Simon Penson is an Exited Agency Founder turned Consultant. He founded one of the very first content marketing agencies in 2009, Zazzle Media.

After securing successful growth and merging with Stickyeyes, Simon sold his business for an impressive £37M. Then Scaled was born. It is his latest venture, where he consults other agency owners to build and grow profitable businesses all the way to exit and beyond.

In this episode, Simon gives an honest account of the deal structure that resulted in that impressive valuation. As a journalist at heart, Simon stresses the importance of owning and understanding your audience to talk to them in their language to build that meaningful connection.

Listen to find out how he built and scaled his agency from 1 to 250 team members, how his opinion on culture changed throughout this period and the challenges he faced along the way. He also shares the secret to how his team’s content managed to become the most viewed on Moz.

Simon discusses the shift in content marketing, shares his advice to agency leaders who are interested in selling, his opinions on options pool & team investment and the power of honesty and transparency during those challenging months.

Would Simon do it all again? Find out by listening to this podcast episode!

Topics Covered:

1:40 - Journey into Agency life

6:40 - Championing content marketing as a business

9:01 - Initial acquisition conversations

10:43 - Merging and buying process of his agency

11:47 - Growth of his agency

15:30 - Launch of B2B SaaS fund

20:40 - Most viewed content on MOZ. How the agency achieved that.

25:15 - Maximising cross-channel content strategy

27:45 - Maintaining a collaborative culture during rapid periods of growth

36:00 - The deal that generate the agency sale

44:19 - Advice for agency owners who are thinking about selling

49:30 - Options pool & team investment

51:50 - Honesty and transparency. Testing things along the journey.

53.40 - Would Simon do it all again?

54:20 - Roadmap for Simon

Joshua Grant is the Director of Digital at Absolute Design, a website design agency based in Nottingham. With a team of web developers and designers, they specialise in Magento and Shopify platforms, helping eCommerce businesses scale.

This podcast episode is relevant to you if you have challenges with managing difficult clients & retaining your staff and unsure what tactics will add longevity to your business.

Find out how to build long-term strategic partnerships, improve the productivity amongst your team members and how to secure perfect fit attendees to your events.

It can’t be ignored that this business has been around longer than a lot of Founders in the agency space. There’s heaps of value and credibility to help you with your agency journey in this episode of Agency Intensive.

Topics Covered:

5:46 - Why Absolute Design are pulling away from Magento

9:22 - Niching down and choosing a specialism

12:34 - Recruiting the right people and attracting talent

16:25 - You will lose talent if you don’t offer flexibility

19:01 - Office vs remote working

21:40 - Selecting the right partners

29:01 - Scaling up the team and how to manage the process

30:45 - Building a community with events

34:47 - Getting the right people to your events

38:01 - Measuring productivity across the business

43:58 - Prioritising marketing time and budget

46:50 - Tools that his company can’t live without

51:34 - The biggest mistake he has made at the agency

54:30 - Firing clients!

57:54 - The roadmap over the next 12 months

One of the most respected humans in the eCommerce world, Nathan Lomax, discusses how you can take your agency to its next level of growth.

He’s a man with an obsession, to be the best serving agency for website migration for Shopify brands.

From 400 calls a month to niching down on what Quickfire Digital are best at, Nathan shares the tactics he is using to scale his multi-million pound business.

A team of 29 tenacious humans all on the same mission, to build a community of people that support each other during the turbulent times of business growth.

Find out why Quickfire set out to smash the events market, how they add value to their clients and their positioning journey.

Nathan touches on sponsorship, targeting perfect fit businesses, building a self-sufficient leadership team, how going from £1M to £2M is easier than £0M to £1M, the importance of remembering the opportunity cost of meetings and empowering the team to solve their own problems.

Not only is this episode full of insight on how to scale your business with a humanistic approach, it’s full of honest life talk too. Growing any business doesn’t come without sacrifice. He shares how he manages to juggle a hectic family life with a growing business and his own sanity.

If you are serious about scaling, this is the podcast for you. You will finish this podcast with real insight from somebody who is relentless in his pursuit of growth.

Topics Covered:

00:15 - The story of Quickfire Digital

08:43 - Niching down to a Shopify agency

10:36 - Identify adding value, focus on key differences

14:11 - Find your niche and what you are good at

16:50 - Doing 400 calls a month to build reciprocity

20:50 - Importance of reaching goals through specific numbers

24:46 - Indecisiveness, obligation, and sacrifice in eCommerce

28:46 - Busy days, events, struggle for work-life balance

31:19 - Work dynamics evolve from informal to hierarchical

34:27 - Building new structures, learning as we grow

37:31 - Difficulty following systems, easily distracted by emotions

39:23 - Fear of loss as business identity risk

42:04 - Book recommendation