How to Sell Your Agency

great so we're live thanks to everyone for joining um this episode is about how to grow and sell your agency so we've got a brilliant panel um we've got Lisa aan and will so firstly a big thank you to all three of you because I know you're you're very busy so really appreciate you putting your time into this and uh yeah and again I think it's something that the audience can take from in terms of their own Journeys start by saying quite a lot of agency Founders may start with an exit in mind um some of them may just start and then realize that they don't want to do this forever and they'd like to find a way to um yeah maybe generate obviously some Capital value um and move on to something new and um there's different ways of running these agent but I think certainly in terms of what you've a so yeah definitely um yeah something all credit to you in terms of your Journeys and they're both or all three of them very different um there's no one way to get there and I think in this webinar we're going to hear from yeah kind of all three in terms of what you've done um what's worked really well and equally kind of some learnings what you're up to now what you would do again so kind of like the whole journey really so if anyone has any questions as we're going through this then certainly leave them in the comments and I'll try and pick some out towards the end and make sure that we can we can cover at least a few of those as well so if we start with a quick intro so you can get the background in terms of the journeys um I think that would help to set scene So Lisa would you mind just doing a quick background top level in terms of your story and appreciate that's quite tricky but then we'll we'll dig into more of the detail afterwards yeah sure so um yeah I'm Lisa pora um I founded agency called ver search and SEO agency back in uh 2009 um I'd worked in SEO for a while when I started um the agency and uh I think my uh my journey was like very much uh on I I very much intended to grow to sell from the start um so uh that was a um very much intention for me so I I grew it uh to uh we were about 35 people in 2017 and we sold to Omnicom Media Group uh and had a threeyear earnout uh uh there's so many things I could I could say about this I'm trying to keep it short uh so I I then had a three-year earnout uh and then uh that was quite a challenge so we can go into that uh further I then uh uh left in 2020 so my last year of R out was uh covid which was quite quite Big Challenge uh and then I started doing standup comedy because you know uh what doesn't kill you makes you funnier um and uh now I run a mentoring and advisory company called activis ACA means uh real and authentic in Norwegian uh which is what this weird accent is by the way uh it's not Irish or South African I've just been there too long uh so yeah that's that's a little intro of me perfect brilliant thanks and definitely realize there's a lot more we can dig into and I'm sure we will say thanks for that okay Adrian hello yes so where do I start well probably from the last century uh 1999 I started my Agency company called Blue Leaf grew it and uh over the years became quite well known for e-commerce and did very well in that space But unfortunately I guess it went sort of bit PE tongue in 2013 when uh I was my starting the year my mom passed away which wasn't good I went through a painful divorce for all I was told I was insolvent and the business needed to uh to close so it wasn't good I lived under my desk for three months trying to figure my life out and thankfully did do that I I was given a book called traction and read the book took action with it changed my business got a a funding Circle local loan and rebuilt the business and then thankfully sold it in 2019 to a global company um yes I did celebrate I guess um I was doing that then for like four years sort of lost my place a little bit in in business life really trying to figure it out and it was quite hard from that point of view and then refound it when I picked up the the traction book again and and now I'm a professional EOS implementor and absolutely loving it just working with leadership teams every day and it's just just fantastic fantastic that's great perfect and um and will I've just realized all of you I think exited at a very Sumer time possibly certainly within 12 months if not six months if actually no that's wrong I think Lisa's earnout was 2020 but still very similar similar time timings so yeah will do you want to give a background about your journey yeah absolutely so uh my co-founder Duncan Morris and I started a company called distilled back in 200 five and we started out in web design got into SEO and we didn't have a plan I think we're like the the anti- Lisa in this respect um had had no idea where we were going we just had fun along the way we ended up being a little bit unfocused so so we created uh offices in three cities we were in London New York Seattle we had the search love conference business and the distilled you online training platform um so we were just kind of amusing ourselves I guess and um then fast forward towards in the late 201s we started um an R&D team that started building the platform that would become search pilot which you can see is what I'm doing now and um in late 2019 we entered into a process that culminated in selling distilled at the end of January 2020 which yeah um uh you can um there's PL plenty of Co stor to be told and but good timing and so we sold basically we sold sold the agency and the conference's business to brain laabs and I'd known Dan the founder of brain laabs since he spoke at our conferences search so the conferences did have a point after all um and yeah in the process we spun out as say the the platform that became search pilot which is what I'm now running which is uh back to bootstrapped we we've um brain Labs at one point put an investment in we bought them out and so we're back to an independent startup doing SEO testing for large Enterprise websites which is a ton of fun and I think we'll get into all the tips and stuff but I think one of the things that's really worked well for me is having that next thing to go on to I think if I just sold and then stopped or walked away I would have gone a little bit crazy some people might say crazier uh and that yes that that's been important for me so my structure was a little different because I was going on to run search pilot I did have to work with the brain laabs team for some period of time but it wasn't an earnout over a longer time period so um it was structured as a a shareholding rather than an earnout uh so I stayed full-time six months and then um part-time for a little bit longer after that but these days I'm 100% doing search pilot great and I think the the latter point on that of figuring out what you're doing next I know there's again everyone's got a different Journey but I've certainly heard some people who have gone on to um the next business some people who have taken time off and enjoyed it and other people who maybe struggled little and then come back and again it's like but knowing like until you do it it's probably not easy to even know what's what's coming next right so I think we we certainly put some time into talking about how you kind of navigated that one in your your individual ways I think where to start for me is kind of almost like going back to the early stage of how you g up company so it's interesting Le you mentioned having an exit in mind from the start will you mentioned kind of figuring it out maybe as you got along again this is what I mean there's no right or wrong answer on this but ultimately I do think I'm probably guilty of this myself sometimes I'm kind of like how do we improve the value of a company and the answer is we just grow actually just focus don't worry so much about the multiple and everything else that goes with it and actually how do you grow how do you get to that scale where actually you're attractive to that point if you actually want to sell in the first place but I think kind of going back to the early days it it would be interesting to hear from you kind of what you think really fueled that growth and fast-tracked you to a point that you could be exit ready um and then obviously there's a a point from there where that becomes more realistic but yeah I start Rel leas on this one but for you um was there a turning point in terms of when you really became say a more serious agency if that's the right way describing it in terms of getting to that next yeah um so um I think around so weirdly the the the kind of turning point for us was actually the the the toughest year because obviously you everyone has in mind that that the the main main thing is to get your profit up and there are a lot of advises in m&a companies that goes you need to get to one million um in profit or iita before uh you kind of ready to sell um but uh I think that's a bit different if you are a specialist agency like SEO but also so basically around 2014 there was a lot of changes in the SEO industry and I've been running a Content team of the agency uh which was basically link development or link building we we called It Old School uh me and will have been around about the same time in the same industry so um and uh at that time I had quite a big content team and my profits were pretty bad well I thought they were bad um and it was only around like 60k in profit that year and I really knew that I had to make a huge change in order to be able to grow and and really you know get get ahead of the competitors so in uh January I think it was January 2015 I actually restructured and refocused so instead of doing a Content kind of LED team that was uh was writing blogs and articles and stuff this was old school um and I decided to close that team and and start a kind of a creative team so hire designers developers and then uh starting a Outreach team which is more about digital PR which is very different in terms of how you approach the kind of Link development now this is where things got really tricky because I couldn't really get everyone to understand that this was needed in order for us to grow and um I had to make some some big cuts and actually uh I think it was about 40% of the agency that I had to cut to then be able to start a whole different direction and so from January 2015 where the profit models were not great um and and the actual profit um that's really where we started growing really fast so for like by the end of 2015 we started then winning Awards we won like best SEO agency and a lot of the SEO kind of specific um uh search Awards and stuff um and it was only two years after that that we end up selling so I would say that you know the journey is a lot about learning and learning What will what will keep you uh set you apart from your competitors um and my focus were very much about doing really quality work and getting you know more for the time that you spent so we ended up kind of although we were an SEO agency we ended up almost looking more like a creative agency so we used to say that we were like uh we're like 50s adct sex but we execute like Geeks and that very much kind of took us in a very different direction and I really do think that that is what what helped our sell because we were doing something in a very different way than um a lot of the competitors I think like distilled was also um really heavy on this and were really good at this but there weren't many of us that were doing this kind of uh link development and so I would say focusing on things that you know the hardest years might be the years that you have the biggest um uh acceleration and and growth so it is also usually the hardest ones in terms of you know getting people on board and stuff but that that for me I that's when I really learned that making those difficult decisions that not everyone understands that's usually where you end up finding the growth yeah and I think the one thing that might be underappreciated in some ways is speaking about this in 2024 you did digital PR Outreach creative SEO that's quite common place now but when you did that that was a risk there were I remember we we made the shift in 2012 when we became part of Blu glass who were doing this already in the US and content markeet in the US at that stage was more developed than it was in the UK at that point time and I think you must have been probably around that time if not earlier Lisa and it felt like a risk I remember a lot of people saying oh this will never catch on why are they doing this and yeah it's like I say it sounds like an obvious move at this point in time if you fast forward 10 years everything's easy in hindsight but back then what you did in pivoting the business that takes a lot of guts in terms of believing what you're doing and yeah kind of having that vision and not just the vision but the follow through and exe execution to be able to do it and certainly as a i' say an outside view but we've known each other pretty well for a while and competed in certain spaces as well but equally that would be for me a turning point in terms of I think you probably had good clients beforehand but then you took that into kind of global very well recognized Brands by being able to offer a service like you say at quality that not many other people could live up to so and also I I specialized also in international so we did Outreach digital PR in in 10 different countries and I think that's also a a big kind of cell like if you can again what how if everyone if you everyone draws a circle draw across like who was that said that it's oh God it's that um ad ad except guy Rory suland and I really like that quote because you have to set yourself apart and there were very few agencies that could do multilingual but London is it's there's not a language you can't find in London um so again the the kind of creative campaigns ideas and that and and do being able to do in several languages set us apart and that I again I think was a a big contributor to to be able to um sell absolutely and like you say it then takes you from doing kind of SEO or digital PR in one market to four five six potentially and that obviously unlocks budgets along the way as well as uh yeah kind of being able to those clients so yeah definitely you're right in London it's yeah it's right and any like any any language but also the utilization of that being able to get you know the the the money out of uh earning more money if you have if you have one client that are in several countries you can actually get better margins by being able to to roll out in several so that's also about getting getting the the the margins right yeah absolutely okay I'm just I'm going to turn to will because I feel like there'll be similarities between your journey and Lisas for sure in terms of what those early stages look like and again I know distill have certainly had a very strong reputation since you started really but you only kind of grown from strength to strength over that time and I think it would be interesting to hear kind of like your thoughts well and I know you put a lot of work into kind of the thought leadership side and how you kind of position agency and attract clients it'd be interesting to hear kind of what that looked like and if there was always like a flywheel effect at a certain stage that really saw distilled take off yeah it's uh it's really interesting thinking back on it because there are some things that yeah absolutely worked in those kind of ways um it's interesting actually one of the things that most had me not nodding along with Lisa though was coming out of the tough year so um we had we had a coup couple of tough times I think one just before and one just after the time that you're mentioning that you you were mentioning there Lisa um some self-inflicted probably some Market inflicted you know just that one one was definitely us we just tried to expand too fast and we heard too many people in one go and um yeah ended up in a bad place uh profitability wise and had to make some changes so the things that did work I think well expanding to the US worked for us um but I know it plenty of people that it hasn't worked for so it's not it's not not a panace here uh for us it worked I think off the back of the previous thing that had worked which was the the fortuitous timing of essentially when we got into trying to do our own content you know like you say the thought leadership they kind of putting ourselves out there was just at that moment when it it was I we I think we all met on the SEO Mo's blog comments uh back in you know 200 whatever six or something and of course you know the SEO Community as a whole was there then moved to Twitter and there was there was a lot of space for blogging essentially speaking at conferences those kinds of things I think a lot of those space are a lot more crowded or it's different kind of challenges getting started today so you can't necessarily pick up a thing that worked in 2006 and just put it down in 2024 and expected to work but for us that partnership with SEO moos followed by the expansion into the US followed by the conference series we had a number of years where it felt like it felt like that growth was easy honestly um and but I remember getting slapped in the face that you know the first year we didn't grow Revenue uh which was like I don't know 10 years in nine years in something like that and I was like what what is this nonsense I I I thought we were supposed the businesses are supposed to grow every year this is this is ludicrous and um that was really tough kind of psychologically and emotionally but our best ever Revenue profit year came the year after that first ever down year so you kind of I think I guess one of the things that I would say worked for us was swallowing the hard pill like T taking the tough decisions when uh when the circumstances arose um and although we did a lot of those same content things that that you were talking about Lisa that was ultimately not the direction that really worked for the still like there was a moment in time where I think we thought it might be we thought it might be the future I I would say probably 2013 we were talking a lot about you know the death of TV and the future of digital um content in in all those kinds of ways and that wasn't necessarily wrong in the macro Trend but it wasn't where we ended up succeeding where we ended up succeeding was really getting back to our roots in technical uh Technical and strategic thinking and the content stuff put us on the map in with certain people but the um as you talk I going back to to search part now which is all about onsite SEO testing I think if I could go back and give myself advice 10 plus years ago it would be focus and differentiate like find the thing that you're uniquely passionate about uniquely placed to be good at and I think yeah we we probably got stretched a bit too thinly a bit too widely and uh there were plenty of people telling me at the time but you know I'm I'm no content genius and so um there was definitely room to specialize into things that I was going to be better place to lead yeah I think that's great because I think sometimes you can get kind of lost in the let's follow the market this is where's going but actually what do you have to add that is better or different to someone else and if you can't answer that then actually maybe that's not the right space for you and again to the whole point of there's no single way of doing this um everyone always everyone has to pick what works for them and just try and this is why you can't really copy someone in terms of if if you do you might do okay but actually what's your unique Spin and angle behind that so so yeah definitely definitely really interested to here and Adrian it sounds like you've had quite the journey yourself in terms of kind of ups and downs and yeah certainly like you say kind of bringing that back and getting through to the other side so firstly like congratulations getting that point and secondly in terms of what that looks like do you want to just add a bit more context in terms of yeah kind of sure i' I'd almost start with where did it it's up to you but kind of where did it go wrong where did you fix it I think that would be really interesting to hear yeah I mean we started off as a generalist so we were doing sort of anything marketing advertising anything like that this is 99 2000 2001 the internet was coming along we figured we' got to do something about web because that's up and coming so we bolted that in and we tried to make that work um I I guess in some respect we started to to get famous for certain types of work we're only a small agency up in chesher we really should have been Dairy Farmers because we're in fields in chesher um but not the Hotpot of digital but we started to get known for doing websites for curtains which is amazing just a lead got to to do a website for a curtain manufacturer and then we picked up next and then we picked up Laur Ashley and we did their website configurator so in some respect we created a niche and if we can create a niche and get famous for that you tend to get more of it and that's what we did we got more of it now I guess there's only so many websites current websites we can do so we didn't really keep going that way but we did figure that e-commerce was our thing and that's what we started to do more of really um I guess where did it go wrong is we over traded we over traded we took the eye off the ball and a little bit of huus setting because we were winning multiple Awards we got L rashley we got Red Bull we' got Tate we got some great Brands and we probably got a a bit of hubis which made us take the eye off the ball and be a little bit cocky and over traded and that's where it sort of went wrong but that's why we had to make that big shift you know my big PIV shift as Lisa said sometimes in that worst year that was my worst year I've not not won that bad where I was you know told to close up and I was also personally bankrupt more or less so it was a a real pivotal change I think people people do things for different reasons don't they I mean some do it more for the pleasure and the satisfaction and the gain and some do it to avoid the the pain and probably more do it to avoid the pain and now that point for me was I'm not closing those doors so I'm going to figure it out and I think figuring out means reading speaking with people you know testing some stuff and then making your plan and aiming not to get distracted from it there's a lot of information out there that can distract you another shiny penny another book another best system another I've done this what about what are you doing you know and that can distract you from your plan which could take you out you know our plan was by following the EOS system we did that and it it created that nice linear access out of being under my desk to selling so I guess there's a few learning points but what in that second part of that Journey we did get more niched again so I mentioned about curtains the second Niche and probably the better one was the Salesforce Commerce Cloud piece so we sort of attacked Salesforce Commerce cloud and we ended up being the ultimate Salesforce Commerce Cloud experience and that's what we became sort of famous for in that period and that's why we had six companies all knocking on our door in a sort of a six-month period wanting to buy us without us going to Market they saw what we were doing and they came looking for us so that's there's a few learnings I think in there about niching about you what you're going to focus on and stuff like that yeah and I think there's a common theme cross all three of you which is focusing down on what you do best and niching so there's as an agency founder you always you don't want to be in a position where you turn down business because you've started from nothing and you just want to take whatever you can get and in the early days year one I think that kind of makes sense but actually if you're year 10 into that then you're kind of like yeah kind of trying to be the Jack of all trades and master of nothing and I think actually in that case if you can position yourselves behind a type of client or a sector of client and really kind of pinpoint who it is that you work with best then actually then you're going to attract them as actually being a generalist you're not really all that attractive to them in the first place so I think it's there's certainly a lot to be said for that positioning and equally like once you've got the case studies the track record the next win becomes easier the first one's probably the hardest and then the second one still a bit tricky but once you've built up that kind of level of experience and expertise then you become a more trusted bet rather than an outsider and a pitch so yeah I think it's it's just reinforcing in terms of those common themes of what's worked for you and I think that's quite common actually that quite a lot of people do find their Niche and you have to find it it probably doesn't come on day one so it's quite interesting and then Adrian come back to if you look at if you look at most many companies they change from when they open up don't they ibms and all sorts of companies they start doing one thing and they end up doing something else so you do have to shift you've got to refocus and uh um you know our end game was being focused on Salesforce quite frankly yeah yeah absolutely I think that's right I think you have to we had we started off as a a SEO analytics payperclick and social media and then I was like I'm not actually interested in anything else than the SEO bit and then within the SEO bit I was like I'm really interested in the links bit because why is it so hard and and I think that that's really important as a Founder I think you really have to get to the bit that you really enjoy thinking about and what you really problems you really like solving because when it gets hard you don't give up if you're really passionate about it and that really is the key bit it's like making sure you follow follow through to the the the parts that you find really interesting makes a huge difference to whether you give up when it gets hard and and that's it the only difference between success and and and failing is giving up really yeah absolutely and think all of your stories are definitely Testament to that I know so Mike who's our chairman always talks about be fixed on your destination but flexible on how you get there and if you're not flexible on how you get there and you just I've got an idea on day one and 10 years later you're still following that plan it's you're probably out of date almost certainly in this industry so yeah I think trying to figure out actually what works for you along that journey is crucial um Adrian I was going to come back to you in terms of when you saw kind of exit as a possibility because obviously at stages where you're struggling as a company you might have it in your back of your mind of this is where I want to get to but at what Point does that become realistic uh yeah when it was destitute there was no possibility of that ever happening but um uh yeah I guess we we started then trading out and we got to quite a good place I wouldn't say exactly where we thought we needed to be but I think our specialization created that for us so I mentioned earlier that sort of six companies were knocking on the door all were after the the sort of ebit number that we were trading at which wasn't that sort of magical trading at a million pound sort of thing that all the advisers were same but our our uniqueness was very nice to one company and so they went for us because they said well we'll give you a multiplier on revenue and we're like oh yeah that sounds good let's go with that one so uh it you know it's not always about profit now I Frank Frankly there's probably less deals around where it is multipliers on Revenue but we got it you know and I didn't go hunting for it it found me um because we did have that specialization that they they wanted and and territory we we were the only ones really independent in uh UK so they bought that footprint basically that's great and Lisa you mentioned you were kind of building this from the start in some respects how yeah kind of often would you think about that in the early days if at all or kind of and what point did that feel like so I think it's important to know the background of this so I I grew up in Norway and and both my parents were bankrupt and I moved loads like 18 times before I was 18 and I moved to the UK at 20 so um and in I had my first daughter at 26 so I literally had never had any money whatsoever and no security so it wasn't like I was thinking like oh I want to be a big time CEO and I want to sell it was more about I really need to get to Financial Security for me and my daughter and and that was the main motivator it wasn't really that the sales thing but I knew that I could I I needed to focus on building a great agency and and although that was in the back of my mind that wasn't the focus I never think you should focus or or Target on money because uh again it it doesn't really um it doesn't really resonate with your heart so if you don't really enjoy what you do it becomes really difficult and and money is like one of those things that um like even if you think you really really want it it's more the things that will allow you that that uh really is important with that so uh for me the focus was never really like oh I need to get to this bit this year but the focus was very much like how do I make it like more efficient profitable how do we do get better results so we can get bigger clients keep them longer all that kind of stuff was really the the focus yeah that's a great answer I think you're right the why you do it has to have more purpose which clearly your answer is brilliant in terms of that's not a number it's yeah kind of how that makes you feel and what you want to achieve and why you want to do it as opposed to the the how you do it increase Revenue make sure your margins are strong etc etc that's more tactical right so yeah yeah yeah that's very important um will for for you obviously you've had different stages of that Journey for growing distilled you've had search pilot was previously part of distilled was there a moment where you were kind of I'm chasing two rabbits with the software in the agency and you needed to pick one or was it were you happy because I know some people are very much you should build software inside an agency helps you long term some people are very much pick one and just do that or hire a CEO or like this again different to do that was there a turning point for you decided to Sally agency and move on to the software that happened basically simultaneously with the opportunity coming along to do the transaction and I think I was very lucky we were very lucky that that particular opportunity came along at that time because it provided the perfect shape of deal for us because what so let's go back slightly go back I don't know 18 months two years before the deal my co-founder uh Duncan and I I remember we we got together and we had one of those like what are we doing chats and we'd talk we we'd realized that we both were excited about where the software was going we were okay doing it within the orices of distilled but to really get where we wanted to go we wanted to to to put more into it to go faster to take more risks to um you know invest in it more heavily and we both felt very nervous doing that within this within the entity that we had created because that was essentially 99.9% of our wealth right like was tied up in this one IL liquid private company and you know we were paying ourselves okay by that point and we were we we'd had one or two dividends so so like you know we were in a very PR privileged position really compared to um The World At Large but we hadn't had any kind of real Capital event and we so we said okay if we're going to do that over the next couple years we need to find a way to um yeah to take some money out to take some money off the table to to drisk our personal lives so that we could be a bit more all in on on growing the software but again we were we were open to different ways of doing that and um I think it's only with hindsight that I looked back on actually I was quite tired at that point you know coming up on 15 years of running an agency it was uh it's a lot agencies are an amazing business because you can get them started with basically nothing you know you can uh when we got started we were 25 we didn't have kids yet we didn't have mortgages we just didn't spend very much and managed to buy a laptop each and literally got you know our seed Capital was like £2,000 or something and you can bootstrap an agency from absolutely nothing that's the amazing thing about it but I think very very hard businesses to run over the long Hall and um I I'm now I think yeah for my own kind of mental health it was it was kind of a good a good time to be to be moving on and having that opportunity so this opportunity came along at first Dan and I couldn't figure out how to make it work because although Duncan and I were most excited about the software piece and brain Lam was most excited about the agency piece we couldn't actually figure out how to do the financial engineering to like tease these things apart and it was actually their investors who figured out a a structure and they were like here's back literally back of an envelope like here's how you do it and and it it really kind of worked um for us and I say it just happened to be it was almost I think it was almost exactly 18 months after we'd had that conversation and so that summer summer 2019 Duncan I looking at this offer going well this is actually what we said we wanted and it's it's a really hard decision but then we went back and we were like when we when we did didn't have this on the table this is what we said we wanted this frees us up personally to take the risks with the next thing we're still going to own the software bit which is the bit that we're really excited about and I'd been telling myself that the the path was grow the software within within the agency be a software enabled agency and I was like the the biggest success version I could come up with was almost pivoted and at some point would become a software business with the Consulting team that we built up being essentially the Professional Services team of the of the software and um yeah that would have been possible but it would have been a longer path more of a slog I think more of a risk in many ways and of course if we'd actually tried to do that we'd have run headlong into 2020 so um it's in the end worked out for the best that yeah that's that's great and it's interesting actually I actually listened to a different Duda um podcast you probably all know Mike grian so he interviewed um one of her co- founders of I Prospect and they said one of their challenges was the software tool that they developed at I Prospect was limited because they could only sell it to their own client base and actually kind of having that as a separate company entity and brand then opens it up to more brands that you can potentially Target but equally opens up to agencies as well in terms of Partnerships and stuff that yeah again this different routs I think the other Trend and there's certainly exceptions to every rule but I think quite a lot of Founders are good at the zero to one style how do you get that company off the ground established almost like up to the call it two maybe three million pounds Revenue I think quite often the people that take that to the next level it's a different skill set um and quite often they're different people as well so I think certainly in terms of how you then get beyond that point you at least need a very strong senior leadership team around you and that is a completely different makeup of an agency opposed to as opposed to what gets you started so again like thinking about is that right for you on your journey at that stage I think is an important question as well um just sorry this sorry I was just gonna add because um not many people know but I built software within verb as well I built built a crawler um and it took me five years to build this and one piece of advice I would give for anyone that does this I think will'll it it ended up uh being going really well for you but um because I didn't separate it out uh before we got the offers that kind of was sold as part of the agency but I really wish I had separated that out as a separate business before going out uh to sale because that could have potentially been worth a lot a lot more um and that was like that's one of my biggest kind of like oh because it's it's nowhere to be seen now yeah sorry go on will no I was gonna say on that uh zero to one versus growing from there I've I've been spending putting a lot of energy into trying to person devel like I want to I want to take sear pilot bigger than distilled everil was um and uh which actually we're we're not now far off but um want to grow grow substantially and do that journey and we've been able to build a that leadership team within the software business uh and some of those folks have been with me now for you I've been working them over a decade because they they were there in the distilled era which which um which is great but I think one of the challenges of doing that in the agency space is that the it's all those pressures on margins all the stuff we were talking about before around uh you know the the profit level if you are an agency with 2 million in Revenue H carving out the budget to hire a seriously powerful leadership team is really challenging and I looking back on it I definitely um I definitely didn't I at least I can look around other people who did it way better put it that way there's um I I didn't crack that next phase of agency growth that I've seen brain laabs has done for example people like will Reynolds at se um and they they've achieved that like next level of Breakout and um I I don't think I was the person to do that in the agency space and um I'm feeling much more much more aligned with doing it in in search pilot but um for me in the agency area I kept I kept hunting for the the the that next thing and that's where you know search love the conference series distilled you the training thing we we had other software before search pilot Lisa that didn't work and um yeah so I I I don't don't have like neat pieces of advice but it certainly is a very challenging I think that there's a few challenging points but that is certainly one of them getting from that like you know you've got something you hit the seven figures but how do you get it significantly bigger from there is absolutely and the selfawareness of what is it that you're good at how do you play to your strengths and how do you get people around you that can take that to the next level or in some cases obviously how do you maybe exit in order to allow kind of the team to grow and a different way or yeah but kind of being aware of what you enjoy and where you're at the best your best I think is really really crucial um Adrian I think you had a question yeah well it was just jumping in a little bit really you mentioned about SLT and Roblin going out and hiring an expensive SLC they can often be found within if they can be nurtured in the right way and that's what we did with ours was by bringing absolute Clarity to accountability and what we expected of each person what the role was what the function in the role and then who was in the right seat and checking we got the right person in the right seat it just helped us to to Really scale out now I think one thing making a bit of an assumption here that there's many business owners uh on on the uh webinar then what we sometimes find is that we sometimes fall out of love uh I love the spelling in AI so funny um it's a bit like mine um but you know often find that um we as business owners or Founders we sometimes fall out of love with our businesses and we sometimes find we're working for the worst boss in the world which is ourselves doing the long hours and paid the least so it's sometimes um a challenge to break out from that because that that filters down into the rest of the team and they feel it and so one of the turning points for me personally was when I realized that I was what's clust as the Visionary in in the Eos terms I I'm the Visionary but I was stuck in an integrator role which is like the C CEO sort you know managing director all that sort of stuff and that was a painful position because I would come into the business and I'd have read a book and then I'd tell my team what about this and explore this and they'd be like don't you want me to just do this so I sometimes sabotage my own business and it wasn't until I was sort of moved to this Visionary seat and blocked with an integrator that's what made the massive difference to us and the integrator was the detailed person the methodical person the person that beat the drum that could just stay in the detail and not get succumbed into new shiny pennies they just made the business tick and when I was blocked I couldn't get into these these that's when we just it's like Rocket Fuel that's when we just took off I think that's quite common as well yeah I had I had a similar story when um 2015 is when I hired my coo um Rebecca and the difference it made to the agency from the the kind of kind of my strength and her strength being yin and yang almost and the ability were able to grow at speed when you find the right people that work together is absolutely crucial yeah yeah I think there is I think there's almost I just made a note but I think there's a whole other episode here on how to manage a senior leip team certainly your experienced now aging with BOS and traction and everyone again has different ways of doing it but finding people that can complement your skills and equally everyone has different ways of doing things to try and give them enough autonomy and freedom to try and do that whilst holding them to account I think is really important um I'm just conscious of time so one thing I want to ask is let's take you kind of forward a little bit in terms of the point that you exited and I think if each of you could maybe give you us kind of a bit of a background on firstly how did it feel that moment that you did the deal um and secondly yeah kind of what would you share to other people if you could go back and tell yourself almost like three different things maybe one thing that you did really well um one thing that you'll do differently um and yeah kind of pick on those key things what would that be so yeah kind of I get a will for this one first you're looking quite thoughtful will so yeah yeah me how did that feel so I it felt I mean it felt great I it was um the the hardest bits for me were in the lead two times in the leadup to it one was I already mentioned actually just making the decision to go for it um when you we had the offer and we had to actually you know go and I found that very very hard I think you always look at an offer and you think um is this the best we can do is this good enough is it uh you know are we is this a thing that you know are we making the right decision and um having made that decision half a weight lifted but then you're kind of one thing I would say to to everyone which I was very very conscious of going through the whole thing is it's not definitely happening until it's definitely happened I know so many people whose deals have fallen through at the 11th Hour sometimes literally the at signing and until um until it's actually all signed and you the money's in the uh in the bank it's not definitely definitely happening and I told myself that so much that I kind of carried that weight around until the the last possible moment so that there's that that kind of moment lifting I mentioned earlier but having the next thing to go to I think was an accidental good move you know that wasn't kind of particularly deliberate it was just that was the way the the um the shape of everything worked out for us the thing we didn't get to do was really celebrate because the plan was to um have a couple of holidays in that first part of 2020 I think I spent uh at least six months of 2020 with negative credit card bills as all of the refunds came back on for all these holidays that we booked of uh that was supposed to happen I was supposed to have a a chef's table with my friends to celebrate my 40th that had happened during the deal so I couldn't even manag that that was booked I think for 15th of April 2020 um and uh yeah I was supposed to go skiing supposed to go to Greece like all these kind of Grace great kind of uh trips and that's something that I think obviously we just had no choice it was straight into covid planning and I was Crisis managing two businesses because I was at that point on the brain laabs executive board and uh trying to run search pilot the startup and both businesses trying to figure out how to how to survive the first half of 2020 but yes there was nothing I could have done about it but I I do think having not had it that decompression window is something that I think is probably quite um quite valuable if if folks can can kind of structure it that way um and I'm sure well I know Lisa I don't know Adrian story I know Lisa has a lot to say about the earnout bit but that period of time working for me it was only quite short working for someone else but it's an adjustment and um mine actually was was really great all things considered um mainly it was difficult because because of covid not because of the folks that I was working with or the the environment but still it's such a different thing to go from the autonomy of running your own business the stress of due diligence and the stress of trying to sell a business straight into being a senior leader in a very different organization um so yeah possibly hand over to Lisa because she's got a Rel like when you were saying it's not done till it's done I always think that when you sign a new client the verbal you've won a pitch is not a signed contract and it's not money in the bank so it's kind of again it's 100% yeah I'm trying to get better at that actually so I read something the other day about kind of human psychology and we all we're all tempted to try and avoid like um uh jinxing the deal right so we don't want to celebrate on the verbal yes we don't we want to wait until it's kind of locked in set in stone um I I saw a psychologist talking about how actually if it's okay to celebrate things that might not happen and yeah this is something I'm really trying to learn and internalize and actually I'm trying to do better at search part is like celebrate like you you C you feel down about bad news even when it's potential bad news right so you hear that you might lose a customer or you might lose a client and you you feel down at that moment so why not feel up at the moment when you might win a clan like that not to Happ done your best and it's worked out well up until that point so yeah why exactly and if it then later turns out not to happen well you can feel bad about that then but like celebrate the wins along the way is is I'm definitely on this journey so I am trying to be better at that as well as someone who also struggles to celebr great success I certainly appreciate that so yeah um yeah so Lisa I think sounds like there might be some similarities there and yeah yeah so we we we sold we kind of signed the deal in like September 2017 but it took like nine months uh of uh negotiations uh due diligence wasn't actually that bad um because uh I I think we had very tidy everything um but that was quite like I I would say first of all the the process of like negotiation is really important um and for me the thing that I concentrated on the most um most deals are based on a earnout not all deals but most deals are based on an earnout which then mean that whatever you get offered um as like you know this is the the kind of letter of intent of what the structure would look like these are just imaginary numbers really um so I would say one is really important to to to get a good deal for the The Upfront uh and and as well as the earnout um and then I would say for me the thing that I was really like hard on in terms of negotiation was uh all the things that they couldn't make us do because I knew like I I was obviously selling to a big Network and I knew that that will be very different to what I'm used to um running your own agency being able to go at speed is very different so um I focused a lot about uh making sure that there there were there were a lot of protections against um how I was running it so I could continue running it like that um and I also had a although I was uh I'm I'm the I don't have a co-founder so it was me but I had a management team that I gave Emi shares to so I had about uh five six people on that and um I did a lot of things that weren't were kind of almost against what the advisers uh advised us against because they a lot of people say that you shouldn't really tell anyone before you have signed the deal but in terms of my leadership style and my way of running things I I just felt so uncomfortable people not knowing so I actually told everyone in the agency quite a while like a quite a few months uh before the deal was done and I know that the advice is usually because you know if if it doesn't go through then you have to tell everyone that it didn't happen but I don't have a problem with that I think it's much better to just be really open because what you don't want is for it to come out and people panicking and then leave or like be worried and so on so um I I still stand by that that was the right decision for me for sure um and uh Omnicom being the the eventure buyer we did get other offers and we saw um we had conversations with other agencies um I think there were a lot of things that I I kind of knew but I wasn't aware of just how big a a a a difference it would be um and for anyone that knows me knows that I'm very outspoken and I'm very kind of direct and and that did not really uh go well with Omnicom like it was like um uh very very different in terms of style so there was a lot of challenges for me that that's also probably a lot to do with with who I am as a person and and I'm not like I I don't tend to change the way I am depending on on different situations um uh but all in all the the kind of like journey of the the actual sale and I know there have been some questions in the the the chat here you know uh you you do usually sell the the the entire brand and the employees and and when it comes to earn out it is very rare uh but it does happen but it's very rare that the CEO or the founders aren't tied in uh obviously there are um situations like with B where you don't you don't have that tie in but the usual kind of classical deals are based on an earnout from two to four years I heard someone had a s year or not bloody hell I would have killed myself um and then uh and then the the the tendency is to to give um as little as they can at the at the front and then have the targets on the earnout every year uh depending on growth um and so that is that that was also a challenge for us obviously the last year being 2010 2020 and covid so uh yeah that was a bit like place of Glory um but all in all there are loads of things I I would say that you really need to think about in these these kind of um conversation but the thing I wish I'd really really listen to my instinct on um is the cultural kind of fit and the I really wanted to protect my crew and my people and and so I I protected them at all costs but that meant that put myself um in every situation so I did pretty much every kind of conversation and stuff with Omnicom um and I did have a massive burnout at the end it was like epic crash um so uh I would say uh the most important advice if you are going to sell your agency and you're likely to do an earnout get a therapist above all you're going to need it but because it's it's just so different it it like even with the even with the best kind of intentions they're just very different if you're an entrepreneur and you build something from scratch the way you think will be so different to to the corporate kind of agencies because um it's it's just a very different world yeah no that that's really good advice and definitely uh yeah something to to think about for a lot of people um Adrian I just conscious we're unfortunately Running Out of Time feel like we could double the time in terms of this but do you want to kind of give an overview in terms of what you saw as kind of like yeah kind of that moment of doing the deal I will be very quick because we are nearly up in time basically we did manage to get a cash up front deal and then a bonus on success so that was was quite nice except covid hit us so we didn't get the bonus unfortunately which was a shame but at least we got the the chunk out first which is very nice I I stuck there for four years I was contracted for three but my I was like a square peeg in a round hole I was just didn't really fit I thought I fitted but I didn't and so it took a while I was trying to figure myself out I lost my purpose personally and it wasn't until I picked up the book the EOS book again and thought holy cow this is what changed my life from being under my desk to selling my business I'm now going to pick it up read it and become a professional implementer and that was my journey out and that's now what I do with passion and that's how you can help people yeah there's um a financial auor I've read quite a bit of Morgan H and he talks about how quite a lot of the financial events that happen um are the unplanned events so covid uh War breakouts all sorts of things where it's like people aren't going to predict this and if you look at yeah energy prices that type of thing there's only so much you can control as well like in terms of what's going to happen in that journey and Co is obviously something that you can't predict and I think it's important to just there's only so much you can plan for the unplanned and what's ahead as well and I think with stuff like that just yeah focus on what you can control and maybe not beat yourself up too much if the timing isn't perfect because ex yeah these freak things do happen and yeah it's just unfortunate time in mind but there's only so much that you can do to control um with bang on time like I say we could absolutely uh double the length of this and go a lot further certainly liser in terms of the cultural side I think there's a lot of great topics there equally in terms of yeah kind of like the next steps and what you're up to now all kind of very interesting stories so but yeah I'd like to say thank you for each of you for openly sharing and hopefully inspiring I'm sure a lot of people who are watching so yeah thanks very much for being a part of it thank you thanks all

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Id: ZraiIF0J8mk

Length: 61min 6sec (3666 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024