Stephen Kerin – acquisition agency founder & technology investor

NOTES

Recorded in London

Stephen Kerin on LinkedIn

Scale Digital

Book Recommendation: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

SUMMARY

Stephen Kerin has had an unconventional path to becoming a successful entrepreneur. He didn’t intend to go into digital media originally, but fell into a sales role with a company called Alcatel in 1994 that kickstarted his career. Alcatel had cutting-edge peer-to-peer connection boxes that allowed businesses to access credit reports by dialing in. Stephen loved driving around London, selling this modern technology to companies.

As the Internet took off in the mid-90s, Stephen moved into search technology and then affiliate marketing. After years of agency experience but no entrepreneurial background, an opportunity arose for Stephen to start his own performance marketing agency called Scale Digital with his business partner, Dom. They started with nothing more than a couple laptops and hustle.

Today, Scale Digital has grown to £3.5 million in turnover with 17 employees and recently expanded into Germany. They focus on cost-per-acquisition advertising, meaning they get paid when a desired action happens like a sale or sign-up. AI aids their efficiency and effectiveness when finding the best media partners and matching them with advertisers. An example is how when it rains, ads for umbrellas should be served.

Scale Digital leans into influencer marketing now too since social content often converts better than traditional ads. They connect relevant creators who attract targeted audiences with advertisers so everyone wins through shared success. Stephen believes no media channel stands above the rest though – the best customer journey utilizes awareness, education, consideration, and conversion together.

Outside of Scale Digital, Stephen is a pre-seed investor in two ad tech startups founded by people he knows well. Seeing aligned products and teams early who can take them to the next level allows Stephen to support and grow with them. His network spanning 20+ years in digital media represents significant personal and professional value.

Stephen recommendations:

• Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Consume information constantly to stay aware of marketplace shifts
• As an entrepreneur, sell first and do everything else second
• Surround yourself with motivated, growth-oriented people
• Invest both your time and money into aligned partners with potential

Kyle Knowles:
Hello, there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships, from startups to stayups, to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start.
My name is Kyle Knowles, and it’s Tuesday evening in London, England. My guest this evening is Stephen Kerin, founder and director at Scale Digital and Pre-seed investor at Kaizan and 59A, all firms headquartered in London, England. Stephen’s been doing digital media… I’m sorry, Stephen’s been doing digital media for a long time, since even before the Internet. Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen Kerin:
Hi, Kyle. Nice to see you. How are you?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, it’s very nice to meet you for the first time face-to-face. I know we’ve been going back and forth with the emails and things, but I’m happy to be here in London at your headquarters for Scale Digital 54 Poland Street.

Stephen Kerin:
That’s right. Downtown Soho.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, right near the theater district.

Stephen Kerin:
That’s right.

Kyle Knowles:
I passed several theaters coming in this evening. So, thank you for being here. Let’s go ahead and start off. I gave a very short introduction, but you have a long history of being in media. Why don’t you tell us about your entrepreneurial journey?

Stephen Kerin:
Well, yeah. I think the thing that always sticks in my mind when I think about that is that none of it was intended really. Digital media didn’t exist when I was at school, so it wasn’t something… My daughters, I asked them what they wanted to do, and they said they’re quite clear. I didn’t really.
I felt that I wanted to go into business I think, and I studied. I started out doing math, but I didn’t really like that. So, I went back a year and did politics and business and social administration as a fairly wide-ranging educational journey. And when I came out, I still didn’t really know what to do. But I fell into a job that started this journey. And as I was saying to you earlier about online information, and this was what we used to call media in those days because it was before the Internet.
And I just got into that game. It was a company called Alcatel, who were a French company who were way ahead of their time. And they had these peer-to-peer boxes, where you could plug them into the phone line and communicate with people. The things you see on the old ’80s film where people are typing and the little green writings flashing away.
And we were selling subscriptions into businesses to use this style of communicating, and it was brilliant. I was driving around London presenting this stuff to businesses, and I loved it. I just knew that was the career for me. I mean, that was an analog product, but as the digital world started in the mid ’90s to really blossom particularly around the dawn of the Internet and search engines arriving, I got into the search side of things, search technology, and then later search generally, particularly in how brands were using keywords in terms to monetize products and sell stuff. And it was great, and I continued to enjoy it.
Always agency or network side, never client side. So, I’ve always been selling, never buying. I think that would be the… There’s the one side. Some people are naturally client side or brand side. I was always agency or network side. So, I was in search for 10 years from mid ’90s to the mid 2000, and then got into what then those days was called affiliate stuff, affiliate around acquisition-type activities, so what people these days called CPA and those things.
I don’t know if you listeners know much about that, but it’s really how brands are able to use advertising and pay out on an acquisition metric. So, tracking technology allows brands to see that a sale has been made and pay out a commission on that. I did that for 10 or 12 years.
And about five or six years ago, an opportunity came up to start my own business. The company I was with at the time, a long story for another day, we parted company, and I’d had a decent payout from that. And I thought to myself, “If there’s ever a time I was going to be able to properly go it alone, it’s now.” So, I took the plunge and that takes us the last six years.
So, we’ve grown the business to three and a half million pound turnover. We’re very excited. We have 17 staff. We’ve recently opened in Germany. We’ve increased our capabilities into other channels. And I’m lucky enough to have a great business partner, Dom, who’s currently doing a month in Cape Town and working down there.
I don’t always necessarily think the word entrepreneur is right. I sometimes possibly think that an entrepreneur might be somebody who’s inventing something or building some technology, but I suppose anyone who starts up like we did literally with a couple of laptops and thinking to ourselves, “We better give ourselves a name,” literally at the beginning. And that’s the start of that entrepreneurial journey. So, this is really my first time being an entrepreneur in Scale.

Kyle Knowles:
So, you’ve been an entrepreneur for six years then?

Stephen Kerin:
Yes. I was involved in one of the businesses some time ago, but I was a junior member of that group. We’d started a company, but it wasn’t really an entrepreneurial exercise then. It was different. We’d sort of had a product, but there was nothing. There was no turnover, no company name whether we registered at company’s house and thought, “Right, let’s get some clients. Let’s pick up the phone.” So, I guess in that sense, that’s my first proper entrepreneurial experience.

Kyle Knowles:
Were any of your parents entrepreneurs?

Stephen Kerin:
No, not really. No. Nobody had started a company. A few business people who did well, but no, not in that sense of starting from scratch. None, I don’t think. I can’t think of anyone, no.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. But were you entrepreneurial growing up or anything like that? Did you ever sell things or anything?

Stephen Kerin:
No, I wasn’t actually. I loved sport really when I was younger. I grew up in a village in Kent, and we were an outdoor classic background in the ’80s or whatever, ’70s and ’80s. No, I hadn’t… No, I don’t think there was any signs that I was destined for a life as a founder of a business and developing it and building it. So, I think it’s probably a surprise to everyone who knows me.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So, what was the tipping point when you had the opportunity to go your own way? You talked about story for another day, but what was the tipping point that made you go, “I can do this?”

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, it was that. I think, “I can do this.” I mean, my previous job was an MD of an ad network, and we had an exact number, 140, 160 staff or something, five or six offices. But I felt that the channel I was working in deserved a new way of doing things, I think.
And within the network model, I felt I had great friends of mine. People you know and people like Jeanette, for example, and others who working in these great agencies. It was so exciting in this area, right where we are here now in Soho. Creative, strategic, commercial agencies with people having a great time solving problems, challenging themselves. I mean, the word agency is to be a franchise to represent something or someone. And I always liked that as a notion, whereas I felt the network model was a bit more reactive. I want to do something proactive.
So really, the opportunity came around to drive agency behaviors into the channel was really that moment I thought, “This is something I can do. The way that we interact with our clients and our media in this channel as a classic agency should.” And we’ve enjoyed doing that. There are some other ones that are good out there, US in particular of course like always.
There was another thing that the technical platform that we specialize in, which a business called Impact. They were entering the UK at the same time. And they were scouting around for partners, and we landed on them through connections and so forth. And there was just a good timing as well on that front. We decided to be specialists and exclusive with them, which remained to this day. They’re great friends and partners of ours. So, it had been a little bit of synchronicity at that time.
I was in the right head space for it and had a bit of money so that I could pay myself for a period and the technology platform all coming together, so we thought, “Right, let’s go for it.” And it was very exciting. It was a bit like that feeling of being thrown over the edge of the Grand Canyon in a barrel, “Okay, what’s going to happen next?”
But, I mean, I think the thing we’ve learned throughout is that you live on your wits or by your wits that you could constantly be hustling. You can’t always take no for an answer. You’ve got to go back, keep going back to the well or quite right, but not always accepting the first version of everything you get. You got to have a thick skin, got to be prepared to sell.
Sometimes you’re selling things that aren’t fully formed. Certainly at the beginning, you’re almost selling things and learning about that topic at the same time. As we were joking about earlier about you, it would be a good all-rounder. I think me, personally, I’m not a specialist at anything really, but I’m a good all-rounder, competent all-rounder because these things to finance or staff or dealing with the landlord or contracts. You’d be writing our own contracts. You’ve got to be a bit good at everything, I think. That’s for an entrepreneur, I think.
I mean, if you’re a specialist, then you need a partner who’s a bit like me, I think. Somebody, particularly in tech businesses, they have the ones we mentioned earlier, Kaizan and 59A, they’re a combination of very specialist talent mixed with good all-round business people. And I think that’s the right blend for entrepreneurs in our game.

Kyle Knowles:
And so, did you go to school for business or what did you do in school?

Stephen Kerin:
Just the basics of late ’70s, early ’80s education in England, a mix of subjects. Again, nothing special that would’ve signified a further career. Like I said earlier, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had some faith that it would work out for me, and I would land on my feet. And I think in some ways, I did with that first job selling the Alcatel, that really was the fork in the road, that moment to get into. And I thought, “Right, I’ll dump into something that I like and I get and I’m motivated by.”
I’m quite fascinated by digital media, generally. I like it. Everything. All these apps on the television, and I see the adverts and the way they work and everything, I enjoy thinking about it. So, it is good to be motivated by something. I don’t think you could run a business like we do in the way that I was talking about with having to hustle and sell unless you’re motivated and enjoy the topic, which I do. So, my education didn’t really form any of that. It was a fluke.

Kyle Knowles:
And so, there’s nothing really from your bachelor’s degree that you utilize today?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, there is actually consumer behavior. I remember a module that I enjoyed doing, which was specifically about how people respond to ads and what their decision-making processes when they exposed to advertising and a few other bits. I mean, commercial law was one of the modules and that helps me.
So yes, I suppose there is actually now you say I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms before, but yeah, consumer behavior was a great module that I really enjoyed. And that probably got me thinking as well about advertising generally.

Kyle Knowles:
And then, so you were selling Alcatel, were you a business manager? What were you doing when you were selling?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, we were selling… It was more like subscriptions, and you’ve got the Alcatel machine as well, so people would buy. There was a combination. It was related to credit information really. The founder of the business who’d offered me this job used to be an accountant, and he developed this product for… Do you know Dun & Bradstreet?

Kyle Knowles:
Yes.

Stephen Kerin:
Because they were competitors, Dun & Bradstreet, so you could get information on businesses. So, they created this database of these reports or a combination of companies house information, county court judgment information on news, and so-and-so. If business A was looking to go into business with business B, they could look it up by dialing into these Alcatel reports.
We also gave them these horrendous printers, Kyle, that used to noisily print off the report as well. So, the clients would get a subscription to the printer, the Alcatel machine, and a certain number of reports where they could dial in, and it would make that dreadful noise when you’d dial into something, screeching noise, but everyone was fascinated by it.
In those days, there was no congestion charge. I used to drive around London, we had people making appointments for us, and I go into these businesses and sell this modern technology to them about online data, which fascinated people. And rather than having to wait two weeks to get a report in the post, they could just plug it into the wall and get it in seconds.

Kyle Knowles:
So, the modem would go off, and then when they had the report, I assume they were printing out on the dot matrix printers that probably had the feeder.

Stephen Kerin:
Exactly.

Kyle Knowles:
The feeder guides in the printer.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah. You remember the printing paper with the dots down the side of it?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. So, it would be tracked, like in tracks. That sort of printer.

Stephen Kerin:
Yes, so it’s fascinating. I started that job in January 1994, and I remember the day when I first came up to… It’s quite a nice story, but I was offered the job. I was working in a golf club in Kent just after I graduated. The headquarter is down in Kent, and this guy used to come in one day, he said to me, “I’d really like you. You’re good at your job. Do you fancy a job?” And I said, “Yeah, sure.”
And literally, overnight gave me this job and said, “You’re starting in London next week.” And I remember arriving at Old Street roundabout near where the offices were on my first day, barely knowing what they did. And just thought, “Right, you just got to just keep going here.” And every time I go past that exact spot, I remember standing there. And that was January ’94 so it’s nearly 30 years ago now.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Stephen Kerin:
It’s gone quickly. And of course, digital media generally is just transformed beyond imagination.

Kyle Knowles:
You didn’t know what was coming.

Stephen Kerin:
No, but I kind of felt it was the right place to be. I think that was the… I thought, “This is good. Something’s happening here.” And I remember we went to the… in those days, there was these shows in Olympia called Online World, and Alcatel would’ve a stand and so on.
I remember going there, I think it was ’95, and there was a thing called the Internet Village. It was part of this exhibition. I remember it clear. I remember looking down at this, “What the hell is that?” And as I went down there, the Internet Village and they were saying, forget all this peer-to-peer. This now is a network of connectivity. I thought that’s a good idea.
And of course, straight away I got into that, and the business I was in, it was called Infotech. It’s now part of Experian. They embraced it straight away, so we ditched the Alcatel thing. You’d use Internet to access this information, and they branched out into other things as well, like all these businesses did. And it was just an extremely exciting time to be involved in the beginning of the Internet.

Kyle Knowles:
So, you were selling and when you’re in sales…

Stephen Kerin:
I’ve always been in sales.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, and you have to use your wit as well, right?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
As well as an entrepreneur. Do you feel like selling is a key skill of anyone that’s started a business?

Stephen Kerin:
Absolutely. Well, unless you are, like I said earlier, so take Kaizan for example, Prav and Glen. Prav is the CTO and brilliant brain in building out AI technology, but Glen is the business person and selling. He’s doing panels and keynotes, and he’s raising money and doing everything.
So, I think if you’ve got a partnership, because we’re not building tech. It’s slightly different. So, we’re just always selling. That’s different to… I mean, we are actually building some products, but they’re more like widgets and tools to compliment what we do generally to help our clients. But we’re not a product-led business. We’re a classic agency, so you are always selling.
And the minute you’ve sold, the next thing’s coming around the upsell or the contract’s up for renewal, so you have to be aware of that aspect of things, but you’re supporting your clients, and you want them to come on a journey with you. But ultimately, you’re after things to be renewed when contracts up, so yeah, selling’s key.

Kyle Knowles:
And then, did you get into the technology as time went on? How did you end up doing influencer and social? What was the path to get to there?

Stephen Kerin:
Great question, yeah. I mean, we have a bit of a joke upstairs about Stephen’s never logged in. And it’s only half a joke really because I know what the tech does. I’ll make an understanding of what the tech does, and it’ll synthesize with what we’re doing generally, or a particular client type or an audience type they’re trying to reach or particular ad metric they’re looking to pay out on. And I understand that, but I don’t log in and spend a thousand hours on these platforms, not buying media or trading media. The others do that, but I’ve got just enough of a grasp to understand what it does.
And of course, we’re always looking around for new technology, but then mobile for example, we’ve got certain partners there. As we built out our capabilities into mobile, we’ve had to understand that creator and influencer. We got connected television and our classic affiliate stuff that we did, and even into Amazon marketplaces, which is something we’re looking at for next year.
So, I think you’ve got to have a love of the tech and what it does, and then it gives you the ability to sell it. You’ve got to research something, you’ve got to know it’s good, you’ve got to know that it can be integrated into, because now there’s a very important requirement to make sure everything’s integrated. One platform talks to the other, and the verticals are different.
So, we have got quite a strong emphasis in fintech. They’re quite different to say travel and retail and what their requirements are. So, it’s a bit of a moving target, that whole thing, but I think every agency’s the same. No two days are ever the same. You’re basking a bit, you’re looking for the next angle and the next client, and you want a client. And it’s very important to us to have clients that come with us on the journey.
We’ve been working on new contract recently and talking about a client covenant. We want them to have a shared understanding of what we’re trying to do together. An agency is us, as I said earlier, representing a franchise to represent them. So, we’ve got to be really clear and understand together about what we’re doing out there on their behalf.
Going out and talking to media businesses about running particular types of ads or influencers. Now, it’s so important with influencers. I mean, who’d have thought that we, as people, would become the biggest media out there? I mean, my daughters, they don’t consume media on the television or barely look up and see an advert on the tube or anything. They consume all their media on social channels, so we have to move with that. That’s where it is now. I think there’s an ability or instinct you must have to go with it, and there’ll probably be something new next year.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. It keeps changing every day almost, it seems like. So, how do you make money? What does Scale Digital do for their clients?

Stephen Kerin:
Well, principally, generally, I think the name that most people might know us is as a performance agency. So, we are paid or our media owners are paid when things convert. So, not just on eyeballs, I mean, the three key types of advertising, CPM, which is cost per a thousand, M being the Latin mil for a thousand, which is principally a display metrics. So, just eyeballs so someone can see in it. A CPC was dominated by Google on cost per click, and what we do is CPA, cost per acquisition.
So, an advertiser will pay out when some event happens. So, it could be an install or something when you install, you register. It’s probably happening to you all the time. You don’t realize, but when you do something, you buy something, or you click on something, an advertiser somewhere is paying for that, and that’s the bit we specialize in.
And we, for the most part, charge a commission on what that commission is. We do have fees and retainers with certain clients, but it’s all about performance. So, a shoe retailer where you want to sell a hundred pairs of shoes a day, so we are targeted with finding places where those clicks might convert. And we’ll get commission usually on the commission that is paid out to their media owners.
So, there’s some shared risk then and advertisers budget for that normally in a sales budget. And we fit into that mix of brand and awareness through to what they’re doing with their search to the bit that we do with acquisition, so we don’t just have a big fee and go away and do things. It’s quite commission oriented.

Kyle Knowles:
And do you feel like that’s what most companies that are advertising do now is pay for performance?

Stephen Kerin:
No. Some do. I mean, there’s this digital first-type agency. London’s got three of them. They’re really good people. One’s called Crowd, another one called Brainlabs, and a third one called Incubator. Brilliant businesses, and they are big. They’re worth hundreds of millions, and they are threatening the landscape against the traditional agency shops in this area.
These old school agencies are looking over their shoulders at these businesses, but they have slightly different charging metrics because they have a bit more of a mixed, so they might be paying out, that might have a lot of their budget might be search budget or CPC budget, and they have different metrics for paying that, but it is largely performance based.
But it’s not like the old days where [inaudible 00:23:46] or somebody like that who would be on these huge millions of pounds a month retainers and big creative teams and everything else. Digital-led agencies do have… The emphasis is on performance and conversion and a ROAS or return on ad spend. So, there is some shared risk, and I think that advertisers prefer that.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, because they’re not just spending money and not knowing. Is it mostly because we can track all this digitally, right?

Stephen Kerin:
Exactly, yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. These are not just ads that are passing people by and your sales go up. You don’t really know why. I mean, this is very detailed.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. As far as Scale Digital goes, you also mentioned the affiliate. How does that relate to performance or performance marketing agencies?

Stephen Kerin:
Affiliate was a word that got retired a couple of years ago, but it’s bounced back a bit. But really, affiliate is desktop media paid out on a conversion. So, if you are looking at a site that’s got top 10 mattresses, you’re looking for a bed and you go on a site top 10 mattresses and you click on one of those and you go through to the retailer and you buy the mattress, that’s a classic affiliate journey.
And the person or the media owner that had that list of top 10 will get a commission, say, somewhere between 5% to 10% of the basket value of that. So, if you bought a mattress for a thousand pounds, they might get 50 or 75 pounds commission for sending you to their site to convert and that would be a classic affiliate journey.
But really, affiliate is about that metric, the partnership between the media owner and the advertiser. There’s a partnership there, because obviously it’s in the interest of the media owner that you do convert, so they want to make sure they’re sending the right audience, with the right intention at the right time ready to buy.
So, the word is to affiliate with each other, but it’s nebulous term a little bit because there’s other things. Now, influencers are increasingly affiliates because the influencers are not just creating awareness about product, although they still do, but there’s trackable links in their post. So, again, if they’re reviewing a mattress, keep the same example, and you go through them, but they’re bouncing at a mattress saying, “This is great,” then there’s an increasingly used term partnerships now, where it’s about a shared media experience between the media owner and the advertiser. And I think that’s the affiliates the first time that was used.
It was started by Amazon. Amazon started the first affiliate program in 1990 something, where they realized that their own customers could be good to a referral system or anyone who’s sending you back to their site is an affiliate. Amazon has a huge, huge history in this. And if you ask them where they’ve started out in terms of getting customers, it was the affiliate journey.

Kyle Knowles:
And that’s where the affiliate links come in. And if you write a blog about a book and-

Stephen Kerin:
Exactly.

Kyle Knowles:
… you use your affiliate with Amazon to get a little bit of commission-

Stephen Kerin:
Exactly.

Kyle Knowles:
… of sending them there.

Stephen Kerin:
They were the first to do that, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And so, do you do landing pages or write blogs and things like that for affiliate partnerships? Or where do you fit into the affiliate?

Stephen Kerin:
No, we don’t. It is one of our many pivots ahead of us. Getting into the media side will be… I mean, AI now and the ChatGPT-type tools out there enabling advertisers to own a lot of that now. But no, we don’t do that. We glue the right media with the advertisers. The bottom, the most important thing in the end is finding the right media for our advertisers with the highest converting best volume audience that lives in that media type.
I mean, there’s loads of other stuff that goes with it because what we call a lot of hygiene stuff to do with payments and validating every click and the technology, and the plumbing, and the reporting, and all those things. But fundamentally, what we are about as an agency is getting that media form the right price point, the right time, but the right ad served to get the highest converting audience. And of course, as we… What are we now? The 14th of November, something?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Stephen Kerin:
Black Friday’s around the corner, literally. So, at the moment, it’s now about finding the right Black Friday media owners for our advertisers, but what you’ve got now, of course, is very high competition. The media owners going, “What’s going to give me the best revenue during that long weekend?” So, that’s what we are doing. We’re out there convincing them. They might say to us, “Okay, well, we’ve got a big newsletter going out on the Friday morning.”
And in fact, this is a good example. We’ve got a client called Eufy, part of Anker, which is a Chinese consumer electronics business, and they sell these robotic Hoovers that go around the floor. Have you seen them?

Kyle Knowles:
We had one, and it lasted forever. We loved it.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, they’re brilliant.

Kyle Knowles:
We love that.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah. They’re brilliant, aren’t they?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Stephen Kerin:
So, they’re making a big play here. We might find that, as an example, there might be a media owner who specializes in Black Friday offers for consumer electronic products in the home for argument’s sake, whatever it is. So, we are fighting with every other business out there, so we might do a deal with them. We say, “Okay, 3000 or 5000 or 10,000 pounds, we want a feature in that newsletter that goes out on the Friday morning.”
So, it’s the first thing that everyone sees. We could have a really competitive offer. The media owner’s got to know that if someone clicks on that, and they go to the site, the user journey’s good, so it’s going to convert. That customer doesn’t get lost because if the customer does get lost, they don’t get their commission. So, this is an affiliate because it’s a shared risk with it. It’s their inventory in their media. So, we’re doing those deals in that way to make sure that these sales are getting converted.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. As far as, you mentioned AI, what kinds of things are you doing with AI?

Stephen Kerin:
Loads of stuff. We’re trying to do everything. I mean, Kaizan for example, helps us internally with our systems to read signals about everything that we’re doing. We’re partnering with AI businesses who are giving us information about patterns to do with… it could be anything to do with the weather or if there’s a sports match on or something’s in the news, what’s converting because it changes people’s behaviors, AI to help build creatives, so you can just put a picture of a product and then the AI tools, you could say, “I would like this product to look like it’s sitting in someone’s front garden,” or whatever.
You can just instruct these tools to create images for you through to using AI platforms to create copy, to write the best performing copy that is 25% off or whatever it is in terms of discounts and so on. Is that the right in testing these things? So, a whole host of platforms to just make us faster, slicker.
I don’t think we’ve seen anything that is going to replace anyone, but it allows us, I know people keep saying this, AI allows, frees us up to do the important stuff. That’s what we’ve found with it. It’s big in advertising and ad tech in particular is all about efficiency, getting the right thing, converting at the right time in front of the right person. So, I think there’s lots more to come in AI within advertising.

Kyle Knowles:
And how did you roll out AI to your company then? ChatGPT came out almost a year ago, November 30th. What were your first thoughts and how did you introduce it to the team? Or did you have any guardrails or policies or…?

Stephen Kerin:
Well, I’m fortunate in that… I mean, I’m double the age of half the team, so they’re just naturally inclined to just go with that sort of thing. They don’t see it as peculiar in any way. They’re all doing it themselves and what their day-to-day lives, so no resistance. I think everyone upstairs loves it. They’re all totally engaged.
We have Hangouts, and people present to us, and partners we’re working with all the time. I say all the time, I mean all the time, six or seven times a day. And they’re like sponges, they absorb it all completely naturally, and they’re using it. No resistance. It’s a joy to behold, Kyle. They just go for it every time.
And I think also with the working from home explosion, there’s benefits as well there because it assists with certain things, the mundane tasks they can set… mundane is not quite the right word, but more the routine or the backend stuff that needs to be done, we can set up things. We don’t have to have them in here and watching them do it. We know that they can just go and be creative and get on their calls, go and do their deals with their clients, go and get their new media and so on.
No resistance at all ever. It’s great. And I think we’re an ad tech business and we called ourselves Scale, so we feel like we should scale for our clients. That’s quite important. Fundamental part of the whole ethos of the business.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, you say no resistance, but really the key here was you didn’t have any resistance because I was on a webinar a couple of weeks ago where the stat was 50% of companies are still actively preventing people from accessing ChatGPT and things like that, which is amazing to me almost a year after it’s been launched, but you had no resistance.
And then, how does your team share best practices or, “Oh, I tried this and did that,” but do you have some Internet or something where people are sharing how they’re using it?

Stephen Kerin:
Yes, we use monday.com. We’re a big monday.com user. Everything goes through that. I mean, we had this thing even before ChatGPT or long before. I was going to say before AI, but that’s not right. We wanted to create a business that we could deal with our clients without email. That was a sort of loose ambition we had.
And actually, it’s turned out to be kind of right because we don’t want anything to live in email for loads of different reasons. There’s a whole thing about institutional memory. You go to a meeting and you send an email as a follow-up, and it’s lost forever because no one ever looks at it again. It is gone. If someone leaves, I mean, obviously you can’t find that email, but the moment’s gone. So, we wanted to create something that lived elsewhere, so we tried to not deal with that. Clients with email.
The only thing you might do is arranging the appointment that you’ve got or something. So, monday.com gave us all of that, and everything lives in there, so we’ve created processes. And I think some clients we’ve won is because they don’t see spreadsheets or PowerPoints that all being… 30 MEG PowerPoints being emailed or we never do that.
With Google Suite business, everything’s light, but it’s all there. Everything historically is there, and AI has just made that even better. So, I think there’s never been any resistance because I felt, as I said to you at the beginning about being a smart agency, I feel that technology allows us to be that. We don’t see the success of our business as having more bodies.
We see it being better for our clients, because we don’t enter rewards or anything like that. We just don’t feel that that’s a good use of our time. So, there’s a whole emphasis on this just being faster and slicker and more efficient and tighter, and AI really gives us that. So, it just come along and accelerated what we were already trying to do.

Kyle Knowles:
How are you applying AI to monday.com then? Are you using Zapier?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, we have been using Zapier. I mean, we glue everything together. One of the things we’ve been doing on our outreach for new clients and for new media owners is exactly that. Although we’ve actually switched, we don’t pull it into Monday, now we pull it into Copper, which is a G suite or Google-based CRM, which we started with about a year ago.
So, invites to if we are looking… We’re doing a project at the moment for the British Council in Japan, believe it or not, and for their English language course. So, for Japanese people who want to learn English, they want… Obviously, there’s loads of tools out there, but the British Council have supposedly, and I’m certain they do the best English language course online.
But finding Japanese media owners, as you can imagine, is quite challenging in parts. But AI allows us to write, copy, translate it to understand the replies and pull the information into Copper through different… I mean, we’ve got links through things like Zapier. There’s other tools that integrate all the platforms for us. So, we have this well-plumbed series of tools around the place and AI just makes each of those interactions work better.
That’s the key thing for us, I think, at the moment. And we’re not writing ads on behalf of our clients or anything like that. That’s not specifically… I mean, we recommend media owners or tools that will do that on behalf of the clients to improve the conversion rate, but that’s not something we do for us. It’s all about finding media and putting them together and AI assists with that.

Kyle Knowles:
I heard Zapier makes you happier, so I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it wrong because I thought it was a Zap like an app, but maybe it is Zapier, I don’t know. I don’t know.

Stephen Kerin:
Zapier makes you happier. It doesn’t work, does it?

Kyle Knowles:
I don’t know. I might be pronouncing it wrong. So, you’re sort of automating workflows and things like that and pulling data into different systems using Zapier. So, as far as the process then, so I’m a new client, I want something done with you. Can you walk through? How does that go? Because it seems like there’s a lot of testing, AV testing, things like that. You’re testing social media, you’re testing email, marketing, newsletters, whatever, to figure out what’s the best channel to advertise for what they’re going to sell. So just walk me through how you do that, how you figure that out for someone.

Stephen Kerin:
I’ll stick with the mattress example as we’ve used that already, and we have worked with mattress brands before. It’s actually quite a good mattress in a box was a big, big thing here. So, a mattress brand could talk to us about an acquisition strategy to compliment their display or their TV or their outdoor or the other CPC search activity, and they come to us to help with their acquisition part.
So principally, the acquisition piece or so I said principally, traditionally, the acquisition piece was about the original affiliate thing we were talking about earlier. It was really the last part of a user journey, getting a sale over the line, that final click or last click, people… There’s all techniques and technologies, incentivized traffic and rewards, and air miles, and super currencies, and vouchers, and coupons, and everything to get sales over the line.
The thing has changed a little bit now, so it’s including influencers or creators and a lot more different types of media owners. Some of the examples we were talking about earlier about lists or content generally. So, the lines of what the media does in affiliate channels change slightly. So, what we are doing, when we’re selling to you as an advertisers representing the media owners, we’ve got to see where we fit in.
The first question we would ask is, what are you doing already? Do you have a sophisticated mature search strategy? The amount of budgets, as you were doing a thousand sales a day, how much of that’s coming through search? How much is coming through your display? How much is just coming organically onto the website? You don’t know where it’s coming from.
Start to build out an understanding of that traffic that you’ve already got. And, firstly, how we might compliment that traffic, improve it? Maybe it could be that you want to improve your average order value, the size of each basket, or you may have all of your audiences in England, and you want some traffic in Scotland. I mean, you could have any number of different problems.
Or you might be finding we’re getting lots of clicks to the site, but a conversion rate’s very poor. Or it could be a combination of these things or it could be a new competitors come in. They’re paying a load more commission. It’s a really exciting brand, suddenly our sales have dropped. So, we want a competitor-led strategy, we’re going after them.
You could have a thousand units of mattresses in a warehouse that you need to sell because you’ve got a new line coming in that’s got a better feel. And you say to us, “Look, can you get rid of these thousand mattresses for us?” So, there’s a whole host of different requirements or a mix of those things that you could come to us with.
And then, our job is to go away, and we benchmark what you’re paying against your competitors, start to get an understanding, we call it discovery or auditing your current setup. And we build out these little scenarios. There could be many of those start to say, “Okay, for this specific strategy, we need to do this. You’re going to need to do this setup for the tracking.”
These are the sorts of commissions you’re going to need to pay to achieve these things. We start to do tests on your site to see if someone lands on your site, what are they clicking, are they converting? What products are they buying? Are they just buying the main product? Are they buying the ancillary ones as well? Are they buying pillows and whatever else it might be or the bed itself? What’s happening?
So, there’s quite a lot of discovery first, and then we present that back, and we build out a strategy based on what we’ve learned and what we think we can achieve for you. Of course, that ends in a discussion about budget as always. We then can set up the tracking through impact.com or if it’s a mobile through our mobile measurement platform partners that we’ve got. In this case, it’s likely to be desktop only, but you could buy a mattress through a mobile, but I doubt it.
And then, we go out and start finding the media, go out and start building out a portfolio of media partners for you across all these different affiliate types. It’d be content sites or newspaper groups or magazine sites or interior design websites. I mean, it’s almost endless. You never get to the end of the Internet and build out a media portfolio and attract and recruit them to start running your program. They then become active, and then we hope they become click active or they might click active, and then we want them to become sale active, so they’re starting to generate sales for you.
And then, we start optimizing or trying to get them to become a high-volume provider of new customers for you. So, there’s a long process from discovery through to strategic recruitment of media, and then of course we’ve got to keep them there. We don’t want them running off to the competition, so we’re dealing with the clients all the time, dealing with their queries, uploading new creatives when you’ve got new ads to share with them, or you’ve got specific offers that might be around seasonal discounts or World Mattress Day or whatever. I mean, the whole thing is just extraordinary really. There’s so much that goes on.
So, we’re just constantly backwards and forth between the advertiser and the affiliates and doing these deals all the time, just hoping each day. First thing I do, when I log into the platform in the morning, we’ve got about 60 clients, I look through each one. “Wow, they had a good day yesterday. Oh, terrific.” Well, another one, “Oh, blame me. That was a bad day yesterday. I wonder why.”
So, we’ll be in like, “Why do they have a bad day yesterday?” “Oh, well, because they’re offer ended or it could be anything.” So, we do constantly just crawling all over the whole platform of advertisers and media owners making sure that there’s lots of sales happening.

Kyle Knowles:
And so, you don’t do the creative part?

Stephen Kerin:
No.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So, it’s about acquisition, it’s about affiliate?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah. Well, most good advertisers have their own creatives, which we use. We use theirs, like I say, some AI partners now who provide them. Some clients have an agency, creative agency partner who we’ll deal with. It varies. But no, we’re not creative at all.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And how do you see AI playing out going forward at Scale Digital?

Stephen Kerin:
Well, I think with Impact, they’re doing a lot with the process because there’s quite a lot of heavy lifting. I’ve mentioned this word hygiene earlier, it sounds great, but actually there’s quite a lot of fiddling around to be done in the background. And I think AI is just going to make us better and faster at that.
Getting an ad for creative onto a platform somewhere, and it being AB tested and we quickly get a reply to know that version A converts better than version B, rather than us having to go in and do a report, it comes to us. And things around the environment, I think, because as I mentioned earlier, somebody gave me this example once. When it starts raining, you want people to start advertising umbrellas. So, that’s a bit of a stark example, but it makes the point about what sorts of ads should be served at any one time.
The football’s on, so let’s people are going to be ordering pizzas at halftime. Literally, AI is going to help us be better at serving the right ads at the right time because they can understand the environment. I think that on the advertiser side, increased efficiency, increased processes to allow that efficiency to happen.
And our own processes, which like I said, we’ve already started with Kaizan and others, affiliate AI, which is a guy know of Rob who’s developed this very exciting tech, which does a lot of this as well. So I think just faster, better advertising, it will be the key thing, and we are embracing it fully. It’s good stuff.

Kyle Knowles:
And then, now you are getting into influencer marketing, so that’s like going and getting an advertiser to help you with this acquisition, right? Are you recruiting influencers or how does that work?

Stephen Kerin:
Well, there is a burgeoning sector of the influencer world who tend to be the ones with fewer followers who are now more willing to operate on a conversion metric. So, in years gone by, they’d be given us fixed fee to review that mattress, but there was no accountability. They wouldn’t know how many sales are generated.
But the technology now allows us to track the number of sales that influencer or creators generated from that review, exactly the same as a desktop affiliate, exactly the same as the Amazon affiliate in 1997. So, they’re sharing in the risk. So, they’re advertising as an influencer now.
In their own minds, they’re geared towards not just reviewing that product but getting the viewer to go and buy it as well. So, that’s the bit that’s really exciting now. Influencers and affiliates emerging. So yes, we go and find those influencers who have a relevant following across their different channels.
We work with TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, all the world, Instagram, everything you’d expect. And LinkedIn’s big one, and find people who’ve got the right audience that reflects what our advertisers are trying to do. And in fact, they’re fast becoming the best, in fact, they probably are now the best media source out there, because their audience types are so precise.
Exactly when they post them, exactly who’s seeing it, the measurement or the types of audience that they have following them, so reported in such a granular way, I mean, it’s extraordinary really. So, it is a really good new media channel for advertisers in acquisition, not just brand.

Kyle Knowles:
What are the sizes of audience that you’re sort of targeting then?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, good question. We’ve done some things with people who have as few as 10,000 followers up to hundreds of thousands. I mean, we haven’t really done much. There’s a couple that are over a million, but we haven’t really got… The people who’ve got those higher following amounts, command large fixed fees, and they’re not really into the conversion metric. It’s slightly different. They’re much more the awareness, big brands.
So, for your brand retail, the influencers, they are still operating on a brand and awareness, sometimes an education-type metric with very fixed fees. Whereas, we are under a million, normally under half a million, to be honest with you, Kyle, who are doing… There might have some fixed fees. I mean, they might get 3,000 or 5,000 pounds as a fixed, and the rest of their money they earn will be through the conversions.
There’s some other great stuff happening with them. Impact where user-generated content generally and the whole royalties business, if an influencer creates a really nice piece of content that they post for them to post it once and then for it to disappear is a waste. So now, there are ways that if somebody creates a nice piece of content, the brand can reuse it and pay a royalty to that influencer. So, every time that ad is served, they might earn 1p or something. And a lot of 1ps can be quite a nice little income.
So, the industry’s moving now. Influencers, creators generally within our specific acquisition channels really come on. I mean, in the last 18 months, it’s absolutely transformed, and we’ve followed that. We’ve changed because of it. It’s great. It’s an interesting topic.

Kyle Knowles:
So, the influencer doesn’t repost it. They actually give the, say, video content from TikTok to a brand, and then they somehow use it in their own materials and then they get a royalty?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah. Impact does that, so you do a deal with the influencer and say, “Look, you can keep earning from this.”

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, that’s really cool.

Stephen Kerin:
And anyone can do that. You could do that today. And if the brand likes it or we like it and we go, “Look, that’s really good. And you’ve also got things if someone reposts it.” We’ve had some things where we’ve had people who’ve got say 30,000 followers or something, and another influencer who’s got 50,000 followers reposts it. So, the first guy or lady will get commission on the second who’s even bigger than they are. There’s this whole world of commissions going on. The way that people earn money on those conversions-

Kyle Knowles:
And do you estimate-

Stephen Kerin:
… and this technology allows that to be tracked.

Kyle Knowles:
And do you estimate that it’s just what is the market size for influencer? Hundred millions? Is it billion?

Stephen Kerin:
I don’t think anyone-

Kyle Knowles:
Because it’s super high.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, I don’t think anyone… I think now, I remember there was a stat about two years ago that there were more product searches on Amazon now than there are… This was two years ago, but there are more product searches on Amazon every day than there were on Google, believe it or not.
And I think now that sort of search type go-to click-type activities being replaced by people responding to social media posts. I don’t have the exact numbers, but it’s soon to overtake it, I think. It gives you some idea how big Amazon are anyway, but it’s taking over everything. I mean, brands are desperate to work with good influencers.
There’s just something good about really good posts reviewing a product independently. The conversion rates are fabulous, and this whole royalty piece, rather than just appearing on a webpage, something once and it sits there and looks a bit tighter. That’s not fair. It doesn’t look tight, but it lacks a bit of the excitement of a social media post that suddenly goes out there, and people are absorbing it and experiencing the ad.
Although the best thing is a combination of all of it. You want awareness, education, brand, your consideration all the way through the user journey to that moment someone clicks by. That’s the holy grail.

Kyle Knowles:
What do you feel like is the top channel to advertise and acquire? Is it just based on whatever the product is or…?

Stephen Kerin:
It’s the combination of all of them.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Stephen Kerin:
A good sophisticated advertiser will have all of them purring at the same time and synthesized and synchronized, and they will have multi-agency days where they’re instructing. We’ve got some good clients who do this for us where they’ll instruct us at the same time, and we’re working with Pret at the moment. They’re really good, great guys, who are very smart, and they will have meetings. We did one in here the other day.
They share their problems with us so we can go away and think about it. And they’re not really the problems, they’re more like opportunities, to be honest. And they’ve got all of their activity working together. That’s the best way to do it. Don’t hide things or be odd. Get your agencies and the channels working together because awareness and brand will result in… You can’t just have an acquisition play if people don’t know who you are and vice versa. So, there’s a synthesis thing that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Kyle Knowles:
I like that answer. So, do you find that these advertisers are optimizing for every channel? Because I know there’s tools like Repurpose where you can just basically put a TikTok up and then it will just take TikTok logo off of it and post it to Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube or whatever. Are they the best advertisers? Are they optimizing and making, basically taking the content and optimizing the size or the copy for each of these channels?

Stephen Kerin:
Yes, they should be. Funny enough, on Friday last week, we had a demo from this company called Human Element or Element Human, one of the two. Very interesting stuff they’ve got where they do that. So, they’ve got these heat maps and the technology looks at a post and understands what is converting best and recommending that the media owner or in combination with the advertised to say, when this product is advertising the daytime outside, it converts better than inside for argument’s sake, whatever it is. There’s so many different variations on it.
So, there’s lots of tools out there, optimization tools, and there will be different… a Facebook ad is different to a TikTok one, they’re different formats. So yeah, that optimization thing. If you’ve got critical mass, like Pret have for example, you can really use technology to improve and those increments half a quarter or half a cent, it was so important. Conversion rate improvement of a quarter of 1% is a highly valuable increase.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. Can you just talk a little about these investment companies? So, you’re a partner or owner in three different companies and two of them are early stage investment vehicles, and how did you get into that?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah. Well, Scale is different. I mean, in Scale, I work full time. I’m founder, but 59A and Kaizan are both similar stories really. Guys that I know from the industry, the ad tech industry in London, who I’ve worked with them all and with PALS, and I’d recognized because we get approached quite a lot about…
In the industry we’re in, there’s a lot of founders, a lot of things going on that you’re interested in. You can’t invest in everything obviously, but both of those businesses I are very attracted to half because of the technology, but half because of the team behind. Adam and Austin at 59A and Prav and Glen I was telling you about earlier, Kaizan, are both great teams, have significant heft in the industry. I know they’re going to be a success, and I was just given the opportunity to come in early.
We spent time understanding the product at the pre-alpha stage on both, and my colleague here at Scale, Dom, the same. He’s involved with those businesses, and we figured it was good to spread our risk a little bit and have some investments in these types of businesses, and we support them in different ways. We use Kaizan, and we’re great ambassadors and spokespeople for those businesses. And there’s lots of breakfasts and the odd beer involved as well in the Western as you’d imagine, and a lot of mutuality really.
People that we know we recommend to each other, so I was lucky to meet them or know them both at the very early stage really and be attracted to the products and know that those guys were going to take them through, and they’re both doing really well.

Kyle Knowles:
And so, they both have products, so it’s not just an investment? These aren’t investment companies, these are… You’re an investor in them.

Stephen Kerin:
They’re ad tech businesses.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Both of them are ad tech.

Stephen Kerin:
And Glen’s business, Kaizan, is more marketing tech business, so client services tool. Whereas 59A is an ad tool for brands. It’s a direct brand tool for them. I mean, we’d need another session to explain 59A. It’s a brilliant piece of technology for very specific targeting and using some incredible data sets that they use to improve performance for advertisers.
And they’ve grown from… Actually, when we were at the Impact office a couple of years ago, there’s just two of them, and I think there’s 55 of them now, and they’re emerging-

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Stephen Kerin:
… to the US. Good stories, both of them, and we are pleased to be part of their journey. We just happened to be residing at their offices, which were a couple of streets away here. We had a banker desks, which Impact kindly let us have for a short period and actually quite a long period in the end, and they sat with us when they started the business and literally on the same desks with us.
And that’s how it works, Kyle. I think it’s a bit who you know at the right time and had a bit of cash. So, we got involved, and we love the journey. I think we put a lot into Scale. We really have, but I think one of the things, as we move through the gears in the coming years, is to horizontally integrate into other technologies and maybe build some of our own, but certainly invest in the ones that we can see are the exciting ones.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, that’s really fascinating. I wish we had more time to dive into that. The one thing I was going to ask you, as far as who you know, I heard the other day, the saying I’d never heard before but I love it, “Your network is your net worth,” and I think that’s maybe what you’re getting to as far as it’s really about the who, not the how, right?

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, very much so, yeah. I’m lucky in a couple of the businesses that I’ve worked at, I mean, the three networks I worked at actually, one was called e-Spotting became Miva, TradeDoubler was another one, and Webgains the last one. I was fortunate enough to just meet so many interesting people, literally dozens, hundreds probably. And they’re now scattered all over London. They’re all MDs and CEOs and founders and things. So, the network is important for us.
It’s great and I enjoy it too because I like the subject, so I’m pleased to see people I know doing well, and it helps the Scale business as well, generally, I think. We have referral partners, if you like, who want the best for us. And we are referring partners back to or clients back to people all the time. We never have the kickbacks or anything like that. We send them a Fortnum & Mason hamper, and we say, “When we get a lead, we’re going to pass it back to you.” So, that’s the most important thing. Yeah, it’s a good part of our setup here. The contacts, which is how we met, of course.

Kyle Knowles:
Yes, for sure. It’s crazy how that works. So, I do, Stephen, have a lightning round of questions. These are very fast.

Stephen Kerin:
Go for it.

Kyle Knowles:
And then, we’ll wrap up with just a couple more questions at the end. What’s your favorite candy bar?

Stephen Kerin:
I don’t really have a sweet tooth, but I’m going to go with, I like dark chocolate. Marks & Spencer’s 70% black salted chocolate, I like.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. I’m going to get it before I go home. Favorite musical artist?

Stephen Kerin:
Oh, artist. Goodness me, I can’t possibly answer that. I mean… Stones, Beatles, Floyd, Bowie, the classics. I couldn’t pick one. Just couldn’t do that, sorry.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Stephen Kerin:
Can I have them all?

Kyle Knowles:
Fair enough. Favorite cereal?

Stephen Kerin:
Porridge.

Kyle Knowles:
Mac or PC?

Stephen Kerin:
PC. Well, I use a Chromebook actually.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Stephen Kerin:
[inaudible 01:02:57].

Kyle Knowles:
So, is that considered Android? I don’t know.

Stephen Kerin:
Yes, it is.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s Android.

Stephen Kerin:
Well, it’s called a Chrome operating system. You don’t see many of them round, but yeah, neither. Chromebook.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. And then Google or Microsoft?

Stephen Kerin:
Google.

Kyle Knowles:
Dogs or Cats?

Stephen Kerin:
Cats.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis?

Stephen Kerin:
Ooh. I love the Les Mis book. It was an amazing read. Les Mis because the book is just incredible, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. What’s the-

Stephen Kerin:
That bit with the priest and the song and… Yeah, Les Mis, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
So, what’s the best piece of business advice anyone’s given you?

Stephen Kerin:
What’s the best piece of… Well, Glen says to me, “Stop doing the invoicing and do more selling.” And he’s right. I think that’s probably one advice. Oh, gosh. I think it’s something specific that… I mean, I’m lucky I get so much all the time. I think, “Your ego is not your amigo,” was something somebody said to me a while ago, and that’s quite good, I think.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really good.

Stephen Kerin:
It just don’t take it too personally, just get on do some business, just business. Go and enjoy it. Nothing specific. Sorry, Kyle, I wish I had a decent answer for you.

Kyle Knowles:
No, I like both those answers because spend more time selling it is a good piece of business.

Stephen Kerin:
Well, I enjoy that as well. That’s the bit I like doing. Get kick out of that. So, get my head out of zero and get on the phones.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. So, what’s the book that you recommend the most to people?

Stephen Kerin:
The book that I recommend the most. Well, I’ve just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I always intended to read, and it was amazing. But I think you are talking about a business book, aren’t you?

Kyle Knowles:
It can be any book.

Stephen Kerin:
I just say to my daughter, “Just read. The papers is the thing. You’ve got to consume information and use.” I haven’t got a particular book, I don’t think, I’ve recommended. One I normally recommend is the one I’ve just read.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. The Road. We’ll count it, The Road.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah. It’s a heck of a book that is.

Kyle Knowles:
Read it two or three times. It’s amazing.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, it’s interesting. It wasn’t what I expected, but I enjoyed it. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, it’s really good. Really good. Especially if you have children.

Stephen Kerin:
That’s right, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Very powerful as a father to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Stephen Kerin:
Yeah, fascinating. I love 20th century American literature. I mean, that’s almost exclusively what I enjoyed from my fiction reading. I love all those guys. It’s brilliant. So, we’ll go with The Road.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. We’ll take it, Stephen. So, thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy schedule-

Stephen Kerin:
My pleasure.

Kyle Knowles:
… to be on Maker Manager Money. I really appreciate it. I’m so glad that Jeanette connected us so that this could happen here in London. I wish you the best in your future endeavors, and I hope that Scale Digital can continue to scale and do amazing things over the coming years. I look forward to seeing you in your journey.

Stephen Kerin:
Cheers.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Cheers.

Stephen Kerin:
You never get to the end of the Internet.