The UBER PR agency model is coming of age. Agency coach Rob da Costa and Jim James discuss On Demand Services.

I was chuffed to be invited to talk with Rob da Costa, former Agency owner turned business coach and host of The Agency Accelerator Podcast.

I was really excited to have a chance to sit down and talk with Rob and discuss what I have learnt from running the agency I started in Singapore in 1995, now based in the UK yet serving clients in Asia, Europe and America.  We discuss how to set up the systems and processes and how to recruit and manage staff when they are dispersed around the world.

Rob always tells his clients that it is very difficult to build an agency using freelance staff because it’s like building a business on quicksand however I share a very different perspective to this and outlines exactly what I have done to build EASTWEST PR using freelance and contract staff.

This is separate to my own podcast:
SPEAK|Pr is for business owners to unlock the value in their organization for free with effective communication and is hosted by international Pr agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James.

Rob da Costa Da Costa Coaching's website: https://www.dacostacoaching.co.uk/
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Please visit our blog post on PR for business please visit our site:
https://www.eastwestpr.com/blogs/

Transcript

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Welcome to today's episode of the agency accelerator Podcast. I am really excited to have with me today, Jim James, who runs East West PR. The interesting thing is that he is based in the UK, but serves companies in Asia. So we talked about how he makes that remote model work, and why he is a big fan of virtualizing agencies and moving to an Uber model. And in the episode, he'll explain exactly what he means by that. And that's interesting because it's in direct opposition to what I often recommend to my clients. So this was a really interesting episode to give some different insights on how to run an agency. So let's get on with today's show. accelerate your agency's profitable growth, with tools, tips, and value added interviews with your host, agency owner and coach, Rob decoster. Okay, so on today's episode of the agency accelerator podcast, I'm really happy to have Jim James with me. Now, Jim has been working in marketing, just about as long as I have as well, we both go back to the 90s. Jim runs a PR company called East West, and they provide communications to help companies in Asia get noticed. Now the interesting thing about that is that Jim is currently based in the UK, but he founded the agency in Singapore and then moved on to China to open offices. So welcome, Jim, to the podcast. Is there anything else you would like to add about your journey? Rob? Thank you. First of all, I'm really delighted and grateful to be on the show with your listener, and a real fan. we've both got parallel paths. I think the only thing is that, over 25 years, I've set up businesses on three continents. And I've run public relations companies, but I've also built other companies, including importing Morgan sports cars to China. So I've been on the client side and also on the agency side for over 25 years. And what made you move around what made you move from Singapore to China and then back to the UK? Well, Robbie, remember back in 1990, we were seeing adverts of the 3 million people unemployed on the billboards under Thatcher and the Saatchi brothers. So I went to Singapore to manage trade shows for a client in the music technology business in 92, and was just infected by the excitement and the energy of Asia. So 9495, I decided that I would sell up from my job and move to Singapore with a couple of suitcases, and borrowed laptop and started East West public relations so that I could really take advantage of the growing desire for companies to sell goods and services into Asia. And at the time, there were almost no public relations agencies in Asia. So just the timing was great for me as an individual, young, 27 year old, and Asia, really the beginnings of the wonderful 90s. In the current environment, it's kind of emphasised that we can work remotely and it doesn't actually matter where we're based. But if you're working internationally, how do you build relationships remotely? And how do you deal with some of the nuances and the differences between business practices and the culture between countries as well? Rob, I think, first of all, how we build relationships, as an agency is how we add value to the client. I think proximity and personality are less important than adding value with every communication. If we position ourselves as trusted advisors, and the eyes and the ears, and the operations that the client can't have, then I think that we can build a relationship based on if you like, need rather than on emotion. So first of all, what I do is I work on ensuring that everything I do for a company, everything from the moment I had them as a prospect through to delivering I keep them engaged in the work we're doing. So for example, I have a podcast speak PR, I have a weekly newsletter called cognition. But I'll also find news and information for example, about a trade show, or an editorial opportunity or a change in regulations. And I'll send that to people. So I think that the key part of building a relationship is about demonstrating value because actually, I'm not looking for friends and frankly, nor are they they're looking for someone to solve a problem. And I don't think that I have to be in the room with them in order to do that. Okay, fair enough. And I know you work in PR. So how do you go about building those relationships with journalists, because I imagine that must be quite different to building relationships with a London journalist than a Chinese one or one in Singapore. Okay, so now we move on to, if you like the international dimension, and I've been lucky enough to have lived and worked in Singapore, I then set up the company in Beijing in 2006. I set up a company in India in 2009, in Bangalore, and on any given day, sspr will do work across Asia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Japan, China, South Korea, actually, all journalists want the same thing. They all want a great story for their readers. So I think what we have to start with is the content that we're going to give the media. I think, by the way, this is just the same if we work in advertising, my first job out of university was in an ad agency, for example, we have to be looking at what the client or the media The audience is looking for, and where they are in that journey. So first of all, I start with, you know, what is going to be of interest. So that's where it does become more specific, according to the context. So obviously, the the Japan ease media have got Japan interested stories, and the Chinese have got Chinese interested stories, and so on. But then also, each culture will have its own perspectives on non context specific ideas. So, for example, how Japan deals with the environment. And environmental legislation is quite different to how Singapore deals with it, because they have a different history. They have a different geography and so on. So I think the real key to international public relations is about being sensitive to the local requirements. Then when it comes to dealing with the individuals, they all have very different personalities. If there is a common theme amongst all Asian media, it's a desire to learn. And the Asian media are always very well prepped, when they come for media interviews, and for press briefings. They like to know what's going on, you'll find this especially with the Chinese, the Japanese, and they see it really is a profession. The second dimension is the journalists, because in Asia, it's a non confrontational society or a non confrontational philosophy. And, and through this idea of Confucian ethics, where people in authority would lead with responsibility, the view on the journalist side is that if you're inviting them to learn about your company, or your product or your service, you'd be telling the truth. You know, why would you be asking them to collude in spreading something that's false. So my experience with working with media in China, India, Japan, South Korea, and so on, is that the media are really friendly, delightful people to work with, they want something that's relevant for their readers. But by and large, they're very humble, and very keen to work with a client or an agency. So those would be my, you know, top lines. Rob. Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. So that is very different to how the media works in the UK, and, and probably especially in the US, as well, where they're probably always starting off thinking, you know, the other party's here just to sell something, I need to find the real story, I need to catch them out. And, you know, get the real scoop, I guess, well, and Robin, there's a fundamental difference between the Western media and Asian media, and that is about ownership. So the history of Western media, by and large is as an independent voice for, you know, the people, the publishers and so on. So people like Lord Beaverbrook, or Reza dailymail, it's hot. So but in in Asia, the media, by and large, are still owned by the government. So if you look at Singapore, the Singapore press holdings owns the mainstream media in China, nobody can own an Independent newspaper in Japan. They are quazy government owned. So there's there's a very different structural position of the media which have in the in the whole and on the whole been seen as really, the voices of the government, as opposed to the voices of the people holding the government to account. So structurally, that's also why it's different. Right? Yeah, that's really an interesting and I guess there's pros and cons to both sides of that. Now, when you and I were talking before we started recording, the podcast, you were talking to me about virtualization of agencies and moving to the Uber model. And I just wondered whether you could explain a little bit more About what you mean by that. Yes, of course. And coming back to this original point about building relationships when you're not there, if the premise of an agency is that you're adding value to a client into the media, proximity isn't necessarily necessary. But also ownership of the factors of production is also not necessary. In other words, hiring people, and having them full time on the staff is not a precondition for them knowing how to add value to a client. If we start with that mindset, which is that actually, anybody who knows how to add value to a client, in advertising, direct marketing in any other way, they can do that, regardless of the, if you like, the economic relationship, contractual relationship with the agency. In the past, I've had offices in Singapore, China, and India concurrently. And I found one of the biggest jobs that I ended up with was managing people. It's either managing existing people in their personalities or trying to find new people with both the skill set and the personality type to fit in. Now, I went down that path, and I managed multiple regions with multiple staff. And there's some merits to that. And there's consistency of delivery, sometimes for the clients and so on. But I actually think that where clients have got to in the last 10 years, is they've got to a place where they're not looking necessarily for the relationship, they're looking for deliverables. Or they're looking for deliverables because the economics have changed in the market. We used to have annual retainers, Rob, I don't with you remember this, but you know, even in advertising and have an annual retainer, and people looked at the agency very much as a sort of an outsource department. But now I think clients are looking for a, a result against some of their own deliverables. And often those deliverables are driven by shareholder requirements. We work for a lot of blue chip and listed companies and they have a quarterly target. And what happens is, they would like to align their expenditure to their quarterly revenue. So this truncation, if you like, in in relationship has led me to thinking that why should I have a permanent, open ended relationship with a member of staff, when I do not have the same relationship with the client, it creates a structural inequality in the business and it creates risk, really, Rob, so what's happening is you're buying with one set of commitments, but you are still only an agent. So you're an agent, without any tenure without any consistency. And you're often billing on the first of the month for payment on 30 days, or at the end of the month, for 30 to 60 days. And your margin might only be 20 to 30%. So then you end up with this terrible issue. You've got people that you've made a commitment to on an open ended scale with X number of vacations, and office, a laptop, and so on. And then you've got a client, this is actually I just want you to get this done. And this is the budget. So from a from a commercial point of view, you build a business that fundamentally is at risk. So I changed that because one day I went to Singapore, and I walked into the office from Beijing, and the team was sitting there looking at their social media online, and they just sort of said, well, are my computer's not working as fast as it could be? Can you fix it? Someone else said, Oh, yeah, now I'm waiting for you to tell me what to do. And you know what, I work too hard. I take too much risk to manage this kind of situation. So I let everybody go. I mean, they, they went on their way variously, and instead of hiring, I built a platform. And I think this is the key. There are two key elements really Rob about this virtualization or this Uber ization model. One is that the client still has a known brand to go to with an established platform. So what I have is a brand new Swiss PR that's been operational for over 25 years. But also I use the Zoho platform, so that anybody who works with me uses the same email address, and they use the workflow that I have put in place within Zoho document templates, quote, templates, invoice templates, media lists, everything exists in the same way that it would if I was a bricks and mortar agency. The second element that Rob is the relationship between me and the consultant or the consultant I should say. So I have a simple financial model which I can share with you where The agency has 100 from the client 20% of that will go to the agency 10% goes to the person that brings in the business, which may be the agency, we have a 10% buffer and 60% goes to the consultant. Now, normally, the consultant only gets a third at most of what the client pays because the client pays 100, the agency takes a third for the member of staff salary and off third for the operational cost centre third for the gross margin, which comes down to 15 to 20%. After you've taken off tax, what I've done by getting rid of all the middle of management that's required all the desk office infrastructure that's required, you save about a third. But what I can do is I can share that with the person who does the work, Rob, they turn up with their own laptop, their own phone, they manage their own time. But also, and this is really what is the kicker for the client, they only work with people that actually want to be on the job. Now any agency owner knows with godless of PR advertising, direct marketing, event management, whatever the agency, you end up deploying the staff that are available. Normally, that means the best offer already busy, and you end up having to do the work with whoever's available. And as an agency owner, you often pick up the slack by doing a bit yourself. But with this model, you only work with people who know what they're going to do. And because they're self employed, they're only going to get paid if they deliver on it. And it also means I've got an amazing amount of freedom, Robb to choose the consultant that's best for the job. So Uber ization, or just like the Airbnb model, means that as a company, I no longer carry risk. But as the consultant they earn what they want to earn, and when they want to earn it, and the client gets the best person for the job. So I think all three stakeholders will get something from this new model. Yeah, this is a really interesting perspective. And I think it is the flip side of the coin that I talk to because I've talked to a lot of my agency clients, and tell them that it is very difficult to build a sustainable growing agency using freelancers because it's a bit like building a business on quicksand, because freelancers often have their own agendas. And if their agendas and their visions are not aligned to your agency's visions, then that can be very problematic. So it sounds like you're giving, you know, the other side of the perspective here, and the reasons why that actually is a good model. But let me just ask you a few questions about what you've said, Oh, then we asked you all of the questions, and I'll let you kind of answer them because I'm sure some of them intertwined. So one of the obvious questions is how on earth do you find enough good freelance people? And how do you make sure that they can deliver to the quality and the consistency that East West PR promises their clients? And what do you how do you deal with changes of personnel on account of, you know, one of your clients has got used to freelancer, Fred working, and then Fred decides he's going to do something else, you've got that typical scenario that a lot of agencies struggle with, which is how to manage changes of personnel. So I'm just interested to hear your perspective on those sorts of things. Sure, I think, first of all, just to address that issue about the vision of the agency, I think one has to look at what is the purpose of the agency Rob as well, because if the vision of the agency is to build something, what are you doing that for? Now, if you're building it as a vehicle to make money, then the agency may or may not be lots of people, because my experience is that when I've had 35 staff, I make less cash in my personal bank account than when I have no staff. Because the overheads are so great. So first of all, I think if we look at what a business is, it's, it's there to create income for the shareholders. And you could my premise is that you can do that without a large number of staff. Now, do you build the same kind of creativity and culture? I would argue that actually you can do? You mentioned three areas there. One is finding people. Second is consistency of delivery. And the third is personnel change. My experience, Rob over 20 years of running an agency with fixed staff, because it'll be the last five I've had this Uber model is that I have all those three problems anyway. The difficulty in an agency is that you've employed those people, and you're trying to find ways to change or manage them, which is why we talk about only hiring the right people. Jim Collins get the right people on the bus. So I don't think that consistency and continuity are hallmarks of an agency. I think they are just part of any business. How can you deal with that if you're running what I would call as a virtual agency, and I call it an on demand agency. If we look at the parallel with making movies, you don't have large teams of people waiting to make a movie, you have someone has a script, someone's a producer, sometimes the director and people come together to create a movie, and PR campaign, an advert whatever. The key to this, then is to find people that have got credibility and credentials already. And I do that by a couple of ways. One is a lot of the people who work with me now are former members of staff. The second is that it's very easy to check people's BIOS out. Now, if you look at, you know, Upwork Fiverr. There, there is like the PR cavalry. One of the amazing aspects of sort of the digital footprint we all leave behind is, with a small amount of investigation, you can find out if someone's any good or not. And the irony of this really is Rob that if someone's being closeted inside an agency, they could be rubbish. And you don't know, because actually, what they do doesn't get published. freelancers are constantly looking for work. So they're constantly getting reviews. And if you look up work, all those people have got testimonials. It's actually much safer, ironically enough to be finding people to second is about consistency. So this is where the methodologies and the processes come in place. And if you look at McDonald's, or Starbucks, these are franchises, Rob, these are not full time members of staff working for McDonald's Inc. Subway sandwiches. Now you may say, Well, how does that relate to the the rarefied world of professionals. It's about having some processes. So we have a five stage methodology. And we've now put that in into the format of the speak PR process. And actually, the value of a business, Rob is the process by which it delivers to customers and the money it makes from that process. So I think that's the second part is about creating a process and ensuring everyone follows that by for example, using common email addresses. Using shared work groups, having communication is often the key part. So using for example, slack or Asana, right. The third, you mentioned is about personnel, and the sort of transitory nature of personnel, my experience, and you tell me if I if you've got a different expression of it, and I don't think I was a horrible boss, some people said, I was good, some didn't. But, you know, people move on when they're ready. You know, I had people that I would take great care of, but then they found a boyfriend, or they got married and their wife wanted to move, people don't stay in the same place. And the only people that do are the business owners and everyone else is passing through. So what I do is I, I make sure, with the consultant that's going to take the job that they're committed to delivering for the duration of the agreement. And if they're not willing to commit to the duration of the agreement, because remember, I'm getting the agreement with the client first. So if I know I've got three months, six months, 12 months engagement with the client, the conversation I have with the consultant needs to be on the same terms. And if it's on the same terms with some penalties for people not keeping to those and some upsides for doing so. I've reduced my commercial risk. Yeah, it's really interesting. And as I say it, it really is giving the other side of the coin, about this. And I guess a key point you're making is to have the platform's in place to enable you to manage people remotely enable you to create a consistent experience for the customer, and all that stuff. And I guess if you can do that, and you can find the people because of course, that's always been the challenge, I guess whether it's a freelancer or an in house, personally just finding quality people. But if you can do that, it sounds like you're making it really work for you. Now, well, the one thing I was going to say is that I actually think that now, it's becoming harder to find full time in house people then to find well qualified freelancers. And especially in light of COVID, I think we're going to see a growing number of people who need to work from a remote location, who don't want a permanent full time role. So actually think that Things have changed. And I think it's going to be easier to find high quality senior people than ever before. Yeah. Yeah, for sure, I think long lasting for a long time it's become an employer's marketplace. And listen, Jim, we could talk for ages about this. And there's lots more stuff we could cover on this topic. But I'm conscious of trying to keep the podcast within our 30 minutes goal. So let me ask you the last question that I asked all of my guests. And that is, if you could go back in time back to the 1990s. And give that young Jim, who's just starting out in business, one piece of advice, what would it be, I would give you, I would give myself the advice that I took, which is to get a customer first. A business doesn't exist without a customer. It's a it's a vanity project Otherwise, the first, the first thing I did before I went to Asia was I got a customer. And that is the advice I'd give myself and anybody looking to start a business because without a customer, you've just got an idea. Yes, that's very true. That's really good. Actually. And I haven't had that piece of advice before. I think a lot of the time people give my guests give kind of similar advice to each other. But I haven't heard that one before. Really, thank you for that. That's a really good piece of pragmatic advice. I think a lot of times people give advice to do with, you know, their mindset, or their self esteem or their belief, all that kind of stuff, which is fair enough, cuz obviously Yeah, of course, no, but that your advice is very practical. Let me just ask you one more question where if people want to find out more about you and about East West PR, where would they go? They could just come to our website. usps.com. Brilliant. Okay, that's nice and simple, great stuff. Well, it's been great having you on the podcast, it's a really interesting conversation. And, you know, it definitely gives a flip side to the way I've talked about growing an agency before. So I really appreciate that. And I know our audience will find it as useful as well. Rob, thank you so much. And it's wonderful to think we've got two different paths. But we're, you know, now later on in life, able to share what we've learned. And thank you for taking the initiative to do so on this great podcast. So there you go. I hope you found this episode. as interesting as I did when I had a chance to sit down and talk with Jim. He definitely has a different perspective and a really interesting perspective on how to grow an agency using remote workers. And of course, that's something that's very pertinent right now in the world that we live in. So as ever, please consider leaving a review. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your colleagues. And I will see you next Thursday for the next episode of the agency accelerator podcast.