Throughout my career, despite its essentially creative nature, I have developed an appreciation for the importance of process.
Since incorporating BusinessCloud Publishing Ltd in 2021, the need to operate within a plan has magnified tenfold. And sometimes you need to step away from spinning the plates to consider whether the overall direction of travel is aligned with your objectives.
Bringing colleagues along with you is part of the challenge. “That’s a life lesson, isn’t it?” Nick Richardson, founder of market intelligence firm The Insights Family, tells me. “When you sketch it all out, it’s quite simple; the hardest thing is people.
“Processes and strategies and plans on paper can be actually quite simple to do. But the two things which I’ve learned, especially since running this business, is you can only be successful if the people around you buy into [your vision] – and, secondly, if they are good enough to implement it.”
Resistance to change
Richardson recalls his experience at a large American publisher, where he was responsible for global strategic marketing. “We ran events and publications around the world. It was a mess! You had all these marketing managers going about research in different ways – then it would go in a drawer and nothing would be done with it.
“The good thing was that I had the ear of the board, so it was a change management piece. It was about changing the culture of the business to be insights-led – using that data to engage their stakeholders such as advertisers, exhibitors and partners.
“The middle management was the hard one to crack – if they’ve been there for sometimes 20-25 years and always done it that way, they might think: ‘who’s this trailblazer in the business think he is?’
“People are resistant to change. People have their own ways.”
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Earlier in his career, at ExxonMobil, he was tasked with carrying out an audit of its global brand and sponsorship. “It had created a purchase funnel so the whole strategy fit on one page of A4: you had all the different stakeholders across the top so you could look at how we were moving down.
“It worked really well – but when I reviewed their marketing spend, 90% of it was in the awareness bucket. It wasn’t actually about driving down to purchase.”
He adds: “I remember chairing a meeting of highly-paid executives in New York and going round the room asking them to introduce themselves – ‘what are you responsible for and what are your objectives?’
“They would say: ‘I’m responsible for digital engagement’; ‘I’m responsible for creating fan engagement’. Not one person said their responsibility was to help sell more oil. That’s the business! That’s got to be the strategy. So it was interesting to look at that.”
The Insights Family
He would take this focus on outcomes into his Manchester-based business The Insights Family, ranked No.1 on our sister publication BusinessCloud’s recent MarTech 50.
The company provides real-time market intelligence on the attitudes, behaviour and consumption patterns of kids and parents for global brands including Amazon, the BBC, Danone, Disney, F1, Havas, Kraft, LEGO, Mattel, MediaCom, Nintendo, Pokémon and Warner Bros.
It now collects market intelligence on more than 56,000 brands and IPs across six continents, 22 countries and 28 verticals every year.
“Our purpose is to inspire organisations to put kids, teens, parents and families at the heart of everything they do,” the founder explains.
“The global kids advertising market is worth about $6 billion a year. So if advertisers think only 80% of their spend is effective, therefore we know that a billion dollars a year on kids advertising is essentially wasted.
“By understanding our clients’ pain points we can build our suite of products from that knowledge – and give them the right intel at the right times.”
It underwent a restructure last year to facilitate rapid growth, trimming its workforce from 65 to below 50. Crucially, it brought in three operational executives in the form of Voxpopme co-founder Tom Williams, BBC marketing guru Rachel Bardill and finance expert Clive Maudsley to support Richardson, who is now in a more strategic role.
Partnerships
Bardill is responsible for partnerships as well as marketing. “I’ve always believed in partnerships,” says Richardson, echoing my own view.
“But it’s important to consider: what are the needs of the partner? What are the needs of the individual? What are our objectives? Then looking to try and find a way where together, we can achieve a lot more.
“When I have a conversation with people, I’ll often divide my notepad into two columns – think about what their objectives are, what our objectives are, and also if there are mutual gains to be found.”
An early example of this was a deal struck with SuperAwesome, which remains as a shareholder today.
“I was sat in The Castle pub in the Northern Quarter in Manchester and very quickly sketched out what the business would look like. A week later we did the deal with SuperAwesome: our first clients were them, Disney, Finsbury Food and Warner,” he recalls.
“We agreed a deal where SuperAwesome would resell our services – so that essentially meant that we could plug into their resources as we built the business.”
Investment
The Insights Family has 5,000 portal users, around 130 clients and generated around £3.5m revenue last year. It is now appointing an advisor to lead an upcoming investment round which will see it significantly scale international operations.
“We recognise now that we need to have an on-the-ground presence in Asia and North America. And that will be built into the raise,” says Richardson. “We have a number of warm relationships with investors and are in a far more investable place now.
“Also, the investor market has changed – the focus now is on finding a pathway to profit then going for controlled growth, not burning through cash to grow as fast as possible. We’ve always been pretty frugal with money, so that suits us.”