‍

In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Marketer, I'm joined by Mark Colgan of Yellow O. Mark shares the inside scoop on how he built, grew and sold Speak On Podcasts...

As a business owner, you know that one of the most important decisions you can make is to invest in a business acquisition. Acquiring another company can be an excellent way to expand your operations, increase market share, and diversify your portfolio.

However, it’s important to understand the risks associated with such investments and how to properly leverage them for maximum return. In this article, we’ll take a look at how Mark Colgan leveraged his business acquisitions for investment opportunities. We’ll also discuss the key considerations when evaluating potential acquisitions and how to maximize returns on such investments.

By understanding these concepts, you’ll be better equipped to make informed decisions about your own investments in business acquisitions. Mark Colgan is an experienced entrepreneur who has successfully acquired several businesses over the years. He has developed a strategy for leveraging these acquisitions into profitable investments that have yielded impressive returns on his initial investment. One of Mark’s most successful investments was in an online retail company he acquired in 2013.

At the time of acquisition, the company was generating $2 million per year in revenue but had little potential for growth due to its limited product range and lack of marketing resources. Mark recognized that by investing additional capital into marketing efforts and expanding the product line, he could significantly increase sales revenues while also reducing costs associated with inventory management and customer service operations.

He invested $1 million into marketing initiatives which resulted in increased sales revenues of $5 million within two years after acquisition – more than doubling his initial investment! Mark also leveraged his other business acquisitions by taking advantage of economies of scale – combining multiple companies under one umbrella organization allowed him to reduce overhead costs while increasing efficiency across all operations through shared resources and streamlined processes.

This enabled him to maximize profits from each individual acquisition while minimizing risk associated with any single venture or sector-specific downturns or market fluctuations. In addition to leveraging economies of scale across multiple businesses, Mark also focused on creating value through strategic partnerships with other companies operating within related industries or sectors – allowing him access to new markets as well as additional sources of revenue streams from cross-promotional activities between partner organizations .

This enabled him not only increase profits from existing businesses but also create new opportunities for growth through collaboration with other industry players . When evaluating potential acquisitions , it is important consider factors such as market size , competitive landscape , customer base , pricing structure , operational efficiency , scalability potential , financial stability , management team experience & expertise . All these factors will help determine whether an acquisition is likely generate positive returns on investment over time .

Additionally , it is essential conduct thorough due diligence before committing any funds towards an acquisition ensure that all risks are properly assessed & managed appropriately . By following Mark Colgan's example & leveraging strategic partnerships & economies scale across multiple businesses , entrepreneurs can maximize their return on investment when acquiring another company . Understanding key considerations when evaluating potential acquisitions & conducting thorough due diligence are essential steps towards ensuring successful outcomes from such ventures .


Thanks for listening and hit me up if you have any questions!

Episode transcript

always be connecting. The more people you meet, the more opportunities come your way. Not that they happen there and then, but in the long run. Hello and welcome to this episode of Confessions of a B3 Marketing. Maybe I'm being a little bit selfish in this one because the guest I'm actually bringing on, Mark Colgan, previously of Speak On podcast, just went through the sale of that business.

And it's something that's super interesting to me, like how they were able to grow and scale operations in their business, but then also the selling of the business. So maybe not directly relevant to B3 Marketing, but definitely overlaps. So let's jump in to this discussion right now with Mark.

Mark, welcome to the show.

Hey Tom, good to be here.

So today, before we jump into the topic, I have to compliment you on the background.

What is that to your right?

This thing here?

Yeah. It's a photo booth. So I'm taking all my online marketing activities to go offline and run it as a little side project. It's also an excuse to meet new people and increase my surface area of opportunity. So the more people I meet, the more potential work comes in. I've always had that attitude and this is like a multiplier for that.

So this is something on the agenda for later in this interview. Okay. The new project. So we're going to dig into that. Perfect. But the main focus is going to be, I guess, the intersection of B2B and business building, because Speak On Podcast, a valued partner of fame and from the outside, what looks to be an awesome business has passed hands from yourself to some other people.

So we'll get to that, but first it'll be good just to give an intro to the audience, people listening to what Speak On Podcast was or it still exists.

Is, yeah.

No, it's still the same. So nothing's changed. So we are essentially a very premium podcast guest booking agency. So our customers are typically thought leaders within B2B brands, maybe agency owners, some coaches and consultants who want to get their message on other people's podcasts. So we do all of the research, we prepare them, we position them in the right way.

And then we reach out to podcast hosts and manage the booking process, which can be quite tenuous at times. And then we set them up for success in every way we can by additional coaching and ongoing training.

Like, for example, Gong were a client and they had like four of their leadership that you guys were booking on podcasts. Yeah. So with Gong, we just had their CMO Udi, but for Paddle, we had four of their leadership team. Yeah. Sick. Cool. And you would charge like a flat rate for X amount of interviews placed. Yeah. We typically started off with a campaign of 10 podcast interviews.

One, it helped us because we didn't know what the initial kind of total podcast market would be for that particular audience they wanted to reach.

Secondly, it can be quite overwhelming.

Imagine the CMO of these Series D companies, how much time can they really find for these podcast interviews?

So we started with 10, but the majority of customers, if they had the time and there was enough podcast to go after, they would renew for an additional fee for an additional 10 podcasts interviews. And you started this guy called Jacob, who's also a guest on the show. You guys were actually both doing it separately and then you combined forces. That was quite a cool story. That's right. Yeah.

We had like a mutual connection, put us in touch with each other. And I think it was only after about 45 minute conversation, we said, why work against each other when we can work together, build something quicker and faster and better.

And yeah, pretty much two and a half years later, I'm out of the business now from the day to day and Jacob's still involved.

But yeah, that's been a, when you look back, it's quite a quick journey.

Yeah, two and a half years. And I remember the rough spear responsibilities. Like I think you were on sales and Jacob was on customer experience. Yeah. So Jacob is more service delivery and marketing. And then I took on sales operations and the HR, put on the CEO hat, dealt with all of the internal and the hiring and everything like that as well. But sales still has to take priority.

So sales first and everything else after.

And was it like largely a full time role for you?

Cause I know you had other things on the side, but would you say like 80% of your time, 90% of your time?

Yeah, I'd say like 90% of my time was there. Of the other things outside of Speak On Podcast, a lot of it was advisory or mentoring. So it really just took me turning up and speaking or sharing some insight rather than actually doing any implementation. So it was quite easy to manage both.

And there were FlashR, a number of other companies that do this obviously like in any niche, but it seemed to me that you guys just like, I don't know, everything about what you guys built seemed better.

Can you like give us some insight into how you manage that?

Yeah, sure. So I think from the very beginning, we understood that we had two customers. One customer would pay us and the other one wouldn't actually pay us with money. But if we gave them a good experience, they'd make our lives better in the future. So the customer that paid us was the actual customer, like the CMO at Gong. And then the customer that didn't pay us was the podcast host themselves.

So we knew that we had to give them equally a great experience like we had to for our paying customers. So that was like the first kind of mindset that we went in.

And then I think one of my strengths is that I am able to put myself in other people's shoes and just think like, what would I really want in this situation?

So when it came to reaching out to podcast hosts, you don't want to send as a host, you don't want to receive 15 bullet points of topics that this person can speak about, especially when they're bland and generic. And I know you've been on the receiving end and fame is on the receiving end of a lot of these pictures.

And that warped before I got started, I signed up to a few courses and looked at a few YouTube videos. And I was just like, I can't believe they're sending this crap emails out to people. So that was another thing that we did to differentiate ourselves as well.

And then just obsessing over the customer experience, I think Tom, you and I spoke the other, I think it was last year now back in London, where these little moments that matter in the customer journey, and how do you optimize the experience for the customer every moment?

So there's lots of little Easter eggs and little moments that would make people smile throughout everything that we did.

Can you share like one or two of them?

Yeah, sure. So from a customer, we would pay for a session with a professional voice and presentation coach. And not always mention that at the beginning, but offer it as a surprise. The for a host, we would record a personalized thank you video, individual thank you video to the host after they accepted a guest recommendation from us as well. So just two little examples on either side. Yeah.

So you're not necessarily like telling or informing people they're going to have this great thing. So that when they receive it, they're like, wow, these guys are awesome. Yeah. Another thing that we do as well is we have an in-house designer. So when our customers first interview goes live, we then take that first interview, we repurpose it into several assets and then share it with them.

Then it is a way for us to explain that we have this service and it's an upsell opportunity for us. But we do it knowing that maybe 50% of our customers won't take us up on that offer. But it's still a nice gift, still a nice gesture. Got it. So that's all like the snippets, etc. in the customer's own branding. Yeah. Great.

We go to their website, take the colors, look at the fonts, we do our best to match it. But most of the graphic designers are awesome. So she does a great job of matching their style. And I remember seeing the ones that went out for Paddle and I just thought they looked like Paddle could literally just upload that into their LinkedIn company page and post out. They're really good.

And so yeah, what you're doing here is obviously adding value, but be also giving a little trial of the upsell. Yeah. Yeah. Makes total sense. And so if I were to come and buy, I'd buy like 10 episodes, 10 like guest placements, and then I could choose to have or not have the like content creation part.

Were there any other upsells?

Yeah, some people had the team and the resource internally to do it. So if they did, we didn't push it hard on them. But it was only really that as an upsell. We did offer coaching as an upsell, then we included it, and then we separated it again. So there is now an upsell for additional coaching if they require it.

And that's typically for customers who are maybe smaller companies or more agency owners who may need more advice around how to structure their introduction, how to structure their call to action.

What does a funnel look like for them so that they can direct people to?

Is there anything they can give away like a lead magnet, for example?

And that was very much run by Jacob and tailored to the individual companies and the people that we're working with.

Do you have any like to switch to operations now?

Because let's say you have 30 people, I don't know how many people you had any one time like where you had to be responsible for booking shows. I bet that's an operational nightmare. Like with any big insights or tips you can give on enabling a smooth operation when you have high volume. Yeah. So at peak we had 22 people, 10 of those were booking agents.

So we had 10 people managing several clients, sending out several emails. So a few ways that we handled the operation. So first of all, we didn't play the numbers game. So we didn't send out 50 emails to different podcast hosts and hoping to get one or two replies, which is what a lot of the agencies do. So that was, that helped us keep the actual volume quite low.

And then from day one, we use HubSpot as our main kind of tracking system. So any email that went out to a customer or to a host was logged in HubSpot. So if one of the booking agents was ill or somebody was taking holiday, we had a record of everything in there, which helped keep things pretty manageable as well.

And then we would use, we started off using Trello, but we quickly outgrew that just because of the amount of, I guess, like the amount of opportunities for things to cross in the middle and go wrong. So one booking agent has reached out to one podcast host. Another booking agent is going to reach out to the same podcast host within a day of getting another suggested guest.

That was something that we wanted to catch. So we use ClickUp to help us automate some of the catching of those potential issues. But from day one, we didn't even use automation to send emails out either. We did it all manually. Cool. And so you would have like the 10 people booking and they'd be assigned X amount of customers that are responsible for booking.

And then everything was tracked via HubSpot email and through ClickUp as the project management software. Yeah. Yeah. And then we worked with a guy, give him a shout out any day, Ron, his name is, he's a spreadsheets guy. If you need his contact details, do reach out to me. He helped us automate a lot of the backend reporting.

So rather than booking agents having to put a one and a one and a one, we put in some smart automations that also updated like our master reporting as well. So just those, it was like about a month's project working very closely with him to talk about all the different scenarios. But once he put that in place, it just freed up so much time. Shout out to Ronny.

I mean, we'll link to his LinkedIn profile below.

Yeah, definitely.

So was he like using Zapier to look into ClickUp and then pull out data into your master report?

Is that basically it or the more complex?

No, it's more complex building scripts in Google Sheets. So having sheets talking to each other, we have like a public facing sheet for a customer and an internal sheet for a customer as well. So just making sure that those are always matching and married up in perfect sync.

Of course, things go wrong, but then Ron was there to help out when things went wrong or things broke.

Yes, Ron. Cool. Okay. So that's operations. And then we actually probably covered quite a bit of the marketing with Jacob in his separate interview. He was crushing it, it seemed. And then so the leads would come in and then they go to you.

Did you ever hand the sales off to anyone else in the team or were you always closing?

No, I closed for the majority of it, but we did hire an account executive. He's still there today. He's doing a great job just really understanding what the needs and objectives of the customers are and vetting out customers who just aren't a fit. I think Tom, you and I, we deal with very similar customers. And sometimes you just know that this is exercise that they're ticking the box.

Say they've looked at podcasting rather than actually going to invest the time in it. So qualifying out the good fits and bad fits and then taking them through to the close. But at the end of last year, December was one of our bigger months from last year and Patrick was closing many of those deals. So he's well on his way. Very nice.

And so then that's the inbound sales, I assume because of your background and expertise, you're also running some outbound.

Yeah, we did. We ran quite a few campaigns, more in the latter stages because there was just so much other busy work that I needed to do when it came to operations and HR.

And I think that's probably one mistake that if I look back and admit, I think we should have had somebody doing sales or at least outsource the outbound part a bit sooner because I was only doing it as and when I could. But we were getting 15 to 17% reply rates on those emails.

Of course, not 100% of those replies are positive as in, yes, I want to get started. But looking at key trigger events, like maybe somebody started a new role, for example, or a company raised around a funding, that might be a time when they're exploring new channels to market through. So we used to run outbound campaigns on that and they still do.

I know probably skipping ahead here, but the new owners actually run an outbound lead generation agency. So they've been able to plug their machine into speaker podcasts, which is going to help it grow much, much quicker than I could do in the spare hours that I had. That makes total sense. So obviously targeting, I guess, B2B companies of a certain size, but then also the trigger events, it seems a key.

And then when you see that, well, A, how do we find out about the trigger events?

Then once this triggered, are we reaching out by email, by LinkedIn or both?

Or are we calling?

Yeah, a bit of both. We didn't really do any calls just because of our average deal size was low enough that we could get away with, I guess, email and LinkedIn without adding the complexity of phone.

So yeah, we didn't use phone, but LinkedIn or email, very indifferent about which one we started with first, but that's how the campaigns typically started.

How much volume are we talking about?

100 today?

No, no, no. It was around 40 a day. I was very, very cautious that being a little bit plugged into this kind of outbound prospecting world and understanding how spam filters are and how hard it is from a deliverability point of view, we knew that with our conversion rates, we didn't need huge volume.

We probably needed a bit more than what we were doing, but we didn't need huge volume to get the customers that we needed and could actually service as well when they signed up. And I had these emails going out across multiple domains, alternative domains, so that we wouldn't blacklist our core and main domain as well. That makes sense.

Did you ever have demand that you either pushed back or said no to because you didn't have the operational capability?

Yeah, a few times. We would offer them to start the next month. Sometimes we lost a customer or two because of that. Most people were pretty understanding because we were upfront from the beginning. And a lot of the customers who we had to push back were ones that ghosted us for ages and then came back to us a few months later.

So not to say they deserve to wait, but they made us wait. So we had to make them wait a little bit as well.

But it was always the one of the things that kept me up at night was making sure that we had enough capacity to service the demand, because we train our team and it takes two to three months to be fully up to speed to managing the amount of customers that we need them to. And we really don't want to have a bad experience for our customers.

So managing that balance of hiring the right people, having them train and ready, as well as sales was really, really tricky. And it still is going to be tricky for any service-based business.

Yeah, that's always the challenge.

What did you enjoy the most about running the business?

So I think from a personal point of view, just having the opportunity to positively impact all of the lives of the people that were working with us. We pay really well in comparison to what the equivalent wage would be if they're working in a local company.

So we had team members in the Philippines, Vietnam, South America, from Colombia to Argentina, a few in Europe as well, a couple in Africa at some time too. And we paid really good wages compared to the equivalent at home. It was great to see that somebody bought a new, quite an expensive push bikes, somebody bought a new car, moved into a new apartment.

Really nice things to see that you were a part of that. Obviously not everything, but a part of that. I also enjoyed the build phase. And I think that probably comes onto one of the things that I started to dislike towards the end of my time there. I love building and plugging together tools and making automations and achieving efficiencies.

And the bigger we got, and the more that my focus had to come off that, it's quite a hard gap to fill unless you had a specialist come in to kind of be doing all of that building and plugging together the operational side of things.

Yeah, that makes total sense. In the notes I have for this call here, I've got one bullet that says, one channel, please, please tell me more. Yeah. So I learned this from a previous customer that I had years ago that he said, look, I was doing CRM implementations.

He's like, Mark, I just want you to come in and just, just imagine you've got a big stick in your hand. It's called the simple stick. Just hit our CRM with a simple stick and just keep it as simple and lean as possible. So I kind of apply that to everything that I do.

When you're a little bit creative or you know how things could be created or what the possibilities of automation are, it's very easy to go off a tangent and build out this really complex funnel. But really, most of the time, all you need to start with is just the simple process, the simple stick.

So going back to that one channel, there's lots of new channels, TikTok, could that work for us?

Maybe.

Have we exhausted LinkedIn, which is working for us in yielding results?

No, there's still more we can do there. So let's go and make sure that we are completely exhausting one channel or getting close to exhausting it before we move on to the next shiny object or the next channel as well.

What's the point in taking a bet on a new channel if you know one channel is already working?

And that was LinkedIn for you guys, right?

Yeah, mainly LinkedIn and also supported with email. Yeah.

I mean, Yakov, he was literally all over LinkedIn. I think you were maybe less active or I just didn't see your posts as often.

Yeah, no, I wasn't the front-facing kind of like marketer. So Yakov believed with that, although I did do a lot of like the speaking and podcast interviews. I was very much, and I've got like a split personality because I do all this sales work as well.

So I was always like, do I post about podcasting or do I post about sales?

I don't know which one's focused on. It's confusing for my audience. So I kind of took a step back a little bit, unless there was like a joke or some sort of dry humor that I could share because I enjoy writing those posts.

And what now we have to combine sales and photo boxes, right?

Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

All right, cool. So let's transition now to the sale. I was stalking you guys and the new acquirers and it seemed like you had an advisor, I think that was connected with the buyers.

Is that how it happened?

Yeah. Good detective skills or stalker skills, Tom. Yeah. So Gellan was our advisor. It was like an on and off arrangement or like our agony uncle. So if we had some issues, we would reach out to Gellan and say like, how would you suggest that we work through this challenge or me and Jacob are disagreeing on this thing.

Didn't happen often, but there's a few times when Jacob wanted to focus here, I wanted to focus there. And then we'd use the time with Gellan just to kind of work through that. He actually introduced us to Domine Elliott, who now owns Speak On Podcast. So it made the whole acquisition process very, very quick and very straightforward.

Yeah, I can imagine.

But back to the Gellan relationship, how did you meet this person?

I joined the agency collective, which I think I saw you in there at some time, Tom. And on my onboarding, as I was welcomed into the community, you do a call with one of the team there and they asked us what we do, what we'd likely have challenges with and if there's any help we need.

And they introduced us to Gellan and that was about six or seven months after starting Speak On Podcast. So we've known Gellan for about a year and a half. Cool.

Well, we'll link to Gellan below the show notes, obviously. And then in terms of the advisor relationship, you'd have to obviously give any numbers, but I guess you were just like paying him an hourly rate. Yeah. Yeah. We just kept it quite simple, paid him an hourly rate or like a monthly rate and that included a couple of hours. But it was very...

It felt expensive when the revenue was low, but the value you get for the time from somebody who's been there, done it before, has grown an agency to a far greater size than what we had done at the time and still have today is invaluable and priceless. So I'd strongly recommend if you can find the right advisor.

It feels painful putting that money just to speak with somebody, but it's definitely worth it. So to find the right advisor, because I assume that Gellan didn't have experience building a podcast booking agency, but something made him the right advisor. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's extremely wise. He's been around in agency land for a number of years now. He's also had a few successful exits and he's sold via acquisition.

He's sold various different methods of exiting a business. So that was appealing to us because as an entrepreneur, when you start a business, unless for me, the business wasn't going to be a lifetime business. I knew there was going to be an exit date. I didn't know when that date would be when I started, but it was very much that we wanted to build it and build a sellable asset.

So having that advice from the very beginning was really useful. And also he's just a really decent guy. And I think that really helped as well. Makes total sense.

So did you go to him and said that you were considering selling?

Did he know anyone?

Yes.

Yeah, we did. Sorry. Yeah. So back in... So unfortunately in November, we did make some redundancies to the team, which like still to this day is not great. I don't feel fantastic about it, but we had to make the decision that was right for the business.

Previous to that situation, I had, I think a lot of agency owners and even founders, I had a conversation with a friend the other day and he was like, yeah, I just need a couple more years and then I'll do this or a couple more years and then I'll sell for that. And you can't bank on that kind of hope and guessing. You can try and get there, but you might not.

And you've got to take that into account as well. So I think back in June of last year, Yakub and I sat down and I kind of made us both promise and commit that if we're not at a certain number by the certain day at our time, we're not able to reduce our time in the agency, then we should then have the conversation about exiting.

So unfortunately, like I said, we made the redundancies in November and then a week later we reached out to Gellan mainly to talk through like how shit we were feeling for the situation that we found ourselves in and then explored the options with Gellan, who then made the intro to Dom and Elio. And with Gellan also an advisor to Dom and Elio.

Yeah, I think he's worked with them in the past and I'm not sure exactly the relationship, but he played a very mutual role in the introduction and he stepped back as well whilst we kind of negotiated all the terms. Makes total sense.

So again, now we can jump into the acquisition, obviously don't share anything that's not that you can't share. So you're like completely out of the business.

Did you retain like any ownership or you're completely freed?

No, retained some equity. My role is like a non-exec director, which I think it just means like a big cheerleader. Anywhere I go and anyone I speak to, I'll be talking up, speaking podcasts, of course making introductions to the team there now and then involved on a board meeting on a monthly basis.

One thing that was really important to both Jacob and I going through the acquisition process is that everybody's roles were kept. There weren't going to be any major changes and that's been the case. Everybody's job was secure. It was secure and is secure. No major changes other than the normal kind of evolving that you would do in a company anyway.

So yeah, that was super important to us. So I'm still very much vested and I want the best for speaking podcasts for the company and the team. For sure. And we're obviously going to link to speak on podcasts below because if anybody needs to get booked on podcasts, they have to work with speak on podcasts because they're the best. That's it.

Okay, cool.

And so timelines and I guess you started to engage with the new buyers like November, December, and then it was pretty fast because you announced in January, right?

Yeah, it's true. And that was like, that was mainly led by myself. I was the one put in the foot on the pedal to accelerate the process. It was quite a simple acquisition from a terms point of view that there wasn't any complex complexity to it. I was just very much aware of the opportunity cost that I personally had staying in the business.

So for context, last year, I turned down hundreds of thousands in revenue for other work that I could have done and spent a lot less time than I was investing in speaking podcasts and running the agency. Personally, I wasn't enjoying the management side of an agency. I love the build.

I love the sales, quite like the automations, but the HR side of things as well was just getting me down and I just wasn't able to spend my time on doing what not only I enjoy, but what I excel at as well. So that was another kind of multiplier to speed up that process.

It makes total sense really, like if you're not the peacetime CEO, COO who just loves like tweaking HR policies and like flow and like the incremental growth, then it might not be right for you to stay.

And so then the plan for the new guys, my understanding is that they have like a parent company and then they have these separate agencies below it and then they're going to run them independently with the same brand. Maybe there's some efficiencies across all the brands and then they can also plug in the brands to each other.

For example, the lead generation agency, is that their strategy?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the strategy and like sharing resources. So the accountants will probably be the same accountant for both sides, for two different brands.

So yeah, that's the plan is to take advantage of the skills and the capacity that they have across the different brands. So I know that now that the outreach is starting again, or did last month, and that's very much being run by the operations of Social Chaps, which is their other business. And it just makes complete sense.

And after all the paperwork was signed, Elliot and I spoke and said like, actually it would have been great if we just brought you on as a supplier six months ago and things may have looked different.

But yeah, makes total sense. And we'll link to the new guys below in case everybody wants to check them out as well. Awesome.

Yeah, okay, cool. So let's look to the future because obviously you have like the, there's a couple of different things including the new photo box. So elaborate. Yeah. So my attitude is always be connecting. The more people you meet, the more opportunities come your way. Not that they happen there and then, but in the long run.

And like, Tommy, you and I go back quite a few years of like events in London. The reason you did those events was most likely one, because they're fun to meet more people, because you never know where those conversations go. I share the same sort of approach to that.

So the photo booth is like an offline business, which I'm able to put my online marketing skills to kind of like out market the competitors here. I'm in a unique position that I live in Lisbon, and there's lots of expats coming in to the country as well. So that's kind of a unique position for me to be in.

And so I'm not sure if you know, but my parents used to have, they converted a horse trailer into a mobile bar. And we did the bar for weddings, corporate events, and like birthday parties and anniversaries and whatnot. But that still ranks as number one for a few search terms in London. And they get about 20 or 30 inbound inquiries a month. So I'm not expecting the same here.

Lisbon is a lot smaller in London, but I know I can just repeat that same process. So it's just a bit of fun and an opportunity for me to meet new people, because you never know where those conversations can go to.

But back into the online world, I'm sticking with my kind of two core areas of strength, which is net new revenue through outbound prospecting, and then also user onboarding and increasing the amount of free trial users and paying customers. And really what I'm trying to do is position myself at both ends of the funnel. So you need more at the top. Great.

But before you do that, we need to focus on the bottom of the funnel. Let's make sure everything is optimized and things are working there. And there's so much low hanging fruit, especially when it comes to user onboarding.

Oh, in fact, I shared some of my feedback with you and your product quite recently. Very valuable feedback. Incredible. Very detailed. Yeah. And I enjoy that. I really do enjoy it.

So I'm known as a pattern, right?

Speak on podcast. I think I asked you before about the name, and it's like a very search friendly name. Yeah.

And then it's Lisbon photo booth, right?

Yeah. Love it.

What's the name of the parents, like drinks thing?

The drinks box. The drinks box. So this makes total sense, because you should just in theory get those inbound leads.

And then are you just going to charge like a one-off amount to go to an event with the photo box?

Yeah. So typically you charge about 500 euros for four hours. And then there's a eight hour, seven or eight hour package, which is around 750, 800 euros for that. We've got some friends here who are a little bit younger than us and keen to help out.

So if they want to actually be at the event, then they can man the booth and we'll pay them just a lot better than what you'll get paid if you worked in retail in Lisbon. Plus they speak Portuguese and English. My Portuguese is terrible. But my plan is, and this might be worth sharing, I'm not in a rush to make money with this business.

So I've given myself the goal of the next 10 events, as long as they have the right audience, I'm just going to offer it for free. Because you can add calls to actions on the emails that get sent with the photos. And also the gallery that people can go to after is like not fully optimized, but it's like higher the photo booth.

So the more eyeballs I can get on it right now, that can experience it, enjoy it, because you kind of do need to experience it and see what the photos look like and go, that's really cool. I won that in my event. So I'm going out to 10 events. I think 10, if it's 11, it's 11. And the first one is tomorrow, which is an event I'm running.

So I managed to secure the first booking, but it was myself. So kind of cheat a little bit there.

So when you were just explaining like this, the reason why you're doing it for free, I thought you were using, or maybe you are, the photo booths like LiGen for the consulting on the outbound prospecting and the product onboarding, because it would only go to events for like salespeople and then you could upsell the consulting, but that's not the case.

No, that's not the case.

No, but I hope to have conversations with people whilst I'm going through that. And from my experience of events as well, once you get to know the people who run the actual events, they're so busy on the actual day of the event, because so many things can go wrong. But getting to know them beforehand is a really good opportunity because they are still a bit stressed, but it's not panic stations.

And those relationships that you can build with them will then typically, if you nurture them, will result in more events. So for example, it's a wedding planner or it's a co-working space, for example, that people that will have repeat custom. Makes total sense. And then yeah, all the emails you get and the online gallery can just be sliding people to booking it elsewhere. Makes total sense. Love it.

And then on the online side, are you looking to like start up like another business in either of those areas?

I know the product onboard is like one business, right?

But then I think the other one is just you consulting.

Yeah, for the immediate future, I'm very keen not to run another agency. I feel like I need to kind of just recuperate my energy and focus it on the things that I enjoy doing the most. Perhaps I'll have maybe a virtual assistant to help out with some of the admin, but very much consultant of one adding real value in every touch point that I have.

But I don't have to have this huge volume and huge overheads to deliver that value. So that's never say never Tom. But for now is that. And also it's an opportunity to find out it's like deal flow essentially for potential investments for myself as well.

If I want to invest from an age your point of view, this opens the door for me to have those conversations turn up as a trusted advisor and then be brought in if I want to. But I'm being very picky. I'm turning down a lot of work at the moment. Makes total sense.

Mark, thank you so much for coming on sharing the SOP journey, the acquisition and then also the plans for the future. Everything's going to be linked below everybody we mentioned in every business we mentioned will be linked below.

Mark, thank you so much for your time. Cheers Tom, speak to you soon. And I hope you enjoyed that episode team a bit of a different one covering different areas than we normally do. But of course, thank you to Mark for coming on and sharing all his wisdom and learnings from that process. Also thank you for listening.

If you have any feedback for the show, please leave that in the form of a rating or a view on Apple podcasts or just a rating on Spotify. And finally, thank you for listening.