Interim Digital – Revolutionising Agency & Freelancer Relationships

Chris Barnard: Ginny, Hi, thank you for joining me today. We’re going to be talking about your business today, Interim Digital, which I believe is revolutionising the way that agencies and brands partner with freelancers. So would you like to just give our listeners a bit of background on your journey to this point and what led you to create Interim Digital?

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me, Chris. It sounds quite nice when you say it like that. I’ve only ever really read those words, so to actually hear someone else say them is, is quite nice. Um, makes us sound like we know what we’re doing. Um, so yeah, so Interim was born out of a recognition of, um, a very different landscape in the digital marketing world post-COVID. Um, so pre-COVID, uh, obviously there was the freelance makeup and pool of freelancers and there were digital market, digital agencies using and partnering with freelancers, but the revolution in the, in the remote working, um, um, that came as a by-product of COVID. Um, and unfortunately in some instances, things like redundancies, um, furloughs, etc. The landscape changed by way of a lot more senior-level freelancers being in the pool. So people who’ve worked at digital agencies or brands who have been maybe head of, head of PPC, head of SEO, the director of search or those kinds of titles who are now in the freelancer pool.

And on the flip side, a lot of the smarter agencies or, uh, more agile agencies took COVID as a bit of an opportunity to take a step back and say, okay, do we need to re-recruit all of these people post-COVID and re-add those line items of cost to our, to our monthly outgoings? Or do we take a little bit of a smarter approach, really double down and focus on the individuals who are in our four walls already and partner with experts in the delivery arms of what we do? Um, a lot more brands and agencies, we work predominantly, I’d say about 95 percent with agencies at the moment, but, but looking to expand more into brands, um, who took that view were then looking for the specific freelancers to help. Finding freelancers can be pretty tricky. Um, so what we’re trying to do and the headache we try and take away is by building this community of excellent ex-agency, pre-vetted, minimum five-year experience, uh, channel experts. When agencies do come to us in that moment of panic and, and requirement of extra resource, we’ve got the guys and girls at hand ready to go.

So, um, so yeah, so we’ve, we’ve been in the market for about three years now operating as the community model. Um, it was just me and a couple of other freelancers three years ago, and now we’ve got over a hundred of us in the community. So, so, so far, so good.

Chris Barnard: I love that you’re trying to solve this problem because this has been a problem that’s been known for a long time, uh, both client side and agency land, and a big bugbear for clients has been, “Oh, with my agency, they are changing staff,” and there’s good reasons for that. But from the brand level, it’s frustrating because you, you often get to a point where you feel you are partnering, feel you have a great understanding or a great relationship, and then you lose that person.

So I can see how it solves that. But you’re also solving that problem that is historically known for freelancers. I’m not sure if, uh, it’s a problem that’s deemed to have got worse or got better. Actually, Ginny, we’ll have to take your insight on that in that, uh, getting freelancers, um, historically unreliable, like web developers, I would say. So very much, you know, one of the reasons we went into web development was because we were sick of liaising with web developers 11 years ago, right?

Because people were having such bad experiences. They were like, “Can you do it?” We were like, “Well, we don’t do it, but we can do it.” So that’s exactly how our business started up really. So you’re solving that problem fundamentally, aren’t you? Which is a problem. I think everybody acknowledges. It’s not something you must have to educate clients on. They must be well aware that these are the views, right?

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, definitely. I think because I’ve been agency side before, as well as freelance, I can totally empathise with the pain in the neck that comes with trying to find freelancers. I mean, recruitment capacity has to be top three pain points of all agencies out there really, you know, with cash flow, sales and revenue, and then people. Um, being the real mission-critical things that keep agency owners up at night. So, um, yeah, I think we’re trying to, I think the usual port of call for agencies or people when they need that extra pair of hands is to go, “Oh God, we need an extra pair of hands. Let’s panic. Let’s put a shout-out on LinkedIn. Let’s get inundated by everybody under the sun.” Um, there might be one or two in there that are great. It’s a minefield to navigate. Get someone in who we don’t know or who’s been referred and we’ve not actually worked with, not sure if we’re going to gel, not sure if the chemistry is there, not sure if they really know their channel as well as they say they are.

And it’s all a bit of an unknown. So, um, I think because we understand everyone in the community being ex-agency understands the pressure and the level of pressure that agency owners are under and agency teams. So by extracting that pain point of a) finding the freelancers and b) doing that due diligence and the vetting, not just from a channel expertise perspective, but from a cultural perspective as well. And what I mean by that is that the ex-agency freelancers have this pre-programmed, um, understanding of agency language, you know, how to articulate their channel to lots of different stakeholders, um, how to fit into agency processes and pitch processes and everything else that goes with agency life. So that ideally, when agencies do have that need, they don’t just get someone who’s great at their role, but they get someone who has that agency understanding so they can sit alongside their team members in client situations and just crack on without having to have all of that rigmarole of, you know, onboarding and getting to know everything and everyone.

Chris Barnard: Something that we’ve spoken about on the podcast before, certainly the, I suppose, the pros and cons of a post-social digital environment and something like community management, which I think is, is, as I’ve reflected on your business, is a space you’ve moved into. Um, and one that is, was never spoken about 10 years ago, but actually there’s a lot of great jobs in community management and there’s a lot to do in community management.

Was there a particular moment that you thought, actually, this is a good route for me? Had you done a lot of community management before? Because it’s a big thing to take on, isn’t it? Sort of, um, helping freelancers who are always looking for, how can I promote myself and get the next best contract to be able to take that on is a big responsibility. Was there anything sort of from your background that led you to community management in particular here?

Ginny Nicholls: Uh, no, nothing. I did very little of that in the past. But what I did love, um, and what I feel I can try and help, and a lot of the other freelancers in the community helping each other can help with it, is having that sales background in agency life. So a real big, um, stickler for people who go agent, sorry, go from agency to freelance, who have been in say, more of a delivery role. So say a head of SEO or a content writer or, you know, whatever their discipline might be. They may have been exposed to pitch environments and they may not actually in some instances, but there’s a very big and stark difference between pitching yourself, um, creating your own cred stacks, promoting yourself, um, and then actually closing the deal, winning the deal, doing the work and invoicing to, um, sitting within the four walls of a cozy agency way whereby you have a sales agent, a sales team bringing you the business, you have an accounts team doing your invoicing, you have a legal team helping you with contracts.

So where we, we don’t offer kind of not legal, you know, we don’t offer legal advice or, you know, accountancy advice as such, but where we can help is that I’ve obviously been a freelancer myself. I’ve been a salesperson myself. That generates a certain amount of thick skin, um, and a certain amount of knowledge of how to, you know, say certain words and nuance what you do to help close deals. Um, but then give you the confidence that you can execute them as well. So part of that community management and, and liaising with our communities is giving people their confidence to be able to sell themselves and not cringe and not feel like, “Oh, I, I don’t, I shouldn’t justify being in this position” or whatever it might be. Just helping them tweak their language and, uh, you know, their decks to sell themselves so that when they do go into freelance, they know that they can have those conversations from a commercial perspective, as well as a channel expert perspective. And I think that’s what gives us the, the edge with our community management, as opposed to just purely being, you know, that person to kind of chat to on a day-to-day scenario.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, and you mentioned your rigorous vetting process there. And I think that’s a key part of community management, isn’t it? Is that actually, if you are doing community management well, you have to accept and put in rules that mean that some people can come, some people can’t. I know you have an invite-only application process as well. Would you like to just tell our listeners about what you consider essential for people to do? Brands, agencies and freelancers who approach you. What is it you are looking for in an Interim Digital partner?

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, it’s a really good question and one we get asked a lot because you can’t, you can’t pay to be part of the community because it is about kind of that, that cultural fit, which I’ll go into in a sec. But in terms of bare minimum, it’s a minimum of five years’ experience and ex-agency. Those are the two main credentials that we look at. We only have, I think it’s one community member who, isn’t ex-agency, but they are ex-very large brand. So they’ve worked as a head of e-commerce, for a large brand, acted as that kind of go-between, between the agency and the brand. So they’re a very minor exception to the rule, but generally it’s minimum five years, all ex-agency.

So those are the on-paper creds that we look for. But the real thing for us and the, the hardest thing to find when you’re agency side is people who are channel experts but also really commercially aware. So take, for instance, an SEOer who’s devising a strategy for a client. There are certain ways and best practices that you can go about SEO and yes, it’s subjective, but fundamentally a lot of the principles are the same for every SEOer there.

The people that we’re looking for are the ones who can devise those strategies, but then align them to specific commercial goals for our clients so that our agency clients and then their clients see what they can expect to get back from those particular strategies. Once those strategies have been executed, seeing them right through, understanding what’s working, what’s not working, and having those conversations to say, “This is what we’ve tried, this is why we’ve tried it, it’s worked here really well, it hasn’t worked here as well.” Being able to switch, flex, change, and have those, you know, anecdotal and, and, uh, challenging conversations. But with that level of channel expertise as well. So when you marry those two, um, character attributes together, you, you have a very powerful individual and a very attractive freelancer, um, for a very attractive full-time position as well, to be fair. That’s why all agencies are trying to find people like this and why we’re trying to find them for them. But I think when you combine those two together, you have, you have a very, very strong offering that will help you stand out from the rest of the freelancer crowd.

Chris Barnard: And where do you find this? This is the key question. Where do you find these attractive freelancers? As I’m sure that’s going to be the question in the minds, as I suppose in a traditional setting with a recruitment agency, let’s say, uh, they will be subscribed to the jobs databases. Uh, they will then send those on. It’s always seemed like an incredibly inefficient method to me, Ginny. So I’m delighted you’re disrupting it of “here are 20 CVs.” You know, this is someone who we already know doesn’t have time. The hiring manager, they’re probably also managing people as well as doing this as a part of their job that they probably feel they don’t get paid for. Right. Uh, getting into the agency politics. No doubt. We’ll get into that. Right. But if you are coming from that perspective. That’s a whole other episode, right? But, uh, where would you, where do you fish for these very attractive freelancers? Because it’s obviously something, it’s something that will get quite competitive, right? I think people try to find the best of the best, the cream of the crop.

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, definitely. I think we were very lucky in the early days. There was just a small group of us who were, who were working together on, um, interim briefs. Um, and what you find within our digital world is even though it’s, it’s, it appears quite big, you know, on, on paper, actually, in reality, there’s a lot of people who know a lot of people who are at similar points in their career. So I was in agencies for nine, 10 years before I went freelance. So a lot of my friends and peersets who are still agency side are now at the level of head of, you know, director of etc. And equally, the people who I grew up with in agency world who have gone freelance are now of the calibre of the types of people that we’d want in the, in the community. So it grew relatively organically to start with.

And what we really encourage freelancers to do is, is then, and members of our community to do, sorry, is to then refer in their friends and, you know, and peers who they rate too. Um, so the referral systems worked really well and we incentivise our community members to, to pass referrals our way. So that’s one route, which has worked really well. Um, another route is to just go out there and literally mine LinkedIn and do the grunt work that not a lot of people are willing to do. Um, and we do that grunt work before we have live briefs to work on.

I guess the biggest difference you’re referring to, Chris, is whereby people get, um, get briefs in or recruit kind of the traditional recruitment route is get the job spec in and then go and find the people. So what we’re trying to do is find the people so that when we get the specs and the briefs and the projects in, we’ve got them in the back pocket ready to go. Um, and we literally do approach them and, and some of them, I think, just blank us because they think we’re some form of scam, which is fine. That’s probably on me actually to work on our outreach strategy. Um, the others that we do engage, engage with, we, we do just have vetting calls with, bring them into the community and they might not work on a brief for, you know, three, six, nine months, but we’ve got that contact there. So when the right brief does come, we know we’ve got that pre-existing relationship.

And I think by taking that proactive, find the people and then the briefs, um, kind of approach with the same approach for marketers, as opposed to recruiters looking for candidates route. Those two combined have made a really powerful pool of individuals who we know can carry out the briefs that our clients are looking for. And I think, not to give away our secret sauce, but I think that’s probably our secret sauce.

Chris Barnard: I’m pleased you mentioned referrals actually, because I’m surprised in other podcasts, particularly on the marketing specific ones, where we’re taking a look at SEO, um, and other aspects of marketing. We did one with Maria for email the other day. Something we’ve not actually touched on is referrals, but a sign of a great community and a strong community is that you have got referrals going.

And I would argue, uh, in our business world now, where branding has become so important. Again, community is so important. Social reputation is so important for the search engines. Then actually referrals always does need a massive focus. And if you nail referrals, then actually you can save so much money on your marketing, uh, because you, you have that flywheel where you can get enough momentum into your, uh, organic referral word of mouth that actually you don’t need to spend a lot of money on other marketing channels. Is that something you found, Ginny, as you’ve been building this business? You’ve not actually had to put much money in for traditional marketing or anything like that?

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, I think, um, certainly with the freelance building the community, without doubt, referrals has been massive, um, and building business and revenue a hundred percent, uh, great as well. And the beauty of working with agencies is that once we kind of gain their confidence and gain their trust and prove to them that by partnering with us, they can, they can scale quickly and with expertise, they gain a level of trust that enables us to, to work across other accounts within that agency. So we might have one client by having an agency, um, an agency client, but within that client, we might have, you know, four, five, six accounts that we can work across. So, by spreading and pushing several freelancers into one agency, you’ve got this lovely little ecosystem of brilliant partners who, within the agency itself, they’re referring us to other accounts. So, you know, the AD on one account might go to another AD on another account who’s not heard of us because they didn’t know we were even working with them to say, “Oh, did you know Interim are actually supporting on, you know, social on here?” So they might have someone in content. And we find naturally we start to kind of eek out a little bit of a web within our clients, um, and they start to internally refer us as well as externally, which is, which is really nice and very reassuring that internally they’re willing to refer us to each other, which, yeah, it’s great.

Chris Barnard: One of the benefits that I imagine comes from these types of relationships would be around the commercial pricing. And of course, the old traditional recruiter models, for those who don’t know, often you would get money for placing a candidate. You would often get money in the form of they have been there for a certain amount of time.

Again, another sort of side of the industry that was probably ripe for disruption. So quite keen to hear from you just in, in general terms, um, how, how the agreement looks like commercially between yourself and sort of the agencies and the other side with freelancers. Cause obviously a problem you are solving is that agencies don’t need to find these clients, spend all that time, spend money trying to find these people, directly liaise with them because you’ve already built that relationship, Ginny. I just wondered if you could talk our listeners through that because I think that’ll make it more real for them in terms of where you sit in the process and how you deal commercially either side.

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, no, it’s a good question and one we get, we get a lot. So we’ve approached this whole business, or I’ve approached Interim, this whole business from agency side. So I’ve never been a recruiter. Um, I don’t understand the process of recruitment. It’s just not a field that I’ve, I’ve ever operated in. Um, so having come in it from agency side, we’ve tried to create our commercials to knit into agencies. Um, so that again, working with us, it keeps it super easy to understand and super transparent. So I didn’t, I don’t charge finding fees because I’d never heard of that because I’m not a recruiter, I’m a marketer. Um, I don’t charge, you know, fees for people being in there for longer or shorter because that’s not what we, what we do in agency life. We charge day rates in agency life. Um, and we charge day rates scalable depending on kind of where people sit in the hierarchy of their position within their channel within agency.

So, I’ve tried to map everything to be agency relatable. So, we have a set day rate, um, that we, we charge per freelancer. There’s no introduction fees and there’s no exit fees, um, things like that. It’s literally, we’ve tried to market it to a point whereby our freelancers still get their day rate. We get a bit in the middle and then the agencies still have room to make a margin on our day rates. We’ve approached it from a very commercially driven perspective to make sure that agencies have the bandwidth in our day rates to work with us because what you find with a lot of, um, not a lot, some freelancers is they’ll, they’ll price themselves out of being able to work with agencies because agencies have their own day rates as well.

And they have to make their margins as well as service their own clients. So by dropping down slightly so that we’ve got that bandwidth to be able to fit into agency commercial models and also pay our freelancers really well is how we’ve tried to market ourselves. And so far, having that marketer’s approach seems to be, seems to be resonating quite well.

Chris Barnard: It’s such a great lesson for our younger, more aspiring entrepreneurs who probably no doubt from this conversation will say, actually, I’d like to be an Interim Digital freelancer, that actually you don’t have to sit with the status quo on these models. And a lot of these systems, these historic systems have been there and actually.

A great thing to do with a young inquisitive mind or an old inquisitive mind is not to be scared to ask why things happen, right? Not to be scared to say, you know, this finder’s fee doesn’t really make sense to me. And actually from an agency perspective, it’s prohibitive, or you are limiting the amount of business you can do by operating in this way.

Of course, recruiting recruitment as a, an industry, I mean, it must be absolutely historic. I’d hate to put a date on it. I was trying to talk about Dickensian times in my last podcast, but I don’t think I dare risk sort of giving an era for it, right. But people have always needed people to recruit. Um, so actually just because someone has not done it in that way. Um, you don’t always have to be reinventing the wheel. You can just be changing a model quite slightly that makes it far better for everyone. And that can be a great business in itself. Ginny, was that, how did you come at it with that? Absolutely a blank slate. Obviously the agency side. So you are naturally going to hit on things that that help the agency side more. Did you also sort of take freelancer feedback and has your model evolved over time? Have you found that you’ve adapted your pricing? There’s been better ways to do it or your terms because there’s been better ways you’ve found doing it in the it’s the classic about the plan, you know, surviving the first punch in the face of scenario. As soon as you’re actually on the ground, it feels very different and you, you have to be adaptable and change. Don’t you? So did, did you find you were making any sort of quick changes early on that have helped the business grow?

Ginny Nicholls: I think, um, I think because we had a very intense start to the, to the first few months that we went kind of live in this model, it was like… You talked about punching in the face. It was like it felt a bit like a few rounds with Mike Tyson by the end of the first few months, which I’m sure a lot of business owners could relate to, um, and that gave, that forced me and forced us as a community into refining processes, refining commercial models, working out percentages. Um, margin percentages that fit with the types of clients that we work with so that they are getting value and that we’re getting value and that the freelancers are getting value. Um, so whilst it was a baptism by fire, it was, it was perfect for what we needed. So actually, since then, we haven’t really changed a lot in terms of how we operate commercially. Um, because I think there’s also a temptation to overcomplicate stuff. Um, and I think that’s maybe why we’ve, we’ve accidentally, we never set out with the intention of, um, kind of this recruitment path, and I love recruiters, like I’ve got, I’ve, I’ve had, my last role was through an incredible recruiter, a really good friend of mine, and he’s so good at his job, um, and recruiters are brilliant, and what we, what we, the picture we try and paint is that we’re not here to kind of compete with recruiters, because what we do is, allow our agency clients to just breathe for a minute whilst they’re recruiting. So we come in and relieve pressure. Let them know that stuff is happening in the background. Their clients are being serviced. Their channels are being supported. Their internal teams are being mentored so that they can focus on long-term recruitment. Because that’s not what we’re there for. We’re there to plug a gap and leave the agency in a better position than it was before we got in there. Whilst the recruiters and the recruitment teams are working in the background to fill those roles permanently. So yeah, I think coming at it from a, a non, like a marketeer’s background, but with a knowledge that we’re never, we’re not a forever, like, we’re not a forever solution is what’s helped simplify our processes and keep them relatively straightforward.

Chris Barnard: That’s made me think about… It’s a great way to describe it, because actually you are, um, you are part of the same sort of process, but you are actually not competing very well in the same space. And actually I have the same view with recruiters. I’ve met a lot of great recruiters. Actually, I think recruiters unfairly get punched down on in a lot of aspects. Some of the best salespeople I know, some of the most resilient people I know, some of the bravest people I know, and often, um, and we’re starting to see that now, right? With digital, I suppose it was quite easy to become a freelancer because you were probably remote. You probably have skills that, um, the wider business, um, as long as you could collaborate and communicate with, would appreciate, but you didn’t necessarily need to be sat in the office. You know, if you’re a web developer or whatever, you don’t necessarily need to be sat in the office. Do you, um, did you, from an interim perspective, did the name come out of, was it a dream that you had, or had you been talking about it? I wonder if there was a name like interim we can have as the brand. And then you’ve searched and found, Oh, the dot digital is available. Should I go for that? Cause it does seem like a perfect name for what you are offering. Um, which I suppose loads of people go. Their whole lives trying to create a business but can never get the co.uk or something that they think fits right for their brand Ginny, how did you hit on Interim?

Ginny Nicholls: Um, so it was actually what I chose years ago when I went freelance as an individual. Um, so it was like the limited company name that, um, we, we just came up with years ago. Um, but when, when we first launched, someone had actually taken the Interim Digital.co.uk. Um, so we had this horrendous interim, interimdigitalltd.co.uk, really clunky, really rubbish. Um, so when it came to the point of, um, Interim now in its current guise, it was like, right, that’s a really great opportunity to define what it is that we’re niching down in. So we will stay within digital marketing. So dot digital seemed, seemed right. Um, and again, to have that interimdigital.co.uk still unavailable, take out the LTD, it’s a bit old school and a bit clunky. So it just seemed to roll nicely off the domain name tongue, so to speak, and it does what it says on the tin. You know, I think, well, we’ve chatted before about, um, you know, how important brand is, um, and brand messaging, etc. And there’s some incredibly creative names in my world or our world in digital marketing, you know, the purple unicorns and the pink starfish and whatever else is out there. But our name is boring, but it does exactly what it says on the tin. Um, so it’s our job basically to make sure that the branding’s pretty fun, um, represents who we are in terms of really fun and down-to-earth people, but very good at what we do, um, combined with that interim notion.

Chris Barnard: So if I’m a freelancer then, Ginny, listening to this podcast, very much understanding the Interim message, I like the brand, it’s very clear what you do to me. How would you say, can we get some sort of tips on, uh, how I should present myself to Interim Digital, uh, as you mentioned the invite-only, I think it’s quite interesting beyond it’d be good to understand how that happens because I think people will aspire to want to do that from this podcast, but equally what sort of skills, what kind of soft skills are you looking for?

Clearly technical expertise is always, um, being looked for. Uh, you’re probably trying to recruit the new wizard of Moz or someone similar for the Gen Z, uh, to aspire to. Right. Whereas, um, if I am now looking, I want to be one of these, um, fabulous established freelancers who Ginny is placing in, in fantastic brands and agencies. What sort of soft skills would you tell me to brush up on so that I’m, uh, the best version of myself for my Interim Digital interview?

Ginny Nicholls: That’s nice, I like that. Um, it’s really, we try and keep it simple and as basic as possible really. And that is literally to just make sure you are as easy to work with as is physically possible. You know, client service runs through our veins at Interim. It runs through my veins. It is number, it is like A-star, number one priority before anything else. So, as long as you’re astute with communication, do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it. Um, be willing to, um, admit when you don’t know. You know, it can be a really scary situation if someone raises a question within your channel and you don’t know the answer because I have 100 percent done this several times when I started out in my career and gone, “Oh yeah, definitely. Of course we can do that.” And you, you get nervous and you, by and large, you’re wrong. So to have the confidence to say, “Do you know, actually I’m not too sure on that, but I know someone who will know that answer,” and take it away and get the answers you need.

We had an ex-CEO that I used to work for, um, who was absolutely incredible and his mantra for his agency was, um, “When I’m, when I’m interviewing someone, if I feel like I’d quite like them to have come around to my house for Sunday lunch, then I’m kind of happy that they’ll be right for the agency.” That’s kind of stuck with me forever because it’s like, if you’d be happy to go for a drink with someone or to sit in a, you know, sit in a restaurant or go for a walk and have a coffee and chat about stuff on a one-to-one level, they don’t have to be yes men, just conversational, know their stuff really well. Then they’re the kind of folk that resonate really well with agencies and resonate really well with brands. And that is exactly what we’re looking for, um, over kind of being super hot on the latest SEO release. Obviously really great to have that too, but I’ll take the personable Sunday lunch folk over that.

Chris Barnard: It’s so important is that having an enjoyable vibe, it’s actually not spoken about as much. I think people just assume that if you get to a certain seniority or you’re working in certain businesses and I think probably sector to sector, there is, you know, a slight difference of. You know, you have to be maybe more of an effervescent personality, um, more gregarious personality, depending on where you are in, in the food chain. Also, sort of what sector you are in people have different expectations around that. But that really resonates with me. It was always something that I cared about with teams that I worked in. Um, that everyone was, uh, trying to be adaptable in their communications, trying to communicate to people, um, in the right way.

Cause for many years, I was a bridge between marketing and digital technology teams. And so often, they would come to loggerheads, or they would come to confusions or, areas they couldn’t progress because they weren’t speaking the same language actually, and sometimes you do need someone, uh, no doubt why you have the senior freelancers who can unblock those, uh, types of issues that actually you can get quite bogged down into. Um, so it makes a lot of sense to me. I think it’s going to be if I was taking it from the other angle now and just sort of saying, obviously, it’s become very, um, I don’t want to say trendy. Trendy is not the right word, but there is a lot of freelancers these days, right? It’s become a very popular, um, self-employment is very popular. There’s a lot of tools and things so that you can become a freelancer if you wish to these days. Is there any moments where you think, um, and what are freelancers or people thinking about becoming freelance should consider before they take that jump? Ginny, is there anything you’ve seen from your experience where you’ve thought actually this person may have benefited more from being in an agency environment a bit longer, being with that brand a bit longer than trying to go freelance?

Now, is there any sort of advice and tips you’d be able to give our aspiring freelancers?

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, I would, I would say, and I bang this drum a lot, and it’s, you know, it’s personal opinion, but I don’t think you should go, consider going freelance without going agency side first. Our industry in digital marketing, um, or brand side, but, you know, a big brand or somewhere where you are liaising with agencies being in that e-commerce ecosystem or that digital marketing ecosystem, digital ecosystem as a whole.

And the reason being is that agency life is intense and it’s brilliant, and you are exposed to so many different channels, so many different people, so many different verticals, markets, niches. It really enables you to not only pick the discipline that you really enjoy, but the vertical that you really enjoy. So we might have, or we do, we have some freelancers in the community who love PR, but love to specialise in B2B PR because they’ve had the opportunity to test and learn themselves in agency life. We have people who love SEO, but particularly love technical SEO. We have people who love technical SEO, but also love content strategy for retail.

You know, all of these nuances within each of the channels that exist. And the only reason they know that they love those bits and pieces is because they’ve been exposed to them because of agency life. So from a channel perspective, you get so much opportunity to try everything. That’s kind of the one main reason.

The second reason is within the agency life as well. You get exposed to all of the other teams there. So what you learn from those other teams, like down to the basics of when to invoice, you know, and would you raise it? How do you raise an invoice? How do you bill? Like, how do you bill your projects? How do you check what should payment terms be? Through to the HR team, through to the sales team. So how do salespeople even outreach? You know, what do they do to qualify leads? Like, how do they approach a pitch deck? How do they interpret a tender? All of these things you’re absorbing almost subconsciously just by being in an agency environment are so valuable that when you go freelance, you can start to pull on them.

You know, even when we went, um, when we kind of developed Interim, everything that we have from paperwork to processes to people, there’s elements of all agencies that I’ve worked at in that without doubt from the good and the bad, you know, I’ve seen agencies organise stuff really badly. So when I’ve been doing our processes thinking, right, I don’t want to do what they did, but they were really good at that bit and combine to create this kind of hodgepodge of the best bits of all of the agencies that I’ve worked at to create something a bit more efficient. So, um, so yeah, I would say that there’s so much value that you can get without even realising it from agency life, which is why it’s really important.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, I very much echo those sentiments and you, you kind of become quite organically the product of all your good and all your bad experiences. And actually, when you do take the plunge, and I would say this from my own experience, setting up my own business, there have been times over the sort of 11 years that it’s been that I have thought, “Oh, actually, if I just got a bit more experience here or there,” a very reflective thing, because often when you make these decisions, you’re doing it for a good reason.

Um, and if you’re quite self-aware or self-reflective, you’ll probably be aware, “Right, I could probably have done with another couple of hours, another couple of years of getting more people on board who knew how good, how good you are at certain things,” right? Because that does just help you on your way. Um, so, so you do find that and a lot of business owners, I think, reflect on that of, um, I could have been, you know, if I had been more active or got into more environments, um, I think I could have done different things from there. And I think it’s always a learning experience along the way. Have you got any examples of, um, people you’ve placed?

Um, obviously you’ve been going for three years now, so reasonably early in your journey, but one that you’ve obviously seen successes on and absolutely want to continue with your business. Has there been freelancers that you’ve placed with certain agencies or brands where they’ve gotten really well, or they’ve created something special and you’ve had a, uh, thank you card?

Hopefully they still send thank you cards for people who help in these scenarios. Right. Any, anything like that, where you’ve really helped someone in a situation that resonated with you, Ginny, in particular?

Ginny Nicholls: What really reassures me that we’re onto something special is, um, when agencies partner with freelancers in ways that they’d never thought of before, because we’ve helped generate that type of relationship. And we, like we’ve chatted about before, the purpose and the mission of Interim is for when a freelancer leaves, we leave that agency or brand in a better position than it was when we landed. And not saying that they’re all in like a critical position, but you know what I mean? We like to add, add value as, as well as deliver on a channel.

There’s been instances whereby, um, a couple of instances in particular whereby an agency’s head of department has moved on. So whether that be head of PR or head of SEO, they’re left with, um, a bit of a gap in terms of a senior-level person, but then also a layer of executives, so, who require and rely on that mentorship to get them up the, the kind of the corporate ladder and up the channel ladder.

Now we’ve used some of our, or we’ll partner with some of our cracking freelancers to go into those agencies kind of head of roles and split their time between hands-on delivery, getting work out of the door and making sure clients are serviced in the correct way, but also developing that agency’s team of execs so that when the new head of does join full-time, those execs are a layer up or a rung up the, the knowledge ladder, um, by the time that person gets in.

Then as like a, I guess, a secret, secret option number three as well that they bring is that they can actually sit alongside the senior leadership team of those agencies and help them refine what it is that they want from that next full-time hire. Having done it themselves when they were agency side, they can now help do things like review job specs, um, look at salary expectations.

Is it in line? Do they? You know, is that what people on the other side looking for jobs would expect? Um, sit alongside the senior leadership teams in interviews because, you know, a head of, um, client services interviewing for a head of SEO is like me trying to hire a lawyer or an accountant. Like I wouldn’t know a good accountant from a dreadful one because I don’t, that’s not my area of expertise.

So why do we expect a head of client services to know if a future head of SEO is any good? So it’s when someone develops and helps bring on a whole department within an agency from a freelancer consultative perspective, um, that, that makes me think that’s, that’s brill. That’s exactly what we’re here for and it’s, and it’s why we’re a little bit special and why our community are as, as kind of as valuable as they are.

Chris Barnard: And if I’m gazing into the Palantir, the crystal ball for Interim Digital for the future, I think it’s impossible to predict in digital what’s going to happen tomorrow, usually, but obviously you’re making great progress and have great momentum. What does the future look like from here for you for Interim Digital?

Is it something that you think about a lot? Are you, are you still in a stage where you’re letting it grow quite organically and in whatever direction it chooses to? Or are you quite, do you have a plan put together for say the next three to five years and what might that entail?

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah. So vision wise, that, you know, the, the biggest mission is to be the preferred partner for every agency in the UK for freelance support. That’s like the, the big, you know, big hitter end goal dream. Um, you know, we work with a handful of brilliant clients, but there are 24,000 digital agencies in the UK. And I’m very aware of the fact that, um, as we were chatting about at the top of the call, you know, it’s quite trendy to be freelance at the moment. It’s quite new for agencies to want to work with freelancers. So there will be ebbs and flows in the freelance market.

And what I don’t want to do is get us to the point where we’re reliant, completely reliant on a really fine-tuned customer base. So the big focus for us over the next few years is to make sure we’re in front of the, the, you know, the cream of the crop of those 24,000 digital agencies in the UK. So that people know that we exist, because the critical thing with us is people don’t need us until they really need us.

And you know, they’ve gone down the avenue of trying to recruit and it maybe hasn’t happened as quickly as they, they wanted it to, or, um, they’ve lost someone unexpectedly because of sick leave or, uh, you know, all of these different variables that could happen unexpectedly, you know. And if they don’t know we exist, we can’t support them.

So really, it’s a big brand awareness piece for the, for the next kind of foreseeable future in a nice organic way. And, you know, continue with the referrals and building our relationships with our existing customer base. Because I’m also very aware that what we offer is refined in terms of the people. So what I don’t want to do is grow at a rapid rate and us lose that level of magic that the freelancers bring. So it needs to be quite a, an organic growth, but one in a, in a definite upward trend would be ideal.

Chris Barnard: An upward trend. That’s what we’re all aiming for and absolutely the best of luck with it. Uh, I think you bring us nicely to a great place for us to leave it, but I can’t quite let you go yet until you answer our last question that we ask everybody on the Bear Business podcast. Um, your choice can be a video game, dice game, garden game, uh, game in the dark, a game in the middle of the day. It depends what you like. What would you say your favourite game is, Ginny?

Ginny Nicholls: It’s gotta be backgammon. Easy. Backgammon through and through. I come from a, slightly unhealthily competitive family, should I say? Um, three brothers and a mum who’s unbelievably good at backgammon. A dad who’s really good at backgammon and gets really sour when he loses. Um, and unfortunately I’ve, uh, taught my husband to play as well and he’s also really good. So, um, yeah, it’s, it’s a competitive, a competitive time in the Nicholls-Deacon-Elliot household, uh, when, when the backgammon board comes out.

Chris Barnard: Known as a casual board game, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a casual game at your house. Do you have tournaments? How structured are you in your backgammon games? Are there people, uh, sneaking out after dinner with a bottle of wine to have a quick game to brush up so that they can beat the others at another point?

Do you have a, it makes sense you should have a family trophy for you for backgammon. That sort of competitiveness. Any tournaments, annual tournaments or just, uh, on a Sunday afternoon, uh, after a port or a, uh, yeah, don’t say cigars anymore, do we? Probably after just a diet lemonade these days.

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, it tends to be a Sunday afternoon, kind of, uh, wintry afternoon type affair, or on holiday. Uh, and it depends which brothers are around at the time, but one of my brothers is particularly good at cheating, so I try to avoid playing him. Um, but, but with all of the others, it’s, um, yeah, as and when we can, but it’s, it’s good fun, but it’s, it’s competitive, and it’s quite strategic, but also with a sprinkling of luck, which is why I think I really enjoy it.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, yeah.

Ginny Nicholls: Yeah.

Chris Barnard: And why is it always the older brother? On that note, Ginny, thank you very much for your time today. Thank you for spending your time with us and your insights. I think invaluable. We also have a lot of freelancers, quite a few agencies, and certainly some brands who list to us. So, no doubt they’ll be interested. and get in touch. I will leave in the show notes, uh, links to your social media profiles. People can follow you, come and ask you questions, come and challenge you to a game of backgammon. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Ginny Nicholls: No worries. Thank you for having me, Chris. It’s been great fun.