Less than four years after starting Verb in a damp bedroom Dean Currall runs a thriving business that has generated more than £23m in extra revenues for its clients. Tony McDonough reports

In 2013 entrepreneur Dean Currall quit his job and started his digital marketing business Verb from the damp bedroom of his Liverpool flat.

Less than four years later Dean runs a thriving business from a city centre business and calculates he has already generated more than £23m in extra revenues for his clients.

Key strategy

Verb’s early strategy was to offer its clients 30-day rolling contracts hoping that the level if service offered would persuade them to stay with the fledgling business.

That strategy paid off and now the business employs 14 full-time members of staff, 37 contractors and more than 65 clients.

Dean told YBNews: “I’d become tired of being an employee, working for someone else, being constrained, feeling unable to achieve the standards I believed the company should have been striving for. So I rolled the dice.

“Many challenges emerged as I didn’t have the backing of a venture capitalist, or attempt to get a loan from a bank, essentially I was poor and had no contacts.

“However, as difficult and tedious as this was, it shaped us. We knew the only way to ‘make it’ was to deliver for the customer, simple as.”

On a mission

Dean adds his mission was to help his clients grow as fast as Verb was growing.

He explained: “We recognised the best way to do this was to employ the successful methods of Verb’s growth within our clients businesses.

“This was achieved through not selling social media to businesses that did not need it, not adding unnecessary extra services just to increase profits and refusing to sell standardised packages to customers just because it was easy.

“The success of our strategy is clear and the results we have achieved for our customers’ speak for themselves, generating £23m for them in our first three years of operations.

“For example, in 2016 we generated £3.3m for DMF Wakefield through a range of techniques such as creating their online platform for both staff and customers to use and via LinkedIn connections.”

Continuous leads

Verb’s affiliate marketing campaigns are also a key part of its integrated marketing strategies, generating continuous leads, worth a collective £7.35m for its customers.

Dean added: “The B2B/relationship marketing packages that we provide have connected our clients and has led to revenues of more than £8m for them.

“This shows how important creating a strong network is in order to be successful.

“Within the Liverpool city region we link businesses together through workshops, and events such as ‘Tech Tuesdays’, and create inbound content marketing strategies, making it easier for businesses to connect through the use of channels such as blogs, search engines and social media.”