VO Guy:
Hello, and thanks for coming along to And We Have an Office Dog, 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. Okay, so let us begin. Over to you, Chris.
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Thanks, voice over guy. And today on the podcast, we’ve got Eve from Parrot PR and Marketing. Hi, Eve.
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Hi. How you doing?
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All right, thank you very much. Thanks for coming along. First thing I’m going to ask you is, tell us all about Parrot PR and Marketing. What is it you do? What do you do best? Give us a plug, just in case a potential client’s listening.
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Yeah, brilliant. Thanks, Chris. Parrot PR and Marketing is nearly five years old. I founded it five years ago. I wanted to leave the corporate world of a 9:00 to 5:00 job and just have my own agency, really. So we do everything that you can imagine that falls within the marketing and PR mix, so from copyrighting and distributing press releases, SEO and website work, social media management, you name it, we basically cover it. And act really as an outsourced marketing and PR for either larger teams or businesses that just don’t have any marketing or PR at all.
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Okay. So five years you’ve been going?
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Yes, nearly five years. This year is our five year anniversary, yes.
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A long five years or a quick five years?
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A bit of both really. In a way, I can’t ever imagine working for anyone else and working for another company, but in another way, it’s gone in a flash, because I’m just constantly busy and doing lots really.
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Yeah. For anyone who understands physics of relativity, when you’re going at the speed of light, things typically slow down around you or seem to slow down around you. I think that’s how it works. So, as with every podcast, I’ve got four questions for you, and we’ll see where the conversation takes us. The first question is, what do you think has been one of the biggest successes over the last five years of running the agency?
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Wow. I’m going say the biggest success, actually, Chris, is just being here. So still being here, still having survived. Five years of business is a really up and downy world. We’ve obviously gone through a pandemic. Business had started prior to that, of course, but just actually being here, surviving, growing as a business and continuing to grow and be successful, I think, is probably the biggest achievement. So, just being here.
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I think longevity is a big sign of success for an agency, and putting up with an awful lot is part of that. There’s the ups and downs across and you’ve just gone through… Your agency is still here after two years of a pandemic, so big success there.
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I think so. I think you have peaks and troughs, and I think consistency pays off in the world. So I think, if you’re still here in five years, and your reputation is still intact, and people are still wanting to work with you, you’re attracting new clients, then I guess you’re doing something good.
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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think … Oh, definitely hear your nextdoor neighbors. Shame there’s no dog.
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They didn’t get the memo. They didn’t get the memo. The cat might make an appearance soon.
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We did talk about that just before the recording. You do not have an office dog but you have an office cat. What’s the cat’s name?
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Paddy. And on Instagram, Paddy Pawson. If I can just give him a little [inaudible 00:03:57].
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There you go. Oh God, I did not authorize two plugs in one recording. Unbelievable. So if you could go back five years to the date that you founded the agency, and you talked to your younger, more spritely self and you had one piece of advice that you could offer yourself, what piece of advice might that be?
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Okay so, the answer I should probably give is plan more, because I really didn’t put too much thought or planning into setting up the agency. It was, “Oh, I want to do something myself, there’s an opportunity,” and I just hit the ground running. And I guess I should practice what I preach. I am constantly telling clients we should plan for what we’re going to execute. But actually the real answer I want to give, Chris, is just don’t work so flipping hard. Of course, you’ve got to work hard to establish a business, it’s not going to be a breeze, but I think I’ve worked exceptionally hard and probably a few too many hours on the odd occasion. So sometimes I would say find that real balance between … Work-life balance, we talk about it all the time. But that’s probably something I should have told myself a little earlier and bring other people to the party earlier on.
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So do you think though that if you did go back in time and speak to the younger Eve, would younger Eve listen to that advice or not?
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No. Anyone that knows me, Chris, know I wouldn’t have listened. That’s a reality. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
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It’s kind of like that thing where you put post-it notes around the house telling you to do stuff. My wife is always putting a post-it note on my coffee machine on a Monday morning to remind me that I’m walking the dogs without her for the day.
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Brilliant. I love that.
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And if its not there, I don’t do it and I don’t know to do it. But if I was to go back in time and remind myself, “Chris, tomorrow you’ve got to do this,” I just wouldn’t listen to myself. Its hard to do that because you’ve got so many things going on and you’re trying to set up an agency, and day one through to 18 months in, it’s all go, isn’t it?
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It really is, yeah.
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And there’s that niggling worry that if you don’t work on your sales and you don’t work on your marketing, and you don’t work on the deliverables, and you’re not working across all of theses things, then you might fail. So you might not have listened to yourself, quite rightly I suspect.
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Yeah, sometimes you just need an accountability partner for things like that. It’s very rare that we listen to ourselves.
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Exactly. So one of the things that I do with agencies is agency mastermind sessions, where we all meet, we all talk about everyone’s problems which seem significant to an individual but every seems to be having similar problems or one’s that they’ve solved in the past. We actually do it in the metaverse. So everyone has their oculus quest and we all talk to each other in the metaverse, which means we can all physically meet as possible. But the cool thing about that is you can share accountability and problems and things. And I think at a certain point in running an agency, you start to realize, “I’m not the only one going through some of this stuff, and there are other ways of doing things and I can’t necessarily get it right every time.” And I think having a bit of an accountability partner, as you say, is quite important, isn’t it?
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Yeah. Definitely. If someone else is in the same shoes that you can bounce ideas off is never a bad thing. And as they say, a problem shared is a problem halved.
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Indeed, it is, yeah. It doesn’t solve the problem, but you definitely feel better about it.
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You do, for sure.
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So if you could think back to something that you either regret or wish you’d done sooner over the years, what might that be?
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Okay. So as a person, I have this idea that I should never regret anything, because I really believe you do everything at the right time for the right reasons and because you believe that’s the right thing to do. But of course we can all look back and think, “Oh, I wish I had done that.” As we said earlier, hindsight is a wonderful thing. So I guess bring in more people to the party. And by that, I mean bringing more parrots to the flock would actually have been-
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I love that, parrots to the flock.
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You don’t even want to know what a group of parrots is called, Chris. It’s a pandemonium.
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Is it?
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It absolutely is, yeah. Just to take it further. But I think earlier on, I think it was very much me trying to do everything. And you can then become the business, which isn’t always a good thing, because as the business grows, of course, more people have to be involved in the agency and the infrastructure, otherwise, it always becomes Eve, for example. So I think recruiting staff earlier on would have been something that I wish I’d have done, instead, I was relying more working on freelance partners, people that I knew or have known a very long time in the industry or had worked with them in previous roles, or had been to university with them so that we shared similar journeys really.
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But yeah, I really wish I probably recruited staff a little bit earlier, and just not have the fear factor. Because recruiting your first member of staff is probably the scariest thing that you can do, because all of a sudden, it’s not just you, you’ve got to figure out, you’ve got to make sure that somebody else is happy, you’ve got to make sure you cover someone else’s bills. It’s actually a really big step to take, but then once you do it once, it’s just like you just hired all the time, it’s like it’s no big deal. But the first one’s the most difficult one, but the most rewarding and most important one as well. So I guess I’d hired earlier.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, hiring the right people is key, because, like you say, you start off with your agency being the finance person, the marketing person, the sales person, the people person, the operations person, the everything, and that’s not sustainable in the long-term, unless you just want to be a consultant all by yourself. But if you want to deliver agency deliverables at agency scale, you can’t do that, because you’ll forget to file your tax return or something silly, whilst also not pressing send on an email to a client or something along those lines, and it causes you some problems in the long run.
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But hiring, I remember my first hire, and it is scary, like you say, because you’re immediately in a sense accountable for someone’s mortgage or rent and their food and things like that, and obviously they’re just not getting it for free, they are doing a good job of working hard, but crikey, knowing that if you screw up the whole business, that one person, to start off with, they’ll have the same problems, but a different level. They could have to move and all those sorts of things. It’s quite bad, isn’t it?
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It is, yeah. It’s a bit of pressure, but I think sometimes it motivates you to do more as well actually, because you have to, to make things work, and you don’t want to let people dow that have take the jump and entrusted in you to begin with.
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Absolutely. So is there something that you learned the hard way though that set you up for future success? Is there something you don’t regret learning or don’t regret doing, but it’s a hard lesson that you go, “Do you know what, now I know there’s a little bit of a secret source”?
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Not necessarily a hard lesson. I guess when I was starting out, maybe I was a bit too trusting in people, people that I worked with, people that you think perhaps have got your best interest at heart. I think sometimes you always expect people to have the same agenda as you, and expect to operate the same as you, and that’s not always the case. So I think you get a bit more business acumen as you go through growing a business, and that’s natural, so.
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Yeah. Fair enough. So if there’s an agency leader, agency owner who’s just starting out, or someone who’s thinking about starting their own agency is listening to this podcast now, is there one piece of advice you think you’d give them that might help them set themselves up?
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Have the confidence to go for it, because so many people say, “I would love to do what you’re doing. I thought about setting up an agency, I wanted to go out on my own,” and thinking about something doesn’t make it happen. You’ve got to take action, you’ve got to have the confidence and belief in yourself to do it. So, for me, it would really be quite simply just go for it, and actually, you’ll make it happen. Anything is achievable if you put your mind to it and you have the motivation and you’re prepared to work hard. Success won’t come to you on a plate, that’s very rare. You have to work for it. But it will pay off in the long run. So I would say, just have the confidence, take the leap, speak to lots of other people. People are always happy to help, give advice.
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I had lots of help when I set up that I’m eternally grateful for with things such as contractual things, which that’s not something that you just learn at school. And all of a sudden you’re in the big, bad world and you’ve got to ditch out contracts, and you’ve got to stick to them. So yeah, have the confidence to go for it, speak to other people, like-minded people and you’ll be amazed at how much free advice is out there to help you.
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Yeah, spot on. I think that there’s an awful lot of value in that. And, I mean, there’s a good reason why everyone doesn’t run a business, it is hard, it takes a lot of time, it does take an awful lot of personal life away, especially at the start, but taking the leap and going for it is something … If you take a leap and go for it and you fail … I had a recording a couple of days ago with Gareth Hoyle from Marketing Signals, and he said that if you want to interview for a role at his place and it said that you run your own business for a couple of months and it failed, he’d be more interested in hiring you than someone who had just worked elsewhere and was looking for another job, because at least you tried. It shows that there’s something there, a little something that shows you got a bit of drive and a bit of entrepreneurism.
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Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with him more actually. It just shows you’ve got a bit of bite, and you’re not scared to take risks. And sometimes, you have to take risks in business, otherwise, nothing happens.
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Yeah. And a part of that is those sleepless nights when you’re wondering whether that contract’s going come through or that client’s actually going to decide to leave, or that sort of thing. But then there’s the big wins, where you get to five years, for example, and you’re popping champagne for your party and your pandemonium turn up and everyone has a great time. At least you can have your pandemonium party in person this year. Oh, look at that [crosstalk 00:14:12].
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Yeah, exactly. I’m looking forward to that. Yeah, I’m looking forward to just face-to-face contact. It’s quite a novelty, isn’t it, these days?
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It feels like it. It certainly does. So in the five years that you’ve been going, is there something that’s been the most powerful growth tool that you’ve used that’s helped you get more business in, or what’s the thing that you’ve done best?
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Social media, I’m going to say actually, Chris. And you probably get this answer a lot, because it’s a really obvious answer, but social media is free to execute. It’s something that you can do yourself or you can work with an agency to do, and it’s something that has an immediate impact. It’s not something… You don’t write a press release, distribute it, sit and wait for coverage, you really can make a difference quite quickly. And I think we all too often forget, LinkedIn is obviously a great B-to-B to all, and it’s been very good to me. And I think we forget how many LinkedIn lurkers there are that they might not be engaging with your content, but guess what, they’re all looking at what you’re doing. And you get messages from people and you think, “I didn’t even know you existed. I didn’t even know you had seen my content.” So I think just being present and consistent on social media and just showing up, I think is probably really key. So that’s something that’s definitely been a bit of a gray tack for me, if you like.
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Yeah. Exactly. It’s spot on. I think obviously there’s reach problems with social at certain times, but LinkedIn is quite good from that … What did you just call it? LinkedIn lurker. There’s lots of people on there who do quite literally just scroll through for an hour a day, like a couple of things and do a few bits, but they’re not going to get in touch straight away. But then they’ve got a need one day and they think, “Oh, I remember that person.” There’s the cat.
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Yes. And he’s come to play.
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Sorry everybody, you can’t see the cat, but the cat did just show up.
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[crosstalk 00:16:08] as well.
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And is there one thing conversely that over the last five years you’ve realized, “That didn’t quite work for us, and if I’d realized it wasn’t going to work, I wouldn’t have put as much effort into it”?
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That’s a great question, Chris. But I honestly don’t think I can think of anything that’s really not worked. I feel like most things that we’ve done have success, whether it’s been getting more in the industry, whether it’s been going to events. Yeah, I genuinely, honestly, can’t think of anything to say hasn’t really worked.
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That’s great.
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But it’s early days. We have this conversation in another five years and I might have a list as long as your arm, who knows?
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Who knows? I mean, well, if we had this conversation in five years time, I suspect it might well be a similar kind of answer, to be honest. Based on what you said, I think the way that you conduct yourself with the agency and the way that you bring business in right now seems to work quite well, unless LinkedIn disappears off the face of the earth tomorrow, which I bloody hope it doesn’t. It’s annoying as hell, but it is very good.
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Yeah. [inaudible 00:17:16] too.
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As long as it doesn’t disappear off the face of the earth, then hopefully you’ll be fine.
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Yeah, I hope so. Fingers crossed. Hopefully the future’s bright.
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I’m sure it is. So thank you very much, Eve, for coming on, on the podcast. Really, really good to have you.
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Yeah, and great to speak to you. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Chris.
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No problem at all. So thanks again, and enjoy listening to the next podcast where we speak to another awesome digital agency owner who’s going to tell us all about their stories, and hopefully, they’ll have a dog rather than a cat this time.