Member Article

Bridge Club - In Conversation With ... Siobhan Bales & Diane Gates, The bgroup on Wednesday, April 25

North East networking experts, The Bridge Club, run a popular Parkinson-style interview event discovering the story behind the North East’s most exciting companies. Here Siobhan Bales and Diane Gates of Newcastle-based creative agency The bgroup talk about their rapid expansion whilst striving to keep the fun factor in their business.

WITH a scruffy, weather-worn rucksack slung across her back and sporting short, spiky hair, Diane Gates was hardly the best turned out of the 70-odd respondents to an advert in the North East Jobs Appointments - an advert that, in itself, was a little unusual.

Siobhan Bales, flush with excitement about her brand new business, had omitted to put a name or contact number on the recruitment ad, just an address signposting willing applicants to the shoebox-sized office in Old Post Office in Pink Lane that her husband, Stephen, had proudly painted bright purple.

And the interview location further compounded what all-in-all was an unconventional first meeting for the pair - a pint and a chat in one of Newcastle’s best known watering holes, The Forth Hotel on Pink Lane.

“We had a lot in common,” Di recalls to an audience of over 70 business people gathered at the Bridge Club event held in The Northern Counties Club in Newcastle. “We both agreed that you don’t have to be a bastard to do well in business.”

As conversations go, it was only upstaged by the one that initially spurred Siobhan to set up her business in the first place.

It was the summer of 2000 and Siobhan was hosting a summer party at her new house. She was on maternity leave from her job at Ward Hadaway and contemplating what the future held. “I didn’t want to go back to nasty lawyers,” she says with a grin. “An accountant friend turned to me and said, “Do you know, you would be great at running a business”.

“In my new house I had a long pure white carpet and at 5am I was scrubbing red wine stains out after the party thinking ‘I’m going to do it’.”

The next day, she was in PC World shelling out £2,500 on a new computer and, after deliberating over what business to start, she plumped for e-marketing.

“I decided to call it emarketing.com. highly original! But someone had beaten me to it, so bmarketing was born.”

From its inception on January 8, 2001, bmarketing was founded on a bedrock of creativity and fun. Enthusiasm and zest for life oozes out of every pore of the pair and it has been a running theme throughout the seven years the company has been running which staff find infectious.

As with most new businesses, bmarketing went at a broad client base in its early days to bring in the revenue although it always had enterprise at its core.

Late 2001, Di took the opportunity to buy into the venture. “The business got to the stage where it rocketed. We needed to get money into the business to capitalise on opportunities. I was never in doubt that it was the right thing to do.”

At that point they took time out to plan a strategy to inject greater focus into the business.

“We decided that youth enterprise was the way forward,” explains Di. “At that time it was so new but it was a natural fit - everything about it was in synergy with what we were about.”

Si says: “At the time, there were a lot of mixed messages. People thought we were a support agency. We realised that internally we needed to restructure to maximise the best of our staff strengths.”

So in 2004 it was relaunched as The bgroup with nine staff and six divisions.

One of those strands was the bdaily, an e-newsletter dispensing bite-sized chunks of news and other useful information which has become perhaps its best marketing weapon within the North East.

Di says: “We had a year-in-industry student Chris who was one of our first employees. He was the first editor of the bdaily. At the time it was very informal and called bmarketing daily and it reached five or six hundred people.”

Si adds: “We did it because we didn’t have time to read business news but it is really important to keep in touch for business opportunities. Initially it was an amalgam of all the local news and then it started to develop into a phenomenon. We have never done any marketing for it. It was zeitgeist. It captured something that was missing.”

bdaily will be six years old in September and now has in excess of 8,000 subscribers. The bgroup is in talks with venture capitalists to explore ways in which to maximise the full potential for it, including the fledgling online television strand bdaily.tv.

Si says: “Once we start marketing it, it will be tremendous. We are really excited about it.”

Trinity Mirror, long the established business news force in the region, has launched its own online business news channel complete with a daily e-news bulletin. Should they be concerned?

Di jokes: “We feel like a mini Richard Branson going head to head with Sky!”

The bgroup is now light years away from where it was in the early days when it ran mad advertisements in the Journal to grab attention. They both acknowledge that they were ahead of their time and driven by love for their work rather than money.

“We were never around profit,” says Si.

Di adds: “We over-delivered terribly. The work was so enjoyable and we wouldn’t deliver a project for a client we would take it over.”

The bgroup has always had a close affinity with the enterprise agenda and maintained a commitment to bringing on young talent.

It worked closely with STEP (Shell Technology Enterprise Programme), now called Shell STEP, and grew a pool of graduates who revelled in the creative environment.

The company’s staff ethos had evolved organically. Work wasn’t really work as the culture of enjoying what you do pervaded everything. Staff were involved throughout the creative process and the business had an open and honest approach to its activities. This included initiatives such as ‘b my guest’ where anyone outside of the business could spend a day working alongside its creative teams.

But as it grew, so did the need for a structure.

“When the business was six, eight, ten people, it was effortless to ensure a relaxed culture. Maintaining that as we grew became difficult,” says Di.

Si adds: “We had a flat structure ? really just a meritocracy ? and everyone was equal. But, when we grew we realised we needed to revisit it.”

They embarked on a culture change management exercise which involved bringing external experts in to find out what the staff expected from a career with The bgroup and to introduce Prince 2 project management to the business.

Si says: “It is very different from the business we started. It has had to grow up massively and it has had to conform a little. But we wanted to retain the freshness and objectivity, that’s why we are very playful when we talk about the business.

“We really needed to know the culture. We have really pushed the staff very hard over the last year, it’s been a toughy, so we wanted to listen to them but knew we couldn’t be the ones to ask the questions.”

The feedback from staff was that they wanted structure and wanted to see career path progression because they wanted to stay with The bgroup.

The bgroup has matured from the days of the wacky adverts and staff appraisal days in the pub and is now heavily involved in enterprise initiatives across the country. It is the darling of the Department of Trade & Industry for its innovative stance on driving the enterprise culture and it was the DTI that pushed for Si to sit on a European Commission panel promoting the enterprise agenda.

With the maturity has come a much more structured approach to reaping the rewards due to the business.

“When we started, the average fee was £500 to £1,000,” reminisces Di. “We realised that you can have 20-25 projects all around £1,000 and it takes just as much management as a £100,000 project.”

After a few years and with a burgeoning reputation, the company was netting £10,000 to £15,000 contracts. Within the last year that had grown to up to £200,000 and The bgroup is now starting to work on projects running into the millions.

Si says: “It is the first time that sort of market has been available.”

This is payback for a concerted strategy to focus on the niche market of enterprise.

Di explains: “It is about miles in the market. We decided our marketplace is within enterprise. We are looking at creating lots of products around that.”

With the focus must come the discipline not to become waylaid by other contracts that take it away from its niche.

“To do that is a massive shift,” says Si. “If you concentrate on one marketplace you lose lots of other stuff. To niche is to be extraordinarily focussed and to be extraordinarily disciplined. Opportunities are just flying to us now.”

The bgroup is now considering opportunities to break out of the UK market and to explore the potential of Europe and the United States.

BUSINESS TIPS: Love what you do, be true to yourself and your beliefs

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .