In Conversation With: Daniel Tiffany, Managing Director

This month marks Dream Big Digital's 6th birthday, and to celebrate, I put Managing Director Daniel Tiffany in the hot seat! We discussed topics such as the motivations for starting Dream Big Digital, what a typical day looks like working both on projects and client-side, as well as plans for the future.

What does a typical day look like for you?

It really varies from day to day. I’d say half of my time is on calls, and the rest is working on projects. Every morning we have a quick meeting with the team and get everyone sorted for the day, so they’re working on everything they need to be. The rest of my day is typically calls with clients, organising workloads and signing stuff off. Then, I do the more strategic pieces for clients as well, so putting together presentations about site or email improvements, or anything like that.

How involved are you in client projects vs internal strategy?

I’m heavily involved with both, because we’re only a small team I still get to do both which is really good. I’m able to be in a position where I can give guidance to my team, as well as be a main point of contact for nearly every client. I work really closely with my clients to talk about their strategy and overarching view of their business and what they want to work towards. I can establish goals with them and how we progress towards them.

We also have our own company’s strategy I focus on; how we grow our business, how we find new business and how we expand with services we offer that could be beneficial to clients who don’t use those services yet. I’m involved in every aspect which is good for now, because when we get hopefully bigger in the future, it probably can’t remain that way, and there’ll be some parts that I can be more involved in than others.

What made you decide to start your own business after working in-house?

A few things! One of the benefits of what I do is that I get to work with lots of different businesses with some really good variety. I’m working on different things every day, whereas if you’re in-house for a long time it can get quite repetitive. The big benefit is being your own boss and taking the company in the direction that we choose to. We’re choosing to work in the way we want to.

From working in house, I worked with a lot of agencies over the years and I could see what worked well and what didn’t. What works well, is when a brand and an agency work really closely together; when both teams have great relationships and can suggest ideas to each other to help the whole business grow. As an agency, we want to feel like an extension of their team; that’s what we aim for.

I think it can definitely go the other way where it feels like the agency is competing with people internally, and there’s definitely a wall built up in between people. So, I feel like working in house gave me a good perspective on what can work really well, and how beneficial agencies can be for businesses.

What makes Dream Big Digital stand out from other agencies in the Shopify space?

As I said, we try to work really closely with brands and feel like we are part of that brand’s team, as well as having a great relationship with them. I think that’s the best way of working together. The ideal situation would be where we’re essentially a brand’s digital team and we’d do everything for them.

In terms of the wider Shopify market, there’s a whole host of agencies that are doing lots of different things. Our space is really the mid-size business on Shopify. I think that down the lower end of the market, there are a lot of templated websites and websites that are churned out really quickly and cheaply, with a lot of work outsourced. I didn’t want to be like that as I’m not a fan of that way of working. I love being able to build a relationship and help a brand grow in the long term, which I think fits the exactly the type of client we look to work with as well. We like a midsize client who is looking to grow, who wants to work with someone over the long term, from initially doing a website project and then growing over a 4 year period. This gives us a chance to really learn who that brand’s customer base is, what their products are like, what makes them different from their competition and what their overall goals are as a business.

How does your team collaborate on a typical Shopify project/ how do you delegate the work?

As a team, if we’re doing a big project, like a new website or a website redesign, typically I’d be the main contact for the client. Katie would lead the design side of everything, and Dom would lead with the development. We’ve all worked together for many years, more than 10 years now! We know how one another works and we know when to get each other involved, for example it could be Dom looking at Katie’s design to get an idea of how it can be built and what’s possible. As I said, we’ve all worked together for a very long time so we know how to work well together.

What’s a campaign or project you’ve worked on that you’re specifically proud of?

I’d say there are lots that I’m really proud of that we’ve done as a team. One of the most proud is our work with Keans, who are over in Ireland. They’re a B&Q-type business; selling hardware, electricals and garden products; they have a huge catalogue. We’ve worked with them over the last 5 years, and they’ve grown massively; they’re earning 10 times the revenue they were when we first started working with them, which has been awesome.

There were a lot of technical challenges with their site, and they have a catalogue of over 15,000 products across a whole host of different product categories. When initially working with them, we were really pushing Shopify at that time to the limits of what it was capable of, when dealing with catalogues of that size. This was as well as managing how navigation and filters work.

Since that initial project when we built the site for them, the site has been continually evolving over the last 5 years, which is how we really like to work. We feel like we’re a part of that team as we work really closely with the guys; they’re lovely and always really receptive to ideas, as well as coming up with great ideas themselves. It’s been amazing to see their website grow significantly.

How do you build long-term, lasting relationships with clients?

Step one is definitely picking and working with the right brands. It’s really important; it has to be a brand that fits in with our ethos and has similar goals for their business to what we think they can, or should be trying to achieve. That’s important from the outset. I think that the people matter an awful lot as well; there has to be investment from both parties into achieving the growth, or whatever it is we’re aiming to do. People that are nice to work is always a massive help. If you’ve got to speak to someone on a regular basis and suggest ideas to them, having a good relationship with them is vital.

I’d say another vital part is having that clear plan for months and years ahead; that’s extremely important. So is getting customer feedback and analytics and feeding these into the plan, as well as anything else you can get in terms of data, in terms of how their business is changing, and feeding all this information in and coming up with a strategy in terms of what that ongoing change will look like.

What’s your vision for Dream Big Digital over the next year or two?

So for the next few years, I want to continue growing as a business. We’ve recruited really well over the past few years. I don’t want us to get too big as an agency; but still grow a bit from where we are now, so that hopefully my role can adapt to be more of an overarching, strategic role, working with clients and their strategies. And, obviously our own business strategy, to not be as hands on as I am now would be really good.

I think with that, would come a bigger team and working with some different brands as well. We have a good diversity of brands now, but I’d love to continue finding even more great brands to work with. We’ve got a really good definition now of who we love working with, so to find more brands as we grow our business by helping them would be perfect.