Voiceover 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 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 today, I’m lucky enough to have the famous Kevin Gibbons again, season two, we spoke a good while ago now on the podcast at least. Hopefully we’ve got a nice nice amount of cool things to talk about now. How you doing, Kevin?

Kevin:
Yeah, very good. And yeah, thanks for having me back.

Chris Simmance:
Well, I almost didn’t have you back when we tried this

Kevin:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
the last time a couple of weeks

Kevin:
Take

Chris Simmance:
ago and

Kevin:
two.

Chris Simmance:
someone decided to cut your internet cables up.

Kevin:
Exactly, yeah.

Chris Simmance:
So for, exactly, for anyone who’s been living under a rock for the last decade, tell them a little bit about yourself and Resignal and, you know, give them a bit of a rundown of what you guys do as an agency.

Kevin:
Yeah, sure. So I’ve been involved in SEO myself since 2003. I’ve run an agency called SE Optimise since 2006 and we became what is now Resignal. Eleven years ago, I think today, I got a work anniversary card from our team this morning. So yeah, we’re now into our eleventh

Chris Simmance:
Ha

Kevin:
year.

Chris Simmance:
ha.

Kevin:
And we specialize in SEO and we made a call recently, maybe even coming up to close to 12 months to focus exclusively on e-commerce as a key sector. So that’s

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

Kevin:
a big thing since we last spoke. And yeah, we work with a great set of brands, so likes of ASICS, Fatface, Under Armour, and continually looking to grow, but specializing within. within SEO as a core.

Chris Simmance:
It’s good to have a focus and a focus within a focus is pretty good because you can command some decent pitch decks there. You know, you really talk to someone’s language. So, excuse me. So tell us about like some of the major changes in the last year with the agency. You know, what’s had to be adapted? What have you been kind of consciously working on?

Kevin:
Yeah, so I’ve always thought of like five answers at once of that, but I’ll start with, I think positioning has changed in terms of what we’re doing. Positioning sets the theme for quite a lot of agencies in terms of what do you say yes to, but importantly

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
what do you say no to as well. And I think for us that’s then allowed us to say, okay, well, what do we want to be moving forward and how do we shape our future in the direction that we want to go. So the positioning piece for us If I’m honest, it’s probably still a work in progress, but it’s something that we found our core specialism over the years has been working with e-commerce brands. And it’s something that I think we’re probably even going to get narrower on in terms of the types of clients

Chris Simmance:
Boom.

Kevin:
we work with and thinking about kind of like, how do we really add value? And I think the game’s changed a bit in terms of agencies and their specialisms and kind of. what you need to be able to bring outside of just SEO experience.

Chris Simmance:
Mmm.

Kevin:
That sector knowledge is key. We’ve bolstered the team in a number of new roles. I’d say my role’s probably changed a bit as part of that as well. But yeah, I think the big thing’s probably positioning and then there’s a number of things that we’ve then implemented as part of that to really strengthen and reinforce who we are, what we do and who we do it for.

Chris Simmance:
So for those agencies that haven’t got like a clear positioning at the minute, um, I know what the obvious benefits are. You now know absolutely because you’ve, you’re experiencing them. What, what would you say would be like a really obviously clear benefit of going down the potentially scary route of, of, of niching into a position and getting that sort of the positioning bit is almost like, you know, I’m drawing my line in the sand and that’s it. So.

Kevin:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
what would you say would be a key benefit to that?

Kevin:
Well, I’ll start with a scary bit, which is you’re turning away business and that’s never

Chris Simmance:
Yes.

Kevin:
comfortable. And I remember toying with this years ago, back when I remember I got like AdWords qualified and everything else. I was kind of like, I need to know everything about digital marketing in order to make sure that we offer

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
the best services to our clients. And then I kind of had this realization, it took quite a long time to be honest, if actually we should specialize on what we’re good at and what we’re passionate about, and for me, that was always SEO. Like. paid cert,

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Kevin:
I got to a certain level where I could do it and do a good job. And we, at times, had a very strong team on paid search, but our core specialism was always an SEO. And I think we started to drop the ball a bit in some of the other areas. And I know a turning point, there’s a couple of turning points. One was we lost a key client that we had exceptional SEO results for, but we were below par on PPC and that

Chris Simmance:
Hmm.

Kevin:
then made it okay. Well, actually, if we specialize more in what we offer as a service, then we can partner with other agencies for the ones that

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
do the other services. And then obviously we get the parts that we want. We give away the other parts that we don’t want, but in return, hopefully we’ll get more back that wouldn’t have come our way previously. Um, so that was scary because it meant that we were turning down money from. a service that we used to offer and now we’re just focusing on one. And

Chris Simmance:
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Kevin:
it’s scary again when we then said, okay, well, over the years, we’ve always been very much B2C, so we’ve been travel, retail, finance, our key sectors. Um, we do have a couple of clients that we still work within financial services, um, do a very good job with. But we’ve made a call that moving forward, what we want to attract is the e-commerce businesses. Um, that’s where, if I look back over the last. certainly five years, that’s where most of our experience has been. Travel faded

Chris Simmance:
Anyway.

Kevin:
away during COVID and e-commerce exploded and we just found actually our track record is really strong. If you look into kind of like moving into the benefits, the new biz pitch rate or win rate, if we were to pitch for an e-commerce business, our win rate would be much stronger because we’ve got really strong case studies of the likes of ASICS, Fatface, Ocar over the years, and brands that show that we’ve been there and done it for people like you in terms of similar brands. That goes a long way, whereas actually if you’re pitching for a business that you haven’t worked with before, I think we know very well that quite often what you deliver might follow a very similar framework, but it’s not the same as having a proven track record that you’ve done it for someone else that’s similar to that. You know the inside. You know, kind of like the nuances of how things work. And

Chris Simmance:
Mmm.

Kevin:
I think, I mean, that’s a big benefit. The other one I would say is just absolute focus. It means that then we can focus certainly our marketing is around the core sector. We used to run breakfast events, for example, around travel, retail, finance, and they’d do one a quarter, we’d do one month. And Now we can focus exclusively on Econ. We made a big move earlier this year to actually say, let’s not just do breakfast events and let’s consolidate. We did increase some of our spend on stuff like this as well, but let’s really focus on Econ. We run a 150-person conference, which

Chris Simmance:
Which was brilliant.

Kevin:
you attended. And it’s very well received. And it was stuff

Chris Simmance:
It was

Kevin:
like that

Chris Simmance:
very,

Kevin:
that

Chris Simmance:
very good.

Kevin:
I If we were to not make that decision on positioning, it would have been harder for us to say, let’s just run another SEO conference. So there’s great SEO conferences out there already, but I think what we could bring with bringing together the specialism of SEO and EECOM really helped. And with that, we became more focused in what we’re doing from a delivery perspective, but also a marketing perspective of how we attract that small kind of… more focused set of clients. But yeah, it does take a bit of a

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
brave decision on knowing what you’re turning away as well.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And, and I think like, you can have all the internal discussions you like about it, you can make the decisions all you like about it, but that as soon as you you literally split the switch, which does instead of we do everything for everyone, it says we do this single thing for the single group of people to solve their problem. Um, that’s when you’re very clearly marketing. This is, this is where you go now. Um, and you know, If you’d have said that a few years ago about travel, you’d be in a different position where you’d say, okay, we changed our mind. But if you know, with Ecom, you’re saying with all of the knowledge you’ve got of Ecom, you’re saying with all of the expertise, experience and expertise. But you’re also able to rely a little bit more on that as a future revenue stream, because it’s a little bit more resilient given the way the world is. How do you think the… How do you think the recent changes in the industry are gonna affect Econ? Cause I know that when this goes out, it would be a bit after the brand new news of, what’s it search generative results, et cetera. What’s it called? Search generative experience or something. I can’t remember now what the acronym

Kevin:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
means, but there’s gonna be impacts to how SEO works. There’s gonna be impacts to how Econ works and things like that. How are you guys looking at that emergence and sort of working on things around there?

Kevin:
I should have, Kashal and our team has put together a deck on his thoughts about this that was shared just before this call.

Chris Simmance:
That’s a webinar we need to do.

Kevin:
Which I probably should have looked at before this call as opposed to after it. But yeah, no, I think the idea is, and that’s probably a key thing, is having people in our team that are both keeping up with the trends but also experimenting with those trends and actually bringing them into use cases. And I think for us, it’s very much, we’ve got clients where… We typically run kind of like QBRs, so quarterly business reviews with our clients. We’ll have a innovation roadmap in terms of these are things that we’re experimenting and trialing with in terms of where we think things are going, where we can drive efficiencies, maybe with technology. And there’s some things that we’re, we’re building out at the moments on that front. But equally what changes with Google and platforms because that’s obviously going to have a

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
big impact of if we just do things the same way that we’ve always done, then actually we’re missing a trick. So, but equally, if you stop what you’re doing and follow the latest Chinese trends every time it changes, we change direction every day. So it’s

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
picking the bets and the things that we think, okay, let’s dig a bit deeper here in an experiment, but then blocking time out to say, okay, let’s, let’s draw some trends together. And. understand firstly where do we want to dip our toe in and then secondly Okay, how is that working? What are the trends that we’ve learned and can we do more of this?

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and being able to have your focus and your positioning means that you can, in a sense, discard some of the noise that the other areas are talking about, that maybe it will be tangentially connected, but not enough that you need to focus a huge amount of time on, meaning, you know, the time you do spend is a lot more valuable. What’s been something that you guys are kind of seeing change in the industry, like makeup of agencies and things like that? Because I know that… I can see that there’s a, after the hangover of COVID, there’s certainly an awful lot that I think is changing in the dynamics and the culture in agencies. What are you seeing as a leader?

Kevin:
Yeah, it’s an interesting point. I think for us, I think it’s still kind of a getting used to, I don’t know, they called it like the new normal at one point. I don’t even know what stage we’re at now. But it’s, it’s kind of understanding what that looks like as from a client perspective of what our clients need from a team perspective of what gets the best out of our team. We always had an office, for example, before. Um, COVID and we were quite flexible. We did four day weeks that we’d actually just taken down to three day weeks, but still kind of with core hours of needing to be in the office. And since then we’ve not just got rid of the office, but we have a largely distributed team that was across the UK. So actually having an office right now. I’m not even sure where you would maybe if we have more people in Manchester than we

Chris Simmance:
Where

Kevin:
do in

Chris Simmance:
you

Kevin:
London

Chris Simmance:
put it?

Kevin:
now. Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
Where would it be? Yeah.

Kevin:
it wouldn’t make sense. Yeah. If we had an office, we’d have a mass walkout because people would not be able to get there. But equally, it’s not just about that.

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Kevin:
It’s about, I could say, what do our clients need and how do we do our best work? I think there was an agency I saw recently that have said that we’re going back to the office and you need to live within a certain range or be able to commute in there. I read their justification for it and I actually thought it was very fair. But I think it’s… what works is one or the other. I think you make a decision that we’re gonna have an office location, people will need to be located relatively close in order to be in the office or we’re remote and we embrace it. I think the middle ground really doesn’t work and I think the, we’ll go in two days a week or you can go in whatever day you like but you go into quite an empty office or the, I’m definitely not a fan of the…

Chris Simmance:
Oh, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Kevin:
the meetings where some people are in the room and some people are dialing in and everyone in the room is talking to a screen instead of each other and it’s like stuff like that I just don’t think works. But

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
I do think if you’re remote and that’s the way that we’ve gone and like I say, not knocking, having an office, I think that we’ve done very well at that in the past and there’s benefits for it but I think you have to make a call one way or the other and I think everyone post-COVID was very much… Let’s try hybrid and figure out which way it takes us. Um,

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Kevin:
certainly if you had a commitment to a lease, then of course you’re going to try and use that, um, in some way, but for us, it’s been very much, we’ve got people in our team, like I say, Manchester, Cornwall, Birmingham, kind of Leeds, London, Oxford, Newbury, it’s kind of like, it’s, it’s very distributed in a way that means if we

Chris Simmance:
Yeah,

Kevin:
need

Chris Simmance:
yeah.

Kevin:
to get

Chris Simmance:
You need

Kevin:
together.

Chris Simmance:
a converted van. You need a

Kevin:
Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
converted van

Kevin:
exactly.

Chris Simmance:
as an office driver around the country.

Kevin:
But it means we can meet up as a team and it’s not too difficult to meet once a month,

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
once a year or stuff like that. If you need to be, we’ve got clients in Amsterdam, if we need to be there and see them, then that’s fine, we’ll be there. But equally,

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
we

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
don’t need to be together in a room five days a week. But I think that’s allowed us to tap open to more talent. So like I said, I think you have to pick your

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Kevin:
position on it. I think we’ve certainly seen benefits from that call.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah. So over the last year, all of the changes that’s been made in the agency, the successes that have come from it, where do you think you’ve gone professionally, personally? What’s developed in you as a leader?

Kevin:
I think it’s an evolution of the role. I’ve been very, very much trying to build the agency as a system that works. And I found that I was a bottleneck, to be honest, in the past. And I think it’s natural for an agency leader, you reach a certain size. I think most agency leaders might get to say, a million turnover and run the show. And I think that’s quite common, but I think beyond

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Kevin:
that point. it’s then really tricky to, you’re spinning too many plates. And I think for us it’s, okay, well, I’ve never felt I’m the best person that knew Biz, um, client services. Again, I think I can build strong relationships with clients and do good work. But again, it’s like trying to do everything operationally, culturally across the team. And I think for me, it’s actually, I put more work into stuff like our own positioning. We have a great head of HR that helps to make sure we’ve got a really strong culture in our team and we’ve built out senior leadership team that again, it’s, there’s focus on new biz, client services and kind of continuous pressure on each of those because they’re, they’re really important. Whereas I think

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Kevin:
in the early days, I did too much of that myself. And I’d spread myself too thin and it’d be like, Oh, we’ve got a great lead. I’m going to focus on this and let’s win it. And then it’s, we’ve got no leads. I’m going to focus on marketing. Let’s fill the pipeline. this client,

Chris Simmance:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin:
things aren’t going that well, I’m going to step in and fix that. And it’s like, you can’t do that. Not a scale. And yeah, I think now just building core competencies in all of those important areas where I can coach the team, but I’m not

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Kevin:
the person with sole accountability. There’s someone that is accountable for each of those areas of the business makes it so much easier.

Chris Simmance:
Absolutely. And speaking of leadership and accountability, thank you for writing the foreword to the digital agency leader book from the OMG Center, Control Alt Lead.

Kevin:
Yeah, of course.

Chris Simmance:
It will be available by the time this book goes live, this podcast goes live. It was really interesting reading that foreword. And when anyone listens to the book, please do head to the OMG Center website to download your copy. Because… Just that one foreword tells you an awful lot about the journey that you’ve gone through as a leader, Kevin. And, you know, first of all, thanks for writing it. And second of all, hopefully you enjoyed the book itself. Probably

Kevin:
Absolutely,

Chris Simmance:
not as

Kevin:
yeah.

Chris Simmance:
many lessons in there as it may well be for others, given your path so far. But thank you.

Kevin:
Yeah, of course. And like I put in forward, I think it’s, I almost wish there was more knowledge about this when I got started. I think I’ve learned from

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, same.

Kevin:
mistakes after mistakes.

Chris Simmance:
This is a book full of well-worded lessons.

Kevin:
Yeah, exactly. But sometimes you have to go through it, don’t you, in order to learn it. It’s like you can get told the right

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Kevin:
answers, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. And I think it’s useful certainly to have kind of a bit more theory and yeah, a bit of a blueprint

Chris Simmance:
Exactly.

Kevin:
on how to do it. But

Chris Simmance:
Exactly.

Kevin:
equally some of those hard lessons, there’s no cheat code essentially. It’s like you’ve

Chris Simmance:
No.

Kevin:
got to go through it.

Chris Simmance:
The Leadership Konami Code does not exist, listeners. So Kevin,

Kevin:
That’s not

Chris Simmance:
we’re

Kevin:
it.

Chris Simmance:
a year into the future. We’re re-recording for our third time. What’s the core focus for you and Resignal in the next year?

Kevin:
Yeah, so I think there’s certain things we’re working on right now to get towards that. But it’s, like I mentioned, our positioning, I think might get even tighter in terms of the brands that we’re targeting and working with. Certainly, I think for us, we’ve always been kind of quite a premium SEO agency in terms of the brands that we work with. And it will be continuing to grow across that journey. Is it interesting to mention like… Um, into our 11th year now, but originally I remember having a vision for the company around kind of having 12 great brands that we work with and 20. Well, class team members. I think, I think we’re there at that point in time. I think we have achieved that and it’s now thinking about how do we take that to the next level. And there’ll be some things around, um, what we need to do. I still don’t see us being an agency that has. 50 clients, I think it’s an agency that has a small group of clients that are kind of larger on the whole and that’s just the model that we work with. But yeah, there’s certain areas that we’re built out with our leadership team. We’re working on some technology that again is probably a bit too early to talk about right now, but yeah, in a year’s time

Chris Simmance:
Thanks for watching!

Kevin:
almost that’s something I would like to have seen not just be built but kind of… being used and helping to drive efficiency and strong work for our clients. So, so yeah, I think there’s quite a lot there.

Chris Simmance:
We’ll time the podcast recording for the launch then next year.

Kevin:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that’s fair. But, um, but yeah, it’s, some of it is more of the same and some of it is actually, like I say, kind of trying to use a bit of my time now, I freed up, um, some of the time in other areas for some of the bigger projects. So doing things like the conference, I think it’s really good fun. Um, and I think there’s other things that we’re working on that there may be bigger projects than we would have done in the past and it’s, it’s nice to be able to focus on that as well. So, uh, so yeah, it’s how do we. move towards where we want to get to, as opposed to just being kind of like reactive to the day to day as well.

Chris Simmance:
That’s nice, that’s nice. Thank you so much for coming along again the second time, Kevin, it’s been great to speak to you.

Kevin:
Yeah, of course. Yeah, no, happy to be a part of it. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Simmance:
And in our next episode, we’ll revisit another agency leader and see how their last year has been. And thanks for listening.