Customer Spotlight: Sam Wright from BlinkSEO

Hey, everybody. Welcome to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast. Now, today's a little bit different because we are doing a first, which is a customer spotlight. And you're going to see these episodes peppered throughout the rest of this series where I sit down and chew the fat with one of my clients, understanding where they were at, why they engaged with me, some of the challenges that they faced and how they've overcome them, and what and what their goals are for the following year. My hope by doing these episodes is that you can learn from their journey and from some of their experiences, from some of the things that they did well and some of the things that they didn't do so well so that you don't have to make those same mistakes. So this is another action packed episode and let's go and meet Sam, who is the owner and CEO of Blink SEO.

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Tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. So on today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast, we're doing something slightly different and we're going to have this is the first of our occasional episodes where I'm going to be bringing on one of my private coaching clients to to share with you the journey that they've been on, some of the challenges that they've had to overcome, where they're at, and where they hope to be in the future. So I'm really excited to have the owner of Blink SEO Sam Wright with me today. And Blink is a digital agency that helps e commerce businesses grow. Now, Sam, I'm sure you can do a much better introduction than me about that. So why don't we just start off by giving a bit of background and perhaps the story on why you decided to start your own agency.

Sure, absolutely. So just to give you a bit of background, Blink is a team of nine, soon to be 10 specialists. Well, we are predominantly an e commerce focused digital agency. We've got a team of nine, soon to be 10, based in a mixture of Norwich, Birmingham and Coventry. So we're pretty much fully dispersed now post lockdown. Typically we work with e commerce businesses that are turning over between, say, half a million to 5 million. Our typical kind of client is a business that doesn't necessarily have digital marketing resources in house, and we kind of step in and fill that gap for them. We've worked with a number of businesses over the years across kind of wide range of sectors, but E commerce is our primary interest at the moment.

And let's get A bit of insight into why did you start your agency and what were you doing before you started Blink?

Yeah, absolutely. So I graduated in 2007 and I studied creative writing at university and that was my kind of my entry into the kind of world of marketing because my first job was in B2B publishing and part of that role was producing content for online channels, various websites. And through that I got my introduction into SEO. I worked there for a year before moving on to do an MA in Creative Writing at the uea. And at that point I started freelancing, doing a mixture of content journalism and SEO work. And I didn't really, really start doing this kind of work with a view to a career path, working in an agency or founding an agency. It's just something that's kind of evolved over time. As I was freelancing, it got to the point where I took on an assistant. Then I started working with some agencies as an additional resource and ended up partnering with one for a while. And at that point, which is about five or six years ago, maybe a little bit longer, I had a couple of employees and decided to focus on Blink as the kind of primary interest. So the whole thing kind of emerged over time. I never thought I want to start an agency. It just kind of happened. So yeah, it's kind of evolved and come to that point.

Yeah. And I think that will be a story that many of our listeners are familiar with and can relate to. And certainly that was a similar story for me when I started my agency. That happenstance meant I was started out freelancing and then got really busy. So hired someone and then before you know it, you suddenly got a team of people you're responsible for and a whole bunch of mouths that you need to feed before your own mouth, your own mouth gets fed. Um, what were your aspirations? I know you said it sort of, you didn't have those plans, but what were your aspirations as you started out? What did you ever have that sort of bigger pitch of future in mind or you just kind of trying to survive day to day?

I mean, there was definitely a chunk of, well, a large portion of it was trying to survive hand to mouth for a while, as I'm sure lots of people can identify with. I think one of the main reasons for branching out on by myself as well is back then the opportunities for content specific work were quite slight. It was mainly just producing content for like, for SEO reasons. There wasn't much strategy involved with a lot of businesses that I was working with, there wasn't much Kind of content strategy tying into broader business goals. A lot of the kind of things that you see businesses pushing for now, a lot of the kind of content marketing stuff that's really interesting that people are doing that, that wasn't happening with a number of businesses, a large portion of the businesses that were, that were operating back then. So I wanted to kind of take a bit more control of that side of things. Also, I'd say the first company that I worked with in publishing had a really unpleasant work environment. And by going out, I, going out by myself, I had a bit more. I had an opportunity to kind of mold the environment where I'd like to work. And I think that's something that we've tried to keep on with with the agency as we've grown.

Yeah, I think that's another thing that a lot of people will be able to relate to that. You know, you've had experiences of how you don't want to do it and they mold you into thinking about, well, I want to be in control of my destiny and my environment and my culture and therefore I'm going to be much more conscious of it than perhaps my employ lawyer was when I was working at my previous, previous agency. So you've grown over the years and then you got to a certain point where you reached out to start talking with me and I'm interested to know what, what were the biggest challenges that you faced at that point and what was it, what was the, like the catalyst that said, okay, I need to reach out to work with a coach like Rob?

Well, I think that there's a few things here. I'd say that Rob probably had a lack of direction before we started working with you and maybe a kind of lack of identity around the business as well. I think we were probably seen as a small, kind of well pressed, good natured, decent agency and that's great. But you know, we've got ambitions to be a bit better than, a bit better than that. So yeah, that kind of core direction has been incredibly useful and that's helped us focus a lot more on what we want to achieve and the best ways to go about it.

And any other, any other challenges that you specifically faced when, when we started working together that you wanted to solve besides that lack of direction or was that the main thing?

Well, I think that that's, that's very important. I'm trying to think back now. It seems like so long ago, but.

It'S actually, it's been about what has been about a year or 18 months.

Yeah.

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. I'd say that I'd had a number of business advisors and I think this is probably something again that might be quite a good lesson for other people in the same situation. I had a number of advisors supplied through like council schemes and government incentives where they put you with a business mentor. But they weren't specialists, they were generalists. And I found the advice was, you know, it was generic and you know, ultimately not that useful. When you've got a kind of business challenge, what you want is some practical advice. Not you need to go off and do some SWOT analysis and do. And all of that stuff which is kind of tend to be where kind of non specialist advisors give you. Yeah, that's where they start off and great. You know it's good to get that kind of general background sometimes. But what I found with working with you in particular is, you know, we don't have to go through all of those steps to get to what the problem is. You know, we can focus on what the issue is and the solution in quite a concise way. There's no kind of, we don't need to get anybody up to speed on how things work, which is incredibly useful.

Yeah. And you mentioned earlier that you one of the catalysts was having a lack of direction. What frustrations did that lead you to have in your agency at the time? How did you feel about that?

Well, I think that lack of direction influences quite a lot of the decisions that you make on a day to day basis. It could be down from what kind of people do we need to hire, what kind of projects are we going over? How should we be using our time? It just means that you're not. Your decision making in general becomes less efficient.

Yeah. Okay, good. Well that's very true. I mean if we don't know where we're headed then we have no framework to make decisions, do we? Whereas if we've got clarity around that. Certainly one of the things that I do with many clients like we've done together is to make sure we've got a kind of a three year vision and a detailed one year plan and then breaking that down into quarters and into monthly plans as well. And talk to me because now Sam, you've been part of my private coaching and then you've also become part of the self running agency group coaching program. Talk to me about some. Now I should just say for the listeners, I told Sam beforehand that this isn't trying to be a big promotion for me, but I just want to get sort of that honest viewpoint from, from someone who's been in, in this kind of environment, what are the advantages of being part of like a group coaching program? Whether it's my program or anyone else's program, what would you say the value you're getting from that?

I think the kind of the general sounding board part of it is really, is really useful. Everybody, everybody in the group seems is in more or less the same boat and the problems that we're facing are kind of shared across the group. So that's been really useful. There's been some kind like a variety of insight across the various people involved as well. So there's, there's a lot of opinions and a, of different approaches which is always useful. But yeah, I think doing this kind of job is quite isolated in many ways and just knowing that there are other people having the same challenges as you is, is quite, is quite encouraging in many ways.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's lonely at the top in any business, isn't it? And having people around you who've got your back but have got a, you know, don't have an agenda about it, I think is, is super powerful. And actually what I really love about the group is how some of it is sort of taking a bit of a life of its own. Like I know there's an initiative going on at the moment where a bunch of you are working on partnerships together outside of stuff that I'm doing, which is absolutely fantastic. So we're just creating a really good, supportive, supportive community. So tell me about goals for Blink in 2021. Where. What, what are your aspirations for this year?

Well, I think we've had such a good year in many ways. Even with the lockdown coronavirus and all of those things. We've managed to pretty much double the size of the business now and the team is growing and I think we can see that there's a huge appetite for what we do. So I mean, I guess the goals for the coming year really are to, to grow the business probably by another 50 to 100% and I think that's entirely, entirely reasonable. But what we want to do now is really focus on cementing our kind of high level expertise and become a real, a real leader in our space. And I think that's, that's, you know, rather than setting kind of revenue goals, I think that's where that's more of the target that we want to achieve. Yeah, we're seeing some good signs that we're on that path already.

Yeah. And what just share with us Some of the sort of growing pains that a business that's growing 100% year on.

Year goes through, I'd say structurally, like team organization is quite a difficult one. We're in that gap now of where most of our team will kind of have hybrid roles. But. And it's a case of do we bring people in as sole specialists without that hybrid, those kind of hybrid responsibilities. When you've got team of 40 or 50, it's much easier to have very, very clear demarcation on roles. But, you know, for a business of like 10, 15 people, then you really need a degree of fluidity between everything. Otherwise it's just not, it's just not practical. And, you know, small businesses, people need to jump on things and move around and, you know, be flexible. We're kind of having to, with our next hires, look at people that are specialists, but also a bit generalist and, you know, try and strike that balance. So. And I think also one of the things that we're finding at the moment is hiring is a very long process at the moment and the people that we're typically dealing with have two, three month notice periods. It takes a month or so to find them. So realistically, we're trying to predict what the business is going to look like in three, four months, you know, before, before we're hiring people. So we're kind of looking for people that are going to help us achieve that next stage of growth before we've got the business through the door. But, but we know if we don't have them in, you know, and when it does come in and we haven't got them there, we're not going to be able to fulfill it. So it, yeah. So kind of looking that far ahead regarding hires is a bit of a challenge, but I don't think there's any other way to do it. You've just got to have confidence that things are going in the right direction and move towards it.

Yeah, well, you've certainly done well in a very challenging environment to have grown 100% year on year. What would you, if you had to put your successes in, like, three things? What do you put your success of that kind of rapid growth down to?

I think it's focusing on clients that are best fit and understanding kind of what, what their pain points are and focusing on solving those. And yeah, I mean, we're lucky in that the E Commerce space is growing so, so quickly and there's an enormous appetite for the kind of work that we do out there, I think. Yeah. Other than that we've got some great long term clients that we've worked with for a long time and we do quite well out of referrals as well. And what we're just trying to push throughout the team is this culture of quality and effective communication and that seems to be serving us quite well at the moment.

Yeah. So a few things just from the viewer's perspective that I think Sam and Blink do really well. So first of all, they have this really clear niche of working in E commerce with a really clear product proposition. They are really clear because of that, of who their ideal target customer is. And therefore, you know, I know this has changed over the Last sort of 18 months, but your pricing is kind of now aligned to that marketplace and that makes it easier to do more profitable work, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think we're kind of in a good space in that it's actually cheap, cheaper for, for a business like an E commerce business turning over 1 to 2 million to hire us than it would be to hire internally. And we, we can do a better job than, than, than someone that would be on a 25, 30k salary. So it like as a kind of value proposition to the client. It, it does make sense. And, and that's kind of. Yeah, that's one of the ways that, that's one of the reasons that we're seeing such strong growth.

And can you just talk us a little bit about your business development journey? Like what are the things that you've tried that failed and tried, that have worked, that have got you this 100% year on year growth because you have to be doing something right now to make that happen?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Basically we've done what you told us, as I'm sure you'll be pleased to.

Hear, and I'll pay you for saying that later.

So we're kind of, Initially our business development was pretty much based on referrals. We have experimented with outbound sales as well, but pretty much we're just focused now on inbound marketing through building email lists, some LinkedIn activity, kind of content marketing side of things. And that's working well. I know we've spoken before, Rob, where I was quite insistent that we should try the outbound sales route. And we've been, you know, a few months in now and it's, you know, it's not as effective as inbound. And that's, you know, that's, that's pretty, that's, that's pretty clear. I think one of the. We've hired a marketing manager now that just solely works on the business, on us as a brand, which is, which is great because it's freed up probably, you know, 20, 30 of my time to do other stuff, which is great. What I'm pleased about with that is we've only been doing it a couple of months and we're seeing the results already, which is great. And because these things are typically a slow burn, I was expecting not to see any results for six to 12 months. That's been. Been really interesting about how quick it can happen. Obviously that's not going to be the case for everybody, but it is. It's been really interesting for us.

Yeah, I think, you know, I know Sam and I have had this conversation many times, and I've had it with a number of clients over time that we always would like to find that magic solution to new business. And sometimes there are people or organizations out there that appear to offer you that magic bullet, but sadly, when it seems to be too good to be true, it often is. And actually, you know, doing the right amount of things, doing them consistently will deliver you results. And that's something that I've spoken about many times on this podcast and spoken about many times with my clients and in the, in the coaching group. And, you know, Blink is a really good example of putting this into practice and actually, you know, getting the results as a result of it, which is fantastic. And investing that money in a marketing person is a great, you know, is a great thing to do or give you more consistent results over time as well.

Absolutely. I mean, one thing just to add in there, we've done quite a lot of work on identifying the places where our target audience commune online. You know, whether it's Facebook communities or Slack groups or Twitter or wherever these kind of audiences are gather. Yeah. And I know this, this is kind of just standard, good marketing advice, isn't it? You know, find out where your audience are and put the right message in front of them. But I think, you know, once you do have that tightly defined audience and a kind of reasonably strong proposition, then all of this stuff does become a lot easier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's sounds obvious when you say out loud, but it isn't obvious to a lot of people. And it's stuff that people just don't do. So, you know, it's always good to, you know, say these things out loud again. I always tell, you know, my, the group and my clients that nothing I teach is new. It's not like I'm a rocket scientist that's coming up with some fantastic new thing. It's just that sometimes you hold a mirror up to people and say, look guys, this is what you need to do and this is what you need to focus on and you need to take work through steps one, two and three to get, to get the results. And there's no fast track way of doing it. So, you know, I think it's good to hear that again. What's the future for Blink? What's your longer term aspirations? If we were, if you and I were having a glass of champagne in a, in five years time catching up, what would you be telling me about Blink?

Okay. If champagne still exists in five years.

Time, there'd probably be some English version.

Yeah. Is that something people can do in five years?

Let's hope so.

I'd say that we don't have an ambition to grow in terms of like vast numbers in terms of head count and I haven't got ambitions to, you know, be turning over 100 million or, or anything like that. I think we, we just want to be as good as we can be in terms of expertise and be seen as that kind of, that industry leader within our, our kind of specific niche. I think that's, you know, that's our kind of our longer term ambition.

Yes. And so my, so my book and also my coaching program is called the Self Running Agency. So how close do you think you will be in five years time to having a more autonomous agency that's less dependent on you perhaps as it is now?

Well, I don't think I'm a million miles away from that at the moment. Certainly a lot closer than when we first started working together. I think, you know, that's entirely achievable. I'm also, well, I'm about to have a kind of an initial test on that because my, I've got a child due in, in June which is a good opportunity to see how the business is running without me.

Can I just say one of the things I love about the group is that Sam posted a question. I hope you don't mind me saying this Sam, but Sam posted a question about, you know, did anybody in the group have any advice about his impending fatherhood? And got some fantastic advice back from people. Right?

Yeah, yeah. I'd like to say that I wasn't having an existential crisis about parenthood.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Of course it was more to do.

With the kind of advice, I think.

Yes, yes. Practical advice about people that have, you know, traditionally worked long hours running a business and Then and then have kind of gone through the same thing. And the advice was, was brilliant.

Yeah, well, there's nothing like that being thrust upon you to make you get some balance in your life and.

Yeah, exactly.

Certainly focus on building a self running agency. So my last question, Sam, which is the question that I ask all of my guests on the podcast, is that if you go back in time and for you it's not that many years, but for me it would be a lot of years if you go back in time and advise your younger self just starting out in business and could give him one piece of advice, what would that be?

I'd probably say to find some, some people that you admire, some mentors that you look up to and follow them. I think that's something I kind of really lacked early on in my career. And typically, you know, I've done most of this stuff by myself without someone else involved. And I think I could have learned a lot more, a lot quicker if there were people around with that kind of, that kind of expertise, you know, and looking back, if I'd have gone and sort that out, I think, you know, I think I would have seen some quite big improvements quite quickly. I imagine this is something that lots of other people would say as well.

Do you know what, I don't know, don't quote me on this, but I don't think anyone has actually said that before in 60 odd episodes of the podcast. So I'll have asked this question 30 times and at one point I'm going to collate all the responses together. But I don't know that anybody's actually said that. So that is a good, that is actually a really smart bit of advice and interesting enough when we're young and arrogant. That might be the last thing that we actually prepared to do when we're in our early 20s starting out because we think we know it all, we can conquer the world. But actually that is a really smart piece of advice that, you know, I think we could all wish we had some mentors and some people that, you know, would have been great role models for us and helped us not just learn by the mistakes that we made by learn, but learn by role modeling great behavior and great decisions as well.

Yeah, exactly. It's one thing from learning from what you don't want to do from people doing things badly, but learning from people doing things well is a completely different kettle of fish, I think.

Yeah. Fantastic. So we will put your link to your website and your LinkedIn address in as well. Is there any other connection points if people want to get hold of you, is that the best ways to find you?

Yeah, I think that's about it.

Great. Okay. Well, listen, I really appreciate your time today and all the best with. Is it. Do you know if it's a boy or a girl? Is that something?

Yes, we do. It's a girl. I'm very excited.

Okay, well, good luck with the birth of your daughter.

Thank you.

So, a big thank you to Sam for taking the time out to join us on the Agency Accelerator podcast today. I'm sure you'll be able to relate to many of the ups and downs of Sam's journey as he's grown his digital agency. As I said at the beginning, we'll be having more episodes like this in the future, so please make sure you have hit the subscribe button. Please share this episode with your colleagues, and if you're enjoying it, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. But other than that, have a fantastic Thursday Friday, brilliant weekend, and I will be back with you next week for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast.