Business Development Strategies (part 2) with Darryl Sparey

Hey everyone, it's Rob here, your host of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. And this week we're doing part two of our business development conversations. And this week we're really focusing on what's working and what's not working in this new online world. We're talking about how to build relationships, how important communities are, what's working, what's not working at the moment, and how you can keep providing value to your audience, to your customers, and also your, your prospects. And a few things about how to cut through the noise of the online world. So I know you're going to find this a really useful, insightful episode. So let's get on with today's show. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. So welcome to the latest episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. This is kind of part two in a series on business development in this kind of challenging 2020 environment that we're in at the moment. And I'm really excited to have Daryl Sperry with me today. Now, Daryl's been in the business development game for a long while and he runs an agency called Hard Numbers, who, what I like about them is that their performance driven marketing and they really focus on delivering tangible, demonstrable results for their clients and they focus on campaigns that drive pipeline sales and growth. And what I liked when I was kind of prepping for the interview and looking at your website, Darrell, was the fact that you really focus on results and outcomes for your clients rather than selling time, which is a conversation I have a lot with my clients. So welcome. Darrell. Is there anything else you wanted to add to my introduction?

Thank you very much for such a fulsome introduction, Robert. I don't think I could add anything to that, so thank you.

Okay, well, that's good that I've done my job. So I just wanted to kick off by asking you a broad question, which is we're obviously in a really challenging environment at the moment and I've seen a number of agencies really flourishing and a number of agencies really struggling. So what changes have you seen to the business development landscape in 2020?

Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I'd start by saying in one regard, it's harder than ever to kind of quote, unquote, sell something to someone for lots of different reasons. I think it's one, there was definitely a period of time, probably from March till about April, May time, where it almost felt like you almost couldn't sell to People, you know, overtly, right. That it was a time for kind of relationship building, for kind of being there to add value to people, to, you know, to support people in your network, you know, all those kind of, to offer, you know, help or advice or things like that, but it really wasn't the time to, quote, unquote, sell to people. But I think that speaks to something more broadly about where a lot of people get selling wrong. And really, you know, it's a couple of principles I live by, one that I learned from my dear departed Nan, which is you've got two ears and one mouth and you should use them in that ratio. So, you know, when you're, when you're talking to a new prospect or things like that, you know, start by listening and start by really understanding what their problems are and what their challenges are and how you might be able to help them or add value to them or things like that. And the second part is earning the right to sell to someone. It's so weird that I get so many approaches from people on LinkedIn which are like, I mean, just rubbish. Just really, really poor sales approaches which are all about them. Like, I want to expand my network. Can we connect? Or I want to, you know, I want to talk to you about something that, you know, my product or things like that. And they're never about, like, me or what I want or what my goals are or I might be trying to achieve or anything. And so I think the other thing is earn the right to sell something to someone. Don't start by just trying to sell someone something.

Can I just dig into that a little bit? First of all, I completely agree. I always think when people send me a connection request that is just that generic request on LinkedIn saying, I'd like to connect with you. I think if you can't be bothered to send something a little bit more personalized than that, then I'm not going to connect with you. And I had an example yesterday which I'm ashamed or, or delighted, I'm not quite sure which, that I took a screenshot of where someone sent me a request that wasn't quite. That was, but was pretty generic. And the minute I accepted their connection, they sent me a sales email and I respond to them saying, why on earth would I buy from you when I know nothing about your business and you haven't demonstrated anything about mine? And then I unconnected from them. So when you talk about earning the right to sell, can you just dig a bit deeper into what you mean by that?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, you have to think about how can I help that person do something, how can I demonstrate to them that I have something of value that is going to help or improve how they run their business or help them achieve their goals, like achieve, you know, a certain fundraising level or a certain level of growth or, you know, whatever those kind of goals or objectives for the business might be. And if it's someone sort of, you know, at a different level within the business, how can you make them look good? Right. What can, what piece of knowledge or insight or, you know, or help or support or whatever it is that you can give that person that you can make them look good. Right. Like actually don't, you know, when you're starting a relationship with someone, you know, which is what the kind of sales cycle is, you shouldn't even start by talking about your product or your service or something like that. You should start much further back, which is just getting to know that person, getting to know their challenges and offering them something of value.

Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. I published some content this week about what the key mistakes so many agencies see to make with their websites. And I was going to call this topic, why is your website full of we. I decided that maybe that was the wrong thing because I think what you said is so true and it should translate into your website as well. But so many websites start off saying we do this and we do that and then we do the other. But in effect, the client who's reading or the prospect who's reading your website doesn't really care at that point because what they really want to see is, can you help me? And then you, then you earn the right to say, okay, well, yes, you've shown that you can help me, so now I want to find out how you do it. And so I kind of completely agree with you on that. And I feel like a lot of people get that wrong in their websites because they just spend all their time talking about themselves and they don't demonstrate that, that they really understand their target audience and the pains that they have that your product or service can solve.

Yeah. I would caveat one thing by saying our website is probably quite full of wee currently. And I would say that's kind of a function of being a new agency. Right. Like when we set up, when we set up. So we launched the first of June this year, so we're still quite fresh out the wrapper. We did set out to try to very clearly delineate the differences between us and other agencies that are out there. So I definitely think that I will definitely want to evolve our website over time. But I think we launched with something that the page that we launched with on LinkedIn and on our Twitter and stuff was our why hard numbers? Why are we different page. And there's five key things that we set out there that we think are points of different difference versus other.

Yeah.

And I wasn't.

I actually thought your website was pretty good. It is interesting because what I like about my viewpoint on this.

Yeah.

Is that some people don't agree and that's perfectly fine and we can have that discussion. I guess in a way what you have to do is think about where does your website fit in the sales process.

Yeah.

Because if some people feel like their website's just brochureware and that someone when they're already kind of pre qualified would be directed there, then it's fine to talk about we. But I actually feel that it's. If agencies just look at their website as a brochureware site, then they're missing an opportunity to make it a lead gen site as well. Anyway, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole of talking about website.

We can totally like another time. If you want to geek out for half an hour about why most agency websites are rubbish from an SEO perspective, I can give you half an hour on that. No, no problem at all.

And I wasn't even talking about SEO really. I just feel like there's comfort and conformity with a lot of agencies.

Like they all look.

Saying they were the same.

But look at how agencies talk about themselves when they pitch as well. You know, most top 150 agencies will start with we're a top 150 agency as a thing. We've won some awards. Right. Okay. Well that's not necessarily as interesting as. Tell me the awards you've won for your client. Right. For your clients. Right. That's more interesting to me because I want to win awards as if I'm the client. Right. And I want to go to have speaking opportunities in places and I want to do those. Those kind of things. It's like what have you achieved for your clients? Not necessarily what you achieve for yourself. They all talk about the people like they make. They spend so much time talking about the people. We have great people. You know, our people are the best. All the rest of it. Well, if all of the other top 150 agencies are all saying the same thing about the people, where's your point of difference? And how can you ever make. How can you have, how can you make a USP out of your people right now? You can if you're committed to continuous personal development. That all of your people, for example, are CIPR accredited. Right. Because less than 3% of all PR professionals, I think it's in fact less than 1% of all PR professionals are CIPR accredited. How many top 150 PR agencies do that? When they talk about the people they don't. They talk about their coffee machines and their ping pong tables, their staff perks, all the rest of it. None of which benefits me as a client. Right. There are so many things that agencies get wrong with how they pitch. And I can say this from personal experience I have used when I was at Precise and we were pitched by about 15 different agencies in that time as well. So I've been the other side of the table and I've been a client and I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly of the pitching experience and the being a client experience.

You don't want to make this a, an agency bashing podcast episode. What it does say to the listeners is, look, guys, you've got an opportunity to look different to your competition. You've got an opportunity to do things slightly differently. And I think that you can't do a lot of what we're talking about here unless you really understand the niche that you work in and you understand the ideal target client that you are targeting in that niche and the pains that they have. And then you can talk to those pains, but you can't do that if you're a journalist. And again, a whole different topic. But I think we have to caveat this conversation by saying you can provide value to your audience when you really understand who your ideal target customer is.

Yeah, yeah, it's what we always start. So we do account based marketing programs for clients and we start with the icp, right, the ideal customer profile. And we've got a document where we kind of detail out exactly both the company, so the company kind of type and then the sort of person, the Persona, the role and then you know, the, the things that influence them, the things they pay attention to, all the rest of it in within the businesses. And we apply exactly the same principles to ourselves and how we talk about ourselves and we market ourselves and things like that as an agency to how we would approach things for a client. But yeah, having that ICP in mind so you know who you're presenting prospective customer is both in terms of the types of companies that you want to work with and Then the roles within those companies that you're trying to communicate to is really key.

Yeah. Okay, great. So let me just circle back to the very first thing that you said and just kind of add my two tuppence to that thought, really, because when we went into lockdown and everything started going crazy, I had a whole bunch of clients saying to me, should I be selling? You know, I think I just need to sort of try and ride this out. And my argument to them was, if you are providing value to your audience and if your services can truly help your clients get through this challenging time, why on earth would you not be putting yourself out there to help those people rather than kind of feeling rather British and awkward and just stepping back? So I don't know if you saw that as well.

Not to give a plug for my former agency, but Hotwire was the agency I was at before I set up Hard Numbers. And I was there for four years. And around February, March time, it was clear that lockdown was imminent, was coming, and we had to do things differently and approach things differently. So we created, I think it was called the COVID Comms toolkit or something like that, which was a set of resources that we crowdsourced from people across the industry for kind of best practice for how to communicate at that period of time and how to kind of get through things and all the rest of it. And that was a really, really useful tool and resource. And that got a lot of traction with people because we were just perceived to being there, to being helpful and not to, again, to kind of overtly, you know, sell to people. But of course, sales thing starts after that. So once, to your point, Rob, you know, once you've demonstrated value to people, once you've made a connection with someone, that you then begin that process of earning the right to then have that sales discussion with them and talk about what they're doing currently and how that, you know, what challenges they might be facing and how you might have something that might be able to help them. So all that stuff comes, comes after. But, yeah, absolutely setting your stall out to be helpful. Definitely to your point, Rob, as well, don't go quiet. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Ian Anderson, a brilliant communicator and consultant, says where there is confusion, there is consultancy. And absolutely, you know, you should be out there talking about, not necessarily about yourself, but about the experiences that you have helping clients through this and how you might be able to help other people. Like there is, you know, definitely don't go quiet because it's the first thing we tell our clients. Right. Any agency that has cut their investment in marketing through this period of time, what do you then say to your client when they do exactly the same thing to your budget? Right. Like the first. Yeah, the first thing we should be doing is putting our foot on the accelerator at this period of time. You know, we're very fortunate at hard numbers that we're at, you know, early, early stages of business. Right. So we haven't got any budget to cut. We're kind of making the budget, you know, now and kind of building our budgets up rather than, you know, the other way. But I think we should eat our. I hate the phrase, but we should eat our own dog food. Right. We should live by the advice that we would give our clients.

Yeah, absolutely. Interesting you talk about Hotwire, because when I ran my agency back in the 90s, early 2000s, we were a tech PR agency. Well, tech full service marketing agency at the end. And Hotwire were one of our key competitors back then, so.

Before my time. So we never cross swords, I'm pleased to say.

Rob, if you were giving some advice to an agency owner who runs a small agency, they've got limited time and budget. What would you advise them to focus their money and their time in terms of business development? If they were putting a strategy in place, what would your advice be?

I think it's a few different things. So first, have a really clear value proposition, like differentiate. Be different from other people. Don't just be another kind of me too agency. So be really clear on what your value proposition is and then who is it for and be really clear about who you're targeting and draw up a list of these are 100 dream clients that we want to work with. And then go and find yourself who the people are that you, you know, who are in the role that you want to sell to, which in our line of work is probably going to be heads of marketing, chief marketing officer or head of communication, communications director. And then work on building your relationships with those people. Create campaigns and programs just like you would for your clients, which get you out there, which build your relationship with that cohort of people that you want to sell to. And do it very much in that way. Start by building. Think about it as building a relationship with someone new, not trying to sell them something. If you start with those principles, you'll probably be all right. And I think the other thing to your point is don't go quiet. Be really disciplined about making the time for this. The other thing that definitely Small agency owners don't do, and I have been guilty of this in the past four months, is we gravitate towards the existing business because we think to ourselves, well, if I keep the existing business, you know, it's a bird in the hands, worth two in the bush. Right. But actually that's a wrong way of thinking, thinking about things because if you've got staff and if you've got a team who are looking after clients who are competent, then they'll do a competent enough job hanging onto those clients for you. Your job is to go out there and get more clients and bring them into the agency and find those opportunities. So don't gravitate towards the existing. Don't be a farmer, be a hunter. Sure.

And in a world where it's harder to build relationships because we can't meet people face to face at the moment, what does building relationships look like in terms of sort of practical things to do?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, the things we do for our clients. So we organize virtual events, virtual roundtables or virtual, you know, kind of conferences or panel events or things like that for our clients. We create content on behalf of our clients. So again, doing the same thing, we're working on a research report at the moment for hard numbers, which we're really excited about, which we're going to launch in November, which is Measurement Month, AMEC Measurement Month. And we've invested time and effort working with the research partner, Karma on some really, really interesting research that we think proves a direct return on investment in pr. So we're really excited about that and we've used that as a way to interact with and reach out to people we weren't talking to previously. So I think coming up with opportunities for people to be part of something. The other thing is Community. So we've got this service that we have at our numbers called Community as a service whereby basically we run online communities on behalf of our clients who are too busy to, you know, they're busy marketing professionals that haven't got the time to do themselves. And that's born out of my experience of lockdown. You know, I set up a group for the CIPR Greater London Group on a platform called Guild. And then we set up a group for furloughed or released talent called called fort. And in both of those groups, you know, we've got guild, the GLG group. We've got over 150 PR practitioners. The guild group has over 300 people like community as a way to build a direct Relationship with people is really underappreciated at the moment as a way to build an audience and build a relationship with people. And I think we see that as a huge opportunity going forward. So those are some things that we're doing that we'd recommend.

Yeah, that sounds good. And obviously we've got to find other ways of building our community and engaging with people that isn't just inviting them onto a zoom call, which probably a lot of us are kind of zoomed out from. When you just stand back and look at the general business development and the marketing landscape at the moment. Again, if we were advising a small agency owner, what would you say to them? The things that they should be doing and perhaps the things that they shouldn't be doing, like what's working and what's not working at the moment?

Yeah, it's a really good. That's a really good question. I think one thing that I did a talk, the marketing kickoff of identity business called GBG recently and one thing I talked about there was realizing the opportunities that were afforded by the fact that we're now, we're not working from home, we're living at work. Right. And one of the things that I'm seeing like more and more is weird, like open times on emails and reply times to LinkedIn messages or connection requests or things like that. Like 8 to 9 o' clock at night, over weekends, people are working more probably than they've ever worked before because they're not creating that firewall between home and work maybe, or their second screening when they're, you know, and on Twitter, on LinkedIn and things like that when they're. So I think it's sort of culturally becoming accepted to send messages to people outside of those hours. Now you're not doing that to necessarily expect a reply at that time, but you're doing it to reach people at a time where the data is telling us they might well be online. So just thinking about designing campaigns, ways you outreach to people, things like that, that just bear that in mind.

Any other thoughts on what's working and what's not working at the moment?

Any approach where you are creating an opportunity to facilitate networking or opportunities for your clients or prospects to meet one another or talk to one another or engage with one another or things like that? Roundtables like I talked about communities earlier, you know, steering group, you're basically the kind of network crucible around bringing together a number of people across different, either different sectors or a number of people from the same sector to talk about a particular Thing or whatever that is that works really well. There was a guy who found out that Tom Hanks was playing was in a film where he was. He's Woody and there's Buzz, the astronaut character. Yeah. Toy Story. Right. And there was an agent, I think it was, who found out that Buzz Aldrin had always wanted to meet Tom Hanks. So he phones Buzz Aldrin. No, I think he phones Tom Hanks people and say, hey, you know, Buzz Aldrin really wants to meet you. And he hears that he's a character in a film that you're. You're in at the moment, has the same name as him, and so it'd be a real honor for you to meet him. So Tom Hanks says, ah, that's amazing. I'd love to meet. Well, Tom Hanks people are like, I'd love to meet. He'd love to meet Buzz Aldrin. Let's make it happen. So then he phones Buzz Aldrin and says, hey, Buzz Aldrin, Tom Hanks wants a meeting with you. Would you like to meet him? And he said, of course I'd like to meet him, or whatever. Right. And then they both turn up at the same time at the restaurant and the agent guy's there as well. Right. So he just facilitated this meeting between these two people and they didn't even know and he was there and they're like, who's this guy? Why is he here? Right. So just it's instructive just as an approach to like create opportunities for your clients and prospects to meet interesting people that they would otherwise not have the opportunity to meet or talk with or interact with.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I have a group coaching program called the Self Running Agency. And I think the biggest benefit people get from that is the interaction with each other. They're starting to be more kind of cross referrals and just advice sharing and all the rest of it. So I think at the moment, any opportunity to create community like that or in the ways that you've described, we should definitely be doing. How do you feel though? People can cut through the noise of that because obviously everybody's trying to do this and there's, you know, webinars, 20 webinars a day that I could enroll to. So I imagine that the show up rate, those type of things has gone down massively in the last few months. So how to, how would you advise someone to cut through the noise to get their message out to their target customer?

Yeah, I think the things that make those things how do you make those things successful? Right. Well, one, you create compelling, a compelling reason. So get someone who would be of real interest for people to listen or a panel or whatever. People that would be of real interest, like genuine interest to listen to. Secondly is to just do all it's boring hygiene stuff. Right. But I can't tell you the number of people who organize events, who don't send calendar invites for the events to people. So the time is they know the time is held in their calendar and that they've got an acceptance back. And then I think it's about trying to build something which has a sort of self sustaining momentum, a flywheel effect. Right. So if you can build a regularly occurring steering group meeting of people in a particular sector or things like that, or a regularly occurring event around something or whatever where you're basically creating kind of a, almost a brand around the event or around the group of people that are meeting or whatever, that has a real value as well. Right. Like that people feel like people want to be part of communities in whatever form that is. Right. You look at Peloton is one of the fastest growing companies in terms of market cap and value at the moment. Right. Why? Because they have harnessed the power of community like almost no other brand I can think of in the last 10 months. It's definitely like build communities, create opportunities for people to network with one another and you're just the facilitator.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, Peloton are a good example of figuring out an opportunity in a crisis and making it really work for them. Have you got any final sort of thoughts on any mistakes that you see agencies making in terms of their marketing or their business development and what they should do differently?

I think the one thing I would say is hindsight is 20 20. Right. But I definitely wouldn't want to be one of those agencies that spent all their sales and marketing budget on awards. Like for the, for the past, you know, five years. Right. Because awards are not going to deliver the same kind of level of return or ROI that they did, you know, a year ago because you don't have that IRL on the night. Brand awareness of continually hearing the same names, picking up awards throughout the night. So I would definitely be pivoting away from awards and putting my money into other stuff. That's not to say that, you know, awards aren't important and don't have a value, but I wouldn't be putting all my money on that one tool for raising awareness of the agency.

Yeah. I think the mistake the common mistake I see people making is that they try something for a short period of time, they haven't really invested in it properly in terms of time, money or effort and therefore they deem it doesn't work and therefore they give up and they say, okay, well that's fine that it works for others, but it doesn't work for me. And I get this quite a lot with people. I'm a big fan of people really focusing on building their email list and then using email marketing is a great outreach campaign, providing your, you know, providing value 80% of the time, selling 20 of the time. But someone might try this and you know, send out a couple of emails, maybe one email a month over a few months, and then decide that they haven't won loads of business on the back of it and say, well, it doesn't work for me. And actually, you know what, you need to be doing it eight way more frequently than that. B and B for a lot longer period. So I think one thing I see people making is that they try something. It could be building your list, it could be doing some advertising, it could be outsourcing business development, it could be a number of things, LinkedIn outreach. And they do it for a short period of time. They almost create their own self fulfilling prophecy of believing at the start that it won't work and therefore proving to themselves that it won't work. And they give up. And then they get, you know, seduced by the next new shiny object thing that's out there. Of course there are many and they move on to that and then they repeat the same cycle again, again, right?

What would we tell our clients? We do a broader range of stuff than, than quote unquote, just PR and media relations, right? When you pitch PR or media relations to someone, you say it's a long term thing, it's an investment, the time and effort over the long term. You can't, don't want this to be a flash in the pan. You don't all those kind of things, right? So why don't we listen to that advice when we apply it to our own marketing and communications efforts? There's no such thing as an overnight success. Everything takes the application of disciplined time and effort. Actually, if there's one other thing, I get approached by a lot of sort of small to medium sized agency owners who kind of reach out to me for business development advice. And the one thing I always say to all of them is make time for this in your diary. Carve out two slots of time a week which are your business development time. And you never ever put anything else in your calendar, no matter how if something is on fire. Right. You don't let anyone put anything in your diary at that time. You keep that for business development because it's again, it will always be the thing that falls to the bottom of your list. Otherwise.

Yeah, you know, yeah, absolutely. It's about consistency. I mean, I talk about, I talk about this in terms of three pots of time. Revenue, strategy and admin. And business development fits in the strategy pot because strategy is basically, how are we earning money in the future? And if you're an agency owner or a business owner of any kind, you have to be able to juggle those three pots. So revenue is all about money today. So that's serving clients. Strategy is all about the future of your business. So that's money tomorrow, that's business development and planning and all the rest of it. And then admin is running your business, which is invoicing and hr. If you don't get the balance of those three right, your business is going to fall over. And like you say, people get busy doing the revenue piece, which is serving clients. And therefore the business development falls off the diary. And the result of that is people lurch from feast to famine. And it's really bad place to be.

Every single agency I know falls into. Because if you think, what's the platform that cuts across those three pots of time that you just talked about about, Right, CRM. Because on our CRM system, so we use HubSpot and we use quarter one for revenue forecasting. Right. So I know at any one time I can pull up a report on quarter one that tells me what my committed revenue is for this month based on what's in the CRM system can tell me what my kind of expected revenue is this month based on the opportunities I've got in the pipeline. And I keep those up to date, so I know, are we going to win this? Yes or no. And I categorize them into are like likely to win or kind of like speculative. So I can then get a gauge of what are we going to do. So I can forecast my revenue at the click of a mouse. So all of the things that you talked about doing, we run off CRM.

Yeah. And it just so happens that I have an episode coming up. I think it's going to be episode 43 or 44 where I'm interviewing a CRM expert. So we will be digging into what you just said in a lot more detail because I know that's an issue. And if I'm honest, it's an issue for me as well, because I am guilty of what you just described. Really? Like, I have a really great email automation system, but I don't really have a great system for managing my prospects and working out where they are along that journey. Last question that I ask everybody, Darrell, before I let you go, is if you could go back in time and give your younger self, who's just starting out in business, one piece of advice, what would it be?

I've got two, two answers to that question, if that's okay. The first is buy stock in Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. I had my own business when I was 20, 21. 22, right. Fresh out the wrapper. I had no idea about anything and I had to learn. You know, they talk about being at a startup, you're kind of building the plane while you're trying to fly it. Well, like, imagine about, like learning what a plane looks like while you're trying to build a plane while you're trying to fly it. So I learned a lot of lessons the hard way when I was that age. I think the one big lesson that I learned, and I'm still trying to teach it to myself today, I still have to remind myself, and I still don't get it right. Every day is focus your time and your effort on the things that only you can do and that no one else can do. And if you find yourself spending time on something that you know someone else could do, but you just think that you haven't got time to show them, or that it would just be quicker for you to do it or anything like that, you are, you're wasting your time and have a word with yourself and get, get some help from someone else within the business to do it.

Great piece of advice. And actually, guys, if you go back and listen to episode 26 of the podcast, I did an episode called what is your notional hourly rate? And this is exactly what Daryl's talking about here, which is your an hour of your time is worth a notional amount in your head. So if you're doing a task that's worth less than that, then why on earth are you doing it? Why are you not outsourcing it to somebody else? And so I completely agree with you and I fight that with myself. You know, I fight these, these stories that we tell ourselves, like it's quicker to do it myself or I haven't got time to show somebody else. And those might be true in the moment, but they're never true in the long term. So absolutely. I mean, I'm a one man band fundamentally, but I have a va and I have a social media person. And the next thing for me actually is finding a podcast editor because that takes up a lot of my time as well. But I, I like that I haven't had that as an answer before. Every year I collate all of these answers and put them into. I'm going to put them into an episode of the podcast this year. We haven't had that before, so appreciate that. So Daryl, if people wanted to find out more about you and more about hard numbers, how would they do that?

So I'm on Twitter. I'm quite noisy. Daryl. D, A double R, Y L S, P A R E Y and we're at hard numbers or one word on Twitter and they can Google us. And if you Google ardnumbers, we're top of page one on Google for that as well. Thank you very much for your time, Rob. Really appreciate it.

No worries. My pleasure. It's great having you on board and getting some interesting takes on where we're at in the world with business development. I'll include all those links in the show notes. And thanks, Daryl, for giving us your time today and sharing your wisdom.

Thank you.

So there you go. We've covered the gamut of business development, particularly in this challenging time. I hope you got a few nuggets of wisdom from this episode, and if so, please make sure you subscribe to the podcast, share it with your colleagues, and please consider leaving a review. But other than that, have a brilliant rest of the week and I'll see you next Thursday for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast.

SA.