Insights Into Running A Marketing Agency: Interview With Our Founders

What better way to celebrate our 10th year in the SEO business than to pick the brains of our marvellous directors and co-founders? We sat down with Click Intelligence’s Simon Brisk and James Owen to uncover everything they learned in the last decade of running a digital marketing agency.  

Video Transcription

Please Can You Tell Everyone How Click Intelligence Came To Life 10 Years Ago?  

Simon: James and I were fortunate enough to work together previously. I was helping him with some multilingual link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs., and James was working at another company, and we worked well together on a project. At the time, I was working at another agency, and we thought we could set up our own agency because we believed that what we could deliver, alongside the technical expertise that James would bring, would be much better than where we were separately working. With James’ technical expertise and my skills in link building and the commercial side of things, we embarked on setting up Click Intelligence 10 years ago, which is crazy! Ultimately, we set up our business to help businesses and agencies navigate search engines in the most effective way. We help their business by increasing their sales, leads, traffic, and revenue. The whole business works on the basis that it delivers a return on investment (ROI)The ROI is the ratio of the return from an investment to the cost of the investment..  

James: I’ve been in the industry for 16 years, and 10 years ago, my career was going ok, but I knew I always wanted to start my own agency. Through that job, I was exposed to working with a lot of other agencies because we were outsourcing a lot of link building. From there, I saw there was a gap in the market. Agencies were charging ridiculous amounts per month to their clients and not delivering growth or ROI. There was such a gap in the market where a good agency could go in and offer them great ROI and not charge the earth for it. So that’s the premise of my idea, and I wanted to start a scalable agency. The agencies I had worked with in the past didn’t have the scalability or the strategies, and it wasn’t consistent or scalable. Simon pitched to me on LinkedIn for some international link building, and we got on quite well. His background was commercial, mine was tech, and it seemed to be a good fit. We went out for lunch, and 3 months later, we launched Click Intelligence. It was born out of wanting to deliver a better quality of work and not charge the earth for it.  

How Did You Scale The Business Up Into What It Is Today?  

Simon: The scalability of it is absolutely crucial, and there’s only one way to do this: getting the right people in the right positions with their own initiative that can run their own division of the business. With the right people on board, you can overcome any challenges through strategic working. You can’t do anything without strategic planning, which is absolutely crucial.  

James: From my standpoint, when scaling a business, my first thought would be, ‘Ok, marketing, how are we going to get more leads into the business? How are we going to grow the business?’ How we grew Click Intelligence was quite interesting. When we started the business, we had no history, marketing, branding, or anything. So essentially, using Simon’s background in sales and marketing in terms of lead generation, we built the first website, which was a lead generation website, one-page website. We used Google AdWords to grow lead generation and our business that way, which was very successful. You couldn’t do it now because the cost per click is through the roof, but there wasn’t much competition in terms of what we were trying to push. We got clients through a door, and we went from there. Then we started our SEO journey by optimizing our website. SEO takes time, 12 months plus. It took us a long time to get a foothold, work out what strategies work. Over the years, we perfected how to get our leads in the business, and the answer is multi-channel. You can’t rely on one channel to bring all your leads in. You need to do a multi-channel approach where you get your SEO, organic social, paid social, and PPC through Google AdWords and also Microsoft, retargeting, and so forth. It’s also about looking at what data we can use to attract new clients. Should we do videos? We were very successful with getting some big clients by doing that in conjunction with video and LinkedIn. Obviously, staff are paramount and hugely important, we can’t do it without them, but you need to feed the business with new business. 

What Are The Most Challenging Parts Of Running An Agency Business?  

Simon: So when running any company, you’re not sure what’s around the corner. So for us, probably the most challenging part of running the business would be a new contract or a huge increase in new business. We’ve got our team; we’ve got a very established one. We’ve got some very skilled SEO technicians, a great link building team, and a great content team. When there’s been huge growth in a short period that presents challenges across the board, from the project management team to the content team and link building team, it’s really how we deal with the challenges. As long as you’re open-minded and you can find solutions, that’s where you start, and then you need to be able to change how you’re doing things to get increased production and increase the flow of business. James and I work dynamically to find solutions quickly, and there are always improved ways of doing and achieving the same things. You have to be adaptable, you have to be incredibly flexible, you have to be determined, and you have to think on your feet.  

James: Running the tech and SEO side of the business, the challenge is keeping up to date with and also modifying client strategies from a Google update standpoint. When I started 16 years ago in the industry, my first job was directory and article submission, which now sounds like the Stone Age in 2023. As the SEO industry matures, we’ve gone through various stages of removing that type of low-quality link building that was rife back in the day. We’ve had Google PenguinGoogle Penguin is one of Google's many algorithms, first released in April 2012 in order to identify and filter out spam webpages from search results., which is the update that killed a lot link building strategies. Then we also had Google Panda, which started to stamp out the low-quality content produced en-masse. Our business started just after the start of that new stage with Google Penguin and Google Panda. Although we weren’t selling that type of link building when we started the agency, we were cleaning up a lot problems for clients.  

One of the challenging parts was that clients came to you and said, ‘Hey James, we’ve been doing link building for five years.’ You think, ‘Oh my word, what’ve you been doing?’ And they say that they’ve been buying linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages., doing direct submission, site-wide link building, and they’ve been spinning content all over the shop and have just been hit by a Google penalty. The challenges were to unpick all their issues and ensure that they were Google compliant in terms of if you were to ask Google and submit a disavow and emails to Google to ensure that penalties could be removed. Probably for about a year to 2 years, that was what we were doing for a lot of clients and to try to build up their domains as much as possible after a Google penalty. One thing we’re very proud of over the last 10 years of business is we’ve never got a Google penalty for our clients. We cleaned them up, but we never actually got a penalty because of our work, and that was part of our sales pitch.  

What Are Your Top Tips For Overcoming These Challenges?  

Simon: We’ve had a history of many challenges, like hundreds of challenges. When I’ve been going through a major problem, I’ve learned that you have to take it at face value and evaluate the problem. I know that no matter how bad the problem is, in a few days, you’ll be on to the next problem. Psychologically, that’s how it works, so you must give your mind time to find a solution. Once you’ve got that, you can start going through the implementation to make that happen. Visualising problems in your mind is incredibly powerful for modelling and building out new teams – actually, that’s really crucial because you can’t see all the people there because they’re not there yet.  

Sometimes you don’t know how you’re going to get to the end goal, and it does seem almost impossible, but in the back of your mind, it tells you we’ve been here before, and we’ve got through this, so we’ll be able to move forward and find a way. That is kind of the thought process on how to deal with any challenging situation. It does take grit and determination, and if you haven’t been there before, you will be unsure about going to that place but programmed in your head is that it’s worked out historically, we’re going to continue to do that, and that maintains a good level of confidence. You have to stay cool even though things are incredibly stressful or problematic; people are looking at you for direction. If you present yourself in a way that seems calm and in control, it keeps a lot of the anxiety around you controlled and in check. I stay cool by exercising regularly and meditating, which gives me a good clear focus and mindset so that I can present in the right way to my team and also help them out by reassuring them. 

James: The way that I look at it is that every issue is going to be unique. I break down the issue into sub-issues to try and knock down each issue from a process standpoint. In terms of keeping cool, you need to show leadership and direction to your staff members and team members and ensure that they buy into your solution and your processes. Any business owner or director needs the resilience to continue until you find a solution and never give up. If you’re easy to give up and put your head in the sand, you’re not going to get that far. Have the resilience of not giving up. You’ve got to find a solution. You know, it’s another day in the office. So those are things that I would consider to overcome any kind of challenges and keep cool. 

What Are Your Highlights From The Past 10 Years?  

James:  The agency’s growth in client base, revenue, and staff numbers, is pleasing to see. When we set out on our journey to start the agency, you build a business plan, which I did, and you forecast things, revenue and clients, and what we’re actually going to do. You might put it on paper, but you’ve got to ask if it will happen in real life. To see it from writing to actually happening and exceeding ten times is incredible. Client results are the bedrock of the business. If you don’t get good results, your clients won’t stick around, and you’re not going to grow your business. We’ve also been finalists for awards. We’ve been in the UK Search Awards, Global Search Awards, European Search Awards, and Search Engine Land Awards and have been finalists. These are nice things that happen when running a business and SEO agency.  

Simon: Me and James are very well driven, and the growth excites us and has done all the way through. So, to be able to hit the numbers that we’ve hit, grow the company, and grow the team is absolutely amazing. We’ve had long-standing team members who have grown up within the company, going from a junior to a more experienced member of the team, and then some of those go on to management as well. I get a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment from seeing the employees within the company developing and it’s been incredibly rewarding. Customers are the key to our business, and we’ve worked with a lot of companies. We’ve done some fantastic work for several companies, and that’s been incredibly rewarding, where we’ve taken them from zero to hero over a short time. We’ve had companies getting acquired all due to the work that we’ve done, I hold that in very high regard, and it’s great. Ultimately that’s why we started a business to help other companies out and help them grow like we’ve been fortunate to do so.  

How Do You Keep Up With The Latest Industry Trends And Standards?  

James: In 16 years in the SEO industry, things have changed massively, and keeping abreast of what Google’s doing and what strategies work and don’t work is a daily job. To do that, you need to read, set up email alerts from known SEO bloggers and reporters in the industry, and pick through the little gold nuggets of information. The best way is by reading and trying out strategies on our own websites to see what the best approach is to help our clients grow.  

Simon: Luckily, I leave all the technical algorithm things to James because that’s not my remit. From a lead generation perspective, things are constantly changing. They have algorithm updates within all of the platforms. Things have changed monumentally since we started. Probably the biggest thing was the IOS update, which meant Apple blocked third-party tracking. Elements like that have been incredibly tricky to find workarounds. There was a good and bad way to go about it. We worked out going server to server from data points and eradicated a lot of the problems, so that was a good solution that we’ve done for ourselves and our clients.  

When I met James through LinkedIn, you used to be able to message directly even if you weren’t a contact. That is a thing of the past now. How to do lead generation on LinkedIn is changing all the time, and what’s come of all of this on every single channel is that you have to give value. You have to give genuine purpose when before you might have been able to bluff it. Now, if you want to engage with people, you have to spend a lot of time researching them and giving extra levels of personalisation. The landscape is constantly changing. I attend seminars to find out the latest trends on how platforms are working. Like SEO, you have to keep your finger on the pulse, try new things, and innovate the whole time. 

How Vital Is Our White Label Service We Provide To Our Agency Clients?  

James: Our White Label SEO service is about trust. We don’t outsource to other agencies. We do everything in-house, from SEO audits to link building to reporting. So, we’ve got a whole suite of things that we do internally, and then we know we can offer them to white label or reseller agencies, and we do a good job of it that we’re able to basically brand up all our work. Essentially you would never know that we did work for the agency’s clients, which gives them a huge amount of value. What we found out was in the US, a lot of the agencies were great at selling, but delivery was not so good; we can come in and plug that hole for them. We’re very good at delivering the work and results through our reporting. We’ve got clients who come back month-on-month because they can trust us to deliver what they need to impress their clients.  

Simon: Outsourcing work is incredibly complicated because it’s third party to third party to third party because the question you have to ask is if the person you are outsourcing to is outsourcing it. If they are, then you lose all level of control, which I experienced previously, working for other agencies. Here at Click, the primary goal is we’re not interested in outsourcing to anyone. We want to have full control. We want to have full accountability. That’s absolutely crucial. All our agency clients need to do is keep up communication with their clients, pass it on to us, and we will give them fantastic results anyway. Everything’s transparent with an online ordering portal. It’s a full end-to-end solution. The client won’t see any markings that indicate it’s Click Intelligence doing the work. Were we not able to do that, agencies would be struggling with their workload. I’m having conversations with US agencies, thankful that they’re not in the office until 8 or 9pm. With our help, they can run a normal office day and leave and actually go to the gym or see their family, but there would have been no way without our service because they were just swamped with work. It all comes down to trust, and then over time, our agencies can count on us so we can deliver as much or as little work in an effective way. Ultimately there’s going to be a drive in that client’s business that will support the agency. If we do well for the agency, the agency does well for us. It’s a strategic partnership that is absolutely crucial, whether it’s paid search, content, managed SEO, or link building. We very much enjoy working with agencies, and it’s a substantial amount of our business. 

What Are The Main Dynamics Of B2B Marketing?  

James: When you start a business, you can’t rely on one channel to grow your business. You need to look at doing SEO, paid advertising, links, outreach, retargeting, content marketing, funnels, and emails to build out your brand more. That’s what Google is trying to get everyone to do from an SEO standpoint. Build up your expertise and ensure that your brand is answering your customers’ questions on the web. Those questions aren’t just on the search bar. Those questions are on Facebook, they’re on Reddit, they’re on TikTok, so you want to ensure you’re on all of those channels and answering those questions for your user.  

Simon: The main dynamics of B2B marketing, fundamentally, it’s like building a house. First, you’ll need your website, and then you will need Google My Business. That’s been a really useful tool for local search on a B2B level. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than it ever has been due to the complexities in each platform. So the biggest message really is that any B2B marketing campaign has to be viewed on multi-channel. So when we look at our business and we have a look at what our leads have generated from talking about B2B marketing, it’s clear that they’re coming in through a source. The biggest complexity in all of this is attribution. Making sure that you’ve got the right attribution in place to be able to track all of these is probably the biggest complexity of any B2B marketing campaign because there are some that you can measure and some that you can’t measure. I would say you should spend a lot of time and attention fixing the attribution for any business to be able to understand what channel is working for them, what revenue to pay into certain channels, whether it be SEO, whether it be paid search, whether it be paid social. Once you’ve got all those lined up, then you find that the business works successfully. If you start taking channels away, you will start missing areas of business.  

Finally, What’s The Best Thing About Running An Agency Business?  

James: It’s the pleasure in the results. At the start of the business, we started with nothing; it was a startup. It’s all about growing the business and having the staff, growing the revenue, of course, that helps you grow the business. Beyond that, it’s giving a good service to clients. That’s why we started the business – that’s it. We have a good client retention of 97%, and that, for me, is the bedrock of the business, and that’s probably one of the best things about running the business.  

Simon: There is a multitude of things that are great about running a business from an agency perspective. The main thing that James has touched on is the results. We have a great team of highly skilled individuals that are incredibly solid at delivering high-performing campaigns. Whether it’s link building, content, managed SEO, paid search, paid social, whatever that discipline may be. The results we can drive through multi-channel is fantastic and we very much enjoy our clients’ success, which is why we set up the company. Second, it’s been very interesting building the team of staff that ultimately drive the company and building a community within our members of staff, and I’ve been very pleased with that. There’s a great sense of community within Click Intelligence; everybody works together and helps each other out and supports each other. It’s important that everyone comes in with a smile on their face and enjoy what they’re doing and enjoy ultimately helping other customers out. I would say they are the two main great things about running an agency.