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. Today we’ve got Gareth Hoyle from Marketing Signals. Hey, Gareth. Hello this isn’t a year since we spoke, but it does feel like a year since we spoke, so we’re going to have a good conversation. I think right now. How have you been? How has the business?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
I think it’s. I think it’s been 10 months for us, almost a.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Year it well, it could well have been actually. Yeah, it has. We’ve been well, you’ve been very busy and we’ve covered quite a. Lot of that. How has the last year been on aggregate good?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Yeah, I’d say stop it out of time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s good. And I prefer an eye or an eye. I’m never going to be a. Titan craft, but my hyperactive brain doesn’t allow me. To ever be a. 10 There’s always something wrong somewhere.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So we something to to adjust.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
It proved. Yeah, absolutely, but yeah. I’d say about. 7 some months or 9 some months or 4. But I think that is. Agency life. I’m trying that, as I’m sure we’re covering, but I’m trying to flatten out the decent famine of agency law. Yeah. And it’s a challenge, shall we? Say well yeah. I’m I’m I’m I’m happy. I’m smiling. I’m in my new house, my new house. I’m in my. New office, so that’s good. I’ve got some workspace within my home that allows me to mentally deal with the fact that we. Fully remote now, so yeah, I’m. I’m, I’m. I’m as happy as Gareth.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Good. And and it’s nice to see your smile. And So what? What’s what’s changed in the last year, what’s been some of the major developments in? The agency how have? You how have you adapted to those?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Well, we now. Do a four day work week, which is something.
Chris Simmance (Host)
That I hadn’t noticed that you. Were doing a four day work week. You were very.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Quiet about that. I mean, they’re 20. 38 million impressions that I got. Like they’ve certainly. I seem to I no longer attract leak sellers. I attract HR people. And then which is refreshing to be honest, because when I accept that connexion, they don’t instantly sell to me. So it’s it’s quite nice to be honest. And I actually get really nice questions about how it’s going. How did you implement it? And I’ve tried to avoid answering them on a one by one basis by looking for PR coverage of my four day week where I could tell people all about it. So yeah, I think the biggest change for us, it’s been four day week. So there’s a quick. They’ll be after those. They’ll know what we’ve been doing with it. So we. Two weekly chefs Monday to Thursday, Tuesday to Friday, so twice a month, everyone gets Friday and Monday off, giving them a a four day clear break from work. A full time employee, if you like now is 32 hours about what we’ve not. Elongated any days. The idea being that you spend less time I think. One of a of one of a better phrase. Had more time just getting. Your job done. So your reward is, is that actually they are had a lot of pushback from Americans because I believe that at 32 hours you’re not classed as a full time employee. Therefore you don’t get as many. Benefit we’ve done this with no loss of benefit, no loss of holiday allowance, no loss of pension contribution. Nothing. We just thought the. Less messiness in in Hoyle Paul and less dicking around and. More and getting on with. It means that you should be able to. Do what I consider to be enough output in in five days in four days, as it’s been six months. At least now, since we did it, I know it’s going really well. I. Don’t think we could go back. I think contractually we couldn’t go back, but I also think I also think that the the Agency culture and and and the workforce happiness we we wouldn’t go back no chance. So two questions one.
Chris Simmance (Host)
A little bit facetiously. Has it changed has in in the agency? Has it changed from kind of like you say, a bit dicking around. Have you seen more of the this this meeting could have been an e-mail style stuff as in less people are bothered about hour long meetings when you could have just a a written exchange has that happened? What’s happened in terms of the dicking around?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
But yeah, well, we’ve always been quite. Good that this should have been an e-mail, and that e-mail could also have just a slack update. That’s yeah. So there is trying to move everything towards just. A real time. Chat some environment and we can talk about other chat type stuff when we talk about the naked. Is that that is, that is everywhere. At the moment and yes, so we. A lot of. The time it’s it’s just efficiencies. So rather than an hour bucks 45 minute. As what you’ve done today, like we don’t need an hour 45 minutes, we’ve got 5 minutes guide at the start. A quick five minute wrap up. How are you? How, yeah, snowboarding, etcetera. And then then we’ve got the the half an hour in the middle to to record. That so? I also think the. The the faffing around or dicking about how we want to Fraser comes from. Are you doing? The washing while you’re working at home, are you are you taking? An hour and. 1/2 for. Lunch and nobody’s although he’s time tracking. We use it. More to about profitability of projects. Rather than tripping the staff up. What? My staff. Choose to do and when they choose to do their work, is up to that. So although we are 32. Hours of output, so again output. Not attendance is something that. You’ve heard you. Say quite a lot. I don’t really care within reason which which. 32 hours they. Work. The ones we’re covering off. Client calls or. Yeah, the client says look I need. To speak to you now, then. If you’re out walking the dog, I suggest you turn around and head back to your laptop. Yeah. Or is he got a good relationship with the client and you? Don’t mind wind. Noise, then call them from your phone. But that is also quite timely with that. Maybe that that fell in the river, to be honest. So yeah, the I think the. The takeaway of my four day work week is it can be done as long as you you have a very measurable task that can be managed.
Chris Simmance (Host)
What is? What’s been one of the kind of key things? You’ve had to, you’ve seen. In the negative sense, from the four day week that you’ve had to adapt to that sort of changed it into something of of positive vote no.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
So there. I mean I think this is probably a personal issue rather than anyone else. I always forget who’s it? So like I want people, me, I I would. Have liked, but we. All got calendars that tell us. Like what? And I think I’m. I’m slowly coming. Around to the fact that. There are so sometimes this summit doesn’t get done on a Thursday afternoon. It’s not yet until Tuesday, so you have got to factor that in, not necessarily with client work, because there’s always two people that can do every task within the agency. There’s a lot more emphasis on a hand over on a Thursday evening before you before you. Before you close your laptop till Tuesday the. I think the biggest thing. That we’ve, we’ve learned from it was so. One of the main reasons we did it other than for mental health attraction and retention, so you know as well as I do the competition. But for good employees in. Any place, yeah. And it it has certainly helped. In terms of. Wisdom in retaining more of the stuff that we want. We’re getting more CVS every time that we that we do a HR push, but what we have noticed is that where people are leading with the four day work week, it’s that they just want an extra day off. And I don’t think that is they’re missing the point of what we’re trying to achieve before they work week, really. So we’ve had to. Push back at people really the the main reason. You want to to come and. Sort of align your. Career for X amount of time with marketing signals is to get every other Friday off that.
Chris Simmance (Host)
I think it might be the wrong. Fit. Yeah. Yeah, I.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Think that and weirdly, I think when I. Look over the time tracking stuff. I think some people are working more. Than 32. Hours because it’s not forced upon them. No, no, no. No one’s doing 40. No one’s doing 50. We’re not. Versus like the ME, it’s people don’t mind going the the extra mile. I suppose we had. We were working on some new reporting template at the end of January and Paul was off on the Monday, but we had a call about them on a Tuesday and he wanted to get it done. So he did his normal. Day off task and then he just went down for an hour, finished it off, went back off, went and wore. Dog. So just having that freedom and flexibility, he’ll get that hour back like this isn’t we’re not trying to. Take time from people, it’s. I think that people, if you get the. Right person in on a four day week it’s it’s, it’s the. Greatest perk? You. Can offer someone really time 3 * 1. We’re not. We’re it’s a commodity we’re not.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Getting back. Yeah. No, no, you keep turning telly. Right? Totally right. And I think like an awful lot has changed in the last year and I think attracting employees and retaining them is. Hugely key in an agency? Absolutely. There’s there’s been a lot of change. In the last. 6 Plus months in terms of the industry as an industry as a whole and I know that you guys marketing signals have have kind of taken that with both hands as I never expected you not to. So what? What? What have you seen trends and things like that happen in the last year that you guys are are implementing internally now?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Well, the I think the biggest thing that we have that in fact two things, one and two about processes and one to do with the industry general over the past 12 months, we’ve moved away from. We had a time tracking software. We had a project management software we. Had holiday allowed software we had, we had a number of bits that just sort of grew organically as the agency grew. So we actually decided to take some time out of paid work and and we rolled out teamwork, it’s the, it’s the software that we that we chose across all all departments. And the efficiencies in terms of? Selfishly, cost savings, but also. Having to log into less platforms to record a working day has probably saved some of the staff a couple of hours a week, so a couple of hours a week is a day a month.
Chris Simmance (Host)
It really is and. It’s really easy to to miss those things, not just the financial bit, the P&L. Bit that that’s. Quarterly repeating returning thing that you should come back to every single time. Because logins increase and people leave, people go and you end up paying for subscriptions and stuff. But I was used to find that if you make it, if you make the task of recording something, a task in of itself, it ends up being either forgotten or not done properly, or just kind of neglected for too long. And then it’s not not as powerful. So if you can do what you’ve done and kind of coalesce things, then then that adds a huge amount. Of opportunity per time, like you said, two hour 2 hours a week. That’s a. That’s a pretty decent amount of time.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
And that’s it’s it’s wins like this, which I think are allowing us to thrive in this four day work week like there are, it’s just efficiencies and I know I always talk about efficiency and processes and you know and it’s so true for us to achieve, we’re 23 at land payroll. With some contract birth so I think. It’s about 3030. Salaries that we that we pay on a monthly basis. The only way we can achieve the output we. Do with a team of 30. Is it’s for efficiency. And I’d say 2 hours a day-to-day, month drive, 2 hours a week in the day a month. It’s that’s real time. Like that’s not. Buying a faster boiling cattle to try and get 5 minutes, but I have I obsess over rap like nobody has an underpowered machine in my in my yeah. If Chrome loads quicker, you type quicker. The job gets done quicker. So yeah, I just think they’re these little wins and then the the second big change in how we’re trying to. Take advantage of it, I suppose. Is around open AI and Jack really it’s not something. That we’re just always going to. Hang our hat on and rely. On because quite often it’s not working, it’s overloaded because everyone’s using it. But where we’ve where we’ve found so we we sell, we sell what both. So somebody needs to write 500 to 750 words about. The best acts in something or reasons why you should. Yeah, some and and we used to target our writers with. An article in our. So 8 per day 32A week. Nice and easy. Whereas what we found by using open AI chat. UX. By asking it the right questions, we’re starting to get some really good article overviews back back to us, and so we’ve still got Western writers doing the actual writing, but it could be if you need to define the H twos that you’re going to use to break up, that’s 750. You know. We found that we’re actually starting to output between 10:00 and 12:00. Articles a day. So again, it’s 12, that’s 50% up, you know. Yeah, that’s it now. Yeah, but it doesn’t work for everything. Like we have a client that sells garden equipment and hedges and daddy easy. We’ve also got a client that’s a platform for businesses to resell their carbon credit work so well for that.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Tiny bit too niche maybe?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
And little bit and a little bit too. Skilled, I suppose, like you actually need to understand. Carbon credits and how they. Interact with their clients platform and it just requires. A little bit more. In depth knowledge I suppose, whereas the yeah, the gardening client or the OR the client that sells clothes clothes. Yeah, America very easy to to use. But again, all I’m looking. For is the. Outline of the article. I don’t want it. To write it for. Me because I. And I’ve had a look at AI detecting software and I’ve I’ve, I’ve done a fair bit of research into it. And I. Don’t want to be the same as every other article on the Internet, and I know we can get. Variations and I’ve. Seen people that take one AI article put it into a different AI tool and get it be written about it. But like, wow, I feel like I’m getting back to spinning articles. For a living.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah. Yeah, it does feel a lot like that. I I’m getting echoes of 2010, 2011 with with quite a lot of the the at scale version of the some of this stuff. Like like you say with with efficiency being quite important to you, but also you know any real business should really give a damn about it. And using it to to increase the efficiency of the. Efficiency output by. 50% and is is incredible and and you know the the outlines. Of a of a of a good article are. The the bedrock of creating a good article and and if that can help that person save some time, then that’s pretty, pretty damn good.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Yeah. And hopefully. It mixes it up a bit for them as well. You know, having to produce. Not. Not every piece of content that we produced in, yeah, eight times the day, but just a certain type of content. Yeah, the wait times for now. But yeah, absolutely. And it’s just again personal development for the writers that is. If you think that the career progression. For copyright has. Become a copy editor and then maybe a head of Head of Team will effectively. We’re a we’re a. It’s almost like a little mini training session to see on that copy editor is because those that embrace. What the technology? Is offering are the ones that are. Going to rise? To the top? Yeah, though it’s. Yeah, it’s. It’s interesting to watch, shall we say it.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And and it’s going to change quite quickly, quite radically by the looks of things as well. With GPT 4 coming relatively soon. And agencies are hard to run, though, and they are? Yeah, they take personal and professional tolls and things like that. So in the last in the last, say 12 months, how do you think that you’ve personally and professionally sort of grown and evolved?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Yeah, I feel like I am. Drinking more wine than ever, right? So I we.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Can do that.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
The one couple of standouts over the last 12 months, we we we, we work with agents, coaches as you know I do see the benefits in coaching. It’s a lonely life, shall we say I I’m the only director and shareholder in marketing signals. I’ve a couple of my team on. Equity investment schemes, et cetera. But fundamentally it is is me making the decisions at the top. So having that coaching infrastructure certainly helps me. I made a HR error. I I took on a head of PR and content that didn’t work out. The knock on effect and that was. A couple of people. Left because they didn’t agree with his leadership, we lost a not not ashamed to say we lost a 600 grand a year client off the back of that so.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Explain the wine.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Yeah, that also just just, just hard. You know, it’s. Yeah, this guy came with a good reputation and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have worked. We let him build his own team. And the the output was wasn’t there, which I guess maybe we can output.
Chris Simmance (Host)
You can’t get it right every time and it. It doesn’t matter.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
But once this one was a bark moustache, well again, it’s my fault because I. He was getting on with that and. Like saying we let him build his team and we. Trusted that he was bringing the. Right people and. We couldn’t work out and and, you know, **** happens. We move on the the client we. Lost. I’m still good friends with my contact there. We actually went on holiday together in November, so it’s not. We’re not falling out. It’s just professionally. Yeah, they, they, they’ve taken a different route and in hindsight, I don’t blame them. Yeah, I’ve I’ve taken quite a lot of learnings from that.
Chris Simmance (Host)
So what do you think? Obviously hiring is super hard and getting the guaranteeing someones perfect for a role is is it almost impossible and what do you what? What could? What have you learned that you probably can use it for, for future in terms of learning?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Yeah. So we we now have a dedicated HR person. The the works part time for us because like say we’re 23 full time, yeah, that’s on track that. We don’t need. 32 hours a week of HR support, but the just somebody to coordinate stuff like with this leadership hire we got. All on all. On my back. So I kind of circumvented the HR process because. I thought nothing. Yeah, station and we. Asked for for a. Task to be completed which was refused. On the basis that I should need. To do this. And again, I was like, OK, let’s you. Know let’s go with. It and. In hindsight, that’s, you know, that should be seen as the massive red flag now. So once again, the team have decided I’m not. Allowed to deal with HR.
Chris Simmance (Host)
And very good of your team to notice that.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Hey I know like I know my flaws. And my my stride, so it is.
Chris Simmance (Host)
I think self-awareness is a huge win when you’re running an agency. As soon as you start to realise. Ah, here’s where I’m good. Here’s where I’m bad. Here’s where I’m excellent. And here’s the places where I need to ask for help. And and if you can hire that help, that’s great, obviously. But otherwise, you know, that’s where coaches and mentors can come in in. The interim as well. So tell us if you can, what’s your kind of core focus for the agency in the next year? And do you do you have a plan to to get there?
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
I’ve I’ve always got planned, Chris. You know that. Yeah, we obviously weren’t. We over the last 20-4 months, we’ve tried to. Up our client level. More towards sort of enterprise corporate rather than SMA? The downside to that is corporate budgets are disappearing quick quickly. At the moment. I mean, I’m seeing a lot of layoffs in the US, so we got half an hour.
Everything. Yep.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
You are. Not layoffs in the US, including some of our contact. Yeah, in certain cases, some of our the. Whole team has. Gone and it’s very different labour laws in the in the US. I’m not sure we’ve seen. Loud to to just make people disappear overnight and not without chaos. Yeah. And then we had a big client in US real estate. So obviously as the interest rates went up and the mortgages went down, they kind of imploded. That change of personnel at some clients where we’ve we’ve lost gigs because our faces didn’t fit anymore. Yeah. So two big things that we’re going to focus on this year. Number one, I was out in Thailand in November with the affiliate market and crew and I’ve spent. €50,000 on domain names this year so far with a view to build out our own site. So we’ve always had a few sites in the background so. That we can test. Strategies and test linked sites. See if. Move. But I mean just kind of double down on my on my investments into affiliate type stuff and and we got a suite of tools that we’ve been developing over the last couple of years on market signals.com/toolsday.
Chris Simmance (Host)
Nice luck.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Alright, sorry HTTPS, so that the transcription could just add a hate trap, but perfect, and so these are brilliant. Or we use them for our internal reporting. We use them. For our internal workflows so we know. That they’re useful. Let’s say I see I was in link builders. What we are not amazing. At is from NU X type stuff. So we’ve just taken on a UX designer. That worked on an amazing app. You may have heard. I could never spoof. So yeah. Yeah. So we are we? We’ve been speaking to our friends ever spins and who they’re using for that, and then you. Work stuff. So yeah, we. We we take on the front end designer with a view to building out some public facing. NICU X versions of our useful tools. One of them is for for reporting, so page you linked table go all the metrics make it look pretty. Another 1-10 differently. It’s where you can say yes or no to whether you want to work with the site or not. Yeah, we got we. Yeah. Just got some nice. The nice little tools that are really. Again, efficiency at the heart of everything. That we do. I think we’re ready. To to roll them out to to the industry now so. And what you’ll know is with. Both of these two ideas that I. Want to do for 2020? Three, it’s trying to. Remove the reliance on client work. So we’re always going to be client facing. We’re always going to be a client agency doing. Fleet building website content and techniques, CIO for other agencies and brands direct. But what I decided to do is where we’ve lost some revenue in terms of client cut backs on projects getting pushed to queue. But my biggest pain in January with projects being pushed to Q2 because nobody, nobody wants to spend at the moment. Yeah. So I didn’t want to make any. Lay off myself or you know I everybody in my team is amazing and I don’t want to lose anyone. So by. Producing our own content and producing our. Own digital assets. That’s keeping everyone busy, but also it should be less risky in the well. I’m the client, so I’m not. I’m not going to cancel. This is what I believe is is a good route to to to. Well yeah so.
Chris Simmance (Host)
It’s it’s it’s incredibly uh, it makes a lot of sense as a focus for for your business given given. The efficiencies that you’ve you know you’ve generated that allow for more time to be spent on other things, but it is kind of like you know build your own digital assets and you and you are kind of mitigating other risks along the way. And while still being able to use those assets for your own clients, which makes them even better because they’re being tested in the real world. Before they go in your real world, as it were, before, they go out to the to to potential partners to buy from.
Gareth Hoyle (Guest)
Basically, case studies as. Well, like well, how, how? Do you know this strategy is going to work well? Have a look at this domain. Go look at the link profile. Have a look in. The yeah, yeah, see and. It’s just it’s we’ve always practised what we preach, not got us in trouble at times and that’s also. Giving us many benefits over the years certainly do. I think we’re just going back to to what we do best, which is, which is SEO inside to make money. But more for ourselves. Rather than quitting so soon, well, that’s the best. Of where we are in the. Season right?
Chris Simmance (Host)
Yeah, best of luck and we’ll speak in season three and thanks for coming on, Gareth. It’s been great to talk to you again. Hopefully we’ll spend a little bit more time together this year than we did last year, but you know there is a good few 100 miles between us. And on the next, on the next podcast, we’ll be having another agency leader who we’ve already spoken to to find out what went well, what went wrong. Probably similar story in ChatGPT, because that seems to seems to be a theme and and and and look forward to listening with you along the way.