The power of specialization: how niching can unlock a global market - #59

Speaker A: Welcome to the Consulting Pulse, a podcast by cemap. CEMAP is an operations and intelligence platform purpose built for consulting firms. Let's dive into today's episode. Yeah. So delighted this week to be joined by Tom Denford. Why don't we start just by getting an introduction from you? That'd be great.

Speaker B: Thank you, Ben. Well, I'm Tom Denford. I'm the CEO and co founder of a company called idcoms. Um, and we are an advisory and analytics firm and we specialize in the advertising space. So for those of your listeners that, uh, are maybe not domain experts in the advertising space, we obviously all see advertising brands spend these days about a trillion dollars a year. Can you believe that on advertising? Um, so it's a big global industry. Of that trillion dollars, about 65% of it, about two thirds normally each year, goes on what's called media. That's obviously the distribution of advertising around the world to all of us as individuals. So that's, um, through tv, print, radio, outdoor, social media, um, sponsorships, all of these kind of things. That's called media. And that money, which is about 6 or 700 billion billion dollars a year, goes through a really complex system. They're checks that advertisers have to write. And they kind of, they might employ agencies or they might buy ads on Google or Meta by themselves, or they might do sponsorships. But it's an incredibly complex system. And so if you're a cmo, if you're a head of marketing for a brand, um, you kind of have to let go of billions of dollars a year basically through this complex system. Our firm, um, monitors and measures that system, uh, on behalf of dozens of major advertisers around the world. So we have the privilege of working with some really amazing famous brands and working with senior leadership in a lot of amazing brands. Um, and we help marketers answer three questions. And these were our founding principle questions when we set the business up in 2009. Um, these were the kind of three hypotheses with which we set the business up. And half by luck and half by judgment, they've proved to be true and viable for a business. And they still are. Exactly what we do. We do the same thing, um, because they're based on insight. So that would be a recommendation straight off the bat is like, build a business based on insight. Um, the first question that marketers need to ask, or we get asked, how good am I at? Ah, media? Because it's a really complex area. How good are we at media as a brand and how can we be the best in our category? Right? So if you're an automotive brand, you don't really care about building a beating, a shampoo brand. You just want to, you want to, you want your dollars to work harder or you want your share of voice to be better, or you want your advertising to be better than your competitors. It's all about competitive advantage. So how do we, how do we be the best at media we can possibly be? Secondly, and that first question is really about them internally. So we do a lot of uh, consulting and change management to help them structure themselves and their people and their technologies and their workflows to be really good at media, to really understand media internally. Second question is, which agencies should I work with? Which external partners, bits of ad tech technology which, what we call publishers or vendors, people like, uh, you know, the TV stations or the, you know, the matter, the Amazon, the Walmart, the uh, Googles, people like that. Who should we work with and in what capacity and can you put the right contracts in place with all of that? So you kind of create an ecosystem, external ecosystem for the cmo. Um, so that's the second question. Who should we work with and how can we make that as productive as possible? And the third question is where the F does my money go? Because actually that's the biggest thing is like I've got this highly complex system which now billions of dollars is going through, but who's independently and objectively measuring that? Well, that's what we do. So those three questions we get asked, we deliver, uh, through those three things. And we're a super niche business, as I've said to you. We're super niche, um, um, but we work with these amazing brands in the background and we've managed to kind of scale that. I started off in the 1990s working at an ad agency, uh, which I didn't really know who it was honestly at the time. Um, but it was a big famous ad agency called Ogilvy, who is still around where we used to fax things from office to office. Uh, and the advertising business has transformed so much as many industries that now we're on really the very cutting edge of AI, energetic driven decision making, um, involving billions of dollars. So, um, I think that's why we found a good market to grow because we're highly specialized in this kind of niche and we work with advertisers in this very kind of messy and complex world of advertising and help untangle um, it and just see where they're wasting money and what they could be doing, um, better.

Speaker A: But you're multinational aren't you? And you're growing in terms of revenue and headcount and founder led. We're going to discuss a little bit about that at some point as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we're still founder led. So there was two of us that founded the business in the UK originally. I'm now based full time in the US but originally we founded the business in the UK uh, in 2009 and came from an advertising background. My background was from the agency. So as I mentioned I kind uh of started work and worked for years and years in different advertising agencies in the US and in Europe. And my co founder came from a brand, so he was a marketer from Coca Cola and Nike. And so the two of us kind of represent both sides of that dynamic, which is the internal marketer's mindset, which is like it's my money, like um, I've got to give it out to this kind of complex system. And my experience was understanding from the inside that those systems and how they work, um, so we set the business up again. It comes back to, you'll hear me say the word niche all the time. I think I've said that to you already a few times. Uh, you know, we're a super hyper niche business but it's enabled us to scale that globally pretty well. So we've about seven or eight years ago we had a load of customers in the us I decided to relocate here full time and we continue to grow our business and so uh, we have a lot of clients, a lot of the brands that we work with, very famous household names that you'll know. Um, we don't really talk about our clients but they're all famous people that you probably know. Um, a lot of them are global brands so we work with them in multiple territories around the world. But it made sense for us to be in the US um, and build more of a team here. And we've now got a much bigger team in the US and servicing a lot of what we call domestic business. So these are brands which are huge in the U.S. but they, you know, you wouldn't know them in Europe or around else around the world, but they spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on advertising. And um, we were the only business really like us at the time and uh, we've done well to grow the business in, in the US now as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I don't know if you know this, I was, I ah, did some internships in Adland As a, as a young, fresh faced, uh, lad, I was at um, Wolf Ollins, if you.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And then moved into media. So I, I, I'm going to hijack this podcast at some point and move it from your consulting business into the media landscape just for personal gain because it is a, it's absolutely fascinating world with a little bit of wild west in there.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's plenty of that for equal measure.

Speaker A: So yeah, you know, we'll touch on that at some point. So, so you've moved over to North America probably six, seven times the market opportunity versus the uk. But challenges opportunities in equal measure.

Speaker B: No doubt it's hard to talk about as an Englishman and coming to America, building a business here. Um, it takes a long time to understand the market and I wouldn't of course say that I know it, uh, but I've learned a lot, uh, and lots of it does feel like cliche when it comes to, I mean we'll focus on the business stuff, um, the US for our business and probably a lot of consulting businesses. Frankly, the US is a really interesting and really good business for a couple of reasons. Um, the first is that the scale of the country, obviously it is fractured and fragmented in many ways. America. And it exists as almost like 50 separate countries in terms of lots of legislation and taxes and even cultural things that kind of divide the states. Um, so it's much easier to think of the US more like a continent. But the good thing is, is that the infrastructure, the currency, the language, general business practices, um, exist across that continent and brands exist pretty consistently across that continent. If a brand is not completely Pan American, it has a desire to be Pan American. So uh, that's good for us. Whereas you know, our experiences in Europe is it's a lot more fragmented. We still have a good business in Europe, um, but our focus of growth in the recent years and for the coming years is really going to be on North America. So include Canada and that as well. Um, the other thing is that, uh, because of that budget, so budgets tend to be bigger. Uh, so you have kind of larger budgets and a fewer stakeholders, fewer decision makers. So actually getting decisions made is better. Um, there's a culture of consultancy in this country. I think there's more openness to allow an expert in a niche or a domain to come and help you. Uh, it's competitive, it's good, competitive business and it's a pretty open marketplace here. So brands are always looking for opportunities to get competitive advantage in their category. And that's what we can deliver them. Uh, those are the kind of main things. And also in our niche, there's less competition. There's fewer competitors here than we had in Europe. When we set the business up 15 years ago. We were really in a category of one. Um, and yeah, it's an industry or niche industry, if you like, that's, uh, grown and it's got more professionalized now and more kind of formalized. But there are some, obviously competitors in our space. Um, but it's much more open. It's like greenfield space, really, in the US and fewer advertisers that do the analytics and the auditing work, which we've, uh, been developing over the last five or six years, particularly in, in the complex world of digital advertising. So US, for us, is a great market. And, uh, there are some interesting challenges, uh, and there are some cliches and lessons that people give you. When maybe some of your viewers and listeners are going through that right now, or they've done that, or they're thinking about expanding into the US you will hear people say to you things like, uh, which is what people said to me, it's going to take you twice as long, be twice as hard, and cost twice as much as you think. That's actually true. That one is true. Um, it's incredibly difficult because, uh, you're bringing something, probably you're bringing something new to the market. That's the thing. The worst thing you can do as a firm if you're coming into the US Market is try and do what people are already doing here, but with an English accent. People might like listening to you on the phone, but you can't sell what somebody's already doing. You've got to come in with something new and innovative. Not only have you got to be niche and differentiated in any market that you try and step into, but also this market, the US Thrives on innovation. So just stories about new and different ways of doing things kind of cut through. So that's the first thing. You've just got to be different. So it does take twice as long, twice as hard, and it costs twice as much because you're bringing something new to bear. Uh, that was quite good advice. And so that helped me because we kind of upped the budget, we were more patient with our business plan, all those kind of things, and we worked damn hard to kind of make it, make it work. Uh, that's something that's definitely true. And I would advise people to kind of consider that if you're, if you're expanding, just be a Bit more patient with it. Um, the other thing which I think was a bit more kind of old school advice which I got given quite heavy handedly and I think actually wasn't good advice. Uh, and I'd like to dispel that for your viewers to save you the hassle, is you get this kind of advice, as somebody put it, you know, you, you've got to chew gum and talk baseball if you want to succeed in business in the U.S. um, and that may have been true 20, 30 years ago perhaps. Um, it's certainly true. You want to hire Americans. I mean, that's great. I want to hire, I've got lots of American sounding people. I forget that they sound different to me. Um, I think, I probably think I sound American now. Um, but I think the advice was there is that you got, you've got to have kind of veteran leaders who really, you know, know how the system works and, and be able to go to talk about baseball with the client and stuff like that. I think it's a bit of a narrow way of thinking of the world and you end up, what you end up doing is trying to be same as everybody else. Um, that not only I think was weak advice or it just wasn't good for our, for us, it actually caused us to make some wrong decisions, you know, cause us to make bad decisions. Um, because I was quite desperate to do that. I was quite kind of keen to think I've got to bring in some heavy hitters who can talk about baseball. Um, but that's not how business works. Actually what we now do and what we did right at the beginning, before I brought in these baseball speaking, gum chewing, expensive executives, um, was just be, just be different, be fresh, be interesting, have something to say. Be 100% customer focused, solve problems for them. Yeah, they like to go to a baseball game, but if you're not solving a problem for them in an innovative way and doing it in a way that can give them advantage, it doesn't matter, honestly what language you speak. Um, we have the fortune and the pleasure of working with some really smart executives in big businesses that are competitive and hungry and ambitious and they want you to help solve problems. That's the secret. So don't get swayed by that kind of advice.

Speaker A: And one thing is identifying the niche and then starting to make inroads. The next thing is maximizing that market opportunity and also preserving your place as the owner of that niche. What are some of the things that you've been able to do there?

Speaker B: I'm obsessed with this idea of building a niche. And of course we now live in an age where that is possible. Okay. Pre Internet it was very difficult. You obviously had to be generally a local business, um, and everything was a handshake. But we're fortunate. As I said, we formed the business in 2009. Obviously Internet was well established obviously by that point. And it was fairly nascent days of social media and self broadcast and all of these kind of things. And I was really interested in this idea, this concept that the more niche you are, the bigger your global marketplace. Which sounds really counterintuitive, but I think I, I kind of understood that quite early on is that when we set our first, when we got opened, our first office which was in East London, um, there's a whole bunch of agencies and people around us in Shoreditch. And it was a kind of. We've outgrown Shoreditch, uh, in the sense that we don't fit in anymore, we're too old. But um, what I said to some of the team at that point was there's no point trying to be everything to everybody. There's no point trying to just saying we're a marketing consultant. Because I could go outside, take a stone and throw it. And I would hit three or four marketing consultants or people that could call themselves marketing consultants. The actual competitive market there was literally like our street. But if we said not only are we a niche, we're a niche within a niche with a niche, we're going to be the best in the whole world at doing some quite specific things which hopefully you figure out high value things to people with some money. Um, because then that's when you've got a business, uh, that then actually you have the ability now to communicate with the whole world. And so that was probably quite a good insight we had fairly early on was like the more niche you are, the wider your global marketplace. And it just coincided with pretty early days. This idea of inbound marketing or content marketing. Right, which is what we're doing right now, Ben. Right. Um, which is give your, give your potential customers something of value because they're looking for answers. They're looking for solutions to problems that they have or challenges they need to overcome or advice or education or. They're looking for stuff, right? They're googling things, they're asking, they were asking for the answers to their questions. And if you show up as the answer to a question, they're going to find you. And so what we found, we were like, wow, we've got customers coming from all over the world. It's bizarre. We've got a little office in East London and we were very early, uh, uh, discovering this niche and kind of the world came to us. We were like, this is really cool. So we spent the first 10 years really doing no advertising, no marketing. We barely went to conferences. We barely did nothing. We just, we had inbound work, um, because people found us. It's more competition now, so you have to constantly be good. You have to a lot of stuff to get out there, as you know. Um, but that was our playbook was like, be super niche, talk about your niche all the time. Because there's always going to be, this is my theory is that any given year there'll be at least 100 people out there who will be willing to pay you $100,000 to do work. And if you get 100 customers paying you $100,000 a year, that's a 10 million revenue business. Okay? And that is a threshold business. If you can get to 10 million when we're still just, you know, we're working our way to that, we're nearly there. Um, but that feels like a big threshold and I think it is. You know, if you're, if you're a founder that's looking to evolve your business, take investment. If you're eventually looking to sell your business, that's kind of know what we're probably all aiming at. And so you've got to think, I've got to find a global marketplace. I've got to find 100 clients each year that pay, willing to, you know, that we can present value where they're willing to pay us $100,000 a year. Um, that's a good scale ambition. You can't do that necessarily just in a local market. You know, you've got to think about how you reach out, uh, to the world. So you don't need broad mass appeal. Um, this applies, by the way, in your own personal life as well. Because, you know, unfortunately, I know some people that have been laid off recently. The advertising industry has gone, is going through this bit of this kind of purge at the moment. And I know a bunch of people got laid off and you know, rightly, they're reaching out to a whole bunch of people and some of them reach out to me. And because I can't help myself, I, you know, I have to kind of think I've got to come up with an answer for them. And so I go, you know, I go on their LinkedIn or I say, like, what are you looking for? And they go, oh, you know, I could do this, I could do that, I could be. I could, you know, um, really, I would take anything. And I go on their LinkedIn and it says that they've rewritten it and it says, I'm a marketing consultant or a marketing expert. I've worked across all these different categories, I've worked in these different countries in the world, and I love helping businesses, blah, blah, blah, something really generic. But I'm like, right, if you just took all of your experiences and like, laid them over each other like they were kind of colored lenses, like, what's the thing that comes in the middle? It's uniquely you. That puts you in a category of one. If you could describe that thing, you might find it super helpful because I guarantee you There are probably 10 people looking for that exact thing right now. And you are the answer to somebody's question. And not only is that likely to be a good job for you in terms of you're quite like that job, but they're probably willing to pay you more because you're the perfect solution to their problem. And. But it's counterintuitive always, isn't it? When I talk to anybody about consulting businesses or people that want to set up a consulting business, I, uh, often ask the first question, which is, well, this is the first question you've got to answer as a founder. Who is asking the question to which we are the answer? Who's asking the question to which you are the answer? If you want to be a consultant, that's really good because a, it helps. Helps you be in the business of answering a question. The worst consultants are the ones that think that they're experts on something. You know, just go, um, I'm going to tell you what I think. Nobody needs to hear that nobody cares about your opinion on things generally. Who's asking the question to which you are the answer? Um, so not only are you answering a question from day one, focus on answering those questions. And I said, we have these three focus questions, but it also, the person that is asking that question is the person that's going to pay the bills. They're. They're going to pay you. They're the ones that are going to make you a consultant. They're the ones that are going to turn you into a business. Nobody else is willing to pay you to answer those questions, but those people are asking a question. If you're the answer, if you can be the answer, then that is a business and that's where you've got to Start.

Speaker A: I know quite a few people in the consulting space who are, uh, big aficionados of going with market positioning first and m niching in. And they'll be loving listening to this because it's exactly what they've been preaching. I've, ah, just had a thought though. Like you are in a slightly better position to be able to do that for your own firm given your background. Uh, like it probably just comes naturally to you given the agency background and where you're part. Is that fair?

Speaker B: I mean, in a sense, yes. I mean, we work in the marketing industry, but I'm not a trained marketer. I went to law school. I mean, I'm a lawyer really, but, um, so I should have. There's nothing to stop you learning instincts on marketing. And my 30 second pitch to any of your listeners is you've got to answer a problem. That's true of any business or any brand. If you want to be successful, you need to be answering problems. You've got to put your customer at the heart of your business. You are not the most important person in your business. Your customer is. And it's really hard to keep the customer in the center of your business. But we work really hard to do that. But so that's the first thing. And that is a clear marketing principle. Okay. It's called market orientation. It's basically finding out who the core customer is, who's asking the question and keeping yourself focused on them. And then the natural flow of that is that everything that you say as a business and uh, anything that you give in terms through your content or your products has to be serving the needs of that customer. I know it sounds really obvious, but I don't think most businesses actually do that. Most businesses talk about themselves. It's just naturally, that's what they do. They talk about themselves. And as I appreciate you giving me an indulgent opportunity to talk about myself and my business because I try not to talk about that too much. Um, that is the only other rule really. And then just try trial and error. I mean, you know this because you do this for cmap. You don't start by talking about how great CEMAP is, right? You talk about, you elevate your own customers. You make your customer the kind of hero, which is, I think, what you're in the process of doing right now. I appreciate that. Um, and you know that customers who can express themselves can convince other customers that may, you know, potential customers that they might be interested in it. There's no need to talk about all the technical functions or how big CEMAP is or how good it or not it is, you know, that's not what people want. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about that stuff.

Speaker A: So where's the business at now, Tom? You obviously you've grown it, you're international, you work with some fantastic brands. You've given us a taster of like where you're at to your revenue wise. So you're on that path. What's happening at this moment in time? What does the future look like for your firm?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, so yeah, good question. So we've got to this kind of manageable scale as I said, which is a real, it's a sweet spot but it's also the hardest point I think for a lot of consulting or for a lot of businesses. If you're trying to grow a business that step from 5 mil revenue to 10 as a, uh, lot of people will say is the hardest thing you'll do. Once you kind of, there's this kind of psychological threshold I think and you'll find you get a lot more, you make a lot more friends, you get a lot more support and you certainly get a lot more money thrown at you when you hit a 10 million revenue business. But at the same time, so it's hard work but it's also a great pleasure and a privilege to feel that pressure. To quote Billie Jean King, that pressure is a privilege and it's enjoyable having a scaled business that you can still kind of play with as an owner but you know, you've got to get out of the way because you don't want to be getting to a 10 minute or beyond business and being a real hands on micromanaging owner because you're never going to, you know, you'll never be able to let go and you, nobody will ever trust you uh, with the business. So um, you know, and nobody was, nobody's going to want to join your business as well. That's the other thing. So it's a sweet and source moment. Mostly suite. Uh, what it means as a founder or as an owner at that point is that you have to build the systems to replace yourself. You have to make sure you can't be head chef. What you have to do is you have to identify the ways that you want things done, make sure that those systems are documented, built into technology, that you have playbooks and workflows and more standardization, a little bit of your product but without diluting quality. Quality, um, and you need to bring on people who can think in systems ways but with high eq I mean those are the people that you know, really want there are, will be and continue to be in high demand. Those are the real kind of real talents, um, people that can think in systems but, but also build relationships. That's the second tier of management that you want in place. And uh, so that's a journey that we're going on. I mean we don't have any particular specific outcome in mind yet as a business and even if we did, I wouldn't probably tell you. Um, but you know, it's the traditional founder story. At some point you want to get to a point where you want to do something right? And the primary focus then at that point is maximizing really the value of the business as it's perceived from the outside. So whether that's somebody coming and you want to, maybe I want to raise money to make some acquisitions, uh, maybe I want to merge the business with some other, you know, some other like minded businesses just want our value to be in that discussion, to be as high as it can be. And so of course you're trying to maximize revenue and margin and multiple as you go, as you go along. So the CEO, those are the three levers I've got of control. Um, but you've also got to get to a point where I have huge, you know, we both of the original founders, we have huge passion and energy for this business. We're working in uh, it full time and we, we love what we're doing and we're excited with where we're going. But there will be a point where maybe that wanes or maybe you want to pass it on to the next generation and you want to kind of be able to get out the way and maybe work less in the business, still be emotionally involved in the business. But maybe if you want some more time, that'd be nice at some point. So you've got to create those systems to enable you to get out of the way without things breaking. So we're kind of in that moment right now. So, um, I spend most of my time building things, which is kind of interesting. Um, and again fortunately for us that's probably coincided with really with the AI age, which has just helped us I suppose build that quicker and probably cheaper, um, than we maybe would have done before because a lot of it we can build internally, we can just build stuff ourselves, um, which are legacy processes and systems and uh, ways of working. So uh, yeah, it's good, I mean it's a, it's a good point. It comes with all of its Challenges. I probably sound like sycophantically, uh, you know, like everything's great. It's not, it's, it's a challenge. The marketing is always highly volatile. It's incredibly uh, sensitive to um, economic uh, or political instability of which there's plenty going on. Marketers are very nervous about where they're going to make budget allocation over the next few years and what to do and what to do best. It's good for us often in that situation because we're in the business of helping people make decisions and that's our business and our primary product is trust. Um, we are a zero conflict of interest business. In an industry which is riddled with conflicts of interest. That's another piece of advice is that ah, you know, and I think these days if you're going to go into a niche, you're going to go into a category. Maybe I'm minded to say this because maybe it just fits my personality. But why not be the most high integrity, trustworthy, best reputation business in that niche. Why not stand for something you don't have to have some fluffy purpose but have some principles in the business? So we have some clear principles, things that we would do and things that we would not do. A lot of our competitors get tempted to take money from and they compromise themselves. Then they end up having to wrestle with a conflict of interest.

Speaker A: Hadn't thought about that, about your space, but that is very interesting. Yeah.

Speaker B: The advertising industry is unregulated industries, a self regulated industry. So trillion dollar global market, completely unregulated. Okay. So you can kind of make your own, you know, judgments of what that might be like. Um, it is as some very, very senior marketers, I mean like the cmo, the head marketer, basically the world's head marketer, a guy called Mark Pritchard, who uh, continues to be basically the head of marketing for Procter and Gamble, um, one of the world's most sophisticated and largest advertisers. Has stood on stage multiple times at uh, conferences and industry events. And he's talked about in his words, the murky media supply chain. This is P and G, highly sophisticated, very, very well resourced. They have some of the best people in the world, some of the best marketers in the world, some of the best brains in the world. Um, and his view was that it was um, what he called a murky media supply chain. Um, and he said lots of other things but it is incredibly complicated. It's full of conflicts of interest. There's lots of, lots of hidden margins and, um, rebate deals and kickbacks and all kinds of dodgy stuff that goes on, um, some above the table and some under the table.

Speaker A: Just quickly, if people want to watch something about that. I feel like I watched one of your podcasts where you and Mark Ritson were discussing. Was that after a can event, if I have got that correct. So, like, you've done something on that?

Speaker B: Yeah, we do. We, we, um. So, yeah, appreciate the opportunity just to plug. I mean, it's probably not particularly interesting for you necessarily for your viewers or listeners, because again, we're super niche. But we have a show which we've done for, I think, 10 years now called Media Snack. Media Snack. If you Google MediaSnack, you can find it. It's a YouTube show. We do it. We've done it pretty much every week for the last ten years, um, where we lift the lid on this complex media, uh, supply chain and some of the risks that brands have to face. Um, and we give advice and best practice about how to do things better. But, um, yeah, Mark's, um, Mark's been

Speaker A: on the show, honestly, as a, but as a, as a consumer of products, anybody should understand how that is getting advertised to you, your kids, your family. Like, even if you don't have the same love of media as I do, like, it's an, ah. It's an industry that influences everything that we do. So actually hearing about that is it lifts the lid on so many things that you, You've probably got questions on. So it's what. Plus, consultants are generally quite curious. So I bet somebody's listening to this going, it does sound quite interesting. I'll check that out. Is a good one.

Speaker B: It does. I mean, it's not. It's totally outside the scope of our conversation today. But just for a second, just to ground that, uh, in the reality, there is a huge responsibility. Let's say that brands have now more than in the past, and that is that where their ads go, funds platforms.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Okay. It funds journalism. It funds content.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: When it was the days of where, you know, and I would put an ad on tv, um, that was one thing. Right now their budgets are fragmented across all kinds of different places. And you've got a company like meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, well, you know, all within the same company. And some other things that people are concerned about, the content on there, they're concerned about. The impact has recently been judgments of, you know, some of the damage that some of the social media can be doing. That company is 96% funded by advertising. Okay. Without advertising there is no Facebook. They are wholly an advertising revenue business. And so there's a responsibility that marketers are ah, realizing now that just where they actually put their money has wider socio, sociological kind of implications even onto our kids health, you know. So uh, you know, yeah, learning about this stuff, it's not, it doesn't hurt.

Speaker A: And take it a step further. You've got like, you've got grok, you've got TikTok. And there was that like ownership debate thing. Like it doesn't take much to look below the surface of that to start making your own judgment on things. It's not just. Yeah, uh, it's a crazy, it's a crazy one. Back in the day, like you said tv, you knew what was going on in the paper or the magazine. The agency would take a slice. There's probably some sort of like agency that would do the positioning either in the TV slots and newspapers. Digital just blown that up. And I have no idea what's going to happen with AI. It's going to be a completely new kettle of fish as well. No doubt. Anyway, more opportunities for you to consult and help people. No doubt.

Speaker B: Exactly right.

Speaker A: So you touched on AI, which was another sort of topic that we mentioned that we were going to cover and you said that you're doing some things internally. Uh, are there some things that are working particularly well as you're trying to remove yourself? You know, not completely but you've addressed the fact that like you've reached a point in time where the, there's. Don't describe as a founder bottleneck because that's not your words but you are trying to consciously put processes in place so that you can do what you want to do. So like the things that have worked there that others could learn from if they're experiencing those similar sort of growth pains and challenges.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Um, there's a few, I mean there's, there's probably a few kind of leadership things. Um, and when I'm, I'm doing interviews on our podcast of, of executives in the media and marketing and advertising industry, I always say to them like give me some leadership advice. And so I've kind of, I gather like a magpie these kind of things

Speaker A: or do share that your shiny silver coin based insights.

Speaker B: Yeah, but things I then I'm terrible at crediting people so I've probably dropped in three or four of them already. I know I have that are not mine. So just you know, if you like anything I'm saying, I've probably already stolen it from somebody else. But um, a few things. But these are also, these are ones which in our experience are, you know, these are not obviously leadership book. These are actual in practice leadership things that I think are really important, um, that I keep front of mind. One is just keep making decisions. And again, um, all these things sound so obvious but keep making decisions. The worst thing, the worst times that we've had as a business is and the worst mistakes I've made and they've kind of related is that you, you get to a point where you think, oh, we can hire some grownups now. Uh, or worse, you've got advisors saying to you you should hire some grownups now. What you end up doing is that you end up bringing in people that are kind uh, of industry veterans or from corporates. And they come in with the wrong, telling you the wrong mindset and uh, they actually just slow you down. They don't accelerate your business, they slow you down because they bring all bad habits from other bigger companies or older companies or whatever it is. And so that's a really bad mistake because what happens, I was observing our decision making as a business was just getting slower. Had these like very talented and knowledgeable people, but we weren't, we were just taking too long to make decisions and too much internal governance. Too many, we've all been there too many meetings and you've got too many opinions. And these are quite established opinions now. They're these industry leading industry opinions. And you think this is, I don't, I don't dunno if I agree with all of these experts. Um, because you should never believe experts, as they say. Um, but as an owner, if you're trying to scale a business, just keep making decisions. You're better to make an okay decision, 80% decision in the short term than wait a year to be 100% correct. Because the whole game's moved on. They say it's a cliche that don't let perfection get in the way of progress. I totally believe that and I've seen it firsthand. We have definitely lost years in this business where we haven't made decisions fast enough. So that's the first thing. Um, you have finite commodity as an owner. Well, we all do. You know, time and money, time and money. Just got to think, write it on a wall, time and money. Because if you start kicking decisions down the road, um, they will just fester and you'll never, you're always better to make a decision today. The other main one is, and this is related to is that as an owner, uh, you are terrible at hiring people. You have to understand that. Again, it took us a long time to recognize. I wish somebody had said to us early on, like, guys, do not hire anybody yourselves. Don't hire based on instinct. Okay, so this is the kind of parable. Is that the right word for it is trust your gut. Always trust your gut on business. Okay? You're gonna have a lot of people telling you, talking things. You'll have advisors. If you've got investors in. They've got point of view, all these kind of things. If you don't feel it, don't do it. Right? Trust your. Trust your instinct, because you are 100% right. If you created this business, it's your niche. You understand it. They're your customers. Trust your gut. Nobody else is as committed to that as you are. Trust your gut on business. Do never trust your gut on hiring talent. Uh, because you just. Founders are the worst people, I think, at hiring to always just make mistakes. And with credit to all the people I've hired. Uh, I'm not saying the little mistake, but the point is that, uh, the danger is you end up projecting onto that person what you think, what you want them to be. And sometimes you get lucky and it works out, and that's great, but plenty of times it's just, that's not the right person. Um, so there's an easy way around it, which is that I discovered this relatively recently, is that there's this whole industry called recruitment that can help you, uh, find people. And they're really good at actually asking you what you need and leaning like, the really good ones. I mean, not all recruitment, but you've got to find. I've been lucky and found some good people. Lean in, understand the business, understand the culture. They go out and find you people. They don't just send you a whole bunch of people that are on their, you know, on their desk. Uh, go and find people. That was a kind of revelation for me. I was like, that's a really good way of hiring people. Um, do you always put them.

Speaker A: Should the podcast headline be Tom Dunford's revelation is Use recruiters?

Speaker B: I think so again, but I wish somebody had said that to me, you know?

Speaker A: You know, did nobody try and approach

Speaker B: you with that at any point? No, but I always thought. I always thought that head. I always thought that recruiters, like, recruiters just had a stack of CVs, and if you said to them, I'm looking for this kind of person, they'll give you Three or four that can't maybe kind of fit that thing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, but genuinely, it's been, it's been a blind spot. And it sounds ridiculous, but it's been a. Been a blind spot. I wish that people, all these advisors that we'd had over the years had said something like that to me, because that would have helped.

Speaker A: Um, but would it have gone against their self interest?

Speaker B: Maybe, Perhaps. Perhaps. Um, you know, everyone's got their favorite people that they were, you know, keen on. But, um, I think that, you know, if I was to go back 10 years and give myself a piece of advice, I'd be like that, do, do not get involved in the recruiting process. Um, so that's a major one. You've got to try and do that. Um, and the other thing is, final thing probably that I would give you. I'm glancing over at my kind of big whiteboard here. I write up all these things, but, uh, business is really exciting. Um, I find business is the thrilling game. I'm not a hyper competitive person, so I don't think you have to be a winner takes all out of the deal. Screw you. Like, I know you come across those kind of people in business. It's not my philosophy. I think, I think that there are win wins. And I know that's maybe sounds a bit fluffy, but, uh, but the, that's me as a person in business. I'm really competitive. You know, I want us to win. I don't, I'm not that interested in other people losing as a result of that, but I want us to win. So. And I find that game, you have to be motivated by that game. I think. Otherwise, you know, why would you become a entrepreneur? Why do you want to run your own business? Because it's not easy. But the reward at the end of it is thrilling. You know, when you've had a good day, you've won. Something that you did a while back has kind of, you know, you planted a seed and it's created something that didn't exist before. Um, there's an organic, ah, pleasure, I think.

Speaker A: Here's a quick question for you. How do you. Because this is so true in professional services, where I can get it from a founder's perspective or people who've got a bit of equity. How do you instill that in the people, the business? Because you're only as good as, you know, the team that you've got around you. How do you make sure that they are along for the ride?

Speaker B: It probably depends. At this point, you are, um, another Great piece of advice that somebody gave me years ago who's still an advisor to the business. So that shows you that's good, is that she said, your business will not go up like this. Your business will go up in steps. Uh, and at the time, I obviously didn't really understand what that meant because we were at the bottom of a staircase. Um, but it's absolutely true. You tend to kind of, for whatever reason, you kind of grow rapidly and expand and then you consolidate and then you grow and you consolidate and then you. And it feels like that. And actually the people that you need at those different levels evolve. Um, so these early stages, you kind of. You're like, you want to hire friends, right? You want to hire just people that trust you because they've got to believe in you. And you ends up feeling a bit like that. And that's why great companies get formed in dorm rooms and colleges and things like that, because college friends or people that work together and they branch out on their own because you need a group of people around you that trust. And frankly, they're the only people probably they're going to work for you or with you. Um, but you get to a different level and then really some of those original people leave because they want to go off and do something else. That's a. Maybe feels a bit more free, formal. They start their own thing and then you just bring in people that have a different level of kind of business like maturity, perhaps, if that's. I don't mean that in an offensive way to those that leave. Um, and then as you go, you know, we've probably gone up like five or six steps over the years where I really feel like we've got. Now we've got a really good leadership that's appropriate for the size of the business that want us to get that want to get to that next stage. I don't think any of that leadership team would have been right for us in the early stages. I think we would have been too risky, too weird, too wacky. Now, as I said before, I've got people in the business who appreciate systems but are entrepreneurial, driven to grow. Um, so there's definitely an archetype of person that you need at different stages. And then you've got to do two other simple things. As a founder, you've got to be able to articulate the destination. So you need to spend a lot of time on that stuff. Um, because if you've got a leadership team that you trust, then let's explain what is that next step for the business. They can decide if it's right for them or not. I think you've just got to be totally honest about that because if you try and pretend it's something that's not, at some point that's going to come back to bite you. Just kicking a problem down the road. So just decide, get the right people in. So you've got to give them. You better paint the picture of where we're all heading. And then the second part of it is make that lucrative for them either financially obviously, but also professionally rewarding. Um, let them imagine what that's going to be like. Uh, I think that's all you can really do. And then you've got to be as a business, I suppose, dynamic and agile enough to certainly in our industry react to the. We see our industry as being this trillion dollar kind of ocean with huge waves on it. Um, and we've got to stay afloat, right as a business, we've just got to always ride that well. That's the way we think of ourselves. So that, yeah, that would be it.

Speaker A: The good thing with most consultancies as well is because largely you have to be doing bigger projects to fund a consultancy. Um, they tend to be quite big clients and your niche is advertising. Marketing. In others it might be some big manufacturing, whatever the niche is, but being able to align yourself with those brands can also be quite like an attractive, compelling proposition.

Speaker B: Uh, if you want. Sorry to cut you off, but if you wanted to talk about AI, I know that's what you asked. I didn't answer your question.

Speaker A: Yeah, so share with us. Sort of like either, well, your perspectives on AI broadly or how you're using it in the firm, or both.

Speaker B: The good thing about AI is that uh, consulting businesses are the perfect use case in my opinion because uh, probably a lot of your viewers and listeners may be in the same way of thinking about them as consulting businesses. Is that the way I view it? Which is we collect information, we analyze information and then we kind of report information. Basically that's kind of, we kind of take um, data, we analyze data and we give it back. Whether that's tons of data points and spreadsheet or a giant database, or whether it's stakeholder interviews and customer relationships you build. You're basically getting stuff, ingesting it, deciding helping make decisions and then reporting back and giving some advice. Um, and so I see us as these three parts of the business. AI is brilliant because it can help. All three of those consulting businesses I think are, ah, just the Perfect use case for AI. So as soon as it became something that we could lean into, um, we've been doing so and it's had a kind of transforming effect on the business. Um, we're in the business, as I've said, of helping decision makers make faster, better decisions. That is the business that we're in. We have executives, marketing executives, in a highly competitive, dynamic marketplace. Lots of competition, literally, like day by day, often they're kind of thinking about things. If they can make better decisions faster than their competitors in terms of, um, financial allocations into advertising or optimizing those in some way, that can be a real winning strategy. Advertising really can drive demand and grow market share. So the faster we can get better answers for them, the better. And AI 100% enable us to do that. Um, and that's a great exciting journey to go on because we better than we were a year ago, we'll be much better in a year's time. Um, and that will be continually, I think, hopefully an added value. The strategy that we've taken though Ben, is that we've taken a kind of native AI approach. And what I mean by that is, um, we're not in the business of selling AI, we're not in the interest in building AI. What I really love is just more recently how good integrated tools are with AI built in. Um, which I mean you guys are close to because you know, you literally have a tech company that's doing this. Um, so you know, we, we. I find the tools that are native, I find the tools that are, that have the technology built in, enable us to just use the best possible tools in the marketplace. Um, that's a strategy of ours. Some of our competitors I know have invested in building huge data management technologies which my fear was that that would always be a liability more than an asset or the risk was it becomes a liability. You have a huge piece of technology. You guys know this. You build a piece of technology, it's not done. You then have to invest constantly to improve iterate, make it secure, adjust to the constant, different demands of your customers. Um, and also in our world getting access to information is like a moving target. Getting data out of Google platforms or out of Meta out of Amazon. It's just the integrations there are incredibly complicated, um, and changing every day. So that's a bit of a risk I think, if you start building your own. Um, the fun thing now because I'm in building mode, is that the cost of build is coming right down and certainly that first bit, the data collection the cost of data, I'm quoting someone else who said this to me and it's just stuck with me. The cost of data collection will go to zero is what someone said to me. So I thought, I kind of like that idea. I need to test whether that's actually true or not. But the cost of actually gathering information certainly in our business is going to go very, very low. Um, which was always quite a high barrier to entry. So that's kind of interesting. So the tools are great. Um, it's another one of the reasons why we were interested in how we connected on talking about cmap, um, was because you kind of want that system of record, right? We don't want all of our company. I don't want my company's data fragmented across like 17 different systems. I want a place where I can gather that all together. Either to use your native AI layer that can help me make sense of that, or to be able to, if I need to export, um, or bring my own AI view into that, uh, when I've got a kind of single source of truth on data. So I think that's for us, that's the strategy. Try and keep it native. Try not to build too much. Just use the best tools that are there. Um, the cost of build if we need to make it keeps coming down. Um, the final thing I will say on AI because uh, this is my, kind of, my favorite thing I like saying about AI, um, is that the people that just say AI all the time, and you know the types, right? We're talking about it now, but you know the type. They're just basically out there just talking about AI. The people that are saying AI all the time are selling AI. So if you just kind of approach the world with that view, those people are just talking about AI. They're not there because they're super expert at what you do, but they just know a lot about AI. They don't know. They're just talking about AI because they're trying to sell an AI solution. The rest of us are just selling the product or service that is getting better with AI. And that product or service is then what we talk about. We just talk about our products and services that are uh, accelerated. They're faster and better because of AI.

Speaker A: You won't find me disagreeing with any of that buy versus build. Not just sticking an AI wrapper on it, you've got more of like powering your business with it. Um, I'm here for all of, uh,

Speaker B: that

Speaker A: CEMAP is an operations platform for consulting firms. The solution is used by hundreds of professional services firms to manage everything from pricing and timesheets to resources, sourcing and billing, enabling you to optimize utilization, uh, drive project margin. Get a single source of truth across your firm.