An Examination of Business Exits and Scaling with Stephen Kenwright

Mike (00:26.104)
Stephen, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast. It's great to have you here.

Stephen Kenwright (00:40.689)
Thanks for inviting me, Mike, I appreciate it.

Mike (00:43.022)
Yeah, I really can forward. Just, yeah, I love the format. I love talking to amazing people like yourself. It's a brilliant way of getting to network with interesting people. So without further ado, just tell people kind of who you are and what you do and something unusual about yourself.

Stephen Kenwright (00:59.515)
So I am Stephen Kenwright. I'm a non-exec and consultant for marketing agencies and was a co-founder of the creative agency Rise at Seven. Unusual thing about myself, I have a master's degree in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature.

Mike (01:22.124)
my god. Wow. That's very niche, but very interesting.

Stephen Kenwright (01:27.397)
very niche. As far as digital marketing and marketing goes, it's a bit of a niche way in, think.

Mike (01:33.198)
But a great way of studying content and language.

Stephen Kenwright (01:37.391)
Yeah, editing, know, all the good stuff.

Mike (01:40.63)
Yeah, absolutely. Fascinating. Brilliant. OK, so let's kick off with a couple of questions that we thought we'd have a discussion around. So the first one is, could you talk about the exit journey process from Rise at Seven via an MBO? What are the key success factors, and where were the real potholes?

Stephen Kenwright (02:00.689)
If I go back a little bit further to the reason for, exiting the way that we did. I, when I started Rise at Seven in 2019 with my co-founder, Carrie Rose and an angel investor, we had planned to sell the business, right? It was designed to scale extremely quickly. We knew exactly who we would sell to, which would have been probably Incubator or Crowd or Brain Labs.

Mike (02:04.878)
Hmm.

Stephen Kenwright (02:27.611)
possible assembly, right? We had a really clear idea of where we were going to go, where we were going to sell to and how we would build the business for that eventuality. And what we weren't quite as clear on were the timelines because we thought it would probably take five years and the numbers that we wanted to reach, we reached in two and a half. And there's loads of reasons for that. was pandemic and everything kind of fell in our favor. We were very fortunate. And, you know, I'd like to think good and hardworking and all those good things as well.

Mike (02:45.676)
Wow.

Mike (02:57.038)
was gonna say, yeah, luck is what you make, not what just happens.

Stephen Kenwright (02:58.129)
Absolutely, yes, but we were in a good place to capitalize on that look for sure. So we got to the place where we wanted to get to from a numbers point of view and started those conversations. So we started talking to those agencies who by design were all private equity backed. knew that was the kind of business that we wanted to sell to. And the private equity companies said, hang on, talk to us, don't talk to them. We're the ones with the money.

We want to run the agency independently because it's got a big brand and this is, you know, it's going places. So we'll, we'll talk about that strategy a little bit separately. So we started those, those conversations. And the thing is like, when you start a business with the intention of selling it, things change, especially if you've not done this before. So Carrie, my co-founder, this is, this is her first business and she found that she loved it. This was her pride and joy. She never wants to leave Rise at Seven.

Mike (03:26.573)
Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (03:55.877)
She doesn't want to hand over the reins to someone else. And I think that's fair enough, right? When going into those conversations about starting an agency, we've got an idea of what we want to do until you witness it firsthand. You don't know how it's going to go. So we had those talks and you know, doing.

Mike (03:56.169)
Yeah.

Mike (04:10.584)
it's also Stephen kind of what comes next. The problem you face is as a founder, if you're in your 30s or 40s, it's like, great, you get liquidity event, you get some capital out, your investor gets the money, and the return they expect. But you're sat there going, what now? You can't just sit and play tennis for 30 years. So I get that, I do get that.

Stephen Kenwright (04:26.641)
Hmm except

Yeah. And that's the point. You know, I got to that stage. I wanted to do something else. I've done search agencies. I've done those kinds of things previously. And my, you know, rise at seven was not a million miles away from branded three, the agency I'd worked for previously. And I kind of, felt like I'd been there and done it. I didn't want to can carry on doing that exact thing for, for the longterm. Whereas Carrie felt that if she was to exit rise at seven, she'd probably do something pretty similar again. So what's the.

point in exiting. we were really fortunate to have a very good relationship and able to have a conversation about that. I wanted to leave, she didn't want to leave. We had an angel in

Mike (05:10.476)
On what scale were you Stephen? Just for the listeners, not the financial numbers but the headcount, roughly how big were you?

Stephen Kenwright (05:17.165)
At this point we were 110 people. One of the things about building in public is there's really no such thing as trade secrets. So, you know, we would probably have publicized that we were about 7.3 million turnover in our third year. So a fairly sizable agency by that point. And that's what I mean about doing five year numbers in two and a half years. We'd got to quite a scale very, very quickly.

Mike (05:19.852)
Wow.

Mike (05:25.527)
Right.

Mike (05:32.107)
Wow.

Mike (05:42.574)
And were you an organic search agency? Was that what you did? SEO.

Stephen Kenwright (05:46.211)
Effectively, yes. We lived in the niche between PR and SEO. whereas a lot of SEO agencies have done digital PR for a number of years, including my previous agency, Branda3, it is very much kind of just using media relations tactics for SEO. Whereas what was a little bit different and what still is a little bit different about Rise at Seven is it's quite capable of answering a PR brief about brand awareness and consideration, changing perceptions.

Mike (05:52.514)
Right.

Stephen Kenwright (06:16.433)
as well as answering an SEO brief. So it's not just using the tactics, but it's actually using the strategies properly in both of those things. So really it was, you know, a digital PR agency, but maybe not in the, in the sense that you wouldn't necessarily think of digital PR usually in the SEO space.

Mike (06:24.301)
Yes.

Mike (06:34.412)
Yeah, brilliant. So you got to that kind of that tipping point where you wanted to exit and move on and your business partner loved it and didn't, but you had a very good relationship, which I think is key. Lots of trust between the two of you, very open communication, nothing kind of hidden, no kind of hidden agendas. People were being very open with each other. Brilliant.

Stephen Kenwright (06:43.557)
Mm.

Yes. Yes.

Stephen Kenwright (06:52.945)
No, absolutely. Yeah. Our complication really was we had an angel investor who was involved. Well, he didn't want to leave. So that's where the negotiations became a little bit more tricky. We'd previously talked to him about potentially buying him out. He was open to that, but not on the time scales that we were working to. He wanted to stay for longer for lots of, lots of reasons.

So we'd kind of made them an offer previously. And I said to my co-founder, look, we, and to our angel investor, you know, we've made this offer to you previously. You didn't want to take that because you felt like there was more value in there. I will take that though, that value that we said that we would give you, clearly you think this is going to be a steal if you give that to me. So shall we do that? And that one of the things that I think made the relationship stay.

relatively strong with me and Carrie is I was pretty clear I'm not trying to gut the business on the way out. You know, I've we've said what we thought was good value for shares to our investor. I think that's good value for shares. Give me that. And it's not then a conversation about me trying to get the maximum amount of money possible out of this. That's going to leave the business in a poor financial situation. It's very much about the personal side of things.

Mike (08:10.776)
Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (08:13.571)
And when you kind of take that money conversation away and make it so that it's not all about the money, then you've got the opportunity to make it a little bit more civil, I think, and a little bit more clear about what you're trying to do and what you're not trying to do.

Mike (08:28.834)
Exactly. And without putting words in your mouth, having sold a couple of businesses before, my own perspective was when you get to a certain number, and that's a personal number, once you've achieved that number, then if someone offers you that number in the right commercial terms, well, then it's time to move on. Accept the number, leave plenty of value on the table for the people staying behind, and move on with the next stage of your life. And it sounds like that's very much where you were.

Stephen Kenwright (08:54.673)
Mm.

Stephen Kenwright (08:58.735)
Yeah, we had appointed accountants, corporate finance partner called Cowgills at the beginning of probably about 18 months into the business. We'd had an accountancy firm to begin with, and we'd kind of outgrown them a bit. We appointed Cowgills after a pitch because we were keen on someone who'd sold the business before who could help advise us through that process and what we should be looking for.

And the first thing that they did with us individually was sit down with a spreadsheet as accountants I want to do and say, how many kids are you going to have? How many houses are you going to have? How many holidays do you want to go on? And put all these numbers into the magic spreadsheet that says, right, the amount of money that you actually need to retire and never work again is X. And for me, that was quite an eye opening moment because I thought it would be a lot more.

Mike (09:45.558)
Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (09:51.203)
I thought we were talking tens of millions of pounds for me to retire fully. And that's just not the case. Like I'm not, I'm not particularly flashing that regard. I'm just, you know, I reached that number and thought, okay, great. That feels all very achievable. And so being able to do that just felt, you know, that I don't need more than that. And if there was an opportunity to get more than that in the right context where everyone is.

Mike (09:51.457)
Right.

Mike (09:58.392)
Brilliant. No, no,

Mike (10:05.592)
Brilliant.

Stephen Kenwright (10:19.099)
happy, enjoying life and, you know, in good health and all that kind of thing, then probably might have carried on. But as it happens, you know, doing five year numbers, which were also quite aggressive in two and a half years through a pandemic, I was just pretty put out to be honest. So all of these things aligned to the point where it was the right time. It felt like the right time for me. I suspect in hindsight, Carrie will have felt like it was the right time for her.

Mike (10:26.7)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (10:36.078)
Absolutely.

Mike (10:40.632)
Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (10:46.809)
as well. So, yeah, it all just aligned in the right way. I think.

Mike (10:51.534)
Brilliant, excellent. So if you just talk about, so now we've kind of gone the journey of kind of what happened. If you just talk about the kind of the potholes, where are the problems? Where were the things that could have really tripped things up on that kind of journey at any point in the growth phase or the exit phase?

Stephen Kenwright (11:08.661)
The difficulties, particularly around the exit phase, are things that usually happen well before the exit phase that you don't really know have happened. And that's largely to do with the shareholders agreement and the legal documentation that goes with it. You know, we, yeah.

Mike (11:19.97)
Yep. Yep. Which were all written at the beginning. You write them at the beginning, but then you get to the end and go, hmm, that's not quite what I really wanted.

Stephen Kenwright (11:30.339)
Absolutely. And you don't necessarily think you're going to be in the situation you end up in. So you kind of feel like, that's that's future Stephen's problem. He'll deal with that. And then future Stephen has to deal with it. And you kind of left left with absolutely. So the pitfalls, the potholes, the first one I would say is when you are signing a shareholders agreement, etc.

Mike (11:43.512)
You have to live with the consequences. Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (11:56.745)
And by the way, like it's completely different to a contract of employment because contract of employment is given to you and if you don't sign it, you don't get a job. So you're kind of forced to do that. And so if you want to violate the terms of your contract of employment, you could probably get away with that. You know, if there's a good reason to do it, you know, the right to earn a living and all that kind of thing. No one makes you sign a shareholder agreement. No one forces you to sign an open a business. And so it's much more legally binding. So.

getting to that stage and really the bit that was missing for us was a really clear, how do we sell our shares if we want to sell our shares? Because there was, there's then two options. You either go down the route of a board agreement. Everyone says, yes, we're all happy with this and it's all civil and it's all easy and everyone just kind of does the thing. Or you have to go through the mechanism that's outlined in the shareholders agreement. And if

Mike (12:35.267)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (12:53.688)
Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (12:54.639)
the mechanism outlining the shareholders agreement is not very favorable to you. You have obviously got the imperative to make sure everyone on the boards is on board with what you want to do, which means all sorts of compromises and negotiations, which may or may not be financial. It might, it might be all sorts of different things. And so the difficulty. Yeah.

Mike (13:09.24)
Exactly.

Mike (13:13.422)
It might indeed. Yep. And they're complicated. And some people in that situation have more leverage than others. So if someone wants to apply their leverage unfairly, then they can. I don't know what happened in your situation at all, but I've seen it happen a lot whereby people use their leverage to the disadvantage of someone else, but it's legally binding. There's nothing you can do about it really.

Stephen Kenwright (13:21.104)
Yes.

Stephen Kenwright (13:24.753)
Mm.

Stephen Kenwright (13:39.087)
Yeah, absolutely. In our situation, what happened was we got to the point where we'd reached a red line. We couldn't all agree on the same thing. And that just dragged on and on and on until someone gave, basically. And this was large, I was leaving. my requirements, my demands are much more straightforward. They're involved being me just leaving and getting paid some money. And that's kind of it.

Mike (13:52.652)
Right. Yep.

Mike (14:03.714)
Yeah. Yep.

Stephen Kenwright (14:07.749)
But then it's like who the people who are left behind, they have a business, they want to have a business in a good state. What their definition of a good state is, is subjective. All these kinds of things make it much more difficult. So I'd say the first pitfall is very much like when you're setting up a business, you don't necessarily plan for this eventuality. You're either of the mind. I think most business owners I talked to, it feels like a good thing to do. And they plan on never selling it. They've planned on just living with it forever. And that feels good to them.

Mike (14:17.576)
Exactly. Yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (14:36.633)
or they're plan on absolutely selling it, but either way they don't have this middle ground of, what happens if I need to leave for health reasons? What happens if I have a family emergency? What happens if all these bits of life occur throughout the process? What happens if, you know, me and my co-founder fall out? Which thankfully wasn't the case with us, but there's these situations that feel unforeseen, but really could be captured in what happens if one of us leaves?

Mike (14:59.808)
Absolutely.

Stephen Kenwright (15:03.397)
How does that affect the other one and how does that actual process work?

Mike (15:07.542)
mean, deadlocked agreements are sadly very common whereby you both got 50-50 shareholding and there's no mechanism in the shareholder agreement or the articles that allows an independent third party to unlock that. And you can end up locked in companies with differing views from shareholders and directors. And it drags on and on and on until one person says, you know what, I'll take a deal. And that's just unpleasant.

Stephen Kenwright (15:28.145)
and

Mike (15:33.966)
So I think the advice here is to anyone listening, when you're setting up your company, assume you're going to sell or assume there has to be some kind of event whereby one of you exits, get a lawyer to help you draft the agreement, but a lawyer who's done transactions who knows what those mechanisms are. Would that be fair?

Stephen Kenwright (15:51.111)
I think that's absolutely right. And independent legal advice for each of you, I think is a good idea. So you, you have a company lawyer or a lawyer each or whatever, but getting a lawyer to talk to a lawyer, it sounds unpleasant. But I mean, when you're an agency, you're dealing with this kind of situation every time a client appoints you, right? Your lawyers talk to their lawyers and it all feels very cringe and you don't like it. But

Mike (15:57.826)
Yes.

Stephen Kenwright (16:18.169)
That deal is then done and you can get on with the relationship and it never really feels damaged by that. It's just, well, the legal things are there to protect everyone actually.

Mike (16:22.606)
That's right.

Mike (16:29.206)
Exactly right. Very good. So I'd be really interested also on in the growth journey, how did you get from zero to 120 people? Yes, you have the pandemic and that obviously helped businesses that were in e-commerce as agencies, clearly you'd get an uplifting growth. But that's not enough as I know from working in several agencies, that isn't enough to get you to that kind of scale. If there were two or three things you have to point out that said,

those were the big enablers that got us to that scale. What were they?

Stephen Kenwright (17:03.525)
The first thing was an absolute clarity on who our people would be and where we would find them and how many of them there were and how we would appoint them and all these kind of situations that kind of come with recruitment. We were based in Sheffield, first and foremost, which is a massive advantage for a business like this because there isn't a lot of other agencies.

There aren't a lot of other agencies competing with us for talent. But the people of Sheffield drive to Leeds for 25, 30 miles, or they drive to Nottingham for 30 miles, or they go to Manchester. You know, there's more supply than there is demand for staff in that city. And I think that's probably still true, which is why I'm still there with Roy Chalkum, but I think that's true of Birmingham. I think that's true of Liverpool. I think that's possibly true of Newcastle. There are a bunch of cities which feel like...

Mike (17:31.798)
Right. Now.

Mike (17:59.651)
Yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (18:00.367)
you can look at them and go, there's not much of a scene there, it doesn't feel like a really exciting place to be a digital agency. But that is not a bad thing, actually. And you go to Leeds or you go to Manchester and you are in an arms race with other agencies who can potentially pay more money for these people that you want to hire.

Mike (18:08.129)
Right.

Mike (18:12.728)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (18:23.094)
Exactly. Or London. Yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (18:25.699)
London absolutely the case bright in another city that's a kind of hotspot for this kind of thing. So that's a clear decision to begin with. We also knew that there's two universities in Sheffield. I came out of one of them that are churning out really good people that have to leave. So we had a real plan of how we would hire people directly from university. And of those 110 people, about 50 were graduates. So that meant that we had to have good training.

Mike (18:30.125)
It is.

Mike (18:51.17)
Really? Brilliant. Yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (18:54.373)
we were able to get people productive within a few weeks. And, you know, the problems usually come in agencies where you're hiring graduates and expecting them to do the work of very seasoned people, or you don't have the right kind of training in place to do those particular roles for people who haven't done it before. So we had the plans in place for really strong onboarding, a good recruitment process and training for people in the right roles with then the

Mike (19:09.986)
Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (19:22.511)
Decision that there are going to be some roles elsewhere that we can't hire graduates for we need some experience in these specific things So we had a really clear idea of okay that that role now needs a really seasoned head in it So we knew where we would find those people to and then the third kind of role is the ones where we're bringing on people because at the end of the day For the first year, especially we're still a startup, you know We we didn't have the money to compete with the network agencies

Mike (19:47.959)
Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (19:52.035)
So we were hiring people who maybe don't have a lot of management experience, but have a lot of doing experience and just giving them a shot at it and saying, you know, if you want to do this, we'll back you for it. And if it doesn't work out, doesn't work out. There's still a place for you. but very much kind of a sink or swim type of, attitude to grow in departments. So we had a bunch of people that would either do really well and we'd hire a load of people underneath them and they would grow rapidly with the business or they would usually come to us and say,

you know what, this bit isn't for me. I like this bit over here. And we go, no problem. And then we'd hire someone more experienced to do that. the recruitment side of things, we were absolutely clear on what we were going to do and what we weren't going to do. We had plans in place very early on for things like remote working and how we would deal with that and all these kinds of situations. We just planned quite thoroughly with that side of things. So that would be, that would be the first thing that helped us to scale very, very quickly.

Mike (20:45.464)
Very good.

Stephen Kenwright (20:49.851)
We just made a really conscious effort as well to get to know everyone that we thought would probably work for us at some point. So people that we'd seen on Twitter, et cetera, just like, we've got no job for you right now, but do you want to meet for a coffee? And we'll just have a chat about what you want to do. And then when we are in a state to hire you, we'll, you know, we'll talk about that. Absolutely. Yes, very much so. I don't think many agencies really do that. I think that's one of the big.

Mike (21:06.752)
Exactly. So your talent pilotlining. Yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (21:16.483)
Everyone has a sales pipeline, but no one necessarily treats their people pipeline the same way. The second thing that helped us to grow very, very quickly, you know, we talk about positioning quite a lot in the marketing space or the marketing agency space. And you've got some people like Blair ends to thank for that, who were very vocal about that kind of thing. David Baker, absolutely too. And, and a few, right. There's a few people who were banging that drum.

Mike (21:20.978)
Exactly. Completely agree.

Mike (21:36.322)
You have. And David Baker. Yeah, exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (21:42.737)
But when we're talking to clients, we talk about segmentation, targeting and positioning, and we kind of forget those two things in agency land a lot of the time, because we have this really clear idea that we, well, not everyone, but a lot of people like we want our agency to be different. And we'll talk about that in second. I'm sure. what our agents to be different, but we don't necessarily say to who, who do we want to feel like our agency is different? Cause we still try and appeal to everyone. We still go everyone who has a marketing budget should.

be interested in us and they should all think we're different, which is just impossible. So it's really important to have that segmentation to begin with, which, you know, doesn't necessarily have to be massively scientific. It obviously helps if it is. It's not common, I think, to launch a marketing agency with a market research, quant survey type of thing behind you. But, you know, if you've got an idea like, okay, I've been, you know, the idea for Rise at Seven.

really came from my time in house at Pendragon PLC running an SEO pitch and talking to a bunch of very good agencies about what we needed. And it just felt like everyone was saying the same thing that I didn't agree with. And, you know, I am not the whole market, but my thought process was if there is a billion pounds of SEO revenue in the UK somewhere and 10 % of the people think that I'm right, then that's going to be a very big agency and it'll be fine.

Mike (22:53.289)
Exactly.

Mike (23:08.609)
Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (23:09.817)
So we had this kind of really clear idea of what we wanted to be and who were the right kind of customers for us, what kind of size of client. And I think one of the crucial things, one thing that we did very well is every time we spoke to a new customer, we tracked a lot of information about that customer, not in a kind of cookie type of a sense, but just a spreadsheet, like how big is the company? What's the structure of the team? Where are they based? What's the challenge that they got in touch with us about?

How did they find us when we pitched? What did we give them? Did we give them a forecast? Did we give them a competitor analysis? Did we do an audit? Did we pitch creative? Huge amounts of information about that just to try and work out what was working and what wasn't. And so as time went on, we were just more and more laser focused on, we know this is our customer and we know that we can seem different to them because we are dealing with their specific unique challenges rather than trying to deal with all the challenges of the market.

Mike (23:59.544)
Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (24:08.817)
And, you know, I think, that kind of goes on the front end of positioning the segmentation and targeting bit. But I think another area where agencies don't necessarily get the positioning thing right is drinking their own Kool-Aid when it comes to the creative side of things. Because you know, Ryzer 7 was very creative agency, but what we were absolutely crystal clear of was our customers are the likes of Misguided and Boohoo and

Mike (24:26.254)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Kenwright (24:37.263)
you know, Sephora and these beauty brands and that kind of thing. So what we should do is we should look like an agency that they would work with. And if it's going to put a completely put off HSBC, you know, and I think that's, that's one.

Mike (24:44.524)
Yeah.

Mike (24:50.22)
Yeah, because they're not in your back to your targeting. They're not your target market. So it's quite it's fine that they don't actually like the look of your brand and the way that you're positioned because you're not they're not your customer.

Stephen Kenwright (25:03.683)
Absolutely right. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, that's one of the areas where one of the other areas, I think a lot of agencies generally get wrong. They have a very clear positioning. Sometimes they know who they're talking to, but they just look kind of sterile. It's just a very generic color palette. The logo looks like it was done in PowerPoint. The website just looks like a standard WordPress website, these kinds of things that, you know, it feels like it doesn't matter.

actually, but yet we as agencies are working in marketing and telling clients that it does. So we should probably believe that ourselves. I think it a big difference.

Mike (25:41.126)
I would agree. Yep. So that's the second one. Now, the third one, I think leads us into our other topic, which is around basically customer acquisition, differentiation, marketing strategy as part of BD. How did you get the kind of the third leg? So you've got positioning, targeting, segmentation, positioning. You've got talent, pipelining, recruitment, very, very clear what you did on that. Now you've got to find some customers.

because to get that level of scale, you need a lot of demand from the right companies, clearly. So how did you grow your sales pipeline? And why is marketing strategy such a key part of that whole business development piece?

Stephen Kenwright (26:27.409)
So if you think, and I generally am a fan of Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg Bass Institute's way of doing things when it comes to how brands grow. And I think the most basic concept that I think we need to apply in the marketing agency space is excess share of voice, which is basically you need to say more than your competition does. And I know they talk about it in media sense of...

We need to spend more than our competition does. If we spend more than we grow, if we spend less than we shrink, obviously that happens over a period of time. But we really should equate that to media in the sense of there's such a thing as earned media. And the way that we scaled was through largely earned media, which was PR and social. So our viewpoint, and we've talked a little bit about what the agency needs to look like, what the agency needs to say.

Mike (26:57.932)
Right. Yep.

Mike (27:12.846)
Okay.

Stephen Kenwright (27:20.241)
We had a point of view on on a lot of things, you know, we weren't afraid to alienate people We had our very clear distinctive. This is how we believe search marketing should be done should be creative Etc we were boundary pushers in the sense of the kind of ideas that we would pitch and the kind of ideas that we would get signed off and the kind of campaigns that we would show off things like the Easter egg with a vibrator in that we did for Ricky or

you know, the various misguided, shoots and that kind of thing that was just, it was much more kind of, disruptive than you would typically get in the SEO space. So we were really clear about pushing that kind of thing. But what was important to us is I think you and having been a client as well, probably helps this.

Mike (28:01.069)
Yes.

Stephen Kenwright (28:14.939)
The amount of time that our clients think about agencies, especially agencies they're not working with is so minimal. Like it's not, it's not the case that even that client that you've pitched to and you're waiting for a response from, thinks about you every day. It's, it's literally, they've got all this stuff going on and they actually have a lot of problems, not just the one that you can solve for them. And they maybe have been able to build a consensus with a group of people, their organization.

that they should solve this problem. And at that point it's like, who, who is top of mind? And the way to be top of mind is to be partially famous, right? And be really well known for the work that you do, but really just to be the last person to say something on their social feed, the last person to say something in their inbox. And I think like one of the, one of the big missing things

Mike (29:01.41)
Exactly.

Stephen Kenwright (29:09.691)
for a lot of agencies, they'll do cold email outreach. Social is just another inbox. It's just another message that you send to people. And it's much less competitive for getting cut through in that kind of way than email. Cause you can't get an easy sales message across in, in email, because you have probably five, six, seven, eight other agencies trying to hit the client at the exact same time of the day with very similar looking message.

Whereas in social, you've got the opportunity to stand out a little bit. It's much more visual. It's much more, you know, in context of they're looking for the kind of work that you might do. So.

Mike (29:48.622)
So there's two things there, Stephen, just to kind of kind of bring some of my kind of previous experience to play. If I'm right, what you're saying, and I think this, it ties up with what I've heard from lots of other people in the sales community that I obviously live in. You know, 95 % of your target customers, the one you talked about, 95 % of those target customers are not in the market for your services at any one time. Only 5 % have a problem, as you said.

Stephen Kenwright (30:13.893)
Absolutely.

Mike (30:17.442)
that they need solving now by a third party agency. So in order to be present when they're ready, you have to be front of mind. And to be front of mind, what you're smartly saying is, yeah, you've just got to make sure that your social stands out and that your creative and content is head and shoulders above the rest. So that when it does come that time, you're the agency they think of. So it's an inbound strategy.

Stephen Kenwright (30:21.136)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Kenwright (30:28.464)
Yes.

Stephen Kenwright (30:46.533)
Yes.

Mike (30:46.71)
effectively using earned media. So you didn't have a big outbound strategy, it was an inbound strategy based on earned media.

Stephen Kenwright (30:49.871)
Yes.

Stephen Kenwright (30:56.025)
Absolutely. We very rarely did any outbound at all. And when we did it, kind of going back to what we've talked about previously, it was so obvious to us that that client should be working with us based on who we were and how we presented ourselves. We weren't reaching out to a thousand businesses. We, can remember two that we actually reached out to and got anything from, which were Klarna and Lounge Underwear.

Mike (31:11.693)
Yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (31:25.675)
And, Rach Fletcher, was our, new business manager, message clan, I just been like, you guys should totally be doing this. This is how we're doing it for these other brands that kind of look a lot like you that have the audience that you have. And they're like, yes, we should be doing that. I remember sending the email to, to lounge underwear and it was, it was sent, went something along the lines of lounge underwear is rise at seven spirit animal. Look at us and look at you. We were made for each other. Why aren't we working together? Can we have a chat? And.

Mike (31:53.454)
Brilliant.

Stephen Kenwright (31:54.609)
That's where that came from. Now, if we'd have sent that to, and I pick on HSBC all the time, very fortunate to work with HSBC nowadays at Right Shotgun. It's a very great client to be working with, very happy about it, but that wouldn't have worked for Rise at Seven. If we'd have sent that message to HSBC, if they'd have even opened it, they would have been a little confused.

Mike (32:04.194)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (32:14.136)
Correct. They're exactly right. Brilliant. Stephen, I'm very conscious of time as well. Seriously, I could talk to you for three or four hours about this. But let's not because you're going on holiday soon. So just kind of drawing the kind of threads together. What are your, if in the audience, there's an agency leader, they've got a co-founder, maybe they're at 20 people, they want to get to 50 people.

What be your couple of things where you'd say, yeah, these are the things that in their situation you would focus on to get from that 20 to 50 people agency? What the kind of big things you'd say focus on?

Stephen Kenwright (32:56.571)
first thing to focus on is the relationship between you and your co-founder and working towards always having a plan for the future because that makes all of the day-to-day decisions so much easier. You're going to be asked to compromise all over the place and if you and co-founder are on the same page, it's very easy to not compromise on things because you're not second-guessing anyone, you're not feeling like you're doing anyone else out of money or whatever it might be.

The first thing is working towards the plan and constantly checking in with each other about how we feel, right? We didn't always do that quite right at Rise at Seven and me and Carrie would be at various points, just too busy. And that's when we sort of started to drift apart in ideologies, et cetera, et cetera. And whenever we got back together, it was a lot easier to get these things back on track. first thing there, that means kind of deciding not to do a bunch of stuff.

If you want to sell the business, you're going to make very different decisions throughout the whole process of growing the business to if you're not going to sell the business. And I think it's, it's, it's, often hear agency owners say, I'm going to run it as if I could sell it at any time. And that's, that's good, except you are going to be refusing to compromise on some things that you probably should compromise on. If you're wanting to hit the numbers and the scale that you want to get to.

So it really does need to be a decision one way or another. You can assume that you're not going to sell it and accidentally find yourself in a position that you are and you've got a great offering. Great. Fine. Go for it. Likewise, if you think you want to sell it, run it like you're going to sell it, which means deciding to take on that client that you don't really love that person that you could be working with, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing wrong with either one of those ways of doing things. Marketing. Absolutely.

I think agencies generally are quite poor at marketing themselves. They don't really hire anyone very senior to do their marketing and they probably don't focus on it as much as they should themselves. I think you can feel quite short term and trapped in that kind of business development cycle. I need deals now. I need to be calling people and if I'm going to spend some time doing something, it's trying to get something in the pipeline right now.

Stephen Kenwright (35:19.269)
When actually, as long as things aren't going to shutter overnight, you should probably be thinking, how am I going to make this pipeline fill itself for the next two to three years by really clearly designing my agency in a way that it looks like the right agency with the kind of customer that I should be working with. Really. It's, it's a flywheel, right? You work really hard to get it going. When it gets going, everything is really easy.

Mike (35:37.944)
Brilliant.

It is.

Mike (35:44.61)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Kenwright (35:46.319)
And it sounds like it's not going to, but it is as soon as you've got a good brand, people recognize and you've got that inbound coming in. You have all of these opportunities to say, do you know what? should just hire that person because we can, or we should just bring on that client because we can, we should do, we nest extra in that thing because we can, you know, that's, that comes from marketing and pipeline.

Mike (36:00.738)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (36:10.638)
Exactly. Stephen, it's been really amazing having you as a guest. Thank you ever so much for being very open and candid about your journey. Fascinating about the growth story. And where can people find out more about you?

Stephen Kenwright (36:25.017)
LinkedIn is probably the social network that you will find me nowadays. I'm not really on any of the other ones. and I'm currently working for an agency called ride shotgun, which if you want to know more is ride shotgun dot global. that's probably like the two places you can find me. think like with all things, you should pick your lanes and double down on those things. So you don't find me on X anymore.

Mike (36:47.072)
Exactly. Yeah, no, same here. Absolutely. LinkedIn is where I hang out as well. Stephen, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you ever so much for joining us on Higgle the BTB Salesforce podcast.

Stephen Kenwright (36:57.999)
Mike, thank you very much. See you soon.

Mike (37:00.152)
See you soon. And we're out. Thank you, Stephen. That was fantastic. Like really, really good. Let me just stop the recording.

Stephen Kenwright (37:05.712)
Lovely.