VO Guy:

Hello! 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 success, and where they’ve learned some hard lessons. All will be revealed with your host, Chris Simmance, the agency coach. 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, voiceover guy. On the podcast today, we’ve got Alan, from Growth Gorilla. How you doing?

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Hey, Chris. I’m doing great. Thanks for having me and-

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No trouble at all.

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… looking forward to the conversation.

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Lovely to have you on, mate. First and foremost, like every single podcast that we do, this is your perfect opportunity to give anyone who maybe, wants a job from you in the future, or anyone who might be listening, who could be a potential client, the pitch. What is the agency? How do you do it, and how awesome are you at it?

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Cool. Yeah, the quick plug. Growth Gorilla, we do content promotion and link-building for B2B SaaS companies. Essentially, we act as a fractional content promotion team for all those SaaS software companies that are publishing a lot of quality content, but don’t have the time or resources to actually promote that content, and build the back links to it, to make it rank for the main target keywords.

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Brilliant. So actually, within the digital marketing sector, it’s quite niched down, in terms of all of the things that people do in digital marketing, I think. Probably lends itself to doing quite well, I guess. Because, my-

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Yeah. We’ve always been trying to niche down, both into a specific niche, so target clients, but also as a specific service that we do. We only do one thing and we only do it for one type of client.

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Which, is the perfect way of getting excellent at it, I guess.

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Yeah, exactly. We do have a whole playbook and a whole set of processes that we mainly do for these types of clients.

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That’s wonderful. How long’s the agency been going for?

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The agency started in 2018. In the beginning, we weren’t super focused as we are now, and a lot of things have changed. But yes, it’s been going since 2018. In the beginning, it was just me and one freelance guy, now it’s me and a team of 10 people. And we have about 10 to 15 clients at any given month. We always try to keep it small, to keep the quality high. Yeah, that’s it.

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That’s really good. That’s some good growth over a relatively short period of time. The first question I’ve got for you then, I guess, is what’s been one of the biggest successes that you’ve seen in the time you’ve been running the agency?

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Yeah. I would say, to keep the flow going from the previous question, I would think the niche-ing down and the fact that we really found a positioning that’s been working. It’s been a very nice thing for us, especially during the past two years with the pandemic and everything that’s going on. SaaS, software has been really growing quite a lot, because more and more people have started working from home. And so, we’ve seen a crazy growth. The past two years have been the best two years ever for us, paradoxically, which is-

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Yeah, yeah.

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… cool for us. Unfortunately, not very cool for some other kind of industries. But yeah, we’ve seen a lot of growth from the positioning.

The second thing I would say, we worked a lot on our sales process. We now do have a very defined sales process that kind of allows me to only work with the best clients, that we can serve the better, as well. So I would say, these are the main things for us.

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To the last point there, about the sales process, I think there’s something that lots of agencies forget about, in that, a lead will come in and you’ll just try and sell to them, because you want to take the money and you want to have the client. And there’s vanity metrics like, 50 clients and things, but in reality, it’s better to say no, if they aren’t a fit.

And if you think, “I can help you for the next two months, but in month three, four, five, six, it’s going to be hard, because you’re not a fit for us. So, we’ll then end up not liking each other and you won’t tell people how good we are.” One of the hardest things, as you know, because the money comes in, the money goes out, and you see it, the last thing you want to do is say no to the wrong person, but you do need to make sure you say no to the right person, as it were.

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Yeah.

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So, it’s a bit tough.

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Yeah, definitely. For us, it’s still always a little bit of a struggle, obviously. It’s not like we’re perfect. Sometimes I would get the occasional client that looks really good on paper, but there’s kind of, that little voice in my head that’s like, “No, these guys won’t probably work,” but I end up saying yes anyways, because on paper, it looks good. Then after two or three months, I’m finding myself hating this client. So, it still happens-

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And potentially, likewise as well.

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Yeah, exactly. Oh definitely, yeah. So it still happens, but yeah, we’ve gotten a lot better at finding the good ones, I think.

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Having had a look over your website, which, as I said to you before the recording, I love the branding. It’s all the AT stuff and all the movie references, and the GIFs. Literally, it’s my dream website. It does look like there’s a really sort of, process driven background to quite a lot of doing this, but with the creative element that you need to keep in there. Have you found that that’s been a difficult balance to strike? Because, you need a process to be followed, but it sounds like there’s a lot of creative thinking involved in there as well.

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Yeah. I think I’ve always been kind of good at systematizing and making a process out of the pieces that can be systematized, but keeping the creative steps out of it, essentially. So for now, what we do for our client campaigns essentially, is I do the first step, which is the more creative part… I’ve also found a way to start training some of the other team members in the same process, because at the end of the day, it is a set of steps that you need to do. It’s a little bit creative, but it’s still a set of steps.

The main thing is, finding those parts that can be delegated to literally anyone; creating the SOPs, shooting videos as well. That’s also been very helpful for us. But it’s still very flexible, so we typically divide the process into three main areas. The first one is the strategy. Second one is prospecting, so finding all of the sites to send the emails to. And the last one is the outreach.

Each one has its own team that does the specific thing. Each one has its own set of processes and procedures. Some of them are more creative, some of them are a little less. I think this segmentation is what helped us to separate the things that can be delegated and the things that maybe, requires a little more expertise.

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Yeah, and that’s a really important balance to catch. Sometimes you’ll go one way too far and realize someone’s had too much control-

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Yep.

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… and one way, too far the other way, and realize that you’ve not given someone enough creativity or enough control, and it’s stifled the opportunity to do some really good work. Obviously, ultimately, if you have members in your team, you want them to feel like there’s growth opportunity. They need to feel like they’re part of something a bit bigger than just their role. They don’t want to be given a checklist and told, “See you in eight hours. Bye-bye.”

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Yeah. For us, especially with the kind of work that we do, which is essentially, link-building for content promotion, it’s very easy to put it as something that any kind of freelancer can do. There’s a lot of low quality link vendors, which is all spam, essentially. So I’m really trying hard to make it look and work like something that is really high quality and that is really strategy driven, instead of just taking orders from the client.

[Crosstalk 00:08:55]. The client comes in as like, “Yeah, I want 10 links of these metrics.” Right, so we don’t do that. We essentially, are the ones that tell the client what kind of links they need and so on. So there’s this strategy that we try to keep there, to make it look and feel more high quality as well.

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Yeah. That’s awesome. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, it was possible technically, to go back in time, and you were in your time machine, and you went back in time, and you could give yourself one piece of advice when you started the agency, what would it be?

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The main piece of advice, I would say, don’t take things personally, especially with a lot of bad clients. In the beginning, I would really take this personally as, “It was my fault.” Because, maybe the results weren’t happening and so on. This is something that I learned by finding better client, that actually, it wasn’t my fault, it was the client that wasn’t right for what we do. So I would say this is the first thing, don’t take it personally. Try to always be chill with most of the clients as well.

The other thing I would say is that, it’s never going to be easy or even stress-free. There’s always going to be that level of stress, but it’s something that is cyclical. I think it really was in cycles. You work your ass off one month to fix or maybe delegate some of the things that are holding you back, and then you get two, three months where it’s easier. And then you work your ass off for another month, and then you get those two, three months are easier, and so on. It’s cycles like that.

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So, if you did go back in time and give yourself that advice, do you think you would’ve listened to it?

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I don’t know. It depends… I don’t know. Yeah, I typically tend to listen to people that are more experienced than me. But if it’s myself saying the same thing, I don’t know, probably not.

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Yes. It’s really hard, isn’t it? One of the things with being an agency leader is that, you kind of need to know when it’s okay to be, in inverted commas, wrong, and kind of get out of your own way. Otherwise, you cause your own problems that you’re struggling with later.

It’s kind of, like you say, there’s a cycle there, where you get to a point where, it’s a lot harder than it really feels like it should be. And then something clicks. You make a change, you make a modification, and then it becomes easier again. And the same thing goes with cash flow as well. Roughly, if you put the two graphs over the top of each other, maybe they’d look relatively similar.

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Yep.

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In the last few years of running the agency, is there something that you’ve done that you either, regret doing, or something which you have done recently that you kind of think, “I wish we’d done that sooner,” or something that’s set you in the right direction for success?

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Something that I regret doing, yeah. With one client in particular, this was our longest term client, we’ve been working with them for two or three years. They were a good client, but in a way, they tend to be that kind of client that’s always chasing the shiny new thing. They were always coming to me like, “Hey, I saw these guys are doing this, can we try to do that?” With that client in particular, just because I was used to working with them, I really like working with them, I tended to agree to their requests too much.

We would try new processes, new things that we’ve never done, but all of that in the end, wasn’t very good. It didn’t work well, because it was basically going out of our typical process. It was up to all on the team as well, to always having to learn and try new stuff. So, that’s something that I would probably not do now. I would try to stay in our lane and let the client know that, if they want to try something else, then this might not be the right fit, essentially. [Crosstalk 00:12:59].

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Learning that is key, right?

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Yeah. In terms of things I wish we would’ve done sooner? Yeah, well, probably the fact of delegating some of the work that I was doing myself before. Now I’ve started delegating some of the strategy as well, as I was saying before, and it’s really been a game changer, because I can do stuff like this. I can do podcasts, I can do more things to grow the agency-

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Absolutely.

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… while the guys are…

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So, delegation’s quite a hard thing to learn as an agency owner? Because, obviously, you hold on to everything all the time and obviously, giving a little bit of that away, or a bit of control, or the risk to that, is quite hard, did you find that?

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Yeah, delegation is definitely something that is a skill that needs learning as well, the proper way for how to delegate, to make your team member feel like they are really helping you, instead of just, you dropping a bunch of extra work-

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Yes.

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… essentially, on them. Yeah, it’s really important. It’s really something that I’m still struggling to get better at. I wish I would’ve delegated some of the more strategic aspect for the client work sooner, because that would’ve freed me up.

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I think, with delegation, it’s hard, isn’t it? Because, you want to make sure that people are doing things they should be doing, but also, like you say, you don’t want them to feel like you’ve just dropped more work on them. A big part of learning that lesson is realizing that people want to grow, and part of growing is doing a bit more. It’s not necessarily more physical amounts of work, is it, sometimes? It’s actually, that you want them to do more things at the expense of something else, which someone else will take from them. Framing how and why you’re delegating something to someone is really tough.

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Yeah.

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I spend a lot of time with the agencies that I coach, and talking through kind of, “Is that something that should be delegated, or is that something that can be delegated later, with training that is done previously?”

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Yeah.

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If there’s an aspiring agency owner or leader listening right now, and they’ve just started out for themselves, they’re just about to start for themselves, or they’re thinking about it, what’s the one piece of advice you think you could give them that they could take away and use to build their agency?

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If there’s only one thing, I would say, be extremely selective with the clients, as we’ve discussed so far, because the more the clients are a fit for exactly what you do, the better everything else is going to be. It’s going to be easier, it’s going to be more a pleasure working with people. You know that you’re helping them actually, solve their problems, and they’re going to be happy to pay you, essentially, which is the most important thing.

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Yeah. Well, it’s funny, isn’t it? Because, when you start an agency, you start it because you’re good at a thing. And then you have staff and tools you need to pay for, and things like that, and you start realizing it’s actually a business. And soon as you start doing that, you stop being selective over clients, but you also potentially, start thinking about everything as a money based thing.

You forget that, realistically, like you say, if you do work and you enjoy working with those people, they will be happier, as happy as you can be with giving people money, they’d be happier to give you the money. Because, not only have they had a good service and good results, but they actually feel good spending time with you.

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Yeah, definitely. I think, having the pulse on the situation, so knowing the happiness level of your clients, is also important. Keeping track of how they’re doing and knowing exactly, if there’s anything else that you can do, and positioning that as an upgrade as well.

Sometimes I get a client that come to me and they want more, but at the same price. So sometimes, essentially, like I was doing with that client that I told you about earlier, I would say, “Yes, we can do it. No problem. Blah, blah, blah,” because the money seemed good. But at the end of the day, if you start actually tracking where the money goes, you can see that the client is not positive ROI anymore. So it’s really important to position everything else that you do as an upgrade, so the client can get more, but they also have to pay more. They get more for more.

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Yeah. I think that’s a business problem as old as time. Everyone wants more for the same price or less.

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Yeah.

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I guess that’s a really good piece of advice, in the sense, be selective over who you pick, but also set the expectations really early.

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Oh, yeah.

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“This is what you have. If you want more, you pay more.” That’s really good advice. Final question for you; what do you think has been one of the best or biggest growth tools, things that you’ve used to build the agency to date?

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Since it looks like it worked on you as well, I would say, my brand. For us, it’s really been, probably, 80% of our success has been the brand, because we really tried to be different from anything else that’s out there. If you look at most of the SEO link building agency, they all look the same. They’re kind of like, that generic…

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Yep.

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… clean look of the website. I really wanted to go in the opposite direction, so dark website, neon sign, and all of the GIFs, and all of that stuff. I would say, 80% of the new leads that come to me when we do the first call, the first thing that they say is, “I love your brand. I love your design, and it really stands out.”

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This is brilliantly interesting. There’s a problem with digital marketing agencies, isn’t there? That they think they need to rank number one in Google, so they make a website which is conventionally what’s going to rank number one. But you’re never going to rank number one, unless you rank number one for, “Digital marketing agency in regional town for plumbers,” or something like that.

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Yeah.

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And that’s where a lot of things end up going wrong for them, in the sense of marketing. They need to market to their audience. Presumably, you use your website as part of the marketing suite, but it’s more of a sales channel than a marketing channel.

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Yeah, that’s a very good point. I would also say, it’s also a way of weeding out clients that might not be a fit. Because, I typically wouldn’t want to be talking with some old corporate guy that doesn’t know what, Back to the Future, is, for example.

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Yeah.

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So this really works as a way of connecting with people that are kind of, synced with [crosstalk 00:20:05].

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I think if you have a brand which is strongly you, the agency, then again, it’s a bit of an expectation setting point. So if you do have someone who’s older and more corporate on the call, but they understand all the references, they love the purpose and the mission that you’re on, then they are still a fit.

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Yeah.

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But if you have someone who lands on the website and they go, “Oh, this doesn’t look like these guys know what they’re talking about. I can’t be [inaudible 00:20:33]. It doesn’t say, award winning, and it doesn’t say, we have an office dog. It doesn’t say those things, so therefore, I have to leave. They can’t have my money.” It’s a really good sales qualification thing.

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Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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If someone fills in the form or sends you an email from your website, you know that they’ve passed the first test.

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Exactly. Yeah.

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Fantastic.

That’s great. Agency owners listening, I think that’s a really important thing to think about. If you look like everyone else, you’re selling like everyone else. And everyone’s buying from you thinking, “You’re everyone else.” So you can’t have a unique value proposition, and it makes it harder to sell and keep your clients if you are the same as everyone else.

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Yeah, very good point.

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What a great tip to end the podcast on. Thank you very much for your time, Alan. It’s been lovely having you on.

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Thank you, Chris. It’s been great.

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Look forward to hearing the feedback when people look at your website after this.

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Yeah, definitely.

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On our next agency podcast, we’ll have a different agency leader talking about their journey and things they’ve learned along the way, so stay tuned and enjoy listening.