35:4 Building an agency your own way

Lee:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee, and on today’s show, we have my friend and soon to be your friend. It’s Mr. Grant O’Neill. How are you today?

Grant:
Very well, thanks. How are you?

Lee:
Mate, I am tip-top and champion. Just so people know, this is our third time lucky. We’ve been on Ringr, We’ve been on Cast, now we’re on Zoom to see if we can record this. I’m pretty sure we’re going to be good to go. Folks, if you don’t know who Grant is, Grant is a good friend of mine. We’ve done business and known each other for a few years. We both have a passion for doing business in a way that works well for us, and that’s exactly what we’re going to be learning from Grant today. But before we do that, I want to just give out two things. Number one, with a name like Grant, I really thought I was good to say… It’s just Grant O’Neill, isn’t it? That’s how I say your name. And then you told me this story about how people actually get your name wrong. Could you just share that with us?

Grant:
Yeah. Yes. I mean, it’s a pretty simple name, I would have thought. My parents actually named me and my siblings with one syllable so no one can shorten it or get it wrong or anything like that, but apparently that didn’t work. Yeah, so I get Grunt, obviously that’s the other way to say it, and I hate that. But that’s been my whole life. But yeah, I did have someone I used to work with who just couldn’t get it. They’d always call me Grunt. After many years, I… or someone actually made up a little sign on the back of my monitor in the office. It had a little picture of an ant with a G-R in front of it, so that they could finally get it. Still took a while, but they got there. Yeah, there’s challenges with every name, I think.

Lee:
Absolutely. And then secondly, can we have a little bit of background about yourself, so who you are, what you do, et cetera? And then we’ll get stuck in.

Grant:
Yep. Basically, I’ve done a lot of different things over the years, but at the moment I’ve been running GO Creative for 20 years. We’re a web development agency. We specialise in e-commerce, but we do SEO and website care plans and all the usual things along those lines. For me personally, I’ve worked in the public sector, private sector, I’ve freelanced. I’ve obviously got an agency now with nine staff here. I’ve done a lot of different things. I’m actually qualified in graphic design and IT. So I started out in that field and then progressed to web development and then social media, Google Ads, and everything in between. Got to a point where I was doing too many things and then scaled back and started to build the agency with a focus on development. I’ve pretty much covered the gamut in the last 20 years.

Lee:
That is pretty extreme. So has the agency been going for 20 years, and that started off with the lessons learned from the past? Or did the agency evolve over the 20 years during all those lessons?

Grant:
Yeah, it evolved. The first 10 years was freelancing, basically. And then, yeah, about 10 years ago, I went full time with the business. I guess learned a lot of things about efficiency and the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day. Working crazy hours and things like that led me to say, “It’s time to find someone else to help me out here.” So over the last five or six years in particular, I’ve really grown the business substantially and added the staff as we’ve gone. It’s ever evolving, and we’re always changing what we’re doing and trying to be more effective at what we do. Yeah, it’s been a long road, but I’m definitely enjoying it.

Lee:
Nice, awesome. Now, I’m looking at the internet, and you and me share a common bond over the amount of content that’s available for people and this feeling of overwhelm. And you just touched on that a second ago about being busy and there’s only so much time in the day. But I really get a sense of overwhelm when I consume a lot of the content online, because it makes me feel like I have to be doing all the time. I’ve got to be doing this. I’ve got to be creating content. I’ve got to be learning about this funnel’s platform, or I’ve got to be investing in this new piece of software which is going to skyrocket my business, et cetera.

Lee:
That just leads to this consistent overwhelm. Over the last few years, you’ve obviously worked out a way to market your own business whilst being a self-confessed introvert. So I would love to learn a little bit from you, especially over the last 10 years of building your business to the point where I believe you’re even giving yourself a day off a week or every few weeks to spend time with the family. Could you share with us a little bit of that journey and how you as the guy who likes to stay away from loads of people, how you’ve actually grown the business?

Grant:
Yeah, well, as you said, there is a lot of pressure out there with the amount of information and the things we should all be doing, apparently. There’s so much stuff out there, and a lot of it is really good and a lot of it works for some people and not others. I guess that’s the main takeaway, that there is personal brand building. There is the option to speak or just attend conferences and networking events, go to chambers of commerce, trade shows. There’s all those sort of in-person things. I hate all of those things. I’m never going to like them. I could probably push myself to do them for 10 years straight, and I’ll still hate them as much as I do right now.

Grant:
It’s not to say that you shouldn’t push yourself and try to go outside or past your comfort zone or expand that. But if there’s something that’s really not you, and it’s causing you stress or anxiety or you just don’t like it for whatever reason, then it’s not something you should have to commit to continue to do. You have to find what works best for you. For me, as you said, I am an introvert, and I can easily get into the office in the morning and just work all the way through the day. If I didn’t speak to anyone else, it wouldn’t really bother me. I could probably do that all week long, and it wouldn’t bother me. I’m not unique in that respect, but I guess for a lot of digital agency owners, we’re typically creative types and that tends to go hand in hand with being a bit more extroverted for many people.

Grant:
Yeah, so anyway to answer the question, I guess the main thing that I’ve focused on over the years is just establishing really strong relationships with strategic partners. It means that pretty much everything we don’t do, we’ve found someone who can do it. Obviously, it’s great if they’re not a business that overlaps with what we do, but we’ve got a really strong matrix of contacts. That means if someone comes to us and says, “Hey, we want to build a website. Do you also do logo design?” We would say, “No, we don’t do that, but here’s the ideal contact for you.” We can pick someone that’s highly relevant to them in terms of where they are, what they specialise, they’re price point, things like that and refer the right person. That’s a really big part of it, because I like to do that organically. We don’t have any kickbacks or commissions or anything like that involved. It’s just an organic referral because we can vouch for that other provider.

Grant:
And then what tends to happen is, obviously, they’ll just refer people back to us for the same reason. That’s obviously a really big thing, making sure you do have those partnerships. But obviously, you still want to touch base with clients, even if it’s not your favourite thing to go out and see people all the time. Just a quick phone call can make a difference just to touch base every couple of months or whatever it might be. But you don’t have to be out there constantly seeing every single client, every single day, if that’s not your thing, and you’ve got other things to get on with. I guess, the main things are the relationships. We obviously do our own marketing with SEO and stuff like that as well.

Grant:
But the big focus of our business really, and the way that I naturally work, is focusing on the continual improvement side of things. It means that if there’s something we’re not doing very well or could be improved, or we’ve had a hiccup on a project, I’ll work to immediately find a way to, or at least plan a way to solve that problem or prevent that from happening. Ultimately, that quality is what gets us a lot of word of mouth as well. There’s probably a combination of things there, but yeah, primarily, just as I said, not having to do all the standard stuff that everyone else does is… Yeah, it’s totally fine to do that and just do things that work for you.

Lee:
Did a live stream, didn’t I, the other day, and you popped in there saying that’s exactly how we’ve grown our business from the get-go, which is building up partnerships and referring people and being referred through those relationships. If somebody was brand new to an agency, and they’ve already consumed content saying, “Hey, you need to be all over social media and create content and go live and go networking and go to events.” What next steps would you recommend to a startup agency to say, “Actually, I recommend you do this.” What would be the next steps to start to build up those relationships?

Grant:
Well, I’d say before the actual steps are considered, the main thing is to have the right mentality behind it. Because I think today there’s a lot of people that want to get rich quick. A lot of people aren’t prepared to put the hard work in or just even be patient with what they’re doing. As I said, it’s taken me 20 years to get to where I am. I’m not saying we’re the biggest agency in the world or we’re kicking massive goals all the time. But the whole reason I’m here is to say that you can get there. I’m not saying everyone’s going to take 20 years, because obviously I freelanced and did other things. But it’s totally fine to just be patient and start small and have a core group of good clients. You don’t have to be signing up a new client every single day or immediately sign up massive clients. You have to work within yourself and within your own time constraints and to suit your lifestyle and things like that. So I think the mentality itself is the big thing there, as opposed to exactly what steps you take.

Lee:
So step one is actually recognise that these things take time and not be looking for the quick wins that are consistently advertised at my face on Facebook all of the time? Just thinking back to all of my businesses where we’ve grown and been successful, it’s always been because we did it slow. I remember just before the recession happened, and we had very fast success with a product that we developed. It blew up and we grew really, really fast that we got to half a million in turnover. We were having to employ people to keep going. And then we were stuck in a position where we then had to keep growing to look after all the people that we had and things just got really, really messy, because everything happened way too fast. I would really echo that mindset of just slow and steady really does win the race and recognising that you’re not going to have the 15-bedroom house straight away, if that’s your target. It’s going to take some time for that target. To be honest, I’m quite happy with my three-bedroom house, and I’ll have a move, I’m an old man now.

Grant:
I was even having a conversation with a young girl who’s in my local area who just started a business recently, and I was talking to her mother about it. I was trying to pitch some free work for them to help get things established for her daughter. The same conversation came up there where I was asking them, “Okay, if this does scale, if we do this marketing for you, how are you actually going to cope with that work?” They didn’t have the answer, which is fine. But you’ve got to consider that you have to grow at a pace that’s sustainable. If you suddenly grow too quickly or you’ve got too much work coming in, what’s inevitably going to happen is you’re either going to drown in the work and miss all your deadlines. You’re going to have unhappy clients. Then word of mouth happens and you’re dead in the water. Or you start trying to recruit people when you’re already overdue, and then you’re going to panic recruit, I guess, and get the wrong people on board. It’s got to be something you’re really planning out with your business.

Grant:
Yeah, as I said, if you can do it, financially speaking, if you can afford to start slowly and work with a small number of key clients, that’s a better approach than trying to get everyone out there under the sun to sign up with you.

Lee:
But one of the things we try and do is to do things that don’t necessarily scale initially. That would be the new product that we have of the digital venue that was born out of Event Engine and born out of the digital event that I did this year for ATL. What we’ve done is gone in there at a higher value. We’re working with just a few clients in a way that doesn’t necessarily scale straight away, but that’s helping us to understand our product, how to position that product, and also how to deliver that product for the future. So that in, say, six months time when we’re ready to broaden this out and hire a team, et cetera, we already have our documented procedures. We already know how we’re going to deliver this product. Right now, it’s all up in the air. We’re trying to work out the market, et cetera. If we’d have just dove in and tried to do what we did last time, again, we’d have created the exact same problem. I absolutely love that idea of slow and steady wins the race. Do something that doesn’t scale, initially. I don’t know if that’s something you would adhere to as well, but to do something that doesn’t scale. You do it really well, learn the lessons, and then create something from that that is really scalable.

Grant:
Yeah, well, I mean, we fire up new products all the time, so as I said, I’m always looking for ways to improve what we do. It might be that for the 20th time, someone’s asked us, “Can you do this?” And instead of having a quote each time and working our way through that process, we’ve just basically productized it. For us, that means we can literally just add it to our system within five minutes, put a price on it, describe what it is, and it’s on there. But those things constantly change, because we might plan that out thinking, “Okay, this is going to take X amount of hours or provide this amount of value or whatever it might be.” But once you start doing it, as you said, things evolve very quickly. You find what doesn’t work. You find what works really well. You might end up changing the product completely by the end.

Grant:
I think it’s the same with business, really. You got to start out with a clear goal, but it’s totally fine if that goal changes over time. Again, going back to the scalability, you don’t have to go from zero to 100. You just have to make sure that you know what you’re doing and who your target market is and all those common things that everyone talks about. But, yeah, as a small or new business, yeah, it’s so easy to get caught up in all the things you should be doing and feel that pressure and trying to do a hundred things at once. If you just slow down and focus on delivering quality services, that’s going to get you much further than going out and doing 50 different jobs every single day and trying to focus on that.

Lee:
Do a few things really, really well. On that then, in the early days, did you feel the pressure and succumb to the pressure of trying to do more and trying to go outside of your comfort zone, i.e. going to trade shows and all of those things, because you thought you had to? And what was the aha moment, if so, for you to switch that and do what you’re comfortable with?

Grant:
Yeah. Well, my father, he actually used to be a head of the chamber commerce in my area, so he was always hassling me to go along. I kept saying, “Oh yeah, yeah, I’ll go along one day.” I never did over that, probably, about 10 year period. But when I did finally force myself to go along to something like that, it’s just really not me. It’s not something I enjoy doing. I guess I’ve learned those things over time as I’ve tried each one. It’s not something where I’ve just said, “I’m going to rule it out and never try it.” But for me, I get anxious at big events, and I’m much better in small groups where I can talk to a handful of people together or those strategic partnerships and things like that. So, yeah, there probably wasn’t any particular turning point where I said to myself, “All right, I’m going to do these things and not these things.” But I think you just learn over time what you’re comfortable doing and, yeah, what things make you feel stressed.

Lee:
Did you feel any kind of… Not guilt, I think is the wrong word, but did you feel that somehow you were holding yourself back, because you couldn’t bring yourself to do all of those other things, or do you think you-

Grant:
Yeah, yeah, no, I definitely did. I definitely for a long time… I guess, like everyone, you compare yourself to other people. When you see someone else doing well, whether it’s a peer or just random other company out there, you tend to model yourself on that and think about what they’re doing, and should I be doing that? I definitely would feel guilty that I wasn’t doing all those expected things or whatever you want to call them. But yeah, again, it’s something that over time you will learn to find if the guilt is misplaced, I guess you’d say. It’s okay to try things and not do them, but you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it if it’s not your thing. Everyone’s different, personally, as well as the way your business is structured and how it fits in with your lifestyle and all those other things. Yeah, it’s definitely not something you should feel guilty about, but it is easy to do.

Lee:
100%. I’ll often look at some of the online influencers with hundreds of subscribers to their YouTube channel, a large podcast, large personal brands. I do have a personal brand, and I have a very particular mission, which is like you, to help other agencies create an agency they love rather than something that needs to be hyper super successful. And yet I still fall into that trap of forgetting that mission now and again, and feeling a little bit blue that I don’t have the massive audience and the massive reach of, say, Chris do, all those sorts of guys who are huge out there. But I don’t need to be, because I’m actually helping a few people really well, likewise with your business.

Lee:
I mean, to some of what you’ve done, me and you had a chat before this, you’ve built a strong recession-proof business from the ground up doing things your way. I’m literally reading a message you sent me from Messenger here. You wrote to me, “You don’t have to build a personal brand or meet up with a million people at every possible event, or even run a podcast or be everywhere to be able to do that.” You’ve built that recession-proof business by doing things on your terms and doing things that you are comfortable with. Out of everything, would you say that the quality of work and ensuring that you have your processes and procedures has been the main driving factor?

Grant:
I’d say so. I mean, because I’m probably about as detail-oriented as anyone can get, so it’s easy for me to do those things in many ways, to focus on the minute details and what’s working and what’s not working. I guess in terms of what we do quality-wise, it does come down to processes and systems. I’m a big believer that a good process and a good system can solve almost any problem or even prevent them from happening. Again, it comes back to planning, being patient, building on that over time. I know there’s been a few different people recently on different podcasts talking about the way processes should work and things like that. The key takeaway with that is really just that same thing, patience. You don’t have to go and write a 10,000 page document on your process. You just have to get something down at a high level and then start building on that over time. As you repeat the process, go back to the document. And as you go through the process, note down what you’re doing, and you’ll get there with those things as well. So yeah, so that’s obviously a process type thing.

Grant:
But in terms of the quality of what we do, the same thing applies where if you’d asked me five years ago, how good I thought my process was, I would have said, “Oh, it’s amazing. We’re incredible. We’re doing so well in all these areas.” And now I look at that and say, “That’s rubbish.” It’s always going to improve and evolve, and that’s how business is really. You just got to keep on improving what you’re doing and making sure that if you’re making common mistakes, they shouldn’t obviously keep happening. So you work out how to get around them, whether you can offer a different type of service or change the way you do things. There’s always a way to improve.

Lee:
I’m glad you mentioned about creating processes. I actually did a video about a year ago on YouTube which talks about how to create a process for your agency. I literally said, “It’s a bulleted list. It can just literally start with a bulleted list of things that you do in a particular order that you just don’t want to forget.” And then you can go further from there and maybe record yourself doing it in a video and get someone else to make a how-to guide from that and all sorts of other things that you can do to build a process. But processes don’t need to be complicated. They don’t need to be something that feels unattainable. You just need to do it in a way that works for you. I think that’s definitely a common theme here, in this conversation that we’re having, isn’t it?

Grant:
Yeah. Well, I mean, just for a little bit of insight into how we manage that as well. The process documents that we use are just Google Docs, but they’re quite detailed in every task. But we also use project management software with those corresponding headings as individual tasks. In other words, when we’re working through any project, we can look at it at a very high level by just working off the task list, but there’s a link through to view that exact step and all the details if you want to see it. It doesn’t mean that having a big, long process document makes it virtually unusable, or you’ve got to read it every single time, but if it’s there and you link them up together and you’ve got a high level view somewhere else as well, that’s an easy way to manage it.

Lee:
Absolutely. We often use a table and then assign particular roles to particular teams, and then we check it off as we go along so we know what teams are going to be responsible for which as we work through that process.

Grant:
Yeah. It’s the accountability side of it too, I guess. It’s great to have a process, but if no one knows who’s supposed to be doing it or who’s currently working on it, then you might double up or miss it completely.

Lee:
Mate, I really appreciate you coming on and just sharing this story as really a part one, because I would love to have you back. You’ve already said yes, so that’s awesome, just to continue to unpack your journey and to learn those lessons. What I’ve taken from this is that it’s okay to do something your way, as long as you are focused on process, on quality, and on relationships. I think they’re the three core pillars that I’ve drawn from what you’ve shared. I don’t need to show up all over the world on podcasts, at events, in networking meetings. Instead, I can build relationships, I can deliver quality work, and I can manage that in a scalable way, which will allow me to grow my agency. I’d love to have you back then, mate, to talk about growing the agency and discussing how we hire staff and go from there. Would you be up for that, if we do a part two maybe in a couple of weeks?

Grant:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I’d love to share that insight.

Lee:
Do you like how I asked you on the recording, which makes you feel you have to say yes?

Grant:
Well, we can always do it over, can’t we?

Lee:
No, you’re coming back, dammit. So how can people connect with you, mate? And then we will see you in part two.

Grant:
Yeah, well, just hit us up on our website, that’s probably the main way. Just go to go dash or hyphen, what do we want to call it creative.com.au. So go-creative.com.au. Yeah, get in touch with us there, and we’ll, yeah, go through an all process to have a chat, find out more about what you’d want to do, and go from there.

Lee:
Awesome, that’s fantastic. That’s go-creative.com. I believe you’re also in the Facebook group over on trailblazer.fm/group. I believe you walk around in there, don’t you, as well so [crosstalk 00:23:29]-

Grant:
Yeah. I’m on a few different Facebook groups.

Lee:
Exactly.

Grant:
I jump on there and tell people how they should be doing things, pretty much.

Lee:
Well, now that you’re old with a beard and that, that makes you the-

Grant:
That’s all right. [crosstalk 00:23:39]

Lee:
[crosstalk 00:23:41]. That’s awesome, mate. Thanks so much for your time, and we’ll see you in a few episodes time, mate.

Grant:
No worries. Thanks for having me.

Lee:
Cheerio.