S2E5 - Jim Banks and Kevin Gibbons Talk SEO, Brand Transition, and Financial Accountability
Today, we're joined by Kevin Gibbons, the founder of Re:signal, who shares his journey through the ups and downs of the search industry, from SEO consulting to handling major brand transitions.
We'll dive into Kevin's experiences with career changes, the challenges and pitfalls of the franchise model at Blueglass, and what he's learned from past failures.
Jim Banks and Kevin also discuss the importance of purpose and value in their work, the evolution of remote work setups, and the significance of financial accountability within a business.
Stay tuned as we explore the lessons learned from these pivotal moments and how they shaped Kevin's path forward.
Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting in the industry, this episode is packed with insights you won't want to miss.
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Important Notes
This is Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, the weekly podcast for aspiring digital marketers.
New episode released every Wednesday at 2PM GMT where you'll get stories and anecdotes of bad decisions and success stories from guests who've been there and done that in many of the disciplines that make up digital marketing.
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I've got a great guest on the show today. I've got Kevin Gibbons, who's
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the founder of Re:signal. Hi, Kevin, how you doing? Yeah, hi, Jim. Really
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good to join you. And yeah, looking forward to this chat. We were talking in
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the green room. I said, Kevin, usually I see him at the UK Search
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Awards. We're both dressed up in tuxedos. We have a quick beer before the
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awards ceremony starts. We have a three minute conversation.
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Kevin then goes on to win a bundle of awards and I never see
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him again because his whole team's celebrating the awards that they won.
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So I just thought it would be useful to have Kevin on as a guest
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on the podcast because he's got a really interesting
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backstory in terms of how he got into the industry. Kevin, how did
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you get into Search? Yeah, and certainly our journeys have overlapped at
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different stages and we can talk about that kind of in more detail. But for
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me, the real moment would have been 2003.
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I worked at a web design agency in Oxfordshire, which is where I'm from, and
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I'm pretty sure I got that job because I mentioned in the interview that they
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sponsored Oxford United, so called Domino Systems. Pretty much
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everyone thought that the shirt sponsor of Oxford at that point in time is Domino's
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Pizzas. Because you would. I was the only one that mentioned, oh, okay, I
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heard of you. Because of this, I applied for a placement year. So I still
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at uni, so it was like the third year of my degree. And then I
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went back to uni afterwards and I think they wanted
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to justify their sponsorship because no one had mentioned that. So they hired me.
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It wasn't for an SEO role, it was actually for a role in web development.
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I think I quickly realized which element was hard.
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You know, I'm not sure I was that good at it actually. They quickly realized
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that as well and. Oh, is it? Yeah,
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exactly. I wouldn't know my way around these days, put it that way, but it
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was a great learning curve to actually do web development. And that
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led into a number of different roles. And at that point in time, the
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agency started doing SEO for clients. I wasn't involved in that myself, but I could
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see it happening and I was excited by that trend of, okay,
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this is where things may be going. I found
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it easier than web development. It was certainly a
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less mature market. It was brand new. It's like 2003, as everyone, you'll remember
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those days, I'm sure that everyone was certainly making it up as they went
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along. And it was a great Time to be involved
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and just, yeah, kind of understand what's happening and
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how to offer that as a service. And I started from
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there, really. I built affiliate websites on any subject you could think
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of, turned that into Google AdSense beer money. When
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I went back to being a student and was just really
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quite curious about how I could build my own
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websites, do SEO, I started blogging about it.
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I did the typical student thing, did a year out in Australia,
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and once I got to Australia, I realized
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that on a holiday visa, you could only do a job for three months and
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then have to leave and go somewhere else, which wasn't. Wasn't that good for trying
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to get involved in a professional career. And so I actually
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freelanced my way around Australia for a year. And by
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building up affiliate websites and earning income off of that, writing a
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blog and then generating inquiries
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off the back of blogging, I found that was just a good
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way to attract attention. And the other tip from that
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really is I was quite often the first to
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notice things had changed. So I did quite a lot like Google Ads and things
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like that at the time. So I would just say, Google have changed X, Y
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and Z today. And because I was 12 hours
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ahead, maybe a bit more for the US, I was the first quite often
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to notice these changes. So I would get picked up by Barry
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Schwartz quite often at Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch back
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then, and I'd get quite a lot of kind of the coverage as being
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an original source of this. That would have been like 2005,
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2006 off the back of that.
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That led to obviously good backlinks, but certainly like inquiries
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from people who were clicking through and seeing that I was an SEO consultant.
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And without even trying to be an SEO consultant, that's where
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I quickly ended up. You were in Australia, you
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freelanced your way around Australia. Did they eventually catch up with you and say, right,
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you need to leave, or did you voluntarily cut back? Yeah, it's
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always a year. And I loved it. And it's one. I've never been back to
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Australia since. And I need to fix that because it's a great country. And I
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certainly think that for me, that
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was. It was a good push. And I think I realized later
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in life when it's like you get more commitments, certainly
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financially in terms of what you're doing. For me, I could literally take a year
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off, use a small amount of savings, say,
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I'm going to live on that and learn what I can, and that's my year.
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And if I come back home And I've got no money, I'll get a job.
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And that's the luxury of being, I think I was 23 at that point in
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time so it was really nice to be able to do that. And
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my plan was always to come back and get a job. And the
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realization I had when I came back in, it was March
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2006, I came back and was that I had a job.
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I my SEO consultant. I think this is a bit
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of imposter syndrome, but I set up a, an agency
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website. Probably more from that perspective of no one's going to hire
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me, I don't know what I'm doing, but let's pretend to be an agency. So
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I set up a domain name, seoptimize.com I
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wanted to get SEO in the domain so that I could start ranking with keywords
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and all of that stuff. And yeah, by the time I
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got back I realized that okay, I could get a job.
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But I wasn't that keen on moving to London at that point in time
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and there wasn't much available in Oxfordshire, certainly SDO wise.
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And there's an opportune moment where someone who
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is running a business locally had just left and exited that company
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and decided that they wanted to start their own
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search agency. And I was already doing this,
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we had a few discussions and then decided, okay, let's launch
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that company together. And that's where SC
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Optimize really became an agency at that point in time. We then decided, okay, let's
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turn this into a limited company. And from there we won
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more clients, employed people and built it
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upwards. Yeah, because I think, I think the sort of
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the mid noughties, the sort of 2000, sort of
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five through to eight, nine were probably some of the best years
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I think for searching the kind of the sphere
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of like what I know, I mean like I think that that was probably the
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peak period in terms of growth opportunities, you
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know. Again, absolutely, yeah. I think so many people that I know that
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ran agencies back then or maybe are still running agencies now, like
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again probably like yourself, they were consulting and thought, well, nobody's really going to
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want to hire a consultant. Whereas I think now a lot of the podcast guests
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I've had on have deliberately stayed as consultants or
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advisors other than switching to kind of the agency model. Right. I mean,
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I think, you know, when you kind of look at it, I mean, you
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know, I think a lot of people, there's this perception of you can't, you know,
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you can't sort of hire consultants, you need to hire an Agency.
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Right. And I always maintain that people will hire an agency
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for one of two things. They're either hiring for expertise or they're hiring for
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utility. Right. And I think a lot of people don't, they, they
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think they're hiring for expertise, but really what they're looking to
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do is just outsource grunt work that they don't want to do themselves. And that's
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for me, the complete wrong reason to kind of do that. Right. I mean,
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ultimately an agency should bring tons to the table and
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equally a consultant can bring the same sort of expertise
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to the table that an agency can. They're just doing it on the back of,
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you know, an in house team or something like that. So yeah,
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absolutely. And you're right, those days I remember walking around the Internet world,
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York's Court, just to understand a bit more about what's going on. And
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I think that would have been the days of Latitude with say, Richard Gregory, John
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Myers and Big Mouth Media Andrew Gwood. I remember very
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well neutralized Teddy Cowell and all of those people in that. What I
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consider to be Dixon Jones. Almost like Dixon.
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Yeah, absolutely. And, and that was great because
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I consider myself quite early in terms of the
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SEO journey, but I certainly wasn't the first wave. There were
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already very established companies at that point in time that
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were absolutely flying off in demand. And yeah, like I said, at
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that point in time, it's a good time to get involved. Certainly it's before
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the 2008 kind of recession and
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everything else that was happening and it was still flying and growing at that point.
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But yeah, even the 2008 sort of
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crash that kind of happened. I mean, even in that sort of
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scenario, there were still opportunities. I think, you know, I think
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a lot of people see the damage and I think a lot of people will
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see opportunity. Right. I mean, I certainly got involved in some stuff
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which again, like, I would never get involved in it now, but I got involved
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in doing things like payday loans and things like that because, you know, people were
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in desperate need of short term cash that they couldn't get
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because, you know, they, they, you know, were having problems with paying mortgages and
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things like that. So, you know, so there was definitely opportunity there that
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presented itself as a result of misfortune that people were experiencing.
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Right. And again, I don't, I'm not saying I'm going to, I want to exploit
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people's misfortune, but the alternative was they have
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some guy turning up at their door in a leather jacket with a baseball bat
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to Kneecap them. Right. And it's sort of, you know, you want to sort of
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see that as a potential alternative, you know. But I think,
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again, I just think that there's sort of been those opportunities if you. If you
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kind of look for them. So you kind of always. So you had sort of
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se. Optimize you were in partnership with somebody. Again, my. I
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think. My understanding is you kind of like the partnership ended up sort of spilling
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up, is that right? It is. And it's one of those that. To be
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honest, I think we did very well. I wouldn't see this as a negative
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story. It was more. We grew the agency from that, like I
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say, I think it was 2007 through to
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2012. And yeah, we had a
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great journey. We went from trying to win small Oxfordshire local businesses
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to large Oxfordshire brands through
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to national brands. I'm not quite sure about global. Yep,
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we probably did, actually, but I certainly remember we did great work
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with Audley Travel, based in Oxfordshire Mila, and
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that went through to the Deloitte M and G investment. So we had a really
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nice portfolio clients, team of 15 or so people
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and a very strong team. Great reputation in terms
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of blogging and those days, kind of social
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media was probably a lot of Twitter kind of back then, but that generated
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great leads. I think we grew to, I think it's like 1.2
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million. We were listed on Deloitte Fast 50. So
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I certainly look back at that time as that was, yep, really exciting
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to be involved in. We probably plateaued for the last,
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I'd say year to 18 months of facing those
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agency growth challenges that I think are quite typical where you get to
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a point of we're winning new business, but now we're turning clients and we're
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winning quite significantly, sometimes in terms of new business, but it's
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replacing what we've lost. And that kind of led to a bit
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of a plateau and that we needed to break through. And
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I think then I had earnings. Why were you churning clients?
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I think it was. Some of it was we ended
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up, I think as an Oxfordshire agency, we focused quite a lot on
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digital marketing. So we did paid search, we did SEO
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analytics, but social media, and certainly coming out the other side of
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that, the focus was much more on SEO and a specialism and doing
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one thing really well. And certainly once we started to break
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through the bigger clients, like all of those I just mentioned, in terms of
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brands, I think we did paid search for a couple of them,
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but really we were known for SEO and I think that was the big thing
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of we were, I don't think we were ever bad at any of those services.
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I think we were good at all of them, but we were never great. And
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I think actually just really focusing and doubling down on
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how do you be great at one thing As a small agency, obviously as
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you get a bit more scale, you can do more. But for us, it was
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okay. Let's really specialize and be known for SEO and then we can attract the
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clients that we want to attract and grow together with them.
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Yeah. And also it's a level of maturity of being able to run a business.
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We now look at things like, obviously,
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finances more closely, client services, project
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management. When you're running an agency and you don't
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have that level of experience, you just have to make mistakes. I certainly
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have. I don't know that's the kind of topic of your podcast, but I feel
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like I'm always a good case study on how to make every mistake you can
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but still come out the other side. And I know certain from it, people that
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are absolutely brilliant at paid search or brilliant
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SEO, but are really crap at running business.
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Right. And I mean, we're going to, we're going to talk, right? We're going to
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talk about Blueglass, which is probably where you and I kind of have our
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closest alliance in terms of like, that we've done together in the
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past, and we'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, I mean,
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I'm just amazed at how many people think that they can kind of do everything
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right. So they go, I'm going to do SEO, I'm going to do ppc, I'm
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going to do analytics. Just they're trying to use the same people to
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do all of these things, rather than understanding and accepting that
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there is a significant difference in terms of skill set
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required to do SEO than there is to do ppc,
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for argument's sake. Right? And so many people go, you're going to do both. And
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I just think sometimes it's almost like
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in a football, soccer analogy saying you're going to be a
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goalkeeper and a striker. Right. And it's a completely different skill set to be both.
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Right. You can't really do the two things together. They just don't work
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that way. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. And
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yeah, I think like you say, it's, how do you apply that? And equally,
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from a positioning perspective, I think we, we actually did very well in
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se optimize of hiring very bright maths
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grads, physics grads from Oxford University. That were
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absolute geniuses at paid search. I think when we started to make it work, it
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was, okay, let's hire people specifically for those
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roles and become more specialists. So, yeah, that was definitely a big learning curve for
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us. And it's not that the skill set I think that you
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certainly needed back then to be an SEO was very different to
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the behaviors and the mindset that you would have for looking at
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paid search. And yeah, I think we started to realize there's a big difference
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between the types of people we should be hiring for the different channels.
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And yeah, let's start to break it out. It's all a bit foggy for me
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really. But you moved from Oxford and you had an office in
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Paddington, and that's where you and I worked together for
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a little while. You had a small team there in an office that was
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above the British Rail headquarters. In fact,
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talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, so
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what happened was in the latter days of
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SEOptimise, we set up a. What we probably called
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a satellite office. At that point in time. We were going into
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London once or twice a week to meet with clients that were starting to be
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based in London. So we decided, okay, let's start up a small
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office and let's hire a couple of people there. So I think we had three
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or four people and set up that office. It's actually linkdex's
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old office. So we were a partner of linkdex at that point in
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time and we. They were moving out
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and they had the cheapest rent in London and
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not the nicest office in London, but they were giving it. I
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mean, the rent was cheap and I think it was because at the time weren't
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they building like the Elizabeth line outside or something? So literally
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every day. I can still hear that
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some pretty still market 10 years later. And yeah, I know it was like noise
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cancelling headphones of trying to block out the Elizabeth line building out
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there out the window. So yeah, it's. I think
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at that point, if we wanted to be in London, we had to do it
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on the cheap. And the train line, if Oxford got into
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Paddington was convenient for the. Yeah.
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Making that our home. And we were there for a few years actually. And like
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I said, I feel that office served as well and it did
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outgrow it, which is certainly a good thing. But yeah, I think
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just at that point in time, I was in a split between. Yeah,
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kind of me moving away from SEOptimise. So for various
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different reasons, some business, a lot of it was personal to be honest, it was
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that I went through a stage of my life where my dad had sadly died
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from cancer. So this would have been in April 2012.
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In hindsight, I should have taken time off and
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just gone through essentially a grieving process. But
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for me, my way of dealing with things was to throw myself
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into work. And I decided I wasn't happy with what I was doing. And
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again, in hindsight, there's an obvious reason why I wasn't and it wasn't
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particularly to do with work. But it's easy to say in hindsight. And I
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think for me, I then decided, okay, going to go in a different direction.
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And I negotiated a deal with Stuart, who's the business
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partner at seoptimise. And we took
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the agency and I took the London office. I took the people in
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London. So I think it was three or four of us at that point in
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time and some clients, and started again
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and set up a new brand. And it's quite a messy period.
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We had a brand name called Quiro, which I
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literally found on a website. I think it's called like Brand Bucket or
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something. They sell you a name and a logo because I had no idea what
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I was doing. So it's okay. That would. I was racking my brains trying to
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think, was that like weird company name? I couldn't, I couldn't remember what it was.
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And you just got it, which year? I remember it. It was terrible. I think
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I've scrubbed it from my LinkedIn now because it was terrible and it didn't last
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very long, but it was. Honestly, Kevin, I need to wear
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all these, all these scars. They're all part of your DNA. I don't think you
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should try and bear in the kind of like this whole part
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of what made is what's made you the person that you are today, right? And
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I think in some, if you haven't gone through these challenging
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situations, right, and made bad decisions, then you'll never end up kind
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of doing what you're doing now, right? I think sometimes, you know, people think
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is you always see people posting on social media and stuff and everything is
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about how fantastic it is. I mean, I keep watching all these
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YouTube videos because, you know, clearly you choose part of my growth strategy for the
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podcast, right? And I keep reading all these, you know, watching these videos
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and everything that people are saying, I made
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$500,000 yesterday, you know, and I'm thinking that is
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complete and utter bullshit. There's no way on this planet,
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right, these 19 year old kids are making half A million
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dollars, right. When they're saying what they're doing, I like the
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reality of it. Never in a million years are going to happen, right? But they're.
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They're kind of claiming it and people are buying into it. And I'm, again, I
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think maybe it's just because I'm an old codger, right, that I'm kind of
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more questioning the kind of validity of what's actually being
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said, right? But I think, yeah, it's much of, like, my
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DNA, right. And what I'm doing now with the podcast and trying to help
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promote the kind of the evolution of the industry, because even though
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I've been doing it for 25 years, I still think we're in the infancy, right?
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And I just think that, you know, there's got. There's got to be a kind
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of like a roadmap for the way forward. And I'm trying to help steer
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people away from the kind of path that will lead them to, you
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know, to a really kind of dark place. I think that, you know, there's so
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many places where people think, yeah, I can. I can become an influence. I can
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do this, I can do that. Right? And the reality of it is that so
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few people are doing it, so few people are actually making the sort of
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money that they're claiming to make, right? Because when, like I said,
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when you blow holes in the business model, you just go, there is no business
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model. You know, you see people that got a million subscribers on YouTube and they're
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going, I can't cope with it. The mental health is killing me, right? And you're
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thinking, well, if you had. If you had a million subscribers and what have you,
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they've got to be making three, four hundred thousand dollars a year. Why. Why
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is so miserable if they're making that kind of money? Just doesn't make any sense.
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But the problem is, is that it's. They're a little bit caught in the hamster
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wheel, right? They've got to continually produce content in order to
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sustain the desire of the audience that they built up, right? So they've kind
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of gone into it, think all this money. Reality of it is that
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they can't sustain what they've got for the length of time
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that it's going to need to be sustained for, right?
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Yeah, no, I think that's very true. And there's definitely something in terms of
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credibility, of just the openness and transparency of this
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didn't work. And this was the learning. And again, if there's
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a success out of that Great. But it's a balanced
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mix of success and failure. It's never just, I'm a
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genius. And like I say, your podcast is bad
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decisions. I feel. I'm sure a lot of people are like this. Every
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decision I've made at a point in time is genius. In
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hindsight, there's quite a lot of them. You're an idiot. But
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again, I think it's that transparency of being able to reflect on it. It's like
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I say, every decision I make, I've made it for a reason. I backed
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myself in order to do that. And it doesn't mean it is correct in. In
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hindsight. But again, I think you need to show, yeah,
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a bit of humility in terms of, okay, what am I going to take from
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that? What am I going to learn from that? Rather than hovering, yeah.
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Paper it over the cracks and just saying it's amazing. It very rarely is.
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But running a proper agency, a proper business, and
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growing sensibly the way that you have with the current
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business that you've got. Again, all, like, all the awards, and we'll talk about
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those a little bit later on, but all the awards that you've won, it must
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make you feel like you've done well to go from
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where you were probably at that particular point in time, a fairly dark place, to
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where you are now. But as you say, with hindsight, yeah, you kind of made
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some bad decisions. Right. We can all say, yeah, that's a horrible decision,
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like, but it's only with hindsight that you realize just how bad a decision it
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was. Right. So, absolutely. And obviously, things like the office in Paddington, I
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mean, I used to kind of get. Get on the train, come to the office
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in Paddington, kind of arrive there. You know,
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you clearly didn't have any meeting rooms, so we'd always kind of go offline, find
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a coffee shop to go and meet people. You know, I remember you had
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like, the sort of two separate rooms. Like, you go off and be creative,
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right. You'd sort of like, take yourself into the other room, be creative, write
Speaker:
blog posts. I think at the time you had a dating site, Right. So you
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were kind of the SEO for that. Right.
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You know, but again, for me, it was. It was a sort of a fun
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environment to be in. You had, again, some really super
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enthusiastic people that kind of worked with you at that particular point in
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time. I think in the industry, they kind of gone on to do really well.
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You had me, what? No receiver. I kind of like, threw myself on my sword
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to allow you to kind of bring in Russell McAfee.
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But again, I think there's a lot of people have been through this sort of
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the Kevin Gibbons kind of like school
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of learning how to do how to run a business. Again, for me,
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I've always been so amazed at your ability to kind of be
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very unassuming but very good at what you do. I think a lot of people
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just look at you and think you're laid back, but
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clearly nobody's fault. Yeah, no,
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exactly. And I think that's it. It's. Yeah. How do you love problem?
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Yeah, certainly for me it's very much. I want everyone on my
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side in terms of how we're working and then how do we. Yeah, like you
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say those days and even today it's, let's get good people
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together and let's work hard but enjoy
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it while you're doing it. So. So Quattro
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morphed into what?
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Yeah, so that became Blueglass. And
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I'd been going to US conferences since I
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think it was 2010 or something like that. So it was like the conferences. You'll
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be familiar with the smx advance, the PubCons and actually
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remember going to a PubCon. And I. I
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always did a blog post afterwards about the top things I've learned and I'd go
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back and I'd do a lunch and learn for our team. And we had a
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couple of people that came along with me through those events as well, but which
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share what I think, what I thought were the learnings. And I remember I came
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back from pubcon. It was like the best talks I saw during this conference would
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have been from Greg Boser, Chris Winfield,
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Lauren Baker and someone else at the time.
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But yeah, probably, probably Dave Snyder. And it's like, where's common
Speaker:
theme here? They all work for Blueglass. What's going on there? And this
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seems exciting. It seems, I think had a brand beyond certainly
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the size of a company. It's very well thought of within
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the industry. And then Blueglass
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started their own conference. So I went out to la. That was Blueglass in.
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Was it called Blueglass X? It was, yeah, that's right, yeah. So I
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went out there and that would have been around the same sort of time, like
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early 2012. And I got to know
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them, got to know Richard Ze, who was CEO and that led to
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conversations around we're looking to grow for acquisition, we're looking
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to enter Europe. Would you be interested in a
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conversation around actually needing a UK part of the agency? And
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I know people I've spoken to. Yeah, similar Conversations
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and I think probably more through my business
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naivety, if you like, at that point in time, I might have been involved in
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a business for the six years prior, but I was very much the kind
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of person who was looking after
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clients, our own marketing of the agency, not necessarily running
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the business at that point. And
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I went into those conversations optimistically, as I feel like
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I quite often normally am. That's my natural way of looking at things.
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And they had a plan that I think, again,
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it's. A lot of people have said in hindsight this is either going to be
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a massive success or a massive failure. They won't settle for anything else
Speaker:
in between. And I think that's right. And it was a massive
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failure. I mean, my understanding was it was kind of like a franchise model, wasn't
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it? So, like, effectively you'd become Blueglass in the UK
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and you had the guys that were going to be sort of Blueglass in sort
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of Switzerland and Germany and whatnot, you
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know. But it was sort of like a franchise model where you could use the
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brand and have access to some of the sort of the social
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media profiles and equity kind of in that respect. But, you know,
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effectively you were, if you like, contributing
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to kind of like buy the franchise for the uk.
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Yeah. And I think that's it. I think if you look at the model,
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I think there's a lot of that is actually very good, but in
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terms of the finances, the operations and
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the infrastructure behind it, it wasn't
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at the level it needed to be for the level of ambition that they had.
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And it was essentially a franchise which in the end
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actually saved us because it meant that the company was
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returned to myself as a shareholder and
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we then were allowed to go back to being independent again, as opposed
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to a full acquisition of a company where in
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any US liquidation situation they might have ended
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up having us tag along with it. So that wasn't actually the case.
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So that saved us. We still, as we had a difficult
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year explaining to clients and prospects that we're no longer
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part of this operation. We're not going to go bust. You can trust us.
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In terms of being a company and can't remember the brand it was now,
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but I remember there was a pitch that we'd verbally won and we then lost
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it almost overnight just because the US company had collapsed.
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Yeah. And there was a whole messy time in the
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period in between where the US company was
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publicly still operating and individually no one was at
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the wheel. And that's when obviously we had conversations
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about, okay, if they don't want to run it. Maybe we should. And
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that didn't go very far. But I remember
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my previous CFO at my original agency, Web Diversity,
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he'd helped me take me to kind of a trade sale. He'd sort of
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ex Barclays bank, right. Was heavily involved
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with some serious investors based in Monaco, right. They were quite happily
Speaker:
prepared to put up some money to enable us to buy the business
Speaker:
outright from Blueglass. In some respects it's like it was horrible at
Speaker:
the time, but so, so interesting to go through that experience
Speaker:
of trying to understand the mechanics behind it. The thing that I was
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most concerned about is there was a top heavy management
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infrastructure where everyone was getting paid a ton of money. Everyone flew first
Speaker:
class, everyone stayed in sort of swanky hotel. So there was a lot of expenditure
Speaker:
in the business that was, was easy to carve
Speaker:
out and say, well, we don't need that. We can manage on a much smaller
Speaker:
management team. Right. And all of the people that were doing the sort
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of the, if you like the work on a daily basis were really, really
Speaker:
good and really smart. Right. And I think the thing that bothered me the most
Speaker:
was at the point in time that it all collapsed, all the people who had,
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you know, done such great content, all that content just vanished almost
Speaker:
overnight, right. I mean they kind of d and everything that was
Speaker:
ultimately, that was the, the people that worked at Blueglass, that was their,
Speaker:
their sort of billboard for how successful they are at writing content and that,
Speaker:
that was taken away. I mean you can kind of go, maybe go back and
Speaker:
look at it on the Wayback Machine, right? But all that content just vanished. As
Speaker:
much as they said it was a ton of money that needed, it really wasn't
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a ton of money. It was just a little bit of money to pay, you
Speaker:
know, this quirky sort of three sort of salaries in a
Speaker:
month thing. And maybe that's right, spent with the
Speaker:
landlord, right. So it wasn't a ton of money that was needed. This consortium
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in Monaco were quite happy to pony up a good couple of million dollars
Speaker:
to enable take over the day to day running. We just wanted to have
Speaker:
access to the books to be able to see what it was that was involved.
Speaker:
And we were like, nope, can't have them. Okay, fine,
Speaker:
let's just park it, let's move on. Right. So as you say, you, you were
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able to reverse back into quattro and I guess at that point in time you
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then. Or did, did you not, did you go back into couture or did you
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kind of, you Gave us Blueglass. We actually did, yeah. And like I say, it's
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like you just drug at the floor. But as a mutual friend of ours who
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was involved it like very late in the journey of a Blueglass bit,
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he described this as being, you just bought a Ferrari and you've run out
Speaker:
of petrol and you can't afford the petrol, so you just leave the Ferrari at
Speaker:
the forecourt. And that is how it felt with Blueglass. There's a lot
Speaker:
underneath this as a great business, like you say, the people in particular,
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in terms of what was happening, the brand that they'd
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established. And yeah, it was a shame to see it go.
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And what Reed then decided was,
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okay, day one. It's almost like that planting office was like
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war room style. How do we communicate this to our
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clients and our team to reassure them that all of
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this, which was at times that quite. Yeah, I'm trying
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to think of the right word, but quite aggressive online in terms
Speaker:
of some of the messaging that was going out. Toxic. Yeah, it's probably the right
Speaker:
word for it. And we had to field a lot
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of questions. And in the end,
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my decision on this was, okay, I've left SEOptimise in
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what was that kind of summer of 2012,
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then rebranded to Couturo. We'd then very
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quickly, three to six months, become Blueglass. So we'd have three
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different brands under my name within the space of 12 months.
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And I didn't want to backtrack and I never really like Quaturo as a name
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in the first place. And there is some equity as bluegrass.
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So let's keep that going. At the back of my mind was like, we can't
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keep doing this forever. And I remember.
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So I went on a. I'm trying to think what year this was, but I
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went on a leading professional services company training course, a
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one week at Harvard Business School. And this was
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for me almost like a growing up period of, okay, I'm not an
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SEO running a business. I'm now a business person
Speaker:
who's running an SEO agency. And kind of like that switch in terms of
Speaker:
my focus and mindset really. And I.
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In that group, they set you up with. You're on a. We called it
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award. Then it'd be smart. Yeah. What do you call it? Halls,
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essentially. It's almost like student style of different people that
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I think there's five or six in this group. Cohort, I think is the word
Speaker:
I'm looking for. Right. And it was a lawyer, a very successful
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liar, a partner at one of the leading consulting
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tax accountant. Again, like very senior people who had
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very strong, established careers. And you've got, I think it was like 20
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minutes to explain a problem to them and
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20 minutes for them to discuss and give you solutions. And I went to
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them and I said, okay, this is the problem. This is our brand situation.
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And we now have a situation where Blueglass us had
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done the same deal with us with another company in Zurich, and
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we partnered together publicly. We were Blueglass uk,
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Blueglass Zurich. And again, from
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the outside, it looked good. From the inside, I
Speaker:
owned 100% of the UK company. Raphael owns
Speaker:
the Zurich company. We get on perfectly well. We'd do ski trips together,
Speaker:
et cetera. But the brand was shared. And it's actually if
Speaker:
you want to continue down this route to a point that you're
Speaker:
building your own brand equity. And. Evan, can I just stop you one minute? I
Speaker:
need to go for a pee in one minute. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Don't worry.
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It's the one problem of getting old. You have to go for a pee. I'll
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be back. I might do the same while you do that. So you have this
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to look forward to when you get older. Kevin.
Speaker:
Yeah, I was going to say it's better than the background noise if you're, like,
Speaker:
peeing into a bar. I was going to say, maybe I should just try and
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see if I can get myself a catheter or something like that.
Speaker:
Right, sorry. Anyway, carry
Speaker:
on. Yeah, yeah. So the point was
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I did this Harvard course and I used this opportunity to pick
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people's brains and just say, okay, this is the company brand.
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These are the two company structures. And it's a
Speaker:
unanimous kind of wake up call for me, where everyone was
Speaker:
like, you're mad. You don't own your brand. You have no brand equity that you're
Speaker:
building. You need to move away from this. Seems to come really. And
Speaker:
that was the turning point. And I don't think we did rebrand for
Speaker:
maybe six to 12 months after that, but it was like, okay, actually, they're right.
Speaker:
If we ever want to kind of get acquired or Jewett wants to
Speaker:
get acquired, which they since have, this is going to get really messy.
Speaker:
So we're better off actually having brand equity. And that was
Speaker:
the point where we decided, okay, let's reposition. Not reposition, but
Speaker:
rebrand ourselves. And that's where resignal came in. And,
Speaker:
yeah, like I say, it was. There was certainly a period of keeping the
Speaker:
bluegrass brand more for stability of clients and our team, but we
Speaker:
knew we had to wave goodbye to that at some point. So there were certain
Speaker:
things about that bluegrass brand that was very positive and strong that
Speaker:
I'm sure we certainly wanted to get benefit from. But there was
Speaker:
also parts of that, as you said, it's like very toxic and
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people would reach out to us and yeah, everyone must be quite
Speaker:
angry about us in the sense of that actually wasn't us then
Speaker:
that it's something that we wanted to then start to distance ourselves away
Speaker:
from. Yeah. It's funny, I've still got kicking around
Speaker:
somewhere like a Google Drive folder that's absolutely chock a block
Speaker:
full of all the old process documents,
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presentations from, as you say, like some of the probably the
Speaker:
smartest SEO people, they've all gone on to do great
Speaker:
things. You know, the kind of Chris W. And Greg Boses and so on, they'd
Speaker:
gone on to do great things sort of subsequent to the Blueglass
Speaker:
closure. Right. But I think some of that, the content that was produced back then,
Speaker:
I look at it now, I tell you what, that stuff still stands true to
Speaker:
this day. I mean, it's still really well put together, really well structured. You
Speaker:
know, proposals were good, the decks were good, you know, the
Speaker:
processes were good. Everything about the great everyone you
Speaker:
mentioned at the beginning there, it was so many great minds all in one
Speaker:
place. And they all threw their hat into the, into the ring, right. I think
Speaker:
everyone that the point in time when Blueglass was born, right.
Speaker:
Everyone was like, there's no way there's going to be that many egos
Speaker:
in a room that's going to survive. Right the way. No,
Speaker:
it's right. As you say, it's like individually, every one of
Speaker:
them, they're brilliant. Collectively, it's like a team of
Speaker:
Cristiano Ronaldo's and it's. You need a routine
Speaker:
or like, you need someone in there that's going to be able to say, okay,
Speaker:
how do we organize this? And I think certainly my big learning is
Speaker:
it's not just about hiring great people and letting them get on with it as
Speaker:
part of that, but you need the right structure and the right mix and blend.
Speaker:
And I think the financial control was the big one in terms
Speaker:
of actually. And just how do you harness leadership? I mean, I
Speaker:
think, you know, I think unfortunately, the kind
Speaker:
of. That everyone was able to kind of go and do whatever they
Speaker:
wanted, right? Where that sort of control element that needs
Speaker:
to be in place operationally, financially, you know, to
Speaker:
enable things to kind of move forward. I used to amaze
Speaker:
me when people would talk about, you know, oh, we're going to go in and
Speaker:
do a client meeting and there'd be like two people on the client side
Speaker:
and 12 to 14 people on the blue glass side.
Speaker:
You're thinking if you added up the kind of hourly rate of pay for each
Speaker:
one of those individuals. Right. There's a huge amount of money
Speaker:
sitting on the phone or sitting in a zoom call. Right. To kind of have
Speaker:
their two minutes of input into kind of what's going on. Right. And I
Speaker:
think, you know, I think when you're running a business, you need to kind of.
Speaker:
I'm not saying you necessarily need to micromanage it at that level, but you need
Speaker:
to be cognizant of the fact that every single person, regardless of whether
Speaker:
they're client facing or not, is a cost to the business. And you've got
Speaker:
to make sure that you're accountable for, you know, that.
Speaker:
That money is accountable. Right. That people are doing things that
Speaker:
are efficiency as well as effective. Right. It's
Speaker:
got to be effective, but it needs to be efficient in the business as well.
Speaker:
So. Absolutely. There's a book I read just last week actually,
Speaker:
and they use an analogy of if you want to drive a race
Speaker:
car, as a good example. The race car, for a very good reason, has two
Speaker:
pedals. It has an accelerator and the brake. And sometimes people forget
Speaker:
about the brake. But you're never going to win if all you do is just
Speaker:
go for the accelerator on every corner. It's an football
Speaker:
team's similar analogy. You need a goalkeeper, you need a defense, and
Speaker:
the business is the same. You need financial control and a bit
Speaker:
of pessimism sometimes, which doesn't come naturally to me
Speaker:
either. But in order to look at, okay, actually, how do we control this?
Speaker:
And it's not just, let's go for it, let's go for it, let's go for
Speaker:
it. There's a lot of really good stuff. There, but proper football
Speaker:
balance, proper football. You know, Erling Haaland
Speaker:
is brilliant for Man City. Mo Salah is brilliant for Liverpool. But
Speaker:
in Egypt and, you know, Norway, not so much. Right.
Speaker:
So, you know, because they support infrastructure in place in terms of
Speaker:
the team that's supporting them to do their job. Right. So everyone in
Speaker:
America, the podcast is two guys talking about it. No idea.
Speaker:
Okay, so you obviously rebranded from Blueglass to resignal. I remember
Speaker:
coming to the kind of launch party that you threw. Oh, yeah, Cross.
Speaker:
Was that Paddington again? I think. I think from. No, it was across
Speaker:
or Kings Cross, the German gymnasium. Yeah. Great venue.
Speaker:
And I remember you kind of giving out Everyone that kind of went there. You
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had that sort of bright canary yellow kind of notebook that everyone. And I still
Speaker:
got it in the drawer somewhere. Right. I still use it from time to time.
Speaker:
Yeah. How prolific I am as a note taker. I'm still using the book. I
Speaker:
should have been on like 50th book by now, but I'm just not
Speaker:
sure. Yeah, but yeah, we,
Speaker:
that was something where we brought in a brand consultant at that point in time
Speaker:
I, from my couturo days, I decided, okay, this isn't going to work. This
Speaker:
isn't how my brain works in there. Let's bring in someone experience and kind
Speaker:
of, let's look at what that identity looks like and how do we
Speaker:
shape that into who we are and what we do. I think one, one of
Speaker:
the things I've always liked about the way in which you conducted things
Speaker:
is you accept your limitations, you understand what you're good at, what you're not
Speaker:
good at and the things you're not good at. You've brought people in to help
Speaker:
support that and things like the brand expertise a lot of people might try
Speaker:
and wing. I've always winged it in the past and made a big mistake when
Speaker:
I sold my. Just made a complete ex ear of it. Right.
Speaker:
So you know, it ultimately ended up costing me something like
Speaker:
£80,000 in you know, fees
Speaker:
for finances because I was selling my business to a publicly traded
Speaker:
American company and I needed to have all my books redone
Speaker:
into something that was going to be generally accepted, the accounting
Speaker:
principles with my accountant. Right. Only to have to do it
Speaker:
again with a kind of US based account. So just to be those.
Speaker:
Yeah, yeah. You know, somebody could have. If, if I'd have had advisors in at
Speaker:
the beginning they could have advised me on what to do. Right. I always thought
Speaker:
due diligence was them doing due diligence on my business
Speaker:
when really it's a two way thing. Right. It's also you doing due diligence on
Speaker:
their business. Right. And had I done that in, in, in a better
Speaker:
way, I may never have sold the business to the people I ended up selling
Speaker:
it to and lots of other options at that time. But I just chose what
Speaker:
seemed to be the best option at the time but with hindsight turned out to
Speaker:
be the worst option. But you know, we all live and blame
Speaker:
absolutely with resignal. You know, again that's been sort of going for
Speaker:
a little while. You've kind of evolved and changed lots of.
Speaker:
Again I've always kind of said like you so you are A
Speaker:
SEO agency. E Commerce. SEO agency. What
Speaker:
is an E commerce SEO agency? Well,
Speaker:
I think for us it's understanding who we do our best
Speaker:
work for. And we
Speaker:
kind of traditionally had been very much B2C anyway. So
Speaker:
I think certainly since that kind of like early
Speaker:
blue glass days of 2012, it was very much travel,
Speaker:
retail, finance for our big sectors and what we focused
Speaker:
on, we had great brands. So Expedia was certainly a strong brand
Speaker:
trust in travel, world remit in finance. And what we
Speaker:
found is coming through Covid. The retail
Speaker:
side had really ramped up and the travel side,
Speaker:
obviously for obvious reasons, without planes being in the sky,
Speaker:
et cetera, had faded away. And at that point in time we
Speaker:
then said, okay, we've got really strong case studies in
Speaker:
retail, we've got our pitch. Win rate is stronger in
Speaker:
retail because that's actually where we've got a great track record.
Speaker:
Case study has proved that we can do work for people like them.
Speaker:
And financial services was a small percentage of the business, I
Speaker:
think. I don't think we're 100% e commerce today. I think there's a couple of
Speaker:
clients that might be outside of that, but we very much sell okay in terms
Speaker:
of where we think we should be
Speaker:
placing our bets. E commerce is the right fit for us. And
Speaker:
let's actually get to understand people from an E commerce background.
Speaker:
Let's understand the buying cycles, everything that goes
Speaker:
into this. And again, E commerce is probably quite broad but then starting
Speaker:
to look at how do we use that track record. So Asics is a great
Speaker:
example of they've been a client for coming up to seven years now, which
Speaker:
is certainly part of established relationship for
Speaker:
any agency. And that's something that
Speaker:
again we treat incredibly importantly and we see this
Speaker:
as every kind of new year, as a new challenge of let's
Speaker:
make sure that we're impressing and achieving great results and
Speaker:
but off the back of that comes great case studies,
Speaker:
award entries and the type of stories that then lead
Speaker:
into more people what to work with us. So our
Speaker:
marketing became very much let's focus on our clients
Speaker:
and that will attract more clients that we want to see.
Speaker:
And E Commerce just goes naturally out of that really because it's.
Speaker:
People want to buy that trust that track record in that sector.
Speaker:
So again, as you know, I'm usually a kind of a judge
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at the various awards that you guys enter
Speaker:
and I've always kind of been. I'd much rather be on the sort
Speaker:
of giving outside of things. They're on the receiving end of things.
Speaker:
Right. In like I, I've managed to make the PPC
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top 100 this year and I always kind of said if I ever appeared on
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one of those lists I'd be like, God, I'm kind of doing something wrong. I
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don't want to be on the list. I'm just very uncomfortable with it being about
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me. I'd much rather being about other people. Right. So for me, you know,
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again, I've always, I've always been curious like, so once
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you're an award winning agency, like, why do you need to submit
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any more awards? Because I don't think it's, it's, I'm speaking out of turn.
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You have won more awards for Re:signal than any other
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company in the world. I think you published a LinkedIn post where you've
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listed a top, top table of how many awards you've won. You've
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won more, I think, than any other company.
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Yeah. And I think the answer to why do we keep going is
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we want to produce award winning work. And for me it's actually, it's not. The
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award is a byproduct of that. The way that we've retained Asics
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for seven years is by saying, okay, we've got a KPI from
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the pitch year one and this is to drive
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organic revenue growth. We've then got year two.
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Let's keep challenging ourselves and if we can achieve that,
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then we've got a very strong award entry at the end of it. But it
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comes from the desire to produce high quality work for our
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clients and to delight our clients. And if we're doing that, then like I say,
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there's a story to tell. And that's become a large focus of our marketing
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is actually, let's do what we're here for, let's delight our clients, let's
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achieve results and then if we can celebrate success together, that's
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fantastic. That leads into, like I say, case
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studies, awards, referrals, just general word of mouth
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and reputation. And personally I think that's the best way
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to do marketing because it's focused on your product. We actually went through a period
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of, we culled a lot of our marketing budget and it was
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stuff like spotted events for something that I think we decided to take down.
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And look, what we said in the end was there's lots of things that we
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could do that gets in front of the right target audience. But actually what really
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cuts through and what matters is them seeing that we've done
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great work for other people. And yeah, like I said, getting those
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recommendations and Referrals off the back of doing good work. So yeah,
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it's been always like a challenge to our team internally. It's great
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for them for their own kind of CVs if you like, in terms of saying,
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I've been involved in this piece of work and it's something that again,
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they have immense pride in doing. And it's also very nice for clients
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as well to celebrate our success. So yeah, it's certainly for
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us it's not so much the result at the end of it, it's not
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the number of awards that we've won, it's. That's our biggest
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way of retaining clients is to produce work against
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what we set out to do. So yeah, it just keeps challenging us year on
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year. Yeah, that's brilliant. And I always find like for me there's nothing
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more satisfying being a judge at any of the
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awards that I've done the judging for to see the
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genuine kind of delight when people win. Obviously
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if somebody's won it means others, other companies have not won, other
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entrants were not deemed to be, of course, kind of win. But again, I've
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always maintained that, you know, if you've submitted good work, you know, and you
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get beaten by somebody else, you know, you should still celebrate the fact that you
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made a short list because making a short list is in and of itself is
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a, is a major achievement. The standard is pretty high and
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all the judges are not foolish enough to give them out just
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for the sake of giving them out. Because it's a brand new recognizing like that
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the work's got to be good and it's got to be of course quantifiable
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and. Yeah, and, and I just think, you know, for me, like I said,
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it's testimony to how well resignal have done in
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being able to submit an award winning entry. Right. But do it so
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frequently for so long, you know, again, I think it's just
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testimony to kind of how well in which you, you kind of manage the
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relationships with the clients you've got and produce the work that you do.
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Yeah. And I think some of it is actually some of our best
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workers come in the planning stages of working with clients. So we've
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even, we've done this in pitching before where we said this
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is what we will achieve within 12 months. So
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pretend you're 12 months into the future and this is what we've
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produced for you and that might include we've won an award, you're still on stage
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collecting this, but then you work backwards in terms of okay how do you make
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it happen? Just wanting to achieve a result and get an award at the end
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of it, Anywhere near enough, you've got to turn that into a plan. But
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then you, by visualizing that success, then you can take this is how we're going
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to make it happen. These are some challenges that we might need to overcome. Or
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take a pre mortem and then looking.
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You've essentially built that strategy which is what you should be doing anyway with your
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clients. But for us, it's quite a nice exercise to say
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that award entry. And I think this is where sometimes it can go wrong. UK
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Search Awards is next week. Submission deadline was what, two months
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ago? I think where it can go wrong is people say in September, okay, what
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have we done this year that's award winning? And the problem with
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that approach is actually you thought about it too late and you might be
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able to polish something into an entry. What you should really be doing
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is when you start working with that client, think about day
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one, how do we turn this into an award entry? What is it that we're
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doing? And then actually build it continually through that process.
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So it's okay now I think we're off track. This isn't. And again, it's not
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about the award, it's about the KPI and retaining and growing with our client. But
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if you have that approach, the material is there for you and
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it's as much as there's an art in being able to write
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an award entry in a way that appeals to a judge and they might
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pre score it quite highly, et cetera. If you haven't done the
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work and you haven't got the result, then it doesn't matter how good you are
Speaker:
at writing an award entry. So it's, it's, it's got to be a cultural
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thing in terms of how you approach working with your clients
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to the point that you deserve that award based on the work that
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you've done and the results that it's achieved. For anyone that
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is thinking of submitting entries, just listen to that bit over and over again to
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get the same points that Kevin's just raised there. It's not about the words, it's
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about the work that goes into producing the words. The words is just a manifestation
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of the work that you've done and breaking it down into the various components that
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make up an actual entry. If you don't do that 100%
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right. So, so talk, talk to me a little bit about your, your
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conference because you had your first one, was it this year? Or was it? I.
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I can't remember if you had. It was last year. So we, yeah, we've done
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two now. We've done them both in March and what
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we wanted to do was to have a real focus on E commerce
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SEO. And that was something that we felt. There's some very good
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conferences in terms of SEO, there's some very good E commerce
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conferences, but bringing the two together, we felt that there was a bit of a
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gap in the market in terms of that audience and bringing
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a mix of people as speakers and attendees
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from an SEO crowd and an E commerce crowd together. And obviously there's
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overlap. Some people are e commerce SEOs and
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it's very much then looking at how we can have a conversation
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around those topics. Um, we took an
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approach where we would bring in a keynote speaker that was very
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well known to set the tone of the day. So last year we
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had Rory Sutherland who was fantastic and it
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was a great way to open up and again have a broader opinion on
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just kind of that consumer psychology
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and looking at different buying behaviors and again in a very
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comical, entertaining way. And then a series of speakers
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is, yeah, he's fantastic. And then this year we had Holly Tucker who was the
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founder of not on High street. And again she was excellent in terms
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of incredible story, incredible background, building
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a company that you would probably take for granted in today's
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day and age. Shopify, CMS platforms and phenomenal. She
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was trying to almost create the behind
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the scenes model at the same time as building a brand and everything else when
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that technology didn't really exist and did incredibly well
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after building that up. And again against fierce competition.
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If you think of likes of ebay, Amazon for that period of
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time, just really differentiating and again, incredible
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stories alongside very seasoned SEOs and
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just people who been there, done it and not just
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what's happened, but predicting the future because we know so much is
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changing right now that it's how you can look ahead as well. So yeah,
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we've definitely enjoyed running those events where we've committed
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to. We'll do this again next year. We're moving it to May rather than March.
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And yeah, it's something that again, we're excited to bring people together
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for. But I guess in some respects like the conference is
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really as you say, it's an opportunity to kind of bring everyone in one place
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and learn from people that are doing things in the trenches.
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But again, I guess it would be nice if you make a ton of money
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from it. But I think as much as anything, it's filling in almost
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like a bit of like a blue glass X type event where you bring the
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very best people in a particular discipline into. Into one place
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to. It does and to be. We lose money.
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We've lost money from both events but for the reason that there's other
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benefits to that. It's like you say, I feel like there's
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certain things we've done we want to be able to give back and help people.
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We've had charities we've donated tickets to, for example. We think it's
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very good for our team in terms of education and
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also giving them a platform for speaking opportunities themselves.
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Yeah. And obviously it's a, it's a marketing event for us to
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pull together people who are potential clients, referrals, et cetera in
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future as well. So it's very much a long game for us but it's certainly
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not a business in its own right. If you'd like, from an events
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perspective. It's funny, I always remember I cast my mind back to when we
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were in the office in Paddington and Hacker who used to work for
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you back then, got the opportunity to speak at Brighton
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SEO. He had like one of the. Yeah like a seven minute new speaker
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slot. He must have done about 70 hours worth of prep
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for his seven. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know,
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but yeah, I think for me it's, it's a great platform having
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a conference like a Brighton SEO to blood brand
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new speakers for the first time. People that want to have that. The
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impact of being able to say on their CV that their
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conference speaker and everything else. But definitely, yeah, I know you've
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done speaking at conferences in the past, but do you do much of that now
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or is that sort of something that you tend to kind of shy away
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from? I've actually done
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one, maybe two this year but like all the agency leadership events now, I think
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I've now realize I'm not hands on doing the
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SEO anymore. So actually there's people in our team
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who are much better at that than me and they are speaking at
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events. So we've had people speak at Brighton SEO this year we've had people
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again speak at our own conference and other events as well. So it's
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something that we certainly encourage as an agency. But yeah,
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I've focused a bit more on the agency side as opposed to the
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SEO conferencing. One of the things I really admire about
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what you do is that you invest in the people that work in your
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team and sponsor them going away to conferences to be able to
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learn from their peer group. It's expensive. It's expensive
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to take people out the office, take them away to like a
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conference overseas. I mean, I know you've taken members of your team to PubCon in
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the past, you know, and again, flights, the hotels, all the,
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you know, the per diems, the kind of drinks in the bar, the
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food, all that sort of stuff. Time away from the office. Right. But I think
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from the point of view of investing in the people that work with you,
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it's a massive thing that I think all agency owners should
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be doing. They should be kind of carving out money right.
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Towards the development of the team that they have. Right. Because, you know, the
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better the people have been developed from a personal perspective, the
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more, the better they're going to feel about working with you, the more likely is
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they're going to be committed. And I think you'll kind of reap the rewards in
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terms of the work they do for clients moving forward. I've
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definitely got a lot of value myself in terms of that investment and the development
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that's come off the back of it. And I certainly encourage it with our team
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as much as we possibly can. To the point that I'd argue
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not investing is more costly than actually investing. Because you've
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got to be like, we know we're in a fast paced industry, you've got to
Speaker:
be able to keep pace. And that does also the marketing side
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of your brand, your reputation and just building more of a
Speaker:
presence of showcasing your work and your thought leadership, that
Speaker:
has benefits as well. And I think more and more agencies now are
Speaker:
decentralized so that a lot of people kind of don't work, go into the office
Speaker:
every day. They may not even be an office. I know a lot of agencies
Speaker:
don't even have offices now, right? Yeah, we don't. Yeah. So, you know, although
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you have a physical address, that's probably just more for tax purposes than
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anything else. Right. But it's sort of, you know, I think, you know,
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you need to have the ability to be able to bring people together in one
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place. Right. So again, whether it's a Brighton SEO, take all your team down at
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Brighton so you can have team dinners, client dinners, whatever you want to do.
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Right. But it gives the opportunity for everyone to kind of meet in one place,
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you know, with the backdrop of a particular conference that you have. And if you've
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got your own conference, then that's a perfect opportunity to kind of get your team
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together, know, to support the conference, but also to kind of meet each
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other and Spend time together. Yeah,
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absolutely. And that, that was a decision we made when we went remote for
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obvious reasons in 2020, but then it was okay. Now we've
Speaker:
hired a distributed team. It's not so much a rent saving, it's
Speaker:
actually very use that budget. So investing in teams,
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training, running a conference, for example, in terms
Speaker:
of the marketing side and the events and equally being able to visit
Speaker:
our clients and go to them. So we've got some clients based in Europe, for
Speaker:
example, and again, it's all go on a plane and go and see them
Speaker:
rather than. Yeah. Having an office where to be honest, in a lot of
Speaker:
cases they prefer us to go to them anyway. So, yeah, I think it's just
Speaker:
an evolution of let's do what works for our clients and works for
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our team. Yeah, I mean, I've made a, made a point of trying to ensure
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that, you know, even though most of my clients are based in North America, I
Speaker:
make a point of getting on a plane and flying out to the States
Speaker:
and visiting them on site again. I mean, you know, you have the people
Speaker:
that sort of ultimately sign the checks, but you also have the relationships that you
Speaker:
build up with the people that work in the office. You can kind of go
Speaker:
out and have lunches and meet the families and all that stuff. So, you know,
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I think so much of that is an investment
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in, you know, the kind of the growth of the agency is as you know,
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it is. I remember you telling me a story ages ago actually about how you
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lost a pitch in the US and it was because I don't think
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you got on a plane and attended. And I think you were saying at that
Speaker:
point in time, it was a turning point of the relative. If you're going to
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go for this pitch and it's a decent size, just go all
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in and make the effort. Be there. Yeah, I
Speaker:
lost again, just SEO Boz. Right. Because Ran got on a
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plane. I mean, Ran was an awful lot closer than I was. But you know,
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but even still, he made the client feel special.
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Right. In. In order to win the business. Right. And on that basis I'm
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like, I'm never going to have that happen to me again. I've always kind of
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made a point. If I'm going to pitch for something, I'm all in on the
Speaker:
pitch to kind of ensure that we try and win the business. Right. So
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yeah, I think that's right. I think you have to.
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So to Kevin, you also, in addition to obviously the know,
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recommerce SEO conference, you, you do your kind of, you know,
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you, you organize a bunch of breakfasts as well, right? I've had the
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opportunity to attend, I think one of them a while back. So what's the
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rationale behind those?
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It's similar to, basically this is our marketing plan in
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a lot of ways is we'll run one big event a year, super E commerce.
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But we don't just want that to be let's get everyone together and then we
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don't see them for 12 months. So actually what we've decided to do is
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let's run a number of events and they might have themes and topics
Speaker:
behind them, but how do we then get people together for
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conversations? And what we found is
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I've always thought from conferences you'll see some good presentations, but the real
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value comes in the bar afterwards. So it's conversations that
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happen around bringing those groups of people together
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more valuable than actually sitting and watching the presentation. I'm
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not saying there's not value behind the presentation format. There is,
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but there's certainly lost value if all you do is just watch
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the presentations and then go home and don't speak to anyone. What we
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wanted to do was very much almost cut out the middleman a little bit and
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then say, okay, let's just have those types of conversations that naturally
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occur around an event. So we'll have topics, but it's
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roundtable discussions. People will bring quite often a
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challenge, maybe a win, something that people can learn from and
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we'll turn that into an agenda and we'll help each other out. So
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everyone, if you've all come with a challenge, you will
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hopefully walk away with a potential solution. And based
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on an investment of a couple of hours worth your time, a nice
Speaker:
breakfast, hopefully that's something that, yeah, people will
Speaker:
appreciate. And like I say, from our perspective, it's
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how do we have conversations with people who it's never right
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person, right time, but at some point in the future, maybe a good
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client, it may be someone that would employ. This has happened with people in our
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team that have attended events when they've been
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at previous companies in the past. And for us,
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it's also a good way of staying present. It's us listening to
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who is our target audience in terms of clients and what
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are their challenges and how should we be evolving to be able to help them.
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So yeah, it's breakfast is typically quite low
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investment, certainly if you can compare that to running a
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dinner and a drinks event, for example. And again, like we've done some of those
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and I think there's a Time and a place to different formats.
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But for us breakfast have worked quite well. It keeps it
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quite serious in terms of the topic of
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conversation and quite focused. They're pretty into the good way more
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small audiences. Again, it's not like, you know, you're not looking to fill a room
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with people and give them all a croissant. Right. I mean it's sort of a
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much. Yeah, yeah. You say round table so everyone sort of sits
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there, you know, Chatham House kind of like people can share things more openly
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because you know things are going to stay within the room and even though everyone
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is technically a competitor insofar as they're all E commerce
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businesses, you know the fact that they're all working probably different verticals within
Speaker:
E commerce. Right. I mean not everyone is. Is going to be a fashion week.
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They're all going to be different things. Right. So you know, they're all having.
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Sometimes there'll be similar challenges that they've all got and sometimes they're different ones and
Speaker:
a different set of, you know, eyeballs looking at a particular challenge can
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be quite helpful and you're just, I guess in some respects you're
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there more as the facilitator to kind of ensure that the conversation doesn't
Speaker:
kind of get drawn away or what have you but you know, you can sort
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of sit in the background and let the conversation run its course.
Speaker:
That's exactly, yeah. And yeah, quite a lot of people have got retrieve value from
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that and we find people share sometimes more openly
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than we would expect and it's. We've had a few where we've had what
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we would consider to be direct competitors in the room and almost a bit
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nervous about okay, they're going to be cagey or they're not going to talk about
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anything. And I think they've walked out of those sessions like it's
Speaker:
a therapy session. It's like I was banging my head against the brick wall on
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this problem and someone else even knowing our direct
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competitor has then openly shared yeah, this is
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similar for us and this is what we're trying to do and it's. I've actually
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been surprised myself by some of those conversations where it's yeah, like I said,
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people walk away much stronger individually as a result
Speaker:
of sharing openly like that. So Kevin, I want to, I
Speaker:
want to end our conversation with. I've got one other question for you.
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Is that resignal you set up as a B call
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for my benefit and the benefits of other people that may not know what that
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is. Can you explain what A B corp is.
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I think there's probably a lot of definitions of
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B corp. I'm not sure. Give me your definition. What a butcher it
Speaker:
completely. But yeah, in terms of my definition, it's how do you run a
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sustainable business that is doing the right thing? So it's thinking
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about how do you, for us, work with
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the clients that you want to work with and feel proud
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of helping? How do you hire people? Again, it's
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looking at making sure that they're well rewarded for what they do. How do you
Speaker:
give back along the way? So as often as we just did a project
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for the different kind who they hire
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people or sell products from, people who have come from
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disadvantaged backgrounds, quite often out of prison. And
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it's set up by the former CEO Liz Warner of Comet
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Relief and stuff like that, where actually we can do stuff alongside
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our work, in some cases, with our work in other cases
Speaker:
that feels again, people are contributing and adding value that has
Speaker:
a bit more purpose. It's not just we're going to try and make this brand
Speaker:
more money. We're doing it for the right reasons and I think that's
Speaker:
really important for us. The B corp process, I think is
Speaker:
quite arduous in many ways, but for good reason that
Speaker:
they don't let anyone in. You've got to be able to, yeah. Qualify
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on a number of different criteria. And I think for us
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that was something that we recognized that we were doing good
Speaker:
things already and we also recognized that maybe there's more that we
Speaker:
could be doing. And becoming a B corp was a nice way for us to
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benchmark and say, okay, how do we challenge ourselves on say,
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like one of our values is in terms of being sustainable, in terms of what
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we're doing for our clients, in terms of how we're growing the agency ourselves,
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how do we take that a step further? And to be recognized as a B
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corp feels like this is a continual thing. It's not just
Speaker:
that you get accredited and then that's it, you have to reapply
Speaker:
and continually get approved. So it's something for
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us to commit to and to look at ways that again, we can.
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Like I said, it's not just about building a business
Speaker:
full of revenue, profit, headcount, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker:
It's actually how do we feel pride behind what we're doing? Yeah, I mean, all
Speaker:
those things are important, but at the same time it's got to have some sort
Speaker:
of purpose and add. Add value. Right? You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker:
exactly. We're all going to kind of go off to pastures new and, you know,
Speaker:
eventually we're all not going to be here. And you just want to say, did
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it. Did I add value that I make a difference in terms of the lives
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of the people who I was able to kind of come into contact with at
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any point in time, you know, whether it's like, you know, agency
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colleagues that you have, whether it's, you know, your peer group, other. Other
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agency owners, other people in the industry. Again, I've got. I've
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made some fantastic friends in the eight in the sort of the industry
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that has been so good to me, and I've tried to do the best I
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can to kind of help be good to it, you know, tried to help
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on and do, do well and support them and, you know, fight their
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corners with them when. When we've needed to, you know, because like
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I said, at some point in time, we're all just going to go, right, that's
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it, I'm done. I'm tapping out. Yeah. You know,
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and just at the end of the day, things will evolve, things will
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continue. There'll still be an industry, it will evolve, It'll kind of
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change. That's the one thing I've. I've always maintained change is the only
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inevitable thing we've got to look forward to. Right. There's going to be change.
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Right. Some of that change will be good, some will be bad, and you just
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have to adopt and adapt to kind of whatever the changes get thrown at you.
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And there'll be plenty. Yeah, I think so. And I think it has an element
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of you're doing the right thing and you're enjoying that journey, then that
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certainly helps in terms of what you're doing and why you're doing it.
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Yeah. I mean, I've said it before in other podcast episodes, but, you know, like,
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if you're. If you're doing a job, I mean, before doing digital marketing,
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right. I was involved in insurance. And even though I was making really good money,
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I hated the job. And every day I went to work, I got dressed up
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in a suit and tie, drove to work, miserable at work, miserable at
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home. Right. So no amount of money was going to change the misery that I
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was experiencing. So I took a 50% pay cut to go and work
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for a web design company. And, you know, and for me, it was the most
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liberating decision I'd ever made in my life. Right. And that was
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25 years ago. And ever since then. Yeah, I can imagine. I've just. It's
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been a whole bunch of highs and lows. I've lost friends along the way in
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the industry, you know, and made lots of friends in the industry
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and hopefully continue to contribute to making the
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industry what it is and what it continues to become.
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Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's great. So, Kevin, thank you so much for
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being on the show today. All of Kevin's contact details and
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information, social profiles will be available in the show notes, which will be available after.
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After the show finishes. It only remains me to say thanks again for
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being such a fantastic guest and I look forward to seeing everyone on the
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next episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks.
Jim Banks
Podcast Host
Jim is the host of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, the leading digital marketing podcast for aspiring digital marketers.
Kevin Gibbons
Founder
Kevin is founder at Re:signal, a specialist ecommerce SEO agency - working with clients including ASICS, FatFace and Under Armour.
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