VO Guy:
Hello and thanks for coming along too …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:
Thanks voiceover guy. And on the podcast though, we’ve got Darren from Engage Web. How are you doing?
Darren Jamieson:
I’m very well, thank you. How are you?
Chris Simmance:
All right, thanks very much. So before we start listeners, Darren also has a podcast and it’s a very good podcast. So you should listen to Darren’s podcast. That was a plug from me.
Darren Jamieson:
Thank you. It’s on our [inaudible] podcast. It’s all right. We’ve got to sell it.
Chris Simmance:
So tell us about the agency, first of all. Give us a plug. What are you all about? What do you do? What makes you special?
Darren Jamieson:
We’re Engaged Web-based in the northwest of England in Cheshire. And we are different from a lot of agencies because most of what we do is content. We started as a content only, agency supplying other agencies back in 2009 [inaudible]. Back in 2009 because we’ve got writers based around the UK, Canada, Australia, United States, and we supply clients and agencies in those countries. So when a very large agency will take on a high street client, say Marks & Spencer for example, that’s not one of our clients and I couldn’t name them if they were because we’ve got NDAs with agencies. What they do is they look at all the content that needs rewriting on the website. There could be 20, 30, 40,000 products that need content for, they don’t have the people in house for that so they come to us and we get that done in a very efficient and cost… Cost, cost? Cost, we’re very, very, very costly. No, a very cost efficient manner.
Chris Simmance:
Wonderful. So how long do you say you’ve been going? 2009?
Darren Jamieson:
Engage Web’s been since 2009, but I’ve been in digital marketing since the late 90s.
Chris Simmance:
Oh wow. So before it was even called digital marketing.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah, I think SEO was first coined right about ’94, ’95, something like that. But we didn’t really know what it was then. But yeah.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. Crikey. So what you would term the OGs, in a sense?
Darren Jamieson:
Yes, I am very original. Very original. Yes. My first proper job was at Game. I was the web designer for Game back in 2000, which I don’t really know how I landed that as my first proper salary job because all I’d done really up to that point was just effectively piss about on the Internet making websites and graphics and animated graphics and stuff. And it just seemed that the marketing manager at Game really liked what I’d done and gave me a chance. And I ended up as their web designer for a few years and designed their website several times while I was there, their digital television channels because back then, you’re far too young to remember this. Back then-
Chris Simmance:
Oh, did I?
Darren Jamieson:
We all thought the future of shopping online was going to be via digital television. And we had something called Sky Open, Sky Active with the adverts on TV, “Just press the button.” They were really awful things. So it was creating digital channels for that. And we all thought that was going to be huge, but as it turned out, it really wasn’t because we all went down mobile devices and not television.
Chris Simmance:
Well I mean as with all innovations, there are some backers who lose out. There has to be. So over all these years, there must be lots and lots of times where there’s been some successes in the agency. But is there anything that stands out as a really big success since the agency’s been founded?
Darren Jamieson:
For Engage Web you mean?
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Darren Jamieson:
Let’s see. I think the biggest success we have I think is something we had very, very early on back in, I think we’re maybe a year in. We picked up what’s become our largest client from a referral, an introduction from somebody I used to work with in Cardiff. Because I worked for a design agency in Cardiff and that they were a print designer primarily, which is something that bugged me because I was a web designer and they got all the print designers to design the websites. Because back then, they didn’t know the difference between web design and print design and thought, “Eh, design’s design.” And I’d get the designers asking me, “So how many millimeters should this website be when I design it?” Well, that’s not even a thing. Anyway, that minor grumbles aside, this guy I used to work with went off and started a print franchise. And when I went off and set up Engage Web, he knew that I was quite good at digital stuff primarily because I told him.
But he knew I was quite good at digital stuff. And when this, the franchise owners from the United States, from New York were over and they were doing their UK franchise meetings, they were talking about they hadn’t done anything online because most franchises tend to be quite old. So like these 60s, 70s and they’re not very good online, they don’t have any sort of presence. And he recommended me. So I ended up having a phone call with a guy in New York pulling over at the side of the road on the M56 in my car, managed to somehow close the deal for that. And that turned into us doing the work for this franchise in the America, Canada, Australia and the US, all of their franchisees, which is about a thousand businesses. And we’ve been doing that for the last 10, 11 years now. So that’s definitely a huge success. Yeah, I’m quite pleased with that one.
Chris Simmance:
I mean I would be too. Those are the wins, the wins that last feel the best in the long term. It’s still every win feels great, that little dopamine hit as the ink drawing on the contract. But then that can wear off over time because doing the work isn’t necessarily as fun as the win from an agency owner’s perspective, win that keeps coming.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah. I mean there is that, isn’t it? Was it on, Richard Branson’s got that phrase that if you get asked if you could do something, say yes then figure out later. It was very much a case of that. It’s like, “Can we actually do digital marketing for a thousand businesses? I mean the keyword ranking report alone is in the tens of thousands of keywords. How are we going to accomplish that?” But we did it because we had the writer base there, we had them in the countries, we knew we could do it. We just needed to scale up the people in house that could manage it. We had to scale up our editing team, our content team.
Chris Simmance:
So a few scary, scary moments then, that’s for sure.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah, yeah. There definitely were. Definitely were.
Chris Simmance:
So then if you were to go back in time and you would just speak to the younger, probably more spritely version of yourself, and you were to go back in time and popped into existence and you said, “Young Darren, it’s me, the old Darren. Listen to this piece of advice,” what would you tell yourself?
Darren Jamieson:
Well that depends how far back I’m going because even in 2009 I wasn’t that young.
Chris Simmance:
So let’s say when you started your digital marketing work, shall we say?
Darren Jamieson:
Right. Well that’s easy. That’s easy then. Because I started my digital marketing work in the sort of mid to late 90s. And at the time then, I did that because I wanted to be a film director. So I went to film school. I made a feature film in school, not a particularly good feature film, I hasten to add. But it was at the same film school the film Human Traffic was being made with John Simm, and Justin Carrigan was the director and he was in the film school with me. He was in two years above me. And I wanted to be a film director. We ended up writing a script and going to the Canne Film Festival, trying to get the film made. That’s all the reason I got to digital marketing in the first place was to promote this film and get it made and become a film director, go to Hollywood, make movies and I was going to be… had visions of making a live action, A team movie, which in the end did get made and it was rubbish. And I was going to-
Chris Simmance:
It wasn’t in your script. That’s all right, mate.
Darren Jamieson:
I was going to make a live Action Transformers movie, which did get made and it was rubbish, and I’m very, very annoyed about that. But the thing I missed out on was the opportunity. I didn’t realize just before I went to film school, I was making films for a TV program called Beatles Hot Shots, hosted by Jeremy Beadle and they had two seasons. And people would make spoofs and send them in and I made loads of spoofs. They’re all on YouTube, people can find them. But when I went down to the studio for the filming of TV show, the editor basically, it’s just like a researcher editor guy working on it. Very local, he was only two years older than me. He said, “I really like the stuff that you’ve done. Can you meet me in the bar after the taping of the show? Because we want to talk about the second season because I want you to film some stuff for me.”
Because he’d sent me a script to film as well. Because he wasn’t happy with my script writing. He was happy with my filming, but he wanted me to be a bit more organized with the scripting. But I left him, I didn’t go. I got on the train and went home because I lived in South Wales from London. It was the last train home, I’d have missed it. And I didn’t know who he became. And it was a few years later while I worked at Game, mate of mine got me into a TV series called Spaced with Simon Pagan, Nick Ross.
Chris Simmance:
Oh, one of my all time favorites sitcoms. Yeah, I know that this is a Digital Agency podcast but we can go with this. Keep going.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah, my mine too. But I watched this series Spaced and the director at the end was a chap named Edgar Wright. I thought I know that name. That’s the guy who was the editor on Beatles Hot Shots. That’s the guy that said, “I want you to meet me in the bar afterwards and talk about films I want you to make for the next season.” And he then went on to make Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, it’s just been the cinemas now. And I walked out on him.
So if I could go back at any point in time and say, “Right. When Edgar Wright says, ‘Meet me in the bar afterwards for a chat,’ you bloody well go and see him because you’ve no idea where this is going to lead you.” I spent the rest next five or six years trying to launch a film career and doing websites on the back of that to try and get to anywhere near the sort of level that I was right there in front of me. The potential that I had right there in front of me that I just walked away from and I regret that, pretty much everything.
Chris Simmance:
So let’s reframe this from a digital agency perspective now and that tells me that you shouldn’t necessarily pass up opportunities just because at the time, they don’t seem applicable or useful.
Darren Jamieson:
No, no, no. A hundred percent. And it’s the same thing, we’ve done that with digital agencies as well because it was like that thing with that client I said on the side of the road. I could have thought, “Well they’re too big for us. I can’t possibly say that we can do this because how hell are we going to deliver this?” Or I thought, “I’ve been in this situation before and I’ve just walked away from it.” Just say yes. Just say, “We can do it and we’ll work out the details later. We’ll work out how we’re going to do it later.”
And we’ve had other situations like that with clients or tenders that we’ve thought, “Are they too big for us?” There was one client actually phoned us up and came to us. I won’t name them because they ended up working through somewhere else, but they’re a high street store. And they spoke to us about doing the digital marketing for them, but they decided that they wanted a much larger agency than us. We were too small for them. So they went to another agency in the northwest, a very big one, quite a famous one, won lots of awards, but they use us for their content. So this client ended up working with us anyway but didn’t know about it.
Chris Simmance:
That’s brilliant.
Darren Jamieson:
The funniest story about that actually is we’re doing work for one particular client, they’re a storage company. One of those where you put things in storage for long term. And we were doing the work through this other agency for them and we are the writer there and this client left the agency and they switched to another agency who also used us. So we have to tell our writer, “Okay, we’ve lost this client now. They’re moving to a different agency.” And then a week later, “Hey guess what? We’ve got this client back again so you can carry on writing it.” And then the feedback we got from this new agency was the client’s really happy with the content that you’re providing for them. He feels like there’s been no disruption whatsoever. Well, there hasn’t. It’s the same guy writing it, you just don’t know about it.
Chris Simmance:
Brilliant. I mean there’s quite a lot of that, that goes around in the digital marketing industry. And the good thing is working agencies or agency with your peers, as long as there’s a level of trust, then it’s not that hard. And you’ve built a business off the back of that. So that on its own is a success I think because when money… it’s all well and good having a mastermind session and having a conversation with a bunch of digital agency leaders about problems and stuff like that. But the second money is involved, it can easily go the wrong way. And I think it’s a testament to how you run the agency and the values that you live to. That means that you guys don’t have those sorts of problems. What do you think something that within the agency itself, so since 2009 onwards that you’ve done, that’s like, Oh, we’ll not do that again.”
Darren Jamieson:
Oh, we’ll not do that again. Yeah, there’s quite a few actually. And it all evolves around the same mistake. When you are starting, whether you’re starting in freelance or digital agency or whatever it may be, you’ve got this hunger for clients, you’ve got this hunger for new business and every client is gold dust to you. “I want to work with this guy and I want to work with this guy because I need the money, I need the clients, I need the experience, I need the testimonials.” But it’s going to get to the point where there’s certain people you look at and you speak to them and you hear what they’re about and you think, “I don’t really want to work with this person.” We’re just starting out. It’s very, very hard to say no to someone.
And we’ve gone through that over the years. There’s been quite a few people where we’ve worked with and our gut instinct was, “No, don’t.” And we’ve always gone, “Yeah. But they might be all right.” “Yeah, but it could be a good brand, this could be a big client.” And every time our gut instinct has been proved right and said, “No, you shouldn’t have done that.” So we’ve hit the point now where if we’ve got this instinct that says, “Red flag, just walk away from it, don’t work with this person,” that’s what we do. And it’s something I would advise people do. It’s easier in the long run. It saves you time, money, heartache.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, well you pick the wrong client and yeah, you get a couple of quid for a while, but when the client churns, it costs more money to replace the client. It also probably potentially over a certain amount of time, churns a member of staff because they’re sick to death of these problems, which costs a lot more money to recruit because of recruiter’s fees and trolling through jobs boards and all sorts of things like that. It’s just a pain in the neck. And then you’ve got all of these sort of knock on impacts and if it happens a few times, it can really sort of damage the culture.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean the last one I’m thinking of, the one that really brought the back on this that we decided this isn’t happening again. The guy phoned up and we had a girl here doing work experience and she’s a daughter of a client of ours, one of our best clients. And she was… work experience from… she’s university level so she’s not like a 1450.
Chris Simmance:
Oh yes, like a placement style thing.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah, she was 20 I think. But it was the first time she’d been in an office environment and she answered the phone and he was really rude to her because she didn’t instantly know who he was. And you think, “That’s just, it’s not good. It’s not good.” And then he was rude to someone else and that was a woman as well. So we think there might have been chauvinistic issues in there, there definitely was a lot going on. And I got this instinct from the first meeting I had with him and he mentioned how his staff quite often say, oh, he says things in the office that you wouldn’t normally think that’s acceptable but he gets away with it because he’s old school, he’s old timer. And then I can give you an example of one of the things he said and I thought that he’s just… I should have just walked away.
Chris Simmance:
He’s not racist, he’s just from a different era.
Darren Jamieson:
Exactly.
Chris Simmance:
He’s not misogynistic, he’s just from a different era.
Darren Jamieson:
From a different time. Everybody said it back then. It’s, “Oh, everybody’s non-racist,” that sort of thing. No, no, no.
Chris Simmance:
But yeah. You’re either a good person or not.
Darren Jamieson:
Exactly.
Chris Simmance:
Doesn’t matter what area you come from. And I think I always like to sort of say to myself that these sorts of things come round back to people, not in a calmer style but in the sense that if you behave badly with people all the time, you’re going to miss out. In working with you, they could have had a massive leap of fortunes in their business but because of the way he behaved, he lost that opportunity. He might have ended up going to an agency that said yes and then had a horrible experience and lost lots of money or whatever. But one of your big duties of care beyond providing services to clients and cash flow to pay the bills is to make sure that the people that you hire and you look after even the work experience people, is to make sure that they’re protected. And I think that if that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was a good one.
Darren Jamieson:
Yeah, yeah, you’re right because your team is your company. It is your business, it’s your livelihood and without your team, then you just have a job.
Chris Simmance:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think one of the aspects of a good culture in an agency is to really focus on that thinking. You’ve got to protect the people you work with because it’s bloody hard to get them back. And once they lose faith and trust, then the quality of the work may go down, their attitude may impact other people’s. And at a certain point in time when you’re growing, that could be the deciding factor in the algorithm of how to run an agency because it is an algorithm. This many clients equals this many staff and this much stuff. And take one of those things out of the mix slightly and it causes you knock on impact. And picking the right clients is often more important than picking the right staff. You can train staff.
So if you look back and you think all the things you’ve done with the agency, the staff you’ve hired, probably some you’ve fired, things like that. And someone’s like, they’re thinking, “I’m going to start my own agency. This call with Darren’s been really…” Like, “Apart from my meeting that I missed with Edgar Wright to listen to this podcast just now, I’m desperate to start an agency and I want Darren’s one piece of advice, what would it be?”
Darren Jamieson:
I would say don’t be afraid to hire early because the sooner you hire somebody, the sooner you can actually move on to doing the things that are important to grow a business. When we first started, it was just myself and Leanne and we were editing all the content ourselves. And I think we were starting at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. We were finishing about eight o’clock at night and we worked Saturdays and Sundays. And it’s a real mind block about, “We need to hire an editor,” but as soon as we hire an editor, we’re going to be paying them whatever it is, 17, 18, 19 grand per year or whatever. And they’re only going to be working nine to five, Monday to Friday. And they’re going to have an hour for lunch and they’re only going to be able to edit so many per hour. And if they edit that, I’m going to be paying them this, that’s money I’m not going to have. And I could edit those quicker.”
You’ve got to get that out of your head because yes, you might be able to do something quicker than somebody that you’ve just hired obviously, but if you don’t hire them and train them so that they can then hire other people and train other people, you are never going to actually grow the agency. It’s always going to be just you doing it yourself and it’s a job and you’re going to be a freelancer. And I’ve been a freelancer before. I’ve worked agency side, I’ve been freelancer and I’ve run an agency so I know the differences between the three. And when you’re a freelancer, the worst thing is your pipeline. So you are working on something, you’re busy working on a website or a project and then once you’ve finished it, what now? You haven’t been out looking for other stuff. So your work goes up and down, up and down, up and down.
And also the payment from the clients tends to go up and down, up and down, up and down. The larger the clients you get, the longer they take to pay you. So working freelancer and if there’s only freelancers listening to this, I’m sorry, it’s not sustainable. It’s not sustainable because if you go on holiday, you are not working. If you get sick, you are not working. If you want to do something else, take some sort of break, if you go into hospital, you are not working. The only way to do it is to bring other people in who can help you. And it is about them helping you and about them being better than you as well.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, hire good people early is excellent advice. And I think that the problem comes down in a sense to learning how delegation works. Quite a lot of people just assume delegation is, “Here’s your job description, get on with it.” And then it’s hard for you to delegate something because you haven’t done it right. And if you don’t do it right, then you’re constantly micromanaging and nitpicking and you don’t feel comfortable with them doing all of the things that they should be doing. But if you delegate properly, you can be comfortable that that person knows what they need and what they’ve got and how to do it and that they’ve got all the resources available to them and all the support that’s available to them.
And you can feel comfortable that yes, they’re doing three things in a day rather than the four that you could do, but you could only do four things in a day. So you are being freed up for three things of the day, which allows you to do three different things in a day. And the mindset shift that you need to have for that is quite big. I remember that first hire thinking, “Guy’s a lot of money to spend on someone who’s doing something I can do.” And then you have to remember that’s not exactly how this works.
Darren Jamieson:
No, no it’s not. It’s important as well that when you hire the right person and you show them the right way to do things, that you also empower them to make the decisions themselves. Because if you don’t do that, they’re going to be constantly second guessing what they do and they’re going to be coming back to you asking you questions that they know the answer to. So you need to give them the authority to make the decisions. I’ve seen this not just in agencies but in other jobs as well where somebody at the top refuses to let go of all the power, refuses to let go of all the decision making, which means all of his staff are just basically doing what they can, but they can’t do any, make any decisions or process any payments or make any actions without him giving the say so on it. And it just slows everything down and makes him a bottleneck. You need to give them the power to make the decisions and give them the authority.
Chris Simmance:
Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. Excellent advice to end the podcast on hire early, delegate properly.
Darren Jamieson:
Didn’t think I’d be going down that route, but yes, yes.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, we go. See and don’t miss any meetings is the other one.
Darren Jamieson:
Don’t miss any meetings. No. Don’t judge anybody as though you think they’re probably not going to be worth meeting because you never know who they are, who they will become.
Chris Simmance:
And everyone go on to IMDB now and down vote, what is it? Live-action Transformers.
Darren Jamieson:
Live-action Transformers.
Chris Simmance:
[inaudible], download those.
Darren Jamieson:
Rotten tomatoes then as well.
Chris Simmance:
Thanks very much for coming on, Darren.
Darren Jamieson:
Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Chris Simmance:
And in our next podcast, we’ll be talking to another agency leader to hear their story and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. So thanks for listening.