Life as an apprentice at a HubSpot gold partner agency

I have been an apprentice at Six & Flow, a Manchester HubSpot gold partner agency, for three months now. I’m at that stage now where I know what I’m supposed to be doing on a daily basis, which is a great feeling!

I don’t need to ask my manager what I should do next, as I’m already busy with things to be cracking on with. Instead, if something needs doing that I can help with, I will add that onto my list so the other members of my team have time to be getting on with other things.

Obviously, I haven’t ever worked in a HubSpot gold partner agency before, so I cannot compare it to anywhere else, and I am only 19 (which means I am NOT a millennial, by the way!) However, from watching what every person does in the office, it seems like everyone knows what they are doing and the company is growing in the right direction. 

We’ve recently moved offices, and now each week there seems to be a prospect of a new client signing a contract, or a new lead meeting our team. As we gain more clients, the number of accounts I’m working on is increasing. At the moment, I am working on seven different clients, who are all on at least two social networks. Compared to just working on three accounts during my first few weeks, to me this shows that we are growing as a company, and I am growing as a member of the team.

JAN 2017 UPDATE: We've made it! Six & Flow is delighted to now be a platinum tier HubSpot agency, the second agency in Manchester to earn this prestigious title. We also became the first officially Certified HubSpot Trainer agency in the whole of the UK, and one of only a handful in the world. Read more here.

Growing our social media accounts 

Last week, Hazel set me targets for all the accounts that I have been working on. So, for the past week, I have been trying to reach them each day. Twitter make this a little hard as you can only follow a certain number of accounts a day, otherwise you get blocked. When I first joined the HubSpot gold agency, I accidently blocked our own Twitter account, but haven’t since!

When doing this, you have to make sure your following-to-followers ratio is even. For example, having 100 followers when you’re following 1,000 accounts obviously doesn’t look great. You have to keep on top of the ratio, otherwise people won’t follow your account.

For Instagram, it’s a little easier as you can follow a lot more accounts than on Twitter. This is why I reached my targets for all the Instagram accounts, whereas for twitter I didn’t reach them all. I was annoyed about this, but only two of the accounts missed the target, and they were very close so it wasn’t too bad.

I am still using HubSpot’s monitoring tool to engage with relevant accounts and show more people what we are about. However, I need to add more handles and hashtags to the monitoring feeds, so we have more of a chance of engaging with people and creating more activity on Twitter.

Last week, Chris the web design manager also taught Alice and Hazel and myself all about chatbots. This was extremely helpful, as we’re the ones looking at the Facebook notifications our clients receive, so we know what kind of responses we need to set up.

Sprint meetings

This week we’ve also had a lot of meetings in the office - sprints are what we call them. As Six & Flow are a HubSpot gold partner agency, half of the team went to Boston in November for Inbound 16. This is where our Managing Director Rich got the idea of agile working from.

Regular sprint meetings help a lot with managing client work and meeting set deadlines. As a UK HubSpot gold partner agency, we have clients in London, Manchester and now Birmingham. We have meetings with them roughly once a month, due to the distance, and manage our work within the team through these regular catch-up meetings.

These sprints are great in my opinion, because everyone gets to know what everyone else has on their plate. If anyone is snowed under with work, then another member of the team can jump in and help. 

Another thing we’ve started to do is a Friday round-up meeting. We have this about an hour before the end of the day, so everyone gets a chance to say what they will be working on next week, and we even have a beer or two.

In the office

This week we also had a little visitor… Rich’s dog! It was a great day, and she was very well behaved. 

There was also talk of us getting a games machine in the office, even though we already have a PlayStation. This has died down a little, so definitely going to have to mention it again, a games machine would be cool wouldn’t it?