SPEAKER_01 0:00

We paid multiple six figures for a single video with a sideman, Mr. Beast, who's charging three million for 45 seconds. The influence of marketing acquisition space right now is so hot.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

What was it that exposed you to entrepreneurship when we're talking like 13, 14 years old?

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I was one of those kids that decided that they wanted to be a YouTuber, and it was that kind of shift in my brain that I can literally just play games all my life and make money. There's a lot of people that I see online who are like gaming is terrible, don't game, you're never gonna be successful, but for me it was the complete opposite. My agency right now is a primarily gaming influencer agency. You've worked with massive companies like Netflix and Ubisoft and ASUS. I was hired as a youngest other employee to basically work with the YouTubers on their roster and partner them with brands. Having the influencers that you manage as an asset is very, very powerful, and it's still a way that we do a lot of client acquisition today. I started a business in July and I was getting chemo until September. Anytime I used to have an issue in my business, I'd be cancelled. This is trivial. When you have something bad in your life, you have two options let it consume you or you have the opportunity to go up.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

You had your acquisition recently with Journey Fervor. Yeah, and that was a multi-seven-figure acquisition leading towards an exit. What motivated you to do that in the first place and explore that? Say it. Welcome to Agency Giants. So you started Saudison Media at 17 years old, an influencer marketing agency. You recently had a pretty nice exit for multi-seven figures. Which I want to unpack later. Let's not get stuck into that too just yet. Uh, what was the key to your early stage success? Because you're pretty early to the influencer marketing game.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Yeah, it was um I was one of those weird kids that decided that they wanted to be a YouTuber. Well, I guess most kids want to be a YouTuber, but um, instead of sort of going out and playing football with my friends and doing all of this kind of other stuff, I basically came home, did my homework, and then tried to learn how to make content on YouTube. So I've been doing that since the age of 13. Somewhat successfully, somewhat not successfully. Some channels did well. I had a couple of gaming YouTube channels, and that was a space that I was really in. I was trying to be a gaming YouTuber essentially when I started early, and that was what helped me kind of understand the industry from a very early age. And the industry wasn't really a thing when I when I first started it when I was 13, but I spent basically three years making no money before I started my agency. So obviously now I've done this, I'm 24, everyone thinks I'm very young how to exit. But I spent the age of 13 to 16, I think I made 2,000 pounds in three years, which if you look at that from an average hourly rate perspective, is very poor. Um, but it was just a process of volunteering in businesses that were working with content creators, trying to gain experience because I knew I wasn't really going to learn this stuff in school because it's something that wasn't being taught you don't learn this type of stuff at university. So I just spent a lot of time learning the mechanics of content creation. How did YouTubers make money? What was the monetization streams behind it? Who were the brands that were sponsoring content creators? And then over those three years, things were just growing and growing and growing, and the power of influencers was becoming massive, and now it's you know one of the biggest marketing channels in the world. So I spent those three years doing that and then got a job at a company called ESL, which is the world's biggest esports company. It was bought by the Saudis for multiple billion transactions a few years ago, and I was hired as a youngest ever employee to basically work with the YouTubers on their roster and partner them with brands. And that was the first time I got exposed to how big commercial opportunities work with brands. The first client I was told to work on was Tommy Hillfiger, for example, and partner them with a number of content creators. So I really learned how content creation pricing worked, how YouTubers' audiences could shift and actually sell products and provide awareness. And that's what led me into starting the agency early. So it wasn't like I just started it at 17 and worked it out. Yes, obviously there's a lot of stuff to work out, but I had gone three years just trying error, learning, learning from people who are more successful in the space to then get started myself.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

It's interesting that you had the gaming channel to start off there. Was that an unfair advantage? Well, it's not an unfair advantage, a very fair advantage that you weren't in getting started with the uh influencer space. Yeah. Yeah, that was a foot in the door. Do you how how do you feel about your relationship between uh gaming and early stage entrepreneurship success? It's something I've spoken to about a lot. I was I'm a I used to love World of Warcraft, man. That was my that was my thing. You'd sit down for hours and hours playing that thing, and just you would just farm levels all day, every day with no return, and I think that taught a huge amount of delayed gratification. Do you feel the same in your entrepreneurship journey, that early stage kind of gaming life?

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a lot of people that I see online who are like gaming is terrible, don't game, you're never going to be successful. But for me, it was the complete opposite. That's pretty much all my success came off game. My game, my agency right now, is a primarily gaming influencer agency. So that is one part of it, but it's also the fact that I wasn't actually particularly very good at gaming. I would just enjoy doing it. So it was that kind of that persistence and resilience of never actually being particularly good, but still wanting to try and get better and go through those challenges, and also that competitive element that came from it, which then fed into entrepreneurship. Like I there's a lot of qualities and attributes that I see from my early experience of gaming and wanting to build, wanting to grow, wanting to get better, that then translated just into the game of obviously entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

What was it that exposed you to entrepreneurship? Because it's still we're talking like 13, 14 years old, as like an exposure. What were the the early stage influences that got you into it?

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Yeah, so I met these guys online who just threw so I was very big into CSGO, FIFA, and Minecraft were the main things. And when I was 13, I was playing a lot of Minecraft, just made these online friends, and it was one of these friends just one day came to this our Skype group chat because that was what was used at the time. I was like, oh, I started this business. And I didn't really understand the point, but he basically had started what was a YouTube multi-channel network at the time. So they were these businesses, and they're still around today, which partner content creators take a percentage of ad revenue, provide services in return. That business model is not a good business model anymore, and most of them have really died off or have had to pivot. But it was the biggest thing at the time, and it was almost like a status symbol for creators to be signed with an MCM. So he launched like a subnetwork of an MCN, so bigger MCN, and then he was essentially like a white label in essence. And he just came to the group and I was like, he's like, I've I've started this. Does anyone want to get involved? I don't really understand it, but he was fri a friend of mine, so I was like, Yeah, let's let's get involved, let's do it. And it was that sort of that sort of like influence of this young guy has just started a business randomly online and he's monetizing what we're doing, he's monetizing gaming, and it was that kind of shift in my brain, and I want to be a doctor until this point, because Indian background, Indian family, and it was that shift in my brain that was like, wow, this guy's found a way that we can monetize our YouTube channels and monetize gaming. I need to I need to do this, I need to learn this because then I don't have to kind of go down this traditional career path. I can literally just play games all my life and and and uh and and make money. So it was that early kind of network from gaming that I met, and then naturally through this guy, he you know got into circles of other people who are building multi-channel networks, and then I got exposed to these people and how they were building sort of small businesses online, working with content creators, working with gamers, and they're just naturally absorbing information from them. That's awesome, man.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

You worked with you've worked with massive companies like Netflix and Ubisoft and Asus and many others. Presumably you didn't get to that point really quick, or did you? And if not, what did the early stage client acquisition look like?

SPEAKER_01 7:34

So I was quite lucky in the early stages where I had this job from ESL that I was in, and the way that ESL managed their clients and influencers was non-competitive to the agency that I started. So they were an MCN, and I started initially Solison as a talent management agency. So both creators can both be partnered to a talent company and an MCN because the way that you monetize is different. MCNs monetize off of ad revenue, talent management companies monetize off of brand deals, sponsorships, commercials. So I was quite lucky in a sense where I had five or six creators that I was managing at ESL under the MCM. That I basically said to them, look, I'm going to start this management company. They had a great relationship with me, they came, they joined me. So it was quite a simple transition from there, which really gave me a bit of a push and a head start. And then the early stages, the client acquisition was two ways. One, it was inbound opportunities to these creators. Having the influencers that you manage as an asset is very, very powerful. And it's still a way that we do a lot of client acquisition today. We still have a management company as part of it and we use that as like an inbound funnel to then upsell to the agency. So brands reach out to these creators. I would help them with brand deals and sponsorships. And then it wasn't really uh it wasn't really a strategy at the point, but a lot of these brands were like, okay, so we've worked with your five creators. Do you have any more creators? Uh actually, we don't want to handle this in-house. Can you just deal with our influence and marketing for us? And it kind of came naturally to the sense that the best business model here isn't managing these creators, it's actually managing the budgets for the brands and then using the creators as that output to get content out there. So that was one main key area. And the second key area, which I always live by to this day, and we still use, is LinkedIn has been the biggest driver of sales for us ever. In the early stages, it was nothing very special. I was just I was just spamming cold outbound. And for me, it was just quantity. That's all I needed. I was like, I just need to get out there, I just need to meet relevant people. There was also not an awful lot of agencies at the time when I started. I was one of the early ones. There was a there was a class of agencies before me who I think started a few years before, but then a lot of other influencer agencies that I'm still very friendly with today started in 2017, 2018, which is when I started. So there wasn't that many agencies. So really there wasn't that much competition. And when you're reaching out to these brands about influencer marketing, it's quite a new concept to them. So the response rates were significantly higher, or they didn't know how to do it at that point because no one knew how to do it. So you the response rate was relatively high. So even from pretty shoddy cold email and code LinkedIn, uh that you kind of got that. But it was just a lot of cold LinkedIn, a lot of follow-ups and cold LinkedIn, and then getting them onto email and then booking in discovery calls to kind of have these conversations. And then really it was a kind of pitching this more like test and learn approach of right, give me five grand, give me 10k budget. I will then deliver on a campaign to achieve certain KPIs and then grow the clients from from there. And the the clients that obviously you've mentioned before, a lot of them came a lot later on. I think the Netflix stuff came in 2023, so about five years on Ubisoft is relatively new. It was last year we signed them. Uh Acer was actually one of our first clients. That one's been there since for five years, and that was actually through an inbound to our creators, which then we then have basically upsold to a proper agency service since. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Can you paint a picture of what what tangibly like what it actually looks like? You're working with creators. Are the creators signed exclusively to a specific agency, or are they working with multiple agencies sourcing jobs for them?

SPEAKER_01 10:58

So it's uh it there's there's a load of different ways that this works, and it used to be a lot cleaner, but now there's so many different structures. So generally in the industry, you'll have talent management agencies, so they exclusively represent creators. So we have one of these as part of our business. It's not it's but it maybe makes about 20% of our revenue, it's a much smaller side. But they're exclusively assigned to this agency. That agency will then handle all of their commercial opportunities. So essentially the creators get allowed to create and we handle the business in the back end. You then have another two type of agencies. You've got your more kind of partnership-focused agencies. These are almost agencies that don't have any exclusive clients, don't have any exclusive influencers, don't have any exclusive brands, but they sort of sit as the bridge in the middle and support brands who are running influencer marketing already themselves but need more scale. So they maybe will go to these agencies and say, can you distribute, you know, they almost look at influencers and media buy and they'll basically use this, they use this agency $100,000, for example, a month, go into and go and go and find and source creators that can be a fit and buy their media. And then you have your more strategic influencer agencies where they are almost like the strategic partner, they almost sit within the market team of the brand. They will define the brand's strategy and like manage the creative and then run and execute all the way from conception to completion. And then they will work with influencers who are all who are managed, they may work with these kind of media buy agencies to get access to these creators, or they may work with creators directly. So whenever our team work with creators, sometimes we're working creator direct, sometimes we're working via an agency who manages a creator, sometimes we are tapping into an agency who has a network of creators that we may not have access to. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

And is it difficult or did you find it difficult in the early stages to find a position of value in the sense that sometimes it's quite hard to quantify and track the outcome of influencer-based campaigns?

SPEAKER_01 12:54

In the early stages, no. I think it's now harder, actually. Reason for that is because back in the day influencer was so new, so everyone was really seeing it as right, let's just test. We don't really know what we're gonna get. Everyone also really looked at it more as a top-of-funnel channel before. Now influencer is shifting. Influencer is still seen for some brands as a top of funnel channel, but now a lot of brands are trying to compare and utilize it as a performance channel because if you do it right, you can make it work significantly well. A lot of brands that do YouTube influencer partnerships are very performance heavy. I think YouTube is a very performance-based channel for influencer. TikTok and Instagram are still much more sort of top of funnel. So from a quantifiable metrics in the early stages, it was very much essentially CPM focused. So how much am I paying for a thousand views? What is that reach? What is awareness? How many followers am I getting? Because that's what people cared about back then. Now the shift is going more towards what is that either direct return, or what is the impact that influencer is making on my other channels through sort of Halo effect or the efficiency that it's generating, or how is this influencer content performing better in my paid ads via normal brand creatives? So now it's shifting much performance, and now it's harder, in my opinion, to justify the value of it because you're getting ranked and compared against SEO, PBC, paid social, and that's where we're we're seeing a bigger shift. There are still some clients who care about top of funnel metrics because they don't have the correct tracking mechanisms in place. Uh, but in the early stages it was super new, it was just this cool new shiny object. So everyone was like, let's just try it, see what happens, and obviously things have developed a lot since. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Has UGC played a big part in what you do, or is this entirely separate?

SPEAKER_01 14:37

We do have a lot of clients who want to get UGC, and we have a service that we offer where we kind of call it, we call it IGC, influencer-generated content, where you're essentially still working with content creators who know how to make content, but they're not specific UGC creators. They are still influencers of their own part, but they will generate creatives. So, like a lot of our clients will look for UGC but from influencers because the difference, obviously, I think, between UGC and IGC is UGC is they are specific creators who maybe don't even have a social following who just create content, know to make ad creative. But the influencer generated content, you get creators who know what to make content, but also the uh sort of face power and the the the likeness, right, that brands can then utilize. So it's this it's the likeness of I can you even use an example of yes me. I could in theory I could be a UGC creator because I'm a lot smaller, but your face was in the same ad. There's more trust, there's more credibility, you've got a bigger social following. So that's kind of where we sit in that sort of uh that sort of creative pool.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I can see how that'd be much more attractive for brands as well, but also a lot more expensive.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Yeah, it does it does become more expensive for sure. There are ways to make it quite cost effective. Um, and we do it a lot with our DTC clients, so we'll usually do a gifting and seeding-based products, uh, product, product kind of activations for those clients. And yes, there are still some bigger creators that will want to charge a lot, but typically when you're targeting very specific creators who will find value from this product, and you're only asking them for, you know, give us one ad creative that then we can utilize and they're generally going to enjoy and use the product, then you send to be able to circumvent the cost in a lot of cases. So we do that mainly for DC clients. For clients that don't have a physical product, it is a lot more difficult.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Do you find that retention is difficult with clients? Do you do a lot of one-off projects and then it makes it difficult to build that sustainable MRR?

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Yeah, influencer is a lot more difficult for uh retained revenue. How I see it is that if you turn off your paid media, your SEO, your PPC, you basically just can't do that, right? That's the backbone of of your performance marketing, that's the backbone of driving conversion. A lot of brands still don't have a real methods to make influencer novels on channel. The performance-focused brands do, and there's some brands, you know, you see your VPN companies right here spending millions and millions a month, and they know how to get they know how to do it, and that's a key part, and they wouldn't they wouldn't shut that off. And you know, the agencies that run some of those, we we do some stuff for we do have one SaaS client who they don't spend their whole budget with us, but they spend about four and a half million a quarter and it's always on and that's retained. There's other brands where it's like, and especially in the gaming and tech space, it's quite difficult because game launch, and then they want a very big splash at game launch, and then it's all just about kind of their retargeting mechanics that they use for the remainder, and then there's a DLC or there's a new product launch. So we have a big chunk of revenue here. For example, we're doing a very big uh we we've just finished the pitch and I should hopefully hear back tomorrow for a two million dollar budget, but that's the two million dollar budget over four weeks, and then the client doesn't want to do any more spend until the next uh main thing, right? So it does get a little bit difficult. The main thing that we that the the main uh I guess I split revenue into three categories. One time retained and then repeat. So we get a lot of repeat revenue where it's say maybe a client won't spell spend five grand a month every single month, but we know guaranteed that every single quarter they're gonna do say two to four campaigns, but they might be slightly different values. So one month one campaign, maybe a hundred K the next quarter, maybe 150 or 90 or whatever. So getting those repeat contracts is still very important because you can still forecast the revenue. And there are some services that you can make um retained, like the gifting and seeding piece, you have to you have to make retained because um there's no fees for creators and it's an all-whice-on program that you're constantly generating creative for. I think anything that's fueling paid social or paid media, you can make much more retained, but anything that's like a more brand awareness, bigger splash piece tends to be more of like a project-focused campaign.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Does this mean that strategic partners have been quite key in your growth? Because you're if you're not offering paid directly yourself and all of the secondary services, have you got a lot of decent strategic partners that have brought a lot of referral?

SPEAKER_01 18:58

We we had uh so we start we we have like uh a couple of freelancers that we brought on for paid social because it's like a very specific influencer paid social. We did have some, we do have some strategic partners with media agencies generally who hold budgets for some of the bigger clients, and then we have strategic partnerships with um agencies within you know, yeah, obviously paid social Agency, paid media agencies who may need to layer influencer into their into their work. Most of our business has been direct to brand, to be honest. Um, and most of the long-term and ongoing like retained clients, we've just built those relationships ourselves. Um, a lot of our business, interestingly, um not an awful lot, but a lot of like when it comes to the partnership piece, actually, is referrals from clients. Like a lot of like clients that we work and do good influencer work for will generally refer us within. So we have one client that we signed last May, who since then has basically just got four other of their similar friends kind of brands to pick up the same service, and that's all those are all retained services. So that's been very powerful. We've got a I think we've got less from strategic partners, but we definitely tap into other people more. And I guess the with this act with the acquisition we went through, and part of that is now we can kind of do all these other services within the wider group. So that has been valuable as well. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Can you paint a picture of like some of the more audacious checks that you've had to pay out to influence? So I just want to paint it, because I think it's like a lot of people don't understand how much you really pay to get in front of certain influencers. So maybe like the high end and then like the low end on like what people are spending to get in front of the right.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

In terms of like for a single angle influencer or is it?

SPEAKER_00 20:36

You mentioned like a company spending, let's say four and a half million, I think you mentioned per quarter, which is a huge budget, right? I mean, it might not be in your world, it might be a single.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

It's pretty big for uh like a performance-based influencer brand for sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Yeah. And so what does that look like? Like let's let's maybe use it's kind of two questions. Let's park that. I'd kind of like to understand what the breakdown looks like on a budget like that, but then also let's look at okay, top end, low end of influencers.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

Yeah, we've paid probably the biggest check, like multiple six figures to single influencers. There's an example we work with the side men who obviously command a very high fee, so we paid multiple six figures for a single video with them. They've also done, they also did a very big deal with uh this is not a deal that we did, but I know I've got privy to information that they did a deal with Revolute, obviously, that people saw a while ago, and that was 3.6 million, for example, for that. That was a longer partnership, of course, but for single assets, we've done multiple six figures for like a single real single YouTube integration because a lot of the a lot of the pricing in this industry is still based on CPM. So, and if you if you're working with a creator who's commanding 10 million views of video and they're asking for $25 CPM, you know, you're paying hundreds of thousands. We ha we were actually uh negotiating with Mr. Beast a long time ago. The rate was way too low for them from the client, but yeah, the time he was trying he was charging, I think, three million for 45 seconds. Now it's significantly higher. Um, and one of his Spots, but we were we we had like a climate budget of like a million at the time. Um and then on the low end, you know, we've worked with creators as low as a couple hundred dollars like on the micro micro side and some on a on a product exchange pure basis. Nice. But it's but it is very it is very wet. And some it's it's interesting because it makes it a little bit difficult actually to resource campaigns, right? So think about it this way with when you're running uh you know paid social campaigns, you have a budget of let's say 300k a month, you're allocating that across campaigns, but Meta's doing a lot of the allocation and it's it's a lot easier to I think when you're when you're you know, I think if you put like three I I don't know paid social that much, but let's say you have five clients who are 300k, 300k, 300k, 300k. I think the workload to service all of those is probably somewhat similar because the way you're allocating budget is somewhat similar. For influencer, I can get a client who wants to spend 300k in a month and then wants to spend it across a thousand influencers, whereas you get a client who wants to spend 300k a month and two influencers. So the workload perspective based on the budget is actually quite difficult to resource until you really get into the scoping of the work and what you need. So some projects are significantly more profitable than uh other ones. You know, if we're working with a client who wants to have a hundred smaller creators because that's just the strategy that makes sense, the team resource is significantly higher. So actually the net profit on these clients are a lot lower. So we always do try and aim for the you know the bigger activations. But when you're a strategic partner with a brand, you can't just do that because you've obviously you're you're bought into the company and you're trying to ensure that they're getting the best output. So some clients that the the the best uh you know the best uh way to do it is uh you know a mixed approach with some macro, some micro, and a lot of smaller creators to really drive into those engaged communities, but then the staff cost on that is significantly higher because you've got to deal with humans, right? So you need humans to deal with humans and do outreach. We have to outreach to content creators and manage, say, a hundred influencer conversations vs just loading up 300k and throwing it a meta and meta doing the distribution. So it becomes uh a lot more difficult in that sense, which is why actually a lot of influencer ranges the last couple of years have um so quite a number of big ones went bankrupt because just a lot of cash flow issues and people are not managing the cash flow effectively against resourcing VS what you're paying out to creators or taking in creator money and then using that to pay your team and then not being able to put creators and then having a lot of cash flow issues. So it can get difficult. Uh so there's a big operational requirement behind everything you do.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

I want to unpack team and structure there. Um just before we kind of come into that. Um just a couple of things on what you just said. You mentioned, like, let's say Mr. Peace, for example, charging um yeah, huge amounts. Did you say was that four million, did you say, for the feature?

SPEAKER_01 24:48

He was yeah, at the time and it's significantly more now.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

He was wanting three million dollars for a 45-second ad spot. Three million for 45 seconds. Presumably it's a very specific kind of business that is getting an ROI on that kind of a feature. Um and uh and and and the same again, correct me if I'm wrong, could be said for a sideman feature on multi-six figures. Are the businesses doing who are featuring within a brand like that, are they doing it for perception and long-term gain, or is it for direct ROI? Uh the the former.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

If you're doing direct ROI, typically most brands will use a combination of small to macro size creators, and when I say macro, I'm not talking like they're, you know, I consider them mega, you know, have a distribution-a-a sensible distribution. Most brands that do direct ROI will actually mostly utilize uh creators that they renew on a consistent basis, but we can talk about that slightly later. The ones who are spending with the Mr. Beast or spending with the side mem are generally doing it from brand equity perspective, that long-term perception, long-term play. Um, and potentially just for a brand awareness approach. There are some performance-focused brands that have done stuff with Mr. Beast. I know Surfshark, who the VPN company did because they were at one of our dinners. And I said they didn't make an ROI on it, of course, because it's very difficult to make a direct response ROI on three million dollars on a single piece of content, given the number of touch points you need in the retargeting. But it was a much longer sort of creative brand equity play that really just gets Surfshark out there. There's a company that are doing influencer marketing right now called Odoo, which people are seeing popping up there. No one had a clue who Odo were before they started working with Nicole Amelan, all these big lifestyle entertainment creators. And we do a lot of work with Odoo, and I was asking them because I thought the strategy was a bit stupid to be honest. I was like, why are you spending this much money on these creators who are completely irrelevant? For contest, Odoo is an all-in-one business solution, right? So they're working with like entertainment creators. And they were telling me that it's because no one knows who Odoo is outside of Belgium. So it's just literally the point of getting that brand equity and having people know and understand and know the name. Because obviously, when you're doing Martin, right, you need to have people know who you are before you can convert them. So it's that kind of play of getting people to know who you are, working with these largest, larger creators, and then driving conversion over time. Influencer marketing is a long-term channel. A lot of influencer content is not going to perform direct response on the first test because a lot of the time influences audience need to get warmed up to the brand. People are obviously very skeptical to ads. If you see an ad on a creator's content, you might think they're just selling out. But if they're building a long-term partnership, so it tends to be a long-term uh avenue. Um, so some of these elements, I don't know if the Mr. Beast thing will pay off over time, but that's the kind of direction that they're that they're looking to go is just getting this kind of bigger brand equity associating with these larger creators.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

It's the peak of the funnel, really. It's as high as it gets in the in the in the funnel, really. Um which is interesting because I think smaller businesses look at it like it's much further down the funnel.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Yeah, and a lot of a lot of smaller businesses, I mean most most small I you know, I suppose a lot of DTC companies, for example, just because you know I've got friends who run e-commerce businesses, most small companies will never consider influencer because it is such a it's a high, high-risk channel. It's not as sustainable as running these kind of more performance-focused channels, so you have to be a bigger size to make it effective, for sure, because you do need to spend a lot more on it, and it also is a long-term play. There are, of course, ways to make it profitable at a as a smaller business that you can do, but a lot of it, and especially the huge crazier side of things, is super top of funnel that will over time make things more efficient and potentially reduce your your your acquisition costs, or over a year or one and a half years you'll see a return. But for a smaller company, it's you you can't be waiting a year and a half to see that see that return. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

What do you think is if you if a company comes to you, they and of course there's a lot of different contexts that we'd need to determine, but a company comes to you, they you're marrying them up with specific influences. What are you looking for to identify that these people are the right fit for this business and the product that we're we're selling?

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Yeah, so there's various different things. We go through various kind of vetting processes. So at the top level, there's kind of three three vetting processes that my team go through. Just trying to remember exactly if that's correct. It's the three. So top level is essentially just understanding who is the audience targeting, is of course the main thing, right? So if uh we we tend to try and find out from brands they're targeting from their other so their other marketing companies, what's more successful there? So if they are a you know one of our clients, so I can just use them as the example here. They're an AI web hosting company. Actually, it's the client I reached out to you about in the in the in the original, in the original time we we first spoke. They are an AI web hosting company mostly targeting small to medium business owners who are consuming content from and trying to learn how to grow their businesses. So we're looking for influencers that create who have who match the audience profiles, so have you know male, certain male demographics, certain female demographics, certain um age, gender, certain um audience that are like phirmographics and uh you know j potential people who are watching from a jobs perspective. So there's a we have a tool where we can see, for example, the proportion of your audience make up is mostly entrepreneurs or whatever, whatever job descriptions as well. So that's one piece. Then it's really about the content creator as well, is very important. So are is that content creator an individual that could actually actively use that product and it makes sense in the context of their content? Because you know, I'm not gonna be throwing a coffee promotion in a business owner that talks about the fact that they never drink coffee, right? So that's also there's that authenticity piece, of course, that comes into it, right? So you have to actually screen and watch the content, which is why it becomes a little bit more tedious as well, um, to see if there's a actual organic and authentic fit. Because if you're trying to place a piece of content, if you're trying to place a brand into a piece of content where there is a complete obvious disassociation, it's gonna be very inauthentic, and then the brand the audience aren't going to react very well to that. So that's another area, and that's another piece. And then dependent on the brand, also the topic of the topics of the channel are very, very important because some brands use influencer as a way to kind of rank and build evergreen conversion in long term. So this client specifically, they like to be placed in content which has high search and trend volume, or their product fits very well in the context. So if I'm a YouTuber who's talking about how to, you know, 2026 AI business game plan, part of that is I have to make a website that fits super naturally into the context of the content. So the conversions are generally going to be higher because you don't almost perceive it as an ad, of course, as the disclosures, but it could fit naturally without it being an ad because it is a core part of that type of content. And also that search topic is going to be very organic and authentic over time. You know, people want to know at this time of year what's the best business model and what's the kind of AI blueprint, for example. So it's placing creators who are creating that sort of type of content as well. Um, and then there's the things like fraud analysis of the following break, the following breakdown, how many followers are active, engagement rates is a very important piece. And one of the things that I think is arguably more important is comment ratio. Uh, because a like is very easy to do. You know, I scroll Instagram all the time, you know, I like a like stuff. But do does the creator actually have an engaged audience that are putting together thoughtful and in in in-depth comments about the content of the video? And those are the type of creators that actually have a more bought-in audience because the audience is genuinely caring to comment and provide value underneath the video. So comment ratio is a very important piece as well. And then really depending on the brand as well, like platform breakdowns. So if my if my client is a mobile game, I want to see people who are watching more mobile or using the platform that's more fitting for mobile, so you can get that further direct conversion debt response. There's a few different scientific pieces that go into it and data pieces, but then it's also just your normal human judgment from does the product make sense in the context of the video? This is creator, create that type of content. Do they actively speak out to their audience that maybe they're needing a gut health supplement or they like this game, they like this type of you know product because then that resonates very well, and the audience has already sort of bought into that journey, and then when they see them suggesting approaching this content, it's very natural.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

How common is it to see when you're running this analysis on brands, to see uh brand owners and how easy is it to identify brand owners or creators rather, engineering growth through you know comments, followers, likes, etc., to to boost the growth of their brand.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

It's pretty easy now. There's a lot of tools that you can you can do with back in the day. The only tool that you could really use was Social Blade where you could see if there's the spikes and you know when YouTube do their would do their purges and you can see when it comes down. Now there's um now there's a lot of tools which we have a tool in that we work with um that I work with a lot on my YouTube channel as well, which can has a has some sort of model which can essentially screens content over the last year, I think, and it can break down engaged audience, audience that have engaged in certain amount of time, and then the quality of those engagements as well. So you can get a quite a good makeup and breakdown of you know how good the content is. And then some of it is just general human understanding and nuance. Like we we've we did a campaign before with a lot of uh mum creators, and those several creators are terrible for this because they have their geek group chats and communities where they all post their content into and then all the other mums engage to kind of boost and fake engagement, but it's very easy to tell that because it is just a bit of like looking at the comments, and if they're just you know creators that just have a bunch of emojis or just like those like one one or two-word comments, it doesn't make sense really, or you can click onto the other profiles who are commenting and seeing if that creator is also following them and is also boosting that engagement. So there are like your scientific ways, as I say, but sometimes it is just a bit of common sense, and after you train you know your team to spot these different things, like if I am watching one of my videos, for example, and I've done a breakdown a step in a 10-step influence marketing breakdown, and someone's asking a specific question about step seven in a very detailed way. I know that that's a genuine follower who's watched the video and is interested. If someone's just commenting, nice, it's it's quite a different makeup of how quality the cop the content is. So it's quite easy nowadays. Before it was a lot more difficult, um, but there's so many types of creator types that are very bad for this type of stuff, and it's generally in the female, the female kind of older female space anyway. So she has to be extra vigilant with those types of creators. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

It's also the the best demographic to sell to a direct consumer.

SPEAKER_01 35:47

It's also the most expensive, uh most expensive type of creator naturally, because uh from a from a community perspective, but they do perform very well. But when you find those gems in that space or not doing that, then you're really on top. They're expensive. They are expensive, yeah. Really interesting. It's just um each each niche in each market has obviously not different CPMs like you would have on Meta based on region, type of content, follower, audience, follower demographic. I almost I always tell people when they're like don't know influence marketing, if they know how YouTube ad revenue works, right? The CPM that you probably get in your channel via CPM, a mum influencer with a very high concentration of female audience and a high US audience, her CPM add on ad revenue is probably higher. Maybe I I don't know your makeup of your audience, but just for as an example, right? That tends to reflect similarly in the uh the CPMs that you see brands brands pay. That is the most expensive demographic comparative to, for example, I work with gaming creators, male gaming creators, you're seeing typically like a $15 to $25 CPM for YouTube integration. Mama influencers, you're seeing upwards of like $60 that you'd be paying for a thousand per per thousand views for those types of creators. Um so they're the most expensive by sure, but it's also because the like consumer, the the audience are the high highest grossing consumer audience as well. So it generally reflects that.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Well I do know is some CPMs, at least on my side, have dropped just every year for the last eight years, they just drop, drop. Is your audience changing much over No, the audience is the the audience is the same, but the CPMs in the the online business space have have yeah, considerably.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

Yeah, I mean the YouTuber clamping down a lot on the type of content. I don't know if you've had any issues. I had a strike on one on my channel because they are trying to push people away from this kind of um like these these big uh sort of obnoxious numbers that you're promising people and actively trying to push advertisers away from that because it's seen as like a as a as a risk as well. So potentially that's uh that's a reason from your end.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

But I've not I've not had any any strikes, but that is that is very important.

SPEAKER_01 37:45

I I got one the other day because I well not the other day, but a couple couple of weeks ago on one of my videos, which was I basically did a breakdown of how one of our one of our clients I made $297,000 on one of our clients and they sought the flag that it's harmful and dangerous because it was uh inf they thought it was like inflated numbers that were kind of guaranteeing people could also make this. So it's those type of things that they're clamping down a lot on, and I think they're also naturally pushing advertisers away from that type of content. That's very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

I mean obviously not in your case because it sounds like it's kind of misrepresented, but that's a good thing by large, that's what we've got to do. By large, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 38:18

Like that for for for me, I was very confused about that video because it was a genuine breakdown of a c a brand deal, uh uh uh a campaign we did for Ubisoft for a client, and I went through exactly the breakdown, but I think it was potentially the way the title of thumbnail was positioned that they thought that I was telling people they can also do this, which is naturally you know, they're not gonna be able to do that that quickly. Um it's definitely possible, you know. Some of some of the people that I know in the space have just started in last year's one one person that was mentoring for a bit, he's did $950,000 in revenue last month within the first two years of running his agency. So it's definitely possible, but uh they are clamping down a lot on that, which is definitely good because there's a lot of people that fall for this type of content, but you that's possibly a reason for uh your ad revenue.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

That's an influencer agency.

SPEAKER_01 39:03

Uh that's an influencer agency, yeah. Yeah. Well that's awesome, man.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Have you been able to run the team quite lean? Like would you say your revenue per employee is better than let's say a performance creative agency or an ad agency?

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Yeah, we're our team's pretty lean. Um, our team is about s just under 20 people. Um and we try to aim for uh net revenue, so like a actual sort of fee income of like £100,000-ish pounds per cell per per um per employee, and it's a kind of a standard benchmark of a lot of other agencies in our space. Uh, we have been able to run things pretty lean, which means our kind of margin on that is relatively high, but we've built process and system, we've got tech that we've kind of got, not nothing that we've built proprietary, but just tech solutions that we've brought into the back end. Um so yeah, we have tried to run run fairly lean, and also just the focus has been more on those sort of larger campaigns, lower volume of creators. Now things are changing slightly because we have more of these uh clients who are wanting to broaden the pool and number of creators, but it is just really like a resource management perspective. We have an operations manager whose whole sole job is just managing project management systems, setting up and ensuring that the team are resourced and allocated correctly for the different parts of the business. And we've streamed in a lot of things with our we've been building this influencer database over the last seven years, so you know, we can start a campaign, we know what sort of expected prices are going to be, we know what creators are going to perform because we've got previous performance data. So a lot of things have improved and streamlined from that. Um, you know, there's other agencies that I know who are doing similar eBit Dan numbers to what we were doing before the acquisition and maybe double the size of the team. Um that's not to say that they needed that many people, to be honest. Like, I don't think they actually do need that many people. I think it's more just from the case of building building for scale, building, building a team for scale.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

Imagine project management is really important with like the the uh what's your project management tool of choice?

SPEAKER_01 41:08

We use ClickUp as our project management tool. We basically have a couple of automations that we built between our sales and uh project management, so everything basically feeds in from Pipe Drive, which we use our CRM, goes into ClickUp, and then Anthony is our project management or operations guy, will basically traffic manage everything and ensure that everything's allocated correctly. And then we've got our senior campaigns lead who basically manages the delivery teams ensure that everyone's resourced effectively. Nice. Cool.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Affiliate links in the description.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

I don't actually have affiliate links for either of them. I've got one affiliate that pays me very well, which is zero accounting software, they pay really well, but yeah, it's it's a great one.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

But the other two I don't I don't know where are you getting the affiliates? Where do you where are the sales? Who are you promoting the zero to?

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Just my YouTube channel. I actually very rarely talk about your zero on my YouTube, but it's just in my description. And I've mentioned like tools that have been required every so often, but that's the one that pays the best, which is very interesting. It's a good one. It's it's a good one. They they pay so zero. Um I know I don't know if this is relevant to the podcast, but zero, but you know, I don't know if you use your accounting software, but I do, and it's like the subscription is like $9.99 a month or something. It's uh in the higher plans, you get to like $30, $40. But they pay like $200 for every single like sign up on the front on the front end. So and that you don't have to wait anything. So literally as soon as someone buys like a 75% off subscription, which is nine dollars, you get two hundred dollars back. So it's been pretty it's been pretty good. Like even I remember just logging in after doing the first video, and I had like a one and a half K in there, and I was like and I had like very like a very small video mention on it. So I should probably start pushing this a bit more.

SPEAKER_00 42:46

That's uh it's it's definitely a good one.

SPEAKER_01 42:48

I and I'm I'm gonna make a video genuinely in the in the in the coming weeks about the things that I wish I did when I first started the agency because I ran the agency very badly, purely in the first four years because I was going to university, I was trying to run it really like a lifestyle agency, and for what we have now, it's so different. Um and I was gonna make a video about like the things I wish that I didn't do, and one of the things is gonna be financial management because I manage finances terribly to begin with. It's the most important, most important thing for an agency, especially when I was going to the acquisition. The only the only thing that the buyers care about is well, not the only thing, but it's the most important thing. Um so I was generally gonna have a video about it, so I'll plug it in that as well. Nice, very good.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

I we got a CFO into the agency, a fractional CFO about 24 months ago now, and it's just one of the best things that we did. And yeah, now we're coming into uh owning the point-wise the software that I'm a part of we just financial health has just been so solid from day one, and it's just so important.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

There's a lot of things I'm gonna do differently when I go on my next venture, but I think this has been a great learning experience, and that is the number one thing is getting experienced, experienced people on earlier, but also experienced people in some of these more strategic key areas because I don't have a clue like about financial health earlier on. So I did the same. I got a Fractional FD during mainly during the acquisition process to really support me in that that that piece and makes a huge amount of difference. Like people always think it's a huge expense, but and you don't and it's they don't realise what it's for. But yeah. Like if you can have someone who understands your financial models and the numbers and how to forecast effectively, then it's uh it's a real superpower because you can basically just you can basically just work your work the how I see it now is that I know exactly what the forecast needs to be and I know all the numbers that need to go on the on from an input perspective to get there. So uh it's it's it's it's changed it massively for me.

SPEAKER_00 44:35

Especially when you marry performance metrics to financial metrics as well. Yeah. We're talking about like stepping into the future. You had your acquisition recently with Journey Further. Yeah. And that was a multi-seven figure exit or acquisition rather, leading towards an exit though, right? Yeah. Okay. And so what motivated you to do that in the first place and explore that?

SPEAKER_01 44:59

So it's interesting. I wasn't going to do it at this stage initially. I had always planned, you know, build agency, exit it, and then do something in SaaS or tech in the future. That's that's always been my kind of plan. But agency is a great first business model. Um so I was planning on growing this for maybe three more years, I think. Because I was always planned I'll do the sale when we're in 27, 28, and then that's when I'm planning like starting a family and all that type of stuff. So kind of have that as a natural breaking point, spend a bit, you know, time on family and then getting to my next thing. Um The shift really came because the there well, there's a few, there's a few reasons, but there was a number of like mostly external factors that made me push the timeline up. The internal factors are were obvious were obvious were the case of I've been doing this now for very, very long, solo. So that's the one of the first reasons. I mean I built this bit business at the age of 17. Whilst I was ill solo, of course I've hired experienced people, but there was kind of these knowledge gaps that naturally I know I'm going to have because I just don't have those years of experience in the game. And because my next venture, I want to be a you know, significantly larger scale business with probably much more operational procedure, more employees, much bigger stakes. I was thinking to myself of Am I going to be able to effectively do that, running a 20-person agency and understanding how to do that? No. There's no way I'm going to be able to know how to run and manage a team of because managing a team of five people to 20 people to 50 people to 100 people, very different challenges. There are of course fundamentals, but very different challenges, and also the way that you remove yourself in the business and what you actually focus on is very different. So I was thinking, right, if I join a larger group that you know has these people, I can get exposed to how a business of this scale and this size needs to operate and the type of people that are involved, the type of leadership team need to build. So that was one of the things that's very important for me. Two, there was a kind of a when I first started going through the process, there's a kind of time period where I was like, I kind of I'm sick and tired of these influencers was one of the motivation at the time. I was like, maybe now I get started because naturally I'm going to have a period that I'll stay with the company. And then, you know, if I do that at 27, I'm still going to maybe be with the company for a little bit of time. So it makes more sense to start now. The external factors that brought it earlier, and the reason that I decided now was just because the influence of marketing acquisition space right now is so hot. Uh, there's a there's a stat I saw on LinkedIn that I saw prior to my acquisition at the time, I think it was in September, there's about 66 agency acquisitions just in influence of marketing or throughout this year already. So people want to buy this service in because the influence of marketing growth curve is kind of exponential right now. I think the influence of marketing industry is worth about 30 billion by the end of 2030, spend is going to be about $100 billion. So going to grow 3x in the next four or five years. Now, in my opinion, there's a certain size of agency that you I you'll need to have in the influence of marketing space to capitalize on that organic growth. Because a lot of these, a lot of the growth is going to come from bigger brands who typically have bigger vendor processes, need a bigger agency because they will not rely on smaller agencies from just compliance perspective. You know, there's a couple of clients that we've tried to work with where we can't get in the roster of agencies because we're too small, uh, because they don't think we have the manpower, we don't think we have the finances, the things we're on, right covers or whatever it is. So if I'm going to cap as I was going to capitalize on this, I might miss out. And the way I mapped out to my team is that if influence marketing is on this exponential growth curve, we're kind of on a curve that's slightly below that, and we're not going to meet that that growth. So it was like, how do I position my business? Because I still want Solderson, the business that I've grown, to be able to flourish and grow, to get to that stage. And really the natural opportunity was coming into a group that is on that growth curve and is of a big enough scale, has this client base that we can then service. So that was one of the reasons. Two influencer, as I say, is just getting more and more valuable. So the multiples right now are higher than they potentially would be in the next couple of years. And obviously, you know, you've been in the space for a while, markets are quite cyclical. So the best time to sell an influencer agency was 2022. The next best time to sell influencer agency is now, because the multiples back then were ridiculous. The multiples now are still, you're getting higher multiples now than you'd get for other types of agency businesses. Um, my view was if I waited a year, two years, three years, maybe I'll have higher profit, and my multiple will probably be you know your multiple scales as your EBADA goes up. But I actually might end up probably with a similar amount than I end up with right now because the multiples right now are higher. So that was another reason. Um so those are the two kind of key things as well. And then the other part, as I said before, was just like wanting to be in this environment with you know people who have been there and done that, scroll and scaled businesses to 200 plus people with multiple offices. You know, we're a fully remote company that have run quite lean. So I can learn and develop and pick up that knowledge. Plus, then also just be exposed to bigger clients. We're very much in this gaming, tech SaaS, AI space. Other agencies we're speaking to are much you know more in this kind of mainstream notion and really wanting to get into that kind of uh market as well. So those are the main driving forces of doing it right now. But as I say, I was always planning this, it just was going to be at a potential later date, but the market forces right now were just it made a lot of sense. And I know a lot of other people actually that since I've sold who've reached out to me that I've friends with have been like, well, I'm also doing this with obviously you don't tell people who and I'm like, wow, like there's a lot of people actively right now trying to consolidate down. Oh, and that's another point that a lot of clients that we know that we're seeing are trying to consolidate their vendors, in our opinion. Like a lot of our clients are you know, say working with 10 agencies and only want to work with five or three. So if you can service across multiple areas, you kind of create a little bit more of that moat. Like if we're just doing influencer and they've got a PR agency that also does influencer, we're probably gonna get the cut VS the PR and the influencer agency. So uh we're kind of creating that uh multi multi-service approach as well.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

How long has the process taken from being like, right, okay, I'm definitely gonna do this thing to finding the the the right buyer and yeah, the entire close to far too long.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

Yeah. I I I I went into it not realizing how long this type of stuff first time doing it, but process took a year and five days exactly. Um I signed the engagement letter with my corporate finance company on the 26th of September 2025, and the official close date was 1st of October, uh, sorry, 2024, 1st of October 2025. The first three months really just prep uh to get to get ready to go to market because the time of the year they didn't want to take the business to market because selling a company and I however kind of explained to other people it's quite similar to selling one of our services. You have to go to market, you have to have a strategy, you have to go to buyers. And that time of the year they thought that you know if we're getting all the prep stuff done in October, November, take it to market in December, no one's gonna be around. So we didn't actually go to market until late January and February. So really spent the first few months just getting everything in the business ready, all the numbers, basically building the information memorandum, getting the data room all ready to go. Went to market in January, late January, early February time, and then basically started getting conversation with buyers, getting people interested, and then went moved to basically getting people to submit letters of intent and offers. That process happened in April and May because there was a bit of negotiation. We had five initial offers of varying sizes and varying structures, so some that were more sort of longer time in the business space, some that were more equity focused, some that were more cash-focused, uh US offer as well. And I think we had I can't remember if they're based in Sweden, but somewhere in Europe, so a few UK, one US or Swedish, and then just kind of went through the negotiation process, agreed on a letter of intent essentially with a buyer, which has joined it further. And interestingly, uh, and one thing I will say, they weren't actually the highest offer. Um, but the reason, and the people are always like, why do you not take the most amount of money when they don't understand it? I'm obviously having to I'm gonna be with the business for a little bit of time, and I'm really thinking about what does the future look like for me whilst I'm with the business, what is the future of their agency? Can I see myself working with this company? And the highest better, I just could not see myself. I couldn't imagine just my team wanting to be in this the environment they were, couldn't imagine my team working. I I I didn't really you know get along with them pretty well, and I think there's you know no more amount of money that you can have to have a terrible year, 18 months, three years, however long you're you're with. And it's just I think it's higher risk that way because if you don't think you have a true alignment with the with that acquiring company, like it's it's yes, they're buying you, but really you need to view it as a partnership and what's best for the business going forward. So they really were the company that I resonated the most with, had the best vision. I really believe in the in in the founder Robin. He comes from a similar story to me. He had a lot of hardships in his life that led him on to build different hardships than me, but I had hardships of my kind of illness journey that started me uh going forward. He's built he's built and scales and sold an agency for multiple eight figures prior, and that's he's got a very clear path of where he wants to take this business, and I could really see how our offering fitted really naturally into their business. So yeah, signed a letter of intent with them in mid-May and then went through due diligence process. The deal was meant to close originally August 22nd, but there's a couple of delays within their business with some kind of share restructuring. There it was a very tense and worrying process because the longer the you know a deal goes on, the more chance for execution failure. Clients could, you know, maybe leave, we could have a downturn. Obviously, the industry's not been the not necessarily the industry, but the market's not been amazing this year with Tariff specifically, and for a lot of our clients, they are gaming and tech peripheral companies, DTC companies that are producing in China. So we had a lot of clients that had to scale back influencer budgets over July and August and the summer time. So our August wasn't amazing. And it's like that kind of worry of are things gonna go wrong? Is the bar gonna back out? Um, because obviously things were getting delayed. Then yeah, just did that due diligence process, a lot of negotiation, and then officially closed the deal off October 1st. So the whole process took a year and five m uh five days, and then I think the due diligence process took four, four and a bit months, four and a half months.

SPEAKER_00 55:49

Was it exciting or was it anxiety-ridding?

SPEAKER_01 55:52

Like when it got done, or during the whole process. It was a mixture, it's like I didn't want to get too excited because my Ebony company specifically briefed me of like a lot of deals. Most deals don't happen when they go through. And there was a couple of um other agencies that had shown interest in us who then didn't end up making an offer because they were already in for deeper process with other companies, and none of those deals happened in the end, like all of those ones that happened. So there's kind of like, I don't want to get too excited because they just told me like, don't until the signatures in the paper, nothing is done. Right. The day before, actually, the night before the deal, there was still like this there was a roadblock that came up in terms of negotiation because they'd missed putting something in the agreement that they wanted to add in last minute. And you know, I was up at 3 a.m. Dubai time because I was ahead at the time, like trying to agree whether we were gonna, you know, agree uh, you know, can basically concede on this point or not. So there was all this anxiety really because um I just didn't want to get my hopes up and too excited, but I tried to keep leveled with it. Most of the anxiety just came from trading performance because of the tariff situation. Like we were having we had a pretty solid first half of the year, uh first quarter of the year was amazing, and then April, May, and June, you know, you started seeing some issues with tariffs coming, and then uh Q3 wasn't super amazing because just a lot of our clients just had to get had to have budget. Because our biggest client in the previous year pretty much just their their their CEO just basically was like, We're they laid off 30 of the marketing team, so loads of that, those issues happened. So it was a lot of that anxiety. Um when the deal got done, it was more like it was it was it wasn't really exciting, it was more just relief, like this weight off my shoulders of like I've been working on this for so long and it's actually happened because obviously it may not have happened. It was that relief of I can just breathe now and not not have to worry about it so much.

SPEAKER_00 57:40

Yeah, nice man, that's awesome. For people who have got an agency right now and they are thinking, you know, I'd like to have an exit one day. Like, what are the things that they need to think about to make their company attractive to a prospective buyer?

SPEAKER_01 57:53

Yeah, there's a there's a few key metrics that that that I learned on the process. So uh you can still sell with having you being quite involved in the business, but it really depends. So first it will depend on your motivations. Are you selling because you want to exit immediately, or are you selling where you want to get acquired, you want to stay for a little bit, you know, ride that sort of wave and then and then potentially exit at a future point. So there's two different there's two different things that are important for each of these. Key man risk is obviously a huge one, right? We're a small business and I'm still pretty uh involved in the company. I do a lot of the sales, so key man risk is higher here. Yes, we have a senior team, we've got a very experienced, my sort of second in command is uh a lady called Sue who's 47 years old, been in the business for like 25 years, really competent commercially, but still because I'm quite involved in business, personal brand, wise related as well, there's there's still that. So there's never there was never going to be a scenario where I could walk away from the business on day one, and that's fine because I'm not, I don't, I don't, I don't need that. I need some time as well to build within this business and learn and grow and see what the next opportunity for me is anyway. But if you want to leave immediately, you really have a very a struct very structured solid management team to the point where actually your role is pretty much redundant. I was out for dinner with a much bigger agency uh in my space that you know mentored me a little bit when we first started. And they're about a hundred people, the two founders basically saying to them themselves, like, you know, over the next few years, we're just basically want to make it so the buyer actually won't want us because they're gonna be doing too high a salary for nothing. Because they just wanna they just wanna get out. But they are you know doing tens of millions of uh you know agency fees a year, uh, have a very structured team operationally. The next thing which I didn't realise was super important is actually the back office of an agency is a lot more important than I initially thought. So when I say back office like HR, people, people team marketing function, uh legal function, because these sort of things just allow you to uh, you know, if you have a very solid marketing function that's producing quality, you know, lead flow uh, you know, uh kind of uh always, it's a much more um sustainable path for a future buyer. And if you have this kind of structured, it kind of just gives you a bit more of a more rigor to your agency if you have a structured back office team. So people actually see potentially having offices as a as a plus because you see it as a you know a proper a proper business to sell that kind of older sort of mindset. So that was that's part important. Um for some buyers it's not that important, but for others it is. For ours, it wasn't really that important because for them it was actually better because they have this all. So they're we you know they don't need to make people redundant and kind of have multiple costs. Now, when it comes to an actual commercials and financial perspective, um agency growth naturally is a very crucial thing. So sort of three years of sustainable growth of the business, you're not having you know downturn and spikes because the bar could just think that well this year's uh you know one in a one in a million years, and actually you're gonna have a have a have a have a have a drop next year. So sustainable growth is obviously naturally very important for the business to show that. Um obviously I've mentioned team structure and operational procedures, like if your team can operate effectively under set procedures that are working, good SOPs, uh, good systems in place, that's very, very important because that means that the business can run and can deliver effectively without you. Um then from like a client breakdown and financial perspective, customer concentration, massive, massive thing. There's an agency trying to sell right now that I know their top clients like 60% of the revenue. It's just super high risk, right? If that client was to leave, then that's 6% of the business gone. So I was told sub 15% for your if for top 10 clients pretty good. So we were at like our top clients about 12% of revenue. So we're actually in a pretty decent spot. So top 10 clients pretty much not making up more than say 56% of your revenue, and no single client making up say more than 15%. It's very important because of the risk for the risk perspective of that. Um that's one. Then your retention of revenue, so influencer space is naturally quite difficult. So for us, like the repeated revenue is very, very important. About 82% of our businesses repeat, not necessarily all retained, but it's repeat business that we have consistently clients. But if you're a business that is just fully reliant on purely project-based stuff, you can still sell, but your multiples are going to be lower. The retention of that revenue is is very important for sure. And then the final thing that I found that was quite interesting, and this is not always uh this is not always a requirement, but for my buyer, the fact that we had a lot of um revenue from out with the UK was very interesting to them because they want to expand into US, US territory more, into the Middle Eastern territory to Europe. So actually having a more diverse makeup of client base helps them have a have a you know be able to go to future clients and say that you know revenue is coming from the ZR clients in this in this market. For some buyers, having actually more revenue in the one area is better because they maybe want to buy a purely UK operation boots on the ground. But that's just something to be considerate of is like where is your revenue coming from as well, because that was uh an important part of the my transaction. Awesome. That's a perfect blueprint there for Yeah, there's a there's a few more things that go into it and like the how you know how how you how your numbers are run, but I think these are just general, like you know, if you're running a good agency and you have your numbers on track on check every uh you know every month and you know things are forecasted correctly, those are just normal mechanics you need to have as a as an as an agency anyway. So I don't think I've need to necessarily add that. But if you're just first starting out, one of the things I regret not doing is getting my numbers correct and managed from day one. So important. So if you ever think consider about selling, there's a couple there's two there's two agency owners I have an advisory role for, and like I basically just from day one I told them do not make this first mistake. Let's first thing we do create a very clear model of what you want the year to look like and manage those numbers like super granularly. Um, because that's the most important thing. And I'm and I and I regret not doing it earlier.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:11

I hosted a workshop last week, three days with 500 uh 660 on the line agency owners experience. Uh, and uh the entire workshop, you know, to be honest, like for most people it wasn't sexy at all, it was probably like pretty mundane and boring for most because I was going through PL and forecasting and budgeting and the financial KPIs and marrying performance KPIs to that. And it's crazy how many established agency owners, and by established, I'm still talking like you know, a a very young agency, pre-100k a month revenue, and uh just don't have any of these these basic systems in place. And you know, throwing our hands up, it wasn't until probably two years ago in our agency after being in the game for six years that we so it's eight now that that we got the CFO in and actually really got our PL in check. You know, we're running the numbers off zero and you know, a couple of little dashboards that we've created here and there. So same with me.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:11

I think I I really started getting things in check from September 2023, and that's five years into running the business. Um it's just like it's it was just a case of like I didn't know what I didn't know. So I uh and and that's another thing I regret is like I didn't go and seek advice from experienced people who've been in the game for longer. It was at that point I hired an advisor who previously sold his uh SEO agency in 2015 for about 37 million pounds. And I think I literally got a newsletter from them and I just reached out and uh he he he he's just been it was super valuable and like helping me structure and actually showing me the key KPIs that are required for an agency. And again, it is one of these things that is difficult as an agency owner because if you're just getting first getting started and you just want to It's not hard to start an agency. It's quite a simple way. It's not easy, but it's it's simple to just get set up, start doing client acquisition, getting outreach. But if you don't know that these things are important, you sometimes just don't think and neglect them. So it was for me, it's the same thing. I didn't know that so many of these things were going to be important. I didn't know client service, client services was an important thing, and now that's the biggest driver of our revenue now, two years on, is having a solid client service team that focuses on growing our existing clients, and that's the biggest part of our revenue. Just a lot of these things that you won't think about because you're just so focused on I just need to get new business, I need to get new leads, I just need to, you know, get this money in every month. I'm going to be super happy. If for me it was really more money was coming in than it was going out, I'm as happy. Right. That was all I was thinking about. And a lot of agency owners get into that route because it's like, you know, my business is fine, you know, but they don't think about the the future planning of what does it take to actually build an agency of scale and value? And enterprise value is building an agency for enterprise value is very different than just building a visit business to sustain your lifestyle and cash flow. And obviously, I started as a for a cash flow and I was traveling and doing my thing. And then when I made that shift and brought the advisor and I was like, I need to now start thinking about this. So many different things that I had to start implementing in the business. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:16

What does life look like now pre like post-exit? I know we're still very much in that, and you've got the the the period where you're going to be running it working inside of the business. Is there like a staged kind of like exit for you where you are facilitating the bus your your leave? Um and uh are you now working more in the business than you were pre-acquisition? Like what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:39

There's nothing there's nothing really like that in place because the years there's a there's a certain like time frame that I have to so the way my deal structure uh was was majority uh on completion and then a portion after 18 months that will come. No earn out, just uh consider the the the only requirement is that I'm employed and I'm in the business. Um so there's no like structured process to phase me out because as I mentioned before the podcast, I've taken a portion of that in uh in equity in the company because I do really believe in the business and the equity private equity earning they're going on. So we've not really planned for anything to phase me out exactly on on that time frame. It's really going to be a discussion of me and and Robin at the time of what does this look like? Does it make sense for me to continue building and growing and building this business? Do my ambitions also feel the same way, or does it make sense that now is the time to kind of everything's integrated effectively? We've got we've got a very clear integration plan of how we're going to integrate Solerson into Journey further. We're keeping the two businesses as separate entities for the time being, but very clear of how we're going to integrate the teams, how we're going to integrate the functions, how we're going to even hive up Solerson into that business, but no real plan of me phasing things out. Over time, we'll probably start developing and building that, but it will also really depend on where they're going with the business in their time frames because obviously I'm very interested in the the journey that they're going on as well. There are there is my second um command that I mentioned who you know will probably start building in her knowledge and her role to potentially take that that position at role at some point, but um, you know, it really is just the case for me of what is what is journey further, you know, what is their journey, what are they going to achieve, and then at that point we'll kind of start to having that that sort of discussion. So there's not like a clear phasing approach to that. It's just at that date I can in theory decide what I what I want to do, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:41

We spoke off camera before we got started about personal brand. How important do you think personal brand is for agency owners in the space right now?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:52

I think it's super valuable. It's um I mean, I don't even have that big a personal brand, but I've got a pretty decently well-known personal brand in the influencer like industry. And you know, I go to events, people recognize me, know me from my LinkedIn content, or I've done talks or whatever. And um I think it is incredibly important. I've signed a lot of clients, but not because of Solderson, because of Suhi, and they buy into me and my journey and my story, and I'm really going to push that. Um, it's just such a great marketing funnel and channel nowadays because there are so many agencies out there, and yes, you can build the best proposition and you can build the best you know marketing channel and function, but really people are buying into people, they're buying into the founder story and journey, and even journey further put an emphasis on founder story as one of their kind of key marketing areas. And you know, if you're lining up, there's so many influencer agencies now because it's a growing space, if you're lining up a hundred different influencer agencies and one's got a very high conviction, trustworthy face at the top that people respect, people like the the you know want to buy into, it's you know, it it's a no-brainer to go them. There's a really great example in our space. It's an agency called Digital Voice, it's run by probably the most successful female founder in our space. Her name is Jenny. Um, her business is over 100 people, I think they're doing like 25 million in revenue or something a year, and she is everywhere, and she's just really pushed that female founder voice, and brands just buy into that and they love that and uh and and and that positioning. So super important um for anything. The only downside to it is just the key man risk element of do you make yourself too uh required for the business for the agency? But I think if I think when you're first scaling your agency, the personal brand is very important, and then over time you transition into really building that agency proposition as a key piece, or also having other people in your business focus on building personal brands. It's one thing that we've started trying to do is yes, my personal brand is the main thing, but our sales guy uh we're trying to make him really push his personal brand because then people are going to buy and then trust him. So it's like kind of trying to still have that personal brand approach, but within other layers of your team.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:07

Having time now to reflect on the business as a as a whole, kind of looking back and really I suppose now you're it's the the closing steps of that company. What are like the proudest more, what is the proudest moment that you've got looking at the company and what you've achieved?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:24

Um yeah, what is very small? Because uh I think there's there's a few there's a few moments that are very proud. I think the first moment it was um end of December 2018 when I realized this could actually be cut this could actually be a business because that was when we did our first 100k in revenue in the first six months. And before when I was running that, so my origin story is that I was ill and that's why it started me from running it. But before when that those first six months, whilst I was ill, it wasn't really like I wasn't I wasn't trying to build a big business, it was more of a I want to do this because I want to try to leave some sort of legacy, so if I can do it, then great. But it was also very much a distraction from what was going on in my life, and then at that point when I can't it was kind of a validation point of okay, I actually have something here that could turn into a proper business. Now let me start trying to build and scale this. So that was a very proud moment because as just a kid who was learning all this stuff online never really actually made very much significant money. You know, the job I was on before I was getting paid 800 euros a month to do and do six figures in the first, you know, revenue, not profit, but revenue was like this is actually something I can grow and scale. So that was the first part. I think the second part of moment was, and it's a weird one to see, just sh getting my mind out of that lifestyle entrepreneur mentality because I was so focused on that. Let me make a lot of cash flow, travel the world, flex, post the stuff on Instagram to be one of these agency guys that you know, internet money guys. And then I don't know what it was or what the shift was. I think there was a couple of things that made that shift I started going out with my current girlfriend and you know, being together for three years, and obviously, part of you don't, you know, you don't want to be doing that because a lot of it is for you know for for women and whatnot. That was one. Also, just the standpoint of like, right, I've had my fun, now I need to just go in on this business because either I'm just gonna keep running this like a uh like what I'm doing, a five-person business isn't really gonna be anything. And I kind of just thought back to what did I want when I first started it? It was create a business of impact, create a business legacy that I could sell. So just that is another proud moment. It's not really a tangible business moment, it's just getting myself out of that mindset and just shifting to right now. I need to lock in and build this thing over the next couple of years and really get it to a proper position. So I think that was uh another very proud moment. Um and then we had a period of time where the business didn't really grow all that much, and it was part of this lifestyle that we know was partly due to this kind of license where I wasn't really pu f fully in the business, but we we grew, but we weren't growing anywhere near where we were at. We're kind of we were kind of like um capping at like just about one million in revenue. And then the when when I when I really focused down, started looking at what was wrong, what we needed to implement, what things we weren't doing correctly, we then doubled the revenue the year after, and that was a pro moment because it just showed me that I'm not, you know, I'm not a guy that can only take the business to this far. Like there was just things that I wasn't doing effectively, and we were able to scale it and double it, and then you know, growth from that point to then to the point of selling has also been amazing, and then you know we've got a great growth plan in place as well now. Awesome, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:35

Your first six months, you said you hit 100k in revenue. Was that during your illness?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:40

Yes. So uh well, the first three months were so I started the business in July and I was getting chemo until September. So basically the first three months, and then the next three months I was still recovering, so I was still, I guess, not in not in the best way. Wow, that's incredible, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:55

What motivated you and kept you motivated during that time? How were you not all consumed by what you were going through with the cancer?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:02

It it was it was a weird one. I've always been very ambitious, and the cancer thing was a very significant perspective change in my in my life. It was more the case of I've always wanted to be successful in some regard, whether that was like a successful doctor back in the day, or whether that was a successful YouTuber. I've had this ingrained in me as a young person to be ambitious, you know, build something of scale, do be successful in my life. And I feel like when you have something bad in your life, you have two options. You can either let it consume you and go in a very dark way, dark depressing path. And a lot of people do that, and you know, it's it's not their own fault, it's just that naturally is where it takes you, and you can't get out of that headspace, or you have the opportunity. And um I forget who who who um who who had who did the I think it's Napoleon Hill with the quote from him, and it was the quote of every adversity comes with it an equal or greater opportunity, and really that's just how I see things in life, and that was the perspective shift that I had that this is simply just an adversity, and I have the opportunity to go up instead and take it that way. So let's just focus down on something that can I can take the positives from this opportunity. The positives really were I don't have to go to school anymore. I've got a load more time, I can try and focus on these things that I've been trying to do. Yes, I'm in this bad way, but you know, I'm at home, my fingers still work, you know, I've I can I can still think clearly sometimes there's you know you get a bit of brain fog when you're getting chemo, but you know, I can still think, I can still learn, I can still develop. Right, why not use all this extra time to try and do something positive and try and make something in my life? So it was really just trying to push myself in that to that perspective. And I've never really been someone who gets too down and out about things anyway. So I think it was only natural that I would kind of go in that direction.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:46

That's amazing, man. I always say that resilience is the most important trait in entrepreneurship. Yep. So many struggle with that and are not or don't achieve what they want to achieve in life or get to where they want to get to because of that lack of resilience and inability to fix their mindset. What would your advice be to someone in that position?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:07

Yeah. That's uh I totally agree with you. Like resilience has been the number one, number one piece of mind, and I think any entrepreneur who does need it. Um I uh what what I what I what I do whenever I'm having a hard time in entrepreneurship, and it's obviously a lot easier for me to do this, but this is what would be my advice to people is that look back at your life and just think about all the tough challenges and times you've had. And I can guarantee you there's something that's tougher than what you're doing and going through right now. Anytime I used to have an issue in my business, I beat cancer. You know, I I I had uh something I was gonna kill. Like this is this is trivial, you know, it's just kind of reframing that perspective. So anytime that I ever have you know any any problems in that sense, I really just tell people like, and again, it's a lot easier for me to say that to say that because I've had something that was so bad. And some people don't have bad things, but everyone goes through shit, everyone has bad things, and I can guarantee you that realistically in the grand scheme of things, this business setback that you're having, it's there's more to life. And there's probably other things that have happened in your life that you can reflect back on and think, what did that do for me in my life and how did that change me as an individual, and then draw on that kind of experience to then move forward. So that's generally what I do is uh is just kind of look back at nothing can really affect or phase me because there's not much worse that can that can happen. I mean, of course there's always worse of having, but it's that just reframing of my mindset in that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:33

That's great advice. And someone asked me uh yesterday actually, they said to me, I've been running my agency for six months and I just can't do the work, I can't make myself do the work. I've done I'm like, How many calls have you made? And they're like, I've made three hundred calls. It's in the last six months you made three hundred calls. I tried to coach through that process. I wanted to really try and get in that person's brain, but actually that mental frame that you just gave is a really nice frame, and I wish I said that to look back on your life and all the things that you've already gone through and and reflect on the things that have changed since that time. I think we all experience this as entrepreneurs, like we can't escape bad times, even when things are really good, like seemingly from the outside. And uh, I think that was a personal challenge for me is getting a lot of success, success in business, and then realizing, oh shit, like you can go through a lull period or a bad period or just a mentally challenging period when you've already made it, when you've already achieved everything that you wanted to achieve when you were a kid, aspiring to be someone great, and that's tough. And then when you go through that once, and then like it's like, oh, okay, we can go through that again and again and again and again, and it's just that repetition of tough times. And then actually, I think you somewhat get to a point where uh things can get a little bit mundane when you don't have something that's really challenging happening in your life. You don't get the contrasting lows for those incredible highs, those exhilarating highs that you want to experience. You go somewhat flatline and end up seeking some kind of you do you do need it for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:58

I think that it's a very dangerous place to be where you just have too much too many wins and too much stuff going on. And I've had that I've had periods of time where I just thought everything was amazing and it was the greatest time of life, but you you build a you build a complacency life as well going through that period, and it doesn't really help build mental toughness if you just always have cons consistent wins. The thing that's the thing that is the best thing is like having peaks and troughs, because then you learn how to come back to equilibrium a lot a lot easier, right? You learn that the highs are highs, but they're only as good as long as they last. You need to kind of bring yourself back to be grounded, and the lows are not gonna last either. So I think if you when you have that those two sides of the extreme and you have those at repet repetition and you do those over enough period of time, you do just train yourself to kind of stay in a more equilibrium phase. And I've done that now where, you know, before I used to get super excited about winning, winning clients, winning business. Now it's like, of course, it's always it's great, but it's like I'm not gonna be, you know, sitting back in my chair and like, okay, I'm gonna take the rest of the days off now. I've I've made it. It's like, no, that's that's great, you know. Now now what's next? Now, you know, we continue building. I just kind of get back to normality and it's just it's it's just one step in the in the journey. And the same way, the lows, it's the same thing. I used to get really, you know, if a staff member wanted to leave or there was an issue, I get we used to get really emotional about things, and then it's just now the case of right, these are just challenges that happen in the the line of duty and the things that you have to go through. Let's just get back to normality and think logically about what are the next steps and how we how we go through these things. And I don't know, it's a weird thing where I think naturally just going through it enough and you see the repetition, it's like I I don't think I necessarily trained myself to get that way. Of course, there's the the resilience piece I mentioned, but I think just a lot of the repetition, you're it's almost like the muscle memory of like when you know you go to the gym, you get you get the muscle memory, your your brain just adapts to being in that state. It's it has been weird. Like I can't recall a point where I tried to make myself that way, but it's just naturally has come with going through extreme highs and extreme lows, and you know, you have basically having to force yourself to act in that way, because if you get too emotional in one or the other ways, it has it's has no benefit to you, really, in my opinion. Completely agree.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:15

And it's it's interesting you said about um the when you get into this state of like for repetitive success, then it creates that complexity. I think that's actually one of the that's that's one of the harder parts to crack because it gets much, much easier in a place in in the lull periods for you to be like, okay, I know this is a lull and it's it's a little bit shit for now, but we'll get through it and I'll make sure I go to the gym and I'll go for walks and I'll do the shit I need to do and we'll make it happen. But it's much harder when you are in this period of win-win-win-win-win to remind yourself it's not always gonna be like this. You convince yourself, no, now's the time, it's great forever. And then it comes and slaps you again. And it gets much harder. I I believe probably as we get older and wiser, it'll get easier to be more stoic and more or just more level in that time period, like as you call it, the equilibrium.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:07

It's just not a lot like enough life experience, really. And obviously, I'm only 24, so I don't have very much life experience at all. But just even to the younger guys that I mentor and help and stuff like they haven't had enough experience to see that life can just slap you in the face at any point. So you think you're on this high and on this win, and then something happens and it's a major extreme, and then you can't quite deal with it. But over time, you know, you just have enough of these scenarios where you just you just learn, really. You just learn for experience. And if you're not learning, then you're doing something very wrong. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:39

So I agree. What's next for you? What are you what are you working on now? Like what is what does the future look like?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:45

Yeah, so obviously, aside from scaling and building the agency, one of the biggest things that has always been an ambition of mine, and I posted on LinkedIn the other day. I when I was, I think maybe 2020, I put this vision board up on my wall because I lived with my parents at the time, and had nine key categories. There was like fame, wealth, uh, health, you know, all these different various areas, uh, you know, kind of uh all of this type of stuff. I don't remember exactly. It's a framework from a from an entrepreneur, but a friend sent me it, and it was just basically categorizing your aspirations and goals into different areas. So I've got my monetary ones of net worth by different ages, of course. I had, you know, kind of health goals of being able to bench certain amounts and help fitness and completing X, Y, Z. And I had a had a fame one, right? Which was uh focused on like how I want people to perceive me, how successful I want to be known and seen. And there's always been a drive for mine, and I think it stems back to the days of trying to be a YouTuber, of trying to become well known, and not well known in the sense that I want to be a celebrity that can't even live their life without people chasing them. It's terrible, it looks like a terrible life. But someone that is well known enough to a inspire and make an impact, and also seen as uh an authority and someone that you want to listen to and learn from in your relevant area. So it's always been an aspiration to be key opinion leader, I suppose, within entrepreneur as an entrepreneur. And I always like envisioned Stephen Bartlett as a great example. Maybe he's a little bit bigger now than I would ever want to get to, but that kind of journey where you know he had that social agency, he actually sold it originally for uh only multi- multi-seven figure figure before they obviously merged it in and then sold it for a much bigger, but you know, somewhat similar journey to then kind of building my personal brand. And I started building my personal brand properly from a video content perspective two years ago on YouTube and about my start building my user channel. I've got about 15,000 subscribers, a couple of videos have hit over 100,000 views, so things are building there. LinkedIn's always been a thing that has been very important for us that we've been building. But I said to myself that once I did the acquisition, once I gained back a lot more time because when you're selling a business, you're both having to run business as usual and make sure the business doesn't go in any bad way, plus then working a second job of doing the acquisition. So I had no time of this last year, really. It was very difficult. I was like, I'm going to just go all in because I truly think that for me, yes, I've got this money now and I'm thinking about where I'm going to allocate my newfound wealth. Some of it's of course going to go into investments and your stable things and doing some trading and leveraging and that and try to multiply those things. But to me, those are probably going to be a bit longer-term plays. I generally think that the most high-leverage investment I can make right now that's going to have the most immediate return, plus also the most sustainable long-term return is building my personal brand properly and really building a team to actually strategize and how do we effectively grow it. Because right now it's been just do influence and marketing content, keep me in that space, you know, mentor some people, whatever. But yeah, I'm assembling a team right now. We're going to change the content structure slightly. We're still kind of working that out to essentially get people bought into me as an individual because my ambitions are, as I say, to do something in tech and SaaS in the future. And how I see the personal brand is that it's going to open up investment opportunities because you know Steven is a great example, can walk into many different doors and either invest in other people and people invest in him or you know, not just Stephen's other people like that. Great marketing funnel for the next thing that I do, um, plus also just a great revenue stream. Um, and I you know already see the monetization that's come from my small personal brand right now. And I just think that if I really go all in on this and it's something I've always wanted to do, that's gonna be the next path. So just hired a guy a couple of days ago to sort of start building out the strategy and the direction that we're going to take with things. So I'm gonna work very closely with him, and then we're just assembling a team. So we've already got the YouTube team that are gonna continue and grow, building a short-form team, and then probably a cooperating team, and then just really trying to build an owned audience as well, um, and then see what we do with it. Not necessarily gonna sell anything immediately right now with it, but it's really just getting people bought into suit as a as an individual and then see what we can do with it from there. So that's my biggest project. And then I'm gonna do a couple of investments, I think, on the side. Like I've always been excited about angel investing and just these high risk that you never you know, small checks, but you let's see what happens. So I've already started having a couple of good conversations about that. Mostly interested in the AI and SaaS space, that's the space I want to go to. I see it both as an opportunity to invest and potentially make some good money, but also learn how those businesses operate and run, because that's my interest. Um, so yeah, do some of that as well. Um, and then yeah, just work out like what that next business is going to be, I guess, over the next little while. And then uh well, I'll take a little bit of time, as I say, want to start family and stuff and then get on with that in my in my late 20s, 30s, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:42

Nice, awesome, man. I was just writing down. I want to and would like to unpack the uh content strat the content team structure with you that I think will be skate will be changing the subject too heavily for the pod now. So we'll have that conversation behind the scenes and you know maybe I'll I'll give you guys some value from that. Um I've got some quickfire questions though for you. We'll we'll try and we'll try and keep these quick fire as well. So just give me what comes to mind on the on the on the question. Um, brands that you'd still love to work with that you never got to in the agency, or a brand, sorry, one key brand.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:14

Um who comes to mind actually? Trying to think. Uh there's it's probably like probably like a big like game publisher, I would imagine. There's there's a couple that we want to work with. And then also on the tech space, like I don't ever see it happening, but I might do. Apple has just always been a cool one as we work in the consumer tech space, but just don't know if they need influence of marketing because the brand equity is so massive.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:38

But it's always been an exciting one, yeah. Yeah, nice. TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram. Which platform has the most opportunity right now? Uh I think YouTube personally, it's it's just bread and butter, it's going to continue growing. I think it's that for sure. Yeah, it's that it's evergreen as well, isn't it? Yeah. One trend that you think is overhyped in the industry at the minute.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:00

Um, I generally honestly think short form is overhyped, to be honest. And I know I've just talked about gonna be building short form, but I genuinely think like just long form, you just can't beat it. Um, and too many people are trying to focus on short form. That's where you build value of your audience, is that long form at. It's where the audience creates connection with you. So I think short form is generally way too overhyped. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:22

Best book or podcast that's shaped how you think.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:26

Um it's annoying because I always forget the name of it, but it's this uh well, actually, no, there's there's two books. So the one that's shaped how I think, The Hard Things About Hard Things, um, by Andreasen Horowitz, I believe. That one just helped me shape this whole wartime CEO uh sort of mindset. And then there's this one sales book, and it's really bad because I draw on it a lot when I sell, but I forget what it's called. So I'll need to maybe find it out after and maybe throw it on the screen or something somewhere. Because I always search, I recommend to people I always forget the name and it's really bad because I remember the contents of the book, but not the name of it but I'd say the hard things about hard things is not. Well, it's not a piece of content from the from the sales thing. It was essentially just about the art of storytelling when it comes to sales, and about we were selling so much like trying to just tell the agency uh all the great facts about the agency, but actually just making a very cohesive story through the pitch, and we changed our pitch strategy to just telling a story about how the campaign strategy would shift, and that just changed the way that we sold. Nice. One thing that people would be surprised to learn about you. Um I quite like being alone. Like always like my Instagram and the way that I am. Yeah, uh the way that my Instagram and everything always like suggests that I'm very vocal. I do a lot of this content stuff. I actually really just like being my own space and just head down and just not being with anyone else, really. Nice. Finally, one quote or motto that you live by. I think the one that I already said earlier uh every adversity comes without an equal or greater opportunity. It's the number one thing that's made a biggest impact in my life. Awesome. Say it. Thanks so much, man. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.