Agency life and the power of happiness - Jaye Cowle from Launch

Jaye Cowle takes us inside the world of performance marketing, including how artificial intelligence and hybrid working are changing the way marketers work. 

Discussing the importance of purpose in business, Jaye explains why happiness is the goal of Launch, the B Corp certified agency she founded. 

She also shares insights on the growth mindset that can help founders take their business to the next level.

Transcript

Mark Greaves:

Today our guest is Jaye Cowle, founder of Launch, an award-winning digital advertising agency that describes itself as the happy performance agency. I'm Mark Greaves from PKF-Francis Clark and I'll be your host. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get updates and notifications on when our latest episodes are available. Hi Jaye, how are you today?

Jaye Cowle:

I'm really good. I've got a big mug of coffee and a smile on my face.

Mark Greaves:

Yes, I've seen the cafetiere or whatever the coffee thing is and it is ginormous.

Jaye Cowle:

Even happy people need caffeine.

Mark Greaves:

Oh, that's a new strap line for you now, is it? So talk me through what Launch does.

Jaye Cowle:

Launch is the happy performance marketing agency because performance marketing basically helps brands and businesses find their customers online through paid media, Google Ads, Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, and then we help people then take them through the customer journey on the website through to conversion with our conversion optimization team and our data and measurement team. So it's kind of the hard end of marketing. It's the end that talks about clicks and impressions and ROAS and it delivers results, but it's also just one of the many tactics that marketing departments need to deploy.

Mark Greaves:

And well done for getting more acronyms in one sentence than we've had. I think the podcast will set the tone for lots of an acronyms, which we will explain, but also mentioning happiness because that's where you came in. What do you mean by happiness and powered by happiness?

Jaye Cowle:

So Launch is over 11 years old now. One of the things a few years ago as we were coming out of the pandemic that we did was an exercise to understand our purpose, like why we exist beyond just delivering tactics for clients. And what it boiled down to was happiness. We want to create a team that enables people to have a happy atmosphere to work in, that empowers people to bring their best selves to work because like I said, we're at the sharp ends of marketing. It requires a lot of experimentation, hundreds and hundreds of decisions, micro decisions every single day. And in order to be able to make the best decisions, if you could create psychological safety and an atmosphere where people can, like I said, experiment but also lean on each other, innovate, have a culture of learning and testing, it enables us to get the best results of the clients. And obviously happy clients is what all businesses are trying to create, and that creates happy clients for us.

Mark Greaves:

I like that balance between happy clients and happy staff. Let's come back to that. Let's start where you started. How did you get into the business?

Jaye Cowle:

Through a need for flexible working. I was working in London as the head of sales and marketing at a travel company. Really enjoyed my job. And then children came along and it turned out, this was, gosh, almost 15 years ago now, more than 15 years ago now. And it turned out that the working environment, it wasn't possible to have flexible working. This is pre-pandemic, this is pre hybrid working, working from home. And so we moved to Cornwall. Don't even ask why. We had family down there. We almost bought a cheese shop. That's a story for another day. Luckily, we had a very good accountancy firm who did due diligence and they told us it was not going to necessarily be the best business idea in the world.

But I got a job down there. And I have to say I struggled post maternity leave, coming out of maternity leave. I went into a very negative working environment, a working environment that didn't try and get people to succeed or bring their best selves to work. So I went freelance like many, many people do in the southwest when they can't find employment opportunities. And from that I found that marketing is obviously my skillset. Google Ads was one of the quickest ways I could make a difference to a business in a very short period of time with measurable results. And that was the journey that took me to where I am now. And it was Google that actually kind of had a hand on my back and helped me along the way and encouraged me a couple of years into it. They said, "You should employ more people, more people like you." And that kind of was the beginning of where we are now.

Mark Greaves:

It's interesting that you mentioned that "by helped by Google," that's not a common phrase in the marketplace. Google is seen as kind of almost the enemy a little.

Jaye Cowle:

Except they're not. If you think about Google advertising, they give a platform for local roofers, coffee shops through to Adidas to be able to reach their customers online, and the positive part of being able to put within reach an instantaneous marketing platform to lots of different size shapes and businesses and they do a lot of free stuff for the small businesses. A lot of our past clients were in the SME space. I've done lots of mentoring for clients that might not be able to afford our services but are able to afford Google. And I think that there are a lot of naysayers, but ultimately they've been able to really amplify SMEs in the UK.

Mark Greaves:

Okay. A slightly interesting take on that. Come back to you moving to Cornwall, slightly odd at that particular moment. It's a contrast between where you came from. We have talked before on the podcast about the geographic nature of Cornwall and Devon actually encouraging entrepreneurs because there aren't the level of resources that you can rely upon. Was that part of your journey?

Jaye Cowle:

I think geography, and I also think any form of adversity, if you think that geography is it can be an adverse working environment if you are needing to get to see clients that are in the big smoke in London or that you are trying to employ large numbers of people, there's some adversity there. The pandemic also gave us adversity. Through adversity comes creativity, the ability where you are freed from norms to be able to do something different with also a feeling of safety that you've got to do something different because the risk factor, whatever happens, you are not going to be able to succeed unless you do something different.

And I think more businesses should actually have that at the heart of their strategy as an always on approach. This conformity, this beigeness to so many companies means that they just don't stand out. It doesn't mean they're not successful, but often they might be in a market that they're successful despite themselves, but it would enable them to be more successful and create value for their customers.

Mark Greaves:

That's interesting. I'd refer our listeners back to a podcast we do with Rodda's, which started with a 16-year-old going on a train between the two great wars to go to London to sell his mother's clotted cream. And it's from that sort of purpose, there's no other choice. "We think this product is really good, we need to get it out to the marketplace." So he gets on a train and goes to London. That's kind of just such a great entrepreneurial beginning but kind of forced to by their circumstances at that stage. You talk about brands there as well. I know that's where you are really passionate about brands with purpose behind them. And you've just given a talk this morning to the team. Do you want to talk through that?

Jaye Cowle:

Yeah, so we are a B Corp. That's a little bit of a shortcut to say that we are a company that believes in purpose, people, environment, community. And one of the opportunities that businesses have is to create value, and that is normally driven by a purpose why they exist. Our purpose is powered by happiness. That doesn't say anything about the fact that we do performance marketing, but it's the energy and intention with everything that we do to have movement towards happiness.

I should point out that you can't make people happy. That's something that's really important to know. You can't force people to be happy. So it is about moving towards and having an intention to create an environment where happiness can thrive. This morning I was talking to the team about marketing, about going back to the basics of marketing and the fact that this value creation for customers is super important because otherwise a business doesn't exist if people aren't willing to part with money in order to buy the value that you are offering. So many businesses I think get so far away from that they're focused on the finances, the HR, the nitty-gritty that they forget why they exist and that is what purpose is. And if you look at buying trends, certainly with Gen Z in particular, purpose-driven purchasing is much bigger than ever before, and so that is a way for businesses to unlock a little bit of magic in what they're doing.

Mark Greaves:

We've seen that in other guests. We've talked to that phrase, "You are powered by happiness." That just encapsulates so much but also cuts through. It's not having employees having to memorize the 17 values of the company and all that type of stuff. It is cut through. I'd also balance that, and perhaps we'll come onto the pandemic and the positives from that in a minute, but you are balancing the happiness of the staff and the happiness of the clients at that stage, which I do see the last two years, three years has become much more important.

Jaye Cowle:

It has. And one of the things that we see an opportunity with is giving, I was going to use the word soft skills, but it's actually hard skills, but educating people of how to increase their confidence, be able to talk through conflict, to be able to increase time management even, the skills of being a human being in order to be able to do their job.

So one of the things that we need to do is be able to have difficult conversations with our clients about, because we're talking metrics all the time, I won't mention any more acronyms. Pay-per-click PPC. It's very driven by numbers and those numbers aren't always pointing in the right direction. So our team are able to be better communicators by us doing confidence training by us, empowering them to be able to communicate with the client effectively. Those aren't skills that are taught really in schools. They're skills that if you've got high empathy, you might be good at, but actually high empathy can cause you to then feel guilt if the numbers aren't in the right direction even if that's things out of your control. So yeah, it's interesting and I think more business needs to be doing that.

Mark Greaves:

I think it's kind of interesting new set of skills where we've been on the cusp of looking at it for the last decade or so, but coming out of the pandemic and perhaps a bit for selfish reasons. You've got to get better at recruiting and retaining staff because it's much more of an employee workforce. So something like that is setting yourself aside those soft skills, those lunchtime sessions. I suppose it also comes into the mental health side of things, much more open about talking about that at the moment.

Jaye Cowle:

There is a great book by Mary Portas called Work Like a Woman, and her second book in that series is called Rebuild and it is about creating companies that are designed for humans rather than designed for capitalism. That is resonating with me so much at the moment. If we have all a short time on this planet, let's all try and do things that make us feel better, that create value, that create impact, positive impact, because... There's another book. It turns out one of my strengths, I did a strengths assessment the other day. One of my strengths is a love of learning. I would say that's only come back to me in my 40s over the last five years post children being very small because I now have a little bit more time and head space to be able to read.

But where I realised that we could make a difference was when I read Dan Pink's book Drive, which is all about autonomy, mastery and purpose. How do you motivate a human being? And I'd realized that our marketing agency, I'd become more of a HR person because I was having to motivate the team to deliver positive impact for our clients. Well, I suddenly had to become a psychologist, and that was not an expectation. I didn't go into this world of agency life thinking that that would be the outcome, but it's hugely rewarding because understanding what motivates people beyond money is wonderful because then you see people thrive. So autonomy is the feeling that you can affect change. You know what your job description is.

So many people don't know what their job description is and it's still a work in progress at launch. As we grow, we're now 30 people, we have to keep evolving it. Mastery is the skills to be able to do the job and always those improving and feeling like you've got forward momentum with them. And purpose. Coming back to that purpose again, why the hell are we doing it? A lot of people don't know why they're doing their job to what end. And therefore they normally find them purpose outside of work.

Mark Greaves:

I like the job title side of things within that. There is a podcast guest we had on who had a chief flavorist. They were into food on that side of this. It's very important post, but it was made fun. It was that kind of concept of the making sure that they properly understood that it's not a chief financier or something like that. It's really cutting through at that moment in times.

You talked about almost change of skills within there. In that terms of that entrepreneurial journey, one thing that we do see is people are really good at starting businesses can reach a ceiling. When they stop being able to do everything, when they have to actually delegate and get that level of empathy, they tend to either fall off a cliff or have to sell the business on. You are obviously still growing and adapting your role. What do you think is within you that's allowing you to adapt to that journey?

Jaye Cowle:

I think the phrase that's used now is growth mindset. And I have to say I don't think I always had a growth mindset. I was a bit of a perfectionist at school and in my early years. And in order to not feel like I was out of my comfort zone, I would stay firmly in my comfort zone and be very confident that I was good at what I was doing. That held me back, that stopped me from pursuing hobbies. It stopped me from pursuing new jobs. I don't know when the shift came, perhaps with the move to Cornwall because you have to be more creative. That also opened me up to meeting lots of different types of businesses. But realizing that you can continually improve until the moment you are no longer conscious is a wonderful freeing feeling. Seeing people going back to doing degrees in their 70s, it's wonderful. And the always learning mentality means that you can make more sense of the world.

I learned early on in my entrepreneurial career about limited growth companies normally run by a founder. So it's a founder run organisation where the founder can't relinquish any control and also doesn't have really a higher purpose that they're willing to bring other people on a journey with. I was determined to not be that person and also I work in an environment where learning and development is hugely important. The Google Ads interface, Meta Ads interface changes every single day. It's constantly evolving. That's exhausting keeping up with that and running a business. So I also had no choice but to find people better than me to do that so that I could... I basically curate a suite of clients for them to be able to work on where they can do their best work. That's my job now.

Mark Greaves:

That's a good job description of that. We should write that down. One picture your phrase was in there was about employing people that are smarter or better than you. That is really brave, especially for entrepreneurs within that. Is there anything specific that you can actually advise that person who might be stuck, who might not want to relinquish control about going out and getting people that are better than them?

Jaye Cowle:

One of the things that comes from a growth mindset is working out who you are, your ego, how you can separate yourself from your ego, how you can do emotional intelligence training, positive intelligence training to enable you to let go of so much. The letting go is the most powerful thing you can do because then you can become part of an effective team. That doesn't mean you stop being a leader. Being a leader is super important, but it is not being a kind of top down head over the shoulder, looking at everyone's work point of view. Knowing that there are people who want to succeed and be great at what they're doing and empowering them to do that is a powerful thing. It doesn't come from me saying I am better or they are better. It just comes from knowing who is meant to be doing what at any one time. Tim Smit from the Eden Project said his superpower was that he was able to find brilliant people and enable them, give them the conditions where they could then thrive and achieve their best work. That's my goal.

Mark Greaves:

I think that's a good definition between leadership and management within that, and that's almost a simple phrase for that delimiting factor that you've got to get over the fact you can't do everything.

Now, one thing I've got to come to on this, in terms of your development, your growth, you have initially adopted but then also refined, and I'm going to be very careful with my pronunciation here, a no arsehole policy, which I really like within limits within that, do you want to talk about the first adopting and then how you've refined it over the years?

Jaye Cowle:

Yes, it is one of those things that kind of cut through the noise a little bit. It stands out in a sea of corporate beige jargon and it's something that people pick up a lot. They especially love it when I tell them that one away day, our company did how to spot an asshole workshop. And really it was about understanding the difference in what behavior is acceptable and what behavior needs to have compassion and empathy shown towards it.

One of the things that we've been doing is, is developing the launch values and purpose that enables us to communicate to a client when our values aren't aligned. A partnership is what a client and an agency relationship is in the same way as with accountancy and any professional services. It is a partnership. It's where you both have a common goal and you're both playing your part in that partnership to achieve that common goal. And there are instances where the values of Launch and the values of our client aren't aligned and we have to call that out, but we do so now, probably more than ever, with compassion and understanding that you will never fully know what the person at the end of the video call or the end of the angry email, all in caps, is experiencing.

So we try not to read tone in and we try not to have a negative reaction to it. We come at it with understanding, but we come at it with confidence of communicating what our values are and asking, "Are those aligned with your values? Because if they're not, we should probably part ways." It's a powerful thing, but it's also an extremely delicate, delicate thing. But a shortcut is to say that we don't tolerate assholes.

Mark Greaves:

I like the refinement within that because I think kindness... You mentioned compassion within there, those are becoming more and more defining principles, especially around Gen Z, that new generation coming through. But it takes me in a slightly different direction because those are uniquely human qualities. Obviously, one of the key topics at the moment is artificial intelligence and especially about the new generative stuff that can generate pictures and can generate videos, can write you a campaign in Shakespearean verse, et cetera, but it's kind of failing to deliver and there's lots of pushback at the moment. What's your view on AI and the future of your market?

Jaye Cowle:

It will affect things. It will affect everything that we do. There's no question about that. I look at it from the perspective of my children who are 15 and 13. And when they go into the workplace, what does the workplace look like for them? I mentioned earlier about Mary Portas' book. The Kindness Economy is what she's actually coined a phrase for, and the idea that we should be building businesses that are built around humans. But they will use AI. Why wouldn't you use AI? But they should enable humans to be more human than ever before. I think we've gone through a long period of time where we forgot what it was to be human and people were just put in positions to do a job, often a job that lasted a lifetime and they lacked purpose and they often weren't happy or they had wonderful extracurricular activities that brought them that happiness, but work was a trudge and the industrial revolution.

You look back to all of that, human beings were kind of forgotten in a majority of that. So I think bringing humans to the forefront, empowering a lot of what we do by AI is the future. And for my children, I'm trying to empower them to have as best communication skills as possible to have as much access to creativity as possible. That doesn't mean it is not at the expense of science. Science is creativity, it's of all aspects, but to understand what it is to be human.

Mark Greaves:

That's a really good phraseology within there. I see a lot of AI commentary about revolutionizing things and making such a big difference with missing the human element to a certain extent in that it would be really good if AI could just help me with some basic stuff. Forget the new revolution stuff. It could just help me manage my emails, help me manage my calendar, help me do that type of stuff. I'd pay a lot of money just for the simple stuff. Forget the arty farty stuff around the top at that moment.

Jaye Cowle:

And it's called Microsoft 365, by the way, which is AI is built all into that. Microsoft 365 is powered by AI now and we have it at our fingertips.

Mark Greaves:

It's getting there, I think, would be my polite expression at that moment. It's still concentrating a little not on some of the basics. Getting really just the basics right is such a good thing in it.

I just want to stick with that culture thing because that's the theme from what we're talking through. We've obviously shifted more towards a hybrid working environment, although there now is a pushback. The productivity gurus are really pushing back about presentees that must be in the office. How do you see that going? How are you going to manage that for your workforce?

Jaye Cowle:

I have two kind of sides there, an angel and a devil if you like on either side. I have a poor presenteeism, but I also know that people normally thrive under structure. The terminology that was used, one of the phrases that was used recently was quiet quitting, which is where you are maybe sitting at your desk, probably not, but not working, but you are showing presenteeism in that instance.

I spoke to somebody who worked for a very large insurance company and I said, "How many productive hours do you expect your team to have a day?" I think she said a gold standard would be two or three hours a day, which just blew my mind. I thought as a small business, that would just not be possible for us to exist. And think of the wastage and how much more that person could be doing with their days. That's what absolutely just blows my mind, that people wouldn't want to be engaged in the pursuit of feeling like you are making a difference. Maybe they don't know that that's an option. I'm not sure.

But in our instance, we have hybrid working, we were hybrid before the pandemic, so it was a very easy shift to us. That was because we were based in the southwest and we have to employ for our skillset, which was a rare skillset to have back then, not so much now. So we were always hybrid, but we have quarterly meetups, face-to-face, team building. We have socials in between. Every week we've got, we call them rituals. So we have the opportunity to have a one-to-one with someone you don't normally talk to, we call that a rabbit, and you just talk about your hobbies and things you're passionate about. We have a Good Vibes Call on a Friday where people shout out their colleagues and say maybe things that have gone wrong that they've been able to turn around. So we have lot of these little micro moments. And actually solidifying them into a routine, which we call rituals, really, really helps because it means that on those bad days, you don't forget about those things. I think if we optimised for the bad days, companies would thrive more.

Mark Greaves:

I like the rituals phraseology there. That brings a lot of color to it and puts it into that normal part of work. This isn't doing something different, this isn't outside. This is part of the overall role at that moment. I think with danger of falling out of some of those, we did quite a few of those with pandemics, but some of those have kind of been put into the background. We're also busy nowadays, and I think that's a really good embedded phrase in there.

Earlier you mentioned about good accountancy support, that type of stuff through when you started. How valuable was that to you?

Jaye Cowle:

It made a massive, massive difference. I would say that was one of those milestones. You don't realise you are having a milestone while you are in it, but when you look back and reflect, and like I said it's been 11 years now, about halfway through, pre-pandemic, thank goodness, but I think only by a couple of months, we employed an accountancy firm to do proper management accounts for us, a proper P&L, a proper budget. We kept hitting what our assumed kind of number in my head that we got to, money in the bank and overall revenue, but I didn't have the nitty-gritty of what some of those, here we go. Here's another letter, KPIs were. And through having that support, which we paid probably disproportionately for the size of company we were, we over invested in it in order to accelerate, which absolutely made sense. It educated me, so I learned through the process of it to run a proper P&L and to also what questions to ask.

And then when the pandemic hit, we were in a fantastic place because we understood what cash we had in the bank. We understood what our cashflow was going to be. We were able to pull down on all of the non-essential expenses all at almost the press of a button. Partnership is the word that I used before and it doesn't matter which... Even if you're looking at a web developer, the partners that you have involved in running your business should be treated with kindness and respect and be an extension of your team because that's where success comes from. And that definitely definitely happened with our accountants and it happens with our web developers. And that's a great place to be in as a business.

Mark Greaves:

I hear that word partnership more and more nowadays. Okay, last question. We've got to keep the happiness thing going on this at this stage. What's the happiest piece of work for which you've been engaged?

Jaye Cowle:

My memory is often not very long, so I'm going to go for a short term one that was a couple of weeks ago. We flew out to Iceland, seven of the team. We flew out to Iceland on the airline Iceland Air that has become a client of ours. They are a very forward-thinking challenger brand when you look at Europe and the US. Obviously not in Iceland. Their approach to partnership, their approach to marketing, customer service, their place in the market is so forward-thinking. But also Iceland is an awesome place. We had three nights out there. It was absolutely superb and I highly recommend it for a visit, especially the Sky Lagoon, which was like this amazing hot springs overlooking with this infinity pool. It was incredible. I'm just saying it's incredible. But they want us to succeed. We are doing our best work for them, and it is our biggest ever client win and I'm thrilled.

Mark Greaves:

Well done for getting a client plugin at that moment. Really good. I would second the Iceland thing. We went out there. I managed to see the Northern Lights whilst we were out there and it is fantastic, although obviously at the moment having slight issues with volcanoes and lava.

Jaye Cowle:

So the team took off as the volcano was exploding nearby, but it's a volcanic island. There's many, many volcanoes. It is just everyday business for them. And one of my teammates who's also a photographer in his spare time, took the most incredible pictures and video from the airplane window as they flew over the magma and the lava. My son's geography teacher was very excited when I sent her the video.

Mark Greaves:

Well, that's a brilliant note to end on, so thank you Jaye so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed the conversation. I know our listeners all enjoy it too. And I think it's really fascinating to discuss that concept of the kindness economy, the happiness factors, which will be so much more important as we go forward.

Jaye Cowle:

100%. Thank you, Mark.

Mark Greaves:

And thank you to our audience for listening to our latest episode of Business Noodles and Doodles. Hope you've enjoyed the conversation. As I said earlier, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get updates and notifications on when our latest episodes are available.