Webinar Recording: Agency Efficiency, Growth & Quality

Sitebulb's Jojo Furnival was joined by an expert panel to discuss agency growth, efficiency and quality in the remote-first world: 

• OMG Center founder and agency growth accelerator, Chris Simmance
• WhitworthSEO owner and consultant, Charlie Whitworth
• Nisa Digital agency founder & CEO, Sabiha Shakil
• Director of Organic Search at global agency, VML, Jeff Russell 

ICYMI you can now watch the webinar recording in full below.

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Read the webinar transcript

Jojo Furnival:
Hi everyone. Thank you for joining today's webinar. I'm Jojo, I'm marketing manager at Sitebulb. ... Our guests today span various different roles within the digital agency space. First up we've got Chris Simmance, who is a business growth coach and founder of the OMG Centre, which is an agency accelerator business here in the UK. He is extremely knowledgeable in all things agency growth and as you can see, beard growth representing, sorry, had to, representing our large agencies. We've got Jeff Russell, who's director of organic search at global agency VML. Jeff has extensive background in agency settings and is known for maintaining high standards of excellence even in the remote first world, which is what we're going to be talking about today.

Next we have Sabiha Shakil, founder and CEO of marketing consultancy, Nisa Digital, which is based in the UAE. She's a judge at many, many marketing awards and the recipient of the top 100 rising women power leaders in Asia 2023 award.

And last but not least, we have Charlie Whitworth, who is a renowned technical SEO and digital marketing expert with 14 years of experience in the industry. He's a longtime customer of Sitebulb. We love him and he now runs his own consultancy firm. Welcome all speakers and attendees. Thank you very much for joining us today. We're just going to crack on now, kick off with the first question, which is one from me obviously.

I worked in the agency world for about 10 years altogether, and the one thing that I constantly felt the pressure to achieve obviously besides positive results for clients was efficiency. In reality, this often felt like pressure to just work faster...

How do you balance the promise to deliver impeccable work to clients with the need for internal efficiency and keeping costs down?

Chris Simmance:
I reckon this should go to someone who's in an agency right now first because I've always got an answer.

Jeff Russell:
I think that's my cue, right?

Jojo Furnival:
Yeah.

Jeff Russell:
We definitely deal with our fair share of competing demands, quick turnarounds, and that fear of saying no as a risk to our opportunity cost, you have to make the best decision. You need to have clear lines of communication. I think that's always the most important thing. You've got to understand the brief, what does that team need to deliver for the client? And then you can establish the clear expectations and timelines so that you know what you have to deliver to the clients. You can't always give the biggest project over if it... That usually takes you two weeks if you have an eight-hour timeline. Talking to the team, understanding what you have to deliver, what's the most important thing that they need out of it? And then just having that clear line of communication.

Jojo Furnival:
Anyone else? On this topic of efficiency, balancing efficiency with the need for, not perfection, but really awesome work, it's a difficult one for solo consultants as well, I imagine.

Charlie Whitworth:
It is and it isn't. My model, I've been quite careful to have a kind of performance related to KPIs now rather than X amount of article articles, X amount of output. And that's helped because I haven't got clients chasing me for, where are those piece of content you promised me, where's that audit you promised me? It's a laser focus on performance, which is tricky for agencies, but from a more consultancy based model that's easier. That's how I've managed that over the last few years is look, they've be chasing me for 10 blog posts, let's talk at the end of the month about performance. And that's helped quite a bit with the efficiency.

Sabiha Shakil:
We have customised services for our agency. It's not just about what we can provide them in terms of what we have in-house or through our partners, but it's also what the client needs based on their business needs. And those solutions generally that we provide are from anything to anything. And our key USP is that we provide a fast turnaround time, so we would be the agency that would do it faster than anybody else, whatever it is because we are in the digital world and it's easy to find anybody out there to compete with not just quality but also fast turnaround time. And that's one of the challenges that we see as an agency, especially in this part of the world because you have so many people out there that can provide these services.

The way we keep cost downs is we invest in tools that would provide the efficiency and we devest in fixed costs or... That doesn't mean human cost at all. We've never really had to let go of anybody, but it's more like, okay, turn off a subscription for so-and-so tools so that we can provide so-and-so service for this client or look at how we can provide a more cost-effective solution to the client. When it's customised, it's also you're at an advantage to price better because you're basically doing everything that is tailored to the client's marketing operations as well as the requirements of the business. That's how we try to... We are just efficient.

Jojo Furnival:
Well, and you're obviously hiring the right people. It starts with the people, doesn't it?

You briefly mentioned tools there as being important to efficiency. What other efficiency tips do you lovely panellists have to share?

Chris Simmance:
Just to jump in because I think this bridges both those, the first question and this point as well actually Jojo, is that, I don't know if anyone on the panel or anyone watching has heard of Parkinson's Law essentially whereby you fill the available time with whatever things you have to do. If you've got a job that realistically takes one hour but you've got 10 hours to do it and the chances are you'll take 10 hours to do it, that kind of thing. The boring advisor in me suggests that if you know how long things take and you make sure time is allotted accordingly, then there is available time to deliver other things. And you should never give someone more than say 80% of their available billable hours to deliver something because they'll fill their time up and then there'll be that pressure.

In terms of tips, as soon as a client comes to you and you know what they want, whatever that shopping list might well be, and you assign a cost-based estimate internally of resources required in terms of time, then it's really easy if you're using the right project management software to essentially snip pieces of time into an order. You could say here's 10 people delivering for a massive client 150 hours a month, when in actual fact they're all delivering a small amount of time each. You can reportably manage whether or not there is actually in fact enough time and that takes the mental load down on people.

Somebody was briefly just touching on what the challenges there are at the moment for agencies. What do you think the biggest challenges are right now in 2024?

Charlie Whitworth:
New business.

It's always an issue, but when I speak to anyone at the moment, I feel like, it's just so volatile essentially and unpredictable. Whereas before there was some sort of predictability about certain things, but that's just my perspective.

I think we've all been saying this ever since COVID now. We been like, we just need to ride this period out, whether or not it's been COVID and then certain things that have been happening economically, certainly here in the UK, but when we do see those little green shoots in the economy, we do see those green shoots of appetite again coming back up. We've certainly seen that. I think there's been an imperfect storm of COVID and then economic situations in various parts of the world and internally here at the UK. I think it's always pretty closely tied to what's going on with the economy, isn't it?

Chris Simmance:
Prices have gone up everywhere, not just for clients but to deliver on an agency scale. Salaries have gone up, cost of tools have gone up, costs of delivering sale have gone up, so gross margins have gone down, which means that you lose one client and you find one new client. The cost of sale has meant that it's actually reducing or eroding your overall net margin at the end of the day, so then you've got less to work with to then go away and do some decent marketing to get the new clients in. Sign-offs take longer because their budgets are equally as stretched. I think, I don't know, Jeff and Sabiha, if you're seeing slower sign-off periods, which makes hiring a little bit more complicated.

Jeff Russell:
Absolutely. We also went through a major merger this year, so I am assuming that's where my CEO would put his hat on as our biggest challenge for our agency. But definitely looking to see how can we continue to provide that ongoing value not only for our organic partners, which is like the fastest way to continue growth, but where are those new opportunities at? Where can we provide value to other folks across the agencies? We're always listening for those key terms where we can potentially insert our own expertise in helping out a larger agency pitch, even if it's not necessarily specifically for my group to look into. But that's definitely always usually the top focus, right?

Charlie Whitworth:
Yeah. I think the challenge has been as well is if clients and prospects have less money, but you want to work with them and nurture that relationship, it's what product you then provide. If you have a premium or a product which is based on tonnes of experience, but it's fairly expensive, it reassuring expensive, but how do you provide that service on that lower retainer? And then it's about upselling that as you prove results. But that's been the tricky thing because you can't do very much with these lower retainers, so it's a catch-22 there. That's where I think some the agencies have been quite clever in how can we drive some results with this lower budget, but on the understanding that when performance starts to actually start to prove the concept that we want to get on a retainer where we can really start to drive proper performance and then when clients have that budget again, then the rest of it should be fairly easy. But I think that's where the tricky bits been the last year or so, definitely the last two years probably.

Jojo Furnival:
It's about it's having to prove your worth, that pressure to prove your worth a lot more. And Jeff, you mentioned one way potentially to do this is by adding more value. This is actually a question for later on, but I might as well ask it now because it does feel like clients are expecting more and more for their investment because budgets are tight, et cetera, et cetera, everything that's just been mentioned...

How are you guys adding more value or being more proactive in addressing your client's needs?

Jeff Russell:
You need to look for those unique value adds that can help your clients make better decisions. You have to be their most trusted advisor and especially if you're an SEO like me, you need to be looking at those updates for AI overviews and how that's impacting their traffic and conversions. You need to be looking into potentially updating any of your tactics or your roadmap from that recent Google algorithm leak. It is like there's so many things that you have to do that's not necessarily your day-to-day job, but looking to provide that extra value for your customers and you being the expert you need to bring your expertise to the table.

Sabiha Shakil:
I think going away from providing generic services would be probably the best approach to take. And looking at really what exactly what Jeff said, what is the value add that you can provide to your customers? I can give you Nisa Digital's example. We target mainly life sciences, healthcare and applied sciences' industry mainly because I am from that background and we have a legacy... Well, I have a legacy of working with life science customers, so it's also looking at segmenting your audiences so that you can provide more specialised services from a strategic point of view but also from an execution point of view down the line, whether you're building websites or even doing campaigns or anything like that.

Because at this day and age, everybody is a digital marketer. Everybody is on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, so everybody knows a bit about digital marketing, SEO and everybody's starting to build their own websites with the user-friendly website builders out there. It's just looking at what is the difference you can provide to your customers and actually it's difficult for agencies now because you have to look back and you have to see, okay, what can I do different from the guy next door so that I can win this deal? I think that's one of the main challenges.

Chris Simmance:
Since I got permission to be contentious, I'm going to have a little bit of a disagreement to a certain degree. I totally understand. I agree with Sabiha, I agree with you, Jeff, on adding value in terms of services and things like that, but I think fundamentally we're missing the point of what value add means. Value add from a client's point of view is different to what we perceive in that same sense. They're spending lots of money in lots of different places. Oftentimes SEO and digital marketing is one cost area and sometimes not even a big one, but when budgets are stretched and people internally are getting laid off in different companies and results are required, value add in my book is learn how their business works and translate everything that you do into their language, so your reports don't just say, this keyword went up by this many places.

It says what it means and why it's important to the business, not just that it relates to more sales, but this is why this is important. Adding value is things like TLDRs in reports that says screenshot this and send this to your boss. That will make you look good. That means that when budgets are being reconsidered, you are the guy or girl or person that's made them look really, really good, so you don't get up for the chop or your budgets don't get constrained. You can add value by just understanding what they want. For the most part, they don't want SEO, they want the results of SEO.

Jojo Furnival:
That's a good point. I suppose it's making... I remember in fact this was the very, very first agency I ever worked at. And my big boss there was a bit of a legend back in the 80s, but anyway, and this was the thing that he was doing to... He was moonlighting in this agency. His son was running it, but he would always say it's about making the client look good, which I suppose is just made me think of that what you were saying before.

Chris Simmance:
Exactly. And with larger budgets or with larger clients, usually the client is the digital marketing manager or the marketing manager or the head of marketing or something like that. And when they go into a boardroom, they don't want to re-share your big looker studio or PDF report. They want something that says, here's the KPI I had translated into the results of the work that we budgeted and we signed off. Thank you very much, et cetera.

Jojo Furnival:
That comes down to money, doesn't it?

Chris Simmance:
All the time.

Jojo Furnival:
This comes back to, it's the efficiency but getting things done efficiently, but also how do you maintain those high standards, especially if you are, I'm thinking around now potentially Charlie or when you don't have an internal resource to do this for you...

How do you balance maintaining standards with trying to grow the business at the same time?

Charlie Whitworth:
I think that's obviously key for my business model because I do have a team, but it's not a team that sit with me in an office, so I've got to intelligently managed those. I think utilising the technology has been... A lot of the tools, I'm not going to sound bite. All the tools that people are using nowadays have come at a good time because I've been able to streamline a lot. But the efficiency element, I think it goes back to those KPIs at the start. Gone are the days where we're reporting on X amount, canonical tags implemented and things like that. It's like how are we performing against the roadmap? What's that doing in terms of traffic? And crucially that revenue piece, it can get tricky. If it's not an e-commerce or a transactional website because then you need to try and tag some monetary value to traffic and some fairly flimsy CTAs then.

But I think it's about what all of us have probably got quite good at in our experience is setting that out crystal clear at the start. And if it is a marketing manager whose knowledge isn't great, it's about putting things into layman's. Or if you've got a digital marketing manager who loves SEO, who loves to get stuck into the detail, then their reporting's a lot different. From an efficiency perspective, make sure you're laser focused on those KPIs because it could be dead easy to go away and just start doing all the SEO stuff you love doing. It's fun or because it's what everyone else is doing at the moment and it's cool to put in reports that we're doing all this advanced structured data or whatever, but if that's not going to get you the result that you set out to start KPI wise, and it could be that that is a fairly simple, simple to some people, but fairly straightforward SEO, but keep laser focused on that because if you're doing loads of other stuff that's not driving that result, then that's not efficient.

SEO-wise, you can go down rabbit holes and you can start finding all this great stuff, which to another tech SEO sounds great and it is great and you should do it, but it's about timing and about achieving the KPIs that you need to achieve. Once you've achieved them and you've proven to the client that you know what you're doing and the stuff that you do drives performance, then you can start doing the other bits and pieces. And don't get me wrong, it may be that that technical stuff is going to achieve that KPI, but make sure that is the KPI. It could be more content focused, it could be more conversion focused, so the efficiency element comes into implementation aspects of what you're actually putting in life. Is it going to help what you're trying to achieve? I think every campaign is so different though, isn't it?

Chris Simmance:
I think as well, if you consider how much context switching goes on in any business in anything these days, because I think Jeff, you said you've got like 24 tabs open and things like that, and the amount time it takes your brain to switch off of one thing, switch onto another thing, switch back onto another thing and offer them another thing, then you've got Slack and email and these sorts of things. Time blocking is a really good way of being efficient because you literally get more stuff done with less time because you are more focused. Switching off apps, definitely getting off Twitter, things like that will mean that you actually get more done.

Jojo Furnival:
That's a great tip.

Sabiha Shakil:
I think just automating whatever you can within your costs would be a great way to be efficient as well as manage your resources as well. If there's opportunity to automate a task, then it's just like what somebody in the comments is saying, is it important to be agile in your business? And that's definitely, that's something that I would recommend as well. Whenever there's a new technology that comes out or if you need to deliver something fast to a client, just find a way to automate that and deliver it so you don't lose the business because it's very competitive out there.

Jeff Russell:
I think the only thing I would add would be having those scalable processes, having a standardisation to either procedures or templates, even minutia, things like having consistent file names. If you're sharing across 20 or 30 people knowing how to get that one document because you're going to pull it down next week and then in a month from now and then you're going to have a thought be like, "Didn't we do something like this." And then be like, "Yeah, it's in this file folder." And having everyone trained up on those kind of procedures, it's crucial to my day-to-day. Especially if you're jumping in something like on Nubiz and they're like, Hey, I need this kind of document. We do something like that. Yeah, let me go find it. It really is beneficial to having those kind of documentation set up.

Jojo Furnival:
That's a really good... I wrote recently about... Processes are absolutely critical, aren't they, in an agency? And the agency experience that I've had, we were pretty good actually. We were very good at creating processes. That was part of my role. I was brought in to do that.

But do you feel like there is a time for processes and then there is a time for throwing the rule book out of the window as well?

Jeff Russell:
Yeah, yeah. Don't stay fixated on the past if it's not going to serve your future, you got to fail fast and learn from, even if something that was working in the past, if it's slowing up your pipeline or your efficiency to market, it's not going to serve you in your future and you just need to learn when to cut ties and when to optimise.

Chris Simmance:
I bet you, Sabiha, you must have some kind of crazy, either automation or some kind of if this, then that thing for which processes need to be skipped and things if you deliver things so quickly, right?

Sabiha Shakil:
We make fast decisions. We also analyse the risks and if it's worth taking that decision. We are quick to respond and we've actually delivered within a day, within two days. Apart from having a small in-house team, we're a very small agency, but we have nice partners that support us and they're also part of that whole system, the ecosystem that we've created, so quick decision making.

Quick decision making. Is that something you can teach, Sabiha? Is there a secret to that or you just go, right, we're doing this?

Sabiha Shakil:
That's a good question.

Charlie Whitworth:
I don't think you can teach that. I had a similar conversation with someone this morning about SEO best practise is the most dangerous thing in the world because it needs to be based on the situation at hand. And I've seen a recent scenario where sites visibility is plummeted because NIH is going to write and implemented best practise when they were flying and they changed a load of things that over time Google had got used to and it was working. That's the decision making, that's the experience. That's where people like us hopefully make the right decisions. I think that's sometimes where a process for go and buy best practises can be dangerous. You've got to really just think laterally about it, I suppose.

Sabiha Shakil:
I think that's where having agency experience is very good because you're exposed to a lot of different types of projects and companies of different sizes and teams. You understand the various scenarios that you could face and the challenges and then that can actually help you in your decision-making in the future. It is a bit experience based, I have to admit as well.

Chris Simmance:
I was basically going to interrupt you to agree with you essentially by the sounds of it, other than to add that if you embrace feeling a bit awkward or embrace feeling a bit uncomfortable in everything, then things like making decisions quickly often comes a little bit easier. It's better to make a decision quickly and find it was a mistake quickly than to spend a month making a decision and find that it's too late and everything changes too quickly in digital, I think, I don't know, don't really do it anymore.

Charlie Whitworth:
Try and make these mistakes on your own websites first I'd say is probably the right way.

Jojo Furnival:
Oh, yeah. That is a good piece of advice as well.

Chris Simmance:
I think data paralysis also is hindering quite a lot of people in this industry. We've got a lot of decisions to make and a lot of data points. And often you put too much together and you decide, oh, either we've got too many opportunities to go down and too many decisions to make or it reduces everything down to the decisions made for us because the data points in one way. I don't know about you guys, but there's often holes in a lot of the data that people look at and even if it's financial information, it's really hard to... If you get too much information, it's hard to make a decision.

Tip for anyone listening, if you've got a big decision to make, do a bit of a scientific version of it and decide what you want to do and then get all the data that you need in order to make a decision on that rather than get all the information and make a decision. I've got choice A and choice B, now I'm going to go away and get all the data that required in order to decide between A and B, as opposed to we need to make a decision but we don't have any options to take just yet.

Charlie Whitworth:
And totally true, it's either that or it's not enough data or anecdotal. Again, going back to this, which I heard on Twitter that someone implemented it and it worked fine. I bet loads that happens daily, people are doing that, but I think people are saying data as well, what is the right sample? What's the threshold for that to be reliable as well?

Jojo Furnival:
Cool. All right. I think we can all agree between getting results for clients staying on top of the ever evolving landscape, managing competing workloads, agency environment can be a stressful one at the times.

How do we all strike the balance between productivity and a positive workplace culture or indeed work-life balance, your own mental wellbeing?

Chris Simmance:
Pretty tough one. I think everyone's different. Every business is different. For me, the advice that I often give is if you have the right bums in the right seats in your business, usually people find it a bit more comfortable to do their job, so if you've hired the right person for the right role that fits the culture of the business, it makes it a little bit easier when times are tough. But as a leader it's really important to be hyper aware to different people's needs, so if you know the people in your team really well, especially being remote, it's a lot harder to do these days. But if you are hyper aware in your meetings, in your calls, in just Slack comms and things like that, it's a lot easier to distinguish whether or not someone's happy or not. And you can remedy it in the right way if you've got the right level of empathy.

And also if conversely you are not feeling that good or that happy or something's going a little bit too stressful and pressureful because you trust the people around you, usually you are able to be a bit more vulnerable and say, "I'm a little bit stressed today, guys, can someone help me out please." And I think it just comes a bit healthy communication. Sometimes we get stressed and there's nothing you can do about it and you just have to get on with it because it's the world and other times there's people that can help you if you just say it.

Jeff Russell:
Chris stole all my talking points there.

But again, making sure you're getting the right hires in, I think, is going to solve lots of your problems with efficiency and growth, maintaining happy clients. Charlie may be in a good seat or a bad seat from that standpoint, but at least for our team and if you do an interview with me and that kind of question always comes up, what's your company culture like? I'm very, very thankful for that on my team, our culture is really, really deeply rooted in empathy. We have that care for each other and having that in a supportive environment really does, it takes a lot of the stress out of your day-to-day. If you have to go to a doctor's appointment, go out for a walk with your dog or something along those lines, or I'm supposed to be in the office today actually, but I'm here talking with you all in my office, in my home office.

Having that kind of flexibility is really, really important. And you don't have that stress of needing to be plugged in at your computer eight, 10 hours a day. It does you no good if we burn out all of our employees to the extent that they end up leaving because now I have to go back through all that process again and find another diamond in the rough. And so having that work-life balance is really important and I'm thankful that we have a leadership team that fully supports it. I think that would be just the add. Does your leadership actually walk the walk along with that? I know Patrick's here, so just wink, but I think that's really, really important is having that leadership team that actually supports and not just says it as well.

Charlie Whitworth:
I was quite lucky that I worked at two really great agencies in Manchester. And Manchester generally the culture across the agencies is fairly similar because it's the environment. But I think something when I did manage large teams at agencies that I found worked quite well was having people working on stuff that they enjoyed doing. It was an organic search team. I had tech SEOs, I had content marketers, I had digital PRs. Maybe away from the digital PR, but the SEO team, a lot of SEO teams people were just told to do stuff as SEO stuff.

But if you kept the tech focused of the tech and the content guys focusing on the content and they were enjoying their day-to-day, they were enjoying most of the work they were doing. If you could combine that with a positive culture and the things that Jeff just mentioned, I think that helps because I know when I was younger, if I had a day of doing something I didn't really want to be doing, it was without my comfort zone, I didn't really want to do it, that makes a big difference. I think that was a way that I used to manage that of making sure people weren't doing tasks that they... We who wants to do boring tasks every now and again, but trying to keep that to a minimum I suppose.

It was pushing techs to do creative stuff and then the creative guy hated all the tech talk. It was trying to be as collaborative as possible, but if you could see that someone hated a certain aspect of it, then try and minimise that. Whereas there's some agencies, I know that people are forced but have to do a lot of stuff that they find boring. Ideally you get loads of hybrid people and they love doing it all and that's great but in a perfect world.

Jojo Furnival:
We have touched slightly on this already. Lots of us are remote, like well Sitebulb, we're not an agency obviously, but Sitebulb is a fully remote team. I'm sure that you guys have got, well and VML being global, got hybrid/remote working environments.

Are there some tips or stories of effective remote team leadership or communication that you can share?

Jeff Russell:
Yeah. We went fully remote during COVID. Thankfully we've already had the tools for effective communication that allowed for that to happen. Not every business was set up that effectively, so we really hit the ground running when it mattered the most. And just this year we moved back to that hybrid role as well of in the office and being able to have that flexible schedule. You mentioned, we do have people across the globe in different countries that we're having to speak with oftentimes, so Microsoft Teams is like that saviour for us. No plug there because it's not a great software. But anyways, one of the programmes that we did set up during COVID or that the leadership team set up was having those quarterly town halls.

We just had one right before I hopped on the call here today as well, but it really helps you get that understanding of how we're progressing as a business caring about new initiatives that are coming down the pipeline that might impact our jobs and things like that. It's really being able to hear from leadership, what's happening, what's our goals, how are we progressing, what can I do to help support that growth? It really helped us stay in touch, stay in tune with how we can best support the business and having those kind of communication tools, having our weekly standups, being able to maintain our one-to-ones with our coachees and things like that has been vital.

Chris Simmance:
I think there's a saying I use a lot when I speak to agencies and it's a confused mind doesn't buy, and that goes for everything marketing through to sales for everything else. But internally, if your team knows where you are all going and everyone knows what they're doing and they literally know what their job is and they know what everyone else's job is and there's no confusion over who does what and where they're supposed to be and all those sorts of things, if people know who they are and where they're going, they're an awful lot more comfortable. And then all you need to do is overlay that with consistent, clear, concise communication, lots of alliterativeness there. But that then means that from all layers in the business, if everyone's being consistent with the way they speak and the way they behave, because they all know where they're going and what they're doing, it makes it a little bit easier to not be physically in the same place.

You might have some teams in a hybrid role, for example, where they're in the office together and a part of the team like Jeff today for example, not in the office and need to communicate. And if the communication is consistently the same, whether you are in person or whether you are via teams or Slack or a video call, if it's the same and everyone knows who they are and what they're supposed to do and where the whole organisation is supposed to be going, everything's an awful lot more comfortable. And I think you can see the businesses, which did really well with that when it had to happen overnight for most of us during COVID and the businesses which have moved into more hybrid and hybrid remote stuff now are benefiting greatly from doing it.

Jojo Furnival:
This was actually a question from Patrick, so if you don't like it's his fault, but we were going to try and address the AI shaped elephant in the room because it's a bit of a scary time out there for agencies, for some agencies. It seems like there's quite a bit of scaremongering.

How much have you encountered fear around AI taking people's jobs?

Jeff Russell:
I don't know. Maybe it's famous last words, someone knock on wood for me, but it's not something that I'm worried about. I don't think my team is worried about it. We're really fully immersing ourselves to learn all that we can and really just looking at it as another tool in our toolbox. Obviously you need to be mindful about how you are implementing change. You don't want to automate yourself out of the human touchpoints that are going to make your business the unique and the competitive advantage. Everyone's going to have access to ChatGPT or other automation tools. A lot of that stuff is free now. Where are that human touch points that you can continue to be a part of that you can drive value with? And just having AI just be a tool that limit the processes, automate the boring stuff, finding ways to grow efficiency from that standpoint, but just don't make it your entire pipeline.

Charlie Whitworth:
Exactly that. For us, it's got rid of some of the annoying stuff that you would bog you down, especially because I've got a very small team. If you've got more time to focus on strategy and stuff that's going to move the needle on less time doing the laborious tasks that we can now get AI to do, then that can only be a good thing. I think it is obviously going to automate some of the more laborious stuff, but that to me isn't the stuff as a strategist or a consultant that drives value anyway. It's the implementation phase but not the strategy phase.

Sabiha Shakil:
I think making friends with AI is a good thing to have it in this day and age. Not that it takes over your brain or the expertise that you provide, just think of it as an employee that's in your team and see what the strengths and weaknesses it can provide and work with it. I always say work with it because it's not going away and you really can't fight it otherwise you're going to be run over by the waggon. I think we should just make friends with it, see what it can offer you and see how it can make you more efficient. It can add value to your services, but don't let it take over your expertise because then the client will be like, oh, if they're going to use this AI tool, we might as well just use it in-house and why do we need them? It's just looking at how you can apply that technology to your services and the services that you provide to your clients. That's my view.

Charlie Whitworth:
I talked about a lot on a recent podcast of Andy and Josh and Co about, I think utilising AI is going to be an SEO skill. It's going to be one where what's your tech SEO? There's a way to use it badly and there's a way to use it well. And I don't feel like you have to use it as well. I think that's something I said right at the start is just because everyone else is using it, there'll be campaigns where it'll have huge value. There'll be campaigns where it'll be fairly limited, but again, the previous point really, you don't feel like you have to tick every box or do everything for every campaign. If you're working on an enterprise site, it's a no-brainer that AI is going to help you save a lot of time of doing certain tasks. But I think every SEO is started thinking, God, should I be using all these tools and how do I use them all? You don't necessarily have to.

Jojo Furnival:
The AI intern essentially?

Charlie Whitworth:
Yeah.

Do you think the anatomy of the agency is changing? Post COVID, what do you think a future-proofed agency structure looks like? Is there an agency versus freelancers debate in all of this?

Chris Simmance:

I wrote an article about two years before COVID talking about this and it's starting to happen, so I feel like one of the first times a prediction that I've made is true so far. In the previously agencies were all pyramid shaped where you had the top person at the top, you had a small layer of strategic account management, and then you had a middle layer and all these hubs and pods or whatever they used to call each other with a lot of juniors doing a lot of junior work. Now because you've got an awful lot of scale that you can deploy, and I wasn't talking about it when I wrote the article about AI particularly, but I was talking about tools like say Sitebulb and those kinds of things where you can do a lot at scale. And that means that you don't necessarily have to rely wholly on the pyramid model.

A lot of agencies that are doing well that we're seeing at the minute are, you've got the leadership at the top, you have good account management that are strategic thinkers. Super qualified SEOs for example, who know what they're doing. They talk to the client because they've been in the industry a very long time and they understand things and they build scopes of work. They build things that need to be done for potentially an outsourced team to deliver or for automation to deliver. And that then means that sadly that bottom junior level need to learn quicker than they used to in order to not be outsourced.

Jojo Furnival:
Two days ago, another lovely customer, Mark Williams-Cook tweeted and I quote, "I was skeptical at first, but the agency efficiency gains of using Sitebulb cloud have basically meant it has paid for itself over the desktop version."

Now, I'd like to ask Charlie and Jeff, do you agree, how does Sitebulb help your operations to be more efficient?

Charlie Whitworth:
I've recently upgraded to cloud. I didn't trade, is not because I was being type, but because it was just me. But then as I scaled, I've got the cloud version. But I think if the reports and being able... I quite naturally don't have a massive team to delegate to, the output of the tool allows me to create reports very, very quickly. And some of my reports that I can give to developers for technical issues, far less time, going to mess around in Excel and Google Sheets and things like that. And being able to leave the crawls running, obviously when I don't have my machine open is a big, big one. Obviously the non-desktop element to that is great, and being able to crawl in the middle of the night for big enterprise sites that don't want... Although Sitebulb is a polite crawler or it's not completely polite sometimes.

I've been known to bring the odd site down, which has obviously been a problem there, but being able to do that at one o'clock in the morning without having to stay up till one o'clock in the morning, it's been helpful too. I think if when you working fast and furious on a new business proposal and you need to get tech data to a developer quickly and efficiently, I'm not aware of another crawler that allows you to get that data compiled in a user-friendly way for clients and developers quite efficiently.

Jeff Russell:
I will bring back our documentation and processes conversation, but we have all of our client onboardings. We set up Sitebulb for every new client and have those scheduled crawls running. It really helps with our onboarding processes and really allows us to find those quick wins in month one and month two while we're getting everything else set up and getting the lay of land with our clients. It's been really valuable from that aspect. But being in the cloud really, really helps when you're dealing with massively large websites that green amphibious crawlers may not be able to handle on your desktop system. Being able to put it in the background and come back to it really helps save that computing power for you to go about your business and your jobs there, so it is been very valuable from that aspect. No shade by the way. No shade.

Jojo Furnival:
No, no. No, no, not at all. We all play nicely in the sandpit and if that has piqued your interest, you can check out Sitebulb Cloud at sitebulb.com/cloud.

If you are fully remote, how often do you get teams together? My team is three of us and we get together IRL.

Sabiha Shakil:
I think I answered that on the chat, but we also just got together after six months of not seeing each other in person. I think what's important is you ensure that you sync up with each member of your team at least a couple of times a month, every week, a couple of times a week, sync up on projects and there's a quick project status. Also, these are good opportunities to understand if they are facing any challenges with the work or personally or anything like that, so that's generally how we work together. It's been working for quite a few years now, so we haven't really had a problem. And when we do meet up, it becomes really exciting because we haven't seen each other for a while and it makes it even more meaningful, so we always ensure that when we meet we have less work and more whatever, just casual talk or going out for lunch or dinner.

Chris Simmance:
I find that you have to work... Again a bit like what we said earlier, you get the cadence right with the right people, because it depends, it literally like SEO, it depends. If you've got a massive team, it's almost impossible to do it frequently and regularly. If you've got a really small team, that doesn't also mean that it's easy, so you work out the cadence that fits the team and you might do it by different departments and things like that. But the reality is, again, it's not that easy. People have lives to live and if you're fully remote, it makes it really hard to do. Setting something that's standardised like it's every quarter or it's every half year or something and it's in person, makes it a lot easier for people to manage and live with.

Jeff Russell:
We definitely have our community hubs based off of offices and where people are at. We try to meet maybe once a year, but budget constraints and things like that, it's been a moment since we've been able to bring everyone together. Those are always great times of being able to see people that you normally just see on the computer screen. And I'm a hugger, so it's probably for best that people don't see me in real life too often.

Are scrums/huddles crucial for efficiency/growth as an opportunity to explain findings, show work, et cetera for a majority of remote SEO teams?

Sabiha Shakil:
Absolutely. I'd just say yes, 100%.

Chris Simmance:
I think one of the key things to remember is a lot of those feel awkward and weird and annoying and no one really enjoys them except for maybe the statistics scrum master/agile team leader or whatever who just loves giving out pain and saying buzzwords. But in reality, the majority of these sorts of things are really, really crucial because it's the first and ideal opportunity for everyone to be on the same page and raise any concerns or thank each other for something or deliver some praise for some work that's been done well. It's more important than the individual would understand necessarily, unless they look at the whole impact. And for the sake of, I don't know, 15 minutes a day or half an hour every couple of days, it can change the quality of delivery and the happiness of people.

Charlie Whitworth:
A good example of that was COVID, where the agency I worked at made sure there was a 15-minute standard, but at 9:30 every day. I wouldn't have done that face-to-face before that because you just wouldn't, you'd been crack on with campaigns, but actually a load of people found that far more efficient because it was a chat. It was a way to get everyone together because it was COVID and people had to be stuck at home and the agency did it to be like, let's make sure everyone feels engaged and make sure everyone's okay. But from an efficiency perspective, it was like the water cooler conversation basically. But every morning because COVID had forced to have that catch up. I feel like it's how that huddle and scrum is organised, isn't it? But has loads of benefits.

Jeff Russell:
It's also nice because not necessarily just in terms of being able to talk shop, but it is part of relationship building as well, especially if it's teammates that you're not necessarily sitting with all the time. You have a lot more better opportunities to get your projects out of the backlog if you make friends with the devs and the scrum masters and things like that, be like, "Hey, good to see you over the weekend." Small talk and things like that that were mentioned, but forming those relationships, it really does help get work done.

Charlie Whitworth:
You just can't let account managers and client services dominate those standups. You make sure there's some fun chat as well, and it's not just, has this done yet.

Further reading for agency professionals

• Efficiency Secrets for SEO Teams
• How Sitebulb Helps StudioHawk Accelerate Results for Clients
• How Moving Traffic Media Increased Team Efficiency with Sitebulb Cloud