S1E14: How to Start and Scale Your Own Digital Agency With Lawrence Howlett

Laurence Bradford:
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I'm your host, Laurence Bradford. Today I'm speaking with Lawrence Howlett about how he built his digital agency, Newedge, from the ground up. Based in the UK, Lawrence began teaching himself how to build websites in college as a way to earn extra money.

Today Lawrence runs his own digital agency that specializes in web design, web development, Magento, and digital marketing. Lawrence is also the host of the More Demand podcast, that focuses on inbound marketing and online marketing advice for B2B service businesses. Remember, you can get the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript at learntocodewith.me/14. That's just the number 14.

Before getting into Lawrence and my conversation, I wanted to say that this is second to last episode of season 1. Crazy, right? I'm totally blown away by all the positive feedback I've been getting since I first released the show. Thank you so much. It took me a lot of time, energy, and money to put the show together. If you've been enjoying it, I would be so appreciative if you could head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review. Simply go to the URL learntocodewith.me/itunes and you'll be automatically redirected there. Thanks so much, and enjoy this interview with Lawrence.

Hey guys, I'm here today with Lawrence Howlett. Lawrence, thanks so much for sitting down and talking with me.

Lawrence Howlett:
Yeah, it's my pleasure to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

L.B.
Yeah, of course. So I would love if you could get the ball rolling by introducing yourself, who you are and what you do.

L.H.
Yeah, sure. I've owned a digital agency for as long as I can remember really, for the last 10 years, in fact we're 11 years old now. I started that in university back when I need to pay those student loans and get a business started. I actually started by business entrepreneurship so I wasn't from a computer background but I taught myself all the skills I need to create some very simple websites in the early days.

I've never really looked back from university in terms of building my own agency. That's all I've ever done from leaving university and that's been the last 11 years. We now have some pretty amazing clients from Wembley Stadium here in the UK. We create their parking application to park all the cars on big match days. We've worked with all sorts of clients in between from very small startups that want simple brochure websites to complex ecommerce projects that need multiple integrations with lots of different systems. We've been going for 11 years, year on year growth and it's been a really, really exciting journey.

L.B.
Wow, that's so awesome. I didn't realize it was 11 years, that's crazy. Things just have changed so much in technology in the last 11 years, I can only imagine.

L.H.
Yeah, exactly. I started out in the days of Classic ASP, I was programming in back in the day. Obviously still HTML and CSS and some raw JavaScript as well but I was using MS SQL databases and Classic ASP to write all of my websites back then. We've moved on since then into more open source frameworks, but yeah, it has changed dramatically.

I remember the days when I had to create something on my laptop and then use a floppy disk of all things, to take that site, even WiFi didn't exist back then in the university hall so I had to take a floppy disk, go to the library, load up the website, see if it worked. Because of the restrictions of admin I couldn't then change any of my code there. If it didn't work I had to take it back to my laptop, redo it, load it on the floppy disk and then go back to the library to load it up again. It was a bit of a faff, to be honest.

L.B.
Wow, that's insane. When you said floppy disk I think my mouth dropped. Of course I remember floppy disks, but wow. It's just crazy to think that was only 10-11 years ago. It wasn't even that long ago we were still using floppy disks and just the process you had to go through, going back and forth. That's wild. So, you started when you were in university, you said you started as a way to make extra money, is that right?

L.H.
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to not have huge debt like a lot of my fellow students came out of university with it. Something I didn't want to end university with. Because I was studying business entrepreneurship as well, I had that mindset of a sort of money and cash flow mindset, so I didn't want to take on heavy debt at that point. I thought, what skills can I do? And I was doing a couple little websites for myself, and I thought, 'let's go out there into the market and pick some small businesses that I can really help.’ I had an eye for graphic design and then I reached out to a few of them, a few cold calls, a few business networking meetings and I got a few clients under my belt.

That's really where it started, creating those very simple brochure sites. For example, I did a landscape gardener, in fact he still uses the same website today. It was one of the first I ever did called gardencraft.co.uk. I'm sure you can go on there. It's even got some flash animation on there I think. It was really back in the day and that site still stood the test of time. It still generates leads to this day.

L.B.
Wow, so that was gardencraft.co.uk?

L.H.
Yeah, gardencraft.co.uk. Sid will thank me very much for plugging that but yeah, he was one of my first ever clients.

L.B.
Wow, I'm on the site now. You know what, it honestly doesn't look, I see sites that look like this all the time, especially local, smaller businesses. Despite it being 11 years old, I've definitely seen way worse. So good job, considering this was, I see at the bottom, 2006 copyright at the bottom.

L.H.
Yeah, that's it. It's an old site but it still stands the test of time. It still generates leads for him, I know. I've tried to resell him a mobile responsive website and he says, "Lawrence, I'm getting enough leads from the website you built me 11 years ago so I just don't need it."

L.B.
Yeah, well hey that's great for you, right? That you can build something that lasts for that long and still working and still getting leads, still working for his business. Yeah, that's really great. So rewinding back just a little bit. You're in college, you're getting these leads, I'm just so curious because I feel like, again, things were just so different back then. There wasn't even WiFi, as you said. How did you know what to charge early on?

L.H.
Yeah, that was a difficult question. I was lucky enough to make friends through a very different avenue, through the music industry because I used to do a bit of disc jockeying in local nightclubs and that and got to know a person called John Bentley that owns another agency called in.house.media, ihm.co.uk, and he sort of took me under his wing a little bit. I was actually doing some freelance work for him as well and I just got to learn a little bit about the pricing and thought that I could, obviously, just drop below that sort of corporate pricing. He's grown his agency wildly from where it was with him and Gavin just in the very early days. There was only two of them.

I sort of learned from him about what I could charge and then decided what was a fair price considering I haven't got offices and all the rest of it. So I could charge that lower price point. But then you know, 10 years ago, I was still not doing cheap websites. Gardencraft came in at about £2000, somewhere about that. Ten years ago to a college student, a university student, that's a good amount of money.

L.B.
Yeah, definitely. I think that's, and I know it's something so many people can relate to in the US, is college debt. Whether they're in college now or maybe they've even been out for 10, 20 years and they still have debt to pay off. So I think it's really great that that's how, you started just as a way to make extra money. When you did get started then, back in college, did you think 10 years from now, "I'll have this digital agency and be building websites still?"

L.H.
Yeah, I definitely had the dream of always building a business of my own. That's always what I wanted to do. I never wanted to work for anyone else. That was installed from my father who owned his own car garage. That's been installed in me from an early age, to own your own business and be in control of your own destiny. I know I wanted to do that.

Whether it was coding websites, whether it was running an agency, my role has changed a lot over the years. I used to, up until about four or five years ago, I was designing every single website, I was coding every single website. My role changed a lot now into director role of an agency. It has changed a lot over the years and I'm definitely enjoying what I'm doing now and I did absolutely love the coding part of it. I enjoyed solving those sort of complex problems. I'm a very logical thinker, that's how my brain works, so I enjoyed those sort of challenges. And I enjoyed the creative side as well, you know, the graphic design.

I suppose where I didn't enjoy it as much was the cut up of those from a photoshop design into HTML, CSS, that just was a bit tedious for me so that's where my skills didn't lie. But I loved database work and the creative, initially.

L.B.
Yeah, wow. So only about five years ago is when you kind of stopped doing the design and the coding and you really took more of a leadership role.

L.H.
Yeah, exactly. I took a backseat and realized that my skills were starting to decay a little bit in terms of what was new. I was still coding in ASP Classic and I know I needed to go open source with WordPress and it was one of the things to think, "Do I want to retrain myself?" It was a big jump for me when we went from ASP Classic to learning PHP and I didn't really enjoy the transition as much as I could have done because I didn't have formal training around it.

It was really, what client jobs have we got at the moment and making myself learn a new language to be able to solve their challenges. That was really, I was sort of doing it the wrong way around. Instead of getting a foundation in it and then applying that to particular jobs. But you can't do that once you're in business. You've just got to fix those problems as you go along. That transition sort of, I realized that my skills aren't in coding as much as they are in the front end of the business and selling solutions.

L.B.
Yeah, I think that's super interesting. I love that you say that because it's all about knowing where your strengths are. And also, I'm sure, we haven't talked about it yet, but you were hiring people as you were growing the agency. And if you can hire someone to do the job better than you can because they have more advanced, newer skills, it just makes sense to do it that way, then you can focus on the stuff that you're better at.

L.H.
Yeah, absolutely. That's what my first hire, who's still with us today, Tim. He's now our lead developer, so Tim's still with us and he was our first hire for coding, for PHP work and open source. I knew I didn't have those skills. My entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and an entrepreneur basically is a fantastic networker who realizes that they don't have skills in certain places but can identify that and then fill that resource gap and manage opportunity and risk. We identified that we had a problem with coding, i.e. me, and wanted to fill that gap. That allowed me then to start to focus on the business in terms of growing it.

It still taken until probably 12 months ago, to be honest, to be able to completely step away from it, but that transition to hiring my first person, he's still with us today, Tim, that was a really big move to take. From working in your back bedroom, which I was, to offices and starting to look like a "proper agency."

L.B.
So when was that when you first hired Tim?

L.H.
I think, off the top of my head, he's probably been working for us for five years now. So probably 2010, I would imagine, off the top of my head. And Tim's probably going to kill me for saying that, because it's probably longer.

L.B.
No problem, I'm just trying to get a little time line idea in my head here. Then you mentioned offices. Do you have now an office? Or more than one even?

L.H.
Yeah, so we got, 18 months ago, we bought our own office premises so we got 2000 square feet of offices. Really, really nice, over two floors, we've got the development and design team upstairs and myself and my co-director. Downstairs we've got a really nice rec room with table tennis and nice foosball and kitchen area and meeting room as well. Customers come in and call it a little bit like Google. I wouldn't go that far because we haven't got a slide yet but it's on the cards.

L.B.
Okay, so 18 months ago then you got this office. Now, how employees do you have working for you today?

L.H.
We've got a few different hubs. In the UK there's six of us in total. We've then got three in Poland and four in Latvia. So we've got, spread across the globe, in terms of our development team. I mustn't forget Julius in the Philippines as well so, there's a few of us in different locations. We did that because we found that recruiting in our particular town was quite difficult to get the skills that we wanted. For example, if you were trying to get four Magento developers in Kettering, you're really, really going to struggle. They just don't exist. Or not at the level that we want. So we open the doors to a wider area and thought, why don't we go global? In fact, it was after reading 37Signals, Rework and Remote, that opened my eyes to that.

L.B.
Yeah, definitely. I haven't read that book but I'm definitely familiar with it because I think I've been to the website several times. I think they have a big website.

L.H.
It's a perfect read. Rework is a great read if you're thinking about creating a Sass project or something like that. Remote is a fantastic one if you, maybe you're a freelancer and you want to integrate with some other freelancers to create an umbrella company or something like that and then you can embrace remote working. Also, it helps you solve some of the challenges like a client, having objections about a team not being all in one place. My instant reaction to that is well, if they're all in Kettering in the UK, I'd have to charge you twice as much for a website. They pretty much dispel that straight away.

L.B.
Yeah, that's a very good point. I would love to hear a bit about what you're doing today and what your day to day looks like. I know, aside from running the agency, you have some other things going on, if you'd like to talk about that a bit.

L.H.
Yeah, sure thing. For your listeners right now, it's a really, really exciting time for them. I think it's worth just stepping back and thinking, "I'm going to learn to code," whatever it is whether you're going to learn, whatever language it is and think about, what are you going to do with those skills? Are you going to think about launching your own agency or are you going to be a freelancer or do you want to go and get a job at an agency? That's a really good place to start testing your skills. Especially in an agency that's got lots of different projects on the go, rather than going to a Sass shop or something like that.

Going to a design agency will give you experience in a lot of different projects that will really allow you to hone your skills, maybe before becoming your own freelancer. We've had quite a bit of churn in terms of developers and a lot of those developers have gone on to start their own agencies. You have to then think about, "I need these coding skills, I need these agency skills," in terms of the business skills as well.

You've got to be able to not only code, because I do find a lot of our developers, they are fantastic coders but if you put them in front of a client, they just haven't got those communication skills that are needed to connect with a customer. It's very important as coders, as well, that we can understand the vision of a client, that we can get their vision and then we can say, "Okay, this is what it's going to look like within a website or a web application or an ecommerce solution." I think as well as learning to code, make sure that you can connect with your clients and with your team as well and understand that communication is absolutely key. I know I've gone off on a bit of a tangent there.

L.B.
No, that was great.

L.H.
Sure, so to bring it back to what I'm doing day to day now, I'm driving all of the sales, which is obviously very important to feed all of the mouths of our developers and keep the company profitable. So I drive all of the sales, I do all of the sales meetings, I do all of the marketing tactics as well for Newedge and the strategies. My day to day looks like, normally, doing some meetings, either initial discovery sessions on the telephone or then meeting clients for that initial session. Then creating the proposals and following those up and then obviously getting the client to sign up. Then doing a lot of the marketing, blogging, making sure we're doing relevant content.

We also do some workshops as well that people can come along to and learn about launching their first ecommerce site, for example. Or maybe launching their first lead generation website or redeveloping their website. We help out, just as a freebie, as an authority builder, if you like, we help people out for free. They can come along to these sessions and they're much more likely to convert into a client. So that's where I'm sitting at the moment. That's my day to day role.

L.B.
Okay, very cool. Circling back to what you're saying with the business and the coding skills, I absolutely, I love that you said that. I had a few conversations so far in doing the first season of my podcast, where these kinds of things reappear. And not just with freelancing or starting your own business, even with starting full-time jobs. When you're going into interview for a position, your communication skills and your personality matter a whole lot.

L.H.
Absolutely. From an agency owner point of view, with two people in the short list, one of them not as good a coder as the other but has a much better communication, I'm always going to go with the person that can communicate better. The coding part can be taught. The communication part really is, that's where you connect with a client. You can then, you'll just get it. When a problem is described, you get that, you take ownership of it. Then you go away and you can solve it in code.

L.B.
Yes, I love that. Just get it. I feel like that can apply to things beyond coding. With employees and working freelancers in general. I work with a lot of different freelancers and I definitely know what you mean. There's some people that just get it. You can just give them whatever it is and they just run with it.

L.H.
Yeah, they are the ones to look after and treat very well. If you're having to spoon feed a developer or you're having to spoon feed from a client, it's just such a difficult relationship to continue. Those sort of things, you just need to work out, where's the communication going wrong and how can we fix that. If you're having to explain to a developer, "this button needs to go exactly there and this, this, and this needs to happen," I expect my guys to know that if they're creating a contact form, I expect validation on it. I don't have to list the fact that an email address is required. I just expect them to get it.

L.B.
Yes, I love that. I completely agree. So you talked about what you're doing today and then keeping up, you're really generating sales and you're doing different kinds of marketing and the blogging and the workshops. While you're talking about all that, in my head I was wondering, is there a certain kind of client that you work with? Like maybe a certain industry that you specialize in or anything like that?

L.H.
Yeah, so we've got two different sectors: E-commerce, and the other one is service businesses. Our sweet spot is service businesses that want to generate high value, high quality leads. That's who we deal with in the sort of lead generation, brochure style sites that want to use content marketing. That's our sweet spot there. On the E-commerce side of things, we want to, we specialize in Magento ecommerce sites and especially bringing multiple systems into one.

For businesses that have maybe grown organically over the last 5-10 years, have got multiple systems, they've got something to upload to eBay, their product inventory, they've got another bit of software that imports CSV, they've got another bit of software that links to Sage accounting, we bring that all into one place with Magento. That's, again, where our sweet spot is. Consolidating those multiple systems into one. On the More Demand side, which is our digital marketing agency, again, we help service businesses, generate high quality leads through digital marketing and just help people make sense of digital marketing.

There's a lot of overwhelm and frustration out there of some really bad advice that is coming out from industry influences and people that are just giving bad advice. Our aim is to make the complex very simple and follow some step by step guides to be able to manage your own digital marketing campaigns.

L.B.
Nice, yeah, wow. It sounds like you guys have a lot going on, but very specific at the same time, like who you cater to and who you serve. As far as, just a quick question, as far as the ecommerce stuff goes, do you guys mostly work with Magento, then? Or do you use any other platforms?

L.H.
Yeah, we solely work with Magento. We have done a couple of WooCommerce websites, but mainly Magento. That's where our skills are. We understand the platform, we understand the infrastructure that needs to go behind it in terms of the hosting requirement. We've worked with it for a good few years now. Really, we can just dive straight in there, get things set up. There's a ton of plugins as well that we can use and extend it. So that's our sweet spot with Magento. We did look at hosted platforms like Shopify and PrestaShop and all the other ones, but Magento really was where we wanted to focus.

L.B.
Yeah, I feel like, especially for an agency, I mean I'm not an expert with E-commerce or anything, but I feel like Shopify is kind of great for an individual or something? I know businesses use it, but I feel like for a larger business, you want more customization and Magento definitely has that.

L.H.
Yeah, exactly. I call Shopify the 'mom and pop' businesses. Magento is really for those people that need an ERP system, an Enterprise Resource Planning system, that want inventory control, they want to have multi channel systems to be able to sell on Amazon, eBay, and pool the orders into one central system. They want to integrate with multiple couriers, they've maybe got multiple currencies and different price points, different customer groups. All of that stuff can happen in Magento and we can heavily customize it. Plus, they own the system. Shopify, I'm sure, is not at risk of going into liquidation, but as a software service platform, you do have that risk if they go out of business, your whole website is gone as well.

L.B.
Yeah, I never even thought about it that way, but that makes complete sense. That's definitely something to take into consideration if you're an ecommerce business.

L.H.
Absolutely.

L.B.
Yeah, wow. I love that you're bringing this stuff up because I never think about E-commerce that much, but I should more because it's such a huge thing, especially for a lot of the beginners I talk to, they're looking to specialize in something, specialize in a certain business or a certain industry or help a certain kind of client and I feel like that's something I need to address more, is ecommerce. Of course it's a huge, so many people are selling their products and what not online.

L.H.
Yeah, and there is a huge demand for high quality, Magento certified coders. There is a real lack of them in the market. There's a lot of okay PHP developers that have sort of just gone through the certification process and don't really use Magento that often. What the industry needs is real high quality Magento developers that understand the infrastructure that goes behind it. That understand the code base, how to theme it. And understand E-commerce itself at a high level, not just the coding, understand the difference between an upsell and a cross sell. Understand what courier shipping rates are required to set up an E-commerce store and really understand the ecommerce element so that when they're coding, they can apply that logic into their code.

L.B.
That's great information. It's kind of interesting, or funny, because the first few projects I ever did when I was starting out getting paid for my coding skills, were actually on Magento sites. It's interesting because I would get contacted all the time from recruiters for full-time jobs, not even freelance work, looking for Magento developers. I remember seeing then, 'Wow, this is really in demand.' I live in the US but in the US as well as, it sounds like, in the UK it's really in demand and I definitely need to tell people more about this now that I'm saying it out loud. I experienced it myself and now hearing you say it about Magento and the need for these Magento developers, it's definitely an area people could look into.

L.H.
Yeah, for sure. There's so much option in there as well. You've got the Magento connect store so you could create your own little applications and plugins for Magento. You could become a front end developer in Magento and get certified for that. you could be a back end developer and move on to developer plus as well. There's so much that you can do in Magento, again, it's just picking a specialism.

If you want to be a front end developer, try to understand everything you can about conversion optimization for the customer so that when you're designing and developing the front end, you're thinking all the time about the customer that's visiting the website and how they're going to convert, making sure that we've got a very easy checkout process and just really thinking about the business logic behind what you're coding.

L.B.
Yeah, love that, taking notes. This is all great stuff, thank you so much. Here is the last question, Lawrence. If a person wants to start their own digital or dev agency, what is one thing that they could do today to take a step in the right direction?

L.H.
The first thing that I would do is sit down and think about who you want to target, who you want to do business with, who is your ideal client and make sure it's relevant to the skills that you have and your ability to deliver today. Just pick one customer, your one ideal client. For example, for us, our ideal client would be a B2B service based business that wants to generate high quality, high value leads with a mobile responsive website. That allows us to then go and have conversations with those people that are more meaningful because we understand who they are. We understand what they want to do. If you're going to start the agency, have a think, exactly, with absolute clarity, who you want to do business with and don't make your menu too big. You'll spread yourself too thin and then you won't be able to deliver.

L.B.
Love it, thank you so much Lawrence. Where can people find you online?

L.H.
You can find my agency, Newedge, at www.newedge.co.uk. You can also, I've got a weekly podcast every single Wednesday that goes through digital marketing tips and tricks so you can head over to www.moredemand.co.uk and find the podcast there. You can reach out to me, send me an email lawrence@newedge.co.uk.

L.B.
Alright, thank you so much. Have a great rest of the afternoon.

L.H.
Yeah, thanks for inviting me on the show, really appreciate it.

L.B.
I hope you guys enjoyed our conversation. Make sure to check out the Show Notes plus transcript at learntocodewith.me/14. I also want to take a moment to tell you about a special guide I put together about how to get started as a freelancer. You can download it at learntocodewith.me/freelance. Inside the guide, I talk about how to identify your specialty, services, and audience so you can make the biggest impact when you enter the world of freelancing. I also talk about how you can land your first client, ways to make money as a freelancer, and how to transition smoothly from a full-time career into freelance, if that's what you want to do. Again, you can check it out at learntocodewith.me/freelance.

As I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, next week is the final episode of season 1. Again, if you've been enjoying the podcast, I would love if you could head on over to iTunes, or wherever you listen and subscribe. This way, you'll know when new episodes are coming out, including season 2. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next week for the final episode.