With a background in nonprofit and social impact sectors, Paul David, Co-founder and CEO of Literal Humans, has seamlessly woven agile marketing and storytelling into the fabric of his agency, driving it to achieve £1M in annual recurring revenue in just two years!
In this episode, we dive into:
Discover more about Paul David's work at Literal Humans and follow him on LinkedIn for more insights.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
With a background in nonprofit and social impact sectors, Paul David, Co-founder and CEO of Literal Humans, has seamlessly woven agile marketing and storytelling into the fabric of his agency, driving it to achieve £1M in annual recurring revenue in just two years!
In this episode, we dive into:
Discover more about Paul David's work at Literal Humans and follow him on LinkedIn for more insights.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
In the middle of a global pandemic. When many saw obstacles, paul David saw opportunity. As the CEO of Literal Humans, paul didn't just start a creative marketing agency. He wanted to revolutionize the way mission-driven brands connect with their audiences. With over a decade of experience in education, non-profit and social impact sectors, paul has mastered the art of fusing storytelling with strategy to drive resilient growth and, under his leadership, literal Humans has hit 1 million annual recurring revenue within just two years. Today, we're going to explore both how he grew the business and himself as a leader. You're listening to Peer Effect, the podcast that fuels you with new ideas and inspiration through interviews with founders and experts who've made it happen. I'm your host, james Johnson, and I've coached Series A plus founders to take back control so they can take their business further and live a great life.
Speaker 2:Let's dive in. I'm Paul David, ceo of the Rose Humans. We are a digital content marketing agency that does holistic growth, partnerships for charities, B2B, software as a service companies and tech for good companies. Ten specialize in health tech, hr tech, fintech, edtech, name a few. We do everything from brand to web to content and SEO and growth marketing and digital PR these days. And growth marketing and digital PR these days. We've been around about four years. We're about eight people, nine people full-time, mostly based in the UK. We've got some folks dotted around the US, africa, europe.
Speaker 2:Small but mighty agency that has worked with the likes of Oura Ring Payoneers, a big client of ours. So a good mix of, and then charities as well. Hospital Rooms is a big charity in the UK that we work with. Core is a big literacy charity in the US that we work with, which is kind of fun to toggle between tech for good and charities who are doing good. Our big goal as an agency is to kind of humanize marketing and we're about to put out a bit of a manifesto on what that looks like're about to put out a bit of a manifesto on like what that looks like, what that means as a bit of a new positioning strategy. So excited about that.
Speaker 1:What's the origin story of Lift for Humans?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're four years ago a little over four years ago, kind of in the middle of pandemic I've been working in a previous agency, decided I wanted to focus on charities and tech for good.
Speaker 2:Charity is my background and also was a writer and content strategist before being an agency owner and realized that my co-founder had a complementary skill set. And then we started a business, grew it, brought in some really great clients in the HR tech space like Oyster Remo First and, frankly, got lucky during the pandemic with some really great client engagements, allowed us to build up case studies and grow, and now we are just under a million turnover and Will has now exited the business. And so that's been a transition over the past few months past few few months really and it's given us an opportunity to like step back and look at building a really strong leadership team and, you know, kind of rethinking how the agency is set up from being kind of mean we'll just doing projects, bringing them in, having a few freelancers and a few full-time folks to okay, now we're a proper agency with repeatable systems and processes and all that stuff. So that's been a difficult but good journey, I think, so happy with that.
Speaker 1:And so what would be a unique insight, or a hardwood insight that you'd share with other founders from your experience?
Speaker 2:I think our biggest learning is systems and processes and kind of the unsexy, boring stuff. So we're getting ready to launch EOS Entrepreneurial Operating System or we're in the middle of launching it. I should say it's just been night and day in terms of the clarity that it gives you and the structure and the way it kind of just shapes how you think about your work every day. So just encourage folks to like, like, pick a system. Don't care what system it is, you know, make sure it's a system that works for you, but pick a system that gives you a process and gives you a way of engaging as a leadership team and an overall team that you can at least try out, that you can keep coming back to.
Speaker 2:I think what's really powerful about EOS is like the accountability piece. I think it's easy, especially in the agency world, for folks to run around and get spun in all different directions and even point fingers and stuff like that, whereas I think systems like EOS really focus you in on okay, what's it say on the scorecard and you're responsible for that data point and how close are we to target? People always matter the most. They're your most valuable asset. But I think you end up winning with systems because, god forbid, something happens to a person. They leave what have you? You've still got a system in place to run the business.
Speaker 2:When would you have put systems in place if you had your time again, that's a good question, I think, maybe towards the end of the first year, beginning of the second year, maybe just having taken some time to sit down and do some reviews of how client engagements have gone to like recreate the wheel and it's surprising, like how many agencies exist and how many former agency and current agency folks are, but how people yet are just still coming to it. And there's not like a guidebook or there's not like a and they're starting to be. There's a few. There's a book by like the guys who did agencynomics about building a five million, you know pound agency, there's eos, there's some of it out there. But, um, I think, yeah, after the first year of just like, okay, we've done the project they say we've hopped and sort of moved around for different client engagements, um, really thinking yourself, like what kind of agency do I want to build? What systems do I want to put in place? What service lines do I want to offer and not offer? What people do I need to to sort of make that happen? Um, I wish we had done that earlier. And, yeah, maybe in the second year instead of like the fourth.
Speaker 2:I think there's a lot to be said for discipline. You know I'm reading a great book by Ryan Holiday called Discipline is Destiny, where he talks about, you know, athletes and politicians and business people, high achieving folks, and the things that they've done to instill discipline in their lives, that that have been pretty extreme in many cases, but how they've rendered really amazing outcomes as a result of it. So definitely recommend that book and also the uh the runner, um kipchoge. Elio kipchoge is like one you know, one of the greatest, and he's kenyan, one of the greatest, he's Kenyan, one of the greatest marathon runners in history maybe the greatest, I guess. And he talks about, you know, taking your vitamin N, which you know for no vitamin no, so like saying no to things, and being disciplined about saying no to things. I wish I had done that earlier or sooner.
Speaker 2:And he talks about how discipline frees you and how, like the people who are out there who are actually the ones who really are less free, are the ones who think they're free because they're just like pulled into their passions every single day and they're pulled into just their whims and they're not actually in control, like their whims are in control, but the people who have discipline are the ones who actually they're exercising and they look very measured and sort of, you know, overly honed, I guess.
Speaker 2:But actually they're the ones who have greater freedom because they're growing in the specific way that they wanna grow. They've chosen a pathway and they're kind of executing it. And I think for me, like my tendency is to and there's a knowledge of self piece here but like my tendency is to go to different things, let a thousand flowers bloom, try a lot of different ideas, bring people in really quickly, even though you know they haven't been tested, they haven't been measured, and there's a lot of goodness to that. But also, I think, having a system in place it limits you in helpful ways.
Speaker 1:Again back to the, the kipchoge discipline piece with some of the new managers this idea of, like I want to give my team total freedom because that's actually what being a good manager is and actually too much freedom is almost debilitating, like it's the paralysis of potential, of options, and actually that you say the power of no and just going okay, let's start off with this framework and as you get more comfortable, we can spread it, but let's not go for total, endless horizons, endless possibilities from day one yeah, I think.
Speaker 2:I think we see that in a lot of ways, like out in, out in the real world, out in the field, as it were, like you know, I think there's a lot of parallels to that and like what we saw with, you know, remote work, when, like, everyone's just pushed into this new way of working and they've got this almost absolute freedom to structure their days and to maybe insert other things in their days, and a lot of people really struggled and you see a lot of return to office, initiatives and stuff like that, because it hasn't been all gravy.
Speaker 2:There have been productivity declines because people are off to the museum or going to do the laundry in the middle of the meeting, whatever. I think we forget how structured people's lives are. As kids in schools, a lot of folks are trained to operate within specific structures. They get good at it and then they explode into a workplace that's very unstructured or totally remote or there's not like sort of tighter management around what they're doing and we we scratch our heads and wonder why they're not succeeding. Well, it's like look at, look at how they've been brought up. They've been brought up in a family that had structure, they've been brought up in a school that had structure and all of a sudden we expect them to operate the same way like or as effectively in an unstructured environment. I think it's a bit silly.
Speaker 1:But you, obviously, as a first-time founder, this idea that you are experimenting when you start becoming a founder and there's this freedom to being a founder, it's like, oh well, I'll do everything differently. I've said this for my first business. It's kind of like you quickly learn all the disciplines you learned, like working at Multinational, are actually there for a reason and you end up doing like maybe 20 of things max differently and there's a good reason for 80 of it. As you come back to like meeting structures, you come back to do minutes, you come back to clarify actually quite like all the boring stuff, you thought, oh well, there's no need for this stuff, I can be totally free from all that. Yeah, actually there's a good reason for it. And actually the founders it's quite hard got. No one, no one imposes that discipline on you. You need to re-establish that discipline and that choice for yourself definitely that.
Speaker 2:That's 100 been our, our experience at least my experience, um of over indexing, for being like the cool dads who run the agency and not having certain systems and processes in place and being, frankly, overly generous with lots of things, with pay, with leave policy, with to the point that, like when you actually run the numbers, you're like, oh my gosh, like we've given so much leave you know we run a four-day work week that we don't have the resourcing to service all of our clients, you know. So like we really need to like step back and think about who's in the office, who's not in the office, how much leave we have. Maybe it makes you feel good, but you're putting your business in danger if you're not careful. So definitely a lot of lessons as a first time founder business owner, and then that same thing.
Speaker 1:And what's an external insight that you would share with other founders that's been pretty helpful to you. What would that be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say this idea of, like everyone kind of being involved in selling and non-sales selling.
Speaker 2:I think that's really powerful. You know, I came from a book that I read called To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink, book that I read called To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink, and he talks about just how, like in today's like modern economy, like we're all selling, whether it's like to our boss, trying to convince them of something, to a team that we manage, trying to sell them on a particular way of operating or way of thinking about something Some of us are actually selling, like to potential clients and bringing in new contracts. I think that's like actually really empowering and takes the stigma off of sales broadly but puts people into this idea of like. Like leadership is relationship, you know, and part of that is, you know, coming at them with like, good information in a kind, supportive, gentle way that helps them be better at their jobs and helps you be better at yours. So that reframe has been powerful.
Speaker 1:Is there a particular sales technique or system that you would swear by?
Speaker 2:There's like a piece around personalizing a bit and like listening really well. So we've now moved to a place where, like all of our sales decks, they immediately just reflect back to the client what we heard from them. And the first slide literally says, like you know, any good strategy is born out of active listening. And then we just walk through hey, we heard this, we heard that, we heard you say this, we've read between the lines and understood. You know that, um, and clients seem to respond to it really positively. They feel like you're insightful within your listening, and then you also give them some ideas.
Speaker 2:You say, hey, based on what I heard from you, here's what I think, and the nuance I think of sales is like giving away enough to sort of entice the person into partnership with you and to collaborate with you, but not giving away so much that they can go do it themselves.
Speaker 2:So I think that's which is tricky in, like a service business, you know, because you want to be generous, you want to help people, you're a creative, you're an artist, you know, and you want to give away your art to some extent, but you have to, you know, drop back a little bit to some extent. I think it's a mix of like what you feel comfortable giving away as relates to your understanding of the potential client and what they need to feel secure. I think we sometimes forget, like some of these deals that we make you know they're five, six, seven figure greater and it's like that's a lot of money we forget For the average person, most people on this planet will never touch, let alone process, the level of economic power that a lot of us touch, and I think we forget that we lose our humility about that and that there's a tremendous amount of trust and belief and belonging in those transactions.
Speaker 2:And I think we get a bit glib about it you know, Like we're just like oh yeah, this is a 50,000-pound deal, this is a million-pound deal, this is a couple million, but like that's a lot and so, like you know, holding on to a bit of humility and humanness in that is like, okay, I need to really think about what makes this person tick, what they care about, what their non-starters are, what really gets them excited, and include that and give them enough of that stuff, Because I think it's less about the technical and more about the interpersonal, the human. It's a bit of a reframe of your question, but hopefully that answers it.
Speaker 1:I think it's great because actually I like the idea of humility in sales, because you're right, let's say it's a £50,000 sale. There's the cash element to it but there's also the impact of it. So let's say you're redoing someone's brand or you're saying a new air conditioner or whatever it is, there is a consequence to that not working. Like. The two outcomes of that sale are either, say, a rapidly increasing brand or a really well refrigerated stock room, or they are not a successful brand, which has impact on growth, profit etc. Or it's like all the stock going bad and like which then not only has a consequence from the company but then the person who made that decision impacts their job prospects, potentially their sort of job position. So actually there is a lot attached beyond just that headline number of the service that you're providing. There are two very real different paths that can be followed. Have people been receptive to that sort of idea?
Speaker 2:I think we've kind of like stumbled upon it in the engagements that we've been most successful, frankly, because you can kind of tell, like the ones that churn are the ones who, like you know they feel like you haven't done a good job. You're kind of making them look bad. They've had to explain some mistakes that you've made, maybe to their boss or something like that. You can, you know they either say that or you can read between the lines that that's happening. They're no longer your internal advocate within um. You know the, the brand, because maybe they, maybe they were before Um and you and you feel that, like as a, as an agency, you're like, oh gosh, like this person is like turned on us, or maybe they're throwing you under the bus as the agency, or maybe you know they never had your back to begin with, not sure, but how do you switch that and really say like, look, we're your sidekick, we're there to make you look good. And what would that look like for you? You know, what would? What would upscaling you look like? What would?
Speaker 2:We don't call it coaching, but I think like sort of growth consulting, growth focused mentorship, because a lot of times those are the folks who are the ones who have to approve your content strategy or approve your new you know ad campaign spend. So if they have blockers, then you're going to have blockers in that engagement and you actually, as the agency, aren't going to be able to do what you want to do need to do to help them grow. So you should be invested in their growth as well, because their growth is, is a or, frankly, the success of your engagement is a function of their growth, arguably so it's almost like one is success of the project.
Speaker 1:Two is perception of the person who's hired you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I would argue the bladder sits within the former and it's not just perception. I think it's more active than that. It it's like the participation, the partnership. The collaboration, because we've had engagements where we'll make a strategic recommendation and the person that we're working with doesn't have the subject matter expertise or the trust in us or the broadness in their knowledge of different marketing strategies to approve it or to even take it to the higher-ups to approve it, and so we try to think about okay, where do we need to get this person? Who's our point of contact in terms of their development? I think those are really interesting questions about the humans in the process.
Speaker 1:What sort of practical hack or tip that you would share with other founders.
Speaker 2:I'm really enjoying micro learning these days. So and I find some of these terms funny like it's just learning, but I guess the micro is the way you consume it. So the snackable bits. I think a good example of this is Blinkist. So I'll get a book recommendation and I'll immediately go to Blinkist, type it in, see if it's in there, go through the summary when I'm on my you know morning walk or you know commute or something, and really enjoy it.
Speaker 2:Sometimes that will take me to, you know, I'll research other articles or research the author, for example. I think it's. I think in my role in particular as a founder and CEO, like my range is really important. My, my generalist skills are really important, um, and so it really suits me to be able to like dive into something really quick not go too deep, but deep enough to be a little bit dangerous on the topic or at least, you know, a dinner table conversation to be interesting and to just integrate that into my stack, cause I find that, like when I go to like sales presentations and like that I can bring in oh, this over here, that over there. That I learned from Blinkist summaries, for example. So I highly recommend like a practice of micro learning. So for me that's language learning, you know, like having partners speak Spanish. So I do my Spanish lessons on Fridays, I do my Blinkist all week. I'll do stuff like different, like growth academies that are focused on marketing practices and things like that, throughout the week even like you know, having a slack channel.
Speaker 2:We have like a learning and development slack channel where people post interesting articles and stuff like that that they find that's a form of micro learning because it's highly curated and recommended by your, your own team, so really appreciate that as a hack I think particularly sort of lively.
Speaker 1:Now. This idea of micro learning is probably quite attractive. It's kind of it's hard to find the time to sit down for three hours, five hours a day, take a week out, particularly as a founder and as a CEO, so. But there probably are moments, sort of when you're walking the dog or when you're commuting to work. You can find these moments, but you've got to be quite disciplined about them, I think.
Speaker 2:I think the key there too, is to as much as possible make it job-embedded. So you think about a teacher's job. They've got students in front of them, so a lot of teachers' learning is on the go. It's from other teachers. They might go to classes after school, but their classes are quite practice based, because maybe they have to then take a new literacy approach and apply that to their class the next day and then write a paper about it and bring it back right. So a lot of their learning is job embedded.
Speaker 2:So, thinking about how do we do that in modern workplaces, it could be some, you know, I think the more happy example is a good one where folks can actually, you know, have a coaching session and get it paid for by their work and do it during work hours. That's a clear, clear example. We had some team members on our design team go and do an AI training. That was given here in London, waterloo. They got trained up on mid journey and then they came back and immediately gave a presentation to the team about AI. So they kind of cross trained the entire team on AI design. So stuff like that. That's like part of your role, you know.
Speaker 1:That's a really nice way of looking at it. As a coach, a form of micro-learning for me is actually sessions with clients, because you're talking through things, they process things. These are not often unique realizations. They are very widely applicable in terms of how do you keep yourself in a good mental space, how do you achieve peak performance, how do you make better decisions, how do you think like it's quite.
Speaker 2:it's an interesting way of looking at it, that sort of job, embedded learning and how can you maximize that and honestly, I think it's going to be like there's all this talk about AI and what it's going to take people's jobs it's going to. You know, I think that's going to be the difference maker, you know, between maybe people who will prosper in the area of AI and people who will suffer and there's a lot of social and political and governmental issues to be said for that. But the skill of like being able to take on little units of micro learning and integrate into your practice rapidly, effectively, and integrate tools like ChatGPT and generative AI into your stack, I think is going to be critical. And so you know, you're just going to start seeing people vault past other people because they're able to learn up and learn quickly and adapt and be somewhat have range, be somewhat of a generalist and integrate these tools into their work.
Speaker 1:As a founder. Every founder is time poor. There's so many things people got going on, so how do you create the time and how do you choose what you're focusing on? Micro learning, on.
Speaker 2:I think I mean one of the first answers is just that you make it a priority, right, like I think there's so much to be said for setting down first principles. So, like you know, we've built an incredibly diverse team at Little Humans, something we're very proud of. We think, we believe, we know diversity is our superpower. We see it show up in the work that we do for clients and I constantly get you know founders asking me like how did you build such a diverse team? I just did it, I just made it a priority. I just made sure that I put hands on every single hiring process and made sure that half of the folks who were in that initial pool were women. I made sure that the final pools had a broad cross-section of folks across races and ethnicities and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:I just insisted upon it, that's just like and I hate to be glib, but like I think that's a really important cause. Cause, if you don't actually care about it as a founder, as a leader, then it's not going to get done. And just that realization that so much of your culture and the reality that you create in your organization flows from you and what you decide to put your finger on the scale for, so there's, there's that piece of it, and then so that's like the adaptive side, that's like the you know, the emotional side of it, I guess. The other side is like the technical, I guess, and so I think it goes back to that job embedded piece of like. Okay, if I decide that I want to build a coaching culture, then I need to put coaching culture practices in place, and one of those practices is okay, everyone on the team is coaching, paid for, you know, for more happy. All you need to do is schedule it and then, as a founder, I take those coaching sessions and I bring my learnings and I share them with the team, and then that kind of gets the team thinking oh, this coaching thing is all right, Cause if our CEO is doing it, then maybe there's a thing here, and he's always talking about coaching and slowly you start to see people pick it up more and more, even if it's voluntary. That's just one way. But I think you can also say to people hey, spend an hour or two each week, Put it on your calendar. We want to see it Studying AI or practicing with MidJourney, or we have an AI book club that our content team runs.
Speaker 2:Um, and just just creating space for it, I think is another, another big way to live your first principles, live your priorities, so, and also measure people on it. I would say to um, sort of you know, like we have a positive performance management system, and part of the way we measure people uh is is sort of how did you say you were going to learn? What did you say you were going to practice? How did you commit to upscaling yourself? And then let's review that quarterly and like have you done it?
Speaker 2:Show us evidence of that and also building a culture of learning in public. So when we sent the designers to the AI training, the expectation was well, of course you're going to come back and present to the entire team what you learned, Like that's a given. So you connect sort of workplace expectations with workplace benefits, that, like we paid for that training. We gave them a day out, you know half a day to do that training. But yeah, you're going to cross train the rest of the team or at the very least learn in public with the rest of the team.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then how do you choose what microlearning to focus on?
Speaker 2:Some of it is sort of timely, time-sensitive. Obviously, in the moment we're in right now, a big chunk of your microlearning has to be AI, so there is a bit of it that's just responding to the times that you're in. I think the other piece of it is having a bit of like a dialectic with your team about what's important for them to learn at any time, asking the question and saying you know what are the skills that you oh you want to do UX, oh you want to do you know, sort of mobile whatever. But at least asking the question, I think, gets them thinking about it and people appreciate that. So, yeah, I think there's like a timeliness thing. I think there's a dialogue thing across disciplines.
Speaker 1:It feels like there's a theme here of sort of having a very clear process and committing to one early.
Speaker 2:You can experiment around it, but whether it's micro learning or whether it's accountability, whether it's performance, this process sort of frees up improvements yeah, I think I think back to the theme of like discipline, as freedom sounds a little or well in, but, but, um, yeah, it does really free you up and if, like, you get good at doing the things you you sort of need to do, you you commit to doing, then ironically it frees you up to do you know other stuff you know and you because sometimes it's just down to the hours like, hey, I got really good at writing, okay, well, now I can write an op-ed or write a you know research report or write a you know tweet, like that I think is really interesting. Like, think about what you're good at and what it took you to get good at that and how that freed you up to deepen that or to broaden it. I think that's a good way to think about it.
Speaker 1:In today's episode with Paul David, we've seen how adversity, coupled with discipline, a learning mindset and the right processes, can be a catalyst for innovation. Paul's leadership showcased the power of diversity and adaptability in building a thriving global business. Thanks for joining me on this week's episode of Peer Effect. Tune in next week for more insights and inspiring stories from founders and experts who've made it happen.