Iyas [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Karmic Capitalist podcast stories of companies that are doing capitalism better. Climbing Trees is a digital marketing agency which, according to its founder and CEO Alex Hollyman, works with companies that the world of tomorrow needs. And when they're not sure whether they should take a project on, they ask the ultimate question does it feel good? In this episode, we talk about the tests that are thrown your way if you're running an escalator agency, as well as diving into the story of climbing trees and how it's evolving and trying to be a better business every day. A fascinating nuts and bolts discussion with a founder who, like all of us, wants to do good and is continually trying to figure out what that means. So welcome to the Karmic Capitalist, where today I'm really pleased to have with me Alex Hollyman, who is the founder and CEO of Climbing Trees. Welcome to the show, Alex.
Alex [00:00:53]:
Thanks so much for having me on. It's good to be here.
Iyas [00:00:55]:
Alex, as is customary, before we dive into the stories and so on, what is Climbing Trees? What does it do?
Alex [00:01:02]:
We are a digital ad agency, essentially, so we help clients get found on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and then we've got a whole programmatic ad discovery proposition as well. So it's helping clients get visibility online.
Iyas [00:01:17]:
Brilliant. And I'm always interested in the backstory and how people come to actually be setting up their own companies. So what was your journey to it? Why did you set one up?
Alex [00:01:25]:
So I fell into working in the ad industry in the worked for some really large some of the three of the top five media agencies planning on buying press, radio, TV campaigns. I came out of London in 2001 to work for a startup which grew to a 25 million turnover business. And I had set up their online marketing division, worked alongside the owner, who was a very entrepreneurial individual, picked up some good stuff from him. And in 2010, the big dream was I'm going to leave, I'm going to work for myself and I want five days work. I didn't want to build a business and have a team and offices and that kind of thing. I just wanted five days work. And I went through an existential angst in terms of, can I even do this? Should I be doing this? I'm leaving a really well paid job. It's very safe. I've been there for eight or nine years and I left. And within three months I think I was fully booked. And that was it. Mission achieved.
Iyas [00:02:20]:
But that was essentially then at that stage, it sounds like the thought process was freelancing rather than necessarily a whole new business. Or did you start by thinking you were going to grow something?
Alex [00:02:30]:
No, so I didn't think I'd grow something and it probably was just being a lone gun for hire a freelancer. And then I sort of did that for six or seven years under the umbrella of climbing trees before I then sort of felt confident enough to then start recruiting team members and then trying to build a business. Yeah.
Iyas [00:02:50]:
And that's interesting, actually, the whole confident enough piece. What did that actually mean? What specifically were you thinking? That, okay, now I can do this, or what made you think in a different way from freelancing?
Alex [00:03:03]:
I think there were two things. So one is when you're freelancing, the only person that the downside is going to be on is yourself, really. If you have a business and a team, you then have a responsibility to that business and that team. I think the other thing was I tried working with other freelancers to build a, almost a collective or something, but it hadn't quite worked. And I think what happens is everyone culturally is master of their own destiny. Everyone's not facing in the same direction. People have different motivations. And so what drew me to actually wanting to build a team out was that creating a shared vision of this is what we're working towards, and then trying to sort of bring that into existence.
Iyas [00:03:43]:
Yeah. And that's interesting. I always find the conscious CEO's angst is always, am I going to make payroll at the end of the month? And I think that's one of the things, quite often, that I think stops people from starting a company and stays with them. In one of my companies, when we sold out at 300, the founders were still anxious at 300 people of, will we make payroll at the end of each month? We never failed, but it was always there as a thing that was hanging over your head that you need to make sure that there's 300 people and families that you're responsible for in some way.
Alex [00:04:21]:
Absolutely. And I think that making payroll in the first phase of recruiting the team, I was probably overly focused on making sure we could keep the lights on and make payroll over and above more of the sort of purpose driven stuff that we'll talk about laterally. So I probably came to working with clients in industries that I probably had no real hearts desire to work for, just on the premise of, actually, I just want to make payroll. I want to make sure that I can pay my team and everyone at the end of the month. As a business, we're a long way away from that now, and so we have cash in the bank, we have a long runway in terms of our cash flow forecast. Our pipeline is very, very strong. And so I haven't had that worry about making payroll for six, seven, eight years now. So we're in a very stable position, unfortunate to me, so and there's taking a lot of hard work from a lot of people to get there as well.
Iyas [00:05:14]:
No, absolutely. And and I think that's, you know, it it is a very real thing that, you know, quite often when I work with very altruistic sort of founding CEOs, which I love, by the way, I love the fact that we are in a place where far more many people are thinking about the purpose and the positive contribution that their business can make than 1520 years ago, but quite often haven't really thought through the harsh commercial realities of well, we still do need to make sure that we are earning enough to keep the lights on, to keep everyone paid and all of those things and the decision processes that come with doing that and the risks that you decide whether that you choose to embrace or not. But I'm intrigued. I mean, we've gone there, so let's start that journey. I mean, you mentioned the purpose thing, so why well, A, when did that happen? And B, what was the trigger to making the organization more purposeful?
Alex [00:06:03]:
So I think there have always been a number of sort of disparate threads since 2010, when I started climbing trees, of trying to do good. So I can remember in 2011 there was an organization called Trees for Cities and we donated money to them to plant trees in cities. I think I have an affinity with trees. I obviously must have business called Climbing Trees. And so that was like 2012. We'd always worked with charities and done work for charities at a really incentivized rate. So not the usual agency thing of like discounting it by 10%, 20% or something. We had local charities where we were making a difference to them all the way through. All of that was quite random and there was no sort of cohesive pull through it. It was just random acts of trying to do something positive. I know a couple of B Corp agencies, so one is called Jago and the other is called Voice Communications. And I know the founders of those organizations well, and they advocated really, really well for the B Corp movement. And in conversation with them, I found it attractive. They weren't preachy, they weren't judgy, they were just advocating for a better way of doing business. And then I think it was probably just over three years ago. So going into the pandemic in 2020, we had started Offsetting using a company called Ecology, absolutely amazing business. And I then started looking at the B Impact Assessment, which is a tool set up by B Lab, where you can start looking at your organization in a number of ways, governance, workers, clients, environment and society. And there's lots and lots of different questions. And it got me thinking about how we could actually make a more cohesive approach to how we actually focused as a business. And so foundationally, as a result of going through that process, we are a much better, better business. So in every area, any that you choose mentioned, we're just foundationally a much stronger business now.
Iyas [00:08:09]:
Yeah. And that's an interesting thing. I mean, I think even when one looks at the days of raging capitalism at its worst, and if one takes the complete sort of freedman view of the social responsibility of businesses to its shareholders, I still think the people running businesses quite often had values. It wasn't that they didn't have values and you would often hear about if they decided to show and tell the world their contributions to charities or quite often they wouldn't tell the world, but they still had a core set of values. What I think wasn't really happening was translating that into how they actually run the business. And it was a thing that was saying, me as an individual, as a CEO, as a founder, I'm a good person, I'll make money and I'm going to spend that money in good ways. But when it comes to my business, what I've got to do is make as much money as possible because that's what the business is. It's kind of a separate world. And then you'd find that some of that does start to creep into some of the companies. And I think it's interesting when you were discussing where it was for you that clearly there was a core value set that you had as an individual and clearly that was translating to the way that you guys were doing business. But what hadn't happened is essentially rooting the whole business around it and actually putting it at the heart of it until that B Corp journey started of saying, okay, no, there can be a structure to this. We can be good and do it in a more organized, more structured way and you started going down that route. I mean, that's my interpretation of what I hear. Is that fair?
Alex [00:09:39]:
Yeah, very much so. And I think I'd always been a bit of a rebellious stoke in my younger days and so business as usual and that tired old thing of, oh, it's just business, like ripping people off and that kind of stuff, it never attracted me. I never particularly admired people that were just purely financially successful. The kind of people that I admire are ones that actually do something above and beyond that. And I think there is a common thing, as you alluded to, to make a load of money in life, in business, and then when you get to 55, 60 start, then almost paying for the sins of your former life. And I think that what appeals to me is actually just there's so many problems in society and I think business has the opportunity to step into some of those issues and then a very small way to run your small business. 15 of us in a very small way, start actually trying to do things in a better way because that's what we have control of. We can't control what big business does, we can't control what our government does, but we have full control over what we do. And so I think that was the point where in my own estimation, we had fallen down because there's so many things we should have done better. But as I said, I was just focused on keeping the lights on and making payroll.
Iyas [00:10:51]:
Yeah, I think that's a very normal trajectory, especially in the early days. And it's interesting, you made me smile when you said that you were so sort of rebellious as I am. And I'm like, oh, well, yeah, that doesn't happen with founder CEO as much. We're all a bunch who are completely conformist as we were growing up.
Alex [00:11:10]:
You knew the truth.
Iyas [00:11:11]:
Yeah. I suspect there's going to have to be an X rated version of this, where we hear the truth. So we'll line up the second podcast episode. Brilliant. So you start down that route. You've spoken to a couple of other agency founders who surfaced this approach, the B Lab approach, and you bought into and liked it. Where was your team on all of this? Were they involved in the decision making or what was their journey as a part of this?
Alex [00:11:44]:
Across the team, we have a wide spectrum of people that passionately care. So I've got people that used to be members of Greenpeace or work at the World Wildlife Fund that are passionately aligned to what we're doing. I've got team members who agree with what we're trying to do out in society. And then there's other team members that I don't think they push back against it, but I think that they're not ambivalent towards it. They think it's a net positive, but they're busy focusing on what they want to do in their careers. But then we'll contribute to projects as and when we are doing stuff. So I think we've done things like tree planting, going into local schools to advocate for joining the digital industry, to try and encourage youngsters from different backgrounds to ours into industry. We've planted trees, we're doing a beach cleanup, I think I said, and people will come and join in because it's part of what we do as a team, I think. We're not a democracy here. We're probably best classed as a benevolent dictatorship. And so it was something that I decided, this is what we're doing, this is the path we're going to tread. And then I sort of picked up the ball and then ran with it.
Iyas [00:12:50]:
Yeah, I think that's also quite an interesting pattern there that I do quite often find. I go back to my altruistic sort of founders who come out all full of how the great the world should be and what they're going to do, but don't really build a strong enough foundation of the business to actually allow themselves to do it. And it's quite interesting when sorry, go.
Alex [00:13:12]:
Yeah. And I think for us, we are a financially very stable business, very small. And that ability to have profit allows all the rest of us to then have impact with talking to the team. At the moment, there's a big demonstration that's going to happen on the 21 April, and I'm thinking that's on Friday the 21st should be at work. I'm probably going to let people go and participate in that demonstration if they want to and they'll still get paid and so I think you're able to do a lot of stuff when you have profit in the business. If I was still trying to have purpose and scratching around trying to find clients I think it might then be difficult to actually have any impact and make any changes.
Iyas [00:13:53]:
Yeah, absolutely. I do think profit absolutely is a prerequisite because if you go out of business you're not going to be serving any purpose. That's a fundamental truth. However much you really want to be serving something, if you haven't got the foundation to do it then you're going to be under serving it so there's no point there and also fascinating what you're saying there about team. I mean I am clearly in the whole raison Detroit of the podcast is about purposeful businesses, businesses that put values and purpose at their heart but I think there also does need to be an acceptance that for some people actually what they want is to do an honest day's job. They want to come in, they want to do their job to the best of their ability, get paid fairly for doing that job well, and don't feel like they need to save the planet or save the oceans or whatever. And I think there needs to be an acceptance that for some people, that's fine, provided that they haven't turned that into sort of making things worse. We don't need to turn everyone into a massive convert in order for us to do good.
Alex [00:14:55]:
Absolutely. And there's a certain part with some of our team and then certainly some of our existing clients whereby you do this stuff myself, you talk about these changes that you advocate for the things that you're doing personally and I try and do that in quite a humble way and I think that's then attractive to people. So I know people might be looking at changing electric supplies at home or next car, thinking about getting an electric car or what they do. Charitably and what's important to them in exploring their own conscience. And there's a process to all of that.
Iyas [00:15:23]:
Yeah, and I think you alluded to earlier, even with your own team, that when the culture is like that, that people who join it and don't aren't necessarily there at the start, they start to participate because that's what the culture of the organization is and that carries them. It's interesting, I've seen that in reverse actually sometimes where the cultures carried the CEO. I've seen there was one scenario and I won't mention the company because it's unfair but there is a CEO and they're a well known company who didn't start the company with a very purposeful mind. He saw an opportunity, and that's fine. He saw an opportunity to create a business and he created the business, which was great, and then discovered that some of the messages he could put with the business that were more about positive contribution resonated. So he started doing it initially primarily because it was part of the business opportunity. It wasn't that he particularly felt it, his team corralled behind it, started to drive it more and he ended up being its biggest advocate because he saw the transformation that had happened and what the impact actually was when initially for him, it was just about words. And I found that fascinating because the culture almost turned him around, even though he was the founder and CEO of the business.
Alex [00:16:33]:
Absolutely. And there is that weird sort of symbiotic relationship we did in the workers section in the B impact assessment that prompted so much development of what we do as a business.
Iyas [00:16:44]:
I'm sure.
Alex [00:16:44]:
I think small business, we'd always moved fast, we're quite skimpy on processes and we've changed so much. And I think having built that out now, the unintended consequence of that, and one that I didn't expect is there's a real sort of glue to the business and attraction to the business, where I think the team really care about what they do and what we're doing because they know that they're being treated like adults and really, really well looked after comparably in our industry.
Iyas [00:17:12]:
And so what does it actually mean for the business of your business? So I understand, I mean, you mentioned earlier the sort of charitable and philanthropic things that you get involved in. But in terms of the core running of the business, what has it meant? What makes climbing trees different in terms of how it's applied its values and purpose to the business of what it does?
Alex [00:17:31]:
So we've tried to move with real authenticity. So we've come from a place of doing a few things very roughly, to then trying to tread with some humility and sure footedness in what we do. So we've changed a lot of stuff with how we do business in terms of defaulting to video calls, trying not to drive, trying not to fly with the business, although that's sometimes quite tricky. Change electric supplier, how we get stationary, the computers we buy, so foundationally to try and reduce our carbon footprint. We've made a lot of changes to systems and processes in terms of staff, we now have a diversity target within the business. And that's one where when we first started the impact assessment, we were a team of six white men. We're now 15, we've got five women, we've got people from different backgrounds, different neurodiversities, different ethnicities, and we haven't specifically recruited for those. But what sits behind that is we changed our job descriptions, we changed the language we used, we changed the interview panel. So there's one man, one woman on the panel. I'm not involved in them. And what we're then building is a team that is actually representative of the society that our clients operate in, rather than one that's just like a little mini Russian doll version of me, almost. And so there was a period of introspection that I went through on that, thinking about, well, am I just a really horribly biased individual that's just been recruiting white people? I don't think I am, but I think subconsciously I might have been. And so I had to go and sort of do some soul search and actually work out where I was as an individual for our women in the business. I'm not women. So what we've done is we've set up a women's council where they meet, they can set whatever agenda they want, and they come to me with things that they would like to see the business do. So if that's increased parental pay, putting in place a menopause policy and these kind of initiatives, if it was left to me, I'll probably do something misogynistic, like paint the Ladies Lose Pink or something like that. So what I don't want to do is have a top down thing where I'm making missteps. I'd rather work out what's emotionally important to them and if the business can afford it, try and put these initiatives in place. And so I think it's just we've gone through everything as meticulously as possible, and I think then we became a B Corp in June last year. So we got a nice logo. We can put it on our email footers and put it on our website and talk about it. But I think there's a recognition from me that actually becoming a B Corp that's now the starting point. It's not the end point, it's the start of actually, how do we embed this meaning and purpose into the business in a more foundational way. And so there's a lot of stuff that we're doing in that regard as well, which I can talk about.
Iyas [00:20:15]:
One of the things that I picked up that's all brilliant, by the way, I always find it fascinating that the diversity thing in small companies, it's always an interesting thing because numerically, you look at your business and you recruit two people from one particular ethnic minority, and you've made a 14% difference into the company straight away. And I think it's quite interesting because it's hard, actually. It's not even hard. It's impossible in a 15 person company, a 20 person company, to reflect absolutely the diversity that's within society. And I think it's always interesting to see where you draw that line. And I think what's fascinating with you is that it sounds like what you actually did was let's just look at our processes and try and remove all bias from our selection processes and then let them land where they land.
Alex [00:21:03]:
I think it is absolutely that in the ad industry, there is a very white, middle class, sort of established this is how things are as a subset of that. The search marketing industry that we predominate in is quite also relatively lacking in diversity. We're in Essex. Essex is a very white county. We're in North Essex, which is even whiter. And so, historically, recruiting from a geographical footprint of the business was really tricky. But I think that we've got those reasons for how that's why things were as they were, but I think you can unpick them and actually aim to do better. And so we benchmark ourselves and so we ask the team on a quarterly basis, are we doing enough with regards to diversity, equity and inclusion? We've got all of our senior management here going through a six module training program, which is about an hour and a half per module on unconscious bias and antiracism. And looking at things like this, because if we talk about it and keep on talking about it, that's when we won't just slip back into doing business as usual. We'll always be a little bit uncomfortable with how we're doing things. Driving to do a little bit better.
Iyas [00:22:12]:
Yeah, no. Which is brilliant. I love that. The other area I find with sort of agency and consulting type organization, where the rubber hits the road, apart from the team, is the clients. And I'm intrigued. You guys have got a client screening process, talking about sort of particular sectors that you won't deal with, and also the wonderful statement at the end of it that says that's not a fully inclusive list. You may be a company that does something that on the surface looks great, but if we don't think you're particularly ethical, we're not going to work with you either. How and when did that come about?
Alex [00:22:51]:
So this is a relatively new innovation. In the first stage of the business, if you'd have come in with a crisp five pound note, I'd have found you a chair, sat you down and found something we could do. And that was literally my criteria. We've had to obviously double down on that. We operate in the messy bit in the middle, where some of our clients are purpose driven. So we work with greenpeace, we work with a robotic underfloor insulation company that's changing the carbon footprint of terrorist houses in the UK to reduce the carbon footprint of them, called CUBOT. And we have these clients that are actively making the world a better place and going forward, what we want is to work with the clients that the world of tomorrow needs. That's an active focus of the business and that's where real magic happens, because there's a passion from the team to actually have that impact. So we recognize that our greatest impact is going to be through our clients. We have in the middle a set of clients that are non purpose driven. These are clients that are not like bad businesses, but they're not purpose driven. When we started the B impact assessment, I'm just actually putting together our first impact report for 2022. And I know that there are two sectors that we were working in last year that we didn't want to work in. So we always say this we are not perfect and haven't been. We aren't today and we're not going to be tomorrow, but we're trying to do better. And I think so we had 5% from a company, private car company, so company selling cars, carbon intensive industry. And so we stopped working with them in January 23. And then we had one client that's one and a half percent of the business in 2022 was sports betting software. So if you're in a casino in America and wants to bet in game, they provide the software that provides the numerical calculations for the bets. We are stopping working with them in ten days time. And so a friend of mine works there. I took him out for lunch, and I shifted around uncomfortably and skirted around this, and I said, we're going to have to stop working with you. And he said, I've been expecting it. Why didn't you mention it earlier? I felt terrible about it. I felt really about the whole thing. So then we have no clients in sectors that are actively bad. What we did as a foundational piece with that is we did a survey of the team Google forms. Would you work with companies that took, like, payday loans or adult services or sex toys or, I don't know, fast fashion? Problems with child labor, the confusing one? Problems with child labor? One of my client team clicked. Yes, but yes, I would, I would work with them. And I sort of think, I hope it was a data entry error. And so I used that to get a sense check for where my team were. And then from that, we then built out the client screening policy that you're referencing, and that's something we set live in the last eight weeks. And so now any clients that come in that tick those boxes, we just don't work with them. And I think what we wanted to try and do was have the sort of latitude for there's always every now and then we get approached by companies that do vaping. So you got the tobacco industry that my dad has worked for for 30 years, had a rich pedigree in and or in a plea, passed away from cancer. And so you got the tobacco industry. We wouldn't work with Philip Morris of the world or British American Tobacco. Then you have vaping. So you could say, well, Vaping says it's not bad as smoking. It's better. But what one of the team came to me with, and we spoke about, and I really enjoyed this kind of thing where the team come to me and provoke soul searching. They said Vaping is pretty much in supermarkets, you'll. Get the sweets in the toys section and then the vapes will be next to it. And so the children see the vapes. Children are stealing vapes and they are then like starting to smoke or vape, sorry, at the ages of twelve or 13. And so do we want to support that kind of industry where we actually had to say, well, no, we don't, and so we will not want that to be our legacy or impact on the world. Because I think there's going to be all kinds of problems with regards to the ossification of lungs and the known consequences of vaping in 10, 20, 30 years time. So we've said, no, we're not touching that. And so that's why we have that caveat about we will say no to other stuff as well.
Iyas [00:27:05]:
Yeah. And I think, again, that's always an interesting thing and it's a real dilemma that I think especially sort of agencies and consultancies have. We talk about tobacco and if for instance, I don't know, British American Tobacco rocks up and says, british American Tobacco by the way, is the pet villain in almost all of my podcasts. But Bat turn rock up and say, guys, you know that we are involved in this anti smoking education program for youth where we're trying to teach youth the dangers of smoking and we're setting up a website to drive youth there so that they can see the harms of smoking clearly. We need some marketing assistance to make sure that that's more a higher profile. Would you help us with that? And therein is the dilemma. How do you guys go about processing something like that?
Alex [00:27:57]:
So I think in our qualification process we have a thing about does it feel good, and so that's where it actually feels good with a client. Like I've got some of the team out pitching to a client today and that ostensibly they're fantastic people, really amazing business, they're purpose driven. That's only going to grow as time goes on. It feels good to be pitching to them and we want to work with them. Working with Philip, we've turned over probably quarter of a million pounds of business in the last six months. That falls in the sections you're referencing in the client screening process. So we could be quarter million pounds larger, that's probably two and a half team size bigger, but we'd be losing more than we've gained. And so I think what we'll probably do is go through a period of having some existential angst. We chew it over and then there's probably two or three people in the team where we just get together and say, well actually, should we do this? Yes or no? And we're in the very fortunate position where at the moment we have in our pipeline too much in terms of inbound activity. And so there would be a criteria whereby actually bat for good, if we call it that, would be probably at the bottom of that list and we'd focus on other priorities and I love that.
Iyas [00:29:11]:
Does it feel good? Because I think sometimes we've become so data driven, we've become so smart, goals driven, that we sometimes forget some things. You can't absolutely measure that way and you just have to go with what does it feel like, what does your gut tell you? Interestingly on that particular one because obviously I've had to go through similar soul searching in terms of terms of what would I do? One of the places I get to is I think if the core of the business and its business model is a thing that's doing harm, then whatever the project is, I'm not going to get involved in it. And that may be too black and white, but I find for me it helps because I look at something like that initiative. And in case listeners don't know that the tobacco industry does have an anti smoking education program which in several of their internal memos have been leaked to say explicitly that these are not authentic to us, but we need to go through them in order to make people like us. But they do have them and they do have just like the betting industry has the charity, the anti betting charity or the betting support charity that they fund. But all of those things are clearly only there because their core business does what it does in the first place. And so for me, the line I've drawn, and it's never a black and white line, however hard you try and make it black and white, you always find gray somewhere and that's the beauty of humanity. But for me, the line is, is the core of the business one that does harm? Because then anything else is kind of supporting that and so I then don't go there.
Alex [00:30:47]:
Yeah, absolutely. And that does absolutely make sense.
Iyas [00:30:50]:
And by the way, I'm not saying that as if that's the best answer because I have heard very convincing pleas from others who would approach it differently. But for me that's the one that.
Alex [00:30:59]:
Works and I think there's always degrees, aren't there? So it's like with the car industry, you know that the car industry is in bed with big oil and, like, Shell, BP, those kind of guys. But then you've got the electric cars, and so the electrification of the car industry is probably a net positive. But then you've got the consequences of the electric cars, so you've got the lithium mining, the materials used, the additional tire pollution that comes from them. And so there are always unintended consequences of another decision that you can't sort of work out on.
Iyas [00:31:31]:
And then the extra dimension I'd be intrigued whether this comes up is that is individuals within the company and their own perspective. So you did the survey, which is great, which sort of helped you to come up with the list. I mean, one of the companies I supported did a similar exercise, but one of the things they didn't come up with was alcohol, and alcohol is not on your list either. However, they had a couple of Muslims in the company who they won a tobacco I'm sorry, tobacco, an alcohol company's work and the Muslims just did not want to work on it, which, again, I understand, if you're a devout Muslim, that would be an issue for you. When you look at your list and how you come up with it, do you provide leeway within the team for people who may look at I mean, you've got meat and dairy industries proven to be ones that are negative impact for the environment. But you may have some people who absolutely think yes, that may be the case, but really, it doesn't mean we need to get rid of the industries as a whole. So I'd quite like to work on a so it can go both ways. Do you have those kind of nuances to deal with?
Alex [00:32:37]:
Yes, so we would do so we have vegans in the business that wouldn't want to work with meat companies or sausage companies, for example, and so I would be sensitive to that. So if someone's personal beliefs were so strong that that's what they stood up for in life, I would support those beliefs and so I wouldn't want the business for them to have to sacrifice their personal values and what they hold to be true for work. I'll try and support that. There are obvious, there are obviously going to be nuances. I don't believe we've got any meat eaters that are so ardent in the business that they're fighting for meat to go out and win the Walls account or something like that, but I think we just try and be sensitive to what's important to people and I think I'm a vegetarian myself, cheese is my downfall. Once a year at Christmas, I will overindulge in cheese, but aside from that, I'm pretty much vegan. I try and get like I buy cheese from independent dairies where the animals have a decent quality of life and they're not treated too terribly. But, yeah, the meat industry and the animal industry in the UK, especially now we're out of the EU and the American influence is coming over, I think there's a lot of poor animals treated terribly.
Iyas [00:33:50]:
I could go on for I love this stuff and I love getting into the meat of it to follow the method we've just been talking about, but I love diving into the detail of it could go on forever. But I am aware of time and I'm intrigued just at a high level, sort of looking back through it. Are there missteps and learnings along the way that you've had in terms of going down this route that you'd look at and say, well, if I'd known that, it may have made our journey a bit easier when we embarked on it.
Alex [00:34:19]:
Yeah, I think I would have liked to have done this much, much sooner. I would like to have probably slowed down in some of the earlier phases of the business, been a little bit less busy and made more considered decisions. So I look back at a lot of the decisions I made. So we moved offices four years ago. I would have said to someone on the team, can you go and sort out the electric? But I didn't say and make sure it's renewable. So they sorted out the electric. So tick box ticked, but it wasn't renewable. And so for a period of time, the business was not run on renewable energy. That's just lazy and poor thinking on my part. And there is a lot of that that we've unearthed going through this process. And so that's why there's a constant reevaluation of everything that's got us to today is great, but we can relook at it and then try and do better. And so I think there is that. We've got a number of initiatives that we're undertaking to actually try and improve us and push forward further from today as well.
Iyas [00:35:12]:
Okay, start earlier, be a bit more thorough, if you will, with some of the thinking and the impacts, the consequences of those thinking. And it's always a thing when you're the MD or CEO that the phrase always uses, that leaders carry megaphones. We say something and people hear it a lot louder than we ever intend to say it. And that carries consequences, including I'm just going to get you, you asked me to get find the electrics, I'm going to find you the cheapest electrics because I'm sure that's what you want.
Alex [00:35:40]:
Right, job done. And so now what we're doing to talk to that, we have a monthly management meeting. We have environmental and social responsibility to be considered at every phase in that agenda. So we're talking about operations, HR, clients. We consider the environment and society in those decisions as well. And that's then going to be minute and within the sort of structure of the business at a very high level. We're also going through the process of rewriting everyone's job descriptions and we're empowering the team to make sure that within their roles, they have very clear responsibility for managing our impact on society and the environment within the purview of their job roles. And if there are conflicts, they can come to me and we can talk about them. So if that's working from home, if that's recycling an old machine or whatever it is, we consider our impact at those stage. So we're trying to make sure that that's then baked into what we do as a business.
Iyas [00:36:32]:
Yeah, brilliant. It is a successful company. What's your view on where you want to go with it? What is climbing trees over the next few years? Where does it go?
Alex [00:36:42]:
So I think wanting to work with clients, that the world of tomorrow needs. That's our big ambition and aim. So that could be working with more charities, working with commercial companies that are selling stuff that is in a really considered way, companies operating in the circular economy, climate, tech, green tech, people doing wind farms, solar panel companies. What the world of tomorrow needs? Those are the ones that we want to actually try and support and help achieve commercial success.
Iyas [00:37:13]:
When you look at what you want out of climbing trees over the sort of long term, is that more what you measure or do you look at growth or what are the primary drivers for you in terms of where you see it going?
Alex [00:37:26]:
So in terms of commercial ambitions for the business, we want to double in size in the next two years and we are on track to do that. We'll get to there and then probably then set another target to take the team that we have on that journey with us and support them in their development. 100% of the team here had training last year. We're getting people speaking at industry conferences, on podcasts, webinars and so to support this team in their career developments and sort of move them forward and then ultimately look after our clients and make sure that they are commercially successful. And so we're a performance marketing business, so each month we have to earn our seat at the table with our clients demonstrating a return on investment, otherwise there's no reason to have us around. We're nice people to have around, but I think the commercial success must underpin all that we do.
Iyas [00:38:14]:
Yeah. And I love that. So we're talking here about the two axes of growth and getting increasingly more purposeful and looking at the businesses that the world needs tomorrow. And that gets into a lovely virtuous cycle if you get those two right because you are increasingly getting you're winning more business in the business that should be growing tomorrow, which will give more opportunities to grow a business and it becomes a beautiful cycle.
Alex [00:38:38]:
Absolutely. I think what we're doing is it's never been as easy for us to recruit staff as is at the moment. So we have people wanting to come and work for us based on our positioning and what we're trying to do. And so people that are minded to that there is a generation in the workforce that don't just want to work for the man, do a nine to five, get a paycheck, get a bonus, they want to work in an environment where they're actually doing something positive about the problems the world has. That sort of then layers because then their day to day is linked to having impact and doing something positive above and beyond just doing business as usual.
Iyas [00:39:11]:
Brilliant. Brilliant. Well Alex, as I said, I could go on for hours with this, I love diving into this stuff, but thank you so much for making the time to talk me through the journey that you guys have been on and are still on, where do people go to find you if they want to find you? Or climbing trees.
Alex [00:39:29]:
So we're at climbingtrees.com and I'm Alex Hollyman on LinkedIn.
Iyas [00:39:33]:
What a fantastic ur. Nailed. Congrats on that.
Alex [00:39:38]:
It was quite surprisingly simple back in the day.
Iyas [00:39:40]:
But, yeah, my sister managed to nail her first name, which I thought was quite impressive. But there we go. So, Alex, thank you very much for coming on. Really enjoyed the conversation and good luck with the journey and where it goes.
Alex [00:39:53]:
Fantastic. Thanks.
Welcome to the Karmic Capitalist podcast stories of companies that are doing capitalism better. Climbing Trees is a digital marketing agency which, according to its founder and CEO Alex Hollyman, works with companies that the world of tomorrow needs. And when they're not sure whether they should take a project on, they ask the ultimate question does it feel good? In this episode, we talk about the tests that are thrown your way if you're running an escalator agency, as well as diving into the story of climbing trees and how it's evolving and trying to be a better business every day. A fascinating nuts and bolts discussion with a founder who, like all of us, wants to do good and is continually trying to figure out what that means. So welcome to the Karmic Capitalist, where today I'm really pleased to have with me Alex Hollyman, who is the founder and CEO of Climbing Trees. Welcome to the show, Alex.
Alex [00:00:53]:
Thanks so much for having me on. It's good to be here.
Iyas [00:00:55]:
Alex, as is customary, before we dive into the stories and so on, what is Climbing Trees? What does it do?
Alex [00:01:02]:
We are a digital ad agency, essentially, so we help clients get found on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and then we've got a whole programmatic ad discovery proposition as well. So it's helping clients get visibility online.
Iyas [00:01:17]:
Brilliant. And I'm always interested in the backstory and how people come to actually be setting up their own companies. So what was your journey to it? Why did you set one up?
Alex [00:01:25]:
So I fell into working in the ad industry in the worked for some really large some of the three of the top five media agencies planning on buying press, radio, TV campaigns. I came out of London in 2001 to work for a startup which grew to a 25 million turnover business. And I had set up their online marketing division, worked alongside the owner, who was a very entrepreneurial individual, picked up some good stuff from him. And in 2010, the big dream was I'm going to leave, I'm going to work for myself and I want five days work. I didn't want to build a business and have a team and offices and that kind of thing. I just wanted five days work. And I went through an existential angst in terms of, can I even do this? Should I be doing this? I'm leaving a really well paid job. It's very safe. I've been there for eight or nine years and I left. And within three months I think I was fully booked. And that was it. Mission achieved.
Iyas [00:02:20]:
But that was essentially then at that stage, it sounds like the thought process was freelancing rather than necessarily a whole new business. Or did you start by thinking you were going to grow something?
Alex [00:02:30]:
No, so I didn't think I'd grow something and it probably was just being a lone gun for hire a freelancer. And then I sort of did that for six or seven years under the umbrella of climbing trees before I then sort of felt confident enough to then start recruiting team members and then trying to build a business. Yeah.
Iyas [00:02:50]:
And that's interesting, actually, the whole confident enough piece. What did that actually mean? What specifically were you thinking? That, okay, now I can do this, or what made you think in a different way from freelancing?
Alex [00:03:03]:
I think there were two things. So one is when you're freelancing, the only person that the downside is going to be on is yourself, really. If you have a business and a team, you then have a responsibility to that business and that team. I think the other thing was I tried working with other freelancers to build a, almost a collective or something, but it hadn't quite worked. And I think what happens is everyone culturally is master of their own destiny. Everyone's not facing in the same direction. People have different motivations. And so what drew me to actually wanting to build a team out was that creating a shared vision of this is what we're working towards, and then trying to sort of bring that into existence.
Iyas [00:03:43]:
Yeah. And that's interesting. I always find the conscious CEO's angst is always, am I going to make payroll at the end of the month? And I think that's one of the things, quite often, that I think stops people from starting a company and stays with them. In one of my companies, when we sold out at 300, the founders were still anxious at 300 people of, will we make payroll at the end of each month? We never failed, but it was always there as a thing that was hanging over your head that you need to make sure that there's 300 people and families that you're responsible for in some way.
Alex [00:04:21]:
Absolutely. And I think that making payroll in the first phase of recruiting the team, I was probably overly focused on making sure we could keep the lights on and make payroll over and above more of the sort of purpose driven stuff that we'll talk about laterally. So I probably came to working with clients in industries that I probably had no real hearts desire to work for, just on the premise of, actually, I just want to make payroll. I want to make sure that I can pay my team and everyone at the end of the month. As a business, we're a long way away from that now, and so we have cash in the bank, we have a long runway in terms of our cash flow forecast. Our pipeline is very, very strong. And so I haven't had that worry about making payroll for six, seven, eight years now. So we're in a very stable position, unfortunate to me, so and there's taking a lot of hard work from a lot of people to get there as well.
Iyas [00:05:14]:
No, absolutely. And and I think that's, you know, it it is a very real thing that, you know, quite often when I work with very altruistic sort of founding CEOs, which I love, by the way, I love the fact that we are in a place where far more many people are thinking about the purpose and the positive contribution that their business can make than 1520 years ago, but quite often haven't really thought through the harsh commercial realities of well, we still do need to make sure that we are earning enough to keep the lights on, to keep everyone paid and all of those things and the decision processes that come with doing that and the risks that you decide whether that you choose to embrace or not. But I'm intrigued. I mean, we've gone there, so let's start that journey. I mean, you mentioned the purpose thing, so why well, A, when did that happen? And B, what was the trigger to making the organization more purposeful?
Alex [00:06:03]:
So I think there have always been a number of sort of disparate threads since 2010, when I started climbing trees, of trying to do good. So I can remember in 2011 there was an organization called Trees for Cities and we donated money to them to plant trees in cities. I think I have an affinity with trees. I obviously must have business called Climbing Trees. And so that was like 2012. We'd always worked with charities and done work for charities at a really incentivized rate. So not the usual agency thing of like discounting it by 10%, 20% or something. We had local charities where we were making a difference to them all the way through. All of that was quite random and there was no sort of cohesive pull through it. It was just random acts of trying to do something positive. I know a couple of B Corp agencies, so one is called Jago and the other is called Voice Communications. And I know the founders of those organizations well, and they advocated really, really well for the B Corp movement. And in conversation with them, I found it attractive. They weren't preachy, they weren't judgy, they were just advocating for a better way of doing business. And then I think it was probably just over three years ago. So going into the pandemic in 2020, we had started Offsetting using a company called Ecology, absolutely amazing business. And I then started looking at the B Impact Assessment, which is a tool set up by B Lab, where you can start looking at your organization in a number of ways, governance, workers, clients, environment and society. And there's lots and lots of different questions. And it got me thinking about how we could actually make a more cohesive approach to how we actually focused as a business. And so foundationally, as a result of going through that process, we are a much better, better business. So in every area, any that you choose mentioned, we're just foundationally a much stronger business now.
Iyas [00:08:09]:
Yeah. And that's an interesting thing. I mean, I think even when one looks at the days of raging capitalism at its worst, and if one takes the complete sort of freedman view of the social responsibility of businesses to its shareholders, I still think the people running businesses quite often had values. It wasn't that they didn't have values and you would often hear about if they decided to show and tell the world their contributions to charities or quite often they wouldn't tell the world, but they still had a core set of values. What I think wasn't really happening was translating that into how they actually run the business. And it was a thing that was saying, me as an individual, as a CEO, as a founder, I'm a good person, I'll make money and I'm going to spend that money in good ways. But when it comes to my business, what I've got to do is make as much money as possible because that's what the business is. It's kind of a separate world. And then you'd find that some of that does start to creep into some of the companies. And I think it's interesting when you were discussing where it was for you that clearly there was a core value set that you had as an individual and clearly that was translating to the way that you guys were doing business. But what hadn't happened is essentially rooting the whole business around it and actually putting it at the heart of it until that B Corp journey started of saying, okay, no, there can be a structure to this. We can be good and do it in a more organized, more structured way and you started going down that route. I mean, that's my interpretation of what I hear. Is that fair?
Alex [00:09:39]:
Yeah, very much so. And I think I'd always been a bit of a rebellious stoke in my younger days and so business as usual and that tired old thing of, oh, it's just business, like ripping people off and that kind of stuff, it never attracted me. I never particularly admired people that were just purely financially successful. The kind of people that I admire are ones that actually do something above and beyond that. And I think there is a common thing, as you alluded to, to make a load of money in life, in business, and then when you get to 55, 60 start, then almost paying for the sins of your former life. And I think that what appeals to me is actually just there's so many problems in society and I think business has the opportunity to step into some of those issues and then a very small way to run your small business. 15 of us in a very small way, start actually trying to do things in a better way because that's what we have control of. We can't control what big business does, we can't control what our government does, but we have full control over what we do. And so I think that was the point where in my own estimation, we had fallen down because there's so many things we should have done better. But as I said, I was just focused on keeping the lights on and making payroll.
Iyas [00:10:51]:
Yeah, I think that's a very normal trajectory, especially in the early days. And it's interesting, you made me smile when you said that you were so sort of rebellious as I am. And I'm like, oh, well, yeah, that doesn't happen with founder CEO as much. We're all a bunch who are completely conformist as we were growing up.
Alex [00:11:10]:
You knew the truth.
Iyas [00:11:11]:
Yeah. I suspect there's going to have to be an X rated version of this, where we hear the truth. So we'll line up the second podcast episode. Brilliant. So you start down that route. You've spoken to a couple of other agency founders who surfaced this approach, the B Lab approach, and you bought into and liked it. Where was your team on all of this? Were they involved in the decision making or what was their journey as a part of this?
Alex [00:11:44]:
Across the team, we have a wide spectrum of people that passionately care. So I've got people that used to be members of Greenpeace or work at the World Wildlife Fund that are passionately aligned to what we're doing. I've got team members who agree with what we're trying to do out in society. And then there's other team members that I don't think they push back against it, but I think that they're not ambivalent towards it. They think it's a net positive, but they're busy focusing on what they want to do in their careers. But then we'll contribute to projects as and when we are doing stuff. So I think we've done things like tree planting, going into local schools to advocate for joining the digital industry, to try and encourage youngsters from different backgrounds to ours into industry. We've planted trees, we're doing a beach cleanup, I think I said, and people will come and join in because it's part of what we do as a team, I think. We're not a democracy here. We're probably best classed as a benevolent dictatorship. And so it was something that I decided, this is what we're doing, this is the path we're going to tread. And then I sort of picked up the ball and then ran with it.
Iyas [00:12:50]:
Yeah, I think that's also quite an interesting pattern there that I do quite often find. I go back to my altruistic sort of founders who come out all full of how the great the world should be and what they're going to do, but don't really build a strong enough foundation of the business to actually allow themselves to do it. And it's quite interesting when sorry, go.
Alex [00:13:12]:
Yeah. And I think for us, we are a financially very stable business, very small. And that ability to have profit allows all the rest of us to then have impact with talking to the team. At the moment, there's a big demonstration that's going to happen on the 21 April, and I'm thinking that's on Friday the 21st should be at work. I'm probably going to let people go and participate in that demonstration if they want to and they'll still get paid and so I think you're able to do a lot of stuff when you have profit in the business. If I was still trying to have purpose and scratching around trying to find clients I think it might then be difficult to actually have any impact and make any changes.
Iyas [00:13:53]:
Yeah, absolutely. I do think profit absolutely is a prerequisite because if you go out of business you're not going to be serving any purpose. That's a fundamental truth. However much you really want to be serving something, if you haven't got the foundation to do it then you're going to be under serving it so there's no point there and also fascinating what you're saying there about team. I mean I am clearly in the whole raison Detroit of the podcast is about purposeful businesses, businesses that put values and purpose at their heart but I think there also does need to be an acceptance that for some people actually what they want is to do an honest day's job. They want to come in, they want to do their job to the best of their ability, get paid fairly for doing that job well, and don't feel like they need to save the planet or save the oceans or whatever. And I think there needs to be an acceptance that for some people, that's fine, provided that they haven't turned that into sort of making things worse. We don't need to turn everyone into a massive convert in order for us to do good.
Alex [00:14:55]:
Absolutely. And there's a certain part with some of our team and then certainly some of our existing clients whereby you do this stuff myself, you talk about these changes that you advocate for the things that you're doing personally and I try and do that in quite a humble way and I think that's then attractive to people. So I know people might be looking at changing electric supplies at home or next car, thinking about getting an electric car or what they do. Charitably and what's important to them in exploring their own conscience. And there's a process to all of that.
Iyas [00:15:23]:
Yeah, and I think you alluded to earlier, even with your own team, that when the culture is like that, that people who join it and don't aren't necessarily there at the start, they start to participate because that's what the culture of the organization is and that carries them. It's interesting, I've seen that in reverse actually sometimes where the cultures carried the CEO. I've seen there was one scenario and I won't mention the company because it's unfair but there is a CEO and they're a well known company who didn't start the company with a very purposeful mind. He saw an opportunity, and that's fine. He saw an opportunity to create a business and he created the business, which was great, and then discovered that some of the messages he could put with the business that were more about positive contribution resonated. So he started doing it initially primarily because it was part of the business opportunity. It wasn't that he particularly felt it, his team corralled behind it, started to drive it more and he ended up being its biggest advocate because he saw the transformation that had happened and what the impact actually was when initially for him, it was just about words. And I found that fascinating because the culture almost turned him around, even though he was the founder and CEO of the business.
Alex [00:16:33]:
Absolutely. And there is that weird sort of symbiotic relationship we did in the workers section in the B impact assessment that prompted so much development of what we do as a business.
Iyas [00:16:44]:
I'm sure.
Alex [00:16:44]:
I think small business, we'd always moved fast, we're quite skimpy on processes and we've changed so much. And I think having built that out now, the unintended consequence of that, and one that I didn't expect is there's a real sort of glue to the business and attraction to the business, where I think the team really care about what they do and what we're doing because they know that they're being treated like adults and really, really well looked after comparably in our industry.
Iyas [00:17:12]:
And so what does it actually mean for the business of your business? So I understand, I mean, you mentioned earlier the sort of charitable and philanthropic things that you get involved in. But in terms of the core running of the business, what has it meant? What makes climbing trees different in terms of how it's applied its values and purpose to the business of what it does?
Alex [00:17:31]:
So we've tried to move with real authenticity. So we've come from a place of doing a few things very roughly, to then trying to tread with some humility and sure footedness in what we do. So we've changed a lot of stuff with how we do business in terms of defaulting to video calls, trying not to drive, trying not to fly with the business, although that's sometimes quite tricky. Change electric supplier, how we get stationary, the computers we buy, so foundationally to try and reduce our carbon footprint. We've made a lot of changes to systems and processes in terms of staff, we now have a diversity target within the business. And that's one where when we first started the impact assessment, we were a team of six white men. We're now 15, we've got five women, we've got people from different backgrounds, different neurodiversities, different ethnicities, and we haven't specifically recruited for those. But what sits behind that is we changed our job descriptions, we changed the language we used, we changed the interview panel. So there's one man, one woman on the panel. I'm not involved in them. And what we're then building is a team that is actually representative of the society that our clients operate in, rather than one that's just like a little mini Russian doll version of me, almost. And so there was a period of introspection that I went through on that, thinking about, well, am I just a really horribly biased individual that's just been recruiting white people? I don't think I am, but I think subconsciously I might have been. And so I had to go and sort of do some soul search and actually work out where I was as an individual for our women in the business. I'm not women. So what we've done is we've set up a women's council where they meet, they can set whatever agenda they want, and they come to me with things that they would like to see the business do. So if that's increased parental pay, putting in place a menopause policy and these kind of initiatives, if it was left to me, I'll probably do something misogynistic, like paint the Ladies Lose Pink or something like that. So what I don't want to do is have a top down thing where I'm making missteps. I'd rather work out what's emotionally important to them and if the business can afford it, try and put these initiatives in place. And so I think it's just we've gone through everything as meticulously as possible, and I think then we became a B Corp in June last year. So we got a nice logo. We can put it on our email footers and put it on our website and talk about it. But I think there's a recognition from me that actually becoming a B Corp that's now the starting point. It's not the end point, it's the start of actually, how do we embed this meaning and purpose into the business in a more foundational way. And so there's a lot of stuff that we're doing in that regard as well, which I can talk about.
Iyas [00:20:15]:
One of the things that I picked up that's all brilliant, by the way, I always find it fascinating that the diversity thing in small companies, it's always an interesting thing because numerically, you look at your business and you recruit two people from one particular ethnic minority, and you've made a 14% difference into the company straight away. And I think it's quite interesting because it's hard, actually. It's not even hard. It's impossible in a 15 person company, a 20 person company, to reflect absolutely the diversity that's within society. And I think it's always interesting to see where you draw that line. And I think what's fascinating with you is that it sounds like what you actually did was let's just look at our processes and try and remove all bias from our selection processes and then let them land where they land.
Alex [00:21:03]:
I think it is absolutely that in the ad industry, there is a very white, middle class, sort of established this is how things are as a subset of that. The search marketing industry that we predominate in is quite also relatively lacking in diversity. We're in Essex. Essex is a very white county. We're in North Essex, which is even whiter. And so, historically, recruiting from a geographical footprint of the business was really tricky. But I think that we've got those reasons for how that's why things were as they were, but I think you can unpick them and actually aim to do better. And so we benchmark ourselves and so we ask the team on a quarterly basis, are we doing enough with regards to diversity, equity and inclusion? We've got all of our senior management here going through a six module training program, which is about an hour and a half per module on unconscious bias and antiracism. And looking at things like this, because if we talk about it and keep on talking about it, that's when we won't just slip back into doing business as usual. We'll always be a little bit uncomfortable with how we're doing things. Driving to do a little bit better.
Iyas [00:22:12]:
Yeah, no. Which is brilliant. I love that. The other area I find with sort of agency and consulting type organization, where the rubber hits the road, apart from the team, is the clients. And I'm intrigued. You guys have got a client screening process, talking about sort of particular sectors that you won't deal with, and also the wonderful statement at the end of it that says that's not a fully inclusive list. You may be a company that does something that on the surface looks great, but if we don't think you're particularly ethical, we're not going to work with you either. How and when did that come about?
Alex [00:22:51]:
So this is a relatively new innovation. In the first stage of the business, if you'd have come in with a crisp five pound note, I'd have found you a chair, sat you down and found something we could do. And that was literally my criteria. We've had to obviously double down on that. We operate in the messy bit in the middle, where some of our clients are purpose driven. So we work with greenpeace, we work with a robotic underfloor insulation company that's changing the carbon footprint of terrorist houses in the UK to reduce the carbon footprint of them, called CUBOT. And we have these clients that are actively making the world a better place and going forward, what we want is to work with the clients that the world of tomorrow needs. That's an active focus of the business and that's where real magic happens, because there's a passion from the team to actually have that impact. So we recognize that our greatest impact is going to be through our clients. We have in the middle a set of clients that are non purpose driven. These are clients that are not like bad businesses, but they're not purpose driven. When we started the B impact assessment, I'm just actually putting together our first impact report for 2022. And I know that there are two sectors that we were working in last year that we didn't want to work in. So we always say this we are not perfect and haven't been. We aren't today and we're not going to be tomorrow, but we're trying to do better. And I think so we had 5% from a company, private car company, so company selling cars, carbon intensive industry. And so we stopped working with them in January 23. And then we had one client that's one and a half percent of the business in 2022 was sports betting software. So if you're in a casino in America and wants to bet in game, they provide the software that provides the numerical calculations for the bets. We are stopping working with them in ten days time. And so a friend of mine works there. I took him out for lunch, and I shifted around uncomfortably and skirted around this, and I said, we're going to have to stop working with you. And he said, I've been expecting it. Why didn't you mention it earlier? I felt terrible about it. I felt really about the whole thing. So then we have no clients in sectors that are actively bad. What we did as a foundational piece with that is we did a survey of the team Google forms. Would you work with companies that took, like, payday loans or adult services or sex toys or, I don't know, fast fashion? Problems with child labor, the confusing one? Problems with child labor? One of my client team clicked. Yes, but yes, I would, I would work with them. And I sort of think, I hope it was a data entry error. And so I used that to get a sense check for where my team were. And then from that, we then built out the client screening policy that you're referencing, and that's something we set live in the last eight weeks. And so now any clients that come in that tick those boxes, we just don't work with them. And I think what we wanted to try and do was have the sort of latitude for there's always every now and then we get approached by companies that do vaping. So you got the tobacco industry that my dad has worked for for 30 years, had a rich pedigree in and or in a plea, passed away from cancer. And so you got the tobacco industry. We wouldn't work with Philip Morris of the world or British American Tobacco. Then you have vaping. So you could say, well, Vaping says it's not bad as smoking. It's better. But what one of the team came to me with, and we spoke about, and I really enjoyed this kind of thing where the team come to me and provoke soul searching. They said Vaping is pretty much in supermarkets, you'll. Get the sweets in the toys section and then the vapes will be next to it. And so the children see the vapes. Children are stealing vapes and they are then like starting to smoke or vape, sorry, at the ages of twelve or 13. And so do we want to support that kind of industry where we actually had to say, well, no, we don't, and so we will not want that to be our legacy or impact on the world. Because I think there's going to be all kinds of problems with regards to the ossification of lungs and the known consequences of vaping in 10, 20, 30 years time. So we've said, no, we're not touching that. And so that's why we have that caveat about we will say no to other stuff as well.
Iyas [00:27:05]:
Yeah. And I think, again, that's always an interesting thing and it's a real dilemma that I think especially sort of agencies and consultancies have. We talk about tobacco and if for instance, I don't know, British American Tobacco rocks up and says, british American Tobacco by the way, is the pet villain in almost all of my podcasts. But Bat turn rock up and say, guys, you know that we are involved in this anti smoking education program for youth where we're trying to teach youth the dangers of smoking and we're setting up a website to drive youth there so that they can see the harms of smoking clearly. We need some marketing assistance to make sure that that's more a higher profile. Would you help us with that? And therein is the dilemma. How do you guys go about processing something like that?
Alex [00:27:57]:
So I think in our qualification process we have a thing about does it feel good, and so that's where it actually feels good with a client. Like I've got some of the team out pitching to a client today and that ostensibly they're fantastic people, really amazing business, they're purpose driven. That's only going to grow as time goes on. It feels good to be pitching to them and we want to work with them. Working with Philip, we've turned over probably quarter of a million pounds of business in the last six months. That falls in the sections you're referencing in the client screening process. So we could be quarter million pounds larger, that's probably two and a half team size bigger, but we'd be losing more than we've gained. And so I think what we'll probably do is go through a period of having some existential angst. We chew it over and then there's probably two or three people in the team where we just get together and say, well actually, should we do this? Yes or no? And we're in the very fortunate position where at the moment we have in our pipeline too much in terms of inbound activity. And so there would be a criteria whereby actually bat for good, if we call it that, would be probably at the bottom of that list and we'd focus on other priorities and I love that.
Iyas [00:29:11]:
Does it feel good? Because I think sometimes we've become so data driven, we've become so smart, goals driven, that we sometimes forget some things. You can't absolutely measure that way and you just have to go with what does it feel like, what does your gut tell you? Interestingly on that particular one because obviously I've had to go through similar soul searching in terms of terms of what would I do? One of the places I get to is I think if the core of the business and its business model is a thing that's doing harm, then whatever the project is, I'm not going to get involved in it. And that may be too black and white, but I find for me it helps because I look at something like that initiative. And in case listeners don't know that the tobacco industry does have an anti smoking education program which in several of their internal memos have been leaked to say explicitly that these are not authentic to us, but we need to go through them in order to make people like us. But they do have them and they do have just like the betting industry has the charity, the anti betting charity or the betting support charity that they fund. But all of those things are clearly only there because their core business does what it does in the first place. And so for me, the line I've drawn, and it's never a black and white line, however hard you try and make it black and white, you always find gray somewhere and that's the beauty of humanity. But for me, the line is, is the core of the business one that does harm? Because then anything else is kind of supporting that and so I then don't go there.
Alex [00:30:47]:
Yeah, absolutely. And that does absolutely make sense.
Iyas [00:30:50]:
And by the way, I'm not saying that as if that's the best answer because I have heard very convincing pleas from others who would approach it differently. But for me that's the one that.
Alex [00:30:59]:
Works and I think there's always degrees, aren't there? So it's like with the car industry, you know that the car industry is in bed with big oil and, like, Shell, BP, those kind of guys. But then you've got the electric cars, and so the electrification of the car industry is probably a net positive. But then you've got the consequences of the electric cars, so you've got the lithium mining, the materials used, the additional tire pollution that comes from them. And so there are always unintended consequences of another decision that you can't sort of work out on.
Iyas [00:31:31]:
And then the extra dimension I'd be intrigued whether this comes up is that is individuals within the company and their own perspective. So you did the survey, which is great, which sort of helped you to come up with the list. I mean, one of the companies I supported did a similar exercise, but one of the things they didn't come up with was alcohol, and alcohol is not on your list either. However, they had a couple of Muslims in the company who they won a tobacco I'm sorry, tobacco, an alcohol company's work and the Muslims just did not want to work on it, which, again, I understand, if you're a devout Muslim, that would be an issue for you. When you look at your list and how you come up with it, do you provide leeway within the team for people who may look at I mean, you've got meat and dairy industries proven to be ones that are negative impact for the environment. But you may have some people who absolutely think yes, that may be the case, but really, it doesn't mean we need to get rid of the industries as a whole. So I'd quite like to work on a so it can go both ways. Do you have those kind of nuances to deal with?
Alex [00:32:37]:
Yes, so we would do so we have vegans in the business that wouldn't want to work with meat companies or sausage companies, for example, and so I would be sensitive to that. So if someone's personal beliefs were so strong that that's what they stood up for in life, I would support those beliefs and so I wouldn't want the business for them to have to sacrifice their personal values and what they hold to be true for work. I'll try and support that. There are obvious, there are obviously going to be nuances. I don't believe we've got any meat eaters that are so ardent in the business that they're fighting for meat to go out and win the Walls account or something like that, but I think we just try and be sensitive to what's important to people and I think I'm a vegetarian myself, cheese is my downfall. Once a year at Christmas, I will overindulge in cheese, but aside from that, I'm pretty much vegan. I try and get like I buy cheese from independent dairies where the animals have a decent quality of life and they're not treated too terribly. But, yeah, the meat industry and the animal industry in the UK, especially now we're out of the EU and the American influence is coming over, I think there's a lot of poor animals treated terribly.
Iyas [00:33:50]:
I could go on for I love this stuff and I love getting into the meat of it to follow the method we've just been talking about, but I love diving into the detail of it could go on forever. But I am aware of time and I'm intrigued just at a high level, sort of looking back through it. Are there missteps and learnings along the way that you've had in terms of going down this route that you'd look at and say, well, if I'd known that, it may have made our journey a bit easier when we embarked on it.
Alex [00:34:19]:
Yeah, I think I would have liked to have done this much, much sooner. I would like to have probably slowed down in some of the earlier phases of the business, been a little bit less busy and made more considered decisions. So I look back at a lot of the decisions I made. So we moved offices four years ago. I would have said to someone on the team, can you go and sort out the electric? But I didn't say and make sure it's renewable. So they sorted out the electric. So tick box ticked, but it wasn't renewable. And so for a period of time, the business was not run on renewable energy. That's just lazy and poor thinking on my part. And there is a lot of that that we've unearthed going through this process. And so that's why there's a constant reevaluation of everything that's got us to today is great, but we can relook at it and then try and do better. And so I think there is that. We've got a number of initiatives that we're undertaking to actually try and improve us and push forward further from today as well.
Iyas [00:35:12]:
Okay, start earlier, be a bit more thorough, if you will, with some of the thinking and the impacts, the consequences of those thinking. And it's always a thing when you're the MD or CEO that the phrase always uses, that leaders carry megaphones. We say something and people hear it a lot louder than we ever intend to say it. And that carries consequences, including I'm just going to get you, you asked me to get find the electrics, I'm going to find you the cheapest electrics because I'm sure that's what you want.
Alex [00:35:40]:
Right, job done. And so now what we're doing to talk to that, we have a monthly management meeting. We have environmental and social responsibility to be considered at every phase in that agenda. So we're talking about operations, HR, clients. We consider the environment and society in those decisions as well. And that's then going to be minute and within the sort of structure of the business at a very high level. We're also going through the process of rewriting everyone's job descriptions and we're empowering the team to make sure that within their roles, they have very clear responsibility for managing our impact on society and the environment within the purview of their job roles. And if there are conflicts, they can come to me and we can talk about them. So if that's working from home, if that's recycling an old machine or whatever it is, we consider our impact at those stage. So we're trying to make sure that that's then baked into what we do as a business.
Iyas [00:36:32]:
Yeah, brilliant. It is a successful company. What's your view on where you want to go with it? What is climbing trees over the next few years? Where does it go?
Alex [00:36:42]:
So I think wanting to work with clients, that the world of tomorrow needs. That's our big ambition and aim. So that could be working with more charities, working with commercial companies that are selling stuff that is in a really considered way, companies operating in the circular economy, climate, tech, green tech, people doing wind farms, solar panel companies. What the world of tomorrow needs? Those are the ones that we want to actually try and support and help achieve commercial success.
Iyas [00:37:13]:
When you look at what you want out of climbing trees over the sort of long term, is that more what you measure or do you look at growth or what are the primary drivers for you in terms of where you see it going?
Alex [00:37:26]:
So in terms of commercial ambitions for the business, we want to double in size in the next two years and we are on track to do that. We'll get to there and then probably then set another target to take the team that we have on that journey with us and support them in their development. 100% of the team here had training last year. We're getting people speaking at industry conferences, on podcasts, webinars and so to support this team in their career developments and sort of move them forward and then ultimately look after our clients and make sure that they are commercially successful. And so we're a performance marketing business, so each month we have to earn our seat at the table with our clients demonstrating a return on investment, otherwise there's no reason to have us around. We're nice people to have around, but I think the commercial success must underpin all that we do.
Iyas [00:38:14]:
Yeah. And I love that. So we're talking here about the two axes of growth and getting increasingly more purposeful and looking at the businesses that the world needs tomorrow. And that gets into a lovely virtuous cycle if you get those two right because you are increasingly getting you're winning more business in the business that should be growing tomorrow, which will give more opportunities to grow a business and it becomes a beautiful cycle.
Alex [00:38:38]:
Absolutely. I think what we're doing is it's never been as easy for us to recruit staff as is at the moment. So we have people wanting to come and work for us based on our positioning and what we're trying to do. And so people that are minded to that there is a generation in the workforce that don't just want to work for the man, do a nine to five, get a paycheck, get a bonus, they want to work in an environment where they're actually doing something positive about the problems the world has. That sort of then layers because then their day to day is linked to having impact and doing something positive above and beyond just doing business as usual.
Iyas [00:39:11]:
Brilliant. Brilliant. Well Alex, as I said, I could go on for hours with this, I love diving into this stuff, but thank you so much for making the time to talk me through the journey that you guys have been on and are still on, where do people go to find you if they want to find you? Or climbing trees.
Alex [00:39:29]:
So we're at climbingtrees.com and I'm Alex Hollyman on LinkedIn.
Iyas [00:39:33]:
What a fantastic ur. Nailed. Congrats on that.
Alex [00:39:38]:
It was quite surprisingly simple back in the day.
Iyas [00:39:40]:
But, yeah, my sister managed to nail her first name, which I thought was quite impressive. But there we go. So, Alex, thank you very much for coming on. Really enjoyed the conversation and good luck with the journey and where it goes.
Alex [00:39:53]:
Fantastic. Thanks.
