SPEAKER_01 0:00

You launched Hush in 2007. You've now got over 50 team members and you've won best use of AI as an award for agencies for the last two years running.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

We were at one point managing about 400 different clients.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

If you were starting from zero, how would you build the business differently?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

I believe one person could do it. I would start with the premise with can one person manage an entire client? What tools is needed to do that? They need to manage their AI employees or AI agents. Claude's a great place to just start. Pick one process that is fairly time consuming that you'd like to shorten, start with something small. Then you're going to be so much more efficient and profitable if they thought about what they needed and they built all the agents and the infrastructure. You obviously would need to have that technology skill or look to buy it from somewhere or get someone in to do it.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Best AI tool right now that isn't yours and not Claude.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

We have this new set of services now within the agency, AI reactivation bots via SMS or WhatsApp. It's bridging out of marketing or into operations and sales.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

One thing you wish you learnt earlier as a founder.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Not everything's in your control. We need to change to be able to be innovative and find new products to market.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Most underrated agency growth strategy.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

It's the most underused marketing channel. It's very low cost. You don't need a huge budget, you start building that email list up. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

You launched Push in 2007. You've now got over 50 team members, and you've won best use of AI as an award for agencies for the last two years running. When you look back at that journey as a whole, where do you see the biggest period of growth was for you?

SPEAKER_00 1:41

I'd probably say it was 2016 to 2020. Um that was about 2012, we made a decision to focus in on Google Ads. Before that, we were doing website development, SEO, affiliate marketing, email marketing. It was pretty the early stages of digital marketing as a you know as a product and as a service. So 2012 we started to focus in on Google Ads. That's what we were really good at, that's what we really liked, search and paid social. And then 2016 was a time where we started to see our case studies, our awards, brands coming to us, and we had we had a really good marketing channel, really good growth. We're on a Google channel partner program as well. And so yeah, we were at one point managing about 400 different clients in that period.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Awesome. It's quite interesting. So it's like 10 years really after kind of establishing the business, or nine years after establishing. If we go back to the early stages, like what did the early period of the business look like?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Day one was me and my co-founder retraining ourselves to even know what is the internet, how do we use it? I remember basically both of us had signed up for this kind of like a franchise of being an internet consultant and having these offshore centers to support you with the work. So I remember as I was leaving my job, I said, told people what I was going to do, and they were like, Oh, so you're going to be working with you know platforms like Google. And I went, Well, what's Google? I didn't literally know what it was. So I had to go through a period of learning, understanding, um, figuring out how to how to build things myself, build a website, understanding the mechanics of marketing. So I think the first few years were really just us learning the industry, learning what's out there, how could we apply this to help businesses grow? And then figuring out actually what is the product, what do we enjoy doing? And we definitely definitely didn't enjoy building websites. So how we ended up into that paid side of things.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

So did you have like an IT background before the agency? Like what what what was the experience that then triggered you to want to start an agency business in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Yeah, no, I'd not really a technology background. I used to I used to work for a computer, computer component distributor selling memory chips, the likes of uh AMD and uh um Samsung, Sandisk, all these products which, if you follow the stock market, are doing incredibly well at the moment, and I've kind of mistimed getting in those quite quite early, but I just held them for the last 20 years and been a bit a really good spot. But um, yeah, so I was working in computer component distribution, but I just had this calling to become an entrepreneur, but I didn't know what I needed to do, which is kind of why I ended up in this kind of franchise route, because I picked something where I thought, okay, I can actually see there's a lot of growth in that sector, and I'd been in a fast growth sector of computer component distribution from when I graduated, literally seeing businesses putting in computers into their workplace. So we were selling the components for those, and I could see that, and that was becoming quite commoditized, so I could see there was this new avenue of internet opening up and internet marketing. The some of the brands that we used to sell to from the computer component distributor were the likes of if you you might know of a brand called like e-Buyer. I think they're actually in Ninja from Sheffield. Um, and they had an e-commer business and they're one of the first e-commerce retailers, and I saw what they were doing. I was like, wow, okay, they got this, you know, they they got this engine, they're generating a lot of sales, and I thought, okay, this could be the next growth area.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

That's interesting. And so you have well, I mean, where did you start with the agency? Where did you who did you work with initially? Were you working with those companies, those distributors or and e-commerce, or was it local business marketing? Like where did you start as far as client-based was concerned?

SPEAKER_00 5:32

Yeah, yeah. So a few, actually, a few of the contacts I had from that industry I started working with, um, maybe doing SEO for some uh for system builders or some retailers, but yeah, did focus in on the local marketing. I would literally walk around to shops and offices with something printed out saying this is you know, this is what I do. I'm an internet console and I can help you get positioned on on the internet. This is why you need a website. Because at that time, people still didn't really appreciate the fact that you need a website, and then once I'd figured out what actually what Google was and how you could use it, explain to people well, if you've got a website, you can advertise on this thing like Google and it's going to replace the yellow pages, and you know, you'll be able to get sales, leads, whatever you whatever your kind of end objective was.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Pick up door to door, it's how I started in the agency as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Oh yeah, I think yeah, yeah, put set put hairs on your chest.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

I think it's coming full circle as well in this AI world we live in where everyone hides behind their email outreach comfortably, people want to see people. Yeah. So in you you went from this period of kind of fumbling your way through it, failing forward with the agency in the early stages. You had this kind of catalyst moment in 2016 where you decided to introduce Google. Have you observed other major changes in the industry over your time, being in the industry for 17 years now, that made you think we need to make a big pivot, we need to make big changes to continue growing and thriving in what we're doing?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Yeah, so the the the one would be the one that's most recent, which is in 2023, we were went off to America, uh, went for an internet traffic conference, which got changed at the very last minute to this now needs to be an AI conference, because you know, ChatGPT had just launched about six months earlier, and we went to that and we saw what some of these American agencies were doing. And we were using the APIs for like ChatGPT and our technology products, but what I started to see how it was being used not just in kind of performance marketing but across the board, email marketing, email newsletters, technology builds. Me and my co-founder Steve, we came back from that and we were like, right, we need to we need to now re and we were already in this position where we knew we needed to reposition the business, but we didn't know what to. And it gave us that that was the catalyst moment. We're like, right, okay, this is this is the future. We can see really clearly now this is gonna change the way you know all of us behave in in you know, operate in our workplace, but also you know how businesses are gonna operate as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

So initially, to you, did that mean coming back and just making what you were already doing more efficient, or did was it a complete pivot in the way that you deliver services as well?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Yeah, it's a great question. I think at the beginning it was right, let's implement this within our own organization, let's make sure everybody is on board with it, understands it why why we're doing it, and then start putting processes in place. So we started off doing things like uh survey with the team, how comfortable they felt about AI, what were they afraid of? We built like AI responsible policies, manifestos, and then we started to go, right, we're gonna now take apart our different processes and we're gonna rebuild them in an AI world. We're gonna start looking at what type of operating system we want to use. Um, do we build something in-house? Do we buy something? And we just started started on that journey, always with the mind that okay, once we've done that for ourselves, we'll be able to go, right, okay, now we can start to build other products for the businesses that we're already working with, and maybe a new set of businesses as well.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

So you're predominantly using AI to make your performance marketing service better initially in the agency. What can you, just for people that aren't familiar with Persia or watching this, just summarize what core services you offer to the majority of your clients at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah, sure. So that would be um paid marketing across Google, Microsoft, then the social channels, Meta, Pinterest, uh, and TikTok. We then have organic services, which is actually our biggest area of growth at the moment, which is SEO, stroke, GEO, helping businesses get in visibility and ranked on the LLMs. That's where we're seeing the most interest. And we're doing a lot of talks about explaining to people how the search market is changing and how people are searching differently and how our results are appearing differently. Then we do creative optimization as well. So all the kind of standard performance marketing um services, but then we have this new set of services now within the agency, which could be, for example, uh AI reactivation bots via SMS or or WhatsApp. It can be AI workflows put into an organization to help them with their task management or their sales processes uh as well. So it's bridging out of marketing more into operations and sales, I'd say, at the moment as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

I want to unpack all of the kind of the tech side of things and what you've been building and so on as we as we get through this. But before before we kind of segue into that, I'd love to understand in offering so many different services, because it sounds like you do an awful lot for people, how does this the client acquisition process look today? Are most of your clients coming inbound and therefore they have a specific need and therefore you're you're you're creating a pitch for them and going for that, or are you outbounding any clients? And if so, what do you lead forward with?

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Yeah, good, great question. So I I think if I tell you what I was doing before and tell you how it should change as well, because I think that'll be useful. So when we had that huge period of growth, we were running Google Ads and Meta at the time as well, and you know, leading with a PPC type audit. We can improve your results by 20%, and we just had huge volume of leads. We were one of the first people to run those PPC type audits, and they would come in, we would do the audit, and then we would sell online, and we would we were selling online before people would, as in via a meet link, you know, way before it happened after post-COVID time. So that was really working for us in that period. Obviously, that's become a very crowded, crowded space, and plus people don't really need that anymore. You know, they kind of that the Google AI is doing a good enough job, they don't they don't need one person to do, you know, or an agency to come in and just work on that one area. So now um how we lead with with the marketing, we don't do a huge amount of outbound. What we do do is try and put us in front of the type of businesses that we want to work with, and we'll run things like webinars, we'll do talks, a lot of events, um, we'll work with some different associations as well, and that way we can get across really all the different things that we that we do. And then the next point, if someone's interested in working with us, is then we would then do some form of we call it internally a discovery, but for a client, it's uh a growth roadmap. And that's the way we can really get across all of our knowledge, all the different things that we do, and then give them a plan of saying, yeah, we do all these things, but you can't do all of them in one go. And this is actually actually how we would structure it over a 12-month period. So it that for us does two things. It means that any of the clients we're going to work with are really invested in us for a long period of time, as opposed to the old days, which is like, yep, come in, fix my Google ads, but I might get rid of you in three or four months. You know, if it's not working so well or or I feel I can take it over myself. So we're trying to find stickier clients that understand that we do all these services, but we can drop its services in and out. And I think the way, for me, the way agencies need to work changes a little bit. It's not about I'm gonna sell you this retainer for this service and this retainer for that service, keep adding, adding, adding. It's like, okay, well, if your budget's X, maybe we'll do these two services for these two, three months, but then we'll drop this one out and we'll drop another one in. And I think the dynamics of the way agencies and clients are working is changing because we know that clients can now take on a lot more themselves, especially with AI as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

You charge for those growth roadmaps as well, don't you? Or I believe I read that somewhere. You charge to pitch in the process rather than the conventional kind of free sales core.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you know, I'm sure you know a lot of agency owners who experience the same thing. You put a lot of time in in pitches, and you're not gonna win, you're not gonna win all of them. And one thing actually, we're we're we haven't actually firmly done this, but we're probably gonna say no to any pitches where it's like, oh, you're coming in to pitch against four people. You know, you've got a you've got maybe an equal chance, but we find those kind of pitch processes where you know you're going in for a over one or two days, the people who are receiving the pitch are exhausted. They're just and they're pretty much hearing the same thing from all four. So either they're gonna be like, oh, maybe we'll just stay with the incumbent agency because we know them, we feel a risk change, and a lot of it's just done on feeling. Oh, yeah, we got on with those guys, we had a good energy, let's go with them. But and you've got an hour to get across how you're gonna spend whatever it is, half a million pounds or you know, a million pounds a year across multiple channels, and we just don't think it's enough time to get across exactly your approach, how you want to do things and and the results they might get. So going down this going down this route of having some kind of paid uh growth roadmap really works well for us because it allows us to invest the right amount of time, get paid for it, and at the end they've got something they can actually take away and implement if they want as well. So that's part of the sell to the clients. Look, we're gonna do this, but it doesn't mean at the end of it you've got to engage with us. You can take that away and go and do it yourself, find another agency, but we'll give you an option to work with us as well.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Nice. You mentioned webinars. Is that a really significant part of the of the getting people onto those roadmaps?

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Uh yeah, not immediately, but building an email list and then marketing to that email list, definitely. So, you know, we found the I would say the the type of customers that we want to work with are the ones that come on those webinars where you really put in some good education out, especially if it's on new innovative content. And so those people will sign up. So you you know, we can send something out and they'd be like, wow, we've got these three, four brands that everyone would have heard of that have inquired back, that are interested in speaking to us on what you know, whatever we've positioned in the email. We obviously send email newsletters out, and then you two years later you might hear from somebody saying, Right, we we've got this challenge. Would you be able to come in and speak to us and talk to us about this? So yeah, it's a it's a long-term strategy. It's not something I you know, I know people who have been successful doing that with a webinar and then an immediate upsell. Uh, we've never we've tried it a few times, never quite worked for us. So I think really our marketing now is really based around this kind of long term long-term marketing and building our reputation in the market.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

So if we were to like visualize the funnel, you've you've got organics and and referrals and so on kind of feeding, presumably, there's a a some kind of lead magnet or so on that's getting people onto the email list in the first place, and then you have the conversion mechanisms like the webinars and so on and so forth. Would that be a fair assessment?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Yeah, that's right. So, for example, take the GEO generative engine optimization product. So we had a uh we we had a guide to to GEO put out kind of before anybody was doing it. So the other thing is like trying to be ahead of the market. So this is everything you need to know about GEO, what's changed, how to make sure you get around, what tools you can use. So we built that out. So that was a really good lead magnet of the word for us, and then from the back of that, exactly that, right? We're now going to run a webinar with more up-to-date, up-to-date information.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Nice, nice, nice. And um, as far as bringing people onto that email list, how many emails a day or a week are you sending at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Uh not a huge amount, just so that would just be um probably yeah, probably on a monthly basis, about two emails. Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Interesting. I think it's one of those things that a lot of agencies don't do that is just always uh a very slept-on strategy, is like that long-term email list nurture. A lot of people forget to do that from lead magnets. And so it's interesting that that is really a a main part of your acquisition strategy with the and I can see that through having so many different services, it allows you to open up through many different verticals with different lead magnets for all different things.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Yeah, exactly. So you can you can do uh and obviously depending on if how how your list is segmented, if it's something if you've got a e-commerce specific, you can put some e-commerce uh or retail specific content out um as well. We have experimented actually with sending more frequent emails and we saw our uh unsubscribe rate go up. So we've kind of found found the balance uh a little bit. You do yeah, you once you if you start to go to one a week, then the yeah, they people kind of they get a bit of blindness to it as well, so they'll they'll miss the important stuff that comes through.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Do you find that and have you found that over the years with acquisition specifically, you look for that one kind of halo message or service rather that people are really interested in? Like you had the PPC audit, then you've got like the the GEO audit and and so on and so forth. Do you do you find that you're always looking for those or or do you have a variety of different uh angles in which to bring people into the business, be that across multiple different services?

SPEAKER_00 18:22

No, it's the the halo approach, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Really, what's what's topical that time, what people are really interested in, and we're we're trying to gauge, we get it wrong sometimes, but trying to gauge that ahead of the market so that you know as soon as that demand builds up. One thing I've learned in doing you know, working in the agency for 20 years is that as much as we can build a product and we like it and we think it's great, unless unless the the brands want to buy it, it's not really that exciting. It's much harder to much harder to sell. So part of it is about making timing and thinking, okay, actually, when is this product going to mature where people are actually going to want it as well?

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Nice. I noticed that you expand internationally as well. Do you have a physical presence in in other regions or just mainly getting international clients across?

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Yeah, so we've got international clients. For example, we work with clients in the US where we don't have um any, we have a like a virtual office uh there, some somewhere we'd like to do a bit more with. We've got European clients as well. That's kind of all serviced out of the UK office. Uh in Greece, we have somebody who used to work with us here, he graduated, worked with us here, is from Greece. He's moved back to Athens. So we have a physical office there. It's about 10 people doing really well. Um they use the brand, the positioning, the processes, they look after some UK clients as well because we have a fee threshold in in the UK, so some of the smaller clients the Greece team can manage uh out there as well. And we also have uh a team in Dubai in the Middle East as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

How did you find expanding internationally and how have you found the impact on the business? Is it something that you wish you did sooner in the business? Because a lot of companies like to stay very regional. And I actually think it's something that that agencies get very limited by and have a physical presence in the UK, think they then can't expand to signing out international clients and kind of forget there is a whole world of businesses that will work with agencies overseas if they deliver the right service and have the right message.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Yeah, actually there was a report. I don't know if you've come across the WoW benchmark report.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Um I'm familiar with I know Peter, who owns that.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Yeah, so recently they the one they just put out, uh I think it was because it's an annually it comes out. There was a really interesting stat I picked up in there that all the top performing agencies by margin and revenue growth were operating outside the UK. And I think UK is quite a competitive landscape at the moment. There's not a lot of growth in the UK. So yeah, I definitely think that's something for people to do, even if they don't go for a in you know an office presence in there. We had a couple of failed attempts, one in um Copenhagen and Romania as well. And these have kind of been they haven't been, I wouldn't say there's ever been a real strategy, but there have kind of been opportunities that have arisen by people either who've worked with us moving to another area or someone reaching out to us saying, could I could I set something up? So I think with the first two that didn't work, we learned that actually what you need is to have somebody who is culturally aligned with the region because the sales process and how to do business is the most important thing. And if like if you if you send someone from the UK to somewhere like Copenhagen, they're gonna find it difficult because there's a language barrier, they understand how to do how business is transacted. Whereas because we've got someone in Greece who's Greek, he knows how that works. And the things just operate slightly differently. So he understands he can take the message, he can take the the marketing, the you know, angles that we want to take, but he can he can change it and apply it for for that individual market. Um having the UK operational resource has been really useful. So they just can tap into the UK for like HR support, technology support, and all of that. So they just focus on okay, servicing the clients and the leads, but you know, they they operate from with our own Slack and all that type of thing. So it's been it's been actually quite Quite seamless to get it set up and running. It's been established now about five years, doing, like I said, doing doing really well. I think the one thing that we underestimated in all of them is you still need to have, if you're going to put on a physical presence, you need to have some capital aside for it. You can't just go, right, we'll start it and hope that the revenue will start start day one and we'll be able to manage it. You kind of need to say, right, okay, we've gonna put aside some money to make sure we've got enough to make sure we've got a team to support that founder in that region, maybe an office presence to start or you know, um, and some marketing budget as well.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

I think depending on the sophistication of the ICP that you're working with, I think if you're if you're if you're going for big corporates, that physical presence matters to them a little bit more. And but in kind of SMBs, let's say, I I I've distilled it down to really you just need a good account manager and a good salesperson in that region. And if you've got both of those two things, you can get away with a lot. The service delivery team doesn't necessarily need to be there, but the person maintaining and building that relationship does. I'd like to get into the AI stuff. So you um won Best Use of AI and you've amongst 50 other awards over the past years. And I'd like to understand from you your perspective, being a very established agency at the point of choosing to pivot into AI or focus your time into AI more so, how did the team initially react when you brought that to them? Because I know normally it creates a lot of ex it a lot of anxiety and can create a lot of anxiety in a team where they're now thinking, oh shit, this my employer is now thinking about AI. What does this mean for me and my future in the company?

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Yeah, I think probably the first thing would have been, okay, they've gone off to a founders have gone off to a conference and come back with another idea, and you know, just like with another idea, let's see how far this one this one goes. So that that was probably their probably their first thought. Uh I think once they realized we were quite quite serious about it, they some people did did leave, if not immediately, but they some people were just resistant to change. And I think actually, out of everything about AI, the technology is the technology. I don't think we need any more advancements in the technology because it's already can do so much and no one's using it to the capability that we can use it to. Um, but change management is the biggest part, like actually getting people to change the way they you know they they operate day to day and the way they think and how they're gonna do their tasks. And some people were just resistant to that. And if they if they're resistant to it, they're just gonna think, well, actually, you know, I don't feel aligned with this, so I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna move on. So we we did lose some people through that transition. The the way we tried to manage that was okay, let's let's put this survey out first and see how you're feeling about it. Are you using it? What tools are you using? Do you feel scared about it? How do you think this might impact your role? So it gave us an understanding, and we was it uh I I thought everybody would be excited, but no, there were people who were scared about it. Now, obviously an anonymous survey, so I don't know if those were the people that that left, or some maybe some of them actually were then found a way to get on board with it and understand it. And even like even today, like yesterday we had a three-hour AI training session on our AI operating system, because we could still see some people, some people are super users and some people are still struggling, but that's okay. Like we're you know, we just continue to have these training sessions and uh let people know it's okay to not know that they don't know how to do things, um, and there's there's variances you've got you would think, oh, maybe all the younger people are just like much better at it. And that's not always the case, so you can it it's not really like an age thing, it's just I think different preferences and personality types on how people adapt to it.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

I often talk about the difference between agencies that use AI that just kind of bolt on additional tools and so on and and have a regular workflow with an LLM and agencies that are AI-led, or now what I believe we're moving to is more AI-native agencies, we're seeing that transition. To you, what does it mean to be an AI-led agency?

SPEAKER_00 25:57

So the first thing would be yeah, do we have all of all of the data from our clients in one place where we can apply AI to it? So, yeah, the you know, the base level would be yeah, we've got a process, we can run AI agents to get personas, and we can build creative ad copy, and we can do all those things, right, from workflows and uh LLMs. But I think truly to be AI, you need to have the data points from all the different platforms. Of course, Google, Meta are going to do their own thing within their own platform. Well, we luckily we had built our own technology platform where we had taken data from all the different platforms into um into into BigQuery, into our own database, and then had that on our own platform. So then we were at because we had normalized all that data, it made it easier for us to layer AI on top of it and interrogate that data and start putting analysis out and anonym uh anomaly detection and all that type of thing and suggestions on what people should do next. So I think that's really being AI-led. It's like you're not only using it in your data process to be more efficient so it's better for the client, so you can get more output and deliver faster. But are you truly using AI to analyze the work that you're doing and get better output for the client as well?

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Lots of agencies will skip straight through to the function part where they'll try and build something that they perceive to be useful, but they skip those context and data layers that actually make function useful in the first place. And I know you've built a lot of internal tech, which I'd I'd love to unpack. You've mentioned the word AI operating system, which a lot of companies have built their own operating system, but also somewhat become this ambiguous term that that not everybody understands what it means. And so, to you, what does your AI operating system do? What function does it serve in push?

SPEAKER_00 27:43

Yeah, so uh we call it we call it dialagents, which is our digital innovation acceleration lab, is kind of like our framework of how we how we have an idea hypothesis, test it, and then launch it. So that's where dial comes from. So we call it we call it dial agents. And within there, what we have is all of every time we've built something, like a process, it becomes becomes an agent, and people will be responsible for a Google Ad copy assistant or a creative ideation agent. So we have all these kind of mini function stroke employees that are integrated into this AR operating system. So that means anyone within the organization can go into the operating system, pick the client, and the client will have all their knowledge base documents. So we'll have all the calls recorded in there, so all the recent calls, so we can understand client objectives, challenges that are happening. It'll also have the data layer in there as well. So we've got actually got data performance, so we're we've got um MCPs tied into Google, Meta, and everything as well. Then we've got maybe their tone of voice, their brand documentation, what we've pitched to them, their proposal. So everything's in one place. So anyone can go in and say, right, I need to create, they've got this new product being launched. Let's say this is a retail brand, new product being launched, and we need to build campaign assets for these and campaign strategy across these platforms. And because all that data just sits there and it's maintained and it's uh and it's updated and it's automatically pulled in from a weekly call, everything can be the AI can go across all of that. You can also pull the real data, and then it uses our best practices of this is our campaign framework, and then it will produce the output. So it's taken a long time to get there, but you have to have all the parts in. You know, we have to put all our best practices in. We have to make sure there's governance in terms of what information from the account management teams is going into the AI operating system. But it means, yeah, anybody can go in, pick any client they're assigned to run assistance workflows and get output kind of you know in a matter of seconds, really.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

How did you tackle the problem of um of building that in the first place? Did you govern that as the founder? Did you were you quite hands-on with that, or did you somewhat decentralize the development of the of the product across the whole team?

SPEAKER_00 30:04

Yeah, so like my my main function really over the past you know 10 years has been to lead our to kind of technology innovation. So yeah, I'm I'm always looking out there and going, right, how's the market changing? What technology is out there, and what what could really really help us? I think it helps for us, it helps us from a positioning standpoint. So if we do go into even if we're doing these growth roadmaps or in a pitch, we want to have something of point of difference. So having our own platform, which we've built, which is unique to us, and people can see the benefit of that, is important. So I've always led the development of that, what I want it, what I want it to look like. So one of the things that came when we came back from this event in America was I could see like the start of this kind of AI operating systems being built out by some American companies. And then I started to investigate that a bit more in terms of okay, what are what products are out there? We tested a few products that were out in the marketplace, and they just didn't do all the things that I would want it to do. So yeah, then we ended up uh ended up building it, building ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

I think we're gonna move to a place in a market where every agency has their own form of uh an operating system, and and there's there's a really kind of big debate at the moment on like do we buy something, do we build it in-house? I do we and um that's actually something I want to in fact we can skip to that and we can come back to this. When it comes to making that decision on, because when you build the initial benefit of okay, originally we look at the business, how can we make this more efficient? How can we make what we're already doing better by analysing the data and just just being a lot better than we are and increasing consistency across the board? You then start to look at okay, what are the new things that we can do? How can we how can we prove? I know you've built like an AI sales agent system, for example, for your clients. How have you found and have you found it hard to decide whether or not to build something internally or whether to continue paying for external software? Because I know for me, I just looked at that massive bill at the end of every month on the software we're paying, and I'm ticking off software almost like a game of what can I get rid of, what can we build, what can we build. Um, but it also is very time consuming to do that.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yeah, it it's to be honest, not something we've we've solved, and it is exactly it's like exactly what you said, reviewing constantly, because the software costs go up, right? That's the other thing. It's like you can go, well, actually, let's buy this software, and then for example, take our um we we have another product called Dal 360, which is basically our um performance marketing where all the data goes in, right? So the AR operating system connects into Dal 360, which is where all the data is, all the campaign data, budget management, that type creative performance analysis. Even though we pay quite a lot for that product, every time I've gone to the market to think, okay, actually, could we replace it? I could probably get about 80% of the functionality that we've got. But then when you start, because we're quite a large agency in terms of number of clients and ad spend, once you get the cost back from a platform, you're like, well, actually, now the price difference is not so big. Because it looks cheaper when you look on the website, like, oh, this is gonna, I could save £10,000 a month, for example. But once you get into the nitty-gritty and you need all the extra layers of governance and support and account management and extra connectors and that type of thing, the the costs can go up. So I think what we always try and do is have a look at that how that changes over time. But I think what we're seeing now is with AI, there's more and more platforms coming out which are AI native, which are at a much lower cost, right? Now, obviously, you've got the costs of the tokens and the usage of Open AI or or or Claude, which then can also increase the cost a lot, and there are a bit of unknowns about that. Um, but yeah, I think I think what I think what we'll see is a lot of software that agencies are using. Either the agencies will start to build in themselves in like clawed code or you know, lovable or replic. And we have done that with a few small things like oh, we're we're spending, I'll give you another example, we're spent we're spending £800 a month on an AI creative tool that you know makes UGCs, image creation, that type of thing. So one of the team who's really you know really kind of understands clawed code rebuilt a platform that does all of that and more. And okay, with the token costs, it costs us about 400 pounds, but we've got better functionality. But I think there's a you know, I I think you'll find in within agencies people going out and going, actually, okay, then it might be easier to tackle the smaller projects rather than the big one. Maybe the big one you still invest in, and then the smaller ones you kind of you know, you you deciding actually we can build this, uh build this ourselves. But yeah, I think we I don't think you can have everything like you know, you built everything, or you actually um you know you're you're you're building everything yourself, so it's yeah, a bit of a difference.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

I I mentioned to you off your off camera I'm a a a software co-founder myself, and we're we're constantly trying to predict what what's actually going to happen and in the market, and I think really the only solution for software companies, especially these big guys, like the big CRMs and so on, like we have companies have in the software space have to move to a place where you are building UI for convenience for the people that don't want to custom build, but you have to be able to facilitate the people that want to be able to custom build and be able to use your software on the back end. So, for example, your team member who's built a creative uh a creative generation system, maybe that was Higgsfield or something like that that you were using before, Arcad's one of those companies. And uh you are able to build your own creative system because you're using the same LLMs that they are, but you've got all this data, you've got all this context, you've got your unique way of doing things, you've got all of your ad frameworks, and so you can create something better than these out of the box solutions that look better because the UI is great and it's had this development team that's been building it for a long time. But those companies are at a danger if they don't facilitate people like you or your team being able to just create their own custom version of it, adding context, adding data layers, and plugging that into the software itself. And so I think that's gonna be really interesting to observe. And I also believe that agencies might move to and fall to the same fate as those software companies in the sense that if software is going to be driven down by price because of their people's ability to prioritize do things, I believe agencies will probably be driven down on price over the long term, if and and depending on the the market that you're operating in, because of the frequency in which work is being put out and the ability and the ease to actually produce good work. How do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_00 36:35

I think on the soft first the soft the software point, I totally agree. I think that would yeah, if you had the ability to work within a platform and create something of of your own, it would work amazing. Like for example, we just cancelled HubSpot. And uh and then because we were mainly using the pipeline feature and built built it ourselves, you know, we didn't need we didn't need to use that anymore. And expensive, yeah, yeah. So um yeah, definitely, definitely agree with that. I think, and then to your point on uh agencies and margin uh pressure and how we're gonna feel that. I think I just think it is inevitable like that, and I think we've seen that seen that for a while, which is why I mentioned this model of really trying to have the brand you're working with, help them understand that you can help them across a multitude of things. Now, I we never wanted to be a full service agency because it's more it's complex, it's hard, you've got to you've got to be really good at everything that you do in you know each each segment that you're working in. But I think as for to survive as a as an agency, you're gonna need to be able to do that across everything because otherwise you will just be driven down in the the segment that you're in, and you need and you need to have open what we're trying to become open conversations about okay, right? Well, how can we best use your budget that you've assigned for agency? How can we provide you the best value? And that might even mean building something for them to put internally so they can be more self-sufficient. And I think that for me, that's the big shift that we're trying to make. And I think that if agencies make it, it will be a much better way for agencies and brands to work together because there's always this, yeah, as an agency and you're always worried, oh my god, they're gonna they've just hired a new CMO, they've got a new person, it seems like they're gonna take it in-house. So you're never but we never have the open conversation. We're always you're just you're trying to say, no, you need to use agency, so stay with us. And they're probably thinking, Oh God, I would love to take this in-house, but can we? But they can now. That's the reality. They somebody says we want to take it in-house, and we've a couple of people we've gone to visit for our AI integration work, have left agencies paying there where they were paying £30,000, £25,000 retainers across, you know, creative paid an SEO, and there's two people running it within their organization using Claude.

SPEAKER_01 38:50

Yeah, I believe that. There's two transitional phases to that, I suppose, and that is number one, licensing the tech that you've built to other companies. So hey, look, instead of you building this thing that we've spent the last two years developing, then license our data, license our IP. I think we'll see a lot of that. I think actually, even away from the software and licensing the the interface, uh people will license the data itself. So, okay, you've ran X amount of ads and it they've got an X amount of performance, so I believe that we'll see that. And but also just facilitating companies bringing things in-house. I've always been in a mindset, well, as an agency, we don't want people to do that. We but churn is inevitable at some point with in business. So I'm thinking if they're going to churn anyway, I might as well facilitate the churn and try and catch it early and actually call it out and be like, hey, I think you're trying to move this in-house. If you want to, by the way, I can make it a lot easier for you. Here's a package to go ahead and do that. Is that something you've experimented with at all?

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Yeah, and we we actually we put that up front in our so when we do these growth roadmaps, that's actually part of the proposition. So just call it out from the from day one. That, yeah, this is what we're gonna do all this for you, and at some point, you're gonna probably want to take this in-house and we can help you because we've got training packages and we'll support you through it. The actually the likelihood of them doing that early on is quite low. But the just them knowing that that's on the table and is an option and you'll help facilitate it also shifts you out from being just another agency provider and turns you into a different partner, you know. Like we never set out to be an agency. I'd be really honest with you when we started the company, I didn't even know what an agency was. At some point, someone goes, Are you an agency? I was like, I don't really know. Are you an ad agency? I was like, am I? Like it didn't really understand, you know, over time I realized, yeah, we are an act we are an agency, and you kind of have to be called that to run your marketing to some extent, but really want to be a we want to be their kind of marketing partner and support them through their marketing journey, whatever that means.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

Even them being aware of the fact that you they could bring it in-house probably increases LTV in the sense that it removes the anxiety or the thing in the back of their mind thinking, I've just been paying this agency this much, should we bring this in-house? They know it's an option. And so it removes that anxiety in doing that, which I think is quite an interesting thought. So I'd like to explore, and I think this would be really beneficial to people who are starting to move kind of more multi-stack because they're able to do more with AI. How are you tackling pricing? Like, how are you approaching pricing when things are so you're building a roadmap for someone and it's so varied if you're not doing it like the classic, okay, meta is this and UGC is this for this much and yada yada?

SPEAKER_00 41:25

Yeah, so we we still have, you know, we're um still have the kind of effort-based pricing models where we'll we'll estimate according to role how many how many hours people are gonna need to spend on it, and by segment where it's meta paid. So we have we have templates for that, so so we understand that quite well. So we can we can give broad ideas about if we're gonna manage a channel that this is how it was gonna be. I think for agencies, you know, uh margin pressure is always a thing. You know, we we end up uh over service over servicing at times, especially if we were trying to keep a client happy and results aren't going the right way, or clients quite demanding. We'll just take it on board and be like, right, we've got to keep this client, we'll just do it. So how do we kind of reverse that? As much as we've tried to best estimate how much time we want to spend, we know that's not the we know that's not the reality and we're gonna potentially get caught out of that. So we try and move more things to a value-based pricing model where the clients not when they're buying those traditional services, they kind of know they're buying time to some extent. They know what they know, right? You're gonna be doing this for me. I can see how much time you're gonna spend, and they value it according to that because they think, okay, well, if I employed someone, how much would it cost me? And then that's how they kind of make the trade-off. So some of the ways we try to adapt and move pricing is to think about different commercial models. So one might be okay, look, we're gonna do this at this price, but what are your actual commercial goals? What's your revenue overall revenue target, whether it's leads or e-commerce, what are you trying to achieve? Okay, if we hit that number and we're within a ROAS target or a CPA target, could we get a bonus? And if we do a bit more than that, so if we hit your revenue target and we're at 400% ROAS, could we get a yearly bonus of X? But if we get a 500% ROAS, that means you're gonna make an extra Y. Can we get another, you know, uh another ticker on top of that? That does two things. One, it changes you again from being like every other agency because you're now we all say, Oh, we're invested in your growth, and you know, we want to make it make it work for you. But now we're actually putting our, you know, our cards on the table and saying, right, okay, let's work on this together. We'll give you a really competitive price to work on, but we want to share in the upside. And it also means that you've got a long term view now, because if you've got a year, if you've got a year target you're working towards, your risk of being churned is going to be lower because now you're working to some real real commercial goals. So that's one one model we've got. Um, another way that we've approached pricing is that with some in some clients we do this in the finance and insurance space. What we do is we actually have our own assets and we generate um leads into our own assets and then we sell the leads to multiple buyers. So we'll do it, for example, in insurance, we'll get through hundreds of leads a day, we'll have buyers buying 50, 30, 20, and it goes on a round robin and sends those sends those leads out. And off the back of those, we can do two commercial models. We can either make a markup on the on the lead, or we can do a commission deal based on those as well. So you need to have good, you need you wouldn't do that straight away. You would sell the leads first, get a good they know they're good quality. And that does two things. Then the lead, the call it like the paper lead industry, is I would say it's not as professional as it should be. There's a lot of like fake leads going, all this type of stuff. But so if you offer them a service where you're saying, right, we're gonna we're gonna build sell give you leads, but we're gonna make sure the leads are really good quality. And if they're good quality, we're gonna end up getting more of a kickback from it. Everybody's on everyone's on board with it. So we're just trying to find different commercial models that are outside of the standard agency pricing that are much more kind of value, value-driven, and it's a bit more exciting for our internal team as well. They know now when they're working on a client, they're like, Well, okay, actually, if this client does really well, we're gonna we're gonna get an additional bonus. Obviously, they get a percentage of that bonus as well.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

It's uh outcome-based pricing is a is a big movement in the industry at the moment. Of course, all kind of online industry, I would, I would say. And I I and I think software experiences that, tech experiences that, agencies definitely experiences that. I think it gets tricky when we start thinking about incentivized based incentivizing based on revenue. Have you found a model that works on the lead generation side that incentivizes you on revenue, or is rev is paper lead basically the best model that you attribute to at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 45:54

Um well, what so on the lead side it we do do a revenue based. So, for example, take the insurance one. Um, what we'll do on that is um if the person we're selling the leads to, they sell an insurance policy, they'll get um their their commission, then we get a share of share of that commission back.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

How do you track that?

SPEAKER_00 46:13

So that yeah, so that's where you've got to have a really good relationship with the the client you're working with. We've been working with a couple of these clients for like three, four years now, or maybe even longer. So they're the best paper lead models work where just you they feed back information to you with the you know the the IDs from Google or Meta, so we can feed it back to the system. So we work so it's not really a siloed approach. We we sell the leads, but they tell us the leads that have converted into sales, so we're feeding that back into Google, feeding that back into Meta, and because of that transparency, they're transparent then with what's what's turned into revenue uh and what hasn't. So there's a level of there's a level of trust with that with the with the with the client that you're working with as well. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

So as your systems get more sophisticated, as your ability to deliver better services more consistently gets gets stronger. How are you thinking about maintaining human brilliance across the team and protecting them from over reliance on everything that you've built in the company?

SPEAKER_00 47:15

Yes, good question, actually, because we had we had that with uh some new starters recently. So I think either the operating system was down or the tokens had run out or something, and the the some of the new starters were literally like, okay, well, I don't know how to write ad copy. Like, how would how would I do how would I do it? So we've we've gone back to some of the new starters and gone back through let's call it old school one-on-one training, like okay, this is how you do things, this is why you would do it in this way, so that they understand really understand the fundamentals and then go go back to it. We always tell everybody not to deploy anything directly, so everything is human review at this stage. Yeah, there's there's a few people in the company pushing for like, okay, maybe we can start just pushing stuff now without without review, but yeah, maybe we'll get there. But at the moment, everything's still got human review. So it's your your critical thinking. How do you interpret what's come out here? Is this right? Is this you know you were on the call, you you understood the client's objectives, does this feel right? And I think that intuition piece is something we still try and challenge the team on and ask probing questions as opposed to just relying on whatever's coming coming back from and you know, and an AI analysis or AI operating system. Uh, we we do a lot around human skills training and commercial training as well and commercial acuming. So I think where we like if you think about structures within agencies, what we've seen is you you'd have that this we call it like the we call it a diamond structure now, whereas before we'd have a typical, you know, kind of uh triangle structure with a lot of executives, account managers, strategists, account managers kind of going up in that pyramid structure. And now it's more of a diamond. There's less executives because the other executives are AI essentially, and you've got a wider middle layer, these people who are strategists and commercial and can speak to clients and build human relationships with whoever they're uh whoever they're working with. I think that layer is the most most important because they now need to be, they need to manage their AI employees or AI agents. Everyone's got their own that they have to look after, but they have to be really good with clients, they have to be really good on still sales, they have to be really good at going to QBRs and managing that. So I think we QBRs as an example, whenever we have those, we really push to have them in person. A lot of brands and clients still say, Oh, can we do it online? We're like, no, can we come and can we come and see you? Why don't you come and see us? Can we go for lunch? So we try and keep that kind of human human connection so that we don't lose all those things. I think which is actually what makes an agency great, right? It's not just the technology, that's just that just supports us in what we do.

SPEAKER_01 49:50

Yeah, it's just the trust that you've got a team that have that have got your best interest at heart. What do you think is the best system that you've built outside of your AIOS?

SPEAKER_00 50:01

I would say the early stages are Google Script system. So when we when we used to have these hundreds of accounts we were managing on Google and Google scripts were launched, that's so that again was one of the projects I led. I was like, right, we can use scripts here to do XYZ. Before you would take a script and you put it individually into each account and say, Oh, I want to run this script to tell me about hourly performance or pause a campaign or do something right. So that again was like, oh, this big this is a bit clunky, like and not everybody's doing it. So we built this really complicated system of Google Sheets with like a dashboard of all the scripts that are available, and you could go into any client and go, right, I want to enable this script and I want to change my um hourly pattern to this because of this. So you could control everything from the spreadsheet within the Google account, but it's all tied into Google Scripts, but it started to break. So it was great for a period of time. That's actually why we built a technology product, and and we went from just being Google centric to then social as well and meta. So we were like, right, we need to take that learning and build it into a platform. But yeah, though those are exciting. And at the time it was a great sales thing. People would see this in a pitch and be like, wow, this is how you how how you manage what you're doing on there.

SPEAKER_01 51:14

Is anything client-facing or is everything back-end?

SPEAKER_00 51:17

No, so we give we give clients the same access to not the AI operating system, but the dial 360, which is all the performance data. They have the same access our team has access to.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Interesting. But none of the agents that yeah, none of the agents at the moment, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:35

So that might that might change that might change over time. Um, there is some functionality within the dial 360 suite, so they could do some AI analysis of their data with it within there. And I would actually like it if clients went into it more. It's surprising that you know you have some who go every day and others who don't go in at all. And we try and educate them at the beginning. This is because one, it gives them again more more power, it gives them information at their fingertips, and reduces them asking for stuff and waiting for and getting delays if they they've got certain information in there. But sometimes I think brands are like they they're happy that they know they've got it, but they trust you that you're doing the job. Yeah, other people they want they want so it kind of serves it, it works then for whoever whoever wants it. But yeah, it's the same access, they can do the same thing. So again, it's so uh a point of transparency as well. It's like we're not hiding behind anything. So if you see something in there where you're not happy with a a performance drop or something across a channel, you can raise it with your with your team that you're working with. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 52:35

If someone's watching this and they feel quite overwhelmed by the idea of being AI led, they're an existing agency with a good team with good clients. Like, what would you say are the foundational steps? Like, where should they start rather than just going ahead and building an operating system from day one?

SPEAKER_00 52:50

Um I'd probably start first of all to look with look at Claude. Claude's done an amazing job in the last six months. For me, it's becoming the choice of AI operating systems for business, and then for you know, by de facto by for for agencies as well. Uh but I'm sure a lot of agency owners will have seen this. Like if I go on my LinkedIn feed, it's like it's like AI overwhelm of your agency's dead, and you know, this is you only need these 10 skills to run your agency, and you're just kind of like and then it becomes I I think there probably are a lot of agency owners who got overwhelmed with that. They're like, okay, well, that's great. What do I what do I do? I would just go into Claude's own training program. We put our some of our team through that as well. Because we use Claude as well as our own AI operating system, kind of got multiple, and I think that all I think also agencies are going to need to have multiple operating systems that they're using. Uh, but Claude's a great place to just just start, go into there, just understand what is beyond just chat, if you're not there yet, what is what is an agent, which is like a skill in in Claude, what is a knowledge base? Just get those base. I think once you've got the foundational understanding of okay, what is a knowledge base, how that how can that help an AI tool? Okay, what what is a skill agent? How can that help me deliver certain processes that I do today? And just start with pick one process that you is fairly time consuming that you'd like to shorten, or you want to deliver faster, and just just try and automate it and build it out. And just there's nothing like just testing it yourself and doing things, and that can be anyone, it can be an executive, it could be the CEO. We try and encourage everybody at all levels to be able to know how to build an agent. I think everyone needs to know the foundational skill of it because then if you're using like a no-code system to build it, you still want to know is that right? You can't just trust it. It's like, oh, yes, built the agent for me. You need to understand how it works. So I think it's a bit of just training to get the basics foundations, the technology piece can come afterwards. I think everyone's trying to do the big thing first, or they're like, oh, if I could get AI to talk to all of my nine different operating, like nine different tools, and Hubspot talks to zero and zero like then life don't try any of that. Like there's no point doing all of those things, just start with something small.

SPEAKER_01 55:10

Nice. Are you or do you feel prepared for the future, the next five years in the business? And where do you see things going in the next five years in agency?

SPEAKER_00 55:26

I think I feel pretty good and pretty pretty prepared. I think that's because we've been through this period of you know, we've we've become leaner over the last last few years. Um, we've we've restructured the the up both like the um administration and operation side of things uh with within the business. And we're at the moment going through a program with with our uh strategists, account directors, where we're we're we're trying to get them ready for the next five years. And so what that means is that back to that piece about that human brilliance, okay. Look, we think where you're gonna add a lot of value is being more involved in the sales process than before and understanding how you can go into an organization and help them with their AI integration across marketing, sales and operations. And the the the good thing is the markets, they are there are more and more people asking about it, but it's not it's not mature yet at all. It's not you know, people aren't there yet. So I think if we if we all agency owners have the have a bit of time to to get up to speed so that when that I think when the market opens up and there's people looking for these type of services, they've got a team able to deliver it. So at the moment, yeah, we feel feel feel confident we're we're we're in the right place. Uh I what was the second part of the question to that?

SPEAKER_01 56:47

Where do you think it's going to be in five years?

SPEAKER_00 56:49

I I think us as a business, and we haven't made this move yet. We're we're providing these AI, let's call it AI integration services. We're providing them alongside our performance marketing services. In five years, I think there's strong likelihood that there'll be two probably before five years, there'll be two distinct, two distinct businesses. Uh they they'll be, you know, they'll they'll may share the same um OPEX, for example. They might have the same HR teams and ad and finance teams, but I think there'll be two different very different delivery teams where at the moment, uh, at the moment there's one. And I don't know part of me is doing that because I don't know the future of performance marketing. Like I don't know, I don't know if it will be what it is today. It will certainly be different, but I don't know if everyone will be able to just do stuff themselves in-house. So part of it is a protection mechanism uh for us to have because I think that other AI integration piece, there'll be a lot of demand for it. I'm I'm I'm sure of it. I've seen it seen for and people can I use the same analogy for Google Ads. Everybody would be like, well, oh, when I used to tell people I run a Google Ads, they're like, well, I can go on and run Google Ads myself. But we you know we've built a whole industry out of this, right? Like people still want experts and they still want people to hold their hand and they still want people to do it for you. So I think the same thing will happen with AI integration, where people be like, okay, I need someone to help me with an AI operating system with Claude and help set that up. So I think we're just trying to get ready for that. But I think that's if you are you you know ask me to put a bet on it, I reckon that part might be bigger than a performance marketing agency in the future.

SPEAKER_01 58:29

Which part excites you more?

SPEAKER_00 58:32

For me, it would be the AI integration piece, but that's because I think I'm an entrepreneur, you know, that I'm always looking at the next shiny thing. I'm uh I'm a quick start, not a finisher, so I'm always on to I'm always on to the next thing and trying to create something. So yeah, that the there's a there's a there's a bias in there, but I still like going in the odd meta and Google account and having a look at how performance is doing. I've learned not to touch the campaigns now. The team gets very annoyed if I do it.

SPEAKER_01 59:00

The gap's too large now. Are you or have you got plans for actually going to the market with that AI integration piece? So at the moment it sounds like it's somewhat of a you know, the performance marketing is there, and and it's not a Trojan horse, of course, it's it's there, people need that, but then people are coming naturally and finding the integrate AI integration piece afterwards. Uh are you are you planning on on going for being forthcoming with that and just going direct to the market with that side?

SPEAKER_00 59:27

Yes, yeah. So what one of the questions, and we I think we're talking about this just before we started, is like, actually, do we need to build a separate website brand and put that on there? Because it we've got it in within our current website, but there, you know, just from an SEO perspective, and all the things that we want to put on there, it's like, okay, Elton, there's actually quite a lot of content and pages we want to put out. So do we need to separate it and make it its own thing? And then also the value proposition becomes a bit muddled as well. And we have had that feedback, to be honest, where some people be like, not quite sure what you like. You're talking about AI integration, and uh you bet you're performing are you still just a performance market? So I can see how it might be confusing for for the you know the end buyer, you know, the brands that we that that we're trying to trying to work with. So yeah, I think we're I would say by the end of this year, ready for next year, we will probably have a a go-to-market strategy for that AI integration piece, but you know, touch wood at the moment, we're getting enough opportunities through just our network and and the webinars and things that we're doing.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:32

What do you think you are going to reframe that if you were to start an agency today and you don't have what you've got at the moment with all of the team members that you've got, all of the services that you have, in many cases, like us agency owners, we create this complexity for ourselves. And I I think at least the agencies at the biggest danger are the real big agencies that have got this, you know, hundreds and hundreds of team members across all these different offices, and like moving to an AI world is it's it's a scary place to be. I spoke to one of the big CRMs a couple of weeks ago, came to one of our events, I won't name them, but they're 2,000 team members, and they're like our biggest fear at the moment is these new CRMs. Like, it's so hard for us to unravel this. So, kind of understanding what that's like and making that transition in yourself. If you were starting from zero now, how would you build the business differently to how you build currently running it?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31

I would I would probably look at from from a if I think first as a service layer, right? How are we going to service clients? I would start with the premise with can one person manage an entire client and then work out okay what tools is needed to do that. Because with the with their the possibilities of AI, I do believe that if you started from scratch and said, right, this is the client, these are objectives, your job is to understand their objectives and deliver performance for them and look at the other services. From a performance marketing standpoint, this is not the not the AI integration side. Um I believe what I believe one person could do it. Well, and if they thought about what they needed and they built all the agents and the infrastructure, you obviously would need to have that technology skill or look to buy it from somewhere or or get someone in to do it. That would be a almost better investment, I think, to build it without from that premise, because then you're going to be so much more efficient and profitable in any of the work work that you do. And then I think also from a from a marketing marketing standpoint, again, build these marketing funnels that can be fully, fully automated. I think I think the possibility again is again to do that. You know, you can whatever you're doing, you can just you can automate the entire flow. Something we're work, I was just working on today. We're we're we're trying to improve our posting on on Instagram, and we get daily news on AI, and we've got this faceless carousel builder that builds the the content and then builds the assets and then can deploy it straight to now. I haven't put them all together yet, but they're all individual. I was like, hold on, why don't we just now we're this point about human intervention? Maybe we don't need to be involved in this piece. So we could make automate this out news and information every day going out. Well, I could probably automate the email out as well, or build the email. I think email we talked about earlier is the most underused marketing channel. And actually, if I was a new brand thinking about it now, I would probably focus everything on building my email list and thinking about strategies and content I can put out. I could make 10 lead magnets if I want if if I didn't have all the other complexities that we've got, I could probably build 10 lead magnets tomorrow or tonight and put them out and start marketing them and you know run ads to them and put them out and and email email sign up on Meta is actually or any Google, you can it's very low cost. You don't need a huge budget. You start building that email list up and then you and then you automate the emails out of those. And you would you could I think you could, you know, it's probably something we should do, I should do actually. But yeah, so but because I think those things all a lot of these things we don't do and are not uh not done I find in my case because it feels like too much effort. It's like, okay, who am I going to get involved to do it? How much time is it gonna take? But I think all those barriers don't don't really exist anymore.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:29

I'd agree, and then it's just being able to ruthlessly prioritize which of the things matter the most. How are you how are you finding that with yourself personally, like being able to prioritize the right things and not context switch so much from from new different things?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:44

Yeah, so I mean it's a lifelong challenge, I think, as well as especially my personality type. So yeah, I um I try to pick the pick the battles I think we're gonna win in both internally. Like I might have a great idea, but if everybody's not on board with it, it's like okay, let's the let's not tackle that. I've learned to take a bit of pressure off and go, okay, that seems like a good idea, but maybe now's not the right time. Let's let's do that in let's do that in six, let's let's do that in six months. I think for us, for us now, like everything that we're trying to focus the projects on are if we do this project internally, for example, let's say it's a an AI optimization uh optimization project, could we turn that into a product that we could market? So that's kind of the framing that we've got. So if someone comes up with something like, okay, we could do that, but could is that valuable as a product out there, then we then we probably wouldn't do it. So it we're trying to build things that we think we could productize and and market because they become lead magnets and that type of thing. So whereas an example, we've we've built one for create this this creative UGC um creator that we've built, we've built on top of that a whole create pipeline. That takes all the ad data, finds the patterns, finds the data points, and produces a brief that you could give to a client that they could give to a creative team, or you could use the creative builder. So that whole workflow is optimized for us to help serve better for our clients. But we know we can take that to market. So that's going to be a next product that we take to take to market and with a with a white paper and webinar and that type of thing as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:26

Nice. And when you say take it to market, are you going to sell it or are you just going to use it as a free lead magnet to get people into the funnel?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:33

So we'll we'll give the how you can run, like why you need to run lots of creatives for something like Meta with the Andromeda update, and how you can do it to kind of give the the theory behind it and some of the steps towards it. But if you want us to run it for you and set it up for you, we could do that for you, and then that that would become a paid paid part. And then if then they want the production off it, then there'll be the production at the end of it. And then you might have then the Trojan also, okay, actually, do you want to take over the Meta account and manage that? Or actually, could you help me with my overall growth strategy? Yeah, makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:05

It's interesting. I was thinking about this the other day, just the idea that if everybody's got the buff, no one has the buff. And so if anybody, everybody now in theory can create sophisticated lead magnets which are micro-sassivin themselves, we we get extremely excited about these things. And and and actually I think there's probably a a good few years or or maybe at least 12 months, I'd like to think, where you know, agencies like you and I and other agencies that are thinking about it on a more advanced sense and building these really great assets have this unique advantage in the marketplace. But at some point, everyone's gonna be doing that. At some point, someone will take that system that you've built, upload it into their iOS and say replicate this for me, and it'll be able to do that. And I think that's gonna be interesting at that point to observe what happens. But at least for now, I think there's a there's a there's a there's a there's a window. There's a window, yeah. There's a window.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:53

Yeah, and I yeah, and I think that yeah, to your point, exactly that. I think you know, we're you asked the question about five years, like yeah, I think okay, well what do we know we can it's gonna work for six or twelve months? Let's do that, and we have to I think we all have to be really nimble and adapt adaptable to how the market's changing. And you know, at the moment, GEOs are great product uh in terms of this what everybody wants working well, but who knows in 12 months it might be something completely different that that that that changes it. But I I for me, I think the good thing is I don't know if you felt this post-COVID. I felt like there was no change in the industry, nothing happened, everything was just the same. Like the odd new type of campaign type of it was nothing really that exciting, and we need change to be able to be innovative and find new products to market and sell and talk to businesses about so everyone could then also the brands get excited, whereas I felt for a while it was just oh nothing's changed, so we'll just change agency or maybe we'll do it and that's not nothing, and it wasn't really that enjoyable. So actually, it whilst it's like the small windows, I think it it's creative and it's a bit of you know, I think we should enjoy the journey as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:59

Yeah, I agree, I agree. Are you motivated by an exit in the business? And does the kind of uncertainty, I suppose, of of the next five to ten years drive you towards that, or are you you know you're you're you're on this ship regardless of where it goes?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:17

No, I think we I think we've always had uh um an exit in mind. Now that might not mean exiting as a sale, it might mean exiting and staying on as a uh, you know, we're still quite involved in the business, both myself and uh Steve, the other co-founder. It might mean being less less in less involved and having having the team running. I mean, we're we're quite fortunate we've got a uh kind of the senior management team have been with us a really long time. They've been with us through that growth period in 2000 from uh 2016. They've been there, they understand the culture of the company, understand how we work, you know, what we like, what we don't like, they can challenge us as well. So I think there's a team there that we could, you know, hand over the reins to um that have you know got a lot of loyalty, you know, uh understand what we'd want from from the business and how we want it to grow. So I think either two things will happen over the next next five years. I think there will either be some some form of an exit or maybe us taking less of a less of a day-to-day um involvement in the business. I think yeah, the the beach is calling me uh uh at at some point. So yeah, but I'm we're I'm trying to what I'm trying to do now is spend spend more time doing those things. Like I think as you as you start to get older, I I hit 50 last year. So you I I look at this decade as being, you know, hopefully my health is really good for a long time, but like I think 50 to 60 might be the the best you know best health years for me now. Yeah, hopefully it's not, but so I don't really I want to I personally want to make the most of that. So yeah, that might mean we have a working from anywhere policy. Anyone can go for a month and and work from anywhere. So, you know, I'll I'll be using that in to go into India and going to go. I've got um I have a place there, but I can do some travel in India as well. So I think taking some of these, some of those advantages, I think with because of the nature of our business, we have that ability now to to be able to go and work remotely. And I think so. Part of it is maybe if I do more of that, I haven't done as much as I would have liked to. Maybe if I start to do that a bit more and or go and go to the UK, I love the coast, I love cold water swimming. If I if I do that more often and I can work and still get my walks in, do that, maybe uh maybe I can carry on and you know still have a still have a good involvement as well. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:34

I've got some rapid fire questions for you. Okay, go one of which I've already answered. Um the first one is uh one brand that you'd love to work with that you haven't already.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:42

Vivo Barefoot.

unknown 1:11:43

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:44

I'm waiting for that. Yeah, there you go. We did a uh we we we work with the British Footwear Association and we did a GEO workshop and I used Vivo Barefoot as my examples. I said, if anybody knows Vivo Barefoot, can you put them in touch?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:58

So that's good, yeah. I've been I've been only Vivos now for the past like four years. Oh, amazing. Yeah, there you go. So what about you?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:06

I've had them for four years, but I've I don't know what happens. Sometimes I just stop wearing them, and I'm like, why have I stopped wearing my Vivo? So I've got these and I've got the Vivo sandals now, so I've got them set now, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:16

Nice, nice, nice, nice. Uh, you kind of already answered this, but most underrated agency growth strategy, you said email, but I wondered if something else comes to mind when I say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:23

Yeah, email marketing.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:25

Best AI tool right now that isn't yours. Oh and not Clawed. RCADS. RCADs over Higgsfield? Have you tried Higgsfield?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:41

Uh I haven't tried Higgsfield. I know the team used Higgsfield, but I think still it's still good. If no one's used it, that's a great one.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:49

I just wondered if there was an argument. No, yeah. Okay. One thing every agency owner should stop doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:54

Micromanaging.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:56

One thing you wish you learned earlier as a founder.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:00

Not everything's in your control.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:02

Ricky, thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:04

Thank you.