Referrals don't scale: Cathal O'Reilly, Rooftop Twenty Two

Connor: Hello and welcome to the Exit Ready podcast for agency owners who want to build a business worth owning and one day worth selling. I’m Connor McAuley and I support agency founders through that messy middle. The part between doing great work and running a great business. Today I’m joined by Cathal O’Reilly, founder of Rooftop Twenty Two, a digital marketing, branding, web development and performance agency based in Dublin. Cathal was the first person to suggest this podcast to me, so it’s only right that he’s my first victim. Actually, my first guest. And with that, Cathal, welcome to the show.

Cathal: Thanks, Connor. Thanks for having me. Good intro. Yeah, I suggested it to you a few months ago and I’m delighted and proud to be here as your first guest. So looking forward to chatting and if anything I say helps anybody else out there, that’s good news. So looking forward to it.

Connor: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here. I know a lot about your journey, but everybody else maybe doesn’t. So you started Rooftop in 2020, just before the start of the pandemic. Walk me through that journey from starting out to where you are today.

Cathal: So I worked for different companies in my 20s. I’m now 38 years of age and from 24 right through to 30, I worked for some great agencies and learned loads. But I really wanted to own my own business one day. I always thought I would do it and I kind of hinted to people along the way that I was going to do it. And in 2019, I kind of over hinted and told a few too many people that I was going to set up my own business. And I think at that stage, I had no choice because if I didn’t do it, I was known as the guy who said he was going to do something and never did it. So in 2019, I handed in my notice to a really well-paid job and a prosperous job and in a great company. And I decided to set up my own business. So just before the pandemic in January of 2020, we started trading and it’s been quite the journey since.

Connor: Amazing. And what has happened since then?

Cathal: So it started off basically me in my bedroom. So me on my own with a laptop, internet connection, a desk and no clients. And since then, from me, my bedroom right through to as we are today in March 2026, we now have 14 full-time staff who sit behind me in our Glass and Fans studio. And we have three part-time staff, I should say, and we serve incredible Irish and international businesses with web design and digital marketing support.

Connor: And like, I know the success you’ve had over the last few years, but when did it stop feeling like you were a freelancer with a team and that you were an actual agency? Was there a specific milestone or a moment that you thought, well, this is now bigger than me?

Cathal: Yeah, so for years, I think maybe people listening to this might be able to relate. So for years, I felt like the imposter. So I started off in 2020 and I used to say “we” instead of “I”, to allude. I still laugh at our first website, which is “we will take care of this” and “we will do that.” But it was me, you know, in that box room in the bedroom who was fulfilling those requests.

And I think there is a natural transition and a really good entrepreneur that I worked for in the past spoke to me at length about a lifestyle business and a business. So I would see it as two different types of businesses. You can have a great lifestyle business. You can have yourself and maybe one other person and you were the people who do the work and you would earn a good wage and you would build a good relationship with your clients. Or else you can decide to transition into a business which has to be moving. You have to remove yourself from the work to a certain degree and, you know, hire and commit yourself to running the business and working on the business rather than in the business.

It probably took me three years to kind of make that transition, which I think if I did it again, it would be quicker. But me being me, I actually quite enjoy working on marketing efforts and I quite enjoy building websites and I quite enjoy running social media campaigns. So for the first two or three years, I was very much in it.

And we’re very lucky in 2026. We’ve great revenue and great profitability. And so we’re blessed and it’s been like this for a few years. But in the early days, although I was earning a really good wage, when I got to the end of the year, the business didn’t make massive profit. And I remember thinking to myself, I was more of a marketing person than a business person. And I was thinking, well, why didn’t we make the profit that I felt the year deserved? And I really came down to not taking the business as seriously as it needed to be taken. And the business was being hampered for its own growth because of that.

So I pretty quickly moved from doing the job to delegating the job and also focusing on the business. So, you know, looking into what our profitability levels should be, looking into what good growth would look like this year and really focusing on those things. Having a monthly profit and loss account, having live updates on your accounts as it goes throughout the month, throughout the quarter, throughout the year. And that transition about three years ago has helped us move from, I would say, a lifestyle business into a business that operates and is structurally sound and can last the test of time. Touch wood, because of that transition.

Connor: What was the catalyst for that transition? Because there’s a lot of learning for somebody who’s a marketer to become a business person or an entrepreneur. You were entrepreneurial, but none of us have those skills when we start, or very few of us have those skills when we start. So was there a catalyst? Was it like, OK, this is now what we have to do. Was it a hire? Was it somebody that came into the business that thought, actually, they can do that job better than me? Or was it something else entirely?

Cathal: Well, I think it was a mindset shift. For those listening, I work with Connor and he’s excellent at what he does and he’s really helped the business over the past year. I wasn’t working with Connor at this stage, but it was an understanding of, you know what, there’s been an awful lot of work gone into the last year and that work deserved more. And how do we get more from that work?

So I think it was more so maybe charging more. We decided to increase our prices a little bit. And for legacy clients, we still hold our previous prices honourably. But we did decide to increase our prices. That in turn increased our margin. And that allowed us to earn more profit and allowed us to put those profits back into the business to a certain degree, hire more people, free up more time to go chasing work and again start that again and again and again. And that’s really worked for us as a business.

Connor: Yeah. And I know some of your team, have met quite a few of them at this point. And there’s 14 full-time staff and three part-time staff from memory. What has been the hardest part of building that team? Because I know they’re an excellent team and I know the work that they do and I see the work that they do. But from your perspective, has that been easy? Have you found unicorns in that team? And what are the challenges that you face today?

Cathal: We’re so lucky. I had this conversation with somebody earlier on. Our team that stand behind me today and contribute to the majority of good work in Rooftop are the best team we’ve had since we started. You’re right, 14 full-time staff, three part-time staff. And there isn’t one person in the team that is not excellent at what they do. So we’re building from a great foundation and we’re very lucky for the last few years that our revenue has been good and our profitability has been good.

The big issue for us at the moment, and that’s why we work with Connor, who has really helped us, is making those operational improvements. So how do we become more efficient at the work that we do? How do we get client delivery quicker? How do we make sure that when we say we’ll do something, we will absolutely get it done to that quality that we hold ourselves to? But also the deadline that we’ve told the client. And obviously 10 things can happen in between that could shift those deadlines. But we still have to hold ourselves accountable to them and to a realistic time frame and make sure the client’s received the work correctly and diligently.

So we’re going through a process at the moment. Not to say that we’re operationally bad. But if we were to look at areas of improvement, I would say our operations is one. As of this week, we have hired a really, really important staff member, which is our first ever full-time production manager.

So think about this from an agency perspective. This person is a non-billable person. He is not going to work on any clients. He’s not going to service our clients, but he is going to service Rooftop Twenty Two and he’s going to serve our internal team, which will help them have better capacity planning. It’ll help the business have more of a helicopter view of what’s happening and it’ll basically increase our customer satisfaction.

So that hire for me is great and we’ve great plans and we’re building a good foundation for future growth. But if I was to give maybe a little bit of advice out there for someone in my shoes, I probably would have made that hire maybe 18 months previous to what we’ve done currently. And I think that would have solved some of the obstacles that we faced over the past year.

Connor: You’ve highlighted a great point there. We are our own customer, first and foremost, before we service any other clients. And we often as agency owners, our websites need updated. The other elements of our brand and the tone of voice that we put together needs updated. And we’re looking after everybody else to the highest standard and holding our work to the highest standard. But looking internally, well, that’s left because paying work always comes first. And not that we won’t get round to it because we will, but we just have to take those glasses off and actually just work on our own business a little bit at the same time. Would that be fair enough for yourself?

Cathal: Like, we’ve had this chat before. That is across the board. Any of my clients who are watching this, I know that this is the same for all of us. It’s like the painter who hasn’t painted their own house in 10 years because they’re too busy looking after everyone else.

One thing on that is that we are guilty of that. So one of the things that Connor is pushing us on is that exact point. So we are currently redeveloping our own website and we are currently making a more conscious effort to push our own social media. And look, we have made some really good moves on that. And we’re currently in the process of launching our first ever client event.

So that’s something that will only help us grow. And like I look back at how we’ve grown as a business. We’ve literally grown from doing a good job for one person back in my bedroom in 2020 to doing a good job today for many clients.

Referrals will always be the best lead that comes in. I mean, if you get a phone call or an email from someone who’s come recommended from a customer you’ve done good work for before, you have a great chance of winning that client. However, I’m a firm believer that referrals isn’t as scalable as you want it to be.

Like the service offering that we offer to our clients is great web design, great digital touchpoints, but consistent leads through their website. And our customers can grow their business because each month they know based on their spend with Rooftop and their media spend that they’re going to get, I’m going to say for argument’s sake, 50 leads to the website and they have a 25 percent conversion rate on those leads. And they can grow their business and predict their business and scale their business.

If you’re relying solely on referrals, yes, you have a better conversion rate on those leads, but you have no guarantees of the quantity of leads that are going to come through. So it becomes really, really difficult for you to build a business if that’s the case.

So I would also, for anybody listening, and Connor has alluded to it: please, please, please place yourself as your best customer. We’ve been guilty of not doing it in the past, but even in recent times, we must do that a little bit more. It’s made a big difference to us. Doesn’t have to be massive amounts. You can grow into it because capacity might be an issue. But just don’t forget about yourself because there will be a time where you’ll need that. And if you’ve done it correctly, it’ll come good for you.

Connor: Yeah. When we were in our high growth phase of business, what we did was we attributed 10 percent of all revenue of our big projects, our brand projects and our digital projects and our web projects. 10 percent of that revenue was put back into self-marketing. Now, some of that was internal cost, design, motion graphics and staff time. But otherwise, we’d have put some of that money towards ad budgets as well.

And you’ve pointed out something that I would love people to know. You speak like an entrepreneur. I speak like an entrepreneur. Many of the creatives that I work with and many of the creatives out there who will be watching this speak like creatives when they speak to their customer. But their customers, they want to know conversion, rate optimisation. They want to know the figures. They want to know what the bottom line of this work will actually be. There has to be a commercial output. And I think that so many people in the creative space forget that, that ultimately our work must have a result over here. It will always look beautiful, but it must have a result that’s commercially viable on the other side.

Cathal: Yeah, like we speak to business owners. Our target audience would be marketing managers who don’t have execution help. So a company that has a marketing manager or maybe two people in the marketing department, but they don’t have an execution team behind them. For instance, they don’t have a design team that can help with their brand or the website. They don’t have an SEO specialist, a Google ad specialist, a social media video team. So we come in perfectly for that marketing manager to execute their strategy.

But also we’re dealing with MDs and they take it for granted that the colour tone and the palettes are going to be correct. They take it for granted that the user journey is going to be correct. They presume that the ads are optimised to target the right people. But fundamentally what they want to know is how many leads am I going to get and what amount of money is that going to make me?

And you have to as a business shift the conversation to that point pretty quickly, because if you’re not even touching on that, they won’t respect you as much as the next agency who does touch on that.

So look, it doesn’t happen every time because not every business is set up for this type of way of communicating. But if we’re working with a business that we’re bringing in leads for, a growing e-commerce brand, we will dive into what is your average order value. So let’s say, for example, if we bring in 50 leads and you have a 25 percent conversion rate on those leads, what is the average order from one of those leads? Is it 10,000 euros, for example? And if it is 10,000 euros, what is the margin of that 10,000 euros? Let’s say that’s 20 percent margin. So let’s take that 2,000 euros and bring it back to the cost of that lead. And does that lead and ad then become profitable?

And if we take that right to the very end, nine times out of 10, it’s actually really profitable. And then if you’re looking to increase budgets, not necessarily from an agency perspective, but from an ad spend perspective, we’re in a really strong position to show the business owner that these ads are really working.

But if you’re not going that deep with them, then you’re forever at the mercy of them saying to you, these ads aren’t working based on subjective opinions rather than hard data. So the quicker you can get to that point, the better.

And that’s what we found over the years. If you can show that, you’re in a much better position than the agency who comes in and just wants to talk about the lovely creative and the lovely user journey. They take that as a given a lot of the time.

Exactly. And we found that was our, not USP because more people spoke about it, but we spoke about it confidently because, well, I’m not a designer. I am a business person. And that was just the language set that I used every single day.

Connor: So I want to talk about you personally for a second because your business has had significant growth over the last few years. What has been the hardest thing to let go of as the business has grown, and what did you hold on to for far too long?

Cathal: I think I was looking to know where everything was at for far too long, because if you think about it, you’re setting the company up from your bedroom. If you’re the salesperson, particularly at the start, the clients, although you might not be the executor, the client expects the results. And if you do not get the results or if they have any questions, they’ll come to you.

So I think letting go of that was hard. But bringing in an account management team and removing myself predominantly as that point of contact has been a game changer for me. That does come at its downsides because you have to give trust, you have to back your team and you have to support your team.

And allowing that team to maybe make a mistake and to be OK with that mistake and understand that this is part of people’s development. And I was there and everybody else listening to this has been there before. That was hard for me. But I think over the last two or three years, that transition has really benefited the business.

It’s also difficult to be OK with the unknown. Like at any given time, I have a fair idea based on reports that get sent to me of where the business is at in terms of client health and client satisfaction. But I don’t truly know the client satisfaction of every client because I’m not the day to day point of contact. So a lot of the times you’re trusting people, but you’re also making judgment calls based on what you believe to be the case.

Now, obviously, based on conversations with Connor, we’re bringing in all sorts of metrics to be able to understand the health of the business even more. But not knowing everything was difficult for me when I was used to doing it myself and knowing at any given stage where everything was at. So that’s a big letting go moment. And you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. But that was a big moment for us.

Connor: It is so hard to let go and it’s so hard to trust your team and you have to do it bit by bit and let them earn your trust. And then when they do, it’s brilliant. It’s like, well, why didn’t we do this sooner?

Cathal: Exactly. But I have to say, I think I said this at the start, we are blessed with the best team we’ve ever had. And I think if we didn’t have such a strong team, it would be a much bigger issue. So we’re really, really grateful and happy and we feel as if there’s a prosperous road ahead, given the team that we have.

Connor: So three years from now, if everything goes to plan, what does the future hold for Rooftop Twenty Two and what has to be true for that to happen?

Cathal: So I’m 38 years of age and still very young. I still feel like I’ve a long road ahead of me. I would like in three years’ time for Rooftop Twenty Two to be a team of 25 to 30 people. And we want to be known for being the best outsourced marketing team in Dublin, plus the country, for medium-sized businesses.

So we don’t necessarily target the large multinational businesses. We have, through good work, had a knock-on effect whereby we have won business from large multinationals. We don’t necessarily target the small startup either. We target the medium-sized business who has a marketing manager who needs execution support. And we want to be known as the number one offering that in the country.

I think we are one of the best offering that. I think our retention rate of clients is extremely high. So the blueprint is proven and we are going to lean into new technology, new ways of working. And we believe in three years’ time that we can grow to that amount of people and to that service offering, expanded to hit that amount of clients with 30 people. And I think that we’re on the road to do that.

Connor: So you mentioned technology there, and you and I talk about AI an awful lot. Quite frequently, let’s say. But how are you as an agency using AI in the business today? And what do you think AI holds for the future?

Cathal: So my opinion has shifted a little bit over the last couple of years. I was speaking to somebody from Ernst and Young about this during the weekend. We kind of agreed that a year and a half ago, and people listening to this maybe will smile, but I’m sure people feel the same. A year and a half ago, if you used AI, or two years ago, for a client presentation or to put together a report or to help you out, you nearly felt like you were cheating. Like, God, I’m after doing something there and it’s given me this great report. And I’ve just sent it to the client and I’ve obviously put my own spin on it. I’ve sent it to the client. I’ve saved four hours of work. The client was really happy with it. You felt as if, am I OK to do that? Is that acceptable? And your gut told you maybe that isn’t acceptable, but look, it’s got me to a good place.

But I think it’s shifted today whereby I think companies expect you to lean into AI technologies. And if you’re not adapting AI as a business, particularly in agency land, you’re probably going to fall behind.

So we have set ourselves a target of being first in Rooftop. And just to be clear, we’re not building our websites via AI. We’re not launching ad campaigns via AI. We’re not designing via AI. But if we can improve small efficiencies throughout our business using AI, we absolutely will. So if we’re putting out a strategy, we will sense check that against AI. If we’re looking to learn more about a business or an industry, we will use AI to help us. Me and my design team are not experts in every single industry. Yet we serve multiple industries so we can lean into this unbelievable technology that’s now at our disposal. The client benefits from that. And why wouldn’t we do that?

Connor: So I have one last question, please, if you don’t mind. What one thing would you tell someone in your shoes and your situation who was starting out and starting an agency today that nobody told you at the time?

Cathal: The one thing I would say is that being an entrepreneur and running your own business is extremely hard. It’s not a nine to five job. And what you don’t see is, and I’m sure a lot of people listening to this will relate, you don’t see the work that goes in beyond the hours.

So quite often on a Friday evening, my family will go to bed. I will work from half nine, 10 o’clock until 12 o’clock, closing off the week. I will do an hour on a Sunday evening preparing for the following week. I will have to travel down the country for work. And you take the stress and the burden of it all on top of you and you protect your team from issues. You face them head on and you are the provider for so many people, which is daunting.

If you’re the person that’s OK with that and if you’re willing to take that on and you feel like that’s you, it is the most incredible, rewarding experience that you will have in life beyond having kids and your own family. I’m a family man through and through. And I know I alluded to hard work there, but I haven’t let Rooftop get in the way of my own family. I still see my kids enough. I still spend enough time with them. But it does have an impact. So you have to be OK with that. And you have to be aware that running your own business isn’t going to be the easiest path you’ll ever take.

But if that itch is in you, I worked for agencies for 10 years. I had this itch. I had to scratch it. And if you feel like you have to scratch it, I would really encourage you to do that, to leave your job and to set up your own business. Or if you’ve currently set up your own business and you’re looking to scale, I would really encourage you to do that.

The one lesson I would say is never fall out with people along the way. I’ve been very fortunate that the companies that I’ve worked with still support me to this day. I left companies on good terms and that goodwill and karma comes back to help you in future years. And I will also help them and help people who are coming up as much as possible.

So don’t win the fight every time. Don’t try and win every battle. Think long term and just enjoy it. But if you have that itch and you really think it’s for you and you understand what it is, just go for it. It’s probably the hardest thing that we will ever do, but it’s also the most rewarding.

Connor: And I completely agree with everything you just said there. I definitely think that we have to respect everybody along the way. Every fight is not one to be won and you don’t have to be the biggest dog in the park. You just need to do business, good business, the right way to be very successful. And I think you do that incredibly well. Cathal, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. I know that everybody who’s watching this will get lots from that. There’s lots of really great information and I do appreciate you sharing as much as you have with me. So all I have to say is thank you. And I look forward to showing this to the world after we finish recording.

Cathal: No problem. Thanks. And one quick thing. I’m sure Connor isn’t using this podcast as a sales mechanism for himself. But Connor is a really, really good business coach. We started to use him over the past nine to 12 months, Connor, I would say. And from initial conversation right through to ongoing support, he says the right things. And it’s up to you as a business to take it on board. And we’ve taken the majority of things on board. I’m sure maybe a little bit slow on some things, but it’s great to have that sounding board and the person who’s walked your shoes and been there. So thank you, Connor, for everything that you’ve done for Rooftop and for me too as well.

Connor: No, I appreciate that. Thank you so much. And to everyone watching, thank you again for being here. This is the very first episode. There will be 10 in the first season. There’s another nine still to come and I will release all of them one a week after another. So please do subscribe, do connect with me on LinkedIn. And I look forward to seeing you all in the next video. Cathal, I will chat to you very soon and thank you again.

Cathal: All the best. Take care. Thanks, everyone. Bye bye.