Business News The Griffin Report


Lightbox Digital’s Rob Pollard and PJ Ellis had varied starts to their journey into entrepreneurship. PJ with an aborted career in professional football and a brief stay in TV’s Big Brother. Rob with a degree in product design. Now the Chamber patrons have an ambitious two-year plan. Jon Griffin, Chamberlink’s award-winning columnist, went to find out what makes them tick.


Shooting for success: Rob Pollard and PJ Ellis (right) prepare to use the recreational facilities at their offices near St Paul’s Square


A


sk Rob Pollard and PJ Ellis what their ambitions are at Lightbox Digital and the


message is loud and clear: “We want to build a happy agency that does brilliant things and consistently helps its clients,” says Rob. PJ (short for Peter James) adds:


“We aim to be the best digital marketing agency in Birmingham.” It’s been a long and occasionally rocky road for the two 40- somethings since Rob first set up the fledgling Lightbox Creative Studio 15 years ago – but the figures over a decade and a half speak for themselves. The agency has grown


consistently from one man’s pipedream in 2005-6 operating out of humble offices in Staffordshire into a thriving concern boasting around 50 clients – from the likes of Millennium Point to Hollywood


20 CHAMBERLINK February 2021


Monster and Curium Solutions. Lightbox Digital now employs 15


staff in spacious accommodation just off St Paul’s Square. Like tens of thousands of other companies Rob admits they are currently “a bit hamstrung” by the Covid crisis - but the worst pandemic in living memory is unlikely to deter the two men at the Lightbox helm. “A £1m turnover with a 20 per


cent profit is not a pipedream. Our ambition is to do that – we have made a lot of businesses very successful through what we do,” says PJ. Like many entrepreneurs, the


two Lightbox directors have varied CVs, ranging from product design and CGI expertise in Rob’s case to an aborted career in professional football and a brief stay in TV's Big Brother house nearly 20 years ago (‘my 15 minutes of fame’ as he


describes it today) for PJ. Rob, 40, who hails from Aldridge, graduated with a 2:1 degree in product design and learned the ropes at initial design jobs in Swindon and Cannock before eventually branching out with his own venture.


‘I put together some packages for small businesses, and they paid in instalments, which levelled off the cash flow. That shift in mindset led me to hire my first designer’


“I was doing CGI work. I managed to win a couple of jobs, one with a company called Goold Estates, who were regenerating


Walsall. I earned £4,000, that was a massive first win. I went full-time in the spring of 2006. “I was doing CGIs, a bit of web


and a bit of design but then in 2008 the property market crashed. I had to change because nobody was doing anything. I focused more on web and design work, mainly small business stuff.” Rob moved to shared offices in


Lichfield in 2009 – “they were tough years, it was a question of just getting through it trying to survive” – but his determination paid off. Annual turnover doubled and the client base grew to 10. “It was a lot of work that was


sometimes the all-nighter period. I had lost track of what I was trying to achieve. I wanted to grow the business, hiring people. I asked myself ‘do you want to stay on your own forever or grow?’ I had


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