Selling our Value – Not our Time

Emily Page (00:00):

Before we get to today's conversation, we want to start with a story. It's about a woman you've never heard of, but her workflow shapes what we see when we look up at the night sky, and it just might change how you think about value in the age of fast ideas and even faster technology.

Doug Downs (00:22):

In the early 1900's, before astronauts ever danced in lunar dust, the moon was already crowded, not with rovers or rockets, but with names. Hundreds of them. Each astronomer who mapped the lunar surface labeled its craters, seas and shadows. However, they pleased there were overlapping names, inconsistent spellings and contradictions that baffled even the most seasoned observers. What should have been a clean map of earth's oldest neighbor looked more like a chalkboard after a dozen children had their turn and into this mess stepped Mary Blag. You don't know her. She wasn't a famous scientist. She had no formal degree, no position at a royal observatory, no access to great telescopes. Hollywood has never made a movie about her. She was a quiet woman from Schrater with a love for precision and a hobbyist's patients. In her fifties, she began painstakingly comparing moon maps line by line, crater by crater, sometimes using just a magnifying glass and a pen.

(01:25):

She cataloged the chaos. She reconciled rival names, standardized spellings. Trace the etymology of each crater's title and cross-referenced every available lunar chart. It was slow work, not glamorous. There were no awards for it, but her system brought order to what had been a cardiographic Tower of Babel. Her work eventually reached the attention of the International Astronomical Union and they realized something extraordinary. Blas naming conventions were clearer, more consistent and more useful than anything they had ever produced. In 1935, at age 77, married Blas lunar nomenclature became the official system used by scientists around the world. And to this day, when NASA publishes a new image of the moon, the names you see, mayor Tranquil Tyco, Copernicus are based on the system she codified. No one asked her how long it took her. No one measured her work in hours or invoices. Her contribution wasn't valued for the time she spent, but for the clarity she brought, what she offered wasn't labor, it was value. And in that she taught us something important about creative work, about intellectual property, and about how we assign worth. Because sometimes what looks like a hobbyist scribble is actually a standard waiting to be set. Sometimes what looks like simplicity is mastery in disguise today on stories and strategies, why time is not your currency and why in public relations your best ideas are always worth more than the clock.

(03:25):

My name is Doug Downs

Farzana Baduel (03:26):

And my name is Farzana Baduel. Our guest this week is Graham Goodkind, joining today from Hartfordshire. Hi Graham.

Graham Goodkind (03:35):

Hi.

Farzana Baduel (03:36):

Now, how are things in Hartfordshire? I know work world is London and home world is Hartfordshire. It looks lovely and green where you are.

Graham Goodkind (03:45):

It's lovely and green, it's very sunny and nice. I do work in the office in Farringdon, Frank's offices in Farringdon, so it's just a 30 minute train journey for me to get in and out of town most days. And I much prefer being in the office to working from home to be honest. But I guess that's a subject for potentially another podcast.

Farzana Baduel (04:04):

Yeah, quite contentious one as that. Now, indeed, Graham, you are the founder and cheer of Frank pr. I mean legendary. I have just worshiped Frank PR for years. Everyone in the UK PR industries knows about Frank PR and how innovative they are and groundbreaking. So for those who do not know about Frank pr, London-based consumer PR agency, disruptive value-driven model built around creativity, Frank has become one of the UK's most awarded independent agencies, landing industry accolades, high profit margins, which we're going to delve into that sort of dichotomy later on and also firmly championing ideas over billable hours. I love that.

Doug Downs (04:49):

Graham, you built Frank on the idea of selling ideas and not ours, right? And you were a sossay because most of PR is still not about that in today's world. Boy, that's changing big time. What gave you the confidence at the time to structure things that way from the start and how did your clients react to that when you did it?

Graham Goodkind (05:11):

Well, it was 25 years ago now celebrating 25th anniversary this year. And I guess it's always been in the nature of the agency creatively and commercially. We have a phrase that we use quite a lot around the office, which is to be a dick. Obviously you kind of might think it's quite controversial thing to say because you don't normally want to be a dick, but in our case, you do want to be a dick. And that references the great late great Dick Fosbury who revolutionized a sport and his sport was the high jump and he was a pretty ordinary athlete, not doing particularly well at the sport. And long story short, he came up with a completely different way of doing it, whereas everyone run up to the and went over headfirst, he decided to run up to the bar and swivel his hips and go over backwards first and shattered the world record, won Olympic gold and really revolutionized the sport, literally turning on its head.

(06:09):

And that's our mantra if you like, from a creative point of view. But also that applied for me from a commercial point of view. When I set up the business, I didn't enjoy working to hours. I didn't like the fact that a client could effectively dictate from a commercial point of view my profitability because if it was buying a number of hours and hourly rates and all that sort of stuff. And I guess that was one of the things that when I set up on my own back in 2000, I thought let's be a dick about it and do something different. And the business model was really based on that twofold. Because if you could come up with an idea as we'll, come onto, no doubt, you can come up with an idea literally walking to the office one morning in your shower as you wake up in the morning, it pops into your head sometimes as the client's giving you the brief, you've got the nugget idea.

(07:04):

So if you can come up with an idea quickly and efficiently, that's a really good thing to do. And hopefully it's going to be such a great idea that actually when you come to execute and implement that idea, it'll spread like wildfire and not require that kind of endless selling and phone bashing as we used to have to try and get people interested in your story. If you come up with such a great idea, people who'd just be interested in the story and it go viral quite quickly. So from a business point of view, it made perfect commercial sense because you could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, to less time coming up with the idea and less time actually implementing the idea, which should lead to in theory increased profitability levels. And if I look back just a couple of stats really over the last 25 years, I thought I'd have a look into that over the last 25 years to see whether that has worked or not or whether that's wrong, true.

(07:57):

And since September, 2000, our total revenue as an agency by the end of this year will be around about 110 million English pounds. That's how much money clients have paid us in 25 years. That's quite a long time. And our EBITDA for that period, looking back at all our books, companies house year in year out, our EBITDA will be roughly about 33 million pounds, which works out for an average ebitda, an average profitability over a 25 year period. And I'm telling you, we've had some ups and downs in that 25 years, but the average profitability is 30.8% and as I said, that includes some good years and some not so good years. So it's worked. If I look at it from a business point of view that not charging by time, we've never done one time sheet and never had any time management software or anything like that. And to be honest, never had a problem with clients working that way.

Farzana Baduel (08:55):

I love that. And my God, the profitability is just astounding. So listeners, if you want to have a beautiful big house in Hartfordshire with gorgeous gardens, you need the profitability. The margins I feel are so brave, Graham, because I came from an accounting background, so I'm emotionally attached to billable hours. And a few years ago I worked with this wonderful consultant called Crispin Manners, and he's written a book How to Sell Value. He's brilliant and he really championed his ana. You can't be just billing by hours. You've got to understand that you IP is all those years that you have spent learning, going to industry events, reading books, and you just want to build for the hour as opposed to all those hours that you've spent really honing that knowledge. And also what I also realized is actually the idea part is fun. The story mining from a culture perspective is actually much more fun and it's more productive and it's more profitable.

(09:52):

So it's kind of like why aren't we doing it? I wanted to ask you a bit about, I mean, you are one of the pioneers of bringing that in and a lot of other agencies such as myself, been really late to the game, frankly, pardon pun. And I wanted to ask about ai. Now AI is going to be cutting down hours it takes to produce work, and so how do you think things are going to evolve? Now we've got these tools where before we'd say, oh, well it takes us about two hours to write a blog and all of that sort of stuff. So how do you think AI tools that LLMs like chat boutique, et cetera, it's going to change. Do you think a lot of agencies are going to follow masse? What you've been doing from day? How do you think that's going to make a change to industry?

Graham Goodkind (10:37):

Look, I can't speak for what other agencies are going to do. For us, it's been brilliant and we use AI a lot both to help run the business a bit more efficiently in the new business process to dissect briefs and interrogate briefs a bit more, distill down tons of information into short snappier versions and then creatively to really help in that process. I don't think they necessarily, AI really hits the nail on head from a creative point of view, but it certainly gives you tons of food for thought and if you give it the right prompts can be a brilliant, almost like a planning director. I sort of use it as really, I mean I'm very involved in the creative process and the questions you can ask get great reaction, so it's only going to make that process more efficient. But I don't think clients really keen. I've never come across in 25 years a client that's bothered about how much time we've spent on a project. The only time they're bothered about time is when we haven't done a particularly good job.

Doug Downs (11:32):

Yeah, so true.

Graham Goodkind (11:32):

If you do a good job doesn't, I don't think clients really care if you knock it out of the part. To me, and that was again, one of the founding principles when I set up the agency, it was all about output, not input. I don't really care if it's taking you a hundred hours, a thousand hours, five hours, five minutes. I don't care how long it's taken you. If you can come up with a brilliant idea for me, that's going to transform my business. And then the other point to make is they say to so Graham, well actually everyone normally calls me Gigi, but so Gigi, now how'd you then get clients to pay you more money? How do you have a fee negotiation with them? You want to go to them and say, look, we spent a hundred hours this month on your account and you're only really paying to 50, so you could give us twice as much.

(12:11):

And I say, I've never ever used that once in a fee negotiation. If I try and negotiate with a client about why they should pay us more, I go in and I talk about what sort of job we've done for them over the last period, six months, a year or whatever, what sort of results we got. If they're great results and the client's really happy, I'll ask them for more money If we haven't got very good results, I haven't really got a leg to stand on if I'm going to ask them for more money, no matter how much time I've spent. So it's all a factor of the results and the output that you get for clients, in my opinion. And I've never really had to refer to hours beforehand, so I've never, and also like you referenced Farana, I think for a creative agency it's almost counterintuitive to work like that.

(12:55):

It grinds you down a little bit. And also I think that a lot of the information that you get from time sheets, which are the way that a lot of businesses are run, is probably errors and probably wrong and inaccurate anyway because I don't think everyone always says, oh, didn't know how to fill up the term sheets, so I just filled it out with what I thought would make sense or only caught up at the end of the week doing it or whatever. There's all sorts of things that actually that information, if you're going to run an agency using it, I think is probably quite inaccurate and a bit hopeful that you're running an agency based on that information.

Farzana Baduel (13:28):

But Gigi, if I may, don't you get staff members then saying to you, well, if we don't bill on time, then why do I have to work 7.5 hours a day? Why can't I just rock up with a great idea and deliver it and then take the afternoon off and hang around the VNA?

Graham Goodkind (13:49):

Absolutely, you can. We have flexi Frank, which is a well iterated workplace policy that you can do exactly that. If you've done your job for the day or you want to get off t o go to the VNA export culture or take your dog to the vet or do whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it. We're pretty flexible. We are in the office five days a week, but we're completely flexible with that. I mean, I think it becomes a bit like a drug though, doesn't it? In this job is that the more success you have and the more great ideas that you're doing and the more great work that you're intraining out for clients, you want to carry on doing that so it

Farzana Baduel (14:24):

Doesn't feel like work.

Graham Goodkind (14:26):

It doesn't feel like you're having fun anyway, so probably more fun than you might have at the v and a.

Doug Downs (14:31):

Do you need to be big and successful already to pull this off? And here's why I'm asking that question. Smaller agencies tend to bill on time because inevitably clients come back and say, awesome, A, B, and C, but now I've changed how I want all of this. I have a completely different template for how this is to be written and to deliver it. It is an additional 10 hours work. This comes to mind because this just happened to me yesterday. Come back to the client and say, yes, we can go backward and fix all of that, but that's 10 hours work, therefore we're going to bill you this amount. How do you cover that if you're not covering hours?

Graham Goodkind (15:10):

Yeah, look, I mean, I think in terms of coming up with creative ideas and creative ideas for creative campaigns and then executing them after a brief, that's the brief. If it takes us five minutes, five days, five hours, it's not the client's problem. It's kind of our problem.

Doug Downs (15:26):

I get that. I get

Graham Goodkind (15:28):

Where a client expands the scope of work. I think you're referencing to, and it might not be ideas related. It might say, look, I want someone working out of my office for the next three days, sort of seconded into that. It's tactical on those occasions. Then we might apply some kind of form of daily rate card, but they're isolated and they're not really the business model. I mean, we'll do that. If someone wants to buy someone for a period of time or increase the scope of work purely based on I want another 10 hours, then we'll have to kind of apply a rate card. And we do have a notional rate card that we work towards, but again, we don't sort of cross-reference it back. Not every campaign is a home run as we know, and we try our best to make sure, but as long as we try our best, I think, and for whatever reason it doesn't happen, and I can count on the fingers on one hand, probably in 25 years the amount of times that happened, then the client may well reference time, but you've probably not going to have a relationship with that client going forward anyway because you haven't got very good results.

(16:31):

The bottom line is it's all about results, and that's what I wanted to build as a business, a results focused business. And as far Asana referenced, it's miles more fun. It's creates a brilliant culture and a brilliant environment. I think people naturally PR people love working in that sort of environment.

Doug Downs (16:46):

Can I tug on that? Just to play devil's advocate, you can't guarantee results.

Graham Goodkind (16:51):

No, you can't.

Doug Downs (16:54):

So how do you bill on results?

Graham Goodkind (16:56):

We don't bill on results. You don't bill on results. You bill on time. So a client will give you a budget. You will work out how much you've got to spend to make your ideas happen and how much your fee is on top.

Doug Downs (17:06):

Fair enough.

Graham Goodkind (17:07):

And then you will try and get results based on that. If you don't get the results that you've led the client to expect that you're going to deliver, then you probably won't get any more work out at them. If you manage to deliver what they've expected, you'll probably get another chance. If you exceed expectations, you've got a client that you're going to have for 20 years, and thankfully we've had quite a few of those.

Doug Downs (17:26):

Awesome. Graham, really appreciate your time today. Thank you for being so frank.

Graham Goodkind (17:31):

Well, it's kind of in the name. The name's above the door, so you've got to do it, haven't you?

Doug Downs (17:35):

Oh, hey, Graham. In our previous episode, our guest, Lauren Passel, she left a question for you.

Lauren Passell (17:42):

This is kind of a selfish one. I would like to hear the most creative use of AI your next guest has used because I'm wondering what I'm missing now about.

Graham Goodkind (17:52):

Okay, two answers to the same question. Firstly, there's a brilliant tool that I love, which is a little hack maybe in terms of a creative hack, which is generative ai. It's called Creative seance. And what you can do on the creative seance is channel the best creative minds in history and summon the wisdom of these creative giants from beyond the veil. So everyone from Banksy to Warhol to Leonardo da Vinci, to Mick Jagger, I mean literally, it's kind of randomized, the creativity, and they won't necessarily give you the idea like that. And the best campaign, I'm not going to take credit for it, it's not one of ours, it's not one of Frank's I should say, but it was a campaign that was done by the mobile phone company O2 this year. I think it actually did quite well at can as well. And I loved it.

(18:49):

And when someone's asking me what was my favorite campaign in the last year, this one is easily it AI or not ai, it's still my favorite campaign. And what they did was they did an AI O2 big problem with people scamming people on the phone, phone scammers the whole time, and they developed an AI granny called Daisy, D-A-I-S-Y, get that what they did on that, which whenever you sensed, although the systems detected that it was a potential phone number from a scammer, which I kind of get on my phone quite a lot, potential scam coming through, it diverts it to this AI bot Daisy who was a real voice AI robot, if you like, that then just kept that scammer talking and talking and talking and talking for ages. And it was absolutely brilliant. And so you've got recordings of it, the scammers are going, but they can't get a word in edgeways re saying, oh no, the weather here, it rained a bit yesterday and today, well, it's still a bit raining. I'm a bit cold. I might put the heating on or whatever. This not a very good impersonation, sorry. But that was the basic principle of that brilliant idea. Got tons and tons and tons of coverage on traditional media, social media went viral and everything like that. And to me, that was pure brilliance using AI in a fantastic way.

Farzana Baduel (20:18):

So your turn, Graham, what question would you like to leave for our next guest?

Graham Goodkind (20:23):

I'd like to know whoever the next guest is. What is the best bit of advice you'd give to someone who's starting out in this industry

Farzana Baduel (20:34):

That is Doug, what would you give?

Doug Downs (20:37):

Don't do it. Whenever I'm giving a talk to students studying pr, I have the same opening and it's to know thyself first. I mean, really understand who you are because in our business, it's all about understanding audiences, and the first audience is you, Ana, yours.

Farzana Baduel (21:00):

God. I would probably say something like, only go into the industry if you're hyper curious because the industry is such a dynamic industry that even after 10, 20, 30 years, you're never going to master the industry because the tectonic plates underneath are constantly shifting.

Doug Downs (21:16):

Graham, what do you tell 'em?

Graham Goodkind (21:17):

I don't know. There's a few things, but I think the one that I'd say, if you really want to create a career that's creative and do the stuff that you really want to do from a creative point of view, sometimes it's better not to ask permission to do stuff, but to then beg for forgiveness instead.

Farzana Baduel (21:35):

Yeah, I love that. Always love that. Thank you so much, Graham.

Graham Goodkind (21:40):

Hey, thanks. Thanks much Graham. Thank you for having me, guys. A pleasure to be on.