Mentorship for creative agencies

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. The aim is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we get come to talk on the show. This is our 10th episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction.

00:19 Before I get into this week's episode, we've got a bit of housekeeping to do. First of all, we recently changed hosts for the podcasts for the betterment of both you guys and for our sanity for several reasons, but this meant that the RSS feed had to change. So the unfortunate side effect of that is that some of our subscribers, your podcast clients may have re-downloaded a bunch of episodes again. So sorry about that. It's a one-time thing and now we're in a better position to grow and serve you guys in the future. So hopefully that's all for the betterment of the show.

00:49 And joining me today, I have my very own co-founder Neil Gardner from Every Interaction. How are you doing? Hi John. I'm good. Thanks. How are you? Excellent. It's good to finally have you on the show. Thanks for the tea cakes. Need a bit of fuel to get through. Yeah. So today we thought we'd talk about something that we've both been through as part of our business and getting to where we are today. Something that we both feel has been pretty important to us over the past couple of years in the recent sort of spout of growth that we've been going through. And that is mentorship.

01:24 I mean, we didn't have mentors before. When did we first start this process of having a mentor? I think it was, is it nearly two years ago now? Two years? Yeah, it must be. At least a year and a half. Yeah. First came up on the radar. Yes. I think I'd heard about it through a well, mentor's ship scheme, the growth accelerator scheme, and we wanted to check it out. Who do we hear about it through? That's a good question. I think, well, initially I was aware of mentorship because obviously we had some friends running their own agencies and they had gone about getting this on their own somehow and that they had found some mentors and they were all speaking quite highly of the experience. And I think it appealed to us based on the benefits we'd seen it brought to their businesses. And I think we were sort of tentatively exploring the idea, but a little bit cautious about investing the amount of money that they had told us they had invested into the process because we weren't particularly sure of what the results might be. I am particularly remember feeling that we can do this ourselves or I can go read some books or something and get the information we need. And maybe we don't need to actually fork out all this money for this expertise.

02:37 That's true. I think we were aware that we needed to get organized, right? We needed to, in order to grow, there's a lot of stuff you need to learn about or be aware of. I think you have anxieties about the size of your business and growing bigger because all the stuff that comes with that, like the additional overheads and all the rest of it, and you want to make sure you do it right. Doing the growth accelerator scheme, I think it seemed like a good opportunity to get some of that advice. And I think it wasn't cheap, but it was cheaper. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think someone had told us about the growth accelerator scheme before, but I think someone we knew who was previously a recruitment consultant had moved to work for Grant Thornton. Yeah. And having been a previous client of his called us up to see if the scheme might be of interest to us. It was his role to sort of generate leads and sales for Grant Thornton on that program, I believe. And I think it was just good timing. Yeah, I think that's it. It was good time. We saw other people doing it and we thought, well, yeah, we can probably benefit from this advice. And it seemed affordable and it seemed like a good scheme to get involved with. It's a shame that they've now canned it.

03:52 Yeah, it's unfortunate. Yeah. But again, it seemed like a nice way to dip our toe into the water of mentorship without needing to pay full price to see what benefits it might bring to us at a subsidized rate. Yeah. Well, first of all, we had to work out who was going to be our mentor.

04:10 Right. And we were put in touch with three different mentors, I think. We had a contact at Grant Thornton and they then selected some mentors based on the profile of our business and the sort of things that we do. And they tried to match us up with the most appropriate mentors that were out there. So people that had experience in our line of work and generally it was about growth. So they wanted to understand what was your biggest block to growth? What was the thing that's stopping you from growing and becoming a bigger business? Yeah. So that was the objective of this.

04:45 It wasn't just about mentorship, but it was about trying to unlock that. So we had three phone conversations, I think, with different mentors and they all had a slightly different angle.

04:56 We spoke to some who were very sales focused. There was another one, the one we chose in the end, a guy called Philip Delisle, who was much more focused on getting to the bottom of the business issues and setting the business up in the right way and just really getting to the bottom of what can improve us as a business and what can really help us achieve these things. And it just seemed like a much more rounded approach. So we decided to go with him. Yeah. I think his experience as well, voted well, like he'd already kind of successful going the tech sphere, knew what it took to get a company not dissimilar to ours to grow and be generally healthier. Yeah. I think that proven background of experience was what we were looking for. We wanted to kind of almost de-risk our growth plan by having someone who had been there and had been through that process and knew how to grow businesses and spot where businesses are failing and spot the weak points.

05:54 Yeah. Well, you mentioned growth plan. I don't think we really had one until we met Philip. That's true. Our growth plan was we wanted to grow. Yeah. And it didn't get much more complicated than that. And we didn't have a pathway to get there.

06:06 Yeah. I remember one of the first things he sat us down and did was the sort of roles and responsibilities or the structure of the company and all the different things that need to exist to make a successful company. We started this company as doers. We're creatives. We came from creative background and we've always either worked for other people or just been self-employed until we started every interaction. We've never been business people. We've never had to deal with all the other bits and pieces around running, growing a company. And there's so much you just don't realize or think of until somebody who's been through that several times can share that experience with you.

06:40 And also starting out as a freelancer, you get very good at that model of working. You get good at identifying companies to work with and they're often agencies and things like that. You can go and you work in-house and you get very used to it or you do stuff from your own studio.

06:54 There's a big difference I think between that and moving to running your own business when you're now going directly to clients. Yeah. I think in the early days when it was just the two of us starting, we both come from that freelance background. You had the mindset of you get some working from a virile or from word of mouth. You get given a brief and you handle that and you send an invoice. At least in the very early days of setting up a company, that seems to be the model you just extend into applying to two people. But it comes to a point where that no longer works and you start doing well, you start getting more work, you start needing more people. It introduces these layers of complexity into the business that just weren't there before. You need things legally, tight and sound. You need contracts.

07:34 You need to do all the project management. You need the account management. You need to make sure that your clients are happy. There's so many different aspects. Once you start dealing with other people and different skillsets that you start bringing into the mix, you've got to manage all of their output and be the intermediary between the client and the workers. All these additional roles and responsibilities come into play.

07:54 I think the mentorship just gives you confidence around those things because the form of sitting down with Philip anyway, I felt that I could ask any question about anything and I could ask it a number of times if I didn't understand the answer. It doesn't matter about whether you feel stupid or not. It's about getting the knowledge and about getting the right answers to the questions around anything, whether it's about retainers, accountants, pipeline, office space, how to deal with staff, politics. There's all sorts of varied subjects. The point about what's the difference between coaching and mentoring. A mentor is trying to get you to answer the questions. He plays the questions back to you. What do you think you should do in that scenario and that situation?

08:38 And then you sit there staring at each other and then eventually put an idea on the table. Probably the raimeers way of doing things, isn't it? You involve me in something and I'll learn more that kind of thing.

08:52 Yeah, I like that approach. He never really gives us any answers. He helps us realize the answers that we need, I guess. He helps us get to the decision points and that's what I think mentorship is. Whereas I guess when you think about coaching, it's more about people teaching you how to do something.

09:11 To improve your skills or something like that. Yeah, exactly. There's so many things that we've just never considered around how the company itself is structured and how our finances are sorted. Just being able to have access to the relevant data to make informed decisions around finances is something that we just didn't have in place before and we're still getting in place today.

09:33 Yeah, absolutely. It raised a number of business structure questions. We actually changed the structure of our business after first or second session, I think. Yeah, exactly. It was quite quick and we did make some serious changes. I remember one of the first sessions actually was about the goals of the business and personal goals and really sitting down and on neutral ground, which was quite a good exercise. Getting away from the office. We always did the sessions at Phillips House. It's good exercise just getting away from the office because otherwise generally we don't put aside the time to do that. We talk about work at lunch time, but we've got more important things to do like what are we going to eat at that time.

10:11 So it's not structured at all. So having these sessions where it is structured, it's a good thing that I guess, I don't know, maybe other companies do this a lot, but I hazard a guess that quite a few don't and don't take the time out to think about all these things.

10:24 I think one of the other big things for me has been the whole sales side of the business. The thing that we've basically never done and are only just beginning to do. Our businesses got to where it is today based on referrals and word of mouth pretty much. And we've never done much sales activities.

10:40 Most we've done is sort of extend our website and optimize that a little bit so we're easy to find. But beyond that, we've never really done any activities to actively bring in clients and we kind of just sit back and wait for stuff to land in our lap. And that has worked great because we've done a good job. We've got a good reputation and that's done us well up until now and allowed us to grow to the size of the team that we have today. But obviously that type of approach has got limits. It isn't infinitely scalable. At some point, your own network is going to hit its natural limits and you won't be getting any more referrals. Well, not enough to keep you going, but not enough to grow further and take the business to the next level where you would like it to be. That's been a real eye opener for me and like how we get new clients through the door, how we need to meet them and how we need to get the process in place. There is a pipeline of things that we can see on the horizon and track everything and every person that we're currently talking to so that we can A) have a better idea around how much income we're going to be expecting in the future and how we should be planning the growth of our team to accommodate the work that should be coming through the door. Yep. Also the exercise that we did where we looked at roles and responsibilities and when you're just two people in a company and you write down all these boxes of all these different roles that are in the company, the idea being that you have to split them so everyone knows exactly what they're supposed to be doing. Yeah, it's also a bit of a scary exercise, isn't it?

12:01 Yeah, that's true. I think I remember reading about that as well in Getting Things Done, quite famous self-help book. It's the idea of you need to imagine the size of your company as it would exist at your ideal size. So I think we sort of extrapolated things out to 15, 20 people and then put in place the structure of what that team would look like at that scale and give a responsibility and a role to each one of those people. And then following that you would basically tick a box next to everyone that already exists on the other responsibilities that aren't yours, cover them off and there would basically be a whole load of empty boxes left. And essentially what we had to do is between us divvy them up. We had to agree who's doing what. You got financial director, I got sales, you got CEO, I got HR. There's all these different boxes that needed to be ticked and we sort of agreed between us based on what we think our strengths are, who's going to do what and each of us have got to wear all of those hats. The idea is I guess that as we grow, we slowly start reassigning some of those responsibilities to people dedicated to those jobs, train them how to do what we've been doing and learning. And we can take that hat off and concentrate on the remaining hats that we've got left, which allows us to do our job better and hopefully increase sales and spend more time on the things that as directors we should be concentrating on rather than doing everything. I guess there's a question around how people find a mentor, which I guess is, I don't know how easy that is to do really. I'm not sure it's the sort of thing that people would actively go out seeking. It's something you see a lot more with startups. I think you'll see a startup and you'll always see a board of advisors and it seems more common in that environment where it's all about getting lots of knowledge on an idea to make it succeed. I think a lot of that's conditional based on the funding. Yeah, it's true. A lot of the VCs putting the money in, if it's from a VC group, they'll often have their own sort of advisors, the suppliers, the resorts for that company, or others may insist. But yeah, you're right. You see it in those types of companies, but I can't remember the last time I saw an agency touting those types of roles. No, you don't often see it unless the management has got lots of connections in that sort of sphere already. If it's the likes of you and me, you don't have a lot of friends who would be able to do that role and it doesn't really happen, I don't think. Yeah. And I guess when we were starting this process, I had some concerns. I think my initial impression of what I had in my mind was that we needed a mentor who had basically done pretty much exactly what we had done that had started a digital or creative business and grown it and sold it or made it a success. I think I quickly realized the people with enough experience like that probably don't exist, at least the ones that wouldn't be useful to us. And having worked with Philip for a long time now, I think all that matters is that person understands business because there are fundamental rules of business that seem to be pretty common throughout most industries. Yeah. And I think we were particularly lucky to get someone who really did understand business and who wasn't just doing this as a means to make a bit of money without necessarily having the right experience. So yeah, we certainly did luck out a bit there, I think. I guess there's also other ways in which you can get mentorship of sorts. And I thought about, we do the QDL, which we might call it QDL, but it means quarterly director's lunch, which is just actually a bunch of friends who run businesses and choose to get together every quarter just to basically talk shop. And I think all of us who got involved in that, it was your idea to start it up, John. Well done. But I think everyone's really got quite a bit out of that, even in a sort of mini mentor kind of exercise. It was surprising how keen everyone was to talk about shop. Suddenly you have this environment where you're out at lunch or we used to do it in the evening, you're out for dinner, and then everyone is free to talk openly about all their sort of gripes about work and things they find difficult and stuff like that.

15:55 And a lot of stuff came out in the open just in those sessions. Obviously, there's a benefit to having one person who's solely focused on giving you a view, a mirror on your own business. And I think that's really valuable. But I think also having it at these kind of micro levels as well of having forums to have conversations about stuff you're struggling with or stuff you want advice on.

16:14 Yeah, I mean, QDD, quarterly director dinners, they were, that was the genesis of this podcast. After starting that up, I think everybody got so much value from it. The idea was to, can we make this bigger, basically? And I guess the thought of arranging events that were larger were a bit daunting and still limiting in terms of how many people you can reach. So the idea was to start talking about those things here. I guess if you can't find or can't afford mentorship, I think that's a great solution. Find a local network of similar like minded businesses in your industry or in the ballpark of what you do. People who are of a similar size or have been doing it for a similar amount of time, people in a similar situation. So everybody gets something from it.

16:55 And yeah, just set up a meeting where you can just talk freely about everything that you wouldn't otherwise talk about to anyone else because it's not relevant to anybody else. Yeah, you'd be amazed how much people want to get off their chests and how many horror stories people have about certain situations they've been through that you might want to avoid. And there might be some practices or some processes you could put in place to make sure that doesn't happen to you. Or likewise, if something they did that was great, you could make sure that you want to try and repeat that success and do something similar for your business. So yeah, I definitely recommend that to anyone who doesn't have a mentor or can't afford one. That's something that's come up actually in a number of conversations. There are things that you think you can't afford to do, but you get to the point of, can you afford not to do these things? There's a number of, yeah, it seems to be a sort of frequent theme. It applies to staff, can't afford to have that person, but can you afford not to have that person? If you want to achieve the growth, can you afford to do sales pipeline stuff? If you don't do it, you're not going to get the sales. So can you afford not to do it? I don't think you can. I think that's not going to facilitate the growth that you're looking for. I think looking at the companies that we know who are in a similar situation to us, you know, our friends running agencies who started this mentorship process before us, and we could see the benefits it was having to their business. We could see that they were all growing and doing better, making better decisions, getting better new business through the door, and just generally operating like professionals.

18:21 I think we've had the same sort of experience with the mentorship that we've been through. I feel like today we are much more of an official professional agency than we were two years ago. Yeah, we're trying to shift from being a micro business, as Philip called it, to being a small business.

18:36 Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a big transition to go through. There's a lot of stuff that needs to change and a lot of things you need to put in place and a lot of money you got to spend to get there. I think, like you said before, I think you can't afford not to do it because if you don't, you're pretty much relying on your own limited experience and blind luck. And I think we would be in a much worse place today if we hadn't started this process. Having seen the value it's brought to us over the past 18 months or so we've been doing it, I almost can't imagine living without it now. Yeah, I think it's something you need to have that mirror and just to keep yourselves in check, really. No, there's always going to be difficult decisions to make. And if it's just a couple of you on the boards who are bouncing ideas back and forward, you've all got your own opinions. You just need that outside perspective sometimes to come in and sort of set everybody straight and just ask the right questions or make you ask the right questions to make sure that you're making the right decisions. So yeah, in summary, I think we'd just say that if you are a small business owner of any kind, especially if you're a small creative or digital agency of some kind and you don't have mentorship, we don't have a sounding board, you don't have a peer and a similar agency you can talk to, I think you need to seek that person out. It's just invaluable. I can't imagine living without it now. Whatever it takes, whatever time investment, whatever money investment you need to put into that process to make it work, I think you're going to see a massive return on investment for that time and money spent. So I can't recommend it highly enough.

20:02 Yeah, what you said. Cool. Well, yeah, if you've got any questions about this episode or any of our others, you can ask those questions on our website at perspective.fm, the share of the Twitter accounts, underscore perspective FM. I've been John Dark at DarkJin on Twitter from Every Interaction at Every Interacts with my co-founder Neil. Where can people find you? At the same place. What a coincidence. Any of that. Following you around. Well, other than that, @NeilGardner, there's a lot of tumble weed flying around my Twitter account. I'm a visual person, like take photos, probably more stuff going on in Instagram if you like that kind of thing. Good stuff. Well, thanks everybody. And we'll speak to you all next time. Bye bye.