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.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Thanks, voiceover guy. And on the podcast today, we’ve got Em from Victress Digital. Am I right? Yeah.

Em Glover (Guest):

That’s the one.

Chris Simmance (Host):

That’s the one. Sorry. I looked at your website and I can see it says, Victress gets me every time because it’s pronouncing the C and the T at the same time. I feel like I’m tongue tying myself. That’s just me. How are you doing today?

Em Glover (Guest):

Oh, good. Thank you. How are you?

Chris Simmance (Host):

All right, thanks. All right, thanks. Yeah, we’ve just talking beforehand about the bank holiday that’s coming up. So I’m quite excited for that one. So tell us about Victress. How long have you been going? What do you do? Who are you? What’s the cool bits?

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah. So just, I guess to add context to that tongue twister of a name. It actually means victorious woman. So that’s what the definition of it is. So that might happen you a little bit. There you go. So we’ve been going since November 2018. So just shy of four years. We specialize in social media and paid media specifically. We do have a couple of amazing partners that work on the other bits of digital, but social media and paid media are definitely our specialism. So the things that we’re really, really good at.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Awesome. So you mentioned at the beginning of the call that got quite a lot of clients in the States, is that conscious thing or is that just something that kind of just happened over time?

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah, it kind of just happened really. We got one client in the States and then they referred us and they referred us and kind the snowball effect happened. So yeah, we work with quite a lot of brands in the States. A lot of software as a service brands and B2B tends to be our niche really, or niche as the American say. Which still throws me off.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Doesn’t sound right.

Em Glover (Guest):

No, it doesn’t. It took me a good month to work out what they were saying when they said it once. I just used to sit and nod in video calls and be like, yeah, sure, definitely. But yeah, we tend to work with a lot of United States brands, but we also have a lot of UK brands as well. And I think during COVID, it opened us up to being able to work globally and people understood that more. I don’t know necessarily if we would have as many US brands had that not happened.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Yeah. It’s quite cool how sometimes these things happen organically in a sense, and it just ends up being the right fit in a way. It’s lovely. So in the last, almost four years now, in the last almost four years, what do you think has been one of the biggest successes of running the agency?

Em Glover (Guest):

I think growing it in a time, a very turbulent time is probably the thing that I’m most proud of specifically. So in March 2020, we invoice for 150 pounds worth of work. And I was thinking-

Chris Simmance (Host):

150 pounds?

Em Glover (Guest):

150 pounds worth of work. So the pandemic hit, the client’s panics, a lot of people paused or canceled because it was like, right, in case we meant you break glass and marketing’s the first to go. So it just happened in this panic, which I completely get and backed. I understand everyone’s got their budgets that they needed to do. So it was a sink or swim for me of do I close and admit defeat and go back and get a probably a good corporate marketing role, which I would’ve. Obviously, don’t knock. Or do I go out there again, sort of reinvent ourselves. I was a one month band for 18 months of this whole agency journey and then started to bring people on board and started to invest money back into the business in the hope that we could grow and get where we needed to be.

So I guess being able to be… We’re only a small team, there’s only five of us, so we’re not a huge team. But being able to kind of claw that back and get some really good clients that we’ve been with for a long time. So retention, client retention’s big thing for me. Love working on projects, but I really want to keep people for long term partnerships. So we’ve got-

Chris Simmance (Host):

Success is measured in lots of different ways and that sounds like two or three different measures of success there. Sticking at it and having a bit of gumption to keep going when realistically the numbers and everything that was like objective pointed, do something else and you’ve stuck to it, which is great, because you’ve grown and now got staff and you’ve got good clients and things like that. But also kind of having that resilience to sort of say, no, I believe in this and I’m going to actually put more into it at the time to get this going is it is incredible. It’s really good. So congratulations. I mean, it is an actual success as opposed to we turned over a million quid that is real. That’s like, it’s a real success. It’s great.

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah. It’s weird because money’s never really been a driver for me. Obviously, it’s a driver when we are not bringing any money in in that month, don’t get me wrong. But it’s never been a hitting certain targets, I guess, is ticks off the accountants happy and other things like that.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Your staff get paid and…

Em Glover (Guest):

And staff get paid, that’s always handy. Don’t want them working for free. But I made it my mission that I never wanted to hire people unless I knew that I could keep them for a long time. So agencies can be unpredictable., Clients can move on and things can change. So I never wanted anyone’s wages or salaries or positions here to be at jeopardy at the loss of a client. So I guess yeah, financial targets are great, but…

Chris Simmance (Host):

Yeah, I was saying to someone the other day that, don’t just look at everyone else’s perceived successes online and say, that’s what it has to be. If keeping people in work and paying them is key to being able to do any of the other things that make you feel good in running the agency. If your reason for being is to grow something massive that sells and whatever, then naturally financial figures are the targets and measures of success. If you’re building something to have a good culture and do some good in the world, then you need money to do that. But that’s not the measure of success for the business, which is a nice thing to have. I feel I’d be remiss if we’re on an office dog podcast and I need you to talk to me about Ralph and Dexter.

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah. Okay. So Ralph’s my French bulldog, he’s two in August. He’s in the other room currently because no one needs that much of a distraction. Everyone told me that French bulldog are really lazy. That mine is definitely not. I think there’s something probably not quite right there, that I definitely got maybe one that’s a little bit mixed with something else, because he’s just fast and wants to be doing things all the time. And yeah, he’s my little sidekick, he is the best. And Dexter is Sophie ahead of paid media’s pug. He is brilliant and Sophie and I are also best friends out of work. So we-

Chris Simmance (Host):

Oh, wow. That’s cool.

Em Glover (Guest):

Well, we wanted our dogs to be best friends. They aren’t. So there’s that. But it’s fine, it’s fine. We’ve recently acquired an office and we move in next week. So we’re going to have some sort of dog writer so that my annoying part whippet part French bulldog, doesn’t annoy her four year old pug that definitely just wants to be left alone and not mounted every two seconds.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Yep. That’ll be hard to manage.

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah. I’ll be a challenge, but it’s fine. But yeah, we just desperately were like, we’ll both get dogs and it’ll be great. And we are best friends and they’ll be best friends and yeah, no, it doesn’t happen that way. But I’m definitely a dog person.

Chris Simmance (Host):

So if you and Ralph were to be able to get into a time machine and go back nearly four years and give yourself some advice about just about to start the agency, start out on your own. What advice would you give to the younger version of you?

Em Glover (Guest):

I’d say stop giving yourself a hard time, probably. I think I live very, I’m very future focused. So not necessarily financial goals, but right, I want to do all these things in the future. And this is where I want to be in two years, five years, 10 years time. Which, sometimes means that I lose track of the good success that’s happening right in front of me. And how I know I’m not financially driven is I had a financial target and when I hit it, there was not this overwhelming feeling of, wow, this is so great. It was like, right, what’s the next one? What’s the next one? And it wasn’t because of that doesn’t light a fire in me. So I think giving myself the time to give myself not much of a hard time, but also relax because I was so hell bent, you have to work all hours, all the time. And actually I’m a better business owner, I’m a better boss when I’m relaxed because it filters down.

Chris Simmance (Host):

You know, it’s so hard though, when you start an agency. Almost every agency owner seems to fall into this trap of you have to be on it all the time and you have to be busy all the time and you have to be doing something all the time. You have to show the team that you are busy and things like that. For some perception based reason, I don’t know. I’m not quite come to terms with what it could be, but everyone feels like that’s what you have to be in order to be the boss, the best, the best in the agency. But you know, you are a better version of you if you give yourself the space to do it. But do you think if you’d have gone back in time and given yourself that feedback or that advice, do you think you’d have listened to it? Would that change things?

Em Glover (Guest):

Probably not. I am pretty stubborn so if I was really honest, probably not. But I do like to often look back and reflect on the growth that we’ve had. And as you mentioned about feeling like we have to be always on. I always wanted to be the best boss I possibly could be. And I can now see that in the reflection of how happy the team is and things like that. So I guess probably wouldn’t have taken it, but I do like to now reflect backwards, whereas I used to be so future focused. Like I think everybody was, and then obviously things happen where you couldn’t predict what was going to happen with the world and that threw everything off. And then made me realize that sometimes you are on a path and it takes a completely different turn and you just have to go along with it and ride that. So yeah, probably not. I’d like say I would, but probably not.

Chris Simmance (Host):

I think it’s a prerequisite in the DNA of a digital agency leader to be a bit stubborn. One of the things as an agency coach, I try to make sure happens is that you don’t give people advice unless they’re ready to take it or they want to take it or they ask for it. Because you know, us agency folk we’re a strange breed in the sense that we think we know best all the time. And even in the face of evidence, we’ll still push through and be a bit stubborn. Now imagine if someone came along and just start waggling their finger and saying you should do, or this is the idea or what do you think about that? You get a bit of a nod and a bit of a commitment.

And even if it was you giving yourself that in advice, et cetera. It just wouldn’t work. You’d just ignore it. But if you say, Hey, can I have some advice please, on this particular subject, then you listen more so, at least. So is there something that in the last four years or so that you’ve done that kind of hit the spot straight away, a new product, a new service or a new way of working? That when you did it, you went, oh, bloody how that worked perfectly. Okay. We’re going to that’s that’s now a thing we’re going to do that all the time.

Em Glover (Guest):

I think training is probably a good thing for us that we, I think all of us internally really enjoy it and find it really rewarding. So there was always… I think there’s sometimes the misconception that agencies are only about doing all of the, doing all the time and sometimes empowering people within businesses to do it themselves and giving them the tricks that they need and the support that they need was actually rewarding for the business to not feel like say if you are a marketing manager and you need a little bit of extra skills, but you don’t want your position to be redundant by hiring an agency, we complimented and fit that gap very well. So we do a lot of training sessions where myself or Sophie, as an example, will come out of that and say, that was really good for us because we felt it really rewarding.

And it’s really nice to walk in and be able to reel off all the industry knowledge that we’ve had over the past decade and to see people light up again and be really engaged rather than being, I guess, the trust being taken away from them and it being fully managed by the agency. So I definitely think training and then we’ve done some really good public speaking opportunities where I think they’ve really hit the nail as well. Because it’s been nice to get out there again. So I’d say those two bits were kind of what makes us different.

Chris Simmance (Host):

That’s nice. I think training is like you say, it’s an ever changing landscape in the industry. But actual training about how, not just how to do delivery of things, but mindset stuff, thinking training, leadership training, just training on how to use certain softwares, things like that. That’s stuff that you end up in an agency that’s kind of if there’s time or we’ll all agree that we’ll all have a slot on a Friday between 02:00 and 04:00 and that would be our training time and it never really happens. But if you actually stick to it and everyone loves to learn and wants to learn and can deliver on the outputs of that, then it’s really nice. You feel good, don’t you when you learn something new?

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve recently done a couple of sessions on like self-esteem and self-worth and personal development, which has been really, really handy. Because I think if you’ve ever worked in agencies before, I would say that our culture is very different to what other cultures might be more high pressure kind of toxic work environments. So then when I gathered the team, they’ve had really bad past experiences where potentially, it’s really negative and they’ve not really been in the greatest head space. So coming in and doing those sessions. As opposed to not just ticking boxes, like you say, personal development, but also professional identity and professional growth. So how people process information and making sure that the client feedback is given to them doesn’t affect their self worth and self-esteem because it’s very important for that to change. So it’s been really good to look in on ourselves and work out where our personal like development needs are and also where our personal growth is as well.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Yeah. No, yeah. It sounds really lovely. It sounds exactly like what people should do in every agency. I go into agencies and do things like critical thinking training and stuff like that. And just watching the eyes light up in people going, ah, Christ. If I think that way about this in advance, then I feel better about doing it and I’ve satisfied a need in the future without having to do any extra work and that sort of thing. And when you know a bit more about how your brain works and you’re more confident in that sense, you’ve got a lot more resilience to other things as well. So a bad day isn’t as bad as it could be.

Em Glover (Guest):

Absolutely.

Chris Simmance (Host):

So conversely then you know, the training is good and that’s a big part of the agency. Is there something that you did or have done over the last four years that you’ve gone, no, that didn’t work. We’re going to stop that immediately. Or I’ve learned my lesson now and I’m not going to do that again.

Em Glover (Guest):

I’d say maybe taking on certain clients that didn’t necessarily fit with us as a team would probably be the bit where I’ve done. So I’ve learned… Yeah, it’s really tough. And I’ve learned to, I’ve now learned to say no to clients that aren’t the right fit for us, because that makes it more feel like a partnership. But I guess not listening to my gut has been the main reason why things have failed previously. So taking on a piece of business that might have been financially rewarding, but actually the dynamic really wasn’t there. So I guess the learning from that would be to listen to my gut and also sense check that these are the right people to work with. And not just because they want to work with us, we must automatically work with them. Yeah, we had-

Chris Simmance (Host):

It’s toxic, isn’t it though?

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Like you said earlier, you’re not necessarily chasing the financial figures. But someone comes to you and they say, Hey, I want to spend a chunk of cash to do something that you can do, but they’re not quite a personality fit or a cultural fit or even a deliverables fit. But you say yes, because you think, okay, it’d be good. We can then pay for the Christmas party or we could hire another person in that we need for other stuff. But it’s toxic because it brings things down a bit.

It’s a bit like hiring, isn’t it? If you hire someone that is objectively good at the role, but doesn’t fit the culture and the values of the business, whether they’re not necessarily a bad person, but they just don’t fit the business that impacts everyone, not just that individual. That individual themselves feels bad all the time as well, because they don’t fit them fit in the business.

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a duty of care to protect my team. And if their client is not making them feel great about their work and ordinarily they enjoy their job, they enjoy the team, they enjoy the atmosphere that the agency’s created, but a client is directly affecting that or making them not want to come to work, that is a problem for me. And I don’t think just because someone pays us a lot of money, doesn’t give them a right to treat us badly. We actually let a client go recently, who wasn’t treating us very well and wasn’t very respectful to the team. And as the agency owner now and not a member of staff of another agency, I now have that power to be able to say enough is enough. And that is very important to me because I think I’ve been in situations previously in other roles where it was left too long, and that kind of dwindles down in confidence.

Chris Simmance (Host):

It’s a big key leadership skill to lead from the front in the, I’m setting the expectations and the standards. And if it doesn’t meet them, there is no gray area here. And you have to be strong to do that as well, because not only do you have to back it up when you speak to the client and expect some kind of discourse, but you’ve also got the team to manage their expectations that, this is why this has happened. So if you have a bad conversation with another client, it doesn’t automatically mean they’re going to get fired too. There are these benchmarks that have to be kind of hit in order for that to happen. But setting the right expectations and maintaining that consistency is essential and good leadership means that you are going to sacrifice the bottom line a little bit at times to keep people happy. And it’s not like, it’s not just keeping people happy in the sense of making sure Dave in the office is happy about something. It’s keeping people happy in terms of their wellbeing more than anything else because some people have bad days.

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah, absolutely. Like we’re not under an impression as a team that we are going to say no to any client that gives us negative feedback, or maybe doesn’t see things the way that we do. Like it is a partnership and it’s my job to have those tough conversations with clients and the team, because that obviously the team isn’t always right, I’m not always right, and clients aren’t always right. So that transparency is there for me and those tough conversations often come with forewarning of this isn’t what we’re going to accept. And then if it continues, then it’s a different conversation. But that ability to know deep down that we are looking for respect and we’re looking for partnerships clients and within the team and if something’s out, it can affect everybody. And that’s not the environment that I want to create.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Which is a nice thing to do and stick to and do really well with it. It’s really good. So if there’s someone who’s listening to this podcast now, and they’re thinking of starting an agency, or they’ve literally just started one out and they’re thinking, God, I need some help. And they’ve asked you for some advice and you’ve only got time to give them one piece of advice. What would you give them? What would be the thing?

Em Glover (Guest):

Find a gap in the market and own it, would be my thing. Own what you’re good at and get really, really great at it and try not to be all things to all people.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Which is brilliant advice. It’s hard to stick to though, you know, day one… Day one, got to pay the bills.

Em Glover (Guest):

Yeah. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve done it as well. It happens, it hundred percent happens, but it is a very clutter market. I saw something on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago by another agency owner. And he said, there’s over 700 UK agencies at the moment. That’s just UK. And I can imagine there’s probably smaller ones that don’t consider themselves an agency, but still practice digital marketing. It’s a very cluttered market. So trying to be all things to all people, doesn’t work so well.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Yeah, totally. I looked on Sales Navigator a couple of weeks ago at leader director level people in digital marketing agencies. There’s something like eight or 9,000 people who identify as that. Now that’s not necessarily full agencies with staff. That’s someone man band style type things where they are delivering agency services, but they’re on their own, but they’re the owner director. And then there’s some larger agencies, but there’s a lot of people there. And yeah, this is why the podcasts named, And we have an office Dog, because everyone tries to differentiate by saying, ah, we got chief morale officer and the biscuit officer and that sort of stuff. But it’s really hard to differentiate yourself.

So if you pick a niche or you pick a skillset or you pick a deliverable and become an expert in that specific thing, your messaging changes fundamentally. And you’re outwardly, if someone’s Googling digital agency, they’re just going to see everyone anyway. But your marketing changes significantly because you go out to the people that you know you’re trying to hit. There is no sort of broad brush marketing that’s required at that point. You know who to talk to specifically because that’s the game.

Em Glover (Guest):

Absolutely. I think, I’m a firm believer that even if it is a very competitive market, there is a seat at the table for everybody. There is always people that are looking for a different type of marketing. Like we are very honest, we’re very straightforward, very data driven. I wouldn’t necessarily say that we are B2C ready because we don’t like double in the creative realms of video production and other things like that. We’re great at B2B and we own the SaaS space, but there’s loads of other people that are better at B2C than we are. And I think if you can find an area and find an approach to marketing that works for you, that doesn’t stop you being you as an owner and kind of goes against your own principles, but also brings in the skills that you’ve built around a team or just your own individual skills and grow that from there, but never losing sight of who your key audience is and the kind of clients you want to attract.

Chris Simmance (Host):

Yeah, absolutely. Excellent advice to end the podcast on. So thank you very much for that. And also thanks for being on the podcast.

Em Glover (Guest):

No problem. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Simmance (Host):

And in our next podcast, we’ll be talking to another digital agency leader to hear their journey and some of the lessons they’ve learned along the way. So thanks very much.

Em Glover (Guest):

Thanks.