Figure out your business trajectory, leverage a business sounding board, with Phil Fraser
Episode 9, Season 2 – Phil Fraser

 

Welcome to the ninth episode of the second season of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast. 

Our guest for today is Phil Fraser, who is known for his multi-award-winning online gaming affiliate business and now a Business Sounding Board. 

Wondering what type of help you need to grow your business? We’ve got the answers in this episode. 

• A success story of getting a product into a micro-niche is at 1:21
  
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  How did Phil generate income from his website? The two business models he used for monetization are at 4:02

  
  
  
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  No cash to spend on advertising? Check out 6:34 to learn how Phil sustained his start-up business

  
  
  
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  Phil’s story of becoming Ex Mr. Online Bingo is at 8:32

  
  
  
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  Learn more about business sounding board services at 11:21

  
  
  
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  The parameters Phil used in niching down in this micro-niche are at 14:20

  
  
  
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  Is there a specific industry for this micro-niche? The answer is at 22:18

  
  
  
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  The common issues business owners deal with can be found at 23:13

  
  
  
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  Need free advice and guidance for your business? Get the Nous of Fraser newsletter here

  
  

  If you find this episode interesting, share it with your friends.

  
  
  

Important Links:

 

linkedin.com/in/philfraser/

philfraser.co.uk

dailycookie. co

Transcript:

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode





Open Transcript

Voice Over:

Welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, he loves practicing singing with his 14-year-old daughter, and they often share songs from their playlists with each other. Ziv Raviv

Ziv:

Hello, and welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast. Hi, I’m so excited today to share with you a double story, a story of both a micro niche success in the product field, and also a story of micro niching on a specific problem with the service. Let me introduce you to Phil Fraser from philfraser.co.uk. Hello, Phil, how are you?

Phil:

Hi, Ziv. Good afternoon. I’m great. How are you doing?

Ziv:

It’s great to have you here. I’m really excited about getting to the point in the interview where we talk about your service as a business founding board, which sounds really interesting and unique and, and specific. But before that you also have a story, a success story of getting a product in a micro niche. Tell me all about that.

Phil:

Okay. So this goes, this story goes all the way up to 2000 and I, I took a, a business idea out to the market to get some angel investment for what would’ve been the UK’s first ever pay to play online bingo site that failed. We got no support whatsoever, but what fell out of the back of it was a comparison in effect comparison website for online bingo sites for initially in the US. And then eventually in the UK and online bingo sits within the whole online gaming space. So within that, you’ve got sports betting, you’ve got online casino, you’ve got online poker, you’ve got online lottery, online slots. We stuck to online bingo throughout, and that was our niche. The great thing about that was if you think about the, those products I’ve just listed in online gaming, you know, casino, poker, sports betting, they’re very male orientated.

Phil:

So online bingo is very female orientated and pretty much in the early days, we were just left to it because it was such a different niche to every it’s easy to take a sports better and go, okay, you like betting on sports. Do you wanna play online roulette or do you wanna play online poker? The further step to online bingo is for a lot of companies was too big, too early. So we were just left to our lane and we became by niching because we were alone. We became a, the whole niche thing was very much a case of big fish in a small pond.

Ziv:

This is fascinating. So you were basically doing like a website and I’m guessing a lot of search engine optimization and you started to generate traffic and you tell me what was your monetization strategy?

Phil:

Okay. So we had, in fact, we actually had two business monetizations, route one, my background pre-launch of the business was selling advertising in newspapers and magazines. So that was where I came from. So our initial business model was simply selling advertising space on the website. So it was a case of, we will advertise your product on this many pages for a month and that’s X pound or X dollars, or we would do it by just by impressions. So we will run your banner until it’s delivered 500,000 impressions, and that will cost you again, X thousand pounds. So that was our initial model. And the other aspect of that initial model in the very early days of online gaming, it was a bit wild west and there was some, some interesting characters within it, let’s say. So we ran with a, a prepayment model. So we said, you send us your money and we will then run your ads rather than how you would normally invoice a product.

Phil:

You know, we’ll pay the product and, and you pay afterwards. And that was brilliant because that gave us fantastic cash flow. So that business, the initial business model was advertising the model that the online gaming industry generally had within it was an affiliate model. And in very, very simple terms, that model as you run our ads for free, but we will pay you back a percentage of the money we make from the players you send. Now, the reason that model works so well within online gaming is it’s quite simple. If you signed up from my website, you spend $50, a hundred dollars a month, we get back $20. It’s very straight line. It’s very simple. And the beauty of that model, and this was fantastic about the model was I, you are my player for lifetime on that brand. So if you keep spending month on month on month, I get money from you month on month on month, which is a great model on one hand. However, going back to the first sentence, I run the ads for free. If you don’t spend any money, I don’t get any money. So there’s a, there’s a sort of risk reward. So we had two business models running. We had a, a straight advertising model and an affiliate model.

Ziv:

And how long did it take before you started to be becoming really profitable and excited?

Phil:

It’s interesting. The first five years of the business were you ran from home. So it to myself and my wife, and basically a couple of freelancers. And when you started a business, a lot of business books and podcasts and, and webinars say, you know, you’ve gotta have your exit planned and, and, you know, seed funding and a, and B and all that sort of thing. The vast majority of people, I believe setting up a business to pay the bills. And then what comes after that is the added bonus. So for five years it took us before we took on staff and an office. And I think that’s probably the point where we go, okay, we’ve got a business now that’s making money rather than just paying bills and maybe buying a new car, or maybe having a nicer holiday than going to the beach locally or something like that. So it’s it sort of grow. So it took about, I would say it took five years before we became a proper business. Well, we put, or we saw ourselves as a proper business.

Ziv:

What was the, like the lives that the yearlong cycle for business like this, is it basically just writing more content and just getting more traffic in it? Or did you experiment maybe with additional traffic sources? Like, I don’t know, Pinterest or Instagram or anything of that sort

Phil:

Bearing in mind? The business, as I say, started back into 2000, so we were quite lucky in the SEO was very early. So I, and those who who know their SEO history, it was sort of gray copy on white backgrounds. So the search engines didn’t see the words and, and keyword stuffing. And then we got into link exchange and all that sort of stuff. So a lot of our initial work, it was SEO and it eventually we got in-house content writers. We got in-house SEO guys, partly because we were as a zero investment startup. So we had no cash to spend on advertising. What we did do, we did a lot of email marketing where we exchanged lists with people. So we’ll promote your product. And again, this is within the niche. So, you know, we’ve got a bingo, a client who has a pay to play bingo site.

Phil:

So he’s got a database of players, some of whom spend money, some of whom don’t, we’ve obviously got a database of a newsletter. So we would say, okay, we’ll, we’ll market your product on our database. And then if you market our product to make, even to, to people who aren’t spending money. So there’s no, you know, there’s no cost to them. Look, these are dead players. These, these are players that don’t spend and, and we’ll do it as a Contra. So actually that gave us some inexpensive or cost negative or cost neutral marketing. And this is, I think one of the things that that’s interesting, and one of the other things I now do is I’m an angel investor. A lot of the stuff we did was driven by the fact that we didn’t have any money. So you have to get creative in how you promote and market your product. If you’ve been given half a million dollars or a million dollars or 2 million by angel investor you go, yeah, fantastic. We’ve got loads of money to spend. And perhaps, and won’t say everybody does this. Perhaps you end up it in ways or places that you probably wouldn’t if it was your money out of your pocket.

Ziv:

So what happened to this business? I understand that you, at some point did do an exit tell us that story.

Phil:

So we grew the business, there was initial website. We created multiple websites and we ended up with the free game and we expanded it to Spain. And we expanded to the UK all within the niche of online bingo at no. Well, I was gonna say at no point, did we expand outside that we did a three or four month trial to get into poker when poker started growing and I don’t play poker and I don’t understand poker. And it took us about four months to go in that can, that we had a domain, which we tried to work on. We sold the domain got out. So we stayed within online bingo. So 18 years later. So it’s quite a long people talk about, oh, we’ll exit in three to five years. That’s nonsense. Most people don’t do that. 18 years later, we become the preeminent brand as a comparison website in online bingo. So we had an annual industry awards ceremony. We got that big, we wrote an industry report for the whole industry B2B report. We advertised on TV all within this simple niche of online bingo. So we became the biggest fish in this pond. And eventually one of the, there was a number of aggregators within the business. One of them came to us, this Israeli company, actually one of us came to us and in effect said, here’s some money. And we said, okay, here’s the keys? Bye-Bye.

Ziv:

And I imagine this is like a secret information as for the details of the actual agreement of the exit.

Phil:

Yes, but it was when people launch their own businesses and, and as they grow, they do tend to get very, very emotionally attached to them. Whereas I’d always had, once we got to a decent size and it was generating revenue and is generating revenue on a regular basis, I’d got to the point of, if somebody gives us enough money, I’m happy to exit. And these guys gave us enough money for me to able to exit

Ziv:

So that was like a long journey, but ended nicely for you and, and for your company and all started by choosing carefully, a very, very specific micro niche that you can actually establish your dominance in it. And you went going through the ropes of constantly optimizing your traffic generation and get got to the point where you had so much traffic. You, you were established in the industry as the number one, the fish in the pond, and was able to even afford a TV spot and commercials and your own award. And all of this is just very inspiring. But what you do right now is also quite peculiar. Like you are offering this sound board service. What is that all about?

Phil:

Okay. So post exit, a number of friends of mine sort of came to me who have their own businesses and were saying, oh, I’ve got this issue. Can you help me about it? Or a couple of people said, I’m thinking of selling the business. You know, what does that feel like? What, you know, what’s the process, all that sort of thing. And I’m love talking to other people about their, and I, I get quite infused about it and all that sort of thing. And just by me, just talking to people about their businesses, like, hang a minute, this people seem to be getting a benefit from this and I enjoy doing it. So, Hey, I could do this professionally. So somebody said to me, who’s a business coach said to me, you should be a business coach. Now, one of the things entrepreneurs will always find is imposter syndrome.

Phil:

I’m just making this up as a go along. I just hope nobody finds out that I’m making it up. I had that despite selling out and all that sort of thing, and this guy said, you should be a coach. And I said, well, who’s gonna listen to me. No, nobody’s gonna listen to me. But having these friends in contacts, sort of getting a benefit from what I was doing, I said, okay, I wanna do that. And within the, so what I do now is falls within the coaching market, but I don’t push myself as a coach. There are too many people out there who claim to be a business coach either, coz they’ve read a couple of books or they’ve been on a course or they’ve bought a franchise I’ve been there and done it and, and run a business. So what I do is I offer what I call a business sounding board service.

Phil:

A lot of time when you are a business owner, you just need somebody to talk to about your issue about your problem might be a problem, might be an opportunity, but often there is nobody there to talk to about it. And it’s difficult if, you know, as you grow a business, you know, you take on a team and you take on other people, they come to you for the answer, you know, hey Ziv,  what, you know, what we gonna do next? What’s the strategy for the next six months in your head, you are thinking, I don’t bloody know I’m making this up as I go along, but I’m, I think I might do this or I might do this or I might do this guys, how do these three ideas sound as to our next strategy? Now they’re gonna think, hang a minute, Ziv doesn’t know what he’s doing, but if you’ve got somebody outside the business to go, Phil, I’ve got, can I just bounce this off you, I’ve got this idea and this idea or that idea, what do you think?

Phil:

And that’s what I do. I work with business owners to help them become better business owners just by being a sounding board, by listening to them, I don’t go. I’m not a sort of a business consultant who goes into a business and says, Hey, your strategy’s all wrong. Or your supply chain’s broken or your HRS got a problem. I will talk to business owner about what they want to talk about and they go, can we talk about this? Can we talk about this? Can we talk about that? And I will, I will ask questions. I will prod and poke them. I will ask those stupid questions that people go, why’d you do that? Or why’d you do it like that? And they go, well, we’ve always done it like that. Or we did it in my previous company. So I carried on and unless you’ve got somebody from the outside prodding and poking, you tend not to sort of query things.

Phil:

You tend not to improve things. And my niche is not only small business owners and I position that between. And there’s two ways I, I niche that one is by staff size. So I use sort of eight to 20 as a staff size and in currency, probably half a million turnover to 5 million. So that sort of middle growth bit. And that’s my niche now, but it actually niches itself by the person who’s gonna come to me. Cause unless you’re a business owner who wants to improve, who’s happy to hold a hand up and say, I need some help. And bearing in mind, the sort of person who sets up a business always has a bit of ego about them. And they all know, they know, right? So the, the niche is by my parameters of size and revenue, but it’s also all almost self-niche by the sort of business owner who identifies that they need some support and wants to improve.

Ziv:

So this is very fascinating. It’s almost like because your clients express vulnerability from the get go, the type of people that are value you being able to speak, be able to be heard and to kind of brainstorm with someone that understand well, a business in their type of levels are then already you niche down to a relatively small, nice and small a group of people that, that are well connected to each other a lot of times. So those business owners in these levels, they know other business owners of that level. And the way you explain your service, it’s almost like psychotherapy for on business. Like I’m not saying that your psycho service, but, but it’s not just about like, okay, so you will talk with me for three sessions and then we will be done forever because you don’t need me anymore. It sounds like you’ve positioned the service in a way that provides value, no matter how long you keep, as long as you’re in business, really, and you are happy, you could continue to enjoy this experience.

Phil:

That’s right. And I’ve only been doing this for about a year now. And the way I see it developing is I might work with somebody for maybe six months and then they might stop and then they might come back in a year’s time. And it’s, it’s actually, I’ve already seen it. Business owners need support at step change points. So it’s, we all know business graphs. Don’t just go from the bottom left hand corner to top right hand corner. They often step. So you’ll grow a bit. Then you’ll get to a, a problem issue or, or a growth issue or a, an opportunity. And it’s that step change that makes the difference. And actually the, since I’ve been doing this as a service, the more I’ve realized, actually in my business life, we had four or five major step change points. And at each one of those, I reached out for external support.

Phil:

So actually not only have I sort of worked the work as a business owner, I’ve actually worked the work as a business owner who needed external support and the benefit. And each time we did that, the benefits were huge because the last sort of external support we had was a guy who came in and, and entrepreneurs will recognize shiny new object syndrome. You know, oh, this is exciting. And this is exciting. And this is exciting. And I used to do that. And he did an exercise with my team where he sort of asked all of their opinions on the whole business. And one of the things I was told was Phil, get out of the way of the business, leave us alone, take all your stupid ideas somewhere else and just let us get on with the business. And if anything happens that we need your support, we’ll let you know.

Phil:

But I couldn’t see that I needed somebody outside to get that from my team and do that. And we did that. I actually ended up creating a separate company to put all my stupid new ideas into. So it didn’t disturb my existing company and that worked brilliantly. So I could see the benefit of having an external support, like a business sounding board or a coach or a mentor, whatever, however you want to position it. And they all do different things, but I can see the benefit of doing it. And what I do with my clients is the first question I ask them in every session is okay, what do you wanna talk about today? Your meeting, it might be an issue. It might be an opportunity. It might be a problem. And that’s the, I haven’t got a set of agenda. I haven’t got a, a training schedule to go through or a 10 different X or anything like that.

Phil:

We will talk about whatever they want to talk about. And that’s the support I can give. And the other benefit as well is I’m independent of the business. So not only it’s independent and it’s confidential. So I don’t care whether they do X or Y or Z. Cause it’s not gonna affect me was if you were, maybe let’s say talking to your sales manager about something within the back of his or her mind, he’s got a bias because he, he wants whatever the outcome to be, to benefit him. Whereas to me, I’m just trying to give best advice. And that’s what I hope to offer.

Ziv

Do you ever get to a point where your client asks for more specific advice where it goes more into the realm of almost like coaching? Like here’s what I would do in your shoes. And what do you do in this situation? Do you go that route?

Phil:

The answer to the question is yes. So I’ve had clients, who’ve said, Phil, I’m thinking of doing this. One of them said, I’m thinking of doing this. Is that okay? Is that okay for business owners to do that? And they just want approval in some cases, in other cases, it is, I’ve got this problem. What should I do? And my question, I will not say what I might say is we had something similar. This is how it played out. This is what we considered, and this is what happened. But what I normally do inherently, I would just say, you know, okay, let’s talk about it. What are the, what’s the upside? What’s the downside? What are the pros? What are the cons? What else have you considered? Have you tried this before? All those sort of questions. And what I’m aim to do is to get the client, to get to the point where they walk away and go, right. I know I’m gonna do now, but I haven’t told them what they’re gonna, I do

Ziv:

Fascinating on the practical level, like do you meet them every week? How long are the meetings?

Phil:

It’s not. I find unless it’s a very, very, very specific problem and they go, Phil, I’ve got this problem. I wanna talk about this, which I tend not to do. I tend to go, okay, let’s do a sort of, and I don’t sell, I don’t sell it as packages. I haven’t got a rate card. It obviously depends who the client is and what they want and all that sort of stuff. But a basic start point for me would be a monthly face to face meeting and then interject connected with that on a two week point a monthly phone call. So it’d be, let’s say on the first of the month, it’d be face to face 14th of the month. It’d be a phone call. First of the next month, it’d be a face to face, et cetera, et cetera. Now, obviously we’ve been through the pandemic.

Phil:

So some of that’s been zoom. I normally put a time on it, but in the, I think every single instance, the meeting will go on longer than, than is, is set. And it’s really down is down to the client. It’s once the client has then covered all the points they want to talk about today, we’ll go right. We’re done. And then normally the follow up will be okay. We discussed, you know, ABC last time. How did that get on? And they’ll go, yeah, we did this, this and this. And they’ll be okay. I now wanna talk about X, Y, Z. We’ll talk about that, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s very, very fluid, very, very flexible. The benefit is for the client, not for me. I haven’t got an agenda to go through. It’s their, it’s their agenda.

Ziv:

Is there any preferred or ideal industry for the qualified business owner when he’s considering you for this sound board service, what would that be? What type of an industry?

Phil:

This is a really interesting question because when I set out to do, when I said, okay, I’m gonna do this professionally. I went through the classic let’s design, a customer avatar, an ideal customer avatar. So my background is, is advertising and digital and online, I thought, okay, we’ve got that sector. And the business size I got to, I thought, okay, I feel comfortable ad advising at that size. Cause I’ve been that size. And I thought, okay, I’ll, you know, I’ll go with that. My first client was way bigger than I’d ever been, was in a sector. I knew nothing about and was multi-location and I’d only ever had one office. So completely blew my client avatar apart. And that then brought me round to the point that I said earlier, which actually is the type of client is self-selecting. So the customer avatar is actually, it’s not industry specific.

Phil:

It’s, it’s the type of person. It’s somebody who wants to learn. It wants somebody who wants to grow somebody who, who will listen and take on advice. And actually, when you think about it, you know, most issues are either marketing strategy, staff, finance product, that’s pre much where your problems lie. And I’ve had all of those problems in all of those different parts. So the type of company it is, and the size of the company to a degree is actually irrelevant, cuz it’s probably gonna be a strategic issue or a marketing issue or an HR issue or a finance issue or a product issue.

Ziv:

The way I see it, it’s almost like what your client, your avatar is. Marathon runners like business owners that consider business as a marathon run instead of a sprint. And if you’re willing to look at your business like that and be vulnerable in the size that is relevant, then you could really get a lot from getting some external support. I wanna thank you, Phil, for raising the awareness of getting support in your business. And on of course the awareness for niching down. I think it’s so important that people will know that there is help out there and that they don’t have to be alone in all of these decisions. So many decisions, every single day we business owners is it’s quite lonely. And sometimes just knowing that you have someone that will listen and, and we’ll ask you the right questions, the smart questions, and will help you realize what you should do. That actually builds confidence that will affect other things that you do as a business owner. So I think this is all really important stuff. And I wanna thank you for being here in the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast. Where can people go to learn more about your Phil?

Phil:

Okay. So the easiest place to find me is my website, which is www.philfraser.co.uk. Don’t go to the.com because.com is a medieval costume company. So you, if you land on a website, that’s got a, a man in a medieval costume holding a bow and arrow that isn’t me. That’s not me. So it’s dot. co UK on there. I’ve got a free newsletter, which I call the Nous of Fraser. Cause we have a brand here in the UK called Nous of Fraser. So I use Nous of Fraser or connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn, most days to search for Phil Fraser and happy to talk to anybody. You know, it doesn’t have to be a, a paid for consultancy or anything like that. Anybody wants to chat, give a shout, happy to talk to you.

Ziv:

And we will put the, the links for your LinkedIn and for your website. philfraser.co.uk on our show notes at dailycookie.co. So it’ll be super easy to connect with Phil. I wanna thank you again, Phil for being here and thank you everyone for listening for yet another episode of the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast. See you next week.

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