Going against the "Grain"

A little over twelve months ago, I did something that (with a touch of hindsight) was both the greatest and the stupidest thing I've ever done. I created a digital marketing agency. In my infinite wisdom, I also created the agency on the same day my first daughter was due. Idiot.

Now, twelve months on, our tiny little Northern agency is growing to be not so tiny. We've acquired some great clients, won some accolades, made steps towards opening an office in London and every day I get to work with some amazing people.

So, to spice things up a little, we thought we'd change our name... But I'll come on to that...

The dreaded churn

A year ago (and still very much to this day) the driving force behind my venturing out on my own was to create a digital marketing agency that I'd want to work for it if I didn't own it. Up until that point, I had worked for and with some great agencies, but it was never quite what I thought it should be.

Agencies typically suffer from high churn rates (both staff and clients) and not everyone is always pulling in the same direction. Clients are often brought on based solely on their impact to margins, playing lip service to a "client first" mentality. The people working directly with the clients have no say over any of the important decisions. Resources often dictate which people work on which campaigns, and the quality of work inevitably drops. When the quality of work drops, clients are understandably unhappy. With unhappy clients, you get a disgruntled team. Herein lies the churn.

So, how are we any different? 

We've taken the approach of being resolutely, unashamedly and very proudly "team first". We've put an awful lot of effort, time and money into finding the right people for our team, each being exceptionally good at what they do. Our approach is to find clients that fit the team, rather than bending the team to the clients.

For each potential client, we have a checklist. The checklist isn't born out of arrogance or a sense of entitlement, it's just how we check if we're right for the client. It's loosely defined, but it gives us a good benchmark:

1. We have to believe in the product or service the client offers
2. We have to believe we can offer real value to the client
3. The client can't be a dickhead

As stupid as it sounds, we say no to potential clients all the time.

All of our client work is on a retainer basis and we work very closely with clients to achieve whatever goals we've set. If we don't think the agency/client relationship is going to be a good one, or if we don't think we can achieve what they need us to do, or if what you do doesn't sit right with us, it's not something we want to take on.

What we do isn't a commodity, it's not stacked on shelves. We're passionate about making campaigns work. Likewise, for most clients, their budget is finite and their time is precious. We don't want to waste either. As we’re not a sales-driven agency, where the sales team outnumbers the delivery team, we are able to look at client relationships differently.

We discuss every potential client as a team. Can we help them? Are we right for them? Are they right for us? If the answer is yes to all three, the client gets a highly skilled, highly engaged team of people eager to work on their campaign. Right team, right client, right results. That's the theory.

We may never be the fastest growing digital marketing agency, but the growth we do see will be sustainable. You want proof? Well, in the last year we've not lost a single member of the team and there's not been a single sick day. We have a healthy number of clients on retainer, and we've created over £15m in client revenue.

So, tell me about your values then

In this last year, we've looked at what makes us, us. What clients want from working with us, how we want clients to perceive us, and how we want to mark ourselves and any new recruits. We have some fairly lofty ambitions for the next five years, and it's important we're all pulling in the right direction.

We did some great work with Roger Longden (who I would highly recommend by the way) to develop our core values as a digital marketing agency and structure our recruitment process. It was most definitely worthwhile. Roger helped us to define what it is we stand for (and want to stand for). The team were involved, it wasn't prescriptive, and that's important. These are our joint values:

1. Accountability
2. Holistic thinking
3. Creativity
4. Playfulness

So, you're changing the agency’s name?

Yep. "Grain" has been good to us, but it signifies the beginning of something, the seeding of a process, the start of growth. That's great, but it's not quite us anymore.

Looking back over the past year, we've very quickly progressed from starting client growth through marketing. Now, we accelerate and sustain that growth – especially in the case of our longer standing clients.

As much as we love it, “Grain” doesn't tip its hat to our core values as a digital marketing agency. It doesn't remind us of what we're here to do or how we want to work. Essentially, we wanted to "grow up" a bit.

Introducing "Six & Flow"

So without further ado, I'm very excited to introduce "Six & Flow".

Why Six & Flow I hear you ask? Well - we have four core values. We have a team first focus. We want to offer real value to clients. That makes six things that are very important to us.

The work we do is also centred on creating a flow of business for our clients. Whether that's done by increasing awareness, footfall or revenue, it's all about creating a flow. And that's the story. Simple as that.

With the new name comes new branding - obviously. We’d love for you to check out our same great content on our sparkly new site sixandflow.com.

So what's next for this digital marketing agency?

Since we started, we've followed a fairly dramatic path of growth, and this looks set to continue. Our current client base will see us triple our year one revenues, and we have some amazing plans set out for us. All of that centres around our amazing team and being able to find the right people for that team. It’s worked so far, long may it continue. Our little Manchester agency is heading exactly where we want it to.

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