SEO, Brand Transition, and Financial Accountability in 2024

I've got a great guest on the show today. I've got Kevin Gibbons, who's

the founder of Re:signal. Hi, Kevin, how you doing? Yeah, hi, Jim. Really

good to join you. And yeah, looking forward to this chat. We were talking in

the green room. I said, Kevin, usually I see him at the UK Search

Awards. We're both dressed up in tuxedos. We have a quick beer before the

awards ceremony starts. We have a three minute conversation.

Kevin then goes on to win a bundle of awards and I never see

him again because his whole team's celebrating the awards that they won.

So I just thought it would be useful to have Kevin on as a guest

on the podcast because he's got a really interesting

backstory in terms of how he got into the industry. Kevin, how did

you get into Search? Yeah, and certainly our journeys have overlapped at

different stages and we can talk about that kind of in more detail. But for

me, the real moment would have been 2003.

I worked at a web design agency in Oxfordshire, which is where I'm from, and

I'm pretty sure I got that job because I mentioned in the interview that they

sponsored Oxford United, so called Domino Systems. Pretty much

everyone thought that the shirt sponsor of Oxford at that point in time is Domino's

Pizzas. Because you would. I was the only one that mentioned, oh, okay, I

heard of you. Because of this, I applied for a placement year. So I still

at uni, so it was like the third year of my degree. And then I

went back to uni afterwards and I think they wanted

to justify their sponsorship because no one had mentioned that. So they hired me.

It wasn't for an SEO role, it was actually for a role in web development.

I think I quickly realized which element was hard.

You know, I'm not sure I was that good at it actually. They quickly realized

that as well and. Oh, is it? Yeah,

exactly. I wouldn't know my way around these days, put it that way, but it

was a great learning curve to actually do web development. And that

led into a number of different roles. And at that point in time, the

agency started doing SEO for clients. I wasn't involved in that myself, but I could

see it happening and I was excited by that trend of, okay,

this is where things may be going. I found

it easier than web development. It was certainly a

less mature market. It was brand new. It's like 2003, as everyone, you'll remember

those days, I'm sure that everyone was certainly making it up as they went

along. And it was a great Time to be involved

and just, yeah, kind of understand what's happening and

how to offer that as a service. And I started from

there, really. I built affiliate websites on any subject you could think

of, turned that into Google AdSense beer money. When

I went back to being a student and was just really

quite curious about how I could build my own

websites, do SEO, I started blogging about it.

I did the typical student thing, did a year out in Australia,

and once I got to Australia, I realized

that on a holiday visa, you could only do a job for three months and

then have to leave and go somewhere else, which wasn't. Wasn't that good for trying

to get involved in a professional career. And so I actually

freelanced my way around Australia for a year. And by

building up affiliate websites and earning income off of that, writing a

blog and then generating inquiries

off the back of blogging, I found that was just a good

way to attract attention. And the other tip from that

really is I was quite often the first to

notice things had changed. So I did quite a lot like Google Ads and things

like that at the time. So I would just say, Google have changed X, Y

and Z today. And because I was 12 hours

ahead, maybe a bit more for the US, I was the first quite often

to notice these changes. So I would get picked up by Barry

Schwartz quite often at Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch back

then, and I'd get quite a lot of kind of the coverage as being

an original source of this. That would have been like 2005,

2006 off the back of that.

That led to obviously good backlinks, but certainly like inquiries

from people who were clicking through and seeing that I was an SEO consultant.

And without even trying to be an SEO consultant, that's where

I quickly ended up. You were in Australia, you

freelanced your way around Australia. Did they eventually catch up with you and say, right,

you need to leave, or did you voluntarily cut back? Yeah, it's

always a year. And I loved it. And it's one. I've never been back to

Australia since. And I need to fix that because it's a great country. And I

certainly think that for me, that

was. It was a good push. And I think I realized later

in life when it's like you get more commitments, certainly

financially in terms of what you're doing. For me, I could literally take a year

off, use a small amount of savings, say,

I'm going to live on that and learn what I can, and that's my year.

And if I come back home And I've got no money, I'll get a job.

And that's the luxury of being, I think I was 23 at that point in

time so it was really nice to be able to do that. And

my plan was always to come back and get a job. And the

realization I had when I came back in, it was March

2006, I came back and was that I had a job.

I my SEO consultant. I think this is a bit

of imposter syndrome, but I set up a, an agency

website. Probably more from that perspective of no one's going to hire

me, I don't know what I'm doing, but let's pretend to be an agency. So

I set up a domain name, seoptimize.com I

wanted to get SEO in the domain so that I could start ranking with keywords

and all of that stuff. And yeah, by the time I

got back I realized that okay, I could get a job.

But I wasn't that keen on moving to London at that point in time

and there wasn't much available in Oxfordshire, certainly SDO wise.

And there's an opportune moment where someone who

is running a business locally had just left and exited that company

and decided that they wanted to start their own

search agency. And I was already doing this,

we had a few discussions and then decided, okay, let's launch

that company together. And that's where SC

Optimize really became an agency at that point in time. We then decided, okay, let's

turn this into a limited company. And from there we won

more clients, employed people and built it

upwards. Yeah, because I think, I think the sort of

the mid noughties, the sort of 2000, sort of

five through to eight, nine were probably some of the best years

I think for searching the kind of the sphere

of like what I know, I mean like I think that that was probably the

peak period in terms of growth opportunities, you

know. Again, absolutely, yeah. I think so many people that I know that

ran agencies back then or maybe are still running agencies now, like

again probably like yourself, they were consulting and thought, well, nobody's really going to

want to hire a consultant. Whereas I think now a lot of the podcast guests

I've had on have deliberately stayed as consultants or

advisors other than switching to kind of the agency model. Right. I mean,

I think, you know, when you kind of look at it, I mean, you

know, I think a lot of people, there's this perception of you can't, you know,

you can't sort of hire consultants, you need to hire an Agency.

Right. And I always maintain that people will hire an agency

for one of two things. They're either hiring for expertise or they're hiring for

utility. Right. And I think a lot of people don't, they, they

think they're hiring for expertise, but really what they're looking to

do is just outsource grunt work that they don't want to do themselves. And that's

for me, the complete wrong reason to kind of do that. Right. I mean,

ultimately an agency should bring tons to the table and

equally a consultant can bring the same sort of expertise

to the table that an agency can. They're just doing it on the back of,

you know, an in house team or something like that. So yeah,

absolutely. And you're right, those days I remember walking around the Internet world,

York's Court, just to understand a bit more about what's going on. And

I think that would have been the days of Latitude with say, Richard Gregory, John

Myers and Big Mouth Media Andrew Gwood. I remember very

well neutralized Teddy Cowell and all of those people in that. What I

consider to be Dixon Jones. Almost like Dixon.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and that was great because

I consider myself quite early in terms of the

SEO journey, but I certainly wasn't the first wave. There were

already very established companies at that point in time that

were absolutely flying off in demand. And yeah, like I said, at

that point in time, it's a good time to get involved. Certainly it's before

the 2008 kind of recession and

everything else that was happening and it was still flying and growing at that point.

But yeah, even the 2008 sort of

crash that kind of happened. I mean, even in that sort of

scenario, there were still opportunities. I think, you know, I think

a lot of people see the damage and I think a lot of people will

see opportunity. Right. I mean, I certainly got involved in some stuff

which again, like, I would never get involved in it now, but I got involved

in doing things like payday loans and things like that because, you know, people were

in desperate need of short term cash that they couldn't get

because, you know, they, they, you know, were having problems with paying mortgages and

things like that. So, you know, so there was definitely opportunity there that

presented itself as a result of misfortune that people were experiencing.

Right. And again, I don't, I'm not saying I'm going to, I want to exploit

people's misfortune, but the alternative was they have

some guy turning up at their door in a leather jacket with a baseball bat

to Kneecap them. Right. And it's sort of, you know, you want to sort of

see that as a potential alternative, you know. But I think,

again, I just think that there's sort of been those opportunities if you. If you

kind of look for them. So you kind of always. So you had sort of

se. Optimize you were in partnership with somebody. Again, my. I

think. My understanding is you kind of like the partnership ended up sort of spilling

up, is that right? It is. And it's one of those that. To be

honest, I think we did very well. I wouldn't see this as a negative

story. It was more. We grew the agency from that, like I

say, I think it was 2007 through to

2012. And yeah, we had a

great journey. We went from trying to win small Oxfordshire local businesses

to large Oxfordshire brands through

to national brands. I'm not quite sure about global. Yep,

we probably did, actually, but I certainly remember we did great work

with Audley Travel, based in Oxfordshire Mila, and

that went through to the Deloitte M and G investment. So we had a really

nice portfolio clients, team of 15 or so people

and a very strong team. Great reputation in terms

of blogging and those days, kind of social

media was probably a lot of Twitter kind of back then, but that generated

great leads. I think we grew to, I think it's like 1.2

million. We were listed on Deloitte Fast 50. So

I certainly look back at that time as that was, yep, really exciting

to be involved in. We probably plateaued for the last,

I'd say year to 18 months of facing those

agency growth challenges that I think are quite typical where you get to

a point of we're winning new business, but now we're turning clients and we're

winning quite significantly, sometimes in terms of new business, but it's

replacing what we've lost. And that kind of led to a bit

of a plateau and that we needed to break through. And

I think then I had earnings. Why were you churning clients?

I think it was. Some of it was we ended

up, I think as an Oxfordshire agency, we focused quite a lot on

digital marketing. So we did paid search, we did SEO

analytics, but social media, and certainly coming out the other side of

that, the focus was much more on SEO and a specialism and doing

one thing really well. And certainly once we started to break

through the bigger clients, like all of those I just mentioned, in terms of

brands, I think we did paid search for a couple of them,

but really we were known for SEO and I think that was the big thing

of we were, I don't think we were ever bad at any of those services.

I think we were good at all of them, but we were never great. And

I think actually just really focusing and doubling down on

how do you be great at one thing As a small agency, obviously as

you get a bit more scale, you can do more. But for us, it was

okay. Let's really specialize and be known for SEO and then we can attract the

clients that we want to attract and grow together with them.

Yeah. And also it's a level of maturity of being able to run a business.

We now look at things like, obviously,

finances more closely, client services, project

management. When you're running an agency and you don't

have that level of experience, you just have to make mistakes. I certainly

have. I don't know that's the kind of topic of your podcast, but I feel

like I'm always a good case study on how to make every mistake you can

but still come out the other side. And I know certain from it, people that

are absolutely brilliant at paid search or brilliant

SEO, but are really crap at running business.

Right. And I mean, we're going to, we're going to talk, right? We're going to

talk about Blueglass, which is probably where you and I kind of have our

closest alliance in terms of like, that we've done together in the

past, and we'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, I mean,

I'm just amazed at how many people think that they can kind of do everything

right. So they go, I'm going to do SEO, I'm going to do ppc, I'm

going to do analytics. Just they're trying to use the same people to

do all of these things, rather than understanding and accepting that

there is a significant difference in terms of skill set

required to do SEO than there is to do ppc,

for argument's sake. Right? And so many people go, you're going to do both. And

I just think sometimes it's almost like

in a football, soccer analogy saying you're going to be a

goalkeeper and a striker. Right. And it's a completely different skill set to be both.

Right. You can't really do the two things together. They just don't work

that way. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. And

yeah, I think like you say, it's, how do you apply that? And equally,

from a positioning perspective, I think we, we actually did very well in

se optimize of hiring very bright maths

grads, physics grads from Oxford University. That were

absolute geniuses at paid search. I think when we started to make it work, it

was, okay, let's hire people specifically for those

roles and become more specialists. So, yeah, that was definitely a big learning curve for

us. And it's not that the skill set I think that you

certainly needed back then to be an SEO was very different to

the behaviors and the mindset that you would have for looking at

paid search. And yeah, I think we started to realize there's a big difference

between the types of people we should be hiring for the different channels.

And yeah, let's start to break it out. It's all a bit foggy for me

really. But you moved from Oxford and you had an office in

Paddington, and that's where you and I worked together for

a little while. You had a small team there in an office that was

above the British Rail headquarters. In fact,

talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, so

what happened was in the latter days of

SEOptimise, we set up a. What we probably called

a satellite office. At that point in time. We were going into

London once or twice a week to meet with clients that were starting to be

based in London. So we decided, okay, let's start up a small

office and let's hire a couple of people there. So I think we had three

or four people and set up that office. It's actually linkdex's

old office. So we were a partner of linkdex at that point in

time and we. They were moving out

and they had the cheapest rent in London and

not the nicest office in London, but they were giving it. I

mean, the rent was cheap and I think it was because at the time weren't

they building like the Elizabeth line outside or something? So literally

every day. I can still hear that

some pretty still market 10 years later. And yeah, I know it was like noise

cancelling headphones of trying to block out the Elizabeth line building out

there out the window. So yeah, it's. I think

at that point, if we wanted to be in London, we had to do it

on the cheap. And the train line, if Oxford got into

Paddington was convenient for the. Yeah.

Making that our home. And we were there for a few years actually. And like

I said, I feel that office served as well and it did

outgrow it, which is certainly a good thing. But yeah, I think

just at that point in time, I was in a split between. Yeah,

kind of me moving away from SEOptimise. So for various

different reasons, some business, a lot of it was personal to be honest, it was

that I went through a stage of my life where my dad had sadly died

from cancer. So this would have been in April 2012.

In hindsight, I should have taken time off and

just gone through essentially a grieving process. But

for me, my way of dealing with things was to throw myself

into work. And I decided I wasn't happy with what I was doing. And

again, in hindsight, there's an obvious reason why I wasn't and it wasn't

particularly to do with work. But it's easy to say in hindsight. And I

think for me, I then decided, okay, going to go in a different direction.

And I negotiated a deal with Stuart, who's the business

partner at seoptimise. And we took

the agency and I took the London office. I took the people in

London. So I think it was three or four of us at that point in

time and some clients, and started again

and set up a new brand. And it's quite a messy period.

We had a brand name called Quiro, which I

literally found on a website. I think it's called like Brand Bucket or

something. They sell you a name and a logo because I had no idea what

I was doing. So it's okay. That would. I was racking my brains trying to

think, was that like weird company name? I couldn't, I couldn't remember what it was.

And you just got it, which year? I remember it. It was terrible. I think

I've scrubbed it from my LinkedIn now because it was terrible and it didn't last

very long, but it was. Honestly, Kevin, I need to wear

all these, all these scars. They're all part of your DNA. I don't think you

should try and bear in the kind of like this whole part

of what made is what's made you the person that you are today, right? And

I think in some, if you haven't gone through these challenging

situations, right, and made bad decisions, then you'll never end up kind

of doing what you're doing now, right? I think sometimes, you know, people think

is you always see people posting on social media and stuff and everything is

about how fantastic it is. I mean, I keep watching all these

YouTube videos because, you know, clearly you choose part of my growth strategy for the

podcast, right? And I keep reading all these, you know, watching these videos

and everything that people are saying, I made

$500,000 yesterday, you know, and I'm thinking that is

complete and utter bullshit. There's no way on this planet,

right, these 19 year old kids are making half A million

dollars, right. When they're saying what they're doing, I like the

reality of it. Never in a million years are going to happen, right? But they're.

They're kind of claiming it and people are buying into it. And I'm, again, I

think maybe it's just because I'm an old codger, right, that I'm kind of

more questioning the kind of validity of what's actually being

said, right? But I think, yeah, it's much of, like, my

DNA, right. And what I'm doing now with the podcast and trying to help

promote the kind of the evolution of the industry, because even though

I've been doing it for 25 years, I still think we're in the infancy, right?

And I just think that, you know, there's got. There's got to be a kind

of like a roadmap for the way forward. And I'm trying to help steer

people away from the kind of path that will lead them to, you

know, to a really kind of dark place. I think that, you know, there's so

many places where people think, yeah, I can. I can become an influence. I can

do this, I can do that. Right? And the reality of it is that so

few people are doing it, so few people are actually making the sort of

money that they're claiming to make, right? Because when, like I said,

when you blow holes in the business model, you just go, there is no business

model. You know, you see people that got a million subscribers on YouTube and they're

going, I can't cope with it. The mental health is killing me, right? And you're

thinking, well, if you had. If you had a million subscribers and what have you,

they've got to be making three, four hundred thousand dollars a year. Why. Why

is so miserable if they're making that kind of money? Just doesn't make any sense.

But the problem is, is that it's. They're a little bit caught in the hamster

wheel, right? They've got to continually produce content in order to

sustain the desire of the audience that they built up, right? So they've kind

of gone into it, think all this money. Reality of it is that

they can't sustain what they've got for the length of time

that it's going to need to be sustained for, right?

Yeah, no, I think that's very true. And there's definitely something in terms of

credibility, of just the openness and transparency of this

didn't work. And this was the learning. And again, if there's

a success out of that Great. But it's a balanced

mix of success and failure. It's never just, I'm a

genius. And like I say, your podcast is bad

decisions. I feel. I'm sure a lot of people are like this. Every

decision I've made at a point in time is genius. In

hindsight, there's quite a lot of them. You're an idiot. But

again, I think it's that transparency of being able to reflect on it. It's like

I say, every decision I make, I've made it for a reason. I backed

myself in order to do that. And it doesn't mean it is correct in. In

hindsight. But again, I think you need to show, yeah,

a bit of humility in terms of, okay, what am I going to take from

that? What am I going to learn from that? Rather than hovering, yeah.

Paper it over the cracks and just saying it's amazing. It very rarely is.

But running a proper agency, a proper business, and

growing sensibly the way that you have with the current

business that you've got. Again, all, like, all the awards, and we'll talk about

those a little bit later on, but all the awards that you've won, it must

make you feel like you've done well to go from

where you were probably at that particular point in time, a fairly dark place, to

where you are now. But as you say, with hindsight, yeah, you kind of made

some bad decisions. Right. We can all say, yeah, that's a horrible decision,

like, but it's only with hindsight that you realize just how bad a decision it

was. Right. So, absolutely. And obviously, things like the office in Paddington, I

mean, I used to kind of get. Get on the train, come to the office

in Paddington, kind of arrive there. You know,

you clearly didn't have any meeting rooms, so we'd always kind of go offline, find

a coffee shop to go and meet people. You know, I remember you had

like, the sort of two separate rooms. Like, you go off and be creative,

right. You'd sort of like, take yourself into the other room, be creative, write

blog posts. I think at the time you had a dating site, Right. So you

were kind of the SEO for that. Right.

You know, but again, for me, it was. It was a sort of a fun

environment to be in. You had, again, some really super

enthusiastic people that kind of worked with you at that particular point in

time. I think in the industry, they kind of gone on to do really well.

You had me, what? No receiver. I kind of like, threw myself on my sword

to allow you to kind of bring in Russell McAfee.

But again, I think there's a lot of people have been through this sort of

the Kevin Gibbons kind of like school

of learning how to do how to run a business. Again, for me,

I've always been so amazed at your ability to kind of be

very unassuming but very good at what you do. I think a lot of people

just look at you and think you're laid back, but

clearly nobody's fault. Yeah, no,

exactly. And I think that's it. It's. Yeah. How do you love problem?

Yeah, certainly for me it's very much. I want everyone on my

side in terms of how we're working and then how do we. Yeah, like you

say those days and even today it's, let's get good people

together and let's work hard but enjoy

it while you're doing it. So. So Quattro

morphed into what?

Yeah, so that became Blueglass. And

I'd been going to US conferences since I

think it was 2010 or something like that. So it was like the conferences. You'll

be familiar with the smx advance, the PubCons and actually

remember going to a PubCon. And I. I

always did a blog post afterwards about the top things I've learned and I'd go

back and I'd do a lunch and learn for our team. And we had a

couple of people that came along with me through those events as well, but which

share what I think, what I thought were the learnings. And I remember I came

back from pubcon. It was like the best talks I saw during this conference would

have been from Greg Boser, Chris Winfield,

Lauren Baker and someone else at the time.

But yeah, probably, probably Dave Snyder. And it's like, where's common

theme here? They all work for Blueglass. What's going on there? And this

seems exciting. It seems, I think had a brand beyond certainly

the size of a company. It's very well thought of within

the industry. And then Blueglass

started their own conference. So I went out to la. That was Blueglass in.

Was it called Blueglass X? It was, yeah, that's right, yeah. So I

went out there and that would have been around the same sort of time, like

early 2012. And I got to know

them, got to know Richard Ze, who was CEO and that led to

conversations around we're looking to grow for acquisition, we're looking

to enter Europe. Would you be interested in a

conversation around actually needing a UK part of the agency? And

I know people I've spoken to. Yeah, similar Conversations

and I think probably more through my business

naivety, if you like, at that point in time, I might have been involved in

a business for the six years prior, but I was very much the kind

of person who was looking after

clients, our own marketing of the agency, not necessarily running

the business at that point. And

I went into those conversations optimistically, as I feel like

I quite often normally am. That's my natural way of looking at things.

And they had a plan that I think, again,

it's. A lot of people have said in hindsight this is either going to be

a massive success or a massive failure. They won't settle for anything else

in between. And I think that's right. And it was a massive

failure. I mean, my understanding was it was kind of like a franchise model, wasn't

it? So, like, effectively you'd become Blueglass in the UK

and you had the guys that were going to be sort of Blueglass in sort

of Switzerland and Germany and whatnot, you

know. But it was sort of like a franchise model where you could use the

brand and have access to some of the sort of the social

media profiles and equity kind of in that respect. But, you know,

effectively you were, if you like, contributing

to kind of like buy the franchise for the uk.

Yeah. And I think that's it. I think if you look at the model,

I think there's a lot of that is actually very good, but in

terms of the finances, the operations and

the infrastructure behind it, it wasn't

at the level it needed to be for the level of ambition that they had.

And it was essentially a franchise which in the end

actually saved us because it meant that the company was

returned to myself as a shareholder and

we then were allowed to go back to being independent again, as opposed

to a full acquisition of a company where in

any US liquidation situation they might have ended

up having us tag along with it. So that wasn't actually the case.

So that saved us. We still, as we had a difficult

year explaining to clients and prospects that we're no longer

part of this operation. We're not going to go bust. You can trust us.

In terms of being a company and can't remember the brand it was now,

but I remember there was a pitch that we'd verbally won and we then lost

it almost overnight just because the US company had collapsed.

Yeah. And there was a whole messy time in the

period in between where the US company was

publicly still operating and individually no one was at

the wheel. And that's when obviously we had conversations

about, okay, if they don't want to run it. Maybe we should. And

that didn't go very far. But I remember

my previous CFO at my original agency, Web Diversity,

he'd helped me take me to kind of a trade sale. He'd sort of

ex Barclays bank, right. Was heavily involved

with some serious investors based in Monaco, right. They were quite happily

prepared to put up some money to enable us to buy the business

outright from Blueglass. In some respects it's like it was horrible at

the time, but so, so interesting to go through that experience

of trying to understand the mechanics behind it. The thing that I was

most concerned about is there was a top heavy management

infrastructure where everyone was getting paid a ton of money. Everyone flew first

class, everyone stayed in sort of swanky hotel. So there was a lot of expenditure

in the business that was, was easy to carve

out and say, well, we don't need that. We can manage on a much smaller

management team. Right. And all of the people that were doing the sort

of the, if you like the work on a daily basis were really, really

good and really smart. Right. And I think the thing that bothered me the most

was at the point in time that it all collapsed, all the people who had,

you know, done such great content, all that content just vanished almost

overnight, right. I mean they kind of d and everything that was

ultimately, that was the, the people that worked at Blueglass, that was their,

their sort of billboard for how successful they are at writing content and that,

that was taken away. I mean you can kind of go, maybe go back and

look at it on the Wayback Machine, right? But all that content just vanished. As

much as they said it was a ton of money that needed, it really wasn't

a ton of money. It was just a little bit of money to pay, you

know, this quirky sort of three sort of salaries in a

month thing. And maybe that's right, spent with the

landlord, right. So it wasn't a ton of money that was needed. This consortium

in Monaco were quite happy to pony up a good couple of million dollars

to enable take over the day to day running. We just wanted to have

access to the books to be able to see what it was that was involved.

And we were like, nope, can't have them. Okay, fine,

let's just park it, let's move on. Right. So as you say, you, you were

able to reverse back into quattro and I guess at that point in time you

then. Or did, did you not, did you go back into couture or did you

kind of, you Gave us Blueglass. We actually did, yeah. And like I say, it's

like you just drug at the floor. But as a mutual friend of ours who

was involved it like very late in the journey of a Blueglass bit,

he described this as being, you just bought a Ferrari and you've run out

of petrol and you can't afford the petrol, so you just leave the Ferrari at

the forecourt. And that is how it felt with Blueglass. There's a lot

underneath this as a great business, like you say, the people in particular,

in terms of what was happening, the brand that they'd

established. And yeah, it was a shame to see it go.

And what Reed then decided was,

okay, day one. It's almost like that planting office was like

war room style. How do we communicate this to our

clients and our team to reassure them that all of

this, which was at times that quite. Yeah, I'm trying

to think of the right word, but quite aggressive online in terms

of some of the messaging that was going out. Toxic. Yeah, it's probably the right

word for it. And we had to field a lot

of questions. And in the end,

my decision on this was, okay, I've left SEOptimise in

what was that kind of summer of 2012,

then rebranded to Couturo. We'd then very

quickly, three to six months, become Blueglass. So we'd have three

different brands under my name within the space of 12 months.

And I didn't want to backtrack and I never really like Quaturo as a name

in the first place. And there is some equity as bluegrass.

So let's keep that going. At the back of my mind was like, we can't

keep doing this forever. And I remember.

So I went on a. I'm trying to think what year this was, but I

went on a leading professional services company training course, a

one week at Harvard Business School. And this was

for me almost like a growing up period of, okay, I'm not an

SEO running a business. I'm now a business person

who's running an SEO agency. And kind of like that switch in terms of

my focus and mindset really. And I.

In that group, they set you up with. You're on a. We called it

award. Then it'd be smart. Yeah. What do you call it? Halls,

essentially. It's almost like student style of different people that

I think there's five or six in this group. Cohort, I think is the word

I'm looking for. Right. And it was a lawyer, a very successful

liar, a partner at one of the leading consulting

tax accountant. Again, like very senior people who had

very strong, established careers. And you've got, I think it was like 20

minutes to explain a problem to them and

20 minutes for them to discuss and give you solutions. And I went to

them and I said, okay, this is the problem. This is our brand situation.

And we now have a situation where Blueglass us had

done the same deal with us with another company in Zurich, and

we partnered together publicly. We were Blueglass uk,

Blueglass Zurich. And again, from

the outside, it looked good. From the inside, I

owned 100% of the UK company. Raphael owns

the Zurich company. We get on perfectly well. We'd do ski trips together,

et cetera. But the brand was shared. And it's actually if

you want to continue down this route to a point that you're

building your own brand equity. And. Evan, can I just stop you one minute? I

need to go for a pee in one minute. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Don't worry.

It's the one problem of getting old. You have to go for a pee. I'll

be back. I might do the same while you do that. So you have this

to look forward to when you get older. Kevin.

Yeah, I was going to say it's better than the background noise if you're, like,

peeing into a bar. I was going to say, maybe I should just try and

see if I can get myself a catheter or something like that.

Right, sorry. Anyway, carry

on. Yeah, yeah. So the point was

I did this Harvard course and I used this opportunity to pick

people's brains and just say, okay, this is the company brand.

These are the two company structures. And it's a

unanimous kind of wake up call for me, where everyone was

like, you're mad. You don't own your brand. You have no brand equity that you're

building. You need to move away from this. Seems to come really. And

that was the turning point. And I don't think we did rebrand for

maybe six to 12 months after that, but it was like, okay, actually, they're right.

If we ever want to kind of get acquired or Jewett wants to

get acquired, which they since have, this is going to get really messy.

So we're better off actually having brand equity. And that was

the point where we decided, okay, let's reposition. Not reposition, but

rebrand ourselves. And that's where resignal came in. And,

yeah, like I say, it was. There was certainly a period of keeping the

bluegrass brand more for stability of clients and our team, but we

knew we had to wave goodbye to that at some point. So there were certain

things about that bluegrass brand that was very positive and strong that

I'm sure we certainly wanted to get benefit from. But there was

also parts of that, as you said, it's like very toxic and

people would reach out to us and yeah, everyone must be quite

angry about us in the sense of that actually wasn't us then

that it's something that we wanted to then start to distance ourselves away

from. Yeah. It's funny, I've still got kicking around

somewhere like a Google Drive folder that's absolutely chock a block

full of all the old process documents,

presentations from, as you say, like some of the probably the

smartest SEO people, they've all gone on to do great

things. You know, the kind of Chris W. And Greg Boses and so on, they'd

gone on to do great things sort of subsequent to the Blueglass

closure. Right. But I think some of that, the content that was produced back then,

I look at it now, I tell you what, that stuff still stands true to

this day. I mean, it's still really well put together, really well structured. You

know, proposals were good, the decks were good, you know, the

processes were good. Everything about the great everyone you

mentioned at the beginning there, it was so many great minds all in one

place. And they all threw their hat into the, into the ring, right. I think

everyone that the point in time when Blueglass was born, right.

Everyone was like, there's no way there's going to be that many egos

in a room that's going to survive. Right the way. No,

it's right. As you say, it's like individually, every one of

them, they're brilliant. Collectively, it's like a team of

Cristiano Ronaldo's and it's. You need a routine

or like, you need someone in there that's going to be able to say, okay,

how do we organize this? And I think certainly my big learning is

it's not just about hiring great people and letting them get on with it as

part of that, but you need the right structure and the right mix and blend.

And I think the financial control was the big one in terms

of actually. And just how do you harness leadership? I mean, I

think, you know, I think unfortunately, the kind

of. That everyone was able to kind of go and do whatever they

wanted, right? Where that sort of control element that needs

to be in place operationally, financially, you know, to

enable things to kind of move forward. I used to amaze

me when people would talk about, you know, oh, we're going to go in and

do a client meeting and there'd be like two people on the client side

and 12 to 14 people on the blue glass side.

You're thinking if you added up the kind of hourly rate of pay for each

one of those individuals. Right. There's a huge amount of money

sitting on the phone or sitting in a zoom call. Right. To kind of have

their two minutes of input into kind of what's going on. Right. And I

think, you know, I think when you're running a business, you need to kind of.

I'm not saying you necessarily need to micromanage it at that level, but you need

to be cognizant of the fact that every single person, regardless of whether

they're client facing or not, is a cost to the business. And you've got

to make sure that you're accountable for, you know, that.

That money is accountable. Right. That people are doing things that

are efficiency as well as effective. Right. It's

got to be effective, but it needs to be efficient in the business as well.

So. Absolutely. There's a book I read just last week actually,

and they use an analogy of if you want to drive a race

car, as a good example. The race car, for a very good reason, has two

pedals. It has an accelerator and the brake. And sometimes people forget

about the brake. But you're never going to win if all you do is just

go for the accelerator on every corner. It's an football

team's similar analogy. You need a goalkeeper, you need a defense, and

the business is the same. You need financial control and a bit

of pessimism sometimes, which doesn't come naturally to me

either. But in order to look at, okay, actually, how do we control this?

And it's not just, let's go for it, let's go for it, let's go for

it. There's a lot of really good stuff. There, but proper football

balance, proper football. You know, Erling Haaland

is brilliant for Man City. Mo Salah is brilliant for Liverpool. But

in Egypt and, you know, Norway, not so much. Right.

So, you know, because they support infrastructure in place in terms of

the team that's supporting them to do their job. Right. So everyone in

America, the podcast is two guys talking about it. No idea.

Okay, so you obviously rebranded from Blueglass to resignal. I remember

coming to the kind of launch party that you threw. Oh, yeah, Cross.

Was that Paddington again? I think. I think from. No, it was across

or Kings Cross, the German gymnasium. Yeah. Great venue.

And I remember you kind of giving out Everyone that kind of went there. You

had that sort of bright canary yellow kind of notebook that everyone. And I still

got it in the drawer somewhere. Right. I still use it from time to time.

Yeah. How prolific I am as a note taker. I'm still using the book. I

should have been on like 50th book by now, but I'm just not

sure. Yeah, but yeah, we,

that was something where we brought in a brand consultant at that point in time

I, from my couturo days, I decided, okay, this isn't going to work. This

isn't how my brain works in there. Let's bring in someone experience and kind

of, let's look at what that identity looks like and how do we

shape that into who we are and what we do. I think one, one of

the things I've always liked about the way in which you conducted things

is you accept your limitations, you understand what you're good at, what you're not

good at and the things you're not good at. You've brought people in to help

support that and things like the brand expertise a lot of people might try

and wing. I've always winged it in the past and made a big mistake when

I sold my. Just made a complete ex ear of it. Right.

So you know, it ultimately ended up costing me something like

£80,000 in you know, fees

for finances because I was selling my business to a publicly traded

American company and I needed to have all my books redone

into something that was going to be generally accepted, the accounting

principles with my accountant. Right. Only to have to do it

again with a kind of US based account. So just to be those.

Yeah, yeah. You know, somebody could have. If, if I'd have had advisors in at

the beginning they could have advised me on what to do. Right. I always thought

due diligence was them doing due diligence on my business

when really it's a two way thing. Right. It's also you doing due diligence on

their business. Right. And had I done that in, in, in a better

way, I may never have sold the business to the people I ended up selling

it to and lots of other options at that time. But I just chose what

seemed to be the best option at the time but with hindsight turned out to

be the worst option. But you know, we all live and blame

absolutely with resignal. You know, again that's been sort of going for

a little while. You've kind of evolved and changed lots of.

Again I've always kind of said like you so you are A

SEO agency. E Commerce. SEO agency. What

is an E commerce SEO agency? Well,

I think for us it's understanding who we do our best

work for. And we

kind of traditionally had been very much B2C anyway. So

I think certainly since that kind of like early

blue glass days of 2012, it was very much travel,

retail, finance for our big sectors and what we focused

on, we had great brands. So Expedia was certainly a strong brand

trust in travel, world remit in finance. And what we

found is coming through Covid. The retail

side had really ramped up and the travel side,

obviously for obvious reasons, without planes being in the sky,

et cetera, had faded away. And at that point in time we

then said, okay, we've got really strong case studies in

retail, we've got our pitch. Win rate is stronger in

retail because that's actually where we've got a great track record.

Case study has proved that we can do work for people like them.

And financial services was a small percentage of the business, I

think. I don't think we're 100% e commerce today. I think there's a couple of

clients that might be outside of that, but we very much sell okay in terms

of where we think we should be

placing our bets. E commerce is the right fit for us. And

let's actually get to understand people from an E commerce background.

Let's understand the buying cycles, everything that goes

into this. And again, E commerce is probably quite broad but then starting

to look at how do we use that track record. So Asics is a great

example of they've been a client for coming up to seven years now, which

is certainly part of established relationship for

any agency. And that's something that

again we treat incredibly importantly and we see this

as every kind of new year, as a new challenge of let's

make sure that we're impressing and achieving great results and

but off the back of that comes great case studies,

award entries and the type of stories that then lead

into more people what to work with us. So our

marketing became very much let's focus on our clients

and that will attract more clients that we want to see.

And E Commerce just goes naturally out of that really because it's.

People want to buy that trust that track record in that sector.

So again, as you know, I'm usually a kind of a judge

at the various awards that you guys enter

and I've always kind of been. I'd much rather be on the sort

of giving outside of things. They're on the receiving end of things.

Right. In like I, I've managed to make the PPC

top 100 this year and I always kind of said if I ever appeared on

one of those lists I'd be like, God, I'm kind of doing something wrong. I

don't want to be on the list. I'm just very uncomfortable with it being about

me. I'd much rather being about other people. Right. So for me, you know,

again, I've always, I've always been curious like, so once

you're an award winning agency, like, why do you need to submit

any more awards? Because I don't think it's, it's, I'm speaking out of turn.

You have won more awards for Re:signal than any other

company in the world. I think you published a LinkedIn post where you've

listed a top, top table of how many awards you've won. You've

won more, I think, than any other company.

Yeah. And I think the answer to why do we keep going is

we want to produce award winning work. And for me it's actually, it's not. The

award is a byproduct of that. The way that we've retained Asics

for seven years is by saying, okay, we've got a KPI from

the pitch year one and this is to drive

organic revenue growth. We've then got year two.

Let's keep challenging ourselves and if we can achieve that,

then we've got a very strong award entry at the end of it. But it

comes from the desire to produce high quality work for our

clients and to delight our clients. And if we're doing that, then like I say,

there's a story to tell. And that's become a large focus of our marketing

is actually, let's do what we're here for, let's delight our clients, let's

achieve results and then if we can celebrate success together, that's

fantastic. That leads into, like I say, case

studies, awards, referrals, just general word of mouth

and reputation. And personally I think that's the best way

to do marketing because it's focused on your product. We actually went through a period

of, we culled a lot of our marketing budget and it was

stuff like spotted events for something that I think we decided to take down.

And look, what we said in the end was there's lots of things that we

could do that gets in front of the right target audience. But actually what really

cuts through and what matters is them seeing that we've done

great work for other people. And yeah, like I said, getting those

recommendations and Referrals off the back of doing good work. So yeah,

it's been always like a challenge to our team internally. It's great

for them for their own kind of CVs if you like, in terms of saying,

I've been involved in this piece of work and it's something that again,

they have immense pride in doing. And it's also very nice for clients

as well to celebrate our success. So yeah, it's certainly for

us it's not so much the result at the end of it, it's not

the number of awards that we've won, it's. That's our biggest

way of retaining clients is to produce work against

what we set out to do. So yeah, it just keeps challenging us year on

year. Yeah, that's brilliant. And I always find like for me there's nothing

more satisfying being a judge at any of the

awards that I've done the judging for to see the

genuine kind of delight when people win. Obviously

if somebody's won it means others, other companies have not won, other

entrants were not deemed to be, of course, kind of win. But again, I've

always maintained that, you know, if you've submitted good work, you know, and you

get beaten by somebody else, you know, you should still celebrate the fact that you

made a short list because making a short list is in and of itself is

a, is a major achievement. The standard is pretty high and

all the judges are not foolish enough to give them out just

for the sake of giving them out. Because it's a brand new recognizing like that

the work's got to be good and it's got to be of course quantifiable

and. Yeah, and, and I just think, you know, for me, like I said,

it's testimony to how well resignal have done in

being able to submit an award winning entry. Right. But do it so

frequently for so long, you know, again, I think it's just

testimony to kind of how well in which you, you kind of manage the

relationships with the clients you've got and produce the work that you do.

Yeah. And I think some of it is actually some of our best

workers come in the planning stages of working with clients. So we've

even, we've done this in pitching before where we said this

is what we will achieve within 12 months. So

pretend you're 12 months into the future and this is what we've

produced for you and that might include we've won an award, you're still on stage

collecting this, but then you work backwards in terms of okay how do you make

it happen? Just wanting to achieve a result and get an award at the end

of it, Anywhere near enough, you've got to turn that into a plan. But

then you, by visualizing that success, then you can take this is how we're going

to make it happen. These are some challenges that we might need to overcome. Or

take a pre mortem and then looking.

You've essentially built that strategy which is what you should be doing anyway with your

clients. But for us, it's quite a nice exercise to say

that award entry. And I think this is where sometimes it can go wrong. UK

Search Awards is next week. Submission deadline was what, two months

ago? I think where it can go wrong is people say in September, okay, what

have we done this year that's award winning? And the problem with

that approach is actually you thought about it too late and you might be

able to polish something into an entry. What you should really be doing

is when you start working with that client, think about day

one, how do we turn this into an award entry? What is it that we're

doing? And then actually build it continually through that process.

So it's okay now I think we're off track. This isn't. And again, it's not

about the award, it's about the KPI and retaining and growing with our client. But

if you have that approach, the material is there for you and

it's as much as there's an art in being able to write

an award entry in a way that appeals to a judge and they might

pre score it quite highly, et cetera. If you haven't done the

work and you haven't got the result, then it doesn't matter how good you are

at writing an award entry. So it's, it's, it's got to be a cultural

thing in terms of how you approach working with your clients

to the point that you deserve that award based on the work that

you've done and the results that it's achieved. For anyone that

is thinking of submitting entries, just listen to that bit over and over again to

get the same points that Kevin's just raised there. It's not about the words, it's

about the work that goes into producing the words. The words is just a manifestation

of the work that you've done and breaking it down into the various components that

make up an actual entry. If you don't do that 100%

right. So, so talk, talk to me a little bit about your, your

conference because you had your first one, was it this year? Or was it? I.

I can't remember if you had. It was last year. So we, yeah, we've done

two now. We've done them both in March and what

we wanted to do was to have a real focus on E commerce

SEO. And that was something that we felt. There's some very good

conferences in terms of SEO, there's some very good E commerce

conferences, but bringing the two together, we felt that there was a bit of a

gap in the market in terms of that audience and bringing

a mix of people as speakers and attendees

from an SEO crowd and an E commerce crowd together. And obviously there's

overlap. Some people are e commerce SEOs and

it's very much then looking at how we can have a conversation

around those topics. Um, we took an

approach where we would bring in a keynote speaker that was very

well known to set the tone of the day. So last year we

had Rory Sutherland who was fantastic and it

was a great way to open up and again have a broader opinion on

just kind of that consumer psychology

and looking at different buying behaviors and again in a very

comical, entertaining way. And then a series of speakers

is, yeah, he's fantastic. And then this year we had Holly Tucker who was the

founder of not on High street. And again she was excellent in terms

of incredible story, incredible background, building

a company that you would probably take for granted in today's

day and age. Shopify, CMS platforms and phenomenal. She

was trying to almost create the behind

the scenes model at the same time as building a brand and everything else when

that technology didn't really exist and did incredibly well

after building that up. And again against fierce competition.

If you think of likes of ebay, Amazon for that period of

time, just really differentiating and again, incredible

stories alongside very seasoned SEOs and

just people who been there, done it and not just

what's happened, but predicting the future because we know so much is

changing right now that it's how you can look ahead as well. So yeah,

we've definitely enjoyed running those events where we've committed

to. We'll do this again next year. We're moving it to May rather than March.

And yeah, it's something that again, we're excited to bring people together

for. But I guess in some respects like the conference is

really as you say, it's an opportunity to kind of bring everyone in one place

and learn from people that are doing things in the trenches.

But again, I guess it would be nice if you make a ton of money

from it. But I think as much as anything, it's filling in almost

like a bit of like a blue glass X type event where you bring the

very best people in a particular discipline into. Into one place

to. It does and to be. We lose money.

We've lost money from both events but for the reason that there's other

benefits to that. It's like you say, I feel like there's

certain things we've done we want to be able to give back and help people.

We've had charities we've donated tickets to, for example. We think it's

very good for our team in terms of education and

also giving them a platform for speaking opportunities themselves.

Yeah. And obviously it's a, it's a marketing event for us to

pull together people who are potential clients, referrals, et cetera in

future as well. So it's very much a long game for us but it's certainly

not a business in its own right. If you'd like, from an events

perspective. It's funny, I always remember I cast my mind back to when we

were in the office in Paddington and Hacker who used to work for

you back then, got the opportunity to speak at Brighton

SEO. He had like one of the. Yeah like a seven minute new speaker

slot. He must have done about 70 hours worth of prep

for his seven. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know,

but yeah, I think for me it's, it's a great platform having

a conference like a Brighton SEO to blood brand

new speakers for the first time. People that want to have that. The

impact of being able to say on their CV that their

conference speaker and everything else. But definitely, yeah, I know you've

done speaking at conferences in the past, but do you do much of that now

or is that sort of something that you tend to kind of shy away

from? I've actually done

one, maybe two this year but like all the agency leadership events now, I think

I've now realize I'm not hands on doing the

SEO anymore. So actually there's people in our team

who are much better at that than me and they are speaking at

events. So we've had people speak at Brighton SEO this year we've had people

again speak at our own conference and other events as well. So it's

something that we certainly encourage as an agency. But yeah,

I've focused a bit more on the agency side as opposed to the

SEO conferencing. One of the things I really admire about

what you do is that you invest in the people that work in your

team and sponsor them going away to conferences to be able to

learn from their peer group. It's expensive. It's expensive

to take people out the office, take them away to like a

conference overseas. I mean, I know you've taken members of your team to PubCon in

the past, you know, and again, flights, the hotels, all the,

you know, the per diems, the kind of drinks in the bar, the

food, all that sort of stuff. Time away from the office. Right. But I think

from the point of view of investing in the people that work with you,

it's a massive thing that I think all agency owners should

be doing. They should be kind of carving out money right.

Towards the development of the team that they have. Right. Because, you know, the

better the people have been developed from a personal perspective, the

more, the better they're going to feel about working with you, the more likely is

they're going to be committed. And I think you'll kind of reap the rewards in

terms of the work they do for clients moving forward. I've

definitely got a lot of value myself in terms of that investment and the development

that's come off the back of it. And I certainly encourage it with our team

as much as we possibly can. To the point that I'd argue

not investing is more costly than actually investing. Because you've

got to be like, we know we're in a fast paced industry, you've got to

be able to keep pace. And that does also the marketing side

of your brand, your reputation and just building more of a

presence of showcasing your work and your thought leadership, that

has benefits as well. And I think more and more agencies now are

decentralized so that a lot of people kind of don't work, go into the office

every day. They may not even be an office. I know a lot of agencies

don't even have offices now, right? Yeah, we don't. Yeah. So, you know, although

you have a physical address, that's probably just more for tax purposes than

anything else. Right. But it's sort of, you know, I think, you know,

you need to have the ability to be able to bring people together in one

place. Right. So again, whether it's a Brighton SEO, take all your team down at

Brighton so you can have team dinners, client dinners, whatever you want to do.

Right. But it gives the opportunity for everyone to kind of meet in one place,

you know, with the backdrop of a particular conference that you have. And if you've

got your own conference, then that's a perfect opportunity to kind of get your team

together, know, to support the conference, but also to kind of meet each

other and Spend time together. Yeah,

absolutely. And that, that was a decision we made when we went remote for

obvious reasons in 2020, but then it was okay. Now we've

hired a distributed team. It's not so much a rent saving, it's

actually very use that budget. So investing in teams,

training, running a conference, for example, in terms

of the marketing side and the events and equally being able to visit

our clients and go to them. So we've got some clients based in Europe, for

example, and again, it's all go on a plane and go and see them

rather than. Yeah. Having an office where to be honest, in a lot of

cases they prefer us to go to them anyway. So, yeah, I think it's just

an evolution of let's do what works for our clients and works for

our team. Yeah, I mean, I've made a, made a point of trying to ensure

that, you know, even though most of my clients are based in North America, I

make a point of getting on a plane and flying out to the States

and visiting them on site again. I mean, you know, you have the people

that sort of ultimately sign the checks, but you also have the relationships that you

build up with the people that work in the office. You can kind of go

out and have lunches and meet the families and all that stuff. So, you know,

I think so much of that is an investment

in, you know, the kind of the growth of the agency is as you know,

it is. I remember you telling me a story ages ago actually about how you

lost a pitch in the US and it was because I don't think

you got on a plane and attended. And I think you were saying at that

point in time, it was a turning point of the relative. If you're going to

go for this pitch and it's a decent size, just go all

in and make the effort. Be there. Yeah, I

lost again, just SEO Boz. Right. Because Ran got on a

plane. I mean, Ran was an awful lot closer than I was. But you know,

but even still, he made the client feel special.

Right. In. In order to win the business. Right. And on that basis I'm

like, I'm never going to have that happen to me again. I've always kind of