Welcome to this week’s episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast. This week Yiuwin Tsang spoke to Alex Holliman, founder of Climbing Trees about how he and his team are on a mission to create a positive impact for their clients and for the planet.
Alex has successfully created an ‘excellent client service is critical to success’ mantra in his agency team which underpins all of their relationships and projects. He and his team care passionately about the client experience they create.
Alex is also keen to harness the enthusiasm and energy that the next generation of employees brings to the table - he feels there is a real sense of the younger generation leaning into some of the problems that are in the world and actually trying to do something positive about it, rather than just carrying on with the same old 'business as usual'.
About Alex Holliman
Alex is the founder and managing director of Climbing Trees, a B-Corp-certified ethically minded PPC and SEO agency. Previously Alex spent 20 years working for global media giants and independent agencies. Alex is all about trying to do business in a better way and advocating for positive change. And Climbing Trees is working hard towards its goal of becoming net zero and is in the process of planting 1 million trees by 2030, with 265,000 already in the ground.
Welcome to this week’s episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast. This week Yiuwin Tsang spoke to Alex Holliman, founder of Climbing Trees about how he and his team are on a mission to create a positive impact for their clients and for the planet.
Alex has successfully created an ‘excellent client service is critical to success’ mantra in his agency team which underpins all of their relationships and projects. He and his team care passionately about the client experience they create.
Alex is also keen to harness the enthusiasm and energy that the next generation of employees brings to the table - he feels there is a real sense of the younger generation leaning into some of the problems that are in the world and actually trying to do something positive about it, rather than just carrying on with the same old 'business as usual'.
About Alex Holliman
Alex is the founder and managing director of Climbing Trees, a B-Corp-certified ethically minded PPC and SEO agency. Previously Alex spent 20 years working for global media giants and independent agencies. Alex is all about trying to do business in a better way and advocating for positive change. And Climbing Trees is working hard towards its goal of becoming net zero and is in the process of planting 1 million trees by 2030, with 265,000 already in the ground.
Yiuwin Tsang:
Hello and welcome to the Beautiful Business Podcast. Beautiful Business is a community for leaders who believe there's a better way of doing business. We believe beautiful businesses are led with purpose by people who care, guided by a clear strategy and softly grown. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the beautiful business podcast.
My name is Yiuwin Tsang, part of the beautiful business team. And this week, I was joined by Alex Holliman.
Alex is the founder and managing director of climbing trees, a B Corp certified forward thinking, ethically minded PPC and SEO agency who are experts at Google and Facebook ads, Alex leads a team of 16 Talented digital marketing experts who are on a mission to create a positive impact for their clients on the planet.
Before this, Alex spent 20 years working in global media giants and independent agencies, Alex is all about trying to do business in a better way, advocating for positive change. And climbing trees is working hard towards his goal of becoming net zero, and are in the process of planting 1 million trees by 2030, with 265,000 already in the ground.
Let's start off with the first topic which is creating client superheroes. And Alex, I love the idea of this because I love the concept of empowering your clients. So I'm really keen to hear and find out a little bit more in terms of your background into your experience of working with these bigger clients at these bigger agencies in your previous roles.
Alex Holliman:
Yeah, so my first role in the industry is working for subsidiaries, Saatchi and Saatchi in the 90s. And I then went on to work for three of the top five media agencies in the world. And I think they have an exceptional approach to Client Servicing. And so I think that's something that's just been, I wouldn't say beaten into me, but you sort of pick up this approach virus mostly.
So I think throughout my career, I've not necessarily been the most technically gifted, but I think something I've really done is empathise with clients, the positions they're in, and then try to support them in their roles. And so I think that's definitely something that I came out of London to work for a startup in 2001, which we grew to a 25 million turnover business. And I wasn't part of the senior leadership team there or anything, but that Client Servicing aspect is like critically important in terms of understanding their objectives, understanding their positions, internally understanding the stresses that they're under, and then really trying to double down on it.
So I've worked on accounts like Lloyds TSB, Waitrose London Zoo through to a lot of retail accounts in the Steinhoff group through to the clients, we've got climbing trees today,
Yiuwin Tsang:
I guess, when you work for these big agencies as well, it is such a competitive landscape to be working in. And in order to have that kind of connection with your clients to have that, I guess, just that stickiness of retaining them as a client for them to look to you, then you do need to kind of build these bridges, you do need to forge these connections, and as you say, understand the context that they're working in better than anybody else does.
Alex Holliman:
Yeah. And I think when you're competing with other agencies that would happily come and eat your lunch, or you're working collaboratively with external PR companies or creative agencies, you have to really make sure that there's always like a cycle that really big accounts go through, and you want to be the agency that's furthest away from the door.
And so to do that, you just have to try and stay as close as possible to the client. And I think that there's certainly an opportunity for smaller agency, that one that I worked for, from 2001 to 2010, we went from four people to maybe 2530, or whatever it was, and we were able to outmanoeuvre a lot of large network agencies by just having that really caring passionately about looking after the client.
Yiuwin Tsang:
Absolutely brilliant. It sounds quite basic. But the reality is, is not everybody does it. There's lots of very big distractions are out there, especially when you're running your own agency when you're running your own company, making sure you hit payroll every month doing this doing the other all these other things.
But I guess from your experience, keeping that connection, keeping that understanding what comes across to me, Alex is staying really curious about what's going on in your client's world. Like just being interested wanting to know what's happening.
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely. And I think we'd sort of undertook that kind of work, we're going into the pandemic and then into lockdown. We've had the cost of living crisis, we've had inflation, we've had Brexit, and really trying to understand how those impacts our clients and what that means for their day to day role. The internal targets, they've got their performance, because you know, marketing, people in clients are always under pressure, and is one of the shortest live 10 years on the C suite. So there's a lot of pressure that people are under. So as an agency, we can support them, and try and make some of that pain go away.
Yiuwin Tsang:
I love that. And when we spoke, you talked a little bit about emotionally connecting with clients. What do you mean when you say this, and why is it important to you?
Alex Holliman:
Well, I think there's different types of clients. There's some that were just like super professional, they want the work done. They don't really want a lot of personable relationship with you. And that's fine. We've got others whereby we have a personal relationship with them whereby we'll know a little bit about them.
Personally, they'll know a little bit about us, there's a connection on this sort of deeper, more personal level. And so I think he's understanding their position, who they are as people, and then trying to dis give them work in a rhythm that really makes them have an impact in their roles.
So sometimes it's like, you know, in agencies, clients can almost become the enemy. And whereas I sort of think if you can get to a point where you're not being reactive, but being proactive, understanding what they want before they know they want it and continually pushing, I think that puts you in a very, very good position as a agency.
Yiuwin Tsang
Definitely, how did you because I guess it's almost like a bit of a balance that you need to do in the sense that you want to be proactive, you want to almost help your marketing contact, your clients kind of navigate the journeys that they need to make within the organisations that they are working for. But how do you kind of make that balance between I suppose, not being too overtly not being too pushy? In many ways? I think that in my mind, I do love that approach. But I think certainly, in my experience, there's been times when I think, oh, you know, what, maybe that was just a bit too far. I mean, how do you navigate that balance, so successfully?
Alex Holliman:
What does I do so successfully, but I'm a technical founder. So I used to sort of almost think of sales as something that used car people did, or double glazing salesman, I'm sure there's some nice double glazing salesman, a used car salesman, I've yet to meet them. But anyway, the horses think sales was quite a dirty thing. I think there's an opportunity where we're a performance marketing agency. So what we do, we can help clients drive sales, where we can actually build a model that demonstrates a very clear return on investment. With that in mind, there are various routes to market that we offer clients, and you can max out on Google ads. So then it makes sense to consider Bing Ads. If you've then you know, getting as much visibility as you can on paid search, you can look at organic search, or you can look at paid sites or affiliate marketing or programmatic or any number of other services that we offer, I think there's a point where I sort of moved from, it's probably a consultative sales role, or sometimes actually just like taking a booking from a client of just saying, Okay, you want some pizza, we'll give you some pizza. So actually trying to move a little bit further upstream and actually move into a more strategic position where you can actually say, okay, based on what we know, your objectives are, these are the things that we can do. And so what we've tried to do is understand the rhythm of our clients business, whether it's a candy or financial year, and ahead of the end of whatever year, that is, we then undertake a full internal review of large client accounts, where we look at what we've done, what's worked, what hasn't worked. And then what we try and do is then sell into them, here are some other options that we think will have impacts on your business based on what we thought about it. So rather than just going around the block, year after year, doing the same thing, we're then able to move into being a strategic partner for them.
Yiuwin Tsang:
And it's incredible place to be if you know if they come to you, rather than just saying, This is what we want done. Please really help us do it.
Alex Holliman:
I think we have a broad range of clients, the larger ones, we do that piece of work for some of the smaller ones that are we picked up in the earliest days of the business, we've perhaps done so.
Yiuwin Tsang:
But I guess our conversations very different rather than can you do this? How much will you charge us for you to do it too? The question then becomes what should we do? What is it we need to do? And what would you say that we ought to do? So it's a very different conversation, I guess that you have with your clients away from the tactical things to be done and more into that strategic level?
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely. And I think we've got some clients who are strategically very well equipped. So they will just come to us and say, Okay, I would like you to take care of this. And that's fine. But then there are others whereby we help them with that they so they can navigate some of the world that we move in quite seamlessly.
Yiuwin Tsang:
That's really nice. And just back to your point that you just said around, you do a review of all your big clients and have a look at what has worked and what hasn't worked. So that just to be clear, Alex, that's an internal review, something that you've done with your team's on the stuff that you've done for clients, that activity that you deliver for your clients.
Alex Holliman:
Yeah, so that's a proactive thing that we do in we probably take because there's a rhythm to our clients business and ours, we probably take about a couple of months to pull that together, we prepare an agenda. And then now that we're out of the pandemic world, we're trying to get face to face with clients and then present to them, This is what's really worked. These are areas that didn't work, these are things that we tried that didn't work, this is what we could have done better. And then just say, based on what we know, these are some options that we can move forward with. So that's the sort of stuff we're talking about in that regard is a lot of paid social advertising on Tiktok. And then programmatic display as well.
Yiuwin Tsang:
I see, I just want to get this claim, because I think it's a wonderful thing to do is the stuff that you play back to your clients and these sessions these kind of strategic playback sessions, is it limited just to their activity with you? Or do you give them a like a holistic view of you know, all the clients that you've had going through the agency?
Alex Holliman:
We're typically so we present what we've done for that specific client, what we're introducing, we've got a new team member on board. And so we are going to start preparing sort of deep dives into our clients market. So to look at them versus their competition, how they stack up in a number of comparable ways, so that we can give our client the feel for what where they are and then what they're doing versus the competition.
Yiuwin Tsang:
That's incredible. I think that kind of segues quite nicely into next question I had around empowering clients because I think it certainly sounds like with this kind of It's almost like a toolkit that your clients have of, I guess, in the immediate instance, an overview of what they've done with you what has worked, what hasn't worked, you know, things you can do a bit more or things you probably do a bit less of. But coming on further down the line coming online, this market view, and I guess just more kind of information, more education, more data points, more insights, you're able to give your clients and empowering them to make decisions and you know, ask for more budget or make changes internally.
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely. I think I've probably been a little bit backwards when I was more in the driving seat with clients about SEO asking for more budget or generating those ideas, because I didn't want to be too salesy. But I think that we have an approach that is if the client buys into conceptually what we're proposing, and we genuinely feel that this is going to make an impact on our client, because we typically, when a client, we will hold on to them for a lot of years. So we don't want to burn that relationship just to get an extra commission or retainer per month, we'd rather do the right thing by clients. I think it's that authenticity. And then sometimes, you know, there are things we will try where it doesn't work where we're not able to change numbers, we thought it would we would or whether return on adspend isn't positive or Something's just not worked. And I think to unpack that you unlock just because usually, agencies will push that stuff to one side, and then talking about all the stuff that is done well and just avoid those sort of awkward conversations.
Yiuwin Tsang:
How do you approach that then, because I guess there's a bit of framing to be done almost before you even start the activity. As you said, you mentioned like some of these guys in newer channels like tick tock and things like this, which I guess is relatively new medium for a lot of people, is there an element of framing that activity before it runs, so that if it doesn't go right, or if it doesn't go as expected, when you have the retrospective of the other side of it, you've got a bit of air cover, as it were?
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely, it's managing expectations going into it so that on the other side, if you go into its own tiktoks and change your business and it doesn't, you've shot yourself in the foot, if you say we're undertaking this as draw, we intuitively think this is really going to work for you. But it might not let's try it. If it's framed as a trial, if it works great. And if it doesn't work, then you know, you've managed expectation, I think it's you know, being consistent with the promise that you deliver on
Yiuwin Tsang
Yeah, indeed. And I guess I get it comes back up to that level of conversation that you have with your clients Onyx around being able to say, look, we've seen some really interesting activity in on tick tock further clients in the space or whatever it might be, we think it's worth giving a try. It's a very different conversation, as opposed to how many ads do you want us to buy here? You know, what do you want us to set the monthly spend for on Facebook for you? It's a different conversation?
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely, I think we're able to have that conversation, probably by dint of historic performance, we've earned their trust, we've delivered results, we've helped clients move from 1 million turnover to 5 million from 5 million to 20 million, or whatever it is. So that trust in our results, in our opinion, is then earnt. And I think there's a process to onboarding new clients whereby sometimes we know that where we can make an impact on clients, and there's almost a hierarchy of performance. And once you've set pulled on all the existing demand, then what we try and focus on is creating new demand for clients. And so is that area that creating new demand that places like social Tiktok, and programmatic will help.
Yiuwin Tsang:
Indeed, so just talk me through that approach, I suppose it feels very, it just feels very sensible, very logical, and very strategic in terms of how you handle these accounts, right from the office, almost, as you say, the onboarding of the clients. There's that expectation setting sounds as real transparency around objectives and results and things like this so that when you come to the retrospective, you come to the playback, you can say right, we said we're going to do this, we did it and you see that kind of level of trust starts to build up and starts to build up. It sounds very deliberate. And I'm going to assume that it is deliberate is there kind of like a playbook are a manual, the user climbing trees that takes them through this journey.
Alex Holliman:
There's not but we'll who's in charge of our sort of automation, and the systems and processes in the agency would love for there to be one. I think it's something that's born out of experience, probably mistakes. And then we've sort of synthesise this approach. And I think between myself and Frankie, who are in charge of onboarding new clients, sales, new business, and then the delivery time, there's a match up in terms of what we set. So I think it's just something we do intuitively, we will have a playbook one day.
Yiuwin Tsang:
It just says to me just a really efficient, really well oiled kind of machine that puts that kind of building of client trust right in the centre of it, because that's what unlocks as you said, unlocks that bit of them discretionary kind of budget, almost a discretionary kind of loosening of the leash almost of work with agencies and being involved agencies in the password, you know, the speaking spreadsheets. It's an IO and it's got how many what kind of budget target impressions, which channel and that's how they communicate with the client through a spreadsheet, and it's just like it's soulless.
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely, we live and die in very horrible looking numerical spreadsheets. I think what we try and do is articulate that in the onboarding, in terms of sales and then the account management side of things.
Yiuwin Tsang:
Fantastic. And I think that takes us quite nicely on to the last question on the sections you've gone really quickly, actually is is around winning this new business and bringing clients on board. But I'm very interested here about the Greenpeace tender to that you won. Can you give us a quick lowdown on what this is because in terms of dream clients for purpose led businesses getting a bit of work off Greenpeace is impressive.
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely. And I think the my back, so I've worked on really, really large accounts. And then when I set up the business climbing trees in 2010, we then started working with smaller independent companies. And this has been a slow process. So we picked up Volvo construction number of years ago, we picked up Olympus cameras, which ran on a Pan European basis. And then I think that we got invited to pitch for Greenpeace from a recommendation from one of our charity clients. So we've got about 10, or 15 that we work on at any one time. And we got invited to tender that approached five agencies, our response could be two pages, and between Greenpeace Nash with a matching colour scheme, which we highlighted in the document, so he tried to bring in a bit of personality, I think the ability to actually technically make what we do as a business, Singh was limited. And so when we sent that in, I recorded a two minute video where just to add mobile phone set up and just recorded this video to mobile phone using my dodgy ethics accent, I just said, This is who we are, this is what we stand for. This is where we're going as a business. And I think we're going to talk a little bit more about B Corp and purpose and that kind of thing later on. But I definitely alluded to that about wanting to be the kind of business that the world actually needs. I don't know why they appointed us, but they did appoint us from that. And so to work with a global brand, like Greenpeace, who are in terms of purpose, and actually trying to drive change out there in the world, I think is a fantastic thing. I think now they are a client of ours, we know the meticulous care and attention that they take to everything. So their standards are really, really high. And so I think technically, with work, we try and do that. But we try and be the kind of business that are the best kinds of business that we can be.
Yiuwin Tsang:
Fantastic. Other than I guess almost the raising of your internal standards that kind of match up, it's quite an interesting turn of phrase, you put that around making sure that you met their expectations. And you saw the way that they worked and the level they were, what other kind of impact did it have on climbing trees to have to bring a client like Greenpeace on,
Alex Holliman:
I think there's a certain degree of confidence that it gave us, I think the team that work on it will who leaves that account. So I don't actually do any of the work so well that they count. We've done a massive amount of work on it. And we genuinely look after our charity clients. And so we deliver tremendous value to them will work. We won, I think three or four awards last year based on the work for Greenpeace. And so we have really, there's almost like a stacking, there's like you're gonna get a stacking of Voice Search AI, and the metaverse and there'll be something that comes out of that sort of stack, which really works and is a really tangible output. I think for us where we've got the services we do the team on board, and the clients, it's those purpose driven clients where there is a real meaning this inherent in the work that we do.
Yiuwin Tsang:
I guess I must have quite an impact as well in terms of attracting talent, and you know, the types of candidates might come and work for you or look for opportunities where for climbing trees. Would you say that having a client like Greenpeace does have that positive impact, not just internally in terms of the way that people work and the standards and the level that they worked at, but also in terms of the candidates coming through?
Alex Holliman:
Yeah, absolutely. I think for the first time, over the last two or three years, we've moved from maybe not having the best employer branding to one, that's the best it's ever been. And so we like retain our staff, and the attraction of staff of the best quality that we ever have them. And so we regularly there's a throughflow of CVS that we are, unfortunately not always able to offer jobs to.
Yiuwin Tsang:
That's fantastic. It doesn't really go to show doesn't matter. If you do get that kind of business development approach, you get real clarity on what your agency is about the value that you can bring. And if you're able to articulate it really well, by the sounds of things, you know, even with your dodgy Essex accent in a two minute video, the impact can be really profound.
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely. And I think there is a generation that's entering the workforce or in the workforce that wants to work for a business that is actually leaning into some of the problems that are in the world, and actually trying to do something positive about it, rather than just carrying on with the same old mantra of business as usual. They're actually trying to do something different.
Yiuwin Tsang:
Yeah, 100%, we've covered a few times in some of the interviews that we've done with beautiful business, the younger generations are coming through the workforce, they look for different things compared to baby boomers and the Gen X's of the world. And it was really, really different. But I guess back to the topic of this podcast about creating clients, superheroes, if you're able to empower your clients, if you're able to understand the worlds that they work in, and I guess with a client like Greenpeace is having a such a thorough understanding of the worlds that they work in the pressures that run there, but also by the sounds of things, real insight, in terms of the passion that they bring to their work as well means that your agency operates, as you say on that level.
Alex Holliman:
Absolutely. And we've got members of the time that we're Greenpeace activists or worked for the World Wildlife Fund. So there is that real synergy there. So great stuff.
Yiuwin Tsang:
Thank you so much to Alex from Climbing Tees for joining us in this episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast.
I really enjoyed our chat and I hope you enjoyed listening to it. Thank you for joining us for this week's Beautiful Business Podcast.