Shakespeare, Seth Godin, Comedy, Why London Needs a Laugh & The Weirdest Marketing Podcast You’ve Ever Heard

0:00Hello, hello, hope you are wonderful. This episode is sick. It's with the absolutely hilarious Henry Hayes whose content I have been gorging on ravenously on Instagram. He's absolutely hilarious. He does all these little skits about Londoners and kind of just very observational and hilarious. So I was gorging on his content. Then I found out on LinkedIn that he actually works for a company called Passion Fruit who are a marketing freelance company that work with PepsiCo, AB and Bev, Mars. So there is an FMCG link up here. There's tons in this episode. it's a real sort of treasure chest chocolate box conversation that gallivants all over the gaff which is what i love we talk about shakespeare we talk about seth godin seth godin his sort of marketing principles run through this conversation comedy you know i think there's so many parallels between comedy and marketing it's a lot about you know empathy understanding people what makes them tick um you know comedy is kind of like playing games seth godin talks about marketing is about playing games understanding the system you're in again that is comedy comedy is observing the system great marketing does that too um loads in this we talk about jimmy car how how to find your edge um you know henry was kind of a rock bottom a couple of years ago and if you're feeling a little bit like you don't know what you're doing this episode has just got tons and just going for going for it um we talk about nike's uh brand building strategy while they only focus on 12 cities how to host amazing events i think in today's digitized world hosting small remarkable beautiful events is is just genius and henry's a master at this he's an absolute master at this um i absolutely loved it he's hilarious um i really hope you enjoy it as much as i did recording it please um do the usual shenanigans share like leave us a five star review pour for and enjoy thank you

2:34I fluctuate between sort of, you know, lardy tardy and trying to get ripped. But he was like, mate, just cut out because I was doing like four lattes a day, which is that's like a fucking thousand calories just in lattes. Cows bloody love it. Yeah, exactly. Nice. But yeah, mate. So what I'd like to start with is paint the picture of the six months before your first vid you put on Instagram. What was your life looking like then? Actually, what was the first vid you put out? Yeah, okay, that's actually a really good place to start. I think I'll come to the first point first, then come to the second.

3:10I think, you know what, like, it sounds really well. Firstly, I find it quite alien that you're having a chat with me. I think this is like, I don't know, it's quite a mad moment for me, right? Like I'm sort of only a year into me doing the comedy. I'm only nine months into me working at Passion Fruit. I think, and my mates know this, but where I was a year ago into now is a very different place. I was partying hard. I was quite lost. I set up a business with my mate. We did it for four years. It was kind of the equivalent of like a grad scheme, but we sort of set up a food and drink discount and rewards app, and it went okay.

3:46Like, we got to travel around the UK and meet great restauranteurs. I lived in Manchester for two years, lived in Oxford, and then that kind of ended. Somehow the business is still going. I don't know how. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still going somehow, which is great. And then I went into an e-bike business run by really great lads. I kind of knew a few of them before I started and huge growth business during COVID, as you know. And then, yeah, and then I just kind of, as ever with sort of businesses that go through like a massive growth spurt during that period, you know, obviously what goes up must come down, right?

4:22So I just found myself - Especially going out on a Friday night and party. 100%. And I just like, there was always this thing of me sort of not really thinking that I was fulfilling my potential. And all of my mates and my mum and my dad and my girlfriend were just like, you know, we think you're quite funny. Like, but you're not really showing that. And I think for ages I was trying to basically be quite, not corporate because I was working in startups, but be like quite businesslike and be sort of quite serious. and I wasn't leaning into kind of who I probably naturally was outside of work but outside of work I was playing this huge party animal quite literally like the monkey in the room just being the laugh out loud guy getting his top off I don't know like dancing silly or whatever yeah and I just found myself quite lost in that in that moment and so I then tried to start looking into new jobs um just because I was like I need to maybe just have a shift of life and so when I did that I basically cut out drinking like I cut out drinking in September last year um just to see how that went and I basically just wrote down on a piece of paper I was really struggling to get a new job in fact this one recruiter was like well done mate you're the marketing director of a bike shop big up now fully charges a lot more than that it's great you buy retailer yeah yeah she was like what else have you got and I was like actually not much so So I kind of then was like, right, what am I going to do?

5:49So on a piece of paper, I just wrote, what am I good at? I think I can make people laugh. I think I'm all right at marketing. I can talk, I can sell or whatever. What am I bad at? I'm bad at the festivals. I'm bad on Friday through to Sunday. So I just crossed that out. And then my best mate, Geordie, just said to me, you know, Henry, you need to start doing some comedy stuff, whether it's stand-up or whatever, just try and put it out there. So in sort of October last year, I put out my sort of first real videos and I did like a couple on TikTok. And then my first one that I put on Instagram was a Gore-Tex character.

6:29Yeah, with the Tash. With the Tash. Running, yeah. Arc'teryx, Patagucci, all that stuff. But obviously like there's hundreds and thousands of us and like rule number one of comedy, be a hypocrite because I'm wearing that stuff as well. Yeah. And I don't know, there was just something funny around like Londoners who like are basically just doing a walk down Hackney Marshes just wearing full Gore-Tex gear. Yeah. And I put that out and it just got an insane response. I got sort of 2.6 million views on Instagram. And I just had like 2 ,000 followers on Instagram, just my mates. And then overnight I was like 6 ,000 followers.

7:03And I was like, whoa, okay. and so and more most importantly I wasn't I didn't like necessarily mind about the followers I was more like oh that made me really happy doing that I just found myself really happy that I put something out end to end I wrote it I acted it and it was a great nice to have people found it funny so that was like the the start of it and then I just kind of built from there um and and kind of from there it's kind of all kind of rolled into place a bit it's mad because it's i think jimmy car talks about finding your edge yeah i don't know if you've read his book and i was i had the same sort of bikes jimmy car actually oh nice yeah yeah yeah 73 well done jim happy happy days him on hamstered heath having a go on that bad boy he won't like me saying that but the uh it's it's um and i had the same sort of thing i was like driving cheese around london yeah thinking what the fuck am I doing yes and I think the way you find your edge is you you write down a list this is what my kind of thinking is you write down a list of your eccentricities um your kind of idiosyncrasies and really lean into that one but then two is you can actually think you can actually be okay at five things but combine them together plus your um uh idiosyncrasies and you like a category of one so like with with this podcast it's like i can't i'm not gonna be the best podcast in the world i'm not that uh good at i'm okay at sales i know quite a lot about brands i love food and drink but you combine those things together and you get hungry which is kind of different same with you it's like you know you're obviously fucking hilarious but you're probably not as funny as jimmy car you know enough about amount but jimmy carpet isn't much about marketing as much as you combine that together and you get the henry's a's edge exactly i think a lot of i I think a lot in life, it's about finding that slipstream and edge.

8:58Again, obviously, you're not the best writer in the world, but I do write. So it's like, but you have these four, you know, one plus one equals five. It's all about, and my boss at work tells me, it's all about just going from naught to one in one area. And also, like, the worst thing you can do is not take the first step. Yeah. Which is basically what we're saying here. Yeah. It's like, you know, to be honest with you, I think you're doing a fantastic job. Like, you're doing really well. But, like, just making that first step in those little areas, you get to where we're getting to and you and i are on the start of this journey you and podcast me um in business and trying to do content yeah at least we've made that first step and then it's just about to your point like just continuing to do it you may have good days you may have bad days you may have weekends you're like reps isn't it yeah yeah just reps it's just reps and getting there and i think so what was the hardest bit because i i it's not even it's not even about putting a funny video out online or doing your first podcast it could be you know it could be not having the confidence to go into to do a presentation at work but taking that first step what was the hardest bit about taking the first step like putting that that jokes video out or were you so at rock bottom that you were just like fuck it I was so at rock bottom you know my girlfriend should take massive credit like I almost get quite emotional about it because she was just seeing me just being a bit of an idiot she never said one thing she was just like there is a support and I think for me, I just needed to get some self-respect back, like desperately.

10:24Yeah. Look, I'm not fucking Jimmy Carr. I'm not bloody Stuart Lee. I'm not, you know, Danny McBride. No, I'm a little piece of shit on their shoe. But I'm just so proud within the last year of where I've managed to get to just from that. And I think, to be honest, people say, oh, you know, are you scared of what your mates would think? I don't care. Like one of my best mates, George, is like, mate, you put out way too much shit on LinkedIn. I'm like, I don't care what you think. Like, I don't care. Like, I think in order to do comedy, I'm not comedian, I'm a content creator, I want to make that clear.

10:57But in order to do that, or in order to build a personal brand on LinkedIn, as well as making that first step, the other most crucial thing is not giving a shit about what people may think of you. Because I think I'm going to have some people who are like, fucking hell, that wanker who does, you know, London-centric, gentrified comedy. Like, I'll give it a rest, mate. and you know what they're probably the type of guys that i look up to maybe a finn taylor maybe like a horatio gould guys in the comedy circuit at the moment but at the same time i'm like you got to start somewhere and um you know i dedicate a tiny bit of my time to that comedy and i think what i'm most looking forward to in years to come five years ten years down the line it's like right if i'm coming out more and more time on that where can it get me but at the same token like I'm almost afraid to do it because the alignment with business and with the comedy is working quite well for me at the moment and I love the fact that I can compartmentalize my comedy through my work you know I'm very strict on my time and and it really helps me not procrastinate during work I get in at nine but before that I've done my written comedy in the mornings I've done my reading I've done my exercise and then from nine till six at the moment and bearing in mind like a year and a half ago mate i was quite literally fiddling with my todger underneath the table yeah yeah you're like all right okay whatever now i'm like yes okay yeah fiddling with my todger on a podcast why not metaphorically i fiddled with my todger every other day i have it in my google meets important to say todger yeah it's always it's always a small one yeah um so like you know i think that's um yeah and just it's mad so it's like really helped me with my work I think and obviously I've got a long way to go with my work and my career and trying to be a better manager and and marketing lead at Passion Fruit but I think it really gave me like it's given me clarity of thought and that tunnel vision and it's really helped me in other areas I think at the moment hopefully my girlfriend would agree like I'm probably a better boyfriend than I've ever been I I've had mates playing with your todger anymore

13:10but um you know and i and i think i've had some mates reach out for advice now and i'm like oh my god like i i was the class clown i would look up to other mates i still do i'm like they're the intelligent ones like i'm like oh my god i'd love to just have a tiny bit of your intellect i think what's been really mad in the last three months and again i want to make it abundantly clear like i'm really no one like i'm not of any ilk at the moment but like just to have people reach out to me to be like oh man i'm seeing you doing this and like yeah yeah yeah what maybe you thought about this with me and help and i'm like oh whoa that's really really i don't know it's just really nice it's matt back to that edge thing when you have your edge and you find that edge it people come to you which is just so like yeah but so there's that then the other thing is i spoke to um founder of riverford right uh you know riverford got live a life on the veg so i mean just a bit yeah yeah yeah yeah uh and he was saying when founders sell their business they they swap their purpose for prozac i they get so fucking depressed because they've lost their purpose it's almost the reverse with you it's like you were in that dark dark place yeah you're almost like thinking you've got two options henry either takes prozac or he finds his purpose and I think when you're at that rock bottom, actually rock bottom is a propeller to propel you forward.

14:28100%. And, you know, as you say now, it's like you've got that thing, you're up before work, you do your comedy, you were writing this morning before we met. Yeah. And then you slay the nine to five or nine to six. Nice Gen Z time, well done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, and I think it's super powerful, mate, and I think it can help a lot of people, but it's finding that purpose. What was the first thoughts in your head when you woke up, when you were in that really dark malaise? just like i'm letting people down letting who down my my mum my dad my like i think you know they they put a lot on their line for for my like education growing up and you know i got massive scholarship to go to a very well-known private school and which private school uh eton let's drop that in there yeah yeah yeah yeah i got huge scholarships to go there wasn't like my dad uh been through like a bit of a court case it gone a bit sour like you know they managed to get me and my brother through to like really good schools eat in millfield on like very high scholarships yeah and i i know and and i never like i'm just so grateful to them for that obviously eating gets really bad press but it's because the five percent are in the public eye who are doing let's be honest sometimes really bad shit but there's a an incredible work ethic at that school that is unparalleled.

15:49Like, even people say, oh, uni's hard. I was like, mate, I was fucking grinding my ass off. What's the day like in Eaton? Well, you're up early, you're bed late, you're working. Like, you know, I was working until 10.30 at night, like doing essays and stuff like that. And just getting a work ethic in you was something that I got from those five years that I don't think people talk about. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get to. It's so reductionist to say everyone that goes to Eaton is an absolute twat. Yeah. Like there's obviously, there's clearly, and it can, and it's a kind of, you can call those, who said it the other day, like a nepo baby, a nepotism baby, which is always a joke.

16:23I was like, I agree that there's obviously, obviously there's that, but it's still, they're clearly doing something fucking right. Because the people on a scholarship and stuff, they're still flying. That's the thing. So what is, what do most people get wrong about eating? So the work ethics one, because I remember we used to play you at rugby and you used to go and get changed in the fucking geezer's room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, what's going on here? He's wanting to see my fucking Tondra there, mate. I think what most people get wrong is like, you know, 25, 30 % of kids that go to Eton are on scholarships.

16:54Like I was very fortunate. I got sort of a headmaster scholarship there, which is not really talked about. You get either a King's scholarship or a Muses scholarship. So like your George Orwell. Headmaster. It's more like big bursaries for kids that they think have the potential, but their parents can pay for them to go there. So I think like people don't talk about that. And also all of the surrounding work that the school does in order to put kids into areas or the services around the local community to make sure you bloody know you are the most privileged kids going. Now, what I'm trying to get to, back to the point about letting people down, is despite that, you still get this feeling that you're meant to do great things.

17:34And that is, I think, one of the worst things that any young boy or girl can kind of have within them. because there's this feeling, and we know this now as millennials in the 21st century, that, you know, like it's, we're probably the first generation that's not going up. Like, you know, the first generation that have plateaued and to be told, not to be told, but to have this feeling that you're going to be successful. When you come out of uni, you know, or come out of school and you're a bit like, fuck, I need to do great things here because of all these people before me that have done great stuff and stuff like that.

18:11And you kind of have this feeling. So I think that eight years of continual pressure of, and I didn't really have much direction. So Ed and I, my co-founder, absolute legend, we were kind of finding our two feet and we sofa surfed from maybe 20 different houses in two years. And it was a right laugh. And then I go into the e-bike business and I had, you know, Ben and Dan who were kind of guiding me a bit. But I didn't really have like the great corporate, like, here's a fantastic leader to look up to. and so when I woke up in that rock bottom I was like you know what mate no one else is going to sort this out apart from yourself and maybe there was like a subconscious element of it's all going to sort itself out maybe because there's contacts whatever but actually no like you you yourself need to find this within you because I wasn't the most intelligent guy like I did acting at school I played cricket in the first team.

19:04I think that's kind of a lot of the reasons why I got that scholarship. But I didn't really look inwards at myself and being like, right, how can I use that in a business sense? Or how can I use that in my day-to-day life? Until that rock bottom moment, I suppose. I just kind of maybe went through the motions, if I'm being honest, for eight years. And I think it's only now where I'm like, I'm really digging deeper into, I'm not calling it a strength, because it's not a strength yet. like the comedy or the like the levity I don't know it's not a strength but just deeping Digger into an area that I think I'm okay at and working on that you know I'm not fucking playing piano I'd be sure I'd love to bloody play the keys I'd love to be Elton John yeah yeah yeah but like I don't think I'm going to be a good musician I think what I could be good at going forward is writing or helping businesses with comedy or stuff like that sorry it's quite a serious few minutes there Yeah, no, no, but it's...

20:00My top two inches, but yeah. Yeah, but it shows the... It's almost like the iceberg as people just see you putting comedy out online thinking this guy's hilarious, but actually, and that's why I wanted to chat to you. Right. Because now I'm going to get onto this, all this... Because I'm obsessed with reading and writing. Yes, yes, we've spoken about this. That's how we... Yeah, yeah. That's like, my morning probably sounds quite similar to you. It's like, I'm fucking militant. Like, I will read, 45 minutes, hour, write, hour. like 6, 8 like this morning I was up at 6 brilliant bang bang but it's like gives me that purpose and I actually think I know a day I don't I want to compete with you there I was up at 6 o 'clock as well mate I was in an ice bath this morning where's your huell mate I did an ice bath and some fucking breath work I did an ice bath and third space so I beat you mate yeah ice bath followed by breath work which was fucking four cigarettes

20:52breathe it in slowly boys so what's your creative process then so maybe we can pick a so you get up early you read yeah what does your morning look like yeah not to be like one of those morning routine wankers morning routine yeah let's do it so I read fill it with your todger yeah yeah fill it with the todger number one not my girlfriends around no I so I read a book like five years ago and I never really took it in until about a year ago and it's called The Miracle Morning can't remember who it's written by but it completely changed how I operate my mornings and it's um hilariously it's six things you should do before 8 30 in the morning Dan right six things are meditate I don't do that one because I'm not quite there I can't get zen on that yet I mean maybe I'll do a video on it soon but like you know just the zen meditation I can't do I wish I could because actually you can probably tell my mind is racing the whole time so I so I yeah maybe you're the same but I meditate I've meditated so and actually I would be mate it will change your life if you can stick to the discipline so I didn't meditate on like yeah my modus operandi is like go at a thousand miles per hour even like making a coffee I'm like I need to make a coffee so fucking quickly and then like just fucking chin it back even when I'm drinking a pint I'm like let's just fucking drink this pint as fast as I can it's like chill the fuck out the meditation does help with that okay yeah so I would definitely try that meditation's one yeah then it's it's exercise obviously 20 minutes so I do trying to do 20 minutes it's a bit tough what does that look like?

22:32just a run around the park run around Clisole Park I look I literally look like Bojo like Boris Johnson I've got an old cotton traders on and I'm running around with the shaggy hair and just you know you've got really quite fit attractive Australian girls just walk around you're there like oh okay so that's quite funny 20 minutes 25 minutes 30 minutes whatever I do that I do this routine 4 or 5 times a week so I do not that I do the exercise on the session on the weekends the exercise yeah and then I do reading for 20 minutes have to yeah so I read um typically what I do is I read like a business book or something that can help me at work in the mornings and I'll read at night like something for pleasure so most recently I read a book about how you can bring humor into uh like the workplace and again it's like leaning into that if you're okay at something lean more into it I think so So I think I'm okay at bringing humour into the workplace.

23:23At the moment, HR, I'm not knocking them down on my door. My boss is probably... I don't agree with that in the workplace. I don't agree with that in the workplace. You know, so I... Office quote. Yeah. There'll be a lot of that. But I, you know, so I do that and then I affirm and visualise at the same time. So that's another... And this is where I look and sound like a complete and utter wanker because I run around Clisole Park and I will say to myself, maybe it's something like, you know, we do events at Passion Free and I mean, I can't believe I'm telling people this, but whatever. I will be like, I will put on the best event today at work.

24:02I will put on the best event today at work. And it sounds, I sound like an absolute fucking nutter. But it's true. That's what I do. And I visualize me standing up in front of, whether it's 15 people or 40 people or 50 people when I say that. Yeah. And then after that, and yeah, so it's meditate, say exercise visualize affirm typically the visualization and the affirmation you can do as the same thing but i've got like a big long-term plan of wanting to write a book in the next two years and so i visualize that moment and seeing like god like imagine the north star of it won't ever get there but imagine it becoming like a bestseller somewhere so i'm like i visualize that moment and then I then write for 20 um yeah for like 20-25 minutes before work yeah and and that is always bar never work like it's uh very rarely it's a LinkedIn post just because now I'm starting to do a lot more LinkedIn stuff and um next year I'm going to bring the comedy that I've done on Instagram into LinkedIn I'm really looking forward to that like you now work in digital marketing or you're the head of marketing at a company and i'm going to bring that in yeah i'm really excited yeah but it's typically always the comedy yeah it's the writing about the book and then it means i rock up a lot i'm always around this area we're in farringdon right now like i'm always around this area like eight in the morning and so my colleagues like the sort of the bosses uh the co-founders are in there around this time as well but i do that and then i get in at nine i'm like right let's just start my day so that's that's it mate yeah yeah yeah i'm not saying it's perfect it's by anything but I think you're visualising the pints on your Friday run well I will drink 14 pints at the moment visualising the lucky saints I see you're off the bottle at the minute off the bottle mate I mean I for how long I think like the drinking thing's interesting because I no means alcoholic like anything like that I was just a binge drinker we all look we all I think our generation big bingers and I just sort of I wouldn't drink in the week I would get to a Thursday night have a couple of Guinnesses whatever maybe there'd be a party on a Friday night go in a bit maybe another on Saturday and then before you know on a Monday morning you're waking up like you've done the luge and you're there and you're like okay and you're sort of knocked out and I think like I so I basically do sprints where I don't drink mate I'm very similar oh really okay so I've just done a did so this year cumulatively I mean we are literally sounding like You know how everyone's talking about you should do this.

26:37You should do whatever. I mean, that's what. Yeah, but it works. But it works. Working at the moment. So exactly. So it's like there's the reason people talk about it. It's because it works. I do think, yeah, so I did a sprint. Then I went to Ibiza. That's when I actually messaged you. Have a good time out there, boy. I was Gary Lineker's brother. Was he all right? He's something else. He's fucking mate. He looks like an AI grand. Do you know what I mean? it's like hello it's Wayne it's like fucking hell oh god yeah but it does work so you're off it now then yeah I'm doing three months off so I basically did September to our last event at work we'll come into a bit more about what Passion Fruit does I'm sure in a set but we've I basically did start doing these events at Passion Fruit as a way of getting marketers in the room and you know we did an okay job from March to July and then I brought a fantastic new team member called Elsie who's just knock out sensational good i can't believe she's only 23 to be honest but we the boss was like man you've done one event a month well done let's do four a month so i'm like okay so i'm doing 14 events we're doing 14 events from september to to the 27th of november which is a big sprint so it's like two events a week sometimes one and they're not that you know they're we're trying to get vice presidents of marketing or big people in the room so in order to do that alongside my comedy alongside i'm trying i'm planning a wedding at the moment getting married um like and trying to be a good boyfriend i suppose or trying to be like still see my mates i just thought i'd cut it out and i've been really grateful that i can kind of get my head around doing that i couldn't in the summer because you got weddings or you know again you you maybe go on holiday for a bit or you maybe just want to chill out in the park and have a few tinnies but yeah i've done i've done it now and um it seems to have worked at the moment no it's mad it's um i love the story of just kind of yeah well maybe you weren't using prozac but like put how it just shows how powerful purpose is and it's like uh it's like a rocket up your ass quite literally let's talk about the events because i'm really curious about this so as i said to you like last year we did shit loads of events hungry did yes supper clubs live podcasts um and they were sick a lot of graft because i was doing all my ones yeah uh then this year we kind of this year i knew the podcast had to go onto youtube to to grow like like trying to trying to grow it on spotify and apple alone is is like you've got five and a bit thousand subscribers on youtube now oh well that's really good well that happened in that's happened so basically we started the youtube in getting subscribers on youtube is no mean feet i mean obviously people know that but like but well yeah so this but i was like we need to we need to do this so we've so we'd so we started in um feb literally fuck all happened but we just kept posting kept posting kept getting better with the thumbnails get rid of the titles blah blah blah blah blah blah and then mate october so we're recording this first november it's first day isn't it it's november today isn't it first november yeah yeah yeah yeah um and then in October it just went and it's just and that five thousands all come like that so it is that whole like hockey stick thing um it's it's reps it's reps it's reps but but that's distracted me from doing the events okay and so now it's almost like with with the podcast we have the top of the funnel which is the pod yes which is the media yes and then I want to do loads of in-person events like brand building one they're fucking sick yes like I love doing events I love meeting people yeah it's great for sponsorship man who'd be who'd be great at that yeah yeah but but I've got no idea so next year i want to do the hungry hooter rooney which is a festival yeah the hung what hungry hooter rooney the hungry hooter rooney yeah yeah yeah literally get an mc henry in there this could this actually fucking great idea mate i'll fucking tap you up son and we can get you get you doing some comedy there but yeah it'll be a b2b event but i find b2b events one fucking boring two money grabbing so this would be super exclusive okay um probably doing a little cheeky dawson rooftop mate why not keep that shrimp and then i want to do more summer clubs but my brain is probably a bit like yours and i just don't know what the fuck i'm doing so like i suppose the first like kind of question on this is like what is the art of doing a great event like what have you learned from doing amazing events i mean do i don't do i think i'm we're even there yet on that no i think i think to bring it back a bit you know like we maybe if i just tell you a tiny a bit about what Passion Fruit is trying to do on that as a top level.

31:16Yeah, give some context. Give a ton of context. Sorry, that was bad for me. That's all right. Do some events, mate. As a freelance marketing platform, which Passion Fruit is, world's fastest growing freelance marketing platform. Sounds good. That's a plug. What we're trying to basically achieve is trying to make the world of work work for everyone. So we're trying to democratise... Practice that one. We're trying to democratise work at the moment for marketers. So you could be working anywhere in the world and you could be a specialist in a certain area, SEO, CRM, TikTok, interim head of marketing, whatever.

31:52And you can basically come onto the platform at Passion Fruit and we can get you really good work at great businesses. Now, there's loads of marketing freelancers out there who like, pick me, that's great. So we haven't really had any issues getting fantastic freelancers on the platform. there's loads of great ones um even though we vet them very highly so 88 percent of freelancers don't get on the platform so only 12 percent do um but there's an abundant there's a growing abundance of good supply there the issue as ever with any business or b2b business is demand like how do you get really good customers in the room and when i got brought in my boss raffi the co-founder Raffi and this were very particular and they just said like you are doing events it was like I'd never done an event before genuinely never ran an event but he saw me on TikTok that's how he found me and he said um that's your edge working yeah exactly he found me on TikTok and went on Instagram and went oh you know how you do these end-to-end things on TikTok I said what do you mean end-to-end he's like well you you write the theme tune you think sing the theme tune you know stuff like that i was like oh yeah i write them i i i then perform them and then i post them he's like well could you do that for the events and i was like i don't know maybe i'll give it a go so what we realized was actually the quickest way of us being able because the product is great like i'm not just saying it the product's excellent like customers love it they understand as soon as they start using it they're like whoa this makes sense i don't need to have a full-time hire i can plug and play a specialist within a particular area and get great output out of them literally inside of 72 hours.

33:28So they're like, whoa. And it really does put the agency model, like it flips it on its head. So agency model, big retainers, long-term retainers, maybe not specialists within that field. We're like, no, we'll just sit as this body who then plugs in a great specialist, whether you need one in Belgium or Germany or America, where 6 % of everyone comes from, et cetera. Yeah. So, but the thing is, is getting them in the room, like getting these people to notice us amongst a sea of loads of agencies and loads of other businesses trying to do the same thing is hard. So we basically came up with the initiative or I came up with the initiative that, you know, I worked at Fully Charged and I love commuting and I cycle on my bike, my Brompton's there.

34:10I cycle on my bike every day and I was like, oh, these people, these marketers are trying to get information throughout their day to better improve their day-to-day work, but also their lives. they're normally listening to stuff on the tubes right or they're like that's kind of what they're doing or they're maybe going for coffees to meet with people before work like we do to try and get information before they start their day and so i just thought about like creating a club like called the passion fruit commuter club which was like an inside access to nuggets of information that you would not otherwise get at any other event and when i mean any other event like i've only been to a couple of b2b events before but they're in a hilton hotel with white cloths and you get a PowerPoint presentation, you might get, I don't know, a cheese stick and a volavon.

34:53Okay. Or like, you know, stuff like that. And I'm just like, oh, like, why would I go do that? So I was surfing your way through a tepid biscuit selection. 100%. You're rich tea, Bicky, that goes in your tea, dunk it out. Everyone's got that sort of coffee breath. They're like, and as a fun fact, my name's Ralph and I've got a cat called Carl. It's like, exactly. And it's like a panel of sort of a brand director of a business you've never heard of. And you're like talking about the future of AI marketing. you're like oh I do you know what I hate is you know they give you those name badges I mean fair enough we actually do do that but but they're with our illustration and people quite like them they're not ads like corporate but I think that's mainly obviously so people know who the people are who are coming but I think one thing that was very clear was all of these like you know we're trying to sell so that people know on the pod like to scale-ups to the Series A and above, Series B, and mid-market enterprise and enterprise businesses.

35:49Big logos, 100 mil to one bill of revenue and above. And these CMOs and SVPs and marketing directors are flying around the world. They've got all the access to AI or to, I don't know, CRMs or how that works, because they've got them at their disposal. The teams underneath them are giving them this information, or they're employing a consultant to give them that. what we wanted to do what we wanted to achieve is basically give them access to a culturally relevant individual that they are they like or that they actually have um some form of similarities with so we basically started doing that so we you know starting with top jaw they were the very first people that we got in a room with and we you know by by getting top jaw jesse and well i don't know how we got them to be honest because i just sort of measured them on my instagram account and they went yeah this maybe sounds like something we do so you'll pay the influencer we'll we'll pay the culturally relevant personality yep um bearing in mind we don't do any ads we don't do any yeah yeah it's just mad yeah events yeah yeah all we do yeah um and we will pay them a fee um but for them it's very important that they feel like they're not going into a b2b corporate environment as well but you know i say to top short look guys like we're um in talks with AB and Bev at the moment and you know it would be quite cool I know that you've just done a Stella Artois thing with AB and Bev we can get people in the room from AB and Bev and they're like yeah sick and then I'm like oh we could get I don't know Amex and BA in the room and like someone from Amex came and they're like oh that's really cool and so there's kind of like this symbiotic thing where the personality is getting something out of it because they're not only getting paid they're not getting paid loads they're getting paid a bit but we can also get the right type of people in the room and then also we're getting those people in the room for us to be able to talk to but what's interesting is i feel like the the marketers are like oh actually i love these individuals these personalities but actually when passion fruit talks to us about what they do it makes sense so actually you know they're only 15 person 20 person max talks these we're not trying to go big ball 60 person 70 person events we're trying to make them really intimate and and then you get you know obviously this is a fmb podcast right this is where you major in like you get people in the room within that space who then understand a bit more about passion fruit and so we started with top jaw we did a great event with grace beverly so what were the top drawers are you interviewing them or yeah i was interviewing them so i've never done interviews before but i just again raffi who i kind of owe a lot to in this role at the moment was just like mate i think that's your bread and butter to want to interview i think you'll do a good job at that i think the hard thing's getting people in the room like it is hard getting people in the room like anyone who's done events marketing as you know especially to big corporates and big enterprises hard so but i think the hook is top jaw like these guys are smashing that space or grace beverly is smashing the women's fashion design space and smashing like how you get more productive in your working day we then did a run with the hardest geezer where people have that was like less about marketing it was more about health and like oh do you just want to come on a run with the hardest geezer and understand more about what he does in his day-to-day to make sure that he becomes better and maybe his personal resilience and then people walked away from that being like god yeah cool okay i'm gonna get up in the mornings more and so it's it's not just about making them better marketers so they go back to their teams and like oh you know i met with so and so today and this is what i found out it's actually a lot more to do with them becoming better people and i think what we're my last point is like what we're trying to basically get across is, yeah, just like, it's, these people are, at the end of the day, they go out on the weekends, these marketers, they love a pint, they play golf, they play cricket, I don't know, they play tennis, whatever.

39:39They're still people. And I think maybe LinkedIn has shadowed us into thinking that we need to be like this corporate person who, you know, doesn't sort of let their guard down during the week. Yeah. I think we can do that, providing it's still relatively professional. Sorry I rambled on there It's gorgeous and there's so much in that And it's interesting because We did So a few things to kind of Go off that, so the first thing there's a great I think it's an essay About Nike And what you're saying about keeping it small No it was like It wouldn't have been Shoe Dog But it was But anyway What they say in this essay It's bioquired, it's great they say what Nike are trying to do bear in mind they're one of the fucking biggest brands in the world their strategy is just to be, they pick 12 cities in the world and all they're trying to do is do these micro events with the most influential people that's their strategy and it goes crazy because you think of a big, they're like ones LA, London, Tokyo, Seoul like I don't know, some other fucking ones and I was like that's mad, it's like Nike, the biggest fucking brand in the world their strategy is to pick 12 of the best cities and go but micro delicious events a bit like what you guys are doing it's like okay let's not do an event with a thousand people let's get 20 people and get the what do you call them the spotlight the cultural culturally relevant personalities yeah exactly in one yeah CRPs CRPs could be that yeah yeah I'd also love that that'll make it very corporate we've been acronyms the whole time yeah can you put the CRPs and CRM CRPs and the ICPs and the E2Bs yeah yeah yeah yeah you need to see CRP welcome to the world of B2B marketing yeah CRP CRM that's hilarious but the so that's and that's something I'm trying to learn off you is actually with this Hoot Rooney I want to keep it boutique sort of the strap line is beautiful boutique festivals and as I said I've got enough people who can I can get like kind of a headline four or five speakers who would like that will shift the tickets I think but then I want to keep it fucking intimate i want to almost keep it like you've got to be your brand's got to be doing over 500 000 to even come you know what i mean i don't know what how what have you found sort of shifting the tickets like what's how do you do that yeah okay i think well on that you know um these i think the most important thing for the people coming is is giving them value yeah but not like of course at the end of the day like they know this we're trying to sell them passion fruit but as I said the product's good I want to just give them the best experience that's it from that event we're not there selling them passion for you on the day but just like look I know because I've checked your LinkedIn out that you follow Strava and you follow I don't know the London Marathon I know that you're the marketing director of x business I think you're gonna I can assume and that's basically what we do as marketers we we make assumptions on what we believe a buying persona is like that's basically it yeah and then we try and execute upon that and you know i can assume that you might have a great time here with the hardest geezer but in order for them to feel important and the reason why we're not going for brand managers or social media execs as much as we love them and they will be they these people in time will become those marketing directors and we're doing other events to get those people involved now they've got to feel like they're in the room with certain select types of people that they across different industries this is not like just talking about one do you sell tickets or is it invite no no it's invite invite only they're free everything's on the house from us at the moment

43:29no i'm joking but like i won't get into the details on the metrics on on like what we get out of it but it's incredible in terms of like actually the marketing qualified leads we get out of an event and how much we put in there and sort of the cost per lead of that and and it's very good and if you i used to work as a um you know i used i used to do linkedin ads i used to do meta ads and click-through rates are at 0.6 percent or like do you know what i mean like yeah the difference of we outreach to 200 people we do no that's all good we do that we do that via personal outbound so henry hayes myself i'm outbounding but then we we've got a very gun cold outbound specialist.

44:11Again, reason why Passion Fruit is great is our team, our marketing team, is myself and Elsie. Luckily, because we're a marketing platform, everyone else in the room, sales team, commercial, supply team, also know a lot about marketing. But our marketing team, and Holly actually is our third marketer, and she's on supply. But we use our specialists. I was about to say leverage. I can't stand that word because everyone uses it. But we just plug and play. We drink our own Kool-Aid. so i've got ollie great illustrator people may have seen our like cool illustrations like he does that we've got jamie graphic designer we've got jake hampson quite literally a cold outbound wizard i don't know how this guy does that but he outbounds and gets on clay which is an outreach tool and then does sequences via ample market what is so so what does clay do clay basically finds you um the right ideal customer profile for what you're trying to achieve like marketing so i Say I was trying to sell sponsorship on the podcast.

45:06Could I use it for that? Yeah, you could try and find the sponsorship manager, people who run sponsorship. So I could basically go and say, right, I want Shopify. Yeah. They've got some longer. What you do is you'd be like, again, and this is not like, I'm cautious of making this like really granular. What I'm trying to say is - No, no, granular to me is good. Great. Yeah, yeah. Like we are, we know that these select businesses, businesses from 100 mil to one bill who are suffering because the marketing, let's be honest, their marketing teams have been constrained to post COVID. There are more and more channels that they have to think about.

45:47TikTok, like fringe, marketing's being played in fringe communities now. It's not just Google and Meta anymore. Put your stuff in Google and Meta, get out of it. Like you can create really good stuff out of other areas, be it events, be it other social channels, be it CRM, like nailing that. And so what basically we do is we try and find those marketers who are struggling. And the way we do that is going on clay and being like, right, it's like an, it basically scrapes the right type of profile. So I will basically say, right, business that goes between 100 mil and one bill, business that um like marketing director profile marketing lead svp of marketing at a push senior brand manager based in london yeah not and then in these industries bang bang and it'll give me a list and then i'll be like okay i think these are the right types of people and then jake our outbound guy will basically go ah these are the people that are interested in the rugby pod we just an event with jim and andy jim hamilton and andy good from the rugby podcast yeah and we then profiled these people because they may have posted on linkedin about the fact that they like rugby or something and so then we then outbound to them and what is the outbound like well it's done via a tool called i'm giving away the secret sauce there everyone but i've like it's done via a tool called ample market and ample market is basically like a sequencing tool so HubSpot is used for sort of email marketing sequencing which is when people are further down the funnel but AmpleMarket's done more in sort of demand gen there's loads of other tools like AmpleMarket AmpleMarket's just the one we use so it will say hey Pete you're into rugby yeah I mean what AmpleMarket there's a really delicious balance here between personalised and again almost back to that really micro niche super personalised message yes exactly Versus like fucking spray and pray.

47:47Sounds a bit dodgy. Yeah, yeah.

47:52This is what it's basically doing a lot better than other. And there's loads. It's the nuance between the two. Exactly. Okay. And the thing is, is with the advent of AI and all this stuff, that loads of people are telling you, oh, personalised cold outbound is becoming a big thing. And I agree. There are probably loads of stuff that's doing that. But what I disagree with and what I maintain is we spend, And I spend 60 % of my time just analysing these people and being like, are they the right fit? And I'm not sending 1 ,000 messages out. We're not. We're sending 60. Because I'm like, I know this guy.

48:26And it comes down to the point of like, I'm not trying to be like seedy with these people. I'm just like, I just think you're going to love this event, mate. Like, I just really, I want to be at that event with you because I love what Willie Cook, okay? I think he's a really funny guy. And you are the Peter Pilgrim's marketing director. And I think you would love to be in a room with What Will He Cook. So I'm just going to outbound to the 60 people that I think are the right, because they're going to be like, oh, I'd love to meet What Will He Cook. Or we've done a thing with What Will He Cook before.

48:55Or Emily English. We did an event with Emily English. And it's like, you know, people who are within health and wellness space or people who are within the food space you want to, or maybe they're just people who work in fintech or finance who just follow Emily, who are like, oh my God, I love Emily English. And I just like, I think you just would get value out of this. That's the key thing. I'm like the value is the most important thing. The platform is actually second. And I think maybe before in all of my roles, before I'm like thinking product first, I'm just thinking like trying to shift them an e-bike and be like, why won't they?