I've been with Six & Flow for a long time... pretty much since the first few months it was created and the majority of my time in Manchester. When I joined, I had just left another agency and taken a job with a big award winning agency but packed it in after four weeks to join Rich building a new agency from the ground up.
Back then, Six & Flow was called Grain, and Rich thought he would be clever with a wearegra.in URL (oooo so alternative...), but this made the company look like it was based in India. Along with the bad Wood pun, there were several reasons for the eventual name change to Six & Flow.
At the start, it was shared office space and hopping between coffee shops to try and get stable wifi. Then, we moved to a tiny office in the middle of Manchester iHub and Alice, Hazel, and Rose joined the team. Since then, the list of names seems to be ever expanding. We have seen some really talented people join and leave the organisation, but we have also seen the team grow from a handful of people to a 30 strong agency with staff and offices across the world. We have experts in new and emerging sales and marketing techniques and when it comes to HubSpot, we know the system intimately.
We have also had some extremely questionable office music on repeat and I now know the lyrics to far too many Ariana Grande songs. We have been lucky on the people front with a lot of really talented, friendly people within the agency and that's part of but not the only reason I have stayed at Six & Flow for so long.
What's good about Six & Flow is that we try to promote a team first environment where individual ego doesn't get in the way of the team ethos, so even if someone is being a d*ck, we normally resolve it quickly without it impacting the overall company. We do this by trying to be open and candid with each other and remembering that this is a job at the end of the day.
There have been a lot of good days and nights with the Six & Flow team and we have a lot of pics around the office. The ones that stand out most in terms of how far we have come are the pics of when Rich's wife would bring in their eldest child in, still in nappies and she would crawl on the table and knock over the phones-now Rich is telling us about how well she is doing in school. I could go on and on as over the years Six & Flow has been a big part of my life in Manchester and the people have all left an indelible mark on my time in this city.
As I mentioned above, before Six & Flow I did a small stint at a global agency that I was super hyped to join. I went in on my first day, did my induction and then for two weeks I just sat on one spreadsheet... every day for two weeks.
I asked the people beside me questions and tried to be really proactive but nothing. Nobody could give me any clear answers, they all knew how to do "their" individual bits but had no visibility on the whole thing. Some people did ad copy, some did PPC scripts, some did tracking, all small bits of a much wider prescribed and monitored process. I soon realised that the place was completely siloed and the reason they had so many people was because it was a factory floor not an agency. If I had wanted to work in a factory I would have stayed in my small town in rural Ireland. I wanted to use my brain and build good campaigns. So when Rich took us for a pint and made an offer, I hopped straight away.
When we first started, we were throwing up paid campaigns and directing them to average landing pages and then doing content on the side. Within six months we thought, "If we are going to compete we need to bring inbound more into the mix." So we learned inbound and how to mix it with paid.
The next six months we thought "if we are going to compete we need to bring conversational marketing into the mix." We learned conversational and brought it into the mix.
The next year it was video selling, the next HubSpot CRM platform, the next sales enablement and CRM, and so it goes.
This is what I love about Six & Flow and the reason I have stayed so long. We are constantly trying new things and making mistakes on ourselves so that we can provide new, effective and pragmatic processes to our clients.
Over the years, we have had to grow up as an agency... meaning that we can't be as cavalier as we were in the first years. This has come with the benefit of creating a stable business where we can look after our staff and give them the opportunity to grow and make what they want of their roles.
At Six & Flow if you want to learn, progress, and find new ways to solve problems-you will feel right at home.