SO The Agency – #AgencyLife

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Verbatim text

Lee:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is an Agency Life episode coming to you every Wednesday and Friday, where we interview an agency owner from around the world, asking them the same questions because we’re all different, but we’re all the same. So let’s listen and learn from each other. This podcast is brought to you by the agency trailblazer. Community Is agency life stressing you out? Then? It is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the Agency Reset roadmap, that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track. We also have lots of noble, straight to the point, easy to consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners, and we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency Trailblazer Comm. Welcome to another episode of Hashtag Agency Life. And on today’s show, we have the young, the handsome Mr. Pete of the Everitt.

Lee:
How are You?

Pete Everitt:
You are very, very kind. And it is a while since I’ve heard your dulcet tones talking to me through the airwaves.

Lee:
Through the airwaves. Yes. Although we’ve just had a long conversation about how awful my internet is at the moment, haven’t we? Yeah, and you’re pulling 60 odd, Meg, which is not fast for the Americans who are pulling a gigabit, but still faster than mine, because at one point I was getting six Meg. So hopefully we will be able to do this and it will be wonderful. So let’s shall we do it? Shall we go for it?

Pete Everitt:
Let’s go for it. I’m ready when you are. I’m probably. Speed is of the essence.

Lee:
Well, in case the internet goes down.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah, absolutely.

Lee:
All right then. So let’s start with the very first question. We’re going to learn about you. Tell us the name of your agency and what it is you do.

Pete Everitt:
My agency is called So Digital Communications. And we are actually half of a bigger company called the So Agency Group, which consists of a branding, branding and sort of creative side. And then the digital side which which is my baby And we work with clients to, um, basically help them achieve their goals online. So looking at what their business objectives are, looking at their business processes, deep diving a little bit more into their business, and then actually identifying what are the problems we could solve that would make the biggest improvement to their to their business, to their revenue, to their return on investment.

Lee:
I like it. It feels like you’ve said that a few times because that just rolled off the tongue there.

Pete Everitt:
Just just once or twice, just once or twice.

Lee:
In networking meetings and all of the above. All right. So we’re gonna have a birthday party. Maybe it’s going to be a barbecue outside. I think you like barbecue, so it’s got to be outside as well. You’re definitely an outdoorsy sort of guy. We’ve got some beers, uh, and all of that sort of stuff. When is your agency’s birthday?

Pete Everitt:
Our agency’s birthday is on November the 29th, and we would be coming up to two years old for the digital side of the business. The branding and communication side of the business was was set up about four and a half years ago. So that’s a little bit older and a little bit more established.

Lee:
So that’s the daddy and your digital business, the digital baby, quite literally.

Pete Everitt:
No, I’m not the baby.

Lee:
You know what? You’re very baby faced as well.

Pete Everitt:
Well, I, I have I can’t aspire to the to the beard that that gentleman such as yourself managed to grow because I haven’t reached that stage of puberty yet. But if I do shave my stubble off, I do look like I’m 12. Which is why my wife insists I keep it.

Lee:
Ah, I get you. No, that makes perfect sense. And if people see pictures of your your sons and that they can see that they look like exactly like you.

Pete Everitt:
Hey, save me on the DNA test.

Lee:
So, so cute, so cute. But let’s let’s focus. Let’s focus. Because I’m not very good at focusing. Neither. Neither me or you are. We go off on tangents all the time. So let’s talk about your setup. And I guess it’s the setup of the social group as well as as the digital wing that you that you spearhead. How many people are there across the soul group?

Pete Everitt:
So there’s four of us in total that are employed by the businesses. And then we have a network of subcontractors that we use in total. If we have everybody working on a big project, there’d be 11 of us in total.

Lee:
Wow. So but that would be with all the subcontractors and everyone involved.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah, yeah. That’s it. Exactly.

Lee:
Cool. And then do you have an office, offices, or are you all from home? Virtual setup.

Pete Everitt:
Um, we have two offices, so I’m based in Sheffield in the UK, and Steve, my business partner, who runs the branding side of the group, he’s based in Margate in Kent, which is just out. It’s on that sticky bit out of England, just east of London. Yeah. Um, and then we have is it that way, is it that way?

Lee:
That way.

Pete Everitt:
Whichever way.

Lee:
The.

Pete Everitt:
But yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s that’s the one. Yeah. And He’s going to really love us for saying that. And then the but the subcontractors are are throughout the country. So they’re actually largely based around the Midlands ish kind of area. But that’s um, um, yeah, we’re we’re a virtual team with two offices.

Lee:
And you have slightly off topic, but you’ve got customers all around the place because you actually have a client that you regularly visit just down the road from our office as well. So me and you get to meet up in person, which is pretty darn awesome and have coffees and do selfies.

Pete Everitt:
We do indeed. We we. Yeah. Oh, it’s great fun. And it’s, um, it it sort of, you know, it’s we’ve always taken the stance when it comes to client side of things. We’ve always taken the stance of, you know what? We we want to do a good job for you. We want to show you service. We our business ethos is about how we can help you and how we can have. I know we’re going to touch on some of this stuff later. Um, but the travel element to us has never been an issue. Yeah. And but when I can then come and then meet guys like yourself and and build bridges, which aren’t, there’s something about being in business which is, is more than, more than the client stuff, more than the stuff, the tactical stuff that you do. And actually being able to connect with guys like yourself and yeah, then break down those physical barriers and actually, rather than doing it over zoom is great.

Pete Everitt:
But actually, if we can sit and have a coffee for half an hour and just chew the fat about life and, you know, you’ve been going through some stuff this year, I’ve been going through some stuff this year, and just to be able to sit there and say, you know what? I’m going to we’re going to have 20 minutes, half an hour where we can just be Pete and Lee rather than Pete, the business owner, and Lee, the business owner. Yeah. And for me, that that’s part of what being an entrepreneur and being a business owner is about.

Lee:
Absolutely. And I love that you can do that with the travel. I think quite a lot of us will often just go and see the client and then go home. But if you can meet up with anyone as well and get that extra kind of feedback loop, as it were. It’s really, really helpful.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah.

Lee:
So your team then you’ve got you’ve got four employees. You’ve also got the contractors. So you know you’re scalable which is great. So as and when the bigger projects come in your team grows etc.. So good model. Um, could you describe the team culture that you guys have developed over the last four, four and a half years?

Pete Everitt:
So we. We’re very much set up to be a lifestyle family business. And that’s we’ve all had corporate jobs in bigger agencies where we’ve been, um, you know, running against the grindstone to, to churn out work, churn out work, churn out work, get the invoices out, get the invoices you get on that hamster wheel. Yeah, we’ve all made a conscious decision to move away from that. So, um, the four of us that are actually employed by the business and myself and my business partner Steve and our two wives. So we have this family, family type culture, Um, we, we sort of take the even with the subcontractors we use, we take the stance of, you know what? We don’t really care when you work, as long as you know that there’s a deadline on that date or you’ve got a meeting, then as long as you show up and the work’s done when it’s supposed to be done, and it’s of the standard that we want, then you fit it around your life.

Pete Everitt:
We don’t we don’t track when people have dentist appointments. We don’t track when people are going off to the doctors. I’ve just been on a kind of three week holiday and it was it was awesome. Um, but I never would have been able to do that through the summer months in my previous job, because everybody was fighting over the same bit of holiday and all of that kind of stuff. We just it kind of ebbs and flows and that’s that’s the culture that we, we try to instil. We also understand that there are times when we all have to deliver over and above, and sometimes we end up doing late nights or early mornings or whatever, but then we try and balance that out with the other side of things where it can be a bit more easygoing and, um, you know, you know what you’ve done half a day today. So what? Yeah. Go and enjoy some time with your kids. It’s fine.

Lee:
I love it. That’s a great culture. Let’s talk about then the kind of your mission. So what your focus is, you’ve obviously your mission internally is to ensure that everyone has good family life, a good work life balance, etc. but also, you’re not scared to go ahead and do the work when you need to. So pizza nights are really early risers. Um, but you’re doing all that. What? I want to just unpack your mission a little bit. Do you have a particular industry or a particular niche? That niche could be, um, a type of service, or it could be a group of people that you serve.

Pete Everitt:
So as an agency, we tend to focus particularly within the education sector. And that goes back to, um, Steve, Steve and I actually used to work together at a previous agency about ten years ago. Um, back.

Lee:
In the couldn’t do back.

Pete Everitt:
In the day when I when I was a young whippersnapper.

Lee:
I when I were a lot. We should remember to link to the Yorkshiremen sketch, shouldn’t we.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah. Yeah. So we used to and and that agency really did focus on education quite, quite heavily. We, we try and focus there. We’re obviously particularly from a digital side of things. We’re still quite young. So we do have a broader spectrum and we’re trying to niche down a little. Um, it’s largely education, stroke, business to business type clients that we are working with.

Lee:
However that’s awesome. And folks, you can listen to an entire episode where we drill Pete for all of the knowledge that he has, and he talks about some really cool stuff that he does with those higher education clients, and also how he puts his proposals together. So no more spoilers, but be sure to go to agency trailblazer. Com go to the podcast section, tap in Pete Everett and you will find his episodes. This guy is always dropping knowledge bombs. Actually, I would also recommend you go check out his own podcast which is at peace.com/podcast.

Pete Everitt:
It is the Marketing Development podcast and you can search for that on Facebook or iTunes or your favourite podcast player, you or your.

Lee:
I like that it feels like you’ve said that multiple times as well. That was absolutely beautiful. And the cover artwork was actually, I believe you used the picture I took of you when you were hanging out at our office a few months ago.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah, I still haven’t had proper headshots done, so I’m using headshots.

Lee:
That was a perfect picture. You look.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah, absolutely. It was. It was literally. We turned up for a coffee. We. I showed you the initial logo, didn’t I? Which was absolutely shocking. Oh, no, I.

Lee:
Think I told you that, didn’t I? Yeah. You did. Yeah, I was a bit honest. I’m sorry, mate.

Pete Everitt:
You are as blunt as a breezeblock. Thank you. And and you said, hey, stand there in front of that screen. So we didn’t, um, if you see it now, I can’t remember whether I’m in front of a grey thing or you’re in front.

Lee:
Of a green screen.

Pete Everitt:
Right. Yeah, yeah. Um, but so we’ve dropped the background in behind that. But yeah, that is, that is the photograph that you took.

Lee:
Awesome. All right. Back to the mission then, because that was definitely one of our tangents. What is the main problem that you feel like you solve as a business for your clients?

Pete Everitt:
If I was to put it into one sentence, if we’re doing this as quickfire, it is to look at the return on investment that a client can achieve from digital. Right? If I’m to if I’m to expand on that a little bit, it is we don’t we don’t have one model that fits every client. Our approach is to go in and talk about the client’s, about their business, about their marketing objectives, about what they’re currently doing, about their business process, and then build a strategy around that that can either increase revenue, increase efficiency to produce more revenue for what they’re currently doing, or change what they’re currently doing to make it more profitable for them.

Lee:
So, and an even shorter sentence. You help clients achieve their goals.

Pete Everitt:
In an even shorter sentence. Yes, that would be right.

Lee:
Just just making sure I understood that. And you would do that by putting in strategies in place. And with regards to the return on investment, that means you’re very heavily focussed on looking at the data, looking at what you are doing and tracking whether the actions that you’ve helped your client take have actually either achieved those goals or at least paid for themselves. So you’re a very data orientated. Would that.

Pete Everitt:
Be. That’s that’s a that’s exactly it. And the, the approach we take or the, the software that we use or the way we approach that depends on whether it’s a lead generation type client like university or a revenue generating client like a, an e-commerce website, for example.

Lee:
And even though everybody’s different, I presume that you have some pretty good, um, case studies as well that you can use to, to clients. So as you’re approaching new projects, etc., you can show, okay, the client engaged in this activity. This was the price and this was the return on that investment, which kind of proves that the model of if we do something, we can then achieve return. And that’s quite I assume that’s quite useful therefore in your sales process or your onboarding process.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah, absolutely. And although part of that is to educate the client so that they understand that you don’t jump from here to there, but that it’s a curve and that that actually actually for the first little bit of time that we’re working with you, we’re going to be potentially, um, correcting things that may have not a negative impact on your business, but it may still flat line for a short time after you start working with us, and then we start picking up the increase. So it’s, um, there’s definitely been an educational need from having conversations with clients where we’ve said, look, you’ve been working with us for four days and we haven’t seen an improvement in our ROI. Yeah. Come on guys.

Lee:
Yeah.

Pete Everitt:
You know, so yeah. So Well that’s.

Lee:
Helpful. So it’s good for expectation setting education etc. as well as sales. That’s wicked. Well thanks for that. I like it. Well let’s talk about marketing. You’re a four and a half year old business overall. And how do you folks generate leads?

Pete Everitt:
This is one of our biggest challenges as well. When we come to the next section, which is.

Lee:
Spoiler alert.

Pete Everitt:
Absolutely useless at marketing ourselves. Okay. Most of our most of our leads comes through, um, word of mouth referrals or business networking. And that’s at the moment they’re the things that we’re most successful in. One of the reasons I’ve started the podcast is that I’m trying to I’m trying to we identified that some of the people we work best with are marketing consultants, who have their own little network of clients and can’t deliver everything. So hence hence where the podcast came from. But, uh, yeah, we’re trying to we made a conscious decision in May that we were going to put together a marketing plan and basically treat ourselves as our own client. That lasted until May and we still haven’t properly picked that up. So we’re we’re now looking at actually, weirdly, getting in some external support to help us market ourselves so that we can keep on concentrating on what we’re delivering for clients. I think a lot of.

Lee:
The time you’re always focusing on delivering for the clients, which means it’s very hard to treat yourself as the client, isn’t it? And it’s much easier to to almost fire yourself and put the clients first. But I mean, at least you are networking and at least the quality of your work is also generating ongoing referrals. So it’s not like the pots drying out. So that’s good. But obviously definitely establishing some sort of actual strategic marketing plan, um, is something that any agency I think really needs to do because, um, you know, I think we all know the feast and famine, don’t we? Eventually that ongoing kind of, um, un unattended Tended to source of leads will eventually dry out unless we can start to, uh, to like a garden, cultivate it. Oh, that was such a beautiful metaphor.

Pete Everitt:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Lee:
Was that a simile? I don’t know. I think it’s something. And it wasn’t an onomatopoeia, though. I know that.

Pete Everitt:
No, no, it definitely wasn’t that. But part of the part of the thing we’ve done to try and address that is about two thirds of our revenue comes from retained income. So people are on or clients are on a minimum term contract that then moves on to a monthly rolling contract. So therefore we have tried to level out a little bit that feast and famine um, cycle so that we know whilst whilst we still experience it, we know that the famine won’t drop below a particular point. Yeah.

Lee:
You’ve got a base point there. Yeah. That’s good. All right. Well, as someone who’s very ROI data orientated, I’m going to be interested in the answer to your question for this, which is how do you measure success.

Pete Everitt:
And we make money when our clients make money. That’s right. That’s basically that’s basically the the way our model works. And and so our success is very closely linked to the success of our clients. And we we have a number of team meetings, um, a month. And one of the things we always discuss is to do with um is to do with the, the basically the work balance, the work life balance and make sure that people aren’t getting overloaded and that they’re, you know, um, identify things that are coming up. If people aren’t going to be around all that kind of stuff. And but key to that is that there are some unmoveable elements which are we have these retained clients that are paying us good money every month to grow their businesses, and this is what they are trying to achieve. What are we doing to to make the steps for them so that they we are helping them achieve their goals. And that isn’t to say we’re giving them business. Some of the steps we have to make is to challenge the client and say, you need to do this in order to help us help you get there kind of thing.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah. But that’s yeah, our our model is very much linked to the success of our clients.

Lee:
Well that’s that’s a really good answer I like that. Okay. So confession time. I think you’ve already given it away. Um, unless you can think of something else. But there’s only me and a few thousand people listening in, so I’m pretty sure your secret will be safe. What is the biggest problem that you guys have? And if it was what you just said earlier, is there anything you can expand on? Spoiler freaking alert.

Pete Everitt:
The biggest, the biggest thing is, um, the biggest thing is the marketing. But we’ve touched on that. So I’ll move to the second biggest thing. Okay. If that’s all right. Which as, as as you know, I’ve watched a number of you agency live things and I know this has come up before, but it is to do with the management of of the workflow. We we are. We have a reasonable sized resource, but it is dependent upon. Obviously, there’s only four of us that are actually full time. We can guarantee on. Kind of thing. And so the management of the work through we’ve had to work really hard on our project management processes. And I did a, I did a workshop for you in the ATB community. So if you’re not part of that, very good. Please go and sign up for lease community. Or you can just feel the love, can’t you? It’s it’s awesome. And the the but you know, we’ve had to work really hard on on that particular episode is looking at a web design project and but we’ve got a number of those processes depending on the type of client and the types of services that they’re using for us, but still managing those through and making sure we have the personnel.

Pete Everitt:
Every client wants to know when is this going to be done? And that that can become a challenge, particularly the bigger that you get and the more moving parts you’ve got to to administer as you go through. So for us that is the and that’s the second biggest thing that we’re. I wouldn’t say it’s holding us back, but it’s certainly one of the topics that we have to keep on revisiting and revisiting and revisiting and actually working quite hard on so that we keep on delivering that quality for clients that we want to.

Lee:
I think as well, because it’s ever changing from client to client, it’s trying to find that sort of process and those checks and balances, isn’t it? That would work well enough for most projects and is flexible enough to change, but people often forget as well that a very important part of being able to scale your business for whatever the end result is, be it financial freedom or just be it time to chill. Um, having a process or a procedure is super, super important to allow your business to scale. It’s not just about being able to switch on extra resources. In fact, if you have amazing processes, you don’t necessarily have to switch on all of those extra resources, i.e. all these extra people, because part of those processes, part of that documentation, part of what you do actually, um, saves an awful lot of time and brings things right through. Yeah. All right. Let’s get off the boring business stuff for a bit then, because let’s all face it, sometimes it can get a little bit boring when people start saying the word processes and I can just hear, we’ll see a few eyes rolling, because I know I do.

Lee:
Sometimes I’m like, oh, document a process. How boring is that? The problem is, is I’ve got this brain that kind of never switches off from the business. I really, really struggle. I love my business. I know you love your business and you and me, pretty much when we hang out or we’re talking, we’re mostly talking about business rather than anything else. Much else. Like what a lovely. Well, we probably talk about the weather because we’re British. Um, so for your well-being, mate, and for your brain sanity, how do you switch off?

Pete Everitt:
So there’s a few things. I’ve got two small children. We love spending time together. Family time is is like top priority when it comes to not being at work. Absolutely. Yeah. And the other thing, the other things that I do, I play the drums and I’m part of our local church and we, I play the drums there. So that’s a really good thing for, for helping me just not think about anything else. It becomes. Um, I don’t know how many of you guys are musicians, but being part of a music group, it’s more about feeling than actual thought. And it being a drummer, particularly when you’re when literally every arm and limb is, is doing something, it really kind of helps you just get out of that headspace and, and, uh, sort of engage in the moment and then, you know, what, you come out the other end of it and you feel a bit more clear your heads, your head’s in a far better space. So that’s the kind of not thinking.

Lee:
Return on investment whilst drumming during the worship.

Pete Everitt:
No. Absolutely not.

Lee:
Okay. Interesting. I maybe I need to try that. So that’s good. And then, um, how do you stay healthy? Because frankly, we’re stuck at our desks an awful lot. And obviously I saw that you did something crazy, so please share that as well with us. Yeah, well.

Pete Everitt:
I did I did stop this. Spoiler alert. So, um, I do some cycling. You can see I’ve got fat lads from door across my across my belly here. Yeah. Um, I’m, I’m part of a cycling club. A few friends and I do these charity bike rides. So three years ago, we cycled from London to Paris. And three weeks ago we cycled from Paris to Geneva for a children’s hospital charity. And we’ve raised over the two events. We’ve raised about £93,000.

Lee:
That’s insane. But it’s also a great way to stay relatively healthy. Do you have to do a lot of practise for those, or are you one of those people who just goes ahead and does it without any practise?

Pete Everitt:
Oh no no no no no no, I have to I have to practise.

Lee:
Good. I figured you’d have to with the length that you had to bike, but I have known people to literally go and do 100 miles flat from never doing anything. And they’ve really struggled for the next like three weeks afterwards to recover.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah, yeah, that’s part of it. I mean, the challenges are multiple days. So the Paris to Geneva was, um, 360 miles over four days. So you can’t have the you can’t have the fatigue the following day after day one morning two, you have to get back on your bike. And by the end of day four, you’ve got to remove the bike from your person. But it’s, um, it’s the sense of achievement that you get. And the amount of money we’ve raised is phenomenal. When we when we started this in 2014, when we started planning the first trip, we had no idea of the scale of anything. It was just five dads then that were trying to make a bit of a difference for a hospital that all of our kids had had some level of engagement with. Yeah, and there’s now nine of us and we’ve done it twice. And it’s, you know, we’re really proud about the amount of money we’ve raised, not in a big headed way, but just that it’s it feels good to give something back.

Pete Everitt:
And also if I tie this back to a personal thing, the whole point of the lifestyle business, the whole point of running your own business, where you can have a lifestyle that you choose, I think it’s good to have focal points that are bigger than yourself. Yeah. And, you know, as I said, family is is definitely number one. But when it comes to something like the bike rides, I okay, it took me away from my kids for six days. But what is the example that I’ve, I’ve left with my children. What am I trying to demonstrate to them? And one of the, one of the things that was most touching was from the first bike ride. The children’s hospital were building this big extension, and if we raised over a certain amount of money, we could sponsor a room and we hit that amount of money. So when we got to Paris, we had a, a caricaturist do a caricature of all five of us, and that hangs in the room.

Pete Everitt:
And we got to choose the, um, got to choose the, the colour scheme and all that kind of stuff. And one of the donors that sent us a donation about three weeks before we went to Paris, to Geneva, His grandson was the second ever patient in our room. And for him to cut, contact us and say, look guys, here’s a check. My little boy really, or my grandson really appreciated and really benefited from the effort you guys put in a few years ago. Here’s some cash to help you towards this one. That that just floors you. That.

Lee:
That’s amazing. I’m getting goosebumps just listening to the entire story, mate. It’s it’s incredible. And I think as well, by doing something that’s bigger than yourself, especially with regards to the way you’re raising this money is through biking, you’re getting the extra selfishly, you’re getting the benefit of the physical exercise. I think sometimes it’s nearly impossible, isn’t it, to motivate ourselves to go and do something that’s good for us. But it’s very motivating to go and do something that’s going to help other people. So you’re you’re helping yourself whilst achieving this much greater, much bigger, beyond yourself goal, which is to really impact those lives of those children and all power to you and well done, mate. I was watching. I love social media and your wife was posting regular updates, as were you. It was brilliant just watching the whole process. Um, so yeah.

Pete Everitt:
I won’t lie, there were some very dark moments when you’re going up another hill and got to keep your legs going round in circles, but when you when we got to Lake Geneva and the family, our families flew out and met us there. And they were stood there with some champagne and they gave us a big hug. And the kids all gave you a hug. It was just yeah, that’s that’s the moment that you can’t. Yeah. Can’t buy that money. Can’t replace.

Lee:
Top tip do not down a glass of champagne after 300 odd miles of biking.

Pete Everitt:
I know. Don’t don’t. Down. Don’t. Down. One down about four. It’s.

Lee:
I once did that after a marathon, and I won’t tell you what the result was. All right, so we’re coming in to land. This is the last question, and you have to be really, really good on this, mate, because some of our guests have broken the rules and mention several tools. I would love if you could think of and share with us one tool. It could be an application. It could be a physical utensil, I have no idea. But it’s a one tool, one thing that has been essential to your agency’s success and why?

Pete Everitt:
Yes, and it’s not a web development tool or a digital marketing tool or anything like that, but it is our finance software. Oh the ability. You see, I’ve been watching your guys, you know, and they’re all saying, oh, Beaver builder this and Yoast SEO that and this, that and the other and you kind of those things are great. And and I use them all the time.

Lee:
Because they were going to punch you otherwise.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah.

Lee:
I’m glad you said those things.

Pete Everitt:
The thing that’s made the biggest difference to our business has been having finance software that a key people in the in the company can use. So it’s not tied to one person. He automates a lot of the process so that we don’t have to worry about chasing late payments or sending reminders this, that, and the other and notifies us when it has found a problem. And C allows us to take the recurring payments. So we use we use zero. I suppose I’m going to mention two two apps here. We use zero connected with Gocardless. So zero is the finance software and Gocardless is the direct debit software. We tie the two together into one seamless application and we can then it sends invoices out for retainers, and we take the payment 14 days later and no human interaction is needed. And that has been predominantly the.

Lee:
Tool therefore is zero. But obviously you can have an add on that plugs into that. I think it’s the same with most platforms, is that you can have multiple add ons like stripe or whatever added into or a CRM system, but I’m, I’m I’m not surprised by your answer, I guess, because you are very much data driven anyway, as a business, you know, looking at the ROI, also looking at the finances, but also process driven and Xero is a very good platform for that, isn’t it? You know, if you send out a quote and then the client can automatically accept and pay a deposit, and then it will do some sort of timing for your next payment and all that sort of stuff. That’s the sort of thing I think that really gets you, Mr. Uber Geek, very excited and very happy. But also it’s very good for a scalable business, if again, you can have all of those tools to automate all of those things, it means you’re not spending loads of money on accountants, and it means you’re not doing it yourself because it’s really boring, isn’t it, if you have to do it yourself.

Pete Everitt:
The thing that would make it perfect would be if it would hook into teamwork projects, and when we hit milestones of the project, it would then ping out next invoice stage.

Lee:
That would be phenomenal.

Pete Everitt:
That would make it perfect. So I’m not saying it’s the perfect.

Lee:
Some sort of like Zapier integration for that or something.

Pete Everitt:
Yeah, yeah, I know it would. It would be good. Um, but that’s, that’s uh, that would make it. So I’m not saying it’s, it’s completely flawless, but for the the question I’ve got is name the tool that has been essential to your agency’s success. And that actually, as boring as it may sound, is it?

Lee:
No, that’s a really, really good answer, mate. You’re a complete legend, folks. Don’t forget to check out Pete’s podcast, which you can find on.

Pete Everitt:
Pete everett.com/podcast, or search your favourite podcast player for the Marketing Development podcast.

Lee:
I love it when you say that. So that audio.

Pete Everitt:
File I’m going to send you an audio.

Lee:
File, my ringtone, whenever you call me. Um, so yeah, that uh, obviously don’t forget as well to go to agency trailblazer.com and go and have a look at Pete’s previous episode. I feel like you’ve been on at least twice I have. This is at least your third. So go and check out Pete’s episodes because he always shares really valuable advice and is always very clear. Obviously, I recommend you go ahead and check out his podcast if you are not a member of the Agency Trailblazer Facebook group, then you can find that on agency. trailblazer.com/group. Pete, you have been wonderful. As always. Thank you for your time. It is time for you to get out of here. I mean, goodbye and God bless. That’s. What are we.

Pete Everitt:
On? Are we on? Are we on celebrity or something? Is there going to be fireworks going off in my office? Get some champagne?

Lee:
Uh, or, uh, what I would really love to do with agency. Life would be like, um, you know, when in, uh, that tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be. And then they name the, uh, the star they’re going to be, and then they walk through the mist and they’ve been magically transformed into said, um, singer that I would love to do something like that for agency life. I just can’t work out how to work it in. I have no idea what I’m talking about now. Oh, you could have come out of the cupboard, couldn’t you? Yeah. Oh, and Tonightly.

Pete Everitt:
I am going to be right, Lacey. Come on.

Lee:
Well, yeah. Just because he’s your man crush. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. All right, so this is the official goodbye. Cheers.

Pete Everitt:
Cheers, mate.