What's next? This time it's my turn to be interviewed ...is this good PR?

Jim James: 0:02

As the world emerges from the shadows of a pandemic, we're all wondering what's next. Has our experience in lockdown altered the future we expected or has it simply accelerated ongoing change? What's in store for us over the next few years? That is the introduction to Andrew Clark & Suzy Goulding's podcast, which I was invited to participate in today. They invite leaders across Asia working in marketing, communications, and lifestyle, and they ask us one simple question, "What's next?" They've gone into this as a bit of an experiment, because they thought they had a lot of free time during their lockdown in Singapore, then they remembered that they had actual jobs. Luckily, both of them have seen an uptake in new work and opportunities in the last few weeks, and that's taken up quite a bit of their time and energy. They began my asking me to introduce myself to their listeners, so I shared that I've been an entrepreneur since I was 27. I got on a plane and went to Singapore to start the PR firm EastWest PR. In 2006, I went to Beijing to start the agency. While I was there, I bought a Morgan sports car and imported it. To cut the long story short, I became the importer for Morgan sports cars. Where Andrew and I crossed paths was in Singapore on an aeroplane going to the Philippines in around 1998. In China, we crossed paths again, because I started the British Business Awards in 2008. I worked as the Vice Chair of the Chamber of Commerce, kept the EastWest Public Relations agency going, and then I met my wife. We now have two beautiful daughters whom we brought back to England in 2019. Next, yasked me how I've been spending these past few months since lockdown started. I told them that part of the the joy of COVID is that it's created an opportunity to start from scratch again. In a funny way, this little shed from where I work, or what I call the "Tardis," is a metaphor for rebuilding my life. By moving from Beijing, where we had a three-storey house and two cars, we moved back here to the UK where I have just the essentials, really, a desk, chair, computer, microphone, and camera, so I can connect with the world. I shared that I've been able to use the time to reinvent and restructure what I'm doing, and I've been able to focus on on a couple of things. One is that I'm working on the SPEAK|pr program, where I talk about 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur running agencies in Singapore, China, India, and the UK. I've had a global network of agencies, and still do. I've worked with a lot of clients that I can now build that methodology and offer that to entrepreneurs. SPEAK|pr is a podcast that I operate six days a week, and on that, I share tools, technologies, and tips for business owners on how they can get noticed. That's how I try to give back during COVID. I've also built some tools that are online and available at EastWest PR on SPEAK|pr. We have there a five-stage methodology which is still Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know. With that, you have tools, a message home, a story planner, and a technology application directory, which has over 100 applications that business owners and entrepreneurs can use for free to create stories, engage audiences, amplify their message, and measure the performance. I've also been remodeling my agency to be employee-free, or what I call a virtual agency. We are everywhere virtually. I recognized that when I ran an agency with offices in Singapore, China, India, and the UK, I spent as much time looking after the people as I did after the clients. That's the honest truth. The bigger the agency gets, the less time you get to do what you started off doing well in the first place, which is giving strategy and counselling to clients. A few years ago when I was in Beijing, I decided to make the agency "knowledge-driven, geography-independent." So, rather than hiring consultants and trying to engage them on their work, I only hire people that want to do the work, and they do it under their own account. I liken it to what Uber and Airbnb have done. They've built hugely valuable businesses by focusing on their clients' needs. They're letting the service provider turn up to work, but they're motivated as a self-employed person. They're not motivated with the incentive that they're given an office, a laptop, a brand, 20 days holiday, and if they don't like it, they can get a better job somewhere else. We work with the client on the strategy that needs to be done, and we provide the legal infrastructure and the business platform using Zoho for knowledge management. Then, we bring together specialists, the best the best of whoever it needs to be. Instead of now trying to hire and recruit and do all those things with an LLC, we've changed the model. We've found people that are really good and we said, "Here's the client need. Here's the simple financial agreement. Let's make it a deliverables-based agreement." Suzy said this COVID experience is showing that that is the model of the future. Typically big agency models, they're broken and have been broken for a long time. So, this notion of bringing together teams of specialists to work for a client is definitely the way that things are going. Suzy sees it in her own agency network, and she says that what I'm doing is way ahead of our time. Andy says there's two words he can describe me and my agency. The first thing is lean, because it's basically me in my shed. It doesn't get much leaner than that really. The other thing, which is really important at this time during COVID, is nimble, where I'm able to change quickly and adapt to the needs of my clients or a landscape changing around me. I replied that technology is creeping into everything we do, whether it's going for a run and counting how many steps we're taking to delivery of food. And as companies using the technology available to us today, we're having to get much better at delivering objectives that our clients give us. Clients are becoming much more results-based, and the payments are becoming much more results-based as well. We're all now trying to find seams, if you like, in the bedrock which are going to be wealthy for us. Core competency at EastWest PR is this idea of international communications for business-to-business clients. This means is that we're going to do more with less. This liberates time, because we'll stop doing things that we were doing before that weren't productive. We'll be able to focus. For example, because I'm not managing 30 people, and I'm managing just as much revenue by the way as I did with 30 people, this is freeing up more time which I can spend with my children or getting healthy. If we do it right, it means that we can make less of an impact on the planet, we can be less wasteful, and we can also create surpluses of time and energy that's fundamentally a positive output, not a negative one. Suzy says we've covered so much ground, and we've produced many interesting thought-provoking things for Andrew, Suzy, and their listeners to ruminate over. Changing topics, Andy asked me what I'm currently reading or listening to. I told him I subscribe to Apple Music, which I love, because they have tailored suggestions for me. I'm cooking mac and cheese to tunes like Spandau Ballet, Visage from Ultravox, and A Flock of Seagulls, so I am completely going back in time to the 70s to 90s. What's cool is that my children listen to some of these songs that have been remixed. For reading, I'm a little bit dull, because I can only manage about three pages at night before I fall asleep. I'm not a great reader in the evenings, but I'm reading a book by Park Howell, who was a guest on the SPEAK|pr podcast. The book is called Brand Bewitchery, and I'm reading that because it's a wonderful blend of how stories are made in Hollywood and how we can build a narrative ourselves. With time so limited, I tend to read things that I think would be be useful and interesting. This may sound dull, but the only thing I'm watching is the clock. It's not because I build clients by the hour. It's just that I don't find really anything on TV adding any value to be honest. I don't mean to insult anyone that's watching TV, by the way. If I've got the spare time, I'd love to have a workout, take the dog for a walk, or hang out with the girls. If I watch anything, I watch it together with the kids. Andy replied saying that's understandable, because watching TV is an activity that's either really personal, or it's an activity that's shared as I am doing with my daughters, which we do as a family. He says the thing about me that amazes him is I have this articulate ability to talk and explain things in very charismatic ways as well as my idea of the virtualization of organizations. Running a zero-employee, global PR company with clients all over the world and a business model to match that is really transparent and allows people to come in as specialists and do their work is really cool, he says. There's so much to learn from that in terms of the way that we run our businesses. What we're seeing now over the last few months is so many companies, particularly if you work in services, which Andy, Suzy, and I all do, if you're offering a service, you're now having to think about how to make that fully digital. Also, individuals are starting to think about if they're happy doing a 9-5 or working in an office all the time, so more and more people are changing the way they work, some due to necessity sadly, but quite a lot due to choice. Suzy joked that I'm follically challenged man, to which Andy replied that if he hadn't known what I looked like, he would have imagined a dashingly handsome man with a massive quiff. Jokes aside, it was a pleasure to join Suzy and Andy today. I'm grateful for the chance to share my story with others, as I do on my SPEAK|pr podcast. It was also refreshing to be on the other side of the mic this time, having been the interviewee instead of being the interviewer.