A Week in My Life: Shane Parkins, Founder and MD, Climb & Conquer

Shane Parkins

Shane Parkins is the founder and managing director of Climb & Conquer, a search marketing agency based in Durham.

Prior to launching Climb & Conquer, Parkins previously held senior digital roles at the likes of Nigel Frank Recruitment, Workwear Express, Silverbean and The Tanning Shop.

After almost 3 years of freelancing, he decided to create an agency that “genuinely puts a focus on work/life balance and mental wellbeing”, as well as providing training opportunities for those looking to get their “big break” into a digital role.

Since 2023, he has scaled the team up from two to around 20 staff and was named one of Prolific North’s Independent Agencies to Watch in 2024.

Here, he shares a recent week in his life as a busy founder in Durham…

Monday

Monday is a day I will typically keep free as it’s usually the day the team or campaigns need me most. My week will typically start on a Sunday evening, where I set about planning my week ahead, so when Monday comes around I’m typically already on top of a handful of things.

I review the previous week’s client performance of our clients and look at what can impact their ability to trade for the week ahead, this could be errors in the site, Merchant Centre, Ads performance and so on. I also know that today is the day the team often needs the most answers to ad-hoc questions, so minimising meetings and being on hand to support the team is key here.

We’ll also delve into quick bursts of management activities, such as new business updates, and management meetings to discuss any hot topics and how we can level up again as an agency. Monday is usually a very heavy administration day, with around 70% of my tracked time today centred around supporting the team.

Tuesday

An unusual day, and very full on!

I met with Cameron, our head of growth, in Durham, to get the train to St James’ Park in Newcastle, ahead of the Live Judging Day for the North East Marketing Awards. We’re delighted to have been named as a finalist for the Best Small Agency award and needed to meet the judging panel to talk through our story and successes thus far.

We headed over to Hotel Indigo afterwards for a debrief on the judging session and a bacon sandwich, along with some commercial planning for some pitches we have coming up. Cameron is a relatively new addition to the team and is having a hugely positive impact on the business. He brings so much business development and growth experience from his roles at Visualsoft and THG Ingenuity, and he’s a brilliant guy to work with, so we’re lucky to have him.

Landing back in the office, we had an operations meeting to discuss our brand new reporting software, which allows us to track 95% of the staff’s time against client work and shows which clients are bogging us down operationally vs. what they were paying for. We don’t have a lot we want to change right now as we’re delivering outstanding results and have a brilliant client retention rate to show for it, but this visibility gives us future growth options and it’s vital insight as a young independent agency.

Following this, I met with a multi-million-pound manufacturing company in the South of England who are looking to expand heavily within search, which is a really exciting opportunity for us.

Wednesday

We ran our first anonymous Employee Engagement survey in October and today was the day I went through the results, identifying feedback around what I would call typical remote-first challenges, such as staff wanting to interact with each other more, asking for more senior presence to be included in certain meetings and a reaffirmation that what we have done so far is having a positive impact. Again, we’re independent and agile, so the team leads and I will get to work on some initiatives that will help with the requests and issues flagged.

We’ve recruited a new member of staff recently, a London-based SEO executive, so my afternoon was spent sorting the laptop out, completing paperwork and access points and other fun stuff, before passing everything over to Victor (SEO team lead) to meet the new starter and get them up and running. Every new starter gets intensive training with Victor, Blanaid (PPC team lead) and me, and their in-person induction day allows us to identify the gaps and map each starter’s unique path ahead, playing to their existing experience, strengths and interests.

I also took a bit of time today to go through our shared Slack Results channel and I often do this for a mood boost as it always delivers. It’s a collective of all the results we get for our clients alongside personal achievements, in real-time. It’s absolutely brimming with results from the previous month.

Thursday

I spend the morning looking at what I refer to as “Palm Offs” – these are areas of the business I am not the best to lead on and would be better placed with an expert in the area. This week I’ve been looking at dramatically increasing the reporting within the business – mainly around operations, and I’ve also explored options with other finance providers, ensuring I’m building everything in the right way.

I also spent a bit of time checking Glassdoor reviews for agencies which we aspire to be like – a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine – but I’ll look at negative reviews for other agencies and contemplate how we’d mitigate it if it was Climb & Conquer. This helps us with planning and provides some inspiration for team initiatives.

I’m super self-critical in this role of myself and the agency, and the staff within the team are always striving to do better for clients and themselves, which is so inspiring for me to work alongside them.

Thursday is also a big meeting day for reviewing client Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Wow – that came around quickly!

Friday

Friday is also the day I’ll start looking at things that may impact our client’s ability to trade over the weekend and into early next week – everything from ROAS to competitor activity and lots in between.

It’s a big day on the road today, first stop heading over to Darlington, meeting an existing client who has recruited an ecommerce manager for the first time and needed me to help carve a strategy that looks to grow the brand quicker and more sustainably (this brand is one of our case studies so far!). Then it’s a quick lunch before my next meeting in South Durham.

I’m meeting a big manufacturing client who has a complex range of products. I retain some clients myself that I work on from start to finish – this being one of them. I’ve walked through what I’ve done over the past few weeks and the impact, and my plans over the next few weeks and assessed how happy they are. They are, again, one of our strongest case studies and clients from this year, and one we can help massively in 2025 and beyond. Oh, and fingers crossed, work which might receive some industry recognition next year. Watch this space!

My meeting with these guys over ran quite a bit – which is great, but I had to pull over and take my final meeting of the day by the roadside. The glamorous life of a remote-first agency owner!

I was speaking with a mental health expert who is putting together a proposal for the business to see how they can help lower the stress of our employees. I don’t think it’s problematic but I want to be proactive here – agency life can be high pressured and we also have some glimmers of this in our employee feedback. I’m also wrapping up comms once back in the office before finishing the week, including our 1% for the Planet application, National Living Wage application and some secret projects we’re planning to launch.

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