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 Charlie, MD at Minty Digital. How are you doing Charlie?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Hey. Yeah, I’m not bad, thanks. Not bad. How are you?
Chris Simmance (Host):
All right, thank you. Not too bad at all. It’s been a long week already and they’re only at Wednesday. I think it’s probably the same for you running an agency.
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Exactly.
Chris Simmance (Host):
So first of all, give us a plug. Tell us what Minty Digital does, what makes you special, just in case there’s a client listening?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Okay. So we’re Minty Digital. We’re a marketing agency based in Barcelona. We specialize in technical SEO, content marketing and digital PR. And we work across both English and Spanish speaking languages.
Chris Simmance (Host):
So tell me, you are definitely not Spanish, you are British from Britain, why have you got an agency in Barcelona? How did that come about?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, well it was a bit of a running joke a few years after we got started, because two years in, we were ranked number one SEO agency in Spain and I could barely speak any Spanish. So that was a bit of a running joke around the office. But I moved to here five years ago now and it was on a whim. So my cousin was out here and he moved three months before and I’d just gone freelance in the industry myself. I saw he’d been there before running around trying to chase clients, pick up clients [inaudible 00:02:16], restaurants, anywhere I could. And yeah, he said, “Why don’t you come give Barcelona a shot?”
And I jumped on the plane the next week, planned on staying for a couple of months to build up the business and ended up in a co-work out here called Ataco, which is based in the city center. And from there I managed to pick up around three or four clients within the first two months. And from there, grown it to, I think, we’re almost 15 people now. So slow but steady. Haven’t grown as far as some of our agencies, but I’m happy of how things are and I’m pretty settled out here.
Chris Simmance (Host):
So knowing you as I do, I know that the speed of hiring isn’t as important necessarily as the quality of the people and making sure that those clients match your areas of expertise. You’ve worked towards a few niches as well, haven’t you?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, that’s right. We’ve [inaudible 00:03:18] and we have deliberately hired slower and it has worked well. I know the industry is notorious for high staff turnover and we’ve been really fortunate. I say touch wood, I know it says we’re not going to last forever, but we haven’t had anyone leave since we’ve started the company, which is a really big achievement, I feel for us. And I’m definitely… Makes me feel as though we’ve got something good going on here.
Obviously I’m not ignorant enough to think that that’s never going to happen in the future, but I think coming up to five years of where we’re at, pretty happy of it. But yeah, is it about niches? So yeah, we’re specialized in a few different niches now, there’s four that we mainly operate in, and it comes into the fact that Barcelona is a big tech hub as well. So the four niches we work in, SaaS is a big one for us. Travel and leisure, finance, and also e-commerce businesses. They are four areas that we look to focus in.
Chris Simmance (Host):
And I guess some of that is because of locations. Some of that stuff that’s come out in a sense of, you just know you’re good at it and you can meet those deliverables as well, I think.
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, exactly. And a lot of these niches as well, especially SaaS and the travel and leisure, normally the companies that are based here especially, they work in both English and Spanish speaking languages. So it’s quite a natural crossover for us to be able to deliver-
Chris Simmance (Host):
Perfect, isn’t it?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah.
Chris Simmance (Host):
So in the last five or so years, what would you say has been one of the biggest successes that you’ve seen in the agency?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
I think alongside, I don’t want to say just around team culture, but the whole retention side of things that we’ve been able to keep, not both staff but also client retention as well. I think one of the things that we’re most happy with, and I know the team have brought this up multiple times as well, it’s that we’re never firefighting as an agency and we’re never over promising to our clients what we can deliver.
We’re pretty clear on what we can deliver and if a client comes on board or approaches us and they’re not the right fit… It was different at the very beginning, but in the last three years we’ve been very good at turning people away if we think there’s no opportunities for them.
Chris Simmance (Host):
That’s a hard thing to do, isn’t it?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
It was a hard thing to do. And I’ll be honest, it was my team that really got me into it because definitely for the first two years, especially when there was just one or two of us, I would try and take on as… I’ll be honest, if someone would come in and I’d just try and take on whatever we could. And we didn’t just do the services we do now then as well, we used to try and offer a bit of everything, as you do in the start out, we’d do anything-
Chris Simmance (Host):
You want it, you’ve got it.
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Exactly. Chat bots, email marketing, website development, and it wasn’t sustainable. And I learned very quickly in the first few months to a year that we need to specialize. We did. And once we specialized, we’ve become a lot more aware and had a lot better understanding of what we can deliver for our customers and what we can’t do. So that allowed us to be able to pick our clients a lot more sensibly.
Chris Simmance (Host):
And I guess one of the knock on impacts of doing what you’ve done there is that you are hiring as specialists in a few areas as opposed to having to know a lot about a lot of areas in order to get the right people. So it’s probably helped with the hiring as well?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, exactly. And also from contacts, one of our industries, say travel and leisure, and we had someone approach us that’s on our PR team now that worked at Tripadvisor before approaching us, saw that a lot of our clients were in the trip travel industry and it naturally attracts.
I think before you go into those niches and before you specialize, you don’t actually see past that and you can’t see how that’s going to happen. But then once you actually find your direction and find your niche, then I think naturally you start attracting the right clients and the right staff.
Chris Simmance (Host):
Yeah, absolutely. So in a sense, big success has been the staff retention and quite a lot of that’s connected to the nicheing, but also being able to say no. What would you say, if you were able to go back in time and speak to a younger version of yourself, what kind of advice would you give yourself when it came to getting Minty off the ground?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
I’ve already said specialized, so I’m not going to go over that. And I know a lot of people say nicheing as well. So I think the best bit of advice I’ll give myself is to get out of my own way, which is a real difficult thing to do, and that’s from everything, from the beginning, offering eight different services and I was doing six of them and we only had a couple people doing SEO. Then you realized, that’s actually taking up my time from admin, team development, staff development, all of those kind of things. So you need to be able to make sure your team are the ones delivering and you’re the one coaching and pushing people along.
And also even the stage we get to now, I’m actively trying to cut out irrelevant meetings and irrelevant scrums where we’re coming on a call, this guilt of leading a call before, but we were having meetings just to have meetings. So now we’re trying to minimize that. I’m trying to speak to my direct contacts at the company and then they relay the information onto their team and then there’s no crossover. You don’t want to manage just saying one thing to one member of the team, then someone else jumping on a team scrum on a Monday and giving some conflicting direction or updates.
Chris Simmance (Host):
So I guess the advice would be to get out of your own way sooner. But knowing when to do, that’s obviously hard because it’s your baby on day one, isn’t it? What was it, do you think, that if you could go back in time, you’d tell yourself that, but what was it that happened that made you think, now I need to learn how to do this? Is there something that changed? Is there something that got you into that mood?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Say one thing in particular. But I think I’ve started realizing it when I’d be coming onto client meetings sometimes between the SEO manager and a client. And I’d be sat on the call and I’d be like, “I’m not actually involved in this campaign at all and they’re talking about things that I’m not involved in.” And then I ended up feeling a bit silly because it’s like I’m not involved in the day to day work on these campaigns and I actually could be spending my time on anything from bringing in new business to developing internal processes, or helping the team with perks or any of the other things that we offer at the company.
I think it took me to the point where I was almost too busy and then I realized I was too busy because I was getting in my own way and getting involved on things that I shouldn’t be getting involved in. And then naturally I’ve been taking a step back, but also making sure I’m still active and available for the team whenever they need me, and also for the clients as well.
Chris Simmance (Host):
Is there something over the years that you’ve done or has happened within the agency, which, let’s not say it was a mistake, but it was set up and it was in place and then you went, “That was a bloody blinder, we’re going to keep doing that forever now?” Did you set up a service or a way of delivering something or was there a moment where you went, “Wow, we’ve really hit the nail on the head, let’s crack on with this.”
Charlie Clark (Guest):
I think most recently since we’ve started to try to streamline our services a lot more, that’s definitely been something where… I think SEO, for example, the campaigns are naturally nuanced, each customer has different needs and different services. But I’m a strong believer that everything can be streamlined either way. And as we’re trying to grow, someone told me a saying a long time ago saying, “The spoke solutions don’t scale.” And it’s true. And as we’re trying to naturally grow the agency bigger to what we are, but while also maintaining quality of work, integrity, all of those kinds of things as well, we’ve had to work something out where we can do that.
I don’t want to use the word package, but we are looking to at least package the first stages of our campaigns now, whatever that may be. And that’s made everything so much easier from initial client requirement gathering to actual offering our services to the delivery of it as well. And everyone knows what they’re doing from point A to point B. And of course naturally you follow procedures, you follow systems, but people are going to implement their own knowledge along the way as well and things change. But overall, putting in some clear systems and processes has been a big one for us.
Chris Simmance (Host):
Yeah, I think as you grow those sorts of things are necessary. And I think as well as that, knowing you can trust your team to deliver the product or the package is a lot easier when it’s a lot more clear what the client is being given. And the client obviously has their expectations set, the team knows what is expected of them. And I guess that is something not… If you’d have carried on doing chat bots and Facebook marketing and things like that, can you imagine the tangled web of different scopes of work and all sorts of things that would be going on right now?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, it would be an absolute nightmare. And I think it goes back to it, especially where we’re our size as well. We’re not a big 50 person agency or a 100 person agency. And if you’re a team of… Well, when we were five, for example, if you’re a team of five and you offer 10 services, then you know can’t be a specialist in them. Well I don’t believe you can anyway.
And if you’ve got one member of staff for each service or one SEO, one PPC, one Facebook, and one of them is ill or one of them leaves, then you’ve got no one to replace or deliver that service as well. So I think by knowing what you’re good at, sticking to it, developing the systems and processes around what you deliver and everyone doing the same thing, then you’re always going to have that support, in whichever area that the team are working on, on any given week.
Chris Simmance (Host):
Totally agree. Now, if someone’s been listening to this podcast and if they’ve just started running an agency or perhaps they’re thinking of starting an agency themselves and they came to you. They knocked on your door all the way in Barcelona and they knocked on your door and they said, “Hey Charlie, give us a piece of advice.” What one piece of advice would you give them them?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
I’d say specialize would be a big one for us. Definitely specialize it in what you’re doing, but also don’t just jump into a service as well. There’s a lot of different services out there, there’s so many different marketing channels out there available at the moment and it’d be choosing the right one to go into, one that’s got longevity. And I know you can’t always predict that, but I’d say definitely specializing in it-
Chris Simmance (Host):
[inaudible 00:15:18] still doing MySpace marketing. It’s a thing, isn’t it?
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, exactly. But for example, paid social, PPC, SEO, you can be… `You want to give yourself a specialty, but you also want to be able to have the option to pivot in the future if you need to. We do SEO now and say Google shut down tomorrow, maybe we could start looking into Amazon SEO or TikTok SEO, is probably more relevant now. So you’ve always got to give yourself-
Chris Simmance (Host):
[inaudible 00:15:46].
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, exactly. You’ve always got to give yourself that plan, be retail, but definitely giving yourself a specialty to begin with. And I’d even go as far as drilling down into one niche, whether that is finance, building, home improvements, definitely. That’s what I’d offer as my piece of advice.
Chris Simmance (Host):
And it would be great advice I think, because what often happens is, as happened with you, as happened with many agency leaders, is you start an agency and you go yes to everything. You take on anything, you end up with a chat bot service, you end up with companies across different niches that are hard to manage. And it’s an easy thing to do, but if you go into it knowing e-commerce for fashion, that’s my thing, that’s what I know, I’m great it already, so that’s what I’m going to nail. And then you build your agency around that. It’s great advice.
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Yeah, exactly. And also even from our side, a lot of what we do, the link building, PR side of things as well, when you just work on these one niches, you start developing relationships with the journalists in that industry, the website owners of that industry, and everything naturally links either way. And people talk about compound interest, after time you end up building your own little specialty and network in this niche.
And I think that’s where the true value is into lie for business owners moving forward. And there’s so many agencies that you see popping up now that are your generalist agencies. I see them all the time and the amount of people I get emailing me every single day trying to sell me back links or something along these lines, it almost just completely goes over my head now. So you really need to be able to specialize and be able to have your USP, I think, in order to be able to make a mark nowadays.
Chris Simmance (Host):
Totally agree. And it’s great advice to end the episode on. So thank you very much for that specific piece of advice, but also thanks very much for being on the podcast Charlie.
Charlie Clark (Guest):
Thanks a lot for having me, Chris.
Chris Simmance (Host):
No problem at all. And on the next episode, we’ll have a different agency leader to hear everything about their agency and the things they learned along the way. So thanks for listening.