Founder reflections: Celebrating Sookio’s first 15 years
As we reach our 15th birthday this month, Founder Sue Keogh shares personal reflections on the things she’s learned about running a digital marketing agency. Plus, we unveil our Strategy Suite, our expanded work experience plans, and something sharp and sweet for clients!
You have to find your constant
In digital marketing everything around you changes all the time. The projects. The clients. The team. We’re onto our 5th HQ. And then there’s the industry itself – when we started out, Twitter was strictly 140 characters and you couldn’t even add images – and now there’s TikTok, the explosion in AI, it’s all changed so much.
Which I personally find very exciting. But how reactive you are, how much you hold your nerve when things get tough, how much you look at a new trend and decide to leap on it or give it a miss…this is the hardest thing.
And this is where the tagline: Untangle your thinking came from.
This is our constant.
It’s less about aligning ourselves with a particular sector or trend, or saying that we offer only one service. This stuff can come and go, but the problem we’re solving for people remains the same.
Clients might come to us and say, “Help! We’ve spent years building up all these social media communities…and we don’t know what to do with them.”
Or maybe you’ve been buried in the lab ten years and have emerged blinking into the sunlight wondering how the hell you’re going to communicate this amazing research with customers who don’t understand the science.
So what we do brilliantly is help solve this problem.
People are always saying you should go niche by sector, but our niche relates to the problem we’re solving. How we take time to understand the challenge, how we advise on the strategic direction and the content to go with it…this will always be our constant even as everything around us changes.
As Dolly Parton says, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” And you can’t argue with Dolly, can you?
2. Things can change in an instant
I was stood in my kitchen at one point last summer and I thought to myself, you know what…things seem pretty stable at the moment. Then I laughed out loud and thought, “Well let’s give it five minutes.”
In any business you have to be prepared for things to change like ‘that’.
You can be riding high, everything smooth, running like clockwork…then suddenly a budget gets cut completely out of our control. And a couple of payments are slow to come in. All of a sudden it’s squeaky bum time on the cashflow front, whereas previously I was strutting round like the world’s greatest businesswoman.
The picture on the left was taken at 11am on 15 July 2019. We went into the office for a full-day’s shoot of promo videos for our Skillshare courses. It was a fun day, but long, and that night I went to bed and put my phone on silent.
The picture in the middle was sent at 5am the following morning from a journalist friend telling me my business was burning down.
It’s hard to fully articulate what I felt that morning as I gathered everything up and rushed into Cambridge…sitting on the train full of adrenaline, feeling like everything I’d spent 11 years building up was destroyed…standing at the police cordon staring at the huge hole where the front door had been…seeing the sooty handprints on the internal doors from where the firemen had rushed round in the middle of the night looking for any of us who may have been trapped.
Three weeks followed where we were shut out of the building. We worked in coffee shops. Kitchens. Client’s offices (thank you Cambridge Econometrics). The church opposite! And little did we know this was all a dress rehearsal for the pandemic which was just around the corner.
Having founded the company in 2008 - the height of the last recession, when my sons were aged 3 and 1, and 2 months after losing my Dad - in a weird way, it’s given me an advantage. I’m pretty resilient. As a business owner you have to be ready for the rug to be pulled out from under your feet at any given moment. And always maintain this optimism that if you hold your nerve, things might just be OK.
Having a strong company culture is something that helps weather these storms. Taking time to build these bonds when you’re not under pressure to do so, is so important. Deliberate communication, praising each other, supporting each other, celebrating the wins…it’s this that made us such a strong team following the Mill Road fire and during the whole pandemic period. This is just always going to be how we operate.
Which brings me to….
3. People are the most important thing in any business
I’ve known this from day one…but I’ve truly lived it now.
When we made our first hires (hello Jake and Cassie) I thought to myself that I may not know much about HR, but I do know it must come down to two things:
Can they actually do the job?
Can I work with them all day?
I’ve been proud to work with people at Sookio over the years who not only do the job brilliantly, but are some of the smartest, kindest, most creative people you can meet - who I LOVE spending time with. We laugh a lot. But we also take pride in doing excellent work. This goes for freelancers too – the designers, animators, video specialists and others we have in close orbit.
I’m still in touch with so many people that have been part of the team over the years, and I love watching their careers flourish even further, like Rhia at BBC Sport, Imogen at the New Zealand Film Festival, and all the people who have completed work experience with us who are going onto exciting careers.
And this month we’re so happy to welcome back Julia Latif to the Sookio family in her new role as Business Development Manager.
Speaking of family - my husband has always been such an incredible support, and the two boys I mentioned above are now teenagers and have definitely picked up their mother’s strong work ethic, and give me interesting insights into social media trends!
The other people in the business are our clients. We’re so grateful to be trusted with your businesses and ambitions, and consider ourselves lucky to work on projects that give us an opportunity to make a positive impact on the world.
And outside of Sookio we’re blessed with a lot of allies and supporters. Cheerleaders! Being a positive part of the business community is so important to me, and every kind word, every encouraging comment has meant so much. Thank you.
OK, so what next?
We have a few things coming up we’re excited to share:
The Strategy Suite is go! It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s strategic digital marketing that gives you comprehensive research, analysis and guidance that will boost your business and even help you reach your sustainability goals. Want to talk about it?
Bootcamp hits year 4! We’re so proud to have helped 60 people kickstart their careers in communications through our work experience initiatives, and we want to help more! Apply now for our August programme.
We’re also forming an official partnership with Long Road Sixth Form College, which will see us extending opportunities to younger people, too. Exciting!Sookio Sharpeners are back! Regular insights and peer-to-peer learning exclusively for clients. No one else, sorry! Join the mailing list for updates.
Podcast incoming! I can’t say much else for now, except that Project Backburner is finally go…
