It's a Good Start Podcast

In this episode of It's a Good Start podcast, Mike and Kevin are talking about what it takes to form a senior leadership team in the company. Learn about a founder role and the signals to start taking this next step of natural agency structure evolution seriously - whether you are getting to the £1 million barrier in your business or already there, find out how to move your growth forward, delegate and invest in people.

In this episode, Mike Lander and Kevin Gibbons discuss how to improve the conversion rate on RFP (Request for proposal), RFP qualifications and success factors, and what the agency can do to stand out. Learn how RFP process is viewed from both buyer's and seller's sides, what is the scorecard and the qualifications for it and how to increase your chances to win.

If you spend your time on a £1000 a day task,  not a £100 - your business moves forward. In this episode, Mike and Kevin discuss what you can do as a business owner / CEO that moves the business forward by doing the high-value thing that someone else can't do, regardless of whether is it a 1-person agency or £50 million revenue company. Learn from the speaker's experience how to build a team of freelancers / specialists, how to implement effectively the tactic of Outsource / Automate / Stop and how to focus more on the business and less in the business.

1. The book mentioned in the episode: - The Road Less Stupid by Keith J. Cunningham  
2. The article mentioned in the episode: - Growing pains — How to get to £1m revenue by Mike Lander

How has your work model changed since the pandemic? In this episode, Mike and Kevin are talking about remote working - how it impacted workflow management and how to keep the teamwork, creativity and collaboration at the highest level. Find out about different scenarios of an evolving model of work, how to make it more efficient and how it works at Re:signal digital agency.

In this episode, Kevin Gibbons is talking about his personal life journey and sharing his learning and life lessons of running an agency business for 17 years and what did it take to become one of the top UK SEO agencies -  Re:signal.

In this episode, Mike shares his personal story starting from his school days followed by an apprenticeship, university years, engineering career, MBA and growing various businesses. This is an honest conversation about facing huge self-doubt, building personal confidence, realising ambitions and lessons learnt from the many successes and big failures along the way.

In this episode, Kevin and Mike are joined by Jeremy Smith (Managing Partner at 4C Associates) to discuss all the aspects and the inherent tension between buying (Procurement) and selling (the Vendor). The speakers cover the topics as:

• Jeremy, as a procurement professional, to talk about procurement vs. sales and how it's not always about the lowest cost but the most value
• Is there such a thing as a win-win negotiation?
• How are procurement enabling marketing to drive growth
• Kevin, as a seller of strategic SEO services, to talk about his experience of negotiating with procurement
• Lessons learnt when buying and selling marketing services

In this episode, Kevin and Mike talk about why great businesses need the entrepreneur to step out of being central to how everything works, and build into a model / framework that can deliver the same outcomes on its own.  

This episode is about what it means to become a trusted advisor as part of the client's relationships model. Mike and Kevin discuss what it takes to build trust and authority, the evolution of the sales and negotiation process, and the models to set up long-term solid business relations. 

This episode is all about the value and power of niche B2B community building, why and how to start developing the community, and how it changed since the pandemic.

In this episode we talk about:

• Our experiences building and being part of successful communities
• Platforms designed specifically to make it easy to build your communities (e.g. Slack, Guild, Circle.so, Mighty Networks, etc)
• The indirect link to sales pipeline building and more.

Links:

Over the last 15 years, Mike and Kevin have recruited over 200 people. This episode is all about the lessons learnt when recruiting, how you can avoid the pitfalls and get a shortcut to potential success.

In this episode, Mike and Kevin delve into 4 books that they recommend to the listeners for inspiration, practical tools and a bit of fun. 

The books discussed:

• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition by Robert B. Cialdini
• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
• Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

If you talk to 10 successful entrepreneurs, over half will not have amazing academic qualifications. If it’s not qualifications that set them apart, what does? In this episode, Mike and Kevin are talking about academic background, what qualities make an outstanding entrepreneur and prove that academic success is not always a golden ticket to business accomplishments and growth.

In the 10th episode, Kevin and Mike prove that in order to grow you have to define your focus and get narrow in terms of what you do. The model of being a full-service business on a micro-scale leads to low-margin business and does not deliver profitable growth. Personal events influence us and help us to reassess and change the way we focus our business - learn how divorce and the death of a close person change the way Kevin defines the agency focus.

What’s the difference between a project manager and an account manager? Pretty often these can be a hybrid role, certainly in small agencies, so it’s important to balance the priorities. In the ninth episode, Mike and Kevin draw the line between these two roles, discussing the potential benefits or risks when having them combined in one person.  Find out which role the business would need first and what is the role of the founder to leverage client relationships and win new business.

Start small, aim big - it’s about the importance of knowing where you’re going and running controlled experiments. Kevin and Mike discuss the importance of lead and lag indicators, cadence, measurement and how to implement the golden What/How/Why model. Learn about the 5 step sequences that help alleviate the frustration and enable entrepreneurs to push through to the next staging post.

The seventh episode is devoted to the account management role in an agency. Account management is a discipline to be treated as seriously as Finance, Legal, HR, etc. The person whose expertise fulfils this role helps to put the company in the position of trusted advisor as opposed to a supplier. Mike and Kevin go through real examples of account management actions including the reporting framework and their recommendations as to how to engage senior stakeholders in more effective collaborations.

In the second part of the negotiation techniques podcast, Kevin and Mike continue discussing the discipline of negotiations and how to design a clear process - the set up, deal design and the negotiation part.

In this episode, Mike and Kevin are talking about protecting profit margins, especially when emerging from an economic crisis. You have to be prepared for tough negotiations when this “V (or W) shaped recession” ends. Mike has recommended tools, templates and negotiation tactics.

Re:signal wins a large amount of new business from referrals and the CEO’s personal network. In this episode, Kevin Gibbons, CEO at Re:signal, shares where to start to build your personal brand and how to turn it into something that can be a core way of growing your business.

The speakers also touch upon what types of content works well on social media, what is a good engagement rate and the importance to stick to your unique perspective.

Learn more about RFP qualification, the Procurement Success Equation© (a real-life example scoresheet presented) and how to prepare your negotiating strategy to negotiate towards a mutually beneficial outcome.

In the second episode, Kevin Gibbons shares his expertise of building organic growth and explains how to understand if SEO is the right fit for a business and good place to invest marketing budget. You will also learn why controlled experiments are so important and why it can be a good idea to start with paid search first.

Learn from Kevin Gibbons, and Mike Lander, who share their experiences in entrepreneurship, running digital agencies / consultancies and looking at the buyer side perspective, so that you can take what’s useful and get off to a good start yourself.

In the first episode of It is a Good Start podcast, Mike Lander and Kevin discuss how the Big4 Consulting firms - EY, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and McKinsey - have successfully established in the consulting landscape.  Mike Lander shared. his experience and insight after 6 years of working within the Big 4 Consulting firm environment, what was his journey through KPMG like and key points why these are the well-known and most successful consulting firms ever.  The Big 4 became so big and successful, in his experience, because of:  

 The culture they create and therefore the people they attract
 The business model they built
 The incredibly strong relationships they built with the C-Suite.