Growth Hacks from a Top UK Managed IT Service Provider

Jim James: 0:23

Hello and welcome to this episode of the unnoticed entrepreneur, young entrepreneur. He's running a company called Everon in the IT services business which is being voted one of the top 50 IT managed services companies in the UK. Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie Marshall: 0:39

Hello, thanks for having me.

Jim James: 0:41

Well, it's my pleasure. We're going to go to Leeds Sunny Leeds, just sort of in the North Northwest do you call it Northwest or North East? I mean the Leeds Northeast, northeast. Okay, so Leeds is a company across from Manchester and a beautiful, sunny part of the world. At Leeds great soccer team and, jamie, you've been running Everon and you're joining me on the show because we're going to talk about how you've been building the Everon brand organically with your business partner servicing B2B tech clients. So we're going to talk about how you've discovered niching and the importance of niching and building a difference, and also why you're sending people chocolate brownies across town. But, jamie, we're going to learn a lot from you about how you're building a business. Plus, we're going to, I think, talk a little bit about some tech like pipe drive and AI. So, jamie, welcome, tell us a little bit about Everon and then tell us how have you been building the brand of your tech business.

Jamie Marshall: 1:38

So yeah, everon, we're a managed IT company, our managed services company, based in Leeds. We have clients all around the UK, but we started up North, as you mentioned, and then kind of expanded from there. We specialize in working with regulated industries. So that's financial, not profits, legal kind of stuff, and essentially we've been probably working as a managed service provider for good for years before we realized we needed to niche down and we kind of work with brands in our own Leeds to help them kind of deliver more benefits from their technology. Basically.

Jim James: 2:18

And Jamie, so I'm just sharing for those people that are watching and those people that are listening here. You recognize as one of the best 50 best managed IT companies in the channel next awards recently, so congratulations for that, and you've also been shortlisted for awards at the Global Business Teach Awards. Now one of the things that comes across looking at your website is that you really know what you're doing, and you've mentioned about being in a niche and focusing. Why did you decide to niche and what was the process and who did you decide to niche on and why?

Jamie Marshall: 2:55

So, yeah, we used to kind of be more of a everyone to sorry, everything to everyone, style IT company. We didn't really say no to a lot if it was tech related and it worked for us and the client. We were trying to do it and the problem was we were kind of a jack of all trades and a master of none. When we kind of were learning about our industry or we'd been in it a few years and we were kind of meeting different people in there, we realized that for what we kind of wanted to do and the way we wanted to grow, regulated industry would be a better target market for us. One of the reasons in particular we chose regulated industry is because the more tightly governed, the forced interchange more often and the kind of unregulated business or industry. So one of our ethos that everyone is to be forward thinking and continuing improvement, so that in itself lends itself perfectly to working within tightly governed regulated industries. And then, as a sort of happy accident, we kind of looked through our current client base and the legal sector was actually probably one of our biggest verticals already. So we already knew about some of the case management systems. We knew some of the kind of pain points and things that matter to them. So we kind of just then built out on that and it's not really a case that if an ideal client walked towards us but they weren't regulated industry, we'd turn them away. But we don't actively go and seek to work with those brands and because we can do a better job or add more value for those in regulated industry, and I love that point that you make the city feel like the macro market dynamic of being regulated means they have to change.

Jim James: 4:30

Does that mean that they get a budget allocation internally but also maybe some government fund that boosts the budget for the work that they can do with everyone?

Jamie Marshall: 4:41

Not necessarily. It obviously depends on the industries. So your nonprofits generally have a government grant or an income that they have to kind of spend and use in certain ways. But for a lot of the kind of legal and financial companies we work with, it's on them to decide how much spend they're going to have. We anticipate because the fines and things like that are higher for regulated companies that people would more likely have a bigger budget to spend anyway, because the more aware of the kind of pains that would come from data breaches or not keeping set standards, so that kind of is more of a factor for our client versus to we need to keep spending, we need to keep moving forward and that kind of stuff.

Jim James: 5:22

Yeah, I love that. I think that's really really smart. Now, another thing that I'm impressed by what you're doing is the insights and the resources, because one of the sort of tendencies for companies to try and just promote themselves all the time, but you really seem to be focusing on education. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about your strategy, because we can see on the website, for example, you've got an IT energy cost calculator and you've got a business downtime cost calculator, for example. Do you want to just tell us about those calculators that you've built and how you use those to drive conversations with your clients?

Jamie Marshall: 6:03

Yeah. So I mean again, just before we probably start on the calculators, the ethos we have internally has been transparent and open and kind of working with someone to achieve a set goal. So educating people is already a big part of that, and our culture here and the calculators came about from the need to show people what something would look like or would cost them without them kind of having that insight straight away. So the IT energy cost calculator, for example obviously we all know about the energy crisis and the kind of economies behind the energy costs over the last 12, 18 months. What people probably didn't necessarily realize was that older IT equipment would use a lot more energy and therefore cost people a lot more than newer IT equipment. So this idea came about of how could we kind of show people what a modern day office setup would look like using real life devices, where people just put in the number of devices they have and it gives them the weekly costs, it gives them the monthly costs, the yearly costs. They can then compare that to what they're spending currently and then they can see a deficit between obviously keeping alive these old antique computers to switch into more modern day equipment. And again, there's no kind of sales pitch around it. It was more a case of just being open and honest and having that chat about all this kind of costs spiraling, all these extra costs businesses are having, not just with energy but with kind of everything at the minute. Here's a maybe a quick one for you guys. Use the calculator, see what you can kind of do.

Jim James: 7:40

Yeah, I think that's fantastic. I've just used the calculate the running cost of your IT systems and I just put in a standard configuration for an office, just with sort of 10 people in it maybe, and you've shown a savings at over a thousand pounds just for the standby costs. That's just the number that would be generated by things staying on overnight. A thousand pounds is just spent by companies. It's just bleeding like leakage from a pipe. So really really helpful. I love that. I've done that before, jamie, so I think that's really really intuitive there to use as well. Now you've talked about the content you've got on the website. You've also got a body of Articles. Now, you're not a huge team, I know, but also you're tech guys, so have you become, you know, fantastic authors and copywriters in the spare time, jamie? How are you getting all the content done?

Jamie Marshall: 8:44

No. So we work with a few kind of marketing content feeds within our industry. So that's one of the ways we help to generate some content. So some of the stuff that we produce that's really intense to create, we actually take from a marketing company that specializes to work within the IT sector and then we sometimes use AI and things like that to kind of reimagine it or twist it to kind of make it fit our cultural values, if it's not a perfect fit. So we do a lot of that with content that's two time resource heavy for us to create internally. Some things we do obviously try like some of the things on my LinkedIn and some of the quicker kind of content pieces we'll create, but we have basically a brand values and a culture piece that we share with anybody. Or we kind of run past the content we create or the content we adapt, let's say, before we put on the website. So it has to follow that transparent, educational, being open and honest approach. We wouldn't necessarily put something out there to scare people. I know there's a lot of. Is it food, fear, uncertainty and doom? They call it content which we try and avoid doing. We want people to engage with us because they're really interested in what we're doing and, if I'm honest, kind of goal or what we feel happens is we will show someone something. One percent of people might go out and do it themselves, but the majority of people will either not try it in the first place and just ask us to do it for them, or they'll start doing it, get stuck and then need some help. So we're just trying to be that kind of person that's always there and available to help, rather than kind of ramming something down someone's throat.

Jim James: 10:23

And I can see here, on your website as well, a lot of transparency, which is interesting because you've got about pricing here and you've got help desks. You've got access to two phone numbers and online chat. John, just tell us a little bit about your attitude to service, because you've got your plans online, you've got the prices online. You've really made it very transparent. Just tell us how are you doing that from, if you like, the admin side, because what most people are afraid of is you know, if you've got a free phone number, how do you answer it after office hours, for example? So take us through what you're doing there.

Jamie Marshall: 11:07

So yeah, in terms of the admin side, it is obviously hard sometimes because you get a lot of requests that we're either not aware of or we don't have agreements in place. But that kind of comes from the culture we have within the team and we have a big emphasis on documentation internally. So we have a whole system called IT Glue that manages all of our documentation and we have SOPs, standard operating procedures pretty much everything we can. Obviously, we continually developing them, or there's times when a scenario will occur and we don't have a process in place for it. But because we have this continuing improvement e-force, what happens is, if a particular scenario occurs, somebody calls up and they want something we have. We don't have a process for. We don't have an understanding of the first time. We do it, we'll document and learn it. The next time that scenario happens, we've got a ready-made process and, yeah, there might need evolving, but we're not starting from zero all the time. Don't get me wrong. It is a big overhead sometimes to do that and keep people up to date in the team and things like that, but it is just the approach of being open and transparent which fits the cultural values we have as a company. That I think is important. We're completely open and honest on the website and the pricing one was not a boner contention. But when we first were deciding whether to do it or not and we asked a few people, we got such difference in opinions, some people being like yes, 100%, do it, lots of people saying no, don't do it, and there's no clear kind of it's right or wrong. So we just went with what felt right for us as a company.

Jim James: 12:39

Jamie Marshall, co-founder of Everont and Leeds. I think that's absolutely fantastic and commendable because you're removing the mystique. So, jamie, that's wonderful. Now just tell us then, with your on-site help desk. I would just like to ask you about that, because many people struggle with that. You know, me included. I have a sales IQ into my chat on my website and I have it and comes on my phone, but there's always reluctance to have those because people are saying, well, who's going to answer it out of ours? What's your policy? Do you outsource the help desk that's on the chat on the website to someone?

Jamie Marshall: 13:20

So during office hours it's mined by the team. Surprisingly, we don't actually get that many contacts through it. We have some other mediums that clients can use, so similar to live chat, another kind of portal that they tend to use more Outside of office hours or outside of contracted hours. For clients we work with an outsourcing partner who have a kind of follow the submodel, so they have the eight hours covered by somewhere in Florida and then somewhere in New Zealand for the eight hours. So if we do have a client that wants 24 seven or we get inquiries outside of the office hours, it goes to those overflow teams. It is company called Uptime who are based. Well, the HQ is in Crawley Townsend.

Jim James: 14:01

Oh, ok, from Sussex. That's great. So it's always useful to know these solutions that companies and entrepreneurs like you, jamie Marshall, have found that others can use as well. In terms of this question, I have to ask that is always uncomfortable for people, but is there something that you found hasn't worked? Is he being built in the Everon brand?

Jamie Marshall: 14:26

We've all got experiences where we've done something we look back on and go, oh, yes, I think in the early days of us learning about marketing and sales and how we needed to kind of move outside of just the word of mouth marketing we were using at the time, we were kind of shiny shiny approach. So we went down the route of doing some LinkedIn paper clicks, some Google paper clicks, some kind of different marketing methods and strategies, but we didn't stick at any of them for really long enough for them to see a kind of benefit or a return and we also kind of just picked one and did one at once, so our lead and buy and cycle could be anywhere kind of from nine months to 12 months plus. We only kind of spent six months on each different test, which was clearly never long enough for it ever to generate a return. And I also think that doing what we do and you're not going to get a sale from just one video or one advert that somebody's seen it's a collection of touch points and a kind of consistent been front of mind and doing the right things approach. So we were probably really naive in thinking that spending three thousand miles a month on Google ads was going to generate X in a matter of weeks, and then we were probably wrong to be disappointing when it clearly didn't work. It was all we were doing.

Jim James: 15:45

You've got a couple of really interesting points in there. One is that the buying cycle of your customers Needs to be a really leading factor.

Jamie Marshall: 15:56

Yeah, I mean back then we didn't use the sales tool we use now, so we didn't really have an idea of how long it actually was. We did know it was longer than probably most industries. We were kind of giving you a metric, like I just did. It's only since we've kind of grown and like we're a bit more developed with the systems we use, that we now can give you those stats and we know how long those things take. So we use Pack drive right now for sales and our kind of pipeline. So that gives us the age of all the deals. So that's one of the reasons why we know exactly how many. It also gives us kind of metrics on how many deals we win versus lose and all those kind of metrics around conversion. And then we use as a kind of marketing automation tool to feed their leads into that user system called Force24, where I think it leads based on an open based company and they do all our marketing automation and point scoring and lead scoring. So only when certain triggers are met or certain contacts deemed to have reached certain points because either they've been on the website a few times, they've engaged with emails or some social posts does it then go into our pipe drive system for kind of a more personal interaction.

Jim James: 17:04

Fascinating and it's great the way you've used technology, as one would expect. Actually, of course, you are in technology integration and support as well. Jamie, as an entrepreneur in your own right, how are you building your own brand?

Jamie Marshall: 17:18

I kind of want to grow Jamie Marshall as the face of everyone. The way I'm going about that is to be as much of a people person as I can, to be as personal as I can across as many different mediums as I can. So one of the reasons I'm doing this podcast is to help people understand a little bit about everyone, but also to get to know me a little bit. We do a lot of kind of different things. Like I spoke at an event last week, all the content we do, if it's related to people, I might have a bit on there, but we kind of trying to take a really personal approach to all the marketing and everything we're doing. And because I've sailed cycles so long, it's about me understanding and developing relationships with prospects in the hope that when they do have an opportunity that we can participate in, I'm front of mind because we've got a long established relationship and they know me as an individual, so that trust and authority I've built up will all likely be passed to everyone for them handing over their IT systems or their support.

Jim James: 18:19

Wonderful, jamie, great, great initiative there. Now my final question is always one activity that you think really moves the needle, something a little bit different maybe than we've talked about already, that you've been using forever on in Leeds there.

Jamie Marshall: 18:36

Yeah. So I guess, following on from that personal touch, we have a really kind of shock and awe approach with a something we call an impact box. So we have these really nicely branded ever on boxes that we fill with a tiny bit of ever on material so maybe 20%, but even then it's educational material, it's not sales material and then when we find out about prospects something really personal and we then fill the box with something related to that. So an example I can give you is I learned about a company that I'd love to work with, just based outside of Leeds. I loved the culture and everything they were doing and really wanted to start to develop a relationship with them. And it happened that on one day the MD of that company told a story on LinkedIn about he'd been having a interview with a potential new staff member and his mom had seen the coffee shop he was in, sent over some brownies to his table, and he talks about how it's really embarrassing and it was supposed to be a professional thing, but then his mum had sent over these brownies. So I googled all the different brownie shops or places by brownies and leads, found the ones with the best reviews. Fulfilled this box full of brownies with a tiny bit of ever-on material and then just a handwritten letter explaining. I heard this story and these were supposed to be the best brownies and I'd love to basically just say hi and get to know him. And that's turning to obviously developing our relationship with them and we're starting to work with them a little bit on one of the kind of foundations they work with, so hopefully that will eventually lead into a little bit more with them.

Jim James: 20:05

That is a sweet strategy, jamie. Well done. That's a fantastic story. Thank you so much. Now, jamie Marshall, if people want to find out more about you and everyone, where can they do that?

Jamie Marshall: 20:17

Obviously, our website is everoncouk, so that's E-V-E-R-O-Ncouk. There's actually a book of time slot with me on there, so if you want to have 15 minutes chat, you can do that. Otherwise, my email address is jamie at everoncouk, or the numbers and all that sort of stuff are on the website or LinkedIn as well. So, yeah, rich art, I'm happy to have a chat and yeah, get to know people.

Jim James: 20:42

Good one, and it's been wonderful to get to know you today, jamie, really inspired by the sort of positivity and the transparency that you're leading your company with. So thank you so much for sharing that today.

Jamie Marshall: 20:53

No problem. Thank you for having me.

Jim James: 20:55

It's been my pleasure. Well, we've been listening to Jamie Marshall, who is the co-founder of a company called Everon, which is an IT services company. We've been learning the benefits of niching and how they've very cleverly understood that regulated industries must change and therefore they release budget for IT and compliance, so a really smart way of identifying your niche. Also, you know, learn from him about automation, which is great, but also the authenticity of education and providing information for clients rather than promotion for potential customers. So love those messages and sure that you'll have enjoyed them also. So, if you have, please do share them with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. If you enjoyed the show, please do rate it on your player, because it also really helps everybody to know about the show. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.