Interview with John Ashton Discussing The Kitchen Table Community Concept

So in today's episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast, I am really excited to have John Ashton with me. Now, John is a man of many talents. He runs a agency called Right Arm, which is an editorial content creation agency. He has also written a book and he runs a membership community called the Kitchen Table Community. And his book is called the Kitchen Table Method.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa.

So welcome John, and let me know if there's anything else you wanted to add to my rather garbled introduction.

Thank you, Rob. Lovely to be here. And no, there's nothing I think I can add to. That all sounds like a good summary of my career so far, at least in the marketing world.

Excellent. Okay, so I imagine that in 2020, more people than ever have started out their freelance journ. And so I'm interested to get your thoughts on that and talk about how the Kitchen Table method comes in for freelancers growing who want to grow an agency.

Yes, well, clearly the events of 2020 have interrupted a lot of people's careers and plans. So many people have been thrown out of staff jobs and are trying to make it as freelancers. But there's an underlying trend that I've noticed which has been accelerated by Covid and that is towards freelancers and indeed staffers, but primarily freelancers starting their own mini agencies. Now, I think this is, this is a trend that I had discussed with a number of agency owners who are sort of in the early stages and they say, and it runs true for a lot of people, that they went freelance and then they started getting more work than they could handle. And then they thought, well, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to farm it out to friends. And so they've become a de facto agency anyway. And then they realize that actually they should become a fully fledged agency. But what they don't do is take on staff and take on premises. They don't want the sort of scary overheads of that. And like most creatives, myself included, they're not necessarily very business savvy. You never find people in this world, or very few who've done an mba. So they conclude that what I call the Kitchen table method, that is running an agency from your kitchen table or your back bedroom, as I did, or your favourite cafe, employing freelancers rather than staff is the way forward. And as I say, I think that Covid has accelerated a trend that was already there.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's Interesting that people start out. I think it's probably your journey and my journey as you describe where you start out almost with that freelancer mentality, that one man band consultancy type of thing. And then you get. There's a certain kind of point where it might be that you'll run ragged with too much business, but there's a certain sort of mindset shift that has to happen from thinking of yourself as a freelancer to thinking yourself as a growing business. However that business grows. Do you see that as well?

Yeah, absolutely. My journey was slightly different in that when I set up Right Arm, I was not acting like a freelancer. I actually didn't want to do any of the client work. I mean, I would have done and there were times when I did a bit, but it was more, you know, I did have in mind to actually run it like an agency, even though I had no clue how to do it. But what you describe is more common, I think. Very typical that you, you do have to go through this, this mindset shift partway through your journey and realize that you've got a serious business on your hands and that you have to treat it as such. And I think that doesn't come naturally to people in this general field of the commercial creative industries. So that could go for marketers, could go for designers, videographers and so on. Those kind of people tend to like to do the coal face work. You know, they like to do the design, they like to do the video, and they're a little bit squeamish about getting involved in business and running a serious business. But my own experience is that you largely learn on the job there are lots of people around, yourself included, who can, who can help you along and give you guidance. And it really needn't be as scary as you perhaps think it is coming from your position as a freelancer who just enjoyed doing the work.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say that when you run your own business, you have to be good at doing three things. You have to be really good at delivering the business. And as you say, when a, when someone starts their own agency, then they obviously are going to be good at doing the thing that they do, but they also have to be really good at looking at the future of their business, which is looking at new business and sales and marketing and planning and all that kind of stuff. And then the third ball that they've got to be good at juggling is running a business. So that means getting your invoices out on time, managing teams as you start to hire People, whether that be virtual teams or physical employees. And that's where a lot of people come across. And I think that's why so many businesses fail in their first year, because they just haven't found a way of learning some of those skills, realizing they need some of those skills, or managing their time so that they can split between the three balls that I've just explained.

No, you're absolutely right. And go back to this point that people, you know, people might be really good at what they do, they might have a great skill and they see their business as a passion project. But it's actually got to be more than that. It's got to be, you know, you've got to dedicate yourself to running a business. But that needn't be scary. I keep saying this to people who want to set up a business. When I did it, I was absolutely clueless and I managed through trial and error. But you get there and you suddenly become a business person. And that's a pretty good thing to be when you run your own business. Of course it comes with stresses and strains, but so does freel life. And the great thing about having an agency, which we forget is actually you take on more clients than you could as a freelancer. See, it's actually more secure. You might think that running a business is terribly insecure, but actually it's less insecure than if you're a freelancer chasing a few clients because you can chase many more.

And I'm sure that's really true just for being self employed rather than being an employee. Because, you know, I know that I have complete control over the destiny of how successful my coaching practice is. I can't say the same would be true for a lot of people who are in jobs and are rather uncertain about where the direction of their business is going. And I guess that's one of the catalysts that have caused a lot of people to start thinking about initially freelancing and then as you say, suddenly finding themselves much busier than they anticipated. And if they don't start thinking a way of kind of creating a larger cup so that they can have more capacity, then they're going to get very stressed and probably start losing clients because they can't deliver to the level of service that they promised. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about what the kitchen table method is in a sort of a nutshell?

Yeah, it's a sort of methodology that I devised off the back of my own experience of running my kitchen table agency. Right Army. And you Know, I've been doing it for years and then I eventually realized that actually what I'd experienced on my journey was actually a method of doing things. And I. Because it's the kitchen table, I've said there are four legs to it, like with a table and conveniently they all begin with a C. The first one is culture. I think you've got to have a proper company culture. You've got to really give culture of thought, which I didn't when I started, frankly. But your culture is at the core of your identity. The second one is clients, so obviously that's winning and keeping clients. The third leg is collaborators. So those are the people who you work with who are largely freelancers or maybe entirely freelancers. If you can be a serious agency, you've got to employ other people. So it's really about the do's and don'ts of doing that. And the fourth leg of OR C is cash. So it's how to manage the basics. And I think if you can master those, then you can run an agency. It took me a while. I think if you, if you read the book, I've done an online course as well, which members of the kitchen table community get. Then there's plenty in there to get you started. It's like, it's like kind of liken it to primary school, you know, I think somebody like you is more like secondary school and university in terms of what you can teach. But just to get you that elementary education in starting an agency and running it successfully in its early years, that's what it was all about, really. And the book is the real starter.

Yeah, that's such, such a good thing. I think when I started my agency back in 1992, which is probably before a lot of people listening to this were even born, I didn't know anything and sort of blind youthful ignorance probably took me a long way. And then when I got to the end of my agency 11 years later when I started, when I was so fixated on selling it, I never real realized that there were other options and there were other ways of getting support because in those days a lot of what is available today just wasn't available. And even simply the concept of coaching wasn't really well known in businesses then. When you talked about a coach, you were talking about sports people. And I think it's fantastic today that there are so many different great support mechanisms out there, such as your book and the kitchen table community and coaching and my online coaching program and all sorts of other fantastic resources that are available to people, I guess, so that they don't have to make the same mistakes that you and I made.

Yes, absolutely. And I, you know, when I came into this, which was eight years ago now, I think there were a lot more resources available. I really didn't know where to start. I was clueless, partly because I'd not come from an agency background at all. Most people who set up agencies have come from an agency background are whether directly employed or employed as a freelancer by agencies. I really didn't know anything about agencies. I mean, a lot of what we do now is providing content for content marketing and SEO purposes. And I didn't know what content marketing and SEO were and I didn't. Even less did I know how to run a business. And it would be a lot easier were I to do it today. I know that I want to say to people, well, here's a first port of call. If you're someone who was like I was and need a leg up in.

That first stage, yeah, that's great. And those four table legs, as you described them, are so important. And it's interesting that you have culture in there as something early on that people should look at because I think a lot of people will not even be thinking about culture at all yet. It's so important. I think you only learn that it's so important further down the road when you have made some mistakes or when you've got an identity crisis. I had an example recently where a client had taken someone on who was super competent and lasted about two weeks. And I was talking to them and saying, you know, guys, you have to recruit people against your culture as well as your, as well as competency. You have to find someone that can do the job, but you also have to find someone that's going to buy into your culture, your values, your behaviors. And this person met one of those criteria, but certainly didn't meet the other one.

Yeah, well, I say that culture is the soil from which you grow. And I didn't pay culture any attention at first. And you know, I always think you could group me with those people who think that culture is about having a beer fridge and football table or table tennis. And therefore, because I didn't have any premises, I thought, well, I don't need culture, don't have any staff, don't need to take them on away days, whatever. And it was only later that I saw what culture really was, partly through going to talks and talking to other, other agency owners. And your culture has to grow from your own, your Own character, your own needs. And I saw that partway down the road, and I was really lucky because I'd shaped the agency around my own needs. I mean, I was. When I set it up, I'd recently become a father, started a family, and I needed to be flexible. We didn't have in laws nearby to do babysitting. My wife wanted to work, and I needed a working lifestyle that would accommodate that. Something that was very flexible and would give a lot of freedom. And as I went on, I realized that I was building, sometimes subconsciously, but later consciously, a culture that was based around those two things, freedom and flexibility. And then I realized that actually that was what we were offering clients. So we got this really neat hole which is, you know, it's kind of. It's your client offering and it's your culture. And your culture has to face both ways, both towards clients and your employees, whether freelancer or staff. So we had this whole culture and offering based around freedom and flexibility. Because my agency write on, you know, what I call it, is a flexible writing resource for marketers. So we don't tie our clients into retainers because all our writers are freelance. We can be very agile. We don't have a limited slate of staff writers. We have an infinite pool of freelancers. So we can find the people that our clients need, and we can do that quickly. And for the people we employ, we give them a lot of flexibility. We don't breathe down the necks. We don't dictate when they must work, as long as they hit deadlines. And we give them loyalty as well, so they get freedom and flexibility, but with the security of knowing that we will put work their way as much as we can. So that's how our identity, our very offer to clients grew out of a culture, which in turn grew out of my personality and my individual needs. And I always say to people, that's the route through which you discover and cultivate your culture. Don't just think that it's about, you know, having away days and beer fridges and so on.

Yeah, so such good advice. There's a whole bunch of things I wanted to unpick from that, if you don't mind. One of those questions would be, how do you make sure you hang on to that culture as an agency grows? Because I think a lot of people believe, wrongly, that they can't, if they've got a culture of a certain way that may be very friendly, for example, that they feel like they're going to lose that culture as they grow their Agency. So how would you advise people to make sure that they don't lose a sense of who they are and why they do what they do as they grow?

Well, I think it's very simple and it might be actually simplistic. Maybe I've got some elephant traps ahead that I've not seen. But I think you just have to communicate it. You communicate it in everything you do from your website copy to the sort of onboarding documents that you provide to new writers, have the telephone conversations, communicate the same thing to clients and just be consistent about it. I don't see there's any magic in it, but I am still a fairly small agency, right arm and it could be that if we grew further than that, I would hit the buffers with that. But you know, when we've done job ads, we've been quite clear that we're all a about freedom and flexibility because we do have a couple of staff employees. You know, got to that stage where the operations were getting too much for me as the spider in the center of the web to handle. So I took on two operations staff who did the bulk of that.

Yeah, so no, I actually completely agree with you. I think one of the mistakes agencies make is that they have a sense of what their culture is and then maybe the owner or the directors know what that is, but they don't articulate it out loud and they don't document it and they don't verbalize it and they don't share it. And as a result of that, they start hiring the wrong people who don't necessarily share those same values and that's when it all starts going wrong. So I think articulation of what the culture has been able to document it and also communicate it is spot on.

Yeah, I'm glad you think so because we're more well versed in these things than I am. I, I practice coaching at a very low level in that I am open to conversations with members of the kitchen table community. But you know, I'm not a coach and I don't know a quarter as much as you do or a hundredth as much as you do.

Well, I'm sure you know a lot about a lot of things that I don't know about, so. But I'll take that flattery. Anyway, just wanted to pick up on something else. So you talked about flexibility and freedom and it's interesting. So I wrote a book earlier this year called the Self Running Agency and then I launched my online coaching program of the same name. And part of my research to really understand what it was that agencies wanted when they work with me. And what makes them tick was this resounding message that people want to have flexibility and freedom without losing control. And what I see a lot is that the need for control comes at the expense of flexibility and freedom. In other words, the owner wants to be involved in everything and know about everything, and they really struggle to let go and therefore they lose the flexibility and freedom that they had dreamt of. And then they tell themselves story with stories which might be. Well, until we get to a certain size, I'll never be able to let go, so I'll never be able to get that flexibility and freedom. Is that something that you see as well?

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, it's something I do still wrestle with because it is hard to let go. And whilst the business has given me a lot of personal freedom and flexibility, I still do feel at times, you know, too shackled to it and too much under the pressure of being the owner, founder. And that's internal, you know, that's not anything that anybody, you know, nobody's putting that pressure on me. And it's exacerbated by the fact that that because of what we do and the way we do it, we are very, very busy. So, you know, a digital agency that, say, specializes in marketing or design might have, I don't know, 50 projects a year, something like that. We have 300. Wow. So there's a. At a practical level, I'm still sort of shackled to the business, but it's a damn sight better than being either not busy or being in a staff job, I think. So sort of have a reality check, talk to myself and say, look, this is a lot, lot better than it might be.

And also, there's a couple of things there. I think 2020 hasn't helped because I think we've all been at home a lot more. So at times there's been less to do. So I know I'm certainly guilty of working some weekends, but I also think if you love what you do, then it doesn't become so much of. So much of an issue to do that. It's when you're doing a job that you really don't enjoy doing that you resent that it becomes very difficult and bad for your health, I think. Can I just move on to talk about growing an agency with freelancers? Because I've always told my clients that it's very difficult to grow an agency solely with freelancers because it's a bit like building a business. On quicksand. But as time goes on, I realize that that old model is less and less true. And 2020, again, has made us work in a very virtual way. I've recently interviewed somebody who runs a PR agency that's based in the UK but serves clients in Asia, and all of his staff are based in Asia. So he clearly proves my theory wrong. What's your feeling about growing an agency in a way that is sustainable using freelancers or virtual staff?

Well, I've got a number of things to say about that. First of all, you've got to be upfront about it with your clients. So you've got to make a virtue of the fact that you employ freelancers. And going back to write, ARM's proposition, which is that we are a flexible writing resource for marketers, and you could transpose any of the disciplines that we find within this industry into the word writing there, you could say we're a flexible design resource for marketers, we're a flexible video resource for marketers, or whatever. So you've got to be clear about that and make it an asset. Another thing that is really important in terms of mindset is that you. They might be freelancers, these people, but you still have to treat them as staff. I don't mean, you know, with all the. Obviously, you're not going to. There won't be the financial benefits that come with that, but you have to give them loyalty. You have to build up a team. They might not be a team that interacts with each other, and in our case, they're not, because writing projects are usually pretty solitary. So it's not as if they, you know, they all know each other. Most of them don't, but they're part of the team that coalesces around the core, in our case, operations, staff. And you give them that loyalty and you make sure that they understand what the company is all about. So don't think of them as casual. There's a difference between freelance employee and a casual employer. They're not casual employees. You're not, you know, it's not like you're a Victorian ship owner who goes and chooses his crew from the people lined up against the wall. These are people you have to treasure. And if you're ever in that position where you want to sell, you make, as I said, you make a virtue of the fact that you've got this remote working freelance team who you're loyal to and who are loyal to you.

Yeah, good advice. And it's an interesting model. I think we're going to see more of. So you talked about that Right arm has got 300 projects. How on earth do you manage the freelancers? And how do you constantly find a good pool of really good freelancers that buy into your culture and, you know, you can manage the quality of their or oversee the quality of their work?

Well, it's 300 projects a year, and at any one time we've probably got about 25 to 30 or 40 going on. We're fortunate in that we're a writing agency, so it's not as if the projects are particularly complex. It's not like we're building websites or running entire marketing campaigns or anything like that. So we're fortunate in that it's simple. That which mitigates the challenges of the sheer volume of jobs that we have in. In terms of quality control. We vet the people who work for us. We look at, you know, we ask them to send samples and so on. We then when we start working with a new client, we'll generally send them samples and profiles of a few writers so they can choose. So that in itself is a buffer against things going wrong. We can't check every piece of work that's submitted. When we've got a new writer on board with a new client, we will check the work, you know, and 99 times out of 100, it's fine. I think it's really about building up a relationship of trust, because when things don't go right, you have to put them right quickly, in whatever way. It might not be getting the work up to the standard that the client wants, that you might actually have to back off and say, actually, apologies, we can't do this. That happens very rarely, but I think it has happened on a couple of occasions. And then it's about making it right. It's about giving a good service. You've got to give a good service whether the project goes well or not. And on those rare occasions when it doesn't, you've got to come out of it smelling of roses. So it's a rather complicated answer to a simple question. It isn't dead straightforward, but if you always have your eyes on the fact that you need to impress the client as much as possible with your conduct, then you won't go far wrong.

Yeah, that's.

It's.

It's really interesting. Let's just switch tack a bit and talk about. I'm sure there's a complete connection to this, but talk about why you formed the Kitchen Table community and exactly what it is.

Okay, well, I had this Idea. About three years ago, I was thinking about next steps and I, somebody said to me, oh, you should, you should cash in on your knowledge. You should run a course or be there as you know, be available to coach people who want to set up a copywriting agency along your lines. And I thought, no, I can't do that. There won't be enough demand and I don't really want to sort of make the leap to becoming essentially a teacher. Then I thought about it more and more and I thought, actually I can do something which essentially monetizes, I suppose, my own experience. And I dreamt up this idea of the kitchen table community, which was initially focused on content. And the idea being that it's an entity that will help people who either have small agencies of the broadly of the type of right arm or have ambitions to have that. But it was very much focused on giving them the content they needed. But then I realized, actually, again going on my own experience, what would be more useful to them is content plus a real sense of community. So peer to peer support plus a marketplace where they can trade services, plus deals on things that will help them along the way, like software products and professional services and so on. So as the month and years went on, I conceived this community as a four prong thing, you know, so you do get the content and you get the community, the peer to peer support, and you get the marketplace and you get the deals on things. So it was three years in the gestation and then I was wanting to launch it at the end of last year, but I just became too busy and I kept postponing and postponing, but I eventually launched it not long after lockdown had started, within about five or six weeks of lockdown starting when everybody's working from their kitchen table, you know, and it's garnered quite a lot of interest through that and you know, through my own network. And it's still in the fledgling stage, you know, I mean, we've got, there's plenty of content as well as the book, we've got a course and regular podcasts and members only podcasts as well, and webinars and so on. The exciting thing in terms of the marketplace, and this is the next big thing on the horizon, which will, I think now happen in January, is that we are opening up the marketplace to companies and other organizations that want to hire in agency services. And the sell, if you want to call it that, to them is that this is a halfway house between taking on a big agency, which will cost you a lot, and land you with a retainer overhead that you probably can't afford. And that's one end of the scale. And the other end of the scale is freelancers. They're managing freelancers, which is difficult. And I have a lot of conversations wearing my right arm hat with marketing managers, marketing leads who say they really struggle to get creative talent because they can't afford agencies. And I'm talking about, you know, I deal with a lot of SMEs and scale ups, particularly in tech. And I hear this story time and again. They, they don't want an agency. They haven't, they, they can't take on a multipurpose agency to help them with their marketing. And they've tried freelancers and it just cost them too much time and effort. And they're always saying, oh we had a good freelancer but you know, she got a staff job or he got ill or just disappeared or whatever. So it's a constant pain for them. So what, what I'm saying to them is come to the kitchen table community, post an advert here and you'll get. Well, we've got now got 50 agencies in the directory. As an agency member you get to, as well as getting to post jobs and answer jobs on the job board, you get listed in the directory which is closed, it's not publicly available. But I'm saying to them, you get access to this directory and you can post jobs and what you get is what you came to writearm for, which is that kind of personal service with a small but perfectly formed agency. So it's that idea that it's a really nice halfway house for organizations that want to hire in agency services. And I think that will give the community a lot of legs next year. It's a slow burn, you know, right arm was a slow burn. You're not gonna, you don't become an overnight success, you become a success just by slogging at it for, you know.

Well, and also you learn as you go along, you learn what your audience needs rather than just assuming you know what they need. And I think that's a good way of evolving the business. I'm sure it will be successful. I think the sort of need for people to network and have that peer to peer support is hugely important. You know, in my coaching program I have it must be about 35 hours of online content and tools and templates. I always thought that was the most valuable piece but in reality the piece that most of my clients, clients, the biggest value they get is our group coaching calls because they just Learn a lot from me and each other and all for also from our sort of discussion forums where people can network and get support and share successes and share challenges. It's that being in the company of other people who have had the same problem that I have or can empathize with where I'm at or can share their experiences, there's so much value in that. No. And I can say then add in the, add in the whole other dimension of letting companies come in to that to look for people and I'm sure you're onto a winner.

Well, yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I mean what you say there really resonates because I've been a member for some years of another agency community which is much more grown up agencies called the Agency Collective, you probably have heard of it, which is a brilliant membership organization which has been going for. Well, I've been a member for six years and it was going for about 18 months before then. And it's absolutely fantastic. Most of the agencies are considerably bigger than Right Arm. We're at the very smallest end, I think. But the, the level of camaraderie and peer to peer support is fantastic and I, I want to emulate that but on a. For smaller scale agencies plus give them. You know what the Agency Collective isn't is a marketplace. And, and whilst I think there are deals available for members on some products, it's not really about that. So there are big differences with the kitchen table community. But that sense of camaraderie and the quality of the peer to peer support is something that I am really keen to emulate.

Yeah. And I guess if you look at the three things, yourself, myself and Agency Collective, it just goes to show that there's plenty of room in this space for, you know, all of these things. We're all doing something slightly different, all serving a slightly different audience. You know, my audience is typically agencies between one and 20 staff. I think Agency Collective is probably slightly bigger than that. And then you're focused at the moment on the sort of freelancers. So let me just ask you a couple more questions because I'm conscious of a time the question I ask all of my guests on the Agency Accelerator podcast is what piece of advice would you give your younger self? If you could go back in time and give, give younger John some advice, what would it be?

It would be to really work on your proposition, to really know what you are, what sets you apart from the competition, why clients would want to hire you. And I didn't do that when I set Out. When I set out with right arm, the proposition was we write, oh, and by the way, we can also do your website and we can also do your photography and so on, because I knew a couple of people who could do that and it was useless as a proposition. And it was only really when I began to think about culture, which is all part of this and what I was really about, why I was doing this, that I developed this proposition of we are a flexible writing resource for marketers and as soon as I say that to clients, they get it. The light bulb goes on and they want to talk, whatever you do. And you know, there'll be people listening to this who are at the start of their agency journey and you know, they might be a designer or a video maker or a website developer, whatever, and they will say, okay, well you know, I'm a designer, that's what I'll offer. You know, I'm a web developer, that's what I'll offer. But you've got to think more about what you, what you are, what you do. And you know, that might be something sector specific rather than the way you do business, but it's got to be at the core of your identity. It's got to be easily understood and it's got to be, it's, it's, it's going to be the reason that people will pick up the phone to you and answer your emails. It's got to be easily comprehensible. There's no point in saying, oh, well, we just do this. Name the skill that will get you nowhere. So that's the single most important thing that I would tell my younger self.

Good piece of advice. I think when we start out, there's often this fear that if we sort of narrow down what we do, then we will lose loads of opportunities, so we better try and be all things to all men. And of course we achieve the absolute opposite of our intent. So I think that is very good advice. Now, John, if people wanted to find out more about you, about the Kitchen Table community and so on, where would they go?

Okay, well, kitchentable community is@kitchentable.community if you're interested in writerm that's W r I T E A r M. So writeasinwriting.co.uk.

Brilliant. And I'll put links in the show notes to all of those websites and so on as well. So great. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's such an interesting conversation, one that we could talk lots more about, but I get conscious of trying to keep these podcasts to 30 minutes, and so let's talk more in the future.

Okay, lovely. Thank you very much, Rob. I've enjoyed it enormously and time has.

Flown, so there you go. I hope you found that really interesting and useful. I always find it really insightful getting different perspectives when I have guests on the podcast. As ever, please share the episode with your colleagues. Make sure you've hit the subscribe button, and if you enjoy listening to the Agency Accelerator Podcast, please consider leaving a review, since that helps the algorithm get my podcast out to more people. Other than that, have a brilliant rest of the week and I'll see you next week on the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. It.