Patrick Nancarrow: Building a business worth being proud of

Pauline Bertry 0:13

And we are live. Hi Patrick, how are you?

Patrick 0:15

Very good, thanks Pauline, how are you?

Pauline Bertry 0:17

I'm well I'm well. Welcome to the den. Thank you so much for finding time to talk to me.

Patrick 0:21

No problem at all. It's a pleasure to be here.

Pauline Bertry 0:25

Same, same. so look, I mean, I was telling you a little bit about the podcast. You know that I like starting the the conversation in a very, very, very kind of broad and open way. I like asking people about their stories and their journey. So what's what's your story? What's the past, the present and the future of Patrick?

Patrick 0:49

Okay, cool. Well, it's good because my favorite thing to do when I start conversations is just talk about myself for a while as well. So very happy to do that. So

Pauline Bertry 0:56

I love it.

Patrick 0:58

my background, I've been working in performance marketing for around 16 years. So as people might be able to tell from my accent, I'm originally from the UK and so started out in London. I was in the agency world, worked at a couple of startups doing digital marketing roles. And then in 2014, I founded a performance marketing agency with my twin brother, which is probably a topic that we can go into in a bit more detail at some point. But so we started that in 2014, just the two of us. I think our first ever client described us as two brothers working from their bedrooms. which is kind of what it was. I set up the company when I was based in London, but my brother was based just outside Barcelona in a place called Terrassa. And

Pauline Bertry 1:46

Very cool.

Patrick 1:47

so we set up as a remote business initially, neither of us wanted to move to where the other person was. And we were effectively just two 25 year olds working from their bedrooms trying to run and build a performance team. And so that was just the two of us in 2014. Between then and 2021, we scaled that team from the two of us up to it would have been about 70 or 75 people. And then in 2021, we got acquired by a larger agency group, which was originally called Sideshow, it's now called Gain. And that was roughly 650 person group. was, I think it was 10 or 11 different agencies that had come together and over the course of the subsequent four years, it was a case of merging those teams together to form a more cohesive entity. And so after joining the group for the next couple of years, between 2021 and 2023, I was basically just still looking after my original business, trying to keep the wheels turning, trying to continue to scale, which was quite a difficult time for the industry. So it

Pauline Bertry 3:00

Yeah.

Patrick 3:00

wasn't very easy. And then from 2023 onwards, I had moved into senior positions within the group itself. So sitting on the Exco, overseeing things like product and innovation. Still having my toes dipped into the performance marketing world though. So still partially responsible for the old business. But yeah, was a different position in a different company, let's call it. And then... I left that role towards the back end of last year and am now enjoying some time off and also starting to think about what comes next.

Pauline Bertry 3:40

Very cool. How was it different to lead a seventy five people company and being in the exco of a six hundred fifty people company? What was like the major differences in the experience?

Patrick 3:54

I mean, as some of it's just common sense, think stakeholders. So when you're running a founder led business, I had one of the founder, we had two other people in the management team as well. But ultimately I was the CEO and even with my brother and the other, so the other co-founder. Usually I'd be able to get my way with things if I wanted to push for it. So I think that there was the ability to be able to make decisions myself, be a little bit faster things. mean, 650 people is not massive. It wasn't like we were totally paralysed by red tape or bureaucracy. But there were a lot more stakeholders involved. so it wasn't, I had the CEO of the group sitting above me. We also had the boards, the private equity company that owns the group as well, or in the majority of the group. And there are quite a few other, yeah, people to please and hoops to jump through to get certain things done. And I think one of the biggest... challenges I had in that, what a group role as well, was moving things in a direction that I didn't necessarily agree with all the time. And

Pauline Bertry 5:09

Mm.

Patrick 5:11

I think one of the great things about running a family business is you can run stuff with your convictions. I think it's really easy to get behind ideas, plans, even if they're difficult things that you've got to implement, if it's your conviction, if it's your idea. Whereas with this, there were some things that I was having to do and changes to the business I was having to make that I didn't necessarily fully agree with. And I

Pauline Bertry 5:38

Mm.

Patrick 5:38

found it quite difficult to do it as authentically as I would have done before. I probably wasn't as good a leader in that position as I was when I was running the business on my own myself. I say on my own, as a founder with the other people in that business at the time.

Pauline Bertry 5:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I that that's exactly how I understood it. And I mean, I'm super curious to learn a bit more about this period of you scaling the business from you and your brother running it as a remote exercise from two different countries in a like in a in from your bedroom, you said, to having a 75 people team. So how how was this transition both from like business perspective, like how the processes evolved, how the team changed, but also how did your role as a founder evolved at different at different stages? What were like the the milestones or the moments where you were like, okay, now it feels different.

Patrick 6:43

well, there's quite a lot to unpack there. think it's very easy to rationalize a lot of decisions post the case and also to, you know, certain things about the way that we set up worked out well for us. And it would be great to say that, you know, for example, the remote element of it is something that think provided a private, provided us with a platform to grow that we might not have been able to achieve without that remote capabilities. We were able to attract loads of really good people. and retain them over a number of years, which was amazing, largely down to the fact we were remote. And it would be great for me to turn around and say, yeah, this was the plan from the start. This is a great strategic business decision. But it was kind of just luck a lot of the time along the way as well. But basically the reason I'm saying that is because we were 25, both me and my brother, at the time we set up this business. we had been working in performance marketing for like four years, both of us. And we were, we were lucky because, this was around the, the time that the newsfeed ad on meta was starting to gain traction and the, the way that people were running online marketing campaigns was changing quite significantly. And it was a lot of opportunity that not many people were well positioned to capture. And so we were very much practitioners who were able to capture this value for people. We did not have very much business experience at the time. was just, yeah, it was technical experience, no experience, managing people, scaling a business, building teams, building culture, et cetera, as well. And so a lot of what we did was failing on the job. I think we came into it with a vague idea of how we wanted to be for our people and how we wanted to be for ourselves as well, because I think for both me and my brother, neither of us were, we're not these people who are totally obsessed with our careers and wanting more and more and more and more. I think we're quite happy with a level of comfort being achieved, a nice high level of comfort. It's about trying to sustain that for as long as possible and to build something that we're proud of, to build something that we're happy being a part of and running on a day-to-day basis as well. And so some of those things, we want everyone in the business to feel the way that we want to feel about the business, which is happy to be there, motivated to turn up and do their job every day without someone standing over there micromanaging them and telling them what to do and being treated like a human being, think, rather than a number on a payroll. So we came into it with some of those ideas for things. We came into it with an idea of more or less where we wanted to get to from a commercial perspective and what we wanted to do in terms of products. But, you know, a lot of these things changed quite significantly over time as well. And I think one of the things that we were probably quite good at was just adapting, as, time went on and you know, the business took slightly different paths at different times just because of some of the people we hired, just cause of the skillsets

Pauline Bertry 10:02

Hmm.

Patrick 10:03

they had. And I think we were quite good to some extent at recognizing when there were team members who has talents that fell outside of their, their normal skillset or the required skillset for the role they were in and trying to find a way to take advantage of that as well. So. There are lots of hybrid roles within the business, which, know, outsides from an outside perspective, maybe from an inside perspective to can get a little bit messy.

Pauline Bertry 10:32

Yeah.

Patrick 10:33

but it's something that meant that, cause we, we tried to bootstrap this quite, quite a lot. So we didn't have investors. didn't put money in ourselves. We just funded stuff, from the revenues we were making and,

Pauline Bertry 10:46

Yeah.

Patrick 10:48

therefore it was, it was a case of, you know, We didn't have a finance, like a senior finance person for a long time. we found ways to make stuff like that work with the resource we have within the business at the time. in hindsight, some of the things might've done differently, might've invested in, some stuff before we, instead of, just trying to paper over the cracks, but I think a lot of the time we were able to offer people hybrid positions which they enjoy to contribute to their development. I know a few of them have gone more into some of those areas that they started to diverge into with us, which I think is great. But yeah, I think it was a case of flexibility rolling with the punches. trying to build what we needed at that point in time with a short to midterm view as well in the future, but we never had a sort of really big long-term strategy with things.

Pauline Bertry 11:43

So I like stories about kind of co-designing the win-win when people like exactly what what you were describing when you have a talent and you find a way to leverage it, even though it wasn't initially the the intention. so how like could could you tell me like a a an example of What you did there?

Patrick 12:05

Yeah, so we had a couple of people in the business who, they were, they were good people. People, people liked working with them. They're also very good at, helping people to also, yeah, to apply the same skills that they were able to apply to things, basically good teachers. and again, for, so for a couple of people, we, we moved them into hybrids, sort of training or learning and development roles so that.

Pauline Bertry 12:34

very cool.

Patrick 12:35

a significant proportion, maybe 50 % or more of their time was not running clients, which is what their background was, but it was helping other people to be able to upscale and do a better job across the business. I think it's probably an area that I see from other agencies, which is massively underdeveloped, is this idea of training. And I think it's something that When we got past a certain size, so maybe 30, 35 people or so, you do have a bit more headroom to be, because the agency game is, it's all about margins and it's all about people's time and using that time efficiently, efficiently, sorry. But when you get above a certain threshold, you start to be able to free up a little bit of headroom to be able to dedicate to non-client stuff. And

Pauline Bertry 13:26

Yeah.

Patrick 13:26

this is, this is an area that we thought was very important because it. It's not necessarily a short term fix stuff. It's not going to improve revenue next month. But what it does do is it over the long term improves the overall client experience and makes people happier because you're investing in their development and they're growing as individuals more than they

Pauline Bertry 13:47

Yeah.

Patrick 13:48

would do if you just left them to their own devices.

Pauline Bertry 13:50

Yeah, and it improves retention.

Patrick 13:52

Exactly, yeah.

Pauline Bertry 13:53

And then to the second part of of the initial question, how did your role as a founder evolve?

Patrick 13:59

Yeah, a lot. I think up until we were probably about 20 people, which would have been maybe the first three years or so of the business. I can't remember exactly, roughly let's say that. I was an operator. was doing client work. I think there were times where I was probably working on up to like 15 different clients at a time. It was a lot. And so it was obviously split between me and my brother. and the two of us up until we were maybe 15 to 20 people or so, one of us was involved in every single client that the business has. and then I think when we started to grow beyond that point, it was mostly growth from a client perspective. We realized that that setup was just unsustainable. so neither of like between us, weren't going to be able to oversee everything. we had to find a way to have people operate more autonomously and, we were never massive micromanagers that managers anyways, but this wasn't some sort of existential change for us as a business. But we realized that, yeah, we were going to have to set things up in a way that was slightly more productized, giving people slightly more free rein with, with everything and, being able to step back and do roles that were contributing to the development of the business, not just the running of, of client accounts. So there was that inflection point around that where between me and my brother, decided to split the responsibilities in the business so that he would oversee the client and RevU engine. So client services, new business. And I would oversee the internal side of things, operations, finance, HR, et cetera, as well. And... So that, was probably the first big change. didn't, we didn't immediately step into, you know, just doing that and me just doing that. but over time, that's where we started to migrate more towards. so I think that was, that was probably the biggest, single change within that. And I think as the business got bigger as well, then the role changed to or the importance of my role changed. think back when we were 20 people, the internal functioning of the business was slightly less important. Just bringing a new business and doing well for clients was way more important. But as we got to like 50, 60 people, I think culture became more important. We were trying to keep a more fixed eye on retention. I think the bigger you get as well, the more people you bring in, the more you've got to focus on implementing the right culture, the right skills, the right processes, because you get less and less control. Your net is cast a bit wider in terms of the people you're having to recruit as well. And you have less time individually with all of the people within the business, which means that it's more difficult to distill. the way you want to do things, the culture to others. And so it was that case of switching over to being a bit more process driven rather than just, you know, leading by personality or whatever, which, you know, you still kind of can do in a remote business, it's a bit diluted, but it still was a bit more the case when we were a younger, smaller company.

Pauline Bertry 17:27

And and that's something I I observe a lot by the way when I talk to to founders or to ex-founders that especially in the agency space, they often kind of build the company they wanted to be a part of when they were first employed or when they were first hired, et cetera, and that it evolves with time as as they grow. So you started mentioning like the culture, the processes, etcetera. Like how how did you think about that? Like once you were at this point of like twenty five people and you understood that you couldn't spend more time with each individual people sorry, with each individual person separately, how did you think about establishing the culture in the company, establishing processes, establishing the the the people organization or the people team? How how was that process for you.

Patrick 18:27

God, this is, this is one of those things that I would love to be able to sit here and post rationalize and say, yes, this was all strategic. We had a big plan when we, when we started to make that change, but it wasn't really the case. It was very much iterative learning over time. It was mostly reactive to challenges that we were facing.

Pauline Bertry 18:46

Mm-hmm.

Patrick 18:47

So we'd see like complaints coming from people in the team about something. We'd see client service dropping off in, in some areas. we'd see, inefficiencies on accounts in terms of time spent on things. And we was, we then look at the, the data coming through and think, we should probably do something about this. And a lot of the, the answer, we felt the answers to a lot of those, those things were to introduce extra processes to things that was, would enable us to. improve the overall experience within our area or within the business as a whole. I think the other thing that drove a lot of thinking with this is that we always wanted to be what we called a people first business,

Pauline Bertry 19:37

Mm-hmm.

Patrick 19:38

which I think it's a noble thing to strive for. I think it's a very difficult thing to achieve in the agency world because there are always clients that you've got to answer to and sometimes it's very difficult to say no for the case of, people and be able to, your people within the business and be able to retain a client is necessary to pay the wages of the people that are working on those accounts. Yeah. So it's, it is, I don't, I don't know if we were ever, or if it is ever truly possible to be people first, but I think by, by making that a stated intention of what we doing. were hopefully thinking about the way that we're approaching people with a different lens from the way that a lot of agencies would usually do that. And so that was an underlying driver of the way we wanted to run things from that point was, is this something that is going to make the people in the business better off overall? I think that's probably a better way to frame the people first side of things. It's not a case of, does everyone agree with this decision all the time? It's on the whole, is this something that's more likely to contribute to the greater goods of the people within this company? And yeah,

Pauline Bertry 20:59

Yeah, I I love this.

Patrick 21:02

so we try to approach stuff with that intention all the time as well.

Pauline Bertry 21:05

Hmm. And kind of micro deep dive on here. So I think often it's kind of very difficult to find the balance between the common sense and the process like following the process. Often what I observe is that once people start implementing or thinking about the processes, they make it overly complex and it's kind of turning sometimes around them. So how did you how did you think about making sure that the processes you were implementing were actually helpful and meaningful without burning the culture and without making it overly corporate?

Patrick 21:47

I think the, for us, I obviously building processes was, was a big part of the, way that we managed to scale things effectively. But I think this is all quite relative. so we were building processes within a business that had no processes. so even when we had a slightly more process led business, it wasn't an maybe you need to ask other people in the team. It wasn't onerous in terms of what people had to do. I think that element of autonomy in the way that you wanted to do certain things still existed. It's just there were more processes put around things like people development and security of the account side of things and a variety of different... other measures which were not really, hopefully not taking up too much time for people. I think maybe one area that we probably did or that some people found more challenging was that with the development process, we had three main client facing positions within the business.

Pauline Bertry 23:00

Mm-hmm.

Patrick 23:00

And we built training programs for each of those, also for the jumps in the two levels. So from the most junior position to the mid position to the senior position. And this was something we changed over time as well. originally it was kind of just done on a like managerial recommendation of this person's ready to step into this role. And I think that originally was something that was it was fine. And it took up less time and people were more or less happy with it. But I think one of the things that it did do is it left promotions down to something that's very subjective.

Pauline Bertry 23:43

Mm-hmm.

Patrick 23:44

So it was just one manager or maybe a couple of people that work with them on account saying this person is good. And I think it's something that If the people who were managing them or the people working with them on it on accounts had stronger voices or prioritized certain traits over others. Like there were some people in our team who were deeply, deeply analytical. And there were some people on a team who were more like client focused and relationship focused. And they would often look for the traits in, in people that they themselves had and they themselves valued. And If we just relied on that subjective element of, you know, this is what one person says should be done. We might not end up getting it again. The loudest voices would be heard as well. We might not end up getting the right people put into the right positions at the right time. And so the, the steps to see that was also, it was sort of homogenized the, the approach to that. It was, it was also a bit as well to do with making sure that we were. building the right timeframes into things for the development of the business as well. We were a quickly growing business and we did need people to be going up the ladder in the company. And it was great. We had very good employee retention. So there were a lot of people that went through those, those steps, but we also needed to make sure that it was staged in a way that made sense for the growth of the business and not just done in a slightly chaotic, this person's ready. Let's put them in a position, but we're actually not ready to have that position in the business, cetera, as well. So it is to bring a lot more formality and strategy into the way that we were developing people.

Pauline Bertry 25:21

I love it. And how did you like what was the approach that worked? So you said for for a certain time for a certain period of time you had people, kind of managers reflecting on on people's promotions and they kind of taking the final decision. what did you change and what was the framework that eventually allowed for less subjective approach.

Patrick 25:54

So I think it was the training programs helped a lot because a lot of different people were then involved with the person. we had a combination

Pauline Bertry 26:01

Mm-hmm.

Patrick 26:02

of those people that I mentioned who are involved in learning and development, the training side of things, they were involved in that process. But there are also subject matter experts that were involved in walking people through different things and teaching them the ropes of those elements as well. And so there was feedback from a lot of different people along the process about what people were good at and what people needed to improve on. And I think this is something that, that meant that we were only really getting to the final stages or promoting people who were rounded and ready for the positions that we were talking about. And I think, you know, there's the other, one of the things that was driving this is that we, so the lower position or the lower down the business we had, it was more operational, analytical, executional stuff that people were doing. The higher up you got, the amount of client exposure changed and you had more face time with clients, less time doing the actual execution of the work. And so the people who were, and this is not some sort of like, this is not news. Sometimes people who are very good at analysis are not very good at client relationship management. And I think we, probably early on in the business, the analytical side of things was much more important later on in the business, the client relationship management was more important. I think we found ourselves

Pauline Bertry 27:33

Of course.

Patrick 27:33

in a situation where we were probably over prioritizing analytical capability in terms of progression, not thinking enough about. client relationship management skills. Some of the, people might refer to as softer skills that are actually hugely valuable to senior members of a team like ours. And I think this was, a lot of this was designed to try to make sure that we weren't forgetting that side of things and we're making sure to push. or to train people in the right areas to actually make them ready for the roles that they were stepping into and only putting them into those roles when they were ready to do so. Again, this is what we're trying to do. Did it always work out like that in practice? No, but there's like, it got a bit better with extra guard rails in place.

Pauline Bertry 28:19

And so how how did you organize it? Like did you have different dimensions and then you would assess people across them, or was it just like a broad conversation between a person and and their manager? So how how did you structure that?

Patrick 28:33

so this was, this is where I leaned quite heavily on some very capable people within the team as well. so they were the ones responsible for building out the actual programs themselves. Some of them had like, it was more than 10 modules or something that people had to work through on things. Again, modules working with different people within the business as well. and feedback would be collected from all the people running those. there'd also be regular performance check-ins as well. think, Earlier on the business, it was every four months and then it moves to every six months. We were getting feedback on people. And so it was trying to gather as much information as we could about the capabilities of those individuals that we were assessing and using that information to decide areas of strengths and weakness where the special needs to be worked on and setting them quite clear objectives for what they needed to do to progress to the next stage. Again, not rocket science and also not something that was implemented perfectly all the time, but that was the overall intention.

Pauline Bertry 29:34

Yeah, I think the intention matters because sometimes in the nitty gritty you can you can fail and and that's fine, but I think the intention is always what drives the the right conversation and the right decisions for

Patrick 29:50

I totally agree and it gives me an excuse for all of my failures as well. I'm a big fan of working with the right intention. Obviously you'll never always get it right though.

Pauline Bertry 29:59

Yeah, and I think it's fine. I mean we all learn as as as we grow, right? I

Patrick 30:06

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 30:06

have another direction I want I want to go into because I feel like the entire knowledge and like expert industry is changing very much in the past two to three years. AI is like reshaping it, the Gen Z joining the workforce. very different expectations, etc. What are your observations and maybe some predictions if you want to if you want to do it, around how will the knowledge and expert industry evolve thanks to those new trends that are now influencing it?

Patrick 30:51

New trends, we are talking about AI, predominantly, I assume.

Pauline Bertry 30:53

AI and mostly AI and Gen Z becoming the part of the of the workforce.

Patrick 31:00

Yeah, I think there's a sort of macro level conversation about AI in general and how effective it's going to be, what it's going to mean in terms of jobs. I think there's a really big gap between what different people think about this kind of thing. So there's the people running the AI businesses over in the US, the closed model frontier stuff. who are convinced that this is something that is going to lead to abundance for everyone, certainly themselves, but abundance for everyone. And means that everything's gonna be completely disrupted. Certain industries are going to be cooked entirely. No one's going to be working these. It's all going to be done by machines. And this is the way that humanity has to go because the cat is out the bag, investments there. This is where the money's going and it's going to happen irrespective of what anyone wants. And I

Pauline Bertry 31:56

Yeah.

Patrick 31:56

think there's like 90 % of the world who are skeptical about it and also not in the same position as, as them or a lot of the people who are more technologically advanced or willing to wanting to embrace this stuff, who do not really want to, to, to embrace this in the same way that the, the people who are creating this and the people who are advocating for it are doing so. And so it's, I think it's a, from that perspective, People within organizations have got very different attitudes to it. I think people running organizations, it's a case of how can we take advantage of this as much as possible? How can we make ourselves more effective, more efficient? But for a lot of people who work within the organizations, it's a fear, it's an anxiety about, you know, is this going to take my role? Am I going to be helping the business eradicate the need for me in the future at some point? I think like this argument is something that creates maybe something I call a false dichotomy in the sense of it's either, the machines do everything or, and, and I lose my job or I fight back and we never implement any of stuff at all. And the reality is, is it's to be somewhere in the middle ground, I think. and. I think it's something that the leaders have got to be thinking about very, very carefully about the way that they do, the way they implement this and the way it gets brought in to businesses and communicates people within businesses as well. Because a lot of the time, see this top-down approach of like, we need to make AI work. We need to cut costs by this much as a result of using AI. We need to see this sort of growth coming through because of it. And I think up until Maybe the last few months even the the capers of AI has just not been there for a lot of people to effectively implement it to see any sort of meaningful change within businesses I think we're starting to get to the point where the Capability is there with some of latest models to actually have more of a meaningful impact in a lot of areas But it's not it's not quite the Yeah, it's not quite the level that a lot of people think it has reached just yet. I think the other thing on the flip side of that is they've got to introduce it in a way that doesn't totally alienate the people they've got within the business already who are important contributors to the success of those businesses. Because if people see that they're There's been stories reported on this, particularly Gen Z people, I'm sure it's not just Gen Z, but outside of that as well, who are deliberately trying to mess up the way that, or the training for models. So if they think that,

Pauline Bertry 34:47

really?

Patrick 34:47

yeah, if they think their companies are trying to use the work they're doing to train models, they're deliberately feeding it incorrect information. I think it was something crazy like, 50 % of the Gen Z workforce who are having to interact with these things are feeding it false information. Check that stats, I might have just made that up entirely, but it was some sort of hefty percentage that was doing that. So I think the purpose of the leader is to not just find out how to make use it to make businesses more effective and more efficient is how to integrate it with the existing workforce to make those people better, to develop those people as well. And I think that's where people will find more successful stuff right now, rather than treating it as this silver bullet that's going to solve all problems for them.

Pauline Bertry 35:41

It it's very much aligned with with how I think about it because I mean of course I'm also on LinkedIn and I keep reading like Claude just killed designers or AI just killed McKinsey and every time it makes me laugh so much because I think there is so much to any type of position or any type of work than just the like physical production of of something. And where my mind goes when it comes to AI is especially for smaller businesses that that I know better, is that with AI they should implement or bring in the capabilities they were not able to afford before AI came in.

Patrick 36:32

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 36:32

because I think in small like it's smaller teams the human connection matters. And especially with a lot of teams now kind of becoming hybrid or becoming remote, this like human connection is getting lost very, very, very quickly. Even if there is like office presence every week, etc., it's still not the same comparing to like 10 years ago when we would go to the office every day. And I think there are so many great use cases when AI can help you bring people closer, bring people together. And I'm so happy when I see people talking about them. Like I was talking to a person who is an AI advisor and his idea was like if you are pla like if you are growing the business, when you are building the AI brain, bring all of the people in The same room, put a recorder on, get AI to interview you and to ask you questions about your business. And this is becoming almost like a mini onboarding guide for any people joining the business in the future, because they will already have all of the processes and all of the key elements about the business documented that they can very easily access. Because a lot of people put a like effort and energy into building this for them and they can leverage it to get better and to get productive much faster. And I love it because not every like not every business can afford to have a full-time like onboarding team. But it still kind of helps a person get better rather than saying, look, now we don't need a person.

Patrick 38:23

I think that's the key point really is that I think certainly with the way that the technology is right now, the capabilities that it's got, a lot of the time people think it or expect it to replace people. It's nowhere near that. And I think there are certain areas where like, so junior developers really heavily affected by this because the coding capability, a lot of the frontier models, Claude and ChatGBC, built by coders often with the intent of being able to produce good code. That's one of the primary purposes of

Pauline Bertry 38:59

Yeah.

Patrick 38:59

Claude is to be able to produce good code. And so junior developers have been affected quite significantly by this because a lot of the code capability of those tools is on a par or often a lot higher than what those people can do themselves. So that understandably has disrupted or is going to disrupt things quite significantly in that space. But in a lot of other areas, and maybe this changes if the focus of those frontier models changes to try to conquer these areas, but in a lot of places, it doesn't feel like it's got to the point where it can just take humans out of the game entirely. And, you know, the people side of things is one of those areas where I think it's going be very difficult to completely remove the requirement for humans or even reduce it by 50 % the amount of time required to do things. What I think it is very good at is some of the things that you were just talking about there, that like aggregation of information and provision of a better overall experience for people. If you take the idea or like line management, for example, as a, as a good thing to think about from that perspective too. AI probably doesn't reduce the amount of time, face time, that you'd need to have with someone that you're managing.

Pauline Bertry 40:14

I think it it should I think it's actually the opposite. Hopefully it

Patrick 40:18

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 40:18

creates you an opportunity for more face time.

Patrick 40:22

Exactly. But what AI can do, and so AI doesn't do the manager's job for them. It doesn't have those conversations with people. It doesn't provide strategy or follow ups for the way to do things. It doesn't build a relationship with them. What it can do is it can help make managers better at doing their jobs. It can help with task tracking and making sure that you're on top of everything that needs to be done for those people. helps with having all the information on that person in one place to be able to call on when you need it. It gives you the ability to be a much better version of the job that you're trying to do or the role that you're trying to play. And I think that that's where I'd be putting my focus right now rather than trying to turn this into something that is going to mean I can just have five people in my business instead of a hundred.

Pauline Bertry 41:13

And and there is actually quite fun fun data on that. I don't remember the exact numbers, but what happened is that like a a s a study group, they gave people feedback, one provided by Chat GPT or like a model, and another one provided by an actual human. And a lot of people found that the ChatGPT feedback was better until the moment they learned that it was ChatGPT. Because

Patrick 41:44

Hmm.

Pauline Bertry 41:44

then it didn't feel like it was real, it felt like it was generic. So the the narrative I've been having for a very long time, it's not because ChatGPT is better at giving feedback, it's because like a lot of managers were never trained on how to provide feedback in the way where it helps people. So instead of Like just taking this part out of them and trying to delegate it to a model which cannot have the emotional intelligence and which cannot have the entire understanding of the job or of the situation the person was doing

Patrick 42:21

Can't do body language either, that's an important one.

Pauline Bertry 42:24

exactly and it cannot get a coffee with you. Like

Patrick 42:28

Mm.

Pauline Bertry 42:29

the it's much better to actually leverage the model to help managers Formulate the feedback in the way where it can be heard or to have them practice delivering it in the way where it gets people to listen and helps people to feel seen and heard. So fully fully with you on that. And I think there are many use cases I see specifically in the people, like people tech, where it's kind of trying to automate a lot of things. But what I would love to see more is use cases where we bring people closer and get them get them build meaningful relationship at the workplace because eventually this is what is gonna improve the retention and this is what is gonna improve the satisfaction at work.

Patrick 43:21

I agree that's the route I'll be going down with this too. think the challenge with that though is that the way that a lot of decisions are made within businesses, it's to do with the bottom line ultimately. the things that provide greater efficiency or greater revenue for someone are immediately visible and attributable to the implementation of something. Whereas the upside to some of that Again, the softer side of things, it is longer term and it's not as immediately attributable to the direct work that you're doing. But I think it's a lot of the stuff that people overlook when running a business that comes back to bite them further down the line.

Pauline Bertry 44:03

I agree. as a as a closing thought, so for someone who is building an agency or a service business in in the current environment, what would be your like top three top three recommendations or top three tips for them to build a successful model?

Patrick 44:25

So number one has to be, so in the professional services arena, people more or less are your products. And I think the, people that you get on board are incredibly important. If you get good people on board, you have to set things up to retain them as well and to make them happy and most face it to do the job. think oftentimes people get too focused on that immediate meeting of client needs. which can often burn people out and have good talent. Leave your team like churn rates in marketing agencies, like 25 % a year or something. This is again, needs to be fact checked, but it's high.

Pauline Bertry 45:07

Tha that's that's close to to reality. I think it's between twenty two and thirty depending on the market, which is twice the industry benefit. So yeah.

Patrick 45:16

Yeah, there we go. I'd say that this is, this is number one is, is get good people do what you can to keep good people. I think if I was setting something up now from scratch, I would also be building something, with AI natively built into, to everything. or everything where it makes sense entirely as well. So change, change has come, change is coming, as well. I think the people who are going to be best positioned to take advantage of that, the ones who embrace these new things, it's not going to be, you know, 100 % disruptive to the way that everything is done. Like some things are still going to remain the same, but you will be able to find some efficiencies and improvements in output if you are early to adapting to technology. think a lot of the bigger businesses are going to be doing those same sorts of integrations, but they move a lot slower. And you have the opportunity if you're something up now to do it much faster and to do it in a slightly better, better way that is building something for that rather than trying to alter something to fit that, which is something that never, never totally works. And then

Pauline Bertry 46:29

Yeah.

Patrick 46:30

I think, final part really is so from my own experience, like don't worry too much about failing with stuff. think that there's, there's obviously, there are some failures which you, which might cause you to like have to close the business. Maybe, maybe I'm not talking about those sorts of failures, but I think, I would, I would treat those, those things as opportunities to grow and learn and to make sure that you just adapt them quickly and. implement changes that mean the next time that situation arises, the outcome will be more positive as quickly as possible. Yeah, think the, again, things are changing quite a lot at the minute. And I think trial and error is really the only way that it is going to be very effective at finding the right path for stuff. Again, what works in one place might not work for another and you've really got to try different things to see what's going to work for you and your business.

Pauline Bertry 47:29

I love it. Thank you so much, Patrick. It was really great conversation. I learned a lot and I enjoyed it a lot.

Patrick 47:37

Thanks a was a really good conversation Pauline, very, very happy to be here.

Pauline Bertry 47:41

Thank you so much. Bye bye.

Patrick 47:42

Great, thank you, bye.