In this behind-the-scenes episode, meet James Starkey, Founder & Director of Black Lab and first employee & Digital Marketing Director, Nick Bardsley as they both share the real and the raw behind how the Black Lab digital marketing agency began. From a single client and a cold barn office to building a thriving team while navigating the chaos of COVID. This is the unfiltered journey of their humble beginnings as two guys, one agency with a lot of lessons learned.
Video Transcript: Two Guys, One Agency | The Untold Story of One Digital Marketing Agency’s Beginnings | Black Lab
Hi and welcome to the second video of the behind the scenes of Black Lab. This one we’re going to actually introduce Nick who couldn’t unfortunately make the last one but this one we’re going to talk about our journey. We’ve called it two guys, one agency.
So first bit here, this first chapter I want to talk a bit about how I set Black Lab up. I set Black Lab up back in 2017. I had a single client that had approached me and wanted to work with me and at that point I thought, do you know what, I’ve got no children, I have a limited or a small smallish mortgage, there was no risk.
So I decided to have a go but one thing that was key to what I wanted to do was trying to do the right thing. So for two years I worked by myself. I started off in a converted barn with no heating in January and it was freezing.
We had a single heater in there that didn’t get the room warm until about three, four o’clock at which point you’re not far off packing up but quite quickly after I got offered a seat in somebody’s office in the corner on a spare desk they had and that was the best thing and I was there for two years. For a start just being warm, being able to work and having an office in a sort of central town gave me the ability to not only have a hub but easily go out and see clients. So I quietly built up the business at that point and for two years I was there just squirrelling away doing my own thing and when I got introduced to Nick who approached me initially to talk about freelancing.
He had been in a job for quite a while and wanted to break out but he was coming to a stage in his life where he thought I want to have a go at something myself. So like all good stories it starts in the pub. So as promised pulled Nick in here and after like two years, 2019, Nick actually joined the business.
Prior to that he’d worked sort of off and on on like a freelance, evenings and weekend basis and helped with some I suppose client development at the time. But I mean Nick in sort of your own words, what did those first few months kind of feel like and look like to you because obviously you know you’ve been in a job a long time, very secure. Obviously part of coming to the business was there’s some security with us but it’s still very much an unknown given it was just me and I’d only been trading for well I think a couple of years.
I’d been in a job for 16 years I think, straight out of university. It was the first job really I hadn’t had sort of grown in that agency from starting as a junior all the way up to senior management and that went on over the course of 16 years. I think moving away felt like a huge jump.
Obviously you’ve got a house to pay for and everything else. And you had twins coming. And twins on the way.
I think making that move felt like it did feel like a big jump. And I think the way we did it was quite obviously there had to be that sort of leap of faith in a way. But we tried to mitigate that as much as possible.
So what we did is we built up a number of clients over it must be the course of maybe 6 to 12 months I think. So doing that allowed us to have some level of security and that at least we had a starting point. So we had some clients when we first started, fairly small ones.
But I remember that first day we’d taken on an office lease, I think 500 square foot or something to give ourselves a bit of a base. And the only bit of furniture we had was a round IKEA table, my laptop, Nick’s laptop. I don’t think we’d even bought you a laptop then.
You were just using your old. Yeah I was just using my old Macbook. 2011 or something.
We got, I think we were doing a bit of mainly probably about half of what we were doing was labelling for other agencies. And I think that gave us a bit of a head start and a bit of security knowing that we’ve got some actually pretty good clients to start with. But at the same time, we probably didn’t have quite enough to keep us busy.
And I think that just on that first day sitting around the table and just both thinking, what do we do next? Yeah, that was, I think, a big realisation of I’ve left this established business. And yes, we’ve got some good clients, but not enough, like I say, not enough to sustain us. And that whole like, OK, well, what do we do now? Because the phone’s not ringing.
There’s no leads coming in. Yeah, we’ve got some good clients as a base, but that was it. It’s like, right, what next? And at that point, though, business sort of gradually and very organically grew on referrals, people we knew, who knew us, who then recommended us to friends and colleagues, things like that.
So we did gradually build up our portfolio. Yeah, and I think saying what next wasn’t quite the case. I think we’d spent a long time, most of which in the pub, but we actually did spend a lot of time planning.
How many clients do we need? We’d put together a pretty comprehensive business plan. So we knew what we needed to do. I think it was just that realisation of like, now we’ve got to make it happen.
I’ve left my job. We’ve got an office. We’ve got a starting point, but we’ve got to make the plan real now.
Quite quickly at that point, we worked with a business mentor, a chap called Peter, who probably really helped us focus on what we were trying to do and help us put process in place and encourage us to employ the first person. That felt like a huge step. But I think in hindsight, we made a real mistake there and something we still talk about today when we’re considering hiring.
We’re by no means, we’ve got the answers when it comes to hiring, but we had really, really junior, didn’t we? The wrong person fundamentally. I think that came about from past experience where we’d seen a lot of success in doing that. But I think we soon realised that that’s great when you’re in a big agency and you’ve got support, you’ve got a whole team to bring those people on.
But when you’re just two of you trying to bring in the work, deliver the work, do the hoovering, doing everything else, the accounts and everything else, then you just don’t have the bandwidth to support them. It’s not fair on them or the business. They didn’t bring the business on either.
So I think that was a big learning early on that we’re not ready for that. And probably arguably as a team of nine of us, we’re still probably not quite ready for it. We’ve had some success with two more junior people, but probably people with a bit more life experience.
So they’ve sort of slotted in well and developed. But I think we’d still struggle if we got somebody that fresh again. I mean, that first year was quite, apart from when my wife was expecting a baby in January and this is around August, your twins arrived.
That was fairly steady away, wasn’t it, that first year until COVID hit. And then we, pretty much everything stopped overnight. We had a couple of small things carried on.
Yeah, well, I think that was tough. I think given we’d worked so well, I think we got off to a really good start and managed to win a really, obviously you started with a good client, but we got a really good client, a big car supermarket. And it was a great PPC job early on from us again as a referral.
I think that gave us a real big, a big leg up. And we’d also won numerous other bits and pieces, smaller bits and pieces. But I think then to get, I think it was around the end, mid to end of March, from memory.
Twice short, twice the load. And yeah, we had one client dropped off and then another and another and another. And as everyone was panicking, wondering what to do, I think it felt a bit like everything was sort of slipping through fingers.
But I think what that did is bring out the, yeah, we then just put our heads down and sort of let’s just get on with it and see what we can sort of rattle the book here, if you like. And then post COVID, I think the next big challenge then was building the team up. Obviously we’d got to a point where I was doing a lot of delivery and doing everything else to support running the business.
I think one of the biggest challenges was, obviously we looked at juniors, so then it was, you know, can we get someone with a bit more of experience? But you’ve got to, it’s always a balancing act to looking at how much revenue have we got? And what do we think’s in the forecast? And what can we afford? And I think in the early days, what was difficult was you couldn’t necessarily afford someone with experience. And we wanted to offer those people stability, didn’t we? We didn’t want them to leave their job. I mean, one thing we’ve always been very careful and made sure that the business is in a strong position.
So we were not sort of flying by the seat of our pants. And I think, yeah, there were a lot of learnings. I think early on we realised getting after the mistakes we’ve probably made to start with, I think getting someone with experience made a massive difference.
Not only they could hit the ground running, but when they’re in front of clients, it helps grow accounts and you’ve got to be there. And, you know, we always wanted to deliver the best service that we could and do everything right. And I think having someone senior that’s got the experience makes such a difference.
It becomes really apparent when they’re in front of the client. And then I think aside from that, it’s then looking at what’s, you know, what then do you need? And that’s, you know, if we look at, say, the two core services, SEO and PPC, it’s then, you know, you don’t necessarily know what’s going to come in. You could save out, you could, you know, if you’re in a position where you can be really selective on the word, then great.
But I think knowing, you don’t know whether you’re going to get an SEO client or a PPC client. Because at that point we didn’t really have a funnel, did we? No. We weren’t doing any marketing.
We weren’t, we weren’t probably, we were leveraging our network, but our networks probably weren’t massive. So we probably picked up some work that just came to us organically. And then it was a case of people would come to us.
So it was always been quite difficult. And I’d say that’s probably been our biggest change. Yeah.
I think there’s probably the most recent hire was bringing a sales function and marketing. Well, I say, and then you get to a point where it’s okay, great. We can, we’ve got some really good delivery people, but you’ve got to then, you know, when there’s two of you, you can manage, if you’re fairly organised, you can make sure that you can deliver what you say you’re going to do when you’re going to do it, which has been one of the core things for us is not letting anyone down, making sure that you’re always going to do what you say you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it.
I think obviously as the team grows, that becomes harder because you’ve got more moving parts. You’ve got people working on different projects and you’re not necessarily then across everything, which, you know, we, we don’t want to be, you know, that’s not, not how, how you can scale. And I think that’s, yeah.
Then as you add more people that presents, you realise you’ve got gaps in your ability. So, you know, client services and from an operational standpoint, you need someone looking at that all the time. Yeah.
And we’re not there with it yet, are we? We’re still in a much better position than what we were. Yeah. There’s a lot, you know, from an organisational standpoint, we’re, we’re much stronger than we were, but yeah, it’s, it’s just pulling it all together.
And I think you, you’ve got, it’s got to be a focus. You can’t just deliver good work without the organisation. So it just doesn’t, you know, clients are quite, you know, quite demanding, you know, they could be quite dynamic businesses.
It’s not just doing the same thing all the time. There’s different campaigns running for different things. And, you know, you’ve got to make sure that you can keep up to that and delivering to their deadlines and pulling all that together needs someone.
So we’re obviously, this is an awful phrase, on a journey, which we’re, whilst we’re sort of five, six years into it, we’re still, I still feel like we’re just learning to crawl at this stage, you know, we’re putting in better financial models, we’re building the right people in the team, but if you look back, Nick, what do you think is kind of your kind of biggest takeaway from since you joined, like how we’ve got here? Do you think it’s been a case of sheer genius and brilliance? I know that’s not my opinion, but what do you think there’s been a degree of luck involved? I think, I still think, you know, a lot of people say this, don’t they, that you, I think you’ve got to make your own luck. And I do think that’s true. I think there is an element of being in the right place at the right time.
But again, a lot of that wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t, you know, use our network. Yeah, you’ve got to build all these relationships up. They are, most of the work has come as a result of that.
And I think doing the right thing, if you do a good job of, if you do a good job of something, then people are more likely to recommend you. And I think that’s core. If you do the right thing, then it will work out.
But it’s not just that you’ve got to, you’ve got to be pushing. Yeah, that was a bit of an insight, hopefully, into our first couple of years at Black Lab and how we sort of got here. There’s tonnes of detail we’ve probably missed out, not caught in, but we can get into that in a later video.
So it’s just good to be able to introduce you to Nick and kind of get his view on some of the things that we’ll be covering, but also that we’ve been through. So we’ll, hopefully, there’s going to be a series of many, many videos. We’ll keep you updated with these and we’ll discuss many other topics, but thanks for watching.
