European Business magazine caught up with entrepreneur Alfie Dawson (pictured), CEO, Bordeaux & Burgundy to find out how he built a £2m business which supports high growth SaaS companies.
Tell us about Bordeaux & Burgundy
Bordeaux & Burgundy is an agency born out of the frustrations of my in-house business to business (B2B) marketing experience. Agencies that I’ve worked with operated slowly and didn’t quite understand the growth objective of B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, failing to work in a way that aligned with how in-house departments work. I wanted an agency that revolved around action and results for clients.
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SubscribeBordeaux & Burgundy works exclusively with B2B SaaS companies to help them achieve ambitious growth targets through rapid campaign creation and deployment to increase revenue pipeline. These campaigns consist of omnichannel content creation and services including design, copywriting, ppc, paid social, landing page design and email marketing.
What’s the secret behind your £2m growth?
Our success so far has been driven by our constant adaptation to client needs. We aren’t an agency who take on one-off projects as that model doesn’t lend itself to achieving the goals SaaS companies want to reach. A one-off three-month campaign can’t generate the pipeline required for clients to reach their next funding stage or an exit. Instead, Bordeaux & Burgundy focuses on creating long-term relationships for long-term campaigns with our clients, helping us to deliver impactful results by adapting our team, developing our services, and refining our scope around the needs of the client. Repeating this model has allowed us to successfully scale.
What key services do you offer clients?
Bordeaux & Burgundy is an all-encompassing campaign marketing agency that creates hundreds of campaigns quickly and efficiently to reach clients’ target audiences and build their pipeline.
Campaigns include everything from paid media, email marketing, Account Based Marketing (ABM), event marketing, social campaigns – we’ve even created Out-Of-Home (OOH) displays in Time Square.
How will your offering help businesses perform despite economic challenges?
During every economic downturn, business leaders and decision makers have their boards and investors telling them to do more with less. Bordeaux & Burgundy enables marketing teams to do just that, improving processes and adopting technology to drive greater efficiency and output. We empower marketers to single-handedly create and deploy hundreds of campaigns across multiple regions at the rate and quality of a global marketing team from a leading brand. Business leaders should re-evaluate their current processes and explore how technology can make their lives easier, allowing them to achieve more with less.
What are your top three learnings from growing your own business?
Empowering others to make decisions: when starting a business, more often than not, the owner tries to take control over every decision, but this is not sustainable. It is important to hire a team to support business growth and empower them to make smart decisions. Trust your team’s judgement and counsel!
If you repeat something, automate it: this not only makes processes quicker and removes human error, but it empowers employees as they won’t be bogged down doing boring, repetitive tasks. Automation is a key enabler for staff and can free up tens of hours a week per employee, allowing them to concentrate on more engaging, high-impact tasks.
Always look for improvements: There’s a huge focus in business on finding product-market-fit, often leading to the idea that once something has been found then the job is done, and the product can be sold to that market. However, there’s always opportunities to improve products and services, relying on regular customer feedback, and there are always opportunities to better understand the constantly evolving market to adapt to new opportunities.
Where do you see Bordeaux & Burgundy in five years?
Bordeaux & Burgundy’s aim is to be the number one B2B SaaS marketing agency in the world, not by revenue, employees or any specific metric other than how many clients we have taken from Series A funding onwards to a successful exit. We’re here to create unicorns!
