How to Use PR in your Agency

So welcome everybody to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Now today we are talking all about PR and how PR fits in your marketing strategy. And I'm really excited to have with me today Michelle and Christian Nguyen from right on time now, they were both two former journalists who've turned to the dark side and become PR pros and they've spent decades writing stories and they've been featured in many of our biggest newspapers.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Da Costa.

Today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast is sponsored by Cloudways. Loved by agencies around the world. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that takes care of all the web hosting related complexities, leaving users free to focus on growing their businesses and clients. The platform offers unmatched performance, reliability, choice and 247365 support. That acts as an extension to your own team, making Cloudways the ultimate choice for growing agencies. Now, at present, Cloudways is offering an exclusive discount for the Agency Accelerator listeners. So visit cloudways.com and use the promo code AA20. That's AA20 to get a discount of 20% off your first three months on the hosting platform of your choice. Okay, on with today's show. So welcome and why don't we start off by telling the listeners a bit about your journey from crossing from journalism into the agency world of primary.

100%. Because we have effectively done what is known as going to the dark side. So myself and Christian have both got extensive experience of writing for newspapers at a local, regional and national level and we have both independently gone into pr. Christian went through the private sector route, I went through the public sector route. And we've come full circle now and created our own PR agency. And, but we like to feel that having actually been in that decision making seat, having chosen stories that get published, that's given us a real insider's insight into the kind of stories that work so well for the press. So that's kind of bit of our USP as former journalists coming into the PR territory.

Yeah. And what made you decide to start an agency then?

Well, we've always had a long standing ambition to work together. We actually met each other in a newsroom that's all the way back in 2002. So we fell in love like Lois and Clark in a newsroom setting, worked together in the, in that environment and then as I said, we went on our own pathways, but we always dreamt of returning to that co working together as husband and wife. And because we'd learned all these skills from the private and public sector, it seemed like a really natural progression to set up our own PR agency. And it's just where we found our kind of flow state, if you, if you will. It's where we felt most comfortable kind of pulling together all our different skill sets and really helping people and particularly to find the confidence to take those first steps towards publicizing their business. I think that's our real strength.

Yeah, completely agree. And I think it was really important to Michelle and I that we showed up in a way where we allowed our own personalities to shine through as well. We wanted to be quite distinctive in how, in how we, we show up in the world and, and try to teach what we know in a way that we feel is quite original and maybe a little bit, sometimes a little bit irreverent or maybe a little bit thinking outside the box, but still getting to the ultimate objective, which is to help people to harness the power of PR and use it for their own good.

Yeah. So for sure, I mean, I see you showing up all over LinkedIn and that's where we met. And you know, you guys have a really great presence on there. And like you say, Christian, your personality shines through, which I think is so important. We can't, you know, especially small businesses, we can't show up as sort of faceless corporations. It's interesting that I was doing some with my group coaching program last week. We had this amazing LinkedIn trainer on one of the questions the group asked her was, should we show up on LinkedIn with our company page or our personal page? And she was like, you need to show up on your personal profile every single time. Because, you know, businesses do businesses with people, they don't want to have these faceless conversations. So, you know, I completely agree with that. How long have you, how long have you been running the agency now?

Since 2017.

Yes. Yeah, so it's, and it's kind of evolved in that time as well because we started out very much doing PR for people. So we were kind of the behind the scenes people doing all the pitching on behalf of businesses. And then when the pandemic struck in March last year, a lot of our clients were in the manufacturing and retail and hospitality sector, so they weren't able to work. So obviously the PR need kind of pulled back at that point and that's when we first started to deliver our services online and actually step into more of a mentorship and training role to of kind, kind of pass along the skills that we've got so that people can do their own pr. And it's worked out really beautifully because obviously working with a handful of clients we could only have a small scale impact. But over the course of the pandemic, we have been able to work with so many different businesses in so many different sectors and we really feel like we found our groove with that.

Yeah, we feel like we found our calling since, since running, for instance, five day challenges for free and things like that. We've been able to help literally hundreds of business owners to identify great story ideas to build their confidence and to help them really, really start to think about using PR in a positive way. But also to show them that it's important to be consistent with it. Don't just do it as a one off thing or something that you do every now and again and then you pick it up and put it back down. You've got to be persistent and consistent. Really important.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I mean, if we get a chance, we can unpick this a bit more. But you guys are a really good example of, you know, using that awful word of pivoting during the pandemic and being able to react quick enough to keep serving your audience and obviously keep, you know, keep revenue coming in. So it sounds like you've had a pretty decent time in a very challenging time with the pandemic by, you know, doing more of this mentorship and I guess reaching more people.

Yeah, I think it's kind of pushed us into a position that we would have hoped to have got to eventually anyway because obviously you can only have a finite number of clients when you are doing the doing yourself. But the model that we're working at now is literally helping us to reach hundreds and hundreds of business owners. And because what we teach is applicable to every single trading sector, because it gets down to the real core of identifying quality news stories, it means that we've not got a limitation on who we can work with. And we have seen literally people from like accountants all the way up to people in the science community using the same process and getting results in really key publications stations for them. So we're really happy with where we've ended up right now.

Yeah, couldn't be more, couldn't be happier with, with the journey that we've taken in. Yeah.

Okay, good. Well, like I say, if we get a chance, we'll come back to that because I'm, you know, interested in learning more, as some of the listeners will be. So let's just Talk about PR from an agency's perspective. You know, the agency wants to grow, they want to build their brand and they want to win more. Ideal business, but, and they probably do this by focusing on having a social media strategy. They may well even do some paid advertising. But in my experience, a lot of agencies are not really thinking about using pr. So tell us about why they should and where it, where it fits in that overall kind of marketing and new business strategy.

Do you want to go back?

No, you go ahead. Yeah, you're in the flow.

We're being very polite because we're husband and wife team, as you've probably been able to tell.

And we're trying really hard not to talk over top of each other.

Definitely going to talk about that in a bit, but carry on.

Yeah, that, that might be when we do start talking over the top of each other when that question comes.

But the brilliant thing about PR is you can do, and you absolutely should be doing social media. We certainly don't say PR is a replacement for other kinds of marketing activity. It's all part of a really holistic approach to improving your visibility. But with social media, you can keep plugging away and speaking to exactly the same audiences, or albeit one that gradually and incrementally grows. But when you actually do succeed in securing really good publicity in key trade publications that serve your ideal client or that have got real credibility attached to them, that's when you can really amplify your message to literally thousands and thousands of people. We've worked with people who've had regional coverage in newspapers that have got readerships literally in the millions. And that's when you can really start to get in front of wide, wide scale big numbers of people who could all potentially convert as a client. So this is very much about amplification, but it's also about credibility because obviously with your social media you can write whatever you want within reason on your own platforms, but when a newspaper chooses to write about you, they've got an established readership, they're very credible publication, then that can actually increase how people perceive you. You kind of see these, these phrases like as seen in, with really big tick names that really attract credibility back to your organization. And the second point I would mention is it's excellent for SEO. So if you can actually get your agency mentioned in an article in a real key public that has got really good ranking on Google, then that's really going to help from your SEO strategy and things like actually getting blue tick verification on Facebook. One of the questions that is asked as part of that process is can you direct us to any media coverage? So if that is on your ambition list as well, then making sure that you have a solid media strategy is really important.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you know that you're preaching to the converter because I ran a PR agency for 11 years, so, you know, I totally buy into that. But I think, like I say when I'm talking to a lot of my coaches, my agency clients, and we are looking at their marketing mix and their new biz strategy, PR often isn't part of that. And I think one of the reasons, which is the million dollar question that you must be asked all the time is how do you measure it? Because that is, you know, if I'm sending out an email, I can measure open rates. If I'm, you know, looking at social media, I can look at engagement and likes and comments. All right, so how do I measure the effectiveness of my PR strategy?

Yeah, for us, one of the things which we do, we do turn to is that we are able to establish with clients the circulation of the publications which are being targeted. That's usually very important. That's something that we can go away and research.

That's a key metric.

That is a key metric. And circulation figures, if it is a title that still has a physical hard copy version, because contrary to what people may believe, they do still exist. There are still, I think it's 25 million people in the UK that still take a regular newspaper, whether that be a weekly or a daily. So we are able to give figures like that. So it does give them an idea of if they are able to then get in front of that number, that there is a level of attraction. So for you to be able to say, for instance, a big regional city title, where we live here, the Liverpool echo, that's got 6 million readers in total. So you know that if you're going to get into that particular publication, there are going to be millions of people who've got an opportunity to view that, to engage with it, to interact with it online or to respond to it in some way. And it's not uncommon at all, which is obviously the name of the game for people to get back in touch with us and say that as a result of appearing in such a publication, somebody then reached out to me and said, I'd love to work with you. So those are obviously great results as well. That is evidence that using PR can and does lead to customers coming on board because they've had a chance to learn a little bit about you as a person, they've become attracted to you in that way and then they've gone ahead and instigated a business transaction. So there's definitely scope for that.

And ultimately that's the key measurement, right. It's do you have new customers come into your business? And if you've got the right systems in place to data capture the journey that they've come into your business and that can signpost that PR has had an influential role in that, then that's key. And we have very common real life examples like a coach that we worked in Manchester appeared in the Manchester Evening News and within 24 hours she had five new inquiries from people seeking information about her coaching packages. And that is very clear. Draw the dots, the line back to that coverage. So it's, in some ways, while you might think it's the hardest thing to measure, it's often the clearest because if somebody comes to you and says, I saw you in the paper, tell me more about what you do, you can measure that instantly.

Yep. The beauty of it is that if you're appearing in a newspaper piece rather than an advert, then you're there based upon your own merit because the news story that you've shared is there because it has got a connection with the readership that's being targeted. So there's always that unique level of authenticity that a newspaper article carries that is completely in its own world to anything else really that exists. You know, to have that feeling of making it into the paper and to have that ability to. Then, you know, we hear a lot about people who will keep their clippings. You know, they'll have a scrapbook or they'll frame them and display them proudly on their office walls and that type of thing. There is something very special about securing that coverage. And then when people do walk into say a bricks and mortar premises and they can see that coverage adorning their walls, it looks very impressive. It all, it already creates a conversation starter and then it gets people really, really thinking about wanting to do business with that company because you can see the credibility is literally coming through the walls. So it's very, very powerful in that respect as well.

Yeah, it's funny, isn't it, that there is all these trendy new things coming and going, but it's still the traditional marketing strategies such as PR and you know, building your email list and networking and all that stuff that is the solid foundation for, for everything. And I think we should all be doing that. Let me ask you a question of Something that used to happen to us all the time. I worked in tech and so our PR agency focused on the tech sector. We would meet a potential new client and we would ask them what they're trying to achieve from the pr. And if we were sitting with the CEO or someone, they go, I'd love to be in the Financial Times. And you think, you sort of. We roll our eyes and think, well, okay. And we. So what do you do when you get someone stating a ridiculous, well, not ridiculous, but a very ambitious goal that actually might be more ego based than actually supporting their business?

That is such a good question. And it does happen all the time. You sit down and the two things that people say to us are, I want to be in Forbes and I want to be on the couch with Holly and Phil. And we're like, have you been in your local newspaper? And like, no, no, I've not, I've not even been in my local newspaper. But what we say is don't discount that. We would never say that can't happen, but have that as a stretch goal. And we also say like, think about your ideal customer. So if you are, for example, an agency that specializes in working with people in the financial sector, having some coverage in a publication that serves that sector is much more likely to convert into paying customers in your business versus a piece that's in Forbes that's being read by millions and millions of people admittedly. But are they necessarily going to come back and spend many spend money with you? So we certainly don't say don't go for the big tick objectives, but also have a strategy that's based on what's going to convert and make it most likely that I'm going to get sales into my business. So that's how we tend to approach things with people.

Yeah, we have become known for providing healthy challenge and we do that with everybody that we come into contact with and who we have a business relationship with. We're always happy to hear what their goals and dreams and objectives are. As you said, Rob, quite rightfully, always very respectful of their ambitions. But there has to be a bit of a reality check sometimes and it has to be about working smart and doing it in the right way, making progressive steps, starting at one level, building up that little bit of credibility through the press, establishing some credentials, revealing a little bit about your story and your background and then you can start to work towards those TV radio opportunities or the big hitters such as a Forbes or, or Time magazine or whichever publication it happens to be that people have mentioned to us.

Yeah, I did a really interesting interview for the podcast that's coming out in the next. The next or actually probably will have come out by the time this one goes live with. With someone called Marcel Pettiba from Paraquito. And we were talking about profitability. But he had a really good point to make that's very salient to this point, and that is that when you first meet a prospect or a potential customer, you have to manage them and you have to show up as a consultant and an equal and guide them. And if you don't do that, you're setting yourself up for all sorts of problems further down the line to do with, you know, the relationship, but also to do with profitability and margins and all the rest of it. And this is a good example, right? So someone says, I want to be on Holly and Phil's sofa and they work in the financial services, then you immediately know that's all about their ego and not about something that's going to, you know, actually engage with the customers and ultimately bring them more business. So it's your job as the consultants to sort of steer them, as you said. And if you've, if you had this, this is probably a hard question, I don't know, but if you could give the listeners sort of three or four tips on what they should be doing if they start thinking about pr. Because I suspect that some people listen to this, probably haven't even thought about media relations as part of their strategy, because they probably think that's what corporates do and, you know, we don't have the time, resource, budget or whatever. So what tips would you give someone like that if they were just going to start out thinking about doing some pr?

Okay, so the first thing we always say is try to understand your own PR personality. So are you a person who is more comfortable with being on camera or perhaps talking than you are writing? And if that's the case, then saving your energies for radio opportunities, TV opportunities, potentially YouTube channel guest expert spots, or even Clubhouse, which is obviously taking off massively at the moment. So focus your energy in that direction. Conversely, if you are that person who needs more time to think and is perhaps a little bit more introverted, or you like to take your time to put together a story, idea or a proposal, then focusing your energies on newspapers and magazines and trade journals is going to serve you best. So the number one thing is we always say, understand your PR personality. And what we try to say is identify where you are now, but also building some realistic stretch Goals, so. So if it is that you have an ambition to be on the radio, practicing and being on Clubhouse for now would be a really good way of finding your voice, finding your talking points, so that when a radio opportunity comes up, you feel a little bit more prepared for that. So PR personality is key.

A good tip as well. Just to use Michelle's example, if you are hoping to make that radio appearance one day, is perhaps having, having a go at going live on your own Facebook page just so that you can practice your presentation. You're doing it there in front of people that are friends, that are family, they're a trusted audience, they're people that can just maybe give you a little bit of, a bit of constructive feedback. But you know that you're doing it in a scenario that isn't the real deal, but it's giving you that chance to, for instance, you know, just to work on things such as how you sound, how you come across your visual presentation, you know, whether you want to have a particular look or backdrop to what you do. These are all things which, if you were doing a visual broadcast piece would be important. But for practice and just rehearsing and getting things right, focusing on what key messages you would like to be translating to people and how you get them out there, that's really, really good for practice as well. So considering doing a Facebook live or a LinkedIn video could be a good way of, of just helping you to prep for the real thing.

Yeah. We also say that the thing with PR is people focus on what they want to sell. So they're like, I want to sell my program, I want to sell my course, I want to sell my service package. And they make the mistake of approaching a reporter with something that is in fact an advert. And that's why they end up being shunted to the advertising team and asked to spend some money. So we always say, bring it back to news value. What are people going to be interested in? What are they going to engage in? So we always say a people first strategy rather than a product and service led strategy. So that involves looking at your business from a people perspective. What are the interesting human interest stories within that? And often that could be the journey to how you actually came to set up your agency. It could be a huge sense of why that's propelling your business or a significant life challenge that you've overcome. And it's being prepared to, in a very controlled way, lift the curtain a little bit and show people who you are. And so you're not just this faceless organization, this faceless agency, it's about giving people that opportunity to get to know, like, and trust you, so that when they need a service you offer, you become their first port of call. So really focusing on the news value that you want to offer as opposed to the end game of selling a product will put your thinking in the right lane.

Yeah, so that's such a good piece of advice. You have to have a point of view and you have to have an opinion, because if you don't, then the journalist is going to get bored. And it's really funny, actually, that I use as a coach now, I use so many of the tips and tricks that journalists used to use. Like we would do media training with clients when they were about to sit with a journalist and we would talk about some of the tips and tricks they use. And now I teach some of those in a different context to my clients, whether it be interviewing a potential employee or, you know, just kind of getting the best out of a client when I'm coaching them. But, you know, you have to have a point of view. If you just go in and you, like you say try to sell or you go in with a very generic, like the same thing everybody would say. Like when we were putting clients forward for feature articles in the media, we would say, look, this journalist is probably talking to five people, and they're probably going to use two quotes from those five people. So if you want to be one of the two out of the five, you have to have an opinion and you have to be controversial where you possibly can. And you know, you can't just give the corporate, you know, the corporate spiel and like you say, or try to sell, because journalists are cynical beasts. So they are going to get very turned off by, by that approach. So that's, that's really good advice. Let's just switch. Switch tax. Because I'm sort of conscious of time. And one thing I'd really like to touch upon is the fact that you work together as a husband and wife. Now, personally, for me, I am interested in that because I, I don't know why, but I have a lot of husband and wife clients and I have a lot of partner clients. And so I suspect in the agency world your setup is pretty similar. So tell us about what that's been like, the pros and the cons and the pitfalls and the boundaries and all the things that you need to put in place to not kill each other.

Yeah, it's a big question that, isn't it? Should I Start that one.

There you go.

Yeah, I think it's really important, first and foremost. I mean, again, it's. It's a. One of those questions when. When you answer it. I'm trying not to sort of fall into saying anything that's cliched or stereotypical, but I suppose it's because it's true. The biggest thing I think for us too, is. Is about compromise. It's really, really, really important that we both feel that when we're talking about any. Any given thing regarding a piece of work that we might be undertaking for a client, or we're actually discussing the strategy of how to take our own business forward, that we both have the opportunity to feel that we're being heard. And sometimes it can be quite tricky if we are in different directions with that. It can be that I might be down one end of the road and Michelle might be down the end of the road, round a corner, and on another road again. So it's important that we try, wherever possible, to speak to each other respectfully, which we do, to take our time considering each other's thoughts and feelings, because we're both experts at what we do. So that can be difficult sometimes when you kind of have that niggling thing to think. Well, I actually feel that I'm correct here completely, but that. That isn't always the case. Usually what ends up happening is we take a breath, think it through, listen to each other, and then we will reach a point where I feel like my contribution or my thought is being heard and reached to some level, and then vice. And then vice versa for you. It's never a way where it's my way or the highway. Neither of us do that with one another. We. We love and respect each other too much to do that, and we value each other's ability to do that. We. We complement each other in terms of. There are things which Michelle is certainly better at doing than I am, but then there are things that I feel Michelle would agree, hopefully, that I'm better at doing some other things as well. So it's about playing to each other's strengths is very important. Recognizing where one of us needs to maybe take a back seat and let the other one take the lead. Hopefully we've done that a little bit and demonstrate that today on the podcast of how we. We answer questions. And yeah, I think it's just always about as well, trying to. Trying to have fun. I know that might seem a bit silly, but we. We try and show up in. In a way where we are educating People and we want to be informative. I think someone once called us edutainers, which we, we were happy to be called that. But I think it's important that at the end of a working day we remember that we're not just business partners. That's something that you do really need to, to think about that you don't let work and work related matters continue to dominate the, you know, the life that you have outside of work. You know, at the end of the day, we're a couple. We. We want to have a marriage as well as just having a business relationship.

So sorry to interrupt you. How do you, how do you manage that though? Because I would say that's the biggest challenge. How do you make sure that when you're on holiday you're not talking about work or when you're, it's the weekend and you haven't got much to do that you don't just lurch back into work mode? Because I know that is a problem for a lot of, a lot of my clients. So just tell it, Talk to us a bit about that.

Yeah, so I think we, we've kind of learned over the past last three years to set some boundaries. So if we are going for a day out, we might confine work chat to the journey. And then when we arrive at the place where we are, we're present and in that moment. And that is something that kind of works quite well for us. I'm the driver in the relationship. I love to drive. When I'm driving, that's when I tend to have my most creative ideas and when I like to talk things through. So we keep that conversation in the car. And then when we get to where we're getting to, that's when our personal time begins and we kind of catch each other in the sense that if we are drifting into work chat, one of us will be like, hang on, let's part that for Monday or let's part that for the morning. And one of the things that we always do at the end of every working day is review our to do list, cross off things we've achieved, update it for the next day. And that allows us to draw a line under the working day and move into our, into our private life after that.

Yeah, we have a pretty much this philosophy that once we close the office door over that door is short in terms. It's physically and it's metaphorically short. And then we don't do anything then until that door is reopened the next working day. And that is when the working thing can resume again. So that's really important too.

Yeah. Yeah, good, good advice. And, you know, I'm a big fan of Michael Hyatt and I use his concept of morning and evening rituals, which is kind of what you're talking about, you know. So my morning always starts off with my cup of coffee and that's the signal to start my day. And I review my to do list, and at the end of the day, I review my to do list, create next days, close everything down, and I clear my desk and I'm ready to go for the next day. So I completely concur with that. And I think, you know, you guys have done really well if you can get those boundaries in place. Because I think, you know, years ago I used to work with my, my partner and it was a challenge of kind of being work all the time. And it's very easy to sort of slide back into work mode and it almost become the easiest discussion. One thing you said, Christian, that I, you kind of said in a, almost an apologetic or flippant way is about having fun. And you know what? You know, my sort of strap line for my. What I do is helping agencies grow in a profitable, sustainable, and enjoyable way. Because I think too many people grow their businesses and they get fixated on this fictitious end light of the end of the tunnel, and they forget that they're actually supposed to enjoy the journey along the way. And of course, we all know that often we never get to that light at the end of the tunnel, so we better make sure we're present and enjoying the journey. So I think that that is a fundamental part of what we do is like if you don't, you know, enjoy in a broader sense what you're doing and you don't have fun doing it, then you need to do something else. So I wholeheartedly sort of buy into that. There's lots more things. Yeah, there's lots more things we could talk about, but I'm conscious of time and I was interested to talk about your five day challenge, but maybe if there's a link, we can include that in the show notes. So if people are thinking about starting pr, then that seems to me like that would be a good thing for them to do.

Yeah, we, we have run a five day, five day challenge four times in the past 12 months. And all together, over a thousand people have taken part today. Every single one of them have been either business owners or authors in lots of cases, or artists. Anyone who's kind of got an entrepreneurial slant to what they do. We have had some agen agency owners involved in that process as well. And basically we take people from day one of we assume from a baseline level that they've never been in the press. Some people have before and they just need to revisit that and build back up. But we take everyone from having no story, no clear newspaper or outlet in mind and no structure or process to pitch on day one. And by day five, we are very strict in that by day five people will literally have pressed send on a fully formed pitch with a central story idea to a publication of their choice. And the reason we do that is we don't want it to be a dress rehearsal or a dry run because that pushes people into procrastination. They never end up hitting send. So we want to really help people to make that journey over the course of five days in a really supported and calm way with lots of fun involved, lots of information involved and a really value packed learning experience. So that's kind of the nature of our five day challenge.

Okay, so we can, we can include some links to that and is that a free challenge or is that a paid for service?

It's completely free. We've done four so far. So the best way to find out about future challenges is to follow us on social media and also website. But we can include the links for you, for you for that, Rob.

Yeah, sure. Okay, so last question before we wrap things up today and the question that I ask all of my guests, which is if you could go back in time and give your younger selves a piece of advice when you were starting out in business, which admittedly is not that long for you guys, but what would that piece of advice be?

Okay, should we, should we go one at a time?

Yeah.

Do you want to go first?

Well, my advice would be keep up with tech. I remember like being a journalist fresh out of university and at that point we were still pitching to the nationals on a fax machine. We were still using yellow pages and the telephone directory to ring round and find story leads. And the curve that journalism has gone on since I graduated in 2001 has been huge. The number of new technologies that come out and social media has obviously revolutionized everything. And I think a key strength of ours has always been to evolve with that. So when any, anything new comes up to be an early adopter and then you can help other people coming down the line to, to upskill as well. So for me, I would say always be at the forefront of new tech. And even if you are not A technical person, use it as a user just so you can have an understanding of how it operates. And. And then you can leverage that to push your agency forward.

Yep. Okay.

And from my point, could be size. How about you, Christian?

Yeah. And from my point of view, I think that myself and Michelle would have saved a lot of time and energy that we expended had we have reached the conclusion earlier that it's okay to put your hand up and seek help from experts within any chosen field. So what I mean by that is that we were very guilty right at the beginning of trying to do everything on our own. So not only were we trying to run the PR agency and show up in a way that we knew that we were experts in, but we were also trying to do a myriad of other things as well, which we were not so great at, and things which we didn't particularly enjoy doing. So when we began to learn the value of outsourcing, and we had a lot of people telling us to do that who had been in business for a lot longer than we had, that really started to open our eyes. It gave us a massive energy boost. It allowed us to focus on the things which we knew we needed to be doing in order to give the most value that we could and just to trust other people to do other aspects of the business which are so important and let them take care of that. It's sort of one of those things where you can pass it over, trust that person or people or organization to do it for you, and then it just frees you up to really, really get enjoyment and fun. As we talked about earlier, looking at the things which light you up and that you want to be focused on. So I do wish that I'd taken that step earlier to have outsourced quicker than we did. That's. That's more of a recent thing for us, to be fair.

Yeah, yeah.

Good, good, good advice. I think we all need to identify what our superpower is and delegate everything else as much as we possibly can. Because, you know, I always talk to people about what their value of their notional hourly rate is. And the concept of a notional hourly rate is how much is an hour of your time worth? And if you're. And this is not about in, you know, how you sell to clients, because you should never sell time. But if you are doing a task that is worth less than your notional hourly rate and why you're doing it, why are you not outsourcing it? You should all be doing tasks that are at your hourly rate or higher because those are the ones that are going to move the needle forward for your business. So great advice. It's always good to hear these things because we might all think we know them, but it's really good to be reminded of it as well. And just on your point, Michelle, when I was, you know, when I was running my PR agency, it was fax machines, it was printing off press releases, stuffing them in envelopes, putting them through the franking machine. There was no Internet back in the early 90s when I started my agency. So it's a very different world to the one that we are in now. And in some ways it was simpler and it was way less distracting. And in other ways, of course, there's so many new ways of reaching our target audience. So it's sort of pros and cons anyway. So we will include your contact details in the show notes. But if people want to find you, what would be the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, the absolute best way to connect with us is on LinkedIn and Facebook. Those are the places that we are most active. So you will find us as Michelle Yuen and separately Christian Yuen on LinkedIn and our surname has the unusual spelling of E W E N. And then over on Facebook, we are right on time uk. And again, please feel free to send us a friend connection request on Facebook because we are active on our personal profiles as much as we are on our business page. So anyone who wants to come into our world, we're always sharing little prompts or advisory points or just a little bit of fun. Lots and lots of pictures of our cat, if that's your thing. Anyone who wants to just come and have a little bit of fun, but also learn some really key skills about moving their PR strategy forward. Come and hang out with us on social media.

Yeah, and of course, we all know that social media is all really for our pets anyway, don't we? I will confirm that you're certainly on LinkedIn. I always read your content, you're reactive on there and you produce great, you share great content, which means it gets lots of engagement. So you're a good advert for making that stuff work. So listen, thank you so much for your time today. It's been really interesting. I. I feel like there's other areas that we could have touched upon today, but I hope this has inspired you guys listeners to think about how media relations fits into your business and also think about the best ways of you getting out there. As Michelle said, whether it be written or on video or on audio like these podcasts or clubhouse go and start doing it because it is such a great way of reaching a wider audience. And as you guys said, it's also a really good way of building kind of endorsements and credibility because it's. It's seen as much more credible than a paid ad. So I really concur with everything you said today and just want to say thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

It's been an absolute pleasure, and we're so appreciative of the chance to speak to your community. Yeah.

Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Rob.

No worries.