"Build your niche around what you care about"

In this conversation, Seb, the creative director and co-founder of Soba, discusses the challenges faced by digital marketing agencies and the importance of finding and owning a unique space in the market. ~He emphasizes the need for agencies to differentiate themselves and avoid common mistakes such as using generic selling points. Seb also highlights the importance of courage in niching down and focusing on a specific area of expertise. 

Additionally, he shares insights on the role of LinkedIn in the industry. In this conversation, Seb and Radim discuss the challenges and fears associated with niching in agency businesses. They acknowledge the difficulty of giving advice on niching when it's not their own business at stake. They also explore the role of LinkedIn in agency marketing and express mixed opinions about the platform.

 The conversation delves into the effectiveness of social media presence and the importance of building an established readership. They discuss the misconceptions and realities of LinkedIn and the need for agency owners to diversify their client base for stability. 

They draw parallels between music genres and branding, emphasizing the importance of courage in brand positioning.

Takeaways

• Digital marketing agencies often struggle to differentiate themselves and sound unique in a saturated market.
• Finding and owning a niche is crucial for agencies to stand out and attract the right clients.
• Courage is required to say no to work that doesn't align with the agency's niche.
• LinkedIn can be a valuable platform for networking and showcasing expertise, but it should be used strategically and not solely relied upon for business growth.

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Radim Malinic: [00:02:10] Hey Seb, good morning. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Seb Mackay: Good morning, man. I'm good. How are you doing?

Radim Malinic: I'm Grant. I'm Grant. I'm super excited to be on the show [00:02:20] because I have been honest with you. I've not heard of you before you got in touch. And the more I found out about you, more research I've done, I was like, Oh, I definitely need this man on my show [00:02:30] because this conversation is going to be definitely of value to me and everyone who listens to this You do something which I think in this current climate and current situation is definitely [00:02:40] necessary.

So for those who haven't heard of you, would you introduce yourself?

Seb Mackay: Yeah, that's very nice of you, by the way. I thought you were going to say, I hadn't heard of you before and you hit me up and I [00:02:50] thought, who is this idiot? so I even turned up with my era hoodie, though no one else can see it, to just try to win some street cred. but yeah, I'm Seb. I am the creative director and co [00:03:00] founder at Sober, private label.

Sober as in the noodle, not as in the, that we don't drink. Um, I live in Glasgow, so obviously I drink heavily all of the time. and we [00:03:10] specialize in. Positioning and copy for digital marketing agencies. so we help them stand out in the market, we help them find their feet and we help them [00:03:20] to own their space because a lot of digital marketing agencies, just sound the same, there's a lot of words, sell it a lot of buzzword bingo.

and we want to put a stop to that because we think that [00:03:30] there's enough space for everyone to succeed. Everyone just needs to be able to own their own space to succeed.

Radim Malinic: I will definitely unpack this over the next hour. We'll unpack the owning the space [00:03:40] and everyone sounds, it looks and sounds the same because I grind this sentence to death on this podcast, which is, the market is only saturated if you look and sound like everybody else. So [00:03:50] we are definitely in good hands today to explain to people like myself.what we need to do about, tell me more about your background because you and I bonded over in our conversations, pre conversations [00:04:00] about the love of death metal and this sort of genre of music, how did you get to do what you do today?

Seb Mackay: Oh, that's such a big question. You know, the funny thing is, I actually started out in the music [00:04:10] industry, that was my very first, and I'm going to age myself here.

 but when I was doing, I started out doing album reviews and interviews with bands, and this was way back when they used to [00:04:20] post you the CD through the mail and you would put it in your CD player.

Seb Mackay: And you'd have five days to listen to it before you had to write up your thing and send it off to press. And so I [00:04:30] did that for years. and that was cool. It was fun. It, those things like never really make anyone money, they're all sort of hobby things. And you learn from each other.

And that was where I started to learn [00:04:40] to write.and I got published in, A couple of magazines in America. I got turned down for some really big ones. I think I, I pitched to alternative press once. So I was going to do the top 10 [00:04:50] Silverstein songs and they were like, yeah, that sounds great.

You should do that. And I wrote it, but I was in this kind of weird, like autobiographical phase. where I [00:05:00] was talking about how music relates to people, not as in this is the best one for an arbitrary reason. And they fucking hated it, which was awesome. but yeah, some other ones like Substream and some [00:05:10] magazines in Philly and a couple in Australia as well, and just cut my teeth doing that, which was really cool.

But then eventually it came along that, you need to get a real job [00:05:20] if you want to do something other than live off Pot Noodle, which it's pains me to say, but I've always tried to keep. one finger or two in the music industry. And I ran a music podcast up until fairly recently [00:05:30] too, 

but when I got into doing real job stuff, it was all about marketing and comms. I did a degree in journalism, so I knew how to put one word in front of the other. and then from [00:05:40] there, it, Just kept growing really. And it was like, I got up to head of marketing, and thought I fucking hate this, I don't want to do this anymore and through financial [00:05:50] security off a cliff and called up Dan, my business partner and said, Dan, you've got a great job with great pay and great benefits.

How would you feel about throwing it all away? to fuck about with [00:06:00] me and start an agency. And amazingly he said, yes.which I think he regrets to this day. We're not going to have him on the podcast cause I think that he would tell you that. and yeah, that's how we got started in it.

[00:06:10] And we knew that we wanted to work with agencies because we'd worked with them as in house marketers. So I think this is the really like core thing for us is neither Dan or I had worked for agencies [00:06:20] before, but we'd always wanted to, but agencies don't hire people that haven't worked for agencies. And so it came to a point where we thought, we want [00:06:30] to work in agencies.

No one's going to hire us. So I guess we'll just start our own.

Radim Malinic: So I want to go back one step. so you said you started writing reviews when you still got CDs, delivered in the post, because [00:06:40] obviously what you do now is you help people to, as you said, find and own their space. To do this in a sort of, let's call it prehistoric era where internet was a thing, not [00:06:50] necessarily as that, because making things happen in a sort of pre digital space and then having the CD in the post, we're talking about sort of year 2000, when the internet was a thing. How did [00:07:00] you yourself get, To, to be even seen to be actually considered for these reviews. what did you have to do personally to say, Hey, I'm Seb, I'm here. I would like to write a reviews [00:07:10] and I would like to pitch this stuff. Like, how did you even go about yourself to promote 

Seb Mackay: is way back when you still had street press and I think that's changed [00:07:20] so much now because I think, it's easier than ever for people to get published, right? Like you can set up a TikTok account in seconds or a blog or whatever, but it's harder than ever to get [00:07:30] discovered. I think you have to be really fucking good.

But when I started, you didn't have to be really good. You just had to want it, you know, you just had to go for it. And I think that was the, like the privilege that we had. So we had the street press [00:07:40] magazines and they had the editor's details in the back. And they're always looking for people, especially on weekly runs, because people have jobs and kids and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:07:50] So if you could get in touch with them, which was super easy, just do it over email, prove yourself by showing up, doing the work and show people that you were consistent, [00:08:00] reliable, then they just sent more and more your way. These days, I couldn't imagine. Having to do it, like having to start a blog and write for years and then [00:08:10] try to pitch to NME, for example, and try to get through with the other 15, 000 people that are pitching in their inbox, I don't envy anyone that's doing it in [00:08:20] 2024.

Radim Malinic: Yeah,

I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it's so much easier to do this stuff. It's so much harder to break through. Absolutely. As you say,TikTok account doesn't take too long to set up. [00:08:30] and I think we've broken the barrier of self labeling. Like we can, once upon a time, I used to call myself a music journalist, even though I've written. A dozen pieces, for a proper publication, but [00:08:40] it was a different time because yeah, as you said, because you wanted it, people came and you wanted it and you showed out, people said, okay,we'll take a risk on you or whatever. Whereas I remember. [00:08:50] My little sort ofendeavor was like, Hey, I've written some live reviews. Would you like to publish them? They're like, yeah, great. Because it was just, I guess there was a fewer people and there [00:09:00] was a sort of less of a noise. And whereas now I think we've opened the gates to anyone of us, but to stand out is so much harder. So I think that brings [00:09:10] us to. the current digital landscape, because you said you do copy and positioning for digital agencies. And they didn't exist when you were born. I [00:09:20] still sometimes find even difficult to understand what digital agencies do per se, because there's so many variables. And, And the ones that I can think of, they're usually the [00:09:30] ones that blur the lines. They're not just specifically digital because sometimes I see digital agencies almost like a production company.

It's not necessarily, as much creative as you would imagine or you would expect. [00:09:40] So going to agencies, then obviously you've, you managed to talk your business partner out of a potentially a cushy job and cushy pay and pension. You've started [00:09:50] Soba and how does that now join up to digital agencies and the reason why you guys actually decided to start this offer?

Seb Mackay: it's a [00:10:00] good question. We started it because we love agencies so much. We worked with agencies so much, is really the short answer to that. Dan and I had both [00:10:10] been heads of marketing or equivalent at different companies. And so we'd seen agencies pitch, we'd made them pitch. We'd been shitty clients.

We'd been good clients and [00:10:20] we realized that.a lot of agencies were just struggling because they were sounding the same as other people, or we realized that we were hiring [00:10:30] agencies just because we knew that they existed, not necessarily because they were the best people out there, right?

Because, and we can talk about this too, but like referral networks are huge. And a lot of [00:10:40] agencies get a lot of their work from referral networks. And that's not something that I want to put down, but when you're ahead of marketing, if you. And you're an agency, there [00:10:50] is a disconnect between those two things, right?

A head of marketing will hire the agencies that they know exist, not because they're the best, but because they know them. And so these agencies [00:11:00] that are dependent on referrals and not doing their own advertising, or don't have a strong market position, are potentially losing out on all this work, even though they might be better suited.[00:11:10] 

And so we knew that, and that was what our backgrounds were. And because we knew that when it came to starting an agency, we thought, there's no point going into the B2C space. because that's just [00:11:20] chocker. we don't need more agencies in the B2C space. I'm also a career B2B person as well.

So that just didn't make sense, right? I didn't have the chops. People were going, who the fuck are you? Get [00:11:30] out. and we originally started out not really, ironically, not really knowing where we wanted to be and being a kind of anything to everyone agency. But then after a few [00:11:40] months we found that our, we were just getting pulled more in this direction.

We were talking to agency owners, we were doing networking, we were posting on LinkedIn. And we started to check out the [00:11:50] competition as you do. And we started to notice this pattern. and that was how we got into it, really. we just thought we want to see these businesses succeed. We want to, we think that we can help because we have all of that [00:12:00] experience of hiring agencies and making them pitch and watching that process.

as former heads of marketing and people that have run departments and run budgets, we know what agencies are up against [00:12:10] this. There's no kind of secret there, or there's no hidden thing when we're doing someone's positioning or writing their copy where we're going, Oh, we hope this works for heads of marketing [00:12:20] because we know it works for heads of marketing.

Because if it works for us, it's going to work for other people. we're not unique sort of outliers when it comes to the things that kind of make us, [00:12:30] right? we're marketers and people just like everyone else. And so we know when 

good copy sells and when it doesn't sell that those things are universally true.

Radim Malinic: I'm quite interested [00:12:40] in common mistakes. Obviously you must've seen, you must've seen a pattern of what people were doing wrong that gave you the idea. I was like. Obviously you've seen, obviously you've seen people [00:12:50] pitch and obviously you've been pitched to. what have you seen and what have you added as a sort of pattern recognition that you've decided like that, that needs to change? I can't bear this. This [00:13:00] needs to change. So is there like a common list of issues that people make, mistakes they make that, made you So I realized that's the area of that people need help with.

Seb Mackay: [00:13:10] Yeah, I think the main one is that people are, they're stuck and this is no one's fault, right? they're stuck in. using things that are table [00:13:20] stakes as things that are selling points. So an example of that is if an agency says to you, we're creative thinkers. You would think, yeah, I [00:13:30] hope so.

You're a fucking agency. This is your job, right? or they say we have a trusted team and it's I wouldn't want to work with an agency who doesn't trust their team. get your shit together. And we [00:13:40] treat these things as table stakes and they should be table stakes, right? No one should have to worry about whether the agency is going to be creative, especially if they're a creative agency.

And so we see these things out there [00:13:50] or we see where the agency for ambitious businesses. And it's Every business is ambitious. This doesn't help anyone. And if they're not ambitious, they're probably not hiring an agency [00:14:00] because they're just doing their own thing and they have a lifestyle business or whatever, and so these are the kind of the main mistakes I think are that people take these table stakes things.[00:14:10] 

And they. try to push them as benefits. I think the reason that this happens though, and the reason I say it's no one's fault is because I really believe that it's [00:14:20] because there's two different skill sets at play, right? You've got your B2B marketers who do all your boring shit, and you've got your B2C marketers who do all of the really sexy stuff.[00:14:30] 

And. All of my B2B colleagues are going to hate me for saying that, but we all agree on some level that it's true. We do undersea cables and, you know, internet, they do cookies and orange [00:14:40] juice and cinema, right? it's more fun to be on the B2C side.but with that comes a sort of gap and that gap, a lot of the [00:14:50] time is that these B2C marketers aren't used to doing B2B.

In the same way that you wouldn't get a B2B marketer to sell a B2C product. We always say to people, you [00:15:00] wouldn't use a webinar to sell KitKats. And what happens there is that these B2C marketers get pushed out of their comfort zone and get told, [00:15:10] we need to market the agency. The agency needs to do advertising.

We don't have any B2B people in house because we're a B2C agency. So you guys do it and do it on top of your client work [00:15:20] and do it in the spare 15 minutes that you've got on a Friday afternoon. And we can't pay you any extra because we're an agency and, margins are razor thin and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:15:30] And so what you end up with is people who are out of their depth doing their level best. And then that kind of becomes endemic. Every agency starts to do that because [00:15:40] agencies, oh man, I'm not going to win any friends here, am I? Agencies like to huddle together for warmth, right?

And we like to do the things that other agencies are doing. And so if we [00:15:50] see our colleagues doing certain things, then we will go and do that thing as well. And all of a sudden, what you've got is 30, 000 digital marketing agencies in the [00:16:00] UK. Most of them, who are never going to be mother or Saatchi and Saatchi, are fighting over the same patch of dirt, using the same language.

And our [00:16:10] argument is, don't do that. Focus on the thing that you really care about, the thing that you really like, whether that's music, video games, curtains, bakeries, whatever. And niche [00:16:20] down and position yourself into that thing and own that space and get yourself a B2B marketer to focus on that biz dev.

Radim Malinic: I, think we should have a bingo card on what you just [00:16:30] mentioned, that when you sort ofview websites of digital agencies or various agencies, or even freelancers that, you know, what you mentioned with the trusted team and we work for ambitious businesses. And I think we've [00:16:40] got a lot of now, creative agencies for changemakers.

everyone's a changemaker and everyone's a visual storyteller.I'm guilty of some of the bullshit myself, cause you try to entice people. And [00:16:50] obviously there's this, I think we try to see ourselves as semi psychologists and like behavioral scientists.

I think this word will definitely make people click, they'll pick up that phone. It [00:17:00] really depends. And I'm really thinking that there should be book like. What do clients want? what is it that people want to see? Like,what is it? How do you see it from the other point of view?

Because even if we're on an [00:17:10] interpersonal chain, like interpersonal level, we see ourselves as ourselves, how other people see us. It's totally different. Whereas we still [00:17:20] believe our own story of I am this, and this is what I stand for. someone else sees you making totally. different sense of values for yourself in their eyes because your actions speak louder than your words, [00:17:30] it's that thing.

So I've had on the show, a copywriter called, tone of voice specialist and copywriter called Vicky Ross, and she started something You know, called the Christmas bingo or the [00:17:40] Easter bingo. when you literally look through the press and you pick up, deck the halls and, whatever, like just to distract and literally I think what you've got here Seb is you can have like agency, chat, bullshit, [00:17:50] bingo card. It was like, because, but when you start, when you started saying all these things, I'm like, Oh, that rings so many bells. And it just seems, for us it was when we write that copy or [00:18:00] when you see the copy, Oh, of course that's empowering. But then. It's trivial. It's absolute nonsense.

Of course, everyone wants to work for ambitious business. no one's just of course, there's lots of businesses running themselves just on the [00:18:10] verge of bankruptcy because, that's just the business, but everyone's got ambitious to make, to the next pay line. that was really interesting.

And I would like to talk about the networking sort of section [00:18:20] in a minute. So what's really interesting when you say you mentioned like the market is for B2B and B2C because, you do under CK rules and there's biscuits and cinemas, [00:18:30] it's just a different

stuff. and sometime, we all, I speak for People I know and people I deal with, it's the glitzy stuff.

And I have, there's quite a lot of glory [00:18:40] hunters in that industry. from animal wall to wall, we want to have the credit. We want to be celebrated because initially with our careers, we go into this with Oh, I've got this massive ego and hopefully, I'm [00:18:50] here to change the world until you realize. You know what, the world will change with me, not because of me, you know, like I think we just need to find ourselves in the space. So,with the [00:19:00] B2B and B2C, like, where do people Begin to understand from your experience that they need help. That's the first thing I feel we need to address. Like when do [00:19:10] you come in and how do you tell people like, right? Because you don't want to, we on anyone's bonfire straight away going you know what, is not running because obviously if you tell people all the [00:19:20] mistakes, I always try to use a method called spin selling. Because you just, don't say anything's wrong. You just said, if you carry on like This is what will happen.

if you don't make any changes, you will [00:19:30] lose sales. So like you will lose customers, you know,like the growth is not going to happen. So how'd you guys go about it to come to your trusted, ambitious business?

Seb Mackay: yeah. So the first thing we [00:19:40] actually did a bingo card once, we have a weekly newsletter that we send out to agency owners. And the point of this newsletter is to be a bit like, to be funny, to be cutting to be a bit of [00:19:50] Seabrook. and the idea is that. This newsletter turns up on a Friday afternoon and people read it and they have a laugh about agency news, right?

 Anyway, the bingo card we titled that [00:20:00] the subject of that newsletter was how to win 500 pounds off your employees this afternoon. And then they opened it and all it was a print your own bingo card with all of the most common words that we've seen. And it was one of our most [00:20:10] performing newsletters.

Ever. And then I posted it on LinkedIn and it got absolutely nothing. And I think it's interesting how like people, LinkedIn feels like you're calling [00:20:20] someone out, but when you're getting an email or like a sort of jokey newsletter, it can feel like such a different experience. so yeah, we did try that, but I think you have a good point.

we should definitely do more of it in terms of the sales [00:20:30] stuff. I'm probably close to being the world's worst sales person. and I don't even mean that in a sort of self deprecating kind of way. When I started the. [00:20:40] I think I did it in the same way that everyone starts their agencies where they go, I'm really good at this thing, so I'll build it and they will come.

It never [00:20:50] occurred to me that I would have to learn how to do sales. Never, not for a second. It never occurred to me that people wouldn't just want to buy the thing because the thing exists, right? Which seems [00:21:00] so stupid now, but all of a sudden we were sitting there with our,fingers in our mouths being like, what do we do?

Where's the business? Where's [00:21:10] the work coming from? We're good at this. you know, we've cut our teeth. We have good chops. like why isn't anyone kicking the door down? then I was like, okay, I'm going to have to learn how to sell and have to learn how to do sales, [00:21:20] have conversations with people.

and I prefer to call it biz dev to be fair than sales just because I think sales is like a discipline. You know, when you meet a good [00:21:30] sales person, whether they're a hunter or a farmer, they're just really fucking good at what they do. I haven't earned the right to call myself a sales person yet, so I try to call it biz dev.

but what I've been learning [00:21:40] over doing that is a lot of it is just about having conversations with people and about listening to them and being the last person to speak and about [00:21:50] understanding like what makes them tick. And because we have worked with so many agencies, we understand what makes agency owners tick, right?

All the things that we've gone through as [00:22:00] agency owners ourselves are things that other agency owners have gone through. that very thing from why aren't people kicking the door down to build it and they will come to, using the same positioning as [00:22:10] everyone else, right? We've had all these thoughts as well.

And we've benefited from being able to push ourselves away from that space. And so to more directly answer your question, for me, it's [00:22:20] about chatting to people and saying, if you're running an agency and that agency is hitting, 700, 000, 800, 000, 900, 000, but you can't get beyond a million.

[00:22:30] That's going to be because the things that have got you to 800, 000 aren't going to be the things that get you further. And generally those things are a really strong [00:22:40] referral network, a handful of really good retainers. but not things that do really strong sort of business development or strong advertising.[00:22:50] 

And so where we end up is having these conversations with people and trying to understand what their goals are and saying, well, if you want to be a million pound agency, you have to [00:23:00] start doing your own advertising, working on your positioning, because it helps you take control of your agency.

I think it's easy for me to sit on a podcast and be like, Oh, your business runs you and you don't [00:23:10] run your business. And every cunt with a microphone said that. I think it is fundamentally true where if you want to start running the business, those are certain things that you have to [00:23:20] take, and so we try to have candid conversations with people about 

Radim Malinic: I think what you mentioned that was really valuable point is that you can't expect the same systems and same [00:23:30] methods to be universal for the longevity of your agency. Like, I mean, that,absolutely doesn't work. And I've recently gone through the book called What Got You Here, Won't Get You There [00:23:40] by Sobat. That's what I was trying. That was, that's what I was looking around. I mean,it's Marshall Goldsmith. So the points that you've raised there remind me of the book [00:23:50] I've read recently, which is What Got You Here Won't Get You There, which is very much about the fact that we can't expect one system to be universal for the 20 years or 30 years of the [00:24:00] lifespan of the agency, but it's definitely hard to be. Running the agency, paying people's [00:24:10] mortgages, paying people's pensions, you're having all of this working and growing at the same time, unless you've got specific personnel, sometimes it's so easy to actually get [00:24:20] sidetracked and just, just thinking that what I've got here, we need to do, and then have that blind panic when you get your email.

on Friday afternoon going, shit, we need to do something about marketing. We need to grow. [00:24:30] We need to do this. We need to do that. Because most of the time, the stuff that you're describing from my experience and from people that I know, it's firefighting, just like,[00:24:40] Oh, I'm running out of work.

Maybe we should do something there. maybe we should have something about it or Oh, I'm going to send a hundred emails to a hundred people we can potentially work with. And it's like turning up in a nightclub [00:24:50] going, there's a hundred women in the nightclub or vice versa. All 100 will be like, will be all over me.

Like,no,it doesn't work that way. And obviously you build your networks and you build your [00:25:00] reputation and all that stuff. And sometimes we have to have a plan, but that plan sometimes seems so unobtainable because you've got work to do and you've got people being off sick and [00:25:10] you go like,so when you say like the agency runs you, I think that's definitely what happens in most cases.

because I think there was a story and I'm not sure if I [00:25:20] can say it now on the podcast, I will, but I heard of someone who was running an agency with 28 employees.and their wife had to go back to work to make [00:25:30] sure that they can pay a mortgage. So imagine like having been in a situation where on paper, it was like, what have you got?

A design agency with 28 people, [00:25:40] brilliant. How's it going? wife's back at work doing what she needs to do just so we can survive. It's like,I think with the creative businesses, more about [00:25:50] a creativity and less about a business, if that makes sense.

Like people just think that, proof of concept will work and our proof of work will work, people will show up. That's what we'll do. But [00:26:00] we kind ofbundle two things together, like creativity, which is sometimes so personal to us and we take pride in it and try to sort of mold it onto a client plus build a business around it. [00:26:10] That seems sometimes So much more complicated than a Gary who's got a van and a plumbing tools and just drives around the town, you know,and then it's in a pub by three o'clock, he's thinking, he's got it different, [00:26:20] but what we've decided to do is I think it needs to come with a little sort of warning label, like, It's going to be this, you need to consider all of these steps.

And usually in our careers, [00:26:30] we actually,we get that step by step because if you give someone a manual, how to become a agency owner, and when they're 20 years old, it'd be like, yeah, I'll be rather [00:26:40] employed any day of the week, because it seems like it's too, too far and too scary. But you mentioned the salespeople, like sometimes when you come to a real salesperson, they're a different breed [00:26:50] of a human. I remember being in so many meetings with salespeople. I'm like, who's the guy? what is he on? Like,is he on Coke? Like, what, what, what? Like,they disregard any sort of [00:27:00] visual aesthetics or anything like sales.

We're going to make the sales. We're going to do this. We're like, all right. That's how the others in the industry work and live. it's a totally different thing. So I [00:27:10] feel. We're kind oflike multifaceted individuals. We should be multifaceted individuals because unless you're a talented artist who can have agents, accountants, everything, [00:27:20] like not do peripherals and you can just get on with the stuff, that's rare.

Like we need to have more understanding knowledge of how these things operate because that makes us stronger. [00:27:30] But then we get to the point where, you know, I mentioned the quote before we started with Massimo Vignelli's quote, you only design one thing, you think you can design [00:27:40] everything and then things that, okay, well, I've run my business successfully, you know,semi successfully, let's say, hypothetically, a freelancer can say, I've been running my business for the last two years.

I can do everything now. [00:27:50] And I think we get to the pitfalls of like,okay, there is a point. where you're actually calling a specialist to do X, Y, Z, because you can't do everything well. It's impossible. You know, [00:28:00] even every multi instrumentalist can, has, have got the Achilles heel and go I can't play the ukulele like somebody else. So at what point do [00:28:10] you get the agency founders to say, hands up, I need your help. What do we do?

Seb Mackay: Yeah, man, you cover so many good points there. There's sort of two stories to kind of[00:28:20] build on your example of the design agency. So we know two agency owners who run outwardly very successful agencies and inwardly as well. And [00:28:30] one of them said to us, they've got loads of FMCG clients, really big ones too, like household names that you would recognize down at Tesco or whatever.

[00:28:40] And every year and a half, sometimes less, that client will say, Oh, we're going to get all of our agencies to repitch, right? We're going to do a whole podcast one day on why pitching is bullshit. [00:28:50] At that point, that agency owner, will panic and they'll do what you described where they'll go out to a hundred people, they'll start networking, they'll start pitching like mad.

And then [00:29:00] it transpires that the sort of household FMCG never actually gets them to re pitch and so they fall back into their rhythm. And so the cycle of this [00:29:10] person's business is every 18 months or sometimes less, they think they're going to lose their biggest client and then they don't. So they keep going for another year, two years, three [00:29:20] years, and then, these things happen on cycle.

So this is how the guy runs his business, right? And then there was another agency owner that we were talking to who has a really big, really well [00:29:30] known, And obviously one of the things I think we need to talk about is how shit 2023 was for agency owners, because this has had a big impact on the work that we do as well.

And I think it would be like [00:29:40] remiss not to mention it, but he was saying to us that there were times in 2023 where two of their biggest clients [00:29:50] walked. I don't know why, I don't know if it was budgets or whatever, but they would sit in the car park. Of their office with like tears in their eyes, panicking about how they were going to keep [00:30:00] this agency going.

this agency owner has a great reputation. They do amazing work. this isn't to discredit them. and at any stretch. It is to say though, that [00:30:10] every agency owner, very much like you said, struggles with these points. And I think it's a lot of it's because of the stuff that you said, you know, we are creatives and we're [00:30:20] creatives who have to then learn how to run businesses.

And these are very different things, right? I think if you gave every agency owner or a business manager, We would probably be all [00:30:30] wealthy and living in the Caribbean on yachts because fundamentally, we're all very good at what we do, right? It's the business management bit that's hard. And that's one of the things that we've had to learn.

But I read this interesting [00:30:40] article in Vox magazine a few weeks ago about how publishers are turning down authors if they don't have big enough social media followings. [00:30:50] And this is publishers like for Bloomsbury and Penguin and stuff. It's not just cottage industry stuff. and the argument that they're making or that we're trying to make is that creatives should be [00:31:00] allowed to just be good at being creative.

You also shouldn't have to be a marketing superstar on TikTok, but the world is changing, right? And in a odd sort of way, [00:31:10] agency owners have been like at the front of that change as a group of creatives who are really good at the thing that they choose to be really good at, who are then learning to [00:31:20] manage a business and have all these other kind of strengths and trials and challenges.

And so to go right back around to what you were saying about getting someone [00:31:30] to say, okay, we need help. 2023 has helped with that because it was such a shit year for everyone. People had to take stock and think, if our referral network dries up, what [00:31:40] happens next? The other thing too, I think is sometimes just showing people that there is a different way that's, I want to say low [00:31:50] investment.

I don't want to say low investment because I'll give the impression that sober cheap and that we're in like a race to the bottom, like some kind of, guy on Fiverr, cause we're not, but getting us [00:32:00] to write someone's copy and do their positioning is cheaper than hiring a B2B marketer full time.

So this is something that. People can effectively trial [00:32:10] out, see what's different, see how it looks for themselves and can kind of separate themselves from the business by having us go in and only know about what's public facing and only know about their [00:32:20] goals and create something, whether it's copy or positioning that they can then work on themselves.

They can get us to, carry through to completion. A lot of the times once someone's seen that, [00:32:30] and they've seen how different. It can be, then that kind of wins them over. I think a really good example is cold emailed outreach. So we're [00:32:40] quite good at cold emailed outreach, right? Our, a lot of people say, Oh, cold email is dead.

And so the thing is cold email just sucks. Everyone sees everyone else's shitty cold emails and they go and do the same [00:32:50] thing. We try to make our cold emails funny, entertaining. We think if someone's not going to buy from us, then we can, we at least have to make them laugh. And so this is the litmus test that Dan and I have.

We sit down and we [00:33:00] write a cold email. And if one of us isn't laughing by the end of it, it goes in the bin. And it doesn't have to be raucous. We're not comedians, but we're clever enough to be funny. And [00:33:10] so we have people come to us and say, can you write our cold outreach emails for us? Sometimes we have people that we cold outreach to come back to us and say, can you write our cold outreach emails for us?[00:33:20] 

Because it has that kind of. it's funny. It's interesting. It's a bit different. And I think sometimes people just need to be shown that there is a different way [00:33:30] to do things. And by doing it that different way or seeing that example, it gives them a moment that they wouldn't usually have, because very much to your point about, putting out [00:33:40] fires and running around all the time, if we can take that thinking off their hands, show them what good looks like, it's Then they can go, Oh, okay, cool.

Maybe we should give this a [00:33:50] go.

Radim Malinic: So you mentioned in the process, there's 30, 000 digital agencies. So how does it then go with owning a space? Because how do you make [00:34:00] 30, 000 agencies be individual? I mean,Of course, if you put 30,000 people to run a London marathon, everyone's got their own identity.

They're running the same race, and [00:34:10] everyone's gonna end up in a different pacing, but it must be a bit harder because we all go after the sort of similar clients, similar targets. So how do you, what is the [00:34:20] process of finding their own space? Because what described initially, like you said, I'm more of a business developer, like a vis dev rather than sort of salesperson because. [00:34:30] Surely you would think, okay, from, you know who you are, you're doing this for other people. Why would you initially struggle with, finding your own patch or finding your own space? Whereas [00:34:40] it sounds like, through the trials and tribulations, you you got there, but how do you find, what's the, where's, all right, let's simplify it. What's the first step of finding your own [00:34:50] patch? let's go, let's

start there. 

Seb Mackay: don't know if that's any more simple. it's having the courage to niche, doing a niching exercise and having the courage to niche are two very [00:35:00] different things, right? Anyone can do a niching exercise, come down and say, okay, this is, these are the people that we want to work with. But actually having that courage to niche is much, much [00:35:10] harder because you have to start saying no to work and saying no to work is really hard and really scary.

We turned down someone. The other week who could have potentially [00:35:20] made us,enough money to have the summer off and it would have been good, consistent work, but it was just, it was so far outside of our ICP. [00:35:30] And every client that you take on that's outside of your niche or outside of your ICP pushes you further away from your niche, right?

There are case studies you can't use, testimonials you can't use, all those kinds of [00:35:40] things. in terms of owning that space, the way that we did it was we're passionate about agencies. We like agencies, so that's what we do. We always advise that [00:35:50] people find the thing that they care about the most. And that's the niche that, that's how they start building the niche.

The reason that we say that is because we're big [00:36:00] believers that you need to sort ofeat, think, sleep, breathe, rinse, repeat everything about your client base. And so if you're an agency who's working on [00:36:10] curtains, but you don't give a flying squirrel about curtains, you're really going to struggle, right?

But if you're a person who's interested in social media and you started [00:36:20] out your agency by doing social media account management or whatever, and as people have come to you, they've said, Oh, can you also do SEO? Can you do PPC? And you've just gone and found freelancers to [00:36:30] do those things. And all of a sudden that's grown into this big thing.

We always say to those people, Go back to your roots and go back to the thing that you're interested in and then think [00:36:40] about how you can niche further down, have the courage to go really deep and really narrow. So if you're doing social media, for example, then you might want to do it for [00:36:50] renewables.

Then how can you dig further into renewables? Maybe it's renewable startups. We always say to people, don't work with startups, they don't have any money, but maybe it's renewable startups. And then maybe it's renewable startups of less than [00:37:00] 10 people. because you know that they don't have a social media person.

And so it's sort ofdigging down and understanding that. And I think one of the common objections that we get to that [00:37:10] is people say, what will happen to my current client base, right? What happens to my current client base when I niche or reposition myself? The answer is usually nothing. [00:37:20] If your clients are with you, they're with you because they like you and they like the work that you're doing.

If they go onto your website and they see that your niche is slightly different or your [00:37:30] positioning is different or your advertising is different, you've usually got a bigger problem than it at first appears because most clients don't give a shit about what's on their [00:37:40] agency's websites. we've experienced this ourselves when we've been hiring agencies, we've experienced it ourselves as we've been running an agency, keeping, you know,when we [00:37:50] productized one of our services into Sober Bento, it meant a big shift into the way that we were thinking.

We've kept clients through that shift, right? Because they don't care about the inner operations of our [00:38:00] business. They care that we're delivering excellent work for them consistently. And so that's what it's about, really. It's about finding the thing that you want to be thinking [00:38:10] about all the time.

That's not going to drive you crazy. Having the courage to then really go after that thing and knowing that when you change your positioning and your niche you won't [00:38:20] alienate your existing clients because they only care that you continue to do great work for them and no one's saying that you have to fire them, no one's saying that you have to start from [00:38:30] scratch, we're just saying that for the next 5, 10, 15 years of your business, this is what you're focusing on.

Radim Malinic: I love what you.described, I think every [00:38:40] second agency I've ever encountered and it was like, okay, we started at one point, then we've added another seven disciplines and that's the Frankenstein monster we've done because of course we need the money and we need to do this and your suggestion [00:38:50] to go back to your roots can seem rather scary and daunting.

Like, how do we. say no to this stuff because you said a really valuable point. You said there's [00:39:00] niching and there's a courage to actually niche. And that word courage, I think is the important one because there's so much messaging out there [00:39:10] saying you need to niche down or you need to find your niche. You don't really know what your niche is when you start. Obviously, especially if you're being told like you need to find the thing, whereas when you said [00:39:20] perfectly, what makes you. excited, like what, where your roots are, this is where you start, you know, and that kind of goes, if we can loop it around the music for a minute, like you find your [00:39:30] true self and the things that make you happy, that sort of, that your expression feels very right, you know, and having been in bands myself, there's a feeling that when you play the music you want to play, it's [00:39:40] the best feeling in the world.

When you do the work that you want to do, it's the best feeling in the world. you work till five, six in the morning and you're like. Let's go again. this is the best thing. Whereas then you realize, [00:39:50] Oh, actually I need extra cash for this and that. And you start saying things to start saying yes to things that seems almost nonsensical, because I've seen friends that have [00:40:00] done incredibly well by following problem solving. their pure passion was in creativity, but more in I want to have a very comfortable life. And they've morphed [00:40:10] into something that. Keeps them happy, you know, and they don't have any social presence. They work with big organizations and governments and they do extremely well. But again, they've niched [00:40:20] down to a particular client and they had the courage to do this.

And they had the courage to to let other stuff out. Whereas we've got obviously that sort of mass of people who want to have the [00:40:30] right thing sorted. And don't necessarily always think that's the right thing to do, if that makes sense. So saying no to things, 

It's scary, especially in 2023 and [00:40:40] 24. Yeah. it's just like, why would someone says, as you said, you guys turned down work that could have kept you busy, you know, orkept giving you a summer off and you're like, I don't think the [00:40:50] economy or Brexit or anything is going to get any better anytime soon. you mentioned clients just walking, like we've had regular clients for years and years.

And some of them, [00:41:00] even though they've had so basically almost bulletproof businesses, one of them had to lay off 170 people out of 400, that's why they stopped spending their money on [00:41:10] beautiful products and beautiful design solutions, because the money's not there because they're depending on the market and like everything at certain point will obviously fizzle out.

And [00:41:20] so what you said there, I've got this phrase and the book Cruel Creativity for Sale, which is the inspiration for this podcast, is that when you live and breathe what you do, People will sense [00:41:30] it sometimes, if you're excited about, branding, but you have to moonlight in the social media space doing ads for whatever, somehow the universe will actually say, Hey, I [00:41:40] know the guy who really loves branding, or there's an agency who was really good at branding.

Stop doing the social stuff. Let me give you some proper work, if that makes sense. So,you [00:41:50] mentioned something there. Let's talk about this sort of process of living and breathing and sort ofgetting the right thing happen because you mentioned your bingo card was on LinkedIn and that didn't do anything.

[00:42:00] And I have to ask you sort ofopinion on LinkedIn because

I just feel it's like. It's a very good pitching place, right? Because you get people like Stephen Bartlett. And then he's a good [00:42:10] example. Stephen Bartlett on LinkedIn is like, Hey, sunshine is lovely. You will live forever. Stephen Bartlett on YouTube.

Oh, you will die because you're sitting down or because you haven't had enough sleep. And [00:42:20] he's Whoa, we played the algorithms too well. You know, and it's just that it's so polar opposite to every other platform. This is what makes the algorithm tick. [00:42:30] And I think on LinkedIn, it just seems like we've got to blind hope that, we are great at this knowledge.

Hey, this is 600 words on something. And you're like, okay, how [00:42:40] useful is it? Because you get so many gurus and so many, volunteers of this information that it seems disjointed and I'm. That's why I like my books, because I [00:42:50] can put things from start to finish and make it coherent. But just let's quickly skate on LinkedIn just how does what you do encourage it, [00:43:00] discourage it, plug it in, plug out, like how do you disconnect or connect with 

Seb Mackay: Yeah, man. This is an interesting one. Firstly, though, I want to say that with the niching stuff, like [00:43:10] sometimes I think it can sound like we're minimizing it and the fear that comes with that. And there are always challenges, right? And these. [00:43:20] agencies are people's lives. And I think, very much to your point, there's so many gurus on LinkedIn and there's so many people saying you should niche.

[00:43:30] And it's really easy to say when it's not your business. it's even easier to say when you work for a corporate and you're just a mouthpiece saying that someone should niche, [00:43:40] And you've got a salary. So like,we totally get that. It's scary as fuck. And I hope that the fact that we've niched in the way that we have.

And I [00:43:50] want to talk to you about an initiative that we did last month as well. But I hope that given that we've niched in the way that we have and the risks that we've taken, we're able to show [00:44:00] people that we understand at least to a degree. the fear and anxiety that they have around those kinds of things, because the last thing that we would ever want is for people to think that we were being [00:44:10] like flippant or ambivalent about their businesses, right?

Because we know that running an agency is super hard. In terms of LinkedIn, mean, look, I'm all for biting the hand that feeds, we get work through [00:44:20] LinkedIn. we also get work through email outreach and We have tried a lot of different things. Personally, I'm not mad keen on social media myself.

I [00:44:30] don't really have any other social except for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is just in my opinion, mostly just really, vapid shit.and there's a whole bunch of [00:44:40] old dudes navel gazing about how great they are. And there's sort of a, an American Puritanism. Um,To LinkedIn as well that I just find it [00:44:50] completely insufferable.

I posted a comment this morning referring to myself as the village idiot on someone's post and I got a content warning come up before I posted, being like your language includes, [00:45:00] your post includes language that's been reported before for like the word idiot. And I was like, come on man, lighten up.

and this is the interesting thing is, we find that a lot of agency owners [00:45:10] still aren't on LinkedIn or don't post a lot on LinkedIn or they have profiles they haven't updated in years. And these tend to be agency owners that have businesses that are sort of 10 [00:45:20] years old or more, right?

I think our perspective of business and of agency life is warped because it feels like everyone's on LinkedIn. But actually it's not. but generally I [00:45:30] think, it's helped us. It's helpful for us to be on it. If we can be funny and entertaining and we can give people value, then we'll continue to stick with it.

but as a social media [00:45:40] platform, I'd rather shoot myself in the foot.

Radim Malinic: What did you mention earlier? And I agree with a lot of many points on LinkedIn. but what you mentioned earlier about the publishing industry, the article that you read in [00:45:50] Vox is that they're looking for authors with already an established, readership, which is as an indie author, I have been outselling. [00:46:00] Established names in the industry because I have got a systems on how to get the books being seen because after all I bought books by 99 out of 100 [00:46:10] people I've never heard of because I was interested in the book, not necessarily who the person is and there's the system. Sometimes you look at the Instagram gurus who have, beautiful [00:46:20] portfolios and millions of followers, but behind the scenes, they're not necessarily that busy because the followers are not necessarily paying your wages.

And then you look at agencies who are. [00:46:30] Incredibly, that their books look incredibly their accounting books look incredibly well in good health and they've got 600 followers because they don't give a shit, know, because that the [00:46:40] relationship is somewhere else that the relationship is in a boardroom or it's a friend from uni who started the FMCG company and that's where the work is being done and as I said, I've got [00:46:50] a few examples of people I know who Because zero social media presence and they are busier than ever. So how does LinkedIn plugged in into this? Because as you said, [00:47:00] some agency owners are not on it for the positioning system. I mean, you,know, you don't have to go too far to stumble across, a LinkedIn course that tells you, what you need to do to attract new clients and get [00:47:10] leads.

And, I've watched a webinar on like how you can plug in freaking Like a data scrape that will automate generally write 3000 emails a day. And then there was [00:47:20] this table, like how many, like you have to have likeseven and a half hours of calls a week to get to 50. I mean,it was just absolutely insane. It was just like. That's all LinkedIn. That's all [00:47:30] LinkedIn. And now you're telling me, the agency on his own is not necessarily on it. There's many people who are not necessarily on it. Like the old shoemaker from Italy won't be on LinkedIn, saying [00:47:40] the key to making successful shoes is, you know,good leather, it's not being the end all and be all and end all, if that makes sense.

Seb Mackay: Yeah. 

I think sometimes, need to. be seen to be [00:47:50] seen. a good, I think a good example. Okay. So we did pay what you want pricing for a month, from the 8th of Jan to the 8th of Feb, And we said to people, you can pay anything you want for [00:48:00] our copywriting services.

And we will honor that price and we'll deliver the work and then you choose your price, right? So we're not getting swayed by how much people might be able to pay or might not be able to pay [00:48:10] We ran that through linkedin and we ran that through our standard outreach like process And there's you know, there's no denying that for us running a [00:48:20] campaign like that We did build up a lot of extra goodwill on LinkedIn.

We're never going to be Lewis Kemp, right? I don't ever want to be Lewis Kemp. I'm sure he's lovely, but that many followers freaks me [00:48:30] out. it built up goodwill. It got more people into our ecosystem. It got more people, reading the newsletter that we put out each month, each week, sorry.

And it [00:48:40] got more people knowing who I am and who the business is. For us, that's great because it's super cheap way of doing it. For the agency owners that aren't on it, that are [00:48:50] running, multi million pound agencies, it's probably less important. And I think that really what it comes down to is scale and it's easy to be swayed by all the [00:49:00] business and activity on LinkedIn because so much of it is happening from smaller sized agencies trying to get big as opposed to bigger agencies.

I guarantee you, the guy that runs mother [00:49:10] doesn't have people popping into his LinkedIn inbox saying, Hey, we want to work with mother.so I think it just, I think it's just pays to be aware of how it can skew our expectations around running [00:49:20] agencies. and where people are shopping and how they're buying, because we're surrounded by, people at the sort of same level as us or slightly above us who are just making loads of noise.

Radim Malinic: that's pretty good stuff. yeah, [00:49:30] I think that's where I've discovered what you do and who you are, because you were saying, look. Pay whatever you like, which in 2024 seems like a daunting prospect.

[00:49:40] the conversation I had about tools like LinkedIn or covered emails is how do we use this?

Because. It hasn't been given to us with a manual and saying, Hey, look, this is what's worked [00:49:50] when you think about driving instructions, like we got a bit of a hang of okay, we've got signs here and we've got the roads, we've got lines on the road, like we, we know how to use that.

Whereas with social [00:50:00] media, we still with all of these platforms, we still working out how to use them because what worked five, five years ago, doesn't work now. And things are changing all the time. if let's say there [00:50:10] was an agency or even a freelancer, like what would you suggest is the best way to start working with you guys?

Like what is the best way to, to get in and be [00:50:20] seen? What is even the mindset? Because we don't really want to leave it to the last minute when the house is on fire, you're not going to start locating the bucket in the water, which is [00:50:30] what most of us, definitely do. So how would you get someone to. Not unrest, but unsettle them, let's just get them stuck, like unscrewed. [00:50:40] I'm trying to make it so someone's on, someone's stuck. How would you, how would you get them unstuck? How would you open that jar and say look, he's at, this is the options. This is what you need to think about because there might be warning signs.

There [00:50:50] might be, lack of pipeline. There might be lots of things. What was the, what would you do? What would you tell them?

Seb Mackay: So that would be it. I think that the lack of pipeline, I would [00:51:00] look at how much of your pipeline comes from new business, how much of it comes from, referrals and how much of it comes from existing business. So I think if you,if you've got employees and [00:51:10] say more than 10 employees and you've got two big accounts or one big account that is keeping your agency afloat, then I would look at diversifying that, right?

There was [00:51:20] a news article recently about an agency in Manchester who had a staff of 20. And they were all running off one account and that account got pulled and they shut their agency down, [00:51:30] which is obviously horrible and obviously awful for everyone involved. So I would say if that's the point that you're at where you've got, one or two big clients and they're [00:51:40] really keeping the lights on and you're thinking, okay, if we lose these clients, things could be catastrophic.

Then at that point, it's not too late to start thinking, should we [00:51:50] be running our own advertising? What kind of sales, messaging should we be putting out there and what's our positioning? Because it might transpire that those clients never leave you, but that's [00:52:00] unlikely. And so I think it's best to just be prepared for that.

And if you have three big clients or you land a fourth big client, then that's everyone wins, right? Your [00:52:10] agency grows, your, you make more money, everyone makes more money and everyone's happier for it. So that's what I would say. I would say if you are in a position where More of your work comes from referrals [00:52:20] than from pipeline, like new business.

I mean,and if you've got one or two really big clients that are just keeping the lights on and keeping everyone fed, I would start looking at [00:52:30] how I can make that a bit safer for everyone else. and diversifying that investment and, or in the same way that you diversify investments rather, because I think [00:52:40] that.

you wouldn't have all of your money in one sort of pension pot, right? you seem, you tend to spread it out. And I think it's the same with running an agency.[00:52:50] 

Radim Malinic: Have you got your money in one pension pot? 

Seb Mackay: I run an agency. Do you think I have a pension?

Radim Malinic: Exactly. All right. That's another conversation we could be having, but before, before I let you go, let [00:53:00] me just bring it back to music because we've established, I'm slightly older than you in terms

of, 

liking,

Seb Mackay: There's nothing in that mate. You've got more hair than I [00:53:10] do.

Radim Malinic: yeah, I do actually, but you got it all on your face. music.

So I always try and think about it from the,as a teenage musician and initially, and, going through the ranks, [00:53:20] I was always absolutely mesmerized by the tribalism around the music genres and music bands and stuff. And I never really realized until later age that, [00:53:30] We were following brands, basically.

Like when you started something of your own, we didn't need to tell each other, Hey, that is going to be my [00:53:40] specialism, we're going to write, we're going to, choke the rhythm faster or whatever. We're going to scream that way. Because after all, that was our own expression. That makes sense.

like you had [00:53:50] carcass because it was carcass. You had like napalm death and you had no fear of fear factory and that kind of stuff,the slipknots and all of that stuff. And there was. not necessarily positioning [00:54:00] exercise, are we going to be this guys or that guys, like things come together and they came from the soul and they came from the idea of like collective, our sort of collective energy and [00:54:10] sometimes We need to remind ourselves that's what we do creatively with our work, because after all, why are we here?

Why do we do it? And how much do we [00:54:20] want this? Because just to be another vanilla, just to be another pair of hands. there's lots of other people who can be there because they necessarily don't have any other option. Whereas I think [00:54:30] that. The word I'm taking away from this conversation is courage.

It's not necessarily courage to kneel, but it's a courage to double down on yourself and [00:54:40] actually say, I will tell the world what I'm standing for, because that someone will, somewhere will hear it. And say, that's the guy we're looking for. That's the agency. That's the person, that's the guy we're looking [00:54:50] for.

And I think that's something that I think, whoever's listening to this podcast, obviously we'll, we'll pick up on and I wholeheartedly recommend them to speak to you because this is, I've taken a [00:55:00] lot from this conversation, even though after I've been around for 24 years in this industry and there's always something new to learn.

So.Thanks you so much for sharing what you do, [00:55:10] explaining to it in the most candid way and can easily come back for another round two or three and then do a carcass special.

Seb Mackay: [00:55:20] Absolutely. 

I'm on board for the carpet special.

Radim Malinic: yeah, thank you very much. And yeah, all the best with what you're doing, because I think it's going to change people's lives and people's careers.[00:55:30] 

Seb Mackay: Oh, thank you, man. You're very kind. I appreciate you taking the time and, letting me swear like a sailor.I'm excited to see how you edit those bits out.

I [00:55:40] don't mind. I'll own it.

Radim Malinic: Excellent stuff. Nice to see you. Nice to meet you. And great to hear from you.

Great to talk to 

Seb Mackay: You too. Thank you so much, man. Have a good week.

Radim Malinic: you. [00:55:50] Cheers.

Radim Malinic: Thank you for listening to this episode of Creativity for Sale podcast. The show was produced [00:56:00] and presented by me, Radim Malinic. Editing and audio production was masterfully done by 

Neil mackay,. from 7 million Bikes Podcasts, 

Theme music was written and produced by [00:56:10] Robert Summerfield. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support the podcast, please subscribe and leave a rating or review.

To get your own action plan on how to start and grow a [00:56:20] life changing creative business. You can get a copy of the Creativity for Sale book via the links in show notes. burning, and until next time, I'm Radim [00:56:30] Malinich, your guide through this exploration of passion, creativity, innovation, and the boundless potential within us all. [00:56:40] [00:56:50]