 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. So we're doing a special series of podcasts which I'm recording over Google Hangouts. So we're doing audio and video because for some unknown reason people don't want to come see me face to face right now. But there's always opportunity and the cool thing is I'm able to now podcast with people from all over the world. So we're going to get an amazing eclectic mix of people from different industries, different perspectives to share their story and tell us you know their thoughts and feelings on what's going on right now and all of that cool stuff. Hope you enjoy it. Please subscribe in all the usual places and enjoy. And we're live. Thanks to Kat and Jay for imagining insights for joining. How are you doing? Good, thank you. We're supposed to do it face to face but you bind me unfortunately. That's not true. It's not quite true. How are you both finding maybe Kat first? How are you finding working from home and you've got a little kid? How are you balancing everything? Yeah I mean you know it is what it is. It's challenging. I'm quite used to working at home so I'm quite lucky in the sense that I'm set up and able to do that. I miss seeing other people and must admit Jay and I used to hang in out every day and we're quite tactile so we like a hug and those types of things so definitely using that. But we all you know our business operates predominantly online so I think largely positive with a few challenges I'd say. Were you working a little bit from home before then? Yeah yeah so I would always kind of split my time between office and home and so yeah for me it's as long as I've got my laptop then I'm kind of okay. Yeah great and Jay what about you? Yeah it's all right I don't mind it because I quite like the I'm a habitual person so I quite like the routine of doing the same thing every day so it's kind of like I'm up exercise go to park exercise come home start work finish the day play piano all that kind of stuff so I like it I like the routine of it and but same as Kat I miss I miss human beings man like I so love my wife I'm like yeah I need to just forgive you. I need to see some other people. I need other human beings man. That's true how long did it take to get into your little routine? Maybe a couple of days I think like I think it was like maybe two days and I was kind of just because it because I may I have a very strict routine when we're out of all of this like in the normal mode I do the same thing pretty much most days anyway I was exercising crap like that so it's kind of I'm in a routine anyway it's kind of just shifting my routine to doing it for a month and the what actually you know the one thing I'm missing most is going through my jiu-jitsu and more Thai classes like literally I feel so sad. I was about to start jiu-jitsu I was about to start it. Oh bro um fight zone fight zone in Bethany Green. Okay because like January I was like this year I wanted to learn jiu-jitsu because I realized if I get into it I can't look after myself but I have no idea what I'm doing really you know you know you can think and punch and kick and stuff I used to do some Muay Thai but I'm really into UFC and I loved it I love watching that and listening to Joe Rogan's podcast is the only other podcast I listened to so I was going to get on it and then lockdown happened and I was like damn. You need to come man it's really good man I've been doing it a few years I love Muay Thai I loved you so I think I just missed the I missed it because I normally I'm training what normally like 16 and a half hours a week and the moment I'm doing like two hours a week and I literally feel so sad. You're doing two hours a week of what of exercise because I can't like I can't really I can I can drill jiu-jitsu techniques but it's not the same with that physical person so like I'm my wife is tired of me like manhandling I'm like come on she's like running away around around the kitchen I'm like come on let's just let me just do one Komora one Komora. Crazy I've been I do CrossFit a lot and I've actually upped it since I've been in lockdown. They pivoted to Zoom classes so it used to be I've got a couple of kids and a wife and my wife likes to do stuff and then obviously I'm running a company and you've got to balance all these things so my exercise was like I've got to go to the gym and I've got to be booking in on the Sunday for the following week me and my wife decide what I want to do but now we can just do it every single day. It's great. I think a lot of people come out of this and be like actually you know what I want to go to the gym properly now like full-time. Yeah I think so. Yeah I'm seeing a lot more people like running now you know. Runners like. Yeah I'm doing like 5k donate five thing whatever it is. Yeah someone nominated me for that and I was like nah. He didn't fancy it. I went really hard for it and then I saw I saw what's his name. The Ross Barkley from Chelsea and he's posted he did his 5k in 16 minutes and then someone else said it was a it was fake so I'm not quite sure but 16 minutes with 5k is pretty decent. Yeah that's really awesome. That's like absolutely like level. Yeah yeah it's good it's good. Do you find them just kind of saying that you kind of the exercise and fitness and stuff helps you cope with like running a company, life, business. Yeah for sure I think we are both incredibly active people and like the gym is our friend like it's we're obsessed with fitness and I think not just from that physical point of view I mean it's something that we've done like our whole lives and I've like you know from gymnastics from young right through to dance which I studied and then kind of carried on with exercise and I'm now a PT but just I don't do that as a job but I'm kind of far as a PT. But for mentally yeah mentally definitely it is that I start my day with that and that just sets me up and I don't think I'm as nice a person if I don't exercise. Yeah me too. I'm exactly the same. I think it's like it's just a good way to set yourself up and just like I literally cannot start the day without exercise and it's just weird if I don't exercise I don't know what to do. Do you always do morning? Yeah oh dude like I have to do jujitsu more time in the evenings because they don't like the more actually that's a lie I'd be more time in the morning jujitsu in the evenings that's because they don't have any jujitsu classes in the morning but but yeah physically going to the gym I can't physically go to like a gym gym in the evening I'm like why am I here up when it's dark like it doesn't make any sense. You're far more than inch I'll mix it up a little bit whenever I can fit it in to be honest. Yeah when you've got kids is that in it it's so nice. Yeah and when did you guys start your business? So we've been going now since oh gosh May 2018 and we had a major pivot in the business like September last year so in this new way of working since September and then Kat joined in November and yeah I was thinking about this at the weekend funnily enough like we literally could not do what we do without the two of us like literally it's like I'm horrendous operationally and normal operationally and I'm only really good at sales so other than that it's kind of like literally without Kat I don't think we probably But Jay's thing is all about public speaking it's like get him a stage get him a video get him anything like that that is that's his bag. Public speaking people that's all I want to do but but yeah no so yeah we've been going to that and I'll probably just give you an overview of what we do so yeah we help agencies and brands to build their products their branding or their marketing by enabling them to collaborate with over 200 000 Gen Z consultants from across the country so there's young people between 16 to 25 the workers consultants for us so the way it would work is um some that the NFL they come and say okay we want to do a marketing campaign aimed at this generation and we go to our consultants by our app and we say to them pitch to us the type of marketing campaign you would do for the NFL so we get hundreds if not thousands of ideas from across the country we then filter through those choose the best 15 take those 15 to the brand the brand goes these are five ideas we love and then those consultants are invited into the brand's head office or right now done virtually and they work with the brand senior leadership team to actually create that marketing campaign or create that branding on that product whatever it may be so really it's crowdsourcing ideas and crowdsourcing talent for brands and agencies right nice and then they get employed paid and and so forth yes they get paid so they'll um they can make it through they'll get paid for their ideas but then if they make it through to the workshop stage um whether that's virtually or in person and then they get paid more for that day um but they can they won't necessarily get employed off the back of it but they can use that on their CV as experience which obviously opens lots of doors yeah what would be quite interesting actually if like if you look at the post-covid era i think i'm already starting to see more people who are kind of opting for a gig type um like work-star you know like a bunch of different things and and even a lot of younger people too and you might find actually that these people are doing it for a career choice branching to see if you see a big uptick in people wanting to wanting to contribute yeah what i think one of the interesting things that we've seen over the last maybe month or so is that our sign-ups have gone through the roof but also um a lot of our audience have been they were the last into a company so they're the first out so a lot of them have just graduated and they were just been employed and they've been made redundant so for a lot of them when we're speaking to them they're saying i need to have multiple streams of income coming in right and after this because i don't know if i go into my next job if something comes along they'll just can me again so we are definitely we're definitely we are a side hustle for a lot of people it's a way of getting to work with brands getting to work with agencies but they treat us as a side hustle which is great for us yeah they could be students that they could also be working or they could be at uni you know so they could be at school uni college or at work or actually nothing except um it's it's more about that age group it shouldn't really matter about what stage of your study or your career that you're in yeah yeah and i think it's great because you've got um there's a few there's a few platforms not for young people like Upwork and through others where say if i if i want some marketing expertise or IT development whatever i can go and stick my gig on there um which is quite cool and i just i see that more i see that growing going forward you guys with the age range that you're focusing on i think you'll yeah i think you'll find it will it will grow a lot in terms of the number of young people wanting to use it and also companies as well yeah 100 i agree i'm answering why did you uh decide to go for a co-founder in the end basically if i'm being honest i wasn't looking for a co-founder so when i was i was hiring for a head of operations um i met cat and i was like ah fuck like i can't hire her as a head of operation i was like she's so freaking because cat's been in industry for like she's just got so much expertise and everybody i spoke to about her was just like yeah she's amazing like you can't just hire her for some basic role i was like oh shit and then when we were basically we just went for long walks like we literally walked out all of east london just talking we were just talking about it yeah come for a walk with me and we'll have a chat yeah literally and then when i when i went after those walks i was kind of just like yeah you're perfect for that role but i think you're also perfect as a human being to help help me push this forward and and yeah it's literally invaluable like the now being able to take that pressure off of having to think of everything up myself or running a new of the company or whatever being able to share that with cat has i'm just so much happier about life because doing it is just the worst yeah they say it's important it's good to have a it's good to have a co-founder it's good to have people to share things with and share the load and stuff and it sounds like you've both got very different skill sets which it's perfectly yeah but very very different skill sets yeah yeah what were you doing before cat um a few things uh so i i was predominantly spent a lot of time in media agencies um so that was kind of the yeah the bulk of my career um also worked at buzzfeed for a bit and then kind of um after that started my own consultancy so media marketing consultancy which actually still runs um so yeah that's been that's that was four years ago now and then obviously found found jay and the rest is history nice and jay how come you started like what was the driver for the starting range yeah it's a good question i think that the the main the main push behind the starting it was really i just looked at our industry in our space and i just saw it's a freaking nightmare to try and get into it and and get involved and for us it was really we were seeing well for me i was seeing so much talent out there that had they had so many ideas that i know this industry needed but they just had no way of of getting it out there and for me i knew i had to really go out there and and prove that this talent was was worth bringing into the room so really it was just going out to brands and going hey let's just let's just try this and if we can come up with some good ideas then pay us and it was really doing that at the start and they were like okay cool and the NFL were like yeah let's give it a go in and it worked and that for a lot of brands it was kind of just like oh sick like there are talented people that are outside of our four walks there are talented people that aren't white and middle class and it was kind of like and it's just and it was just it was kind of really just going there's a whole bunch of talent out there that we are missing as an industry simply for the fact that we don't know how to reach out to them a lot of the time or we just don't know we don't know where they are so i think yeah it was really just looking at it and going okay there's a massive need in our space as an industry but then i saw that that need could easily be solved by the new talent that's coming up so we're just connecting the two together nice nice what's the plan moving forward so focus on the same thing you mentioned pivoting a little bit yeah so we actually so when we first started the company was actually we were running as a startup incubator in secondary school so basically just helping young people to launch their own businesses so that was it and it wasn't even a business it was kind of me as like a hobby while i was working consulting a firm i was kind of like i'll start doing this and just help people start their own business and just give them some of my own cash to help them get their business off the ground that was it that was all it was but then one of our brands came to us was kind of like hey we don't really want to do anything in the startup space but is there any chance your young people could help us to create a marketing campaign and then that's when the light bulb went off for me and i was like okay if they wanted other people might want it started to look into the space more and then carried on there so we made that pivot that full pivot in september last year and really the future for us is scaling across the uk more so we've got our new app that launches hopefully god willing september and and then really it's just scaling across the uk getting more young people on our platform UK but we literally all the time every brand we meet with all they ask is when are you going to the u.s when are you going to mainland i think just a lot of brands have um like you know there's if it's the big brands then they've often got offers in in the u.s but um yeah it must be every meeting right that we get asked that yeah next is next is the u.s and obviously europe as well so you need to get the u.s seeing oh good i'm so clean but yeah so i think the next the next step for us is really us mainland europe i've just seen recent over the last couple of days we've had consultants sign up from like Czechoslovakia and stuff so yeah which is really really cool so we're starting to spread over there we're getting consultants over there so really it's just starting to really solidify our solidify our presence in those countries and just continue to scale up yeah nice so it's a predominantly the clients are UK and then your your consultants are sounding like becoming more global and then as you build up you'll be able to go into different countries and exactly yeah we have big aims but also we do then have to go right we're still a small business we're still a startup we still just need to like go through you know some of those early processes but yeah i mean we've got we've got big dreams and why shouldn't we be very big definitely definitely i set up an office in new york in january which is okay yeah kind of it's kind of like um obviously it's a bit slower now than it would have done if covid hadn't hit um but it's just a it's a great thing to do and if you can find the right people there yeah it's it's great how did you go about finding that i don't know it's probably you meant to be asking us questions but anyway how did you go about finding the right people um in the in the US so so there's kind of there's probably two ways you can do it so to start with you can either think about people that you might already know you know so i i knew a great lady uh called kelly who i'd met a couple of years ago in london and she just left her last executive search firm i run an exact search business yeah um and so we connected i had a chat with her and it was just perfect timing and she was keen to set something up do it with us um so it worked really nicely otherwise you have to go and recruit um and so you know whether you might be advertising using a headhunter um whatever it might be but i think the first the first person there is the is the most important because you haven't got you're not physically there and um you know as much as this video is really cool it's just it's as you said like it's nothing nothing better than calling someone right so um and it takes time to like build up it's just different it's different over video yeah so um they say high or slow and fire fast yeah so you've just got to take your time to find the right people and um yeah often it's you know often it can be the person that really makes really makes a difference versus the product you know you often see like the most innovative products not do so well but something that's been done before just done a little bit better by some amazing team yeah yeah yeah the other thing is is uh i asked a lot of industry contacts so again like clients um so clients are quite good they've got quite a good network in your industry probably as well and there's always people the cool thing is there's a lot of people and more and more now wanting to move from big firms and work in smaller entrepreneurial environments yeah there's a lot of there's a lot to be said for it and and so yeah i think a lot of people will be keen when you're ready that's cool man i'm excited dude i can't i literally cannot wait for it and i do the good thing is one thing i'm happy about is even though we're a small team now we all have the the exact same values and i think for us it's just it makes everything so much easier because i always say if i get hit by a bus tomorrow i know that cat and the cat and team could literally just run off and and keep it moving because we have the same value and the same mission behind everything yeah yeah so again i was gonna say i was gonna say um so do you have an office at the moment if you weren't locked down yeah insured yeah yeah yeah could you see yourself moving more to like if people want to work from home did it have to come into the office or is it part of the of the community that you're building yeah we're completely flexible i mean yes we want to we want to be in an office of course um but we're also like very behind people having their own time and their own space and so you know yes we might have a standard working day but if people want to work different hours because they've got other stuff to do or they've got you know they want to exercise or whatever it might be then yeah so be it as long as the work gets done um that's the beauty of being a start-up as well is that you can kind of really create the atmosphere that you want to create and what we've got is a real like jay said our values but a really open dialogue so our intern Anna for example has as much of the voice as we do you know we share absolutely everything with her she knows how the business runs she knows the cash flow of the business she knows you know what we're thinking the calls we have if she might not be on them but she knows afterwards so i think yeah it's really important just to have as long as you've got a culture then that can work from anywhere yeah pretty cool what have you done to stay connected to the team are we doing like daily video calls yeah we have video call morning and afternoon i mean jay and i talk all the time anyway um again and daytime in our sleep we play games as well sometimes don't we do is jay likes a quiz so we do make sure that we're we're all connected what do you mean zoom or hangouts yeah yeah i think for some reason we were having so much trouble with hangouts every day um but in zoom sometimes it just does that like oh you've 40 minutes are done it's just locks you out yeah struggle i found the hangouts have been quite good to video these things and the effect for my team actually as well we do we do like a daily 2 p.m chat nice what's going on because everyone's also some people are living with other people some people are on their own yeah quite hard is to like to really understand how people are feeling on the video and they're like hey and then it goes off you don't know yeah yeah well that's also something that we've been discussing you know we've said haven't we that if you aren't feeling good and you're not having a good day or you're always frustrating you then you also need to say and we've had that chat quite recently there's been you know an issue with something and it's really got to both of us so we've got to talk about that because we need to work out how we can overcome that and especially now we're not there in person yeah yeah it's really important it's really important awesome guys really great to chat to you both um next time let's do face-to-face for sure and you can teach me a little bit of uh of jiu-jitsu what was the um what was the place you go to fight factory you say fight one fight zone in bethanyl green fight zone all right that's an advertisement i will shout them for my money when i advertise for them so yeah and you need to come to the jiu-jitsu class with marco or with raff and come to the moi tai class with hosey in the morning and i expect to see you there bro i honestly go literally i'm all over it i need to check their timetable so my wife doesn't beat me up for but i'm literally this was this was like written down i rate it down i want to learn jiu-jitsu this year um is that is the best martial arts you can learn easily how long have you done it for um jeez maybe five maybe five years maybe a little longer literally for as long as i can remember amazing amazing no i'm gonna do it man i'm hitting 40 next year and i'm like need to learn something new dude for real i think cat's frozen or is cat frozen yeah i think she's frozen oh you're still there all right perfect time perfect time to chat you too