Latest / The Christian Reeve Podcast / Emma Hersh (Founder & CEO Of GigLeads) | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #33 |

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Emma Hersh (Founder & CEO Of GigLeads) | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #33 | · The Christian Reeve Podcast

• 0:01
  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Christian Reef
• 0:04
  podcast. Today's guest is Emma, Hirsch.
• 0:07
  She is the CEO and founder of gig leads, which is a new
• 0:12
  company that's been running for about two months now.
• 0:15
  And this is a first for me in many different ways because it's
• 0:19
  the first time I've had someone sort of in the business world.
• 0:23
  First time, I've had a business leader of some description.
• 0:27
  And first time, I've kind of had Like a company on the show, and
• 0:33
  I do want to kind of just say straight off right off the bat
• 0:35
  before we get into this interview today that this isn't
• 0:39
  like a sponge this year. This isn't like an ad or
• 0:41
  something. Obviously Emma reached out to me
• 0:44
  when I was looking for guests and I thought this would be a
• 0:47
  unique challenge in many different ways because it's not
• 0:51
  just going to be showcasing the business, but it also be
• 0:54
  actually finding out more about Emma and hopefully for people
• 0:59
  that are interested, In this business and this idea or kind
• 1:02
  of give you a bit more than just luck, you know.
• 1:06
  Like for instance, if we just did the podcast on the business
• 1:09
  I'm not sure that that would necessarily have the same level
• 1:13
  of Interest as if you know you finding out the person behind
• 1:16
  the business because especially with startups.
• 1:18
  I feel that you know, when you know that it's kind of by a
• 1:22
  person who's more, relatable, it kind of makes that business more
• 1:27
  not what I guess. Yeah, relatable.
• 1:29
  Many ways. But anyways, welcome to the
• 1:33
  show. Emma.
• 1:34
  How you doing? I'm doing great.
• 1:35
  Thanks for having me on Kristen's great to be here.
• 1:38
  No, no, it's a pleasure. Thanks, thanks for reaching out.
• 1:41
  Obviously, this is your first time doing a podcast, so it's
• 1:44
  best for you to. There's different ways.
• 1:47
  I could jump into this, but I think the first thing I want to
• 1:49
  do is just jump into your background.
• 1:52
  So a lot of this information I found from LinkedIn.
• 1:55
  Thank God for LinkedIn. It says here that you had a
• 2:00
  17-year career in business management specifically within
• 2:04
  the logistics and supply chain industry.
• 2:07
  So just briefly talk to me about, you know, how you got
• 2:11
  into that. Like, I know that you did a
• 2:12
  degree which kind of set you up to that, but what kind of made
• 2:15
  you decide that you wanted to go and follow that route for many
• 2:20
  care chance? Actually, it was not removed
• 2:24
  from the UK and I'm sure you kind of got that from my
• 2:26
  LinkedIn and ended up sort of emigrating out to him.
• 2:29
  Erica, and that was back in 2001.
• 2:32
  And I, you know, I really didn't kind of go the typical route
• 2:36
  that most people go and just, you know, I started off of the
• 2:40
  bottom. I started off in, you know,
• 2:41
  dispatch and, you know, worked my way up into a supervisory
• 2:45
  path and then into management from there.
• 2:47
  But yeah, ended up with quite a extensive career there with
• 2:51
  business management and Logistics and did a lot a lot of
• 2:55
  traveling all up and down America.
• 2:57
  So it in some ways, I don't even know if it was Choice to get
• 3:00
  into that industry but it was just I had an opportunity.
• 3:04
  I got into it and you know the career path just took off from
• 3:07
  there and was it was a case of just kind of like seeing how far
• 3:12
  it would go or I mean because obviously you said that you've
• 3:15
  taking opportunities here and there so was it.
• 3:18
  Oh hey this is great. You know I get to travel around
• 3:21
  the world and that's kind of the thing that pulls you, I guess, I
• 3:24
  guess what. My question is is like, what was
• 3:26
  the main thing that was kind of keeping you going.
• 3:29
  Young and kind of. I guess pushing you to keep
• 3:33
  following that route for so many years, I think.
• 3:36
  I think with most things you kind of you get us on a path or
• 3:39
  on a trajectory there. And I think most people like to
• 3:44
  probably challenge themselves a little bit, you know, want you
• 3:47
  to sort of in that management mode and you know you go from a
• 3:50
  supervisor to an ops manager from ops manager to a GM, you
• 3:54
  know, the path just keeps going. So I think most people probably
• 3:57
  just like to challenge themselves and to see you know
• 3:59
  that's your career you want to see.
• 4:01
  How far, how far you can take it.
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  And, in some ways, I started quite late because I lived in
• 4:06
  the UK until being about 29 and then go away today.
• 4:11
  So yeah, kind of given my age where they're terribly but
• 4:15
  that's it. That's interesting to me.
• 4:16
  I mean because I feel like you know that okay since you come
• 4:22
  from an older generation, I'm not trying to be rude.
• 4:25
  But I'm just saying, you know it's different in the sense that
• 4:27
  like okay, like many years ago, you know, B, and I'm talking
• 4:32
  many, many years ago, but it would be like, you know, job was
• 4:34
  for life or for right here, it and stuff.
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  I was probably the first generation that got away from
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  that, you know, that was, yeah, my parents generation was very
• 4:43
  much, I mean, to put it in perspective and there's, this is
• 4:45
  really sure A, my age. Now, back in the UK, when you're
• 4:48
  going through the education system, I was the first year of
• 4:51
  people, the batch of people that did the GCSE.
• 4:54
  Oh wow. Okay.
• 4:56
  Exam when the switched over from the old levels to that, right?
• 4:59
  Yeah. So that was, that was a whole
• 5:01
  mess because nobody bothered you.
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  But you know it was it was very much sort of.
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  Yeah. You were in the mood of your
• 5:06
  parents were saying, you know, you get a job, you're gonna stay
• 5:09
  in a job, you know, try and keep in that job by a house, stay in
• 5:13
  that house and of course things just don't move like that now
• 5:16
  and then things shifted from that to think very much, you
• 5:19
  know, I saw imagination here, you're the one thing I've
• 5:22
  noticed as well just just on this topic like Perception that,
• 5:27
  you know, you should stay in a job.
• 5:29
  And, you know, if you don't then that kind of represents maybe a
• 5:33
  lack of loyalty or maybe a lack of motivation or whatever, you
• 5:37
  know, it now has kind of flipped in the sense that if you spend
• 5:40
  too long in the company sometimes the perception can be
• 5:44
  all this person. Just lacks ambition, they lack
• 5:46
  Drive. They just want to have a
• 5:48
  comfortable life so to speak but I did it for me.
• 5:51
  Personally, every corporate company that I've worked for and
• 5:55
  to some 10th also, you know, in in in customer services and so
• 6:00
  on, like there seems to be this thing of, you know you only
• 6:03
  really stay in a position for probably a maximum of two years
• 6:08
  maybe a bit longer if you're following the managerial route
• 6:10
  but you can about for in that realm.
• 6:12
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah there seems to be like this
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  cut off point and it really does depend on your strategy, but a
• 6:19
  lot of the time once you kind of got what you need you know, you
• 6:22
  just go to the next company and no one really has that purse.
• 6:26
  One of oh well, you know what about loyalty?
• 6:28
  What about this? What about that?
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  It's like kind of just understood that.
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  That's just how, I guess the job market works now, you know.
• 6:37
  Yeah. And he right, you know, it's,
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  you know, part of my world along the years was to do some
• 6:42
  recruitment interview. No, look at CVS, all resumes, is
• 6:46
  the cold weather there in the States but and that was
• 6:48
  something that would look out for me and that was the one time
• 6:51
  it used to be if you'd been with with a certain company for 15 20
• 6:54
  years then you know, You were regarded as as, you know, loyal
• 6:58
  Dependable, employee and even in my sort of tenure, I would look
• 7:03
  at it and go, why why have you been there so long?
• 7:06
  Why have you not thought of moved across to?
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  So, you know, so it's quite a double-edged sword.
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  Now. Yeah, so sort of, you know, it
• 7:12
  can benefit you more to move around every three to four years
• 7:15
  and gain a bit more than experience, I think.
• 7:17
  Now I'm one of those people, like, I just need to for my own
• 7:21
  personal reasons. Like I feel like it's important
• 7:23
  to keep moving and keep growing and learning and stuff.
• 7:26
  Like I feel bad for people that just want to stick with the job
• 7:30
  because I get that sometimes you know you're just happy doing a
• 7:34
  certain thing for a certain company or you know, whatever.
• 7:37
  Like I don't I don't feel that that should be used against you
• 7:40
  but I mean, I don't know. It's so tricky to know what to
• 7:45
  do. It's very double-sided as you
• 7:46
  say it's and I'm the same, it's not you know I don't necessarily
• 7:49
  think that's a bad thing some people.
• 7:51
  Yeah you know you've got a good career path with you know, said
• 7:55
  company. So you'll see Staying with it.
• 7:57
  So I don't think it's necessarily a negative thing but
• 7:59
  I think probably again, maybe a generational thing.
• 8:03
  You know, I had parents say, you know, you stay in the job.
• 8:05
  You were right? Yeah.
• 8:07
  Everyone. You know, in the older
• 8:08
  generation and you would be, you know, gone to a certain job from
• 8:11
  school stayed in it till retirement, My Generation.
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  You know, you were sort of coming off the back of the 80s
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  when we had, you know, recessions and manufacturing
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  companies were kind of going under are changing more into
• 8:24
  automated processes and Unless staff.
• 8:28
  And so I think it was a bit of a, it was kind of like a bit of
• 8:31
  a Mad scramble, every man or woman for herself because it
• 8:34
  was, you couldn't be guaranteed. That job was going to last for
• 8:37
  that period of time or that company was going to last for a
• 8:40
  period of time. I'm is a very good point
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  especially in these days. I was talking to someone the
• 8:45
  other day about this and he said, you know, with the way
• 8:48
  things move right now every 5-10 years or even less than that,
• 8:52
  some jobs can exist for one minute.
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  And then a couple years later, they're Just completely
• 8:58
  eradicated because there's no use for them.
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  Yeah I remember there was one company that I was working for
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  where we basically what we were doing with the company was
• 9:06
  trying to get all of its analytics done in such a way
• 9:10
  that you know you wouldn't need people kind of monitoring them
• 9:13
  to certain extent. You just have the reports coming
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  automatically and I automatically I sort of
• 9:18
  identified. Okay my job in and let's say six
• 9:22
  months won't exist like it. So I even eat alone that's true.
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  It's, you know, I think Tech and advancement is a brilliant
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  thing. I mean I love progress but it
• 9:32
  does sort of leave some people behind.
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  I mean, again, double sacks, you know, two sides of the same coin
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  is, you know, processes change evolve.
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  There's a lesser need for people on one side, but then it kind of
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  opens up opportunity on the opposite side of that, you know?
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  Absolutely, yeah. So yeah, what prompted you to go
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  freelance? I mean obviously you had this
• 9:52
  long career, your some people might say, you know, you're
• 9:55
  comfortable, you got this. You're high up in, you know, in
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  the corporate ladder, you know, you've established yourself.
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  You've got a lot of respect and stuff.
• 10:02
  You could probably go anywhere, why the decision to go
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  freelance? Just probably just a progression
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  at that point. I think you hit you hit a point
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  in your career. I mean, I did not for everybody
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  but I certainly did where it was a case of.
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  Well, I've sort of done all this stuff.
• 10:19
  I've done added a massive amount of traveling around up and down
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  the United States, mainly on Easton side and then you kind of
• 10:28
  get to a point. You end up with this sort of
• 10:30
  Crossroads at a certain point where you kind of go.
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  I've done all this stuff and it's been great and now, you
• 10:37
  know, hitting 40, as I was okay and you go.
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  So what? Now, I am, I going to do this
• 10:43
  now, until the very point that I retire or am I going to kind of
• 10:48
  do something different? You know, I respect is something
• 10:51
  different, you know? Yeah.
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  So that's that's the same mentality.
• 10:54
  I have as well, like, I guess. Yeah, I get that but like, I
• 11:00
  guess I want to probe you more on this because obviously
• 11:04
  freelance is one of those things that it's kind of a scary notion
• 11:07
  for anyone that hasn't done it before, right?
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  And even me, you know, I'm kind of doing freelance right now,
• 11:13
  just because I have to, it's not even a choice case, I can't find
• 11:16
  a full-time role but because I've kind of proven myself over
• 11:21
  the years, I've got people that I'm working with my clients that
• 11:25
  are Clearly Eva referred from someone I've worked with or, you
• 11:30
  know, through the network, something like that.
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  And it's funny to me, because years ago, I thought, like, you
• 11:36
  know, it's probably inevitable. I'm going to end up freelance.
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  And here we are, you know, during a pandemic situation
• 11:42
  where things the job markets, a little bit crazy, can't find
• 11:46
  work, but Freelancers and option and but I think.
• 11:50
  Yeah, again, just bring it back to the point.
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  Like for most people, it's scary because it's like, you know, So,
• 11:57
  instead of having like a reliable wage and, you know, job
• 12:03
  duties and all of this stuff and work, given to you, you're
• 12:06
  actively chasing your project by project and nothing is every
• 12:10
  sort of guaranteed as not to say that, you know, in jobs, it's
• 12:13
  completely secure. But, you know, you can't just
• 12:16
  kind of get like fire like straight away.
• 12:18
  And I mean, whereas with a freelance project, it ends that
• 12:21
  could be it. You might have someone decides
• 12:24
  not to appear you, that could be it, you know, that.
• 12:26
  See ya every Freelancers. Probably run into that.
• 12:30
  It did. Yeah.
• 12:31
  It's and it is your right as you say, it's just very scary
• 12:34
  proposition when you start doing it.
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  So when I quit my career to go freelance, I mean I think a lot
• 12:40
  of people have this impression of, do you have a good career?
• 12:43
  So, you know, you had loads of money behind you.
• 12:45
  So you were set, you know, and, you know, I'm not going to say
• 12:49
  that's untrue. I mean I had a, some, you know,
• 12:52
  kind of cash behind me to get started because that's, you
• 12:55
  know, just sensible. You know, you're going to do it.
• 12:56
  You can stop a little bit, but probably not as much as
• 12:59
  everybody thought, you know? So it is, you know, you know,
• 13:03
  Miss any of y'all your listeners and viewers if you're involved
• 13:06
  in the freelance world. And as you found out yourself,
• 13:08
  it's terrifying, you know. I mean, it can be really, really
• 13:11
  scary to not know where your next rent payment or mortgage
• 13:15
  payments coming from. And, you know, you have to think
• 13:18
  on your feet. You have to be pretty agile.
• 13:20
  And basically, sometimes you have to pretty much do anything
• 13:22
  that's going to, you know, provide a bit of cash.
• 13:25
  But a you It kind of seems to me, like, that's where the
• 13:30
  market is headed, because I see more and more freelancing
• 13:33
  opportunities, more and more Freelancers.
• 13:36
  And also the nature of jobs, like, you know, during this
• 13:40
  whole pandemic while I've been applying for jobs as well.
• 13:43
  I've noticed there's a lot of things that are like fixed-term
• 13:46
  contract for six months a year, something like that.
• 13:49
  Where it's kind of while it is full time, it is essentially
• 13:53
  saying, yeah, we only need you for this particular matter.
• 13:57
  And to me. Yeah, that's that's freelance.
• 13:59
  That's what it's all about. Really, so I feel like without
• 14:05
  kind of stating the obvious things are naturally changing
• 14:08
  and headed in that direction in the same way that, you know,
• 14:11
  remote working. I've said this for years, you
• 14:13
  don't need to be in an office for most of those jobs and it
• 14:17
  frustrates me that, you know, it's different if you working
• 14:20
  like sales or something like that, but when you work in
• 14:23
  marketing or something, you don't need to be there.
• 14:26
  It's like you don't restrain. Yeah.
• 14:29
  And he's letting you right now. I think maybe finally, that's
• 14:32
  I'm sort of of the opinion and that's something that should
• 14:34
  have probably started moving and shifting a little bit earlier
• 14:37
  than it did again even in my career and have people that work
• 14:41
  me like you don't need to be here and it, you know, I think
• 14:44
  probably I was a little bit unique in that I would operate
• 14:47
  quite well on a results-based. Ya think you know for my
• 14:51
  employees rather than here you have to be at your desk at this
• 14:54
  time. Punch your Clock and staying
• 14:56
  there until, you know, just because somebody's sitting at
• 14:58
  the desk from 8:00 in the morning till 5:00 at night.
• 15:01
  Doesn't necessarily being, you know, mean that they're being
• 15:04
  productive in those hours. You know somebody?
• 15:06
  No, no, I mean, everyone's, you know, you got night hours, you
• 15:10
  got people that come in in the morning, you know, for me, it's
• 15:13
  always been that first block of. Let's say, 3 to 4 hours, I get
• 15:19
  loads of work done then and the rest of the day.
• 15:21
  Yeah, it's just a bit like this is a drag.
• 15:24
  And like you try and vote. At yourself but it's like I
• 15:28
  think we for instance this time me working at home and doing
• 15:32
  freelance stuff in the way I've been doing it.
• 15:34
  You know sometimes I'll work intensively for like 3 hours,
• 15:38
  then I won't do any work for the rest of the day return to it.
• 15:41
  The next time at the set, at the same time, probably get the
• 15:45
  whole thing done. And for me, it's like more
• 15:47
  motivational because it's like, while there is like a deadline
• 15:50
  somewhere, it's still not you, I guess what I'm saying is You
• 15:56
  don't feel like this sense of guilt that you do when you're in
• 15:58
  an office and, you know, you're not a being as productive as
• 16:01
  maybe you should be. And like obviously there are
• 16:04
  people that are lazy and don't cares there but there are many
• 16:06
  of us that want to be productive but you can't sort of like force
• 16:10
  yourself the carriage and I mean, it's like I think I think
• 16:14
  it's the same as like when you're at school or university
• 16:17
  and I remember hearing this statistic that apparently, you
• 16:21
  know, you only have like 20 minutes of like core attention
• 16:26
  where you're invested in it and then the rest of the time you
• 16:29
  know your mind just kind of wanders naturally, that's true.
• 16:32
  Yeah. There's a lot of Statistics that
• 16:33
  show if you have, you know, if you go to a meeting or a
• 16:36
  seminar, you only actually retain I think it's seven
• 16:38
  minutes of these emotional guy. Yeah, it's true.
• 16:44
  You're saying it's yeah there's so much.
• 16:47
  There's so many of those meetings were like this could
• 16:49
  have been an email that. I mean, I spent my life on
• 16:51
  conference got when I was in the kind of the corporate world.
• 16:54
  I always have this this recollection that there's do was
• 16:57
  my worst day because I spent five and a half hours on
• 16:59
  conference calls but then you know you get people calling up
• 17:03
  screaming what's happening with you know in Miami or what?
• 17:06
  I don't know. I've been on the goddamn Sun but
• 17:09
  I remember one manager I had actually in one of my previous
• 17:11
  job, she had this problem like them both.
• 17:14
  Some days, I would literally not have see her the whole day
• 17:16
  because she was only in meetings is ridiculous.
• 17:20
  I believe that you know, I got to the point where I think, at
• 17:24
  one point I kind of called some people up.
• 17:26
  I'll send an email going guys, really come on.
• 17:29
  They were trying to hold a conference call about how to
• 17:32
  organize a time for our conference call.
• 17:34
  And I'm like, oh no I'm not doing it so it can it just gets,
• 17:40
  you know, it's ridiculous. It can just get kind of a little
• 17:43
  bit deal. The joke.
• 17:44
  But yeah, but yeah, I see your point about productivity.
• 17:47
  I think everybody kind of works at different levels and some
• 17:49
  people do good sort of, you know, doing that very solid
• 17:52
  steady, you know, work process throughout the day.
• 17:56
  Some do good kind of just really slamming it for like four or
• 17:59
  five hours ago get in the way and one of those and better
• 18:02
  doing that. You know what, I think, like, as
• 18:05
  long as you, you know, always hit the hit your deadlines.
• 18:08
  As you said, like, you hit those those targets that you have
• 18:11
  numbers wise? I don't think it really matters
• 18:13
  the time in which you do that. Because I mean, you know, I used
• 18:16
  to know designers that would roll up to work, you know,
• 18:20
  pretty late in the day like at 11 a.m.
• 18:22
  But then they'd be there till later.
• 18:24
  And then I just understood that that was kind of their frame.
• 18:27
  Don't, you know? And I think everyone's kind of
• 18:30
  got that somehow naturally within themselves.
• 18:33
  Yeah. And I think the danger would
• 18:35
  freelancing is. It can go the opposite way.
• 18:36
  If you're not careful and you stole them, we got this deadline
• 18:39
  looming and you like it. It's a nice day today.
• 18:44
  Beauty of it, though, once once you learn how to overcome
• 18:47
  because I get that, you know, I'm not like I often joke that
• 18:51
  I, I'm either super productive or super lazy but I think that
• 18:55
  that's a nice balance because you should, you should have that
• 18:57
  because if you're working too hard, your body will leave or
• 19:00
  just go nope or you'll get ill. So you got it like a racer.
• 19:05
  Yeah. And you know that Stress
• 19:07
  Management, you know especially that you've been in the
• 19:09
  corporate world, it's an need to manage that stress a little bit,
• 19:12
  you know? So what would you say are the
• 19:15
  key differences between standard jobs and freelance jobs?
• 19:20
  Well, the obvious, you know, the pay kind of fluctuates a lot
• 19:23
  more when you feel an sin, but I think just, you know, along the
• 19:27
  lines of what we were just talking about mean that that
• 19:29
  kind of that freedom and that ability to sort of be able to
• 19:32
  direct, you know, it kind of kind of carve your own destiny
• 19:36
  out almost, you know. So I think if you're
• 19:38
  freelancing, you can, you can make the choice to say, Hey, you
• 19:41
  know, I really, you know, Don't want to be like the next CEO
• 19:45
  level. I want to just, I just want to
• 19:47
  kind of pay my rent and have a lot of treater and I think being
• 19:51
  that's the beauty of it being able to I think for me being
• 19:53
  able to dictate your own work. Life balance much more I think
• 19:57
  is the real draw for me. You know it's important to have
• 20:01
  you downtown. It's important to have family
• 20:03
  time and I just for me I feel that I get looked much more
• 20:07
  flexibility with kind of freelance world to be able to do
• 20:10
  that, you know. Yeah, I agree.
• 20:12
  I mean I remember Client of mine recently because they always ask
• 20:17
  me like our cat. Can you give us like a rough
• 20:19
  idea of how long this will take and are you?
• 20:23
  I prefer to go by our, if it's a task, like this, like editing
• 20:28
  proofing, because I feel like I always work in the same manner
• 20:31
  and I'm very structured and organized with how I do it.
• 20:34
  And let's say like because I was doing the website and it went
• 20:38
  exactly how I thought it would go where some pages would be
• 20:41
  like three minutes, 20 minutes something.
• 20:44
  And other Pages would be like two hours.
• 20:46
  This is like the impossible to say.
• 20:50
  This is how long it will take. I can fully sympathize with that
• 20:54
  accepted a little bit of website.
• 20:56
  When I first started, you know, because you kind of do anything,
• 20:58
  you know, you dip your toe in everything.
• 20:59
  When it's out freelancing, I did a little bit of, you know,
• 21:02
  marketing added a bit of SEO stuff.
• 21:05
  I did, you know, website building the whole and I always
• 21:08
  loved the thing of and if you've done some website design, you
• 21:10
  know this you sell beside, you can suddenly get caught up and
• 21:13
  spend hours. Has on sort of one element of a
• 21:15
  page and then invariably the client, come back and go, should
• 21:19
  you just change that? You know, that that was always
• 21:23
  the kiss of death? There was, could you just, you
• 21:25
  know, can you just change this to?
• 21:26
  I think when you're not in that world, you don't understand.
• 21:28
  There's a lot on the back end that goes into that.
• 21:31
  And I agree because I remember when I started, I just talked
• 21:35
  about this proofreading thing again because I learned a lot
• 21:37
  from like I've done. Obviously done proofing before.
• 21:40
  But this particular time, everything was Really badly
• 21:44
  written like so badly written. And you know, it's one of those
• 21:50
  things. Sometimes when you're doing with
• 21:51
  International clients, you know, if it's coming from one language
• 21:54
  to another, they use Google Translate but as we know, Google
• 21:57
  Translates rubbish. So you just have to basically
• 22:00
  start from scratch and a lot of the time I would look at it and
• 22:03
  be like, okay, I've corrected it but this is not the best way
• 22:07
  that this could be written. This is You know, he needs to be
• 22:11
  rich so I would invariably just yeah.
• 22:14
  Right. It will rewrite.
• 22:15
  Yeah. And then I'll be like, I mean,
• 22:18
  this is taking longer, but it will be better quality.
• 22:21
  And that to me is kind of key and freelancing because you're
• 22:24
  always trying to build like a brand for yourself.
• 22:27
  You're trying to say like, this is me, this is the services I
• 22:30
  offer and it will always be like this level, whereas, you get
• 22:34
  people. I've seen like a lot of people
• 22:36
  from certain countries around the world that do Fring
• 22:39
  freelancing. They're not paying as much
• 22:42
  attention to Quality and say it's like the focus is on what
• 22:46
  the price like or do it for like two dollars or something.
• 22:49
  And I mean you get what you pay for kind of thing actually do.
• 22:53
  I had a very good client for a while.
• 22:55
  That did added quite a bit of sort of proof in edges in for
• 22:58
  him. And he's like, can I can I send
• 23:00
  you these these files and these documents?
• 23:02
  Because I've had this stuff written, but he said, I did he,
• 23:05
  you know, by his own admission said I probably went a bit too
• 23:08
  cheap on it and I think you've got someone from Um, Adam, I
• 23:11
  like India or the Philippines or something to write the whose
• 23:13
  command of, you know, the native English wasn't where it should
• 23:16
  be and you can tell when you read it, you can tell by the
• 23:19
  way, the sentences are formulated and stuff.
• 23:21
  And, and he knew is like, you know, I probably went a bit too
• 23:24
  cheap, and you get what you pay for, but that's, that's the
• 23:27
  component, that's can be quite difficult to communicate to your
• 23:31
  clients. I think that it's, you know,
• 23:33
  there is a value attached thereto.
• 23:35
  The money that you're charging is that, you know, another
• 23:38
  important element to this as well.
• 23:40
  Which is really interesting is, obviously, Google is always
• 23:43
  becoming more aware, becoming better understanding these
• 23:47
  things. So if you take like, SEO that
• 23:48
  you've mentioned before, when you create bad content or poorly
• 23:53
  written content, like Google nose and actually, like, drives
• 23:57
  your content further down the CRPS, that's search engine
• 24:01
  results Pages for those. Don't know.
• 24:04
  And I found that fascinating. I was like, wow.
• 24:06
  So Google knows if your content is trash, right?
• 24:10
  What Google knows if you're copying content, you know.
• 24:12
  Yeah, but see that's a tricky one.
• 24:14
  And I've explained that to clients as well.
• 24:16
  Sometimes that? Even if you're not copying
• 24:20
  people, like a lot of time if you like writing an article or
• 24:23
  guest post on sorry. I do apologize for that.
• 24:29
  That's never happened before. No.
• 24:31
  Hey, I'm just looking. No, that's fine.
• 24:33
  Actually, I'm I'm sat here at home and I have a dog, so I'm
• 24:36
  just like praying that she's going to keep quiet through
• 24:38
  these call. You know, I got a really
• 24:40
  apologize to everyone and that that's really unprofessional.
• 24:43
  I do feel like that's never happened before.
• 24:45
  Like that was actually a family member as well, so I feel bad.
• 24:49
  Sorry. Anyway God, that's that's from
• 24:52
  me, completely God. What was I saying?
• 24:56
  I kind of remember, It's talking about the quality of freelance
• 25:00
  work and the, you know, people don't always understand that
• 25:03
  there's a monetary value. Does the monetary price does
• 25:07
  actually reflect quality in a lot of times that's quite
• 25:09
  difficult to get across to the clients potentially?
• 25:14
  Yeah, I mean money. Money of course, is always a
• 25:18
  factor in a special especially if you're a small business, you
• 25:20
  know, the your budgetary restrictions can be difficult
• 25:24
  but at the same time, I don't know, I don't know what you
• 25:27
  charge for your proof. Eating editing or, you know,
• 25:29
  writing, but that I see these ads where people like, you know,
• 25:31
  I need 10,000 words written, and I'm willing to pay like a penny
• 25:35
  a word, it was about. What do you think you're going
• 25:37
  to get rich? I mean, you just underselling
• 25:40
  yourself. Like one thing that I realized
• 25:41
  as well is that your price kind of reflects?
• 25:47
  The quality of what you're producing.
• 25:48
  So if you undersell yourself, you're basically saying what I
• 25:51
  do is cheap and rubbish she said you don't value your own work.
• 25:55
  Exactly. So yeah but like the perception
• 25:57
  I mean it's like to me it's the same as when you go into a store
• 26:00
  and you know, you see different products that are priced
• 26:04
  according to to brand and stuff and the one price is higher than
• 26:08
  another. Like your immediate reaction is
• 26:11
  while the more expensive stuff is obviously high quality,
• 26:14
  that's not always the case but You know, a lot of times that
• 26:18
  that will be true because you know you're paying for that
• 26:21
  quality you're paying brand or whatever and I thought that's
• 26:25
  exactly the same with freelancing and marketing.
• 26:27
  It's true. It's like there's I think
• 26:29
  there's a I don't know who cause I'm probably not as well read as
• 26:32
  I should be, but I think there's a whole paper or psychology
• 26:36
  thing written about, you know, the psychology of the perception
• 26:39
  of, you know, price versus value.
• 26:41
  And, you know, so you're right. You know, the instant think,
• 26:43
  maybe it costs more, therefore, it's better, you know.
• 26:48
  It's really not the case. Anyway, let's bring it back to
• 26:53
  you. So obviously you mentioned the
• 26:55
  USA. So you relocate to the us a
• 26:59
  couple of weeks after September the 11th, which is crazy.
• 27:05
  Can you tell us more about kind of the atmosphere in airports at
• 27:09
  the time and in general in the u.s. when you were living there,
• 27:12
  well it was, you know, it was just such a very impressive
• 27:16
  dented. Time all but not not.
• 27:18
  I mean, obviously for completely different reasons that the
• 27:20
  minute. I mean, I think we're almost
• 27:21
  living in a bit of an impressive end up kind of and said,
• 27:25
  unprecedented time. Now, with the whole, you know,
• 27:27
  pandemic, you know, I didn't expect I would see that in my
• 27:30
  lifetime. So, so obviously for different
• 27:33
  reasons, but back then, it was very, very tense.
• 27:36
  I mean, especially in the airport's.
• 27:39
  I mean, tempers were running High emotions were running High.
• 27:43
  Everybody was extra vigilant. Everyone was on high-alert.
• 27:46
  I mean, I remember, Member when I went to the states, I went to
• 27:51
  pick up my ticket for the flight because back in the day where
• 27:54
  you booked through a travel agent and you get went and
• 27:55
  picture ticket up the good old days.
• 27:58
  Yeah. And I remember the, the
• 28:00
  assistant at the travel agents, kind of kind of holding on to
• 28:04
  the ticket and sort of doing this little back-and-forth, took
• 28:07
  with it with me and she's saying, she's cautioning me
• 28:09
  saying, you do understand that this ticket could be revoked at
• 28:12
  any time in case, you know, planes or whatever and needed
• 28:16
  for Literary purposes or whatever.
• 28:18
  Yeah, it was really strange. Okay.
• 28:21
  Yeah, yeah. It was very read.
• 28:24
  She's got shoot but that's how it was.
• 28:26
  They were like they could you know, put all commercial flights
• 28:29
  down and you know, depending on what's needed.
• 28:31
  You know, basically said, if you know, if we have a war or
• 28:33
  whatever you know is, I think it might just be a u.s. a thing as
• 28:38
  well because, you know, I've flown around the world as well
• 28:40
  been to different costumes as that I suppose.
• 28:43
  In England is pretty strict too, but I'm never Ah, forget this.
• 28:47
  When I went to the states back in 2014, I had never been.
• 28:50
  And I think we'd arrived at LAX and huge line for customs and,
• 28:58
  you know, I thought, oh, maybe you know, got British passport,
• 29:01
  that will make a difference. No, it doesn't matter where
• 29:04
  you're from same for everyone, and there was a couple of really
• 29:08
  weird things that happened. I'll start with with when I got
• 29:13
  to the actual gate. So basically, I had my ticket
• 29:18
  over and my passport and the guy at the Customs desk is just like
• 29:23
  Why are you here? I'm sorry on Holodeck, like, I'm
• 29:27
  just this nervous. 21 wreck and I'm like on holiday and he's
• 29:32
  like, where will you be going? And I'm like, well first, we're
• 29:36
  going to downtown Long Beach and then he's like, where else after
• 29:41
  that? And I'm like, I don't know.
• 29:45
  Probably Las Vegas, maybe this place and he just stared at me,
• 29:49
  like, me sitting like, piercing eyes for me.
• 29:53
  And then just randomly, he just goes.
• 29:55
  Okay, go for it. Yeah.
• 29:57
  Yes they question. And I think you know that even
• 30:00
  when was that 2014, you were still just a few years after
• 30:03
  yes. And everyone was still kind of
• 30:05
  on very high alert. You know, I kind of found it
• 30:08
  like now it's a little more relaxed than it was back then
• 30:11
  because it was just everybody was just as you can imagine.
• 30:15
  And for good reason, you know everybody was just in that
• 30:18
  extremely hyper Vigilant mode and it was a little scary, you
• 30:22
  know is a little Gary to sit on a half, empty plane like three
• 30:26
  weeks after September 11. And I think, probably the thing
• 30:28
  I was like when I'd give you the ticket story.
• 30:30
  I think probably, the reason for that was because I was flying in
• 30:33
  and out of Boston at the town, which, of course, we're all the
• 30:36
  planes were hijacked from so going in and out with Logan
• 30:40
  Airport. Yeah, so I mean, I think it was
• 30:43
  only about maybe six months prior that I'd been on one of
• 30:46
  the planes going and I can't remember if I was flying in.
• 30:49
  I think I've flown into Logan Airport meant.
• 30:52
  Connecting flight somewhere else and the pilots.
• 30:55
  Like, and if you look out of the plane to your right, you'll be
• 30:57
  able to see the Top of the World Trade Center and I was like,
• 31:00
  yeah, I'm not, you know, and then six months later, who knew
• 31:04
  so yeah, it was quite a scary time, you know, and I had
• 31:07
  friends, a lot of friends in New York City, that were, you know,
• 31:12
  quite deeply impacted by all that is again, just on the level
• 31:17
  of like, strict airport security.
• 31:20
  I remember that same day, I Before that altercation at the
• 31:25
  gate. I never forget this because it
• 31:27
  was sort of surreal. It was like, it was like being
• 31:29
  in a movie seeing this, we're all standing in the line, you
• 31:33
  know, it's taking forever and someone, I don't know why they
• 31:37
  decided this was a good idea, but they decided to take a photo
• 31:40
  with flash photography, okay? And this really tall Asian
• 31:44
  American, like security guard who was at one of the desks
• 31:49
  literally like, leaped know, he sort of, he At first, she goes,
• 31:54
  who took the photo. Who took the photo and then he
• 32:00
  just jumps over the desk and just goes, no one is going
• 32:04
  anywhere until they tell me who took the photo.
• 32:07
  And we're all just, it's like being in school.
• 32:09
  You know. Like, when someone says, no one
• 32:11
  says except like, this is like really serious.
• 32:15
  Yeah. Everyone just like and luckily,
• 32:18
  it wasn't me. Luckily, we had a guard near us
• 32:21
  who kind of motion to split some of us off, right?
• 32:26
  We were in the part of people Just got let through and then
• 32:28
  everywhere away from the offending party.
• 32:31
  Everyone else was like they were in under deep Taro that
• 32:34
  arrogation and this guy which is not drop it.
• 32:36
  Like, even though he made it clear, why?
• 32:40
  It's not okay to take photos, he was still hounding until you
• 32:43
  would find that purse. Did he find them?
• 32:46
  I don't know because I was kind of like too nervous to look.
• 32:49
  I didn't want to make us suspicious that's like yeah that
• 32:54
  was that was pretty crazy. Yeah the the whole secure.
• 32:57
  Something the Customs thing they don't they don't play about
• 33:00
  their, you know, I mean as you know, cause I had to go through
• 33:02
  the whole immigration process and all that good stuff.
• 33:05
  So it's, you know, it's a lot of Hoops to jump through and did
• 33:08
  they ask you any like weird questions, anything?
• 33:10
  They always. Yeah.
• 33:11
  They always do a bit like you do that but I think really it's
• 33:13
  just there's some want to know why you're there and how long
• 33:16
  you're staying. And they just want to know where
• 33:19
  you are. And I think really they just
• 33:20
  sort of want that that point that you're going to be at in
• 33:24
  case you suddenly decide that you're not going to go back to
• 33:26
  your country. They kind of have a starting
• 33:29
  point to find you from, I think that's usually the motivation
• 33:32
  for you, fair enough. Yeah of course that's a flow
• 33:36
  concept because you could just drive to another state without
• 33:39
  you knowing it is so vast. I mean when I first went there I
• 33:46
  couldn't I think I flew from I lived in Florida.
• 33:48
  First ten years for the last seven that I was there.
• 33:55
  Yeah. When I was first that I was in
• 33:57
  Florida, I went Colorado and I couldn't like being from
• 34:00
  England. You know, we fly two hours and
• 34:02
  were in Spain for hours and that was really what Greece Italy
• 34:06
  Cyprus. It was really hard for me to get
• 34:08
  it, you know, my head around that you could fly for four or
• 34:11
  five hours and you still in the same country.
• 34:13
  You know, I mean it's so much more preferable than the
• 34:16
  alternative of doing the road trip like I because I'm a big
• 34:19
  fan of professional wrestling there and I hear about all this
• 34:23
  kind of travel that they have to do continuously obviously not
• 34:25
  now but like before And sometimes maybe they'd be
• 34:30
  driving as long as like 13 hours or some reason.
• 34:32
  It's like that. Remember, our talk in terms of
• 34:36
  hours in the states and then if you know that, if you kind of
• 34:38
  like here, if you say, you know, how far is it from London,
• 34:42
  they'll say oh, it's like, there's like 200 miles or
• 34:44
  something over there. They'll say it's like, oh, it's
• 34:46
  like six hours, you know, the drive, they'll give you the
• 34:49
  drive time rather than the mileage by something.
• 34:51
  Like I remember when we were there, my friend that I was
• 34:54
  traveling with was like, we have to get a convertible, we have to
• 34:57
  have a car. Car and I understood I didn't
• 34:59
  understand then but as soon as we got there, I understand why.
• 35:02
  Like, if you don't have a car in America you're a lot.
• 35:09
  Like my family would come over and they're like, well we'll
• 35:11
  just get the books. I'm like, no.
• 35:15
  If you I mean, you know, big cities and stuff have have
• 35:17
  public transportation, same as we do, but unless you're in
• 35:20
  somewhere, like, you know, like New York, or Chicago, where
• 35:23
  they've got like a good subway system that shoot.
• 35:26
  It's like it's just not the same.
• 35:27
  You could even then though, if you're in the major cities, it's
• 35:30
  like, it's like being in London. It's just a nightmare because
• 35:32
  you've got so many people and it's so packed all the time.
• 35:36
  It's just, you better off just driving like yeah, maybe it's
• 35:42
  not I'll just add up live, the whole Subway, anything either.
• 35:45
  So, hey, yeah. It sounds that I remember when I
• 35:49
  was working in Estonia, I had a friend who was from New York
• 35:53
  he'd lived in New York City. And he was remember, he was just
• 35:57
  I walked into the room and he was talking to us, another girl,
• 36:00
  there who happened to live there at some point and he's
• 36:02
  explaining New York City and I've never been.
• 36:05
  And I'm like, that sounds just like London.
• 36:07
  But 10 times worse though. He's so small.
• 36:11
  I mean like Manhattan Island is so small people don't realize
• 36:14
  how small it is. So densely populated you know
• 36:17
  it's in. It is a nightmare to get around.
• 36:19
  Sometimes I have you been since have been to New York?
• 36:22
  No, I haven't been anywhere. I've barely seen America.
• 36:25
  I've been to California law. Vegas and oddly, I haven't
• 36:30
  Vegas. Yes, look Vegas, but California
• 36:32
  all the time I spent in America. It's just like an oddity that I
• 36:35
  never set foot in California. Not, not even to take like a
• 36:39
  connecting flight or anything to Hawaii.
• 36:43
  So you think I would have tipped, but I ended up
• 36:44
  connecting in Seattle and, you know, this President, it's not
• 36:47
  necessarily like a big business Hub as far as corporates
• 36:50
  concern, because it's more like entertainment industry, isn't
• 36:53
  it? And like, tourism and stuff.
• 36:55
  I mean, I imagine is some business.
• 36:57
  So you've got Silicon Valley and stuff like that, but like in
• 37:00
  terms of like, you know, maybe like Financial hub, for example,
• 37:05
  and that's going to be more, I guess, NYC, and Chicago and
• 37:09
  places like that. Maybe.
• 37:11
  Yeah. I just, I haven't really spent
• 37:13
  much time at all or any time at all.
• 37:14
  In California, it's nice. He's pretty crazy as well, but
• 37:19
  it's got some nice places to I think a lot of places in the
• 37:22
  state's just run with a little bit crazy.
• 37:25
  You know. Yeah there was a little It's
• 37:27
  tough. I remember it was really weird
• 37:29
  like going to a supermarket and seeing that they sold like you
• 37:34
  know ice cream and then guns. And that's just like what you
• 37:40
  know that that's that's a whole yeah different from England.
• 37:43
  I mean that whole gun culture is definitely just completely, you
• 37:47
  know, alien to us. I think it was a in some
• 37:50
  Walmart's. You could theoretically, you
• 37:53
  could live in that. Yeah, they literally have
• 37:56
  everything you can find. The sea beds food, like
• 38:01
  everything. It's crazy as it sounds.
• 38:03
  You actually. And then a lot of them are
• 38:06
  24-hour. Like, some of our round?
• 38:07
  Yeah. Tesco Metro store.
• 38:09
  Yeah, that was, that was tough when I came back because it's
• 38:11
  that, you know, we don't, we don't care to quite so much to
• 38:14
  people, you know, so I found in our shops and open as long
• 38:17
  places aren't open as long and it's just like the general sort
• 38:20
  of day-to-day a convenience is, I think that, you know, that
• 38:22
  would have been back about two years now and until an until
• 38:26
  coronavirus hit. I was kind of back, but I wasn't
• 38:29
  back if that makes sense. So I think year, while I was
• 38:32
  back hours, literally back and forth, to the states like five
• 38:35
  six times for, you know, sometimes up to six weeks at a
• 38:38
  time. So you know, it wasn't like have
• 38:40
  made this big transition because I was still going back and forth
• 38:44
  and then even earlier this year and I just got back to England
• 38:48
  just before the whole lockdown thing happened.
• 38:50
  So I was over in, I've been in Florida actually for about four
• 38:54
  or five weeks and got back just around the end of February and
• 38:58
  then of course, you know, weeks later we hit the hit the
• 39:01
  lockdown thing. So it's a good point.
• 39:04
  You make actually, I mean, I gotta say, like, I came back to
• 39:07
  England in, let me see February. It was kind of really close.
• 39:12
  Like I was in London. Yeah, like London for like a
• 39:15
  week and then came up to Manchester had this stress of
• 39:19
  finding a place to live did that.
• 39:21
  And then all of this stuff happened and I'm like wow.
• 39:24
  But as far as like adjusting because obviously, I don't need
• 39:28
  been back to England like twice in those three years, and it was
• 39:32
  only for, like, a month for best and to get to the point, like,
• 39:37
  you know, I was thinking it does take it some time to adjust and
• 39:42
  even now, like, I don't feel the same as I did living in it.
• 39:46
  Okay, it's nice and Manchester's.
• 39:48
  Nice. But it's like, I think yeah,
• 39:50
  when you've lived in other countries, you do have this like
• 39:53
  Newfound appreciation and feeling as far as like when you
• 39:56
  come back to your home. I'm land.
• 39:58
  You kind of feel a bit like appreciative of some things,
• 40:01
  missing other things, but like not like it takes some time to
• 40:05
  kind of get back into. Was it said, well they say,
• 40:08
  actually repatriate thing is harder than you know, leaving in
• 40:12
  the first place and I can I can well believe it.
• 40:14
  I mean, I struggle very badly with certain things.
• 40:17
  Of course America was in Florida at Atlanta and Atlanta is
• 40:20
  amazing. I love living life to go.
• 40:22
  It's very cool. I live very much in the Midtown
• 40:25
  area, right in the Heart of the City story.
• 40:27
  What, what years did you live there?
• 40:29
  Because I've see the Walking Dead's been filmed there for a
• 40:31
  long time. Yes it has.
• 40:33
  Yeah that was being filmed there while I was there.
• 40:35
  Yes, cool. And I think the film a lot of
• 40:38
  that quite a way south of the city.
• 40:42
  I forget the name of the little town where they film it in.
• 40:44
  Now it'll come to me but it's south of Atlanta by about an
• 40:47
  hour, an hour and a half I think.
• 40:49
  But yeah they do and actually the filming industry as a whole
• 40:53
  in Atlanta is massive. It's that there's actually more
• 40:55
  movies made in Atlanta now than in.
• 40:57
  Hollywood I think wow because they did some humongous and I
• 41:02
  guess some tax breaks or whatever is that you know so
• 41:05
  well to try and attract the movie industry into the city.
• 41:09
  I think the last year I haven't followed it for a couple of
• 41:11
  years but I think the last year I looked the said something like
• 41:14
  the movie industry had bought some ridiculous.
• 41:16
  Some like 900 billion into, you know, the state of Georgia.
• 41:20
  This to me is another fascinating concept as well, cuz
• 41:22
  I've had a couple of American guest on the show previously and
• 41:25
  I remember one of the guests I asked about this.
• 41:28
  How every state essentially is that, it's almost like a little,
• 41:32
  is different country, right? In terms of like how its run.
• 41:35
  And like I remember him saying that, you know, you've got like
• 41:38
  your federal so government. Yeah.
• 41:41
  Legislation and guidelines and stuff and you've got like State
• 41:45
  guidelines and and Municipal which I guess would be like
• 41:48
  County County. Yeah, yeah.
• 41:53
  And everyone there is, you know, it's like, you know, depending
• 41:56
  on which state you're living in it.
• 41:57
  Depends what state tax, you pay like in Florida, there's non and
• 42:00
  Atlanta it was yeah or something, you know it's like
• 42:04
  we've those guys like because they're musicians DMT for those
• 42:09
  who are wondering, like there that, you know, see they do
• 42:13
  drugs and all of this stuff and he said that you have to, like,
• 42:15
  be really careful because like, in one state you're fine and
• 42:18
  then you've got ya drive. Just half an hour into that
• 42:20
  other state, and like, you're looking at serious offenses.
• 42:23
  It's true. Anyway, I watched the some like
• 42:26
  good Comedians and stuff. A lot of stand-up comedy sir
• 42:28
  what a cool quite a few American Comedians and there's a guy's
• 42:32
  pretty well-known out there and he was I think he got arrested
• 42:34
  in Florida for partying too hard and he's like that anymore.
• 42:38
  This is Happy padding in Florida for years I didn't even know
• 42:41
  they had laws. Hey, you know, let's see that
• 42:44
  party little. Well yeah, yeah he said I didn't
• 42:47
  even know they had any laws is like, how was I arrested?
• 42:53
  Let's just move it back to the, the job markets.
• 42:56
  How does the The u.s. job market sort of compared with the UK job
• 43:00
  market and obviously, they're going to be totally different.
• 43:02
  But what do you think about the key differences?
• 43:05
  I think just probably just the vastness of the country makes
• 43:08
  such a difference and, you know, corporations are huge.
• 43:11
  So I think there's a lot. I think, you know, I mean you
• 43:14
  all read these things about you, like the American dream and then
• 43:17
  you sort of, but when you go there, And I mean, this is
• 43:22
  really sort of from from my perspective but I got very much
• 43:25
  the impression that as long as you're prepared to work and put
• 43:28
  the effort in and, you know, you have to be a little bit smart
• 43:31
  with it and take your opportunities, but you can kind
• 43:33
  of basically, just do or be anything you want to be because
• 43:36
  the opportunity is there. So I ended up being, you know,
• 43:40
  the logistics and supply chain. Weren't, as you said, I got, you
• 43:43
  know, I moved up through the ranks.
• 43:44
  I got quite high in the industry to the point where I was the
• 43:49
  only female At my management level and sometimes for a level
• 43:53
  of to below me and I just, you know, it was quite a it was
• 43:58
  quite a different state of affairs to what I expected when
• 44:01
  I, you know, was coming up through school and some I didn't
• 44:04
  know what my career was going to be on, but I will always
• 44:08
  maintain that. I don't think I would have ever
• 44:09
  had the opportunities in England that I was afforded in America.
• 44:13
  I don't think I would have had the career that I had.
• 44:16
  If I'd have remained in England, I just don't, I don't think I
• 44:19
  would have been given Opportunity.
• 44:21
  So are now whether that's just because we're a smaller country,
• 44:24
  therefore everything is much more competitive, maybe that
• 44:28
  it's hard to sort of put one sort of defining reason on it.
• 44:32
  If there is one reason it could be multiple.
• 44:34
  I don't know. But it just that was always the
• 44:37
  impression I got that. I wouldn't have the same chances
• 44:40
  here, as I had their, you know, it's crazy as it sounds.
• 44:43
  Yeah. I agree with you as well.
• 44:45
  I'm a member of one of the main reason I left the UK when I did
• 44:49
  was, you know, to finish my degree.
• 44:50
  Re I did the degree to get into marketing to have a car.
• 44:54
  Specialism something to get a job, basically, right?
• 44:57
  Because it's been so many years in customer service before that
• 45:00
  and you know, customer service is always a delight, isn't it?
• 45:06
  It's just like the worst. I mean, I have to have customer
• 45:10
  service people that worked for me.
• 45:12
  I have the greatest admiration because it is just, it's just
• 45:15
  awful, you know, people called screaming at you and it's just,
• 45:18
  yeah, you just, you just have to Eli e, just have to learn to
• 45:22
  deal with it. And the funny thing was like,
• 45:24
  before I did my degree, the only really customer service I'd done
• 45:28
  was like supermarkets, which I thought was bad enough and I had
• 45:31
  the luck of the draw because I worked at waitrose so was okay.
• 45:34
  So you were kind of on the high end of the supermarket.
• 45:37
  Slightly nice. So it's a bit like saying like,
• 45:40
  oh, you know, I had a less dirty patch rather than the super
• 45:44
  dirty packaging. And I mean, like, nothing gets
• 45:46
  waitrose. It was more to do with like the
• 45:48
  customers and what you kind of down, right?
• 45:52
  But that was only like two or three years before, uni, and
• 45:55
  then I did, you know? So I took some time out went to
• 45:58
  UNI at 21, you know, did it that way?
• 46:01
  And obviously, inevitably, I had to take work while I was at Uni.
• 46:05
  So I did all these jobs you know, in hospitality and stuff
• 46:09
  and that was the real learning curve.
• 46:12
  That was like, wow, I had it easy, Marcus will show you that
• 46:16
  will show you sides of human nature that you Dream of talking
• 46:21
  to people that way. I mean that's that's the
• 46:23
  biggest. Yeah, that's a nice pose.
• 46:26
  Yeah. Yeah I just yeah, I was always
• 46:27
  sort of raised with the manners cost nothing thing, you know?
• 46:30
  It's yeah. But like, you know, bring it
• 46:33
  back to the job aspect. Like, obviously did that degree
• 46:36
  couldn't find anything in London and I was looking for like two
• 46:39
  or three months whilst working you still working at that hotel
• 46:45
  after graduation and that the time I was dating a girl who's
• 46:49
  from Estonia and And we sort of sat down and decided, like,
• 46:53
  maybe you have a shot at Sonia because we're just going to be
• 46:55
  stuck here. And it was only ever supposed to
• 46:58
  be like a temporary thing. And then we would come back to
• 47:00
  the UK. Right?
• 47:02
  And you know, 23 months turned into three years is, but I
• 47:07
  remember whether that's the thing.
• 47:09
  I remember thinking that I'm better off in that country
• 47:12
  because I'm actually getting work experience and jobs and
• 47:16
  it's funny to me, being back in the UK with like a degree, three
• 47:20
  years, And running worth of experience.
• 47:22
  Yeah, I can't find a job and the main thing I'm being told is all
• 47:27
  you don't have enough experience, which I find
• 47:29
  hilarious like the coverall excuse of it.
• 47:31
  How much do you need like, you know.
• 47:33
  Yeah. You know I think I think what
• 47:35
  you said was really important this idea of like an
• 47:37
  oversaturated Market, you know? Even if you are in a smaller
• 47:41
  country, obviously the UK is so much smaller than the US, so
• 47:44
  there's less competition. But I mean, you've got we're
• 47:48
  rich in terms of immigration so you're competing.
• 47:50
  Meeting with people from all around the world and also, yeah,
• 47:53
  just very good education here as well.
• 47:56
  So just, you know, to me like it.
• 47:59
  Yeah, it kind of I suppose it's good for us because we've been
• 48:02
  abroad. Our CV stands out a little bit
• 48:04
  more, but if you're just standard went to do, you know
• 48:07
  Universe, he got the experience. You just another fish in the
• 48:11
  ocean, really? I mean, yeah.
• 48:13
  It's and it is, it's used to think, you know, of course, I
• 48:17
  was much younger, then, but I used to think it was very, very
• 48:19
  difficult to You sort of just get your foot in the door in
• 48:23
  England, like almost like you know it's just a maybe it was my
• 48:26
  perception. It just seemed that people would
• 48:28
  just not willing to sort of give you that opportunity and that
• 48:30
  again you know, being older and having worked in management and
• 48:34
  hiring it. If you've got a pool of
• 48:36
  well-qualified people then I know it sounds awful.
• 48:39
  But why should you give that person a chance if you've got
• 48:41
  this your team. Well qualified people here and
• 48:44
  you know that they can do the job that you need them to do and
• 48:46
  you know, it's quite difficult. I agree with you.
• 48:50
  Because I see it two different ways.
• 48:51
  I see it like from the business side and then from the kind of I
• 48:56
  don't know how to put it like no actually.
• 48:59
  I know I only see it from the business side because the only
• 49:01
  complaint I have with companies right now in terms of their
• 49:06
  hiring is one thing. If someone just genuinely lacks
• 49:10
  or the experience or that sit in some major areas, then that's
• 49:13
  fine. I mean a lot of the time I don't
• 49:15
  go for opportunities. If like you know there's
• 49:18
  something major missing like all we need you to be You know,
• 49:22
  comfortable Graphics, design or programming or something.
• 49:26
  Obviously, I'm not going to go for that, right?
• 49:28
  But if it's one where I've got say, like, 80% of what they need
• 49:31
  and then it's like a tiny bit stuff.
• 49:33
  I need to work on, I'm not. Well, every company has
• 49:36
  resources for training, you know, you know, a lot of the
• 49:39
  time, you're just learning on the job.
• 49:41
  Anyway, you have to learn their systems and even if you do have
• 49:44
  what they need. Every company uses different
• 49:46
  systems, different programs. So you gotta learn that, but
• 49:50
  Think the bigger thing and this is what I take exception with is
• 49:53
  that? Yeah, you can get someone that
• 49:56
  ticks all the boxes but really it's about the attitude of the
• 50:00
  person, you know, in terms of like what matters you need.
• 50:05
  Someone that yeah. Thinks the way that you think or
• 50:08
  can be molded or that you have chemistry with or whatever.
• 50:12
  I think that's why I like, you know that expression that the
• 50:16
  supposedly you know, the employer.
• 50:20
  In the job interview kind of knows within 20 seconds if
• 50:23
  they're going to give you the job or not.
• 50:25
  And I think that that's not because I think a lot of people
• 50:27
  misconstrue that is like oh it's how you look but I think it's
• 50:30
  more like the way you carry yourself and your attitude and
• 50:33
  then that's what they're going to base it on.
• 50:35
  Yeah, I mean I agree with that 100% like said I was involved
• 50:38
  with hiring people and add. I've had a you know definitely
• 50:41
  more than one Higher that I made where like my superiors and I
• 50:44
  had to justify that then they're like why the hell did you hire
• 50:47
  that person? But I would because I would hire
• 50:50
  a A lot of the time on sort of attitude and sort of work ethic
• 50:55
  and, you know, because you can skills, you know, I mean as long
• 50:58
  as they have the basic skills, you know, I mean yeah to be able
• 51:00
  to read and write but as long as you have the basic skills, you
• 51:05
  can teach sort of what's needed or people can learn, you know,
• 51:09
  if they've got a reasonable aptitude but you cannot, you
• 51:12
  can't teach somebody to care. You can't teach it work ethic,
• 51:16
  you know, you can't teach that at all.
• 51:18
  So I would, I would hire that And above, you know, the skills
• 51:22
  some people have a lot of the time just because it's going to
• 51:25
  cause you a less of a headache. Couldn't agree more.
• 51:28
  Yeah, also just just on that on that trailer for.
• 51:34
  Do you have any like horror stories as far as hiring is
• 51:37
  concerned and he like easy interview situations because
• 51:43
  it's America. So sometimes it's like, there is
• 51:46
  such a broad sort of spectrum of people and I think It's
• 51:50
  generally I mean I think if you go to an interview in England,
• 51:53
  people will, you know, dress appropriately.
• 51:55
  Go to Indian try and present themselves as best as they can
• 51:59
  America. It's a little bit different.
• 52:00
  You know, I've had people turn up like Dragon 3 kids with the
• 52:03
  minis. No.
• 52:20
  Turned up and then making an everything.
• 52:22
  Tell him that. Yeah.
• 52:24
  It's just it's just a really strange thing to see like you
• 52:27
  know, somebody dragged their kids in like until the three
• 52:29
  kids to sit in the waiting room with more than.
• 52:31
  Well they have this job interview.
• 52:33
  So did you get any fun that did anything like weird?
• 52:36
  Or like maybe not weird like really badly wrong or gave off
• 52:40
  like a bomb or something? No, not that.
• 52:42
  I can really I think it usually goes the other way.
• 52:45
  I think people talk themselves up like really, really big and
• 52:47
  like your Chanda Challenge and saying, but you don't have
• 52:50
  experience of this or can you tell me and they're just doing
• 52:53
  this sort of talk thing and you're like, you don't really
• 52:55
  have a clue. But as far as like actual horror
• 52:58
  stories, go, I don't really have anything.
• 53:01
  Yeah, I struggle, I struggle with the question of like our
• 53:05
  tell us about the weaknesses that you have.
• 53:07
  Because like, I try to go and like, say things like are, you
• 53:13
  know, maybe I'm too passionate with certain ideas that can
• 53:16
  cloud my judgment or stuff like that.
• 53:17
  And then I'll try and put a spin on it and be like But, you know,
• 53:21
  I'm open-minded and I'm working with blah blah but like I don't
• 53:24
  feel like there's any good answer, you can give the really
• 53:26
  is. It doesn't interview writers any
• 53:29
  real good answer. I mean, I've asked that question
• 53:31
  myself. It can go either way sometimes,
• 53:33
  sometimes people give this whole Litany of like these weaknesses.
• 53:36
  You like that's probably a little too much.
• 53:37
  Yeah. All do like that.
• 53:42
  And try and take a negative and turn it into a positive, which I
• 53:46
  do that myself. Have been a long time.
• 53:48
  I've been to the interview now but I think I would I would try
• 53:50
  and do that myself but that just sits.
• 53:52
  Yeah it is. It's one of those questions that
• 53:54
  there's never really a good answer and it probably depends
• 53:56
  on the interview or two as to how they're going to participate
• 54:01
  because like I'm a very honest person so like I would say it
• 54:05
  was it is but then I quickly rip so like I'll say yeah like ah
• 54:11
  Something like, you know, I'm not very good with maps.
• 54:13
  And then I'll realize that I can't just say that.
• 54:16
  So, gotta like, put something in there.
• 54:18
  That makes it not as bad, something like, but, you know,
• 54:23
  I've worked a lot with analytics and finance, so, you know, I'm
• 54:26
  pretty good with that and I've, you know, it's hard not to
• 54:32
  stumble with that. So yeah, okay, let's move it
• 54:35
  forward. So obviously we understand that,
• 54:38
  you know, there are major differences between In the UK,
• 54:41
  and the u.s. job markets. But how does freelancing differ
• 54:44
  between both countries are one of the major differences that
• 54:48
  actually don't know. If there's a lot of major
• 54:50
  differences, it's just a similar.
• 54:55
  It's just a similar Arena. I think in, in both countries, I
• 54:57
  think, you know, do it having done some freelancing myself.
• 55:01
  I think we're sort of back to the same conversation that we
• 55:04
  were just having against, you know, the size of the country
• 55:06
  versus sort of opportunity. I think.
• 55:10
  I haven't done a massive amount of freelance in here since I've
• 55:14
  got back to the UK and a lot of my clients that I have and I
• 55:17
  still do a little bit. I have clients but the more sort
• 55:20
  of International International based, I think it's the same
• 55:24
  sort of thing as well as then about the job market.
• 55:26
  I think it's probably a little bit harder to break in a little
• 55:29
  bit harder to kind of, sort of, get up above the crowd.
• 55:33
  Just just a little bit more competitive all around, I think,
• 55:36
  you know, in terms of think there's maybe I think, was
• 55:39
  possibly, Or quality here. I think there's probably a lot
• 55:42
  more people doing it in the states.
• 55:44
  There's much higher numbers that I think we're sort of so
• 55:46
  concentrated that you've really got to be sort of good at what
• 55:50
  you're doing, you know. Okay.
• 55:53
  And I noticed that you're currently based in Manchester is
• 55:58
  any particular reason that you decided to base sort of things
• 56:01
  there or is that just not. Manchester was actually was a
• 56:05
  place that I always came to a bobby pin in Yorkshire.
• 56:10
  But I would spend a lot of time over here in Manchester when I
• 56:14
  came, and it's just an actually before I moved to the to the
• 56:16
  states, it was very much on the cards that I was going to move
• 56:19
  to Manchester is either going to be Manchester or London.
• 56:22
  And I had a lot of friends here in Manchester, so it was
• 56:24
  probably winning out over all then.
• 56:27
  You know, just, you know, fit had it that ended up going to
• 56:29
  America and the rest is the city's history.
• 56:32
  But that was, it was just a place.
• 56:34
  I spend a lot of time. It's sort of, you know, I've
• 56:36
  been a bit of a northern girl. I guess you never said, you
• 56:39
  know, Northern Tea. And that's just, it's just seems
• 56:42
  to be where I've landed since I've come back.
• 56:44
  You know, because they business-wise, I've noticed
• 56:47
  since I've moved because I've never been here ever before.
• 56:49
  This is new to me, and it does kind of feel like I can, you say
• 56:58
  a competition to London, either? It feels like it an emerging
• 57:02
  second Siege. And I mean because obviously
• 57:04
  like Birmingham technically is the Second City in terms of
• 57:07
  amount of people and stuff, but I That in terms of like your
• 57:12
  major hubs for activities or things going on, it's people
• 57:16
  always talk about, you know, Newcastle Manchester Liverpool
• 57:20
  and such an obviously, there's specific reasons for that, but
• 57:23
  Manchester certainly visually as well.
• 57:27
  Kind of appears now to be an emergent place in terms of all
• 57:30
  the different companies that are coming here and real estate
• 57:35
  developments here and stuff. It really does seem to be
• 57:38
  developing considerably and one of the other interesting things
• 57:41
  I found is that there's like all these kind of traditional trade
• 57:45
  links between like Manchester and like st.
• 57:47
  Petersburg and right other countries and Wuhan for
• 57:52
  instance, right French. Yeah yeah, yeah, very strange.
• 57:57
  But it's logical parent. Its twin with wil Hahn and
• 58:01
  that's the reason why Manchester's ahead of the curve
• 58:03
  on a lot of this stuff because they had the information early.
• 58:06
  Yeah. And I think I'm not sure.
• 58:08
  I mean, like, I've only been back here.
• 58:10
  About 18 months two years. So, it's difficult for me to
• 58:13
  kind of get a bead on it right now, but it just seemed that
• 58:16
  some of the investment is starting to push up north.
• 58:19
  Now, out of London where as at one time specially when I was
• 58:23
  younger, everything was just very, very much concentrated in
• 58:27
  London as the Canticle. But, yeah, I mean, that's,
• 58:29
  that's the interesting thing to me is well, like, particularly,
• 58:32
  when you look at the news and stuff, like, I don't pay
• 58:34
  attention match to the news. I just kind of like, skim it
• 58:37
  just to keep them on track of stuff and Yeah, you're right.
• 58:41
  I call you never hear about is like London and what's going on
• 58:44
  in London? And the only stuff you'd hear
• 58:46
  about up north is like just like funny cutesy stories or like
• 58:50
  maybe if it's a particularly crazy winter.
• 58:52
  You might hear about what's going on our North but you'd
• 58:55
  never really hear about. Yeah.
• 58:56
  What's going on in the other cities?
• 58:58
  And yeah there's the sun. There's such that like divided
• 59:01
  you know, between North and South.
• 59:03
  It was always sold and looked at as very push I even found like
• 59:05
  since I've been since I've come back and I've driven around the
• 59:08
  country and I'll go down south, you know, That I'll drive back
• 59:11
  up you know to say Manchester and you get those road signs
• 59:15
  that say the North and it almost as funny as well because I don't
• 59:23
  know. For me I find people up here
• 59:25
  really friendly. Yeah because one of the
• 59:27
  complaints I always had about living in London was people I
• 59:29
  mean it comes with a territories where I imagine it's like that
• 59:33
  in any place you go probably like Moscow, New York whenever
• 59:36
  people don't have the time for pleasantries.
• 59:39
  It's like Gas is very much not sound too bad in the states that
• 59:44
  the south is seen as sort of friendly and hospitable,
• 59:47
  whereas, you know, like New York at the people who have some
• 59:50
  regard as a little bit rude and vulgar having been to both, I
• 59:54
  can say that I found people in New, York's be quite polite and
• 59:56
  friendly and helpful. I put as just a very different
• 1:00:01
  attitude. I think like, you know, I mean,
• 1:00:03
  people in the South, we'll just wait for you, you know, like, if
• 1:00:06
  you don't want to order food or a sandwich and you sort of
• 1:00:09
  staring at a sandwich, People. Wait their politely for you.
• 1:00:12
  While you make a decision, what you want to eat, where is the
• 1:00:15
  New York will say? Okay, I'll come back to you
• 1:00:17
  next, you know, that's so true. I think that's rude.
• 1:00:21
  That's so true. Yeah, but I don't think it's
• 1:00:23
  yeah. So the people from the southern
• 1:00:25
  states perceived that as being rude and abrupt but they don't
• 1:00:28
  think it's rude to hold up. 30 people behind them in a queue.
• 1:00:31
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, like I've got
• 1:00:35
  good and bad experiences with London in in the same manner as
• 1:00:38
  well. And I do think it does come down
• 1:00:39
  to time. I'm that's the key.
• 1:00:42
  People are busy, you don't have the time.
• 1:00:43
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, let's move the conversation
• 1:00:48
  forward. You've also worked extensively
• 1:00:51
  as a business consultant. How exactly do you help
• 1:00:55
  businesses in this role? What exactly is involved with
• 1:00:58
  business consultancy. It's just really sort of getting
• 1:01:01
  business on track and a lot of that I think came from my
• 1:01:04
  Logistics and supply chain experience.
• 1:01:07
  Because even though I was in that industry, really what it
• 1:01:10
  was And it was a lot of, a lot of my job was to go into
• 1:01:13
  individual buildings or terminals that were perhaps,
• 1:01:17
  struggling on, not operating as they should.
• 1:01:19
  And then, you know, fix them in quotes, you know, sometimes I
• 1:01:23
  don't sinking ships. It's be exactly safer sleeping
• 1:01:26
  shit. So, in terms of business
• 1:01:28
  consultancy, that's what I did with that to help businesses.
• 1:01:31
  And I also worked on sort of a, if you sleep now, LinkedIn, you
• 1:01:35
  probably know this to when I, when I first came back here, I
• 1:01:37
  sort of partnered with a local College as well.
• 1:01:40
  Well and help them to do a lot of them.
• 1:01:43
  They needed help with developing a whole Logistics and supply
• 1:01:46
  chain in training horse. Basically had it they have a
• 1:01:50
  whole facility set up. That is diverted to and it's a
• 1:01:54
  cross on the East Coast. It's based around.
• 1:01:58
  There's a lot of sort of dock area around their lot of
• 1:02:01
  logistics. A lot of sort of import-export,
• 1:02:03
  I think. So the business training
• 1:02:05
  facility, then it was brand new, but very state-of-the-art, very,
• 1:02:08
  very cool. Sort of went around.
• 1:02:10
  Help them put together their initial sort of offerings.
• 1:02:14
  If you likes about logistics and supply chain training modules
• 1:02:19
  which which was all very, you know, it's not just like a trip.
• 1:02:22
  It was all very, very much backed by, you know, the
• 1:02:25
  logistics bodies and things here.
• 1:02:27
  So is that it was the real deal so that was kind of interesting.
• 1:02:30
  So yeah, consulted with them for a good year or so on that that
• 1:02:34
  really took up most of my time in that realm.
• 1:02:38
  Cool, cool, cool. I'm gonna take it on a Bit of a
• 1:02:40
  more serious route here, but there's reasons by white by.
• 1:02:43
  Why am I? Okay, so many people that have
• 1:02:46
  worked in corporate jobs. Myself included, have
• 1:02:49
  experienced. Unfortunately, some sort of
• 1:02:51
  toxicity office politics in the workplace.
• 1:02:55
  What is your experience of this? And how did you handle it?
• 1:03:01
  I think you just, yeah, I think you're right.
• 1:03:02
  You get it. I think you get it in any any
• 1:03:04
  and every job I think you do. You know it?
• 1:03:11
  I always hits kind of say this because it's put it is a true
• 1:03:14
  fact is being a woman in a male-dominated.
• 1:03:16
  Environment can be very difficult and it's the old adage
• 1:03:19
  is true. You do have to work twice as
• 1:03:21
  hard, do twice as much and I think sometimes it's and I think
• 1:03:26
  that's difficult to understand sometimes, if you're a, you
• 1:03:30
  know, a guy in that industry because you don't kind of have
• 1:03:33
  the same, you don't kind of have the same.
• 1:03:36
  Prejudice is coming your way, it's a little bit different, but
• 1:03:39
  that's not to say that, It's anybody's fault particular.
• 1:03:41
  You just kind of, don't get it because a lot of the toe and a
• 1:03:43
  lot of these businesses to kind of be a very Neil oriented
• 1:03:46
  environment. So it's very kind of a welcoming
• 1:03:49
  environment. Also almost for free guys, so
• 1:03:54
  you do have to work a little differently.
• 1:03:55
  You do have to work a little harder, a little smarter, but
• 1:04:00
  everybody handles it in their own way.
• 1:04:02
  I actually had very, very good Partnerships and very good
• 1:04:05
  business relationships with a lot of guys that I worked with
• 1:04:07
  closely, but maybe I was, you know, just very Had a very good
• 1:04:11
  team of people. I had very good relationships
• 1:04:14
  with those people. So that sounds very.
• 1:04:16
  Fortunately I didn't run into the whole, you know, the glass
• 1:04:20
  ceiling thing too much. A dive, you know, encountered it
• 1:04:23
  here and there but it's for me. I think I was quite lucky.
• 1:04:26
  I didn't get that too much, you know.
• 1:04:28
  And I thought that I tend to think maybe people don't argue
• 1:04:30
  with me so much. Well I'm usually pretty good at
• 1:04:34
  what I'm doing and yeah, this is not I think, you know, it's I
• 1:04:39
  have quite a Large physical presence as well.
• 1:04:42
  I mean, it's difficult to tell here because we're on, you know,
• 1:04:45
  with sat down talking on video chat but I'm six foot two, you
• 1:04:48
  know. Wow, okay, I'm like really tall.
• 1:04:51
  So, you know, people tend not to try and it's a little extra Edge
• 1:04:56
  until cool. Cool it should, which I'm not
• 1:05:01
  intimidated. Anything in that business.
• 1:05:05
  I think, would you say it's gotten?
• 1:05:10
  Better over the years because, you know, a lot of the places.
• 1:05:14
  Yeah. I follow various things on
• 1:05:16
  LinkedIn for instance, and you get like, really inspiring
• 1:05:18
  messages about, you know, female CEOs and female that women in
• 1:05:23
  power and stuff. And it's really good.
• 1:05:25
  Uplifting stuff's, good to see and obviously seen examples of
• 1:05:32
  guess. Sexism or It feels like a bit of
• 1:05:37
  a strong word because it's not always necessarily like straight
• 1:05:40
  success. It can be more like, kind of
• 1:05:42
  institutional sexism is, right? So it's like, yeah, I can be
• 1:05:46
  systemic. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:48
  It's like the old adage. I mean, there's a lot, you know,
• 1:05:51
  we're talking a lot right now about things like, you know, the
• 1:05:54
  whole races and thing black, right?
• 1:05:56
  Matthew stuff like that. So you know, again having lived
• 1:05:59
  in the deep south in America, that's a very different thing
• 1:06:02
  and it is I don't want to say, it's a similar thing, it's not
• 1:06:05
  this not similar at all. It just sort of to your point of
• 1:06:08
  saying things can be systemic. I've experienced things down
• 1:06:11
  there that I've kind of witnessed and gone, oh my God.
• 1:06:15
  But yet the perpetrators of it, that sort of way of being is so
• 1:06:19
  ingrained in them that they don't even realize that they're
• 1:06:22
  doing something that's completely inappropriate.
• 1:06:25
  So that's that's probably where the change has to start with a
• 1:06:28
  lot of those things but yeah, you're right.
• 1:06:30
  I mean, I think it's changed over the years.
• 1:06:31
  I think it's there's more opportunities now.
• 1:06:34
  But women like you say ins many more females CEOs and stuff like
• 1:06:37
  that. But I think I think like me
• 1:06:39
  probably most women in business will say they've experienced
• 1:06:42
  some some sexism awesome sort of discrimination at the end of the
• 1:06:46
  day. It end.
• 1:06:48
  And for me, I think sometimes it gets shouted down about it, but
• 1:06:53
  a kind of, you know, it goes with the turf a lot of the time
• 1:06:55
  especially when you're the first person going in there, you have
• 1:06:58
  to change perception. You have to change house and
• 1:07:02
  lands and someone's got to do that.
• 1:07:04
  You know, it's, it's not always easy.
• 1:07:06
  It is changing. I think it's changed for the
• 1:07:08
  better. That's kind of my hope with
• 1:07:11
  that. Really because, you know, you
• 1:07:14
  hear a lot of stories about how things are changing and stuff,
• 1:07:16
  but there's a big difference between, you know what's been
• 1:07:19
  spoken about. And then the reality, and as you
• 1:07:23
  said, like quite rightly, you know, you go to like, obviously
• 1:07:25
  when I was in the stonier, some of the say, Estonian Czar,
• 1:07:28
  racist or anything. But you do meet people that
• 1:07:30
  have, you know, interesting opinions and stuff.
• 1:07:35
  Yeah, thanks. And I don't hold that against
• 1:07:38
  people because as you said, like a lot of the time, it's not even
• 1:07:41
  necessarily meant maliciously, it's just like, upbringing
• 1:07:44
  history, various different things and you do have to take
• 1:07:49
  these things into account. But as far as like, workplaces
• 1:07:53
  are concerned, you know, I mean, the idea was obviously that
• 1:07:57
  things are just don't marry, you know, they mean, and how you
• 1:07:59
  are. Because I mean I've had like
• 1:08:00
  female bosses male bosses bosses from all different.
• 1:08:05
  You know what of people from On the wild, I don't really notice
• 1:08:08
  any difference. Either way it to me, it's just
• 1:08:10
  kind of like, you know, is someone good or bad at their
• 1:08:14
  job? That's what I care about that.
• 1:08:15
  Yeah. People actually come out to me
• 1:08:18
  and accuse me of being, you know, said way or certain thing,
• 1:08:22
  you know, because you only hire this type of person or you hired
• 1:08:25
  this person over me so therefore that means y'all you know,
• 1:08:28
  insert insult here. And and it really wasn't that
• 1:08:32
  it's like you know, when you especially when you're a manager
• 1:08:35
  of somewhere You care that that person can do the job or not?
• 1:08:39
  She's yeah, they can do the job and do it.
• 1:08:42
  Well, it saves you an awful lot of headaches, you know, that's
• 1:08:45
  and that's really all you're looking at in that regard.
• 1:08:49
  You know, can someone do the tasks that are needed as set and
• 1:08:53
  just a level that you need them do too because it's we just need
• 1:08:57
  to do the job. This next question, bring it
• 1:09:01
  back to freelancing. I kind of already or know the
• 1:09:05
  answer or I feel that. I know but I just wanted to ask
• 1:09:08
  anyway just in case. Do you think that having a
• 1:09:12
  university education is necessary in order to become a
• 1:09:15
  successful freelancer? No no I don't I don't think
• 1:09:20
  education is ever wasted. I don't write well and I'm
• 1:09:27
  saying I'll Backtrack on that a little bit because I think it
• 1:09:30
  probably depends on what you want to do freelance in so that
• 1:09:33
  can come down very much to Industry choice and there's the
• 1:09:36
  certain industries or you know that you're going to need an
• 1:09:41
  education on all definitely at least some knowledge on but just
• 1:09:45
  for, you know, regular sort of freelancing.
• 1:09:48
  I don't know what I would do if an regular freelance.
• 1:09:50
  I know it's even. Yeah it's not I think you can.
• 1:09:53
  I think if you know reasonably Savvy, you have a, you know, a
• 1:09:57
  good business knowledge, a good command of English language or
• 1:10:01
  whatever. You can probably make you as a
• 1:10:03
  freelancer without a university education.
• 1:10:06
  I think. So, therefore, I think that
• 1:10:07
  probably opens up quite a lot of, and it depends what you
• 1:10:09
  define freelancing. As I mean, some people that are,
• 1:10:12
  you know, Uber drivers will describe themselves Freelancers
• 1:10:15
  and you can definitely do that without, you know, a college
• 1:10:18
  education and you can make money doing that, you know, I don't
• 1:10:21
  know about here but I think you couldn't America.
• 1:10:24
  This is just something to me. And I think one of the reasons
• 1:10:26
  why I asked is because, you know, one of the things I
• 1:10:29
  realized straight away when I finished my degree was that and
• 1:10:34
  this was before I was doing freelancing.
• 1:10:36
  But I kind of did the degree initially because I just
• 1:10:39
  couldn't find a job that wasn't customer service based and I
• 1:10:44
  just wanted to move out of customer services, there's
• 1:10:46
  nothing against customer service, but like I just felt
• 1:10:48
  there was, you know, a limit on my progression there and what I
• 1:10:51
  can achieve. And, you know, I wanted to just
• 1:10:53
  do stuff that you use more of my mind and my creative staff.
• 1:10:58
  And so when I looked at the job market at the time, there wasn't
• 1:11:02
  any kind of schemes, or anything or apprenticeship.
• 1:11:06
  Anything like that, it was non-existent but then when I
• 1:11:09
  finish my degree it suddenly became apparent.
• 1:11:12
  That like, actually these internships, apprenticeships
• 1:11:17
  schemes were now cropping up and they would kind of majority and
• 1:11:21
  actually, having a degree didn't really matter.
• 1:11:24
  E, that's it. I feel like that's frustrating
• 1:11:29
  though and you spent four years, you know, education to come out
• 1:11:32
  and there's nothing there but it's like you said, I mean, I
• 1:11:35
  think it depends Like because I've been thinking about doing
• 1:11:38
  either a podcast or a video on this soon and I think one of the
• 1:11:41
  major points are that I feel about uni in terms of whether or
• 1:11:45
  not you go on, you should go or not, ultimately comes down to
• 1:11:48
  your industry. I mean, you know, if you're
• 1:11:50
  looking to become obviously like a doctor, or a lawyer or
• 1:11:52
  something like that, then it is necessary.
• 1:11:55
  But in terms of business, I don't really think it is.
• 1:12:00
  I mean, you know, when I did my degree in marketing soon, as I
• 1:12:04
  actually started working in the field, I had To learn everything
• 1:12:07
  from scratch, right? Yeah, everything I've done I
• 1:12:10
  think, you know, universe is great and I would never, it's
• 1:12:14
  never wasted, but I think it is very much a sort of theoretical.
• 1:12:18
  You know, then when you, when you come out into the job market
• 1:12:21
  and try and apply the theories that you've learned and put them
• 1:12:23
  into place, I think, you know, usually found, it's a very
• 1:12:25
  different, very different way of being very different from what
• 1:12:30
  you imagined it to be to what you were taught in the
• 1:12:32
  classroom, you know. Absolutely moving it forward.
• 1:12:36
  Just kind of clothes on freelancing in general because I
• 1:12:39
  know I've asked your quite a lot of questions about this, but
• 1:12:42
  they all make sense soon. And what advice would you give
• 1:12:46
  to people considering going freelance, get some money behind
• 1:12:51
  you. Number one, promote yourself as
• 1:12:55
  much as you can. Anyway, you can enlist, you know
• 1:12:57
  this all sounds a little bit sort of trade.
• 1:13:00
  It's the start of stuff you can read on any blog but it's true.
• 1:13:03
  You know, it's like, you know, enlist the help of any friends
• 1:13:05
  families. Yourself, you know, make sure
• 1:13:09
  you know what you're selling, you know, be clear about what
• 1:13:11
  you're selling be clear about what your talents and your
• 1:13:14
  skills are. And, you know, I have a
• 1:13:16
  marketing background to as you do, some big on sort of
• 1:13:19
  marketing to that, you know. So play to your strengths I
• 1:13:23
  suppose is the advice of give, but the advice I'd give anybody
• 1:13:27
  is the sort of if you're going to, if you're going to quit the
• 1:13:29
  day job to go freelance and I would say just try and get just
• 1:13:34
  as much cash cash yourself. If as you can because it's you
• 1:13:38
  know, having some money behind you is never going to make it
• 1:13:40
  harder, you know. Yeah.
• 1:13:42
  I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think we've
• 1:13:45
  freelancing a lot of the time. It's about Landing like big
• 1:13:48
  contracts or consistent like building relationships.
• 1:13:52
  Yeah. Like I felt a lot lately that
• 1:13:54
  building those business relationships, it is kind of key
• 1:13:57
  because, you know, you can kind of have, you know, for instance,
• 1:14:01
  when it, when I worked in this Finance Company, there was some
• 1:14:04
  people we worked with who are free.
• 1:14:06
  It says, who'd been freelancing and working with that company
• 1:14:10
  for like five years? So you can have like long-term
• 1:14:13
  Partnerships. And I think a lot of the time
• 1:14:15
  it's good in terms of like not having to have a contract or,
• 1:14:20
  you know, like your agreement is that kept very simple.
• 1:14:23
  So it's, you know, it's and it can be like rescinded at any
• 1:14:26
  point kind of things. It's and until your point
• 1:14:29
  earlier, I think, maybe because of the pandemic, it's brought
• 1:14:32
  things forward a little bit, but I tended to think that industry
• 1:14:35
  needed to change a little bit. B, probable bit sooner than it
• 1:14:38
  has. And I think this is sort of
• 1:14:39
  brought it to the fore. So more people are looking at
• 1:14:42
  freelancing and remote working. As of X, I think, was we are
• 1:14:45
  starting to shift more and to understand that, you know,
• 1:14:49
  people can operate much more on that results-based premise
• 1:14:53
  rather than you punch the clock at eight o'clock and you punch
• 1:14:56
  it again to leave at 5:00 and just sit behind a desk for the
• 1:14:59
  full tell, you know. So I think it's definitely
• 1:15:02
  shifting kind of, I know I said it before me, it kind of blows
• 1:15:06
  my Mind. How people don't see how
• 1:15:08
  inefficient that model is efficient in my career.
• 1:15:13
  I knew that was an efficient, you know?
• 1:15:16
  Anyway, we've got, we finally got to the moment, we're going
• 1:15:19
  to ask you about your company, big leads.
• 1:15:22
  Now, the reason that I asked you so many questions and built,
• 1:15:25
  this picture was too kind of, I wanted to get behind the person
• 1:15:27
  who runs the company and kind of give people an idea of, if you
• 1:15:31
  and your background. So it would make sense as that
• 1:15:33
  is the kind of like the, I suppose Journey.
• 1:15:36
  To the creation of this company. Now, as you said before, you've
• 1:15:39
  started this company about two months ago, now, this is just my
• 1:15:44
  understanding. I could be wrong on this.
• 1:15:46
  But is it sort of like a database style website that
• 1:15:49
  collects leads from other like job websites?
• 1:15:53
  Puts them into one place for you?
• 1:15:55
  And then you've kind of got access to lots of different
• 1:15:57
  leads in one place success. That's yeah.
• 1:16:00
  That's absolutely correct with. Yeah.
• 1:16:02
  Just at there's a couple of extra things that go into that
• 1:16:04
  but yeah, you're absolutely correct.
• 1:16:05
  Yes. So much fun.
• 1:16:06
  It is. So what else kind of that I
• 1:16:10
  missed goes into this program? This is there's a few other
• 1:16:13
  things so they know the whole premise of giggly is why stand.
• 1:16:15
  It was, I was as, you know, as you covered I've done the
• 1:16:18
  freelancing weld myself and I felt that I spent an awful lot
• 1:16:22
  of time sort of hunting and pecking and searching different
• 1:16:25
  job sites and searching different areas to try and look
• 1:16:28
  like, as you mentioned to get that sort of consistency of
• 1:16:32
  clients that consistency of work.
• 1:16:34
  So this is why we put Together big leads to try and just get
• 1:16:38
  everything all into one place to make it.
• 1:16:40
  So it so it is it's probably easy.
• 1:16:43
  Say it's a job site but in some ways, it's a productivity tool
• 1:16:45
  as well. The whole, the whole essence of
• 1:16:48
  gig leads is to try and be a time-saving tool for
• 1:16:52
  Freelancers. So they can just go to this as a
• 1:16:55
  One Stop Shop almost. And we've got some and there's a
• 1:16:59
  little a couple of additions to that.
• 1:17:00
  I think unlike some other size. We've got some freelancer pages
• 1:17:04
  as well and it's very He much sort of geared towards the UK at
• 1:17:08
  the moment and whether that will spread out a little more into
• 1:17:12
  Europe, that's that's all sort of, you know, in discussion at
• 1:17:16
  the moment, we'll see. But Sam, it's very much targeted
• 1:17:19
  to UK Freelancers because what I saw was there wasn't an awful
• 1:17:22
  lot that for everyone seems to focus on America or everything.
• 1:17:26
  Seems to get sort of devil used by the Freelancers that come
• 1:17:30
  from sort of feather over, into Europe.
• 1:17:33
  India, whatever. So I'm like, well, where's the
• 1:17:35
  British people? Cause I know.
• 1:17:36
  Has loads of us here. There's loads of was doing the
• 1:17:38
  freelancing stuff. So so that's why I put it
• 1:17:40
  together as in your app to the right is to aggregate jobs from
• 1:17:44
  basically as many websites as we can find and put them, sort of
• 1:17:46
  as a repository, in one place for people to then apply to, and
• 1:17:50
  save time. Yeah, because it's going to say,
• 1:17:52
  like when I saw your service like the, the first thing that I
• 1:17:55
  kind of looked at ways. Okay, this reminds me of say,
• 1:17:58
  like, freelancer.com, true Lancer, those kind of websites.
• 1:18:03
  So like what would you say are the major differences?
• 1:18:06
  Between your service versus those more, sort of well, known
• 1:18:10
  existing competitors. Yeah, well, I think a lot of
• 1:18:12
  those Services. They take, they tend to be a
• 1:18:15
  based on a commission, okay, mission of this is a lot of
• 1:18:18
  them. So, you know, you do certain
• 1:18:19
  amount of work and they're going to take a percentage of it.
• 1:18:22
  All her gig leads is a paid service.
• 1:18:24
  We don't dig into your actual work and we try and keep the the
• 1:18:27
  fees for the service is quite low.
• 1:18:29
  You know, it's not it's not a highly expensive service.
• 1:18:32
  We hope and nobody thinks for the time that you save in, you
• 1:18:35
  know, you Talking like two or three quid a week to have
• 1:18:38
  everything aggregated in one place, so you can then access it
• 1:18:41
  easily and once once you do that, you're applying to jobs
• 1:18:44
  then it's we kind of step out. It's completely between you to
• 1:18:46
  negotiate with client on rate and all the rest of it.
• 1:18:49
  And we're not, you know, we don't do anything where we take,
• 1:18:53
  I think some sites operate on a bidding fee.
• 1:18:56
  Yeah, yeah. Which you know, you're paying to
• 1:18:58
  bid on a job. It's that and I think I won't
• 1:19:00
  mention names, but there's what I looked at Predator.
• 1:19:03
  One years ago, and there were like by the I'm you did the math
• 1:19:07
  it was it was costing you like 35 quit sometimes to bid on a
• 1:19:10
  job and it's like nobody can afford that if you don't get the
• 1:19:14
  job at the end of it. You know.
• 1:19:15
  And plus as well. I think we probably tag it and
• 1:19:17
  it little as well to the the newer Freelancers coming in
• 1:19:20
  because it's so hard to get to get in and to get your foot on
• 1:19:23
  the lattice. But a company you're talking
• 1:19:25
  because I remember looking into this myself and I kind of
• 1:19:28
  eventually I just decided I'm just going to chase my own
• 1:19:30
  leads. Because why would you bid like
• 1:19:33
  what I understood was. Okay, I can sign up.
• 1:19:36
  Okay, I've got all this stuff done now, huh?
• 1:19:39
  And then I realized. Wait, wait, you have to pay to
• 1:19:41
  pee on the job? What do you mean?
• 1:19:43
  I'm trying to make money not lose money and actually I can't
• 1:19:46
  remember if they're kind of double dip and take a commission
• 1:19:48
  as well II can't remember if they do I'm not but you know the
• 1:19:54
  vendors are the companies that do.
• 1:19:56
  I mean I've worked with companies like that, take a
• 1:19:58
  commission and some really aren't bad.
• 1:20:01
  Once you get past a certain learning level will take maybe
• 1:20:04
  10 percent and I'm like, you know what?
• 1:20:05
  Ten percent My money in escrow and protected.
• 1:20:07
  I'm not going to I'm not going to argue about that but yet they
• 1:20:10
  are still taking a percentage of of that wage which, you know, if
• 1:20:14
  you've got a big job that can add up to quite a substantial
• 1:20:18
  chunk out of your n. And so that's that's why we
• 1:20:21
  base. This is basically a membership
• 1:20:22
  subscription site rather than that commission based payment,
• 1:20:26
  you know. Yeah, let's talk a little bit
• 1:20:27
  about that. Actually, you've got three
• 1:20:29
  different membership plans. You've got what I can see is a
• 1:20:32
  monthly, a yearly and a six-month plan.
• 1:20:36
  An I did kind of want to ask you because I think they're
• 1:20:39
  reasonably priced based on what you're offering.
• 1:20:40
  A fitness is pretty reasonable. Especially the fact that you
• 1:20:43
  said that there isn't a commission fee because I owe it
• 1:20:47
  to my knowledge. I don't think any other
• 1:20:50
  companies are doing that, think they all charge some degree of a
• 1:20:53
  commission. Usually pretty high and that'll
• 1:20:58
  and that'll stand as we hopefully as we go forward.
• 1:21:00
  And we grow at the minute, as you say, we are aggravating a
• 1:21:03
  lot of jobs from different websites but You know, we're
• 1:21:07
  talking to quite a few people. Now we're going to have the
• 1:21:10
  ability for people to go and you know, if you wanted to hire,
• 1:21:13
  let's say, you wanted to hire a writer or something.
• 1:21:15
  You can go on post a job on their Freelancers, can apply to
• 1:21:19
  it, we haven't got massive amounts of people doing that,
• 1:21:23
  but that, that will grow, that's something we're targeting.
• 1:21:25
  And as that grows, we're going to keep the same.
• 1:21:29
  We're going to keep the exact same payment methods.
• 1:21:31
  It's not again, we're not looking to take commissions from
• 1:21:34
  people, you know? Yeah.
• 1:21:36
  So to clarify that last point, you basically saying that this
• 1:21:39
  is a website both for Freelancers, looking for work
• 1:21:43
  and also companies, or individuals looking to get the
• 1:21:46
  services of Freelancers. Yes, exactly, excellent.
• 1:21:50
  Excellent. Do you have any plans and I'm
• 1:21:54
  sorry if I got this wrong, but I just want to double check this.
• 1:21:56
  Do you have any plans to sort of introductory introduce a sort of
• 1:22:00
  a free trial for users who might sort want to test out your
• 1:22:03
  services before they commit straight away?
• 1:22:06
  And we did that initially but for some reason that just
• 1:22:08
  doesn't seem to work very well. So what we do is on the first
• 1:22:11
  month, is we give a 50% discount?
• 1:22:15
  It's yeah, so you sign up, there's a code on there, you can
• 1:22:17
  put in it's right there. When you go to the sign up page,
• 1:22:20
  you get the first month of 50% off.
• 1:22:22
  So it's basically going to cost you a fiver to sign up and to
• 1:22:25
  see what it's all about. Let's go see.
• 1:22:27
  Because for the monthly one, it's currently 10 pounds a
• 1:22:30
  month, isn't it? So for that first month, it
• 1:22:33
  would just be 5 for the first month, you get 45 pounds yet.
• 1:22:37
  Actually and actually the reason we did that was to get some
• 1:22:39
  commitment from Freelancers on the other side and it was almost
• 1:22:43
  just like a psychological thing. Like what I'm talking about
• 1:22:46
  because we were running into problems where we'd given 13 and
• 1:22:50
  then when the building started was time to get all these nasty
• 1:22:52
  emails about, hey, you took our money with that know, we didn't
• 1:22:56
  know you're Catholic, but, you know, So we wanted to avoid that
• 1:23:03
  other cars. Yeah.
• 1:23:04
  So this business seems logical in terms of bringing in sort of
• 1:23:09
  ongoing an ongoing Revenue stream.
• 1:23:12
  Since Freelancers are always kind of looking for new
• 1:23:15
  projects. Are there any other kind of key
• 1:23:17
  factors behind your decision to Target Freelancers?
• 1:23:22
  With this particular business model.
• 1:23:25
  Probably just because I have worked in the industry myself
• 1:23:28
  and then I have difficult. It is to keep that.
• 1:23:30
  That stream of, you know, the revenue going of clients going.
• 1:23:33
  And I figured it's sort of a, it's a way for Freelancers to
• 1:23:36
  get in to apply for multiple jobs.
• 1:23:38
  They can gain a little bit of exposure by.
• 1:23:41
  I don't know if you looked at the profile Pages there.
• 1:23:44
  Look, I don't see that as a search but yeah, that, you know,
• 1:23:46
  people go on, they can add their profile, they can add their
• 1:23:49
  social media links, they can put some examples of past work.
• 1:23:53
  So, you know, anybody seeking Freelancers or Freelancers
• 1:23:56
  Services, can sort of browse, they can even.
• 1:24:00
  Browse by City. You can just zoom in on the map
• 1:24:03
  and kind of click on the Freelancers are signed up and
• 1:24:05
  contact them directly if they want to others there's no you
• 1:24:08
  know there's no additional charge for that.
• 1:24:10
  That's just something that's a straight communication between
• 1:24:13
  client and freelancer that we don't get involved in.
• 1:24:16
  So I think that's that's a nice little addition for you again,
• 1:24:19
  newer Freelancers to gain a little more exposure, what the
• 1:24:24
  biggest kind of challenges that you faced with building this
• 1:24:27
  company. Like, I understand obviously
• 1:24:29
  it's still early days. Days and start is a start up and
• 1:24:34
  there are always kind of challenges we're starting up its
• 1:24:37
  startup, usually in the cost area of like building up funds
• 1:24:40
  and stuff for me happened, but since you're fully based online
• 1:24:45
  that kind of able to do to circumvent various costs and
• 1:24:49
  stuff. So yeah, well what are the
• 1:24:51
  biggest challenges that you faced so far?
• 1:24:55
  The biggest challenge is probably just on a technical
• 1:24:57
  level is just getting everything work the way you.
• 1:25:00
  The way you want it to and I'm a probably a bit of a
• 1:25:02
  perfectionist. I'm constantly like going in and
• 1:25:04
  tweaking something else, but we're sort of, sort of testing.
• 1:25:07
  Some of the things that we're hoping will be very useful to
• 1:25:11
  Freelancers. We're just in the process.
• 1:25:13
  Now of testing the daily email alerts which you know doesn't
• 1:25:17
  sound like a huge thing but it's another time-saving thing.
• 1:25:20
  Like instead of even actually going to the gig lead site, the
• 1:25:23
  email will drop in your inbox every day with all the latest
• 1:25:26
  jobs listed there for you, that you can then just click on and
• 1:25:29
  apply. Too.
• 1:25:30
  So that's that's, you know even more time saving than just as
• 1:25:33
  aggregate in the jobs in the first place.
• 1:25:35
  You know. That one's a game changer.
• 1:25:36
  Actually, I used to use this particular service.
• 1:25:39
  I think it might be an American base to cut member, but it was
• 1:25:42
  offering a similar thing. And I remember thinking like,
• 1:25:45
  this is perfect, it has all the links in there.
• 1:25:48
  You can click ERM and then I don't have to, then check like,
• 1:25:51
  say five different websites. I can just have it sent to me.
• 1:25:53
  So that's the site you're talking about and it's a Ironic
• 1:26:01
  because I've built gig leads. It's a backtrack again about
• 1:26:06
  five or six years ago when I first went freelancing because
• 1:26:10
  Logistics and supply chain was my background and I done some
• 1:26:13
  Recruitment and there's a massive shortage in the
• 1:26:18
  logistics and supply chain industry of good talent.
• 1:26:21
  You know, drivers all the way through to Warehouse people all
• 1:26:23
  the way through to managers and I built this exact website but
• 1:26:26
  for the logistics industry. So basically Taking that model.
• 1:26:30
  Now. And I've used it for the
• 1:26:32
  freelance industry and then yet turned around and saw the site
• 1:26:35
  that I think you're talking about, and when almost looks the
• 1:26:37
  same. But, yeah, I promise you, it
• 1:26:39
  wasn't pushed off of him. There's a model.
• 1:26:42
  It was actually some ways I'm kicking myself because it's a
• 1:26:44
  model. As I say, I used about five
• 1:26:46
  years ago, for Logistics, supply chain recruitment basically, and
• 1:26:51
  now it's working. So well for Freelancers pad, me
• 1:26:53
  sort of kicking myself going, why didn't I set this up like,
• 1:26:56
  three or four years ago? But yeah, you live in land.
• 1:26:59
  That's that's part of your problem.
• 1:27:00
  Excessive going on your own, you're constantly sort of
• 1:27:02
  changing and evolving and learning new things.
• 1:27:05
  You know, I think happy things happen at the right time than
• 1:27:07
  they are doing. I thought about that as well.
• 1:27:10
  I call, why didn't I do freelancing from a earlier age?
• 1:27:13
  Won't do this one. Why didn't I do podcast in
• 1:27:15
  earlier? You know, I think that you do
• 1:27:17
  need to go through certain things in life, to kind of Step
• 1:27:22
  lead you to the next step and you learn all the things that
• 1:27:26
  you need to learn along the way and eventually sort of if you've
• 1:27:29
  if you're fortunate also I love comes to fruition in one major
• 1:27:32
  aspect, you know, one major area.
• 1:27:34
  Yeah. What would you say?
• 1:27:36
  Have been your biggest successes so far with this particular
• 1:27:40
  company so early days? So, yeah, I know.
• 1:27:45
  Sorry. Yes.
• 1:27:46
  So we launched an actually in terms of challenges.
• 1:27:49
  I'll just go back to that second if I can.
• 1:27:51
  Yeah. Go for a girl, first kind of
• 1:27:52
  funny that sort of put this together and I was really more
• 1:27:55
  or less just sort of testing the market to see if they would be a
• 1:27:58
  market to this side. I built And I just sort of built
• 1:28:01
  it there it was I've just sort of built it on.
• 1:28:03
  I think some like demand I had kicking around and then it took
• 1:28:07
  off really well. So I know there's a market for
• 1:28:09
  this I instantly after about a month had to turn around in
• 1:28:11
  Rebrand the hook into. So, you know, I mean, you know,
• 1:28:17
  we all make mistakes but you know, you learn from those and
• 1:28:21
  you know, so I wanted to change the name changes into gig leads
• 1:28:24
  because it just seemed much more reflective of what you know,
• 1:28:27
  what it was about what the company was about, what we're
• 1:28:29
  trying to do is good. Name.
• 1:28:31
  Yeah, yeah. So you know it gets the point
• 1:28:33
  across and, you know, hopefully it's useful for people that in
• 1:28:37
  terms of success has seen some good success already.
• 1:28:43
  I think is, you know, we're it's definitely had its got people's
• 1:28:46
  interest. It's got people standing up
• 1:28:49
  doing podcasts with people. Now, like you mentioned, you're
• 1:28:52
  my first one. I've got a couple more lined up.
• 1:28:55
  I've been approached by someone that does quite a large on.
• 1:29:00
  On seminar, just little things that wants me to come on,
• 1:29:03
  basically takes a keynote speaker.
• 1:29:06
  I said, but I think I think the biggest success that I've got up
• 1:29:09
  my sleeve at the moment and it hasn't come to fruition yet.
• 1:29:13
  So I'm not going to mention the name of a couple of companies.
• 1:29:16
  Fine. Yeah, I get that but it is it is
• 1:29:18
  another startup that I've had a few conversations with and
• 1:29:22
  basically, that would add a payment process in engine to
• 1:29:27
  this site. That is specifically for
• 1:29:28
  Freelancers. So energy, which, you know, if
• 1:29:34
  this all transpires the way, I would like it to, it would
• 1:29:36
  basically give them the freelancer, the whole One Stop
• 1:29:38
  Shop, they can negotiate direct lines, and then they can choose
• 1:29:42
  to use the the payment processing tool or not.
• 1:29:46
  That's something that will be a third party from me.
• 1:29:48
  I don't own. It will be a single thing.
• 1:29:51
  Obviously. Then for their service, the
• 1:29:53
  would be a small charge to Freelancers for using it, but it
• 1:29:57
  basically protects their money. It protects their earnings and
• 1:30:01
  it's not I think we've had some discussions about what's being
• 1:30:05
  charged for that and you're in the, you know, 23 percent more
• 1:30:09
  than say like a PayPal commission or something like
• 1:30:11
  that. So I'm hoping fingers crossed
• 1:30:14
  that that all yet fingers crossed that that all works out
• 1:30:18
  the way I would like it too. Because then that to me, that
• 1:30:20
  sort of adds, like the last element that whole site, you
• 1:30:24
  know, and to sort of draw things to a close on the Geeks leads,
• 1:30:30
  what are your main kind of goals and aspirations for this
• 1:30:33
  business man? Girls and aspirations?
• 1:30:36
  I'd like to grow it. So, you know, it's just very
• 1:30:38
  much a gun. Yeah.
• 1:30:39
  You know, household them, almost four, independent Freelancers in
• 1:30:44
  the UK. And I think I'm quite proud of
• 1:30:46
  it being uk-based, even though spends too much time in America,
• 1:30:49
  it's nice to sort of come back and do something for, you know,
• 1:30:52
  for the people of my own country I suppose I'd just like it to go
• 1:30:58
  on and see it change and evolve. Of the way it has so quickly
• 1:31:01
  already. It's been really exciting, but
• 1:31:05
  I'd like to just, you know, I mean, I don't want to I think
• 1:31:08
  it's not it's not something where I'm going.
• 1:31:10
  Hey, I want to grow it in some like massive Corporation, but I
• 1:31:13
  definitely like it to be a go-to tool for for many Freelancers
• 1:31:16
  and hopefully they found value in that.
• 1:31:20
  Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 1:31:22
  And just to draw things all to a close today.
• 1:31:24
  My final question for you is, do you have any kind of upcoming
• 1:31:28
  projects events? Or maybe just some final
• 1:31:31
  thoughts that you'd like to share with us upcoming projects,
• 1:31:34
  is that just the ones we've mentioned?
• 1:31:36
  I think there's going to be probably quite a few more
• 1:31:38
  upcoming podcasts. Probably some some more seminars
• 1:31:41
  and II can imagine that again. This this whole payment
• 1:31:46
  processing processing element would like to add to the site.
• 1:31:49
  I think if that, if that goes ahead, that's probably going to
• 1:31:52
  take up quite a lot of my time in the coming months.
• 1:31:55
  But hopefully it's all for the good.
• 1:31:57
  Yeah. Absolutely.
• 1:31:59
  I'll have my Crust for you. I think this is a very promising
• 1:32:03
  business and particularly when it comes to the, the setup of
• 1:32:08
  the membership plans and what you're sort of discussing their
• 1:32:11
  that's not something I've seen as a common thing with within
• 1:32:16
  the freelancing sort of community.
• 1:32:17
  So it's it's good and a particularly for the UK Market.
• 1:32:20
  I think especially with what we spoke about earlier about how
• 1:32:24
  things are changing and where things are headed.
• 1:32:26
  I think this is an excellent time to be setting up, something
• 1:32:29
  like this. So I wish you all of the best
• 1:32:32
  with this this business. I'm sure it's going to work out
• 1:32:34
  and hopefully this podcast will do something for you.
• 1:32:37
  And the rest of that would be great if it does and I very much
• 1:32:41
  appreciate you having me on your show.
• 1:32:43
  It's been great. Yeah, thank you so much for
• 1:32:45
  appearing. It's been a real pleasure and
• 1:32:48
  just want to say to all of my listeners.
• 1:32:51
  Yeah you know obviously if you're freelancing make sure to
• 1:32:53
  go check out gig leads and set yourself, up a profile there
• 1:32:56
  seems really cheap to start up. So it's an opportune moment to
• 1:32:59
  get Started and get you some more work.
• 1:33:02
  And also for any startup businesses.
• 1:33:05
  Any guests that would like to appear on the show in the
• 1:33:08
  future. Please get in touch.
• 1:33:10
  I would love to have you on the show.
• 1:33:12
  I'd love to get to know. You get to know your business or
• 1:33:15
  you know, whatever you have to promote or want to talk about.
• 1:33:18
  Get in touch with me. I would love to have you on the
• 1:33:19
  show, I do hope. Everyone is enjoying the podcast
• 1:33:22
  and enjoying all these different things.
• 1:33:25
  I'm trying with it right now and trying to make it as varied as I
• 1:33:27
  can. But Invariably it's going to
• 1:33:30
  keep moving forward and keep growing and it's very exciting.
• 1:33:34
  So thank you very much for listening subscribing to the
• 1:33:38
  podcast, supporting the podcast, I really appreciate it.
• 1:33:42
  And until next time, peace out. See you in the next one.