AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Growing Minty Digital to Its Best Year
Guest: Charlie Clark
Guest: Charlie Clark
Charlie Clark deleted LinkedIn and Instagram from his phone in November, and Minty Digital went on to record its best year in a decade.
The growth didn’t come from posting more. It came from removing himself from work he couldn’t give 100% to (hiring, daily content), rewriting his own job description down to three things, moving from Barcelona back to London to get closer to real buyers, and repositioning the agency away from “SEO” toward a single organic growth service that folds in content, PR, SEO, and AI/LLM visibility. On GEO, Charlie is blunt: attribution isn’t there yet, the tools only give a baseline share-of-voice signal, and the real edge for small agencies is speed — he replaced a £10k/year social listening tool by building his own in an afternoon.
His hiring philosophy is hire slow, fire fast; AI fluency is non-negotiable; and the founder still closes every deal because a consultative search sale can’t be faked.
Charlie removed every social app from his phone in November, inspired by a completely analog friend in Thailand.
The pressure to post daily, and the sense that every feed and comment now reads like it was written by ChatGPT. had stopped being useful. Deleting the apps gave him back time and headspace, and fewer inputs meant fewer opinions to react to every day.
That reclaimed time went into the business: speaking events, fixing operations, and improving the service. Minty’s H1 numbers came back as its best ever, across client retention, profitability, and revenue, off the back of a tougher couple of years. Charlie is now posting again, but intentionally, not on a treadmill.
The point isn’t “quit LinkedIn.” It’s that “always be posting” is not a strategy, and for a founder, the highest-leverage work is often the work that doesn’t happen on a feed.
Charlie’s single biggest change was removing himself from decisions he couldn’t give 100% to, starting with hiring, where his fast, gut-led calls hadn’t always been right. Those decisions moved to accountable owners on the team, who built out client-retention methods and proper progression packs.
Having pulled himself out of so much, he asked the obvious question, what is my job now?, and wrote himself a job brief the same way Minty writes one for any hire. It left three focuses: new business and partnerships, high-level activity on the most important retainers, and top-level strategic input on SEO and paid.
While the industry spent a year arguing over whether to call it GEO or AEO, Charlie went and asked customers what they actually needed. The answer was a repositioning: Minty rolled content, LLM visibility, SEO, and PR into a single organic growth service and started dropping the word “SEO” in prospect conversations.
Moving back to London accelerated this. Outside the expat/tech bubble of Barcelona, he was talking to plumbers in the pub and physios in the sauna, real businesses that made the market feel bigger than the online SEO world. The repositioning is marketing 101: build the product around what the customer is trying to find.
After the pain of losing a whale client at a smaller stage, Charlie built Minty around mid-tier clients so that no single customer accounts for more than roughly 40% of revenue. There are still some high-ticket accounts, but the model is deliberately spread, concentration risk is what keeps founders up on Saturdays and Sundays.
Prices rise gradually in line with market inflation rather than opportunistically; overcharging just sends clients looking for a better deal.
Charlie’s sharpest line: every one of your customers has one of the thousands of new GEO agencies emailing their CEO directly. Whether those pitches are technically right or not, they’re live and coming for the account. You cannot defend “this is how it’s always been done” while someone else is telling your client the game has changed.
Minty’s answer is honest positioning.
GEO is an evolution, not a replacement, you can’t do GEO without SEO foundations, so Minty tells clients: we’re on this journey with you, we’re investing in the visibility tools, and here’s the honest caveat about what they can and can’t show yet.
That framing keeps the relationship and gets the client ahead of the game without overpromising.
Charlie is candid: no analytics tool on the market accurately attributes conversions or sales to AI search yet. From a branding and discoverability perspective, though, it’s another layer worth tracking, so Minty measures share of voice versus competitors as a quantifiable baseline it can report alongside the rest of the work.
To reduce the personalisation noise in LLM results, Minty builds an ICP (or several) for each client, uses that to decide which prompts to track, and cross-references against SEO data. It’s a baseline, not a guarantee, and Minty says exactly that to clients.
On the eye-watering valuations of AI-search tools, Charlie draws a dot-com parallel: this isn’t a bubble on the same scale, but the same principle applies — the durable value sits in the underlying infrastructure and data, not necessarily in tools you could replicate yourself. His proof: Minty cut a £10k/year social listening tool after he rebuilt it in Lovable with a few APIs on the train to the airport.
Minty keeps it as one tiered offering: foundations, then outreach, then the AI-visibility layer. GEO isn’t free, it means more tools, more work, and more cost, so clients who want it plug it in, and those who don’t accept the effect on deliverables and price.
Every call frames it the same way: this is where the market is moving, so if you want to be ahead, we should plug it in.
The core change is that Charlie removed himself from hiring almost entirely, entering only at the final interview and offer. AI fluency is now non-negotiable, but the real filter is critical thinking on top of genuine fundamentals, and there’s a strong pool of people with junior in-office experience who now have exactly that.
The process:
Target cycle time: 3–4 weeks.
Roles are also shifting from narrow specialists (technical SEO, link builder, digital PR) toward the organic search strategist who can cover most boxes, a specialist with a wider remit than the same role five years ago.
Minty hired a salesperson, but Charlie is clear-eyed: no one closes like the founder, especially in year one, and you have to accept that. The salesperson’s job is qualification and building a clear brief with a head of department — not carrying the close alone.
Selling search is a consultative sale, not double glazing. Drop a hire from a big-name company onto a call with a client’s in-house SEO manager and one wrong bit of nuance on PR, social, or content gets called out instantly. So Minty pairs the salesperson on the relationship with the actual expert for the sale, and gives it time.
Charlie dislikes the classic agency handoff, a salesperson sells, then vanishes, and the client is passed to an account manager they’ve never met.
Instead, the head of department who’ll run the account helps build the brief during the sales process, so nothing lands on their desk as a surprise and the client speaks to their actual team from day one.
Charlie’s read: the major LLMs lean on Google and Bing to return results, ChatGPT has hit something of a wall after its early surge, and Google is catching up and will likely take more share again. Search, social, TikTok, and ChatGPT are converging under one remit, so brands and agencies simply have to learn to optimise across all of them. The real gap isn’t visibility; it’s an accurate way to forecast and plan across these channels, because no current tool ties it together well.
Sell. Focus on bringing in sales from day one, before the brand, the website, or the logo.
Bootstrap, get out there, start talking. And never switch the marketing and sales engine off, even when things are good, because the worst time to look for business is when you desperately need it, and that’s when the silly, desperate decisions get made. Best case, you build a waitlist. Worst case, no clients, a far bigger problem.
For the full episode with Charlie and Josh, find the link below:
[0:00] We’ve even started actually moving away from the term SEO when we speak to our prospects. We’ve been through the pain of losing a whale client. And I just decided that we want to try and build a model where 40% of our revenue isn’t relying on one customer.
[0:14] Every single one of your customers has got one of the 5,000 GEO agencies that popped up every day directly in the CEO’s inbox. And whether it’s the right way or not, they’re coming for your business. You need to understand — things are changing. They’ve changed. They’ve already changed.
[0:31] When you’re a company which is smaller, agile, the moves you can make at the moment, the competitive advantage is absolutely unbelievable. It’s very easy when things are going well to get complacent. But the worst time to be looking for more business is when you really need more business.
[0:51] Charlie Clarke, thank you so much for joining me on the Agency Growth Club. We did a podcast four or five years ago when I didn’t even know how to spell business or what SEO stood for. So pretty crazy to get you back on now, with the amount of growth you’ve gone through. Thank you so much for coming on.
[1:08] Yeah, good to see you again. Coincidentally I’m just around the corner from where that first podcast was. I’m back in Barcelona this week and I was thinking about it, walking up the street on the way. It reminded me — it was me and Mark, I believe Mark Roof. And things have changed. Same for you. I see everything building up, the podcast — it’s been really good to see you grow. So, nice to be back on.
[1:37] I appreciate that, man. It means a lot. We did that in a hotel lobby, wasn’t it? There were people coming past and every time we saw them we were like, oh please, walk away.
[1:47] So, first thing I want to get into: I saw recently you did a LinkedIn post about how you went off LinkedIn. A lot of agency founders are told you need to be posting on LinkedIn every day, it’s the inbound engine, the pipeline. But you went quiet on LinkedIn and it ended up being the busiest quarter in Minty’s 10-year history. It doesn’t make sense — let’s break it down.
[2:14] Yeah. Background: it wasn’t just LinkedIn, I went off everything — Instagram, LinkedIn. I deleted it all off my phone in November last year. On LinkedIn especially, I was going online trying to post all the time, and I think a lot of people have this problem — you feel like you should always be posting. Then everything starts looking like it’s written in ChatGPT, the comments look like they were responded to in ChatGPT, and I was just like, I’m done with this for a bit. I need a break. It was driving me crazy. So I got rid of everything. I was out in Thailand with a friend who’s completely analog — he’s not on anything — and he kind of inspired me.
[3:03] It gave me back time. So much more free time in my head each day. I still go on it now on the laptop, but I’ve not got anything on my phone. It bought me back so much time, more time to think, a lot less inputs. You don’t always need everyone’s opinion every single day. What it enabled us to do is focus on the business — I was looking at other marketing channels, reaching out for speaking events, working with the team to fix things operationally in-house. It’s been one of our best years ever. We just got the H1 numbers back last week and everything from client retention to profitability and revenue has been fantastic. The best year — and that’s coming off the back of a tougher year a couple of years ago.
[4:07] I’m back on social a bit now, doing the odd post. I had a little run down Barcelona beach this morning and put a little post of that on LinkedIn. But I’m trying to be more intentional rather than saying I need to post every day to make an impact. And that seems to be working quite nice.
[4:27] I was expecting the selfie on Barcelona beach but we just got the actual beach. First of all, congratulations on your best year. Let’s break it down from highest priority. You said you took time to focus on speaking events and operations — what moved the needle the most?
[4:54] So, the most important thing and the biggest change is actually nothing to do with me in particular — it’s the team. Everyone from management down to the executives, the processes being built. Forcibly removing myself from certain job decisions I couldn’t give full energy to — hiring, for example. Before, I didn’t always make the right decisions with this. I’m busy, everyone’s busy, so I need to make sure everything I spend my energy on I can give 100%, and everything I can’t needs to sit with the responsible members on the team. They’ve been doing a fantastic job — building client-retention methods, real progression packs for the team, making sure all the benefits we promised are getting rolled out.
[5:52] On my side, a few months ago I realized I was removing myself from a lot of these jobs and thought, what is my job again? So I wrote myself a job description again, like a job brief we’d do for anyone on the team. That’s really helped, because now there are three things I focus on: new business and partnerships, getting the name out there; high-level client activity with some of the more important retainers — not even moneywise, but the most important; and top-level strategic input on the advertising side — the PPC, the SEO. Focusing on that, and going to more industry events rather than so many SEO events this year, has been really useful.
[7:00] You mentioned new business. I saw on LinkedIn you’ve got a waitlist for the first time ever. How did you build that out — what new business strategies are you doing?
[7:14] The team told us to stop taking clients on. We’ve just hired — put three offers out, hired three more people this week — so that’ll change again. We’ve got a salesperson, a sales team building up internally. We’ve been nailing down how the funnels work. We’ve got our different engines — the SEO organic side, the speaking events. What we used to do before: I’d speak at an event, get a bunch of people wanting to sign up, then struggle to get back to people on time. We’ve been nailing down those processes.
[7:54] We’ve refined our offering — almost completely. This is something on LinkedIn where I decided to take a step back. Everyone’s been talking about whether to call it GEO or AEO for the last year, and I thought, I’m actually just going to work on our service and improve it for our customers — speak to the customers about what they need to find. We’ve rolled up everything we do — the content, the LLM visibility, the SEO, the PR — into one service, an organic growth service. We’ve even started moving away from the term SEO when we speak to our prospects. It’s resonated really well. The biggest thing was, instead of arguing with all the other SEOs on what to call it, we went out to our customers. I moved back to London last year, and I’ve been speaking to people, going to non-SEO events, working out what people actually need. It’s marketing 101.
[9:19] One more thing on the waitlist. When Minty has a waitlist, does that affect your prices — do you put prices up?
[9:33] Good question. Not so much — should do. The model we’ve built has a couple of packages. We do have some high-ticket clients, but we’re much more of a mid-tier model; that’s what it’s been for quite some time. We’ve been through the pain of losing a whale client when we were smaller, and I decided we want to build a model where 40% of our revenue isn’t relying on one customer keeping me up on Saturdays and Sundays. We’re always pushing costs up slowly, but nothing ginormous — we’re not increasing prices by 30-40%, because you need to sell a product at the right price. You can’t just overcharge people; well, you can, but they won’t be with you long — they’ll find a better deal. So we push prices up in accordance with market inflation, but we’ve never been ones to greedily get as much as we can.
[10:46] You met me first in Barcelona — you’ve gone from Barcelona back to London. Barcelona has a lot of events and people in our industry. Why did you make that move, and have you seen the business grow from being boots on the ground in London?
[11:06] We’ve seen massive growth. I often joke I’m the only British person to move back to the UK from Spain in the last year. For me it’s been fantastic — I can be at an event, pick up contacts, get to know people. The biggest difference is understanding more about what people are looking for. In Barcelona it was quite easy to be in a bit of an expat bubble. Being back in London with real businesses that aren’t all tech and SEO — you’re speaking to plumbers down the pub, playing padel at the weekend, in the sauna with a physiotherapist. I never used to get those broader conversations as much in Spain. And in a city like London you just realize the world’s a lot bigger than the SEO world you see online. That’s been motivating.
[12:35] I always love an event in London — I’m 100% saying yes to London. It took me a few goes; I actually wasn’t the biggest fan three or four years ago, but the energy in London is great, there are so many brands there, everybody’s there. It’s a fantastic city. I don’t regret moving back at all — and it’s nice to still visit Barcelona, catch up with friends, keep that work relationship here too.
[13:17] Have you been doing more speaking events in London, and have they resulted in more new business?
[13:24] Yeah, I’ve been speaking at more industry-specific events — legal events, healthcare events. The reception is significantly different because you’re talking to people who actually want to learn about the service; it’s new to them, whereas at an SEO conference it’s not. It took me a long time to get into speaking. People think I come across confident, but public speaking was nerve-wracking for me for a long time. I’ve only just got to a point where I’m a lot more confident. I spoke at Brighton SEO last year — before, I was so nervous, but as soon as I got up there it was fine. I was with Ashley Liddell at Brighton SEO last week — I know you had him on recently. He looked cool as a cucumber, went straight up and smashed it.
[14:44] You get a buzz after it. I’m the same — I don’t get nervous until the last 30 seconds before I go on, and then the voices in your head are like “make a runner, nobody cares,” and then you get on and after 20 seconds you’re back to normal.
[15:10] You mentioned you went quiet on the whole GEO vs AEO vs AI-search debate and went and chatted to your clients. What did you learn — what do they want?
[15:25] Everyone’s boss is saying we need to rank on ChatGPT, we need to rank on LLMs.
[15:32] What I realized is that a lot of companies over the last year were investing so much into AI in general — not just AI visibility — that it had a knock-on effect on budgets across the board. But now people have realized they can’t run a whole SEO strategy with ChatGPT — they need support. On the other side, they still want to rank on these LLMs. The problem: the SEO industry, with good reason, are evangelicals — everyone wants to push the message, this is how it’s done, this is the right way. But every single one of your customers has one of the 5,000 GEO agencies that popped up directly in the CEO’s inbox. Whether it’s the right way or not, they’re coming for your business. You need to find a way to position that to your clients and prospects, or you’ll lose them. You can’t just say “this is how it’s always been done.” The approach we’ve taken, and what we understood from clients, is: it’s an evolving service.
[17:00] I’m in the camp where, for me, it’s SEO. You cannot do GEO if you don’t have the SEO foundations in place. But it’s an evolution — same as when mobile rolled out. Every few years there’s a new change; this has been the biggest.
[17:17] What we’ve been able to do is say, look, we’re going on this journey. We’ve been doing this for 15 years, we’re at the forefront every day. We’ve got visibility tools we’re starting to roll out — we caveat that they aren’t 100%, but they give a baseline. We say: we’re with you on this, we’re investing, we can work on building the visibility, but you need to understand none of these tools are yet in a place where you’ll accurately see the ROI on the investment. We’re going to help you get ahead of the game while focusing on what we know still drives revenue, leads, and impact. It’s worked well — all of our clients now have this GEO element we’re rolling out, and it’s evolving each month. Honest conversations are the best way to approach it, and reading the room — you can’t have your back against the wall saying this is how it’s always done. Things are changing. If you’re doing the same things you were three years ago, I don’t think you’ll be in business very long.
[18:41] As that added service, do you charge extra, or put it into the retainer?
[18:58] We do charge. We try to keep it as one package. Our standard offering is a tiered system — you get your foundations, then the outreach element, then the AI-visibility side, so you can plug it all together. In all our calls we say it’s important to have this; if you don’t want it included, fine, but that affects deliverables and pricing. If you want to be ahead of the game, this is the way it’s moving, so we should plug it in. It’s more work, costs more for the tools, different elements — even though the fundamentals are the same.
[19:42] What do you track on that? Attribution is so hard — someone goes to YouTube, your LinkedIn, the website, researches on ChatGPT. How do you attribute that when six months down the line they ask where the results are?
[20:09] The main metric we use at the moment is share of voice versus competitors. It’s something we’ve always done for PR. We mainly use Peec AI at the moment. There are a lot of tools out there — my preference is Peec; I’ve got a friend from a few years back who worked there. I signed up for a demo and he saw my email come through. I’ve tried a few other tools but I love it. We always caveat with clients that we’re tracking retrievals, but if you search for something you’ll get a different result to someone else — you’re not always going to get the same result with AI. So we’re looking for a baseline: share of voice versus competitors, and building on that.
[21:05] To mitigate the personalisation side, rather than take traditional keyword research, we build out an ICP — an ideal customer profile, or multiple, for the client — and from there we look at the type of prompts we want to track, cross-reference with SEO data, and build a model. But no one’s really seeing any massive impact in terms of conversion and sales from AI yet. From a branding perspective, though, it’s another layer of brand discoverability. If we can track that share of voice, that’s something quantifiable we can report back with the SEO and everything else — and that’s where I think the most value is.
[22:08] You mentioned Peec. You’ve got Searchable and Profound valued at crazy amounts of money, all for AI search and getting ranked on LLMs. What are your thoughts on those valuations?
[22:29] I like my stocks and shares. I’ll be political in my answer. We’re not just talking about any of these AI tools — Peec, Profound, Fireflies, whatever.
[22:44] I don’t think we’re looking at anything like the dot-com boom we had years ago, but the same principles are in play. When the dot-com boom happened, all these websites and businesses crashed, but the fundamental technology behind it — the fibre optics, the data centres — that’s where the real value ended up. I think it’s out to question with a lot of these tools what you’ll be able to simply replicate yourself. We just managed to get rid of a social listening tool we were paying — God knows how much, over 10 grand a year. I built it in Lovable with a few APIs, on the train on the way to the airport the other week.
[23:37] For agency owners, freelancers, business owners — if you’ve got a big cruise liner, you’ll struggle to change direction of the ship quickly. But when you’re smaller and agile, you don’t have to go through so many decision makers; the moves you can make at the moment, the competitive advantage is absolutely unbelievable, if you’re taking advantage of it. The point is: if you can pass that efficiency on to your customers — get the cost right — that’s where people are going to win.
[24:29] You mentioned lean and agile — you’ve put out three offers to join the team at Minty. What’s changed in the last three years from what you were hiring to what you’re hiring for today? Is AI baked into your interview process?
[24:52] The use of AI is non-negotiable now. But the biggest thing we’re looking for is critical thinking — someone who actually knows the fundamentals. It’s a unique time: there are a lot of people on the market who had junior in-office experience and are now at the stage where they’ve got those fundamentals baked in, plus client-facing knowledge. Ideally we want people we can bring on who can work with a number of clients — not from day one, but fairly quickly. In general we’re moving all our roles towards organic search strategist rather than a specific technical SEO or link builder or digital PR. Most people can cover most boxes efficiently now, where before they couldn’t. If you’re a large organization — somewhere like Apple — you’d still want a dedicated technical SEO team, but for us the role covers a lot more than it would have five years ago.
[26:33] I saw Apple just put out a new tech SEO role — something ridiculous. My team keeps showing me it. I think it was about 280 grand a year.
[26:55] You mentioned a few mistakes throughout your career with Minty were hiring the wrong people, hiring too fast. You’ve got the philosophy of hiring slow, firing fast. Take us through that.
[27:12] Biggest change is I’m not involved as much anymore. I’ve removed myself completely from the stage up until maybe the final interview and offer. It’s worked well in the past where I’ve hired people I met at events very quickly without due process — but at the stage we’re at now, that wrong hire isn’t just financial. These people need to be looking after our clients, being collaborative members of the team. We cannot afford those mistakes. So we’ve put a solid process in place.
[28:01] We get so many applicants for any role. It’s impossible to go through them all, so we shortlist to 10 or 20, then use a really good tool for one-way video interviews — that’s where we filter the first stages. It’s five or six questions, and it enables you to clear down the list further. Some people don’t join it, some submit late, some do the video interview laid on the bed — those are things you can pick up. There’s nothing worse than a first-stage interview where 30 seconds in you both realize it’s not the right role, but you’ve still got to stick it out for an hour. That eliminates that.
[29:08] We usually get it down to three or four people, do a follow-up, then a paid interview task — that’s the final stage before I get involved to do the final “are we happy with this hire.” We’re trying to get the process down to 3–4 weeks. Time is the biggest drain with hiring, especially with the volume of applicants, so any way we can make it more efficient without wasting people’s time and while getting the right people through — that one-way video interview system for the first stage has been fantastic.
[29:55] My team could write a book on interview practices. You’d think after two calls they’ve vetted people — they might have the ability, but they show up and sit back in the seat and you’re like, what are you doing? Answers were great, but the way they carried themselves… you overlook it. It’s crazy how many people still do it.
[30:39] Last time we chatted you were starting to sign clients in the US. Where did they come from — socials?
[30:55] This has been happening a couple of years — we’ve got quite a few US clients now, growing every month. We won a couple of US Search Awards over the last two years, which helped a lot of our marketing material. We’ve been involved with more webinars over there. I’ve still never been to the US — I need to get over there. It’s been organic growth, building partnerships, clients referring us on. You don’t want to rely on referrals as an agency, but it’s been really good. It’s a compound effect of doing good work, reflecting in our case studies. I love working with US clients — they’re busy, active, they pay, they’ll be on your case. Texas, Miami, Florida, New York — that’s our biggest concentration. Now we’ve got the case studies in place, we’re looking at ways to build that up further.
[32:21] You need to get to some events, boots on the ground over there.
[32:25] I know — before the end of this year, that’s the plan.
[32:29] Where do you see the future of search in the next two years? Does Google still hold the fort, or are we optimizing for 10 different answer engines?
[32:44] We’ve all seen over the past year that a lot of these LLMs are using Google and/or Bing to return a lot of their results. At first I thought ChatGPT was going to take over the spot, then I made a prediction last year that ChatGPT would hit a wall and go crashing — which is kind of what’s happening. Whether it’s Google, social, TikTok, ChatGPT — I think it’s going to become more under the same remit, and people are going to have to learn how to optimize for all of these different search engines. The biggest challenge as agency owners and brands is that we need an accurate way to forecast, plan ahead, and put strategies together — a lot of the tools are good, but none are a real fit for bringing it all together. To answer concisely: Google is going to take up a lot more market share, they’re catching up again, but we need to keep all these other new channels in consideration.
[34:10] Let’s say your concentration was London — one of the most competitive places to rank. Your ICP puts in “best marketing agency London.” How are you showing up on that?
[34:33] I actually think we’re up there in the top three. AI is different though — ChatGPT. I know we were ranking in the top five for search marketing agency a couple of months ago. I’ve not actually checked our own reports over the last month — sounds bad — but the team’s been working hard. We’re doing well in London. But we’ll see. I still struggle on AI visibility, like I say, to put it all together accurately.
[35:07] You’ve hit your biggest year, you’re 10 years in. What’s the future with Minty — what’s the plan?
[35:19] Really enjoying it at the moment. A lot of people say, would you be interested in acquisition? We’ve had those conversations over the years, and the lessons from them built the agency to a position where it’s not reliant on me — it can run without me. So we’ve always had that option on the table. I’d never say never, but at the moment I’m enjoying it. Work-life balance is good, clients are good, team’s good, lots of fun stuff going on. For now, no — but if a potential acquisition came on the table at some point, we’d be interested. There’s so much more we can do.
[36:14] In the next few years we could double or triple what we’re working on. Never say never.
[36:24] Having fun and enjoying what you’re doing is the most important thing if you zoom out. I had Jason Hennessy on the podcast recently for the second time. He was running Hennessy Digital — built it to $20 million-plus a year — and sold to private equity recently. A lot of our clients in that space have some backlash about selling to PE, so it was interesting having him talk about how his whole plan when he got acquired was never to leave, never to exit. He’d always been bootstrapped and wanted a partner who could come in with money to exemplify everything they’d done.
[37:13] He’s now joined the Herring Bone Digital group — they’re buying up home services companies. They’ve brought it to like $110 million revenue, $30 million EBITDA in the last year. It’s bonkers. So interesting hearing about all that.
[37:32] A lot of agency owners — I’ve been doing this so long, I’ve got friends who’ve sold and I’ve seen the process. It’s great, but it’s not always the dream solution everyone thinks it’ll be. A lot of the time you’re still locked in — locked into terms and conditions and things you can’t do afterwards. The grass isn’t always greener. The payout’s nice, but sometimes you can be chasing things without fully understanding the outcome. Seeing that firsthand over the last years has changed my opinion on it.
[38:18] Last question: if you were to start Minty again tomorrow, knowing what you know, what’s the first thing you’d do?
[38:30] Focus more on sales. Focus on bringing sales in, rather than the name of the brand or what the website looks like. Bootstrap, get out there, start talking, start building the brand, start doing sales from day one — because without sales there’s no business. It’s very easy when things are going well to get complacent, take your foot off the gas. But the worst time to look for more business is when you really need it — that’s when you make silly decisions or get desperate. So don’t turn the marketing and sales engine off even when things are going really well. Worst case, you have a waitlist. If you haven’t got the clients, that’s a much bigger problem. Sales, as always — get the clients through the door.
[39:28] I lied, that’s not my last question. You mentioned you hired a sales team. Is that right?
[39:37] Yeah, I’ve got a salesperson integrated into the team.
[39:44] What does that look like — are they closing inbound, going fully outbound?
[39:50] Most of it’s inbound at the moment. A big part is qualification of customers. There are a lot of people who aren’t qualified to work with us or aren’t the right fit, so a big part is qualification and making sure we’ve got a really clear brief in place. Then, rather than me speaking to the prospect, the salesperson follows up once they’re qualified with one of our heads of department. This eliminates me being the bottleneck. I never liked the idea with agencies — it’s one of the reasons we don’t have account managers — of a salesperson selling something and then disappearing completely, handing you to an account manager you’ve only just met. By bringing the team into these proposals, building the brief together, you join it up from day one. The prospect speaks with who’s working on the account throughout the sales process. It’s smoother, and they’re not surprised when a brief lands on their desk because they built it.
[41:14] Most of what we do from events, speaking, and marketing works really well. They come in, get qualified, go into the marketing funnel, pass through a collaborative call with a head of department, and once qualified we build a brief and go out with proposals.
[41:38] What does the training look like? I ask because we do a lot of sales roles for US clients — they come from big companies with unbelievable track records, but because the founder has done the sales for 10, 15, 20 years, it’s the hardest thing to let go, and nobody does it like the founder. How was that transition and training for you?
[41:53] First thing you need to accept is that it’s never going to be as good as the founder. Unless you want to be the person doing those sales forever, you’re going to have to stay on them. You need to accept they’re not going to close as much as you, especially not in the first year. So the answer is you want more leads — that’s something you can control. I’ve had them shadow a lot of calls to begin with. We have call recordings, we try to involve them in the service. Selling SEO and search is a consultative sale — it’s not selling double glazing where you go in with a product and an offer. You can bring someone from one of these top companies and they don’t have the industry knowledge. If you’re on a call with an SEO manager at a big company and your sales guy says something that sounds right, but with the nuance — you say the wrong thing about PR or social or content — they’ll call it straight away.
[43:00] By having them work on the relationship side but bringing in the actual experts for the sales bit, that’s where you bridge the gap. You have to give it time — they’re not going to get much return on investment in the first month, they’ll make mistakes. Involve them in not just sales but the team calls, the trainings — just absorb it. Our sales guy now has good enough knowledge of SEO to have those conversations, at least from a starting point. Just make sure that first step: they’re not going to sell as well as you, and you need to accept that.
[43:49] Charlie, thank you so much for coming on — really enjoyed every bit of that. If people want to follow you, where can they find you?
[43:59] LinkedIn. I’m not on X at all anymore. LinkedIn’s the place, or mintydigital.com if you want to check out what we do. Apart from there, maybe catch me at an SEO event from time to time.
[44:15] Thank you, Charlie. And thanks for sticking around to the end — I really hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re an agency owner wanting to scale and don’t want to put everything on pause for hiring and finding the best talent in SEO and paid media — that’s something I can help with. I own a recruitment company specializing in both the SEO and paid media sector, and we work with 100+ businesses. There are two links below. No big pitch, but if you want to talk strategy, hiring, and how my team and I can find you the best A-player talent in SEO and paid media, book in and I look forward to talking to you.
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