Simply Zesty – The Story 2 Years On

SZ News May 20, 2011 16 Comments

Time flies when you are having fun and today we hit our big 2nd birthday! We are having a big party with lots of beer tonight but as time flies and it’s sometimes hard to remember what has been happening we thought we would have a quick recap of the last 2 years and look at some of the highlights of the company. We tend to spend most of our time running at about a hundred miles an hour and never pause to look back on what has been achieved so indulge us in our little look back. We try to share everything that we do both here and on our Facebook page.

The Spare Bedroom Start Up

It all started 2 years ago in Niall’s spare bedroom which was converted in to an office. Niall and Lauren started talking about setting up a business on Twitter and before long Lauren moved over to Ireland and Simply Zesty was born. The early days were tough but exciting and we really were living by the seat of our pants. It was full on start up mode with 18 hour days and a lot of marketing ourselves and getting the name out there. Niall and Lauren went to take some photos for the new website with Phil O’Kane and standing beside some grafetti down in Windmill Lane the style of the company was born. The picture below shows just how lean things really were. It was basically our own laptops, a borrowed desk and our own heads.

This Blog

Lauren and Niall hated networking in the real world. After going to about 3 or 4 events begging people for business they decided they didn’t want to do that any more and came up with the plan for this blog. It started off as the drawing on the sheet of paper below and the plan was basically to “give all of our knowledge away for free and share as much interesting information as possible”.

We spent about 1000 Euros setting up the blog and spent hours every evening writing blog posts about social media and still put in the same amount of effort to this day. People starting using the blog as a resource to help their own business but larger brands and businesses saw the knowledge and started using Simply Zesty’s services. The blog has continued to grow and now is a core part of the business bringing in nearly 80% of new business and being visited by nearly 250,000 visitors each month.

UK Investment

When you were growing as fast as we were it was important to get a little bit of investment to help manage that growth and allow us to expand as fast as we wanted to. We raised €500,000 from the UK and that allowed us to really push on and step things up while forging deeper ties with the UK.

Messing Up On Offices

Niall decided it would be a smart move to get an office that was big enough for 12 people. It was a huge move on from the original spare bed room and it was taking a bog financial risk signing a long term lease. 4 Months later the offices were too small and we were all sitting on top of each other with people having to work on the ping pong table which meant it was time to look for something bigger and better.

New Offices

We quickly realized that we all wanted nice lunch options and a city center address. There were lots of offices that we could move in to immediately but we did it the hard way and found the perfect space but it did need a lot of work and the entire place basically had to be gutted with a new studio added.


It’s been tough but as you can see from the video below in the 6 months since we have moved in here the offices are starting to take shape and now starting to look a bit better. It’s still a bit of a mad house but the ping pong table is still there, we now have a real world Facebook wall and our studio.

New Boss

With the company growing and Niall and Lauren especially bad at things like counting money and putting systems in place it was time to hire a proper boss, our new CEO Ken Fitzpatrick. Ken has lots of experience of managing people, building big businesses internationally and generally making sure Niall and Lauren don’t come up with too many crazy ideas. Bringing Ken in also meant that everybody else could actually focus on the social media side of things and not have to worry about the day to day running of the company. This is the moment the company was really able to go to the next level and had finally grown up.

New Faces

We’ve got a lot bigger in recent months with many new faces joining us on a full time basis. We now have full sales teams, a large video department and a team of designer along with lots of people to look after the clients. As you will see from the website and the company in general we have really moved away from a small agency that is run by Niall and Lauren to a large agency with multiple departments and a strong backbone. This is a people businesses though and without the best people we would be nothing. Luckily we have the best we could possibly wish for.

New Clients

We are lucky now that after only a couple of years in business we have an awesome client list and we get to work with some great companies in Ireland, England and recently across Europe. We wouldn’t have a business if it wasn’t for those clients and as social media starts to become a bigger part of the marketing mix we will look to look after existing clients and extend further afield.

New Products

We’ve always wanted to challenge the notion of an agency and push it in different directions and that is what we are doing with our new online training suite. We used to carry out training in the real world but there was only so far that could go and we wanted to make something that could scale all over the world. We already train more people online than we did in the first quarter of this year and the site is growing with sign ups every day. Who knows where our new products will take us but this is not the end and there are plenty more on the way.

The Future?

If you thought the first 2 years were exciting then wait until you see year 3. We now have the structures, resources and talent in place to make a serious push forward as a company. There are huge plans in place around the agency itself, the products that we are launching and keeping the blog going. We only get to write these posts once a year and although it looks like the growth has been impressive for the first 2 years it’s year 3 that we have all been building towards.

Thanks to you all for visiting the blog and coming along for the journey with us so far. It hasn’t all been easy and there have been seriously tough moments along the way but we are pretty happy in general with where we are and where we are headed.

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