Summary

Nick Tyldsley joins host Kiran Kapur to explore how he built Superfly Marketing from a one-person operation in his back bedroom into a 15–16-strong digital agency over 14 years, defying the odds faced by most small businesses. The discussion dives into the realities of growth: bigger clients, bigger cash-flow pressures, and the challenge of hiring early enough to avoid overwhelming stress on the team.

 

Key Points

Build for Long-Term Success, Not Short-Term Gains

Nick emphasises that in business-to-business services, having a long-term viewpoint focused on networking and reputation-building has resulted in long-term success.

Quality and Consistency Matter More Than Quick Results

Nick's biggest client started as a small project, but by maintaining quality work and consistency, they eventually became a major account. He notes that if quality starts to slip, "that's when it all starts to fall apart."

Don't Wait Too Late to Hire. Plan Ahead.

Don’t wait until you're overwhelmed before bringing on new staff. Taking on too much work without adequate team capacity creates excessive stress and risks the entire business. Proactive hiring, even when leads are uncertain, provides necessary headroom.

Clients Often Pull the Plug Too Early

The biggest mistake Nick sees clients make is short-termism, pulling marketing campaigns within a month or two before there's been enough time to test and see results. He now sets minimum six-month terms to give strategies a proper runway.

Set Boundaries and Build a Sustainable Business Model

Rather than working constantly, Nick deliberately chose to allocate time to family and avoid weekends. He's built what he calls "a lifestyle business" with clear boundaries, and it has still achieved great success, proving you don't need to sacrifice everything for business growth.

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated. 

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:01):
Hello and welcome. This week we are in the world of digital marketing and a digital marketing agency. I'm delighted to welcome Nick Tyldsley, who is MD and founder of Superfly Marketing, who are based up in Hull. They describe themselves as high-quality online digital marketing services. Nick, it's probably fair if I declare that you have several apprentices study with Cambridge Marketing College, so we know you from different directions. So welcome to the show. Tell us a bit more about what Superfly Marketing do.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (00:30):
Brilliant. Well, thanks for having me on, Kiran. It was me and my brother who set up the business and we're really almost polar opposites, so it's kind of worked really well. I'm kind of on the more creative and marketing side. My brother is more on the technical, almost like IT background side. So he's brought the data and the performance side and I've kind of bought the more creativity and marketing. So we kind of now are an amalgamation of this kind of strong on creativity, but on strong on the actual results and performance side of things. And that's what's worked really well, especially over the last, I'd say five to six years where people have wanted accountability with their marketing so that it works, but also a flair so they've got some creativity to be proud of. And also with social media and people's concentration levels, you need to have a creative flair to actually grab people's attention.

(01:30):
So yeah, we've built that on those foundations and we've gone from in 14 years it was me sat literally in my back bedroom with my cat to now there'll be 15, possibly 16 of us this year. So it's taken 14 years to get there, but that's how in my experience these things can take.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:51):
And also it's worth pointing out that the majority of small businesses actually go under within the first five to eight years. Depressing, but true. If you've crossed that milestone, that is dramatic. So to have a business running for 14 years is amazing, and to have one that's running and growing is a success story. And it's worth just pointing that out to listeners if they're not aware that that's impressive growth.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (02:15):
Thanks. That's nice to hear. And I can relate to that because at that five to ... Sometimes you feel like you obviously set up your business to start off with and you've got all the drive, the motivation and you just really want it to work, and everything's kind of flowing your way. And also a lot of people want to be a part of it so they know your friends and family, your network are all on it. But then once that starts to dry up, you've then got to really expand that network and also think more outside the box and also motivate yourself as well. So within five to eight years, they were probably the most difficult times because you hit a bit of lull. So you either pull yourself out of it or you kind of drown in it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (02:59):
And lots of businesses don't cross that level. Since we're talking about growing your business, you made a really interesting point about as the business grows, stresses and problems haven't gone away. They've just got bigger. So we talk about that a little bit because you say at the beginning, it's all new and exciting, and you're trying to work out where the market is as much as anything else.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (03:21):
Yeah. I think as you get bigger, I mean ultimately we talk bigger, we mean explicitly financial. So there's more turnover. There's not necessarily more profit, but there's more. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. And that's sometimes hard to get your head around. As you grow as a business, you take on more people. So there's more money coming in, but there's more money going out. And if you grow, especially over the last two or three years, we've grown quite significantly. So the amount of money that's coming into the amount of money that's now going out is a lot more. So that not only can that financially catch up with you because you've got some clients who aren't used to paying how quickly you want them to pay, but also when you look at the bank balance, you're like, ooh. But I mean, we've got over that hump again as well.

(04:15):
We put some of our money into savings, but then it's locked away. And then that was a bit of an issue because we locked it away for too long, and then we've got bigger clients. We have to take on more staff to service those clients, and you can get into cash flow problems. So that's one of the things. And another thing for me, especially running the business, I'm heavily involved with meetings and running the team and looking after the people within the business.

(04:44):
I genuinely do love that. I really enjoy that. But as everyone will know, everyone has problems in their own life and just the day-to-day issues, and they then usually crop up to me. Sometimes I can kind of take that in my stride, and sometimes they can come a bit left field because ultimately people are people and you can't ever guess of what's going to happen.

Kiran Kapur, Host (05:16):
Yes. And there's that lovely point where you've got someone to just the level you need them to be because they're filling in a beautiful role, and then they turn around and go, "Actually, I'd like to do something else now." And that's wonderful from their development side, and one's very proud of them for wanting to do it, but there's also a business element side of "rats, I just got you in that round peg in the round hole, and now you want to do something else." Yes.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (05:39):
Or they leave. I remember early on, when one of our apprentices, we trained her up for two years and then she stayed on with us for another year, and then she said she was leaving. I just remember just being absolutely devastated and just being actually offended. But then that was my business naivety. It's like, why would she not?

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:04):
Yeah.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (06:05):
How would she not want to go on and do better things? And after a few days, I was kind of like, "Oh yeah, obviously it's fine." And now, after that's happened quite a few times, actually the young people and the apprentices that we've had in the business, seeing them go on and do really great things is actually so enriching in a way because it's just nice. It's just nice to see, oh, well, I suppose we kind of gave them that marketing opportunity and look where they are now. Some people are working in Dubai, some people are working for huge brands, and it's just lovely to see.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:38):
Yeah. You do end up with this, on the one hand, pride. And on the other hand, oh, and now I've got a business hole, which is another issue. And one of the other things you talked about was you said that I thought work would magically just show up if I told people, and nope it doesn't work like that. It's a constant beast that needs feeding. So how do you do that constant feeding?

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (07:04):
It's always a big challenge. I think when you're in business-to-business, and you're delivering a service, you're generally looking for a smaller amount of businesses to work for. You know what I mean? Whilst when you're selling products, you're just basically pushing it out to the target market and to as basically as many people within that market as possible and trying to sell a product. Whilst when it's in business-to-business, there's a lot of networking and building up reputation. And in my experience, having a long-term viewpoint of all of that has resulted in long-term success. But that's really difficult because sometimes you're going through a short-term blip and you need stuff to work, and it's just not working, and you're just like, "Oh my God, what am I going to do? We need another client or we ain't going to have money here." So you're having to make decisions.

(07:57):
But really, if you don't flap and you stick to the plan of what you've got, and I suppose for me that's been building up a network locally in Hull in East Yorkshire, but also in the wider marketing community and building up a reputation for Superfly from nothing, like a builder from absolutely nothing, ultimately that takes time. And also, I've had two children at that time as well, so I haven't wanted for it to completely dominate my life. Some people actually fully live and breathe their business, and they'll work on it all night and all day. I did that to start off with, but I was young, and I had more patience, but now I actually actively don't want to do that. I want to allocate time to my family, to my wife. I don't want to be working on weekends. So I've built kind of a business which is almost like a lifestyle business, but also something that has actually, like saying that it's still done great considering I've set those boundaries as well.

Kiran Kapur, Host (08:59):
So you mentioned earlier about getting bigger clients, and I think this is one of the things that small businesses often have to grapple with. So you tend to start off as a small business with smaller clients because you network with them, and they know you, and you're probably cheap to begin with. And then as you say, eventually you start needing to get bigger clients, but that comes with other overheads. So how have you balanced that? Because it's something I think all businesses struggle with.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (09:27):
It's a really, really difficult balance. I think for us to actually bring in the clients, we've done loads of work on our own marketing and our own processes and our own nurturing of leads and also not having a short-term, like I mentioned before, short-term kind of attitude and thinking, "Oh, well, if they don't want to go with us right now, fine, two years time, they might come back to us." And loads of people have come back to us. Our biggest client currently is someone who we did a small amount of work with and now they work for a lot bigger company. So it's having that attitude of thinking it will come off eventually. If you carry on being good, if you're good at what you do, that's the most important thing. If the quality starts to slip, then that's when it all starts to fall apart, I think.

Kiran Kapur, Host (10:15):
But obviously, bigger clients come with bigger requirements, bigger teams needed, bigger overheads.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (10:20):
That's what I was just about to get onto. So yeah, for example, right now I've got quite a lot of leads that I think that will come off, but I don't know. So where it stays now where I have experienced a time where we have taken on too much work, we've had to work really hard to service that work, and although we've been more profitable, that has put my brother and the team under too much stress. So for me, that is a risk that's not worth taking again, because if that happens again, there is a serious risk where someone is too stressed to work and then the whole thing crumbles. So now we're trying to be proactive and bring people in at an earlier time when we think, yeah, maybe even if one or two of these come off, we could easily service that, and we've still got a bit of headroom as well.

(11:13):
That's where I want to be, and that's where we're going. So that's the lesson that I've learned is not to wait too late to hire. But God, it is so difficult because with business as well, people can just come out of the blue and be like, "Yeah, I want that. " And then within a week they signed, and then you've got this huge amount of work, and then it takes about two months to bring the right person in usually. So it's really challenging. So you're having to scrabble around for a bit before another person comes in. But at the moment we've focused on investing on managers of the individual services that we've got, and now we've started to build those out, and that's working really nicely.

Kiran Kapur, Host (11:50):
It's always a balance to get out to business, and every so often you get to stage, and you go, and then something else happens, and you're off again.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (11:57):
100%. That is literally how I would completely describe it. I mean, I feel at the moment, it's like things are going okay, what's going to happen next? I'm just waiting. It's like the democally sore of hanging over you ready to fall at any point.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:14):
Do you know what? I think any business owner listening will say, "Yep, that's exactly how it feels." You never completely relax. So what sort of digital marketing techniques do you apply to your own business?

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (12:25):
So with us being business-to-business that really, I mean, whenever I'm doing strategies for other businesses, it depends where your customers are hanging around. So our customers are hanging around on LinkedIn. So there's a really strong presence we've got with myself, but also the business and a lot of the team members, we encourage them just to create authentic LinkedIn content. And then basically if they're pushing themselves, they'll see that people are working for Superfly, and then our name gets out even further, and that has worked really well just to be really consistent and do it over years. Don't think, oh, I'm going to do it for a few months and get other clients. It's a year's thing. It's taken us years to build this up. And to plug into that, we do our own podcast, so we get people generally local to us, but sometimes not who work in marketing.

(13:20):
We also run our own email marketing consistently. We put our content on other socials. More on the creative side, videos and stuff like that. And networking, getting out there and meeting people, is really important face-to-face. I know social media's great, but actually meeting someone and building up that face-to-face trust is still, for me, is still really important.

Kiran Kapur, Host (13:44):
Yes. You have a very nice video. I wanted to pick up on the video on your website, which is just your staff walking into the building and walking around, and it gives a real sense of the space that you're working in and the dynamism between your team and the fact that your staff all seem to like each other. Now, I don't know how much you had to cut out of the video, of course, but there's just a really nice dynamic going on in that video.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (14:08):
Yeah, there is actually. And I think it does capture the genuine vibe, I think, in the office. I mean, you'll get people who have bad days and good days, and some people will clash at times. I don't think you can ever stop that from happening, but I think generally people are really kind of respectful and that I'd like to think that they really like working here, and for me, I just try and treat people with how I would want to be treated myself. It's difficult for me to say it because I would say that, wouldn't I? Because anyone listening is like, "Oh yeah, of course you're saying that. " So I think it's more powerful when other people do say it. But no, I think there is a really nice vibe. I love coming to work every morning, and we've just invested in a new office over the last 18 months, and that's made a big difference.

(14:59):
We've got little breakout areas. So generally, people are in the main area to begin with. And then as the day goes on, as you start to like literally your concentrations go, and you can break out into different rooms and everyone kind of spreads out a bit, and that's really nice.

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:12):
There's a nice clip in your video where you've got three members to start playing a card game. I assumed that was lunch, but it could have been a creative technique for all I know.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (15:19):
Yeah, it generally is lunch. I mean, everything with the social team especially, our social media team are really kind of quirky and sometimes we will just do the odd kind of team building thing, but that actually works in fusing the team further together and getting people maybe from different teams to talk to each other and just having an hour out, even if it's like 11 o'clock or whatever, it genuinely does help. I know people might think, "Oh, well, you're losing an hour of everyone's time," but you're gaining more motivation long term and a better team cohesion. So that's the way that I see and it does tend to work, I think anyway,

Kiran Kapur, Host (16:05):
I agree with you and certainly your video, as I said, has a lovely vibe. In such a fast moving industry, how on earth do you keep your team up to date? Because digital marketing, when you say yourself in one of your blogs, I mean, it's just changing out of all recognition so fast.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (16:23):
Yeah, I think I'd say 70% of the team are under 30. So I think younger people generally have a, and I am generalising here, it's not always the case, have more of a thirst for the latest technology and are genuinely more interested. But my brother, who he's very technically oriented, and he kind of encourages it and says to quite a lot of the managers, "Have you seen this? " Obviously, AI has been a massive thing at the moment, and it's trying to find your place and find how you can use it without completely overrelying on it. So you end up de- skilling yourself and just ruining everything that you're doing, but mainly using it for what is good at a lot of data and analysis, and just giving you a second opinion on strategic things. But then things like Claude, you can actually challenge it, and it responds quite well to be challenged.

(17:14):
I mean, that's a whole other conversation. We could do a full podcast on that.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:17):
Yes, we could. You did a nice blog on your top five tools that you really like. And I love the fact that ChatGPT, Claude and something else all got lumped in as one tool, which I thought was really nice.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (17:29):
Yeah, because I'm trying to find my ... Over the last, I'd say six to 12 months, I've hugely accelerated my use of it, but I don't use it to write my LinkedIn content. I don't know if anyone else can. I'm sure they can, but I can tell a mile away when people have overused, basically just like writing your LinkedIn person, copied and pasted and slammed on LinkedIn, and it just sounds the same. You just end up sounding like whatever ChatGPT sounds like. I'm not saying that that will always be the case because you don't know, but the moment I think the biggest thing is that people generally, if people know who you are and what you sound like, and then your posting something doesn't sound anything like you, there's a big disconnect there. And the irony is that AI makes that more easy for people to do, so that the people that are creating their more authentic content, the gap's going to widen even more than it already did in the first place.

(18:23):
So yeah, I've gone off on a tangent there.

Kiran Kapur, Host (18:26):
No, I think it's a really important point. And I also think that there's, I mean, I get so many people pushing, use AI to create more content, more content, more content. I want to write, but actually it's got to be good content. 100%. Use AI to cut up your podcast to do this bit and put this little bit out here and this bit out there. But if you haven't got the basic good quality content at the beginning, there's no point in doing that.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (18:49):
I absolutely 200% agree with that. None of us need more AI content. It's just becoming tiresome, I think. And there is an AI fatigue, I think, with non-authentic content. And you see when you see the comments just on more social sites, like things like Instagram and Facebook and even TikTok to some degree. If the content is heavily using AI, people are just like, "Oh God," that's what the comments are filled with is just people complaining about it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:21):
So I want to talk a little bit about the sort of things that you see coming through from your clients now, that's always got to be a little bit careful with that one, but what sort of things are you seeing that clients are wanting?

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (19:34):
Although, especially recently, the tools have changed so much, they've always changed. I mean, I've been working in marketing for like 20 years, but the premise is still to get more of your target market in front of your service, in front of your product, in front of your organisation. I mean, like marketing, I've worked for charities and stuff before and the principles are still the same. It's still pushing it in front of people who need it or want it. So the services I'd say over the last 10 years have stayed pretty static. I mean, social media has changed probably the most. We've gone from posting more static graphic promotional stuff to that's heavily video now. Our baseline service is just video going on and doing on-site shoots.

Kiran Kapur, Host (20:28):
Wow.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (20:28):
Your Google ads, your SEO stuff is still, obviously the way that they are done are very different. The way that they are managed, but they're still doing the same thing. So SEO is still getting your brand up on the search engine rankings organically and then your ads are pushing it to the top, but the platforms are changing all the time. I suppose it's up to us to keep on top of them. And I think that's the biggest thing that clients want is when they are looking at maybe hiring a marketing team or a marketing manager, or they have a marketing manager that can't do it. Of course, they can't do everything. So we plug the gaps, the skill gaps, and that can be one specific area like Facebook ads or that can be multiple different things that we basically plug in loads of different people.

(21:15):
So sometimes even our social media service, you probably get eight people in total and that all work on the project. So there's quite a lot of value in there for a marketing manager. If you're getting eight people for nowhere near that amount of money from a hiring perspective. So that's the way that we're currently building out the services and the business and at the moment it's working in a very difficult climate.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:39):
Yes. I mean, I think any business that's hiring in the current business climate is doing really well. It's not an easy climate at the moment.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (21:47):
No, it's really not. No, it's been challenging, definitely.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:49):
What sort of core mistakes do you see clients making, perhaps things that they think that digital marketing can do that it can't do or things that they ask for?

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (21:59):
No, that's a really good question. I think the biggest, most common thing that I see is short-termism. We spend sometimes months discussing what the plan's going to be and what we're going to do and how things are going to play out, and within a month or two, they're getting like, "Oh, whether something worked or..." And there hasn't been anywhere near enough time for us to even test or discuss or think about what we've been doing before the plug. The plug's usually pulled, to be honest, which is why we've started to set more minimum terms now and put a bit more expectations like, "Look, we need a good six months runway here for us to actually figure out with you. " And we're obviously not just going to go dark. We send monthly reports, and we use a system called Basecamp so you can communicate with us at any time.

(22:53):
But sometimes I think some clients make mistakes where they're pulling things almost at the point where the momentum or you're starting to see the inquiry come through or it's starting to kind of do that, and it's on the upward trajectory, and that's when they pull it because there's just not quite enough of what their expectation was. That is by far the biggest mistake that I see. And I do understand it because it's their money and they're investing into it. But I think even with our own marketing, we don't outsource much, but we outsource our podcast, the guys who come in and do the podcasts on higher-end video because that's something that very similar to our model, I would have to then hire three people, which I can no way can afford to do whilst I get them on a retainer. But I was like, "Yep, let's just do it for two years." And we have done it for two years and it's worked.

(23:48):
I think it's setting budget aside, and not dipping in and out and switching from one thing to the other every kind of week. It absolutely doesn't work. You've got to stick to a plan.

Kiran Kapur, Host (23:58):
It's interesting because you've several times used the phrase long term and in your own words, it sounds like long-term view could be up to two years. Now very few businesses are sort of comfortable planning that far out.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (24:12):
And I get that. And maybe two years is maybe on the upper end. If you're going to start some marketing work, I think to have a six to 12 months, right, we've done this. We need to give it a good amount of time, six to 12 months. At the end of 12 months, you will have very much of a good idea of whether this is working or not. But there's always stuff you can ... In my opinion, if you're doing marketing for that long, there's always takeaways you can get from it. It's like, what did work? What are the wins here? Because there will be some wins. There's no way you can't do some marketing and there's nothing. Whether you've got more subscribers or more email, more people on your mailing list or what are the markets that are generally responding better to these different types of messages.

(24:51):
There's all sorts of almost research, almost market research that is done as a byproduct of marketing services and products. So it's interesting from that perspective, but yeah.

Kiran Kapur, Host (25:02):
And it would be remiss of me, I know because a lot of listeners are looking for work or interested work. What do you look for when you're hiring since you are ... I mean, you've been hiring for a while. What sort of things are you looking for?

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (25:14):
So in creative roles, we're always looking for portfolio or examples of work. I'd say even at apprenticeship level, especially in design and social, there's a good kind of five to 10% that do have a portfolio. So if you don't, I don't think you're even getting through that door with that side of things. And then we tend to shortlist and discuss which are the most appropriate for that particular role. So if it's a design role, we may be looking at more graphic design skills. If it's a social role, we're probably looking at more kind of like video, like UGC style skills. When it comes to the more performance type roles, we're looking for people who have got a bit of experience in looking at data or have done some work experience with a company or just show that they've actually got a bit of knowledge or grown their own knowledge in that area.

(26:12):
If you do that, then that makes you just stand above someone who doesn't, basically, who hasn't got any relevant kind of, not even experience, but just kind of knowledge.

Kiran Kapur, Host (26:25):
I think that's really good advice. And what's nice is that that's things that you can do yourself. You're not relying on somebody necessarily giving you work experience to you, something you can go and do. Brilliant. One last question, which I didn't ask, but where does Superfly come from?

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (26:40):
I was looking for something like memorable that a word that was not associated with any other businessy marketing type terms in this area. So we came up with, I wanted also really boring, but I wanted a domain name. I wanted say a superflymarketing.co.uk, I wanted it to be the name marketing.co.uk. But then we came up with almost superhero type because we were quite big superhero fans or quite nerdy, to be honest. And we put a few in a jar of the different ideas, and we picked out Superfly, and Superfly was the one, and we're like, actually, yeah, let's go for it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (27:25):
Brilliant. I've never heard of anybody sort of picking it out of a hat literally.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (27:30):
And it was literally a hat.

Kiran Kapur, Host (27:32):
I'm sort of intrigued because I know you're into a number of what you've described as nerdy areas. So I'm really now desperate to know what other names were in that hat, but perhaps you don't want to reveal that.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (27:46):
Yeah, it's me remembering as well, but it would've been very superhero-y type DC Marvel nods I would've said. And Superfly is a nice one because it insinuates that a bit, that it's not really obvious. It's not like called, I don't know, Batman Marketing or something.

Kiran Kapur, Host (28:10):
Yeah. Batman Marketing, you might have had some copyright infringement. I've had a problem with that.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (28:13):
Yeah,

Kiran Kapur, Host (28:14):
Yeah. Nick Tyldsley of Superfly Marketing, that was absolutely brilliant. I really enjoyed it. We've covered an awful lot of ground. Thank you very much indeed.

Nick Tyldsley, Managing Director of Superfly Marketing (28:25):
No worries. Thanks, Kiran. Thanks for having me.