This month we caught up with Antonio Wedral, Co-Founder & Growth Director of NOVOS. NOVOS is the UK’s largest eCommerce SEO agency & global eCommerce Agency of the year 2023. Unlike other SEO agencies, they put strategy & data at the heart of everything they do and their eCommerce experience is their superpower. They are in a unique position to be able to offer the full suite of International SEO services including technical SEO, content marketing and performance PR backlink building.
This is part of Ignition Law’s ‘Igniting The Spark‘ series, where we spend five minutes with inspiring entrepreneurs, talking about the key moments that defined their careers.
Tell us a little bit about your business and what you do…
I’m Antonio Wedral, a co-founder at NOVOS. We’re an employee-owned eCommerce SEO agency that has supported well over 200+ eCommerce brands since we launched 5 years ago. We recently won eCommerce Agency of the Year at the Global Agency Awards which I’m so proud of! I’m also now an investor in d2c brands and an Independent Trustee at Riverford Organic Farmers.
The moment that ignited the spark in me to start a business was…
I knew there was a gap for our offering for so long but then, as co-founders, we came from quite toxic company backgrounds and I just realised that I had to find a better way of working & motivating myself that wasn’t for companies that didn’t care about their people. It was clear that there was a gap for an agency to do better and to also help specifically eCommerce brands reduce their reliance on paid media as we couldn’t find the right agency when we were in-house… that was the moment I knew we had to go for it.
The toughest challenge I’ve faced in business is
I think, naturally, just scaling people is tough for any business leader. Even when you have the right team with the right people, there’s lots to do to keep them perofrming at a high level and happy at the same time. Then it’s a challenge sometimes when not finding the right talent for your busienss and so on. We’ve implemented a really strong recruitment process, a strong onboarding and training programme and the Operations team are constantly tweaking and improving the day to day management & support that is provided to all team members. But I think no matter your company size or age, growing a team will always be the most challenging, but most rewarding!
The biggest success has been…
Implementing our Senior Leadership team really early on. We focused on getting the right leaders to help grow the company in the day-to-day really early on and finding them, training them up and watching them support the growth of our entire company since has been a joy to see. They’ve been with us for years & we’re all aligned heading the same direction, so bringing them in early was definitely one of our biggest successes.
I’m very good at…
Focusing on the details – I’m usually quite obsessed about details whether it’s spelling, font usage, the wording of things and so on. I’m an overthinker, so this helps me to focus myself. I’m a believer in small things make the biggest differences when compounded, so people always send me things for a final review as they know I’ll likely see something small!
The type of person I look to recruit is…
Proactive & motivated. Skills and knowledge can be taught but in our current generation/time we’re in, finding someone proactive and motivated is rare and that’s what we always look for.
The part of my day I most look forward to is
Going to the gym – it’s great for me mentally and physically.
If I could give fellow entrepreneurs one piece of advice it would be
Be resilient. So much (not good stuff) will be thrown at you over the years and many quit or make the wrong choices under that pressure, but remain resilient and stick to your dreams, it’ll work out fine.
Outside of work I can be found…
I’m a big racer, so I race karts around the country often. I also go to the gym, swim and you’ll find me enjoying an old fashioned on most weekends.
My philosophy on life is…
Be a good person and believe things happen for a reason – positive outlooks result to positive results in the long term even if and when things ebb & flow.
Client story
What was your business challenge?
As we were scaling we had more needs from a legal perspective. Whether that was client contracts, internal employee things etc. I’ve always found law quite scary and corporate… my sister is a lawyer so I also wanted to keep family + business separate so had to explore the right partner for us! We then were introduced to Ignition Law when the time came for us to revamp our client contracts.
How did you work with Ignition Law on this? What support did we provide you with?
Ignition supported us by reviewing our current contracts, providing drafts of new ones and finalising them for us to use for future.
What did you enjoy most about working with the team at Ignition?
Transparency & a great, knowledgeable team. Feels more aligned to our own company values which really helps too.
Explore more inspiring entrepreneur stories in the Igniting The Spark section of our website here at Ignition Law.
Further reading:
- Connect with NOVOS on LinkedIn.
- Read about how NOVOS is one of the top ecommerce SEO companies on The Retail A to Z website.
- 5 Principles for Start-Up Digital Marketing – part of our Commercial Conversations series at Ignition Law.
