Darren Jamieson: [00:34] On this week’s Engaging Marketeer, I am 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.
Darren Jamieson: [01:03] So I am going to be speaking to Nathan about how he started, how he scaled his business, and what his plans are for the future. Well, yeah, I have done three podcast interviews this week already, I think. Is this two already? I do not know what I have done. And I have done two in person talks somewhere. Yeah, I have done no work at all really. It has all been getting out speaking to people. So, is that your job with the agency?
Nathan Brown: [01:24] Pretty much. Yeah.
Darren Jamieson: [01:29] You do not like physical work.
Nathan Brown: [01:29] I do not like it.
Darren Jamieson: [01:29] It is how you grow an agency, right?
Nathan Brown: [01:35] It is. I cannot grow an agency if I am building websites and doing SEO stuff. I have not got time for that.
Darren Jamieson: [01:42] With Phil, actually, how do you grow a marketing agency? You do not grow a marketing agency with paid ads. So ironically, with Google ads and Facebook ads and that sort of thing, as effectively as building relationships.
Nathan Brown: [01:57] No, that is true.
Darren Jamieson: [02:03] Because building relationships will get you leads and referrals for free.
Nathan Brown: [02:03] Exactly.
Darren Jamieson: [02:03] Whereas paid ads cost. The only downside is, of course, with the relationships, if it is an agency, the relationships might be yours, not the agency’s. That is the downside if you are looking to sell.
Nathan Brown: [02:15] Yeah.
Darren Jamieson: [02:15] If you are looking to sell, you need to make sure that it is the agency that is always referred. So that when people are recommending you, they are not recommending you, Nathan. They are recommending the agency.
Nathan Brown: [02:27] Yeah. You do not 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 has got to go through the team so that you can take yourself out of it. I did that years ago. My business cards do not have my phone number on anymore. They do not have my email address on either, because what is the point in emailing me? I am going to lose it anyway. There is a funnel for this sort of thing. And depending what it is that somebody wants would go to a different person.
Darren Jamieson: [02:57] Otherwise, you will be a very profitable marketing agency, hoping to sell at a five times multiplier, suddenly not worth anything.
Nathan Brown: [03:04] No. 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 are looking at possibly £100,000 or more salary for those two people. That has got to come off your profit then, which reduces the value of the business. So yeah, you need yourself to be out of it.
Darren Jamieson: [03:36] Look at that. Well, we have started the podcast already. This is good. So let’s just crack on with the way we have been going. Obviously, you run an agency, but you have not done that forever. What started you getting into this marketing business that we all love and hate at the same time?
Nathan Brown: [03:53] Oh gosh. So I have no formal A levels, no formal degree, nothing like that.
Darren Jamieson: [04:01] At all, or related to marketing?
Nathan Brown: [04:06] Not at all. I have no A levels.
Darren Jamieson: [04:06] Wow. Okay.
Nathan Brown: [04:12] I actually used to work in the music industry.
Darren Jamieson: [04:12] Now it all makes sense.
Nathan Brown: [04:20] Live sound. Big events. Hammersmith Apollo. A production company. That is what I studied. I did a BTEC, but it was not for me. The challenge with that is you go on tour for three months of the year, you are away from your family. It just was not 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. That was kind of really my first step into marketing.
Darren Jamieson: [04:57] What took you from being a musician to temping in care homes? Very different avenues there.
Nathan Brown: [05:04] I needed a job. I was temping as an admin assistant in a care home, in Lewisham, 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: [05:27] It is a churn of clients, is it not?
Nathan Brown: [05:27] It is the churn of clients. Why did that client leave you? Well, they died. You cannot do anything to stop that one.
Darren Jamieson: [05:39] Hopefully you can do some stuff to stop it.
Nathan Brown: [05:39] You can treat them a little better and make sure they last a little bit longer. But yeah, the natural churn of those things. It is not good.
Nathan Brown: [05:46] And I always say the potted story is, I got promoted every year. So it is a group of care homes. They have 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.
Nathan Brown: [06:23] And then they said, do you want to join the senior management team as 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 is really how I got into formal marketing. I would say maybe more sales at the beginning.
Nathan Brown: [06:50] 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. And amongst other things, I decided that I should do some study, and I kind of taught myself. I have got a level six diploma in professional marketing with the CIM, which was really helpful.
Nathan Brown: [07:10] And my first marketing project was a 42 page annual review, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Darren Jamieson: [07:22] Yeah.
Nathan Brown: [07:28] But yeah, that is kind of how it happened. I got made redundant in 2014.
Darren Jamieson: [07:33] Because of that?
Nathan Brown: [07:33] No, not because of that. It was that much of a disaster, right? No. I had a lot of other responsibilities for a conversation for when we have 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 did not work out, and then had to get rid of her after a couple of weeks.
Darren Jamieson: [07:57] You have made a mistake if you are getting rid of somebody after a couple of weeks.
Nathan Brown: [08:03] I was just too green in marketing. But sometimes being made redundant at the time can seem like a really bad thing, but when you look back on it, sometimes it is a good thing that actually happened. So I was out of work for four months in 2014, and then I applied for so many jobs.
Nathan Brown: [08:22] One of my challenges was my job title was business support director, and they were saying, why are you going for manager and officer roles because you are a director? But I was not experienced to be a director. But then I applied for director jobs and they were like, you do not have the experience.
Nathan Brown: [08:41] 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. It was just me and the whole comms thing, from teaching myself Google ads to strategy to design.
Darren Jamieson: [09:07] So that was for a guy that owned five franchise offices.
Nathan Brown: [09:14] Five franchise offices.
Darren Jamieson: [09:14] It is not always common that franchises allow their franchisees to do their own marketing. It is often that the franchisor will do the marketing for them, the franchisees will pay for the marketing budget. Did you have a lot of freedom when you were at Bluebird to do what you wanted, or was there a franchisor saying, no, do not do that, that is not within the brand guidelines?
Nathan Brown: [09:37] 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 their own marketing. Now Bluebird Care is top three, five market share in private home care in the UK. They have got like 250 offices. So they are quite big.
Nathan Brown: [10:03] But you as a franchisee need to grow your territory. So there is a degree of yes, head office is helpful, but also we are doing things our way because we need to grow our business.
Nathan Brown: [10:17] 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 does not do anything for me, what is this campaign you said has got this many leads, or where were my leads.
Nathan Brown: [10:46] But yeah, that is how I really learned and how I started the agency is basically they became my first client.
Nathan Brown: [11:03] In 2017, in my annual appraisal, it was the what do you want to do when you are older kind of question, and I thought it would be interesting to start a marketing agency. And they said, why do not we be your first client. So I was doing my kind of 9 to 5 with them, doing my job basically and invoicing. Learning how to run a limited company, how it all works.
Nathan Brown: [11:21] Then he would have friends who need a website, and I worked with a few other franchises. But I grew the business from there, and that is really where we went through business networking. Working 6:00am till 8:00am, going to work, coming back at 6:00pm, working till 1:00 in the morning, and then rinse and repeat six days a week.
Darren Jamieson: [11:46] It is hard at the start, but you do it because you love it, right?
Nathan Brown: [11:52] Yeah. You love it.
Darren Jamieson: [11:52] I am right there with you. I have been doing it for 16 years. I am not sure I still love it, but I am sure I do.
Darren Jamieson: [11:57] You mentioned that you work a lot with franchises. Are they all UK owned franchises?
Nathan Brown: [12:04] We work with three main franchises. All based in the UK.
Darren Jamieson: [12:10] The reason I ask is, we work with the big American franchisor with territories across the UK, Canada, Australia, and the United States. We have worked with other UK based franchises. And we have 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? It was like, I never want to go back. I hate doing exhibitions.
Darren Jamieson: [12:42] What I found, and I do not 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.
Darren Jamieson: [13:02] Their focus is primarily on selling franchises, whereas in America they seem to have a more overall approach. The more money their franchises make, the more money the franchise is going to make. So their priority seems to be on helping the franchises get leads. What is your thought on that in the UK, being obviously very careful you cannot say anything negative about any of your clients?
Nathan Brown: [13:19] It is a fair point because 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 is going to be good for you.
Nathan Brown: [13:38] But actually, if you have got big shareholders and things, how else can you demonstrate the growth of your business by adding new franchises. So yes, there is a big push towards that.
Nathan Brown: [13:51] The franchises that we work with, they are actually quite good at helping their franchisees develop their business. We manage two franchise networks, we manage all of the Google ads for. They are quite big spends, and the owner, the franchisor, it is a family sort of business, is very involved and really does care.
Nathan Brown: [14:20] We also, for another franchise network, we do all their Facebook ads and all their social media content directly with the franchisees.
Nathan Brown: [14:33] 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 have got the knowledge, the experience, and the account that shows the history.
Nathan Brown: [14:54] So, maybe we have just been lucky, but that has not been my experience.
Nathan Brown: [15:01] Bluebird Care again are good at helping their franchisees. 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.
Nathan Brown: [15:17] 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 franchisees to help them develop their business.
Nathan Brown: [15:35] One of the challenges I find with franchises as a whole is there are 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 does not work, or you go, I am going to go and start my own business, here is this thing called a franchise. It is like a ready business out of the box.
Nathan Brown: [16:02] So often what I find is the people that will join a franchise might not always be maybe as seasoned entrepreneurs or driving it themselves. So maybe they do not have the experience. So there is a bit of both really.
Nathan Brown: [16:20] But yeah, maybe we have just been lucky with the franchise networks.
Darren Jamieson: [16:25] I would agree. They are growing as well, which is good.
Darren Jamieson: [16:32] I would agree with exactly what you just said as well. 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 do not need to formulate yourself. All the mistakes have already been made, they have been ironed out, and this is ready to go. It is a turnkey model that is going to work for you.
Darren Jamieson: [16:57] Pretty much anybody could run a franchise if they follow the procedures exactly to the letter that they are written. So long as you are not a complete idiot, you should be okay following a franchise.
Darren Jamieson: [17:10] So they are very appealing to people in that situation. But your seasoned business owners probably going to start their own or buy a business.
Nathan Brown: [17:15] Yeah. Buy a business they can add value to.
Nathan Brown: [17:22] One of the challenges of working with franchisors compared to business owners is that kind of expectation of results as well. If you are going on your own, you understand it is going to take a bit of time to work.
Nathan Brown: [17:35] With franchise networks, we tend to find there is a slightly higher churn of clients, because they might start, it might work.
Nathan Brown: [17:42] We had a client the other day and we are doing some Google ads for, and he was really happy with his results, but he looked at his numbers and like, oh no, you are the one that I spend the most money on over the last quarter, so I am going to pause it for three months. And you think, why are we doing this. Obviously it is your decision, but it is that kind of thing.
Nathan Brown: [18:07] That is not exclusive to franchises, to be honest. It is not, but it seems you have a slightly higher churn. But the positive with a franchise is you get one client, you get multiple clients.
Darren Jamieson: [18:19] We have got one like that at the moment. It is a regular 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 are getting all the leads they could possibly want. Yet they are saying, I am not happy. No, we are going to go somewhere else where it is cheaper. I was like, what are you doing? It happens.
Darren Jamieson: [18:47] One thing I found interesting with franchises, the big bonus, the big benefit, is that everything is the same. The model is the same, the suppliers are the same, the processes are the same wherever you are. It is just picked up and plonked down somewhere else.
Darren Jamieson: [19:06] But from an SEO perspective, the big problem is everything is the same. So the number of franchises that we have worked with have all had the same problem, and that is that they pretty much have duplicate content on websites. They are basically templated turnkey websites, identical.
Darren Jamieson: [19:24] Have you found that problem with businesses you work with and what have you done to solve it?
Nathan Brown: [19:32] We do not currently really do SEO for any of the franchises that we work with, but we do. Some Bluebird Care offices launched a new website with their rebrand 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: [19:58] Google.
Nathan Brown: [20:04] But actually what they did was, because that whole duplicate content thing is an issue, right, and so you have got 50, 100, 200 franchise areas with their own micro sites with their own duplicate content.
Nathan Brown: [20:18] 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.
Nathan Brown: [20:34] Their new website has taken another step forward, but what we are looking at, we are almost 80% of the way there now, is building lots and lots of local pages. So home care in town, for example, there is a hundred local pages we are building. Well, all of those have got unique content on, and they are ranking quite well.
Nathan Brown: [21:07] So I guess the answer is, yeah, it is a problem, because that is ultimately what really helps with the rankings for the Bluebird Care site.
Nathan Brown: [21:20] Some of the other franchises that we work with, their micro sites have the same content but just a location change, which is not the best way to do it, but it does work. But it works to a period.
Nathan Brown: [21:38] Having unique content is more effort, but it is 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 1,000 but we are now doing even more so that we can get better results.
Nathan Brown: [21:56] We tend to, the franchise SEO clients that we work with, we tend to get quite good results from their ranking side of things.
Darren Jamieson: [22:09] It is interesting because it is a very similar experience to what we have had, where the big client that we work with has got about a thousand locations around the world, and originally they would 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.
Nathan Brown: [22:23] It is a lot. How many times can you rewrite the same thing more than once?
Darren Jamieson: [22:28] It can be done and it does need to be done because if it is all identical, Google is just going to see it and go, what a load of spam.
Nathan Brown: [22:34] Exactly. What a load of absolute repetitive spam. That is not going to work.
Darren Jamieson: [22:41] But that is the franchise issue. That is the problem they have got. But it can be solved if they do it.
Nathan Brown: [22:47] If they do it. But a lot do not.
Darren Jamieson: [22:52] A lot do not do it.
Darren Jamieson: [22:52] When you first started your agency, where were you, physically location wise, or in terms of numbers? Was it just yourself or did you bring people on board straight away?
Nathan Brown: [23:04] No, it is just me at the beginning. Obviously, I have my employer. I am 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.
Nathan Brown: [23:37] The retained revenue very comfortably covers all of our expenses.
Darren Jamieson: [23:44] Nice position to be in. At the start of the month you know you are going to be okay, you are going to keep the lights on.
Nathan Brown: [23:50] Yeah. By 2020, which was Covid year, started the business, say 2017, we had just a handful of clients, maybe three or four.
Nathan Brown: [24:10] It was only when I started doing business networking that I started growing the business. So to give you the picture, 2018 to start of 2020, by start of 2020 I have here 16 retaining clients. And we have got 100 retaining clients now. So obviously you have different unique challenges at those levels.
Nathan Brown: [24:38] But right up until I took on our first member of staff in 2021, it was just me.
Darren Jamieson: [24:43] So you were running it yourself for a very long time then.
Nathan Brown: [24:50] It was just me. I did outsource a little bit. Every couple of months I did a time and motion study. A few times of the year I would write down every 15 minutes what I am doing, what client I am working on, and what task I am doing. And then I would look at chunking things off.
Nathan Brown: [25:12] A lot of our clients early days were social media content clients. So I then go, okay, I need to get someone to write this content and design it. That is 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 still follow that today.
Nathan Brown: [25:38] 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.
Nathan Brown: [25:50] I was married, but I did not have a child at the time. I could not do it now. I would go out for dinner with my wife and I would get home at 10:00 and do a couple of hours work. That is just how it was.
Nathan Brown: [26:08] It was very difficult the first couple of months settling into that. It is really difficult on your energy, your whole approach. But then the trouble is you get used to it.
Nathan Brown: [26:31] I only build a business based on very solid numbers. So often, I am sure you see it Darren, you talk with business owners, how much profit did you make last quarter? Well, I do not know. They do not know their numbers. I am able to be quite confident in the next quarter, I already know pretty much what profit we are going to make, largely give or take. Know what my costs are going to be. So I can grow with confidence.
Nathan Brown: [27:08] But obviously the other approach is employ people at the beginning, you fart around not doing anything. What is the point in that?
Darren Jamieson: [27:20] That is the key. If you are employing people, you cannot fart around not doing anything. You have to get out there and feed them. You have to give them the work to do.
Darren Jamieson: [27:27] So when you employed your very first person, what role was it? And were you clear on what you wanted?
Nathan Brown: [27:34] I will tell you the story. My first employee is a lady called Jen. She is still with us today.
Darren Jamieson: [27:40] So you got it right first time then?
Nathan Brown: [27:40] Yep. My first freelancer, I went through a few freelancers. But Jen is 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.
Nathan Brown: [28:12] So I had to email her, 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.
Nathan Brown: [28:34] Then I had a bit of design work I needed doing and I was like, this is so last minute. Who can I ask? Jen. And she did. So we kind of had that little relationship.
Nathan Brown: [28:45] We did not really do web development at the time because I did not have the ability to be able to do it. I had done a few websites and lost a lot of money on them. But we did have a website we were waiting to go live, and the partner that I was working with was not very reliable. So she helped with that.
Nathan Brown: [29:05] And it got to a point, Darren, I was so busy I just sent her a WhatsApp message one day. I was like, I do not suppose you fancy a job, do you? And she said yes. I was like, shit, now what do I do?
Darren Jamieson: [29:16] Yeah.
Nathan Brown: [29:16] 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.
Nathan Brown: [29:34] And quite quickly learned that she was great at graphic design, but writing, no. You do not find a good designer that is also a good copywriter.
Darren Jamieson: [29:46] I have known one in 25 years.
Nathan Brown: [29:53] So it is 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.
Nathan Brown: [30:04] There was some learning. I have 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 I know, how do you make it work. It worked first time. She quite quickly went four days and five days.
Nathan Brown: [30:34] The thing that was helpful was someone that used to be a freelancer, used to do her own thing, but did not like getting a business or asking people to pay invoices.
Darren Jamieson: [30:42] That is the perfect employee. Someone that has done freelance before and did not like it, because it means when you have employed them now, they are not going to be looking at the work and thinking, I could go freelance and do this for myself. Because they have already done it and did not like it.
Nathan Brown: [31:06] And we are now working together for her to take on some of the operational side of the business.
Nathan Brown: [31:11] We are 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 requests. When you have got 150 clients across websites and monthlies, you could imagine the requests you get. Can I add a page? Can I just.
Nathan Brown: [31:29] And she now is in charge of that whole process.
Darren Jamieson: [31:34] With those clients, do they pay you per change or are they paying you a retainer and you do those changes within the retainer?
Nathan Brown: [31:42] On websites, we charge our hosting, obviously, but changes are chargeable. We had one the other day, for example, I would like to copy this page on my website and just add all this content and text. We just go, it is half an hour’s work. It is 30 quid. That is what it costs.
Nathan Brown: [32:05] You hear these, you have been around, you will know. I need to add a Google Analytics tag to my website. Oh, that will be £300 kind sir.
Darren Jamieson: [32:12] Yes, I have heard of that kind of stuff.
Nathan Brown: [32:12] We do not always charge for changes though. If it is just swapping an image or a bit of text or something and the client never asks for anything, then we are like, it is fine. We want to look after you as well.
Nathan Brown: [32:31] 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 will not do that for understandable reasons.
Darren Jamieson: [32:51] Some will block it. Some guard it and do not want you doing anything yourself. They want you to pay them to do everything.
Nathan Brown: [32:57] We give ours access, but we tell them if you break anything, it is chargeable if we fix it.
Darren Jamieson: [33:10] We give them editor access rather than admin access, so they cannot go in and mess about with any of the nitty gritty unless they specifically ask for it. It is their website, but we warn them.
Darren Jamieson: [33:26] You mentioned you will do changes for free if it is a small change. Be careful with that because if you do a change for free and they think, that is great, they have done it for free, when they come back and ask you to do something else that is a little bit bigger and then you say, that is going to be 50 quid, they could go, you did not charge me last time.
Darren Jamieson: [33:58] There is a slippery slope there. You could end up doing loads and loads of work for free and suddenly you realise, how come we are not making any money? It is because my developer is doing 40 hours a week for free on small changes. So I would be wary of that one.
Nathan Brown: [34:04] That is it. It is something we monitor. It does not happen too often. Often if we do it, we will say, usually we charge, but we are not charging this time, just so people know.
Darren Jamieson: [34:22] One thing we have, rather than clients coming to us and saying, how much to add this page, or how much to add testimonials, and then we quote a time, give them a cost, then invoice them, there is a lot of admin back and forth, probably more time than it takes to actually do it.
Darren Jamieson: [34:42] We have a maintenance package where they will pay per month and those changes are included anyway. So then all they do is email it and we just do it. Everyone is on direct debit. They end up getting sometimes more work than they paid for, sometimes less, it depends how often they need those doing, but it saves everybody a lot of time. A lot more recurring revenue.
Nathan Brown: [35:06] That is something I have discussed with other people. It is also a good way of increasing your hosting revenue.
Nathan Brown: [35:17] A lot of our clients are like the jewellers down the road or your lady who will do ironing. They very rarely make changes. So they would not 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, you pay per month, you get x hours a year of changes, and I keep a record of it.
Nathan Brown: [35:58] We figure that sort of thing out.
Darren Jamieson: [36:03] The way to get around that is to say the hours roll for six months or three months, so if they get to a year and say we have not used any of those hours, you have lost the first nine because they only roll over.
Nathan Brown: [36:25] Yeah.
Darren Jamieson: [36:25] So is this just the one employee you have got at the moment then, or have you scaled further than that?
Nathan Brown: [36:31] Let me tell you a bit about our team. I went on a bit of a hiring frenzy in 22. My little boy is coming up to three, and November 2022 was when he was due to be born. So I thought, right, I need to free up a bit of time here.
Nathan Brown: [36:53] I am definitely a delegator. I want to make sure this is done, what is happening with this, so there is an anxiety sometimes there.
Darren Jamieson: [37:10] But being a delegator is a really good thing. A lot of business owners are not delegators. They do not want to let go. So you are in a strong position.
Nathan Brown: [37:16] You stranglehold your business. And on being a delegator, you have to understand that no one is going to be as good as you at the things that you do, but that is okay. Mistakes are going to happen, but you have to try and fix them or catch them.
Nathan Brown: [37:34] So I hired a copywriter three days a week in 2022. Then about a month later I hired a graphic designer because we had started doing websites by then because Jen, I realised, can build websites.
Nathan Brown: [37:57] 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 push stuff to the team.
Nathan Brown: [38:09] And then I next hired end of 2023, October. I realised 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. It got to a point where I needed help. So I hired an executive assistant, then we changed the title to operations assistant. So we have now a full time operations assistant.
Nathan Brown: [38:42] Also I hired another graphic designer because our social media clients had grown. So end of 2023, we were me plus four.
Nathan Brown: [39:02] Our graphic designer I hired on a three month contract because I did not want to commit, but he is still with us today.
Nathan Brown: [39:14] 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 are a team of five. I hired a Google Ads person.
Darren Jamieson: [39:33] So you took on a Google Ads client and then hired a Google Ads person straight away. That is ballsy.
Nathan Brown: [39:39] Well, I can do Google Ads. It was more I needed someone to implement the stuff that I am telling them to implement. I did not have the time to create.
Darren Jamieson: [39:51] It means you need to be selling more Google Ads clients.
Nathan Brown: [39:57] It is 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: [40:03] So you took on one new big client and thought we better get somebody in to look after.
Nathan Brown: [40:09] Right. So we are a team of five. Then I hired a marketing manager as well at the end of last year full time. One of our staff left earlier on in the year.
Nathan Brown: [40:20] So as of today it is me. I have got Jen, who is our client executive and taking on the ops stuff. A graphic designer who is four days a week. We had a graphic designer who had a baby a year ago and she is now going to be staying at home to look after the little one, so she is not coming back, but we are not replacing her. We have just increased hours to cover that.
Nathan Brown: [40:47] I have a marketing manager, our ops assistant, and our Google Ads person. I have lost count, but it is like five or six.
Darren Jamieson: [40:58] So long as you know how many there is when you are doing payroll, that is all that matters.
Nathan Brown: [41:05] Mixture of UK based and in the Philippines.
Darren Jamieson: [41:05] Are these all remote or are they in an office?
Nathan Brown: [41:10] They are all remote. We use Teams, always have Teams open. I have a chat with everybody and we have a team chat. And we have somehow got a really good culture between us all.
Darren Jamieson: [41:22] Do you do physical meetups at any point?
Nathan Brown: [41:29] Never done it. I was going to do a team building a couple of years ago. I was going to do clay pigeon shooting. We were all going to meet in Birmingham. Then one of the team was expecting and I thought maybe that is not a good idea.
Nathan Brown: [41:50] But now I have two members of staff in the UK, Jen, our client exec, and a designer, and then three in the Philippines. So it is a little bit difficult for us to all meet up.
Nathan Brown: [42:03] But what we do do is birthday presents, work anniversary gifts, even in the Philippines. Baron, our executive assistant, if it is somebody’s work anniversary, I send them some money and they go and they buy a gift and put it in the post.
Nathan Brown: [42:20] But yeah, I do not know how we have achieved it to have such a good culture, but I guess I am just lucky.
Darren Jamieson: [42:32] I do not think it is luck. I think you work at that.
Darren Jamieson: [42:39] With all of these people working with you now, the temptation for a lot of people is to keep doing more of what you are doing. Keep doing Google Ads yourself. Keep doing websites. Keep doing content. What do you actually do?
Nathan Brown: [42:51] That is a good question. I am asking myself that.
Darren Jamieson: [42:58] I ask myself what I do and it is mostly nothing.
Nathan Brown: [43:05] I do all of the sales. My job in the business is sales and marketing.
Darren Jamieson: [43:10] That is what you should be doing.
Nathan Brown: [43:18] Largely I do a little bit of everything. I have a few social media clients I look after. I client manage everybody.
Darren Jamieson: [43:29] So you still do social media yourself then for clients?
Nathan Brown: [43:35] Several. I write eight. It is more like where we are doing consultancy level social media where it needs my input rather than on the level of one of the team.
Darren Jamieson: [43:47] So you are still logging into clients’ Facebooks or into Hootsuite or whatever and writing posts yourself.
Nathan Brown: [43:53] Yes. For about eight clients. But work with them on their strategy.
Nathan Brown: [44:06] At the moment, I do all of our website wireframing and manage all of our website projects. Every quarter we are handing stuff over to Jen. The plan was for by now. We started it about two months ago.
Nathan Brown: [44:19] Each service, you suddenly realise how much is in your head. We do have processes, but every process we have realised is like 70% there. Then I am holding the strings together.
Nathan Brown: [44:42] 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. Suddenly you are like, how is this.
Nathan Brown: [44:56] She will be taking that on eventually.
Darren Jamieson: [45:01] The best way to test the process is to actually use them. Follow them and see if they fall down.
Nathan Brown: [45:07] We need to make sure they exist first, and everybody is using them all the time, and they are not going off and doing their own thing and ignoring them. That is where things go wrong.
Nathan Brown: [45:13] 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.
Nathan Brown: [45:33] If I look at my diary from Wednesday, for example, I had a meeting with someone, 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 are going to be working with. So that is the kind of stuff I do.
Nathan Brown: [46:05] Next week I have got a mixture of desk time. I am meeting a business coach. I am also meeting a life coach that I am potentially going to start working with to improve my overall, stop the wild ups and downs you get as a business owner, to improve your work life balance and focus on yourself.
Nathan Brown: [46:22] It is a lot of management stuff. But there is still admin bits and bobs that I am doing. I do not think you can get away from that sometimes.
Darren Jamieson: [46:34] You want to try and get away from the social media because that is nitty gritty that someone else could be doing. The other thing is do the stuff you love a little bit.
Nathan Brown: [46:46] If you love it, if you really enjoy it, there is no harm in keeping it.
Darren Jamieson: [46:53] I still do video editing every now and then because I actually like it. It is time consuming and there are other people that can do it, but I do enjoy it.
Nathan Brown: [47:03] There is a couple of clients, like an architect, for example, and I find her work fascinating. I really enjoy sharing the inspiration that she sends over. Remembrance Day, rather than just saying lest we forget, we are going to be looking at some architecture that is related to war periods.
Nathan Brown: [47:22] Christmas, we are going to be looking at architecture related, like Belgium Christmas market. Let’s look at some detailed stuff from there that stands out. That is what I really enjoy.
Nathan Brown: [47:40] I do not always enjoy the writing. I really enjoy the strategy side of things and coming up with the ideas.
Darren Jamieson: [47:46] I never really enjoyed the actual web designing and web building myself. I have done it for years, for 25 years. The thing I like about having other web designers and developers who are better than me, and I have got to say that because they are going to be editing this podcast, so Gab and Nick, they are better than me.
Darren Jamieson: [48:04] What I really like is when I go into a client meeting, previously I would be talking to a client about what they want, and I would be saying, we can do this and we can do that, and it is really exciting, and people can upload their own products, and then it can flip around. And in the back of my mind, I am thinking, slow down, you have got to do this.
Nathan Brown: [48:26] You go back and you have to then sell it, do you not?
Darren Jamieson: [48:31] I have to go, I have got to actually do this. But now I do not. I have got other people to do it, so I can go, right, this is all the stuff we are going to do. Does not matter how ridiculously complicated it is. I am not doing it. Gab and Nick are doing it.
Darren Jamieson: [48:49] That is the bit I really like about having a team. Sell whatever you like. Somebody else’s problem. They can deal with it.
Nathan Brown: [48:57] Have you ever heard of Balsamiq? It is a wireframing piece of software.
Darren Jamieson: [49:03] Yes, I have heard of it. I have not used it myself.
Nathan Brown: [49:03] We do Balsamiq wireframes and then we do a Figma and then it goes onto the build. Our process is, depending on the client, it depends on who the right fit within the business is, either me or my marketing manager.
Nathan Brown: [49:22] I had a healthcare client. I had to do the sketches for each page because working with transforming GP surgeries or access triage is quite complicated and I have a healthcare background so I know the terminology. And I quite enjoy that, but I do not do the design.
Nathan Brown: [49:44] I might have a meeting with our developer to say, has the build been done, why does that image go nuts when you put it on your mobile. So I QA.
Nathan Brown: [50:01] I will do the layouts, manage the delivery, and do the QA. Long term, I am going to do none of that. It is just short term.
Darren Jamieson: [50:07] That is the goal.
Nathan Brown: [50:12] They QA each other, but once a month I will 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 do not, which is great.
Darren Jamieson: [50:23] What are your plans for the future? Plans for future growth, because we are almost running out of time now. I just want to know what your aim is.
Nathan Brown: [50:35] It is a funny one really because I love mostly 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 would be bored. I would not know what to do.
Darren Jamieson: [51:00] Yeah. But you also do not want for the next 20 years to be involved in the day to day delivery of services.
Nathan Brown: [51:04] So I am 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 do not have to think about it too much. Maybe I have an ops meeting a couple of times a week.
Nathan Brown: [51:30] 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 saying, we could do this, it could flip around. I want to be doing that.
Nathan Brown: [51:50] And I also want in the long term to be doing more speaking, training, networking, because I think that is a good way to grow a business, but it is also something that I enjoy.
Nathan Brown: [52:05] Next 10, 15 years plan is to do more of that and grow the business at the same time. I do not want a massive team. I am quite happy with the team the size that we have. I do not want to be a manager. I have not grown a business to be a manager. Ironically, I am a manager.
Darren Jamieson: [52:26] Until you hire a manager, in which case you do not need to be a manager.
Nathan Brown: [52:32] I know. But then you have to pay and then you have to grow, do you not? That needs to be factored.
Darren Jamieson: [52:38] I do not manage anybody. I would be rubbish at it.
Nathan Brown: [52:40] So that is what 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, doing stuff like this.
Nathan Brown: [53:02] So you are part of my future plan, Darren.
Darren Jamieson: [53:02] That sounds ominous.
Nathan Brown: [53:09] Delivering presentations and things is ultimately the same as coming up with the ideas. You are having the conversation with people that care.
Darren Jamieson: [53:16] You are selling the idea. You are selling the dream. You are selling the concept. You are selling yourself. Your own brand.
Nathan Brown: [53:21] I do not put myself out as being an expert. I will always say, this is what I have done. It has worked for me. We are a very solid, very strong in terms of our numbers business.
Nathan Brown: [53:41] But ultimately if you say you are the expert, you put yourself on a pedestal and you have further to fall.
Darren Jamieson: [53:47] I like that. Put yourself on the pedestal, you have further to fall.
Nathan Brown: [53:52] That is it.
Darren Jamieson: [53:52] 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 is the best way for them to get in touch?
Nathan Brown: [54:10] Check out our website, which is robus, r o b u s marketing dot com, or drop me an email at hello at robus marketing dot com and we will help you out.
Nathan Brown: [54:23] I will always have a chat first of all. My approach is always make sure people spend their money in the right way rather than spending it thinking they are going to get results and then be very disappointed six months later, that sadly you hear all too often.
Darren Jamieson: [54:35] You do indeed. Nathan, thank you very much for being a guest on the Engaging Marketeer podcast.
Nathan Brown: [54:41] Thank you.
Darren Jamieson: [54:41] You are very welcome.
