On the Tools: Lee Wilcox on How On The Tools Transformed Construction Marketing
In this episode of The Build Up — the go-to podcast for marketing professionals in the construction industry — host Dan (Creative Director at dissident creative agency) welcomes Lee Wilcox, co-founder of On The Tools, for an unfiltered, inspiring conversation.
On The Tools has grown into one of the most influential platforms in the UK trades scene, with millions of followers across social media, a dynamic media arm, and deep roots in the construction community. But its success didn’t happen overnight.
Lee shares the full story, from his early career drifting between jobs to the late-night conversation that sparked an idea for a recruitment app. What followed was a series of unexpected pivots: a viral Facebook page, a chaotic merch business run from his mum’s living room, and eventually, a full-blown media company that now helps brands authentically connect with tradespeople.
This episode dives into:
- The origin story of On The Tools
- The power of content and community in construction marketing
- The failures that paved the way for success
- How to build an audience before a product
- Why humour, honesty and relevance win in this industry
Whether you're a marketer, founder, or creative working in the built environment, this conversation is packed with insight, practical lessons, and the kind of candour that’s rare in business podcasts.
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. I
Speaker:am Dan, the creative director at Distant. We are a social first creative agency
Speaker:working with construction brands to create hard hitting content and social media
Speaker:marketing. I can't believe I managed that. And I'm joined today
Speaker:by Lee Wilcox Keelan. Pay attention Lee fucking
Speaker:Wilcox from on the tours. What
Speaker:is Wilcox, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for that. I do that every single time.
Speaker:As soon as I said Wilcox, I was like, I've got that wrong. No, no, it's right. I just called you
Speaker:Lee forever. Yeah. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Oh, mate.
Speaker:Thanks for having me. Love the setup. Love it.
Speaker:It's a pleasure. I think this is the first, like, build up
Speaker:Keelan, genuinely, I know he didn't want me to tell you
Speaker:this, but he's got a poster of you on his wall in his bedroom.
Speaker:The only human on the planet to have a poster of me. No,
Speaker:don't say stuff like that because it builds up the build-up podcast
Speaker:too much. There'll be a much
Speaker:But thanks for having me on, I appreciate it. It's been an absolute pleasure. Famously
Speaker:co-founder of On The Tools. Everybody knows
Speaker:who On The Tools are, but what I
Speaker:would love for you to do is just give us a little introduction to yourself, a little bit of a history of
Speaker:kind of who you are, kind of how you came up to
Speaker:Four. Yeah, so no one asked me the question of
Speaker:who I was before On The Tools. It's interesting, that is. It's because I
Speaker:You know what it is. It's you're the storyteller in here, that is. It's the film, I
Speaker:reckon. So yeah,
Speaker:so before On The Tools, I was
Speaker:bumbling around from job to job, mostly. So I left school not
Speaker:knowing what I wanted to do. So I stayed in school, in
Speaker:sixth form. Failed miserably. Terrible grades, two
Speaker:E's and a U. But having a good time, right? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker:yeah. Sixth form, some of the best years of my life, I think. Just
Speaker:from, you know, you just get to do so much shit, don't
Speaker:you? So loved that period. And then
Speaker:just really got into uni, failed miserably, left
Speaker:after a year. went
Speaker:literally went back to my mum and dad's with no notice and was like, I'm
Speaker:getting letters from the uni, like, they're going to kick me out. I need to
Speaker:like come back home. My mum was like, no problem. But like, you got to go get a job
Speaker:in the morning. So did that, got two jobs, one
Speaker:at the Belfry. which is a golf course in
Speaker:I was there, I got brutalised by the Belfry a couple of
Speaker:Oh like you actually played it, sorry it wasn't really a venue. No. Yeah, what
Speaker:did you play, the Brab? Yes. Oh, it's brutal. I was
Speaker:so hungover as well. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. And
Speaker:the local service station, so just did that and then just went from
Speaker:sort of job to job trying to find out what I wanted to do. I tried plastering, I
Speaker:tried shop fitting, I tried, I
Speaker:I imagine that's quite obscure isn't it? I wanted to, I've completely
Speaker:forgotten about this kind of like fantasy of
Speaker:Because it looks, because at college, sorry, and at university, Genuinely,
Speaker:people used to pay me to frame, because you can
Speaker:And we had these manual, you'll know, these sort of bezelled... You
Speaker:are the only person I've met that, when I've said I used to
Speaker:No, this whole episode is going to be about picture framing now. When
Speaker:I was at college, for some reason, no one could grasp the
Speaker:maths of how you got, when
Speaker:you cut the frame, when you mark out the bit where you cut the frame,
Speaker:it's been a long time, no one could work out the maths. There's like a
Speaker:special equation that you would have to be
Speaker:able to set out the centre point and how big the picture is
Speaker:and then therefore how big you should cut out the mount board. without
Speaker:a machine, it was just all manual stuff. So
Speaker:I bought this really fancy mount board cutter, because I had two jobs in college,
Speaker:and people used to pay me to cut
Speaker:their mounts, and then I would put their pictures in there, and
Speaker:then I would frame them and stuff. That
Speaker:is not something I thought was going to come out today. That was
Speaker:the end of my picture framing journey, up until, and I'm saying like
Speaker:65, I open a little framers in town, and
Speaker:like just be dead old school and just frame up people's like, I'll come.
Speaker:It's always going to be needed. Did you enjoy that job then? Well,
Speaker:so I was an apprentice there. I stayed there for a good couple of years. It
Speaker:was ran by a guy, a family ran guy
Speaker:Yeah, he's a scouser actually. But
Speaker:resided in Tamworth. He was ex-military,
Speaker:had been in the military all of his life and then had learned to do this in
Speaker:the military as I was leaving. I don't know what the story was there, but anyway, and
Speaker:set up in his garden and I ended up just getting an apprenticeship there.
Speaker:And I stayed with him for a good couple of years. You know, it's one of those things I look back
Speaker:on. I learned so much from him. not
Speaker:just like the picture framing side of things, because he was a wizard. He
Speaker:was so good. And we did loads of good events. There was loads of sporting events. He did lots
Speaker:of memorabilia. So I got to do loads of stuff, but it was mental.
Speaker:Like he was an absolute like. like
Speaker:workhorse, the geezer was just at it all the time. And the
Speaker:expectation he had of me, I think because he was in military, he was just like, right,
Speaker:you're a young person and I'm gonna like treat
Speaker:you as if you're in my army type thing. So like, yeah,
Speaker:so I would do like, you know, like 16 hour days for
Speaker:like two pound 80 an hour. Do you know what I mean? It
Speaker:was like, but I learned so much from him in terms of like what
Speaker:was expected and like, At that point, I never knew I was going
Speaker:to run my own business or any of those things. But it's
Speaker:looking back now, I'm like, I learned a lot from him. And I'm
Speaker:really grateful I got to
Speaker:spend time with it. I don't see him anymore. But
Speaker:ironically, the second office on
Speaker:the tools had was in the same trade in the state where that business was. So I
Speaker:sort of got to see him a little bit. It was weird, it was bizarre, but
Speaker:many years on. Yeah, so I did the picture framing
Speaker:and then I moved to, from there I did a
Speaker:small-sided football league. So I worked for a company called Leisure Leagues who run,
Speaker:they hire like sports centers, schools,
Speaker:and they run five and six side football leagues. Again,
Speaker:learned loads there. Was there for like eight years, like
Speaker:a pretty long amount of time for somewhere
Speaker:that I look back on and I go, I learned a lot, but I didn't enjoy it all the
Speaker:time. A lot of the time I would drive there So I
Speaker:lived in Tamworth and it was in a place called Knoll in Solihull,
Speaker:just outside Solihull. It would take me about 40 minutes, no
Speaker:traffic. And I reckon 40% of
Speaker:my eight-year journeys there were spent driving,
Speaker:thinking, how the fuck can I not go there today? Do you know what
Speaker:Horrible, horrible. And I kind of like, when we started on
Speaker:the tours, I was like, I've got to just make sure it's a business where we
Speaker:limit the amount of people that have got that Sunday night feeling or those Monday
Speaker:morning, whatever you want to trade at. Sundays are the worst when
Speaker:you're in a job like that. Oh, just the pits, you know. Don't get me wrong, I've
Speaker:built loads of like... still talked to some of the people there and
Speaker:like, and actually even though I can say that I don't
Speaker:know if I agree with the way that it was managed and stuff. Again, I'd say
Speaker:I'd still learned quite a lot from the people who did run the business and like took certain
Speaker:things away from it as you sort of tried to do or always sort of
Speaker:try to do anyway. And it was there that
Speaker:we came up with the idea for On The Tour. So myself and Ad were
Speaker:just pissed on a Friday night. I
Speaker:was recently divorced, living back with my mum and dad, so
Speaker:I was in my mum and dad's garden and he was
Speaker:moaning about the fact he couldn't find a plasterer on the job he was on. So he's in the trade
Speaker:at this point, has been. for about 11, 12 years, something
Speaker:like that, 11 years maybe at that point. How old are you guys at
Speaker:this point? So, 20, no,
Speaker:Yeah, maybe just before, yeah, 29, 30. Okay. And yeah, 29 I
Speaker:would have been, 29. It was 2014, yeah, so this was
Speaker:August 2014. Wow. I
Speaker:was just a nerd, loved technology, was
Speaker:using social media a lot through the current job I had. And I
Speaker:was like, surely there's got to be something out there that allows you to find people
Speaker:to work with. Like, what's the problem? You had things like Checker
Speaker:Trade and Rated People and things like that. But there was nothing. Obviously, that's
Speaker:like a vetted tradesperson into your home. There was nothing from a contractor
Speaker:to subcontractor and vice versa. And they're kind
Speaker:of still. As I said, there are businesses trying
Speaker:to solve that problem now, but I don't know if anyone's fully solved it.
Speaker:So we just set about this idea, this drunken idea of creating an app that
Speaker:would essentially get rid of
Speaker:the recruitment industry within construction. So his point of view, Ad's
Speaker:point of view was, You go to the ND phone book or you use a recruiter, right?
Speaker:Or you meet someone in the pub, like it's all word of mouth and you get any job on
Speaker:the next job, et cetera. He didn't really like using recruiters because his opinion was
Speaker:that they're either making money on the workforce or they're
Speaker:taking money from the SME. He was the SME at this point. So he was like, you know,
Speaker:Yeah. It's just the same as there's great salespeople and not great salespeople. Yeah.
Speaker:It's, you know, um, uh, and so
Speaker:we came up with this idea, um, and
Speaker:spent like three credit cards trying to freelance this build of
Speaker:this app on Elance, which is like a
Speaker:freelancing website. I think it's Upwork now it's called. This
Speaker:is how old it was. It used to be called Elance. And
Speaker:we sent it to India, I think it was, where this freelancer was building it. And
Speaker:we were just like broke. So obviously I'm
Speaker:living back at my mom and dad's. a
Speaker:kind of beautiful stage for me to start the business because I kind of felt like I just had
Speaker:Yeah, and I was like, my risk appetite was just so huge because
Speaker:I was just like, fuck it. You know, like nothing matters type
Speaker:thing. And add,
Speaker:you know, so we'd sent this thing off and we were like, okay, well, this
Speaker:is the like depth of the business plan. The business plan was we'll, We'll
Speaker:get 100,000 people on Facebook and
Speaker:then we'll launch the app. They'll all download it and then we'll
Speaker:sell the business. That was like the plan. We
Speaker:knew that the app would take like six to nine months, something like that. We
Speaker:thought, okay, well... Let's give ourselves a year as
Speaker:a plan and we'll go, we've got 100,000 people on this Facebook page. Ab was
Speaker:like, I've got loads of funny videos. He didn't, he
Speaker:had like four. So like we
Speaker:used, we basically just ripped YouTube for the first couple of weeks, just getting like
Speaker:what we felt were funny construction clips. And
Speaker:there was this one, that sort of drove this mad amount
Speaker:of growth that we were and again we just had no clue what we were doing right so
Speaker:this video clip was it was one that someone sent in actually
Speaker:so we'd we'd looked around or was it yeah it was so we'd
Speaker:we'd put a few videos on for a couple of weeks and we got to like 10,000 in
Speaker:the first two weeks 10,000 followers and we were like fucking hell this is mental
Speaker:right and then I
Speaker:was using some of my salary. I mean, I look back, I think, what on
Speaker:earth were you doing, like, using the limited amount
Speaker:of money you had? And this is my point about, I was just like, this is,
Speaker:you know, this is the idea. I didn't know what it was. All or nothing.
Speaker:All or nothing. And then someone had sent this video. We'd started to
Speaker:get, once we hit that 10,000 point, people started to send content in,
Speaker:just via the Facebook page. And
Speaker:it's funny, because the first couple of days when people were doing it, I was a bit like, what are they
Speaker:doing? Why are they sending it? And I was like, oh, they
Speaker:want us to repost it. Like, it's this like, you know, five seconds
Speaker:of fame thing. Yeah, it's almost like you've been framed or something like that.
Speaker:Yeah, it's exactly like that. Yeah, yeah. And so
Speaker:then this one video, and it was an 11 second clip,
Speaker:right? And it was landscape. It looked like it'd been filmed on a
Speaker:potato. It was like, and it
Speaker:was about, eight, 10 guys
Speaker:all stood round and it was like onsite,
Speaker:terrible, they'd had terrible weather clearly, but
Speaker:it was a brighter day. It was just this massive like mud bath basically. And
Speaker:they're all waiting round and then this guy just, this young lad, they go,
Speaker:go on then. And then he just runs up and just face plants into the
Speaker:mud. And it was funny, but the funny part was the
Speaker:laughter. You know when you hear laughter on
Speaker:a video where it's like contagious? And
Speaker:it was just like first couple of seconds was him falling and then there was like
Speaker:six, seven seconds of like this really like it
Speaker:contagious like happy laughter that when you watch the
Speaker:video you it made you feel great right everyone
Speaker:was in on it there weren't this you know so there was no like there
Speaker:was no bullying there was no do you know what I mean it was just like a perfect little video and
Speaker:I put 40 quid on a paid ad behind it, didn't know it
Speaker:was a boost back then, like boost the content. I think Facebook told me to
Speaker:do it, you know, do you want to boost this video? And it got like from the
Speaker:40 quid, it got like 14 million views. And
Speaker:we got like another 20,000 followers just off that video within like another week.
Speaker:And I was like, this is mental. And then from there, that's when
Speaker:we just started getting like insane amounts of
Speaker:messages of people sending content. So we were getting like 200 messages a
Speaker:day, all video content. So I would just spend my life like,
Speaker:coming home from work into my sad little room at
Speaker:my mom and dad's, which for the first part was my three-year-old
Speaker:daughter's bed. It was a grim, I look back, I'm like, it made
Speaker:you that did. And I would sit until about
Speaker:one in the morning. You watch 200 videos, some of
Speaker:them are like three minutes long, some are 30 seconds, but it takes like an
Speaker:insane amount of time just to watch them. And I would reply to every single
Speaker:person, And it just became more, I
Speaker:think, more survival mode of like, okay, this is my purpose at the minute. Like, you
Speaker:know, nothing else matters. You go to work and do that shit, and
Speaker:then you come home and do the proper bit. Full-time community manager, essentially. Yeah,
Speaker:yeah, yeah. And then after three
Speaker:It was wild. And those first big numbers that
Speaker:like, you know, you mentioned that film of the guy
Speaker:in the kind of mud bath and the guy laughing, and that generated huge
Speaker:growth. What's going on in your head at that point? Are
Speaker:you thinking, great, this is a
Speaker:bigger step towards our end goal of getting enough people on here to then
Speaker:launch the app? Or are you thinking, I can do something else with this?
Speaker:No thought about trying to work with brands or any
Speaker:of that. It was just like, we built a website. Very
Speaker:shortly after that three-month period, we built a dot-com and
Speaker:started driving traffic to that from social organically, which started
Speaker:to do great. I remember the first month, it was December. We
Speaker:had Google ads on, and we made like three
Speaker:grand, I think. And I was like, whoa, this is the model.
Speaker:We're going to do this. And then January, we made like 200 quid. And I was like, oh,
Speaker:I don't know what I'm doing. And we'd spent money trying to
Speaker:drive the traffic, do you know what I mean? And that arbitrage just didn't work. And
Speaker:then the organic reach dropped at the start of that year. I remember it specifically. I'm
Speaker:thinking, OK, well, this link posting thing, that's probably not the
Speaker:right. Maybe that's not the right thing to do. Actually
Speaker:the sort of change in the model, the first bit of revenue was actually
Speaker:about merch. So we were getting messages from
Speaker:people via the page around on the tools
Speaker:like hoodies and mugs and stuff like this. So
Speaker:it was a brilliant business model. basically what we did was we posted
Speaker:on the fake, you'd never do this now, because it's like goes against every principle of
Speaker:like social media of just like essentially being a brand or, you know,
Speaker:a media brand or whatever and talking like a person. And
Speaker:it was basically like send us your funniest trade
Speaker:slogans. And so we just went through the comments and pick the ones with the
Speaker:most likes. And we picked the first like the top six. of
Speaker:different trades and it was like a chippy wine, a sparky wine, a
Speaker:plumbing and all that. I
Speaker:went on Google and found some like Google stock images, put
Speaker:them overlaid on some t-shirts and set up a Shopify store in like a
Speaker:day and then put this like flash sale on
Speaker:where we opened it for 24 hours and we did 800 quids
Speaker:worth of sales and then the next day I
Speaker:went into my job and was like I'm leaving. And
Speaker:I think my mom and dad thought I was having a breakdown. Because I'd
Speaker:gone from this, obviously just being in the mix, they knew sort of what was
Speaker:going on in terms of we had this Facebook page, because that's what it was, it was
Speaker:just a Facebook page. And then I was like, yeah, we're
Speaker:going to start selling like hoodies and t-shirts. And I sent the
Speaker:first, me and my mom sent the first
Speaker:hoodies out in like black bin liners with brown masking tape
Speaker:with like handwritten addresses on because I just didn't
Speaker:think anyone was going to buy any of them. We did it. Cause I was like, okay, well we should do it. People were asking. And
Speaker:then that month we did 15 grand's worth of sales. And then that year we did
Speaker:350 grand. So like from- In March? In March, it was mental.
Speaker:Yeah, so this is where it was just so ridiculous. So the
Speaker:Honestly, I was actually, because of this, and for
Speaker:the podcast, and I was trying to think about some things. I was going back
Speaker:through some photos that I've got. of me and Ad in the early stages.
Speaker:And we found a shop in Tamworth that would do the printing for us at
Speaker:like a rate that we could sort of keep up with. And they couldn't
Speaker:keep up. It was just like, no one was going to keep up until we'd got someone quite
Speaker:big or we brought in internally and dealt with it. And they
Speaker:offered us, because at this point we're still, there's no office, Ad's
Speaker:still on the tools. I'm still, I'm working my
Speaker:notice period now at my job because I'm like, I can't afford to not have the money that
Speaker:I'm, and, And they offered
Speaker:us to move in behind their shop into
Speaker:this, honestly, and I kid you not, it is about
Speaker:a third of the size of this room. And it's got, when we got in there,
Speaker:bright red painted walls, and it's got a safe.
Speaker:an old safe, honestly, half the size of this desk, about
Speaker:this high. And me and Ab were like, yeah, we'll have it. And so
Speaker:we started decorating it. We was in there for the weekend, like
Speaker:chipping away at all the walls and everything. We were like, how are we gonna get this? We're gonna have to take the
Speaker:door out to get this safe out or we'll just use the safe as a desk and we'll just have that
Speaker:Yeah. And then I don't know
Speaker:what, I think like a friend or someone sent me like a, an
Speaker:advert for an office space that was like much closer to home, wasn't
Speaker:at the back of the shop but was like a normal size room, you
Speaker:know it was about the same size as this and it was still crummy, had like prison bars
Speaker:on the window and it was you know bars like what are we doing like
Speaker:you know and we just said to him like we're going to give you the business but we're not having that back room
Speaker:off you and they were like whatever. So we moved into this small
Speaker:place, and then they
Speaker:just kept coming in. It was just every post we put on, we were just doing it organic,
Speaker:no paid ad strategy, it was just organic. Every post we put on, we would
Speaker:sell like 20 hoodies, 25 hoodies, or like 15 mugs.
Speaker:And then, so I found a new, this shop
Speaker:in Tamworth were just like, look, we can't, keep
Speaker:up with what you're doing here. We're not like set up for it. And they were
Speaker:doing like heat pressed. So it was like really slow. Like
Speaker:I found this guy over in Coalville in
Speaker:Leicester who could do like direct to garment printing. Much
Speaker:speedier, much cheaper, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, boom, done.
Speaker:Penny Crayon, Dan from Penny Crayon. Great guy, really
Speaker:worked himself out. So
Speaker:then we were using him. And then he was like, look,
Speaker:this is getting a lot now. Like, and I've got, he had loads of other clients. We
Speaker:were just meant to be this, you know, just a standard thing. So in
Speaker:the end, I was like, look, mate, I'll still put stuff for you. I was like, but where'd you get this machine from?
Speaker:Talk me through it, blah, blah, blah. And my mom and dad lent me. lent
Speaker:the business 10 grand for this printer, which
Speaker:at the time I was like, I knew they felt uncomfortable with it. But equally,
Speaker:my mom was working for free in our house, just like, honestly,
Speaker:we'd get deliveries and we were trying to fold stuff up over the living room. It was mental,
Speaker:the whole thing was ridiculous. And then, So we got
Speaker:this printer, moved into this office, Ad then like two months
Speaker:later came on full time, he quit, he came off the tools, took
Speaker:on the tools and then he dealt with content, he was the
Speaker:best person to do that because he was from He was the
Speaker:person where he was the avatar that we were creating content for. And
Speaker:I was like, right, I'm gonna work out how we get this into
Speaker:some kind of shape. And then the rest of that year, all
Speaker:we did was just like content in a day and
Speaker:then pack stuff overnight. And like, they were like 16 hour
Speaker:days. every day, like without fail. At
Speaker:Christmas we were like three weeks behind on orders, like
Speaker:it was such a terrible service. There was
Speaker:a co-op right next to where the office was and we would queue up honestly
Speaker:and they would see us coming in and I knew they were like, fuck these
Speaker:guys again. We'd have like three trolleys each full
Speaker:trying to push them through the co-op into this post office queue and
Speaker:we would be there for like an hour and a half just trying to get things tagged and
Speaker:then then you get it and you go okay we get a dpd service and everything
Speaker:grows and then we moved office again and then then we
Speaker:shut it down yeah because we were like we've got half
Speaker:the room half of our new office is full of people that
Speaker:are creating content and the other half is full of stock. This
Speaker:bit over here makes about 10% margin. This is making like
Speaker:60. What are we trying to, are we trying to become a workwear brand? No, we're
Speaker:trying to, this has turned into a media business. So
Speaker:we ended up shutting it down and which is, I look back and I'm like, I
Speaker:always look back fond on that era of the
Speaker:business. because it was our first bit of money and it was exciting
Speaker:and we didn't know what the hell we were doing. But
Speaker:it just sort of, the brand or the content and
Speaker:the media outgrew this idea of selling merch.
Speaker:And the only reason we did the merch was just to make some money. People asked us for it
Speaker:Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can pick up relatively straightforward and easy, can't you? Although
Speaker:the actual, sounds like the actual, the
Speaker:crux of doing merch, especially at scale, is
Speaker:obviously a lot more challenging than you originally work out, because as soon
Speaker:as you don't think about distribution, you
Speaker:can handle five or six hoodies, can't you? Which is, I imagine, what
Speaker:Honestly, there were some days where I would always remember this, and I'd be at home with
Speaker:my mum and dad, and we would My mom was so bought in
Speaker:bless. I mean, she just like without my mom and dad, the business wouldn't
Speaker:never have carried on. Right. And I mean that from like the money
Speaker:they lent us, but also from the. like the
Speaker:buy-in that I had family packing at Christmas and
Speaker:all that. So did our dad's wife worked for us and all these different things. And
Speaker:like, I remember we did like a Black
Speaker:Friday sale the one year. And I
Speaker:can't remember what we did. It was only something simple. Like you get a free t-shirt with a hoodie that
Speaker:you buy because the t-shirts are dead cheap. And we were like, fine. And
Speaker:honestly, it was like, we had the, all of us had the
Speaker:Shopify app, and it was just ping, ping, and you'd be
Speaker:like, oh my God, 80 quid, oh my God, a 90 quid order, oh my God, someone's just spent 150 quid,
Speaker:but that one day, we turned it off, we shut the shop down, because we'd done like, in
Speaker:a day, we did something like four and a half grand's worth of sales, and my mom, bless
Speaker:her, was going like, we're not gonna be able to do it, we're not gonna be able to do it, we
Speaker:need to stop it, we need to turn the offer off, and we had to turn it off, because we were like,
Speaker:this is like, beyond what we wanted it to be, but it was just, it
Speaker:became like a big problem. And then it all
Speaker:changed, everything became paid and we didn't have the ability or the knowledge of
Speaker:how to do that, or the money, you know, that whole
Speaker:like paid strategy. But for two years, really, we were a
Speaker:merch business, really. And then
Speaker:we became a media business because we went on the black and realized
Speaker:that we could probably create content for brands. make
Speaker:I think we sort of semi kind of skipped past that phase and come back
Speaker:to it a little bit. There was a merch and that was kind of like a period
Speaker:of time that you've kind of learned from and it was all exciting.
Speaker:And that was how you initially utilized that massive audience that
Speaker:you'd grown. At what point did you transition
Speaker:and what was the
Speaker:catalyst of that transition to go, why don't we, rather than reposting
Speaker:other stuff, create media? I think it was the app failing.
Speaker:Yeah, so it was a failure of the app idea. Eventually,
Speaker:the app never happened, or did it? No, it never happened. It's still in the idea's
Speaker:graveyard. And we built it twice. Oh, wow. Yeah,
Speaker:ridiculous. But I think the best money we ever
Speaker:spent was those credit cards. Because I
Speaker:think if we hadn't have done that, we wouldn't have built the community. None
Speaker:of it would have happened. It was almost like just that first
Speaker:Sorry Lee, I just pulled that out of nowhere, didn't
Speaker:I thought it was just good brand placement from Fisher.
Speaker:Genuinely, we don't get any merch from anybody else, do we?
Speaker:I think we might have had some cups from them, but Fisher really look after us with the
Speaker:merch. And this is like the biggest water
Speaker:vessel. I'm well into it. But I just drink so
Speaker:much on podcasts. That glass of water went straight
Speaker:I just double check in Keelan, we are recording on the road, right? Yeah,
Speaker:yeah. A little freak out came into my head. I don't know.
Speaker:I have it as well. Yeah, I just like,
Speaker:that was gold, please say you were recording that. I just found
Speaker:myself laughing. So
Speaker:So we got the app back from this first freelancing thing after that
Speaker:and it took about 15 months in the end because there was loads of
Speaker:problems and then it just didn't work. I'd
Speaker:done some digging into it once we got it back properly, the final version, and then
Speaker:like, it'd been built in iOS 3, and I think that Apple had
Speaker:just discontinued it and been like, this is no longer something we're gonna support. And
Speaker:I was like, shit, this is just a big fat waste of
Speaker:money and time. So at this point, we're like, this
Speaker:is like a year in, so we've just done
Speaker:this mad Christmas of merch, and then we're meant
Speaker:to get the app back. It comes back, we, it
Speaker:doesn't work. And, I'll tell
Speaker:you what happened as well. Sorry, this is something I need to sort of try and realise the
Speaker:story. So as well, what we'd been doing is we'd had a brand. who
Speaker:had been buying content from us. So we weren't
Speaker:creating it, it was just buying all the UGC, because we were licensing it, which
Speaker:we just took from LabBible. We just looked at the LabBible model and what they were doing, and we're like,
Speaker:oh, they've got this licensing agreement, we should do that. So we just literally changed
Speaker:all the words from LabBible to on the tools, and we're just like, this is our thing.
Speaker:Because I often, I don't know
Speaker:whether other people do this, but I associate on the tools with LabBible. to
Speaker:some extent because it just feels like it's not
Speaker:necessarily a similar business model but it just seems like a similar vibe but
Speaker:Yeah I think for years we were I think I would say
Speaker:over the last three or four years we've Both
Speaker:become quite different actually. Yeah, but yeah for the first five years
Speaker:We I mean that you know, we were in touch with them a lot, you know Actually
Speaker:Yeah, it's quite nice to kind of like to just go we're doing something, right?
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah, because at the time we were like, oh my
Speaker:You know, we had a very short phone call with them and I was like, oh no,
Speaker:that's not what yeah We're actually trying to do a proper business with
Speaker:this and they were like, oh, yeah, okay. I I think they were buying up lots of stuff at the time,
Speaker:they had so much scale. And so we got
Speaker:this app out, it didn't work, and then this business we would, and I
Speaker:remember it was four grand a month, and for us this was just like paying both
Speaker:our wages and and the rent everything like that was like because
Speaker:the shop money and turnover we didn't really quite know whether we were making any
Speaker:money it was just like money coming in direct to consumers it was great we got paid straight
Speaker:away and then everything would fall off the back of it but I
Speaker:couldn't tell you to this day out of that first year whether we made a penny or not you
Speaker:just wouldn't know and then And they
Speaker:pulled the can as well. So we got to March, the app didn't work, this
Speaker:brand had stopped paying, it was the only bit of revenue separate to the
Speaker:shop we had. And then all the organic stuff on
Speaker:the shop had started to sort of like weaken. And
Speaker:I was like, fuck, like, what, you know, I've
Speaker:never run a business before this. I've had loads of different ideas, but we've never actually,
Speaker:I've never actually done it. And I was thinking maybe this is, maybe
Speaker:this was the, this is it. Like this was the ride and it's over type
Speaker:thing. And then it was like, we started to see, the
Speaker:likes of Lab Barbers, a few others like, I don't know if you remember a brand
Speaker:called Viral Trend, or VT, the channel was called that,
Speaker:owned by Jungle Creations, a really good outfit in my opinion
Speaker:anyway, they've built loads of like good social brands. They
Speaker:own like Twisted Food and a few others, right, and they
Speaker:were doing some branded deals as well, and we didn't quite know what a branded deal
Speaker:was, we just could see that they were the brand was so
Speaker:heavily featured, like, they're definitely being paid for this. Ad
Speaker:was like, we could definitely do that. And so
Speaker:we sort of set about trying to
Speaker:work out what that would look like. And there was a guy who I
Speaker:worked with at Leisure Leagues, a chap called Andy
Speaker:Taylor, who's sort of still involved with it. He doesn't work in the business now, but
Speaker:still involved in the business, still a shareholder. And he was
Speaker:a great sales guy. And I
Speaker:said to him like, look, if we can get like three
Speaker:months salary in the bank, will you come
Speaker:on board? We just, we need to start selling. And like, I've got to make
Speaker:sure the shop's still, the shop's still an opportunity. I'd still got to do content. We
Speaker:can't, we haven't got enough time to do it. You're the best person for the
Speaker:job, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, yeah, okay, if you can get three months in.
Speaker:And then I rang him in about five weeks. And I was like, yeah, we've got the money. We didn't. I
Speaker:had like, I reckon, four weeks worth of pay for him. And he was
Speaker:like, yeah, OK, I'll do it. I still rib him now after this day, being like, what were
Speaker:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was bought in anyway. He'd put some money into
Speaker:the business. I'd done that from the day, pretty much week one
Speaker:of when me and Ad set up and got
Speaker:Mark involved, the other co-founder who's in the business at the minute.
Speaker:He came, we did his first day, it was like a shoot, it was
Speaker:like down Dublin with Juice and that we were doing and like... I've
Speaker:got photos of us in, we went for a car, I always remember, we went for a carvery, we were
Speaker:down Dublin shooting in the morning, which he was like, because he's a big Cov fan,
Speaker:so he was like, you know, really sort of like buzzing about
Speaker:me. He went for a carvery and he was like, this is mint. I was like, mate, this is
Speaker:not the work. We've got to like actually start doing some juice and the like in, but this
Speaker:is all free, like we're not really doing anything with them. So
Speaker:his job was to try and get three brands on like a longer term deal
Speaker:by the end of the year, so that we could go into the new year being like, okay, we've
Speaker:got it. And he did it. He got Juicin'
Speaker:for two years, Darkline for business, and
Speaker:Scruffs. And so we'd committed to like 55 videos
Speaker:for the year. We just did like this, like we'll create this amount
Speaker:of it. One a month, you know, like I can't remember what the make of it was, but we just
Speaker:made it up. We didn't know what, we didn't know how to price anything. We didn't know what media was
Speaker:worth. We were just guessing. And we
Speaker:didn't own a camera. We had no one who had any production experience
Speaker:And like your mum and dad and stuff. And yeah, my mum's in, at this point,
Speaker:And then there was, and then Ad's then wife
Speaker:was working there as well. So there was five of us. Right.
Speaker:Oh, my mum's friend Kay, who's still in the business now. Cool. Yeah, amazing. She's-
Speaker:Big up Kay. Yeah, absolute life, I carry this ledge. But
Speaker:we're basically just on the blag, because to
Speaker:the point where I was like, well, how are we gonna, even if we've got some of this shit, who's
Speaker:editing it, and what does that even look like? I don't even know what software to
Speaker:use, or, you know, because we were doing stuff on like, just
Speaker:in the iMac, like iMovie, like that's how we were doing
Speaker:it, because we were just getting the video, and if we needed to do anything with it, like a compilation, we
Speaker:would just stick them in order, and then put it out, like, done. no watermark, we
Speaker:didn't have watermarks then, we didn't have anything, there was no like... And
Speaker:then, well this is like the dark ages of, like we forget that like this is
Speaker:a while ago right, like social media, like it was purely Facebook right,
Speaker:for the most part. Purely Facebook at this point, didn't have any other channels, I think
Speaker:we might have had Twitter, yeah we did, we did Twitter and Facebook because again
Speaker:like even that, it just showing like they were the sort of primary channels, and Yeah,
Speaker:so then we had to set about employing people, we had like, you know, just those
Speaker:basics that you're not ready for, for like, we didn't have, none
Speaker:of us had contracts, we were just trying, you know, I think I might have done Andrea contracts,
Speaker:We didn't have chat GPT back then to help you make contracts and that kind of
Speaker:Yeah, like, and we, you know, I think I found like an online service that
Speaker:did it for like 25 quid, it was like, I can't remember what it was called. I
Speaker:wouldn't mind a piece of that pie. I'll have to find it.
Speaker:That business is probably dead. I
Speaker:think we employed six people. We were moving offices anyway because
Speaker:of the shop and we'd found this mill in Tamworth. luckily
Speaker:we'd got a bit more space and then I don't
Speaker:know why we did this either so we did this we moved into the
Speaker:new office in the October and then we were like right we've got to
Speaker:like get people started by January because that's when all the content started going
Speaker:out so we held this like weird like
Speaker:apprentice style interview. I
Speaker:look back I'm cringing now thinking about it. It was like a group
Speaker:interview stage. We had about 30 people apply for four
Speaker:or five. I think it was four roles we had. And
Speaker:we got them to do like group
Speaker:activities, just all this weird shit that if someone asked me to
Speaker:I'm not jumping through hoops. That was a thing back
Speaker:in, it's a while ago now but recruitment agencies were
Speaker:doing that to weed people out so it was quite a trend rather than
Speaker:and you're going to show us these kinds of things and it was just like a mass kind
Speaker:of like... It was like a whole day, I can't believe we did it and we had this
Speaker:presentation where they had to like answer like 10 questions on
Speaker:it and then then the next part was like a creative session
Speaker:so they'd had to have prepped something because we were like we just want creative people
Speaker:that's basically what we're after you can use camera So then you had people
Speaker:coming in and they were singing songs on camera. And
Speaker:then there was a third stage to it, I think, I can't remember what that was, and at the end of it,
Speaker:me, Ad and Andy just stood there like some kind of fucking X-Factor final,
Speaker:moving CVs around, being like, yeah, they're in, yeah. Wankers,
Speaker:like absolute wankers. Anyway, some of the people who
Speaker:we employed that day are
Speaker:still with the business. I know one is definitely Dan
Speaker:Lucas, who's an absolute ledge creative lead in the business. He
Speaker:was one of them. and so
Speaker:then we employ these people and then when they first started I was saying to
Speaker:you earlier so we had to like I had no camera so I took them to Jessops in
Speaker:Birmingham because I was like I don't know what to buy like you you tell me what to
Speaker:buy and I was like yeah yeah I was like we've got I think I'd
Speaker:like we had I was like I think we've got five grand on this credit card we'll just we'll just
Speaker:go and we'll get some stuff um came out
Speaker:with that and then it was like okay we've got a Production company,
Speaker:And that was that. So then that transition then became about like,
Speaker:we were rebuilding the app still. So we built it
Speaker:again in the UK. So we were like, OK, until the next version of the app we get back,
Speaker:we're going to do this. Yes, get a few deals in, we'll have some fun, and we'll open the
Speaker:app. And we could be content. And then what we'll do then is we'll
Speaker:engage the community, and then we'll sell them something. That was
Speaker:the strategy. we got the app built
Speaker:in this country, it worked, and then we were like, this is a shit idea,
Speaker:we shouldn't do it anymore. We realized that it was gonna need
Speaker:like an Uber style rollout, so we were gonna need so
Speaker:much cash, because we were just like, oh we'll just
Speaker:do it organically and everyone will download it, but the reality of I guess some learnings
Speaker:that we had across that two, what was a two and a half year period now of
Speaker:like trying to get this friggin app ready, was that We
Speaker:had, organically, we had followers in Dundee
Speaker:and frigging Devon, right? And therefore, contractor,
Speaker:subcontractor, and they go, this is shit, there's no jobs around by me. Or a
Speaker:contractor, there's no people who want a job around by me. And actually,
Speaker:I don't think we fully understood how
Speaker:the industry worked from a recruitment perspective. I think we just... It
Speaker:was just an idea, basically. Do you know what I mean? And I think you can look back
Speaker:and you can go, yeah, the naivety and the passion we had for that project
Speaker:was great because it got us into business. I keep hitting that, sorry.
Speaker:Got us into business, but if
Speaker:we had launched it, it would have a million percent failed and
Speaker:we would have gone out of business if that was our only thing.
Speaker:This is what I love about business and what I love about great
Speaker:ideas and stuff is a lot of the time, You know,
Speaker:you don't really concentrate. You know these companies that come out of the woodwork
Speaker:key, like on the tours and stuff, you don't think about all
Speaker:the stuff that they've tried and tested and fucked
Speaker:around with and failed and stuff to get to the point where it's like,
Speaker:this is now like, you know, everyone knows about this. It's
Speaker:a bit like these kind of like struggling artists that you think, you know, people
Speaker:like Sabrina Carpenter or whoever that have just like come out of the woodwork and think that
Speaker:this is their first go at it, you know, and if they've managed to be successful right
Speaker:now, they've probably been grafting and fucking up for ages. Think of
Speaker:like Central C, like the rapper, like his,
Speaker:if you look at like historical, like videos of him, they're so different,
Speaker:You know, you see those stories about when he was busking when he was 13 and then like
Speaker:he's sleeping on everyone's couch and all that, and then he just banged into
Speaker:the scene through, Who's your manager
Speaker:at MTV now? He used to be on Radio 1 all the time. I know who
Speaker:you mean. Damn. Aussie
Speaker:guy or New Zealander? It was Zayn. Zayn
Speaker:He was the one who sort of brought him to the radio. And he
Speaker:was like Arctic Monkeys, same thing. You know, we're like, they're just
Speaker:boom, they're here. But yeah, they've been like knocking around for fricking ages, you
Speaker:know, and not getting it right. And, you
Speaker:Like it's the same principle, isn't it? But the great thing
Speaker:is you've been working on this. I kind of, I guess, kind
Speaker:of, not by accident, because you meant to build it, but I imagine Perhaps
Speaker:you didn't realize initially the kind of
Speaker:the benefits of building a huge audience would have in the fact that you
Speaker:can do anything I can kind of do anything with this audience now I've got
Speaker:a captive audience to do something with right which is
Speaker:kind of the model of. the sort of the influencer or
Speaker:the sort of the media kind of outlet to some extent of
Speaker:like build your audience and then sell them something or build your audience and
Speaker:then create something for them or something like that but you've always got to build the audience first
Speaker:Yeah yeah and I think it was and that's why I was saying the app was
Speaker:the best thing we didn't do right because so
Speaker:like when Lab Bible came and they were like oh we might you know will,
Speaker:I think, I think I've ever said it, but they're like, we'll, we'll give
Speaker:you 50 grand. And I was like, no, no, no. Like,
Speaker:Absolutely not. And that was in that conversation, but like, we
Speaker:would look at them so much for like ideas of growth and
Speaker:all those things. And that's why I think those similarities were probably coined
Speaker:and the audience itself, all those things, right. Just sort of laddish culture
Speaker:or that. And like, um, We,
Speaker:at one point, we were like, oh, we should broaden out what On The Tools is. We should start
Speaker:focusing on sport. We should do all these different, and just turn it
Speaker:into a male thing. But because of
Speaker:the app, we were like, no, we can't do that, because we
Speaker:only want tradespeople. There's zero point in us having a
Speaker:bloke who's not in the trade, or a woman who's not in the trade. It's
Speaker:pointless. If they're not a tradesperson, then this
Speaker:is an empty venture. but then we didn't even launch
Speaker:it. But that principle of going like, no, no, we have
Speaker:to be construction sort of kept us true to make it, kept us
Speaker:in that niche. And I think like, I think without
Speaker:that app driving that decision, even though we never launched
Speaker:it, I think we could have become a real diluted version
Speaker:of what we are now, I guess, or
Speaker:what we're gonna be, I don't know. So it's an interesting sort of like,
Speaker:failure, I guess, by
Speaker:Which is where it's sort of they go against each other there, but it
Speaker:Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's those sort of situations where you
Speaker:go, well, I could have, we could continue down this route. And
Speaker:I kind of get the principle of just like, Blinkers
Speaker:on, let's just fucking make this happen and not really thinking
Speaker:about all of the potential ways in which it wouldn't work. Because you
Speaker:can do that forever and kind of get stuck and never make
Speaker:anything, right? And not start. Yeah, exactly. So I
Speaker:like that idea of just like, We've got this idea. Let's go
Speaker:for it. We'll figure it out along the way. And along the way, you figured out
Speaker:that it potentially wouldn't be a particularly good idea. Or at least not in
Speaker:the circumstances you had. I think if you had some venture capital behind
Speaker:I think it would have been different. And
Speaker:the product should have been built in-house. We should have been developer founders, if you know
Speaker:what I mean, for that idea. Freelancing it
Speaker:in another country was just wild. The
Speaker:chances, the likelihood of success by doing that model and then even
Speaker:when it's built having no tech stack, it's not even Do you know
Speaker:what I mean? It's not even managed service in this country. Would have been a disaster, but
Speaker:we just didn't know what we didn't know. Do you know what I mean? You just go for it and then see what
Speaker:I love, by the way, that we're about an hour in, we've got to question two.
Speaker:Yeah, sorry. I've been talking too much. But it's a
Speaker:hell of a story, isn't it? I mean, I don't know if you remember the
Speaker:first time, because I'm considerably older than Keelan. Say
Speaker:that again. Even though I'm
Speaker:considerably older than Keelan, even though he looks
Speaker:a lot older than me. But
Speaker:I remember the first time I saw her on the tours and I wasn't the owner of
Speaker:Dissident. Because when did the tours officially blow up on
Speaker:Well we started August 2014 and
Speaker:I would say by like really by early 2015, Q1
Speaker:2015, maybe halfway through that we were really like packing a punch in
Speaker:terms of views we were getting. We hit that million mark in I think the September of
Speaker:2015 so then, I don't know, it's difficult because I was sort of in it
Speaker:so I was like, but it was really interesting because
Speaker:when we would like, I don't know, If
Speaker:I ever met a tradesperson, I'd always like, under
Speaker:the radar, I'd be like, oh right, have you ever? In fact, it wouldn't usually be
Speaker:me, but if no one had ever got to it, I'd be like, have you ever heard of On The Tools? And they'd be
Speaker:like. yeah or no, and
Speaker:if they said yes, I was always just like, I can't fucking believe it.
Speaker:It just blew my mind that other people, I remember I
Speaker:saw someone wearing an On The Tools hoodie once that
Speaker:they'd obviously bought, and I nearly chased them down the road, because
Speaker:I just wanted to be like, I did that. But not even that, I did
Speaker:it just like, no way, you know what On The Tools is?
Speaker:Why did you, basically you start doing some market research in the street, do you know what I
Speaker:mean? But it's always an interesting thing, you kind of like, I
Speaker:don't think we understood the size
Speaker:of what was being built, I guess, to
Speaker:a certain extent. We were just so focused on this app.
Speaker:It was a disaster, do you know what I mean? We
Speaker:were aware of On The Tools' success
Speaker:and reach a way outside of
Speaker:the trades as well because people
Speaker:Yeah it was a weird one because we always sort of felt we
Speaker:were just I guess through like friends or
Speaker:whatever who weren't in the trade who would see the content But
Speaker:also just from the amount of views we were getting, we were like, well, there's
Speaker:no way that, you know, we'd done a bit of work of like, okay, how
Speaker:many trades people are there? You know, we'd done a bit of like time and, you know, all
Speaker:the, for the app. So I was like, well, you know, you can't
Speaker:be getting a hundred million views a month. And they're all trades people. And
Speaker:It's like, this is far more, even if you went down and that was like aggregated.
Speaker:So even if you went down to unique views, I'm like, we're, we're just way over
Speaker:what, where, where we should be, you know. And
Speaker:actually, for the first couple of years, it was a bit of
Speaker:a hindrance, because when people were, you
Speaker:would say, oh, we get X amount of views, and the challenge back
Speaker:with the brand would be, well, is there loads of
Speaker:wastage then? Do you know what I mean? And because we just couldn't
Speaker:articulate, we didn't have the data, we didn't have the understanding of how to position
Speaker:that, or at least have some answers of where
Speaker:that data was, and the unique views versus, all those different things.
Speaker:For the first couple of years, we almost avoided a little bit, because
Speaker:we were like, oh, I don't want to get into muddy water. We're on the tools, and we're trying to train people,
Speaker:and that's that. But inevitably, as we got older, as
Speaker:the business grew and actually as the industry grew as a whole, both
Speaker:from a construction perspective with content, but also just social media into
Speaker:construction, you've got to face those challenges
Speaker:and work out what, you know, who you are and what you're doing and what the value is
Speaker:It was funny, you know, because, you know, I was aware of Honest Rules because my
Speaker:mates who are almost all of my friendship group are trades people.
Speaker:And I was the only one that went into sort of like, a fancy
Speaker:career of like, you know, arty kind of
Speaker:stuff. I should have been a plumber, but it just never happened.
Speaker:I ended up going to art school. And
Speaker:I always sort of joke around about this kind of, well, I certainly don't joke around about
Speaker:it. You see the similarities between creatives and
Speaker:tradespeople all the time. I think it's the same side of the brain. It's
Speaker:the same areas of the brain that are using the same tools. It's
Speaker:just sort of done in a different way. And when you put, trades
Speaker:people and creatives into a room most of the time. You
Speaker:can just see they just look like the same people. They've probably got a bit of ADHD,
Speaker:they're probably very hyper-focused, they're really
Speaker:creative and problem-solving. You've
Speaker:Yeah, he's been in the trade for 12 years, comes over into the creative
Speaker:industry and looks like he's been doing it forever. Hyper-focused,
Speaker:gets well obsessed with stuff, brilliant problem solver, very,
Speaker:very creative. but was a
Speaker:shop fitter. Not using any of those skills in that vein or
Speaker:It's really really interesting. I love it and I find it fascinating and
Speaker:I didn't know until we started working in the construction industry that
Speaker:you know I was having these conversations with these people that I thought I'd have nothing in what's the
Speaker:term? nothing in common with. And
Speaker:I'm like, these are friends for life. And we have
Speaker:all the same problems in the same scenarios. And they look at
Speaker:something, something being built, some kind
Speaker:of problem. And I look at that being like, I have no fucking clue.
Speaker:Like how you even you know, internalize
Speaker:how to do any of that stuff. But
Speaker:I can appreciate, and they'll do exactly the same from our point
Speaker:of view. They'll look at all the cameras that we're using and all those different things and
Speaker:all the terminology and they're like, fuck those. But it's the same principles. It's
Speaker:just a different output. But when, like, putting
Speaker:business aside a second for like this
Speaker:kind of like national slash global reach
Speaker:on the tours, Were you aware of the impact it
Speaker:was having, or are you aware now of the impact that it's had on the
Speaker:perception of trades for
Speaker:the general public? Because, you know, all of a sudden we've got all this trade
Speaker:content going out to the general public. And I think
Speaker:up until that point, no one was really talking about trades, except
Speaker:No, it's an interesting, so
Speaker:I think the business has gone through different phases. And
Speaker:I don't think I realized, or
Speaker:Adam maybe, but Adam had a much better approach to it than I did initially.
Speaker:And maybe that's because he was sort of, you know, he was in the trades and
Speaker:understood it a bit more. But like, I would
Speaker:say for the first like four or five years, no, I just
Speaker:was so focused on the fact that we
Speaker:were surviving as a business, as you do in those sort of formative years.
Speaker:And then that we were growing, that I was just
Speaker:so like focused on like, we've got to get bigger each
Speaker:year. Like that was my like, and
Speaker:is the audience, chasing followers and in
Speaker:those early, which I look back on now, we probably had to do it,
Speaker:but don't know how much it meant necessarily.
Speaker:And it was about the halfway point to now, I
Speaker:would say, I got invited to go and do basically
Speaker:what we're doing now, right? It was a, I'm
Speaker:pretty sure it was a considerate construction event. And
Speaker:it was at London College, about 350 construction
Speaker:marketers. And they just asked me to come and tell the story of On The Tools. So
Speaker:I've got a presentation up, got like all these photos
Speaker:of me. I've got so much content of me in ad. and like
Speaker:Andy and Mark in the first year, I've just got, I
Speaker:could honestly build out a two hour film easy with
Speaker:I do think about this about like what, you know, when I'm, when I'm gone out
Speaker:of the business, I wonder what I've got to look back on and, you know, and how
Speaker:that's captured, but there's so many photos and all that. Anyway, we've got, I'm mixing it
Speaker:with like videos of what we put on the channels and all this. Tried
Speaker:to make it entertaining. So I was thinking these things can be a bit boring. I wasn't there to
Speaker:like, educate anyone. So some funny
Speaker:clips in there, some funny photos, told a story about, you know, how we nearly
Speaker:went out of business and the app didn't work and all these
Speaker:things. And then it went down really well. And then at
Speaker:the end of it, there was a Q&A and I got absolutely battered on
Speaker:it. So like, I felt like an MP. answering
Speaker:questions on. So there was just a queue of people being
Speaker:like, why have your videos got no diversity in them? Do
Speaker:you realize the health and safety impact you're having on
Speaker:the industry, the negative impact? There
Speaker:was loads of stuff. There's no women in construction. There's no women in your videos. Like,
Speaker:Mate, I just was, I was answering and being like, fucking
Speaker:get me out of here. Like, what is going on? Went on for about 15 minutes.
Speaker:I remember thinking, like, I was looking over, thinking, like, someone get me off.
Speaker:Like, I was on my own. You know, I just, anyway, I
Speaker:got on the train back from London, went back up to town. I was fucking fuming. I
Speaker:remember, like, just being really pissed off. I felt like I'd been, like, ambushed.
Speaker:And I was like, well, I've gone down there for free, it's not
Speaker:like I was getting a speaking gig, I was just doing it because I thought
Speaker:it was the right thing to do. And I
Speaker:rang Adam and I was like ehhh, bitching to him and that. And
Speaker:then we had this, in the office at Faisley in
Speaker:the Mill, It was like a table like this, but probably
Speaker:twice the length. And we called it the Hogwarts area. It was where everyone would have lunch.
Speaker:It was like where we'd have company meetings. It was just this thing. And
Speaker:he sat at Hogwarts and he had a brew ready. And I sat
Speaker:down and he was like, I think they're right. And I was like,
Speaker:oh, he's like, you're like, you're whinging about
Speaker:it. He's like, but I think, I can't remember what the figure was at that point, but
Speaker:he was like, we've got, you know, these millions of people that are following
Speaker:the channel. He said, and like, what are we doing it for? Like, how
Speaker:are we helping them? We're not helping them at all. We're just, we're essentially just
Speaker:monetizing them. All we do is, okay, we might entertain them. He's
Speaker:like, but beyond entertainment, really, we're just
Speaker:trying to get as many brand deals as possible to make money. He's
Speaker:like, I think they're right. He said, I think we need to be like thinking about like, Like,
Speaker:what's the, why are we doing it? Like, what's the sort of, and at
Speaker:that point, neither of us knew about vision or mission or purpose
Speaker:or like, you know, this was just like, but he's, he's sort of like, um, that's
Speaker:what he was articulating. Maybe not with those words, but he was like, what's the point? Why are
Speaker:we doing it? How are we going to help them? You know, we've got, we, and he was, I remember his
Speaker:words were like, we've got, we've probably got a responsibility to do something. And
Speaker:so we sort of like, that's where I, there's a real change in
Speaker:the business. There's a massive change in terms of the content we created. Um, And
Speaker:that always happens to be fair, like I would imagine, like just
Speaker:points every year where I know we might make changes and we're not doing that anymore, you
Speaker:know, we sort of, I guess, grow
Speaker:Well, you evolve, don't you? Yeah, evolve is a better one. And like
Speaker:you say, you know, you were two guys that had a go at something that was,
Speaker:there was planning to be this thing that ended up being this thing. Yeah. And
Speaker:then, and then you get kind of, you come across these
Speaker:situations where you think, Well, we haven't got a head
Speaker:of diversity or we haven't got like
Speaker:social responsibility sort of executive in the business. It's
Speaker:me and Adam, some other people and my mum. Yeah, yeah. And Kay.
Speaker:And no one told us that we needed to do this kind of thing.
Speaker:And we were kind of, you know, just utilising kind of what you've got. And
Speaker:it takes situations like that for you to sort of go, oh, yeah.
Speaker:And do you think it transformed the business in terms of like what we do now? what
Speaker:we invest into, and it took us a while to get there, don't get me wrong, it's not like it was an overnight, suddenly
Speaker:we're this great business that was doing everything for good, not
Speaker:that at all, it took us, I reckon it took us two years to really
Speaker:sort of understand, maybe longer, because we actually went down the route of building other communities
Speaker:that were not in the trade, as like a growth part for the business,
Speaker:and it kind of worked for a bit, and then it really didn't work,
Speaker:and we had to strip everything back again, but
Speaker:yeah, I would say really, I would say over the last three, Yeah,
Speaker:I think it took us two years to get in shape with it. It takes much longer than
Speaker:you think it does. You can think, yeah, okay, well we'll have purpose now. And actually that's
Speaker:just a really shit, stupid way of like trying
Speaker:to imagine why you might do something. Do you know what I mean? It
Speaker:really took a long time. And you know, other
Speaker:people coming into the business and influencing that, people leaving the business and influencing
Speaker:that as well. Do you know what I mean? You sort of go through all these different stages as you sort
Speaker:of grow in and retracting as well. We've gone through that, you know,
Speaker:where we've grown and then we've had to go like, oh, half the company needs to,
Speaker:be made redundant and you know, you go through all these different weird shit
Speaker:things that you don't expect to go through. Do you know what I mean? But I think that that for
Speaker:me was a real, it's a point
Speaker:I always remember. It's a point in the story of On The Tools that I can always tell
Speaker:quite vividly. And I can, you know, when I'm talking to you, I'm like, I know we're sat at
Speaker:There's just little bits where you're like, I'll always remember it. Well, that's the
Speaker:kind of stuff that we keep up at night. You know, those kinds of like those situations where,
Speaker:you know, they make you so upset and angry
Speaker:and also at the same time, you're like, actually, you're
Speaker:But also at the same time, how dare you make me feel that way? Because
Speaker:if I'd intentionally done all that stuff, I'd
Speaker:be like, yeah, fair enough. But you know, you're just coming
Speaker:at it from a place of naivety of just like, I didn't know. I remember thinking,
Speaker:But I mean, I didn't really... experience
Speaker:any of that with my understanding of
Speaker:on the tools and how I approach on the tools, not being in
Speaker:the trade, being a creative. At the time I was probably 25 when
Speaker:it blew up. So I was
Speaker:early on in my career doing okay My mates were sort of
Speaker:like, again probably 25, 26, 27 year old
Speaker:tradies and stuff like that. And I had never really considered
Speaker:the construction industry as being, first of all, anything to do with media. entertaining
Speaker:at all. And what I loved about on the tools
Speaker:was it kind of like opened up the trades to the
Speaker:masses of like, this is what the trades couldn't can
Speaker:be like, obviously, like, it's sensationalized. And it's funny. And it's
Speaker:great. But no one was talking about the trades back then. And no one was no
Speaker:one's been being You know, the
Speaker:Well, it's a big old niche, right? I always say this, that we kind
Speaker:of landed lucky in the sense that it's like a big industry, but
Speaker:it's still very focused in terms of who we, you know, create for
Speaker:or who, you know, all of those different things and
Speaker:who we represent, I guess, as a business and as a brand. But
Speaker:really, if you look at it back then, it was like the media in
Speaker:this industry was like print. That
Speaker:was it. Okay, there was some like, there was some like
Speaker:news websites, but like social
Speaker:sort of brought all those people that were knocking around in the industry to
Speaker:some kind of home is the way we've always like thought
Speaker:about it and been like, yeah, we sort of allowed them all to aggregate send
Speaker:us content and all that and obviously that's evolved into where we're at now
Speaker:where actually you know I believe there'll be creators
Speaker:that completely surpass the size of On The Tools, in terms of
Speaker:views and followers and all those things, whether they will
Speaker:from a commercial or business side, all those things.
Speaker:But there will be a Mr. Beast of the construction
Speaker:industry, I guess is my point. They will be able to sell their own products, do
Speaker:So it's fascinating. I mean, have we finally got to that? I
Speaker:feel like we've got to the end of the story of On The Tools. And now
Speaker:where we are, maybe, yeah. So what is on the tools now?
Speaker:Like if you could put on the tools into some
Speaker:sort of category or several categories and kind of explain what
Speaker:on the tools is at present and who it's for, how
Speaker:So I would say we're an insights and media business. We
Speaker:create try to create the best
Speaker:social media content in construction to improve the lives of
Speaker:every tradesperson in the UK. So that's our purpose. We
Speaker:focus on social media, we focus on construction content, and
Speaker:the reason we do it is because we want the output and our profits to
Speaker:be able to support the trade, I think. We
Speaker:landed in so many different places when we were trying
Speaker:to think about, well, why are we doing it? And the app finally got
Speaker:like, okay, that's been parked. We've really focused on the
Speaker:community. Who is the community? Do we care about the
Speaker:white collar side of it a little bit, but actually it's the real boots
Speaker:on the ground. It's the, it's the labor side of the workforce. We're really
Speaker:like representing here and actually who we feel aren't
Speaker:represented well. Sure. Both from like for
Speaker:all, all wrongs, right. Whether that's employment, pay, like
Speaker:pensions, um, access to just normal
Speaker:shit that people get in employment. Um, mental
Speaker:health support, tool theft, all these things that we cover now,
Speaker:we want to scale
Speaker:the business through insight and media to
Speaker:be able to build something that tradespeople rely
Speaker:on is ultimately where our end game is. I think that in
Speaker:10 years time will be a completely different business again. I'd argue
Speaker:we might not even be a media business anymore but let's see
Speaker:So it's almost like if I could
Speaker:reiterate that in perhaps potentially simpler
Speaker:terms like there's a part
Speaker:of the business that needs to make money and that's through brands and
Speaker:advertising and utilizing your huge
Speaker:audience essentially. And then there's like perhaps a part of the
Speaker:brand that's kind of almost on the opposite sort of spectrum, which is doing,
Speaker:I guess you would call it social engagement, like doing stuff that actually benefits
Speaker:the audience as a whole. Because there's benefits to
Speaker:both not only your conscience, you're helping other people, but also it's really
Speaker:good for the brand. It's really good for the brands that work with the brand. So
Speaker:it's kind of benefiting everybody. So you're kind of being able to sort of
Speaker:pay the bills, keep clients happy, but also be able to
Speaker:engage in social endeavors that make a huge
Speaker:Yes, it's funny because I'm just about
Speaker:to launch this document within the business called the Heart of
Speaker:On The Tool. So I've been writing it for about three months, right? And it
Speaker:was at the 10 year point I started to think about it. It was more around trying
Speaker:to help people progress in the business. Like there's all these things
Speaker:that when you've been running a business for like a decade that like People
Speaker:know, but they only know because they've been there, like isms and like just
Speaker:shit that happens or knowledge that we've got. And then you go, why'd you do that? I
Speaker:don't know, actually. It's just like a fucking thing that we do. And it's
Speaker:been trying a lot, and it's like quite a big thing, like a document in my hand.
Speaker:I've gave it to loads of different people to read inside and outside the business. And
Speaker:I'll be, you know, how's the work? How's it make you feel? And you're at all these things. But
Speaker:one of the things I tried to sort of like, really like, focus
Speaker:down was the model, what's the model, what
Speaker:is it? And I've kind of got it down to this trifecta now
Speaker:of like, okay, we've got our community, which is at the top of this triangle, right?
Speaker:That is the bit that we have to look after. So we create content, we
Speaker:serve them with information, we empower them with campaigns
Speaker:like the Lost City, and we grab as much information off
Speaker:them as possible to understand what the hell's going on with them and in the industry, all those
Speaker:things. And at the bottom right here, your bottom right,
Speaker:is our partners, and we bring them in because
Speaker:they pay for it, right? And we give them access to that community if
Speaker:they're willing to, one, be the right type of partner, and they've got the
Speaker:right type of product or service or whatever it might be, and they
Speaker:pay for it, right? Because then what that does is it allows me to pass across
Speaker:to the next corner, which is the people within the business, right? I can go, okay, I
Speaker:can now build a business where people want to work. They don't have that Sunday night
Speaker:feeling where you just think, fuck, how do I not go there? We can
Speaker:pay people well. I think it's a good, you know, people don't
Speaker:talk about money enough. And I'm like, well, we all work so that we can
Speaker:live. And I want people to have the right balance of like, you
Speaker:know, grafting. And cause that's, that's who I am. And that's what I expect from
Speaker:people in the business, but also in return being
Speaker:given this lifestyle that hopefully benefits everyone. And
Speaker:from that point there, if, the people within the
Speaker:business are like, this is the shit and I believe in
Speaker:the purpose that we've got, then the community will benefit. And
Speaker:then it's just this like, boom, let's just pass it from each corner. And
Speaker:hopefully then it expands into other things that we haven't thought of at the
Speaker:minute, but that at the minute, that is our model. Look
Speaker:after the community, bring partners in that are willing to pay to play and
Speaker:be good partners for the trade and get
Speaker:the best people who really give a shit about the purpose of
Speaker:the business and then I hope the rest of
Speaker:it takes care of itself, potentially. That's kind of like the model. How
Speaker:It's the most simplest image in the docket. I've really tried to
Speaker:like, this is it. It's like if someone saw it, they'd be like, fucking, this
Speaker:I love that. I mean, it's really, really clear. Because
Speaker:on the tours, if you look at it, you kind of go, I
Speaker:think it's this, but it could also be this. And it's also this thing.
Speaker:But then sometimes it's this for these people. And it's
Speaker:not as simple as it's an advertising agency. It's not as simple as it's a
Speaker:creative agency. It's not as simple as it's a media outlet. It's
Speaker:kind of more nuanced. I'm
Speaker:glad that I kind of got it right. I missed one
Speaker:element which was it needs to be a really good place to work. I'd
Speaker:like to think that a lot of the times that's a given, but a lot of the times it's not thought about
Speaker:enough. Thankfully, we think about it as much as
Speaker:possible because I've been in those
Speaker:situations, especially as a creative. You can either land
Speaker:And I bet you at points we've been horrible. I'd almost guarantee it.
Speaker:Certainly at the points where we were really scaling up, we just turned into a
Speaker:shit show. The culture went in
Speaker:a different direction. like, definite learning
Speaker:on how you scale and how many people you bring in at one point and have
Speaker:you got the right level of managers in and all those different
Speaker:bits. We've definitely been a bad employer at points, but I think
Speaker:the key thing for me is like, well, as long, you know, and then people talk
Speaker:about intention and like, don't care about intention, they care about impacts, all these things. But I
Speaker:do think there's something in around like, well, the main way to
Speaker:make sure I actually sleep is that like, well, we're never trying to be a
Speaker:You know, so I'm like, well, you know, we've, we've always had a real.
Speaker:collective mission to make sure that it's not a
Speaker:shit place to be. And that's just the personalities of
Speaker:the people running the business. I can't change that. I'll never be able to change that.
Speaker:It's like if we took loads of private equity money, I would never be able to
Speaker:turn the business into this. you
Speaker:know, like numbers driving machine. It's just like, yeah,
Speaker:like I just wouldn't be out of it. And that's, I'm okay with that. Do you know what I mean? And
Speaker:maybe I'm not that if we get to that point, maybe I won't be the right
Speaker:person to run the business. Do you know what I mean? I think at the minute whilst we're,
Speaker:We're in this stage where we're the brand is changing.
Speaker:I think we're moving heavily into insight and you
Speaker:know I believe there's a model for us. We've got this thing called trade brain which
Speaker:is like an insight membership that we're in my opinion is like something that
Speaker:every brand in construction should be in because it's about investing
Speaker:in the workforce and understanding what they're doing. It drives things like The Lost
Speaker:City and the campaigns we do like that, which I think can have more and more impact. I
Speaker:think we will be in a position where in five years' time, On The
Speaker:Tools will be something that is even
Speaker:more for the boots on the ground than it is for brands.
Speaker:That's where we're moving. And I
Speaker:think I'm the right person to do that. Beyond that, who knows,
Speaker:maybe it's time for me to take the knee and get out, you know what
Speaker:I mean? You sort of run up to your capabilities and at the minute I'm like,
Speaker:I know where I want to be. I'm not obsessed by the long
Speaker:term vision because I think you can put numbers for next year and
Speaker:they don't mean shit. I'm always like, what's happening in the next 12 weeks? what's
Speaker:the most important thing that's gonna like support the
Speaker:growth of the business. We should try, and I'm really trying at this at the minute
Speaker:of like trying to remove multiple things that
Speaker:we're doing all the time. And like, you get into that thing where like, oh, we've got to do that, we've got
Speaker:to do that, we've got to do this, you know, and really trying to sort of like suck it back down to
Speaker:focus. And look, I think we're, the brand has never
Speaker:been in a better position in terms of like what it stands for, I
Speaker:think how it's viewed. from the trade perspective and
Speaker:from partners, and that's because of the team we've
Speaker:got and what they've suggested we focus on
Speaker:I think it's brilliant. I think one of the things that we've been
Speaker:clear with our clients, and this is from, we're not
Speaker:fucking geniuses at marketing at Dissident. We're,
Speaker:for the most part, creatives with a marketing direction.
Speaker:You know what I mean? I've always called class dissident as like it's
Speaker:run by marketers but kind
Speaker:of backed up by creatives. I've never been able to sort of
Speaker:really articulate what that is but we're creatives that work towards marketing
Speaker:goals because the owners are kind of marketers to
Speaker:some extent. So the
Speaker:reason why I'm saying that is we're not really heavily invested into our clients
Speaker:strategies we don't necessarily create strategies for our clients we're not that high
Speaker:up in the in the on the rung of lads but what what we do suggest when it
Speaker:comes to the content the types of content that our clients should produce and
Speaker:the things that we should be thinking about and putting our budgets towards is stuff
Speaker:for the people not just about the brand not
Speaker:just about the product, let's do stuff for the
Speaker:people. So things like The Lost City, you know, focusing
Speaker:around mental health, focusing around tool theft,
Speaker:but essentially any kind of social issues that are going on in the industry,
Speaker:not only social issues, but like, you know, social, you know, positives as
Speaker:well. You know, let's, you know, if
Speaker:you want to be a brand that people engage with
Speaker:and interact with and are
Speaker:more proud to use and purchase, then you
Speaker:really want to be doing something that benefits
Speaker:them in a way other than create a good product. I think that's
Speaker:massive. That's present
Speaker:in other industries, but especially in construction, because I feel like construction needs
Speaker:a little bit more support than some other industries. Because
Speaker:it's kind of been that industry that's been left behind when
Speaker:it comes to support. I couldn't give you an example of another industry. I
Speaker:think there's that expectation that it's a load of men, they
Speaker:don't need any help. They just get on with it. They get on with it
Speaker:and a lot of them do, don't get me wrong. You can go too far in one
Speaker:direction and
Speaker:try and find fault where there isn't. But I
Speaker:think there's a situation now where
Speaker:trades people need more support, not just mentally. But
Speaker:you know, in the fact that, you know, we've got these issues with with stolen
Speaker:tools, which we'll probably go into a little bit later on. But
Speaker:also, you know, celebrating trades as well.
Speaker:You know, I had Ryan Jones from SLG Agency,
Speaker:who's one of my first guests on the podcast and I still revere. I don't
Speaker:know if you've come across SLG before. Ryan is
Speaker:like literally one of the most clever people I've ever met. And he
Speaker:mentioned that for years and years and years, Constructions had brand
Speaker:issue in the fact that everyone thinks construction is one thing and
Speaker:it's not it's multiple things and it's and it's not considered
Speaker:to be a particularly sexy industry it's not considered to be a particularly interesting industry
Speaker:for a lot of people coming through school through the school
Speaker:system and you know now
Speaker:There are brands and there's companies and there's agencies and there's creators that
Speaker:are saying, no, no, this is fucking cool. Not only
Speaker:is it a really cool job, it's not
Speaker:just for thick people like people used to think it was in the 90s or the 80s
Speaker:or whenever that kind of lie started. But
Speaker:also, if you're clever and you're good, you can make
Speaker:a shit ton of money, not just as an individual, but as a
Speaker:business. And there's
Speaker:loads and loads of benefits to construction. So it's not just about focusing
Speaker:on the problems that the construction is going through, but
Speaker:also like really highlighting how cool of an industry
Speaker:Yeah, like one of the problems is that it's not positioned in the
Speaker:Yeah, yeah. It's like the army went through that, didn't they? Like 15, you
Speaker:remember like the whole like media campaign that
Speaker:went on for years around joining the army because it was just deemed as
Speaker:somewhere shit to be, but like they transformed the
Speaker:intake. I know that's dropped off again now, but like, I
Speaker:always feel like the construction industry needs that type of backing where it
Speaker:gets huge, huge amounts of scope,
Speaker:both from, whether that's from government or whether it's from the
Speaker:governing bodies within the industry. But it's so fragmented
Speaker:that no one, and this is kind of why we ended up
Speaker:getting into a position where we're like, well, maybe it's our job to fight these fights a bit because
Speaker:we're like, who's going to do it? Because everyone just keeps doing this. Everyone's like,
Speaker:no, we're in this lane and like, oh, we're here. And we're like, yeah, but. We're
Speaker:just getting to the point where they're not being, you know, people aren't being looked after properly in
Speaker:so many different areas that how can we expect people to want to join it?
Speaker:No. Do you know what I mean? Like I've got kids and I've
Speaker:got a nearly 14 year old daughter in the next couple of weeks and like
Speaker:if she came to me in two years time and was like I want to join the construction industry I'd
Speaker:be like on one hand really excited and on the other hand quite
Speaker:scared and be like hmm Is it the right industry for
Speaker:Um, you know, I've got a nearly four year
Speaker:old, maybe, you know, I'm hoping by the time he gets older, maybe
Speaker:the industry will be in a better shape. But I think in two years time, will things be solved
Speaker:in the right way? I don't know. Maybe it feels like we're making enough
Speaker:noise now where there seems to be more focus
Speaker:on some of the problems. which
Speaker:I think is, and I mean outside of the industry, so you know just more broadcast
Speaker:media around trades, the tool theft stuff, like the
Speaker:rate of suicide, these things are now becoming a bit more
Speaker:widespread, but I do think it's a timing thing, so like there's a
Speaker:lack of housing, so therefore the
Speaker:construction industry is more topical for broadcast media and
Speaker:government to comment on. And if they're both going to do that, then they have to cover
Speaker:more stories. So for me, I'm like, whatever. I don't really care why
Speaker:it's coming up. Let's lean into the fact that more outside
Speaker:of the industry, more media outlets and more MPs, et
Speaker:cetera, are willing to sort of stick their head above. the
Speaker:trenches to talk about it. I'm like, well, let's just ride the wave
Speaker:and see how much movement we
Speaker:And it's massively helped by the individual creators as
Speaker:well. We've got this amazing thing that happened in really, I
Speaker:It feels like it's sort of really snapped, hasn't it? Yeah.
Speaker:All of a sudden, we've got these like, you know, You
Speaker:have to use the word influencer because it's easier. I don't know whether
Speaker:We've termed it as creator, but often
Speaker:To like, I
Speaker:don't know, some like 55 year old kind
Speaker:of like director of sales. I'm like, they're influencers. It's
Speaker:just easy for me to say that. But, you
Speaker:know, these accounts are coming out of nowhere. and doing
Speaker:all sorts of amazing things for all of these different minute
Speaker:or individual, sorry is the best word term, issues, problems
Speaker:and benefits and highlights of the
Speaker:construction industry. They're all kind of doing their own sort of thing. So there's
Speaker:particular accounts that are really flying the flag for women in construction and
Speaker:they're getting together and they're banding together and doing all these amazing projects. There's an
Speaker:amazing project going on at the moment that I haven't been following
Speaker:massively apart from I follow some of the guys that
Speaker:are on there, which is this full build with female
Speaker:Yeah, we covered something like last week for International Women's Week. Incredible.
Speaker:I'm just like, mate, if I was any of
Speaker:the publications or any of the media out there, this is cool. This is
Speaker:cool. Not just talking about it, doing something about it, being like, look, we built
Speaker:something. I don't think anyone was ever like, well,
Speaker:I suppose there are some twats out there that are just like, women aren't any good at construction, that
Speaker:you're always going to get those kinds of people that are nutters or whatever. But
Speaker:I think the bigger problem is just like, Again,
Speaker:in those situations, it is just like being able to
Speaker:speak to a younger audience to say, this is a viable job for
Speaker:And having this amazing thing where you've got
Speaker:all these creators making a huge difference, like the
Speaker:tool theft. I've completely forgotten the guy's name. I knew I'd do this.
Speaker:That's like really flying the flag for tool theft. Schwab. That's it. What's
Speaker:the Instagram handle for him? The Gas Expert. That's it. He's
Speaker:All the time. And respectfully,
Speaker:and I mean this in the most complimentary
Speaker:way possible to him, he's just a bloke. And
Speaker:what I mean by that is look how much impact one person can have.
Speaker:And he will say this himself, he's just an ordinary guy who's pissed
Speaker:off enough about something that he's gonna make a change. Now, he'll call
Speaker:himself ordinary, he's not, he's extraordinary, like, in all accounts.
Speaker:He's a pilot as well, like, yeah, he's just, and
Speaker:his work is just incredible. I don't know if you've seen his work, but some
Speaker:of his work is mental. There's a particular one, he's got like
Speaker:a Hogwarts boiler. Honestly, you go through his account, and
Speaker:he's flown, the reason he learned to fly was because he got flew
Speaker:out by someone because he worked so good, it was only like domestically, but and then
Speaker:he was like, I want to learn to fly. He's a great guy, really interesting guy. But
Speaker:just that, just, I mean, the guys move mountains on
Speaker:his, you know, and like, look, there's been loads of people who supported him
Speaker:and he will always say that, but like, You know, we've
Speaker:been on the edge of that. We've like tried to help him where he's
Speaker:needed help, but we've not been the driving force behind that. He has, you know,
Speaker:no one else has been the driving force behind it. He has, we've all just sort of
Speaker:like hung on his coat, has been like, okay, well we want to help. And
Speaker:he's like dragging us. Sometimes we push him a little bit, but generally like he's
Speaker:the one dragging us along being like, you're either coming with me. And if you're not coming with me,
Speaker:fuck yeah, I'll get it done anyway. Like he's, He
Speaker:is a force that guy is and if there's anyone that I've met
Speaker:over the last 10 years in terms of this industry who's
Speaker:going to get something done, honestly he is the one because he's just
Speaker:He's caused such a ruckus over it. and
Speaker:that's had what the beautiful thing is with this kind of thing we've kind of gone
Speaker:off on a tangent here but it's a beautiful tangent which
Speaker:is like he's started something that snowballed all
Speaker:of these other situations right it's not just him and
Speaker:everyone's focused and tool theft isn't just about him now there's like lots of
Speaker:different things going on and different pieces of media
Speaker:The things he's done, he's changed how the police are
Speaker:now approaching theft generally. Like,
Speaker:basically, a law, there will be a law change because
Speaker:of Shweb. And that is just a fact. Eventually,
Speaker:that, because there's a couple of things that need to happen. Like, there isn't,
Speaker:currently, there's no way to categorize a tool theft. It's just theft. So
Speaker:then you can't change the law on something that hasn't got, that's
Speaker:not categorized and there's no data on all these things, right? So there's a couple of
Speaker:stages to it, but like, That will be the end outcome.
Speaker:The law will change, the consequences
Speaker:and the implications of stealing tools will be more
Speaker:severe and therefore then eventually the
Speaker:thieves will be like, the risk-reward here is starting to light.
Speaker:sort of shape half here, I'm gonna probably stop doing this now. And
Speaker:it'll be because of him. Like, and if you think about it as like a thing,
Speaker:you're like, God, that's mental. Like, that he basically
Speaker:had his tool stolen and then was like, fuck this. Like,
Speaker:this ain't happening again. And then he's gonna go on what will be
Speaker:probably a five, six year, like,
Speaker:crusade. Yeah, I was gonna say rampage. Yeah, yeah, rampage, crusade,
Speaker:like, you know. and
Speaker:he'll get it done. And I just think it's incredible, like,
Speaker:and you'll vouch for this, and I say this to people a lot, but like, you
Speaker:know, through the years of running the business, the industry is
Speaker:full of the most incredible people, like incredible, and
Speaker:I mean from a talent, from a loyalty perspective, from
Speaker:a kindness perspective, all these different things, like, There's
Speaker:not many industries like it and yet they're all shit on. They
Speaker:don't get the support that most other industries get. And that's what I
Speaker:think just sort of drives our
Speaker:thinking behind what we're doing and where we're heading. I think it drives a
Speaker:lot of, it's why people stay in the industry once they're in
Speaker:it. Don't get me wrong, I know there's a lot of people leaving, but
Speaker:I do think it's the camaraderie in the industry is
Speaker:incredible. And I just
Speaker:I tell this story quite a lot, but not necessarily on the
Speaker:podcast. Before
Speaker:Dissident was Dissident, and we were just a social media agency,
Speaker:a creative agency, and we worked with
Speaker:everything, every kind of possible, anyone
Speaker:to pay us, we did some cool stuff. You got some money, we'll do it. Yeah, but
Speaker:we kind of worked our way around a few
Speaker:different areas, which was, hospitality, spas,
Speaker:restaurants, hotels, service-based offerings,
Speaker:service businesses like accountants and all that kind of thing. And
Speaker:little bits and bobs, we started to push in towards like bigger brands
Speaker:for like furniture, fashion,
Speaker:stuff like that. And we
Speaker:were also working construction and we started to play around construction and
Speaker:we basically got COVID happened and that was The
Speaker:two sectors that stuck with us for
Speaker:the most part was construction and healthcare, because they weren't going anywhere. Business-wise,
Speaker:it makes sense to double down on these guys, because if
Speaker:a pandemic can't ruin these two industries, they're probably a
Speaker:pretty safe bet for the longevity of an agency. So
Speaker:there was a business sort of mentality there, but also we were
Speaker:working with a lot of these industries, not shitting on hospitality
Speaker:and fashion and furniture and stuff like that, but a lot of
Speaker:them were wankers. A lot of these people that
Speaker:we were working with were just like, you're horrible to deal with. You
Speaker:know because you were working with like models and like some of those were
Speaker:not that nice and there was a lot of situations like and
Speaker:I'm probably tarnishing a bigger problem
Speaker:with a you know with this one brush but I was like I'm
Speaker:not I you know I'm perhaps just not the right person to be in this industry
Speaker:because I you know they weren't horrible to us I just couldn't deal with
Speaker:the bullshit and then We were
Speaker:working in construction and everyone was so nice. Everyone
Speaker:was really down to earth. There was no prima donnas, there
Speaker:was no messing around, there was no entitlement. It
Speaker:was just real people getting on with real work. And,
Speaker:you know, we got to work with tradespeople, obviously, as kind of a byproduct of
Speaker:working with brands and stuff. And they were amazing. Even the people in
Speaker:the brands were just like, dead down to earth. And I was like, these are our people.
Speaker:Like, what amazing industry. to be in, but like you say, even
Speaker:with its problems, the individuals
Speaker:I'm very aware that we've got no marketing value from this
Speaker:podcast up until this point. I told you it was going to be
Speaker:a catfish. However, it has been such an
Speaker:amazing, entertaining episode about the
Speaker:history of On The Tools and what you guys do and stuff like that. But I'm going to pull a
Speaker:little bit of value from the podcast right at the end before we get to Jon's talk.
Speaker:Yeah, let's do it. I want to leave giving some value if
Speaker:possible. Drag it out of me. There's the
Speaker:value that I want to get for brands and there's value that I want to get
Speaker:for the creators, let's say. Let's not use
Speaker:the term creators, let's use the term self-employed people, anyone that
Speaker:can benefit from putting
Speaker:their work or putting content out on social media. Originally
Speaker:I wanted to talk about the formula of content that you
Speaker:guys have and how you found it. But I think we have like just
Speaker:maybe we'll have to do like a part two. Well, I can give you two minutes on that
Speaker:form. Let's do it. Let's do it. So how did you find, you know, there
Speaker:was a formula that was being created on the tours, and you
Speaker:were coming across all these different scenarios, you were, you were, you were kind
Speaker:of like repurposing content, creating your own content. Like,
Speaker:I think we've just come to the realisation that the formula is there's
Speaker:no formula. Cool. Right. So there are just lots
Speaker:of different tactics that some stay around for ages and some
Speaker:don't. And so there's tactics we've been using from the very beginning.
Speaker:So the three second rule for us has never gone away.
Speaker:And what's that? It's just like an opening hook. But it was always
Speaker:something we termed a three second rule. I think it was driven by the fact that
Speaker:Facebook tracked by the first three seconds. And that's why we have
Speaker:that three second rule thing. Now, you
Speaker:know, you might change it to the five second rule, but basically the
Speaker:opening hook from a social perspective, whether it's paid, whether it's organic,
Speaker:like if you want it to be engaged, you've got to think about that tactic.
Speaker:You know, there's like a sound optimization,
Speaker:even like sound like, um, like
Speaker:removing sound and replacing sound so like sound retention tactics
Speaker:or sound retention as we we call it or like mid
Speaker:hooks so like okay you're 20 seconds in what's happening
Speaker:like there's all these like little bits that you can you can look
Speaker:at But in terms of the formula
Speaker:for it, it's different every time because I could give
Speaker:you two bits of content and they could have the same formula in
Speaker:terms of like their makeup or whatever it might be. They
Speaker:could be the same length. They could have a
Speaker:very similar opening hook. So they could be both a visual opening hook,
Speaker:right? They then
Speaker:could have like a really very similar midway
Speaker:hook. They could have the same track from like a sound perspective or
Speaker:overlay. they could have the same style of captions
Speaker:or subtitles, whatever, they could have the same caption, right? And they'll fucking
Speaker:perform differently. And it's the most frustrating thing,
Speaker:but also the most magical thing that social brings, because you've
Speaker:got to constantly put yourself under pressure of like, okay, but why is
Speaker:this going to work? So for me, the formula is just that You've
Speaker:got to aggregate loads of different tactics that you can pull together for content. Understand
Speaker:why the hell you're creating it would be one
Speaker:part of the formula. There needs to be some value there. There needs to
Speaker:be some value. Why are you doing it? Who's it for? But
Speaker:beyond that, I'm like, it's a bunch of tactics that you try and pull together based on
Speaker:what it is that you're creating. And then you've got to accept the fact
Speaker:that those tactics will change. Like if you get to the point where you're
Speaker:like, okay, we've got it, we've got our bit, then tomorrow
Speaker:you will create content that won't work. The
Speaker:only thing we've got that's been consistent for a while now
Speaker:is that we have a daily content meeting. In the bit, there's
Speaker:no content that gets put out on any of the channels, whether it's organic
Speaker:or original program, as we call it, or branded, that doesn't
Speaker:go through this meeting because there's
Speaker:a thing around, like we went for a patch where we, and
Speaker:looking back on it is how we now term it, is that we just got too far
Speaker:away from the content. So you sort of like, and I mean, this is like
Speaker:owners or founders or whatever. And I don't know how you scale that.
Speaker:I don't know, you know, Ads basically got a team of people in this meeting
Speaker:that are collectively trying
Speaker:to get to a point where they all understand each other in the same way and that they can essentially
Speaker:review content if one of them wasn't there, right? So you're trying
Speaker:to build out this team who really know what's happening because you
Speaker:can give a formula to people or like some tactics, right?
Speaker:But if you do that and you move away from it, it
Speaker:will all like, change and
Speaker:the performance will change, everything will. And so this thing around, there's
Speaker:this like, if you don't know how to solve it,
Speaker:you're too far away from it, right? So as a manager or as
Speaker:someone who's running that area of the business, if you can't quite work out how, what
Speaker:the hell's going wrong, it's probably because you've been a bit far away from it for too long. But
Speaker:with content now, we've just gone back to this like, model
Speaker:where we're like okay it sometimes causes some bottlenecks but
Speaker:it doesn't half like weed out having poor performance on
Speaker:content where you don't get the second chance on it because once it the problem is
Speaker:with content is that is that you that all the hard work
Speaker:goes up front yes and then you click a button it goes out
Speaker:and that's where you get your performance it's like and that's where everywhere everything's
Speaker:rewarded in that in that area right but Once
Speaker:you once it's gone, it's gone like okay can take it
Speaker:down. But if there's a client involved you're in a world where it's like We've
Speaker:got to reshoot, or we've got to do something again, or whatever it might be. And it's expensive. And
Speaker:then they're like, oh, do they know what they're doing, all these things. So all the work, you're far
Speaker:better off taking a bit more time on things and really understanding that you've given it
Speaker:your best shot than you are being like, OK, it's ready, and not really getting
Speaker:into, you know. These videos are watched, and they are critiqued
Speaker:every 10 seconds, being like, OK, well, what's happening now? I think it's fell
Speaker:off. It could just be a personal opinion of like, I'm bored. And
Speaker:generally, if the people in there, if one or two of them are like, mm, I'm lost,
Speaker:it's like, oh, that retention's gone, it's going to fail there. And
Speaker:it might not, but like if you feel like that before it's gone out, change it. Do
Speaker:you know what I mean? Like really sort of like criticize the work you pulled
Speaker:together. I think too often what will happen is people create content and the job's
Speaker:not creating it. The job's not done once you've pulled it all together. The
Speaker:job is like watching it and then trying to create something from
Speaker:that point that you're like, yeah, I've done as much as
Speaker:I can do with everything I've got and all the tactics and all the
Speaker:skillsets we've got in the business and all of those things. And then you
Speaker:know what, sometimes you're still posting it It will fail. Do you
Speaker:know what I mean? But that's part of it. And so my
Speaker:value for anyone listening is don't become too obsessed about having
Speaker:some perfect formula
Speaker:for your business. You can have a style of content. I think that's great. But
Speaker:content to content based on what it's for, which platform it's going on, how
Speaker:long it is, all these different things. Just try
Speaker:and build a skill set of spotting
Speaker:where it hasn't worked and then replaying that
Speaker:back in and like watch the content. Don't just like have
Speaker:really good sign off processes where people can learn and build a
Speaker:culture within your marketing teams or your content teams where people are like it's
Speaker:absolutely fine if someone's like, I think this is shit. I
Speaker:don't think you're shit. I think what we've ended up creating is
Speaker:not right. And it's okay that people go, I think this is shit or this is not
Speaker:as good as we should be putting it. Whatever the words are, people sometimes
Speaker:be like, oh, someone just said I'm shit. It's nothing to do with it.
Speaker:We've got to get into a culture where it's like, do we think this
Speaker:is going to be the best performance we can get out of it?
Speaker:Because if it's not, then we should all be able to just be able to go like, oh
Speaker:man, this is fucking not what we thought it was going to be. Damn, like, how
Speaker:do we? And then get into the world where it's like very quickly where everyone's
Speaker:back on the same page being like, okay, we could do this, we could do that. Have
Speaker:we got any other shots of that? Do you know what I mean?
Speaker:I think sometimes there's so much focus on people
Speaker:not being able to say things because everyone's going to get a
Speaker:little bit upset. Don't get me wrong, our business has still got
Speaker:I'm trying to slowly eradicate personal...
Speaker:It's that thing of creatives, and again I'll
Speaker:bring it back to the trades people at the same time, crafts
Speaker:people, whatever. We've got egos and they're delicate and
Speaker:we want to make something, you know, really, I mean, I
Speaker:don't know a lot of creatives that want to make something and then never show someone and never
Speaker:get gratification from it. Yes. I do know some people like
Speaker:that. It's rare though, right? Yeah, really, we are creating something so
Speaker:that, like, because Back in the day, when we
Speaker:were kids, our parents didn't give us enough attention or didn't give us enough
Speaker:fucking praise. And now we're desperately trying
Speaker:to get- There's some deep psychology, isn't there? That's another
Speaker:episode. If you have a conversation with my coach,
Speaker:he'll go through all this stuff with you. Your parents weren't
Speaker:proud of you enough. So now you've got to make thousands
Speaker:and thousands of people think you're really clever. But
Speaker:basically, there's these situations where you get
Speaker:these creatives, and I'm exactly the same, I come from
Speaker:a creative background, where you make something and I'm like, this is
Speaker:perfect. Although a real creator
Speaker:is never fully 100% happy with what they've created. like this
Speaker:is as far as I can take this as far as I'm allowed to criticize it
Speaker:but you're not yeah yeah and I'll get one person go and
Speaker:Kate my wife is the worst for this because I'm wait and I'm
Speaker:like I made this this is it I don't make a lot of stuff these days but like
Speaker:I made I made this she's like really good I'm
Speaker:like and you can you can hear the kind of What
Speaker:I would do, or whatever, I'm like, fuck off, Kate,
Speaker:this is perfect, give me a day, give me a day where I can, but
Speaker:this is why we're a creative agency led by marketers, because
Speaker:you can get so focused on the creative, you can get so focused on the craft and
Speaker:what you've made, that it actually, like, when you really
Speaker:boil this content down, it does nothing, it's
Speaker:got zero value, it's a sponsored art project, that's
Speaker:all it is. And when you're working with brands, you can't afford to do
Speaker:that. You've got to give some return, yeah. Yeah, you can do that for yourself, but
Speaker:don't do it on a £20 budget. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker:Oh, mate, it's mad. So yeah, that was my formula anyway. I love
Speaker:that. Test and evaluate. Don't
Speaker:get comfortable. Yes, exactly, because it's going to change. 100% it
Speaker:will change. Love that. So
Speaker:we've got the formula. What I'd love to do is get a
Speaker:little bit of feedback from yourself very, very quickly in
Speaker:terms of creators. What
Speaker:do you think creators could be doing more of that would benefit them
Speaker:the most on social media? Can you give a little bit of something that's just like,
Speaker:this is the stuff I'm seeing on social media. Perhaps you
Speaker:can use a little bit of your insight into what you're seeing that's not
Speaker:So I guess I was trying to approach these things if
Speaker:I was manly enough and creative enough and skilled enough
Speaker:to be able to build something and not have such soft
Speaker:hands that are built for spreadsheets. How
Speaker:would I approach being a tradesperson? I
Speaker:think a nuance I've noticed is say about
Speaker:five years ago there was businesses out there that were that were building
Speaker:white label solutions aimed at tradespeople for websites. Because
Speaker:there was lots of trades that were running SMEs that
Speaker:didn't have a website, right? Yeah, they needed leads, basically. Yeah, and they needed leads. So
Speaker:you'd have this, like, it's a subscription model. So it's like a SaaS model for
Speaker:the technology business. And the tradesperson would then get a fully
Speaker:serviced website that would pretty much look the same as somebody else's, but it
Speaker:would generate leads and all this shit, right? spiked
Speaker:a little bit and then disappeared again. I think because it's social, right?
Speaker:And then now I see it that it's almost like a
Speaker:trades person's Instagram or TikTok account
Speaker:has replaced websites. In
Speaker:the sense that if you're not creating content of the work you're
Speaker:doing, then your validity
Speaker:as being a trusted trades person diminishes
Speaker:slightly. It's like, if I think of it from a consumer's point
Speaker:of view, I'll go, okay, I'm going to get someone to come and look at, you know, we know
Speaker:loads of trades people, like I'd point, you know, point at him, my arse on
Speaker:Friday, fit in a tap for me, obviously try and utilise
Speaker:I did pay him, I wasn't afraid of him, I want to make that point, I'm not
Speaker:grabbing favours in it, but I'd much prefer to use people that I know than I don't, right?
Speaker:Are you the, just on a side note, are you the kind of person like me
Speaker:that would rather not get mates rates because you want to support them
Speaker:but also at the same time you want it to be done quickly? Yeah, so I was like this weird
Speaker:And I kind of don't want to pay mates rates. And he doesn't live close by me,
Speaker:but I've been chatting to him. Anyway, anyway, you digress. So
Speaker:if I was faced with two accounts
Speaker:that I'd found, and that's how I'd found it, which is the likelihood now
Speaker:that if I wasn't in the profession I'm in, but I was the same personality
Speaker:type, I would be on social, looking at
Speaker:content, right? And I'd go, okay, they look good. I go, who's local, all this,
Speaker:right? And if I was faced with someone who had some content
Speaker:that I could see their work and someone who hadn't, I would go with that person who has like
Speaker:a hundred percent, right? It's why, it's
Speaker:why Amazon reviews has driven their business into just
Speaker:this stratosphere is because people are sheep and
Speaker:we try and get some form of like, like
Speaker:social standard of going, okay, well, it looks like loads of people are following
Speaker:this person or I like their content, oh, I'm gonna buy from them,
Speaker:right? It's why influencers exist, right? The
Speaker:whole concept. But I think what's happening in our
Speaker:world now is that everyone's
Speaker:trying to become a trade influencer, if we'd call them
Speaker:that for a second. The difficulty in our industry is
Speaker:that you can't be an influencer without being in the trade, right? So
Speaker:it's not like you can, you can't build your, you can't build your
Speaker:community, obviously, but you can't build your audience or
Speaker:your Instagram channel, right, to a point where you go, I know I'm
Speaker:making so much money on this now that I no longer need
Speaker:to be a tradesperson. Because then the money you're making will
Speaker:diminish because you're no longer a tradesperson. The reason someone's willing to pay is
Speaker:because you're really good at what you're doing. Whether that's creating content, whatever it might
Speaker:be, right? And this is a feeling I
Speaker:get over actual data, but I see
Speaker:people popping up now who are creating content with
Speaker:no business value. So if I was in the trade, I
Speaker:would be like, okay, I'm a great whatever, right?
Speaker:I'm a chippy, right? And I go... I
Speaker:would start by growing my business. So I would be creating content
Speaker:to get more leads. As opposed to
Speaker:brand deals. Not brand deals. Because I think what happens is
Speaker:that you can go too early. And I think one of the benefits we
Speaker:had as a business was because we were so focused
Speaker:on this fucking app that we never did. This happy accident. We
Speaker:kind of didn't do brand deals because we didn't know what we were
Speaker:doing. We were selling merch and that was fine because people were
Speaker:like, oh yeah, I'll give you some money. We were like, here's the products. It wasn't
Speaker:shit, it wasn't amazing by any means, but it had labels in and stuff, it
Speaker:looked sound. We put some effort into it. We
Speaker:were never asking them for anything. We were never like... I
Speaker:remember the first... I'll tell you this very quick story. I remember the first
Speaker:brand deal we did, right, and it was with ITS. Shout out to ITS because
Speaker:I like you guys. We don't do much with you now, but... And
Speaker:it was a phone call that I got, and
Speaker:they were like, we wanna promote, I don't know if it was a Black Friday
Speaker:or what, it was just an offer, right? And we just didn't know what
Speaker:we were doing, so we got, they provided a still image artwork,
Speaker:and we posted it, and I always remember it, instantly, we
Speaker:got messages on the channel being like, fucking sellouts, what's this shit?
Speaker:Do you know what I mean? And I remember thinking, and they gave us,
Speaker:I think it was like 500 quid, I think we got for it, and I remember thinking, boom! I'm
Speaker:just quid, if we just press the button, that's all I've done, just press the button, man. We're
Speaker:gonna be like millionaires. But like, we
Speaker:didn't do it again, because I was like, the feedback we got, and I remember
Speaker:reading through the messages, and Ab was like, it's fucking bullshit, like what, we shouldn't
Speaker:do it for free forever. And I was like, I know, but we've obviously done it in the wrong way. Like,
Speaker:it's not been receptive. And I think there's a world where creators
Speaker:now are so focused on being a creator rather than
Speaker:being in the trade. So like you focus on being in the trade and
Speaker:creating content, your account will grow more
Speaker:than if you focus on being a creator. Absolutely. Right.
Speaker:And if I was a trades person, I'll be focusing more on how I could
Speaker:understand paid advertising than I would be trying to like, I'll
Speaker:be like, Deep diving into TikTok ads and meta ads
Speaker:being like, okay, locally, how can I utilize the
Speaker:great con? I'm really good at creating this content. I'm doing it because I'm trying to showcase how
Speaker:good I am. I'll be using a page strategy to
Speaker:get more leads to then employ someone who can
Speaker:just follow me around shooting all the content. That's what I would be doing. I wouldn't be.
Speaker:Whereas I think there's an immediacy for people to be like, give
Speaker:me an affiliate link or give me like, I want to do a branded deal and
Speaker:they're at a point where they've got like, and I'm all for the like micro-influencer and
Speaker:all these things, but. I think there's so much of
Speaker:it now and so much not, just like there is in the industry three
Speaker:years ago, because the construction industry takes a while to sort of catch up.
Speaker:We're in that world now where there's so much noise that
Speaker:I think trades are sometimes missing the opportunity they've got
Speaker:where they could build this incredible business. And
Speaker:then actually, if a brand did come along at that point, kind
Speaker:of like it's on your, you can be like, I want like, I
Speaker:want six figures. I barely want to do anything. This
Speaker:is what you'll get back. I do it in my own style. And if you don't want me to do
Speaker:it in my own style, I ain't doing it. And also if I don't do it
Speaker:in my own style, it won't work. You know, all these things that I
Speaker:think even we fall down on where we're like,
Speaker:no, we need to do it. And then we, you know, cash gets exchanged. You do something you're
Speaker:not that proud of because you've took money, you know, all these different things. I
Speaker:think a tradesperson is in such, if you're in the trade
Speaker:right now, if you're in the trade right now, right, you've got
Speaker:this amazing opportunity to build a business that no one can touch
Speaker:and then have a brand that you can license out, do sponsorships where
Speaker:you're making so much money. But I think people shoot
Speaker:too early and they go, I'm going to do these brand deals and they become reliant
Speaker:on them. and it affects the work they're doing dramatically. I
Speaker:don't think people realise how much work it takes to do brand deals and
Speaker:how much time it takes and the shit you have to deal post-shoot, all
Speaker:these different things. I would grow my business,
Speaker:I would lean into paid advertising, I would learn that
Speaker:and become a god at it, make so
Speaker:much money that I'd build a media business off the side of my actual business.
Speaker:Lee, it's been an absolute pleasure. It's been a whirlwind of
Speaker:history of On The Tours. I genuinely think that there's going to be a lot
Speaker:of people who have just become complacent
Speaker:about On The Tours, that it just exists and there's no history behind
Speaker:it. So I genuinely think that's going to be really, really fascinating for the audience.
Speaker:We've we've dived into kind
Speaker:of like marketing towards my 20 was a 2015 onwards,
Speaker:you know, like any kind of like social media and the history of that. And
Speaker:we've we've dived into, you know, what is your, you
Speaker:know, what's been the formula, which is the fact that there is no formula,
Speaker:just keep testing, keep evaluating, don't get comfortable. And
Speaker:we've looked into Like if you were to start out
Speaker:on social media as a small business in the construction industry, what
Speaker:would that look like? And I genuinely think that'll provide a lot of value. And
Speaker:so I just want to give a quick round of applause, Key, for Lee Wilcox on
Speaker:the tour. Thank you so much,
Speaker:mate. And hopefully we can get you back again at some stage to go
Speaker:in more depth. That'd be amazing. I'd love to talk more about some
Speaker:of the social engagement elements like The Lost City
Speaker:and Tool Theft and stuff like that. Yeah, I would love to get nerdy on some social
Speaker:stuff, yeah, whenever you want. But for now, if
Speaker:you could point to anybody, any of my audience in any directions, where
Speaker:So from a marketer point of view, definitely on LinkedIn, so
Speaker:follow either me or
Speaker:on the tools or both if you want to. We're doing a lot of
Speaker:stuff around, I mentioned it earlier, Tradebrain as a membership. If
Speaker:you're like In marketing or insight or
Speaker:data within construction, I think trade branding is
Speaker:like a must. I'm really peddling this at the minute. It is the
Speaker:reason we can do things like the lossy. I believe that
