How Mint Digital Built 64 Startups - Interview w/ Tim Morgan

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tim Morgan is the CEO of Mint Digital, an agency that has built over 64 startups, while consulting to major brands including Tescos, Goldman Sachs, and the BBC. In this episode, we talk about how Tim has built an innovative culture, how he hires great staff, and what it takes to balance a hybrid agency that provides consulting services while building in-house projects.

Show notes:

To capture more leads from your website, check out Leadformly

episode2

Transcription

You are listening to the 10X Your Agency Podcast where everyone is safe for the next 12 weeks you will be learning strategies on how to scale up your agency and grow your client base from successful agency owners who have been, there done it and built a highly successful agency. You will learn how they attract clients, what their biggest causes of client churn were and what there challenges were at different stages of building their agency. My name is Marcus Taylor and I will be your host.

Marcus: Hey guys welcome to episode two of the 10X Your Agency podcast. Today we have got a really special guest, Tim Morgan, who is the C.E.O of Mint Digital. A really fascinating agency that in addition to having worked for some really impressive brands like Goldman Sachs, The BBC, Tesco, have also built over 64 of their own startups with a team of just 18 people. Now collectively these startups generated returns ten times higher than the average European VC. We are going to learn how Tim has done this, how he balances client services work with building over 64 of their own startups as well as many lessons around hiring, scaling up a team and as well as how Mint Digital acquired their first big clients. Tim it’s a huge pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you doing?

Tim: I’m very well thank you and thanks for having me on.

Marcus: Before we dive in I was just wondering if you can maybe explain a little bit about what Mint Digital is and how it came about.

Tim: Mint Digital is a startup studio. I will probably come to that a little later. It kind of means that we have a client services business where we build technology products for clients that range from Goldman Sachs ,BBC, Tesco ,but then as well as having a client services business we also conceive of and build our own products or startups and in our area we, have built and Two we have of where we raise venture capital into another tool to become separate entities. And the reason I said I will come back to start up studio, that’s now called the startup studio. Mint is so old that when we started doing that there was no word for it so we have adopted the phrase because that’s what people started calling what we were kind of already doing. Mint started when a friend of mine who I had known since I was 18 ,I met him at University came and had lunch with me one day and said I want to start a company and I want to make internet hits, is what he said at the start and at the time I wasn’t too sure what internet hits meant but I knew I wanted to work with him and so I kind of said yes and from that moment on we started building web and mobile apps mostly focusing the broadcast sector. That’s why we are very early in second screen entertainment I suppose and then from there we started building our own products and services as well.

Marcus: Fantastic, so many agencies that I have spoken to over the years they aspire to reach this point that sounds like Mint Digital has got to where they are kind of building their own projects to reduce their dependence on their client base. You guys have actually done this very very well having built I think you said 64 of your own startups. Can you take us through the some of the strategies that you have used at Mint Digital particularly going back to the early days on how you kind of ensured that you always had time to focus on building these kinds of startups and ventures and not get bogged down in the client work?

Tim: Yes, so we never set out, like our motivation was never to reduce our dependency on client services work, our interest was twofold. Number one, we were five people in a small chipped office in South London who had big ideas but like lots of people who have ran agencies will know, if you are a small company its quite hard to persuade a large client to do something especially with unproven or new technology which at the time actually we were very early in review on rails. So we were using rails from about 2006 and at the time most clients or potential clients loved meeting us and loved our enthusiasm and our ideas but it’s kind of like we were too risky to a point to actually take on meaningful work. Our motivation was kind of twofold; first, from an intellectual perspective you have got your client base saying, “ I like you guys and I like the sound of what you are saying but I can’t really kind of commission it.” So then from an intellectual perspective, our only option is to build it ourselves using the technologies we wanted to build .That’s kind of like the curiosity side of things in its quite hard to be told by someone else what your interests are and there’s no market for what you are interested in. I think you have got no choice but to do it anyway on your own back. The second thing was then the things that we built became examples of how and why it worked. So one of the first things we built was very successful in a very short space of time. So suddenly we could go back to the same people and say this thing that you were not ready to commission four months ago because there were not enough real life examples of it in the world to show that it was possible, scalable, stable, well now I can show you exactly that it is possible, scalable, stable because I have built this thing and I have got hundreds of thousands of users. That was our motivation and I think that’s an important distinction because am not sure we would come to the same place had our starting point be dependent upon client views. The second part of your question was, “How we didn’t get bogged down in client work?” I would say that I believe if you going to do like this start up studio model, you have to focus on your client services work. It’s the thing that creates a stable enjoyable place to work from which you can venture. So I don’t really agree with the notion of being bogged down by client work you have to concentrate on it to the extent that I don’t think you are going to be in a good position to be able to build your own products unless you have as you say you have got a good client services business. To answer the question more specifically like we were never successful at sales, we never had sales to implement, so we were never so successful at sales that our client work took up all of our time. I mean that’s the truth we were not effective enough at finding work to ensure that we were occupied 100% of our time. So then it becomes a question of what do I do when I am not working on client work and that’s where it all came from.

Marcus: Do any of your ventures come from the work that you are doing for clients, have you kind of had any experiences where the problems that you have identified through working with the clients has that kind of fuelled some of the ventures you have created?

Tim: Yes, definitely I will give you an example. We were also very early into real time press technology we went out again into the broadcast world trying to find people who would– what we wanted to do was to make like play along games so that you could have studio based T.V careers and people at home would be playing along with no latency so that the host of the TV could say in real time, that question I just asked 44% of the population answered it correctly with no latency or even 23% of police officers answered it correctly and 19% of students answered it correctly or the north beats south you know whatever. We actually had been working with the technology first. We then went out to the broadcasters and said we want to form a second screen entertainment and actually again the answer was kind of like nobody but we did learn from speaking to the market was that eventually led as to create a real time football game that came a company called of Mint and that we sold in 2012. So in that case I think that if we haven’t been active in the broadcast sector, we wouldn’t have found the application of the real-time technology to affect the live sport broadcast, I think it would have been very difficult had we not been operating our client services work in that industry so that’s an example of where I’m not sure we would have got to the same place had we not been out and about. Probably more often than not there is no kind of direct link. I think one of the great benefits where they can cross over is more around the similarity of people working together. Having ran a startup, one of the hard things, by that I mean a startup other than Mint, one of the hard things is getting talent and making sure it gels and all the rest of it and I think people who are talented and are used to working together are mildly irresistible in terms of their ability to make progress and just to avoid the same sort of mistakes that first time starter founders might make over and over again. So yes I believe there is a big crossover between the two sides but it’s not necessarily that I was I working on client x and I noticed this problem y and then I came back to the office and solved it myself .It’s not quite as linear as that.

Marcus: So you mentioned that over the years you have been able to work with brands like Tesco, Goldman Sachs, BBC, first of all how did you land that first big client? And secondly now that you have kind of I think you mentioned you’re is it 12 years into Mint now, how do you decide what a good client is and probably more importantly what kind of clients you typically avoid?

Tim: Yes, the first big client, I mean this is a classic reason to going back to what I said earlier about why I think all agencies should develop their own products. The first big client saw a product that we had made in the market. So we made something called Island Dew which was a social network in about 2006 maybe 2007 and that was our first, I suppose, venture that we made of our own but it received a lot of attention throughout the world. It was one of the fastest growing social networks in the world. It very quickly within a matter of weeks had tens of thousands of users who were very active, financial times and so going back to an agency with no sales people, or marketing skills to speak of it’s kind of like the best calling card so Disney on the West Coast of America where we are not by the way, saw this because it had been covered by Mashable, was being covered in all manner of press came to us and said we think what you do is really cool how about we work together? So for us that’s how integral I suppose building our own place has been to making that step to sort of having more significant clients. And then in terms of what we are looking for now, I think you learn to be fair. We’ve always had the same idea as to exactly what we are looking for. A lot of it is sometimes feel right but then we try to be a bit more prescriptive than that .I think you know I Mint we do want to make a difference and then that has to impact in terms of the client selection. Number one is,is what they are contemplating or what they want to achieve fundamentally positive to the world and second are they intent on doing it? So we like to spend our time making progress, developing products, acquiring customers not necessarily jumping through decision making hoops and so for us one of the important things is that is this client actually determined to do something because we want to make progress. It’s much more satisfying for us if we can identify a problem with them and help them solve it. So I suppose the kind of things we were looking for are do we feel good about this, do we actually want to do it, are they serious about it? And then the third, frankly, is purely financial in that I think lot of small agencies especially but we as well get contacted by people who kind of say I never got this idea, will you build it for me and I’m going to raise money in three months. You now Mint takes enough risks on your own products not to take risks on other peoples. So there are those that I would say Marcus is a very kind of soft thing in that it’s a feeling as much as anything.

Marcus: When you are working with let’s say a big company like Goldman or a company like Tescos, these companies being so massive and I presume you are kind of bringing some kind of startup or some kind of new element to what they are doing, does it kind of operate almost– like are you familiar with the skunk works concept?

Tim: Yes I’m familiar with the concept. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like that and I do think that actually often we work in slightly different kind of circumstances So yes we do work on new products sometimes we do work on improving existing ones so yes we think we can help someone just get a better ROI on something that they are doing then we do. I mean in some cases its more kind of digital transformation taking something that needs to be brought up into a kind of digital age. And sometimes it’s pure team augmentation like that definitely happens and sometimes we work with like funded startups on that front where they just want three weeks of accelerated development in this certain area that they have identified entirely themselves without necessarily having to expand their team. So yes I wouldn’t say you know we are kind of skunk works. I would certainly never use that word but I do think that our pedigree is probably in building highly disruptive digital products because I suppose that’s where the venture side of things comes into it is kind of the essence of venture; you’re building something from nothing and that’s something that Mint has a lot of experience of doing.

Marcus: Tim, I read in one of the interviews that you did, I think it was possibly with Hiscox you said, “At Mint we are all execution with very little presentation.” I read on your website that at Mint we do rather than talk acknowledging that Mint’s contribution to the leadership surplus is very low. Can you maybe kind of explain some of the thinking behind that and perhaps what impact that on stands for what leadership has had for Mint when it comes particularly to acquiring new clients?

Tim: It’s basically born out of a sense that time is precious, it’s the most precious commodity that we have. And so may I give you a quick example completely made up example that say if we were working on some drone technology; now drone technology has been around for years. It’s obviously become very popular to speculate about the future of the worlds and how detains to drone technology. Now if you are in my shoes or somebody like me, and you are interested in the area you can write future facing a blog post about what you think will happen, you can spend a lot of time speculating as what’s going to happen in the industry or making sense of things what other people have said, but ultimately that time is better of spent finding out for yourself. That notion is born out of there is absolutely nothing in the world of technology that you are better off learning second hand than first. So if that’s make any sense ultimately you learn so much more by actually doing something. Even if it’s a catastrophic failure, even if it doesn’t make any sense at all with hindsight you will learn faster and be more qualified to either go again or to have someone else achieve it than you would if you became a kind of thought leader. So that’s kind of mean in that we much prefer to do than to talk. Now in terms of the second part of the question which is, “How does it affect client winning ability?” Probably negatively, I mean I have certainly been in these situation where the thing that or the potential client wants, is very similar to something that I can from top to bottom demonstrate that I have built because I have done it myself instead of congruent to another venture that we have done for example, that I’ve lost the pitch because a competitor is more convincing on the thought leadership side and I think unfortunately the way the digital agency work is bought in the market. I have done all these things but probably the most suitable for the job wins the pitch. I think presentation is actually disproportionately weighted in the digital agency business and so I’d say that that policy of theory or mantra about doing rather than talking doesn’t necessarily help in terms of winning new business. And I actually think, don’t get me wrong am not bitter about that that’s life. But I would say that from the clients perspective, very often Mint and I think maybe as much as a quarter of our work is coming into situation where someone else hasn’t delivered what was expected of them and I do think anyone contemplating buying digital services should– everyone that they are considering appointing they should ask, you know I want to see something in the real world that you built that demonstrates you are capable of doing this. That isn’t a mockup, that isn’t a presentation or a proposal that is something that people are using every day because there is no barriers to entry to building stuff on the internet. You can do it in your spare time you can do it cheaply these days. You know if I was in their shoes I would want to see evidence that this person A, cares about the problem and B, he has solved similar problems themselves in the past because I don’t think there’s any reason or a kind of excuse not to at least try. Doesn’t obviously mean you are going to have a perfect match of what the client is trying to do and what the digital agency is trying to do but there should be something. I wouldn’t hire a writer at mint if they couldn’t point to something on the internet that they’ve written.

Marcus: So it’s kind of a bit of a trade off in terms of sales for I suppose the way that operations are run it has perhaps a bit of a negative impact on sales. But I suppose also within that there is kind of a edgy kind of touch like a positioning element to it. When I was reading the Mint Digital website it’s so different to how most agencies try to position themselves that I imagine it kind of has almost that nice impact on attracting a different kind of client or a client, as you say, that has perhaps gone through some bad situations with a previous agency that perhaps were very like and thought leaders so have you noticed such kind of an effect coming through?

Tim: Yes I have and that is very rewarding from to choose I suppose because it feels like we are useful and helping people. And it means that we have good relationships with our clients it means that our attention is very good because it’s like anything in a relationship, you don’t know on day one what someone like because one thing I kind of wish actually would happen; very often the digital agency space, a client would hire a digital agency for the first time to do a big job, if it works, overtime they might give them more smaller jobs. Maintenance or product development but in a way, it’s the wrong way around. It would be better if you could get used to working with someone when the stakes are lower and if it works out really well, you give increasingly large work only if it’s working out which is kind of how the real startup community works. So yes I can’t wave a magic wand. The way digital services are bought has been this way from as long as I can remember and I can’t change it on my own but it’s refreshing to hear what you’ve just said and I would like to think, the most important test is, Am I satisfied or are we satisfied meaning everyone at Mint that we are providing value for money, that we are solving problems and that we are making progress because if we are not then we are not going to be happy with ourselves and it’s important to us that we are.

Marcus: Yes that’s really interesting so Tm I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the team, so how many people are in the current Mint team?

Tim: So it’s around 18 in the team at the moment.

Marcus: Can you talk us through some of your kind of philosophies around building the team and is there sort of any intentional around keeping the team deliberately smaller? 18 people, that’s relatively small for an agency that’s working with the kind of clients that you guys have ?

Tim: Yes, there’s two things to have in mind here number one is that the size of our team fluctuates according to some of our ventures. So one of the hard things about the startup model is that you are continually
breaking up the band depending on the certain point in the cycle, we lose people to our own startups if they get funded if that makes sense?

Marcus: [laughs]Yes.

Tim: [laughs] I’ve left Mint to run one of our startups for two years and then come back so I kind of know what that’s like. So we have been bigger than we are but if we were a hundred people there’s two things I think become hard; first, is to ensure quality consistency and the second is being easy to maneuver. It’s good to be able to make decisions quickly, it’s good to be able to turn down clients because you are either not appropriate for the work because you just know that they are looking for some skills that you don’t have or you don’t want to work with them going back to one of your earlier questions for some other reason rather than have what I would describe as a sort of treadmill effect which is I’m now on the treadmill, the treadmill is moving faster which means that my life becomes increasingly panicked and anxiety driven and it means that I’m a little looser around some of my principles than I otherwise would be. So it is by design. Now all I have to say that doesn’t mean we don’t hire and in certain circumstances we would do so but yes I think it’s harder to do probably our model at a much bigger scale than our size. Actually at a bigger scale you might I mean you could conceivably get so big that you generate enough cash that you can venture but then you kind of its more like asset management you are really refocusing cash not thought scales or people but then you could use you balance sheet just to become a kind of a angel investor that’s a slightly different thing to what we do.

Marcus: So when you say 18 people on the team, is that just Mint Digital that’s not including the startups that have come to spun out of or have been acquired from Mint?

Tim: That’s right, yes.

Marcus: Okay in terms of your–I mean what are your kind of processes or philosophies around what you look for when you are hiring at Mint?

Tim: Step one is always around competence. We have extremely rigorous entry criteria and generally real tests but that’s code reviews, you might spend some time solving a problem with a candidate but yes we do have a crack at hands-on and a thorough recruitment policy kind of around competence and because we are quite a small group we do I mean we don’t have like a written policy around this but it’d be unlikely that anyone will be hired at Mint if one person who’ve met them in the recruitment process was a kind of no hire. So the first thing is competence. Other than that I think willingness and inclination is really underrated. It’s probably harder to measure than competence but I think it might be more important than competence other than extremes of incompetence by the way [laughs]. But on the basis that everyone gets to a certain level of competence ,most candidates do then willingness and inclination. And what we do is hard but we have much greater chance of success if the team is inclined and curious and experimental and hardworking and you know a lot of those other skills so we do look for those things too. I mean I like to think that we also have a pretty good culture and I’ve never advertise this because it’s the sort of thing that you can never say because most people having worked with us say that one of the most remarkable things about us is that we are nice ,I don’t know exactly what to do with that but I think we want to maintain that again it’s very important to us that we like not just most of the people that we work with but all of the people that we work with because it’s not that many of us and we all have to work together.

Marcus: Yes, so Tim before we move over to a couple of quick fire questions to you to wrap things up, I read somewhere that Mint’s investment in building this 64 startup has generated returns that are ten times higher than the average European VC. Can you maybe kind of deconstruct that a little bit?
Tim: Yes so we have been building our own startups probably for 8 years at the time that we did the calculation. It was approaching Christmas so I was working from home and historically people have either said, I love some of the startups that you guys have built or they have never had of the startups that we build that happens as well and that’s kind of all fine but the conversation that remain goes on around the kind of the merit of those startups. I don’t know like an interest in us or subjective kind of thing. And that’s fine but then there is a different type of conversation which occasionally people have asked which is how much money have you made out of it how well does it do? And we have never really sat down and calculated what our investment in them was and what our returns were so I thought it was a good thing to do so we basically added up all of the time and money that we had spent and then we looked at return. And return in our world is like we have created profitable startups that never raised venture capital so the return is a combination of the contribution that kind of comes back to the mother ship if you like plus any exits you may get so slightly different from how VC would calculate returns because the profits that in the VC don’t go to VC and that’s what pays the dividends which is unusual. So is a kind of matrix for calculating what our returns are and then just do an IRR calculation and then to compare it versus benchmark European venture capital which as an the benchmarks are occasionally published so that you can see how you are doing. And we found that our returns were ten times higher than the average European venture capitalists. Now there’s a lot of caveat that go with that market so number one we haven’t deployed anything like as much capital so you could argue that if we got lucky once early, then it’s kind of disproportionate and also in some cases we mark our investments to market which means if a company spun out of Mint we will take evaluation at the last round of financing which is exactly how VCs do it too. But again there’s still risk in terms of all those investments haven’t gone through a cycle or reached exit or anything like that yet. Yes, that’s what we did.
Marcus: That’s an incredible achievement. It’s such a great thing to achieve. The second thing I was wondering kind of how that actually works. From the team’s perspective, having these 64 startups, let’s go for a scenario. Let’s say I were to join Mint Digital tomorrow. What does it look like in terms of putting those ventures together? For new people joining the team, can they work on their own ventures or do they join an existing team or at any one time do you have multiple ventures or is everyone working on, I know that’s a couple of questions in one but just want to get a feel of what is the internal process for how you put these ventures together and then get them out into the real world?
Tim: The answer is clean-cut so if we take this scenario because the missing data points are if you join was there something you wanted to work on that was potentially interesting to Mint would be question number one. In most cases, in the past we tried to manufacture ideas and with mixed results I would say. So I think that it goes back to inclination. Is this something that you are genuinely interested in and you really want to solve a problem? So if you are in that instance then there is every chance that on the basis that certain individuals at Mint agreed with you, you would be allowed to at least explore that venture. But of course for most people most of the time that isn’t the case. And so we have this notion at Mint of a venture being on and that’s the word we use. And if a venture is on that means that it’s established that we’ll be working on it but it could be a new one or it could be an existing one. Now as time goes by, you learn more and more about what you are doing as time goes by. And in the seed stage, the earliest stage, it is much more a feeling than anything that can be defined in metrics. Metrics help, data helps, no question. But sometimes, the question isn’t I’m I making a hundred thousand pounds a week in revenue? The question is, do I feel more or less confident this week than I did last week? What have I done to improve this product and how is it being received? What’s my view on the size of the market, having now worked in that market for the last two months? Is it what I thought what it was? Let’s go back to the thesis we started with when we started talking about what having a venture is, venture How do we feel about that now, now that we actually have more data? Again unlike traditional startups, we fund these things almost by a drip based on the feeling that at the time, rather than very large intervals which is okay, here is money for the 18 months, come back and if everything looks rosy, we’ll give you series A. So it is soft but they are on to some of the specific questions that you ask, yes it is completely conceivable that we are working on more than one thing at once. Although I would say that if something looks like it’s really on and obviously there’s no on-ometer and it’s something that every week you work on it, it seems to get better and everyone is enthusiastic and you’ve been positively surprised or not surprised, even better, that everything was going positive, then I do think that in a world like Mint there’s limited resources. I’m not sitting on a massive balance sheet. So really and truly what we really need to do at that point is to start focusing on the one that we think has the best chance. But that creates a lot of problems because you find yourself having killer ideas or saying no to ideas. Again, comparing to the traditional venture capital market, if a venture capitalist says no to an entrepreneur, they never have to see each other again. In our world, we have to work together the next day. And so culturally, it’s a completely separate and different model. But I would say this that there is no real process in that we change our process as often as we find bugs in it and the feeling to us is much more important than any particular gauge or metric or defined path to doing this. Again going back to venture capital, as an Mint has better IRR than an average European venture capital on the certainty that it doesn’t have better IRR than the best European Venture Capitalist, probably nothing close to it. So there is an element of art and not science in this area and there’s obviously a lot of science too that, I think, helps the appreciation that the combination of both is the best approach.

Before we go on, if you are looking to grow your client base and capture more leads for your agency then I’d recommend checking out Leadformly. Leadformly is a lead generation tool run by yours truly, that enables you to upgrade the forms on your website to conversion optimized forms, that are going to increase your conversion rate and help you capture more qualifying leads from your website. Using Leadformly, we’ve seen agencies capture up to 700% more leads. So if you are interested in giving it a try we have a 14-day free trial that you can check out at leadformly.com. That’s l-e-a-d-f-o-r-m-a-l-y.com. Once again, that’s leadformly dot com.

Marcus: Okay Tim, what I want to do now as we wrap up is go through five quick-fire questions. They are just some real kind of quick questions. The first question that I have is, what is your number one book recommendation that you would recommend to other agency owners?

Tim: That’s hard because I haven’t read particularly read many books that are aimed at agency owners. But the one I would say anyone who runs a business whether it’s an agency or not should read is Give and Take by Adam Grant. I’d highly recommend that. I can tell you why if you want.

Marcus: Go on, give us the reason.

Tim: [laughs] Well, typical historic world view is that if you are generous in business, you get taken advantage of and Give and Take is really about how you can be generous and not only does it not decrease you chance of success, it increases them but with some important caveats. With that, I’d recommend you read the book.

Marcus: Awesome, what are two of your favorite tools that you use at Mint?

Tim: Two, Slack is not particularly new but it’s transformational as a tool. So yes, I love Slack. It’s not really a tool but we started working with Alexa recently which has opened up some opportunities and new way of thinking within Mint. So yes, Slack, Alexa.

Marcus: Awesome. What is one piece of advice which you would give to a business owner or an agency owner who is looking to go from six figures annual revenue up to seven?

Tim: Provide value for money. Don’t take on engagements for any reason other than you think you can really help the client and at the end, they will be delighted and punching the air that they hired you. If you don’t think that’s what’s going to happen then I think you might be making the you’ll find retention very hard so you need to really believe that you are the best person for that job.

Marcus: And on that note, what have you noticed are some of the biggest causes of client churn for agencies?

Tim: There’s two that springs to mind. Number one is that very often agencies solve too specific a problem. So they are not really aware enough or their clients entire strategic goals which means that when the very specific problem has been solved, there’s no work for the agency to do. I think, in the new age, digital agencies should try and help their clients succeed. That’s normally, to help them grow. But to do that effectively you need to know at the very top-level what the client’s trying to achieve, not just the sort of details specific piece of work. So I think that’s one thing in that once they’ve had their use, they are sort of shown the door because it’s not obvious to the client how they could be helpful in future. The second thing is this; there’s a lot of movement of some human capital within decision making jobs clients. The digital area, is an area where the job market is very fluid so there might be a new chief marketing officer joining the company and I think sometimes the agency could potentially be shown the door because the CMO who now has the decision making ability wants to work with someone they’ve worked with before almost regardless of what the incumbent has ever done. There’s nothing that digital agencies can do about that other than trying to discourage their key client from leaving them. [laughs]

Marcus: And last question is what’s next for Mint digital?

Tim: We’ve got some exciting new ventures that we are working on. An AI based venture which we’ve got working internally but haven’t shown the world yet. We are all excited about that. Maybe a fund, if you look at what we do, generally digital agency work does not attract very high margins. So your ability to generate large amounts of cash with which to build new ventures is limited and I have, I think even in the piece about our IRR and how good it is, I do wonder what would happen if we had more money because we’d be able to make bigger bets and bets on more things.

Marcus: Awesome, it’s time to wrap up Tim. So I just want to say a huge thank you for your time and for sharing all these insights with us. It’s been really really fascinating having you here. If people want to learn more about you or Mint digital, what’s the best way for them to find out a little bit more.

Tim: Go to the website or email me I guess, [email protected] and I’ll tell them all about you.

Marcus: Awesome. Thanks Tim.

Tim: Thank you.

Marcus: Thanks for listening to the episode of the 10X Your Agency Podcast. If you are interested in acquiring more leads for your business I’d like to invite you to a free webinar that I’ll be hosting on how to acquire 300% more leads from your website without increasing the traffic. In this webinar, I’ll be sharing how you can turn your website into a lead generating machine, four strategies on how you can boost your form submissions by 300% and much more. So if you are interested, all you need to do is go to Google, type in, Leadformly acquire more leads. That’s Leadformly spelt L-e-a-d-f-o-r-m-y acquire more leads and the landing page to register for the webinar should appear at the top. As I said it’s completely free and we run this webinar every single week. So once again, thanks for listening to this week’s episode and stay tuned for next week’s episode of the 10X Your Agency Podcast.