Ricky Solanki on Agency Giants Podcast

You launched Push in 2007. You've now got over 50 team members and you've won best use of AI as an award for agencies for the last two years running. We were at one point managing about 400 different clients. If you were starting from zero, how would you build the business differently? I believe one person could do it. I would start with the premise with can one person manage an entire client. What tools is needed to do that? They need to manage their AI employees or AI agents. Claude's a great place to just start. Pick one

process that is fairly timeconuming that you'd like to shorten. Just start with something small. Then you're going to be so much more efficient and profitable. If they thought about what they needed and they built all the agents and the infrastructure, you obviously would need to have that technology skill or look to buy it from somewhere or get someone in to do it. Best AI tool right now that isn't yours and not clawed. We have this new set of services now within the agency. AI reactivation bots via SMS or WhatsApp. It's bridging out of marketing more

into operations and sales. One thing you wish you learned earlier as a founder. Not everything's in your control. We need change to be able to be innovative and find new products to market. Most underrated agency growth strategy is the most underused marketing channel. It's very low cost. You don't need a huge budget. You start building that email list up. Ricky, welcome to Agency Giants. Thank you for having me. You launched Push in 2007. You've now got over 50 team members and you've won best use of AI as an award for agencies for the last two

years running. When you look back at that journey as a whole, where do you see the biggest period of growth was for you? I'd probably say it was 2016 to 2020. Um, that was about 2012 we made a a decision to focus in on Google Ads. Before that we were doing website development, SEO, affiliate marketing, email marketing. It was pretty the early stages of digital marketing as a uh you know as a product and as a service. So 2012 we started to focus in on Google ads. That's what we were really good at. That's what

we really liked search and paid social. And then 2016 was a time where we started to see our case studies, our awards, brands coming to us and we had we had a really good marketing channel, really good growth. We're on a Google channel partner program as well. And so yeah, we were at at one point managing about 400 different different clients in that period. Awesome. It's quite interesting. So that's like 10 years really after kind of establishing the business or nine years after establishing. If we go back to the early stages, like what did the

early period of the business look like? Day one was me and my co-founder retraining ourselves to even know what what is the internet, how do we use it? I remember basically both of us had signed up for this kind of like a franchise of being an internet consultant and having these offshore centers to support you with the work. So I remember as I was leaving my job I said told people what I was going to do and they were like oh so you're going to be working with you know platforms like Google and I went

well what's Google literally I didn't know what it was so I had to go through a period of learning understanding um figuring out how to how to build things myself build a website understanding the mechanics mechanics of marketing so I think the first few years were really just us learning you know the industry learning what's out there how could we apply apply this to help businesses grow and then figuring out actually what is the product what do we enjoy doing and we defin definitely didn't enjoy building websites so so how we ended up into that

paid side of things so did you have like an IT background before the agency like what what what was the experience that then triggered You to want to start an agency business in the first place yeah no not really a technology background I used I used to work for a computer computer component distributor selling memory chips the likes of uh AMD and uh Samsung's SanDisk, all these products which if you follow the stock market are doing incredibly well at the moment and I've kind of mistimed getting in those quite quite early if I just held

them for the last 20 years and been a really good spot. But um yeah, so I was working in computer component distribution but I just had this calling to become an entrepreneur but I didn't know what I need to do which is kind of why I ended up in this kind of franchise route because I picked something where I thought okay I can actually can see there's a lot of growth in that sector and I'd been in a fast growth sector of computer component distribution from when I graduated literally seeing businesses putting in computers into

their workplace. So we were selling the components for those and I could see that and that was becoming quite commoditized. So I could see there was this new avenue of internet opening up and internet marketing. The some of the brands that we used to sell to from the computer component distributor were the likes of if you you might know of a brand called like eBay I think they're actually in from Sheffield. Um and they had an ecom business and they one of the first e-commerce retailers and I saw what they were doing. And I was

like, "Wow, okay. They got this, you know, they they got this engine. They're generating a lot of sales." And I thought, "Okay, this could be the next growth area." That's interesting. And so, you have Well, I mean, where did you start with the agency? Where did you Who did you work with initially? Were you working With those companies, those distributors or and e-commerce or was it local business marketing like where did you start as far as client base was concerned? Yeah. Yeah. So a few actually a few of the contacts I had from that industry

I started working with um maybe doing SEO for some uh for system builders or some retailers. But yeah, I did focus in on the local marketing. I would literally walk around to shops and offices with something printed out saying this is you know this is what I do. I'm an internet consultant. I can help you get positioned on on the internet. This is why you need a website. Because at that time people still didn't really appreciate the fact that you need a website. And then once I figured out what actually what Google was and how

you could use it, explain to people well if you got a website you can advertise on these things like Google. It's going to replace the yellow pages and you know you'll be able to get sales leads whatever you whatever your kind of end objective was. Pick up doortodoor. It's how I started in the agency as well. Yeah. I think Yeah. Yeah. Put put hairs on your chest and things. I think it's coming full circle as well in this AI world we live in where everyone hides behind their email outreach comfortably. People want to see people.

Yeah. So in you you went from this period of kind of fumbling your way through it, failing forward with the agency in the early stages. You had this kind of catalyst moment in 2016 where you decided to introduce Google. Have you observed other major changes in the industry over your time being in the Industry for 17 years now that made you think we need to make a big pivot? we need to make big changes to continue growing and thriving in what we're doing. Yeah. So the the the one would be the one that's most recent

which is in 2023 we were went off to America uh went for a internet traffic conference which got changed at the very last minute to this now needs to be an AI conference because you know chat GBT had just launched about 6 months earlier and we went to that and we saw what some of these American agencies were doing and we were using the APIs for like chat GPT and our technology products, but what I started to see how it was being used not just in kind of performance marketing but across the board, email marketing,

email newsletters, technology builds. Me and my co-founder Steve, we came back from that and we were like, "Right, we need to we need to now re and we were already in this position where we knew we needed to reposition the business, but we didn't know what to." And it gave us that that was the catalyst moment. We're like, "Right, okay, this is this is the future. We can see really clearly now. this is going to change the way you know all of us behave in in you know operate in our workplace but also you know

how businesses are going to operate as well. So initially to you did that mean coming back and just making what you were already doing more efficient or did was It a complete pivot in the way that you deliver services as well? Yeah it's a great question. I think at the beginning it was right let's implement this within our own organization. Let's make sure everybody is on board with it, understands it, why why we're doing it, and then start putting processes in place. We started off doing things like uh survey with the team how comfortable they

felt about AI, what were they afraid of. We built like AI responsible policies, manifestos, and then we started to go right, we're going to now take apart our different processes and we're going to rebuild them in an AI world. We're going to start look at what type of operating system we want to use. Um do we build something inhouse? Do we buy something? and we just started started on that journey always with the mind that okay once we've done that for ourselves we'll be able to go right okay now we can start to build other

products for the businesses that we're already working with and maybe a new set of businesses as well so you're predominantly using AI to make your performance marketing service better initially in the agency what can you just for people that aren't familiar with push or watching this just summarize what core services you offer to the majority of your clients at the moment yeah sure So that would be um paid marketing across you know Google, Microsoft. Then the social channels Meta, Pinterest and Tik Tok. We then have organic services which is actually our biggest area of growth

at the moment which is SEO stroke GEO helping businesses getting um visibility and and ranked on the LLMs. That's where we're seeing the most interest. We'll be doing a lot of talks about explaining to people how the the the search market is Changing, how people are searching differently and how our results are appearing differently. Then we do creative optimization as well. So all the kind of standard performance marketing um services but then we have this new set of services now within within the agency which could be for example AI reactivation bots via SMS or or

WhatsApp. It can be AI workflows put into an organization to help them with their task management or their sales processes as well. So, it's bridging out of marketing more into operations and sales. I'd say at the moment as well. I want to unpack all of the kind of the tech side of things and and what you've been building and so on as we as we get through this. But before we kind of segue into that, I'd love to understand in offering so many different services because it sounds like you do an awful lot for people.

How does this the client acquisition process look today? Are most of your clients coming inbound and therefore they have a specific need and therefore you're you're you're creating a pitch for them and going for that or are you outbounding any clients and and if so what do you lead forward with? Yeah, good great question. So I think if I tell you what I was doing before and I'm tell you how it changed as well because I think that would be useful. So when we had that huge period of growth, we were running Google ads and

meta at the time as well and you know leading with a PPC type audit. We can improve your results by 20% and we just had huge volume of leads. We were one of the first people to run these PPC type audits and they would come in we would Do the audit and then we would sell online and we were selling online before people would as in via a meet link you know way before it happened after postcoid time. So that was really working for us in that period. Obviously that's become a very crowded crowded space

and plus people don't really need that anymore. You know they kind of that the Google AI is doing a good enough job. They don't they don't need one person to you know or an agency to come in and just work on that one area. So now um how we lead with with the marketing we don't do a huge amount of outbound. What we do do is try and put us in front of the type of businesses that we want to work with and we'll run things like webinars, we'll do talks, a lot of events, um

we'll work with some different associations as well. And that way we can get across really all the different things that we that we do. And then the next point if someone's interested in working with us is then we would then do some form of we call it internally a discovery but for a client it's a growth road map. And that's the way we can really get across all of our knowledge, all the different things that we do, and then give them a a plan of saying, "Yeah, we do all these things, but you can't do

all of them in one go." And this is actually actually how we would structure over a 12-month period. So, it that for us does two things. It means that any of the clients we're going to work with are really invested in us for a long period of time as opposed to the old days which like, "Yep, come and fix my Google ads, but I might get rid of you in three or four months, you know, if it's not working so well or or I feel I can take it over myself." So, we're trying to find

stickier clients that understand that we do all these services, but we can drop it services in and out. And I think the Way for me, the way agencies need to work changes a little bit. It's not about I'm going to sell you this retainer for this service and this retainer for that. Keep adding, adding, adding. It's like, okay, well, if your budget's X, maybe we'll do these two services for these two, three months, but then we'll drop this one out and we'll drop another one in. And I think the dynamics of the way agencies and

clients are working is changing because we know that clients can now take on a lot more themselves especially with AI as well. You charge for those growth road maps as well don't you? Or I believe I read that somewhere you charge to pitch in the process rather than the conventional kind of free sales call. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know I'm sure you know a lot of agency owners have experienced the same thing. You put a lot of time in in pitches and you're not going to win. you're not going to win all of

them. And one thing actually, we're we haven't actually firmly done this, but we're probably going to say no to any pitches where it's like, oh, you're coming in to pitch against four people. You know, you've got a you got maybe an equal chance, but we find those kind of pitch process where, you know, you're going in for over one or two days, the people who are receiving the pitch are exhausted. They're just and they're pretty much hearing the same thing from all four. So either they're going to be like, "Oh, maybe we'll just stay with

the incumbent agency because we know them. We feel a risk change." And a lot of it's just done on feeling. Oh yeah, we got on with those guys. We had a good energy. Let's go with them. But and you got an hour to get across how you're going to spend whatever it is a million pounds or you know a million pounds a year across multiple channels and we just don't Think it's enough time to get across exactly your approach, how you want to do things and and the results they might get. So going down this

going down this route of having some kind of paid grow uh growth roadmap really really works well for us because it allows us to invest the right amount of time get paid for it and at the end they've got something they can actually take away and implement if they want as well. So that's part of the sell to the clients. Look, we're going to do this but it doesn't mean at the end of it you've got to engage with us. You can take that away and go and do it yourself, find another agency, but we'll

give you an option to work with us as well. Nice. You mentioned webinars. Is that a really significant part of the of the getting people onto those road maps? Uh yeah, not immediately but building an email list and then marketing to the email list definitely. So you know we found that I would say the the type of customers that we want to work with are the ones that come on those webinars where you're really putting some good education out especially if it's on new innovative content. And so those people will sign up. So you you

know we can send something out and they be like wow we got these three four brands that everyone would have heard of that have inquired back that are interested in speaking to us on what you know whatever we've positioned um in the email. We obviously send email newsletters out and then you two years later you might hear from somebody saying right we we've got this challenge. Would you be able to come in and and speak to us and talk to us about this? So yeah it's a it's a long-term strategy. It's not something I you

know I know people who have been successful doing that with a webinar and then an immediate upsell. uh we've never we've tried it a few times, never quite worked for us. So I think really our marketing now is really based around this kind of long long-term marketing and building our reputation in the market. So if we were to like visualize the funnel, you've you've got organics and and referrals and so on kind of feeding presumably there's a some kind of lead magnet or so on that's getting people onto the into the email list in the

first place and then you have the conversion mechanisms like the webinars and so on and so forth. Would that be a fair assessment? Yeah, that's right. So for example, take the GEO generative engine optimization product. So we had a we had a guide to to GEO put out kind of before anybody was doing it. So the other thing is like trying to be ahead of the market. So you know this is everything you need to know about GEO, what's changed, how to make sure you get ranked, what tools you can use. So we built that

out. So that was a really good lead magnet of the word for us. And then from the back of that exactly that, right, we're now going to run a webinar with more up to-ate up-to-ate information. Nice. Nice. Nice. And um as far as bringing people onto that email list, how many emails a day or a week are you sending at the moment? Uh not a huge amount. Just so that would just be um probably Yeah, probably on a monthly basis about two emails. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I think it's one of those things that a

lot of agencies don't do. That is just always a very slept on strategy. It's like that long-term email list nurture. A lot of people forget to do that from lead magnets. And so it's interesting that that is really a main part of your acquisition strategy with that. And I can see that through having so many different services, it allows you to open up through many different verticals with different lead magnets for all different things. Yeah, exactly. So you can you can do a and obviously depending on if how how your list is segmented. If it's

something if you've got a e-commerce specific, you can put some e-commerce or retail specific content out um as well. We have experimented actually with sending more frequent emails and we saw our unsubscribe rate go up. So we've kind of found found the balance a little Bit. you once you if you start to go to one a week then yeah they people kind of they get a bit of blindness to it as well so they'll they'll miss the important stuff that comes through. Do you find that and have you found that over the years with acquisition

specifically you look for that one kind of halo message or service rather that people are really interested in like you had the PPC audit then you've got like the the GEO audit and and so on and so forth. Do you do you find that you're always looking for those or or do you have a variety of different angles in which to bring people into the business be that across multiple different services? No, it's the that the Halo approach definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Really what's what's topical at that time? What people really interested in and we we're

trying to gauge we get it wrong sometimes, but trying to gauge that ahead of the market so that you know as soon as that demand builds up. One thing I've learned in doing, you know, working in the agency for 20 years is that as much as we can build a product and we like it and we think it's great unless unless the the brands want to buy it, it's not really that exciting. It's much harder to much harder to sell. So part of it is about making timing and thinking, okay, actually when is this product

going to mature where people are actually going to want it as well. Nice. I notic that you expand internationally as well. Do you have a physical presence in in in other regions or just mainly getting international clients across? Yeah. So, we've got international clients, for example, we work with clients in the US where we don't have um any we have like a virtual office there. Some somewhere we'd like to do do a bit more with. We've got European clients as well. That's kind of all serviced out of the UK office. Uh in Greece, we have

somebody who used to work with us here. He graduated, worked with us here. He's from from Greece. He's moved back to Athens. So, we have a physical office there. It's about 10 people doing doing really well. um they use the brand, the positioning, the processes, they look after some UK clients as well because we have a a fee threshold in in the UK. So some of the smaller clients, the Greece team can manage uh out there as well. And we also have a a team in Dubai, in the Middle East as well. How did you

find expanding internationally and how have you found the impact on the business? Is it something that you you wish you did sooner in the business? because a lot of companies like to stay very regional and I actually think it's something that that agencies get very limited by have a physical presence in the UK think they then can't expand to signing out international clients and kind of forget there is a whole world of businesses that will work with agencies overseas if they deliver the right service and have the right message. Yeah, actually there was a report

I don't know if you've come across the WOW benchmark report and I'm familiar I know Peter who owns that. Yeah. Yeah. So recently they the one they just put out I think it's because it's annually it comes out. There was a really interesting stat I picked up in there that all the the top performing agencies by margin and revenue growth were operating outside the UK and I think UK is quite a competitive landscape at the moment. There's not a lot of growth in the UK. So yeah I definitely think that's something for people to do

even if they don't go for a in you know an office presence in there. We had a couple of failed attempts. One in um Copenhagen and Romania as well. And these have kind of been there haven't been I wouldn't say there's ever been a real strategy behind there kind of been opportunities that have arisen by people either who've worked with us moving to another area or someone reaching out to us saying could I could I set something up. So I think with the first two that didn't work. We learned that actually what you need is

to have somebody who is culturally aligned with the region because the sales process and how to do business is the most important thing. And if like if you if you send someone from the UK to somewhere like Copenhagen, they're going to find it difficult because there's a language barrier. They understand how to do how business is transacted. Whereas because we've got someone in Greece who's Greek, he knows how that works and the things just operate slightly differently. So he understands he can take the message, he can take the the marketing that you know angles that

we want to take, they can he can change it and apply it for for that individual market. Um having the UK operational resource has been really useful. So they just can tap into the UK for like HR support, technology support and all of that. So they just focus on okay servicing the clients and the leads but you know they they operate from with our own Slack and all that type of thing. So it's been it's been actually quite quite seamless to get it set up and running. It's been established now about 5 years doing like

I said doing doing really well. I think the one thing that we underestimated in all them is you still need to have if you're going to put a physical presence. You need to have some capital aside for it. You can't just go right we'll start it and hope that the revenue will start start Day one and we'll be be able to manage it. you kind of need to you say right okay we've going to put aside some money to make sure we've got enough to to make sure we've got a team to support that founder

in that region maybe an office presence to start or you know um and some marketing budget as well I think depending on the sophistication of the ICP that you're working with I think if you're if you're going for big corporates that physical presence matters to them a little bit more and but in kind of SMBs let's say I've distilled it down to really you just need a good account manager and a good salesperson in that region The service delivery team and building the AI stuff. So you um won best use of AI and you've amongst

50 other awards over the past years and I'd like to understand from you your perspective being a very established agency at the point of choosing to to pivot into AI or focus your time into AI more so how did the team initially react when you brought that to them because I know normally it creates a lot of a lot of anxiety and can create a lot of anxiety in a team where they're now thinking oh this my employer is now thinking about AI. What does this mean for me and my future in the company? Yeah,

I think probably the first thing would have been okay, they've gone off to a founders have gone off to a conference and come back with with another with with another idea and you know just like another idea. Let's see how far this one how this one this this one goes. So that that was probably their that probably their first thought. Uh I think once they realized we were quite quite serious about it they some people did did leave if not immediately but they some people were just resistant to change and I think actually out of

everything about AI the technology is the technology I don't think we need any more advancements in the technology because it's already can do so much and no one's using it to the capability that we can use it to um but change management is the biggest part like actually getting people to change the way they you know they they operate data in the way they think and how they're going to do their tasks. And some people were just resistant to that. And if they if they're resistant to it, they're just going to think, well, actually, you

know, I don't feel aligned to this. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to move on. So, we we did lose some people through that that transition. The the way we tried to manage that was, okay, let's let's put this survey out first and see how you're feeling about it. Are you using it? What tools are you using? Do you feel scared about it? How do you think this might impact your role? So it gave us an understand and we was it I I thought everybody would be excited but no there were people who were

scared about it. Now obviously anonymous survey so I don't know if those were the people that that left or some maybe some of them actually then found a way to to get on board with it and understand it and even like even today like yesterday we had a 3-hour AI training session on our AI operating system because we could still see some people some people are super users and some people are still struggling but that's okay like we you know we just continue to have these training sessions and let people know It's okay to not

know that they don't know how to do things. Um, and there's there's variances. You've got you would think, oh, maybe all the younger people are just like much better at it. That's not always the case. So, you can it's not really like an age thing. It's just I think different preferences and personality types on how people adapt to it. I often talk about the difference between agencies that use AI that just kind of bolt on additional tools and so on and and have a regular workflow with an LLM and agencies that are AIEL or now

what I believe we're moving to is more AI native agencies. were seeing that transition to you. What does it mean to be an AI agency? So the first thing would be yeah, do we have all of all of the data from our clients in one place where we can apply AI to it. So yeah, the you know the base level would be yeah we've got a process we can run AI agents to get personas and we can build creative ad copy and we can do all those things right from workflows and LLMs. But I think

truly to be a you need to have the data points from all the different platforms. Of course, Google Meta are going to do their own thing within their own platform. What we luckily we had built our own technology platform where we had taken data from all the different platforms into um into into BigQuery into our own database and then had that on our own platform. So then we were because we had normalized all that data, it made it easier for us to layer AI on top of it and interrogate that data and start putting analysis

out and an anomaly detection and all all that type of thing and suggestions on what people should do next. So I think that's really being AI. It's like you you're not only using it in your day-to-day process to be more efficient so it's better for the client so you can Get more output and deliver faster, but are you truly using AI to analyze the work that you're doing and and get better output for the client as well? Lots of agencies will skip straight through to the function part where they'll try and build something that they

perceive to be useful, but they skip those context and data layers that actually make function useful in the first place. And I know you've built a lot of internal tech, which I' I'd love to unpack. You've mentioned the word AI operating system which a lot of companies have have built their own operating system but also somewhat become this ambiguous term that that not everybody understands what it means and so to you what does your AI operating system do? What function does it serve in push? Yeah. So uh we call it we call it dial agents

which is our digital innovation acceleration lab is kind of like our framework of how we how we have an idea hypothesis test it and then launch it. So that's where dial comes from. So we call it we call it dial agents. And within there what we have is all of every time we've built something like so a process it becomes becomes an agent and people we responsible for a Google ad copy assistant or a creative um ideation agent. So we have all these kind of mini functions stroke employees that are integrated into this AR operating

system. So that means anyone within the organization can go into the operating system pick the client and the client will have all their knowledge based documents. So we'll have all the calls recorded in there. So all the recent calls so we can understand client objectives challenges that happening. It'll also have the data layer in there as well. So we've got actually got data performance. So we've got um MCPs tied into to Google Meta and everything as Well. Then we've got maybe their tone of voice, their brand documentation, what we've pitched to them, their proposal. So

everything's in one place. So and anyone can go in and say, "Right, I need to create, they've got this new product being launched." Let's say if it's a a retail brand, new product being launched, and we need to build campaign assets for these and campaign strategy across these platforms. And because all that data just sits there and it's maintained and it's and it's updated and it's automatically pulled in from a weekly call. Everything can be AI can go across all of that. It can also pull the real data and then it uses our best practices

of this is our campaign framework and then it will produce produce the output. So it's taken a long time to get there but you have to have all the parts in you know we have to put all our best practices in. We have to make sure there's governance in terms of what information from you the account management teams is going into the AI operating system. But it means yeah anybody can go in pick any client they're assigned to run assistance workflows and get output kind of you know in a matter of seconds really. How did

you tackle the problem of um of building that in the first place? Did you govern that as the founder? Did you were you quite hands-on with that or did you somewhat decentralize a development of the of the product across the whole team? Yeah. So my my main function really over the past you know 10 years has been to lead our kind of technology innovation. So yeah I'm I'm always looking out there and going right how's the market changing? What technology is out there and what what could really really help us. I think it helps for

us it helps us from a positioning standpoint. So if we do go into even if we're doing these growth road maps or in a pitch we want to have something of point of difference. So having our own platform which we've built which is unique to us and people can see the benefit of that is important. So I've always led the development of that what I wanted what I wanted to look like. So one of the things that when we came back from this event in America was I could see like the start of this kind

of AI operating systems being built out by some American companies and then I started to investigate that a bit more in terms of okay what are what products are out there. We tested a few products that were out in the marketplace and they just didn't do all the things that I would want it to do. So yeah then we ended up uh ended up building it building ourselves. I think we're going to move to a place in a market where every agency has their own form of an operating system and and there's there's a really

kind of big debate at the moment on like do we buy something do we build it inhouse like do we and um that's actually something I want to in fact we can skip to that and we can come back to this when it comes to making that decision on because when you build the initial benefit of okay originally we look at the business how can we make this more efficient how can we make what we're already doing better by analyzing the data and just just being a lot better than we on and increasing consistency across

the board. You then start to look at okay what are the new things that we can do or how can we how can we prove I know you built like an AI sales agent system for example for your clients. How have you found and have you found it hard to decide whether or not To build something internally or whether to continue paying for external software? Because I know for me I just looked at that massive bill at the end of every month on the software we're paying and I'm ticking off softwares almost like a game

of what can I get rid of? What can we build? What can we build? Um but it also is very timeconuming to do that. Yeah, it's to be honest not something we've we've solved and is exactly it's like exactly what you said reviewing constantly because the software costs go up, right? That's the other thing. It's like you can go actually let's buy this software and then for example take our um we we have another product called Dial 360 which is basically our um performance marketing where all the data goes in right so the AI operating

system connects into Dial 360 which is where all the data is all the campaign data budget management that creative performance analysis even though we pay quite a lot for that product every time I've gone to the market to think oh actually could we replace I could probably get about 80% of the functionality that we've got. But then when you start cuz we're quite a large agency in terms of number of clients and ad spend. Once you get the cost back from a a platform, you're like, well actually now the price difference is not so big

cuz it looks cheaper when you look on the website. Oh, this is going to I could save £10,000 a month, for example. But once you get into the nitty-gritty and you need all the extra layers of governance and support and account management and extra connectors and that type of thing, the the cost can go up. So I think what we always try and do is have a look at that how that changes over time. But I think what we're seeing now is with with AI there's more and more platforms coming out which are AI native

which are at a much lower Cost. Right now obviously you got the costs of the tokens and the usage of open AI or or or claude which then can also increase the cost a lot and there a bit of unknowns about that. Um but yeah I think I think what I think what we'll see is a lot of software that agencies are using either the agencies will start to build it themselves in like clawed code or you know lovable or replet we have done that with a few small things like oh we're we're spending I'll

give you another example we're spend we were spending £800 a month on an AI creative tool that you know makes UGC's image creation that type of thing. So one of the team who's really you know who's really kind of understands claude codes rebuilt a platform that does all of that and more and okay with the token cost it cost us about £400 but we got better functionality but I think there's a you know I think you'll finding within agencies people going out and going actually okay there it might be easier to tackle the smaller projects

rather than the big one maybe the big one you still invest in and the smaller ones you kind of you know you decide and think actually we can build this build this ourselves but Yeah, I think we I don't think you can have everything like you know you've built everything or you actually um you know you you're building everything yourself. So it's yeah bit of a difference. I I mentioned to you off your off camera, I'm a a software co-founder myself and we're we're constantly trying to predict what what's actually going to happen and in

the market and I think really the only solution for software companies Especially these big guys like the big CRM and so on like we have companies have in the software space have to move to a place where you are building UI for convenience for the people that don't want to custom build but you have to be able to facilitate the people that want to be able to custom build and be able to use your software ware on the back end. So, for example, your team member who's built a creative a creative generation system, maybe that

was Higsfield or something like that that you were using before, Ard's one of those companies, and uh you are able to build your own creative system because you're using the same LLMs that they are, but you've got all this data. You've got all this context. You've got your unique way of doing things. You got all of your ad frameworks. And so, you can create something better than these out of the box solutions that look better because the UI is great and it's had this this development team that's been building it for a long time. But

those companies are at a danger if they don't facilitate people like you or your team being able to just create their own custom version of it, adding context, adding data layers, and plugging that into the software itself. And so I think that's going to be really interesting to observe. And I also believe that agencies might move to and fall to the same fate as those software companies in the sense that if software is going to be driven down by price because of their people's ability to to to practically do things I believe agencies will probably

be driven down on price over the long term if and depending on the market that you're operating in because of the the frequency in which work is being put out and the ability and the ease to actually produce good work. How do you feel about that? I think on the soft first the soft the software point. I totally agree. I think that yeah, if you had the ability to work within a platform and create something of of your own, it would work Amazing. Like for example, we just canceled HubSpot and then because we were mainly

using the pipeline feature and built built it ourselves, you know, we didn't need we didn't need to use that anymore. An expensive. Yeah. Yeah. So, um yeah, definitely definitely agree with that. think and then to your point on uh agencies and margin pressure and how we're going to feel that I think I just think is inevitable like that and I think we've seen that seen that for a while which is why I mentioned this model of really trying to the brand you're working with help them understand that you can help them across a multitude of

things now and we never wanted to be a fullervice agency because it's more it's complex it's hard you got to you got to be really good at everything that you doing, you know, each each segment that you're working in. But I think as for to survive as a as as an agency, you're going to need to be able to do that across everything because otherwise you will just be driven down in the the segment that you're in and you need and you need to have open what we're trying to open conversations about, okay, right, well,

how can we best use your budget that you've assigned for agency? How can we provide you the best value? And that might even mean building something for them to put internally so they can be more self-sufficient. And I think that for me that's the big shift that we're trying to make. And I think that if agencies make it, it will be a much better way for agencies and brands to work together because there's always this you as an agency owner, you're always worried, oh my god, they're going to they've just hired a new CMO, they've

got a new person, it Seems like they're going to take it in house. So you're never but we never have the open conversation. We're always you're just you're trying to say no you need to use agency so stay with us and they're probably thinking oh god I'd love to take this in house but can we but they can't now that's the reality they somebody says we want to take in house and we've couple of people we've gone to visit for our AI integration work have left agencies paying where they were paying £30,000 £25,000 retainers across

you know creative paid um and SEO and there's two people running it within their organization using Claude. Yeah, I believe that there's two transitional phases to that I suppose and that is number one licensing the tech that you've built to other companies. So, hey, instead of you building this thing that we've spent the last two years developing, then license our data, license our IP. I think we'll see a lot of that. I think actually even away from the software and licensing the the interface, people will license the data itself. So, okay, you've ran x amount

of ads and got x amount of performance. So I believe that we'll see that and but also just facilitating companies bringing things in house. I've always been in a mindset whilst as an agency we don't want people to do that. We but churn is inevitable at some point with in business. So I'm thinking if they're going to churn anyway might as well facilitate the churn and try and catch it early and actually call it out and be like hey I think you're trying to move this in house. If you want to by the way I

can make it a lot easier for you. Here's a package to go ahead and do that. Is that something you've experimented with at all? Yeah, we and we actually we put that up front in our so when we do these growth road maps that's actually part of the proposition. So just call it out from the from day one that yeah this is we're going to do all this for you and at some point you're going to probably want to take this in-house and we can help you because we got training packages and we'll support you

through it. The actually the likelihood of them doing that early on is quite low. But the just them knowing that that's on the table and is an option and you'll help facilitate it also shifts you out from being just another agency provider and turns you into a different partner. You know like we never set out to be an agency. I'll be really honest you when we started the company I didn't even know what an agency was. At some point some are you an agency? I was like I don't really know. Are you not an agency?

I was am I? like it didn't really you know over time I realized yeah we are an we are an agency and you kind of have to be called that to run your marketing to some extent but really we want to be a we want to be their kind of marketing partner and support them through their marketing journey whatever that means even them being aware of the fact that you they could bring it in house probably increases LTV in the sense that it removes the anxiety or the thing in the back of their mind thinking

I've just been paying this agency this much should we bring this in they know it's an option and so it removes that anxiety in doing that which I think is quite an interesting thought. So I'd like to explore and I think this would be really beneficial to people who are starting to move kind of more multistack because they're able to do more with AI. How are you tackling pricing? Like how are you approaching pricing when things are so you're building a road map for someone and it's so varied if you're not doing it like the

classic okay meta is this and UGC is this for this much and yada yada. Yeah. So we we still have you know we're um we still have the kind of effort based pricing models where we'll we'll estimate according to RO how many how many hours people are going to need to spend on it and by by segment whether it's meta paid so we have we have templates for that so so we understand that quite well so we can we can give broad ideas about if we're going to manage a channel this is how it was

going to be I think for agencies you know margin pressure is always a thing you know we we end up over over service overservicing at times Especially if you were trying to keep a client happy and results aren't going in the right way or climate's quite demanding, we'll just take it on board. Like, right, we got to keep this client, we'll just do it. So, how do we kind of reverse that? As much as we've tried to best estimate how much time we want to spend, we know that's not the we know that's not the

reality and we're going to potentially get caught out of that. So, we try and move more things to a value based pricing model where the clients not when they're buying those traditional services, they kind of know they're buying time to some extent. they know what they know right you're going to be doing this for me I can see how much time you're going to spend and they value it according to that because they think okay well if I employed someone how much would it cost me and that's how they kind of make the trade-off so

some of the ways we've tried to adapt and move pricing is to think about different commercial models so one might be okay look we're going to do this at this price but what are your actual commercial goals what's your re overall revenue target whether it's leads or e-commerce what are you trying to Achieve okay If we hit that number and we're within a rorowass target or a CPA target, could we get a bonus? And if we do a bit more than that, so if we hit your revenue target and we're at 400% rorowass, could we

get a yearly bonus of X? But if we get a 500% rorowass, that means you're going to make an extra Y, can we get another, you know, another ticker on top of that? That does two things. one, it changes you again from being like every other agency because you're now we all say, "Oh, we're invested in your growth and you know, we want to make it work for you." But now we're actually putting our, you know, our cards on the table and saying, "Right, okay, let's work on this together. We'll give you a really competitive

price to work on, but we want to share in the upside." And it also means that you've got a long-term view now because if you've got a year if you've got a year target you're working towards your risk of being churned is going to be lower because now you're working to some real real commercial goals. So that's one one model we've got. Um another way that we've approached pricing is that with some in some clients we do this in the finance and insurance space. What we do is we actually have our own assets and we

generate um leads into our own assets and then we sell the leads to multiple buyers. So we'll do it for example in in insurance we'll get through hundreds of leads a day. We'll have buyers buying 50 30 20 and it goes on a round robin and sends those sends those leads out. And off the back of those we can do two commercial models. we can either make a markup on the on the lead or we can do a commission deal based on those as well. So you need to have good you need you wouldn't do

that straight away. You would sell the leads first get good they know they're good quality and that does two things then the lead the call it a paper lead industry is I would say it's not as professional as it should be. there's a lot of like fake leads going all this type of stuff. But so if you offer them a service where you're saying right we're going to we're going to build sell give you leads but we're going to make sure the leads are really good quality and if they're good quality we're going to end

up getting more of a kickback from it. Everybody's on everyone's on board with it. So we're just trying to find different commercial models that outside of the standard agency pricing that are much more kind of value valuedriven and it it's a bit more exciting for our internal team as well. you know, now when they're working on a client, they're like, "Well, okay, actually, if this client does really well, we're going to we're going to get an additional bonus." Obviously, they get a percentage of that bonus as well. It's outcomebased pricing is a is a big

movement in the industry at the moment across all kind of online industry, I would I would say. And I and I think software experiences that, tech experiences that, agencies definitely experiences that. I think it gets tricky when we start thinking about incentivized based incentivizing based on revenue. Have you found a model that works on the lead generation side that incentivizes you on revenue or is re is pay per lead basically the best model that you attribute to at the moment? Um well what so on the lead side we do do a revenue based. So for

example take the insurance one. Um what we'll do on that is um if the person we're selling the leads to they sell an insurance policy they'll get um their their commission then we get a share share of that commission back. How do you track that? So that so that's where you've got to have really good relationship with the the the client you're working. We've been working with a couple of these clients for like three four years now or maybe even longer. So they the best paper lead models work where just you they feed back information

to you with the you know the the ids from Google or meta so we can feed it back to the system. So we work so it's not really a siloed approach we we sell the leads but they tell us the leads that have converted into sales. So we're feeding that back into Google feeding that back into meta and because of that transparency they're transparent then with what's what's turned into revenue and what hasn't. So there's a level of there's a level of trust with that with with the with the client that you're working with as

well. Makes sense. So as your systems get more sophisticated, as your ability to deliver better services more consistently get get stronger, how are you thinking about maintaining human brilliance across the team and protecting them from over reliance on everything that you've built in the company? Yeah, good question actually because we had we had that with uh some new starters recently. So I think either the operating system was down or the tokens had run out or something and the the some of the new starters were literally like okay I don't know how to write ad copy

like how how would I do how would I do it? So we've we've gone back to some of the new starters and gone back through let's call it old school one-on-one training like okay this is how you do things. this is why you would do it in This way so that they un really understand the fundamentals and then go go back to it. We always tell everybody not to deploy anything directly. So everything is human review. Um at this stage you there's there's a few people in the company pushing for like okay maybe we can

start just pushing stuff now without without review but maybe we'll get there. But at the moment everything's still got human review. So it's your your critical thinking. How do you interpret what's come out here? Is this right? Is this, you know, you were on the call, you you understood the client's objectives. Does this feel right? And I think that intuition piece is something we still try and challenge the team on and ask probing questions as opposed to just relying on whatever's coming coming back from an, you know, an an AI analysis or AI operating system.

Uh we we do a lot around human skills training and commercial training as well and commercial acumen. So I think where we like if you think about structures within agencies what we've seen is you'd have that this we call it like the we call it a diamond structure now whereas before we'd have a typical you know kind of triangle structure with lot of executives account managers strategists account managers kind of going up in that pyramid structure and now it's more of a diamond there's less executives because the other executives are AI essentially and you've got

a wider middle layer these people who are strategists and commercial and can speak to clients and and build human relationships with whoever they're whoever they're working with. I think that layer is the most most important because they now need to be they need to manage their AI employees or AI agents. Everyone's got their own that they have to look after, but they have to be really good with clients. They have to be really good on still sales. They have to be really good at going to QBRs and and managing that. So I think we QBRS

as an example whenever we have those we really push to have them in person. A lot of brands and clients still say oh can we do it online? We're like no can we come and can we come and see you? Why don't you come see us? Can we go for lunch? So we try and keep that kind of human human connection so that we don't lose all those things I think which is actually what makes an agency great right. It's not just the technology that's just that just supports us in what we do. Yeah. It's

just the trust that you've got a team that have that have got your best interest at heart. What do you think is the best system that you've built outside of your AIOS? I would say the early stage is our Google script system. So when we used when we used to have the you know hundreds of accounts we were managing on Google and Google scripts were launched that so that again was one of the projects I did. I was like right we can use scripts here to do XY Z. Before you would take a script and

you'd put it individually into each account and say I want to run this script to tell me about hourly performance or pause a campaign or do something right. So that again was like oh this bit this is a bit clunky like and not everybody's doing it. We built this really Complicated system of you Google Sheets with like a dashboard of all the scripts that are available and you could go into any client and go right I want to enable this script and I want to change my um hourly pattern to this because of this you

could so you could control everything from a spreadsheet within the Google account but it's all tied into Google scripts but it started to break so it was great for a period of time that's actually why we built a technology product and and we went from just being Google centric to then social as well and meta. So we were like right we need to take that learning and build it into a platform. But yeah those were exciting and at the time it was a great sales thing. People would see this in a pitch and be like

wow this is how you how you manage what you're doing on there. Is anything client facing or is everything back end? No. So we give we give clients the same access to not the AI operating system but the dial 360 which is all the performance data. They have the same access our team has access to. Interesting. But none of the agents that Yeah. none of the agents at the moment. Yeah. So that might that might change that might change over time. Um there is some functionality within the Dial 360 suite so they could do some

AI analysis of their data with it within there. And I would actually like it if clients went into it more. It's surprising that you know you have some who go every day and others who don't go in at all. And we try and educate them at the beginning. This is cuz one, it gives them again more more power. It gives them information at their fingertips and reduces them asking for stuff and waiting for and getting delays if they they've got certain information in there. But sometimes I think brands are like they they're happy that they

know they've got it, but they trust you that you're doing the job. Yeah. Other people they they want. So it kind of it serves it works then for whoever whoever wants it. But yeah, it's the same access. They can do the same thing. So again, it's a a point of transparency as It's like we're not hiding behind anything. So if you see something in there where you're not happy with a a performance drop or something across a channel, you can raise it with your with your team that you're working with. Nice. If someone's watching this

and they feel quite overwhelmed by the idea of being AIDled, they're an existing agency with a good team with good clients. Like what would you say are the foundational steps? Like where should they start rather than just going ahead and building an operating system from day one? Um, I'd probably start first of all to look with look at Claude and Claude's done an amazing job over the last six months. For me is becoming the choice of AI operating systems for business and then for you know by defacto by for agencies as well. Uh I'm sure

a lot of agency owners would have Seen this like if I go on my LinkedIn LinkedIn feed it's like it's like AI overwhelm of your agency's dead and you know this is you only need these 10 skills to run your agency and you're just kind of like and then it becomes I I think there probably are a lot of agency owners who got overwhelmed with that. Okay, well that's great. What do I what do I do? I would just go on to Claude's own training program there and we put some of our team through that

as well because we use Claude as well as our own AI operating system kind of got mult multiple and I think that all I think also agencies are going to need to have multiple operating systems that they're using u but Claude's a great place to just just start go into there just understand what is beyond just chat if you're not there yet what is what is an agent which is like a skill in in Claude what is a knowledge base just get those B I think once you got the foundational understanding of okay what is

a knowledge base how that how can that help an AI tool okay what what is a skill agent how can that help me deliver certain processes that I do today and just start with pick one process that is fairly time consuming that you'd like to shorten or you want to deliver faster and just just try and automate it and and build it out and just there's nothing like just testing it yourself and doing things and that can be anyone it can be a executive It could be the CEO. We try and encourage everybody at all

levels to be able to know how to build an agent. I think everyone needs to know the foundational skill of it because then if you're using like a no code system to build it, you still want to know is that right? You don't you can't just trust it. It's like oh it's built the agent for me. You need to understand how it works. So I think a Bit of just training to get the basics foundations. The technology piece can come afterwards. I think everyone's trying to do the big thing first or they're like, "Oh, if

I could get AI to talk to all of my nine different operating like nine different tools and HubSpot talks to zero and zero like then life don't try any of that." Like there's no point doing all of those things. Just start with something small. Nice. Are you or do you feel prepared for the future, the next five years in the business? And where do you see things going in the next 5 years in agency? I think I feel pretty good and pretty pretty prepared. I think that's because we've been through this period of you know

we've we've become leaner over the last last few years. Um we've we've restructured the the op both like the um administration and operation side of things with within the business and we're at the moment going through a program with with our strategists account directors where we're we're we're trying to get them ready for the next 5 years. And so what that means is that back to that piece about that human brilliance. Okay, look, we think where you're going to add a lot of value is being more involved in the sales process than before and understanding

how you can go into an organization and help them with their AI integration across marketing, sales and operations. And the the the good thing is the markets they are there more and more people asking about it, but it's not it's not mature yet at all. It's not, you know, people aren't there yet. So I think if we if we all agency owners had the have a bit of time to to get up to speed so that when that I think when the market opens up and there's people looking for these type of services they've got

a team able to a able to deliver it. So at the moment feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel conf confident we're we're in the right place. Uh I what was the second part of the question to that? Where do you think it's going to be in five years? I I think us as a

business and we haven't made this move yet. We're we're providing these AI let's call it AI integration services. We're providing them alongside our performance marketing services. In five years, I think there's strong likelihood that there'll be two probably before five years there'll be two distinct two distinct businesses. uh they they'll be you know they'll they'll share the same um opex for example they might have same HR teams and and finance teams but I think there'll be two diff very different delivery teams where at the moment uh at at the moment there's one and I don't

know part of me is doing that because I don't know the future of performance marketing Like I don't know I don't know if it will be what it is today it will certainly be different but I don't know if everyone will be able to just do stuff themselves in house so part of is a protection mechanism for us to have because I think that other AI integration piece there'll be a lot of demand for it. I'm I'm sure of it. I've seen it seen before and people can I use the same analogy for Google ads

everybody like well oh when I used to tell people I run Google ads they're like well I can go on and run Google ads myself but we you know we built a whole industry out of this right like people still want experts and they still want people to hold their hand and they still want people to do it for you. I think the same thing will happen with AI integration where people be like, "Okay, I need someone to help me with an AI operating system with Claude and and and help set that up." So, I

think we're just trying to get ready for that. But I think that's if you, you know, ask me to put a bet on it. I reckon that part might be bigger than a performance marketing agency in the future. Which part excites you more? For me, it would be the AI integration piece, but that's because I think I'm an entrepreneur, you know, that I'm always looking at the next the next shiny thing. I'm a I'm a quick start, not a finisher. So, I'm always on to I'm always on to the next thing and trying to create

something. So, yeah, that there's a there's a there's a bias in that, but I still like going in the odd meta in Google accounting, having a look at how performance is doing. I've learned not to touch the campaigns now. The team get very annoyed if I do. The gap's too large now. That's nice. Are you or have you got plans for actually going to the market with that AR integration piece? So, at the moment It sounds like it's somewhat of a you know the performance marketing is there and it's not a Trojan horse of course

it's it's there people need that but then people are coming naturally and finding the integr AI integration piece afterwards. Are you are you planning on on going being forthcoming with that and just going direct to the market with that side? Yes. Yeah. So, one of the questions and we I think we were talking about this just before we started is like actually do we need to build a separate website brand and put that on there because we've got it in within our current website but there you know just from an SEO perspective and all the

things that we want to put on there it's like okay hold on there's actually quite a lot of content and pages we want to put out so do we need to separate it and make it its own thing and then we also the value proposition becomes a bit muddled as well and we have had that feedback to be honest where some people be like not quite quite sure what you was talking about AI integration and but you're perform are you still just a performance market so I can see how it might be confusing for for

the you know the end end buyer you know the brands that we that that we're trying to trying to work with so yeah I think we're I would say by the end of this year ready for next year we will probably have a a go to market strategy for that that AI integration piece but you know touchwood at the moment we're getting enough opportunities through just our network and and the webinars and things that we're doing. What do you think you are going to? Now, I'm going to reframe that. If you were to start an

agency today and you don't have what you've got at the moment with all of the team members that you've got, all of the services that you have, in many cases, like us agency owners, we create this complexity for ourselves. Yeah. And I I think at least the agencies that the biggest danger are the real big agencies that have got this, you know, hundreds and hundreds of team members across all these different offices and like moving to an AI world is it's it's a scary place to be. I spoke to one of the big CRM a

couple of weeks ago came to one of our events. I won't name them, but there 2,000 team members and they were like our biggest fear at the moment is these new CRM. Like it's so hard for us to unravel this. So kind of understanding what that's like and making that transition in yourself. If you were starting from zero now, how would you build the business differently to how you build you're currently running it? I would I would probably look at from from a if I think first as a service layer, right? How are we going

to service clients? I would start with the premise with can one person manage an entire client. and then work out okay what tools is needed to do that because with the with the the possibilities of AI I do believe that if you started from scratch and said right this is the client these are objectives your job is to understand their objectives and deliver performance for them and look at the other services from a performance marketing standpoint This is not the not the AI integration side um I believe I believe one person could do Well, and

if they thought about what they needed and they built all the agents and the infrastructure, you obviously would need to have that technology skill or looked to buy it from somewhere or or get someone in to do it. That would be a almost better investment I think to build it with that from that premise because then you're going to be so much more efficient and profitable in um in any of the work work that you do. And then I think also from a from a marketing marketing standpoint again build these marketing funnels that can be

fully fully automated. I think I think the possibility again is again to do that. You know you can whatever you're doing you can just you can automate the entire flow like something we're working I was just working on today. We're we're trying to improve our posting on on Instagram and we get daily news on AI and we got this faceless carousel builder that builds the the content and then builds the assets and then can deploy it straight to now I haven't put them all together yet but they're all individual like oh why don't we just

now we're this point about human intervention maybe we don't need to be involved in this piece so we could make automate this out news and information every day going out I could probably automate email out as well build the email I think email we talked about earlier is the most underused marketing channel and actually if I was a new brand thinking about it now I would probably focus everything on building my email list and thinking about strategies and content I can put out I could make 10 Lead magnets if I if if I didn't have

all the other complexities that we've got. I could probably build 10 10 lead magnets tomorrow or tonight and put them out and start marketing them and you know run ads to them and put them out and and email email sign up on meta is actually or and even Google you can it's very low cost you don't need a huge budget you start building that email list up and then you and then you automate the emails out to those and you would you could I think you could you know it's probably something we should do I

should do actually but yeah but because I think those things all a lot of these things we don't do are not are not fun in I find in my case because it feels like too much effort. It's like okay, who am I going to get involved to do it? How much time is it going to take? But I think all those barriers don't don't really exist anymore. I'd agree. And then it's just being able to ruthlessly prioritize which are the things that matter the most. How are how are you finding that with yourself personally like

being able to prioritize the right things and not context switch so much from from new different things? Yeah. So I mean it's a lifelong challenge I think as well especially my personality type. So yeah I um I try to pick the pick the battles I think we're going to win in both internally like I might have a great idea but if everybody's not on board with it it's like okay let's let's not tackle that. I've learned to take a bit of pressure off and go okay that seems like a good idea but maybe now's not

the right time. Let's let's do that in let's do that in six let's do that in six months. I think for us for us now like everything that we're trying to focus the projects on are if we do this project internally for example Let's say it's a an AI optim uh optimization project could we turn that into a product that we could market that's kind of the framing that we've got. So if someone comes up with something like, okay, we could do that, but could is that valuable as a product out to then we then

we probably wouldn't do it. So we're trying to build things that we think we could productize and and market because they become lead magnets and that type of thing. So as an example, we've we've built one for create this this creative UGC um creator that we've built. We've built on top of that a whole creative pipeline that takes all the ad data, finds the patterns, finds the data points, and produces a brief that you could give to a a client that they could give to a creative team, or you could use the creative builder. So,

that whole workflow is optimized for us to help serve better for our clients, but we know we can take that to market. So, that's going to be the next product that we take to take to market and with a with a white paper and webinar and that type of thing as well. M nice. And when you say take it to market, are you going to sell it or are you just going to use it as a a free lead magnet to get people into the funnel? So will we'll give the how you can run like

why you need to run lots of creatives for something like Meta with the Andromeda update and how you can do it. So kind of give the the theory behind it and some of the steps towards it. But if you want us to run it for you and set it up for you, we could do that for you. Then that that would become a paid paid part. And then if then they want the production off it, then there'll be the production at at the end of it. And then you might have then the Trojan horse that

okay actually do you want to take over the meta account and manage that or actually could you help me with my overall growth strategy? Yeah, makes sense. It's interesting. I was thinking about this the other day, just the idea that if everybody's got the buff, no one has the buff. And so if anybody everybody now in theory can create sophisticated lead magnets which are micro SASS within themselves, we we get extremely excited about these things. and and and actually I think there's probably a a good few years or or maybe at least 12 months I'd

like to think where you know agencies like you and I and other agencies that are thinking about it on a more advanced sense and building these really great assets have this unique advantage in the marketplace but at some point everyone's going to be doing that at some point someone will take that system that you've built upload it into their iOS and say replicate this for me and it'll be able to do that and I think that's going to be interesting at that point to observe what happens but at least for Now I think there's a

there's a there's a there's a there's a window. There's a window. Yeah. There's a window. Yeah. And I Yeah. And I think that Yeah. To your point exactly. I think you know we're you asked the question about 5 years like I think okay what what do we know we can is going to work for six or 12 months. Let's do that and we have to I think we all have to be really nimble and ad adaptable to how the market's changing and you know at the moment GEO is a great product in terms of this

what everybody wants working well but who knows in 12 months it might be something completely different that that changes it. I I for me I think the good thing is I don't know if you felt this postco I felt like there was no change in the industry nothing happened everything was just the same like the Odd new type of campaign type of it was nothing really that exciting and we need change to be able to be innovative and find new products to market and sell and talk to businesses about so everyone then also the brands

get excited whereas I felt for a while it was just oh nothing's changed so we'll just change agency or maybe we'll do it in nothing and it wasn't really that enjoyable. So actually it whilst it's like there small windows I think it it's creative and it's a bit you know I think we should enjoy the journey as well. Yeah I agree. I agree. Are you motivated by an exit in the business and does the kind of uncertainty I suppose of of the next 5 to 10 years drive you towards that or are you you know

you're you're you're on this ship regardless of where it goes? No, I think we I think we've always had a um an an exit in mind. Now that might not mean exiting as a sale. might mean exiting and staying on as a you know we're still quite involved in the business both myself and Steve the other co-founder. It might mean being less less in less involved and having having the team running. I we're we're quite fortunate we've got a kind of the senior management team have been with us a really long time. They've been with

us through that growth period in 2000 from 2016. They've been there. They understand the culture of the company, understand how we work, you know what we like, what we don't like. they can challenge us as well. So I think there's a team there that we could you know hand over the reigns to um that have you know got a lot of loyalty you know understand what We'd want from from the business and how we want it to grow. So I think either two things will happen over the next next 5 years. I think there will

either be some some form of an exit or maybe us taking less of a less of a day-to-day um involvement in the business. I think yeah the the beach is calling me at at some point. So yeah, but I'm I'm trying to what I'm trying to do now is spend spend more time doing those things. Like I think you as you start to get older I I hit 50 last year. So you I I look at this decade as being you know hopefully my health is really good for a long time but like I think

50 to 60 might be the the best you know best health years for me now. Hopefully it's not. But so I want to I personally want to make the most of that. So that might mean we have a working from anywhere policy. Anyone can go for a month and and work from anywhere. So you know I'll be using that in to go into India. I'm going to go I've got um have a place there. I can do some travel in India as well. So I think taking some of these some of those advantages I think

with because of the nature of our business we have that ability now to to be able to go and work remotely. I think so part of it is maybe if I do more of that. I haven't done as much I would have liked to. Maybe if I start to do that a bit more and or go and go go to the UK. I love the coast. I love cold water swimming. If I if I do that more often and I can work and still get my walks in, do that. Maybe maybe I can carry on

and you know still have a still have a good involvement as well. Nice. I've got some rapid fire questions for you. Okay. One of which you've already answered. The first one is one brand that you'd love to work with that you haven't already. Vivo barefoot. Nice. I'm wearing shout out. Yeah, there you go. Look at that. We did a we we work with the British Footwear Association and we did a go workshop and I used Vivo Barefoot as my examples. I said, "If anybody knows Vivo Barefoot, can you put them in touch?" So, it's good.

Yeah, I've been I've been only Vivos now for the past like four years. So, Oh, amazing. Yeah, there you go. So, what about you? I've had them for four years, but I've I I don't know what happens. Sometimes I just stop wearing them. And I'm like, why have I stopped wearing my Vivo? So, I've got these and I've got the Vivo sandals now. So, I've got them set now. Yeah. Nice, nice, nice, nice. You kind of already answered this, but most underrated agency growth strategy. You said email, but I wondered if something else comes to

mind when I say that. Yeah. Email marketing. Best AI tool right now that isn't yours. Oh, and not Claude. Ards. Ards over Higsfield. Have you tried Higsfield? I haven't tried Higsfield. I know the team used Higsfield, but I think still it's still good. If no one's used it, that's a great one. I just wondered if there was an argument. No. Yeah. Okay. One thing every agency owner should stop doing? Micromanaging. One thing you wish you learned earlier as a founder. Not everything's in your control. Ricky, thanks so much. Thank you.