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, though, we’ve got Clair from Serotonin. Hey, Clair.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Hello, I’m so happy to be back.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Well, we were literally just saying that it doesn’t feel like a year. It feels like a long time ago that we last recorded.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
It really does. Uh. I think for me. From a mindset situation, when I when I think back to the Claire that spoke to you 12 months ago, so much has happened for me and for the agency that you know, I know we’ll we’ll get into, but it really is quite phenomenal how much can happen in in just a short year, yes.
Chris Simmance (Host)
He is. I’ve been seeing what? What you guys been up to in the last year and it is lovely to see, but it is a a a lot now for for anyone who’s listening who’s been really naughty and skip season one. Can you give give everyone a little rundown of who and what serotonin are and what you do best?
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
So. So it’s honing as a creative digital agency. We’re based in Manchester’s Northern quarter in Stevenson Square. We’ve been going for about 3 1/2 years, which means that we’ve. We’ve got past the baby stage and we’ve become a little bit more established. We’ve matured in the type of clients that we work with. So we’ve really got a strong proposition with e-commerce and property and hospitality and we work with clients across those sectors and more on brand creative web. And multi channel digital strategies and we’ve got a team of 20 now.
Speaker 4
Hang on a. Minute. I know I said a lot had happened. OK. Yeah, we’ve we really have grown.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Pretty rapidly, but that’s not to say that that has always been on a constant trajectory. Yeah, there’s been various ups and downs along the way and and and challenges along the way, you know, last time I spoke to you, we were just coming out of the kind of COVID pandemic era. Which in in many ways served us as an agency in terms of growth, and we were readjusting to life beyond that as we’re our clients and other clients as well, so. Last year ended up being a year of kind of rediscovering our positioning, attracting great talent, retaining really good clients and strengthening those relationships and seeing those, those successes too and really kind of drilling down into you know what, what it is that makes us a great agency to work for and work with.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So quick fire question, what’s the best and worst thing in the last 12 months?
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Best thing in the last 12 months? Well, it’s funny because on the day when I spoke to you, we were about to go to an awards do we were? And spoiler alert, we won. We were.
Chris Simmance (Host)
You were. Doing spoilers work in this. When you tweet about it for about month.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Northern this situation to the year, so that was a highlight to to kind of start things off and we did end up having a a year of really solid recognition through through awards and. You know people. In the team being recognised their work, so those were lots and lots of highs. Challenges many hiring challenges, internal process challenges, commercial challenges. All the nuts and bolts of the agency have thrown up challenges to me in the past 12 months.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So what have been then some of the major developments in the agency in the last year? How have you adapted to the like the speed of hiring that you’ve had? Doing things like that.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
So hiring is a key part of that. That growth, of course, one of the things that we’ve done over the past couple of months is bringing some senior. So we brought in three heads of department who are in creative search and e-mail and they are really helping us to build out that that XSLT handle. So helping us to kind of create that positioning for other people within the business. Who have aspirations to head of department and to kind of create a structure and and journey of growth for them as well? So that’s been a really big focus for us to bring those people on on board them, get them working optimally and like you know, get get them really ingrained within the culture and and it’s been. Brilliant. The outcome of that now is brilliant and it’s been a lot of hard work because hiring is hard work, finding that people is time consuming, draining. Scary big risk. Fortunately, right now that’s really paying paying off for us. So that’s been a really, really. Big change, obviously then. You know, growing across the whole teams has been a change and and because of those people that we’ve been bringing in, we’ve been able to offer a real kind of diversity of. Of service to our clients, so particularly our retained clients, we’ve been able to expand the service that we’ve offered to them, which has been fantastic because then we’re able to add additional value and then we are you know, we have our new clients that we’re bringing on board and and likewise we’ve got this really strong senior team that can pitch in with. With Dom and I in terms of putting strategy together and making sure that things are working effectively. So that’s been really, really brilliant and and I’ve tasked them at the moment to work with me on what is it about that’s so unique about our positioning. So that’s kind of coming soon and I cause I really want that to come from the team. And it’s it’s a big part of what we’re. Working on at the moment.
Chris Simmance (Host)
When hiring, you know for SLT the. Underlying purpose of that is that essentially you become less hands on, right you for them to be able to be excellent, you’ve gotta you’ve gotta take just the leadership point and and kind of let that leadership let let the let the team and do the job. I remember how hard that felt. How does it? How did it feel for you and Don was it? Was it a natural, relatively easy thing to sort of let those guys get on with it? Or was it because? I I found it very hard to let go and it might just be my personality.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Oh, it’s brilliant, Chris.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So you’re saying I’m a control freak?
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Yeah, but don’t do it. There’s so much better. And no, I mean, it’s it so that there’s some areas of the business that will always be very much retained and delivered by Dom and I and fortunately for me, that’s the part of the business which I love, which is brand strategy. And I think it’s really, really important that when we onboard clients, they know that they’re working with me on that because that’s the promise that we make. And I work with them from the very beginning of that first conversation all the way through to workshop to, you know, the strategic side of the brand creation and then making sure that I’ve got that ownership of it throughout any kind of marketing that we do. For them, so I’ll always have. I’ll always be handled and I’ll always do that. And likewise with Dom and and kind of digital media strategy with the best place to to kind of lead on that but. Having people that I really, really trust, who I know are really good at. What they do? I am more than happy to step away and let them take over and and do what they do best and give them this, that that space, you know, it’s ohh.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Not like a true leader.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
I love it. It’s brilliant cause and I and you know it. It’s taken time to get people on boarded and and confident. And ingrained within the team and understanding the processes and being able to make those decisions and all I ever wanna do. Genuinely, all I ever want to do is just empower people around me to to do good work because I sincerely think that that is the crux of my job as an agency owner, whether I’m doing it through creating a good culture or it’s in mentoring individuals or bringing on clients that they’re going to enjoy working with like. My my job is to make sure they. Can do good. Work. So yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s definitely not about me a dog. It’s. It’s all about them. And I love it. Lovely.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And and so we. Just sort of touched on like. All of the developments in the business for the last year, the industry itself has upside down inside out several times over every single week. It feels. What do you think’s been kind of one of the the biggest evolutions you’ve noticed in the in the industry and and how has it affected the agency?
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
I think there’s been some small shifts and some big shifts and we should just not all get crazy and distracted by either, and it’s very easy to get over shiny things, shiny things.
Chris Simmance (Host)
The only things shiny things.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Suddenly the robots are coming and and that’s the end of copywriters, for example, and. And you know, I’m talking about.
Speaker 4
You just get carried away by the.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Fun stuff because it is fun.
Chris Simmance (Host)
I I want to sound flippant and laugh, but also at the same time. There were people who said who laughed at in the PIN factories when the robots came and made pins for for so there’s there’s been let’s have a a a slight dose of of carefulness here cause a robot will listen to this podcast at some point and will judge us.
Speaker 4
I think that.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
These are tools that are interesting and exciting, and we should look for productive ways to adopt them into the work that we’re doing already, because if we don’t see it in that way, then we are just going to become distracted. By by trying to reinvent things that you know that that we don’t need right now. And I think that the, the, these are, they’re really interesting things happening within AI and and I think that we should be looking to embrace them. Make best use of them. Be careful about we the fact that we’re using them for a purpose. This and that they’re aligned to our overall strategy and we’re not just getting over excited and running off in a completely different direction because that’s when you know the the solid ground of what we’re trying to achieve through a strategy or with a client or with the brand is going to fall apart. So those those are the big things. And then I think there’s a lot, lots of little things which are probably more exciting. Really, you know the the. You you could say that a platform, a social platform like TikTok which is, you know, even up until the last couple of years, we’re still being regarded as, oh, it’s the, you know, I’m still having conversations with brands who think that, you know, or thought that it was something that was for kids and we are now really getting into the kind of. Mass adoption and mass understanding of how. The not just the platform, but the way that the content is created and the way that people engage with the content impacts human behaviour. What that means for brands and those are the conversations that I’m really interested in because those are not necessarily about a shiny thing, but how we use the shiny thing as a tool within our existing.
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Strategy to influence human behaviour and to understand the way that the society and culture is changing. And that’s really. That’s interesting to me, and it’s interesting to the team as well. So rather than run away and bring in, you know, someone that knows how to manipulate AI as someone that would be my next hire, I want to bring in people that are are inspired by branding that have a real deep, interesting. In consumer behaviour that are really in tune with the platforms that people are engaging with right now and that’s where like the really interesting conversations happen across the table with the brands that I’m working with rather than me trying to go, hey, let’s do this big thing over here which doesn’t think.
Chris Simmance (Host)
In some agencies, there’s there’s a head in the sand. Approach it’s not anything and don’t worry about it, which is obviously wrong because things develop and you need to at the very least be aware of them and try and work out how to adapt or use them, and it’s certainly not coming for the end of all things. But at the same time, if you’re if you’ve got a very bottom heavy agency with a lot of juniors who typically do a nice a sound like an *******. When I say this, I’m sorry if you are. Listening and you’re one of these people. If you do a lot of repetitive. High volume, low value tasks. That job is going. AI will take those job. If you do thinking jobs and you do strategic jobs and you do jobs where you require empathy and you require an awareness that other people think differently and buy differently. You’ve you’re you’re. You’re fine, but agencies are definitely gonna have to account for those kinds of things in the future. Because once the cost of this these tools comes down to such a degree, much as when it comes to sort of resourcing overseas, used to be. Looked out, it won’t be long before you know a million page titles can be written in 10 minutes and you don’t need four people to do that for six. Weeks, for example.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Yeah, certainly. I mean, I’m just looking out now at the. The team that I’ve got sat there and it was when you were talking about, you know, empathy and caring about. You know, behaviours and consumers and I, I I genuinely believe that, yes, manual slash repetitive tasks can exist, you know can can be done more efficiently and then and probably should be done more efficiently. But the team that I’ve got set out there right now, I know that. To hide them because of their ability to be empathetic, every single person carries that value and and I and I believe, you know, it’s the way that I’ve always thought about marketing it. It’s always just about. People and and so the the you know the heart of create the the creative side of marketing and the you know the strategic side of putting a plan together to understand which touch points are going to influence which decisions. That there has to be people at the heart of that, I and I. I think that’s why I. Do love agency life because I’m surrounded by people like that all the.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Time. Yeah. They’re people. Businesses at their heart. And it’s it’s just a there will be a operational or skill based shift in how it’s delivered. There’ll still be people. There has to be well, so there has to be. I can’t see into the future. I’d love to be able to see in the. Future I’d be buying a lottery ticket right now. And so. Over the last year like. A an incredible pace. Things have changed for for the business and I know as an agency leader the person on the professional are often quite highly intertwined. Has your. Sort of personal professional growth evolved in the last year.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
So I think for me that’s the one of one of the high points of the past 12 months. How I feel about myself as a leader and when I look back at my my personal slash professional accomplishments over the past 12 months, I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in my own self-awareness. Knowing what inspires me, my own physical. Fitness my own, you know. Achieving certain challenges, which I’ve kind of set myself and have more coming up this year, that I really thrive off and understanding that I thrive off those things outside of work, so that the dopamine or serotonin hit that I get from achieving something isn’t totally reliant upon what happens within the falls of my office. It also cascade out into my personal life, and that brings me it create makes me much more of a four dimensional character rather than Claire from serotonin. And you know, my clients get sick of me. Talking about my. Running and and and those challenges. But they also love it because they know. Who? That that took that. That tells them the kind of person that I am, and it’s been it’s been really brilliant to be able to have those things going along side by side so that even when times were tough with serotonin, I still had this real strong sense of self worth and energy and reason to get out of bed because. There was a challenge that I had to achieve that was more than the agency. I think that’s really that’s for people.
Chris Simmance (Host)
That’s almost the definition of purpose, right? Yeah. And yeah, and. And you find everyone finds their own individual, one some people. It is simply very simple, like the pursuit of one thing other people. There’s a lot of depth and layers to it and and you’ve got to have quite a deep character and a deep appreciation of other people. In order to be able to. To be resilient to the times that aren’t.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
That good? Yeah. Resilient is like one of just one of the words. Like like carry in my. Heart but the. There’s a really interesting conversation that I had with a business coach that I’m working with at the moment and it, I mean, it was a very emotional conversation, actually. And it was at the start of this year and she was talking to me about my goals and and I really went in big, you know, I started this year, you know, I was sprinting out the starting blocks in every respect. I knew what I wanted to achieve. Personally I had set my physical goals. I knew I wanted for the agency. You know the across culture across commercial across for my clients, I I really had thought about it and I thought I’m going to go into this conversation with this business coach and I’m going to blow her socks off. She’s never going to speak to anyone like me before. She’s gonna think. I’m so ready for this. She’s not gonna know what to do with me. And I really felt that way because I was so hyped up for the year and I came on this call with her and she let me talk about it and she just let me release everything. And I just talked and talked and talked. Power, power, power. This is clear in 2023. And she went really quiet. And she was like. And I just started stuttering and I was like, ohh. And she was like, what did you last year? And I told her thing and she was like. Why? And I was like because it just it. And it it. I didn’t. I couldn’t give her a good enough reason as to why there was this constant need to. Keep pushing forward for more, for stronger, for. Bigger, better, greater. And she did this exercise with me, if you don’t mind me very quickly explaining it, I think it would be a really, really useful. Exercise for people. To do, she made me close my eyes, which was very awkward because I was on a zoom call in the middle of the meeting room, which has a glass meeting room so everyone could see by close my eyes and she said to me, imagine you’re at a party. And so imagine’s party. Then she told me that the party was my 80th birthday party. And she asked me to imagine all the people that were there. They could be people that had died and they would come back. There was magic burnt. They party, everybody was there I’d ever loved or known or wanted to be there. They were in that room and she gave me some time to experience that room and to look around and to see the way that people were talking and interacting. Then she asked me to choose three people. Any people to get up and go and give a speech about me on my 80th birthday and she made me sit there and think through each of those speeches. And as soon as she asked me to do that, I had my eyes closed in this glass meeting room in the middle of the office, I started crying. I was in. Absolute floods of tears. I sat there with it and and I felt the word that people were saying. And when I came and opened my eyes, I had to sit quietly and write down so many different things that come into my head. And it was such a powerful exercise because what it did was strip away the goal setting and the challenge setting. And it made me dig into what is actually really important to me in 40 years. Time. What do I hope or think or want people to say about me? The people that I love and care about most? What impact do I want to have? And it cheques this.
Chris Simmance (Host)
They’re not going to say you you had a 200 person agency and £10 million they’re. Not going to. Be worried about that.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
No, they won’t. What they might say is that in doing those things, she inspired me to start my own business. Or she gave me a a job. That meant that I could achieve something it with my life that I never expected or and suddenly the things that I was doing with my agency and the things that I was doing, my physical challenges, suddenly started to mean so much. Well, and that was just in January. I had now way, you know in middle of February and already this mindset shift, it’s not taking anything away from the goals and challenges that I’ve set myself, but it’s giving me this underlying feeling of everything just meaning a little bit more and it is so powerful to really. Truly understand your why beyond. What am I going to do this month or next month that’s going to be better than what I did the month before because it gives you thatpermission. Yeah, to like, look around and go. What’s actually meaningful? Is it meaningful that we target in Q2 or is it meaningful that the people who I’m looking at now who are sat within my agency? Come into work, feel happy and fulfilled. Comfortable say. Progress and they feel inspired and I did.
Speaker 4
That well, yeah.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
I’ll tell you honestly, both those things matter to me. But for me having one without the other makes your life less meaningful, and I’m so glad I had that conversation because now I feel that I can align my goals to something that is more. Powerful and more important to me than anything else.
Chris Simmance (Host)
That’s what I was in my head. I was. Thinking vulnerability, power, importance, etcetera. That. Yeah, that’s. Yeah, I’m going to have a little close of my eyes. I don’t know if I’ll cry though. We’ll see. We’ll see. I’ll probably cry.
Speaker 4
Do it. I bet you do. I bet you do. You’re.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Gonna cry. I won’t be on the podcast guys, don’t worry.
Speaker 4
If we wanna see it live.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Do a live stream and so next 12 years we’re recording the next season of this. You’ve come back for a third time. What are we talking about?
Speaker 4
So we’ve got a we’ve got.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
A A growth plan. In terms of the growth of the agency, we know where we want to get to Domini and there’s loads of things that you could checklist that against size, scale, type of clients, reach of the projects that we’re doing, number of awards, we’ve, we’ve won recognition that we’ve got. All these things are. Important to us. Also important to the to the team as well. We’ve had all those conversations this year. Yes, we are on a on on a path that we’ve we’ve we’ve kind of recognised, but there there’s other things going on as well. So we’re launching soon some software that we’ve been developing. In the background, which is very exciting and adds a whole new dimension to the to the Agency, but also helps us stay really, really true to the proposition we’ve got, which is about. The effectiveness of digital media and the power of creative coming together to deliver great impact. So that’s something that’s quite exciting and and in so in terms of agency growth we we kind of have, we have that plan set which I’m not going to go into now just in case things don’t work out. And then I can come back next year and go, yeah, everything went totally to plan. But but we know we we we’re not going to be. To come, you know, we know what size we want to get to that we’re comfortable with and we have a road map for getting there in, in terms of kind of like my own journey. One thing I didn’t and I kind of wanted to talk about, but didn’t just talk about them was was leadership and I’ve really feel that the challenges at the past 12 months. Have just helped me see myself differently in terms of what a leadership role needs to be and and should be. And I think when I said at the very beginning of this podcast, you know, I look back at the Claire from 12 months ago and how different she was. I think back then there was still a sense of unsureness around. You know who I was and how I could be expected to respond to some of the challenges of running the agency. Now I’ve been through some real difficult times in terms of growing this agency and I’ve come out the other side and I know that they’ve made me really stronger. They’ve helped me make difficult decisions. Trust my gut. That’s a really big. So I just wanna keep going with that. I love the self development that I’m getting from running this agency.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah. Ohh yes it it. It’s every day is a personal lesson, isn’t it? You you learn something new about yourself and other people and it is it.
Speaker 4
If nothing if not, yeah, this is a this is a massive. Can you?
Chris Simmance (Host)
It’s it’s quite wonderful.
Speaker 4
It’s a big experiment in there. How far can you? How far can you go?
Chris Simmance (Host)
Well, you might just transcend one day at this rate by the sounds of it, you just disappear. Into the 4th dimension.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Yeah. It’s, it’s, I’m loving that. And rather than being fearful of that, which I possibly was this time last year for being really, really honest with myself, a conversation that we had a year ago. So now I feel far more comfortable with that and and I think that comes with age as well, you know and I think that comes with the fact that now I turned 40 last year, that was a big milestone birthday for me and and that really helped me. See things differently. Have more faith in myself and also give less of a **** about other people. I mean, so brilliant. Liberate.
Chris Simmance (Host)
We we talk. We talk about resilience and that is a big. Part of it, yeah, so.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Right when you stopping a ship.
Chris Simmance (Host)
I look forward to having a catch up with you on the next.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Recording. Yes, I can’t wait.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Thank you so much for coming and and congratulations on such a good year and future year as.
Claire Heaviside (Guest)
Well, thanks so much, Chris. Can’t wait for our. Next catch up.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Thank you. And in the next episode, we’ll revisit another agency leader and see how their last year has been. Thanks very much for listening.