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How To Start A Podcast Your Audience Will LOVE

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Wondering how to start a podcast? I want to let you in on a secret…we don’t just produce this podcast for fun (although we love doing it), it’s helped us generate hundreds of thousands of pounds of new business for our Marketing Agency. In this podcast episode, we open the bonnet & share our podcasting secrets, what we’ve learnt along the way & actionable steps you can take to start a podcast that generates a worthwhile return on investment for your company!

Timestamps

00:00 – 01:03 Intro
01:04 – 04:48 Why podcasting is a game-changing platform
04:59 – 08:27 Why we started Businesss Anchors & our download stats
08:28 – 09:37 Why download numbers aren’t as important as you think
09:38 – 19:07 How to start a podcast your audience will love (4 steps)
19:08 – 25:44 Lessons we learnt from podcasting
24:45 – 25:57 Outro

How To Start A Podcast Clip

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Transcript

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. What does it take to start and run a successful podcast? Well, today Dan and Lloyd discuss how they built their podcast and share tips for getting started and growing over time.

0:13 Lloyd
The value that Dan and I would get for our business. And for us, as people from like one episode of the podcast may be equal to the value we would get from shitloads of other tech, like 30 Tik Tok videos, think like the time consumed.

0:29 Pat
We’ll also explore some of the ways a podcast might be a better option for growing an audience or a business than other platforms.

0:36 Lloyd
There is kind of four steps that I think can get you, to record something and be on a good path to having a good podcast in the future.

0:46 Pat
Right. Let’s get stuck in this is episode 82 of the business anchors podcast.

1:04 Lloyd
Why is podcasting a game-changing media platform that anchors shouldn’t ignore?

1:09 Dan
Good question.

1:10 Lloyd
Thank you.

1:14 Dan
The main thing I think about podcasting is it’s one of if not the only media platform you can consume effectively whilst doing other stuff like audio in general. And I think from an early stage, we both were quite big audiobook listeners.

I don’t do that so much anymore. I’m more of a podcast guy. But we both used to do that whilst doing crappy chores and like cleaning. And that from that point, I saw the value in Wow, we could produce content that people can listen to when they’re doing boring stuff like driving, and that’s one of the main ones.

The second one, I think we found, it’s a longer form, type of content that you can build deeper relationships with your audience or listeners, in this case, you know, rather than getting a three-second video of you on Facebook, this is a half an hour to a 45-minute piece of content, where you the listeners are listening to us communicate what we want to communicate to you.

And finally, I think podcasting can be super, a super-efficient way of producing content. Yes, we’ve got a bigger setup here. But we could just have like an audio recorder, two mics, and just do that which could be done very efficiently. So there are my three reasons why I think it’s so powerful.

2:34 Lloyd
Yeah, I think that your second point about the kind of deeper relationships from podcasting, rather than posting a three-second video is a massive one. I think it’s not unique to podcasting, but I guess it’s unique to long-form content. So you could create a 30 minute YouTube video, or you know, video on various platforms.

But podcasting is something, audio, and video, you can do long-form, and it’s such a difference, I think, TikTok’s obviously blowing up and has been for the last couple of years. And I think there’s real value there. But it’s I think, you know, the value that perhaps we Dan and I would get for our business. And for us, one episode of the podcast may be equal to the value we would get from shitloads of other tech e.g., 30 TikTok videos.

3:29 Dan
Like the time consumed the minutes of our content consumed with the podcast.

3:34 Lloyd
And anything you’re putting out to the world you’re communicating stuff, and educating them about you, what you believe and the knowledge you have and what you do. And that’s why, you know, someone would have to follow you on TikTok for six months to consume enough to go, oh, okay, there’s kind of themes here. Oh, these guys are honest people, and they want to know their doing, they would know what they’re doing. And there they have a good knowledge base on marketing and social media.

Whereas you can get that from, you know, you business anchors, obviously think we’re brilliant, but we’ve probably communicated all of those things to you in one episode previously. So we’ve kind of got you in and got you to listen somehow, thank you very much, emulated all that with one piece of content, which that deeper relationship offers you more opportunities basically.

4:30 Dan
And as the podcast has been so valuable to our business, in this episode, I want us to break down a bit of the backstory as to why we started the podcast, but then also share some like how to stuff I think you’ve got a few more how-to today people are listening like I actually might consider starting a podcast the actual practical steps.

Yeah, I think towards the end, I’ll go through, basically, there’s kind of four steps that I think can get you to record something and be on a good path to having a good podcast in the future. So quick backstory. as to how this all came about, in February 2020, we started the podcast as a bit of an experiment. Really?

5:08 Lloyd
Do you know when we first record the podcast? We didn’t know COVID existed? Because it was. Yeah, yeah. a month, recorded in January. Yeah.

5:18 Dan
Anyway, we recorded it. And I think for us, we always try to focus at least 20% of our marketing efforts on something new. Rather than just knowing like, for us, LinkedIn works well. We’re always trying different things. And for that year, that test and experiment was the podcast.

And I don’t know about you, Lloyd. But I saw a bit of a gap in the market because there were lots of marketing podcasts out there may like all the ones in the marketing charts, were very practical. How to grow a YouTube following how to build a strategy for, you know, Twitter step one, do this.

5:55 Lloyd
Step two, do this. Step three, this is all very useful. So we’re not taking the piss. But yeah, that’s which is good.

6:03 Dan
But I listened to a lot of them. And I didn’t find them very interesting to listen to, in the sense of like, the kind of thing I’d want to listen to at the weekends.

6:11 Lloyd
It’s more effort, because you’re like, oh, I should learn about this. I’m going to make myself listen.

Yeah. Whereas we try and make, we thought it could be an opportunity for us to provide value through our own experiences of growing a business of running marketing campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the world, all of that insight. And all the things we’re learning and the mistakes we’re making, share that with you listeners, whilst also taking the piss out of it because we’re brothers and we like to poke fun at each other.

We’re such a laugh, aren’t we? Yeah, we have such laughter on business anchors.

6:40 Dan
Oh, so that was the start of the podcast. And I’ve actually got some data to share with you some insights. Don’t tell anyone this stuff because we don’t everyone know. So month one of the podcasts, how many downloads? Do you think we had Lloyd in February 2020? Oh, trying to think back in that it wouldn’t have been many in month one. What like 250. So we had 757. Right, I think was really quite good. Yeah. And there’s a point I’m sharing these numbers, which Oh, yeah. Okay. So I thought we had 257 downloads. Now that across the next few months, that number fluctuated, went up and down. And in October 2020.

It went down to 481 downloads. And I remember the time Lloyd was, you know, cracking the whip and saying to me, Dan, this bloody podcast isn’t working. We’re putting lots of resources into it. Why are we not doing getting, you know, hundreds of 1000s of listeners? But in February 2021, which is a year later, the numbers continue to fluctuate up and down. And we were still learning. February 2021, a year ago, we got a call from a marketing manager from a brand who said, who said I want to speak to you about doing a marketing campaign ended up pitching this quite significant campaign.

And when I got on, in the pitch, the managing director was there and he instantly said has Lloyd managed to find all these Bitcoin yet, because he was an avid podcast host. And we did an episode on that. So we ended up winning that contract. And that was the first real return on investment we got from the podcast.

And since then, we’ve continued to get new business referencing this podcast. So I guess the reason I wanted to share the numbers as you don’t have to have hundreds of 1000s of downloads and listeners to have a successful podcast. Yeah, we’ve obviously increased our downloads significantly. Now. I think we’ve had over 25,000 downloads now. But yeah, don’t be put off if your own because if you think 10 people listening to you for half an hour is better than 100 people seeing a three-second video view as we learned. And now we’ve continued to upgrade this production because we know it’s adding value to our business.

8:58 Lloyd
I think that’s really interesting about the numbers, like if you think we’re all fighting for people’s attention, and the reality is just one of those downloads one of those listeners we potentially getting for our podcast, like half an hour of their attention. So like you’re saying even though on LinkedIn, we might be reaching hundreds of 1000s of people each week, and the podcast could be under 1000. Those podcast listeners where we’re reaching people on a much deeper level, and those kinds of relationships are much stronger and could be worth a lot more.

9:38 Dan
So on a more practical front, I’ve got some things that I want to share in terms of what we’ve learned from the podcast, but to get into more of the practical, how to start. If someone’s listening and thinking I trust what the Knolton brothers are saying, I want to start a podcast or try and test it, what kind of practical steps can they take?

10:00 Lloyd
Well, Dan. Let’s go into every other marketing podcast. I do actually have four steps.

10:10 Dan
We just shat on the marketing podcasters that do this.

10:12 Lloyd
So I think the big mistake people make when they start podcasts is that almost everyone goes, don’t really know what we’re going to talk about. I mean, we’re just going to, we’re going to record on just see, I think it will be fun. We’ll see what we talk about. I think most podcasts start like that, and you know no offence to people we were, although we thought we were structured and organised, there was part of that without first episodes. But I think step one, try and be clear on why you’re doing this and who you want to listen to.

Because that will skip the whole process of the first 20 episodes of you going, just having a chat. You might enjoy that. So that may be good for the enjoyment and stuff. But if you know if you’re starting a podcast, because you want to grow your business, or you’re starting a podcast, because you’ve got a YouTube channel, and you want to drive more people to that YouTube channel, you need to look at why you’re doing it and who you want to listen.

11:10 Dan
So are you saying the business anchors podcast is very structured and strategically designed to ultimately get us business for our agency, rather than just off the cuff entertainment?

11:19 Lloyd
Yes, exactly. I know, it’s interesting, because you listen to it and think this is so entertaining, their main goal must be entertainment. But it’s not. But that’s a really good point, yes. So I think as a starting point, I think that’s working out why am I doing this? Who do I want to listen to, and that will help you skip a load of crap that you’d have to get over. The second part, once you’ve worked that out, is actually taking action and recording something. So me saying oh, you need to know, be clear on why you’re doing this. And you want to listen, I’m not saying everything has to be perfect for you to start because that often stops people from starting.

12:07 Dan
Can I add one tip in? Yeah, I think something that is super useful at these early stages in your process as well is actually listening to podcasts. Because I think we got a lot of insight into what we thought worked well and didn’t by actually listening to podcasts to help shape what you’re going to hear.

12:25 Lloyd
Great. So take action record podcast, knowing that it won’t be the best podcast ever. And it will improve over time. And then you need to repeat that. But and I’ll go into by the way, in a minute, I’ll tell you a tool you can use to upload because the technical stuff where you’re like, well now I’ve got a microphone, but then what do I do?

12:44 Dan
It’s not actually as difficult now, that makes it nice, upload it to one place, and it puts it all on Apple or Spotify.

12:51 Lloyd
But yeah, so you’re recording a podcast? Great. Then the third, that there’s kind of four sections to this third part step three, to think about with every episode that I think, from what we’ve learned will really help. So first thing, Why will my people click this, and by my people, I mean, you’ve decided that you want this type of person to listen. So each episode is going to have a title before people hear anything. It’s going to have a kind of topic of discussion or several and a title. So thinking why will people click on this title?

13:25 Dan
Like how to start a podcast, your audience will love? something just like that example?

13:30 Lloyd
And then secondly, why will people keep listening, so don’t have a clickbait title and then not offering the value or the entertainment or the inspiration or whatever it is that you’re giving isn’t good enough? Because you’ll never get any listeners that return. They’ll just go oh it’s a clickbait title and I’ve got to get off. So thinking about right what we’re actually going to be discussing or what am I talking about that it’s going to keep people listening and keep people engaged?

Third point what can we discuss that would help promote this and reach new people? So we talk about clips that we’re going to break up from the business anchors podcast of you know, some of the best ones we’ve had are me discussing about how I lost 12 million pounds in Bitcoin. We knew that putting that on social media saying lawyers lost 12 million pounds per minute coin.

We knew that putting that as a clip and writing that on social media on various platforms is going to get people to listen. So kind of thinking right? We’re talking about cryptocurrency or we’re talking about money. What can be the thing that’s going to grab people’s attention? Get them in. The fourth point. 4D?

14:43 Dan
Oh no sorry, it’s 3D.

14:45 Lloyd
That’s why it feels so real. Dad joke. What can we discuss that will encourage my listeners to take the action we want them to? So remember at the start, I said to be clear why you’re doing this and who you want to listen to. So we talk about topics that not all the time, but sometimes we talk about topics that allow us to demonstrate the skills we have within our business or our knowledge that may help others that we can really benefit from the business.

And although it’s great, like our previous podcasts were about, if you haven’t listened to about healthy habits, and I think that was a great episode positive, that’s when we didn’t actually communicate much about how amazing campaigns around the world. Yeah, yep. Where is this one? Dan’s just mentioned all these marketing campaigns. But so it doesn’t have to be you don’t want it to be just a sales thing of my business is great, because no one will give a shit.

15:45 Dan
But being able, to smoothly fit in those conversations. Yeah, like we’ve broken, we’ve done episodes where we break down why how campaigns we’ve done, have been successful to give that value element rather than just become a customer of ours. Yeah.

15:59 Lloyd
Or if your goal is to build your YouTube channel, or if your goal is to sell your book, your book, for example, there’ll be topics in that book. And you’ll kind of you can reference that in some of your conversations. And after six months of someone listening and you referencing that book 12 times for a couple of minutes, it builds that and helps you achieve that goal. And that’s a lot of people miss that kind of link to what they’re actually trying to achieve.

16:28 Dan
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make, not just podcast, but content in general is just going too far on the entertainment fun side. I’m doing fun videos, I’m going to do TikTok trends doing dances, really tempting, the most fun thing is to do that get more views to get more engagement, but it doesn’t ever shoehorn into how you can actually help them in their business.

16:47 Lloyd
That’s the real skill. And part of how we help our clients within our marketing agency is we are known as a creative marketing agency. And we do creative, weird and wacky stuff. But the real skill and our value is how within that creative content, do we communicate those things that are really important for your business and make them take action? That’s the key.

17:11 Dan
This is so meta because you’ve just done what we’ve said we need to do you need to do in a podcast.

17:14 Lloyd
Yes. Oh, that’s like Inception. And finally, I just want to say I said, if you’re thinking right, I’m going to start podcasts. How can we make it easy? You can Google, how to find the microphone you need and stuff like that. But we use Buzzsprout. But basically, most people think how do I get it on Spotify and Apple podcasts and stuff. So with Buzzsprout, there will be other services, but we upload it there, we started on the free version, which allows you to upload two hours of content per month. So you don’t even have to pay anything to do this.

And with a few clicks, you upload it and within sort of 24 hours, your episode will be on Spotify, Apple podcasts, all those other places. So it’s simple and free to do that, which people don’t realise we now pay. Because of the amount we post for weekly podcasts, I think we pay $18 a month, which allows us to post six hours of content. So the cost isn’t high. The time and effort aren’t high, it’s you know, it will the first time you’re doing it, you’ll have to work out how to do it. But there’s not as much of a barrier to entry as you would think from the outside.

18:27 Dan
And chartable was another really good tool that we use, which helps you see it’s like more in-depth analytics for your episodes helps you understand how they’re performing compared to other episodes you’ve done. And also they’ve got these really cool things that I’ve spoken about before called Smart Links, where you can create one link that easily takes people to their favourite podcasting platform. They click it either Apple, Spotify, Google podcast.

18:49 Lloyd
So just to be clear, for instance, I listen on Spotify, and I’m on an Android phone. If I click that link, that’s where it’ll take me. Yeah, if Dan’s got an Apple phone, it will take him to Apple Podcast.

18:58 Dan
You can set rules basically for different devices where it will take them to. So that was useful. I think it’s a good practical step there. Yeah, I’ve got a couple of things that I’ve kind of, I think we’ve learned from doing podcasting for how many is it 2 years now? Feb. 2020. It must be.

19:22 Lloyd
Yeah, shit. It’s two years. Bloody Hell.

19:25 Dan
We’re on episode 80 Lloyd.

19:29 Lloyd
What we’re gonna do for 100. We should start thinking about that.

19:32 Dan
Do you know what we should do? We should do a live in-person Business Anchors podcast. So in terms of things that we’ve learned, one of the main things I think is if you’re starting a podcast, focus more on how good the podcast is, rather than the download numbers it gets a mistake we made early on… yes, download numbers are important and to continue, you want to grow the podcast more people listened to it.

But if you are just heavily focused on that you can end up just making episodes that you think or know will get downloads rather than are actually going to help your overall objective for us driving business for our agency. We could get more downloads, just talking about trending stuff, he just burped again didn’t you?

20:15 Lloyd
Yeah. I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I’m sorry. I’m going to get such a bad reputation.

20:28 Dan
Somebody commented last time you did this saying I don’t know why there’s such a stigma around this. It’s just a bodily function.

20:34 Lloyd
Oh, thank you.

20:39 Dan
Don’t focus on the download numbers, focus on making a good episode of people to listen to. Another thing we’ve learned, I think we’ve learned from this is done is better than perfect. For example, over the last two years, we’ve improved the podcast set and how this looks and sounds. And I think sometimes we’ve waited for it to be perfect before doing something and it’s taken months, and then we never do it. Whereas even with this newest set, we’re doing it in stages. So, it started a few weeks ago. And it wasn’t perfect.

And now we’ve got some really cool new stuff. Tay’s worked really hard on making this set really good. You’ve got pictures on the wall, we’ve got other props here. And we’re going to keep we aka Tay from the team is going to continue to make this better and better, because done is better than perfect. I was going to say shout out to Tay and with the support of pat on sound, really been improving the business anchors podcast

21:33 Lloyd
As Dan said, it’s been such a positive thing for us to go, Oh, we’re going to improve this over time. And Taylor’s been taking like steps each episode improving the set improving the sound. And gosh, oh, my body is not functioning well today. Sorry. And yeah, we wouldn’t have even gone live with this set and improved sound at all, because it’s still not completely perfect. Yeah. Whereas we’re now producing better stuff every single week. I think that’s important not to just not do anything because it’s not perfect.

22:10 Dan
Definitely. I think the final thing, I think, which will hopefully be valuable in promoting the podcast is just as if not more important than producing it. Because you can have a brilliant podcast, but if you don’t promote it to a number of channels, then no one’s gonna listen to it.

22:26 Lloyd
Have you heard the phrase build it and they will come? Yeah, not true.

22:31 Dan
No.

22:32 Lloyd
Don’t just expect if I’m producing something brilliant. Well, the listeners will find me. They won’t.

22:38 Dan
I mean, if you think about this podcast, we do a lot of different things to promote this. So we clip it up, and put it across all social platforms, clear, optimised versions on TikTok and Instagram reels, we share it to our weekly email newsletter, we do a competition to get people to listen to this, you can win a bottle of wine on the Friday club, which is our weekly email newsletter. We talk about it in person with people who we meet, we strategically have clips going out each week in the form of Knowlton nuggets, so that we have more downloads so that we get in the charts more. There are just all these things we do.

23:13 Lloyd
Don’t let that put you off. Remember what we said. It doesn’t have to be perfect to start.

23:17 Dan
This is us now two years on.

23:19 Lloyd
Yeah, two years on, we’ve worked out all these things. But at first, we were only clipping it up and putting it on socials. So yeah. Don’t let it put you off. We’re saying all this stuff to promote it. We only need to do that because we’re trying to scale this and scale the positive effects two years down the line. But yeah, like Dan said, that promotion once you’re in the swing of things, and you’re like, I know what I’m doing with this podcast, you can literally start using the microphone on your Apple headphones and using a tool like anchor as a starting point.

Yeah, I won’t mention names. But I know in the marketing, podcast charts for the UK, I know of two that are or at least were just recorded on a phone that was in the top 10. So don’t think that you can’t do really well with that level of production.

24:11 Dan
An interesting point. I did a talk recently, and there was a lady there forgotten her name. Dammit, Janice, Janice. But she said a really interesting tip, which was to do enough to make sure the audio isn’t annoying as a base level, because if it’s like oh like it sounds annoying, people just won’t listen. So it doesn’t have to be you know, really good like this, but just not like oh, yeah.

24:38 Lloyd
Yeah. And that that will mean that it’s not having a negative effect. People won’t be put off and might be like, I’m not listening to that. And that’s the base you need to get started.

24:48 Dan
Cool. Well, hopefully, this episode has been useful. I’m also just as a final point in the Friday club, which I mentioned in our weekly email newsletter. I’m going to be updating our journey of how our podcast downloads to 100,000. Which our goal this year go, and what we’re learning the mistakes are making and things that are working and aren’t working. So if you want to know that then sign up for the Friday club. Just search the Friday club.

25:11 Lloyd
Let us know if you’ve got any questions that you want to be answered. If you’re considering starting a podcast and that sort of thing. Ask us because we want to help.

25:20 Dan
We’ve got a podcast studio that can record podcasts as well if you want to record your podcast or you can do it for yourself.

25:25 Lloyd
He’s being a salesman now. Yeah, we have a studio and that’s a service we can provide.

25:32 Dan
Okay, so look forward to seeing you in your ears next week.

25:37 Lloyd
And book a studio session to record your podcast. See you in your ears next week. Bye now.
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How To Start A Podcast Your Audience Will LOVE

Timestamps

How To Start A Podcast Video Clip

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Transcript

How To Start A Podcast Your Audience Will LOVE

Timestamps

Podcast Video Clip

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Transcript

How To Format A Script

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Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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If you’re wondering how to format a script and want your videos to drive more leads, sales, engagement, or action in general, this is a must-listen. In this episode, we read through a recent script we wrote for a Knowlton video & breakdown how to format a script that drives action.

There are so many value-nuggets in this, not just for script writing but for producing content in general. Get ready to learn how to format a script!

Timestamps

00:00 – 01:16 Intro
01:17 – 06:10 Why script writing is so important
06:11 – 13:02 Knowlton’s live script read
13:03 – 17:34 How to format a script & script writing tips
17:35 – 19:02 Where to find character inspiration
19:03 – 23:20 Our #1 script writing tip
23:21 – 23:34 Outro
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Transcript

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. What does it take to write a script that converts customers? Well, today, Dan and Lloyd discuss the importance of your scripts and how small choices can have a big impact.

0:12 Lloyd
You might say a word or phrase that turns off 2% of people, if you’re putting paid-spend behind that you’re going to exaggerate that result. So rather than like 20 people going, Oh no not for me, maybe 200,000 people get switched off, you get a much worse return on your investment.

0:34 Pat
We also explore some of the ways that Dan and Lloyd make sure their videos are relatable and hook in the right audiences.

0:40 Lloyd
We had a title come up after the hook title on screens saying creative marketing agency, the edgy one. So that’s if you’re in marketing, there’s the word marketing on the screen. If there’s any doubt then you’re going oh, this is a thing relevant to marketers? That’s me. Yeah. This is a video made for me that I should watch.

1:00 Pat
Right? Let’s get stuck in. This is episode 84 of the business anchors podcast.

1:17 Dan
Why are we talking about script writing Lloyd? Surely we can just wing it when speaking on video like we used to?

1:22 Lloyd
Well, you could wing it if you want. But if you’re, if you’ve got specific goals you’re trying to achieve, then language and communication are important. It’s important to be specific with that language.

1:38 Dan
I remember when we started making videos, I don’t think we ever scripted anything, did we?

1:43 Lloyd
No, no we would kind of have bullet pilot points.

1:48 Dan
It just took ages and they weren’t that good. And then I think when we realised, we don’t mean scripting as in this isn’t completely scripted, we’re not reading off a bit of paper now.

2:02 Lloyd
No, we are not. Pause for Dan to laugh.

2:13 Dan
Explain what we mean by scripting Lloyd, why will anchors give a shit about this episode, basically, what value are we adding.

2:19 Lloyd
If you’re into creativity and scriptwriting and video, you’d be very interested but also more about communication and how in your marketing or in anything you do that you want to communicate to anyone in the world.

Especially with the sorts of stuff we do, so we create videos for online platforms, and social paid ad campaigns, if you’re creating a video, and you’re gonna post it organically on the internet somewhere, so say you’re gonna post a video to Instagram or reels.
Then you might say a word or phrase that turns off 2% of people as in like, you kind of show that you’re not an expert in this thing because you use the wrong terminology, you might use a certain word. If you post that organically 2 people might go I’m going to stop watching that.
If you’re putting paid-spend behind that to let more people see it, which you do in marketing, normally with anything, you’re going to exaggerate that result. So rather than like 20 people going, Oh, nope not for me. Maybe 200,000 People get switched off, you get a much worse return on your investment.

And it could be the same the other way, if you do something positive, those specific ways you communicate and that language you use those words, those phrases that laugh that relatability is going to exaggerate and have a huge effect.

4:00 Dan
We understand this. Because when we’re producing videos for clients, we have to make sure that what’s being said is the correct information like for your own company, you know, you may be listening and have your own company, so I know what I’m talking about.
But if you’re marketing and providing marketing service for some services for someone else, you need to make sure the wording is correct.

4:20 Lloyd
The specificity of language and communication is much more important than people think. And there are a couple of examples that I’ve read or listened to this week, and one is one from Spotify. So this isn’t a part of a video script or anything but this is the text that was on their platform.
And they changed free users to saying your subscription is currently free to your subscription is currently zero pounds, zero pence. And that change meant more people click the button underneath to sign up for a premium account, so like a change of a word, especially if you’re a big business or you’re planning to have, 100,000, millions of people look at things that might have got them another 200,000 users worldwide.
And there’s another example in Facebook, in the early years of Facebook when they were trying to increase their user base around the world. In the culture of Japan, it’s seen as rude to invite people to say you’re a Facebook user around the world. Normally, it’s like you sign up, invite your friends and invite them.
In Japan obviously, I don’t understand the Japanese culture well, but the guy that was in charge of this in Japan said, it’s seen as rude to kind of invite people to stuff like that. And they change the word invite to announce that you’re on Facebook.
And suddenly, it became one of the quickest growing countries for Facebook users where it was the slowest. So words, you have much more impact than you could ever imagine, especially if you’re scaling them in a marketing context.

6:11 Dan
On that note, I want us to try something completely different than we’ve never done in business anchors history, Lloyd. I want us to actually read through one of our most recent scripts for a Knowlton video, and then dissect it and talk about why we’ve done what we’ve done. And by the way, this is mainly you.

6:32 Lloyd
Do you know what, that makes perfect sense as to why you printed the script and go Yeah, for this episode? I did think it was weird.

6:39 Dan
But I think this would be a good way of a real-life example of a video that we’re producing today actually, we’re producing this video. And this is the script that you’ve developed based on ours. </p

6:50 Lloyd
Should we do what we do? At Knowlton? Yeah, you’re not usually involved in this process table. Both the production team and the creative team usually do a table read of a script when we have it.

As in, we read what the characters say, the bits in the script. Shall we do that for business anchors, give them an insight. And then afterwards, we’ll get into the detail.

7:09 Dan
Do you want to start by giving the context of what this video is?

7:14 Lloyd
Yeah. So at Knowlton, what we are trying to achieve, because we always tell you, this is important to understand that so, hopefully, you understand that we are trying to reach as many sorts of marketing manager level people in brands and businesses around the UK.
That’s our main thing. A secondary goal is to try and convince them we know what we’re doing. Well, Dan. Let’s go into every other marketing podcast. I do actually have four steps.

7:40 Dan
And convert them as clients.

7:41 Lloyd
Yeah, yeah. So this script is about a marketing meeting. Oh, relatable. So I’ll play the role of Edgy Sean.

Do you wanna play the role of Ben?

7:59 Dan
Yep. Then we’ve got boss Barbara as well.

8:04 Lloyd
Okay, shall I play boss Barbara? And you read the parts in between.

8:08 Dan
Okay, Yeah. So this is a creative marketing agency meeting. That we’re going through, shall we start? Are you ready? Okay.

So, hook section. Quick two to five seconds of Edgy Shawn enthusiastically shouting his edgy shit thoughts and ideas.

8:29 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Fudge the client, fudge the boss. No one says another word until you’re over the drink-drive limit.

8:39 Dan
Does that say title creative marketing agency?

8:42 Lloyd
You can tell Dan isn’t usually part of our table read. So now title on screen, Creative Marketing Agency, The Edgy One.

8:49 Dan
We see a group of creative marketers around a table ready to start a meeting.

8:54 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: We’re here to discuss some creative ideas and concepts for some amazing brands. There’s a lot to do so let’s get straight into it. Ben?
9:02 Dan
Ben: First up we have Grenade, protein bars, energy drinks, performance nutrition. Shot of team member about to speak whip pan to edgy Sean sat back was on my chair in the corner drinking directly out of the coffee pot.

9:15 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: We change the pronunciation of Grenade to *Pooooowhhh*.

9:20 Dan
Ben: We can’t change the name of the brand Sean.

9:22 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Can’t is just can with the T. Oh, next page of the script, right? Yes. Sounds are more recognisable than words. But bah bah, bah, I’m loving it.

9:38 Dan
Sean looks around the room encouraging others in the meeting to speak.

9:41 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: McDonald’s?
Edgy Sean: *Pooooowhhh*.
Boss Barbara: Grenade?
Edgy Sean: I don’t know the brand of that name. But if you mean *Pooooowhhh* you’d be right for once Barbara.

9:52 Dan
Ben: Sean, the clients not going to authorise that.

9:55 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: F the client.

9:57 Dan
Ben: We can’t though can we Sean, they pay us and doing that with a client was
what got you your first written warning from the boss.

10:04 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Fudge the boss.

10:05 Dan
Whip pan to Boss. Boss looks horrified.

Ben: I’m not sure this is useful.

10:11 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: You’re making a bad call guys. In 2008 McDonald’s ignored my Mcfudger idea and they haven’t recovered since.

10:19 Dan
Ben: I think they’re doing all right, Sean.

10:20 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Fudge Ronald (Quietly in the background was Barbara beginning to speak.)

10:25 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: Let’s move on, to the ecology project. They’re focused on climate solutions, carbon reduction, and tree planting to try and undo the damage we’re doing to the planet. Wholesome stuff. The video is a triangle. No one’s done it before.

10:38 Dan
Ben: But surely they haven’t done it because none of our screens are triangular. And what video?

10:44 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: The video is just constantly spinning.

10:47 Dan
Ben: Sean that isn’t a concept. That’s just a spinning triangle.

10:51 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: I drink sambuca through my eye and only take eyedrops through my mouth.

10:55 Dan
Ben: Sean now we’re just saying things to try and be edgy that have no link to this conversation.

11:01 Lloyd
These pages are very hard to turn, aren’t they?

Edgy Sean: Okay, fine. We got 100 of us in a room and we do a shot for every time there’s a tree planted. p>

11:08 Dan
It’s you boss Barbara. p>

11:13 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: Oh, they’ve planted over 30 million trees, Sean. Exactly. If anyone is used to social norms and business, as usual, you might want to step out, this is business as unusual.

11:28 Dan
Ben: Sean, we’re not going to get anywhere just shouting swear words. At Knowlton, we have processes and structures in place to maximise our creativity in ways that benefit our clients. Our concepts need strong hooks in the first three seconds otherwise, no one will watch.
We need to engage the target market in the next couple of seconds to ensure the concept is relatable, and viewers think this is for me.

11:51 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Maybe it’s not for them.

11:53 Dan
Ben: That doesn’t make any sense, Sean.

11:55 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Maybe that’s a good thing.

11:57 Dan
Ben: You’re saying anything to contradict the norm. But none of it makes any sense. We can’t entertain this anymore.

12:07 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Maybe our ads shouldn’t be entertaining.

12:10 Dan
Ben: The entertainment in our ads is what allows us to engage the viewer for long enough to communicate what we need to about the brand we’re representing.

12:18 Lloyd
Nice, that’s kind of, where we’ve got to with that. There are a few lines that didn’t make the cut at the end. One of my favourites is the videos of the ice cream and you’re the cone. I’m the flake, I’m going to get inside the ice cream. Doesn’t make sense, that’s probably why It didn’t make the cut.

12:37 Dan
We’re also going to make a shortcut TikTok sketch video of you just saying edgy lines.

12:43 Lloyd
We need to push boundaries here? Mood boards put me in a bored mood. Let’s make notes on the wall. And yeah, so obviously, we’re pretty bad at that.

12:55 Dan
So what that was was it was playing out at a marketing meeting where there’s a guy who’s just trying to be edgy. Because you know, sometimes you get that in marketing people just trying to be weird, because it’s marketing like let’s do this.

13:17 Lloyd
Yeah, exactly. If you’re in a marketing department in a big business, or you’ve worked in agencies if you’ve been there several years, you’ve likely come across a character like Edgy Sean, someone that’s just coming up with different ideas, but only for the sake of it not to benefit anything.
Yeah, so that’s the whole idea. We spoke in the last episode about how it needs to be able to relate to your audience. And this is someone in our, the world of marketing, and the world of creative strategy and stuff. There’s all there’s always an Edgy Sean on who’s just trying to be different and weird.

13:57 Dan

So what I think is clever about this is that it hooks you in instantly like there’s this weird edgy character who’s dressed weird and saying relatable stuff. It hooks you in and grabs your attention and is relatable long enough for us to then actually communicate some sales messages, that are talking about why Knowlton are good.
If you were listening to the final part of the video is like well at Knowlton we don’t just do that we do this and this rather than this just being a sales video, come work with us, at Knowlton, we can do creative stuff.

14:29 Lloyd
Exactly. That first point that we spoke about in the previous episode is about a thumb-stopping hook to a video and you might notice here it starts with five seconds of Edgy Sean enthusiastically shouting edgy shit thoughts and ideas. Fudge the client.
By the way, it’s it I said fudge instead of you know, I didn’t want to offend you guys. Fudge the client, fudge the boss. No one says another word until you’re over the drink-drive limit.

14:58 Dan
So ridiculous.

15:00 Lloyd
If we’re thinking about standard storytelling, that’s not the start of the story. That’s just some random funny lines he said. But because it’s an online ad, we need to hook people in with this kind of stuff to make sure we get their attention at the start. So that’s why it’s there.
If you were just telling this story, you would have just started with Barbara saying, we’re here to discuss some creative ideas and concepts for some amazing brands. But that’s not going to get the attention that shouting, fudge the client fudge is gonna get.

15:32 Dan
And I think this has also got the light bulb moments that we always speak about, when you see Edgy Sean, we should show what’s what you shouldn’t be doing in a marketing meeting to come up with creative ideas, it then gives us the ability to then position Knowlton, as this is how you should be doing it, rather than doing it like Edgy Sean with his spinning triangle.

15:53 Lloyd
yeah, it’s that lightbulb moment that we’ve spoken about in previous episodes, you need the viewers and the people you’re trying to convince to have that thing of saying, oh, that’s me, I need that.

Where we’re taking the Mickey in an exaggerated way out of a creative meeting where basically, you need to come up with some great ideas for your marketing projects. And it’s tough. And then we add a bit in with a relatable character kind of saying, oh, Knowlton, we do this. And it’s kind of like, supposed to be that thing of, ah, I need that so I stopped wasting time in these creative meetings. And we’re not coming up with good enough ideas.

16:29 Dan
So I guess to provide value to some of the listeners, you’re one of the people that write these kinds of scripts. What advice do you have? Or what approach do you take to write these scripts that could be useful to listeners? Are there any tips that you’ve got?

16:46 Lloyd
Well, there are lots of things that we’ve spoken about previously, I guess we’ve already spoken about the hook. That’s so key at the start, we need it to be relatable, just like we’re talking about in a lot of things relating to the previous episode. But you need it to be relatable to who you’re trying to get in front of.

For this obviously, it’s marketers. And that’s why it’s a marketing meeting setting, you need people to think this is for me. So even elements, like we had a title come up after the hook title on screens and creative marketing agency, the edgy one.
So that’s if you’re in marketing, there’s the word marketing on the screen. If there’s any doubt, then you’re going oh, this is a thing relevant to marketers? That’s me. Yeah. This is a video made for me that I should watch. So that’s important early on in the video.

17:35 Dan
Where do you just random questions, but you’re good at coming up with these characters? Where do you get inspiration for these characters from when you’re writing stuff? Like, um, for client campaigns? We’ve had a whole raft of interesting characters in client concepts. Where do you get inspiration from?

17:51 Lloyd
So a few places? One, we’ve mentioned this before, the to the anchors, not from ads. So basically, if you’re looking in your industry, or what’s the best marketing ad, you’re not going to find really good characters and entertaining. So from shows like the office that’s seen as one of the best comedies ever made and stuff for sitcoms, like, get your inspiration from, from characters on there.

Also like real life, like exaggerated versions of people you meet in real life.

18:27 Dan
We’ve done episodes before about networking, like one of our past services talking about that. And we’ve met some really interesting characters like the lady who tried to heal you with stones.

18:35 Lloyd
Exactly. And some characters are exaggerated versions of the guy that tried to tell me that cows would explode if we didn’t drink milk at networking events. By that guy. He’s a nice guy’s he’s funny, but obviously, an exaggerated version of him is a great character.

But yeah, I think trying to create that relatable kind of exaggerated character in this kind of video is key.

One big tip as well. So, Dan, I don’t think you’re aware. But this was the first draft of the script. And it’s been improved since. And one of my biggest tips is if you’re writing a script, or even if it’s not a script like this, and you’re just writing notes for your first video, and you’re kind of just writing almost the story, because you haven’t done this before you’re writing bullet points, get someone else to read it and be critical with feedback.

Ellie, who’s a great part of our team, our production team. Now knows I won’t be offended if she just writes notes all over the scripts. This is bad. This should be cut. This could be funnier. That’s what she did for me. Yesterday when I did the second draft for this script. And it’s so helpful because there’s perfection is too much for any one person.
And obviously, with stuff like this is like you’re trying to get the closest you can to the perfection of how good this video can be, how relatable it could be, how entertaining it can be, how well you can persuade the viewers to do what you want them to do and take the action.
And it’s just too much for one person, if you get someone else’s eyes on it, that has the confidence to be critical. It’s very helpful.

Why are you smiling?

20:24 Dan
Just because you always get me to look at this kind of thing as well. And it’s always a good sign when I’m laughing to myself and reading it. And this was one of those were things like the spinning triangle video just really tickled me.

20:39 Lloyd
That’s another point I was gonna make. So I think we usually, with scripts like this is a working environment, we send it to each other for feedback and stuff. And you’re the first person I got to read this, Dan, and I deliberately watched your reaction while you were reading it.
Because it’s such a key, we always talk about triggering emotion. And that’s what helps in marketing, how you’re going to get people to take action and feel something. And with a lot of this, we’re trying to trigger like joy, and we’re trying to make people laugh and that kind of thing.

When Dan was reading this, there were a few bits where he laughed out loud while he was reading it. And then I said, Well, what, what are you laughing at there? Because it’s the first experience of okay, one person’s looking at the script. And these parts already make them laugh out loud and trigger emotion. So obviously, we need more bits like that we need more of that.
And any bits where he was just kind of silently reading, you probably think, okay, there’s probably a bit of a gap there where there’s not enough so losing that and getting someone’s reaction before it goes to the world.

21:49 Dan
This was one of the best bits that made me laugh as well. He says, I only drink sambuca through my eye and only take eyedrops through my mouth. How do you come up with this ridiculous shit?

21:58 Lloyd
What is the benefit of having very strange thoughts? It becomes useful when you’re trying to write a script that’s supposed to be funny.

22:10 Dan
I found that quite interesting. I hope that was interesting to the listeners. And this is a bit of a different style of a podcast episode. But we thought we’d give it a go. And hopefully, you found this useful.

22:22 Lloyd
This gives you a bit more of an insight into our business and the random things that we do that are such an important part of our world that might not be part of your world. Yeah, in the different business anchors, listeners, homes and workplaces. But if you want to hear any more like see or hear any more parts in detail about what we do let us know, because we’re just trying to do the best stuff for you really, whatever you’ll be interested in.

22:45 Dan
This video will be live when this podcast is out. So go to our LinkedIn or my LinkedIn.

22:52 Lloyd
It’ll be the one with millions of views. With viewers going ‘Oh my god, this deserves an Oscar’.

22:58 Dan

And if you have found this useful, and you think anyone else would be interested, please do tell them about the business anchors podcast so that we can spread the love and get more people in our little community of anchors.

23:08 Lloyd
And if you have any expertise in scriptwriting, please let me know I want to learn and improve and improve everything we’re doing. I’m open to your critical feedback.

23:18 Dan
See you next week in your ears.

23:20 Dan
See you in your ears.

ENDING
Hopefully this has been useful and taught you a little more about how to format a script that can drive sales and leads. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you in script writing or video production Start A Conversation.
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How To Format A Script

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Listen on Apple Podcasts

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If you’re wondering how to format a script and want your videos to drive more leads, sales, engagement, or action in general, this is a must-listen. In this episode, we read through a recent script we wrote for a Knowlton video (Edgy Sean Video) & breakdown how to format a script that drives action.

There are so many value-nuggets in this, not just for script writing but for producing content in general. Get ready to learn how to format a script!

Timestamps

Transcript

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. What does it take to write a script that converts customers? Well, today, Dan and Lloyd discuss the importance of your scripts and how small choices can have a big impact.

0:12 Lloyd
You might say a word or phrase that turns off 2% of people, if you’re putting paid-spend behind that you’re going to exaggerate that result. So rather than like 20 people going, Oh no not for me, maybe 200,000 people get switched off, you get a much worse return on your investment.

0:34 Pat
We also explore some of the ways that Dan and Lloyd make sure their videos are relatable and hook in the right audiences.

0:40 Lloyd
We had a title come up after the hook title on screens saying creative marketing agency, the edgy one. So that’s if you’re in marketing, there’s the word marketing on the screen. If there’s any doubt then you’re going oh, this is a thing relevant to marketers? That’s me. Yeah. This is a video made for me that I should watch.

1:00 Pat
Right? Let’s get stuck in. This is episode 84 of the business anchors podcast.

1:17 Dan
Why are we talking about scriptwriting Lloyd? Surely we can just wing it when speaking on video like we used to?

1:22 Lloyd
Well, you could wing it if you want. But if you’re, if you’ve got specific goals you’re trying to achieve, then language and communication are important. It’s important to be specific with that language.

1:38 Dan
I remember when we started making videos, I don’t think we ever scripted anything, did we?

1:43 Lloyd
No, no we would kind of have bullet pilot points.

1:48 Dan
It just took ages and they weren’t that good. And then I think when we realised, we don’t mean scripting as in this isn’t completely scripted, we’re not reading off a bit of paper now.

2:02 Lloyd
No, we are not. Pause for Dan to laugh.

2:13 Dan
Explain what we mean by scripting Lloyd, why will anchors give a shit about this episode, basically, what value are we adding.

2:19 Lloyd
If you’re into creativity and scriptwriting and video, you’d be very interested but also more about communication and how in your marketing or in anything you do that you want to communicate to anyone in the world.

Especially with the sorts of stuff we do, so we create videos for online platforms, and social paid ad campaigns, if you’re creating a video, and you’re gonna post it organically on the internet somewhere, so say you’re gonna post a video to Instagram or reels.
Then you might say a word or phrase that turns off 2% of people as in like, you kind of show that you’re not an expert in this thing because you use the wrong terminology, you might use a certain word. If you post that organically 2 people might go I’m going to stop watching that.
If you’re putting paid-spend behind that to let more people see it, which you do in marketing, normally with anything, you’re going to exaggerate that result. So rather than like 20 people going, Oh, nope not for me. Maybe 200,000 People get switched off, you get a much worse return on your investment.

And it could be the same the other way, if you do something positive, those specific ways you communicate and that language you use those words, those phrases that laugh that relatability is going to exaggerate and have a huge effect.

4:00 Dan
We understand this. Because when we’re producing videos for clients, we have to make sure that what’s being said is the correct information like for your own company, you know, you may be listening and have your own company, so I know what I’m talking about.
But if you’re marketing and providing marketing service for some services for someone else, you need to make sure the wording is correct.

4:20 Lloyd
The specificity of language and communication is much more important than people think. And there are a couple of examples that I’ve read or listened to this week, and one is one from Spotify. So this isn’t a part of a video script or anything but this is the text that was on their platform.
And they changed free users to saying your subscription is currently free to your subscription is currently zero pounds, zero pence. And that change meant more people click the button underneath to sign up for a premium account, so like a change of a word, especially if you’re a big business or you’re planning to have, 100,000, millions of people look at things that might have got them another 200,000 users worldwide.
And there’s another example in Facebook, in the early years of Facebook when they were trying to increase their user base around the world. In the culture of Japan, it’s seen as rude to invite people to say you’re a Facebook user around the world. Normally, it’s like you sign up, invite your friends and invite them.
In Japan obviously, I don’t understand the Japanese culture well, but the guy that was in charge of this in Japan said, it’s seen as rude to kind of invite people to stuff like that. And they change the word invite to announce that you’re on Facebook.
And suddenly, it became one of the quickest growing countries for Facebook users where it was the slowest. So words, you have much more impact than you could ever imagine, especially if you’re scaling them in a marketing context.

6:11 Dan
On that note, I want us to try something completely different than we’ve never done in business anchors history, Lloyd. I want us to actually read through one of our most recent scripts for a Knowlton video, and then dissect it and talk about why we’ve done what we’ve done. And by the way, this is mainly you.

6:32 Lloyd
Do you know what, that makes perfect sense as to why you printed the script and go Yeah, for this episode? I did think it was weird.

6:39 Dan
But I think this would be a good way of a real-life example of a video that we’re producing today actually, we’re producing this video. And this is the script that you’ve developed based on ours. </p

6:50 Lloyd
Should we do what we do? At Knowlton? Yeah, you’re not usually involved in this process table. Both the production team and the creative team usually do a table read of a script when we have it.

As in, we read what the characters say, the bits in the script. Shall we do that for business anchors, give them an insight. And then afterwards, we’ll get into the detail.

7:09 Dan
Do you want to start by giving the context of what this video is?

7:14 Lloyd
Yeah. So at Knowlton, what we are trying to achieve, because we always tell you, this is important to understand that so, hopefully, you understand that we are trying to reach as many sorts of marketing manager level people in brands and businesses around the UK.
That’s our main thing. A secondary goal is to try and convince them we know what we’re doing. Well, Dan. Let’s go into every other marketing podcast. I do actually have four steps.

7:40 Dan
And convert them as clients.

7:41 Lloyd
Yeah, yeah. So this script is about a marketing meeting. Oh, relatable. So I’ll play the role of Edgy Sean.

Do you wanna play the role of Ben?

7:59 Dan
Yep. Then we’ve got boss Barbara as well.

8:04 Lloyd
Okay, shall I play boss Barbara? And you read the parts in between.

8:08 Dan
Okay, Yeah. So this is a creative marketing agency meeting. That we’re going through, shall we start? Are you ready? Okay.

So, hook section. Quick two to five seconds of Edgy Shawn enthusiastically shouting his edgy shit thoughts and ideas.

8:29 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Fudge the client, fudge the boss. No one says another word until you’re over the drink-drive limit.

8:39 Dan
Does that say title creative marketing agency?

8:42 Lloyd
You can tell Dan isn’t usually part of our table read. So now title on screen, Creative Marketing Agency, The Edgy One.

8:49 Dan
We see a group of creative marketers around a table ready to start a meeting.

8:54 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: We’re here to discuss some creative ideas and concepts for some amazing brands. There’s a lot to do so let’s get straight into it. Ben?
9:02 Dan
Ben: First up we have Grenade, protein bars, energy drinks, performance nutrition. Shot of team member about to speak whip pan to edgy Sean sat back was on my chair in the corner drinking directly out of the coffee pot.

9:15 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: We change the pronunciation of Grenade to *Pooooowhhh*.

9:20 Dan
Ben: We can’t change the name of the brand Sean.

9:22 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Can’t is just can with the T. Oh, next page of the script, right? Yes. Sounds are more recognisable than words. But bah bah, bah, I’m loving it.

9:38 Dan
Sean looks around the room encouraging others in the meeting to speak.

9:41 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: McDonald’s?
Edgy Sean: *Pooooowhhh*.
Boss Barbara: Grenade?
Edgy Sean: I don’t know the brand of that name. But if you mean *Pooooowhhh* you’d be right for once Barbara.

9:52 Dan
Ben: Sean, the clients not going to authorise that.

9:55 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: F the client.

9:57 Dan
Ben: We can’t though can we Sean, they pay us and doing that with a client was
what got you your first written warning from the boss.

10:04 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Fudge the boss.

10:05 Dan
Whip pan to Boss. Boss looks horrified.

Ben: I’m not sure this is useful.

10:11 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: You’re making a bad call guys. In 2008 McDonald’s ignored my Mcfudger idea and they haven’t recovered since.

10:19 Dan
Ben: I think they’re doing all right, Sean.

10:20 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Fudge Ronald (Quietly in the background was Barbara beginning to speak.)

10:25 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: Let’s move on, to the ecology project. They’re focused on climate solutions, carbon reduction, and tree planting to try and undo the damage we’re doing to the planet. Wholesome stuff. The video is a triangle. No one’s done it before.

10:38 Dan
Ben: But surely they haven’t done it because none of our screens are triangular. And what video?

10:44 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: The video is just constantly spinning.

10:47 Dan
Ben: Sean that isn’t a concept. That’s just a spinning triangle.

10:51 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: I drink sambuca through my eye and only take eyedrops through my mouth.

10:55 Dan
Ben: Sean now we’re just saying things to try and be edgy that have no link to this conversation.

11:01 Lloyd
These pages are very hard to turn, aren’t they?

Edgy Sean: Okay, fine. We got 100 of us in a room and we do a shot for every time there’s a tree planted. p>

11:08 Dan
It’s you boss Barbara. p>

11:13 Lloyd
Boss Barbara: Oh, they’ve planted over 30 million trees, Sean. Exactly. If anyone is used to social norms and business, as usual, you might want to step out, this is business as unusual.

11:28 Dan
Ben: Sean, we’re not going to get anywhere just shouting swear words. At Knowlton, we have processes and structures in place to maximise our creativity in ways that benefit our clients. Our concepts need strong hooks in the first three seconds otherwise, no one will watch.
We need to engage the target market in the next couple of seconds to ensure the concept is relatable, and viewers think this is for me.

11:51 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Maybe it’s not for them.

11:53 Dan
Ben: That doesn’t make any sense, Sean.

11:55 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Maybe that’s a good thing.

11:57 Dan
Ben: You’re saying anything to contradict the norm. But none of it makes any sense. We can’t entertain this anymore.

12:07 Lloyd
Edgy Sean: Maybe our ads shouldn’t be entertaining.

12:10 Dan
Ben: The entertainment in our ads is what allows us to engage the viewer for long enough to communicate what we need to about the brand we’re representing.

12:18 Lloyd
Nice, that’s kind of, where we’ve got to with that. There are a few lines that didn’t make the cut at the end. One of my favourites is the videos of the ice cream and you’re the cone. I’m the flake, I’m going to get inside the ice cream. Doesn’t make sense, that’s probably why It didn’t make the cut.

12:37 Dan
We’re also going to make a shortcut TikTok sketch video of you just saying edgy lines.

12:43 Lloyd
We need to push boundaries here? Mood boards put me in a bored mood. Let’s make notes on the wall. And yeah, so obviously, we’re pretty bad at that.

12:55 Dan
So what that was was it was playing out at a marketing meeting where there’s a guy who’s just trying to be edgy. Because you know, sometimes you get that in marketing people just trying to be weird, because it’s marketing like let’s do this.

13:17 Lloyd
Yeah, exactly. If you’re in a marketing department in a big business, or you’ve worked in agencies if you’ve been there several years, you’ve likely come across a character like Edgy Sean, someone that’s just coming up with different ideas, but only for the sake of it not to benefit anything.
Yeah, so that’s the whole idea. We spoke in the last episode about how it needs to be able to relate to your audience. And this is someone in our, the world of marketing, and the world of creative strategy and stuff. There’s all there’s always an Edgy Sean on who’s just trying to be different and weird.

13:57 Dan

So what I think is clever about this is that it hooks you in instantly like there’s this weird edgy character who’s dressed weird and saying relatable stuff. It hooks you in and grabs your attention and is relatable long enough for us to then actually communicate some sales messages, that are talking about why Knowlton are good.
If you were listening to the final part of the video is like well at Knowlton we don’t just do that we do this and this rather than this just being a sales video, come work with us, at Knowlton, we can do creative stuff.

14:29 Lloyd
Exactly. That first point that we spoke about in the previous episode is about a thumb-stopping hook to a video and you might notice here it starts with five seconds of Edgy Sean enthusiastically shouting edgy shit thoughts and ideas. Fudge the client.
By the way, it’s it I said fudge instead of you know, I didn’t want to offend you guys. Fudge the client, fudge the boss. No one says another word until you’re over the drink-drive limit.

14:58 Dan
So ridiculous.

15:00 Lloyd
If we’re thinking about standard storytelling, that’s not the start of the story. That’s just some random funny lines he said. But because it’s an online ad, we need to hook people in with this kind of stuff to make sure we get their attention at the start. So that’s why it’s there.
If you were just telling this story, you would have just started with Barbara saying, we’re here to discuss some creative ideas and concepts for some amazing brands. But that’s not going to get the attention that shouting, fudge the client fudge is gonna get.

15:32 Dan
And I think this has also got the light bulb moments that we always speak about, when you see Edgy Sean, we should show what’s what you shouldn’t be doing in a marketing meeting to come up with creative ideas, it then gives us the ability to then position Knowlton, as this is how you should be doing it, rather than doing it like Edgy Sean with his spinning triangle.

15:53 Lloyd
yeah, it’s that lightbulb moment that we’ve spoken about in previous episodes, you need the viewers and the people you’re trying to convince to have that thing of saying, oh, that’s me, I need that.

Where we’re taking the Mickey in an exaggerated way out of a creative meeting where basically, you need to come up with some great ideas for your marketing projects. And it’s tough. And then we add a bit in with a relatable character kind of saying, oh, Knowlton, we do this. And it’s kind of like, supposed to be that thing of, ah, I need that so I stopped wasting time in these creative meetings. And we’re not coming up with good enough ideas.

16:29 Dan
So I guess to provide value to some of the listeners, you’re one of the people that write these kinds of scripts. What advice do you have? Or what approach do you take to write these scripts that could be useful to listeners? Are there any tips that you’ve got?

16:46 Lloyd
Well, there are lots of things that we’ve spoken about previously, I guess we’ve already spoken about the hook. That’s so key at the start, we need it to be relatable, just like we’re talking about in a lot of things relating to the previous episode. But you need it to be relatable to who you’re trying to get in front of.

For this obviously, it’s marketers. And that’s why it’s a marketing meeting setting, you need people to think this is for me. So even elements, like we had a title come up after the hook title on screens and creative marketing agency, the edgy one.
So that’s if you’re in marketing, there’s the word marketing on the screen. If there’s any doubt, then you’re going oh, this is a thing relevant to marketers? That’s me. Yeah. This is a video made for me that I should watch. So that’s important early on in the video.

17:35 Dan
Where do you just random questions, but you’re good at coming up with these characters? Where do you get inspiration for these characters from when you’re writing stuff? Like, um, for client campaigns? We’ve had a whole raft of interesting characters in client concepts. Where do you get inspiration from?

17:51 Lloyd
So a few places? One, we’ve mentioned this before, the to the anchors, not from ads. So basically, if you’re looking in your industry, or what’s the best marketing ad, you’re not going to find really good characters and entertaining. So from shows like the office that’s seen as one of the best comedies ever made and stuff for sitcoms, like, get your inspiration from, from characters on there.

Also like real life, like exaggerated versions of people you meet in real life.

18:27 Dan
We’ve done episodes before about networking, like one of our past services talking about that. And we’ve met some really interesting characters like the lady who tried to heal you with stones.

18:35 Lloyd
Exactly. And some characters are exaggerated versions of the guy that tried to tell me that cows would explode if we didn’t drink milk at networking events. By that guy. He’s a nice guy’s he’s funny, but obviously, an exaggerated version of him is a great character.

But yeah, I think trying to create that relatable kind of exaggerated character in this kind of video is key.

One big tip as well. So, Dan, I don’t think you’re aware. But this was the first draft of the script. And it’s been improved since. And one of my biggest tips is if you’re writing a script, or even if it’s not a script like this, and you’re just writing notes for your first video, and you’re kind of just writing almost the story, because you haven’t done this before you’re writing bullet points, get someone else to read it and be critical with feedback.

Ellie, who’s a great part of our team, our production team. Now knows I won’t be offended if she just writes notes all over the scripts. This is bad. This should be cut. This could be funnier. That’s what she did for me. Yesterday when I did the second draft for this script. And it’s so helpful because there’s perfection is too much for any one person.
And obviously, with stuff like this is like you’re trying to get the closest you can to the perfection of how good this video can be, how relatable it could be, how entertaining it can be, how well you can persuade the viewers to do what you want them to do and take the action.
And it’s just too much for one person, if you get someone else’s eyes on it, that has the confidence to be critical. It’s very helpful.

Why are you smiling?

20:24 Dan
Just because you always get me to look at this kind of thing as well. And it’s always a good sign when I’m laughing to myself and reading it. And this was one of those were things like the spinning triangle video just really tickled me.

20:39 Lloyd
That’s another point I was gonna make. So I think we usually, with scripts like this is a working environment, we send it to each other for feedback and stuff. And you’re the first person I got to read this, Dan, and I deliberately watched your reaction while you were reading it.
Because it’s such a key, we always talk about triggering emotion. And that’s what helps in marketing, how you’re going to get people to take action and feel something. And with a lot of this, we’re trying to trigger like joy, and we’re trying to make people laugh and that kind of thing.

When Dan was reading this, there were a few bits where he laughed out loud while he was reading it. And then I said, Well, what, what are you laughing at there? Because it’s the first experience of okay, one person’s looking at the script. And these parts already make them laugh out loud and trigger emotion. So obviously, we need more bits like that we need more of that.
And any bits where he was just kind of silently reading, you probably think, okay, there’s probably a bit of a gap there where there’s not enough so losing that and getting someone’s reaction before it goes to the world.

21:49 Dan
This was one of the best bits that made me laugh as well. He says, I only drink sambuca through my eye and only take eyedrops through my mouth. How do you come up with this ridiculous shit?

21:58 Lloyd
What is the benefit of having very strange thoughts? It becomes useful when you’re trying to write a script that’s supposed to be funny.

22:10 Dan
I found that quite interesting. I hope that was interesting to the listeners. And this is a bit of a different style of a podcast episode. But we thought we’d give it a go. And hopefully, you found this useful.

22:22 Lloyd
This gives you a bit more of an insight into our business and the random things that we do that are such an important part of our world that might not be part of your world. Yeah, in the different business anchors, listeners, homes and workplaces. But if you want to hear any more like see or hear any more parts in detail about what we do let us know, because we’re just trying to do the best stuff for you really, whatever you’ll be interested in.

22:45 Dan
This video will be live when this podcast is out. So go to our LinkedIn or my LinkedIn.

22:52 Lloyd
It’ll be the one with millions of views. With viewers going ‘Oh my god, this deserves an Oscar’.

22:58 Dan

And if you have found this useful, and you think anyone else would be interested, please do tell them about the business anchors podcast so that we can spread the love and get more people in our little community of anchors.

23:08 Lloyd
And if you have any expertise in scriptwriting, please let me know I want to learn and improve and improve everything we’re doing. I’m open to your critical feedback.

23:18 Dan
See you next week in your ears.

23:20 Dan
See you in your ears.

Hopefully this has been useful and taught you a little more about how to format a script that can drive sales and leads. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you in scriptwriting or video production Start A Conversation.
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LinkedIn Video Strategy That Made £50K in 1 Week

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If you’re looking for a LinkedIn video strategy that is proven to generate sales, this is for you. In this episode, you’ll learn the exact LinkedIn outreach video format we used to win a £50k project this week.

Timestamps

00:00 – 02:39 Intro
02:40 – 03:39 Video Outreach Example
03:40- 10:17 LinkedIn Outreach Video Format Breakdown
10:18 – 14:29 LinkedIn Video Outreach Tips
14:30 – 15:32 Outro
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Transcript

0:00 Dan
So how do you format a LinkedIn outreach video that generates 50,000 pounds of revenue? Well, I’m going to answer that this week, because sadly Lloyd’s, not here this week. So I’m going to try and do a bit of a solo episode.
And to be honest, this topic, which we’re going to go through, would have pretty much been me talking through most of it, because it’s what I do in our business, which is handle our marketing and sales. It’s a strategy to do with that. So hopefully, you enjoy this one. Sorry, you’re not here, Lloyd. I’m sure you will be listening to this.

But yeah, just to give you a quick backstory, the last couple of weeks have been pretty mental for us here at Knowlton. In terms of winning new business, we’ve won some amazing new projects.
Just to give you context, in the last two weeks, we’ve won the same amount of business, the value that we turned over, that was like a third of our revenue last year, or quarter third than a quarter of our revenue.
So it’s been a pretty big couple of weeks for us. And one of the projects that we won came from a certain strategy that we’ve used, a LinkedIn outreach strategy. If you’re an avid business anchors listener, you’ll remember episode 74, how to generate leads and sales with creative outreach strategies. We went in through a lot of detail on that strategy. But one of the elements that we didn’t talk about much was actually how to format a video that you send to people.

1:30 Dan
So just to give you context, that strategy, if you haven’t listened to it, go listen to the episode, that strategy is where on LinkedIn, you find people who are showing interest in what you do who are in your target market, you send them a direct video, which I’m going to talk through in a second to generate new business, right.
And in this video, I want to dissect the format of that video is. And also, I’m going to play to you the exact video that I sent to someone that generated 50,000 pounds of revenue this week. And then I’m going to dissect how that was formatted so that you the listeners can copy this strategy because it’s incredibly, incredibly effective. Once I’ve done that, I’ve got a few more tips for you at the end of this video.

2:18 Dan
So what I’ll do now, I’ll play, well I won’t, the lovely Knowlton editors, will play that video, it’s like a minute long. Just listen to this because I’m going to dissect this video. This is originally a video that I shot on my mobile phone in our office, and I sent to someone, but you’re going to hear the audio for it. So ready? Okay, here it is.

Hey, Paul, I hope you’re well, this is random, but we’ve been connected on LinkedIn for a while now and had a few discussions over the last year or so. I’ve been kind of following what you guys are doing.
And I just wanted to see if there was an opportunity for us to have a chat to see what you’re trying to achieve in the next six to 12 months to see if there’s any way we can support you in doing that. Your company looks fun.
And I think there could be an opportunity for us to help you produce some cool content or run some kind of paid ad campaign. We’ve recently shot a really exciting TV ad and tracked 1.2 million pounds of E-commerce sales for another client and also helped another client go viral. So we’re doing good stuff. I can see you are.
So just want to get in touch and see if there’s an opportunity for us to have a chat to find out what you’re up to and maybe present how we could potentially work together. Also, if that’s not relevant, then that’s fine. Just let me know, either way, and we’ll go from there. Thanks.

3:40 Dan
So now I want to break down for you the video format that you should use for your LinkedIn outreach videos to generate leads and revenue. And I’m going to break this down into different segments of that video and explain why it’s worked for us and how you can emulate this.
So just to give you context, as well, normally, these videos we send these outreach videos are probably around a minute, you don’t you want them to be clear, concise, and to the point, you don’t want them to drag on for ages because you know, people’s time is valuable. So yeah, they’d normally about a minute.
And it’s broken up into a few different sections, which I’m gonna get into now. So the first thing within your video that you’re sending directly to someone on LinkedIn, you want to start firstly, by getting to the point, you know, you don’t want to fluff at the start because it just instantly puts people off, they won’t watch the rest of the video. So you want to get to the point.

4:35 Dan
The first part I call context. What is the context of you sending this video to this person? Why are you reaching out to them? Now if you listen to business anchors, Episode 74. I talked through the strategy in detail. But this first part is all about why you’re reaching out to them.
So for example, the way we use this in our LinkedIn outreach strategy is If someone is showing signs that they’re interested in what we’re doing.

So for example, this could be commenting on our videos and our content on LinkedIn positively, liking our content on LinkedIn, visiting my profile on LinkedIn, but not communicating with me. These are all like context as to why I’d be sending someone a video.
So for example, in a video, I would be saying, hey, so and so I just wanted to send you a quick video because I noticed you viewed my profile, and just wanted to see if there’s anything we can help with, as that kind of thing, giving context right at the start to give a good idea of why you’re reaching out to them.

5:43 Dan
The second part, now this seems strange because it’s slightly early compared to other types of content. But having a call to action after that is important. So for example, you need to think about what do you want the next steps to be once they watch this video, and you want to get this in as early as possible because it’s likely that some people won’t watch all of the videos.

So once you’ve given your context, hey, so and so just wanted to reach out to you because of x, y,z wanted to see if there’s an opportunity for us to have a chat, or a zoom call, or a phone call, or a meeting, or whatever that call to action is to get it right at the start.
So that person knows, one, why you’re reaching out to them, why you’re sending them a video, and two what you want them to do after that video. So the first two parts are context and a clear call to action.

6:32 Dan
Number three, the third element in that video is what you can offer them. So what is it that you? What can you offer them? You know, is it accounting? Is it marketing? Is it cleaning, whatever it is, you need to somehow communicate what you can offer that person.
Another really good tip for this is to make sure you do your research, for example, us as a marketing agency that produces creative ads. Before I will reach out to anyone, I’ll look at what ads they’re currently running, if any, to understand what they’re currently doing.

So that when I say we can produce some creative ads for you, you can add more context to show it’s more personalised so you can say, I’ll check out your Facebook ads and saw that you’re not running any or I saw that you don’t currently use short-form video content.
This is a great opportunity to get to achieve x y z, you know and give that context and communicate what you can do for them. So when I talk about this, we talk about producing creative video content and running paid ads all to drive a trackable return on investment.
What is it that you can offer that person, clearly communicate that? So we’ve got the context, the call to action, what you can offer them.

7:48 Dan
Then number four is social proof. So social proof is credibility. So they know why you’re getting in touch with them what you want them to do, what you can offer them. Now it’s a case of demonstrating that you deliver on your promises, what can you share with them, that demonstrates that you deliver on your promises.
So for example, it could be sharing some quick case studies to say we’d love to do your cleaning in your office for you. We’ve worked with x y z brands, who in your area who are very credible, who have hired us, or it could be talking about the results you’ve achieved for clients.

You know, for example, some of the things we mentioned is, some of the work we’ve done to deliver 1.2 million pounds of trackable E-commerce sales for some of the E-commerce brands we’ve worked with, about us producing a TV ad, about us helping clients go viral.
There are these things that we’ve done that demonstrate we deliver on our promises for clients, which you can be mentioned in this video. And again, this video is like a minute long, so you don’t want to end up waffling for half an hour, it needs to be bullet points.
And that could be another tip actually to help you format this, write it down in bullet points. I don’t tend to do that. I tend to just do it because I’m used to sending these videos, but you might want to do some prep before. So then you got your social proof.

9:09 Dan
Number five, call to action. Again. I know we’ve already done a call to action right at the start. But again, you want to remind the person watching. So just to summarise, it’d be great if we could set up a call or a zoom call or have a meeting or have a chat or whatever that is, just to remind them at the end of that video. They know exactly what you want them to do.

9:30 Dan
Then the final part, which I’ve called begging for forgiveness, I think at the end of these outreach videos I always like to say like, this may not be relevant, and I apologise if it’s not so if it’s not relevant, you’ve got this all covered then no hard feelings.
Thanks for taking the time to watch this anyway. You know, just to show that you understand and value their time and if it’s not relevant then fair enough. What you don’t want to be is like trying to be pushy sales with people because you know, just be a nice person.

10:05 Dan
So there’s the structure just to summarise again, you’ve got context, call to action, what you can offer, social proof, call to action and beg for forgiveness. There the six kinds of different parts to this.

10:17 Dan
What I want to share now is just some additional tips around sending these outreach videos that we found from doing this for the last six to 12 months. So firstly, tip number one with your LinkedIn outreach videos. Talk like a normal person, don’t put your business video voice on, again, people buy from people and you want to be relatable in your content.

So something that I found when I first started making any kind of videos as I went directly to this robotic weird, like, oh, I don’t know what I’m talking like, don’t sound like myself. So some tip I saw on Tik Tok recently was, imagine you’re talking to one person down the barrel of that lens, imagine it’s one person you’re speaking to.
And that kind of mindset, you’ll come across a lot better, you’ll come across like you are talking to one person who is the one person behind the screen. Rather than thinking, I am in a room full of 100 people Hello, everyone, you know, which one of those two comes across better to you.
The first one, I’m pretty sure. So really try and practice just coming across like you’re having a conversation with one person, and it will land more with the person watching that video. That’s the first tip.

The second tip is to practice enough that you feel comfortable kind of leads on from that first point, make sure you practice what you’re saying enough. So it appears natural and you appear calm. Don’t just do one video and send it instantly if you’ve never done this before, do a video, watch it back and just practice coming across naturally and that kind of thing.
What you don’t want to end up doing is that it’s so prepared that it looks over-prepared. And it’s like oh god, this person just sends out hundreds of videos to random people. And it’s not that at all. So yeah, make sure you practice and get comfortable with it. The third point and I think a lot of traditional sales, people will probably say this is a rubbish tip.

But my third tip is don’t follow up too many times. Personally, when I’m sending these outreach videos, I don’t think I have ever followed up once after sending them because someone gets a video view. And they’re gonna watch it because it’s a video message in their inbox that people rarely send them if they don’t respond, you know, don’t keep following up.
That’s one of the most annoying things ever. Hey, did you see my video? They have seen it. I get what you would follow up with others, like communication formats, like email and stuff because they can get lost. But yeah, a video inbox message people aren’t gonna miss.

And also, just to give you an example, we’ve, with this strategy, I’ve sent a video like ages ago to someone and it took like, I didn’t get a response. I didn’t follow up. And then six months later, that person had moved to another company. And they messaged me and said, You sent me a video six months ago, it wasn’t the right time. Now in this new company, this could work well.
So yeah, you don’t want to end up being annoying with these because, again, then you’re going to turn people off. And yeah, so sorry, traditional salespeople, you’re probably gonna say I’m rubbish because I’m going against what you’d normally say. But that’s just my opinion.

And then I guess a final tip. I would recommend don’t send these videos, and this is all in Episode 74 that I mentioned that the business anchors podcast, but don’t send videos to people who have shown no level of interest in working with you. I think, again, you want to spend your time sending videos to people who are interested rather than just annoying everyone.

So really focusing on the strategy I mentioned that podcast episode, where you identify people who are showing signs that they’re interested in viewing your profile, commenting on your content and that kind of thing. Because otherwise, you’ll just end up spending loads of time sending videos to people who don’t give a shit about you, who don’t want your services and who aren’t interested.
Again, other salespeople might say it’s a numbers game, send as many as possible. But for me, and again, I can only speak from my experience, what’s worked for us is identifying the right people to send the videos to who we genuinely believe we can add value to and who have shown interest in us.

14:30 Dan
So yeah, hopefully, you find these tips useful. And this has been a bit weird without Lloyd being here. It’s been a bit of a solo episode. So hopefully it’s been alright, I know Lloyds is not here to say stupid stuff like normal. It’s been quite nice not having him here. But maybe you prefer him here.
So next week, he’ll probably be back. But uh, yeah, if you’ve enjoyed listening to this or any of our podcasts, please do subscribe. And also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It’d be really helpful to us to help get the podcast to more people. I know lots of you haven’t left a review.
So please do leave a review. And I look forward to being back here with Lloyd, my partner in crime next week to record another episode of business anchors. See you in your ears then. Oh, that was a terrible outro. See you in your ears.

Hopefully this has taught you everything you need to know about how to format a LinkedIn outreach video that works, if you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton we can support you anything Start A Conversation.
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Save Tax With These Simple Tax Planning Tips

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If you’re looking to save tax, this is for you. In this episode, you’ll learn some simple Tax Planning actions you can take to save tax.

We recently had a deep-dive session with our Accountants to understand how we could use Tax Planning to save tax. We were shocked at how much we could save (by making fairly simple changes).

Everything we share in this episode is above board. This isn’t financial advice, we’re not experts, we’re just sharing what we’ve learnt from our Accountants (a massive shout out to Telfords Accountants.

I know this episode sounds pretty boring, but any business owner or employee should listen if they want to save some money.

Save Tax Timestamps

00:00 – 01:11 Intro
01:12 – 05:18 Why tax planning is so important
05:18 – 06:43 The definition of Tax Planning
06:44 – 07:53 The definition of Tax Avoidance
07:54 – 09:13 The definition of Tax Evasion
09:14 – 11:43 Lloyd’s thoughts on Tax Aoidance
11:44 – 30:27 Tax Planning Tips
30:28 – 30:36 Outro
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Save Tax Transcript

0:00 Pat
Hi, I’m Pat, the podcast editor here. Today anchors, Dan and Lloyd are talking taxes. No, no, no, no. Okay, look, don’t click away. Because today, we’re talking about tax planning and the changes you can make to minimise your tax liability, potentially saving 1000s.p>

0:18 Lloyd
The government says we tax you on these things. And we allow you to do these things. And it’s going, Oh, you allow us to do those things. To help us grow our business, we will be allowed to do that.

0:30 Pat
You’ll hear about what they’ve learned, and the actions they’ve taken that have saved the company a projected amount of over 20,000 pounds.

0:38 Lloyd
Those business savings, like I said, depending on what sort of business owner you are, you could just take it out. Or you could reinvest it into the business or you could hire more people or you could give people pay rises, you know, that’s up to you.

0:52 Pat
Right, let’s get stuck in pen and paper at the ready. This is episode 86 of the business anchors podcast.

1:11 Dan
This sounds so boring. Lloyd, why should anchors continue listening to an episode about tax.

1:18 Lloyd
It is not going to be boring. And I’ll tell you what I tell if you run a business, you probably are either running a lifestyle business. So basically a business at the size that you as an owner can have a nice lifestyle, making enough money and having the things you want for you and your family to have a lovely life.

Or you’re trying to scale your business to be massive, make loads of money and be like a gazillionaire both require you to make as much money as you can. In reality, just one you reinvest more than the others.

1:55 Dan
Okay.

1:56 Lloyd
And if you can plan your tax effectively, every single year, you can have loads more money.

2:06 Dan
Okay.

2:06 Lloyd
Does that make sense?

And I guess why I’m more excited than you and everyone listening is because we’ve recently gone through a process of basically looking at our taxes and seeing what we can do.
And if we’re doing things right and efficiently and all that sort of thing, and found out that we weren’t and our business could save a huge, huge amount of money that we can reinvest into our team or equipment or more.
Or we could be greedy business owners, and just take it all. Ah, my phone’s ringing, but it’s not supposed to be on vibrate. p>

2:49 Dan
So we’ve got a bit of a history with accountants have my Lloyd.

2:53 Lloyd
Yes. So we had an old account, that was absolutely rubbish.

2:58 Dan
And we did a podcast episode about episode 19 are all accountants rubbish, and we pissed off a lot of accountants didn’t we?

3:05 Lloyd

Accountants and people that have loved ones that are accountants saw the title and got angry. But if they’d have listened or watched, they’d see that we were saying like, our one has been rubbish.
And we were shocked. And going into what we heard about brilliant accountants we’ve now switched. This was years ago now but to Telford’s accountants.

3:37 Dan
Mark Telford who’s bloody good.

3.39 Lloyd
Legend. And I couldn’t think more highly about our accountants at you know, they’ve helped us with this kind of thing that we’re going to be talking about and helped us in a lot of ways and a proactive in helping us have what we need to grow our business.

3:54 Dan
Go to Telford’s if you want good accountants, everyone.</p

3:57Lloyd
Call to action, accountants. But seriously, also like DM me and Dan, if you want to get put in touch with Mark Telford if you want better accountant stuff because they’re brilliant.

4:07 Dan
Do you know how I know how excited you are about this episode?

4:11 Lloyd
No?

4:12 Dan

Because when I went to sneak off for a sneaky McDonald’s the other week, and just have some time to myself, sometimes I like to do thatp>

4:20 Lloyd
You do, more often than I, I first thought actually.

4:23 Dan
You just wouldn’t stop ringing me and telling me about these things we can do to be better with our tax.

4:30 Lloyd
Yeah, no. And it sounds boring. But the more I was discovering, imagine, you know, we work we all work so hard. The team here and we as business owners work hard to try and make sure the business makes enough profit to be viable and to grow and for us all to earn more and work on the more exciting stuff.

And I was just discovering more and more things like oh, imagine just finding out this year, we could have an extra 3000 pounds, think how hard that we usually work to make 3000 pounds, but it was just a fairly simple thing we needed to do to make that happen.

5:04 Dan
Just to clarify, for me the stupid person. Yeah, this isn’t avoiding taxes we’re not like telling people to do sneaky stuff, though.

5:13 Lloyd
Interesting. You say avoiding tax, Dan, some of it might be.

5:17 Dan
Oh, okay.

5:18 Lloyd
But to be clear. Okay. Just so no one thinks we’re busy, busy? We are busy, I was meant to say dodgy. We’re not doing anything illegal. And I don’t think we’re doing anything immoral. You can judge that. But just to be clear, okay, I’ve written this down One thing, tax planning.

5:44 Dan
Okay, is that what we’re doing now?

5:45 Lloyd
This is the main thing that we’re doing tax planning. So listen to the definition of tax planning. As part of good governance, companies will seek to minimise their tax liability through tax planning, making the most of the tools and mechanisms which the government makes available to them specifically for this purpose, allowances, deductions, rebates, exemptions, etc.
They all make choices about how to pursue their business goals in the light of all the implications, which include the tax consequences. Okay, that’s tax planning, which is mainly what we’re talking about. So the government says, we tax you on these things, and we allow you to do these things, and it’s going oh you allow us to do those things to help us grow our business, we will be allowed to do that.
Oh, you tax this thing? Okay, we’ll be careful not to do too much of that and get tax loads. So that’s tax planning. I think everyone I spoke to agrees. Good idea. We weren’t doing well enough. We’re going to talk about it. Next Level tax avoidance.

6:45 Dan
Oh, that doesn’t sound as good.

6:47 Lloyd
Final level. Okay. Tax avoidance is more of a grey issue. The term tax avoidance is used to refer to legitimate, but maybe aggressive use of things such as financial instruments and other arrangements to obtain a tax result not intended. Or anticipated by the government. The use of overseas tax havens is one example. Most of the debate about tax avoidance has centred on the taxes businesses pay on their profits, corporation tax in the UK, but other taxes can also be affected, including VAT.

7:20 Dan
So that’s not illegal, but it’s a grey area?.

7:22 Lloyd
No, it’s completely legal. But I suppose the difference in their tax planning is the government’s view of what should be taxed and not. And you going? Oh, yeah, thank you. Thank you. That’s exactly as you say, tax avoidance is going Oh, hang on, let this rule that you cannot be taxed to do that. That’s not what the government intended. But we want to do our best for our business to make sure we can grow and have the money we need to grow. So we’ll make sure we make the most of those.

7:55 Dan
I feel like this goes down to another level.

7:56 Lloyd
There’s s a third level.p>

7:57 Dan
Third level!

7:58 Lloyd
Which to be clear. We are nowhere near and would never consider. Okay. Tax avoidance is different to tax evasion.
This refers to a situation where a company tries to reduce tax liability by falsely suppressing income or inflating expenditure, recording fictitious transactions, etc. evasion is fundamentally illegal. So just to be clear, from those kinds of definitions, tax planning, good idea and sensible, tax avoidance, could be a good idea. A bit of a grey area, though, and morally questionable, worth the debate. Tax evasion is basically, just lying because you’re greedy. p>

8:48 Dan
And I’m glad you saw that right. So the things we’re gonna be talking about in this episode? Don’t go to the bottom?

8:54 Lloyd
No, don’t want to.

8:57 Dan
In the bottom category.

8:58 Lloyd
That could not go down as a business expense. Okay. Would certain industries maybe it could. So what we do and what we talk about not tax evasion, don’t evade tax.

9:12 Dan
Okay. Okay. I think we got it, we got the picture.

9:13 Lloyd
Interesting, though, before we get into these ways of saving you hundreds of 1000s of pounds, which we’re going to do listeners, previously, my personal view, being a brilliant person. Yeah. And you’re just so ethical, brilliant morals. I used to completely steer clear of the tax avoidance, you know, in what I would want to do for the business tax planning. And so that tax avoidance, the middle one, yeah, the middle.

And we weren’t very good at the tax planning the one so we will just be fine. Yeah. But the way I thought about it, I kind of, I mean, the same tax avoidance, I thought, well, that sounds dodgy. We don’t want to be a dodgy business. I mean, never go near there. My views have changed my view guide so people may disagree.
But over the last couple of years, in my personal view, I believe a lot of the ways that we spend money in our business, I think have a bigger positive impact than the way the government spends money. So I used to think, well, we want to pay as much tax as we can, that’s the moral thing to do.
And now, because I feel we’ve got so many positive plans, we have our positive impact plan we’ve been putting together and where we’re trying to do things to positively affect the world and the local community and all this sort of thing.
And I now think my personal view is if we can completely legally reduce some of our tax and spend it in those positive ways and offer people more jobs and that kind of thing. .

10:04 Dan
I guess that only counts if you are spending the money in a good way, though, rather than us taking it.

10:50 Lloyd
If you and I were just taking huge salaries, I would feel differently. I guess you’d have to be on the inside of this to truly know.

11:02 Dan
To some listeners, that could just sound like an excuse. As if we are like we trust ourselves with our money. So we’re not gonna pay as much tax.p>

11:12 Lloyd
I completely agree, it sounds like that. And so I think as business owners only, you know, in reality, if you’re doing it, because you want to earn more money, or because you feel it’s the right thing to do.

11:26 Dan
One of our values at Knowlton is to do the right thing. Are we doing the right thing? I think we are.

11:32 Lloyd
Yeah, that’s why it’s the question, I guess I know, in my mind, from what I currently know, I might learn things or change my opinion. I feel we’re doing the right thing and having the most positive impact we are on the world.

11:44 Dan
So I feel like that’s a really good setup. Yeah, I feel we’ve got a good background. Now. I think all of us want to hear Lloyd, what do we do for effective tax planning? Or what things can we do? Because you’ve called me up and told me loads of stuff.

12:02 Lloyd
So listeners your going to gain some value. For our business from making these changes. We’re projecting a saving of 21,000 pounds.
12:12 Dan
Oh, yeah. Geez.

12:16 Lloyd
So that saving just to be clear, comes from savings that hopefully our employees can make, savings that Dan and I as business owners can make, and savings that the business can make. So those business savings, like I said, depending on what sort of business owner you are, you could just take it all.
Or you could reinvest it into the business, or you could hire more people or you could give people pay rises, you know, that’s up to you. But that’s how this is made up. And thinking about it over 10 years, that’s 200,000 pounds. If your business stays the same size, think about what you do to have an extra 200,000 pounds. Yeah, in the next decade. So now going into it, Dan.

12:56 Dan
Yep.

12:57 Lloyd
Tax, can you tell I love tax?.

13:00 Dan
You’re getting excited by this.

13:01 Lloyd
So I’m just going to go into some of the things that Telford’s accountants have helped us with again, Telford’s accountants are the experts. Speak to us and we’ll put you in touch. Yeah, do we need to do like, this? Isn’t financial advice? Anyone? Yeah. Oh, yeah, we should. Yeah, this Yeah. So I was putting off taking these, I kind of knew that we should, but I was putting off taking these actions previously because there’s lots of important stuff to do in the business. I was thinking, I’ll get to that at some point on my to-do list until I went through it with our accountants and realised there’s a significant difference if we do it this way.
This is not financial advice. We don’t have a clue what we’re doing financial advice. I’m telling you what we’ve done, and what, what we’ve been told to do, and think, Oh, that’s great. Don’t listen to me for advice. This is just purely for entertainment.
Okay. So firstly, I think this is the one that probably most business owners might already do. Yes, I think potentially they don’t. But if you don’t, you need to, so it’s paying yourself in the most tax-efficient way as business owners.
So Dan, and I, how we take our salaries, obviously employees have to be paid by pay normal salary. As business owners, there are different options. So there’s a 2000 pounds a year dividend allowance.
So as a business owner, each individual can take 2000 pounds out completely tax-free. And that’s, that’s on top of the 12 and a half 1000 that you can take completely tax-free for through tax-free through your normal pay salary. So that’s a yes thing.

14:48 Dan
So that’s like 14,000 not taxed.

14:50 Lloyd
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, for most people, it makes sense to pay yourself the low salary of 12 and a half. And take the rest of whatever you want to make up your salary in dividends. And so I encourage people to look at that because, on dividends, you don’t pay things like National Insurance and employers’ national insurance.
And I was shocked about how much that equates to Dan and me, and also Dan, and I haven’t even we haven’t increased our salary because of that. We’ve just kept it the same. But with the changes we’ve made, we’ve got a chunk of money left in the business each month, that would have previously been taxed.
And again, this is all this is just doing completely legal things and finding the way you’re advised to do not advice by me, though, not financial advice. So simple but effective.

15:48 Dan
So that’s the one that most people will probably already be doing. But if you’re not as that’s the biggest one that does that.

15:53 Lloyd
Because that’s something quickly you can change whoever’s doing your payroll or if you’re doing it yourself, you can kind of Google, there’s Google comparison of pay and dividends, and there are calculators to work out for you. So really easy.

16:09 Dan

Cool.

16:10 Lloyd
Do you want the second one?

16:11 Dan
Give me the second one Lloyd. Save me money.

16:12 Lloyd
Maximise the company’s private pension contributions. So pension?
This one, I was really, again so sound simple, and it’s probably listening to thinking do that. But for our pensions, Dan, we can have a private pension and put money into that pension, and it counts as a cost to the business. So rather than us attack ladies, so before anything’s taxed, it gets paid into our pension.

So when we’re oldies, we can have a life, hopefully. But if you think about it, if the employer is making that contribution if our businesses, that also means that we make less profit, to get down counts as a cost. So effectively, and again, there might be limits on this I’m not aware of, but if you just put all of your profit into your pension into the pension, there wouldn’t be any tax to pay on your profit, because the company has limits on that, though, potentially. Okay.

Not business advice. But are there any limits? Yeah, but certainly at the level we are, we’re not, we’re not fancy, we’re not millionaires, we’re not operating extremely high level. It’s it saved us a significant amount. Doing it that way, Dan, and I previously was, were paying into pensions as kind of employees from our contributions, as well as the employer contribution, like with all of our team, but didn’t realise that that’s, I think that can pay more into a pension.

Yes, and the thing with that, obviously, boring advice, pension is always a good thing to put money into. But if you think like this saving that Dan and I realised can be made that that can either allow us to put more money in our pension, but, overall, our financial situation not change. Or we can have more money in the business, both over the long period long, long term could have a huge effect.

So if you think if we put more into our pension now, because that’s invested and over time, fingers crossed, that will increase supply, if we put, you know, if there’s an extra 200 pounds a month in your pension in over the years that have a huge that can equate to an extra, lots of money.
So positive. Or if, if you just leave that money in the business, that’s kind of the extra that you’re saving, you can reinvest that. And I think as business owners, if you’re a sensible business owner, rather than just taking the profit out, you’ll be reinvesting any money that’s left in the business. So if like I said, all these savings, equate to 20,000 this year, we can reinvest that into our business by either paying our team more or hiring someone new or getting new gear and then that money can multiply by two by five by 10 over the years.

So pay yourself in the right way, as a business owner, pay more into your pension. Number three, we got the three I didn’t realise this sort of thing, probably obvious life insurance. So anyone that’s homeowners, usually people end up getting life insurance as part of their mortgage is a requirement by most lenders, I think. So basically, if one of us dies, hopefully, most of your mortgage gets paid off your family is hopefully okay and that kind of thing.

Again, I didn’t realise this could be as business owners, we can pay this through the business. So again, we pay for it before we’re personally taxed on that money. So we save that and because the company paying for it again, it’s a cost to the business. So the company makes less profit and pays less tax on profits. So double whammy again. And simple just to change. You know, you can be your current life insurance policy and change the account that it’s coming from and include it as a business.

20:20 Dan
Makes sense, yeah.

20:21 Lloyd
Boring and effective.

20:23 Dan
So pay your life insurance through the company. That’s the third one. Cool.

20:26 Lloyd
Yeah. Simple.

20:28 Dan
I need to change mine, then I need to do that.

20:30 Lloyd
Yeah, both of us do. We’re planning to do tax planning. Yeah.

20:35 Dan
Number four number. Save us more money Lloyd.

20:37 Lloyd
This one, I like trivial benefits, because it’s beneficial for you as business owners and your employees. And I think it’s something that we’re planning to utilise as much as we possibly can. And helps everyone involved, which is good.
So these are trivial benefits. So basically, this is anything except cash, that’s less than 50 pounds. That can be given as gifts to the team. So is that items, vouchers, or, I think, an example of this that we’ve done recently, one of our employees moved home. And as a business, we wanted to get a moving housewarming gift
So if we were to give him a bonus, or she could be anyone, they would be taxed on that. Yeah, so if we were like, oh, you know, this person’s working hard, they’re moving house, and we’d like to give them a little bonus in their pay packet, they’re going to be taxed, our business is a cost to us, it would still be our they’re going to be taxed.
So they’re going to get less value, we’re going to pay more employers National Insurance, they’re going to pay more national insurance. Whereas if you’re doing it this way, if you could get perhaps a gift card, as long as it’s less than 50 pounds or a maximum of 50 pounds, it counts as business costs.
So the business makes 50 pounds less profit, which is the same as before, but the business doesn’t pay employees national insurance, and the person who receives that gift doesn’t pay, it still gets the full 50-pound value.

22:24 Dan
And what’s that called again Sorry?

22:25 Lloyd
Trivial benefit, trivial benefit. So I believe, this isn’t financial advice, check yourself a limit of 300 pounds per year for direct. So I and Dan couldn’t just pay for ourselves and gift cards. We could get 300 pounds a year that way.
But I think employees don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think that limit counts. So this doesn’t have to be gift cards, that’s just obviously a good way of passing value to your employees without them being taxed. But this could be wine, this could be…

22:59 Dan
Cigarettes?

23:00 Lloyd
I’m not sure, if I assume it probably, I don’t know, or you know, chocolates, or whatever. But you know, presents that your employees would appreciate most, they can get the value without being taxed, and the company saves money. So we’re going to try and make the most of this. Okay, I think that’s a good one because it affects everyone. Yeah, positively feel benefits. Love it.

23:23 Dan
Okay. Is that a four? So number five?

23:25 Lloyd
Number five, there’s a load that I won’t go into as much detail but five childcare? So yeah, just this but you know, those things in business, you kind of thing I’ve heard is I don’t know how it works, and all that kind of thing. So if you’ve got employees that currently pay anything up to 2000 pounds for childcare, you can set up a scheme that comes out of the business account and comes out of their pay packet before they get it. That saves them.
So that salary sacrifice scheme for childcare allows for up to 2000 pounds of childcare for anyone in the business to be paid by the business and therefore paid before tax. So again, that usually equates to like a 20% saving on that.
. So if you’ve got employees that currently pay anything up to 2000 pounds for childcare, you can set up a scheme that comes out of the business account and comes out of their pay packet before they get it. That saves them.

24:09 Dan
I’ve done this recently.

24:10 Lloyd
We’ve done this for Dan, and anyone on our team in the future that has children and want childcare, we’ll be offering that.

24:17 Dan
So you’re saving 20% On what you’d normally pay for childcare.

24:21 Lloyd
Yeah. So this is the benefit to the employees or us as business owners 20% of childcare, which I think is if that is possible to give to your employees, why wouldn’t you? Yeah. So I think that’s a brilliant one. And, parents that are employees, they’ve got a lot going on a lot to manage. If you want them to perform at their best, you want them to be able to have great childcare for their children and not worry about the financial impact. So any help I think it’s really good and as business owners, we have the same ability to do that. Yes. So good. Quickfire round?
And, parents that are employees, they’ve got a lot going on a lot to manage. If you want them to perform at their best, you want them to be able to have great childcare for their children and not worry about the financial impact. So any help I think it’s really good and as business owners, we have the same ability to do that. Yes. So good. Quickfire round?

24:59 Dan
Yeah, go on.

25:00 Lloyd
So speak to Telford’s accountants to help you with this and switch them. Because they’re brilliant.

25:05 Dan
We did like a review thing. And they gave us tonnes of these things, right? Yeah. And we’ve got plans.

25:10 Lloyd
We got far more than we’re talking about now. And like I said, a mixture of things that can positively affect our employees, us as business owners and the business in general. So really positive for everyone involved. And it may be, I think, we had a lot to learn and improve a lot.
It may be that you already do most of these, but there’ll be two or three things that might, for example, we don’t currently want to have electric company cars. But I found out that if you’re looking to get an electric car, doing it through the company, like a company car, is currently quite a good way of doing it to save money. Not so much on our normal cars. But there are things like that different things will be relevant to different businesses.

Mobile phones, again, if you’re not doing it through the business, make sure you are a simple, stupid thing, but you can charge it through the business. If you’re using it for the business. Most of you probably will be. Homeworking costs.
So I won’t go into details, not financial advice. But if you’re using your home as an office, there are lots of benefits that you can claim and that kind of thing to make sure they go through the business. Yeah. Previously your spare room might have been part of your home. So you’d have the cost. Now, if you’re using it as an office, there are lots of ways.

26:33 Dan
What if you wanted a bed, and you work from your bed?

26:38 Lloyd
I think I think that will be controversial. I mean, not financial advice if you genuinely worked from your bed.

26:48 Dan
I think you’re mental first of all.

26:50 Lloyd
So first of all, it’s strange. But I think that would be the sort of thing that will count as a business expense. Yeah, like we’re saying, we’re not encouraging these attacks and just buying your bed, because you want to.
But I would assume if you genuinely worked from it, it would be a thing, but not financial advice. As I said, electric company cars cycle to work schemes, so the team can have discounts on bikes and bikes can be paid through the business and paid back over time. Mileage claims and congestion charge if you’re travelling, lots of things like that, that are smaller, but all add up, loads more stuff. Sorry for talking about taxes.
But I do think the fact that like I’m saying the changes we’re making, even if the business stays the same size, will potentially be the same as 200,000. If the business grows, they may save us half a million in the next year, just mental. You know, well, more than that, which is a huge impact.
So I would encourage you, even if you’re a smaller business if maybe there’s two or three of you, and it might just be oh, we should be paying our life insurance through the business and our mobile phones. That might save you a few quid this month, but over the next 10 years, that’s gonna save you loads.

28:10 Dan
I think he’s made up for not being in the last episode, but I’m sure the listeners are happy for you to be back Lloyd.

28:20 Lloyd
Well, I’m not sure I’ve just come in whether it was a really dry subject.

28:23 Dan
No, but it’s good to chuck in a crap episode, now and again, that’s value-adding.

28:29 Lloyd
Thank you. I just want to be clear as well, two things. We do not finance people. So we’ve been talking about what we’ve learned. But please don’t take any drastic action. Don’t action, any of the advice we’ve shared without doing your research and that kind of thing. But also, as I said, our accountants are excellent and I’d highly recommend them Telford’s Accountants.

28:54 Dan
Genuinely Yes.

28:55 Lloyd
And like I said, either look, look them up and say Lloyd and Dan sent us here. We don’t have like a deal or anything. We don’t make any money. We’re just trying to be good people. Or come to us and we can connect you with Mark.

29:12 Dan
Mark if you’re listening to our accountant, obviously this is a free promo for you. So we’ll be expecting a discount on our accountancy fees in the future.

29:20 Lloyd
Yeah, that’s the real reason why we’re doing this. All these positive actions to help people, trying to pressure people. Next week, we’ll be doing an episode on how good our cleaners are if they give us a half-price discount.
Yeah, so thank you, Telford’s, accountants for being brilliant, and for all of our suppliers that are helpful. And thank you for listening guys. Hope you enjoy that. Sorry, it was about tax. The next one will probably be more interesting because Dan’s talking about stuff

29:54 Dan
Yeah. Next week, we’re going to be talking about how we’ve developed our new marketing communications guide that everyone in marketing a business should be creating for their business.

Hopefully this has been useful and taught you a little more about how you can save tax with effective tax planning, potentially saving you thousands of pounds. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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Marketing Plan Template: How To Create A Marketing Communications Guide

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Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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If you haven’t created a Marketing Communications Guide, you’re at risk of having inconsistent communication & messaging to the outside world! Creating this has been a game-changer for us & in this episode we break down exactly how we produced ours, so that you have everything you need to make your own. This is great as part of a Marketing Plan template.

Timestamps

00:00 – 01:08 Intro
01:09 – 05:10 What is a Marketing Communications Guide?
05:11 – 06:50 How a Marketing Communications Guide is used and what it’s used for
06:51 – 11:38 The 3 parts of the Marketing Communications Guide
11:39 – 17:30 What to include in a Content Checklist
17:31 – 23:59 What to include in a Brand Guide
24:00 – 25:50 What to include in a Brand Checklist
25:51 – 27:50 Why you should make a Marketing Communications Guide
27:51- 27:52 Outro
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Transcript

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. What on earth is a marketing communications guide? Well, today Dan and Lloyd are talking brand guidelines, and what outlining your brand identity on paper can do for you and your team’s.

0:14 Dan
This whole thing is super important for new team members because how on earth are they to know how to communicate to the outside world.
0:21 Lloyd
It’s gonna save you time from saying this over and over again to different people.

0:25 Pat
Now, when it comes to social media content, consistency is key, especially when it’s the image your company is projecting to the outside world. So having these guidelines in place will ensure that every piece of content you create fits perfectly within the bigger picture.

0:40 Dan
Describe adjectives that your company’s personality is not.

0:44 Lloyd
Well, we’re certainly not rude, dismissive, boastful, or unethical. Are we?

0:47 Dan
What are we, Lloyd?

0:49Lloyd
I’d say with fun, intelligent, ethical and creative.

0:54 Pat
So what can developing a marketing communications guide do for you? Stay tuned to find out. Right, let’s get stuck in. This is episode 87 of the business anchors podcast.

1:018 Lloyd
What on earth is a marketing communications guide then? And why is it worth us listening to this episode?

1:24 Dan
Well, that’s a good question. What a marketing communications guide. I think different people describe it in different ways. But for us, it’s an instruction manual for everyone that works for our company to know how to communicate with the outside world, and internally, with anyone and everyone so that we’re all consistently communicating in the same way and getting the same messages across to the world.

1:50 Lloyd
Cool, that was very good.

1:53 Dan
Does that make sense, though? It’s like, yeah, it’s a guide to show how we should be speaking what kind of perception we want people to think about us what things we want to communicate.?

2:03 Lloyd

I think the massive positive is the long term effect, that consistent messaging to the world over time, I guess puts you where you want to be over time.

2:14 Dan
Yeah. And I guess a quick backstory as to why we’re doing this. So if you don’t know already, every month, we have like a management meeting where we review our performance. And a couple of months ago, I had a bit of a bad month. And you were kind of kicking me up the ass to improve with our marketing, which is a good thing you do? to help improve?.

2.36 Lloyd
Yeah, it happens the other way around, sometimes.

2:39 Dan
And one of the things is like we’re not consistently communicating, the whole marketing and everyone involved was quite disjointed. I was doing certain things, other people in the team were doing other things.
And it was purely down to me, not creating some kind of guidance to help the team to ensure we’re all aligned on the way we communicate. So from that meeting, I then scheduled time to create this communications Guide, which is an instructions manual for our team, like I mentioned.
And I’ve got that communications guide to hand. And I thought, as always with business anchors, we want to help you the listeners to improve in marketing your business. And this has been a huge benefit to us. And I thought why not share the process we went through to develop this and give some examples of how we’re doing it so that you can create your own communications guide.

3:32 Lloyd
I think it’s so useful once you go into the detail you realise with this, there are so many different ways that you communicate with the outside world that affect what people think of your business. And especially as we’ve been growing and new people have been starting and stuff like Dan said, we have several people communicating with the outside world whether it’s intentionally as in I’m posting something on social media, or whether it’s kind of the more passive thing of like I’m on a video shoot with a client and I’m chatting to them.
Yeah, to have those consistent messages of like, This is who we are this is what we do. This is how we help people is really important. I’m just thinking it’s my no it’s not about how we look I wondering if my rubbish beard communicates anything negative.

3:36 Dan
No, but.

3:56 Lloyd
Oh, that makes it sound like it does.

4:13 Dan

No, no, no, it’s not that kind of like okay, we don’t want to become you know, so intrusive to our team that you have to wear a certain you know, we’re very much like come to work with what makes you comfortable. Yeah, it’s more the way you’re communicating and speaking and engaging with the outside world.

4:38 Lloyd
Do you know what annoyed me about, sorry, just a quick tangent? Yesterday, we played squash together. Walking out and someone we know because what is it beard vember annoyed me because I thought if anything it’s barch. Funny when this goes out it’s bapril. I mean, if your late this episode, potentially bune or buly, not beardvember.

5:00 Dan
I could tell though, because of Movember, you know, the thing you grow a tash for charity, I think, yeah.

5:07 Lloyd
Bapril mate. Anyway, sorry, continue.

5:11 Dan
So, um, what I want to do is break down the different kinds of sections to this guide and give some insight into I’m reread some of it to give you insight into what our drive looks like. So a few different parts, the first part I developed was the guide purpose, because whoever is reading this guide needs to understand how it’s used and what is used for..

5:43 Lloyd
Could be a new employee.

5:38 Dan
I was gonna say, I think this whole thing is super important for new team members. Because how on earth are they to know how to communicate to the outside world if they’ve never shown been shown how to.

5:51 Lloyd
It’s gonna save you time from saying this over and over again to different people.

5:54 Dan
Yeah. So just to give you an insight into what ours says, The purpose of this document is to function as a guide for every way Knowlton communicates to the outside world. This could be content, videos, copy for posts, images, podcasts, so anything we produce that is seen by the public, it could be polite communication, basically, the way we speak to clients, you know, in person, or over zoom, etc.
Or it could be any other communication to the outside world, for example, speaking to people you meet at an event, or speaking to actors, or speaking to people who own locations, we’re trying to hire like anything. And again, we were talking from a marketing video production company site. But if you’re an accountant, or if you’re a cleaner.

6:40 Lloyd
Speaking to customers speaking to your suppliers, posting on social media, it could be anyone you deal with as a business, which usually there are loads of people.

6:51 Dan
Yeah. So that’s a bit of the kind of guide purpose, then the actual meat of the guide is broken down into three parts. So we’ve got.

7:03 Lloyd
Weird you said meat?

7:06 Dan
The meat of this Knowlton content checklist and I’ll explain what those in a second, Knowlton brand guide and Knowlton brands checklist.

7:07 Lloyd
Oh, interesting.

7:08 Dan
So our content checklist is basically, and I’ll go through the points in a second is a checklist for every piece of content we produce, needs to be hitting these points to ensure it’s at the standard that we want it to be. And I’m gonna I’ll go through those.

7:32 Lloyd
And this is great. Like we said, for the team, because running a business, you want your team to have all the tools that they need to do the best job they can. And most of the time they want that too. It’s quite hard if you just go do this and make it good, but they don’t have guidance or the tools they need.

7:50 Dan
I’m the kind of person that works better when I’ve got more guidance to ensure that I’m doing the thing. So yeah.
So and then the second part is the Knowlton brand guide. You see when we get into this, but really, it’s a case of like, what is our personality? What are the what’s our vision, what are we focusing on that we want to get across so that people get a real feel for the type of company we are, you know, how corporate? Are we super corporate? or are we laid back and chilled, like, what vibe are we going for?.
And this has implications on the language we use when we’re speaking? Or the language we use when we’re creating content?.

7:59 Lloyd
And we worked backwards with this? Didn’t we? So started at basically what do we want the world to think about? Knowlton? Yeah, if you think ideally, like our clients, potential customers, followers online, when we say like, oh, who are Knowlton? How do you want to be described? How do you want your business to be described and work backwards from that?.

8:43 Dan
On that note, a really important point is that with this is it has to be true to you. Like you can’t just say you want to be perceived as this thing that completely isn’t what you are. So it needs to be super aligned. We started by having this session where we were like, what are we and what do we want to be?

9:03 Lloyd
I think that’s important! What do we want to be, there may be things that you aspire to you like in if you have a meeting about this, you might be saying we want people think were fun. If you’re not fun at the moment, I think first take the actions to try and be fun. I think just saying it and then communicating it to the world.
You might get some short-term benefits, but people will see through it. So it’s fine to say that’s what we want to be. But take the actions before you shout about it too much.

9:32 Dan
I think I believe we are fun. So we unintentionally do that through the content we create and the behind the scenes videos we make of our shoots and our Tiktok’s to show the kind of culture here.

09:45 Lloyd
Oh, we laugh, don’t we?

09:46 Dan
So I think yeah, I guess if you’re not fun, then try and do something.

09:51 Lloyd
It’s quite harsh to think of yourself as not fun. More thinking like a business in general. There are loads of businesses there. You wouldn’t describe it as fun you know. Some businesses have to not be fun. And there are other focuses. So it’s okay if you’re thinking my business isn’t fun.

10:06 Dan
I mean, I said, okay, though, I’d like to work for the fun company?

10:09 Lloyd
Well, we would. Yeah, we’re probably a small part of the business landscape.

10:15 Dan
So yeah, so then the third part is the Knowlton brands checklist. Now, this is something that you had input with to make sure we’re doing this. And this is the key things Knowlton, we want to be known for the key, you know, when people are watching our videos, reading a copy of our posts, what messages do we want to get across to the outside world.

10:44 Lloyd
And that comes from our business goals. So I know Dan you’ll go into detail and things. But we’ve got goals of becoming the most creative agency in the UK. So we’ve got things in place of how we can maximise creativity coming out of our business, and therefore that’s something we want to communicate.
So I think, try and relate it to what you’re trying to achieve, rather than just going oh, do you know what I want my business to seem fun. It’s like is that related to your business goals? For us? It is we’re trying to maximise how much Dan and I and our team enjoy coming to work. And that is a massive part of it.
. So the fun has to be part of that to make it worthwhile. But if that’s not one of your goals, don’t feel like you have to say that’s one of the things I think related to what’s important to you and your business.

11:37 Dan
Yeah, definitely. So to go into the real nitty-gritty from each of these three sections now, the first one, the Knowlton content checklist, we did an episode, a deep dive into this recently, I can’t remember the episode. But it was, I usually remember the episode, it was one of the recent ones before this, about creating good content. So there’s the checklist, there are 1234567 things that we want our content to be hitting every time so first..

12:10 Lloyd
We remember this with the acronym, don’t we?

12:17 Dan
So we did try to come up with an acronym, but it didn’t work. Reonvtv. There weren’t any vowels in there. So yeah. Relatable? Is this piece of content relatable to the target market? Will they be nodding along when they’re consuming this piece of content? Super, super important
. The next one, emotion triggering does it trigger some kind of emotion? Does it make the viewer feel something? Does it make them? You took the piss out of me last time I said this? Because I said does it make them feel entertained?.

12:54 Lloyd
That is not an emotion.?.

12:56 Dan
Does it? Make them laugh, cry?

13:01 Lloyd
I think you don’t need to be thinking like, hang on to this picture I’m posting on Instagram. Instagram isn’t going to make people cry. So I’m not going to post though it can be. It doesn’t have every piece. It doesn’t have to be a really strong emotion of like crying or laughing? With absolute joy.

13:18 Dan
I like to think like, what noise? Will this make someone? Will this piece of content make someone mad? So the next one on brand? Is it in line with what is outlined in your notes in your story brand? Communications guide? Is it on-brand for you? Is it getting the right kind of vibe across? If you’re super corporate, you don’t be using acronyms and like cool words like lol.

13:49 Lloyd
I was gonna say I’m looking forward to a cool word lol.

13:52 Dan
I mean, you like we like to come across as very non-corporate. And yes, we are talking the way that you speak. Whereas lawyers might want to be very formal and talk correctly. The next one is native, is it built for the platform that is being distributed on? Understanding each of the different platforms is super important when you’re creating a piece of content, like, for example, you wouldn’t put a highly produced TV ad on Tik Tok because it’s not going to work.
Because much lower produced low production value content that taps into trends worked better on Tik Tok, and some of those things could harm what people think of you. Yeah. So if the content you’re putting out looks like you haven’t put the effort in or you don’t know what you’re doing that could probably more from a marketing perspective, like ours.
For most businesses, like you could genuinely put a million pound TV ad on tiktok, and it would perform worse than a video that one your team is shot with your phone that’s tapping into a trend that the sounds going viral at the time.

The next one value-adding is it adding. Any kind of value-adding, this is a crucial one, looking at the piece of content of the copywriting and asking yourself, what is someone getting from this? I think, again, us as an agency, we’ve improved this a lot recently. Because before we would say, you know, even with copy, we’d sort of say, Oh, here’s the thing, we did look at it. Oh, yeah.

Whereas now we’re like, here’s the thing we did, here’s an insight into how we did that thing that you can learn from, we learn this thing, step one, step two, step three.

15:26 Lloyd
Thinking about the other side of the content, the people looking at it, watching it, listening to it, rather than because we want to because we’re excited by the work we do. And our team, we want to just go look at this thing we’re doing. Because to us, it’s exciting. And it might be to some people, but like, you’re saying, You need to think of the person on the other end of that. Does that excite them? Or entertain them? Or do we need a different angle to make sure it’s value-adding?

15:49 Dan

That’s why empathy is so important with marketing. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

15:54 Lloyd
In our team, we’re just going, Oh, this is so exciting work on this project. If someone outside of it doesn’t feel that, then probably not that excited, probably not know.?

16:03 Dan
The next one is thumb-stopping. So obviously, people on social are constantly scrolling. What about that piece of content is making them stop scrolling to look at it, like a video, the first three seconds are key, we focus on creating hooks in a video. So something visually engaging, or something that’s communicating something key that they’re going to learn from consuming that piece of intriguing, intriguing.

16:12 Lloyd
So I’m gonna talk about something that saved me a million pounds and made me grow a foot in

16:37 Dan
I want to watch that video.

16:38 Lloyd
Yeah, believe me. So do i.

16:42 Dan
The final call to action in juicing, you need to tell people what to do at the end of that piece of content because people need reminding. So if it’s two, let us know what you think in the comments below. Or if it’s subscribing, or if it’s gone and listen to the business anchors podcast or leave us a review.

17:02 Lloyd
Yeah, which you should. Oh, dan we need to think of ‘Reonvtv’ before we go to the call to action.

17:12 Dan
Yes. Okay. We’ll think of ‘Reonvtv’. So yeah, just remember, say it together.

17:22 Lloyd
I mean, our team will just never forget it, because it’s so memorable.

17:24 Dan
So that’s the Knowlton content checklist. The next one is the Knowlton brand guide. Now, this is a lot more lengthy. So I’m not going to bore you all by going through this whole thing.

17:38 Lloyd
Oh, thank God, we had tax last week.

17:40 Dan
Excuse me. You were talking about tax and it was incredibly boring.

17:45 Lloyd
We can’t do it two weeks in a row, can we?
17:47 Dan
But just to give you an idea, so the kinds of headlines we’re going for in this in the brand guide. Our core values, notice core values, our core focus for the business, our 10-year target our brand voice. So just to give you an idea of I think it’d be good to share our values. What did Knowlton care about? Lloyd? Why don’t you share some of our core values?

18:06 Lloyd
Okay, I’ve worked hard on these. Number one, do what you say. Number two, strive to be the best. Number three, do the right thing. Number four, find improvements in everything. And number five, have fun and stay weird.

18:25 Dan
I like you’re reading voice.
Um, but some other interesting things in the kind of brand voice side of things, that there are questions that you can answer, I’ll just read out these questions so you can create your version of this. So if your company was a person, what kind of personality would it have?

18:46 Lloyd
Probably exactly mine. That’s was everyone aims for right.

18:50 Dan
How does your company make you feel? And how do you want it to make other people feel? Hmm, if your company was a person? What’s their relationship to the consumer? What are the brand voices you admire? Describe adjectives of what your company’s personality is? These are all questions you can answer to get a vibe.

19:10 Lloyd
If you’re thinking as well like I’m just imagining, right, a new employee starting their first week within your business. And they’re looking at this and I think it gives them such a good guide to doing the best that they can do.
The question is what are the brand voices denoted admire? Or do your business admire and some options there? A new employee can look at that company’s communications and think okay, so this is the sort of thing we’re aspiring to be such a good, good way of doing things and showing them what they need to do.

19:45 Dan
So you’re saving 20% On what you’d normally pay for childcare.
So this is how we describe our personality. Knowlton would be the funny guy or gal who uses their intellect to be witty in exactly the right way in all situations. Knowlton doesn’t tell childish jokes or not and subtly communicates credibility through relevant witty humour.

20:12 Lloyd
Oh, I like it. I think I might need to cut down the childish jokes. That’s one thing. Yeah. I mean, this isn’t just for new employees. I’m learning. So, yeah, yeah, I like that. I’ve read this before, but it’s nice to be reminded.

20:32 Dan
Cool just to flip the page final page. The final few questions in this guide that you need to answer describe adjectives what your company’s personality is describing adjectives what your company’s personality is not.

20:47 Lloyd
Well were certainly not rude. dismissive. boastful is unethical..

20:150 Dan
I mean, what are we, Lloyd?

20:52 Lloyd
I’d say with fun, intelligent, ethical and creative.

20:56 Dan
Good reading, honestly.

20:58 Lloyd
I think that that’s, that’s good as well, having like three or four of that, rather than do this massive list. That gives you a good idea of who we are and who we’re not. Like the whole, like just saying we’re not boastful.
I think if you had to put a social media post out about something that we’d achieved to be like, Okay, actually, we were not boastful. So we don’t want to be like, Look at what we’re doing. We’re so good. But we do want to be fun and creatively do this. Yeah, good, good work.

21:33 Dan
And then this, this finishes off. This part of the brand guide finishes off with just some do’s and don’ts. And I think this is keeping it simple for especially new team members. So let me just share some of these with you.
So Knowlton do’s, show fun and witty personality in the copyright whilst also demonstrating we’re not just funny. We’re also highly clued up when it comes to marketing. I think this is something when it comes to our personality is fun, and that kind of thing. We don’t just want to come across as stupid like just cheap jokes.

Yeah, we genuinely understand that by being more fun and entertaining you guys are gonna listen and watch for longer so that we can get the key messages that we want to get across. Yeah, like Nelson’s the best marketing company you could ever work with us that kind of thing.

22:19 Lloyd
I don’t think they noticed.

22:22 Dan
The next one, use relevant pop culture references and slang where possible, without trying to sound like a dad trying to be cool.

22:29 Lloyd
Oh, that’s tough for me.

22:30 Dan
That’s why you probably stay away from this kind of area Lloyd because you are the dad that is trying to be cool.

22:55 Lloyd
Yeah. Okay. But then I don’t know, some of the other team, my BFFs in the office probably do well with it.

22:48 Dan
Another do be kind and complimentary. Always.

22:51 Lloyd
And that’s a really good point, Dan. Well done..

22:54 Dan
Thank you, Lloyd. You’re brilliant. And the final one, writing away that oozes intelligence and adds value. Ask yourself, what is someone gaining from reading or watching this? Who’s his intelligence?

23:09 Lloyd
Someone’s remembering their creative writing classes in primary school..

23:13 Dan
Just to end with the big don’ts. Don’t be rude. Don’t say anything that would show a lack of knowledge of marketing. And don’t argue.

23:21 Lloyd
That’s so simple. Don’t argue, with someone online saying you don’t know what you’re doing in marketing. And us going we do because of this. Yeah, that makes sound stupid. Also, someone on a shoot going, do you know what we should do? We should probably just bury these plastic bottles, rather than argue with them.
Yeah, and say that you that is a rubbish thing. So that’s not we can just say, Oh, actually, we’d rather recycle. We prefer to recycle or not even use them. But thank you for your input.

23:52 Dan
That’s exactly how you’d react. And the final part of this the not the kind of brand checklist. So this is the key. The key message, we want to get to the outside world. So with everything we do, we want to be communicating at least one of these things. So shall I give you an example of some of them? Okay. Let’s take a look at a couple.
This is a really, this is the really big one. Knowlton is focused on having a positive impact on everyone, our clients, their customers, our employees, the world, our local community. So with everything we do, we want to be thinking, are we communicating that we were having a positive impact because it currently you’re developing a positive impact plan, which is a real, tangible action plan to implement that.
So that’s one thing. Another one, Knowlton is trusted by some of the biggest brands in the world. But the biggest and most well-known brands in the world. We’ve worked with the likes of wolfy for Nestle, etc.
I think we spoke about milking them top 10% previously, but this is a big part of how we attract the biggest brands in the world to work with. By showing our best work with other household name brands.

25:05 Lloyd
And when you look at this, it’s so obvious like why you would be why you’d have a list like this to make sure we’re communicating the right things like, of course, if we’re communicating that we work with some of the biggest and well-known brands in the world. That’s, of course, we want to be doing that all the time.
If we’re communicating, we’re, we have about our positive impact plan and how we want to have a positive impact on everyone in the world. Why wouldn’t you want to communicate that? I think without a guide like this, there are so many options of what you could write what you could say, what you could communicate this, this is a real focus on making sure the business gets a real benefit from how we’re communicating with the outside world.

25:45 Dan
Yeah. And that’s it. That’s the end of the guide. Hopefully, you found this more interesting, than Lloyd’s episode on tax last week

25:54 Lloyd
Hopefully, because there are probably only about three people listening to that one.

26:00 Dan
But yeah, no, I highly recommend everyone who works with anyone or has team members to create some kind of communications guide so that you will learn how you can even if it’s a simpler version of that if it’s simplified, or you just start with one of these sections, I think, such a good thing.
And from my point of view, wanting to grow a business. If you put in the time, now, it’s going to save you time, when you have 10 times the amount of people you do now or even you just have one extra employee. One final thing, and because of listening, I know there are a lot of you, but hardly any of you are subscribed to the business anchors YouTube channel.
Oh, that’s where we share the best clips from these episodes. So you can get a flavour of an episode before you listen to decide if it’s something that you want to listen to. So please type in business anchors podcast to YouTube, and subscribe, and then you’ll never miss out.

26:57 Lloyd
And if you do it on, you’ll be able to see a clip with me with my beard now. And then you can let me know if you want to join me in April. Okay, yeah. What an incentive.

27:12 Dan
They’re all gonna be running.

27:15 Lloyd
To see me trying to grow a beard.

27:18 Dan
I don’t think you get the whole, like marketing and convincing people to do something big enough.

27:24 Lloyd
I’ve done some of the don’ts in the communication.
—
27:27 Dan
I’ll tell you what, Lloyd, after this episode, if you give us a good reading through, yeah. And then try and stick to it. We might be able to get subscribers to our YouTube channel.

27:36 Lloyd
Thank you. You’re always really kind and you never argue and you communicate intelligently. Thank you. Okay, thanks for listening guys. And please let me know if you’re planning to join by Barch or Bapril..

27:51 Dan
See you next week.

ENDING
Hopefully this has been useful and helped you create a Marketing Communications Guide/ Marketing Plan Template. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you href=”https://knowltonmarketing.co.uk/start-a-conversation/”>Start A Conversation.
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Small Business Tips: Fast-Track Your Business Success
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Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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Looking for small business tips? Imagine if you could learn from some of the biggest mistakes someone else has made with their business growth journey so that you can fast-track your own business growth…

Well you can, by listening to this episode. From one change we made to how we send proposals that has made us £Hundreds of thousands, to wishing we’d used two amazing tools sooner which have been a game-changer for our business. This episode has it all!

Strap yourself in, this episode is packed full of small business tips

Small Business Tips Timestamps

00:00 – 03:52 Intro
03:53 – 10:44 Why you should stop emailing proposals
10:45 – 12:13 Why you should be clear on your unique value proposition
12:14 – 17:22 Make decisions on over & under performing employees quicker
17:23 – 24:28 Test a wider variety of Marketing approaches & platforms more frequently
24:29 – 26:44 Delegate & trust more quickly
26:45 – 30:02 Be more ambitious
30:03 – 32:59 Get better at capacity planning
33:00- 36:40 Use Xero & Hubspot
36:41 – 36:56 Outro
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Small Business Tips Transcript

0:00 Pat

Hi, Pat the podcast that is here. What would you do if you could start over? Well, today then annoyed are looking back at some of the minor missteps they took on the road to working with global household name brands, along with some of the changes they would have made.

0:16 Dan

I think some of the biggest lessons we’ve learned have come from ourselves making mistakes, but also from hearing about other people who’ve made mistakes and then thinking ah Lloyd let’s not do that, or let’s do that. And so hopefully, I think this is gonna be a real value-adding episode for the anchors.

0:31 Pat

You’ll hear about actionable steps to put your best foot forward from testing a wider range of marketing approaches to keeping your proposals from sinking to the bottom of the inbox.

0:41 Dan

Look at your current marketing. What are you doing that’s trying something new, try new stuff, I wish we would have done that sooner.

0:49 Pat
Remember, Dan and Lloyd made these mistakes so that with a little luck, you won’t have to right let’s get stuck in. This is episode 88 of the business anchors podcast.

1:10 Lloyd

This is an audible production. It isn’t. Does anyone else listen to audiobooks on Audible and it says that at the end?

1:18 Dan

Lloyd keeps saying that because he’s been listening to it recently. And I thought why not start the episode?

1:22 Lloyd

This is an audible production.

1:24 Dan

It’s not.

1:25 Lloyd

No, it’s not, do not sue us. This is a Knowlton production for the business anchors podcast.

1:24 Dan

So Lloyd our normal starts the podcast I ask you a question. Yeah. What would you do differently if we were starting our business all over again?

1:38 Lloyd

This, urm loads of things. And I think I’m excited about it.

1:45 Dan
So you live with regrets then do you, Lloyd?

1:48 Lloyd
I suppose I wouldn’t describe them as regret. But you know, this is something that I find interesting. You know, no regrets. I think no regrets? I think it’s okay. Saying no regrets is admitting you ‘I never plan to grow or improve anything in my life.

2:08 Dan

No, you’re inferior if you have regrets.

2:11 Lloyd

Oh, am I okay? Well, I have regrets. And I’m proud of them.

2:14 Dan

You go girl. Yes.

2.20 Lloyd

So there would be things I would change that looking back. Don’t get me wrong, happy with the journey I am on in my life. And we are with the business and everything. But excited for this episode. Because I find it exciting when there are massive things we’ve learned on our journey.

And we think, Oh, wow, let’s change it. And then you kind of think, Oh, we could have changed that a couple of years ago would have had massive positive effects. Passing on that knowledge. Hopefully, yeah, might help people.

2:50 Dan

I think some of the biggest lessons we’ve learned have come from ourselves making mistakes, but also hearing about other people who’ve made mistakes, and then thinking Lloyd, let’s not do that. Or let’s do that. And yeah, so hopefully, I think this is gonna be a value-adding episode for the anchors.

3:05 Lloyd

I think we’ve had a couple of similar episodes in the past where we talked about our experiences and what we might change and stuff. But I was thinking like, oh, and we’ve always had really good feedback, really I don’t know if we have, but when I’ve recorded them, I thought they were really good episodes.

3:19 Dan

That’s how we should do all of our marketing, not look at data or anything else. Just what you think with your gut.

3:24 Lloyd

Lloyd, what’s your gut feeling on that? And be one of those business owners. No, look, I don’t look at data. It’s what I feel. Okay. I felt that that was a good episode. But Lloyd the data says that people are unsubscribing.

3:38 Dan

Funny you say that. That’s one of my points later on in the podcast about data. Oh, me too. But let’s Okay, let’s start with Jonah go. First, we’ve got several different things that are gonna open up a can of worms, and lead the conversation for things.

3:51 Lloyd

Yeah. Okay.

3:53 Dan

So what was the first thing that you want to talk about that you would do differently in our business?

3:59 Lloyd

So I would have stopped throwing away opportunities by emailing a proposal to people.

4:08 Dan
Ah, ha, ha.

4:10 Lloyd

And I think this is relevant to a lot of businesses, basically, anyone that if you send, if you’re a landscape gardener, and you’re emailing someone a quote for a job if you’re an accountant, an accountant, a cleaner.

4:24 Dan

Like it can be a service-based business pretty much isn’t it?

4:27 Lloyd

Yeah, I would say, I think it’s, it’ll be a service-based business.

4:33 Dan

What’s a proposal, Lloyd?

4:35 Lloyd

A proposal, so people call it different things. We’ve called it an action plan, call it proposal, call it a quote someone comes to you, I want this thing and you go, Okay, I’ll, I’ll do that. I’ll write I’ll do that thing. I’ll write stuff down about how I’m going to do that thing.

And I’ll tell you how much it’s going to cost when we’re going to do that thing, what’s involved in that thing. And then somehow, I will communicate that stuff to you.

So for years, we would say, oh, you want that thing? Dan would go into his little, well, that’s gonna say, into the spare room, we started the business in. Shut himself down for about two weeks typing out this massive document with full detail of like everything we’re going to do for them.

I mean, the perfect guy for them to do it themselves, it was just probably didn’t work. And don’t get me wrong, you know, for the first few years of the business, we won work this way.

5:31 Dan

I think I was trying to overcompensate for, for my lack of experience, by in this in this proposal showing that look, I know this stuff, I think that was the reasoning.

5:41 Lloyd

I suppose actually that the length of it and the effort that you put into the proposal. And when I say you, it was us like we were working on this together, you were just the one typing. It was coming out of you’re, coming out of your finger, weird way to explain it.

But it wasn’t the length and the effort put in I think it’s often good to put effort into that sort of thing for business. But we would put all of that effort in. And then we would just email it to them. And I’d say, half, we either didn’t get ever hear from them again. Or we heard from them, after chasing them a lot. And they just can’t Oh, no thanks. And we had to I can’t remember exactly when we realised that.

6:25 Dan

Was it a podcast or something? Or someone we learned from someone.

6:29 Lloyd

Why are you emailing it? Well, they asked us to email it. And now I don’t think other than the very low-level business that, you know, without sounding, trying to be boastful or anything.

6:43 Dan

If it’s only worth a couple of million.

6:47 Lloyd

Like it’s not a significant thing for the business kind of like, oh, well, if we can help we can Yeah it doesn’t matter. We always have, well Dan has a call with these people on zoom at least or would meet in person and present. This action plan, and it’s very different.

7:06 Dan

And book that appointment, in the previous meeting you have with them or the previous call or the previous point.

7:12 Lloyd

So when they’re saying to you Oh, yeah. Okay, so what are the next steps? Can you let me know how this works and how much it’ll cost and stuff? You don’t go and get oh, yeah, I’ll do that. And then we’ll arrange it.

Dan says, Yeah, I’ll go and do this. And on that call, or in that meeting, say, okay, right on the second of April, at three o’clock. So you already know, you’re going to have another conversation with them, you’re going to be in front of them, communicating how brilliant your business is, and what you can do for them how you’re going to help them.

And you’re setting yourself up for a win, basically, rather than setting yourself up for failure if you’re sending an email, and it’s something they’re gonna forget. And you don’t have the opportunity to answer any of their questions, because you can only communicate what’s in that thing that you’ve emailed.

And if they read something, oh, I’m not sure about that. If you’re in person, you can say, Oh, if you’re not sure, we could send you five case studies to let you know that we’ve helped the exact business like you on that changer.

8:08 Dan

Making that one small change. If you’re listening to this, and you email proposals, I guarantee you will win shitloads more business if you just do that tip. Yeah, if you are in the previous call or meeting, arrange that next meeting to go through it with them.

8:24 Lloyd

And I do think it is appropriate from businesses like ours to a landscape gardener with two employees. Like if you’re a landscape gardener if you’re only one, but if you landscape gardener and you feel like you want to win more business because some people have enough for what they want to achieve and what they want to be doing.

If you want more, and you’re not converting every piece of business, and you are just sending something off, do this and I’m 100% sure you will win more business.

8:52 Dan

Like most people aren’t doing it, like in our marketing agency land, like most good agencies will do that now. Yeah, but I think in a lot of industries, they don’t, they’ve always done it the way of just sending out emails.

9:06 Lloyd

You say most do in marketing, but we’ve even heard from some, we won’t say who and stuff. But they’re like ‘oh, we have presented this thing’. And then they were emailed this kind of proposal, they could just tell it was a generic thing that they just changed, like, the name of their business to and stuff and you can kind of see who’s going to the effort.

If someone’s going to the effort to communicate what they can do to help you. You kind of get that feeling of worth they’re going to the effort to do this rather than just sending me something they care about and they’re going to put the effort in.

9:38 Dan

I did have this conversation with someone the other day, though, I think another challenge with all service-based businesses is knowing how much effort do you put into that process? Because a big mistake we made at the start as we weren’t good at qualifying how lucrative an opportunity could be, like how big it could be in terms of revenue.

The likelihood of us winning it and how much we wanted it. We didn’t look into any of that. And we treated every opportunity the same. Whereas what we now do is look at opportunities to engage, is this a good fit for us? Is it lucrative, profitable? Is it something we want to do? It’s logical, isn’t it?

10:20 Lloyd

Yeah, I think for any business, you have a different scope, but we may have an opportunity that’s worth 150,000, and an opportunity that’s worth four and a half 1000, we probably want to win both of those pieces of work.

But of course, it’s going to make more sense to put in more resources to win, the more valuable or whatever is more valuable for your business. Yeah, great. So that’s my first one. What about you, Dan?

10:45 Dan

My first one is to be super clear on our unique offer to the world from the start. I think, looking back, for the first few years, we didn’t know how to communicate, we didn’t really know what we’re offering, or how to communicate it, we were just like, marketing will help you with that.

And whereas now we’re clear on what we do, who we help and how we help them. What that does is it helps you attract more of the right opportunities and repel more opportunities that aren’t right for you.

11:19 Lloyd

I think sometimes you can think Well, hang on. No, if I say I do exactly this, what about these other opportunities that aren’t exactly that I’m going to miss out on? When the opposite happens, you get far more opportunities in that thing you’re saying you can do than the other ones you will miss out on?

11:35 Dan

And the way you can test if you’ve got this covered on are is if I said to you now what do you do? Can you clearly and concisely communicate to me exactly what it is you do? In a way that most people will understand? And I think a lot of people can’t?

A lot of people can’t do that. So yeah, if you can’t do that, definitely sit down and take time to think about what is your unique offer to the world? What makes you different from the other 1000 competitors in your area? Yeah, or in the country? And then define that, because that helped elevate our business.

12:10 Lloyd

Great.

12:11 Dan

What else Lloyd would you change or do differently?

12:14 Lloyd
A big thing, a big thing? If you’re in your business involves people, which they nearly all do? Well, they all involve people. But if it’s not just one person, making decisions on overperforming and underperforming people is far quicker.

And by making decisions, I’m not some ruthless guy, as in like, sack them on the second day, if they’re not, I’m not saying that. I’m saying our team is in the I believe in the best position it’s ever been as in performing the highest as a team we ever have. People are enjoying working together more than ever.

12:51 Dan

And this is genuine as well. We’re not just saying the podcast episode. Yeah, we’ve been in lots of different places, ups and downs.

12:56 Lloyd

I do feel now we’re producing the best work we ever have done for our clients. And it’s like saying, there’s a journey to get to that point. And we will have more dips and peaks and things in the future. But what I’ve learned is, you want your people to be rewarded fairly.

And if some people are, every single day, all of your team’s actions are either gaining value for your business or losing value for your business, every decision that’s made, it might be minuscule, it might be, oh, they haven’t put enough time looking into this thing we’re buying. We’ve spent an extra 50 quid. So that’s that person’s actions cost us 50 quid, this person’s put in so much effort and then ultra creative with the way we’ve shot this video.

And that means we’ve produced better work than we have. And we know that’s going to attract more business, they’ve provided huge value in the work they’ve done for the business. And they’ve made us every decision affects that. And I think in the past, there have been people who have been underperforming been overperforming, but everyone sort of was getting rewarded in the same way. And we didn’t implement changes quickly enough to make sure that that wasn’t the case. And we readjusted things.

So if people are underperforming, I think to get in there early to support them with how they can increase their performance and make sure that they’re not. They’re not losing value for the business, because that’s not fair for the rest of the team that is working hard if someone isn’t, and it doesn’t make any difference and those people that are providing great value. Again, more quickly.

This is something I’ve learned more quickly by saying, Wow, what you’re doing is brilliant, and we need to reward you more. So whether that’s pay or whether that’s giving you the flexibility to do this, a promotion, response, whatever, whatever that thing is.

14:53 Dan

From a practical point of view, I think that we have a lot of people listening, thinking that sounds great, and I’ve got a team and I’m making In a zone where I’m sort of rewarded them all equally, and not really, practically what processes and things have we set up that have helped him prove that.

15:10 Lloyd
Clear goals and accountability for the individuals in your team? So, person A, you are responsible for this. And every week in our weekly meeting on a Friday, as a team, we’ll be asking you, are you hitting those goals, and we’ll be questioning and discussing if that’s not happening, and it’d be really clear, or you’ll be saying, I have hit those goals, and it’ll be clear to everyone that you are doing your job well and adding huge value to the business.

That’s one thing, and then that can lead to the actions that you need to take. So every single week, you get a bit of a wake-up call as a business of Oh, hang on, that’s, that’s been two weeks in a row, that person hasn’t been doing what, what we need them to do in their job.

So we need to take some sort of action, have they not got the right support? Or have they got the right support, but they’re not putting in the effort? You know, do they not want to be here? are they struggling with something so we can help them and raise it every week, we have that wake-up call. So I think that’s a really important part.

16:09 Dan

I think the weekly meeting has been a game-changer, not just for the team. I’m part of the team as well. But for me, as well, and what I’m accountable for, for you and what you’re accountable for because we’re just as accountable as the rest of the guys.

And yeah, it is that weekly, wake up call. And we learned this from the entrepreneur’s operating system, which we recently did a podcast on. So listen to that, if you haven’t already done so. But yeah, weekly meetings, checking how you’re performing against what you’re accountable for have been massive.

16:35 Lloyd

Also for your people know exactly what they are accountable for and be clear. And we still need to improve this even further. But you got to be fair, it’s not just about you as a business owner or a manager going like, Oh, now I know these things. It’s giving your team the tools that they need. Oh, I know. Exactly. That’s my responsibility.

Because we had in the past. Oh, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to do that. Or they were and we both kinds of haven’t and it’s been missed. And that cuts all that out being ultra-clear on accountability. Nice. Yeah, you could have a whole episode on that.

Yeah. That’s, that’s something I’d changed making those decisions quicker, having processes in place to identify people that are over or underperforming and taking actions that are needed far quicker.

17:24 Dan

I’ve got a big one for you from a marketing perspective. Looking back at what we did, I wish and this was my responsibility, we would have tested a wider variety of marketing approaches and platforms more frequently.

I think what we fell into the trap of is doing something that worked a bit and just thinking, yeah, that works. All right, let’s just do that for ages. And more recently, and in the last few years, we’ve been more like eat, like, for example, this podcast this is quite meta.
So when we realise this was a massive thing we should do, we will always want to test at least 20% of our marketing resources into something different and new. We, this was a podcast, this experiment. And now the business anchors podcast accounts for at least 50-60% of our revenue, people who are coming to work with us through listening to this silly little podcast that Lloyd and I sit down to do every week. And that was just a test.

And looking back for the first few years, I think we were just mainly doing the same stuff. And like, Yeah, this is all right. And hence, our growth wasn’t massive for the first few years, whereas now we’re on a really good trajectory.

So I guess an action for you listeners. Look at your current marketing, what do you do to generate business? What are you doing that’s trying something new. So look at your marketing is at least 20% of it trying a new platform like TikTok, or as a unique outreach strategy, like the one we spoke about in a previous episode, our LinkedIn outreach strategy. So yeah, try new stuff. And I wish we would have done that more frequently, sooner.

19:05 Lloyd

Yeah, one of my points is like a step from that, which is to record and analyse marketing activities effectively. So you’re saying try new stuff. And I think the next step is when you’re trying new stuff, and you’ve got your old stuff going on, actually recording the resources you’re putting into those things and what you’re getting back from it.

So far too many businesses have stuff going on. And they might have 20 different things going on that could get them business in different ways. But they have no idea which of the 20 are working and what value they’re getting from any of them and I think we didn’t either to be on it. We were getting much better at this now. And it’s just it’s, it seems so simple like see, you’ve got you got 20 taps, and like one of them’s got like drips coming out. And the other ones like just pouring crazily. And you can look if you had them like that.

You’d be like okay, well obviously we should we should get a big version of that tap. Yeah, because that is just water. That’s all. Yeah, I’m thirsty. Whereas when you just got it all going, oh, yeah, every month? Yeah, it’s all okay, this, this buckets filling up nicely from the 20 Tap. So a weird analogy. But basically, we have sort of done this and now we look at it and it’s like, well, that activity takes two and a half days a month and costs 200 pounds.

You know, so that is going into it. And for our business, we know that needs to ride or worked out 805 pounds of value to the business. So I think being able to look at that and go and ask yourself, so okay, that thing we do, does that create 805 pounds of value for the business, if it’s less than that, it’s not worth doing. If it’s more than that, we need to do more of them.

And we also because we now really analyse all of this stuff, we know how much a lead is worth to our business. So if you’ve worked out and you think, well, actually, every new lead on average, it works out, if we get a lead, our business gets 2000 pounds. If you get one lead from that 805-pound activity, you know, the leads worth 2000 pounds, you know that that thing’s working.

So being able to analyse all of this activity, and it’s step by step, we now have lots of things in place. So we can make these sorts of calculations. But just take the first steps of just trying to understand a bit more like what’s actually coming from this, rather than just being in a completely unknown state of well, the phone rings, we get inquiries through the website. It’s working somehow.

21:32 Dan

Devil’s advocate a little bit. Yeah, because I do honestly agree with you, on most of that. I think even today, still, some things are difficult to track. Like, for example, if you and I like we went to San Diego, we spoke a Social Media Marketing World, and we built some relationships there. Even in a year, someone who saw us there, but hasn’t been in touch and has been quietly following us for ages, and then gets in touch via LinkedIn, no matter how much we ask them, ah where did you find us if we hadn’t remembered that they saw us there.

And they haven’t remembered that that’s where they first saw us, it’s very difficult to track the origin of some business. But if you set up tracking on enough things that you can track, and you know that you know, 20% of it, 30% of it is just the other things that you need to use your intuition for then, that works.

22:23 Lloyd

I think even there’s the first set of things that are hard to track. Oh, we went San Diego and, and built relationships and stuff, we might look at that, oh, that’s cost us like 5000 pounds in time and resources. I think you can still make a good judgement. And that’s the cost. Do we think this trip will make more than that back in the next five years? And I. I would look at that and go, Yeah.

22:47 Dan

We’ve got more paid speaking opportunities. Another thing from just being on the list of those speakers.

22:52 Lloyd

Exactly you can look at it just make a judgement of do I think it’s likely would get more than that back over the long term? And if the answer’s yes, then it’s worth taking that risk, I guess. And if it’s, if it’s no, then it makes you think, yeah, should we be doing something else?

23:07 Dan

Yeah, I think on that note of like, different marketing channels. Another thing I’ve put is to stop, something I would change would be to stop doing the things that don’t work sooner. Like looking back at specific examples, like ah, networking breakfasts you and I went to for years, that I think I do think some of them had value, which I’ve mentioned in the past, but then we just continue doing them for years.

And like, a lot of the time, it wasn’t anyone that we’d ever want to work with. And they said like, they didn’t have the budget and that kind of thing. But we just did it because we were like, Oh, this is something we do.

p> 23:40 Lloyd

Yeah, it’s kind of well, everyone else starting in business seems to do this. So we should just probably keep doing it.

23:46 Dan

And I think Anchors look at your current might like an action, look at your current marketing, look at the different channels. Analyse and ask yourself if that channel generating more value than we’re putting into it in terms of resource time energy.

And I think if you take the time to sit down and write down right channel one, social media, channel two, you know, exhibiting at events, channel three, networking, or whatever your marketing channels are if you take the time to think about it, I guarantee there’s at least one or two channels that you’re pumping shitloads of money in resource into that never achieve anything.

And then you can cut that and put more resources that we mentioned the taps a minute ago. What else have you got for me, Lloyd? What else would you do?

24:29 Lloyd

Delegate and trust more quickly, more easily? Delegate and trust quicker?

24:35 Dan

Yeah, you had a radio voice then, that hasn’t come out in while?

24:36 Dan

Well, yeah. Oh, well, it’s kind of more audible voice.

24:42 Dan

Oh, is it audible?

p> 24:43 Lloyd

Yeah. But this is something I even spoke to our team yesterday, encouraging people to do this more. Like most people have a habit of clinging on to stuff that they I think we’ve discussed this in the past as well. Two tasks and things that I think oh, no, I’ll do that. I’ll do that. That’s my thing. Yeah, the reality is, if you’re trying to grow a business, you’re trying to make more money, you’re trying to have a bigger positive impact however you want to.

There’s only so much you can do and everything that I delegate almost everything that I delegate and kind of pass on, say, Okay, this team member going to be good at that, let’s, let’s teach them how to do that. Almost every time, I think, when I do it, I should have done that sooner, because they’re doing well at it. They’ve got more time than I had.

And now I can focus on these things. And I think, from what I see, you know, even as I said, other people in our team that they should be delegating other tasks to other people, they’re also clinging on and most people need encouragement to try and offload some of that stuff. I think, the value that we provide to, you know, as an employee, to our bosses, our employers, we often think like, oh, no, if I get all this done, I’ll get, I’ll get all the credit.

And I’ll be seen as doing a good job when the reality is if you’ve got a good leader, or manager or whatever, they will see the value in you delegating that to someone else. And as a team, getting that work done far more than you can do more of the stuff that you’re good at.

Exactly. And yes, it’s relevant to me trying to try and delegate things, but also to other people in the business. I’m not saying just get everyone else to do your work that becomes a negative A lot of people do it too much. But most people try and cling on to this stuff.

And like, I want the credit for this. And I want to make sure this goes well. So I’m going to do it myself when delegating and trusting other people quicker to give things ago is often a really good idea.

26:44 Dan

Nice. I wish we were more ambitious. started. Yeah, I think, um, I don’t want to sound like the whole Grant Cardone 10x thing because that’s, you know, he’s just someone that tries to manipulate innocent people to buy courses by saying turn X everything.

But looking back, 10 it’s everything. If like we have, we have, I think to feel like we have ambitious goals now. Because he finally realised through seeing evidence that what we do works and is good and that kind of thing that we can be ambitious.

But if we were too when we started to set goals that were 10 times more ambitious, and we got anywhere near close to those that would be better than having 10x smaller goals and achieving them. But I know it sounds like a stupid, simple principle. But yeah, I think you have bigger goals than we I feel like we could have been further ahead if we would have been more ambitious because I’m trying to look back when we started.

What did you think this business would be when we started it? Like, what was your sort of like, oh, in five or 10 years, we’ll be?

27:57 Lloyd

Do you know what, I reckon when we started, I just didn’t even think about it?

28:02 Dan

Listen to Lloyd’s advice on setting goals.

28:06 Lloyd

I’m completely open to saying that, you know, we’ve grown and we’ve been through things. I think at the start, I wasn’t thinking like that I was thinking let’s try and make this something that can make myself salary enough to live.

28:19 Dan

You were thinking, I’m gonna wear a suit so that people think that I know what I’m talking about. The Lloyd suit day.

28:25 Lloyd

Yeah. Thinking that is a good investment, that suit that’s for sale in buttons, 45 pounds. Well, we pay evidence. It didn’t.

28:39 Dan

Yeah, but it’s interesting, isn’t it? When you look back and think what I think I just thought, Oh, if Lloyd and I are working, and we’re paying ourselves a consistent salary, that’s what I want to achieve.

28:52 Lloyd

Yeah. And I, I think that’s for people starting a business. That’s quite often the first goal. It’s, the first goal is, oh, can I make this work? As in? Do I, you know, in six months, do I have to go and look for a job? Or can I make this work?

29:11 Dan

We were laughing yesterday, slightly off tangent, but we’re currently talking about creating a new video about us and our story and what we do and stuff looking at the journey. And one of the stories we were talking about was when we won these Kent awards and stuff and everyone was like, Knowlton is winning these awards.

And then Lloyd got to get the bus to a networking event the next day because he couldn’t afford a car or petrol. Yeah. But we’re a successful business.

29:38 Lloyd

It is interesting how people’s perceptions and the current reality can quite often be different like saying we winning awards of the best like a digital business. And I was like, the best digital business can’t help me afford to run a car at the moment. And I’m happy to say a lot of things have improved. I can run a car? Yeah, we’re doing a lot better work.

30:03 Dan

Good. What else? have you got any other?

30:06 Lloyd

Yeah? Yeah.

30:07 Dan

What have you got for me?

30:09 Lloyd

Capacity planning.

30:11 Dan

This is like the tax episode.

30:13 Lloyd

No, no, it’s good capacity planning to allow us to work efficiently and never overstretch people or under, stress under non-stretching? Well, I think businesses often are. So if there’s capacity planning, just for anyone who doesn’t know, you have an amount of work that your business needs to do differently in all sorts of businesses, and you have several resources.

So we’ve got these people that have these skills, quite often businesses look at it and kind of go, oh, yeah, we’ll probably be alright, this month. And sometimes that can work out. But a lot of the time doing that, you end up overstretching people. So people in your team are stressed and think like, how am I going to do this? I’m really under pressure, which for a short period of time, sometimes that’s okay, for a couple of days for people to think, wow, I’ve got a lot to do here.

You can get through that those peaks and troughs. But if that’s a consistent thing, it causes big issues. And also the other way, if actually, you don’t realise go, yeah, the team seem okay. And actually, your team are thinking I could probably do double the amount of work I’m doing. But this is quite relaxing.

31:18 Dan

What’s the rule where people, will make a job take as long as they got for it?

31:23 Lloyd

Exactly. So with capacity planning, I literally like there are fewer, probably much more sophisticated ways of doing it. But I have like an Excel spreadsheet I’ve been developing over years with coloured boxes, and each box has like a certain day, a day of a person’s time, and then allocate it to different projects and have this colourful thing that would look mental if you don’t use it. And basically, a line of like, this is the maximum.

This is the number of working days in this month. If the coloured boxes are above the line, that person doesn’t have enough time to get their job done this month.

So we need to, there are two things you do you can either colour boxes, you can adapt and go, Okay, do we need to hire someone else? Or actually, that person can take on that work to even out or you don’t do anything and you go, Oh, that person is just gonna be stressed and probably do a bad job. So obviously, you have the information to make the decisions you need to make.

32:20 Dan

There’s just so much stuff to think about when you run a business. Yeah, like now, we are nowhere near where we are going to be in the future. Yeah. But like, there’s just so much stuff to think about. We never used to do any of this stuff. How on earth did we figure anything out? When we started? We didn’t even look at like how long things gonna take. We’re just like, yeah, we’ll do that.

32:39 Lloyd
Yeah. Well, I think, and this is why these episodes are good. Then a couple of years. In a year, we’ll be able to do another one of what we’ve learnt this year, yeah, colour boxes, and now I have holograms that that move around the office to show us who’s Yeah, we haven’t made any holograms yet. So that’s something we need to improve here. Right. Do you have anything else, Dan?

33:00 Dan

I’ve got one more. It’s just a simple one. I think one of them is in your area, but use zero, use zero and HubSpot sooner to software, so accounting software, and sales software. And I’ll go I’ll take the sales software side.

Since using HubSpot, our whole sales process has been properly mapped out managed, and we convert way more business because we know we’re taking all the right steps to hold the hand of all of those new leads and opportunities through the process and the most effective and efficient way to pop out the end. Most customers sign an agreement saying I want to work with you because it’s all nicely organised and mapped out.

If we would have originally, I think we used to use spreadsheets where we would write someone’s name and say, John Smith, is called and said they want this thing. And then we wouldn’t do anything. After that. We just have a chat and just try and remember that we need to follow up with them and do all this stuff. So yeah.

And we’ve done episodes on HubSpot before on sales. So look back at business anchors, episodes. And zero, the accounting software side you’ve found that releasable for like managing accounts.

34:13 Lloyd

Yeah, I mean, we were on Excel spreadsheets for like the first two or three years of the business. And as a small business that can often work, I think, especially even if you started a business now like it’s even more important to get on it. But again, just makes everything much more clear, efficient.

<p. You have to spend the money for the software, but you very quickly realise oh, by the time this saves in the data that this shows me to make good financial decisions pay for themselves very quickly. So I would agree Dan. Taking the leap to use it’s using tools that might cost a bit of money but that will improve what you’re doing and add a lot more value to the business.

34:51 Dan

Well, Hubspot is free. It’s got a free version that we still use free version which has mental Yeah, I know zero doesn’t have a free version. Yeah, anything from you any other things?

35:01 Lloyd

Yeah, I’ve got a few things, but I think I’ll save them for another episode. Sure, I think yeah. Yeah, I think.

35:07 Dan
Does that mean that the listeners have to listen to all future episodes to try? And are they the best? Things that you’ve got leftover?

35:13 Lloyd

Yeah. I mean, how are they going to learn about financial forecasting? If they don’t listen to future episodes.

35:24 Dan

Can I just ask something? Recently, we did a solo episode where it was just me. And obviously, the download numbers are showing that it’s way better than all other episodes that Lloyds is involved in. Can we just ask, do you want Lloyd involved in this podcast? Or would you rather be just me?

35:40 Lloyd

Oh dont ask that. Well, yeah, but do tell us? Dan’s solo episode has performed a lot better than any others? Just to be completely honest, everyone, I won’t be offended. If you prefer just listening to Dan. I will think the good decision for the business. Dan needs to do more solo episodes.

36:00 Dan

I genuinely think that most people would hate that. I think it was just I’d set it was a good episode about a strategy that made us like 50 grand in a week. So I think it’s quite hooky.

36:09 Lloyd

But anchors. Can you please tell us why you’re like that one so much? If it’s just that I wasn’t there, or is the subject matter or a bit of both? It genuinely will be really useful for us and I won’t hold any grudges.

36:19 Dan

Cool. And call to action. What do we want people to do?

36:24 Lloyd

Tell us why you liked the solo episode so much. I’m not I mean, I’m not bothered. Okay.

36:30 Dan

We’ll see you in yours next week.

36:32 Lloyd

Yeah, well, might be both of us. Maybe just D I’m not bothered.

36:37 Dan
You’re just mumbling now.

36:39 Lloyd

Why don’t you like this?

Hopefully this has been useful and helped Fast-Track Your Business to Success. If you have any more questions or want to know howKnowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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How To Be More Grateful And Stay Ambitious

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Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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Wondering how to be grateful and stay ambitious at the same time? Practicing gratitude is one of the best ways to increase your happiness but how can you continue to be ambitious whilst being grateful for what you have?

I mean, we all want to ensure we’re fulfilling our full potential right? Well, this isn’t easy, but we’ve got all of the answers for you in this episode. Prepare to be motivated & inspired to grab today by the balls & take over the world (sort of).

How To Be More Grateful Timestamps

00:00 – 05:01 Intro
05:02 – 12:27 How to balance Gratitude + Ambition
12:28 – 14:36 How Lloyd learnt how to become more ambitious
14:37 – 20:07 Where to start if you don’t feel gratitude or ambition
20:08 – 24:09 Dan’s switch to becoming more grateful as well as staying ambitious
24:10 – 26:50 Outro
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How To Be More Grateful Transcript

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat, the podcast editor here. What’s more important, gratitude or ambition? Well today, Dan and Lloyd look to find out. But more importantly, they’ll take a look at the benefits of striking a balance between the two.

0:14 Dan
Because I don’t want this to just be an episode where like, Oh, we’re so grateful and we’re so ambitious. It’s like we’ve been on this journey, and we still are, some of those things will help you and these stories will help you.

0:22 Pat
Yeah, whether it’s ambition or gratitude you’re struggling with, you’ll hear about practical steps that anyone can take starting today, to help strike that balance and further that, improve your happiness.

0:33 Dan
If you want to be more ambitious, setting goals and achieving them, even in a small way, is a way of making you more ambitious.

0:41 Pat
Right, let’s get stuck in this is episode 89 of the business anchors podcast.

01:00 Dan
This is a big question, Lloyd. How can you be grateful for what you have? But stay ambitious.

1:06 Lloyd
Oh, I don’t know Dan.

01:09 Dan
This is going to be a good episode.

1:10 Lloyd
Thank you for listening. No, this is something I’ve been reflecting on a lot recently. So have been reflecting a lot on what makes me happy and that sort of thing. And to continue to try and improve those things. The important stuff in life and this is something I identified as being two really important things is being able to be grateful, and kind of feeling content, but also being ambitious. And it’s two things that often people don’t manage to do together. And often I haven’t managed to do it together. I think it’s a massive opportunity. If we can manage those two things effectively.

1:51 Dan
And for those who are listening, thinking, oh this is a fluffy episode, I’m going to skip it. I’ve got some really practical, actionable things you can do to feel grateful and stay ambitious, and Lloyd’s just gonna talk about fluffy like oooh.

2:07 Lloyd
So if you are concerned this will be rubbish, because some of it will include me talking. Don’t worry, because Dan is also talking and you’ll enjoy that.

2:16 Dan
We did ask the listeners last week to tell us if they like you being on the podcast or if they’d like to solo episodes.

2:23 Lloyd

We haven’t heard yet. Because last week was five minutes ago in the recording world. But yeah, you know, the consequences may be embarrassing for me.

2:36 Dan

So Lloyd, would you say you’re grateful? Do you practice gratefulness? Is that even a thing?

2:45 Lloyd
Gratitude?

2:47 Dan
Aha, wow.

02:48 Lloyd
Dan, I often practice gratefulness while I’m feeling the emotion of entertainment. Yeah, I think personally, I have massive improvements that need to be made feeling gratefulness and gratitude. But I think I also think I’m pretty good at it. But I think I guess when I was thinking about this, I feel like the feeling now that I’ve developed some things, and I focus on gratitude, and I kind of have gratitude and like feeling content in the same way. In my mind, that’s kind of how I feel about it. It brings me a lot of happiness. And, sorry, go ahead Dan.

3:38 Dan
I was just going to ask why. Why would we talk about being grateful? Yeah. Why would people even want that? Like, what listeners will action some of the stuff we talked about in this episode? What was good about being grateful? Well, why don’t you carry on with what you’re doing?

3:52 Lloyd
From my perspective, stopping and thinking actively putting things in place to think how grateful you are and how lucky you are? To put it simply just makes you a lot happier? That is like, for me, it’s as simple as that feeling. Grateful. That’s what I get from it.

4:12 Dan
Can I tell you why I think that’s the case? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, it comes back to Mo Gowdat that the happiness expert guy, we’ve done an episode on him before his happiness equation, which is the classic happiness is expectation minus reality. Yeah. I feel like taking action to show gratitude reduces that gap daily.

So rather than thinking, Oh, I wish I had a Ferrari and I wish I had this. You’re like, I’ve got food and water and I’ve got a healthy family. I’m so grateful for that. And it like reduces that expectation like if you expect if you lower your expectations in a way and feel grateful for the things that you’ve got, but again, that At the same time, that’s kind of going against the thing of being ambitious.

5:03 Lloyd
That’s the challenge we’re talking about. So exactly this, I think this is why this is interesting. So you’re saying, in reality, lower you’re, your expectations in some ways to make sure that you are grateful for what you have, you’ve got amazing things in your life, no matter who you are, there is a level of amazing things you have in your life, I’m sure.

But it’s balancing that that’s the whole point is that this episode, I think of, if you just say low, your expectations within saying what we’re not gonna, we’re not going to aim to ever do anything better, we’re not going to be ambitious, we’re not gonna have goals to work towards.

I think that’s the interesting point. And I think this is, so a lot of people, they either have a level of gratitude and they feel content, they feel happy with their lives, and that’s a positive thing. And but they, they then lack the ambition, because they’re feeling so happy and content, why would I? Why would I have a motivational drive to improve things, I feel so grateful for what I have, and content in this or the opposite.

People aren’t grateful for what they have, they just can’t see that what they have is good enough. And that drives them to be ultra-ambitious, they’re always aiming for something bigger and better, which can be a positive thing to improve elements of your life, but they never get that positive feeling of feeling happy where they are because they’re always aiming for to improve and, and being so what’s more important, gratitude or ambition.

I wouldn’t say personally, there’s a more important thing, I think, I think the importance is learning how you can have both of those things.

6:39 Dan
Okay, how could you have both of those things? This is the big question you want to answer.

6:44 Lloyd
Yeah, so I guess so on the gratitude side. I think to am truly grateful. A big thing for me is empathy, and a spectrum of empathy, being a big part of my life and so important in previous episodes, but understanding if you can truly understand the lives of others, you can see the amazingly positive things that you have in your life. And be grateful for those. Right? Can I just give you a few things that will help us feel grateful now?

7:20 Dan
Okay go on let’s do this.

7:25 Lloyd
If you have more than 3195 pounds.

7:30 Dan
What do you mean, just in the bank? Or?

7:33 Lloyd
In any way? Yeah, if you have a car that’s worth that you have savings?

7:38 Dan
3000? How much sorry, 3195 pounds?

7:40 Lloyd
Yeah, you are richer than half of the world.

7:46 Dan
Wow.

7:47 Lloyd
So, if like I’m saying, if you own a car, that is worth three and a half thousand pounds, you are financially better off than half of the world. So even if, you know, if you don’t own a home, if you don’t own anything else, if you’ve got and if you’ve got 1000 pounds in the bank, and you’ve got a Lego collection worth two and a half 1000 pounds, you’re richer than so and I know a lot of people won’t have that.

But I just think some people have, financially all these lovely things, and money and savings. And they feel like they’re not good enough. When, if you compare yourself to every human, you are in a really good position and a lot of the time.

8:29 Dan
You’ve got more?

8:30 Lloyd
Yeah, if you’re in a country that’s at peace, and you’re free to do what you want to do. You’re extremely lucky. But like most of the listeners to this podcast, are listening from a country that you know, and there are recent things in the news about Russia and Ukraine. Just think, I think that has brought it home for a lot of people how fortunate we are, we have these things.

Oh, but I didn’t get that promotion that I was hoping for Steven got it. And you think like, oh, that’s I’m in such a terrible situation, I think looking at the bigger picture and realising there’s another opportunity in six months for that, and I can work towards it.

But I’m extremely lucky. If you’ve got any friends. If you’ve got any sort of support network, a lot of people don’t have that. And when I was working with the homeless a couple of years ago, that was a major difference. Like they, a lot of them had the same sort of things as me in their life, other than they no longer had any friends or family.

And that was the difference. And I think just realising even if you’ve got, oh, you know, I don’t have a massive family, but I’ve got a really good relationship with my sister. Or like, you know, oh, yeah, my family is quite small. But I’ve got these two friends, I can rely on. If you’re focusing on those things. It’s really good to think about that sometimes. And you think like, bloody hell yeah. A lot of people don’t have that. And I’m fortunate.

9:56 Dan
So how can you, so I get all that? How can you stay grateful whilst also being ambitious, though? What? Like, how does it work?

10:06 Lloyd
Yeah, I think this is the challenge. So I think, I think focusing on that gratitude, but then not doing what I did throughout my 20s. And just thought, which is brilliant by the way, if you’re in this position, it’s still a good position to be. I am so happy and like, so I just really need to do anything. I’m just really happy, I think.

Now I’ve like unlocked a cheat code for a new level of happiness, if you can be grateful, but then still set yourself goals to achieve new things, unlocks a whole new level of happiness. Yeah. And I think that’s it. So you’re at the stage where you’ve got to like, oh, yeah, I feel grateful. But then not allowing it to make you think, well, I’ll just stay where I am. Going oh, even though I’m so happy and grateful, I’m now going to set some goals.

And they could be hugely ambitious goals of growing a business that’s worth 50 million pounds, or raising 2 million pounds for charity, or your goals could be, I want to improve my relationship with my brother, or I want to get at least eight hours sleep a night and setting those goals and working towards them, then you get this hugely more positive feeling than you had of just being grateful. And you get the science behind it of setting goals and working towards them.

Even if you’re an overall happy person. Have you heard you know doing a to-do list you get a dopamine hit? When your brain anticipates a reward, you get a dopamine hit, which makes you feel good and makes you feel happy.

11:43 Dan
Anticipates a reward?

11:45 Lloyd
Yeah and your brain sees ticking off the thing from your to-do list or a goal you’ve set as a reward, it likes that. So if you if you’ve got a massive goal, you break it down into chunks, and then you know well each day, I need to stay under 2000 calories and my diet or each day, I need to make sure I contact three new people to make relationships for my business, whatever it is, whatever goal is in or outside of your business.

And then when you tick those each day have a thing where you go yeah. You get this hit every single day, every single thing. There’s a level where it says it gives you that dopamine hit. And you have that in addition to the positive feelings you get from being grateful and grateful.

12:28 Dan
So what was your switch? Because I remember Lloyd in his 20s, early 20s, who was very happy, but a bit of a coaster. Not like you’re, I class you now as very ambitious. And like that kind of stuff. What was the switch? Because I think there might be some listeners who might think I’m just happy doing what I’m doing. So, you’re saying you got this new thing of like, if you did that, and you were ambitious as well. It’s like this new thing. What switched in your head?

12:50 Lloyd
And for me personally, it was probably feeling that even though I was happy. This could get deep I suppose but even though I was happy, I felt like I needed to prove to you and to our dad, that I could achieve things if I wanted to. That’s the reality of it. Like I was just happy. And I knew and I would say to dad and stuff. I’d say, Oh yeah, if I wanted to do that I could. He was very supportive. Yeah, but I could see that he didn’t believe it.

13:56 Dan
But you get the logic of if someone says yeah.

13:40 Lloyd
So then then I think had the thing of well, I want to make, I want to make my family proud of me. And even if I’m feeling happy in my head, if they are kind of and it was through my all of my school, and everything was always he’s got so much potential if he tried at anything. And so yeah, I think eventually I kind of thought, well, I want I want people to believe what I feel in my head that I can do these things. So I started actually trying Yeah, and then unlock this thing of, Oh, wow.

If you can that that feels even better. When you’re grateful and content in your life and have that good feeling but you’re also getting the dopamine hits of achieving a goal and being ambitious. And then I realised like, oh, that’s even better than when I was just happy and grateful content for what I had in my life. Yeah, so that’s where it came from. For me, I think and what made me try it and then realized, oh, shit, this is even better.

14:37 Dan
So what can I share something that I think with gratitude and ambition, I think if someone’s listening, because I think there’s some people listening who have neither who or who would say, you know, we just talked about you, you had the gratitude and we’re happier. You didn’t weren’t ambitious.

I think there’s some people who are listening who think oh, I want to improve both. What should I do? And I recently listened to a few good podcasts and stuff and learn some stuff. Right? So there’s a really good podcast I discovered called what Shawn Spooners podcast life and lessons.

15:10 Lloyd
Is that a real name? Okay, cool.

15:16 Dan
Yeah, it’s an interesting podcast, I actually discovered him because he did an interview with Chris Williamson, who has modern wisdom podcast, which is another really good podcast. And he taught was talking about this gratitude journaling. And previously, I’ve thought it to be very fluffy and like, oh, yeah, sure do that like, but he talks to through this thing of every day, he made this rule where he would have to write in the notes on his phone, something he was grateful for.

And I read this in Mo Gawdat’s book about happiness. Solve for happy yeah, where he talks about this activity called three good things, where, throughout the day, you pick three good things that you’re grateful for. And at the end, you look at it and, and it just made complete sense. Because on Shawn spooners podcast, he mentioned, when he started doing this, here’s, oh, I’ve got to think of something, got to find something grateful when it was just tedious.

Eventually, he noticed himself throughout the day, looking for things he was grateful for. And it made him feel better, because he was actively like, oh, you know, lm sitting here, record this podcast, wow, this is a real cool send that the team have built that we’ve enabled them to build by hiring them.

And like you can, you can just if you sit down for a second and start to think about things, you can show more gratitude. So I think if you’re someone who wants to be more grateful, then there’s certain activities you can do and things you can do like that journaling. And every day make me do that.

16:53 Lloyd
As a first step. I used to do something when I wasn’t feeling as happy for a short period, I got into a routine. I remember this vividly because it was in my old house. And I heard I don’t think it was Shawn Spooner, but it’s a similar thing or Mo Gawdat. But the similar thing, I’d get up, I’d make my cup of green tea, and I’d look out the window.

And I’d think of three things that I’m grateful for. This was like before anyone in the house got up, so you kind of got your own time. And then I think of three things I wanted to achieve that day. And none of them had to be hugely big things.

But I, you know, it might, you know, wake up, and I’m grateful that my son is enjoying his karate that I took him to yesterday. That’s brilliant, like, so cool to see. I’m grateful that today, I’m going to work, and I’ve got a job that I genuinely enjoy. Most people would love to be doing what I’m doing. And then like, grateful I’ve got this lovely house.

And each day, there could be things that repeated from the day before, whatever, but it’s amazing how just it making your brain think of those things just for a moment does boost you. It sounds too fluffy and like, oh, yeah, that’s Is that going to have an effect. But it genuinely does.

18:06 Dan
I think you’ve moved on to the thing that I was going to talk about, which is the ambition side.

18:11 Lloyd
Oh, sorry.

18:12 Dan
No, but that’s good. Like, you know, you just said you thought of three things you were grateful for, which is, in terms of what I’ve been listening and reading about is one step you can take actively scheduled time to think of them or write them down or wherever you want to do that. There are other ones I’ve seen where it’s like a grateful jar where you write on a bit of paper and put it in a jar and whatever either way you want to do it, you just actually think about it, do something, do something. On the other side, the ambition side, you hit on this with your thing where you said set three goals for the day.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And setting goals and achieving them even in a small way is a way of making you more ambitious. Because once you get a taste of the feeling of setting a goal and achieving it, no matter how small. So my goal today is to do 20 minutes of exercise or to do this piece of work and get it done, whatever, it’s not massive goals, you then get a flavour of what it’s like to achieve them and you get that dopamine hit or whatever it is that like oh, that was good.

And then you kind of get addicted to it and you’re like I want more of that and you know you want a bigger, better dopamine hit so you think right the next thing I want to achieve and I’ve from a sales perspective as the business has grown you know, our first sale when someone agreed to spend 100 pounds with us.

We were jumping around like oh my god, someone will pay us 100 pounds for our time. And now see we’ve you know on significantly bigger deals and each time it’s stepped up a bit and you’re looking for that bigger hit, bigger hit, bigger hit and so yeah, I think as a starting point, if you want to be more ambitious, start by setting small daily goals.

And as you start to achieve those, then start to set bigger ones and it will be like The Steppingstone effectively, eventually, you’ll be setting like us. Now we’ve got to a stage where we’re setting a 10-year goal or 2030 plan that we want to achieve, which is very ambitious.

20:09 Lloyd

Interestingly, I think for me, I was quite good at being grateful and feeling gratitude and tense side for a long period of my life and needed to work on ambition. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like perhaps you’ve always been quite good at the ambitious side. Yeah. And in earlier years, I would say, from my perspective, weren’t as good at the gratitude side. So how do you think, well firstly, is that true? And what, why? Or how do you think that’s happened? Have you thought about it?

20:42 Dan

So I think in my early days, you’re exactly right. Very ambitious. But, and I think I had the thing where my expectations, I wanted the Ferrari and I wanted a lot of stuff. I was like, the end goal is to have a massive house, and a nice car, and all that kind of stuff. And I guess as I’ve gone through this journey, and had a son, and that kind of thing, and built a family. My priority, I still I do like, I’d say I’m a lot more than you on that side of things in that I still want more stuff, where’s your very content, but I think my priorities kind of shifted a bit.

And now I’m more like, I want to build a wicked life for my family. And like a Ferrari isn’t going to help them much. Whereas, you know, renovating my house for them, which I’m currently doing is more of a thing that I’d be wanting to spend money on. I’m trying to think of what was the shift? I think it must, it probably was when maybe when Brody my son was born. And I think that’s quite a big life change. So it’s a bit of a shock to the system.

And you’re suddenly like, Oh, there’s another person I need to look after. So the selfish thing of, I’m going to work hard. And I’m going to buy myself this, and I’m going to get that it sort of gets boiled down a bit.

22:05 Lloyd

Big time, for reflection on how, are you feeling and what you’re doing?

22:08 Dan

Yeah. Oh, and another thing was, which was a big shift for me, was the feeling and very fortunate feeling of getting to a point in my life where I felt comfortable in the sense of, it wasn’t getting me to the end of the month thinking, Ah, how am I going to pay for that? Or what if my car breaks down?

And, again, I know, I’m grateful for being able to get in that position. But feeling like that, I felt was the feeling of not being stressed about that side of things was better than buying something nice that I want and then be having the stress as well. Does that make sense?

22:50 Lloyd

That’s good. I think is being you’re about being grateful for your position of, of being kind of comfortable financially as in you. You’re not worrying. Can I put food on the table? Yeah. And that sort of thing. Feeling that gratitude? And for what you already have, which I think is, rather than just purely focused on your goals, like because you could a lot of people and you could just ignore that stuff? Like, yeah, yeah, of course, I’m managing to do well enough.

I was I had those goals years ago. Yeah. Like, I’m aiming for this, and this, but I think, yeah, good to reflect on that. Like, it’s great things going on.

23:28 Dan

But now where I’m at now, I feel like I’m there. I want both now. So I’m now feeling super ambitious, to not just get Ferrari or whatever. But to build the business and build this thing. And be successful in the sense of building something that has a positive impact, you know, we’ve just been developing a positive impact plan.

Yeah, positive impact on our employees’ lives, the people around us, and, you know, me and my family, and you and I feel superb. But now I feel in that comfortable place. Now. It’s like full steam ahead for taking things to the next level. But it’s taken shitloads of time to get here. So it’s not just a thing that’s happened overnight.

24:10 Lloyd

It’s really interesting that for both of us, obviously, we this, this whole episode is how to how we feel, being able to be grateful and ambitious at the same time is, it’s such an amazing thing to get to if you can, and it’s interesting. I feel we both had one at one side of that and we’ve had to learn how to get the other one over time. I think a lot of people will be in the same position people will either be listening like you thinking oh yeah, I’m always like young Dan aiming for the next thing but not thinking about how lucky I am or they’re like me thinking,

Yeah, I’m just I’m quite happy with what’s going on but I’m not pushing myself to achieve bigger things. So hopefully, it’s a bit of one of those Wake-Up Calls of like, you know, give the other side a go and see if you can improve your happiness and how you’re feeling through that.

And if you’re not, like you said earlier if you don’t have either, you know, make a start with one of them either start the kind of goal setting and ticking that thing of each day and getting that dopamine hit of achieving something, or the exercise of gratitude, I think it’d be good if you’re thinking I’m a, I don’t do well with either of these things, start with one of them, and, and improve it.

And then at some point when you think, Okay, now I’m feeling grateful for everything. I’m getting that happiness from being grateful. Now I can go on to the ambition thing of what goals do I want to achieve? So? Yeah, interesting how different people have different things naturally. And yeah, interesting that we had to go from either side and learn the other half. Yeah.

25:46 Dan

And I’m hoping people listening to this will get value from maybe because they’re in a position we were in or are in and because I don’t want this to just be an episode where like, Oh, we’re so grateful. And we’re so ambitious. It’s like, we’ve been on this journey, and we still and still got a long way to go. But there are certain things that we’ve done that have helped and because some of those things will help you and these stories will help you.

26:05 Lloyd

Yeah. A bit of a different episode today. That was interesting. For me, sorry. But yeah, but different. Hope you enjoyed it, guys. And we’ll be back or just Dan, depending on your feedback. For the next episode. Really good chat Dan. Thank you. See you next week. I see you next week. See you next Tuesday. Oh, god. Isn’t it Thursday? Nice.

26:32 Dan

See you next Thursday.

26:36 Lloyd

See you next Thursday.

Hopefully this has been useful and helped to understand how to be more grateful for what you have and also stay ambitious. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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How To Improve Your Marketing ROI

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Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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Looking to discover how to improve your Marketing ROI? How about building deeper, more meaningful connections with your audience that will lead to an increase in sales & an even bigger love for your brand?
This episode is made for you. If you don’t finish this episode with a brain full of creative ideas & (what feels like) a rocket up your ass motivating you to execute them, we’ll eat our (metaphorical) hat. This episode has some really interesting examples in it.

Timestamps

00:00 – 01:08 Intro
01:09 – 05:52 What is unscalable Marketing?
05:53– 06:22 What is the thank You Economy (Gary Vee Book) About?
06:23 – 09:32 Is Marketing Automation effective?
09:33 – 28:06 Unscalable Marketing examples & the results they’ve achieved
28:07– 28:20 Outro
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i7EutISAlDA

How To Improve Your Marketing ROI Transcript

0:00 Pat

Hi, I’m Pat, the podcast editor here. What can you do to make your marketing stand out in a world where everyone is competing for your customer’s attention, today, Dan & Lloyd, discuss their unique approach to unscalable marketing, and show you how to form deeper connections with your ideal customers?

00:18 Lloyd
If you are strengthening relationships by going above and beyond and doing something nice for people, those things over time, build and make it more likely that you’re going to do business with people.

Pat 0:29
We also compare long and short term mindsets. And give me examples of how over time these strategies can pay off.

00:036 Dan

One of the people we sent the weird wig packages to work for another company, moved companies and then got in touch with us and said, You sent me a weird wig six months ago, and now I work for a new company. I’m in a position to work with you. And we were just starting that project now.

Pat 0:51
Right, let’s get stuck in. This is episode 90 of the business anchors podcast.

Lloyd 1:09
What is unscalable marketing? And why are we talking about it, Dan?

Dan 1:12
Unscalable marketing is…

Lloyd 1:14
Unscalable marketing?

Dan 1:16
No, not quite. Okay. It’s all about doing the things that don’t necessarily seem efficient, or scalable when it comes to marketing. But they’re incredibly important because of the impact they have. Okay, now I know that’s maybe not that easy to understand without examples. So, I’ve got loads of examples. I can give you one from recently.

Lloyd 1:35
Go straight in with an example.

Dan 1:37
Okay, well, would you want to we can go in slower if you want.

Lloyd 1:40
No, no, I’m, I feel comfortable. Thought you might just wine a dine me a bit before.

Dan 1:45
I want to share an example. So one example is from our accountants recently, we love talking about accountants on this podcast for some reason. Yeah. You know, we recently did that episode about tax savings.

Lloyd 1:58
I do. Yes. That went down very well.

Dan 2:00
It went down very well. We got like 30,000 views on a Tiktok. About that, which is quite good. So we did an episode about how you can save tax sorry, not save tax about tax planning, based on the advice we’d got from our accountants. And we did that. And without us knowing in the post the other day, we received this big package. And we’re like, Oh, what’s this? opened it? And it was like a thank you goodies box thing.

Lloyd 2:28
A what? A thank you goodies box?

Dan 2:31
A box with loads of good stuff in, yeah.

Lloyd 2:35
Or if you were a child, you’d describe it as a thank you goodies box.

Dan 2:40
So that was nice of them. They without knowing sort of send a thank you gift. And that’s just one of the small things that they’ve done for us that, I think means that they’re probably going to be our accountants forever.

On top of them being good accountants, yeah, those small things that aren’t scalable, like they couldn’t send out 1000 of those things, because it wouldn’t probably be scalable, or efficient, but it’s something that they’ve done that builds a deeper relationship with us as customers. And that’s one example I’ve got loads.

Lloyd 3:14
Just to be clear for the context guys. They sent it and sent a note kind of saying, Oh, thank you for mentioning us on the podcast. So they were grateful because when we spoke about the advice and we just said oh Telford’s accountants are brilliant, get in touch with them if you need an accountant.

And so they were saying thank you really, but it’s that I think it’s the going like above and beyond what’s expected that makes you appreciate it and think what a lovely thing to do and have that positive impact on a relationship, I guess.

Dan 3:48
Yeah, and like, another thing that happened recently that it feels weird. There have been loads of these things happening recently. So I recently did a masterclass with the two Laura’s who have like a membership community, two nice ladies who we met in San Diego. I did a free masterclass thing with them.

And they sent through a bar of chocolate which had a message on it and stuff and a handwritten note it just got me thinking recently, quite a few things have happened. And there are the small things that people have been doing that make that has had a genuine, positive impact on my perception of them. And it got me thinking like we do certain things.

We do similar things. But I think not enough businesses, companies, and marketers think about doing these unscalable activities because there’s so much pressure on you, you’ve only got this amount of budget to spend. You’ve only got this amount of resources, but I think we should be thinking about this more and I’m hoping this episode inspires marketers and anchors to start doing more of this kind of thing.

Lloyd 4:50
You described it as unscalable marketing, but those two things so they were people sort of going the extra mile and sending things to say thank you. So would you count that as marketing, then?

Dan 5:02
Yes, I think anything, where you’re doing something to get in front of or build a relationship with your audience, is marketing.

Lloyd 5:18
Yeah, I think it’s just, it’s straight. When I first thought of it, I thought, yeah, it’s that, you know, sending a gift to someone, because that’s what, what a couple of those examples were, is that marketing, but the reality is, if you are strengthening relationship by going above and beyond and doing something nice for people.

Things over time, build, and, and make it more likely that you’re going to do business with people? Or if you’re not, not in a business context, make it more likely that you’ll have a longer stronger relationship with them. Yeah.

Dan 5:52
Have you read The Thank You Economy?

Lloyd 5:55
Gary V’s book? Yes, years ago. But yes.

Dan 5:58
If anyone’s listening and or watching and wants to learn more about this, that’s like when I was preparing for this episode, that was a book that reminded me of the importance of going the extra mile for customers that book, Gary Vee talks about a whole range of examples when he works at Wine Library, forgoing the extra mile with customers and how that builds a brand like that people care about because there are all these things with technology coming in, there are so many things that you can do to scale up through automation.

Like there are loads of tools out there where you can automatically reply to people, automatically comment and send messages. Whereas that’s not building depth in terms of relationships. Whereas when you do this kind of thing and go the extra mile, it does help strengthen those relationships. And it’s an important part of your marketing strategy.

Lloyd 6:48
It’s interesting because we’ve always steered away from in our business from automation that other businesses have sort of value in being able to do more with their marketing and their communication. And it seems to have been a theme that it’s just always I don’t know why we’ve been so, so different with our approach and kind of doing these things that take more time and effort and don’t necessarily look like they make sense in the short term.

Dan 7:18
I think I know why. Okay, personally, for me, yeah, I think this whole thing we’ve spoken up before, of like, lazy selling, and lazy marketing, where people like, the perfect description of this is like cold calling, where someone makes zero effort, a bad cold call, let’s call it a bad cold call. So I’ll make zero effort to understand who you are what you do, they just call you up and say, Hey, can I speak to you for three minutes about this thing? I think, experiencing a lot of that over the last few years, it’s made me want to be the opposite of that.

Like do the things that actually where you’re making an effort to take time to genuinely build relationships, there are so many people out there marketers and influencers and people that are selling courses that are like, yeah, just do all this good stuff, and like automate this stuff. But, from our experience of growing this business, the things that and I want to share some specific examples for our business to show you how we’ve done this, the things that we’ve done, when we have gone the extra mile are the things that have generated the greatest return on investment for our business.

Lloyd 8:27
It’s also long term versus short term thinking. So a lot of those automated things, you can do the scalable stuff, oh, I can just put this into this tool, and then it will send this email to 1000 people in the short term that genuinely I think, could be more beneficial than some of the things that we’ve done that have taken a much more personal, have a more personal touch, and I’ve taken much more of our resources.

But in the long term, I think it always pays off, I guess, short term sacrifice, in everything in life usually pays off in the long term. So it takes more effort in the short term to have this kind of unscalable things that you’re doing. And in the short term, it’s like, oh, that’s annoying. It’s taking more resources, it’s cost more whatever. But in the long term, it always seems to pay off. It’s just like, in the short term, it’s rubbish to go to the gym every day, and it takes a long time. You’re like, oh, I’ve got abs, obviously not me. But yeah, maybe mainly.

To try and provide some value for the listeners and to try and inspire them for things they can do. Can I share some specific examples of things we’ve done? And the results are achieved?

Yeah, cuz I think this will be interesting for listeners, rather than us being like, Yeah, you should do this is so much nicer doing these unscalable things that you put the effort in, actually hearing things and hearing the benefits that we get in the long term.

Dan 9:55
These are measurable things real.

Lloyd 9:59
Real example coming your way.

Dan 10:01
So one thing, building a solid relationship with Andrew and Pete, for those who don’t know, Andrew and Pete are two marketers from Newcastle that we met years ago. I think they wrote an article for Social Media Examiner and I shared it and tagged them and said, this is a great article years ago.

Lloyd 10:23
You could have automated that.

Dan 10:24
I could have automated that but that’s not part of this explanation. But anyway, so we, we met them, we went to one of their events we got on well, yeah, over the last few years, we’ve been supporting them by attending, oh, and helping them promote their events, going up and meeting them and hanging out together. And we’ve, you know, spent quite a lot of time together over the years. Yeah. Now we didn’t, we didn’t just do that with this strategy in mind that, oh, that’s going to be beneficial to us.

Lloyd 10:53
We do genuinely like them.

Dan 10:54
We do genuinely like it needs to be authentic. I think that’s another key thing. But from that relationship, so one example of something really valuable to us. They have, they used to do a lot of public speaking. And when they, because they got lots of opportunities to speak more than we ever did, whenever they had the opportunity, they couldn’t do because they had another speaking event, they would recommend that I would go and speak at those and that that I think we went to Lithuania and you came with me? Supernova, that event that was one of them.

Like they put they also helped us get a speaking slot in Social Media Marketing out in San Diego. Another thing, they also put us in touch with a training company in Dubai, to go and deliver strategic training with some of the biggest brands in the world like FIFA, Nestle, Citibank, and Boston Consulting Group. So all these things have happened from us, nurturing and building that relationship and going up to Newcastle and seeing them. And that’s just one example of many.

Lloyd 12:02
It’s been, it’s interesting with that relationship with Andrew and Pete who run atomic, they so both ways, we’ve helped each other, both ways over the years, and gone the extra mile to support each other with various things. And I feel like it’s paid off for both sides, if we were just thinking short term, you know, Andrew, and Pete with those speaking things, they could have thought, well, we could try and get a commission and hands this off to someone and see if we can make some money that they were just being genuine and supportive with that kind of those kinds of actions.

And I think, yeah, really paid off for both sides, putting the extra effort in for several years which, if you looked at it, just of how productive is my time, us going up to new cars, so a few times and supporting their events whenever we could, you could look at that and go, that’s a huge amount of time to put in all that travel and stuff when you could be doing really good stuff to sell stuff in your business in the short term.

Dan 12:59
Yeah, definitely. I’d think don’t undervalue those trips, and the time you spent building those relationships.

Lloyd 13:07
And bonus, doing stuff like that. It’s fun. We’ve got a lovely relationship and friendship with them and did a lot of fun stuff. So.

Dan 13:15
So I guess that would that could come under the theme of building partnerships or relationships with other people in your industry?

Lloyd 13:23
Is that kind of a good description? Yeah. And taking the time to build relationships, not just be that superficial kind of fake? Oh, yeah, God, I love what you do. And I’ll support you.

Dan 13:34
Another example is something that happened recently. So for those loyal listeners, you might have noticed this so recently, we stopped sharing the whole video episodes on YouTube. What we used to do is a film we still film this whole episode, but we used to share the whole video episode on YouTube.

And we stopped doing that recently because it took a lot of time to edit and there weren’t that many people watching the whole video most people were listening to the full podcast or watching the shorter clips. So we wanted to use that extra resource that we saved to create more kinds of tiktok promo videos and the things that are working well moving forward. Now, one of the things that with the YouTube videos is it had an auto-captioning feature. So, anyone who needed to read the captions if they were hard of hearing or impaired in some way, could watch the YouTube video and the auto-captions for the whole episode would come up. When we stopped doing that.

We got a message from a lovely business anchor Jeremy. Hi Jeremy, I know you’re reading this who said oh, now that we’ve stopped doing that he can’t consume the podcast because he can’t hear the audio. So we wanted to make this accessible to everyone. So we now write up all of these podcast episodes and create a blog on our website where it’s written up with notes. And it takes loads of time. And initially, it doesn’t seem an efficient way of using our time. But it means it’s accessible to people who need to read the podcast rather than listen to it. And Jeremy, we did that, didn’t think anything of it.

And Jeremy did a lovely post saying how it made him happy because he could still be a loyal business anchor and thanking our team, our team during that whole process, and it did make Yasmin from our team cry, good tears. But it just made like getting that message just made it worthwhile. And I think knowing that we’re making this accessible to everyone is a bigger positive than knowing that, oh, we could save time and not do that.

Lloyd 15:52
I think, again, though, some of those decisions that, in the short term, a purely business financial driven decisions, it doesn’t make any sense to do that. This is why I think a lot of businesses don’t do this sort of stuff. It doesn’t make logical sense in the short term financially, we’re using our team’s time for something that doesn’t bring the business money in.

But I’m so confident from all of these examples, in our previous experience that doing the right thing, in the making, the extra effort in the long term always pays off somehow.

Dan 16:25
Yeah, I’ve got more examples. But do you have anything that you’ve any kind of examples of things that you think are unscalable marketing?

Lloyd 16:34
My main example, I don’t know, if you were gonna mention it, the main thing I was gonna talk about is when we sent wig parcels to people like we this was an amazing test and, and had a really good return, I guess, you can go into the details, but something unscalable we went through a phase where a lot of our content, we were wearing wigs and making funny videos, and we kind of got reputation of Oh, you do the videos on LinkedIn in the wigs.

And so the engaging people, we sent in the post, a wig, a parcel with a wig, and a note kind of saying like, Thank you for your support, if you ever want to talk to us about working with us and whatever, let us know. Now obviously the time and effort to firstly, sourcing good value wigs. Putting all the packages together, writing the note, getting everyone’s addresses and stuff, all of sending them off all that stuff, hugely inefficient, rather than like sending a sales email to them or sending them a direct message DM saying, Hey, do you want to work with us?

But we just felt we wanted to have a test of if we go to the effort and do something different then it’s gonna get noticed and take more time? Will it pay off? And I don’t know Dan, you’ll probably be in a better position to let us know, the return on that investment.

Dan 17:52
I am Lloyd. Yeah. Well, if listeners want to know an in-depth insight into that strategy and how it works, go and listen to episode 21, the weird marketing strategy that generated 10x ROI, which we produced, was that 60 Something episodes ago, so it was quite a while ago.

Since then, you know, I’m not gonna mention the product, we recently converted another project, who originally one of the people, we sent the weird wig packages to work for another company moved companies and then got in touch with us and said, You sent me a weird wig six months ago, and now work for a new company, I’m in a position to work with you. And we’ve we’re just starting that project now. So it’s more than 10X the time and resource we put into that the return in terms of the value the revenue value has been worthwhile.

Lloyd 18:45
That’s just the perfect example of what we’re saying. So even if we sent those parcels out, and we had no instant sales, which we did, we booked a strategy session. So 10x the time and resources so even if we got nothing immediately, most businesses would have thought, Oh, that was a failure.

Why didn’t we go to the effort to do that? And then it takes someone, so someone was in a job where they thought actually in my current role, there’s not gonna be an opportunity to work with you nothing happened, they get a new job and then six months down the line then you convert that sale I think that’s exactly what I’m talking about are the long term effects how it always works out long term if you take the time and put the extra effort in the short term.

Dan 19:35
Another example is this podcast. Literally for the first year, like there’s a lot of resources you know, there’s the team that is shooting this there’s a time to edit it. There’s a time we prep. There’s a lot of time that goes into this podcast um for a year. We didn’t make any money or I think we made a very tiny amount of money that made a huge loss. And we had to wait a year of doing this consistently to finally, after a year, we booked in like a six-figure contract that made it all worthwhile.

And we’ve since, you know, at least 50 to 70% of our new business mentions that they listen to the podcast now. So it’s one of those things, it’s just a reminder for all marketers or business owners listening, you need to do things consistently over time to gauge if something is working or not, don’t just do it once and be like, Oh, I didn’t get an instant client.

I guess one question, Lloyd. How do you know when is the time to stop trying something that because you know, like we’ve waited a year to get the results from this? Yeah. What if something’s terrible? And well.

Lloyd 20:40
I think was something like the podcast, we could monitor things that weren’t income to show that it was worthwhile. We could see the engagement online of people speaking more and more positively about us and what we’re saying and what we’re doing. So there are things like that, that kind of those positive signs is the main thing. Oh, okay.

Things like sending the wig parcels. I have to admit, that’s a harder one. Like, you just have to go, Well, maybe this will work in a bit. And if it doesn’t, then that gives you confidence. I’d now be confident, say if we had some kind of weird theme on this podcast, oh, I always eat kiwis or something. I’d be confident if we sent out a load of Kiwis to our biggest listeners with a lovely, note, we would probably get a return on investment for that time because we’ve done it in the past.

Dan 21:27
Just sending kiwis. That’s why I handle our marketing Lloyd.

Lloyd 21:33
I was trying to think of something I don’t know, not kiwis, we won’t send any kiwis. Because of the logistics of sending perishable food items.

Dan 21:40
So you’ve let me think of something else now. So the reason that’s a terrible idea like we had a company that just sent us cheese in the post, do you remember that. Over weeks, and we’re like someone keeps sending us cheese, and at the end they were like, We’re a new IT telecoms company. Do you want to work with us? We’ve sent you cheese. And we’re like, No, we don’t think so.

Lloyd 22:00
That was strange.

Dan 22:01
But I do get the idea. We appreciate the creativity a bit. But it’s sort of like…

Lloyd 22:06
When you don’t need the services, and you’ve just got one cheese. It’s not a good combination. But then they might have got a good return on that.

Dan 22:15
They might have done yeah. I mean, it had no impact on me deciding that they were a good company to work with by just sending cheese in the post.

Lloyd 22:24
If anything, it made me think if you can’t handle the logistics of keeping cheese cool. In the process of getting delivered, how are you going to keep cool when I have an IT emergency?

Dan 22:35 +++++
Wow, that is cringe. One more example for me. I know I’m being Mystery Example, this episode before we get into some practical, more practical stuff. So, agency nomics, we’ve done a business anchors podcast episode on agency nomics, which is a brilliant book, if you run an agency or you’re in the marketing world, or you want to do business go and read agents, economics by
Spencer, and Pete, two guys that used have an agency and they sold it, and now they help other agencies. We read their book and then did a podcast episode on it. And then we went to one of their events. And we’ve since kind of built and nurture that relationship over time. We’ve put quite a lot of time into producing content about them, going to meet them, and attending their events. And we had

Lloyd 23:27
Drinking champagne in their house.

Dan 23:28
Drinking champagne and one of the houses. Yeah, that was, that was tough. That is just a quick, quick backstory on that. That was a weird one because we’re going to an event they’re running. And then we were invited. It was one of their birthdays and were invited back to their house.

And we thought it might just be one of those things where it’s like, oh, we better invite them because we didn’t know them that well. Did we? Then we just ended up in their house. And it was really good in the end.

Lloyd 23:57
Weird tangent.

Dan 23:58
But anyway, so so that that’s another unscalable thing we’ve done building the relationship with them. And we got mentioned in their recent book. That’s one thing that’s happened because of that.

Lloyd 24:10
In a good way?

Dan 24:11
In a good way. Yeah. They said how brilliant we were and how creative we were.

Lloyd 24:14
Now in the long term, people gonna read that, and someone’s gonna go, oh, I want to speak to them about giving them loads of money to do something really good.

Dan 24:21
Exactly. Yeah. And we’re actually, I don’t know how much we can talk about this. We’re gonna give too much away. But we’re potentially going to be hosting some kind of event thing in the future. But we can’t talk about that.

So we’ve given lots of examples of like positive things that we positive outcomes we’ve had, in the long term when we’ve done unscalable things that have taken more resources that seem to make sense in the short term. If people are listening, thinking, well what can I do? What steps should people take to take on this kind of strategy?

It feels weird, like giving steps for how to like build real-life relationships and stuff, because it Could sort of just happen but to make the structured one, I would write a list of all the people with who you want to build deeper relationships, or who have supported your business, or potential customers you want to work with and build relationships with writing a list of all those people, then prioritise them in terms of who are the most important people you want to build a relationship with.

And then literally set actions to do something unscalable for them. That could be, you know, booking a ticket for the event, they’re running and going there and supporting them. It could be writing a handwritten thing as we did with weird wig packages.

Lloyd 25:46
I think anything that shows that you’re putting time and effort into the relationship. Not annoying things like don’t send them cheese every day and look at the effort. I’m making something that hopefully they will value like we were sending the wigs because we thought it would make people laugh like that.

They’re like commenting on our videos. Oh, I love those wigs. And then we’re sending them we thought they’ll probably laugh at this. So that’ll be. But yeah, anything that just shows you’re making an effort and that relationship is valuable to you.

Dan 26:20
Go and do that stuff. Is there anything else that you think would be valuable to add to the conversation, Lloyd, anything around unscalable marketing, that will be useful to listeners?

Lloyd 26:30
I think just the summary that always thinks of the long term whenever you possibly can unless there’s a bill you need to pay in like two hours. And so you have to just think of short term income over time.

Yeah, I said that weird then stop laughing at me. Our long term strategies have always paid off us. Are you still laughing because I said income funny? So I’d say any decision making try and do that, like make the extra effort in the short term. Like I said, almost anything in life seems to be this way. Put the extra effort in, in the short term, and it’s going to pay off in the long term.

Dan 27:08
Yeah. So actually take action. What are you going to do after listening to this episode, to build a deeper relationship with someone who you want to build a deeper relationship with? Do that thing, send them that handwritten note with a chocolate bar and go and book a ticket to their event? Do it now and you genuinely will see it and it’s just a nice thing to do. Like you’re being a good person.

Lloyd 27:32
They probably like melted chocolate bars in the past. It’s a good thing to do.

Dan 27:36
So yeah, cool. We’ve got a really interesting episode coming up next, which is all about how to generate Predictable Revenue, which I think is probably going to be the most valuable episode we’ve ever done.

Lloyd 27:46
Next week’s episode, just it’s like gave us a magical power to predict revenue in the future and know exactly how much money our business is going to bring in. Magical. Listen to that in a bit. Or if you’ve listened to this light, probably already live. So go there now.

Dan 28:05
See you next week.

Lloyd 28:06
Bye.

Hopefully this has been useful and helped to understand how to improve your Marketing ROI. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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How To Predict Revenue

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Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

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If you’re wondering how to predict your revenue and you’re tired of going month to month, not accurately knowing what your revenue will be, this episode (one of our most value-adding to-date) is for you!
Over the years we’ve developed a system to predict our revenue and, in this podcast, we’re sharing it with you. Notepads at the ready, this step-by-step, actionable podcast is about to blow your mind…

How To Predict Revenue Timestamps

00:00 – 01:09 Intro
01:10 – 05:19 What is predictable revenue?
05:20– 06:07 Step 1: Set revenue goals
06:08 – 07:32 Step 2: Set up a process (and tools) to track leads
07:33 – 10:24 Step 3: Work out the value of an unconverted lead
10:25 – 11:56 Step 4: Work out how many unconverted leads you need to achieve your sales targets
11:57 – 13:19 Step 5: Track performance every week
13:20 – 18:17 Use the Entrepreneurs Operating System to track progress
18:18– 18:28 Outro
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i7EutISAlDA

How To Predict Revenue Transcript

0:00 Pat
Hi, Pat, the podcast editor here. How can you possibly predict the future of your company? Well, today, Dan and Lloyd take us through their five steps on how to predict the revenue of your company, regardless of the size.

00:14 Dan

If you run a business or you\’re in marketing, and you don\’t currently have a predictable way of knowing the revenue, it\’s coming into the business, these steps that we\’re going to share are going to be incredibly valuable to you as they have been for us.

0:26 Pat

Now, as if five steps weren\’t enough, you\’ll also hear about actions that you can take to ensure that your business adapts appropriately to its projected future.

00:35 Lloyd
Once you get to this value of understanding how much an unconverted lead is worth to your business. You know, if that phone rings, on average, that phone call is worth 300 pounds.

0:45 Pat

So how can these five simple steps help you predict the future? Stay tuned to find out. Right, let\’s get the show on the road. This is episode 91 of the business anchors podcast.

01:10 Dan

What is predictable revenue? And why is generating it so important for business owners, Lloyd?

01:15 Lloyd

Because I think we have a superpower in this business now of accurately knowing what our future income to the businesses is. And that just gives you so much freedom to make the best decisions for your business.

01:30 Dan

It didn\’t use to be like this though did it?

01:31 Lloyd

No, we didn\’t know how much money was coming in tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, we come a long way with it. And it\’s majorly helped our business in the last few years.

So I guess we have gone from the point of having no idea what money will be coming in the future, whether it\’s going to be good or bad to have this process of being in, I think a process that almost any business can have to accurately predict our future income.

01:59 Dan

I remember it almost being a complete shock that some months we\’d get to the month and just be like, Oh, what are we doing this month? How are we paying the bills, and just it all being a big surprise? Yeah. And we kind of just used to do things as and when, Oh, someone wants a bit of work done, we\’ll do it.

Whereas now we\’ve got a very systemized approach that gives us warning signs, three, four months in advance to know if we\’re not doing the right things, hitting the right numbers to be having a sustainable business to make this work.

02:28 Lloyd

If you think like if you follow the steps that we\’re gonna go through, so that you can do this to being able to accurately predict the income that you\’re going to have in the future means you can make decisions like, oh, okay, well, I need to start recruiting people because I need more staff in three months, or the other way, obviously negative, but oh, if I don\’t change something, I can\’t pay all the bills in three months, because I can see that the income is going to drop. So we need to work this out. Or we need to get rid of people or you know, whatever needs to happen.

So it can be a lifesaver. Also for investing in your business. Like, you know, if you know that your income is going to be higher, and you\’re going to have spare cash in the business in future months, you can go Oh, actually, well, we were talking about getting a new van. And that\’s going to be a great investment for the business and mean we can deliver our products 20% more efficiently.

Or, you know, for us with the studio that we\’ve built for the podcast at the point where we predicted, we can see that our income, we\’re going to have the spare cash. And we invested in this kind of unit down here about 20,000 pounds in various things to improve our business. And we couldn\’t have done that. Or we would have had to take massive risks doing that. If we didn\’t know what our income would be in the future.

03:48 Dan

I don\’t just think it\’s the decision-making benefits. Like you\’ve said, though, for me, whose responsibilities are the sales and marketing for our business? I think it also dramatically reduces stress. Because the stress I used to get when we get to a month, the Lloyd would be like what so what\’s going on with sales and, like, didn\’t know what was going on, we can, you know, we didn\’t have enough to do what you needed to do.

Now, it\’s so far in advance that the stress levels, you know, may increase slightly, because we know right, something needs to change because, in three months, we\’re not going to be having what we need to have.

04:28 Lloyd

We have things in place now where every Friday, so once a week, forever. We have signs (what we will call lead indicators) that I\’ll go into in a minute and we can see like oh that\’s going to affect the business positively or negatively in three or four months. And having that like you\’re saying reduces stress for everyone and knowing where we are and having the time to make decisions, so you don\’t get in a stressful situation. It\’s like a superpower.

04:57 Dan

So if you run a business or you\’re in marketing, and you don\’t currently have a predictable way of knowing the revenue that\’s coming into the business, the steps that we\’re going to share are going to be incredibly valuable to you, as they have been for us.

05:12 Lloyd

So Dan, the steps that give you this superpower, please tell the lovely business anchors, listeners.

05:20 Dan

So there are five steps to ensure you\’re generating predictable revenue for your business. The first one is all about setting goals to understanding if you\’re achieving the revenue targets you need to achieve, you need to have the goals for that, first of all, so think of what your revenue goals are each month to hit your revenue goal for the year and break that down. Most people will have this already. But if you haven\’t got any kind of goal, set that out.

05:48 Lloyd

If you don\’t have that already, just work out a number that to break even our business needs this much. You know, a goal, that means we\’ll be earning a good amount will be this much of a stretch goal will be this much just so you can see where you are on the sliding scale on the absolute minimum, you need to cover your costs and survive.

06:08 Dan

Yeah, definitely. And once you set that goal, step two is to set up some kind of process if you don\’t have it already to track the leads coming into your business. Now there\’s a great tool we use called HubSpot. There\’s a free version, which everyone should give a go, it\’s good where you can. It\’s like a CRM system customer relationship management tool where whenever a lead comes in, you can input that lead.

So there are all tracks digitally, and you\’ve got all of that data there. So you need some kind of way of tracking how many leads are coming in, you may already have this, if you have already been tracking this kind of data, then that\’s great. But if you haven\’t, you need some data to make this work.

06:48 Lloyd

And this is relevant to businesses of all sizes. So whether you\’ve got a sales team in an in a massive office, and 70 people are selling for your business, or if you\’re someone who makes model trains, and you\’re one guy who just gets people, phoning them, like, don\’t think I don\’t get business leads, I just get you to know, few people ring.

They\’re like they are your leads, if somebody if Tommy\’s calling up going, I\’m thinking I might get you to produce another big, big old steam train. I don\’t know anything about like they that\’s what you\’d be recording, right? Tommy\’s called and said he might be interested in the big old steam train.

07:29 Dan

Yeah, exactly.

07:31 Lloyd

Tommy loves his trains.

07:33 Dan

So once you\’ve so you\’ve set your goals, you\’ve tracked the leads coming to your business, and you probably need 1-3 months of data to make this work. But the more data you have, the better. So you\’ve been tracking leads for a month or three months or a year, you\’ve got that data, you know, right? Every month, I\’m generating X amount of leads, on average, the next thing you need to do number three, is working out the value of an unconverted lead. And this will become apparent why this is important in a second.

So the way you work out the value of an unconverted lead is to take the total revenue generated in that period. So let\’s say in your first quarter, you generated 3000 pounds in revenue, take that number, then divide that by the number of leads that have come in in that period. Now we know not all of them have converted, but it\’s the total revenue figure divided by the total number of leads. So let\’s try to make this simple.

Let\’s say in the first quarter, you generated 3000 pounds, and you\’ve had 10 leads, trying to keep these numbers simple so that I can do the math, you divide the total revenue by the number of leads. So 3000 divided by 10. So you know, an unconverted lead is worth 300 pounds. Does that make sense Lloyd?

08:54 Lloyd

Yes, it does. And so depending on your business, you may have a business where you have 1000 leads, and only two or three of them convert. Or you might have a business where like, you have 10 leads, and eight of them convert, but the same calculation will work. So no matter how many customers you have to convert to get to that, it still works out.

Yeah. And this is amazing. Also, once you get to this value of understanding how much an unconverted lead is worth to your business, that means whether you\’re Tommy where this model trains, you know if that phone rings, Tommy wasn\’t making the trains, Tommy was this customer, if you\’re Brian, and Tommy\’s calling you when Tommy calls you, you know that on average that phone calls worth 300 pounds.

So if that Phone\’s ringing five times this week from different people, you know. On average, that\’s gonna be worth 1500. And it might be that one week that\’s worth 1000. And the next week, it\’s worth 2000 Because, you know, you have good and bad weeks, but over time, you\’ll know that it\’s at that level.

Yeah, and yeah, that\’s just such a, such a magical moment when you get to that point because even it takes the stress away from, oh, I hope I convert these deals this way, oh, I need to sell stuff because if the signs are still showing aren\’t getting enough leads in, I know that over time, it\’s all going to work out because I know that\’s how much it\’s worth, it reduces your stress and you can know you\’re in a good position.

10:24 Dan

And then what you can do in step number four is work out how many unconverted leads you need to achieve your sales targets. So let\’s say as we were saying, an unconverted lead is worth 300 pounds. And let\’s just say your sales targets are 3000 pounds a month, you know, you need 10 unconverted leads to generate the 3000 pounds a month to hit your sales targets. So if you\’re not generating 10 leads a month, you know, you\’re gonna get behind with your sales targets.

And that\’s what we call a lead indicator. So that\’s something to show you and we track this every week in our weekly meetings, I have to report to the team how many leads have we generated this month, or sorry, this week, to see if we\’re on target for our weekly goal. And if we\’re not, then we can start to make changes.

11:14 Lloyd

Way that this allows us to predict the future. Like I was saying, it\’s because we know from when the phone rings, or we get a message through our website or a LinkedIn DM of that lead initially, we know that it usually takes three or four months until that affects our bank account, basically, the money in the bank.

By the time you\’ve gone through the process of converting or not converting those leads to completing a project and then paying for it, we\’ve got three or four months to make changes and adapt if we need to. So if we\’ve had one week, where we know that we know we need 10 leads, is it a week or a month we need to at least 10 leads, Dan?

11:59 Dan

Am I can’t remember.

11:59 Lloyd

All right, in this made-up example, we need 10 leads in a month. So that\’s two and a half a week, a week or two a week, roughly. So if we\’ve had a week where we\’ve got no leads, we know Oh, hang on in three or four months. If this continues, we\’re gonna be short here. Or if we\’re like hang on the last three weeks, we\’ve had five leads each week, we know That\’s double what we need in three or four months, we are likely to be able to hit double our targets, if we can do so.

So Brian, at that point goes Hang on. Brian\’s my lead indicators are showing, I could have doubled the income in three or four months. I need to hire Sondra to help me with these model trains. And I know that rather than 10 minutes before the sale comes in.

12:47 Dan

And that is step five, which you\’ve just explained, sorry, step five is tracking this every week. And then make appropriate changes if needed to ensure you\’re going to hit those numbers in the future weeks. And like you said that could be it could be making changes to your marketing strategy.

It could be trying and tweaking different things, it could be making more calls, you know, trying to make those changes so that you know that you\’re going to hit the numbers you need to if you just sit there and look at the numbers and know that oh, we\’re not achieving what we need to achieve and not doing anything, nothing\’s going to change.

13:19 Lloyd

If you\’re in a bigger business as well. And you have the resource, you may have things that you know can increase or increase leads if you need them. So you may know that, okay, our Google PPC campaign, we know we have to pump about this much money into it to get this many leads. And if leads are looking low, then you can have that conversation with your manager, whoever the decision-maker and say. Look, we\’re looking pretty low.

If the team\’s going to have enough work to do in three months, we need to increase the leads, let\’s increase our budget for the PPC campaign, and make sure that we fill that gap. So we don\’t have a room of 30 people that are working at 50% capacity.

14:01 Dan

And I think a really important thing to make this all work is having that process where you\’re checking the numbers regularly. Like Lloyd mentioned, the way we do this is in our weekly meetings, our weekly team meetings and we use a system from the entrepreneurs operating system where we\’ve got a scorecard to great like rank everything we\’re doing and score everything we\’re doing.

If you want more info on how you can do that, go and listen to episode 72 called how the entrepreneur\’s operating system is a game-changer for business. And in that episode, we break down how you can do that because that\’s a really important point to make this all work, isn\’t it.

14:37 Lloyd

If you think whereas if we didn\’t have these things in place in our business, we wouldn\’t kind of work out until two or three months down the line. We have an issue. Now every single week we\’re on top of this and don\’t get me wrong. If we have a week where we don\’t hit our targets. We don\’t worry about it. But if we see over the last two weeks, those lead indicators are looking low or they\’re looking high.

That\’s when we start going. Okay, there\’s a pattern here that we need to take some kind of action. So if there\’s a pattern of two or three weeks where it\’s looking high, we start making plans in how we\’re going to have extra capacity to deliver more work in our business in the future.

And if the lead indicators are looking low, we need to start looking at how okay, how do we increase these results, increase the numbers for the next few weeks to make up for it, or the negative side, but something that at least you\’ll have time to to take action with is okay, we\’re not going to need as many resources in two or three months.

So actually, we\’ve got freelances that we work with that, we need to kind of say, oh, it looks like in July, we\’re not going to have as much work for you. I think that\’s the important thing with this whole process. If you don\’t take action, in response to those lead indicators, it\’s all pointless. So when you see that they\’re low or high, and you see patterns, you need to take action to get it where you need it to be.

15:59 Dan

Examples of the kind of actions we take, for example, increasing the volume of your output of content, if we\’re seeing that we\’re, we\’re not reaching as many people as we should be, and our numbers are down, you know, we produce more TikTok, we produce more content on LinkedIn, it still needs to be good quality.

But you know, we send more outreach videos as part of our LinkedIn outreach strategy. So whatever your marketing is, you should understand what are the levers that you can pull to increase what\’s happening or reduce it.

16:31 Lloyd

The more of those levers you can work out the better control you have. So it\’s like saying you might have a flexible workforce where you can plan right, we can get more help, we can get less help and that sort of thing or the other end those flexibilities on how many leads are coming in and changing that.

So you know, just your workforce is going to be fine, because we\’re just gonna turn the tap on or turn it off. Or we\’re using a lot of levers or taps.

17:02 Dan

But yeah, I think fine, just my summary is, I think that if you implement this kind of process in your business, it will be a game-changer as it has been for us. So don\’t make this one of those episodes where you listen to it like Oh, that sounded good. See you later, actually take the steps that are needed. And we\’ve got a written version of this on our website, knowltonmarketing.co.uk. So go and read back. Read that if you want.

17:27 Lloyd

Even if your first step today is just working out how much an unconverted lead is worth to your business. That\’s quite an exciting point where you\’re like, okay, so every time my phone rings, or someone contacts me, it\’s worth that much. It\’s quite exciting. Yeah. Or it could be worrying. It\’s worth 50p and only happens twice. But yeah, this could be worthwhile.

17:48 Dan

This will either make you panic because your business is terrible, and it\’s failing or excited because you know what you\’re doing and you can make the appropriate changes to achieve what you need to achieve.

17:59 Lloyd

Good all around. I think this was a good episode. Good. Yeah. Good value, adding stuff.

18:05 Dan

If you\’ve liked this, please do subscribe. Tell your friends about it.

18:09 Lloyd

I will.

18:10 Dan

Not you already do that. Okay. And we\’ll see you in yours next week. Yeah, okay.

18:16 Lloyd

See you in your ears, nice.

Hopefully this has been useful and helped to understand how to predict revenue. If you have any more questions or want to know howKnowlton can support you Start A Conversation.
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