Growing and Sustaining a Successful Digital Agency: A Veteran's Guide to Agency Success

Hey, hi, everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay, here. And today we have Darren, who is the founder and MD of fellowship. Darren. How is it going?

Hi there, Ranmay. Yeah, very well, thank you. Nice to meet you. And thanks for inviting me on.

Darren, before you move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey, your career, and how you build your agency, and we take it off from there?

Sure. Yeah, we’re happy to do that. So summing up a long journey. So I’ve been in this industry now for well over 30 years. And from a young age, I was always really fascinated by essentially art, design, and music. And that’s my real passion from a young age. And that passion led on to being interested in essentially graphic design. Then when the internet exploded in the mid ’90s, I was passionate about websites, designing websites, and managing teams to build websites. It started many, many years ago, about 30 years ago. But fellowship as an agency took a long time until I made that plunge into creating and starting to build the agency that we have now. Before that, I was very much a freelance graphic and web designer, working with partners and other agencies to build websites. But then the moment came when I decided, let’s build an agency and let’s build a really good in-house team so that we can design and build fantastic websites ourselves with other services. That’s a very short summary of the journey.

Lovely, Dan. It takes immense guts and a lot of decision-making to start your entrepreneurial journey. While you did it, the initial day must have been challenging. Running an agency, starting an agency, and then running it for so long is not a mean task. So throw some light on those initial challenges, getting those first clients to keep those lights on. How were those days, Dan?

Absolutely. I think I was quite fortunate because from the age of 18, I landed a job as a graphic designer running a studio, but there wasn’t a great deal of work at that particular company. I started doing freelance graphic design projects for local businesses, fairly small businesses, which grew fairly quickly. By the age of 20, I left the company that I was working at and became a full-time freelance graphic designer and managed to build up quite a good reputation with some decent clients. I was quite lucky in that respect. In the evenings, by the way, I then dabbled with… Because of my passion for music, I dabbled in the music industry and started to make some records, and music production. I essentially for 10 years had a daytime job as a graphic/web designer, an evening job as a record producer, started to build a studio, and I managed to juggle both by doing essentially 70 or 80 hours every week running both businesses. But I very early on employed one person who was a junior graphic designer, and that helped. I kept it very small with just one employee working from a home office for a long time, for over 10 years.

So if I’m honest with you, it wasn’t particularly challenging back then. I found it quite easy until I landed a few very big clients and then things changed. I was very lucky that I landed a large client called Thomas Cook, the big travel brand. And that changed everything. Within a year, that one client was responsible for about 90 % of my turnover in total.

When did that happen? When did Thomas Cook- Yeah, That was around about the year 2000.

At that time, I only had maybe half a dozen clients. But Thomas Cook was the big one that took up all of my time, and I had to move on from the other clients that I had. For Thomas Cook, I led a lot of their rebrand projects, did a lot of graphic design work, and also helped to design some of their travel websites, which was particularly successful. Then they introduced me to other brands in their portfolio and their marketing team. They pretty much became my sole client for a long time. That began the journey of me deciding shortly afterward, thinking about, should I now create an agency. Should I try and build a company of value and build a team and have an agency rather than carrying on just having a lifestyle business with just me and one employee? So that planted the seed, and made me the future growth.

Right. And talk about growth. I mean, you guys have grown significantly in the last 20 years, right? So what was the challenge in terms of scaling the business? Yes, I understand. You got to in the early days, but then going from one client to five, five to 10. And then again, that is one thing called getting from zero to one and then going from one to 100. How did your one-to-100 look like?

Again, so our growth was very slow and steady to begin with. If I look back, I wish I had been a bit more ambitious and accelerated the growth earlier, but we grew fairly slowly. So we were quite selective about the clients that we took on, and we built a team to only a small size of 5-7 employees, we kept the team fairly small for several years, and we were quite happy. I was quite happy with just managing a fairly small team because as the founder and the MD, you have to wear a lot of hats, don’t you? My challenge was always, I was still designing websites, I was still managing projects, I was responsible for sales, I was responsible for finance. I was still spinning lots of plates and wearing multiple hats. I could fit all of that in and manage a team of, say, seven or eight people. But the real change was when we got to the year 2019, and we had an opportunity to acquire another very good website agency, which consisted of a web designer and three developers. I was very fortunate that they wanted to come and join Fellowship.

Within about a month, all of a sudden, our team grew to about 13 people. We then acquired a nice selection of new clients virtually overnight. They brought about 20 of their clients over to Fellowship. That was just before COVID. The interesting thing was we then moved to bigger premises and we had the whole team in a lovely building. Then in March 2020, COVID hit. Then, you know the rest, we were all locked down. But, during COVID, COVID, it was our busiest period ever because lots of our clients, the e-commerce clients, their stores, their shops, their retail outlets were closed down. We were all in lockdown, and they asked us if we could help to increase the revenue from their e-commerce website. We had to then employ quite a few other people, mainly developers, during COVID, which was very challenging doing remote interviews and building a remote course. But that was a very busy time for us. And we grew during those two years of COVID. We grew from a team of about 11 to about 14. And then we’ve grown steadily now up to a team of 17.

Lovely, lovely. Talking about the team, you have quite a strong team at Fellowship. And then you mentioned about hiring developers, which can be tricky, right? So any tricks up there? How do you foster a culture of innovation and collaboration at Fellowship? And also ensure that the skill sets that are required are also there.

Sure. It’s challenging. I agree with you. So before hiring my developers, I worked with another company that had a team of developers. The owner of that business used to tell me, that it’s really difficult build a team of brilliant developers. It is. Really good skills. He had given me a bit of advanced warning about, my venture into this, be prepared because you need good people, you need to create a good culture, and so on. I think what I’d say is we did it fairly, slowly, and steadily. I made sure that my first lead developer who started with us about 11 years ago now, worked very closely alongside me on interviews, reviewing the skills of a potential developer. Obviously, my only experience in web development was in the early ’90s when I read all the books from industry giants like Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholme, and Eric Mayer, and I learned HTML and CSS. I loved it, but I quickly decided that I couldn’t be a web designer and a web developer and run a business. I took a big step back, obviously, from being a developer myself. I had to rely on a very good lead developer who I employed 11 years ago.

His name’s Alex and he’s still with us today. He’s one of our lead developers today. Alex would work closely with me to make sure that we employed the right developers that we felt were a good fit in terms of culture, but had the necessary skills. But I’m going to be honest, it’s still difficult because you can’t expect every developer to have the same skills and expertise in all areas. What we’ve managed to do is we’ve managed to build a team of seven full-time developers, and some of them have specialized expertise in particular aspects of web development, as you’d expect. So we’ve got some stronger developers maybe on the front-end, some developers that have additional strengths in certain areas of back-end, maybe integrations, and so on. But we’ve managed to build a good team where between the whole development team, we’ve got a really broad range of expertise. And we’ve now got… So within the company now, we’ve got four lead developers and three web developers. But as you say, it’s not been easy. But I think, again, we’ve been quite lucky because all of our developers live within an hour of our office, so they are all local and we’re all fully hybrid now.

So we all come to the office at least two days a week. So that helps to build the culture because you’ve got to see. I think it’s important, personally, to see people face-to-face, to have those face-to-face walks, and discussions, go out for lunch, try and build those relationships between your team, and build the culture.

It has its own thing, meeting people face-to-face. While you and me sitting on the other side of the globe, having this conversation on Zoom, but from a company culture standpoint, I would view it any day. Back for meeting folks face-to-face and having those brainstorming sessions face-to-face, where you can understand what the other person is trying to comprehend there.

Absolutely.

And talking Client relationships, Darren, maintaining long-term client relationships is crucial, especially on an agency side of things, right? Where we start earning revenue after they have stuck with you for a decent amount of time. And talking about that, the retention happens along with the seal, right? If you have solid relationships, the retention is taken care of more or less, right? But yeah, I mean, how do you ensure or what are the strategies you employ to build those strong and long-lasting client relationships?

Sure. It’s a great question. So when we were very small, this was purely done by myself. Luckily, now I’ve got a fellow director, Matt Johnson. He’s our Client Services Director, and we’ve got an Account Manager Joe. We’ve got a Client Services team now. But between the three of us, the key focus for us is to invest the time to understand their business. We like to do that, ideally, face-to-face. We do have some international clients that we’ve still never met. We’ve got a couple of clients in America who we haven’t met face-to-face, but we talk over the Internet as we do today. But for us, if possible, we want to spend the the time getting to know not just the business and their current situation and where they want to be and how we can help them get there, but also understand the person because you’re doing business with people, and we like to build those relationships where we regularly see those people that we work within those marketing teams. We position ourselves as their proactive strategic advisor, particularly in the digital world. We will bring along our subject matter experts in an early stage.

Within early sales meetings, I would be led by myself, but I would introduce them to our subject matter experts. That might be Greg, our web designer. It might be one of our lead developers. We try and ensure that we can offer our expertise to help that business achieve their objectives and get where they want to go in as quick a space of time as possible. Our clients benefit and love that from us. What we don’t get asked to do with most of our clients is to be a reactive order taker. They encourage us to make suggestions, bringing in experience that we have with other clients, and other sectors. They’re very keen for us to work closely with them as an extension of their marketing team and proactively suggest new ideas, and new features that could help their business. That enables us really to build those long-term relationships because most of our clients stay with us for 10 years or more. We’ve got some clients now that are at 15, 16 years or more because they see the value in us being an extension of their team and proactively helping them to grow their business.

So that’s something that we make sure that we invest the time in. And we also like to meet clients and take them out for lunch and talk about their personal, get to know them personally as well, not just business, but talk to them about their holidays and stuff and just build that relationship, which I think is vital.

Yeah, absolutely. When getting to know the human behind the businessman, right? Or the founder, right? So that is also important. So give us, since we’re talking about clients, Darren, what is your What’s your favorite plane story?

Wow. That’s a really good question. I’ve got a couple, and one of them is for it. Yeah, it’s one that I’m happy to share. And this is a long story. This is a 15-year story. This is a large big global company called DP World, based in Dubai, a $10 billion turnover company. I think they’ve got 35,000, 40,000 staff globally. So DP World, owns and manages container ports all around the globe, and they’re a logistics company. And we started working with them about 15 years ago now, and it was a phenomenal journey. It has been an amazing journey because we were a very small agency, and we were invited to pitch to do all of the marketing for a new container port and logistics park that they built in the southeast of England. We ended up… We did some initial work for them to raise awareness about the port that was being developed, but we ended up doing just such a wide range of projects, over half a dozen websites that we designed, some of which we then built, but we did a lot more than that. We helped them implement their brand, we helped to produce their marketing materials.

It was a wonderful client relationship because I got to work with about 30 or 40 people in their business across all departments of the business. We became embedded as their primary marketing agency, working to help grow, not just in their marketing department, but we would help in the HR department with their employment. They started with a handful of staff. They’ve now got over a thousand full-time staff on their site. We were invited to help in a whole range of ways in different departments, which was great. That journey has now reached a point where we don’t do a great deal for them because the container port is a huge success. It’s achieved its objectives. All of the shipping lines now stop at London Gateway. That’s the name of the port. Essentially, our work is done, but we still help them to produce a few ongoing projects as and when required. But that’s one of my favorite examples of a long, really valuable client relationship where we offered a whole range of services and helped a business grow from nothing up to over £100 million turnover business that it is today with over a thousand staff on site.

But if I think about a more relevant, recent one, we’ve got a client right now that we love, and this is a US company, and this is a great story because this is a fintech company called Explore Technologies. They’re a global business They turn over in the region of $700 million or so. And they came to us last year, and they’ve got a portfolio of between 20 and 30 websites. And their websites are on different platforms by different agencies. And they were suffering from a lot of pain points managing such a wide range of websites built by different companies on different platforms. And they found us on Google and they approached us and said, we love the sound of WordPress multisite, and we’re keen to work with you to redesign and rebuild the websites in our portfolio. So we started the first project with 12 websites, which consisted of various brands and targeting different countries. So one of the websites is for Japan, one’s for the USA, one’s for the UK, and one’s for Spain. But they’re a fantastic client, and they’re a really good fit for us in terms of the way they work. They fit in well with our values.

They value us as that digital adviser. And they’ve got their in-house marketing team that we work very closely with. So they had their in-house SEO people that we worked with in that early phase of planning the new websites and the SEO strategy and migration. But that’s a client that we love to work with because it’s very satisfying when a business comes to you where they are suffering from so many pain points. We know that we can help them overcome those pain points and get them to a place where their daily role in marketing can be so much happier more efficient and more productive. We’re still on that journey. I think we’ve built about 15 sites for them so far, and we’re working with them on other projects, other websites, and other brands. It’s rewarding for our team as well as the client. They came to see us recently and we did a workshop together and took them out for lunch. So we managed to have that face-to-face meeting with their team, which was nice. So that’s a great client for us. That’s the client that we’d like to win more of because it’s a really good fit for our expertise and our team.

Finally, Darren, 20 years, 20 plus years in a long time. What is the most important piece of advice you’d want to give to someone starting in the web design and development industry? This one is for our listeners, young listeners out there.

Sure. I mean, the advice I would give, and this is the biggest regret that I have, is to try and read the very best books. There are so many good books out there written by phenomenally smart people. I wish I would have gone on that journey of learning a long time ago. And in the last few years, five years maybe, I’ve read 20 to 30 books a year, not just about our industry, so not just about website, design, UX. I’ve read those books throughout my career. But for anyone thinking of starting an agency now, I would recommend that you a couple of key books that give you the expertise and the knowledge required how to build a team. So give you that advice on leadership. And there’s a couple of books that I’ve read recently, fairly recently, which I love. One is Turn the Ship Around, Which is a fantastic book about leader-leader rather than leader-follower. And then the other one we love is Radical Candor, which is a fantastic book about having honest discussions with employees and being vulnerable and inviting them to critique you and ask what you could do better as a leader.

There are a couple of books that I wish I’d read many years ago. The other one that we’re big fans of here at Fellowship is a book called Traction by Gino Wickman, which we read recently, and then we decided to apply the EOS model to our business. We found that to be very effective. That’s something that I would recommend to anyone looking to start an agency or a business, read those, and find out the best books out there that will help you to build an efficient business and the right people at an early stage. Because I think, looking back, I learned a lot of things the hard way by trying to figure everything out myself. I like to jump into the deep end and learn things myself.

It has its fun, right?

It does.

But in many ways- Falling and then standing up and then moving forward, it has its fun, right?

It does. But I think, looking back with hindsight if I’d read some of these fantastic books many years ago, I think the journey might have been a bit more efficient. It might not have been quite so painful. Who knows? We’re in a good position now. We’ve got a great agency and a great team. It does make me wonder where we could be now if maybe I had just read a bit more at an early age. But that’s the advice I would give. The other crucial one is to surround yourself with the best people you can. You can’t be good at everything. You’re not the best at everything. I tried to, and looking back, I think I would have benefited from employing brilliant people at an earlier stage and essentially delegating. Delegating Delegated more things so that I could focus on the things that I love best and that I’m best at because I’m not great at everything like anyone.

Lovely. Peter, and Dan, thanks so much for those insights. It has been a lovely conversation. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Sure, absolutely. So two ways. Reach out to me directly via LinkedIn. You’ll find our fellowship page, and then you’ll see me there. So feel free to DM me on LinkedIn, or just drop me an email to Darren, and that’s D-A-R-R-R-E-N@fellowship. Agency. So I’m more than happy to respond to people by email. And yeah, thanks to you very much for allowing me to be here today.

Lovely. Cheers, Darren. Thank you so much.

You. You’re welcome.