Gareth Hoyle joined Mark A Preston on Unscripted SEO and named a pattern that most agency owners recognise immediately and rarely say out loud.
Creative Thinkers, Not Business-Minded
“It’s challenging because many SEOs, especially those involved in PR and content marketing, tend to be creative thinkers rather than business-minded.”
Gareth Hoyle
It is not a complaint about talent. The people he is describing are good at the thing they were hired for. The gap is that the thing they were hired for is a means to a commercial end nobody ever explained to them.
Why This Shows Up Worst In PR And Content
Technical disciplines have a shorter path to a number. A fixed crawl error, an improved load time, a recovered indexation problem — each has an obvious before and after. Creative disciplines produce outputs whose commercial value is mediated by several steps, so the habit of tracing work back to revenue never has to form.
“Many of my creative staff, brilliant in their artistic domains, sometimes struggle with the commercial aspects, like understanding the financial implications of their work.”
Gareth Hoyle
The Commercial Questions To Learn First
The short list a creative lead can learn in an afternoon and use for a career: What does it cost us to deliver this? What do we charge, and what is the margin? How long does a client stay? What does it cost to replace one? How long until this piece of work pays for itself?
None of that requires an accounting background. It requires somebody to have said the numbers out loud once, which in most agencies nobody has.
Building A Team That Covers Both
“Ideally, they would blend creative flair with business acumen, but it’s difficult to instil this mindset.”
Gareth Hoyle
He is honest that the blend is hard to teach. Which leaves the structural answer: pair the roles deliberately, put the commercial numbers in front of creative leads as a matter of routine rather than at review time, and stop treating financial literacy as somebody else’s department.
More agency-side conversations in SEO agency life and freelancing and digital marketing growth and paid search. Everything else is in the episode guide.
