Location, location, location

This week’s post is a personal story with a practical lesson for any agency, so indulge me.

I worked at Branded3, on the outskirts of Leeds, for 7 years.

The location is significant…and a topic of conversation in many board meetings. We debated whether moving to an office 5 miles away, in the city centre, would enable us to find more talent. Despite being a Leeds agency, we had almost no staff who lived in the city centre - and we struggled to keep the ones we hired who did live there.

When Branded3 offered me a job, I accepted immediately, turning down an offer elsewhere in the city for more money. Branded3, then an independent, was my first choice because:

• I wanted to work with (and learn from) Patrick Altoft and Tim Grice, who I’d been following on Twitter (after my first ever manager, Steve Connor, now of JD, gave me a list of “who’s who” on SEO Twitter)
• I liked Dave Smith, who interviewed me (Dave led the outreach team at the time, later joining the aforementioned board as Operations Director)
• I loved the location: a converted barn in the small village of Aberford, 15 miles outside of Leeds (it had a tennis court, which I told my parents was a perk, even though I don’t play tennis and never once used it).

I joined at the same time as David White (now Chief Growth Officer at connective3) and Laura Crimmons (who now works in Berlin for Ringier) and later found out that, despite having a year of experience at the time, I was offered £2k less than both because I’d told them in my interview I was being made redundant from my first role - which I brought up with them repeatedly over the next 7 years!

My starting salary was £14,000. Aberford was 35 miles from my house and, in 2012, I was in the office 5 days a week, so I ultimately spent £250 of my £870 take home pay on petrol for my Ford Ka. Obviously that pay packet would need to increase to make that commute long term viable (and it did increase by a factor of almost 10, all considered).

I’d had an offer to work at another agency, in Leeds city centre, for £18k. It would have taken me an extra 30 minutes each way to drive that extra few miles, plus the best part of £1,000 for a parking space.

When Branded3 moved from Aberford in 2012, we moved to Thorpe Park: a business park on the M1, still miles away from the centre of town. It had just enough free parking.

Why should you care?

• The average length of service in Branded3’s Leeds office, where 60 of its 80 people worked, was 5 years
• The average length of service in the SEO team, which Branded3 was known for, was 7 years
• In 2018, Branded3 turned 15 years old, during which time it had employed a total of 150 people - more people worked at the agency than had left in a decade and a half
• Clients stayed longer than the industry average, partly because the team was so stable - it wasn’t a common occurrence that we’d change an account manager or strategist
• We “couldn’t find enough talent” so we grew a training culture, completely naturally: learning and teaching others was expected (when I started at the agency, to pass one’s probationary period, one had to stay an extra hour per day reading…the first week on the job was 5 solid days of training); our training was easily adapted into a revenue stream for the business and more than 90% of our leads were inbound because we shared what we knew
• The SEO team, for example, were not from marketing backgrounds: we had degrees in Chemistry, Archaeology, History and no degrees in marketing or, actually, many staff members with any previous experience of marketing - but our training was good and our SEO team was the best in the business as a result
• Staff costs were below the industry average.

This was both necessitated by - and possible because of - the location. I drove from the top end of Nottinghamshire to “Leeds” each day, where I worked with colleagues who came from Selby; York; Sheffield; Huddersfield; Wakefield; Harrogate and Wetherby, to name a few (if you’re not hot on geography, those places are mostly 20-40 miles away).

If we’d moved to the city centre, I’d have lost an hour a day on the commute: let’s assume the average would have been 30 minutes per person, equating to 30 hours per day; 150 hours per week; or 960 working days a year across the team in the Leeds office. Let’s assume that we’d have quickly realised that we need to pay for the parking costs to retain staff - and that the lack of parking would have balanced out the city centre location to make the same size office cost the same amount, so parking for 60 people would come on top.

All of that suuucks, but here’s the real kicker: for its current workforce, Branded3’s moat would disappear. Any of us could have joined Epiphany, Stickyeyes, Home, 26, Search Laboratory, or any of the 10(!) digital marketing agencies employing 100 people in the centre of town at the time, without adding to our commute. Probably for more money. That’s the opposite of the outcome we wanted.

So here’s what you should take away from this…ask yourself:

1. Who makes up my current team? Where do they live and how does my location help or hinder them?
2. If I can’t get experienced talent, how am I going to find and train people who aren’t experienced (without burdening your senior staff)?
3. Does my location mean that providing or paying for staff parking would be a disproportionately advantageous perk?
4. If I want my people in the office, am I making it easy for them (or am I making it easier for them to choose to work somewhere else)?