What You Need To Know Before You Hire An Agency – Episode 85

Are you emotionally ready?

I mean, you could have just not used that phrase. I guess, couldn't you?

To hire an agency?

When you hire an agency, you then have to be happy to trust them to go and make decisions for you, don't you? I guess that's the other. This is starting to sound more like a kind of relationship help podcast, but I like the kind of metaphor extended analogy. You cannot micromanage an agency into success. It just doesn't really work like that. So I think going into it with the mindset that you're going to have to oversee things or run things, is also a kind of beginner mistake, I guess.

Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, this week we're going to have a chat at a more sort of philosophical level. He said, closing in on the mic to get the to get the, uh.

Just try not to look me in the eye. Radio two.

DJ. See, uh, Ken Bruce is leaving. Radio two. I did, yeah. He'll maybe, uh, get him on our podcast. I don't think he will.

Maybe one day.

Want to chat today about how you can figure out if you're. This is gonna just sound wrong. It sounds like we're going to be up our own backsides, but are you emotionally ready?

I mean, you could have just not used that phrase, I guess. Couldn't you?

Are you emotionally ready to hire an agency now? Sounds like we are tricky people to work with. And it's a big, you know, emotional.

I mean, you are, you are.

Yeah. But what we're actually talking about is, um, when we have started working with businesses who've never worked with an agency, there's, there's a sort of learning curve. And, you know, in the many years we've been in business, we've had situations where it hasn't worked out and in some aspects, in some in some senses, it's like it's not any particular reason why it hasn't worked out other than maybe the people didn't really know what to expect to work with an agency and potentially weren't in the right place.

Emotionally ready.

Emotionally ready. Yeah. Again, I kind of like the title when I wrote it down, but I'm very much aware that it just sounds a bit.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think the thing is.

It's alright, it's fine, it's fine.

Fantastic.

It is digital marketing from the coalface. This is a live office where we're trying to record this.

Really good excuse for our shoddy recording skills. Um, no, I mean, I think the thing is, isn't it like agency client relationships can go fantastically well by chance? Um, they can go fantastically well because you go into it with the right mindset. I think the problem is often they can go quite badly because you go into it with the wrong mindset, right? I guess that's what we're really getting at is that if you go into these things, there's a very good chance that it may all go south simply because you had the wrong expectations or didn't necessarily know what to expect.

Yeah. Okay. So I guess the first thing to think about is a relationship with an agency can be transactional. They could simply provide services that you need practical service. Like we need a designer, let's get an agency to do our design work. And it's just like you tell the person what you want them to design and just let them design things like, we need a pretty this or we need a thing for that, that kind of thing. So you could take that approach and that's okay. It's not the kind of relationship, it's not the kind of gig, rather that we, we are looking for as an agency. We're looking for situations where businesses want us to help them to grow, for example, and less about the the skills hiring, the skills that we have.

I mean, I think that's the nail on the head, isn't it? Because at the end of the day, if you hire some agency for their skills and you tell them exactly what to do. But as long as your strategy for growth or whatever is, is fantastically good, then yeah, sure, you might get some growth out of it. But that relationship is not in and of itself actually going to grow your business. It's just going to give you products that you've requested. And that's not I don't I mean, maybe it is why some people get, you know, kind of go the agency route. I think it's a mistake because ultimately, I think the power of an agency is that it can, you know, bring growth in its own right. The agency should be helping you to grow your business, not just delivering on time. Yeah. You know what I'm trying to get at here? I don't think I'm articulating well.

And while while we've been doing this, Julie's slacked me and she's gone old fashioned Swiss Tony on me because Julie's saying that a relationship, building a relationship with an agency is, is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. That's Julie. That said, if I'd said that, like, what's that old sexist doing?

Oh, dear. Yeah. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, transactional relationships never really do anything productive or beneficial. Do they?

So yeah, if you've got somebody in house that really understands, um, how to market and grow the business, and they literally just need somebody to enact their vision, their strategy, then yeah, it can work. But how many organizations have like a marketing strategist in the team? I mean, you, you'll always get people, you know, intelligent people who are running businesses will have a go at it and might have a measure of success. Some of them might be wildly successful. But if we're talking about situations where you recognize that your business is not looking as good as it could, isn't being found by the right people, isn't saying the right things. People think of you as a cheap X, Y, z company when in actual fact that's not who you are. If everything's wrong and you haven't got that strategist in place, then hiring an agency to do you a nice logo and build you a nice website is.

Not.

Going to cut it, is it? That's not fundamentally.

Fundamentally what agencies do, and that's not the point of hiring an agency. And I think that kind of is the point, isn't it? At the end of the day, an agency is much more than just make your website pretty, give you a nice logo. It is more about the kind of strategy and the ideation. I mean, to your point, it can work well.

Whoa whoa whoa.

What did you just say?

I said I was ideation a bad word now.

I don't know, what does everybody else think? Ideation. It's not even a word.

Isn't rule by committee.

Fine.

Okay.

Ideas, stuff. What clever things people do. Yeah. Me ug me do market.

Look.

I think, you know, ultimately, to your point, an agency can work like that, but you'd be just as well going and hiring a freelancer. Realistically, if you just want them to do stuff.

I mean, you get some great freelancers who help with strategy and, and really become part of the team. And this idea of becoming part of the team, you have to think about hiring an agency, a bit like hiring a member of the team, a new member of the team, a member of staff or whatever, whatever you want to call a new colleague. Yeah, whatever you want to call it. You know, that's what you need to be thinking because to, to really work well with an agency and get lots of value out of the relationship, you have to basically let them see all the skeletons in the cupboard, open up the books, really let them.

See stuff vulnerable. Yeah. But really let them.

See, you know, what the business is all about. Fundamentally not, you know, you can't keep them at arm's length and them do a good job for you, broadly speaking.

Yeah. No that's.

True. Obviously, you know, with some of these huge corporations, you know, you're not going to see the skeletons in their cupboards. But, you know.

But.

With with, you know, SMEs, small and medium enterprises, you know, that kind of organisation that we would predominantly work with. Um, yeah, kind of, you know, and let's face it, if you think about some of the conversations we have with our customers, they will open up to us and talk about certain aspects of the business that even members of staff don't know about. You know, they'll be like, you know, you just can't go any further, but X, Y, z, I'm going to stop saying X, Y, z. And they've got to be, um, in a position where they feel comfortable doing that. And this is why, you know, when we started trying to think of a subject for this, or rather trying to think what to call this, this chat about, are you, you know, in the right place to think about hiring an agency? And that's what I was kind of driving at. It is it is an emotional decision.

It is. Yeah. As well as a practical decision. Yeah.

You have to be in the right frame of mind, don't you? And like you say, I mean, there is still sometimes when you have conversations with people and you'll say things, well, like, you know, especially on the PPC side, right? When you're trying to work out how much you can afford to spend on somebody's adverts for a service, and you're like, well, what are your margins on that? You know, how much money do you actually make? And they get cagey with you and it's like, I can't do my job. I can't do a good job of, you know, appropriately pricing your advertising if I don't actually know how profitable this is for you. So there's no point in entering into those relationships unless you're willing to, like you say, just kind of lay your cards on the table and you have to trust the people that you're working with.

It's not an alien concept for businesses, is it? Because they have either in-house or outsourced legal teams who know all the ins and outs of the business they have? Um, I guess accountants who know the ins and outs of the business. I guess it's kind of on a par with that. It's along those lines of like, like I say, opening up the books and, and trying to figure out what the business is really, really about.

Yeah.

Because often we need that information to do a good job. And ultimately, in much the same way that you wouldn't expect an accountant to do anything untoward with it, there's no way we're going to do anything except use it to build a better strategy. So there's very little value to being kind of cagey with your agency, I think.

Okay. Um.

So the mindset then the, the mindset is that you recognize the business could be doing better, could be attracting more customers, whatever.

And you know, that you're not necessarily the right person to spearhead.

That, which.

Again, is difficult. It's difficult to come to the conclusion that I can't do this, especially for business owners who, you know, when they've started their businesses, they've quite often done everything. We've all been there where like, you know, you are doing the books, you're sending out the invoices, you're chasing the invoices, then you're doing some of the actual work. And then, you know, I've certainly, you.

Know, not too.

Long ago actually been in here hoovering the office, literally literally doing everything in some, in some cases, obviously we've, you know, we've got to a size now where we have got an accountant who just takes care of stuff for us, etc. but business owners And people in quite large businesses find it hard to let go of things.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you're not prepared to do.

That, if you're.

Gonna.

If you're gonna hire an expert and then tell them how to do the job, that isn't going to work out particularly well.

Either.

Well, that's another really good point, isn't it? Because I think that comes onto the whole sort of trust thing. You know, when you hire an agency, you then have to be happy to trust them to go and make decisions for you, don't you? I guess that's the other. This is starting to sound more like a kind of relationship help podcast, but I like the kind of metaphor slash extended analogy. Um, yeah, I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? Because the other thing that will absolutely kill our productivity is when clients sit over our shoulder and they're like, why have you done that? Is that thing you did yesterday working yet? Can I see this? Can I see that? And you can't have that sort of you cannot micromanage an agency into success. It just doesn't really work like that. So I think going into it with the mindset that you're going to have to oversee things or run things, is also a kind of beginner mistake, I guess.

Um, Yeah. If you if you can't let go and and trust. Now, that doesn't mean blindly trust.

No.

Because the agency, a good agency anyway, will always say, look, you know more about your business than we do and it's going to take us a long time to get to a point where, well, sorry, just backtrack slightly. I like to think that with some of our customers, we could stand up in front of a bunch of people and talk about the business as if we worked for them now. Yeah, we would, you know, like if you think about, um, the journey we've been on with, um, you know, we talk about the specific customers, but the, you know, if you talk about some of our customers who are engineering companies, for example, you know, we've learned a lot.

I can tell you they do.

I can tell you way more about golf course irrigation than I really want to know for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And working with an agency will, you will get to the point where the agency people who you're working with, nor nearly as much about your business as you do, but you are the. Ultimately, you're the subject matter expert, so the you know, the agency will want to listen to you. So there's a difference between saying, make that blue and make that red. You know, that sort of interference is probably going to be counterproductive, but you are going to be expected to bring your subject matter expertise. You're not you're very rarely going to get a situation where you just say, right, we're going to give you five grand a month to market our business. And I just, I just want to see results. I don't want to talk to you. Just go and do it. I mean.

That has to be two.

Way communication. Yeah for sure. And I think, you know, to your point, I think one of the things that we often end up doing in, in relationships with clients is you'll end up in a place where, for example, you can interview the client, get the knowledge you need to write something, put together a campaign or whatever, then take it back to them and have them quickly check over it and they'll say, yes, that's okay. But that's the kind of level of communication you want. You know, you want to be kind of checking each other's work saying like, yeah, this is absolutely fine or no, how about this? How about that? But not sort of directly trying to involve yourself. I guess it's a tricky one to balance. To be fair.

I was.

Listening to an agency, a podcast by another agency owner, a good podcast, the Exposure Ninja guys, and they were talking about how stifling it can be when the client holds everything up. And, you know, we've certainly got some customers, some clients who we know when we send them stuff, they're going to sit on.

It for weeks.

And that is a bit of an issue. And that is, again, back to this. Are you emotionally ready to hand over some responsibility to the agency to talk about your business now? Yeah, by all means. You know, certainly for the first six months, you want to be maybe checking everything they write, everything they're putting out on behalf of your organisation. You want to make sure that it's, it's, it's as good as it can possibly be. And you know, the terminology I use with one of our clients is like, can you just check this and make sure there's no howlers in there? We don't want to make you look bad because it's a very specialist, very specialist service that they provide to, to a very well-heeled, uh, clientele. So they would be embarrassed if we'd said something ridiculous, like, um, you know, about a particular aspect of what they do, which is wildly incorrect.

And I think we all appreciate that, don't we? I mean, you know, most agencies, most people that work in agencies are not super thin skinned. And we appreciate that, you know, sometimes using the wrong word in the wrong place can be enough to lose a potential clients trust or whatever. So yeah, I mean, always feel free to be like, you know, this, this word is wrong, this is bad, do this again, whatever. But it's just like you say, it's just about kind of checking. And you should always be aiming to get to a place where you can trust your agency to just publish stuff to your website without being checked. Long term, that should always be the goal, I think.

Okay.

Um, I was kind of really hoping by encouraging the guys to send us Slack messages while we were recording this podcast, that we'd have like heaps of really interesting points being brought up that we could discuss. So far, all we've had is drivel.

Well.

I was just about to tell you to say as I started typing it. You went and said it.

Okay.

But I mean, I think yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the point is you have to be able to trust somebody. You have to be willing to trust somebody. You have to be willing to lay your cards on the table. You have to be willing to communicate openly. I think the other thing we should probably talk about is what you should be willing to kind of put forward financially, really, isn't it.

Put.

Forward.

Financially? Yeah.

Tiptoeing around.

That. Yeah.

What are you gonna pay? What are you.

Willing to say?

Be ready. Well, I guess it's just be ready to pay an appropriate amount. Right?

You make a good point. And I'm being I'm being silly about it because.

It's just.

Being mean.

As usual. Yeah.

It's okay. What do agencies charge? Typically, agencies that help businesses grow. Digital marketing agencies, inbound marketing agencies, call them what you will. I mean, you're very unlikely to find somebody who's going to help you grow your business for less than two or three thousand quid a month. And that's kind of at the lower end. We see numbers, you know, um, into, into five figures, you see significant investment. So whatever the level of investment is, it's probably going to be more than you thought it was going to be. Um, because we've had conversations with people in quite substantial businesses who were inexperienced when it came to working with agencies and were very surprised at the kind of fees that they were expected to pay in order to get the services of an, of an agency. So you need to be aware of that. We've now just kind of put it out there and, you know, those numbers are pretty much industry standard. I mean, if you can go on to a lot of agency websites and you'll see them with like packages, we were looking at an agency recently, just yesterday and they actually put their package prices on there. The cheapest thing that they did.

Was like was five grand.

It was three thousand six hundred quid a month. And it went up to, I think one of the packages was twelve grand a month. And um, and the thing is, you know, other businesses are paying significant amounts of money to employ agencies to help them. And you think, and we were going to talk in this podcast about whether you should hire an agency or get an in-house team. So once you start talking about spending five, six, seven, eight thousand quid a month, then a lot of people will think, well, I might as well hire my own people. And, you know, maybe I don't want to get deep into that.

But.

Yes, you can. And if you hire a couple of decent people and that might cost you, I don't know, it might cost you five, six thousand quid a month to hire a couple of decent people. They will not have the range of skills that you are almost certainly going.

To need.

In order to execute a growth driven project to help you find more customers. Very unlikely. They're not, you know, unless you find a couple of unicorns as they're often referred to people that can literally do design code. They can write stuff, they can look after servers, they can do all of the.

And these unicorns are going to be happy to just kind of stick around indefinitely for a few thousand pounds a month.

Really? That's right. Yeah. So.

Um, okay. Wandered off a little bit. You're talking about the level of investment. So, you know, the level of monthly investment is along the lines of what I said, you know, two, three, four.

five.

six thousand quid a month, which, you know, again, sounds like a lot. So are you emotionally ready? I mean, I've spoken about this before, but, you know, the first time I ever bought a half decent, nearly new car from a proper garage wasn't a million years ago. And, you know, I committed at the time to spending two or three hundred quid a month on these PCP contract payments. And I remember it like it wasn't actually the amount. It was it was an emotional thing that I did because ultimately it wasn't a huge amount of money, but it kind of felt like it was for a while. It felt very odd to me because I'd always just like gone out and bought cars. I need a car. How much money? A couple of grand. I'll buy that one, you know. Sort of thing. And so for me, making that commitment, uh, felt felt strange. So making a commitment is a, is a, you know, has a huge element of, of, of emotion attached to it. I think, you know, absolutely think that and. You need to think about it as a long term proposition. Again, going back to that podcast I was listening to, they were saying, look, they say to people, look, this is the level of investment we need in order to do the the work that we've established is going to be required to move you from where you are to where you want to be, and you need to be up for like at least twelve months. I mean, at the end of the twelve months, it might be that you need another twelve months, another twelve months or whatever. But you know, if you're not thinking this is a long term exercise, I'm going to have to find this level of investment over this period of time then you're going to get into trouble. Because if you start down the line and you find three or four months in that, you can't fund it, you might as well almost not have spent any of the money. Yeah, you'll almost certainly have wasted it.

I was going to say something, I think relatively controversial that you might kind of, you know, smack me down.

I've got the klaxon. Ready. Go. Go on.

But but I think you also have to be comfortable with losing that money, because I think, you know, one of the things that that people really don't like with marketing is that it isn't always a sure thing, right? You can't I can't guarantee you that if you give me twelve grand, I will get you all of the, the business growth that you hope for. There are no guarantees in this industry. I think you have to be quite grown up about that. You have to kind of recognize that you're not gambling. It's not about that, but it's about the fact that you have to be willing to put that money up and accept that it may all go without driving the results you want. And you have to be all right with that, because as soon as you start doing that thing that I think so many, especially small business people, when they hire their first agency do where they want to cling on to every pound, they want to know that every pound is generating profit. They want to know that every single pound they spend on their Google ads, for example, is delivering an inquiry, or that all the money they're spending on SEO is getting a return. And that doesn't always happen, especially not in the beginning, in the early stages. And I think that kind of discomfort around because they'll put the money up and they'll be saying to themselves, okay, well, I can, I can afford that, but I don't want to see it go to waste. And then, you know, they'll get scared.

Of trying to micromanage it.

Yeah. When it doesn't immediately deliver the return they're expecting. And I think you just have to be happy to say, okay, I trust this agency. I've got the money. The money is theirs. Now they're going to use it to do the best they can to drive growth. And if that, if you're not comfortable with that idea, probably not ready.

When you talk about small business people, you know, how small are we talking?

Well, I don't know in this economic climate anymore. Does anybody have any money? I don't know.

I think about five foot, five foot three.

Yeah. Maybe maybe I think anything anything below five. Five.

And five. Five is a small business person. Okay. Got you. Um, I'm just looking at some of the comments that the guys are firing through on the Slack channel. Um, going back to the, um, the idea of doing it yourself, building your own team. Um, there's always a problem there of managing that team and potentially having people set.

Direction as well. I mean, I think, you know, I can come back to this time and time again, but like at the end of the day, you can have the best designer and the best coder in the world, but if you don't give them a proper strategy or a direction to go down, they're just very good at doing whatever rubbish you're asking them to do. And that is the honest truth, really.

Yeah. And what you're actually paying for with the agency is you're paying, you're paying for a, a fractional chief marketing officer, a fractional designer, a fractional quarter, a fractional writer, a fractional PPC expert, and so on. You're paying one fee and you really are getting that unicorn.

Well, and you know that they're going to work well together because I think that's the other thing you can't possibly know when you're employing people. You know, people talk. I mean, and it does get a little bit kind of waffly, but this whole idea of like team culture and instilling a good culture in your team and, you know, guess what? If you hire an agency, you don't really have to do that because they've already done it. You know, people working in these environments have to have good working relationships. So, you know, you hire us and, you know, we're going to get on with each other, communicate well, all that stuff.

Yeah. That's right. I mean, speaking about waffling, Julie sent me a message, um, which is the long term trust based relationship. You can review and pivot your agency and you can review and pivot and your agency adjusting to get results.

Decode that.

No, I've got no idea what she was talking. I do, I do, I do, I do. It's okay. Yeah. I think what the, the underlying point that Julie's making there is that you must you need to realize that the agencies really are invested in your business. They they really are looking at what they're doing, looking at the results, looking at whether or not it's the right thing to do, whether they need to pivot, whether they need to, you know, review, you know, and constantly speaking to you. I mean, most of our customers, we prefer to meet them at least once a week, usually on Zoom these days. But, you know, we want to speak to them once a week. Talk about what we're doing, why we're doing it, the results that we're seeing as a result of the work as as a yeah, the results we're seeing from the work we're doing. And it's, it's this idea of investment that maybe, again, if you're not, I don't know if it's, it's, it's trust. It's trust. Yeah. It's an emotional thing, isn't it? Trust. Going back to this idea, are you emotionally ready to work with an agency? Good agencies. We're a good agency, and there are plenty of other good agencies. Good agencies really do invest in your business. They really do think about how to get the best value for the money that you're spending, and try to figure out how to help you grow your business. You know, it's, it's not, I don't think everybody really understands it. I think I think big businesses, successful businesses lean on and rely on their agencies and recognize the value that they bring. If you're coming to the idea of working with an agency for the first time and maybe, maybe you you did it previously and it didn't go so well. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I can totally understand the, the, that you might be nervous about that. Well, there's absolutely get that.

Yeah. I mean, there's an element of this around, I guess accountability as well. Isn't there like some good agencies will make themselves accountable. We can't really hide. And just going back to the point of, you know, if a strategy is not working, we have no choice but to say to you, look, this strategy hasn't worked. We want to try something different. And here's what we're going to do. Because ultimately, you know, you can hire an in-house team. And as long as they look busy and look productive, you might not be asking any questions. But as soon as we aren't delivering on the growth that you're paying us for, we do have to answer those difficult questions. And that's not you know, that's not to say that the only reason we'll try hard is because otherwise, you know, you'll know about it and hold us over the coals. But it's just to say that, you know, at the end of the day, one of the things you can expect to get back from a good agency is that accountability and transparency, and you might not necessarily get that from an in-house team, I don't think. Not to the same level.

Uh, no. Um, yeah, I'm just trying to think an in-house team. Well, an agency will always be sharing information, sharing data that you can't hide if you're not getting the results. If you're not getting the traffic, the inquiries, then you know, the key metrics quite often with, with the work we do is are we.

Are people ringing up?

Are we, are you getting more business as a result of the work that we're doing? You can't hide away from that. Um, but an in-house team wouldn't be able to hide from that either. You know, heads would roll, I imagine.

Yeah, I'd imagine so. But I think it's harder, isn't it? I mean, at the end of the day, I don't know. I like to think that we make ourselves more accountable than most people would. But maybe that is just me drinking the agency Kool-Aid. Who knows?

Okay, maybe. Um, it's. Yeah, I mean, as, uh, as Julie said on the Slack channel, it's also trickier if you like getting.

Getting.

Getting, getting rid of a member of staff than it is like saying like the agency's not performing. So you can have a tough conversation and say, actually, you know, we need to part ways. We need to, we need to find somebody else to work with kind of thing. Um, and agencies don't want to fail. They don't want to lose customers because they didn't deliver results. They really do want to, to produce the goods. Um, you know, because I'm talking about, are you emotionally ready to hire an agency? And hopefully there's something of use in the nonsense that we've been spouting, but the probably is a few bits and bobs in there. If you fast forward, um, it's an emotional journey for the agency as well. You know, there's, there's lots of feelings and emotions at play in client agency relationships. It's not like my car needs servicing. Change. The oil right will change the oil. It will cost three hundred quid. It's not transactional. It's more along the lines of because we do love a car analogy, it's more.

Along the lines of.

The the situation where that you've been in recently, where you had a problem with your car and you didn't know what it was. So you're now trusting that garage and the garage is a good garage. They know that you're nervous about how much this thing might cost, and they're rooting for you, and you're hoping they're going to be honest and do a great job for you, and you're happy to pay them a fair price to get a good job done. It's I mean, in life, you know, every big financial decision that we make is sort of like bathed in emotions, isn't it? Of all kinds of all.

Yeah. I mean, the risk of making this too philosophical. I think that's the thing, isn't it?

I think you've already gone down that.

Rabbit hole any I mean, you know, you say with the car, I mean I had the same thing with the roofer the other day. And you know, he came over, he did his best to fix the problem. I said, is the problem definitely fixed? And he said, oh well, if it's not, I don't know what it'll be sort of thing. And you don't have to get very far when you're in business or doing any kind of like long term transaction with somebody before it becomes a kind of emotional investment and you get to know them and suddenly like there is something more personal at play than just kind of their money. So yeah.

Okay. Um, I think there's loads more we could talk about on this, but I'm kind of, I'm feeling too emotional.

I gotta have a cry. Mhm. I don't think I'm allowed to make fun of you for that anymore, am I? That's really appropriate.

Yeah. If you've been affected by any of the subjects discussed in this podcast.

Agency owners were.

Hurt. Five. Okay. Um, clearly, we desperately need people to come on the podcast to talk about some other aspects of digital marketing because we're starting to scrape the barrel. Um, if you'd like to come onto our podcast, uh, Digital Marketing From The Coalface, you can get in touch with us via red evolution dot com or the podcast on website fromthecoalface.com. Uh, in the meantime, we're wishing you emotional and mental good health as you try and decide whether or not to work with an agency. Get to know them. I didn't quite touch on that. But, you know, get to know people. We've talked in the past about a foot in the door projects, do a little piece of work, see how the chemistry is, try and try and work together and then start building on it from there. Um, again, I think one of the previous podcasts, we talked about how not to write an invitation to tender or how not to find, find an agency. And if you, if you turn it into a transactional, we need X, Y, z, give us a price for each of these things. Yeah. You know, if you've got somebody good in house that might work, but generally speaking, it won't, I don't think end well. Um, I mean, I get a real buzz out of talking to some of our customers and, you know, they'll throw things out there and quite often say, you know, but you're the experts, you know, tell us whether this, whether you think this is a good idea. And quite often clients come up with great ideas.

They do.

Yeah. So it's not, it's not, it's not one way traffic. It's not like, hey, you know, we're the experts. We're the ones with the, with the turtlenecks and, uh, you know, and the beards, you, you just leave us alone and let us do our job. It really isn't like that.

You should get a turtleneck.

It's funny. I thought I'd winding the podcast up, and now I've gone into it again. But I'm gonna stop now.

Go on. I was just gonna say that. Really. It all just comes down to kind of go into these things from both sides with an open mind, ready to trust the other person. And, you know, nine times out of ten, it will work.

Yeah, hopefully.

Fingers crossed. And on that note.

You've been listening to Professor Ali.

One day, one day.

Did you ever listen to, uh, Doctor Anthony Clare on the on the on the psychiatrist couch?

I did not.

Did you not?

I don't even. What even is it?

Uh, he was brilliant. Google it. Google it. Everybody. He's no longer with us, sadly. But it used to be fantastic. It was kind of like a podcast before podcasts were a thing. It was. It was so good. Yeah. Anyway, see you later.