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. OK, so let us begin over to you, Chris.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Thanks, Voice Over Guy and on the podcast today, we’ve got Ross Tavendale from Type-A Media. How you doing, Ross?
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Very good. Thank you, Mr Simmance. It’s lovely to be back. Can’t believe that it’s been a full season. It’s uh.
Chris Simmance (Host)
These are one episode.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Wow left the neck and look how far we’ve come, huh? For a couple more grey hairs, I think I’m a couple of pounds heavier.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, exactly.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
My liver is a little bit more. Dry there, you know, we’re all making good progress. In all fronts.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah. And All in all the right. Fronts all the fronts. So for those terrible people who skipped series. One, and they’re now listening to Series 2 and give them a little bit of a rundown of who you are and who type A is and what do you guys do best.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Type A is a form of diabetes. No type a media or a digital marketing agency. An SEO agency specialising in data journalism. My name is Ross. I’m the managing director of said agency and I cut my teeth on big box agency world. So the publicist strips and WPF of the world. Dealing with Big Blue chips and started type five years ago now, which is pretty nuts I. Think it’s it’s.
Chris Simmance (Host)
This year going to be your 5th birthday.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Yeah, flip a neck.
Chris Simmance (Host)
There you go. Big party coming up, everyone. You heard it here first. RSVP for your invites then. So over the last year since we spoke. What? What have been some of the the major changes in the agency and like for good or bad, how have you, you know adapted? To those things.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
The major changes have been around structure. Around hiring so understanding you know, getting the right people in the right. Seats. Yeah. Doing a proper org chart. Really doubling down on job descriptions and really looking at the people element of the business more than just the delivery element where you’re first getting started. It’s like make a product that’s really amazing, make a process. It’s really amazing. And then you do that and then you know there’s only so much that you can tinker with, and then it’s like cool. We now need to, you know, get past the certain revenue targets and certain headcount. How do we do that? Well, that’s through the internal processes. So that’s been the big change for us as we can have operation side of things.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah. And we’re building an operational machine. Uh, that essentially gives you the the traction, should we say, uh that the.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
That is a very good keyword. Yeah, we read traction. We have something called ohh our. What’s what’s even stand for vision? And I forgive the two stands for actually, but essentially we’ve. Really, systematised what we want to achieve in a one, three and five year timeline. So it was like a one year plan, a three-year uh picture and a five year view and they just get more you know one of them is written with you know fine line pen the next one with a marker and then the next one with the paintbrush so. Yeah, actually helped and then defining our quote unquote rocks every. Which are our big boulders that we need to move out of the way to to move things forward and slowly but surely it started to really put us in a. A really good place.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And and those are the sorts of things which. That you can buy these books, by the way, everyone, I’m not sure gonna try and gatekeep any of this secret knowledge. They’re the sort of things that if you know what it is you want to change the the you can. You can follow one of these. You can follow some of these practises in these books and I think that. You know, not saying, oh, yeah, you definitely need a agency coach, by the way. I’m just saying that everyone should, you know, book me. But you still need. You need a. You need to follow something, and if you’ve got something that’s in writing and you’re following a process and you know where you wanna go, this these sorts of things are really helpful and do have you found? Any particular part of kind of working on that side of the business harder than anything else from your perspective?
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
The people bit is always a challenge for me. I find myself trying to do things to to make people happy and grow them in their positions and grow their careers and trying to work out the like the the balance. That’s always the the challenging part. Recruitment has become much easier this year. Weirdly, we started opening it up to countries outside of the. OK, which it just massively changed things for us. I think the UK market, especially the London market for recruitment is pretty ********, especially when you’re dealing with recruiters who perhaps do not have well, I mean they’re they’re incentivized to do certain things that are not necessarily aligned with you. Best interest. So with that, that’s been an interesting one.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Interesting side note, you recently hired Maya first ever hire. The new. I said yes, that was my accident. So strange.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
And yeah, I’m just slowly taking all of your intellectual property from your first ever. Agency onto my.
Chris Simmance (Host)
You’re doing it. Very slowly, because there wasn’t very much.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Yeah, one a year we’ll do one year. Yeah, we did. He’s been phenomenal. You know, we’ve eventually got him to unlearn all that rubbish. She. Learned Optus and yeah.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Like, that’s like I told you. Anything that anything good that he’s doing? I’ve obviously taught him beyond that. It’s it’s been 7 and a. Half years, that’s.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So beyond the the agency developing in the last year, what what’s been something you’ve noticed in the in the industry as a whole that’s that’s developed or evolved and and how are you? There’s a business adapting to it.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
And there’s been a lot more. Players in the market. And it continues to be more and more fragmented. When we last spoke, I think I was complaining about. These new agencies coming in and cutting their own throats and what I mean. By that is. We lost a piece of business to someone who was going to do it cheaper and with no terms. And that we’re we’re fine to lose when it’s that that’s the, you know, if we’re beat on, we’ll have no contract and we’ll do it for you know, no money well. That’s not great. So I see that a lot more. I’m also seeing it. It’s much harder to get a client to commit. To an annual contract which in my mind doesn’t make any real. Cents because the companies we deal with are typically mid sized to large. And their marketing budget gets signed off annually. So what used to happen is marketing budget gets signed off. It’s was part of that signing up for the year. Off you go try and get again next year. That’s not happening as much. Their procurement teams are much. That they prefer to just have you just on a 30 day roller which is just really not a good place for for agency.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And and and from an agency’s point of view. Obviously it means that you kind of have to increase the the monthly fee in order to be risk losing them sooner than the year. And for anyone who hasn’t listened. We did a. We did a a webinar about a month ago about IP and contracts and there’s a really good reason for having longer term contracts. And it’s not just to lock a client in. It certainly shouldn’t be. And and and I I know that you’ll have noticed this as well, Ross, when you’re when you’re trying to have longer term. Contracts with clients. It often does come down to die, risking on both sides from a financial point of view, but also kind of making the agency look better. If someone was to want to buy it.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
That and also like they say, it’s a better deal for the client to do long term contracts because you can invest more as an agency up front and get them results faster because you know that you’ve got the the year’s contract to fall back on. An example is one of our clients who are French and English, so we have. And SU and PR SO2 service lines for us and two countries for us. The interesting thing there is we don’t have just ready to rock’n’roll, you know, French PR, because it’s quite niche. So yeah. Yeah. So and especially for this industry as well. So you’re just wearing niche or niche niche and also they need to be like. With SU and link building and all that. So it’s there’s no a big, you know, line of people around the corner ready to do. So you need to hire and specialists for it, and that would typically be on a freelance contract. Now you cannot hire a freelance for 30 days at a time that’s worth their salt because no one who’s good wants to have the risk of 30 days and dropped. And also I want to book their time so I can guarantee deliverability for the client and I can’t and so I I need to book them for a. And then the UM, and so therefore the client needs to be able to sign a contract per year. So it’s actually the client’s best interests to do that because it creates stability, which is what I don’t think they realise a lot of the time.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, there’s that. But there’s a lot of concerns around money at the minute, in many senses, and I think it’s not always the best decision to make as you say. But I think there’s a there’s an argument there where. There someone at the top who has the purse strings makes the decision but doesn’t understand the where the any of these the the the money is is necessarily spent I think. And obviously I I I like everything. It’s kind of cyclical. Eventually the the budget caps will disappear and all of a sudden it will be a spend fest again like it was, was it 2010, eleven, 12. And just all of a sudden, went went hyperbolic. Could be looking at that again in a year or Two’s time, assuming that that you know financial services change their their tune somewhat.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that but I think that’s definitely going to happen and when there’s blood on the streets, it’s really a. Good time for. Companies that do things like organic marketing, because that’s typically the one thing that gets more investment. We saw with the COVID pandemic or should should probably not say certain words in case it. You know demonetizes or reduces the.
Chris Simmance (Host)
- You’re you’re one of the four listeners, so it’s fine.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Right. Yeah, that’s. And they’re going to. Two or four. So I think it will be good for organic. Marketing with all this stuff happening, one of the things that we’re manoeuvring to do is give them cancellation terms month to month, but uhm, annual but full annual contract values, which allows them to break but keeps the contract value sign.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And and in the industry wise that that that totally makes sense and and you’ve you know you’ve talked about some of the major developments in the agency over the last year. What do you think’s been one of the kind of the core personal and professional developments that you’ve personally seen in the last year yourself?
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
I’ve personally seen people get a lot better at the working from home remote thing, and that is certainly got a lot more. We we worked out how to build culture when being remote and it means making a little bit extra effort with comms and things like that. So in terms of professional development. I think it’s really just the nuance in conversation and communication with people in terms of my personal professional development, I think my. My mindset has very much been trying to simplify. Everything we we had a kind of one of our kind of secondary values, it was less but better. So we we want to still deliver great work to our clients, but do we necessarily need to produce 15 pieces of documentation in order for them to understand.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Oftentimes no.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Almost definitely no. I mean, it was we have a a multi country client and their Google Drive is just like it’s impossible to find anything for them. So that’s how we started to look at our professional development and we’ve created something where there’s a single thread. It goes through all deliverables from a uhm delivery point of view to a strategy point of view, to reporting point of view, which has become. Very important, whereas before it was very just desper. Deliverables. Now everything is heavily connected and makes sense.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Well, it’s been one of the the major wins for the year for Taipei.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
I think the major wins would be so when we opened up our hiring process to outside of the UK. Being able to onboard quite a lot of people that are not UK based, integrating with their culture and get them working on client stuff straight away, that’s been a major win for us as a business. And also just learning little silly things that you don’t take into consideration like. There’s no Amazon.com in certain countries, so how do you get someone a laptop there?
Chris Simmance (Host)
And how do you post something when maybe those countries don’t necessarily have the best of services and things?
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
And like, you know, orch pirates are quite a big thing in some of those, like particular places and all of that. You know. Yeah, that’s been interesting. Or like, if someone leaves, how do you get the equipment back when they’re in like Dubai? You know, it’s just like. All that sort of stuff and you, you start to realise that there’s so many of these, like implicit trust contracts you have with your team that you need to really lean on quite heavily so. Yeah, we, we’ve learned a lot about. Uh, and integrating the international, I would say.
Chris Simmance (Host)
12 years in 1212 years, 12 months into the future, we’re recording season three. We’re looking back over the next year. That’s to come. What’s your main focus for the business?
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
It’s doubling headcount and achieving a a personal escape velocity. And what I mean by that is a as an MD owner and I wear. So when we’ve done our right see a right people write seats exercise. I’m sitting in three seats. Uh. Which? You know what? Well, well, I’ve got a big. **** through snow lambic still. Uh, we need people to fill those seats. Mainly commercial director. That will be like the last domino to fall for Taipei before we can have truescale and and then looking at HR and you, we use all these various. Private companies and many of which we found on the OMG Centre and to do our HR and and things of that nature. So bringing that yeah, bringing that in House is going to be a big, big thing for us.
Chris Simmance (Host)
12 months into the future, we’re going to see a A, a larger headcount. We’re going to see the the dominoes coming into place ready to fall and it’s pretty pretty big year ahead then.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
Yeah, it was actually. And again and I’m not just saying this because you’re interviewing me, but I took on an executive coach again from OMG Centre. And pointed out something really interesting to me. So as a business, we will go up to a certain very significant revenue number and then we’ll come back to it and then we’ll go up and we’ll come back down and we’ll just consistently do this. And he said, well, why don’t you just create little mini companies inside the company at that revenue figure? And I’m like, oh. Which makes sense and all. These done there and but with different languages said create pods and then just go create a new pod. If you’re really good at, you know, building your business up to a certain size, just do that over and over and over again. There doesn’t have to be some crazy complex layer thing. Just redo it and do it again. So. That’s really helping me. To think differently about achieving scale and structure and all of a sudden getting into like crazy, you know, revenue numbers is less intimidating cause it’s just like two or three pods of something. I’ve done multiple times in the last.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Five years. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, I know I won’t be a year. Before I speak to you again, but best of luck and I’ve I’m pretty sure that you’ll you’ll have at least some of those more pods this time next year.
Ross Tavendale (Guest)
We shall see, and perhaps a couple more grey hairs, but yeah, it’s been great to talk and I hope to see you. Somewhere in the very near future.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Thanks a lot Ross. In the next episode, we’ll revisit another agency leader and see how their last year has been. So thanks very much for listening.