Episode #17

A tale of two agencies with Atomic Smash - Behind the Screens #8

This week Nic and Nat sit down (remotely, of course) with Piers and Dave from Atomic Smash – a Bristol-based specialist WordPress and WooCommerce studio. CookiesHQ and Atomic Smash are nearly the same age, and have had very similar journeys towards similar goals, so they dig deep into this alignment.

Piers and Dave started Atomic Smash fresh out of university, where they’d met and become best friends. They share their experience of building a business with someone you have a close relationship or friendship with, and share their tips for ensuring that dynamic stays healthy.

This interview is right off the back of Atomic Smash’s 10th birthday and a fresh rebrand – Nic and Nat quiz Piers and Dave on the the what and the why, and how this new look goes beyond the cosmetic and puts their brand values front and centre.

The group share their experiences of working together in the early days of each agency, as well as taking on that first member of staff, moving through to how they’re presently engaged in growing and strengthening a team remotely.

Finally, they close by reflecting on how difficult it is to avoid the pitfalls of comparing yourself to other agencies as you grow, and their plans for the next 10 fantastic years of Atomic Smash.

Join the conversation on the CookiesHQ Twitter. Head over to LinkedIn to find out more on Dave and Piers.

Read the transcript

Nic:
Hey podcast. Another special episode today that we will file on our behind the screen series. Today Nat and I catch up with Piers and Dave from the amazing Bristol Bay’s WordPress Development Studio, Atomic Smash. Atomic Smash and Cookies are roughly the same age, and we both have the same aspiration for our respective agencies. Piers and Dave they’ve started their journey fresh out of uni, where they met and became best friends. So today we talk a lot about the dynamics of running a business with your friends or your spouse for Nat and I, and the various path of running an agency. As usual give us a follow on Apple podcasts and Spotify. I hope you really enjoyed the episode, and don’t hesitate to continue the conversation on LinkedIn or Twitter. All the links are gonna be in the show notes. Sit down, listen, and enjoy bye.

Nic:
Hello and welcome to new episode of the Tough Cookies podcast. Today with me is David or are David and Piers from the amazing, amazing Atomic Smash Studio in Bristol, how are you guys?

David:
Pretty good thank you, yeah very good.

Nic:
Cool Piers you okay?
Piers:
I’m very well, thank you. Yep very good.
Nic:
All niced up and tied up and nice tie with you today, as usual.
Piers:
Friday tie day, that’s how we roll at Atomic Smash.
Nic:
And obviously I have Nathalie with me as well today.
Nath:
Hello?
Nic:
You okay?
Nath:
Yeah, I think so.
No tie for me either.
Nic:
No tie, for me either. We used to have well, we wanted to have like a fancy Friday at some point and everybody had to dress nicely on a Friday kind of thing. We never did it. I just wish I would. So this today episodes is basically a very special for me. Like I just, I love what Atomic Smash Studio does, I love everything that it represents, and I love the work that you guys do. And I’m very excited to talk as part of a behind the screen series, to talk about what’s going on in Atomic Smash. How you both run the studio, and how you’ve started your journey. Obviously we share some, we share some parallel between us. We’ve both been going for nearly 10 years. We both created the company with somebody that was important for us at some point. So, I think I will let you guys present Atomic Smash and present you both now, and then we can talk about what makes things tick today.

David: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, you know from our side, we basically, both were on the same university course. We both went to University of Plymouth. We kinda met almost on the first day of university. So the kind of classic thing is a big group of people, you get paired off in groups of like eight or 10 people. We kinda got put in the group and with the course that we actually went on, it was, it’s a kind of very mixed strange course. So there’s lots of different topics we covered. We covered things like programming. So we had to do a bit of light artificial intelligence around the whole course we had to do Java, we had to learn FLASH. We also had to learn a bit of drawing and we had to build musical instruments and learn how to solder so there’s a real mix. And kind of when you went through the course, it kind of made sense to work in groups. So there’s probably about groups of four or five people. And throughout the whole of the course, Piers and myself were in one of those groups. So we kinda just worked together throughout the whole of university. So when it came to the end of uni, it was really just a case of, cause we kind of knew we work well together. Just seeing, just trying out and actually seeing whether we could’ve get going with building an agency or just basically just try it. And we’re in a position where definitely leaving university you kind of don’t have much to give up. You’re not giving up a big career or an actual salary when you’re sort of starting something directly from uni. So for us, it was a kind of sensible transition. And as it was not that much of a burden to try and start out at that point. Kind of it fails, we could just run and get a job. That’s kind of the mindset. Is there anything else you wanna add there Piers?

Piers:
Not immediately, I guess, as we kind of like, meander a few conversations I definitely got some bits and bobs to add as well. So yeah kind of, I guess, jumping to that. Atomic Smash so yeah. We’ve been in Bristol running for 10 years. And in that time we’ve evolved as a company. So when then first started, we kind of did everything. And then now the position we’re at is we’re a WordPress WooCommerce technology specialist agency, helping businesses to improve and evolve their WordPress WooCommerce sites, through kind of longterm partnerships and relationships and that side of things. And we’re an agency of 15 people and we’ve got the disciplines through UX and strategy to design and most of our team are developers, probably similar to yourselves in that sense.

Nath:
Yeah I guess very very similar, except we don’t work with the same technology and we Ruby shop.

Yes, it does feel like that I remember when.

Piers:
Yeah when we first met the similarities were kind of quite scary really, I guess in a way, ’cause you, and also you, they make like similar size you’ve kind of grown and at kind of a similar rate as well. And I think our values and ambitions are really closely aligned. Yeah like you said different technology stacks.
Nic:
Yeah I think that’s where the parallel is extremely close is not only, we obviously, as any agency, we follow the same path and like, we kind of like go in parallel with that. But we very much align in what we believe in and we’ve very much align in the values as well for both companies like the team, the web itself, the web as a platform and the passion for like an accessible web and a web that can be used by everybody. And I think we very much align on those kind of core values from the company on both sides. So you guys basically created the company’s out of uni together. As I presume at the time there were either two mindsets and you don’t know where that was going or you had a world domination kind of end game idea maybe. It’s always one or the other. Like there’s, there’s never a mellow like, “oh we will see.” But you were, I guess, best friend at the time. Is that right to consider that best friends? Or were you just good friends?

Piers:
I’d say very good friends is how I’d put it definitely.

David:
Yeah I know, I think going back to kind of where I was saying, we had that almost working relationship to begin with anyway. We kind of knew how to work together and to get stuff done. That was the kind of key part to it. Yeah I think if there’s kind of that ability, we basically how that practice at uni to kind of go through these things and have, even though we didn’t, we don’t really run up against each other that often it’s more having the things or when stuff actually used to get done to a deadline and things need to happen. We can get, we actually do it. We knew we could do it and actually get our sources.

Piers:
Yeah, I don’t think that at uni we ever did a project, just the two of us, I think there was
David:
No that’s true actually.
Piers:
We were always in like a group of three, group of four or maybe or like individual.
So basically it was an individual project and I was just getting Dave to help me on the side.

Nic:
There was always the referee between you then.
Piers:
Kind of, I think even that we’ve never really needed one that third person, fourth person’s always just been kind of like as an equal. And if you don’t need to like a referee and such it’s just been part of the team. And we also lived together at uni as well. So we knew that we could do projects together and live together and socialize together without kind of wanting to kill each other.
Nath:
That’s a good sign when you start a company together.
Piers:
Yeah, it does feel like that’s a good like acid test to if you can work with somebody.
Nic:
Did you enter any kind of early days conversations of like, “hey, look, we may run a business together. It may not work. How do we make sure that it doesn’t taint or erode the friendship between us?” Like, have you had that kind of conversation or have you had some sort of like six month idea milestone and we see where we go or it was much more like, “we’re excited and off we go.”

Piers:
Not really, no. I think our kind of first, like director’s meeting happened after about two years of, like running the business. We were just working and just too busy almost and like kind of just enjoying ourselves to in a way, to worry about that kind of thing. I think because we’ve never had much friction at uni, we just probably felt like we didn’t really need to have those conversations. And we’re both from similar family backgrounds and got parents who’ve run their own businesses. And I think our mindsets are just kind of naturally quite similar. And I think we’re really aligned in the way of like work ethic and money. And like money’s a massive taboo for loads of people. And like, I think maybe because we were in the same boat and same age, we didn’t have different monetary aspirations. If one of us was like 30 and the other one was 50, one’s got five kids already and like two houses then you’re gonna need to earn different money. But we were so similar that it just felt kind of fine. And we were both quite happy to not earn much to start with as well. And just kind of crawled along a little bit until we, till we got going. So yeah, we had like, we never had to have those conversations really at first.

David:
Yeah and from like a friendship side, I even feel like even, if everything exploded after six months, it would only probably take a couple months we’d probably just be talking again. Like I don’t think there’d be any sort of real worries with that. I think there’s too much issue that sort of just you know, for us to stop talking or just not get on I think. Yeah, it would have to be one of us literally killed the other one to actually stop continue talking yeah.

Nic:
And so how did the growth start? Because obviously beginning you’re nimble, you do everything yourself. And then at some point it’s like, okay, there’s a business here. Like we are actually profitable and therefore we could, there is a business, like there, if there is a profit, there is a business. How did you decide to grow? Did you have plans originally or did you again, like go with the flow and then at some point decided on plans later on?
David:
I think for us, it was really just a case of, we got to the point where we couldn’t actually deliver the amount of work we had, and I was pretty much a bottleneck on the development side. I think Piers was probably a bit less, less of the bottleneck at that point. But we really were just didn’t have the hours in the day to deliver what we needed to do. So, it was a natural progression to start employing people just to handle those things. And that, I think from our perspective, we didn’t necessarily want to, cause we, our projects and the project sizes we were dealing with, if we were just to get a freelancer for short amounts of time, all of our sort of profits would have just been thrown down the drain. So, it made sense to, you know, have this fixed cost for a month and then actually, you know, if there’s way more predictable and we can then get a project to support us. And I thought that and then, kind of started naturally happening from there. So I think for us, we could have probably, I could’ve got our first employee sooner, and we were definitely, you know, we’re both overworked at that point. We were working incredibly long hours and putting a lot into the business to get to that point. But it really, yeah, I feel like that, it was almost a necessity that we had to do it. Otherwise we just have to get up the work.

Piers:
I like to refer to those days as the good old days. When just me and Dave and we had like total control and freedom over like how we worked and when we worked and everything like that. As soon as you grow, as you know, it’s such a different ball game. Like so much more responsibility, so much less freedom. And we didn’t really, maybe we didn’t think about it as much as we should’ve done when we made those decisions. We waited quite a long time, like two years before we took on our first employee. But like before then I was, I used to do like, take an afternoon off to go and do like drawing classes at the RWA. And I used to volunteer for the Bristol dogs and cats home, like half a day a week. And as soon as you’ve got staff in my opinion, all that stuff just goes out the window. It’s like, you have to be like a role model obviously and you can’t just disappear off to do random, seemingly random activities.

Nic:
I’ve been told there’s a way back when you get a bit bigger in size,
There is a moment where actually when you have more senior people in the team, the freedom from the founders comes back a bit if they want it.

David:
I think that’s a real goal for us now. I think that’s the future in our sort of growth internally it’s so basic gets that point. ‘Cause of kind of what we’ve heard is as well, you know in the longevity of the journey.

Well let’s hope they were right.

Nath:
I mean you can do it, obviously you can’t really take the person be always out and not seem to look like you’re working. But I do think you know, you need a couple of hours or an afternoon here and there because I don’t know you want to take some time off then you’re allowed to. And I mean, you’re at the end of the day. I mean, I would say that because I do it and I will go for brunch with my friends once a month and that’s it and that’s my Friday morning. I’m going out for brunch, whoever, and it’s in the calendars, like Nat’s off, that’s it that’s my time. But then I put in the hours, the rest of the time. I work really late some days because I have to. So I think, you know what, I kind of deserve it, and I know it’s working hours, but you know, you’re not staying up till one o’clock to get stuff done so why not? So, you know, there’s a bit of balance. And also if you’re flexible with them and quite open, open and honest and it’s all about the culture I think how you do it. And if tomorrow they need you know, a very long lunch to go and do something then give it to them and they’ll be happier, I guess.

Piers:
I totally agree.

Nath:
How did employing people and actually having a bigger team, how did that impact your relationship? Did you fall into roles a bit more as in you know, someone’s more responsible to manage the staff and the other one looks more after projects. Or did that not change or did that come naturally?

David:
It kind of did basically we had originally was, is very much divided and Piers was on the more creative let’s just say side. And I was a more the development side. And the first couple of employees we got were basically developers. So really was a case of, they were, I was sort of more in line with them as a team and it kinda made more sense. And then Piers naturally transitioned into the more project management side of things, the UX side of things. And as we grew and grew, we kind of made sense then just that’s why I’m kind of the development lead now, ’cause in theory there’s still diversely under me and I’m helping them through, you know, in the daytoday work. But Piers has kind of shifted away from let say managing people directly and actually more about managing the business as an entity rather than that, yeah.

Piers:
It’s quite funny actually, ’cause I’ve basically done like every role at Atomic Smash except for backend developer. I haven’t done them very well some of them, but I have done them. Like frontend developer, I was frontend developer for a while when we were doing like projects quite early on. Designer, UX designer, project manager, client services and then yeah. Backend developer is like the only job at Atomic Smash I have haven’t done. Maybe even did it, no I’ve done it for one day maybe badly.
When we were doing like ACF early days, ACF work in WordPress but. It was like it’s Dave has definitely stayed way more on the like tech lead development side of things so.

David:
Yeah and almost now it’s that transition away from that now and to more client services. So business ownership side of things. So actually putting myself out there and not doing production work has been a challenge for the last two years. And I feel like I’m basically there now, you know, actually doing that. But two years ago I was directly involved in daytoday development because it just made sense. But now with the team of this, the scale it is, we can actually you know, that was a challenge we set out to do and feel like we’re going to complete that now.

Nath:
It is hard, isn’t it? I mean it’s the same for you it’s like your, I mean, we’ve tried and you know, you’ve done it for a few months and it was fine. And then you, somehow you get pulled back into it because there’s a need and because you can do it.

Piers:
Yeah we were just stuck in that trap for years. This much it felt like, and it maybe, well, the catalyst really was when Dave went on his honeymoon, it was like right, we need to sort all this, we need to get this all sorted so that all this stuff can happen while Dave’s away. And it also coincided with quite a big turnover of staff at the same time. And there was a bit of a cultural shift of, everybody kind, like before that point, I feel like everybody kind of relied on Dave quite heavily and would always ask him those questions. But then suddenly the staff weren’t here and Dave wasn’t here. So when he came back, it was like right we can start afresh and now it’s like, David isn’t this person you always have to ask questions to. And he actually now is kind of on the tools. He’s more helping and overseeing, but it’s is really hard. And I think it’s really easy to, yeah, it’s just such a difficult transition and it’s good that

David:
Yeah you are right definitely. Yeah you are right the honeymoon and the idea of I was away for that period of time, was, it was like a nice line in the sand in that regard.

Nic:It’s well, let’s go to a second honeymoon maybe.

Nathalie: Well, we kind of, what’s the plan I mean next summer we want to because it is our 10th wedding anniversary next year and the plan was to go away for awhile and actually for, again for the company to keep running and without relying entirely on us completely all the time, 24 seven. So, you know, there is a plan, obviously we can’t travel anymore so that might actually go out the window. But it’s, I think you do need that event, or that’s something that makes you break the cycle somehow and forces you to take action rather than, because otherwise it’s just too easy and you keep going day after, day after day. And if there’s nothing that really forces you to do it, you keep in the cycle.

Nic:
Yeah, but how do you feel though, Dave? Like I know that when I go for like three, four months without really coding on projects, I kind of like get the itch and I miss it, like, is it still for you or?

David:
I kind of do kind of fill that in a different way. I think from my perspective, the things I’m working on, maybe not directly on client work. So things like our internal framework, kind of scratches that itch. And I still try and learn stuff and doing stuff on the side, but it’s less client facing, it’s not to a deadline. It’s more just kind of scratched and itching in a different way if that makes sense. And it’s more just, it’s going back to me more of a hobby and more fun rather than just, actually having to get something done for a client on a particular deadline. So, yeah definitely I’m more involved in, even in the next couple months, give me more involved in actually helping the internal framework but that’s way more of a business decision to actually help that and move that forward and have a bit of a product owner on it rather than necessarily just or multiple product owners even but just having a bit more focus and that’s way less you know, actually, you know, client facing it will be client facing in the long run but daytoday it’s not. And the deadlines for it are way longer here.

Nic:
And if you, obviously, 10 years is a long time. Running an agency for 10 years, I think not a lot of people realize that it takes a toll to run an agency and it’s like, it’s a very stressful job. Like service, sbased business can be very stressful. Is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight or is there anything that you actually decided if it was a really good decision and I should double down on that one now in the future?

David:
Yeah kind of alluding to that first employee, getting them sooner we should have definitely done that. Had I had more sort of I don’t confidence in ourselves to do that kind of going back to what Piers said earlier and about our sort of views on the business and views on money and stuff like that. We, I’d say we have a pretty low ego. Like we don’t have much in that regard. And I think our self confidence to actually do that and push forward. That we should have had that earlier. And cause there was a big period of time, where I was you know, incredibly overworked at the very start. So relieving that and having more confidence at that point I’d say is definitely something I would have taught myself at that stage.

Nic:
It’s funny because I don’t know if you remember, but the, that you probably had the same thought going on when trying to hire your first employee for month and month and month, you see that you’re overworked, but you’re like, you don’t know what the future is gonna be. We’re gonna have to support one new person, and we’re gonna have to support their mortgage, or their life or whatever and like, it did feel of such a big responsibility.

Nathalie:
You need, you know, that you need to do it but you just don’t want to take the leap and be like, I, you know, it feels like it’s too big and it is becoming something rather than just being us two working together as in.

Piers:
Yeah and as soon as you as you start it, you can’t stop it by the way.

Nic:
Let’s get another one, let’s get another one.

Piers:
You’re trapped, you’re forever not trapped well definitely trapped, but like you’re forever on that like treadmill, of paying people’s salaries, keeping the work coming in, keeping clients happy, keeping staff happy, building the brand, building the agency. It’s like, yeah, just relentless. And I think maybe if I could go back in time, I would have just like before we just stopped for like a little bit and just thought right like, this is the last few minutes of like peace I’m gonna get before we start this thing. Cause as soon as you start working, you just can’t stop. Like you said, it’s impossible. And I don’t think we spent enough time by getting our ducks in a row before we started, which would have definitely accelerated our growth and made everything a bit smoother. We just started and didn’t have a clue what we were doing. And I remember our first ever, we went to like a business, it was like a business mentor, in the startup space we were in. And we went in with some questions, like what we thought were quite seemingly simple like business questions. The first one was, “should we trade as a partnership or a limited company?” And his response to it was, “Hmm, that’s a very good question. I’ll go away and think about it and come back to you.” And we were like, “we thought this guy was gonna be able to like just solve all our problems for us and like help us accelerate ourselves.” And I think after that meeting we were like, “right, we’ll just do it all ourselves, We won’t bother asking anybody else now because maybe nobody really knows what they’re doing.”

Nath: Given that it’s a really steep learning curve.

Piers: The only advice they gave us was to get business insurance.

And everything else I like yeah, just really like wishy washy. And but then I think in a way that kind of slowed us down quite a lot because then we didn’t really look externally for help again for ages. And if we’d have like a decent mentor in those first couple of years, we would have navigated so many problems much quicker. We probably would have had more confidence to bill more and like up our day rates sooner. And yeah for the first like two or three years when it was just me and David, we were quite slow I guess at progressing I think.

David:
Definitely yeah yeah.

Piers:
As soon as we engaged with like a decent mentor, our growth started to happen and we yeah and it just got kind of better well bigger and bigger, mildly better and better.

David:
And it’s also important so we didn’t actually have jobs inside the agency. So we didn’t really know about agency culture, or actually see any of this stuff in real life. So, actually having that sort of lack of mentorship at the start even just from a perspective of what we were going into, we kinda didn’t have and I think we definitely even now we find the best advice comes from not necessarily just business people is more actual agency owners and speaking to other agencies, who currently own agencies now, you know, that’s definitely where the key advice comes ’cause everyone’s gone through the same problems. It’s not, nothing’s unique. Even doesn’t matter the technology, it doesn’t matter the location in the world. Everyone has the same problem. So, yeah.

Nathalie:
It does help to have that external eye on your business and actually be able to guide you. ‘Cause sometimes you’re just too much in it and you don’t actually see it. It’s just, I found it really hard to find the right person to actually try and help us, and it took us years and years. I mean there’s so many coaches and consultants and mentors out there and there’s some, it’s just, it’s hard to, because you need someone you can trust, you need someone you, because they will know everything about you, about your personal life, about your business. It feels like you’re giving yourself out completely. And if you don’t trust them with your life basically you can’t work properly with them. So, they need to understand your personal situation. I mean, Nic and I are married. So sometimes running the business is a bit different. And also we need someone who needs to not be afraid of being in a room with us arguing, knowing that we’re married, and you know, our marriage is not on the line here, but we’re still gonna argue and you know, fight about things and we need someone who’s comfortable with that. And it’s not, it’s hard to find that person.

David:
Yeah, definitely. I also feel like some of the first business meeting, or some mentor meetings we had, it did feel a bit like therapy. It’s just, I don’t know how it actually work out.

Piers:
Asking that really difficult questions like, “why do you want to do this? And which bits of it do you enjoy?” And just stuff that we were like, “oh yeah, we’re just doing it, like I hadn’t really thought about that to be honest. we just kind of started and so.” But just on your point Nathalie about kind of arguing and that sort of things, as you said, like you two are a married couple. How do you go about resolving your differences in like in a business sense when, Nat’s coming from one end and Nic’s coming from maybe like a totally different end, and you’ve got to come up with some resolution?

Nath:
It depends in who’s in the room with us. If it’s just the two of us, I’ll just go out in a strop and think about it and come back later with to be able to discuss a bit more. Cause I can’t, I need time to think and I need time to reflect and I can’t take everything like right now and give answers. I just need to go away and think about it. Whereas Nic will sort of keep talking and talking and talking and talking.

Nic:
Yeah.

Nath:
So I think it’s just trying to understand how we function and now we know each other really well so he, I hope he’s not too offended when I go off and he knows I will come back. And actually yeah the other thing is we know there’s a reason why we say the things that we say. We both want the same thing out of it. So, you know, we know we’re doing it for the good of the company at the end of the day. And then just starting to view the other person’s position and actually be open and listen. Even if it doesn’t look like I’m listening, I’m still listening. I just need time to process it.
Nic:
I think it also helped to, when we started to have a bit more defined line between our roles. Like before the lines were very blurry and I thought I was managing like everything and
Nath:
Well that’s because we are freelancing at the start.
So you were managing, when you freelance you manage everything. And then they came in and I had, I think I struggled to find what I was supposed to be doing to help and take some of that away from you took a long time, it was quite hard.

Nic:
With, with the growth, obviously that became very apparent like that there was a problem here. So, at some point that’s Nat and I actually had that, that very like important decision of like, okay how are we functioning together? And who’s responsible for what? Because for a very long time, I was like saying, oh we’re going that way and Nat will say we’re going that way. And therefore, no decisions were really made because nothing was aligned. So, actually saying, well, look, the reality is like we at that time we had been doing my way for a couple of years. And we were just like running in circles and not going anywhere. So I said look, clearly this is not working. So Nat to the reign of like this is the strategy of Cookies and this is where we going. And I took the tech strategy. And I try as much as I can to follow what she says, but.

Nath:
I think basically we know there’s, if it’s tech related or if it’s basically, if it’s tech related then Nic will be the one making the decisions and be like no, I know I’m talking about. This, we’re doing it this way. And if it’s more team and kind of strategy, I’ll have the final say on it. And we kind of have to define it that way.

Nic:
Somehow it works. And but it’s true that we do argue, but there’s no, it’s not like we argue to the point that we shout at each other or whatever. But the arguments for us is a way to let things out. And then there is the arguments, and then there is the after the argument important discussion but there’s always a, not confrontation, but there’s always like an argument peace sometime, which is like, I think A, you think B and everybody’s trying to like weigh their, weight their views, and then everybody goes and think, and then we come back and make a decision. Do you guys argue much or is it simpler on your side?

Piers:
I think we do. I think we’ll both maybe get like frustrated at each other or I tend to get maybe more frustrated about things. And we do, I think we do argue a little bit, not loads and loads. Yeah we do argue a little bit. I’m try to think about how it ends up getting resolved. Not too sure to be honest. What do we do? Just.

David:
You know, I think basically most of the time, again it’s coming from exact same position of, we just have the business mind at heart. Like even just the way we promote ourselves the way we sort of think about stuff, it’s usually business first. Then actually that as an entity rather than necessarily ourselves and all it goes is more around. The thing, things we normally clash on is more around, just less about the delivery of stuff. Maybe it’s just more internal business decisions and it’s maybe more HR and stuff, you know. It’s the things that actually getting other people involved in other people’s eyes on is a bit more, it wouldn’t actually have that much help if that makes sense. Because it’s basically us making those decisions. The daytoday running and all that sort of stuff. And the way we tackle projects sort of what stuff we, like technology use anything like that. That basically solves itself a lot of the time and we just go to the team for answers. But yeah, a lot of the things we just, we kind of just work through and just try to make the most logical decision I’d say, but yeah.

Nath:
Yeah, I mean and for us work is just work. It’s, I don’t think it’s ever really affected our personal lives that much. Obviously it’s always there, but it was a lot harder to have. It’s a lot harder to raise small children on your marriage than to actually run the business I think.

David:
Yeah, so with you two, obviously you’re a married couple who have a house in lockdown. Are you able to work together or you do you have to split up between the house? How do you sort of work in that sort of situation?

Nath:
We’ve never been able to work in the same room. I can’t stand it. And it’s always been like that. I feel like Nic is spying on me every time and I can’t have someone looking at my screen cause I want to have the freedom to you know, look on Facebook whenever I want to, if I want to because it’s my five minute break without someone judging me in my back. And it’s always been like that. So we work in different rooms very rarely do we work together actually. And even when we go to the office in our old office, we had two rooms. So Nic was in one, I was in the other. In our new office was a bit bigger we were very far apart again because I can’t be too close. And I think that makes us then enjoy the time that we have together in the evenings and at the weekends more. Cause we’re not constantly in each other’s pockets. And I think this new lockdown is gonna be harder because we do spend all our time at home together. It’s gonna be interesting to see. The previous lockdown was slightly different. Cause we, it was actually that time of, where we saw each other the last the least because Nic was working in the mornings, and while I was looking after the kids and doing homeschool. And then we had to switch lunchtime where Nic was been coming down to look after the kids while I was going up to work. So we actually never spent a minute together between seven and probably seven or eight in the evening. So we didn’t see each other. So that was I think harder to actually not be able to even chat about things.

Nic:
I think that the biggest difference when you’re, when you’re running a business and with your partner is, for you Piers or Dave, when the day goes on and you had an argument between you, you go back to your relative partners and you’re like, oh Dave was a nightmare today, or Piers with a nightmare today. And you’ve then vent a bit and then you have another point of view which is actually sometimes is gonna be like, “yeah but look, he’s probably right here.” Or like, “I don’t know have you considered that, or have you considered that?” And then the next day you come back and like, okay you had the bit of relief from somebody else where you’ve been able to talk through your day. Obviously with Nat and I that doesn’t really exist here. Like there’s no surprise. Like there’s no that the question of your passing for the door, “hey, how was your day honey?” That doesn’t exist, is like I know I was there, like literally two meters from you and I know how your day was. So that can be very, very strange.

Nath:
But the good side of it is I know when we’ve had a very bad day. I mean, I don’t have to ask, I know exactly what happened. And I know it was a really bad day for your business or very good day, so you know.

Nic:
And we celebrate the good days together with usually sushis or.

Piers:
Have you, do you settle your home arguments in the same way as you settle your work arguments, or do you have different tactics?

Nic:
Good question. I think they’re about the same.
The weird thing is, so when we started and we had our first, we had Timmy of the first kid. We kind of well and when I say we, it was Nat. Nat kind of like created that rule, which was, as soon as we turn off the bath water, as soon as we give the bath to Timmy, this is the time where work kind of chat stops. And it’s usually around like seven and a half seven in the evening. And this is when the work chat stops and then following that is like kind of family time in it’s bath time and it’s like watching something on TV or whatever. And Nat was very strict on that rule at the very beginning which I think up to today, even if we don’t think about it as a rule, there’s clearly like a pre and after 7:00 PM in our house where like pre 7:00 PM you could hear us talking about work and all that. And after seven, it’s more, “okay now we’re gonna cook dinner, and now we’re gonna talk about something else that is not work.” I do have a tendency of like, work is my life, work is my hobby, work is like everything for me and I’m a workaholic. But, that you have a tendency to speak too much about work, but I’m trying to be more mindful of these times. And obviously the breakfast time, you get at breakfast and like before, because I wake up early and I’m usually having like a couple of hours clocked in before everybody wakes up, because I’m useless in the evening, and I don’t work in the evenings. And usually by breakfast, I’ve would have already like a couple of work questions and

Nath:
I think that’s what I find the hardest is like I wake up at half six and you’re already talking about work and I literally just woken up and that’s, I find that tough. And I’ll be like, “not now.” And it’s also appreciating that, you know, when I say not now, I do mean not now. And we’ll discuss it later. There’s enough hours in the day for that. And you do respect that and it’s the same the other way round. Where at some point, if one of us says, “know what, let’s not talk about work right now it’s too much let’s leave it.” Then we’ll leave it.

Nic:
And I think that’s the most surprising thing that has happened in the past couple of years is, I’ve been the one sometime on the receiving end of saying like actually, know what, let’s not talk about work. And that’s something that I’ve never said in my life. And now I’m actually like saying look, there is a family here and there’s like a couple of kids, and there is us and like, let’s not talk about work now, we will talk about it later. Or I would send you an email tomorrow morning like to get my thoughts out so yeah.

David:
That’s the closest comparable is definitely for me, I was in the same same position as you Nic ’cause I feel you could just work 18 hour days, and then just in the evening, just turn on the laptop and do it. And definitely when we started, I was working in the evenings and doing those sort of things. There’s a big shift in just the way I kind of realized that sort of actually focused work in a period of time is so much more productive than just trying to work every hour in the day. And I think when I kind of learned that it made way more sense and it made it way easier to just say whatever time when you finish your day you finish your day. And usually that meant a transition of moving from the office back to home. So now with the lockdown it’s more around moving from upstairs to downstairs. But, I think that that was a real lesson for me. And I kind of assumed that if you weren’t working all the time you weren’t being as productive. But you can actually work probably three hours or four hours. And actually if you’re focused and actually, you know, have a goal rather than working eight hours and not really have a goal of what needs to be done.

Nic:
Well, we have a future episode coming out on product, I’ve always been a productivity nerd. And like, I’ve read all the bad selfhelp books. Like I’m, I don’t know why I like them. They somehow reinforce whatever I think. But I’ve always been productivity nerd and trying like different things which like, from now and for a couple of years now I’ve settled into like the kind of like a habit. And I know exactly how I work, I know exactly how I can be productive. As soon as I deviates, like everybody can feel it because all of a sudden stuff is not getting done correctly or stuff is not getting done as it should. But I think that one is gonna be an interesting one to see how we organize our days between us, because you have a completely different

Nath:
Yes, but it’s a different role as well. I don’t need to, you know, put my head down in code for three or four hours. My tasks are very much more broken down and done in little bits. And there will be you know, some days where I just write something and I’ll have to time away but. And it’s also communicating you to the team so they knew when to reach to us because, you know, they know that if you code between, I don’t know, two and five, that’s time where they can’t disturb you. So it’s trying to make that rule in the team as well. Where you know, I like to, I am available at lunchtime or at the end of the day, and then that’s it.

Nic:
So, there’s one I think question that I wanted to touch with you so, 10 years as an agency and I, in my head I still have the old Atomic Smash logo. But you recently went through a rebranding exercise. And that to me is very interesting because your and you went for like a, it’s a dramatic change. The way, Atomic Smash is presenting today, is presented today is very very big change compared to where it was a couple of months ago. I just have so many questions about how? Why? what was the deciding factor? Why now? Was it tied up to the 10 years? What do you think it’s going to achieve? And where you’re going with that new branding basically?

David:
I think yeah sort of answer some of the questions is really just a case of our current, our first logo and even just our brand in general you know, there are certain things of when we first started the agency our the idea of having a brand was more around oh, it’s a logo, it’s a website. It’s these flat things that just sit somewhere and they’re on a letterhead it’s not, it’s nothing more than that. But as the business is growing, having a brand and having some people know us and actually having a bit of identity behind that has been really, really empowering. And just actually knowing it has value is the key part to it. Especially for me as a nondesignery person actually seeing the difference between brand having value rather than just it is just a logo and how it looks. So that was a big sort of lesson for me, especially just around that. But I think the sort of the sites and even the way we talked about ourselves even up to maybe a year ago was just around again it was very matter of fact. So it was very much we’ve kind of done this, we’ve, were doing this and it kinda came together for necessities purposes. We’ve had actually at the time to think about it, think about the messaging and the way we talk of ourselves have a bit of the roadmap built into our branding. And do it from the ground up. So, really think about our brand values, which have always been there, they’ve just never been actually sort of material, they’re not visible to anyone, that’s the key thing. So it’s not an internally facing thing, it’s more of an externally facing thing as well. And we only really did that with help with an external branding agency. You know, it’s one of the things you kind of think you can just do all this stuff inhouse. And even when you sort of start talking about yourselves we’re not the best PR people, you know we really are just okay, we fall into the roles that we have we are, we do now, but you it really is a case of having an external company or just an external entity look at us and actually talk to our clients and ask you know, when you think of Atomic Smash what comes to mind? You know, that those sort of simple questions us asking those to our clients, is very different to an external person doing that. So, all that stuff sort of fed into our brand and it’s just so much thought has been put into it even though it looks like it’s coming quite quickly, it’s been in the works for a long time and we kind of wanted to make sure it was right. And it’s not even right from a look and feel perspective as a messaging perspective and our value perspective. That’s all we really focus on rather than just the logo, if that makes sense.

Nic:
Yeah. Well that’s coming from, that’s coming from a company that has bought a logo for like $15 at the start of.

Piers:
I Love it. It’s got so much character. I think your brand, I guess your brand’s kind of organically developed over time, which is similar to kind of ours and where we were at previously. But yours is like a good reflection of yourselves I think.

Nath:
Yeah, we’ve done them. I think it was the same as that. It was just a logo and a name and we didn’t really put any particular intention or thoughts into it. And then a few years ago, we started trying to think about what we should do about it. We used, we did think about changing the name and everything and because it didn’t feel like it was bringing or doing anything for us. And then instead of that, we, you know, exactly like what you we thought about values and we knew what they were, but I think Nic and I were the only ones that knew that.

So we did some work. And then we tried to put more effort into, thinking about the branding in everything that you do, in all of your marketing and talking to clients and make sure that what you are and what you’ll present is really understood by everyone. And you put that forward because it’s not just we’re able to build websites. It’s a lot more than that and I don’t think that was going anywhere. And even though we wanted it to be a bit bigger, it wasn’t so we yeah, we’ve done a lot of work on that. Not with an external agency, although we did work with someone on the values and all of that but. Yeah I think to some extent we’ve kind of worked on it as well. And again I think it comes after a few years where you think you know, it’s been 10 years it’s fine to start with something, but you need a bit more. And also when you have more time to work on the business, whereas than be on the daytoday constantly producing work for the clients. You have time then to think about the rest.

Nic:
And it certainly helped kind of like realigning what was the work that we were very interested in. Like we, from a technological point of view, we could build WordPress websites. We could build WooCommerce websites. And at some point it’s also very, when you start to grow the agency and it’s like hey, we need to find work and this person over there wants a WordPress website, we could do it. The reality is this is not the work that we enjoy doing because this is not our core expertise. And from a technical point of view, we could do it. But the reality is this is not who we are. And I think at some point we started to dabble into like, okay, try to branch into more technologies. And WordPress was one of them, but now it’s more like, actually we know, like by having this branding or rethinking of the values and the branding’s size, it did really help into like, actually what we want to do is like apps, startups, scaleups. And then if we do something with WordPress or whatever, it’s like for big sites that have performance, that have like a lot of different issues that is not a like actually one I want a new website. We, I don’t think we would take a new, brand new kind of like Greenfield WordPress project because it’s not really for us. But if you’re, if the WordPress project has been there for quite some years and it needs a scaling element, and that DevOps element may be like here, that comes in. But the rest of the technology is more towards like Ruby, Go, Elixir, which is more like app based. And that’s where we really shine. And that really helped that kind of like value exercise really helped.

Nath:
And then you have, you know, the partnership with the clients, the longterm relationship. we’re not really in to just build a product for two months and then go away and not think about it anymore, it’s really not where we enjoy again. Not what we want to do, and it doesn’t feel right. Same with the team. We really want to grow a team that works well together and put some effort into making that work. And it’s not, you know, someone, a team member is not just a person that works for us. We really want to be a proper team even if it’s hard when we all work remotely. But yeah, it’s all of this that we knew we wanted to do and at some point you have to sit down and actually define it.

Piers:
I got a quick question on that actually about growing your team, and your kind of bringing people on. Obviously, cause you’re husband and wife, do you have did you ever feel like you were the parents of the team and has that been like a dynamic and it’s kind of like naturally happened or, and have you had to like be really conscious to not let that happen, or how have you

Nath:
So funnily enough there’s someone who used to work with us. And one day he turned around to me, he wasn’t that much younger than me. And he said, “I feel like you’re a bit like my mom.” And I was like, “is that a good thing or a bad thing.” He’s like, “no, no, no but as in you care and you will ask me if I’m all right and you will look after me.” And I was like, “okay, I’ll take that. Although the difference really isn’t there.” So I think we, it’s and I will joke that you know, I have three children at home and another 10 at work, because it does feel like that. And also maybe it’s just the a mother instinct and like where I look after them and I think it will, it does make a difference. But if you can, if you’re really careful, you know, not what they do at work, but also their wellbeing and their lives and all of that. And it makes a difference, I think. And I hope that they know that we are there to help them, and not just as an employer, you know, we’re there if they need anything from us and we’ll try and support them in any way we can with whatever they facing outside of work as well. Oh yeah we’ve had that before. I’m not sure they see Nic as a dad though.

Nic:
Well I’m the dad that told them off basically when something goes wrong probably.

Piers:
The good cop, do you ever get to have like a good cop, bad cop?

Nath:
There is certainly dynamic of good cop, bad cop sometime yeah.

Piers:
Is Nic the good cop?

Nath:
No, Nic is not very diplomatic. Nic is very blunt and he knows how he wants things to be done. And he will tell you the way it is. And so I am more the one that will give the positive notes and the you know, not just the bad things, but the good things as well.

Nic:
So that’s true, but I’ve been working on it. I’m trying to get better because I do realize and I think that that kind of like joins my, probably one of the last question. We were mentioning the team and during that conversation you mentioned that you had stage where like there was a large turnover in the team. which it’s funny because when we grew and we were looking at agencies, they were like probably double the years that we were, like when we year five and they were like year eight or nine. They were having that same problem. And we thought we were different it’s like oh look, people will stay with us for a long time. And like, look, we’re different we are better, whatever. Long before you know, we had the same problem at some point where actually there was a total shift, there was a turnover naturally that happened. And it’s painful. As founders and as the directors it’s painful because you take it sometime too personally. And it’s like, it’s something that you have done or something that you have not seen or something like that. How did you feel about it? And what did you put in place to try to stop it somehow?

David:
Yeah, so I think from definitely from my side, it was more of a case of you kind of assumed there’s a lot of assumptions here. Again, maybe come back to the sort of branding side and not stuff actually stuff written down and actually that clear, just kind of felt they were more in there for the long term if that makes sense. But it really is just a case of taking that sort of stance of this is just the job you know, it really is a case of, you know, people have lives outside of what they do for their job. You know, especially with developers who are incredibly you know, they spend a lot of time, you know, learning what they’re doing and it’s not a simple role to get into. It’s not like a job you can just pick up and put down and it’s a case of if you become a developer and a good developer you know, you’re doing it for a lifetime and it’s something you really really trying to craft and then build on. So, it kind of felt a bit from that sort of, you know, furthering perspective of kind of felt a bit like, ah, this is real knock because we kind of thought they were there for a long time, that they almost like set in stone kind of, you know, there’ll be there for the long term. The thing that would kind of learn from that is not to think like that. And really just not, no don’t sort of pin too many things on that being a thing, And actually from our perspective having flexibility in the team is more of a bonus, you know, and for us and not, it kind of taught us a lot of things about just simple, like daytoday stuff like documentation, like how much we have to have written down, because if it’s in someone’s head, and you know, they could leave or they could get hit by a bus, they could, anything could happen. You know, it really is a case of, you have to, think of the business first and not pin too many things on this one person or yeah. So for you also Piers, any different?

Piers:
It was really hard. It was like one of the hardest things I’ve been through for a long time. I was in tears about it, like privately and even in front of a client because they were asking us to do some work essentially, and I was like, I’m really sorry, but we can’t do this for you because we’ve been let down, or we’ve, we’re having this big shift now. And it was really, really hard to manage and I had obviously going on as well. And I was actually having counseling at the time. And that really helped kind of like individual counseling like therapy was really good to have somebody to talk it through. I don’t really talk about work at home much to Allie. So having somebody else to talk it through it was really good for me. But I think it definitely made us stronger. We went from having like four developers, I guess, including to Dave to when he went on his honeymoon. I just had one developer for a period of time and just kind of getting ready for that and gearing up for that was yeah like pretty stressful. And then we were able to kind of recruit and find really good people who matched technology and culturally as well. And we definitely came out the other side of it stronger. But yeah a couple of times in the early days, I was just like, “I don’t really know how we’re gonna get through this.” It’s hard and you know,

It’s either gonna cost us like a lot and lot of money to float ourselves for a bit, or we’re gonna really upset some people clients wise or everything’s just gonna catch on fire but we got through.

David:
And also just as coming from that point of view, you can’t really plan for anything. So, just being flexible and actually having the ability to you know, turn on time is it’s kind of key to that. Especially as we had this point in time where I was going on my honeymoon, I was not gonna cancel my honeymoon and I wanted to enjoy my honeymoon. I’m not gonna be here for that period of time. You know, what can we do to get to that point? And that was planned in for two years probably before we had that day in the condo where that was going to happen. And I was trying to do my utmost to make sure that it wasn’t gonna be a stressful honeymoon. And I could just actually turn off. You know, that date is in the calendar. Yeah, everything collided at, you know, two, three months before that date, you know, you can have all plan and everything meticulously and things kinda just happen.

Nath:
And in recruitment is quite long and lengthy and time consuming process. And it’s not easy to recruit. And also it’s not, it doesn’t, it’s not for every developer to work in an agency because you know, you’ve got the client, the pressure from the client and then you’ve got the pressure from the agency and it’s quite fast paced because you know you have deliveries and it’s very different from working on a product. And we found that actually a lot of developers think I’ll try it and it’s not for them. They can’t cope with the pressure of the delivery dates coming again and again and sort of the pressure of having multiple clients and multiple projects. So, it is yeah, it’s hard you learn from it.

Piers:
Just quickly. I remember phoning you up Nic in the summer and basically explaining saying like, oh, we’re about to be super low on resource and you offering to kind of do whatever was needed to help us get through it. And I think having friends like that was so important and just that like ultimate safety net and my brother at one point offered to quit his job and come and work for us because he could see the kind of toll that we’re going through and how difficult it was. So having like really good friends, help people get through those really tough times. Yeah that was really valuable.

Nic:
They are tough and they are also very emotional times like when you start to lose people that you care about and then like they go off. I do remember as well like being in tears when like one of the developers said, I’m gonna go, it’s like, I don’t wanna loose you. Like, but I understand at same time, I’m happy for you. You’re going to do your own things. And it’s fantastic, it’s really good opportunity for you. But yeah I don’t wanna lose you. And it’s difficult and we tend to, you have to grow thick skin somehow to like, to be able to take it. I think what we had recently, and that was very recent is, and that was extremely, it came at the right time. We needed that one, to be honest. We had a lead frontend who left us end of last year, was it or beginning of this year?

Nath:
February.

Nic:
February so beginning of this year. And he left to do like a couple of his on things and all that. And he’s the one that I really valued as a developer. And later in the year, when we said, hey, we’re looking for a new frontend dev, he actually raised his hand and said actually, “I would like to come back.” And that was a very positive moment. It’s like okay, so it’s not just us being bad, like bosses or whatever it’s like there’s other things happening in everybody’s life. And so that was positive, but it’s difficult, it’s difficult and I guess it’s something, I would always remember looking at other companies that were going through that through my younger years and being like, “oh, we gonna be different, we’re not gonna have that one.” And actually I think it’s a natural thing that will happen with the change that goes from, okay, we were in the early days, everybody’s a family and whatever you want to call it. And then things actually starts to get into a business. And now like there’s other pressure coming from like different, different sources. The business is evolving, the business is actually finding his own entity. At the beginning the business is very much us, the founders. And very quickly the business moves into being his own thing and like the business as his own life where you don’t decide everything. And that’s where probably that kind of like exodus happens sometimes.

David:
Yeah, definitely. I think also from our point of view just kind of that mentality shift that even I have had. And as a business, we now definitely think of Atomic Smash as being more of a stepping stone of someone’s career we’ll help them build and help them progress. We do things like actually having dedicated time for learning and development and at learning development it’s helping them, you know, in their career. But it’s definitely an idea of if someone’s coming to us now and say, they’re moving on, it’s not a stab in the back. You know, it’s not that sort of that shift in mindset is way more that actually that’s probably like you’re saying it’s a good thing. You know, they actually, that progression is probably good. And it means that there is a bit of change in the team and we’re bound to get someone, you know, who have the same caliber, less caliber or just change you know, change in evolution is actually quite a good part. And that’s definitely key in our branding as well. Just one of those points of just really that change of mindset is actually a really, can be actually a valuable thing.

Nic: So 10 years in, what’s the, what’s in for the next 10 years then? Aha, big question.

Piers:
Gosh, yeah. We’re hoping that the branding and repositioning and our value proposition now can help us to accelerate our growth a little bit. So I think because we’re both more mature business owners we can hopefully in the next couple of years kind of progress faster than we have previously. So we wanna continue to grow the agency and grow the business. And all based around the value proposition of helping people who’ve got existing WordPress WooCommerce sites to scale them up a bit of the kind of performance optimization and just help them to make their sites better and better over the long period of time. And that kind of evolved to solve a mentality and philosophy from us. But I guess we want Atomic Smash to be a place, like a great place to work as well. Probably very similar to you. We want to make people feel supported and a place where people can come and learn new cool things, even if they’re not doing them on live projects and a place where people, because we’re such a big part of your life just want it to be a place where people can enjoy going. And it doesn’t have to be their whole life. And we’re not expecting people to like live the brand essentially or wanna do crazy hours. We just want people to have a good experience while they’re with us.

Nic:
Cool.

David:
And I’d say we don’t have any massive goals of like selling agency, building it up and then just boop but we all need more, just a case of, for us having a business which may be a bit more, of a less reliant on us daytoday is a key part of that. And having less of those things. Cause there’s definitely other things that Piers and I wanna try, you know, outside of building Atomic Smash. So giving us time to do those sort of things and even just simple things like family. Just having more time for family and then, and that’s the stuff is kind of key. But I think as the goal by getting to a scale where we’re not as needed in the daytodays is a real incentive for us.

Piers:
I send Dave, annoying new business ideas like every day. Basically.

Nic:
That’s me.

Piers:
Like maybe I should do this. Maybe we could do this instead or as well.

Nic:
On the side yeah. It’s just something that we’re gonna do on the side.

Nath:
I’ll do it in the evening.

Piers:
Yeah so when are we gonna start our pizza business or like stuff like that as well.

Nic:
Oh Dave’s pizzas on the Instagram looks really great. Yeah, I do.

Piers
Yeah we need to bottle that.

Nic:Yeah, I think there’s a business in that one.

Piers:
Pizzas and Cookies maybe we could team up on that side of things.

Nic:
Yeah there we go, we did the things.

David:So it’s all dough so yeah.

Piers:
Yeah it is, that’s very true actually.

Nic:
Well look, so it’s scary how we align on our past nearly 10 years and our future nearly 10 years because we have the same ambitions here. Like there’s no ambition to sell. It’s really about, it’s almost creating a legacy. Like at some point, if Cookies explode, I want to make sure that, I want to make sure that anybody that came in touch with Cookies actually had a good experience whether they were clients, whether they’re teammates, whether they were like people that we mentor, help or whatever. It’s really about the legacy here more than anything. So, I’ve very much, very much enjoy our conversation today. I think we are, we said we would draw a line around the one hour, so we nearly there. In fact, we’ve slightly over there. So now I’ve very, very much enjoyed the conversation the honesty and like thank you, thank you very much for today. As the last words if people want to learn more about Atomic Smash or you Piers and Dave, where do they go?

Piers:
They go to atomicsmash.co.uk or look us up on LinkedIn. Oh and if you wanna join the Bristol Creative Agency Chess League get in touch with me, and I can add you to our growing group of chess fans.

Nic:
Yeah, we’re not gonna talk about chess. I’m getting

Nath:
We’ve got a sore loser here.

Nic:
Yes I’m a sore loser but that’s how it is. But yes, it’s very good

David:
Yeah definitely not part of the chess league I don’t, but I feel like if I joined, I would lose. So I’m not gonna join.

Nic:
I’ve joined with the idea that maybe I could beat one or two people. So far if it’s not going that route. It’s not going that route at all. And I’m gonna be the wooden spoon I think, but that’s fine. I’m gonna bake cookies for everybody, and then we’re going to have a big party when lockdown is over.

Piers:
Amazing can’t wait.

David: Thank you for having us, it’s been really enjoyable.

Piers:
Thank you very much every body and we speak soon and hopefully we get you run into the office for a big lunch when the office reopens. Thank you.

Nic:
Great, cheers both.

Nath:
Thank you.

This podcast was brought to you by CookiesHQ. A Bristol based software agency who builds apps and websites for early stage founders and growing startups. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, you can drop us a message at the CookiesHQ on Twitter or head to www.cookieshq.co.uk/podcast for more episodes.