An impromptu check-in from James Starkey, Director at Black Lab. Filmed on a sunny Friday morning walk, reflecting on a transformative few weeks behind the scenes. In this episode, James shares how financial modelling, clarity of direction, and the value of mentorship have shaped the agency’s next chapter, and why taking time to zoom out is sometimes the most strategic thing you can do.
Video Transcript: Transformational few weeks working with a mentor | Black Lab
Hi and welcome back. This is a bit of an impromptu video. I hadn’t planned on shooting this but I’m out with the dog, it’s a Friday, I’m not having to rush to the office so I have a little bit more time and I’ve just been enjoying this wonderful weather and just looking back on my last couple of weeks.
And the reason I wanted to do this video was because I’ve spent the last two to three weeks creating our budget and forecast for the next year, for Finance Year, which starts in March. And this is a bit of a first for us to really properly start pulling all this together. Yes, we’ve had tracking spreadsheets and various other things before but not really had anything quite as formulaic as this and gives as much insight.
And what I really enjoyed yesterday, which sounds a bit weird when you’re just looking at numbers, was you start wargaming things out and you can start seeing, oh if we do this, that does this to our net margin. If we employ somebody else this is what it looks like, this is when we can do these investments, things like that. We’ve not been great, it’s not necessarily my background so it’s something I’ve had to learn but very much under the encouragement of our mentor.
So we work with a mentor who’s got god knows how many years of agency experience and successfully exited about five or six years ago I think, maybe even longer, he’ll probably correct me on that. And having, kind of looking back on having that, not intervention as such, but somebody there to question you and checking what you’re doing and for you to throw ideas out is really important. We’ve actually for the last five or six years always had a mentor.
We changed to a guy called Gareth Healy who’s quite well known in the Leeds agency scene about two years, just under two years ago I think, and that feels like it’s been another step up for us. So I’m really glad we do that but as a whole having that opportunity to bounce ideas off people and say what would you think, what do you do in these situations, I think is invaluable and I think a lot of people don’t do it. I actually met with somebody yesterday and really interestingly he was saying, he’s employed by a big corporate but he was saying he has a personal mentor, somebody that he sees and speaks to maybe once a quarter, a couple of times a year basically, to talk about his goals and objectives and again bounce ideas and thoughts off.
And I’d never really considered it on a personal level but we do sort of have that with Gareth and you know one thing I raised with him this week is my role personally within the business is changing and I wasn’t even that clear about what I should be doing on a daily basis and he quite quickly laid out what he would expect from me and you know the great news is I was doing a lot of it but at the same time hand-compartmentalised it in my head that this is what I should be doing and that formalisation has actually really helped me and probably towards the back end this week I felt quite invigorated by that and knowing what I need to be doing. So you know I’m used to doing project management and dealing with clients on a day-to-day basis and actually my colleague’s now taken that off of me predominantly, she still needs support and asks for my opinion things which you know I value that but at the same time for me I’m not always quite clear on what I should be doing but having somebody to be able to say, hang on I’ve got the dog through here, come on Basil, having somebody else to kind of say yeah this is what you should be doing and how you should be doing it and what he would want to see from me is great as well as that person directing me in the right, well the right direction. I think sometimes when you’re trying to run a business everything you do is new whether it’s from especially our size helping manage say any HR issues and managing people’s personal development things like that you’re learning everything every day and it can be quite easy to get stuck I find in that sort of granular tasks and bits and pieces and then not feel like you’ve really achieved anything throughout the day and actually what you need to be doing is trying to push the direction of the business in the way you want it to go.
So I’ve probably waffled for a few more minutes than I thought but I was just sort of keen I haven’t had a put a video out and I’ve been trying to do a few a week but various various commitments I have struggled but this seemed like a great opportunity on such a beautiful morning a great time to actually reflect on really for me the benefits of working with a mentor in our business capacity that is as well as you know what he’s helped us do in this last couple of weeks with bringing the clarity and there’s absolutely more we need to do on our financial side I’m speaking to other people at the moment who should be able to help us so it’ll be interesting to see where that takes us in the next few weeks and months but much like the weather things are feeling really bright I’ll catch you on the next one.
Watch Video 1: BTS Journey of A Digital Marketing Agency in Growth.
Watch Video 2: Two Guys, One Agency | BTS at Black Lab.
