EP106: How to stay profitable | Anna Appleton | Rofinery

Speaker A: Welcome to Small Spark Theory. This podcast is designed as a collection of thoughts, ideas and practical tips on using marginal gains to help your agency new business endeavours. Small Spark Theory is created and hosted by me, Lucy Mann of Gunpowder Consulting. Hello and welcome back to Small Spark Theory. How are you doing? I'm recording this in the middle of May 2026 and yep, we're full into spring and, uh, looking forward to a great summer. I hope your businesses are well and thriving as well as they can be. I'm really excited about our episode today because it feels to me as though this particular guest and the subject that we have for you is perfect for Small Spark Theory. It really is perfect marginal gains territory. And just as, uh, a bit of background for any of you who've come to this podcast, uh, later, it might just be worth kind of recapping a little bit about the original premise. The original reason why I started this podcast almost 10 years ago now. It was my belief that winning new business, growing existing client relationships, none of that is particularly rocket science. Essentially it's sales and marketing. It's about building relationships. But because we are so focused in agencies on delivering client work, and we are often practitioners rather than professional salespeople or professional marketeers, quite often we get so focused on doing the work that and we forget about some of the finer points in the process. And the whole kind of new business sales and marketing ecosystem to me is a bit like a car engine. There are lots and lots of moving parts and it's very easy for us to forget or overlook some of those moving parts. So the idea behind Small Spark Theory was very much about, let's try and look at some of the, those moving parts. Let's try and look at all the contributing parts of that ecosystem that have to work together, um, and make sure that we're not overlooking those. And if we can make small improvements, um, across that ecosystem, then that's going to give us a better result. For example, there's no point doing lots of, uh, uh, marketing for your agency if you're then sending people to a suboptimal website that doesn't reflect your agency's positioning or paying lots of money for lead generation if you've got people that are going to have those early meetings who aren't skilled and haven't been trained on how to have a really good first meeting with a prospect. So it was looking at all of those small improvements that we can make. Now fundamentally, I think one of the biggest, biggest, biggest overlooked areas is data. I really believe that Data is one of the kind of missing components that we, that we tend to overlook. And in fact, in the very first episode of Small Spark Theory, I was inspired by Matthew Syed's book Black Box Thinking, where he used the brilliant phrase which I've quoted so many times since then, and that's that failure is data rich. And that really, uh, stuck out to me at the time because I'd experienced so many agencies where, you know, they would win a pitch or win a new client and that would be really exciting. But the losses, the pitches that we didn't win or the opportunities that we didn't convert, um, we would kind of sweep under the carpet a bit and, oh, well, we've probably dodged a bullet or, you know, rather than kind of analyzing actually what went wrong here. So I love this concept about failure being data rich, but also the wider point about how we use data, about how we're running our businesses. And certainly when I'm working with new clients and I'm onboarding my agencies, uh, to help them with their sales and marketing strategy and plan as part of the audit, I'm asking lots of questions about how profitable particular service lines are, how profitable particular clients are, which is their primary source of new business, where their referrals come from. So looking to really unpick, um, some of the patterns that are lying beneath the business. And in so many cases there are agencies that don't have that information and certainly don't readily have that information. So, ah, a bit of a long winded introduction, but somebody who really, really has got to grips with the data and a system that can really measure all of that performance data across an agency, um, is Anna Appleton from Refinery. Welcome, Anna.

Speaker B: Hello.

Speaker A: I'm so pleased that you're here. Now, I should say that you are from Refinery, uh, which we're going to talk about, but you are also, uh, from the agency we create, Digital. We've got a lot to talk about in terms of what you're doing with Refinery, but I wondered if, first of all you could just tell us a bit about your career and what led you to develop Refinery.

Speaker B: Of course. So I actually started out working in a public affairs agency. It was a small team over 15 years ago now. And from there I went on to a much bigger agency again within Public Affairs. And during my time there I did a bit more work on digital. And after I had my first maternity leave, I decided I wasn't ready to go back to that. And I actually did go back for three days. On my third day, I handed in my resignation and uh, it didn't last long. I took a lot of advice from people and they said, drag, try it for six months, maybe a year. Day two, I went, no, this, this, I can't do this. It was a long commute. I didn't love it anymore. And I needed to prioritize flexibility in my life and I thought that's what's going to come first now. So I. My husband's agency, we create digital and at the time it was just him and one other person. So it was very small agency. Uh, he was working from the shed at the bottom of our garden. So a very kind of classic working from home situation. And over time we've just built up our team a little bit, got a few more people who have brought different skills and expertise to our team. And from that stage of being very small and progressing to being still small, but, uh, around 10, it allowed us to see where we had gaps in terms of our workflow, in terms of data processes. And when he started out at the agency, he tried to find a platform that would work for a small agency. And there really wasn't a, uh, lot out there or you could, but it felt like it was delivering so much that you didn't actually need everything. And they're very expensive and sometimes frankly the minimum users were three. And when you're a team of one or two, you're blocked out, even though you think, well, what's the difference between two and three really? So we decided that we were going to take what he originally built to replace having to use an external supplier and build it up a little bit to make it work for us. We did over time use a few other third party tools here and there. So we had a time tracking tool, but we were paying $80 a month at one point for it. And we thought, well, we can just build this ourself and integrate it with our other system. And then the more we went, oh, uh, we now need this, we need something to track our leads again. We went, well, let's just build it onto our system. And we ended up with a platform that worked really well for us. It was a bit clunky and we knew it, but it didn't have the best user experience. And at the same time we actually do quite a lot of work with other agencies. We're often a digital partner, whether they're a marketing agency or design agency or we just come in and do the accessibility side of things as that's our little bit of our niche. And the more we spoke to them, the more they would say, well, how are you sending us this quote? This quote looks great. How did you build it? Or okay, great, you've given me this time report. This looked fantastic. How are you tracking your time? And we'd explain it's our own system. And then they'd ask, can they use it? And we said, well, we'd love to, but it really isn't pretty enough for you. And then I think it was about two and a half years ago we decided, actually, why don't we make a version that could be used by other agencies? And even if it wasn't a success, at the same time, we're just going to make our own platform better for us and it will help us to grow even more if we want to do that, whether it's growth through headcount or just growth through turnover, something that's more streamlined and seamless will help us with that, uh, growth. And that's how Refinery really came to being from. So Refinery is essentially, it's our version two of what we had originally, but we've just been, um, marketing it now since about September. And we're getting a lot of interest in it because people are saying similar things, that their platforms don't really work for them or there's nothing out there that feels like it's built for them as a small agency, or everything just works really well together. It's not just something's done for the sake of it or to try to appeal to the masses. And that's where we are today.

Speaker A: Brilliant. I have to say I have a vested interest in what you're doing. Um, and one of the reasons I was so excited when we first spoke was because probably about 10 years ago now I was working with a digital agency who had previously developed some of their own, uh, products. And we had talked about building a pipeline management system because at the time I'd seen so many agencies who had spent a lot of money, for example, with Salesforce and then spent. So they'd paid for a Salesforce license and then spent money with, with somebody who would then adapt the sales force for them. So there's a kind of almost, almost like, I don't know whether is that a reseller? I don't quite know what, how, what, what they term those people, but they would then make that Salesforce supposedly bespoke for that agency and then they would still find that nobody was using it. So. And, uh, I just seen a lot of agencies and this is just on the, the kind of new business CRM and pipeline, um, part of performance information. But I'd seen it so many times, a lot of money being spent and zero engagement. People just, and you know, bad data in, bad data out. And uh, at that time I think we were looking at doing something. Pipedrive was quite new I think at the time, but I think had then got a whole load of investment and I think we had lots of ideas and we started talking about it and then thought actually do you know what? Pipedrive are only just getting started and this was very much just focused on new business.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: But having gone through those conversations and uh, really understanding the needs of agencies, I can completely see why. If you've developed something for yourself and you've got other agency partners that are saying, hang on a minute, can we have some of that? Yes. So that's why I'm so interested in what you're doing. Um, so I mean I've had a, ah, demo and a little tour through the system. But I'd love for you to, just because it is so comprehensive, I'd love for you just to kind of explain the main agency problems that it's designed to solve because it obviously goes way beyond just time tracking and new business.

Speaker B: It does. I think for us it was really important to try to have one tool where everything comes together. The main agency problem we see after speaking to so many is that they're using multiple tools in multiple places, costing them several different amounts and obviously costs go up. So every time one goes up then it might be another and then they lose track of actually how much they're spending and at the same time then trying to take time to actually put the data from one into another. Everything doesn't talk to each other. And I think there are some people who are doing interesting things with um, integrations or using AI to help them with that. But most agencies don't have the capabilities, they don't have the time. So we wanted to make it easy. And we actually have been onboarding an agency recently and she was shocked at how easy it was. So they are officially joining us in August, but she wanted to start the process of onboarding in May just to make sure that everything's all set up and ready to go. And one thing that she'd been doing, which is fantastic, was getting together all the data ready to put in to Refinery and she straight away saying, I'm not very good at the math side of things, so I don't know exactly how I need to link all this data. You don't need to do that. You Put in the initial data and then Refinery does everything else for you and that's the big thing that it's helping to solve where August comes together. So you put in your team members salaries, any extra costs such as national insurance, pension bonuses, you put in your overheads, then you set up what hours of the week and days of the week everyone's working and um, what their utilisation targets need to be. And from there that's all you need pretty much. Because after that it will then tell you if people are time tracking, it will tell you are they meeting their utilisation target. Are you over servicing a client? What's your profitability per client or per project or per individual? So you don't have to keep on amending this. And a lot of agencies have spreadsheets and sometimes they're very sophisticated spreadsheets, but spreadsheets is the most common tool or platform really used to managing an agency and all it takes is someone who's managing them to be off for two weeks and they're out of date or someone breaks a formula and the time it takes just to um, update the spreadsheets. Whereas at any point you can go into Refinery and go, let me look at the utilisation for April or the past quarter or let me look at the, the over servicing for this client. Because I think that we're just, we're getting a lot of phone calls, we're getting a lot of can you just questions. I want to see what the bottom line is, how is that affecting our hours? And Refinery can do that. So it addresses that problem of everything coming together, but it does that in a way as well because it can take you right from the point at which you bring a lead in to the reporting on the project after you've won it. So you can add a lead, you can score and qualify it, you can forecast it in your pipeline to see when you think the payments are going to land. Once the proposal for the project, um, for that lead gets approved, you can then turn that into tasks very quickly, assign them into the resource calendar at the same time seeing everyone's annual leave booked in the same resource calendar from a task, you can just click Start Timer. You're tracking your time on the project overview page. You can see how much time you're taking and then you can see your real time profitability. So you can see your quoted versus your actuals at any point in time. So when you get to the end of the project you can go, great, here's where we are. But also if people are realizing as they're going, I need more time on this task, they can actually submit a notification to uh, their project manager to say, I'm going to need an extra hour or two hours on this task. So before you might have had a problem where the project manager would get to the end and go, right, we went over hours. How did that happen? Now you'll get notified during, right, this person's asked for more time. That means we will go over, uh, how do we mitigate it? So instead of you just having to look back and go, right, where do we over service, where do we lose profitability? You can stop even getting to that point and you can see from your clients if you're over servicing consistently. Actually, do we need to be having conversations with the clients to say we keep on having extra hours because there's a little bit of scope creep or because we're having weekly calls, can we make it bi weekly, can we make it monthly? So Refinery can cover all of these different elements and it is really comprehensive and it's interesting because a lot of people try to say, oh, you should just pick one tool that does something really well. But that's not the way agencies work. Because if you've got all these separate tools and nothing speaks to each other, then as you said at the start, you're losing that data. And if you haven't got the data, then you're setting yourself up to fail. So have everything thing in one place and then it means that you've only got one M source and that's your complete source of truth. And that's what Refinery is aiming to be.

Speaker A: I also know that there are so many barriers that get in the way of performing well. And quite often those barriers are around, um, confidence. And I think what you've described is going to give an agency confidence because they've got at their fingertips all the facts. They've got proper comprehensive management data that they can use when they're thinking about new business approaches, when they're um, putting together quotes and estimates and proposals for new clients, they know that it's date, it isn't a finger in the air. It's based on absolutely rock solid data and what we've been able to deliver in the past. So, um, you mentioned before about working with some partners and them seeing some of the quotes that you put together. So uh, presumably it can generate quotes for new clients as well.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So once you've put in all of your team member salaries and costs and overheads, you can create rate cards and you can set what you want the margin to be on the rate cards. So it will pull in the costs. So for example, you choose a rate card for developer, it will pull in the people who have the job title developer, so it will give you the average of their costs plus it will look at their utilization rates to think about the percentage of overheads it will allocate. And then you put in, I want to get 50%. And it will say something like £45 should be your charge out rate. And then from there you can adjust it to go well actually I want to get 100% profitability. So then you can tweak what you want the rate card to be. So you know, every time you allocate that rate card to a proposal, that's the profitability margin you will be making. And when it comes to building out the proposals, you can do this in multiple ways. So we have proposal builders for hour based projects, fixed fee, retainer or cap time and expense. So retainer, fixed, uh, fee and hour base, the more common ones. But even if you pick an hour based one, you can for example put in the deliverable as being the development of a new homepage and you'll put the line item, um, in there for this and you'll allocate the rate card, you might pick six hours and it will say, okay, based on the rate being £90 an hour, that's £540 for this. And then you can actually fix the fee to go along. I think we can charge more for this. So I'm going to fix the fee at £800. And then you can see your profitability go up on each item. So when you are building this out, there's definitely no finger in the air because you, you're looking at the exact hours you want to allocate. And then also if you want to still keep those hours but charge a little bit more for it to offer a bit more value based pricing, then you can do so. And then at the end it means you look at the figure and you go right, those hours, do they seem realistic? And because you've got the data refining from other projects, you can look back and see right when we did this other very similar website, how many hours did we end up delivering it in to understand, was that correct? So what you quoted, did that match up with what you delivered? So each time you're improving in terms of your accuracy, but you're always putting in the exact breakdown of what should go into your proposal, the exact hours. And it's giving you your exact profitability. So at no point should you then end up in a situation where you go, oh, hang on a second, I don't think I actually made any money on that. Or often what people do, they just don't even know. They've got no idea about profitability because they haven't got any of that data.

Speaker A: I'm thinking back to my.

Speaker B: And, um.

Speaker A: I'm sorry for anyone listening from Salesforce, if you are listening to this, but

Speaker B: thinking back to my.

Speaker A: My Salesforce observation before, I know that one of the real, uh, barriers, and this is going back quite a long time, one of the real barriers, particularly for smaller agencies, was just. Just the usability. And I'm. I'm wondering whether, uh, and in fact, not just Salesforce, lots of tools that I've seen agencies over the years adopting, they've found that actually it's not intuitive, it's asking for things that they don't need or it's not doing things that they do need. And the user experience is kind of clunky. Given that you've got something that is doing so much, how do you get that balance to make sure that you've got something that's doing lots of things and is flexible, but that also it's a really intuitive user experience, so that you're making sure it's getting full use across the business.

Speaker B: So one of the areas that our agency, WeCreat Digital specialise in is design and user experience. But not only user experience. I mentioned earlier in its accessibility. And often accessibility is. It's not really prioritized. It's seen as something. As a, uh. Well, it's a requirement for other people, but I don't need to do it, so I won't. Whereas actually, accessibility just means fantastic user experience. Because if you're designing for everyone, then you're improving the user experience for everyone. There's examples of this in sort of the physical space as well. So if you think about it, uh, like the drop curbs you have where wheelchair users. They're designed for wheelchair users to be able to cross a road, um, through a drop curb, actually. They're helpful for people who've got buggies, they're helpful for people who might not be in a wheelchair but who might have mobility or stability issues. And this is often what we come back to when we design for accessibility. If we design for someone who maybe has to use a keyboard or looks at a screen in certain ways, then what we design for them, it means it actually might improve the experience for everyone. So that's one thing that we focused on with Refinery is trying to make it so it is a very seamless experience. It is very intuitive. And we've actually done multiple workshops through the design and development of it where we said, how do we want people to describe it? So for us, success in Refinery isn't just paid users, it's the way people talk about it. And so as part of that workshop, which is of what we do for the clients, it was quite fun doing it for ourselves and going, we're the client today, so how do we want people to talk about it? The words were easy to use, nice to look at, intuitive, user friendly. And this is the kind of feedback that uh, we focus on. So when people, ah, we ask them, how are you finding it so far? If they're saying those words back to us, we're going great, we're ticking our boxes, that's our success. If at any point someone says, oh, I found this a bit tricky to use, we straightaway look at it and then think, how do we improve it and where do we need to make some tweaks to make it more user friendly? Because in all the websites we design and develop or mobile apps or web apps, any kind of development we do, the end result has to be why did we make this in the first place and is it being used that way and is it generating leads, inquiries, sales? And what we don't want to do is to create something and just keep adding feature after feature and to make it really clunky just for the sake of having everything on there. Because for us that ultimately that's not a sign of success because you're right, people won't use it. And one thing as well we're doing is we don't actually charge for onboarding, we don't charge for any extra support, but we do provide it if people need it at no cost. And we're booking in check in calls with our users to say, right, how are you finding this? And I'm sort of running through a little bit of a demo again to go, how's this part? Are you using this? And I think, oh no, I don't even, I forgot about that. Then we're helping to remind them to then see how we can improve the experience for them or how we can make sure that a feature that perhaps they hadn't really thought about could be utilized in their workflow. And it's little things like when you go to the list of all projects, you can see all projects, but also you can see an overview of your projects. And that's a bit of a health check page, so you can see what milestones have you got coming up, what tasks are overdue, what are at risk of delivery, that is, um, the hours look like they're going to go over or what's a profitability risk? So before you have to click into any individual project, because those are the ones you're focusing on, you can look and go, well, actually, where do I need to be looking? Where's my attention required? And if you're an agency owner short on time, you haven't got time to be looking at every single project, but there you can go to it and go, right, I'm just going to look at this one and jump onto that, because that I can see there might be an issue and we need to solve that before it becomes an issue.

Speaker A: Thank you for that. You talked a little bit about features and pricing. Just explain your pricing model. Um, because obviously, Normally the typical SaaS model is different tiers or gold, silver and bronze, and different ticks in the boxes for different levels of functionality. That's not how you do it, right?

Speaker B: No. And I think the thing that we wanted to do the most was to. That was one of the things we hated from other features from other platforms. So that's what we've tried to do, is look at everything we hate about others and go, let's not do that. And the thing that annoys me the most is when you have a call for pricing and I don't have the time to call for pricing, but also if I have to call for it, how expensive is that going to be? And so we wanted to just be very upfront, very transparent and say, we've got a single price and that's it. There's no gold, silver, bronze. It's just, here's our price and also the price we do not see changing. Because I've actually had. I've had quite a few people ask and say, oh, uh, at what point is this your introductory price? Is it going to change in a year? And our plan is to keep our prices as they are for as long as possible. Because at a time when agencies are quite squeezed and they're looking at how they can reduce overheads and subscriptions, we don't want to have to add to that stress. And, um, we've been very thorough in how we have developed and approached that pricing and we're not going to have it as well where we add on a new feature and go, right, that's an extra £5. Per user per month. If we add an extra feature on, we're adding an extra feature on because we think it's going to help the overall experience. So it's not going to be a case of the quickly add to bundle or add to basket. And it's like a pick and mix menu. It's just very straightforward flat pricing.

Speaker A: And you talked at the beginning, obviously, um, because this started out, uh, as your own system, uh, for a very small agency and there wasn't really anything that could do the job. So you built your own. Now that you've uh, further developed it and you've sort of, as you say, made it a bit prettier, made it more kind of user friendly and, and developed the functionality, I guess I'm wondering is there an ideal kind of agency profile for Refinery or, you know, is there a limit to the size of agency it can support?

Speaker B: I don't think there's a limit to the size of agency it can support. I think you can be an agency of one. We actually do have agencies of one who are paid users and they love it because they've never had anything like this before because it's always sort of been off limit. Uh, we've also got bigger agencies and the thing that we've noticed is that especially I've worked in an agency of over 100 and Alfie, who is the commercial officer for Refinery, he's also worked at two very big agencies. They didn't have proper systems in place, they didn't have proper project management platforms, they didn't have proper training tools, they didn't have reporting. And that's made us realize, well, actually these problems are for agencies alike. And I actually know of an agency who spent a huge sum of money to try to create a spreadsheet that could solve a lot of these problems and it wasn't successful in the end. So there are agencies of all sizes out there who I think this could help. I think the thing that as well people do come back to is they say often if you hit a certain size, that's when you need to start having something in place. But really you need to have it in place from the start or as soon as possible. Because don't wait till you hit that sort of figure of 10, which is often the given figure of right now. You need to be a bit more mature and serious because if you are selling your time as a business, your time is your biggest cost. You need to know where that's going, whether you're a team of one or 10 or 50. And especially if you are a team of one, the best way to grow is to understand how to allocate your resources and your capacity, because they are very limited and they're very precious then, and especially if you do start then taking on more people, you've got to be very careful that you don't suddenly start leaking. Profitability and sort of profitability leaks is a term that we do come back to quite frequently in the demos where, especially when it is a smaller agency, often if it's an agency owner who started it and they've, they're growing the hiring quite quickly, they often forget about their own time when they're, say, scoping at work, and so they might allocate time for the team. And then I say, okay, well, don't forget, you can add multiple rate cards to a line item, so you add your junior member, then you can ask them of your time to review their work. And they go, oh, it's just my time, I don't need to add that. And straight away I go, well, hang on, if you've lost two hours, you're not allocating two hours of your time there, then that's two hours of profitability gone. And I think sometimes it is partly from a fear of will clients pay for all of this. But this is what you have to think about, is it's your time, it has a value on it, you need to use it properly. And whether you're a team of three or five and you're the director, just looking at something here and there. With one agency I've been speaking to, we've worked out that they're losing probably about £100,000 just by the director, uh, not allocating their time onto projects. And that's a huge amount of money.

Speaker A: I can see that. I can absolutely see that, yes. Thinking of the conversations that I'm having with agencies all the time, and we're always having that conversation at me saying to them, um, your time is the most valuable asset that the business has. So how you spend that time is absolutely vital.

Speaker B: And that goes for small agencies, medium sized agencies, big agencies, all of these little things. If they don't get captured, and often they don't get captured because the way that the data is set up or the way the software or the platform they're using works, it doesn't allow for that. This is why specifically on a template that I helped build for an agency last week, um, it's for an audit. So they set up the templates so they can reuse it on A proposals going forward, they don't have to enter it every single time so on. For example, the stakeholder mapping aspect of the audit, uh, they added an account exec and a junior account manager. And this is what you should be doing is thinking about all the different levels and who's going to be working on it and how many hours each person should be working on it. But think about every single stage. So it's not just the junior, more delivery focused members of the team, it is everyone. So put your director on. Even if it's half an uh, hour quick review, that all gets built in, all gets added up and often people forget about this and they just put in six hours and it's not, they're not thinking about who are they using for that six hours. Because as well, if there's a bit of a squeeze on the budget, maybe you should be using someone who's more junior because then you can keep the cost down. But if you just add on say one hour for a senior person to review it, then you're going to be able to deliver that at the cost that the client has said they've got to stick to. But also where you're not then using up the profitability because you've got more senior members of the team spending all the time on it as you get bigger, uh, that really needs to be the focus to ensure that all those different parts of the profit are captured within it.

Speaker A: Brilliant, Brilliant. I'm curious, you know, I gave my example um, earlier on about you know, having an idea and working with another agency on building a new business platform and actually we realized really early on that everything was moving so fast and there were so many SaaS, products, uh, and developers or tech businesses that got really, really deep, uh, pockets for development. Um, and there's lots of consolidation going on everywhere. I'm interested what your longer term goal is as an independent developer. This is separate to your other business which is your digital agency. So what your goal is for Refinery?

Speaker B: Our goal really is to focus on how we can make it the best product and platform it can be. I think we get a question quite a lot which is are we still going to be around in a year or two years? And as you mentioned as well with Pipedrive, that was all just starting out and people do see tools come and go. We don't have investment behind us, we aren't seeking to get investment and we're not reliant on investment to grow. Um, and because of that we are not subject to any kind of particular external targets or requirement. So we very much can keep it independent and take it the way we want it to go. And we've really been listening to our users. We did a beta version a while ago to then get some people on board using it, give us some feedback and understand how to improve it. We don't see it as great. We've heard from them now, we'll move on. We want to carry on hearing from our users to say how they think things could be improved. Sometimes we can implement new features quite quickly. Sometimes we might ask a question of, well, hang on, why do you want it to work that way? And we end up then having conversations to understand how everyone works in different ways because agencies do have their own ways of working, but at the same time there is so much similarity. And I think as well we're learning that a lot of people work in certain ways because that's the way they've sort of been forced to work.

Speaker A: So Anna, presumably people can just get in touch with you through the website and you can take them through, they can book in a demo with you and you take them through the functionality.

Speaker B: That's the first step? Yes, that's the first step. So anyone can go to the website, refinery.com, go to the book a demo button or they can email me annarefinery.com and I try to keep demos to an hour. They can go over, they can go under. There's so much to cover with some agencies it's that we have multiple calls and to be honest we also sort of start the onboarding process by the second demo to just show them how it works, get everything in and then they can start experimenting and seeing what they can realize about profitability quite quickly.

Speaker A: Yeah, I seem to remember when you took me through the demo immediately, it's just the visibility of the numbers that are coming up, it's just really, really compelling. So I can imagine that your engagement through those um, through those demos must be brilliant. It's also ah, interesting timing because I think about the time that we first spoke, the Design Business association had just launched their uh, In Focus report, which is the annual survey, but it's essentially a state of the nation report for the design sector that talks about everything from agency confidence in terms of looking at the year ahead, but it also enables agencies to benchmark charge out rates, utilisation, profitability and salaries, all of that kind of thing. So I would imagine that uh, there are a lot of agencies who probably have to put quite a lot of work into submitting their Data for the DBA's In Focus report and obviously in other agency disciplines. There are lots of other organisations that do similar reports and usually the barrier for agencies being able to take part in those is because they don't readily have the right data available. But I think, you know, it's really great that they can use those as a benchmark to be able to understand what good looks like, um, and how they're performing as well against their peers. So, yes, anybody, if you've been going through the DBA's In Focus report and um, thinking about how you can improve on some of those stats, then I would say having immediate visibility to all of this kind of data management information in your business is a really good way to start. I would love to know, Anna, which book you would recommend for our listeners.

Speaker B: So the book I'd Recommend would be 7 habits of highly Effective People. I've been reading it as part of. I've been doing the Level 7 Senior Leadership Training for about nearly a year now and in it my favourite habit is number two, which is begin with the end in mind. And I think for any agency owner that's what you should always think about. So I think about, where do you want to be, where? What's your ultimate goal, the outcome you want to achieve, and then work backwards from there. And this isn't just me say about Refinery, this is about everything I do in life. I think, right, how do I make sure I can get there? What do I need to do? The steps break down the processes to make it realistic. Because I think everyone procrastinates. Everyone procrastinates and I think often it's because we can't see the end, we can't see the easy steps to do to get to that point. Whereas if you break everything down by thinking right, that's the end outcome. So I'm going to work backwards, then it makes everything so much easier.

Speaker A: Brilliant. So is that Stephen Covey, am I right? Yes. Brilliant. Okay, listeners, you know what to do. Join in the conversation on LinkedIn using the hashtag smallspark theory. I will pick a winner and send you a copy of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Anna, uh, what's the best advice that you've been given in your career that you'd like to pass on to our listeners?

Speaker B: It's a good question. I think it's probably not to overthink something or to worry too much about what other people might think about something that you do. I spent so much time thinking if I say this or I post about this or if I talk about myself in this way, it's going to come across either showing off or like I know everything. And I was that classic kind of child at school where I knew the answer but I wouldn't always put my hand up. And actually in the past couple of years I've just gone, well, you know what, I don't care about that anymore. And if someone doesn't like me or think that's a certain way, well, that's on them. That's not me. And as a result, it's really made a huge difference because things like Refinery, I've stopped wondering about, well, what do people going to think if they don't like it, they're not going to use it. Move on, someone will. But also, we've ended up winning business off the back of just LinkedIn posts I've put out where people have it's resonated and they've connected with it and they've gone, well, hang on. If you think that way, you might be the right fit for me. And I think I'm so much happier not to have that weight in my mind, always worrying.

Speaker A: I love that. And I'm glad that you've managed to let that go. And I'm glad that you were, because probably if you hadn't, you wouldn't be here talking to me today.

Speaker B: Um, I don't think I would.

Speaker A: So I'm really pleased that you are here talking to us today because I just know, having looked at the system, I know how much value it can add to agency owners. So, yes, I'm really pleased that you've developed it. Thanks so much for coming and telling us all about it today.

Speaker B: Thank you so much. It's been lovely speaking to you and I've listened to your podcast before I even knew about you and it's been such a fantastic opportunity. I'm so grateful for it.

Speaker A: Oh, well, you're most, most welcome. Um, thanks everyone for listening. We will see you again next time. You have been listening to Small Spark Theory, brought to you by Gunpowder Consulting. Join in the conversation on LinkedIn or Instagram using the hashtag smallspark theory. This podcast is created and hosted by me, Lucy Mann, and edited and produced by Isabel Jarvis. For more information about Gunpowder's new business and client development support, visit gunpowderconsulting.com There you'll find all the previous episodes of this podcast, a library of book recommendations from all of our guests from each episode, and 10 years worth of blog posts on the topic of new business and running an agency. If you've enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review on itunes or Spotify and share the love? Thank you.