Why the Best Business Decisions Are Made in Conversational Settings
James Wood and Paul Ferry spent hours “talking shop.” That led them to build their company. Images: c/o ShopTalk/DEPT
Paul Ferry and James Wood spent years talking shop as industry peers in pubs, so much so that they decided to launch their London-based brand and experience design studio ShopTalk together in 2017. Then reality set in–they had never technically worked together. At their first client presentation, they shared a mutual thought: I really hope this other person is as good as I think he is.
While they didn’t win that first project pitch, it went well enough for them to trust the other and continue on. Good thing, too, because over the past five years, they’ve doubled their team size and worked with clients such as Heinz, Coca-Cola owned Innocent, and Swiss electric car brand Piëch.
Over the summer, Ferry and Wood took another leap to grow their business further. ShopTalk was acquired by Dutch digital agency group DEPT, bolstering DEPT’s digital creative practice in Europe while opening up DEPT’s full service offering and global roster to ShopTalk. Here, Wood (creative director) and Ferry (director) share the key to a successful partnership, how they built and sold their company, and the importance of ‘talking shop’, i.e. why the biggest and best business decisions are made in the most casual and conversational settings.
The ShopTalk team at work and in portrait mode .
What led to the creation of ShopTalk?
Paul: James and I went to university together and then went into the creative industry, though we never actually worked together. I went down the client service strategy track and James the design and creative track. Whenever we saw each other in social situations, James and I would invariably start talking shop while the rest of our friends might talk about football, family, or whatever. We talked about stuff we thought was good and the stuff we thought was broken and we could fix. That snowballed. As the years went by, we came to the idea: Why don’t we put our money where our mouth is? The morning after one boozy night with James, he called and said he’d just quit his job. It took me a little bit longer, a few months, but I did it. We had three months of savings, so we gave ourselves three months to figure it out.
James: One thing we thought we could do better is better work. We had experienced people going into meetings, and presenting work that was done by others and pretending it was their own. We wanted to have more honest conversations with clients.
What was the pressure like in those first three months and how did you land your first new client?
James: The most surprising thing, and it makes sense looking back, is that there is nothing like being in it. Jumping in focuses you to think: Get a client now because you can't pay your mortgage if you don’t! In our industry, we're lucky that you don't need much to get started: a laptop and even less office space than you used to need. It was pretty much Paul and me and a couple of Macs working from our bedrooms for that first bit.
What’s surprising is you always think a person would definitely give you some work and then that would never materialize. But then someone we wouldn’t think about much would suddenly pop up with a project. It was these small projects that allowed us to get a foot in the door and build on it incrementally over time.
Paul: A big learning is you have to swallow your pride and reach out to everybody you know and let them know what you’re doing. We said yes to everything, no matter how small, and tried to see how we could grow those projects.
Our focus was always on getting clients, even if that meant that we didn’t focus as much on getting everything set up from an admin level. Then at some point we’d realize, Oh sh*t we need to get insurance now.
You did what mattered most–finding clients, which makes everything else go. What’s ShopTalk’s calling card?
Paul: The mix of creativity and efficiency. We get to the solution quickly and we don’t fill it with loads of unnecessary stuff. Dialing back to one of James's original points, when you're a smaller team, the team you're using is the team that the client gets. We found we were able to work with bigger brands because we’d staff the project with as many people as the bigger agencies did–the difference was that that was our entire team versus a small percentage of theirs.
Strong partnerships are key to successful organizations and outcomes. Tell us about your partnership.
Paul: We were good friends, and I guess that could go one of two ways: either great, or you can’t work together. For us it has turned out well. When we started our business, we could already be honest with each other. From a logistics point of view, we have James’s experience with the design and creative side and mine in client strategy. Some agencies start with just creative teams, and their work is nice, but they are in financial disarray and losing money on their work. Conversely, you see people from the client strategy side and their finances are in order, but there is barely any work coming out and they are in trouble creatively.
ShopTalk’s work for innocent raised awareness and supported the brand’s carbon reduction efforts.
To reflect Ferry’s drive to create something more joyful, ShopTalk/DEPT® created a visual identity that approached the brand as a digital-led-service rather than a traditional car leasing brand.
Building on the idea of talking shop, why are the biggest and best decisions made in the most casual and conversation settings?
Paul: I wouldn’t say this is always the case, but the environment is great at facilitating that first step – taking a very roughly formed idea or thought that might otherwise stay that way and turn it into something, with the aid of collaboration, that might actually take flight and become reality.
James: Formal settings are already packed with agendas, deadlines to hit, and workstreams to progress. It’s outside of this setting where you can look to get new projects, new ways of doing things, and new approaches to problems off the ground.
How did you two decide it was time to evaluate an acquisition and join DEPT?
Paul: They approached us to start the conversation. One of the surprising things, and it still stands true today, is just how open and honest they were during this process. The main thing was they felt like a bigger, global version of ShopTalk and they had many of the same values. They're a B Corp, which is huge for us. They have an entrepreneurial, agile mentality.
James and I had been asking ourselves what the next stage was for ShopTalk: How do we grow and move this forward? We had looked at creating this ourselves, but we saw we could join the DEPT digital network. We wanted our next step to be focused on the work. And for us, when we got to a certain size, we knew our team needed bigger HR and office management systems behind them. We could go out and hire those teams, or we could find a place with those already in place.
James: Early on we understood that these guys were about the creative. Yes, they do tech, but when they asked us to tell them about our studio, before they got to our team structure, it was all about the work. We realized they understood it, and it felt nice to have these creative conversations before we started negotiating the financials. That stood out for me.
Paul: We were also cognizant of the fact that our team members joined us because of the type of work we do, the company atmosphere around creative, and our culture. We wanted to make sure that whatever we were moving into, the reasons they joined us remained. One thing we did was to bring senior members of our team into these conversations as soon as we got to a point where we thought this thing might actually be real and work, as opposed to it being this little secret that we as the founders held all the way through until the big reveal meeting. We didn’t want people to join the new company only to leave three months later.
You’ve described some of your work as the ‘bottom of the iceberg’ – the core bulk of the concept, strategy and design underneath the surface of what most consumers see. How does your new partnership with DEPT ensure every detail from ShopTalk is executed and carried through into the final end-point service – the tip of the iceberg – from websites to 3D and experiential design?
James: Joining DEPT completes the puzzle for us. As you say, we often got to a point where we had to hand off a lot of our work to another party to execute against, as being a small and specialist team, we didn’t have the necessary disciplines in-house to execute across all media. Now, as part of DEPT we can suddenly add some of the best data, media, engineering and 3D talent into our mix.
Paul: This both improves our work as an input, and vastly increases our capabilities as an output – meaning we can truly own the end-to-end process for our clients.
When joining a parent agency, it may seem like you’re relinquishing control, but in fact, you view it as the opposite. How so?
James: I guess it does depend on the parent that you choose to join. But in the case of DEPT, you’re absolutely right – their set up is to bring on board ‘Departments’ to build upon and complement the Departments that they already have across the globe. That being the case, you’ve been brought on to do the job that you have already been successfully doing, so you carry on doing that, with all the autonomy that you previously had.
Paul: Only DEPT provides you with best-in-class operational support, to lift (and improve on!) a lot of the behind-the-scenes tasks that running an agency requires, freeing us up to be the most ShopTalk that we’ve ever been. Add to that an incredible talent pool to collaborate with, learn from and execute ideas with, it’s been a fantastic journey so far.
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