Pop Quiz, Monday with Robert Bownes, Founder at Old Street Communications
The Pop Quiz, Monday is a fun little exam that we love to give to savvy business people. The examination is not a surprise after all since the interviewee already knew about the questions in advance. However, we can always pretend and have fun with the scenario of a young entrepreneur sitting in class nervously biting on their pencil. They are ready to take a pop quiz on a chapter that they were supposed to read the night before. Instead, they played Metroid all night on their SNES (Oops, this was me in high school). The real purpose of the pop quiz is that this is a fun way to introduce business tips from real-world experiences that you cannot learn in a classroom. We want to thank our interviewee for being a good sport and volunteering their time to answer a few questions to help our community grow from their knowledge.
I want to introduce you to our guest today who will be taking our Pop Quiz, Monday.
Can you please tell everyone your name?
Robert Bownes
What is your job role?
I am the founder of Old Street Communications.
Tell us about your company?
Old Street Communications is a PR consultancy for tech startups. We have a particular expertise in business to business PR campaigns for proptech, fintech, enterprise, blockchain, and regtech companies. I founded OSC in October 2017, and since then we have won a number of clients, hired staff and taken on an office.
What do you love most about your job?
The freedom. Being able to dictate your own terms and decide who you work with, when and how is great. Add to this the satisfaction of building a business from scratch and employing people, and it really is an awesome job.
What motivates you to get up every day and go to work?
The variety of work and clients means that no two days are the same. Any day could result in a client getting on TV or in a major national publication which can make a huge impact on their business. There’s also the excitement of winning new clients, which can happen when you least expect it and involve some really interesting projects. For example, out of the blue, we recently won a project to work with Samsung to launch an augmented reality platform with Family Guy.
How do your co-workers inspire you?
I think it’s best to work with people who have different skills, views, and experience. It means they look at things from another angle and can come up with new ideas. This process can be very inspiring and delivers the best work for clients.
How do you have fun at work (team building, pranks, etc..)?
I like work to be relaxed and people to keep the hours that best suit them. Getting drinks after work is one of the best ways to celebrate a long, and hopefully, successful week.
What are some of the challenges of your job?
PR is at the mercy of a lot of factors beyond your control — the news cycle, the mood of journalists and so on. Add to this working with startups where the situation can change rapidly, and it can add a lot of pressure and unknowns. However, weirdly, hiring quality staff has been one of the most time consuming and tricky aspects of the job. Our company requires some very specialist skills which are currently in short supply.
What are some lessons learned from a past project that you can share with us?
I think it’s always important to have one eye on the next project with a client. This may mean taking on a project which, on paper, might not be the most exciting or valuable, but if you always take a long-term view about how the client relationship could develop, it can end up paying off in unexpected ways.
What advice would you give to someone who is starting out in your industry?
The media industry is in a transition phase. Traditional skills such as pure media relations may not be as much in demand in five years time. This is why it’s important to gain as much experience and develop as many skills as possible. This may mean taking less money and spending more time on the lower rungs of an agency at the start of your career. However, the pay off is future-proofing your career, ultimately making more money and having more options. At a basic level, it also gives you a taste of different industries and subsections of PR which can help you decide where you want to specialise. The worst thing you can do at the start of your career is pigeonholing yourself.
Thank you for taking our pop quiz today. You get an A+ for effort. You can learn more about our interviewee and their business by visiting them on the web:
www.oldstreetcommunications.com
@robertbownes
