Elliot & Dom Chapman : Managing Hyper-Growth & Int. Teams for B2B SaaS Companies | SaaS District
In this SaaS District episode, host Akeel Jabbar interviews Elliot and Dom Chapman, co‑founders of the B2B marketing agency Social Chaps. The conversation begins with the brothers’ origin story: frustration with traditional agencies while running an IT consultancy and a tech startup led them to build their own agency. They describe a data‑driven lead‑generation system built around LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Crunchbase, and their proprietary LinkedIn automation tool, Prosper, which feeds contacts into HubSpot. Key performance metrics are shared – roughly 30 % connection acceptance and 20 % response rates, with a recommended ceiling of 100 LinkedIn messages per day to avoid blocks. They discuss how campaign strategy varies by product‑ticket size (minimum $500 LTV) and sales‑team capacity, and how they integrate CRM setup, call recording, and a custom sales methodology to ensure leads are closed. The episode also covers scaling an international remote team across the US and Europe, challenges of time‑zone coordination, and the internal tools they rely on (HubSpot, Slack, Asana, Zapier, G‑Suite) plus an intranet for documentation and goal visibility. They share their approach to keeping remote staff engaged through entertaining monthly meetings and transparent ownership. Podcasting is examined as a content‑amplification channel, noting the high production effort but strong ROI when repurposed. Practical advice is given for founders starting LinkedIn + cold‑email campaigns, including step‑by‑step data collection, personalization, workflow automation, and daily message ramp‑up. The Chapmans recommend the productivity book “Eat That Frog” and provide contact details (socialchaps.com, elliot@socialchaps.co, dom@socialchaps.co).
Chapters
Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about managing hypergrowth marketing campaigns and how to manage international teams for B2B SaaS companies. Today we have our guests, Elliot and Dom Chapman joining us. Elliot and Dom are the co-founders of Social Chaps, a marketing agency described as a no-nonsense B2B agency focused on growing pioneering businesses by understanding them and helping them reach their goals to scale. Elliot and his brother Dom, after years of searching for a good marketing agency in the B2B space, they decided to roll up their sleeves and founded Social Chaps. So after 3 successful years of growth, They decided that the systems and processes they put into place are replicable across all types of B2B businesses, which we will discuss today. So welcome Elliot and Dom, thank you for joining us today.
Thanks Akeel, thanks for having us on. Awesome.
Yes, thank you.
For our audience, can you share a quick background on your guys' startup experience and why you decided to build Social Chaps while looking for a marketing agency yourself? What was the story there?
Yeah, sure. So I'll go first, Dom, and then you can dive in, 'cause there's sort of 2 slightly different stories.
Sure.
So I was running an IT management consultancy. It was the family business. I'd been involved in that for about 3 or 4 years at that point. And we were getting to a stage where, you know, decent-sized consultancy turning over between £5 and £6 million, but we really wanted to break the £10 million mark. a year mark. And to do that, we thought, right, let's bring in a marketing agency. We went through 2 or 3 in the space of 9 months. What I thought I wanted was more leads through the door. I knew that's what I wanted. What the marketing agency bought me were a couple of nice LinkedIn, fluffy LinkedIn posts and not a lot of engagement. And that's really my issue with with sort of within that marketing space is when you generally tend to engage with, with marketeers, and this isn't all marketeers, but just my personal experience, there was a lot of fluff and not a lot of action. So I sort of vented my frustration at spending £15,000 and not a lot in return to Don at a family barbecue over a beer and didn't really think much of it other than a mini counselling session. Dom was running his own startup at the same time, which he'll sort of dive into. Got together a couple of months later and we were like, why don't we just launch our own marketing agency? Which isn't what it is today, but it was the sort of the first birth of Social Chaps. So it was very much born out of frustration of not getting what I wanted. or not getting what we wanted. And Dom had a pretty similar experience as well. Cool.
Let's hear from you, Dom. What was your story?
Yeah, so I was sort of on the other end of it where I launched a tech startup, had a little bit of funding, but definitely wasn't able to spend sort of $15,000 over 3 months. So I had to go for the sort of scrappy approach. We worked with a few agencies and consultancies and sort of individuals, sort of had a similar experience They were pushing us down social media and LinkedIn and Instagram saying, this is what we need to do. So we did it, saw no results. And then similar, similar, yeah, we're both at the same barbecue having that conversation. And we decided to sort of knock our heads together and start to build out our own processes and systems that we thought would work. And that's where we both started to see results for our own both separate businesses.
Now, did you guys have experience running any campaigns before, or did you say, hey, let's try it out on our own businesses? Let's try out them. Hey guys, I think it's about contact.
Did you?
Yeah, I'm back. I did just— not sure what happened there, but did you guys have experience running marketing campaigns, or Did you say, hey, let's try this out with our own company, see if it works, and then you guys had some results and you said, hey, let's start offering this? Or was it just like, let's start selling this? Because if somebody else wants to get into the space, maybe they want to run their own agency. I mean, I want to know that kind of story, how that happened.
Yeah, so Dom's startup was very much the guinea pig, the initial guinea pig, where he was trying, he was reporting back saying, I'm trying this, it's going well, or I'm trying this and it's really not working. We then started to use some of the techniques that were working within the IT management consultancy. So obviously a completely different space, completely different target audience. And it wasn't until we found success within both of the companies where we did— we start thinking, you know, we can actually start doing something here. We could probably look to launch our own agency.
Yeah.
The intention was to never get it to the size that we are now. In fact, we were boldly making claims within the first month of starting the company, having won 2 clients in 1 month, we're making bold claims saying that we would never ever have any more employees, which is the biggest load of BS we've ever sort of spurted out.
Yeah.
Which 18 months, 18 months sort of down the line, we would not be where we are without our employees and without our staff. But, um, but yeah, it was very much tried and tested within the two, the two separate companies. Um, Dom would be constantly trialing new bits of tech, new bits of automation processes, little things that, that wouldn't work or would work, and then we would look to go and roll them out with the IT management consultancy.
Yeah, if you can figure out how to scale a marketing agency with zero employees, please let me know. I'd love to hear that story. Haven't figured that out yet? OK. So what is the data-driven approach your team uses? So you speak with— I know you work with B2B startups. I want to hear more about what is the methodology you guys use? What are the analytics you guys are using? What are the software you recommend? Or any growth marketing tactics that Social Chaps— Social Chaps that differentiates them from the other agency and actually drives quality leads that you weren't able to get?
Do you want me to take that one on?
That one's yours, Akeel.
So I guess in terms of the data-driven approach, well, I'll start with the other question, which is what would I recommend in terms of software and tools and where to start? I think if you're a B2B SaaS platform or a company, LinkedIn is definitely the place to start. In terms of how we've built out our process and systems, we actually decided to build our own sort of LinkedIn automation platform, which is called Prosper. And the data gets pulled across from a multitude of sources and directly pushes into Prosper. But if you're looking out there trying to find initial sources, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great place to start. sort of savvy with it. Crunchbase is also a good place to start. If you're getting sold on things where they're trying to offer you £500 to £1,000 a month for data, I would stay away from that. We still, you know, we've tried a few of them and the quality of the data you can find there versus just going straight to Sales Navigator and Crunchbase, you know, you can just go there for £70 a month. So I would start there. And that's where we build out all our data sources or the majority. So from LinkedIn, you can obviously get first name, email, company, all the specifics and build out those data sources. And then with what we have is we can push them into LinkedIn email campaigns, which are scalable. So once you get your copy right, you get your data right, and you start getting positive responses, All you need to do is just add more data into that and it scales up. So that's where I would start if you're trying to get in the room with the right people is LinkedIn and email, finding a couple of LinkedIn automation tools. Obviously you can use Prosper or there's a couple more out there on the market, but I would be wary not to get blocked. So don't go too hard too soon.
Okay, yeah, I haven't heard of Prosper. I'll have to check that out. Is it prosper.com?
No, we haven't even got a domain. It's just a little tab in our website just called Prosper. We very much soft launched it. We launched it because of everything that's happened. It was sort of part of our managed service. And then we were working with a lot of founders and they couldn't quite afford that package. So we decided to just say, look, use it yourself. And here's all the methodology on how to do sales. That's kind of how that happens.
Nice. Yeah, we use WeConnect, so I'll have to check that out and see if it helps. So I know you guys can control the messaging, you can control the lead, kind of the outreach, the volume of your leads, but there's one side of the equation which is product-market fit of the company you're working with. Founders coming to you, they say we want to scale or grow without Maybe they're not very clear on who their ideal customer profile is, or they still haven't found product-market fit. How do you guys work with the founders to actually make sure they're ready to scale and you're not wasting their time, or it won't actually lead to proper results?
Or their money.
Just all their money?
No, no, no, making sure they're not wasting all their money. So going back to that sort of data-driven approach, Once you've been running the campaign for a month, if they don't know who their target audience are or where their product is gonna fit, it's very much looking at a potential split test or splitting a number of different audiences with a number of different messages or sequences and then letting the data and letting the actual results do the talking. It's as soon as you start getting data and looking at the data-driven results, is going to be very, very clear if you're— if it's even a fit or where your product is going to fit. Who are the people that are genuinely interested in? To be honest with you, there's not many of the clients that we actually tend to engage with that don't understand who their product or who their target audience is. For us, particularly if you're going to be spending the money with us, you need to have that. You need to have that customer persona already ironed out. The ones where, or the clients rather, that have said, listen, we get the risk, we appreciate that there's going to be an outlier cost working with you guys, but it's very much, we're going to be working with you to understand who our target audience is. That has worked, but it's not the most cost-effective way of doing it. You can do that yourself. You know, the recommendation would be spend 2, 3 months getting up to speed and figuring out who your audience is. You can do a lot of the outreach yourself, even if it is manual. You know, there's cheap tools on the market. If you don't want to use Prosper, there's cheap— there are really cheap tools on the market that you can use to start testing out who that audience looks like, feed everything back into a CRM and look at the types of companies that want to speak to you. And then it's very simple. You just double down on those companies that actually want to engage with you and want to engage with your product.
Got it. So when you guys are kicking off a lead generation campaign, normally you suggest LinkedIn and email outreach. Is there any other scalable channels you suggest, or would you say those are the ones?
Yeah, it very much depends on, on the type of product, the type of service. I know, Dom, you were going to sort of jump in there. It's very much what it is you're selling. What's your product? Is it a B2B product? Is it a B2C product? It completely depends on, on what it is you're looking to sell. Dom, did you want to Jump in.
Yeah. As well as that, it's also how your sale is. Obviously within the SaaS game, there's sort of lower end of SaaS where you've got self-signup and that side of it. And then obviously the enterprise stuff. I think with the self-signup and pushing people through a process, you can definitely look at Facebook and Facebook advertising and social advertising that does work. You know, I would potentially do that as a second phase once you've got LinkedIn working. The beauty of going through LinkedIn and email first is the feedback you get is sort of literal. They're gonna tell you why they're not interested, or they're gonna tell you to, you know, go away. But what you want is people to say, look, I'm not interested for these 3 reasons, for example. And then that gives you iterative feedback on how to improve your campaigns. Once you've got all that, say 3, 6 months in, You can then take that copy, take all that feedback, and then push it into advertising campaigns and get an effective ad spend.
So from my understanding, I think you need to have a certain LTV value to make it worthwhile to go towards using LinkedIn. Is that correct? Do you guys have a certain threshold you like to work with? And then does it also work for enterprise as well? And are you guys working with that? So 2 questions there.
Yeah. LTV, yeah. If you're looking at a lower cost sale, then LinkedIn can— LinkedIn, certainly using things that are scalable, is probably not the best route to go down. If you're looking at slightly higher tickets, and that could be anything from $500 upwards, then you're gonna look to get your return on that investment pretty quickly.
Yeah.
So it also depends on what your sales cycle looks like. which normally coincides with the deal value. So for example, if you're looking at a deal size of around about $100,000, for example, then you know that that sales cycle is gonna be around about 6 months typically, if you're looking to sell into those enterprises. Therefore, you know you've gotta have a runway, you know, a decent runway of probably $10,000 to actually spend on this to get to start to see value. So yeah, absolutely. There needs to be some form of— it is certainly— I wouldn't say it's high, high ticket, but it's certainly not, you know, into the $10, $20. You need to be having a ticket size of a minimum of $500, I would say.
$500.
Yeah. And it's also setting that expectation. If it is a lower ticket, you're gonna get a higher number of meetings. And then obviously with the enterprise stuff, you're gonna get a lower number of meetings, but you've gotta invest that time afterwards to make sure you continue to nurture them and close them over a longer period.
Makes sense. So speaking of— sorry, go ahead.
No, no, I was just gonna elaborate on the enterprise stuff. That is definitely a space that we're operating in. There's a small number of clients that we do operate in, or operate with rather. And again, they are much longer sales cycles, A lot of it is largely regulatory as well. So geared around certain, I can do this or I can't do that, for example, within certain markets. But there is without question the space for enterprise sales on LinkedIn, without question.
And are you guys only focusing on UK and the US? Because I've heard of other startups interested in this, for example, say in Brazil or Mexico, but I think there just isn't enough of a market of people active on LinkedIn. It's not as, uh, yeah, it's not as active as other countries, right?
Yeah. Um, so we are, we're Europe and US. There's been, there's been, I'd say a small number of conversations with, with South America. Um, but you're right, there's not as many people on, on LinkedIn within South America, South America, for example, or potentially Asia, some, some Asian markets. But particularly the companies that we spoke to in Mexico, the price point, you know, just the economics of scale, it just doesn't fit for them. You know, the economy is obviously much smaller in South America than it is in Europe or the US, for example, or North America.
Right.
And therefore, for us to— we're just not mature enough to be able to go in and go, right, we can scale this right back and open it up to a market or an economy like that. We're just not mature enough to do that. And then there's also issues around the language. You know, we are to deliver our service right now, the core language is in English. We've obviously outsourced a couple of things in Italian to an Italian freelancer. We've got a Spanish speaker within our realms, but for us to go and win 10 clients out in Mexico, for example, We just wouldn't be able to deliver that. We would need a bit of a runway. So it's also being really realistic about where we want to be as a business.
Makes sense.
Australia is an interesting space. We tried to enter that market, but the time difference, we just couldn't handle it. But there's definitely interest in Australia, and we did get a couple of Australian clients. So that is a market that this would work in as well, and does work in.
So you guys are okay with the, the Pacific time to Europe? You're still able to manage that okay?
Wow.
Um, barely.
Late nights.
I wouldn't say manage it okay. Yeah, no, it was, it was difficult. Um, it was, it was difficult. And at the time, you know, I think there was— it was literally just the European team at the time. I think we had one guy out on the East Coast of the US at the time as well. So The delivery worked to a degree, but again, we just weren't— the team and the infrastructure wasn't mature enough to deliver that service to a very, very high standard. We've now got a team that sits across both the East Coast and West Coast of the US.
Mm-hmm.
And we decided to scale back on the Australian focus purely from a delivery perspective. You know, yes, there's a big market there, but there's also a huge market in Europe and the US. So as a business, after about 6 weeks of, you know, giving it a good look at it, and Dom and I probably sleeping about 4 or 5 hours a night, we decided to scale back. And there is a big enough market in the US and in Europe for us to, you know, still be able to grow at an exponential rate that we are right now.
Makes sense. So I know hypergrowth is kind of an area you guys focus on, you know, growing startups want to come to you and say, we want to grow 40-50% year over year. That's kind of the goal. One issue and risk I've heard from other agencies doing kind of similar to what you guys are doing is the sales team not being able to effectively manage the leads, or they don't have the right system and process in place to be able to handle. So, I mean, you guys can do your job, give them the best leads, but, you know, they can easily screw them up. So how do you guys work with the sales team to ensure that the business actually hits their goals, they're managing the leads effectively, and they're actually closing on the deals, the leads that you guys provide to them?
That's a good question. Dom, that's got you written all over it.
Yeah, so I think there's 2 elements with our service, and when you sort of work with Social Chaps, we'll help build out a CRM in that initial process as a starting point. So a lot of the sort of startups and the companies who work with us in that sort of area, they don't even have a CRM. They're using a spreadsheet or an Excel sheet. Whereas we implement a CRM. So we're a certified partner of HubSpot, which means we know it in and out, and we've scaled up multiple HubSpot CRMs. So we teach them how to do it, and everything runs through HubSpot.
Mm-hmm.
That allows them to sort of get sticky with it, and we push them to actually use that past when we give them a meeting or book them a meeting, and sort of we train them on that. That's sort of the first element, which is the system side of it. I think where the other side of it is where Elle and the sales team come in and sort of we do a full circle where we actually support and train that sales team to make sure that they are closing those deals.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we get them to record all those sales calls, we'll analyze them, and we'll almost audit them and try and get them into a place, you know, help them with a script. Help them with everything they need to actually close those deals. Because eventually if they're not closing, then we're not going to be a partner with them long-term.
That's actually huge, yeah. I mean, if you guys are actually helping them on the sales side to actually help them close their deals, which their sales manager, their founder should be doing. Yeah, I mean, that's huge value. So that's different than the other guys where you're just giving the marketing and the leads. So kudos to you guys for managing that.
I mean, we realised pretty quickly that yes, we can deliver them leads, but ultimately if people aren't knocking over the leads and they're not converting into business, then they're not gonna stick around for long. You know, we could give somebody 200 leads over a 3-month period and not close a single one. And yet the service isn't a failure.
Yes.
But the relationship will fall apart. So at the top of the relationship, when we get going, we make sure As Dom was saying, there is some form of process in place. We've also written the sales methodology that we use. We give that to them. So we say, hey, listen, we know, we know you're doing this. This is just out of interest. This is what we, this is what we do. This is how we do everything from an automated perspective, from how do you record the calls? How do you then give feedback on those calls? How does everything then funnel into the, into the CRM? How do you track things through a certain phase? How do you get one deal? Who's not going anywhere, how do you then convert that into a sale? So we give them that sales methodology to help them with that at the top of the relationship, on top of the consultancy as well.
Nice. Is there any differences you guys are providing or prioritizing your marketing spend or campaigns based on whether they're regular growth companies or hypergrowth startups? If there's any.
Hmm. It definitely is dependent on how their sales team is structured. There's a couple of different things to think about. The sales team, their LTV, you know, how much they're gonna make on a close, how much they can handle in terms of bandwidth. So for example, if it's just the founder and it's a higher LTV, then we would focus on LinkedIn. as a focus point, and with that, the team can qualify those meetings more to make sure every call that they're on is a meaningful call and more likely to close. If they've got 3, 4 sales guys, we're probably gonna put— distribute that ad spend more evenly with advertising, LinkedIn, email, and a couple of other channels. So that, you know, one would, yeah. And with an ad spend, you know, you're gonna get a lot more leads, but it's gonna take more time to actually qualify them and get them on a call. So yeah, it very much depends. So I don't know if that answers the question or not.
No, no, it does. So if I'm a founder, if I'm a marketer, I'm looking to start with this. Let's say I already have another channel working, whether it's social organically, but I want to start using LinkedIn, maybe plus cold email outreach campaigns to generate leads for my B2B company. I have ideal customer profile. I know my LTV. Can you share some steps that they can use to get started? So they have the tool you mentioned, Prosper. Anything else to help them get started?
Yes. So go directly into Sales Navigator, get a free 1 month. Build out your dataset there. And then with most tools like Prosper or Duck Soup or any of the others, you should be able to pull that data directly across. If you can't, then find another tool because you should be able to. What you're then gonna do is build out an automated campaign. So connecting and then sending targeted copy to those guys. I'd make sure it's not too long and not spammy. So really trying to engage in conversation versus just selling straight up. So offering some value and actually trying to engage in conversation. The key thing is how you manage all those responses and scale that up. That's the bit that people don't get right. So what Prosper has is a direct integration into HubSpot. So every new person who responds creates a new deal in HubSpot, and then we manage it and push them through a workflow. So have your workflow sort of sorted, which is like someone replies, it's a positive reply, we're going to get them in for a meeting, they're interested, we're going to close them. So have that workflow sorted in HubSpot or another CRM and sort of push people through that. And then obviously the conversation is on LinkedIn or email. Once you've got that and you've got that working, you can get a little administrator for that. You can just scale that. Right up. So you can add multiple LinkedIn profiles, multiple emails, all that sort of stuff.
And are you personalizing each email or do you have kind of a generic one for, you know, one single, say, you know, VP of marketing that you use for connecting? Or do you do without a message on the connection one? And then on this first one, once they do accept your message, I know that one's pretty critical to actually getting to a next step. What do you suggest on that one to get to a meeting?
Do you want to take that one, Al?
What do you think?
Yes. So I would build the campaigns targeted to, as you said, the type of person you're focusing on and also industry if you can. You can then personalize the copy around that. Sorry, what was the second half of the question?
So what, like, do you include a message in that first connection one? Do you recommend that?
I would just split test it. It's very dependent on the type of customer. So if you've got a very direct offering where it's gonna be an easy sell, so for example, we've got a client who does a commission-only model. It's an easy sell, which is I have a commission-only model. Are you interested in having a chat? Once they accept, instant follow-up, and then it's normally a conversation. If it's gonna be a slightly harder and longer sale, then I would not have a connection message and then probably focus on once they've accepted, sort of bringing that into the portfolio.
It does depend on the type of sale as well. You know, if you're looking to, let's say enterprise sales, for example, where you know it's gonna be a 6-month sale, it's pointless going in with, you know, an out-and-out connector message where you're, You're not even going to get past the first door. You've got to treat it almost as a gatekeeper so that, you know, they let you in and you can start building that one-to-one relationship. Whereas if it's slightly lower value and you just want to know straight off the bat whether somebody is going to be interested, then that's fine to go down that route. So it is completely tailored to what you're trying to sell.
Got it. And do you guys have any stats or data you can share? So if I'm going to start this by myself, I know, I think your guys' campaign, you mentioned 1,000 messages or contacts per month. Let's just use that as a round number. What can I expect as a number for say, you know, connection rate and maybe leads from what you've seen? Just kind of a generic so that I know I'm doing it right, or maybe, you know, close to what you guys can offer.
So as a minimum, you should be getting a, as a minimum, a 30% acceptance rate on LinkedIn. And then a minimum of a 20% response rate. on LinkedIn as well. So when we say 1,000 messages, we're actually putting around 2,500 to 4,000 people through a campaign. We obviously need them to then accept and then go through that sort of journey for them to actually respond. It's also worth saying I wouldn't— well, definitely don't send more than 100 messages and connections a day, otherwise you're going to get blocked pretty quickly on LinkedIn.
100 per day, that's your limit, the limit you suggest?
Yeah, as a max. Yeah, you've got to work up to that as well. So I'd start on say 30, next week 50, next week 70, and then work your way up to 100. If you go 0 to 100, you're going to get blocked.
Got it. Okay, cool. Last question on the marketing piece, then we can segue into the building international team side. I wanted to ask you guys about podcasting. So I know this is something you guys were pretty involved with as well, helping companies build out their podcast system. Do you guys still think there's value on building a podcast, and where do you see that fit in in the marketing system? And then any tips for people who are looking to be successful in launching their own campaign or own podcast?
Yes, there is definitely value in doing it. There's the classic Gary Vee model where you create one bit of content and then you spin that into 10, 15, 20 other bits of slightly smaller content. That was essentially our model. So we had our own podcast series last year. Was it last year or the year before? It was last year, wasn't it?
Last year.
Yeah, 2019. So it feels like a lifetime ago. So much has happened since then. So what I would say about launching your own podcast series, and you'll be able to vouch for this, Akeel, it's incredibly time-consuming.
Mm-hmm.
And one thing that we didn't take into account, so we did it as a, effectively as a bit of promo for our business. It was called Social Chaps, and the theme was to talk to interesting people about various different things in their life. So it was pretty broad. We spoke to authors, we spoke to ex-military people, we spoke to TV personalities. Spoke to, you know, young business people. So it's pretty, pretty broad and pretty wide. And one thing that takes up an awful lot of time is the research. You know, you've got to research these people, as you do, Akeel, to understand what they do, what their background is, what their interests are, to be able to hold a conversation with them for 30, 45 minutes, maybe even an hour.
Yeah.
It takes up a lot of time. On the back of that, you've then got to come up with all the questions. And try and concentrate on the interview and read the questions, figure out what's going up next. So there's a lot of, a lot of stuff that goes in, goes into getting a, getting a podcast out there. That's not even taking into consideration the, you know, the production and putting it live on, on all the various different platforms. That being said, it is still an unbelievably cheap way of producing your own content, particularly if you can spin that into a minimum of 10 other bits of content. If you can get little snippets from the podcast and start adding value as well, hugely beneficial. So my advice to anybody thinking about it, if it's on your roadmap and you're thinking about it, then do it. The beautiful thing about where we are today in the post-COVID world is there's a beautiful excuse to do it online and do it through Zoom or Google Hangouts or whatever, which we weren't doing. We were doing everything in the flesh, which obviously takes up an awful lot more time. But yeah, there's more upsides than there are downsides.
Got it. And are you guys still running that Social Chapman podcast, or did you guys stop that? Too time-consuming?
We say every month, we're like, we should start the podcast again. But then finding time to actually do it at the moment, Just because we're scaling so fast, it's tough to find the time.
Of course, I understand that. Cool. So talking about international teams, building your own team, I believe with your— I'm assuming from your first IT consultancy, that was probably a local team. And now you've kind of moved to an international team. You said remotely from— they're all remote as well, right? In the US and Europe. What are the main benefits and challenges you've seen when building international versus local?
Yeah, so the first thing I'd mention is we are by no means any experts in building international teams. In fact, the complete opposite. We were sort of partly pushed into it by COVID. We had an office in the UK, in London, and also locally in Bournemouth, which is where we're from on the south coast in England. So we were very much pushed into it. But having said that, the productivity and the people we've been able to recruit because of adopting a remote model or a fully remote model has been absolutely fantastic. We are all more productive. Everybody's happy because they can essentially work from wherever they want in the world. We've got one of our account managers They've just flown out to Italy to renovate a family member's house. Dom flew to Madrid last week because he got fed up of the UK. We've got another team member flying out to the south of Spain in a month's time. So it gives you that wonderful flexibility as a person working within a remote company.
Right.
For us, as long as the work's delivered, I genuinely don't care where you are in the world. As long as you can work within our time zone, within the time zone that you're meant to be in, and you can deliver the work, I don't care. From a sales perspective, we've got people in the UK and also out on the East and the West Coast of the US. Managing the time zones has been— it's not horrendous, but it's not ideal.
Mm-hmm.
But you make it work, you know. So we're having calls late on in our day and early on, just as we are now, early on in the day on the West Coast. And you make the monthly meeting super engaging. So one of the things that we've just started to adopt is to make the monthly meeting as entertaining as possible so that as an outsider, you would genuinely pay to watch or be involved.
Super cool.
Because there's so much story involved, it's funny, it's super engaging, you know, there's genuinely things happening and you can learn something from it as well. We're not talking about an all-day event, it's literally an hour, but the idea is everybody does— everybody hosts, has an opportunity to host it. So Dom and I will do the first couple, then we'll delegate to the team. It can— it's their slant on what they have done and what they are doing within that, within Social Chaps, and also they'll deliver all the reports as well. It gets everybody involved, and also it's their their opportunity to tell their story. So it makes them feel not only super engaged with social chats, gives them an element of responsibility as well, just engages the whole team. So that's just some of the stuff that we are doing. We are also completely open to new ideas.
Yeah.
So if anybody's listening and is super experienced in building remote teams and how to get everybody fully engaged, That's pretty cool.
Yeah, we've been a remote team since 2015. I mean, since I've been kind of working in this space, I've built, you know, all the companies that we manage or acquire, even if they have an office, we then move them to be remote. Like you said, you're able to find much better talent when you're hiring across the country or the world. I guess one challenge I've seen is, maybe you can speak to it, is when you're looking to build something new. It's a little difficult when you're doing it over just a 1-hour call versus you're right there in person and you can move a lot quicker, which I find, versus when you have a process. So I think if you already have a process, you have a system, you know it works, and you have someone come in and kind of take over the role of what needs to be done, I think it's a little bit easier. But I don't know, what's your guys' thoughts on how you guys can— do you have any strategies or systems you've used to overcome these differences? Or any other challenges?
I think, I mean, in terms of building out new products, we haven't done that since lockdown. I'm currently doing one at the moment, but it's usually just me and potentially— it's just me and Elle doing that. So it's not too complex. I think the one thing which is going to get tougher as we continue to scale remotely is the training side of stuff and getting that training you know, getting everyone trained up quickly remotely. Video calls can be time-consuming. Also, sort of, you lose interest pretty quickly at times. So I think that's one area we're really trying to focus on. And what we're doing is building a lot of internal guides and processes. We've just launched intranet, like an internal internet, where people can just go and find everything themselves instead of scrapping around Slack trying to find, you know, certain bits of information. So that's what we're sort of focusing on in terms of keeping everyone in the loop, um, and being as transparent as possible, I think, is also key to, um, being remote.
Makes sense.
And that's, that's, that's one of the things as well is, um, you know, everybody is on that intranet one of the first things that you can go and see is the company goals and what we're all working towards. And it's making sure that everybody is fully bought into, you know, what we are trying to deliver as an organization by giving them some level of responsibility and some level of ownership over an element of that goal. Again, it just brings them even deeper and even deeper into what we're trying to do.
Got it. Yeah, I suggest if you guys are interested or anybody in our audience, check out the interview I had with Gary Swart. He was the former CEO of Upwork. He has an interview called The Future of Work. Really, really great guy. I'd recommend checking that out. Is there any tools that you guys suggest? Slack, Trello, or any others, maybe top 5 that you'd suggest for our audience to check out to help them with remote work or remote teams?
Yeah, so I mean, the, the 2 key ones that we use to— well, 3 including HubSpot— is HubSpot, Slack, and Asana. And then what pulls all that together is Zapier. I'm sure you've heard of Zapier as well. So with those sort of 4 tools, you can automate and keep on top of and track everything that you need to be doing. You know, there's not much more you need. If you've got Google or G Suite as well, you've got access to Google Docs, Google Slides.
That's all collaborative as well.
as well. I think those 5 do a good job of getting you to where you need to be remotely.
Awesome. Last question. What's any favorite book you guys suggest to our audience to check out, whether it's for building remote teams or for lead generation?
Not so much lead generation, but the book that Dom and I are actually both reading at the moment, this is by pure coincidence. So I walked into his house the other day and I was like, Did I tell you to read that book? He was like, no, did I not tell you to read it? So we're both reading the same book at the same time. But it's called Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy.
Yeah.
Pretty well known. But the idea, it's all around time management and how to be, you know, super productive with your day, which as a founder of a business which is growing pretty rapidly, you need to learn to be really productive fast. I'm not the most organized. Um, so it's something that I am— I'm having to learn on my— literally on my feet. But the idea behind it, if, if people haven't read it, then I definitely urge you to go and read it. It's if the worst thing every morning you were to eat a frog, that would be the worst thing of your day. So the idea is to get the shittest task out of the way first thing in the morning so that you can then focus on all of the other good stuff throughout the rest of the day. So That would be my number one book to read for any founder or anybody within the SaaS space. Go and read that book.
Awesome. Yeah, that's a good book. I've read that a couple of years ago. How can our audience get in touch with you and learn more about what you guys are doing or get started with a campaign maybe for their own business?
Yeah, cool.
So obviously, Dom and I are both on LinkedIn. They can go head over to our website, which is socialchaps.com. There's a little engaging video of me at the start of lockdown urging everybody to come and speak to us. Or you can reach us at elliot@socialchaps.co or dom@socialchaps.co.
Awesome. Thank you, Elliot. Thank you, Dom. Anything you guys want to add before we wrap this up?
Not from me. Dom, anything from you?
All good. All good for me as well.
All good. Big thank you for for inviting us on. It's been it's been really really good to to talk shop. So thank you very much.
No, thank you guys. Thank you.
Cheers. See you later.
Bye bye. Thank you all for listening in to today's episode. Don't forget to join us for another episode where we interview top leaders and experts in the business and SaaS industry. If you enjoyed this episode, I ask that you please give us a five-star review on iTunes. That would be really, really appreciated. Otherwise, if you have any feedback, suggestions, or improvements for this podcast, please feel free to send it directly to me on our website at horizoncapital.com, or you can just tweet me @akeeljabbar. Thanks again, and hope to see you guys on the next episode.
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