#152 – David Darke on Building a Successful Agency Through Strategic Growth

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, building a successful agency through strategically planned growth.

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So on the podcast today, we have David Darke.

David is a Bristol based entrepreneur, and a longtime WordPress user. He is the co-founder of Atomic Smash, a digital agency specializing in WordPress and WooCommerce performance optimization.

Since its founding in 2010, Atomic Smash has grown from a two person team into a thriving agency, known for helping businesses improve their digital platforms with WordPress.

The podcast today traces David’s experiences growing the agency, and the many highs and lows he’s been on.

David’s story begins in a business incubator, where the affordable desk space facilitated invaluable networking, and relationship building opportunities. Through perseverance and strategic networking, David has grown the agency from these small beginnings into a robust team of 20 professionals.

We talk about the myriad challenges he faced, from overcoming the initial skepticism due to his age, to the trials of managing business growth and client expectations.

You’ll hear about the critical role that external business coaches have played in guiding his agency through different stages of growth, and how strategic learning has been pivotal in expanding beyond core web development skills, to mastering business acumen, and operational strategies.

David also discusses his current role, which involves less hands-on coding and more focus on technical oversight, sales, and strategic client interactions.

He shares his insights into the importance of delegation, finding work-life balance, and ensuring his team operates efficiently without overextending themselves.

We also get into the evolving web industry landscape, particularly the integration of AI and SEO into their service offerings, aiming to position his company as a strategic partner for client growth.

He emphasizes the importance of hiring the right talent, including freelancers, and the necessity of pausing business coaching to implement growth strategies effectively.

Whether you’re an aspiring freelancer, an agency owner looking to grow, or simply passionate about WordPress, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so, without further delay, I bring you David Darke.

I am joined on the podcast by David Darke. Hello David.

[00:03:46] David Darke: Hi there. How’s it going?

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to chat to you. David and I first met, well, we haven’t really met much because the role in which I met David is one where I’m typically quite busy. I help out with the WordPress London meetup, which happens each month in the city of London, and David was doing a talk there.

However, the nature of my role is that I am face down in an iPad trying to make sure that the recording happens, and then as soon as the event is over, I busily tidy up with everybody else.

So I never really got to meet David, but I did manage to catch his talk in great detail. Gave a presentation over there essentially about growing an agency, managing a successful agency. So we’re going to get into that conversation today, but before we do, David, would you just give us a potted bio? Tell us a little bit about what you do, the journey that you’ve been on with WordPress and your agency.

[00:04:38] David Darke: Yeah, yeah, great. And I’ll also say, you looked busy and not stressed, which is actually quite an impressive thing for all the equipment you were managing on the day, but yeah.

So yeah, my name’s David Darke, started a WordPress based agency 14 years ago. We are based in Bristol in the UK. And I’ve definitely worn many hats in that time.

So started off with myself and my business partner. I was the primary developer and only developer within the team.

We’ve grown the team now to just around 20, and my role has shifted in that time going from the only developer, to development lead, to operations management part of the actual business. And now I’m actually shifted away from operations, and more on the growth and sales side of the business. So definitely all inwardly focused, and then now outwardly focused.

Again, worn many hats and that’s been one of those challenges of owning and running an agency is the need to adapt and wear different hats.

[00:05:33] Nathan Wrigley: When you began with you and your business partner, did you have an intuition that you wished to grow? Was it more just, let’s start a business, let’s put food on the table and see where it goes? Or did you always have that light at the end of the tunnel, that thing that you were aiming for, growth, growth, growth, getting new business, grow the business, employ more people? How did that all work out?

[00:05:55] David Darke: Yeah, it’s really funny. In the first year it was that sort of approach of, we need to get clients. We had no money, we had no funding, we were all bootstrapped and self-manage. We literally worked for, it was about eight to nine months before, so in normal jobs, it’s basically the only job I’ve actually had.

I was actually part of a photography team, a photo editing team for a sportswear company. It’s a random role, but it was basically just get some money behind us so we can actually live in the first year, really.

And initially it was just, let’s do it, let’s try it. It was the perfect opportunity. It was directly outside of after leaving university. There was no risk. I had no family, you know, it was just case of, if it didn’t work, we’ll just get a job.

So the idea was, let’s try it, let’s get going. And as soon as we started moving the idea of, not necessarily, not aiming for massive growth, but the idea of having a team behind us was a real goal at that stage.

And we definitely took a long time to actually employ our first person, and that person’s actually still part of the team now. He just had his 10th anniversary. So from our side, we definitely took quite a while to actually get that first employee on.

But after that is really a case of, let’s work out what team size we need to be to facilitate all the things we need to do. Make sure that myself and my business partner weren’t overloaded. You know, there’s definitely a period in the middle growth of the business where we’re just doing too much stuff and were spread very thin.

So working out what sort of team size does it need to be to allow us to have the flexibility to give more responsibility to team members, and also give us the brain space to think about how the business should be shaped, grown, and how it should just maintain itself really, yeah.

So now we’re at the stage where myself and my business partner are definitely doing less on the tools jobs, I’m basically doing no production work at all, but we’re able to invest time in the business and the team.

[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do you work exclusively with WordPress based projects, or are you more of a broader church than that? Do you do web development in other areas, maybe even software development, things like that, or is it just purely WordPress?

[00:07:49] David Darke: We have a couple of sites where they’ve got a primary WordPress platform and they use some like Shopify for their e-commerce. So we do support a bit of Shopify on the side. We basically do no real software development or anything outside of the WordPress ecosystem. Every single one of our clients has some form of WordPress installation at some level.

That does, when you’re talking about WooCommerce and big sort of CRM integrations, it does mean we have to have our fingers in a lot of pies. We integrate with things like Salesforce and the other big CRMs. So we do have to interact with some middleware sometimes, but 99% of our clients are WordPress.

[00:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to hang out in Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups, and things like that, there’s always a lot of conversation around where you were at the beginning of your journey. You know, I’ve got this agency, I’m a one person team, I would like to grow and what have you. And it feels like you’ve probably gone through all of the things, you’ve tripped over all the trip wires, hit all the hurdles, got past them all in some way, shape or form.

And one of the things that came out was, the bit that you just mentioned about, maybe it’s regret in some way of not making the first hire sooner. And I never managed to scale an agency, I was always very happy to just operate myself, but that was one of the things that concerned me a lot, was making that first hire, committing myself to somebody else’s welfare.

Am I right in saying that you, looking back, you think you maybe should have jumped off that a little bit sooner and hired the first person sooner, to free yourselves up to do other things?

[00:09:21] David Darke: Oh yeah, definitely. And you are right, it’s more about, we didn’t want to necessarily employ someone and then have to let them go because there wasn’t enough money to fund their salary. It was really that simple. Making sure there’s enough security in the business to make sure that we just spent the time and effort in getting them on, getting them into the team, and then having to let them go.

That’s from our side, and also from their side. We hadn’t employed anyone before, we didn’t want to disappoint them. They want to be part of the team, they want to be part of the journey, we didn’t want to then have to say, well, you got to go now because we didn’t think this through properly.

So we definitely spent a lot of time and I would definitely say at the start there was definite, we were doing too much stuff, and then we had too many projects on, and by the time we needed to have someone on the team, it was almost like too late because the recruitment process does take. You need two weeks to basically start looking for people, you need another couple of weeks to basically do interviews and do that whole process properly and meet them.

And this was obviously pre covid, so a lot of it was in person, it really was, interview process was getting people into our studio space to actually speak to them. And we really did it too late. We should have been doing it months before so they’re ready to join. So again, it’s just that sort of balancing, and it’s easy with hindsight, but actually the balancing of making sure that our capacity was right, and how we balance our capacity, we did it too late.

And if we look back now, we did have the security even with the upcoming projects, but it’s just quite big thing to do on the first time. And even from a legal side, just not knowing exactly every box you need to tick when you employ someone, like what contracts you actually have to have. Actually getting the contract and you need to pay someone to do that, or you need to get, you know, there’s a lot of things to do. So the advice is, try and do it as early as possible if you want it to do it.

[00:10:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the interesting word that you used there was capacity. And so there must be, in your head, looking back, obviously now with hindsight, you recognise what that capacity was. Do you have any rule of thumb that you could bring to bear to this conversation? Let’s say that somebody is, like I was, a web agency owner, or maybe there’s two or three people who’ve joined and they’re just beginning to get the intuition that maybe they could take somebody on. Is there a rule of thumb? Maybe that’s around finances or the, I don’t know, the bottleneck in the pipeline of work you’ve got? Do you have any sort of wisdom about when that first hire might be suitable?

[00:11:33] David Darke: Yeah, I think at the start, it wasn’t like an intentional approach, but I was definitely working seven days week. And definitely got burnt out around year three or four in that sort of process. And that idea of actually being able to be at a position, obviously finances are one thing, you need the money to pay their salary, that’s like an underlying thing of security that side.

But I would definitely say the idea of being able to deliver projects in a capacity where you are only working five days a week, and actually have a normal nine to five or whatever the timeframe is, in X number of hours, seven hours a day, without needing to work in the evenings, without needing to do all these things.

Actually, even if you are a freelancer, or just trying to grow, or just the idea of being able to do the work in a sensible timeframe, and if you can’t do the work, then you need help.

And that’s basically the rule of thumb. And that’s how we even work out our hiring capacity now, is we look at the team, we look at what needs to come up. Can we deliver this stuff with a team that we’ve got?

And that’s the sort of tipping point of actually how we scale and grow, and in the areas we need to grow and scale. So even within the team now, we only have one designer. We don’t do huge number of projects, but if we were doing more and more design work, we’re literally looking at, how much capacity does that designer have? When do we need the second designer? Or do we just need freelance capacity? That’s really how we balance it. So just trying to make sure we’re not over-delivering and just not doing insane hours, just making sure everything’s sensible and you can actually start to look back and enjoy the actual process rather than it being this burden.

[00:13:02] Nathan Wrigley: I think obviously the finance is a given. If there’s not enough throughput of cash, then the business is not really a business, it’s something else. But the intuition around seven days a week being something that is unsustainable, I think everybody can grasp hold of that.

So if you wish your business to be five days a week, seven hours a day, and it’s seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then maybe there is extra capacity, and assuming that you’ve got the finances. I think that’s an interesting one that everybody can grab hold of. If the amount of free hours in your week don’t match what you wish to have, then maybe it’s time to start looking around for additional help.

[00:13:38] David Darke: I really, really, wholeheartedly agree that actually, someone working five hours a day in a productive and structured way is actually probably more effective than someone working 12 hours a day. It really is a case of actually having the brain space to think about what you’re doing, and less procrastination and more focused on just doing what you need to do in this timeframe. That limitation actually really helps to make sure that you’re not twiddling your thumbs, you’re not doing things that don’t need to be done and really gives focus.

I think actually from our side, restricting our time, I now actually only work four days a week. So that’s brought another restriction around, every Thursday I’m not in the office, so I need to make sure what I need to do in the week is done, usually at the starts of the week, and then Friday, I’ve got the capacity to almost plan the next week, or do meetings, or do those other things.

So those limitations sound like there are limitations, but actually it’s more of a guide rails of how you need to use your time. And then as soon as I leave the office I’m not interacting with the business. That clear definition really helps from a, the classic work, life balance, you know, really just having that definition. And most of our team, that is the case. It really is a case of, once the time’s over, you pick up the next day. But it does take quite a lot of management and organisation to do that, especially personally. That’s something I had to learn. That was one of the biggest of skills I had to learn is just how to organise your own time.

[00:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think everybody can identify with that thing where, it’s late at night, you’re trying to read a book or something like that, and you realise that for every 10 lines that you read, none of the information has gone in. And you could map the same thing to your work life. It’s so easy to fall into the trap that 12 hours a day, good, five hours day, less good, just because I’m doing more hours a day.

But I think you’re right. There’s this sort of burnout which just builds up over time. It’s sort of compound interest, you just feel more and more burnt out, each hour becomes less productive. So taking that absolute time out, and in your case, four days a week, maybe it’s five hours in the office, something like that. Step out of the front door, you are back to social David, if you like, and normal life, and then walk back through the following morning and you’re back to work. I can really identify with that, and hopefully the people listening to that can as well.

[00:15:45] David Darke: Yeah, and also I’ve got a 2-year-old as well, so that really puts a clear definition of, when I’m at home, they’re the focus really, it can’t work both ways. You can’t work with a two odd running around basically, it’s almost impossible.

[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: A lot of people might be at this point saying, yeah, that’s all very well, David, but what about, where does the work materialise from? How do you get the work? And obviously now that you are more established and your name has been circulated many, many times, I imagine that’s a different jigsaw puzzle than it was in the beginning.

So let’s cast our mind back to when it was just the two of you at the beginning and you were presumably scrambling around for work. Do you have any advice there? I mean, was it just that you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, the internet was taking off and so on and so forth. Or were there things, looking back, that you thought, actually, do you know what, we did that really well, and we did that really poorly?

[00:16:35] David Darke: I definitely see that the conversations we have nowadays are very different to the ones we had in the past. I think client’s knowledge of even WordPress is a lot higher. So they’ve, again, it’s just maybe just the maturity of the internet and the idea of project managers and digital teams have probably been through two to three websites in the last 10 years. And people’s sort of growth with that, and experience with it has changed.

So I think when we were sort of pitching WordPress websites, and actually the whole web development projects, there’s a lot less emphasis on how much money needed to be spent on a website, everything was cheaper. I think their expectation now is there needs to be good investment in sites for them to be effective, and that was a lot harder sell 10 years ago, I think.

So there’s definitely been shift and change in people’s understanding of what it takes to build a website. And we talked to project managers, digital project managers now, they actually understand that when you create a new website, it’s actually quite difficult to do content migration. You need two months to like move all the content and do an SEO plan. 10 years ago, no one cared. Just do the website, just get out of there. But they’ve been through it.

I think the internet is at that sort of age and maturity where, and the teams that work in businesses and digital managers, they kind of understand the pitfalls of rushing those things, and there needs to be time and thought.

I think when it comes to your question around how we find work. We started in a business incubator. That was more of a case of, there was some services tagged on, but it was basically the idea of, you join this incubator, it’s very, very cheap desk space. When you start, I think it’s every six months you are there, might of been like less than that. Every whatever time period you’re there, the desks get more expensive. So the idea is you start really cheap and it gives you the idea, within two to three years, it’s at the point where you should be sort of moving out of the incubator and thinking about other spaces or other options.

For us it was just cheap desk space. It was the ability for us to get out of the house, go to somewhere where we can work, and the idea is, well, we might meet some people while we’re there and, what actually happened is when we got dropped into this business incubator, we were pretty much the only web developers in this incubator. So actually being able to help and do favors for people have built to lasting relationships where we still talk to them now.

Some of them are freelance or contract UX people. Some of them are data people. And they were just there because again, they just wanted desk space. But the people they’re working with now are bigger organisations, bigger corporates, and those relationships have tied together. But at that time we were basically doing really small work for them, but we’re around a group of people that needed help and needed advice. And again, expertise and knowledge in general was limited 10 years ago.

So I think that really helped us in that initial stage of like, how do we just get these small bits of work? As the team grew, it was really about us being proactive with conversations with people we wanted to work with. That has been effective, very ineffective sometimes. But it’s finding, for us, our unique offering and the way we work, which is more of a maintenance basis and a recurring model, that we kind of really dialed into, and we found the benefits of that. And that’s, for us it’s our ability to sell that to clients.

You know, the idea of you don’t necessarily need a brand new website every three years. If you just work on the one you’ve got, adapt and evolve it, you can actually save a lot of money without needing to build a brand new site every three years. So that’s taken us quite a while to find our model, and our sort of unique offering. But actually finding people and being able to sell that has definitely shifted and changed as the business has grown.

[00:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like there’s a fair degree, in your business at least, at the beginning of what you might describe as networking or socialising. It’s not all about, I don’t know, posting Google ads and paying in that way. This is meeting real people in this enclosed space or out in the wider community or what have you. So it sounds like you were getting local business possibly, at the beginning.

That kind of leads me in a curious direction that I didn’t anticipate. And that is, did you rely, you and your partner, on your gregarious nature? Are you outgoing? Was that some sort of superpower that you maybe have?

I think it’s possible to say that a certain proportion of people who end up in the web development space are not that, they’re fairly introverted, and so the idea of mixing and socialising might be something that they’re feeling, yeah, a little bit uncomfortable about. So I just wondered if you wanted to speak to that, whether there was some element of your personality which enabled you to grow.

[00:20:57] David Darke: That might be a possibility. I would also say that at the time when we started the business, myself and a business partner looked quite young. When we’re talking to businesses and companies about how they want to be growing their website, we just generally looked like we just left university. So actually from a sales perspective, that wasn’t actually particularly a great thing. We didn’t look like we had the experience. We didn’t look like we’d done this process many times.

I think from our side some of the networking side of things was beneficial, but then actually hiding behind some of that other communication and other ways speaking and reaching out to businesses was actually beneficial. Because you could actually show expertise and experience in other ways. So it’s kind of like twofold.

But definitely from a networking side, the thing we’ve definitely found with networking events and just general things, you have to be quite careful if you are trying to find new business. For example, most WordPress meetups, you’ll be talking with people that use WordPress, or develop WordPress, build sites, and not necessarily clients or potential clients. So you then have to find those particular networking events that would actually have potential clients in them. And that might mean that you are going to something that’s a bit more random. Even something that’s maybe based around accessibility or something that’s based around, I don’t know, even environmental impact or something like that, where you’ll be talking with other people that potentially would have those challenges, and then you can speak to them about their website and what have you.

So it is about a selection of what events you go to. But I think the networking side of things is super important because as soon as you come across a challenge, and if you’ve spoken to someone, a great branding person that you met two weeks ago, that person’s at the top of your brain. As soon as you see someone with that challenge or you try and help someone, or even a current client that might come to you with a branding challenge, we basically don’t do any sort of branding at all, we just do development work and design work.

But as soon as we find someone has a challenge, you can just grab these people really easily because they’re just forefront of your brain. And that’s the power of networking more than just meeting people directly. It’s just getting people to know what you do, and when those challenges come up, they’re the front of people’s brains.

[00:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: So you are now at 20 people, I think you said, or thereabouts. So you’ve gone from two and you’ve added 18 roughly. During that journey, was it always upwards? Did it always go from two, to three, to four, to six or did it ever sort of slide down again? What I’m trying to get at in this question is, has it always been growth or have there been moments when that growth has stalled? When the anxiety, looking at the financial spreadsheet, has been more than it was less, put it that way.

[00:23:34] David Darke: Yeah, hundred percent. Definitely hasn’t always been up. There’s definitely times where we’ve had to go down. Some of that has been natural just churn of people leaving and then they have been replaced. Some of it has been from loss of projects or loss of clients and had to make difficult decisions. So it’s never as, well, for us, definitely wasn’t always an upward trajectory. I’d definitely, from my side, there was also points of stagnation and really from our side to actually work out how we get past those. We’ve needed external business coaches to really help us prioritise and work out how we utilise our superpowers and what we’re really, really good at, into better, more cohesive offering. And that will really help grow the team.

So I think from our side, we were kind of quoted these numbers of, when you get to around sort of 10 people, that’s certain number of challenges. Growing from 10 to 20 is another set of challenges, and getting beyond 20 is basically another set of challenges. So it’s almost like these milestones in growth.

And we were definitely lingering around 10, 11 for a long time, just because their natural, even the process you have internally to scale to that number, just needed a lot of internal help, internal and external help to get beyond that. So yeah, there’s definitely been points of stagnation. There’s definitely been points of retraction. But if you look to the graph in general, it has been upward.

[00:24:52] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like you’ve put yourself in the path of people who you recognise to be good teachers of whatever it is that you need to know. So maybe that’s some aspect of, I don’t know, web design for those people in your business that do that. But it also sounded there, like you have deliberately gone out to find business coaches.

So that maybe has nothing to do with web development, but you’ve got to balance the books and there are ways of doing that. Is that the case? Do you go out and find people who you think, okay, I need to learn this thing, rather than reading it in books, I’m just going to take the direct route and go and find a human being that can do that, or an agency that can do that? Because I guess that’s fairly important as a short circuit of trying to figure it all out yourself.

[00:25:34] David Darke: A hundred percent. Yeah, we were very active three, four years ago of finding a proper business coach. And business coach is like, that’s very much like a phrase that could cover a lot of things, like you’re saying, could cover financial, could cover operations or whatever. But actually when it boils down to what we needed, it was almost like a third party for myself and my business partner to be responsible too. To actually say, we’re going to be doing these things, we’re going to be doing this activity or whatever it might be, a task that needs to get done in the business or a KPI.

The first thing that they basically said to us when they joined was, your accounting’s terrible, go and get it sorted, like basically just go and do that. Look at this and just give that sort of advice and experience to say what’s working well, what isn’t. And you now need to go and do this. You’ve got two weeks to go and do this or however long, and get it done.

And actually there’s not many people that myself and my business partner are responsible to. We’re responsible to our employees for employee led things, but when it comes to business level things, we’re just responsible to ourselves, you know, each other.

So actually having this third party to basically wag the finger and say, you need to get this done and you need to get it done now was really helpful to actually make sure things got done. Yeah, that level of experience and that third party to be responsible to was really, really beneficial. And the thing that we kind of got to, and the point we got to was they helped us form KPIs, so key performance indicators for the business, and metrics we can track, and they helped with our accounting processes, they helped with our general capacity processes and all those sort of things that helped the business.

We then stopped using them because we basically had a load of work that needed to happen, you know, months and years worth of work that needed to happen. And the idea is we’ll probably pick up that relationship again when we are at the next stage because we now need to work on, we now need to do the growth, we now need to do these things. And we were at the stage where we kind of knew what we needed to do, and we were just basically checking in at that stage. We weren’t getting anything new.

But there are going to be set of challenges that we’re going to face in the next year, two years, where that relationship will be super beneficial again. So I genuinely think that having an external voice, an external ear as well, just to talk through problems, that whole classic rubber duck programming of just speaking your program out loud to someone, it really is super beneficial. And having a mentor, and actually being a mentor for other people is very, very important.

[00:27:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s almost like you’ve hired in a third partner or something like that. Somebody who’s got the right to tell you, you’re doing this wrong. There’s a better way to do this. And I think as a freelancer at the beginning, just you and your partner, it is easy to assume that everything needs to be done by the pair of you, and if it can’t be done by the pair of you, you’re failures. And of course, in the real world, nobody has the capacity to do all the tasks in every walk of life. We employ people to do almost anything that we come into contact with. So that’s really interesting.

Are you good at delegating? Because again, right back at the beginning when you are doing everything, and you’ve got to go from two to three, I think this is where probably I stumbled, and I’m sure a lot of people can share in my experience here.

I just seem to find delegating quite difficult. I don’t know what that is, but there’s this thought maybe in the back of my head that, well, I know what I need to do, so I should be the one to begin it, and end it and, what have you. Are you a good delegator or was that a skill that you had to learn?

[00:28:50] David Darke: Yeah, definitely had to learn. And I’d definitely say I’m a very average delegator. So my approach to it now is trying to be a bit more hands off. So if I’m not involved from the start, it’s a lot easier for me to not be involved in the future. Having oversight and seeing how things work is definitely beneficial. As soon as I’m trying to get into the, I’m quite detail orientated, so as soon as I get to know the details and I feel myself wanting to be more involved in something. If I’m a bit more hands off, and allowing our employees to have responsibility for things, that’s easier for me to then not be involved in the future and just allowing those things to happen.

I was definitely a bad delegator at the start, and it’s definitely something I’ve worked on and improved on in the years. But it’s more about techniques rather than naturally just this becomes a thing you can do. It’s more just allowing people to have responsibility for those things. And myself, just making sure I’m only checking in when I need to check in or whatever’s needed for the task at hand. It’s definitely a challenging thing and it’s

one of those tasks, that sort of soft skill which isn’t really something you can just do a course in or learn. That suite of soft skills is something that you don’t really get training for as a manager or a business owner, get trained for very meticulous or very particular things around accounting, or if you need to do a certain process, you can just get a course. But that soft skill stuff is super important, but it’s hard to get training in, and you kind of just have to learn as you go really.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: Do you ever have to pull yourself back from the opposite of delegating, just getting in too deep into the tasks that your employees are tasked with doing? You sort of find yourself looking over their shoulder and thinking, oh, that’s curious, let’s have a chat about that. When really your job now is divorced from that, you are one step back, one step higher if you like, and you’ve got to just pull yourself back from that precipice.

[00:30:34] David Darke: Yeah, I mean, not necessarily in the way, my role now within the business, because I’m more to do with the sales side and the growth aspect and less about the internal workings, I definitely find that’s a lot less. From my side, the things I’d be checking in now and making sure happens is once a client joins, making sure they’re happy and checking in from that perspective.

Definitely from my business partners side, who’s now more internally focused, it’s basically their role as a director to direct, actually steer the ship. So there definitely needs to be a certain level of oversight and seeing what is happening. But I think our personalities and characters, he’s very, very good at having a lot of different things, and having oversight of a lot of different things without needing the granular detail.

Whereas I’m, because I’m more detail orientated, I kind of need everything to help make decisions. But I think for my new role I’m definitely less involved and less overseeing and that side of things. But it’s almost important that it does happen to some degree, that people have oversight of stuff, just to make sure things are done in the right way and make sure that things are profitable, for example. And we have a set of business values, make sure things are being delivered with those values in mind. It definitely needs that in place. It’s never just about wagging fingers, just watching, making sure people are working or anything like that. It’s really the case of making sure the business is doing what it’s meant to be doing.

[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it sounds like you have to have trust on a fairly profound level, that the people that you have invested your time into, and they’ve invested their time into your business, you can trust them. You delegate a task, and the anticipation therefore is that that task will be done and they’re going to tackle it in the same way that hopefully you will have done, and the processes are there to make sure that happens.

So now that you are, I’m going to use the word manager, maybe you have a different word for yourself. I’m guessing, again, if we rewind the clock, I’m guessing that you probably weren’t able to look forward and think, yeah, this is what I’ll be doing in 10 or 15 years time, this is what my day will look like, because you generally concentrate on the next six months.

Do you enjoy the work that you are doing? I’m not meaning to back you into a corner there. What I’m sort of angling after is, there’s bound to be bits of this new role that are satisfying, but there’s probably bits that, oh boy, I just wish I could hand that over. And again, that’s part of growing the business.

Because it feels, sometimes I have conversations with people who are in similar positions to you, and in some cases they’re stepping back from the more managerial role and they’re going back to the, I want to be in front of a computer and I want to be doing coding again, and it’s still my business but I’m going to employ somebody else to do the managing part, and I’m going to go back to being a developer because that’s what I enjoy.

So it’s questions around that really. Do you find the same satisfaction in the work that you’re doing now, or do you find sometimes you look over at your employees and think, oh, wish I was doing that again?

[00:33:10] David Darke: I think from my side, the things I really enjoy doing, I really enjoy experimenting and having sort of technical oversight over things. My needs to be doing coding and delivering is slightly less. But again, a lot of satisfaction, enjoyment even just from the sales process of really delving into a client’s challenge and communicating with them about how we can solve those things. That actually requires me to actually have a lot of technical oversight, understanding, not necessarily prototyping, but actually being able to articulate to them how our work will improve their site.

And that does require, that does sort of scratch that itch from a technical side of me being able to work with clients, and talk with them, and do technical audits, and actual solution architecture and stuff for new potential clients and existing clients. So I definitely feel that my need to be on the tools is covered by that.

My real, I guess purpose within the business is to make sure the business is growing, that’s the key thing. That’s where I get real satisfaction from is seeing the team working, from seeing the business grow. And that’s almost like at a different level from my own personal need to do coding or those sort of things. So I get a bit of an itch, scratch from that side of things.

The definite story that we have when we employ people, and we really do look to try and grab freelancers to be part of the team, because they’ve had to deal with, I don’t know, some of the minutia of sending invoices, getting new clients, having to tackle all these things of being a freelancer. And when they have the opportunity to just do the work they want to be doing, you get really good results from people, and you get a really satisfied employee because they just get to worry about what they’re doing, rather than worrying about the work upcoming, and having to worry about were the invoices sent. Do they have to do their tax return? You know, all this other stuff that they just don’t get to do.

So I think from my side, it’s really like a character thing. And you do have to ask yourself what you want to be doing within your business. And there’s no reason why someone couldn’t run a business and be any sort of business. It could be a design business, branding, it could be developments, that they can’t build themself into the business in a way where they are still on the tools. They could be a solutions architect, they could be lead developer, but it’s about building the business around it so there’s still opportunity of growth and they still have ability to concentrate on other things.

There’s nothing against someone actually doing the work and running a business. Just you need to have that character to be able to handle that, and also want to be able to it.

And I think what we want to be doing within the business is something we worked on a lot with our business coach, because we have worn so many hats along the way, just actually picking those things that we did really enjoy and trying to build them into a role that we wanted to move forward with was a key part of the work we did with them.

[00:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: I think every industry, no matter what you’re in, you’re always staring over the horizon. You’re always trying to figure out where the next piece of work is coming from, or what the next big wave is. But I think particularly the web, technology, but the web specifically, that moves at a really incredible rate. You take your eye off for six months and you’ve lost sight of what’s going on.

And I’m just sort of wondering about that really, if there’s anything in the near term that you are thinking about. I don’t know, that may be AI, it may be something that you’ve seen in the WordPress space that you really like. So that’s an open-ended question really. Where does the business feel like it’s going to you? What pivots are you thinking about over the very short, near term?

[00:36:19] David Darke: AI is super interesting, it’s something we’re definitely keeping an eye on. And the understanding that AI is going to be part of everything, every app in the next 10 years. It’s going to be here, it’s here to stay, it’s not going anywhere, it’s going to grow. And the idea of how we utilise it. Most of the time, the way we deliver stuff to clients is understanding what is in the marketplace and making the good recommendations.

So you might have a particular brief that says, we want to be using AI as part of this project, you know, really delving down to what actually means. Is it a chat bot for sales process? Is it chat bot for support? Is it something around content creation? It could be anything.

So I think from our side, the things you want to actually be focusing on, again, it’s really delving into our, the way we work and trying to work with clients and find clients that really want to be digging in and helping them grow, not just helping them keep their website online, help them, support them.

The idea of us or anyone being able to produce a website that looks pretty good, either using page builders, or AI generator websites, or anything is becoming more and more easy. So the human connection there and the ability to actually be a strategic partner and help growth is going to be the key to businesses in the future. It’s more about the strategy and the consultation that happens around these things is going to be where the profit is, where the actual need for businesses is going to be really focused.

The way we’re adapting is basically bringing in bigger strategic brains, not just delivery, it’s about businesses and growth. That’d be business insight people. It could be even just SEO specialists, we don’t do much in the way of SEO, but that’s quite a simple thing. But actually having a specialist on the team for growth rather than just for building a website. We’re part of your team, your digital arm of your team, how does your website grow? That’s going to be our offering more and more in the future. So we’re not just delivery partners.

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Fascinting. Honestly, it’s been a really interesting chat. I’ve enjoyed very much hearing about your journey. If anybody else has shared my intuition and would like to contact you, maybe they’re interested in the way that you’ve grown, or maybe they’re going through some struggle that you have perhaps overcome already, where would be the best place to find you? Be that on social media or your website. What’s the handle that you would drop?

[00:38:34] David Darke: Yeah, probably the best place would be LinkedIn. I’ll give you a link. Yeah, I don’t actually have it off the top my head, but it should be just LinkedIn, David Darke. But, yeah, that’s probably the best place. I’m trying to be on social media less in general so, yeah, that’s definitely a good place.

[00:38:46] Nathan Wrigley: Well, in which case, I will put that into the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com/podcast, search for the episode with David Darke, D A R K E, you will find it in the show notes there. So all that it remains for me to do is to say, David Darke, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:02] David Darke: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

On the podcast today we have David Darke.

David is a Bristol-based entrepreneur and long time WordPress user. He is the co-founder of Atomic Smash, a digital agency specialising in WordPress and WooCommerce performance optimisation. Since its founding in 2010, Atomic Smash has grown from a two-person team into a thriving agency known for helping businesses improve their digital platforms with WordPress. The podcast today traces David’s experiences growing the agency and the many highs and lows that he’s been on.

David’s story begins in a business incubator where the affordable desk space facilitated invaluable networking and relationship-building opportunities. Through perseverance and strategic networking, David has grown the agency from these small beginnings to a robust team of twenty professionals.

We talk about the myriad challenges he faced, from overcoming the initial skepticism due to his age, to the trials of managing business growth and client expectations. You’ll hear about the critical role that external business coaches have played in guiding his agency through different stages of growth, and how strategic learning has been pivotal in expanding beyond core web development skills to mastering business acumen and operational strategies.

David also discusses his current role, which involves less hands-on coding and more focus on technical oversight, sales, and strategic client interactions. He shares his insights into the importance of delegation, finding work-life balance, and ensuring his team operates efficiently without overextending themselves.

We also get into the evolving web industry landscape, particularly the integration of AI and SEO into their service offerings, aiming to position his company as a strategic partner for client growth. He emphasises the importance of hiring the right talent, including freelancers, and the necessity of pausing business coaching to implement growth strategies effectively.

Whether you’re an aspiring freelancer, an agency owner looking to grow, or simply passionate about WordPress, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Atomic Smash website

David on LinkedIn