for a bet one of a better word, that are you know everywhere, and and that kind of runs into a conflict there. But again, that's where our model, you know, 80% of our model is to try and emulate those guys and the the what the best work they do, and what we'll try and do is benchmark against the best agency we can find in PPC, say it's a brain labs or something. That's what we're gonna strive for in those areas. But I think even more crucially is the way we distinguish ourselves from those guys is by taking the worst parts of working with a big agency and then doing them really well. And that's client services, that's um that personal approach, overly investing in the the sort of human elements of relationship building, um, really in-depth reporting, really good understanding of the business. Um, and that's a way for us to differentiate. So there is still ways that you can in a in a crowded market, you I think it's oftentimes better to pick one thing that your competition does badly and focus in on that than try and compete with them on be five percent better at PPC. There's a benchmark for that, but dialing on what do they do badly that I can do better, that's where you can add value. Yeah, that's a great piece of advice.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:27

I've got uh five rapid questions for you. First one is one brand that you'd love to work with at uh pattern that you haven't already.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:37

I think um just from a personal perspective, um, I'd really like to work with another sort of independent, like a boutique fashion house. I think someone like Stussy or someone like that that's really sort of up and coming. I think we've done a bit of work with players like on running and stuff like that. I think it's really interesting to see brands that are coming through and you know taking market share. I I really like uh challenger brands. Um I think you know, if you look at someone like Nike, used to have this huge dominant position in the market, and over the last few years has been totally caught off guard by the likes of Hoker and on Running in the trainer markets and stuff like that. I think working for a challenger brand like that would be really interesting. Um, yeah, and I yeah, I'm sure there's tons of other examples of of those kind of ascendant brands. Um, but I really like the idea of working with challengers. Definitely, yeah, there's an energy to that. What about one book that's had a big impact on your career? Um, I think actually, in a kind of nod to that previous question about competitors, uh, there's a really interesting book called Eat the Big Fish or Eating the Big Fish, I think it's by Adam Morgan, and that's about challenger brands. Um, and again, I think it was quite early on in my career I I sort of came across books like that. Um, and that really just stoked the kind of creative strategy parts of me. And you know, I've always been fairly interested in business and entrepreneurship, but when you see how that's possible, and especially when you start an agency, you are immediately challenger, you know, to bigger ones. It's kind of interesting seeing how those principal principles bear out. Um, and so yeah, that's a really fascinating book that gets that sort of challenger mindset going. And when you're in an agency, especially when you're starting out, you have to, I think you have to engage that part of your brain.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:31

Nice. Most underrated skill as an agency founder.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:35

I think leadership and management is is tricky. I think certain people are better managers than others. And I think the the main skill you think you've got to have is understanding what you're good at but what you're bad at, and replacing that part of your your your role as quickly as you can. And it means often you may have an honest conversation with yourself, whether it is you know management or if it's you know strategy or sales or something, you know, if there's something that you you under-index in, I think it's important that you iron out that flaw by bringing someone in who is good at that. So maybe self-awareness is kind of the key to understanding what's holding me back here and not letting your ego get in the way of saying, Well, I like doing it, so I'm gonna do it. If you if you if you're not as good at it, you try and replace it as quickly as you can.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:20

Just a little side note from that, then like have what have you found to be some useful resources on developing your leadership skills?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:28

Uh again, I think you know, reading's really important, surrounding yourself with good mentors. Um, I think obviously you can learn a lot from you know some of the captains of industry in that sense. Um, but I think that by far the best thing we've done is surround ourselves with really good mentors. Um, asking for advice, you know, we went and spoke to Rob Pierre not that long ago, who was the uh founder of Jellyfish, and he gave us some great advice, which was when you're starting your company, it's really tempting to create processes and ways of working that work really well when you're 10 people, but don't work great when you're 50 people or 100 people. And he likened it to, you know, when you're a small company, you could create something that's like a JPEG, it looks great on a screen and it works really well, but if you try and enlarge it, the pixels get blurred and it doesn't work. You need to think of process and incentives that work like vector files, in that you can pull them as big as you want and the quality doesn't change, and that's where we that was like illuminating for us because we start to think, okay, well, does this certain policy we've got around holiday or bonuses or leave or whatever it might be, is that gonna work when we get to 50 people, 100 people? And that's where we were able to preempt some of that and take that advice on, and that was just one nugget of information you gave us. And we've since got other mentors of you know, ex-agency founders that have been there on that journey, and we've just learned countless pieces of information. Some of that is quite anecdotal, and it's you know, it's quite fortunate in the sense that it might happen when you're just in the pub one day or you're just chatting through something, but surrounding yourself with people that have been on that journey, and you know, again, let not letting your ego get in the way, I think that's crucial to success. Yeah, agreed. If you weren't running patterns, what would you be doing? Um, very good question. I think I think I'd still have found my way into the marketing industry. I think I've I I really love it. I love what I do. Um, I love working with interest in brands, and so I think I probably would have tried to either I would have tried to get myself into a probably brand side, some sort of interesting role there, or my entrepreneurial instincts might have just kicked in and I probably would have started to try and do something else. Um I think I've I've always wanted to try and build something, um, and that that might have just always been a something that was on the roadmap, so it probably would have kicked in at some stage.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:52

Nice, and then finally, one word that you can use to describe patterns and mission.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:57

I would say ambition, um, whether that's the ambition of the company, which is to to grow, but equally the ambition of the people that we've hired. You know, we've like I said, we've really tried to find curious, you know, interesting people that want to grow themselves professionally, want to do really good work, um, always curious to know more about clients. I think that trait is the thing we look for the most that matches our ambitions for the company. Um, yeah, and it's just guarantee that we've got a really good team now, and that's the one thing that I think everyone's got in common is that curiosity, uh, that ambition to to grow personally and and you know, in this in their work really. They take good pride in their work, um, and that's ultimately what we we've always been is ambitious. We've always, as I mentioned at the start, sometimes there's been a fake it till you make it approach. Very early on, that was the case, but we've always backed ourselves to to to get there and to do it, and now we're we're sort of really seeing the the fruits of that, and we're a really well organized company now that doesn't feel that we don't really need to to not fake it till you make it, but yeah, but we feel really confident in our abilities now, and that's because we've had the you know the the balls to just be ambitious, I suppose. Yeah, love it.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:13

Jack, thanks so much, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:14

No, thanks for having me.