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Protecting and celebrating play and creativity when scaling an agency, with James Kindred
54 Plays1 year ago
How do we ensure we can retain excellent client care and protect our creative drive while trying to develop an agency?
James Kindred is a startup veteran, having developed and launched many brands, including the fantastic Big Drop Brewery. During this quite frank conversation, Yeseo founder Andrew and James discuss the challenges of growth in the face of a ‘hard market’.
James and Andrew also dig deep into how we can retain the joy of ‘play’ and celebrate creative practice when scaling an agency. If you’re finding that you’re having to fight for new clients harder than ever, then this is the episode for you!
Visit James’s website - https://fork.uk.net/
Find James on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sketchybear/
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO podcast. We do have a guest today. He pressed record and he's gone to chuck something out the window.
00:00:10
Speaker
Sorry. What was it? Was it a wee beastie or something? No, I just need to refill my vape. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So this is, this is James Kindred. Hello, James. How are you doing? Hello. How are you? I'm all right now. The full purpose of series two of the Untitled SEO podcast is that it's meant to be LAN, live action networking. Now I know the acronym LAN has already been taken, what, 25 years ago to 30 years ago, but yeah.
00:00:34
Speaker
And the whole point of this is that people in tech, we form these little bubbles where we all get to know each other. And I think there's something really positive can happen when people in tech, especially SEO and the surrounding technologies, make an effort to speak to new people.
00:00:51
Speaker
Now, in this episode, I'm entirely failing to do that because I've not even worked with James for years and years and years and years. But James, you're always a pleasure to speak to.
Networking in Tech and SEO: Referrals vs. Self-Promotion
00:01:02
Speaker
And each time I've spoken to you before on this podcast and previous ones, we're very much focused on a topic rather than focusing about on you. And I think I know you well enough. You're probably not massively interested in talking about you, but I think your journey is something that people will find interesting. Yeah, I
00:01:20
Speaker
I don't have, I even own a trumpet to blow. So it is, and kind of long may it continue, which is kind of weird because I've always been, to a certain extent, self-employed with what I've done. So I should be a kind of a bit of a master at self-promotion and networking, but I prefer to kind of just, I don't know, I was going to say lurk in the shadows, but that just sounds a little bit kind of clandestine and devious, but I prefer to kind of
00:01:49
Speaker
be referral driven and meet new people through people liking what I do and telling other people about it. So I kind of try and get my customers to network for me rather than do anything myself, which sounds terrifically lazy, but it also works.
Challenges in Tech and SEO Marketing
00:02:06
Speaker
So if it ain't broke. It works well. I'm going through a thing with, I have a coach and I'm going through a thing at the moment. Me and several other people in tech are doing
00:02:17
Speaker
Considered outreach for the first time, going out and finding prospects to speak to.
00:02:22
Speaker
It's quite a hard market at the moment in tech, especially in SEO, whenever people kind of want to stop spending money. For some reason, marketing is often the first to go, although anyone in marketing would say that's the worst possible time to quit your marketing. Absolutely. So anyone in marketing, or arguably anyone with common sense, you want to kind of put your foot down a little bit when things are quiet and actually start proactively
00:02:51
Speaker
either through outreach or just visibility or whatever you're doing is just kind of, you know, make a noise, do something, get out there, don't kibosh your marketing strategy, because you're just accelerating your demise into silence.
00:03:07
Speaker
Also, if your competitors are saying less, they're leaving a void, leaving a vacuum to which you can step into it. You can rush into but the interesting thing about having to do this and I was speaking to somebody else who I won't mention who's a mutual friend. Actually, she wouldn't mind speaking to Sophie. Sophie said, well, she's not Sophie Soreau anymore. She's got a third name. Company is we are grumpy. It's not grumpy.
00:03:32
Speaker
Yeah. I shouldn't have mentioned it, should I? That's my mind. I shouldn't have mentioned it that I wouldn't have had to stumble across that. But speaking to her, and the interesting thing is having to, for the first time in 20, 25 years of working for myself and running an agency, having to really think hard about how my agency might be perceived. When you get all your work through referral business, it's not really a problem because the people you've done good work for are doing that bit for you.
Transition from Solopreneur to Company Owner
00:03:59
Speaker
Which, as you say, it might be lazy. I'd call it efficient more than lazy. Yeah. I think it's the thing is, is that you do, I don't know if it allows you into a false sense of security, but you are only as good as your last job. You can't, you're kind of leaving yourself open a little bit because you don't have any, you know, I, I work in branding and brand strategy and kind of brand development. I don't really have any of that for myself because I'm too busy doing it for other people.
00:04:28
Speaker
So, you know, I have a logo and I have a way of communicating. It's how I communicate. I don't kind of put a layer on top of it because how I talk and how I present myself is that I can't, you know, I'm autistic. I can't do performances. So it's kind of, you know, I can hide behind another person's logo and talk fantastically about it. If it's talking about me.
00:04:51
Speaker
I'm very straightforward with it, but because of how I go out and kind of get further work or go out and get, you know, make clients happy or try to make clients happy, it's, you're only as good as how someone tells you, tells their friend or their colleague or their business partner or whoever. Oh, go and speak to James at Fork because he did a really good job for me.
Scaling a Business: Maintaining Identity
00:05:15
Speaker
That strategy can dry up pretty quickly if you're not very good at what you do.
00:05:20
Speaker
Also, if I was being unkind, I'd say it does sort the wheat from the chaff somewhat. Because SEO is a limited company and employees came in in the last couple of years. So I got 20 years of, yeah, it was limited, but it was just me. And it had my name on it until only about two years ago.
00:05:41
Speaker
I was expecting there to be a seismic shift when I changed to being a company. In a way, it's slightly easier because I've developed a personality for the company, which does align with mine because it'd be pointless to do it any other way. It would be a lot of work to try and pretend to be something that we weren't.
00:06:02
Speaker
The other challenge I found that comes with that, if you go from being very small or an individual and you scale it and it becomes something else, or it becomes bigger than it was, and we had a similar sort of thing when we ran Condiment and we were bringing account managers and junior designers. So just quickly,
Company Culture vs. Creativity
00:06:19
Speaker
Condiment was an agency that James ran.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yes, and it was kind of guerrilla marketing and boutique design and there was two of us and anyone could pick up the phone and speak to one of us and get direct to us. And then we had project managers come in and junior designers come in and everyone's like, well,
00:06:38
Speaker
I enjoyed the original too. Can I talk to James? That's the ultimate question is how do you keep the personality of a small boutique thing and then try and scale it because I haven't figured that out yet. I've been doing a lot of work on it recently and it feels a bit nasal-gazy but it's also quite helpful because what I'm trying to do is
00:07:06
Speaker
I'm now doing the things I always used to fight against, like talking about company culture and having a mission statement. And I've always like, oh, that's all corporate crap. I'm not doing that. You know, we are your your best, you know, you can send us into battle like your champion, and we will do everything we possibly can for you. But that's easy when it was just me. Now I've got to distill that throughout the agency. We are actually, we have a mission statement and we talk about where we're going. But a lot of it's come down to not
00:07:35
Speaker
not leaning too heavily on those, I still think they're kind of cliched, although they are useful, the mission statement. And this is what we're doing. Yeah, what has come down to for SEO is what we have a weekly meeting, which is another thing I never thought I'd find myself saying we do. But we now we take take turns chairing the meeting.
00:07:55
Speaker
So I discourage them from talking about me being the boss. I'm starting to sound like Ricky Gervais's character in the office here, but I said, look, we're all creatives. We're all here because we want to do cool stuff. Having a guy at the top who tries to impose his vision on everything doesn't really work anymore. Now it has to be, and it pops up in some really interesting ways. We're talking about possibly getting an apprentice at the moment. And one of my colleagues said, right, what happens to the apprentice at the end of his apprenticeship?
00:08:25
Speaker
And I was like, why? He says, because I've worked in a lot of agencies. And when someone finishes the apprenticeship, they generally got rid of. And I'm like, I don't have corporate experience. I was like, why? Why would you do that? If I've invested two years, you know, we all invested two years in an apprentice. The last thing we want to do is to boot them out. They should be like better at the job than us after that time. Why would you do that? But that was his concern. And I never would have guessed that. I wouldn't have seen that coming at all.
00:08:54
Speaker
I had a really interesting conversation with, I did another podcast with a marketing guy, very experienced marketing guy the other day.
00:09:05
Speaker
we're chatting about kind of the crossover between what big brands can learn from small startups, kind of plucky, going 1000 miles an hour in every direction kind of startups and what those startups can learn from the big corporates. And the common thing that kind of came down was
00:09:26
Speaker
However simple it is, it can be a one-line mission statement, but it needs to communicate it enough that everyone that joins the company should buy into it in some way, shape, or form. And they don't have to be as massively enthusiastic as the founder because they can't be. They weren't there
00:09:47
Speaker
for the inception of the idea but if there's something they feel they can buy into then it's easier for them to come along on it and some people that that's impossible to deal with some people are just there for the paycheck but they have their own absolute perfect purpose they don't need to be the brand champions they don't need to be the people that are kind of waving the torch around but those people still have absolute purpose as well but don't try and kind of evangelize to them because
00:10:14
Speaker
it will just piss them off.
Versatility and the Joy of Learning New Skills
00:10:16
Speaker
That's not what they're there for. It's partly one of the reasons I resisted the focus on culture so much because I read too many business books and I've sort of been trying to give them up. Bad addiction. It's bad addiction because it never fully relates to your situation but those kind of ones about disseminating your company culture and
00:10:40
Speaker
One thing that sounds like brainwashing, if I hire someone, I hire them because they're more generally better than I am at something, most things in my case. And I don't want to lose their individuality by me trying to enforce something that I think is the best thing to do. Yeah, and you can't, you can't, you know, the worst thing you can do with someone who's coming in, who's, especially if they've got
00:11:06
Speaker
creative talent or they have their own flair is to try and micromanage them into something that they're not because then they're just going to sit there and be bored or disenfranchised or completely kind of well I thought I was coming into this to offer something but you're trying to change me into something I'm not so why hire people based on how they're coming into the business not how you think you'll mold them when they're here that's kind of
00:11:32
Speaker
part of the joy for me is when when people start people join the team, I mean, this goes to freelancers as well, because there's up until having actual employees, which wasn't really planned, it just sort of happened as an opportunity. Before that point, even working freelancers, the more I work with them, the more I kind of go, actually, now you're really good at these bits. And they're the bits you really enjoy. And I love that process. When the person who joined me most recently, Bex, I said to her, how do you feel about about
00:12:02
Speaker
making some phone calls to company and she's like, that's about the last thing I'd ever want to do. Okay, well, fair enough. That's all right. But at the same time, she's developing all these other skills and doing all these things. I had no idea it existed before she came to work for me. And she'd freelanced for me for a couple of years before becoming an employee. And I think that's a luxurious point at the size of my company that I can just kind of go, right, off you go.
00:12:32
Speaker
I think that is an interesting thing, kind of segueing, not subtly at all, but segueing slightly into the kind of small agency freelancer thing is that it can be very hard to remember to tell everyone what you do.
00:12:50
Speaker
So I think, you know, we have, you know, there's a couple, there's a few mutual clients that we work with. And I think there's probably been occasions in the past where it's like, oh, can you, do you guys do that? Is that a thing you do? It's like, oh, I've never told you that that's a thing. Cause that's kind of most of what I do in my business. I'm specializing over here with you guys, but this is what I tend to do kind of, you know, the day to day stuff. And that, that gets quite interesting because it, again, it's, you know,
00:13:19
Speaker
going back to the blowing your own trumpet thing, all right, I don't have a trumpet to blow, but is going out and telling people exactly what you do. And that can be a really hard thing to try and grasp.
00:13:30
Speaker
for a small agency or freelance to kind of go, I do all these things. You're just kind of using quite a small resource of what I do. How about all this stuff over here? But it's also trying to kind of, you know, you don't offer everyone everything because they might not be necessarily interested in everything that you do. Or you might, they might take you on to do absolutely everything. In which case, then how are you
00:13:55
Speaker
specialising for them. I got a little shiver of fear down my spine when he said that because I used to operate that way many years ago. And I was like, what can you do? We can do everything and you get clients who go, smile, we need somebody who can do everything. Then you find yourself on the phone to the MD at half level at night because he can't connect his telephone to his computer or something like that. I've done that. I don't like that. But
00:14:21
Speaker
the sort of the perceived the thing that's always trout trout, you know, people go in business books go on about is, you know, don't don't let yourself appear to be a master of everything, a jack of all trades master of none. So we very much we are an SEO agency. That's it. We do SEO. Sure, I understand things like Google Ads have passed the exams, which any any of our mutual friends who do Google Ads would probably be terrified to learn. But
00:14:48
Speaker
I don't want to do that. But at the other side, we do some audio visual stuff that is not mentioned anywhere on our website. But we do it because we enjoy it. And it's cool. And if people want to get us involved on a greater level, they'd love to do that. We're looking to buy some new equipment, some new camera equipment soon.
00:15:08
Speaker
But outwardly, we don't tell anyone about that. It's just we are a creative. We're a set of creatives. I'm trying to think of something that if there's anything you don't start listing everything you do, then there must be things that you do that I don't know you do, even though we've worked together for years.
00:15:24
Speaker
with music today you sent me you sent me a track you'd made yeah what where did that come from first time in ages i've actually well i've never sat down and recorded and released something of my own i've always done it in a band or as a group of people and and usually live rather than recorded there's a few recordings here and there but there's nothing too much and then i got
00:15:47
Speaker
Logic Pro a couple of years ago. No, during lockdown, I was fiddling around with that and did a few kind of live recordings through that of people coming over and us just noodling around. That was fine.
00:15:58
Speaker
And then I think I got a focused right two channel thing from you. So that's still awesome. And then I think probably about a year ago, I bought, I was chatting to you about kind of, it might be longer, I was chatting to you about kind of recording software and different,
00:16:19
Speaker
doors or digital audio workstations and trying to say, oh, you got to try Ableton. And I didn't really get round to it for ages and then downloaded the demo of it and had a little bit of a relearning because it looks very different logic. It's kind of flipped with logic because you get the session view in Ableton first, and then you can have the timeline view when you switch over. Other way around in. Logics only just got the session view.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I couldn't really get my head around it. And then I tried to enable it and it just made complete sense. So then I started doing stuff and I have two different sorts of music I'll listen to.
00:16:56
Speaker
depending on what my workflow is, is there's either kind of very driven, very loud, very purposeful stuff, or very ethereal floaty stuff. If I kind of don't know where I'm going, I don't have a direction and there's no momentum to it, I'll listen to music of exactly the same sort. I love that. That's such a brilliantly logical way of operating. Yeah, it just makes complete sense of my head. I just want something that's just kind of floating around.
00:17:23
Speaker
If I know exactly what I'm doing and I just need to get it done, I'll just listen to some insanely heavy prog metal. And like 20 minutes later, my piece of work is done enough of listening to some amazing songs. And that just makes complete sense in my head. And it can range in styles. It will sometimes be jazz that's driving me along.
00:17:45
Speaker
or blues that's kind of fairly ethereal and floaty, but I have a kind of distinct separation in my musical tastes between box A and box B. Never thought of it, but yeah, once I know what I'm doing, metal is always what I listen to. As soon as it's there, that's just like putting your foot down and kind of listening to good metal. My point was to try and remember that I'm trying to be a podcast host here, which is also something we offer for clients but don't have anywhere on our website.
00:18:15
Speaker
To my point, so with music, so you're a musician, I mean, we're probably not doing this on YouTube. I probably should have talked to you about that first. But there's guitars hanging up behind you, there's guitars behind me. And if a client came to you and said, look, we're struggling to get the sound design together for this part of the project. And you suddenly went, I know exactly what that needs. Would you pipe up? Or would you just go, no, that's not what I do.
00:18:45
Speaker
It depends on the day and the mood and who the client is, I suppose. You just gave an SEO professional type answer. It depends. The lawyer's greatest way of answering a question is you protect yourself comprehensively if you just say it depends. But I think, yeah, it would more depend on the client and I think if they
00:19:16
Speaker
were, I think if they were a more risk averse client, I wouldn't kind of just throw it out there because it might make them kind of go, what, oh god, that's, you know, that's a strange offer. I thought you were a graphic designer. Thanks, anyway. Yeah, but black metal for a face care cream. Why wouldn't you want it? There you go. But I think if there was, you know, other clients I've worked with who are
00:19:43
Speaker
who enjoy the kind of momentum and the kind of a little bit more, not a throw around attitude. It's the journey of the journey clients. Yeah, they're just enjoying the journey of the process and that sort of thing. Then I'd probably put my hand up and say, you know, I can have a try at throwing something together for you.
00:19:59
Speaker
Um, I've got, you know, I vaguely know what I'm doing with musical instruments and the rest of the time I'll just hit a load of buttons in Ableton and like the sound that comes out. Ableton's so good. Yeah. So yeah, I think I popped my hand up. I've done stuff in the park. I didn't, I'd never done any video editing.
00:20:24
Speaker
how many years ago this was, I can't remember, probably about five or ten years ago. Never really done any video editing before. Prior to that, even more, we had an opportunity to do some work for the Royal Bank of Scotland like 20 years ago or something. Wow, how did that come about? I can't remember, but it was a friend of a friend and they were looking for a company who did video editing to take a load of video stuff and put it on a big wall at their new Bishopsgate office. And somehow we got the work.
00:20:55
Speaker
And it was a huge project. We'd never done video editing before. And we bought a, all of their video content was on Betamax. Showing your stage, definitely. Yeah, so like, you know, professional Betamax recordings on there. And this lorry turned up outside with 300, 400 tape, Betamax tapes.
00:21:13
Speaker
And that was all their fridge. And we just had kind of reference numbers and time codes of what stuff to pull off it. So this is kind of like prior the cloud and having to kind of pull that down. And we put it together and we did it. I spent two weeks in France learning how these video walls worked and learning kind of video engineering 101 of how to these kind of different things work together and rear projection and that sort of thing.
00:21:37
Speaker
But we did it and then a few years later someone said, oh, can you do can you actually edit a video together for me? And it was for it was a stonemason And I was like, yeah, sure. No worries send us all the stuff much easier I've got and I had like a DVD with a load of files turn up and Downloaded some stock footage and that sort of thing and put it together. But there are occasions where it's like Yeah, I'd quite like to get my brain
00:22:01
Speaker
into that, you know, I know what a timeline is, that's pretty much universal across anything that has to go from A to B and has a number of seconds in between it. I can, I can, and there's layers to that. So I can put it, I know Photoshop, I know audio programs, I'll just smoosh that together and make video instead. Yeah, it's something I still enjoy. I'm working on a project at the moment, which is
00:22:25
Speaker
We were recording some conversations with amazing women who survived Auschwitz and Belsen. And I think if I didn't have the ability to pick things up as a creative and grab hold of those opportunities, we wouldn't be able to do it. So kids, if you're listening, don't be too linear with your skill set. I think for me, if something interests me, I've got some bloody weird
Creativity and Curiosity in Branding
00:22:50
Speaker
skills. I can run these massive industrial machines called slitters.
00:22:55
Speaker
And I fully understand how the tension in the machine works and how they operate. And I probably couldn't get a job doing it. But I am one of a few people, maybe less than 100 people in the country that knows fully how to operate these machines. No way. Clearly, it's purely because a client of mine makes them. And I was just really interested. And I like playing with big machines. And that sort of turned into me filming them and taking photos of them. The only photographer I really do these days is these industrial machines.
00:23:25
Speaker
But again, that's not on the website because somebody else said, can you come and run our machine? I'd be like, like, give me two or three years of being really interested when I'm in your factory and I'm supposed to be doing something else. Yeah, yeah. Catch me at the right time. Catch me when you think I'm thinking about something else, but I'm actually thinking about how your machine works. Exactly. It's a good thing to do as a creator anyway, because the deeper the understanding you get of some things, the more things it inspires in your own mind.
00:23:54
Speaker
and the more opportunity it gets. So yeah, I think it's the opportunity to play.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, there's a really good quote by, unfortunately it's by John Cleese, but I can't remember, I'm not even going to paraphrase it, but it's very good. It's about people who aren't creative don't have a connection with their child self, and you lose creativity as you grow up. You want to try and keep hold of the creativity because it's going back to the basics of play. I think to your point is that
00:24:25
Speaker
when i work with food and drink clients and that sort of thing i'll just go can i come see how it's made can i come to the factory and see the process don't worry i'll wear a stupid net on my beard i'd love to come and see how this works because i think
00:24:39
Speaker
You know, because branding touches absolutely everything in a business, you have to, to a certain extent, understand every part of the business that happens. Even the bits that people don't see, because there might be something in that process that people don't see that is actually a very integral part of how the brand functions, how it communicates what it means, what it believes in, and that sort of thing. And I think you have to see that process to be able to unearth something that someone might not necessarily see at face value, or if they don't see that process.
00:25:09
Speaker
Especially because people who have been at a company for any length of time, especially if they're the founder, they lose objectivity on what's so cool about what they do. Anything can be cool. I've got a client I've worked with for 15 years and they sell these little nozzles and this equipment that is for applying hot melt adhesives, a very specific temperature range.
00:25:34
Speaker
Why? You know, we can't write anything exciting and cool. And the longer I got to know them, it turns out if you buy their parts, you'll save like 40% a year on your running costs. Like, how is that not cool? Yeah, that's cool. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be really flashy. Look at one client. And I apologize if I told you this before. It is a story I like to trot out. He, his company makes TV series. So like Sky TV will come along, Tom,
00:26:00
Speaker
Tom at Summer Owl Films, I don't know if you know him or not. Yes, I think I've met Tom. So his company, which he started when he was very young, Sky TV, say we want a series on motorsport, and he goes, all right, and he delivers a whole series. So talking to him about the sort of things they could put on their blog, it's like, there's not really anything all that interesting that we do. To be honest, a lot of the work they do is corporate editing, or certainly was at the time.
00:26:28
Speaker
I'm going to have to look up a name because otherwise this is going to fall on its behind. Right, so the whole time I was talking to him in his office, he's who I learned to edit from actually, he's got a degree in editing and I learned by him. I said, look, can I just sit, he's his premier. And I said, can I just, this is the end of the meeting. I said, do you wonder if I hang around just like what she work? He's like, no, that's fine. And an hour of that.
00:26:54
Speaker
I knew exactly what I was doing from that point on. It was really good. So he sat there. He's going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nothing interesting that we can write blog posts about. Behind him is this huge picture of him. He stood next to Richard Curtis, the writer, and he's holding Richard Curtis' Oscar. I'm like,
00:27:12
Speaker
Do you think that might be the sort of thing that I was always trying to impress upon him? Like you work in one of the sexiest industries there is to talk about. I mean, schlepping out industrial adhesives and you've got like, Hollywood stars you mate with and whatever. Amazing. Yeah, I think it's just having, it's being curious, I think as well. It's not just being creative, but I think people can be creative without actually being curious and, and
00:27:41
Speaker
to a certain extent vice versa, I suppose, but you have to kind of constantly say why, why does it do that? Why aren't you talking about that? The word why can unearth a lot of different things. Yeah, just keep poking and asking why, like a really annoying sugar hyped six year old. I was a coaching day last week and they were running through an exercise. Stephen Covey, have you heard of him?
00:28:07
Speaker
is like a famous business writer. I quite like Stephen Covey's stuff because it's got more humanity in it than a lot. But we went through a process where you're supposed to get down to this, talk about your business, think about your business, you're supposed to get down to the point of what it is that you actually enjoy and what's the best thing about your business. And I went, had it from several different angles. And the word I came up with each time was play, which does neatly fit in with everything we're talking about. It's almost like I could have planned this conversation,
00:28:36
Speaker
I was thinking in SEO, because the next thing is right now, now put that in your literature and tell the world that this is your greatest power play. And I'm still mulling it over because the world of SEO is either people going, whoa, isn't it mystical and magical? Or it's people saying, look, this is just black and white stuff. And that's more the side I lean on. But the reality is, it's the play of it that's fun. It's the taking a website and getting it to rank and doing amazing things. That's fun. It's play. It's enjoyable.
00:29:06
Speaker
I think the really interesting thing for me is to take the playfulness of something and the complexity of something and all of the different things that go into it and distill it down into one or the simplest way of communicating something possible, which is where design and branding comes in and where there's a crossover between content and layout and format.
00:29:33
Speaker
image and all of that sort of thing. But I think the ultimate challenge with anything and the real enjoyment for me is to kind of really get involved in something, try and understand it, boil it down to its constituent parts, and then work out how to communicate the character and the energy of that thing in a really simple way. That's the kind of the real enjoying bit for me because I get to play and I get to pull things apart and I enjoy breaking things to understand how they work.
00:30:03
Speaker
probably clients wouldn't enjoy if I walked into their factory. I bought a teesmaid for a jumble sale when I was about 10 years old. I brought this teesmaid home, which I think I probably paid about 10 pence for because it was the early 80s. I remember my mum being thrilled that I bought a teesmaid. She came back into my bedroom about an hour later and I'd taken it to pieces and just bits all over the floor. That's the fine line between a serial killer and someone with genuine curiosity is that it'll either be a teesmaid or a badger.
00:30:36
Speaker
Right. I'm going to end it on that note. God, what a conclusion. James, thank you. We haven't even said how people can find you. I'll put the link in the show note. Brilliant. Yeah, we'll do that. Thank you.