Hopefully you have seen that we are currently celebrating our 15th birthday at Ponderosa, the agency that I co-founded with Richard Midgley.
When you reach a splendid milestone like this, it enables you to become a little self-indulgent and spend some time looking back and reflecting on what you have learnt on such a journey.
In those 15 years so much has changed. We have been through two recessions, dealt with Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath on working habits, for both our teams and our clients. We have dealt with an explosion of technology and social that was only a glint in the eye in 2010. This proliferation of media has meant us getting our heads around new ways of helping our clients find and communicate with their audiences. Now AI has popped up its lovely head, and we are all adjusting to what opportunities that now brings us.
We also moved offices, built three new service lines and, because we didn’t think we were busy enough, we took on investment and built out a group of specialist agencies under the Audience Collective brand, with Ponderosa at the heart of that expansion.
So, all in all, we’ve have kept ourselves nice and busy and out of mischief (to a degree).
Hitting a big birthday means we’ve had a chance to stop and take account on what we’ve achieved. When you properly get the time to reflect, you obviously remember what went well, what didn’t go quite so well, and how you might have tackled those challenges a little differently (obviously with a large slice of hindsight we are all a genius).
But for me, what I remember the most, is about the people I have met and how they have helped to shape the destiny of our agency – sometimes for the better, sometimes for the not so good. But there was always a lesson to learn once the dust had settled.
When we sat down and decided what we should share about our journey, I decided I would like to do a piece about the people I have met along the way. From my early career at Intermarketing, and then with my first agency Prego*, I have always worked on the client services side of the agency (mainly because I had no other talents in terms of colouring in, writing or coding).
This meant that I realised at an early stage that getting along with people and building a trusted relationship was not only crucial to the success of a service-led business, but also, if you get it right, it made life quite a lot of fun.
The tricky bit is that in these 15 years I have met quite a lot of folk who have made a big difference to our success. These were advisors, clients, suppliers, family, friends and of course, the brilliant people who I have worked with. But if I started simply listing them all out, two things will happen. The first is that you will all get bored and stop reading; secondly, I will undoubtedly forget someone, and they will be forever offended! Neither are a good idea.
So, instead I thought I would share three key people-related lessons that have shaped my career in the hope it could help someone else starting their journey today.
- Always find time for a brew
The arrival of COVID-19 had many negative impacts on us all, but one of the worst ones for me is that it stopped people meeting in real life (as the kids like to say). I was devastated because I had built 100s of relationships by agreeing to meet someone for an initial cuppa.
Sometimes the reason why we were meeting would not be clear, but I would always say yes. On many occasions nothing would ever come of the meeting (apart from a nice chat and slice of cake), but there have been countless meetings that have led to wonderful, long-term relationships, that have ended in a mutually beneficial outcome for us all.
- Always do the right thing
I have always been a great believer that the Universe will always right itself in the end. And so, if you always do the right thing, you will get that behaviour returned to you with interest. Making the right decision might mean a short-term detrimental impact on your business as you turn down work you are not an expert in. But it’s always about the long term in our world, and a hasty decision will come back to bite you.
In my experience the return might not be straight away. It might not be for years, but I truly believe that you will get your just deserts (not a pudding) in the end.
- Always be nice
I say this with my tongue slightly in my cheek. Midge has always lovingly taken the piss out of me being the nice one (but we all know that he is really the softest one). But he has now recognised that if you treat people in the way that you would want to be treated, then you will get much better outcomes in your relationships.
I must stress that this not about creating a false persona, instead it’s about taking the two points above and wrapping them up in your character. Trust me, the world is then a better place as people always do business with people.
We have luckily seen the result of this approach pay dividends each year as our new business pipeline is heavily built on what we call ‘black book’ opportunities. People who we have worked with for years, and can now proudly call them our friends, who keep coming back.
Therefore, we must have been doing something right for the last 15 years.