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The Digiday Podcast
How to sell an influencer agency: Lessons from Digital Voices founder Jennifer Quigley-Jones
00:54:32
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:10]
B
Hello, hello and welcome to another episode of the Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone who's curious about how to sell a company. I'm Kamika McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.
- [00:20]
A
I'm Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday Media. Kimiko, I feel like we're coming up to be due for an episode on the Trade Desk. Given what's been going on, I would
- [00:32]
B
say so one of my favorite narratives in this industry is how the Trade desk has become the industry's boogeyman. So I think we are absolutely do
- [00:41]
A
this is not that episode. To be clear, for this episode we have Jennifer Quigley Jones, who's the CEO and founder of Digital Voices Influencer agency that she sold to PMG late last year. And I mean in this episode she really gives a masterclass in like building an agency and then selling it. But Trade Desk is top of mind for me because they've really been getting pummeled by agencies within the past month. The most recent example being Publicis reportedly writing a memo to clients, hey y' all should stop buying from the trade desk.
- [01:20]
B
Oh man. Yes. Also good catch. Make sure that we acknowledge that. Jennifer, first of all, a fantastic personality. Really enjoyed the conversation. I'm glad that people are going to be able to hear that. But also, yes, jump the gun because there is so much happening with the Trade Desk. We did a check in about six months ago and they were taking a flogging. Then they lost their, you know, exclusivity with Walmart and they are taking a flogging now again because Publicis to your point has says, hey, maybe let's not. So maybe we are due for a good check in.
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A
Yeah, because it's not just Publicis. But you know, a few weeks prior Adweek had reported how Dentsu and WPP similarly said, hey, we're going to stop buying from openpath, which is the Trade Desks program where it sources inventory directly from publishers and cuts out supply side platforms in the name of transparency and lower fees. But WPP and Dentsu said actually this isn't transparent like we would want it to be. I have so many questions about all of the politics here and how real or not real some of these claims and issues are. But luckily we have Ronan Shields, our senior ad tech reporter, and Seb Joseph, our executive editor of news, who have been all over the story along with the rest of the team. So yeah, we'll have to get ready for that episode sometime next month. But like you said, I'm really excited for this episode.
- [02:45]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. Jennifer was a real treat having her on the show to to talk to us about how her influencer agency, Digital Voices, became under PMG as their new parent company and what all that looks like from the inside out. So I hate to say you know how the sausage is made, but she does you a very good look as to how the sausage is made. So no further ado. Jenny, welcome to the show.
- [03:14]
C
Thank you for having me. It feels surreal to be here.
- [03:17]
B
I almost want to say it's been like a year on the dot since I first connected with you and obviously you've had a very busy year since then with acquisitions business and things like this. CEO of Digital Voices. One thing that Tim and I have been talking about pretty much at length, in addition to the creator economy as a whole, is about how the creator economy is kind of becoming the backbone of this merger and acquisition space. Given that you've recently been acquired, we wanted to have you on the show. So super excited to have our chat today.
- [03:48]
C
Thank you. Yeah, I think there's a lot of pressure for media agencies, but also pressure for influencer agencies to integrate closer with media because I think 2025 was the year of experimenting with creator paid ads, so testing whether influencer produced assets perform better than brand owned assets. And I think a lot of the results of that were a resounding yes. So I think a lot of media agencies realized they needed to fill that gap and I think a lot of creator agencies realized there was just this huge disconnect from media and so they were producing assets and handing them off, but often never getting the feedback loop. So I think that that probably helps to drive the acquisition growth, but it's a really exciting time for the industry.
- [04:30]
B
Now you've also got this interesting and interesting angle of being a female founder. I caught your LinkedIn post last year kind of describing the acquisition process and one of the things is that female founders don't often talk about it. So we'd love for you to kind of talk about the process, the funding rounds, the revenue milestones and some of those. Those other things. Why is it that female founders don't typically talk about this?
- [04:54]
C
Do you think that's. Yeah. Loaded question. I think there's a lot that grows goes into running a business. As a woman, I think there's like a lot of accountability to your team. So I think often you want to make your team feel like they're going to be psychologically safe, that you can make sure they feel fulfilled, you can solve Their problems. I think there's also a just a very different emotional relationship there often with female founders and male founders. I spoke to a friend of mine who is a sister who runs a business with her brother, and her brother was like, I get none of the questions that you get, like, very personal questions from employees. So I think that whole experience is very different. And for me, I never see it like a family or like when people say, my business is my baby. I hate that. But I do think there's a different level of accountability and openness and. And also just a desire to see your team growth that is probably a little bit different for female founders. I think the second thing that's really different is only 2%, less than 2% of VC funding goes to female, entirely female teams. So you end up with a very different model of building the business. You end up with a model where you have to be profitable from day one. Because if you're not, if it's harder to raise investment, then okay. And it's also really hard to raise investment as a solo founder, which is why a lot of people have founding teams when they go through venture capital rounds or through accelerators. You then have to be profitable from day one. So I think it's a very different way of building a business. If you start with funding, you can think, okay, what tech do I build? Which superstars do I hire? Like, how do I market this? So I think it changes the way you build because you're not building with that freedom of time and flexibility and kind of this opportunity to have Runway. While you're trying to find product market fit, you actually have to find product market fit to survive. And you also have to win those first clients. And then often if you're hiring people, you can't start by hiring the most expensive, most senior hires. So you often have to start by, okay, what. What can I break down in the work I'm doing that I can give to someone who's more junior, because that's what I can afford. So you really have to break down your process into all these tangible, tangible steps, and then gradually hire for those people. And I think also there's just this. Thirdly, this has been really interesting to me, the number of people who will ask, oh, are you building a lifestyle brand? Like, oh, is this. Is this the lifestyle business? And I ask other men, and they don't seem to get that question. So it's an interesting coded. It's a very coded question. And I mean, of course, I love what I do. Like, you can't you can't be an entrepreneur unless you love what you do because you live it, you work, you know, longer hours. But the thing I find interesting is I think there needs to be more examples of people who are just come from any form of underestimated place, whether that's like race, gender, sexuality, whatever, who and who build businesses that where they exit and they fundamentally transfer wealth to their community and then that changes the life of your life. The people around you, your family, the number of founders that I know who have paid off their parents debts, paid for their parents retirements, things like that. Like that I find really exciting because the ramifications of people who earn that money and get those exits, it's shifting a power dynamic as well as a capitalistic dynamic. So for me I always found it really interesting because people ask like oh is this a lifestyle business? Or they say oh my God, you must be so creative. You work in the influence industry. And to me like I have great people on my team who are creative but the thing that I love is data and putting the business pieces together and seeing what's missing in the industry and having building a strategy to solve it. Like I actually it's taken, it took me, I'd say five, six years to actually call myself an entrepreneur. But that is actually what I really like is the building process. And so I always kind of from from the outset knew that I wanted to build something that would really scale because it's like a free mba. And then I think it's important to see examples of women exit again. It's not abandoning your business, it's helping in many cases it's helping take your business to the next level and take your team's careers to the next level as well. And I don't think that should be something where ashamed of or hide away from.
- [09:23]
A
And given you got to exit and are able to kind of look back fondly on all of that work that went into getting to the point of exit. Is there any like one thing looking back that you wish you had known at the time when you were early with the business?
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C
Oh my God, so many.
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A
I'm sure, I'm sure there's a lot of us.
- [09:45]
C
Yeah, a lot. The first thing is I think for the first, God, the first four or five years of the business. So it's nine years old on the 23rd of March, so really soon. It's a weird inflection point. I and I knew very little of what I was doing. Like I had never managed people before. I'd Never worked in an agency, you know, I. And I started one. So I do think it. I threw myself into learning a lot, hopefully in a compressed timeline. But I think there are always things you could have done faster. For the first five years of the business, we didn't really market properly. We were so focused on doing the work and we assumed that doing the work would lead to scale. And yes, it is important that your customers advocate for you and you do the work well. But honestly, we didn't build a community around the work we did. And I think we've really tried to elevate that. We have a great head of marketing who has helped with these crazy initiatives we run now, like the Global Influencer Council, where we bring together the best brand marketers across EMEA and the US and like, bring them to literally talk about industry challenges together. We do a lot of speaking at conferences, a lot of like, articles and how to's and trend reports. We realized we weren't bringing anyone on the journey with us. And it sometimes is and it kills you because the perfectionist in you is like, I just want to build the perfect business and do the perfect work and then it will speak for itself. But you have to do it really loudly and you have to bring people on the journey. And when I started, like, I did this LinkedIn challenge where I posted 100 times in 100 business days and that really accelerated the growth of the business. We had clients come through and they were like, hey, we want you to do measurement work about influencer marketing. Because we see or this LinkedIn post, we'd have so many clients come and approach the agency. Because of that, we started having dinners where we'd bring clients together and just let them discuss problems. And we always thought, what if we bring them together and they say, hey, could you do this in house? Have you tried another influencer agency? That's not what happens. Actually. The more you educate people on like lifting the hood of your process and how complicated it actually is, they don't go, oh, I'll do this myself. They go, that's a lot of work. I finally understand why that's a lot of work and why I should pay for it. Influencer isn't paid media. It is so time intensive. You have to source creators, which normally requires specialist tools. You have to reach out to them. You have to negotiate with every single one. You have to do onboarding or briefing in some way. You have to chase them for content. If the content's not right, you have to feedback. You then have to get all the results and that's just the execution part that's not coming up with the strategy that succeeds on social. So I think if you're nervous about whether you're giving away your secret source of marketing, you're missing the point. You have so much value as a business owner because your work is hard to do. It's not clicking a button and the campaign's run. So I wish I'd opened the lid on that sooner because I think I was just really protective and really being perfectionist and it was the opposite of a growth driver.
- [12:54]
A
How did you get over that hump, that initial. What was the posting strategy or when you got started with that hundred day challenge?
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C
Manic I had. I think everyone has all these ideals when they start marketing or anything to do with personal brand where they're like, oh, on Tuesday I'm going to do a throwback post and you know, sorry, Thursday, throwback Thursday I'll do a throwback post or I'll talk about a creative campaign every Wednesday. It is really, really hard to block, shoot and block produce and be reactive. Like I don't know how you both do the work you do because you have to produce so much content and produce like long form considered content. I remember the one, one post, I was at an airport waiting to board my plane at midnight and I literally filmed a video where I was like filming the empty airport gate and I was like, well, I guess I'm here, I'm going to talk about measurement and influence marketing. And that drove sales for the travel client who are like a household name brand. It was the roughest. I nearly didn't post it because I thought I looked so rough. I was just struggling. So I think starting is probably better. And then trying to also ask your audience for like, what are you struggling with? Ask people you work with, what are you struggling with? The other thing that really shifted, I noticed that most of the content that went viral, LinkedIn at that time, the algorithm was pushing video. And so I tried to switch to doing five LinkedIn posts a week of video. That was really hard. That was too much intense. But again, I wouldn't have known it unless I tried it. So I think it's like letting yourself test and learn, just not again, fight the perfectionist in you. Like the perfectionist in you is the reason you won't start a business. It's the reason you talk about starting a business. It's the reason you won't bring customers on the journey. It's the reason you won't solicit better opinions, other opinions from your team or people in the industry. I feel like the perfectionist in you will kill your ability to scale because it's always going to be messy. And so that was, I think it's just a journey to let go of that. I mean, now I can talk about how crazy it was. This is also really interesting. When you get to the exit, you can kind of lift the lid. My fear, talking about how messy running a business is or how stressful it can be, or how, you know, sometimes you have to make decisions with very little sleep or not knowing the answer is I didn't want to stress out my team. So the time I didn't want to like the, the reason I didn't do a TikTok ever about business was poor. Share these really funny memes that are like a business owner in a house that's burning down was because I didn't want to stress my team out and have them think like, oh my God, what is Jenny secretly worried about?
- [15:38]
A
Wait, we're in that house too. What?
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C
We're all in the house. Yeah. So I think it's interesting you could be a bit more open about it after you exit. So I'm trying to do that now. But it's just, it's that psychological safety point, right? Like I signed up to run a business. Like I signed up to be. If you sign up to be a business owner, you should be happy to be the last person that gets paid. You should make sure your employees get paid paid first, then rent on an office or the bills you need to pay. Well in this industry as creators get paid first, then employees, then rent, then you like. I think there have been a lot of studies done on psychological safety and security that essentially say that when someone is stressed about money, you are incapable of making rational medium to long term decisions. So this is why often people who are in dire financial positions, it spirals, right? Because you're making the short term decisions. Because in stress your brain can't not be in fight or flight. My job as an entrepreneur was to be in those positions myself, but to not let my team fill that. And I think I find it really frustrating when I see other agency owners or entrepreneurs who are like, I want my team to feel like entrepreneurs, I want them just as invested as me. And I'm like why? Why would you want them feeling in that fight or flight mode where they can't then make good rational, long term decisions for your clients? Like your whole job is to trick your brain into being able to make Rational decisions, decisions and then make it a safe space for your team so that they feel like they can grow so they're not literally always living in cortisol and because if you do that, your business will be like full of knee jerk decisions that are bad for everyone. So I found that a really interesting psychological challenge.
- [17:23]
A
Right? Yeah. Because I guess it's similar to like parenting. Like, you know, I know I've had conversations with my parents since I've moved out of the house, become an adult and all that where they talk about times when I was growing up when things were a lot tougher than they let on because they didn't want that to trigger me. I guess it's a lot of parallels in terms of being a founder and not letting your employees know everything that's going on necessarily if it's not going to be beneficial for them.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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B
How do you make that decision? Right. Because even to the parent example, like, you know, there are some things that affects the kid and you're like, I guess I got to tell them. I don't know. So as an, as a, as a founder, you know, kind of what are your talking points around exiting and things like this and making sure that everybody remains cool, calm and collected in house.
- [18:14]
C
Yeah, okay. Okay. There's a lot there. I'll go for like an example pre exit where we were not transparent enough, then too transparent. And then I'll talk about like the process, the exit process example because they're both fascinating. So there was a time where we weren't sharing break even numbers versus where we were at. So Digital Voices has. I own 94.4% of the company. So the beginning I owned 100%. We started with 500 pounds. I had like 10,000 pounds, like $12,000 in savings. And then three years in we raised 120,000 pounds, like $150,000 from seven angel investors. So combined seven angel investors. And it was literally January, the end of January, the year of COVID So Jan 2020. And all of that money was supposed to go to running events and sales.
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B
Oh boy.
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C
Which obviously you're not going to do events. We didn't do that. And then obviously like March 2020 happened and the business grew 500 in a year because not because of that money. I mean those investors are lovely people. Because during COVID everything shifted online. Like you couldn't produce ads on set, you'd produce the ads with creators at home. So anyway, so we had a great run and then we had a really rough year where we had to make some cuts. I look back on it now. At that time, it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. We cut three people from a company of 50 people. Now I look back and people said to me, the tech companies are cutting, like, 10% their staff. You cut three people out 50. This isn't a layoff. At that time, it felt like I had let everyone down. Like, I was like, I should have run this business better. The interesting thing was because we were bootstrapped. We had to be profitable, and we weren't running the business in a way that was profitable. We had some client issues, and everyone said, oh, we're so disappointed, because it felt like it came out of left field. So I didn't ask me anything with the team. I let them, like, honestly anonymously ask every question. We got questions. After we'd expanded the U.S. we got questions like, how much do we spend on CEO travel and having an apartment in New York? I knew that investment was worth it. So I went through and I calculated what it would cost versus hotels and how having the apartment was better. And I literally answered everything. And I felt so accountable, but I felt so bad that people felt blindsided. So after that, we started reporting every single week where we were at versus break even and where we were at versus our targets. So anyone in the company on the all hands every Monday would be like, okay, so we're at 70% of break even, which was helpful. People were like, oh, we know what's going on. This is great. But the issue is, then you see people in intense stress. So people could even message each other. We'd say, even, here's what your team can do to help get to the target. Here's what this team can do to help get to the target. Target. People were just messaging each other, like, hey, can you shortlist some more creators for this campaign? It would be really helpful. And I realized once a week was way too much. Once a week was, like, stressful, and people were just really struggling. So we shifted it to once a month. And I felt like that made it much better. And then if there was a month where things had gone wrong, we could say, hey, look, we had a really good month two months ago. We have this much in reserve. We're okay. Don't worry. But it then ended up creating this psychological insecurity because the team were like, you've had a couple of bad weeks. Are people going to be made redundant again? And it's the opposite to that psychological safety that you want to create.
- [21:45]
A
As an entrepreneur, I Also imagine like switching from weekly to monthly. There could have been a period where people are like, oh God, did things get even worse now we're going monthly?
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C
What is she hiding? It's so funny. Yeah. And also when you have a company of less than 20 people, you can have individual conversations with everyone like to calm them down, but a company of like 75, 100 people, you can't. So yeah, it's just um, it's a shift in the way you run things. So then during the acquisition we'd actually had our, our bankers signed up for two years and I'd bought the CFO in five years ago to get us ready for transaction. Initially it was like to get us expanded to the US because she was an expert. She'd actually worked in financial services and defense tech. And yeah, she knew how to run. I mean she's incredible. She was like an audit from PwC. She has a PhD in physics and quantum mechanics. She sees everything like a factory line. So she really helped us be profitable and think about how to staff campaigns that are profitable. She made everyone so much more commercial.
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A
How did you land her?
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C
She was recommended by the head of finance on the team. She was actually her sister. And she said, hey, I don't have the skills of, I don't have the skills for financial fpna, which is financial projections analysis. But I do know someone who does. It's kind of weird. If you feel strange about this, I understand. And she had just moved back from, from America and it was Covid and she wanted to like take a career step that was different. She wanted to work four days a week. She wanted to get fit. And I think when you run a startup again, a scale up, you can offer people maybe not the highest salaries, but you can offer them something in terms of work, life balance or a new challenge or equity that they couldn't get elsewhere. So she came in and said, I'll help you expand to the US So we did that and then she said, okay, let's get ready for sale. So she was, she had been bought in for five years. We knew it was going to happen. We'd had the bankers for two years and we'd, we got to the stage and I think it was July where we decided to actually go and try this. And we had NDAs sent out. We signed 51 parties we allowed to sign the NDA and we took people off. That was after we took, we didn't want to go to another influencer marketing agency. So anyone who already had a really, really strong Big influencer practice. And it was going to be a, a messy integration. We took off the list.
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A
The 51 was that all like outbound outreach where you, the team that you brought on reached out to the companies or how much of it was inbound.
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C
I think the way it works in M and A, and I would really recommend this for anyone who's looking at a process is to find a banker who has a really strong, really strong expertise in your industry. So there are so many people interested in buying influence marketing agencies at the moment, especially ones who are profitable and have tech. There's a huge gap for it. And then in the US there's a huge gap for global partners as well. Because even if you look at say some of the other Holcos, they might buy a U.S. agency and an EMEA agency and a LATAM agency because they want that global coverage. So because we had global coverage and profitability and tech, that made us quite, I think, an attractive proposition. And then we had a banker who knew the space really well. So people were coming to them saying, hey, we really want influencer. We have a gap for influencer. And then also they spoke to a few parties as well. And then they shared a list with us of who do you want to talk to? These are all the people who are excited to sign the NDA and speak to you. And we approved whoever was on that list. And then so we whittled some off and then we did 51 interviews. Those 51 interviews were minimum an hour each. And then you have follow up calls, you have tech demos. I was traveling to New York with the CFO quite a lot. And so getting through doing that without telling your team because you don't tell them until it's certain. Like even in early October, we were like, are we doing this too early? Like, we're having a really good growth year. We're like, should we wait for longer? Should we pull? So I've had hints of these conversations for two years. You're trying to have these conversations privately that really ramped up that six months. It's really intense. And we knew it was going to be PMG from about the end of October. But you can't tell the team because at any point, even when you're like in the rooms with the lawyers doing the deal, it could fall apart or you could stress them out for no reason. And I think again, as a boss, I was so lucky to have a senior team and to have hired a senior team that could carry on the work. And I knew some of them Wanted to be in the rooms. And I was like, I appreciate you, you would be great. But the value is keep the business going. Right now, me and the CFO can handle this maidenly. And then of course, they met the management senior team, but they didn't take up a huge amount of their time. And so that by the time it came to actually closing on the 3rd, 31st of December, we'd done so much work to make sure it was the right fit. But then when we announced the team on the 5th of Jan, it was like they were shocked. There's no. There's no way you can do this without shocking them. I mean, the senior leadership team know, but. And it's interesting because you always hear horror stories of people saying, oh, like, you know, I was in an acquisition and they didn't tell us till the end. And I wish we'd known sooner, but if you'd known sooner, it could have jeopardized the whole deal. And it also. It's not worth taking up headspace if it's not going to happen. And that was an exercise for me, like, in trust. So we told. We had to announce to PMG and did the digital voices team. On Tuesday morning, I announced, it went public press release. So we announced to the team, the press release went public. And then I had to get on a flight from Dallas where I was announcing it, because we had to take photos from the press release on the Monday night.
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A
Oh, wow.
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C
Yeah. So Monday night, take photos Tuesday, tell everyone the press goes out when? Tuesday afternoon, get on a flight to London to spend Wednesday with my team and Thursday with my team to make sure they, like the ones who are in the uk, felt really heard, they felt really seen. And I think that way's going to be nervous, especially in this context. Like, there are so many horror stories of mergers especially going on now that I think everyone's first concern is like, I love what's been built. How, what's. What's next. What's like, what's next? The unknown is way scary.
- [28:13]
A
Yeah. Because it's like your parents selling your child at home and saying, well, we're moving into a mansion, so, like, things are going to be okay. It's like. But I. My height is marked on this wall.
- [28:23]
C
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. One of my team, it literally broke my heart. And I. It was funny because I think you always. Again, there are so many positive. There are so many positive team members who are like, I'm thrilled. Like, I felt like I was hitting a career ceiling because they'd Done Influencer for years with the same clients. And when Influencer Media integrates or. And you're not part of the media conversation or when you aren't in the room with the CMO or the CMO is important to the strategy, you're kind of losing out. So I felt like the position we were in stopped the team learning as well. There were so many positive reactions that there was one person on the team and actually you always remember that the pain. She ruined this bar and she cried. She said, you've. You have created the only work environment where I felt truly safe and seen and celebrated. And you take that so seriously because you know that's. You get to world build when you're an entrepreneur. When you're a parent, I guess you get to. You get to be like, this is how a work environment should be. And I know where we're going is I know pmv. I watched the team and the way they interacted with the management team through it. I watched them have opportunities to belittle anyone on my team or to tear them apart. And they did the complete opposite. Like, they built them up and I knew I was sending them somewhere safe. But you can't. It's like there's still an unknown. Were there.
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B
Speaking of child rearing, were there any times also if I could backpedal really quickly, really, really interesting that you were able to kind of keep that under wraps until things fell into place enough to take it to said team. The running joke in my family is that my mouth cannot hold water if I'm suffering. It's in 4K.
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C
Yes, same. It did help. We were remote first because I think if we'd been in the office, it would have come out. There was one day when I turned up at like, we had a WeWork. We have all access. We work. So you can go into any. We work around the world however much you want, however little. And there was. We have a monthly working together day. And I turned up in this very smart outfit. That's not characteristic for me. And they were like, jenny, where have you been? And I was like in a room with lawyers for seven hours. And it's fine. So. Yeah. And even there were so many twists and turns. Like there was a law firm we'd worked with on with that tiny angel round raise in 2020 had made a mistake. And so there was a debate that was like, jenny, by the way, maybe this paperwork mistake means you don't own 70% of your company. It got fixed very quickly. It was literally an admin Error on a form. Someone entered the wrong number. And again I came back to the team like, hang on one sec. This is. Got to sort this little admin error. And the lawyer. It's just all these things and you're trying to hide it from the team. Like, how's the client campaign going? And yeah, my. I'm similar to you, Kimiko. I struggle so much to hide anything that I'm going through.
- [31:25]
A
So both of you are good for a poker game. Good job.
- [31:27]
C
Yeah, it's perfect. Yeah. You would take us for all we have. It's fine.
- [31:33]
B
You talked a little bit about the process of getting the banker and talking with the team and things like that, but I'm really curious about what does the process look like to prepare for an acquisition. Does that mean pulling a PR team together? How early do you actually start this process?
- [31:50]
C
I mean, it's interesting. We've always tried to be quite organized. I would say the number one thing is making sure that you have a strong narrative. So you're measuring your growth. You can prove where you're profitable, you can prove where you're not. So things like time tracking is not essential, but you need to find a way to prove that your team is commercially viable. So do you have like that strong narrative? What is your individual perspective in the industry? Where do you see things going? What's your differentiator? Why should people believe the story of you? And it's very interesting because it is a sales process. So if you've done sales to clients, you just have to apply it to yourself, which is a really weird feeling. So, yeah, I would say get the narrative right. The other thing that we found, it's a lot of work. We had been really organized with our Google Drive folder. So we had made sure like every employee had contracts. Every supplier form, every supplier contract, every supplier invoice is filed in the right place. The creator contracts, client contracts, all of that. Making sure that is all organized. Because the amount that you have to put into these data rooms when you are selling is. It was. I think at one point we. We had 26 pages of single line links to different document folders. Like it's. I. Yeah, the. The amount of work that by the time this got real and you're doing the data room, the amount of work that the senior team is doing is insane. The one person we tried to leave alone was our chief client officer. So she could. I was like, don't worry, I've got those contracts. You handle everything else. The cfo, the chief people officer and the chief technology officer. It was answering questions on every single piece of, like, data legislation, every single contract with employees, every. That I would say is really time consuming. And I think a lot of business owners, there's always like some degree of chaos going on. But please make sure you have that in locked down and make sure you, before you even approach a banker, before you even go to do this, make sure that, like, your house is organized. The other thing that it really helped with is because we have head of finance, who's more on the accounting side, and then a CFO who's more on the storytelling, forecasting side. She could help tell this narrative. And she was really good at, like, putting the puzzle pieces together. And I honestly don't know if I could have done the process without her. Like, it really. So if you could bring in someone fractional to do that, even that skill set is so different to what a founder has. You also need that counterbalance to you in the room because you can. I come across as quite, I think, enthusiastic and very positive. And, you know, I can sell a narrative and a vision for the industry. But for her, she was the person who was this. I don't mean to say it. She felt like the adult in the room and she counterbalanced me really well by being like, hey, this isn't just a story Jenny's telling. Here are the numbers that back that up. So I would say spend at least six months before you get that banker getting your house order, then interview bankers. So, like, don't just go for one. Interview a lot of different bankers and ask them what valuation they'd give you. Like, which partners would they look at, which valuation would they give you, what strategy? Even things like when we first signed up to our bankers, we were thinking we were going to go and do a whole process in2024. And then we had four of our clients do restructures all at once. So we paused that and waited another year. But it was great to have a banker who said, hey, wait six months and you'll get. You'll do so much better. Like, wait till you're on the track you want to be before you do this. So I think sometimes it also helps to have a banker who will tell you what you might not want to hear. And the interesting thing is the financial incentives with you and them are aligned. So you can often get into banking deals where they get a certain percentage of the sale, but if they, if you get a higher valuation, their percentage increases, so incentivizes them to push you for more and to get a deal done. And so I think you need someone who's really honest with you because if they're going to make more money, if you sell for more money, great. So I really enjoyed having a team that was so honest with me. I also think having a banker who's well known stops people putting cheeky, really low offers in. And again, I think potentially any founder who comes from an underestimated background, everyone's like, hey, do you think I can get a deal? But my bankers were quite well known in the industry and they were known for doing deals that were much bigger than ours. So if anyone came towards threatening to put like a low number, they'd be like, don't insult Jenny. She won't say yes. And that again, as a younger woman, is very, very helpful because it's a counterbalance again, to someone thinking that they might be able to get a great deal. So start putting things in place six months beforehand. Have a narrative, have something that makes you special, have a strong profitability story. And then also just be organized because it will save you money and time in the long run.
- [37:08]
A
And in that last part of the sale process, like when it becomes clear, okay, it's going to be pmg, how did you think about and to what extent did you even work any language into the contract in terms of how they would handle your employees becoming part of pmg, Restructuring things where you can only do so much to protect your people when they become part of PMG, part of any company, ultimately it's going to be PMG's prerogative what they can do. But is there anything you were able to do to protect your people insofar as you could?
- [37:48]
C
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think a lot of founders say that when they do a deal, they think about culture. But I think I didn't realize how much it bore on my mind until we got to this stage. So post loi, you often choose exclusivity with one party. And so we, we had chosen pmg. But the thing is, you have to remember, it's funny, everything in your brain as a founder says the sunk costs get higher and higher because your legal fees mount. Right? Suddenly you're like, oh, if this deal doesn't go through, I still have to pay the lawyers. Or if the deal doesn't go through, you don't have to pay the bankers, but you have to pay a little thing, something for their time. But it starts becoming like, oh, do I have a backup if this deal doesn't go through and I think you have to really switch into your brain to like, if I walk away, it's going to be fine. So actually as we got to the LOI stage where they put in their offer and we said, yes, let's explore it. I had simultaneously written a plan for how to triple the size of the digital voices business. But step by step written it down just so I felt that I always had that like reminder as an exit, like, you don't have to do this. If something comes up a red flag, you can walk away and it will be okay. Then I would say PMG specifically are a partner where they are very public about not having done layoffs in the past. They really, they were like influencers. A space that is growing really fast. We have a small influencer practice. We know from our clients there vast commercial demand. We need more than your team. They were like, this is a huge growth play. We are, we are going to, going to scale this part of the business and we want to do it together. So I think going somewhere where you question what are your reasons for doing this? And being told it's a growth play and what George, the CEO of PMG always says is trust that Verify. So it's really interesting process. Again, you go from being a solo founder to selling your business and it's kind of like you have a partner and you've never had a partner in business before. So the Trust but Verify was I went and spoke to other businesses they'd also acquired and the founders and said, hey, what's it really like? Like, take their team off the call. Like, has there been anything I should be worried about? They always said it was a really fair process, that they felt like it was a partnership that there hadn't been, you know, that they tried to retain the team as much as possible. So that was really helpful. And the third thing that was fascinating was watching how the team, how the PMG team during the process responded to the way I talked about the team. So during the management meeting, the Chief Client Officer was asked some tricky questions by George, the CEO of pmg. And you know, she said, oh, three things, that's tricky. And he just turned around her and went, you're smart. You've got this. I know you do. Come on, like, give me an answer. The CTO at one point was demoing tech and he said, oh, this part of the tech is shit. And I was watching like. And the CEO of PMG went, don't say that. I've seen the resources you've been given. You've built something great. We have the same problem. Here's how I fixed it. And I watched every point where they had an opportunity to critique someone who was slightly insecure. Like, a lot of my C suite have not been C suite leaders before. They haven't gone through an acquisition. And I realized how nervous I was. I literally felt my body calm down. I watched a team, a leadership of a team that wanted their partners to succeed. And I think you can. I think that's a real luxury. I don't think that happens with every acquisition. I don't think people talk about how you're going to grow, how you're going to partner. A lot of acquisitions never integrate. They never integrate the businesses. You literally keep the separate unit. The founder does their earn out, the founder leaves. And I think watching the way they try to build the confidence the team and did plan to integrate and they shared things like their tech, their learning platforms. They were like, we're going to invest in building more influencer tech because the industry desperately needs it. That I think were all little signs of, okay, you trusted what this person said initially, but you verified it through every interaction you've watched. And they really understood. Even things like, there are certain people on the team who work from home and PMG loves in office culture. There are certain people who can't, like, they have family responsibilities and they don't live in the city with a PMG office. And again, watching them be like, yep, completely understand, that's a fair excuse. Okay, that was so reassuring. So when you have moments where the team are nervous, I can wholeheartedly say that I made the best choice of any player that came to the table. Last bar, it's been two and a half months in it. I haven't seen red flags. So, yeah, it's been really exciting to join a company that is really focused on growth. And we're hiring like 19 roles for the influencer team at the moment.
- [42:39]
A
Oh, wow.
- [42:39]
C
Like, we can't have enough people to do the work that we've won. So I think it's going to be hopefully a positive process.
- [42:48]
B
Something to be said about PMG's parenting practices. I was gonna, I was gonna also ask, give it so much of the backbone of this, the. The M and A space in the creator economy. We touched on this earlier. It's built on the tech. What was the tech that Digital Voices was kind of putting what has. But also putting forth the narrative around the acquisition.
- [43:09]
C
Yeah, I think tech in the influence marketing space is really important and it's A really kind of large priority to people. And I think that's only going to change more as we enter this AI identification marketing. We have a really strong philosophy that's like, build where nothing that you do exists. Build where only you can build or partner if it exists out there. So we've used tools for sourcing like Captivate, because there's no point in us investing in a team that's doing all API building. We have a small tech team, so we only want to build where it really, really makes sense for us to build, where we're not duplicating efforts. So we use tools like Influencer, sourcing tools. We'll use Gemini, Google Gemini, and all our processes. But on the other side, we'd built two things. We'd built a campaign management system, like a software system, so it's called Chord, so that you can work in harmony with our clients. I mean, the team was stopping me naming things because it was Chord, Composer and Chime. It was very musical. They were like, jenny, please stop the geeky, like, Band Geek is coming out. So Cord is all about having an interface where clients can log in and run the campaigns, we can run the campaigns. They can approve content, approve creators, and they can see reporting. That was partly developed because we had a very. This doesn't sound true. We had a very sophisticated Google Sheet system. Like, so much of our process was customized on Google Sheets and there was a whole workflow. And then one client loved it so much, they hit share on the sheets and shared it with all the competitor agencies they worked with. And we only found out when we got back our own sheet shared with us from another agency that even said, contact your digital voices representative at the bottom. And we were like, oh. We're like, that's kind of our ip. Like, that's how we, our processes are, how we can guarantee results.
- [44:56]
A
Kind of shouldn't have done that.
- [44:59]
C
They did apologize. They were really. They were like, we just loved it so much. Oh, man. So we then graduated that into a safer, more protectable tech system. So in Cord, you can do that. So I think that really helped. It was just like, to me, that type of campaign management system should be table stakes from any influence rates you work with. The other thing we have is a tool called Composer, and it basically takes our nine years worth of historic data and uses AI to learn from it and to benchmark from it. So things like, what should we guarantee for a certain view number if It's a utility YouTube campaign, what should we guarantee for engagements if it's a TikTok campaign that's like $300,000. It also helps do things like what's a good CPM for tech? What's a good CPE for Instagram for CPG brands. So we, it really helps us make smarter decisions. And I think again a lot of influencer agencies haven't that data is so valuable that data from previous campaigns, especially if clients have shared sales data like that shows you who drives results. And the issue is that for a while before we built Composer we just had it living in random sheets like it. It was such a mess. So then we, we kind of built. Our CTO is a head of performance head of data at a performance marketing agency. So we bought in someone who had that data architecture experience because we were like this is a, this is the special thing that we have. That's our moat that makes us make smarter decision decisions. So I think that really helped. And then I think also it helps that there was the appetite to build more. Again like a lot of people it's very, very fair to want to sell your business and then want to get out on day one. That is fine. Like if you don't have the energy, great. To me that's like missing the last module of an mba, right? Like I hadn't reported to a board, I hadn't had a boss, I hadn't learn how to integrate businesses with other teams. There's so much left for me to learn in this next phase. That's exciting. But I think if you're a founder who doesn't have that energy, that's okay. You just need to be really open about it. Day one like don't do a deal with an earn out then like or do succession planning. So someone's ready to take over and then say that you're willing to take some earn out because you trust that person so much. So yeah. The other interesting thing is PMG has like over 200 engineers and they were like what do you want to build for tech? So I had the energy to be like right. This industry needs such better measurement. It needs more scaled like asset management for creator paid ads. It needs stronger creator interfaces with clients. Like there's so much more this industry needs, needs stronger media planning for Influencer. Like how do you integrate that? I think there's so much potential still that it was really helpful. Even if we hadn't had the tech to have the mentality of knowing what should be built and what the industry still needed.
- [47:51]
A
It sounds like a really well timed sale given like Kimiko, we've been talking on the show since for the better part of the past year about how the creator economy is in this maturation stage where it's really leveling up the business side. I cover the TV and streaming industry a lot and there's a lot more parallels now when it comes to the business side of the creator economy than I remember there being when I first started covering YouTube in 2013.
- [48:21]
C
Yeah, you're right. And it's so funny because YouTube is now TV and creators and I think there's this just, there's this real media coming together and I think we were servicing our clients really well as a small specialist influence agency. But I think there are so many gaps that you can miss and the clients need joined up thinking because they don't have in house, they don't have the experts in this. So they're asking from agencies because clients now with AI are going to be so they're already skeptical of agencies, they're going to be so much more skeptical of like what value do you bring to the table? So you need to not just be an activation agency, you need to be a strategic partner. But if your team can't have those conversations on how media and programmatic and influencer organization all fit together and experientially like how how's it all tied together, you are going to lose those clients not because you're not servicing them well, but because you can't speak the language they need. You can't necessarily persuade the cmo. You can't put together a really cohesive media plan. And I think that's where I see AI saving so much time and I see that AI is going to really transform the way this industry industry works. But I think we could probably 10x our output with 1 to 2 times the team if you get that that piece right. And then also you have stronger client relationships on the other side. So yeah, you're right. It's such an interesting time for the industry and I worry if people aren't thinking critically about the business they're building and thinking, hang on, if I were building it from day one today, would I build it, build what I've got. If you have too much ego to think that you're going to really struggle in the next two years because AI is going to transform the ways we work and clients demand is going to change as well.
- [50:08]
B
Neither Tim nor I have an influencer agency however, nor have plans of getting our non existent agency required. But we have learned a lot today. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [50:19]
C
Jenny well, if you want to build one, there you go.
- [50:22]
A
I mean, this feels like a master class written on LinkedIn, how not enough female founders have talked about the actual transaction, like the full process. It feels like you got into all of it today. So thanks so much for coming on and really opening up.
- [50:38]
C
It's so funny. There have been people who have reached out since then. Thank God I've so many founders who are in the space who hadn't asked me before, but they're like, hey, I'd love to talk to you about Exit. It's something we're thinking about, but we haven't, we haven't even formalized the thoughts. And I'm like, thank God I can actually help you and talk to you now. Like, it's not. It's funny, it gives you. It's not that I wouldn't have given them the advice before, but it's more that when you have headspace and you're not in this existential fight or flight, trying to pretend that no one else is in the existential fight or flight, make sure they're safe. Yeah, it's really nice to be able to do that. So thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate it.
- [51:23]
A
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Digiday Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Get more from Digiday with our daily newsletter sent out each weekday morning. Visit digiday.comnewsletters to sign up.
- [51:39]
C
SA.