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How do world-class agencies continue to grow profitably and hit their goals, even through the choppy waters and challenges of agency life?
How do leaders like Tiffany Sauder, Marcus Sheridan, Jay Acunzo, Shama Hyder, David C. Baker, Nikole Rose, and Zeb Evans think?
Join Agency Journey host Jakub Grajcar as he interviews agency operators and leaders to share insights, actionable tips, and hilarious stories from the builders who live in the agency trenches.
Each episode focuses on crucial aspects of growing an agency like building the right team, delegation, project management, client success and retention, and operating frameworks like EOS.
Brought to you by ZenPilot: we help lead your agency through the final project management implementation you’ll ever need. Book a call to learn more at ZenPilot.com/Call.
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All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray MacKenzie from ZenPilot. Today we've got the pleasure of bringing on a friend, William Ferreira from an agency, a social buff in the UK. William, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. I'm excited to dig in here today. Tell us a little about social, like the agency right now. Where are you guys? Where are you headed?
So agency right now, we are year four in trading. So we launched early 2019 as a business. We've kind of gone through a lot of change, primarily due to COVID, adapting to the market demand of COVID. We had initially acknowledged as a social media agency, which is why I'm called Social Buff, but because of our backgrounds as kind of entrepreneurs, we
and the vehicle that we had built in 2019 to help primarily retail brands pivot into e-commerce or help e-commerce direct consumer brand scale and purely out of demand, we kind of grew the business from that and became a full service direct consumer e-commerce marketing agency. And kind of since then, we've kind of grown a lot in different ways. You know, we scaled to becoming
25 man team during COVID and then looked at kind of how we wanted to scale a business that was a little bit more sustainable, but also created deeper impact and produced better results for the clients that we worked with. So kind of restructured, scaled back, doubled down on what's really important to us as an agency and what do we actually want to deliver to our clients, which ultimately was increasing revenue and business growth through performance marketing growth initiatives.
And since then, we've kind of taken performance marketing and included a variation of different services that kind of help support that. So eCommerce Solutions is now a Shopify partner, as well as content production. You know, basically being the backbone to our performance marketing and achieving better results. Year ahead, I think very, very simple. And we want to sustainably grow, build better brand recognition, not just in the UK, but globally as well.
Um, and it's separate ourselves as kind of the go-to growth partner for, uh, small to medium size e-commerce businesses looking to scale. Makes sense. Uh, on the performance side, is it still a big chunk? Um, this is primarily meta, mostly Facebook, Instagram, or you guys, um, are there other channels that you're loving? So the page so short at the moment is predominantly meta and TikTok, um, some Pinterest.
Um, we are very proficient in PPC, so, um, particularly searching, shopping, um, and, uh, email marketing, which seems to be kind of those three paired together seem to be the sweet spot for the skating e-commerce brands at the moment. Yep. He's using Clivio for that email. Clivio partner as much as we can, obviously I feel that a majority of the brands that we work with at the moment.
have recently transitioned or are using it, but as a platform, I think the same with Shopify. Both platforms are becoming the kind of go-to platforms for e-commerce businesses, but we're still seeing a lot of digital transformation, you know, migration from one platform to the other. So a lot of the work that we do at the moment is essentially helping with foundational work across what the best platform partner is. So yeah, we're seeing a lot of that change at the moment.
It's interesting to see that space just continue to evolve. I mean, just like a lot of spaces in this industry, but from an agency perspective, like if someone says they're doing an e-comm email over the last three years, like that's on Klaviyo almost for sure. Yeah. Klaviyo has obviously gotten ambitious with their pricing more so. And so now you've got like agencies and they've just paid attention like in my world, I'm talking to a lot of agency owners.
And the buzz is like, man, I wish that there's another platform and people are trying a bunch of different platforms, building different platforms. And so there's a little bit of like, uh, you know, uh, rebellion against the Clego kind of having the market cornered for a little bit of time. Yeah. But then if you look at what are general econ brands doing, like there's still a huge amount of growth in that Clego space. It's interesting to watch some of the, like, you get the agency circle and then you've got the end customer circle. And there's, yeah, yeah, I think.
Definitely from an e-comm standpoint, the space is changing quite quickly, but I'm also seeing a bit of a monopoly happening. So obviously platforms, platform to platform kind of integrations and partnerships, you know, essentially making it as difficult for the customer or the, you know, the e-comm owner as possible to move to something else because it creates that ripple effect of issues. Yeah. So clever from the platforms.
And I guess ultimately if the e-combrad is performing well, then they don't need to worry about the cost, but you know, especially in startup scale upstage, I think we're seeing a lot where, you know, businesses are looking to pivot and find other solutions, but it's quite a difficult market to compete against, to be honest, in terms of what you can do with those platforms outside of, you know, I guess the most popular ones, but I think there's a couple creeping up. And I guess it's the same with how Figma has kind of taken over the, the editing space at the moment.
most of our team has moved over to that from Adobe and we're seeing, yeah, software in general, I think there's a lot of great options coming out where they're consolidating, you know, basically what you'd work across multiple platforms and software into one place. So convenience is key, I think, for, you know, both the agency and Brandside. Right. It's definitely true. Just on the tour side, the everyone.
ridiculed Adobe for a 20 billion acquisition of acquisition of a Of Sigma. Yeah, but I mean singler really was in a lot of these teams eating their lunch in terms of design so in some sense just a It was just need to protect our MRR and so we're gonna buy them as like the hedge against the turn that they were saying Yeah, I'm sure there's right upsides what um What is the sales motion look for you guys, how are you acquiring customers?
Honestly, I'd say up until probably around 2021, a lot of it, I'd say 100% of it was referral based. And I owned an agency previous to Social Buff. I consulted in between both agencies. So I had a good network of consumer brands and there was, you know, a good demand. So I think that kind of helped grow the business, especially during COVID. And
In hindsight, it was probably also a negative effect was the fact that we didn't build brand as an agency because we focused so much on personal brand leveraging new business. I think what we focused on over the last 12 months is investing in the right channels and the right strategy to help build a brand as an independent entity that would be recognized in the market. So the last phase of that, which
and it's happening in the next couple of months is we're rebranding and repositioning slightly. And that would be the final kind of stage of that. Most recently is working with the generation partner that leverages primarily email marketing, so data core access to database, whether that's software. So being able to identify, for instance, Shopify brands in the UK, US, Europe, and then ultimately
determining a cold outreach campaign that would be attractive or potentially get them to opt into Discovery call. And at the moment, what we're seeing is a lot of brands are looking for what I would say consolidation. So they're working for different agencies. They want to work with one, which makes us quite attractive to smaller e-commerce businesses. So we do a lot of consultancy, a lot of auditing.
And I think that's really helping with our new business wins in comparison to other agencies that we compete against because purely because we understand the business model and we put the business first over, you know, the individual channels that we offer as an agency that manages them. And I think to a lot of founder businesses and most of them are, or at least kind of startup founding team businesses.
They want people who don't just know how to run paid advertising to generate sales. They actually want people who can look at the P&L, challenge it, look at forecasting, challenge that, understand what leaders you need to pull to scale an e-commerce business. So we always kind of look at business first and then everything else second. And so combined with obviously generating those great leads and our, I'd say, unique approach to sales, which is
You know, we want to focus on quality, not quantity in terms of the partners that we bring on. Um, I think it allows us to unpack and add a lot more value than, um, our competitors do at the moment.
That's awesome to hear. I think we got a question around the outreach side into as deep as it sounds like you're going in strategy. Because I think you could put us in a similar bucket. And you guys from the outside, an agency might be like, or I'm sorry, an in client might think, oh, here's my Shopify partner, here's my Clidio guys, here's my like meta ads team or whatever. And what you're saying is, like we actually go deeper than that. We can help you.
running, like there's no point scaling an offer if it's not profitable for you. All the, all the classic mistakes in Ecom. And in our business, it's a lot of the same thing. We're known by a lot of folks as, Hey, if we're looking for ClickUp help, Sempilots, the largest ClickUp solutions partner, they're the, the first ones that the highest rated ones, like it's my ClickUp partner. And the reality is, is ClickUp is kind of the, like, that's the front door. That's the way to find out about us. Um.
But behind the scenes, we're helping agencies run better businesses, um, figure out how to get more productive, get more profitable, get more healthy. Um, as a team and ClickUp is the tool that we do it just like Shopify is the tool that you help us through it. Like the, um, the whole toolbox ClickUp by itself doesn't solve the problem. It's the combination of the tooling and the process and that. Yeah. So, but you take that depth of strategy and expertise that you have, and then you run, uh, cold outreach.
to an audience that needs it and bridging the gap between, hey, I've got two lines to get your attention and bring you in. And then I need to open up the type of quality conversation. How has that experience been where someone's like, fine, I'll give you the 15 minutes on a discovery call to then bridge the gap to, hey, can we actually get into your P&L and unpack what's really going on? So what I'm noticing more now than I did back in 2019 is I'd say there's been a
elevated freelancers who kind of basically single-man agencies that are usually specialist in one channel. And I would say it's kind of the online business mentality. And then you've got kind of your smaller agencies established and then you've got your bigger agencies that normally have good market equity and great online IP. And what I'm finding is our biggest battle is competing with...
bigger ones that are ultimately going to be the preferable choice because they have a great reputation, they have years and years of experience, they've got awards. But then also on the flip side, we have is kind of these single individual agencies or kind of remote businesses where it just feels like there isn't a lot of professionalism or isn't as well polished. And trust me, I've been there, I understand, you know,
When you've got a closed business, you got to do everything you can, especially when you're first starting out. But I think what that's doing is putting, uh, it's making call and outreach harder and harder where you used to have, I mean, speaking from experience, I used to have one or two messages a week. Now I have 10 to 20 messages a day offering me services. And so it's how do you separate yourself from the noise? Um, and to give us some simple tips to agencies, I think, you know, again, this is why we want to focus on building our.
brand IP as an agency versus my personal brand is, my personal brand could get us through the door. So, you know, my LinkedIn, for instance, there's a lot of press and there is kind of mentions of awards or, you know, what I'd call kind of my verification tech, which is, you know, mentioned in Forbes or, you know, award-winning entrepreneur or whatever that might be. So there's social proofing there on a, what I'd call commercial level. So,
those people aren't going to look at your Instagram, they're going to look at your LinkedIn. So it's making sure that that's well polished. And then also there's a consistency across the team. So all of my team members will have LinkedIn banners that are consistent or essentially job descriptions or descriptions of the agency. And I think a lot of people, especially starting out, don't think about these things. It's kind of where's the brand IP outside of a good looking website. And a lot of them actually don't have good looking websites either. And I think
starting out, a lot of people don't think they need to prioritize it. They just focus on an inbound, sorry, but you know, an outbound kind of new generation technique can just double down on sales calls, which I think works in a certain period of time, especially when you first start. What I've noticed recently with cold outreach is essentially being able to leverage bigger brands or case studies of previous work and then basically combine those with.
what I'd call that personal IP. So two sentences is, we've partnered with X brand in this category that might be a globally recognized brand or a challenger brand that's got a lot of attention. And on a personal level, then talking about the personal achievements, you know, award-winning entrepreneur or mention in this, or, you know, not exactly director in this company, which if they look it up as just raised.
million pounds. So it's kind of layering what I'd call the blue verification tip that you have on Instagram through obviously digital IP. And I feel like there's actually not as many businesses doing that as you would expect. And that's definitely helped us. I'd also say being a little bit tongue in cheek, it's a British kind of approach, but almost making it
feel like I'm texting you versus sending a professional email. So the script is very casual, almost like a, you know, I'm here to help you not the other way around. And therefore kind of inclines that person to, um, to engage. And then I think the final one is adding a piece of value. So usually again, it's leveraging your time and your personal value and sense of brand perception. So saying I'm willing to, you know, give 15 to 30 minutes of my time for a free consultation.
or we're willing to audit your e-commerce store and give feedback on how you could better perform and, you know, no strings attached. So it's kind of layering those different, I'd say, brand IP with a clear hook and value proposition that is really attractive and doing that in two sentences is hard. So you have to split tests and tradition angles, but it is really effective. Yeah, that's cool. I think the point that you made as well, like where is the transition point?
for some of these brands where it naturally makes sense. If you've got a ton of success competing against the one person show where the, you know, originally they got bought by the brand because that was the budget option. And so I'm gonna do the thing that everyone's telling me I have to run Facebook ads, like, okay, I'll go find the cheapest person I can go to do that. And then they grow to a point where, okay, we got to add in retention marketing, and add in whatever else. Yeah. So yeah, I think if you can gear towards what's the transition point. Yeah.
And for us, a lot of that transition point is, and we've got kind of like a couple of different types of brands. You've got the couple hundred percent agency or a hundred plus percent agency and their transition tools, or this is a big initiative, you know, this is a three month, six month, like, Hey, we're going to, we're going to make a big push around process orientation, how we work and efficiency, but you've got a lot of the folks in the 10 to 20% range.
who are like, hey, I'm at the point where I can't do anymore. As a founder, I need my head of ops. And usually the first head of ops that people hire, this is also their first time doing head of ops. Same thing as why we hire one person agencies. It's like, hey, this person was affordable or they're with me and they had an inclination for this. And so I really need that person to become legit in a relatively short period of time if that's gonna be the right investment. So finding those transition points is really important in terms of what do you then message around? So I think that's helpful. What do you guys?
Um, if we stay on the off side and go back to tools, are there one or two lesser known tools that, um, that power your, yeah, lesser number, like what are the key pieces in your tech stack? Through us there, there isn't, I actually say that the problem that we have is we've previously had kind of an overstimulation of too many tools. So I think that's the, actually the key issue I found is
And, you know, I had a, a consultant that came into the business last year, and a good friend of mine who had run bigger businesses and he made a joke saying that the way we were operating was if we're a hundred million company. And, um, you know, and actually that was a, a negative to how we need to operate. We need to be a lot leaner and more agile. So what we've actually recently done is scaled everything back. Uh, you know, we're using a tool for everything and what we've.
looked at is how do we simplify that down to essentially using, I'd say now, four key tools from an operations standpoint. So, your basic is Slack, big advocate of Google Suite. So, Slack, Google Suite, Google Hangout, Gmail, and so on. And then internal, what I'd call operating system, which covers task management,
uh, filing SOPs is obviously your bread and butter, which is ClickUp. And that's the most recent transition we've made. And then externally facing for clients, we actually leverage Airtable. So separating Airtable and ClickUp, I think was a good decision because I think it caught up mentalizes the team's attitude towards the two systems. We could go as far as integrating and merging Airtable into ClickUp, but I think we've got a very kind of visual and customizable content system.
that the clients have access to. So I'd say in terms of our go-to tech stack, those are the core kind of components. Back end, we have a couple of other stuff from an HR standpoint. So Charlie HR is really great. But yeah, that was actually my ops director. He comes from a tech background and kind of looked at how we operated as a business and wanted to make it more agile, more efficient, and streamlining.
communication, coordination, organization. So I think we went from about 15 different pieces of software down to the now four being our day-to-day use, which has completely transformed how we operate and how quickly we can work. That's awesome. Two follow up questions out of that one. What do you guys use for a CRM? So CRM is pipe drive. Pipe drive, again,
way I think and this is their way I advocate this for other people but usually when it comes to software it's more about the UXUI design than actually the software itself. I'm terrible and if it's not minimalist then it's not visually compelling so I really really struggled with using other CRM systems and because I felt they were over complicated for what I needed which is basically a dashboard to visually identify deal flow.
And then a CRM system working for a lot via email and book calls. And that's basically it. So again, we used other platforms in the past, but, um, pipe drives has been the, been the easiest one we've used. Um, and then from all kinds of tasks based deal flow management, we actually used a click up integration so I can, I can manage all the tasks for new business deals from pipe driving as well. Cool. That's awesome. And then the, like the spicy question, the obvious question is.
What are some of the tools that got cut? Because I think this could be an inspiration for a lot of adolescents. I think there was a lot of tools that got cut applying facing tools. So social media management software. Um, and I think the biggest problem about being an agency that is full service for e-commerce businesses is you've almost got to operate as an e-commerce business yourself, um, and implement the same way of thinking and the same way.
working as them, but across multiple brands. So actually what I found was similar to our internal tools than our external tools in terms of what's client facing or what was aiding client delivery versus how we operate and organize ourselves as an agency. It was the same attitude. We had software here for social media, software here for email, web, analytics, data. So finding software that essentially integrates that as much as possible. So on a
kind of a basic level Google Data Studio has been obviously a very useful tool for that, but then going deeper as to, you know, actually partnering with e-commerce specific data tools that an e-commerce brand would pay to use that gives insight into how do we optimize campaign performance across paid email and so on, but how do we generate the data we need as an agency to put together great reports.
And so we've gone through a very long discovery process of working with different platforms and figuring out which one's agency specific, or has a wide core kind of a, an integration for agencies to use across multiple brands, which is actually very limiting. You have to kind of create your own kind of manual integrations and ways of working, but there's a couple that have been great. So.
More specifically, Wayler, Total Analytics are the two that stood out to us. We recently worked with Clar as well, a couple of our clients on that. So that's the only attitude shift that we've had to make is we need to think like e-commerce business and operate like one, but with an agency mentality. So it's kind of a hybrid between the two that's been the hardest one. There's no specific platforms that were cut. I'd say it was just kind of a migration of
you know, having a less as more approach and just kind of filtering that down as much as possible. Yeah, makes sense.
I like to ask people, what's your number one tip for agency operators? And that may be it, but I want to run that. But it's a one, one could be, Hey, consolidate down your tech stack. Uh, is there anything else that sticks out? It's like you're talking to, uh, William from two years ago and saying, man, if you, if you knew this, like this is, this would be my big tip. I would say on a human level, talent has a lot to do with having
improve operations as a business. And delving into that is understanding different personalities are needed for different things. So I think that was kind of the first layer to give myself advice is understanding what kind of people I need in a team to essentially create the engine versus essentially the team that deliver the work for the clients. So that's the first layer. The second one I'd say is also.
Again, basic level, but so many people don't consider this or think about it as SOPs. Essentially making it as simple as possible for an employee to come into the business and understand how everything runs. And then not overcomplicating things. I do think, especially when you're kind of a smaller business, there's a lot of bottlenecks, the quicker you can remove those bottlenecks, implement a lean operating system that is, you know, foolproof for anyone to learn.
and then combine that with great people to manage that process, um, led with very easy training. I think that's kind of where your sweet spot is. I would say for the first three years of running the business, it was, go to this person, to this information, speak to this person, to this information. Um, if you don't have clarity on this, you know, figure it out and let us know. How do you figure that out? It was, you know, I think just having the right processes in place and a way in which you can record that. Uh,
And I'd say especially from a remote business, it's super important. It was a lot harder to problem solve as a remote business. It takes a lot longer. So SOPs, leaning down your systems and processes, make sure you have a very kind of efficient operating system. Those are all of the things I just didn't think about, especially during COVID. And that's probably because we had a lot more contact time, multiple calls throughout the day. And then I think the final one.
which I read it quite recently, which was the difference between kind of your different layers of being an entrepreneur is realizing that you go from being a startup founder who starts the business and it's like the building block effect versus someone who owns a business and the person who owns the business. And when you get to a stage where you're focusing on the business is focusing on the data, data first. And if you don't have the right systems in place to give you the data, then you need to start.
systems. But I'd definitely say the last 12 months, I myself and my ops director have been far more focused on what the data tells us. That's from everything from your finances, your time tracking capacity, your profitability per account, your expenses. Just really looking at every single piece of the business from an analytic standpoint, where almost each week you have a snapshot of everything and how it's operating and get clear.
feedback on what needs fine tuning or tweaking. So I'd say that's probably be the most important thing in terms of the change in attitude. That's helped us operate that show as a business as well. Yeah, that's awesome. The natural follow-up is where is that scorecard? Like, when we're working with teams, it's one of the first steps is, hey, let's build out your agency operator scorecard. Let's make sure that we understand what metrics matter the most. So I totally agree that that's.
crucial step. A lot of people are like, oh no, we're too, we're too early for that. And it's rare that there's a team who's actually too early to have a really simple swear card that they're, that they're managing off of. If you're one person and you're trying to figure out, you're just taking on whatever you can take on to try to figure out if there's a business. Yes, you're too early for that. Yeah. If you're four or five people and growing data is your friend and all it becomes more and more important. So where does that get centralized and where does that live?
Well, at the moment, I'd say originally it was actually an Airtable. And we actually had a very good one because Airtable has a lot of pre-made kind of templates to this and a custom dashboard that migrates everything. As of four weeks ago, we're now migrating that into Kakao. And so we kind of know in terms of the foundations of what we need,
It's more of a case of making sure the tool is autonomous and that it can operate without the kind of manual labor required to go into it. And because ClearCup obviously offers solutions around essentially some of the KPIs, such as capacity and time tracking, and being able to produce a RAG status on client accounts profitability. Those are the things that ClearCup already does.
And those are large proportions of what we focus on as an agency in terms of, are we, you know, performing and hitting KPIs and operating the way we should. So, um, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we'll have that. Yeah. It's kind of a solid foundation to the business. That's awesome. Cool. Well, I've got a million more questions I could ask you, but, um, this has been really good, so I appreciate you being able to come on and share, dig into some stuff around tools, talent, um, data. Like.
Really, really key pieces I told you right before we started recording. I'm coming back from the EOS conference. So I was talking about the six key components of running a business. Like we hit on a bunch of that stuff today. Folks who do want to follow your personal brand and tag along for the story. Where should we point them? Um, you can probably find me the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. So William Ferreira, um, or you can search social buff on LinkedIn or www.socialbuff.com. Um, that's probably the best place where all my content.
information is free of those two. Awesome. William, this has been great. Thanks so much for joining me today on Agency Journey. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.