Building a 20-person Lifestyle Agency, with Gareth Hoyle

Episode 12 • 8th September 2026 • Lifestyle is a Plan • Kelly Molson

Kelly Molson

Hey, I'm Kelly. How you doing? Welcome to "Lifestyle Is A Plan," a podcast for founders who are done with the growth hustle.

Kelly Molson

I'll be chatting to creative founders, agency advisors, and all kinds of brilliant people, sharing real stories and practical tools to help you design an agency that supports your life, not takes it over. You'll learn about unconventional agency models, incredible lifestyle agencies, and the choices that you have to build your agency exactly on your terms.

[Kelly Molson]

I've been really looking forward to talking to you because you're the first agency founder that I've seen speak at a high-profile conference about the lifestyle agency route. There's loads of lifestyle agencies out there, but you are the first person that you've put it to the forefront of everyone's minds. So tell me about Marketing Signals, your agency.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. So we've been trading for nearly 20 years. We've been trading under the Marketing Signals brand for 13, 14 years now, I think. Longest I can remember.

[Gareth Hoyle]

We literally just do search, so SEO, PPC, GEO now, because obviously AI is ubiquitous. We are a team of... Well, when we first started talking about this, we were a team of about 30. We're now a team of about 20 thanks to Claude. But we'll go on to using the tools to make your life easier. And we have, at the moment, I think 19 or 20 projects on the go. So we work with mid-market to enterprise. Our average client's been with us four-ish years. Our average staff tenure is five-ish years.

[Gareth Hoyle]

We're probably quite boring in terms of growth trajectories and... But it's just how, as will come out in the next hour, how I run my business, really. It's a cash-generating machine that I do other stuff with the money. And a lot of the stuff that-- We're a serious business. We turn over well over seven figures a year, and we make a decent margin on that, and we have clients that you will have heard of. We just have a different approach to business management, I suppose. But yeah, that'll come out in the next hour, I'm sure.

[Kelly Molson]

Yeah. So it's the approach that I'm really interested in, and I think that there's a couple of things that when I... I was gutted I wasn't able to get to the Hackers Conference that you spoke at, but I was really interested in the topic and the summaries that I saw after that. Because I think there is this assumption that a lifestyle agency is small in some way, and I think sometimes that's because founders of those types of agencies probably want a bit less stress, so there's an assumption less people, less stress, okay? But you are not. So like you said, when we first started talking, you were a 30-plus team, and still 20-plus team is overwhelming for a lot of people thinking about that route.

[Kelly Molson]

So that's one thing that I'm really interested about. But then the other thing is this whole 2 million turnover. So again, you have got a really kind of solid take on the financial side of stuff and growth, but it's not growth for the sake of it. And I guess I kind of want to know how did you set out to do this? Did you set out strategically to build a lifestyle agency, or were you kind of on that scale exit path and just went, "Actually, that's not what I want. I'm just going to run this as a cash cow?"

[Gareth Hoyle]

I've always been a bit lazy, I suppose.

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

So trying to-- Well, I think it was Bill Gates that said, "If you want a difficult job doing, give it to a lazy person, because they'll find a quick way of completing it." So at one point my agency was touching 300 people, but a lot of those were offshore, so they were almost at arm's length. Any good manager should only ever have six people that report into them, no matter the size of the organization. So with 300 people, you just have layers and structure.

[Gareth Hoyle]

ogle changed what it needs in: 2012

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

So I've already bought the domain, by the way, so don't worry, don't try and steal it, you domain squatters. Because ultimately, and so I have exited a few software businesses, so I have walked the route to exit, and I made some nice, not life-changing money, by the way, but six figures a couple of times. So that's nice. That takes the edge off you, puts you into the 50% loan-to-value on your mortgage bracket. [chuckles] So that's quite nice. Divorce brings you back up, but that's a different conversation.

[Kelly Molson]

Ah. Yeah.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Ultimately, a service-based agency will probably get three to four multiple of EBITDA, unless you're doing over a million EBITDA a year, which I've never got to that stage. I've never desired to get to that stage. So if I'm only ever going to get three to four times annual profits on exit, and probably have to do a two, three-year earn-out where some... guy or girl is going to want some kind of PowerPoint on a Friday afternoon to explain what I've done this week. I'd rather just play it by ear and just run the business as I do every day. And that seems like a nicer route. And bear in mind, I was chatting to a couple of friends that work in the M&A space, 96% of agencies don't exit.

[Kelly Molson]

I know, right? It's a crazy stat.

[Gareth Hoyle]

So there's all these agency owners paying themselves 50 grand a year to stay below the dividend bracket, and, "I want to leave the cash in the business so it's more appealing when we exit." Well, open your eyes. 96% of you aren't going to exit. 96% of you could've put that money into a different channel, or a nicer house, or better holidays, and still had the same conclusion to your business. It goes bust. [laughs] Which unfortunately, most businesses go bust, don't they? There is a natural end to most-

[Kelly Molson]

Well, there's an end point, and that end point is either it goes bust, you sell it. I had a co-founder and the two of us ran out of steam working together. There's always something that's going to happen that means that that thing is not going to exist anymore, and what does that look like for you? I sold my agency, but it was a sale of necessity, not a sale of plan, because the two of us had decided not to work with each other anymore. That was it. So if I'd been thinking about scale exit, would I still have got a shitload of money at the end of it? Probably not. I just wasn't on that path.

[Gareth Hoyle]

I think everybody hopes that one day it'll be worth 50 million pounds. I'll give you a clue, it won't.

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

We're fairly profitable and let's say we, normalizing out my business development dinners, et cetera, we probably do, I don't know, 400 net. So that means my business is worth less than a year's revenue. I'd rather just play with that money and do other stuff really.

[Kelly Molson]

Have fun with it while you can. So what is it that you do differently? What are the key things that Marketing Signals does differently as a lifestyle agency?

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. So, number one, we're fully remote. We're four-day week, so a full-time employee for us delivers 32 measured hours a week. Reality of being a parent, a lot of us don't do four days. We do five shorter days. So my head of strategy picks his kids up from school every day, takes the dog for a walk in the day, but will log back on and put his hours in, if you like.

[Gareth Hoyle]

So very much about output, not attendance. I'm trying to think of an analogy off the top of my head. I could stand in a garage for eight hours a day. Doesn't make me a car.

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

If you're just turning up and doing your fantasy football and making a cup of tea for 15 people in the office, well, well done, you've burnt two hours of output and you've done nothing. I think it's easier because we're remote. If I want to make a cup of tea, it takes me five minutes. If I'm in an office with 30 people, "Oh, go on then, I'll have one." And before you know it, you've wasted half an hour. So it is just the time efficiency stuff.

[Gareth Hoyle]

We still have a career path for a lot of people, and what we're actually seeing in our last recruitment drive is we're taking a lot of senior staff from the big network agencies. Because as they get to the stage of their career where maybe they're having children, or they're just knackered because they've been working 7:00 till 7:00, six days a week for eight years. But it's okay though, because every now and again you get pizza, and that makes it all okay.

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. Everyone loves a pizza. Okay, guys. Five Guys will come in, you get extra chips and a shake. Well done. You've not seen your kid at the parents' evening for the past three years, but that gluten intolerance we ignored. So-

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

... it's just a different way of running the business, I suppose. But I think because we're so specialist though, a lot of customers come to us to solve specific problems, and maybe that puts us in a slight different power cycle. Probably the wrong word, by the way. Sorry, customers. I don't mean it like that. But we're very narrow in the channel that we work. We don't claim to be everything to everyone, and we say no to a lot of work because I just don't think that the cultures align with some of our clients. So maybe that allows us to get away with it a little bit more.

[Kelly Molson]

What I hear in that that's really nice is that not only is this for you, it's for the team as well. So the way that you've structured the agency, it's founder first. This is the way that you need to live your life and run your agency around, but it's really important for the team that they get the same benefits of the four-day week and that level of flexibility as well.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. When we hire people, we hire slow and fire fast. It's brutal, but that is my decision of how I'm going to market. People either last two weeks because they just can't get their head around that there's not somebody tapping them on the shoulder every 10 minutes asking them what they're doing. Or they never leave because they're like, "Oh my God, I finally found my tribe." I'm working on cool projects. I've got some big budget clients, which means I can actually, I've got thinking space as well as doing space, but I'm also walking the dog at lunch or I get... So our four-day week means that you do four days on, four days off, four days on, two days off. So in theory, you get two Easter weekends a month, which I think is amazing, like a proper break.

[Kelly Molson]

Yeah, it's nice. Yeah, that's a really good break.

[Gareth Hoyle]

You're rested, you're motivated to do a good job.

[Kelly Molson]

So your team, you get flexibility, your team gets flexibility, and this huge level of autonomy in what they do because it's about output and not about hours necessarily.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah.

[Kelly Molson]

What else does this model give you as the founder? So what have you been able to do differently? How has that affected you and your kind of stress levels and mindset?

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say it's stress-free, by the way.

[Kelly Molson]

No. [laughs] I'd be amazed if you did.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Let's just put a line in the sand. It's still running an agency. It's still running 20 people.

[Kelly Molson]

Yeah.

[Gareth Hoyle]

So it's not that it's not stressful. And what has it given me? I've traveled the world. I take my laptop with me. I've got the freedom to, sometimes when my kid's gone on school trips, I'll be the helpful parent [chuckles] that gets to go around the museum for free.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Just the freedom and choice, I suppose. The removing yourselves from the shackles of we have to do this 12 hours a day for 10 years, and then hopefully somebody will buy me a sports car, because that's really all your agency is worth. It just opens your eyes to there's just a different way of doing this. It doesn't have to be...

[Gareth Hoyle]

I'm not a freelancer. Sometimes people think because I probably spend four to five months of the year overseas, so I'm not a digital nomad. I'm not a freelancer that's just got a handful of clients. I'm the managing director of a fairly successful British company that has been trading for 17 years with only one Phoenix, which is quite good in 17 years in agency life. I do take my job incredibly seriously, and I never stop thinking about it. Since Claude came along, I often wake up at 4:00 in the morning with an idea, and I wake up at half 7 later on, and I've just got scribbled notes on my bedside table where I woke up in the night and thought of something. But it's been, it's just using your skills in an efficient way that makes you happy. We're on this burning rock once, so I'm going to make the most of it, if I'm honest. And this is the journey that I set upon 10 years ago, maybe a bit longer.

[Gareth Hoyle]

And in COVID, we got rid of our office. Nothing made me happier. We had a guy, wow, this blows my mind when I think back. We had a guy, a writer, that wrote for us. He'd drive for an hour to the office, put his headphones on, work all day, and drive home. I basically owe him about a year of his life from sitting in traffic. What were we thinking?

[Kelly Molson]

I had the same. I was always the commuter, and then I met my husband, my then partner, who lived in Cambridge, and made my hour commute to the office even worse. Just the time that we got back by shutting our office was phenomenal.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah, it's still the norm. Because quite often in the pitches, because we work in mid-market to enterprise, some of our clients or some of the pitches that we've been on, I think we've lost because we're remote and four day.

[Gareth Hoyle]

As an example, and we've never pitched for these guys, but I'd love to. So Amazon are trying to get their staff back in the office five days a week, and the way they see it is they want agency partners that are also in an office five days a week, because otherwise the Amazon staff are going to feel a bit shitty that they're in five days, and almost see the other side where people are working four days. So, we're not a perfect partner for every business out there, but that's fine as well. We get half our work from the, probably more than half our work from the US, half our work from the UK.

[Gareth Hoyle]

The people in the US, I mean, I could just change my Zoom background and I'm in an office, but they don't care. Nobody cares where we're sat. In the same way, I wear a hoodie. I don't wear a... Ugh, imagine having to wear a shirt and tie every day. I'm gonna choke, basically. Because nobody cares what I wear. They care about-

[Kelly Molson]

Getting the job done.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah.

[Kelly Molson]

So you said earlier that it's kind of allowed you to travel the world. You spend a significant amount of time abroad. I'm guessing that you take significantly more money out than a normal founder who's on that kind of growth scale exit path, because they're trying to retain the profits in the business, so it looks more desirable to the end purchaser. So I think I've read somewhere, and forgive me if I've got this wrong, but you do a lot more investments in ISAs. You've done some property stuff as well. So the agency facilitates outside interests as well.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Very much so. So, I mean, a lot of the traveling is obviously work trips to work conferences with 100% work output. [laughs]

[Kelly Molson]

Of course.

[Gareth Hoyle]

But what works for me is to take the profits that the agency generatesAnd I can look at the agency and say, "Okay, I could grow this 20% a year, so I'm going to make 20% return on this set of money." But what if there was another option? What if there was a stock or a fund that you thought actually... For me, my biggest win on stocks was Nvidia. So I use Nvidia as a gamer, and then crypto came along, and everyone wanted to buy their GPUs. So I went really heavy in on Nvidia due to crypto, and then AI came along [chuckles] and it was just like, wow, that was a good decision.

[Gareth Hoyle]

And the same with Bitcoin. And I'm a HODLer, so I've not even sold much of my Bitcoin. I work on the internet. We saw Bitcoin as a way of paying each other that was quite funny. We were paying 100 quid a coin. All of a sudden, you just accumulate a few. All of a sudden, it's $100,000 a coin. One thing I will say, and I still have financial pressures, but I have made a few good decisions over the course of my career, and I've had a couple of small-- Okay, so 100 or 200K exit isn't going to change your life, by the way. Trust me. It put a loft extension on a house that I gave to my wife in a divorce. So [chuckles] it's really not going to change your life, but maybe it takes the edge off.

[Gareth Hoyle]

But I also think though, even without a couple of good investment decisions and a couple of smaller exits, I'd still have this attitude because fundamentally, I don't believe that two days off is a fair swap for five days on. We work with computers. We've got tools that can do the heavy lifting for us, and the history of the five-day week came from Henry Ford that wanted his staff-- So he doubled the minimum wage in his factories to $5 an hour and gave his staff an extra day off. So he basically invented the weekend, and the idea was that if you've got more leisure time, then you're going to travel further and you're going to need to buy a car to go further. But also because he invented the production line, he brought efficiency into the workplace, which meant that you could achieve the same in five days as people used to in six.

[Gareth Hoyle]

So I believe that we're at the start of the technological revolution, or maybe the second wave with AI of the technological revolution, where we're given the tools and the efficiencies to mean that I can do the output of five days in four days. So why not reward yourself and your team with extra leisure time so that they can go-- So we also pay 100% salary for that four days. There was no loss of salary, no loss of benefits. We had a couple of people moan about bank holidays. Again, you're trying to put an old circle into a new square. If people want their six bank holidays a year, then go and work five days a week for 46 weeks of the year somewhere.

[Gareth Hoyle]

But yeah, it's using what's in front of us and our brains to free ourselves from the shackles of serfdom. [laughs]

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs] Well, that leads me to the question about headcount, because again, we said earlier there's assumption that a lifestyle agency is going to be on the smaller side. A lot of the founders that I work with who are kind of teams of one to five, maybe up to 10, would argue that 20, 30 headcount is really big. They see that as quite a big commitment. You've got a team of around 20 now. You're really process-led in your organization, aren't you? So I'm really intrigued as to what kind of processes you've put in place to facilitate that level of growth whilst also keeping those stress levels to a minimum. But I think that there's been a shift into AI as well, isn't there? So tell me about what you're doing.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. So SEO as a discipline is fairly repeatable. So I guess if you're doing a brand project for a rebranding or a new web design, every project is totally unique. Whereas with search, we kind of have three or four tenants of activity that need doing. So if you can write SOP, standard operating procedures, for everything that you do, you can productize it. If you can productize it, you can look and you can record, and you can record the time it takes to do something, and you can look at where the kinks in the process are, where does the production line stop, where are the dependencies, and then once you've actually broken it down to the sort of ones and zeros that make up the process, you can look at, well, how do we automate part of that?

[Gareth Hoyle]

So if you're saying, "Okay, we need somebody to go off and find the email addresses for this media list," well, why can't I create either an API call from a tool, or why can't I create a Claude coworker to go and search the internet and bring me back those email addresses? So the API call and the coworker have a cost. It's a hell of a lot less than a full-time employee. A AI coworker will work 24/7, 365 without getting complacent, bored, going on holiday, sick... married, vacation, however you want to look at it. Occasionally the server'll go down, [chuckles] but that's a lot less loss of output than having a human in the loop.

[Gareth Hoyle]

The headcount to a lot of people is scary. Don't get me wrong, payroll day is like, "Oh my God, where's all my money gone?" Luckily, it's owed in, so it's not like we have the revenue coming in. I guess you've just got to roll the dice, really. And don't get me wrong, most agencies in the UK are one to five people. That is the norm. It's not normal to be a WPP or a MediaCom, like 18,000 people work for Publicis. Most agencies don't go to Cannes. It's not normal to live that kind of life. Most are one to five with fractional help at board level. That is totally normal, and there's nothing wrong with that. Most people in this country work for a small business. That's just how life is, and especially these days because the freezing of the tax allowances and stuff, it's even more people are just wanting to be freelancers and just do their own thing and get their four-day week off their own back by increasing their day rate versus being employed.

[Gareth Hoyle]

And for me, we're quite happy to say we're quite good at what we do. And I was probably happy at 15 staff, but then we retain clients, and we win new clients, and you retain clients, and you win new clients. So all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, bugger, we need someone else to do this. Right, so let's hire someone. Oh, we actually got two people in the pipeline that are both really good. I don't want to say no because there's not much talent available on the marketplace on the average day, so why don't we hire them both, and we'll just figure it out later?" And then they can always work on our site, they can work on some side projects that we've got going on. We can always find work for talented people. And I guess we just grew and grew, and grew till we got to about 30 people. I don't think I'd want to be 50. I could argue I wouldn't want to be back to 30, if I'm honest.

[Kelly Molson]

Do you actually have any kind of goals about the agency growth path that you're on? Are you on a growth path right now, or is it about growing profit, or how do you define what is a successful growth path for you?

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. So, the initial goal every year is to not bugger it up.

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs] Excellent goal.

[Gareth Hoyle]

So if we can do that, then we're-

[Kelly Molson]

Tick

[Gareth Hoyle]

... we're winning.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. We're still here. Our end of year is September, so every 1st of October it's like [exhales sharply] we made it.

[Kelly Molson]

Phew, we made it. [laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

Growth for me, I don't spend what we make, so if we just continue what we're doing, that's amazing. What I'm more interested in is, so a lot of the time it's still me that does a lot of the public speaking, a lot of the agency marketing. I'd love to have my head of PR on the stage. I'd love to have my head of ops talking about the SOPs and the process-driven stuff that we do. I want to build their careers now, really.

[Kelly Molson]

That's nice. So bring them into the spotlight.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. What's that saying? "Why did you train them? They might leave." Yeah, but if I don't train them, they won't leave. [chuckles] So, I want them to go off and...

[Gareth Hoyle]

Success for me would be a big alumni of previous Marketing Signalers that are out there winning at their own discipline. And yeah, maybe that is not under my umbrella, but then maybe they might come to me and say, "I really want to go off on my own, but I need like 30 grand to get it off the ground. Would you invest in me?" I'm not against that either, so-

[Kelly Molson]

No, and because of the way that you've structured the agency, you would have the funds to be able to do that in that circumstance.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah.

[Kelly Molson]

That's nice.

[Gareth Hoyle]

And again, there is no right or wrong way, by the way. I'm certainly not sat here going-

[Kelly Molson]

I agree

[Gareth Hoyle]

... "This is my way. You should all follow me into the lava." Because that's where it could end up.

[Gareth Hoyle]

But at the same time, it works for me. It works for my team. We've had clients in the past that are like, "Where are you?" It's like, "Well, they're off." We have two people for every role, so there is five days a week coverage for the clients. It's not like, "Oh, yeah, no, she'll be back on Tuesday. Don't worry."

[Gareth Hoyle]

But also I think the nature of SEO is it's very much a sort of medium to long-term marketing investment. So tasks tend to be completed over the course of a month rather than like, "I need this for Wednesday, I need this for Thursday." Work doesn't really come in on a Wednesday and need completing by a Friday. So maybe that makes it easy. We don't do crisis comms. We have a reactive approach to the digital PR we do, so if a funky story breaks, we will jump on it and get our clients coverage. But yeah, it's not like the MD got caught kissing the HR director on camera like that one in America.

[Kelly Molson]

[laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

It's not the sort of product or service that we deliver. So again, that probably makes it easier. It's like a perfect storm of top-level laziness.

[Kelly Molson]

Yeah. Well, no, but it's strategic choice, isn't it? Going back to what you said about, I know you said that you're inherently lazy, but you've actually picked the services that fit the model along with everything else. So everything has been a very strategic choice and a plan.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah, I was over the moon when I found I was actually quite good at this discipline that you can do from anywhere in the world on a laptop, gain international recognition for what we're doing, which gives quite a nice life. I don't live in a shed. And people respect my approach because, a lot of people-- I was speaking to one guy, an American guy, and he was like, "Four days? I want my team in six days." And you know what I thought? I'm going to go to your LinkedIn, find all your staff, and offer them a job. Because it's just the wrong approach. What an old-fashioned way of thinking. Working harder does not mean better output. His staff are probably knackered. They're burnt out.

[Gareth Hoyle]

I think I can outperform somebody like that in four days than they can in six days, even if it means my 32 to his 48. Well, I think I beat him. He's got 50% more time. I still think I'd beat him in output.

[Kelly Molson]

Yeah. What I love about your story is, and what I really appreciated when you were part of that Hackers event is, it is the thing that you said about choice. So there is no right or wrong way. Everybody gets to choose how they structure their agency, whatever model they use. But I think for me, there's not enough people talking about the other option. So I'm really intrigued. When you sat down and put this plan together and this is the way that I'm going to do things, did you have any kind of support or advice, or did you just make it up as you went along?

[Gareth Hoyle]

No.

[Kelly Molson]

So what, just I'll just wing it.

[Gareth Hoyle]

[chuckles] No. So even when we had the office, I would come and go as I please. And I had an office at home as well, so I'd just take my laptop from the desk, put it on my desk at home. I just think it's just the right way to do it. And I think the people that are scared of doing it...

[Gareth Hoyle]

Okay, so some clients might not like it, but I get that. But then who's the boss in this relationship? You don't work for that client. They're coming to you to procure a professional service. If you can deliver that professional service, they shouldn't care where you're sat when you do it, as long as by the deadline, the work is delivered at world-class standard. So maybe stand up to your client a bit more if you're worried about that side of stuff.

[Gareth Hoyle]

There is a slight risk at recruitment that if we're interviewing someone and they keep talking about the four-day week, that's a red flag for us because they're probably thinking, "Yeah, they don't take it seriously. It's not even like having a job." It is. Trust me. We want output. That's eight hours a day measured. So you want to take two hours for lunch and walk the dog and go to the gym or play paddle, highly recommend that, you're going to work 8:00 till 7:00. It's almost like a split shift if you've ever worked in catering. So I guess it's work when you're productive. I'm productive sometimes at half five in the morning. My email signature says, "I'm emailing you because it's convenient to me. Email me back when it's convenient for you." Although we have dependencies on each other, it's not like it's a production line where it's like, "Oh, all this stuff's backing up because Phil's gone on lunch." I suppose it's just our way of doing it. It's hard to sort of put in a box, I suppose.

[Kelly Molson]

No. Again, it's just really interesting because I think the model that you work to is the one that I talk about a lot, but you are just the first kind of person that's put that out publicly and really talked about it. I want to know, what advice would you give to founders that are considering this same lifestyle agency model that you've mapped out?

[Gareth Hoyle]

Give it a go. But make sure that you've got the processes for the output mapped, because automation or efficiency can't fix a broken process. So if you're a hot mess to start with, it's going to be a boiling mess when you try and condense stuff. Maybe ask a few of your bigger customers what their thoughts would be if you trialed it for three, six months. Because I don't want to be the one that says, "Yeah, just do it," and then all of a sudden you lose your Pareto customer. [chuckles] I don't want to be that guy.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Speak to people that have done it. I'm here presenting the polish. [chuckles] Like a duck under the water, we're sometimes paddling like idiots trying to keep it working.

[Gareth Hoyle]

It is just making sure that there's cover, making sure that you're really strict with people's out of offices when they're on their four-day break, because not every client remembers. Update your Slack status for when you're next in. There's just little... just procedural, really. So just make sure your procedures and your processes are in sync. We're quite aggressive with time tracking. We don't like screenshot people's machines every 30 seconds or anything. But they have to declare on Teamwork exactly what they've done for eight hours a day. And there is a head of ops that polices Teamwork. So again, it has to be structured. It has to be, "Oh, well, I don't want to do time tracking. I don't like time tracking." Go work somewhere else then.

[Gareth Hoyle]

You want the benefits over here, that's because we measure over here. And if you don't like it, then just leave because we hired you because we believe in what you can do, but if you're a wrong cultural fit for us, then that's a worse problem than you not being good at your job.

[Gareth Hoyle]

So, try it is the big thing. A lot of my staff are now on four-day a week contracts, so we're not going back. Not that I would want to. But I guess if you're trying to exit as well, that could maybe be a pain, because if you're going to someone that does five days a week and believes that being in the office from 7:00 till 7:00 in exchange for the Domino's is the future of work, and then you're approaching it from the actual future of work, which is work when it's efficient for you, when it suits you, from a location that suits you, you're not going to gel. And if exit is your actual goal, maybe there aren't enough Gareths in the world for you to find the exit, that maybe you're going to have to suck it up and keep doing that five-day, 40-hour week until you exit, and then maybe you can start again and choose what you want to do. Most of you agency owners that exit will have to start again because you're not going to get that life-changing money that you hope.

[Kelly Molson]

Agreed. [laughs] This is why I'm doing what I'm doing. But what about you as the founder, do you have to have very strict boundaries in place around your time, your outside agency interests, those kind of things?

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yeah. I don't stop thinking about this. It's not like, "Oh, I'm on hour 32 now. I'm just going to close my laptop and all my sales leads and all the stuff that I was doing disappear." I guess I'm still the founder thinking about stuff. I've just developed the ability to log off for a bit.

[Gareth Hoyle]

th of May at: 10:47

[Kelly Molson]

I love that you just read out your diary to me, because that is what I do. Everything gets block-booked in my diary so that, one, I know what I'm doing, but I can see where my time needs to be. And all my school stuff, drop-off, pick-up, things with her, that all gets logged in as well. Gym trips, everything.

[Gareth Hoyle]

If you're going to run an efficient life, you need efficient time. I obsess over time, if I'm honest. Don't be late. On time is late. Be there three minutes early. It has to be, otherwise it doesn't work. And I believe in time blocking to get stuff done. I also believe in Pomodoro, which is work 25 minutes, 5 minutes off, work 25 minutes, 5 minutes off. Every couple of hours, take 20 minutes off. There's a sofa there. If my call finishes 10 minutes early, I will happily just lie on there for a 30-minute nap. [laughs]

[Kelly Molson]

He gets a little nap. A mid-call nap. [laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

Absolutely. But yeah, it is just being that efficiency and just trying to block out the time. We can do most stuff on our phones these days. So even if I'm waiting to play paddle and I arrive 20 minutes early, I'll just Slack an email on my phone. If you're at an airport, you can just open your laptop. For me, I just got back from New York. On the way over to New York last week, I actually had fast Wi-Fi on the plane, and I managed to build a little SaaS tool in six hours because I wasn't being pestered by people.

[Kelly Molson]

Yeah. The noise has gone.

[Gareth Hoyle]

I'm literally deploying to my GitHub repos from 38,000 feet, and I'm thinking, "This is the way I want to live. This is the dream," I suppose. I'm sat on a lay-flat bed, I'll be honest, as I'm not traveling in economy. I've worked too hard for that. And if I want a glass of wine, someone will bring me a glass of wine, and me and Claude are just chatting away, building what's hopefully the future.

[Kelly Molson]

You and Claude are having such a delightful time-

[Gareth Hoyle]

Oh, best-

[Kelly Molson]

... in business class together

[Gareth Hoyle]

... my new bestie, and he only costs $100 a month. [laughs] It's like the cheapest date I've found. [laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

But occasionally he runs out of credits, and we fall out. But-

[Kelly Molson]

I love it

[Gareth Hoyle]

... he makes me shut my laptop for a couple of hours. So I go for a walk, not at 38,000 feet, obviously. But yeah, look, it doesn't have to be the way that your parents worked. It doesn't have to be the way that you think.

[Gareth Hoyle]

Work is a thing you do, not a place you go to. David Gilroy, the orange man, taught me that little saying. Because a lot of people are going to work to do what? You go to this work just to be present. Be present with your kids. They'll appreciate it more than your boss.

[Kelly Molson]

Yeah, 100% agree. Right, one final question before I ask you about your podcast recommendation. Do you think, as it is now, that you could sell your agency in the future if you chose to?

[Gareth Hoyle]

Yes, with the help of my accountant. [laughs] I think we'd have to look at how much I spend on business development dinners, how much I spend on corporate travel. But I would also take less money for a smaller earn-out, because I'm not interested in being an employee for three years. Wow. I'm 45, consider myself to be in the prime of my life. I'm not being an employee, I'm not being someone's bitch for three years right now. So, I think that ship has sailed-

[Kelly Molson]

Okay [laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

... selective purchasers. [laughs]

[Kelly Molson]

Good to know. He's just putting it out in the world everywhere. [laughs]

[Gareth Hoyle]

[laughs]

[Kelly Molson]

I've loved this chat. Thank you so much for sharing and being so brutally honest about the way that you've done things. It's very greatly appreciated.

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