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