Ellie spoke to Ben Thomson about his journey, starting from pioneering cloud-based printing solutions to pivoting from a product based company into his current serviced based company, Full Metal Software.
[00:00:00] VOICEOVER: Welcome to the Agency Collective Tales with Ellie Hale, our podcast where we talk to our brilliant agency owners about all things agency life.
[00:00:10] ELLIE: Today on the Agency Collective Tales, I am joined by Ben Thompson from Full Metal Software. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
[00:00:18] BEN: Oh, good. Thank you very much for inviting me.
[00:00:20] ELLIE: I'm really excited to hear your story. Let's start like we always do at the very. So what prompted you to start your agency? How long ago was it and how did you go about it?
[00:00:31] BEN: It's quite a potted history really. But I came out of university with a degree in computer science, spent most of that degree drinking, I must admit.
[00:00:38] But I came out not really knowing what I wanted to other than I wanted to get involved in the web and use that term very, lightly. I didn't exactly know what part of software development I wanted to be in, but that was very much my driving force was to get into that. So I joined a company in London. We, at the time, developed websites for some very big brands, a lot of football clubs like Juventus, Barcelona, feeding my passion of football at the same time.
[00:01:00] Unfortunately, the.com bubble burst. So I was without a job, and then I decided to take a couple years out and went traveling. Whilst I was traveling, I very much wanted to get back into software development, but I didn't really wanna work for anybody else. So I had a quick chat with my brother on return.
[00:01:16] He was just coming out of a position, a management role. And we decided to set up a company that developed software for the print industry. So we were working out of a pokey little office in Northampton above a printers. Very dirty, very non-tech - far cry from what is expected of a software company these days.
[00:01:32] But it was exciting times. We were building some very advanced software for the print industry at the time, very much in terms of cloud-based software, which wasn't really a term back then until Google made it very funky. And that was it. We were off. We developed that for the last 15 years or so. We expanded the team to, I think in our heyday, about 25 members of staff, building sales and various support staff, big foothold in the UK, a bit of a foothold in Europe, and we had American offices as well, so that's where the staff was scaling up from that point.
[00:02:00] ELLIE: Bloody hell, Ben! That's not bad for your second ever job.
[00:02:03] BEN: Don't get me wrong, you can't deny the help that my old man gave us at the time. He was looking for something to invest in and he's the most anti-tech guy available. But I think he was impressed with our sales path. We knew we had an idea, we knew we wanted to push that, and he quite happily invested.
[00:02:17] That hats off to the old man for doing that. But yeah, second job, a lot of responsibility.
[00:02:20] ELLIE: Like that is, Incredibly early on to discover your niche, so to be doing it for the print industry, how did that niche come about?
[00:02:28] BEN: Again, the link to my old man, he was invested in a printers in Northampton and they had invested themselves in a huge big, one of the first in the country digital printer machines.
[00:02:38] I won't go into the very boring print side of the business, but essentially enabled printers to print variable prints. So no longer did you have to do the 20,000 runs of the same thing, you could do one variable print. So at the time this company was producing tens of thousands of personalised calendars. So at Hewlett Packard, who in their wisdom, they invented the machine then didn't invent any software to drive it, they just dumped them in varied printers across the world and no one could really work out what to do with it.
[00:03:02] A lot of head scratching. But we had an idea that we could drive that from the web. It was one of the first out of the traps, in web land. There's a lot of on-premise stuff, so a lot of geeky old servers sat in rooms doing a similar job, but there was no link up to online ordering and stuff like that. So we were first out of the traps with that.
[00:03:17] We were just looking so far as our first couple of developer hires were remote themselves. They weren't from the office, so it had to be in the cloud. It had to be remotely accessible way before any of our competitors, and so it was 70% luck, 30% choice, but we managed to get a very well known product out there very quickly.
[00:03:33] ELLIE: That's amazing. Then from there, 25 people.
[00:03:36] BEN: Yes. So we scaled up and then fast forward to about five years ago, and we noticed a fairly big decline in that side of the business. The pipeline was drying up, unfortunately. We couldn't really pinpoint it other than looking at print as a whole. The industry people just aren't printing as much as they used to.
[00:03:51] It's a fact, an environmental press point of view, but CSR and all sorts of things are coming into the mix. I can't remember the last time I've had any business cards printed for example, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of our software was used by smaller printers, and unfortunately, when an industry is hit, it tends to be the smaller people that go with it.
[00:04:09] So we call them mom and pop shops, but they were family owned businesses with one or two printers up against the really big companies that have got 50, 60 moving all their operations offshore. And so they were struggling and then like that, we were struggling to get 'em to sign on the dotted line. So bit of a decision to make.
[00:04:24] We had a very vast piece of software, millions of lines of code. Does a few things very nicely. Got very print focused, so we had to decide whether to re-engineer that into a different form to put it into a different industry. I, for one, didn't really fancy another 15 years of blood, sweat, and tears to break down the doors of another industry, only to find out it was another wrong choice. Or not the best choice we could have made.
[00:04:46] So we looked to the skills we had. At this point, we'd shrunk back down to about eight people. We looked at the skillsets we had. We looked at the product development lifecycle that we're very good at. We were very good at software development. We weren't brilliant at marketing ourselves, so we embarked on a rebrand into full metal and started to turn from a product agency into a service agency.
[00:05:06] So we started to build products for other people, and that was very quickly, very successful. We've outgrown the original company in a few years. It was one of those decisions that you wish you'd pinched yourself and done it 10 years earlier. But we could have run...
[00:05:18] ELLIE: You wouldn't have had the learnings Ben.
[00:05:20] BEN: No, we wouldn't. We wouldn't have been able to develop as well as we do. We know code, we know software, lived pretty much the infancy of the web side of things all the way through to what it is now, which is a vast behemoth of an industry to be in. Yeah, a lot of lessons learned. We're glad we've done it and don't get me wrong, it's still going, the printing [INAUDIBLE] called Red Tie is still quite widely known, still quite respected. So it's helped during some of these quieter periods to be able to keep the income coming in. But yeah, it's very much a customer of ours now, rather than our mainstay.
[00:05:45] ELLIE: And how many do you have in your team now?
[00:05:47] BEN: So there's 10 of us in total now, so we scaled slightly during the tumultuous times. We've taken on a couple of staff. We'd want to get back to the size that we were. I think that's the ultimate aim, but it's obviously been a slog to get for these last few years anyway.
[00:06:00] ELLIE: Is bigger better in terms of headcount?
[00:06:02] BEN: It's not so much that: We don't like saying no to anyone that's for a start, but having more developers, in our opinion, your knowledge sphere is so much... but we've all got a very core sets of skills, so we can all develop a Microsoft language, but we find the more we bring in, it's exponential in terms of what they've seen elsewhere. Business best practice, new tools, new ideas, new solutions, new processes. It just helps the company.
[00:06:25] So I don't think we'd ever get back to the 25 or nothing that serious that quickly, but an expansion path towards 15 would be our ideal.
[00:06:33] ELLIE: And do you still have a specific niche that you work within, having had success with a niche previously?
[00:06:38] BEN: So the only thing we generally say is that we're Microsoft based, and that is niche on its own, we find. There's not a lot of us around in terms of other agencies offering bespoke work. Microsoft's an odd moniker to have next to your name. I think it's one of those languages that's taught behind closed doors. It's always been seen as the big brother that people even love it or they hate it, essentially. They're either well bought into Microsoft and they love language or they're fully what they consider open source. Even though Microsoft languages are open source these days. But historically it's been a very Marmite brand to work with because we're one of only a handful that we know of, especially UK based, that's offering .net and Microsoft and C Sharp and all the lovely terms that come with Microsoft. That's our niche. We find that's a niche in itself.
[00:07:17] ELLIE: What is it that really satisfies you about being an agency owner?
[00:07:21] BEN: Yeah, depends which day you ask me, but I know satisfactory part for me is the problem solver.
[00:07:26] It is the getting the job done. I love the fun of the chase, don't get me wrong. I'm weirdly I've come away from being a technical team leader on the tools into sales and marketing, and I didn't think I would like it. It was supposed to be a temporary situation, but now it seems to be my full-time job. So I love the fun of the chase of a sale.
[00:07:41] I think it's fantastic. It's very exciting. It changes day by day. But as a company as a whole, it's getting that solution solved. We are genuinely offering a positive move for a company by the time we've delivered it. So we're fixing a problem or we're solving a process issue, or enabling them to expand the team because they're no longer wasting many man hours doing the same thing day to day. It's generally the problem solving that I think is the thing that drives me.
[00:08:05] ELLIE: The sales element of the role. Do you think that's one you will eventually be able to delegate and step back from? Within the AC, all the time we hear about how difficult it is to work on the business because you're stuck doing the do. Is that the focus of yours or are you just having too much fun?
[00:08:20] BEN: It is a really tough one. When we were in our heyday and we had 25 staff, we had sales people. They didn't have any skin in the game though, and that's not negative. It's just they're not as passionate as I am when I'm sat in meetings, and I think clients and potential clients react well to it being a founder or a director or someone that owns part of the company.
[00:08:38] We've tried it in the past. It's just not worked. So, I'd love to be able to delegate. That's the ultimate aim, right? Is to be able to sit on a beach somewhere and let someone else do it for you. But I'd still got the drive that I had 18 years ago when we started the business.
[00:08:48] So that's not dwindled at all. I think if one day I wake up and that's gone, then I will be definitely looking to delegate. I am having too much fun at the minute. In fact, I'd rather do this more than getting involved in the day-to-day running the company, which my brother, who's the MD which is handy, can do more of.
[00:09:01] ELLIE: That's really lovely to hear. How do you keep that level of excitement in a role that you've done for so long?
[00:09:09] BEN: People ask me this quite frequently. They can't believe it. Cause there's obviously a lot of ups and downs in agency life, always has been. Over the last few years, even more so. I think it's just the variation.
[00:09:17] I think being able to have enough rope to go and run with things if you need to, is important to me, it's having that responsibility. I suppose, cause I've had it for such a long time, and I've had quite an important role in both companies. I guess that's the passion for me, is that I know there's lots of companies out there that we can still help.
[00:09:34] And I know there's lots of developers that I wanna bring them on board, and it's such a variation. What I'm doing today is not what I'll be doing tomorrow. What I'm doing today on the podcast will not be what I'm doing in an hour. It's the variation that drives me. And I think if that ever became stale, that's when I would probably start to think, this isn't for me.
[00:09:49] But it just hasn't happened in 18 years. It's helped that we've pivoted. There's no question. I think if we'd have continued on the print software side of the business, we'd have been looking for an exit plan at some point in the few years anyway. But because we did pivot, I always say we're like a new startup, with 18 years experience.
[00:10:03] It's really refreshed all of us, especially myself and my brother.
[00:10:06] ELLIE: What would you say have been the key learnings as an agency founder?
[00:10:12] BEN: Keep going! [LAUGHS] I think it's very easy when times are really hard to give up. I think because the other alternative is going working in industry, and I think especially when it comes to software at the minute, I don't think I am that hireable.
[00:10:25] But I have the skills that could transfer into it working for someone else fairly quickly. So it is easy to look at life sometimes and say: "This isn't for me" but I always say to myself: "Keep going". And I always say, especially to people that are smaller than us and just starting out doing what we're doing:
[00:10:38] "Times are going to be tougher. You should just keep going. You have to keep going because there is a need for what we do." And that's probably the biggest advice I would tell anyone.
[00:10:45] ELLIE: How do you find managing a team?
[00:10:47] BEN: I used to be better at it. I think when I was on the tools myself, because I could sense check the team. These days that is way above my pay grade, so it's difficult.
[00:10:55] There's a lot of personalities involved. There's a lot of ups and downs for employees, and it's as tough for them as it is running a business these days, I think. Especially with all the crises that are going on, and there's a lot about wellbeing that we try to manage. We're getting better at it.
[00:11:09] Ultimately we're nerds, so it's an unknown part of our business, really, wellbeing, but we're trying to get better at it. And we used to just have the one meet up a year and that was it. At Christmas but we're not, we're doing that every quarter if we can, and that's helped. Things like that. Very little things, but I would say I've grown as a manager of people.
[00:11:24] I don't know. It's a tough role that always has been, especially when you're talking about developers. The personality shifts are quite different and they're not the stereotypical sit in the dark room anymore. Definitely not. Especially because we have a couple that have come from contractor roles, worked in really big businesses and kind of removed the blame culture and tried to enable them to freely speak.
[00:11:42] Managing personalities, I would say is very tough.
[00:11:45] ELLIE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think trying to keep the team momentum and morale up at the moment has become a real challenge for our community as well. How have you found recruiting developers at the moment, and how have you found the shift of demands for junior developers?
[00:12:02] BEN: If we look back 18 years, this is a funny story, do not believe me, but we used to be able to put classified ads in the local Northampton paper and we would get 10 to 15 CVs with experience come through the door so we didn't use recruitment agents and from that we could whittle it down and take the one or two that we need.
[00:12:19] And it is unbelievable at the time. Looking back, that was how it is. These days we have to use agents. We have to plan our growth strategy pretty rigidly because it does take so long to find a decent developer. It's gone from a few week process to a couple of months, if not more, unless we're reacting to someone handing their notice in.
[00:12:37] So I do think it is a tough market to be in. Touch wood, we've not actually had to scale in the last 12 months, but that could change after Christmas, you just don't know. And I'm not personally looking forward to it. We've had a couple of false starts like everybody has. I think the problem that we've got in a minute is the developer, pool is lacking.
[00:12:52] That you are getting mediocre developers slipping through and into your desk and they look great on paper and unfortunately they turn out not to be. And vice versa, because we are so busy, we don't have the framework to take on junior developers. Now that's the tragedy because we don't have the capacity to mentor them.
[00:13:06] And it's the same with apprentices. I'd love to do more apprentices, but we just do not have the capacity to mentor them. And unfortunately because we are small-ish, that taking on more juniors and apprenticeships would result in us taking our eye off the income generating stream, which is a developer. So it is tough. We've only got senior developers. It's not by choice.
[00:13:24] We have talked about next year trying to bringing in a midweight developer, but just some of the stuff we build is so complex, we need them to almost hit the ground running. And that's the problem, especially in our company, especially being Microsoft. There's loads of reasons why we can't really take Junior and mid, which again, I don't feel great about cause I don't think I'm helping the problem at all by snapping up the senior guys when we could really be better at having a program for the junior.
[00:13:46] ELLIE: And what is next for you guys? What is it that you are really excited about?
[00:13:50] BEN: In normal times, looking at the path and journey, we probably would've taken on another one or two developers this year, but that's not happened for various reasons. We've had a very quiet summer, but in the last few weeks have showing very good signs, we're mad busy again, which is great.
[00:14:02] I'm hoping mid next year we'll be back on that path to scale, another couple of developers, and then I think we will be in a position where we'll be able to feed that many developers with work, I think, consistently. So that's our next immediate strategy. Medium to long term strategy though, would be an exit plan at some point.
[00:14:19] But I don't even think of that and I know we should. I don't think of that because the passion's still there and I fear not having a company more than I do working for the company. So I think for me it is all about that passion and if that's still there, I don't think we'll be discussing that exit plans in this next few years at least.
[00:14:35] ELLIE: Exit, schmexit! Just enjoy the ride. That's what it's all about!
[00:14:39] BEN: Exactly. Don't get me wrong, if we'd have done this podcast tomorrow, I probably be telling you something different, but as it stands today, we're very busy, but I don't feel like we're mad busy as in we're not running around like fools. It's very progressive, we're pushing forward rather than getting stuck in loops and it feel like we're in a really good position to scale actually.
[00:14:55] ELLIE: That's wonderful. Ben, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed talking to you.
[00:15:00] VOICEOVER: Thanks so much for listening. Please don't forget to subscribe. Stay in touch, and if you like what you hear, find out more at theagencycollective.co.uk.