Celebrating SearchStar's Diaspora

With nearly 5 years elapsing since SearchStar was sold to 多语信息技术有限公司 (it became Adapt ) I’m mulling what we achieved and what it meant.

Our financial achievement was significant - we created a consistently profitable 65 person paid media business and successfully sold it in a competitive auction to a US buyer. Yet the euphoria from that inevitably has faded…the more lasting legacy for me is in the people we hired, grew & saw flourish in the business and after they left us. The real achievement was the opportunity we gave this diaspora of successful happy people.

I started the business having been recently told by a previous boss (thankyou Dominic Benton ) that I was a bad manager…it was a fair critique given my team were barely on speaking terms with their Media Director freshly “Down From London”. After this slightly bruising experience, I left to become a one-man PPC specialist…however as the business started to gain traction I had to make the decision to hire employee #1…a postcard was put in the village shop window and the fabulous Nettie Wells was hired…she stayed almost 10 years and is still a close friend.?

My biggest learning over the subsequent years was that our #1 success factor wasn’t our tech or our sales & marketing. Our #1 success factor was our ability to hire, train and retain great people.?

Back in the late 2000s Google’s PPC advertising system was only just hitting its stride after online advertising's near useless “banner years”. There weren't many experienced people to hire, especially in Bath. We discovered the ideal person was what Google’s recruiters called a “General Athlete”... smart, numerate, ambitious & energetic with strong people skills.

Over subsequent years we hired +150 people. An client & now friend Rob Austen once told me that if people don't impress in the first days / weeks / months they rarely get better…we learnt to have difficult conversations quickly and asked people to be equally direct back if SearchStar wasn't for them.

Training, we largely had to do ourselves given online advertising’s infancy. N.B. credit to @Google Agency Partners programme which kicked in for us in the 2010s. I’d done my media buying “apprenticeship” at 竞立媒体 and MG OMD in the 1990s…both brilliantly run companies stuffed with talented people. Within SearchStar we tried to offer that same culture of continuous learning and development. If we could make it a great place to train and grow your career we’d attract the best people and they’d be reluctant to leave…largely we succeeded.?

We worked hard at retention with SearchStar’s employment practices being relatively progressive (staff bonuses, lunch together once a week, pastries on Friday, good nights out etc.). Christmas all agency parties took us as far as Marrakech, Reykjavik, Dublin and Berlin. Just as hiring training & retaining was our #1 success factor so the inverse was true - a staff exodus was by far our greatest business risk.?

Highly fliers sometimes want to spread their wings and we had to learn to live with people leaving after 2+ years for jobs further afield…London, Canada & Australia were the fave destinations. They’d “graduated” and that could be celebrated. What I never celebrated was a talented team member leaving for a local agency…in my mind we'd failed by not being the better option...thankfully that rarely happened.?

In the years after we sold inevitably the feared exodus occurred. However it has been one that has borne fruit. The talented ambitious people we trained have set up new agencies such as Bind Media | B-Corp & Grapevine Ads . Others have taken leadership positions at existing businesses such as Rob Wilde (we happily still work together there as I'm a non-exec) at Varn Search Marketing , Emma Chun at Adapt , Joey Stevens & ?? Mike Sharp . Careers are flourishing as CMOs, within 谷歌 & Meta & at international agencies across the world. Ecommerce businesses have been founded. I hear of significant & joyful life events…weddings, babies & houses.?

In all this, there is a massive satisfaction that I simply never anticipated when founding SearchStar. Back then, people were seen by me purely as a problem. Now I’ve discovered they were the true joy within the business. Seeing the diaspora flourish gives enormous pleasure…. congratulations to you all.

Forgive me for namechecking only a few of the team...there are too many of you to mention everyone!?...apologies if I've missed you off.