#39 Building and Selling a PR Agency with Lisa Paasche

Louise:
Today we’re joined by someone who truly shaped the landscape of digital PR, Lisa Paasch, the founder of Verve Search. Long before the digital PR boom of 2020, Verve Search had already established itself as an innovative agency renowned for creative and very successful digital PR campaigns. She’s since sold Verve and now helps other agencies navigate the challenges of growth and acquisition. In this episode, we’re going to chat more about the heydays of Verve, what it was like selling and life after birth. Welcome Lisa.

Lisa:
Thank you so much. That was such a nice intro. Can you just intro me everywhere?

Louise:
That’s lovely. Intro for hire.

Steve:
You spent a long time on that as well, you? Good work. Verve Search, massive inspiration to us at Propellernet, like genuinely, me and Lou talked about it a lot, your work, know, what you achieved, but even pre 2020, you were renowned as being one of the best digital PR agencies out there. When did you realise you’d kind of made it for want of a better phrase?

Lisa:
I think it was probably around 2016. And we had been doing kind of digital PR for quite a few years, but in the kind of like old school SEO way of digital PR. And that’s when we decided to really change things up. And that’s where I think the success really took off. And that was actually because of a really, really bad year in 2014. So at the end of 2014, we had a content team, which we called then Content Marketing. And it was very much like still, you know, the odd infographic, small piece of content, a lot of written content, trying to get journalists to publish stuff rewritten. Now it sounds insane, but that’s what we… And I remember the end of that year, our profits were the lowest that it had been in many years. And it was still profit, but the profits were low, the margins were tiny. It was like 10 % profit margin. And in my books, that was not great. And I was like, look, if we keep on doing the same thing as we had been doing, we will not really get anywhere.

It might’ve been at brightonSEO where Rory Sutherland was speaking. And he had a slide which had just loads of crosses on and one circle. And he said, if everyone’s drawing a cross, draw a circle. And that stuck in my mind. And I have always been really like, before I started Verve, I worked at a marketing agency, marketing advertising agency that had like a big creative team. And I always wanted to be part of that team. I had so many ideas, but they were like, shoo, you geek. And I was like, I think we really need to change it. We need to change what we do, and how we do it. My very brave, very thin line between brave and stupid. But it turns out to the right decision. In January, 2015, I actually made a big proportion of the agency redundant and shut down what we call the content team. Cause I wanted to create creative campaigns like it was an ad agency. So the slogan we had was ‘think like a 50s ad exec and execute like geek’. And that became like our motto. So we wanted to come up with really great ideas that the journalists wouldn’t be able to resist, even if it was a gambling client. You know, that was like the biggest aim. By mid 2015, we were already rolling. And from 2015 to 2017, when we sold, our margins grew from 10 % to 40 % and we sold to Omnicom. So that was the right decision. But I didn’t know it then. And I was actually really quite scared because as everyone knows, when you have to make big changes, people don’t like it. And if they don’t understand it, there’s a lot of challenges that goes with that. But I knew that we wouldn’t survive if we didn’t change things up.

Steve:
How immediate was it, you know, I love that cross and circle analogy, but how immediate was it when you made that shift that you realised it was really compelling for clients, for journalists? Was it like business started flooding in, that profit margin started going up straight away, or was it a slower burn than that?

Lisa:
Well, it was slow and fast because I knew that this would be the chance that we could really grow quickly, getting clients on board with that change of like, no, no, we’re now going to charge you double as much because we’re going to have a designer and developer, cetera, et cetera. That was obviously a bit of a challenge. And I have a story about that actually. And I think this was the start for us.

And it is relevant to Brighton, which where we are now. So we were working with a hotel client in Australia. We had actually never met them. They were called Hotel Club. And they were quite interested in doing something creative, but they didn’t have big budgets. One of my creative guys who I had kind of only just hired, but he was super shy and was very quiet spoken. Me and him were doing loads of brainstorming about what we could do to really impress them to then make them sign up to doing these creative campaigns. And we had this idea of doing a sightseeing video in Brighton, by via skateboard. We called it skate-seeing. And we were like, yeah, this is going to be so cool. And then I was like, I just don’t think I can get the client to sign off on the budget it would take to get the film crew, et cetera, et cetera.

So we continued kind of thinking of new and other ideas and then about two weeks or maybe three weeks later Matt came into my office and he was like Lisa I’ve got something to show you and he sat down and he’s like I really hope you’re gonna like this and he turned his computer around and he had gone and hired a student film crew from Brighton to do this video and it was so good and I was like okay and he’s like I hope you like it because I paid for it myself. I was like, it still gives me goosebumps because he really, really believed in it. He was like, I think you’ll be really good. He managed to do on a really low budget. He got some really good creatives, film students to do the video. And then when I had to that, I then went to the client and say, we’ve created this. We really believe it will work. Will you pay for it? And that was the first bigger one. The client was like, yes, we’re going to do this. And this is the client that we’d never even met in person. That was the start. So, you know, it takes a lot of brave decisions from a lot of people, not just me.

Louise:
Yeah, I feel like as a client, it’s like the ideal is like, and here’s the package up finish thing. Do you want this? Like, yeah, sure. It’s like, you know, it’s such a skill to be able to sell something in. It’s really lovely to be able to say like, this is exactly what it will look like. You mentioned how you were looking at like ad agencies. Were you looking at other PR agencies as well?

Lisa:
So, no, when I started hiring the team, obviously no one wanted to be a link builder. And we used to call it that for a while. And so I was like, I need to change the term or what we call it. And I didn’t want to be confused with like standard PR either, because it was very specifically negotiating a creative piece of content with the journalists. So it wasn’t really the same. And that’s when I made up the title ‘outreach’. So an outreach executive and outreach rather than it being digital PR, it now is. I wanted people that had the kind of mindset of a digital PR, but didn’t necessarily need to have the experience in digital PR. So I didn’t really look for people that already had that experience. It was more about the thinking, the kind of person that will not give up even if you get 50 nos because that’s really the main thing you need.

Steve:
Tenacity, such a key part. How difficult was it to find those people? Because you obviously one of the, if not the earliest, certainly one of the earliest, I remember joining Propellinet and it was a similar thing. It was like we’re hiring people who have a PR background, who understand creativity, but have that kind of geeky mindset as well. How did you find it? Like building that team? It must have been quite challenging at times.

Lisa:
Yes, it was, but I loved it because it turns out, like I was an SEO and then I was a managing director and a CEO. But the thing that I’ve always been interested in is people and how to figure out people, how to find the right people and how to motivate them to do great. So then I became slightly obsessed about how to figure out whether someone had that tenacity, that kind of grit.

I come from a quite challenging background myself. you know I’m Norwegian by the way. That’s what that weird accent is. I just now sound like a slightly aggressive, drunk Irish person trying to… In Norway, you think that all Norwegians have it all and it’s really easy. But my background was quite challenging. And I think that is important. Like when you’ve been through difficult things, you’re less likely to give up. So I started thinking of how do I, in an interview stage, figure out whether a person, one, has the kind of right mindset, how do you measure grit? How do you figure out whether someone has what it takes to keep going? There’s no one way of doing it, but I did realise there were some things that you could ask that would help you.

So I remember one interview with an outraged person who had literally just graduated from, is this Sussex University? it here? Yeah. And it was a journalist degree and he came across really great in the interview and I was like, yeah, I feel he has the thing. But I was like, how do I know? I was like, tell me something about, tell me a time where you found something challenging and how you overcame it. It was quite open or whatever. It could be related to your studies, it could be anything. And he told me this story of how he was covering a new story of the council that were helping an issue of homelessness by getting these big, you know, those empty trailer things. They were actually living inside of these trailers, I think. And he, this was like a big PR story, right? And he wasn’t quite sure whether that was, it was as grand as they said. So he broke into this area where they had these to then interview these people. And I was like, now that’s it. That’s the thing. And again, he was very, very shy or kind of reserved. And he ended up being the creative director.

Steve:
Really? Yeah. There you go. I thought you were going to say you did something like a Bear Grylls challenge like, I dropped him in the wild for 30 days, no supplies, what’s the tenacity like? But amazing, absolutely amazing. You knew what you were looking for.

Lisa:
Yeah, I knew what it would feel like. I knew what I would recognise if I saw it, but you have to kind of dig a bit. At the start, I did all the interviews myself, because it’s hard to figure out how you know. Instinct is a hard thing. And actually, that’s one of the reasons I started on my own as well, is because a lot of time is intuition for me, and it’s really hard to convince someone of intuition. You just think you sound a bit crazy, which also is true.

Louise:
Around this kind of time when you were hiring that team and getting this kind of perfect team together, were you looking at other agencies and seeing how you kind of differentiated from them or were you just on your own path and just focused on what you were doing?

Lisa:
I didn’t, to be honest. But mostly because I just believe that if you are spending loads of time looking to the side, you lose sight of the goal and you can waste a lot of time like that. But what I did want to do and what we did start really caring about was levelling up the industry as well. Doing more talks and concentrating on getting the bigger, the quality links rather than number of links. In fact, that became like a challenge to me. It’s like, look, we can do better than this. And although we didn’t look for what to compare ourselves, there were competition, course, like verb and distilled, I think certainly we were always like head to head and like, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t really analysis. I think people in the outreach team, they would do more of that, but I didn’t particularly do that.

Louise:
Yeah, I guess more if you’re doing more kind of research of what other clients are doing or the competitors are doing, that’s one thing, but maybe as an agency owner, like you said, looking to the side doesn’t really do you too much value.

Lisa:
Yeah, exactly. But there were loads of brainstorming sessions where they would be showing a campaign for propellant or from distilled from in that period from 2015 to 2020. There were some amazing kind of campaigns and people were doing great work. And so was really exciting.

Louise:
It was the good old… In many ways. Do you think it’s different now?

Lisa:
I feel really sad because I spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince people to do better. we built, I don’t know whether you know this, at Verve we also built a link scoring metric, which was our main focus. And that’s how we sold into clients as well. This is focusing on the quality. And I actually gave that out for free for people to use, but no one really bothered using it.

But I did feel like for a period everyone was focusing on quality and I now I work with SEO agencies and mentor and advise and what the hell? How is we’ve gone back in time like the amount of rubbish or, you know, people are again counting links or saying that was too hard. I don’t believe that. I really don’t believe that. think they’ve convinced themselves that it’s too hard to do good work, so you just might as well do meh work.

Steve:
Sort of take the easy route rather than do it the hard way. Interesting. that the kind of, what kind of work is making you say, obviously you don’t have to name names of actual clients and stuff, but is it like more reactive style of things?

Lisa:
Yeah, reactive, look, it can do well. And I think this is what the problem with the kind of like reactive campaigns or focusing on doing something that goes viral is that it isn’t consistent enough to increase rankings. And if it isn’t consistent enough to increase rankings, you’re not going to keep the client. And if you’re not going to keep the clients, it’s going to cost you more to get new business. This is all margin related. And this is where it becomes harder and harder to run an agency. And I feel like people have shot themselves in the foot by thinking, well, the client wants to count links or they want to do reactive campaigns. And I do think there was a period just after I left Verve where everyone suddenly was doing reactive kind of news jacking and all of that. And I was like, yeah, that’s all good to do one great one like that. But if that was it for that client, and I have seen that for, I’m not gonna name names but yes, there are a few of those. As long as you, you know, please do that as well as doing campaigns that will get links throughout the years maybe because it’s genuinely useful.

Steve:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s a fine balance to tread, but I think there’s also the shift. I’d be interested to get your views on this because journalists and obviously it’s changed quite a lot, media landscape. a lot of what we see in here is that journalists are so time pressured now that those big campaigns, this isn’t an excuse, but it’s more like a realism. Like the reactive stuff is just like, if it’s topical, we can publish it straight away. But if we go too far that way, then maybe with just feeding journalists the same stuff and they’re not getting the really creative work. So a really interesting balance.

Lisa:
Yeah, I think that that was the same thing we had back then. I remember one of our clients, it was BBC and we got BBC because we outreached them so many times. And he was like the BBC future editor was like, look, you keep on sending me these, but look, we don’t really want to publish it. But we would be interested in you doing some campaigns for us. We don’t need the SEO, but we just want to do the campaigns. And at that time everyone was saying, their journalists won’t publish this or that because it’s for a product or for a client, et cetera. And I was like, that isn’t true. And in the end, the guy from BBC Future, spoke at the conference as well, and he was telling people, look, we need content, we need ideas because we are so time pressured to create so much content every day, and we are being measured on social shares and comments and engagement.

Louise:
Yeah I remember going to your outreach conference. I think a couple of times and I remember coming back to Propellernet with lots of notes and going through them with the team and you touched on it before how you wanted to kind of help the industry and help the industry grow and yeah that’s what like got me, I mean I was already working in digital PR but I was like oh wow seeing what other people can be achieving with it and the way other people kind of approach it really inspired me. little thank you.

Lisa:
Did you? Yes. Thank you. That means a lot. Thank you.

Louise:
Yeah before we come to you selling Verve, was there anything in your Verve time where you have any regrets over things that happened or decisions that you made?

Lisa:
Well, I think you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have regrets. did best as I could at the time, but there are things that I really wish I had more understanding of. And I think only, you know, it only comes with hindsight. I think especially, you know, at the end for me, like selling was a very different agency or a very different targets and goals and stuff. And I feel like I held my integrity doing the right thing then. But I think one of the main things I would say is that I was diagnosed with ADHD about two and a half years ago. And I now realise just how much that would have helped knowing that before, because I now realise that I was such a fast paced person and had such ideas and wanted to execute really fast, sometimes I would railroad people by going like, no, we’re doing it and not spend enough time explaining. But I didn’t really understand, I couldn’t understand what they were looking at me like a question mark for. Like now I know more about myself. I think I would have spent a little bit more time. I would have for sure communicated that.

Although I think I kind of knew, subconsciously knew that I did have a difference in the way that I am. I just blamed her being Norwegian. But one of the things I used to do, which now really makes me laugh, I didn’t know that then, but the week before my period, I would always really get really stressed out and be really like quick to pissed off. And that’s quite a lot of women experience that. But it turns out when with ADHD has that quite like it’s very heightened. And I used to warn people by having a Darth Vader stress ball on my desk when it was that week. So like you could come in but

Steve:
Who knows what’s gonna happen?

Lisa:
And so I think I tried to mitigate things that are, that were hard for me. But if I could have just communicated that better, think it would have been easier because there were times where I would get really pissed off or I would be very reactive and not really think about what I was saying. Not that I think about what I’m saying now either. But I now am better at knowing how to explain things afterwards, saying this was not on you. This was me. I think I wish I’d done more for understanding how I impacted others.

Louise:
Yeah, I think like, in general, people have got lot more aware about obviously people being neurodiverse, but also just people working differently, just being different people, humans. And so there is a bit more understanding that, you know, some people just work in slightly different ways. So I feel like with time, you know, now is a lot different from 2016 kind of time where that wasn’t really discussed as much or people just weren’t really aware that it made such a difference.

Lisa:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I remember really advocating for this, that people work differently at Verve and that, you know, even like things like brainstorming, like I can’t sit in a room and write down ideas and then present it with other people because my brain only really works while talking. And so we would have, I would be very good at helping people find their way on this. I just didn’t realise much about my own challenges.

Steve:
And it’s interesting because when you, I’ve not run an agency neither of us have, but we run a team, a growing team, but you, you kind of put processes in place, right? So like there’s some things that have like a natural flow to them, like how we generate ideas and how we present them back. But you want some flexibility in that because you’re right. Everyone works differently. So if you had these really rigid processes in place, it freaks people out. Cause some people like to just to go for a walk and think of ideas. We’ve tried so many ways and now it’s kind of like, we’ll have a brief and then we’ll come back in like a week’s time and we’ll just share what we’ve got. You can put it on a sheet. You can say it out loud, you know, try and mix it up a bit, but it’s, it’s hard cause you don’t always realise this at the time. You can’t get everything right.

Lisa:
Yeah, that’s true. But yeah, I love those brainstorming things and sharing the ideas though. That’s the fun bit. yeah.

Louise:
I didn’t realise that you were coming up with some of the ideas.

Lisa:
Yeah, that was why I wanted to have that. Because I’d had so many ideas when I worked at the agency before and felt a bit sad that because I wasn’t a creative by training or by experience, I honestly don’t believe that that needs to be a thing. Anyone could come up with ideas. And we had ideas that my PA came up with. It was really important to me that we were not a creative agency where only some people are creative. Obviously, there are some people that are more suited for that and can turn them out, but everyone should be able to contribute.

Steve:
That’s interesting in itself because you mentioned about the taking inspiration from like ad agencies, which did have those very dedicated creative departments. So you kind of took the essence of it, right? But then made it your own. Before we get onto that, we will get onto you selling Verve, because we’re keen to talk to you about that. what were your, like, can you name a couple of favorite ideas from your time at Verve? Either that you came up with, your PA came up with, whoever came up with. I’m just very interested. There were so many we like.

Lisa:
Yeah, so James, who was at the end our head of innovation, James Finlayson, me and him, we are basically very, very different. But I feel like we were like different sides of the same coin. But me and him had just some like crazy, crazy ideas. And sometimes people be like, you what now? And one of them, which we nearly, this was idea that actually didn’t make it, but it’s one of my favourites.

I really want to work with LEGO. I have been a Star Wars fan since I was a little girl. And this was back in the day where LEGO had just got the Lucasfilm and Lego were doing Star Wars figures and whatever. And I’d been walking around with Lego in my handbag because I was like, one day I will get the opportunity to pitch to LEGO. And people would see this LEGO going like, why are you walking around with LEGO? How old are your kids?

And I was like, they will make sense soon. And then we had an opportunity to pitch to LEGO and me and James had this idea that we would build the… So was just before one of the premieres of one of the movies. And the idea was that we would build the Death Star, the LEGO Death Star, beam up to near space and then it would explode.

Steve:
Amazing. Completely normal idea.

Lisa:
But it turns out you can’t really blow things up in space and even the tiniest piece of Lego could kill someone. But the weird thing is that we were so close to getting that idea made, but Lucasfilm said no. We so excited, we so very nearly made it ourselves because at that time it only cost like 10 grand to be, it was like the weather balloons, beam up and we were like, should we just do it? I’m like, it’d be completely random. But it was, yeah, we had so much fun coming up with ideas. And I actually, one of my favourite ideas that did make it that I’m like, I can’t believe this worked. The idea was basically we would go through all the scripts and see which movie was the swearest and which actor had the most swears, you know, and everyone expected to be Samuel L Jackson. And it wasn’t, it was Noah Hill in Wolf of Wall Street. And that’s the perfect thing. It is like, it really thinks it’s going to happen. Back in the day in SEO, we used to say the most difficult things is the three P’s, poker pills and porn was the difficult, I used to say hard to rank, but… And so being able to get links for a casino gambling client is really difficult and everyone always tells you it’s not going to be possible. This, some of the surprising footage we got, coverage we got from this was actually on The Tonight Show where they printed out the campaign, logo and everything. Samuel L. Jackson was like, what do mean I’m not the fucking swearest!

Steve: 
And it Jonah Hill, didn’t he get involved on social as well? So he was like really chuffed.

Lisa:
He was like, yeah. It was crazy how much coverage we got from that. And again, we just really enjoyed coming up with ideas that, you know, it would be so good that they would not care what the brand or the client was. And that was like a real kind of target for us. Like, can we come up with something? Obviously the relevance is entertainment. And back then, like entertainment would be enough. if it is, you know, think we had the New York Post with that as well, which we’d never had at that point. So the quality of those links were so insane and the client was very, very happy, of course. I love doing those campaigns. But one more I really enjoyed and that’s probably because we worked with Expedia in all of the Nordic countries. And I’m originally from Norway and again in Scandinavia, especially in Norway,

They had a lot of like belief that you can’t get links for SEO. It is impossible. And we were like, I don’t think so. And for Expedia, we had this 75 years anniversary of the World War II, Norway being occupied. And Norway actually managed to hold off the Germans for an entire month in Nydvig, far up north with the naval fleet. They managed to keep them off for an entire month with help from the British because they knew the sea, obviously. But in the fjord in Arvik, are literally like so many warships sunk from the Germans. So we created a campaign about all the different warships. You could then go onto this site to read about them and the history. We then sent a film crew into one guy in Arvik who was very, very old, who was a veteran, who was there. And so we did this interview, et cetera. And it was just a good quality campaign. It was relevant because it was about travel and its history. And that got links from NRK, which is the biggest news channel, TV channel in Norway. But it also got links from Herin, which is the army in Norway and the royal family. So we were like, what did you say about NRK?

It’s like proper journalism though. So that’s the thing. It’s like a really interesting subject matter told brilliantly. So like, why wouldn’t people cover it, link to it? It’s finding the right way of doing it. Cause it was probably impossible before, but if you’re sending them stuff that’s not right.

And also the challenge in that kind of digital PR outreach for SEO is that you usually didn’t get the huge budgets to do a… So you had to think of ways of doing it for very little. And that I think we were really good at that. We would always find a way of like… One campaign we did for Expedia on that…

We put a 360 camera on a train from Bergen to Flom. And we managed to convince the… And that cost absolutely zero in production because we convinced a company here in the UK to do all the filming and do all the work for free because we would also mention them in the coverage. And we got the tourist board in Flom to pay for hotels, etc. So we managed to do it for nothing and we convinced the NSP, which is the train company, to let us put a camera on the train. But that was the fun stuff, the whole like, know, willing and dealing, convincing people, because it wasn’t just about the links, it was about how do we make this with not much budget? Because we want the budget to be the outreach bit, so we could actually get the money.

Steve:
Okay, this is a great segue. I was really happy with that when I heard the word dealing I was like, we’ve to get into this. We’d like to ask you about selling Verve. You had this incredible journey. Why did you sell? What was the, what was the reasoning, the rationale, if you don’t mind us asking.

Lisa:
Yeah, no, not at all. So I always knew I wanted to sell. So it wasn’t that I’d already, when I set up for a bit, it wasn’t that like, I’m going to sell in this many years, but I knew that I wanted to grow something and sell and then do something else. So I always had that at the back of my mind, but it was about 2014 where I was like, really want to. I’d already worked at that point 10 years in SEO and I wanted to do something else and I wanted to do something different. And so that’s when we started kind of like, I started talking to people about wanting to sell and it was more like, and then I literally had this thing, I do vision boards every year and at Verve I used to do this with the team every year. So everyone had vision boards on their desk, like actual physical ones. had like big, and I’d been doing them since I was like a teenager. And I remember that year putting on my vision board that I would tell and how much I would sell for, et cetera, et cetera. And then it was on the vision board. It was in my mind. And then things started happening. Although that was the year that the profits for Louis. So that is probably, everyone’s like, well, this is a great time.

Louise:
So you put it on your vision board, what’s then the process like?

Lisa:
Yeah, so obviously, from, so started working with an advisor. The funny thing with that was that as they started coming in once a month, I didn’t have anything structural like a board or anything. I a, I’d just formed a kind of a management team. It was really useful for me to sit down once a month and really kind of think about what I was doing. And I remember sitting with these guys and they were asking me questions. And every time they asked me a question, I was like, hmm, this is interesting, the questions they’re asking. But also I was like, I feel like they’re not asking the right questions. I decided I was just going to focus on doing great campaigns, but I realised I needed to really focus on the profit margin because everything they tell you at the start is like, if you want to sell, you need to get to the 1 million EBITDA and no one will talk to you before that. And I was like, well, I’m nowhere near that. And I was like, well, I can sell like this much to be able to get them 10 % margin or I can improve the margins. So I was like, I am going to focus this year on getting the margins, getting people doing quality work, really getting the team working well together. And so then it became like, okay, how do we increase margins? Like, what do we need to do? So I focus on getting rid of clients that weren’t actually earning any money. So doing profitability and utilisation of each client, what kind of work was actually profitable, what wasn’t profitable. And then just moving towards what was more profitable, which was outreach. so we did less and less technical SEO or strategy work. And because we’d had a few campaigns that were doing really well, we were just like, let’s double down on this. And then by the end of 2015, I already had Omnicom come to me. And it wasn’t through the advisors, actually. I had lunch with someone at Omnicom and they were asking questions and they were like, oh, it’s really interesting what you guys are doing. And then through 2016, we then started really focusing on getting the winning the awards, getting ourselves like noticed. And that I think 2016 was the year that everything. That’s when things started really working. had the right team. just hired and the biggest, the best decision I made was when I hired Bex, which was my CMO. What I was really aware of is that I can break walls and I can wheel and deal, but you asked me for details and asked me to read a contract and it will take me like a week.

And when I found her and when she was focusing on, you know, actually getting things happening on time and I focused on the clients on the outward, that was the magic that made such a difference. And then then we we started going out. And this is kind of the process of the &A of like getting ready to sell is ideally you have to be quite close to the one million EBITDA, not necessarily for specialists and we were were SDO kind of outreach, very specifically outreach specialist. So it could be less, but that mark is really it. And then you have to make sure you have everything in order that you have EMI. Like if you have a management team, make sure that you they have EMI shares or that they have options so that they are part of the journey with you. That was really important to me because I really wanted everyone to feel like this was all of our journey. So I was quite open, very much against the advice of my advisors when I did hire them for the &A process was that I didn’t feel comfortable not telling. I just don’t, it’s just not me. That will be so against everything I’ve told everyone for all this time. Once we had the offer and we had other offers as well, we did do the dance, I call it, where you go and it was awfully like dating. I was just like, this is weird. But we got the offer from Omnicom and that took a long time to negotiate. It nearly nine months. Could have had a baby in that time.

Yeah really it takes that, well we’ve never done it but it takes that long. Such a long process. Especially a big, big network like that. And yeah, it took a long time and it was really, really challenging to keep business going while you were doing all these talks with lawyers and all of that. And I wasn’t super confident that it was the right choice. That’s one thing I wish I had listened to. Because I’m such an intuition person and I was like, what about this? But you you get really quickly swept into the, you know, it’s going to happen. This thing that I’ve been wanting to happen, it’s going to happen. We did all that we could do to try to make sure that it would be a good deal. But yeah, the whole &A process, I think in general, are just a bit, it’s just a bit broken. It doesn’t quite make sense to me now.

Louise:
So it didn’t quite work out how you, you obviously sold as you wanted to do, but the actual deal, everything didn’t quite work out as you intended or wanted.

Louise:
No, I think it’s not really the deal. The deal was good. But I think I don’t think people realise just how unlikely it is that you’re going to get the amount that you think you’re going to get. Because most deals, especially in this kind of space, is based on upfront amount, initial amount, and then you have an earn out. And an earn out can be anything from like two to four years. I think ours were for like three years. we, you know, that period and what you have to achieve while being part of a whole different agency or network, there’s so many things that is different at that point. And that is what I underestimated, just how difficult that would be. Like I now have like the boss that had before I started Verve. I remember nearly not. So I started Verve and I’d got an offer to join a really big kind of software company as the VP of marketing. And they were going to pay me a lot of money. And I was like, maybe I shouldn’t do Verve. Maybe I just get someone to run that. And I went back to my old boss and I said, should I do this? And he was like, Lisa, you are completely completely unmanageable. And that’s a good point. And I wish that had been repeated to me when I was on that cell is that when you are an entrepreneur CEO, are someone that will have a vision and you will go for it. But that isn’t necessarily the same in big corporate environments. You have to get everyone’s opinion and ideas and that isn’t me.

Louise:
Hahaha. But you said you started on your own for a reason. Yeah. So yeah, it must have been quiet.

Lisa:
Yeah, also we were very, very unlucky in that our last year of earn out, which typically is where you get the bigger amount was 2020. I didn’t know that. I was going to say that’s awfully bad luck, but that sounds really terribly British. That’s awfully bad luck. But that is really unlucky. It’s a dreadful year. It was a very dreadful year and we had too many like travel clients. So by the May, I knew we would never reach those targets. I had to put loads of people on furlough and I knew that I would get, me and all the other shareholders would get absolutely nothing for that year. But that turns out to be, I feel really emotional talking about this, but that turns out to be the thing that I’m the most grateful for, because it really taught me about what is important to me. Because I was knackered, I was already stressing out. But there is no way I could have just left everyone to HR of a network to figure out how to make that work. And I still feel like that’s the thing that I’m most proud of. And I know loads of people really hated me because I had to make people redundant, I had to restructure the whole thing. And it wasn’t for me, but I still feel really glad that I stayed because I don’t think I could live with myself if I had left. And that is really important. It’s really important to figure out who you are. And for me, my integrity or doing what I think is right is really important and more important than the money. I also, worth knowing is that I got divorced just after I sold, so that also turned out to be a lot less. But I now think that, and I have to reframe this, and I think it’s really important is that if I had got all of what I thought I would get, I wouldn’t be doing the stuff that I do now. I wouldn’t be on the journey that I have been on for the last four years. And I think that would have been a greater shame because I feel more aligned with who I am. I feel truer to myself. I feel more honest than I ever have. And I think that’s the thing that people really strive for is figuring themselves out and knowing who they are. And also, be honest, I’ve wanted the money because I had none growing up. But then when it came to the sale where everyone would have thought I bought a car or, you know, I bought a custom made viking outfit. This amount of money, I was just like, what the fuck? But that made sense to me. So it was like, I’m just a bit of a geek that just wants cool stuff. And you don’t really need that much money for doing cool shit.

Steve:
This is true. I agree with you as well that you, learn a lot from, adversity, you know, when things are going well, like everyone’s patting you on the back, you kind of pat yourself on the back and think, this is great. You know, I’m making the right decisions. When things are harder, you, you learn a lot. That’s part of, of the journey. And you said it wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have got to where you are now. So let’s talk about what you’re doing now post cell. Tell us a little bit about that and, how you feel about it.

Lisa:
Yeah, so after I left, so I left literally at the end, I had this thing in my head I would not leave before I was supposed to. So it was the end of 2020, the contract was basically January 2021, and I had a massive like, that was, I call it a, you know, they call it burnout. That just means breakdown. Like, I don’t think anyone, like the burnout is just a breakdown. And it was a really challenging year, that first year. But from that is where I then, I’ve always been interested in self-development and like I sent most of my management team to the Hoffman process, which is like a week long self-development program. And I’d done loads of stuff like that before, but suddenly from ashes of that breakdown, I started feeling more in tune with what I really care about. And I started reading a lot of the kind of psychology and neuroscience. I really wanted to start a master’s in applied neuroscience because that’s between neuroscience and psychology. But I really felt so exhausted. I couldn’t do it. I did what anyone would have done in that scenario, started telling jokes and did stand up.

Steve:
It’s so unexpected. So wonderfully unexpected.

Lisa:
I’d like honestly all my friends were like, apart from my best friend, who was the one that forced me to do this stand-up comedy course. But I think I just needed something completely different to reset. And I wasn’t expecting it to take two years of my life. But I got really excited about it and started a comedy club and got really focused on doing stand-up for a while. Also, I had a very strict non-compete from Omnicom. So I did mentoring, I could do one-on-one, but I couldn’t really do any agency advising or I could, but I don’t want to talk to any of those lawyers ever again. So I did that for a while. And while I was doing self-studying of learning about more about neuroscience and psychology, and last year, beginning of last year, I then started kind of really thinking about what I wanted to do for my consultancy, which I called Ekte.

And Ekte is Norwegian for real authentic. It’s about like being who you are and being comfortable with it. So I now basically mostly mentor and advise agency owners or founders. The kind of spiel is that if you want to sell, I’ll help you do that. But the thing I care most about is helping people figure out like what they actually want, who they are, whether they are leading with their real self. Because I think a lot of midlife kind of challenges comes about because you have strayed way too far away from the person you are. Like if this is who you are, this is who you always are, these are your values, these are your integrity, all of it. If you start adjusting too far because you want people to like you, you want people to think you’re successful, whatever it is. The further this goes away from who you are, I call this the unhappiness gap. And there are so many founders that have a very big gap because, and it kind of happened to me where I realised I made myself, like I was verve or that that was my personality, being a person running an agency. And that isn’t good for anyone.

And so helping people really figure out themselves, their background, what challenges they’ve gone through to figure out what is problems and what are actually just triggers and going through that. I really enjoy doing that. And now I have so many kind of ideas and plans of things to do to actually help people be more of who they are, basically.

Louise:
I guess because you’ve seen all these examples of various different people where you think actually various different people are having this issue in various different ways. Yes. So now you can advise a bit better.

Lisa:
Yes, and also I think I’m in a good place. I love doing the advising for agencies to help them figure out things within the agency. the world of business is about people. People is what businesses are. And if you can’t figure out that bit, then you’re not going to do well at business. Because the easier bits are actually improving the margins or doing the utilisation tracking or… all of that is quite, that’s like maths. But people is connection. And if you’re not authentic, they’re not going to follow you. And they’re not going to believe in you. And you’re not going to be able to do really awesome stuff. And I really think that that’s what I did manage to do. And I didn’t do it perfectly. I made many mistakes. But I do believe that people knew me. And that they knew that I was authentic and I was truthful. Good or bad. People are very comfortable with you being an asshole, as long as you’re an authentic asshole. But being authentic is actually really important from a neuroscience point of view. This is where we always know whether someone’s being authentic or not, because you’re in your brain, the limbic system, which has no capacity for language, is where you make all the decisions. But that’s not where our thinking happens. So you always know when you don’t like someone, but you don’t know why. The likelihood is they’re not an asshole, but they’re just not being authentic. You can spot that? I think, yes. Everyone can spot that. That is literally like built in. You are like a detector of inauthenticity.

Steve:
You just did? Talking of authenticity, advice, you know, the things you’re doing now, wanted to take you back to the very beginning and just ask you like, if you could give yourself one piece of advice from either, let’s take, where are we going to start this from? Just before you started Verve? Not right to the beginning of Lisa’s life. Let’s do from Verve. From Verve. If you could give yourself one piece of advice or do something differently, what would it be? If you pointed out some mistakes, you’ve been very candid, but is there one thing you wish you’d done differently?

Lisa:
Don’t be so harsh on yourself and take things slower. Don’t be so afraid of thinking things through. It doesn’t all have to happen straight away.

Steve:
I like that. Thank you Lisa.

Lisa:
Thank you. There’s this quote that I really love that is, blessed are the broken ones because they let in the light. And I think we spend so much time worrying about the parts of us that are broken, that we don’t realise that that’s the thing that actually helps us connect with people.

Louise:
That’s beautiful. I really like that. Thank you so much. This has been a really fascinating talk. Thank you so much for allowing us to delve into the nitty gritty of Verve. Like me and Steve were very keen watchers of Verve. So thank you for letting us geek out for a second on that. And really exciting to hear what you’re doing now. Is there anything that you would like to promote at this point? I know you have a podcast. Yes. So there’s that.

Lisa:
Yes, I do have a podcast. It’s called Am I Crazy or… And it’s a podcast about everything that kind of makes you feel crazy. So the first season was on perimenopause, which hit me really hard. I don’t know why they call that second spring. It’s more like monsoon season. And the next one I’m recording now is on ADHD, because obviously I got that very late diagnosis. Other than that, Ekte, which is my consultancy, I basically help people figure out where to go next or whether to take their agency to exit or wherever it is. But I love working with people. that’s what I will continue doing.

Louise:
And I did actually notice I saw your headshot on Hive Manchester. So you’re a few talks coming up, things like that.

Lisa:
Yes, I’m doing a talk with agency hackers in November on operations. But yeah, I’m speaking at Hive again next year. So Charlie Whitworth is one of my mentoring clients. And I’m now starting getting back into the industry.

Steve:
Love that. Love that we’ll see more of you. And it’s linked in the best place for people to get in touch with you.

Lisa:
Yes, LinkedIn, and you can send me an email as well, [email protected]. Great.

Steve:
Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute joy.

Lisa:
Thank you so much, guys. Thank you.