The UnNoticed Entrepreneur
Business marketing for entrepreneurs.
I talk with entrepreneurs and experts about how to build a brand and generate more leads.
My name is Jim James. I've built my own companies on 3 continents since 1995 (that's right pre-internet), including a multi office public relations agency.
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The UnNoticed Entrepreneur
From Underappreciated Journalist to Multi-Million Pound Agency Founder
How did an unnoticed and under-appreciated magazine editor in Wales overcome the challenges of building a multi million pound content agency serving major shopping centres across the UK?
In this episode:
- How Charlotte Laing transitioned from a freelancer to leading a team of over 50 people.
- The importance of storytelling in marketing and how to create engaging content that resonates with audiences.
- Strategies for scaling a business, including the challenges of recruitment, cash flow management, and maintaining quality as the team grows.
- Insights on navigating the competitive landscape of the agency world and how to stand out against larger firms.
- The role of AI in content creation and how to leverage technology while keeping the human touch in storytelling.
Charlotte also discusses her experience with the NatWest Accelerator program and the value of community support for entrepreneurs.
*Disclaimer: Please note that the views and information have not been endorsed, issued or approved by NatWest. Any views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of NatWest.
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In this conversation I'm going to talk to Charlotte Lang, who is the founder of a company called the Content Emporium here in Bristol. She's managed to go from being the unnoticed and underappreciated journalist into the founder of a multi-million pound agency. Let's hear her story, charlotte. Thanks for coming to talk with me today at the NatWest Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast series. So tell us a little bit about you and the business that you've built over the last decade.
Jim James:Yes, no problem, I'm Charlotte Lang and I'm the founder and director of the Content Emporium. We are now a team of growing weekly, quite honestly, but it's approximately 53, 54 people at the moment and we create content for large brands. So we work predominantly for shopping centres and we are that kind of plug-in marketing resource that big brands really struggle to have in-house, because I think the skills you need now are so diverse across social media, web content and everything that they really need some support and we can offer that at a high level, really good quality.
Charlotte Laing:So you're based in Bristol, but your clients, I'm assuming, are all over the country.
Jim James:Indeed from Bluewater in Kent to St David's, Cardiff, Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow. So yeah, right across the country.
Charlotte Laing:Okay. So how have you managed to build the content emporium from a base in Bristol to becoming really a national content company? And that's a hell of a journey, because it's not easy to get such large clients, especially when you're an owner operator rather than one of the big blue chip agencies.
Jim James:That's right. I think at the beginning it was just me. You know, I was essentially a freelancer, solo sole trader, and I approached one shopping center actually to create a magazine for them. That magazine then went so well it was such a good magazine that people really loved that they said, oh well, we should just run our website for us as well. Oh, maybe take on our email, marketing, social media. So it just really grew really organically from having done one really good project that they trusted us and trusted us, and so we've grown as an agency and I've hired people to meet the skill set needed by the shopping centres. Once one shopping centre worked with us, several others then saw what we'd done and said, oh, I want what they've got. That's better than what we've got. So that's really how it's come about by word of mouth.
Charlotte Laing:But what was your background before you started the content emporium? What were you doing?
Jim James:I was a magazine editor, so I was based in Wales at the time, in Cardiff. I was a magazine editor for Media Wales, so I was editing a glossy women's magazine, so that was very. I was from a very editorial journalism background, essentially trying to make things genuinely interesting, genuinely nice photography, um, on the website there'd be genuinely good videography and everything that people would genuinely want to read, and I think that's what I was taking into the marketing space.
Charlotte Laing:So I was coming in quite fresh, not with a marketing sensibility, but from a journalism and editorial sensibility, and bringing that into marketing, which was quite, you know, quite refreshing for the people hiring us sensibilities, because when people think about content, they may think of them both being the same thing a smiley face, not happy customer and not see the difference. How do you define the difference?
Jim James:I think I think marketing hasn't actually come on leaps and bounds, but I think there was a bit of a tendency in marketing to just go straight for the sell. You know, to kind of say this is a great product, come and buy it in a very stilted marketing way, whereas we would weave a story around it about the lifestyle maybe you could have if you had that product or, if you know, if you came and spent more time in the shopping centre, the kind of person that you would be at that point would be the kind of person you might want to be. So I think we were kind of creating a lifestyle, as we did when we were working on magazines, kind of creating a lifestyle as we did when we were working on magazines. You know, a lifestyle that people might aspire to, um, and that's what we were bringing into the, the marketing space yeah, there's interest.
Charlotte Laing:So you're really thinking also more about the customer journey and the backstory, rather than the marketing being sort of top of funnel. Yeah, work, and taking a much broader perspective that's it, I think.
Jim James:um, in a way, especially these days since COVID, we're not selling the shirt that someone might buy because they might buy that online. We're selling the experience of going in and buying that shirt and spending time, maybe having a meal at the same time, and so we're kind of selling an experience around a purchase really.
Charlotte Laing:Yeah, that's a really good point because, as people can shop online, they don't need a relationship anymore with with the venue or the vendor or the merchant. But experiences are becoming such a key part of brand building, aren't they as well?
Jim James:yes, absolutely yeah. So I think, um, I think that's that's where our skills as really good copywriters come in, um, and the fact that the photography that we'll create is the kind of photography you might find. I think that's where our skills as really good copywriters come in, and the fact that the photography that we'll create is the kind of photography you might find in a magazine or on a more a website you might read for fun, rather than a website that's trying to sell you something.
Charlotte Laing:Charlotte, let's just look at the transition, because you had a successful job in South Wales and then you said well, I just approached a shopping center. Something happens in between. You know, there's that entrepreneur moment, isn't there? What was that for you? From the security and the fulfillment of working for a magazine to pitching up to a large shopping center and saying, hey, I can do this for you.
Jim James:I think in the role I was in with my journalism job, I felt that I was giving too much to the role. Really, I'm quite somebody who will overwork or give a lot of myself to a role. So I think that it was almost obviously not being monetized because I got my salary, but I was overworking in that role and really creating something really good and I thought maybe I should do that for myself and actually get get paid for the extra mile I'm willing to to run um. So that's what I decided to do really and just, yeah, walk away and try and set something up on my own. It was a very lucky first client. I think it did involve a bit of persistence. I did send an email, then another email, then I phoned them and you know, eventually, eventually they really wanted a magazine. It's just I had to keep knocking the door to make sure that that got over. The line.
Charlotte Laing:I'm going to catch you there because you said a bit of luck. But I think we all know that entrepreneurship is about a lot of hard work and some courage too. The luck is kind of how we maybe dress it up later, you being very modest Now, we maybe dress it up later. You're being very modest. But you had that moment where you thought I'm overworking. And so many of us have had that time where we're not really getting paid for what we're worth. And there comes that genesis of an idea when you thought about a shopping center. Why a shopping center? Just take us through that first client, because that's often the hardest client to win is the first one. So why did you go for that shopping? I?
Jim James:think it felt really within my um, my skill set, in that I was already writing about fashion, beauty, food and drink. It was all the lovely things I was writing about in the magazine world and I thought I could offer that to them and and they could then have this editorial voice which would really benefit them. So I think that's where the shopping centre idea came from, that I saw it as all the world is there, if you like. There's all the different aspects of things I'd like to write about and I could unearth the stories from within the centre. We could have human interest pieces and I just I saw it as quite a rich seam of potential. What is now called content, but actually at the time wasn't really called content, um, I only named the business, the content emporium, five years after this, actually, and the word content wasn't as prevalent as it is now no, exactly so when.
Charlotte Laing:When did you start the content emporium?
Jim James:so I've. I've launched it into a limited company and took on my first employee around 2015, so this is about 10 years ago now, um, and it was actually preceded by me deciding that I was 34 and probably, if I was going to have a baby, I should probably have a baby, um, but I had built this uh, fledgling businessling business, which you know, had a couple of, I think at the time. I had a three or four shopping centers that I was working with even by then, just as a solo entrepreneur, um, and I thought, well, I can either just put it in the bin, tell them bye, I'm gone, or I can hire someone to try and keep it going while I'm away having a baby. Uh, and I did, and I hired my first employee, who is now my chief operations officer, um, so this is over 10 years later. She's my second in command and very much running the business alongside me now.
Charlotte Laing:So she was again, I'm going to say lucky, because she was a lucky hire, um, you know, I've definitely nurtured her, but she was a lucky hire because she was really, really good well, but I also know, having hired you, my first person, that then it changed from being me working when I wanted to work and the clients I wanted to work to paying a salary at the end of every month and providing an office and a computer, and it changed the relationship I had with my clients as well. Can you just take us through? What did you have to do as a person, as an entrepreneur, once you hired? What's her name, by the way?
Jim James:Well, her name is actually Charlotte as well.
Charlotte Laing:Charlotte okay, the two Charlottes.
Jim James:I was trying to clone myself and it did successfully work. Yeah, so we call her Char because we need to differentiate.
Charlotte Laing:So, char yeah, so do you want to just take us through? Because that first hire, in my experience, is when you go from having a company you know, which fulfills your own needs, to needing to fulfill the needs of your people as well as your clients, because you've got to retain them, keep them employed, keep them engaged. How did you have to change how you manage the business?
Jim James:I think there was. I've always been quite open as an entrepreneur, so I think I just went through it with her. I just sort of experienced the growing of the business and the hiring of her with her. Quite frankly, I just made it quite clear how much money was coming in from the clients, what work we had to do, how we needed to win some more. Should we hire a third person? We, you know, we had these discussions together, so I think I just used I actually decided I couldn't draw down an iron curtain between me and this person who I was sitting in a room with all day, every day, and actually just let her see the growth of the business for herself. Okay, um, you know how are we going to set up a server that we can both use? Let's figure out how we do that. How are we going to you know all sorts of things migrate to a different email platform? You know there was lots of things that we needed to do and I just sort of talked about it.
Charlotte Laing:But that's great because some people hire somebody else and see this sort of almost boss employee relationship, right yeah I struggle with the boss label.
Jim James:Really I don't, I don't, I don't identify much with it, which I'm starting to try to slightly elevate myself above the team now that there's so many of them.
Charlotte Laing:I've kept very open doors with everybody um through the journey well, let's just talk about that, because when you scale a business you know my experience of growing an agency as well is that you get to four or five people. You know everybody's names. You can be involved in helping to check their work, for example, help to sort their computers, and as you get bigger and bigger it gets harder. So let's just talk about the content department, because you've grown it now to being a multi million pound business. You've got 50 over staff serving multiple clients across the country. Charlotte, let's just talk about some of the challenges that you've faced in scaling. Where should we start? Do you want to talk first of all about the recruitment side and how you start to find the right people? Because the organization changes, doesn't it?
Jim James:people, because the organization changes, doesn't it? Yes, it does. I think every scaling journey will be a bit of a roller coaster, in the sense that you kind of go through moments that are difficult and then you have a moment of when you're in your flow and you've got the right number of people and they've got the right skills and the right amount of money's coming in, and it's all great, great. And then you can reach a sticky point again where that's not true anymore, and then so I've been through a couple of those waves and kind of can see how it, how it works out, I think from my personal point of view. I think around the, the one million mark I think.
Jim James:I've heard other agency founders saying this and other business founders saying that when you get to about one million you've got. You can kind of still have quite close contact with your staff. You know them quite well. The amount of work coming in is a lot, but you can kind of keep a handle on it personally. You can kind of understand what all the work is and you know where the projects are in their stage of completion. And you haven't necessarily got to have loads of managers in place. You can have, you know, a few people managing but you don't have to have a whole layer and I think that breaking through that barrier was a like tough moment in the business really, which was about a year and a half, two years ago, where we needed to to try and break through that barrier okay.
Charlotte Laing:So when you had that barrier, you say you start to get beyond about eight to 10 people. In my experience, you need to have people to help manage the people in the systems as well. Yeah, what steps did you take to do that? Because a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck at the million, want to be in control, want to still have the, the customers maybe still do the banking and finance on the weekend. What did?
Jim James:you have to do to change I had quite a frank conversation with our biggest client actually, because I needed to get to the point. I think I'd been charging, uh, at a level which was kind of fine if I was just paying people to just do the work, and so that's where we got a bit stuck. I think we'd we'd agreed some, some rates with the client which would just about just about cover the staff only, but no management, no strategy, no finance function, as you say, no HR function. So we got to a bit of a barrier where I knew that the the revenue coming in wouldn't allow us to go beyond the staff that we had and get the right level of management so that we could be the agency we needed to be. So I just had a very frank conversation and kind of asserted you know what we were offering and what we could, what more we could offer as well if we became a slightly larger agency that had a strategy function, had a better finance function so that the invoicing was done better, had a management layer so they could have a single point of contact where they could talk to someone really quite senior and then the work would just get done rather than them having to reach into different parts of our team. So this was really well received, which I had.
Jim James:You know it was actually through the NatWest Accelerator which were I was on at the time um, which this, this um possibility occurred to me because my mentor sort of said what, why are you thinking about just the cost of? You know, you're thinking about yourself as a cost to your client. You need to think about the value you're adding to your client. And it was like a revelatory moment. I was like, of course, of course I need to think about that, rather than, you know, I was obsessing over, you know, this number of thousands, you know, oh, maybe that's a bit expensive um, and I think I started to think more in the terms of the value we could add to them if we were a slightly larger agency with the functions that they really needed us to have.
Jim James:Um. So it was amazing conversation had um had some support from the netwest procurement team at that point as well, which my mentor here put me in touch with um. So I had some quite open conversations where they um were able to to share how a large company procures services which you know, I felt like a little fish in a small in a big pond really from that point of view. So, um, yeah, it was really a turning point in the business, I think, just being able to renegotiate the terms and come away with a a better contract to deliver even more work in the end it turned out Because I think the client actually appreciated the conversation because it made it seem we were thinking like a big agency.
Jim James:We wanted to deliver exceptional services. So it was all really positive.
Charlotte Laing:Yeah, but I think what's great there is that you had that ambition, but there must have been that also anxiety, because as you grow the business, certainly there's that danger of overt trading.
Jim James:Isn't that you get more clients but then you've got to get more staff to to serve and sometimes the cash flow is that you've got more people to deliver, a more payroll to make before the clients are coming in absolutely, and there's been some tricky you know tricky cash flow moments for sure, when you know that you're just waiting for an invoice to get paid before the end of the month, before payroll comes in, and you're kind of checking that your mum's got some spare cash that she could maybe put across into your bank in case it doesn't come in in time. That those kind of conversations, I think, most scaling businesses. If you've not got equity funding or you know you've not got a big, a big bank loan behind, then that's the way that it goes.
Jim James:The staff get hired, the money sometimes doesn't come in until a bit later.
Charlotte Laing:Yeah, we normally pay staff on 30 days and clients, especially big companies, pay 60, 90 days, right? But, charlotte, I'd love to just hear from you what you learned from the NatWest procurement team, because that's access to wisdom that it's very hard to come by, right? Because, on the whole, if we're going to be talking to a company to sell our services, procurement is someone that you fill out the form. They may be on the other side of a do not reply email address, but you were given access to the procurement team at NatWest, which is amazing. What did they tell you about how that works?
Jim James:Because that's an insight that most people aren't ever going to get I think they were able to share what, what the procurement team um with it, with a large company, would be hoping to guard against.
Jim James:So I think, because we were relatively small and I think the questions that were coming in and the, the delving, um, you know, from our financials to our team structure and everything, I found it quite you know it's quite invasive, but they were. So the NatWest procurement team reassured me. It's just, they want to make sure that you're solid so that you know if you've committed to deliver a multi-million pound contract to a big company, they want to know that contract can really be delivered. You've got the financial security to see it through. You've got the, the, the, the team is really solid to deliver that. So I think that made it much. I felt just reassured that that standard practice, um, it's only trying to make sure that the service they're paying for is really going to get delivered. I knew I was going to deliver it so I kind of felt like, oh, these questions are not needed. But I can totally see why with retrospect.
Charlotte Laing:And what's interesting, when you get to bigger and bigger clients which you really need to grow a business, to be larger and larger is that you're selling to multiple stakeholders in an organization, aren't you? You might have the marketing team looking at what you're providing for content and procurement so you're having to balance the two, aren't you? And what were the expectation differences of the clients, the shopping centers, as you started to grow the content emporium, and it sounds they bought into you and the vision of what you could offer. But what were they starting to ask for? That may have been different from when they saw you, as you know charlotte, who comes in and we meet charlotte, and now she's got a bigger company that's it.
Jim James:I think, um, I think number one, I think a layer of uh, presenting ourselves well. So I think I'd always thought, well, I'm doing work for them. Doesn't really matter what we look like as a brand or how we show off about what we've done. But I think that's actually I was being a bit, a bit blind to the importance of that, especially within a big organization where, as you say, multiple stakeholders need to buy into us being their big agency. So, actually, how we look digitally, how we present reports to them, how we you know, when we present work to them, even how we present the work, the document, the work comes in, even little things like that.
Charlotte Laing:I think I've really had my eyes open to how important those signifiers are of whether you're a respectable big agency right and, as you say, when, when big companies buy companies, they're no longer buying employees, right, and so, mindset-wise, you almost went in like an alternative employee, but now you're a business partner and you have to be perceived as that right.
Jim James:Yes, we had to show that we had the right level of strategy and management in place. I think you know, again, they didn't just want to deal with me every, all the time anymore. They wanted to see that I had really solid people who they would equally have hired to, you know, to run different parts of the business as we, as we expanded across social media, web content, crm design. They wanted a really strong contact in each part of the business and, I think, also social media, I mean literally.
Jim James:I remember the first time we were handed the keys to a social media account. It was very casual. It was very like how about you run our Facebook account? Um, whereas now there's so much sort of strategy, and not just a social media strategy but a platform strategy. So there's TikTok strategy. We've launched TikTok for them as well, which was a big, you know a big kind of strategic piece of work which we investigated where we should be in that space, you know how we should present those quite corporate brands in an irreverent social media space. So yeah, delivering the strategy across all the different channels and just proving that they can totally rely on us really is the change you give to entrepreneurs that are building their business, who maybe can't afford a large agency like yours, but need to build their brand?
Charlotte Laing:what advice would you give people?
Jim James:I would say, um, make content that's relatable. So, I think, across social media I wouldn't put out content that's too, uh, kind of carefully branded. I think people often make some graphics. They'll get, you know, we were talking about Canva at a previous conversation, so they'll get some Canva and they'll just, you know, make some graphics that they think, oh, this is in brand, and then they'll put those on the social media channels, which I would hesitate to do.
Jim James:That, I mean from the experimentation we've done, putting out a graphic with words on is is often really not a good, a good way to go. Linkedin's probably the exception, um, but I think, um, and having consistency across your channel. So, having a strong brand look and tone of voice as well, and making sure that you're known for that across all of your channels, um, that would be okay. And I think, um, if you can't afford an agency to film for you, just make sure that you set aside time every week to actually create that content, because I think it's all very well to have a kind of a plan to have some content, but you have to actually do that content right, and so do you think content now is is really king, for both entrepreneurs, but also these large shopping center clients that you're you're serving I think it's been absolutely uh, huge actually, because I think it's allowed them to establish a voice in the community.
Jim James:So we, increasingly, are bringing in local voices, whether that's employees who actually work at the shopping centre, or there'll be a lot of content where we do guest interactions, and I think that it's really helped entrench the shopping centres at the heart of their communities, which for them, is the golden ticket. You know that's really they want to be top of mind. You're going to go for a day out on a Saturday. Where are you going to go for a day out on a saturday? Where are you going to go? And I think that's been so valuable for them to just be, um, become more beloved, I think, through their social content. You know, people literally in the comments are like I absolutely love this content, like this. So we you know some of it is so um, so local, so entertaining, um, and really, yeah, speaks to the community that they're sort of part of it.
Charlotte Laing:Okay, and now when we talk about community, you know you are part of the NetWest Accelerator community. What role has sort of the community here played for you as you've grown the business? Because, going from you know zero with you in Charlottelotte, or char as you call her, to 50 plus people, you're building your own community, but you're also part of an entrepreneur community. So how important do you feel that is and what role should entrepreneurs look for? Uh, in that, in that kind of a community?
Jim James:I think it's been. Uh, it was absolutely amazing experience for me to be in the NetWest Accelerator. When I arrived, I didn't quite realize how lonely I was in terms of I was surrounded by my team, but I was in a very particular position where I had all the financial burden of the company, all the kind of client burden, in a sense that the ultimate client burden, in that I had to retain the client, in a sense that the ultimate client burden, in that I had to retain the client, um, all the responsibility for their salaries and, you know, their, their well-being. And it felt quite heavy at the time, I think, and nobody I could particularly talk to about all of those things. You know my husband would listen, but I don't, you know, it was sort of he wasn't in the same boat, let's say so it was.
Jim James:It was different but I think, arriving here, having a mentor which I had, jason as a mentor and the support of the wider entrepreneurial community here, so the mentors and NatWest, but also all the other entrepreneurs in the space, just having really open, frank conversations about where I was, what you know, what was the next step I was hoping to achieve, um, and having their support as well. So a bit of cheerleading from the from the entrepreneurs here as well, was, like, really, really helpful. I used to, you know, go home just in with a different mindset after a NatWest day, so a day I'd been in here I would almost skip out of the building, feeling lighter from having been in here yeah, it's amazing how different it can feel just to feel like you're not alone, right.
Charlotte Laing:And there are other people on the journey and that you're not necessarily making the mistakes on your own. We all make mistakes as entrepreneurs, but other people are there to support you and help you to pick yourself up and keep going. On the mental health side, I do want to touch on that because we talk more and more about entrepreneurs and the journey that we go on. What have you found works for you, charlotte? Because as an entrepreneur, you do have to carry, like a parent, the weight of expectations. I'm sure you're like me. I try not to burden my wife and my my children, with what I'm going through. What's been sort of for you best practice in terms of dealing with this, with the stresses and the strains of growing the business?
Jim James:I think, actually being more open about it. So I think the you know, the more I talk to the entrepreneurs in here and actually I think then that opened the floodgates even more for me to talk to my team about it, actually about, you know, some real conversations about the clients that we needed to have, um, I think. So I think openness has been really key and actually not I'm not somebody who will try and hide, um, you know, if I'm finding things tough, so I'll kind of go in and say, you know, I'm feeling quite stressed today because there's just a lot going on, and I'll say that to the team. You know, I won't, I won't hide that from them and just kind of not come in or something or be slamming things around. I'll actually just say what's how I'm feeling.
Jim James:So I think that's mentor support here at NatWest has been again really transforming. You know, there have been a couple of times when it was particularly difficult and I'd walk into a mentor session and just kind of, you know, put my head in my hands and go. I don't know how I'm going to get through this week. There's a lot going on, there's just such a lot I have to achieve this week and it feels you know almost too much. But just knowing someone's got your back really and is actually aware that that's going on for you, checking in on you saying how's that, how's that gone, it was really just really helpful. I think so just knowing you've got a bit of support, even if they don't do anything practical, knowing that somebody's listening.
Charlotte Laing:One thing comes to mind is you know the question of we say I've got to do this. You know, and why? As an entrepreneur or as a person? Why do you need to grow your business? Because as entrepreneurs, we put ourselves under incredible pressure. You know, you may have been overworked and overlooked, but you had a normal salary, you could spend time with your daughter, so why do you want to put yourself through growing a business like the Content Emporium?
Jim James:I think it's got some internal motion, the business almost that you get. You're in a system, then You've hired people, the clients are really keen for you to do more work for them, and it's kind of like a self-perpetuating, like an engine that's almost running, and so you are then aware that you're trying to function within that self-propelling engine, if you like. So I think it would have felt like a huge failure to ever say stop, stop the bus, I'm getting off the bus. You know it's going too fast for me. So I think that's I've always felt this, this responsibility I suppose to to kind of keep, keep the pace with how fast the business needs to go.
Jim James:I think I'm also, just at heart, quite an ambitious person and quite, quite competitive person. I always and quite, quite competitive person. I always have been quite a competitive person. Um, and kind of the, the thread of um entrepreneurialism runs quite strongly through me as well. So just the, the thought of scaling a business is actually quite exciting and that I can, you know, I can really make it is actually quite, quite motivating for me as well.
Charlotte Laing:Yeah, and I want to come to that question of competition, because you've built a company, but it's not in isolation. If you build an agency, it's an extremely competitive market. You've got all the big players, the Omnicoms, the WPPs, the digital Veritases. How have you competed against these big companies who would love to have those shopping centers as clients?
Jim James:Yes, they would. I have. We have delivered exceptional work is the truth. And so there have been, at the periphery of what we do, there have been some bigger agencies who've kind of been taking maybe small roles here and there, even bigger roles occasionally, and it's just, without exception, been really unsuccessful actually.
Jim James:So I think the delivery we're very strong on delivery and there's a lot of work needs to be done. We're very strong on delivery and there's a lot of work needs to be done, and so you know, a big agency can come in with a huge strategy proposal where they say this is what you should do, or I've got a bright idea which we can also have as well, but then the delivery is is not there. There's a kind of a fill in a form, and in two weeks time maybe we'll get a copywriter to work on your poster that you need made, or you know your billboard that, whereas we're working on on it on the day. You know. So we're immediately involved, like our clients right hand person, and they can talk to us daily, have a daily conversation with the people actually doing the work.
Charlotte Laing:Um, I think that's what's what's been our saving grace, that's yeah allowed us to cut through and and in essence that's a's been our saving grace that's allowed us to cut through and, in essence, that's a very positive message for anyone thinking about running their own business is that you don't have to worry about the big companies, because if you focus on delivering great service and being there for clients, actually the clients really appreciate that, because once you've taken care of the corporate side, you do need to look like a trustworthy brand to work with. You can't look like a mom and pop shop because they've got to go through the due diligence, yeah, but they want the corporate reputation side and credibility to safeguard their own internal compliance. But they want the kind of delivery that Charlotte and Char can deliver, because you're passionate about delivering quality and helping them to get to their community.
Jim James:And we're not hiring, you know, a junior. So you know, I think a lot of big pitches there would be an over-promising, and you know they bring out the big guns for the pitch where they say we'll do this and we'll do that, and we've worked on the Nike account and we've worked on the you know whatever big, big, big brands. And then in the end who ends up working on the account is some junior they've just hired out of college, who has never, you know, used a laptop before.
Charlotte Laing:I'm exaggerating. They used to call it the pitch and switch model right the pitch and switch model the pitch and switch.
Jim James:I didn't know that phrase.
Charlotte Laing:Yeah, the pitch and switch where you have big agency comes in and really, for them, it's all about shareholder value, and so they always would take as much of the money as they could and give it to the investors, whereas people like you know you running your own business, would reinvest it in the team I genuinely want to just do a really good job.
Jim James:I would be mortified to misrepresent what we would give to somebody and then give them an inferior service. I think I would always, if anything, I'd be concerned how I get, how can I spread my good people across enough work? I think it's. Yeah, it would be completely alien to operate in that way. I think it. Yeah, I would feel very unsatisfied with the work we were delivering face when we're entrepreneurs.
Charlotte Laing:And scaling is retaining that essential passion and energy and quality and attention to detail, but scaling it so that we don't get burnt out and there are so many agencies that fade away because the founder doesn't scale. Charlotte, how have you managed to take that passion, that attention to detail that your clients really love and how have you managed to get that into the organization so that every touchpoint for a blue water with the content emporium feels like it's a consistent experience? How have you managed to scale that magic, charlotte moment?
Jim James:I think I'm quietly quite demanding and I think people know that I think I have quite high expectations. I think most people in the company would say I mean, I don't particularly like the word nice, but I think they would think that I'm, you know, a kind employer. But also they can sense that I'm I'm really bothered by things being good and I think that that's permeated through the whole company. And I think that the people I've hired in senior roles also really care that things are really good. So my creative director really cares, you know, and if something looks, you know, if, if I'm, quite literally if something's slightly out of alignment in something that we're putting through, he will take it back to the stage where it's got to get put back. And same for the account director on the biggest client, my chief operations officer, obviously, who's been with me for 12 years. Everybody really cares that things are as good as they can be and we'll take that Charlotte voice, I think, on themselves and know that we have to maintain that quality.
Charlotte Laing:So you're a guardian of quality and you create that threshold, which, of course, is what the clients still demand. What about systems? Because as you scale a business and I ran an agency with offices in three different countries as you scale a business and I ran an agency with offices in three different countries and each individual person coming on creates another set of how they can see something to be done. Can you just take us through how you've scaled the systems as well? Because a business can't grow without the growth in the infrastructure.
Jim James:That's right. I think we're still getting there. I think there's more to be done. Every day we're kind of like how could we make this run more smoothly? There's no, I think you never. You never win that battle really. And I think, as you, every stage of growth, every extra 10 people, you kind of think, oh, maybe there's some way we could make this more cohesive.
Jim James:Um, we've got, we use a, a trello system at the moment, so the work flows through the company in a trello system. Everybody has the same procedure and is very much trained on how that needs to look. Um, in terms of social management, we've used sprout social, which is a very sort of high-end, expensive social uh management tool which means that everything is in one place and very um, there's lots of systems within that that allow you to trigger alerts to people when something happens. Or there's um that that kind of um brings us a lot of systems that we we use. We're just onboarding an agency management software called synergist, which I think um is uh very popular in the agency world and that's going to be the key to unlocking right from a brief through to the workflow delivery to the invoice Exactly and the time tracking within that as well. That will kind of run right through the agency. So we're hoping that's the next smoothing system that we put in.
Charlotte Laing:Okay, so as we grow the business, we've also got to grow both the team. Keep the culture but build the systems. We have to talk about cashflow because a business, you know, really can have everything, but if it doesn't have cash it's over, without going to too much detail, if you like. But how are you managing the cashflow for growth, because that's often a really sticky subject for people.
Jim James:Yes, I think at the moment we are in a really good position. We've got long contracts and we are able to invoice ahead of work delivery often, which is very important for us. It just means that there's there's never a gap between having to pay the team and having to get paid for the work and getting paid for the work. So that's actually, um, quite transform, transformative from a cash flow point of view.
Jim James:Again, it's a it's an awkward conversation I've had to have with a client at certain point, which was a couple of years ago, and I had to say this is tricky for us, we're a small agency and actually it would be so beneficial if we could have different payment terms. Was a couple of years ago and I had to say this is tricky for us, we're a small agency and actually it would be so beneficial if we could have different payment terms. So I think I think that's what I'd advise to other other agencies where that's a problem. If you're valuable to your client, have that conversation. They would want to help you. They want you to be able to deliver the service. They don't want you to not be able to deliver.
Charlotte Laing:And Charlotte, I think that's such a great mindset point that if you go into the client feeling sort of mendicant or sort of please give me the work then, you do the work and hope to invoice later.
Charlotte Laing:But actually you have to have the courage, don't you, to say, actually I'm going to invoice you, I do 80% in advance, and if they say no, then actually it's often not the client that I really need because I'm otherwise carrying the risk. Yeah, so it's great that you're structuring your invoicing so that you're taking the risk out of it, because you've got to hire the staff and pay third party. So I wanted to touch on that is this strategy of make sure you get paid at least all your fixed costs before you do the work, even if you leave a tail of the profit at the end. Yes, that's it, which is you know, yeah, so we can.
Jim James:We can just about get by with if there's ad hoc projects that come in, we can get by with invoicing them once they're done, because that's trailing towards, you know, either the final VAT payment of the year or the profit margin, or so it's things that can wait until that money does come in. But, yeah, the core amount. I think it's super important that you get that paid up as soon as possible.
Charlotte Laing:Good.
Jim James:And a good large client would want that for you yeah.
Charlotte Laing:And actually once they've made the decision to work with you, they're more interested in business continuity because they've made that decision put you through procurement, absolutely that was that was really clear from the procurement process was that's what they cared about?
Jim James:they cared about the reliability of us as an agency. They didn't care whether they paid exactly the same amount but 30 days here or you know later. They didn't, they didn't mind about that good.
Charlotte Laing:So another sort of a piece of advice perhaps you're giving to people is be confident, ask for the money upfront, and also for the large company. They're not paying from their own pockets. That's the difference with consumer marketing, isn't it? The consumer is paying out of their own wages, maybe, or salary, but the business is going. You're solving that problem. Actually, it's just cashflow for them, and they've probably got enough cashflow to pay a smaller agency and not worry about it anymore. Charlotte, let's move on a little bit. We've got to talk about the topic of the day, which is AI, because you're in the content business and more and more people are building more and more content more and more quickly. More and more people are building more and more content more and more quickly.
Jim James:What's your view on AI content as the content emporium? How do you think? So a lot of our best content involves people. So the content that cuts through and which we've been talking about for a number of years now is entertaining. It's got people in it, people experiencing the spaces that we're talking about, and actually I don't know how AI is in any time soon replacing those people. Then it's not.
Jim James:So I think we're in quite a fortunate position from that point of view that we're not churning out infographics or, you know, text-based as I just said, text-based graphics that could get put on social um, or even you know, uh, sort of would never run a stock image or anything like that that you could again generate through AI.
Jim James:Um, in terms of the copywriting, we have so many micro conversations with our clients, where and you know you have to bear in mind social captions in particular are really quite short um, we have so many micro conversations with them about exactly what their priorities are. You know how they want to slightly pivot, the way they're presenting a certain center um, that it's so much quicker to just get that from your brain because we already have all of that information. So, to try to put that into an AI model that could then write that caption as well as you could, and we've tested it. We've sort of tested what can it come up with? And it feels so much more generic and, um, just something that the general public would be quite suspicious of.
Charlotte Laing:I think if they read it they'd go it's ai but it's interesting that there's a becoming a sort of a distrust of ai generated content and of course it's becoming quite vanilla and so actually consumers.
Jim James:Absolutely, and a proliferation of so much content is being outputted that it's the stuff that has humans in it, that actually feels entertaining, that cuts through, and so I feel really lucky that we're in that space where that's the kind of agency we are.
Charlotte Laing:We're creating kind of personality-led content, and I think, as entrepreneurs that may be watching this, it should also be reassuring that the humanness, the authenticity of being themselves, is actually what people are wanting, not mass-produced AI graphics and content that just looks like a fire hose of content, so it should be also very reassuring for people as well. Yeah definitely.
Jim James:But we're very much not saying, as an agency, let's ignore it, put it in a box and leave it in the corner. I think we're thinking how is this a tool that we can use to further our creativity? So how can we use it for gain? So there was a piece recently. There's an employee at Bluewater who is a bit of a superstar. We talk about her a lot. She's in some of our content. If we've got anything fun going on, we'll draft her in because she's a hoot.
Jim James:So there was a trend recently where people were using AI to create a vacuum-packed version of themselves as if they were a little doll. So we made a vacuum-packed version of themselves, as if they were a little doll. So we made a vacuum-packed version of Hev, who is the superstar at Blue Water, and that was a really popular piece of social content. We ran it on. Social said look who we found. You know it's Hev in a box and she's got all like a Gregg's pasty because she loves Gregg's pasty. The things in the box are all very relevant to her.
Jim James:So we kind of needed to. But we needed to use our creative thinking to think let's put hev in a box. She's gonna have to have a greg's pasty with her. So we used it as another creative tool really to generate that content, but it was just as much work as other content that we do. So in that sense, I think you know there were, there were days before photoshop, there were days before in design and all these tools we use now and we just incorporate them into our creative processes great, as you say, we're really needing to use ai to augment the creative process, but heath or heath or heath.
Charlotte Laing:Sorry, she's heather, but she prefers heath she already had a personality that was known and so you were able to build off that, Whereas if you just done a packaged anybody it wouldn't have had a backstory right. So there's that authenticity. Speaking of stories, then, Charlotte, as you start to look at the next five years, where do you see the content emporium going? Because you've got in front of large organizations, you've built a bigger and bigger team that's still keeping the danger of basically over-trading, getting more cost than income. So the road's open for you.
Jim James:Where do you? go next in the next five years.
Jim James:We feel really optimistic at the moment. I think we just feel I've got a really good senior leadership team in place. So there are seven of us who are like plotting the next phase in place. So there are seven of us who are like plotting the next phase, um, and I think, uh, within two years we're hoping to become more of a sort of 10 million turnover business. So that's the road ahead, essentially, and the pathway to get there has been plotted out, um, through a method I learned at netwest, actually through the backcasting method of you know, you know, look at where you need to get to, because really we need to um, work with more big clients to kind of de-risk the business. So we've got several really large clients on the books, um, and we know what that end scenario needs to look like in in two years, and we've kind of plotted out where we need to be in two and a half years, where we need to be in two years, one and a half one, and and therefore what we need to do in two and a half years. Well, we need to be in two years, one and a half one, and and therefore what we need to do in the next few weeks. So there's, there's steps that we're taking that are slowly getting us there.
Jim James:So business development is a huge, a huge focus for us. Now I think that we've we've kind of sort of recalibrated ourself after, after winning quite a lot more work in the last year, um, and just about feel ready to now to go again. Look, so we'll, we'll scale again. But I think it's the business development side of things which I've always slightly put on the back burner, because the work's come in organically and I've always felt, well, you know, I've doubled the business this year. As it is, I can't actively go over, you know, over more things. So but now I'm feeling let's just be really ambitious and actually don't, don't prohibit the growth, actually go after the growth okay, that's great.
Jim James:So backcasting has come from nat west and the kind of conversations that you're having here, which is helping to really give some, if I, management structure. So you've come a long way from being an underappreciated journalist in Wales to running one of the UK's fastest growing content businesses.
Jim James:That's it. I think, yeah, I think I was always. Yeah, I think I was always quite entrepreneurial. Even so. I was a journalist but I was kind of I'd worked in economics before that, so I've kind of had like a financial entrepreneurial thread through my whole life really. But I think I didn't really have those practical business skills until I came to NetWest. So, I think, learning models like backcasting, whereas I just thought there was just this future, this void of time ahead of us, and I thought, oh well, I'll grow the business, I suppose. But I think when you actually say, okay, in three years' time we want to be here, and what that means for where you need to be in two years, one year, six months, a month from now, it makes you get real. It makes you actually take genuine steps that are genuinely going to get you to that point in three years where you want to be, rather than just muddling through and is backcasting, discussing revenue or staff or market positioning or systems.
Jim James:It's a bit of a whole, I mean. I hope I'm presenting it correctly.
Charlotte Laing:I might be completely wrong to me, but my version of backcasting how you're using it, that's what's important.
Jim James:It's actually like a vision for the whole company. So it's almost a vision. It's what the company should look like in three years' time, from everything from what I'm doing to the number of team members we might need to have and the revenue that might be coming in the client base we might have. So the whole proposition really about what we would be at that point. And then you take each of those strands of the company and work out from a people point of view if we're going to need to get to 200 people by that puts, as you say, get the systems in place early. If you genuinely want to go for that vision, don't hold back on getting the systems ready to get you there. Um, I think in the past I've been a bit guilty of thinking oh well, I at the moment I don't need an, you know, a finance director at the moment I don't need, but maybe if, where you want to get in a year's time, you do need one, probably good to look at getting one now so they can get you there.
Charlotte Laing:So it sounds like being involved in the accelerators and I don't mean this in a in a bad way, so it helped us all. Professionalize absolutely your approach yeah, to running a business rather than owning a company. Now you really see yourself as a business owner. Yeah, and scaling would that be fair?
Jim James:I think I was uh sort of very caught up in successfully doing the work before I came here and then it made me realize the exceptionalism of my role leading the business and actually needing to make the decisions that would get us to a future state that we need to be in. So, yeah, I think it hugely helped. And all the entrepreneurial chatter in the room I loved it. I just love being part of it. It really, really appeals to me and I think again it made me take stock of the gold mine I'm sitting on. Really that actually I was aware I've got a really valuable business here that I need to really, really nurture yeah, and you've been nurturing and growing it really really amazingly, charlotte.
Charlotte Laing:So thanks for sharing your story and welcome. If there's someone thinking about joining an accelerator, what, what would be your piece of advice?
Jim James:I would absolutely embrace it and take what you can from it. Make friends, kind of, take all of the advice that you can from your mentor and, I think, be quite open to change, be aware that maybe where you are with your business at the moment is not quite where you need to be. I think the biggest success stories I've seen from my cohort uh here at natwest has been people who've actually had to pivot their business quite a bit for different reasons. Either they they change what they're offering or they completely change their mindset. So I think I think that would be it be open to change and really embrace all of the contacts that you'll make here.
Charlotte Laing:Charlotte, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jim James:Thank you so much. Speak soon.
