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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 before we kick off the show. Here is a word from our sponsor.
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Lee:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of AgencyLife. And today on the show we have Mr. Peter Freeman. How are you, sir?
Peter Freeman:
I’m well, just. Well, thanks for having me on the show, mate. I’m awake. It’s a good day.
Lee:
8Am for you, is that right?
Peter Freeman:
Yeah, it’s 11am I did my maths wrong, which is kind of 8am for most people as I work, but yeah.
Lee:
Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. And for us it’s 4pm Isn’t it amazing that I can talk to you with better quality than I can talk to somebody who’s actually just a hundred miles up north? So we, like, did an episode and it was really bad reception, kind of Internet connexion and you’re 3,000, 4,000 miles away. Just ridiculous. And for the folks I know his accent’s deceiving, but whereabouts in the world are you right now?
Peter Freeman:
I’m currently in Canada, in northwest Ontario. As you can tell by the accent.
Lee:
Yes. As you can tell. You keep saying A all the time. Eh? That’s it, actually, accent wise around there. Are they all. Do they do the A and the a boot or is that just stereotype where we are?
Peter Freeman:
It’s actually not too bad. It’s. It’s kind of proper English almost.
Lee:
Probably more Ontario side, because that’s what I remember when we were there. So no worries. Right, should we learn about your agency? Are you ready?
Peter Freeman:
We should.
Lee:
We should do.
Peter Freeman:
Really?
Lee:
Because we could chat all day.
Peter Freeman:
So we’re supposed to be keeping this short.
Lee:
We supposed to be. And I’ve just chatted for two minutes. All right, let’s do this then. So, Peter, tell us the name of your agency and what it is that you Do.
Peter Freeman:
Okay. We are Woof Media, so Woof as in bark like a dog wolf. And I won’t give you the tagline because that’ll give away what our niche is. So I’m the director of digital, so I’m one of two partners in the agency and I basically handle a digital side.
Lee:
Nice.
Peter Freeman:
Digital is usually what I go by, but, yeah, depending on the day of the week.
Lee:
And you guys also have. So you got team in Australia and you’re also. You. You’re personally in Canada. That’s right, isn’t it? Yeah.
Peter Freeman:
So headquarters is in a small regional town in South Australia, just across the pond from Adelaide, if you’re familiar with Australian capital cities. And yeah, we’ve got a couple of their team are based in Adelaide as well. And then we’ve got a couple of people in Queensland and then myself over in Canada. So we’re very much the virtual team.
Lee:
From memory and geography, I think basically Australian cities are all around the edge. And then you have a desert, is that right?
Peter Freeman:
Pretty much, yeah. It’s kind of like Canada. It’s just instead of desert, it’s snow and we just put everyone around. Everyone lives at the bottom, at the.
Lee:
Edges, around the site.
Peter Freeman:
Very similar.
Lee:
So if we’re going to have a birthday party, you know, we’d have to fly everyone in, obviously, because everyone’s all around the world. But we’re about to have a birthday party to celebrate your agency’s birthday. When is the rough date and how old are you guys?
Peter Freeman:
Yeah, the agency was actually founded by my business partner back in 2001.
Lee:
Whoa. That’s ancient.
Peter Freeman:
It’s ancient in modern terms. I’ve been partnering the business for coming up. Six years now, actually. Just gone six years September 1st. But we’ve been around for the best part of scarily. 20 years, I guess. 17, 18 years. Fucking not run out of toes.
Lee:
Yeah, that’s old, mate. Well done. It is for staying the course. And you don’t look at a day past 50, mate, so you’re doing really well.
Peter Freeman:
Not at all. Should have put the hat on and pretended I had hair.
Lee:
All right, I know your niche. This is a good one. Tell us all about your niche.
Peter Freeman:
So our tagline is your tourism marketing partner. So that probably gives you a bit of a sense of what we do within that. We’re very focused on regional tourism, so that’s. I guess we’re based regionally for the most part. Our team’s very much all regional backgrounds, grew up in the country sort of stuff. And that’s I guess where we relate the most. So while we’re niche down in tourism, we sort of niche down even further within that to work with regional tourism destinations and businesses within that.
Lee:
I think there’s a phrase there, niche until it hurts. So there’s niching and then niching even further. And that’s where you can find even more riches because you, you’re super focused and it makes it really obvious who your target audience is and who people need to be referring to you as well, which is cool.
Peter Freeman:
Very much so.
Lee:
What do you feel the main problem is that you guys are solving for your clients.
Peter Freeman:
The biggest problem for most of our clients is overwhelmed with all of the options available to them with marketing. Marketing obviously drives tourism. I mean you can’t scroll through Instagram without seeing a new destination you want to go to. But on the flip side of that, all the people in the destination businesses and destinations struggle with how do we do this? With this fast paced digital world and print marketing and all the rest of it. So we basically step in and partner with clients inside Tagline. We partner with them, essentially become an extension of their business. That’s the way we like to look at it.
Lee:
So essentially you remove the overwhelm and you become the digital experience driver of their entire marketing process pretty much.
Peter Freeman:
And it varies a little bit client by client. Some clients will have a full time marketing manager and that’s fine. We work closely with them more on strategic end. Others don’t have the resources to have someone in house so they just push it all over the fence to us. And we work with them very closely to make sure it all works for them. So in terms of what we do in that space, it goes from strategy all the way through to creating the assets, websites, social media, social media management, AdWords, anything they might need to fulfil what they trying to achieve.
Lee:
Yeah, I was going to ask you that because marketing is such a broad term. So you kind of given us the lay down. It is literally end to end, which is awesome. So marketing then for you guys? Obviously you’re doing it for other people. But how are you folks generating leads for the business?
Peter Freeman:
Predominantly through partnerships and referrals. I guess the great thing about what we do is we focus a lot more on the, the asset side. So creating all of the widgets, if you like, shiny objects for clients. But before they get to that point, they need to invest in strategy and a whole bunch of other things. So we have a lot of partnerships with people, consultants that work in that space building destination strategies for Clients, that sort of thing. So we generally find a lot of our marquee projects, if you like, come that way. Outside of that. Yeah, a lot of inquiries through our website. Just people hearing about us. We’ve got a little bit of a unique name and being specialised. Obviously people do hear us mentioned in dispatches, so we do get a few via the web. But they generally come from word of mouth when we scratch the surface.
Lee:
So word of mouth referrals and your partnerships. Actually, top tip for people, marketing consultants are a really good type of consultant to align yourself if you’re a web developer or web designer, if you can align yourself with some good marketing consultants, they don’t necessarily do the work, so they need to have connexions with good developers, good designers, et cetera. And that’s actually one of the ways we generate quite a few leads as our agency. We do have the agencies, but we also have the marketing consultants as well. So it’s a really, really good method. I’m glad you brought it up. There’s nothing so far and it’s great.
Peter Freeman:
For clients as well, because I don’t have to. Okay, we’ve done the strategy, now we’ve got to go and find someone that implements. It’s someone we’ve met earlier, basically the relationship, the trust is there and then off it goes. And that works really well. Having that trust and that referral is critical.
Lee:
Yeah. Now it’s just me and you right now, mate, and a few thousand listeners around the world. So your secret, I promise we’ll be safe with all of us. And the question is this, what is the biggest problem you feel you guys have as an agency?
Peter Freeman:
I think ironically, because we’ve niched down, which before we did it, there was all that fear of, okay, if we’re niching down too much, what if we don’t get enough work? We now have the opposite problem in that we’ve got too much work to handle and I guess resourcing and project management and that side of it, because we have so much on and we’re gradually expanding the team, but that’s not necessarily keeping up with the growth. So demand management and resourcing is probably the biggest challenge right now.
Lee:
All right, so it’s kind of scalable. Yeah, great problem to have. It’s kind of scalability, isn’t it? And we talk about that actually in the agency trailblazer community. We’ll be doing some of that on our mastermind call as well. That’s coming, coming up, which is called just talking about processes and stuff. I’M sure you’re going to get like now a tonne of emails from people saying, hey, you got too much work. You know.
Peter Freeman:
We are referring a lot because we, I mean we do have a lot of previous clients that were non tourism obviously, but these days we just keep turning work down, bouncing them on.
Lee:
I’d love to know how many extra friend requests you’re going to get on Facebook. Yeah, that’s great problem to have and obviously I hope you guys continue to work that through and it’s wonderful that you are having that issue. And like you said, people do get scared about niching down, but actually niching down is really, really powerful and having too much business or too much coming in, that’s really cool. So well done.
Peter Freeman:
Yeah, well, I mentioned before about the breadth of services that we do. I mean, I think that’s one area where we’re looking at niching that down and just specialising into a few key areas rather than doing quite so much.
Lee:
Makes sense.
Peter Freeman:
That way we become even more of the expert in that space.
Lee:
I like it a lot. Well, being obviously a busy guy and you know, and there’s the time difference as well, which is insane because you’re going to be able to communicate with those guys as well and continue to run the business. So how do you switch off.
Peter Freeman:
The off switch, to be honest, and having. Having four kids at home, it’s. Even the off switch from work, there isn’t really an off switch either. So downtime for me is really hanging out with the kids and family and it’s tough to manage, obviously working from home as well. So sort of scoot out coffee shop and chill out a little bit here and there, catch up with people face to face, which is a. Can be a rarity when you’re working from home. So it’s nice. Yeah, it’s an ongoing challenge like I expect most people will relate working from.
Lee:
Home, hashtag relatable and kind of carrying on from the kind of the wellbeing side. Do you find the time or. And if you do, how do you manage to keep healthy? Because we are kind of chained to our desks a lot of the time. And working from home, like you said, you are pretty much stuck in your room, aren’t you?
Peter Freeman:
Yeah, it’s tough to find the routine and particularly with the hours I work as well, I work into the evenings, sometimes that turns into a late one as well. So 2, 3am in the morning sort of thing. So balance is hard with that. Not getting enough sleep is not healthy. I can vouch for that, I generally eat pretty well.
Lee:
Pretty.
Peter Freeman:
A little bit of a health nut with food, my lunches prepped and all that sort of stuff. So I guess working from home, the trap is, and I’ve been there, you tend to sleep in the fridge and whatever comes out kind of thing. And there you go. And that’s energy wise and all the rest of it. If you’re also combining that with lack of sleep and lack of exercise, you’re on a downhill path pretty quickly. So, yeah, sticking with decent food and trying to exercise as much, get out and play a bit of volleyball and things like that.
Lee:
So it’s so cool doing volleyball, mate. That’s just well cool. We were just chatting before, weren’t we? So I’ve not. We move into our office next week, finally. But we’ve had a stint of having to work at the home office and I’ve been doing these treks to the fridge for no reason other than to look in the fridge and I look inside the fridge for like 20 seconds. I don’t take any out of it. Exactly. And then I shut the door and then walk back to my desk and I cannot wait to get out of this office. And then obviously what happens in the afternoon is I start like, oh, that 3:00. That beer looks like it needs drinking. And then I’ll be sat here writing a proposal and drinking a beer. So it’s a really, really bad habit. I need to be out of here.
Peter Freeman:
Yeah, it’s hard work.
Lee:
Usually win those proposals, though, because I’m a lot more like, no worries. Well, we’re coming into land. This is our last question, mate, and I’m going to be really strict. You have to stick to one tool. You’re not allowed to say office because that’s lots of tools. That’s cheating.
Peter Freeman:
One tool we On a microphone.
Lee:
Well, I mean, if you have been instrumental in your agency success, great. But the question is, what tool has been essential to your agency’s success and why?
Peter Freeman:
Just one.
Lee:
Yeah.
Peter Freeman:
What about all the other shiny obvious.
Lee:
No, that’s the thing. That’s why we’re trying to do it. The whole question is because Paul Lacey keeps sharing stuff on app Sumo and I’m like, oh, I need to buy.
Peter Freeman:
Yeah, yeah.
Lee:
And then I’m like, lock him from the group.
Peter Freeman:
Seriously, things coming out, just about to solve a problem and somebody.
Lee:
So one of those tools gone, man.
Peter Freeman:
Yeah, I think. I mean, it’s. It’s a boring one because it’s just there for mostly everyone. But I think G Suite for Us doesn’t count. It goes everywhere.
Lee:
Any other tools you can.
Peter Freeman:
Any other tools. A project management tool is probably the one thing we’ve been using for.
Lee:
All right, what are you guys using?
Peter Freeman:
We’re using work etc, which is a little bit of a lesser known one, but it’s one of those all in one tools that you kind of customise quite a bit. And we stuck with it for about five years. And that’s good for project budgeting. It does all your time sheets and project budgets and all the rest of us. A little bit long in the tooth with interface now, but the impact that’s had in terms of measuring where our time goes in projects and then obviously using that data to quote, better be more informed and a little bit more strategic in how we’re quoting and taking into account what things actually take in time rather than what we think they might. Five minutes on the. On the quote and days on doing the work. So all that sort of thing.
Lee:
It’s funny how we forget these tools, isn’t it? Like, because you’re so used to it and you see it all the time, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind. But like I said, it sounds like a very instrumental tool, being able to track your time, then quote better based on that. So are you using that as well to like plan the entire project schedule out as well so that you can kind of give visibility to clients or is it more of an intern?
Peter Freeman:
Not as much. They have some limited, like GAD charts and all the rest of. But that’s, that’s an area I’m trying to crack at the moment. So I’m pretty interested in looking at your workflow with Asana and Instant Gantt. That area, as I said, with the growth side of things and the volume of work we’re doing, that’s becoming more of a pain point. So, yeah, yeah, finding the right mix of tools to do that without subscribing to 400 different.
Lee:
That is the problem. I mean, we found the happy medium with Asana and Instagram. The two of them work perfectly well together. Asana has actually launched a timeline, but it’s still way too basic. Instagram is made to integrate with Asana only and the Gantt charts that we can produce from that are phenomenal. There’s a whole video on that in the, in the community. You can watch that video as well, where I can share our process and our templates. But yeah, it’s. It’s really powerful project management. Good call, mate. You’re a legend. I’m glad we finally got to do this. People won’t know that me and you have had to cancel on each other a few times because of time zone differences and things going on. So it’s wonderful to find get to have this conversation. So, mate, all that’s left for me to say is thank you so much. Links are all in the show, Notes to work, etc and to Woof Media and to connect with Pete. So thank you mate, for your time. Wonderful day.
Peter Freeman:
See you inside.
Lee:
Fist bump. That’s cheesy ending, isn’t it?
Peter Freeman:
That’s terrible.
Lee:
Fist bump. Cheesy.
Peter Freeman:
Punch the camera.
Lee:
Punch the camera.
