Interview With Ian Harris, Agency Hackers Founder

Ian Harris is founder of Agency Hackers, a community that helps established agencies grow with help from fellow founders and leaders, sharing strategies and receiving support from other reputable businesses.

Ian was kind enough to answer questions about how Agency Hackers got started, how the community has developed over the years, how he stays motivated and more…

Can you tell me a bit about your professional background?

When I was young, I wanted to be a journalist. Eventually I realised there is no money in journalism and it’s not actually as glamorous as I thought. It only took me 10 years to realise that.

One day I noticed jobs being advertised with the word “content manager” in them.

They all paid twice when I was earning as a journalist, but seem to involve doing about a quarter of the work. That’s how I got into the agency world.

What sparked the idea for Agency Hackers and how has that idea evolved over the years?

There are two versions of this story. There’s the tidy lie and the honest mess.

The tidy lie is that I wanted to create a community where agency leaders could meet each other and learn from them. That’s a kind of ‘neat’ version of the actual truth.

The honest mess is that I wanted to start my own business, and I knew that if I could build an audience of say 1,000 people there would somehow be money there somehow.

I chose agency leaders as an audience because:

• They’re quite easy to find
• They are generally fun people
• They have similar problems
• They have money
• They don’t have to ask anybody else to spend money on stuff.

Starting any community is tough, how did you go about approaching the first wave of agencies to come on board?

At first Agency Hackers wasn’t a community really. For a long time it was just an email newsletter.

It didn’t even have a website or a logo. I’m not sure even had a name for a while. 

Eventually as I grew the newsletter I started asking people what they would buy from me and it turned out to be conferences and events and it took off from there.

Running a community is actually quite difficult.

A lot of communities aren’t actually communities – they’re just dead chatrooms. So many people try to start communities and give up after a few months.

The thing is. you can’t rely on people talking to each other. You have to have smart people watching what’s going on, stirring the pot and surfacing stories.

It’s actually closer to running a newspaper that is a community, that’s the odd thing. 

At Agency Hackers, most of our employees are trained journalists. If you try to run a community without having any editorial experience, it doesn’t really gel.

What value do agencies get out of being a member?

Agency Hackers is part sounding board for agency leaders and part training for their teams.

One payment of £200 per month covers the entire agency.

Agencies get access to two or three online events per week for their team and for senior leadership.

They also get access to a leadership development program and coaching groups where you can sit down with other agency leaders and work on your strategy.

What are your goals with the live events and what do you think makes a great conference?

We run more live events than anybody in this space and I think we are getting pretty good now.

Our events are bigger than others, in better venues, and they are very thoroughly researched.

You don’t just get consultants and freelancers standing up and trying to sell you stuff.

Instead you hear from actual agency people who have solved problems in an interesting way.

That makes it a lot harder to curate because you have to find these people, and then coach them on the best way to tell their story. It’s not just a matter of shaking somebody’s hand and then they’ll rock up with six top tips on a slide deck.

We always get quite detailed feedback on our events – which is painful sometimes.

For example our last two live events were rated 7.5 or something by attendees. That’s not bad but it’s not amazing.

The thing is – MOST conferences are a 7 out of 10, it’s just that the organisers don’t realise it because they aren’t asking for feedback.

That’s why we were so chuffed this month when our agency operations conference was rated 9 out of 10 for the first time.

That’s a direct result of us getting feedback from people and putting it into practice.

For example, some people told us the facilitation from our team wasn’t good enough.

So we all went out and got facilitation training, and now people comment on how good it is!

Have there been any surprising hurdles or challenges you’ve had to over come you didn’t anticipate?

We don’t really get any surprises.

The reason for that is we’re so obsessed with finding out what people want – and giving them it.

The way I see it, if we always know what people want in our audience, and if we always just give them that, we won’t have any surprises and life will be good.

When did you decide to commit to Agency Hackers full-time and what was making that decision like?

When I started Agency Hackers I had a full-time job. It was about three years before I quit to do Agency Hackers full time.

The problem with leaving to start a business is that you have no money, so with Agency Hackers I wanted to wait until I was making more money from it than my actual job. I didn’t quite get to that point, but not far off it.

What actually happened to push me into leaving was two things:

I ran out of holiday. We were running so many events I physically didn’t have the holiday left to be able to do it.

We ran one conference in October 2019 that I didn’t feel was very good. The speakers weren’t very prepared and it just felt a bit lame.

I realised that to do a good job I was gonna have to go full-time.

Agency hackers has really grown over the years, how do you see Agency Hackers developing in the coming years?

One of the things we need to do is start behaving like a proper specialist media business.

That means figuring out how to work with sponsors better, make our live events even bigger, making our membership stronger, and also going into the USA.

One of the things that’s really put us on the map is our Ibiza Super Summit.

This was just a crazy idea I had one night after two glasses of wine, but it’s turned into the biggest event we do.

It happens at the end of September, in Ibiza. This year will have 200 people there. Next year we are going for 400.

We’ve actually created the biggest business conference on the island of Ibiza completely by accident!

Over the next few years we want to grow it into like a Cannes festival for independent agencies.

But, erm, in Ibiza.

Running your own business, and especially one organizing live events, is tiring. What keeps you motivated?

I just keep thinking if we can give people what they want, our life will be easy.

Whenever something feels hard or I’m not sure what the next move is, it’s normally because we’ve forgotten what people actually want.

Anytime you get that feeling of pushing water uphill, it’s time to speak to people and figure out what they actually need.

From your experiences of being close to a community of successful agencies, what tips would you give to new or small agencies who are looking to grow?

Hang around with bigger ones.

I work in a coworking space with a lot of people who run small design agencies that are basically the other and a couple of freelancers.

Or they’re a small UX consultancy doing about 200K or 300K in revenue.

That’s fine, but you will always be that size if you don’t hang around people who are bigger.

Agency Hackers is approaching £1 million in revenue. The only reason for that is that – because I run Agency Hackers – I spend all my time in a world where it’s normal and expected to be a £1 million business.

Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. That’s either from the Bible or Judge Judy – I don’t remember.

➡️ Find out more about Agency Hackers and their upcoming online and in-person events.