Would You Trust Your Agency With Your Life? Transparency and Trust in B2B Tech Marketing – Episode 93

I totally understand that trust is built over time, but there are things that you can do. Trust your instincts. Have very open and frank conversations. If the agency you're talking to seems a bit guarded and it all seems a bit too good to be true, and they're not saying things like, quick, look, you're in a very competitive niche. Your website's awful. It's not got any current rankings. It's a lot of work needs to be done. I'd be more inclined to speak to and want to trust that agency than the oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Six months from now you'll be, you know, getting it guaranteed.

The thing I would say is like, ask probing questions. I really welcome questions like that. I'm really happy because it means that we like A, they care. And B, it's a chance to show that we are actually kind of doing this good work. And if you ask probing questions, people should be really happy to sit there and geek out. And if they're not, and they're like, oh, well, we don't really share that with clients, then oh, like run away. I know, I know.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. It's been a couple of three weeks, hasn't it? You were you were off sick. I was away in the van.

Um, my car gave up. That was the thing.

Your car gave up again.

Shut up. Buy a Land Rover, kids. It's great. Super reliable.

As long as you like looking at it and not driving it.

Yeah.

It's a little bit of a of a misnomer. I think they are probably quite reliable vehicles, aren't they? It's just you've been a bit unlucky with a few bits and bobs.

Yeah. It's just all electrical issues. But look, look at us. Two minutes in and already talking about cars.

Yeah. Haven't even done an analogy about cars. But it's interesting though actually. No, no, no it is. Because what I wanted to talk about today, um is trust. Um, and I suppose in the car industry that was historically an absolutely massive issue. You know, the term like used car salesmen, is used as a derogatory term to describe somebody that you wouldn't, you know. You know, it's like putting a rabbit in charge of a lettuce. It's just like nobody's going to trust this person. You know, a used car salesman is a euphemism for a, a not ne'er do well, but certainly a non trustworthy person, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. And maybe, you know, there may be still are, you know, people out there who are like that, the, the, um, you know. Yeah. It's an honest car guv, you know.

Yeah. I bought my car from one. Yeah. A little bit.

A little bit. And a friend of ours, uh, who sadly lost her husband last year, needed to change cars and somebody helped to buy this car. And it got, I think it got delivered from somebody from a from a garage down in Glasgow. And it was an absolute pile of shit. Yeah, absolutely. So they're still out there. Um, and that must be infuriating for people who run good, honest second hand car businesses because, you know, um, it's I suppose because it's a big purchase for most people. Um, it's, it's a big purchase and you know, we're, I'm, you know, Leslie, uh, one of our guys asked me, she asked me to help her look for a car.

Um, a bit of a minefield. That isn't it, when people ask you to do that. Yeah, but.

But basically, you know, she was like, you know, I just want to be her main. The main thing was I just need it to be a good car and reliable, a good car. That's what people.

Want, isn't it?

You know, anyway, we found this car, which hopefully might turn out to be the right one. No, no, it's, uh, it's. Well, you know, Cameron's got the up GTI, so it's an up VW up, so it's not a GTI, but it's, um, it's a VW up. Um, and you know, the thing is it's, it's, it's a VW approved car. So it comes with a two year warranty and all that kind of good stuff. So it might tick the boxes. Although they actually phoned me about yesterday. This is really interesting for people to listen to a digital.

Marketing thought we were gonna learn about marketing.

But I think this sets the scene because, you know, when I, when I decided to talk about this, I hadn't, you know, I've literally got one word written down in my notes the word trust.

Which is bad for me because I sort of live off reading and reading.

My notes upside down, a bit like Isa of um, of, uh, still game. She's very good at reading things upside down that people are holding in front of her. Um, that's a reference to still game, which some people will get and some people won't. Um, the right kind of people will get that reference.

So now we've alienated three quarters of the audience.

Well that's right.

Yeah.

You know, the thing is though, and I'm sure I know we've got people, people in the States who listen, I don't know if it's the same over there. It's probably the whole idea of used car salesmen, you know, and in days gone by when cars were pretty awful, once a car was three or four years old, it was knackered. I mean, rusty, mechanically knackered, not like that now, but so, you know, this reputation has stuck in people's minds and they are nervous about buying a car. Now, over the last few weeks we've we've, you know, got some new customers on board, delighted, fantastic customers. But there was a recurring theme, um, during the, you know, the initial discussions and the discovery sessions and that recurring theme was, and it kind of it, it, it carries on a little bit from the last podcast, which is, which was, um, you know, um, is your agency really just a bloke in his pants and a bunch of people working for peanuts in a low cost economy. Um.

It carries on linking them together. It's like we have a strategy.

It really is. Yeah. We haven't. Um, but, you know, it kind of feeds on a bit from that because these, uh, these conversations that we have with people, there's one in particular as, as per, we don't name customers. Um, but, you know, brand new customer, they've come on board. We're delighted to be working with them and we know we can do some great stuff with them. Um, but the, the overriding theme of all the conversations before we started working with them was one of. Oh, can we trust you? Can we trust you? You know, we put them in touch with one of our existing customers, which we're always delighted to do, just kind of make the introduction, step back, let them have a conversation. And shortly after that they said, oh, we've been speaking to so and so. Uh, and that's it. We're on board. We really want to go for this thing. But even then, once we started, you know, I got a message from, from the, uh, the person that owns the business, which was, you know, kind of thinly veiled way of saying, oh, you know, I'm really nervous about this. We've had a bad experience in the past and, oh, this whole digital thing is such a nightmare. I think it's almost certainly the case that web companies, digital companies, digital marketing companies, digital agencies now own the reputation that.

The used car.

Salesman used to have. Possibly we are the new used car salesman. Yeah.

And it is immensely.

SEO is, you know, when it comes to search engine optimisation, that's a biggie that, you know, we they really are. not only used car salesmen, but the really dodgy backstreet used car salesmen.

Yeah, I think yeah, I think I've said to you before, haven't I, about the whole idea of sort of moving away from SEO as a sort of offering just because of that. I think it's the sort of thing that sold as a silver bullet. People do deliberately try and mystify it and make it seem very strange and esoteric and scary. Yeah, yeah. It's not. And yeah, we do have a bad reputation because of it. And it is immensely frustrating because I don't know, you can sit here and say, oh, we do a really good job, we're different. But you still automatically on the back foot. Are you still trying to convince somebody? Whereas in reality, we're just selling a service that works.

And that's I find that one of the most difficult aspects of the work that we do. Yeah. Um, you and I know each other really well. We've worked together now for two years or whatever it is feels like longer.

Ah, there we go. It does actually, but yeah.

Um, we've worked together for a long time. You know, we spend a lot of time talking, doing these podcasts and working together, etc., um, to, uh, to a person, uh, the team here at Red evolution are decent, honest people trying to do a great job for our clients. Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes we get it wrong. Of course we do. You know, we don't do everything perfectly. Nobody does. But we are one hundred percent decent, honest people and being put in a position where you're trying to convey that to somebody is it's demeaning. I find it I find it quite difficult sometimes it's like, you know, it's almost like I have to justify my existence sometimes. That really pisses me off. I understand where it's coming from, and I think I've got the right, uh, language to use to reassure people. I mean, working with us is pretty risk free. You know, we will have done a month's work before you've given us a penny. sort of thing. So if at the end of that.

You can see whether it's.

Been horrific and you don't see any value in it, you can just walk away.

Yeah. We're big fans of things like foot in the door projects for exactly that reason. Aren't we? Like, we do kind of go out of our way to reassure people. But I think you're right. I think it does take an enormous amount of energy. You spend a lot of energy that you could be spending, you know, getting excited about a gig or thinking up of new and innovative things to do, just sort of placating clients.

So how do we short circuit that process of realising that the people you're talking to are trustworthy, decent people who are going to do their absolute best to do a knock out, knock it out the park job for you? How do we do that? I mean, I mentioned, well, I mentioned with that, with that client, I mentioned that I put them in touch. I keep looking at the thing because there's only one one bar left on the battery level in the in the recording device battery. I just thought I'd sell close to the wind because this is garbage anyway. So if the battery runs out, it doesn't matter, does it? How how do we. One of the things, one of the things I said was, look, I'll put you in touch with their customer or customers so you can have conversations not involving us. Just like, you know, speak to the customer. Are you happy to speak to this potential customer? Yes, I'm happy to speak to them. Put them in touch. Great. That I think that's a good way of doing it. There are some people who probably would say, no. Yeah, you've probably got you've probably got certain customers, a.

Bag of customers that like you and a bag.

And actually your mates pretending to be customers. I get it, but I guess what I'm trying to say is like, we need to get to that point where you realise that that person, the agency is, is one hundred percent in your corner and, and trying to do a fantastic job for you. I think you need to, you need to achieve that more than anything else. I mean, by all means, try and figure out their creative capability, their technical capability, etc. but you've got to find people that you like and trust in order to really work effectively in this, in this space, probably in most spaces.

Well, I think that's absolutely key to it, isn't it? Because where we do have clients who sort of never fully trust us or decide not to fully trust us. It is very hard to deliver the best possible work for them. Like it's going to have a really detrimental effect on the overall impact of your digital marketing retainer or gig or strategy or whatever. If you don't learn to trust people because we can't really do our best work. If you're sort of holding your cards close to your chest, you know, not telling us about essential things that are happening in the business, not being fully transparent about things like leads and enquiries and that sort of thing. Like it just, it's just a barrier to the work we need to do. So yeah, I agree with you as to whether or not there is an answer to this question. I don't know, because I guess like my first thought is like the way we position ourselves and being really up front about that, like saying to people, you know, because, because I think I was saying to you earlier in the week, wasn't I, when we were sort of having a related discussion that I think in some ways this lack of trust is something that a lot of bigger. You can't just get up and walk away. That's cheating. Um, some of the, um, bigger gigs are always gonna come with that because people naturally outgrow the kind of starter SEO agencies and they start to look at what they're doing and think, oh, this isn't really good value for money. This isn't helping me grow my business. So I think to a degree, you know, we're always going to get this with, with sophisticated clients who've sort of been through the ringer a couple of times, who have been doing digital marketing for a while, because I think that's just a natural part of the process. But whether or not it's then a case of like, we should be positioning ourselves to talk about that and acknowledge the fact that we know people have, you know, have had a bad experience in the past, or whether that sort of puts us on the defensive, I don't know, really.

I think we do need to acknowledge it. I think, um, I think again, just like if we go back to our car salesman, there are, there are people who are still, you know, dodgy in that space and probably there are people who will point them out to you and say, yeah, you know, be careful if you're buying cars off them. They've they've had issues in the past and they tend to buy super high mileage X Rental cars and then sort of tighten them up and make them look like something they're not. Well, yeah, I suppose those days I would like to think those days have long gone, but maybe not, I don't.

Know, I doubt.

It. Um, but, you know, going back to the key, the key idea for this, this little chat is, is around trust. Do you think if you, if something doesn't feel right, trust that instinct and walk away.

Yeah. One hundred percent. Well, I think because I think with us, I feel like with our industry, and maybe it's because I'm in the industry, but I think it's really easy to tell when an agency's trying it on and when they're just sort of.

Give me some examples.

Well, it's just.

Gonna put you right on the spot.

They're the super slick, shiny, like we have this unique approach to digital marketing. Like we've cracked the SEO code or like, you know, in three simple steps, special.

Insight into Google or something like that.

Bullshit. And anybody selling that stuff is lying. Yeah. And I think the other thing is it's really obvious when agencies are trying to paper over the cracks and be like, we've worked with some great clients, including and then there's like three names or do you know what I mean? Like they can't give examples of stuff they've done.

Or did you say examples?

Examples.

Why did you say that? It's not even your accent. Examples. Sorry.

Again. Examples.

That's better. Carry on.

Well, they can't give you results from campaigns, that sort of thing. I think sometimes it's really easy to see through a lot of the bullshit, but I think that might just be because I'm really close to it. Um, yeah. People pretending that what they do is really sophisticated. People pretending that it's black magic.

One of the things I hear a lot is that the we started working with an agency. They were great at first, and then we found we could never get in touch with them. Yeah, we got a call centre or they didn't return calls, didn't reply to emails. That whole kind of weird thing. We've banged on about this in in our podcasts in the past. Um, we insist we insist on a weekly meeting. We will tolerate bi weekly meetings. Yep. And we do that so that we can build trust so that we can be transparent with the client. So the client always knows what we're doing, why we're doing it, what's happening as a result of the work that we're doing, that whole thing. And I think if because we get asked that question, you know, how do you do reporting? And when we and when we say, well, first of all, we want to meet every week and discuss the work that we're doing. And people are, you know, almost without fail, totally surprised. Yeah. Not everybody's doing this. In fact, probably hardly anybody's doing this now. You know, you're going to get some agency agencies are going to say, oh yeah, but if we have a meeting every week, you know, that's, that's four hours a month that we can't do work for you. It's like, that's the cost.

Of.

Doing business. That's just rubbish. You know, a fifteen minute catch up to go through stuff that's going on and to and to say, by the way, we're waiting for you to give us X, Y, and Z. And that's holding this up. And, and just for the client to ask questions and really kind of, you know, get an appreciation for the team and the people that we're working with and what those people are trying to achieve.

Yeah, I would almost go so far as to say that if, you know, whoever you're working with isn't encouraging you to ask questions, isn't encouraging you to sort of take a sort of laser. Look at what they're doing. Then they are up to something because really, there's no harm in being transparent. There's no you know what I mean? We don't lose anything for sitting there and saying, this is exactly what we've done this week. This is how well it's working. This is what we think we're going to do next week. Like, you know, it's just not a not a difficult thing to do unless you're hiding something. And I think that's like, yeah, in terms of like immediate red flags, that's, that's a big one, isn't it? I think people in our industry try to bamboozle with reports. I think a graph that shows you something is very rarely useful without any context. And I think if anybody's sending you a big packet of graphs, it is only because they're trying to disguise the fact they're not doing very much real work. Um, and, you know, there'll be people who are very annoyed by that statement, but I do just think fundamentally it's sort of meaningless really, isn't it?

I don't think, um, the digital industry, be it SEO, paid search, web development, I don't think that industry, our industry is alone in hiding behind.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I get from my, you know, piss poor pension I get, I get a report and it's and it's a, it's a nicely produced document full of charts and graphs and everything else. Yeah. You know, in twenty twenty two, um, I can't remember how I put a good few thousand quid into my pension. And by the end of twenty twenty two, it was worth less than the start of twenty twenty two. Excellent. Well, I mean, you know, money well spent. I know. Absolute complete waste of time for me. I mean, my my biggest, one of my biggest regrets is not not taking that stuff seriously when I was younger. But hey ho. Um, one of the things that I think builds trust, but not initially when, when you get asked the question is companies. Um, again, going back to this most recent, uh, client, and we've had a run of getting some great clients on board over the last couple of months, all.

Had the same sort.

Of.

Experience.

But you know, they're going to say, right, so you want two thousand a month, you want three thousand a month. What exactly are you going to do? Tell me now exactly what you're going to do. And you know, if you say that to an agency and they tell you exactly what they're going to do. I'd say don't trust them. Yeah. Because we cannot possibly know what we need to do to help a business achieve its goals until we get to know the business. That's why we we start with a discovery session. So, you know, a discovery session. But that's only the start of getting to know the business, which is why we want to meet you every week. It's why we want to be planning maybe initially, probably no more than a month or so in advance so that you can say, right, you know, we've got some quick wins here. We can we can tighten up your PPC campaign.

Have a better idea.

Create a decent landing page so you get better conversions. You know, we're going to there's some quick wins that's so you can be very specific about that. But in the bigger picture, until you understand the business more, you know, you're really going to struggle. And just one more thing. I haven't actually got one more thing. I just wanted to make you wait because I know you're dying to say something. Well, I haven't finished. Ah. Go on, go on. Oh, no. Actually. Oh. Go on.

You finished? All done. Yeah. Good. Yeah. No, I think you might be really onto something there because, like, when you initially said it, I was like, oh, but I don't know. You can have like a process and a strategy and an approach, but you're absolutely right. You can't know what you're going to need to, you can have a general approach or a general process. But as soon as you say to a client, yeah, we're going to deliver three blog posts a month and two backlinks, and that's nonsense because.

You don't buy that particular client. How many backlinks will you build for that money? And how many blog posts will you write for that money? And the other the other lot charged us a thousand quid a month. And for that they created one and a half blog posts. Like what? The actual one and a half blog post?

Exactly. You're not buying something off a shelf, are you? And there's nothing to say that writing X amount of blog posts per week will work. And to be honest with you, we don't really know what's going to work until we've actually dug in. And like most of the time, it starts with like just doing an enormous amount of research into the market, into the way that your audience shops and to understand, properly understand what content is needed there is back and forth. I mean, we had with a different client that we onboarded at the beginning of this year. I had a meeting with them this week where we went through the content strategy. And by the end of the conversation, the content strategy that I was proposing was completely different. And by the end of this week, now that they've gone in with their PR company and added some more stuff, it looks like you wouldn't even recognise the document because it's a living document. It changes based on what they actually need, and nobody knows that. So if nobody's, like you say, if nobody's willing to sit down and do that with you and say, well, we don't know what we're going to deliver yet, let's find out, then they are probably at it.

You made a good point. And I just want to reiterate, um, that we do have a process. We do know what we're going to be doing. As in we've got, we've got a process that we go through.

Do we know.

The output of that process is what we're going to do.

one hundred percent?

So first of all, you know where to play, how to win basic strategy, and then the tactics, how we're going to actually set about doing that.

And that's another really good point because I think people who start with tactics first, that's always like an immediate red flag, isn't it? Oh, you'll need some SEO and you'll need some PPC and you'll need some social media. It's like, how do you know that you even haven't even dug down and worked out how people buy this stuff? So yeah.

Yeah. Tactics first can feel good if you're buying digital services because it's like last week I was in a bad place. Nothing was happening. I was, I was freaking out because I keep hearing about blogging and pay per click and SEO and we weren't doing any of that now like I'm doing, I'm doing two hundred quid's worth of SEO. I'm doing four hundred Quid's worth of blogging. Great. I'm doing, I'm doing something.

six social media posts.

A week without the guiding policies, without understanding, you know why that's happening. It's just complete waste of time.

It's interesting, isn't it? I wouldn't try and articulate something. You'd probably laugh at me or tell me I'm an idiot, but it it's the clues.

You need me to tell you. You're an idiot.

I already know these things. Um, the clues in the name, isn't it? Trust. It actually requires something of you. If it was easy and at the beginning of your engagement, you were immediately getting all the things you needed to feel safe and reassured. And you didn't have to work to trust then. Guess what? That's a red flag. Because ultimately, this does require some buy in, some risk from you, and it is going to feel uncomfortable, I think, in those initial months where you're like, but I don't know how many blog posts I'm getting. I'm paying two thousand pounds and I'm not guaranteed to get these outputs that I think I need. And that can sometimes feel really kind of uncertain and strange. But ultimately that is what real professionals are gonna do. Because anybody who says to you, pay me two thousand pounds, you get X, Y, and Z, you don't have to try and trust them. And that is because they're selling you something that fundamentally you don't necessarily need.

Yeah. That's right. Um, something just something that you said in, in, in that meaningless ramble, there was, was something about we put ourselves into our work. Now, I think people probably understand in the creative industries, um, that and that somebody who produces something um graphical might be a painting, might be a design for a website, whatever The. They sweat over it and they put something of themselves into.

It sounds a bit sad to say. I sweat over spreadsheets, isn't it? Yeah.

But I think it's the same I do, I think I think it's the same for, um, for anything that we do at the agency and, and businesses who are in other lines of business as well. I'm not saying that solicitors and accountants and other professions don't put, you know, body and soul into the work that they're doing and become invested in it. Um, but we very much become invested in the work we do. We become very much invested into the clients that we work with. You know, we've got a bell in the office. And when, you know, when one of our clients gets a really good looking lead, the bell gets rung. Caron started doing that. And I mean, yesterday, like the number of times I was working and I got this. Oh, that's, that's another lead for XYZ, you know, and it's a really good one because and we're discussing it and.

We give a shit.

We're all lifted and boosted by that because this is the work that we do, turning into something very real for the customers that we're doing it for. Yeah. Um, and I wonder if, you know, if somebody's looking down the barrel of two, three, four, five grand a month of a retainer, that at that point, all they're thinking about is the money. Go back to cars. If I decided to buy myself a really nice car on a PCP deal and it was going to be six hundred, seven hundred quid a month for something really tasty. Um, or maybe not. These days cars are more expensive and they seem rare.

Peugeot three hundred six for that.

You know, for the first couple of months I'm just going to be seeing that seven hundred quid a month going out. Yeah. But very quickly I'm going to get behind the wheel of that car and think yeah, well this is why. Look at it. It's fantastic. I love it and I really enjoy driving it. And it makes me happy. And and then I start like we did like you. You bought a house. Was it last year or the year before? And probably initially you were looking at the mortgage payments and now they go out of your account. You don't really think about it. You've just got this lovely house around you, which I know you put a lot of time and effort into improving and.

It still looks shit. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, everyone's in the same situation mostly anyway with houses, apart from people who've got brand new ones or they've finished the refurb work they're doing. Um, you know, but we, we see the thing and, and, and we've seen that transformation in clients haven't we. We've seen clients obsess over what am I getting for my money? What am I getting for my money? And then maybe two or three months later, we're just talking about what we're doing for the business and we're doing this. Oh yeah, we saw this. This is happening. That's happened. They just stop thinking.

About you end up in a place where people don't even ask, don't you? I mean, we've, we've got clients where, you know, you send them an invoice and it literally just gets paid without, you know, nobody questions it. Nobody cares because they know that what they're buying is, you know, working. And, and that's exactly it. Yeah. You just have to get to the point where and trust that you're going to get to the point where, you know, that happens. Really? Yeah.

You know, we've got one of our values and our mission, vision, vision values. It's all it's on our website, on our About Us page. I think, you know, fearlessly pursue our client's best interests. You know, this came up this week and I'm, you know, for sanity's sake, I'm not going to go into the detail, but this came up this week where we had an opportunity to do something that absolutely was not in the client's best interest.

Yeah. And you have to.

And we got, you know, people tried to browbeat us into doing it and we were like, no, we're not doing it. It's just that is not in the client's best interest. That is not fearlessly pursuing our client's best interests. And we're not doing it. Yeah, we'll do it right. Or we or we won't bother doing it at all.

And it's worth pointing out as well, that.

Isn't just, you know, sorry, those mission vision values things they're not we're not paying lip service. They're really short. Our mission vision values, they're really succinct and we live by them. We absolutely do.

But I think we have to I mean, this isn't empty virtue. And it's not, you know, you know, with the best will in the world, I think we're all.

Where did you steal that from? You didn't come up with that. You didn't.

Right.

Was it Oscar Wilde? Who was it?

I have no idea.

You studied English. You've got a degree in English.

These things go in and then.

Anyway, carry.

On. Anyway, what I was trying to say was that they're not just empty virtues in the sense that we're not just, like, sitting here and saying, oh, we're paragons with the white knights of the SEO industry. We're great people. We live by them because we have to, because ultimately the future success of our business, you know, there's a our industry has an enormous reputational problem. and the only people who go the distance, the only people who can keep doing good work are the people who earn a reputation for doing that. And you know, the second that somebody starts saying, oh, well, we'll just, you know, we'll just take the money off the client and do it anyway, you know?

Yeah.

Who cares? Which is exactly.

What's happening there.

Yeah. Who cares if it's not in their best interest? Like you will eventually come a cropper doing that kind of thing. Like somebody will eventually twig to the fact that you are not sort of living by your mission values or whatever they are.

Yeah, I kind of have this, you know, it's maybe a bit silly, but my you know, I say if I can't stand in a room of peers, tell them what we did and why we did it and justify it and feel comfortable that we did the right thing, excuse me. And defend. If I get asked awkward questions, then I'd be uncomfortable.

Yeah. There are times over the last two years where you've turned work down, and I've been a bit like, hmm, I don't know if I'd have turned that gig down. And the thing that happened this week, and actually having these conversations with these clients just sort of brought into real clarity for me why we do that. It's, you know, it's because you cannot ever get into situations where, like you say, you have to stand up in front of people and try and defend yourself. And you are trying to defend something that you know is wrong. There's just no point that is the grown up thing to do. But I think it is really hard to get there. And I think unfortunately, in our industry, an awful lot of people don't actually have that sort of personal kind of growth. They just think, oh, well, everyone's at it, so why shouldn't I be, you know, just take the money or it'll go to another agency. And I just think that's the yeah, that's how we've ended up in this mess really, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's part of the reason that we haven't grown as rapidly as some agencies. We've been around for twenty years now and twenty years in June, I think when I.

Yeah. And there's not.

A flag in the ground and said, right, we are now at the time, Scott Webb, when we came, became red evolution in two thousand and six. Um, you know, we, we, you know, as an agency, I don't mind saying it. We should be double or three times the turnover. We are, we should maybe we should be.

But like you say, what you have to sacrifice to get there. Yeah.

You know, I mean, there is a you know, it is about business at the end of the day, but I think it's, um, I certainly feel comfortable, um, with what we do. You know, what we do, you know, who we do it for, the results that we get and everything else. And I'm, you know, I, and that to me means a lot. That means I sleep at night, you know, speaking about that or sleeping at night. I mean, I, I, I had a really, really, really nice curry for my tea last night, got it.

From.

one of.

Your.

At home. If you go Google actor at home base down in Birmingham, they they do well. He's a Michelin star chef and um they will deliver you a box of um, you know, ten. Fantastic.

Um, it's only one o'clock. You can't make me this hungry.

Curries with naan breads and all the rest of it in the freezer. You can have a fantastic Indian meal whenever you want. Um, I had one last night. When I do sometimes get a bit of indigestion off, uh, spicy food. So I woke up at, um, I don't know, half past two this morning, went and got a rennies. I thought, well, I'm just going to sit here for a minute and just, just kind of contemplate. And I was thinking about work, and I was thinking about a very specific aspect of work, you know, not necessarily fretting and worrying about it, but certainly thinking about it. And this, this idea and Julie's mentioned this in previous podcasts as well. You know, we do, we are invested to that level. Clients never see, you know, really, really good agencies, not just us. Really good agencies are invested in the work they're doing for the clients and the clients never see. I'd welcome any of our clients to come and plonk themselves at one of our desks for a week and sit in our office and be part of the team and see how we work.

Maybe, you know, my desks a bit messy, but.

Yeah, well, Dave's is as well, thanks to your little, uh. You had the day off yesterday, but popped in with Vivienne, who is as cute as I.

Proceeded to empty orange juice.

Poured orange juice and sticky, fruity hands all over Dave Marshall's desk because he kind of frowned at me this morning and said what was going on on my desk when I wasn't in yesterday. So I explained, toddlers? Yeah, toddlers, toddlers were going on on you. Well, toddler toddler, um, that was a, that was really lovely as well. Did she enjoy the playback when you did.

Yeah, she loved it. We had a funny little meltdown afterwards.

Oh, really? Because she didn't want to leave.

Well, she made a friend, and then she wanted to go home with the friend. And I was like, you can't, you can't. You have to come home with me. So she lay down and screamed for a bit.

Excellent. I was, I nearly offered, but I thought maybe, maybe not quite yet. I was gonna take her up and show the fire engine.

She would love that.

Oh. Would she? Yeah. Because I thought, oh, she probably wouldn't. She'd be, like, so.

Obsessed with fire engines and ambulances.

Well, next time she comes, I'll take her to the fire station and show the fire engine. She can sit in the driver's seat. Yeah, probably do a better job than me. So, um, where have we got to with this whole trust thing? I mean, ultimately, you know, you can tell somebody that you're trustworthy, that you can be trusted, that we will do good work for you.

I think that's almost.

Anybody.

That's pretty suspicious in and of itself, to be honest.

No, it really is, mate. Yeah. It's one previous owner. It's. Yeah. Yeah, I know it should have done about seventy thousand miles, but it's only done twenty. It's genuine. It's all genuine.

It's all real, mate. Don't worry, don't worry. Don't look in there. Yeah, it always reminds me of one of my my year six teacher first introduction. She stood up in front of the entire class and wrote on the board, I am fair, she wasn't. She was a complete bitch. Yeah, yeah. It's always the way.

Well, my favorite again, boring because I've said this before, people who tell you they're perfectionists.

Yeah.

Never are.

Never.

Never are. So yeah, this idea of saying, look, you can trust us. I totally understand that trust is built over time, but there are things that you can do. Trust your instincts have very open and frank conversations. If the company, if the agency you're talking to seems a bit guarded and it all seems a bit too good to be true, and they're not saying things like, right, okay, quick, look, you're in a very competitive niche. Your website's awful. It's not got any current rankings. It's not going to that thing that isn't going to improve any time soon. There's a lot of work needs to be do needs to be done. You know, I'd be more inclined to speak to and want to trust that agency than the oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Six months from now you'll, you'll be, you'll be, you know, killing it guaranteed. And you know, it's um.

Yeah, the other thing I would say is like probe, even if you don't really have any interest in how the sausage is made, ask probing questions. I mean, one of the clients that we were just talking about before asked me in a call recently, they were like, so what does like, how do you actually optimise a page? Like, what is that? Because I've always been really confused by it. And like, I really welcome questions like that. I'm really happy because it means that we like A, they care and B, like it's a chance to show that we are actually kind of doing this good work. And if you ask probing questions, people should be really happy to sit there and geek out and go into way too much detail and tell you things that you don't really care about. And if they're not and they're like, oh, well, we don't really share that with clients, then oh, like run away. I know.

I know, because, you know, there's nothing that we do that we.

Google all of it.

You can Google all of it. That's right. You know, there's nothing that we do which which we would claim is some sort of black art and a and a special insight that only we've got and a special relationship with Google or Bing that only we've got, you know, that that sort of I don't think many people are coming away with horseshit like that these days.

I don't know, I think it's more approach based now. It's not. It's more like, oh, we have this unique approach to ranking pages and we don't want to share what it is. And it's like, f*ck off. Yeah, yeah, we're allowed one swear. I think I've sworn a few times, but.

Yeah, I haven't, I haven't noticed you swearing much. That's fine.

Well I hope Apple never listen to these and revoke our clean rating.

Yeah. Do we really care. Um okay. I think we've covered covered that off. Um a lot of this a lot of this stuff that we talk about, we, we, we talk about it because we, we are on the receiving end. We are an agency who have many, many times, including in the last seven days picked up the pieces. We have been a companies rescue agency. I'm almost tempted to call Red evolution a rescue agency. You're in a slightly dodgy situation, not of your own making. You're maybe not entirely blameless. You maybe thought that that agency paying quoted you ninety nine quid a month really could build you a new website and do amazing things for ninety nine quid a month. In which case more.

Isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the new customers we've taken on board has said, you know, they were quite open with us. I mean, they've come in at what I would describe as a kind of lowest monthly retainer for the kind of work that we're going to be doing for them. And it's actually double what they were paying the other company, although by their own admission, the other company haven't delivered what they what they were expecting.

So you get what you pay for. You do get what you pay for.

I do, I do understand how people are really confused about what. Because if you don't really understand what somebody.

Does, somebody says, how can you possibly. Yeah.

How can you possibly know what it should cost?

It's interesting though, isn't it? Because we were getting um my wife, um, she has a mini, she bought a brand new mini. Um and we were getting it serviced recently and one dealership was quoting a five hundred quid and the other one was quoting a hundred. Wow. And it was like, okay, well, that's a five fold difference. What's going on there? A service is a service, surely. And it's like in the end, we just went for the more expensive one because when we actually sat down and said, well, why is it five hundred pounds? They were happy to sit down and explain it. But there again, you know, you do get these like massive disparities in price and you think, well, how on earth.

Do industry for.

Sure, yeah. How can it cost them one hundred pounds and them five hundred pounds? But it is because what they're actually doing will be far more involved. I mean, ultimately you are paying for somebody's time and energy and effort.

So that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. As usual, if you've enjoyed the podcast, want to come on the podcast, um, or you want to go and rate us on one of the platforms, I don't care which, um, that'd be nice. Uh, you can get in touch with us at red evolution dot com. Um, feel free. We'd love to discuss maybe having you on the show. In the meantime, big plans for the weekend. This will actually go out on Monday or Tuesday, but we're recording it on Friday. What are you what are you up to this weekend? I'm either playing golf or watching golf because it's the Masters weekend.

Oh, is it excellent? Uh, gardening, probably. Unless it rains. In which case.

I think the forecast is not bad. Good. Yeah, good. Enjoy your weekend. Yeah, well. You too.