Start­ing your own busi­ness is nev­er easy, as Many­minds’ Founder Kirsty Hulse has recent­ly dis­cov­ered. I caught up with Kirsty to find out a lit­tle bit more about the chal­lenges she’s encoun­tered start­ing up a new busi­ness in the dig­i­tal and SEO space, and to dis­cuss her thoughts on how resourc­ing and teams could be improved in the indus­try.

First things first, tell us about your current role and the project you’ve been working on for the past few months?

I’m the founder and man­ag­ing direc­tor of Many­minds. Many­minds is a col­lec­tive of inde­pen­dent experts that col­lab­o­rate togeth­er accord­ing to project needs. We’re fair­ly new, about sev­en months in, and our busi­ness mod­el is that we oper­ate entire­ly with free­lancers, and are more flu­id about the way we work and are resourced.

We’re sim­i­lar to an agency in that we deliv­er against the same kind of work that agen­cies do, and our out­put is very much the same. But the big dif­fer­ence is we have no full-time employ­ees, and it is essen­tial­ly var­i­ous dif­fer­ent peo­ple work­ing on a project basis that are used as and when we need them.

What have been the biggest challenges in getting off the ground?

Any new ven­ture comes with it’s chal­lenges. For us, because the mod­el is so reliant on hav­ing the right resource, get­ting the right peo­ple to work togeth­er in the right way was dif­fi­cult to begin with.

It was a chal­lenge to make sure I was match­ing peo­ple’s skill-sets and per­son­al­i­ties togeth­er prop­er­ly. To begin with a bit of the work was being dupli­cat­ed, and roles were being over­lapped. That took some tweak­ing and fid­dling, but I think we’re on top of that now.

One of the oth­er chal­lenges we faced was being a new busi­ness and get­ting through pro­cure­ment process­es. Being new in the indus­try, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly hav­ing estab­lished cre­den­tials and case stud­ies beyond every­body’s indi­vid­ual exper­tise and expe­ri­ence, was some­thing we had to over­come.

Also, learn­ing how to do tax and VAT was the most hor­ren­dous thing. I felt like I’d climbed Mount Ever­est in flip flops when I final­ly fin­ished all the paper­work.

What kind of team have you put together?

A lot of the work we’re doing at the moment is SEO relat­ed, more specif­i­cal­ly tech-relat­ed stuff, and I work with some real­ly incred­i­ble tech peo­ple across the world.

It does vary on a project by project basis, but at the moment we have about 15–20 free­lancers, col­lab­o­rat­ing togeth­er on mul­ti­ple projects. We have PR spe­cial­ists, con­tent spe­cial­ists, data spe­cial­ists, tech spe­cial­ists, ana­lysts — every ele­ment which you might see in any good dig­i­tal agency, or specif­i­cal­ly on an SEO con­tent cam­paign, fea­ture!

Per­son­al­ly, I like to keep the skill-sets quite niche and spe­cif­ic. SEO is a field where it can be real­ly tricky to be good at every­thing. Some ele­ments are super tech­ni­cal and oth­er ele­ments are real­ly reliant on good inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships, so there are always mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent skil­lets at play in order to deliv­er great SEO.

What would you say are the main points of difference in the Manyminds model?

One of the key things I have noticed when work­ing with free­lancers or inde­pen­dent con­sul­tants, is that their work is very impor­tant to them. Ulti­mate­ly it’s their rep­u­ta­tion that is on the line, so their qual­i­ty of work is always excel­lent. They’re much more invest­ed in doing a fan­tas­tic job and deliv­er­ing against expec­ta­tions, because that’s incred­i­bly impor­tant when you’re putting your own rep­u­ta­tion and your own indi­vid­ual brand out there.

And of course it has it’s chal­lenges but i think the raw con­cept is that there’s a whole world of resource and tal­ent out there, so as a busi­ness own­er who is try­ing exe­cute good work, I don’t want to lim­it myself to a 20 mile radius of where I hap­pen to be. I want to be able to access the huge tal­ent pool we have in our indus­try.

Do you think agencies can replicate this to an extent?

Absolute­ly… first of all, it’s worth say­ing that agen­cies also have a lot of incred­i­ble resource too, but they can also use and rely on free­lance resource to extend on that.

It might be that resource is thin if they’ve just won a new client, or they need some real­ly spe­cialised exper­tise. I think using free­lance resource is open to every­body. The nature of free­lancers is that they are dis­creet, can hit the ground run­ning, and can dive into projects eas­i­ly so there’s noth­ing stop­ping any brand or agency from access­ing all the tal­ent that’s avail­able to them. It’s find­ing them that is the tricky part!

How has the brand response been?

Well the proof is in the pud­ding! As of today all of our clients are hap­py. And of course, it’s still ear­ly days and as always in busi­ness to win some­body’s trust and real­ly get a client on board, you have to prove what you’re telling them to be the case.
But clients real­ly like the mod­el, can see it’s val­ue and can see the ben­e­fits. Peo­ple have been incred­i­bly recep­tive and now it’s up to us as a team to make sure we’re prop­er­ly exe­cut­ing long term.

What are some remaining sticking points in the industry you think probably should change?

I think the whole world of work is becom­ing more nomadic. Tech­nol­o­gy and the fact that we all work from portable devices now, means we’re not inher­ent­ly tied to a sin­gle loca­tion near­ly as much as we once were. And that is a mind­set and way of work­ing that’s becom­ing increas­ing pop­u­lar.

I think at the moment, being free­lance still has some neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions of some­one work­ing in their pants in their bed­room, but over­all the accep­tance and the under­stand­ing that peo­ple can be free­lance and deliv­er excel­lent work is grow­ing. I do think the world of work will shift to a more accept­ing mod­el of peo­ple work­ing inde­pen­dent­ly and brands rely­ing more and more on inde­pen­dent resource.

At the moment, it’s main­ly a change in the dig­i­tal and tech indus­tries, but I think that will broad­en out to all forms of man­age­ment, and I’m even start­ing to see cas­es doc­tors and lawyers doing a sim­i­lar kind of thing.

So I see a path for agencies to become more adaptable… but what about brands?

It’ll sound like a cliche, but the fact is that a lot of orga­ni­za­tions acci­den­tal­ly end up work­ing in silos, and that’s due to team hier­achies, and exist­ing orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures of hav­ing peo­ple in spe­cif­ic roles, with spe­cif­ic remits, where peo­ple tend to stick to that role and that remit.

Teams ulti­mate­ly become siloed, and a lot of the brands I work with still work in incred­i­bly sep­a­rate teams across dif­fer­ent chan­nels. I think every­body has an aware­ness that silos prob­a­bly aren’t a great thing for cross col­lab­o­ra­tion, and I do think it requires a shift in the cul­tur­al mind­set to over­come.

The aware­ness is there though, and a huge glob­al cor­po­rate brand I know, was a few years ago, in the process of chang­ing their whole office to a hot­de­sk­ing envi­ron­ment. The fact that a huge glob­al orga­ni­za­tion was com­mit­ted to chang­ing their entire office to hot­desks is indica­tive of peo­ple start­ing to under­stand and acknowl­edge that you should prob­a­bly work in terms of projects, rather that around spe­cif­ic roles and remits.

It’s more effec­tive to have teams of peo­ple who work togeth­er and have a sin­gle remit of deliv­er­ing against a project, rather than one indi­vid­ual per­son hav­ing a spe­cif­ic area that they look after. And I think that the cul­ture with­in brands will con­tin­ue to change to sup­port that.

How do you keep the projects across channels consistent and also maintain that flexibility and fluidity of resources?

That’s one of the ques­tions we get asked a lot, and there’s ways you can build that in. It’s impor­tant to be flu­id, but at the same time process­es are huge­ly, huge­ly impor­tant. As is hav­ing quite vig­or­ous task man­age­ment process­es that are man­aged from a cen­tralised basis. At Many­minds, I work with a cou­ple of real­ly good project man­agers, and they keep every­one on task and make sure the out­put is con­sis­tent.

Con­sis­ten­cy is some­thing that the brand would have to own. Work­ing with free­lancers tends to be on a project capac­i­ty where a brand needs some­one super spe­cialised for a cer­tain amount of time to deliv­er on a spe­cif­ic area. So in that sense, for brands it is a lit­tle bit more eas­i­er to man­age than hav­ing mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent free­lancers on a main­tained capac­i­ty.

Also, I’ve realised that learn­ing to write a good detailed brief is one of the most impor­tant things for any­body who ever works with anoth­er per­son. And some­thing i’m still try­ing to get bet­ter at!

How do you approach internal culture?

In terms of build­ing cul­ture, we imple­ment it in the same way any oth­er agency does. We have team days, and recent­ly we took a heli­copter ride across New York. We hire hous­es and vil­las for con­fer­ences, and we try to bring about that idea of a team, or a cul­ture, even when peo­ple aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly employed by us or work­ing under the same roof. So we still get that fun stuff from an agency that is build­ing an inter­nal cul­ture.

Essen­tial­ly we try and treat our free­lancers with all the perks they might get in an agency but whilst main­tain­ing that auton­o­my for them to man­age their own work­load, and to pick work that they want to do.

Do agency teams need to be more ‘fluid’ in the way they resource skills and expertise?

Talk­ing about Many­minds is a tricky one, but I do firm­ly believe that work­ing with inde­pen­dent resource to exe­cute against a project, is ulti­mate­ly a very pow­er­ful thing. I gen­uine­ly believe you can deliv­er incred­i­ble work when have flex­i­bil­i­ty and flu­id­i­ty to get the best peo­ple work­ing togeth­er!

Also, I wan’t to be clear in that I don’t want to come across as say­ing that tra­di­tion­al agency mod­els don’t have a place, and that they don’t equal­ly do excel­lent work. They have qual­i­ty, scale and con­sis­ten­cy, and that’s impor­tant.

How­ev­er, I do think that agen­cies need to get bet­ter at being more flu­id in terms of billing struc­tures and how they deliv­er against and ser­vice clients.

At the moment, it’s not uncom­mon for some agen­cies to shoe­horn clients into their exist­ing agency struc­tures, so clients get dif­fer­ent lev­els of ser­vice, because that is what the agency offers. The agen­cies have their inter­nal heirachys of account man­agers, client ser­vice man­agers, account direc­tors and so on, and they can tend to slot clients into that struc­ture. That’s not always good for a client and aligned with what a client nec­es­sar­i­ly needs.

So it would be good for agen­cies to start deliv­er­ing against projects accord­ing to the specifics of what a client brief entails, rather than apply­ing their struc­ture!

Con­nect with Kirsty on LinkedIn, or find out more about Many­minds.