E35: Richard Hill

Richard Hill:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of eCom@One. Now today's episode is a little bit different. Now, normally for the last 35 weeks, we've interviewed an expert in the e-commerce mindset, motivation business, innovation field and we've gone live every Monday with that episode. Well, this week is a little bit different. The guest is going to be myself, I'm just going to give you a bit of an insight into the businesses that I run, my day-to-day, my motivation behind the businesses. I'll give you a bit of an update on some of my findings and learnings over the last 35 weeks. What I've learned running businesses and interviewing obviously a lot of experts during the last 35 weeks, it is now.
Richard Hill:
Seems crazy to say that out loud, but that's obviously well over half a year since we’ve had this idea. We launched it in lockdown the eCom@One Podcast, and we've had literally thousands of thousands of listeners from dozens and dozens of countries. I had a friend of mine send me a screenshot of their daughter listening to the podcast as a screenshot of their dashboard in their car, in the foreground I could see the Dubai skyline. They were listening to one of the episodes while driving to work in Dubai, which I thought was pretty cool.
Richard Hill:
So you've got me for the next 45 minutes or so. I thought really what would be quite cool to start would be to just introduce my companies and give you a bit of a feel for both of the companies and what we do, because I think that's just quite an interesting topic. Obviously we have had 35 episodes so far around e-com, but behind the eCom@One, there are two digital marketing agencies and one very specific agency that is geared around e-commerce marketing.
Richard Hill:
So my journey in e-commerce and business started when I left uni, which is gosh, about 24 years ago now, not quite sure what I was going to do as I just left uni, a graduate, which I think a lot of people, you leave uni, you do your degree in a certain topic. But are you going to actually get a career in that topic? You're not sure maybe, maybe not. You just don't really know, I think is quite common. I've got a young son now, he's not at uni age but he's made decisions on his A levels, or first phase decisions on his A levels, that may change. But I ask him what he thinks is going to do. Obviously, don't know, don't know, not sure. He's got an interest in certain things, he's got an interest in business, which is quite interesting.
Richard Hill:
My youngest son, he thinks he wants to be a lawyer but he's only 13. So a lot of time will tell, but ultimately I left for uni not quite sure what I was going to do. But happened upon an opportunity where I... The quick version, I met a Meta chap that was selling computer components and used to get all the returns from what was then called MasterCare. I think it's called KnowHow now. So we're in the UK, when you had Currys, Comment, PC world, these big companies that sold a lot of consumer electronics. And basically the chap I met had the contract to get the returns from that company. I met him, started chatting and he had a lot of PC returns, computer component returns.
Richard Hill:
I said, "Do you know, I might actually buy a few of those off you for my own use and start building a couple of computers with a friend." Or my friend started building them for me. But I used to source the components from this chap. Fast forward six months, we were selling a few. Fast forward a year, the chap rang me and said, "Look, I'm really looking to get out of the business. Is it something you'd be interested in, is buying everything we've got and the contract, with MasterCare?" I was like, Whoa, that's quite a big decision, but yeah. Do you know what? I think at the time I didn't have anything to lose I had no house, no mortgage as such. I was living in a family home and didn't really have too many concerns commercially and financially.
Richard Hill:
So I was very much like, "Do you know what? Bugger it, I'm going to do it." I remember going to his unit where he said, "Oh yeah, we've got quite a bit of stock." And it was a bit like that image on Raiders of the Last Arc, I think it is, the film at the end where they open that sort of warehouse, or they pan back from that warehouse, there's just racks and racks and racks and racks, he steps back, and racks and racks. He opened the door and the lights all shown in the warehouse, it was like, Oh my God, there's literally like lorry after lorry after lorry. It was literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pallets worth of technology products. Now, not just tech. There was other things there, white goods and things like that.
Richard Hill:
Anyway, short version is we came to an arrangement. I bought all the stock off him. And I opened a shop at Hemsworth Cliff, which is in Lincolnshire, Caenby Corner. We built that shop up to a very successful business at the peak, where we'd managed to build different channels in the business, different sort of distribution channels, where we had different shops we would supply. We started importing products from China. We built the company up to about 38 staff at its peak. From myself, and one of the guys still works for me now, actually, Andy, who, some of you will have met. Some of you. He's on one of the episodes. I can't remember the exact number, but he looks after all of our tech, but he was with me pretty much from the start, I think the second year-ish.
Richard Hill:
We built that company up over about a 10, 12 year period. But we had different channels, different areas. We were distributing, like I said, we were importing. We were going out to exhibitions and finding manufacturers and branding them, creating our own brands, bringing them in. We sort of jumped on a couple of, what's the word? Sort of niches. But primarily it was PC components, all the things that you see in a PC, in a PC system, in a tower, the memory, the hard drives, the floppy disks back in the day, the cases, the keyboards, the mice, the monitors, the external products, the speakers, the processes, the graphics cards and so on. And we bought them and built computers or sold the components.
Richard Hill:
We had different sides to the business. We had a shop which started as one person then growing to about eight, nine people working in the shop. But then when we really sort of jumped, and really grew, was when we started going into the trade side. We built a new brand within that limited company. We would sell PC components to the trade. Rather than buying, say, 20 CPUs, we would buy 200 CPUs and then we would sell them to other traders. We seemed to have a knack, or I think my strength then was negotiation, really, negotiating a real good buy price. Then we would then sell them quite small margins, but big turnover.
Richard Hill:
Our turnover was in the millions, but we very quickly got to a million pound turnover very, very quickly. At the peak we were doing about 1.3-ish, 1.3 million a month. So we got about 14, 15 million a year at the peak. But like a lot of things back then I very much got sort of side blinded. Is that the right word? Blindsided? That's the one. By the economy. The fact is, it was 2008 and things became really very tough. Lots of things were happening with the economy. You know, it was really challenging times. What we had to do is really decide what we were going to do with the business. A little bit, like the last sort of six, eight months potentially, but very different. I've got very different memories then to what's happened in the last six months, seven, eight months, we've locked down in the pandemic.
Richard Hill:
But back then, we were officially at a recession, so we had to decide what to do. We had parts of the business that were very successful and parts of businesses that were not. So unfortunately, we had to close down the core distribution business. But what we had from that then were some niche products that we then went off with built brands around. But I had a lot of learnings from that, a hell of a lot of learning from building a business from one person, myself, to sort of 38 people importing containers every week. But the thread from that that brings me to today is very much, we obviously had an online thread. The online thread sort of came where I was pretty much where I was one day, do you know what? We need a website? What's this internet thing?
Richard Hill:
They were talking sort of 18, 19, 20, it was 19 years ago. So a long, long time ago. And my website was actually literally, sorry, an Excel sheet. It wasn't even an Excel sheet, but the equivalent of an Excel sheet online. That Excel sheet very much, we could update very, very quickly and it became known in the locality that we very price aggressive in our pricing. It was very much about price back in the day. I'm not a big advocate of that now, obviously you need to be competitive, but I think being the cheapest in your industry, it's a stairway to doom almost. I think obviously you do need to be competitive, but I'm not a big fan of playing the price game. You definitely need to be competitive, but you don't need to always be the cheapest.
Richard Hill:
There's a lot more things you need to stack in there to add the value, but ultimately we started our e-commerce journey with an Excel sheet. Then a year later we built an e-commerce store, then a couple of years later, built an e-commerce specific brand, a sub-brand from our core brands. Then it got to a point where we were doing about 350 orders a day, about 350 orders a day. And I'm talking about 12 years ago, and we continued with that business. But at that same time, I was getting asked how come you guys are selling that much stuff online? We were saying, well, it's SEO, primarily SEO. You go to Google, you search for GTX 9784 graphics card, and we would be number one, or we'd be number two and so forth for all the ... we had about 1,500 components probably usually in stock. We had good stocks.
Richard Hill:
But what we had it was that SEO side of things that we learned, myself, and they saw me, other colleagues. We had hired agencies in the early days, but we became very disillusioned quite quickly with what they were doing. So we learned it ourselves. But, we were ranking our own site. Our own sites, our own businesses. We had several e-commerce stores at the time and over those years. But we were getting asked, how do you do that? Well, it wasn't really something we did as a service. It wasn't. But then I just got asked one day, could you help us with it? And basically to sort of keep the story a little bit shorter, I said, "Yeah."
Richard Hill:
So I did half a day for quite a well-known electronics retailer. And then that turned into doing a day for somebody else doing half a day and charging for half a day, a day. Then we were in this transition part. Where do you know what? Actually, I really enjoy the service piece of it, of the business, but I really enjoy buying product and selling product through e-com. But it was getting a little bit more challenging. We were still in the recession, we were sort of coming out of it slowly. But then I was just getting asked more and more around the e-commerce side. Then an opportunity came along to sell all my e-commerce businesses. And that's what I did. I sold my e-commerce businesses. This is about 10 years ago now.
Richard Hill:
We sold those businesses and we went 100% into the agency. The first agency is SEO Traffic Lab. So a lot of you that are familiar with the podcast will know, as e-comm one, where we actually have two agencies. We have SEO Traffic Lab, which was our first agency, which is very much still thriving. Which, we just celebrated our 11th year. SEO Traffic Lab agency very much started out as the name suggests an SEO agency. But again, as e-commerce and the marketing industry matured, we started offering other services, different services.
Richard Hill:
We started doing obviously paid ads, a lot of you will know us from our paid ads for our Google premier partner and so forth and our ad work. But also obviously SEO, PPC, email marketing, you name it, we've sort of done it over the years. But some of those things we are exceptionally strong at. What we found is that over the years, we found partners that are a lot better, to put it quite bluntly, at certain areas. So what we decided to do a couple of years was really consolidate and focus on the things that we are exceptional at, which is PPC and SEO. But more than that, we then split the brand into two sites. So now we have SEO, the focus is on PPC and SEO for SEO Traffic Lab. We have SEO and PPC for B2B businesses that are looking for form fills, phone calls, conversion, et cetera.
Richard Hill:
Then we have E-Comm One, which a lot of you will know as, an e-commerce marketing agency, which purely works with e-commerce marketing agencies, sorry, e-commerce marketing websites and companies, marketing managers, owners. We work on four core services there, so that's Google shopping, search ads, so that's two services with Google. Then SEO, obviously Google SEO, Bing SEO, et cetera, but primarily 95% is Google. Then Facebook ads, Facebook ads is a huge growing area for us. So running product specific ads and brand ads for e-commerce brands. That's a fairly quick run through of my last 20 years. But through that process through that time I think I think very interesting, probably lasts what? We're on eight months of sitting here recording this. It is now the 12th of November.
Richard Hill:
I think you'll be listening to this, obviously it'll go live next week, but you could be listening at any point, but we've had quite an interest in eight months as a lot of us have. I think we locked down our business, in terms of our offices, we've just committed last November to some new offices in the middle of Lincoln. A beautiful renovation into a new coworking creative hub, I think just shy of 2 million pounds was spent by Lincolnshire Co-Op. We took sort of the main offices in that building, which we're very, very pleased with. But unfortunately, we were five months into that journey, that next chapter of our business. And then we had to go home. We actually made the decision to go home a week before the official lockdown.
Richard Hill:
I think it was the 15th, 16th of March. We went home and we stayed there for about four months. Then we went back to the offices for about two and a half months, and then obviously we just got locked down again. But again, we actually made the decision a week before that to go back again. I know a lot of different companies have done different things in terms of working from home and not working from home. But yeah, we did sort of a four month stint from home about two months plus two and a half months still going back.
Richard Hill:
Then now, we've been back at home for the last two and a half weeks or so. Okay. So during that time, I think there's quite a lot of takeaways. I think as a business, we've been very fortunate. Unlike, there's a lot of different businesses out there that are going through a lot of pain right now. I understand that it's been quite challenging. What we found, the core of our clients, from our experience in the clients that we're working with, the e-commerce side has been super strong. Obviously a lot of companies that are in the e-commerce sphere have had exceptional sort of seven, eight, nine months, really, really strong.
Richard Hill:
We've had a pretty good, I hate to say it and touch plenty of wood, but we have had a very good, where are we? Seven, eight months as a business. We are still slightly down on what we forecasted, but still we've had definitely had to make some adjustments we definitely have. But we've had a really good few months. We actually got nominated for the National Search Awards, which is something I'm super proud of, super proud of the team. But obviously, we all went home and worked from home. I think it'd be good to share a few of the things that we do, as a business, and I do as a business owner, to sort of help manage that process.
Richard Hill:
Some of the tools we used, and some of the softwares we use, always seems quite an interesting one. I do try to share a few actual takeaways of things that we do in the business whenever I do a talk or anything. A few of the things that have been fantastic for us is Slack, for example. Using Slack software is something we've used in the business for probably about six years. But what Slack enables you to do is to create channels for communication. Now whether that's a channel of communication with a team of people in your business or one-on-one chat, or the whole team, or client projects, or internal projects. It keeps everything in a channel. That's Slack, and that's something, like I said, we've had for about six years.
Richard Hill:
But me, personally, I've not used it that much. But the team, they live and breathe. I haven't used it that much prior to lockdown, but now I'm in it all the time, all the time. Basically, we have different channels in there. How we use it, which works really well, we have different client projects. We work circa 100 different client projects throughout our business at any one time, give or take. It obviously does vary. That's our sort of number, pretty much. Some clients are working with us on a couple of things and so forth. So we'll have a channel for each client, so we can go to that channel, we can look for a client project. We can go over the client name.
Richard Hill:
Then in there is the team working on that client. Now most of our projects are multi-team. There's very rarely a client where any one person is working them. We'll have maybe five, six, seven of our team, maybe eight of our team in a project sometimes, just if it's a PPC project, a paid ads project, we'll have somebody in there from the tech side that's running the tech, so somebody that's responsible for the tracking, the pixels. We'll have somebody in there maybe from the creative, looking at the design side, if we're using design. What will be design, if there's design elements, especially if it's Facebook ads. Then we'll have an account manager. Then we'll have a project manager. Then we'll have myself. I'm in every single channel.
Richard Hill:
Although I do mute quite a lot of the channels, and just go in when I need to. That's been great. But then what it's also enabled us to do is obviously keep real tight communication as a team together, which has been a huge savior, should I say, for Slack. We have a channel that obviously is a bit like the water cooler channel, I think some people refer to it as. But it's sort of a general channel. In the morning, we all jump on when we start, say hi, how are we doing? What have we been up to? People start at different times, we have different start times for our staff, we're very flexible.
Richard Hill:
We have an understanding and an agreement of what time people start. But that can change, that can move, depending on peoples' circumstance. We've got different people, different family circumstances. That was the same when we were in the office, people would start, they were very flexible working environment, instead of just start times and finish times and working times. Then yeah, Slack's been great. Then for project managing projects, actually the detail of a project and the things that are getting done within a project, we use a system called Asana, which has been really strong. We've tried a lot of project management softwares, probably all of them, or about five of them in there. Because like I said, our agency is 11 years old now, as a brand.
Richard Hill:
Project management wise, Asana. Again, we have a project for each client's projects. If we're working on SEO for a client, there'll be a project for that client's SEO. If we're working on the same client's PPC, there'll be an additional project there. What that does, that just gives us a more granularity, get my words out today, on the specifics of a project. If someone's working with us for SEO for example, we know that that project's going to have maybe six core things in the first month. Those six core things will be listed in there. They'll be assigned to people, there'll be deadlines on there. But then, you click on them, there'll be notes on there.
Richard Hill:
One of the things that we've been able to do during lockdown, one of the projects we've been able to do, is really work on our systemizing and systemizing the things that we do as an agency. That's been something that we've been working on and trying to work on for years, with different degrees of success. But what lockdown's enabled us to do, it's given me quite a lot of time, I think, as a business owner, to sit back and look at some of the bigger picture and work on the business more. I've always been aware of that, that I need to do more of that. And I do do a lot of that.
Richard Hill:
But as a business, during this last six, eight months, we've been revving up to work on our systemizing. What we've been able to do, for example, on the SEO side, is really systemize our process. We've come up with a new sort of naming convention for everything, what we call our SEO Recipe. Then the recipe consists of about 16 different workflows, frameworks, assets, presentations that go with those different areas. So those of you that are listening that are clients will be very familiar with the new things that we've been doing this last six months, and that coincided with some new blood in the agency as well, which has been amazing.
Richard Hill:
I think we've recruited four people during lockdown, four full-timers recently, which has been great. Some new blood in the business, which is fantastic. Yeah. Asana and Slack. But then what you can do, you can integrate the two. So Slack, the projects detail in Asana can be pushed through to Slack. So then you're using Slack as a central hub. Again, Slack is literally, when I finish this podcast recording, I'll be jumping on to Slack to see where we are with things. That's been great. Then what we've done, another thing that's been really good, is obviously keeping that comms with, sorry, with the team is the real key thing.
Richard Hill:
A few things there, and a few bits of advice I'd give there, on what we've done. Obviously you can take away from this what you will, but it's worked well for us. We've not lost any staff during lockdown. Everyone's spirits, obviously we have good days and bad days, everybody has now. We'll talk about that as well. But I think to every day, we have a standup, what we refer to as our standup. That's something, that terminology comes from more of the dev industry. That sort of industry, I believe. But it's something we've had in our business now for about the last 18 months. Every day in the business, if we're in the business, we would all get together for literally 10, 15 minutes.
Richard Hill:
It was about 15 of us in the office at any one time, depends on the day, really. It could be 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, something like that. We all get together, 10:00, meet. We'll agree, wherever it is. There's a couple of different places in our offices where we meet. It depends. We've got a main office, we've got a couple of big meeting rooms, a couple of big meeting spaces. Obviously during the pandemic, we've not been able to do it quite like that. So we've done so many in a room, so many dialing in via Zoom. So we'll have a quick meeting.
Richard Hill:
Really, what that gives us the opportunity to do is have a little meet-up. We'll say hi to everybody every day. Obviously we've said hi on the chat, but we're saying it face to face or on Zoom. That just gives us a bit of an update from everybody. Everyone gives a bit of a rundown on what they got done yesterday, and what they're working on today. It's literally like, what I did yesterday was da da da da da. What I'm working on today is da da da da da. What that enables us to do is just keep really tight as a team, so you get a feel definitely for myself, and for the other managers in the business, we get a feel for the different projects. We can give a little bit of feedback, a little bit of help.
Richard Hill:
I did such and such for such and such. But we had a problem with ... okay. Well, what we could do ... yeah, yeah, yeah. It just helps relieve any potential blockers, or helps towards relieving those blockers. But it also just keeps the team in contact. So we do that. Then every other Friday, we have our celebrate meeting. I think what we can all be so guilty of is just, there's always something else to do, there's always something else to do. Always looking forward and not maybe just appreciating what you have achieved, and what your team has achieved, in the last week, two weeks, month, and so forth. It's really important to me that we celebrate more than this if we can.
Richard Hill:
But really, we've kept this throughout lockdown, where every two weeks, we'll have a meeting. Everyone gets together. But obviously, we do use Zoom now. Now we're back at home again. Use Zoom to do our celebrate. We come to a meeting with three things that we want to shout about, each individual. If there's all of us there, there's 40, 50 things that we're saying, "I was so pleased with this, we recorded this, and we did that event. This client has had a 25x grow out, and this client." There's a lot of client wins. If we've got a client win, that's an agency win for us, because we know if our clients are doing well, it works both ways. If we've got happy clients then it's great.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Yeah. I think keeping in contact with the team is key. I think that has feathered down to our management, to our management, they've got their own pods of people in their team. Again, I spend quite a lot of time with them, they spend quite a lot of time with our team. Whether that's sort of junior team, our senior team, and a whole mix there. Then we all get together quite regularly. Another something that's come out of lockdown is a little bit of software that I'd recommend. It's called Loom. Quite a lot of what I do, or a lot of what I did do, was obviously face to face meetings, meeting our clients, meeting our potential clients, our potential partners. That's a lot more tricky to do, and a lot trickier to organize, obviously, or it's impossible to do now for a little while.
Richard Hill:
With Loom, it enables you to shoot a video and do a video email, to do a video response. If somebody sends me an email, it says, "Richard, can you explain how we're going to scale this ad account? We're currently spending $80,000 a month, we've been stuck on that, a 25 grand return off that for about a year. What are your thoughts on that, how we could scale that?" Now, if they're busy, it might be quite tricky to organize a Zoom. And I think people have got a bit of Zoom fatigue as well. So what we've been doing is responding with a video. Very much like I'm speaking on this podcast now, I'd do the same to camera, and just do a little 10, 15, 20, 25 minute video response.
Richard Hill:
Something that's worked really well. Loom, they do do a free trial. We're not associated with them in any way, but we'll link that up. Then I think a few other things that we've been doing as an agency, for the industry and for our own marketing as well, to be honest, we've been putting a lot of events, as an agency, over the last six, seven months. We've ran different webinars. We're a massive fan of educating our audience, and educating our prospects, to be honest. If they like what we say, and they like how we sound, and they can sense our enthusiasm for our industry and for what we do, if they want to put their hand up and ask for some help, then great. Which quite often happens. That's been a huge, huge thing for us, for new business.
Richard Hill:
Something I would implore all of you guys that, I know it's nothing new now, we're eight months into lockdown, or version two of doing events and doing online events. But we've done very many webinars. I think we're about to do our fifth one. There's our fifth different one in a couple of weeks around Google shopping feeds, specifically. Just a huge part of e-commerce, and if you've not got your feed right, it's 50%-ish. It'll make a difference, in terms of what comes back from feeds. Events have been great.
Richard Hill:
Then what we did, also, we did an event about six weeks ago now called Lab Live. For our SEO Traffic Lab agency, let me just take a sip of water. We've ran different events from our offices. Actually in-person events, and that was one of the big reasons we moved to our new offices in the middle of Lincoln, Lincoln City. Was to have a beautiful place and a beautiful space to run live events. Now obviously, we're not able to do that. We have done many, many webinars and Zoom call style trainings. But we were really keen to do a bigger event. That's something, about six weeks ago, we managed to pull off seven weeks prior. I got together with the team, and we decided that we would partner up this time.
Richard Hill:
Usually, we do our events as an agency specific. But something that has been very good for us as an agency, and something that you should think about, is partnerships, partnering with different companies that align with your ethos, your culture, and what you stand for. I'm a massive believer, and I know it's a massive part of our business, most of our business, most, by a mile, of the business we get is through recommendation either from our clients or from our partners. Bar nothing, there's nothing else out there. I think for any business, it's getting recommendations. How you can work that into your own business. Obviously if you're an e-comm store, there are ways that you can obviously focus on getting recommendations.
Richard Hill:
Whether that's through social sharing and reviews and things like that. But ultimately, we managed to run Lab Live online, or Lab Live Goes Online, Lincolnshire's digital marketing summit. That was about six weeks ago. We live-streamed that, we used a local video production company, a friend of ours. Again, one of our partners, who we've worked with, worked on various projects. We're working on a project right now with them, or with the combined client, where they did the video production, we did the paid ads.
Richard Hill:
We worked with eight other agencies, there was 10 speakers. Quite a few guys, three of my colleagues, and then it was six other agencies. So six other agencies, which are six other partners of ours, all got a common thread, which is digital and driving businesses and marketing businesses. We had a fantastic day. It was a six and a half hour livestream, and that went really, really well. That's something you could look at as an agency, or as a business, listening in. What sort of live events could you do?
Richard Hill:
I think we'll move on now and sort of change it up a gear, and talk about some of the clients that we work with, and some of the struggles maybe they've had, and some of the things that we've done as an agency to help them, or some of the things that they've done. Like I said, a lot of our clients are e-commerce specific. They've had, as a whole, a pretty good time. But obviously that's not everybody. Some of the struggles and some of the challenges have been a little bit different to more bricks and mortar type companies. Some of the struggles have been very much around getting stuck, and delivery times. If you're selling a specific brand or importing a specific product, that sells out, like a lot of products.
Richard Hill:
We've got clients that sell a lot of, say, they were very busy during the summer, so seasonal type products. Normally, they've got four months worth of stock coming in. But then, in summer when you're just selling barbecues, you sold out of barbecues very, very quickly. If you're selling hot tubs, you go from selling a couple a day, selling 20 a day, you're going to run out of stock. That's been a thread through a lot of our clients that we've seen. But then obviously, had to counter that, be very forward thinking and think and look at, where else can we get stock from? What other manufacturers can we bring on?"
Richard Hill:
What you've got to be careful of is just that, I guess, fixed mindset is a bit of a strong sentence, but a fix. You've always got to be looking forward and be open to that change, is the big takeaway. But you think about, we're doing that, we're just going to do these products. We will have missed a big opportunity, and you will be missing a big opportunity moving forward, because things are changing at such a rapid pace during ... Boris says, "Right, we're going to do this, we're going to do that." You know you're now going to have to shunt that side of the business. Well, you can wait a month.
Richard Hill:
Or, you can do something about it. But what can you do about it? Some of the ideas, what we've implemented and seen in our clients obviously are to really look at what you can commit to commercially. Obviously I'm not saying overstretch too much in terms of stock, but what stock can you get? Look at the delivery times, what can be done there in terms of the delivery. But what are the additional products that can you look to go into? This is something you should've thought about, obviously, in lockdown one. But it's still not too late.
Richard Hill:
We've got clients that sell, for example, hot tubs. There's literally a worldwide shortage of hot tubs. I've seen quite a lot of them, articles on that, actually a video I saw today. This isn't for my client, this is somebody else's as well, but was selling 50 hot tubs a day. Which sounds ridiculous. I'm watching it, that sounds a little bit far-fetched. But that's what I saw a video on today. But our client couldn't get, and can't get, many hot tubs. Because there's literally a worldwide shortage. He would go into his store and say, "I'd like a hot tub." And I think it's like, "Yeah, no problem, you can have it in June next year." It's like, what? That's crazy.
Richard Hill:
So what he's done, he's worked with other manufacturers to get other brands in, different brands, they've got different selling points and different USDs. They aren't the same, but they are a different brand, so now he's got stock. At least he has got that revenue coming in there, still. He's also, I think, selling out of those. But then also, you've got a client base that's reasonably affluent, obviously there's a whole mixture of costs when it comes to hot tubs, from four grand to 40 grand, I think, almost. But it's quite an affluent, quite a nice product. If you're going to spend 10,000 pounds on that, or 20,000 pounds on that, you might well then look to spend a reasonable amount on other things for the outdoor.
Richard Hill:
Then they focused on outdoor kitchens. Not just a barbecue, but an actual whole cooking area where there's a fridge, a chiller, and a very large barbecue style, maybe a smoker, I think. Then you're looking at thousands and thousands, if not 10,000 pounds, for your outdoor kitchen area. So think, what else can you sell? What else can you get? Committing to stock. Then there's sort of click and clack side of things, which has had a huge rise. For obvious reasons, when you're shut and you can't actually open your doors. But you can, on your website, enable click and clacks.
Richard Hill:
There are a lot of tough development friends of mine, we're not a development agency. We have some development support with the business. But if you want a website building, that's not what we do. If you want something to talk to something else, a bit of software, that's not what we do. But one of our partners, like one of our speakers at Lab Live, very much so, that's what they do. Working with clients, not ourselves, but they've been working with clients, implementing different areas of the business to get additional revenue streams, things like click and clack, and things like that.
Richard Hill:
Some of the things I think I've said there might not apply to you. But I think the big thing, really, is more around mindset, and the way that we look at the situation that we're in. Now, I know everyone listening to this podcast is going to be in a very different situation. The reality is, some days are crap. That's the truth of it. Some days are crap, and I think it's spending time working on our own mindset, and the way that we deal, and have some things in your armory that can help you deal with some of those days where it can be quite challenging. I'll put my hand up, I'll put both my hands up. Those days do come. Those days do come.
Richard Hill:
Some of the advice I would give would be to have some routines that you can draw on when you feel yourself getting into that negative mindset, or that worried mindset, or those down mornings or down days, things aren't just going your way. I think having a strong routine, first thing, when you get up in the morning, is just so important. So, so important. Some of the things what I do, one thing I do is really plan my day. I'll plan tomorrow today. One of the things I do is really just, I have a list of five things that I want to get done tomorrow. But I usually start with a couple of very simple things.
Richard Hill:
Quite a couple of simple things might be reply to Mike about the proposal for the AdWords. Well, that's quite a simple thing to do. It would take me about 20 minutes. I know I can do it in 20 minutes. But I know it's a valuable thing for the business and for our agency. Another thing might be to, let me think, check in with one of the team on how they got on yesterday with their meeting with client X. It's quite a simple thing to send that email and check that thing. They're quite simple things. But then, I get up, I get those done, then I'm going to have a cup of tea. But I think well, start the day pretty strong. Got a couple of things done. I got a couple of things done that I planned to do.
Richard Hill:
Now, I know they're not earth shattering productivity things. But they're getting me in that flow, they're getting me started. Then, I'll tackle one of my bigger things. Now, one of my bigger things may well be preparing for this podcast and making a few notes around what we're going to talk about on the podcast. And structuring this 45 minutes or so. Then, right, I've done that. Then I'll go in, and I'll try to get these five things done, and I'm really trying to get these five things done. That's one thing I would do. Then I think, the other thing, and I think a lot of people think it's a bit hairy fairy, talking about exercise and this and that. That's a bit extreme to say.
Richard Hill:
But I think another one, saying go for a walk. But yeah, absolutely. I think when I'm definitely on my fitness, and I'm doing exercise. I know we can't necessarily go to the gym right now, but to be able to do some exercise in the garage or something, that this lockdown, I've been a lot stricter with it. I've trained three times this week. Committing to going for that walk, going for that half an hour walk. Getting the Fitness Pal on, checking the steps, whether you're doing the 5,000, the 10,000, the 6,000, whatever you're focused on, getting out, breaking the day up, going for that walk. I think having a real strong start to the day with those five things, creating that little mini-list.
Richard Hill:
And don't go too crazy. I think what happens is, we have a tendency to make lists upon lists upon lists, and we go to our lists, and it never ends. It never ends, this flipping list. I know, I know. But having this sort of next day list, and if you get those things done, that's great. But if you don't get them done, don't be too hard on yourself. I think this is the thing. I think we can all be very hard on ourselves, and we shouldn't be. I think we're going to look at drawing this episode to a close. Now, let me know if you've enjoyed this episode, because this is the first time I've done something like this, in terms of our own podcast.
Richard Hill:
This has given you a little bit of insight into the background of the agencies, and of my career, if you like. Obviously a very quick version. Obviously, then, we've had a little chat, or I've had a little chat, with some of the things we've been doing as an agency to help our clients. We've spent a lot of additional time with our clients. Maybe just touch on that again, but a big thing for us was the comms, the comms of our team, the comms as, importantly, almost, with our clients. Meeting, we've had a lot of time planned with our clients, you know? I think we've talked a lot about clients. I'm going to use the word pivot, then we have an episode that talks about the pandemic without the word pivot.
Richard Hill:
But we've had to help a lot of them move, when we talk about click and clack, or when somebody's shut, what we can still do a virtual tour of something, or we can still do obviously a Zoom call or a Loom call or a Loom response. We've had a lot of time sorting that out. Yeah, let me know what you think of this episode. Then I may well do some more where I give a bit more insight into my marketing chops, I guess. Obviously I do run two agencies, and have ran a lot of marketing campaigns over the years.
Richard Hill:
I think we may well do some further episodes. There's a couple of questions here that one of my colleagues asked me to talk about, and I'm going to finish on these, really. What would I tell my younger self? I think it's just something that I would say to you guys, listening, it's something I would say to myself, if I was going back in a time machine, would say, "Enjoy the process a bit more." I think I really do enjoy the process now. I've got that balance more now than I did have many, many years ago now. That's maybe, I think it is because I'm a bit older, probably a lot more comfortable commercially and things like that.
Richard Hill:
But I think we can get so wrapped up in the day to day, and so wrapped up in worrying about what's coming next. I think just pause, stop, have a look back, be thankful. Think, you know what? I've had a bloody good week. We did this, we got that, we got that. Actually, step back, we've had a really good month. Actually, step back, we've had a really good two, three months. I know people listening, we won't be all in that position. But still, there'd be a lot of good things going on in your life, a lot of good things in the world. I think just stepping back and appreciating them.
Richard Hill:
For me it would really, if I was going back, enjoy the process a little bit more. I think I did take things a little bit too seriously back in the day, we were all very much focused purely on work, having that split a bit more, having that disconnect. Which I know can be a lot harder when we're working from home. Okay. Well thanks for listening to this episode. I'm not going to do a book recommendation. We always end on a book recommendation, but I'm not going to do that this time, I’m just going to leave it at that. Thanks for listening. This has been Richard Hill at eCom@One. I look forward to hearing your feedback. Thank you very much. Bye.