V.O. Guy

Hello and thanks for coming along too. And we have an office doc. The Digital Agency podcast where we talk to agency owner directors. And learn more about. What makes them tick from the things that make them similar to the things they’d rather have known sooner where they’ve had success? And where they’ve learned some hard lessons. All will be revealed. With your host, Chris Simmance, the agency coach, and he’ll be talking to a different, awesome agency person. In each episode, asking them four questions and seeing where the conversation takes us over the next 25 minutes. OK, so let us begin over to you.

Chris Simmance (Host)

Thanks, voice-over guy. And on the podcast today, we’ve got Charlie MD at Minty Digital. How are you doing, Charlie?

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Hey, yeah, I’m not bad, thanks. How about you?

Chris Simmance (Host)

Alright, thank you. I’m not too bad at all. It’s been a long week already, and we’re only at Wednesday. I think it’s probably the same for you running an agency.

So first of, give us a plug. Tell us what Minty Digital does. What makes you special? Just in case there’s a client listening?

Charlie Clark (Guest)

OK, so, yeah, we’re Minty Digital. We’re a marketing agency based in Barcelona. We specialize in technical SEO, content marketing, and digital PR, and we work across both English and Spanish-speaking languages.

Chris Simmance (Host)

So tell me, you’re definitely not Spanish, and you’re British from Britain. Why do you have an agency in Barcelona? How did that come about?

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Yeah, well, it was a bit of a running joke a few years after we got started. Because, you know, two years in, we were ranked the number one SEO agency in Spain. And I could barely speak any Spanish, so that was a bit of a running joke around the office. But I moved here five years ago on a whim. My cousin was here and he moved three months before. And I’d just gone freelance in the industry myself, chasing clients from Upwork and restaurants, anywhere I could. And he said, “Why don’t you come give Barcelona a shot?” So I jumped on a plane the next week, planning to stay for a couple of months to build up the business. And I ended up in a coworking space called Atico, based in the city center, and from there I managed to pick up around three to four clients within the first two months. And we’ve grown to almost 15 people now. It’s been slow but steady. We haven’t grown as fast as some of our agencies, but I’m happy with how things are, and I’m pretty settled here.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Knowing you as I do, I know that you know the speed of hiring is not as important necessarily as the quality of the people and making sure that those clients match your areas of expertise, and you’ve worked towards a few niches as well, haven’t you?

Charlie Clark (Guest):

Yeah, that’s right. With staffing, we have deliberately hired slower, and it has worked well in industries notorious for high staff turnover. We’ve been really fortunate, and touch wood, we haven’t had anyone leave since we’ve started the company, which is a big achievement. I’m not ignorant enough to think that that’s never going to happen in the future, but coming up to five years, I’m pretty happy with it. We specialize in four main niches: SaaS, travel and leisure, finance, and e-commerce businesses. These niches are mainly because Barcelona is a big tech hub, and these four areas are a natural crossover for us to deliver our work in both English and Spanish-speaking languages.

Chris Simmance (Host):

OK, and I guess some of that’s because of location, and some of that’s because you’re just good at it and you can meet those deliverables as well, I think.

Charlie Clark (Guest):

Yeah, exactly. A lot of these niches, especially SaaS and travel and leisure, are companies based here that work in both English and Spanish-speaking languages, so it’s quite a natural crossover for us.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Fit, isn’t it? So, in the last five or so years, what would you say has been one of the biggest successes in the agency?

Charlie Clark (Guest):

I think, besides the team culture, the biggest success is our retention of both staff and clients. We’re never firefighting as an agency, and we’re never over-promising to our clients. We’re clear on what we can deliver, and if a client comes to us and they’re not the right fit, we’ve been very good at turning them away in the last three years. But in the last three years that you know, we’ve been very good at turning people away. If we think, there’s no opportunities for them

Chris Simmance (Host)

Yeah, that’s a hard thing to do, isn’t it? It was a hard thing to do.

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Yeah, it was a hard thing to do, and to be honest, it was my team that really got me into it. Definitely for the first two years, especially when there was just one or two of us, I would try and take on as much as I could. To be honest, I would take on anything that came in, and I’d just try to do what we could. We didn’t just offer the services we do now then as well. We used to try and offer a bit of everything, as you do when you start out doing anything.

Chris Simmance (Host)

You want it, you’ve got it.

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Exactly. Chatbots, email marketing, website development, yeah. And it wasn’t sustainable. I quickly learned in the first few months to a year that we needed to specialize. Once we did, we became a lot more aware and had a better understanding of what we could deliver for our customers and what we couldn’t do. That allowed us to pick our clients more sensibly.

Chris Simmance (Host)

And I guess one of the knock-on impacts of doing what you’ve done is that you’re hiring specialists in a few areas as opposed to having to know a lot about a lot of areas in order to get the right people. So it’s probably helped with the hiring as well.

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Exactly, yeah. And also, from contacts. For example, one of our industries is travel and leisure. We had someone approach us who is now on our PR team who worked at TripAdvisor. They saw that a lot of our clients were in the travel industry, and it naturally attracts the right people. I think before you go into these niches and before you specialize, you can’t see past that and you can’t see how that’s going to happen. But once you find your direction and find your niche, then I think naturally you start attracting the right clients and the right staff.

Chris Simmance (Host)

Yeah, absolutely. And so in a sense, big success has been the staff retention, and a lot of that is connected to the niching. But also being able to say no. If you could go back in time and speak to a younger version of yourself, what advice would you give yourself when it came to getting Minty off the ground?

Charlie Clark (Guest)

I’ve already talked about specializing, so I won’t go there. A lot of people say the same thing as well. I think the best advice I would give myself is to get out of my own way, which is a really difficult thing to do. That’s not just from the beginning, offering eight different services, and I was doing six of them. We only had a couple of people doing SEO. Then you realize, OK, that’s actually taking up my time from admin, team development, staff development, all of those kinds of things. So, you need to make sure your team is delivering and you’re the one coaching and pushing people along. Even at the stage we’re at now, I’m actively trying to cut out irrelevant meetings and scrums. I used to lead calls, but we were having meetings just to have meetings. Now, I’m trying to minimize that. I talk to my direct contacts at the company, and they relay the information to their team, so there’s no crossover. You don’t want to manage by saying one thing to one member of the team and then have someone else give conflicting direction or updates during a team scrum on Monday.

Chris Simmance (Host)

So the advice would be to get out of your own way sooner, but knowing when to do that is obviously hard because it’s your baby from day one. What made you think that you needed to learn how to do this? Is there something that changed or happened?

Charlie Clark (Guest)

There’s nothing in particular that made me realize it, but I started realizing it when I would be on meetings sometimes between the sales manager and a client, and I would be sitting on the call but not actually involved in the campaign. Then I would end up feeling silly because I wasn’t involved in the day-to-day work on the campaigns. I could be spending my time on anything from bringing in new business to developing internal processes or helping the team with perks. I think it took me to the point where I was always too busy, and then I realized I was too busy because I was getting in my own way and getting involved in things that I shouldn’t be involved in. So, I naturally started taking a step back, but also making sure I’m still active and available for the team and clients whenever they need me.

Chris Simmance (Host)

Is there anything over the years that you have done or has happened within the agency that was not necessarily a mistake, but it was set up and it was in place, and then you realized it was a “bloody blinder” and you decided to keep doing it? Or was there a moment when you said “Wow, we’ve really hit the nail on the head. Let’s crack on with this”?

Charlie Clark (Guest)

I think most recently, as we’ve started to streamline our services, that has definitely been something where we’ve made progress. For example, in SEO, campaigns are naturally nuanced, and each customer has different needs and services. However, I’m a strong believer that everything can be streamlined. As we’re trying to grow the agency while also maintaining the quality of our work and our integrity, we’ve had to find a way to do that. I wouldn’t call it a “package,” but we’re looking to package the first stages of our campaigns, whatever that may be. This has made everything much easier, from gathering client requirements to offering and delivering our services. Everyone knows what they’re doing from point A to point B, and procedures are followed, but people can also implement their own knowledge along the way. Overall, putting in clear systems and processes has been a big help for us.

Chris Simmance (Host)

Yeah, I think as you grow, those sorts of things become necessary. It’s also easier to trust your team to deliver the product or package when it’s clear what the client is being given and the client’s expectations are set. The team knows what they have to do, and I guess that’s something that wouldn’t be possible if you were still doing things like chatbots and Facebook marketing.

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Oh, yeah, it would be an absolute nightmare. I think it goes back to the size of the agency as well. We’re not a big 50- or 100-person agency, and if you’re a team of five and you offer ten services, you can’t be a specialist in all of them. And if you have one person for each service – one for SEO, one for PPC, one for Facebook – and then one of them gets sick or leaves, you have no one to replace or deliver that service. I think by knowing what you’re good at, sticking to it, developing the systems and processes around what you deliver, and having everyone do the same thing, you always have that support, no matter what area the team is working on any given week.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Totally agree. Now, if someone has been listening to this podcast and they’ve just started running an agency or are thinking of starting one, and they came to you and knocked on your door in Barcelona and asked for a piece of advice, what would you give them?

Charlie Clark (Guest):

I’d say specialization would be a big one for us. Definitely specialize in what you’re doing, but don’t just jump into a service. There are so many different marketing channels available at the moment, so choose the right one with longevity. You can’t always predict that, but definitely specialize in it.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Hey, I’m still doing my space marketing. That’s the thing, right?

Charlie Clark (Guest):

Yes, exactly. For example, you can specialize in paid social, PPC, or SEO, but you also want to have the option to pivot in the future if you need to. For example, if Google shut down tomorrow, you could start looking into Amazon SEO or TikTok SEO, which is probably more relevant now. You always want to give yourself a Plan B.

Charlie Clark (Guest):

And even drill down into one niche, such as finance, building, or home improvements. That’s what I’d offer as my piece of advice.

Chris Simmance (Host):

And that would be great advice because often what happens with agency leaders is they start an agency and say yes to everything, take on anything, and end up with a catch-all service that is hard to manage. But if you go into it knowing, “E-commerce for fashion is my thing, that’s what I know I’m great at, so that’s what I’m going to nail,” and build your agency around that, it’s great advice.

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, even from our side, a lot of what we do, the link building and PR side of things, as well, when you just work on these niches, you start developing relationships with the journalists in that industry, the website owners of that industry, and everything naturally links together, and it’s kind of like compound interest over time, and you end up building your own little specialty and network in this niche. And yeah, I think that’s where the true value is going to lie for business owners moving forward. And you know, there are so many agencies popping up now that are just general agencies, and I see them all the time. The amount of people who email me every single day trying to sell me backlinks or something along those lines is almost completely goes over my head. Now, you really need to be able to specialize and have your USP, I think, in order to make a mark.

Chris Simmance (Host)

Totally agree, and it’s great advice to end the episode on. So thank you very much for that specific piece of advice, and also, thanks very much for being on the podcast, Charlie.

Charlie Clark (Guest)

Thanks a lot for having me, Chris.

Chris Simmance (Host)

No problem at all, and on the next episode, we’ll have a different agency leader to hear everything about their agency and the things they learned along the way. So thanks for listening.