00:00 Introduction.

Martin Henley : [00:00:12] Hello there. My name is Martin Henley. This is the Effective Marketing content extravaganza and if you are new here, you won’t yet know that I’m on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business. Providing, of course, that what you need to be successful in your business is to know more about and be motivated to implement more effectively and enthusiastically sales and marketing in your business, which is of course what you need if you’re going to be more successful.

Martin Henley : [00:00:40] So I’m here giving you everything I know about sales and marketing. We bring you the news every couple of weeks. We review the very best and the very worst of marketing content on the Internet and whenever I can, I pull in anyone I can find with experience that will be useful to you if you are looking to be more successful in your business. So if that sounds interesting or useful, it should. We’re only here to be interesting and useful. You should take the time to like, share, comments, subscribe, do all of that really, really good stuff to support us in this epic endeavour. To support anyone who needs support to be more successful in their business.

Martin Henley : [00:01:17] Today is talk marketing so we have a guest for you. Today’s guest has sales and marketing experience working his way through the ranks to channel manager selling advertising with Sensis. Since then, he has been a sales director at Easy Weddings, National Sales and Operations Manager at Alchemy, providing data-driven marketing services. He has founded three digital marketing agencies Digital Eagles, Content Marketing and his current pursuit, the Hype Society, which fuses strategy with digital marketing outcomes. He was introduced to us by the quite brilliant Mark Carter. What you may not know about him is that he has been to more than 50 countries and for fun he plays golf and works. Today’s guest is Ryan Jenkins. Good morning, Ryan.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:02:17] Good morning, Martin. How are you?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:02:20] Makes me sound really boring. He plays golf and works for fun.

Martin Henley : [00:02:25] The thing is, I think you can work for fun. I think it can be fun. Yesterday’s person that I spoke to on Talk marketing is trialling the four-day work week with her business and it is producing fantastic results, great output, new sales records, everyone’s happy, and everyone’s staying in the business. So less is more I think, when it comes to work, but also more is more when it comes to work. Like you can get to a point where you’re just loving what you’re doing so much. It’s a little bit like gym membership, I think, every week.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:03:08] Yeah, I agree. I think that again, depending on where your business is at, if you can execute on a four-day work week, I think it’s it’s interesting. I’ve definitely read studies coming out of Japan around, you know, getting four, ten-hour days, you know, versus five, eight-hour days. The studies definitely show an increase in output and engagement. So, yeah, who knows where that’ll go in the future. It’s definitely interesting because it’s not what I thought would happen by taking people out of the office one day a week. I even really struggled with working from home and going through COVID and you know, almost being forced to manage a remote workforce scared me stiff. The reality is it’s worked perfectly well and okay, it was really scary early. Then I was pleasantly sort of surprised with how it’s worked out. We’re fully still remote at the moment, so this business was built in COVID, and managed fully remotely. So we’re all 100% working from home at the moment with insanely good engagement, collaboration and outcomes for our clients.

Martin Henley : [00:04:34] Well, excellent. That’s cool. The thing about the four-day workweek is there’s a formula, and I’ve only learned this yesterday, so I’m 100% qualified to talk about this. The formula is 100% of the pay 80% of the time, 100% of the output. That’s like the contract that you enter into. So they don’t do longer days. They just still do eight-hour days but because they are freer, more relaxed, I don’t know, happier, more organised in their life. They are more productive. I mean, it was a really cool it wasn’t about that, It was about marketing but she told us all about it at the beginning and it’s a really cool idea. The thing is I think is if you staff less work for the same money is a win. If you’re the business owner, it’s 100% consuming. Like since I started running my business in 2005, I mean, it’s much less of a business these days so it’s not so much. Let’s just say while I was running my agency properly from 2005 to 2014, I can’t tell you that I enjoyed a movie, or a game of football, or a game of golf or whatever, because there’s always in my mind a thought about the business, something I could do, an idea, someone I could meet, someone I could introduce. Do you know what I mean? There’s always something going on. So I think there’s that. It’s like stepping through the looking glass when you become a business owner. Do you know what I mean? It’s completely different. I think, that’s where it’s like gym membership is maybe you have to force yourself to get going, but at some point the momentum just carries you, you know? And I get a sense of that’s where you are.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:06:20] I used to be like that. I’m purposefully not like that anymore. I try and disconnect and fill my life with other things, like going to the gym religiously, you know, 4 to 5 days a week during my work week as well. Like, that’s important. That’s important to me. I get up at 6 a.m. and go for a morning walk. I meditate every morning. I make time for family. I didn’t do that before and I’m no less productive. I just probably have less stress and more balance and I’m probably a happier person for it. So I can certainly understand, though, that the consumption of mind that comes with running an agency, because I was there the whole time running the Digital Eagle’s business was pretty much how I felt all day, every day.

Martin Henley : [00:07:14] Okay, cool. So I want to talk about the digital Eagles thing. You’re in Melbourne, Melbourne, famously the most lockdowned city in the world. So that must have been interesting.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:07:30] It was probably one of the most horrific experiences I’ve been through just as a human, because the lockdowns weren’t just lockdowns. They were, you know, police, almost police stateesque and, you know, five k radius to travel. You can only exercise during certain times. It was almost just a loss of freedom. It was it was un-Australian and it was really, really hard to to bear, to be honest. As a as a melburnian, living in arguably the most liveable city in the world to almost the most unliveable city in the world over that period.

Martin Henley : [00:08:13] Wow. Because, what do I think? I think the whole lockdown thing was insane. Like, and the way people went for it was insane. The way people were like, okay, yeah, we just won’t leave our houses for months on end in Melbourne. What do I think the thing about Lockdown is? Like, if you think about the lockdowns, you could say, okay, they put everyone under house arrest no crime committed, no charges bought, no findings, no-one was found guilty of anything. Everyone’s under house arrest but that’s not even true because a lockdown isn’t house arrest, a lockdown is what happens in prisons when everything goes to complete shit. Then they’re like, okay, now we lock down. Now everyone’s in their cells for other than an hour a day. I think it’s insane what went on. You founded a business in in that situation. Yeah. Are you mad? Yeah.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:09:11] It was through force, to be honest. So I chose to exit my previous agency with my previous business partners. So it was either stay at home and do nothing, or it was learn from my experience and decide what I believed to be the future of what businesses needed from a marketing perspective, which is where The Hype Society was born. So we built an agency that brings brands.

Martin Henley : [00:09:45] Whoa, whoa, whoa because I think you might be going ahead. You might be disrupting the order of things here, Ryan, which isn’t allowed.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:09:51] Okay.

Martin Henley : [00:09:52] Okay. So just to touch on this, we did.

09:56 How do you go about founding a marketing agency during lockdown?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:09:56] We did found a business in the middle of COVID and it was really difficult. We had to do things exclusively remotely. We couldn’t even catch up for coffee. Everything had to be done via Zoom or by Google Meet. Customer calls were all done remotely leveraging relationships where I had them. But it worked. It worked. We were focused. We weren’t distracted was the upside. So we could focus a lot of our energy all day and all night on the business because we didn’t have other things that we could do at the time. So there was there was positives to starting an agency that could deliver remotely in a period like we went through.

Martin Henley : [00:10:48] Okay, cool. It was interesting because in 2008, when I was running my agency proper and the situation happened then, with the crash and the recessions and all of that stuff, I was all over it. I did a really barnstorming presentation one time about … they were putting out these keep calm and carry on little signs. I don’t know if you remember those or if you ever saw them.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:11:14] Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:11:15] So we edited that. The message of this presentation was basically get excited and kick arse because what I was saying to people is recessions are your opportunity, and your competition are going out of business. Their customers are going to be looking for suppliers. Everything’s going to become, it’s going to become a buyer’s market. This is a really great opportunity. I didn’t feel like that in 2020, maybe because I was much more removed from it because I hadn’t run my agency since 2014. But what I remember is the feeling of abject terror. Like they have actually broken everything. So with a couple of clients that I was working with, I had to have kind of interesting questions and conversations about is your business actually viable? Can your business make money? What was interesting is what I thought at the time is what I think all the time there’s a massive dip is either this is the best opportunity or the biggest excuse you’re going to have. You know what I mean? So you can opt-in or you can opt-out and only had two clients at the time and one of them took the opportunity and the other one opted out. So I can’t even imagine going to new customers and trying to convince them that what say they should invest in is marketing in 2020 and this is like, right on it, isn’t it? This is May, June. That time that you founded?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:12:36] Yep. Yeah. We were very strategic about the clients we targeted, first of all. So we knew what areas were in growth or that were due to benefit from these lockdowns, and that was e-commerce. So we were able to do enough research, We were able to leverage enough data to make compelling enough cases about what potential opportunity lay ahead. Fortunately enough, we captured those customers and helped them grow and capitalise on the market opportunity that existed with people buying online.

Martin Henley : [00:13:20] Brilliant. Yeah. It was an incredible time. I mean, it was I remember saying to people at the time, it wasn’t so much the virus that scared me, it was the response. The response was frightening. The idea that I’ve got friends who’d been in business for 20 years and their businesses just closed overnight because they involved bringing people into the country or they involved people being in groups or, you know. So hats off to you, man. I think that’s amazing that you did that. Maybe we’ll. Yeah.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:13:57] One. One other thing just to note, I also experienced the opposite. So we had sort of two waves, right? We had wave one and wave two. Wave one I was still working at Digital Eagles and within a six-week period we lost 40% of our customer base. So I have experienced the downside, you know, that smack in the face downside and being forced to stare down significant losses and, you know, manage huge risk within the business as well. So I also understand that the downside, it’s not all lollipops and rainbows that I’ve been through with COVID.

Martin Henley : [00:14:41] Okay. So it was your hand was kind of forced.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:14:46] No. Well, at that time it was forced. So we had wedding and events companies. We had entertainment companies, we had restaurants that we were looking after and they couldn’t even trade essentially. So they had to stop marketing. Fast forward 12 months later, I was starting The Hype Society and had a really good understanding of where the opportunities lie, because I’d already crossed that chasm previously, once before, so I knew where to go, how to get there, and which customers would be benefiting from the upside of COVID.

Martin Henley : [00:15:25] Okay, cool. Weird to talk about the upside of COVID because Digital Eagles, you took that, you founded that and it got to 40 people. 40 people in an agency is huge. It’s huge where I’m from in the UK. So in Australia that’s no mean feat. Hey?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:15:46] Yeah, that was that was my first effort at starting a company. So, you know, when you say baptism of fire, that was certainly true for me. I had no previous business experience. I was essentially a sales and marketing person. That was where my experience lied. So my inexperience was also highlighted throughout that experience. I’m incredibly proud of what we created and the business that we grew, the brand we grew the portfolio that we grew, the talent that we developed, the outcomes we got for clients and the revenue that we generated out of that business was really, really cool.

Martin Henley : [00:16:36] Excellent. Cool. So you know what you’re talking about. This is how I feel.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:16:41] I’m glad you do.

Martin Henley : [00:16:43] We’re not quite there, because we haven’t quite qualified you yet, but we’re in the process. You know there’s only five questions. The five questions are, firstly, how are you qualified to talk to us about your specialist subject, which is digital marketing? Second question is who do you work with and how do you add value to their lives? The third question is what is your recommendation for anyone who’s looking to get better at digital marketing? Fourth question What should people read or consume? And the fifth question who can you throw under the bus who might endure or maybe even joy to have a conversation like this with me?

17:21 How are you qualified to talk to us about digital marketing?

Martin Henley : [00:17:21] The first question is how are you qualified to talk to us about digital marketing?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:17:28] I’m qualified to talk about digital marketing because I’m a tragic when it comes to understanding how to use digital marketing to grow businesses. I eat, sleep, read, talk, strategise, and analyse all of my days in digital marketing. I have worked in marketing now as a general topic for 20 years, and I’ve been through the transition of traditional or print-based marketing into understanding what pure digital disruption does through the rise and rise of Google. Then social media companies coming into the market and seeing how that can really disrupt a whole industry essentially, and change how people are marketing their business. Then into the incredibly fragmented, insanely confusing environment that we’re in today with almost 100, maybe over 100 different ways to even do digital marketing from traditional social media and search-based marketing to guerrilla-based content. It’s just so broad. I’ve also helped probably over 1000 businesses in my time formulate and execute digital marketing campaigns. So I’ve got a fair understanding of how to how to drive results using digital marketing as an engine to execute on a strategy.

Martin Henley : [00:19:17] Okay, Super cool. So what’s interesting is I think we’ve got something in common, we’ll test that now. I started about ten years before you selling advertising, print advertising, and classified ads in business-to-business magazines in a London media sales environment. Is that also your experience? You were selling advertising?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:19:47] Yeah, Yeah. B2b in the White and Yellow Pages. So directory ads. Predominantly my time was in the White Pages. So I would argue that it’s hard to sell advertising to organisations that are listed alphabetically in a directory. So it was all-around enhancements, speed of information consumption of the important details within the directory, and then using things like branded assets to help reinforce brands. We had a pretty tough gig selling enhancements in an alphabetically listed directory.

Martin Henley : [00:20:29] And how were you selling that? Were you selling that on the phone? Was it originally on the phone and then face-to-face? I don’t know what the white Pages are.

20:37 What is the origin of branded search?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:20:37] The White Pages is the … you had a Yellow Pages, which is category, you’re looking for a plumber, you go to P and you find a plumber. The White Pages is an alphabetical list of all businesses within that region. So if you want, you know, Ryan’s plumbing service, you go to R and then you go to the section that would have me alphabetically listed and you would find my details and then contact me that way. Yes, I was selling phone based. We were making 100 cold calls a day to businesses that weren’t spending any money in the directory. Then I moved into, I progressed my way through the organization into senior accounts and then into a sales manager and sales director, and then eventually a channel manager, leading sales managers that led to sales teams. So that was, you know, over nine years I sort of climbed the ladder twice to essentially get to the sales director or channel manager role.

Martin Henley : [00:21:40] Right. So let’s just make sure we’re understanding this. All of the businesses are listed alphabetically. So what you’re competing with as a business on that page is with businesses that start with the same letter as yours. Not other plumbers. Not other electricians.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:22:03] Right.

Martin Henley : [00:22:03] That’s ridiculous. How could you possibly sell that? Because they might be looking for Ryan’s toothbrushes or Ryan’s plants.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:22:12] That’s exactly right. Correct.

Martin Henley : [00:22:14] And you were selling them…

Ryan Jenkins: [00:22:15] So you’re not even competing with the competitor.

Martin Henley : [00:22:18] You’re not even competing, literally competing.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:22:21] You are competing with the speed and the breadth of information that you would like your customers to have. We would sell bold enhancements. We would help them list things like fax numbers, or email addresses, or websites, or multiple office locations and help the directory have more comprehensive information about their business.

Martin Henley : [00:22:47] Right.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:22:50] But yeah, it was a tough sell.

Martin Henley : [00:22:53] Right. So just unless they are already looking for Ryans plumbers, it’s a little bit like PPC now, where people bid for their own company name or their own brand. Like maybe they should do that, or maybe they shouldn’t. But for my money, if the person’s….

Ryan Jenkins: [00:23:11] It’s exactly the same. It’s exactly the same as brand search. The value of brand search is that you can control the narrative or the search headline around how you want your customers to consume that information. Then you can also control the links that sit underneath your brand so you can direct those clicks to the most relevant section of your site. So it’s a really similar brand sort of comparison around what happens online these days versus what we were selling previously. Yep.

23:51 The benefit of selling hard-to-sell things.

Martin Henley : [00:23:51] Okay. So it’s similar in concept, but in practice, they are so committed to finding you that they are going and picking up a book and opening the book to exactly the page that you’re on. Do you know what I mean? It’s like. You would have to. What could you possibly do to deter them from calling you once they’ve gone through that process? They’ve moved. I mean, they’ve got up, they’ve got the book, They’ve physically opened nothing, gone through 1000 pages to get to you. You’re not going to stop them.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:24:24] Nah, Nah. It was about brand protection. It was about simplicity of information. It was about customer service, protecting your word of mouth business, giving them a good brand experience, with all the information being available, I feel like I’m going back to selling the White Pages but that was the value proposition.

Martin Henley : [00:24:45] I’m sorry, for anyone who might still be selling this. That shouldn’t be sold. That is unsalable and it shouldn’t be`sold. Your brand has done the work. It’s got the people to physically go there, get the number, find the number. That’s all they need. You’re not going to deter them. The benefit in there being a fax number or a logo or a list of services is so minuscule, like the brand work has already been done. You’re in their head. They’ve gone, they’ve found your number.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:25:18] This is pre-Google Martin like we’re talking about the time where you would have to go to, well, ish pre-Google ish. It wasn’t what it is now where you go to Google to find absolutely everything. We were getting, you know, tens of millions of searches a month on the in the book and online and using the 1234 connect number. So there was a phone number that you could call and ask for a business as well. So yeah, it was so there.

Martin Henley : [00:25:49] So there was a tiny bit of value in it.

Martin Henley : [00:25:51] Value in it.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:25:53] Yeah, that was how I that was where I learned to sell and it was incredibly formative for me to learn the process and then also to teach others the gift of sales as well. We had a tough product to sell and big targets and we had a strong value proposition back in the day, but certainly now it sounds ridiculous.

Martin Henley : [00:26:17] I think it was ridiculous then. That’s what I think. I was selling advertising. Selling advertising is hard. Selling Advertising is really, really hard. Selling that tiny, tiny, tiny little benefit must have been impossible. But then I think you’re right it’s where you learn to sell. How I feel about this is I was also making 100 calls a day. I was speaking to probably 30 people a day who could make a decision. So I’m speaking to like 150 people a week, 600 people a month, 6000 people a year. So I’m in my market, and I think that’s how you learn marketing. It’s almost like the more difficult the proposition, the more effectively you have to learn to sell. Then because you’re selling that to marketing managers and business owners I think that’s a really good grounding for running a marketing agency. I sold advertising. I sold lobbying. I sold exhibitions and then I sold events. And then I spent two or three years selling IT. That eight years of selling to business managers, selling a marketing solution to marketing managers and business owners is what I think set me up to run an agency. How do you feel about that?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:27:53] Yeah, I completely agree with that. Throughout my career I went through the transition of a print-led product into Easy Weddings, which was, you know, an industry-leading digital product, essentially selling directory marketing through a website which drove leads to wedding suppliers; into an agency with Alchemy, working with education and finance companies to build end to end marketing and inbound sales and enrollments into my own agency. So the transition from sales leadership into digital, into marketing agency, into my own agency was a really good stepping stone and progression for me because I was already armed with communication, sales, business acumen, and marketing knowledge. Then I needed to understand the commercials around how to set up an agency, you know, the real nuts and bolts detail of how to set up marketing campaigns using Google, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, SEO email marketing to build and execute strategically for businesses, and then taking that all of that knowledge wrapped up into my own business. Then that took me on the entrepreneur journey that I’ve been on for the last sort of five or six years, the next phase of my career is learning how to be a good business owner and leader within my own agency and organisation.

Martin Henley : [00:29:39] Brilliant. Because what you do when you are doing that on-the-phone marketing, is you learn how to engage people and you learn how to get yourself in and out of situations. You know how to catch people’s attention. You know how to develop a value proposition. You know how to present. Then when it all goes to shit, you know how to get yourself out of trouble. Now, I think that’s a founding. I don’t know, because obviously I’m not doing it anymore, I feel like now it’s too easy for somebody to do a bit of Instagram because there are DJ, get quite good at doing Instagram because they were a DJ and they were marketing themselves and then start a marketing agency. Or any one of the different platforms or all of the social media? But I feel like that actually hitting your head against a wall all day, every day, dialling 100 numbers, having 30 conversations, I feel like that opportunity has gone away for young people. Or maybe it hasn’t gone away, maybe people are still doing those jobs. The opportunity to short-circuit that process and then just know about social media I think is too easy. You’re going to go we’re going to record.

31:12 What is the challenge for businesses looking for a digital marketing agency?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:31:12] There’s two things there. The first thing is it’s incredibly difficult for business owners these days to see through the crap that is out there and decide who is going to be an effective digital marketing partner. One, because it’s it’s easy for people that know marketing how to market themselves and make claims and look professional. Two, customers or clients or business owners don’t actually know how to look, what to look for, what their requirements are, what they actually need and they’ve essentially been burnt multiple times by agencies that haven’t been able to deliver what they’re looking for. And then they go down the freelance route to try and build their team of freelancers, which is incredibly difficult as well. You know, to the point now where so many marketing managers and business owners are really gun-shy around the commitment component with their agency. So we specifically work with businesses that are in the mid-market they actually know what they’re looking for, they have a strategy, they know how to shortlist, they know how to tender, they know how to fill out a brief. That makes it a lot easier for us to attract and communicate with prospects. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I think resilience was a key skill that you learn by having a difficult, repetitive, challenging job as a young person. I’m not sure that young people these days have the same challenges that we had when we were younger. I don’t think that it’s going to come back anytime soon because a lot of those jobs are done in different ways, you know, through automation and through systemisation, the door knocking, the cold calling, that outreach stuff now has been replaced by smarter marketing and inbound channels rather than those outbound traditional channels.

Martin Henley : [00:33:27] Five Yeah, 100%. I think that and I’m thinking back to now to when we were selling this advertising, what would happen is there was no email so people would fax us. They’d have to blow up on their photocopier, their logo and fax it to us as big as they could and then we had people in our production department would colour it in with their colours and then reduce it down so that they’d have the quality to go in this little three by one ad or whatever. Then what would happen is they’d do all the production, they’d stick these ads on the pages, and then we had to take it to the train station, that physical thing, for it to get shipped into somewhere else in London to be produced. Even the process, we would phone people, convince them to take a media pack, then we’d have to wait for three days while it went in the post before we could call them back and say, Did you get it? What did you think? I think digital is making things easier, but I think there’s a cost, like you say, to things being too easy.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:34:33] Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, I don’t want to. I also don’t want to disrespect because we have a reasonably young team here as well and it’s just different. I think they, the team work harder in different ways. I experienced the same thing around receiving proofs that got faxed to us. They would have crosses and edits, pieces of information that would need to go into the book or be published and that stuff is just done in a vastly different way these days. The communication streams that are available and some of the software and online platforms that you use even to make mockups is makes life a lot easier to communicate for sure.

Martin Henley : [00:35:22] Yeah, 100% and I’m not dissing anyone. It’s not young people’s fault that the world has changed, but I do feel like there is a cost and it will be interesting to see. People do diss younger people, do talk about them not having resilience but we bought those people up. You know, I mean, we brought them into the workplace. We have to take some responsibility for that as well.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:35:48] Well, I listen to people like Simon Sinek talks about Gen Y and Gen Z that have different motivators and different ways of accepting information and different ways of communicating. I totally agree and support that. However, you know, sometimes I feel that resilience has been lost and. I just don’t know how you get that back without going through harder times and not throwing in the towel. It’s just it’s just interesting.

Martin Henley : [00:36:32] Well, you know what they say. They say that hard times produce hard people. Hard people produce soft time, soft times produce hard times. Something like that.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:36:44] Yeah, and it’s true. We haven’t had much, if you go back to the the fifties in the forties like, you know that was that’s hard right. Like we haven’t had much in terms of wars or recessions and you know really significant challenges in the last sort of 40 or 50 years. I think that’s also interesting, right? I don’t know how that ties into the generational changes that we’re seeing now but we were brought up by a potentially different thinking generation compared to what we have now.

Martin Henley : [00:37:23] Yeah, 100% and the thing is, I don’t know what the effect is either, except that there is the effect. It’s interesting because we’ve just done two years, or you’ve just done two years of lockdowns and you’re saying it’s not hard. I think our perception of what’s hard has kind of changed as well. Do you want the good news?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:37:44] Yeah.

Martin Henley : [00:37:44] I think you are eminently qualified to talk to us about digital marketing.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:37:50] Oh, good.

Martin Henley : [00:37:53] Cool. So that brings us then to question number two, which is who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives? Excitingly, what did you say? You said I’m just a nerd when it comes to knowing what people need from digital marketing. So that’s what we need to know. What do people need from digital marketing?

38:11 Who do you work with and how do you add value to their life?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:38:11] Yeah. I somehow, through experience, have a reasonably good gift of just being able to see really quickly where opportunities lie within digital marketing campaigns or within customers just in general. So through a series of qualification, what I would call business needs analysis questions, it’s really evident, really quickly where I go and how I take customers on a journey or clients on a journey. As I touched on before, we have almost two businesses in one and provide a boutique service that wraps it all up in a bow. We do brand, we do brand communication, brand development identity. We do content, content strategy. So let’s draw a line down the centre. Then we do digital marketing strategy and then digital marketing execution. So your traditional sort of SEO, Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, email marketing, content production in terms of written content. We work with what I call sort of mid-market businesses, businesses that are turning over sort of 5 million and our biggest client turns over sort of 200 plus million in terms of revenue globally. We look for businesses that have an internal marketing team or department that are looking for more expertise or more specialised resources to support them on the execution of their campaigns. So we have a few niches that we’re sort of finding organically, one is commerce. So helping really drive scalable revenue online is a real strong suit for us.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:40:10] It’s really advantageous as an agency because there’s essentially no middleman. We don’t have to rely on the salesperson converting a lead, for instance. It’s literally, you spent this much money and you made this much money and this is what drove those outcomes and this is where we see more opportunity for investment. We have a lot of clients in the energy sector as well. So energy, retail, solar, solar retail and installation. We also help some SaaS businesses. Fashion and retail, both bricks and mortar and online, is also one of our core market segments. So that’s pretty much it. We sometimes help business owners, but they need to be really clear around how and what they’re trying to achieve. Then we also provide them with what’s called a virtual marketing manager or a virtual digital marketing manager as an integrated component of their business that almost wears two hats. They wear The Hype Society hat at the same time as wearing the client hat. So they’re able to get in work with the business owner slash CEO, general manager, whoever it is, to really get the information out of the organisation and and drive that into The Hype Society and then come back with the outcomes and updates to report back into that business. So that’s yeah, that’s who we are and what we do.

Martin Henley : [00:41:33] Okay, fantastic. The Hype Society is a brilliant name for a digital marketing agency.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:41:41] Thank you.

[00:41:44] But. A lot of my energy when I was an agency, and I got it wrong, I got it wrong in the way that you haven’t got it wrong, I think. I wanted to be the small business marketing champion, and it took me five or six years to realise they don’t deserve one. They really don’t. I think because of what you’re alluding to. If you are serving that market, small businesses, owner-operated businesses, you have to spend a lot of time tempering people’s expectations. You can’t call yourself the Hype Society because everyone’s hyping their business around them already. Everyone thinks they’re geniuses just because they started a business. When they come to you, it’s like we’re brilliant now you just have to take us to whatever, millions of pounds in turnover in 20 minutes. There’s a question around there. I think I know the answer because it’s what you’ve alluded to already.

Martin Henley : [00:42:45] How do you manage the expectations of your customers?

42:50 How do you manage the expectations of your customers?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:42:50] By being very clear and transparent around what are the KPIs, the expectations and desired outcomes over time and gaining agreement on those things. And also being very transparent and strategic about where their shortcomings are, in a respectful but truthful way, is the fine line we walk. We walk that very, very early with confidence, without arrogance, because wrong expectations and a false sense of outcomes at the start, I know is fraught with client expectation danger.

Martin Henley : [00:43:37] There is such a thing as fraught client expectation danger.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:43:44] Yeah, I think.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:43:47] I was going to say, and you would know as much as I do, the less squeaky wheels you have, the better, right? Because the squeaky wheels do get the oil. We try and make sure that there are as few of those as possible by managing communications and expectations really effectively.

Martin Henley : [00:44:09] Yeah, 100% its the worst clients that get all the attention. That’s the that’s the issue.

Martin Henley : [00:44:15] The answer I found really late, way too late, was not to do business with those businesses.

44:24 What is the benefit of working with mid-tier businesses?

Martin Henley : [00:44:24] What do you call them, mid-tier businesses? By the time they’ve got 600 people, marketing management, then all of the strategic is kind of done. At least they know what they need in the way of of objectives, in the way of goals. They kind of have a sense of what’s required to do that and they come to you to support them to do that. That’s what I found.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:44:47] Yeah, I totally agree and that’s exactly why we’re after that customer, because they know enough about enough, but don’t know enough around how to execute with the specialisations they know that they need and that’s a really good sweet spot for us.

Martin Henley : [00:45:08] Yeah. That’s what I found as well. And they will just renew every year. Like if you’re here in all their checkboxes, they will renew every year. That’s a really good market to be in. Um.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:45:20] Marketing managers also have a budget and a desired outcome. All we need to help them do is look great, one, so they can take those results up the chain and say, Look what I’ve created. Two, it’s not their money so they’re not as concerned about how you’re spending it as long as you’re getting the objectives. Then our second persona as the business owner needs to tick a few boxes but even that persona, as long as we’re really clear about the expectations and they stay out of the weeds and we’re ticking the boxes, they’re equally as happy because they get super excited about growth, right? How much more can I spend? How much more can you make me? They’re the types of clients we want rather than going and trying to look under the hood and helping us take out the spark plugs and fill up the oil of the car. Just let us do that And you just sit behind the wheel and keep driving the car.

Martin Henley : [00:46:22] 100%. There’s something I want to say about that as well.

46:26 What is the danger of working with small businesses?

Martin Henley : [00:46:26] The thing is, business owners are always the brakes on their business until they get to a certain point. Until they get to a certain point where they see okay, this is going to work, this is going to be successful, this is going to be fine. Up until that point, they’re running under this huge pressure that they might fail and failure is so closely linked to them owning their homes, and owning a home is so closely linked to them, staying married to their wife or their husband and living in the same house as their children, all those things. So I do think also, I don’t want to blame small business owners, but there becomes a point…

Ryan Jenkins: [00:47:07] I’ve been there, you know. I know how that feels, right? I can empathise with those business owners. However, as much as I’d love to help, I’m not going to, and I’m not in a position to anymore because it’s just tied to too much risk. It’s tied to too much of what I call investment anxiety. There’s too much control that is unnecessarily implemented from their side. I think the one big thing that works really well for us is the qualification of the type of client that we work with and also how we strategically alleviate that investment anxiety. If there’s too much of that, it’s quite difficult. We try and pick the lowest hanging fruit in the shortest amount of time so that anxiety is gone and they are into opportunity creation. The conversation is much more about, okay, great, we have a relationship we have ticked some boxes together and now what? How can we execute phase two? We do phase things for our clients quite a lot and give them the opportunity to choose their entry point and their growth path, how they would like to see us execute without the over-capitalisation of investment at the same time.

Martin Henley : [00:48:37] 100%. So I think there’s a point where businesses are either success-sustained or ego sustained. There comes a point where the business is doing enough, where it doesn’t have to be sustained by the owner’s ego anymore. That’s where, like you say, everything becomes much more sensible. The danger with doing business, I don’t want to dwell on this because it’s not what you do, but the danger of doing business with these small businesses is if you turn up and they’re in a shitty mood, you’re likely to get fired, because they’re in a shitty mood, It’s not got nothing to do with what’s going on with you. So 100%, I think you’re right. You need to be at that point where the business is doing everything it needs to do and it can afford to be making the investment in marketing. I think that idea of investment anxiety is really strong as well.

Martin Henley : [00:49:31] Shall I give you a stat?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:49:34] Sure.

49:35 What is the key to keeping marketing agency clients?

Martin Henley : [00:49:35] I don’t know if it’s true any longer, but for a period of time it was reported that the average lifespan of a digital marketing agency customer in London is three months. So a digital marketing agency will win a customer, they can expect to keep them on average for three months. How do you feel about that?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:50:01] It’s not incredibly surprising to hear that. If they were my stats, you know, you may as well give up. The miscommunication of the desired outcome versus investment, versus time is the reason that that happens. They are the three boxes that need big ticks on both sides of the coin to be able to ensure that you keep your customers long-term. I’ve seen it so many times where the sales pitch is we can do all these amazing things in this incredibly short amount of time and it’s rainbows and lollipops and, you know, gold booleans and Ferraris. The reality is it doesn’t come true. If it is too good to be true, often it is. So we try and under-promise and over-deliver. We get our clients in at a sustainable, confident level of investment. We have clearly detailed plans and that’s what keeps customers coming back. We have insanely strong retention rates within the business. Even in the last business, we went through a stage where we were losing 20 to 25% of our clients month on month. We were pouring all these new clients into the business, pushing a whole heap of downstream pressure on our delivery and client service team, and then equally, an equal, or even greater amount were walking out the door, right? So we really had to come back and assess how we were doing things, the type of clients that we were targeting, how we were executing, expectations that were being created, which, you know, again, massive learnings for me around you can’t just make more revenue, you can’t just keep selling more things. You need to understand what’s required to build a long-term, sustainable, engagement, return on investments driven business. That’s what we’ve done since day one here.

Martin Henley : [00:52:19] 100%. And I think. The first thing is the reason you do marketing is so that you have lots of opportunities to sell so that you can pick and choose who you want to sell to so you can really qualify which of those relationships are going to be successful. I think that’s the first thing. What we’re saying is what’s true for your business, but it’s true for all businesses. It’s about the quality of your offering, the relevance of your offering and the quality of your offering, the quality of your targeting, your messaging, your delivery of those messages, the delivery of the solution. You know, this is what. This is how you be a successful business, isn’t it?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:53:09] I absolutely agree. I think it is. Then, once you’ve done that, you then go through the next phase of growth. You then start getting managers and leaders within departments which requires the old to be essentially rebuilt, systemised and process driven so it’s not just in people’s heads anymore. There’s a documented process and there’s a system to support how you want your business to run. That again, that sort of growth, that next growth step is the next phase of business maturity. I think that once you have your mission, your vision, your values, your products, your service offering, your experience all nailed, once you execute that and you grow, you then need to face the next list of hurdles that are going to come your way, which is trying to afford people that you can’t necessarily afford at that time but is really critical to the next phase of business growth and development. So you can continue to take that next leap.

Martin Henley : [00:54:23] Yeah, 100%. It felt like that to me when I was running my business. It’s like every 20 minutes you get the opportunity to take a huge leap of faith and it is only ever that. If you haven’t got it right, if you haven’t, if you’re not charging enough, you’re never going to be able to afford those people. Do you know what I mean? So I think all of business is basically sales and marketing. I think sales and marketing is the process of finding, winning, and keeping customers profitably and people go in to business and they’ve got no idea that’s what it’s about.

54:58 Is sales and marketing the key to being successful?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:54:58] I’ll speak from personal experience. I was great at sales and I was great at marketing, but without the right experience in operations and finance management, I was really quickly exposed. I just kept throwing more sales, more revenue and then hiring more people, which was essentially making the bucket bigger with the same amount of holes in it because we didn’t have a great financial strategy, we didn’t have a great retention strategy. You know, our communications, our reporting, our CRM, you know, all of our cash collection, you know, our payment terms, the amount we’re charging, like all of those things were the things that essentially just kept the bucket leaking. Sales and the marketing didn’t actually fix my problems but I think the opposite is also true with people that are really good at systems and operations and financial management they’re quite poor at that marketing, communications, sales, and leadership piece, which, you know, is just as critical when it comes to running a successful business. I agree and disagree depending on the business owner themself and how versatile they are or how good the people they have around them are.

Martin Henley : [00:56:23] Okay, good. Because that’s exactly what I did. I was always really good at sales and selling in a really quite wholesome way. I was really good at finding out what people needed and selling them that. That was always my solution, was just to find more customers, more customers, more customers. My issue was, because it was just me, I didn’t have anyone to do the delivery. This essentially is what ended the business, is I tried spending as much money as I could possibly afford on finding that person who was as interested in delivering as I was in selling and I never managed that. That was why, ultimately I gave up because it’s like like you say that leaky bucket. So have you founded The Hype Society on your own, is this your business?

57:15 What skills do you need to find a successful digital marketing agency?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:57:15] I have two other business partners. My other business partner is our creative director and also CFO, really great finance and finance strategy mind. Also has the gift of an insanely good creative brain as well. He essentially heads up 50% of that, the second half of our business. Then my other business partner is my brother, who looks after, he’s our sales director and partnerships director, so new business and partnerships is what he looks after. Then my departments are the client experience or what we call the digital performance management team and our operations and delivery team.

Martin Henley : [00:58:07] Okay, super cool because I think you need actually those three things. I couldn’t even find the second one. I couldn’t find anyone who was interested in doing the work, let alone someone who could manage the money but if you’ve got those three, I think that’s the triumvirate.

Ryan Jenkins: [00:58:24] That was very deliberate. I knew what the key pieces of the puzzle were. I was fortunate enough to work with both in the last organisation as well so we were able to found with those foundations from day one, which was a huge advantage for us.

Martin Henley : [00:58:46] Yeah, I’m sure 100%. That is exactly what you need. You say that you’ve got a knack for knowing what it is that people need from their digital marketing. We’ve spoken about how you package the deal. What are the actual mechanics of, what are you offering? Like which platforms are you driving with? Where is it that people need to be investing in digital marketing right now?

59:22 Where do people need to be investing in digital marketing right now?

Ryan Jenkins: [00:59:22] There’ll be a long answer to this. It really depends on the business. For businesses that come to us that want to execute on a digital marketing campaign, that don’t have a strong enough brand, or that don’t have a strong enough website, or that don’t have the right assets, or that don’t even have a digital marketing strategy, we’ll kind of pull them back to that foundational review and strategy piece. Even if we don’t start there, we make it known that we’re not confident that all the boxes are ticked on the way in. Then we will do an audit, a preliminary digital audit. We’ll get our SEO team to provide an audit on their website. We will do a paid media audit If they’re running Google AdWords, or do a social media audit, we’ll do an automation review and audit and we’ll come back to the client with a series of strategic recommendations or what we call the lowest hanging fruit that’s available. The other thing we do, which is really unique, is have a flexible marketing retainer. We kind of through the old, you know, digital marketing agency model in the bin and said what do customers really want? What they want is flexibility, communication, strategy and then outcomes. What we do is we give them a 90-day rolling digital marketing strategy and not lock them into a 12-month SEO, six-month Google ads, six months of Facebook ads. We say we think your marketing retainer should be X within X, we’re going to deliver Y to get Z outcome over that 90 day period. Then we are continuing to review, to iterate, and come back to the table every 90 days with a new version of that strategy that’s going to then take them on the next phase of executable growth or helping them rebuild some of the foundational elements that we called out early in the engagement.

Martin Henley : [01:01:37] 100%. Because the answer has to be it depends, doesn’t it? It’s because there is no. One. Fix for everything. So you will offer services across all of the platforms that broad.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:01:56] Yes.

Martin Henley : [01:01:58] Yes. Good answer.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:02:00] Yeah. TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram almost any automation platform, including HubSpot, Active Campaign, Send in blue. Google ads, including Performance Max or Google Display or YouTube. SEO obviously is Google search engine optimisation. Then we have an in-house digital design team that does all of our asset design. So whether it’s video editing, or video ads, we have digital design that does all of the Facebook, and Instagram, and LinkedIn ads. We have a web team that does all the web design. We have a UI UX person as well that provides the science and web strategy. We do Shopify and WordPress press predominantly with in-house capability. We have a web project manager that makes sure all of that sort of comes together. Then we have a brand and strategy team. For a lot of our clients we’ve taken on brand evolution or revolution journeys to help them elevate how they look and are perceived, with style guides and all of the image and asset formats that are required to support the rollout of those rebranding and communication projects too. So we really do have have it all when it comes to brand content, digital and marketing strategy and then digital execution.

Martin Henley : [01:03:35] Brilliant. Okay. Are you ready for a challenging question?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:03:39] Yes.

Martin Henley : [01:03:41] Good. What I do now for money is I teach digital marketing. What I do over the course of five days is paint this beautiful picture about how wonderful digital marketing is, about how transparent it is, about the feedback, about that attribution. You know What the opportunity is on the way in, you know what the result is on the way out, all of this stuff. But I have to tell them that I’m painting them a very rosy, perfect picture, and it won’t be as rosy, as perfect for them because it used to be so much better. You weren’t doing PPC in 2006, but let me tell you, it was like turning on a tap. It’s like, how many customers do you want? And it was fantastic and we were getting penny clicks. It was amazing. So the challenging question is. Is digital marketing, actually. Just hype. How good actually is it?

1:04:48 Is digital marketing just hype?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:04:48] So early adoption, done well on new platforms is really nice when you can get that to happen, Right? So TikTok is essentially almost that now, huge reach, more difficult because you need a strong content strategy, and engagement strategy, and you really need to understand your target customer, and it’s a pretty skinny market. That’s probably the equivalent now, which is the cheapest or underpaid engagement or exposure that you can get. That’s what I’m looking for.

Martin Henley : [01:05:36] Cheapest man? We’re marketing people.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:05:39] The most cost effective engagement you can get. However, you know, I think a well formulated, well researched, well executed digital marketing strategy can unlock rapid and sustainable long-term growth, which we continue to prove time after time. I won’t mention any names, but we grew one of our clients by $40 Million in Revenue in the last 12 months just by transitioning their business to a digitally-led marketing program versus a partnerships-led referral business. So there’s still a huge upside within digital marketing and marketing in general because I just don’t see many businesses doing it well. The ones that do it well, you know, get insane growth. Like if you have a look at brands like LSKD and the meteoric rise of that company in the last four or five years. It’s an online exclusive, male and female fashion slash activewear brand that’s turning over tens of millions of dollars just using digital as an execution platform from zero. JB Hi-Fi, when they pivoted their marketing strategy to be focused predominantly on online and re-platforming their website to Shopify, you know, they grew their earnings by, I don’t know what percent, but a lot off the back of that transformation and the pivot from letterbox dropping catalogues to dumping a huge amount of money into their online marketing spend over COVID. So there’s still so many brands and businesses that aren’t executing well from a digital marketing perspective that could do so much better.

Martin Henley : [01:07:38] That’s so true. All three of those things, or both of those things, I think.

1:07:46 How do you get value from digital marketing?

Martin Henley : [01:07:46] Let’s go this way you have to be extraordinarily cute to get value out of these monolithic digital marketing platforms. Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube because they’re so good at extracting money and so disinterested, I think, in actually delivering value.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:08:08] Yeah, totally.

Martin Henley : [01:08:09] You have to be so cute to actually get that to work. People aren’t that cute and that’s why agencies like yours need to exist. You need to have people who are nerdishly, freakishly, geekishly interested in understanding how these things work and how you get value out of them. That leads into the second thing that you’re saying, which is that early adoption always works. Early adoption of PPC really worked. Now, arguably we’re still in the early adoption of TikTok. We’re 100% in the early adoption of Reels, and Facebook stories, and YouTube shorts. Where the platforms want to get those things working, they do leak value, almost by accident.

[01:08:53] Yeah.

[01:08:54] You know, I mean, that’s where you play if you want to get value. Good.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:08:58] Yeah. And I mean, Gary V is the champion of attention and capitalising on the platforms that give you the best value attention as well. He’s built his whole brand and business around not being afraid to go into those platforms and learn them and execute really well against them. But businesses are so slow to move, they’re scared or they don’t understand and they prefer to wait and see and by that time, the opportunity is passed.

Martin Henley : [01:09:41] Yeah. And I think, well, firstly what you need to know is Gary V is my nemesis. I can’t stand Gary V, He doesn’t know I exist. It’s okay. I think he ths Kardashian marketing. He’s successful because he’s famous that’s what I think and it’s not replicable, he can’t do that for clients. I don’t think, we don’t need to get bogged down in that.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:10:02] Sure.

Martin Henley : [01:10:03] People are so resistant to marketing in the first place. They’re not even in the shore break, let alone swimming in the depths or out on the good breaks. They’re so resistant to marketing that they don’t know. So I think you’re 100% right, people aren’t as invested in these things as they need to be. For those three things, being really cute, being on the latest wave that’s breaking and being seriously invested in these things and knowing that your market aren’t going to be coming close to where you’re getting to is how you be successful in digital marketing in 2022. You can’t, like we did, do the lazy thing, which is just flick on some PPC and just wait for the floodgates to open. It doesn’t work like that anymore.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:10:51] I think if you do that as a business owner, it’s probably the quickest way to burn your cash without a proper Google Ad strategy.

Martin Henley : [01:10:59] Yeah, Google ads don’t give a shit if you’re in business tomorrow or not. They really don’t. They really don’t. These are my issues we’re touching on my issues here, man. This is dangerous territory to be in.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:11:11] I agree with you more. I think although we use these platforms and spend millions of dollars, this service model has a lot to be desired.

Martin Henley : [01:11:23] Really and imagine if they were, we’d never have to be in recession again if these platforms just did the job that they’re purporting to do, which is delivering good value customers to businesses. That’s what I think. Let’s not get let’s not go too deeply into that.

Martin Henley : [01:11:40] Question number four. What should people read? Or because it’s 2022? What content should people consume?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:11:51] So I never used to listen to podcasts.

Martin Henley : [01:11:56] Right. Sorry. I’ve screwed this up, man. I’m really sorry. We have to do question number. For your recommendation. So for people who want to get into digital marketing or people who want to get better at digital marketing, and if you can do this in one or 2 minutes, we’ll put this on TikTok. Cool.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:12:19] So are you gonna ask the question?

Martin Henley : [01:12:23] What is your recommendation for anyone who is looking to get into digital marketing or looking to get better at digital marketing?

1:12:31 What is your recommendation for anyone who is looking to get into digital marketing or looking to get better at digital marketing?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:12:31] If you want to get into digital marketing, I think find a really good agency that’s got great people already that can teach you how to become effective and be a specialist. Try not to be a generalist. If you’re a client looking for a digital marketing agency to get in to work with someone to help you grow your organisation, I think do your research, ask for references, ask for a plan, ask for a shorter-term engagement, maybe ask for a 90-day plan to de-risk yourself, being locked in to something that’s not going to drive the long term strategy that you’re looking for. Try at a smaller investment level, that you’re confident, or that the specialist or agency is confident that they’re going to be able to show you some green shoots and try not to overcapitalise to too fast until you’re confident of the outcome that you’re looking to to achieve. They are two lenses that I think you want to look through. That’s what I would suggest. If you want to get in to be a specialist, find the best of the best and learn from them for, for free or for, for a low, a low wage. If you’re a client, just do your research and ask for a shorter-term results-driven engagement.

Martin Henley : [01:14:11] 100% to great recommendations. Excellent. So recommendations for things that people should consume or read.

1:14:21 What are your recommendations for things that people should consume or read?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:14:21] As a business owner, what I’ve found to be the most valuable is things like this. So whether it be video casts or podcasts. I think the sheer volume of amazing content that’s available online can almost answer, and predispose your thinking in ways that it’s that it’s never been able to do before. So there’s people like Steven Bartlett the diary of a CEO who has amazing entrepreneurs and industry experts that he interviews. Mark Ritson is a quality marketer who has an amazing blog that I read from a marketing perspective. Then there’s some other sort of personal slash professional development people that I listen to that help me sort of get access to as much information that’s really relevant to me as possible, whether it be marketing, or entrepreneurship, or business strategy, or even personal development.

Martin Henley : [01:15:41] 100%.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:15:41] Lewis Howes is another great one.

Martin Henley : [01:15:44] Who’s that?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:15:46] His name is Lewis Howes. He’s more of a professional and personal development specialist, but really versatile in the types of guests that he has. But yeah, I’ve really found him to be hugely beneficial to.

Martin Henley : [01:16:00] Fantastic. I think the opportunity that comes from this kind of content is to know stuff that you don’t know. Like they say, you don’t know what you don’t know. Do you know what I mean? Where these kinds of conversations will? This would have been really useful to me if I’d seen this in 2005. Do you know what I mean? It might have saved me years of of knocking my head against the wall. Cool. We’re running over by a couple of minutes. Is that cool?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:16:24] Yeah, it’s fine. It is.

Martin Henley : [01:16:25] Okay. So I need to check in and find out how you’ve enjoyed your experience of being on the effective the Talk Marketing Show.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:16:34] Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed it. I think it’s it’s been relevant. Your questions have been super pertinent as well. I’ve really enjoyed being here myself and giving me the opportunity to add value where I can is appreciated.

Martin Henley : [01:16:54] Okay, super cool. And the reason I’m checking in of course, is contrived because if you’ve had a good experience, you’ll find it easier to throw a couple of people under the bus. So who do you have in mind for us?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:17:05] Ryan I would say Mark Gulliver, who works in an organization called Cloud Staff, who has a really long and broad career in sales and marketing. He would be a really good guest for you. He is very direct, matter of fact, very honest and also really experienced.

Martin Henley : [01:17:34] Fantastic. Is there somebody else?

Ryan Jenkins: [01:17:38] He’s the one that sort of came the easiest to me.

Martin Henley : [01:17:44] Um.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:17:49] No, I can’t think of anyone else that I think would be good.

Martin Henley : [01:17:52] All right, that’s cool. So that’s good. We’ve got to the end. So all we have to do now is say goodbye for the benefit of anyone who’s got this far. Then we’ll start recording. And then we’ll say goodbye like normal human beings.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:18:05] Sounds good.

Martin Henley : [01:18:08] The interesting thing about this for me is we’re generations apart, continents apart but the journey is kind of really similar, and the findings in the outcomes in the strategies are really similar as well. The thing for me about that is that there is clearly an answer. If we came to this, faced similar challenges, came to similar answers, then these must be good answers. That’s what I think.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:18:38] I’m glad you think that. I also think that. I found that we were, you know, very alike and been through similar experiences and solve similar problems for similar clients. It’s not always easy, but I think that the biggest growth areas and the biggest gains to be had come off the back of the hardest things you do.

Martin Henley : [01:19:06] 100%. I think that’s true and I think it’s okay for things to be a bit harder. That’s what I’m remembering from this conversation. Being challenged makes you stronger, I think and that’s good. Man, thank you so much for your time this morning. I have thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and we should stay in touch, man.

Ryan Jenkins: [01:19:26] Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Martin.

Martin Henley : [01:19:29] You are very welcome.

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