Chris Simmance:
Thanks voiceover guy on the podcast. I’m lucky enough to be joined by Simon, the MD at Hype Collective. Hello Simon, how are you?
Simon Lucey:
Good, thanks. Yeah, it’s a very glitzy voiceover guy.
Chris Simmance:
I’m the best that Fiverr can offer. I swear to God that guy should be on TV and things. It’s very movie style, like, you know, announce a type thing or strictly come dancing or something like that.
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
He’d have probably done very well in the nineties on generation game for those in the UK listening to this. So, Simon, first opportunity, first thing, first and foremost, realistically, tell us a little bit about hype collective. Tell us about who you are, what you do, how you, how long you’ve been going, things like that.
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, so I’m Simon, founder and MD of Hype Collective. We’ve been going just over six and a half years now, recently acquired actually. And we are a student in youth marketing agency. So it started off working with university sports teams and societies around the UK, you could sponsor them and we promote your thing for them. So our very first ever campaign was doing cooking classes with university sports teams that were around like different nutrition plans and stuff like that. And just grown into doing a wider range of things, but always targeting university students. So we do influencer content events, stuff like that. And yeah, that that’s us basically primarily work with either kind of big consumer brands that you have heard of niche student or youth focus things or the graduate employer basically.
Chris Simmance:
So you started off really niche to an audience, which is probably a good reason why you got acquired, I presume. It makes an agency a lot more acquirable being tight into an area, doesn’t it?
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, I believe so. I mean, obviously I’ve only done it this way, so maybe
Chris Simmance:
Thank
Simon Lucey:
it’s
Chris Simmance:
you.
Simon Lucey:
easy the other way. But yeah, I think it meant that we were, you know, for our size, you know, we weren’t, we’re not a massive agency. We got to like kind of 1.2, 1.3 million.
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Simon Lucey:
Um, but we have big brand names that people believe that they can sell other things too, so, you know, our big brands that we work with are like, you know, co-op Adobe delivery, which I don’t think we would have won if we hadn’t been
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
we’re never going to take on Adobe’s sort of general branding or general marketing. You know,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, yeah.
Simon Lucey:
we’re not, we’re not equipped for that. Um, and, um, also meant that we weren’t, what we do is so niche that, you know, there are very few people that know what we know about that thing. And it meant that we’re not treading on the toes of the people that are requiring us, even though they are in a similar space, but what we do is just different basically.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and definitely not easier. Nishing makes it easier from a, you’re speaking a same language as the audience a lot more easily. You can create very systematic workflows and things like that, but no agency is easy to run regardless of how
Simon Lucey:
Oh
Chris Simmance:
niche
Simon Lucey:
no.
Chris Simmance:
you get. They all come with their little foibles and things like that. So aside from the acquisition, which we’ll touch on shortly. What do you think has been one of the biggest successes that you guys have seen in the six and a bit years?
Simon Lucey:
Oh, I think it’s, I mean, obviously everyone says it’s like tumultuous times, you know, COVID, cost of living crisis and all that sort of stuff. I think where we’ve been best is always willing to kind of reevaluate our proposition, but always sticking to the core of what we do. So we’ve changed our services, we’ve changed like how we service clients and make them happy. But we’ve always, there’s always been that red thread throughout all of it. And
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Simon Lucey:
that, and you know, to get back to it, the niche, which, all the groundwork that we still have people that would have worked with us six years ago. And they’ll, I’m always quite like, you know, no one really cares about agencies, they don’t actually matter. So they’re not going to remember that our specific, you know, service proposition at that time, but they
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
will remember our Hype Collective, they were reliable and roughly did students, right. And that’s, that’s still true. But the services around that have changed a little bit.
Chris Simmance:
And sticking to your guns is a really big success because it’s so easy, isn’t it, to see either chase some cash or run from an issue and
Simon Lucey:
Mm.
Chris Simmance:
kind of then that one, it’s like one step at a time before you realize you’re a mile away from where you started. And it’s so
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
hard to bring it back. So it’s really hard to stick to your, you know, your tone of voice, your audience, your niche. So yeah,
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
I mean, it is a big success. It’s something that a lot of agency leaders struggle. with even with the knowledge that they have, because a big pile of cash comes along or a big issue comes up and it is actually sometimes seemingly the best of all the options to change something fundamental about the business, but usually isn’t the right thing to do.
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, we.
Chris Simmance:
Look at that, you gave him a compliment and he interrupted you. Unbelievable.
Simon Lucey:
That’s all right, so good.
Chris Simmance:
Um, so if you could go back six or so years in, into the past and, uh, you know, poof, you’ve, you’ve arrived and you’ve got an opportunity to talk to the younger version of yourself. What one piece of advice do you think you might give yourself?
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think the thing that I got obsessed with then was trying to plug the gaps of my weaknesses. So my background is in biz dev and growth. And so I was very concerned with kind of how we build a really high quality client services and delivery offering, because that’s not my background. In hindsight, I kind of over focused on the weaknesses a little bit, and actually didn’t. uh, that manifests itself in the organization, eventually turning into me being the bottleneck on the bits that I was good at because I hadn’t handed them to anyone else. Uh, and then actually when I tried to then hire a kind of a biz dev person, there was no process for it. There was no like systems,
Chris Simmance:
See
Simon Lucey:
there
Chris Simmance:
ya.
Simon Lucey:
was no like, um, thought because I just, uh, that element of the business was the bit I was so confident in that I just kind of. run with it, but actually I didn’t have the time to do it effectively. And so ironically, I think like the bit that I was most personally confident in, it’s probably the least structured element of the business where there’s the bits where I was unconfident were very well thought through and methodical.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, like the amount of agency leaders that I speak to who are their own bottleneck for whatever reason or another. It’s amazing because I was there, you’ve just explained
Simon Lucey:
Mm-hmm.
Chris Simmance:
that you were there, we’re our own worst enemy at a certain point in the agency’s life. And it depends who you are and what it is, but there’s always something that you get in the way of. And like the… the decision to delegate something that you know in and out and up and down is really hard, right?
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, yeah. And then, but you don’t even have time to do it properly anyway. So even though in theory, I could do this job really, really well, that I wasn’t even doing it really well, because
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
I was getting stretched across everything. So yeah, I think that’s, that’s the main thing is that treat all aspects of the business equally, regardless of where you feel your personal strengths are basically.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and I think if you were to disappear back in time and speak to yourself and give yourself that advice, do you think that the younger version of you would have been able to heed it?
Simon Lucey:
I hope so.
Chris Simmance:
Hahaha!
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, I think I was, it’s interesting, like, I’ve always had a couple of different like coaches or mentors throughout the time. And I’m, I’d say one of my personal strengths is I’m, I’m very open to feedback, you can, you can, you can, you can tell me I’m being stupid, and I won’t, I won’t get too offended. And I will, will. So hopefully I would have done but who knows, maybe that’s just
Chris Simmance:
Well,
Simon Lucey:
a bit of arrogance.
Chris Simmance:
I think you don’t set up an agency because you have a lack of confidence. And usually it turns out that you know what to do. You know how to do it. You might know, you know, the by the book way of doing these things. But even if you give yourself that advice, it’s often very hard to listen to because it goes against what you’re thinking is right
Simon Lucey:
Hmm.
Chris Simmance:
at the time. And often like… You would have never got to a point of the recent acquisition of the agency if it weren’t for the fact that you had learned the way you’d learned it. You might well have gotten there further down the line, but you can’t know what you don’t know. And you’ve got to learn where that comes from, because at the end of the acquisition, at the end of the process there, however long that will be for you, you’ll be able to move on to something new. And you’ll have all of that in the background that you’ve learned. So just on the side of the acquisition stuff, a lot of agencies have this kind of vision of this utopian view of someone’s going to come along one day with a massive checkbook and you can walk away scot-free and it’s super easy. What’s the process been like for you within what you’re allowed to talk about, of course?
Simon Lucey:
Yeah. So first thing is this isn’t like WPP coming in and offering us you know, 50 million quid for our agency. It’s not it’s not that scale. But it’s like a scale that we’re still really happy with. And it’s really exciting for us, I guess that for me, well, firstly, the motivators for doing it, there are a few things. One quite practically, there was another thing that we didn’t really focus on in our agency, which was investing in our own tech, which for the influencer offering, means that our team were less efficient than some of our competitors because it was very manual. Secondly, personally for me, I think I fell out of love with actually owning an agency and the stress levels
Chris Simmance:
Mmm.
Simon Lucey:
associated with it. So it was very much like a personal sort of, I guess, I’ve loved, interestingly, most agency owners that sell normally hate the sort of earn out period or the period, whatever it is where you’re working for the new people. I’ve absolutely loved it.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah?
Simon Lucey:
Because like I’ve been, yeah, just present like, I feel like free to do a good job without the levels of stress that I had on before. And I’m definitely better at my job since the acquisition than I was before the acquisition, which I think is interesting. So for me, it’s personally worked out quite nicely. That’s not the answer to your question. I can’t remember what the question was.
Chris Simmance:
So, so
Simon Lucey:
It was
Chris Simmance:
first
Simon Lucey:
just
Chris Simmance:
of
Simon Lucey:
a
Chris Simmance:
all, it’s lovely to hear that you’re enjoying the turnout because oftentimes with a larger acquisition
Simon Lucey:
Hmm.
Chris Simmance:
firm, usually the, the things that kind of dictated are harder for you to, to reach and attain, it feels like, sounds like there’s a decent alignment between the two businesses, which makes it a little bit easier to. to not feel like you’re suddenly being encumbered by lofty, massive targets, which are unattainable and all sorts of things like that. And, and,
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
and I think that’s probably where quite a lot of agencies, um, worry, what a lot of agencies worry about. So it’s nice and refreshing to hear a good news story about that. What was the, how did, how did it come about and what, what were the, what were the typical kind of steps that have been in place there? Cause there are,
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
there’s the, the buy the book approach, which is, you know, contracts offers and things like that. But. What was the organic aspect to it? Where did that come in?
Simon Lucey:
So yeah, I basically made a decision just before Christmas that I wanted to explore it as a route. We’ve got kind of nothing, so the Hype Collective was part of a group model
Chris Simmance:
Okay.
Simon Lucey:
already, so we also owned an agency called Hard Numbers which have been on this
Chris Simmance:
Yes?
Simon Lucey:
very podcast,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, yeah.
Simon Lucey:
Daryl’s Berry, and so that we were in a group model with them and I decided they were supported the decision. I was kind of my day job was hype. And Paul and Darryl work across hard numbers. They supported the decision. At that stage, we went to we get an invite, we’ve got an advisor called Stephen Waddington, who’s kind of a non exec director type role with
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Simon Lucey:
us. And sat down with him made a list of about 40 agencies that I thought might be interested in acquiring hype, but he facilitated anonymous introductions to all of them with a very top level of the agency. One thing I will say is everyone is super interested in the gossip of who’s up for sale. So our hit rate of people just having a 10 minute chat off that nearly broke me because
Chris Simmance:
Ha ha!
Simon Lucey:
I basically I had a call with most of them. And it’s just a sales process from there you know, track it down to the final got down to three that were like that we’d signed three that I’d say we got the opportunity to go under the carbonate with
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Simon Lucey:
each of them and then vice versa with us. And it was, we were lucky we managed to make a decision about who we went with as well. Part of that was the money, but also part of it was the culture fit and stuff like that. I think my big bit of advice is they will all ask for exactly the same thing. So you might as well have it all prepared in one pack. Like I ended up with about 20 different kind of versions of the same material, which was confusing me. And so… get
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Simon Lucey:
your
Chris Simmance:
yeah.
Simon Lucey:
NED to kind of tell you what you need and you might as well make that and be you might as well be honest because they will
Chris Simmance:
Let’s
Simon Lucey:
if they’re
Chris Simmance:
find
Simon Lucey:
any
Chris Simmance:
out.
Simon Lucey:
good
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
if they’re any good they will ask those questions later on in the process you might as well give it to them early and make a decision quicker.
Chris Simmance:
And much like bringing in clients or bringing in staff, expectation management is key to this. You know, if you do, if you think you can kind of massage a figure here and there. The expectations won’t be right. Yeah. The cash upfront will be decent, but six months down the line, you’re having to defend the indefendable and it’s very hard. Um, the, the process you explained there about, you know, going out to, um, to, to find potential buyers and things like that sounds an awful lot like what we do at the OMG center, actually, in the sense of kind of building up like a kind of blind portfolio and profile, um, essentially everything that you’d need to know without the name or anything that would lead you toward the name, if you looked into it. And I think that those sorts of things, you do get a lot of looky-loos and you do get that, you know, that sort of stuff. And you just have to very much hope that people live to their end of the NDA,
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
which is very hard to enforce and very hard to prove, but you know, everyone hopefully is professional. But I can imagine that, you know, 40 times 10 minute calls to talk about exact same things, probably quite, quite stressful.
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, it was actually I booked it off the team thought I had it as holiday for that week because I just lined them all up and I was like, I just needed a reason for them not to message me I can’t deal with the lies.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Simon Lucey:
So
Chris Simmance:
it’s
Simon Lucey:
I
Chris Simmance:
hard.
Simon Lucey:
booked it off. I booked it off as yeah and that’s interesting. We know I don’t know who but one person did break the NDA because a client came back to me and said oh he got it and still don’t know who and it’s yeah it’s not that deep but yeah,
Chris Simmance:
It’s
Simon Lucey:
it will
Chris Simmance:
hard.
Simon Lucey:
happen.
Chris Simmance:
It’s, it’s, it’s really hard to get it right. And also, you know, naturally people are people as well. Gossip is part of people’s DNA. Um, the, um,
Simon Lucey:
It’s a great concept.
Chris Simmance:
so when, when the, when all the paper was signed and all of the things were done and it was ready to roll and rock and roll and everything like that, how did, how, how did you, and they kind of convey that properly to the team because, you know, it’s agencies are people businesses, aren’t they?
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, I think so we, I guess one thing is that we probably took it slightly slower than some acquisitions. I think sometimes like the paper is signed, everyone finds out the next day and then they’re in a different office the following day. And like, I, one of my best mates works for a company that was acquired by Google and they have the system and the process for that. And it sounds like magic. Ours was slower than that because we were doing it for the first time and we were less worried about, you know, whilst this is interesting and it’s good gossip, we knew that this wasn’t going to be like huge industry press. So we weren’t worried about like things getting out that way. So yeah, we had the acquisition happened, you know, signed and done on the Friday. Then the next Tuesday, I announced it to my team. And then Josh, the founder of Buller came in the afternoon and had one to ones with all of our team and met them all and answered any questions. And then the following day we had a group team social, which was really fun and got everyone together. And then other things have migrated a little bit slower, but I think the key thing is obviously, me and Josh spent a good time thinking about, right, what are people’s worries gonna be here in this? It’s gonna
Chris Simmance:
Hmm.
Simon Lucey:
be job security, my role changing, stability of the organization, probably my role. and a few other things. And we went through and we were like, what can we give black and white definitive answers on here and what can’t we?
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
And then we shared that and we were explicit in where there is uncertainty. Like there is always gonna be some uncertainty with things, there’s things we
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Simon Lucey:
don’t know.
Chris Simmance:
yeah, yeah.
Simon Lucey:
But we were explicit where we were like, this is a definite and this isn’t a bit of an unknown.
Chris Simmance:
That’s a really nice way of doing it. And the pacing especially is important because, you know, not to do anyone who works in an agency down at all. Um, if you don’t know like the, the role based who you are and where you’re going and what you’re doing, it’s very, it can be very scary because you rely on that income for the most part. And,
Simon Lucey:
Mm.
Chris Simmance:
you know, if you, if you find out one day, Oh, like you say, you, you’ve been acquired and your new company is called this or something like that. It’s very hard to then tie that to, have I got a job at Christmas? Um,
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
and things like that. And I remember the last agency I ever worked at, and it was a key reason why I left and set up for myself was, um, I think we got an email on a Thursday and all hands email, not it was literally high, high name. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like for us in particular. Um, Acquisition is completed. We will now be known by, and I’m not going to mention the thing. Um, on Friday, rather than the normal all hands meeting, the project department or something, I can’t remember what they were called now, will be delivering like boxes to each of the desks. And we filled up all the boxes and we got told the address to arrive at nine o’clock in the morning on the Monday down the road. And we all showed up in this big older place. And it was kind of like a massive room where they were like, right, okay, reading out names and saying which floor you had to go to. And it was really, it was awful. And I just
Simon Lucey:
God.
Chris Simmance:
remember thinking I’ve got a, like a, um, IBM think pad or a Dell, something or other laptop with a barcode on it and all that sort of stuff. And I was like, I’m not a person. I’m a number in this place. Uh, hence why I’ve been treated like a number in this place. I’m off. And I think a lot of other people either did it and left or felt terrible for quite a while. So the pacing that you’ve chosen and the way you’ve communicated it is, is exceptionally good.
Simon Lucey:
Yeah. And I think, I mean, the fundamental motivator for this is ultimately like an actual mistake that we made that we during the COVID launched more of an influencer offering and we didn’t invest, we invested in people, not tech. And that was an explicit decision that we all made. And in hindsight, we should have invested more in our technology than we did.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
And this is the company that required us have got that problem solved. Their technology
Chris Simmance:
minutes.
Simon Lucey:
is incredible. So I think everyone like the fundamental rationale was community. Kate up front, but I think the thing that Stephen Washington said to me constantly is he’s like, you’ve got to remember that. So we, our acquisition happened in early June. He’s like, this has been your life for the last seven months. For them, they’ve got no idea what’s going on. And
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
it’s so new. So like all of these things that you’ve spent seven months thinking through, they haven’t, they’re starting completely from scratch. And it
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Simon Lucey:
is
Chris Simmance:
yeah.
Simon Lucey:
so
Chris Simmance:
It’s almost
Simon Lucey:
many
Chris Simmance:
like
Simon Lucey:
of those.
Chris Simmance:
finding out you’ve got a kid coming in two months time.
Simon Lucey:
Yeah, it’s huge. And like so many of the real like, and the reactions were all so different. Like I remember telling one of my team who I was slightly worried about, and they were like, totally cool with it. Amazing. And then others were like, go straight into the detail of worrying about like, are we going to use the same project management tools and stuff like this? And like it’s, and it’s like, there’s no right reaction, but it’s you have to facilitate for a very wide range of them.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and it sounds like it’s gone well, going well, and the team have sort of assimilated in a nice way, which is which is kind of key to keep you know, key to take away as a big win beyond the obvious personal accolade as
Simon Lucey:
Mm.
Chris Simmance:
to a certain level of an exit from an agency. And if there’s someone listening to the podcast right now and they, you know, they they’ve heard about all of this or they’ve just hearing about the the exit right now or anything in particular, that’s kind of, they knock on your door and they say, what’s one piece of advice you would give me as another agency owner? What piece of advice would you offer them?
Simon Lucey:
Oh, good. I think just prioritize yourself. Like, genuinely, if you’re prioritized your like, own well being,
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Simon Lucey:
like when you’re like, when you’re I always think when I’m in a good headspace, I’m a really good agency, like manager or founder, whatever.
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Simon Lucey:
When I’m not, I’m pretty terrible. So like, it really is important to like,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Simon Lucey:
make sure that your headspace is in, in the right place to do a good job. Because ultimately, You can be there worrying about everyone else’s problems, but that will actually make you a worse
Chris Simmance:
Yes.
Simon Lucey:
founder or manager. And so sort your own shit out first, basically.
Chris Simmance:
Yes. So typically good advice there based on everything I’ve heard so far is sort your shit out first. And you’re right. I was terrible at running the agency when something was wrong with me, either physically or mentally, when there were outside pressures that I didn’t handle very well, the internal team. often ended up suffering to a certain degree. Yeah, they were annoying and they did things wrong, but they definitely didn’t deserve the,
Simon Lucey:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
you know, the rest of it. So you’re a better leader if you, you know, know yourself better and you understand yourself better for sure. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Simon. It’s been wonderful to talk to you today.
Simon Lucey:
Thanks for having me, Chris. Loved
Chris Simmance:
No
Simon Lucey:
it.
Chris Simmance:
problem, no worries at all. And in our next episode, we’ll be speaking with another agency leader to hear their story and the lessons they learned along the way. Thanks very much for listening.