SPEAKER_00 0:00

Out of nowhere, like they just blew up, they just went zero to a hundred million in like months. You launched Bevant in 2017 and you've worked with many new age fashion brands.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

I'll jump into Pangaia, but that was a bit of an enabler for us while my wife was watching the Kardashians and every single member was wearing a Pangaia attractive for like pretty much the whole episode.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

If you were to just still it down to three core reasons as to why that brand blew up so quickly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

I mean to be honest, the reason they blew up was You've equally now got over 50, 60 people. So what changed then in that? We were like, we have zero capacity. How are we gonna take this on? I just had to accept that I'm gonna hire five people. That ended up being like a massive catalyst for us being able to take on some of the brands that were kind of knocking on our door that we wouldn't have been able to take on without hiring. Never had any salespeople. We've kind of just grown organically, word of mouth. I've only ever looked at one number really, which is just net profit.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

How do you make the decision to okay, we want to invest in these areas of the business without it becoming a shiny object that takes you away from the main thing?

SPEAKER_01 1:04

I always give advice to people in the industry, stay in focus because I see it all the time. I did a million side projects, so I had dropshipping sites, I had affiliate sites, loads of other stuff. That was just a point where I just became like the most focused man alive because I'd just made so many mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

If you were to be starting the agency today, what would you do differently for what you did originally? I think I would welcome to Agency Giants. Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited to be on. So you launched Bevont in 2020, uh 2017.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Yeah, roughly. Yeah. I think yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

And you've worked with many new age fashion brands, big ones like Represent and Pangaia. Presumably didn't start off with working with that kind of client.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

No, no. I mean, to be honest, you say about starting business in 2017, so it's quite ambiguous as to when we actually started it. So I was doing like independent consulting, largely around replatforming projects. Uh back in those days, a lot of brands were wholesale only. So I was going in and like launching their D2C site, like kind of project managing it. Um, and then Josh is my best friend, so he was working for different media agencies, and then we were working with a couple of brands, and they wanted to like test D2C media and uh you know, like appear on search and shopping for brand terms, which before they just weren't present at all. So, really low level, he started doing that on a freelance basis. Um, and then we kind of realized that there was a bit of demand for people to just go in and like plan that stuff, so then we were like, right, let's go, or he needed to go full-time, and we were like, there's we'll operate as like a little consultancy, and then we realized actually all the demand was for managing media, so we kind of pivoted the paid side to that, which at the time was a lot smaller. Um, and to be honest, we just really we really wanted the fashion brands and like the brands that we respected. Um, but they certainly weren't we we got really lucky with a couple of clients up front, and we'll come on to Pangaia, which is a massive uh thing for us, and that yeah, triggered a lot of growth. Um, but to be honest, we got really lucky, we got lush really early, and somehow we were managing. Hopefully, they're not gonna watch this, but somehow we're a team of like four managing their global media, and then all of our other clients at the time were like tiny uh random businesses. Um, and then the account started to grow, so I always um again, I don't know if I should say this or not, or like what I can say, but we won this uh penis pumps client, which at the time was massive for us, like huge or pretty big spend, uh really interesting business. They had patents, massive uh like resale, wholesale uh channel, and then yeah, that was kind of like a bigger account for us that kind of allowed us to kind of change how we operated, and then from there we just started to pick up better brands, and then we just kind of doubled down on the fashion side. Um, I'll jump into Pengaya, but that was a bit of an enabler for us to be honest. So when we pitched it, it was funny because the guy that was there, who I still know now and really good guy, super smart, uh, good friend. Uh, he was like, This brand is gonna take off, like this is gonna go massive, and every brand says that. And we were kind of like, Do we think it will? Blah blah blah. And then in the end, we were like, let's just uh and it was tiny for us actually at the time, and it was a small fee, and it wasn't really clear what we were gonna do, and they really struggled for like consistent inventory and everything else. Um, but we pitched, pitch went terribly. Uh, the founder was just like not engaged at all. We were like, That's the worst pitch we've ever done, definitely not gonna win it. Uh, won it, and then out of nowhere, like they just blew up, to be honest. Um, and they were just so well placed, they were so well connected, great product, um, yeah, great timing, and they just went zero to a hundred million in like months. And that, you know, as soon as people saw that we were running the media, and the media did become pretty big, and they had a really good in-house team. Josh was basically working, my business partner um was basically working in-house for them, and that kind of catapulted us, and then out of nowhere, because at that point we'd probably been six or seven people for uh three years basically. We'd been going three years, and we had had six or seven people, and then out of nowhere we had like some of the best uh or like the best kind of contemporary fashion brands just contacting us wanting to work with us, um, and then we had a few others like Pangaia, and then that kind of kick-started things, really.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

That's amazing. I know I want to unpack how you leveraged that case study because you it sounds like that's the the kit that was the catalyst to a lot of scale. I want to hold that thought just for now so we can we can come on to back to that and revisit it. Um but going right to the early stage of the agency, like what was the time frame between you know working with the smaller brands to working with a a a big brand like Pangaio, or at that stage, not big, but too big.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to be honest, um so Josh, I mean it kind of all happened at once, and I think before this I said to you, like I think Vivant has always been pretty scrappy, and the kind of off side for a long time kind of uh was our lowest priority to an extent, and we were a lot more focused on how do we deliver really good work, how do we build like advocacy with clients, how do we um yeah, just organically make people want to work with us. And I feel like to be honest, at the start, you know, Josh was still delivering a very high proportion of the work, and it wasn't like Josh and I had gone into like founder mode and started operating differently. Like, to be honest, even to this day, Josh and I are so in the day-to-day. So I feel like Josh and Josh and Bethan, who I imagine we'll talk about a lot, we hired uh so essentially Josh is number two in his team uh from uh one of the Wave Maker. Uh so we hired her early, and those two had both worked on accounts spending millions a month. Uh, they kind of Josh had zero discipline, Bethan had a lot of discipline, like she was kind of between the two of them, they could manage an account of any size, I'd say. So whilst they were working on you know really small uh kind of multi-brand retailers and everything else. I feel like we were kind of ready to manage a bigger account. And yeah, got lucky with Lush. I'm trying to think the penis pumps client was a larger spend client, but I think you know we had what we needed to be able to, it's not like we kind of grew up if you see. I mean, I think those two were very used to working with larger accounts, and then we just gradually kind of flipped the smaller clients for bigger ones, and that's kind of how we've grown, if that makes sense. Does that answer your question?

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Yeah, it does. Was there was there an outbound acquisition system?

SPEAKER_01 7:49

No, so it's interesting you mentioned Pangai as well. So again, we've never, I think, and this I always have whenever I talk to agency people, I think one thing that we've always been like super proud of is like we've never had any salespeople, we've never tried to grow. If anything, Josh and I were always very resistant to growth, and I'd imagine we'll come on to that as well. Um, and we were, yeah, we've kind of just grown organically, word of mouth, clients moving around different brands. Um, but actually now it's as you know we started working more with IDHL who have got a big commercial organization, everything curves. I almost feel like in some ways we're quite naive because we're so uh we prioritise working with the brands that we like love and respect so much, and we've just done we've just kind of waited for those brands to come to us, and it's almost like I wonder what if we had a really good kind of uh salesperson that worked in like in the same way we were, actually, we probably would have been a bit better at getting the top brands, you know, to our events or you know, kind of opening those conversations. But equally, a lot of our clients say the thing they love about Vivon versus some of our competitors is we're just completely non-commercial, which has pros and cons, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

You say you're resistant to scale. Yeah. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_01 9:08

I mean, to be honest, so Josh and I are just wired to think about I think team and client, and it's been I would say, you know, every agency owner would say, or most would say, you know, it's a really stressful uh thing to do and be involved in. And I think for both of us, particularly me, the stress comes from the idea of a team member or a client being like really disappointed in us, or us not delivering, or thinking that we're not uh, you know, operating in their best interests. And I think basically we hired Beth Ann, so she came in, she again big challenge getting her into the business. She's like the opposite of Josh and I, very structured, uh, quite professional. Like, I mean, someone we really needed in the business, but uh probably not uh the obvious fit at the time for her career-wise. And then on the e com side, we hired someone called Sham who's like my number two, and she's the same, so she was like uh kind of running the product, a digital product team at BHS, and she had kind of big brand experience, um, and she was the equivalent. And I think what we realized quite early on was that both of them and then a number of other people we went on to hire, if we didn't grow, those people just didn't feel challenged and they weren't bought in enough to want to stay with us. And I think we've kind of obsessed with retention uh since the start, and actually, there's been so many periods where Bethan, in particular, so there's been I can think of two or three meetings where Bethan has been like, right, I'm hiring six people, and I'm like, No, you're fucking not. Um, that's gonna ruin our culture and it's gonna change things because we were at points we were almost like cult-like, to be honest. Like all of our team would hang out at weekends up until we were like 15 people or whatever. Um, and I didn't want to lose that. And I think both Josh and I were like, Well, we uh from the start, we said we wanted to be the best 10-person consultancy in the world, and we never wanted to grow bigger than that. And I would say that the people that we bought in pushed the growth, but in a good way, like yeah, I always say I attribute so much of where we ended up getting to uh to Bethan and Sham because otherwise it'd probably still be six people, and me and Josh would be really happy with our output. Um, but we'd yeah, Vervant would be nowhere near as big and wouldn't work with the brands we work with.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

So what changed then in that? I suppose, and I can only presume you still have the mentality of small team, high effort, you know, low churn, and just the maximum attention to all your clients, but you've equally now got over 50, 60 people in the company.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

So about 72 people, so a lot changed like that. I think to be honest, like over time I just had to accept that. I mean, to be honest, I would say my role, as much as you know, I'm MD, I've always been very protective over certain parts of the business. Nowadays, I feel like it's so proven that Beth Ann, Sham, a couple of other people in the business are so much better at a lot of the op stuff, like understanding you know when to hire in advance, all of that kind of stuff that I just have almost no say anymore, which I'm okay with. Um, and I've just had to over time uh get more comfortable with the idea of people leaving, the idea of you know needing to push people a bit harder, all of that kind of stuff. Um, but to be honest, I think the first time when Beth Ann was like, I'm run I'm gonna hire five people, and if you don't like it, then you know this isn't the right setup for me almost. Um, and that ended up being like a massive catalyst for us being able to take on some of the brands that were kind of knocking on our door that we wouldn't have been able to take on without hiring. Um, and then also another situation that was quite similar was Beth I wanted to run a grad day, um, and you know that was the equivalent as well. She's like, I want to hire four or five grads, and then I was like, that's mental. Uh, and also like even the whole thing, I was not 100% comfortable with the idea of bringing in more junior people where you can't then just immediately assign revenue. Um, but actually, a lot of those people and that grad scheme of yeah, they've ended up being some of our best people, so I think all of that stuff, and it's funny because I feel like I'm gonna talk about Beth An a lot because we're the opposite, we did like the personality tests, and she and I are like the complete opposites, but yeah, she's definitely been a big part of the media growth, and I think Shams being the equivalent, but probably more around like yeah, being present uh uh like externally and culture and also kind of pushing the e-com team to grow as well. But I think she and I are very aligned that we don't want to be 15 people, we want to be eight people, and we want to stay very good and still be able to kind of pick and choose the brands we work with.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

I'm interested to know what that five, six people was that group, the department, what was that bottleneck team that she wanted to build that allowed you to scale?

SPEAKER_01 14:12

Yeah, I mean to be honest, it was more I mean, there's been various points. That was the first one, and I think that probably would have been let's build our first or like our second pod, essentially. So you probably would have had Josh and Betham both being quite hands-on at that point. Bethan now wouldn't work in the product, she's more uh running the teams with someone called Tom, who's our head of paid and like uh, you know, capacity management, all of that kind of stuff. Um, but you would have had those two and then probably like a couple of uh mid-level people and maybe like one junior, and then essentially uh rather than hire like one more person into that kind of existing structure, it's like, right, let's hire a one senior person that can then take ownership of a whole new pod. Um and yeah, and that you know, was it ended up working, and then now we've kind of continued to grow in that way almost. So kind of building out new pods. So like now there's more like every now and then we'll change to structure, which you know sometimes goes terribly, sometimes goes okay. Um, but yeah, that's kind of where uh kind of how we started to then and the other thing is we've just always for our first five years, we were just always uh backs against the wall. Like we'd get a really cool brand, and I'd be like, we have to work with this brand. So like Gani was one that we got, and like I love that brand. Uh loads of people in the business love the brand. Uh, and then we were like, we have zero capacity, and then it was like, How are we gonna take this on? And then we kind of yeah, just continuously had that cycle of like bring someone in, if they're not good, it's a disaster. If they are, then it works really well. Um, but their fans are we have to hire in advance, and this will give us runway for like five or six clients, whatever, and then it's just always worked, even though on paper I was like, this is the wrong move commercially and team-wise, but yeah, it's always kind of worked out.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

I would say I'd like to expand on team and and and so on as well, specifically because you guys are so uh involved in the delivery side aside, presumably, because you just back the your own individual talents there as well. I I do want to hold that as just a as a seed to plant for later on because I think there's a lot that we can unpack in team and culture and and so on, and maybe some hiring mistakes that you've made as well. But n whilst we were still kind of closely attached to the topic of growth, that Pangaia account, when that came in and they saw that explosive growth, how did you use and leverage that case study to be able to then like how did every other brand hear about that, for example? What what tangibly did you do?

SPEAKER_01 16:52

To be honest, I think a lot of people we've spoken to about this over the years, I think everyone agrees we could have done a lot more with it. So we talked about it, like we would if we were talking about clients, if we were, you know, events, whatever else, we talked about Pangaira a lot. Um about when about a year in or two years in, we were kind of like right at the center of some awards, or let's talk about on LinkedIn. I think that was like for a long time, it's the only case study we had on our website. Um, but to be honest, I think when a brand, because I would say they were probably the number one brand in the world for hype at that point, like they were and they were like a real kind of like you know, Gymshark level of growth. And I remember through COVID, I turned out well, my wife was watching the Kardashians, um, and every single member was wearing a Pangaya tracksuit for like pretty much the whole episode, and like they were just so present that everyone was like, Wow, these guys are growing ridiculously fast, who is managing their media? And then people would like Google it, people would ask around, people would reach out to them. Um, and yeah, it's all really organic to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

How would you or why if you were to distill it down to three-core reasons as to why that brand blew up so quick?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, it's really interesting because at the around this time a load of other brands were doing really well. And I remember one of our competitors had a brand that was doing really well, and they like so like everyone was kind of attributing the growth to what they did. Uh, I think it has nothing to do with us. Uh, I think the media had definitely helped like amplify uh what they were really doing amazingly from a brand and marketing perspective, and also help them to enter new markets and potentially kind of show people that there were new products available outside of just tracksuits. Um, but to be honest, the reason they blew up was timing was perfect, like that has to be mentioned, even though I don't think they were a covet brand, and a lot of people think they were, you know, a covet boom brand. Um, and I think they were so well connected, and that was the big thing as well. And like everyone in that business when we started working with them was so sharp, and yeah, all the people were well connected, but the founder in particular was just so well connected to A-less celebrities, um, and I think they just got so much organic reach, organic and uh kind of connections uh reach that they were just everywhere. Like, and then I think what worked really well for them as well, they really struggled with inventory up front, and there was so much scarcity, like people were so like proud to have got their hands on a tracksuit, and you know, all the footballers and everything else would be posting like organically, uh just because they'd managed to get their hands on a tracksuit, and that worked so well, and then by the time they managed to get their hands on like decent levels of inventory, the demand was there, and then yeah, they just kind of blew up.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Was there a moment when you when they were growing that you sat down as a team and were like, shit, we've now got a huge opportunity here?

SPEAKER_01 19:51

I think I don't know if it was that. I think the moment where we were like, shit, this is like ridiculous, and this is we need to really make sure we do a good job and everything else, there was they were getting a low, they were getting like, and I don't know how much I can say, but they were getting like eight million pounds, or the equivalent inventory, and this is when they were tiny, of like eight million pounds worth of sales in, and they were like, right now we've got three months and we need to, you know, really think about how we're gonna approach media and like new customer acquisition and everything else for this three-month period, and we'd kind of built out the media plans and everything else, and it sold out in like four minutes, and we were just like wow, like this is mad, and everyone internally were just like fuck like this is crazy. And I think that was I remember that point we were just like this client is gonna go crazy. Um, but yeah, really, I mean to be honest, the the sad thing about the Pengai story is because they've obviously they kind of went up and down, and I think, yeah, I mean we we still work with them at the moment, actually. We won't be working with them long term, but the uh and by that sounds like that sounds a bit odd actually. So essentially they asked us to retender and we decided not to do it just because it's such a different business, and I also think it's just good for them to have like a fresh perspective as well. Um, but and that yeah, we've worked with them for five years, but yeah, the only sad thing I think yeah, there's just so much change after that growth and so many like big decisions, yeah, that maybe didn't quite work out that yeah, I think um it's just kind of yeah, it's just a bit of a shame that they haven't kind of been able to prolong that. Do you think explosive growth in any company facilitates decisions that maybe aren't advantageous for the long term and that are I think um I mean I think yes, and there's been so many brands that have done what they've done and then just kind of disappeared, and there's also a lot of brands that just yeah, can't maintain the hype and they become a fad and everything else. But I do think with Pangaia, because they had such good plans in like moving into new categories, there were some crazy high profile collabs they were gonna do, and I think. The problem was just because the team was changing so much. Uh, they'd build these plans, and this is like the leadership team, they'd build these plans, and then by the time they'd finalize the plan, the person would leave the business, and then it would be like, Okay, let's spend three months building a new plan, and then they'd kind of get round to you know signing everything off, and then that person would leave the business. And yeah, they just never really acted on a lot of the bigger things they wanted to do around when they were at their peak levels of demand and like reach, and I think, yeah, for me that was probably the biggest issue. And I think you know, there's a lot more I think internally that they maybe didn't do perfectly from like an ops perspective. Um, but yeah, I think that's kind of how I look at it from where I was involved.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Was there anything as you went through that growth period in that same kind of time where you were taking on new brands and so on, that broke inside of the business as you tried to scale?

SPEAKER_01 22:55

Um, you mean in terms of like things that broke inside our business? Yeah, inside of your company higher. Yeah, like loads of different things. So um I'm trying to think about how I uh yeah, kind of focus on some of those. I think there's I mean to be honest, some of the things that I think have broke inside our business probably been more recently or like over the last couple of years. I think we somehow managed to because everyone talks about different periods of growth and different team size changes where everything changes, and I think like the first one, which you know people say is like I don't know, 10-15 people, whatever. Um, I think we managed to avoid a little bit by just kind of growing through it. Um I think probably one of the worst periods we've had as a business, I would say internally, was last January. And I think that was an interesting period because essentially we had grown a lot, and then approaching January, we're like, right, New Year, um, we've got a lot of small clients that we uh essentially we've we were busy, like really busy as a business. So we were like, right, we're stopping all new business, we're not gonna take on any new clients, and we're not gonna entertain any new clients for a while, we're gonna focus on our team and everything else. Uh then we were like, we're gonna remove like our five smallest clients that you know we're just not the right fit for anymore. They could find someone that would do a better job, everything else. Um, and then uh we went into January, and then we just randomly, and we hadn't really lost any clients for a long time, randomly lost three or four clients, um, and a couple of big ones, and like a couple of them were probably our fault, a couple of them were more uh just completely uh kind of macro things. Uh two of them went into administration, actually. And we were just like, fuck, we've got like zero pipeline for the first time ever, as well. Like, we've always just had more demand than we could supply, which is something we've been super lucky with. And then we were like, we've literally just told everyone no, we don't have anyone you know that really wants to work this. Um, we've essentially just removed or lost eight clients, which is quite a big portion of revenue. Um, and then also we've like made a load of changes in the team and everything else, which are really positive long-term changes, and I think worked really well. But it's like we are just in this very strange position. So then we kind of had to, yeah, just make a lot of change. So, I mean, we did to be honest, it wasn't bad, like we made up the revenue quite quickly, but it's more we put a lot of pressure on the team, I think, around new business because we don't have dedicated salespeople or teams, you know, everyone was kind of like working on you know pictures and everything else. Um, and then we were also like because there's a lot of account changeover amongst the teams, it's just like a lot of change at once, and I think, yeah, that was probably one of the more difficult moments of a run, and this is all the paid side, um, and it was just six months of just change, to be honest. Um, but I think overall, I mean we learnt a lot from it as well. I think one thing we learnt is that if people move media agency, they're typically gonna trigger that in around this time, uh, which was really good. And I think and we just learnt a lot of what I think most agencies already knew because I think, like I said to you before, I think all the way through we've kind of just had our heads down and we've just been like, right, let's you know be the best at what we do and service our clients really well, and just kind of you know, we're kind of like insular in that way. Um, and then I think we just learn a lot more like mature agency things that kind of yeah, made us a bit more like a normal agency from an op's perspective, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

January is always the highest time for churn, but also I think we we would have never known that, which is very naive. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

I think but in in in it the highest time periods for churn always are the best time periods for client acquisition as well. Yeah. So on the run up to um November, you know, Black Friday. Yeah. On the the September, October can be high months of churn, but also great months of opportunity where the B2C brands at least want to move agency to capitalise.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah. Um, but yeah, that was a good period for learnings, I would say. And I think this year, you know, we've we're in such a bad position, and I think yeah, we've improved a lot of areas in the business, and I think we've got we I think the big thing during that period we just had no headspace in the business for like just continuous improvement, and like I think what we've done well overall over the years has been like learning and like foster like uh shared knowledge transfer amongst the team and like kind of fostering like newness and innovation and pushing the boundaries and whatever else, and during that period, I think it was just a very intense period where we had just a lot of change.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

You and Josh are, as you say, heavily involved in the business and the delivery side of the company. Yeah. As you expanded and you know, presumably had to go through quite a lot of mental challenges in being able to relinquish that control. How did you distill what was in your brain to the team? And do you think you did that effectively?

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Definitely not done it effectively, but I also think what Josh and I have in our brains isn't necessarily the right things to grow our business. And like I think I sometimes I play down the role that Josh and I play because I do think we in terms of our overall direction, it's never changed and like we've always like overinvested, and like different people come into the business and said we've overinvested in team, and like like we do a retreat every year, and we and everyone says, Do not take 70 people abroad for four days because this will go wrong, it's not good use of money, blah blah blah, like all these reasons, everything else. But we've always kind of stuck to we want to invest in the team and also our clients, and you know, we spend a lot of money like just going out to dinner with our clients, like doing exercise classes, doing like different things, and like we're quite close to our clients. Um, and I think we've kind of always stuck to a number of those types of things, but I think neither Josh or I want to be close to the numbers, want to be thinking about how we grow the business, uh, want to be thinking about like systems and processes and stuff like that, and that's never changed. And I think I look at Sherman Befan uh and other people like now. We've got an FD and a head of HR, and Tom, our head of paid as well, is very strong on that side. Um, and we've got a guy called Joho. I'd imagine we'll talk about him. He kind of runs Pulse and has been a big part of the growth of Pulse. But all of those people are so much better at those areas, and actually they that that's what they want to do, like they want to improve and grow the business. Whereas Josh and I realistically, it's probably our biggest strength and weakness. We want to be like the best, I want to be the best econ consultant out there. And Josh is exactly the same from a media perspective.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

It's really interesting, it's quite a it's a very rare and admirable kind of trait that you both have. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it very much feels like neither of you are very commercially motivated and not very much the love of the game.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

We've had to change a bit, and we've obviously just gone through this kind of exit, which we I'd imagine again we'll come to. Uh so we've definitely had to change a bit, but I mean to be honest, it the amount of times people have got, like particularly Barefan and Sham have got so annoyed of us because we've just I always I remember once we went to um we did like a bit of an away day in Oxfordshire and uh we had we've had a few, we've had lots of advisors over the years. We've been very quick to bring in consultants, and this person was like just trying to get us to focus on growth and like putting reporting in place, which we never had anything like that. And me and Josh were like talking to Sham and Bethan and saying we need to do this, and then I remember Bethane came to me and she's like, Do you actually care? Like, do you actually and she was annoyed and she was like, I don't think you actually care about these numbers, and I was like, I do, I do, but I didn't like to be honest, I didn't care. And um, I was like, as long as we're all I've only ever looked at one number really, which is just net profit, and as long as we're profitable and we're in a position to reimburst, um, I've always just been happy. Um, so yeah, I think we were really fortunate with Beth Ann and Sham. And you know, there's a lot of equivalent things that Sham's done from a like yeah, cultural perspective. Like she was uh yeah, kind of she drove a lot of our like internal cultural things for a long time, and also partnerships, which is a big part of our business, um, and also um operations. So I, for example, everyone said I was mentor when we were 10 people, I was like, Sham, here's the bank. Um, and like Sham's only been in the business for a year, and she's never done anything of finance or anything else. I was like, Sham, here's the bank. You go and manage anything to do with money. Um, I don't want to do it anymore. And um, yeah, and she's been amazing at like kind of helping us grow on that. And now we've kind of you know brought people in for different aspects. But I think basically Sham and Bethan and Tom and Joho, those four people um we've just been really fortunate with because it's allowed Josh and I to do the things that we actually care about and are motivated by, if that makes sense. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

You talk a lot about investing back into the company. I know you got you guys uh uh are really hot on RD and various different projects. So you've got a really successful Shopify app for post-purchase service. Yeah. Um talk to me about that. How do you how do you make the decision to okay, we want to invest in these areas of the business without it becoming a shiny object that takes you away from the main thing?

SPEAKER_01 32:26

I think one thing that's really lucky about Vivant, because I am a magpie and I'm I'd say I'm pretty creative, very quick to try and do something new. But before we started Vivant, so I've done loads of different things, like I've worked in-house a couple of times, but I've spent a lot of time in agencies and I spent three years at a company called GPMD, a company you know we still work today, really close with the owner, very good friend of mine. Uh kind of worked my way up to being a director in the business, left, did a startup called Audited, which was essentially a marketplace for audits delivered by people that worked it mostly in-house doing freelance, and it was a really nice little business. Um, but I kind of burnt out and it was really badly ran. Um, and when I did that, I then merged it with GPMD again, and through that phase, I did a million uh side projects. So I had dropshipping sites, I had affiliate sites, I had a Magento module, loads of other stuff, and I was just doing so many different things, and I think there was just a point where I just became like the most focused man alive because I'd just made so many mistakes, and I I always give advice to people in the industry around like staying focused because I see it all the time when and actually I hope he won't mind me saying this, but Mark from GPMD uh has definitely been distracted quite a lot at different points, and I think he'd say that. Um, and he's kind of put a lot of attention and money into things that then haven't come to fruition. I think I've just seen so many smart people, and he's one of the smartest people I know, um, do that, and it's had a really bad impact. So, whilst we do definitely do that, and Pulse is an example, and yeah, we've got maybe eight products in the business, um, we've definitely made sure they don't distract us. I think I think the thing that the RD side has done really well has kept me and Josh motivated, to be honest. Like, I think that we've both really enjoyed building stuff. So census, so uh we had a guy called Liam in the business who actually was a big part of Avant as well over the years, and he came in as like a technical consultant and moved his way up to technical director, and he's architected a lot of what we have, and then over time, so he left, did his own thing, and now works for an agency, and we've like kind of bought in different people. But census essentially, I was I did a lot of the roadmap uh and kind of asked for a lot of features and everything else, but he ran it, and then now different people in the business kind of run it. Um but I'd say I'm still quite still like a big focus for me. Um, and then the equivalent on the paid side, so we've got visualize, which is like to be honest, and again, hopefully I won't get trouble saying this, but Pengaya, when we were working with them, they were using Smartloo, um, which you probably know, um, and they were paying Smartly a lot more than they were paying us to manage the account. And all Smartloo's doing, they're just going in and building these basic templates, uh, with uh pulling kind of data out of Shopify and creating like yeah, nicer images for uh DPAs, and we were like we can build that super easily. Um, so we built an equivalent and we just gave it to all our clients, and then yeah, we just kind of used that to push the boundaries. I think we were the first to do video in that when that became available. Um, and then now we've got like different tools around creative reporting, got some agents. I think one of the big investments we've made on that side actually, we hired a team to put all of our clients' data into a data warehouse, and then we are now in a very good position internally to say what's going on in the US, like what's why uh you know, why's CAC changed, everything else? Um, but all of that stuff, we've actually been quite good at not doing the work, and I think all of that, because Josh is like worse than I am at that stuff, and actually he's he is quite easily distracted. Um, but yeah, we've done quite well bringing in the right resources to prevent us from getting distracted from our roles, which ultimately is client and product, really.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Have those tools that you've created over time, the various projects, become a good revenue driver for the case. Absolutely not, no, definitely not interesting.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Um, I mean, every there's been so many people in our business, and Beth, Ann and Sham definitely have wanted to make them revenue drivers, and we've just never I think that's where we felt it would be a distraction. So census, census is now probably profitable. So we've probably I think that's probably made close to a hundred grand now, and we've probably spent about 90 grand on it, something like that. Um, and that's just to be honest, we put it on all our clients and it's got about 500 brand, it's got some massive brands using it. Um, and then organically they've recommended it to other people. Um, but to be honest, a lot of the value of the tools, like the value for me with census, like we've actually got a really good view uh because we can like look at the aggregated data, like I can see when the spikes uh so most people that use census will ask the question, um, who are you purchasing for? Like, is it for you or is it a gift? And I can see like gifting spikes, and we've got so much data around that. Um, and we've got so much data around like attribution, and like we've got so much data around like what people say is a friction point when shopping. And to be honest, we don't really use it as much as we should. Um, but yeah, the value to us, because actually we do to be honest, we we're not close enough to the numbers and not organised enough to know the total cost that it is to our business, but the paid ones in particular we probably spend. I reckon we probably spend I reckon we probably lose about 150 grand a year on just having those tools, but I think they're a big part of why I think our clients love that we don't charge for them, and I think they're a big part of why people want to work with us as well.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

Well, presumably did they were they included in the the roll-up and and sell? Yeah, which is um did that amplify the multi- the multiple that you got as a business?

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Which is the saddest thing actually, like when we and again, like I mean we can talk about like our motivation and everything else. I think what's interesting is like just starting this conversation is Josh and I, I think everyone in the industry knew we would be like the last people that would want to sell our business. And I think uh one of the hardest things was that yeah, essentially Pulse didn't really have a value, um census and the other tools didn't really have a value, but yet they're like I I feel like you could so easily take any of those and go and like create pro a lot of profit, um, because the way that an agency is valued is essentially just on eBid DA, primarily with like the odd uh higher like benefit from a multiples perspective because you've got a brand or like everything else. Um but to be honest, I think that was something we found really difficult. But the actual I mean actually coming to go through that process, we and do you want is it right to just move on to that? Yeah, sure. Um because I think that was a definitely a hard part of it, but we like I say we didn't want to sell the business. I mean well what we felt was we were at a really good point as a business, and like all those people I mentioned had helped us get to a really good point as a business, and then we were like a AI is gonna really change this landscape, like and we need to be 100% confident that you know agency uh multiples will come down in order to retain our levels of retain and everything else, we're gonna have to work really hard and we're gonna have to invest a lot in what we're doing, and then also it's gonna become more competitive across a number of areas, and it's not just AI, I think Shopify having a really big impact on the services market as well, and I could definitely talk more about that. Um, and essentially then we sat down and we had a few different conversations with people, and we were like, How can we keep going? Uh like you know, maintain a lot of what we love about the business, um, but de-risk a bit and also give us more cash because we want we should have done New York years ago, and it was like it's gonna cost us 250 to 500k to do it properly, and we were just like we don't want to risk our money on this, and also it's a big distraction again. And we've yeah, tested it a little bit. Bethan did three months there, um, and it was a bit of a disaster for me and Josh because everyone's coming to us instead of her because she's in New York, um, and no, yeah, a bit of bit a few a lot of risk around that, and also the product stuff, because I think we think we need to invest more in that to kind of continue to grow. Um, and then we were like, let's do private equity, like that's a really good route for us that we'll we'll continue to have control of everything else, and the more people we spoke to, it was like you two have got no chance in uh in private equity and it'll change everything. Uh, and then we were like, let's bring in a CEO and do it, and then we just didn't really feel like that was the right route for us. It just didn't feel like we were gonna be able to focus on like the team and everything else. So then we were like, I spoke to a few more advisors, who could we sell to where we could uh maintain a lot of what we've got, and they were kind of like you can't really, but you know, these there's some really nice vanity names that you could sell to and it's gonna look great for you, and you could sell to these smaller organizations, and maybe they're aligned, but it's gonna change everything else. And then around this time, uh so my second best friend uh was working for IDHL, so he sold his business to them eight, nine years ago. And to be honest, I think we've always felt like there's a lot of stuff in IDHL that we really respect, but it's a very different business to Vivant, as you'd kind of expect, it's private equity backed, they're five four or five hundred people, um, and there's some really good stuff in there, but it's just very different to Vivant. And I think uh they were changing a lot though, like they'd brought in a new CEO, and he had completely changed a lot of things that I probably would have said were the contrast areas, and then he decided to leave, and then whilst me and Josh, I would speak to this guy every day, and like we just chat about e-comm and everything else, and he was like, Right, I'm probably gonna become the CEO of this company, and I want you to join us, and then he was telling me more about what he wanted to do and you know who he wanted to acquire and how they were going to enter the US, and even like clients had one and changes he'd made to like org structure and everything else, and I was like, actually, out of nowhere, this could be a really good fit, and we've got the trust of him, and realistically, I know we can structure a deal in a way that will motivate us really well long term, and we'll avoid because I think what we wanted to avoid was like the aggressive growth targets and the earnout, like the complex, the complexity around kind of balancing, wanting uh we basically didn't want to be incentivized to grow aggressively, and I think what we've managed to do with these guys is engineer a situation where we're a part of you know, those guys just continue to improve the product, uh really innovate in tech, push community, um, and I think there's a really good mission in the company to just go in the direction we want to go to, but equally we kind of operate fairly independently, and we've got a lot of control over the PL and like how we invest and everything else. So, yeah, I think whilst the whole process frustrated us that most of what we had invested in. And didn't actually add any tangible value from a numbers perspective. I think all that we wanted from a deal was to de-risk, give us an environment that we're happy to work in longer term and try and achieve more things at a bigger scale and protect the team. And I think it gave us that.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

Coming out of that then, and presumably being able to do quite well personally as well, but also simultaneously not being like massively commercially minded. Yeah. How was that?

SPEAKER_01 44:28

I mean it's weird. So I think in terms of like the deal and everything else, we've invested a lot in the group. So we've rolled, you know, uh kind of money into the group for sure, but we did take money out. Um and to be honest, I haven't thought about it, which is so weird. And um, yeah, it's actually been quite interesting. I think I felt very burnt out afterwards just emotionally because I think I have been obsessed with Vervan, like too obsessed with Vervant for eight years, and I've spent every day just you know obsessing over Vivant. And it's not that I mean, if anything, I'm actually probably more obsessed now, but just I just didn't expect that reaction. And actually, and when we were talking all the way through, I was really excited about like broader group level things and you know, acquiring a company in the US or really scaling that side of the business. But I think one personally I'm just more motivated to prove to people that you know we're gonna be a bit of an edge case in where you know people go into a group and then you know we want to continue to push areas forward and get better, and um yeah, and also just continue to grow Vivant as like a brand. Um but yeah, it's been a I must admit it's been an odd, odd few months, and I've spoken to a lot of people that have gone through this, and I think actually it's probably pretty common. Like some someone said to me it's like you get PTSD when you go through this, and I definitely feel like I've gone through PTSD for sure, but I think like more recently I've got a bit more comfortable with it. Um, yeah, and also I think we learn quite a lot from IDHL because, like I say, I think uh we're pretty immature in certain areas, and those are the areas where they're super mature, so yeah. I think it's just been interesting. Like, I think I thought I would feel very different, and I think I thought I'd be like, right, you know, I can go and buy a new car or something, and uh I've just not thought like that at all. It's just you know, I've just cracked on, which is interesting. Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

I wonder if that moment will come.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

Yeah, maybe, maybe one day. I don't think it will, to be honest. I think, yeah, one of uh I think again, a strength and a weakness for Josh and I is we're way more motivated about like our clients and people externally, like what they feel about us and our product than we are about yeah, making money.

SPEAKER_00 46:44

Interesting. What changes now um and after this sale? Like where where is the business moving to?

SPEAKER_01 46:51

I mean to be honest, the business right now is going in the exact same direction. Um the only changes, so I think realistically we're just looking at how do we create how do we go at AI and go at the fact that the service model and it it like landscape is changing so much. So I think I think we think New York's a really good route for us. Like the types of brands we want to work with are over there and they like our client list, and organically we've got to like 20% of our business is from the US, and New York mostly specifically. So I think that's a big thing for us, and you know, you can charge more money there. Um, yeah, and there's a lot of big clients, so I think that for both sides is important. Um, and then I think, yeah, the product side, and I think realistically we need to. I mean, you guys are pretty heavy in the creative space, I think, and we introduced that about 18 months ago. I think we've got a good offering, but I think we need to introduce newness in that's in that area. So I think we're thinking about where does influencers sit, where does you know the creator piece sit either in Vivant or in IDHL, and we can kind of capitalise on it. Um, but that is something I think we basically just think we need to make sure that our service is constantly being modernized because everything's moving so fast. Um, the product side, so we're doing a lot with AI on that side, so we're testing a lot of uh kind of creative uh kind of variation product in that space. Um, we're doing a lot around the data that we've got in BigQuery, uh, like you essentially being able to say this type of creative across 50 clients is doing X, all of that stuff. Um and then I think yeah, we're trying to build a lot more around reporting and automating the bottom 50%, essentially. Um so I think that's kind of it, really. And I think if you asked us two years ago what what are you gonna do if you had money behind you or whatever else, I think we would have said this. And I again I think one of the frustrations that certain people in our business would probably have with me in particular, would be like, okay, what's the strategy now? What's changing? It's like nothing's changing. Like we're just we've just got to do these things that I think will help us stay in a position where we've still got the demand and our clients want to stay with us and spend the same amount of money with us. What do you think about the impact of AI long-term and agency? I mean, it's do you know what I think I mean, I think it's it there's definitely gonna be a big impact. I mean, I think the thing that so long term, I think that essentially the way that people work with service providers will just be very different. I think the things that will motivate someone to work with an agency will be category experience, uh kind of alignment with what they're trying to do as a business, enter new markets, um, move to full price, whatever else, um, strategy in general, and then I guess like creative direction, I guess. Um, but I think unless you build IP, I think the retainers will be smaller, or you'll be paying a higher rate and there'll be less people involved. Um, so I think that's kind of the overall uh direction of travel across not just the paid space but also the e-com space as well. I actually I'm close way closer to like e comm and you know uh how people work with agencies on that side, and I think you're already seeing the build costs coming down, the retainers getting smaller. Um, but I don't necessarily think that has to happen. It's more about because people still have these budget lines, or at least some uh brands, you know, they've still got money to invest. It's more just I think they want different things, and it's whether agencies can adapt and provide those things as well to keep the income the same, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 50:58

Do you think the the bigger, longer established agencies in the e-commerce space are at threat from smaller agencies?

SPEAKER_01 51:04

But they have been anyway for the last few years. I mean, to be honest, the growth of like your agency, our agency, a lot of that is coming from the larger agencies just not being able to keep up, and like creative's a great example. Um, you know, you look at the big media agencies, they're all like pretty poor on that side, and now they're all kind of rushing to try and buy agencies, probably more so than like build teams, and they don't understand it as well. Um, but yeah, definitely. I think I actually think when we talked about our next move initially, our biggest concern was we're at 70 people, we need to change a lot to get to a hundred, um, we're not gonna be able to keep up with the small agencies. To be honest, that was what triggered it all. It was like, you know, our attention is gonna have to go elsewhere, and you know, there's going to be things that distract our whole leadership team. Um, so we need to put ourselves in a position where we can keep up, and that was why we were like, right, and actually that was probably definitely as big as the de-risking piece. Um, it was more like this just can't really scale unless we do something that allows us to put the time and money into it.

SPEAKER_00 52:15

Let's talk about pulse. Yeah. So Pulse is the is it the the biggest e-commerce?

SPEAKER_01 52:19

I don't know if it's the big I mean to be honest, the thing's gone nuts. Like, I mean, yeah, so it's pretty big now. So this year it'll be like 1800, 2,000 people. I think the reason people like pulse, so I uh grew up in the SEO industry and I always talk about distilled in particular. So I don't know if you would know them, but uh they got bought by Brain Labs. Um but back in the day they were like I I mean a lot of what we do, I look at them and I think they did this amazingly, and they were definitely an inspiration to us. They were like great at content, like really technical, deep content around the areas they did, and they ran very premium events that just had really good content, and that was the only one of the only events, and Brighton SEO I always loved as well, and Measure Camp and a few others. But that was I would go there and I would come back with like loads of notes, and I would spend my weekend, it's on a Thursday and Friday, uh, literally just like testing things and everything else. And I was like, that just does not exist in e-com, like, no one does that, and I don't think it exists in a lot of the digital uh kind of areas. Um, and I was like, let's build that basically. And we did it the first time, and it was gonna be tiny. I think the venue had up to 300 people, and then we were like, no one's gonna come to this, even when we got the registrations because all of our clients came, everything else, and then the way that we positioned it, people really wanted to come. Then there were train strikes, uh, so then we've like no one now, definitely no one's gonna come. And somehow we still had 300 people, and that went really well, got a lot of hype, and a lot of people were like, right, we want to be involved in the next one. So then, and again, very similar to what I said before. So we've got this guy called Josh Hobson. I nicknamed him Joho, the whole industry knows him as Joho now. Um, and I take that as I take a lot of credit for that. Um, but so he essentially, again, very similar to Beth Ann and Sham, like forced the growth. He was like, I'm going to put like 100 grand down right now for a venue, and we're gonna have 700 people there. And I was like, No, you're not, like, definitely not, it's too big a risk. And he was like, I've done it, basically. And then I I was like, because my role in it is like I will make sure that we've got the right topics, the right speakers. I'm essentially like the kind of editor for the event, and it's all kind of things that I find really interesting. So it's always been quite deep around like back office, around so, like, kind of how people structure the back office systems, how they scale that, how people enter new markets, and again, like bring people in that can talk quite specifically around that, yeah. Kind of topics that you just don't necessarily see talked about. Um, and then yeah, it's grown organically from there, and then now it's a pretty big operation, there's a lot of money involved, uh, a lot of risk around it, but I love it. He also pushed for two days, which I was like, this is stupid. A lot of people were like, that's a really bad move, and then last year that was great because a lot of people just can't do two days, so I think we ended up with like it was like 1200 on one day, and then like round 1200 the next day, but there was like a total of like 1700 people. Um, so it actually worked really well. Um, and then yeah, we did New York. That was the most anxious I've ever been since we started for Vant because it was a new market, so much money involved, but we probably lost a little bit of money on that. Goal is to break even. At times we've made money, at times we've given the money to charity, at times we've used it for other events, made money on London, invested a lot of that into New York. Um, and then yeah, I just I think the risk with that was because there was lots more money involved, sponsors needed to pay more money, um, and it just needed to be a success. I think that could have killed Pulse if that was a disaster. Um, but that went really well as well in the end. Um, and then yeah, it's been a big part of our brand. I would actually say, like, sometimes I think I I kind of act like, oh, we've never had a salesperson. Um, it's all just been organic, but actually, to be honest, our salesperson is probably like pulse and stuff like uh and a few of the dinners and stuff like that. Um, but equally we don't take advantage of it. I remember there was um it was last year where um people were like, I've received like five follow-up emails from sponsors. Why does Vervan not do it? And I was like, Oh, never thought of that, just never thought of sending a follow-up to people. And we I don't know if we'll ever do it or not, but yeah, we don't really capitalise on it. But I think people quite like that organic nature, and actually one of the things that helps post. So I've uh I you when we first started Vervan, we had a lot of demand because I had a blog which used to get 25,000 visits a month of people looking for like which platform should I use? How do I structure my catalogue? How do I do all this kind of stuff? And we kind of it just gave us a lot of contact with brands, and then I decided to move from that and I started writing a newsletter, and we've never promoted this newsletter, like it was a client newsletter only, never promoted it, and then just organically people started adding friends and stuff, and then that's now like 3,500 people, so 3,000 people, and that's pretty mostly like e-com directors, and that again uh kind of gave us the foundation to get people to the event, and I think that again it's like indirectly, I guess that's kind of sales activity, it's just like the it's a super organic email where it's yeah, just trends we're seeing and stuff, but yeah. So I think basically we don't have a sales team, but we've got a very good growth director, and yeah, Sham's really strong around kind of that type of activity as well. So we've probably we're just very present and kind of doubled down on market. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 58:00

What's the plan for this year for polls?

SPEAKER_01 58:02

Bigger, bigger, but same venue, uh, bigger. I think there will be some newness. Um, I think there's a lot that we still need to decide. So last year, like because it ended up going really big and we ended up with like a surplus of money, Joho decided to spend it on we got Bewitched. Uh DJ Fat Tony, some guy from Steps, um, and a couple of other like really well-known people, a couple of like major drag queens. Um, and I think that side we kind of got to follow through with this year as well now. So we've got to get some really good uh kind of entertainment. Um speakers-wise, so yeah, kind of similar profiles. So we've got some really nice brands like COS and Anthropology and uh fanatics and uh companies like that. I think content-wise, we're trying to, I think I get really annoyed about AI in our industry and particularly on LinkedIn and like all the like scaremongering and people selling services that are quite generic. Uh so we're trying to uh cover quite tangible topics around that. So we've got like the um product director from World of Books talking about how they use AI specifically around catalogue enrichment for 10 million products, um, and like stuff like that, like showing how they've used Claude and everything else. So I think we're gonna introduce quite a bit of content like that, but yeah, it'll largely be very similar, I'd say. I think we're almost definitely gonna introduce awards, which is quite controversial, uh, because I basically just don't think there's an awards uh in our industry that is not basically I think it's really hard to do awards because if you enter an or if any either of us enter the uh some of the paid award, we can write absolutely anything. Like I could say we've grown this brand two million percent, uh, and it's all because of this, but that you can't prove it. So I think what we're trying to do, so half of the categories will be like creative, art direction, front-end experience, and then the other half will be more like user experience, um, and it's all just things that you can kind of judge, but I think there's room for us to get the right judging panel, like good, high, uh like experienced creative people, good experienced like digital directors, and yeah, create a bit of value in that, and like yeah, so I think we'll probably introduce that.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:31

Nice. When's the next event? What's the date?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:34

13th and 14th of May, my wife's birthday. Nice. But that went down well. No, it did not.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:40

Yeah. If we were to like zoom out just from a high-level perspective, and if you were to be starting the agency today from zero in today's climate, what would you do differently to what you did originally?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:52

I think a lot of what I've said so far probably it sounds I think it sounds like good in a way, and we've kind of done stuff like uh centered around product and everything else, but I actually think a lot of that comes down to lack of confidence. So I think when we were as we've grown, I just don't think we've had part of it is we've just not had the confidence to be like, right, we're gonna uh do this and it's a big investment and a big risk and it's gonna work. I think now I'd probably and again a lot of that's come from Shaman Befan and Joho and others, uh, but I think we'd be more confident to be honest, in like investing. So yeah, I think what would we do? I think I'd probably day one invest a lot in like yeah, New York, invest a lot in product, invest a lot in content. And I think there's a phrase I heard the other day, I actually can't remember the phrase, but it's something along the lines of uh basically if you do certain things, like the revenue will come, and I think I'd invest a lot in brand, community, and product and talent as well, to be honest, because I actually think as we've grown, I think that and a lot of the things that have gone wrong, you asked about things that have broke, have actually come down to like talent and bad hires, I'd say, and I think that's probably pretty common in the agency space. But I think I'd try and be more intentional around yeah, talent and really hiring the right people that can because I think something that I have definitely not nailed as well, and I'm always jealous people that have is there's so many areas of our business where I've still got accountability, and it would be really nice to not have that. And I've again saying all the things I've said are probably kind of alluded to the fact that I'm not that accountable. Um, and don't get me wrong, like all those people that I've said are super accountable, but there's definitely a lot of areas where I'd like to be able to put less kind of mental energy into them, and I think I'd probably think about how could I or how could we bring people in that might be product, for example, product director or whatever, or you know, head of RD? Um, yeah, it could it could be sales to be honest. Um, yeah, they're definitely some of the more operational areas. Um, yeah, to take accountability and bring someone in that's like yeah, able to kind of run with some of those areas.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:22

Nice. Is there a specific service that like if you were to start again, yeah, would you go straight back into a e-comm consultancy or right now is there a service that you would be more leaning towards?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:35

I think one thing I'd say, so definitely e-com consultancy. Like I don't I'm not that interested in anything else. Like over the years, so many of our clients have asked us to do dev, asked us to do SEO, because that's I still know a lot of people from that industry because I kind of spent the first few years of my career in that. Um, analytics, whatever else. Um, I probably wouldn't want to do any of those, to be honest. The only things we've like uh deviated away from paid an e-com consultancy for has been affiliates, which has been nice, it's like really nice little part of our business, and we've got some nice clients and good people, but it's it's small um and creative because you have to. I think you need that service and good people in that space. Um, but yeah, I think I would definitely stay in e-com consulting and strategy. The only one thing that I quite like at the minute, so I've been doing a bit more like advisory stuff with SaaS companies, and it's all through Avant. And like I've been on the Clavio Advisory Board, even though I know nothing about CRM, uh, done a bit of Shopify. I used to, there's a company called Clavu, which is a search company that just got acquired into like a bit of a roll-up in that space, and I worked with them for seven or eight years, uh, all the way through it. And I think more recently I've been doing a bit more of that stuff, and I really enjoy it. So I think if I yeah, was to get sacked, let's say, by Lewis, um I yeah, I think I'd probably want to do like 70% e com consultancy, but like some strategy and product work with SaaS companies, maybe as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:07

Interesting. Love that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:08

Yeah, I don't think I'd change too much, really. I don't think there's anything else that really like gets me excited.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

Cool. It's been a pleasure, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:17

Right, yeah, I've really enjoyed it. So yeah, thanks for having me on.