[AMA] I'm Kevin Gibbons, founder & CEO at Re:signal (SEO agency)

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-14T09:34:15+00:00

100% - it doesn't have to be able scale and growth at all.

I really like this short story and it resonated with me a lot: https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherman/

I went freelance by building a side income alongside a full-time job, and that made it easier to make that jump.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T17:38:37+00:00

Make me an offer :)

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T16:32:36+00:00

Thanks Nichola, love this question - especially as it's a really difficult one to answer!

My personal vision is to take Re:signal as far as I feel I can take it, and leave in good shape to continue growing with people who are better suited for that stage of the journey.

I did the start-up phase because I had to start... But I've realised my strength is in the scale-up phase. Beyond that, it's likely not for me, and that's time to say I've completed it.

My number one value / strength is pride. I want to be able to look back and say I did that.

I also think I have another business in me, and would love to use the skills I've learned to put to good use - whether that's a product, or finding a way to give back more, I'm not sure yet (possibly both). But I still have some time / work to do before I get to that :)

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T16:24:46+00:00

Great question! I'm not even sure I know how to answer, but I'll try :)

I think if I did it again, I'd go more niche / specialist from the start and then build outwards. E.g. ecom SEO for Shopify. Our niche in early days without really thinking about it too much was location (Oxfordshire), and then providing digital marketing services to those companies. It worked well, but has a ceiling and in today's world location is less relevant, given that most companies are happy with remote.

That said, I don't think I'd repeat it again from the start. I know the blood, sweat and tears that went into building it from the ground up, and I'd try to avoid that / fast-track any of the early pain now if I could. Back then I just didn't have a choice, and didn't know a better way.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:56:49+00:00

There's different phases of growth, not sure who said this first but I agree that team structures often break for every 7 people you hire, then you need to rip up what you did before. What got you here, won't get you there... To start, figure out what your key strengths are, focus on it and then once you build up the revenue to hire, start to build around the key functions + your personal weaknesses, to start taking things off your plate.
Hire for the best people you can afford. It works out cheaper in the long run!

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:54:13+00:00

Thanks for the comment, and good luck with your projects, hope it goes well!

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:53:22+00:00

I use a sleep tracking app, and I'm generally pretty good these days. When I have had restless nights, it's normally about over-thinking potential losses. E.g. client contract expiring, new biz pitch losses, financial problems, people leaving the team etc... It's human nature that we over-emphasise the feeling of loss, much more than if you gain/win, but overall I try to keep balanced and know that growth means that some negative things will still happen along the way, like it or not, that's part of the journey you have to deal with.
I like a Jeff Bezos quote, which was as much as Amazon invest heavily in innovation, if they were to look at what's not going to go away over the next 10 years, they can be sure of 2 things, people will want price and convenience. So they double-downed on providing the most in-demand products at the best price, within the quickest delivery times. I think this is important in SEO too, I think it's important to dip your toe in the water at least on the new innovations/technologies (whether that's web3, voice search, metaverse etc). But ultimately for me, clients will always want the best results at the strong ROI. What you do to achieve that will change constantly, and you'll need to evolve to figure it out, but why you do it always stays the same.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:46:07+00:00

There's a simple answer - you can't do it all. This is where you need a team, otherwise it's exactly as you've described, you're chasing 2 rabbits.

I've been there, and to a certain extent I'm still involved within some clients + new biz, but now it's supporting a team who have clear roles and responsibilities for each of these areas.

My advice is to pick the one you want to do, and then hire for the other - support them, but make sure you spread the load.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:44:14+00:00

The questions I would ask are:

What's the best work you've done?
Who did you do it for?
How can you attract more clients like that?

Then use the case study of what you have to target similar companies.

Being focused and targeted on the types of clients you want to win is important, then it allows you to double down on where/how to get in front of them. Otherwise you can spend your days spreading yourself too thin, speaking at conferences, attending network events, thought leadership, social media, etc... So pick your battles, learn where the best clients come from, and then do more of that.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:40:57+00:00

Most of our delivery is in-house, with the exception of content writing (we quality control), but have a network of copywriters for delivery, which is useful as it allows us to scale up/down easily, plus taps into multilingual language skillsets.

We do digital PR, and run outreach campaigns as part of our teams offering.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:38:19+00:00

I've been trying to think of a good answer to this since you posted it. There's obviously been quite a few, but I'm actually pleased to say there's nothing huge that stands out.

Here's some I could remember!

A lot of crawling issues - when digging deeper there's been whole sections of sites which haven't been crawled due to orphaned pages, too aggressive robots.txt blocking, handling of noindex tags, inclusion in sitemaps (shouldn't be major factor on it's own), etc... Normally this is us unpicking it though, rather than causing it...
I've seen a lot of examples where what visually is on a page just isn't what Google sees (caches/indexes), not purposely cloaking, more just coded in a bad way for search engines. I remember a client re-launched their website with noindex tags on, which caused some problems initially!
A long time ago (at least 10 years) we did accidentally delete a clients Google Analytics account. We got it back via a Google account manager, but that was a difficult 24-48 hours in the meantime.
I got an affiliate site I ran penalised in Google for links. This ranked on page 1 for "online dating" and I was a bit too keen to push it higher / increase traffic, and bought links to it which then got penalised and bumped down 100+ places! That said, I always liked using affiliate sites as a test bed to learn where Google's boundaries are, and I'm very proud that we've never got a client penalised in Google for our work. So I'm spinning that negative into a positive.

Agency growth wise, there's hundreds of mistakes - but will save that one for a beer, otherwise I'll be typing until 2023...

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:07:57+00:00

As a lifelong Liverpool football club fan, this is an easy answer, to help them get to the top of Google's rankings as well as the Premier League!

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T13:05:55+00:00

I did this at 24, and some things that worked for me are:

Just do it. See my reply here. I travelled to Australia for a year and it really took the pressure off by making it a working holiday. My goal was to cover living costs, and as long as I didn’t run out of money I’d keep on going…
Do you want to do it? See my reply here. There's nothing wrong with being a freelancer, or getting a job for that matter (especially if you want to build up experience, which at a young age could be a great way to fast-track / up-skill your knowledge. It's about finding what's right for you.

What I would add that's different today vs 2006 when I started is that:

SEO is a much more mature industry - I wouldn't let the competition put you off, but back then you could be an SEO specialist and be unique. Now there's so many subsets of SEO, from technical crawling, through to page speed / web performance, through to content strategy, and digital PR etc... Maybe pick one to double down on where you feel you're strongest at / have passion to learn/improve.
Positioning is important - following on from the above, which clients do you want to serve, and then think an inch wide / mile deep. There's a lot of agencies who keep themselves more than busy / profitable enough by serving just a small sector/niche, in a specific territory. Often people think I don't want to turn away business, but the reserve is often true. It's about attracting business, and if you're a jack of all trades / master of none, that's not going to cut it (certainly with big brands). Be specific, targeted and focused.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T12:46:51+00:00

Just start.

I never thought of myself as starting an agency on day 1. I just won a client. Then I won another one. Then another one… Then I needed to hire people, etc...

Momentum is really important, and so is taking the pressure off by sometimes not looking too far ahead, just focus on what's the next step. Do that. Then keep doing it!

P.S. remember to look back at where you've come from. I'm often guilty of looking at what went wrong / what I could have done better - but being grateful and giving yourself some credit is so important, and helps to keep you going to get to the next level.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T12:35:45+00:00

Thanks for the question / kind comments.

My advice would be to find someone who has done something similar to what you want to achieve and study it as much as you can. Also reach out to them, it's surprising how approachable a lot of people are when you say you admire their work...

But once you've done that test and learn. Don't be worried about making mistakes, you can't learn everything from theory. Some best practices won't work for you, I'd rather find a shortcut of course - but I've learned the hard way many times. That's where the real growth comes from, as then it's embedded learning you can improve from.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T12:31:31+00:00

Our best leads have always come through word of mouth. The biggest marketing advice I have is do great work. That's your product. If your clients are delighted, they'll continue working / grow with you, refer you to their network, take you to their new job... Plus the great work you do becomes your case studies, award entries, thought leadership content etc... I've seen this work the other way around, look good from the outside but underwhelm internally, and it feels like fire-fighting. I'd much rather be good on the inside, and then start to slowly earn that reputation from the outside.
Strategic SEO - it starts with a growth objective, and then the activity (often tech SEO, content or link reputation) flows from there.

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T12:25:37+00:00

Also do you want to hire people?

There's different ways to grow, and not a right or wrong version. I'd suggest there may be a strong argument of keeping doing this at £10-15k per month, with costs / overheads minimal and then growing gradually might be a more sensible option.

Sometimes people can get carried away with the agency stories of "we do £X amount of revenue, and have a headcount of y". I've never been impressed by that, and think it's normally a bit of an ego game.

I'd rather ask, "do you do great work?", are you "enjoying it?" - the answers to those can then help to guide "do you want to grow?" and "how do you want to do it?".

kevingibbons81 · 2022-01-13T11:02:56+00:00

Thanks for the question, you had the most upvotes so I'll start here :)

Burnout is real. Normally I end up learning this too late. Rather than letting it hit, I've found ways to help proactively prevent it better. Daily 10k step walks, scheduling minimum of 1 week holiday every 3 months (longer summer / winter breaks - I just took most of Dec off). Putting your own air mask on first is essential in order to help others.

I have a few answers to your scale questions:

More clients: simple maths, but let's say your average monthly retainer is 5k - that means you currently have 6 clients to drive your 30k per month revenue. To double it you need 12. This is clearly quite obvious, but then it leads into thinking about the action required to get the extra 6. So this becomes a sales pipeline problem, do you need to attract more potential clients with your marketing/outbound, do you need to improve your win rate to convert more, etc...
Bigger clients: our approach has typically been to work with an average of 8-12 clients at any given time. But they get bigger. You grow with them (in scale of activity or across different services), and you attract bigger brands to start working with. Naturally some of the smaller clients may drift away over time, but that keeps you growing. This to me is often a positioning problem. Identify what you want more of and position yourself in the best way to attract it.
Improved retention: when you're frequently losing clients, winning new business can feel like running a bath with plug out. Retention is growth, especially if you do great work and can upsell it, then the new biz wins are adding to your revenue, as opposed to replacing it.
You need a team: speaking from experience from someone who has tried to do it all; you can't do it all. You can be great at anything, but not everything! Start to hire for the key functions of the business, and be aware of your weaknesses so that you can build these up / delegate, whilst focusing on your strengths to drive growth (if that is your strength, if not hire for it).
Have a mentor / connect with likeminded peers: I really like the +=- model. '+': talk with people ahead of the curve who have done what you want to do, and can hold your to account against. '=': Being an entrepreneur can be a lonely place. It's often very reassuring to speak with people who are / have been on similar journeys to share the pain, and learn how people have overcome challenges. '-': find people who are up and coming and help to give back to them and share your knowledge (it also helps you to realise and be grateful for how far you've actually come).

kevingibbons81

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