Optify was an SEO agency, and the talent behind it was a chap called Robbie, exceptionally gifted in the area of SEO.

We would always talk. I had used his service a number of times. He would share ideas, he would give me ideas for how to improve traffic to The Brotique, and I would talk him through his business as well, what it meant to be a brand and how to scale an agency like I had done.

But there was an issue. People often knew that they wanted their website to be busier or better, but a lot of people didn't know the language to search for that, or how to find the people that could help them. And this is actually even true sometimes for agencies. If you cannot name the thing you need, you cannot go and buy it.

So I came up with a name. Optify worked because it took an object. In a pitch it becomes: Optify my hairdressers, Optify my business, Optify my brand. The name was both a reference to a sense of the visual, but also optimisation, which is ultimately what SEO is.

The rename did two other things. One, it separated the company from his name, his identity, which is important both as a proposition to market and for his own approach to the business. It gave him the space to look at it more impartially. And he started it from scratch as well, so he could prove how quickly he could do it, on a brand with nothing behind it.

I built the pitch decks and everything for it.

And once that was in place, the value of the contracts jumped. One project price went from two thousand pounds to twenty thousand.