In this episode of the Speak PR Podcast, host Jim James—an agency founder with over 25 years of experience—explains why the COVID‑19 pandemic creates a unique opportunity for business owners to obtain public‑relations (PR) support at lower cost and with greater availability. He cites data from Francis Ingham of the UK Public Relations Council showing that roughly 20,000 of the 100,000 PR professionals employed in mainstream agencies were furloughed, with at least 5,000 unlikely to return, resulting in a flood of agency‑trained freelancers. James contrasts generic freelance marketplaces (Upwork, Fiverr) with specialist PR talent platforms such as TheWorkCrowd, TheSortlist, CreativeHunt, Telemedia, Marketing Interactive, and PR Week, highlighting their vetted pools and rapid growth. He introduces the UK‑funded Digital Marketing Apprenticeship (via Cloud Academy) as a cost‑effective way to bring in young talent, noting government coverage of up to 100 % of training costs and modest weekly apprenticeship fees. James also outlines his Speak PR methodology—Storify, Personalise, Engage, Amplify, Know—as a DIY template for owners who prefer not to hire an agency, and describes how he leverages virtual assistants from the Philippines through the Outsource School to handle content creation, transcription, editing, and distribution. Finally, he discusses broader retraining initiatives for older workers, emphasizing that PR work (messaging, thought leadership) can be split between founders and trained assistants, turning the pandemic’s financial pressures into an opportunity to rejuvenate communication strategies while supporting displaced talent.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. Now, I've run my own multi-country agency for over 25 years, but I've also built my own businesses across Asia and the UK. So I'd like to share on this podcast some tools and some tips that I know work for building a brand and for public relations. Now, on this episode, I'd like to say that it's a great time to go shopping if you're thinking about having PR support for your company. No matter how big or small your company is, it's always useful to have a consultant that has practical experience, great media relations, and quite probably gives you an extra set of hands to go and engage with public relations. Now, According to Francis Ingham, who is one of the leads at the Public Relations Council here in the UK, there are some 100,000 people employed within the industry, within mainstream agencies, and some 20,000 of those were furloughed. Now, according to Ingham, he believes that at least 5,000 of those people will not be going back to work. Now this means that we're going to have, for those companies that are looking for a little bit of extra support, there's going to be a flood of people that can help them. Now at the start of 2020, there were some 2 million freelance people working in the UK. The problem with the general freelance, when I go for example to Fiverr or to Upwork, Is that you put in a post there and that and you can get any number of of replies, and there's some ranking and some ratings. But frankly, it can take as long to find a consultant as it does to have the consultant to do the work. So the news from Ingham and the PRCA that there could be an an influx of some five thousand. Agency-trained consultants is really good news for everybody and anybody who would like to get some support for their PR and doesn't know currently where to look. Now, one of the places that you can look is theworkcrowd.com. Now, it's in the UK, but it boasts some 3,100+ registered and vetted freelancers. So they've seen the number of PR freelancers on that website double from 1,200 to 2,200, and I imagine that they're going to have those numbers swollen in the coming weeks as the August furlough starts to come back to work and the reality hits the agencies. Now, the, the number of websites that there are around the world, for those of you not in the UK, for public relations is terrific. Now you can use some of the big ones like Upwork and Fiverr, but they're not specialists. So there are some, for example, like thesortlist.com and creativehunt.com that actually works for agency recruitment, but also some of the others like, for example, Telemedia in Asia and Marketing Interactive in Asia. PR Week. They all have directories available and job postings that you can use. Now, another opportunity, if you think that you know more about what you want to do and could just have someone in-house do it for you, is the new apprenticeship funded in the UK. For example, the digital marketing apprenticeship. Now, I'm just filling out the paperwork for this, and the young people in the UK are getting skills, uh, training funded largely by the UK government as long as a company like mine is willing to support them for 15 months. Now, the young learners will get access to what they call the Cloud Academy, and they have access then to tech labs and online learning whilst they are then working with me. So, and because they're not needing to go into the college, these people are going to be working online for their course and with me. You know, currently it'll be online as well, but at times in a facility or an office or wherever. Now, I want to mention this because governments all over the world are starting to create financing to help young people get into the workplace. Now, the young learners on this UK Cloud Academy program will have 15 days of classroom training throughout the 15 months. So over 15 months, they're only gone for one workday a month. Now, this is the great part. If you have a company already, the government will cover 100% of the apprenticeship training program for a A young apprentice between 16 and 18, okay? And they'll cover 95% if they're between 16 and 18, and 95% if they're over 19. So in other words, these young people who are looking for work and that I can help to mentor will be coming to me virtually for free. Now, I do have some costs, but. They recommend, you know, £200 to £300 per week as, if you like, an apprenticeship fee. Now, I think that's quite fair in that, you know, if we've taken, as I have, the Bounce Back Loan, which was on offer here in the UK, I can't think of a better way than to recycle that money by putting it into the pockets of a young person that I can train in the industry. Now, maybe one of those 5,000 that have been, or that are going to be let go, might turn up on my books. But if you've got some dedicated work that you know needs to be done, and you can give them some mentorship and leadership, this apprenticeship, which I'll put the details of in the show notes, could really be a great addition to the team. Now, I've built a program called Speak PR, which is To storify, personalise, engage, amplify, and to know. Now, what I can do with my young apprentices is I can work with them on making this into an online course, which is where I'd like to go with this, to enable the knowledge that I've got to be shared by business owners as and when they want to, to take the methodologies that we've got so they can get noticed and, and learn them and deploy them within their own business. Because I do understand not everybody wants the expense of an agency, but not everybody knows how to manage a consultant. So the Speak PR program is going to be a template and a guide, and in fact it already exists at eastwestpr.com. Now the other thing that, that I'm doing is I've just signed up for a program called the Outsource School And I've done this because I've just contracted a virtual assistant in the Philippines with, with quite a good deal of success within the first week, because there are some areas that I need to focus on. For example, like content creation for this podcast, where I then transcribe that to Otter. But then what we're doing is we're having some young people in the Philippines to reauthor and edit the text of the article, and then to place that on our website and also onto our social media and onto our LinkedIn, for example. So we're able to build a value chain, but that needs a process, and The Outsource School has a whole bunch of sort of methodologies for how to select a virtual assistant, tools and templates that you can give to the assistant, when it comes to things like task lists and so on. So why does this all make sense, and why is it about public relations? It's about public relations because often when we're cutting costs, and in the same way as these agencies are going to be cutting their members of staff, we often cut one of the most important parts of the business, which is communication. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to share some solutions that would enable you to get public relations, maybe more than you've had before, by using what will become a pool of educated and trained PR people, by finding them on freelance websites, but also quite possibly taking advantage of one of the many, many young people in the UK or in your own country that need to get back into the workforce. Now, I know in Singapore, we've been approached to help older people get back into the workforce, and that's something that's being funded as well by the government. Older people being, you know, not a lot older than me, you know, in their 60s. People that have retired or been forced to retire are now having government funds to enable them to retrain. So in public relations, a lot of the work that we need to do is on the messaging and the thought leadership. That's something that really only the founder can do. But getting that message into writing or into video or into text, into audio— those are skill sets for reformatting and distribution which young people and old people can bring to bear for us. And with the financial conditions of COVID It creates an opportunity for entrepreneurs to take advantage, if you like, not of the people themselves, but of the situation. But at the same time, to give these people that may be less fortunate than us an opportunity to get back into work. So I think that will be a great way that we can all try and take advantage of COVID and reinvent our businesses, and certainly to rejuvenate the the public relations work that we all really need to do when the landscapes have changed just so dramatically. So with that, I'd like to say I wish you the best of health. Of course, that's first these days. Wish you a profitable business and that you keep on communicating, possibly with some help.
