Kate Butcher
Welcome Helen Woods, who is joining us today on the podcast. Helen, thank you very much for coming on. Please can I start by asking you to give us an introduction of yourself and your business and your family and what you do?

Helen Wood
Yeah. Morning, Kate. Thank you for having me on board. My name is Helen Wood. And I’m the owner of two businesses. Two very, very different businesses actually. One is called Simply Construction Group which I own together with my husband. And the second business that I run is called Ava Rose Marketing, which, as the name suggests, is a marketing business, that I set up three years ago. I’m a mother to two daughters, Millie and Bella, age nine and five. Yeah, and Yeah, lovely to be here and talk to you today. Kate.

Kate Butcher
Fantastic, thank you very much for joining us, as you say two really different businesses. So can you tell us how it is that you’ve ended up working into such really different industries?

Helen Wood
Yeah, so I’ve always really kind of had a love of marketing and I, like many others, went to university, always had done languages and really enjoyed them at school. And I remember my German teacher saying to me, don’t just do a language at school, make sure you’d combine it with something else. And so I thought perhaps a business management degree would be a good one to combine and so I took German with business at University, did a whole plethora of of different modules, finance, logistics, obviously marketing, and then yeah, kind of fell in love with marketing and decided to pursue a career in it after I left university. So I went on and worked for quite a few different brands, including some German ones. And yeah, so my last job was working for Schwarzkopf, which is not too far from here, actually. And there I was a senior brand manager working on their consumer hair dye. So I was doing all the marketing for them running campaigns, launching new products, and so I always really kind of loved marketing and to have been able to sort of combine it with my languages, in a few of my jobs as well was ideal. But yeah, as it kind of happens to many of us, I wanted to start a family. So nine years ago, I fell pregnant with Millie. Yeah, so that sort of made me really evaluate, like, where where do I want to go with my career? Because, you know, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back into full time work. So at the time, we were sort of, well, my husband had set up a business in London. He was a engineer working on underground railway projects. He was working on sort of like connecting the tube stations for the Olympic Games at the time, and he had a vision of kind of setting up a construction company that had basically would kind of be a professional step on from our experiences that we’ve had from renovating our flat in London. And he thought, gosh, you know, this could be done in such a kind of different, more professional way. So he decided to set up a company called Simply Extend. And basically, he was kind of half doing his contracting role and half running this construction company. And when I sort of was trying to figure out where my career was going, we decided that it would give us more flexibility to be around Millie when she was born to for me to kind of step out of that, that world and for us to work together on on this construction business. So yeah, it was quite daunting at the time.

Because we were you know, to have one of us on like in a salaried role. You know, that was quite nice whilst the other one was pursuing a business. So for us to both be in it was kind of like a major step forward and a little bit daunting at the time. So Millie was born and yes, and then a year after that, I decided to take the leap and go and work with Rob together on the construction side of things, so it’s just started, like with one day, a week, I was very tired. Obviously. And I said to him, Look, you know, what, what can I do? What can I do to sort of help you know this business and obviously having the marketing experience, we decided that would be like a logical thing for me to take over. So I just started on one day and then increased to two and it just slowly built up over time and you know, we changed different things. We launched new brands. And it just grew and grew like together with us both focusing on it at the same time and working together as a team. We kind of went from the you know, the first year doing 12 projects a year then the next year it went to 24. And it would double like every year, the third year it was 50. And then we took on more staff and you know, nine years later now we’re doing anywhere up to 300 projects a year across London, and we’ve just recently opened in the West Midlands as well. So two years ago, so that’s doing really well as well. So it’s just been a huge kind of learning curve because I guess no one really ever prepares you for sort of owning your own business and running it. And whilst I’d love to say it was just marketing that was getting involved in I was getting I was having to get involved in so many other elements as well, that perhaps took me out of my comfort zone a little bit at the beginning. So that was kind of the journey with Simply Construction Group. I mean, at the time it was just Simply Extend but it’s become a whole group now. And so yeah, it’s been lovely to kind of watch how it’s evolved over all of those years and where we are today.

So, So yeah, so that was one of the businesses. And then obviously Ava Rose Marketing which Yeah, is my is my other business that I run on the side as well. So that was born kind of in 2019. So nearly three years ago now and I really kind of wanted to the idea behind Ava Rose Marketing was to take everything that I’ve learned from working sort of on bigger brands before I worked on Simply Construction Group, but also taking those learning experiences from running the business with my husband and kind of providing support and advice to small businesses, startups, sole traders, for example, you know, and providing marketing advice and consultancy to people that were in kind of our shoes, as well. And just getting them practical, you know, advice to work from and to be able to build their companies from because I think it’s, it was so different from working on a big brand versus you know, working for yourself on your own company and having to use your savings to invest in it and build on it was really, really kind of a totally different experience. And I really wanted to kind of give back to businesses and help them as well through Ava Rose just gets really solid advice and make sure that they’re going in the right direction. So yeah, so that was the kind of the idea behind Ava Rose. It started as a consultancy, and then we kind of found out that, you know, it wasn’t just strategy that small business owners needed, they perhaps didn’t want to carry out their own marketing themselves. So we then became sort of an outsourced marketing function and yeah, have a couple of team members now and Ava Rose as well that helping me so yeah, we’re doing everything from strategy right through to implementation, which is great. So we get to see kind of the whole life cycle and journey that our customers go on as well. So it’s it’s really rewarding.

Kate Butcher
Wow. Okay, loads of questions. And I suppose key points to pull out as well. One of the things that you you sort of talked about there was then when when he joined with your husband and started bringing the marketing into the business and doing it doing the, the role that grew and grew for marketing and it just goes to show I think, doesn’t it how important marketing is within a business?

Helen Wood
Yeah yeah.

Kate Butcher
I mean, I assume that you would attribute a huge part of the growth of the business and the rapid growth to the marketing side of it that was going on. Would you say that’s fair?

Helen Wood
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I hope so. And I think you know, it was it was very comfortable, you know, to can’t come out I mean, I was working in the hair and beauty industry, obviously, before I stepped into construction, so it was, you know, completely different, completely different kettle of fish to work. On. And I think what was fascinating about that journey is, you know, if you think about the construction industry, it’s you know, perhaps, you know, not as advanced as other industries are in terms of marketing and so, you know, nobody had ever really kind of built a brand in our industry, it’s quite fragmented, and a lot of players are, you know, smaller building companies. So, you need to build a bigger brand and to try and create trust with the clients that are potentially going to use those as well. It was, you know, it’s quite a big challenge, but, you know, thankfully it’s it’s one that’s paid off. And, you know, it’s it’s, I think, you know, hopefully when people see our brand now in London, they know that they can trust us. I mean, we’ve been around now for 12 years and you know, a lot of players in our industry, you know, they don’t they don’t last long it’s, it’s quite a turbulent kind of sector to work in, you know, players come and go. So, the fact that we’ve been there for 12 years and have built a lot of equity in the brand through what we’re doing and the number of projects we’ve worked on now, you know, hopefully that places a lot of trust. And you know, what we’re seeing in in Birmingham, for example, where we’ve just opened is almost like having a start up again, because it’s true, no one really does what we do. So it’s completely new in this in this world, you know, in that industry, so, so yeah, so it’s like with with Birmingham and the West Midlands it’s like kind of starting off on a little journey again, which is exciting, but it’s nice to see that we are winning work there and people are choosing to use us and hopefully we can build up the reputation there as well as what we have done in London and then you know, who’s to say that, you know, hopefully there might be more cities that we can kind of take the concept too. So, yeah, it’s been, you know, you know, I think hopefully, with, you know, the marketing that we’ve been able to bring to it has kind of influenced that as well and we can reach more people with what we have to offer so –

Kate Butcher
And marketing with, that you do with Ava Rose. So, Ava, where does the name come from? I didn’t, I didn’t ask.

Helen Wood
Yeah, I’d love to say I spent ages brainstorming it. But actually, I felt like I didn’t want to just call it Helen Wood marketing. So I chose the middle names. of my children. So yeah, it was just it’s just as simple as that really. And I think and it’s lovely, because it’s just more it’s more than me working on, you know, Ava Rose now, I have Emma and more recently Libby who’s joined us and I think that’s nice as well to have, obviously it means something to me. But you know, if it was just my name, for example, you know, it’s it probably doesn’t mean that much to the rest of the company to so you know, it’s yeah, that’s that’s the reason I chose it really is purely just the middle names my children.

Kate Butcher
Fantastic and what a lovely thing to inspire your business is your children who are clearly the inspiration behind it so. And the reason why we do what we do, isn’t it? So yeah that’s fantastic.

Helen Wood
Yeah exactly, they sort of, yeah, sort of goes together actually.

Kate Butcher
It works nicely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think again, the the importance of marketing, I mean, it is huge, and it’s something that’s come up in previous podcast interviews where business owners have talked about starting their business and it is something I hear so often from mums, you know, they start their business they do what they do in their business. And they find that actually marketing has to take a lead, on a lot of what they’re doing and it takes up so much time, especially if you want to do it well. It really is, is just so time consuming. So actually an agency like yours or a company like yours that can help somebody with the strategy, but also potentially help with some of the delivery. I think is is so needed, there is so much demand for it. And yeah, it’s something that’s so important in all areas of business. So I think it’s Yeah, brilliant. To have that that dual function as well to have the strategy that you’re helping people to create, but then also being able to deliver that for them.

Helen Wood
Yeah, exactly.

Kate Butcher
It’s really important. How do you find other people who use just one part of that and not the other and or people in both sections? Or how does it, how does it work?

Helen Wood
We meet we meet people from all sort of sectors, and, yeah, usually people come to us with with their business and are perhaps just stuck in a rut somewhere. Don’t know where to go, or they’ve just launched, say, a website and they don’t know why they’re not getting any visitors or they’re not making any sales, all kinds of clients from all walks of life. To be honest in various stages, I’d say probably about 80% of them come to us wanting strategic direction first. So and that’s lovely, because actually, if we get to work on the strategy, we really get to craft the direction of where their business should go from a marketing perspective, but we also get to learn like a lot about them what their goals are, and it becomes a real journey that we go on together, which is really, really nice. And I always create my strategies in a very kind of, simple way that it’s it’s very to the point so if they wanted to because I think what’s often the case with startups or small businesses is the lack of investment at the start, that can be quite prohibitive, I think to small businesses and we completely empathise with that situation because we’ve been in it before ourselves. And so, I always write my strategies in the way that you know, if they wanted to, they could go away and try and carry some of this out themselves, if not all of that, or if not all of it. So we write them in very simple steps, very simple stages. You need to do this, then followed by this and then this is the more kind of a longer term strategy to focus on. And so it never you know, forces people to have to use us for the delivery side of things. And some people like to go away and say, Right Well, I’m gonna do this bit but I’ve really got no desire to do this, would you be able to help us? And yeah, we can pull a price and a plan together to be able to deliver that for them. As well. Or some people just say, right, I know what I love doing. And I haven’t got the time to execute any of the marketing side of things, would you, you know, let us know how much it would cost to run this month to month? And so it varies really, but I’d say you know, 90% of the strategies that we might we do, go on to kind of working with them in in further capacity as well which is really, really nice, because, you know, we’ve seen some amazing kind of success stories and we really, you know, that’s what’s so rewarding about working on Ava Rose is watching other people kind of go on their own journey with their own businesses and hopefully onto a successful, you know, a successful experience.

Kate Butcher
Fantastic. That sounds amazing. Thank you very much, Helen. You’ve told us a bit about kind of where the business started from, what would you say though, is the best bit of business advice that you’ve been given since being in business?

Helen Wood
Oh, that’s a really, really tricky one. Do you know what, because my husband and I’ve always just been together as a team. We’ve never really had lots of people advising us unfortunately, because you know if I’d done it again, I would have asked loads of people for advice and questions. So we’ve always just followed kind of our common sense and, our like, you know, our own experience and don’t get me wrong, you know, we have made mistakes along the way and you know, really had to pick ourselves up from that and learn from them. But the one thing that I think that I would say I’ve always tried to take from when I was working on bigger brands that has worked really nicely is the planning side of things and how important that is because I think when you when you meet a lot of clients, I think one of the especially with Ava Rose, I think one of the common mistakes that so easily, it’s so easy to fall into when you’re running a small business is to just go off on perhaps a more gunshot approach on marketing, right? I need to advertise in this magazine or I need to, you know, I need to be all over social media and actually, you know, you’re spending money left, right and centre on all of these different types of marketing. And actually, what we all need to do is just take a deep breath and go one step back and I think the kind of experience I took from the bigger brand kind of bigger brands that I’ve worked on, and all the planning needs to go through for that. And granted, we don’t have the luxury of time when you’re running a small business to spend months and months on planning and strategy and that sort of thing. But I think if you can just allocate however much time even if it’s just a little bit to really kind of think about what your goals are and, you know, what direction you want your business to go in. It’s so invaluable really and, you know, I we’ve probably guilty Rob and I, a little bit of that when we first started working on Simply and actually I’ve been right, you know, every year we need to work out what our strategy is this year, how are we going to improve, you know, what are our sales targets, you know, all those big questions need answering and then that really, you know, once you’ve got those answered that really then starts to help you plan what marketing you need to be able to deliver and reach those goals and targets and and, you know, I think we’ve always tried to follow that every year, although it’s so tempting not to. But I think it’s really important. No matter what size of business you are, you could just devote a little bit of time to it every year, it really pay dividends really and help you kind of track and see if you’re, you know if you’re reaching your target.

Kate Butcher
Absolutely. So really, it’s about creating that marketing strategy, rather than just using a scattergun approach to see what works.

Helen Wood
And actually you know, if you are doing that, you’re rea- you know, what people don’t realise is you probably, possibly, wasting a lot of marketing budget because it’s not refined in any way and you’re not perhaps reaching the people that you’re meant to be. So lots of planning at the start will really help and it’ll help save money as well, which is really important for small businesses. So you know, so yeah, that would definitely be my advice.

Kate Butcher
Fantastic, no, that’s a really great bit of advice. And it’s one that I mean, it fits really nicely at the moment this week while we’re doing the interview, but obviously when it goes out, it will have already been and gone but at the moment I’m running my business planning challenge at the moment, which that’s one of the things exactly what we talk about is that it’s really important to have a plan to know where you’re going to know what you want to achieve. Because if you don’t know where you’re going and what you want to achieve, you’re not going to be able to plan your route on how you’re going to get there.

Helen Wood
Yeah exactly.

Kate Butcher
And so yeah, that’s a really, and marketing is such a huge part as we’ve already said, to any business so to plan your marketing is absolutely key isn’t? It is part of it. So yeah, really good advice. Thank you very much for that. And equally I mean, we’ve asked about your best advice, but what would you say is the best tool that you have within your business or that you find that you use and that could be an app, it could be a piece of equipment, it could be any kind of tool that you would advise or recommend for mums in business.

Helen Wood
Do you know, it’s really tricky we, so we, when I first started Ava Rose, it was just me working on it on my own. So it’s have a lot of spreadsheets and all sorts of things flying around. And we’ve had to obviously get a lot more organised as the months and the years go on. And now there’s more than just myself working in the team. We actually use Google Sheets quite often because what we found was that if one of us was in a spreadsheet and then someone else goes in, it’s not saving. So actually, some of the Google sheets have been brilliant for us, Oh, it sounds really simple. But actually any one of us can go in at any time and edit it and because we have lots of clients now that we’re working on it’s been great way to kind of track what projects we need to do, who’s working on them? When is it been done? How long did it take those kinds of things and the fact that it’s you know, anyone can go in at any time and edit it is brilliant so you don’t have to worry about spreadsheets being open and you know not being saved. That kind of thing. One of the, I think from a business perspective, and you’ll probably agree with me, Kate but, just invoicing, hosting that that kind of thing. I think it just pays dividends to have kind of some software there to help you so just been recently transferring everything over into Xero which has been an absolute godsend because, you know, in the early days when I only had like a few clients, it was fine and just kind of manually invoice that kind of thing and and as we’re getting bigger I think it’s just really helping me stay on top of everything really easily. And you know, I think what none of us prepare for is that you know, obviously I love marketing if you can’t tell. But actually when you’re running your business, so many other things isn’t there you know, the bookkeeping, the financial side of things, HR, you know, it’s not just doing what you love. It’s just so many other little elements. So you know, moving everything over to Xero has been a lifesaver for me and hopefully my accountant too.

Kate Butcher
Totally with you, in fact, both of those tools that you’ve mentioned there, I am absolutely with you on both. The Google Sheets, exactly the same. I find that with, exactly. Again, as you say having a team. It’s really really useful having Google Sheets and I’ve transferred a lot of our business work over to Google sheets that was previously on Excel. And Excel is still great for some things don’t get me wrong. It’s great, particularly for the financial sheets. The formulas are so much better on there. But actually, yeah, the Google sheets that I we share and we do. As you know, in my business, we do a lot of social media scheduling for clients as well. And so it’s really great because the client can be on the Google Sheet. I can be on the Google Sheet the associate who’s creating the content can be on the Google Sheet, we all have access to it. People can go in and make amendments and as you see, you know, as you say, you can see who’s working on which box at the time, and you can all be working in the same document at the same time. It’s amazing.

Helen Wood
It’s brilliant, I love it.

Kate Butcher
So I totally, yeah, totally with you on that one. And likewise it Xero, yeah is probably one of my absolute favourites. I love Xero. It’s my favourite account of the accounting software. I use quite a few with with different clients. But yeah, zero I use myself. I did start off actually with QuickBooks. I did a free trial of both and I didn’t spend enough time during that free trial of both to decide actually which one I wanted. And I went with QuickBooks because so many people recommended it. And I very quickly after using Xero with a few clients decided that I actually needed to switch over. Yeah, it’s such a fantastic tool, as you say, keeping everything streamlined and recorded and so it’s so user friendly, so easy to use.

Helen Wood
Yeah, yeah, it really is. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because I’m not, you know, I’m not always a big fan of like doing all the financial side of things so yeah, it’s like a dream. But so yeah, I feel very lucky actually that I chose that one and none of the others actually talking to you.

Kate Butcher
And like you say your accountant can be on there so they can get all the information they need. And I do find that a lot of the clients that I work with, those who use Xero don’t tend to make many mistakes and they’re inputting, whereas other software including QuickBooks is much more easy to make mistakes or to do things wrong. From a bookkeeping perspective, or you know, there’s multiple ways to do things. And if somebody does it three ways, you’ve recorded yourself three times and so on. So, yeah, it’s much easier and more straightforward. And yeah, it’s brilliant tool. It’s fantastic. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Final question for you today Helen, is about business books do you have, well, I’ve already asked the question before we started today about do you have a favourite business book and you said that you don’t really tend to read a lot of books about business particularly, but do you have any, any book recommendations that you would like?

Helen Wood
Yeah, I say I read a lot of business books, but I have kind of read a couple of biographies, albeit quite some time ago, actually, I read like one about Richard Branson, and I read the Alan Sugar one as well. And I think you know what’s really interesting actually, because my husband, with the Richard Branson, what I found quite interesting because he suffered with dyslexia, and kind of really struggled at school and kind of my husband went on a kind of similar journey with that as well. And so you know, he’s always, well, he’s quite heavily dyslexic and has always kind of, you know, had to really kind of work super hard academically and found it quite challenging when he was younger. So you know, to read those sorts of stories are always very inspirational as well. But yeah, they, sadly, I don’t get much time to read anymore now with the children. But hopefully, at some point, you know, that will change but I’ve actually been getting into a podcast called The Diary of a CEO. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one, probably you have. And that one’s actually run by a gentleman called Steven Bartlett, again, really interesting kind of stories, and I think probably because the fact that he ran his own social media agency as well and then went on to sell it. There’s quite a nice kind of marketing connection. there as well, which I always found quite inspirational but yeah, so just kind of listening to that now but sadly, don’t get the time to read as much anymore as I as I’d like to but hopefully, you know, if I can get early retirement Kate, that might change.

Kate Butcher
Absolutely, most definitely. And yeah, I mean, both of those two books that you mentioned the two biographies are they ones that you would recommend did you feel you got a lot from them?

Helen Wood
You know, it was such a long time ago, and I think, you know, I probably didn’t place as much value on it as I would have reading it now because I’m in totally a different situation. And I think I read them so long ago, it was before we’d, you know, gone on a journey, kind of journey, sort of launching our own businesses. So how about is hindsight I’d love to pick them up again. And read because they, you know, everybody’s just, you know, starts off as in a very ordinary you know, place and I think that was what was kind of quite inspiring about those two, two books is that they were once very just, you know, ordinary normal people like like ourselves, and, you know, it’s always very interesting, I think to read about, you know, what they went on to do and, you know, the ups and the downs of getting to where they are today, I think is always something that you know, we can all relate to really because it’s it’s never easy is it when you run your own business. There’s always challenges I think, and I think people tend to sometimes just think it’s, it’s quite easy and it might all be plain sailing, but actually, you know, there’s a lot of mountains you have to climb, I think on the road to anywhere so it’s nice to always read about how other people did that and overcame it as well. So yeah,

Kate Butcher
And I don’t know so much with with Alan Sugar, but I know certainly with Richard Branson, sort of some of the quotes that I’ve read from him over the years, for him, but so much of it is about mindset and having the right mindset, and having that that sort of, you know, I can achieve anything I want to mindset that he’s always had. And I think yeah, that’s really inspiring. And actually they’re certainly his his autobiography is one that’s been on my wish list for a while and I still haven’t read or listened to.

Helen Wood
He’s probably written another one since I read them.

Kate Butcher
I think there are a few around, but yeah, they’re definitely yeah, two, two entrepreneurs who are definitely we’re aspiring to be, to get just a fraction of their success. Yes, and that would be amazing so. And the podcast, yes, The Diary of a CEO, again I haven’t listened. But it’s been one that’s been on my radar for a while, and I’ve heard a lot of people recommending it and it’s been up at number one in the podcast charts for a really long time. I do see a lot of, Steven Bartlett’s quotes on LinkedIn as well, he seems to be popping up all over the place now.

Helen Wood
And I think he’s from Manchester, which is obviously where I’m from –

Kate Butcher
Oh is he?

Helen Wood
I find it really inspiring so it’s nice to see you know to listen to and see what he had to overcome and the challenges aswell because I think he had to drop out of school too so, you know it’s, yeah, another interesting listen.

Kate Butcher
I think that’s gonna have to go a bit higher up in my list of priorities of which podcasts to listen to. Definitely. Yeah and he, I don’t know if he is, but he certainly, he looks very young from his podcast cover so he’s seems like quite a young man, who’s doing incredibly well.

Helen Wood

Yeah, I thinks he’s on dragons den now as well isn’t he? I think, yeah, I’ve not actually watched it but yeah, he’s doing all sorts of things which is great. So –

Kate Butcher
Fantastic. Yeah, again really, really inspiring. Somebody to aspire to be like, definitely. Fantastic. Oh that’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for your insights and your time today Helen, that’s been really really valuable and really good, good insights for all of us, well specifically the ones around marketing, so thank you for that. Before we finish, could you just give us an idea how we can find you, where do people go online to track down Ava Rose Marketing or Simply Construction or anything that you do?

Helen Wood
Well if you’re in London or the West Midlands, obviously Simply Construction Group is, those are the two areas we operate at the moment, so yeah, our main website is www.simplyconstructiongroup.co.uk so you can find more out, find out more about us there. Also Ava Rose Marketing, you know, we’re based in Thame, but we have clients, you know, in all sorts of towns and cities across the UK. So our website for that is www.avarosemarketing.co.uk. So yeah, those are the two businesses. So yeah.

Kate Butcher
Fantastic, and are you on socials as well if people can follow you?

Helen Wood
So we’re on Facebook and Instagram are the main two, but yeah, we’re also on LinkedIn more recently as well. So by all means, yeah, feel free to to look us up and connect with us.

Kate Butcher
Fantastic. And we’ll make sure the links to all of those are in the show notes as well.

Helen Wood
Thank you so much.

Kate Butcher
– So people can find you really easily. Fabulous.

Helen Wood
Thank you Kate.

Kate Butcher
Oh, well it’s been really lovely to chat to you today. Thank you so much, Helen. And we look forward to keeping up with the developments of simply Construction or Ava Rose going forward.

Helen Wood
Thank you. It’s wonderful to meet with you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks Kate.

Kate Butcher
Fantastic. Thank you.

Find shownotes, and Listen to the episode here

Or watch on YouTube