SPEAKER_04 0:00

You're set to do over a million pounds in revenue from LinkedIn alone this year.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

I saw the opportunity on LinkedIn and I capitalized on it. It's the biggest open database of working people on the planet. I'm interested to know how you got into LinkedIn in the first place and starting an agency around it as well.

SPEAKER_04 0:16

When I was 19, I got this really unusual opportunity to come work in a startup in London. I was watching him raise money in his LinkedIn DMs and he raised eight figures through LinkedIn and he offered me my full-time salary to run his LinkedIn. Within 11 days, we'd hit a six-figure run rate. It was a complete shit shit. Like we never took a pound out for the first 18 months. What's your data on sending a connection request with a message versus without? 30 to 40% is the benchmark for no message. And then with a message is like 5 to 10%. Like the maths just don't add up to send it with a message. How do people stand out? How do they grow a brand? The only thing you should share if you're looking for awareness is two things. Objective of all marketing is just to start conversations. There's never been a better time to run a small marketing agency. Everyone above you is dying and not willing to admit it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

No, welcome to Agency Giants.

SPEAKER_04 1:04

Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to do this.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

So you're set to do over a million pounds in revenue from LinkedIn alone this year. What's driving that growth on the platform?

SPEAKER_04 1:15

You know, my about section on LinkedIn says like I'm a very ordinary guy with a very fast-growing business because of two reasons. And it's uh one, I saw the opportunity on LinkedIn and two, I capitalized on it. Um that's exactly why we're doing so well with driving that amount of sales um on LinkedIn. Um there's a like a massive misunderstanding of what the platform is. Um people are fundamentally just like mistaking LinkedIn for a TikTok and Instagram, like the B2B of social media, and that is not what LinkedIn is at all. And all we are doing is capitalizing on that gap of the misinformation that other people are seeing LinkedIn as, and people just aren't even seeing the opportunity that we've been able to capitalize on. What do you think people see LinkedIn as versus how you see it? So people see it as a social media platform, right? So if you look at LinkedIn, naturally, you associate it with like an Instagram or Facebook. You see comments, likes, reposts. But when you look at how the platform is built from like a business level on LinkedIn side, they built it as a networking platform. So originally it was built as a Rolodex. So you could go to a networking event, you would connect with people that you met there, and then you had this big list of contacts. And because of that fundamental how the platform was built, it's the biggest open database of working people on the planet. So while there is a social media element to it, the benefit is not the social media element. The benefit is how it's set up as a networking platform. So it's built to help you have conversations with other people. So the stats are something like the average salary of someone on LinkedIn is $75,000, something like 10 million C-suite execs, 75 million decision makers. And like though, and the platform is built to help me connect with them. Like there's no other platform on the planet where I could just message the CMO of Aldi, Matalan, or other like uh I wouldn't get in touch with probably the CMO of Amazon, but they're all available on the platform. And that is the massive benefit of LinkedIn, how it's built to help you get in touch with them, not the fact that I can post and get to 20,000 impressions.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Interesting. I want to unpack your strategy and just general philosophy around LinkedIn, but we'll hold it for now. I'm interested to know how you got into LinkedIn in the first place and and of course, then starting an agency around it as well.

SPEAKER_04 3:09

Yeah, so when I was 19, I got this like really unusual opportunity to go and work in a startup in London. And I say it was unusual because it was a personal branding agency. And at the time, like personal branding wasn't a thing. Like over the last like five years, it's exploded. At the time, personal branding was like more PR. So I was employee number three there. And because there were no personal branding agencies, we were working with like some of the top people in London. So like famous podcasters, athletes, uh, billion-dollar CEOs. Um, and it was a small agency, and when you're at a small agency, they give you a lot of responsibility. So at 19 with like very little marketing experience, I was uh the personal brand manager of these massive names. And there were two incidents which really uh walked me up to LinkedIn. The first one, there was a guy who had a music startup that was raising money. And I was watching him raise money in his LinkedIn DMs, and he raised eight figures through LinkedIn. He was like, What's your check size you're writing? He was sending them the deck, just DMing back and forth with PE firms, investors, and then they were like, okay, magic, let's hop on a call, this looks good. And the next minute I'd get a text through on WhatsApp, these person just closed around. Can we do an announcement of it? Like this people just raised, uh, so just invested. Can we do an announcement on it? And that was crazy. And the other one, we had this coaching client who had a podcast. And at the time we were doing everything, full personal branding suite. We had Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, PR, we were getting them on podcasts. It was like full range. And we did LinkedIn, but that was like a side piece of the agency. It was like we're just doing a little bit of LinkedIn. And this coach in particular was just signing like 10-figure contracts, uh, sorry, 10 figures, 10,000 pounds a month contracts in his DMs. It was just like and I was watching the messages at 19, and at the time I had very little money to my name, and I was like, everyone is talking about TikTok, YouTube, all these platforms where you can go viral. And then there's this weird job site to the side, and that's where everyone seems to be making the easiest money. And that was my um first opportunity that I saw. Um, the second thing was about nine months into that role, I had a CEO reach out to me and I was posting on the platform, maybe had 2,000 followers, and he offered me my full-time salary to run his LinkedIn. And I I remember when I was that age, I was like, if I could just earn 30,000 pounds a year, like I would have made it, like that's amazing. And he offered me over that just to run his own LinkedIn. And I was like, why is he doing that? Like I couldn't understand it. Uh and that's when I realized like the reason he's doing it is because there's an opportunity there. Um, and that's when we kind of grabbed onto that with with both hands, started the agency, and um within 11 days we'd hit a six-figure run rate. Wow, that's awesome. 11 days. Yeah, so we posted and um I I I have the post, it's it's really funny. I'm in like a Puma top. I've got like a I haven't cut my hair, I'm like, I look a mess. And I literally posted something like, Today's my first day going freelance. And I called it freelance at the time because I didn't want to say I'd started a business because like that wasn't a thing. Like, I didn't want to be like, I'm not a business owner, I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. So it was like, it's my first day being a freelancer. I'm thinking I'm gonna like run people's LinkedIn accounts. Not like not sure. That was virtually the post. And off that post, we'd already hit a six-figure run rate. We were doing over 10 grand a month within 11 days of me posting that. Um, and it was just like a really clear example of like a bit of luck and a bit of action taken. And we fell upon a really nice opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

How did that original service look like for those initial clients? And then how has that evolved today?

SPEAKER_04 6:17

Yeah, so the original service was um, and by the way, I think it's really important to say that we hit a six-figure run rate, and everyone's some people are like, especially if you've not run a business, they're like, wow, that's amazing. It was a complete shit show. Like no one wants to, like, I had no idea, like, didn't have a business bank account, didn't know what an accountant did or was, like, didn't know how to hire. Hey, like it was terrible. And like the first six months were like horrific. So much so that we never took a pound out for the first 18 months because we were so scared of taking money. Like there was this Monzo account, um, which was terrible, terrible at the time anyway. And like, we were just stacking up on me and my brother who started the business with me, we were like, we just don't want to touch it because we were like, I have no idea what we're doing, let's just like leave that there. Um, the original service though was very much content focused. So obviously, uh I was starting to perform better and better on the platform. I was gaining followers, uh, still only like sub-10K, which I think is important to reference. Um, and we were literally just taking generally like a founder, CEO, maybe an exec team, and just sharing content for them. Um and at the time, that's all you needed to do on LinkedIn. I think there's something interesting happening now where a lot of the gurus on LinkedIn are still saying to use those same tactics. Um, but we can get into how the supply and demand equation shifted on LinkedIn. But back then, all I did for the first two years of the business was post content, get leads, close those leads, post more content. And that's all we did for clients was just post content, they'd get leads, they'd close them, we'd post more content. And it was a no-brainer at the time, but LinkedIn's changed dramatically since then.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Interesting. How is that? Actually, no. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of how this has changed and what we're gonna do about it. Yeah, there's there's so much for us to go down there. Um in order to yeah. Okay, let's park that. The as far as you getting those initial clients, yeah. Presumably that one post didn't build the entire momentum of the whole agency. Did you then have to outbound on LinkedIn to get new business? What was the client acquisition strategy?

SPEAKER_04 8:08

Yeah, so literally for the first I'd say 80 months to two years of the business, we'd never sent one outbound message. So at the time it was literally just all content. Um and and all you had to do on the early days of LinkedIn was just post. And the reason why there was this massive supply and demand equation. So LinkedIn was growing rapidly as a platform. I think it was like 300 million active users, and only 1% of those posted. And still everyone uses it at staff, like 1% at post. So if you think of it from just simple supply and demand, there's a massive demand for content, and then there was only a really small percentage seeing it. So you had this uh interesting flip where I could have 2,000 followers, but if I was posting content, LinkedIn had to share it to more people because it had to fill their feeds, like they had to fill it with some content. So I'd have 2,000 followers, but I'd get 20,000 impressions a post. So it's a beautiful supply and demand equation. And not to already get into it, but like over the last three or four years, everyone's seen that opportunity. Um I was listening to the pod you did with Lauren, and she was like pushing you to post on LinkedIn as well. But everyone also had that same inkling over the last kind of five years. So there's a couple of different things that happened. The first one was people saw it. So if you're posting on Twitter and YouTube and you see like a Laura get from zero to like a hundred K in six months, you're like, oh, I'm gonna go post there. So there's a massive influx of new content being posted on the platform. Then AI and ChatGPT exploded, and next minute it was like anyone can now post content very, very easily. So the supply and demand equation changed, where there's still a big gap between active users and active posters, but it is much, much smaller. In fact, it's jumped from a Shield Analytics released that it went from about 1% posting to about 5%. So that's a 4% jump, which seems like nothing, but it's actually more like 20 million people posting a day extra, which means the supply and demand equation is very much changed. And now, while content, there's still potential for content to get a lot of views, it's not the same as it used to be. In fact, you're now sh they don't need to share your posts to this thousands and thousands of people because they have so much content to distribute. Shield Analytics also released that the average amount of impressions you'll get on LinkedIn. If you have 10,000 followers, about 734 impressions per post. So if you think about that flip when I launched the business, I had 2,000 followers who would get 20,000 impressions a post. Now, if you have 10,000 followers, you'll get under a thousand impressions a post on average. And that's benchmarked across like a billion posts that went through their platform.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

That's so interesting. You know, screw it, we're gonna get into it. Yeah. Let's just do this. We'll get into the business afterwards. You know, screw the rules. Okay, so you saw the interview of Lara. Lots of lot and I've had other LinkedIn creators I've spoken to over the years, LinkedIn agencies and experts and gurus and so on, and everyone's always like post, post, post, post, post. Yeah. Um I myself could have personally got a lot of resistance to I used to love LinkedIn was amazing. Um for me, it started my sales career. I actually did get hold of the CEO of Universal Studios, but in um Middle East, and then flew me out to Middle East. I did this publication for this job that I was working on back then. So I'm a huge advocate for being able to get hold of great execs on LinkedIn and used to use the platform a lot. In my business career now, being so busy running the YouTube channel, having success there, I haven't been able to translate that success over to LinkedIn. So I've I've found felt resistance in putting in the time and so on. So you do what everyone does and get a copywriter and you get them to write posts and so on, and they're using a little bit of AI now to make life easier, and you know, I'm getting 10 likes a post feeling super demoralated. Why am I doing this? So um you must have looked at my LinkedIn maybe beforehand. Did you have a little look?

SPEAKER_04 11:26

Yeah, I've had it before for you, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

What do you think uh like the mistakes that people are making like now, now that algorithm has shifted? Like, you know, I'm posting, I'm aware of content, but maybe it's just the fact that it's too generic. Like, how do people stand out? How do they grow a brand?

SPEAKER_04 11:39

It's a really good question. Um the first thing you have to understand is that the content on LinkedIn, the fundamental benefit of it isn't to get impressions, right? So like we know on TikTok we can get more impressions. On YouTube, if you put out good content, you'll get dramatically more impressions than you can get on LinkedIn. So that's great. Um why would you post on TikTok? Reach is available. But that's not the same reason you could post on LinkedIn. That was the confusion. People came to LinkedIn and was like, I'm posting on LinkedIn four impressions. It's like, no, I don't care if my post gets 2,000 impressions because the average person who sees it earns 75k a year and is more than likely a decision maker. So like my impressions have dropped off. I did something like 30 million impressions in 2025, 2024. This year I'll do about two million. Looking at that, you'd be like, this is an absolute failure. But like we said, we're doing a million in sales this year on LinkedIn. So the the the initial benefit of it is um you have to understand that it's not impressions, it's like the quality of people we're doing, and we can get into like how you can add those to your network as well. But that's like the fundamental thing you have to understand is like I am not posting on LinkedIn for the reach. Like that is a lie sold to us by gurus who um and let me be careful. I I love Laura, by the way, I'm good friends with Laura and um gurus who are telling you to post aren't lying. And it's there still is a benefit there, and you can still go viral. The issue is for 95% of people, they're never gonna achieve 10,000 followers on LinkedIn anymore. It's very, very tough. Um so that's why it's it's a flawed concept for them to start thinking that's the objective versus like understanding if I want followers and impressions, go to TikTok, go to a high-reach platform. If I want high value people, I'm gonna go to LinkedIn. And the reason so many gurus just tell you to just post and you'll go viral is because that's what happened to them. I went from zero to 60k followers. I probably went from zero to 10 over two years. I went from 10 to 60 in about seven months, just posting, nothing special. Um, so what content should you be posting? For me, there's two types of content that I post. Um the first one is awareness content. So I'm good friends with Ash Jones, who runs great influence, and he's probably one of the best minds in the UK when it comes to personal branding, runs Gary Neville's personal brand, um, Sasha Lord, what was Stephen Bartlett on the come up. Um and I was talking to him recently about like AI and like content being generic, and he said the only thing you should share if you're looking for awareness is two things. He said, um uh personal experience and unique perspectives. And the reason that is is because that's the things that only they can share. And ironically, someone doing it better than anyone right now is Bartlett. So if you look at Bartlett's LinkedIn, he's sharing a lot of content around, for example, he'll pull the data from Dairy CEO and explain the data he has and what he's seeing from it. No one else can replicate that type of content because it's like it's his data. It's like one thing that I shared recently was how my LinkedIn articles are getting more impressions than my videos. It's a much more simplified version, but no one else can share that. Uh, before the podcast, you were talking talking to me about decisions you'd made around uh the agency and where it was going to be located. That's something that only you can share on LinkedIn because no one else can share that. That's your personal experience. Uh, and the other thing is unique perspectives. You know, you'll have unique perspectives on um how to do marketing, AI, we talked about before, cloud code. Like these are unique perspectives that only you have because you've experienced that, and that's why they're interesting. So that's awareness content if you want to get um viewed by the right people. The other type of content that we do a lot of now is phishing content. So with the rise of AI, you're able to use AI agents very, very easily, like non-technical, to scrape the engagement of any linked input on the platform. And we're actually doing it to steal our competitors' leads, which we can get into down the line as well. Um so phishing content. If I can scrape the engagement of anyone who engages on my content, it's really important I put out the right type of content. If I did a post on me coming to do podcasts in London, that's great. But if I scrape that, I can't reach out to them because none of them are leads. Like they're just curious about me. If I do a post on how we did LinkedIn outreach for an engineering firm, that might get 75 likes, but I can go through that and that's a clear, intent signal that all 75 of those are curious about LinkedIn for uh uh engineering firms. So I know that I have 75 leads to reach out to. In general, for my phishing content, I get about 1,500 to 2,000 engagements that get filtered through clay and become leads for our sales team. Like that alone, and by the way, is zero paid spend, completely organic, like with paid ads, would cost a bomb, probably five, six K a month, I'm guessing. And that's just fully organic for me putting out content. So when I'm looking at phishing content, I'm trying to be in the niche, direct to our ICP, and really keep it high value, high utility. So as useful as possible, I can make it. But the the most important thing is it's on the topic of the people that I want to talk to. So the only people that engage with it are the ones that we can then sell to later down.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Nice. Love that. I want to get into the GTM piece. But on on the the note of building the brand itself, how do you feel about if it is harder to get the reach at the moment and it isn't about the reach and it's about the impressions? Like how how how do people gain momentum on the platform if you know you're getting a couple of likes or posts, like you're not getting much engagement? Is do you think social proof is important on a platform like LinkedIn? Um It's a really good question.

SPEAKER_04 16:30

There's there's a few things you can do that are really, really key. So Stanford did this um study with recruiters, I think it was in 2018, um, and they studied how long people stay on people's profiles with the eye tracking study. And uh you mentioned case studies and and proof. And I want to start with the profile. So on the first thing you have to do on LinkedIn is like positioning. If you want to like a lot of people think that content's the issue if they're getting no likes, generally speaking it's positioning, and that all starts with like the profile and how you're setting yourself up. So Stanford did this study with eye tracking, and they found that um people make uh a decision on you, uh an opinion on you with being on your profile for 3.2 seconds. And then they um judge whether they want to go further down and read your content in about 30 seconds. So you know when you get someone on your profile, you have about 3.2 seconds to convince them that you're an authority, and then you have 30 seconds to convince them to do something else, or go off platform, go to your website, whatever else. And that 3.2 seconds is what we focus on a lot. So if my content was not getting engagement, the first thing I would focus on is like, how can I just signal that I'm an authority in 3.2 seconds? The easiest way is professional headshot, professional banner. Um when I say professional headshot, like you can take it with an iPhone, like just make sure the lighting's half decent, stand outside, like don't have it a holiday photo where you've got like a beer and your missus in the background. Um professionally written headline, like nowadays you can do it with a chat GBT or Colored, but just like have something that shows authority, have that proof and credibility in there. Because um people really underestimate the impact of that setup positioning-wise on the content. For example, why would anyone read my content? Well, if you look at my as I appear on the feed, my headshot's professional, and my headline says UK's number one LinkedIn agency within two seconds, you know, like generally speaking, he probably knows what he's doing. If I just had like Nara Ratcliffe, it was me and a selfie, see me on the feed, it's like I've already registered that this person isn't worth listening to before I've even read the post. Um that's probably where I'd start. It's just on the positioning element.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Nice. Visual elements as well. Do you think that's important? A lot of people say about putting in carousels and so on and so forth. A lot of high effort for people who are just starting out, or I think I think overrated.

SPEAKER_04 18:32

Overrated. Um it'd be like me telling you to go on TikTok and like start, like pay for an editor, pay for a videographer. It's like, why don't you just test proof of concept? And like, you know, people go viral on TikTok and it's just like they hold the phone, no one's no no editing, no cuts, it's just like that. And it's the same with LinkedIn. Like if your content's genuinely good and useful, um, there's some guys from Shake, Shake Content who are a LinkedIn agency in in London. And one of their founders posts like no images, just text. And he flies all the time. It's like, why? Content's good. Like if your content's good, like full stop, like if you're trying to game it with a carousel, and I've been there, like I've put out my fair share of carousels in my time. If you're trying to game it, like generally speaking, it's like a signal that you're probably not putting stuff out that's useful enough or or unique enough.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

So presumably you're writing content for clients. So you're you're you're pulling that piece off well. I'm I'm evidently failing at that piece at the moment. Um what what is your process for taking these, and this is a a personal roadblock of mine, in is taking the ideas that the founder has, that the company has, that what the brand has, and distilling them into posts. Like what is how are you taking that? How are you feeding it? Are you having a weekly meeting? And are they creating a massive library to start off with? Like, what is that?

SPEAKER_04 19:47

Yeah, really, really simple. Um so I'll I'll be honest as well. Like when we first started, we'd spend a lot more time on this process. Um, when we first started the agency, we'd do like three one-hour calls with clients. One would be like um a positioning call on like how they want to come across all that type of thing. We then do an onboarding call where they told us their whole life story for like an hour and a half, and we'd digest it all, um, get the notes, and then we'd do one more call where we did like strategy and agreed it with them. Um and while that's fantastic when you're trying to build like a massive personal brand, um, which a lot of it was like originally what people came to us for, now it's like you actually don't need that. That's not essential. Um the way we do it is really, really simple. We do a 45 minute to an hour call with each person we're writing for. Generally speaking, we'll take on four or five uh profiles, which we get into why that's important anyway, down the line. Um 45 minutes understanding of what your perspective on things, um, like what do you want to talk about, what's off limit, and that's it. And the rest of it we're like reverse engineering from the audience, which I think is underrated. And that means what we're doing is like taking a deep understanding of who are they going after and what are the problems that they're having, and then we're just taking the unique perspectives we got from the call and just applying them to that. So let me give you an example. Let's say I'm working with uh a freight forwarding for uh firm. That's one of our clients at the minute, and they help uh transatlantic um uh forwarding of freight. It's a really basic, like traditional business. Like we want to say, okay, what are all the things that are wrong with the industry on our call? What are your unique perspectives on it? What might what might you say that your competitors wouldn't say? And then we're just sitting down and being like, what are all the issues that their current audience is having? Okay, it's a timeline issue, it's a risk issue, they don't want to switch from their current agency. And we're saying, okay, they don't want to switch, but actually he's had a unique perspective that there's a stat that when you switch from your freight forwarding agency currently, it drastically increases the efficiency. Okay, great. That there's a port that we're piecing together. So we're starting with unique perspectives, and then we're just reverse engineering from what what the audience wants to hear are the problems they're dealing with. Um and that's like a minimum standard that everyone can start with as well.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Nice. What do you think are some of the biggest mistakes and and therefore highest leverage things that people can do to use AI to help writing the content, but actually avoid it being AI based content and therefore driver on the news? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 22:00

Yeah. I think it's the place they start from, right? So like I can write a post with Clay, sorry, Clay, Claude, or Chat DBT, if it starts from like a unique thought process or perspective I've had. It's almost like the foundational starting point. So for example, if I go to Claude now on my phone and was like, give me 10 LinkedIn post ideas. Like you're naturally starting from a flawed beginning. What you actually want to do is start from, okay, what are 10 ideas that I can share that are really unique? I can write on the bullets of the of the post. I can put that in Claude and get Claude to write it. And that's a very, very different flip of like, actually, it's still a unique idea. Claude's just written it and formatted it. And by the way, there's like zero value in a human doing that nowadays. Like there's a very marginal gap between what a human can write and what Claude can write for that. And I'm saying that as someone who employs content writers, do you know what I mean? Who are the top standard? The minimal gap. The actual real value is in like the fundamental step of what's what's the idea. And I think that's what probably where people go wrong, is like they probably outsource that rather than the other thing. That's why I think Laura's tool, Clio, but a placement here, um, is really useful for that because it it starts with like they can do the right the the AI does the writing element, but actually like you have to still input your ideas. It's not taking the ideation away from you, just taking the copywriting which has already been quadratized.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Yeah, nice. And and kind of already thinking as you've been talking about this, it's really a a good place for people to start is probably just extracting the data that they've got. We host 5,700 coaching calls a year, 600 group calls. There's so much data and information in there about the the audience.

SPEAKER_04 23:37

And those are things that you can say that I can't say. Yeah. So it's just like an instant differentiation. And the things that I can say that you can say, like I said, about my content or the data we have on LinkedIn. But like I can't talk about the lessons you've got on coaching calls.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned that LinkedIn's like a networking platform first and foremost. That's how it was built. So you've got you've kind of got the content piece, but then how are you how are you introducing the networking side of it and building through that?

SPEAKER_04 24:00

Yeah, so um we we say that LinkedIn, any sort of LinkedIn strategy is a LinkedIn pyramid. So the fundamental level is positioning. So we talked about that a little bit, getting your profile right, how you positioned across company pages and exec teams. Layer two is content. So just distributing content. Generally speaking, the best way to do it is across four or five execs, um, just because you have this like um omniscient feeling that you're everywhere um on the platform. Then you have outreach layer three, and then ads layer four. For 90, probably five percent of especially agencies but businesses, you don't need to touch ads on LinkedIn. Unless you have like 10k a month to spend uh or to burn is a better way I'd put it, like if you're happy to burn 10k and it doesn't work every month, that's great. You should you're probably at a stage where you can do ads. Or you need to do such a scale that you have to touch ads. So you're like Intel, Amazon. It's like it wouldn't make sense. Like they can't do the scale and outreach that they could do with ads. So other than that, you should touch the first three layers. Uh and to be clear, we right now do no internal ads. Like the million in sales we do through LinkedIn is through the content and the outreach. And I say that to show you that like you don't need to touch ads to generate a large um amount of revenue in sales through the platform. So where it ties in, so you mentioned like your content you weren't happy with right now. I think if I uh I can't do this, but if I could just remove the largest impressions number from your content, I think you'd fundamentally flip why you're putting out content on LinkedIn and you start to realize like, okay, these are high value buyers. I need to put out content for the high value buyers, I'm gonna completely forget about the impressions. The next thing is, well, I've got not enough high value buyers in my network, and the content is not reaching them, so I'm not expanding my audience. And it's like LinkedIn is the only platform that I'm aware of on the planet where I can add my audience to my network. So literally, um on the simplest level, you could just be like, this is my target audience, I'm gonna put out content for them, and I'm gonna set up an automated campaign just to add them to my network. So every week I have 40 more of my ICP who are gonna see my content. And then you no longer need to have this expansive compounding effect of like on YouTube, you need to get views to get more people into the network, to get more views to get more clients. LinkedIn, it's like I can just literally add them. Like if that was added as a feature on YouTube, like it'd be like, and they charged you a thousand pounds a month. Everyone on the planet would pay for it. And LinkedIn is free. Like I can just set it up like free of charge. Um, minus automation software, which is like you know, hundreds of pounds, not thousands. Um so how do you type both together? Is like the first thing I would do is like I'm putting out content for a specific ICP. I would start doing like simple outreach campaigns, just add them to my network on the basic level, and then you're starting conversations with them. So for people who don't understand it, there's three ways you can start a conversation on LinkedIn. You can send a connection request with a message, so I can say, hi Jordan, I'm now would love to add you to my network, et cetera, start the conversation. Once you've they're connected, you can send a natural DM. So I can just reach out like a like a message, and then you have in mails, and technically you have conversation ads, but we'll we'll forget the ads. And you can automate all three of those. So literally, um, right now for like a majority of our clients will have two K plus prospects a month that we'll add to each person's network and starting a conversation with them. And like um, I have this story I like to tell of um about a year ago, we worked with the former CEO of Pandora, he's called Jeremy Schwartz. And he's one of the best CVs of anyone I've ever met. He worked at CEO of Pandora, uh, brand marketing director at L'Oreal, Sainsbury's, um, like incredible CV. And on our first call, I was like, this guy's got way more experience than me. So I actually jumped on I don't usually do onboarding calls. I was like, I'm gonna ask him some questions, just like selfishly. So I asked him, like, when you went to Pandora, it was a turnaround job. So when he went into CEO of Pandora, it was like on the slide, and they brought him in to kind of turn things around. Uh, marketing background, they thought he'd be helpful. So I said, What was the first thing you did uh when you went to work at Pandora? And I thought he would say, Do you know I pumped money into ads or like did these brand activations? And he was like, I literally went to my Instagram, he said, I went to hashtag Pandora, I found people who'd posted about Pandora more than once, and it was like I reached out to them to ask them, like, what products are you interested in? What would you like to see more of? And I was like, why would you do that? And he was like, fundamentally, all marketing starts. And the objective of all marketing is just to start conversations. And it really, really resonated with me, and it ties back to this where it's like, what am I doing on LinkedIn? I'm trying to start conversations, and the simplest way to do it is I can set up an automated campaign to start conversations with my ICP, and it's virtually the only platform on the planet available that you can do that. Um, and yet it's not the number one thing talked about. Everyone talks about if I went to YouTube and was like LinkedIn right now, I watch a hundred videos talking about how to post content, and there'd be probably zero videos, like one or two, that actually say, like, here's how you can start conversations with all your dream clients.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

What's the your your data on um sending a connection request with a message versus without? Because I hear a lot of debate on some people say don't send it with a message because you'll get more people accepting because they're so used to receiving that.

SPEAKER_04 28:54

Yeah. The only reason you would send it with a message is if you've got so many leads coming out of your ass that you're like, I don't want people out of my network. Um other than that, it's like 30 to 40% is the benchmark for uh no message. And then with a message is like five to ten percent. So like the maths just don't add up to send it with a message. Interesting. Um the only reason you would literally send it is like if I had, for example, 150 people that could buy from me, I'd probably do a message because actually starting the conversation there is is more important than getting them into the network. Of like these very, very rare circumstances I would ever send uh connection request campaigns with without sorry, with a message.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

That's interesting. What do you think that is from like a psychological standpoint?

SPEAKER_04 29:33

Um one, very, very tough to word a connection request, like not in a sales way when you're having a sales conversation. So like I believe that sales conversations that we're starting should be as like honest as possible and show up with something valuable. Whereas like if someone I see a connection request, I was doing it before this podcast, like I can go through my connections, I have like 4,000 right now, and I see like high Nile, and it's like they start to, and I'm like, this is like this is for you, not me. So I'm not gonna accept that one. Or if it's blank and I see CEO at this company, I'm like, interesting, connect. It's just like the um the friction there is so limited. Um but also just like opens the door after it when there's no connection requests, you can send anything after that. Uh and other than blocking you, you've always got access to them as well.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

What about those so you're filtering out who you accept and who you don't accept? Um what about if somebody has built a LinkedIn platform from like a previous role or something like that, a profile from a previous role and they've got 10,000 followers or connections in irrelevant industry now? What do they do to reverse that?

SPEAKER_04 30:35

Um two things I would do is like one, start talking about my new thing, and that would naturally start to change the network. Secondly, I just add the right network. So like my background was in personal branding. We don't see ourselves as a personal branding agency. We don't necessarily even the content we do, we don't call it personal branding. So what do I do? I add um probably 8% of our roster is traditional businesses. So what do I do? I add in traditional businesses to my network every single week, like manufacturing firms. There probably isn't a manufacturing firm in the UK or islands that isn't connected with me right now because I'm reaching out to thousands every single month.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

Nice. And then your strategy then for when you do connect with them and you send them their outreach, like how are you going? Are you going in with a lead magnet? Are you pitching them on a call? Like what are you doing?

SPEAKER_04 31:17

Yeah, so there was a study done by um it was an American university, I think it was Brown University, and they found that with B2B outreach, um, you get two to three X high response rates when you start with something of value to them. They define it as a case study, uh, like a lead magnet um or a stat that they thought would be useful for them. So um the best way you can do it is with we call it a sales asset, um, but you shop with something. And the analogy I like to use is uh if you went to like someone's wedding, you would like shop with a gift. If you go to like someone's house, you might show up with wine. Like you never show up empty-handed to somewhere else. And I always think like we're dropping in the inbox and I don't want to shop empty-handed. So one of our highest converting messages, um, it was actually last year going into December, and I posted about it. It was a really simple message where I said, hi, um, so you've been engaged on this type of content. And it was like LinkedIn outreach. Um, we've recently put together a guide on two or three interesting ways you can do it as a manufacturing firm. Are you against me sending it over? And like it's a really simple message of like, I'm dropping in the inbox, I've got something for you, and all you have to say is, no, I'm not against sending it over. Or yeah, please fire it over. And it's also a really simple no for them as well. So it's not awkward. They can just say like, no, I'm not interested right now. Great, that's great. Um, but it also really sets up a uh a great sales conversation afterwards. So um with sales conversations, you need a reason to follow up. A lot of like original code email agencies got this wrong where they had no reason to follow up. So like the messages would be like, hi, just following up, just following up on the on the sales message I sent above. Whereas we can follow up with, hi, did you get a chance to read the resource? Hi, I know you've got the resource. Is that something you're thinking about internally right now? These are really easy um questions we can follow up with that just signal this is a sales conversation. And if you want to go down this route, you can go down this route, and if not, no. Um but like they're all conversational questions. Like I said, like, are you thinking about this internally? Did you get a chance to read it? Yes, I got a chance to read it. No, I didn't get a chance to read it. Or would it be easy if I just jumped on a call if you and walked you through it? Um yeah, we are thinking about it internally. Or maybe it'd be useful if I jumped on a call and I could show you through a deeper chart. These really simple steps that we can take. Um so that's what we generally lead with. There's some some campaigns we don't lead with a lead magnet, but I would say like 75% of the time I'd recommend starting with a lead magnet that's just genuinely useful.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

Nice. And are you still using those for posts as well and getting people to comment down below and do using that strategy?

SPEAKER_04 33:30

No. Um like um I don't I don't really so we have lead magnets that we use separately for posts. Like we just did a live event on Tuesday uh that will get people to um but like no, I I will separate the outreach from like I almost see it as a completely separate channel than like the content. And like the thing I'm doing with content is is different from what I'm doing with the outreach. The outreach is like purely sales conversations, and for me to be fair, like um my content may be slightly different from what I do with clients because I I do have an element of trying to build the brand while it's not just probably like 6040 brand and sales through the content, um, which is probably slightly hypocritical. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

So you would change the format of the the lead magnet for the DMs as well, or is it Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:16

Um so for example, if I'm posting content, a lead magnet that might work really well. We just released a LinkedIn report and we had like five LinkedIn experts comment on it. Laura was one, Ash Johns was one, Sophie Miller, and each had a section where they commented on where they thought LinkedIn was at right now. That is a beautiful thing I can promote in content, because it's like a LinkedIn report, it has the natural thing, it did 500 downloads, completely organic, great. A LinkedIn report isn't massive value added in the DMs. It's like, hi, I have a LinkedIn report, thought it'd be useful for you. Whereas I can have something really actionable for like, we just did this for a manufacturing client. I thought it might be applicable to you guys since you're in the same space. Like that's something that's like very, very useful to a niche audience that I can send in a DM, but just like wouldn't resonate from a content perspective. Um, content lead magnets, I'm trying to think broad and um inside a box. What I mean by that is um if I'm a marketing director, report makes sense to me. It's like people publish reports, this is a report I will download. Whereas like if it was like this is a manufacturing case study, it's like, oh, that's not something I naturally download. So I'm trying to think in a box of its content, broad, in a box, lots of people can download and it's something that they understand what it is, white papers, um uh reports, that type of thing. In the DMs, I can also explain better what it is and how it applies to them. So I'm trying to think really niche, really uh simple utility. So like can they action this in the next like 60 minutes? Um, which like which wouldn't resonate from a content perspective.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

You meant to clearly use automation on LinkedIn. Yeah, it's obviously a big debate there. Uh Lara, for example, I know is quite antique.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

Um automation, some well, what is your general mindset around it? Um do you have a favorite tool? And have you ever run into any issues? Should people be concerned?

SPEAKER_04 36:00

Yeah, good question. Um no, we've never run into any any issues. Uh we send, God knows, like probably cost 100,000 DMs uh a month on LinkedIn for clients and ourselves, and and zero accounts have ever been taken down. Um tools nowadays are so good. We use Hayreach for our LinkedIn automation and for actually like a sending mechanism. I mean it's a little bit more complicated than just HayReach, but the set it's a good sending mechanism. They do an amazing job of one limiting it so it's like you don't push any LinkedIn boundaries, uh, but they also like natural like cool off accounts. For example, if you've had loads of replies and they they're worried like that the software is built to cool it down. But like it's it's not even close to a comparison of code email. Like we have never ever had a client's LinkedIn account being taken down. Like code email domains, like you know, in five a week, you know what I mean? You rotate in the market, like it's a very, very different game. Um, and I think that anyone who's worried about the automation, either like um the opportunity cost, it doesn't work for them, Laura, like anything that could possibly get our account taken down is like even if it made a £100,000 this year, it's just not worth the opportunity cost. Um and like hasn't needed to do it at a scale. So like if you're like I said a freight forwarding firm and you want to be charged 10,000 prospects a month, it's like, well, you're gonna need some automation to do that. Um it's like, yeah, but this there's it's a real like for me a myth of um what actually is getting taken down. I think LinkedIn promotes that myth to reduce the automation they want you to buy their internal, they're incentivized to get you to get sales navigator, which isn't automated. And obviously is revenue for them. Um why would they tell you that yeah, it's great, you can just use automation.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

Yeah, makes sense. What are the caps on on these days on like how many people do you use burner accounts as well?

SPEAKER_04 37:43

No. Um we had a we're interviewing for our GTM team and someone like suggested that. And I was like, that that's uh for me it's crazy. Um like it's just like massively high risk for a client to be reaching out from like someone who doesn't exist and someone's like, Oh yeah, I talked to Lucy, and it's like, oh yeah, she actually doesn't exist. Um is a bit wild to me. Uh do it on email though. Yeah, yeah. You're under an email account. Um that's why I think LinkedIn works much more personal. Because you can see Lucy's got head, now it's a fake head, it's just all a bit of a weird trust barrier. Um what was the original question? The limits. So you can do about 25 connection requests a day, um, and that's like a really safe um boundary. Um then off the back of that, you're looking at about 40 messages a day per account. Um and that's why you you need multiple profiles to do it. You scale LinkedIn outbound with profiles, um, not uh domains like email I can scale volume and only have like one person technically, and just like I could have J Platinum, you know, n Ratcliffe um with LinkedIn and you scale it by profiles. And that's why it's key to do it with like sales team, exec team, uh, and have people willing to use their profiles for it.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

Fine. Cool. Nice. I want to uh we'll probably come back to the the server side of things just from like the perspective of the agency, but I want to like jump ship for a moment because um you mentioned Stephen Bartlett earlier. I know you uh once met uh Dom, who was the co-founder of Stephen Bartlett. I saw you mentioned that he said that um your business sucked. And I want to get you back in that headspace and have you explain kind of what happened there and and and what that then changed in the company.

SPEAKER_04 39:14

It's a really good question. So I've had the pleasure of meeting Dom and Steve over the last like um few years. Dom in particular, we had a really close relationship with, we still do. Um so when we were when we started the agency, we moved to Portugal. And the two reasons we did that was like tax efficiencies, but also like um we wanted to be efficient on our side, so we didn't need to take money out of the business. Um and it allowed us to scale to about team of 15 by doing that, um, which was really, really useful. And around that time, though, we were a little bit lost with where to go with the agency. We were a team of 15 and we were doing well, um, under seven figures a year, um, maybe just. And anyway, we we got connected with Dom through a friend of ours called Jack, and he'd done a podcast with Dom. Anyway, we got in the room with Dom. And I remember ironically, we were sat in the car park beforehand, and me and Morgan were like, oh my god, like, is he even gonna like give us the time of day to talk here? Because we were like, uh we're really early on in the business journey. But when we went in, we we explained the full business for him. And I remember we had this big white piece of paper and he was like making these massive notes, and we we talked like 45 minutes, like this is everything about the business. And the first thing he said, he's like, took a second after we'd finished talking, like took a breath and we were like, oh my god, and he just went, brand's way off. And we were like brands everything. Oh, what do you mean? And at the time we were called Ratcliffe Brothers, and like he then went on for like 30 minutes to tell us like every stage of the business was wrong, like the structure of the team, the name, the brand, the positioning, the pricing. He just told us everything was completely wrong. And it was a massive wake-up call to us because like at the time it was like, I think for people, so we had a work we have a working class background, our parents, like my dad worked in a factory, so we'd never seen money. And at the time we we were seeing money, and it was like you get this feeling that you have a Midas touch that like, oh no, I just post on LinkedIn, we get leads, and then money drops in the bank account. Like you you feel a little bit on top of the world. And we had this guy who'd been on the journey, he'd scaled social chain, they'd gone public, IPO'd, and he was like, Yeah, you guys can suck. And we were like, Jesus Christ. And it like it completely reshaped the business. Um, and we literally tripled revenue um in three months after that chat. Uh, and then obviously the rest is history. Um and I think two of the biggest reasons was was like one a massive humbling, but secondly, I'd never taught someone who'd been on the journey. I think a massive lesson for any agency owner is like the number one thing you can do to move the agency forward is go and find three people who've walked the path you've walked and just like find a way to get in contact with them. And I I could tell like probably five or six moments of where I've met someone who is 10 steps ahead, 20 steps ahead of me, and it's like completely reshifted the journey. And there's like key moments. If I looked at the revenue of the business, there's key inflection points, and every single time it's when we've sat down and talked to someone. Um, and it's just like completely reshaped or reshifted the direction we were going.

SPEAKER_01 41:54

Nice. What was so off about the brand and then what like were the three biggest levers from the change?

SPEAKER_04 42:00

Um the first thing was Dom believed that we could like 10x our prices. So we may be charging like 1,500 2k a month at the time. And he was like, no, you need to be charging 15, 20k a month. And I think the two price points that work in agencies, I think Alex Helmosi says this it's like your low ticket volume for your high ticket and low volume clients. And he was like, you won't survive, where like we were technically close to the low volume, but he was like, you won't, like you're you just won't survive in the middle ground. He was like, and I think you can charge 15 to 20k a month. And he was like, but no brand that will pay 15 to 20k a month will touch you right now. And what Dom understand and what Steve understands so well is this perception. So it's not necessarily about um delivering a better service, just seeming like a company that can handle 15, 20 grand a month retainers. And he showed us everything from the pitch decks, he showed us the pitch deck social chain did for like Vimpto, the UK government, and he was like, this is how we pitched our service, this is how we looked. And he was like, look at the old website, look how Steve put himself across, look how we put ourselves across as an agency. And if you look at the social chain journey, from start to finish, they just seem like people you can pay money for. And they were getting like retainers of like 40, 50 grand a month in like year two. And the whole reason was to understand this perception of not just being very good, but like seeming like you can handle that caliber of work. Um that was the number one thing. The second thing was like structure of the team, which is like a little bit technical. Um we had a pod structure, which is actually really popular nowadays, a pod structure. Don was massively against it. The reason was was that he feels like you can't improve each subsection of the business while in a pod structure. So, for example, we had an account manager, a content writer at the time. He was like, your content writers are just like hemorrhaging all their skill set because they're not working. He wanted it to be uh like siloed teams, content team, accounts team. Um, massively shifted it. Our accounts team uh in particular like transformed from that moment on. For example, back then, the accounts team were like dipping into content, trying different stuff on this because this part is all working on the same clients. So, well, let me just fix this content thing. Now our accounts team like have Very set targets and they're commissioned and they have different incentives from the content team. And you have this like internal competition of like, actually, accounts team are incentivized for retention. And it's like, I'm not losing this client. Content team is incentivized for retention as well, but also metrics of getting the content to do well. It's like they have their goals, accounts have their goals, and they're technically not the same goals anymore. The account managers don't necessarily care if the content's doing well, as long as they're retaining. So they're looking for like while while the content person is trying to make it perform, so everyone has their own different incentives, but also each person has a team leader who's like pushing that team on, which massively changes from an operational standpoint. I don't think the pod structure is wrong. It just wasn't working for our business and wasn't scaling and like I said, it completely revolutionized it. And if you do look at like um separate the internet agencies from the side, um, like I know like I think it's Freddie Mulouf who's like massively pushes the pod structure and many others. If you look at like Dentsu, um the big marketing networks, like no one functions in a pod structure. And I think that's always an insight to me is like talking to Dom was like this different games here. I'm trying to play this game, and we would be the only probably like if you look at like let's say 50 million a year plus, there's probably zero agencies that function in a pod structure of 50 million a year plus. Um and it's like there's something I didn't know. I hadn't been I wasn't even close to that, um, which I found really useful as well.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Interesting. That is interesting. I've I've seen that I've seen the pod structure work well on some decent sized agencies. So for example, Saw of us, um you might be familiar with the code. Yeah, the Ollie and Yeah, there I mean they're at they're at over a million pounds collected a month at the moment across the group. And at least the last time I I du dove into org structure, they were pod structure, but I think it's somewhat of a hybrid. I think delivery is is pod, but then the the the way the management team is structured is very much siloed. And so I believe it's somewhat of a hybrid now.

SPEAKER_04 45:54

And that's probably a realistic explanation of what we do. So like for example, uh uh, let's say Ben, one of our account managers, will work with Sib, one of our copywriters, on three accounts. Like each account you could technically argue is in a pod, because they have one account manager, one content writer, one GTM person working on it. But the way it's structured from a management perspective isn't. So like and that is the key. Like there is an accountant director who oversees the accounts team. There's a content leader who oversees the content team, there's a GTM leader who oversees the GTM team. Like that's the key lesson. Whereas before it was like the account managers don't have a person to report to. They run their pod and they report directly to me on the results of their pod. And it's like, well, now I'm like, I see the pod results, and also there's no one to blame. It's like, for example, the pod's not performing. Does the account manager suck? Does the content writer suck? Does the GTM person suck? I don't really know because there could be a lot that goes wrong in the pod. Whereas like I can sit down with my account director and be like, how are Ben's clients performing? Okay, here's the retention rate on his clients, here's what he's doing, completely separate to the fact of like, okay, now let's look at the SIDS content writing clients. This is what's happening with these stats. I can see I can really clearly see where things are underperforming. And but it's different for every business, but that like for us, we wouldn't have got to where we are today in like the way it was. No, so um yeah, we could talk about talent for forever because uh it's it's a massive talking point right now. We have a Manchester office, uh core team, generally speaking, like accounts sales, uh like customer success sales. Um and then we have all over the world. We have some team in in London who good content, strapped up on Avon, but then over the GTM, like overseas talent for GTM is like incredible. Um, and then content as well is like um not to call out the UK, but I actually think we've got some of like the um we're not keeping on the trajectory of overseas talent. It's no longer going overseas is no longer a thing about cutting costs, it's about getting better talent, um, which is a massive perception shift. Like 10 years ago, it was like go overseas, you'll pay a third of the wage. And now it's like, no, you'll pay a UK wage, but that person will be like a hundred times better than someone you could get in the UK, which I think is like a a real unraveling that like the big marketing like networks and um you know the densities of the world like haven't embraced yet or or fully understood that.

SPEAKER_01 48:08

I've seen you're a big advocate of EGC, so employee-generated content. And for people that don't know what that is, what is it and how impactful is it for you?

SPEAKER_04 48:15

Yeah, so employee-generated content is where rather than you know just focusing on a founder or a CEO to post content, you essentially encourage or incentivize the employees to do that. There's two ways you can really do it. One, you can pay an agency. Technically speaking, we do EJC for a lot of our clients. We'll take like a CEO, head of marketing, head of sales, and we'll pull out content. The reason that is impactful is let's say I uh I have a founder brand. I might only relate to a subsection of my audience. But for example, Philippa posted today to our marketing coordinator on the live read on Tuesday. Like she's female, very different character type to me. Like the content that she puts out will resonate with a completely different audience. So if we're trying to talk to the entire TAM, the talk to the rest of the market for us, it's like I need females posting, I need different perspectives posting. My brother and co-founder posts about like he does like ultramarathons, iron man's, he's like crazy injured and stuff he does. Like he signs clients sometimes because that's what they resonated with, that was their entry point. I'm much more like I talk about LinkedIn, more technical stuff, that's what resonates with other people. And by doing EGC, you get that across the board. Two ways you can do it, like I said. One, you can pay someone to do it for you, like just post my team. The second way is an incentive structure. So we have an internal incentive structure where if you hit a certain amount of follower count, you get a reward. It starts with an Amazon voucher and scales up to like a week away that we pay for all expenses paid. It's probably cost us five grand over the last three years. 2025 we did 17 million impressions through our team's content. Um in the early days, we seemed like a a rapidly growing or like noticeable brand when we didn't even have that much exposure. But like our team were posting or the same colour heads on LinkedIn. Suddenly you think, God, these guys are everywhere. Um and that's the feeling that EGC gives you.

SPEAKER_01 49:57

Nice.

SPEAKER_04 49:58

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 49:58

How was the the relationship split between your brother and you?

SPEAKER_04 50:02

He does sales, I do service. Um like completely separate areas of the business. Um people say like don't work with your family. For me, it's like the the biggest um just like positive of everything. Like I love it. It's like if I win, he also wins. It's like we were like naturally put together by blood. So it's like he's gonna be with me when I die. He was there when I was born. So it's like what a beautiful thing that we can build something together and both be rewarded from it. Um the only thing I would say is like it's important to completely separate things. Um it just makes it so much easier. Like he has his targets, I have my targets, and like we're both to the same goal, but like we're in completely different sections of the business. Like he's even like in work, ironically sits on another table doing sales stuff, and I sit with the service team. Um I'm retaining, he's selling, um, it's very, very separate, uh, which I think is like key for any founders in general. Uh, but it's worked really well for us as brothers as well.

SPEAKER_01 50:50

Nice. So uh you are the the service delivery team direct reporting to you. Is there like a middle management in place in the age?

SPEAKER_04 50:56

Yeah, so each team has uh a leader um that's like the middle management, and then they all direct reporting to me. I'm very hands-on. Um I think underrated, by the way. Like I think in the world of AI, this is a really interesting thing to say, not to tangent onto AI too quickly. We were a team of 22 January 2025. Now we're a team of uh 14. We've actually got three jobs off. So we're out team of 17. Um and we've doubled in revenue year when year, we've done 100% growth. Um so we literally like cut our team in half, and our eBay margin for May was 47%, which is like slightly too much for an agency in general. So you know, experienced agency founders will will tell me that I should be investing in talent and growth, et cetera. Um don't let them tell me. But the key thing to understand there is that like um there's been a massive uh operating leverage added to agencies over the last 12 months where like we can now do much more with a big team, uh with a small team. Back in the day, you would need like if I want to get to 10 million a year, I'd need like 50, 100, you know, 200 staff, social chain was like 360 by the time they um exited. Now there's no reason to scale much past like a team of 50, 60. You can go very, very far with that team if you're uh you understand AI. Um so literally we we literally have a team leader for each organization, and I do it. The reason I was gonna say I'm hands-on is because like we have this ability now where like each person in the business has so much operating leverage that they can do so much more for each client. It's like I can be hands-on because I can just go and talk to this person and get involved in these projects and suddenly have this massive impact on the agency. 12 months ago, 18 months ago. If a founder was hands-on, it's like such a minimal impact where like they go and work in this department, but actually there's 17 different people and it like filters out where it's like I can work one-on-one with this person and have an impact with 15 different clients, um, which is obviously like a massive percentage of our roster.

SPEAKER_01 52:45

Nice. I think it's interesting you say about like the 47% net margin, like people, like other agencies will tell you to reinvest and so on. I think that is true for lots of agencies, but the market is just fundamentally shifting. Yeah. I'm currently one-to-one consulting, and I have to be careful what I say with one of the big five agencies and it's their division in New Zealand. And they're really struggling with the size of the entity, uh, can be keeping up with like AI-driven competitors, the net margin is really small, and just like it's just the manifestation of the old mindset of the way of doing things, and they're desperate to like become agentic and so on. Keen to unpack the AI thing and and how you're thinking about AI. Obviously, lots of what you do is kind of written and so on and so forth. Presumably there's a lot of different ways that you can use it. I know you're using clay and so on and all these various different tools. Um, how are you how does your mindset shift going from a larger team to a smaller team, which seems to be a shift that almost every at least modern agency should be or has done in the last like 24 months. Uh yeah, what what are you how are you changing your mindset as you as you now look to hire and grow? And are you a lot more cautious in building the team now?

SPEAKER_04 53:49

Yeah. Um what's really interesting is that like when you have a smaller team, every person has a big impact. And it just means from a talent perspective, you have a way high standard. I think you can get when I had like 22 staff, well, I was a bit sloppy with hiring. It's like they're gonna come in, they're gonna be in the content team. The content team was like a team of eight. It's like content writer comes in, they're good, the bad, like who cares? Like they're gonna have a really minimal impact anyway. And now it's like, oh no, like our content team is a team of like three, they work across 60 clients, we do god knows how many posts uh a month. It's like if I add one person there, they're gonna take a big portion of the roster and can have an impact. But what it allowed us to do is just control quality. It's like the ANZ game is like controlling quality and standardization across the board. And like obviously you're a service-based business, you want to deliver the highest quality product possible and deliver it as standardized as possible for efficiency. Um, and now you're able to do that. And like with the AI element, like I said, I'm able to give like one person ability and impact on a client roster that's just expanded. It's like each person now has more of an impact, and I can focus on improving that talent. Um, and like I said, just really hone in on who's actually working there. I was at a round table yesterday or the day before, and there were two agency owners there in particular who uh one actually founded Densu, and there was another one as well, and incredible operators. And I was listening to them talk about like their where their agencies are at, and there was so much I could learn from them, and I think they're fantastic. But I was also sat there thinking, like, oh my God, we might like eat everyone alive over the next five years because like we I think I'm behind, like we sat beforehand talking about Claude Cord. I haven't touched Clord Code, we haven't touched it as an agency. It's like, but like you forget, like I can compare that to to what you're doing with Clode Cord, and be like, wow, there's so much more to go. And you look backwards and you're like, oh Jesus Christ, the marketing networks are like laying off senior stackers, they can't, their margins are so tight, and they're like, what are we gonna do? Someone said at the round table, there's the highest um influx of fractional CMOs ever. And you could say it's a trend with more fractional CMOs. The reality is there's been more senior marketing layoffs at the big networks and uh the larger agencies than ever. And it's the reason is like their margins are getting tight, they're trying to compete, and they will never be able to compete with us on price, quality, or anything, because we can be more efficient. If they want to drop prices, one, we don't have to because we we have enough demand. But secondly, I could undercut any big network. Like they couldn't function. Like they have like five or six people on an account. It's like we can deliver the same work with two people on the account. Um, but the main impact is just like efficiency and the standardization that AI brings is just like an absolute no-brainer. And the agency model is like, it's never been a better time to run an agency. Uh and I think yourself, us as well, is like anyone who's like um at that stage where they didn't get bring on too many people is like in just like this beautiful sweet spot of like things gonna be really productive next few years. How do you think things are gonna morph and evolve over the next couple of years? Um from an age perspective, I think there's two interesting things that could happen. So, one, I think like um what was the SaaS model, how excited the SaaS model was online, is now gone. And the agency model will have a resurrection like that. The SaaS model was so exciting, it's like build once, sell a gazillion times, you become a millionaire. It's like, well, now it's like, well, no, you build once and then like some kid in his apartment builds again the same day, and then another 70 popped up tomorrow, and like now it's a massively competitive market. On the agency side, it's like, oh, actually, I can learn to deliver really good service, have massive operating leverage, and scale it to the moon and do like 10, 15 million a year with a team of 20. It's like that's that's a very different game you can play. Um, the second thing I think that's gonna be interesting, that I have a mini prediction for in like five to ten years. I'm hoping that uh I'm either not in the game or we're ahead to do this by then, is I think that the agency model will pivot to be more of upfront fees and low retainers after it. Very similar to like web development of the past. What I mean by that is, for example, right now it's not quite there. But let's say as an outbound agency, I could probably get very close to having a profit profitable uh run system where like someone pays 10, 15k up front for a setup and they actually charge in the hundreds for a monthly retainer. And that's where you get into this interesting model that Alex Hormosy talks about, where you could do low cost, high volume and it'd be profitable for like the first time ever at that scale. Um, I think the ANC model, some of the ANC models will pivot and need to pivot to being upfront fees, low maintenance, and like no labor costs off the back end. So the labor costs are set up, and then no labor costs on the back end, and you just have a small margin on what you're paying for tools and automation. Um and I think there'll be another subsection of agencies that do still charge 30, 50k a month, but they'll be very boutique, one-of-one creative agencies. For example, um, you know, and I'm separating off like a video agency that works with MNS, like ignore that, like that what we're not talking about that type of agency. Uh I'm talking about like the other nine percent of the market. Um, but there'll still be like a 40, 50k retainers for like a one person who's a creative genius, like a Rory Sutherland type character, and he will come in and consult for that type of fees. But I think the majority of the agency market could shift to upfront fees and low retainers.

SPEAKER_01 58:57

So you're you would to just to affirm on that, you think that the majority of the market will move to a place of price reduction because of the natural increase in profit margin, so it will drive prices down in a market. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 59:08

I think that if someone did that now, they could eat up the market. Like the only competitor I would be afraid of would be someone who's in my space, who's willing, willing to do an upfront fee and do volume on the back end. And it's very it's not a bad business model either, which is key to understand. Like, you could still have 50% margin on law, you just have to do volume. But like, it's much easier to have someone pay £600 a month and never turn it off. Like, no business is going to turn off £600 a month. And have you could have a thousand of those a month. It's a very different business setup. Um, but like that's a competitor I would be scared of. Um the PPC agencies, for example, is like we work with a lot of PPC agencies, they're fantastic. It's like, well, now I could definitely see a PPC model where it's like we come in, we set it up, and like it's just algorithmically doing bidding and like automated reporting goes straight to your email on a weekly basis. And it's like, well, if someone was able to do that profitably, I'd be very worried if I was uh, especially a middle section, so maybe like five to fifty million a year PPC agency, I'd be very, very worried about those. And like the the 50 million plus are always going to get like um, you know, you don't get sacked for hiring IBM. It's like so those big people will still be fine. Like they're gonna go to those, you know, people are gonna go to Orgully because they don't get sacked for hiring Orgulvie. But the rest of the market, like 50 million a year down, like I could see if someone did it well and profitably, they're eating up the market of upfront fees, um, low but high margin retainers. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:36

I've got something really cool to talk to you about that, but I'm not prepared to talk about it on the podcast, so I will talk about it off camera. Um but talking of the future and just like thinking ahead, like how do you think that like LinkedIn is gonna be uh impacted in into the next couple of years as well? Do you see that that's gonna evolve quite a lot as well?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:53

It's a great question. So I like to compare the journey of LinkedIn with Facebook and Instagram. So 2008, I think it was. Facebook exploded with organic reach. And you had like King Batch and like I think there's like Logan Paul and a few of those, like posted videos on Facebook and you would go viral. Like the supply and demand equation was similar to what it was in LinkedIn two or three years ago, and you could just post it on Facebook and you would go viral. Uh in 2012, uh, organic reach completely collapsed. And all these creators started jumping off Facebook, they realized the platform was dead from an organic reach perspective. But I and they introduced uh like meta ads or Facebook ads at the time. But it was ironically, it was after 2012 where all the money was made. The billion-dollar brands, Gymshark, MVMT, Overring, all came after 2012 when organic reach collapsed. If you look at Instagram, it was uh I think it was like 2010, um organic reach exploded, like Kylie Jenner would post like a fruit ball and it would go viral. You could just post a photo like now best of luck, like going viral on Instagram with you know a photo. Um but it was very soon after that that again, all the money was made. And if you look at LinkedIn's trajectory, it's been very, very similar. Organic reach absolutely exploded. It's now collapsed, which we can all admit. Uh, and I think this is where the brands will start to make money, um, or the real money, I would say. And the reason I believe that is because when the organic reach collapsed, you can start to see the actual marketing benefits of the platform. People thought Facebook was great for organic reach at first, and then they realized, oh no, I can just pay to get in front of my audience for the first time ever on a personalized level, exploded from a business perspective and a marketing perspective. Instagram, exact same thing. And now with LinkedIn, I think we'll start to realize people being like, oh, actually, this wasn't the social media platform we thought it was, but wow, look at the marketing opportunity, which is I can get in contact with a massively high-value audience. Uh, I wouldn't be shocked if billions pour into LinkedIn ads over the next five, 10 years. Um, but in particular, like the marketing budgets will flood into LinkedIn, in my opinion, over the next two to three years after Organic Reach has collapsed, um, and the whole euphoria of you can go viral on there and people start to understand what the platform actually is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:50

How how would you feel about LinkedIn ads in general? Are you running any ads for clients at the moment? I I've I've always heard that they're very expensive. Um and but I also hear that there's a there's a great ad format. Yeah, I I won't you can explain what this is, but there's there's just a very organic ad format. Yeah, it's a thought leadership ad. Fort leadership, that's the one.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:10

Yeah. Um so we don't do any LinkedIn ads. I think it's a service offering we'll add over the next kind of 18 months. Um but realistically, like it's it's it's it's interesting. So it's a different market that can run LinkedIn ads because they're expensive. So you're selling to a different market and you're selling to real enterprise with LinkedIn ads. Uh we have quite a few enterprise clients, but um not a roster full enough for us to need to build our LinkedIn ads team right now. You can have so much success with the other things where your your margin is drastically better, that's an interesting format. I think over the next two to three years, I'm very bullish on LinkedIn ads. Um I was with Stephen Kenwright on Tuesday and he scaled Rise at 7, um global agency now. And they were on the pod. Yeah, you had carry on the pod, he's a co-founder. Um and Stephen was he's very bullish on LinkedIn ads. For the same reason that people were bullish on Facebook ads back in the day, he was like, There's no other platform where you can literally reach out per job title to decision makers. So you not reach out, you can um you know get get in front of uh and it's like, yeah, is it expensive? Well, you're paying to get in front of you know key decision makers that you want to go after. Um I think it's been massively underrated, but the attention the LinkedIn's got over the last two or three years will flood into LinkedIn ads uh bullish on them, but not like personal experience on them.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:22

Okay, interesting. I wonder if it's uh if the the ICP you're going for on LinkedIn, like the CPM is dictated by the the caliber of business you're working with. I wonder if you're paying like a similar CPM for an enterprise-level CEO versus you know uh home service business, for example.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:39

Aaron Powell, and I think the in here's what I think about LinkedIn ads um and why I think they're valuable is like it'd be like going to a conference and you go into a room and on Facebook you've got like all these people and you can judge them by like interest or like you can do a look like audience is great. But generally speaking it's like the broad audience, and there's just like a room over there with like all your target audience, and it's like, yeah, uh, you can go in there, but it costs like 20% more than just sitting in here. Like everyone would just be like, yeah, no worries. I'll I'll pay the 20% more. The premiums just go and sit with my target audience. And that is like uh my argument for LinkedIn ads, is like, yeah, Meta's cheaper. And I'm not saying it's less effective. Obviously, for D2C or everything else is great. Like for B2B, when you have to get in front of the right people with their right job title, it's like, well, the only platform I can do that is on LinkedIn. And is it slightly more expensive? Yes. Uh and the only issue with that is the budget that has to be available to do that. Like it's almost like there's a barrier to entry with LinkedIn ads where Facebook ads, especially back in the day, um, there's a massive push of people to spend 500 pounds a month. It's like you you might as well post a video on LinkedIn if you're setting 500 pounds on fire. Do you know what I mean? And that will get your money together audience more than the 500 pound will. Um whereas like so there's a bit of a barrier to entry where you need thousands to get in the LinkedIn ads game versus Facebook ads, you can scale up, especially, especially back in the day, incrementally scale up from very, very low budgets. Um, but with the Cost on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:03

I suppose the only thing that matters is the customer acquisition cost. I'd be interested I haven't seen a study of CAC on Meta versus on LinkedIn. But yeah, it's kind of irrelevant if you're if you're paying more to reach a thousand people, but those thousand people are five times the quality.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:20

And where that really starts to kick in is like if your average order value is 250K, like suddenly LinkedIn ads, like probably six spent of our roster, we'll have an average order value of over a quarter of a million pounds a year, like an engineering firm, big contracts. Like suddenly you can start to be like, one minute, I can spend 200k before I get one customer acquired. And it's like that's very different. And that's why the LinkedIn ads market hasn't massively exploded. Because for a lot of companies, especially the people who you know, if I looked at six 60 to 90% of the people who run meta ads probably wouldn't be suited to running LinkedIn ads. Um but I wouldn't be shocked if it they do catch on over the next two to three years.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

Yeah. So you've obviously built loads of followers on LinkedIn organically. If you were to get rid of all of those, you you had none anymore. Uh how do you do things differently if you're starting again today?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:14

That's a really good question. I'd be upset if I lost them all. Um I think I would care less about um the followers on on and and the issue is is like if if I lost my offline reputation too, it'd be a slightly different story. Um what I would do if I was starting again uh from zero and I and it was still me, I would focus LinkedIn purely on just ICP and like I forget impressions completely. In fact, I would maybe even purposely like go with LinkedIn and YouTube, just for me personal preference, because like I still want to build my personal brand, but I'd want to separate what I'm doing on LinkedIn from it. Like I want to be like, no, this is a marketing channel. And if I want to build a personal brand, I'm gonna do that on another channel. And I would do that literally just for like a mental separation. But if I didn't care really about the brand, I would really focus on okay, what's the market I'm going after? I'd reverse engineer who my ICP are, and then I'd literally position myself directly for them. Like it's simple of like what do they want to see, how do they want to be positioned, and I would build my profile to be that way, and then I would start posting content. And I would just focus on my unique experiences with that target audience, working with them, the results I've got, the data I've got, and I would just share like high utility content. High utility content is just like how useful is it after reading it in the next 60 minutes. If it's really, really useful, it's high utility. Um I would do that, and then I would just simply set up outreach campaigns to just add my ICB to my network and start conversations with them. And I would just do that at scale. I would just constantly A B test the campaign and like I'd be off to the races. I think very quickly, even though I wouldn't gain the followers back to the level I have, um, I think I'd be very quickly making a similar amount of revenue to what we're making through my LinkedIn profile.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:47

Nice. Love that. So that's what you would do. What is what do you think is the the big mistake that most people make when they are just starting out?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:54

Right now, the number one thing is like the um I was listening to the pod with Laura on the train down and uh she joked with you that like you you got you post, she forced you to post and then you didn't get many impressions or something, and uh you're like LinkedIn sucks. And um I think that is a mistake that people make is like they're told by these people that like all you need to do is post and you'll go viral, and then you post, you don't go viral, and you're like, well, this doesn't work. Do you know what I mean? It'd be like someone's like, press a button and this happens, and you press it and nothing happens, you're like, well, the button doesn't work anymore. Um when it comes down to like understanding what they do, it's like when you start from that perspective, it's like, okay, I'm just gonna do no offense to the ghostwriters or anything like that, it's like I'll hire a ghostwriter, I'll just get them to post and and one minute the stats. Why are we only doing 10,000 impressions a month? It's like, well, we're doing the completely wrong thing here. So the biggest mistake is just like a fundamental misunderstanding. Like I said, if I could have a button, one button on LinkedIn that'd benefit everyone, it'd be like a button to turn off impressions and likes. And just from a strategic standpoint, everyone would win more on LinkedIn. Because they'd start to think, one minute, actually, this is just purely a marketing channel, it's purely getting in front of my ICP, like ego aside, I'm just gonna share what I think is useful for them, add them to my network, game over, and that'd be it. Um, there's just not another platform that can do it. Like for you, let's say you're targeting agency owners, like even for this pod, for example, like you could literally set up tonight and be like, I'm just gonna post content for agency owners, and then just gonna go on LinkedIn and like even free tools, if you want to do it manually, you could go on sales now, it's not free, actually, it's like 80 pounds a month. Um, I could build a list of agency owners and just be like, I'm just gonna add them to my network, post content for them, and just do that again and again and again. It's like like I said, if any other platform added the connection feature, like people would pay thousands every month. If I could add people, I don't do Instagram, I was building an Instagram following and I could add connections like to follow me, like I'd pay probably 10k a month, but LinkedIn is just free. And and like no one talks about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:47

Yeah, interesting. You're going on the basis that you've already got some kind of uh uh something to talk about. You you've got a business, you've got you've got all this. If you didn't have that, and there'll be lots of people that are watching this thinking, I just don't know what to talk about. I don't think I have got a unique mindset on anything. I don't maybe maybe they're not deep enough into business to be able to do that. Like, where does someone start to like come up with ideas and and and find a voice?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:15

Um my initial thought was get a job when you say yeah. But I think that's um it's unfair. Um it's like a one thing to say. I think that's true. You know, I'm I'm a big fan of Daniel Parisi. Uh I got to have dinner with him in Belfast a few years ago, and like one thing he talked about constantly when we were getting dinner is like the impact that had he had by just like getting a job when he was like 21 and working for something else. I think he calls it like an entrepreneurial internship or something like that. And his idea is you should go and work at a small company where you have one-to-one contact with the founder or CEO and just sit there and learn and get your opinions. I had that at 19. I went to work at a personal branding agency. I got one-to-one contact with the CEO. I'm now good friends with him afterwards. Uh in the early days when we were setting up, I would like constantly jump on calls with him. He showed me what our CRM was afterwards. Um and even since then, like I said, like I'll still talk to people 10 steps ahead of me. I think that like if you don't have an opinion, like just go and go and do things and just like develop that. Like I would like, even for our stage, like we're a team of 15, if you come and work in our Manchester office, you would like sit across the table from me. You'll see exactly how I operate, the systems we use, how we sign clients. You'd hear Morgan on sales calls, like you would very quickly get a deep understanding of how an agency runs. Um and that's what I would do. Is like if you people like, I hate this push to um start businesses for everyone. I think it's a I think entrepreneurship is amazing, it's changed my life. Um, but generally speaking, you should probably like do one to two years and then do it. Do you know what I mean? Like start the business when you like have a general understanding of how things are going and just like do 12 months, just commit to it. Like, I'm just gonna get a job for someone who's doing what I want to do, just spend 12 months learning. And I'd say this as well. One of my biggest regrets is not spending more time in a job before I started the business. I could have skipped the first two years of the business were an absolute shit show, like just like terrible. I had no idea what we were doing. We made so many like stupid mistakes, and we always joke that like if I had my knowledge now and I could just go back two years ago, like we would be like 10x ahead. And it's like the only way I could have got that is going like and working in the agency. You had Carrie Rose on the podcast. Carrie Rose was um sitting in Brandon 3 the agency with Ken Wright for years before she started Rise at Seven. Mitch Clayton and Ash, who run Fload, um, who were also on the podcast, like they worked in a sales team in Manchester for like five years before they started Floyd. Like, if you look at anyone's success, you had rapid success, it wasn't because they randomly started an agency and just exploded. They just like learned from good people and then and then built off the back of that. And there's unique cases. Stephen Bartlett, who was 18, started social tree and exploded. Dom as well, you know. There's unique cases like that, but like 95% of people, like I think you have to you realize that like you're probably not that unique edge case and like just go and get a job, learn from someone, and then go on the entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:57

That's great advice, man. I completely agree with that. Yeah. I completely agree with that. And uh someone I preach about all the time. It's like that that the business started when you were in that experience having that job. Yeah, it started.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:07

I just learned everything. I learned how to onboard someone, how to have a sales. Like it's impossible. And like I said, I wish I would have done if I would have done three to four years, I would have just like it, I wouldn't have put me behind in life because I would have leapfrogged over the first year in business, the the two years of lessons. And it's like, and you can't when you first start a business, you can't get access to the John McGregor's, the Stephen Kemerites of the world. I got access to them two years in, three years in, when you start to uh be a caliber person in the agency that they're willing to talk to and have a conversation with. And the only way you can get access to that level of people is just working for them originally, um, which I think is just so underrated.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:42

Yeah, nice. What's the long-term vision? What are you working towards? Are you building to exit or what's the one?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:47

Um good question. Um, my like uh top-level goal is to like generationally change the the tax back in my family are in. Uh like I grew up working class. Uh, I think my mum did absolutely everything she could to like give us a chance to earn a living. And I want to like do the 10x that for like my kids. Like the experiences that I have been able to have of like a job flying business class, being in a lounge at an airport, not caring about getting an Uber. Like these are things that I couldn't do when I was a kid. And like that'll never be a problem for my kids. Like generational wealth change is like the my number one top-level goal. Um, from an agency perspective, we want to take over Manchester. Like, I want to be the number one B2B agency in Manchester and then the north of England. I don't care about London. Full London to the side. Um, but that that's what I want. And I want everyone who touches our company to have our name of like golders on their CV. There's this social chain effect. You know, they have a PayPal mafia. And we joke in Manchester that there's like a the social chain mafia. So like if you look at the people who came from social chain, social chain is like this golden fucking letters on their CV that changed their lives. Ash Jones started great influence. Don McGregor now runs the co-founder social chain, but now runs Freeless Adventures, Nick Crompton went to work with Jake Paul in the US, Katie Leeson became the CEO of Relentless Group. Um probably a million more, I don't even know. George Mack came from social chain, now obviously Vial on Twitter, run the note of some agency. I don't know if he stepped away actually. Uh, multiply. There's like it is like a social chain mafia. And all of them have this weird thing coming into the CV of social chain. And I want everyone who touches our agency, like their careers to absolutely skyrocket because they came into it. And there's two really simple things we can do that is like we can be successful and we can be well known. Uh, and that's like the next five years to be the most well-known agency in the north of England, and also the best B2B agency in the North of England as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:25

Nice man. What are the practical steps you're going to take in order to get there?

SPEAKER_04 1:16:28

Uh a lot of work. Uh, I posted on LinkedIn this morning that like on uh online it's like uh entrepreneurship is all like Lamborghinis, gold watchers, and mojitos, and like my life is like last night I got in at like 7.15, went to the gym for like 30 minutes, like went to bed, and I was like, might be the most mundane like day you'd ever see. Um and that's the reality. So a lot of like long, um, monotonous days, um which I enjoy, um, but that's the reality. Um and really pushing on the on the brand side, um, we're very, very passionate about being well known. I think it's a really underrated objective to have as an agency. Um, where we're doing in-person events in Manchester, um, and you know, getting well known, and obviously just living for clients. AI is a massive advantage for us. We have an advantage of being young, agile. Um, and I believe that we're gonna like other than anyone else at our stage is embracing innovation and like eat the the marketing networks alive. There's never been a better time to run a small marketing agency um because everyone above you is dying and not willing to admit it.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:25

Agree. Do you write your own content then? So you are you also write.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:30

Yeah, I I right now I do. Um Philippa helps me, our marketing coordinator. For a time, like there was like three months of this year, I didn't write one piece. Uh now I'm like raw dogging it on the way to work. Um which I think is like the underrated lesson as well, is like you everyone thinks everyone has like a secret system for doing things. Like I wrote my LinkedIn Plus this morning on the train on my phone. Yesterday I wrote it walking to the office. Like it's like um you always think someone's got it's like random silver bullet, and the silver bullet is that there's no silver bullet.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:58

Nice. I've got some rapid fire questions for that. Classic podcast. Um one brand that you'd love to work with, or one creator that you'd love to work with that you haven't yet.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:07

Oh God, really good question. Um one brand I'd like to work with.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:14

I don't want to be like generic. I'd love to work with like Flight Story or a Stephen Butler company. Uh just because he was a massive inspiration from the start. Um, I just think that's like a really we could probably do good work for them. Um and something that like for me would be like a box checked, not to be like a generic Englishman and and and rim Stevens else. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:34

Um one book that every agency owner should read.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:38

One book that every agency owner should read. It's a really good question. Um Do you know what I think sometimes is like I read a I I used to read a lot of business books. Uh I probably read all of them. Uh that you could like the generics. And I think that like one of the biggest underrated things I've done recently is start reading um non-business books. And the reason I say that is as a business owner, it's very easy to think that like all you need to do is like just read more and consume more. And I think like an underrated thing that you benefit from an agency owner is um to actually just like read like a fiction book or a story that's unrelated to business and like just take 30 minutes at night to like be away from it and completely disconnect that's not watching Netflix. Um American Kingpin is a book about uh Russ Olbrook who built the Silk Road. Um and I think that's an incredible book that I would like genuinely recommend where like I think a business owner would um enjoy it because uh it's a story of someone building an illegal business, um, but also it's like an amazing storyline. I think a lot of entrepreneurs would benefit more from just like taking 50 minutes to read a fiction book at night than read like Daniel Priest's 24 assets and start to think about like how you need IP. Yeah, and then get out of bed and quickly jump down. Oh, I just need to leave. I mean, it's at night. Like the best thing you can do is just decompress. Like you don't you don't need to learn anymore. You've done it all day.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:53

Like, I feel that. Um every agency owner should, or sorry, one LinkedIn account every agency owner should follow.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:01

Now Rackley's a good one to start with. Um another one I would follow. I think um who I'd study, I'd study Stephen Bartlett. I think he's always head of the trends. I think he was posting viral LinkedIn content when it was right to post survival. I think now he's switched. I think that one's to study, um, one to learn from if you're interested in LinkedIn. Ash Jones is fantastic, doesn't post often, but like really unique perspectives. Um, and that's I would go with. I wouldn't touch anyone. This is an underrated lesson, not to affect no offense, anyone who has hundreds of thousands of followers. Uh, I wouldn't touch anyone who has hundreds of thousands of followers because they are gaming the system, not trying to share unique insights. And there's nothing wrong with that. Um, but there's a different game to play where like Ash Jones has maybe 60,000 followers and he posts when he has a unique insight that he wants to share on LinkedIn or personal belling that he's learned. If I have 200,000 followers, I have a content schedule where I'm cranking out because I need to grow my account, because that's the game. Um so there's nothing wrong with that. You can be inspired by it. Uh, if I was an entrepreneur, I would avoid that um just because I don't think you'd get as much useful information out of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:00

Nice. You kind of just answered my last question. Um you might have a different one, and that was what one thing that people should stop doing on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:07

More things should be stood. Um, posting for impressions, um, and thinking it's a content platform. Like content is one factor. Social media is one factor of LinkedIn, but it is naturally a networking platform, it's a roller deck to the people you know, um, and it's the biggest open database of working people, and that's what you should be utilising it for.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:26

Nice.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:28

Awesome. Thanks for doing this. I'm really excited.