Unilite: Alex Insley On A Family Business Turned Brand Powerhouse
In this episode of The Build Up, Dan engages in a dynamic conversation with Alex Insley from Unilite, a family-run business that has evolved significantly over the years. Alex shares the journey of Unilite, which began in 1981 and has seen substantial growth under his and his sister's leadership, particularly by focusing on the construction trades. The discussion delves into the strategic shift towards direct-to-consumer sales, highlighting how this approach has revolutionized their business model, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when traditional wholesalers faced challenges. Alex emphasizes the importance of data-driven marketing and influencer partnerships, explaining how they have built a tight-knit group of reliable influencers who genuinely connect with their products. The episode also touches on the challenges faced by larger brands in transitioning to direct-to-consumer models and the significance of authenticity in influencer marketing. Throughout the conversation, both Dan and Alex reflect on the unique position of Unilite in the construction industry, showcasing their commitment to creativity and effective marketing strategies that set them apart from competitors.
This podcast is produced by dissident creative agency, the original disrupters of construction marketing. This podcast is born out of our passion to create conversations that push boundaries as hard as our content!
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to The Buildup. This is the podcast for marketing
Speaker:in the construction industry. I'm
Speaker:Dan, the creative director at Dissident. We've been working with construction brands for
Speaker:a number of years. It's an exciting and rapidly evolving industry, and
Speaker:that's why we created a podcast dedicated to the weird and wonderful world
Speaker:of construction marketing. I'll be speaking to leading brands, other agencies,
Speaker:creatives, influencers, and startups. This is the
Speaker:resource I wish we had when we first started out in the industry. Thank
Speaker:you for being here and welcome to The Builder. Welcome
Speaker:to Build Up. I'm Dan, the creative director at Dissonant, and I am joined today by
Speaker:Alex Insley. Yep, that's right. Who is the... I never figured
Speaker:Okay. And the reason being is, I just... there's
Speaker:That's true. So I never... Well, let's just say Alex from
Speaker:Unilite, also famous for Trade Legends podcast,
Speaker:among other things. Welcome to the podcast, really appreciate having
Speaker:you on. I wanted to start, well, listen, I'm
Speaker:not very good at doing intros, so I'd love for you to, for the
Speaker:people who don't know who you are, just give a brief introduction to
Speaker:Uh, so Unilight was originally created in
Speaker:1981, mother and father, so family business. And those
Speaker:guys got divorced when I was about eight, eight years old. And we, we
Speaker:never really did what we sort of do now. Like the company's evolved probably
Speaker:in the last 15 years or so that my sister and
Speaker:I were running the business for. Um, you know, it sort of, it
Speaker:was always there or thereabouts sort of grew and then decreased
Speaker:because my dad had somebody else running the business for him. And then when me and the
Speaker:sister have come into the business, For the last 15 years we've had double
Speaker:digit growth apart from one year. So
Speaker:it's sort of we primarily aim at trade construction tradesmen
Speaker:and women. And again when I came into the business the thing that we sort of
Speaker:did was I felt like we were trying to make products for everybody. Yeah.
Speaker:Whether you were going fishing camping running walking doing
Speaker:your daily job, whatever it was. And we were sort of spreading ourselves
Speaker:too thin. So I looked and I thought whenever there's a recession or anything
Speaker:like that, what one thing never stops or, you know, if
Speaker:you're short for money from a recession, you're going to not go
Speaker:camping. And the only thing that I could see was trades.
Speaker:You're always going to need somebody to fix lights or fix your toilet. So
Speaker:we started just hammering tradesmen and women. And we
Speaker:sort of, you know, started with the lighting. And then in
Speaker:the last sort of five, six years we've gone into work wear, tool
Speaker:bags, tools, knives, loads of
Speaker:different things. So it's sort of evolved over like
Speaker:Love that. It's very similar, not very similar at all. But that specific
Speaker:area of just like, what's safer
Speaker:than other industries, that was exactly how distant sort
Speaker:of found themselves in the construction industry. We had
Speaker:a massive range of clients, we did kind of like everything
Speaker:for everybody. And when COVID
Speaker:hit, the guys that stuck around were healthcare
Speaker:and construction. So about 70% of our client
Speaker:bases is currently construction about, well even, no,
Speaker:it's probably like 80-20 construction to healthcare. And,
Speaker:you know, it's one of those things that we just sort of thought this, you know, the lockdown hit, about
Speaker:three days later, you know, one of our construction class, like, should we
Speaker:jump on this video production? And I'm like, are we even allowed to?
Speaker:Are you okay? And they're like, yeah, yeah, we're cracking on as normal. No problem at all.
Speaker:And I was like, okay, this is this is this is an industry that we need to very
Speaker:Yeah, yeah, it was so we were, you know, all of
Speaker:our we had, you know, we had some great, you know, sexy clients, like
Speaker:spas and restaurants, and, you know, sort
Speaker:of high street brands. And they're all
Speaker:just like, yep, no budget, marketing's gone, sorry, for the next foreseeable
Speaker:and then building construction, healthcare. Obviously, everyone still needs healthcare,
Speaker:everyone still needs stuff building. Yeah. And especially because we work mainly with
Speaker:manufacturers. of construction products, you
Speaker:know, the even the DIY, you know, was going mad in,
Speaker:in COVID. So really, really cool. So Unionlight currently,
Speaker:it's start off as lighting, but moved into sort
Speaker:Yeah, we sort of looked in, obviously, the size that
Speaker:we were, in probably 10 years from where
Speaker:we were at the point where we sort of started to diversify, I looked and I thought, if we
Speaker:don't start looking at other avenues, when
Speaker:I'd go into a wholesaler, for example, they would say to me, they'd say, oh, you
Speaker:only sell one thing. So they weren't bothered. Whereas if you're a larger
Speaker:company, say like Milwaukee, and you've got a whole range of different things, you'd go
Speaker:in and you go, right, I want that wall. And I'm going to stick all my products on here.
Speaker:I'll supply you with all the the stands, and it didn't matter what
Speaker:you were selling, they'd put it in because it was part of a bigger profile. Whereas
Speaker:for us, we would struggle to even get a tiny little bit of space in a
Speaker:wholesaler. That makes sense, I've never even thought about that. So I looked and I thought, I need
Speaker:to be able to go in and at least fill a stand. So that
Speaker:was the work where hoodies, gilets, knives, pencils,
Speaker:even the coffee mugs, everything branded Unilite. And now obviously
Speaker:we have a much wider offering, safety glasses, whatever it is, and we can go
Speaker:in and market that whole stand and say to somebody, I can come in and
Speaker:merchandise this for you. Absolutely. Which actually gave us a foot into the wholesalers. So
Speaker:that's why initially I diversified. Yeah. And then
Speaker:the direct consumer came along, which meant actually I could use
Speaker:some of these products as free gifts or to say, look,
Speaker:if you buy this, you get this cheaper. And the whole sort of process
Speaker:then started of trying to eke out more on your average
Speaker:order value. Yeah. and stuff like that. So the two, you know, I did
Speaker:one thing and it actually helped something else without sort of semi realizing.
Speaker:Yeah. That's mad. Your toggle's gone up
Speaker:here. I know you would hate me if I didn't tell you. It was like up here a little bit.
Speaker:Hiding up there. If I saw a clip of
Speaker:that, I'd be like, Dan didn't tell me about that. That clip, that thing stayed
Speaker:there forever. It's like, um, yeah. So if, if like your collar's turned
Speaker:up or whatever, why didn't you tell me? The direct-to-consumer thing
Speaker:is interesting, because most of the companies that we work with and speak
Speaker:to, they only sell through distribution. And
Speaker:there's great things about that, but also issues for as a marketer, because
Speaker:a lot of time, you really struggle to get the data. You don't know what's working, certainly
Speaker:short term. How do you tackle that? Because I
Speaker:get the impression, I could be wrong, that a lot of, especially the really
Speaker:big brands that have got big distribution networks, and
Speaker:retailers are almost too scared to go straight to consumer.
Speaker:Did that, could the direct consumer come later? So the B2B has
Speaker:always been there. Yes. And another thing which sort
Speaker:of, you know, really saved us as a business, obviously, if you had COVID
Speaker:and it was just that COVID period, a lot of the wholesalers shut down or
Speaker:it's limited access, we'll give you whatever you order, we'll come out and meet
Speaker:you. But the direct-to-consumer thing, I kept watching
Speaker:the likes of Jim Shark the likes of Nike, Lululemon, all these
Speaker:types of brands. And then there was an article I think where it was like
Speaker:Nike had gone from doing nothing direct to consumer, they had this big massive
Speaker:network, and they'd done like 20% in the first year direct
Speaker:to consumer, and then like I think two years ago it was 65%. And
Speaker:I thought, hold on a minute. And I was looking at brands like Dyson, and I was thinking,
Speaker:well, they've got their own website. And it's absolutely everywhere. I
Speaker:know, I think they stipulate everything's got to be the same price, like map
Speaker:pricing like they have in the US. But I sort of looked and thought,
Speaker:hold on a minute. Our type of product, I can send it out. It's
Speaker:not like you send it out to sealants or something like that, and you've got to send out a
Speaker:whole box of it to warranty. You can't just order one tube of sealant online.
Speaker:And yeah, probably about five years ago now I thought, I need
Speaker:a website. So we went, ironically, to a marketing
Speaker:agency which was based in Leeds called Rascal Agency. They're not
Speaker:there anymore. And got
Speaker:those guys to build us the website, which is how I met Nathan. Because it was
Speaker:Nathan that built the website for us, for this agency. And
Speaker:then as time progressed with those guys, I kept finding that
Speaker:every time I wanted something changing, it was costing me money. Or every time I wanted
Speaker:something doing or a new idea, it was always me that was having to think of the idea. And
Speaker:I was like, this is, you know, it's laborious. And
Speaker:eventually Nathan said to me, he said, I'm leaving. I said, well, where are you going? And
Speaker:I asked him exactly what he did for us. And it was basically, he was doing the majority
Speaker:of the work and the account manager wasn't really doing anything
Speaker:for us. So I said, look, come and work for us. He was like no
Speaker:no no I want to go freelance so that I don't I don't want to come and work for
Speaker:another brand. And after about six months of using
Speaker:him freelance. He decided that actually
Speaker:I'll come and work for you. But he was originally living in Leeds. Yeah. So
Speaker:he moved down to Birmingham and that was sort of the birth of the. the
Speaker:direct-to-consumer fully then, because we had an in-house developer. And
Speaker:when he came down, he then said, look, OK, we've got this website, but
Speaker:it doesn't really link up with your internal system. So he
Speaker:sort of integrated that with our delivery thing,
Speaker:ship station, and everything sort of progressed from there. So now everything's seamless.
Speaker:Yes. And the orders get sent downstairs to the warehouse. They get picked and
Speaker:packed and scanned. Everything is done and automated. And
Speaker:like hundreds of hours a month. Mad, isn't it?
Speaker:Pure profit. And you have to look at stuff like that. As a smaller business,
Speaker:if you're not lean and you're not quick, then these bigger companies,
Speaker:they'll just gobble you alive, you know, because they're slow and laborious,
Speaker:So, um, so for context and Nathan, and I
Speaker:spoke to Nathan because Nathan's the guy that you speak to like for like the
Speaker:trade legends podcast and stuff like that. Um, he's,
Speaker:he's basically the, the genius behind the digital. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's,
Speaker:and he's what an amazing, uh, cause he did that pretty
Speaker:He's self-taught. My
Speaker:thing was, after... So I already had Jack at this point
Speaker:doing video stuff for me, and I thought, well, why don't I bring him down,
Speaker:and then I've got him building the website and doing all the internal stuff for us.
Speaker:Jack's doing the video content, and my... Theory was
Speaker:I looked again at Gymshark because they were just based down the road and thought, I
Speaker:watched Ben's videos and these are so good. And
Speaker:he's always saying, oh yeah, we've got these guys working internally. And
Speaker:at the time, like I said to you off the podcast, there was nobody like you
Speaker:guys doing anything. And I thought, if I want that type of
Speaker:content, I'm going to have to invest in it and bring people in-house, which
Speaker:a lot of brands, they just, they don't want to touch it. They don't know
Speaker:about it, so they don't want to touch it. Especially the bigger brands as
Speaker:well. The ones with the bigger budgets, they'd rather just Forget
Speaker:about that. Yeah. But for me I wanted to sort of put my own
Speaker:stamp on the content and you can't really do that if you're using
Speaker:somebody outside the business. Yes. Unless you're specific where you
Speaker:Well I think I'm sure there's there's other
Speaker:other agencies like us who specialize in the construction industry but
Speaker:I don't think there's anyone like us. I think we were like sort
Speaker:of trailblazers of this like very specific creative
Speaker:content and social media marketing specifically for the construction industry. I
Speaker:don't think there's a lot of companies out there that do what we do. So
Speaker:brands might go to a sort of an agency similar
Speaker:to us that don't specialize in construction and they're kind of getting stuff that's generic
Speaker:and corporate and things like that. We sort of we
Speaker:were positioning ourselves as these kind of the The
Speaker:rebels, the guys who work with brands who
Speaker:want their content to be different and creative and stuff like that, which
Speaker:is always, you know, whenever I saw your content, I'm like, there's not even
Speaker:There's still brands that are like us. I mean, like, even if we were
Speaker:doing a bigger project, say now, We've got to run a
Speaker:large campaign across the US or we've got to run it across the
Speaker:whole of Europe. I still would probably look to get some external help
Speaker:on stuff like that. So there are still brands that do what we do and go. You
Speaker:know, we need more bodies to do it because it's such a big campaign. But,
Speaker:you know, it's very, very difficult to find people in construction that
Speaker:understand that sort of what we want. Yeah. You
Speaker:know, and that's where sort of you've you've pigeonholed yourself in
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely. I do think, though, that I mean, I said this, I said, I
Speaker:think I said this on several podcasts or certainly in several conversations. Unilight
Speaker:are the only ones that I think that I'm aware of
Speaker:There may be others that have got an in-house team that
Speaker:are doing it right. I think there's a lot of brands that have tried to get
Speaker:an in-house team that is like a creative team. but they're not
Speaker:the right people and they're not qualified. And I think a
Speaker:lot of the problem with that is I think they'll
Speaker:cheap out. They'll cheap out on it. They'll get a junior. They'll get someone
Speaker:who's really inexperienced in the industry, but
Speaker:they've got no one to learn from. So you get someone who's like, let's say a junior videographer
Speaker:or something like that, but they are the only videographer So how
Speaker:do you expect that junior to progress and to
Speaker:build their skills and stuff if they don't get anybody to learn off? You need a head of
Speaker:video. At the very least you need like a creative director or
Speaker:I sort of took up that role because when Jack came in obviously he could
Speaker:do whatever but it's me telling him this is what I
Speaker:need and then he'd do something I'll go that needs to tweak or put
Speaker:that track to it. And a lot of brands they don't have somebody that's
Speaker:that No that visionary for the direction of the marketing and
Speaker:that's where they should they'll bring that like you said the videographer in he'll work
Speaker:for six months he's got no direction or you know it doesn't really
Speaker:understand what the brand is yeah and nobody within the business understands what
Speaker:Yeah, it should take a tick box exercise to go videographer, that'll, that'll
Speaker:solve a problem. But, you know, especially if they
Speaker:haven't even got a robust marketing team, what's that videographer going
Speaker:to do? I'll take a video of this, but they're kind of going, I have no reason, I have no idea
Speaker:why I'm doing this. It's like, it's a sponsored art project,
Speaker:essentially, at that point, it's kind of like, I've made something. And it's,
Speaker:yeah, it's mad. You guys, I
Speaker:think, are one of the few that are actually doing it, doing it
Speaker:well with a big team, because it's a big investment. You
Speaker:know, it makes sense for a lot of companies to go down the agency route
Speaker:It's easier for us in essence to do and have
Speaker:that risk because we have the direct to consume. So it actually in
Speaker:essence, that investment is getting back what we pay for it
Speaker:and more. Whereas a lot of brands, if it's, if it's just B2B, but
Speaker:they don't realize actually, if the marketing's on point, all the distributors, you've
Speaker:got all that content for them. So they're using your content and
Speaker:eventually the business grows, but they don't see that because it's not, it's
Speaker:Yeah. You guys have got the data. You can, you can make a video, put it
Speaker:Two days, three days. And that's what we did because when the business progressed and
Speaker:I started to use influencers and introduced them and then we created our
Speaker:own influencer software that literally drags data
Speaker:in from Instagram, from TikTok, all that sort of stuff and
Speaker:sort of collates it for us. I can go on now and
Speaker:actually see all the stuff behind the scenes on
Speaker:a particular influencer and I can go, right, okay, that's when they posted
Speaker:that. We can even plug them into our system with an
Speaker:API, and it draws all their data automatically from their own profile. So
Speaker:we can actually see, well, they posted it here, and this is where the uptick
Speaker:was, and that product didn't quite work, and that time of day. And
Speaker:we've got all that data now, and again, I can't remember who
Speaker:it was that said data's the new gold. And I was like,
Speaker:data, how do I get this data? And I was like, you know, direct
Speaker:to consumer. It means when they sign up for an account, I get to
Speaker:know whether they're an electrician, HVAC or a
Speaker:plumber. I get to know how old they are, when the birthday is. I
Speaker:get to know what products they're looking at because we track them across the website.
Speaker:So then if a wholesaler comes to me and it's a plumber's merchant,
Speaker:I can say these are the products that plumbers are interested in. So I know if
Speaker:I put those into the branch, 95% of the time it's
Speaker:going to sell and people don't realize is you use one thing to
Speaker:help you with the other thing. Yeah. And these so many brands just
Speaker:don't get that. No they don't get it. It's just you know once you've sold the
Speaker:product to the wholesaler. Who's buying it? Yes, absolutely.
Speaker:And if you don't know who your customer is, how can you make products for them that you know they're
Speaker:It's just so cool. Yeah. We discussed our fair
Speaker:about the, the, um, the, the direct, the direct to consumer stuff.
Speaker:And it's, um, it's revolutionized our
Speaker:business. Yeah. When we started doing direct to consumer five years ago, we're
Speaker:now, three times the size we were. And
Speaker:it just turbocharged the business. It gave me like instant
Speaker:like data on the whole business. And I could see not
Speaker:only on social media what stuff was working obviously because we're working with the
Speaker:influencers. The influencers can say this is what's working. This
Speaker:is the questions that I'm getting and I'm getting live data all
Speaker:the time. It's instant. It's not where it's sold. The wholesaler it
Speaker:sits on their shelf for six months and then come back and say can I send all this back
Speaker:because it's not selling. Yeah. You know, even if you have a sales team going
Speaker:around and they're going, yeah, well, it hadn't sold after three months, but they're not always
Speaker:tracking that because they're focused on getting a sale. And stuff
Speaker:could be not selling at all. Yes. And you've not got that data. You're seven,
Speaker:eight, nine months behind. Whereas on the website, I can go, this
Speaker:isn't selling. I need to shift this out so I can turn my stock over and get a new
Speaker:product in. Or actually, I'm getting that feedback back that there's
Speaker:an issue with that product, especially if there is an issue with a product. It
Speaker:goes to a wholesaler. It doesn't sell for six months. 12 months later,
Speaker:suddenly you've got an issue. I could have fixed it. So it's,
Speaker:I did a little bit, and then I have
Speaker:done over the course of the years, but we're very good at sort of managing
Speaker:the disparity between the two, because obviously they're like, oh, we don't want you selling it,
Speaker:and I'm like, well, are you open on a weekend? Yeah. And
Speaker:they go, no, and I'm like, well, We are. I'm
Speaker:not going to just shut the whole website off because you want to open
Speaker:on a weekend. And you have to sort of say that
Speaker:to people, but say it in a way where we're not going to shit on you. You
Speaker:know, I still want people to come into your branch and buy it because it benefits
Speaker:me as well as benefiting you. But the reason I went direct
Speaker:to consumer was because I was trying to get products in a place like Screefix, for example. Not
Speaker:interested. Who are you? You like never heard of you. And what
Speaker:ended up happening was we pushed stuff on the direct consumer via the
Speaker:influencers. They all know who the influencers are because they want to work with
Speaker:them. Yeah. All of a sudden, how can we put
Speaker:your products in? Yeah. And then that actually gave me a bit more power
Speaker:back because I was like, well, you never wanted me when I was nothing. Yeah. And
Speaker:now you see us everywhere. I'm not interested. Yeah. So actually it gave me the option
Speaker:of picking and choosing who I worked with now. Whereas before it was like, please
Speaker:work with me. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas now I just, I'm
Speaker:not interested. I know I can go and make that money myself if I needed to,
Speaker:Do you think, you know, for these brands that were perhaps already in
Speaker:Screwfix and they've relied on that kind of trade, that there's an
Speaker:element of just, I'm too scared to go direct to consumer, especially if they haven't got the
Speaker:There is, but I also feel like you
Speaker:know, so many brands do it now. And I
Speaker:just think you can't say don't do it because most people's products
Speaker:So if it's on Amazon and you're not selling it on Amazon and somebody else
Speaker:is, I just think. You know, it's not about having control over
Speaker:like your supply chain, but it's having control over your brand. Yes.
Speaker:And I would rather do it direct to consumer than do it on Amazon. We
Speaker:are on Amazon, but I don't do that. Yeah. There's another company
Speaker:that runs our Amazon for us and that's deliberately done. So it's like
Speaker:I don't really have a hand in that. No. I get to focus all my
Speaker:energy on the direct to consumer, the own branding that we do for other
Speaker:brands because we package up products for other companies and stick
Speaker:it under their brand. And then also the B2B side. Um,
Speaker:but a lot of big brands, I mean, if somebody like Milwaukee, for example, decided,
Speaker:right, we're going to go direct to consumer, their business would probably treble.
Speaker:Yeah. Well, I think it's, I think it's sexier for power tool companies to
Speaker:I'm not as sure whether... Still keep the B2B. I still
Speaker:feel like it should be an option that somebody can go
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah. And like, for instance, like
Speaker:sealants and adhesives and stuff like that, we were talking about this earlier. Do you think that's still
Speaker:like viable for direct to consumer? Or do you think for the most part, like, because
Speaker:you've got to look at your market, haven't you? There's no point in going direct to consumer if your
Speaker:You need a product ideally that's Probably 20 pounds
Speaker:plus. Okay. Because you've got to have something that if somebody's going
Speaker:to order it, if the shipping is the same prices, you
Speaker:know, like say if you buy a box of fixings or you buy a tube of sealant, it's
Speaker:the same as getting it delivered. Yes. And it's a bit like you said with the business rates
Speaker:and the rent, business rates are more expensive. You think, well, why am I going to rent
Speaker:it? Yeah, absolutely. Um, So you have to have something
Speaker:that's a particular type of price and a particular type of product. For
Speaker:us, it's like big work lights. It warrants ordering
Speaker:one and it turns up at your house. So you then don't have to spend the time going out
Speaker:and looking for it. Or if you've been looking for it and you can't find it, it's on
Speaker:And I guess it's one of those, that's one of those items that you're not getting
Speaker:for a specific job. That's, that's a sort of decision that you're making for
Speaker:the long term, isn't it? So, you know, it's not like, although I'm
Speaker:sure there is a case where you go into your local merchant, you see a
Speaker:big, you know, like product that's more of an investment, you go, yeah,
Speaker:And you might, well, you might need to get it for a specific job. So you go, you know,
Speaker:there might be a situation that comes up where you, where you're like, I'm on this
Speaker:job today. Oh, I've just realized I've run out of sealant. I'm not going to order online. I'm
Speaker:If you're in a wholesale and you're getting stuff for your job for the day, you'll
Speaker:And you just, you pick them up and off you go. Absolutely. So I think it does make sense
Speaker:for the, especially like things like the, you know, electrical items and stuff like that.
Speaker:But yeah, for people like Milwaukee, you know... When they
Speaker:do, because they will, it will revolutionise their
Speaker:business. And it's sort of, a lot of them, like you say, are too
Speaker:scared to do that. And Milwaukee actually have sort of pigeonholed themselves in
Speaker:a way, because they've got those red vans that go out everywhere showing
Speaker:off the products. And you probably wouldn't need them as much.
Speaker:No. You know but you're paying somebody to go out with this big red van full
Speaker:of tools showcasing people when you could just go to exhibitions and
Speaker:actually the stuff's online. These days you've got people that do YouTube
Speaker:reviews of products. So theoretically you don't need to touch
Speaker:it as much. You can see it and especially like Nick was in here. You
Speaker:Nick Bundy, by the way. The worst thing I could have done this
Speaker:morning was get Nick Bundy, the electrician, in to
Speaker:come and give us a quote when Alex was coming in, because it was
Speaker:a 40-minute conversation. It was a 40-minute catch-up. I didn't even know you guys knew each
Speaker:other, but I should have known. Really, really cool.
Speaker:It's great to hear your thoughts on that. Also, just finishing
Speaker:off that kind of line of topic, Imagine
Speaker:what the marketing budgets would be like if you just went direct to consumer. Say Milwaukee, they've
Speaker:got great marketing already. Imagine if they
Speaker:went direct to consumer, how the marketing would transform, because
Speaker:they would all of a sudden go, you know, we need videos,
Speaker:They're in a unique position more so than what we are, because they're
Speaker:a bigger brand. they are getting consistently tagged in
Speaker:products every single day with people just
Speaker:showing off like products. And the one thing they do quite well is they do like
Speaker:a pipeline, a big product reveal and launch, and they get a load of
Speaker:influencers there. It's just live streaming. It gets everybody excited for it.
Speaker:But they really wouldn't have to invest as much into an
Speaker:influencer program as what, say, I've had to. Yes. Because people
Speaker:are already pushing the products. They're not actually paying anybody to push
Speaker:No. Because it's a cool product to promote. You
Speaker:know, even for free, just go look and check out my new Milwaukee tool.
Speaker:Maybe all they'd have to do is send free product to people. Yeah, perhaps. Which is
Speaker:a lot cheaper than giving extra GP away
Speaker:So we've established Unionite as
Speaker:a brand that takes marketing seriously, it takes creativity seriously,
Speaker:which I think is huge. And, you know, like
Speaker:I mentioned before, Unionite is one of those brands that I wish we'd
Speaker:have got in before you guys got a great team. But as
Speaker:soon as you know, when I'm, you know, doing my research, I'm looking at brands
Speaker:that I think would be cool to work with, I've scrolled through this is quite a few years ago.
Speaker:scrolling through the Instagram thinking they don't need us. There's no point at
Speaker:all. They've got this down. And
Speaker:one of the few brands that's, you know, essentially got a dissident team in-house in
Speaker:that respect, which is amazing and brave and not a lot of companies do it. And I'd prefer
Speaker:There's not many that could do it. And I feel
Speaker:like especially, again, product dependent. There's not many that
Speaker:What has been the what's
Speaker:what's made you like it is today in terms of a kind of like a
Speaker:market leader in that creativity and that marketing like what what things did you
Speaker:I think that one of the one of the main things that we did was probably again
Speaker:five years ago me and the sister split the business down the middle because we're all
Speaker:doing a bit of everything that's why when you ask me what my job title is I've done
Speaker:every single job in there um but I think splitting it
Speaker:into she looked after logistics and the finance
Speaker:and the HR, all the boring shit. And then, obviously, I did the
Speaker:sales, marketing, product development. And then when we looked and it was like, we
Speaker:don't have a big sales team. We've got one sales guy, Rich. And
Speaker:the reason being is every time we bought salespeople in, it's very difficult. You've
Speaker:got to pay for their car, you've got to pay for the meal, you've got to pay for them to stay away,
Speaker:you've got to pay tax, NI, pension contribution. It's
Speaker:A lot of time it can take 12 months for you to get returns on those because like they've got
Speaker:A long time. So it's a big, long investment. Whereas again,
Speaker:I thought, well, what's a quicker way of doing that? Now using
Speaker:people like Nick or Mark who you've had on the podcast. these
Speaker:guys in essence have become my sales team. Yes. And
Speaker:actually I can ring them like a wholesaler and this is I'm not
Speaker:slagging off my distributors because they're an important part of the business but
Speaker:Yes. So that's slowing my business down. It
Speaker:Whereas if I rang Nick now and said, look, can you help me with this? I've got
Speaker:this product coming out. Can you show this off? It's done in
Speaker:a day. Yeah. And anything where, like I said to you, you can speed
Speaker:your business up. that revolutionized our business.
Speaker:Influencers and social media revolutionized
Speaker:the business. I had that direct connection with my
Speaker:customer and I could create my own story that
Speaker:they could buy into and feel like they're part of the brand. So
Speaker:I don't know whether it's okay talking about this but I kind of overheard
Speaker:and it was part of the conversation earlier around Because
Speaker:essentially, like, Nick Bundy would be like an affiliate. He
Speaker:would class as an affiliate for you guys. So
Speaker:for those who aren't aware, you know, affiliate is someone
Speaker:who isn't necessarily getting paid to promote a product. They're someone
Speaker:who is actually, they've got skin in the game, they get
Speaker:some sort of cut or whatever of the sales
Speaker:that are generated from content. Typically, that's how it works. But
Speaker:the beautiful thing about this is, you
Speaker:can test stuff with these guys. You can go, right, guys,
Speaker:I want you to put out, we're ready to launch this product, or
Speaker:we want to relaunch, or we want to push on this particular thing. Here's
Speaker:a code to get x amount of
Speaker:products or whatever. And then they can put that stuff out. And then, again,
Speaker:with your software, you can track everything. Straight
Speaker:away, you can get that data instantly to go, that's worked. Which
Speaker:is amazing to be able to do, again, only because you
Speaker:can sell direct to consumer. Because if we make a piece of content, We
Speaker:know it's successful, but we don't know how successful. You can't
Speaker:quantify it. Yeah, because it's too complicated to, because we're
Speaker:working with the brands, although I'd like to work with more retailers, I
Speaker:kind of didn't realize there was such an untapped market there. We're working
Speaker:with a brand, we create launch content that goes out for
Speaker:a particular product. That goes over the next, let's say, three
Speaker:months. We market that on our client's social
Speaker:channels. That then goes in, starts to go into the
Speaker:distributors. But it might take 12 months for it to actually go into the retailers, this
Speaker:particular product. So it's about two years down the line
Speaker:that we might start to get data on this kind of thing. But a lot of the time, the
Speaker:data isn't there. It's
Speaker:not that clear or clever
Speaker:for us to go, okay, how many did you sell and be able to pull that data in?
Speaker:It'd be nice to get those figures, but I think for a company like us, it's just too difficult
Speaker:And a lot of brands as well, they don't want to be honest
Speaker:with that. Like if somebody asked me about the company, like I'm
Speaker:honest with them. This is what we do. This is how we set the influencer stuff up.
Speaker:And I try to tell people, but a lot of people go, sounds like
Speaker:a lot of work. Yeah. But it's not because once it's set up, it
Speaker:just works. It's everything we've done, we've automated. Yeah. So
Speaker:it's just, you know, and it's a bit like a Tesla car.
Speaker:The more Tesla's that are on the road, the more data they've got for the full self-driving.
Speaker:Yeah. And it's a bit like that with us now is it's just, it just keeps going
Speaker:like that. So we've, we've got all of that data. So if we want to go and do a
Speaker:particular product with Nick and we want Nick to sort of show something off. I
Speaker:know any new product that I've designed that's similar to that. I
Speaker:know pretty much Nick's the person to give that product to. Yes. And
Speaker:then it becomes so much easier rather than going everybody promotes it.
Speaker:Two people have got no sales or you know three never
Speaker:showed it off because it wasn't for them. It's just everything's instant.
Speaker:It makes the business so much more like agile quick and
Speaker:What I like as well, we have a lot of discussions around influencer
Speaker:marketing, which I was surprised, Andrew,
Speaker:I'm going to reference Andrew now, because it's the first time we've
Speaker:got Andrew on the Keelan cam, it's Andrew cam today. I've looked
Speaker:him and I've realized I've not introduced and Andrew at all. Yeah,
Speaker:yeah. Keelan's on holiday on a cruise. And
Speaker:he's what, 22? We all think
Speaker:that's weird, he's gone on a cruise. But it's
Speaker:surprising on this podcast how often we mention influencers. And
Speaker:that might be because we're biased in the fact that we work with influencers
Speaker:or content creators, and we work with brands who work with influencers. And it's not
Speaker:actually a that much of an area of
Speaker:business for us. We don't get paid necessarily to
Speaker:do that kind of thing. We're not an influential agency. But the
Speaker:topics that we come across a lot of the time is how much do you pay them? You're
Speaker:trying to get content out of these influencers. You're not doing the right content.
Speaker:It's not looking right. We used to have discussions about the
Speaker:fact that, yeah, you told us you were going to do X amount of stories, but you didn't. Or
Speaker:one of them was a rehash. We come across those problems all the time. From
Speaker:an affiliate marketing perspective, you do what you want, mate. Do what you
Speaker:Do you know one mistake that a lot of brands make is they don't realise somebody
Speaker:like me, for two, three years, I was sending products
Speaker:to different people. And I was just sending them to people's pages that
Speaker:I loved and just putting them out there, which at one point, everyone
Speaker:was like, you're everywhere. Absolutely everywhere, which it may have seemed like,
Speaker:but I was testing these people. to see, A, how
Speaker:they are to deal with on a personal level, how responsive they were,
Speaker:you know, did they talk about the product in the right way, and
Speaker:eventually I whittled it down to a select group of
Speaker:people where I was like, these people, I could take them
Speaker:home, introduce them to my mum, I know they're not going to piss anybody
Speaker:off, and I know that also they are reliable.
Speaker:And that took me two or three years to get to that. I
Speaker:didn't actually pay anybody for two or three years. I was just sending products
Speaker:out. But it was almost just testing and to see whether or
Speaker:not I had that relationship with these people over an extended period of time. Eventually,
Speaker:I started to pay people. And I think A lot of people
Speaker:in the industry will hate me because I had so many influences, people like Dave Ellwood
Speaker:and Ash Mahoney and some of these others messaging me going, how much should
Speaker:I charge? And, you know, I think you talked
Speaker:about it with Emma talking about media packs. I used to do media packs for free for
Speaker:people because it's just like, you know what, if you want one, I'll I'll do one because we had
Speaker:all the data on them, which we'd got on our own system. So I
Speaker:did them all these media packs. But a lot of brands, they
Speaker:don't they don't see that you have to you have to like
Speaker:not test people, but you have to have like a bit of
Speaker:a relationship with them first before you just go, they just expect, they'll
Speaker:say to you, who should I use? Bang. You're not actually look
Speaker:at or watch that. But I studied people and then I had all the
Speaker:data to back up to go, actually the data doesn't match
Speaker:what I'm seeing with people. Sometimes the data didn't and
Speaker:I've still went ahead with it because I was like, actually, I see what you
Speaker:do for us. Yes. And the good thing as well was a lot of
Speaker:the people we started to use had already used our product. This one
Speaker:knew I'm not going to have to push you to push this product because I
Speaker:could see you putting it out there before I've even contacted you. And
Speaker:I think brands sort of underestimate the power of social media
Speaker:was I used to just sit there. People used to call me a vampire because I was up like
Speaker:watching American content, talking to American influencers, Canadian influencers,
Speaker:and then up early talking to ones in Australia. And
Speaker:I did that for two, three years before I started paying anybody.
Speaker:Yeah. And is that, is that still you now? Are you, are you still the
Speaker:I've got my own page now where I talk to people, but
Speaker:I'm not like, I was fully addicted to, to,
Speaker:the science of it. And it worked. Obviously since I've
Speaker:sold the business I've took a step back and there's people in the office now that
Speaker:are doing it. Probably not to the same like intricate level
Speaker:that I am. Not three in the morning. But the influencer side
Speaker:of stuff now we've got a real good tight knit group of people and again
Speaker:a lot of brands they'll just scattergun it and then they take
Speaker:on loads of influence because they think the more influences we got the more money we make.
Speaker:which isn't true. I tried to, again, like
Speaker:it ended up being like that, but I didn't look at what Gymshark did, but I had like
Speaker:a select group of people. So it almost became, and
Speaker:people, oh, how do I become one? Because I kept it
Speaker:so there's like seven or eight of them there. It's the elite, you
Speaker:know, you want to be part of that group. And people are like, how do I
Speaker:get in there? And I'd have to say to people, look, it's not always about your
Speaker:follow account or whatever. There's a whole host of stuff that I'm looking at for people.
Speaker:And again, I get people saying, well, how do I get brands to look at me? And
Speaker:I'm like, well, you have to tag them in stuff to begin with. I said, but only
Speaker:work with brands that you truly, truly love. Like
Speaker:if, I don't know, you wear a Snickers
Speaker:workwear, but you get Regatta, message you. And this
Speaker:is no disrespect to Regatta or whoever. If they're
Speaker:sending you a product and you've been wearing Snickers for ages and you suddenly
Speaker:go, oh, this Regatta stuff, you know, look at it. It's great. People go, it's
Speaker:bullshit. It's just, I've never seen you wear it.
Speaker:But it's just some people will do that because they want to be a brand
Speaker:ambassador or an influencer. And I just think, just stick to the brands
Speaker:that you love. And that loyalty eventually pays off because somebody
Speaker:goes, do you know what? Their stuff's great. I love their content
Speaker:and I can see how invested they are in the brand, which sometimes
Speaker:And you can tell, the audience can tell, can't they? You know, especially
Speaker:if you're a prolific content creator, especially on long form and stuff like
Speaker:that. And then all of a sudden you sort of switch to a
Speaker:different brand. Some people could do that and they could do it quite
Speaker:well, especially if they're very honest. But, you
Speaker:know, you can just tell, can't you, if you're just like sort of shilling a
Speaker:brand that you've never had any connection with in the past, and you've always been
Speaker:a Snickers guy, that your audience is just
Speaker:like, come on, mate, we know what you're doing. Which is a
Speaker:sad thing for content creators and influencers,
Speaker:because I think I've said this in the past as well, is that
Speaker:authenticity is their brand. And that's the, you know, if that's a
Speaker:big stream of income for them, they've got to guard that
Speaker:authenticity. as a creative agency, we don't give a shit. We'll
Speaker:just like, biggest check, who's, you know, what brands are
Speaker:But people will get dangled a carrot by some of these other brands that they've never used
Speaker:before. And it's very difficult for them to turn it down because I'd never begrudge
Speaker:anybody their financial situation. But I always think you
Speaker:have to, if that is what you want to do, and you're focused on becoming
Speaker:a brand ambassador or working with brands, you have to have like,
Speaker:just don't get flirty with something just because it's dangled in front of you.
Speaker:If you if you want to work with a particular brand you have to. You
Speaker:have to stay at it, even if it takes two years. Mark with
Speaker:us wasn't somebody that I used initially, but he
Speaker:was somebody that I kept watching and I kept watching and he was tagging products in
Speaker:and he was like, I love this. And he just loved the
Speaker:product. And I thought that shines through with him. And
Speaker:eventually I said, oh, do you want to come on board? And he said, yeah. And
Speaker:And long term, like he probably, I think we discussed this a
Speaker:little bit on his episode, Mark Tiff's episode, where
Speaker:you might have to turn down short-term gains
Speaker:in terms of like a brand coming to you for the long-term goal
Speaker:of, you know, if you're wanting content creation to
Speaker:be a part of your income, a decent part of your income, you can't make
Speaker:some sacrifices in terms of brand deals to guard that
Speaker:authenticity because you can't just be shilling out to every, you know, every
Speaker:brand because you're totally reliant on your audience believing
Speaker:You never sell anything. You can't get it back. So difficult. And at the moment it's
Speaker:probably OK because a lot of brands don't do something where it's quantifiable. But
Speaker:as soon as it's evolving and maybe more brands will do direct
Speaker:I wouldn't want to be an influencer, I wouldn't want to be a
Speaker:content creator. The money maker in me would take every deal. I'd
Speaker:take every deal known to man. I'd be selling
Speaker:I mean you can compare them. You're not going to get paid to
Speaker:compare them because people... And the other thing as well that annoys
Speaker:me about brands, because I see it from both sides, obviously I've
Speaker:advised people on this is what you should charge. Mark sometimes still asks
Speaker:me, how much do you think I should charge for this? And it's like,
Speaker:well, this is how I'd work that out. But,
Speaker:you know, a lot of brands, they'll send products to influencers and
Speaker:they expect something back from it. Yes. I never sent any products to
Speaker:anybody and expected anything back. I was just like, I love your page. That
Speaker:is it. Like, I don't want anything from you. If you don't show them off, you don't show them
Speaker:off. Yeah. But people aren't willing, brands especially, to
Speaker:do that. They just think, I've sent you that, so you must, you must
Speaker:Yeah, it's mad, isn't it? We've had products, I've had products sent to me in the
Speaker:past. I'm not an influencer at all. Like
Speaker:just, and then they're like, here you go. I'm like, okay,
Speaker:like, did you need me to? And they were like, no, just enjoy. Just
Speaker:enjoy. I'm like, this is great. I felt obliged to create some
Speaker:really cool content about that. But I think if they'd been like, if
Speaker:we send you this product, can you make a video? I'd be like, no. Well, what happens if somebody doesn't like
Speaker:Yeah. And I've always said to somebody, I said, look, if you don't like it, be
Speaker:straight with me and then tell me what you don't like about it, which
Speaker:is how I came to work with PB originally was I
Speaker:sent him these like part plastic, part rubber
Speaker:starred products. And he just went, it's not for me. He says,
Speaker:I don't, I don't really like plastic. It feels too cheap plastic. Um,
Speaker:so I ended up doing a whole range of products, which now we use quite
Speaker:a lot of the aluminium sort of side of things and then sent them to him
Speaker:and he was like, these are way better. But initially, I didn't
Speaker:have anything like that. That's really cool. But I was like, at least he was honest
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's valuable to get that feedback, isn't it? Absolutely
Speaker:massive. So we've split in
Speaker:the business into sort of segmenting particular
Speaker:She left in August, because obviously sold the business. So she was there
Speaker:for just over a year. But her idea was to exit the business. OK.
Speaker:Is she still in the similar industry? She's retired. That's
Speaker:She's retired. I love that. I think the thing we must see, she's older
Speaker:than me, you see. And she'd worked at the business slightly
Speaker:longer than what I had. And she was just like, you know what, I just want to go and
Speaker:enjoy myself for a couple of years. She'll probably go back to doing something. You
Speaker:know, we got property businesses together, so we still do that. But
Speaker:she just wanted to chill out, which is fair enough.
Speaker:I love that. So you segmented the business, you brought
Speaker:on, you started this program, you know, with working with
Speaker:influencers, content creators, and things like that. Was
Speaker:there anything else that you did, you know, with Unilite that's kind
Speaker:Changing the colour of the products and targeting a
Speaker:specific like tradesmen and women. Yeah,
Speaker:we had to, we used to, like I said to you before, we did stuff for
Speaker:camping, for walking, for rock climbing,
Speaker:whatever it was, we did something for everybody. And the
Speaker:products were all in different colors, different styles, nothing really
Speaker:matched. The logo didn't really say anything to anybody. And
Speaker:when I came into the business I was like right OK we need to target one
Speaker:specific group. We need to do you know a certain style
Speaker:of product where it felt more premium. The packaging represented that.
Speaker:Everything that we sort of did fell into that. And then the one
Speaker:probably biggest thing that we changed was the color of the product. Yes. Because
Speaker:you know when you do something in blue you do it in orange you do it in black. There's
Speaker:no brand identity there. Whereas we put everything into that high vis yellow.
Speaker:And I remember it was about seven or
Speaker:eight months we undernagged about it. We did products in black with yellow switches or
Speaker:all yellow with black switches. We took them to an exhibition and people said, oh,
Speaker:I'd buy that one more. And I remember when we first launched
Speaker:it because it was high-beige yellow. It was like, why would I wear a canary on my head? You know,
Speaker:like yellow head torches. And the best thing that we ever did was
Speaker:across social, across TV, because our products end up on TV,
Speaker:people go, so you like the product. So those colors now
Speaker:are synonymous with us. And then everything that we did then with
Speaker:the branding, the style of videos that we had, we had the strap line
Speaker:for the business, which was lights built tough, which
Speaker:eventually became hashtag built tough. But stuff like that,
Speaker:all sort of one thing led to the next thing. And then you go, OK, well,
Speaker:if I change that and then before you realize it, your
Speaker:customers are sort of pushing you in a direction of how they want
Speaker:to see the brand. Because they're giving you, you know, the data back,
Speaker:especially with a direct-to-consumer. I was getting that data back all the time. Well,
Speaker:actually, they prefer aluminium products to plastic products. They're
Speaker:buying more head torches than inspection lights or whatever it
Speaker:is. And all of that sort of you know, they're,
Speaker:they're meandering your business for you. All that data that you
Speaker:get back and all the things that they say to you at an exhibition or the
Speaker:things that they say to you on social media or the way you see them using the product
Speaker:in videos. You're like, and
Speaker:that's why social media for anybody watching this, I can't,
Speaker:I can't big it up enough. It revolutionized our business.
Speaker:That's the one thing that revolutionized it. You look at
Speaker:any of the big, large successful brands over
Speaker:the last few years that have come out, you know, like Lounge Underwear, that's
Speaker:another Birmingham based business, which, you know, it's
Speaker:in essence, it's just women's underwear. But they're massive
Speaker:direct to consumer. Same with Gymshark, the same with Able,
Speaker:which is the other guy who started Gymshark, it's another gym brand. Like
Speaker:brands like Hera represent. These are all
Speaker:brands that are like, born e-com brands. Yeah.
Speaker:But how did they get so big? Because they had the data and
Speaker:the customer and they know their customer. And that was
Speaker:you know for us social media media just revolutionized
Speaker:it. I had instant access to customers 24 hours
Speaker:a day. Yeah. And feedback if something was wrong picked
Speaker:it up and it's sorted. Whereas with a disreview like I said you
Speaker:know you're waiting for your how did this campaign do.
Speaker:Yeah. But you sat there and you And
Speaker:time doesn't stop your business is still moving. Whereas if it's instant feedback. I
Speaker:So it made us more nimble. Because
Speaker:you can work so quickly, you can get sales, you can get data instantly. Has
Speaker:that affected the way that you market the brand? Because
Speaker:I imagine, I know this for a fact, there's a lot
Speaker:of brands out there, their sole focus is advertising and
Speaker:not necessarily marketing, if you know what I mean. sacrifice
Speaker:brand, like creative for
Speaker:a quick book, a quick sale. Let's just move this stuff around. Do
Speaker:you focus a lot on like, okay, not every piece of content needs to sell
Speaker:The best brands that do that are like Red Bull. You
Speaker:look on Red Bull's Instagram. You never see a Red Bull can. And
Speaker:that's because they're selling high performance, like,
Speaker:you know, on the edge, like everything's like,
Speaker:they're not even selling a can of drink. And I
Speaker:used to look at brands like that. That's where we started doing the videos
Speaker:of like smashing products or driving over in a tank. And
Speaker:in our industry, it's very difficult to do anything where you're not showing off the
Speaker:product. Yes. Because it is a product. Obviously, when
Speaker:you're doing Red Bull, you can have Red Bull plastered on
Speaker:the side of a racing car. You know, put Unilite on the side of a racing car.
Speaker:It's very, very different. And I think when you're sort of in that, Retail
Speaker:side of things, it's easier for you to do, not show off
Speaker:the product as much as industry. People want to see it working. That's
Speaker:the whole point. They want to see, you know, you turn the light on, wow, look at that
Speaker:up against the side of a house type of thing. But we
Speaker:try to do our own spin on it. Driving over in a tank sending
Speaker:There was a the thing there was no First first piece
Speaker:of content I ever saw from you like which solidified on it. These guys have got
Speaker:it Or you can keep I can't remember
Speaker:it perfectly can tell the story of like how that came to be and but we were
Speaker:sponsoring Warwickshire cricket club at the time
Speaker:I'd actually ironically talked to one of the tools about ideas for videos, and
Speaker:those guys, they were coming back with stuff, and I was thinking, it's still not quite right for
Speaker:me. Had some good ideas, but I was like... I want to convey that,
Speaker:you know, I work in construction. People want to know that stuff like construction
Speaker:is like a big, tough, hard job. You know, you're outside in
Speaker:the elements, all that sort of stuff. I want something where it shows
Speaker:just how durable one of these things is. And if you're buying our product,
Speaker:that's what you're getting. And then I had the idea to
Speaker:go down to Warwickshire Cricket Club and I thought, maybe we hit them with some
Speaker:bats. And then I thought, No, how do
Speaker:I get players in? Because I can't just have players just chucking it up and hitting a
Speaker:work light. I thought, right, what we're going to do is set it up on the tripod and
Speaker:we're going to have speed bowlers. They're two fastest bowlers
Speaker:just throwing balls at it. And then those guys were smashing
Speaker:them down. I thought, right, we'll bring out the bowling machine and turn
Speaker:it up to 100 miles an hour. which no one's ever
Speaker:going to throw something at a product 100 miles an hour. I want people to see
Speaker:that hit the product and it still works. And it's sort of that
Speaker:reverse psychology of wow look at that like. And
Speaker:It's entertaining. It goes back to that kind of entertain, educate,
Speaker:And then that set the precedent then for doing, driving over
Speaker:in a tank, shooting it with a shotgun, sending one into space. And
Speaker:we were going to carry on doing all these different videos. And then COVID hit, which
Speaker:sort of stopped that. And then because we were so focused then
Speaker:on the direct-to-consumer and the short-form content, the long-form content sort
Speaker:of fell by the wayside because we were so successful with the
Speaker:I never really went back to long for, but I would class the
Speaker:that the those kinds of the cricket one like that for me that that's
Speaker:not your typical direct consumer e commerce put
Speaker:some money behind this and try and convert, you
Speaker:know, that's that is brand essentially it's got great brand creative.
Speaker:And it says something obviously educated about
Speaker:the product, but it's not just flogging the product. It's
Speaker:got some culture behind it and some creative. And
Speaker:that kind of what I was getting at was the kind of, Some,
Speaker:some brands exist just to create ads and that's it. Every
Speaker:It makes you less successful. Yeah. You have to be sort
Speaker:of like, this is, you have to entertain people, but
Speaker:you have to give them a reason to be entertained. And this is what you're going to
Speaker:get back. You know, I'm, I'm actually selling somebody the
Speaker:product there because I'm showing how durable it is, but
Speaker:I'm not, directly saying look you gotta buy it because this thing
Speaker:is as tough as nails. Yeah. I'm doing it like look at this how cool
Speaker:this is. Yeah. Like firing cricket balls because you know most
Speaker:most guys especially be like yeah let's stick the bowling machine on let's
Speaker:let's break it and that was the sort of reasoning behind
Speaker:it even like people look and say well why did you do that space video because
Speaker:I think it cost me about six seven grand. Did it? To do. to
Speaker:send it into space. But again, it was to show, look, we test our
Speaker:products like lithium batteries to like minus 20. When it's up
Speaker:in the atmosphere, it's minus 60. And the product stayed on the whole time. So
Speaker:I'm sort of, I'm showing that we can, you
Speaker:know, the test that we do, I mean, the product's reliable, but I'm even
Speaker:going past what I test, you know, for me, it's to show, look how far
Speaker:we're going on the scale. And stuff
Speaker:like that, again, it was exciting to me because it's not just, you
Speaker:know, selling to somebody, I'm showing somebody, look how cool this is, and it's cool
Speaker:to see your product actually achieve that, if that
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely. And just for context, for the viewer not
Speaker:listening, where can people find this? Is it on LinkedIn? It's on YouTube, the
Speaker:videos. YouTube, OK. Yeah, yeah, on the Unilike YouTube, the videos. Go
Speaker:check those bits and pieces out, so you kind of understand what we're
Speaker:talking about. But really, really cool pieces of content. And was that, when
Speaker:you were filming those, again, was that with your in-house team, or
Speaker:The Sent Into Space guys are an external company
Speaker:and they obviously they have to track everything. They've got flight data
Speaker:as well because you can't just send up a... You can't send Jack
Speaker:up there. Yeah, yeah. So they have to like pre-plan everything, the
Speaker:weather, like points of location where you let it
Speaker:go and where it lands and all that and they track the whole thing for you. So
Speaker:they're external. That first cricket video
Speaker:actually wasn't done by the guys internally. That was
Speaker:a... a guy called George who has a company called Rodapond. And
Speaker:he now does loads of like real big videos for football teams. So
Speaker:he's really progressed. But that was both of those were were
Speaker:external. And the one for the
Speaker:tanks and stuff like that was done in-house, but everything else
Speaker:after that was basically, I thought, I'm using these guys,
Speaker:I love what they do, but it's costing me, costing me
Speaker:big money. And obviously when that money is sort of tight
Speaker:for a small business, you think, if I bring somebody in, I can have consistent content
Speaker:that I can go out and do. But initially it's sort of like, well,
Speaker:I'm paying somebody's wage. That's four or five of those videos that I can go and do.
Speaker:And some people don't want to take that leap. And if I hadn't taken
Speaker:I think, um, you've got to,
Speaker:if you're going to take on this much investment, because you've got what? I
Speaker:So I've got Jack, G and Kai, videographers, but
Speaker:the good thing with them is they can edit as well. Yes. Some people are
Speaker:great at shooting a camera, but can't really edit, which I think now
Speaker:is not so much. But we've got those guys, we've got Nathan who
Speaker:does all web and like CRM integrations,
Speaker:stuff like that. We've got Chloe on socials. team who'll do
Speaker:like a bit of the data for the website. And then we've
Speaker:got Lisa who does like, she looks after all the pictures and
Speaker:Okay, that's cool. I mean, just having, I mean, I
Speaker:would class almost like, in terms of content team, I'd probably put Lisa
Speaker:in there as well to some extent. You've got, you've got
Speaker:your three guys who are on video and probably Stills as well, they do a bit of Stills
Speaker:and stuff. Yeah. And you've got Lisa, like, you've
Speaker:got to commit to creating stuff so often
Speaker:to be able to warrant that amount of investment, right? And
Speaker:If you're a certain size and you've got the profit within your business,
Speaker:Go and do it. Yeah. Go and do it. But I think a lot of people are worried
Speaker:to go and do it. But obviously, again, like I said, when I
Speaker:started, there wasn't a you. No. You know, and obviously,
Speaker:if I if I hadn't started, I'd be like, yeah, I'll just. And that's another
Speaker:thing as well, is a lot of brands go, well, I don't want to go and spend that
Speaker:money on wages. But then they don't want to pay you probably a
Speaker:quarter of that to do it for six months or a year. And
Speaker:You've got, you've got a title because I think the thing is like you can, what
Speaker:happens with us regularly is we run out of budget.
Speaker:They don't realize how time consuming to
Speaker:go all the way to somewhere is just traveling there, set equipment up.
Speaker:Yeah. Obviously the stuff that goes in behind the scenes before you've
Speaker:gone out because you've got to pre-plan everything because they want to see. what
Speaker:am I getting? Yes. And then obviously you're there for maybe
Speaker:a day, two days doing a full shoot or getting stills or whatever.
Speaker:And then you've got the edit. Yeah. And then you've got any tweaks
Speaker:It's so expensive. It's funny actually. And I don't know
Speaker:whether there's some, there's, there's, there's gotta be some way of educating.
Speaker:Maybe this is, this is the podcast to educate brands on this kind of thing. I,
Speaker:I, um, I gave a rough, idea of
Speaker:cost for a production with a company of the day in a
Speaker:meeting. I said it's going to be one day production, this, this
Speaker:and this, a few extra little bits and bobs, 10 grand. That is
Speaker:going to be roughly 10 grand. I'd have to figure it out and you have to give me a proper brief.
Speaker:This is why I kind of like we prefer the retained model because it.
Speaker:We don't need to brands know where they stand with that. Yeah. And once you
Speaker:kind of understand, once you've been working with us for six months, you know, understand how
Speaker:much stuff costs. All of our rates is set, but it's just like,
Speaker:there are certain things that are like editing, for instance, you
Speaker:do a production, they say a one day production, they
Speaker:don't, Brands and people that, you
Speaker:know, our customers a lot of the time don't factor in the editing time. So
Speaker:they go, well you do one day production, we want 20 edits out of
Speaker:that. Okay, well that's tripled the cost of that production because
Speaker:that's a month of editing. As opposed to a one day production
Speaker:that has one piece of hero content. It's a
Speaker:Even when I was utilising, say, that video for
Speaker:Warwickshire Cricket Club cost me three and a half grand. Yeah.
Speaker:Three and a half grand. And it was it was one edit with a couple of social media. Yeah.
Speaker:Short short reels. Yeah. Literally three and a half grand. Yeah. But
Speaker:people like that was. 10 years ago? Yeah. It's
Speaker:mad. I don't think people understand how much
Speaker:And the guy who I was speaking to, lovely guys, you know, they're
Speaker:just not, they are not educated enough to go, is that pretty high
Speaker:end then? I'm like, no, it's not even close to high end.
Speaker:He's like, he kind of, he was like, are you like top level, like
Speaker:By the website that I had done with the marketing agency, external, it's
Speaker:50,000 pounds. Which is why I
Speaker:brought Nathan in-house, because I was like, 50 grand?
Speaker:I mean, don't get me wrong, I've made enough money off the website over the
Speaker:years from direct-to-consumer, but at the time, like, for a small company. So
Speaker:Jesus, yeah, 50 grand. 50 grand's for anybody's a lot of money, isn't
Speaker:And because, I think the thing is... But it's mindset, like,
Speaker:people don't think, actually, if I do that, Is it going to
Speaker:bring me more sales? Is it going to make the brand seem better?
Speaker:Are people going to trust that brand more? Because I've done that, which it
Speaker:I think the difficulty is, especially when it comes to pricing, is you know that you
Speaker:can get a website for a grand somewhere.
Speaker:Fiverr, some local person. So
Speaker:you know, there's a website here for a grand, there's a website here for
Speaker:50 grand. They're both going to do very different things. And a lot of it's to do
Speaker:with e-comm. It's got to be robust. It's got to sell. It's
Speaker:It's got to- If you're doing direct to consumer, the worst thing for
Speaker:Orders get messed up, you know. And because anytime a
Speaker:problem happens in ordering and things like we've seen
Speaker:this with businesses where they've changed to a different system, These
Speaker:are huge businesses. They've changed to a different system. They've fucked up
Speaker:It's ruined their business. Jim Shark had that Black Friday and they'd moved
Speaker:from... Was it Shopify to Magento?
Speaker:People switch between the two a lot. I think they'd moved to
Speaker:Magento and they switched the website on for Black Friday. And
Speaker:I think they had £100,000 worth of orders. And
Speaker:literally that website crashed, it all went down. And
Speaker:people weren't getting orders, orders hadn't gone through. And I think Ben
Speaker:said it cost him like 70,000, 80,000 in lost
Speaker:revenue, which when you're a sort of startup business as he was.
Speaker:So I was just like, if I'm going to do it, it needs to be done right. It's
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely. No, it's mad. And yeah,
Speaker:it was quite funny. And I think a lot of the time, The,
Speaker:the difficulty is with, especially when pricing video production, photography and
Speaker:stuff like that, the conversation is too long to be able to
Speaker:It's, maybe you just need to say to people like do videos behind
Speaker:the scenes here showing. How much goes
Speaker:I think a big part of the strategy for us socially was
Speaker:to show a lot of the behind the scenes because
Speaker:then you see the crew, you see the lighting, you see... But what you don't see a lot of
Speaker:is the planning and the editing. And the editing is the biggest expense.
Speaker:But even this, like if we're looking around the room, most people obviously aren't
Speaker:going to see this, but they might see pictures on your Instagram, the amount of
Speaker:camera equipment that's in here. Obviously, Andy sat there
Speaker:with... the edit for it. Obviously we're
Speaker:sat here, this is our time now, which is costing money, but
Speaker:just everything costs money. And,
Speaker:you know, we do the podcast and Jack sometimes has spent
Speaker:all week editing podcasts. You know, obviously we've got software that
Speaker:helps us, but you've still got to go over and fine tune everything if
Speaker:Absolutely. Yeah. It's mad. We'll talk about the
Speaker:production. I think we could probably wrap it up there because there's so many, Really,
Speaker:really valuable points that we've had there. I don't want to dilute it
Speaker:with anything else because we've talked about using
Speaker:ambassadors, how going direct
Speaker:to consumers completely changed the business, how you have
Speaker:split marketing and brand from other areas
Speaker:Wholesalers. Yes. Other brands for saying that influencers should
Speaker:I think I think especially for you know, and that
Speaker:was quite what was quite interesting as well. What we discussed earlier about the fact that
Speaker:there are some brands where going direct to consumer won't work. It
Speaker:just won't work. You can try it. But you're probably going to like
Speaker:annoy your distributors
Speaker:and your customers more than the
Speaker:benefit that you get from going direct-to-consumer because that, you know, box
Speaker:of screws. I don't know whether that would be relevant to go direct-to-consumer.
Speaker:But who knows? Hilti do it. You know, Hilti, everything, pretty much
Speaker:I know a lot of the batteries and stuff I had to buy. buy
Speaker:off there for when I was designing the product. I had to go and buy everybody's batteries, which
Speaker:cost me probably a thousand pounds to go and buy all these
Speaker:Yeah, so, I mean, Hilti, everyone knows Hilti, they're one
Speaker:of the biggest, biggest construction brands. I'm
Speaker:pretty sure they're a direct consumer. We'll edit this out if they're not, I'll
Speaker:check afterwards. But I want to talk about the podcast, because
Speaker:I came on the podcast, loved it. And... It's
Speaker:another marketing tool, the podcast. Amazing marketing tool,
Speaker:as you know, as we're discovering now. But,
Speaker:like, How did that come about? And was that a
Speaker:part of the unilight kind of strategy that kind of branched off
Speaker:A lot of the stuff that I've done, I've stumbled across. Okay. Like people
Speaker:go, Oh yeah, you know, like you've done really well with the marketing with the brand, but
Speaker:a lot of it's stumbled across. And I mean, one, one thing really,
Speaker:I think the best thing that ever happened to us as a, as a business was COVID.
Speaker:We'd managed to get the direct consumer website done. But that also
Speaker:gave me the time because I, you know, I always wanted to
Speaker:diversify into different products, but it actually gave me the time to actually do
Speaker:some of these things like the tape measures, the safety glasses, all that sort of stuff. And I'd got,
Speaker:I designed loads of different products for different things. Like I just look at something and
Speaker:think, how could I make that better? And it freed me up
Speaker:to start focusing on that side of things. And at the same time,
Speaker:I'd always wanted to do a podcast, but there'd always been negativity
Speaker:around it. Our podcast never really taken off, you know, blah, blah, blah. Podcasts aren't
Speaker:successful. And I thought, I want to
Speaker:get to know these people that I'm working with on social media. Yes. Because
Speaker:I speak to everybody all the time. I don't, I was saying to Andrew before, I don't really
Speaker:know these people on a personal level. And I
Speaker:thought, I want to hear their stories because I may
Speaker:learn something about how to make a product better. So I
Speaker:rang PB at the time and I was like, fancy doing a podcast? And
Speaker:he was like, no. I said, come on, I'll get the
Speaker:whole set built at work. I said, we'll get everything ready. And
Speaker:we've got some specialised trade legends beers made with a company that like
Speaker:runs a brewery down the road. And we got the podcast together, and
Speaker:I thought, I've got Pete on, Pete can talk to people from a perspective of being
Speaker:a tradesperson, and I'll talk to them as a brand and as a
Speaker:business, and we get different people, and so if a
Speaker:brand's on, I can talk to them, and Pete obviously uses their product and vice versa
Speaker:and stuff like that. And I didn't realise just
Speaker:how successful the podcast would become purely from the fact of
Speaker:everybody that came on I feel bad if, like, I invite
Speaker:somebody onto the podcast and I don't give them something because they've travelled there. Yeah. So
Speaker:I'd always go, fancy some products? Yeah, I'll have some products. I'd
Speaker:give a hoodie or give, like, some lights or, you know,
Speaker:utility knives and stuff like that. Not thinking anything of it. Yeah. Everybody
Speaker:that came on would go, wow, look at this haul that I've got. Mm. And
Speaker:people were like, oh, I want to go on there, so I get a haul of goodies. But also, people
Speaker:were like, you know, painters and decorators that never really thought,
Speaker:I need a really good light. Yes. You know, and they were seeing, like,
Speaker:paint warrior Kev with this light on there, where can I get one from? And
Speaker:because we have the direct consumer, Kev was like, you just buy one off their website, or
Speaker:it's in this wholesaler. And what's ended up happening was, just
Speaker:from the podcast, we get painting and decorating stores that come through and
Speaker:say, can I stop these products? I've seen them on blah, blah,
Speaker:blah. And then, you know, the direct consumer sales were going up.
Speaker:And I was thinking, hold on a minute, I've stumbled across like the best marketing
Speaker:tool. And I'm getting to learn about
Speaker:these people, but also make those relationships. And if ever
Speaker:you see Black Friday, for example, I can send out a piece of content and say to
Speaker:people, do you mind just putting this on your stories with a link? And
Speaker:you'll see the Unilight Black Friday sale on so many people's
Speaker:pages. Yeah. Because they're like, yeah, no, no problem. Yeah. And it's, it's
Speaker:because I've always helped these people or done a media pack for
Speaker:them or I've had them on the show and it's, it became my
Speaker:network. And now it's, it's
Speaker:literally, I can, you know, add, uh, Derek Barrett, uh, carpenter message
Speaker:because he said to me, he said, Oh, thanks for sending me. He asked for a charger. And
Speaker:because he's always supported us as a brand, I've had him on the podcast. I've
Speaker:just sent him two or three products with his charger. He's like, you didn't have to, mate. I
Speaker:was like, well, you know, thanks. Yeah. Type of thing. But
Speaker:he's stuck a post out this morning and put it all over his socials. I
Speaker:never asked him to, but yeah, that's it. And that's how
Speaker:the podcast sort of progressed. I never really thought
Speaker:about it in, you know, a bigger sense. And also I
Speaker:never wanted sponsors on there. No adamant. I don't want any sponsors because
Speaker:I was like, just don't want anybody trying to tell me what to do with it or
Speaker:what to say on there or we can't have that guest on because it just. you
Speaker:know, it kills the show off. And then over a period of
Speaker:time, the amount of brands that were like hounding me, saying,
Speaker:I've seen your show, I've seen this, can we sponsor it? Can we do this with you?
Speaker:Do you do anything else? And I was like, well,
Speaker:go on then, we'll do a giveaway. The first thing was a giveaway. And
Speaker:then after that, it's sort of, you know, we ended up with Bisley Workwear
Speaker:as a headline sponsor. And now obviously it's CT1, but
Speaker:all these brands kept coming through and they were like pestering me all the
Speaker:time, saying we want to work with the show. So it's become, in
Speaker:And how did you, from a perspective, I don't think we're
Speaker:in any danger of having any major sponsors for this particular podcast. Never
Speaker:say never. We never, yeah, this is it. I think it'd be cool to have. I
Speaker:was thinking about it the other day. Well, someone did offer to sponsor it the other day, to be fair. I
Speaker:won't mention the word. Great guy. And we really appreciate the offer. But
Speaker:there's a point in the podcast, in that conversation, we
Speaker:go, I have no idea what to charge for sponsorship for this thing. It's
Speaker:a bit like the media packs. You go, I don't know. Is there
Speaker:a money value associated with viewers and
Speaker:Our thing was, it was more like the Spotify. People
Speaker:are listening to that all the time. So if we put an advert on there, I think we've
Speaker:had well over a million downloads now on Spotify, and
Speaker:we're over. 1.2 or
Speaker:1.1 million views on YouTube. Obviously that's now, but
Speaker:when it first started out, I wasn't, you know, I was like, well, if you want to sponsor it,
Speaker:it's just going to be this. But as it's grown, I think we've got 70,000 followers
Speaker:across all platforms, which are a podcast for the trades. He's
Speaker:so niche, isn't he? He's mega. But obviously, I
Speaker:still don't go, well, you know, like some of the influencers,
Speaker:when you talk to them, they're like, yeah, I want 20 grand for this. And you go, you
Speaker:know, no. But we're
Speaker:sort of just, I'd rather have somebody that's going to be there long
Speaker:term that supports the podcast rather
Speaker:than being, OK, well, we'll be here and we don't get anything back.
Speaker:Well, it is. I want to work with you. You know I'd rather have that longevity
Speaker:So I think I think for us it's the opportunity to be able to
Speaker:stop doing it for free. You know it's that kind of thing. It just
Speaker:You know I've got Jack videos. He has to edit it. Nathan
Speaker:helps with booking people on. Um, but obviously I
Speaker:don't want it being where I'm not rewarding those guys for their, for
Speaker:their time. So it all costs, you know, the equipment that's in here. I
Speaker:dread to think the cost of the equipment and people
Speaker:go, Oh yeah, but you're hiring it out. I've had to put that
Speaker:initial investment in. Yes. And it cost us 20, 20 grand to
Speaker:do the whole podcast set with the, you know, the actual set
Speaker:and the cameras, the lights, the mics. And
Speaker:I still remember my sister going, what the fuck have you spent this money on? And I
Speaker:was like, but it's just something that will be good
Speaker:for the brand. And then when obviously the direct-to-consumer and the brand started to take
Speaker:Yeah, yeah, yeah. An interesting thing, I think a lot of people won't know
Speaker:this about our podcast studio is we actually crowdfunded it.
Speaker:We went to, I say crowdfunded it, we went to our clients and
Speaker:we were like, we're thinking about doing this. We put together like a pack. We
Speaker:think about doing this. This is something that we want to do anyway. We're
Speaker:going to do it anyway. But we haven't got the budget to make it as good
Speaker:as we could make it. We want this to be super,
Speaker:super high end. So we put together a package, like
Speaker:a discounted rate to do a pilot for our clients, six
Speaker:episodes, where we produce everything. And it was you
Speaker:know, obviously the recording, the social media clips, behind
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's again, any
Speaker:advice for me is if they get the opportunity to come
Speaker:on, talk about your business in a setting where people can easily
Speaker:digest it. Short form content, you can't digest anything because
Speaker:Yeah. So we've produced two, one
Speaker:podcast for Thomas Dudley. And then we're looking to do to
Speaker:revisit that next year as well. That was relatively successful. And
Speaker:because the podcast can do, it can be a
Speaker:couple of different things. It can be really successful. Yours is really successful because it
Speaker:engages with a much larger audience, which is tradesmen
Speaker:in general, tradespeople. Or you can have like a
Speaker:corporate podcast, which is having very specific conversations
Speaker:That's why I called it Trade Legends because I didn't want to a lot of people have like an electrical podcast
Speaker:but you can only talk to electricians. Exactly. There's only going to be a set amount of
Speaker:people that would listen to that whereas I wanted it to be like it's a bit more wider.
Speaker:Yes. Wider net. So I was saying before you can, I could go
Speaker:and get people that wrap cars or spray
Speaker:The guys that I was on with, like shoemakers. Yeah. Really cool. And that's the
Speaker:trade. Yeah. It's like a, like a dying trade, which is really, really
Speaker:cool. So yeah, yeah, absolutely. We did. So we crowdsourced,
Speaker:crowdfunded all of that too. And I was like, but we haven't built
Speaker:it yet. Here's what it's going to look like. Can you give us some
Speaker:money? Yeah. And that was, that was how we did it. And And
Speaker:I kind of went, why don't we do this for everything? Why don't
Speaker:we just crowdfund everything? Anytime I want to do like, I don't know,
Speaker:want to hire a new member of the team or something, I'm like, much crowdfunding. Even
Speaker:Because if people sell a specific product and they know
Speaker:they can come in any time, it's already set up for them and
Speaker:So yeah, that's something you can do.
Speaker:Just crowdfund everything. I've got a couple of other projects that I
Speaker:quite like the idea of doing, and they will be a lot of investment, I
Speaker:think, crowdfunding. Crowdfunding, that would be amazing. I've gone off topic a little bit
Speaker:there, Alex. Is there anything that
Speaker:I haven't asked you that you think, God, this is a really valuable piece of information that
Speaker:I came in with and that you've not asked me a question about? Anything I've missed here,
Speaker:I think that the only thing I did was, you have to
Speaker:take a risk on absolutely everything. You know, if I would have gone, it's going
Speaker:to cost me this to hire my first videographer. and
Speaker:gone, oh, none of the rest would have happened. So I feel like people,
Speaker:especially other marketers that are going to be watching this, especially
Speaker:from brands, even from like influencers themselves, you
Speaker:have to like, you have to take that risk on it. Because
Speaker:if you don't do anything, you're never going to know. And if you do do something and
Speaker:it goes, worst thing is somebody say, say no to you or it goes wrong and
Speaker:you try it again. You just have to like, you have to take
Speaker:that risk. And it's sort of if people are sitting there thinking, oh, well, he's
Speaker:just quoted me £10,000 for this. you've got to think in your
Speaker:head where do you where do you see the brand now and where do you want the brand to
Speaker:be yes and the only way that you get there is by doing
Speaker:those small steps across a period of time like it's taken us five
Speaker:years of social media sort of style to get to where we are and
Speaker:i'm no way an expert but i've sort of self-taught myself
Speaker:to help the business and you have to take an interest in it there's no point going
Speaker:you know, Dan, we want you to come in and we want you to do all this sort of stuff. And then they
Speaker:don't know what they want. You have to go, OK, well, we try that.
Speaker:I love this. But on the next one, could we try this? Yes. And you
Speaker:sort of lead where you go. And then, you know,
Speaker:your customers will give you feedback. I saw that video you guys did. Absolutely
Speaker:amazing. And I feel like that's what people need
Speaker:to take more risk or get more involved and obsessed. Like
Speaker:I obsessed about social media. I just saw how
Speaker:it was working and with the website and the data that we were getting. And I thought the
Speaker:more that I did that, the more it just, you know, what we were drawing into
Speaker:the software for influencers and ambassadors. I could probably
Speaker:I've got a question about that. We'll save that to after the
Speaker:podcast, because I'm quite interested in that as well. I
Speaker:want to use this episode as for the
Speaker:guys who say, who are concerned about return on investment when
Speaker:it comes to video production. Because it comes across like, yeah, yeah, yeah, great. We
Speaker:appreciate that you guys spend some money, but I just want to make sure I get a return on investment. The
Speaker:problem is, if you're B2B, you won't see that return. You
Speaker:won't understand the return on investment. You won't get the data for
Speaker:a while, but it's there. If you direct to consumer, it's
Speaker:the same thing, except you get that data straight away. You know where the sales
Speaker:are coming from. You know that this has had a great, massive impact in
Speaker:what's going on in terms of marketing. So I might just, anytime
Speaker:I get that conversation, that question, I'm just going to point them to this
Speaker:But also, the other thing that they get, which they don't realize, is if they are
Speaker:working with influencers, you are, in essence, getting extra
Speaker:salespeople that are buying into your brand. They're going
Speaker:to support you. They're online and all the
Speaker:jobs they're doing consistently using your product in these videos
Speaker:it's subliminal advertising like if you ever see people where they're talking
Speaker:in a van it's always a unilight sticker there or they've got a unilight jule
Speaker:on or they'll be like scribing something with a
Speaker:pencil and they you know it's a unilight pencil. My
Speaker:style of marketing is just. It's not in your face. I'm not trying to
Speaker:show it off all the time. It's just everything like a unilight air freshener
Speaker:in someone's van. Yeah. And I just kept going. If people
Speaker:keep seeing the logo, if people keep seeing the colour. You
Speaker:know, so if these brands are looking at that 10,000 pounds thinking, well, what
Speaker:do I get from it? I can't, there's nothing tangible. We've just made that relationship with
Speaker:an influencer. That person then is loyal to your brand and
Speaker:I had this conversation with someone the other day that we, um, I think we said, um, if
Speaker:it, we, Construction's had a tough year this
Speaker:last, this last 12 months. I think, I think on average, it's down
Speaker:by about four to 8%, depending on the type of business you
Speaker:are. So sales haven't been great for a lot of businesses. Some
Speaker:of it, some, some have been great. But,
Speaker:you know, we start to think about things like redundancies, and you
Speaker:start to think about these kinds of things. And I had a conversation with someone
Speaker:the other day that said it's probably more likely for some
Speaker:of these bigger brands who are more savvy with marketing and social
Speaker:media, they're more likely to lay off a salesperson
Speaker:than they are an influencer. You know, if the budgets are
Speaker:Influencers are salespeople. Exactly. Even if they're not pushing somebody
Speaker:to directly go and buy it from your website, they're
Speaker:showing it off that somebody might then go into a branch and
Speaker:push it. And also with the influencers, you're not paying their national insurance
Speaker:or tax, pension contributions. You're
Speaker:not having to pay for them to stay away. You've also got somebody there
Speaker:that you can pick up on the phone straight away. And you know, you haven't got all the HR issues
Speaker:Unless they go off the rails and say something that you don't like. But you have to take
Speaker:You take risks with sales guys, don't you? And girls. Because you
Speaker:can pay a sales guy 80 to 100 grand a year, whatever. There's going
Speaker:to be, you know, scales of that. who can go,
Speaker:cool, you know, and they do a good job for you. And then they take all of
Speaker:that business to a competitive,
Speaker:you know, that's, if anything, way more risky. So
Speaker:it makes sense. And that happens, especially in construction, a lot, a
Speaker:lot, it's really competitive. And you can see why the industry is super competitive. I
Speaker:don't like that about the industry. But I get it. I
Speaker:We just couldn't find anybody decent. Yeah. People that want
Speaker:to turn up for work. I can teach anybody anything, but
Speaker:I can't get, I can't make you love it. Yeah. That's absolutely mad. Really,
Speaker:really powerful stuff, Alex. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's
Speaker:amazing. Where's the best place for people to find
Speaker:Probably on Instagram, Big Al Trade Legends. I did try
Speaker:and start a YouTube, but because I had a third child, everything's
Speaker:just gone out the window. So I need to get back on my own content, which is basically going to
Speaker:talk about me building houses. Me also
Speaker:doing like a finance and business podcast with a
Speaker:friend of mine called Matt, who I did a trade legends podcast with trying to teach people
Speaker:about tax and how to set up limited companies and all that
Speaker:sort of side of things. And yeah, just putting out content
Speaker:now, really, because people go, oh, people only put out these bits
Speaker:of content to do business courses and stuff like that. My thing is now is
Speaker:I've had a successful business in this side of things. And if
Speaker:people want to learn how I did my marketing or what
Speaker:type of stuff I do in the property side of things, they
Speaker:can learn that. But the majority of it will be free stuff. If
Speaker:somebody wants one-on-one coaching to help them start things, then that's fine.
Speaker:But the majority is all going to be free content YouTube. Hopefully
Speaker:teach people a little bit of what I've learned, if that's
Speaker:I think you get to a certain time
Speaker:in your life, a certain age, I'm 35 now, and
Speaker:my YouTube has gone from like nerding out about
Speaker:camera equipment to compound interest, property
Speaker:As soon as you have kids, I think, and it's sort of like my thing
Speaker:is now is, I feel like I've had, not had my life because
Speaker:I'm 41, but everything that I do now is for
Speaker:my kids. Yes. So sort of the property side and the finance side.
Speaker:But if I can help people, because I don't know everything myself. I
Speaker:learn stuff every day. But if I can help, you know, even talking about, I did
Speaker:one thing on the podcast talking about kids' pensions. People
Speaker:didn't realise you can put money away into kids' pensions from the minute
Speaker:they're born. You know, and if you did that, like even £100 a
Speaker:month until they're 18, like the pot that they've got,
Speaker:and if they consistently did it themselves, they'd have over a million pounds in pension by
Speaker:the time they're pension age. Yeah, never even thought about that.
Speaker:For people. That's what I love about these kinds of things is, you
Speaker:know, if you're going off and cracking off and doing your own thing in
Speaker:that area, and you're making mistakes and telling people about it, it saves me from making
Speaker:that mistake. You can learn from other people's experience, pick
Speaker:out the best bits, and I'm excited for that. I'll
Speaker:be 100% a subscriber to that because I like the
Speaker:idea of that. I do think, yeah, I think you're right. Because you don't get taught it
Speaker:No, you don't get taught. And then you learn horrible lessons,
Speaker:especially if you're like, you know, you're young, you take a credit card out and you go and
Speaker:max it out thinking. You know, not thinking
Speaker:There's no financial education in mainline education
Speaker:That's why one of my heroes is that Martin, is
Speaker:it Martin Lewis? Yes. On the TV. Even though he's not like
Speaker:my cup of tea with how he explains it, but that guy has done like
Speaker:Yeah. It's just that all this information is
Speaker:available. It's just difficult to digest and understand. I love
Speaker:it. Thank you so much again. Go and check out
Speaker:Unilite, check out Alex and keep an eye on the YouTube as
