Successfully scaling up your business from 2 to 200 is one of the greatest challenges you will face.
Doing so while maintaining a strong company culture with remote teams spread across the globe makes it an even taller task.
But it can be done!
Myles Anderson navigated this path and joins the podcast to map the way for other up and coming entrepreneurs. As the CEO and Co-Founder of BrightLocal, Myles has implemented a culture of empowerment and support across the entire organization. He has a hiring process that helps ensure new candidates possess the right attributes to be good cultural fits. He has also established a system of guidance and feedback to help retain talent and get the most out of everyone.
If you are looking to scale up, or are already deep into it, this is an episode for you. Plus, get Myles’ top business book recommendations!
Mentioned in this episode:
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Myles’ favorite books:
Transcript
Myles Anderson: Use your customers to gain to gain other customers. Don’t be shy about asking because I think from our own research eight times out of 10, if you ask someone to leave a review, you’ve had a good experience. They’ll do it for you, and they’ll no doubt be an advocate for your business as well. So that’s a great way for you to turn one customer into three.
Voiceover: You’re listening to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast with professional speaker, coach and consultant Nicole Greer.
Nicole Greer: Hey, welcome everybody to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and I am excited to be with you today. They call me the vibrant coach and today I have a very vibrant guest on the show. I have Myles Anderson. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of BrightLocal. I love the name of his company, BrightLocal, it’s very vibrant. It is a technology company with a mission to help marketers become brilliant at local search marketing. He founded it in 2009. BrightLocal is an independent bootstrapped business with a focus on profitable long term growth growing at a rate of 20% a year. I know, those of you listening you’re jealous. BrightLocal now serves over 6000 customers and earns 9 million and employs over 190 people across the UK, Ukraine and the Philippines.
BrightLocal works with a wide range of customers from pioneering digital marketing agencies like iProspect and Vortala Digital to some of the biggest brands in the world like Home Depot and Hilton. BrightLocal’s success comes from a deep understanding of their customer’s needs and understanding rooted in their origins as a digital marketing agency. Having been there himself, Myles and his team know what local businesses and agencies need to become brilliant at local SEO and BrightLocal achieves this through a powerful combination of software, done for you services, and educational support, which all enable marketers to learn perform and deliver on their goals with maximum effectiveness.
Now I know you’re going to just dying to get over there and look at everything. So go to www.brightlocal.com. That’s where you go to find out about everything about SEO that he does. But here’s what I’m interested in because we’re interested in building a vibrant culture. As CEO Myles daily focuses on the expanding the leadership capabilities throughout his business, fostering a deep sense of accountability at every level and strengthening the highly supportive company culture that aims to make BrightLocal the best place that any employee will ever work. Oh my gosh, that is a huge, awesome goal. So welcome to the show. Myles Anderson, I’m glad you’re here.
Myles: Thank you very much for having me. I’m blushing by that very long and sort of gushing intro. Luckily, I’m wearing a red top and maybe that’s sort of like counteracting my cheeks. But but wow. Yeah. When when you read that back back to me, I didn’t know what to say. I’m slightly lost for words. It’s you know, it sounds good. Doesn’t it?
Nicole: Sounds really good. You’ve been working been working hard, haven’t you, Myles?
Myles: Yeah, I think you know, I just don’t often take a huge amount of time to, to reflect on the whole journey that we’ve we’ve been on. So when someone reads it back to you, there you go. Yeah, okay. Actually, you know, you know, we’ve you know, I think sometimes focus more on you know, what we get wrong or where the struggles are at that particular point in time. And don’t give enough time for that for the wins, or the all the little achievements. So thank you. I really appreciated hearing hearing that back. And then although I’m blushing, I’m also very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve.
Nicole: Well, I think it’s fantastic. And I would just like to dive into how did you do it? Right. So first thing I want to do is I’m collecting definitions of leadership, putting them together so will you share with me what your definition of leadership is?
Myles: Yeah, I’m so be totally honest. I don’t have a sort of a succinct phrase that I like to use. So let me let me describe how I see my role as a leader, within an organization. We’re not we’re now 200 people. So a reasonable size, you know, by no means enormous. But you know, we’ve, we’ve overcome a few a few hurdles to kind of get here. So for me leadership is, is one, it’s about providing clear direction for where the business is going. So providing, you know, that that kind of mission, that vision so that the team around me knows what we’re trying to achieve. And that’s commonly understood across the whole team.
Second is about it’s about leading by example. So it’s about conducting myself in a way that I want others in the business to, to look at and understand that the way I want to behave. So it’s being a role model within the organization. And then ensuring that I help to spread those attitudes, those behaviors as far down within the organization as possible. Be the champion of them, but also be the kind of conduit of them and the chief communicator so that those behaviors and beliefs become widespread and kind of commonplace within within the wider organization. And I think it’s about being a champion of other people. It’s about being a champion of people. We’re a very people focused organization.
The reason that we built a business in the first place was to create a workplace that myself and my business partner, Ed, felt that we’d never had in our early careers. A place that was incredibly supportive was nurturing. A place where we felt people cared personally about us. We wanted to create a place where we could come feel these things, feel that they could bring their whole self to work, but then also give them an opportunity to grow enormously through, through coaching, through formal training, through giving them challenges that push them to, to the next level, and create an environment that is also one of high achievement. So where we look to push ourselves to be better every day, we look to learn from all the mistakes and opportunities that we either do and don’t take advantage of.
But do it in a way that we allow people to, to make mistakes to be themselves, to have a bad day, if they’re having a bad day and not holding it against them. But knowing that they’ll come back stronger, once we’ve given them all the support as well as the the nurturing that the coaching and the training kind of get there. So yeah, I think I sort of summed that up, it’s about providing that vision and direction. It’s about being a role model for the right attitudes and behaviors. And it’s supporting people as much as possible on their journey to both be successful at work, but also be successful in their personal lives, whatever that might happen to be.
Nicole: I love your definition. It’s so beautiful. Yeah, clear direction leading by example. And then a champion of people. If I was going to give it three bullet points those are the ones I’d give it. I love it. Yeah. So I love what you said about also that, that you are the champion for the right attitudes and behaviors. Let’s get let’s go there for a minute. Because I’ll tell you about 25 years ago, Myles, I got promoted within, you know, one of the greatest companies I ever worked for, and I became the training director. And when they gave me the title of training director, they gave me this t shirt that said, attitude is everything. And that I was going to wear these t shirt, this t shirt while I was doing training with the team. And and so what do you think about that? First of all, we think about that little phrase attitude is everything? Is it everything?
Myles: I think it makes up I think it is a huge amount of what goes into being successful. I think you can overcome a lot of skills, shortages, technical shortages, through having the right attitude. I don’t think it’s the other way around. I think with the wrong attitude, however good you are technically at doing your job, you will always come up short, because you’re not approaching it in the right way. And you’re not able to work with people around you in the right way that gets the best out of the group. So yeah, I think I think it’s maybe a little bit simplistic, but I think if I was going to was going to back one horse in the race, I’d back attitude.
Nicole: Okay. All right, fantastic. Well, what what what are the right attitudes? Let’s dive in a little bit like, you know, when you go to look to hire somebody or promote somebody within your ranks, what are the attitudes that you’re looking for? Can you identify maybe a couple of them? And let’s talk about them?
Myles: Yes, maybe I can give a little bit more kind of context before I say, well, so building a culture is what I spent 50% of my time on pretty much as a CEO. We also have a head of people and culture, who helps me, helps me extend my ideas helps me turn them into actions and operational implementation within within the business. But building a strong culture is the way we want to grow, or I want to grow, BrightLocal. And the reason for that is I feel it’s a great way to build a culture of an enabling environment where individuals in the business can be their best selves, can achieve a lot more than they would do say in a very hierarchical environment where they weren’t given lots of autonomy, lots of support, where there was micromanagement at play. And for me, I feel I don’t want to run a business where I have to be involved in every decision, in every conversation that matters.
Yeah, I want to be involved in as few conversations as possible, I want to make as few decisions as possible, by empowering those throughout the organization to make more decisions. Obviously, if you throw someone into that world, without giving them clear guidance, they can really struggle. And that’s where I think culture comes in. It’s about instilling people with a right understanding of how to make decisions, what’s important to the business. So when they’re evaluating opportunities, and options, they’ve got a clear set of guiding principles that they can make those decisions with. And I would have to say, you know, I sit here today running a company of 200 people, and I’m not involved in a lot of the kind of day to day operational decisions anymore.
Roll back five years, before I developed a leadership team, we’d all developed together, we’ve kind of grown and set this this, this sort of movement in motion within the organization. I was way too involved in daily decisions, I was, you know, had fingers in too many pies that start to slow things down, as we grew, just to frustrate those people who frankly, knew a lot more than me about the things that they were running that I was, you know, meddling in, so to speak. But as in five years on I, I feel, I feel quite liberated from a lot of that enabling me to really kind of focus on the culture as well as the strategy of the business, but also giving people in any, in any kind of role in the business, be it leadership role, or an individual contributor role within a team, a lot more sort of ownership of what they do every day.
And that provides a lot of intrinsic motivation, because they have the autonomy, we’re giving them the skills, which gives them the ability to kind of do their job to a high degree, and the culture, also kind of creates and a sense of belonging to something, something kind of bigger than bigger than themselves. Because that’s how the we, we I’m we, as a team are trying to set up BrightLocal. And I just I think we goes beyond the leadership team, because everyone is, so everyone in the business is empowered to protect that culture. It doesn’t just reside with me or a few other people. Everyone wants to kind of protect it, because they’ve, they’ve, they like what they see, they like what they feel about the business. And they want to ensure that that kind of continues.
And we at the core of our of our culture, we have a set of company beliefs. And those are essentially a set of behaviors that we use in many phases throughout someone’s time at BrightLocal, to reinforce how we want people to behave and act. And we’ve got a very, we are a very people focused business, a lot of those behaviors are around being very supportive. So it’s about being generous and considerate to your colleagues as well as customers. It’s about focusing on learning, learning from mistakes, sharing issues that we have, and getting better collectively. It’s about embracing work, it’s about enjoying work as well. So it’s about trying to find the time to enjoy work and like have a good work life balance, about being positive and proactive, open and transparent.
And also about respecting the individual and the right of everyone to be different and have individual needs. But doing so in a culture that champions teamwork, and shared success above individual success. So there’s essentially a lot of the the kind of the kind of beliefs that we have that manifest into, into kind of behaviors, that you talked about sort of specific attributes. For us, it starts at the, you know, as we’re interviewing people, you know, we actually have a beliefs interview, which is one of the one of the stages that every team member in any role has to go through. And that believes interview asks a number of questions, it’s really kind of conversation starters, all around the the eight beliefs that we have, have as a business.
And it helps us tease out from an individual what they’re like, and how they’d respond in certain situations and how they would conduct themselves. Maybe under pressure, for example, you know, how they, how they respond, how they work together to sort of solve a problem. Would they clam up and, you know, try and solve themselves or their opens up themselves up, be vulnerable, and ask for help do to rise to the sort of charge. So for us, when we do the interview process, we have a skills interview, if you pass that you go to the beliefs interview. And quite often, people will have the right skills and experience to do the job.
But we get to the beliefs interview, find that actually, they wouldn’t necessarily do it the right way. They wouldn’t be great, great colleagues and team members and they wouldn’t ultimately be people that would come in and add to the culture making it stronger and richer for both themselves and others within it. And if people don’t pass the beliefs interview, even if they’re at the job and got the right experiences and skills, they don’t kind of join the business. And actually what we do with that belief stage is actually I do all the beliefs interviews myself, but I always do it with one or two other colleagues and often those colleagues are very junior within the business because they themselves having been junior probably started recently would have said that the other side of the table and gone through that beliefs interview.
And suddenly, we had a girl last week who had just passed her four month internship. And she was there interviewing her boss, or someone who was applying to be her team leader, a leader. And I find it’s a great way of making people realize that these beliefs aren’t just real a piece of paper that gets stuck in a drawer that no one looks at. These are living breathing ways that we want to kind of grow the business. And what better way is to do that is to ensure that everyone who comes into the business now has to pass this sort of beliefs interview, and the people doing the interview process are not, you know, people in the leadership team, the higher ups. It’s me, because I like to meet everyone that comes in, but also like everyone within the business to get a chance a to vote who they get to work with.
But also it gives them the chance to see that these beliefs are really, really used throughout the throughout the kind of organization. And that’s been really, really powerful at ensuring that we get the right people into the business. Someone asked the other day, like when you have this beliefs interview processes, does it really extend out the the interview process and and take a lot longer? To little bit it does and, and we all work in an environment now, where I think recruitment is very hard. It’s very competitive, people are moving jobs a lot, there’s this whole talk of that kind of great resignation. And because of that people sometimes hurry through the recruitment process, so they don’t lose a good candidate to kind of allow the candidate to go and get bored or get given a job offer elsewhere.
So what we’ve done is we’ve actually condensed it down, and we try and get to the interview process in three days. But by going through the steps and stages, so that we don’t lose one of those key stages, we just kind of compressed the timeline so that candidates don’t get bored, they’re hurried through, we can make a quick decision. But we’ve done all the necessary the necessary checks. And once someone is in the organization, and they’re working, we do a number of things to reinforce our culture. So the thing I think is the most powerful has been the most effective for us is every month, we have a thing called the big heart awards. Our logo is a heart. So big heart awards is all about that.
And big heart awards are, it’s a peer to peer sort of voting system, where you can nominate a colleague, who you believe has exhibited one of our beliefs and behaviors. And you vote for them on Slack, which is the messaging system we use, we use internally, and you talk about what they’ve done. And sometimes it might be someone who’s just been so good at that their regular job, they just do it in such a great way to make someone’s life easier. It could be a small, random act of kindness somewhere in the business where someone was just incredibly thoughtful. Or it could be really significant where someone has delivered a new project. And this significant piece of work. There are really kind of no rules and regulations around it. But people can vote for each other. And then they can get up voted for those sort of beliefs. And we’ve got around 200 people in the business, we probably have around 30 to 40 nominations I’ll bet day that happen.
And what’s great about it, it surfaces for everyone else in the business to see. So you might find that someone in our development team gets nominated for responsibility. Someone in our HR and operations team gets nominated for loving work or living life, or someone gets nominated for being proactive in solving a problem. And it’s across the whole business. And it just bubbles up each day four or five times a day, it pops up into your Slack. And you click on it and you see that someone somewhere, has done something that really lives up to our beliefs. And that gets reinforced and then people get to upvote that, and then the end of the month to get counted up. There’s usually 2000, 3000 votes that have kind of gone on within within sort of business.
There are winners and runner ups runners up in each location, and they get a day off. They also get a little prize, and they also get $250 to donate to a charity or a local cause that is significant to them. So they get a chance to support a local charity. And the great thing about that is it just drip feeds our culture in every day, just slowly slowly reinforces it reinforces, filling the culture bottle up, and it’s almost overflowing. And because it’s a peer to peer thing, it’s not top down. You know I can nominate people and who can nominate me but it’s not about that. It’s about others recognizing others that peer to peer piece. And it just has this wonderful, supportive drip feed effect on our on our culture.
Nicole: I absolutely love everything you just said I have the biggest smile. I’m so happy to hear about this. Yeah. And I wanted to, I want to say a couple things about what you just said. So you said I have a beliefs interview. And I have a skills interview. So I wanted everybody to write that down that’s listening. Make a note that more than one interview is really good. Because first of all, it really demonstrates I think, to the candidate that you’re serious about culture, and I gotta be honest, I think people know that culture makes it a difference. You know, especially you know, if it’s not their first job, they realize I want to work somewhere awesome. And so if they’re treated a little bit differently than the average company in the way that they’re taking through the interview process or they’re on boarded, they notice. Do you have a story or somebody who might have even commented to you that they loved the process they went through to get hired?
Myles: Yep. So we’ve just we’ve just recruited a new lead designer, who in the story I just told, where there’s a design intern who had just passed her internship and got to interview her, her future leader, someone who was going to mentor and lead them through that, actually, that their first job. She did a brilliant, she did a fantastic job in this interview, I was incredibly impressed, actually, because she’s relatively new out of university, only been an internship, intern for four months. But actually, she had some great questions, and great follow up question. So she, she really embraced the opportunity. But on the flip side, the candidate came to us because he’d read about our culture, we do talk about these things we do try and get the word out there, we’ve got good Glassdoor reviews, etc.
So some reinforcement out there. And they came to us, they were looking, they were looking for a place where they could exercise their skills in a culture that was really appreciate them. And they from the outside in, and they saw these things about about BrightLocal. It read, it sounds like a really interesting business, they think it’s right. But when they got into the interview process, they met the team. And they got to realize that someone who was going to be someone that they managed, was able to interview them, and actually had veto on whether they joined the business. It was like, I get this. I’m hooked now. This is exactly you know, this is you’re not saying one thing and doing another thing, you’re being entirely kind of consistent across the board. And for us, that was great.
We knew we are hiring someone who was going to really be a value add on the culture side and was actually, in a way, slightly terrified of this person, because they’re so forceful about culture, that I know, I’m going to wake up with three emails in my inbox most days going, why don’t you do this, or that’s not good enough. For me, that’s great. It’s great. Because actually, we need people to push us to get better, we want to get better. Sometimes, for me, the ideas dry out. So ideas come from other people is great. But I know that and I know they’re going to be you know, enormously positive in enhancing that culture. But it absolutely brought, brought someone to us, who was the right person for us.
It might well have put other people off and we have, we definitely do lose people in the interview process. I don’t think anyone dislikes it. I just think some people, for us is the right and we want these people in the business. And so if there’s a way of ensuring that the people who aren’t out of people don’t make it to the door, because actually, they probably wouldn’t have a great experience. Once they got there in the first place. It’s better, they learn early, then we get the right people. Now that takes a little bit longer. They’re no doubt going to stay longer in the business. So that’s actually fine once.
Nicole: That is fantastic. Yeah. And so I mean, I think going slow also in the interview process, I don’t know if you know, you’re making me think of these little taglines that I’ve heard my whole career one was picked up along the way, Myles was be slow to hire, and fast to fire. What are you thoughts on that one? Yeah. What do you think about that one?
Myles: I agree with the first part, I agree with the first part. The second part, I say I’m a bit on the fence on and I’ll give you my reasons why that is. So firstly, when we recruit someone, obviously, we go through a fairly lengthy process. And I think when we bring somebody to business, we’ve made a commitment to them, we’ve made a commitment to help them have a better life, basically. And so if someone doesn’t work out or someone is struggling, we work very, very hard to try and make it work for them. And sometimes, we probably elongate the process where the writing may well be on the wall. But we’re not ready yet to say goodbye to that person or to let that person go. And so we do give people a reasonable number of chances. But we do try hard to help them overcome some of the issues that they might be having in terms of and it’s generally not skills. It can be skills, but it also can be a sort of attitude and kind of characteristics.
So I think we’re pretty guilty of making it go on for too long. But I also think we have a duty of care to everyone that we recruit into the business to help them improve and grow and give it and give it that give it their best shot. The downside of doing that is the collateral damages is on the team members, is on team members who work around them, because it makes their life a little bit harder. It’s a bit of a drag on on them, they either have to cover that colleague because they’re not able to do the work they were hired to do, or their their personality just clashes and it creates a slightly kind of toxic culture within a team. So that is definitely the downside.
And you certainly when you make the hard decision to let someone leave the business, then the rest of the team members breathed a collective sigh of relief. And actually you see that you see a their their work quality and their their attitude kind of go up because they’re not sort of having to temper or work around this one individual. And you certainly see it in the feedback that we get in terms of how people are feeling, what their needs are just got a pulse score which is a weekly check in to see how someone’s feeling. And you certainly see the the number, the numbers, the numbers rise in that. When we do make that decision to let someone go, once you’ve made it, we make it happen pretty quickly. We make their departure, as honorable as it can be, allowing them to kind of keep their dignity in the process.
So we help them help work together with to craft language around why they’re kind of choosing to leave and what’s happening next, typically give them extra money, so that they’re not having to then jump straight from us into any other job, just because it works, we try and give them some buffer so that they can make the next right step for them. And we treat them with as much as much dignity as we can, actually, that helps to go and reinforce our culture and our beliefs again, because even if someone is leaving the business, they no longer be part of the kind of BrightLocal family doesn’t mean they get treated any differently to people who are staying behind. And that’s also a great message for those who stand behind that our beliefs matter, and that we stand by them at every point in the work journey that we’re on.
Nicole: Fantastic, fantastic. I love what you said is just honoring people in the process. Because sometimes it is just, you know, not a good fit, you know, and I think sometimes in the interview process, you can ask those questions in your beliefs interview, but there might be some nuances or some situations where people might call the beliefs situational, and then you figure that out later in, you know, you can’t get that resolved with them, because the belief systems just don’t match. So so I really love what you’re saying. The other thing that kind of bubbled up for me and there is that you said earlier that one of the things that we do is we do a lot of coaching, and I think oftentimes, you know, going to, you know, invite somebody to leave the company, the it shouldn’t really be a surprise, because you’ve been having conversations you’ve been working on, you know, the the misalignment of whatever it is the attitude or whatever. So, so how does your coaching process work?
Myles: So each line manager will obviously have their direct reports, we use a system called Fifty & Five, which is a SaaS cloud based system, which helps us run our one to ones and also we do a weekly check in with team members. So the one to ones are regularly scheduled, the check ins are from the team, the person being managed to the line manager saying how I’m feeling, what I’m working on, what are my priorities? What am I struggling with, and some other wider questions around the business. There can be sort of randomized series of questions that they get. But really the key is, is is focusing on the one to ones. Ensuring the one to ones are very focused around the individual.
And not necessarily the tasks they’re doing, but how they’re doing, how they’re feeling. What are they getting out of the work experience? What can they do, what can they do next, and then flipping into some of the more task orientated discussions that that that we need to have. And those happen at least once every two weeks. So there’s a high amount of interaction and contact at a very personal level between line managers and people that they that they look after within the business. And that’s where all the coaching, the coaching happens. We also talk about a lot about giving feedback in the moment. So ensuring that strike while the iron is hot, there’s a situation that needs feedback, either positive or negative, give it there, and then, and try and be as candid with it as possible.
Don’t, don’t duck out of giving feedback, that will sound tough, but it’s not about to be tough, it’s about being clear, being really clear, what’s good, what’s not good and how you can improve. I think the worst thing you can do is not be clear in your feedback, not bottling it up. Because you don’t want to create a scene or you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, or you don’t want to seem like a bad person. Actually, the person who loses out in that situation is a team member who’s not getting clarity on why things aren’t going quite right or what they should be doing more of, because that’s what you want to see. The clearer you can be within the moment and as regular as you can be, gives you the best chance to right any of the kind of incorrect behaviors and attitudes that they’ve got, and double down on things that are work working really well.
So I think the two things are, make sure you stay very close to team members through regular contact and having a good online system actually is incredibly helpful. So the system Fifty & Five has this weekly check in. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to do. And it allows the team lead to know exactly how each person is doing and getting on time because we’re we’re working remotely are much more remotely these days, you’re not looking people in the eye day to day, this is a really direct kind of communication line back in. Then having that cadence of fortnightly one to ones again so that you have an hour long discussion about the individual really focusing on them.
And then there’s culture of feedback in the moment and being really clear with the direction that you’re giving people. And that’s generally how we how we manage certain situations. But you’re actually right by the time someone gets to the point where they are being let go. It absolutely cannot be a surprise because if it is a surprise, then you’ve done them a disservice because they’ve not had the opportunity to change their behavior. To change the way they work, so that you give them a chance to be successful within the business.
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I, what I find is people just don’t know sometimes that these behaviors aren’t acceptable. Maybe they’ve gotten away with them up until this point. And then, you know, one of the responsibilities I think leaders have is to make people as you’re saying, I’m gonna leave people better than I found him. You know, and and I love this idea of, you know, the focus needs to be on the other person, what you want the outcome for them, not the outcome for yourself. And I do think a lot of leaders fail to give feedback, fail to share in a candid and clear way, I’m using your language, what’s really going on. Because, again, they don’t want to, their ego gets in the way. They don’t want to be seen as a bad person. But really, you end up being the bad guy, if you don’t give them the feedback. Yeah, it’s absolutely essential.
Myles: There’s a book called Radical Candor, which is.
Nicole: By Kim Scott.
Myles: Kim Scott, exactly. And I’ve read, I’ve read it, listened to it a couple of times. And a bit that I like the most it’s awakened within me, was this, they have this quadrant and have two axes. One is around caring personally, which is something you have to do for people to trust you. And for people to actually take on board your feedback and realize that what you’re giving them comes from a good place, a positive place that will help them. The other one is about being direct. Challenging directly, I think, is the phrase that they use. When you’re caring personally and challenging directly, you’re giving great feedback.
You’re in a radical candor zone, which is enabling people to get great feedback that will help them and know that it’s coming from a positive place. So they can trust it, they can take it on board, they don’t find it damaging necessarily. They realize that you’ve got their best interests at heart, and therefore that they’re more likely to take this and improve through it. But if you have that caring personally, but you’re not being directly challenging to people, you’re in this place called ruinous empathy, which I will be really honest, I find myself in more often than I’d care to be, where I’m just holding back on being really clear, honest with someone, because I don’t want to be the bad person.
I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But actually, they’re the ones who suffer from it. They suffer from my own insecurities, because they don’t get the full benefit of the feedback that they deserve. So that they can take the course correction they need to improve, grow and succeed. Yeah, I find the phrase ruinous empathy sounds like a horrible phrase. And I keep in my mind, because I never want, I never want to be there. Because it sounds it sounds like a very bad place to be.
Nicole: Yeah, and I don’t know. Have you ever watched a TED Talk, everybody, have you ever watched a TED Talk or listened to a podcast where she’s a guest? Have you ever done that, Myles?
Myles: No, I haven’t.
Nicole: Yeah, so Kim Scott is such a straight shooter. You know, she’s, and so like ruinous empathy. That’s such her personality, because she she kind of exaggerates and makes everything big. But I think, you know, really, she’s trying to get leaders attention. She’s like, Listen, this will ruin things, you know, so so pay attention. So she she is quite candid. That is for sure. Yeah. So you you mentioned, it’s almost like you’re you’re reading my tea leaves today, I wrote down the word virtual, because in your bio, it says that you have, you know, 200 people in the UK, the Ukraine in the Philippines. And so I wanted, you know, I think more and more leaders are having to manage teams and lead teams that are just everywhere. So tell me a little bit about how you’re doing that. How you’re being intentional, maybe a place where you’re paying attention, and you’re having a great outcome.
Myles: Do you mean in relation to culture, or just growth of the business?
Nicole: I’d love to hear both, you know, I think that, you know, people like we’re in here in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a lot of the banks have sent people home, and they’re maybe 40 miles or four miles from from their, where their office used to be, but they’re operating virtually. So I think it takes some intention and attention to manage a virtual team, because you don’t have that convenience of you know, popping into somebody’s office or meeting up with them in front of the coffee pot or whatever. So, you know, you don’t have really a choice with your folks that are in the Ukraine or the Philippines other than getting on a plane. So I’m curious, how are you keeping the culture going in those places, and then also growing the business in such a global way?
Myles: Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you. You’ve given me lots of lots of tangents to go off on so I’ll try. Having a strong strong culture is a great way of keeping people unified and united across different different locations. It is a bit harder in different cultures, particularly, because a lot of our we’d like to go and reinforce our culture by going over and seeing our teams as often as we can do. And with COVID, we’ve not been able to go to the Philippines for two years. I did go to the Ukraine in November. So I was able to meet some teams there. But one of the team members hadn’t met us, since they joined, it has been to two and a half years, they may never have met us or met us once.
And so therefore, you can’t meet people, you can’t look them in the eye, and you can’t convince them through your own personal power. That what you said in terms of the interview process, and what the culture is, like, it’s really true. So you have to find other ways to, to get them to kind of live it and breathe it. So I mentioned two of the things that we have found great success with. One is the big heart awards, which we run in all three locations. And that is a great way for them to recognize each other, and to to nominate each other and to come up vote. Obviously, the beliefs interview is another one again, and we also reinforce that we get Ukrainian team members to go through the process as well.
And I will say it has been a little bit harder there than we have over here. I think, in the UK, and probably in America, we’ve grown up in a very different culture than they have in Ukraine. You know, a lot of people who work on our team now, Ukraine became an independent country 25 years ago, so a lot of them are first generation outside the Soviet Union. And they’ve kind of a lot of quite a strong, authoritarian kind of government. And sometimes they can be a little bit unsure. Whether you’re being genuine. When you say, look, I want you to make decisions, you’ve got full autonomy, they look, you go, really, really, I’m not sure I believe you. And so give it a bit of time, they have to feel it a few times to kind of buy into into and to get it. We have, we have a team member over there called Anna, and she looks after the culture.
So she’s helping to take all the things that we do in the UK, and transplant them over there, the best practices with a feedback loop for things that they try over, over there. And they and they do over here, we try and get people together quite a lot. So actually, our team in the Ukraine has just come back from their their annual ski trip where they go to the west of the country, they go skiing. We don’t have a ski trip in the UK, we don’t really have the sort of budget for it, but it’s a little bit cheaper over there, and they love it. And that’s actually a great way of bringing the team together. So we do try and have those events, even though they’re not working side by side in an office every day, we try and try and get them together physically from time to time.
So they can have those kind of closer relationships. And they can, they can bond with team members. But certainly having a good connection between the locations, you’ll have some in the in the Philippines team who looks after kind of culture as well. And the three three groups the UK, Ukraine and Philippines share best practice, they talk a lot on a weekly basis, sharing ideas and trying to, to get things to things to spread. I would say there are definitely barriers around cultural differences. And there are certainly barriers around people working from home in different cultures, because you just have less chance to have to build up those connections to build up that sort of that tissue of understanding between team members when they’re not working physically with each other.
But one thing that we have done a lot of is will work from home in COVID is we tried to be as generous to people as possible. So really being generous in terms of time off, because it was stressful in high pressure. But also we’ve sent gifts out quite a lot. So whereas usually we might have a party at Easter, we’ve sent chocolate fondue sets to everyone and encouraged people to get online and have a fondue party virtually with their with their colleagues. So found other ways to do it. But it does require generosity, it does require forethought, does require commitment to really investing in your culture. But I will say it absolutely pays off because our our retention rate for team members is I think very high compared to what a lot of other businesses in our industry face given how competitive it is raising salaries, all those situations.
So I think the proof is in the pudding in that sense that people are staying with the business longer, they’re enjoying the experience. And we pay a market rate, we don’t pay a lot more than other people. So it’s certainly not salary alone that’s keeping them keeping them here. It is the fact that we take care of people we look after them. They know that they’ve got the best chance here of being in a culture that really cherishes their individuality, but is enabling them to kind of grow and mature and gain new skills and succeed in the areas that they want to grow their career in.
Nicole: Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, so I love the idea of a fondue pot. I immediately got a visual of my father, you know, he had the fondue pot 1970 something and I love it. Okay. All right. That’s fantastic. Yeah. So, you know, Myles, you seem to be really an informed leader. Like, you get it. So how, how did you get it? Like, how do you find your way into this place where you’re like, we’re gonna have a culture person in each place, and we’re gonna go, I’m gonna do culture 50% of the time. I think some of the leaders that might be listening are like 50%? I’m over here having a moment like, this is so great. So so how did, how did you figure out that that’s where you want to position yourself because I think it’s absolutely fantastic. So tell me a little bit about your journey personally, I’m dying to know.
Myles: Okay, so. So I started the business in 2009. I had never run a business before. I had worked doing business development in a number of media and software businesses and actually got made redundant. By the last business, I went to everybody eHarmony, you probably know of eHarmony. Big, huge matchmaking sort of website. I was part of the launch team in the UK, didn’t didn’t work out, it didn’t work out, I got made redundant. And it hit me pretty hard. I was incredibly disappointed in myself. And two kids at the time, I felt really rubbish. And I felt that I was a failure. And I didn’t want my kids growing up with a dad as a failure. So I took that as a real motivator for me to, you know, to get together to do something significant. I’d always wanted to run a business.
So I decided, well, I’m gonna go and run a business. The early years were pretty slow. I have a business partner called Ed he’s our Chief Technology Officer, we still run running the business together. And yeah, we you know, we, the first three years were very slow. You know, we had a lot of freelancers, we had day jobs, we’re scrapping and grappling to get stuff together. Around 2011, we got to around $20,000 of revenue each month. And that meant I could pay myself for the first time. So I stopped my day job and went full time on BrightLocal. And our profit since then, it’s been mostly sort of focused on long term profitable growth, we don’t have any outside investment. We’re a bootstrap business. And we’ve always been focused on growing profitably.
And we’ve grown roughly 20%, year on year, since since then, and we’ve grown through reinvesting the profits. And as we’re a software business, it’s about bringing other people, we haven’t got factories, we don’t have stock, we don’t have big fixed costs, it’s all about people. So it’s really been about who can we bring in to help us to that next stage, next stage of growth and investing, investing in them. And so fast forward 10 years, we’re at 200 people. I’ve never run a business with 200 people. But six months ago, I’d never run a business of 160 people. And before that, 100 people, so I’ve had to evolve enormously. I think before I ran this company I think my biggest team was two.
I never managed more than two people directly. And so I have had to go on an on a on a tough, personal journey of self self growth. And that journey continues every day. So I say to anyone who cares to ask, my job changes every six months. The challenges I face, due to the scale, due to the size of the people, due to the size of the business changes every six months, and I have to rapidly rapidly keep up. So I do that through a lot of study, I read a lot of books that I listened to a lot of books, I do a lot of running as somebody to kind of keep my my mind, like my body and my mind fit. So I’ve probably listened to one or two leadership books a month. I obviously, obviously, my generally re listened to them.
So I’ve gone through a cycle of relistening to my favorite 10. At the moment, 10, which has given me great ideas, and reinforce that, so a lot of is about is about continually investing and the time for me to do it when I go running because I can listen and run, I can absorb it all. And I’m multitasking essentially. So that’s that’s been my personal strategy is one of growth. Why I like culture so much, it really I personally, it really it really appeals to me. I’m not big into sales. I come from maybe a bit more like a marketing background, but the bit I like is people. I like working with people. And I like creating a culture and environment that people like to work within. And so culture is a key key part of that. And it’s really interests me, because I find it, it’s about sort of it’s about sort of psychology, and understanding what people need to feel self motivated.
So actually a big part of I think we why we’ve been quite successful in in lockdown is we bring people in one of the attributes of it for is self motivation, and productivity. And we put a self motivated, productive person in a lockdown scenario, they actually work harder than don’t work. And so actually, we spend more we have more conversations in the business about how do we avoid people burning out, then how do we get people to work harder, because we’ve got the right mix of people in, we’ve given them autonomy, we give them the skills to do the job, we’ve created an incredibly supportive environment. But actually they want they don’t want to let other team members down.
And that creates an environment where people just want to work hard and feel fulfilled and do a good job for not for me, not for the company, but for themselves and for their their teammates to the left of them, and the right of them. So therefore, culture is a way that we’ve grown the business because I can’t be a part of every conversation. And I don’t want to be I want people to make quick decisions. But I want them to make decisions within the right kind of guidelines with the right ideals. And that’s what we reinforce through through our culture. So people can make decisions.
They know how to make decisions in the right way. And they make them quickly. They didn’t always get them right. But we learn from our mistakes. We actually have a very transparent culture. So when someone makes a mistake, they often jump on Slack and share it go look, I’ve just done this. Totally screwed it up. I made a massive hash of it purely because I don’t want anyone else to make that mistake, and then we will move forward. We certainly don’t have a culture of retribution and fingerpointing, it’s like, okay, let’s all learn from mistakes so that we can all collectively not make that mistake a second time around.
Nicole: I absolutely love it. Yeah. And so I love what you’re saying too, because I would think that if you had the culture that you guys are striving for, you would have people that are like, they don’t ever leave work, you know, like they go fix dinner, make sure the kids okay, oh, let me just go back and do a couple more emails because it’s right there in my office. So you know, having those right people in the first place, you’d have the opposite problem. I love that. Now, I am dying to know what your favorite 10 books are. Now, I bet you can’t get them all. Maybe you can’t get them all 10, in this moment. Would you mind sending those to me? So I can put them in the show notes?
Myles: Yeah, I can read them out to you if you like.
Nicole: Yeah, read them to me. I’d love to know what the 10 are.
Myles: Well, so I am a big fan of Simon Sinek. So the Infinite Game is one of the books that I that I really, really like. I like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. That’s actually how we’ve worked in creating our leadership team and creating the the sort of the way the character of the different teams, where they work with each other a big part of our culture built around that. And what else I want to Drive by Dan Pink, which is all about understanding intrinsic motivation. So I’ll just go through my Audible now and having a look at them. There’s a great book called Black Box Thinking, which is all about how to learn from mistakes and how different industries namely, it contrasts the medical industry with the aviation industry, learn from mistakes.
And that’s I think, was just fascinating, sort of social psychology as well as personal psychology to understand about how the right culture built around learning through through problems, not brushing under the carpet, enables sort of hyper growth. A love a book book called The Trillion Dollar Coach which is all about this amazing guy called Bill on his name now, right? You just got Bill, he was a coach for the leaders at Apple, the leaders at Google he’s at Facebook. He and the book is called The Trillion Dollar Coach, because basically he coached companies worth, you know, that much that much money. And that’s a really interesting book for leaders in terms of wanting to understand how to be a better coach is a great a great read.
What else, we got to Measure What Matters, which is a book by John Doerr about how to set objectives within an organization. And a great book called Execution, actually, which is a book about how to about how leaders can often be so focused on strategy, and so far removed from how that strategy is implemented within the business. And that’s often the missing piece. It’s like we’ve got a great vision, you know, got a great direction, I know what our strategy needs to be. But why is it amounting to nothing? Why is it not getting close to where we need to be. And often that gap is around execution. It points out how business leaders can sometimes be too separated, they can put themselves on a pedestal and not worry about how things get implemented within the business. And this book Execution, this helps to build have sort of fill in the gaps in between.
And for me personally, as business grows, I think I will also focus more on strategy, and I’ll focus more on culture, it’s helped anchor me back down into the operations where I’m not micromanaging. But I’m ensuring that the people, people who you know who within the leadership team, and then there’s sort of deputies, how we’re always talking back to how we’re going to do that, what is the plan for doing it? How are we actually going to make this happen. And so therefore, we’re grounding and actual actions and responsibilities that we can follow through on rather than just having it as this kind of esoteric strategy, which just never really gets operationalized. So I think those are quite good books that were the best ones that I like, kind of go back to. There are probably a couple others.
Nicole: That’s a fantastic list. That’s a fantastic list. All right, we’ll make sure to put those in the show notes, everybody. So I’m wondering how you might talk about SEO for a moment. So you know, you’re talking about how leaders are up here, they might put a strategy in place. We all know that our presence on the web is vital. It’s important. So what do what leaders need to know about their presence on the web? And what would be some ways that they could, you know, double check what’s really going on? Maybe they might be removed from whatever that process is. So what are the things they need to check on and make sure are getting executed?
Myles: Broad a broad topic. Let me try and summarize it, I guess from, SEO is all about. Google wants to know, we work with local businesses, generative businesses who attract their customers from the physical, local area. So it could be a place that you go to visit like a restaurant, or a hardware shop or a cafe. Or it could be a service business that comes to you like a gardener or a plumber or a construction company. Or it could be a professional services like a lawyer or consultant, essentially any businesses that are around 10 million of these businesses in the US, and they’re typically looking to find their customers from a defined area. So it could be a town, city or even a zip code if they’re a very local cafe.
And I guess the opposite of that is ecommerce based businesses or cloud based businesses, credit cards or airplanes, anything that doesn’t necessarily attract that a customer from that from a local area. But with an SEO, Google is really looking to understand essentially, how good you are at what you do and where you’re located. So those are the things it’s trying to pin down, you know, location is quite easy for Google to tell, and you quite easy for us to give information to Google about where where you’re located. The heart of it is about how good you are at it, you know, and then can you have you got authority in that area. So whatever your business does, what you need to do is ensure that you’re basically showing off to Google in as many ways as possible, how good you are at something.
And you could do that through writing content on your website that talks not just about what you do, you might have a service page, but also bits of research that you might do, or things that reinforce that you are a genuine, bona fide expert in something. And sometimes there’ll be something that comes from you personally, or it could be a connection that you’ve got to another expert. So you could have a business, that’s a chiropractor, but you might have linkages to other chiropractic associations, you might link to other chiropractors. And you might sort of bring in other specialists to write content, you’re in your website, if someone is a specialist in ankles that say, which I am sure there must be get that expert who is well known on the web who has got real bonafide authority to talk about that, to do something on behalf of you for your for your current customers.
So it’s about telling Google, where you’re located, but also how much authority you are. Are you a bonafide expert? The hard thing about SEO, it’s not a flash in the pan, it’s someone that you have to continually invest in. And I know that’s partly because it’s my business to know but part it’s also how we built our business. So if we give you some sort of numbers about our business. We have around 6300 customers, we acquire around 150 customers a month, we also have around 100 people try our platform every day. So there’s a free trial option. 100 people come to us and try it every day. About 95 of those come from Google, from organic search, rather than paid search. So we know we built an engine that brings people to us, but it has taken a lot of time. And it’s a constantly moving set of goalposts.
So we know it works, because we would be putting an investment in there. But if we stopped investing in it today, and we decided, you know what, we’ve done enough, we’ve done enough content, we’ve done enough authority building, we’ve got enough online reviews about us, we know over time that that would erode, and it would worsen and it would dwindle. And those 95, become 85, becomes 75, 55. And it will drop off because other people around us are continuing to invest. And so the goalposts constantly move because it’s a competitive landscape. One of the things that a lot of business owners business owners don’t understand is they think SEO is a one and done set it forget it type approach, actually, as with any part of your business, you have to keep evolving and keep and keep nurturing.
So one of the things that people should probably do is we should then have that clearly understood, and work out where they want to spend their budget. Do they do they want to spend it, constantly building this to long term organic lead generator, which is where SEO is, or do they want to invest in more short term to short return channels, such as PPC, paid advertising, paid social posts. Of course there are other things you could do, you could do, you could run podcasts, you could run webinars, and host those and, and invest in that side of things. So there are other things that you could do. It’s about finding a balance again, that’s right for you. Personally, for me, I think I would always encourage people to to be layering on that that bedrock of search engine authority, and over time, it will come good and pay off. But obviously you need leads to be getting customers through the door.
So you’ve got to have some some short term options that drive the traffic as well. The key thing is actually is is thinking about your website and making sure your website is converting the most that it possibly can. So if someone is coming from organic search, or they’re coming from paid search, or they’re coming from social media, they’re landing on a website that gives them what they need very quickly, and does that in a way that conveys that you’re the best person to provide that service. So they’re going to want to click on whatever your action is. It’s called, it’s call me now. Submit a form, sign up for free like you can do on BrightLocal, that they take the action that you want to do.
So focus a lot on, make sure your website conveys you in the best possible light and the most convincing possible light. Get that right first and then look at the other channels that are bringing people to you and see where you want to make your investment. But I will say don’t underestimate how long it takes to be successful at Search Engine Marketing. I think people sometimes have the attitude that it’s free marketing and it’s easy to do. It’s it is essentially free because you’re not paying for it, but you’re paying for someone’s expertise to get it right.
And I think it’s quite hard to understand all the facets of local search marketing and sometimes we have business owners who come to us sign up and they get a bit confused and unsure about how what to do next. I would say in that circumstance, use a marketer, use a professional marketer whose job it is, is to truly understand this. Find some reputable, try and find someone who can be recommended to you and make the investment but then you’ll free up an awful lot of time, so that you can focus on running the core business. And you can focus on doing the culture as your business grows.
Nicole: That is some solid advice. And so I just wondering if there’s a special listener listening right now somebody that is leader, they’ve got a business, they want to draw people in locally, they want to build their culture. What’s the one last little bit of nugget advice you would give them Myles? What’s one thing that I haven’t asked the right question and you want to tell us? What do you want to tell us about running a business?
Myles: About running a business or about search marketing?
Nicole: Let’s go with your search marketing. Yeah, what’s the one little nugget you want to leave them with?
Myles: I would focus a lot on your online reputation. So through existing customers, get online reviews, get them to become advocates to your business. Don’t be embarrassed about asking for referrals, building case studies, getting them to leave reviews for you. Because then you can start to utilize those reviews. In so many places on your own website in marketing materials. It starts to appear in Google search engine results, it appears on key websites. So use your customers to gain to gain other customers.
Don’t be shy about asking because I think from our own research, eight times out of 10, if you ask someone to leave a review, you’ve had a good experience, they’ll do it for you. And they’ll no doubt be an advocate for your business as well. So that’s a great way for you to turn one customer into three. And if you can do that multiple times over, then you’ve got the flywheel turning, and your business can really start to move. It’s probably the easiest way to win new customers.
Nicole: Absolutely. Fantastic. Well, it has been such a delight to have you on the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast, I feel like we need to have you come back and tell us how to build our SEO, we can have another session, we’ll see see if you’ll have time for us in the future. But if people want to get a hold of you, and they want to take advantage of your genius and hire you to get them some SEO, what what’s the best way to reach you?
Myles: Well, it’s not my genius as the genius of my team. So that’s probably a good thing for you to know. You can find us at brightlocal.com. There you can find everything you need to know about us. You can sign up for free, there’s a free trial. You can get yourself in with our sales team who are very consultative, so they’ll talk you through all you need to know, they’ll help you understand what the software does and how it solves the challenges that you’ve got. We also have a free academy.
So if you are the learning type, there are five or six courses that pretty much tell you everything you need to know about local search marketing or local SEO. So go there, take the course get a nice little accreditation at the end, it’s entirely free. You don’t actually have to sign up to BrightLocal to use it so it’s free for anyone to access. If you have any questions for me personally or to ask anything to do with company leadership, anything of interest you can reach me at myles@brightlocal.com. Myles is spelled m y l e s, little bit unusual, so Myles m y l e s@brightlocal.com.
Nicole: Fantastic. Thank you Myles for being on the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. It has been an absolute delight. Thank you for giving me a book list. I’m a major reader. So I appreciate some of the ideas on there that I haven’t read yet. So thank you so much and have a great afternoon. Thanks.
Myles: Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Bye.
Voiceover: Ready to build your vibrant culture? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference or organization to help them with her strategies, systems and smarts to increase clarity, accountability, energy and results. Your organization will get lit from within. Email Nicole@nicolegreer.com. And be sure to check out Nicole’s TEDx talk at nicolegreer.com.
