Cowork Crew Replays

Lessons from a new business

Speaker: Harry Evans, Co-Founder of TwelveTwentyFive

It’s been a whole year since Harry Evans, co-founder of TwelveTwentyFive, quit his job to chase the self-employed dream.

In this talk Harry shared the 9 actionable lessons he and his business partner have learned the hard way, that weren’t taught in their combined 25+ years of employment, and what actions you should take based on these learnings.

Okay, cool. So, yeah, I’m Harry, and I’m from TwelveTwentyFive. We started our business a little over a year ago. Well, like 14 months ago now. And I was just saying we did a podcast after 12 months talking about the nine things we wish we knew before we started.

And I’ve turned it into a 20 minute talk. So let’s see how it goes. But it does have the potential to be quite generic, like when you see these like lessons; we learnt things. Most of the lessons tend to be things that you’ve heard before, read before, those kind of things. So I’m going to try and avoid those as much as possible to make sure it’s not surface level lessons that are just going to be a mask for telling you how wonderful I believe we are. Don’t know how that got there.

Right. So let’s make this really, really specific. On the 12th July 2024, we turned one. Now there’s something really embarrassing about this photo, which is I’m actually standing on my tip toes in this photo, and I’m still by far the shortest person in the team. Yeah, I tried to tell them there was like, a slope, but it’s not.

I’m just very, very small. And whenever anybody asked us how it was going over the first 12 months, like if it was my dad, or anybody who like, I don’t see, like a distant relative, sometimes they would call and say, how’s business going? And you’d give one of these answers, right? Which is like, oh it’s really busy, I can’t complain.

It’s really good to be busy. I’m so happy about it. And a very quick side note, like this guy isn’t me. When I was putting these slides together Alina, my partner came in and was like, oh, I didn’t know you were using baby photos in this talk? Not me. That is a meme. And like, another thing we get quite often is like, we go, I can’t believe we haven’t done this sooner, all the kind of like the very generic things about you say when you first start a business. Now, most of it is true. Like, it is very true that, I mean, we’re all either freelancers or business owners here that like, probably never want to go back to employment. I can’t imagine having a boss again and being told what to do.

Even today, I was saying to Penni, getting here for like 10 past nine was a stretch. Like I am very much a get to office 10-10:30 kind of person. And you get the point, right? Like, we’re trying to not make this surface level advice. So by all accounts or almost all accounts, it’s been going really well. So we made, after all said and done, and the tax man took all of our money. We made about 50k in profit at the end of the first year, which was really nice. We hired two people, again, all of them taller than me, which is fantastic. We still have lives and partners, which is good.

No one has left us. It would have been very easy to, I’m sure I was horrible to live with for at least the first six months. And then, on a touching note, I get to work with some of my closest friends every day. I can be quite annoying to work with, so that was just a little, little nod to them that they stuck with us for 12 months. But if I’m being honest, like now, we’ve finished those 12 months we’re in like month 14, 15, I’m really tired.

Like it’s been a really long road to get to where we are now. And like, we’re still nowhere near where we want to be. But there was a bunch of stuff I wish we had done in the build up to those first 12 months, and after those 12 months, now that we should have done so much sooner and our lives have been so, so much easier than they are now, and I’m definitely going to take a holiday at some point.

So let’s get into some of these lessons then. So the first one like this is so obvious. We talk about it at TwelveTwentyFive all of the time, and if you’re connected to me on LinkedIn or my co-founder Brendan, you’ve probably seen us talk about this quite a lot. But we launched TwelveTwentyFive on the 12th July 2023 at 12, 12:27.

We didn’t realise that it would take about 3 or 4 minutes to upload the launch video onto LinkedIn when we pressed the go button. So like obviously we had no clients at this time, so we were just sat in the office all morning like, oh, let’s wait till 12:25, and we got there pressed the button, and it just slowly uploaded for like two minutes, and it was soul destroying. So our first mistake was we launched a company at the wrong time. But when we did launch, nothing happened. Like we thought people would see this launch video and be like, yeah, this is great, we definitely want to work with you. Like, loads of people saw the launch video and they told us how great it was.

And you know that it was really nice to see us going out to do our thing, but nobody wanted to come and work with us. And that was a, if I’m honest, a bit of a hit to the ego. We’d spent 12 years in marketing agencies up until that point. We had like pretty good networks of people. We thought a couple would have been like, yes, let’s go, we’re ready to go straight away.

And that wasn’t the case. And since launching, we realised that the problem was, we hadn’t done any of this. We hadn’t been building our personal brand either in person or online at all for those ten years, no one knew who we were apart from the people that we’d been working with. But the problem is, is that people we were working with were already working with someone because they’ve been working with us, so we needed to develop brands, or at least, you know, get our faces out there somewhat.

And some really quick things that I would say, which is everyone has a podcast, but they make total sense. Like we do not look at the listenership of all of our podcasts at all. Like it’s great if it gets views and likes, all that sort of stuff, but really it’s just a great opportunity for us to sit down and talk to people that we want to talk to you like everyone loves talking about themselves. We’ve never had a podcast guest of any stature, any size, say no to us. Like we’ve interviewed people that have just had investment from the previously mentioned Steven Bartlett, for example. Everyone is really happy to come on and talk.

In fact Penni, that’s one of the ways that we got a lot closer in terms of working relationships, because you came on our podcast. So if you don’t have one, it’s a great way of just networking, but you also got some free content from it. This is Brendan. He hates cameras. He hates people looking at him. He describes it as a necessary evil. We were saying earlier as well that he’s very much the type of person that as soon as the camera gets turned on, he turns into like Joey in Friends when he’s trying to learn French, like the words just don’t come out in the right order.

But we’ve had to push through that. And if I’m looking back now, over the first 12 months, every big win that we have had has been because of our personal brand in some way. It’s not even people engaging with it. We’ve had people that we haven’t spoken to in three, four years, message us randomly out of the blue saying, I’ve seen your podcasts, I’ve seen a couple of your LinkedIn posts.

Let’s have a conversation. And then from there, we’ve been working with them. So if you’re not already building a personal brand, probably video content is the way to do it. Like get started straight away and you’re even doing some videos today, if anybody wants to get started. But what I would say is, while we didn’t have people queuing up to get us through, you know, that first milestone of whatever revenue target we had, we did have to rely on our network incredibly heavily.

And your network is absolutely everything when you get started, but as you grow as well, I mean, we cobbled together our website, pretty much everything that we did before launch was borrowed or stolen from somebody in our network, like even to the point that I had my stepdad sneak in bins out of his office to get it into our office, even though they would’ve been like a tenner.

We just didn’t want to pay for anything at all. So your network is absolutely everything, and that’s what got us through this time here, we had a couple of people reach out and say, okay, I’ve seen your stuff. We worked together three, four years ago. Let’s give it a go. And another big thing that I would say is we decided to shorten our contract lengths in the early days.

So anybody that signed up to TwelveTwentyFive in the first 6 to 9 months was just put on a 30 day rolling contract. We were confident in what we were doing, and it got over that milestone of having to commit to like a new company for 12, 18 months, and that really helped as well, because we’d have these people who used to work with us, kind of liked us, but they still had that big risk of taking a two person company to their boss and saying, we want to move away from this 50-60 person stable agency, to these guys.

But if you do like a 30 day rolling contract, all that risk is removed. But you need to nurture these relationships. And this is something that, hands up I’m terrible at. Like people can message me and I’ll look at the message, I’ll stare at it and go, oh yeah, I need to reply to that. And then I’ll just go off and do something else and forget about it.

And before you know, it’s been three, four days before I’ve messaged someone back. Or one of the things that I complain a lot about, to one of my friends is, I want to send that message, and in fact that’s a task checked off. But then he replies straight away again, and then it’s back on me. So I am terrible at nurturing relationships, and I don’t even mean that in like a busines-sy way. Right? Like people work with people. People trust people. But really, to build friendships, to build relationships, there has to be some reciprocal value sharing that doesn’t always happen. So yeah, we were terrible at this. And even now, Brendan will call me on a Monday and be like, have you replied to everybody that messaged you last week?

And most of the time the answer’s no.

Yeah, this one is probably every bad decision we made in the first 12 months is because we were on some kind of hunt for validation. We both had very well-paying jobs that were very secure jobs. We could do all the things that people talk about when they start a business normally right they’ll be like, if I start a business, then maybe I’ll get some money and I can go on holiday whenever I want, or I can travel whenever I want, or I’ll be able to do this thing or that thing like we had jobs that let us do that, and then we took the plunge, and now we don’t do any of that.

Like, I haven’t been on holiday for almost two years now, but because of that, we were hunting for validation. We were hunting for people to tell us if we were doing the right thing, or we’d made the right decision or they liked what we were doing. So quite often we would sit down around a very small table because we couldn’t afford much and be like, okay, is this something that we should do?

And normally the decision we made based on would other people think this is a good idea or would they tell us good things? It was really, really bad all the way through to this is a bad example, but I’m going to go with it, which is we applied for a grant from the BIPC. I think they may even work out of here, so I shouldn’t slag them off too much.

But the only reason we applied for that in the first place is because Brendan wanted the little badge that you can get and put on your website as a form of validation to say, yes, a government funded institution believes in us as well. So every decision that we made for at least nine months was because we’re were in the hunt for validation.

And we spoke to this lady here, Camilla, on our podcast. She is a business coach, a life coach. She runs a company called fifty50 coaching and one of like the big light bulb moments for us is when she said, as soon as you become self-employed, you have to switch the way that you get validation. So when you’re in employment, you’re always getting external validation.

At least if, I mean, if you’re terrible at what you do, you probably don’t. But if you’re a fairly good employee, your boss or someone in that organisation is going to be saying to you, hey, good job, or really like that audit, that was a really good report that you did. As soon as you go out on your own, especially if you’re on your own solo you’re not getting validation from anywhere.

So you have to turn where you get that validation from, from external to internal and I am still terrible at that. Absolutely terrible. Like I’ve definitely moved away from making decisions in the hope of validation, but I will never, ever, like, pat myself on the back and go, yeah, you’re doing well or yeah, that was a good thing to do.

So if you can like get ahead of that as soon as you see something like this, it’s probably like for us, it was the first time we’d ever heard about like the external and internal validation metrics. But if you’re seeking that external validation, really try and move it the other way, because, yeah, it’s allowed us to make much clearer decisions.

This is something that we’ve again spoken about quite a lot today, which is like, I’m really tired. And the reason that I’m really, really tired is because, well there’s two reasons. But the main one is that I’m really, really tight. Like I hate spending money. And if I can, I will just claw all of the money and keep it for myself.

And I don’t mean like trying to become rich. It’s just like we work so hard for these things that I don’t like the idea of having to spend money to make our lives easier and things like that. I for some reason, find like nobility in the suffering sometimes, like, yeah, if it’s hard now, it’s going to be better for us later.

It’s just not true. The first thing that we did forced because I was very scared of getting the government coming our way, was about three months in we get a letter and a massive VAT bill arrives. I mean, good, at least that probably means something is going well. I had no idea what to do with a VAT bill. I didn’t know how to pay it.

I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t really realise that that’s what we were doing. So we had to get an accountant and it was, I reckon ¬£200 a month for paying this accountant. Oh my God, life changing. Like, we don’t have to think about bookkeeping really. We don’t have to think about invoices going out or money coming in like, once a month they just send us a little email that says all is good, the balance has gone up or it’s gone down and carry on. And that was the first real insight we had into the power of outsourcing or delegation. So like I said, I like to keep the money, but your time is like a really expensive asset, especially if you’re solo or a very small team.

And recently we probably last week and a half, we got a VA for the first time. There’s one here today as well but, life changing. You were talking earlier about like 10 pound jobs, for example, and it’s those kind of things that take up so much time that it’s easy to think you’re being productive doing, but they’re not the big things that you should be working on if you’re trying to build your business at the same time.

So some great examples, booking meetings, organising food for those meetings, they were really good. We do a lot of like filming days for clients, at TwelveTwentyFive. We would spend probably a day a week looking for set locations. We’ve been able to outsource that, and it’s so easy, like his name is Tan, he’s based in the Philippines, but he’s amazing.

He will just send us an email and be like, okay, I found all of these in a 20 mile radius just select the one you want. Go get it. And the cost, I mean, the amount he costs versus the output is ridiculous. And it’s transformed what we’re doing to the point that, like, I’m actually finishing at like 4 or 5 o’clock now instead of 10 o’clock.

And yeah, my dog is very happy about that, it means he gets to go for a walk when it’s still light outside. So if you can delegate or outsource everything, like we’re now trying to get to the point where we have a staff member for everything, we have a process for everything, or we’re outsourcing it, and while it’s, oh no.

That’ll do. Let’s go here. Cool. All right, so Virtual Assistants are great. A.I note taking is huge as well. It’s like a tenner, but I don’t take notes. Never have. Not because I don’t want to, but, like, I get so engaged in the conversation that’s happening, or I’m so focused on making sure that, I have a habit of saying things I shouldn’t say, like I’m really bad for just saying the first thing that comes into my head, or making a joke that I’m so engaged in that meeting I forget to take notes, or I forget what the actions are, like a 10 pound a month A.I tool solves all of those problems, and I’ll talk later about my big problem with A.I that I have had to overcome as a bit of a personal challenge. And again, quick side note, ginger bloke, not me either. Like it’s just a lot of generic ginger people. So go at your own pace.

So I mentioned earlier about, by almost all accounts in our first year things were going incredibly well. The only person who didn’t think that, was me. I had a really miserable 6 to 9 months. And the only reason it was incredibly miserable is because, I’m friends with a lot of other agency owners, and they would talk about the growth that they were having in their like second year, third year, or their first year when they launched in like the Covid years, for example, like they were the golden years to launch an agency.

We should have just done it then. But I would compare myself to every other company, even if they were remotely similar to us, and I’d look at the growth that they were having and be like, well, we’re not having that growth, even though I know the reasons. I knew the reasons. Like, we didn’t really have a network.

We have no personal brand or we were a brand new company. But I would look at anything and be like, na, this isn’t going well. This is really, really bad. Everything is wrong. And even when we had our end of year meeting with our accountants, they sat down and told us it went really well. And then I ranted at them for about ten minutes about why it was really bad.

So yeah, I am definitely the problem. As Taylor Swift would say. So one of the things that Camilla, who we mentioned in the podcast, I mentioned earlier, she was on a podcast, she helped me realise is that you can take inspiration from competition, but don’t compare yourself to them like that comparison, yeah, you have the phrase of that ’comparison being the thief of joy’, but like, it really is, like that comparison ruined my life for 6 to 9 months.
Which again is why I reference the fact that Alina, my fiance, hasn’t left me is more credit to her than me, I was terrible to live with.

Don’t be an idiot. So what I mean by this is like, you have to take all the help you can get. And as I mentioned, I wanted to claw all of the money and keep it for ourselves. But I also didn’t really want help. I like the idea of, like, suffering in the trenches, like very old school. And I found we have this like an nobility problem, which is, I would tell myself, like, I don’t need A.I, I’m going to do this the hard way. I’m going to do this the right way. Like, if I do all this work myself, then it’s going to be better than what a computer could generate. Terrible, terrible advice like these things are so much more powerful than any of us. They have access to pretty much every word that has ever been written on the internet.

And the light bulb moment for this was, so we do our podcast recordings every two weeks ish, and for whatever reason, in the week of the podcast recordings, I hadn’t done any prep. I was really busy, but we started to do the prep, the level of the podcast was going up and I just in a panic on the day of filming turned to ChatGPT and said, I have this guest coming on.

Do you know who they are? It came back and said, yes, I do. And I was like, great. Now in the style of this podcast, write some interview questions. It was done in probably five minutes, if that. And I’m not even joking. I changed 1 or 2 questions. Everything else was perfect or at least it was workable if it wasn’t perfect. But that took a job that would normally take me two and a half, three hours to 15 minutes, and then it comes through to like email writing, meeting scheduling. You were talking earlier about bookkeeping, for example, and how it can match up receipts based on like learned patterns. The reason no noble factors at play to do things the hard way, like if you can get help, if you can use machines, if you can use people, if you can get the help of family, friends, whatever it may be like, embrace it.

Don’t spend months suffering in the trenches like I was. Celebrate everything, like I celebrate absolutely nothing. Like Brendan chats to me all the time, we’ll get a client contract signed. He’ll be bouncing up and down the corridor celebrating, and I’m like, great, onto the next one, onto the next target. But then I heard this guy George Mack on a podcast say about like, we don’t know how to celebrate anything anymore.

Like we have 21st birthday, 30th birthday, 40th. But in between there, we don’t really celebrate anything, unless there’s like a big life milestone, maybe you get married or you have a baby, whatever it may be, or in my mum’s case, you probably celebrate when she got divorced. Who knows? But like, we don’t always have these things to celebrate.

But when we’re business owners, there are a ton of things that we should be celebrating. Even those small wins, sign a client, you finish a project. I’m sure there are nightmare projects for some people where everything is going wrong like that happens. Definitely happens. But when you’ve got that and you’ve delivered it and it’s done, you can celebrate then as well.

So I think finding reasons to celebrate is something that we didn’t do enough within the first year. So now pretty much every Friday we’ll sit down around the table and just talk about like what went well this week and we’ll celebrate them in some way. And if it’s going really well, we’ll go to the pub. But yeah, we don’t know how to celebrate and we need to learn to celebrate more.

See, go to the pub. Right. So on a serious note, I probably would have given up about month 9, 10 if I didn’t have a coach. It took me a long time to get on board with this. Like I had a coach in pretty much every other area of life. I love golf, I’m terrible at it, but I love it.

I’ve got a golf coach. I have a personal trainer to help me stay motivated at the gym. I have, I mean, I even, this is embarrassing, so in Covid, like gaming became a big thing again, right? And I hadn’t picked up a PlayStation controller for years. I paid, I shouldn’t say this, I paid a kid that I met on the internet to teach me how to play Call of Duty again, but like, I had coaches for like, everything.

But when it came to business, I didn’t. And then I found this, well I say, I found this guy, my old boss, Matt, offered to take me for a drink, and I was just telling him all the things that were frustrating me, mainly ranting about Brendan, which I shouldn’t say on camera, but Brendan, I’m sorry. About like, oh, he works this way, I work that way.

And all he said was just go to the pub, have a conversation, like, just talk about business, talk about things that are happening day to day. Like ask yourself about each other’s lives, what’s happening, what’s what’s frustrating you, those kind of things. So now the first Friday of every month we go to the pub like that is in the diary, it is a non-negotiable.

Apart from last month, because Brendan went on holiday and didn’t invite me, but just get out of the day to day, do something different and try to focus on yourself, which isn’t always the same as focusing on the business like it can be really hard to do so, especially if you work from home. There’s no separation at all, but find a way to get that separation.

And I spoke to people who do like self-care days where they’ll just go to the spa once a month, whatever it may be, just to get out and think about what’s going well, what’s terrible, what are the things that I can improve upon, but find a coach and work on yourself, and your business is going to be better for it.

We’ll go this way. And this is the one that exposed probably our biggest flaws. So when we met Penni for the first time, Brendan and I were stood in a corner like this at The Marketing Meetup. Not wanting to speak to anybody like, we are so introverted it is unbelievable. Like I, I know it’s hard to believe because I’m like standing in front of people now, but I’ll probably go and sleep after this.

Like it’s taking a lot of energy for me to be stood here doing this. I am so introverted. And we suck at networking. Oh, we are so, so bad. Like even today I’m sat on a table with people I don’t know. I’ve just been staring at my laptop like, oh please don’t ask me questions like I am so terrible at human interaction.

Like how I ever convinced anybody to marry me is, I have no idea. But we’re terrible at it. But this exposed like a big problem about, there are so many different ways that you can sell depending on what business you have. So a bit random, but we have a company that it’s like a little side project for us, and it sells functional mushroom supplements.

So like if you want like lion’s mane mushrooms to help increase like cognitive function for example like let me know, I’ve got some. But that type of sales is unbelievable. Someone comes on your website, puts in their card details, leave again and I’ll never have to speak to anybody like that is where I should have started a business.

An agency is all around people like you have to network, you have to meet people, you have to sell to people, then you have to get on calls with people. You have to do client management. You have to account manage. You have to meet, all of the time, the entire business of an agency is focused around people. And I wish we had just sat down before we started and said, what type of sales are we actually going to be good at?

We are not good at agency sales. That’s why our first hire into the team was someone who was good at that. Someone who could be our extroverted face and go out to these events and talk to people and, you know, speak to complete strangers. Because Brendan and I can’t. But, yeah if I had my time again, looking back 14, 15 months ago, having a conversation with ourselves like a real, honest conversation around what type of sales are we actually good at, I can’t imagine TwelveTwentyFive would exist.

Like, I’m really glad it does, but I had to get massively out of my comfort zone to do this. And I have OCD and I hate odd numbers, so I never should have title this talk, 9 things that we learnt because 9 is an odd number and I’m not like, I hate them like to the point that Alina and I have had huge fights when she leaves the TV on like volume 13.

Why? Why would you do that? And she always sets like the cruise control on the car to like, 21 mile an hour and stuff, I hate odd numbers. So here’s number ten. Like, go on holiday. Like, I am so unbelievably tired. I am so fatigued sometimes. And I have definitely made more mistakes in the last month than ever before.

And that’s because I’m not taking a break. And it can be really hard to do that. Penni, I’m sure I heard you say earlier that you haven’t been on holiday for a long time and you’ve just booked one for next year or whatever it is, but like, take time off. It’s going to be okay. Nothing is going to break.

And even if it does, you’ll probably be on a beach and not care about it anyway. So yeah, I really wish I had gone on holiday more or I’d been forced on holiday more. So yeah, they are the 9 plus 1. So 10 things that we wish we knew before we started TwelveTwentyFive 14 months ago, and that is it.

We are done.

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