Tony Ward is the co-founder of Psydro, the world’s first social review platform. Unlike other review platforms, Psydro is a trusted, transparent and validated community that helps consumers spend wisely through authentic and verified reviews, which also drives Psydro’s partners business.
Lindsey Pickles is the founder of Bright Dials. Bright Dials is an independent agency that specialises in helping businesses get the most out of their CRM and automations. Taking your current data sources as a starting point they identify where responsive, data-generated processes attract the hottest leads to your business and accelerate the sales cycle.
Ben Bennett is the founder and Managing Partner of Second Voice,a boutique business consultancy in Brighton. Second Voice enables tech and service-led founders to fast-track business growth utilising decades of experience growing sales teams and start-ups first-hand. Focusing on strategy, team structure and people development, Second Voice clients and partners have seen accelerated growth, even during the events of 2020.
Take your mind back to a time when we were in the office… This is where it all started for Ben, Lindsey and Tony. When Tony first joined the NatWest Accelerator, he had barely spoken to Lindsey or Ben. However, when Tony was looking for support to bring his product to market, he stumbled across Ben’s LinkedIn profile and was delighted to discover that he was a mentor and alumni of the Brighton Accelerator.
After connecting, Tony brought on Ben as an external consultant. With the input from the Psydro team, Ben designed the business growth strategy, as well as built comprehensive forecasting and financial models that would allow Psydro to scale. However, they discovered that one of Psydro’s biggest needs was attracting and acquiring customers and then preventing them from becoming dormant.
Due to working with Lindsey previously on the Accelerator, Ben was quick to recommend Bright Dials. Lindsey’s business specialises in helping businesses spend less time on manual tasks, focus their sales and marketing activity, and run a fully integrated operation.
Lindsey and Ben helped Tony to build a completely bespoke automated communications programme from the ground up. Initially, designing and building a new CRM system with sophisticated workflows that encouraged leads to engage and sign up, as well as upsell from the different packages that Psydro has to offer. After 6-8 months of working together, Psydro has undergone a massive transition towards becoming a fully self-serving SAAS platform. We recently caught up with all three entrepreneurs to find out how they have progressed since.
Tony: “Within 10 months I have built a product that I can sell as well as forming a talented team focused on growing the business.”
Ben: “My favourite part was seeing how quickly Tony and the team adapted to using the new growth strategy and financial tools. It’s fantastic to see founders collaborate and drive the change with us. The Psydro project has been hard work, but a huge learning curve, and ultimately a success story and a lot of fun for all involved.”
Lindsey: “I have hired a great project manager who has been instrumental in getting projects over the line. I was also effectively able to replace myself on the project with a fantastic CRM specialist too. It’s been a great learning curve which has allowed me to embed processes in my business to deliver bigger projects in the future.”
Tony: “Constantly ask questions, always be keen to learn and understand from other people so that you can give your best.”
Ben: “Make it clear from the start who is doing what. Know what you are going to deliver each week and what is going to be implemented to help business growth. Also, make sure you are using the right tools and maintain regular communication to manage expectations.”
Lindsey: “Use the right form of communication at the right time. We always use the tools our client’s prefer but I’m a big believer in picking up the phone when you need to. In this project we were fortunate that both Tony and I work in a similar way by making quick decisions over the phone.”
Tony: “My ultimate moon shot is for Psydro to become a direct household shopping destination as well as the successful delivery of my second business, Wild Hire.”
Ben: “Being able to support service or tech founders is something I’ve always enjoyed doing. I aim to continue doing this and make Second Voice a go-to partner in the start-up growth space.”
Lindsey: “The project has provided me with an opportunity to hire more people, giving me more time to focus on growing my business and achieve my goal of Bright Dials being the best CRM and automation agency in the UK.”
Our photography was produced by Tabatha Fireman a fellow Entrepreneur also on the NatWest Accelerator programme. Tabatha runs Female Perspective, a photo agency representing women photographers. Soon launching new brand ShotByWomen, an image library for the purpose of licence and distribution of content created exclusively by women photographers from around the world.
