Scaling an agency from 1 or 2 people to a growing and stable team, with Pete Campbell from Kaizen Search

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small indie creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. The aim is to provide useful advice and inspiration to others, as well as learn from each other and others we get to come talk on the show.

00:14 This is our 18th episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction. Joining me today, I have Pete Campbell from Kyes & Search, a digital marketing and SEO agency located here in London.

00:25 Hello, Pete. Hello there, sir. How are you? I'm Jolly Good. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm all right. Things are pretty good. Fantastic. So Kizen, remind me again what it stands for. You told me a while ago, but I have forgotten. It's something Japanese.

00:41 Sure. So Kizen in Japanese literally means improvement, but it's better known for the manufacturing process by Toyota, where they use the idea of continuous improvement.

00:54 So they have like a car on a manufacturing line. They'll stop it at each stage in the manufacturing process and see if they can make incremental improvements to that process.

01:05 And that I think is a nice way that fits into what we do, really. That's right. I remember. That's very clever. Yeah, I mean, you know what it is. I learned the word when I was 15 when I was doing my business at the GCSE school.

01:19 And then I completely forgot about it for about 10 years. And then I don't know why I was walking down Oxford Street when I was trying to think of an idea for the name of the business. It just came to mind. So, you know, my past self is clearer than my current self at the time.

01:35 Nice. Well, I bet you absolutely own the SEO on that term. You know what? No, we definitely don't. It comes up with the definition first and then like what it is. And then we're the first company, I guess.

01:51 Yeah. Fair enough. And, yeah, give us your sales pitch. Tell us when you meet someone for the first time again, tell us what you tell them about what it is that Kaizen do.

02:02 Okay. Okay. So, we're a specialist technical SEO and content marketing agency. So what that generically means is we help brands secure organic visibility across search and also online publications, basically.

02:21 And we do that by having a team of technical SEO specialists. So our team is comprised of coders, creative people and also weird business people like me.

02:33 And we help a client not only find out all the things they can do to improve their website's performance, but we're also hands on and we can implement it as well. And we have a full service creative offering so we can help them on the UX of a landing page, right through to HTML build of it and integrating it all for the purposes of improving their organic search.

02:56 Awesome. Everybody needs a bit of that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Now, Pete is our go-to person for SEO on any web work that we undertake. I think we've been working for three or four years now.

03:11 Well, we've been around two and a bit, yes. So, yeah. So, a little bit. I think you've just got fond memories of me, but it's actually been a shorter time. Oh, there you go. Time does fly. And yeah, when we first met, it was more or less just yourself, I think, running things over there.

03:27 And since then, we just had a little catch up before the show and you mentioned that you're nine people full time now. As of today. Today. Congratulations. That's fantastic.

03:39 Thank you, sir. And that's what we'd like to talk about today. Skating an agency from one or two people up to that first milestone of having a small team. But before we do get into that, why don't you tell us a little bit about what's happened over the past couple of years?

03:53 What was your journey from starting on your own and then making those first couple of hires to getting to where you are today? Sure. I guess the starting point is I'd always been a bit intoxicated by the idea of having my own business, I guess.

04:09 And I think that I had that idea when I was kind of 16 or younger. I got my start in the world of online by when I was 11.

04:23 I bought our first computer at home and I went up to the local library and I got a book and HTML for dummies. And from that, I learned how to build a couple of websites on platforms like Geocity and Tripod.

04:37 It was really kind of early days. So I used to go on websites that I liked, since I was website at the time. I was only 11 and South Park. And I used to just do file and save ads on their websites and try and edit the HTML and CSS code to turn it into my own website basically.

04:54 And I came a bit infatuated with online then and I started making my own little websites about video games and TV shows I liked. And then when I was about 15, I discovered you can make money off it basically.

05:09 So I found out that if you sign up with like Ashgies, they'll send you 2p. They give you 2p for every time someone does a search on Ashgies to your site. And I found out about things like Google Adwords, which you monetize your site by having advertising on it.

05:24 And I kind of started liking the idea of building these online communities. So I built one about a video game series I really liked. And I grew it with a team of volunteers for like 50,000 visits a day, like in 2006.

05:42 And I realized that I had a passion for what I didn't realize at the time was marketing. I thought I really was fascinated by the idea of just pure design and the execution of it.

05:53 But I realized actually what I was doing just marketing. So it was a bit of SEO, it was a bit of social media and it was a bit of online marketing. So I guess that then carried through to me and to my job, I got my first job as a web designer, as a front end web developer for 2 and a bit years.

06:11 And they were setting up their own online marketing team in SEO. And they asked, "Would I join that team?" Because I knew I had some experience of doing it. So I helped join that team and that team grew to about 20 people.

06:24 And then I spotted the opportunities down in London basically. And I pivoted to work for a much bigger agency where... So basically I went from doing SEO for small medium-sized businesses to much larger businesses and brands.

06:40 And between the two, I realized there's two different ends of the spectrum. When you work with small medium businesses, you're very enriched and lead. And it's very hands-on. They need you. You are their online marketing guy.

06:52 You're the one who's responsible for everything when it comes to online presence. So editing their site, getting their domain name working, publishing a blog post. So it taught me a lot about client management, taught me a lot about actual performance of a website and how to actually be hands-on and improve the HTML and CSS.

07:12 Talked about content and social media commercially. And then at the bigger end, with the bigger clients, I learned about doing that at that scale. And I learned about how you need to build a business case for larger businesses to do certain things.

07:28 It's very much about forecasting, very much about big step changes in businesses. And I realized through doing that first job and that second one, there's this big gap in the middle.

07:39 So with smaller companies, it's very hands-on. You're doing all the work yourself and not just advising it. We're of large agencies. When you make a suggestion like, "Hey, I have a new page. There's 20 people that need to be involved in that decision." And I realized in the middle, there's not a kind of company that does a bit of both.

07:56 So I had the idea to set up an SEO agency where we not only just give you really, really good strategic advice, we actually have a full team that sits behind this of coders and designers who can go ahead and do it for you, basically.

08:09 Which that kind of combination doesn't really exist much. So I basically, throughout the whole time of my second job, I was freelancing on the side. So I picked up a bit of money here and there.

08:22 And then I used that money. I put up a pot of 10,000 pounds and I used that to quit my job. And I made a deal with my girlfriend that if I don't start making some money after six months, I can just go back and get another job.

08:36 And that was how I started. Smart. Yeah. I really like the model. It just allows something like a marketing company to execute on their plans without having to involve loads of other stakeholders and internal teams and just do things really quickly and also efficiently.

08:53 Yeah. What's changed in the past few years, which just came to our benefit is that when I was first looking at the SEO, it was quite a new thing. And digital marketing was quite a new thing. So companies are very reliant on agencies to steer them.

09:08 Whereas now it's, you know, digital marketing is matured. A lot of bigger brands are building their own in-house digital marketing teams and splitting it by disciplines. They might have an SEO person, a content person, and a UX person.

09:23 But those people still need to scale up. You know, to do SEO properly on a big site, you need like two or three people. So, you know, sometimes we brand ourselves as like a band of contractors.

09:33 You know, you can pick us and we're the specialists that help you scale up, you know, and we'll just fit in, we'll fit in the gaps where you have gaps. Good stuff.

09:43 So yeah, going back to the early days, how did you go about sort of managing things when it was more or less just yourself leading things? How did that work day to day?

09:55 I mean, it was a bit overwhelming, but I kind of... The way in which the business is set up is largely we offer a retainer model.

10:06 So clients pay us a monthly fee for our services and then we used to take on project-based work. And my way in which we did that in my previous roles is that for every client, basically, you had a project plan.

10:21 So at the start of each project, at the start of each quarter, all the term and all the work we're going to do for the next 12 weeks. And that allowed me to build a bit of a checklist for each client, I guess, as the user was to say.

10:32 And I used to just basically have an Excel sheet which had all of my to-dos and what dates they needed to be done by. And that's how I first started managing things. So each client had a package of X number of deliverables per month.

10:45 So I'd be like, "You're getting two blog posts and you're going to get three hours of technical SEO time and we're going to have a weekly call." And that allowed me to break things down quite easily so I could plan week to week the work that I need to do and figure out what time slots that I can kind of fit that in.

11:02 And that helped me manage my time effectively. So it felt like I was going into work each day. Well, work, I went from my bed to my desk a meter away. And I had a clear to-do list.

11:13 And then I guess it came to a point quite quickly after a month or two where I realized that I have a bit of a problem here. You know, I had this classic thing I didn't realize when I started a business that I have a limited amount of time to do things.

11:25 So I ended up realizing quite quickly, I only had 40 hours in the week. I then started looking at freelancers basically. So I looked at which processes within my business can be kind of automated or scaled easily.

11:40 So which ones are repeatable. So one thing we did for clients was write and publish blog posts. So I set up a system where I hired a freelancer to write the blog post for me.

11:52 And then I hired a virtual assistant person who would take those blog posts and publish them on the clients sites for me. So I just had to take a stock check in those early kind of six months of looking at what things have I got that I can repetitive, that I can pass on to someone else.

12:09 Wow. Yeah. It sounds like you did everything by the rulebook. I mean, you did everything right there. Maybe. I mean, there was, you know, I mean, it all sounds good in hindsight now.

12:20 I guess the problems I faced were it was mentally hard. You know, I ran the business from my house. So from nine o'clock to 5.30, I'd be on my own all day and, you know, I'd have no one to talk to.

12:30 And then, you know, my girlfriend would come home or I'd see a friend that evening. I'd be full of beans and started seeing another human. But, you know, it drove me crazy. So it felt a bit like a factory for the time.

12:42 So those early days were just very much like just trying to keep my head down and get through it with the hope or ambition that it will become easier and better and start to feel like a proper business.

12:55 Yeah. And that's why making those first hires comes in really handy, right? Because then it allows you to work on the business, not in the business. Yeah. And, you know, that statement is one that I read in every business book, you know, here, every business matter.

13:10 But it's only something maybe in the past six months that it's started to come a little bit true for me. You know, there's still a little grind work. There's a task we do in an SEO called page starters and meta descriptions, which just edit the code on the site to just say the description you want to be on Google.

13:27 And I always tell myself that my dream is to stop writing page starters and meta descriptions for clients. So that's some of it for me, but I just can't seem to get out of it. Yeah. When did you make your first full-time hire then?

13:40 So it was, I think six months after I started. So, you know, I was doing, I had my little checklist that I was doing each day and the repeatable processes that I had, it kind of ran out. I kind of ran out of those and I realized that I need a bit of more creative help. So I thought about who I currently knew basically from my current jobs and past jobs and hired someone who I'd already worked with before basically. And they were looking for a second role and they very much came on as like an assistant. So they helped me just start to look after a couple of the smaller clients and also scale up some of the more administrative tasks that we did.

14:20 Nice. And yeah, when did employee number two come along? Well, we had a bit of, it's kind of difficult to answer that because for me, you know, when I was hiring people, I was very nervous about it because, you know, I was very worried about, you know, what I have the runway and money to make it happen. So, you know, so I actually went down the road of hiring an apprentice first, which unfortunately didn't work out. It was more just my, we're too small to give someone a nice nurturing environment where they could benefit from it really.

14:56 Yeah. I can imagine that takes quite a lot of your time to nurture them and train them properly. Yeah, it does. And it's something I think we could do better now as a bigger business. But, you know, I was naive as a business at the time and obviously I'm told by the apprenticeship companies, "Oh, they'll be great. They'll get on fine." They work with two businesses all the time, but actually, it was a little bit unfair on that person. So I kind of realized that, so I was thinking, "Oh, I need to save money. So what I'm going to do is hire interns. I'm going to hire apprenticeships because the tasks I have at the minute are administrative." And it took me probably like six to nine months to realize that actually each hire I make needs to be someone who's going to help me grow the business in some way. It wasn't so although I hired like an intern and I hired an apprentice, neither of those things worked out. So it was good nine months after that until I hired that second person. And it had to get to a point where, you know, I was much better at defining the role for that person and what would they do and making sure they have some experience so that they are able to be independent or autonomous, but at the same time, happy to be managed and trained.

16:05 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We've stayed quite clear of interns and apprenticeships for a while now. We did take on some interns in the past. We don't have a lot of administrative tasks that someone can really do. So it's all quite highly skilled labor. And yeah, everyone's so busy. Nobody really has any time to take someone under their wing and help give them the attention it needs to make it a worthwhile experience. So until we've got a bit more flexibility, we're sort of stepping back from that as well.

16:38 Interestingly, it's something that we've been exploring a bit more recently. So, you know, we've kind of got to a point now where due to the amount of freelance work that we're doing, and the contract lens you have with our client, I've kind of identified their areas of the business where we could actually save money by making those hires potentially in-house.

16:57 But I've been a bit nervous about whether that statement is true or not. So at the moment, we've hired two people on an internship basis. There's a fully paid internship. It's all above board and they're getting paid more than minimum wage. But it's like contract positions, I guess, is a better way to put it because internships is a bit of a stigma. But I'm doing that as a way to explore, can I take someone, train them in this process that's quite unique to us and hope that at the end of their internship four months from now, they can prove their value in turning that into a full-time role because I'll be able to save money by taking it away from that freelance cost, if that makes sense. So that's the way before when I was working internships, it was more just like, "Oh, I'm too busy. I don't need help. Can you do that for me?" So I've got a bit more defined with fun.

17:49 Yeah. It is an investment, right? It's an investment you make in time and effort. And hopefully, if that goes well, then you'll be rewarded for the effort that you put into it. Yeah. And these days, I've obviously the benefit of the fact that there is more of us. So I can, as a team, we can all train them. Whereas before, when I was first doing it, it was just me or nothing. And it wasn't fair on that person.

18:11 Nice. Yeah. I mean, how did that sort of growth curve start to look over time? How fast did you scale up? So there was, by the end of year one, there was two of us. And then by the end of year two, there was five of us. So I seem to have so far done kind of new hires and batches. So the three people we hired last year, they were all within a fairly short time of each other because it's just started to make sense. So the first hire was in the form of we wanted someone to look after. So we're operating my first hire internally. And we wanted someone to replace her in that role, basically. And we'd learned lessons of where things have gone wrong with internships and apprenticeships. And we'd hired someone who had some experience in SEL content. So they're a graduate because they had done an apprenticeship for a year before. And we found that it worked out quite well. And then because of the fact that there was now three of us, there was a lot more managerial time of client.

19:20 So I was like, okay, I need to be someone else. So I brought on someone I'd worked with for two and a half years. He's a really instrumental part in the business now. And then all of a sudden, after that, we realized we needed more help. So I think so far, there's been certain times of the year where we've had an influx of new work. I say yes to it because I'm naive, and we end up being really, really busy. And then I end up solving the problem temporarily with freelance work and then hiring it back in. And then this year, it's been more... Again, same similar thing. We had growth with new clients. And I decided first to look at how we can use freelance resource to help us with that because a lot of the work we're doing didn't really have a guaranteed long term future. And now at the point where it has, this year, it's been more about how can I save money by turning freelance costs into full time costs? And also what areas of the business if we invested in those and had a full time person, could it potentially lead to more clients? So I guess it's been about three to four hires a year, I guess so far. It's good progress pretty fast.

20:21 Yeah, I mean, I worry. I worry that I'm not hiring too fast or too slowly. Like I hear the advice. Yeah, it'd be good to get your take on it. I hear the advice that you should always hire slowly. But for me, it's more I'm kind of like, I kind of break everyone. And then I promise I will fix it.

20:38 Yeah, I don't think there's any hard and set rule for that. I think you just do what you need to do for the business and what seems right. Yeah. I guess what you shouldn't do is do something that's unsustainable with the structure you have in place, right? So you can't hire too many of the wrong type of people. Like if you suddenly take on a load of really junior people who require a lot of handholding and there's only one manager and that person's you and you've got a thousand other responsibilities and need enough time to do the management and directorial duties that need to be done for those types of staff. Yeah. That you would hire appropriately and get in the tears of people of different experience so that you've got a nice sort of downward chain going on as you start to get bigger. Yeah, I can agree with that. I think that's reflective of how we've hired this year.

21:29 I started off by getting a more experienced person who had cut their teeth in content marketing that I knew that if they brought that experience to the table, it would improve our client proposition and it would improve our team. And now we've kind of built a team around that person, if that makes sense, with more junior people because I know that I've got him to train those other junior members.

21:54 And also there's another person on that team who's really talented as well who can kind of benefit off that. I get the advice that you should always look to hire junior people and train them, but now I'm kind of making sure, well, hire an experienced person first so I can then build a team underneath in order so that everyone benefits as a whole. Yeah, I prefer that approach as well.

22:17 I mean, it depends on the business and what you do. I mentioned earlier, what we do is pretty specialist and pretty highly skilled. So the junior people do need quite a bit of management in order to get all the details right and get everything to the standard that we're happy putting our name to. And as a result, it does take a lot of our time to work with them. So any hires we make in the immediate future are definitely going to be more at the senior level so that we can, as we grow further, fill out a more junior level underneath them and have that person in that role who's used to doing that job in a stable way, that will allow us to scale more efficiently, we think, and allow us to do more of that working on the business stuff rather than in it and doing all the management ourselves. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so I mean, you guys have got more people than us now, so you could teach me a few things. Maybe, I don't know.

23:17 That would be interesting if you've had any kind of teething problems with that many people, staff fitting in, sort of cultural aspects. Yeah, I think people fitting in was something that was a problem. It's the thing, a lot of this is new to me. I mean, I guess it's one of the most exciting things about starting a business is that, you know, I'd never been in an environment where I'd seen the very initiation divisions to the growth to this kind of point. And along the way, things have kind of surprised me. So when I was first hiring, it was very much skill based. So I actually had the raw talent, and I didn't really think about culture, to do agree. And in the first year, that definitely became an issue. I didn't think much about how the personalities needed to lock in together and the importance of that. And I did realize that quite quickly. So we had a kind of weird eclectic mix of the two at once where one member of the team had religious beliefs that came into conflict with the kind of work that we're doing. And that was a situation that I didn't really anticipate, for example. But obviously, when you're in marketing, we are an extension of that client's team. So that was an interesting issue. That's a tricky one. Little things like, we have different tastes in food when we go for lunch. So this person wants to go for the 10 pound lunch, and I want to go down to Tesco to get my meal deal. And little things like that infer personality or just even what films you like or what TV you like and how you like to spend your spare time. And do people actually get on well together as a team in terms of personality? And I found I had to kind of figure that out. So now, in our job applications, we have as a kind of thing that says, if you like Nando's, cups of tea/coffee in fizzy sweets, you're the person that we want. And we use that as a bit of a checklist. Yeah, that's good. And it kind of builds company culture. Nando's reflects kind of modesty for me. You don't mind a bit of junk food every now and again. And you like stuff that's good value for money. It's not good for vegetarians, though. Yeah, true. They do have good veggie meals. I used to have a veggie staff member in an old job and we used to go down to the time and she didn't mind. She might be being polite. She might be being polite. So I might have a massive apologies. And then when it comes to sweets, it's that childlike nature of curiosity that we all have as creative people. And then cups of tea and caffeine, I guess it's just about knuckling down and getting good hard work, but also times dealing with stressful problems, you know? Yeah. So culture was something that I didn't realize I'd ever have to think about. And it is something that I unfortunately only learn as a result of making mistakes. Yeah. It's really important when you're small, I think, to make sure you get that stuff right. I guess the bigger you get, you kind of have little cultural groups forming inside the team, but you need to make sure that there's at least someone else you hire will fit into a group of, there'll be a nice natural cluster of like four or five people who really get on. Yeah. And yeah, you've got to make sure any new people slot into that and don't conflict too much because that will cause more problems than it's worth no matter how talented they are. Yeah, definitely. And like I said, I first started hired by looking at my skills and looking at how I can hire people to reflect each of those skills. And I never brought my personality into it. And the way our interview processes works is first you have a telephone interview, which is very much skill-based. So I'll ask a person out of the question or two, and then we'll very much be in person if you bring members of the team in.

27:12 And we spend a good portion of the interview just trying to get to know them as people. And you can when you get that kind of chemistry, you can realize that actually they're going to be a very valuable asset. In terms of other problems, there's definitely been issues with staff performance. Early this year, I had to go through a really difficult process of someone that we hired for a kind of mid-level role. We made the decision that, well, basically, I felt I had concerns over their performance in terms of them being able to actually fulfill the job, spec, and responsibilities.

27:51 And it was kind of a new situation for me because I felt like, what do I kind of do in order to, do I cut the cord or do I invest time in training and developing this person to fulfill that gap?

28:06 So a similar way to explain it is behind someone that we thought had kind of two, three years experience and we're giving them responsibilities that fit that. But then it turned out actually they're experienced, although they've been doing the job role for that long in previous roles, their experience is actually someone where in my previous roles, it was someone I'd expect to know about a year after a year. So I had to kind of think, what do I do in this scenario?

28:31 Yeah, that's tricky. You've got to really stay on top of regular appraisals and performance reviews and setting targets and goals and constantly checking in on those. I mean, it's a lot of work.

28:43 That's why eventually you need someone to run HR and do these things for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a process, we have kind of personal development plans for people in place, but I actually had to, so a good friend of mine is actually a HR consultant and I kind of had to go, how do I deal with the different sides of the coin? And we decided to do a training plan where we kind of I assess the person and they assess themselves in terms of these are the list of skills and software and processes that I have and they kind of self assess each one. And then we developed a system of writing training for it. And unfortunately, the performance didn't improve both in terms of the skill set and also their attitude to work and I made the decision to not allow them to pass their probation. And that for me was a really like emotional experience because I realized that I'm not ever going to be someone's best friend in these businesses. I'm not going to be like David Brent in trying to make friends with everyone, but at the same time, I don't want to be a dick. And I found it really hard to actually have to professionally say we've had regular meetings, we've had regular appraisal, we laid out the training you need, it's been two months since that time and we feel that you're still not meeting that specification. And as a result of that, we made this into not continue past your probation. And that was basically the kind of conversation we have. And it ended on, it did end on, I mean, you can't say a breakup is mutual, it's never mutual, but it ended up in a professional level okay. And I think the other person, you know, just went on now to another full-time role and I hear they're doing great. But it was something that was quite difficult for me in terms of how to deal with it at the time.

30:31 Yeah, I've had to go through something similar as well, not because of performance, it was more our mistake for creating a role. We came to realize the business didn't need, but yeah, it's not a nice thing to go through at all. Yeah. Avoid any costs.

30:49 Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so I'd say they're the main issue. So are you the any manager of sorts in the business? You're the only director, right? So I'm the only shareholder. So it's, but essentially I have an operations manager, basically. So the way that the team is set up is it's myself as director. And then we have the operations manager who looks at all of our clients and decides which team is going to work on which projects and handles new business as well. And then we have two teams, we have an SEO team and a conference team basically. And then there's a person who's the lead in each of those.

31:29 What's that mean you get to go on holiday occasionally? Yeah, it does. I mean, in my first year, I had pre-booked a two-week trip to Japan. And throughout the whole time, I was just constantly calling back at the office just checking in. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't enjoy the break. But then I recently I just came back off of two-week college to San Francisco. And I was like, guys, contact me anytime. Don't worry about it. And they didn't even want to speak to me. And I wasn't finally calling. This isn't right. And it was fantastic to come back. It was a nice validation of after doing this for two and a half years, like the blood-studded tears that I could go away for a period of time and things will run smoothly.

32:15 I heard in the wind that my ops manager was in the verge of having a bit of a breakdown, but he didn't tell me that. But it seems to me right now, they did a stellar job as a team coming together. And it was a nice thing to see. I think building a team to a point where it's operational is a good thing. And I'm happy that I've got that now. I still think my role is very much in the strategic element. I'm still the one pushing us in new directions and changing what we do and improving what we do. But yeah, it's nice to see that it can run.

32:52 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's vital to be able to know that if you do need to step away for some reason, that the business will continue. Yeah, definitely. I rely entirely on my co-founder. Neil, yeah. It means we can't go away at the same time or do anything for long periods of time together, which is a shame because we do like to cycle and things like that. Yeah. Well, we have a little bit of that too. I'd make it so that even myself or Ian, who's our operator, we don't try and go and holiday at the same time.

33:24 We even try to book our big holidays at the opposite ends of the year. Oh, wow. Okay. It's just a little bit easier that way. Yeah, I know. Fair enough. Just space them out as much as possible because it does cause a bit of stress for the other.

33:36 And the less chaos and handover that happens in between, the better. Yeah. It's one of the perks and not perks of having your own company, the ability to go and holiday whenever you want, but the paranoia of doing it.

33:49 Yeah. What's next, I guess? I mean, what's next on the cars? Have you got any plans to hire any more in the short term? And where do you see this hiring trend going?

33:59 At the moment, we are currently advertised in a role. So my plan is to be hopefully 10 by end of the year, but that as a result is functioning in an office move. So that was a problem that I didn't anticipate that as I get more people, I'm going to have to get more space for them. So that's one problem that we're looking at the moment, basically, that I didn't really fully think through, if I'm being honest.

34:20 Who are you looking to hire now? So it's again, there's a reflection of that we do a lot of web development work at the moment. So we have in-house designers, but we have to pass that out to freelance web developers.

34:34 And we just, both in terms of, we as a company have the ambition to do better and better work. And it's hit the point where the cost of freelancing it versus actually bringing someone in, we're kind of exploring, is that better? So it's a role we've been advertising for.

34:54 I've been massively struggling to find candidates that fit our uniqueness. We do a lot of short term projects that we work on for five days, then you close and you go off.

35:05 And they're not websites, they're all quizzes, calculators, or games. And micro projects. No, micro projects. And also it takes a certain kind of mindset in order to enjoy that kind of work and also to be able to deal with that differently. I feel like with that, you got to get into that from when you first line your design and development skills. So if you've been doing WordPress websites for years, for example, I feel like maybe as a mentality, it can be quite hard to shift to just working with raw code and no frameworks or no platforms or no CMSs.

35:38 That's one of the problems that we've had with that really. And also it's actually interesting with that. That was definitely where you can find sometimes the skills, but the culture fit is a big kind of problem.

35:52 If that sounds appealing to anyone out there, we'll put a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to apply for that role. So that's immediate problems.

36:04 Planning the Christmas party is interesting as well. Oh man, you were organized. Yeah, well, no, I can't. This is the thing. The only thing we have a team now is the culture is they love going out and having a drink, something to eat. So Christmas party was discussed in September. So yeah, that is organized.

36:26 Very good. But then I guess I get sorry, but you can answer your actual question in terms of where we're going. I mean, one of the things is a bit, I'm quite an emotional business director, maybe all of this is that, I was only in this to be the best at it basically. So one of the things that we've been trying to do is build it to be the best SEO/Constant Marketing Agency in the country.

36:50 That's the kind of aim. And I've tried to validate that a bit this year. We've submitted ourselves for five awards. I see you won one, maybe more than one. No, no, we've been shortlisted at the minute. So we've been...

37:03 Oh, okay. Sorry, shortlisted. That's all right. So we submitted for five and three so far revealed their shortlist that we've got on each one. So I'm hoping that that's one way to emotionally validate that things are going well and they're getting awards to show for it, which is quite nice. And then what that means in terms of people, when I was on holiday, I kind of drawn out a kind of organization shot for next year, which is hopefully getting to a point where we have a full service... We have an SEO team.

37:36 To the minute, it's just one full-time person and a bit of me and a bit of Ian. And we have our content team. That's pretty well established. And also we look to get into more CRO-based, analytics-based work. A lot of what we do at the minute is our revenue at the moment is kind of 40% SEO and about 60% content. We've seen huge growth in that area of the business.

37:54 Primarily because digital marketing seems... They don't have a lot of content resource at the minute. But a lot of the reasons why these content teams are doing it is for the purpose of earning links online, which is a massively important part of SEO. The more links you have and the quality quantity of them really influences your presence on Google. And my fear is that... I'm not fear.

38:18 I think it will happen at some point. Google is going to switch that off. Google is not going to count links in their address anymore. So I need a business that's diversified basically, so that we're not just looking at that. And we're looking at things that I think are growing and important.

38:32 More brands are investing in conversion rate optimization-based work and also analytics work to get a true understanding of their performance. We've got the raw talent in the business at the minute. I want to spin that out as a product so that we have free teams basically. So hopefully 15 people, fingers crossed, this time next year offering that. And we've validated us as the best agency. And then the year after that, grow to about 25. And I think that's as much as I want it to be at the minute in terms of a UK operation and then beyond there. Ideally, we'd like to set up little caisins in different countries of the world or we acquire little caisins and we acquire businesses and turn them into little caisins. That would be the idea really.

39:19 Freaky, you're an entrepreneurial chap. Well, that's the idea. I mean, we'll see how that goes. I feel like if I have a vision and I work towards it, it helps me.

39:29 That's fantastic. And then the other element is we want to start looking at technology. So a lot of marketing agencies in the minute are very reliant on their tools and software.

39:41 And that is third party software. So the elements within SEO and in content marketing where I feel there's still gaps for good proprietary tools. So we're going to look at the processes we have within our business and see if we can develop tools or software ourselves to automate those processes. So it saves us time, it saves us money. And maybe if we do those as experimental little projects, maybe we'll hit one good thing and we can maybe spin it off into something.

40:11 There you go. I've revealed all my cards to you now. I'm going to hold you to that, Pete. I'm just putting all these things down and I'm going to check back in a year's time and see how many you've managed to achieve.

40:24 Probably one of them. No, that's just great. I know, but as a business owner, I'm a little bit ambitious sometimes. I don't realize times things take, if that makes sense. So this year I said to the gang, we're going to have a proper sale of the marketing plan. You're going to do blog posts, you're going to do emails, you're going to look after an event we're going to do, you're going to look after webinars. And then we've done about 30% of those things. And out of the 30%, we're probably only doing one or two of them a really good job of because I have this habit of wanting to do everything and not focusing for the time.

40:57 Sounds like a topic for another time. Yeah, definitely. Cool. So just to close off, any advice you give to anyone who's looking to grow their agency from a couple of people up? If you were going to do it all again, what would you do differently?

41:14 I think I would have started by having a clear business plan for the first couple of years. I went into it as, "Oh, hey, I do this full-time in a minute. I could just quit my job and just do the same thing. I get paid more money for it." I didn't really go in with any kind of idea of what I wanted it to be. And I regret that because I didn't really figure that out until the second year. And as a result, the first year, that affected my performance, that affected the team.

41:46 So I guess I would sit down and think about what's my one-year, three-year, five-year plan, whether that's you want to be the biggest, you want to be the best at it, whether you want to sell it or whether you want to acquire it. I think that helps free the mind and then lets you draw the plan to do that. And I think that's the one thing that helped me that in my second year of business, I drew out what my one-year, three-year, five-year plan is and evaluated.

42:15 Why am I actually doing this? What's in it for me? What do I want to get out of this? Ideally, my ideal lifestyle would be sitting at home playing PlayStation all day. It might be my business, but it's still a job. So I had to think about what do I want my life to look like one, three, five years from now and how can my business help me get there. So I wrote a list of things that I want to achieve in my life for the next five years and then maybe helped me clarify about how I could achieve that with my business. And when I did that, it made me feel 10 times happier about having a business. I wish I could have seen that. Nice. You're doing it with your mentor.

42:27 Yeah. So I have a business mentor that we see once a quarter and having a business mentor, definitely that is something I again, I wish I had seen. That definitely helped me have someone else that I could be confidential to and tell them this is the thing when you run a business and you have a team, you have to give this perception of this omnipotent leader and everything's perfect and everything's going great, guys. But actually, running a business is very emotionally tough and I find it very tough to run a business just for sometimes and sometimes you need some people who have been there, done it and cut their teeth that you can confide in and they can turn around to you and go, yeah, you know what, running a business is pretty rubbish sometimes. And you can't just kind of make those things to your team sometimes. So I think having a business mentor is definitely helped me bring it all into perspective. Yeah, we'd agree. We've gone through that as well. And yeah, a lot of things you were just saying, it sounds like it's a pretty common set of processes to go through with a mentor to try and really help focus you down on what it is you should be doing. Definitely. Well, thanks for coming on, mate. That's all right. Thanks for having me. Sorry if I ramble on too long. But yeah, it's been a pleasure. Not often I get to talk about everything in hindsight and it's nice to do it. Well, if our listeners want to find out more about you or Kaizen, where can they do that? Easiest way is probably to follow me on Twitter, I guess. Mine is just @petecambell. And you can also visit our website at kaizensearch.k.uk, which is full of resources and blog posts and tweets about us going to escape rooms and even Nando's basically. Fantastic. Thanks everyone for listening. I've been John Dark at Dark John on Twitter from Every Interaction. You can find us online at everyinteraction.com. If you'd like to contact us about this episode or find any of our past episodes, you can use them on our website at perspective.fm or just send us an email directly on get@perspective.fm. We're on Twitter too, @underscoreperspectivefm. You can find us on iTunes. We always appreciate ratings and reviews. You might leave us there, so do that. Tweet about the show. Share it on Facebook. Tell your friends. Everything helps. We're easy to find in your podcast app of choice. Just search for @perspectivefm in Google Music, Apple Podcasts app, Overcast, Pocket Cast, whatever you like to use. All the links are on the website along with the show notes for this episode. Thanks everyone, and we'll see you next time.