Telum Talks To... Jim James, Founder and Managing Director, EASTWEST Public Relations

Thanks for joining us. Today, Talem talks to Jim James, entrepreneur, founder, and managing director of EastWest Public Relations. Jim arrived in Singapore 25 years ago at the tender age of 28 with little more than a laptop and the ambition to set up an agency, EastWest PR. At age 40, you moved to Beijing and did the same thing again. And now you've moved back to the UK, Jim. So kind of completing the hat trick, but pointedly not opening an office office because I think East West has become a virtual agency in some ways. So we can touch on that a little bit.

Yeah.

You're also, aside from being a PR entrepreneur, a man of many parts in that you become a car importer in China, Morgan Sports Cars. You're now the host of a podcast, Speak PR, which I would love to talk to you about. And in that you share your kind of thoughts, wisdom, advice, and insight on the world of PR. And you were also briefly CEO of Lotus Cars, I believe, as well in China. So many and varied careers. So thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

You are coming to us from a wonderful office space in the UK. So how's the transition been back to the UK? How are things in the UK?

Yeah, Tim, first of all, thanks very much indeed. And I've watched the growth of Telum, the start of Telum and the growth of Telum over the last number of years, and you guys have done a brilliant job of providing a great service to the industry. So thank you for that as well. I moved back from China last summer. It's been actually pretty much a year to this week that we moved back with the girls to get them to school here in the UK. And yeah, I'm in a I'm in what I call the TARDIS. If you hear a noise, it's because my beagle is sleeping on the rocking chair there. He likes to be with me. Overall, it's been interesting, of course, to come back to COVID times has meant that the business has been quite challenging in some respects. But you mentioned about this idea of a virtual agency. I just want to sort of maybe talk to that first, if I may, which is that Virtual in my definition doesn't mean that we just work from home, but the relationships between the company and the consultants are the same. So when I was in China, one of the big trends was that people didn't want to travel because in Beijing the staff would have to travel so far and the cost of living in town by the offices was so high that it became impossible to do. So what happened was increasingly staff wanted to work from home anyway. When I flew to Singapore to manage the office there, people said, you know, they came in specifically to see me. And I had an office in India as well, and people would have to sort of come in. And I thought, well, there's something going wrong here. And when I look at companies like Airbnb or Uber, but also at films, like film production, Actually, it's not a permanent crew sitting around waiting for another movie. It's experts— stylists, scriptwriters, producers— who come together for that particular film, however long that project is— days, weeks, months— they will have a role. So I kind of took my cue from what was happening in China in terms of people wanting to work from home and present themselves. We see the growth of sites like Upwork and Fiverr. And so I decided about 4 years ago, in fact, to not employ more people but to be the brand and the process and the legal entity that clients need because they have to have one to do the proper billing and have compliance and so on. But then to find consultants, many of whom are my former staff, by the way, but to have them on, if you like, a back-to-back contract. So virtual for me doesn't just mean we work from home, it means People turn up to work because they're actually kind of self-employed and working on clients.

Now, as I mentioned in the intro, you arrived in Singapore in the mid-'90s with, you know, a laptop and a dream, as it were. What brought you here, and setting up an agency like in Singapore then versus the kind of experience that you've had more recently in moving back to the UK?

You know, I think obviously first of all moving to Singapore was because I had been to Asia for trade shows for a company in the digital music technology industry. And sitting on Sentosa, as it was then the World Trade Center, sipping a Coke and having a hamburger because that's all there was there at the time, I didn't see the point in going back to Manchester, to be honest, in November. And I got back to Manchester and I realized that I should have stayed in Sentosa. But also because the trend in the early '90s and mid-'90s was all towards Asia growth, and we had at the time the digital tide, the Asian Tigers. So there was this really, as always, a push and a pull. Setting up the business in Singapore was remarkably easy all those years ago. But it was all offline. And in fact, I did arrive really with 2 suitcases and a laptop on a tourist visa. And sort of on the 28th day, I realized that I wouldn't be able to stay. And I managed to find an accountant who helped me to set up a company and employ myself and get myself a visa. So I wasn't, to be honest, entirely prepared. Setting up in China was— I was a little bit more organized. I got help before I went rather than once I'd arrived. Of course, in those days, in the early '90s, you couldn't find people on the internet. I mean, we forget that, but Yahoo and Google were only '96, '97, right? So coming to Asia in '94, you had a phone directory, so you couldn't be that prepared in advance. China was fun. Because of course of the language, but I set up a wholly owned foreign enterprise as a subsidiary of the Singapore company, and it seems like it's getting easier and easier because in England I was able to set up a company sitting here for £18, you know, so it seems as though being an entrepreneur is getting easier and easier.

Now we talked there about the technology shift, and PR's experienced a significant— experiencing that as much as any other industry. You've seen that over the years. What struck you as the kind of most interesting trends and transitions? It's an industry that's changed an awful lot, isn't it?

Yeah, I think that there are a couple of key trends around the impact on the public relations industry. One is about mobility, that we now have much greater portability and the ability to create content from site We used to go to an event, take pictures, wait for the photographer to send us the, the negs, choose the ones we wanted. He'd send us the pictures, you know, and had a filing cabinet full of pictures. And then you send them to the magazine and you'd see it maybe a month later. You know, obviously now we can attend and we can stream live from the venue itself. So I think the first thing is going to be mobility. Because it means that we can have proximity to the PR event itself. That's a fundamental change. The second is the democratization of public relations by the use of technology. So, you know, that we're broadcasting now— in the old days we'd have to go to a studio— and that I can create a podcast from my TARDIS here in Bath And I have listeners all over the world, right? I have a thousand, just about a thousand downloads now in this first month from all over the world. Now that would never have been possible before. So technology has democratized content creation and distribution in a way that it's never going to have been possible before.

Now you, on that subject, you've launched Speak PR, the 25th year of East West. Just explain a little bit about the thinking behind that and what that's all about, because it's very closely tied to the podcast, isn't it?

It is. So the idea of Speak PR, which stands for Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know, is really to share the knowledge that I've built up over 25 years of running agencies and my own companies and enable business owners to learn how to do their own PR. So it's my contribution during COVID times, if you like. So rather than asking for fees from people that are struggling, I wanted to give people the tools and then to coach, mentor in any way I can those businesses that are struggling, because there are many parts of public relations that an entrepreneur can do themselves So I created a directory of over 100 free applications called the TAD, the Technology Applications Directory. And with the storyboard and the planner and the TAD, an entrepreneur can really build their own public relations campaign for free. And that was the idea. It's sort of my, my way of trying to help the COVID plan.

And it's an interesting approach within the podcast because the way you think about public relations is broad, I would say, and it touches on many different aspects and touchpoints. As we talked about earlier, we were talking about emails yesterday.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, thank you for listening to it. I know you kindly listened to it, you know, yourself on the run and so on, so thank you for that.

Yeah, so I mean, it's quite— it's a broad definition. Is that very much your philosophy, I guess, and the way you approach PR and marketing? It seems to be within sort of an inquiring mind and looking at all aspects and all touchpoints?

Yeah, I think I look at public relations being fundamental to the communication of a business to its audiences, right? So I don't see it as press relations, which is how it's often translated, or in a sort of the new sort of digital media relations. I think that's too narrow. I think from a business point of view, my experience is that it's very narrow because what it means is that If you go into a client with just, we do press relations, it's, you know, it's commodity really. So I think from a commercial point of view, I've grown my businesses by finding good clients and then delivering more rather than trying to find lots of clients with one niche. And there are products out there that can replace press relations, you know, digital. There are tools, many of them in this directory. But also I think that I approach public relations as a business person. So the podcast Speak PR, which is on iTunes and the Google Podcasts and Spotify and Deezer and so on, is really for entrepreneurs and business owners with a view to repositioning PR as being a key part of building a business rather than being you've got to hire an agency to talk to the media for you. So yeah, I see PR as a fundamental part of a business, not as sort of an incremental service.

Well, we talked about you setting up in Singapore and then setting up in China. You set up PR businesses and you set up businesses outside of PR, and not just businesses, but you've been very active in the British Chamber of Commerce in China as well. Coming from a sort of entrepreneurial PR background, Has that been helpful in the other businesses that you've become involved with? And how has that all kind of unfolded? I mean, how have you kept it all going?

I think first of all that the essential ingredient in the success of any company is the ability to communicate about what it does. So it really doesn't matter what you make if no one knows about it. And so the fundamental part of the businesses I've set up, whether it was the internet business goevents.com or the import business of the cars or the drinks or starting the British Business Awards is I always start with the need. You know, it's got to start somewhere. You can't communicate without a reason for the business to exist. So starting with why, as Simon Sinek says, right? But then the next really is about who, which is this idea that I've got around a book, which is why am I the right person to start importing British cars or why am I the right person to start an entrepreneurs organization and awards for that? So as long as those things are aligned between my motivation and my personality, then I can construct a product. And once you've understood the business model of that product, actually you kind of not need to spend too much time on that anymore. And I think what we do often as entrepreneurs is we kind of over-worry the essential business model. So the cost model of the PR business, and I built something called a Cost-O-Matic back in the early '90s on a spreadsheet, the essential business model of the public relations agents hasn't changed. Okay, so actually once I've built the model, I can train people, I can train people to use that model. And then I can move on to communicating in order to build the value for that model, which is finding clients and finding consultants. And once I've learned how the process of finding clients works, I can delegate that servicing. I can delegate that— I mentioned about the Speak PR process. So actually building a business is about identifying the business model, how you add value in the supply chain. In the car business, we bought them from the factory, we shipped them, we did a harmonization, we added tax and so on, and then we had a margin. Now once I've understood the margins in each particular part of the process, I can then start to put people in place to deliver that piece of the margin. So I use now a tool like Loom, for example, loom.com, where I'm videoing work that I do every day and giving that to a virtual assistant in the Philippines. Okay, so it's all about identifying the value and then building the process and then replacing yourself with those people who are better than me at doing those particular jobs. So I have in a way the great distinction of not being very good at anything, so it's quite easy to replace myself with someone better than me at pretty much anything. So running multiple businesses, one time having the car business and I had Morgan myself in the morning and I had Lotus, I was the CEO for Lotus in China in the afternoon, was really about identifying the problems that were happening in that process and then finding the right person to come in to tackle that problem, which brings me back all the way back to communication because The secret to solving that process and building the team is communication. So the common element in all of the businesses has been the ability to articulate a vision and to get people to buy in, bind into that vision, understand what they should be paid for delivering those individual parts, and then creating some milestones for them. So if you do that ideally, then you're not working in the business, you're you're working on a business and building businesses that can manage themselves because there are people who are great leaders, there are people who are great writers, there are people who are great media outreach, but it's getting them to all work as a team towards a common purpose and that's really what the entrepreneur should do.

What would your advice be to any young guns who are starting out in PR?

Well, I think that public relations as an industry, as I defined, you know, not press relations, but in the definition of helping companies to communicate to their audiences, I would say there'll always be a need for public relations because unlike the legal profession and the accounting profession and some others where there are some rules to follow, the AI can follow those rules and can implement solutions, but because PR is essentially a business about intuition, about emotional intelligence, about human engagement, there will always be a need for public relations, and because companies are constantly moving, growing, slowing down, and economies— there are so many variables— the only way for companies to survive is to communicate about what they're doing next and what they're doing now. So I would say first of all, I think it's a great choice as a career because I think it's fundamentally sustainable. Secondly, I think I would say don't determine the public relations on what you see it is now, but see it on where you think it's going to be. Because as the Wayne Gretzky, or, you know, aim for the puck, you know, I went to Asia a little bit early, but I went to the right region. Because as we see now, it's Asia's century, right? And I benefited from going to where I saw the opportunities would be, and I benefited by going into digital technologies back in '95, '96. So my personal advice, if you know, and I wouldn't— can I be sued if someone takes the advice? But I think to be innovative, because there are so many agencies out there, hundreds now in Singapore, but there were about 25 when I started. So The only way to differentiate yourself is to innovate. And the final point is that I've always had this mantra, which is to add value with every communication and to not forget the fact someone is paying you to help their business. You don't do PR for the sake of PR, you do it to add value. They should make more money with their company by engaging you than than if they didn't engage you. So, you know, choose— it's a sustainable business, good luck. Innovate, because that's the only way you're going to stay relevant. And thirdly, make sure that you add value, because that is what ultimately will keep the customers paying your bills.

Jim James, founder and managing director of EastWest PR, thank you very much indeed.