This year went by with the snap of a finger.

At least, that’s how it feels.

After what felt like the end of the pandemic, and the return to some sort of normality, I think a lot of people (myself included) were expecting some sort of ‘roaring twenties’, whereby markets would open up and we could expect high growth across the board for ourselves and our clients.

The first quarter did start like that. We won 7 out of 8 pitches in the first few months. A highlight here was winning against a host of major independent agencies in the UK, which felt like a great achievement and confirmation that we were going in the right direction.

Towards the end of February, the first domino fell in the macro conditions which ultimately led to the economic challenges we see today. Russia invaded Ukraine – which impacted global markets, energy prices, and consumer confidence – and that paired with the political instability in the UK, previous economic policies, and global challenges meant inflation increased to its highest level in recent history.

However, even against a turbulent economic backdrop, we’re very happy with how we’ve grown through the year. Let’s see how we did vs. our targets (which we wrote in our last year in review article):

Lots of positives, and lots of learnings. Let’s dig into the details a bit more below.

After working remotely for the first 2 years of our existence there were a few things we wanted to do:

• Have a company trip to spend time together.
• Get an office so we could have a place where we could meet when needed.

Organising the company trip was more complicated than expected. At the end of 2021, we were looking around for options – we toyed at one stage with going skiing in Europe – but then the uncertainty around travel restrictions meant we iced those plans and decided to stay local.

We took to Airbnb and had a look for something suitable. Eventually, the team found a manor near Derby, which was perfect. Big enough to host everyone and mostly in the middle of the country; so folks from all over would have an equal distance to travel.

We spent the weekend playing games, off-road biking (where we got covered in mud, evidence below), eating food, and hanging out.

One of the best decisions we made for the trip was to invite folks who were about to join the agency along to meet everyone – what an onboarding!

After being nominated as finalists a few of the WeDiscover team members made their way to the Bloomsbury Big Top Arena in London to attend the UK Search Awards ceremony – a big one!

Incredibly, we went home with the award for the Best Small PPC Agency in the UK (under 25 employees)!

After only being 2 years old, and those years being pretty turbulent in the world, this award win felt incredibly good.

It’s a testament to the amazing work done by all team members at WeDiscover.

The moment it happened:

Going up to collect our award felt pretty good. We hope it will be the first of many!

Towards the end of last year we decided to set in motion the wheels for our Early Careers Scheme.

We have called this a Grad Scheme in the past, but we’re moving away from that terminology, because going forward it won’t be limited to just graduates, but also folks who didn’t go to university or who just want a career switch, in recognition of the fact that access to higher education isn’t the only indicator of exceptional potential.

If I look back at this year the scheme, and the success of it, is one of my proudest memories. Solely because I had very little to do with it. It was owned, managed and designed by select team members, who took the ball and ran with it.

The Interviews

The posting received 100s of applications within 48 hours and the team interviewed a great range of candidates before finalising offers with a small group of outstanding future team members.

The interview process was rewarding for us as a business as we explored the motivations of candidates who have not previously worked in the industry.

Our key focuses going in were fairness and feedback. We wanted to ensure that everyone who interviewed with us was able to leave the process with a positive experience regardless of whether they were successful, and we gave personalised feedback for candidates at every stage.

We also ensured we had CV-less interviews to ensure that our focus was on the individual’s drive, motivation and potential, and to reduce any unconscious bias.

You can read more about the process here.

The Scheme

In September this year, we then had our small group of Early Careers join us in the London office.
They have enjoyed a thorough training scheme to learn about paid search and client management. Since September we have delivered over 30 training sessions and countless pairing sessions and workshops channeling our approach to training and adult learning.

Our first set of Early Career joiners are already having a fantastic impact on the business through the work they’re contributing and the energy they have brought to the company! Their feedback on our processes and the scheme is also already being taken on board to help further improve the experience of future employees.
These new joiners have set the standard and will be on hand to support and guide our next early careers cohort in H1 2023!

Operationally we made pretty large strides forward this year. We had always been tracking time allocation across teams, clients and projects, but we weren’t doing anything interesting with that data.

Towards the beginning of the year we spun up a few projects and work streams to change that. What we aimed to do was ensure that every client was getting the level of support they needed (and signed up for), and equally, as a business, we wanted to ensure that we understood and allocated the right volume of resources to make sure their targets were met.

We took the time tracking and project data and started to build out our operations system. First up was a macro view of client performance, which looked at resources allocated vs. planned for. Here we can see things like:

• Time allocated and used per month
• Internal costings per month
• Profitability ratios
• Servicing agreements
• Team allocation (tech & media)
• Individual team member time allocation

This lets us know if there is anything that we need to change from a resource allocation perspective, and when we need to do it (sensitive data has been pixelated for confidentiality across the following screenshots).

Then we wanted to get a view at an individual team member level. As a service-based business, our team members are our greatest asset, and we want to ensure that their work levels are at the right balance (too much leads to stress, and too little leads to boredom).

What we broke down was billable time allocation vs. internal time allocation, client responsibilities, and revenue generated at a client level.

Then, we had a pretty obvious realisation that while we had this data at a Director level, it wasn’t accessible at an individual level. So we created personal reports where team members can see their own monthly resource plan.

This is only to be used as a guideline and to flag if there is a project or work-stream that is taking too much or too little time vs expectations.

This would never be used in annual reviews or as a guide for promotions, or pay rises. What it does do, is look at how much time has been spent on a client so far through the month alongside the goal, and work out – if the current pace of work continues exactly the same over the month – how much time would be allocated at month end and how that shapes up vs the target.

Therefore, in theory, each team member can understand as the month goes on where additional focus should go.

As a growing agency, we are in constant discussions internally around choosing to allocate technical resources to client-related work (where we directly earn revenue) or internal technology work (where we create IP, and therefore ultimately products/services that we can ship to clients much faster once created).

As an estimate, we currently allocate around 30%-40% of some technology team members’ time to internal technology projects.

There have been a few big milestones and projects that are worth calling out:

1. 1. We have onboarded Looker as our BI tool. Expensive, yes. But it gives us reporting and insight capabilities that are unrivalled across the agency landscape.
   2. Built internal tools for standardising server-to-server conversions, reporting on conversion maturity, building decomposition charts, automated audience upload processes, share of search reporting, and more.
   3. We’ve created a new function in our tech team: solution engineers. They will assist our clients with marketing technology operations (tagging, tracking, and platform management).

We are continuing to hire and train our Technology team as we go into 2023, and expect to see a lot more innovation here as we grow.

It’s turbulent out there at the moment. The cost of living crisis, the funding landscape, the energy crisis. All of these things make for a difficult outlook.

However, we are still expecting to grow. As difficult as things are at the moment, we actually think this is where we can add real value and shine as an agency.
Our performance capabilities and technology (understanding value, incrementality, LTV, etc) is what companies will be leaning towards over the next few years.

Here are some of our targets that what we’re looking forward to working towards:

• • Growing to around 30+ team members
  • Growing revenue by around 75% while maintaining current margins
  • Expanding our Paid Social technology and team
  • Launching our Employee Pillars scheme (which will include an employee led D&I team, amongst other groups focussing on sustainability and CSR initiatives)
  • Expanding our intelligence service (reporting, insights, etc).
    Continuing to build some of the most innovative novel solutions for the most exciting brands
  • Launching a second round of our Early Career scheme.

Since the start of the agency, one of the big reasons we have been able to work with so many wonderful clients is because of our approach to solving challenges. Using the skill stacks of performance marketers, engineers, and data scientists allows us to find answers in unique and novel ways.

As we grow, we want to ensure that we maintain and foster this approach to solving problems. This is, and will always continue to be, part of our agency mindset and ethos.