The SEO Agency Rollercoaster with Becky Simms of Reflect Digital
Becky Simms, founder of Reflect Digital, shares her journey launching an agency in 2011 with just £3,000 and growing it into a leading digital marketing firm that prioritizes human psychology and culture.
She discusses how understanding customer behavior and motivation drives strategy—from discovering that payment gateway switchers were primarily growing businesses needing more robust solutions, to mapping customer journeys across diverse touchpoints.
The agency pioneered a four-day work week in 2018, which increased productivity and happiness while maintaining client satisfaction.
Reflect Digital integrates AI thoughtfully through guard rails and human-centric processes, using tools like Gemini and Notebook LLM to support rather than replace human creativity.
The company now operates under the Human First Collective umbrella, with a vision to fuel the next generation of digital talent through Aspiration Digital.
[Music] Welcome to the SEO agency roller coaster podcast. Here we sit down with agency leaders to fuel the ambitions of up andcoming SEO entrepreneurs, equipping them with the insights they need to start, grow, and scale an SEO agency. Think of it as a road map to success packed with lessons from industry leaders who have been there and done that. My name is Andrew Zeruni and I'm a content marketer at ranking and I'm joined by my co-host and colleague from our success team Maximiz. Today we're thrilled to have Becky Sims of Reflect Digital on the show. We're excited to uncover the highs, lows, and gamechanging moments to find out what it takes to run a digital agency. If you're ready to take control of your future in SEO, buckle up for a thrilling and insightful ride. Bey, thanks so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to talk to you about your experience in the digital and your world in general. So as Andrew has mentioned today we would like to uh have different blocks of questions. So
the first question would be mostly focus on your past to see how you get started in the digital world. So as far as we're concerned uh you started reflect digital in 2011 and it was only at the age of 24 when you did that and you only had around £3,000 at that time and your big dream was to actually follow your father's entrepreneurial uh footsteps. So what I'm wondering about is that how how did you manage to do that and if there were any challenges that you uh actually experienced at that time? Wow. Uh well, thank you for having me and yes um wow it feels like a long time ago now. Uh but yes, you're correct. So 2011 I'd worked in an agency previously and had fallen in love with agency world um having not really known about what an agency was prior to that. Fell in love and thought go on then let's give it a go. And I guess there was a real naivity probably um which was which was probably a good thing cuz I think if you know too much you might not do it cuz it's quite scary when you start a business and you start hiring people and especially I mean this podcast is called the agency
roller coaster. It is an absolute roller coaster out there. So there was definitely a naivity to it. But I guess it's working out how are you going to start to win some clients and where's that going to come from? How are you going to be able to convince them? especially cuz when you're brand new, you don't have a history to tell them about. And so, I guess I lent into things that I'd done previously working at other agencies, but also my skill set was more on the client management side of things. It wasn't I wasn't an SEO. I wasn't a creative. I wasn't delivering the work. I had people that were going to deliver the work for me. So, also, you're trying to get them bought into something from your past that actually it's not really as relevant as it could be. But I guess it's knowing how are you going to be able to sell because that's the key to it. Until you start having some sales coming in and some money coming in, you don't really have a business. So, um, yeah, those early days, those first few businesses that trusted me that we could deliver work for them, I still thank them so much to this day because we wouldn't be where we are now without them. Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you. And as a young female founder in the tech and digital
industry, did you experience any biases or any hurdles that you need to overcome in those early days? So, do you know what? It's a really funny one, this topic, because I think again I was naive to this. I cuz I'd grown up watching my dad run his own business and he had never ever put anything in my way to think that I couldn't being a female that it might be harder. He'd run it worked in the tech space as well, but I think he'd never considered it. I'd never considered it. So, I just went out there doing it. I think it did start to hit me as I was going to different networking events. That was that. Oh, there's not many women around here. Um, why am I the why am I one of very few women? But I think because I don't know, I suppose one thing I had on my side, a lot of the businesses we targeted in the early days, we niched into legal, which we don't work in that space so much anymore, but it was an area we niched into. And I think actually the bias there was they wanted someone young to talk about digital marketing and to talk about websites because a lot of them were much more senior in their career.
They were partners in firms and they kind of believed we don't know about tech. We need someone young. So it was almost they weren't worried male or female. They were just I was kind of through the door because I was young and therefore I must know about these things. Obviously not definitely not the true way to look at things. But it kind of I think that probably helped me. But I think I just had a confidence about me. Um which I still have today because I just I don't see a difference in gender from what we're doing in the workplace. It's um and in many things out there in the world. It is a case of you either like the way we do things, you like our style and our culture. It won't suit everybody, but that's how we do things. But I do know it is a barrier for some people and and I will do everything and anything I can to help women feel like they can be out there in the workplace and out there uh leading businesses even even though the numbers are still tilted towards men especially on on agency ownership side. And I'm going to jump in now with my with a question of my own. I I have noticed that you've worked with Tottenham Hotspur football club in the past and my
question is how did you manage to land such a huge client at that time? What did that do to your company's trae trajectory moving forward? What was that experience like? That was incredible cuz that was quite early on. I'd say we were maybe like year four or year five. Do you know I'm just racking my brain as to how we got that initial lead. Do you know? I think it was we had a business development person working for us at the time and he was hitting the phones, sending the LinkedIn messages, doing all all what you've got to do. And I think it was just one of those lucky scenarios where and and sales that initial part of sales often is it landed in the right inbox at the right time when they said, "Oh, do you know what? We're just looking for an agency. We'll put you into the mix." Um, the funny thing with the Tottenham uh work that we did that was actually more on the creative side. So we were we ended up and we did it for three or four years um on the trot once we'd won the work. Um we were designing the creative for their membership renewal campaigns and our creative team at the time was literally a team of football fans. None of them Spurs fans I will say even an Arsenal fan in there um
but they were football fans and they really tapped into understanding what motivates a football fan and they were able to channel that. I think one of the hardest things though for us back then is to win the work you basically had to do the work. So they literally to pitch it you had to do the creative concept. So by the time we were in the pitch we were like if we lose this we have literally just probably lost about 25 grand worth of work. Um and luckily four years in a row um we won it each time and then they ended up taking it in house. But um it was one of those really risky situations. And I think that's often the case with creative work. People want to see it before they buy it. But actually it's it's not really fair on the agency because you put so much into it. And I do think on the SEO side of the business, we're a bit luckier that they maybe want you to commit to some kind of results you're hoping to get, which is also a dangerous ground to be on. But um yeah, it was definitely that was amazing and it was incredible to be in the boardroom working with people at that level at Tottenham Football Club and being able
to we went on the journey with them as they were moving to their new stadium. So there was some really key business things happening that we were having to kind of bring through in the creative and the way that we spoke to the fans um which was just really good fun at the time. Yeah, I like to think that you did a lot of work to lead them to getting into the final this year. So it may be hopefully better pay out uh on next Thursday. I also read that in 2019 you joined the lab group which added a unique focus of of understanding human behavior to reflect digital's toolkit and uh I wanted to understand what drove that decision and uh again like with the trajectory how did the how did your agency evolved once you took that human behavior aspect into your work. This is a really interesting one. So we've been interested in how psychology plays such a part in marketing for a very long time, but we'd not really had the skill set internally other than being curious, reading books and learning about it in that way, but nobody formally had the kind of education in it. And we weren't in a position to say, well, let's go
hire someone to do this because that felt like a bit of a gamble and I don't think we had the the funds to invest. But this opportunity came about with the lab group. We'd known them for a while as lab as an agency and they had this vision that they were building a group founded on human behavior and they were looking for agencies covering different disciplines us being very specific around kind of the SEO and paid media at that point to to come on board and to grow this group together and I think we took the opportunity we hadn't really been thinking about any kind of sale event or um anything like that at that time but the opportunity came up we were like you know what it would be so good to do this as part of something bigger to have colleagues around us that have maybe been there and done this before because I suppose one of the things when you start a business especially as you said at the start I was like 24 at the time I'd actually only ever worked in two agencies prior to that across like two or three years so I was very inexperienced in what a bigger agency could look like or what the future of agencies like we were just kind of
growing with the agency and having to acquire the skills at the time to manage the amount of people we had and the type of we were winning, etc. So, it was kind of appealing to say, do you know what? Wouldn't it be nice to go and kind of work alongside some people that we can learn from? They can help nurture and grow us. Um, we were still going to be owners of our agency um alongside them. So, it was not a sale event as in we're now out of it and goodbye to our agency. We were still going to be the driving force behind what was happening at Reflect Digital. So yeah, we we took the decision to to do it after a lot of kind of courting each other and working on some projects together and seeing what that looked like. Um, and it was incredible adding that human behavior piece in because it's so relevant to marketing. It is so relevant to understanding your consumer and I think it really helped us grow up in how we did strategy for clients. So instead of just, oh, we'll do some SEO, what keywords would you like to rank for? us being able to take more control of those client relationships and to tell them what their strategy should be and how we
should use the channels together. I think it gave us more ability to look at that from a human perspective of what their audience wants. And obviously that's now a huge part of what we do today. Fascinating. Frankly speaking, I'm so interested in psychology and human behavior and just seeing it being used in marketing is something noble and niche to me. So this is something I would like to focus on a bit later. But first things first, the question that I have for you right now is quite straightforward and sorry for being that straightforward. Why did you wake up this morning? So what made you wake up this morning? No, no, no. Get up this morning as wake up. Well, good question. So today's first day back from holiday actually, although in my calendar I'm officially still booked off, so I've got a day to catch up. But for me, it's always I just love what we do. Like it just gets me out of bed. conversations like this, catching up with the team, seeing what's happening, and I'm very much involved in the sales and marketing of the agency. That's my my happy place. And strategy and ideas for clients is also my happy place. So, being able to to help our
clients grow is what it's all about. Um, we also last week while I was away, we heard that we've been listed number three in the top 100 companies to work for in campaigns. Um, yeah, best places to work, which is incredible. Right. I'm very excited to get back into the office to to celebrate that with the team because um that's a huge achievement. Great. Um so coming back to that topic of psychology, could you tell us a bit more how exactly you believe this is the superpower that your agency had and if you could give us a specific example or even a couple of examples of when applying such a strategy actually made a difference for your client. Yeah, definitely. I think so often in marketing we end up we sit around a boardroom table and we make decisions and we go, "Oh yeah, we think we should do this and we think we should do that." And we need to ensure that when we're making those decisions that we're doing them off behalf of what our audience really wants, what our customer really wants, what they're looking for. And and I think the psychology angle allows us to do that. So we've got a number of
different kind of ways that we approach this. And it depends where a client's at and how mature they are in understanding their audiences. But the main thing is that we need to understand what motivates their audience, what motivates them to buy. And that as a piece of work leads into then allowing us to do customer journey mapping to truly understand how a customer interacts with them, where at what point they might realize they need a service and what's that journey look like. And actually this is changing more than ever at the moment. I think with um the rise of um AI and people turning to new tools for search and search kind of really diversifying um what it means. I think we're getting to a point where Google isn't going to be the monopoly like it still is at the moment. But we've got so many different ways we can search and actually depending on audiences and depending on what they're looking for so many different start points. Um, and that might be, I don't know, you could be a clothing brand that attracts lots of different audiences, but you could have your Gen Z's might start on Tik Tok and they're looking for what's the latest
trend, but actually you might also still appeal to your 40 plus year old woman that might not be using Tik Tok as their first place. They might be looking on Instagram or they might be turning to Google looking for something super specific like, I don't know, an outfit to wear to a wedding or whatever it might be. But it's trying to understand those different touch points and therefore what type of content you need to have in the right place at the right time appealing to the right audience. I think some specific examples there's one that always comes to mind that I always play back uh because it just it was really interesting. We were working with a payment gateway provider. So this was in the B2B space so slightly less less sexy as clothing. Um, but it was it was such an interesting one because they'd been working for a long long time to attract audiences and they just weren't really having much cut through and we were a new agency to them and so we're taking over different areas of their SEO and their paid and their ads were just really boring. Their ads were just kind of uh buy your payment gateway from us basically. It was just it does what it says on the tin. And we did some
audience research and it allowed us to uncover the fact that actually most people that were moving to them from a a switcher perspective were moving from something like a PayPal where maybe they'd been a smaller business that had been a good solution for them at the time, but actually they were realizing they needed a a more robust service. They needed maybe better reporting. They needed something that tied into their accounting because the business was growing. So we we had this kind of insight that suddenly they were outgrowing what they were doing previously and it was to do with a growth reason that they were moving. So we then switched up all of their ads to be like outgrown your payment gateway with some really quirky disruptive graphics of things that had outgrown things. So for example, we had like a full-sized man on a kid's bike. We had like a plant where the roots had cracked out the bottom of the pot. Just things that would make you look twice cuz they were and they were kind of depicting this kind of outgrown message. And the results were just phenomenal because we'd really worked out why people were making the change. We tapped into something that maybe they didn't realize
at the time, but it was kind of heightening their need to change cuz they were going, "Yeah, you're right. I have outgrown this solution." But without that customer insight, you'd never have got to that creative campaign. We'd never have understood that to be able to to play with that as a campaign. Besides introducing different aspects of like human behavior to SEO, um you also try to challenge you challenge the norm and other aspects by uh having introducing a 4 day week work week. Is that true? Yes, it is. It is. Yeah. And the followup to that question is what inspired that decision? Was it COVID? Was it something else? And has what has been the effect? What has been the result in the productivity, the culture, onboarding new staff members? Tell me how how that motivated the team to keep going and produce results. Yeah, so this was actually precoid so we were early days. This was 2018 and it was as we were looking at joining the lab group actually and it was something that they were talking about we were talking about and we were like why why wouldn't we do this? Why wouldn't we find a way that this could work? Because wouldn't it be
better to work 4 days not five? I've always been a believer as well. So some of the agencies that I worked in previously, I often had this feeling of it was one rule for the senior leadership team and then everyone else was kind of operating under these not so enjoyable conditions. And it was one thing that when I set out to create the agency, I never wanted that to be the case. I always wanted to show up for my team and to show them that I'm working as hard as they are are and to to motivate them. I've never been that person that could just kind of bunk off early and do what I want to do because that that doesn't feel right because I don't give my team that ability. But when this idea of the 4 day week came around, I was like, well, this would be brilliant because then actually I can have a day off as well. Um because I'm going to give them the ability to do this, too. So, yeah, we started in 2018. We used to do it that um it was either a Monday or a Friday and we split the team so that we were still operational 5 days a week, but it was either Monday or Friday. So, you've got the benefit of a three-day weekend. And um yeah, and we just we kind of said to the team, you need to help make this work. Like, we're
doing this as a trial. If we start to get complaints from clients, if it isn't working, if people don't want to work with us anymore, this won't be able to continue. So, you need to help us make this work. And I think that really worked because it when you give the team the power to go, well, we've got to find a way, we've got to put the solutions in place, etc., then then they do because if it's something that they want. So, we saw productivity increase. We saw happiness increase and we' just been able to make it work. Co changed it a little bit because a lot of people went back to 5 days in COVID cuz when you couldn't leave the house, what was the point in having a day off? Um, so people kind of went back to stretching their hours across 5 days. But then when we came out of CO, we kind of inc we increased the flexibility that we gave people. So instead of saying it had to be Friday or Monday, it was kind of like actually some people do work 5 days anyway just cuz it works better for them and their pattern and if I don't know they've got responsibilities outside of work that means that doing shorter days is better for them. So some people are in five days anyway but some people were
like actually I'd rather do four and a half days and work a bit on a Friday and do slightly less hours on the Monday to Thursday for example. So, we've kind of given people the the power to work the hours that work for them as long as they're in in their core hours so that we can work together as a team cuz I think that's the key thing. We're um I know there's some agencies that have gone gone out there and gone, do you know what? You could work any hours you want. If you want to work at 3:00 in the morning, go for it. That's never been our stance because we everything we do is about our people and coming together as a team. So, we have to have these core hours where we can work together even if we're remote from each other. Yeah. I'm you're not going to get many answers at 3:00 in the morning if uh if you need to be working collaboratively together. This sounds great on paper, Becky, without any offense. And but just want to find out a bit more about how do you make sure that the team which is supposed to be very technical, right? Is also creative at the same time. Is is that something that you look at when you hire new people? How do you cuz you're known for for balancing big creative ideas with ROI. So I'm just really want to zero in on this on this aspect of
having creative team creative people on a technical team. And I guess you can't expect everything from everyone. So if someone is super technical um they probably are less creative like not that's not exclusively true but potentially um and vice versa if you're super creative you're not always the most technical. So I think it's balancing that we've got the right people in the right roles that come together at the right points. And I think one of the arts especially when it comes to SEO and this is something that we we often see like especially if um I don't know we've all had this before as an SEO agency. Your client comes to you and says oh so and so another agency has done an audit and they say our SEO is not great. And you go okay but can we see it? Can we see what they've done? And I think a lot of people treat SEO as a checklist of yeah, you've got to do this, this, this, and this. And and a lot of the software platforms will give you give you those checklists, which is great. And it's important to have an awareness around the checklist because they're often correct that there's certain things that are important, but understanding your position against your competitors and what your market looks
like and being able to decide when you need to be more creative and lead more into content or when you need to be more technical because that's what's holding the the website back. Sometimes there are things that sit on those checklists that you go, do you know what? In a perfect world, if we had all the time in the world and all the money in the world, we'd get these all to green. But actually, right now to get the ROI you need, we need to do this thing over here. And do not worry that that's not sitting at green. It's not holding you back in the same way as not doing this will do. So, I think it's having that balance of having those strategic people that can sit in the center of creativity and tech to be able to make those decisions um and guide the clients and and show them how we're doing that and why we're doing that. And it's not that we're dismissing things, but it's prioritizing. Thank you. Amazing. Finally speaking, Andrew, I think we have so much to talk about, especially to bring that up to our HR team because I would love to have a 4 day week instead of a 5 day week and give back it. You're hiring if you're hit. Yeah. Okay. Um, so I think it's time we address that elephant in the room that
every podcast addresses, which is AI. Though what I'm wondering about is that it is rumored that Reflect Digital is actually trying to leverage AI in increasing the um paid advertisement uh boost. So I'm wondering how exactly you're incorporating that new technology and if you have any means of ensuring that it's still human centric and not robotic as it normally comes. Definitely. So I guess our our AI stance is coming from a human first place. So we so we actually this year have committed to and we've done one and we're about to we're just pushing the button on the second one. We're doing a quarterly pulse report on um how search behavior is changing and trying to understand by polling the general public because I think sometimes we overindex in our minds when we work in our industry on things like AI because it's everywhere we look but actually for Joe blogs on the street that that doesn't work in digital marketing or in in digital in general it's not as big a
thing but it is starting to find its way in there. So we we're doing this pulse report quarterly so that we can start to keep an eye on what that trend looks like and be really clear what Joe Blogs on the street or what our client on the streets um customer might be thinking so that we can understand where AI sits in the customer journey. So I think from a customer journey point of view that that's really important. We need to understand where customers going and how their queries are changing and what types of queries they're asking to to which different platforms and for what they're hoping for from it. And when it comes to using AI internally, so we um we've got an AI working group that we've had running for a couple of years now where the team and those that are really interested in it and meeting monthly to look at innovations, what's changing to to keep the rest of the business informed on what is happening out there and where we should be putting our focus. We also last year moved one of our SEO team into an innovation role to lead that within the agency and a huge part of his role is around AI. So it's
understanding and setting the guard rails for our team to work on so that we can be sure because again it's such a new thing we have to be really careful cuz the it's changing literally by the week. There's new tools, there's new advancements. So helping make sure that our team know what's the right thing to do. We do not want to be creating just content using chatbt. That's not a good idea. by using chat GBT to support the processes and how we're creating content or actually we're using Gemini a lot. We're a Google agency um from all of our products and services internally, our email, our Google Docs, etc. So Gemini obviously works really well embedded with all of that using Notebook LLM a lot for trying to pull together information and help surface the right things that we need to at the right time for the team. So there's lots of ways we're using it, but it's definitely not creating any final client work for us at the moment. We've had it in support um for some of our clients from a translation perspective and working very openly with clients on that side of things and that's been really interesting as an experiment to see and actually in some cases it's been really
good um really really strong. So yeah it's it's all a ongoing journey at the moment but I think it's transparency is key internally and externally. Um the minute you start claiming everything's your own work and it's all been done by humans and it's not I think you're going to come a cropper. So it's uh you need to be really transparent with clients so that they understand how it's carrying what you're doing. But also I think from an agency point of view it's understanding where your value still sits because if you are starting to save time using AI that doesn't mean that you necessarily just need to give that away to clients because otherwise we're going to start to erode the agency model and erode ways to be able to to make money and to be profitable as a business. So I think that's the other thing is having a really clear idea on the value that you are bringing to the party to your clients and making sure that you're selling on value and not just on hours and therefore if AI is cutting the time you're losing out when actually you're still delivering value. Right. Right. So on the topic of that ongoing journey um Reflect Digital actually celebrated its
10th anniversary in 2021. So you're now in your second decade in the digital world. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, what we're wondering about is that what's the vision for the next decade? Do you have any specific frontiers or any goals that you've set for your team and where would you like to take your agency? Amazing. Good question. We have a lot. So, um, yeah, there's always a lot going on. So, one of the things I guess really quickly to note with the with the Lab Group acquisition, we actually ended up reversing out of Lab Group in 2023. And then very long story that I'll just give the highlight of it ended up that we ended up actually buying the original lab agency that now sits with us. So we now have the human first collective as our umbrella business and group of businesses. And so sitting under that we have reflect digital on the performance marketing side. We have lab from a digital product solutions side. And then we also have aspiration digital which is our um our arm where we're fueling the future of the industry with bringing young people
on board. So we're there to inspire young people about what it means to work in digital broadly. So that's a big mission for me. But yeah, we so we we sit as the human first now. So a lot of what we do is looking at how collectively we work together to bring together brilliant people that are really passionate to use technology and AI, but to be human first and use this super superpower that we have with behavioral science. So it's about growing our impact and growing what we're doing for clients um alongside fueling the industry. uh by bringing amazing talent and ensuring that young people that are at school today that maybe don't know about they know about digital. They're probably more savvy than the three of us on using their phones and internet and whatnot, but they don't know about the jobs that exist. They don't know your job exists. They don't know my job exists. and and that for me is a real big passion alongside the agency because we'll keep doing great work and that's our focus to ensure that we've got a human first eye on where the industry is going, but we won't be able to do great work if we
don't have great people wanting to be inspired to come and work in in the industry. So, it's a bit of all of those things is how we're we're working. We've got a vivid vision which I guess from a bit of advice perspective, we went through this process a couple of years ago. So there's a really good book called Vivid Vision written by a chap called Cameron Herald. Um he's previously helped the likes of uh Elon Musk which he obviously divides people whether you like him or not but um I think we can all see that he's uh doing doing well from growing a business perspective. And the idea of a vivid vision is that you um often in a business you'll have these big goals. you'll say, "Oh, we we know we want to get to here." And and then your team sit there and they're like, "I don't really know what that means." And okay, yeah, cool. We'll help. But they don't really feel behind it and integrated. The idea of a vivid vision is you write you write a document 3 years out from where you are. So ours was written at the end of 2023 and runs to the end of 2026. And you write it as though it is the 31st of December 2026. and you deeply describe
what the business is like, the type of clients you're working with, the type of team that you have, the the ways and workings of the business. So, it becomes this story that people can start to see what's inside your head. They can start to feel what the business is going to look like in the future. And then off the back of that, you build out your goals and and ways to get there. And obviously, some of it will become true, some of it might not. Um, there's already probably a few things where we've kind of taken slightly different directions. um we're what 18 months into our vivid vision, but most of it still rings true and it's just this brilliant ability to help people understand properly where you're going. And I'd say that's been a really big turning point for us in getting the team with us on the journey and really feeling like they're part of where we're going and part of shaping it and delivering it. Yeah. Brilliant. Uh um I actually want to jump into the quick fire round right now and ask you a couple of questions. Don't think about them at all. Whatever the first thing comes to your mind, just let us know. So, what's one digital marketing buzz word or cliche you would like to disappear forever? Content is
king cuz everyone talks about that, don't they? Okay. Uh, so wi with the 4 day work week that you have, what is the first thing that you do on your extra day off? Uh, I 7 a.m. workout with my PT. Do you prefer speaking at conferences or crafting the strategy behind the scenes? Oh, conferences. And I'm going to give Max the opportunity to ask a couple of more quick fire round questions. Yeah, absolutely. So, what's a hobby or a talent you have outside of work that might surprise your colleagues? Oh, I do aerial silks, so hanging upside down from silks and climbing up. Wow. Oh, fascinating. I always wondered how you do that. Okay. So, yeah, absolutely. It looks that way. Uh, what's the one tool or app you rely on the most on every like every day? Slack, probably. That makes sense. Great Becky, thank you for joining us, sharing this information. Yeah, we'd love to have you stick around for longer. Maybe we'll have you back for another talk later down the line. Yeah, wishing you all the best uh with Reflex Digital second decade. Uh and yeah, moving into
the AI age with your experiment. I want I wanted to have a ask question specifically about the innovations that you have, but you just really closed it off really nicely. So, there's takeaways for the young entreprene AI, what's next for the market. So, um, I'm going to do the outro here and saying that is a wrap for this episode of the SEO agency roller coaster podcast. A huge thank you to Becky Sims of Reflect Digital for coming on, sharing her journey, and inspiring the next wave of SEO entrepreneurs. This podcast is powered by Ranking, the SEO tool set that helps agencies scale smarter and achieve lasting success. If you're serious about building up your agency, SEO Ranking is here to help you make your mark online. Hit subscribe for more expert insights, motivation, and agency growth hacks. Keep pushing forward. Stay ahead of the curve. And remember, your agency success story starts with action. [Music]
Key takeaways
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Q&A
Becky relied on naïveté about the difficulty of entrepreneurship, focused on winning the first clients to establish cash flow, and leveraged her client management skills by hiring specialists to deliver the work while she drove sales. — Becky Simms
She didn't initially realize bias existed because her father had normalized entrepreneurship for her. While she noticed fewer women at networking events, she found that being young actually opened doors in legal sector prospects who wanted digital expertise. — Becky Simms
A business development person at the agency reached the right contact at the right time via LinkedIn outreach. The pitch required creating the actual creative work beforehand, representing significant risk but resulting in four consecutive years of wins. — Becky Simms
Becky wanted access to human behavior expertise and colleagues who'd scaled agencies bigger than hers. Joining allowed Reflect Digital to integrate psychology formally into strategy, enabling them to take more control of client relationships and understand audiences from a human perspective. — Becky Simms
Becky wanted to challenge the 'one rule for leadership, another for staff' culture she'd seen in other agencies. The team helped make it work through focus on client satisfaction, resulting in increased productivity, happiness, and flexible arrangements that suited different employees' needs. — Becky Simms
Becky emphasizes having the right people in the right roles who come together strategically. Rather than treating SEO as a checklist, the team prioritizes what will drive ROI and sometimes deprioritizes checklist items that aren't holding back results. — Becky Simms
The agency runs quarterly pulse reports on search behavior, has an AI working group meeting monthly, uses tools like Gemini and Notebook LLM internally to support processes, and maintains transparency with clients about any AI involvement in their work. — Becky Simms
Becky aims to scale impact as the Human First Collective (which includes Reflect Digital, Lab, and Aspiration Digital), grow brilliant people passionate about human-first technology use, and inspire young people to pursue careers in digital through educational initiatives. — Becky Simms
Quotes
“Until you start having some sales coming in and some money coming in, you don't really have a business.” — Becky Simms
“We need to ensure that when we're making those decisions, we're doing them on behalf of what our audience really wants, what our customer really wants, what they're looking for.” — Becky Simms
“Without that customer insight, you'd never have got to that creative campaign. We'd never have understood that to be able to play with that as a campaign.” — Becky Simms
“I've always been a believer that I want to show up for my team and to show them that I'm working as hard as they are.” — Becky Simms
“The minute you start claiming everything's your own work and it's all been done by humans and it's not, I think you're going to come a cropper. You need to be really transparent with clients.” — Becky Simms