Mat Bennett

I help leaders of technical agencies build better agencies through Coaching, Mentoring and Consultancy.

Running a digital agency can be difficult. Whilst the demand for digital services has increased, as has the competition both for clients and talent. It can take all of your energy just to stand still, meaning that growth can sometimes come painfully slowly.

I have run digital agencies for 25 years and sold my own agency in 2021. I’ve learned a few things along the way, often deliberately, but also by making some expensive mistakes. I now use that experience to help other agency leaders hit their goals, grow their businesses and make fewer mistakes of their own along the way.

Agency Advisor, Mentor & Consultant

Open Awards

Board Trustee

Insticator

VP Ad Product Innovation

OKO Digital

OKO are an established and respected digital agency with a results centred approach. We are also the first UK company to be award Google AdSense Certified Partner status giving us specialist insight in  the online publishing space. 

As well as leading the company through it's current growth, I am actively involved in project planning for clients and in continuing to improve the AdSense and wider online Advertising skillset of the OKO team.

Founder & Managing Director

I help agency leaders achieve more of what matters for them and their business and to remove hurdles that slow their progress. 

There’s a trap that too many agency founders fall into. We start businesses because we want freedom, independence and a better lifestyle then somehow sacrifice exactly those three things trying to build a business that will never give them back. We become trapped by the businesses we build. 

Your business should be a tool to give you the lifestyle you want. Your lifestyle should not be dictated by what the business demands. That often requires growth, but growth is an important tool that can be applied to help us meet out goals, rather than a goal in itself, and the journey often starts with understanding what leaders really want from their businesses. 

I work with agency leaders to avoid these traps and to help them get them free when they fall into them. I do that through Mentoring, Coaching and general advisory support. 

WHAT I OFFER
* Regular advisory / mentoring support
* Problem solving workshops
* Strategic marketing support for technical agencies
* Non Exec Directorship
* Consultancy on other projects that are interesting, challenging and fun!


WHY ME?
* 25 years leading a profitable agency, culminating in a successful trade sale
* Experience through both boom and bust
* Business transformation success
* Great problem solver and big picture thinker, bringing an additional leadership brain to your organisation
* The benefit of both experience and hindsight

WORKING TOGETHER

My style is relaxed and focused on bringing real change in agencies to better align the business with the goals of the individuals that own them and helping them gain traction to bring about change. I put a lot into every client relationship I have, so do not always have the capacity to take on new clients, but I’d love to have a chat if you are interested.  

DM me to get the conversation started.

If you have every wondered why my typing seems to get even worse after about 4pm, then I have to admit that the cause is  too much Charlie.

Meet Charlie. My usually antisocial cat who feels the need to curl up in my arms and adore me for a couple of hours from about 4pm most days.

Agency Founder (exited). Now supporting other agencies & their founders

Come on LinkedIn. Where are the brand and creative people talking about Mamdani's election branding?
It's so standout compared with the "corporate nationalist" style you see so much of in US politics. Brave. I'd love to read some teardowns by people more brand literate than me.  
Don't make me do it. I already stopped myself phrases like "Bollywood meets the Bodega" and referencing the mark of Zorro in this post. No one needs my take.

The first Nano Day that Kelly Molson and I ran together in October received 100% five star feedback from those who attended and was rated as EXCELLENT value by all, so how could we not run another?? 

Nano day is a day of training, insight and networking exclusively for the tiny agencies (1-3 FTE) who so often get overlooked. The day covers strategy, new business and finances specifically through the lens of what is proven to work for small agencies; drawing in mine and Kelly's experience working with other agencies as well as leading our own. 

We've secured two dates for next year already: London in January and our first "Nano up North" in Leeds in April.  It's a great value day anyway, but we have a limited number of discounted early-bird tickets available for each date for the fast moving bargain hunters amongst you.

"You don't work Mondays Mat. What do you do on that weekday off?"
"Well, today I am going to try to get through on the Phone to Virgin Media"

New Agency insights incoming! 
The first part of the Q4 results is now landing in email inboxes and it's all been tidied up for this quarter. 
In this email: How agencies are fairing RIGHT NOW plus a look at founder dependency.  Results on our deeper looked at payment terms and debtors coming soon. 

If you are on the list check your email this afternoon and let me know how the new format works for you. If you aren't and would like a free quarterly reports stuffed with anonymised insights from other agency leaders, let me know!

When Kelly Molson and I decided to team and deliver a day of content and connections aimed specifically as the smallest of agencies, we agreed one criteria for success: Those who attended had to feel that they got great value from it.

Ticket price is one thing, but for tiny agencies the real cost is founder time. A day out of the business isn't just a ticket and a train fair, it's as much as 20% of billable capacity for a whole week. We both not-only support other Nano agencies, but run tiny businesses of our own, so understand how important it is to get value from anything that takes you "off the tools" for a day. 

So, how did we do delivering that value?  I'm pleased to say that every person who attended rated the day as 5/5 on value - check some of the great comments they left in these slides.  

The last slide has coming dates for Leeds and London

Every 2 weeks I email out one simple idea for Agency Leaders to try. I've been collecting them from client calls for a while and am sharing one every other week to email subscribers. 

I've just written up next weeks. This one is a piece of "leadership discipline" I have used myself (and still use) to get more of the important things done. 

I've already had conversations with people who have changed things in their business off the back of the first two.  Let me know if you are not on the list and would like to be.

I don't usually care much for Christmas adverts. In fact, I rarely even see one. I was absolutely gripped by the Keira Knightly / Joe Wilkinson ad from Waitrose & Partners  though.  It needs to be its own series.

What on earth does an Agency Advisor do? November Edition.

I shared a post like this last month where I commented that the theme was very much "People Problems." November was rather different so I thought I'd do it again.

If you believe the LinkedIn doom-scroll, there is no work out there. Yet, almost every agency I’m working with is busy (and we are confident in plans to change that of the other). The current headaches aren't "how do we get clients," it's "how do we deliver this without breaking?"

Here are the themes from a month focused on operations and future-proofing:

Theme 1 : UNBLOCKING FOUNDERS
A big focus last month was been bottleneck-busting. I’ve been working with a small agency founder to systemise and offload the low-value admin that is eating their week. The demand is there, but the founder capacity was the obstacle. We’re freeing them up to get back to their highest value: strategic insight.

We’ve also been getting proactive. I’ve run exercises with several founders to map out the "inevitable but forgotten" demands of the year, putting processes in place now so they aren't fire-fighting later.

Theme 2:  VISION & TRANSITION
It’s hard to balance the long-term view with the daily grind, but it’s necessary. I’m currently supporting a client developing a new sub-brand to target more valuable work - navigating that tricky space of building a pipeline while delivering the day job.

Elsewhere, I’m helping a business at a leadership crossroads. We are moving from a period of change into a clear vision of where they actually want to take the business, and the tactical plan of how to get there.

Theme 3: CULTURE & CASH
With a larger client, we are tackling the "glue" problem. How do you improve coordination and adhesion in a largely remote team during a transition? We’re pushing a mix of hard systems and soft "nudges" to build that internal culture.

A deep dive into pricing with another agency uncovered a solid revenue opportunity: bringing underpaying legacy clients up to sustainable rates. It’s essentially "free" money, but it requires a delicate touch to manage the transition.

EVENTS
Feedback from the first "Nano Agency Day" I ran with Kelly Molson was fantastic, so we aren't slowing down. We’ve just booked two new dates for the new year (London and Leeds). It’s rare to find dedicated strategy and new-biz support for the smallest founder-led agencies, so I’m excited to keep this rolling.

NEW STARTS
One of the benefits of working flexibly without long-term lock-ins is that I get to rotate and refresh my partnerships. I’m prepping now to kick off with a new client in December (in person, for a rare treat!) and a pair of young co-founders in January. 

THE USUAL
The background noise is constant: keeping marketing consistent when founders are busy, cutting through AI hype to find practical workflow gains, and general sanity-checking.

November takeaway? The work is there. The challenge is building the machine to handle it.

I think northerners must just be more weather-hardy than us "Soft Southerners".  

Last week Kelly Molson and I announced new dates for Nano Day (Our day of learning, thinking and networking for tiny agencies) in both London and Leeds.  Leeds is smashing it with the early bird tickets being snapped up pretty quickly now.  I think our London Nano agencies must wrapped up in warm blankets and hiding from the cold spell and the bookings are much slower to start. 

London : 29th January
Leeds : 23rd April

Strategy, New Business and Financial sanity for leaders of tiny (1-3 FTE) agencies. Details at nanoday .co.uk (which i dare not link for fear of upsetting the algo gods).

Posted from under a warm blanket of course.

I think I am filing this under "Clever, but strange for now". Google's NotebookLM can now create a video overview from any source in just one click. I experimented by having it create this video from my latest LinkedIn Newsletter.  

If you can get over the absolute cheeseball AI presenter, I think it's pretty good. I already sometimes use the podcast feature to quickly understand large texts, and I can see this being more useful for that than for content creation... for now at least.  That said, I am sure people are already plugging in other people's content and turning it into social media videos. 

It would be very easy for them to dial up the visuals and dial down the cheese and turn this into something borderline useful.  It's probably a way off being customer facing, but I can see it already having value for internal use if your team is more cheese-tolerant than I am .  What do you think?

Black Friday week: The start of the season where unsubscribe links are treated like festive decorations. Pretty an all, but serving no practical purpose.

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