V.O. 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 Voice Over guy, and on the podcast they’ve got Carolyn from ROI Swift all the way from Austin, TX. How are you doing?
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Fantastic. How are you, Chris?
Chris Simmance (Host)
Lovely to speak to you. I’m really good today. So finally getting a bit sunny in the UK after months and months and months of grey, we have up one of our we are having one of our two full days a year of sunshine.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Well, I hope you. Get to get out and enjoy it.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Same here, so I’ll be. I’ll be taking the office dogs out for a for a walk after this after this recording. So Caroline, for those who don’t know, tell us all about ROI. Swift, what do you guys do? And and you know, potentially there could be a a potential customer listening so. So tell us tell us how awesome you guys are.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Well, thank you. Well. I have to back up a little bit that just before I talk about our why SWIFT, I I come from big corporate Fortune 100, Dell consumer marketing, e-commerce 20 years ago and that was fantastic. But once we got to be a $8 billion division, it wasn’t fun anymore. So I, Left and alert.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, all that, all that, all that money took all. The fun out of it.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
You know it it. There wasn’t the excitement of, you know. Oh, I didn’t make. An extra $1,000,000 today so. So I went to the drama. If only we could have. Those problems as a smaller agencies, right versus Fortune 100?
Speaker
Then that.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
So I went to work for a small mom and baby company. There were $3 million company and. I was their entire marketing team and I loved it. I did all their Google ads, their Facebook ads, their Amazon, their website, their clavio e-mail marketing, and really loved it helped them 5X and they got acquired by recumbent Kaiser and that this is really fun. I want to do this for more brands. So I started our way SWIFT in 2015. We’ve been helping sort of three to $50 million brands grow in those areas, primarily growing on Amazon, growing their revenue there and growing their due to fee revenue through paid ads. So we’re a Google partner, a meta partner, an Amazon partner. So that’s what gets us up in the morning. And our goal is to grow 1000 emerging. Plans by 2030.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Ohh wow OK so. We’ve got 7 more years to go. Are you on track?
Speaker
We are on.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Track we have, we have, I’ve got some job security, you know, we’ve got few 100. More 6-7 hundred more to go, but it’s it’s very exciting. We’re coming out with some some newer offerings for smaller brands that are we typically would have to turn away we we refer out 30% of our business but it breaks my heart to see what some agencies have charged people and then what they’ve done that that’s why. I mean this I almost have in this to give agencies a better. Name too.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yes, there’s quite a few. There’s quite a few that don’t give agencies a good name, but there’s on the on the nice way of looking at it. There’s an awful lot of agencies that do really care, and I think that, you know, when you know when you are one, don’t.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. You know, when you hold yourself accountable and you think like an owner, and we always say if this was our business, is this what you would do? Is this the best that we could do? What would you do differently and really put ourselves in those shoes? You know, there’s a lot of brands that. You know, run out of money only. 4% of businesses. Only ever make it over $1,000,000 so. A lot of businesses will shutter before then or. Run out of cash. So we. Don’t want to think that happen.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, we see that happen. An awful lot, don’t we? And so how long has he been going? You said seven years, 7. Seven years. So what do you think’s been one of the most successful things that you guys have done over those seven years? What? What’s the one thing if if someone was to say, you know, give me the the the top thing that that ROI Swift has done in the seven last seven years, what would the first thing come to mind?
Speaker
Well, we do.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Have some some client wins you know from two guys. You know, we work to $2 billion revenue. So those are some of the fun ones. But really I think what? Helps us and helps us grow is processes and we use the EOS, the entrepreneurs operating system and we have accountability and everything’s in asana. And so we, you know, there’s not a lot of tribal knowledge that walks out the door. So the fact that we have a playbook and a process that’s repeatable, it’s really. Really helpful to both the team and to our.
Chris Simmance (Host)
It’s amazing how you say that so easily, yet the amount of agencies which I speak to over the course of my role and who have accountable processes and uncountable in inverted commas, the processes are bullet lists on Google Docs and and. And the the way of measuring that is did something go wrong or not and and and and did did did this kind of building of the agency mindset come from where you were previously in the larger organisations or is that something that you kind of always always been doing?
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
It’s actually a great question. You know, we we did. Have processes and we went through Dell when I was there was starting to go through business process improvement BPI and some of that process improvement. But it really it came from joining entrepreneurs organisation, which is a global organisation for CEO’s and founders of. Business is over 1,000,000 and it really came from talking with others and meeting some great folks who had scaled their businesses using. EOS and we use software and we have like weekly scorecards and accountability and there’s really no weird.
Chris Simmance (Host)
High saying any of the right words. I like this. Yes, that’s awesome. So if you could go? Back right to. The very beginning you’ve just you’ve just I’m. If I’m following the timeline, you’ve just left the company that. That and got bought and you decided to set up for yourself what one piece of advice would would current you give to past you just as you were? Setting up the agency.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Don’t start an agency business.
Chris Simmance (Host)
It’s not that.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
I’m joking. I’m joking. No, I I think from the get go I would have done a lot of things differently. I I went through four sales people and they were great people. They just weren’t the right fit or I didn’t have the right software. And so I finally talked to this great guy. His name is Jack Daly. He has built massive sales organisations. Wildly successful, wrote seven books, and he he came to Austin as part of an EO event and talked to us. And I talked to him for an hour afterwards. And he said, why are you? Why are you hiring sales people? You’re a marketer. You don’t know how to rent sales. Why? Don’t you just outsource it? And it took me, you know. Five years to figure out. But me trying to run a sales organisation as a marketer is not a good thing. So I wish I would go back and, you know, make make all those mistakes a little bit quicker. If I were starting an.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Agency. I’ll tell you what, I’m enjoying this conversation, Caroline, because you didn’t say. Don’t you didn’t say give advice that stopped. Making the mistakes you, you you would rather learn them quicker and which which is great because I think. Running a digital agency is probably one of the most expensive MBAs you’ll ever have. The amount of things you can, you know, in corporate land, the amount of things you know in all the jobs you’ve ever done in your life, you start running your own agency, and quite a lot of mistakes happened that you didn’t even know to consider and think about and. It’s quite. It it’s a very quite a lot of punches in the face, shall we say when things go wrong, but you, you know, it’s it’s it’s something that you continue to do out of love and and if you’re good at it and you’re good at learning and you’re good at systems and processes and accountability and it it grows into something like you’re talking about right now it’s.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Thank you. What about you? I’d love to hear your. Answer to the question.
Chris Simmance (Host)
If I could go back in time, I would have told myself to get out of my own way much quicker. I have. I was a bad employer at times because I didn’t listen properly. My way was the right way regardless or delegation was pretty poor at certain times because I just wasn’t. I wasn’t uhm. Clear. Really what I wanted for quite a lot of the time and and a lot of those lessons came at a price and sometimes it’s, you know, it just wasn’t good for the business. And so I learned an awful lot. And by not getting out of my own way, I’d preferred to have been told to get out of my own way much sooner, because I think it would have been less painful. But. But yeah, get out of your own way sooner, Chris. And I think it was very humbling to learn that.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
That’s great. I we we used to have a saying, Adele, you know, well executed failures, you know, so and and I’m a believer in fail fast, you know, try things and and fail fast and move on and to your point I didn’t I I didn’t fail fast enough you know and I might have had employees stay on too long that weren’t. A+ players and as you know as an agency. If you’re if you’re under 30 or 40. People, I mean. Everybody’s got to be an A player. There’s no room for yeah. What we call. Campers or gotta goes we we sort of plot every. Buddy, and we really need a plus players and and that’s the other thing that I have been mistakes I’ve made in the past is. Let yeah, let. Someone that we knew was not the right person for that seat. They’re a great person. They’d be great in another role, but they. Weren’t the right person for that seat have. Let them stay in that.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Seat too long, but I think that as part of the the US stuff, isn’t it? We need to have the right bums in the right seats and and it and and and some sometimes. Sometimes it’s you can go through the best well in your perspective the best hiring process. Really good onboarding. You can have great documentation, but until that person sits down South to speak and gets the work, it’s very hard to really see whether they were the right fit or not. And you know, it’s it’s fine to have your values and to try and exhibit all of these things and and and show all of this to people. But people are all different. And sometimes you will hire someone that isn’t a fit. And that might be a mutual thing. And you know, you work out a way to to to make that amicably, make an amicable separation, as we say, and but other times it isn’t as easy as that, and I think. People part of the digital agency structure is the OR kind of piece of the puzzle, and it’s often the hardest to to to manage and and especially in the long run when you’re when, as you grow the stakes get higher.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Absolutely true.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So what do you think over the last 7? Well, yeah, 7 ish years. Has been something that that you you did really early on that you think’s kind of set you up for this success that you’re seeing at the minute?
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Probably the thing that I find the. Most troubling with agencies is that not everybody is an expert, right? So sort of from day one, I I hate to say it, and I won’t admit that, but. I know how to code and Shopify. I know how to the four things to look. At an Amazon. Account within 5 minutes to tell. You. What? What? What? What you can do. How you can be doing better? So I think everybody having that expertise and platform knowledge is is critical and so. I a lot of people.
Speaker
You know I.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Sort of joke that I’d love to go open. A line of car washes, like an unsexy business. You know that. Just makes money, right? And and and. Just do a car. Car wash franchise. You know the most upscale, convenient car wash franchise ever. And it. But you know and I. Don’t need an expertise in car. Wash right. I can hire someone. Whereas I feel like that’s the key thing that you have to get it. Everybody has to be. A platform expert. For for your agency to work, because all you have is your reputation, and if you are not consistently, we get so many referrals that those all come from doing great work. And so we have a goal of, you know, making our our customers raving fans and the only way to do that. Is to know the platform. Inside and out and constantly deliver value.
Chris Simmance (Host)
That’s it. And and and the good thing the the downside of referrals is you can never fully rely on them, but the upside is that you know, they’re swifter to sell, they’re longer lasting, etcetera. So the balance is is great and if you can have lots and lots of referrals then that’s fantastic as well as a sales machine and which is obviously again a big part of that. That that puzzle, it’s interesting you say about having, you know, say a semi non expertise required business to to run in, in, in the digital agency world, especially in the last year or so. With with uh meta changing its platform quite a lot with, I mean every week it seems some sort of development in Amazon and Google and now all the AI stuff that’s coming through, it’s it’s increasingly becoming more important to be an expert on a platform or an area or a niche because. Then that personal people can keep up to date with stuff. If you’re broadly aware of things that it’s not gonna be good enough very soon because it’s just gonna be too much going on and too many changes I logged in to to meta business the other day to to stick some ads on Facebook and I and I couldn’t recognise anything from. Like a year ago. I don’t do this stuff anymore, so I’m looking at it and thinking. I might need to hire someone to do this. And that it it it just it. It’s not because I’m stupid or because I’ve never done it before, but because I’m not an expert in a in a platform like you say. So right I’m having to I’m having to take a big step up every time I look at some of these things versus smaller. Depth because you live and you.
Speaker
Read it.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Exactly. It’s almost like training for a marathon, right? If you run a marathon, but if you don’t run for a year, you you’re not gonna be able to go. And run another marathon. So yeah, you there’s no. Have to.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Chance of that? Happening here? No me neither 5.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
K is my speed, but it’s the same thing. You have to keep up with it. And so one of our questions and one of. Our core values. To always be learning, and so when we’re interviewing folks, we’re asking them how do you stay on top of trends in your industry and you know, we want to hear them. Say that they’re listening to podcasts. They’re reading blog posts. They’re reading the meta blog or the Amazon Seller blog, and they’re in certain meta groups or masterminds of, you know, if someone’s not owning their own learning, we can’t. We can’t make them learn, you know, it’s just has to be ingrained in you. That you have a thirst for knowledge and that you know natural curiosity.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Completely agree and. In this industry in particular as well, because not just because it changes so much, but because you do have to be able to put yourself in the customer shoes quite often in order to be able to reverse engineer. Onto the platform that you’re wanting to to promote them on. What? So that’s one thing you did. Well, early on. What, conversely, didn’t you necessarily consider that that was either a mistake or something that was a a hard lesson that has kind of now turned into a a process or something that that’s kind of set? You up for this success now?
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Yes, give it. Great, we. You know, we did run. Our own Google ads, and it’s really hard. And I had a lot of conversations, but not. A lot of. Ideal clients and so I think it’s the combination of. When we hired our first salesperson, we didn’t have a good database. That person spent most of their time looking for database. Second person was a great person, wanted to be a farmer, not a hunter. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Third person of was amazing. Classic Sandler sales training. We had the Salesforce, we had zoom info for the database, we had everything. She was just a little. Not the right fit well in a China shop from a people person standpoint, right? And the last one, again, same thing. He’s a great guy at trade shows, but we don’t do a lot of trade shows. He’s your in person account manager, sales guy. So so I think you know those are. You know, getting that getting sales, figure it out like you said, we had so many referrals. So early on we didn’t even think about outbound. And now it’s, you know, 7. Years in, it’s like, oh, we should think about. Outbound uh. We should actually redo our website. That’s seven years old, you know. So I I wish. I had been thinking about those things. A lot sooner.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Well, and those are things that often get missed because you’re spending a lot of time building the rest of it. So it’s forgivable, but so it’s forgivable so. There’s someone who’s listening to this podcast right now, and they’re thinking of setting up an agency for themselves, or they’ve just started setting up an agency for themselves. What one piece of advice do you think you? Could give them that. That that they could take take away.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
If it goes back to, I like the way you put it, the right thumbs. In the right. Seats, you know, in agency is all about people, right? It’s all about relationships, and so just making sure that you’ve got those right people in those right seats makes you know when I didn’t. I would lose sleep and I I. It was a stressful time for me. And when you knew you didn’t have the right person in the right seat and they were going to be happier somewhere else and your job was to make to help them find happiness somewhere else. You know, those were the stressful times. For me, so I would say be really, you know. Higher slow fire fast.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Very good advice actually. The there there’s a. I I don’t know if it’s the same for you where you are right now, but I’m noticing an awful lot of difficulty in the recruitment side of of the industry where it’s there’s. Seeming it seems to be an employees market right now in that there are there are lots of people going for lots of roles, but there’s also a lot of people leaving a lot of roles. And I think that that a lot of that sends from hiring too quickly and being in the wrong seat post COVID lots of businesses have suddenly opened up roles. Taken on whoever they can, and I think that there’s a there’s a knock on impact now, you know a year and a half later of people realising that they’re not happy where they are and leaving. And then those agencies are having to rehire quickly. And so higher slow fire fast feels like a really good bit of advice there.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
Yes, here in Austin, there’s been massive layoffs at Meta, Google, Amazon, Walmart just announced they’re closing their tech centre in Austin and forcing people to move to one of their other two tech centres, either Bentonville, AR, or forget what city the third one. And so, so there’s, I’ll tell you a. Year ago it was impossible to hire in Austin. So we were actually. We will hire anywhere in Texas. We have team members in San Antonio which is about an. Hour and a half. From here, 15 member in Houston, who’s about 3 hours from here. And so we basically said for tax reasons, as long as you’re in Texas. He can work with us because Austin is. Yeah, I can imagine what it’s like where you are, but. Austin was really hard to. Hire for a long time. It’s it’s definitely easing up and we’ve just brought on an amazing person onto our Amazon team that we probably wouldn’t have been able to get a year.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, which is great news for you and and sorry, Amazon, you don’t get them back now. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. Caroline, it’s been it’s been really great talking to you.
Carolyn Lowe (Guest)
You too, Chris. Thank you so. Much for having me.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Thank you. And in our next episode, we’ll be speaking with another agency leader to hear their story and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. So thanks very much for listening.