When you need the right freelance consultant, call the PR Cavalry and fire over 700 data points to get the right troops for your campaign.

Jim James: 0:00

I am very happy that Nigel Sarbutts was able to join me today. Nigel started a brilliant service for SMEs and business owners called the PR cavalry. PR Cavalry is like the Booking.com for clients in need of PR freelancers with a deep understanding of their market and relevant skill sets. Th y're somewhere between a search engine and a dating agency, igel jokes. I saw on LinkedIn the other day that he posted a really nice, glowing testimonial from a client about one of the consultants listed on the PR Calvary. Nigel says this was a client in the PPE or Personal Protective Equipment market. It's a very crowded market, and they came to the platform to find a freelancer who could help them start a business. In a day and a half of work, it was simply a very short project, this freelancer was able to get them on national TV, get them some really impressive international press media coverage, and a huge number of specialist market titles as well. It was on the back of knowing the market, having great contacts in the media, and then, without any fuss or fanfare, just getting to it. That's really what clients want. They want somebody who they don't have to explain how their market works. They want someone who gets it very quickly, and then can pick up the phone and speak to journalists that can make it happen. For the client, it was an amazing investment of a rather small amount of money for some amazing results in the media. That's a great point and amazing turnaround as well. I'm full of admiration for that pitch. I then asked Nigel how much money was involved. On the whole, clients and SMEs are really wary about agencies coming up with big-ticket consulting fees. Nigel said he was talking to a client recently, and they had approached some relatively small agencies, and with absolute honesty and respect for the agencies, they were told that unless they were willing to pay the agency a retainer of 3,000 or maybe more a month, then there wasn't much they could do for them. Meanwhile, freelancers could be charging 400 pounds a day, and if you do the math, you can get five, six, or seven days a month of work from a freelancer who is very experienced and also very invested in the result, because it's their income. It's their work. They can't pass the work on to anybody else. So, freelancers will always give you a very honest appraisal of what's achievable, because only they are there to deliver it. For that investment of 400 or 500 pounds a day, you're probably getting somebody with upwards of 10 years experience in your market, and he/she will be very, very dedicated to the task, and it's difficult for agencies to compete against that. Freelancers are able to benefit from low fixed costs, and while any business has overhead, a freelancer is an extraordinarily cost-efficient way to get an expert working for you with minimal overhead. In terms of the freelancers on PR Cavalary, Nigel says that of the 1,600 freelancers on their platform, around 95% of them are from the UK. Within that, as you can imagine, they have anything and everything on there. He reckons they've got about around 12-15% of the freelance market registered on their platform. So, if you can't find what you're looking for in 1,600 people, then you probably have got a really unusual niche. He says it's actually amazing some of the briefs that they've been able to match by a little bit of extra diligence, but it's the algorithm that fuels the business. The matching algorithm between what the client wants and the skill sets of the freelancers that they've indexed is very accurate indeed. They very rarely find that the client comes to them, searches the platform, and finds no matches. It just doesn't happen, according to Nigel. When it comes to how a client would find a freelancer on PR Cavalry, Nigel says the approach is similar to that of Booking.com where you input your criteria into the search engine, and then the algorithm does the matching. A client would go on their website and say, for example, "I want somebody who knows the DIY sector. And within that, I want somebody who has done blogger outreach, or has done event management, or has done copywriting, or has profiled a CEO." There are different types of PR work, because it's a bit like hiring a lawyer. When you say you need a lawyer, well, why do you need one? Are you getting divorced? Are you selling a house? Have you committed a crime? It's not just, "I need a PR person." Quite often, Nigel says, businesses struggle with that last part. They say, "I just want someone to do PR for me," and it doesn't have that extra level of narrowing down. You need to specify what you have in mind, because PR Cavalry has nearly 30 types of different PR and communications activity that a client can specify. They can clearly say, "What I've got in mind is we have a new CEO, so I want to profile him in our trade press," or something like that, so they will tick the box that says "CEO profiling." PR Cavalry makes it easy for cli nts to be very specific about wh t they need to articulate their needs. That, obviously, then pro uces a much better outcome, ecause when that first contact etween the client and the fre lancer takes place, hopefully, it's a meeting of minds, ecause they've matched very pr cisely between what the client' got in mind through som simple drop-down menus n their platform, and hat the freelancer is able to rovide. So, there are benefits to both parties in the way t at they work, and it's all dri en by a simple front-en on the platform. That is, y u don't have to be an expert n PR to work it, just as you do 't have to be a travel agent to know what you want when you go into booking.com to book y ur your vacation in Paris. As long as you have a clear idea of what you need, PR Cavalry akes it very easy for the s stem to understand that and atch it precisely to find at l ast one in 1,600 people w o could possibly be the perso you're look Nigel's background is PR. He runs PR agencies, and he's been a freelancer, so he's been a buyer and a seller of freelance services. It was seeing both sides of the coin that gave him the inspiration for PR Cavalry as well as knowing that there is this huge talent pool of freelancers out there. But for most people, it's invisible. It's very hard to know where the talent is, and so clients end up putting a shout-out on LinkedIn, asking around, or fishing ar und for business cards that th y may have. It's a very haphaza d way, and Nigel thought, "In n era where we expect everythi g to be searchable and there wil be instant results, there's go to be a way of matching the tw sides, the need with th availability," so that's wha they set out to do two year ago. They built the shop, and hen they had to stock the shel es. They spent a long time buil ing up that talent pool to the oint where they were conf dent that pretty much any clie t search could be matched with n their resource. They've been open to clients for searches for about a year and a half now. And in that time, they've had around 300 assignments go through the platform, and they want that to increase. Everybody took a bit of a hit at the start of the year, but Nigel says it's surprising how much work is coming back to the platform now. They feel buoyant about the future, because they believe that as the economy feels its way back to the "new normal," people are going to take baby steps. They want to have flexible resources on tap rather than take the plunge. People are hopefully going to commit to a big investment in people as a resource. So having talent that you can dial up and dial down with very low risk and in a very cost efficient way positions the PR Cavalry at the right place at the right time. That's certainly borne out of the number of client briefs that are now coming back onto the platform. In terms of their business model, Nigel says there is no mechanism in their model for them to charge a client for what

they do. They are free: 10:51

free to search and free to hire through the platform. The way that they make money is when the client pays the freelancer's invoice for the work, they take 10% from the freelancer, not the client. What they're doing is creating value for the freelancer in work finding them hopefully while they're doing something else, so they can devote more time to actually working and less time hunting for work which is expensive for a freelancer. And because of that precise matching, it's very profitable work, because it's right in their sweet spot of what they do best. For the client, they are an inversion of the traditional recruiter model where normally, a client would pay to be matched to somebody. But on PR Cavalry, they charge no fees at all to use their platform to hire anyone. Of course, clients love that, because they're getting access to a huge search for talent pool at no cost. There's this perception that only big companies can do PR, but a big belief that I've got is that it's the SMEs, really, and the owner-operated businesses that need the marketing support the most, so I asked Nigel what kind of companies sign up on their platform. He says that most of the work, around 60% of the briefs, are coming directly from SME business owners or SME marketing managers, because freelancers add huge amounts of value to their business. A very time-hassled SME marketing manager simply doesn't have the time or the resources to have a big black book of contacts or freelancers. These are the people who are posting on LinkedIn or looking around in a rather haphazard way for support when they need it, and they're in a position that is quite time-pressured. That can lead to a problem which is, "I need someone tomorrow," and that's why they call the PR Cavalry. When you're time-pressured and also trying to find an expert, those two things can be in conflict, and that can lead to hiring the wrong people for the wrong reasons. A lot of clients can be dissatisfied with using PR, because it wasn't quite what they wanted. Nigel believes that the root of that problem is they didn't speak to the right person, or the right person wasn't available to them to hire at the time when they needed it. That's the big problem that PR Cavalry is trying to solve, that you need that person who knows the DIY sector and who has done 20 product launches in DIY. If 10 names are presented to you five seconds after you've hit search on their platform, then they've solved that problem. They've given you a list of 10 people that are able to do the job, and then it's up to you to decide which of those 10 you want to have a further conversation with to dig deeper into their skills, and for that freelancer to dig deeper into exactly what you need, so that they can come up with a plan and proposal which is right for the budget, right for the task, and also is right for human chemistry. The algorithm is great, but it doesn't replace human chemistry. They put human beings in touch with each other to determine whether they can genuinely work together, because Nigel says PR is a bit different from hiring a web developer or hiring someone to do your SEO. You need someone whom you have a deep understanding and good mental connection with, because there's a lot of trust involved. There's a lot of variables. There's lots of tiny details that need to be oriented to get the right things in the right order in PR. So, that's why Nigel says they are very clear that the algorithm is great, but it's only the start of the process. It doesn't solve everything. And of course, no client would hire a freelancer on the click of a mouse, and probably no freelancer would want to be hired purely on the click of a mouse. There needs to be that human contact which is the second stage of their process once the client is shortlisted. But you're shortlisting from a small pool of people, anyone of whom could, on paper, do the job well for you. My next question was on testimonials. Nigel says they really thought hard on that. Freelancers can put testimonials on their profile, previous work that they've done, and they do encourage them to do that, particularly with a named individual, because that offers the greatest credibility, that John Smith of Smith Industries is putting his name to that testimonial. However, they decided not to have a star rating, because things can go wrong. As TripAdvisor has found, people leave reviews sometimes for the wrong reasons. AI is not a magician. Again, this goes back to the analogy of law. Simply hiring the best barrister in the city doesn't mean that your case will win. There are other factors involved. There is an element of risk. Be very honest with clients and say, "If you want your message to guarantee getting the media on the day you want it using the words you want, take an effort, because that's what will guarantee it," but that's a very different argument. PR is a question of judgment and the risks involved, but when it works, it can do wonders for you, as with the mask supplier startup. They invested a day and a half, and they ended up with two or three minutes on Good Morning Britain TV. They got an amazing spread of coverage for an investment which isn't even four figures. It was under 1,000. With that, if anyone needs to call in the PR Cavalry, you can visit their website. Nigel encourages you to watch their explainer video which is very simple and easy to understand. If you've used a site like Booking.com, you won't have any problems using the PR Cavalry. I learned a great deal from Nigel today, and I hope you did too. If you're an owner of a small business and want help with your PR from an expert without breaking the bank, then you should definitely consider the PR Cavalry.