Unveiling Avantra's Success Story: Emily Tippins Talks Marketing Strategies

Thank you. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

I’ve been in marketing since I left university, so that’s getting on for 25 years now. I’ve done agency-side as well as in-house. I started publishing in-house, working on academic journals. I had a list of academic journals that I needed to take to market in fields like geology and plant science and really exciting stuff that I had no clue about. But it was a really good opportunity for me to learn the principles of marketing. So I went through the charge Institute of Marketing program, the Postgrad with them. That gave me a really good understanding of Porter’s Five Forces and the Boston matrix, all those good solid marketing principles. And it gave me a really good foundation then to move my career on. Then I wanted to go to the city side. I worked in a couple of brand agencies, marketing agencies, and digital agencies. I ended up heading up the content and the SEO and the PR teams within one of those agencies. That was great because I got to experience some of the B2C side of business as well. I had some hotels that we were marketing for.

There was an online beauty shop that I was doing marketing for. I was doing their social media for them. That was a really good eye-opener into how brands play in those B2C fields and then actually take that learning on to when I’m working in B2B. Because moving then into B2B, after that, I went back into the house. I took my knowledge of what it was like to be on the agency side. When I’m working with suppliers, I can understand what it’s like from their point of view as well the time pressures that you have in the agency, and the really whirlwind and busy work. If you don’t get work out the door, you’re not getting paid. It’s that environment, very fast-paced. Then I found that being able to use the learnings from B2C marketing and take it into B2B, because at the end of the day, with B2B marketing, it isn’t that much different. You’re still marketing to people. We’ll quite often think that, oh, no, it’s a business marketing to another business. But within those, there are people. You’re still a person selling to another person and people buy people.

It’s really important, I think, as a B2B marketer, especially in the tech space where everything’s very overly complicated with lots of jargon, to speak like a human and make sure that your marketing still talks the love language of your customers and looks to how can you evoke those emotional reactions in people, even when you’re talking from a business level. That’s what I learned from my career. Then in the last, I don’t know, eight years, I would say, I specialized in the technology space. I found I could quickly understand what a complex technology platform or system might do and what the benefits are for other businesses. I was able to get my head around those complex scenarios quite quickly, even though I don’t have a technical background per se. And so, yeah, carved out a niche for myself, if you like, within that space of B2B tech marketing, which I really enjoy and I’m still loving it today.

I think that there are traits from when I was in the agency model that I have brought with me into B2B in-house because I like to treat our marketing teams. The marketing team that I’ve built up, I treat that as an in-house marketing agency. Our clients are internal stakeholders. In my team, we have daily stand-ups, we have two weekly sprints, we have Scrum, and we do our retrospective. That’s just the same way that an agency will work. You come together every day, you talk about what’s going on, what challenges you might have, and then as a team, how can you address those? I like to think of it as an in-house agency, and I think that’s a really good mindset to help the marketing team think about how they bring their PR into it. How can marketing educate others internally about the importance of what we’re doing and why it makes a difference? Also, I think it just gives an element of fun. I think one of my core values as a person is to have fun. I think when we’re at work, it shouldn’t be any different. We can have fun and still get loads of work done and still do really good things that create amazing results.

But we ought to be having fun at the same time, I think. That agency mentality where we get together, even though we’re all remote, we’ll make sure that we get together. If we can go to, for example, we’ve got a conference What’s going on in Orlando, I’ll try and bring my team over there so we can do a bit of a marketing off-site. And also just make sure that we get that FaceTime with each other, even though we are remote. I like to think that I bring out that enthusiasm and that agency vibe because I like that fast-paced urgency. And it’s funny as well because when I was in an agency, I was writing a lot of content at that point. And I used to struggle because the designers and the developers wanted that, like boom, music playing all day, boom, to keep the energy up. The guy that owned the agency, he wanted that, too, so that when clients came in, they were like, Oh, okay, yeah, this is the vibe of the agency. It’s all cool. I struggled. I’d be like Putting my headphones on and listening to Vivaldi’s classical Four Seasons or something.

But then I learned to adjust to it. And now I can’t work without music on. So even when I’m at home in my home office, when I’m not on a call, which is the majority of the time I am on calls, but when I’m not, I’ve got the music on in the because I just like the upbeat vibe that it gives me, and I find it keeps me energetic and full of the right positive energy for the day.

Yeah. We’re quite a small business. I would call ourselves a little bit of a disruptive brand. We are a smaller player in the market. It’s quite a large market with a lot of different big names. But we like to think that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. We’re being able to use the coattails of other people to elevate our position. We can do that by being a bit different. We have that ability as we’re not a huge, great big corporation. We can be a little bit different. We can be agile with how we change and tweak our brand and our brand messaging. The main thing that we’re working on at the moment, actually, with our story is trying to help people understand as a value proposition what our rallying cry is. We’re trying to create a movement. This is the old world of IT operations, especially SAP operations. It’s manual. It’s laborious, it’s repetitive, it’s time-consuming, it eats into your weekends and your evenings. That’s the old world, right? Now, Avantra is showing you that there’s a shift happening. There’s a movement, especially with AI. Everybody’s talking about that now, generative AI and automation.

We want to bring people into that revolution with us. Our rallying cry is to feel the difference. We’ve got lots of customers. Some of them we’re not allowed to talk about because they’re big names and they don’t want to give away their competitive advantage. But we want to show that other leaders, you’re also able to feel that difference in your business. The difference is better cost operations. You’re able to keep a lid on the cost. They’re not spiraling out of control. You’re able to give your team more important strategic work. They don’t have to sit there in a dark room doing boring tasks, which they have to do day in, day in and out. That can all be automated. Then, as a result, you’re able to transform your and business, do important projects like moving to the cloud or digital transformation. And so really our platform is an enabler for other people to be supercharged in their work. And this idea of shifting from what we call man-ops, manual operations, to AI-ops. Yeah, so it’s an exciting time. I think that as we’ve been a little bit ahead of our time in a way at Avantra, we were talking about hyper-automation about three years ago, and people didn’t know what that was, especially in our space of SAP operations where everything is quite slow moving.

It’s not like DevOps where everything is fast and exciting. Even talking about AI-Ops, it’s quite new in our space. But we’ve been able to lead the charge and people are starting to recognize the value of it and carve out a budget to be able to make these investments. We say one investment, one platform, and one single pane of glass to supercharge your competitive advantage with Avantra.

One example that I can give you is, We’ve got a customer called Scotts Miracle Gro. You might have heard of them. They’re big in the US. They have a product called Miracle Gro, and they’ve been using us for quite a few years now. There’s just one component of our product that allowed them to cut down It was a piece of work. It was a system refresh. They were having to do system refreshes at the request of the business, and they were doing it about once a month. It was taking them about five hours each time they wanted to do this new cut of the system refresh for new data. Once they put our product in, they were able to do it in about three minutes. Also, not only does that save them that time to allow that person to be moved on to other things, but it also means that they can give the business that system refresh more frequently. They’re more secure, they’ve got better data that’s up to date, and the business is happier because it’s not having to put in an IT request and then think, I won’t hear from anybody for a month until I get my request made.

That’s just one small example. Another example would be we had a customer who operates Smart Factory, they had quite a complex invoicing system, and it all fed off SAP. They They had an issue where invoices weren’t being picked up and therefore weren’t being paid. They had money owed to them, and they weren’t able to cash it in because they weren’t able to see where these invoices were going. Once they put our platform in, They had visibility over what was going on in their SAP landscape and could highlight the issue and find out where it was. And Avantra told them where the issue was and could then start to rectify those things. So they were then able to save a huge amount but also generate a lot more cash into the business quicker as a result of having our product. And one other thing with that customer was that they’ve got a lot of machinery within their smart factory. And Avantra was able to detect when something was close to the end of life. So again, if you’ve got lots of tooling that are producing a product that’s getting shipped out the door if one of those machines fails for whatever reason, and then you’ve got to have that machine down until you order the parts and it comes back in again, you’re not able to make your product and get it shipped out the door to then realize that revenue.

There are a lot of cost savings, but it depends on the niche operations of your business as to how our product can help. But that’s the great thing about it. It’s extendable. You can write your scripts in it, so you can build your automation.

We need to be working with companies that have a complex logistical setup. Usually, they’re multinational, and they are working internationally, but also shipping products internationally or doing business internationally. For example, you take Coca-Cola as a brand. They’ve got bottling companies, they’ve got products that they need to get to various locations, not only on a consumer basis but also to establishments like pubs, nightclubs, wherever. The more complex your business is, the more Avantra can offer you value. We always look for companies that have, I would say, probably a reasonable size amount of basic engineers. Basis Engineers. Basis Engineers, that’s just the name that’s given to people that work in SAP. The people who keep the lights on of SAP within the IT team are called Basis Engineers. You want to have a sizable team so that you know that they’ve got a big enough landscape that it’s going to work for us. Because if you just got one instance of SAP and you’re running a relatively small operation, a corner shop, or something like that, our product isn’t going to be a good investment because you’re not going to see the return.

That’s what we’re targeting your large enterprises with, let’s say, at least 10 to 20 basis engineers and with a complex SAP landscape where you’ve got lots of different products with us, HR, PR, finance, all the different SAP products within that space.

Yeah, this is a really interesting question because it’s changed, right? I’ve been with Avantra for nearly four years. When I first joined, we were in COVID or we were just coming out of COVID. No physical events were happening. Everybody was just grappling to get to terms with online events and, Oh, we better put on our event, and people didn’t know how to do it what platform should we use,e and how we communicate with people. When I first joined, it was very much about setting up that online virtual platform. We use, for example, we used a platform called Bright Talk, which has already an audience base there. Then you promote your webinars to your segment, your segmented audience with keywords, and different types of algorithms within that platform. We went from getting most of our leads and most of our business from physical events. All of a sudden needing to jump onto virtual and sometimes hybrid. We also partnered with third parties that we knew. For example, for us, we’ve got big user groups. In America, you’ve got ASAG, which is the American SAP User Group. In German, you’ve got DSAG. They’re a UK ISAG over here in the UK.

And so all of those partners of ours, if you like, they’ve got the community. They were already putting on webinars, so we would sponsor those or we would pay to have our series within that. So that was one immediate shift that I saw coming in here. Then, of course, once people started to get back into the real world and want to see the YTS of people’s eyes again and start traveling, it was very much, wow, the floodgates have opened. We can get back to doing events, I was quite nervous about doing that because they take up a big chunk of your marketing budget. They’re not cheap to sponsor these events, especially when you’re talking, so within SAP, their biggest event is Sapphire. You can easily spend a quarter of a million on a sponsorship package just to go and attend and be a sponsor. We needed to understand how can we make use of that money when we’re going into an unknown. We don’t know whether it’s it’s going to work for us because the world has changed. I was having a conversation with somebody else, actually, the other day, and they were asking me, What things have changed for you over the years?

I said, If I look back four years ago to the first event that I did with Avantra, even though I’ve been doing events for years, but just the first event with this company, we went along to a conference in Vegas. With these venues, you have to submit your graphics about six months in advance. They want to see it, they want to sign it off, and then you’ve got to get it to somebody who’s going to do the production of the bills of your booth. You’re working very hard to a deadline. Then when you get to the event, you think, That was six months ago. We’ve moved on from there. Our messaging has moved on. Or we’ve changed, especially in a startup environment where you’re rolling with it every day and trying to be agile. And so we turned up to this event, the first one in Vegas, and we just didn’t have any messaging. We didn’t know who we were. And so I remember we ended up with just our logo. Then I got our graphic designers to print some just wood effect boards on the back of the booth. And then I was like, it’s looking a bit empty.

So I went to Walmart and I bought some plants and I bought some of those electric LED candles and put those on the booth. And we have a sofa and a little coffee table. It looked nice, but everybody was like, Who are you? Are you a home decor company? What are you? We made the best of that event. Looking back, I think, good for us. We weren’t quite confident in our messaging and our value proposition, but we went out there anyway, and we listened to what people said. We chatted with people, we understood what message they wanted. What makes sense to them? What’s their pain point? Now, fast forward to four years later, that same event is happening this week. It’s happening right now in Vegas. My team’s out there in Vegas at the moment. Within four years, it’s quite a short space of time in marketing when you’re talking about brand and brand strategy and changing people’s perception, because, at the end of the day, that’s what a brand is, right? It’s whatever lives in people’s minds and their perception of you. But I had the first bit of feedback from my team where they came back and they said, Wow, people are coming up to us and saying, I know who you are.

I know Avantra. You’re the automation guys, aren’t you? Or, You’re the ones that do AI. I’m so proud of my team, where they just think, Yes, finally. From years of having salespeople come back and say, Nobody knows who we are. All this money we’re spending is pointless. Nobody listens to us. They don’t know who we are. They don’t know what we do. Then all of a sudden, it’s, This is why we keep chipping away at the brand awareness pillar of our marketing strategy. It’s very easy within a small company, especially when you’re investor-owned as we are, to only listen to the noise that comes in about pipeline, revenue, gross, need it now, change. We were smart enough to have one eye continually on brand awareness because we needed that air cover, and four years in, starting to pay off. After all, it does take time. I just thought that was an interesting story for you as how things change in four years isn’t that long in the grand scheme of brand strategy.

Yeah, you’re right. So Compass is definitely at the moment the biggest spend within the marketing budget. But we also have quite a large chunk of money that we spend on content production. But that wouldn’t just be, for example, white papers and articles and press. We’re doing something with a partner at the moment called TechPros, and they’re doing community-based marketing. Last year, it was all about ABM. This year, it’s all about community-based marketing. And what’s slightly different about that from based marketing is that you’re trying to bring people together. So your industry peers, you bring them together. So let’s go back to Coca-Cola again. Say I’ve got a prospect of CocaCola and they’re on my target account list. I want to go and get these people and bring in the business. Then I need to look at similar businesses. And if I’m targeting the CIO, I want to go and look at the CIO of Pepsi, and I want to go and have a look at other bottling companies, or I want to go and have a look at other FM the CG companies. Then what we do is we invite them all into what we call a challenge forum.

We get all these CIOs into one room and they’re like, Oh, yeah, I want to go to that because I’m interested to know what Joe blogs his thoughts are on this particular challenge that we’re dealing with in SAP. When you get them on this challenge forum, they all submit something that’s a bit of a pain point for them at the moment or a particular challenge. It might be, how do you move to the cloud? How do you deal with the rise of SAP? Should you remain hybrid? Should you keep your legacy stuff on the premises, et cetera? They all vote on which challenge they’re going to discuss. Then as a group of peers, they come together and help each other to get through what their challenges might be. They might be, Oh, yeah, I’ve got experience, but actually, this is what we did. Once you’ve got people engaged in that way, it’s not a selling environment. It’s a value-added, educational relationship-building environment. We’re building these relationships and that almost buys us the right to then go back to that participant and say, Hey, really appreciated your contribution there. Would you be interested in having a quick call with us we think we might be able to help with some of the things that you raised.

You’re stroking their ego a little bit, but you’re connecting them with their peers, and only then are you suggesting that maybe there’s a sales call to follow up after that.

Yeah. I think there are probably a couple of key things. The first thing I would say is when you’re doing your keyword research, try and think of that in terms of the questions that your ICP or your personas are going to ask. Not just, for example, let’s go with Coca-Cola again. Not Just with, for example, our fizzy bottle drink, you want to go with things like, What is the best fizzy drink to offer at a party? For example. You want to go with those long-tail questions because that allows you to provide more of an opinion. It means that your keyword is slightly more niche, so you’ve got more chance of being competitive in that field. It also offers something of value because we all know that the way that we use search engines now has changed. I remember 20 odd years ago or 15 years ago, whenever, typing into Google and being clumsy with just keyword stuffing to try and get as a prompt to try and get a result. But now we just use it as we use ChatGPT and other chatbots, And we’re putting in there, Where can I find X, Y, Z?

We’re very specific about our questions. So the more you can be specific with your content and your keyword research as to what your audience wants to know, the allows you to carve out your niche and be a thought leader the when you can be able to put your content strategy together. That’s probably the first thing I would say. Then there’s a tool that can help you with that. There’s something called Ask the Public. I think it’s called. It might be, answer the audience. I’ll I’ll find out and I’ll let you know.

Answer the Public, that’s the one. Neil Patel, isn’t it? Yes. It’s Neil Patel, he’s behind that platform. It’s a really good tool to use, again, to find, if you don’t know what questions are that people are asking that are within your personas, it will tell you. You put a few of your keywords in and it will start to give you ideas. It’s a bit like a hub and a spoke situation. So this is your main question. Then off the back of that, Oh, here’s another question that somebody asked that’s related, and then you can build your content framework around answering those. Then possibly the last thing, so I’ll just give you three things there. The last thing I’d say on that as well is, and I wrote about this in a LinkedIn article just the other day, but When you’re trying to be thought leaders within your content program, I would suggest that you try and get your subject matter expert to agree on what their stance is. If you are writing about, I don’t know, let’s go back to Coca-Cola again, why not? If you are writing about fizzy drinks, you need them to take a stance and have an opinion.

The more controversial they can be, the better because that’s what generates interest. The more people are likely to come on a comment and either agree or disagree, I strongly recommend trying to get your subject matter experts, your SMEs, together in one room, talk about your content strands, and discuss together what is your stance, what’s your angle and try and be a bit more like a journalist and try and find out, Okay, that’s interesting. Whereas everything else that people have said is just ubiquitous. It’s very me too, and everybody’s doing that. Try and find your difference, I would say.

Absolutely, yeah. I think building backlinks is one of the hardest things to do within an SEO strategy. It’s really difficult. We tried various things. We’ve had websites where, for example, we worked with one SEO partner, had a large number of customers or clients, and they would use their websites to build out content within those particular niches, and they would post content on our behalf within those to get the domain authority up and push it back to our website. So that’s one thing. We don’t do much of that anymore. We find that it’s better to dovetail it with your PR strategy. So we have a PR agency called BCM, and we work with them to make sure that all of our pitched media and our editorials go out and have a backlink to our website and possibly even some embedded long tail backward, backlink, sorry, to go to a specific deep page within our website. More often than not, some publications are very much, No, we don’t do that. That’s not what we do. But more often than not, 99% of them are like, Yeah, sure. Of course. We’re happy to do that.

Sometimes if you don’t ask, they won’t even give you a link back to your main homepage, but you just have to ask. We’re keen to make sure that for every single editorial pitch that goes out, we include a link back to our website. Then another interesting one to mention, there are lots of other tricks and tips, but just one thing that I think might be useful. We’ve just started using a platform that allows us to bring all of our employees’ LinkedIn accounts together. What we can do then is have a dashboard that says, this is your company’s or your teams and metrics. This is your share of voice that you have as a whole company. This is how much network growth you’ve had in the last seven days. The number of comments or the number of invitations that you’ve sent. It gives you that much wider visibility of the power of all of you together as brand ambassadors. Then you can break it down into different teams as well. I can see, for example, within the I’m one of the people that’s got a top voice. I’m not the top voice, but I’m one of the people that’s got a top voice.

Again, how can I help other people within the business to generate their voice and get it higher up the rankings, if you like? One of the things that we also do then within that platform is follow the people that we know are influential within our space. Not necessarily the people we’re trying to sell to, but the influential people. We follow them, and every time that person posts, it flags up in our system you can integrate it into Slack as well, so it pings you a note. Then as an admin, I can say, boost this post, which pings out to everybody within our company to say, I need your help to swear around this person’s content. It might be mine, it might be somebody else in the business, but more often than not, it’s somebody who’s an influencer within our space. Then as many employees as possible, I would hope will be going on to LinkedIn, and responding to that person’s article, not just saying, Hey, great article, but putting a comment that’s intelligent, insightful, and ideally has a similar alignment in messaging to all of the rest of the Avantreans, we call them people at Avantra.

Then you just basically you’re making sure that within that piece of content that’s very influential when you stream down the comments, you just got a lot of different people from Avantra all saying something very similar and intelligent. Of course, it’s linking back to their profile. If I see an interesting comment, I always go and have a look at somebody’s profile and go, Oh, they look interesting. If you set LinkedIn up properly, you’ll have a call to action on there saying, visit my website. ‘ Every single one of our employees is saying, visit my website, ‘ and putting intelligent content on LinkedIn creates more traffic back to our website and increases the share of voice.

Client retention is interesting. For us, we’ve got one of the highest NPS scores within our space. We’re plus 65. An SAP, for example, I think they might even have stopped tracking it because it’s not very good. It goes to plus 100 and then to minus plus 100. So being plus 65 is very good. We also have about a 99% renewal rate. So once people buy from us, they continue to renew year on year. We say the Vagas conference that we’ve got going on right now, we’ve got a big splash on our booth saying more people were new to AventAvantra than any other vendor in this space. Come and ask us why. One of the main reasons is because you’ve got a quality product, you’ve got to keep your brand promises right. We’ve got a quality product. We have a lot of subtle features, which means that people can use them in a way that’s not shoehorning them into a particular way of working. If you take HubSpot off the shelf, for example, it’s very rigid. There are a few things that you can change or you can buy more modules, but ultimately, it’s like a standard box of tools.

Whereas with our platform, you get those out-of-the-box things, but then you can also extend and build on top of it with automation recipes, if you like. That’s one thing that goes down very well with our customers. We have a customer council as well. We bring our customers together, we get their input on what they want to see in terms of new functionality, as well as look at what the market is wanting. At the moment, the market is going towards Gen AI. We’re looking at them building our copilots. We’ve just launched the concept, which is called Avantra Air. A bit like being able to have some ChatGPT on your shoulder saying, Did you know that you got a problem here? Here’s how you may fix it. Or, Do you want to schedule a maintenance window? Because we can see an opportunity over here. Do you want to go and do that? We’ve got some interesting things in development with our AI product, which we’re probably going to do as a separate SaaS product. The fact that we have a co-innovation with our customers is really important. Quite often, we’ll work with a particular customer because they want a specific set of functionality.

If it makes sense to do it because the rest of our customer base will benefit, then we’ll do it. That’s one thing. I think the last thing I’d mention as well is just the customer support is fantastic. It’s exceptional customer support. We’re always getting great feedback about it. We jump on it, we rescue people when there’s a crisis We make sure they understand how to fix it in the future. We’re teaching them to fish, not just giving them that fish.

We’ve just employed a head of AI, and our head of AI has got some fantastic ideas about where he wants to take the product. It’s all very exciting. I think what our customers are probably really keen on is this SaaS offering. At the moment, for example, when you buy our product, we need to go and put an agent on your server. You can’t just put in your credit card and go, Hey, I want to buy Avantra today. Yes, I’ll go and have that, thanks. Being able to offer some SaaS element where more junior members of staff, for example, can go and say, Oh, yes, I want to buy the Avantra AI copilot, Avantra Air. I want to go and buy that. And then they can. It also means that we’re giving our customers freedom of choice. It’s up to them whether they go to the cloud stay on-premise or they’re hybrid. Whichever they want to do, we’re agnostic, but we’ll support them in their journey wherever they’re going to go. I think that’s something probably that the market is going to have to look at, especially in our space. Sap is an example, a hugely successful business.

But I think they’ve become slightly to some of the requirements that the market is asking for. They’re getting people to sign up these huge contracts and then they’re locked in. They’re then saying we’re not going to help you with innovation unless you’re on one of our big contracts. I think being able to offer flexibility to customers, depending on how they want to basically how they want to carve out their future as a business. Some businesses just will not move to the cloud. They just don’t want to. They’ve got too much important data. For whatever reason, they can’t put it in the cloud. I don’t think we can shop people out from that. But sometimes I think that some of the larger businesses like SAP are making those decisions for their customers, and it starts to not feel quite right. What we want to make sure that we do within the market is make sure we offer that flexibility, create products that people want to buy, and allow them to have that freedom of choice. Ai is here to stay. It’s not going away. But we also, I think need to be careful.

There’s a much bigger ethical discussion about AI within the different spaces, but within SAP operations, within IT operations, is something beneficial. As I said earlier, it’s there to help people reduce the number of repetitive, boring tasks and do some interesting things, very intelligent people who do some really important work. Then you have better talent retention, you attract better people. I think AI and AI Ops are only just starting in the SOP space, but out there in the wider world, it’s going at a great pace. I think there are hundreds of businesses starting up each week just in the UK with some element of AI within their product. So yeah, it’s quite a fascinating space at the moment.

Yeah, so we’re starting to embark on a project where we’re looking at our brand narrative. As I mentioned to you before about that first conference that I went to, we didn’t know what we were, what to say, what our messaging was. And we’ve been working on that. We’ve done some great work on our personas, and we’ve got to understand what it is that the pain is within our ICP. Now what I’m doing with my team is working on the strategic brand narrative, making sure that we understand this, as I mentioned before, this rallying cry. As a business, what is our rallying cry? What are we calling people to come and join? What’s the revolution? Then my team can make sure that we take that on and activate that in the market, but also so that we work with HR and the people team to make sure that people understand what our brand promise is so that there’s alignment up and down the spine of the business. Because when you have that alignment, people then know what they’re doing & how to make decisions in their daily work because they’re thinking, Oh, yes, this is why we’re here.

This is what we do. It’s beyond making money. It’s the purpose of why we’re here. Then every decision they make, regardless of what function they’re in, whether they’re in IT, HR, marketing, or finance, they can base their decisions on that brand promise and think, Yes, that’s why we’re doing this. That’s why we’re going forward. That’s the project I’m working on at the moment. I’m excited. I’m working with an external brand consultant who’s used to this space and what we do. We’ve got a workshop planned in Philadelphia in a few months, so I’m excited about that. It’s just a really good growth time, I think, in the market, and I’m excited about it.

I’m ready for that. Let’s go for it.

Overthinking.

Yeah. Do you want an explanation or is it that rapid fire?

Yeah. I think that as a person, I have a tendency to overanalyze every single thing, and sometimes you just need to be bold and go out there. I think rather than overthink it, be bold, push forward, and go and do it because you can always seek forgiveness rather than permission.

Budget tracking. Spreadsheets. I hate spreadsheets.

Brand and brand strategy. I just find it fascinating the psychology of it is how you can shape people’s perception of what you are.

No, not. I wanted to be a singer. I did.

I did. When I was at university, I was in a band and we got on Spotify. We’re still there if I look hard enough today. We had quite a few gigs in London and Oxford. So yeah, I did it. Nothing major came of it, so I went and got a proper job.

I think I searched. This is boring, but I searched for a book, a marketing book by Martinumier, and I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I wanted to search for it. That’s quite boring, isn’t it?

You’re very welcome. I enjoyed it. Thank you.