Building Partnerships for Success: How Platform81 Elevates Client Relationships in Digital Marketing

0:01Show up, take the risks and enjoy the success.

0:07Today's guests are Nick Wroe, founder and sales director, and Gary Mawhinney, managing director and technical director of Platform81, which is an award-winning digital marketing and design agency. Now, Platform 81 partners with ambitious businesses to really deliver results through web development, branding, SEO, PPC, social media, and also creative campaigns. They also are working with Brave Bob Brillant on our new website, which is really helping us expand our reach and impact. So Nick and Gary are here to share their journey of building a successful agency and their insights on client growth and everything in between.

0:52Enjoy the episode.

0:57Well, welcome to Brave Bobbill. I'm here today with Nick Rowe and Gary Mohini. Have I said that right, Gary? I tried to say it really fast. You've said it perfectly. Yeah, I've heard all sorts of different attempts, but that was a good one. Yeah, thank you. Amazing. Well, listen, it's great to have you on. So you two are the co-founders of Platform81. You know, not only a web development age, it's a brand as well. You do a huge amount to help all your clients. And actually, you're helping us with our own website as well, Brave Bold Brilliant. So it's great to see you both here. So we're going to have a cool conversation about all things digital, the do's, the don'ts, How do you create an impactful website?

1:37How do you help your clients? But I want to start really with around the digital landscape. So this is going to be a question for you, Gary, because I know you're more on the techie side of the business. Nick's the sales guy. He does all the talking, right, all this. Yeah. But, Gary, right, digital, it's moving at such a fast pace, as we know, not just now, but has been for a long time. But what I'm really interested in is what separates a good digital strategy from a really sort of transformative one for a business? Yeah, cool. OK, I think the ultimately a good strategy would get results for a client.

2:22But a transformative one is almost how a business kind of thinks digitally. So a good digital strategy would be leads. It's inquiries coming through. It's helping scale the business. But to take it to the next level, really, you want to almost change the way clients are thinking. So kind of for what we do, digital marketing, it's a piece in the puzzle to help our clients grow and scale. But a kind of transformative kind of campaign, it helps the business grow sustainably. we almost kind of need to get into the business really. I think asking the right questions, understanding the business, I guess is one of the key things.

3:06If we can understand the business at a good level, it helps our team sort of help them scale. So I suppose it's getting under the hood, user experience, the way that the – I suppose if we can get under the hood to the clients, it's helping us understand their clients, understanding what they need and yeah, helping them scale. There's a, there's a lot to it. It's, but I think a lot of people just kind of see a strategy is getting leads and inquiries through. There's so much more to it than that. And yeah, I guess, I guess it's the key thing for us personally, I guess would be getting under the hood of the client, really understanding their business, getting to know what makes them tick, understanding their clients, and if we can do that, yeah, we can be a nice partner for them on the digital side to help them scale.

4:01Yeah, I love that, Gary. As you were talking, what was bringing to my mind was really getting to understand the why. You know, why does the business exist? What does it offer in the market that's going to be different? And I can say from my personal experience of working with you guys and my team, you know, you definitely took the time up front to kind of understand what we're trying to do with Brave Bold, brilliant where we're heading the different phases of growth so you know from a first-hand experience of having been a client on the receiving end of your services i i can definitely say that that's the approach that you've taken with us uh which is really helpful yeah it's really important sorry gary you go go on mate sorry yeah i think from my perspective it's exactly like janet it's we work really hard early on to make sure that end result is above expectation in terms of what you need as a business.

4:51Identify what you see as success. What's the value that we can add here? This website is going to push your, hopefully push your business forward. So we just need to make sure that we understand the problems that you've had previously, the challenges that the current website has brought to you as a business. So what can we do to add value to your business and add value to you going forward? You become a partner, don't you? You become almost like an outsource extension of sort of my team in the case of us working together. And I think that's when you really get the best results, when, you know, you do create that partnership.

5:25And talking about that, you know, Nick, I know that the whole team aspect and culture and people, you know, hugely important for you guys internally, but also, I guess, with the clients that you take as well. So do you want to just talk about the culture and the team that you've created at Platform 81? Because someone that's listening to this, one, they may be thinking, well I need to sort out my digital strategy I need a new website what I've got isn't working but actually also as entrepreneurs and business owners ourselves I think we can share a lot in terms of what we're learning how we're approaching things so when it comes to team and culture Nick I know you're passionate about it so let's jump in and talk about that a little bit if you don't mind yeah fundamentally you know it's making an environment where your team are comfortable coming to work and they actually enjoy coming to work you know so it's um creating that environment where people have a laugh i know it's a bit cheesy but people enjoy it and people aren't just here just to deliver a project they are here to deliver however working together collaborating sharing ideas like we do a few things in the office well for starters we are hybrid so we're in the office two days a week um and that's been the case since pretty much since post-Covid.

6:39So every Wednesday, every Thursday, everybody's in. The buzz in the office is really useful. It's really good. And if anything, it's probably our least productive time as a business because everyone's talking about what they're up to, what they're doing at the weekend, et cetera, et cetera. Football team news, all that side of things. But yeah, we do encourage people to share information. So every week, another example of what we do is, sorry, every month we do like a knowledge share session. so we feedback from a senior leadership team to the business and then the business team uh team leaders within within the organization then feedback as to what's happened quick wins you know win successes you know team uh client feedback whatever it may be we do share some negative stuff as well because we can't all just be you know super positive all the time but we do try and be yeah but and just sort of share and communicate as much as we can to to harness that sort of team ethic if that makes sense yeah 100 i mean listen and you're talking a lot about culture values you know kind of the way that you do i think the way you do anything is the way you do everything right um and and you know my mentor rob moore says that a lot and and certainly i think that's absolutely true and the other the other great um kind of bumper sticker that my husband chris says is practice like you play you know so actually if you apply that so every opportunity to be straight, to be honest, to have fun, you know, so that when you're with the client, it just becomes natural then, doesn't it?

8:09Because it's just how you are as a team, right? Exactly that. And that does come across, hopefully, you know, when we are discussing projects with clients and then we bring the team in, everyone's got a full, because again, if it's a full briefing session, like with yourself, everyone is aware of what this project is. We've had our own internal briefing first. So the client is then sort of getting the sort of like the A team together with all their knowledge. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, and I suppose another thing that we're quite passionate is no blame culture. It's the fan. It does happen. You know, balls get dropped.

8:42It is what it is. But there's not like, I can't believe you've done this. That is a disgrace. Okay, all right. Let's think about it. Let's fix it all first. And then let's have a chat about how it won't happen again. Yeah, you've got to own your shit. You absolutely, there's a few things that drive me absolutely crackers. One is bullshitters, right? Two is we don't always get things right. That's okay, but just be straight. Don't work on the basis of no surprises. Own it. And like you say, don't make the mistake again. Fix it and then crack on. So 100%, I love it. Maybe it's our northern kind of roots here.

9:17Absolutely. So, Gary, I want to come to you because obviously the business has been going for quite a while now. Can you talk about the start of Platform 81, how you guys sort of decided that you were going to sell the business and then I want to talk a little bit about how you two complement each other as co-founders because it isn't always easy when you're starting a business and you're scaling a business and I'm sure you drive each other crackers sometimes but Gary talk us through the start and start of the journey how things got going for you for you with Platform A2.1. Sure yeah so Nick set up the business originally and I met Nick I finished university and managed to get employment straight away after university and I met Nick at a networking event and we were both much younger than we look now a lot less wrinkles much much better looking but we we just got to know each other from the networking event and to cut a reasonably long story short I then set up a business and we both worked together so from one kind of I acted as supplier to Platform81.

10:26We did that for about 12 months and Nick obviously with his expertise in client services and sales and marketing and my expertise from a technical side, it really hit off and went really well. Then we thought this is crazy, let's merge both businesses and join. So Nick made me a shareholder and that was back in 2008, kind of in the recession time. So a lot of people were kind of saying that we were crazy to set up a digital marketing agency deep in a recession. Probably wasn't the greatest time to start the business. But yeah, it kind of kicked off from there. The two kind of skill sets that we had really complemented each other.

11:14And I guess we kind of thought a little bit of a vision at the time. We saw a bit of a gap for an agency that had sort of high quality digital output with a kind of client focused mindset, which at the time, I think, was very unusual. And the main aim really was very similar to where we are now is just to help ambitious businesses grow and scale. and from there, you know, following that kind of mentality, we've managed to grow and scale ourselves really. So, yeah, it's worked really well. Wow, amazing. So, Nick, obviously you spotted something in Gary and vice versa when you kind of hit it off, if you like, you know.

11:58But like all relationships, there'll be highs and lows, right? I mean, there just is in business, isn't there? How do you guys deal with the challenges where maybe you don't agree or maybe you start bumping into each other a little bit? And that had been in the early days as well, where you're defining your roles a little bit more clearly. Have you ever had any scenarios like that as kind of being business partners, which you've then had to overcome? Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners that are scaling up, they struggle with this a little bit if they have, you know, a couple of directors in the business, for example.

12:34So any examples you could share, Nick, or things that has helped you kind of get over those scenarios? I mean, I suppose there's no specific examples, but, you know, myself and Gary do work very well together because, well, we've become mates as well. You know, a lot of people have been working together for 18 years. We are good mates and we know what each other's strengths are. So we're sort of asking for advice, et cetera, et cetera. But, yeah, we have come to situations where we don't agree. but I think for the good of the business and for the good of the future of our partnership we genuinely it sounds a bit cheesy, we just write get all the shit off the table, here's my point here's your point, where are we going to go through where do we get to from here one thing that I think we definitely respect each other's opinions I said to Gary yesterday that if he was my best mate from home, I would never set up a business with him because you know them too well whereas you know one of those that you know if I had to get a team of lads together who I could trust Gaz would definitely be one of them you know so things like you know like the finance side of the business that that's my bag Gaz trusts me inherently about that sort of things the internet sorry the digital security GDPR stuff you know data protection that's Gaz's bag 100 % you know I just get told off for not using the proper kit and all that stuff all the time but we are where we are um yeah but i think also you know it's we bollock each other politely and and and each of us know when the other one's pissed off and then they go okay yeah i get it my bad and sometimes you know we've never honestly had a stand-up argument about anything no we just think that you can get you can hold a grudge you can be pissed off for too long and we just need to move forward.

14:23So if you're enjoying this conversation and finding value in the insights that Nick and Gary are sharing, don't forget, hit subscribe to Brave Bold Brilliant podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you know someone who's looking to scale their business or sharpen their digital strategy, then share this episode with them. It might be exactly what they need. but it sounds like you you you do call it out you do have the tough conversations when they need to be had but you do it in the right way because i think so often people don't right and then it festers and it becomes a bigger thing you know i mean you think about the number of bloody marriages that could have been saved if the communication had been better or whatever so communication linking back to your team and culture piece right and and actually owning owning the situation and calling it out I think is really is really refreshing but if you're coming at it from a point of view of wanting to move forward and solve something together even though you don't agree that's going to help in the situation so I think that's that's a really good insight Nick and and and Gary just coming to you I want to talk about um just you know I suppose some of the innovation that's going on in in the sector right now I mean obviously AI everyone's talking about ai it's not the future it's here let's be honest and if you're not on it and you're not using it in your business then you're already behind the curve in my opinion um but from your point of view sort of with your technical hat on and then i'm going to come to nick from a kind of consumer perspective and what you're seeing client side nick with this where are we with ai how is that influencing digital strategies how are you bringing that into clients websites and their sort of end-to-end lead generation funnel etc just and it's a massive topic i appreciate that but what are your sort of thoughts observations just to help people understand it um a little bit if that's okay yeah sure um yeah i mean it's it's kind of the buzzword at the moment isn't it over the last kind of um 12 months two years that ai is it is huge already it's not going to be huge it is huge already um i guess the it's almost the biggest thing since the internet was developed it's it's that on that scale um i think that from in our industry um perhaps a little bit of apprehension um a lot of kind of maybe just digital agencies were a little bit scared about sort of what would happen um so is it going to stop people coming to digital agencies are they going to want to stop having websites are they going to try and do their digital marketing themselves um but what we've actually found um is that it's it's kind of higher the the level um that we can perform at and it's almost bottomed out the bottom of the market really so if you are a small business and you want to attempt to build your own website or do a little bit of your own digital marketing you can use these new ai tools that have been developed to build your own website uh and kind of get the the business launch if you've got kind of you know if you're bootstrapping a business or you've got a startup um but if you want something that you know is a little bit more serious you want to scale you would still use the digital agency for the expertise um and essentially our guys can use ai to scale faster to be more time efficient um there's a there's a lot of things around at the moment about the prompts um and um you know you do still have to have the knowledge to be able to prompt to get the best feedback in.

17:53So you put rubbish in, you're going to get rubbish out is kind of the term that I'm seeing a lot at the moment sort of on various podcasts and various videos, which is absolutely true. You've got to have that knowledge to be able to prompt to get some good input back out. But yeah, in terms of our kind of sector, it's absolutely enormous. I think, I guess to touch on specific things of how we're using it is, well, from a web development point of view, the support it can give the developers is phenomenal. So instead of trying to fix issues and fix bugs for a couple of days, we can use AI to speed that up.

18:33Absolutely phenomenal. So the output of what we can offer our clients is a lot faster, more efficient, which should keep it more efficient in terms of costings for the client. in terms of digital marketing, SEO, PPC, social, yeah, it's all been supported by AI, whether that's content generation, whether that's support from paid ads. It's, yeah, it's absolutely phenomenal. But I think, yeah, ultimately, we're using it as a tool to support us. We still believe in the human element of what we do, just using AI to support us, really, and keep pushing forward. Yeah, I think it's that combination, isn't it, of tech and human, you know, and that sort of interplay.

19:16You know, I see a lot, I do a lot of advisory work in the hospitality space, you know, where one of my big clients is the core hotels. I mean, they're absolutely vast, you know. They're the market leader, the largest hospitality business in Europe, Asia, Middle East and Pacific. You know, they have, let me tell you, I think of the numbers now, 380 ,000 employees. It's huge, right? But what they're, yeah, over 5 ,000 hotels, every brand from the ibis swiss hotel novotel pullman orient express they're all within the core group so i advise their ceo and they've been working at board level for the last three years but what we're seeing in hospitality is absolutely to your point gary is where can you use ai and tech for the almost not i wouldn't call it admin but for the more simple customer experience parts of the journey that then allows you to reallocate resources for where you can give a more deeper more meaningful service in a different way you know so using a chatbot to answer a basic question rather than a concierge on the front desk for example means that the concierge can then be there to help the guests when they've got more complex itinerary or they want something more bespoke advice with you know and I think it's that interplay that is interesting isn't it yeah Yeah, fantastic.

20:34We get a lot of inquiries at the moment for kind of chatbots on websites and stuff. And exactly what you've just said, there will be some answers that are sort of fairly routine. You know, so I don't know if you've got a kind of retail outlet, you know, what time do you open? What time do you close? You can perform those answers with AI, feed it all the information that you need. You don't need a paid employee, you know, to give that answer. It's fairly routine. But if someone's looking for a strategy or somebody's looking for something a little bit more in depth, you know, You can get started on AI, but that's really when you'd want somebody with some specific skill sets to get involved.

21:09But, yeah, you're exactly right. I think customer service in our kind of digital sector, AI will be transforming it. I think there's so many opportunities for business to use it. And I guess, as you say, free up time for those team members that, you know, you want sort of on the more demanding tasks rather than the more trivial ones, I guess. Yeah, yeah. So, Nick, I love this, Gary. It's super interesting. And Nick, obviously, you're often the first contact point with the client, right? Or you or someone in that part of your kind of sales client service part of the business. When you have a new client coming to you and maybe they're a little bit fearful about AI or tech or like me, I am not technically minded.

21:51I kind of know what I want the end customer journey to be and what I want the customer to have and the experience. ask me how we make it happen I haven't got a clue I'm not particularly interested to be honest I just want it to work and it will look good which is why we work with you guys because you do all of that great stuff but when you have a client coming to you and they're maybe a little bit fearful of tech and it could be AI it could be something else on the client side how do you work with them to get them to to the right place that they need to be where you can help them but also So they get comfortable and always get out of their head what they're trying to visualize so that you can make it a reality.

22:33What's the process? How do you work with those clients? Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Sometimes I sort of swing it back to the client themselves. So let's say they're a hotel or a development company, for example. And I don't like you just alluded to. I don't care how you build my house. I want this end result with that beautiful smooth and poor life. I wish. You know, and that is what I want. The detail, I understand I'll need to get involved with some of it, but I genuinely don't care. I will give you what you need, i.e. the money, you know, make decisions on interiors, whatever it may be, but you just go away and do it.

23:08And so what we try and do is make this process for building a website in particular as simple as possible. You know, there's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. I mean, creating a website in itself is not an easy task fundamentally. I can't even do it. like I've never built a website in my life however I've run an agency for 18 years and you know so it just shows that I think if I could have built a website I'd have the the business growth would have stunted because I just got involved and done it all um but I get so and that's what I often say is that you know you don't need to know that I don't know the detail of exactly how it's done you know and then I had a very honest conversation with a client yesterday regarding AI and obviously I'm an advocate of it, probably not as much as Gary is, but we bring it into our sales process in terms of helping write proposals, helping do some research.

23:57You know, I had a conversation with a client yesterday, you know, and I asked the question, because again, this client was very, very sort of passionate about AI. I went, if AI breaks, who fixes AI? I didn't really have an answer for me, because can AI fix AI, or is this when human intervention then needs to come in again? So AI is, yeah, it's a game changer, like Gary says, absolutely embracing it as much as we possibly can. But I do get nervous when you hear there's businesses who are relying on AI for their stock control, for example, or for their production line. I just think, what happens if it does go wrong?

24:37you know so and that's not me sort of being negative it's just generally you need some sort of contingency to know that if it does go wrong that then we we have the process as humans to fix the problems um but yeah as i say i started back to your question like i just sort of it depending what what level of knowledge the client has obviously sometimes a little bit of knowledge is very very dangerous uh you know and you know and then if if there is something that is beyond my knowledge i just bring the team in and if anything that gives the client confidence that well you know we've got the web directors coming into this conversation they must know what they're doing so again all about the team bring it in and then we deliver it as one yeah yeah yeah well again come back to people right and surround yourself with people that are smarter than you are and i think as a business leader um especially someone that's maybe starting out um certainly i think when you're a more junior point of your professional life sometimes you feel like you've got to know it all and you know it's almost seen as a weakness if you don't have the answers whereas as you get older you just kind of go no that's why i got these guys i've actually i'm focusing up here and and being able to to serve you in the right way but the team they're the experts not me um and i think that comes with maturity doesn't it and um and gary from your point of view because you're you're in that md role right um in terms of running more of the operations is that right of the the kind of the team so with your leadership style how's that changed for you over the years would you say from when you started out when you first met nick after university and you got together and you said this is great let's merge our businesses how have you changed and matured as a leader do you think um i think uh from kind of a street strategic point of view i think one of the best things that we did were as you kind of just touched on is bring on people with the right skill set and bring in essentially marketeers and developers that were better than me.

26:32So as you say, I think with business owners, you're stuck in the running of the business, aren't you? And you almost need to free yourself up to allow you to have that vision. What you mentioned about sort of a ship without a captain, it's going to sink, isn't it? So you've got to have that real strong vision, but you can't really get to that vision if you're still doing the nitty-gritty work of building a website, doing the SEO, doing the ppc so um i think the first kind of key thing was to bring in the right people bring in some really strong kind of team members that allow you to have that capacity and that kind of you know remove that kind of brain fog of being in the nitty-gritty um and then i guess yeah kind of over the last 10 or 15 years you kind of learn the right things to do i mean there's no kind of general general thing that you know you can read lots of books you can improve your knowledge um Obviously, my thing is the tech.

27:25I'm really good with what's going on in the industry, but it takes time. Ultimately, it takes time to learn. When you do come in to ask any business, it takes time to be able to understand it, doesn't it? Make kind of key decisions. I guess things like awkward conversations, awkward decisions. You've got to be pretty strong and be able to lead a team and ultimately be accountable, I guess, for any decisions. So like Nick said, we haven't necessarily got a blame culture at all in the business. So it's important for me and Nick to both kind of stand up and let people know we'll be responsible, we'll help them and just keep pushing forward.

28:05I think really, I think it's very important when you're scaling the business to have a very strong vision that you're all aligned to. I think one of the reasons that me and Nick do not quarrel or disagree is that we've got that strong alignment of where we want to be in two years, three years, five years. As long as that's fed down to the team, you know, and everyone should be aligned, really. Yeah. And where is that then, Gary? Five years hence, where do you want to be? Well, the kind of key thing is year on year growth. So since we've set up, we've grown every single year, which is kind of a really amazing success that we're both really proud of.

28:47You'll probably know the stats, Jeanette, better than us, but a lot of small businesses fail within the first 12 months, five years. So even to be going for the first 12 months, you know, it's really a success. but our kind of key metric and our key kind of vision is that we want to continue to grow and be kind of industry leaders in terms of our locations of Birmingham and the northwest and continuing working with businesses that want to scale that's the kind of key thing but in terms of the five-year plan our aim is to double the size of the agency and so that's kind of where we're working towards.

29:27So we kind of put some measurable goals in place, working back from five years to see if we can double in size. So quite ambitious. But, yeah, I think if you're kind of aiming really high, if we don't quite get there, you know, we'll still have a really nice kind of growth trajectory. So, fingers crossed, we can keep pushing forward with it. I think what's really important as well, Jeanette, is that we've made everyone within the team aware of our plans. So we had an off-site six months ago where Gary is MD, because Gary's only just become MD, so we switched our roles because we needed focus on the sales side of things and focus on the operation, which, obviously, Gary has taken.

30:03But we shared that vision with the team, so everyone is aware of where we're going. We've changed the structure of the business as well pretty recently. So this is all this calendar year. so we have our SLT so myself Gary and two other colleagues that are fundamentally the thinkers of how we're going to grow this business or bring extreme you know specific skills to the company that you know we can then sort of focus on our own sort of department to really sort of harness the people that we've got within the company as well we've also got a growth team so each sort of department manager so to speak is part of a growth team so what can we do as a collective of five or six to push forward because there's no point in the digital team going one way and the web team going the other it's all about you know following the same sort of path and that's something that we're really passionate about something we're working very hard on and a beauty of being able to have the people around you who can do the work better than you can is that you can then focus on this stuff which is pushing forward fundamentally i'm excited for you guys i mean i think you'll absolutely get it why not why can't it be you You know, I mean, you've got the right, like you say, you've got strong foundations, you've got a clear vision, you've got the energy and the va-va-boom to do it.

31:17You're bringing in the right people in the business that are super smart and that have got to want to scale and be part of something special. You know, you're doing all the great things you are with clients. And as I say, I'm not just saying this to blow smoke up your backside, but, you know, I've had bad experiences, as you well know, Nick, with our previous websites, which is why we came to you in the first place. so with BraidBolt, brilliant the approach we've taken is we've broke it into two phases haven't we Nick, we said let's get the basic website out and then let's actually focus on phase two which is going to be the client portal which is when we're going to be launching our Rise Academy in October watch this space everyone get ready, get ready fingers first to get booking your amazing Rise Academy to scale up your leadership with your more junior leaders but yeah it's an exciting time Nick And if you take our website as a case study almost, as an example, do you want to just share some of the elements that you think have been important in us being successful?

32:16And I know we haven't got everything right and we'll still have things that we want to kind of add and tweak, you know, because we will evolve with you as a partnership. I don't plan to just be, you know, with what we have. This is about long term relationship and growth, right? Otherwise, I would choose someone who was different and not so ambitious and with a different price structure as well. Right. So, yeah. So just talk to us a little bit about about kind of using Brave Bob as a bit of a case study, some of the elements that you focused on for us. Yeah, absolutely. So if you probably remember, Jeanette, right at the start of it, we presented with your current site, which was on a WordPress platform, which is fine.

32:53but we said to you that we wanted to rebuild that recently built site which you were like a little somewhat taken about this but you know it was but the reasons for it was because then we can then scale and grow your business and obviously with the rise academy and with the portal side of things if we could rebuild that site initially it would make that integration far far easier and we and that was our conversation for i think our first meeting was about two hours long wasn't you know you know that was one thing that i'm assuming no other agency offered and the fact that our pricing was significantly as you alluded to was significantly higher than what the other agencies were uh proposing to you but we know so it just shows that it's not all about price it's about the value that you're adding um and then when obviously we then progressed with the website and it was a quite a game-changer for us because we were working with an external agency as well I see the company tribe that you brought in in in line to deliver the rebrand halfway through a design project which is a challenge but you know we are where we are it's always long yeah always wondering

34:09to be fair it was discussed knowledge of it coming just it was a bit sooner than thought it would be um well again this tribe and emma and the team there and then our guys had some great conversations with those guys about what is our joint sort of um vision for this site um so we were with with with the team and tried to discuss transitions just making sure that when that final site that was launched the day before you do remember rightly um let's keep it tight was fundamentally above expectation and I appreciate we have some conversations along the way because there's a little bit of uncertainty about what we were delivering so let's get a call, let's discuss it and let's crack on it so phase two is it's ready for your content and once in October that'll be a cracking project well delivered and like you say working forward going forward working together and make that even better as your business progresses and as the demand needs it yeah yeah i mean this is just a start for it for us and and as i say i said to you i'm not interested in a transactional relationship i want i want a partnership that's how we work with with the people that we bring on and work with you know and then i think yeah this this is a bit of a bit of a watch out for everyone right so if you're going to have a new website really consider whether you're happy with your brand positioning before you start development right because what happened with me i emma who is the founder of tribe or co-founder of tribe is a very very old friend of mine we go back way back 30 years when we started on a graduate scheme at thompson holidays in 1995 and our friendship is one thing but emma is a very very impressive marketeer and brand person right and she has her own business track so we've gone out for a glass of wine we were chatting i said oh you know kind of got all these things that i want to do with brave bob brilliant i said i could just do with a little bit of help to get it out of my head so we did a workshop and it was nothing to do with the brand the look and feel but what emma did not being kind she said i know it wasn't part of the brief but we've had a little look at your logo we're not talking about changing the day and then of course they presented something and i went oh my god we're gonna have to change it oh we're gonna do a full rebrand job and obviously you guys are already in full flow and i'm like really sorry but i think we need to press pause so that we can go go further in in the right way and that's essentially what we've done so um all chapeau to you guys as well for sort of working with me as the clients go we get it okay there's a little bit of rework done needs to be done here let's be fair to each other right um and then but what we're going to end up with is going to be phenomenal i'm so excited about it and i think we can jointly be very proud you know 100 you know and that's what you mentioned there about the partnership is exactly what we want to be for all our all our clients you know price should be a secondary conversation or even a tertiary conversation this is what we can do this is how we can improve your website your digital strategy i'll go let's do it oh yeah how much is it by the way no so it's so we have all had customers that we've taken on that you know potentially we shouldn't have the first thing is what how much is it how much is it how much is it well how much is a car how much is a house we need to just we need to go break down the detail which is obviously what we've done your project and even though that we were you know a good chunk higher weren't we i think what you said yes significantly yeah you were still happy to move forward because you knew it's the best solution yes yeah yeah yeah exactly i mean listen sometimes in life you get what you pay for and when you when you're you know a certain size of business or maybe you're a sole opener sometimes your budget is only your budget you know i mean i have conversations with people um on the business mentoring side and i said listen i'm not for everyone and you know you're not buying my time you're buying 30 years of business experience and knowledge yeah right please and it's an investment but i know that you will 10x that investment but i also appreciate that maybe your budget is at a different level in which case you know, no problem at all.

38:26Maybe we meet again in five, 10 years time. And that's fine. You know, so because I know my value and you know your value. And that's what's really important, isn't it? And how you help. So fantastic. So Gary, I want to come to you now a little bit, if you don't mind, about cybersecurity, because it's bloody boring, right? But it's absolutely critical. It's like that. No, it is. It's one of those things. And listen, I mean, I've run big FTSE 100, FTSE 250. So So trust me, I know the importance. And when we've had the cyber breach and stuff, it has been like, you know, everyone in the kind of emergency room scenario.