In this episode of the Agency Collective Tales, Ellie spoke to Tony Hallett, founder of Collective Content about founding an agency following on from a successful career in journalism, his policy of openness, honesty and upfront information about staff wages and about keeping the balance between growth and retaining your ethos. After working for a number of years in tech journalism, following the fallout from the 2008 crash, Tony started Collective Content and used the wealth of relationships he had formed over the years to establish and grow it into a thriving business.
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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 Hale
So today on the podcast, I am joined by Tony Hallett from Collective Content. Thanks so much for being on the podcast, Tony.
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Tony Hallet
Not at all. Hi, Ellie How's it going?
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Ellie Hale
Very good. Thanks very much. And I am really keen to get you on the podcast because you've got some cracking ideas about things which we will go into a bit later. But just to start off, like we always do at the Agency Collective Tales,
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Ellie Hale
Can you just tell me a bit about your background as an individual and then how you started your agency?
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Tony Hallet
Yeah, of course. So I guess I'd start. The absolute summary would be to say writer. That's been my main career over many years. Slightly longer description is now I run, as you say, Collective Content, which is a content agency.
00:00:55:02 - 00:01:12:22
Tony Hallet
That's a pretty brief description. And if I start to, then I talk more about what we do. Technically, I describe us as a B2B content marketing agency. And we mainly serve the technology sector. So Big Tech companies that you'd have heard of, lots you probably wouldn't have heard of, in like cybersecurity and other fields, but it's a
00:01:12:23 - 00:01:24:08
Tony Hallet
good niche to be in. They get the content world and that's where we mainly are. The agency is ten years old, almost exactly. And before that, so I definitely consider myself an older founder. If I can put it that way, that doesn't sound too bad.
00:01:24:09 - 00:01:30:21
Tony Hallet
I heard you interview people who are running agencies at 25, and I don't know how they do it because like, I certainly couldn't have done it.
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Ellie Hale
I don't know how they do it! You're not alone there. I listen and I think, "Oh my God, what the hell have I been doing with my life?"
00:01:38:11 - 00:01:50:16
Tony Hallet
So the way I described it when I when I set up Collective Content is, I think I was old enough to feel like I had a network of great contacts learn a thing or two. But I was young enough still to have the energy and the ambition and see that 20 years plus ahead of me where I could really make
00:01:50:16 - 00:02:00:19
Tony Hallet
a go of it. So I was really comfortable with doing that. But the main story is that sort of moniker of being a writer. It came from me working in media, so I was basically a journalist in the late nineties.
00:02:01:00 - 00:02:12:09
Tony Hallet
Before that, I lived abroad for a few years, mainly in the US. I had originally not wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to go to film school and it didn't work out. And I found myself falling into journalism.
00:02:12:09 - 00:02:22:21
Tony Hallet
I ended up temping long term, at a tech company, fairly successful tech company in the nineties that went on at that time to get bought by IBM. So I learned some things about tech I never, ever expected to know.
00:02:23:02 - 00:02:34:15
Tony Hallet
And then I got a big break in journalism, and it happened to be a publication which was about business and technology. So all came together really, really well. And most of my career has been spent in digital, which seems obvious now.
00:02:34:16 - 00:02:44:07
Tony Hallet
But I remember 20 years ago my first job in journalism, the guy sat next to me , he just turned. I said, "Of course, you know, this means nothing until you're in print and and you're not worked in print at different times."
00:02:44:13 - 00:02:51:18
Tony Hallet
But it was an absolute sense of like, this is this will never last this computer thing, this internet thing, you need to be in magazines or.
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Ellie Hale
How do you even like fathom that, that seems absolute madness!
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Tony Hallet
It makes me smile, and I really does. I even do accept the guy recently, and he's done very well in a digital agency. And, yeah, would be appalled if he thought he'd ever said that. But that's kind of where it all started.
00:03:08:00 - 00:03:24:16
Tony Hallet
And then the real big growth spurt was. I worked for a dot com company, which was both a dot com itself, but we were reporting we were a media company reporting on that amazingly bubbly time. Both here and in many countries spent a lot of time traveling in the states reporting on things in the rest of Europe
00:03:24:16 - 00:03:35:20
Tony Hallet
as well. Just so amazing things. I can't believe that whole intense period was only really of four or five year period before everything went bust. Lots of people left both the tech industry and online journalism and things like that.
00:03:35:23 - 00:03:50:19
Tony Hallet
I persisted and ended up at a company which became CBS Interactive, and I went on to become the editor of the publication where I'd worked at the dot com time, become an editorial director in charge of about 35 journalists at that time, also across consumer media as well.
00:03:50:20 - 00:04:02:24
Tony Hallet
So things like massive gaming publication CNET, which was and still is maybe the biggest, if not one of the biggest consumer tech titles. If you buy new TV, your phone or even a car, probably check out reviews there.
00:04:03:03 - 00:04:15:10
Tony Hallet
So that's when I learn a lot about managing the operation, as well as what you write and what your readers and viewers consume. And of course, then disaster struck. There was the whole crisis of 2008 and the subsequent years, and it was tough.
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Tony Hallet
It was a really tough time.
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Ellie Hale
Yeah,
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Tony Hallet
I think a lot of people thought it was just a cyclical thing. It's like, Oh, here comes another recession. Things will pick up again in two or three years. And of course, it wasn't.
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Tony Hallet
It was a big structural change. So publications which were funded by advertising, unless you're The Economist, the FT, a few others. And there was a huge amount of, unprofitability across the whole industry worldwide. And I think journalism numbers are probably halved in that time from about 2005 to now.
00:04:41:11 - 00:04:56:02
Tony Hallet
It's a sad tale for Democracy and other reasons, that's another conversation. So I actually chose my moment. As I say, it's so ten years ago, 2011, beginning of 2012. That's when I got out and set up Collective Content. And that was knowing lots of agencies over the years.
00:04:56:02 - 00:05:04:21
Tony Hallet
Media agencies, PR agencies, others never worked at one before then. So I. Took the leap, and here we are, ten years on, which I'm not sure if that makes us old at this point or not
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Ellie Hale
You're still young. Oh my goodness. The amount of agencies we know as part of our collective Tony is not how long you've been going. I think that actually is how you tell the age of an agency. Always.
00:05:17:05 - 00:05:36:16
Ellie Hale
It's sometimes about your spirit, your ambition. I'm interested in is when you set up Collective Content back then, ten years ago, did you have a vision of the agency that you have now? So has it happened the way you envisaged when you started it off or has your journey taken many sort of turns along the way?
00:05:37:01 - 00:05:53:23
Tony Hallet
That's a really good question. If I'm being really honest with myself, I would have said that as our name suggests, and as your name suggests, being a collective, it can be quite loose and from day one. The idea was that this allows us to scale really quickly, maybe even with hundreds of people, some of those people you're
00:05:53:23 - 00:06:05:22
Tony Hallet
working with once a year, and it's a very different model to having full time staff. And what's happened is this over time, we've ended up with a lot more people on staff and then we have a few people who are freelancers.
00:06:05:22 - 00:06:20:20
Tony Hallet
Well, not a small number. I mean, like 10 to 15 people at any one time who are freelancing with us in different ways designers, writers, people like our accountant, etc. They're not on staff. But the core team is bigger and kind of more robust than I probably would have expected back then.
00:06:20:20 - 00:06:32:08
Tony Hallet
And and that that collective model people would call it something else. You call it, for example, a platform in our world. There are companies like Contently and Skyward, a few others who've made a great play out of providing the infrastructure.
00:06:32:08 - 00:06:42:22
Tony Hallet
And on one hand, they've got the suppliers. So thousands of freelancers and on the other hand, they've got the clients. So people who need to commission people and they act as the broker in between and that can be a really great model.
00:06:43:00 - 00:06:47:20
Tony Hallet
It's a different company to us. I would say that's not an agency, right? That's something else. And it's a platform play.
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Ellie Hale
Yeah, absolutely. In your ten years, can you count the number of times that you've had to pivot as an agency owner?
00:06:55:13 - 00:07:10:06
Tony Hallet
We haven't had to pivot a lot. I think it's a genuine answer, and that's not because we're wildly successful or did exactly what we set out to do. I think it's more to do with the philosophy that I just expected that certain things would take time and it was better to do things the right way and grow
00:07:10:06 - 00:07:20:17
Tony Hallet
really slowly, or some years not grow at all. But stick to the game plan. And we're lucky in a way that there's been a real rising tide for all things content. There are plenty of people out there who don't even think about content.
00:07:20:18 - 00:07:32:23
Tony Hallet
Maybe they run another kind of agency. Maybe they don't work in marketing in any way. We all use words every day. We speak, we write, we read and increasingly we consume visual content. People even make visual content. You send a video clip to your friends.
00:07:32:24 - 00:07:44:08
Tony Hallet
People don't think so much about that now, and people don't always have the mindset that you need professionals to do that for you. But a lot of really smart people who we work with do know that and they're good of all kinds of aspects of marketing.
00:07:44:08 - 00:07:58:18
Tony Hallet
But they like to come to us because they're like,: "You know, the craft, you know, our subject area, you've worked with people like us before." So some of our best clients are people that I knew, for example, in PR 20 years ago and they were an entry level, they were an account exec.
00:07:58:22 - 00:08:11:22
Tony Hallet
Now they're MDs of PR agencies or in-house at massive brands. That's again, something which is handy being an older founder that you've got those relationships, which some of which were going for ten or more years even before the agency started.
00:08:12:00 - 00:08:22:15
Tony Hallet
So people know that professional content is as important as it ever will be, and it's still on the up. And that's what we double down on most years. It's like we just need to be really good at that and do the right thing.
00:08:22:15 - 00:08:24:12
Tony Hallet
And that touch wood is how we've grown.
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Ellie Hale
That's really interesting. Do you think throughout your agency founder career, Hhve you leaned on your network a lot?
00:08:32:16 - 00:08:48:00
Tony Hallet
Yeah, I would say quite a lot. You know, from past discussions, we've had that we're really about loyalty and retaining and growing clients. And of course, we have to get new work in the door. And of course, even our best clients who love us and we love them.
00:08:48:06 - 00:09:00:23
Tony Hallet
Sometimes things change and times move on and we lose them. So you always need new business. But I don't know if being a cliché at this point, but it costs a lot more to get that new work in than it does to get extra work from the people you"ve known
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Ellie Hale
Absolutely
00:09:01:10 - 00:09:19:19
Tony Hallet
who trust you and know what you can do. So we probably more than some agencies doubled down on existing relationships and again, our Rolodex and not just me, but other people on the team. Senior team members know a lot of people and have worked with a lot of people over the years, and that kind of direct
00:09:19:19 - 00:09:28:00
Tony Hallet
link or referral from someone like that is so, so valuable. That's really core to who we are is making use of those kind of relationships.
00:09:28:06 - 00:09:35:11
Ellie Hale
Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned your team then, Tony. So how are you as a manager, as a leader of people in your team?
00:09:35:20 - 00:09:49:11
Tony Hallet
Including someone who's starting with this in a couple of months we're 18 of us full time and have pretty flat structure? So four of the team are outside of the UK, so we don't get month to month face time with them that we do with some of the other team members.
00:09:49:12 - 00:10:03:10
Tony Hallet
Having said that, we've been a purely remote team now for a number of years, five or six years. And even at that point before then, we kind of had a cluster of desks at one of our clients near London Bridge, and it always felt like we always had people who were at the end of an internet connection
00:10:03:21 - 00:10:17:24
Tony Hallet
. And of course, our clients in tech, they work that way very easily. This way before the pandemic, yeah, we had clients who were all over the world. Their companies were the ones enabling that remote working from everywhere. So of course, they wanted to do that and we were similar.
00:10:18:02 - 00:10:35:11
Tony Hallet
So it always worked really well for us. So really flat structure. We've got a few pretty good, more direct reports than I should have. But certainly for directors, there's a senior team members. And then in the last 18 months, we took the big plunge hiring apprentices as well, which I'm sure is again another whole subject area around
00:10:35:11 - 00:10:43:21
Tony Hallet
staffing. But that's been a really positive step for us. Opened our eyes to lots of things. Just really, really great bunch of people across the whole team.
00:10:44:21 - 00:10:55:21
Ellie Hale
That's really exciting. You wrote some brilliant articles recently about sharing how much you pay your staff. So can you talk about that and the thinking behind that and how it's gone?
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Tony Hallet
Yeah. And really controversial to some people.
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Ellie Hale
God, isn't it? Some people are like... [GASPS] "Oh no!"
00:11:00:23 - 00:11:01:18
Tony and Ellie
[LAUGH]
00:11:02:23 - 00:11:06:07
Ellie Hale
You want to know how much you're getting paid, right?
00:11:06:16 - 00:11:16:24
Tony Hallet
Yeah. Well, I think you've probably seen it and a bunch of people who listen to this will have seen it that nowadays, if you're posting an ad for a job or if you're someone looking at job ads, you look on Facebook Linkedin wherever you see on
00:11:16:24 - 00:11:30:02
Tony Hallet
Other job boards. It's very common now. People say, how much does it pay? And it almost feels like we've hit a tipping point where it feels rude not to say. Now I know lots of people who work for very large companies where the culture around hiring is not going to change overnight.
00:11:30:03 - 00:11:39:19
Tony Hallet
But if they honestly say something to you off line, it's: "We really wish we do that as well." It feels like it's the right thing to do now that it's not quite the same as revealing what your staff earn.
00:11:39:19 - 00:11:56:04
Tony Hallet
And there are some organisations, not very many of them around the world who literally will give you the exact pay of people who work for them. As I say, it's very, very rare. What we did was somewhere in between we disclosed salary bands, for the different positions from the very entry level up to director level.
00:11:56:07 - 00:12:09:11
Tony Hallet
And again, a slight copout - director level - we say: "Starts at X amount per year "and then everything else in between is detailed. And in the articles you refer to, we say that it's not an exact science that you might get two people with the same job title and it's not the same.
00:12:09:11 - 00:12:19:05
Tony Hallet
And that might be because someone's been with you for four years and the other person's been with you four months. So, so there will be typical things that we all know about that come into play. Practically, it's proved really positive.
00:12:19:13 - 00:12:33:22
Tony Hallet
The team are all behind it, and new recruits will say to us: "This is one of the reasons I wanted to come and work for you because you're showing integrity, you're being open." I was like "Well, you know, it's still quite new to us, so we'll see." Just anecdotally for the fun side has been the negative side of
00:12:33:22 - 00:12:49:12
Tony Hallet
it, really, because the reasons why people have been against it and they're people I don't necessarily know very well. There was one bulletin board where someone posted one article of mine from a few months back and a bunch of people were like real great H.R. pros and senior people who know way more about this than I do
00:12:49:12 - 00:13:00:11
Tony Hallet
. And one person was just really upset was like, "I just think it's between me and my employer.!" And it's like, Okay, fair enough. And you got the impression he wasn't from the point of view of somebody wanting other people not to know that they earn a lot of money,
00:13:00:22 - 00:13:12:11
Tony Hallet
maybe more that they wanted other people not to know that they didn't earn as much money as they would want to. And there's probably all kinds of psychological reasons going on here and certainly from the point of view of an H.R. director or someone like that.
00:13:12:11 - 00:13:20:07
Tony Hallet
I know I get a bit of pushback from those people because they're like: "No, no, no, no, this is not how you do it." And it's like, OK, well, let's see. Let's see what works for us.
00:13:20:21 - 00:13:29:14
Ellie Hale
That's really interesting. Looking forward to hearing how it goes, absolutely. But if your team are finding it encouraging, then you must be on the right track, right?
00:13:29:17 - 00:13:41:12
Tony Hallet
That's the main thing it works for us. I'm not necessarily saying it would work for every organisation. Clearly it wouldn't. But for us and maybe for certain types of agency, I'd encourage people to look at it. I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of someone applying for jobs as well.
00:13:41:13 - 00:13:57:18
Tony Hallet
And when you apply for a job, you apply for a job in various places and in a tough labour market. And we all know about the great resignation and the current risks and opportunities for employers and employees. You want to stand out and be seen to look like someone that's going to be a better place to work
00:13:57:19 - 00:14:06:17
Tony Hallet
. And we've got a lot of faith in how we do things, but people don't know that until they actually start with you. So what indications can you give before that time? And we think this is one of the ways.
00:14:06:23 - 00:14:21:14
Ellie Hale
Yeah, I'm totally behind you on that, Tony. What is next for you guys at Collective Content? Does the niche that you work in push you to strive to try new things all the time to try new innovative content methods?
00:14:21:14 - 00:14:30:17
Ellie Hale
Or do you just keep it really simple in terms of your offer and let what you talk about be the creative boundary pushing stuff. How does it work?
00:14:30:22 - 00:14:41:03
Tony Hallet
I think you've heard me so far talk about how we've stuck to a plan, and it's pretty much worked. It's slow growth over a decade or so. And I think one of the things that naturally starts to happen is we get a bit broader.
00:14:41:04 - 00:14:53:23
Tony Hallet
So we're doing a lot more now around areas where traditionally we said: "Yeah, we can help you, but that's not really our thing" And now we realise we do know quite a lot about video and SEO and other visual content - animation, localisation.
00:14:53:23 - 00:15:08:01
Tony Hallet
We have got some great partners in several European countries, but the biggest economies are Germany, France, Italy. We're doing some really good work where we're not just doing translations, we're doing what we do here, but in those countries. So, you know, there are definitely opportunities.
00:15:08:02 - 00:15:21:14
Tony Hallet
And invariably, as we've just looked for good people, couple of people we hired last year, their background is more in PR than in journalism. So the two are very closely linked and it's a lot of crossover, but they bring things to the team, which we didn't know we were lacking.
00:15:21:14 - 00:15:37:03
Tony Hallet
So then that opens doors, opens opportunities. So I think invariably we do start to do things, but we don't want to go too broad, too quickly, and there are always growing pains. So we're at a classic point where, well, how big can we get and what would that do for how good we are?
00:15:37:05 - 00:15:53:12
Tony Hallet
Yeah, we don't want to compromise quality because just getting big for the sake of it, but I think there's definitely some growth ahead. But again, what we do? It doesn't scale hugely, so we're not producing software, which you can sell 1,000,000 copies of or 100 copies of, and it's the same for every report we write for, every
00:15:53:12 - 00:16:06:17
Tony Hallet
blog we ghost, or, for every set of Linkedin post we write for someone, we have to put in the work each time. So growth normally means more horsepower. And we want to keep our culture and keep what we like about the place.
00:16:07:00 - 00:16:13:08
Tony Hallet
Rather do that and grow in a conservative way, then throw the doors open and lose is what makes us us.
00:16:14:07 - 00:16:28:04
Ellie Hale
That sounds magic just to sort of finish up, then Tony, what is it that makes you feel really sparkly? What is it about agency life and life as an agency founder that you just really bloody love?
00:16:28:13 - 00:16:38:04
Tony Hallet
I think it's doing things our way. To quote myself from a few minutes ago, I think I said, like, yeah our way isn't what's right for everyone? And we've got to respect that other people do things their way. Good luck to you.
00:16:38:08 - 00:16:57:06
Tony Hallet
That's totally valid. But it's having that freedom to make those decisions to work with good people. And I don't just mean the people we hire or our freelancers. I'm talking about the quality of our clients. For example, we've worked with some incredibly smart, just wonderful people, and we will not work with people that we really don't get on with.
00:16:57:06 - 00:17:12:19
Tony Hallet
We won't just take the money and say: "Well, such is life." We've got a choice. And I think that's the big thing is, and those choices take many forms, whether it's around clients, the type of content we're creating, the type of people or where we work, how we work, all those things.
00:17:12:20 - 00:17:23:10
Tony Hallet
It's the freedom and it sounds a bit wooly and it's not so measurable, right? It's not like profitability or number of clients or award wins or something like that, but it's just being able to do your thing your way.
00:17:23:11 - 00:17:37:02
Tony Hallet
And so far as well, I would say the thing I'm most happy about is that helps us attract good people. So that gives me a lot of faith. Who knows what the future holds? There's no complete blueprint for what's going to happen, and I kind of keep it real and keep on working hard this way.
00:17:37:10 - 00:17:48:19
Ellie Hale
I don't think that sounds woolly at all. I think that sounds absolutely from the heart and the way it should be. Thanks so much, Tony. This has been really great chatting to you and I llook forward to seeing what you guys do next.
00:17:49:00 - 00:17:51:02
Tony Hallet
Brilliant. Thank you so much. See you soon.
00:17:51:23 - 00:18:02:12
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 about the agency. Collective Dot. CO.UK.