Video - John Readman on Bosco - a new business in 2020
VIDEO: 27:50
AUTHOR: John Readman
In this video short Robert talks to John Readman of Modo25 about his new business Bosco... started in the recession of 2020!
Why BOSCO and why now?
What does BOSCO do?
Challenging the normal
Which number to measure your marketing by?
NPS for digital marketing
Can agency people change their spots?
2021: connecting, USA, predictability and scale are the words!
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:16
Hello, welcome to GYDA talks. And I've got the wonderful John Redmond with me today from murder 25. And we've got a really great topic which we're going to try and try and unpick a bit. But first, John, launching a new technology. And that's what this is about really launching a new technology into a recession. Great timing or bad timing.
John Readman 00:42
Wow. Oh, absolutely madness, depending on how you look at it. And so we were committed to this as best we could have not done it. I think it's great timing. I think the tool we built wealth helped people come out of the recession. The other side. When I was studying the Manchester, one big exhibition, the prolific North exhibition, just four days before locked down, and there's nobody there and everybody was just locked down with looming locked down one or whatever it was. Yeah, that was a bit of a car crash a bit of a disaster that said, now, I'm very, very positive that our solution and technology will help retailers specifically come out the other side of this. And all the positivity that I read says all the best businesses were set up in a recession. And, and that's, that's, that's, that's you got to remain positive about these things, because otherwise you'll just give up.
Robert Craven 01:43
Okay, so that's quite a big bold statement helping people coming out of the recession. How do you think Bosco will help people?
John Readman 01:53
So are the Bosco philosophy. So I had this vision that we've got ourselves into a world, particularly agencies as well as our clients and the brands VITA is become a Google first world. And then it might be Google first, Facebook second, and nobody gets fired for buying Google clicks. Right? It's a bit like IBM in the 80s. And 1970s. Natives is like nobody gets fired for buying IBM. So I think we've got ourselves into this problem where nobody questions the Google budget, as long as it's sort of fits in with the very last target or the cost of acquisition, nobody sort of says, Well, where else could we spend our money? And I think there's this problem in the boardroom, that everybody's scared to challenge the CMO, or the head of digital or the agency with, well shouldn't be spending underground. And Google is that actually good idea. So what we wanted to do and to come back to answer the question is we wanted to give people this view of the whole horizon to say, well, actually, where could you spend your money? And where is going to give you the best return across all channels? Rather than keep spending more money in Google? Because if you ask you will waste my money. They will go, oh, funnily enough, give it to us. And if you end up mass, Facebook, the same question they go give it to us, everyone, and that's amazon or ebay. But my question to help a retailer, so where we could help retailers come out of this situation, there's a lot of retailers, let's take a paper Take, for instance, or retailer papers, maybe 5% of their business was online before this. I don't know what it is now, but I imagine it's a significantly larger percentage, and they probably had to reinvent that whole ecommerce proposition. But Paperchase? Well, they've got two options. I suppose they could either go and invest with a big agency, or they could try and learn how to do it themselves.
Robert Craven 03:43
Let me let me just stop you there. Because it's not a case of the agency is dead. Because agencies, many agencies, I'll rephrase that are simply the salesman of Google. In that fact.
John Readman 03:56
Yeah, we do get completely I've been a salesman of Google. And we've been informed lives. We've all had kickbacks from Google and everybody else. article this morning was someone trying to sell me an influencer platform. And the pitch at the end was all the good thing is that you get flexing kickback. And I'm like, Well, this is exactly what this is actually not what it's about. I don't think I think there's always we've had a separate conversation before about our agency do I think the agency model needs to be challenged? I don't think agencies will ever die, right? There's always going to be room for new innovative strategies. I think are you going to do more and more of the legwork in house? I think you will as I certainly SEO and PPC it's no longer a black art. It's you can learn how to do it and but those new strategies of thinking elements will be anyone agency but I think the bit we're trying to solve the Bosco is giving people pull enough data to challenge the norm of where should I be investing my budget? So if I've got 100 grand budget demands, and where should I be investing it. And I think most people, if you are honest, if you were in the house most CFOs, or most CEOs, they wouldn't actually know if where they spend it gives them good value for money or not. And I think that's what I'm trying to surface and, and they're what sort of prompted all this, there's, there's just too much data. We're just awash with digital analytics and data. And nobody really knows which number should they hang their hat on. And even if you went to speak to a seasoned veteran in all of this, they'd start quoting loads of different numbers, I feel it's about traffic as well click the rate, it's about conversion rate on this, but that, so we've, within all of this, we've created an index, which gives everybody one number to obsess about. So they've got the Bosco index. And that gives them a score of their digital marketing performance against all their against their three closest competitors. And then that gives the board something to obsess about, but it's a number. And it's like a yardstick. So we're hoping that that becomes like the NPS, the Net Promoter Score for digital marketing. So there's now one number that is the same ruler, but I don't know, we'll see. We'll see. And hopefully, it can help people make better decisions.
Robert Craven 06:33
That's, so I spent an hour this morning on zoom with my marketing director for trying to figure out what KPIs we should be using for for marketing. And every time I said, Well, I think we should be looking at that my little brain said, Yeah, but we can gamify that we can, if we want to get that number up, we can just go and buy. Yeah, you can go to Bangalore and buy 1000 clicks, you can buy 1000 links. That's yeah, it's nearly everything you touch. I really agree with you knew everything you touched upon in terms of how do we know whether I'm getting big bang for my money? Because my money is, it can be gamified, you know, until you actually get to the sales bit. How do you how do you how do you know whether it's views? How do you know whether it's number of engagements, quality of engagements, number of phone calls, number of inquiries. And I actually, ironically, I actually said, you know, like, I don't think we're gonna get to one number, it's going to end up being a cafeteria style with a big finger in the air. And I'm saying no, it needs to be the knees with all these numbers. And I'm not prepared to have 75 metrics, there needs to be, you know, one or two numbers that we can look at, which will tell us what we're doing right or wrong.
John Readman 07:54
Yeah, and that's another thing. Also, if you think about a lot of business, still, at the senior level, is run by people who will openly admit they're not digital natives. They're not, they have an amount of experience where they haven't necessarily adopted digital in the same way that other people have, and an agent experience where it's, they're still learning all of this. And some of them might not want to admit, they don't know what they don't know. And I think that is a type of what we're trying to do is open up people's eyes, and they make it easy for them to see data to make better decisions. And then ultimately, I suppose, enable them to connect their data to forecast the future. That's really where the next bit is. And I think what we've sort of learned in quite a short space of time is, the opportunity of building a products versus running an agency is a very different beast. A lot harder than I thought it was gonna be.
Robert Craven 08:57
This is where I started getting interested in because, you know, so many people have been invited by by the platform that they work with, you know, to stop being stopping agents and start being a software house. And I guess part of the reason for that is because if you've got a piece of software, which works with my platform, in the UK, and you and I can go off to my market in Nigeria, or Venezuela, or wherever it is, take your software, and we can just dump it. And it's fantastic for you because you scale up and it's fantastic for me because we scale up and everyone and everyone's happy but there is there is this mission, you know, this encouragement that everyone should become more of a software house they should be using. They shouldn't just be pretending machine learning they should actually be incorporating incorporating AI and machine learning into what they're doing. And I've no more than several agencies that have had a crack at writing software. range diseases. It first appeared on the Gantt chart, I think is the phrase.
John Readman 10:05
Yeah, I think, well, we were always gonna build this, it became very apparent the amount of when, when we had investment to do it. So we had a significant amount of investment when we set the business have to do to do this. And it was always part of the plan. The bit I think I'd underestimated was then when we got around to the launch and the marketing and everything, it was almost like, oh, actually, this is a whole separate business. But then looking forward when we start looking at the revenue streams, and start looking at what is potentially a recurring monthly fee. So it's a bit like the agency conversation you had when people said, well, I've got to stop doing project based, I've got to start doing retained. Right. And we've all had those conversations with different agency owners, right. Let's try and get more what can we sell? That's a month to retain service. So can we sell monthly SEO cameras on Monday, BBC, rather than just doing projects? Right? So that's, and then this is almost like the next stage on which is, well, can we build something once and sell it many times. Because actually, if you can, or if you have something in your portfolio, only that you can turn into recurring revenue in software, that is then I suppose truly scalable. And I think where we are, where other agencies can do this is, if we were just a software company, setting up some software to sell to brands and agencies, you're just some guys who have some software, but we're coming at it from the point of view of practitioners. So this we've got a bit of a not a bit, a lot of experience and credibility and why this actually means. So it's the combination of years of experience and knowledge and the data and the software. So I think something that I've been listening to and hearing quite a lot is every because it's all about the people, right? Agencies voice, it's all about people, then you've got the tech guys go now it's all about the tech, then now you've got all these data guys going is all about the data. And actually, I think it's about all three, right? Because if you've got the data, you need the tech to work on the data, but you also need the people who can work all of it. Right. And so you it's almost like the three parts to the stool. Right? I don't think you can just have amazing tech. And I don't think just by having clever people anymore, or just having loads of data. I think you need all three.
Robert Craven 12:27
Well, I'm seeing something slightly different, which is it's we've got a beach ball in front of us, and I'm seeing the red, yellow, and the pink green and white one.
John Readman 12:37
What books that's that's from the famous book, is it.
Robert Craven 12:41
It's in a sumo book, isn't it? Awesome. Again, Paul McGee. Yeah. So I see coming out of recession honestly, quite frankly, Quicken is coming out of recession, majority of agents who are saying how can I be? How can we have it like it was before when I was an agency, when we now realise the good times? How can we return to being because we're a performance agency, or we're an SEO agency, we're a Content Agency. And that's what we want. And they fail to realise that one of the great recession has accelerated digital sort of five years on. And secondly, that customers now want different things. So this is actually I see a fantastic opportunity to do different stuff. But most agencies aren't capable of doing that because of the original technical beginning. So it's the same conversation, which says, the ROI is three times better from YouTube Advertising than PPC advertising. So why don't you go and do that, and everyone kind of goes, because we do PPC, yeah, I understand that. But you could do YouTube Advertising three times more effective, you make three times more money, the client three times happier. What's wrong with that? It's like, you don't seem to understand I'm a car driver and you're asking me to drive a motorbike. It's just, it's not what I do. Whereas what you're saying is, as a definition of entrepreneur spots, opportunities and gathers together the resources to make it happen. You're in your entrepreneurial mindset, you see an opportunity in you go about assembling the resources to make it happen, as opposed to saying, but but I'm, I'm I'm a PB is a hammer and it's therefore it has to be a nail and I think that that many of the agencies that are going to do really, really one of the ones who who are entrepreneurial in that sense of recognising opportunity as opposed to because otherwise you know, we we'd still be doing everything by fax. You know, if, if, if we'd have had furloughing in the last recession, and they'd furloughed, all those fax companies. We still have fax machines and the world's moved on and I think we need to move on and recognise what it is our clients want. I think where the opportunities
John Readman 15:02
And I think, I think an agency's responsibility is, in my mind, certainly digital agencies with competencies to help their clients make more money from the internet. Right? It's not help their clients spend more money on Google. All right. But I think a lot of clients, a lot of agencies, because of the way, and also some agencies have sold out because they become the reseller, which is exactly when you say, to Google go, can you resell our, our advertising platform, please? Can you resell this? Can you resell that? Because the other thing is, it's and then you're sort of conflicted, because you can't then go out into the world and say, Well, okay, clients, we needed to split, you should be spending more money on Amazon, because we're reselling Google's platform, you're then conflicted. It's really tricky. But it's, I think there's gonna be loads of opportunities for agencies out. And for brands, I think, the people who'd have thought you'd have been able to get tins of beans delivered straight to house of mines. I've just, I've just ordered via direct from BrewDog direct on their website, like a normal transaction. And 10 years ago, people are gonna go, you'd never going to go online and order for weeks with a bit and get it delivered to your house. But that seems perfectly normal that.
Robert Craven 16:16
Yeah, and I think that, and that's my point, really, is that there is just so much opportunity out there. And I guess I worry about people looking at looking at the 2019 business plan. And I'm kind of rehashing it for 2021 in the hope that that's okay. Because I think everything has everything that's shifted, you know, I mean.
John Readman 16:42
W ell, yeah, I think you've got the world has changed. And we're no, we're never gonna go back Do I think? And I can't. I don't think it was we I had this conversation with someone the other day, and they're like, is it all gonna stay on Zoom forever? Or teams or whatever? No. But is it all gonna go back face to face? Well, no, I, we're certainly going to end up doing more zooming than we used to do more teams than we used to do. But we will end up going back to do some things face to face. But that is going to happen because we're humans, we'd like interaction. And we like having a beer. And we like doing. We'd like that spontaneity of events and this that, neither is it going to happen overnight. So I think what we've got to probably think about is, well, how can we take advantage of this new world rather than trying to think well, I want it to go back to normal because those that's that's changed now. And so I'll give you an example. And I think you've done the same and this sounds really daft. But I've kitted all my team up with. So we've upgraded everybody's broadband, right? And we've paid for that upgrade. And we've also, for the pitch team, guys, we've got the proper mics, and we've got the proper likes, and we've got them proper cameras, because you think about well how much time and effort for us, that's a return ticket to London, which you'd pay to go on a site. But everybody's up well, I'm not, I'm not gonna buy them an HD camera, and I'm not gonna get them some lives. But you'd have paid for them to get the train to go to the pitch. And I just think we've got to set it set ourselves up for success fairly. Well loved it. But I could I could talk about this for hours. But I think I think fundamentally, all agencies have an opportunity now to look at this new world and think well hang on, could we or maybe they don't want to be a tech company. But I think there's there's still a huge opportunity to take your knowledge and distil that down into something that you could you could you could licence.
Robert Craven 18:42
Okay, so just going back to Bosco for a moment, because I'd like to just to just like to go through that a little bit further. In the old world you would have, you'd have invited me to a launch party or two, you'd have one in Manchester, you'd have one in London, you've got maybe got some kind of a PR company involved. You have stories about it all over the place. I might have received a nice goodie pack from you kind of enticing me to get involved with it. You've got all your mates saying you know bigging up, you know, plenty of food, plenty of alcohol, plenty of meetings, plenty of discussion. None of that. Yeah. So so how how is that just because you're you're selling a piece of software? Or is that because you're doing that in COVID? And how has it been different? And what have been the upsides and downsides,
John Readman 19:34
Yeah, so this is you're absolutely right. We would have launched after Well, we'd originally planned to launch at retail week life. Right? So we were going to launch the software at retail we live and we'd we'd already paid for the stand. We paid for some speakers. We were flying our data scientist over from Australia. And this was six months in the planet. Right? So we started talking about this in February, and we're What was that launch date? Isn't the launch So it was going to be in October, retail week live. We're talking about in February. And we were like, right, this is we're well ahead. We're going to be I don't know, seems week to week live Nomad Fest was one of these events. They all anyway, we had an event in the calendar in October, we were all geared to that. And it became very apparent by May, that these events weren't going to happen. Everybody was still trying to sell stuff. I had a cold call from sales guy trying to sell me an event in September in May. I might your events not happening, right. It's just don't bother. And it was it was at the Excel. And I'm like the XL is a hospital. Right here. Nobody's going to any events in September the XL. You're crazy. Anyway. So going back to answer your question, what we're actually doing is focusing on partners and selling alongside people. So our biggest thing we have is you can type your domain into into Bosco, you can go to ask bosco.io type at your retail domain, press a button, put in a few rudimentary targets, and it gives you a score and it also breaks down how should you invest your budget? Where should you invest your budget? What is the maximum budget you could spend it in by category? So it's really and it sucks this data in from probably 15 different data sources instantly. So I suppose now with the demise of things like hitwise, having that access to competitor data is hugely important. So we've been looking at, well, how can we launch this? Right? So you've got things like, right, LinkedIn, you've got Facebook, and we've got all the things we know, like paid media, we can do that. So we're an agency, we can do that ourselves. But also, we need to build up trust. And we need to build authority. So what we've actually been doing, Robert is partnering with the lot of the big media partners out there in both in to provide them unique, interesting data, because we've now got our own data repository and content. So we can give a view on so what one of the partnerships we're doing is with internet retailing, so the internet retailing of the internet retailing, top 500. All right, so in general and his team have got the top 500. And they've done it this way. All right, we can actually batch run all of those who Bosco and go Well actually, it's not that way, it's this way. And here's why. And we can give some unique perspective on that. So hopefully, and then we can partner with those guys, ultimately, in a way that gives them some interesting you unique content for their readers, and helps promote us. So we put a lot of time and effort into producing some content. And then hopefully, that also promotes us. And then we're going to do the same with people like imrg, the drum in America, internet retailer, Social Media Marketing World. And we're almost going to become our own mini In fact, we had a meeting about it this morning content hub to produce content using our own data to give our partners who will then promote us, if that makes sense. Alright, so I don't see a world where we're going to be in the short term. Going down, I mean, big stands or big events, I just don't see that. Right now. We tried to do.
Robert Craven 23:18
Recycle that you can recycle the money that you would have put in into into other creative, different things.
John Readman 23:24
I'm actually I'm better employing a really smart grad who can write well, to write content. And when we pause that we can then give the drum to put on their website. And the drums have because they get some unique, interesting content. And we hopefully will get some leads. So so that's what we're doing. We did do a little bit of a webinar to launch it. We got a couple 100 People that was quite interested. We got a few few signups. But yeah, it's different. But I suppose we I was trying to work out next how we launch into America.
Robert Craven 23:58
So move on to my final question, which is, what do you think 2021 hold for you?
John Readman 24:05
Well, we, yes, a Bosco is currently the index on the media planning kit. And then the next stage is connect so people can will be able to click a button connect all the Google Analytics and AdWords and then it will forecast where you should be accurately with your own data where you should invest your money. And that also is going to be a white label for agencies. So I hope we'd go to the office more. That's one thing where I'd like to be able to do next year. And yeah, hopefully, I think we're just at this tipping point now where we're getting what we would see product market fit. So people are logging on, they're giving us their data. Next week, we launched the part where they actually could give us some money. So and it's about I think how Having having that faith that we can just come in log on the computer in the morning, and we've had 25 people sign up and give us some money. That will be a really interesting point. And then I suppose, how do we scale that? And then what does how we scale that we will find out in January? And yeah, well, we've just received an innovation grant. So we've the government has given us some, it's a grant for innovation. So they obviously saw something in this. And we're going to use that money to scale up and recruit more people faster. The reason I say January is the people start in January, because the grant money lands in January, and then we can really push it a lot harder. But I'm normally really bullish, but this year is sort of taking a bit of the edge off, I think, because I think you've a fool if you try and predict what's going to happen now.
Robert Craven 25:53
But the thing is, though, it's exciting.
John Readman 25:56
It's very exciting. Also, one thing Robert Nasir said you'd look at my mom, right? And this is my mother's an analogy. She used it. She used to be, she used to never buy anything online, ever. Right? But this lock down. She's got into buying groceries or clothes. And I don't think she will change. Right? There's my mom is not alone. So there is now I think you said five years Digital's accelerated. So more people are shopping online, more people have got more data, they need to make more decisions, and they need more information to help them make decisions. So having useful dashboards to help you make decisions, who are only going to be a good thing. So yeah, I think the future is great. I'm quite excited. Hopefully, we can create a lot of jobs, we can give a bit of money to charity, and we'll see what happens. Who knows. Brilliant.
Robert Craven 26:50
Yeah, what a great place to start. Because not not the first of the interviews, which people got 2021 It's gonna be exciting. I mean, you know, I guess my final thoughts really, if you've got a choice between the roundabout and the roller coaster, you know, I'd rather be on the roller coaster. Way more exciting.
John Readman 27:07
Yeah, no, definitely. Definitely. And I suppose it'd be it'd be good to catch up in three or four months time, and we can report back and say, Well, yeah, it was good, bad, indifferent. Or hopefully we can. We can give you some numbers, and that'd be exciting.
Robert Craven 27:23
Right. Well, we'll be watching you, John. Thank you so much I've ever greatly entertaining, greatly challenging, and very thought provoking. Thanks a lot for being a great guy. Good speech again. Thanks so much.