45:2 Invest now, get paid later

Lee
Welcome to Trailblazer FM. This is your host, Mr. Lee Matthew Jackson and on the show today, we have the one, the only, the award winning, Darren Jamieson from Engage Web. Sir, how are you today?

Darren
I’m very well, thank you. My wife would take offence at the award winning. Every time I call myself award winning, she disagrees with me because I wasn’t technically given an award, so she always pulled that one away from me to bring me back crashing down to earth. So, thank you.

Lee
Well, in an effort to get to know you, can we have that little backstory before we jump into that time machine?

Darren
Well, yes, I’ve always wanted to be a stand up comedian. As you can tell, I’m immensely entertaining. But I entered a competition to raise money for Wirral Mencap a few years ago, where I was trained for six weeks by a professional stand up comic person who does this for a living and entertains people and makes funny. And I did a 15 minutes stand up routine that I wrote for Wirral Mencap on a stage at Printon Park, at Tramirova Football Club, and I won the audience vote, so it was part of the Liverpool Comedy Festival. So I am technically a Liverpool Comedy Festival winner, but when I was calling myself an award winning comedian, my wife would keep going, you’re not an award winning comedian. They didn’t give you a trophy. There was no award. Shut up. So that is why I tried to call myself out. So I’m going to take it. You’ve called me award winning, therefore the ward is verbal. It’s mine, you cannot take it back. I’m having it.

Lee
And that was three years ago. They’ve not run an event ever since. So that’s three years running.

Darren
I am the longest running winner of the Comedy Festival. Yes, the longest runner. I’ve held it more than anybody else. Nobody’s taken it from me. I am undefeated, unchallenged.

Lee
So, folks, we only get the best on here. And, of course, as you are a listener, you will know we jump into the time machine. It’s going to be the Tardes today. And let’s go back, Darren, to the very early days of when you started getting into agency life. When would you say that was?

Darren
Well, I love a bit of Tardis wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. I started getting into agency life kind of when I was still working in Manchester for another agency who I won’t name, but you can see them on my LinkedIn. We were doing things the old fashioned way, shall we say, that Google has always said, don’t do that. You know the sort of stuff, the kind of things that involve links with sources that should not be used and should never be touched. But we started getting stuff into content because we realised that content was a big thing, going to be a huge thing on Google. And immediately they started outsourcing this to India, which if you’ve ever tried to edit content written by Indian writers, it’s very difficult. Their standard of English is exceptional, better than most people in the UK, but they use words that we don’t use. Therefore you’re finding that things are a boon for your industry. And for me, Boon is a 1990s TV series with Michael Elphick about a motorcycle courier. It’s something we don’t use in everyday language in the UK. So it was very difficult editing this. And they were talking about, be careful with your garden ponds because you got a problem with raccoons.

Darren
We don’t have raccoons in the UK, but it’s not an issue. So we started to find writers in the UK and we built up our own content marketing agency that we were then outsourcing to, if that makes sense. We realised then that this isn’t sustainable. We don’t want to be working full time, we can’t do this. We wanted to do it the right way and for the clients, the way it should be done. So we left that agency, took the big step, quit our jobs and started our own digital marketing agency as a content supplier to other agencies back in 2009, which was a huge difficult task to do because it was just the two of us and we were doing it all ourselves. So we were editing probably 3000 articles a month between two of us, which meant starting at seven in the morning, finishing eight at night, working Saturdays, working Sundays, and it was really hard and really boring. And you might be editing content, say, 500 articles on printing off 500 articles on concrete floors, and then you’d think the kind of stuff that you couldn’t possibly write content about and make it in the slightest bit interesting.

Darren
But that’s what we were doing. And the real difficult thing about this was that we were losing the first hour of the day, every day, because we have to get into work, open up an email, save all the content down from freelance writers that have done it previous day, and then update a spreadsheet with who’s edited who’s sent what in, what’s there to be edited. And it just took a long time, it was ridiculous. So we needed something that would do this for us, something, some sort of CRM that would manage this for us. But there was nothing out there. We looked at things like Salesforce and Base camp. None of them had this functionality. So we actually specced out and built our own CRM that would handle this for us. So that the freelance writers that we were using were able to log into this. Accept the briefs we gave them. Add the content that they were writing. It would automatically do a word count cheque to make sure that they hadn’t submitted a blank piece. Which when they’re emailing it. Is a problem. And it would also keep them on track. So you’ve got ten articles to do, you’ve got ten days to do it.

Darren
This is where you should be at this point. And it was doing all of this automated because I wrote the whole thing myself. And that saved us probably an hour every day right at the start. Going back now, that was 2009. We’re now 2022. That’s probably saved us months, if not years of time that we would have lost doing that just by building this one piece of software right at the very beginning.

Lee
Our first massive takeaway then is people will often think, well, it’s just an hour, but that hour adds up. And like you said, from 2009 to 2022, that hour definitely would have added up. So essentially, you’ve started off in an agency, you’ve seen what they do, you don’t like what they do necessarily. And you and your friend have said, right, we believe in better. We’re going to do something about this. You took that scary step and left, got cracking, doing something that doesn’t scale very well. I’m doing it all manually, getting all those emails. And then you’ve developed a solution to help you save just that 1 hour. You doing that 1 hour. Is that something that then carried on for other aspects of the business?

Darren
Well, absolutely, because as we scaled, as we got more people involved, our first hire was an editor, a content editor, to do the stuff that we were doing so that we could work on building the business and going out there and meeting potential clients and bringing more people in. Had we had two, three, four editors, they all would have been sat there while one person updated a spreadsheet so that hours would have multiplied for every single person that we had. As I mentioned as well, our big problem was that writers would occasionally submit blank Word documents or they’d send in a duplicate Word document, or they’d forget to attach the document is the most common thing people do on email. Please find attach the documents, what attachments, you haven’t done it. So this system that we built took away all of those problems as well. It wasn’t just the hour, it was the scalability of everybody else’s hour and the errors and problems that people were finding when they were sending stuff incorrectly. And it just wiped all of that out. And it took months to do. It absolutely took months to build this, and I was the only one doing it.

Darren
But it was so essential because it allowed us to scale the agency to where we are today. Never would have been able to do that had we still been operating on an email system which just wasn’t scalable at all.

Lee
So you now have a small team. Are you all still doing what you were doing in 2009 or has the business evolved into other areas?

Darren
No, we’ve got people who are still doing that because that system that I built back then is still being used now. It’s kind of like the backbone to our agency, if you like. In fact, we’ve worked with lots of other agencies and we know we can’t mention them, unfortunately, nondisclosure agreements, which is a real problem, but we know some of them have similar systems themselves, but none of them are as good as what we do. I mean, I’m biassed, obviously, but none of them have word count potential to stop you submitting the wrong article. None of them keep you on track and tell you where you need to be at a particular point. None of them do this. Ours is the only one that does this. If we could licence it, rent it out brilliant, but we’re not going to do that. But we have also expanded to do other things because originally, as I say, we were just working for other agencies, we were supplying content for other digital marketing agencies who couldn’t do the scale themselves. But we did find that clients came to us directly and wanted us to do work for them.

Darren
So we do web design, we do SEO, search engine optimization, we do email campaigns, we do Facebook advertising, Google Ads, we do all the things that other agencies do. But our backbone is content. I would say probably 70, maybe 80% of our business is content base still at this stage.

Lee
So when you decided to add those other services, how did you go about bringing those skills in? You’ve already mentioned that you actually built that original product. Did you become the jack of all trades doing all of the website builds as well, and the SEO and teaching yourself? Or did you hire those skills in to scale and provide those services?

Darren
And that’s a really good question. And you’re right. I was feeling like a bit of a jack of all trades at one point, because I’m not a web developer by trade. Originally I was a web designer. I was a web designer for Game back in 2000. I designed the Game website in 2000, redesigned it in 2001, redesigned it again in 2002 because we did it every year. So that was my background, e-commerce web design. So when we started to get clients wanted web design from us, obviously we were able to handle that and we could do the e-commerce aspect as well, but only one, maybe two a month. Because it was just me with the web development for the actual product itself, I had to learn that on the job. So I basically found out how to do that to build this system. It’s not my core skill. There are many people far better than me at doing this and somebody with more development skill probably could have built that system a lot quicker than me. So looking back on it, if I had to do it again, I probably would have just outsourced that.

Darren
But we didn’t have the funds back then. It was literally me doing it. So I had to do it. But as we’ve grown, I’ve not built a website now for probably two years, and I have no intention of ever building one again. I don’t want to. I don’t really like web design. What we’ve got now is we’ve got a team of web designers here, and I’m going to speak quietly because one of them is in the other room right now. They are better than me. It is important that you hire people better than you. Some people have a sort of a block on that. I don’t want people better than me, I can do it better than them. I don’t want people who are going to start taking clients away, maybe, or go away and set up in competition. You have to hire people better than you, otherwise you’re going to be looking at what they do and going, I could have done that. I could have done that much better. I don’t like the way they’ve done it. You want people who are better than you, who can do things that you can’t do because it just makes your company better, it makes your agency better, it makes you more profit.

Lee
Quite frankly..

Darren
Looking at it from a purely capitalist point of view, you want the best people.

Lee
Speaking of the best people, then, did you have any experience of hiring people when you started to add people to the business, or was it pretty much a sucker to see and learn as you go?

Darren
We had absolutely no experience whatsoever other than what we’d seen from when we were employees at other companies. We’d seen ways not to do it.

Lee
Yeah..Sometimes that’s actually the best way. We’re not doing that.

Darren
Yeah, so one of the first things we did is we took HR support, outsourced HR support, because if you don’t do that and there’ll be people listening to this now, thinking, I’ve had a quote for outsourced HR. It’s this much per month. That’s quite expensive. I want to try and save that. Do not do that, please. Take the advice. Take the advice. Because I worked in an agency in Cardiff back in 2005, 2006 they didn’t do any of this. There was a bit of a dispute in the agency where somebody was accused of supplying software to a former employee and he hadn’t done it. And one of the owners went into his personal email when he was off on holiday, saw a message where somebody was asking for this software, then accused him of it and sacked him. And he hadn’t done anything wrong. But the owner of the agency went into his personal email, which isn’t an invasion of privacy, you can’t do that. But because it was so badly handled, this guy who’d left the company then got to choose his own reference, got his legal fees paid for him, and got a massive package in terms of funds that they have to pay him as a result of the wrongful dismissal.

Darren
These are the mistakes that as an employer, you could quite easily make and think, right, that person stunned me over, you’re fired, get out. You can’t operate like that. You need the support. You need to do it properly, the legal way, otherwise it’s going to really come back and bite you on the ass.

Lee
Yeah,I couldn’t agree more. I mean, it’s hard to find the right people and sometimes you’re not going to attract the right people and sometimes there are going to be issues with that employee, but without that HR support, we aren’t experts are we know how to run a business, we know how to solve people’s problems, etc. But we are not an HR department. We don’t know the law. And there have been so many times where I could have absolutely screwed up if it wasn’t for our HR team. And I will put a link, folks, in the show notes, we actually interviewed the person who does our HR three years ago so far sight, HR, we’ll put a link and you can go ahead and listen to that episode. Very insightful.

Darren
I mean, even when you get someone in for interview, they’ve got right straight away, as soon as they accept an interview, you have to treat them properly and don’t do anything that really dodgy employers might do. And without that HR knowledge, without that backup, you don’t know what you’re doing. And you’re leaving yourself wide open to being sued, to having money coming out of your company, to potentially go in under because you just don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Lee
You don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s the scary thing, isn’t it? You’ve pointed out that you don’t know what you don’t know, and yet you were brave enough to leave your full time job to start a business. Can we just go back there 1 second? And what was the final push for you guys to make such a massive step because you didn’t know? That’s quite a scary idea, isn’t it? I am now going to pay myself. I’m going to do enough work to pay myself. What was the final push? How did you guys push through the fear?

Darren
I think it was something we’d been talking about for a long time and originally there was four of us going to be doing it, but it ended up just two of us. And you’re right, it is that if I leave this job, I’m leaving a guaranteed salary. I’ve got however much money it is, two grand after tax, whatever per month coming into my bank account that pays my rent, pays my mortgage, pays for my car, that’s guaranteed. If I go and start my own business now, I’ve got no clients, I’m starting from scratch. I potentially might earn no money for the next month, two months, possibly even three months. It might be a complete failure. And I have to come back and try and beg for my job back or try and get somewhere else to actually take me on. But the problem was, it’s the way the staff, the team were being treated that I could not I just couldn’t stay there anymore. It was like, have you ever been in a job where you know not only what you’re doing is wrong because it’s against basically it was against Google’s terms and conditions, it was against everything that you knew was wrong, but it worked.

Darren
So they were doing it. But it’s not just that, it’s that you were not being valued. Your opinion was not being valued and you were not being respected for what you do, what you knew what you could do. For example, you weren’t even allowed to get up and make a coffee unless it was during a 15 minutes coffee break. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon. And some of these people, and they were like 30, 40 years old, been in the industry a long time and they’re not allowed to get up and make a brew.

Lee
And you know, our age, mate, we need our coffee.

Darren
We switched our coffee. We need a bloody coffee. If I don’t get caffeine, I am no use to anybody.

Lee
No, I’m doing after this episode.

Darren
I’ve got one here right now. It was like being in a school, it really was. There was one incident in particular, I remember actually, the internet went down and there was one guy who was older than me, who he’s gone on to work for some huge businesses now. Huge businesses. He got up and made a brew and he was probably about 35 at the time. He got off, made a brew. When I sat down and the manager had a go at him, the manager was sound, he was a really nice guy and he was younger than me, he was younger than this guy, but he had to do that because that’s what the owner told him to do. If he wasn’t seen to be basically ballot in this guy, he would have got it in the neck. So what you’re doing making a brew, it’s not 11:15, whatever it is, but the internet’s down. There’s nothing we can do. That’s not the time to be doing this. This is just not the place to be. This is just not what I need in my life right now.

Lee
I think from that I took as well. That not being respected and your opinion and your views not being listened to and actioned upon, that’s definitely a surefire sign that you need to respect yourself and leave. So if anyone is listening and you are dreaming of starting your own agency, you are stuck perhaps in a company, then just take a look around you and think, do I really want to be here? And maybe this is your call. Maybe Darren’s experience here is your wake up call to try something new. I remember when I did it and decided to give up my job, I always thought, well, you know what? If it fails, at least I did it so I knew it failed. And I can always go and find another job. I’ve got some skills, so I can always go and block another job somehow, somewhere. And I’ll eat beans for a while. I never had to, thankfully, although I do love Heinz. Now, when you and me were chatting, we met up before this podcast and you were sharing some of your story. One of the biggest things that struck me was it was actually a phrase you said where you said that you invested time and effort upfront in order to get paid later.

Lee
And that really made my ears spark up because we so often are looking for hacks or for quick ways or quick wins to generate income or to be super ridiculously productive. And we’re actually willing to even throw money at either software or courses that offer us that promise. Can you explain more behind that? Of investing time and effort up front to get paid later and how that’s essentially driven Engage Web?

Darren
Yeah, the first one, obviously, was the software that we built, because that took me months to build. We got no money for it whatsoever and it did save us so much time and money and obviously salaries into people’s time in the long run. That was absolutely essential. But I think one of the biggest things that we do now regularly is about the processes and procedures that we’ve got. Everything that we do in business, from talking to a potential client, to creating a proposal, to designing and building a website, to putting a website live, to doing the final cheques on it, to everything to do with SEO, which obviously needs changing on an absolutely regular basis. Thank you, Google for the last one. Everything we do regards with content, with the content brief, with the liaison, with the writer, the actual acceptance of the brief, the way it goes back to the client, everything is procedurized. We have procedures, document manuals that you would not believe we even have one. And when I say this to people, they think I’m taking the piss. I’m not. We have a procedure document on how to create procedures.

Lee
Oh, I think we’re going to say for coffee.

Darren
No, we’ve got an infographic for coffee. We’ve got two infographics for coffee on how to do that. I’m not kidding

Lee
On that, though I mean, you say infographic. I am a very visual person, so an infographic would really help me work my way through. So I’m now thinking, as a potential employee of engagement, holy moly, you’ve got so much documentation. How on earth do I consume all of that? Have you guys got a way of gathering it together and presenting it so that it’s easy enough for somebody to consume and follow? Do they follow as they go, do they read up and get tested on it beforehand? How do you actually utilise those procedures?

Darren
Yeah, 100%. That is important as well. If you were just to hand somebody a document and go, right, this is everything we do at the business, read that and then we’re going to take that off you and off you go tomorrow, that obviously isn’t going to work. We have what’s called a skills matrix. So all of the team are listed in the matrix and all of the different things that we do within the business. So say, for example, from setting up a Twitter account for a client, something as basic as that, to creating a full SEO strategy or proposal, everything is matrix so that who can do what and when they’ve done it and when they’ve learnt it is ticked off in the matrix. It’s amazing. And the more ticks you have off in the matrix, obviously the more cross skills you have throughout the business, potentially the more salary you could earn. But we don’t just have the procedure documents for people to read, we also have instructional videos talking you through them. Now, again, this is very much a case of investor time up front and it will earn you money in the long run.

Darren
So we spent a lot of time creating these videos on. This is how you do this particular process, so that when somebody new comes in, they have time set off each day where they can go through these and learn a particular task, a particular procedure, a particular skill that they’re going to need to do, rather than have somebody sit with them and explain it to them. They’re watching it, already recorded, already explained, which can then be used again and again and again..

Lee
Which allows you as well to take your time with that the production value. I’ve noticed on your website you guys have got some incredible videos. I don’t know whether or not you apply that to your documentation as well, the documentation videos, et cetera, but you’re at least able to remove all of the extra fluff or the mistakes and really make those succinct and helpful. I’m the video guy. If you give me a document but there’s a video link somewhere, I’m watching the video, I ain’t reading the document. Not unless I need to just look specifically at, say, a few steps in a row. The big thing from me, though, is that skills matrix is actually something I’ve never considered. We’ve done stuff where we’ve created kind of job role lists, where we understand what each roles are and our skills are, but we’ve never really put it in any sort of way where we could say, okay, well, actually, out of all of our documentation, Karthi only really needs these areas of our documentation in order to do his job. So as long as he’s learning that we understand what his skill set is, as of right now, and like I said, as he updates his skills externally with regards to languages and all that sort of stuff, but also internally with regards to what our processes and services are, then we can continue to take that so we know that we have that resource available.

Lee
I don’t know why I’ve never heard of that.

Lee
Did you guys invent that or did.

Lee
You find it somewhere?

Darren
I certainly can’t take credit for that. It was probably Leanne came up with it. It may have come from somewhere else, I don’t know.

Lee
Legend.

Darren
Tell you what, let me take credit for it. Yeah, I came up with it. I did that. The good thing about it is, say, for example, you’ve got somebody who leaves the business or somebody who’s ill or somebody who’s off on holiday. The skills matrix, because it’s essentially a spreadsheet, you can philtre it on who can do this particular task. This person is unexpectedly not in today. Who can do this task? Oh, there’s the skills matrix. These two people can cover for them that way. You also know if somebody does give in their notice and leave, or somebody is on extended leave, you can say, right, do we need to bring someone in to fill in this particular ability? Or can someone else cover? Or who do we need to train up to do this so that when this person is away, say, on maternity leave, then you can cover that. It allows you to plan ahead with the skills matrix.

Lee
That’s amazing, mate. Something as simple as that has absolutely blown my mind. So thank you so much for joining us today on Trailblazer FM to give us insight both into your journey into the history, but also into what you guys are doing right now. Mate, how can people connect with you, especially if they maybe have any questions on Leanne’s epic skill maker? Sorry, your epic skill matrix. And then we shall say goodbye.

Darren
Absolutely! You can follow us on Twitter, Engage Web or Facebook, which is at Engage Web. Did I say Engage web? I meant LinkedIn. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook @EngageWeb or you can connect with me direct on LinkedIn if you want. That’s Darren Jamieson with an Ie. unfortunately not spelled like the whiskey.

Lee
Oh, I do love a Jamieson whiskey. If anyone’s listening, and Christmas is coming up, the address to the office is at the foot of trailblazer.fm. Why the hell not? I’m probably going to have so many bottles of Jamieson it’s ridiculous, and then I could actually start selling them and actually, I don’t know if I’d need a licence. Anyway, we digress. Thank you so much, Darren. You are absolute legend. I’d love to have you back on again sometime, so I’m going to budget you for that one. Thank you for sharing the skills matrix. I’m going to go and see if I can find a template for one.

Lee
Folks there will be links to everything we’ve talked about in the show notes over on Trailblazer FM. Darren, you are fantastic. Thank you so much for your time.

Darren
Alright. Thanks for having me. Cheers..

Lee
Cheerio..