Unlocking PR Success | Interview with Sneha Saigal, Co-Founder and CEO of Geeks and Experts

Ryan Purvis 00:23:08

Hello, and welcome to the Digital Workspace Works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In the series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field, story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

So, welcome Sneha to the Digital Workspace Works podcast. You want to introduce yourself, please.

Sneha Saigal 00:23:41

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Ryan. My name is Sneha. And I'm the co founder and CEO of Geeks and Experts where a fractional talent platform for startups and scaleups to hire PR specialists for their PR campaigns. And we also have growth strategies, sales executives, but our bread and butter is PR.

Ryan Purvis 00:23:59

Fantastic. Great. And then as I said, the standard question, what does the digital workspace mean to you?

Sneha Saigal 00:24:04

The digital workspace actually it's evolved so much right, starting from COVID. I think it always existed, but it really had stellar growth during the last few years. So I think it's the ability to be able to work pretty much remotely from anywhere and access talent across the globe and be cost effective in that process.

Ryan Purvis 00:24:20

Great. And how's that affected your business? I mean, we talked before we started that you've come from India, your time in Spain ad now you're in New York, I mean, tell me a bit about the real life.

Sneha Saigal 00:24:30

Yeah, absolutely. So it's been an exciting journey, I would say, it's always been kind of in the small and medium businesses, early stage startups. So I've worked pretty much starting from nonprofits to social impact to food tech, and ad tech. And eventually, during COVID was when I realised, you know, I kind of wanted to get onto the founder side, myself. So started working on this fractional talent platform, which as you obviously know, you know, COVID gave the opportunity for a lot of people to do multiple jobs, or to kind of pivot their careers and start their independent kind of, you know, professional work projects as well. And that's when I saw the opportunity for a lot of PR specialists to be able to work with startups and scale ups, because you know, at that stage companies don't have budgets to hire, like a an agency, or an annual contract, which is, you know, six figures per month in retainers, there was an opportunity here for freelancers in the PR space to kind of, you know, showcase their their specialists, and expertise. And that being said, we're kind of, you know, often called an upscale version of Fiverr. So it's not somewhere where you would give 50 bucks and get a logo, which is fine. I mean, you know, there are platforms that exist for that. But PR is such a nuanced space, that you need specialists from specific industries, you have to kind of give it a little more time. So that's when our platform started picking up steam. And it's been about two years now, we've been pivoting and iterating, like every other early stage company along the way.

Ryan Purvis 00:25:50

Yeah, I can be a client of yours. To be honest, that's amazing. I mean, it's funny, because I was actually looking at this yesterday. So I obviously, this is a podcast that but there's a there's another thing called Valuu, which is our assess, and consulting all the work that we do. And I get inundated with emails every day, for people wanting me to come into a magazine or do this article, do that article, and some of those are free and some of those you pay for. But the time we waste reading the email often. And you know, let's say there's two a day, and replying to all the rest of it. And just having someone who actually, I don't know if this magazine, or this thing is actually a good one, I don't know if it actually leads to anything. And just having someone with that little bit expertise, you know, even if I'm paying them for two hours a week, and they can go through that batch of 20 in an hour. And say out of that, look, there's nothing here or these ones will be good for you or actually, you know, I forget all this stuff will go into this way would be so valuable. Because it just, you know, it's not my forte. And also you build relationships when you do a certain speciality. So you'll know who to talk to if you want to get in the right publications, and what to say and all that kind of stuff. So I think there's huge value in that.

Sneha Saigal 00:27:02

Exactly. Thank you so much for saying that. I think you hit the nail on the head with uh, you know, the media relations part of it, because I think that is pretty much what a lot of people who get caught up in the paid media or paying too pure on the front cover of magazines. I mean, paid media is an option. Yes, I'm not denying that. But I think there's a lot that you can leverage from an earned media perspective, you know, increasing your top leadership and like you said, you know, just identifying which are the outlets that would showcase your story that match your audience as well because there are a lot of nice trade publications that speak to your audience. So you know, coming on a top to your outlet or to your one outlet may be may or may not make sense for you if you want to be known for a very specific expertise, or as a subject matter expert in a particular domain and that's where media relations can really change the game for you because it builds trust and credibility with your audience. And it can be done at a budget so you don't have to fall for the trap of spending tonnes of money to appear on you know campaigns and six month or one year Sprint's you can kind of take it as you go and with the budget you have in mind when you're starting out.

Speaker 1 00:28:05

Yeah,

Ryan Purvis 00:28:05

Yeah, yeah. So and someone else about the segment, we talked about the gig economy on Uber rocked up. And we said, oh, you know, this is a stock that you had, you know, Airbnb in your head for these lifting and all these other things that come along. And that, to me was never really the true gig economy, because that was just people basically being paid slave labour, didn't go to commerce, to fulfil a job of somebody will be replaced by machine at some point. You know, just it's a low skill thing to large extent. But if you think about, you know, what COVID has done, it's levelled everyone up from a technology point of view, Everyone now knows you can work from home and be connected, every now knows that with a good internet connection, you can do your job. And when you look at the sort of way, or at least I think the market is going, I think you're into a case where businesses are trying to cut down their heavy cost, which is your experience and all your experience person that costs a lot, they want to try and cut that down to the minimum that they have to have.

And then switch it over to more fractional part time, resources, which is one of these where we started the community where they can bring somebody in who's done this before, or has some expertise, and they can help them solve the problem. But in the same token, you want to make sure that the person comes in there has authority, and trust. And I think that's where the PR thing is so important. Because in order to make sure that somebody is now trustworthy. If you don't have that friend, I can tell you, this person is trustworthy, easy to go with their social media is, you know, whatever they have they done anything and it doesn't have to be on Facebook and Instagram, Tik Tok, it could be just LinkedIn. But if they're writing every day or every week about something that is related to what your problem is, and you get the eyeballs on it, then that is how the authority comes through the trust comes through because now you've built a relationship through experiencing them.

Sneha Saigal 00:29:44

Absolutely. No, I think there's a lot of merit there, especially when you mentioned you know, fractional, I think fractional has also been around for a bit, but it's kind of got rebranded now. And the core of being fractional is you work for a fraction of your time with different companies. And I think like you said, that's such a big, you know, leverage that companies can can utilise, you know, when they are limited with budgets, and they're looking for that specialist who has the skills that they don't have. And I think we you know, PR is one of those things, which kind of has a mystery or mystique around it, a lot of people are not very familiar necessarily with what goes behind the scenes or how to, you know, navigate that. And there are a lot of tools that even as a founder yourself, you know, you can leverage, including tools like Harrow, which is basically, you know, a company that sends out three emails a day about journalists who are looking for sources on a story that has a deadline. So it's literally stands for Help a Reporter Out. And I think a lot of these tools exist for founders to use. So you can start out just dip your toes a little bit in media relations, but when you're reaching that stage, when you need somebody to kind of take the reins from you, you can go for a freelancer or fractional executive as opposed to hiring a whole agency that necessarily would not meet your budgets.

Ryan Purvis 00:30:57

Yeah, I think there's that point about you bringing someone who's an expert, they might do it in 15 or an hour. Whereas you could have, you could have an agency that could take two days to do the same thing. We were talking about something the other day where they had these big fancy guys come in, and the time it took them to do the quote, somebody else had done had done the work. Yeah. And it was kind of this like disjointed thing where you thought because you're going to get this big brand to do the work for you that it'd be faster and more efficient, more effective. And actually, it wasn't it was just more expensive to buy it. So, so I definetly see the value, so how does your platform work? Or how do you guys do your thing? I mean, give us some

Sneha Saigal 00:31:32

So we work like a marketplace format. So we have PR specialists who you know, have very, very specific expertise from every industry that you can think I mean, we have people who have worked on True Crime podcast right up to you know, fitness, you know, whether it's FinTech, it's essentially, because your industry matters so much when you're in the space of media relations. So we have the specialists who are, you know, on boarded referrals and word of mouth, and then they go through a vetting process themselves. So we have PR analysts who kind of bet their expertise and you know, how long they've been in the industry, and they could charge anywhere from, you know, $1,000 per month going up to $15,000 per month, depending on, you know, what their retainer is, but that's the whole beauty of it, that there isn't a one size fits all. So that's on the supply side. And on the demand side, we basically work with seed to series A companies that are you know, basically startups scaleups, right, who are maybe doing a fundraising campaign and they want to get some PR talking about their founders thought leadership or background story. And then you could also have a startup that's been around for a while, but it's now launching a new feature for their product and they want to do some PR for that. So even if you're looking for like three months sprint , just to get your marketing efforts and PR efforts, some more visibility. Those are the essentially the kind of clients that we work with.

Ryan Purvis 00:32:45

Yeah, and I think that's often the case, I'm gonna just need someone to get them over the first hump. You know, when we do some of our stuff. It was trying to figure out what tools do we use to use LinkedIn? Do we use Twitter or X now? Do we use and then if we want to use some of the general AI stuff, which tools are the better ones to use is a Taplio, is it Apollo is it whatever. And once you've got those sort of basics decided and you just need the basics view someone who's done it a few times to say, 'Look, don't use this tool, because once you paid for everything, it's actually more expensive than this other tool'. And when you sitting at your sort of plan for the year, these are the things you must make sure you do. You know, like, my wife has a little bit of background of this. And she said to me, never ever put pictures of people on your, on your website. I said, Why. And she said because no one picks you pick it, you're going to offend somebody. So just pick ones that are you that you can't tell. I said, Okay, so, so no male, no female, no black and pink, whatever. So that's what we've done. And it's a very high concept for people to get that you don't have any people in the pictures, but you want to show people, You know for collaberation, and or it's you almost gonna have every possible combination in the picture. And when I was having this chat, I did a magazine article the other day, and they asked me for some pictures. And I said, Well, here are the pictures. And so we want people's like, No, we don't want people because this is the problem. And they're like, Oh, we never thought about that. And in Sheena, I got some feedback informally for them. So I've actually had some complaints thought about my stuff. But one of the other articles because there was not enough representation in the pictures. And I said, Well, that's quite weird that that would have actually happened, that we talked about.

Asaf Darash 00:34:13

And that's an interesting angle. And you shed light on an important sorry,

Ryan Purvis 00:34:17

good. So I'd love to know what your thoughts are on that. Because, you know, I never thought about

Sneha Saigal 00:34:22

Yeah, I was just gonna say, you know, at the end of the day, every business is a people business, because that's something that, you know, over the over time, you've learned that even when you're selling to startup, or even if you're a b2b business, you're selling to somebody who's in that business. And I think that's an important thing to think about, you know, when you're figuring out your ideal customer persona, or just doing your customer discovery and sales is your at the end of the day, you're talking to a decision maker at a company.

Ryan Purvis 00:34:47

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, do you so customer side with you guys, do you take do you front, then the resource, and then they get a cut and you get a cut? And that's your model or do the resource pay? And then you just commercial deal is just...

Sneha Saigal 00:34:59

It's commission based? So it's a contingency your success based model?

Ryan Purvis 00:35:02

Okay. Okay, good. And what sort of numbers do you have in the sense of signed up resources globally?

Sneha Saigal 00:35:08

Yeah, absolutely. We have close to 100 150 PR specialists who are, you know, across different domain experts, like I mentioned, and like I mentioned, the budget that they charge is starting from $1,000 per month, going up to $15,000 per month. We do have a few boutique agencies as well. So it's not to say that we only work with PR freelancers, or independent PR specialists. But the boutique agencies are, you know, super small, it will be like three to seven person team. So not like obviously, like an overly or, you know, a large agency like that is what we have right now.

Ryan Purvis 00:35:38

Great, great. And then what's the I mean, do you guys, do you have people that are focused in some areas, or there's a really strong across the board, I mean, give you some feel for for what you have?

Sneha Saigal 00:35:47

Yeah, so the domains or the verticals would be as specific, as you know, professionals who have worked in pet industries, or they've worked in SAS products. Of course, by nature of being a tech platform, we do have a lot of tech startups that are our audiences. So they would be like b2b SaaS companies. But that being said, we do have few CPG brands, we have a few, you know, fashion and beauty tech companies as well. So it's, like you mentioned, you know, across the spectrum, and you will have different levels of seniority as well. So even the PR specialists have either, you know, their entry level, maybe they have worked at an agency for a few years, and now they want to start their own independent practice. So they will be starting out as an independent PR freelancer or there are specialists who have been doing this for decades.

And even in that there will be media relations, as well as analyst relations who have worked with, you know, your analyst publications, like Forrester, IDC, Gartner also totally depends on the specialists that you're looking for. And we're also trying to identify who is that, you know, hero or hero and user of our product? Is it a, you know, is it mainly in tech? Or is it also CPG and beauty brands, because a lot of these companies, you know, need PR depending on what their end product is. And they will need to get in front of different audiences, depending on what their product is. So for some it will be just trade publications for summit would be here, when outlets are getting into the top, you know, holiday gift guides that are consumer facing. So it really boils down to what your objectives are. And I think that's the most important thing, when you set out to do PR is to understand, what is your objective? Like? What do you want to get out of it? And why? Because without having those, you know, success metrics or KPIs, you're you're just throwing money and not seeing the results that actually move the needle for you.

Ryan Purvis 00:37:25

So do you have a methodology to use to do that? So like, typically, when I do my stuff, we follow an OKR based methodology, but some other stuff that we've added to it? Do you have a similar thing? Or how do you?

Sneha Saigal 00:37:35

That's a great question. So yes, it will be, you know, during onboarding call with the client first to understand what their objectives are, like you mentioned. And so we go through a questionnaire just to understand, you know, where they are at right now, with their PR goals. Have they got any digital footprint prior to doing PR? And then also where do they see themselves, you know, going down the line? So is it three to six months? Is it to just increase their brand visibility, or is it to increase top leadership of the founders of the business owners? So you know, that onboarding call really helps us understand. Also, if this is the right client for what we're looking for, because something times you have to say no to certain clients and, you know, not reach the stage where you have to fire them, but at least understand that maybe you wouldn't be able to service them the way they think you can. Because sometimes in PR, you do have to educate the client a little bit about how it works, you know, try to make them understand that it's not that you can pay somebody for a week or a month and start seeing results, it is a little more, you know, long term campaign, I mean, give it at least three months, while your PR specialist is you know, putting out your messaging or doing your, you know, PR campaign, drawing up a press release, etc, etc. So, your onboarding call comes first, and then we'll showcase you know, a couple of different profiles to them, that would be a good fit. And then they decide on that, whether they want to, you know, go through an introductory call with these specialists, we handle that. And then if they think it's a good fit, then that's when we draw up contracts.

Ryan Purvis 00:38:57

Yeah, I really like your website I'm going through now while we're talking. You know, it's, it's very nicely put together, like how you've done peer referencing, for example, you know, having fixed rates, that kind of thing. I mean, we would do something similar with ValuuExecs, although we don't want to get involved in the commercial side of things. We want our members to get the get the deal. But I like how you've done this, this is really, really slick.

Sneha Saigal 00:39:16

Thank you.

Ryan Purvis 00:39:16

You got some nice customers.

Sneha Saigal 00:39:17

My Co-Founder, he's also actually, he's also a you user experience, or customer experience designer. So I think that's where probably, in your experience, you kind of appreciate it,

Ryan Purvis 00:39:26

Maybe, maybe it just looks like a really good site. Cool. And then what's the I mean, what are your thoughts on AI in the space? I mean, do you think it's a, an enabler or a competitor?

Sneha Saigal 00:39:36

I think that's a that's a great question, especially right now, right, that's all in the in the news right now. But I think there's a lot of potential to use it in the right way, I would definitely say that do not use AI to write your pitches to journalists, because they get a tonne of pitches for the they can read, you know, if it's written by a human or was written by AI. So I would say there are ways to read, you know, use it to your advantage to maybe get some interesting stats or get some interesting angles, or even to to use existing content that you have, I think this is a, this is a tool that I realised, you know, a little later that I have so many articles that are right, just on my personal blog on medium. And I could use AI to just leverage or use that content to generate more content. And I think those are some of the ways in which you can use it. So that means you're giving AI your own voice and your own unique angle to a story, but you're just helping or using its aid to multiply the content that you have. So I would say it can be an enabler, if you know how to use it. But don't use it to just be the voice for you use it to, you know, implement whatever you already have and turn that.

Ryan Purvis 00:40:44

Yeah, I mean, I've definitely found that with ChatGPT, for example, if you've got a really I mean, my, I listed some of my first prompts the other day, and my prompts have definitely gotten more sophisticated. And also because now it's been trained more and more on more recent data. And it's probably about a year behind maybe six months, we always transcribe our podcasts. So it's got the transcriptions now. So now I can actually get it to use my voice when it writes something, which is a bit weird, because it's not how I would write something. It's how I would say something that it's writing. But I can definitely see that it's got it's picked up stuff, like, yeah, there's something. So that's been quite interesting, I haven't felt confident yet to put that out, as opposed to because I kind of find Taplio does a much better job. But it is, it is fascinating to see how close we are in some respects to something simulating you.

I watched a very scary video LinkedIn two hours ago, where they had a picture of a kid and in their show, you take the picture, and they take the dots off the kid's face. And then they morph this kid into a simulated version of her oldest self. And then basically this is talking to an audience of people. And he says, Mom, Dad, that this whole spiel about you just shared a few pictures of me online. And this is what they did with me. And this is what could have happened. And like it'd be, you know, simulated have bad credit to child pornography, like the whole, like, this is the worst case scenario. And it was quite a scary thought. Because, you know, we, I mean, I use, I'm involved in the textbook, you know, I have an inkling of what it can be done. I mean, it's obviously learned a lot more than I do, and I'm nervous about it. But there's people that have no idea. Now, if you think about it from a deep fake point of view, or something like that. And it was actually a video of a rugby player not shaking the president of South Africa's hand during the fight thing, and it was fake. But because no one could tell the difference between what was fake and what was real, it led to a whole lot of social uprising. And that's where it is scary because it's the validation has to be almost as quick and as expert as what was used to generate the deep fake. So you have these two allies basically fighting over what it is. And I just think about from a PR point of view, how that could be good or bad for you as a person or a company or whatever it is.

Sneha Saigal 00:42:41

Yes, that is definitely an interesting angle and a scary angle at that. And I think we'll we are the generation that will look to see what happens and how this technology evolves. Because we haven't seen something like this, you know, in the last several decades. So it's definitely something that I hope will be used in the right way. But yeah, like you mentioned, there is a lot of potential for and I think that comes with any any innovation, right? I mean, it does have its have its pitfalls and even our convenience. obsessed culture. I mean, there are so many things which we wouldn't have taken for granted earlier. But now there are things that we take for granted. And we function that way. Now, we have evolved that way. And maybe it's not always for the better.

Ryan Purvis 00:43:19

No, but I mean, history judges us, right. So whatever happens now we think we are on the right path or not, whatever it is, but really, when you look back, you know, look at, look at the wars look at, you know, whatever's happened in the last 20 years, you can only judge it based on what would that hindsight and you know, this was going on now with ultimate Brink being fired from ChatGPT, and now he's going to Microsoft. And is that is this the inflection point of something deeper and darker? Or is this just a case of, you know, typical boardroom politics and someone's rebooted? We will, We won't know until now. But yeah, the amount of AI tools that are coming out that are that are specifically playing in the content space, I think that's the interesting thing is it's all about content. And you almost need an AI to read all the content to give you the salient points, because there's so much more we generated now, because now it's X percent faster or exponentially faster to generate content. So how would you advise a client of yours of yours? And remember, you would think, to come up with a strategy with this in mind, so that they can be unique?

Sneha Saigal 00:44:14

And yeah, absolutely, Ithink there's, that's exactly where your unique voice and angle, you know, kind of comes into play. Because even when you're talking about, you know, there being so many AI companies now, that's an interesting case study, just to look at that, I don't think companies are going to call themselves AI companies, you know, down the line, I mean, it's going to be redundant, it's going to just be understood that you are an AI company. And I think that's kind of where you have to start focusing on what differentiates you. And if you're, if you have a unique, you know, background or a unique case study that you've worked on, or you're a subject matter expert in something, that's where you have to leverage that and showcase that, because that is something that cannot be replicated, or, I mean, somebody can probably take the technology that you have, and try to replicate it or build it. But if there's something specific you bring to the table, your experience and expertise from before then that is something that needs to be highlighted. And that's what we recommend our clients to do is to is to just highlight that not talk about, you know, like we say, always talk about the benefits, not the features, you know, show don't tell, and those kinds of things are becoming even more important right now. And because at the end of the day, that's the human part of it that has to be held on to in the world of AI.

Ryan Purvis 00:45:21

Yeah, that's what I want to say talk about storytelling, how storytelling has become more and more important. And you could still prompt that. So you can still like what I will do, commonly, someone will say, Oh, I need you to write this thing, you know, and I'll write the prompt, while I'm saying I need you to talk about this. But then I'll explain how I want it written. And that's really where I found the value in AI is that you can give it the guidance of the guardrails to where you want to get to, and then let it spit it out. But not just say, Tell me all about digital transformation. And the rights like this spiel, it means nothing to anybody. But you say I want digital transformation in the in the FinTech space, where we deal with payments and cross border remittances. And tell me how you use the Star Wars analogy, for example, that is really cool, because it's a really nice focus thing. And then he uses common themes that people that you typically talk to you with no, they're no I stole was it? No, but you know, Skywalker, and whatever. And, and the one he came up with, I thought was beautiful. It said, you know, Luke needed to send money to Leia to get out of jail. And this is how it was like this whole thing. I was like, that's so contrived. And I thought that was actually so brilliant, because no one would have thought of that, like that analogy. But he explained the remittances and getting across the galaxy, and also so well. So I think there's, you know, from that point of view, creativity, it's not creativity, it's just associations that we wouldn't have thought of interesting, because it creates...

Sneha Saigal 00:46:35

What are the prompts that you were using before? Like you mentioned, your prompts have changed so much when you started out? So it looks like you've you kind of found that unique way of asking the right questions or the problem?

Ryan Purvis 00:46:45

Yeah, so what I normally do is, I would write like one sentence like that, right? I think about this. And then I normally take that sentence, and I put it in a text thing next to it, and then I'll do I'll keep building on what I get as responses, fine tuning it. And then as I fine tune it, I put those sentences all together in that piece of text. And then usually when I've got about five or six lines, I look at that text again, and I reword it. And then I start adding in the stuff that I really want to make it more targeted. And then when that's done, then I paste that in and say, Now write this thing again, but using this stuff, so I can kind of see, you know, you can kind of develop a little bit to where it's going. And then you can, you know, ask for the finished product. Because what happens, usually, when you interact with it, I find at least is after a while, it starts to go more and more away from where you were going. And that's probably just a, you know, a progression issue. But when you've got the whole thing together, and you can then say using this context, which is the five lines, give me this output, that's usually get a really nice thing. And then something I learned, which I'd never thought of is you can actually tell in your prompt to keep rewriting until it reaches a certain thing. So like if you want to make a 200 words, you can say please rewrite this and you get to 200 words. And it might take a bit longer, but it'll actually give you exactly 200 words, yeah.

Sneha Saigal 00:47:58

Use it and say Okay, write the same thing now and make it more concise or you know, wanted in an email format, or I wanted more in a LinkedIn blog post format. So it really does pick up you know, those elements.

Ryan Purvis 00:48:08

Yeah. So I mean, in that respect, I'm less worried about the video of the girl get, you know, being simulated for deep fakes. And I mean, I read a very good book series with that was used. But I'm very positive in the sense of I've got clients of mine that are not very good writers who say, but leaving them write what they want to tell everybody and then having the AI, you know, make it marketing friendly, or put it into an analogy to what's going on in the market right now. Because I mean, that's all part of PR right, is to connect with you, be relevant. Yeah. So I think it'd be a great conversation is anything else you want to chat about?

Sneha Saigal 00:48:40

No, I think this is great. I just love learning more about how you were using the I think I learned two things or two from you.

Ryan Purvis 00:48:45

You know, the secret to all these things is to be lazy. As when you lazy you find ways to avoid doing the things you don't like to do. And that's why the AI is amazing, because you know, if I could get to the point where we're having a conversation now, and AI is listening in from that, it understands that I actually want to go and do two things from this conversation and just start doing those two things. Like for example, maybe we mentioned somewhere, do some research on something. So by the time we finished the meeting, the researchers popped up email to you or whatever, and said, Oh, you know why you were talking about this research, and we think this is relevant to you. Or you said you wanted to come to the UK, you're getting a message in my inbox saying, Well, if you go fly, you know, six months from now, the price of tickets is this and based on your likes and dislikes, these events are happening, you know, maybe want to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Fringe Festival, maybe want to do this thing. I think that'd be really cool.

Sneha Saigal 00:49:35

Like minutes of the meeting, but with like actionable takeaways that like a personal concierge or?

Ryan Purvis 00:49:39

Yeah, like, Well, I mean, so I'll give you a good example. Right? So we have we have ValuuExecs, which is our fractional community, our whole model is different, because we're not there to charge the fractional is to, you know, so it's not about ValuuExecs, it's about the member, right. So, like, when I was thinking when I made the joke about will be your clients is, you know, could we have got a few factional execs that are looking to we promote the member, that's how we do. That's our model, we don't we want them to be the front and centre thing. So you know, how do we make them publicly more available, so that they get more, so we get more leads, because that's what it's about the end of the iteration, but it's inbound. And that's why the trust and authentic authenticity is so important, because like we're doing a podcast, now we have every member come on to the podcast. We do a YouTube series of them as well, we put them on to other podcasts, but we need to basically keep promoting them, you know, get them into thought leadership things and that kind of stuff. And that's where a PR person would be really helpful. And if we were to split that cost across all the members, it then becomes palatable for them as well, because they're not, there's two problems with this thing. Usually when you when you're doing PR. One is someone has to come up with a content, which is exhausting for people. So they don't like to do because it's can be exhausting. The other thing is when it all starts to come, and then you start doing all these things that it takes them away from the work with respect to them. So if you sort of So the whole point of that model is that we have enough members that you can sort of ride the wave of when you're busy, you don't have to do it when you're not busy, you can do it and someone else can do,

Sneha Saigal 00:51:02

I can say that it makes sense for whenever you need. And I think that's the sustainable way of doing it. That's interesting. And I think, you know, some of these things kind of have a snowballing effect. So like you mentioned, when you start out, you know, in one space, then you just kind of have this ripple effect. And then you you're seeing the results come out in different places. I keep calling it like increasing the surface area, and just having those many touch points online, which I think makes a lot of sense. Especially like you mentioned, you know, it's all about lead generation at that point.

Ryan Purvis 00:51:28

Yeah, well. So what we're trying to do with with us is inbound lead generation. So we want somebody to be going through LinkedIn, which is our preferred platform at this stage email, they want to be able to, I want them to see a member of ours like like Roger, who's a growth guy, Tim is a CIO, who you know who available Oh, you know, I need someone who can help me grow my startup. Let me check with Roger. Now they can reach out to Roger directly, or the contrast doesn't matter. But the point is, they now know about Roger, because we've made him available. Because they you know, typically what happens is someone will hit you on LinkedIn with some message, but it's never really a true connection message. But if I've seen something that Roger said, Oh, well, you know, Roger talks about scaling up a startup and, and he's mentioned this, this and this, and that resonates that two out of the three things resonate with me, they can reach out to say, hey, Roger, I saw this thing. You mentioned this, and this, can you help us come have a chat, and might just pick up coffee, and you might spend half an hour with them and say, Look, you know, I don't need to be born as a fractional for this. Here's what you need to do A, B, and C, if you still need my help come back. And then we can go from there. And I think that's the thing that we'll get to about the economy. Again, I think that's what's changing in the market, or the ability to contact somebody and talk to them because of technology is so much flat. That's the wrong phrase, it's exponentially easier. Because, you know, you could literally just hit someone on LinkedIn, you can go search by keyword, I want people in FinTech, I want people in digital transformation, get a long list, then you can automate contacting all of them, and someone will respond to you, but they could be in another country. You've never met them in your life. If it wasn't for LinkedIn, or Facebook or whatever. That's for that back to the PR thing. If you've if they contact you, then you go look at their profile. And they've written no content that matches what you're talking about. And you probably won't follow through. But then yeah, but now they've got good PR. And you're like, oh, actually, this person talks about a lot of stuff that we need.

Sneha Saigal 00:53:10

Kind of the way you put it makes sense because it's sometimes you have a user you end up working with doesn't know what they're looking for. They might have an idea, but maybe they're not sure if it until they see it, you know, repetitively and then they understand maybe this is what I need? Because very often you don't even know what you don't know,

Ryan Purvis 00:53:25

No, well, this is it. I mean, you know, one of the things that, you know, I always tell the story. So a friend of mine was made the CEO of a business, he was he was the chief marketing officer that he was paying a CEO, we were playing golf, we're just talking walking while you're playing. And you were saying, you know, I don't know what to do this problem. I said, Well, you know, let me have a look at you. Because, oh, well, why would you look, first of all, you know, that's what I do is like, Oh, I never even thought about I was like, Yeah, well, you know, this is how the things work. Sometimes, you know, once we looked at it, and we realised what it was, and we spent like, 11 months together, solving this problem, changed his whole business, you know, sometimes you need to be unconsciously incompetent on something. And that's kind of a weird statement. But you need to know you don't know something, and then you need to be okay with bringing in somebody. And you know, if you think about the big four consulting firms, they kind of get a bad rap because they just regurgitate the same stuff, and the expensive and you know, all those negative things.

But actually, the biggest problem with those guys is they don't usually finish a project, they don't you get the consulting person who gives you the strategy, then you get another team that does delivery, and they don't always meet. So a fractional is, I think, slightly different. Because usually the fractional is done at a lot of times, and now we bring them in, they're coming and going, You know what, I've done five exits, I'll help you. And it's a different experience, because they've got the scars from doing the whole thing through.

Sneha Saigal 00:54:38

Yeah, and it's about the process, right? It's not about, okay, here's what we need them to just deliver it to us in the next three months, or whatever it's about the process. And I think that's the key differentiator of, you know, when you have somebody who's full time, of course, you're spending like north of I think $4,000, just to hire somebody. And then when you have a consultant or somebody come in just from that perspective, you're so focused on just the deliverable. But with a practical executive, you're working literally like a plug and play, you're integrating them into your team, you know, for that period of time and seeing the process and what goes into it actually behind the scenes.

Ryan Purvis 00:55:10

Yeah, I'll say to one of the guys started coming on board. So you don't involve the politics. Like you're not there for fight, you're not there for five years, you're not there for promotions, and that kind of stuff, you're there to help solve a problem could be five months, could be two months, could be a year, probably two years, but you're not just there to solve it just just add value. In the end, the nice things about these sort of engagements is a person coming in, always has to show value. So they're always trying to be helpful, and always trying to be useful, because they've only got a limited time that whereas, and I'm not saying being employees about things, I just think when you're an employee, you have a different mindset, typically, because you there, you know, security and all that kind of stuff. But I think that the fractional stuff, and I think this is where the world is going is to be more of a hustler in the right sense.

Sneha Saigal 00:55:50

And then you're more agile, you know, just in terms of the economy, also where we're headed. And with everything that's evolving so much, you know, I think it's just brings a lot more agility, and it opens up a whole new network, right? I mean, like you mentioned, if I'm talking to Roger, who's a specialist in scaling a business, and then through him, I know somebody who he can work in tandem with, from the marketing perspective, you know, are from like a financial perspective or operations. I think it's just a whole network that opens up.

Ryan Purvis 00:56:15

Yeah, well, yeah. And that's I mean, that's the crux of our network is to be a in South African or an African thing, which is Ubuntu to, which means I am because we are, doesn't really have a bit. But it's basically unselfish, help each other out. And then by helping each other out, we'll all grow together. And that's exactly it. I mean, I expect that to be the case, if, you know, as people go into roles, and I've seen it badly in the sense of people come in, and they fire everybody bringing their mates in, which might work if everyone's high functioning, and it's a good team, etc. But I think there's there's value in also just been coming in and realising that you're not the right person to solve that problem over there. So you're bringing, you could recommend somebody in your network that could but not be precious about whether they use them or not. Yeah, but because you've built some trust with the business and the people running it, it might be a good thing, because then you bring somebody in and you work well with them. You help them even faster, or better, or whatever it is. But I think, you know, it's like picking a team for any sport. You pick the right players, honestly, the best players?

Sneha Saigal 00:57:14

Absolutely. Yeah, that's at the end of the day, like these units added earlier. It's about it. You're in the people business always. So it's about relationships, and it's about those connections.

Ryan Purvis 00:57:23

For sure, for sure. Get there's no we have to end because I've actually got educational school. So yeah, we will definitely keep in contact. I mean, I mean, dead serious when I say I think you maybe help us out with value execs question, so we'll talk about that later. But if anyone was to get a hold of you, what's the best way?

Sneha Saigal 00:57:40

Oh, LinkedIn as best it can reach out to me there. And also just write to me at hello at geeks and experts.com. If you want to talk about fractional PR executives, I'm happy to chat.

Ryan Purvis 00:57:48

Fantastic, super great, awesome. Good to meet you and have a good rest of the day.

Sneha Saigal 00:57:53

Likewise, you too. Bye. Bye.

Ryan Purvis 00:57:55

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Heather Bicknell is our producer and editor. Thank you, Heather, for your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DWW podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www.digitalworkspace.works. Please also visit our website www.digitalworkspace.works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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