From Cleaning Company at 26 to $14m Agency By His 42nd Birthday, EP 266: Andrew Howlett

Andrew Howlett, Chief Digital Officer at Rain, and a board member at the Society of Digital Agencies. Andrew started a million-dollar cleaning products business online at 26, before moving into marketing consultancy. Listen as Nathan and Andrew talk marketing, strategy, and how to get out of finance.

Famous 5
Favorite Book? – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
What CEO do you follow? — Maurice Levy
What is your favorite online tool? — Pipedrive
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Yes
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? —That finance wasn’t the direction I wanted to go - it would have been great to understand computer science more

Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:20 – Nathan’s introduction
01:40 – Welcoming Andrew to the show
02:00 – At 26, started a website that sold cleaning supplies
02:35 – At 29, started Rain
02:40 – uClean had total revenues of $200k in its first year; almost $1 million the next year
03:30 – Clear around $200k each year from uClean
04:05 – Rain’s latest client is BeachBody
04:40 – Rain is helping them re-imagine their products
05:00 – Revenue model is generally either a monthly retainer or T&M
05:25 – Retainer of $50-75k per month
05:55 – Works largely with 7 major clients
06:30 – First-ever Superbowl ad this year - Campbells Chunky Soup
06:55 – Wanted to focus on online placement
08:10 – 90% of placement is hustle
08:30 – They use People Pattern as a helpful piece of software
09:10 – Ended up with 3.5 million views in 2 weeks
10:00 – Made 3 videos for the Facebook 10-year anniversary
11:10 – Margin on video can be tricky to handle
11:56 – Total revenue in 2015 was $14 million
12:30 – Vision is to keep strategy, design, development and building in-house
14:20 – Happy with the current size of the company - no plans to grow dramatically
14:30 – Connect with Andrew on Twitter or LinkedIn
16:10 – Famous Five

3 Key Points:
The majority of marketing is hustle. Automation helps, but to some extent you need to have real people pushing things along.
There are benefits to limiting growth. Having a core team that’s small enough to be in the same room at the start of a project is fantastic.
You need to understand how technology works. Even if you’re never going to be a developer, educate yourself in the basics. It will pay off.

Resources Mentioned:
Freshbooks - The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible.
Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives