The situation that you're describing here, where an agency, you know, with account managers kind of employs some freelancers to fill in the gaps in their own workforce and then is very upfront about that with clients is a completely different thing, isn't it? Problem is, when you start to bury it and pretend that that's not the case and pretend that these people are like permanent members of staff.
And so if you're talking to an agency, thinking of engaging with them, you just ask them the question.
Can we assume that if people don't ask that question, they don't really care? Then like, do you think there are people out there who are just like, yeah, please, offshore my work.
They maybe don't care or they just don't know what happens.
Mhm.
They won't care if they're benefiting. Yeah. They would care if they didn't know it was going on. And they were getting charged one hundred and ten quid an hour for a developer's time. And the agency was paying somebody in India fifteen quid an hour and literally pocketing the rest. They would care about that. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And this week we are honored to have joining us. Um, joining me and Alex, um, another dev, one of our devs, Dave Marshall, who's gonna add some value with his immense knowledge and acerbic wit.
I like that you've set him down the other end of the table. So he feels-
It feels like a job interview.
And we have got the dog with us as well, who is being very well behaved. But if a dog walks past outside the window there, he's likely he's likely to go batshit crazy. So bear with us on that one.
Yeah. What if he sees his own reflection?
Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. He's a dog, after all.
Yeah.
Uh, so the subject today is. Is your agency just a bloke in his pants using a low cost economy to do all the work? Now, there's maybe nothing inherently wrong with that. We'll discuss it and explore it. Oh, you're already looking quizzical. Alex. Um, lots of big agencies offshore to get economies. Yeah, I doubt they're actually passing those economies on to their clients. They're probably still charging many pounds per hour, even though they're paying thirty bob and a fried fish to get the actual work done. That's the bit that concerns me more than anything. Fair enough. If you're looking for economies and you're saying your client, look, you know, this is just just grind. We can offshore it. We can do it for much cheapness, then great. But if you're not doing that, then, um, you want your ass kicking. Really? Mhm. So how can we start this? What what what are we trying to say? Is that all that glitters isn't necessarily gold in agency land. And what you get are people who claim to be an agency and might be one or two people who've got the gift of the gab and maybe are capable, maybe are good at what they do, maybe are good at strategy or whatever. And you know, they use the term we when there's usually just one or two of them. If there's two of them, that's fair enough. But quite often when there's like a one man band or a one woman band, they also use the term we. We do this, we do that. Like there's some kind of big agency. Um, and I guess what we'll probably get into talking about is, you know, the, what are the main differences and what to look out for, you know, because our podcast is aimed at marketing managers and business owners. It's not aimed at other agencies. So, um, maybe we'll become the, um, Penn and teller of agency world.
Maybe it's getting a bit like that, isn't it?
Yeah, it is a bit. Yeah. That might work.
I mean, you couldn't be teller though, because you can't keep your mouth shut. I'm assuming I'm assuming I'd be penance, I don't know.
A very early dig there.
It'll stop eventually.
You see, if I keep my mouth shut. The podcast is pretty boring, isn't it? I mean, you know, you're having a pop at me, but actually you rely on me to keep this thing going because you usually run out of steam within the first 30s a common theme in your life? Probably. Okay, so is your agency just a bloke in his pants using a low cost economy? Um, let's talk about what an agency like that might commonly look like.
Well, I mean, I think one of the things that I'll say straight off the bat is that sometimes it can actually be really hard to tell that that's the case. I mean, certainly if you're shopping for agencies online, there is no there is nothing stopping somebody who is just one bloke in his pants presenting himself as an agency, talking about himself as if he's an agency. Um, yeah, I think one of the problems is they're often hiding in plain sight. You can't really see them. It just looks like an agency.
Okay, so if you were if you wanted to work with an agency like that, it's not a problem. But let's assume that you expect the people you're talking to to have the in-house skills that they've got a team of people, um, they might not necessarily all be in like an office in London or an office in Aberdeen or Edinburgh or whatever. They might not be that, but they, they are a cohesive team of people. They are like on the books, they are staff. The company is employing them, you know, paying them, paying their pensions, paying them sick pay, doing all the things that a proper business does with proper employees. They are that if you want that and you recognise that, you know, that comes at a certain price and you don't want the bloke in his pants offshoring, um, how can you explore that?
Well, I mean most agencies about pages will have about us page will have a list of staff and you can, you know, they'll put faces to them, they'll put names to them. And when you go and search for those people on LinkedIn, they are generally, you know, listed as an employee of that company. And I think that is pretty much the only way you can realistically do it nowadays, right? I mean, otherwise, yeah, I mean, lots of agencies. I mean, to be fair, lots of really big agencies don't name every member of staff, but you can only tell if it's a big agency and small agencies generally do. Our website does, for example, we have literally everybody listed on there. You can go to their LinkedIn pages. You can see they're real people. And if you're looking at an agency website.
LinkedIn page, because I think I've been saying we should get our LinkedIn pages linked from our profile page. And I don't think we have. Have we did?
No, I.
Don't think we have.
Yet it's the only really good source of external proof because again, one of the things I've seen done many, many times is somebody, a one man band, will set up an agency website and they'll list all the freelancers they use as employees. And it'll look at first glance, you go to their about page, there'll be twenty people working there and you think, oh yeah, this is a proper agency. And then you'll click through and you know that, you know, all twenty of those people are actually working for four different companies and are just freelancing and whatever. So yeah, I think it is quite hard to kind of dig through the deception really. I think you sort of do have to look for external sources of proof like LinkedIn or, or whatever.
I mean, there is the chance as well that if people create the pages like that, they don't put a LinkedIn link on there. So you really have to go digging to find that information. So for the untrained eye, you know, they'll see a page full of stuff and they'll have all the descriptions and biographies. And I'll say they've been with the company for, worked with the company for however many years. And it's not telling a lie. You know, they maybe have freelanced for the company for like four years, but they're just not on the payroll with them. So it's unless you start doing a bit of Google stalking and you go and dig for them on LinkedIn, you're not going to question that. So it is very difficult to actually tell the difference.
Yeah. Before the pandemic, um, if we were working with or potentially working with a company and they were maybe in London or somewhere else, somewhere that's not on our doorstep, as is often the case with our customers. Um, I would go and see them. Um, I guess that meant that they only had my word for it, if you like that we had a proper team of people who were in-house, etc.. Um, but since the pandemic, since using Zoom and teams, if you really have to and other tools like that have come about, then there's no real reason why. Well, sorry, not, not rephrase that. We often will have a meeting with a potential customer and we'll have several of us involved will bring maybe Dave in or Robin from the dev side, Diana or Rob from the design side. And we'll try and kind of like have those people there, even if they're just almost spectating, just to kind of give people a feel for who we are and who we are, that sort of thing. Because, you know, if we had an opportunity in the past, if we had an opportunity down in London, it's going to cost us like a thousand quid in travel just to go and see them just to actually, I know, I know, we lost a gig. There was a gig in um, uh, what's it called? Near Ipswich. The on where the, where the offshore place is near Ipswich. I can't remember what's it called. I can't remember.
My job is.
Rubbish. Yeah. I can't remember. Just off the top of my head. But, um. You know, when we didn't win the gig, we were, it was, we were, it was down to us and another agency in the end. And he said, well the other agency brought in, you know, a team of their people that we got to meet. And you didn't do that. And that was like, fair enough. Yeah, I got that. But that's good. It's good that that's what they wanted to see. They wanted to see, you know, a bunch of real people. So it's, I think really easy to wheedle out the yeah, the bloke in his pants agencies because all you've got to do is say, well, we'll jump on a Zoom chat. I'd appreciate it if you could bring in one of your devs, one of your designers, one of your strategy people, and they potentially won't be able to. Or if they do, it'll be, you know, it will be easy to see that, wait a minute, these people are working, you know, maybe in the Philippines or in India. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. There's no real as long as there's I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that approach.
There's no reason that that's still not legit because we've got Diana working for us and she's in San Diego.
She's in San Diego.
That's right. People might look at that and go, hang on, that's a bit suss.
But yeah.
That's right. There's a genuine reason for being there.
Husband works for Amazon. He got he got moved to the States. She's American anyway and she's finished up living back there. So you've got the story to back it up. Yeah.
Yeah. We're pretty much in a remote working society now, so it's not impossible for people to be, you know, working abroad, like working for a company, but working from home in a completely different country.
That's yeah, we had a meeting this morning with a new client, and, uh, you and I were here in the office, and Rob, because he's in Newcastle, he was working from home, quite clearly sat on his couch at home for the meeting again, pre-pandemic, that would be like, oh, you know, make it look like you're in the office, you know, kind of thing. But whereas now nobody cares. No. In fact, in fact, the client was working at home as well in what looked like a bit of a bomb site because she's in the middle of doing a load of decorating, decorating, decorating. I was going to say decorating then as if I'm from Nottingham or somewhere Like they say. They don't say yesterday, do they? People from that. But they say yesterday.
Yeah.
Don't they? It's the only defining feature about their accent is this this, this sort of I don't know what you would call it. The accents in the wrong place.
Just emphasise the wrong words.
Yeah. Um so yeah, that, that you're right. That's, that's, that's quite common now. I have no idea what he just said. What did he just say?
Yeah. No, I mean, well.
Because you were pulling the first while he was saying it.
Well you didn't like me saying about the remote working society.
Well, no, it's not that. It's like this is a difficult line to tread. And I may well end up as the the villain of the table for the day. And that's fine. I think there is. It is absolutely fine to outsource your work remotely, but there is a huge difference to outsourcing to a developer that works in Newcastle or Nottingham or San Diego.
Remember to keep talking into the microphone. I know he's over there.
Sorry. I mean, you you created this.
I did this issue in order to make it awkward for you.
I'll just talk up the wall. Um, no, there's a huge difference between that and outsourcing your work to a low cost economy where there is a definite relationship between quality and and and price. If you are on a Zoom chat with somebody who is in the UK and all of their developers are in the Philippines or India or Pakistan or something like that, versus somebody who's sat with a collection of people from all around the world. You can probably say that the person who is outsourcing all of that work to a low cost economy is going to deliver a worse quality of product. It's not the case that we live in a society where you can simply say, okay, well, everybody has remote staff nowadays, so it isn't a red flag that all these people are working in a low cost economy, because that is a deliberate decision. And it does say something about what they're going to deliver.
Are you convinced that there's a correlation between quality and cost, especially when that cost is kept low by using? Well, we've just said earlier that a lot of agencies don't keep the costs low, so they don't even pass on the benefit of using the offshore resource. Are you saying that there's a correlation between cost and quality.
In my eyes? Yeah. And I'm perfectly happy to have that disproved. But I think like you said earlier, there is grunt work that you can outsource reliably to places where the standards are lower and the skills are less developed. And I think that's absolutely fine. I think the finesse work, it has to be done by people who are very well qualified, right at the cutting edge of their profession. And I'm not convinced that you can outsource to cheap developers in any country and get good product back.
We get, on average, would you say ten emails a day? Yeah, and four or five phone calls a week from people who want to be our offshore outsourcing partners? Yeah. All right. Dave.
Yeah. At least, yeah. At least in emails.
And in the global economy that we're always told is a thing clearly is a thing, are we not economists? So why, if that's such a good thing, like there's billions of people out there who will do the work for a lot less than it costs to get it done in the UK. I mean, I think there's all sorts of societal reasons why that is horseshit and it's just a bad, bad idea, full stop. As well as the disingenuous aspect of it, if agencies are not being upfront about that. But, um, uh, I've lost track again. Honestly, I'm just having one of them days.
Yeah, you are with us. Sort of.
I am, and I'm not.
Yeah. I don't really know how to frame this debate. It's not about the countries that they're working from. I think it's really important to point that out.
No, I'm carefully using the phrase low cost economies. And they just are lower cost economies. You know, any one of us could sell up and go and move to Malaysia and buy a mansion and have plenty of money, but it's because their economies are lower than ours in terms of, yeah, cost of living.
It is to do with the environment that you are that you sort of grow up and skill up in. I think. So like the I think a really good analogy is like the Savile Row tailoring thing, right? It's like, you can go to China or you could go to China to a market and buy something that at first glance, looked like a very nicely tailored suit, like you would buy on Savile Row for a tenth of the cost. And people would maybe say, well, how come Savile Row tailors can charge three hundred pounds an hour to sew things when this person in China can do it for ten pounds an hour, and you still get the same quality of product, except everybody sort of deep down knows that it's not actually the same quality of product at all, and that there is a very clear difference between the two things. And I think we're talking the same thing in terms of, you know, dev work as well. It's like it's nothing to do with where these people are located. It's just to do with the fact that they're not, they are out there sort of peddling their work for ten pounds an hour because it's fundamentally not very good work.
Well, we're potentially kind of focusing on the wrong bit here and going for the quality thing. And what I see is the bigger risk where it is the the service thing. So with the quality, you know, a lot of these places you go out there, and they'll build sites on WordPress, and then they'll use a page builder tool element or WP bakery. There's such like, and you can get pretty consistent results with them because a lot of it's drag and drop. There's a lot of templates, their standard templates, you just pick a template, drag and drop the stuff in. You can't go far wrong with it. So you do get a kind of consistent quality there, which could be replicated by a cheap UK agency as well. The problem I see is if in the UK you've just got one person who's liaising, all those freelancers, if that one person goes on holiday, you've then got no one else to contact in that company. You can't contact the freelancers directly, so there's no one else in that company you can contact if you've got a major issue with your website. So you've then got to wait two weeks for this person to come back from holiday before you can actually get anything. And that's where I see the big issue being, it's the service that can be provided by a true agency that's got lots of people involved in it compared to the fake agency, that's kind of one person with multiple freelancers.
You might be right there actually. Because going back to the tailoring analogy, I suppose if you bought a suit in China from a cheap tailor and it fell apart in three weeks, you'd have no recourse. You'd be back home in the UK. There's nothing you can do about it. If it's from a Savile Row shop and I'm sure they do fall apart occasionally, you could take it back and say, I fixed this, I paid you six hundred quid for it or whatever. So yeah, I guess in that respect you're right. It's the fact that there's sort of recourse that you can go back and say your problem, whereas yeah, you can't.
A lot of the things you guys are talking about really comes down to, do you want to feel safe and be safe, or do you want to wing it, get something for a lot less money and, um, take the risk. But that's not necessarily what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the agencies who are not agencies. They're outsourcing it and pretending they're their agencies. They're pretending to be a twenty person, ten person, fifteen person agency or whatever, and they're just outsourcing all the work, you know? So you've got this this situation where I'm asking the question, is it okay if you've got, say, for example, you know, I kind of know a thing or two about this shit, right? So I could say, right, I'm going to walk away from red evolution. I'm going to set up and I can go and talk to people and figure out what they need. And then I'm going to just go away and I'm actually going to maybe fly to India, meet some people, set up a workshop, an office in India, who are going to do all the work so that and I could make a lot of money because I would basically be.
You'd have no wages to.
Pay, no wages to pay. So I can see the attraction. Yeah. Why people do it. And there are some big agencies who do it. I, I know of big agencies both here and in the States who are offshoring now. They would argue, you know, oh, we can't find people, you know, fair enough. You maybe can't find people, you know, in the States to do the work. But that's not that's not the bit, the whole story. They're actually, you know, commoditising what we do. And that's happening to an extent, whether we like it or not. And just looking for the lowest price for that commodity. Yeah. Um, I'm still trying to dig into that and try and understand whether or not we're actually just trying to defend an indefensible, indefensible position, you know, because we're a proper business. We own an office, we've got mortgage to pay, we've got wages to pay, we've got everything that goes along with that. We have to charge what we charge in order to support that, that, um, that organisation that we've created, as do any, as does any other real business, real agency. And yet, you know, we are sometimes competing with these one person, one man, one woman band in the pants offshoring it, outsourcing, and they might even be outsourcing it to people in this country because there's plenty of thirty quid an hour freelancers in this country who can do a half assed job and get away with what they're doing.
Yeah, but you know, that's not the right thing. Here's the thing. These people A wouldn't be pretending that that wasn't the case if it was a defensible thing to do. Like, they wouldn't be saying, oh, you know, I'm, I'm a real agency. They'd be saying I'm a one man band. I'm a consultant and I outsource all my work to India, Pakistan, the UK, whatever. Um, they're not. And there's a reason for that. There's a reason they are pretending to be an agency. And the other thing is, can you honestly say that if you did decide to quit, read Evo today, go and set up a workshop in India and then sell yourself as an agency to people that you would be confident in the quality of what you could deliver?
No, because I've got, um, experience of outsourcing offshoring in the dim and distant past to, uh, well, it was supposedly a company in Poland and that didn't end well or it ended well for them because they got the money and didn't do the work. Um, I'm not sure if in the dim and distant past, we also did try and say, okay, well, let's, let's, as we always do, experiment on ourselves, let's get these guys in India to do this thing. Yeah. Um, and there was one quite amusing one where we'd figured out what the client needed and figured out that it was going to be about ten grand or something like that. And we got, and we, we then provided that scope of work to this organisation in India. And they came back and said, oh, yeah, yeah, that'll be like twenty five grand. It was like, okay, yeah. How does that work? I don't know if you remember that, but it was it was a long time ago, but they actually came back. And then because then they immediately and I said to them, well, I said, I've scoped it out using developers and designers, etc. here in the UK and my budget is like less than half of what you just oh, we must have misunderstood the scope of work and can we look at it again and all this kind of stuff. But to me, it just smacked of like not really knowing. Yeah, I don't know. It was it was a difficult one to understand, but.
I think this is what I mean. Like, I think in agency land, most people have had this experience at some point. They've probably, you know, hand on heart at some point, everybody has tried to offshore something to see what would happen. And it has gone badly. And I think that is why, rightly, a lot of people say the same thing we do, which is that it is a terrible idea. And it is very disingenuous because we know that the quality just isn't there most of the time when you do this, when you offshore it to somebody who has no stake. And I think that's a really important point too. But we'll come back to that in a minute. You know, if you offshore it, it's going to be rubbish. So when people are kind of selling themselves.
Are you making a statement there or do you just make are you just for the purposes of the argument saying that.
Well, yeah.
That's two questions you can't just answer. Yes.
I, I sort of believe that. I think it's, it's, it's an important kind of position to try and defend.
It's not a scientifically defensible position you've taken. It's just a gut feel.
Yeah. And occasionally you'll get it back and it's really good. I'm not saying it's always the case. I'm just saying most of the time the work is not going to be as good as it would be if you used a proper agency. And the fact that people know that and still set up these pretend agencies and offshore the work and promise you the world and then can't deliver it is a real problem.
Yeah, and it's very easy if there's continents between you, for the other, for the people who are doing the work just to go, you know what, just stop replying to those emails. What can they do? They're not going to come and knock on our door.
Yeah, well.
That just goes back to that accountability thing. It's yeah. You know, with a real agency, it's a case of the people are there, they're on the doorstep potentially, and they're in the office. So you contact them, you can speak to any one of them, like the developer that did it. But if it's a company in India, you speak to the agency owner, he tries to get in contact with them. They just go, I did what you asked. Yeah, they're gone. And there's no comeback. There's no qualms. They did the work. They got paid for it. They got paid and they just, you know, block the email and that's it. You never hear from them again.
And yeah, and I might be completely off base here. And you may well tell me I'm an idiot, but I think there's also something to do with like.
I just stop you.
There. You're an idiot. Yes, I did it myself. Carry on. I think you have to ask the question. What makes people do good work, right? In general, everybody here sat around this table is capable of phoning it in. We are. We're capable of being very lazy if we want to be. We never are with clients.
Why were you looking at Dave when you said that?
I can't look at Dave and you know that.
The listeners don't.
Yeah. Um, you, you know, we are all capable of being lazy if we want to be, but we never are with clients because I think to a degree, our reputation is on the line and we know that we live or die based on the quality of what we do. If you take that away and you say, well, somebody else is going to take the blame for bad work, what real motivation do you have to sort of sit there until three a m, desperately kind of trying to figure out a really complicated problem or like racking your brains. There's none of that. If you if you don't really have any stake in the project, you are just going to phone it in. You're going to say, I'm going to do the six hours I quoted, and then I'm going to stop. And that's I don't see how you stop that when you're doing this whole kind of outsourcing, sorry, white labeling thing. I don't see how you ever get people to actually give their best.
Well, this this idea of white labeling is an interesting one because it's not just the approaches we get from overseas companies. There was one came in this morning. It was a company in Birmingham, you know, basically wanting us to outsource work to them.
So they.
Could do. And, you know, one interesting bit of that is like, they're not smart enough to actually create a website that gets found by people. Potential customers deal with those enquiries as they come in. You're not going to have a heart attack.
You know, it's okay.
Just it'll just be annoying because it's quite good so far and I'd hate to have to stop it. Um, you know, they're not smart enough to find their own customers, so they've gone are these guys are smart enough because we've, we've done some research and look, look, they appear in search for all these. So they're, they're getting enquiries. They're getting they're getting people and they're bound to be out the door with work. Or they might, we might be at a certain, hey, you know, we'll do it for this, this amount of money and you'll make way more money. I mean, you know, when I've had these conversations in the past, I'm like, but I really enjoy running an organisation and giving people hopefully enjoyable employment. And, you know, seeing people like Dave. Dave's been red evil now.
thirteen.
Years. Thirteen years. Wow.
Unlucky thirteen.
I know. So there's been like thirteen years. And you know Dave came along post uni. And in that time, you know, I've seen Dave like be part of the team and develop as a developer, develop as a developer, grow as a developer. Uh, I've seen him start his family and buy a house and all, and it's, it's, it's way more than just like, you know, a, like a, like a, a a, a meat grinder, you know, where you just put like meat in one and turn the handle, the mince comes out the other. And it's not like that. It's a whole thing. Yeah. And that's what people are buying when they come to Red devil or any other good, decent agency, they're buying into that bunch of people who genuinely care. But there's a lot of talk in our industry about a lot of the things we do becoming commoditised. And that surely means that it makes more sense just to offshore that to, um, an organisation that will do it for much cheapness.
Well, the same thing. We love a car analogy.
We were looking at some lovely cars early, weren't we? What was that red evolution like? It was Mitsubishi.
Very nice, but also quite expensive.
Gee whiz.
Yeah. Um but yeah, no, you know, we love a car analogy. The exact same thing has happened in the car industry hasn't it? It used to be that cars were made here in factories in Britain by British companies. Don't you be ruining my point. No, I mean, come on. Yeah.
Whatever's going on with Land Rovers.
You're talking to a guy who's owned two Allegros.
Okay, so maybe Britain's not pretend we're German for a second and we're in Germany. Yeah, the point is, I mean, the same thing happens everywhere. When things become commoditised, the quality drops out the floor. I mean, loads of stuff now in the car industry is manufactured overseas, comes here, the parts aren't great. The actual kind of quality control is very poor. Stuff gets sent back to the factory and back to the dealers all the time. You can't. You can't do what you're talking about, which is effectively like scrape all of the the skill. And I know you hate the word passion, but the passion out of something, outsource it, commoditise it, and expect the quality to stay at the same level. It just doesn't happen. I mean, you can look at any number of industries and see that in action when you do what so many agencies are trying to do now, which is cut costs and boost profits at the cost of what made them an agency in the first place, like that is a very slippery slope, and it only goes downhill like nobody in in ten years time is going to be saying, oh yeah, what a fantastic idea to outsource all of our dev work to other countries and not grow any homegrown developers. Like.
Yeah, I mean, another problem is a lot of these low cost developers, you know, they're just getting the job sheet built up, stacked up for them. So the quicker they get it done, the quicker they get paid and the more money they make. So they aren't looking for the quality, they're just churning out as quickly as they can, using the cheapest, quickest, dirtiest, dirtiest methods they can just so they can get quicker and make more money on it to move on to the next job.
So yeah, because it's easy. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dave, but it's easy to create a website that, on the face of it, looks pretty good. Yeah. And then like when you as a developer, say, for example, that, you know, company does that. And it's happened quite a lot recently because we are somewhat to, to a certain extent, we call ourselves a rescue agency because we're quite like in inverted commas, helping people who are in a bit of a bind because they've made some bad decisions with their digital marketing, with their websites, etc.. So when you look under the hood at some of these sites, you know, we don't have to go into too much technical detail or anything. Um, probably because he's not capable of doing that. I would imagine Alex.
Is probably not.
But offshore.
What you see.
Are you, are you quickly texting an Indian developer.
To get the answers? Is it do you see as a developer and a very good developer, do you look at these sites like, you know, the one I'm thinking of that we're working on at the moment that came to us? And is it plain to you that it was thrown together by somebody who didn't really know what they were doing?
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot I mean, the big rescue ones we get in a lot of is like the WordPress sites. And, you know, you can see that they have been quickly thrown together with these page builders and it's just everything's thrown in it, you know, to make it look fancy. So on the face of it, the client looks at the site and there's lots of things moving about and lots of shiny things and stats and that, and they're just blown away by it because it's got all this functionality. But in the back end, it's straining like hell because there's all this bloatware in there. Yeah. So you can see that straight away. It's just, you know, smoke and mirrors thing to yeah, blow the client away, but they don't care in the back end. Yeah. But then there's some that are a bit more technically minded or they're trying to be technically minded and it's Yeah, you get the feeling they just don't actually understand the system they're building. And so for instance, like someone's been told, yeah, can you build a website in Joomla? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can do that. No problem. And then they're given it and they're like, uh, okay, quickly go to Google and finding all these hacks and quick fixes and throwing them all together without really understanding what they're doing. And it works to an extent. But then when it comes to actually being able to do anything on it, it's, yeah, you make one little change and the whole website falls apart. So yeah, you can, you can see the differences there on the ones that people just don't really have a clue what's going on.
Because some people listening to us might think, oh yeah, you know, these guys are, you know, trying to protect their domain. You know, they, you know, they're trying to protect their incredibly high, um, you know, rates and things and associated, we do a.
Colossal amount of money.
It's scary. I mean, I'm actually, I'm gonna have to get the garage extended because I have no more. I've got two more Ferraris on I was gonna say.
Put him in the Bentley or the Royal.
I'm gonna leave the Bentley out there. You know, if there's no wheels on it when I get back on Monday. Well, that's just a good excuse to put some fancier wheels on it, isn't it?
Get the branding updated on it for the company car.
Yeah. That's right. Absolutely. That makes it legit. Um, I think it's hilarious. We have got a client and we won't name them, but they've just spent one hundred and thirty grand on a fancy car. They did that. They can do some fancy video work.
Just to take some videos. Yeah I know. Fantastic.
Fantastic. Um, okay.
So I derailed, you know.
Slight spanner in the works.
Um, I mean, it is also important to say though with like the sites that are badly built, it's not always low cost economy sites, you know, low cost economy and freelancing that's maybe built them wrongly. It could be a proper agency. So just because a site's been badly built doesn't mean it's been offshored it. It could just be that someone just, you know, doesn't quite understand the different. There's so many different cmses out there. It is hard to be an expert in every single one of them. And for some people it's maybe quite hard to turn down work. So if a client comes and says, can you do this? Your first answer is yeah, yeah, yeah. So they know they can Google it.
So not the last podcast that went out, but the one before that, which was called Dave, because I know you religiously listened to them all.
Oh, there's so many of them. It's just slipped my mind.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, it was basically why you shouldn't trust a design company with your website project, because one of our newer clients have come to us and their website was built by a design company. It's awful. It's not doing what they needed to do. Um, it had even been set up so that Google couldn't index it. You know, it's just just a bit of a disaster really. Um, so you're right. It's not just the low cost economies, the offshoring of websites that, uh, has the potential to have, uh, an end product, which is substandard. One thing I was going to say, um, just to kind of throw a spanner in the works was there are no doubt some really good, reputable, reputable organisations in, for example, India who do a fantastic job. They're not that cheap. There may be a bit cheaper than the UK, but they're certainly not cheap cheap. And you know, it must be frustrating for them that they're surrounded by this ecosystem of of wannabe much cheapness type people.
Yeah. I've spoken to an Indian copywriter once who has this problem because on Upwork and Fiverr and all of those places, you can also you have the same problem with content or copywriting that you have with websites, which is that there's a lot of people out there in these kind of offshored economies that are willing to do stuff very cheap. And I remember chatting to him and him saying that like one of the biggest, one of his biggest sort of like hatreds or kind of pain points was that he was from a country where everybody just assumed that the quality was really low. And he's like a very accomplished copywriter, very skilled, very talented. He'd worked really hard, but he couldn't charge the eighty, ninety pounds an hour that he was worth because there was this perception that because he was in India, he would be charging five pounds and doing rubbish work. And that's that must be incredibly irritating. But yeah, you know, there are these people out there. I think we are talking in very broad strokes, aren't we really? It's important to acknowledge that there are very talented, let me say, companies out there in these low cost economies. It's just that as a rule, they're not the people that UK based consultants in inverted commas or agencies are outsourcing to. They're picking the bottom of the barrel people because they're the people that are willing to charge ten pounds an hour or whatever.
Yeah. And they can get the the bigger markup, you know, it's probably a case of they look at it and go, well, if we're going to outsource, might as well do it properly. And yeah, you know, make as much money from it as possible.
So going back to the idea of dodgy Dave's digital dynasty.
Oh, I like that. Yeah. You know.
The agency I've just created because I've left Red evolution.
Do like a thing where you just make it deliberately. Deliberately. Yeah.
So if you go back to Dodgy Dave's digital dynasty and, you know, because I've now left Red evolution, I've set up my own agency and I'm offshoring all the work. If dodgy Dave is making sure and quality checking all that work and making sure that what gets delivered to the client is fantastic, then no problem.
Well, what are you gonna do six months down the line when you want something changing on your website and he's lost touch with that freelancer or that?
Oh, no. No, because I remember Dodgy Dave's digital dynasty. Like a bit of alliteration.
Yeah, I can tell.
Has set up an office in India. So I've got I've got like four or five people in an office in India who've got all the skills I need. I'm offshoring it to them.
Sure. Of course you.
Are. Um, so I mean, no problem.
Well what you're describing, there is still an agency, you know, that's not really one guy in his pants sitting in his bedroom. It's an actual agency. You've set up this agency, you're employing all those people. So that is an agency?
Yeah. I'm only employing them as and when I need them. Can I do that?
I don't know the intricacies of this arrangement. Ah, yeah.
The dodgy Dave's digital dynasty.
Are they there by their own free will?
Are you running a sweatshop?
That sounded like an advert. He sounded like. Are you running a sweatshop? And they're just not producing the goods. And you need them to sweat harder. Come on, Dave, dodgy Dave's digital dynasty digital whips. You know, what sort of websites have you been visiting?
I'm outing myself now.
You are?
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. There are all kinds of problems with this model. It might work. You're taking a massive gamble, though. Anybody that comes to dodgy Dave and chances it is taking a risk, aren't they?
Yeah. And going back to the purpose of this, um, this podcast, we really wanted people to, I guess, figure, you know, give people some tools to wheedle out dodgy devs digital dynasty and make sure that they were working. And maybe it's just as simple as I'd like to meet the designers. I'd like to meet the owner of the company. I'd like to talk to some of your customers. I'd like a face to face meeting.
Well, the other thing I was just thinking about when we were talking about that earlier was that there is very rarely that we don't really have an onboarding process. But when we start talking to potential clients, there is very rarely a time when it is just you emailing them. Like nine times out of ten, somebody else will end up involved in those initial conversations. And I think it is a massive red flag. If when you contact an agency, you are repeatedly only talking to the same person, at some point somebody else is going to get involved. They're going to say, oh, you'll want to talk to Rob about that.
Dave's got something to say.
Is that the case, though? Because there will be a lot of agencies that just have project managers and account leads, account account leads.
Yeah.
So that will be the only point of contact that they have. Um, you know, if the devs got any questions, they will feed it to the account lead, who will then feed it back to.
Agencies that employ account managers. We know my feelings on that.
Yeah. Be careful. Okay. Um, well, I mean, speaking about, um, agencies who employ account managers. I mean, you know, we know for a fact, um, you know, an agency reasonably well who shall remain nameless, who, who use freelancers for some pretty core stuff that they deliver. Um, no, I can't remember whether they're saying to their clients, yeah, yeah, we're outsourcing this to freelancers or whether they're not. And I think they probably are. I mean, they're really decent company. I mean, they're not likely to be pulling the wool, but, um, I think, I think the thing is, it's more common than you think because first of all, finding good devs is really hard, right? So finding good devs is hard. Growing your own devs lucky. Come here a minute. He's having a wee back. He's been very well behaved though. Um finding good people is really hard. Developing your own good people is really hard. You have no idea what I've been through developing. Oh.
But you said sleepless nights. Well, you also said good people and you've, you know, manifestly failed at that.
Yeah. Well there is that. Um, but for example, if you, if you were a um running an agency and your background is more creative than anything else, if you try and employ people that do all the tech work, um, there's a good chance you'll struggle with that. You'll struggle to understand their mindset to manage them.
To what they need to help them.
To answer their question. You kind of will. It'll be quite challenging.
Just to keep them in work, because if it's not the main part of their business, you're then trying to invent work for somebody or you're going to put them on like part time contract and they're not going to stick around for too long.
I think the situation that you're describing here where an agency, you know, with account managers or whatever, um, kind of employs some freelancers to fill in the gaps in their own workforce and then is very upfront about that with clients is a completely different thing, isn't it? I mean, there is there is manifestly no problem with that whatsoever. It's you know, it's no skin off anybody's back to admit, you know, we're not really talented in that field. We know somebody who is. We can pay them X amount of that, you know, per hour. Do you want us to do that for you? That's absolutely fine. The problem is when you start to bury it and pretend that that's not the case and pretend that these people are like permanent members of staff. And that's where it sort of starts to fall apart.
Okay, so you make a good point. So if you're talking to an agency, thinking of engaging with them, you just ask them the question and thinking about it, you maybe back me up. We have been asked that direct question. Do you do the work in-house or do you offshore it? So there are a bunch of people out there who need agencies to help them with with their business growth, etc., who are savvy. They know that agencies are doing this and interestingly, are asking that exact question. And it's all, well, it's not almost, it's like they're asking it and saying, because if you are, we don't want to work with you. They actually want to know that it's a real team of people here in the UK or wherever.
Can we assume that if people don't ask that question, they don't really care? Then like, do you think there are people out there who are just like, yeah, please offshore my work.
They maybe don't care or they just don't know what happens. Well, they were uneducated in the fact that there is companies out there that will do that.
They won't care if they're benefiting. They would care if they didn't know it was going on and they were getting charged one hundred and ten quid an hour for a developer's time, and the agency was paying somebody in India fifteen quid an hour and literally pocketing the rest, they would care about that. So yeah, if you're going to be up front, if you say to them, right, we're thinking of, you know, you know, we've spoken to some agencies, we've narrowed it down. We'd like to work with you. Could you just tell us, do you offshore the work? Yes we do. Will you pass that saving onto us? Yes we will. Great. We're happy with that. And but you'll quality check it. It'll. You know, you're the person whose tie I grab. Not that any of us wear ties. You know, if I've got a problem sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm I'm your, you know, the buck stops with me, to coin a phrase. So because I think that's probably okay.
Is it? Well, yeah, because I think the other thing that goes on there, you know, if an agency is really upfront about the fact that they're offshoring stuff, they probably also have all the processes in place that they need to make sure that what they get back from these offshoring. You know, the places where it's offshored to is actually decent quality, or they know how to fix it if it's not, you know, if they're pretending otherwise or not being upfront about it, they probably don't have those processes in place. They're probably not quality checking stuff. So I guess there again, yeah, there's a, you know, if somebody is upfront about it, chances are it'll be okay. I'd have thought.
Okay. All right. Uh, anything else on this one?
No. I think we've made that as clear as mud.
Well, you could say we've made it as clear as mud or we've. We've talked it to death and added no value at all. I guess the bottom line is it can work and it can save money. Um, don't let agencies pull the wool over your eyes if you suspect that they're offshoring the work and they haven't got the skills in-house and you would rather they did or rather work with an agency, ask them that question, find out what skills they've got and what skills they haven't.
Got, and set your expectations accordingly.
You know, we have we have one subcontractor, uh, who's based, based in Jersey looks after our service and he's on a retainer. Sure. He would be a member of staff, but we couldn't we simply couldn't. You know, he's got his own successful business as well and would never want to be on our staff. But he's been with us since two thousand and six. Yeah. You know, and we'll tell people that, you know, we'll talk about our server guy, our, you know, our geeky guy who helps us out. You know, we're totally up front about that. It's not that agencies have to employ all of the skills they need, because we wouldn't have enough work to keep him busy. Apart from anything else, it would just be a colossal waste of money. So that's fine. And you might have writers on the team who you use on an ad hoc basis. It's not it's it's about the honesty, I think. And I think that's where I was coming from with this, you know, man in his pants, bloke in his pants, running an agency in inverted commas. It's the dishonesty that I'm that I'm kind of concerned about, rightly or wrongly. And maybe I'm just going, wow, wow, wow, it's not fair because they can do it cheaper because we've got mouths to feed and they haven't. Uh, I don't know, I don't know.
But no, I think the important thing is that don't be afraid of asking the questions. If you're thinking about working with an agency, you know, don't think, oh, am I going to be rude by asking, do you offshore the work? Can I meet your team members? You know, a true honest instead of like, yeah, of course.
You know.
one hundred percent want to jump on a call? Do you want to come to your office or whatever? If they start trying to, oh, well, they're kind of busy then and, you know, pick an excuses out. That's when you should be worried.
Yeah. And, and do be afraid if you ask the question and they try to dissemble or trick you as well. Because I think that's the thing, isn't it? Like you're describing a situation where people are very upfront because they know it works and they know that there's a reason for the model. And if somebody turns around and says, yes, we offshore this work for X, Y, and Z reason, that's one thing. But if they try and lie to you and say, oh, no, no, no, this person's in house and you know full well they're not. Or you can see from their LinkedIn profile, they're a freelancer or whatever. There's a reason they're doing that. Mhm.
Mhm. Okay. Hopefully that was of use. If you're a business owner, marketing manager, etc., and you're thinking of, you know, engaging with an agency and trying to figure out, you know, whether they're offshoring the work or doing it in-house, etc.. Uh, if you are in agency land or in any land and you've got a view on this, we'd be delighted to hear from you. You can get in touch with us at red evolution dot com. Just give us a ring, send us an email, fill in a form which is on pretty much every page of our website. I think you can also go fromthecoalface.com, which is where the podcast lives. Did you update the podcast page, the From The Coalface page with the last podcast, like I asked you yesterday? No you didn't. Clearly, by the look on your face. You'll be doing it now though, won't you? Yes, yes. Okay. Thanks for listening. And until next time, have a great weekend. I don't know why I said that because it's actually going to go out on Monday. Probably this. Yeah. Mind you, there'll be a weekend after that as well. Stop talking.