Expert of the Month - Kostas Petrou - Ascend Digital
VIDEO: 47:13 mins
AUTHOR: Robert Craven & Kostas Petrou
In this GYDA Talks, Robert talks to Kostas Petrou. He is the founder of the creative agency, Ascend Digital. He fell involve with digital marketing 8 years ago and studied through the CIM (Chartered Institute Of Marketing) at Loughborough College. He then worked in- house for a few years learning and perfecting the art of marketing but very quickly realised that his skillset and passion was in digital marketing.
He then deep dived into disciplines such as SEO and Digital PR and quickly discovered that the way SEO agencies were doing things did not quite make sense to him.
Kostas found that many agencies were focusing purely on satisfying an algorithm instead of focusing on actual human beings and so immersed himself in what he calls Creative SEO. The art of combining SEO, Digital PR, Creative Content, data and a sprinkle of social media, to create the perfect search cocktail. The Ascend slogan is – Creativity In Search.
So, he decided to launch Ascend Digital in March (Yep, just when lockdown happened) with the understanding that businesses will very quickly need to adopt a digital approach to how they do business because during lockdown, that will be the only way to do business! One of Ascend’s first clients was an electrical contracting business in Nottingham and after just a 3 month period of working with them, they went from page 3 on google to ranking in the top 3 on page 1 and 10x their traffic! As a result doubling their revenue.
Since then Ascend have been working with businesses in Finance, Retail, Pharmaceuticals and more.
A refreshing interview with a start-up agency, full of enthusiasm and passion to make a difference.
Here’s what they discussed:
What are you known for?
What are you doing right now?
What was the spark that made you want to run an agency?
Where did you go for advice to start-up the agency?
What would you do differently?
How do you put together your business plan?
What do you measure in terms of KPIs?
How did you deal with COVID-19?
What does success look like?
What would more experienced agency owners say to you right now?
What would a ‘fit’ agency look like in 12 months?
Kostas’s recommendations/pearls of wisdom, golden nuggets.
Transcription:
Robert Craven 01:02
And hello, and welcome to the GYDA initiative talks. And today, I'm absolutely delighted to have with me Kostas Petrou, who runs a centre digital now, he is a bit different from our normal guests, because he's got a relatively new, maybe we may even describe it a startup agency, but I think it's gonna be really interesting to talk to someone at the beginning of their journey, firstly, to understand where they are, where they're coming from, what they're doing, and also to understand what the journey ahead for them is. So hello, Kostas.
Kostas Petrou 01:36
Hello, Robert, how are you doing?
Robert Craven 01:37
Absolutely great. We're absolutely delighted to have you on board. And it's gonna be a really good conversation, because it's known. As you know, most of the people who come on here are more experienced, it'd be really nice to have a different angle. My first question to you, just kicking off straight away, is what Kostas is known for?
Kostas Petrou 01:59
There's a few things, Robert, I'm known for, on a personal standpoint, I'm the son of a former British champion boxer. So it was very well known in the 80s. So that's one thing that's a personal standpoint. I'm also an Amazon Best Selling Author. So that is actually when I mean, I will get into more detail. That's when I actually fell in love with digital marketing, because I had to market myself back then. So yes. So those are the two main things on a kind of more personal stash professional standpoint. And, of course, being a startup has been locked down, you know, people that really start to pay a business when everyone else is locking down and shutting shop.
Robert Craven 02:45
Time when everyone's thinking it's the time to zag. And so right now, you're running Ascend, which has got like, three or four of you in the business at the moment. Is that right?
Kostas Petrou 02:57
That's correct. Yeah, me myself. So me and Chris, who comes from an accounting background, and I've called Jonathan, who has more of a digital PR type background.
Robert Craven 03:07
So how long have you been running? How long have you been going?
Kostas Petrou 03:10
We set up, believe it or not in March this year. And we all know what happened in March this year?
Robert Craven 03:18
That's absolutely perfect. So yeah, I remember March, I think we were doing open webinars every night for about seven people saying, I had a business with 25 people. We were doing hospitality, we were doing weddings and disappeared. So but actually, you know, it is totally the right time I've owned businesses in recession. It is easier in some senses, because you're going in the opposite direction. So it's easier to get noticed. It's easy to get discovered. And I think that, you know, too often what's become totally obvious. And what makes you different from the other agencies at the moment is everyone's waiting for the new normal to return as if it's ever going to be 2018 again, and hey, guys, it's not and you don't know what 2018 was like. So that sense you're way ahead of everyone. So there's always a sort of a spark there. I mean, I remember my very first business was at a cafe, and I remember sitting really clearly in a well known cafe in Bath, as the students looked at a piece of pizza and went, Oh my God, I don't believe this. This is like, you know, 10 pieces worth of cheese and flour and 10 pennies worth of tomato, and onions that's like 20 P or maybe 20 P to heat it. And they're charging three times 75. What a ripoff. I could do better than that. And I had that entrepreneurial aha moment. I could do better than that piece. So for you, what was the spark that took you from what you were doing before, to suddenly deciding you're gonna run a digital agency?
Kostas Petrou 05:08
So I started off in digital marketing, maybe seven, eight years ago, and it was noticing that I come from a sales background. So I was very target driven. And everything was about, you got to hit a figure, you got to have a target, you got to hit a figure, when I moved into the digital marketing sphere, if you like, especially agencies, there was a lack of, I couldn't quite understand this. There was no real focus target was more satisfying algorithm, especially in the SEO world. And you have to wait six to eight months, and so on and so forth. So there wasn't really a definitive laser like focus on what's next, what the step by step process would look like. And so I was told once, I don't know where I heard it, or maybe somebody told me it, but be the change you want to see in the world, somebody said to me, and so I could see there was a clear, definitive path that people weren't taking, as agency owners, there were certain things that wasn't happening. And I could see that a lot of people were talking SEO now there's one of the main things that I do is SEO, I will say that people are buying links, they were doing blogger, outreach, and all the usual stuff that you see day to day, and very few we're doing a combination of quality SEO and actually digital PR, and on a creative level and combining that together. And when I saw two things combined together, magic happened. You saw loads of backlinks hitting, you know, hitting clients, websites, and so on and so forth. And so you didn't need to go out and buy these blogger outreach backlinks, you didn't need to go out there and spend money on this, if you actually over bid for creativity about you, from a search point of view, you can get these backlinks organically and also drive 1000s. I mean, I've seen examples where a website 10 times its traffic by having one quality digital PR campaign. So I wanted to combine that together, I could see that wasn't happening very often. There were even agencies that were doing SEO, digital PR, they were doing it in two, almost two separate elements. And I wanted to combine that as one kind of under one roof. It's all part of the same goal ultimately, which is achieving goals driving rankings, driving traffic, but ultimately return on investment for the client, which is a number one thing they aim for.
Robert Craven 07:28
Okay, cool. I'll come back to that. But I guess my thing is just going back to startup mode, I mean, where did you? So you were employed at an agency, and then you went native is that right?
Kostas Petrou 07:42
I was working for a b2b van hire company. And I was working in the sales team. And there was a start a very new digital marketing team that had just come to the company. So that employed a few digital marketers. And they started working with some agencies. One of them was an SEO agency. And because I was having a lot of involvement, we're talking about small business. So as we know, in small businesses, you wear many hats. I mean, it wasn't just in sales, I was crossing over into marketing. And I could see the conversation between the digital marketing team, and the SEO agency. And I've considered frustrations from the client side, the frustrations that we were having. And I saw that there was a big gap there. And so after much mulling over thinking about how it could be improved, and again, looking at that change that I wanted to see. And then I eventually branched out and created that change myself with Ascend.
Robert Craven 08:44
What were the gaps that you felt weren't being covered by existing agencies?
Kostas Petrou 08:50
First and foremost, the first thing I noticed was, there was always a month one where the only thing that happened was an audit. And you'll be charged for that I mean, that I couldn't get my head around. I mean, you've been charged, full whack plus usually a startup fee, you know, working with the agency, just for an audit. And for me, I've completed audits they take maybe you know, the best of time. I think that forward, it can take a couple of days, if you're doing it flat out. I guess from a small agency perspective, like myself, we have the capacity to spend more or less focus on these things without having to go through two or three different teams. So you know, three of us can all focus on one goal, which is to get a quality audit produced. So I could see that companies will, you know, clients are being charged a lot of money in month one just for an audit. So I could see straight away that there was an opportunity to say why spend 1000 - 1500 pounds a month or whatever it may be for the first month just on an audit. Let's actually get the audit done within the first few days and start delivering within the first few weeks. Start seeing some tangible results happening within month one, rather than waiting for month two, month three, month four. So there was this, again, it was all about for me from a sales, kind of a sales mindset. We haven't got time to, you know, a lot of the companies I was speaking to during that time, I haven't gotten the money to give you just to produce an audit in month one. You know, we need to have results straight away, what can you do to make move the needle immediately? And that was our initial goal. We, you know, we targeted in month one, take restaurants that wanted to branch into takeaways, because we knew that they were lacking down, they weren't able to have people moving in. So it was all this that was combined together that enabled me to say, actually, you know, the gap in the market here, and let's kind of let's explore it further.
Robert Craven 10:42
Well, I certainly think that what's happened is that the COVID has made agencies have to redefine how they do what they do. So what we've got is we've got a bunch of agencies, so we remember 2018, it was so much more than 2019. It was so much fun. It was so easy. In retrospect, it was so easy. And that's how we do business. We are a hammer. Yeah, and everything is a nail. So we are going to push stuff through our cookie cutter that suits us. And if it suits us to spend month one, we're going to do the audit. And month two, we're going to make recommendations. And month three, we're going to that's cool. And I think that one of the things that COVID has done is it has created people like you who said, Well, that is how agencies run, but they don't have to run that way. Similarly, I think a whole lot of PPC agencies have recognised that being pure PPC is people don't wake up in the morning and say I want more PPC. Yeah, they wake up in the morning and say I want more customers. Does a client really care how you get a new customer whether it's SEO or PPC or content or PR or sending emails out or telesales? I'm not so sure they do. I think customers actually want more customers more better. Give me more better customer, I don't care how you do it. So I think it's been a real challenge to the digital agency community about how we deliver, that's great. So what does that have interest? I'd be curious to know, I'm gonna start up. I'm gonna run my own business. Where did you go for advice?
Kostas Petrou 12:26
Initially online, and then I started connecting with other agency owners. I'm hoping that the two names I'm going to mention here were my mentioning them but one of the most in the largest inspirations for me was speaking to the aironet impression in Nottingham. I've never met him in person because I've only spoken. I just sent out a blanket email to maybe five or six agency owners who I did some research on. I found that these guys established themselves in perhaps between a five to eight year period. I'm really well. And I wanted to get the blueprint, so to speak. And, you know, I'm not expecting him to share all their secrets. But Erin was very, very willing to give me a lot of advice. And from March till today, I would just say email me last night. We've been back and forth. And I've been asking him tons of questions. And he's been so happy to kind of help and another guy called Dan, who he actually set up his own agency not long back as well. So he's got a lot more experience as an agency from an agency background than I have. But um, but he started, I believe at a similar time to myself. So I've been asking them a lot of questions as well. And again, we're still talking to this day. So reaching out to people that have been there and done. It is my main thing. And obviously, I've been reaching out on the GY VA Facebook page. Asking questions there, getting good advice, good answers there. So, I mean, I don't need to reinvent the wheel, I just need to look at what people have done, and then try and try and improve it. And that's what I've been trying to do.
Robert Craven 14:24
And what would you and I know so March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, it's not been that long, but just already, you know, what would you have done differently if you knew what you knew now, what would you have done differently?
Kostas Petrou 14:42
I'm gonna be really transparent about this, Robert. So when I first started the agency, I got my first client and we wanted to get results quickly. So we could get a case study so we could prove that we could do it, you know, so we could prove that we were doing a good job. So we actually did a bit of Blackhat techniques in terms of getting backlinks. And yes, it worked. But in hindsight, I wouldn't have done it that way. So that was definitely one thing that was different in terms of how I dealt with getting results for my first client. But it was kind of, I need to get something done quickly. So I can go out to the market and show people what we can do. And now we've realised that's not the right way forward.
Robert Craven 15:26
It's quite interesting because, you know, there's an NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming thing, which is about, you know, fake it till you make it. It's just, yeah, behave as if you've run an agency employing people and talk, talk and walk the walk, and then lo and behold, you'll be able to do it. I actually think it's really disingenuous, because it's bordering on my opinions bordering on lying asleep. But it's not. So I've done this, it's like, behaving as if you have done it, and I totally get what you're doing, which is you having role models, and scraping them for whatever, for the better word, to actually get much out of them. And I actually think that one of the great joys of a startup is that you can say the unsayable, Think the unthinkable, do the undoable and say, I'm just starting, I didn't realise. Yeah, so when we created guide runners it's just a breath of fresh air to be able to just go to the audience. And so this is what we're trying to do. If we got it right, if we got it wrong. Tell us what you want from us. I think it gets harder. And I'm the man with the grey hair here. It gets harder and harder, especially as you become the authority or you're selling your authority, or you're selling your deep voice becomes harder to kind of wear L plates. And it's not the arrogance of use, it's the naivety of, or the innocence of the questions that you can ask. And that's the power. And I think, you know, going in and saying, Hi, I've just started a business, it's just like half a dozen questions, I'd like to ask you a lot. Don't want to sell you anything. I think people will reply to you. But they're not going to reply. If you say, Oh, we've been in business for 25 years, we'd like you to fill in a questionnaire that we know what's going to happen at the end of it, you're going to try and sell us.
Kostas Petrou 17:36
100%. I actually, I've got an example behind that as well, I actually reached out to a large brand a couple of days ago, you may have, I'm sure you would have heard of them misguided. And I reached out to one of the decision makers there who I would need to speak to if I was to pitch to them. And that actually said to them. If you were looking to kind of partner up with an agency, and ask them this question, would you consider a small agency? Or did you know you were looking to partner with large, you know, national agencies and went into a list of questions, you know, what would you be looking for in a pitch? And I'm not necessarily interested whether that ruins the opportunity to work with them in the future, because there's so many brands I can work with, but if I can get the mindset of, you know, one large brand, who ultimately, a lot of them have the same kind of rulebook if you like, if I can get some good guidance on that I can use that move forward when I pitch to other larger brands. And they replied to me, and it was really good.
Robert Craven 18:40
No, I think that innocence is just lovely. And I think a couple of things. I think in COVID, you can talk to more people than you ever could because people aren't networking the way they used to, you know that you're not getting to a conference, you're not in a bar, you're not bumping into people so people will give you half an hour. So I think that's the first thing I think. And I think the second thing is that people are, in my experience, incredibly generous. And as long as you I have to say there are some RFAs, you know, from one particular organisation who said, we'd like to come and talk about business opportunities. And I say to them, if you come into my house, and you meant asked me the value of the house or the value of my business, I will kick you out of the house straightaway. And they walk in they go, this is the nice house, how much they're worth. And you say, that's the door. I told you, you just wasted my time and I'm not prepared to work with your brand. And I think that people are just fed up with that. That kind of Hi, I saw your profile on LinkedIn. I think we should be in each other's network. Yes. 20 seconds later. I can get you to number one on Google or whatever it is. And if people say, you know, I'm startup I'm really interested in talking to people aren't you have like 10 minutes of your time to feel understood just to understand what your buying criteria I don't want to sell you anything, I just want to understand what your buying criteria are, I want to understand what it is you're looking for so that we can create a bit. And then you can have a conversation afterwards. And I think, you know, one of the things that's interesting is that the more established agencies are trying to figure out what their clients want. Yeah, from within their own boardroom, if that makes sense. And you can't find out from within your own boardroom, you need to go and you need to understand what the client's problems are and how to solve them. So how did you just go and get them back on track? Did you write a business plan? Is there a document? Is there a marketing plan? What's going on there?
Kostas Petrou 21:09
I created a business plan initially. And then Chris, my business partner, looked at it and he challenged certain things, which I asked him to do. Because I don't want to know The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. So he challenged and said, What about A, B and C? Can we do this differently? What will happen if this happens? So I looked at the business plan to restructure it, and the business plan went from initially targeting. So in the very beginning, up down, it was targeting local, local restaurants who were going to transition to takeaways. That was the initial business plan. The reason purely for that was because that was the opportunity in that moment. So we looked at that opportunity and small boutique, retail, online stores, who wanted to, you know, who wanted to kind of take that to the next level, because everyone's going to be buying online. So we came up with some ideas of locked down loungewear, and so on, and created, you know, kind of a whole thing behind them. And they already had the clothes and stuff, you know, they already had the range, it was just how you market the message. So we haven't put a spin on that and don't really do well. So it was a case of we did produce a business plan initially, but it's changed over the course of the past four to six months, because now we're moving into a more brand focused on what you know, we want to focus on building a brand, because we realise that's what the search engines really want. They're not interested in you just satisfying their algorithm. So we changed the business model to run been at the centre. And then you've, as I say, initially it was local, we moved from local to more national client base and are looking for more national plants. And we do have focuses but we're not niching in a sector per se, but we are focusing on sectors as we go along. So right now the focus is on the sporting brand. So the business model is basically saying, we're not going to restrict ourselves to one specific area, but we will focus on a specific area for a specific period of time. And then we can be flexible. If something spins off an opportunity to spin off in other areas, we can look at doing that. And maybe when we grow it bigger, we will then niche into something that actually appears to be the thing we do best that.
Robert Craven 23:20
Nice a lot of it says there's a book called thought leaders practice by Peter Cook, not the comedian. And they talk about taking a piece of IP. So that could be SEO, PPC, brand search, whatever it is, you're taking a platform, webinar, presentations, facilitation peer to peer one to one coaching, consulting, training facilitation. And then client, marketing director, finance director, owner director. And he says that what you do is a general thought business but applies also to you as you take the one piece of IP you want to sell, you select a platform, it's a bit like a slot machine that you want. And then you take the target customer you want to work out. And once you've established we want to sell this via this to these people. His argument is you work on it for one quarter. And at the end of the quarter, you pull the handle again, look for your next best. I was different. Go for that. And his thinking behind that is that it's really easy to get 100,000 pounds of trading because you only need two or three clients to actually get that piece going. But 50% will fail. So therefore you need to top up the hopper with a new niche line and keep that that's really I mean, I really like that. I think that's really excellent. So within the business do you have KPIs? Do you have monthly board meetings? Do you have quarterly meetings? How do you actually run that? Because it's like thinking back to a startup. It's also Oh, my God, what's happening today? Oh, wow, we've never had an interview with a board. Oh, wow, this is I've never been invited. So everything's new all the time. So do you have those kinds of processes in places ?
Kostas Petrou 25:30
We have them loosely as three people, we don't have board meetings, and so on what we have this agenda. So each week on a Monday morning, before our call today, we all jumped on a call. And we all planned out what we're going to do for today, what we're going to do for the week, and obviously, if anything urgent comes up in between, then we react to that. But ultimately, we have a schedule. So we all know what our tasks are for that week. We've got some clients that we're working on. And we've got some really exciting projects that we're working on at the moment. So each individual person, myself, Chris, and John, we're all working in our own little niche if you like to combine all of it together. So we've all got our weekly schedule every week, we do the same thing. So we have a weekly schedule, at the end of the week, we'll have a catch up to say how it goes. But we talk every day. So it's not really necessary. Well, we have to kind of have a roundup of how events come because they kind of know anyway, because we speak in every day. People you know, Chris calls me for advice constantly. So we're constantly bouncing ideas off each other all the time. So there's no need for such a rigid structure, so to speak right now.
Robert Craven 26:41
I am going to offer additional questions. I would add, I would add two questions, simply because if the questions aren't there, then things can get out of hand. So Mike, I would ask three questions, which would be Monday morning. Hi, what's on your to- do list? Question two, What's in front of my mind? Question three. Are there any elephants in the room? So the to-do list is, oh, I've got seven things to do for three clients, I need to do them by the end of the day, and I've only got six hours to do it. Cool. What's front of mind is, I'm really thinking that our reporting system isn't up to speed. And I'm really trying to figure out how we can make that happen. And that's interesting. And the elephant in the room. There is actually because we've not discussed it, I'm starting to think that I should be paid more. Or whatever it is. My point is that the elephant, we want to knit the elephants in the room really, really quickly. And the what's in front of mind thing kind of gets them to tell you what's kind of bugging them? And those questions for me. Flush stuff out. free piece of advice. Okay.
Kostas Petrou 28:02
Absolutely. Makes sense.
Robert Craven 28:04
So I'm still intrigued, really, what does success look like? I mean, do you have in three years time we want to be 30 people or is it in one year's time I still want to be trading?
Kostas Petrou 28:20
I'm a very ambitious person. So the goals are large. But again, from a sales background, I like to plan every step in great detail. So it's not going to be a case of I've got the you know, I've got a 10 year goal. And I don't see anything else in between, and I'm just running, you know, blindly towards that goal. It's not like that at all. I've got a really large goal, which is within five years, I want to be turning over 1.5 million pounds. That's the goal. Maybe some people may think it's unrealistic. Yes, I don't have a black book behind me. But I look at agencies such as right at seven who, you know, I think we spoke off camera before about rose at seven. They do have perhaps a black book that they worked with when they started up. But ultimately, there's still a lot of clients yet to acquire that they probably didn't have that relationship with. And they've done that through creativity and doing quality work. So yes, we have a big goal of 1.5 million in the first five years. And then after the first five years moving on from there, we will look at the goals and say where do we want to go next? I'm not looking at any exit strategy at the moment. But it's not saying that I'm not adverse to moving in the future. It's just something that at the moment, I want to build something long, sustainable. I want to build a culture. I want to build something that's special and it sounds a bit cheesy and whatever. But I want to build an agency where people love to come to work. I'm used to hate going into work and I don't want people to have that. So when I do build a team and grow a team, I want them to come to work and be happy there and if I can try and find ways of doing that by letting them be creative. Let them have a voice within the business. That's what I will do.
Robert Craven 30:05
So, I have this thing you've probably heard me say that you know, what makes the winners different from the losers? I meet people all the time you say, Yeah, we set up the same time as Google. How many people were? 25. Okay, well, Google did a bit better than you didn't know. The difference between the winners and losers, especially where you are, it's kind of a bit like that thing where you know, that thing where you look at, when you hit the golf ball, it's like a half degree now makes no difference. But like 500 yards away is a huge difference. And one of the things I find really interesting is if when you look at the winners, and you say to them, so why did you win, and it's always in these, most of these dreadful books, which kind of go we had a strategy, believe in our culture, we wanted to do things differently. We had a passion, and we believed in the future. And he Okay, right. And that's why you grew your business to 100 people within five years, and you sold it out for 10 million pounds. And that's why you're now on your own private island. But the interesting thing is, if you talk to the losers, if you go to the graveyard of startups, and say, when he started up what were you trying to do is, we had a strategy to plan to have passionate emotions. But we got screwed over by a client who refused to pay us but we had a member of staff who screwed us over, but it didn't come up. But COVID hadn't. But blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now the intention, and the passion and the strategies are almost identical between the winners and the losers. But it seems that luck is what separates them out. Because I know someone who created Facebook before Facebook came out. But sold it for a pittance because wrong time wrong place wrong, blah, blah, blah. But it was the script for Facebook. And I just think it's fascinating that we look at these books by the inverted commas of successful people, without recognising that actually their script for success is the same as the script of the people in the graveyard, if that makes sense. And I'm not in any way being disrespectful because I think anyone listening to you, okay. I remember when I felt like I remember when I wanted to run, I wanted to run a place that people wanted to work where people wanted to come to work. Now what my staff don't understand now is so important. There's so much money in there so difficult. So it's wonderfully, it is wonderfully refreshing to hear that. And you know, in the past, we've created programmes where we have literally startups with blue chip companies to remind the blue chip companies, you know, you want to make the change, just go do it. Well, how do you do it? Well, what you do is, you just get a paintbrush out and you paint the room blue, you buy a pool table and put it in the room and the big companies go, Oh, God, well, that would need to go to board and then it needs to go to support and report to LA and then LA. And it's just like, Oh, why didn't you go and do it? And the wonder of where you are, which is you want to put up prices? Or put up prices? How did you do that? Well, they're just 10% more than lured to report monthly, how do you do that? We just report monthly. I mean, what's the problem? Where is the problem? And I just think that's just fantastic. I remember we had a client, a hotel client, and I'd had some MBA students when I worked at Warwick. And one of the MBA students said, So tell me, her name is Trina, what is your communication strategy in the hotel? And she said, we talk to each other.
Kostas Petrou 34:10
I think people like to make things more complicated than what they are. I think keeping it simple is actually a thing of today what is needed today more than ever. I asked my dad who was a successful athlete, and he had to work so hard to build up from nothing to become a champion. I said to him, what was the one thing you would say that made you a champion? You know, there's so many 1000s of them out there trying to do it what made you different? And he says to me, to be honest, it's one one thing so that more than anything else and it's relentless consistency. He said, just be consistent. When you don't want to do something, because you're tired or whatever it may be just do it because that's when everyone else is quitting. Just keep on pushing yourself.
Robert Craven 35:11
So what's the difference between the champions, and the non champions, is that the champions recognise that grind? Willing to invest in that grind in order to make that happen. Now, I love that you're talking about that because I think that one of the things for me about successful agencies is and I call it in praise of the dull, boring stuff. It's the agencies, because it's great doing the sexy stuff and making the sale and hitting the ROI for the client, and so on and so forth. But actually, it's the dull, boring stuff, which is making sure you've got all your paperwork in place, making sure you're measuring on a weekly, monthly basis, making sure that you're showing your clients love consistently, and making sure you're choosing your star. And it's really, I think, COVID has demonstrated that it's really easy for agencies to got really smug about that. And I spoke last month with Jeff RAM, have a look at that interview. He talks about celebrity service. And it's a lovely saying, which really hit me he said if and I know it's a bit dated, but I get with me. If Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt was to come to visit your agency, what would you do? You'd have the best coffee, you can clean the place and paint the room, you polish everything you'd use, you're really on top of it. So why don't we do that for everyone else? Post start up. Agencies inevitably do good enough rather than going the extra mile.
Kostas Petrou 36:47
Yeah. 100% actually sent to a restaurant takeaway cloud last week, make your service and your food Instagrammable. And I think having that kind of sums it up. Because if you can do that people will want to talk about you and share what you do so 100%.
Robert Craven 37:04
So it's a bit of a different question. What do you think of people listening to you? The agency owners tend to be 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 Staff. What do you think they would be saying to you right now?
Kostas Petrou 37:26
From an advice point of view as in to advise me? Well, from speaking to agency owners in that position, and beyond that, it's to have a specific focus on who you're targeting, that seems to be the one thing I'm hearing the most. That really is, the one thing that people keep telling me is to have, even if you're not been a niche in that sector, forever, just have a focus on something that you can just laser like focus on. And so I've tried taking that on board. And it was a bit of a confusion with that rubber, because I was asking the question, What should I do, to kind of take this to the next level, and everyone was saying specialise, or have something that you really focus on for the next six months. And then I would look at startup agencies, and a lot of them weren't doing that. And yet, for example, are looking at rise at seven and then within 1.5 minutes, then somebody says to me, stop looking at what these agencies are doing, because they did have a black book, they did have people they could contact straight away, they have 10 - 50 years experience in the industry, just because they haven't had an agency of their own doesn't mean they haven't been around for longer than what you are. So for you to make yourself stand out, you've got to do something different. And by doing that, you've become an expert in one area. And so that's what everyone's been, that's what everybody's been telling me who actually, you know, who own these agencies have 3, 10, even 50 Plus stuff. So that's been the main thing.
Robert Craven 38:51
So I push back on that. So the usual question, which is, you know, why should people bother to buy from you when they can buy from the competition when the competition is smarter, faster, bigger, brighter, friendlier, ruder, whatever it is. So what do you do? How do you reply to that question?
Kostas Petrou 39:13
I was on a call last week with somebody who said to me, what do you do? And I said, I speak to 100 agency owners a week. And he says to me, so tell me about yourself and what you do. And I said to him, we don't approach, we are purely an SEO agency. That's what we do. And we're doing a bit of social but mainly SEO. And we don't approach SEO, like 99.9% of your agencies. We approach SEO with a different angle. We approach SEO and have spoken to so many agency owners now when they have the same vision for SEO, and it's very 10 years ago. And what we're looking to do is look at what's going to happen moving forward. So I studied and really looked at what Google wants from search, what do they want people to be doing? And it wasn't Buying backlinks it wasn't doing this and that was what 95-97% they were doing it was building a brand. So our goal now is we work with clients to build a brand within search. So that involves digital PR. So it's creating pieces of content, interactive pieces of content or not on their website that we can go out to journalists and neighbours we want to talk about. And by doing that, instantly, drives traffic through these publications. If you land a link on BBC, you trap, it's gonna go through the roof. But that also has a direct impact on SEO because if you get a backlink from BBC, your SEO is gonna move the needle in search dramatically. And alongside that, you've got the technical SEO experts. So I've been in technical SEO for this, that was the thing I really specialise in from seven years ago was technical SEO. So focusing on making sure that's all in place, but everything driven by data. So those three things combined, was what we weren't seeing in the marketplace very often. I worked directly with an agency who said, you want it, you want backlinks, we'll go and buy 200 of them for you. So that's so often and it was like we don't, we just don't want that. So we might not be everyone's cup of tea, but we don't want to be.
Robert Craven 41:19
Cool. So it's interesting, isn't it? Because by definition, you're moving faster. Nothing's set in stone. You're competing with agencies who are I mean, they're not necessarily oil tankers, but they're moving slower. They've got systems, they've got processes, they've got sign off and approval, and they've got their way of doing stuff. What do you think a fit agency might look like in 12 months time? Now, the backstory to that question is everything is moving. You know, every part of the jigsaw is moving video. Yes, no video advertising? Yes. No SEO content, PR, PPC. Google was the only gig in town five years ago, clearly no longer is. It's been, you know, for 10 years, we've been told this is a year of mobile to last five years, I've been told this is a year of video, I'd been triggered about how you imagine a fit agency looking like maybe in 12 months time with all these Tik Tok all these moves going on social media.
Kostas Petrou 42:46
For me, from an SEO agency standpoint, I see two major things. I see this shift from traditional, as I mentioned earlier, traditional SEO type work into a more creative SEO type work. So agencies will have to move forwards and actually offer more than what they're offering to clients. Because this is another thing that we offer from agencies speed, I can get a call from a client. And that's just something immediately. And I think you touched upon that just a moment ago, where the larger agencies have to go through three or four different teams. And we don't have that so we can get something done one week, two weeks quicker than the average agency, because we can respond immediately, which makes us obviously, at this moment, much more responsive. But in regards that's a winner, where do we see agencies in the next 12 to 18 months? Definitely they have to move into a more creative element of how they deliver their work. And also having a more client focused element rather than looking at what they do good. What is it the client does good because ultimately, you're marketing that client, so you need to focus on what they do well, and you're going to put a message onto the forefront. It's not all about what we do well, as marketers, we have got to look at what they do well, because that's the message we're going to look to portray for them. And that's what we tried to do. And it's having two ears and one mouth so to speak. But listen to us as much as we speak. We digest the information and we try to create campaigns based on what they do well. What's the USPS as a client?
Robert Craven 44:11
Love it, love it, love it. So I guess my question, final question, frags our time is up. My final question is What are your pearls of wisdom? What are the one liners that you work from our work? What are the golden nuggets? What are the things that you'd like to share? I'd be really intrigued to know what your replies.
Kostas Petrou 44:45
Okay, so about eight, nine years ago, I was desperate to speak to James Caan from Dragons Den. As he was in it. He's an investor I'm sure you probably would have heard of him. And something that I've never been fearful of is rejection. I mean, I called him 36 times in one day. And eventually the reception staff got so fed up with me that they put me through to him. And I spoke to him directly on the phone. And I said to him, I want investment, what is it you're looking for to invest in? And what do you want from a business you're going to invest in? And he said, first read my book, because I've got a lot of information on what I want and what I see in businesses. And secondly, once you've read my book, I want you to create a plan whereby you observe the masses and do the opposite. He said, That's my number one thing he said. If you observe the masses and do the opposite, because if you just keep doing what everyone else is doing, you're going to be no different to everyone else. So he said, that was the one thing that stuck with me said, observe the masses and do the opposite. And the other thing was, as I mentioned earlier, the one thing that my dad says to me was relentless consistency, and do everything small. Excellent. That's what he said to me. So all the small things that people cut corners on, you get the person to do them exceptionally well. And all those small things will add up to a much bigger vision.
Robert Craven 46:09
Love it. Absolutely love it. Well, Kostas, you know, you certainly want to watch and it's gonna be awesome in three in five years time to get back to this interview and see that you've knocked it out of the park. Or dot any permutation of the other stuff. So we wish you every luck. It's absolutely great talking to you because it's real, a really refreshing insight into why we do what we do. And I just think that too many agencies. They run by Thai brains, mainly men who forgotten the energy and enthusiasm and the passion that you have when you start up. Kostas, thank you so much for being an absolutely excellent interview.
Kostas Petrou 46:58
Thank you very much. Thank you, Robert. Great, thank you for your time.