Simon sits down with Joe Marston, co-founder of Soar With Us, the UK's leading creative growth agency, for an honest conversation about what it actually takes to build something great in e-commerce - and what most agency owners are getting badly wrong.
Joe started Soar with his school mate Ollie as teenagers with no money, two failed brand launches, and a bank account a thousand pounds in the red. They cold DM'd brands on Instagram offering to run their ads.
Their first win was a fascinator hat shop that had never made a single online sale. Then COVID hit.
We go deep into the real mechanics of agency building - the hiring traps that nearly broke them, why the creative strategist incubator exists, and why AI is now the dividing line between agencies that survive and those that don't. We also get into the agency apocalypse Joe sees coming for smaller operators, what soulmate theory actually means for your ad creative, and why focus is still the only advice that matters.
This is a direct conversation about luck, focus, creative strategy, and what it looks like when you build slow enough to get it right.
Want the practical AI strategies Joe mentions in this episode?
We go deep on the exact frameworks in Part 2 - and we've put together a free video walking you through the full system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g152V_9Hkg
The link to Pt. 2 here: https://youtu.be/gT5b0EJdTSQ
