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 Cheryl from Wagada. I’ve said it right this time, haven’t I?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
You did well done.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Learned. Then you took me 12 months of repeating it three times a day in. Front of the. Mirror how are you?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Good. Yeah. Brilliant. Yes, thanks. Yeah. How are?
Chris Simmance (Host)
You not too bad, not too bad. And and. And I was just saying before we started recording that. And I’ve seen you guys and your team all over, mostly LinkedIn, over the last year, almost every winning awards being involved in big things. It’s it’s really been good to see. So looking forward to to hearing a bit more about.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yeah, brilliant. Yeah. No, we’ve had a good year, actually. Yeah, it’s been a it’s been an. Exciting year with lots going on.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So for those terrible people who skipped season one and missed your episode, give us a little plug. Who, who, who? Who are you? What do the agency? What does the agency do?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yeah, OK. Fab. So we are a digital marketing agency. We I started off the business about 12 years ago and we were purely an SEO agency in those. Days. But as SEO has changed over the years and become more about brand building, we’ve grown the business into more of a full service marketing agency. So I think the last time we spoke, we weren’t doing very much web development tools. We were doing web development. We were bringing in external web developers, but actually excitingly at the end of last year, we took on our first in-house web developer.
Speaker
Oh wow.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
So that was exciting. So now we’ve started making websites, you know, really pushing forward with the websites previously would only really do them if our clients asked. Us for them. Whereas now we’re proactively selling that as a service and encouraging our clients to to really update their web presence. And so that’s quite exciting. But we we’ve got a bit of a niche kind of the cyber tech industry. We also have quite a few clients in the kind of food industry and construction.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So what was the thing that kind of made you? Decide to go from hire and external whenever you need it for where to adding it as a as a in house like proper service.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
I think we realised that we needed to push it a bit more. I’d always been very keen not to bring on web development as a service because there’s a lot of Web developers that offer SEO on the side and I wanted to make it clear that we were a very specialist, very niche expert, SEO. In agency. So. So why? I was always a bit reticent to go down the web development route, but the sort of clients that we’re now working with, they expect us to be able to offer that full service. They don’t want to have to go to different. Frances. So we’ve been using freelancers for a little while and I think it just feels a bit like you’re at the mercy of someone else and someone else’s business.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Very much so.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yeah. And whilst they were very good, we weren’t necessarily getting things done at the speed that we wanted them to be done or in the order that we wanted them to be done. And I I think it’s about of control really about how we could get a bit more control over our web development.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And and over the last year that that was the tail end of the year. So what what other kind of major things have developed in the agency since we last spoke?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
So I think one of the really big things is that we’ve grown the team quite a lot over the past year. So I think this time last year we only had about 14 people and now we’ve got 2728 people. So we’ve grown quite a lot.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And I recall when we spoke, you had a relatively. Unique way of of going through hiring. You know, going out for coffees and having a conversation with people and maybe they’re a fit for later. Did that has that panned out? Has that been working well?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
It has been working well. I mean it’s still been a. Tricky year for. Recruitment, but we had we’ve had to be quite creative in how we find people. So you know, I’m one of the one of the people we recently recruited was the niece of one of the mums I met on the playground at school, but it has literally been just talking to anybody. You know? Yeah. Anybody know anyone who might be looking for a? Job and and that’s tend to be working quite well and we’ve also been building up a database of people that we could come back to later, which I think is probably what we talked about last time. I think we got a bit irritated with the number of recruitment consultants that would come to us and sending a CV’s and saying, oh, this is Jessica. She lives down the road from you well. How did we not know? That Jessica lived down the road. From us, you know, how do we don’t know, Jessica. So just being really proactive in getting to know who’s local and who might want to one day come and have a have a job with us.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, I I think. And recruit recruiters like estate agents. You end up having the vast majority. There’s a there’s a an underpinning of kind of you, you, you and I know everyone who’s listening to this knows that feeling. But then there are a few very good ones that that really do care and do give a damn. But you gotta find them.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And we’ve got a few good partners in the OG Centre, but again, it’s gonna be about the right fit and things like that in terms of timing and things. And it sounds like, you know, in the industry that, that, that we’re in. If you’re a smart person and you’re looking for a new role or a new career, it’s not impossible to learn quite a lot of the skills that you need so you know the the the person you met in the playground looking for a job, smart person, keen to learn. That’s more or less the the the the key key components. You can learn quite a lot of the stuff. That you do so. With recruitment being quite hard, I know that speaking to a lot of agencies that I’m working with that that it’s been hard for pretty much everyone coming out of COVID. No, you had a lot of people who were who went freelance whilst they were on furlough and all that sort of stuff. And I I’m starting to see that there’s a lot of those people coming back into into employment and things. Have you noticed it getting any easier? Or is it roughly as as difficult as it was before?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
No, it’s definitely got easier. I think we got to about November, December and suddenly there seemed to be a big surge of applicants, really good applicants. So we ended up recruiting a few people that we didn’t actually need yet just because we were so over excited about the fact that we’d found some people that have been such.
Chris Simmance (Host)
They’ve come to us. They’ve come. To us, we better.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yeah, so, so we we ended up taking on more than we needed in December, which in a way was quite a nice position to be in because it meant we could start the year with quite ambitious sales targets. Well, I think this time last year we were slightly short staff. So whilst we were still growing and we were still pushing. Nails. It was. We were pushing it slightly, nervously, because we didn’t really have bar capacity. Yeah. So this is it. So, so yeah, we have done a really big push on sales this year, which has been quite, quite exciting actually, cause I’ve always been a bit passive with sales. I would say we all, we’ve been quite lucky in that we get lots of. And you know, kind of inbound. Leads. You know, for quite organically, but I think when you rely on you know referrals and that sort of thing, then you don’t, you’re not necessarily in control of the work that’s coming in or the tighter clients or the size of.
Chris Simmance (Host)
It’s funny, you’re the third person in this week to say we love referrals. They’re, you know, good for. They’re good, easier sales because they already know you and things like that. But the the the. Reliance on them has become less attractive in the last, you know, six months or so.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Chris Simmance (Host)
What do you think in? The last year like a. Has been like a, a, a major kind of change in the in wider industry and and what what have you guys been doing either to to adapt to it or work in a different way? What what’s happened around there?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Well, one interesting thing that has happened coming back to the crewman thing is that our clients, a few of them, got to the point where they said we actually we’re going to have to slow down the marketing because we haven’t got enough staff ourselves to be able to fulfil the work that you’re bringing in. So it was people like chains of care homes that we work for and chains of nursery children’s nurseries. So we we adapted to develop a an employer branding service probably starts a little bit before the beginning of last year but and and we’ve been pushing that quite a lot and that’s been really, really helpful way to to sort of support our clients. They get to where they need to be but also they’re not lose the marketing.
Speaker
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Work as well because we can work on. Both at the same time, and it’s been quite a nice inn for some clients as well. So because it’s really such a pain point for people that is kind of, you know, we’ve we’ve been doing a lot more sort of proactive outbound sales and we’ve been using the employer branding as a bit of a a character to dangle in some people.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah. So. So is that you kind of going going in as making? Then more appealing externally so that they can hire more easily. Is that what we’re?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Saying yeah, yes it is. Yes. So establishing what their messages are around, why people should go and work there and what the benefits are. So in developing things like their employer value proposition, but also supporting them in their recruitment marketing to get that message out. So it’s amazing the number of. Kind of work for us pages on websites which are just. Terrible. They’re just more about them being able to sort of say, you know, show who they are rather than necessarily show attractive. What what’s that?
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, they they usually just add. They usually just like a an eye stock image with a pithy paragraph and then a list of job openings. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, [email protected].
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yes, they’re completely, so it’s amazing them the difference you can make to making the business look more appealing. And we’ve been also improving the SEO of those pages as well because I think they do a lot of work on the SEO of the rest of the website to attract clients, but actually physically if it’s a business where people have to go to a place to work like a children’s nursery, it’s all, it’s all local, it’s all very localised and quite often the the tools that they use to display the jobs are often not very. CEO friendly and they don’t necessarily lend themselves very well to being optimised, so there we’ve been working with them on that as well.
Chris Simmance (Host)
That’s a that’s called development internally. What what, what do you think in the last 12 months you personally do you where where’s your kind of? Agency leader professional and personal development bin what? What? What’s been a big change for you in the last year?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Though at the beginning of last year we did a bit of a reshuffle of the senior management. So we promoted 2 of the people from the team to more of a senior role. And in the past year we’ve taken on a new OPS manager. So that’s allowed me to really step back from the day-to-day and and really focus on the strategic side of things, which would always get left behind because you get so involved in the day-to-day and the and the clients and that sort of thing. So I really feel like I’ve over the past year, I’ve really developed my leadership skills because I’ve been able to use them. Being a manager.
Chris Simmance (Host)
You’ve been able to zoom out somewhat, yeah.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Of an. Yes. Yeah. So that’s been really beneficial.
Chris Simmance (Host)
I’ll tell. What the best hire I ever made in any of my any of my agencies was was an OPS person because there’s a there’s something that they’ve got that you as a leader when you’re running an agency with a million plates spinning, they could just take so much off of you that allows you to work on it rather than in it, so to speak. That’s fantastic. And and and what what out of all of the kind of the leadership traits that you’ve kind of developed over the last year, what do you feel has been like the most satisfying?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Ohh, that’s a that’s an interesting one. I think one of the things I feel I definitely got better at over the past year is sort of having. Those difficult conversations whereas. You I might in the past have been a bit nervous going into a meeting, having a difficult conversation. It really feels like it comes quite naturally now and I’m not panicking about how I say the words the words. Just come out quite naturally from my mouth.
Chris Simmance (Host)
That’s that. That is so hard to get to do that, so that. I mean the really. Good answer in in in the in in the in the the development perspective on that is it’s like being able to give feedback and and and sometimes not the nice version or at the very least having to have a tough conversation. You don’t want to do it so often. You want to be the nice guy. You want to be. You want to be the friend, and if you zoomed out a bit, it’s a little bit easier to do that. And you know you can. Work on those skills. It’s it’s pretty, pretty cool. And so if we zoom. And though another 12 months into the future next series, we’re having another another conversation about about the year. What do you what’s what are you telling your future self right now that your core focus for the agency is in the next 12 months?
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
I think our. Core focus is very much around sales at the moment. So that’s another area that I’ve been working really hard to develop myself on. Because whilst we have, we have a sales manager and my MD does quite a lot of sales, it’s always been a bit of the poor relation. So we’ve really been working hard to kind of upskill ourselves to become better at the prospecting side of things and you know, knowing how to choose the sorts of target clients that we want to work with and knowing how to. Then go and get them. You know, I think there’s there’s a a bit of a gap sometimes. You’re like, I want to work with them and then, you know, OK, how how? How do I get from there here to there without being that annoying person that just rings up and says work with us? It just doesn’t work, does it? So? So I think that’s probably one of my personal development goals for the next year. Is is about becoming a better salesperson. And you know, and and developing those skills and and those are I think changing a little bit our messaging. We’re gonna do a bit digging a bit deeper into what we want our messaging to be as an agency and how we differentiate ourselves.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And and I mean it’s a it’s it’s no quick and easy task any of that. So I I’m I’m hopeful I’m thinking in 12 years time you’re gonna say you’ve got a massive sales machine and you’ve now now had to the problem of rehiring additionally again to in order to to to to fill that extra capacity yeah. I I it’s it’s certainly doable. I know that you guys get to work and you get get stuff done. So I think you’ll you’ll certainly we’ll we’ll see in a year some positive positive outcomes from that I’m sure.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Yeah. Hopefully, yes. Yeah, I think so. I feel like we’ve already done quite a lot like January’s quite been quite a good month. We kind of had this sense at the end of January that we hadn’t done very well with sales and then we actually looked at what we’d actually sold and we realised we completely smashed our goals and I think sometimes if you don’t recall the data properly, you’re you’re a personal opinion is not necessarily right.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah. Gut gut feeling doesn’t usually doesn’t usually change the bank balance. Absolutely right. And thank you so much for filling us in over the last 12 months and giving us some food for thought for what you’re up to for the. Next 12.
Cheryl Luzet (Guest)
Brilliant. Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Thank you. Thank you. In the next episode, we’ll revisit another agency leader and see where their last year has been. So thanks very much for listening.