Kelly Molson @ Rubber Cheese

00:00:00:03 - 00:00:10:01IntroWelcome to the Agency Collective Tales with Ellie Hale. Our podcast,  where we talk to our brilliant agency owners about all things agency  life.00:00:11:00 - 00:00:17:11EllieSo today on the podcast, I am joined by Kelly Molson from Rubber  Cheese. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Kelly.00:00:17:15 - 00:00:20:18KellyThank you for having me on the podcast, it's a pleasure!00:00:21:01 - 00:00:34:02EllieYou are very, very welcome. So like we always do with Agency  Collective Tales, take us way back in time when Rubber Cheese first  started.  First off, where did the name come from?00:00:34:05 - 00:00:52:08KellyIt's such a rubbish story to this and everybody always asks about  the name and honestly, we just plucked it out of thin air because we  were young and foolish and stupid. This was like nearly 20 years  ago. So there was like a theme of agencies being called like Blue  Chile or Green Banana. So rubber cheese didn't seem that odd back  then.00:00:53:11 - 00:01:15:22KellyAnd we were like 24, 25, didn't really think through the whole brand  image or brand story stuff back then. But we did actually run a  story competition later on in our agency career. So actually if you  go to the website, you will see there is a little story on there as  to why Rubber Cheese is called Rubber Cheesebut I'm going to let you  go and find it rather than tell you00:01:15:22 - 00:01:16:10Ellie & Kelly[LAUGHTER]00:01:17:07 - 00:01:27:21EllieI'll do that. So you were 24 when the agency started. What had been  your work experience up till then? That's ever so young to make the  leap to starting your own business. How did that come about?00:01:27:23 - 00:01:47:15KellyI think it felt young then, it doesn't feel young now. There are  agency founders that are way younger than we were that are members  of the AC. So back then it felt quite young. But I'd worked in an  agency I mean, I was a graphic designer. I'd trained to be a graphic  designer and I'd worked in various roles. I guess you'd probably  call me a bit of an allrounder, so i never really found one thing  that I wanted to stick at.00:01:47:15 - 00:02:13:10KellyI did a little bit of branding design and I did some packaging  design, and then I went and worked for a marketing agency and did  marketing design. And I just stayed in places a couple of years and  then moved on. Got itchy feet, I guess. And then I ended up working  at a web design company who had developed a really early Shopify  platform, and it allowed people to build their own ecommerce shops  and think about this is like 21 years ago.00:02:13:10 - 00:02:30:22KellySo this is really a new thing back then. I think e-commerce and  shopping online was still quite a frightening thing for people. It  wasn't the norm.  I was brought in as a print designer, but then I ended up designing  ecommerce shops and I guess that was where I got my first taste of  digital think it's probably the first time that I've had an email  address as well.00:02:31:13 - 00:02:48:01KellySo long ago! And I met my co-founder Paul there. He was a designer  as well, and I think the two of us, we were almost doing the same  thing day in, day out, and we just got a little bit frustrated  really. So the two of us decided that we were going to almost go off  and freelance but do it under the Rubber Cheese name.00:02:48:01 - 00:02:51:00KellySo we hadn't really thought that much about setting up a company. It  was just:00:02:51:00 - 00:02:55:04Kelly"Let's go and freelance, let's go and do something a bit different  for a while and see where this goes."00:02:55:04 - 00:03:05:10KellyAnd we were just really lucky. So when I left the company, I sent an  email out to everybody on my email database which was probably about  20 people back then, 'cause I'd only just got an email address.00:03:05:14 - 00:03:38:10KellyBut I had just recently connected with an old school friend on  Friends Reunited - Retro, I know! And he worked at an architect's  firm, and the architects firm needed to partner with a designer or a  team of designers on a pitch they were doing for Tescos. And so they  asked if we would partner with them on it. We said, yep, and long  story short, they won the pitch and so we ended up working for  Tesco's for about two years and that was one of our first clients  and that was just a phenomenal stroke of luck because that was our  bread and butter that paid our rent and that gave us I guess a  little bit of freedom to try00:03:38:10 - 00:03:52:19Kellyout lots of different things that we wanted to do. So we did some  illustration work, we were doing some graphic design work and then  slowly over the years we just built up our client base quite  organically. It felt like a really nice easy start to agency life,  and then it got chaos.00:03:54:23 - 00:04:02:12EllieYou guys have quite a specific niche, so can you tell me about that  in terms of the clients that you work with and how you discovered  that niche?00:04:02:12 - 00:04:25:04KellyYeah, so we work a lot with visitor tourist attractions, and tourism  in general. It came about in a bit of a weird way. So one of our  longstanding clients is Pernod Ricard, global drinks company. And  they have brands under their umbrella like The Glenlivet, Abelour,  Plymouth Gin, Beefeater Gin, and we've been very lucky to work with  them for probably over ten years now on various different digital  projects.00:04:25:07 - 00:04:44:18KellyAnd a few years ago they asked us to create a ticket booking system  for the Plymouth Gin Visitor Centre, which is a great project. We  worked on that for about a year launched it, and it was such a  success for that visitor centre that they then rolled the platform  out for Beefeater Gin and then for four of the whisky distilleries  up in Scotland.00:04:45:08 - 00:05:22:08KellyAnd that project gave us an incredible insight into the visitor  economy, visitor experience attractions world. We all soon realised  how much we'd loved working on that project and how much we wanted  to do more of that kind of work. So I guess that's really where the  niche started to come from. We actively then looked for more  projects that we could use our expertise that we'd gained on that  for. Very lucky to win a pitch for Eureka, the National Children's  Museum, and those projects set us on the road to niching in that  area, which was quite scary to start with because we'd never put all  of our eggs in one basket before and we do still get enquiries  outside00:05:22:08 - 00:05:38:16Kellyof that sector. And we pick and choose whether we think that we're a  good fit for them or we pass them on to other agencies as well. I  think that's probably just a historical thing because we've been  around for so long, but we started to then focus all of our outward  marketing on that niche as well, which was quite frightening to do  that.00:05:38:16 - 00:06:00:10KellySuddenly you're making a really big statement about who you want to  work with - 'are you cutting your nose of to spite your face',  moment., But it's been fantastic, actually. And for me and the team  are all very much people that we would spend our own money on  experiences rather than stuff. And so it's a really good fit  personally for us., as well and runs through the core of our values  and what we value from a personal perspective as well.00:06:00:20 - 00:06:02:20KellySo it was the right thing to do.00:06:02:20 - 00:06:05:07EllieHundred percent. But then how did 2020 affect you?00:06:05:16 - 00:06:22:08KellyYeah, I'm not going to lie. That was quite scary! [LAUGHS] If I'm  being completey honest, 2019 had been a bit of a challenging year.  So I've spoken to quite a few agencies who had a bit of a rocky 2019  to be honest, and it was very up and down for us. So we came into  2020 with a slightly leaner team.00:06:22:14 - 00:06:45:20KellyWe came into 2020, probably a bit war wounded, bruised and feeling a  little bit damaged, but we worked our bloody arses off. We won some  brilliant projects that all kicked off at the start of 2020, so we  were in a really, really strong position. March happened and that  was pretty terrifying and I guess it did make us sit back and  question, have we done the right thing here?00:06:46:03 - 00:07:03:24KellyI think that anyone will tell you, if you're going to niche into to  a sector, it's going to take good 18 months to make any kind of  impact I would say and we had launched into that in around July  August time of 2019. So we were coming up for just six months of  that and we did sit and question and say 'What do we do?"00:07:04:02 - 00:07:24:02Kelly"We've gone all in and we've made this massive statement. It's what  we all feel and believe is the right thing for us." And so what we  did was just carry on doing everything that we could to support that  sector with the understanding that nobody had any money to spend.  People were being furloughed, made redundant, left right and centre.  It was horrendous attractions were closing, some never to be opened  ever again.00:07:24:18 - 00:07:57:05KellySo what could we do to help them? What could we do to support them?  And try and get through this dreadful time? And that was what we  did. We focussed on our podcast called Skip the Queue. We spoke to  as many people as we can. We asked them what help they needed. We  created a free e-book download with hundreds of strategies that they  could try, but when they were reopening just to try and get their  websites in the best possible position before they could reopen, I  spoke on webinars, I spoke at conferences and we just shared as much  of our expertise as we possibly could because that's all we could  do.00:07:57:17 - 00:08:20:24KellySo it was scary but that was the best thing that we could do. And  actually I made some amazing... I don't even want to say contacts.  I've just made some amazing friends within that sector, they're not  contacts anymore. They're friends who we've gone on to work with or  we've gone on to help in some way, or they actively support us in  terms of referrals and introductions and introductions just for the  podcast,00:08:20:24 - 00:08:29:11KellyI feel like it gave us the opportunity to really build a community  over that time community of people that we could really help.00:08:29:11 - 00:08:34:02EllieThat's brilliant. Must have been such a comfort going through  2020/2021.00:08:35:02 - 00:08:52:01KellyThe podcast was if I 'm honest. I've said this is blog posts, it was  the one thing that just kept me going because every week I knew that  I could speak to people, someone different, and I was going to talk  about something new, something exciting, or I was giving them a  platform to be able to share how they were feeling about what they  were going through or how they could support the industry as well.00:08:52:11 - 00:09:01:16KellyAnd it got me through that. It was brilliant. I'm so grateful to the  people that gave up their time to come and share on it because it  was helping me just as much as it was helping the audience that was  listening.00:09:02:17 - 00:09:13:13EllieI bet you were! Going from the two of you, 24, starting your agency,  just accidentally, almost. How do you then learn to be an agency  leader and lead a team?00:09:14:24 - 00:09:31:12KellyProbably still learning! [LAUGHS] It's just ongoing. Isn't it? Every  day is a learning day when it comes to stuff like that. It's a  really interesting question. It was just the two of us for a really  long time. So Paul and I for about five years and we were very much  trying to run a business, trying to get work in, trying to then do  the business.00:09:31:12 - 00:09:55:13KellyYou know, I was in a production role still then, both of us were.  And I think we would have coming up to that 30 bracket and having  that conversation about what are we doing? Is it just the two of us  forever or are we going to grow this? What does this become? And we  decided that we were going to try to grow an agency and we had to  make the decision about somebody stepping back from a production  role, really, because it was getting too difficult to manage those  two different roles.00:09:55:20 - 00:10:14:00KellyAnd then we would end up with that feast or famine where we won a  lot of business. But then we were too busy doing the business to  actually look at what the pipeline looked like, and more. And so I  took a step back from production and we hired a designer that would  take on my design role. And then it became a two year journey of  pain.00:10:14:00 - 00:10:34:12KellyI'm not going to lie. I really struggled coming from a creative  background, suddenly being thrown into a world of spreadsheets and  pipeline and profit and loss [COMICAL GROWLING NOISE] and all those  scary things that you have to learn when you're a business owner and  learning how to manage people. In any of my roles prior to that, I'd  never actually managed anybody.00:10:34:12 - 00:10:52:22KellyI'd never had a junior under me or anything like that. And so there  was a lot that I needed to learn, and it felt like a very, very  steep journey. And I actually did feel quite resentful to start with  because I felt like Paul had stayed in his designer stroke creative  director role when he got to do the things that he knew really well.00:10:53:04 - 00:11:10:13KellyAnd suddenly I've got to learn all of this stuff that I'm finding  really difficult and challenging. And I just wanted to pull my hair  out every single day. And I'd say it honestly took a good couple of  years to feel confident in that role and confident that I knew what  I was doing and I could lead that agency. Every day is a learning  day from now.00:11:10:13 - 00:11:24:09KellyI'm really lucky that I have a really good agency network around me.  Obviously, we've got Agency Collective, who's been an incredible  support and there's always someone that's been through an experience  that you're about to go through that you can ask: "Has anyone gone  through this?" And instantly you'll have like00:11:24:09 - 00:11:25:14EllieBeen there, done that advice.00:11:25:14 - 00:11:30:19KellyYeah, five or six people will be like, "Yes, oh my God, this has  happened to us as well, and you're not alone in it all"00:11:30:19 - 00:11:39:05KellyAnd that's probably the best thing that I did, is just try and build  up as many agency contacts as I possibly could, who would support me  through that journey of pain.00:11:41:06 - 00:11:45:20EllieWhat's next for Rubber Cheese, then? What's coming up and where do  you see the agency going00:11:45:20 - 00:12:05:13KellyThere's been lots of change already. Obviously, the pandemic made  big changes for everybody. It's interesting because in 2019 we had  one team member who moved back home up north, so we were already  running a semi remote working model. So we had experience of how  that might work for us. And at the moment that's what we've gone to.  Everyone was really happy our office lease came up.00:12:05:17 - 00:12:23:06KellyNobody really wanted to go back there five days a week. So at the  moment we're just running a remote office. So that's been a new way  of working and a new way of patterns to understand how to lead an  agency like that. The niche is doing brillianty. So we've got some  fabulous client partners that we're working with within that, so I  can only see that going from strength to strength.00:12:23:10 - 00:12:39:11KellyAnd there's some exciting things happening with the podcast and an  event that will be happening hopefully at the beginning of next  year. And that's something that we see developing more and more of -  us doing live events again, which would be amazing to get people  back in the room.00:12:39:11 - 00:12:49:18KellyLots of change, lots of exciting things happening moving forward,  and I think maybe a slightly different role for myself as well  because we've just had our lovely little girl, she's eight months  now.00:12:50:01 - 00:13:03:02KellyLife is very different for me personally now, and I think that has  to be reflected in what I do with the agency as well. So I think  there might be a few changes coming up there that will help me  manage my work/life balance a little bit better than it currently  is.00:13:04:00 - 00:13:12:10EllieWell, I wish you all of the luck for the future, and hope you get  that work/life balance. It's so important. And you as an agency  founder, you've got to lead the way for the team as well, right?00:13:12:18 - 00:13:16:08KellyAbsolutely. Yeah. If it doesn't come from the top down, then it's  not going to happen, is it?00:13:17:03 - 00:13:19:02EllieBrilliant. Thanks so much, Kelly. It's been great.00:13:19:11 - 00:13:22:01KellyThank you. So lovely to be on. Really appreciate it.00:13:22:19 - 00:13:33:08IntroThanks so much for listening. Please don't forget to subscribe. Stay  in touch. And if you like what you hear. Find out more at  theagencycollective. co.uk.