E7: Ady Collins

Richard Hill [00:00:07]:
Welcome to episode 7 of Agency Intensive. I'm Richard Hill, your host. In this episode, I'll speak with Adi Collins, CEO of Knotted Commerce. Firmly rooted in the ecommerce space here in the UK, Adi has held a host of senior leadership positions before he established Knotted Commerce as a serious player in the integration space. We chat the mission behind knotted commerce, scaling teams using global talent. Is that something you guys are doing right now? Niching down your business to offer a very specialist service and the issues around offering a full service proposition. And Adi shares the personal story of his cancer diagnosis and how he pushed through and so much more in this one. Now if you do me one favor, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast.

Richard Hill [00:00:52]:
You're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now Let's head over to this fantastic episode. Hi, Aidy. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me in. No problem. You're not allowed to come that far, have you? It's quite rare.

Richard Hill [00:01:06]:
Most of the guests

Ady Collins [00:01:07]:
I think it's gonna be different on the way back because the weather's coming in, but it's a nice sunny drive in, actually. So as I think I was saying to you just before we went live, it was hard not to carry on to Skeg Vegas, Skegness, and have a have a day on the beach.

Richard Hill [00:01:19]:
Yeah. So you Eighty is, what, about 90 minutes away. And, from where our office is and where we are right now in the studio, we're about 45 minutes from the coast down with a lovely skeg nest. That's right. A lot of us are quite, fond of for for fond ish, mad reasons.

Ady Collins [00:01:32]:
Good and bad reasons.

Richard Hill [00:01:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for coming on the show. Obviously, we work both in ecommerce, so it's great to have you on. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. But I think before we do get into the nitty gritty, it'd be great for you to introduce yourself and how you got into the world of agencies and ecommerce.

Ady Collins [00:01:49]:
So I suppose, in short, kind of by accident. So my career started out kinda 25 years ago in a corporate world. I was experienced, started in mainframe programming world. So I come from a quite a different path to most people. Most, you know, entrepreneurs end up with an agency with a more creative kind of bent. I'm not really that. I'm the the dry engine room oily Hoo hoo. Kinda coder from the past into a business analyst.

Ady Collins [00:02:13]:
But, yeah, I did kind of just shy of a decade in corporate world. Ended up accidentally really through a redundancy in in an agency, a local agency at the time. It was called Chemistry Digital. Stayed there 5 years, then later got acquired by the Publicis Group. And it was inside there that I kinda really have realized that that's what suits me. The speed, the flexibility, fluidity that comes with agency life, you know, strip away some of that, without stripping away too much, but strip away some of the red tape and the politics and all the rest of it. And I just found a sweet spot that I came alive, and I was I was doing well there. I kinda moved up into ops director kind of world, follow the Sun development where I had teams in most time zones in that business through the acquisition we had through, the Publicis group because they had deep pockets and teams all around the world.

Ady Collins [00:03:01]:
It was kind of from there. I never kind of looked back. I I went from there. I went to another agency, Orange Bus, that was acquired by Capita. So I did a lot of digital transformation in the public sector, then moved from there. I did a bit of a divergent, move to a role that I thought was gonna be something it it kinda wasn't really, but kept closer to home with my children. I ended up in a role that was back into consultancy and account directorship again, that felt a little bit more SME Yeah. Corporate.

Ady Collins [00:03:31]:
So I kinda came away from there about 18 months in. A chance opportunity conversation with Dave Wiltshire that I'd tried to pass work over to him in the past when he was just managing Juno. Yeah. I'd at the time, when I was at Prodigius, running that agency, I tried to pass some work over. I never got a response back from him. But then his name jumped into my head while I was in this role that I wasn't quite enjoying. Thought I wanna get back into Nottingham to be closer to family.

Richard Hill [00:03:58]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:03:59]:
I wanted to get back into the agency space. I'll start there. His name kinda just popped up in my head at 3 AM. I'd messaged him on LinkedIn. He messaged right back, which I felt was strange.

Richard Hill [00:04:09]:
3 AM? Yeah. I thought

Ady Collins [00:04:10]:
it was strange at the time. Jump jump forward 5 years. We know each other very, very well. I realized

Richard Hill [00:04:15]:
that's not strange.

Ady Collins [00:04:16]:
No. That's that's that's not strange at all. So, yeah, we we've we've had many a conversation in the middle of the night Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:04:22]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:04:22]:
Since then. But, anyway, yeah, so I ended up I I didn't actually know about Patchworks at that point. And and Patchworks then was a a hybrid agency plus platform, I plus platform. So I was very much running went in, came to see where I was very much running the agency side. So it's the the client facing delivery and support side of things there. Yeah. And it was through us kinda growing through, you know, we we became a little bit COVID rich, really. Everyone wanted to get online and trade online in in ecommerce and needed to do it quickly.

Ady Collins [00:04:54]:
We had an Ipass at Patchworks that did that. So we decided instead of just doing the bootstrapping they've been doing for many years, we'd take investment. There was a hunger for it. And we went on a journey for the last 4 or 5 years growing and scaling and transforming it to be pure iPaaS platform, so just a SaaS based product business. And all that while I was still very much focused on the agency side of the business. So, well, the drop the dropping off point is clearly there's gonna be a gap, and a known gap, a a a required gap. You know, a the agency space is quite distracting if you're trying to build a business build a a product business. So that needed to divide, and I was in the best place.

Ady Collins [00:05:35]:
You know, I've lived and breathed the Ipass integration space, delivery, and support. I brought in the support model and the different tiers of support that worked well in integration, for all of our many, many customers. Well, this this this gap is perfect for me to fill. So fast forward to January, December, January, this, you know, this January just come. We we spun up Knotted Commerce, myself and cofounder in, Tom Brewer. He was the head of sales at Patchworks.

Richard Hill [00:06:03]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:06:03]:
So between the 2 of us, we'd see So

Richard Hill [00:06:05]:
he left Patchworks as well?

Ady Collins [00:06:07]:
Yeah. Yeah. And it was a it was a conditioned thing. We saw it. We knew when we brought the VCs in. We was in the senior management. Yeah. We made the agreement that that was where it was gonna go.

Ady Collins [00:06:14]:
We were gonna turn that into the product based business Yeah. Because it was better to then hand off the configuration, the support work into the agency space. Yeah. It was at that point where I went, well, I suit that space more. That's where my life has been, and then that sweet spot has been looking after being a real frontline with customers. So we all we all knew very early on that was what we was gonna do, and kinda jumped in and and built not a commerce start this year. It's going very well already. We're kind of at the we're trending around the £1,000,000 year mark already, which is not good enough not not not too bad in our 1st year.

Richard Hill [00:06:50]:
It's early August.

Ady Collins [00:06:52]:
Yeah. And it's and I think, you know, that comes from such a platform that we've had at, Patchworks, both in terms of knowing the platform to work on, the technical platform, but also the platform in terms of the the contacts, knowing the business. You know, I've I've been embarrassingly lucky to be sat there with, you know, big founders of, you know, the the lounge underwear, Shieles, Gymsharks, Castels, Bellstaffs, all these huge businesses, and you learn so much dealing with them that, it was a no brainer at that point to go right when the platform becomes just purely a platform inside one business and the agency needs to hive off. Yeah. There's no one better than me to to go off and do that. And with with Tom, as well as the cofounder, knowing the the front end of that journey, you know, how to pick out what the customer needs through the sales cycle because he was a sales guy through to me as the delivery guy. We kind of had it all sold up.

Richard Hill [00:07:42]:
Fantastic fantastic, journey there. So to clarify for the listeners then, so not at Coors.

Ady Collins [00:07:49]:
Yes.

Richard Hill [00:07:49]:
Obviously, you've you've come from that background working in, you know, working in a, you know, a very corporate back in the day and then a vast range of experience work with a lot of big brands, you know, working for a very specialist agency Yes. With Patchworks. Yep. And then spot an opportunity where, if I'm not mistaken, where you've got this sort of you've got these merchants Mhmm. That need this very, very, very specific specialization, which is sort of connecting the merchant with a with a product, with a, you know, with a a Petrobras in that instance, but sort of the bit in the middle that a lot of people is sort of make or break. If that's not done right, that that sort of consultancy piece, connecting the right thing, is it the right doing the right amount due diligence, you know, and and looking at what is needed for what might be, you know, a fair large organization, but Mhmm. 50,000,000 can soon go to 200,000,000, 300,000,000 or whatever it may be. So you're like the guy in the middle or the team in the middle that's consulting between these fairly successful founders.

Richard Hill [00:08:51]:
Obviously, there's a there'd be an array of different customers, I'm sure.

Ady Collins [00:08:53]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:08:54]:
You know, but fairly savvy businesses Mhmm. That have seen it all, heard it all, you know, and have looked at every platform. We can list them all off and then maybe just making some decisions, but they need a a trusted adviser, trusted team so to connect them to their next sort of phase of growth and and sort of be that team to help manage that connection with a new platform or, you know, a a new set of tech. You know, I was I was looking at your site. Obviously, I've got I'm pretty aware of what you do, but, you know, we know that, for example, quite often, you know, clients will come along on there. They're on 1 or 2. You know? Oh, we're doing Google Shopping. We're doing Amazon.

Richard Hill [00:09:32]:
Ah, but you're not doing it in another country. Okay. And do you realize that with 4 or 5 more marketplaces and 20 more countries, we just opened up a 100 more opportunities, and that's the sort of thing you're doing, is there, for some big levers?

Ady Collins [00:09:46]:
Yeah. I think the way I position it in particular is to say it's to it's to provide the access to best of breed technology into future proof businesses' growth or change of direction or optimization. And you can only do that, if you don't just go headlong into some big custom build

Richard Hill [00:10:06]:
Yep.

Ady Collins [00:10:07]:
That may take a couple of years. You've got something very custom then. You go, right. Well, without growing it 6 months later, what do you do next? So, being on that front line of an Ipass business, which was patchwork Patchworks and seeing the value you can bring by then effectively creating that myriad of bringing bringing best of breed technologies in. And

Richard Hill [00:10:26]:
a com composable

Ady Collins [00:10:27]:
It's compo yeah. It's the whole composable ecosystem. I kinda coined that. It's probably out there myself. But we talk a lot about composable commerce, and everyone now knows the value of that. Say, right. There's all of these different businesses that do specialist things very, very well, and to get hold of that technology and plumb it altogether is the composable commerce. And when you've when you've got a great scaled, sustainable, stable, user rich experience there that's plugged all these things together, that's composable commerce, and it's it's bringing it all together.

Ady Collins [00:11:00]:
But I say, well, you still need the businesses to bring all that together, and we haven't quite got that right. We're getting there very fast. There's a lot of, you know, the I feel it in all of the, you know, the Ecom Collab Clubs and all the rest of it. That hive mind mentality is ripe. Everyone wants to work together now. Yep. But at one point, you've got the idea and the buzzwords of composable commerce, but you to knit it together, you want that composable ecosystem. So all of us businesses that specialize in those specialist technologies need to then work together.

Ady Collins [00:11:30]:
So the 2 need to go hand in hand. It's all well and good that you might be able to plug all these systems together, but you're gonna be scratching your head to find who can do that if you're waiting on a full service agency to come good and say I'll do it. So I'm trying to piece the 2 together to say the technology now all connects together Yeah. But technology is always just the enabler. The people the business with the people in it that then know how to connect those things together and why and in what order and in what time frame. There's the gold dust to then help a business scale. And it's a scam.

Richard Hill [00:12:02]:
Business, Aidy, that. Very exciting because I think that's a that's you know, as you're saying it in a few of the episodes I've done recently, there's a real gap there

Ady Collins [00:12:08]:
There is a gap.

Richard Hill [00:12:09]:
Yeah. Which I think, you know Yeah. Obviously, a few months in, you you're doing very well at. So And,

Ady Collins [00:12:13]:
yeah, and I've seen that gap because it had to come flooding over to me while I was at Patchworks Rich to say we're in a mess here, or we don't know what to do, or we need the advice, or we've got stuck. Yeah. It's just providing that service as a focused full time business.

Richard Hill [00:12:26]:
Yeah. So let's just, step back a little bit. Mhmm. So I think, you know, the people that will be listed in, we've got all different founders at different stages of their of their journey with an a with agency, and we talk, you know, we we talk a lot about the £1,000,000. You know, the or this £83,334 reoccurring is your £1,000,000. But agency, obviously, however you skin it, you skin it. Whether it's you're doing lots of projects or retainers. You know? I'm obsessed with retainers in a in a healthy way, but, you know, but, obviously, project work as well.

Richard Hill [00:12:54]:
But step me through the the sort of, you know, how you you the retainer project. Mhmm. You know, how you you know, share what you're willing to share. Yeah. Yeah. It's just it's really, insightful to our listeners that are sitting there. They've maybe hit the mill trying to get to the 2, the 5, the 10, or what you know, there's all different scales of agencies out there. And but we talk a lot around this sort of 1 to 2 to 3 mil agency land.

Richard Hill [00:13:18]:
You know, there's obviously all different conversations outside that. But, you know, you've obviously grown very quickly, you know, from 0 to, you know, run rate of a coming in, in, you know, 8, 9 months. Mhmm. Talk to you about the you know, how you decided on the billing and how Yeah. You know, and and the and the rates.

Ady Collins [00:13:36]:
Sure. So you're right. Effectively, our business starts as a project based business. It's about going to customers and say, you need all this technology tying together. We can do that. Yep. It's time and material kind of or a fixed price depending on how you do it. We're gonna we're gonna estimate and quote it based on the effort.

Ady Collins [00:13:51]:
Yeah. That effort is about people. And that means that then when you start the next month, then it's back to 0, and you go again, and you look at your capacity and all the rest of it. So that's the starting point. But one of the key value adds of our business is to say, look. We all know it. Whichever part of the spectrum you're on inside the agency land for ecommerce businesses, nothing stands still. And particularly when you're when you're boasting like we are as a business that we will connect together your trading platforms that is so important to stay live, then the retainers come in 2 ways then.

Ady Collins [00:14:23]:
The retainers come in a support package, and there's various ones that we provide, from LightTouch all the way through to far more partnership kind of I I call them from support.

Richard Hill [00:14:33]:
Consultancy more. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:14:34]:
Yeah. So so instead of, like, the gold, silver, bronze, because they're quite different, I've got the the entry level support. It's all about keeping the lights on. You don't need to be looking at your tech stack. We will.

Richard Hill [00:14:43]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:14:43]:
It's support. Then the next stages on from that is more the agency model like retainers, which is then, well, what do you wanna do next?

Richard Hill [00:14:50]:
We can

Ady Collins [00:14:51]:
guide you. So it's then baking in extra hours of consultancy and Yeah. Execution time to to connect the rest of their platforms together to optimize it

Richard Hill [00:15:00]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:15:00]:
Proactive. So, yeah, it goes from support through to optimize through to growth. And depending where the customer is on their journey, they'll want one of those kind of comforting arms around them.

Richard Hill [00:15:11]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:15:12]:
And that's where the that's where the the MRR comes. That's where that monthly recurring revenue

Richard Hill [00:15:17]:
comes from. Maybe 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 months projects. Obviously, it'll vary. Yeah. Something's then live, that's that's delivered. Yeah. But, obviously, you you're discussing retainers right at the early stages so you can see the conversations that are very much, you know, part of the the sales process at the beginning.

Ady Collins [00:15:34]:
Yeah. And and, absolutely, the reason it's part of the sales process at the beginning, I've spoke to many I'll come onto it later down the line with all the questions, I'm sure. I spoke to many ecom agencies since starting Knottard, but also while I was at Patchworks Yeah. About, well, you know, if you're gonna do the integration, how are you then gonna support? You know, it's one of those things. The minute you've done it, the customer is not gonna let you go. Yeah. It's so important. If that goes down, they're gonna be ringing you.

Ady Collins [00:15:57]:
How are you gonna support that? Have you thought about it? And most ecom agencies that they're building the websites or whatever that might take on some of the integration, they've kind of paused their thought and said, not really thought about it. Maybe we'll put it into our retainer.

Richard Hill [00:16:09]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:16:09]:
And my provocative question back there is always, well, you get a a very enthusiastic and emotional founder that's got 1,000,000 of pounds riding on something that's just broken. It's their baby. They don't wanna discuss

Richard Hill [00:16:22]:
For too long.

Ady Collins [00:16:23]:
Hours they're gonna yeah. For a couple of days about the potentially what the fix is, or do you use the retainer hours that you was gonna use for consulting? You Don't do that. You need a very specific integration support

Richard Hill [00:16:35]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:16:35]:
Tier that's drilled. You've got your SLAs and SLOs, and you've got your Yeah. Your tiered response rates. All the rest of it needs to be nailed down. Yeah. And you need to be talking about that at the point where you're talking about the project. Yeah. So when we go live on this date, you need a period of hyper care to to deal with the snaggins, and then you move into some business as usual level of support because you can't afford not to fix when something breaks if you're

Richard Hill [00:16:59]:
obvious when you lay out like that, isn't it? We're gonna build this thing, but there's nobody there to to to you know, whether you just need the base support, whether you want growth Yeah. And and proactive work. Yeah. So it just comes hand in hand. So pricing model then, you know, we've got this we've got this project piece at the front, which can vary from, you know, see, I guess, you know, a few few day. Actually, going back a step, do you charge for initial sort of project discussion?

Ady Collins [00:17:28]:
We have done once.

Richard Hill [00:17:29]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:17:29]:
It it it all comes down to it's it's one of them classic it depends kind of answers. Yeah. A lot of the work that we do and because when I say we I should clarify as We're a specialist integration agency. That's all we do. I don't go and build the websites. I don't do the marketing SEO, any of the creative, none of that. And I won't hire for that. I'm purposely out there in the market to say, we don't do that.

Ady Collins [00:17:49]:
Yeah. I wanna be hive minded and do a specialism. Yep. Be a specialist. Work with specialists. It's too expensive to do full service, in my opinion, and the output's not that great if you try and do everything. You're gonna have a weak spot. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:18:01]:
So we are just there to do the integrations. And for those bigger digital transformation projects where a business might be literally ripping out their entire tech stack

Richard Hill [00:18:10]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:18:11]:
We can then go in, and we are doing one one right now, where it's okay. Let's break that down into kind of MVP through to end goal 2 years down the line, what you're trying to bring together. And at that point, it makes sense to give a ballpark, and this is going way back to my old waterfall kinda days of a business analyst, ballpark wrong, kinda. It's likely for your budgetary purposes gonna be x 1,000 of pounds, but let's not worry about it too much. Let's only fix that in when once we've got through a discovery phase. The discovery phase will be a fixed price of x, which will cover these outputs, these workshops, these amounts of hours of a consultant or consultants. At that point, we will turn that ball park. You can have your outputs and you don't have to carry on at that point.

Ady Collins [00:18:54]:
You've got the blueprints effectively. You can choose at that point. We'll lock in a fixed price per phase

Richard Hill [00:19:01]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:19:02]:
At that point because you then know you can be accurate with your quotes.

Richard Hill [00:19:05]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:19:06]:
And away we go. You can get to choose. The reason you you charge for the scoping at that point is, 1, because you could never be accurate enough on a big digital transformation project to just you know, you don't wanna get we don't wanna get a customer into trouble where you say, let's let's wing it. Let's say it's £20,000 and it turns out to be £200,000. No one wins in that situation. So as long as they understand that it's a big project, you're gonna partake in that scenario Mhmm. And everyone normally will go with it. So let's break it down.

Richard Hill [00:19:35]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:19:35]:
Not over commit. We all know expectations.

Richard Hill [00:19:38]:
I guess that's where your specialism comes in because they'd have thought about what they understand, but and their experience, their knowledge of the you've got this much experience. So, like, oh, I didn't think of that. And in 2 years, what happens if we outgrow that warehouse? We need a new ERP for that, and then we've gotta connect. And then there's talk of actually going into 20 countries. Oh, oh, crikey. So we've got we never thought about feeds. Oh, okay. Feeds is a whole new thing.

Richard Hill [00:20:03]:
The conversation might start here at 20 k, but then the road map Yeah. Leads into, obviously, 100.

Ady Collins [00:20:08]:
Yeah. And that's the beauty of doing it like I say, being an integration agency is iPass first. That's the beauty of that. It's future proof, and it's flexible. It's fluid.

Richard Hill [00:20:16]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:20:16]:
So you don't have to know your 5 year plan. Yeah. It's good to talk about it upfront so you know roughly where you're going because then we'll give the best recommendations. But the point of it is to be kinda component components that you add on. Yeah. And as long as you've not gone stupidly down a totally different Yeah. Route, then you're gonna be fine because you see it as a bit of a printer cartridge. That one's done with now.

Ady Collins [00:20:37]:
Let's plug the next one in. You don't have to rewire the the printer. It's got its universal connector that you plug it into, and that's why we go via middleware iPASS.

Richard Hill [00:20:46]:
So I think, brilliant kickoff there. We've got a very very, very specialist agency, you know, with a a raft of experience, you know, very, very literally, like, down the middle. You know? And I I I've had a few conversations recently, and I'm thinking, oh, I've got some clients for you straight away, you know, or some conversations I've been having recently where there's a bit of a gap, you know, with merchants that are Mhmm. You know, I think for the listeners, it's a real key takeaway. You know, the specialist agency, we talk about it a lot. You know, you've said, you know, not try to do everything to everybody. You know? Some of the especially in marketing, for example. You know, there's 30 channels you can be an expert at.

Richard Hill [00:21:23]:
But you must have seen, obviously, working in, you know, in agency, you know, a lot of agencies that sort of maybe do quite a lot. You know? So that was a conscious decision straight away, was it, Ryan, at the beginning?

Ady Collins [00:21:34]:
Straight away. Yeah. And I I've I've probably been a bit too bold and said I'm trying to see this not just as a business, but as a movement. Yeah. I genuinely do want us as a collective ecosystem to take away the pain points that we all live and breathe. If you're a full service agency doing too much, there's always something that you're like, we we get into trouble there or it's painful or that's not where the margin is or whatever. I spoke to loads and loads of ecom agencies at at this point. And when I give my pictures to what we do and why we do it, and I'm not gonna go and hire people that could cannibalize your work if you was to work with us, and I'm gonna need to pass that work back to you when they want the website or the visuals or the design or whatever it may be or even the consultancy around getting you traffic in and all the rest.

Ady Collins [00:22:16]:
I'm not gonna touch that. Yeah. But at the same time, I'm there as your guy as your supporting arm when the conversation goes a bit like, well, we've got all these things we're trying to put together. We're gonna I'm gonna hand that over to Notted, and we're gonna sit in the middle and talk together. And we're gonna offer our expertise at the same time and work nice and friendly in the middle together. I always say, like, for ease of maths, if there's a £100,000 piece of work and you wanna take it all and and in the past, you'd have taken it all because we don't all work, you know, commercials aren't great and how you try and work together. You try and take all that £100,000, and then you think of an alternative situation where you only try and take 50. Well, that sounds ridiculous.

Ady Collins [00:22:53]:
Let's take the 100. But the 50 route may have meant you've got in and out within 2 months, and you've taken 30 of it in margin.

Richard Hill [00:23:01]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:23:01]:
The 100 route might have meant you've been locked in for 2 years. You don't know how to get out of it. You spent £200,000 and lost money. So it's it's be brave, be friendly as an ecosystem, and work it all out between us so that then the customer doesn't have to worry about that themselves. They they might see the value in getting specialists in, but then the next worry usually is, oh, I've now got these 3 or 4 different, businesses to try and work with at the same time. Let's also work that out between us

Richard Hill [00:23:31]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:23:31]:
And then you go in with a unified front, and that's where I go back to that composable ecommerce ecosystem that I'm trying to build in that movement. Say, let's do that for the customer before we get to the customer's door, and then you go in with a shrink wrapped offer that might be 3 businesses deep.

Richard Hill [00:23:48]:
I think

Ady Collins [00:23:48]:
that's not gonna need to

Richard Hill [00:23:49]:
advice, Adi. I think those that are listening. I think if you're you're on that journey to hit the mil, the 2 mil, I think you're not going it alone when you're doing it that way as well. You're building a, you know, partner network, you know, depending on, you know, what you know, you're listing in if you're you know, we have a lot of people in ecommerce listed in, but, obviously, you know, there's a lot of agencies that do not ecol as well. But Yeah. Having those trusted half a dozen people Yeah. Agencies, partners, obviously, as you know, you know, we we made the mistake if we were at you know, just a few years ago. Now we had, like, a 100 odd partners.

Richard Hill [00:24:19]:
It's like, we just can't manage this. We can't manage this. So we're like, alright. Okay. For the different ICPs that we work with, we've got different partners, obviously, different scale, different size. Yeah. If they're, you know, doing a, you know, 5 minute a year, that's a certain size. If we're doing 50,000,000, then their requirements are very, very different.

Richard Hill [00:24:35]:
We're not gonna send them to the same dev agency or the same design. Maybe, maybe not. You know? What's the sort of headcount of an agency? You know? What, you know, very, very deep specializations for very specific things? You build those relationships. It then works both ways, doesn't

Ady Collins [00:24:51]:
it? 100%.

Richard Hill [00:24:51]:
Because that's what my next question is, sort of like new business. So I assume the majority of the leads come from, you know, your existing relationships with, you know, where you've worked before, where your other cofounders were before. Yep. But, you know, what would you say about lead gen, consistent new business coming through? What's a couple of tips you could give to the listeners?

Ady Collins [00:25:11]:
Yeah. So you're absolutely right. The initial platform that that we we stand on is with our own black book of contacts. Yeah. And we've done it for a lot of, you know, embarrassingly good businesses, so that's been a real good head start for us. But the long term is all about that partnership goal. So when we're talking lead gen, it should always be a circular piece. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:25:29]:
I I want to know your business intimately, not just as a let's get a 20 ecom agencies that build websites and I'll just spin a wheel and decide which one I might throw a a customer to. Because if it's the wrong agency or for the agency, it's the wrong customer, that was a pointless introduction. So for example, we we're integrating. We're just about to go live, or we are going live right now with, the Jacuzzi Group, doing all their integrations. They don't have an incumbent web agency. Mhmm. They're interested in talking to 1. Now I picked the person to go and speak to.

Ady Collins [00:26:01]:
So through The Ecom Collab Club, which I love, and speak to the, you know, the anecdotes and you understand the businesses more, intimately, I just learned through Champs. I'm talking to, Ross at Strafe Agency, CEO at Strafe Agency, that they specialized in kind of single product immersive, you know, conversion. So and he'd done some work for Hot Tub Yeah. Business. I it's a no brainer. My Jacuzzi Group customer will feel thankful and add and and feel the value I'm I'm adding by listening to their needs, listening to, my ecosystem and all the businesses within it so they don't have to and say, you need to speak to this business. So it's less about the old world of referrals and contracts and all, you know, partnership channel management. I've passed you 2.

Ady Collins [00:26:45]:
You now need to pass me 1. I want it to be more organic than that. And I'm always gonna have a customer that I can't service 75% of their needs. Yep. So I'm gonna pass that 75% of their needs out to the right place. But at the same time, I also appreciate that this isn't the sexy stuff. If I'm gonna go and try and get the attention of a business that's not in dire needs of re tech, architect, and all the rest of it, They're probably more interested in talking to a more creative agency that's talking about how to bring in their get their conversion or bring in traffic. So I'm not gonna get into that conversation.

Ady Collins [00:27:22]:
So I'd I then, in turn, need that relationship with the agencies to say, right. I'm talking to this customer. We can only actually win it because we found that we've got lots of problems on beyond the service.

Richard Hill [00:27:33]:
Hot tubs, very specialist thing, isn't it? You know? Straight away, I'm thinking my brain's probably like yours was when you oh, hot tubs. It's very u obviously, it's a high high value product. It's a big big purchase. Yeah. There's probably finance involved at the at the end users, so there's a finance element plugin tech required. You've got multicolor inside, multicolor outside. Have we got some sort of color chooser we can create? That's a whole piece for some 3 d modeling, branding, design. So that's a who who have I got for that? Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:27:59]:
That's it. Finance. Bang. But then my mind goes but this is where well, I'm thinking that's jacuzzi. They then have a network of distributors, retailers, you know, probably I don't know the numbers. You know, 30, 20, 30, 40, 50 in the UK and every other country you can think of. So there's a Jacuzzi, but then there's a network of dealers that are selling these things. So there's then local SEO that you could have, and then the list goes on.

Richard Hill [00:28:24]:
The next thing you know, you've got you're thinking of your of your network of of of partners. Well, I've got a local SEO guy. Well, they didn't ask for that, but you know

Ady Collins [00:28:31]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:28:31]:
That Yeah. You know, this that you'll be able to help. There's not just maybe them, but their why their wider network Mhmm. Their distribution network. That's it. And then you're obviously building this, you know, this group of of partners, and everyone's winning. Partnership. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:28:47]:
Yeah. And and you think about it, all these these the the busy businesses. Right? If you're Jacuzzi group or you're lounge underwear, whatever, busy businesses, you you you're dealing day to day with all sorts of things. You don't want to then have to try and keep this

Richard Hill [00:28:59]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:28:59]:
Perfectly up to date set of businesses you might wanna talk to if you didn't expect. Let leave that to us to work it out between us and work hard together, and then we become that rolodex for the end customer. And then they start to learn that movement, and there's no fear. I know this fear right now of if I'm working with 4, 5, 6, 7 different businesses, that feels like a nightmare to me. It's our job to make that not feel that nightmare, and it will just become the norm where they just go and pick out like they do with tech now Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:29:26]:
And

Ady Collins [00:29:26]:
go, well, I don't need to buy in one big monolith that does

Richard Hill [00:29:30]:
Yeah. Everything.

Ady Collins [00:29:31]:
Everything, and some of it's gonna be a bit rubbish, but I gotta accept it. I can go and pick the start up businesses that do one thing really well

Richard Hill [00:29:38]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:29:40]:
And it's then up to us to make that accessible, by taking away the fear of, oh god. Is this gonna be difficult to Yeah. With so many businesses? So so so that's what

Richard Hill [00:29:49]:
we're doing. I think some great insights there for listeners around, you know, obviously starting an agency with that experience. I think there were a lot of people listed in that have, you know, either worked in corporate, worked at an agency, starting their journey so far on and think, you know, oh, yeah. We'll take that work, but really, should you take that work? You know, I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't, but it's it's difficult in the early days, isn't it, I think, when, you know, oh, it's the $20 deal. It's not what we do, but we'll we'll we'll figure it out

Ady Collins [00:30:13]:
sort of thing. But, you know, but what happens with that is you took that $20 deal, and you might need to. You might just have to. But if it was a choice but it felt scary not to, then you've always gotta think of the missed opportunity. While you're bogged down in 20 gram work Yeah. That's gonna take you all of your time and absorb you, you could have probably done forward lots of 20 gram

Richard Hill [00:30:32]:
work gone and

Ady Collins [00:30:33]:
that's that's in your sweet spot. So let's be brave and go, you know what? When's it right to say no and bring Yeah. Because you no longer say no. If we get this movement in this community, right, it's no longer a no go and, mister or missus customer, find another way. It's no from me, but this is who we say yes. We

Richard Hill [00:30:50]:
can't help you, but

Ady Collins [00:30:51]:
Yes.

Richard Hill [00:30:51]:
And they'll respect that.

Ady Collins [00:30:52]:
It's no longer a full stop anymore if we're all working together. It's it's passing it around. Then that way going back to your point about lead gen, it's such a cobweb then. It's such a spiderweb. Yeah. Every conversation probably creates 5 more Yeah. In the ecosystem. So it should just

Richard Hill [00:31:06]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:31:06]:
Like a spit flywheel just on a take care

Richard Hill [00:31:10]:
of itself. Snowball.

Ady Collins [00:31:11]:
That's it. And I'm sure it'll snowball. Not like cocktail. Yeah. I love

Richard Hill [00:31:14]:
the crossroads. Ball, please. Yeah. So let's change direction a little bit. I think, you know, we talk very much about this sort of the focus of the agency, very, very specific. We talk about that a lot. I think, you know, great. Covered that.

Richard Hill [00:31:26]:
You know, and and you've found, you know, a gap in a very unique, area of ecom, you know, fantastic. But then to then staff that and man that Yep. You know, and hiring, you know, in in in a relatively very short space time. I know you do a lot of work with sort of outsourcing and global teams. Can we talk to us about that?

Ady Collins [00:31:48]:
Because I

Richard Hill [00:31:48]:
think that's really a really interesting topic. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:31:50]:
Yeah. Yeah. So so first of all, I think through my I I'm lucky for for the journey not at going on. I'm lucky in terms of the blueprint I got from Patchworks because as I said before, we kinda got COVID rich, and we got a lot of customers fast. Yep. There there was this kind of mushroom happened in 2020. And we went from I think I was about the 20th person into the business at that point, and we transformed at that point to probably 18 months later. We was a 120 people inside the group Wow.

Ady Collins [00:32:16]:
With investment just coming in at that point. Mhmm. And it's the growing pains of of of being successful. Right? It's like the biggest, most frightening problem to a growing business, although it's a good problem to have, is resourcing. And it was all in it was all, you know, trial and error and finding the right engineers inside the UK. So I've now probably got a heat map of, you know, although we went up to a 120 people, there's lots of people then left inside that time. There's lots of people that I probably interviewed that weren't right for it then, but maybe now. So I've got a heat map of probably 200 integration engineers that no one else has got that heat map of Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:32:55]:
That I don't know where to go. I'm already doing it. I've I've I've plotted the next 2 or 3 hires based on that network already.

Richard Hill [00:33:02]:
What you need and

Ady Collins [00:33:03]:
Yeah. So so that's the fundamental core team to just do that considered growth around a a core team to make the business sustainable early doors. And we're about 11 people now. I think we have another person coming in, the 12th person coming in, in September. But yeah. So that that's the nucleus of the team. It's always gonna be a UK based team for the reason that it's a consultative led business. So you've got to be in front of the customers, guiding them through knowing their business.

Ady Collins [00:33:27]:
That that's where the magic is. It's not the keystrokes to connect the iPass to all of these other systems. Because anyone can do that, and you could do it badly. Yeah. It's the nuance. It's understanding their business. It's providing the recommendations and then doing it. So that's UK based.

Ady Collins [00:33:43]:
Where I go to outsourcing, and it kinda started by accident. There's various videos of me talking to camera in my LinkedIn feed down the line about my journey through through that. So I'll let people find that rather than take up too much time here.

Richard Hill [00:33:55]:
But Yep.

Ady Collins [00:33:56]:
It started when I so when I was in Experian, I saw it done very badly offshoring, and it was just where's the cheapest resource and lots of them just go and grab them. And it just never worked as far as I was concerned. Yeah. So then when I went into the next age my first agency, and we started to look at well, you you'll know very well. In the agency land, you can be very peak key in trough y with work when it's coming in. Before you get to a magic retainer amount, you can end up in a situation where, you know, you've got too much work on, but, you know, the next month it might not be there. And I don't wanna be in the yeah. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:34:27]:
I don't wanna be in the position where you over hire, you over commit. There's too many businesses in that position right now, bigger businesses that, you know, you look and you see the horrifying 100 people laid off, you know. How would you end up with a 100 too many people?

Richard Hill [00:34:38]:
I'm sorry. A lot didn't win or you still still are.

Ady Collins [00:34:41]:
Still still are. So so that's where I look at outsourcing, and I've done every model going through one way or another in different businesses just through needs must, like spikes of business. Yep. When am I gonna get this done? When I was at Prodigious, they had obviously a wealth of money in teams in different locations. So I just ended up acquiring and having to make work. Teams in Ukraine, in Costa Rica, Colombia, Mauritius. And I had to knit that altogether and work out how that works. So I've got a blueprint in my head of how to make borderless kind of development work.

Ady Collins [00:35:16]:
And the best way I found is to have specialisms. You kinda talked about it a little while ago. It's have a hub rather than just, okay. Let's just collect people and they order the same thing. So where is that gonna where is what is this team in this location going to do? Yeah. And it might be a full service team

Richard Hill [00:35:32]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:35:32]:
That's looking after a market

Richard Hill [00:35:34]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:35:35]:
Or it might be a specialist team that's that's you know, that's where you do your front end, and that's where you do your back end, and that's where you do

Richard Hill [00:35:41]:
Design.

Ady Collins [00:35:42]:
Design, whatever it may be. And so I found when I was at Patchworks, we'd grown to the point where we had, you know, 50 customers in Australia and then growing amount of customers over in America. And you said, well, at the time, I had to I had to get a bit of good faith from the team and then I have to go on to a bit of a elongated, rotor. And it just didn't feel right. You got really skilled individuals that you basically having to make work a night shift. So that's where I go to the outsourcing model is to say if you end up in a business where you've got 247 operations

Richard Hill [00:36:13]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:36:13]:
Or you can compartmentalize a specialism, then look at your options.

Richard Hill [00:36:18]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:36:19]:
And don't offshore because offshoring the dirty side of offshore and the the the world of just where's the price point that's just dirt cheap and all this. Yeah. Look to outsource where there's record employment, HR, finance, legals wrapped around these individuals in a location. Mhmm. And start looking in the universities to see what's coming out of

Richard Hill [00:36:37]:
the universities. Locations.

Ady Collins [00:36:38]:
In these locations Yeah. And find, you know, what what's good in each location. Mhmm. I know I was struggling. I got to the point. I've got my heat map of integration engineers.

Richard Hill [00:36:47]:
Yeah. But they're more UK.

Ady Collins [00:36:49]:
They're all UK based, but then those engineers aren't necessarily the best for customer service.

Richard Hill [00:36:54]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:36:54]:
So they'd be doing brilliant work fixing very complex issues. But the customer's like, what's going on? What's going on? What's going on? Yeah. So I then learned, well, to deal with the 247 instead of them working through the UK hours Just

Richard Hill [00:37:05]:
the service.

Ady Collins [00:37:05]:
Through the UK night Yeah. And to have better customer service that's providing that constant iterative, this is where we're up to, this is where we're up to, while the engineers are deep inside the code. I start to build out the idea of outsourcing that specific team, so the customer service team that could work across, ours. And that's what I built at Patchworks, and that's what I'll do again at Knotted. Because I don't wanna I wanna make sure that I'm not that business that did the feast and famine Yeah. Overcooked it. I'm now starting to shrink down permanent members of staff. Because in these outsources

Richard Hill [00:37:35]:
worst thing is that I think is a I mean, that's any any fab that doesn't wanna let anybody go, but, obviously, you go through these peaks, you know, which, obviously, we're talking about COVID and whatnot. Yeah. But then It's like, oh, you know, I saw you know, I've I keep an eye on sort of link certain agencies' headcount. You go to LinkedIn, click all, you know, people, and, you know, we get the get the graph down. You saw this COVID growth. And then Yeah. Yeah. Couple of agencies I know know of.

Richard Hill [00:37:59]:
I don't know them that well personally, but, you know, they went, like, from almost not a lot to a 100 and whatever, and then they went back down 50. So they let, like, 50 people go Yeah. Yeah. Or 50 people left. You know? A bit of a bit of a mix, I'm sure. But Yeah. To navigate that, just as a cofounder, let alone the 50 people you've got, you've you're, you know, 50 sets of families you've got to consider and which I would. You know, I'd be very I would hate to be in that position.

Richard Hill [00:38:25]:
Yeah. And but, you know, just over high, over high, high, high. And, obviously, you know, sort of the the salary things went a bit crazy, didn't they, Joe? Especially in dev and your your side. Some of the stories I heard of, you know, just ridiculous. But to be able to manage that better, that growth better, or mix in with I mean, more refers to maybe more of, like, an international mix of people. But you're saying, to be clear then, to have so you could potentially work with universities and then hire, you know, 1 or 2 to start in that area? Or

Ady Collins [00:38:58]:
So I say that's the approach, but the way to do it is to then wrap it with a with a a specialist business, in my opinion. So in the same way that I was saying, let's all us in the ecom space do what we do well. The approach is to go, well, where is good for this? There's no point going in and investing in a country and then go, well, I've got the 3 people and then no one else is coming out of university doing that skill. So what was the point? You've always gotta you're only going into that model if you're looking at scale, in my opinion. So you've gotta make sure that there's a pipeline of talent. Yeah. But although that's the approach, get the specialist in to do it. So I for example, I'm a Ned, a a business called the dev team based out in the Philippines in in Manila and Bacalod.

Ady Collins [00:39:35]:
Yeah. And it's UK founded, cofounder with a Filipino cofounder came together. I I I say take the hard work out. Make sure you do the right approach. So make sure you're not just gonna blindly go into something. But when you know the the questions you want answers to, that's the important bit, get somebody else to answer them questions for you, which is where you go to these outsourced businesses.

Richard Hill [00:40:00]:
Specialists to outsourced.

Ady Collins [00:40:00]:
Yes. So I'm potentially coming to you

Richard Hill [00:40:02]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:40:03]:
Into your market, investing money into a team. This is my potential requirements. I wanna start with 2 to make sure it works and train the trainer and understand my business. Then I'm potentially gonna grow to 6, 7, 8 Yeah. In this time frame. Yeah. Lay all that out. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:40:17]:
The skill set that you're gonna need. Yep. Give your culture and values because the outsourced business should be a specialist in knowing how to kind of adopt that, and become an extension of you. And then you'll feel it out. And I did it when I was at Patroofs. I had 3 different agencies that I was talking to, outsourced businesses, outsourced agencies that I was talking to in different locations. I had my tick boxes, you know, price points, the culture, the value, the different commercial models they could do, the flexibility, the the the types of skill sets, and all that. And then I picked, and I went there.

Ady Collins [00:40:48]:
And and it went so well through that business. I've ended up as a nerd on dev team because they were so good Yep. That I thought I've danced around this topic for so many years. They're specializing in it. Yeah. They seem so hungry to do it well.

Richard Hill [00:41:03]:
Yep. The So you're paying them, and they're paying the the team. Yeah?

Ady Collins [00:41:07]:
Yes. Because then they get the employee

Richard Hill [00:41:08]:
navigating the all the local Yeah. Yeah. Or HR payments. So you're paying them one fee potentially to pay your 4, 5, 10 people.

Ady Collins [00:41:16]:
Because every market will have totally different

Richard Hill [00:41:18]:
I mean, that's brilliant advice. Better advice. Something we we have a lot of conversations internally about that.

Ady Collins [00:41:22]:
And then that typically means you're not gonna go and get the $30 a day, you know, but you shouldn't be. In my opinion, ethically, you shouldn't be looking for it for that reason. Yeah. Agree. Maybe you've got you a wrong price point if you need

Richard Hill [00:41:35]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:41:35]:
Those really cheap resources. Yeah. There's it's not about cheap resource. It's about talent. Yeah. Where is that talent? And you either need to cover geographical time zones or you need to cover, specialisms. Yeah. That's why you should outsource and then choose for that reason.

Ady Collins [00:41:52]:
So, yeah, we could talk 12 hours about ways of outsourcing. But

Richard Hill [00:41:56]:
No. I think that's great. So we covered some great ground. Obviously, the structure of the agency, I think, getting that right at the front end, you know, as as we start on the journey. It's it's it's all it's really challenging piece, and then we talked about the people piece. Mhmm. Fantastic insights there on on building that international team and some ideas there. Something that's given me a few things to think about.

Richard Hill [00:42:16]:
Now we're gonna change direction a little bit, and we're gonna talk about sort of working with particular brands and companies around around, funding. K. What would you say you know, what are some of the challenges that you you're seeing that some of the people you've worked with around scaling? And, obviously, that's very much what you do is help companies scale. So how has that sort of helped your agency, and how has that sort of fit into your

Ady Collins [00:42:43]:
Yes. They're quite different lenses I look through in that respect. So, yeah, we absolutely, as a business, help businesses scale, but I'm way away from their their their finances and all the rest of it. It's just about their future proofing and keeping flexible and being able to be cartridge led, plug in, take out, and all the rest of it. So I wouldn't say I get too much from the customer's idea with in terms of how I can then take that back into my agency Yeah. Because I'm really only scaling them from a a technical capacity, really. Yeah. The rest are is behind the scenes.

Ady Collins [00:43:13]:
I don't see what they're doing with their money. Yeah. But, I've got a pretty rich experience recent experience of how I will potentially be scaling knotted through or or not Yeah. The the do's and don'ts based on what we did at Patchworks. Yeah. And I think so so for there, we went through I think it was the 4th round just as I was leaving. Definitely 3 rounds I was heavily involved in of VC series a funding. And that was just a conscious decision at the time.

Ady Collins [00:43:39]:
You you we bootstrapped up until that point.

Richard Hill [00:43:43]:
So how many people were were they at at the point where it started?

Ady Collins [00:43:46]:
We were probably at oh, now we're talking I think we were between the 20 to 50 people mark. Mhmm. Was ramping quite quite a lot quite quickly before any funding came in, but we'd already talked about we're gonna need to take investment if we're gonna capture this flag. Yeah. Then when the investment came in, it grew again. So there was there was a period it was already growing quite quick before the funding could come in. Obviously, that can take a while to go through your due diligence, find the right firm, and all the rest of it.

Richard Hill [00:44:15]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:44:17]:
But personally for me right now, I I I think what it gives me is the knowledge of what's available, and and it's more about when. Like, when would you go that far? I I wouldn't I wouldn't want to distract the business too soon into going VC kinda led Yeah. Or anything like that at this point in time. I think because what I've learned through scaling Patchworks is there's an awful lot especially for me who was a COO, there's an awful lot of of a transition you've gotta go through from this creative founder led business that's just doing whatever that you feel is right on quite minimal amounts of data and and, you know, metrics and insights. You're going a lot on instinct, and there's nothing wrong with that if you've been in the market for so long. Instinct's probably a good thing. To then get in a VC, and then it's obviously very scientific, and you've gotta be by the spreadsheet, reports monthly, and all the rest. And that's a very big culture shock.

Ady Collins [00:45:09]:
Yeah. And it took some transitioning to some learning. You know? The first come in, you do the due diligence. You gotta go through a 100 day plan. So I know all these steps, and I took that in. What I'd say is there's definitely to get you away from the edge of feast and famine, getting some investment in at the right time, I'd say, is is gonna be key for most businesses if you're in that fortuitous position where you can't go fast enough to catch what's coming in. Yeah. I don't think bootstrapping at a certain velocity would work.

Ady Collins [00:45:38]:
So I'll bootstrap as far as I can to be considered growing organic business.

Richard Hill [00:45:43]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:45:43]:
But at the point where it looks like loads of work's coming in, I think you'll you'll fall over if you're trying to pretend to your customers that you can offer all these things, but you're actually just trying to grab 1 by 1 by 1 individually into business. So I would say investment is key at that point. I only know really know, angel investment or series a. At the point of getting in a series a investment, what I found to then navigate through that, and I would do again if that's what I choose to do with Knotted, is typically you're working, like I say, on instinct. Then you gotta work very much in a scientific manner to be feeding back the information and the the hygienic reports and all the rest of it to to your VC. You're gonna be bringing in board, members at that point in time. And the crucial point there is how do you keep going at pace without losing the creativity of the potential of the founder, which for me, I had a very creative founder in Dave Wiltshire. But you've then got to bring in some rigor.

Ady Collins [00:46:36]:
You can't just do you can't do gut feel when you're bringing in a 100 people and you've got all these, you know, 3, 400 customers on your books, and you've got, you know, 1,000,000 of pounds being sent into the business from founders. So I found the EOS framework, the entrepreneurial operating system, was perfect. It allowed me to face off to a creative founder and let all the ideas keep flowing.

Richard Hill [00:46:56]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:46:56]:
But at the same time as putting in some rigor, putting in some structure that allows you to create a cadence that's not just boom and bust and do whatever the hell we feel is right. It's making you condense your business down to, 1, your culture and your values, so how you hire and be a bit more conscious about the kind of people you're bringing in. But then when they're in the business, how they feed the business goals. And I found that in other previous businesses in hindsight, the 2 are disconnected. So you might have the notion of giving KPIs or a or a, you know, a 6 monthly targets to your team. But it might not necessarily be what your company's goals are. So you've gotta cascade those down, and I find that through EOS. So set out at the start of the year, whatever your calendar year or financial year, whatever it may be.

Ady Collins [00:47:43]:
Set out your vision for the year. Look slightly ahead of the year, but then start condensing down to your 90 day Yeah. Kind of plan 3 monthly, quarterly. Turn that vision into traction. What are those OKRs? So your objects were key results for for your business for those 3 months that go towards your North Star of the year. And translate them into, well, what does each individual or each team in the business need to do to achieve those company okay OKRs? That cultural shock is quite big. So you've got how you how you're adopting cascade into the team, and then they're seeing a very different identity without wanting to scare them away. That was tricky but necessary.

Ady Collins [00:48:22]:
So that's that's what I found for scaling where you find you can't bootstrap anymore. You've gotta bring investment. It's the culture shock. It's changing from creative gut instinct to scientific led but without too much, stuffiness there and don't break your creative flow. EOS is

Richard Hill [00:48:41]:
So, obviously, when did you so EOS was, like, how many years ago? When did you bring that out? 3 years

Ady Collins [00:48:46]:
ago? About 3.

Richard Hill [00:48:47]:
Yeah. 2, 3 years. So that's sort of a couple of years managing that at Patchworks, and now it's Yeah. You're bringing that into your own agency now?

Ady Collins [00:48:54]:
Are you Yes. Yes. I use it right from the get go. I use it in my Ned role, at the dev team as well where we're doing a bit of an identity piece. How do we pivot? What's the the core values and the vision to enter 3 that that's how I start my any business. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need investment.

Ady Collins [00:49:09]:
You don't need to be on hyper growth for that. It's just a way. And I did a post not long ago about making a bit of sense of your meetings. Like, there's yearly meetings all the way down to daily meetings. Make sure you're doing the right things in your meetings. And I got a lot of that from EOS. It's it's organizing my mind, and I'm that kind of person that needs to compartmentalize and organize into what am I doing at what time? What am I thinking about on any given day, week, month, year?

Richard Hill [00:49:34]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:49:34]:
And how do you cascade cascade that into your team? Because if you don't do something like an EOS framework when you're scaling, you're gonna become a very burnt out, busy founder because

Richard Hill [00:49:46]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:49:46]:
My analogy would be, you know, you've got this you've gone and bought a bigger house now because you can afford it. You got all these rooms, and you got all these your team are in it. But you're the one that's got the paint pot on the brush, and they're just sitting in there waiting for you, and you're then getting frustrated that you want it to be a nice pink color and and a nice yellow color. You're running around trying to do it all. Give them a paint pot. Give them the context and the vision, the value of what you're trying to do as a business, and then all of them rooms will happen at the same time. And that comes from having a framework in place. And because, like I said at the start, being a corporate to start with and not really liking it, I was very hypersensitive of not going too far, and EOS was perfect.

Richard Hill [00:50:22]:
I find, we talk about EOS on a few different episodes of the other podcast. And, so, obviously, you you identified EOS, and you're right. We're gonna run with this. You know? And anybody listed, I would employ to read traction. And, you know, Geno Whitman is the is the chat behind all this. And, so then you sat down as a with a set of founders or senior management and sort of write. What is the 3 year the well, 5 year, 3 year, 1 year? And how are we gonna then break that down? And then did you then present to the whole company the vision? Yeah. I think suggest?

Ady Collins [00:51:00]:
Yeah. I it's it's probably not as brand new as this at this point because it's still such a small business. But the idea of town halls, you've got to it's that difference between managing and leading and Yeah. Through context versus leading through instruction, and I believe very much in context.

Richard Hill [00:51:13]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:51:13]:
Because there's gonna be a bunch of bright people around me that's gonna throw me some curve balls or some wider opinion that makes us better for it. You're not gonna get that if you're just giving, a bullet list of instructions. Go do these things. Yeah. So now this is what we're trying to achieve. Yeah. So the team are completely bought in. They understand.

Ady Collins [00:51:30]:
Yeah. We're a very transparent business.

Richard Hill [00:51:32]:
And that's the reason you do it is that you're you know, really, you're trying to obviously I think there's nothing worse when I see, you know, people working for firms and they maybe just did a box over here. They have no real connection of why they're doing the thing they're doing and what the impact is in their department, that department on the bigger picture. Whereas you run on EOS Yeah. You know, and and the and the founders or the founding team or the the management are open in, you know, explaining, you know, in detail, you know, the vision, the 1 year, the 3 year, the your OKRs. You, as an individual, then should buy in more Yeah. And have more passion for the firm you're working for. So in turn, that helps with retention. Mhmm.

Richard Hill [00:52:12]:
Obviously, when you first present that vision I think, you know, some conversations I've had and, you know, my own experience, you present that vision, and not everyone is on the bus. And you think, oh, okay. But then you find out who's who a bit, don't you, Al?

Ady Collins [00:52:27]:
I I think that's perfectly fine. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:52:28]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:52:29]:
It's perfectly fine because I've wasted so much time in so many businesses where you're trying to prize people into a certain way of thinking or being or behaving or whatever. What's the point? There is a business that's perfectly suited for them. It's that analogy of don't get a fish to climb.

Richard Hill [00:52:42]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:52:43]:
Just and in EOS, there's that point of everyone's got a number. If everyone's comfortable with what their number is and what they bring to the table

Richard Hill [00:52:50]:
you put numbers on the

Ady Collins [00:52:51]:
I haven't got them for everyone at this point in time.

Richard Hill [00:52:52]:
We don't do that.

Ady Collins [00:52:53]:
No. No. But and again, so that's where I'm kind of EOS lite. I think there's something I wouldn't I wouldn't

Richard Hill [00:52:58]:
It's like all these frameworks, isn't it? You you you'll you know, the we could list 20 books right now, and they'll they'll all be great, but you take your bits. Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:53:06]:
You do.

Richard Hill [00:53:06]:
You know? But I think EOS is probably the top Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:53:08]:
Yeah. It is.

Richard Hill [00:53:09]:
Where they should be. You don't necessarily have to do the 10 out of No.

Ady Collins [00:53:12]:
You don't have to do everything.

Richard Hill [00:53:13]:
7 that suit you, the 6, 7.

Ady Collins [00:53:15]:
I like to take the approach. So that idea of everyone's got a number, I go, okay. I don't want to define a number because that's quite scary. A salesperson, fine. A support engineer, what number do you wanna give them? You want to give them the notion of what that number would be. So if you achieve these types of things, if this is what you're thinking about in terms of customer satisfaction and all the rest of it, we're gonna do well. So it's it's less about the individual number. It's more about, oh, EOS is telling me that Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:53:39]:
It's not just the sales numbers or it's not just the support tickets. It's everyone in every role has got some kind of metric they should be thinking about. So, yeah, I don't go as far as the number, but I go as far as they know Yeah. It's a metric that makes a difference

Richard Hill [00:53:52]:
to Yeah. Full business. So they're getting more of a sort of a it's like a detailed job description, expectations where, you know, I want you to be doing this, this, this. If you're doing this, you're doing the job sort of thing. And if you're not, then, you know, doing the job so you're more than 4 out of 10.

Ady Collins [00:54:08]:
Yeah. And you you could probably give 2 bits of context and say, go and achieve these things that would completely surpass a set of 20 instructions Yeah. That you've gotta try and put together for that person. You're not gonna get much out of that. So give Yeah. Give them the the the shining light of where we're trying to get to, and let them work it out a little bit,

Richard Hill [00:54:27]:
you know, to

Ady Collins [00:54:28]:
the point.

Richard Hill [00:54:29]:
Well, thanks, Aideen. Now sounds like you've had a hell of a journey, you know, from obviously spending all those years in in different aid in an agency and also working, for yourself. But I know, obviously, speaking to you off off camera, you've had a, should we say, a a challenging few months or so, and diagnosed, with with cancer. Yep. You know, how's that been, you know, sort of managing that diagnosis and, you know, and and sort of also you just set up your business and trying to juggle everything.

Ady Collins [00:55:02]:
Yeah. So I think, so it's testicular cancer, which I think managing getting over the initial shot, so it happened kind of very quick around Christmas period. Now I've got a big family there that we come together at Christmas, and I'm holding on to this kind of secret at the time. I don't wanna ruin anyone's Christmas, so that was kinda difficult. We was already midway through the transition of me coming out of Patchwares at that point. So it's not like I had to juggle work, but it was definitely a bit of a panic.

Richard Hill [00:55:28]:
You were out, and you were out. So

Ady Collins [00:55:29]:
There's a panic of, well, now who knows? Am I gonna be going through an elongated set of chemotherapy that's gonna stop things and, you know, not everything's a given. So even if you come out of it, knotted commerce wasn't necessarily gonna be available to to capture at that point in time. So while I was laying there, you know, the cancer piece was quite brief for me. I'm very lucky. I've got a little bit of survivor guilt where I've had to go and sit in rooms every 3 months for checks seeing people so much worse than me. So so part of my story and the reason I do talk about it is to say, literally, when you talk about the symptoms my my first symptom was tiny in terms of physical symptom. I find I kinda brushed my hand across myself, found it was wasn't a lump or anything like that. It was like almost like a hardening.

Ady Collins [00:56:13]:
It was like a shell.

Richard Hill [00:56:14]:
A big rip.

Ady Collins [00:56:14]:
It felt it felt just different. It felt unfamiliar. My biggest symptom was this impending doom that I'd never felt. I'm not a hyperchondriac or anything, but there was this instinctive that's really wrong. There's something really wrong. Do something about it. And all this go very ahead. You've got a busy day.

Ady Collins [00:56:32]:
Maybe ring them doctors tomorrow instead and get in. I I thought, no. I've gotta stay the course. I just went through the process of getting checked. And then when I come out the other end of it, it's meant that I've not had to go through chemo. They've got it out when it was still very small. So the actual brush with cancer at this point in time has been very very brief. I've ended up unfortunate in terms of I had, during my surgery and post surgery complications, and sepsis kinda kicked in.

Ady Collins [00:56:58]:
And I had horrendous pains for a couple of months and thrown back into hospital and and and all this stuff that meant I was bed bound. And I wasn't supposed to be. It was meant to be 5 days bed rest, get up, start slowly getting into things. I had a bit of a dark period of 2 months where I was wanting to go and settle the business, start contacting all the customers, get my personal branding going and all the rest of it so that, you know, people are aware I'm out there doing something slightly different now so to contact me. And instead, I was on a bed where I couldn't even turn to my side without excruciating pain. I, you know, I was I'm a I'm I'm a fiercely independent person. I've got 3 kids. I make sure I cook clean, do everything for them so that, you know, my partner doesn't have to part a split marriage.

Ady Collins [00:57:41]:
I've always been that way, and I put myself in a bit of a a box where I must do everything. And then then then just been thrown into this situation in agony with drugs that were making me feel sick, to get rid of pain that didn't go away with then a partner that's having to do everything for me, for my kids, for me, bring me food on a tray. And it was just horrendous. I just didn't like that that feeling. Coming out of that and now fast forward into, you know, getting into building the business again and all the rest of it, my the echo from the cancer is, one, is just, you know, 0 tolerance for wasted noise and time and effort. We don't, you know it's not like I didn't feel like I had a brush with death. I definitely felt mortality, but I didn't feel like I was close to death, nothing like that. Un cliche like that.

Ady Collins [00:58:25]:
But it makes you not waste your time because of not about how much time I got left, nothing like that. Just to do with how much energy and emotional energy you have to go into it. Yeah. What's important. And, you know, I I won't go too far into the story, I will cry. How I broke the story to the kids and and those memories of how they broke down and all the rest. That's what I hold dear to go, there's no time for that today because that was so much more important. So get on with it.

Ady Collins [00:58:50]:
And it's making me just move on and move on and move on and and cut out the the noise, the unnecessary. And that's what we're trying to then build as part of the business is say, there's zero time for nonsense. Yeah. Time is valuable because well, it's more the emotional energy and the effort it put into your work is valuable.

Richard Hill [00:59:10]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [00:59:10]:
So let's make every bit of that count. So it's not as cliche as it probably sounds. It's it's more about zoning in. I I talk to people about it. It's almost like a spidey sense now. I feel like when you you know, Paul Parker got bit with a spider and everything's clear, I just got this clarity. And I've got all this learning from 25 years of business that's now been put into this calm demeanor of knowing exactly what steps I feel like I'm gonna make with zero hesitation now. So yeah.

Richard Hill [00:59:35]:
Thank you, Eric.

Ady Collins [00:59:36]:
But in terms of juggling it, I've I've never been one of these kind of work life balance. This is work, and then off, and then this is play. I I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone, but I've always had a bit of a fluid everything urges anyway. I am me. Part of me is my work. Yeah. And part of my personality and what I do outside of work comes into work. So I've just juggled the whole cancer.

Ady Collins [00:59:57]:
You know, I get bad backs. I get bad feet. I get bad knees off the back of complications from surgery that I have to go and train in physio. It just becomes part of my life in and around work like everything else does, like being a dad does.

Richard Hill [01:00:10]:
Well, thank you for sharing that. I really, really appreciate it.

Ady Collins [01:00:12]:
Say, everyone get checked because that's why I've still got hair and didn't have to go through chemo and the risks of what chemo do to you as much as it's a necessary thing. Yeah. If you can avoid that, that comes from I was lucky it was a cancer that you can avoid it. Yeah. The likelihood is I was gonna need chemo need chemo. But because I hit it so quick and went straight in with the doctors

Richard Hill [01:00:33]:
Yeah.

Ady Collins [01:00:33]:
They they just chopped it out.

Richard Hill [01:00:34]:
So you had a thought, oh, something's not quite right. Literally straight away. And they were straight in the doctor's treatment, but it didn't mean you needed chemo. Yeah.

Ady Collins [01:00:42]:
That that morning, I I went on to the phone call to to get a appointment at my doctor's. I was, like, 24th in the queue. Nearly put it down. I went, no. Don't sit for the half hour. You're gonna need to sit and just went with it. Mhmm.

Richard Hill [01:00:56]:
Well, thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Well, that has been a whirlwind, an absolute freaky whirlwind, David, episode. I thank you so much for coming over.

Ady Collins [01:01:05]:
I feel I need to apologize because, yeah, I I tend to do that.

Richard Hill [01:01:08]:
That that's brilliant, Alex. But brilliant. So much there for founders that are on the journey, in the journey, you know, trying to hit certain targets, looking at, you know, hiring, specialization, specialization, you know, new business. We recovered a lot of ground, you know, amongst, you know, a very tough personal 6 months or so. So thank you so much for sharing that. Now I'd like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. Hey. Did you have a book you'd like to recommend to our listeners?

Ady Collins [01:01:37]:
The first one you already said, I'd absolutely say to any any agency founder or or just senior manager that's trying to get to grips with their business is Gio Wichman's traction.

Richard Hill [01:01:46]:
Yep.

Ady Collins [01:01:46]:
I think the next one business related would absolutely be essentialism. Greg McKeown leads into the whole cancer stuff, I suppose. It's about that. Don't just be a busy fool. Don't just fill your time with stuff because you feel like you should. Yeah. Be ruthless with your time and work out what makes most sense. It's written in a way that's so simple that you'll read it and instantly go, I know all this, but you won't practice it until you read it.

Ady Collins [01:02:09]:
So Essentialism by by Greg. Absolutely. And then just slight tangent from that, I read a lot of because of what my partner does and because of some of the sports I do, I'm I'm very much an outdoorsy guy. I like watching and reading about climbers and alpiners and all the rest of it.

Richard Hill [01:02:24]:
Like adventures and

Ady Collins [01:02:25]:
Yeah. Adventures. So so Doug Scott, he's got a book about when he summoned to Everest. He was a Nottingham based climber for the sixties, seventies. But what I get from that, and I think any kind of founder and and business owner can get is, you know, life can be tough and you can push yourself. And those kind of stories where they've summited Everest or walked across the Arctic or whatever it may be, you're gonna learn a lot about the human soul reading them stories.

Richard Hill [01:02:49]:
For sure.

Ady Collins [01:02:49]:
And it gives you some resilience to take into your business where you're not gonna panic and stress and worry about Yeah. Some nonsense decision you need to make. You're just gonna make it because these people are out there doing 10 times

Richard Hill [01:02:59]:
Love it.

Ady Collins [01:02:59]:
More difficult things than we do. Highly recommend go and grab a an an alpinist's summiting book, and you'll learn about human beings.

Richard Hill [01:03:07]:
We'll link a couple up. Yes. Some of these ultra marathonists

Ady Collins [01:03:10]:
Yeah. If

Richard Hill [01:03:10]:
that's that's the right word. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks, Aidy, for coming on the show. Sure. For those who wanna reach out to you, find out more about knotted commerce, what's the best way to do that?

Ady Collins [01:03:18]:
So you can contact us on knotted commerce Yep. Website. So knottedcommerce.com Yep. With a k. It's got a contact form if you wanna get help, but I'm on LinkedIn a lot. Yeah. Now, so just find me on there. Yeah.

Ady Collins [01:03:29]:
And, we can I'm always prepared to talk. So DM me, contact me on LinkedIn, or or our Knotted page on LinkedIn, and we'll talk from there.

Richard Hill [01:03:38]:
Lovely. Thanks, Sadie. Thanks for coming on the show.

Ady Collins [01:03:40]:
Thanks for your time. Thank you. Cheers, Richard. If you

Richard Hill [01:03:44]:
enjoy this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast. You're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Have a fantastic day, and I'll see you on the next one.