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
Thanks voiceover guy and on this podcast today we’ve got Alan from Growth Gorilla. How you doing?
Alan Silvestri
Hey, Chris, it’s great to be here again. How you doing?
Chris Simmance
It’s a whole year. We would literally almost a whole year ago talking and on the podcast at least we’ve.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Flew by.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Simmance
And how’s how’s the last year treated you?
Alan Silvestri
Right, last year has been very interesting to say the least. Uh, we’ve essentially had our best year ever, but also some of the worst times ever. At the same time. So it was kind of a roller coaster, to be honest.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
I think every day in an agency is either the up bit or the down bit of the roller coaster. It’s never the cruising in at the end of the at the end of the ride when you start to calm down. So.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Oh yes.
Chris Simmance
Uh, just for anyone who’s not listened to the original podcast with you on John, give us a quick rundown of what the agency does and talk about how you came to that amazing branding as well. I’m still really jealous of your branding.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. So growth Gorilla is a content promotion link building agency for BB software companies. So we have those companies that are producing quality content to get the word out.
Alan Silvestri
And essentially acquire backlinks to increase traffic for specific keywords that and that they want to rank for.
Alan Silvestri
So I started the agency back in
Alan Silvestri
So initially we were doing kind of like the more standard type of link building that like most people do. And then over time, we included more strategic aspects. And so we tried to position ourselves more of like trusted strategic partners with our clients where we don’t just take orders from them, but we also help them figure out what they need and why they need that to be able to get more results.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Which is that that that bit is the bit that that changes in agency, doesn’t it? Because when you go from taking like link orders or whatever it would be through to why do you need that many or what here’s here’s what you really need. You need one good piece of content to attract some good, good readership and things like engagement is just as important. So what’s kind of one or two of the major developments that’s happened in the agency over the last year or so and you know have you.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Have you felt about making those developments?
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. So the main thing and I also mentioned this in our first interview. So I started back last year when we were talking, so I started delegating some of the strategy stuff to someone else in the team. So that I didn’t have to do all of that myself.
Chris Simmance
Hmm.
Alan Silvestri
That turned out to be a great decision and I’m really happy that I did so over time I started delegating more and more of that kind of stuff, so that’s been working very well. The main thing is keeping in mind that like unless you want someone to be, like, totally proactive and coming up with new strategy and new things.
Alan Silvestri
You so like basically if you want someone like that, you’re gonna have to like pay more and hire, like, a dedicated role. Right? So what I wanted to do is essentially take most of the strategy stuff that was sort of like systemize able and repeatable to someone else that that was already in my team to.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Free up some of my time essentially so that’s been working very well.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
That has allowed me to do more marketing, more sales and things like that.
Alan Silvestri
But the main thing that’s happened is.
Alan Silvestri
Is essentially when things were going well. So like July last year, we had our best like time ever like the most clients that we have ever had the most revenue. So basically I started getting complacent, right and so.
Chris Simmance
That happens.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. So I kind of stopped doing all of those very important things that most like leaders should be doing all the time, right? So like doing more regeneration and coming up with new processes, new systems and stuff.
Chris Simmance
Hmm.
Alan Silvestri
And some of the reasons why I stopped doing that is also because some of the clients that we had turned out to be kind of like painting the ask clients.
Alan Silvestri
And that’s something where I learned like a lot as well in in clients management.
Alan Silvestri
But yeah, like all of these things, combination of me getting complacent. Some clients that deviated my attention to them.
Alan Silvestri
Essentially, I stopped doing all of those things, and so for that reason some clients cancelled. We had some issues inside the team as well.
Chris Simmance
Hmm.
Alan Silvestri
So yeah, that was not a very good time, but that’s where I essentially.
Alan Silvestri
God, like a wake up call right to like, go back in my seat and start doing those important things again. And so those are starting to pay off now, which is good.
Chris Simmance
Hmm.
Chris Simmance
I think I think there’s there’s, you know, there’s more than probably anyone right now because of what you just said that like learning how to delegate and being able to delegate at two different things like that feeling when you get it right and you’ve got someone who feels good that they’ve got a task that they’ve delivered properly and you feel comfortable allowing more to be delegated. That’s quite nice, but it’s a process, isn’t it? You kind of learn the right way of doing it over time and you know you’re I think as a business grows, you’re going to realize.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Some clients aren’t a fit and like you say, you know exactly who your clients are now, right? You’ve got the BB software, SAS, etcetera. That’s really important to make it fit and sometimes there isn’t the right fit.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Mm-hmm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. So something else that I that I learned as well is that niching down is very important and very useful. That said, especially in times like these, it’s also important to diversify a little bit. So we started taking on some clients that are not necessarily SAS.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Uh, with the COVID that it should be a very good client and doing like really good quality content, right? So we do have these kind of like exceptions that are useful for us to diversify in times like these where maybe there’s not a lot of SAS clients because the recession because the times are like weird.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Absolutely. And I look, I look at it. So I don’t know if you do this and if you don’t maybe have a think about it. So we do like lead scoring style type things. So if you’re in the niche, you get points. If you’re not in the niche and you’re ,, miles away from the niche, you get minus four points and anything in between that is a spectrum. So you might have a great budget. You might be really fun to work with. You might have the right team behind you, you might have everything, but because you’re not in the niche, it shouldn’t mean you don’t work with them.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
They might be the perfect client, just not in the niche. And naturally if they’ve got a big enough budget to compensate for not being in your niche, you’re you’re you’re change a few processes ever so slightly, but the last thing you wanna do is obviously be everywhere for everything and just open the doors because you then have clients which are terrible and hard to manage. So yeah, score the leads and they don’t have to be perfect every time.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Yep.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah, that’s a very good point. I guess I’ve been doing that kind of like subconsciously, just like in my head, but it’s definitely a great idea to, like, write it down and make possibly delegating to someone in my team that handles the sales admin kind of stuff so they know when someone comes in like they should be getting on the call and maybe these are the guys shouldn’t write for all these kind of scoring points.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Yeah, we we used to. We initially started like similarly to you kind of like a gut feeling. Does it work? Is it gonna work? Then we type then I thought once let’s quantify it because we were losing a lot of clients, but we’re gaining a lot of clients at the end of six months, I was exhausted, but we had the same amount of clients in the same revenue and I thought well, let’s track it back and then you can see what kinds of questions in your lead scoring actually suggest that six months into the future, they’re going to be.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Good or bad to keep? And so yeah, it’s it’s. But being able to delegate any of these tasks is is absolutely like a fantastic option, especially if you want to be the leader, set the strategy and do the call bits of the marketing. I mean as we’re talking now just before we came on, I saw about four of your tweets over the course of like scrolling through Twitter. So you’re definitely having the time to do some good sort of outbound marketing, which is great to see.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Mm-hmm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
And in the rest of the outside of the agency, what in your either in your niche or in the digital marketing industry in particular, what have you, what trends have you seen over the last year or any of those things that you’ve kind of gotten in on early or are there things that you’re not gonna touch with?
Chris Simmance
With a a long stick.
Alan Silvestri
Hmm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. So like you mentioned before, we started recording chat, GPT is the obvious kind of winner here. Everybody’s talking about it. For me personally, I started implementing it like very slowly for some things. And I gotta say.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Like it can be very useful, right? So I was just doing a job post because I’m trying to hire a new financial kind of assistant.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Like basically on off work, right? So what I did is I is I wrote down the main like tasks.
Alan Silvestri
And that this person should do. And then I went to charge PT and I was like like write me a job description for this role that should do these tasks and then boom like in a couple of seconds I got very nice written job descriptions. So for things like these where it’s essentially.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
It could be very good. That said, yeah, I wouldn’t probably use it for like creative work like articles, blog articles like some people are suggesting, which I don’t really think it’s gonna work, especially because if.
Alan Silvestri
Basically, if it’s like an artificial intelligence that.
Alan Silvestri
Taking data from a database.
Alan Silvestri
I’m pretty sure Google is smart enough to be able to find like that out right and to spot duplicate content as well.
Chris Simmance
So so about. I don’t want to show my age too much, but a long time ago when article spinning was a thing in SEO and it was relatively new. At that point it was you put that entire article in, press a button and seconds later you got versions of the same article.
Alan Silvestri
So.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Hmm.
Chris Simmance
And now each one of those tools that did article spinning were uniquely written. But in terms of the tools they they they output was written was created differently and for a little while everyone was saying this is the great, this is how you get links. So you then put all of this in one article, different blogs, different links from different domains, great job. Google will never know. And then over time.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Google picked it up, Google worked out and then article spinning became really really easy to spot and in the really early days of article sending, unless you knew you, you’d spun it. It’s really hard to find because that web of interconnected pieces of content didn’t exist or wasn’t easy to find. And you’re right, I think if you’re writing words, , word articles at the very least you should be using them to give you a guide. And then maybe that’s the the guide for the outline. And then you can add creative into there. But.
Alan Silvestri
The.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Similarly to to the old old days of article spinning this this is this is article spinning . in many senses and but like you say with the job description and things like that.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah, basically, yeah.
Chris Simmance
To to cut down on like laborious types of things is great. So like I’m I I. If I wanted to, if I if I’ve got like or tweets that I want to to send in this in the space of a week, I’ll put them in as a bullet list and say repeat this bullet list back to me with appropriate hashtags that I wouldn’t necessarily have considered and some of them come through and OK, I wouldn’t have thought of that. And it does help. But getting it to do all the thinking for you.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Nah, too risky. Too risky.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean like.
Alan Silvestri
Well, yeah, it’s risky, but it’s also defeats the whole point of being human, you know, thinking so, yeah.
Chris Simmance
Do do do you think in the future if the if these tools do this, you’ll have?
Chris Simmance
AI tools writing content that humans won’t read because they don’t want to spend the time reading it. That they’ll use an AI tool to summarize the content, and then you’ll have robots which spend time deciding whether or not that’s human content, and then penalizing it.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah, yeah. I mean that might as well happen. I mean, like I yeah, I can’t really. I can vision like, you know, the the thing that your mask is working on what they call the the newer link. So people with like get content injected like straight into the brains like some serious sci-fi stuff which I love by the way. Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Chris Simmance
It sounds really scary. It sounds really scary, but I’m not gonna lie. I’m. I quite I I I’m. I might join the queue for that just to see. And I don’t know, it’s.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Simmance
They would say and so.
Alan Silvestri
So we can all be like like NEO in matrix and we can all learn Kung Fu in in like seconds.
Chris Simmance
I mean that would be cool, right? And so, so you’re using, you’re using like AI in the agency now to kind of help develop on certain things like, you know, job roles and things like that and whatnot. And if you had anyone in the team try to to kind of develop a process with it or is that something that you’re kind of holding on to at the minute?
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. So for now, I just want to try and experiment with it myself. So for now, like within our team, like everything.
Alan Silvestri
Sort of start from me. Like all the time, so I still don’t have someone else in the team that usually come up with new processes and things like that, like I’m the highest level kind of like employee. So yeah, what I typically do is experiment with new things myself, and then if I find something that works, then I can move it down the pipeline to someone else in the team.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
Nice. Nice. So.
Chris Simmance
And if you’ve explained a little bit about, you know, the last year things that have changed in the agency and kind of going with it, what what, what’s what’s developed over the last year sort of for you professionally in terms of your sort of professional growth as a leader of a business?
Alan Silvestri
Umm yeah, so so I did learn quite a lot more in like client management setting expectations multiple times like over and over and over again because no matter how much you do that, some clients like always seem to not understand what the expectations are. The other thing that I learned is that a client is not a client basically until they paid month one, because I’ve had my clients confirming and everything. Yes, we want to get started like I started.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
And then five days prior to the start date, they changed their mind, which was really not great.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Uh, so yeah, it’s a mix of like client management, team management, delegation and all things that you sort of have to learn in difficult times, unfortunately.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
But it’s also where, like most of the growth can happen.
Chris Simmance
And what?
Chris Simmance
And and out of the whole spectrum of leadership, what do you think beyond delegating? What do you think’s been one of the like your?
Chris Simmance
Uh biggest lessons, or one of the things that you’ve sort of taken away from from the year and gone? I’m I’m I’m a better leader now because of this.
Alan Silvestri
Umm, yeah, so I definitely. I’m definitely happy about the fact that even though revenue went down and we did hire new people when things were going well, so we had more expenses when things went kind of down. That said, I did my best to not fire anyone, so I cut on some other expenses. I went into our software and see what I could cut from there.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Just because I didn’t want to to cut anyone in the team and and I seriously believe that’s true and a good decision because everybody’s happy in the team and everybody’s kind of proud of being part of the team as well.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
A good uh and that that often is the first thing people think of if they’re not. If they’re not people focused as much as they like to say in the good times and but equally I guess when you were looking to to cut down on things, you didn’t cut things just because you needed you wanted to save money, you cut the things that probably were bloating out anyway. And if you’ve got a bit more time for the team, then maybe they can take some of that work on.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Chris Simmance
And I think I think that’s it sounds really good to say and and I’m and it’s really credit to your honesty to sort of say, you know when things weren’t going so well, we focused on the team. That’s a real leadership trait, which is great to see.
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Chris Simmance
And so what’s the what’s the kind of the core plan, the core focus for, for you and for the business over the next say months if we did season three in months time, what what’s the plan? What are you trying to get towards?
Alan Silvestri
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah. So I mean, the main plan is to # go back to where we were last year. This is because there was a very good place and I think with the new mindset and new infrastructures that we have in place now, we should be able to manage and handle that super well compared to last year. So we do want to go back to that. So we need to do First off a lot of lead generation and I essentially spent like the end of Q just starting to do a lot of lead generation started using a new software.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
To do like cold e-mail for sales, essentially. So in developing a process for that that hopefully I can delegate soon.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
That’s been working quite well, but I also want to do more like sort of like like creative things. So part of it is going to be I want to launch a Content promotion podcast. So that’s all going to be a podcast about on the promotions on Link building, content distribution, digital PR, like everything that is essentially taking content basically after it’s published. And what do you do after that essentially. So that’s yeah. So that’s the main project. The second project is I want to do an online course.
Chris Simmance
Nice.
Chris Simmance
That’s awesome.
Alan Silvestri
That’s basically going to outline the entire process of what we do in the agency that’s going to be.
Alan Silvestri
Serving mainly as a way to get people in the door, then maybe don’t have the full budget to be able to work with us and but also yeah, to kind of.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Alan Silvestri
I’m like service some extra cache like bluntly said you know.
Chris Simmance
Yeah, of course. Yeah, naturally.
Alan Silvestri
That works and that.
Chris Simmance
You you’re not a you’re not a charity. So remember that.
Alan Silvestri
No. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, those are the two main projects and.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah, I mean, we hope to go back to where we were and do more. Possibly my goal is to go to K per month. That’s my my revenue target for the year.
Alan Silvestri
So yeah.
Chris Simmance
Pretty decent, pretty decent target. So if you’re if you imagine right now you’re listening to this in a year’s time, what one thing out of all of that? Definitely, definitely. Do you want future Alan to say yes. Nailed it.
Alan Silvestri
So is it like an advice that like future me should give to?
Chris Simmance
Yeah. So, so out of all of the things in your entire year that you’re focusing on now for the next months, if you in a year’s time are listening to this podcast again to see whether you made it, what’s the one thing that you’re gonna really under all circumstances, you’re gonna say? Yeah, but nailed it, popping the champagne.
Alan Silvestri
Hmm.
Alan Silvestri
OK.
Chris Simmance
Umm.
Chris Simmance
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
No, that was well.
Alan Silvestri
The other thing is to do more at lead generation cause I’ve never done that systematically, so I’m really curious to see how to go.
Chris Simmance
Hmm.
Chris Simmance
OK. Well, we’ll ask future, Alan. What what, whether he, whether he made it or not in probably season .
Alan Silvestri
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri
Awesome.
Chris Simmance
Thanks so much for being on Alan again, second time round for spending time being on on the podcast. So thanks very much and we’ll find out whether you made it in a year.
Alan Silvestri
Yeah, sounds good. Thank you, Chris. And yeah, looking forward to episode .
Chris Simmance
Fantastic. Thanks so much. And in the next podcast, we’ll be speaking to another agency leader again to find out what happened to them in the last year since we spoke to them. Thanks very much for listening.