Darren Jamieson: On this week’s Engaging Marketeer, I’m speaking with fellow agency owner Nathan Brown from Robus Marketing. Nathan started in the care sector and then ended up doing marketing for a care franchise and now he runs an agency with people in different parts of the world doing digital marketing and website development, Facebook ads, Google ads, the usual stuff that agencies do for businesses all across the UK. So I’m going to be speaking to Nathan about how he started, how he scaled his business, and what his plans are for the future.
Nathan Brown: Well, yeah, I’ve done three podcast interviews this week already, I think. Is this, or is it two already? I don’t know what I’ve done. And I’ve done two in person talks somewhere. Yeah, I’ve done no work at all really. It’s all been getting out speaking to people.
Darren Jamieson: So, is that your job with the agency?
Nathan Brown: Pretty much. Yeah. I have to do any physical work. I don’t like it. It’s how you grow an agency, right? So, it is. Yeah. I can’t grow an agency if I’m building websites and doing SEO stuff. I ain’t got time for that.
Darren Jamieson: No, but you can’t. So with Phil, actually, how do you grow a marketing agency? You don’t grow a marketing agency with paid ads. So ironically, Google ads and Facebook ads and that sort of thing are less effective than building relationships.
Nathan Brown: No, no, that’s true.
Darren Jamieson: Because building relationships will get you leads and referrals for free.
Nathan Brown: Exactly. Whereas paid ads cost. The only downside is, of course, with the relationships, if it’s an agency, the relationships might be yours, not the agency’s. That is the downside if you’re looking to sell.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. You need to make sure that it’s the agency that’s always referred so that when people are recommending you, they’re not recommending you, Nathan. They’re recommending the agency.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. You don’t want people to be personally in contact with you, to give your personal email and your phone number and then everything goes through you. It’s like, no. It’s got to go through the team so that you can take yourself out of it. I did that years ago. My business cards don’t have my phone number on anymore.
Darren Jamieson: Okay.
Nathan Brown: They don’t have my email address on either because what’s the point in emailing me? I’m going to lose it anyway. There’s a funnel for this sort of thing. And depending what it is that somebody wants would go to a different person.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
Nathan Brown: Otherwise, you’ll be a very profitable marketing agency, so you’re hoping to sell at a five times multiplier. Suddenly, not worth anything.
Darren Jamieson: No. Yeah. Because the first thing that a buyer will do is, what happens when you leave? Are the sales going to dry up or are they going to continue? Does it work without you? Does it need you? And the worst case scenario is, if I take you out of it, do I then have to get an MD and a sales manager to replace you? Two roles to replace you. You’re looking at possibly a hundred grand or more salary for those two people. Well, that’s got to come off your profit then, which reduces the value of the business. So yeah, you need yourself to be out of it.
Nathan Brown: Exactly. To be out of it.
Darren Jamieson: Look at that. Well, we’ve started the podcast already. This is good. So let’s just crack on, I think, with the way we’ve been going. This just seamlessly straight into it. Obviously, you run an agency, but you haven’t done that forever. What started you getting into this marketing business that we all love and hate at the same time?
Nathan Brown: Oh gosh. So…
I have no formal A levels, no formal degree, nothing like that.
Darren Jamieson: At all or related to marketing?
Nathan Brown: Not at all. I have no A levels.
Darren Jamieson: Wow. Okay, good.
Nathan Brown: I actually used to work in the music industry.
Darren Jamieson: Ah.
Nathan Brown: Live sound. So, big events. Hammersmith Apollo’s, a production company. That’s what I studied. I did a B Tech. But it wasn’t for me. The challenge with that is you go on tour for three months of the year, you’re away from your family. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I took a year out, lived in Cape Town for a year and then came back and I temped for a group of care homes and that was kind of really my first step into marketing.
Darren Jamieson: What’s took you from being a musician to temping in care homes? Very different avenues there.
Nathan Brown: Yeah, I needed a job. I was temping as an admin assistant in a care home in Lewisham, just at Lewisham Hospital. But obviously as well as admin, payroll, all that kind of thing, part of the role was show rounds when somebody unfortunately died, as people do in a care home. You have to replace them. And it was my job to manage the waiting list, manage the relationships with the local authority.
Darren Jamieson: It’s a churn of clients, isn’t it?
Nathan Brown: It’s the churn of clients.
Darren Jamieson: Why did that client leave you? Well, they died.
Nathan Brown: So yeah, you can’t do anything to stop that one, can you?
Darren Jamieson: Well, hopefully you can do some stuff to stop it. You can treat them a little better and make sure they last a little bit longer. But yeah, the natural churn of those things.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. It’s not good. And I always say, the potted story is I got promoted every year. It’s a group of care homes, they got five care homes. So the next year I took on responsibility for admin in two care homes and an admin assistant. I got a promotion. Then my manager left and they said, do you want his job? I was like, yes, okay. So then I was responsible for all of the administrative processes, all of the waiting lists, all of the admissions, like occupancy. If you have ever worked with care homes, occupancy is a big thing. What percentage occupancy are you, really, is what drives your success. And then they said do you want to join the senior management team as like a non exec director. It was far too, way overpaid for my young 22 year old self, but I just said yes. Right place at the right time. And that’s really how I got into formal marketing. I’d say maybe more sales at the beginning. That was in say 2011, 2012. I took on the marketing department, which was two marketing officers at the time. It was a charity that turned over about 10 million. Amongst other things, I decided that I should do some study and I kind of taught myself. So I’ve got a level six diploma in professional marketing with the CIM, which was really helpful. And my first marketing project was a 42 page annual review, or if 42 is divisible by four or whatever, was close to that.
It was an unmitigated disaster.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
Nathan Brown: But yeah, that’s kind of how it happened. I got made redundant in 2014.
Darren Jamieson: Because of that?
Nathan Brown: No, not because of that. It was that much of a disaster, right? That’s, we’ve got to let him go now. No, I had a lot of other responsibilities for a conversation for when we got more time. And I basically made the whole marketing team redundant through that time and rebuilt it and restructured it. Employed a manager who didn’t work out and then had to get rid of her after a couple of weeks.
Darren Jamieson: Wow, you know you’ve made a mistake if you’re getting rid of somebody after a couple of weeks.
Nathan Brown: I was just too green in marketing. But sometimes being made redundant is, at the time, can seem like a really bad thing. But when you look back on it sometimes, or often, it’s like a good thing that actually happened. So I was out work for four months, 2014, and then I applied for so many jobs. And one of my challenges was because my job title was business support director and they were saying, well, why are you going for manager and officer roles because you’re a director? But I was, well I wasn’t experienced to be a director. But then I applied for director jobs and they’re like, you don’t have the experience. So, but I managed to get a job with a care company called Bluebird Care as a franchise and I was the marketing manager for a guy who has like five offices in Kent. Full service was just me and the whole comms thing from teaching myself Google ads to strategy to design, that whole kind of one.
Darren Jamieson: So that was for a guy that had five franchises, or five within?
Nathan Brown: Five franchise offices. Because it’s not always common that franchises allow their franchisees to do their own marketing. It’s often that the franchisor will do the marketing for them. The franchisees will pay for the marketing budget. So did you have a lot of freedom when you were at Bluebird to do what you wanted or was there a franchisor saying, no don’t do that, that’s not within the brand guidelines?
Nathan Brown: The nature of franchises, and I have to be careful what I say, is the franchisor is in control of the brand and that is very important. And head office do do their own marketing. Now Bluebird Care is like top three, five market share in private home care in the UK. They’ve got like 250 offices. So they’re quite big. But also you as a franchisee need to grow your territory. So there is a degree of yes, head office is helpful, but also we’re doing things our way because we need to grow our business. We work with several franchises now because I understand the dynamics and the relationship between franchisor and franchisee. There is a push and pull there. Often the franchisee will say, well the franchisor doesn’t do anything for me. What is this campaign you said has got this many leads or where were these leads, that kind of thing. But yeah, that’s how I really learned and how I started the agency is basically they became my first client. So in 2017, in my annual appraisal, it was what do you want to do when you’re older kind of question, and I thought it would be interesting to start a marketing agency and they said, why don’t we be your first client. So I was doing my kind of 9 to 5 with them, doing my job basically, and invoicing it, learning how to run a limited company, how it all works. There’s obviously a lot to learn there. He’d have friends who need a website and I worked with a few other franchises. But I grew the business from there and that’s really where we went through business networking. Working 6:00 a.m. till 8:00 a.m., going to work, coming back at 6:00 p.m., working till 1:00 in the morning, and then rinse and repeat six days a week.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
It’s hard, isn’t it, at the start, but you do it because you love it, right?
Nathan Brown: Yeah. Yeah. You love it.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. I’m right there with you. I’ve been doing it for 16 years. I’m not sure I still love it, but I’m sure I do. You mentioned that you work a lot with franchises. Are they all UK owned franchises?
Nathan Brown: So we work with three main franchises. Yeah. All based in the UK.
Darren Jamieson: All based in the UK. The reason I ask is, we work with the big American franchisor with territories across the UK, Canada, Australia, and the United States. And we have worked with other UK based franchises. And we’ve been to the National Franchise Exhibition in Birmingham at the NEC a couple of times. Very expensive to exhibit there. I think it was on this week actually. Was it this week? I hate doing exhibitions, but we might go on to that later. But what I found, I don’t know if you found the same with UK franchising, because franchising in the UK is not as established as it was in the US because the US pioneered all of this stuff. UK franchises, in my experience, are more preoccupied with selling franchises to new franchisees than they are to helping the franchisees get leads and more business with the marketing. Their focus is primarily on sell franchises. Whereas in America they seem to have a more overall approach that their franchisees, the more money they make the more money the franchise is going to make. So their priority seems to be on helping the franchisees get leads. What’s your thought on that in the UK, being obviously very careful you can’t say anything negative about any of your clients?
Nathan Brown: That’s a fair point there. Ultimately the success of a franchise network is based on its growth. So yes, you want your franchisors to grow and develop their business because ultimately they pay you back a percentage fee that’s going to be good for you. But actually if you’ve got big shareholders and things, how else can you demonstrate the growth of your business? By adding new franchisees.
So yes, there is a big push towards that. The franchises that we work with, they’re actually quite good at helping their franchisees develop their business. We manage, we’ve got two franchise networks that we manage all of the Google ads for. They’re quite big spends and the owner, the franchisor, it’s a family sort of business, is very involved and really does care. And we also, for another franchise network, we do all their Facebook ads and all their social media content directly with the franchisees. And then with other franchise networks, we have exclusivity. So if they want Google ads it comes to us as their preferred partner.
Obviously, the franchisor can go off and do whatever they like, but we’ve got the knowledge and the experience and the account that shows the history. So on that basis, maybe we’ve just been lucky, but that hasn’t been my experience. I think when it comes like Bluebird Care, again, are good at helping their franchises. They had a rebrand. They are obviously a lot bigger so there is a lot that does need to be done on the ground as well. But often what we find with the franchise networks that we work with is they will have a business development manager, either regionally or depending on their size, or nationally, that will work exclusively with the franchisors to help them develop their business. Because one of the challenges I find with franchises as a whole is there’s two ways to start a business. You either do your own thing and you learn as you go, and you find your resources and you find what works and what doesn’t work, or you go, I’m going to start my own business.
There’s this thing called a franchise. It’s like ready business out of the box. So often what I find is the people that will join a franchise might not, and it’s not always the case, right, but might not always be as seasoned entrepreneurs or driving it themselves. So maybe they don’t have the experience. So there’s a bit of both really. But yeah, maybe we’ve just been lucky with the franchise networks.
Darren Jamieson: I’d agree with exactly what you just said there. Most seasoned entrepreneurs would start their own business. You tend to buy a franchise because it has all of the contacts, all of the pricing models, all of the processes and procedures that you don’t need to formulate yourself. All the mistakes have already been made, they’ve been ironed out, and this is ready to go. It’s a turnkey model that’s going to work for you. So without dumbing it down, pretty much anybody could run a franchise if they follow the procedures exactly to the letter that they are written. So long as you’re not a complete idiot, you should be okay following a franchise. So they are very appealing to people in that situation. But yeah, your seasoned business owners probably going to start their own or buy a business.
Nathan Brown: Yeah, exactly. Buy a business they can add value to. One of the challenges of working with franchisors compared to business owners is that kind of expectation of results as well. If you’re going on your own, you kind of understand it’s going to take a bit of time to work. With franchise networks, we tend to find there’s a slightly higher churn of clients just because they might start, it might work. Like we had a client the other day and we’re doing some Google ads for and he was really happy with his results but he looked at his numbers and like, oh no, you’re the one that I spend the most money on over the last quarter so I’m going to pause it for three months and you think, why are we doing this? Obviously it’s your decision, but it’s that kind of thing. That’s not exclusive to franchises, to be honest, it’s not, but it seems you seem to have a slightly higher churn. But the positive with a franchise is you get one client, you get multiple clients.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah, we’ve got one like that at the moment. It’s a regular business, a regular small business. Their organic traffic is up something like 300%. Their enquiries are up. Their citations within AI are up. Their rankings are up. Everything about it is up. They’re getting all the leads they could possibly want. Yet, they’re saying, I’m not happy. No, no, we’re going to go somewhere else where it’s cheaper. I was like, what the hell are you doing? It happens.
Darren Jamieson: One thing I found interesting with franchises, the big bonus, the big benefit of a franchise is that everything’s the same. The model’s the same, the suppliers are the same, the processes are the same wherever you are. It’s just picked up and plonked down in somewhere else. But from an SEO perspective, the big problem is everything’s the same. So the number of franchises that we’ve worked with have all had the same problem and that’s that they pretty much have duplicate content on websites. They’re basically templated turnkey websites, identical. Have you found that problem with businesses you work with and what have you done to solve it?
Nathan Brown: So we don’t currently really do SEO for any of the franchises that we work with, but we do have, some Bluebird Care offices, they launched a new website with their rebrand of last year. Nationally, report came out the other day that search traffic is up. Obviously your AI overviews have chunked away at a little bit of it.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
Nathan Brown: But actually what they did was, because that whole duplicate content thing is an issue, right, and so you’ve got 50, 100, 200 franchise areas with their own micro sites with their own duplicate content. A few years ago, before this latest rebuild, they started to address that with all of their service pages. They were central service pages that somehow had some clever URL structure that pulled in the header of the area that you were in and things like that and that really helped with web traffic. Their new website has taken another step forward. But what we’re looking at, well, we’re almost 80% of the way there now, but building lots and lots of local pages. So home care in town, for example, there’s a hundred local pages we’re building. All of those have got unique content on and they’re ranking quite well. So I guess the answer is yeah, it is a problem because that really helps with the rankings for the Bluebird Care site. Some of the other franchises that we work with, their micro sites have the same content but just a location change, which is like a one out one, it’s not the best way to do it but it does work. But it works to a period. Having unique content is more effort but it’s a bit of a slam dunk. When we do SEO for clients now we try and do 1,500, 2,000 words a page. We used to do a thousand but we’re now doing even more just so that we can get better results. We tend to, for the franchise SEO clients that we work with, we tend to get quite good results from their ranking side of things.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s a very similar experience to what we’ve had where, say the big client that we work with has got about a thousand locations around the world and originally they’d have all been identical. So every single month we go through and we create unique content for every single one of those franchises, which is a lot. How many times can you rewrite the same thing more than once, you know? But it can be done and it does need to be done because if it is all identical, Google’s just going to see it and go, what a load of spam.
Nathan Brown: Exactly. What a load of absolute repetitive spam.
Darren Jamieson: That’s not going to work. But that’s the franchise issue. That’s the problem they’ve got. But it can be solved if they do it. If they do it, but a lot don’t.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. A lot don’t do it.
Darren Jamieson: When you first started your agency, where were you? Physically location wise, where were you, or in terms of numbers, was it just yourself or did you bring people on board straight away?
Nathan Brown: No, it’s just me at the beginning. Obviously, I have my employer, right. I’m like Mr Report. My focus in growing the business has always been on our retained revenue and then seeing the website builds and that kind of thing as the one off stuff, the extras on top. So the retained revenue very comfortably covers all of our expenses.
Darren Jamieson: Nice position to be in that, isn’t it? So you know at the start of the month we’re going to be okay. We’re going to keep the lights on. We’re good.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. So, by 2020, which was obviously Covid year, wasn’t it, started the business say 2017. It was, we had just a handful of clients, maybe three or four. It was only when I started doing business networking that I started growing the business. So 2018 to start of 2020, by start of 2020, I have here 16 retaining clients. And we’ve got 100 retaining clients now. So obviously you have different unique challenges at those levels. But yeah, right up until I took on our first member of staff in 2021, it was just me.
Darren Jamieson: So you were running it just yourself for a very long time then.
Nathan Brown: It was just me. Yeah. I did outsource a little bit. Every couple of months I did like a time and motion study. A few times of the year I would write down every 15 minutes what I’m doing, what client I’m working on, and what task I’m doing. And then I’d look at chunking things off. A lot of our clients early days were social media content clients. So I’d go, okay, I need to get someone to write this content and design it. That’s kind of what I started outsourcing. Then I was like, okay, I need to track that this is happening. So I brought in an auditing process to make sure that was done and we pretty much still follow that today. So when I brought on our first member of staff in 2021, it was about September, I had 60 odd monthly clients and that was just me. But I was married, but I didn’t have a child at the time. I couldn’t do it now. I would go out for dinner with my wife and I’d get home at 10:00 and do a couple of hours work. That’s just how it was. And it was very difficult the first couple of months just settling into that. It’s really difficult on your energy, your whole approach. But then the trouble is you get used to it. I’m definitely one that’s like, I only build a business based on very solid numbers. So often, I’m sure you see it, Darren, you talk with business owners, how much profit did you make last quarter? Well, I don’t know. They don’t know their numbers. And I’m able to be quite confident for the next quarter I already know pretty much what profit we’re going to make, give or take. I know what my costs are going to be so I can grow with confidence. But obviously the other approach is employ people at the beginning, you fart around not doing anything. What’s the point in that.
Darren Jamieson: That is the key, isn’t it? If you’re employing people, you can’t fart around not doing anything. You have to get out there and basically feed them. You have to give them the work to do. So when you employed your very first person, what role was it? And were you clear on what you wanted?
Nathan Brown: I’ll tell you the story. So my first employee is a lady called Jen. She’s still with us today.
Darren Jamieson: So you got it right first time then?
Nathan Brown: Yep. Yeah. My first freelancer, I went through a few freelancers. But no, Jen is like my right hand person now. She was a freelance web developer for one of my clients. She also worked for a national charity doing graphic design. So I just had to email her, say can you add some tracking codes. If you remember back in the days of the Green Homes Grant, the failed Green Homes Grant that the government put together, we got some great Google ads results for solar and heat pumps and stuff like that. So she had to add this tracking code. I was like brilliant, fantastic. And then I had a bit of design work I needed doing and I was like, oh this is so last minute. Who can I ask for a last minute, Jen? And she did. So we kind of had that little relationship. We didn’t really do web development at the time because I didn’t have the ability to be able to do it. I’d done a few websites and lost a lot of money on them. But we did have a website that we were waiting to go live. The partner that I was working with wasn’t very reliable, so she helped with that. And it got to a point, Darren, I was like so busy, I just sent her a WhatsApp message one day. I was like, I don’t suppose you fancy a job, do you? And she said yes. I was like, shit, now what do I do?
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
Nathan Brown: So we had a conversation around what her role could potentially be. The first thing I needed help with was writing and designing social media content. So she came on board three days a week, September 2021. And quite quickly learned that she was great at graphic design, but writing, no. You don’t find a good designer that’s also a good copywriter. I’ve known one in 25 years.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
Nathan Brown: So it’s a very different skill. So I took back the writing, gave it to someone else and we built the role around what she was good at doing. There was some learning, I’ve managed teams before when I was a director, I had a team of 13, 14, 15 people, but I was seeing them all in person. This whole online thing was new. I spoke with some other agency owners, how do you make it work. And no, so it worked first time. She quite quickly went four days and five days. The thing that was helpful was someone that used to be a freelancer, used to do her own thing, but didn’t like getting a business or asking people to pay invoices.
Darren Jamieson: That’s the perfect employee. Someone that’s done freelance before and didn’t like it or it didn’t work. Because it means when you’ve employed them now, they’re not going to be looking at you and looking at the work they’re doing and thinking, I could go freelance and do this for myself, because they’ve already done it and didn’t like it.
Nathan Brown: Exactly. And we’re now working together for her to take on some of the operational side of the business. So we’re carving some stuff out that she does and trying to reduce her workload down to two hours a day, three hours a day maximum, so that she can then take on all of these. When you’ve got 150 clients across websites and monthlies, you could imagine the requests you get. Can I add page? Can I just go? And she now is in charge of that whole process.
Darren Jamieson: So with those clients, do they pay you per change or do they paying you a retainer and you do those changes within the retainer?
Nathan Brown: Sure. So on websites, we charge our hosting obviously. But changes are chargeable, right. So we had one the other day, for example. I’d like to copy this page on my website and just add all this content and text. We just go, it’s half an hour’s work, it’s 30 quid. That’s what it costs. You hear these, you’ve been around, you’ll know, I need to add a Google Analytics tag to my website. Oh, that will be 300 pound kind sir.
Darren Jamieson: Yes, I’ve heard. I’ve heard of that kind of stuff.
Nathan Brown: Go for like a two course three star Michelin lunch and then do it. It’s disgusting, isn’t it, when that happens. But yeah, people do that. We don’t always charge for changes though. If it’s just like swapping an image or a bit of text or something and the client never asks for anything, then we’re like, well, it’s fine. We want to look after you as well. And we do also give our clients access to their website. And we make them admin. You can show them how to make changes. A lot of agencies obviously won’t do that for understandable reasons, but yeah, some will, some will block it. We give ours access and we tell them if you break anything, it’s chargeable if we fix it.
Darren Jamieson: Typically, we’ll give them editor access rather than admin access. So they can’t go in and mess about with any of the nitty gritty unless they specifically ask for it, in which case we’ll give it to them. It’s their website, but we’ll warn them. One thing you mentioned there is you’ll do changes for free if it’s a small change. We have done that in the past. Be careful with that because if you do a change for a client for free and they think, oh, that’s great, they’ve done it for free. When they come back and ask you to do something else that’s a little bit bigger and then you say, oh, that’s going to be 50 quid, whatever, they could go, oh, you didn’t charge me last time. Why are you charging me this time. So there is a slippery slope there with doing stuff for free. You could end up doing loads and loads of work for free and suddenly you realise, how come we’re not making any money. It’s because my developer’s doing 40 hours a week for free on clients on small changes. So I’d be wary of that one.
Nathan Brown: That’s it. Yeah. It’s something we monitor. It doesn’t happen too often and often, if we do do it, we’ll often say, usually we charge, but we’re not charging it this time. Just so people know.
Darren Jamieson: One thing we have, rather than clients coming to us and say, I know how much to add this page to my website or how much to add all these testimonials to my website, and then we quote a time for it, give them a cost, then invoice them, there’s a lot of admin back and forth with that, probably more time than it takes to actually do it. We have a maintenance package where they’ll pay per month and those changes are included anyway. So then all they do is email it and we just do it. Process it a lot faster. Everyone’s on direct debit. So they end up getting sometimes more work than they paid for, sometimes less work than they paid for. It depends how often they need those doing, but it saves everybody a lot of time as well. A lot more recurring revenue.
Nathan Brown: That’s something I’ve discussed with other people as well. It’s also a good way of increasing your hosting revenue.
Darren Jamieson: Absolutely.
Nathan Brown: Obviously not at the expense of your clients, but it’s a good way to do that. A lot of our clients are like the jewellers down the road or your lady who will do ironing, that kind of thing. They very rarely make changes. So they wouldn’t really make use of it. We do make it available on some bigger websites. If we have an ecommerce website or a bigger website that people are going to want to make changes to, we will say, per month you get then x hours a year of changes and I just have to make sure I’ll keep a record of it if it isn’t used. We don’t have that conversation in two years’ time or we’ve never used this, but we kind of figure that sort of thing out. But yeah, you are right, you do have to be careful. The way to get around that problem you described there is to say, you say for example you have two hours a month, those hours roll for six months or they roll for three months, so that if they get to a year and say, oh we haven’t used any of those hours in the last year, it’s like well you’ve lost the first nine because they roll over.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. So is that just the one employee you’ve got at the moment then or have you scaled further than that?
Nathan Brown: So let me tell you a bit about our team. I went on a bit of a hiring frenzy in 22.
Darren Jamieson: Dangerous.
Nathan Brown: Coming up to three year old and November 2022 was when he was due to be born. So I thought, right, okay, I need to free up a bit of time here. I’m definitely someone, I’m a delegator, right. As any business owner is, I’m also like, I want to make sure this is done. What’s happening with this. So there is an anxiety sometimes there.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. But being a delegator is a really good thing. A lot of business owners are not delegators. They don’t want to let go. So you’re in a really strong position.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. You strangle hold your business. And on being a delegator, you have to understand that no one’s going to be as good as you at the things that you do, but that’s okay. Mistakes are going to happen, but you’re going to have to try and fix them or catch them. So I hired a copywriter three days a week in 2022. Then about a month later I hired a graphic designer because we’d started doing websites by then because Jen, I realised, can build websites. So the team was then three and me in 2022 and then a little boy came along and that was really helpful because when he was born I was able to take two days a week off to spend with him and just push stuff to the team. And then I next hired end of 2023, October. I was realising I was doing a lot of admin. We had a new client, I was doing the contract, I was doing this auditing, all these sorts of things, and it got to a point where I was, I need to try and get some help here. So I hired an executive assistant, the title was at the beginning, we changed it to operations assistant. So we’ve got now a full time operations assistant. Also I hired another graphic designer because our social media clients had grown. So end of 2023 we were me plus four. Our graphic designer I hired on a three month contract just because I didn’t want to commit just in case down the line. He’s still with us today.
Darren Jamieson: Right.
Nathan Brown: And then we stayed like that until the start of 24 when I took on a Google Ads client, realised there was some help there. So I then hired again. So we’re a team of five. I hired a Google Ads.
Darren Jamieson: So you took on a Google Ads client and then hired a Google Ads person straight away. That’s ballsy.
Nathan Brown: Well, I can do Google ads. So it was more like I just needed someone to implement the stuff that I’m telling them to implement. Didn’t have the time to create.
Darren Jamieson: It means though really you need to be then selling more Google Ads clients.
Nathan Brown: But it’s a work long term. The thing is, Darren, I had about 10 or 15 Google Ads clients already that I was doing the reporting for and things like that.
Darren Jamieson: Right. Okay. So you just took on one new big client and you thought, right, we better get somebody in to look after.
Nathan Brown: Right. Exactly. So we’re a team of five and then I hired a marketing manager as well the end of last year full time. One of our staff left earlier on in the year. So as of today it’s me. I’ve got Jen who’s our client executive and taking on the op stuff. A graphic designer who’s four days a week. We have a graphic designer who had a baby a year ago and she’s now going to be staying at home to look after the little one. So she’s not coming back, but we’re not replacing her. We’ve just increased hours to kind of cover that. I have a marketing manager, our ops assistant, and our Google Ads person. So I’ve lost count, but it’s like five or six.
Darren Jamieson: Five. Five or six. So long as you know how many there is when you’re doing payroll, that’s all that really matters. Mixture of UK based and in the Philippines.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. They’re all remote.
Darren Jamieson: I was going to ask. So are these all remote or are they in an office?
Nathan Brown: They’re all remote. We use Teams, always have Teams open. I have a chat with everybody and we have like a team chat. And we’ve somehow got a really good culture between us all.
Darren Jamieson: And then do you do physical meetups at any point?
Nathan Brown: Never done it. I was going to do a team building a couple of years ago. I was going to do like a clay pigeon shooting. We were all going to meet in Birmingham which was kind of in the middle, go, and then one of the team was expecting and I thought maybe that’s not a good idea to do. But now, I have two members of staff in the UK, so Jen our client exec and a designer, and then three in the Philippines. So it’s a little bit difficult for us to all meet up. But we do like birthday presents, we do work anniversary gifts even in the Philippines. Baron our executive assistant, if it’s somebody’s work anniversary I send them some money and they go and they buy a gift and put it in the post and post it to them. That kind of thing. But yeah, I don’t know how we’ve achieved it to have such a good culture, but I’m just lucky.
Darren Jamieson: I don’t think it’s luck. I think you work at that. So, with all of these people that you’ve got working with you now, the temptation for a lot of people in your position is just to keep doing more of what you’re doing. Keep doing Google ads yourself. Keep doing websites. Keep doing content. What do you actually do, though?
Nathan Brown: That’s a good question. I’m asking myself that. I ask myself what I do and it’s mostly nothing.
Darren Jamieson: So, I’m just curious what you do.
Nathan Brown: So I do all of the sales. My job in the business is sales and marketing. That’s what I should be doing.
Darren Jamieson: That’s what you should be doing. But what are you doing though?
Nathan Brown: Largely I do a little bit of everything. I have a few social media clients I look after. I client manage everybody.
Darren Jamieson: Well, so you do you still do social media yourself then for clients?
Nathan Brown: Several. I like eight. I write eight.
Darren Jamieson: Right.
Nathan Brown: It’s more like we’re doing consultancy level social media where it needs my input rather than like on the level of one of the team. But yes, I am still doing that for about eight clients. But I work with them on their strategy. At the moment I do all of our website wireframing and manage all of our website projects. That’s something that every quarter we’re handing stuff over to Jen. The plan was for by now because we started it about two months ago. Each service almost you suddenly realise how much is in your head. We do have processes but every process we’ve realised is like 70% there. Then I’m holding the strings together. It takes a little bit of time. You realise as a director you can do 14 hours of a human’s work in a day because you know how it works. You work fast and really efficiently. And suddenly you’re like, how’s this. So she will be taking that on eventually.
Darren Jamieson: The best way to test the process is to actually use them.
Nathan Brown: Oh yeah. Follow them and see if they fall down.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
Nathan Brown: That’s, we need to make sure they exist first. What I’m learning, everybody is using them all the time and they’re not going off and doing their own thing and ignoring them. That’s where things go wrong. So that’s a little bit of everything. But I have a heck of a lot of client meetings. I spend a lot of my week speaking with clients, having meetings with clients, talking about their service. If I look at my diary from Wednesday, for example, I had a meeting with someone, actually this was a Robus Marketing meeting to talk about our email marketing plan. We then had a review with one of my clients for their social media. And then I had a sales call with a new franchisee that we’re going to be working with. That’s the kind of stuff I do. Next week I’ve got a mixture of desk time. I’m meeting a business coach. I’m also meeting a life coach that I’m potentially going to start working with to improve my overall, stop the wild ups and downs that you get as a business owner, to improve your work life balance and focus on yourself. That’s the kind of thing. So it’s a lot of management stuff that I do. But there is still admin bits and bobs that I’m doing. I think you can’t get away from that sometimes.
Darren Jamieson: What you want to try, you want to try and get away from the social media because that’s nitty gritty that really someone else could be doing. The other thing is, do the stuff you love a little bit.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. If you love it, if you really enjoy it, then yeah, there’s no harm in keeping it. There’s a couple of clients, like an architect for example, that we work with and I find her work fascinating. I just really enjoy sharing the inspiration that she sends over. Architectural inspiration or like Remembrance Day. Rather than just saying lest we forget, we’re going to be looking at some architecture that’s related to war periods. Christmas, we’re going to be looking at architecture related, I don’t know, like Belgium Christmas market. Let’s look at some detailed stuff from there that stands out. But that’s what I really enjoy. I don’t always enjoy the writing. I really enjoy the strategy side of things and coming up with the ideas.
Darren Jamieson: You see, I never really enjoyed the actual web designing and web building myself. I’ve done it for 25 years. And the thing I like about having other web designers and developers who are better than me, and I’ve got to say that because they’re going to be editing this podcast, so Gab and Nick, they’re better than me. What I really like is when I go into a client meeting, like yourself. Previously, I’d be talking to a client about what they want. They’d be saying all this exciting stuff and I’d be saying, oh, we can do this and we can do that and it’s really exciting and people can upload their own products and then we can have it flip around. And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, slow down. You got to do this.
Nathan Brown: I know. You go back and you have to then sell it, don’t you?
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. I have to go, I’ve got to actually do this. But now I don’t. I’ve got other people to do it. So I can go, right, this is all the stuff we’re going to do. Doesn’t matter how ridiculously complicated it is. I ain’t doing it. Gab and Nick are doing it. So there we go. That’s the bit I really like about having a team. Sell whatever you like. Somebody else’s problem. They can deal with it.
Nathan Brown: I love it. Sometimes I do, have you ever heard of Balsamiq? It’s a wireframing piece of software.
Darren Jamieson: Yes, I have. I’ve not used it myself, but I have heard of it.
Nathan Brown: We do Balsamiq wireframes and then we do a Figma and then it goes onto the build. So our process is, depending on the client, it just depends on who the right fit within the business is, either me or my marketing manager to do something. I had a client that was a healthcare client. I had to do the sketches for each page just because working with transforming GP surgeries or like access triage is quite complicated and I have a healthcare background so I know the terminology. And I quite enjoy that but I don’t do the design. And I don’t, I might have a meeting with our developer to say, has the build been done? Like, why does that image go nuts when you put it on your mobile? So I QA. So I’ll do the layouts, manage the delivery, and do the QA. Long term I’m going to do none of that, but it’s just short term.
Darren Jamieson: That’s the goal, isn’t it?
Nathan Brown: Yeah. But I don’t do QAs now either. They QA each other, but once a month I’ll look at the sites that have gone live just to see if I can pick up anything that needs changing and 90% of the time, no, I don’t, which is great. I don’t need to see anything.
Darren Jamieson: What’s your plans for the future? Your plans for future growth because we’re almost running out of time now. I just want to know what your aim is for the agency.
Nathan Brown: Yeah. So, it’s a funny one really because I love, mostly I love what I do. And I think if I was to say I want to build a business to sell and retire in my 40s, which realistically I could do, I’d be bored. I wouldn’t know what to do.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. But I also don’t want for the next 20 years to be involved in the day to day delivery of services.
Nathan Brown: So I’m trying at the moment to use systems and processes and people and technology. Next year is about AI, for example, how do we leverage that to optimise the service delivery so that that largely just happens and I don’t have to think about it too much. Maybe I have an ops meeting a couple of times a week. But what I then want to be doing, I want to be meeting with clients and the architect as an example. I want to be coming up with the ideas. I like the strategy. I like sitting in meetings and like you said, we could do this, it could flip around. I want to be doing that. And I also want in the long term to be doing more speaking, training, networking because I think that that’s a good way to grow a business, but that’s also something that I enjoy. So the next 10, 15 years plan is just to do more of that and grow the business at the same time. I don’t want a massive team. I’m quite happy with the team the size that we have. I don’t want to be a manager. I haven’t grown a business to be a manager. Ironically, I am a manager.
Darren Jamieson: Until you hire a manager, in which case you don’t need to be a manager.
Nathan Brown: I know. But then you have to pay and then you have to grow, don’t you? That needs to be fact. I don’t manage anybody. I’d be rubbish at it.
Nathan Brown: So that’s what I want to get to. I want to get to something that ticks along nicely that I can be involved in that I still enjoy doing, but a couple of days a week working on my personal brand, but you know what I mean. Doing stuff like this.
Darren Jamieson: Exactly.
Nathan Brown: You are part of my future plan, Darren.
Darren Jamieson: Well that sounds ominous. Okay.
Nathan Brown: The delivering of presentations and things is ultimately the same in my mind as coming up with the ideas. This thing can flip around and that.
You’re having the conversation with people that care.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah. You’re selling the idea to people.
Nathan Brown: You’re selling the dream. You’re selling the concept. You’re selling yourself. Your own brand. Yeah. I don’t put myself out as being an expert. I will always say, this is what I’ve done. It’s worked for me. We’re a very solid, very strong in terms of our numbers business. But ultimately if you say you’re the expert, you put yourself on a pedestal and you have further to fall.
Darren Jamieson: Oh, I like that. Put yourself on the pedestal, you have further to fall.
Nathan Brown: That’s it. That’s it.
Darren Jamieson: So, as a final point, Nathan, anyone listening to this thinking, I love the sound of this. I want to work with them. I want to get in touch. I want to find out more about marketing for franchises, or I am a franchisor and I want to work with Nathan. What’s the best way for them to get in touch?
Nathan Brown: Check out our website which is Robus, or drop me an email at hello@robusmarketing.com and we’ll help you out. And I’ll always have a chat first of all and my approach is always make sure people spend their money in the right way rather than spending it thinking they’re going to get results and then be very disappointed six months later. Sadly you hear all too often.
Darren Jamieson: You do indeed. Nathan, thank you very much for being a guest on The Engaging Marketeer Podcast.
Nathan Brown: Thank you. Oh, you’re very welcome.
About Nathan:
Nathan Brown is the founder of Robus Marketing, a UK based digital marketing agency that works heavily with franchise networks. He has no formal A levels or degree and started out in live music and events before moving into the care sector, where he progressed into senior roles and then took responsibility for marketing and sales. He later completed a Level 6 Diploma in Professional Marketing with the CIM.
After being made redundant in 2014, Nathan became Marketing Manager for a home care franchise, which shaped his franchise marketing experience. He launched Robus Marketing in 2017, grew it primarily through business networking and retained relationships, and now runs a fully remote team across the UK and the Philippines delivering Google Ads, social media, website projects, and marketing strategy, while he focuses on sales, client relationships, and scaling systems.
Connect with Nathan:
Website: https://robusmarketing.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robusmarketing/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robus_marketing/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanbrownp/
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/robus-marketing/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
