Capacity Planning – How To Effectively Plan Your Workload

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Capacity Planning…If you ever feel like you have too much work to deliver and not enough time or resource, this episode will enable you to stop hating your life. Capacity Planning will allow you to identify;
1) If you have been given too much (or too little) work to do & give you data to present to your boss or
2) If the team you currently manage does (or doesn’t) have enough time to deliver the work you need to deliver.
Not only that, all of this capacity planning gives you advanced warning if you need to bring in extra resource OR if you have extra free time you can spend working ON your business. This capacity planning model was a game-changer for us.

Capacity Planning Timestamps

00:00 – 01:06 Intro
01:07 – 06:36 What is capacity planning?
06:37– 11:05 When Lloyd realized we needed to begin capacity planning.
11:06 – 20:12 What form can capacity planning take?
20:13 – 21:35 Tip 1: Stick to it (capacity planning).
21:36 – 24:20 Tip 2: Make sure you add ‘hidden time’ into your capacity planner.
21:21 – 25:32 Outro
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Capacity Planning Transcript

0:00 Pat

Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. In today’s episode Dan and Lloyd, talk about capacity planning and how to use them to maximise time efficiency, whether you’re a one-man band or a multimillion-pound corporate business.

00:13 Lloyd </p

So capacity planning allows you to actually work out the exact time you have in your business, traditionally it’s used for big businesses, I’ve found it crazily useful in our business that isn’t, doesn’t have 500 people.

00:25 Pat

And we’ll also hear about the structure of Lloyd’s own personal capacity tracker, and what it can do for you.


00:31 Lloyd

We do it, sounds old school when i say it, Excel spreadsheet, each person that you have to learn your business has a little square for every day, and that little square gets colour coded towards different projects or clients.

00:46 Pat
To set your learning brain to maximum capacity. And let’s get stuck in. This is episode 94 of the business anchors podcast.

01:07 Dan
What on earth is capacity planning? Lloyd it sounds really boring.

01:11 Lloyd
Well, you’re right, Dan, it is. That’s why I’m talking about it.

01:16 Dan
Why is it always you to talk about the boring episodes?

01:18 Lloyd
No, it’s not boring. It’s useful.

01:21 Dan
We were just saying actually before coming on air. I’ve always wanted to say that. That some of our more inverted commas boring episodes like this, where it’s more practical stuff. Have done well. Like we got half a million views on TikTok for our tax planning one obviously got 100,000 views on my Instagram about tax planning.

01:39 Lloyd
And big numbers like that really mean so much don’t they? Dan. It means that we are brilliant people. So…

01:46 Dan
Yeah, I mean, we’re reaching some of the more boring episodes. Yeah.

01:50 Lloyd
Got no money in the bank, unhappy. But half a million.

01:55 Dan
We’ve got an all right. Businesses.

01:57 Lloyd
Well, yeah. No, only joking. We’re happy and making money.

02:01 Dan
So yeah, to go to the question.

02:06 Lloyd
I’ll try to make it less boring by not talking about. I find this really interesting. So you want so it’s basically working out. If you have the resources, you need to do the work in your business. Oooo bloody hell. Calm down guys.

02:28 Dan
Give context. So, someone if they’re listening, they can think oh, I have a problem. And that will help with that.

02:33 Lloyd
Okay, two people. You’ve got Clive. Clive works on his own. And he makes grips for squash rackets. Okay. Clive is getting really busy. And he’s taken on all these getting all these people saying, can you do this by Friday? Clive, can you do this this month? And he’s going Yeah, I think so. But he doesn’t really know how if he’s got enough time to do all this work. So he’s letting people down. He doesn’t know if he needs to contact him to come and help him out next week. Because he has no idea if he has enough time, okay, so just one person.
And then and it can cause issues like you don’t have enough time to invest in your own business, because you don’t know how much time you’ve got, you can let down people not do as good a job. So capacity planning allows you to actually work out the exact time you have in your business. And if you have any spare time, or if you need to find people. Another thing, so outside of Clive could be a business like ours. So you might have a department with eight people in it. And you’re taking on new work, but you obviously need to know, you’ve got customers saying when can that work be done by you know, if we sign on the dotted line today and say, Yeah, we want to work with you.
Will that be done by the end of July? And you’ve got another department saying can you do this work internally for the business in the next two weeks? If you don’t know the capacity, you have in that department? You can’t make any of these decisions, or you can but normally you muck them all up.

04:08 Dan
I’m glad you shared that second example. Because I don’t know how many squash racket repair is listening to the podcast.

04:13 Lloyd
Other than Clive, you’re welcome.

04:15 Dan
But it could like, you know, all anchors listening any type of business, that delivers a product or service. Is it mainly service based business or?

04:24 Lloyd
No, both because you can have, you can have a factory of people making products and you need a capacity plan. So capacity planning traditionally is used in bigger businesses, where there’ll be people that have 500 people, you know, working for a big company manufacturing stuff, selling stuff, and they need to know if they have the capacity in their team or in their separate teams or if they need to move workload around. So traditionally, it’s used for big businesses. I’ve found it crazily useful in our business that doesn’t have 500 people.

04:54 Dan
Something I’ve realised over the years to do with this is that the smaller businesses that act like bigger businesses stand out from their competitors. And yes, we’ve only learned this because we never used to think like a big business. But now looking at some of our competitors, and the way they’re, that we’ve been working for long, we’ve been working longer than them. And we’ve learned this, I can see us standing apart from them, because we’re having these processes in these things in place.

05:53 Lloyd
I completely agree. And I think I had a moment where I realised that when our business was turning over something like 250,000 pounds a year, and our accountant said, oh, do you have anything like this, and they were trying to help us. And we had all of these things in place. And eventually, they said, you the way, the process you have in place around your finances and forecasting and stuff, are in line with the companies that are making in between sort of three and 10 million a year.

And that was one of the moments I realised, actually, the reason why we’re managing to improve our business so much and achieve what we’re achieving is because we’re, we are using things those bigger businesses use before we need them. And that’s how we’re stepping up. I think that’s a good point. So that’s why I’m saying if you are Clive, and obviously, that’s a random business. But if you are a freelancer, if you if you’re just working on your own, this is still useful.

Or if you’ve got a team that you’re managing of, it could be two people, it could be you and another or it could be a team of 20 people. Or it could be you’re managing, if you’re an operations director, and that kind of thing you probably know about this stuff, but it’s also for I’ve got 200 people. Right. Good stuff. Sorry Dan.

06:37 Dan
I was going to ask you second thing. When did you realise that we needed to do capacity planning? Because was there like an aha moment?

06:44 Lloyd
So I didn’t realise. And then dad said, What you need is a capacity planner. So I think it was when the business was still just you and I, and we’re having these sort of conversations, I think you being the sales side of the business was probably saying to me, I’ve got this new client that wants to sign up to do this thing. They say they really need it done by next month.

Can we do it? And in reality, most businesses have no way other than than just going, Oh, can I do it? To work out if they can, or they can’t commit. And then most are like, it’ll probably be alright. Or potentially, oh i don’t know, it was a bit worrying, just say no. Both of those are negative. And dad, having worked with bigger businesses and corporations, mainly in manufacturing, used this a lot, and introduced it to us. And at first, first of all, that’s quite cool.

Didn’t overly use it for the next couple of years. And then when we started building our team out, realised how useful it was. But when it was just me and new Dan starting up the business, a peak of activity, when it’s like, oh, God, do we have time to do this? I don’t know. And that’s when it became useful.

08:00 Dan
So this will be useful for pretty much anyone that runs a business that is looking to run it more effectively. And I guess it’s also better managing the expectations of your potential clients. Because when they are saying, when can you do this, you actually have an accurate way of telling them or looking at our capacity, we can do it that way. If you know how many how much resource you have left.

08:22 Lloyd
In any period of time, you know that either, I’m just on my own, I’ve got 30 days in this month. You might look at it and say, oh, I’ve got 10 days spare. So you know that you’ve got 10 days this month to take on new client work of up to 10 days to invest in your own business, or have a holiday or mixture of any of those things. Or the other way, you look at it and go, Oh my God, I’ve got 30 days in this month, and I’ve just mapped out the capacity, and I’ve got 42 days work. And then it highlights that you need to take action, because that’s not physically possible.

And I would say at that point, don’t just say. Oh, I’ll have to work hard, because that’s absolutely mental fitting 42 days in 30. It’s saying, Okay, right, I need to communicate with this client to say in advance to say, really sorry, we’re really working hard on this for you, but it’s going to be seven days late. Or right I need to get extra help, extra resource, outsource some stuff to do that. And I’m actually thinking further ahead. If I’ve got 40 days work in 30 days. Am I too cheap? And this is why loads of people want to work with me. Or actually am I just doing well and I need to hire someone else.

09:41 Dan
I feel like this has been a game changer for our business. This isn’t something I’ve managed. This is what you management from an outsider’s perspective. It’s been amazing to see how we can plan more effectively in advance. Like you just mentioned, knowing that if we’ve got extra time available, how could we allocate that to use it as effectively as possible? We’ll help grow our business. And also times when when we’ve had meetings like, Crap were literally like, a month of extra time we need and we haven’t got enough resource, let’s hire people or lets you know exactly.

10:11 Lloyd
And again, in the last couple of episodes, we’ve spoken about planning ahead and forecasting things. So you know, if you need to hire people and that kind of thing. But with this capacity planning, we managed to in the beginning of April, or maybe the end of March, we managed to see that in June, we would definitely need an extra video editor.

So if you think mental was a great tool, that’s what two, two and a half months in advance, we saw a problem at two and a half months out there, and knew we needed to hire someone and gave us two and a half months to do that. So we’ve got that we’ve hired that person before June, they’re already within the business they’re being trained up before we need them. And that’s exactly what this is for basically highlighting either issues or opportunities, where you can use your time or you haven’t got enough time.

11:06 Dan
And before we dive into the practical sort of steps and tips for how people can implement this, can you explain what kind of form this comes in? Because people think a capacity planner, what is that? Is it something on a bit of paper? Yeah, is it a board? What is it?

11:20 Lloyd
So there may be far better ways of doing this. But I can tell you, honestly, the way I’m always open to learning. So I’d be interested to hear perhaps bigger corporations that do have the 500 people have software that does this really well. But we’ve got the way that we do it. And we’ve got the way that I’ve seen some other businesses do it. So we do it. Sounds old school when i say it, Excel spreadsheet. But it could be a Google Sheet, if you want to sound a bit cooler. But quite simply, each person that you have within your business has a little square for every day.

And that little square gets colour coded towards different projects or clients. And you can work out, are there any sounds really like simple? Are there any empty squares? Do they need more to do or? are there too many squares? We’ve got to sort this out, they need less to do that it sounds so simple, obviously.

So I have this for about 12 people. And so, I find this really fun, oh, this person’s got too many squares, let’s move on, you know, and then you go, Oh, that project actually, that person can work on that and well, as well, and they’ve got five squares available. And the way you should look at it, first thing I put in is holidays. So each person might have annual leave or bank holidays, fill those squares up. Because if you don’t think about that, you’re not gonna have enough time in the month.

12:57 Dan
What colour are those squares, Lloyd.

12:58 Lloyd
For me, they’re black. Then you have a different colour for each client, or each project, depending on the sort of work you’re doing, have that colour code somewhere that you can see. And, and then very importantly, if all of your squares are filled up with client work, your shit, now you’re not, you know, shit. But I would see that as a big problem unless you unless that person is in a very specific role.

Nearly everyone needs time, sort of admin time. So there’s things that don’t come under a particular project, or client, and people need time to do so we have yellow squares for admin. And everyone will need at least one day a month. But depending on your business, or what you do, they might need one day a week to do that kind of in-house stuff that needs doing that isn’t attributed to a certain client. But also our green squares are very important my green squares. So 25% of the capacity in our business as a maximum, but we usually quite close to 25%, our green squares, and that is the effort that we put in the days that our team put in to our own business and our own marketing.

14:10 Dan
And each month we have a monthly management meeting where I come up with a plan for how we can best allocate that up to 25% time of our team’s time towards marketing and then present that to Lloyd and say, this is the plan. This is what we’re gonna do.

14:23 Lloyd
Do you know what I think will be crazily helpful for listeners? So many people, whether you’ve got a small business or you’re working a bigger business and managing a department or something like that. People are like, Oh, we got so much client work, we never get around to doing this good stuff we want to do to improve our business or improve what we’re doing. If you put those green squares in ,in advance. Say we’re working on our own business.

We’re marketing our own business. You then highlight that you haven’t got enough time and then you do something about it, rather than every month getting to the end of the month. We haven’t had time to do it again. And I think that will be so useful blocking out that time saying, No, we definitely are using that time for our own business, we’re not taking on more work.

So you may have a manager or the owner of the business or saying you need to take on this client work that gives you what you need the information, you need to go back to them and say, Actually, Timmy, we can’t take that on. Look, we’ve got these projects on, we’ve got this time allocated to improve our business or market our own business, which is really important. So we can’t take that answer and other department needs to take it on or we need to delay that project or we need to hire someone new. I think that is really a really useful tool for people to make sure you’re improving your own business.

15:40 Dan
So Sandra, the freelance Social Media Manager who is looking to implement some kind of capacity planning model? Yeah, to do all this great stuff that we’ve spoken about? What was the process you should go through? What tips have you got for Sandra, or Clive?

16:00 Lloyd
So Sandra, Clive Timmy, whoever you are, and to be honest, even if you’ve got any other name, that’s fine. Firstly, there was another example of how to do it. So either you’ll be setting up that spreadsheet, and it can be really simple names at the top, whether it’s one name, or 20 and 30 squares for the month, or some businesses that are much more, you know, this can’t be if you’re working from home or anything, but in a location, they’ll actually have a big like whiteboard where they’ll have coloured magnets that go on it, and you can move them around.

And that sort of thing, if you want a more physical thing people can see in a physical location. So either way, you need to set up the people and the amount of squares. So that’s step one, do some squares.

16:50 Dan
I guess also, Lloyd just to give a bit more help. I’m sure there must be templates and models online.

16:56 Lloyd
That’s why I’m saying there’s definitely a template online. But this you can hopefully picture simply in your head how this works by me saying this. And once you do that, you want to put you want to colour code, absolutely everything, anything you or your team are spending time on, make sure it has a colour and put the next three months work that you know that you have to do in there. And don’t sort of go oh no God, that’s not going to fit up but not put that admin time in that defeats the whole point of this, put everything in and don’t worry about if it’s saying you need 60 days in a month. That’s what we want this to do to highlight where you need more time.

So put all of that in, see where you are at the moment. And this will either highlight to you why we we’ve only got 12 days of work, and we’re taking a month to do it. This is our normal sort of workload like what’s and that then shows you that the opportunity. Hang on, we’re clearly not working as efficiently as we can, we could probably make double the amount of money we are in our business, if people had 24 days to do 30 days work rather than 12.

18:11 Dan
This, again, is highlighting a massive mistake we made early on when when we were much more naive and inexperienced. We used to get a project and not track how much time it took us to deliver it, we would just do it until it was done. And then that’s not an effective way of growing a business.

Now, we plan a certain amount of days and resource allocation to a project. We do it and track how long it actually took and then learn from that and figure out oh, maybe we under or over egged that, and then make changes accordingly. And we can we also in our weekly meeting, we keep them accountable to say, Oh, why is this taken an extra day or three days?

Yeah now we have even more processes in place, like you’re saying every single week we’re tracking if we’ve taken those extra days, or we’ve got days free, and we can adapt over time. So you can improve on this setting out to one thing, this will be improving throughout the time that you’re working. So you’ll either see that you’ve got those days, that’s opportunity there, your business could be making more money or you could be working less basically. Win Win.

19:10 Lloyd
Win win. Or the other side, which you’ll see we’ve got too much going on. And you can kind of this is a great tool, if you’ve got a manager or someone higher up that you believe is giving you or your team too much work to do. And it’s not physically possible. It might be hard to approach that if you have this and you say, I’m really worried about this workload. And now that I’ve used the capacity planner, I can see we’ve got 20% more work than our our team can physically do in the time that we pay for them to work here. That’s that’s the other way this could go and again, really useful for you to see.

19:45 Dan
I’ve just realised this could be really useful for an employee of a company like you were just sort of saying or hinting to that if you’re a marketer, what marketer works for a brand that feels like you’re burning out and you’ve got too much on, you could literally look at your work for the next month, set it out in the days and see like, Oh, I’ve got, you know, 20 days of work I’m supposed to do and this is 40 days workload. And you can present that to your manager and say this clearly is too much for me to deliver.

20:11 Lloyd
And because you’re showing the actual information, it’s not your opinion. You’re not saying I believe this is too much for me to do, you’re saying, you’ve given me work that takes this amount of time? I don’t, I don’t have 40 days in a month. And yeah, I can help the whole business improve, hopefully. But yeah, so you do your little squares, stick everything colour coded. Then next point is, you really need to stick to it, or track any extra days or the days you didn’t spend on things.

So there’s no point doing this, and then be like, oh, yeah, that client projects are supposed to spend five days on did 15. But you know, that’s the way things go. I think if that happens, you need to track it, and then say, well, I’m never going to sell that sort of project to a client for five days, if it’s going to take 15. The next month, when I sell it, I need to be put in 15 days in there. Be realistic, don’t just kid yourself and be like, well, I did put five days, but it’s taking 15 because then you’ll never be improving basically.

21:17 Dan
Also another thing I’ve sort of seen from afar, when things change is important to change, swap things out as well in the current month. So if a project gets delayed, move another project forward, it’s supposed to be started, it’s really quick to see how that can work, how you can use the time and resources as efficiently as possible.

21:36 Lloyd
And please, if you need time off, put it in there. If you’re either like a businessperson working on your own or with a small team and God never had any time off, put it in there. And it will happen if you follow all of this. Because you’re then go, oh, well, if I want my week off, I need to to find someone to do this, these five days of work. And then you can actually do it rather than them get there and think that oh no, what’s going on?

Yeah, and that’s as simple as it is, really, it’s putting the stuff in understanding if you have a problem that you need to either you have a problem or an opportunity and how you do that. So you could be moving squares to someone else. Or you could be outsourcing so that you have a new column for freelancer. And the squares go into their days. Or like we said the opportunity you start filling that opportunity with new client projects, or investing in your own business, marketing your own business.

22:38 Dan
And we can’t emphasise enough how powerful this process and it is just we’ve learned from not doing it well to now doing it. You know, we’ve still got things to learn. But it’s made a huge difference to our business isn’t just one of those things that we’re saying, yeah, do this extra random thing that’s not useful. This has been incredibly useful for us to help us grow.

22:56 Lloyd
A massive benefit for your people and your business, I think is you can get to a point where you know that you’re not, hopefully if you’ve got everything, right, you’re not overstretching people. Because if I see that someone has 40 days work to fit into this, the next month, we’re going to be firstly talking with that person and saying, looks like you’re gonna be really busy. So we need to do something about this. But I think over time, if you’re taking those actions to make sure I know there’s peaks and troughs, so everyone has busy weeks busy months, where it’s like, cool.

Our whole team has been busy. This has been hectic, isn’t it, but not to an extent where you’re overloading people consistently over a long period of time. Because that will make people leave that will make people stressed that will make people not want to work for you. So I think that’s something that I think is really important that I can see. Oh, no, Taylor is really busy this month, so we need to take some of that workload off him somehow. Otherwise, if we give him two months of work to do every month, at some point, he’s going to go oh, this is shit. And I don’t want to do this anymore. Please never do that. Taylor.

24:09 Dan
Wow, that was interesting.


24:12 Lloyd
Good. I hope the listeners think it was. You can tell I find interesting, but because I’m boring. Sometimes that’s not a good judge.

24:21 Dan
That is really good. And yeah, I mean, next week’s episode, we’ve got something a bit more fun looking at some of the lies you’ve been told in marketing, so it’s probably less sort of Lloyd boring and more fun.

24:34 Lloyd
So if you’re here for boring lied, skip next week. If you’re here for fun Dan, listen to next week’s episode.

24:42 Dan
But honestly, if you do enjoy these episodes, we speak about this quite a lot. We’ve noticed an increase recently and people messaging us ,posting about the podcast and sharing links to the episodes and we really do appreciate that so yeah, if you really enjoy this, please do share it and post about it and tell other people and yeah, it helps more people listen to it. Yeah, hopefully.

25:06 Lloyd
We really want to grow this help as many people as we can. And we want to have more people listen to the podcast that’s good for us as well. Win, win, win. So yeah, we’ll see you in your ears next week.

25:17 Dan
Bye.

Hopefully this has been useful and helped you to understand how you can implement capacity planning to ensure you have enough resource & time to deliver your work! If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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10 Marketing Lies You’ve Been Told

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Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify
 

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You’ve been lied to by some very influential Marketers and today is the day you discover the truth.
Ok now you’re hooked with that over-dramatic first line, this is actually a really interesting podcast for anyone in the Marketing/Business world. We unpack some of the biggest BS we’ve heard and give reasons for why we think it’s BS (from our experience).
Plus, we have some pretty insightful conversations about how we look at the Marketing & Business world. Enjoy!

Timestamps

00:00 – 01:07 Intro
01:08 – 02:10 How an episode about marketing lies will help you.
02:11 – 05:19 Lie No.1: Only analyse local competitors.
05:20– 06:53 Lie No.2: Build it and they will come.
06:54 – 10:32 Lie No.3 Anyone can be successful in marketing a business.
10:33 – 13:25 Lie No.4 Just increase your prices to get more customers.
24:52 – 26:04 Lie No.7: 10 X your goals to improve.
26:05 – 26:55 Outro
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10 Marketing Lies You’ve Been Told

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. Have you ever fallen into the trap of flashy Instagram business gurus selling overpriced lies and empty promises? Well, in today\’s episode, Dan and Lloyd discuss the 10 marketing lies you\’ve been told.
00:15 Dan
I think, alarm bells always go for me when someone because I\’ve been speaking at events before and other speakers and stuff have said, it should be a three and a half minute video that\’s posted at 2 pm on a Tuesday on Instagram stories with three and a half hashtags. And it\’s like, what, that doesn\’t make any sense.
0:033 Pat
You\’ll also hear Lloyd give his spin on some popular marketing phrases.
00:37 Lloyd </p
Build it? And no one will know you\’ve built it, build it and shout about it. And people might come. Sounds rubbish. But that\’s what they should say.
Pat 0:47
Right? Let\’s get stuck in lie detectors at the ready. This is episode 95 of the business anchors podcast.
01:08 Lloyd
How is an episode about marketing lies going to help our audience, Dan?
01:12 Dan
Well, it does sound like a bit of a weird one. But for any marketer listening, we\’re going to be shining the light on some of the things that lots of people talk about in the marketing world that we don\’t believe is true. And I think understanding why these things aren\’t true will help you improve your marketing. So hopefully, it\’s going to be an interesting discussion.
01:33 Lloyd
It will, so we\’re going to be talking about lies that are often told in the mark, that sound quite that people lying to people.
01:42 Dan
Also, this is subjective as well. So this is our opinion. So again, anything you hear take with a pinch of salt.
01:49 Lloyd
But our opinions are better than anyone else\’s opinions. So that kind of balances it out.
01:55 Dan
So we\’ve each kind of thought about some different things that we\’ve heard in the marketing world that we don\’t believe are true, and we\’re going to start some discussions around those different points. So Lloyd, yeah, tell us one of your marketing lies. What have you heard in the marketing world that you don\’t think is true?
02:11 Lloyd
Okay. Tell you what you should do. You should analyze your local competition. Okay, I can tell you why I think that\’s not good. Because I think you should be aiming higher than that. So, often businesses are told to write what they need to do and analyse what their local competitors are, which, to an extent, I don\’t think is bad. Competitor research is helpful. But I think people are limiting themselves in this new online, new online age, not new sound like an absolute boomer there, we got the interweb to use. I don\’t think people should be comparing themselves to the business down the road that does the same. And well, I suppose I don\’t want them only to compare themselves to that.
And how can we be? So we\’re Locksmiths? We\’re Mr Lucky locksmith? Yeah. And you\’re going oh, this is Mr. padlock locksmith down there. We just need to make sure we\’re better than them. I think to look at the biggest locksmith in the USA, look at the biggest locksmith in Sussex, look at the biggest locksmith in Essex, what the best businesses are doing and compare yourself to that and take inspiration from that. Rather than saying, I\’m gonna compare myself to the one that\’s closest to me, and just trying to be a bit better than that.
03:35 Dan
And we\’ve even got a lot of value from looking at other businesses completely outside our industry. So that can be useful as well. Like, we get some of our biggest inspiration for our marketing from campaigns that are being run in other countries for completely different businesses, for our kind of content.
03:32 Lloyd
In our scripts, get you, we get our inspiration from massive global or British comedies and sitcoms and the comedy in that rather than. Can anyone think of a funny advert they\’ve seen, you know, like you\’re saying outside of your industry looking for that inspiration, looking for the best of the best and aiming for that rather than? Can we just be a bit better than this company? It can be the same for big brands as well.
You know, if you are a drinks brand, right, um, Corona that took me a while. Yeah. And that\’s a big brand that probably will be looking at other competition but looking outside of their industry for competition, like who\’s, who\’s marketing their product in the best way not which beer is marketing their product in the best way? Who out of all the businesses in the world is doing something that we can take inspiration from and improve our own business?
04:50 Dan
So competitive research is still good.
04:53 Lloyd
Yeah.
04:53 Dan
But just doing it now. I believe what you\’re saying is just don\’t do it. Just a local level. Do it on a global level on look at the real big players, because you can learn a lot from that.
05:02 Lloyd
Even small businesses, we\’ve got the internet now you can look at businesses like yours in South Africa that smashing it and take inspiration from them. You have access to every business in the world now, so take advantage of that. That\’ll be mine. So, do you want to go headlong yours, Dan?
05:20 Dan
Yes. Have you ever heard build it and they will come?
05:24 Lloyd
Do you know what Dan? I have. And it was actually on my list. You stole it.
05:30 Dan
I just think this is absolute rubbish. Imagine, like, if this was true, our jobs where we wouldn\’t have jobs would be because we\’re marketers that help get attention.
05:40 Lloyd
I think the true thing is, to build it and probably will. No, no, no, no, you\’ve built it. Yeah. That should be the saying. Yeah.
05:49 Dan
I mean, sounds like crap saying though doesn\’t it Yeah, yeah. So there are so many things, trying to fight for our attention, that it\’s important as a business that we need to work hard to go out there and be one of the things that are captivating our customer\’s attention, rather than just being part of the noise.
06:05 Lloyd
I think it\’s a little bit vain, actually, they\’ll build it and they will kind of you\’re basically, you\’re saying, If I build a business or do something, that\’s good enough, people will find me. And the reality is like saying there\’s so much competition for attention, they won\’t like someone can just put, do a pay per click ad for the name of your business. And they will probably get the attention before it gets to you.
06:29 Dan
And I think we\’ve experienced this growing our business like we especially in the early days, when no one\’s heard of you, like everyone who\’s started a business knows that in the early days no one knows you. And we had to fight so hard to get our name out there go to every networking event we possibly could to build our social channels to create content to get to, for people to know us, it\’s, it just takes a lot of time to get people to know.
06:54 Lloyd
Yeah. So build it, and now know you\’ve built it. Build it, and shout about it. And people might come. And what\’s your next one? Lloyd. So my next one is anyone can build a business and market a business that\’s gonna make you millions. Because from personal experience, I think even though I\’m good at a lot of business stuff, without you, I couldn\’t have had a business as successful as this.
So I think the thing online of people saying like it\’s really easy to build and market a new business, they don\’t say it\’s easy, but they say you just need to buy this $5,000 course. And then anyone can do it. I just think it isn\’t true.
07:36 Dan
There\’s so much more to think about than you think when starting. We talked about this a lot how we\’ve got completely different sets of skills, and it works well. And at the start, if I would have known how many different things you need to know to run a successful business I probably wouldn\’t have started one.
07:54 Lloyd
Yeah definitely. And I, I don\’t know, I think for lots of people, they would be far better, far happier, far more successful, make more money, like maybe managing a department in a business or being a brilliant Freelancer at they do, than trying to build a business that\’s going to make them millions, because I think this is specific sets of skills that not everyone does have or would be suited too.
08:22 Dan
I guess you don\’t know until you start, like how did we know that we would enjoy this? we didn\’t do?
08:30 Lloyd
I think it\’s fine for people to try and run businesses and I don\’t think it\’s good that people say anyone can do this. Because you should try if that\’s what you want to do. And I\’m not saying people shouldn\’t try new things. But don\’t then if it doesn\’t work, don\’t think well, there must be something wrong with me because they said anyone can do it.
Because the truth is building a business and marketing a new business or brand or product or service is difficult. So sometimes, it\’s your skills might not be suited to that. But I\’m not saying don\’t try just I don\’t like it when people these gurus say anyone can build a seven-figure business.
09:10 Dan
I think this is one of the key themes for all of these types of people. They\’re always oversimplifying everything. The honest thing about running a successful business is that from our experience, it takes years of working hard, making mistakes and figuring things out. You can\’t just do something in three simple steps. From a marketer\’s perspective, I understand that to make something hooky and catchy you know, we do it with our podcasts and stuff like here\’s three ways you can do this thing.
09:41 Lloyd
Probably with this podcast.
09:42 Dan
Yeah. But I imagine if you did a podcast like here are 10,000 things you can do across seven years to maybe run an OK business. No one going to listen to a good episode. Yeah, yeah. So I think yeah, a lot of these things are kind of oversimplified to make it sound catchy, but You need to understand the truth that 99% of successful businesses take years of doing 1000s of different things and making mistakes to be somewhat successful.
That\’s, that\’s the truth, isn\’t it? Yeah, I think something that isn\’t good is that a lot of light is shone on this kind of unicorns like, you know, texts, like Facebook. And companies like that. And like in our industry think company like a social chain that is like one day, they\’re one employee, then they\’re 10,000 the next day.
10:34 Lloyd
They don\’t talk about the 500 social agencies in the last three years that I\’ve set up, and then they fail. And they don\’t exist anymore. So yeah, I think that\’s a good point. So Dan, do you have another one?
10:47 Dan
Yes, I do. So another lie, a lie. Something that I don\’t agree with is you should just increase your prices?
10:56 Lloyd
Do you know that\’s so good? It\’s also on my list? Yeah, completely agree.
11:00 Dan
But yeah, I think I\’ve heard several kinds of people saying this, and I just don\’t agree with it. Because I think for young, naive sort of business owners starting, they just again, it\’s oversimplifying, it\’s another thing of, oh, I\’m not earning enough money, I don\’t have enough clients.
So I\’ll just increase my prices. That\’s not a good idea. Because one, you\’re gonna increase your prices, but your the quality of what you\’re doing probably isn\’t in line with that. So you\’re going to lose customers, and you\’re gonna put other people off? And it\’s just not.
11:33 Lloyd
I think there\’s, there\’s, it\’s a bit of a trend over the last year or so for that to be business advice, like, you\’re not making enough money double your prices. And the reality is, that\’s probably bad advice.
11:39 Dan
Like, it can be good advice. It can be good advice, in a way thinking of our previous episode about capacity planning, if you\’ve always got too much work, and you have to let customers down and say, no, that could be a time when it\’s like, oh, you know, in terms of supply and demand, there\’s more demand than there is supply. So let\’s increase the price.
12:08 Lloyd
But a lot of the time the advice is given to the businesses or the people that haven\’t got enough work, like, I haven\’t got any customers, double your prices, it\’s the opposite of that. Oh, so then you\’ll have half as many opportunities to get business and they still won\’t work with you. So yeah, I completely agree with this one.
12:28 Dan
What I would say is, so instead of doubling your prices, I\’d focus on double the amounts of your energy and getting better at what do because of how good you are at what you do because then that will lead to being able to double your prices. After all, the demand for your service will increase.
12:46 Lloyd
Double how good your service or product is, and you\’ll have double the amount of people that want it. And then you can double your prices. Again, sounds rubbish. But that\’s what they should say.
12:58 Dan
I think so many people are going to be put off from like starting businesses and listening to this episode because we\’re just saying, do things for years. And it might work.
13:09 Lloyd
I think it\’s far better to be realistic than or, you know, don\’t forget anyone listen to this, you could ignore this advice and have this unicorn business that ends up being the next Tesla, but you probably won\’t so.
12:23 Dan
Anything else. What other lies have you heard Lloyd?
13:26 Lloyd
So very marketing, one, you need to be on this platform. Otherwise, you know, everyone\’s gonna be on this, you\’ll fail if you don\’t. There\’s no social media platform or certain website you need to be on to have success. So some are there are very successful businesses, massive businesses that aren\’t on Twitter. There are massive businesses that aren\’t on Facebook. There are massive businesses that aren\’t on this website that this local guy and networking meeting says you have to be on. And you have to pay him 20 pounds a month to be on it.
I think everyone has their expertise and pushes what they know and what they\’re good at. But your business doesn\’t necessarily need it. So don\’t listen to someone if they\’re like, you\’ve got to be on TikTok at the moment for a lot of businesses, I would say probably a good idea to explore tick tock, you don\’t need to be on it. I don\’t know. What do you think?
14:25 Dan
Yeah, I think like you say some businesses are hugely successful just through email marketing, but a lot of people now would say that that\’s not gonna work. I think this is a trend especially with marketers though because there are so many new platforms coming out.
After all, things change so all the time. marketers want to be the first to adopt everything because I think that kind of first mover strategy of if I\’m the first person to join this new platform, and it blows up, then I\’ll be like, influential on there. Yeah, but because there are so many platforms like when clubhouse came around. Yeah. Some people invested crazy amounts of time because of the way the platform was built, you had to be on it live, having a chat for it to get exposure. So people just spent so much time.
15:12 Lloyd
Marketers who were then experts in the clubhouse were telling all of their clients and their audience that they need to be in the clubhouse because that\’s beneficial to them. They\’re not saying you have to be in the clubhouse because your business has to be in the clubhouse.
So like you said, we analyse the club clubhouse and realised it wasn\’t worth us investing the time, or we didn\’t think so at that point, in three years, the clubhouse may adapt and change. And we might think it\’s worth it. But I just think, I think to be aware of marketers that push, you have to do this, you have to be on this because that\’s usually in their best interest, or it\’s just what they know the most about. So they\’re saying, you have to do this.
15:48 Dan
I think this has been a shift in the way we communicate over the years. Because early on, I was one of the people that said, You got to be on LinkedIn, you got to be on Facebook, do Facebook ads, because that was working for us. I was like, oh, it\’s gonna work for everyone.
16:05 Lloyd
It\’s what we felt most comfortable with. We knew we can deliver value to clients on that because we were good at it.
16:10 Dan
And now I\’m way more like, whenever we talk about and all these podcast episodes, we kind of let give context that listens to this because this is what\’s worked for us.
But it may not be for you, there may be something better for you like your skills may be matched with a different platform with a tip different type of marketing, your audience may not be on any of the platforms we\’re talking about. So definitely take every piece of advice from marketers you hear with a pinch of salt, especially us because we\’re just sharing, this is what this podcast is all about sharing our experience.
16:38 Lloyd
I think I\’ve realised the big marketing lie as well. And that\’s that the title of this, I think, is 10 marketing lies. And I haven\’t kept track of how many there are. But I think we\’ve doubled up I don\’t think there\’s 10 So just another example of how marketers lie to you. Yeah, okay. 10 sounded good. So we put it in the title.
16:56 Dan
I mean, before you said that, we could have just changed your title to the number it was. Yeah, that we said, Yeah, that would have been fine, too.
17:02 Lloyd
Yeah. But I want to lie to him. This is just a show you, that even people you trust can lie to your face. Yeah. You\’ve got any more Dan?
17:13 Dan
Yeah, I\’ve got another one.
17:14 Lloyd
Cool, who knows how many? not 10.
17:15 Dan
I\’ve got up to 10. All of our attention spans are shrinking. Yeah. So and I\’ve again as I fall into the trap of saying this as well. I think previously, everyone\’s attention spans are shrinking. I don\’t believe that. What I believe is our options are widening. If you think about it, our options for where our attention is widening, because I mentioned this earlier, because of the internet, we now have so much information accessible to us on so many different platforms that we have to divvy up that time accordingly.
So it\’s making it more difficult for brands and marketers to get in front of someone and hold their attention. Because especially when you think of like TikTok, so TikTok is blown up through snackable. Short, like 10/22 endless videos. How can you compete with that? It\’s very difficult to compete with when this algorithm is literally like manipulating you just stay on this platform for hours swiping, swiping it\’s difficult to get people\’s attention.
18:25 Lloyd
It\’s interesting, because yeah, so so like you\’re saying our option, we\’ve got options of what we want to give our attention to. But like YouTube and Netflix, people watch for hours. And we don\’t say, Oh, we got you got to make YouTube videos that are 30 seconds long, or on Netflix, we need to change our programmes to make it three minutes long. Because the content is good enough for that audience where people will watch it for hours.
And people say, Oh, no one watches TV for six hours each evening anymore with our ads. You know, no one can concentrate like they\’re concentrating on their favorite YouTuber for four hours in the same evening. So I think it\’s a very good excuse for people who don\’t have the knowledge and how to get people\’s attention or can\’t create content good enough to go. Yeah, it will have to be five seconds long, because anything longer now and watches it.
19:13 Dan
And I think being open, realising this was a game changer for our business. And this is why we\’ve shaped our whole business around creating marketing content marketing campaigns that serve the end customer first, rather than help the brands we want to work with first, because if we just focused on this product brand coming to us and pushing their product, by this product by this product, that may work in the short term, but eventually people are gonna get turned off. And that\’s not what they want to see.
Like we said before, they want to be educated, entertained, and inspired by the content they\’re consuming. So this is why we try and focus on and I think all marketers should focus on What content you do your customers want to listen to, like take this podcast, for example. In this podcast, how often do we say to you, buy Knowlton services and become a customer, we\’ll help you with your marketing? We don\’t we rarely say that.
Because we know that you won\’t like that listeners and viewers like you\’re not interested in that what we think maybe we\’re wrong you\’re interested in is learning from our experiences of marketing, what\’s working for us what we think about the industry so that you can gain value from that first. And yes, we do have a strategy behind this podcast, we do mention campaigns, we run like the cool campaign we did with a top 10 Netflix show recently and a global brand to kind of show you that we\’re good at what we do. And if you do ever want to work with us you can, but most of it is focused on actually trying to provide value for you.
20:31 Lloyd
That\’s the funny thing. So you guys listen to us for like half an hour at a time. And we\’ve got loyal listeners that listen to almost every episode. So thank you, everyone. But we could have done this podcast differently, just like selling our business. We\’d look at the graphs, and they only listen for three minutes, and then they go off and then we\’d be going, your podcasts have got to be three minutes long.
Because no one wants to listen for longer than three minutes. So no, actually, if you create a shit podcast people don\’t want to listen to, then it has to be three minutes long because they\’ll give up after that. But you know, Joe Rogan, and some of the big podcasters they\’ve had at some of the podcasts I listen to, there\’s been ones that are almost two hours long. And I put and I even like, I don\’t have time to listen to them in one go.
So I divvy up, and I go back to them. Because I have such a, I have a long attention span for those things, because it\’s so good. And people always come to us. So how long this should this video be? And my they want a quite often when we have like kickoff calls or clients, they want us to go on Instagram, it should be one minute 36. That\’s an awesome time. The real answer is, that it should be as long as it is interesting.
So if we haven\’t got much interesting stuff to say, and we\’ve got a really low budget to put into this, and we can only make a brilliant video, that\’s 12 seconds long, it should be 12 seconds. If we have a big budget, and we have great stuff to say and to show people, it should be seven minutes.
22: Dan
I think alarm bells always go for me when someone because I\’ve been speaking at events before and other speakers and stuff I\’ve said it should be a three and a half minute video that\’s posted at 2 pm on a Tuesday on Instagram stories with three and a half hashtags. And it\’s like, wow, that doesn\’t make any sense.
22:24 Lloyd
Some of those details can make a very small difference. But if you\’re forgetting the sort of stuff we\’re talking about the fundamental stuff is going to be like so the time of day you post could have an impact, it could be like 10%, it might improve or, or make it worse because the audience isn\’t online. But what we\’re doing, we\’re making content that\’s good enough for people to want to watch, we\’ll make the 1,000% increase.
22:50 Dan
And I think to kind of not contradict what we\’re saying. But I think that should be your first focus, focus on the core thing of actually producing content and marketing campaigns that people enjoy. Once you\’ve got that, as the foundations there, then it\’s about making the incremental improvements of posting time or day or like how you\’re promoting, like, for example, this podcast, we\’ve we can\’t see looking on how to improve and get more people to listen and watch this.
We\’ve recently realised that our TikTok clips are performing like the nine by 16, and phone screen sizes are performing much better than our YouTube size 16 by nine, so we\’re gonna try and push that more. So now we\’ve got the foundations, hopefully writing of like, an interesting podcast to listen to about business and marketing. That\’s value adding. Now we\’re like, right, what are those small changes we can make to move the needle? Yeah, that is a really good point.
And it is like it\’s like a butterfly effect. So those small changes we\’re making can completely change the trajectory of the success of lists and our business, like knowing now that those TikTok videos perform 1% better. So we\’re going to push those more and focus more on that. Imagine the graph of like doing that too, just sticking with the average stuff that wasn\’t working. And even though I know we need to get better at this still, we need to get better at constantly testing and trying new things and testing new ways of doing things that will improve how things are performing.
But I think there\’s an action if you\’re listening to this and you haven\’t tried or tested something new or analysed how what you\’re currently doing is performing you should look at that. That\’s it. That\’s a really important point.
24:29 Lloyd
And if someone says your video has to be one minute 30 seconds long, say to them, I don\’t listen to you anymore. Good advice. I think that was good is have we got anything more to say that is as good as that. Have you got more?
24:45 Dan
I\’ve got one more. Okay, one more. Yeah, it\’s probably not as good as that. But it\’s one.
24:50 Lloyd
Bonus Porky pie marketers are telling you.
24:52 Dan
Okay, ready? 10 exit. So there\’s a well-known marketer. That\’s got a book called 10x or something like that. And his whole mantra is 10x everything. So you\’ve got goals to achieve this year, you want to do better 10x them. You want to improve at something 10 exit. And I think, again, this is this, this advice is damaging, because one, it\’s doing that thing of oversimplifying everything. Just 10x In your goals isn\’t going to help you improve.
There\’s a whole load of other work like that it could help you improve to be more ambitious, yes. But once you 10x your goals, you then actually need a whole plan for how you\’re going to achieve those 10x results. So that\’s another one that I hear thrown around a lot.
24:58 Lloyd
I did it on my fitness pal with my calorie count 10X it. But I\’ve been putting on weight.
25:54 Dan
I don\’t get that.
25:55 Lloyd
Yeah, I don\’t know. I changed my goal to 20,000 calories a day. But I haven\’t been losing weight.
26:03 Dan
If anyone can help Lloyd then please do.
26:05 Lloyd
So I don\’t think that\’s good advice. Okay. Cool, really good advice, Dan. I don\’t know if there are 10. I think there were about eight. Possibly, but we lied to you.
26:17 Dan
But this episode is about lying.
26:19 Lloyd
Yeah, we meant to do that.
26:20 Dan
We\’ll keep it as 10. But yeah, you know, yeah, there\’s a handful for you.
26:24 Lloyd
Yes. A handful. wouldn\’t have been as good in the title of it just said a handful. Maybe we\’ll call it that. Maybe we have lived throughout this episode. Maybe it\’s called that. Okay. Should we see the next one?
26:35 Dan
Yeah, we\’ll see you in your ears next week.
26:37 Lloyd
Or maybe we won\’t. Maybe we\’ve lied. We\’re marketers.
Hopefully this has been useful and helped you to understand some of the Marketing lies you’ve been told. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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