Stewart talks about how he went from creating online forums for fun as a teenager to taking this specialism into a successful agency working with medium / large scale media clients, via a degree in Human and Mammalian physiology! He also shares how his adulthood diagnosis has shaped the way Powered by Coffee is run so that it compliments neurodiversity, rather than using a cookie cutter business model, as well as the agency's exciting future projects.
Stewart talks about how he went from creating online forums for fun as a teenager to taking this specialism into a successful agency working with medium / large scale media clients, via a degree in Human and Mammalian physiology!
He also shares how his adulthood diagnosis has shaped the way Powered by Coffee is run so that it compliments neurodiversity, rather than using a cookie cutter business model, as well as the agency's exciting future projects.
00:00:00:12 - 00:00:10:11
Narrator
Welcome to the Agency Collective Tales with Ellie Hale. Our podcast where we talk to our brilliant agency owners about all things agency life.
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Ellie
Today on the podcast, I am joined by Stewart Richie from Powered by Coffee. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
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Stewart
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
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Ellie
So as always, with the Agency Collective Tales, we start right back at the very beginning. So how did you get into working with agencies? What prompted you to start your own agency?
00:00:31:04 - 00:00:53:01
Stewart
I think this is basically the only thing I have ever known. So back when I was a teenager, in the early days of the Internet, I had started designing and building websites for video games like forums and communities and stuff that were really popular in the early 2000s. But it never occurred to me that that was a job you could do it always just seemed such a hobby thing for people that I was interacting with.
00:00:53:01 - 00:01:19:02
Stewart
So I ended up going off to uni and doing first human and mamallian physiology. So if medicine is the body going wrong, physiology is the body in its right state. So it's how the body system works. It's like how your heart beats why and how you breathe. And how all those things work together. Originally, I was going to go into drug research from that into pharmacology, but you realise at a certain point how messed up pharma is in some ways.
00:01:19:19 - 00:01:43:18
Stewart
So I came out of uni in 2018/2019 and in mid-crash there wasn't a lot of jobs going. Went back to Ireland for a bit. And moped around in my parents' house and they packed me up to go back touni to do a masters in IT and systems design. It was like a crash masters. So coming out of that I really sailed through that quite easily compared to a lot of the people that were in my class and through that process just started doing bits and pieces of websites and stuff like that.
00:01:43:18 - 00:02:03:03
Stewart
So I just fell into it a little bit. Somehow I decided during that master's degree, that I just was going to start doing websites again with people because I kept it up and at that point I realised that it was a job you could go to. So that's where it started. For those that don't know about Powered by Coffee, we're very much a WordPress development agency, so we don't do a lot of design or a lot of marketing work.
00:02:03:03 - 00:02:22:02
Stewart
It's really technical stuff for larger scale sites, so publishers and enterprises and groups that maybe have multiple instances and things that need to talk to each other, but that's not where... it started off as a very general purpose, "Oh, we'll make your website" company. So we did things for local charities and coffee shops and tiny restaurants, and we've been growing from there.
00:02:22:07 - 00:02:37:20
Ellie
So how did you go from the smaller local businesses to scaling up, because I know that's something that lots of agencies, when they're initially starting off struggle with, is getting bigger clients or establishing what their position is or what their niche is. So how did you guys do it?
00:02:38:07 - 00:02:59:06
Stewart
It kind of happened quite naturally. So over time we started doing less and less of the design work. So I feel like at the time and I was living in Scotland and Glasgow at the time, there just was less developers around, particularly freelancers who were young and didn't necessarily know what they were doing. So I ended up doing a bit of outsourced work for a couple of agencies where they would hand over designs.
00:02:59:13 - 00:03:16:18
Stewart
And I would go off and built them. So eventually we stopped with the design part and it became purely where we just end up building these sites for people and that worked out better because you weren't really managing the clients. You're only doing bits and pieces, but the process parts. So that meant you were working with slightly larger projects than you would have been able to get on your own.
00:03:16:18 - 00:03:36:24
Stewart
And so from there that built up, so it eventually became less than less general purpose website building into doing more specifically WordPress stuff. And then as we did more WordPress stuff, we got better known within that community. So I think back in the day I did a lot of stuff around how processes work within WordPress, stuff like version control and dependency management and giving talks at things like WordCamp London about dev tooling and things like that.
00:03:36:24 - 00:03:53:10
Stewart
So it very naturally progressed from there until the point where, OK, we're only doing build stuff. Who has the more buildy type projects? Who do we want to talk to where their website isn't their marketing, but it is the actual product that they are selling? Like it's a core piece of what they're doing and that took us into dealing with the media and publishers.
00:03:53:10 - 00:04:10:04
Stewart
And then once you can deal with things at that scale you can kind of do anything. So every problem they have, it's a problem every other company has. That's how we got there. It was never an intention of like sit down and work out what our positioning is, that's not how my brain works. All those things become very obvious to me very quickly,
00:04:10:04 - 00:04:18:15
Stewart
whenever we're doing things. Like I never have to sit down and do that: "We're going to work on this. We're going to work on this [INAUDIBLE]." It's just like: "Here are the things we're going to do." I think I just must process it subconsciously.
00:04:19:11 - 00:04:23:12
Ellie
That's a nice place to be. And is this the work that you and the team enjoy the most?
00:04:23:15 - 00:04:36:01
Stewart
Yeah, because it's like, there's very few things that work off the shelf exactly as you want. So you end up kind of doing a lot of things because you want to kind to be quite dictatorial about how things are going to be. They are quite stressful because if something goes wrong, it can go really wrong.
00:04:36:11 - 00:04:36:19
Ellie
Yeah.
00:04:37:02 - 00:04:43:19
Stewart
But it's more interesting certainly than building another brochure website for an accountancy firm. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not for us.
00:04:44:20 - 00:04:48:10
Ellie
[LAUGHS] A little disclaimer there. How many people do you have in your team now, Stewart?
00:04:48:17 - 00:04:50:22
Stewart
I think there's seven of us at the moment.
00:04:51:06 - 00:05:03:08
Ellie
So how have you found that going from somebody that had gone effectively straight from uni into owning a business? How have you found people management and cultural organising, all of that? It's terrible.
00:05:03:22 - 00:05:28:07
Stewart
I hate it. I hate it so much. We've dabbled with remote and being on site in different ways and we've always been somewhere in between. So I hired someone relatively quickly maybe a year or two in, and then we were plateaued for a while. One person was OK to manage because it's: "Oh, what are you doing? Blah, blah, blah". But my brain does not work in a micromanagey kind of way. I'm going to tell you to do something and probably leave you alone to do it and assume it's going to happen.
00:05:28:11 - 00:05:44:14
Stewart
So we have an unusual team balance where despite being quite small, we have someone who fills the role of head of agency, who deals with a lot of the HR and a lot of cultural pieces that we're trying to do, as well as most of the marketing, being the general day to day, I would say runner because they still come to me with a lot of stuff.
00:05:44:16 - 00:05:50:16
Stewart
That would be their goal is to take that over because my brain is just not suited for that. I am a technical person and a technical problem solver.
00:05:50:19 - 00:05:51:22
Ellie
Not a people problem solver.
00:05:51:24 - 00:06:02:09
Stewart
[INAUDIBLE] but a people problem. Yeah. So we have a little bit of an unusual structure, I suppose compared to other agencies of our size, but that's what we need. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to progress.
00:06:02:22 - 00:06:07:13
Ellie
So how many staff members were you before you hired that HR / marketing person?
00:06:07:24 - 00:06:23:04
Stewart
They originally came on as a marketer and that would have been in the middle of the pandemic. We took our bounce back loan. We were like: "All right, well, everyone's retreating a little bit. Let's take the load and hire a marketer, try and do and push a bit further and a bit forward."
00:06:23:04 - 00:06:24:03
Ellie
Clever.
00:06:24:03 - 00:06:28:08
Stewart
And so then over time, their role evolved as they wanted to be more involved.
00:06:28:11 - 00:06:38:22
Stewart
So they started to take over bits and pieces of finance and admin and stuff like that, so they could take some of the sales work off me and some of the sales admin. And then that progressed into that and that and so their role has grown again. I needed the help.
00:06:39:06 - 00:06:40:10
Ellie
Help me, help me!
00:06:41:01 - 00:06:47:04
Stewart
I think we were probably four and they were number five that came on. But again, that role changed a lot over time.
00:06:47:16 - 00:07:00:24
Ellie
It's quite a shrewd move, though: Early strategic hire to palm off the stuff that I think as an agency founder, can really drag you down. You've really got to find the joy in what you do, haven't you? And learn to delegate the tasks that fill you with utter dread.
00:07:01:06 - 00:07:23:07
Stewart
Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the key things for me was just before all the pandemic stuff kicked in, I found I had quite severe ADHD and had got through like 30 odd years of my life without diagnosing it. And really was it not a great place whenever all that stuff started. And I reckon if you did a survey of agency owners, a lot of them would have it and wouldn't know and wouldn't be diagnosed or would have a diagnosis and wouldn't necessarily talk about it?
00:07:23:11 - 00:07:32:13
Ellie
There's definitely a lot of neurodiversity that comes with the level of creativity and I guess the sporadic nature of agency life I think you might be right there.
00:07:32:13 - 00:07:46:23
Stewart
But I think a lot of the advice you get from how to run a business comes from a neurotypical perspective. You need to take two days off and go do a strategy aand make it [INAUDIBLE]. And everyone was like: "Ah, I need to go do that." It's like, I'm really struggling to do that because I don't have the attention to put into that.
00:07:47:14 - 00:08:03:07
Stewart
Actually just intuit it. That's what you're going to do anyway. So don't stress about not taking the two day planning thing. We might have those now, but that's for everyone else's benefit, not mine. I know, I know what's going to happen coming out of that is just a matter of like, right? Well, I have already solved this problem subconsciously.
00:08:03:13 - 00:08:17:03
Stewart
I am going to take your input and reassess it. But I think a lot of business advice can be really bad for neurodivergent people because it puts a lot of emphasis on: "You've got to get through this, you got to do this and you got to hustle and you got to like X,Y&Z" Like no, you've got to rest and do what you're good at.
00:08:17:04 - 00:08:17:15
Ellie
Yeah.
00:08:17:15 - 00:08:32:04
Stewart
Part of the mistake we've made now is because we have developers working under me and a lot of folk who're all doing the site work. It's like, Oh, actually, I just not get stuff that I don't particularly want to do. Like problems come up to me. They take up my time rather than solving the things you want to do.
00:08:32:04 - 00:08:38:09
Stewart
So that's the next thing for us to solve with me, as a neurodivergent person, to get round to the next stage.
00:08:39:04 - 00:08:47:24
Ellie
So what's the plan for that? Is that hiring more additional support, or is that just looking at the team and looking at processes and looking at how you can navigate it together?
00:08:48:14 - 00:09:08:17
Stewart
Looking at how to navigate it together the problem with someone in my position is that your needs and the accommodations you might require yourself can be a bit of a moving target. So it might be a bit more support and help. We're at the moment floating the idea of an account manager part time couple of hours a day, typically dealing with those clients because I will get very hyper focussed on whatever I'm doing and then can drop all my emails for a couple of days.
00:09:08:17 - 00:09:23:16
Stewart
It's not great for everyone else involved. So someone who can take over bits and pieces of that or more of another developer to give, the developers that are already underneath me, a bit more breathing room so that less stuff bubbles up to me. So those are three of the options we're looking at. But we've got to win some work to make that happen.
00:09:23:21 - 00:09:28:02
Ellie
What is your new business strategy? What is it that you're doing to find those bigger projects?
00:09:28:05 - 00:09:50:14
Stewart
We're working a lot on the folk we have already, to increase their billing with us, so we tend to work on a retainer basis with most of our clients. So it's trying to increase those up to a point beyond which they go: "Actually we could just hire someone internally", so it's bringing the account to a point where they don't think too much about getting rid of you, but that you're still valuable. Beyond that we've got a whole lot of marketing stuff coming out. We've got our own podcast that's going to be out soon.
00:09:50:14 - 00:10:00:22
Stewart
Not sure when this is going to go out, so it may already have come out by the time this goes up. May not. We're trying to start a series of webinars in conjunction with professional bodies in the spaces that we're going to be working in.
00:10:01:14 - 00:10:04:20
Ellie
Brilliant, that's really clever. So who you're interviewing in the podcast?
00:10:05:01 - 00:10:30:00
Stewart
The podcast - our working name is currently "Scale: A Podcast for Modern Media", and at the moment the early ones are clients that we're already working with to talk about projects we're doing with them, a few people in Agency Collective that we've reached out to that do similar things. A few people in industry that aren't necessarily AC but work related fields, and we're trying to get our first batch of those up and out and then we'll do another round of maybe going to folk we want to work with to be like:
00:10:30:00 - 00:10:48:20
Stewart
"Hey, would you like to be on this podcast to talk about a particular thing?" And hopefully we'll get a few people coming to us with interest in being on it suppliers into that space. Our first one is on a WordPress plugin that we've built for a gent as a product that he is going to sell into media companies that does data for elections in the US, which is obviously...
00:10:48:20 - 00:10:50:20
Ellie
My goodness, how exciting!
00:10:50:20 - 00:11:04:10
Stewart
And that podcast is a little bit around: "OK, well here's what your product is and here's why it exists. And media is responsible for how messed up the world can seem, sometimes. Here are some ways we can look at being better and countering misinformation a little bit." Can't talk about the rest yet. Out shortly
00:11:04:10 - 00:11:16:14
Ellie
Sounds great, Stewart. It's such a good way as well, of getting in touch with those aspirational clients and saying: "We just want to talk to you, come and have a go." That sounds really exciting. And then what else have you got in the pipeline? What else are your plans coming up?
00:11:16:14 - 00:11:33:21
Stewart
We've got some webinars and things we're going to do again within that medium publishing space. The first few we're looking at are around how advertising is going to change in 2023, and then the next ones are going to be around AMP, and should publishers still be using that, just in case anyone in the audience that's interested in those other than that, we're looking at products.
00:11:33:21 - 00:11:53:12
Stewart
We keep solving the same problems. So we're like: "OK, let's normalise these a little bit and try and get them out." We're also looking at putting together some training material for people to purchase potentially around dev ops and WordPress. So running WordPress inside of Docker, running scalable WordPress on AWS and Google Cloud and platforms like that, so lots of really high end how to do these things.
00:11:53:12 - 00:11:59:23
Stewart
So trying to take all the bits of the business and monetise them independently without always being client and retainer focussed.
00:12:00:17 - 00:12:14:00
Ellie
That's such a good idea and that's so clever. Just to finish up then, Stewart, what would you say have been your key lessons if you were to pass on one tasty titbit of advice to agency owners listening? What would you want to pass on?
00:12:14:02 - 00:12:39:12
Stewart
I think you need to get very intimate and familiar with yourself and how you work and your differences from other people and maybe read a little bit less and do a little bit more or if you want to read, read the fundamentals, rather the tips, articles and things like that, because one size isn't going to fit all. There's no point in reading all this stuff about how to scale a business when actually you need to skill it a different way because you have different needs to get out of that.
00:12:39:12 - 00:12:49:07
Stewart
I think that is the big thing that I have learnt is that just because someone else is doing it one way doesn't mean you have to do it that way. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's your thing.
00:12:49:15 - 00:12:54:19
Ellie
Just bloody great advice. Thank you so much. I've had a really lovely time. It's been a really interesting chat.
00:12:54:19 - 00:12:55:07
Stewart
Thank you
00:12:55:07 - 00:12:58:00
Ellie
And good luck with all the exciting stuff you've got coming up.
00:12:58:14 - 00:12:59:11
Stewart
Cheers. Thanks.
00:13:00:13 - 00:13:11:02
Narrator
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