Chris Simmance:
Thanks for your service guy. And on the podcast today, I’m really pleased to have Joe Davies from fat Joe. How are you doing, mate?
Joe Davies:
All good mate, how are you?
Chris Simmance:
Not too bad at all. Thank you. Not too bad at all. Um, I, I was just saying before we started recording, we we’ve been sort of working together on and off, uh, from my agency’s perspective, I think since about 2014, 2015, um, so bloody long time to be working with agencies. How do you
Joe Davies:
long
Chris Simmance:
look
Joe Davies:
time.
Chris Simmance:
so young?
Joe Davies:
Well, thank you. I don’t think I do.
Chris Simmance:
Sorry about that. I pressed the mute button. That’s a good start.
Joe Davies:
Okay.
Chris Simmance:
So Joe, give us a bit of a rundown. Like who are you for anyone who’s been living under a rock, never logged into Twitter, never been on the internet before? Who are you? Where did you start? What is Fat Joe?
Joe Davies:
Okay. Yeah. So I’m Joe. Um, I’m not the fat Joe. I’m not fat, but, um, yeah, we started a, a platform called fat Joe. And we provide services to agencies primarily who want to outsource link building and content.
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Joe Davies:
Um, so we, we were born out of a frustration. We were born out of, uh, a real need. Um, I thought in the industry, um, me and my. co-founder who’s also called Joe.
Chris Simmance:
makes it easy.
Joe Davies:
He’s also not fat, but yeah, the name I guess we’ll come to a bit later. But yeah, we both worked at an agency and it was a pretty small to medium size agency. We had a few clients, but we had a little bit of a disconnect between the sales team and the delivery team. And the sales team were just focused on getting as many clients as possible in, promising them the earth and. this many links and this much content. And anyway, I was the head of SEO at that agency and I was kind of like landed with all these new clients and, um, not enough of a team to fulfill, uh, these clients needs.
Chris Simmance:
Hmm.
Joe Davies:
So naturally, I mean, outsourcing isn’t, isn’t a new thing. Outsourcing isn’t like a groundbreaking brand new thing. People have been doing it for many, many years before we started or before SEO even.
Chris Simmance:
Hmm.
Joe Davies:
Um, but the thing is the, the way that we, we. we’d outsource back then would be through, Upwork or Fiverr, or we’d find people on forums. There’s some forums
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Joe Davies:
back in the day, like the SEO forums and people are offering services, link building content, and it kind of worked. It kind of like, you could get things at a good price, resell it to your clients, but our frustration was it was really hard to manage all these. vendors, I was getting vendor anxiety, so many to choose from, who’s the best, who’s going to go missing, and also the customer support was just terrible, you know, you’re dealing with a link builder, not someone on the phone saying hello sir, what can I do about your order today,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Joe Davies:
you’re dealing with a link builder who’s just got his head in links and he doesn’t
Chris Simmance:
And
Joe Davies:
care.
Chris Simmance:
people from all over the world as well. So you’ve got different ways of having to say the same thing. And it’s not always as simple as just using English. You’ve got to be a little bit more clear in certain senses.
Joe Davies:
Exactly. Yeah. So there’s a bit, a little bit of a disconnecting though, in those departments as well. So we just dreamed of, we dreamed of a platform, if you like, where we could log on, we could choose what we wanted. It would, it was easy to order. I weren’t messing around with Excel spreadsheets. It was like a, an Amazon order form and,
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
you know, pick the quantity or pick, or, you know, give a few inputs. And then, this platform would tell me exactly when it would be delivered. There’d be no No messing around with asking when it’s going to be delivered or
Chris Simmance:
Yep.
Joe Davies:
why it’s late. And then if I had a problem, I’d like to speak to someone on a live chat or a phone number, and I’d like to speak to someone very polite. And then if there’s a problem with the order after it came, I could get a refund, get a guarantee if I didn’t like it, they wouldn’t go missing. There was a phone number, all those things I wanted. and we kind of dreamt that up and we decided that we’d create it out of frustration. That’s how it was done.
Chris Simmance:
And you guys have been going for a significant amount of time now, and it was just Lynx originally. Now you do a lot of different outsourcing services. So, you know, this is the whole point of the OMG Center is to accelerate the growth of an agency. And in my view, there’s agencies keep their brains internally and, you know, where you can from a scale point of view, and you can trust you should be outsourcing various different things. What is it that Fat Joe can do for agencies? I’m not just… anyone listening, I’m not just trying to sell here. There’s no affiliate scheme or anything like that. These guys know what they’re doing. So what is it you do? Um, what other services are there that an agency could take up to you up on?
Joe Davies:
Yeah, so primarily we do link building and content. We’ve really built some very large processes that agency can take advantage of. Because we’ve got high leverage point where we’ve got a lot of writers, you know, we’ve got a hundred writers, you
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
know, that fluctuates, but it’s roughly a hundred writers who are committed to working to Fat Joe full time. So we’ve got access to that pool of writers whenever. anyone needs links or blog content or web copy. And obviously we’ve got access to, we’ve built relationships over the years with many, many bloggers in many different industries. So it’s very easy for us to call upon these relationships, but we’re also making new ones every single day as well, because we’ve got the huge outreach team
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Joe Davies:
that adjust.
Chris Simmance:
yeah.
Joe Davies:
I think we’ve reached to every blogger. I think we’ve nearly done it.
Chris Simmance:
for now.
Joe Davies:
But yeah, besides from that, we do video. These are smaller services, but there are cases where agencies might need a video for their client and explain a video. We do things like press releases, Harrow, business citations for your local clients, infographic design, but yeah, mainly it’s
Chris Simmance:
Not a lot
Joe Davies:
links
Chris Simmance:
then.
Joe Davies:
and content. Yeah, yeah, not a lot, but I mean, when you go on Fiverr, you can imagine you’re seeing like, I think they’ve got like 700 service categories or something like that. So we’re really niche to.
Chris Simmance:
It’s a lot more trustworthy in a sense because you’re working with you guys and that’s the difference. I think Fiverr is great for lots of stuff and genuinely, voiceover guy came from Fiverr.
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
speaker, the devil and he, here he comes. And, but you know, I, there’s a lot of good stuff you can get on there, but it’s the, it’s the aspect of the, the full sort of delivery service that, that works really well, especially when you’re outsourcing things.
Joe Davies:
I’m telling
Chris Simmance:
I remember
Joe Davies:
you.
Chris Simmance:
years ago, like I relied on Fiverr for a lot of stuff and it is great for lots of stuff, but the stuff I started using it for, I realized after, you know, three weeks of delays and waits, then it comes and it’s totally wrong and you know, all that sort of stuff. Thankfully you lot deal with that a lot.
Joe Davies:
Yes.
Chris Simmance:
So Joe, what is it in all of the years you’ve been working with agencies that you love most about agencies?
Joe Davies:
So, I mean, I loved working at ANC, you know, previously when I was a head of SEO at ANC, I loved the variety in clients that you can work for. I loved the fact that one day you could be working on maybe a small local client, and the next day you could be working on a national client, and you can pull big levers and get them good results. I love that because… It’s a lot different to working on little affiliate sites where you’re earning a bit of commission. It’s
Chris Simmance:
Hmm
Joe Davies:
like you’re using the same processes for an international client. You’re using the exact same skillset, yet you’ll leave us like 10 times as big. So I kind of liked that when I started working within an agency. But then when we was working for agencies, what I really like, I mean, I don’t get intimate with… our ounces clients,
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Joe Davies:
because that’s just, we don’t need to,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Joe Davies:
they’re doing all the strategy, they’re telling us what they need. Um, but I do like to, when I do speak to ounces, I do like to hear how they’re um, building their strategies for their clients, what, what exactly what they’re doing, um, I love to hear how, how lean some ounces are becoming these days,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Joe Davies:
especially in the light of COVID, um, it’s become more of a freelancer economy.
Chris Simmance:
It has
Joe Davies:
and
Chris Simmance:
a bit, yeah.
Joe Davies:
a vendor economy and agencies are realizing, you know, well, we can just keep a really small core team,
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
the brain of the agency, and then we can outsource everything else to people like, you know, ourselves, but that, you know, there’s many choices out there as
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And like I say, the thing that, the thing that clients come to agencies for is, is the, is the thinking that they can’t necessarily do. Um, if you have a client come to you and they’ve got an in-house team, then you’re the outsourced delivery provider. And that’s usually because you’re delivering a physical, tangible thing, more likely like, you know, website or an asset of some sort, and maybe outreach or something along those lines. But, um, most agencies, the good ones, I think are the ones that go What we do is we’ve got the creativity and the intelligence and the experience to do stuff, but then we turn the wheel and get the maximal delivery for the client by scaling up all of that smarts. In all of the experience you’ve had with agencies in the last, how long has it been since you started? When did you start in an agency? How long ago was that?
Joe Davies:
I started working for ANC in 2010.
Chris Simmance:
Right, so.
Joe Davies:
But I’ve been in SEO since 2006 maybe.
Chris Simmance:
So quite a long, long
Joe Davies:
Long
Chris Simmance:
time.
Joe Davies:
time.
Chris Simmance:
I think
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
actually I saw a photo on Twitter the other day of you and someone else at an event and you looked a lot younger. It was a good
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
while ago and it was before SEO was even popular.
Joe Davies:
Yeah, I’m very well.
Chris Simmance:
But in all of those years and all that time you’ve spent in and now working with agencies, what do you think actually does set the best from the rest?
Joe Davies:
I think that, well, the best agencies we work with, they, I’ve mentioned this a few
Chris Simmance:
beyond
Joe Davies:
times, but
Chris Simmance:
how much
Joe Davies:
they,
Chris Simmance:
they spend.
Joe Davies:
yeah, but they, they in-source strategy and they outsource deliverables.
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Joe Davies:
So, so like I said, they’ve got like a really small core team. Like they’ve just got like account managers who deal with maybe five to 10 clients depending on the service level of the agency. And these account managers are almost operators of the SEO marketing. You know, they’re sort of fractional heads
Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.
Joe Davies:
of SEOs for that client. And they’re just deciding, right, this client needs this, and this on a monthly basis. And they might need this every so often. We’re going to do all this on their site as a setup. We’re
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
going to add content every week, content every month. And then they use outsource providers because… It’s just, it has more scale because some ounces like they hire in-house, they hire link builders in-house, they hire content writers in-house, but that doesn’t scale really because then you’ve got to get more desks, more computers, bigger office, and then when something happens, you know, touch wood, it doesn’t, but maybe, maybe there’s a economic downturn or maybe there’s AI. Maybe, maybe,
Chris Simmance:
Hmm
Joe Davies:
you know, I didn’t want to say the AI word so soon, but
Chris Simmance:
You did.
Joe Davies:
I did. But maybe that happens, then maybe you have to think about how much stuff you’ve got servicing your clients. And at that point, you kind of like the carpet’s been pulled from under your feet and you’ve got all these people who are meant to be writing content for your clients, but the client you’re using now, I know, so there’s, there’s many benefits to, to outsourcing deliverables, but I think the main one is scale, I think you could just scale a lot faster and then you, you’re sort of protected from any downturn.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And I think I don’t disagree with you. And I think that there’s, um, there’s, there’s obvious other benefits to it in that sense as well, because an agency really isn’t as good as its head count. And I don’t know how many conferences I’ve ever been to, but every single time I remember saying I ran an agency, the next question would be, how many are you? Not
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
how much, what’s your profit margin or anything like that. Now, employing people is good because it’s good for the economy. It’s good for people and
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
things like that, but there are different ways of doing that. and there’s different ways of keeping people in jobs and things. And you can be a really lean agency making a mean profit margin. And
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
you’re much more sellable. You can scale in a different way. You can
Joe Davies:
Sorry.
Chris Simmance:
work with people in a different way. You know, if you scale really highly, you need lots of very intelligent, um, course setters and, um, account managers. Um, and the, the outsourced aspects, uh, the, the way that you can do that sort of thing. Um, you don’t have to be lean in the sense of four people. You could be 40 people, but they’re all, all doing the in-source thinking bit, um, you’ve worked with agencies for, for Yonks then. Um, In that time, you will have seen car crashes and agencies that aren’t so good. So we’ve talked about what the best do and beyond like the outsourcing aspects and stuff, what do you think the ones that are the rest, what do they look like?
Joe Davies:
So I think the ones, the answers that are not doing so well, they may be caught in sort of old habits of selling by time.
Chris Simmance:
Hmm.
Joe Davies:
So selling by hours. And this is something that I’m really against because I don’t think value is in time. I don’t think clients care about how long something takes.
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
You know, if you say, look, I wanna rank, I wanna get more traffic, I wanna get more sales, which is really what the client really wants. and you say, well, it’s going to take 10 hours. So because it takes 10 hours, we’ve got to charge you this much. I think first of all, they’re shooting themselves in the foot because they need to charge in terms of ROI. They need to charge in terms of value of what they’re providing. Second of all, it just doesn’t make any… They can’t outsource it at that point because they need to prove that they’ve spent 10 hours on it.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Joe Davies:
So this is why the agencies who are caught in this archaic… almost factory like setting where they’ve got people logging time and,
Chris Simmance:
You know.
Joe Davies:
you know, saying I’ve spent 10 hours link building and it just doesn’t make
Chris Simmance:
I think
Joe Davies:
sense.
Chris Simmance:
that’s a hangover from a couple of things, one of these things at least. So the agency model is essentially a model offshoot from the likes of legal firms and things like that, where you’re buying time because the expertise is the thing that you’re buying. But also more likely is that agencies, and quite a lot of agencies, they’re slowly getting their heads around it, but quite a lot of agencies, struggle with the understanding that it’s not a product, but it is a service. And you can’t deliver a service in a certain amount of time, unless that service is something like a massage or, um, you know, something where you fit, you’re having a, um, uh, um, a training session with a personal trainer and the thing like that, but that’s still very much more a tangible thing and intangible
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
services. are not possible to measure time. I said to an agency leader the other week, we were building their processes and we were building the operational aspects of the agency to fit the strategy that we built for them and they were on the time thing and they were pushing back on it and I said, look, what if one day you’ve got a new client that comes in and you find an SEO aspect that is literally, it’s a 10 minute fix, but it impacts every page of the website and within six weeks, huge changes have been made, have been seen. Are you going to spend another nine hours and 50 minutes filling time up? Or are you going to produce that value and show the value of the work you’ve done? And they were like,
Joe Davies:
Yep.
Chris Simmance:
got it, makes sense now.
Joe Davies:
Exactly. I mean, a good example of that is like a conversion rate optimization company, CRO company. They, they provide so much ROI. Um, you know, if you double the conversion rate of a sales page that’s doing six figures a month, you, you might’ve spent two hours wire-framing a new page or changing a headline or changing the hero shot into something that’s more high quality and that would have took, you know, an hour, two hours, but you’ve, you know, you’ve like at least five figures difference
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Joe Davies:
monthly,
Chris Simmance:
I remember
Joe Davies:
you know.
Chris Simmance:
doing on one site we worked on a long time ago. And all we did was via a command line on the server, um, zip,
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
um, not zip, um, compressed every single header image ever so slightly just to accept by ever so slightly as a percentage of us as likely, but it improved the page speed of every single page by, you know, quarter of a second, something like that. And the traffic never changed. The conversion rate increased. That was one command
Joe Davies:
Yep.
Chris Simmance:
line that went, look in the WP content folder, take the JPEG or the ping
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
and just take it and, and smush it a little bit and do it in one go
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
as a batch. And it did it. And that was it running in the background for an hour or two. Laptop got very hot. Um, but you know,
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
the client got a really good return on their, on their investment of what we were doing, not necessarily how long it took us to do it. And.
Joe Davies:
Right, yeah
Chris Simmance:
You
Joe Davies:
that’s
Chris Simmance:
know, if
Joe Davies:
brilliant.
Chris Simmance:
you’re selling time, um, times running out guys, sorry about that.
Joe Davies:
Exactly.
Chris Simmance:
So let’s just say for the moment that you’re looking at adding some more services to, to fat Joe, you’ve got the R and D department running over time to look at it and you come up with a service, which is a one shot only magic wand. And that magic wand you can only, you only can use once that changes one thing about every single agency out there. In like
Joe Davies:
Mmm.
Chris Simmance:
straight away. What is it? What’s the magic one gonna do?
Joe Davies:
Well I think the magic wand would… It would help them realize that they don’t need all this, you know, stuff doing their deliverables. It would, it would make them realize not to sell by time, to sell by value,
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
sell by ROI, and then they would use our services.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean, naturally. Yeah, I do think the selling by time. And I think the, the only time you’d probably have internally from a writer’s point of view, internal writing would be dependent on the type of client you’ve got. So if you’ve got a very,
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
very niche, very, very bespoke, very, um, uh, regulated client or something like that. makes perfect sense because you need that writer to be on the calls. You need the writers to be understanding the needs of the client more. But,
Joe Davies:
Yep.
Chris Simmance:
but if you’re not along those lines and you, you are selling, you know, 15 hours of work and, you
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
know, one of the things that, that we did with Minty that the voiceover guy kindly reminded herself is
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
we looked at, not just like where costs were, but how costs, how, how fees were calculated. And one of the things that we didn’t, what we did was essentially suggest how much the level of effort went into the work. So when, when a proposal was being put together, it would say
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
level of effort over time, as opposed to 10 hours here, 10 hours there, that level of effort translated internally to hours for capacity planning and things like that. But
Joe Davies:
Yeah,
Chris Simmance:
the
Joe Davies:
yeah.
Chris Simmance:
level of effort over time then meant that the, you can, you can play with the fees a bit more because then your margins
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
go up and every single client understands. that they’re buying effort and value that comes
Joe Davies:
Yes.
Chris Simmance:
from effort. And not only did they make more sales, but they actually made better margins on that because they weren’t necessarily delivering 15 hours, they were delivering effort and it worked really well.
Joe Davies:
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. When, when I used to work at ANSI then, and I don’t recommend this at all, but it was 2010, we used to do something really, um, it was, it was, I call it genius, but other people might say this is an idiot thing to do. We used to like, whatever the client was, we used to print off a list of, list of keywords from Google keyword planner.
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
That’s what we was using at the time. And we’d, we’d have this, um, formula, which, um, sort of It was based on the volume and the difficulty, not the difficulty, the competitiveness
Chris Simmance:
Yep.
Joe Davies:
that Google said it said it had. And then we gave each keyword a score and it would be something like easy, medium, hard, something like that. And each, and each keyword also had a time period to, to rank on first page. And we had this algorithm and then, and then we just sort of printed off this list of keywords and we went into meetings and we just gave this list to the client. And it became sort of self-selecting. They were picking off keywords they wanted to rank for,
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Joe Davies:
individual keywords, and the total of the keywords selected would be their monthly retainer. If
Chris Simmance:
Oh yeah.
Joe Davies:
you know what I mean. So, I mean, obviously it was a car crash when it come to eight months down the line and the keyword they picked
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Joe Davies:
didn’t rank, but the sentiment was there
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Joe Davies:
to say,
Chris Simmance:
the logic of it makes sense.
Joe Davies:
logically it makes sense, but it’s kind of going, they then didn’t care about the hours or the time or what we were gonna do. It was just the end result we were selling. And it kind of, once we got to the point of six months and we had got some results, probably not the exact results we had promised, they were kind of a lot very forgiving and kind of saying, okay, well, these keywords are ranking, these ones aren’t. At that point, we could get them on a normal retainer.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Joe Davies:
But.
Chris Simmance:
and I think that it’s essentially assessing, showing them upfront the level of effort to provide some value. It’s not a promise.
Joe Davies:
Exactly. Yeah,
Chris Simmance:
You
Joe Davies:
yeah.
Chris Simmance:
know, that does make sense to make that intangible thing more tangible, especially back then when no one really understood any of it was very much magic. And
Joe Davies:
Exactly. Yeah. It was, it was, I mean, before the, um, the penguin days and, and Panda and everything, everything that come after it, it was kind of like, you could pick a keyword
Chris Simmance:
Yes. Yeah.
Joe Davies:
and you could get to pay. So it was kind of like one plus one equals two,
Chris Simmance:
To get old
Joe Davies:
but
Chris Simmance:
age.
Joe Davies:
now we know we kind of, yeah, now you’re learning more about, you know, topical authority and it’s not about the keyword. It’s about your organic traffic. And we, we sort of mature in as
Chris Simmance:
It’s
Joe Davies:
an industry,
Chris Simmance:
certainly a lot more
Joe Davies:
I hope.
Chris Simmance:
mature now for absolute
Joe Davies:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
certain. Joe, it’s been wonderful talking to you on the podcast. Thank you so much.
Joe Davies:
Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.
Chris Simmance:
And in our next episode, we’ll be talking with another agency advisor, coach, mentor, or, or trainer. In the meantime, thanks very much for listening. Speak to you soon.
Joe Davies:
Thanks, see you later.