Recently, Hey Me’s founder and director, Amy Jeffs, was interviewed by Business Spotlight Yorkshire’s Mike Moss. You can find the interview if you follow this link: but if you didn’t get the chance to watch it, we have created a transcript of the interview below. If your interested in advice for starting a business, motivation, and truly making a difference for your clients, then you don’t want to miss out on Amy and Mike’s interview below.
Mike: Thank you very much for joining us today really appreciate you being here. So if you could kick things off and just let us know a little bit more about who you are what it is you do, and how long you’ve been doing it for.
Amy: So, I’m Amy Jeffs, I work as the founder and chief communications lead at Hey Me. I’ve been in Communications for about 20 years now and we run a UK- based fully remote holistic Communications team of experts – so we’re completely agile. We don’t have working hours and we work completely kind of flexibly as well. We provide holistic end-to-end communications
Mike: Fantastic. I must ask, when you say ‘we don’t have working hours’, how does that transpire into staff and servicing clients?
Amy: It’s an interesting concept. It was put together because at the beginning I needed to come out of full-time work because I have quite a rare allergy that that ends up as being like a kind of chronic fatigue condition, so I can’t work sometimes. I needed the flexibility to be able to work my hours when suited me, but still do a really good job. So as I recruited people we just extended that to everybody else as well. It really helps in a creative industry because not everybody can write something at 9:00 in the morning some people are more creative at 11:00/12:00 at night. It also helps for people with families, any kind of responsibility outside of the workplace or anything else they’re interested in. We’ve got people who volunteer a lot, we’ve got students, and everyone can continue doing something else in their life. It basically means, in essence, that you do your hours, but you do your hours when it suits you, as long as you’re available for clients. It means that we can serve as clients at every end of the day really in in any way required – including kind of Australia and America. Being able to jump on the phone at 8:00 or 9:00 at night and it doesn’t really affect us too much.
Mike: That’s brilliant! So, just asking the questions for anyone else that’s watching that may feel that flexibility could be a game changer for their business – was that a spark for you getting into the business then?
Amy: There’s two parts of that: I’d run out of excuses to set up my own business, and an awful lot of people around me had told me that I’d run out of excuses, and it was time that I just kind of set up on my own. I’d worked in really boutique small agencies in-house and big corporations as well, and it was kind of that grind I’d reached kind of that point where it was a bit like ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ – waiting for the kind of head of head of comms to leave so that you could get into the next role. So it was a little bit of I’d run out of excuses, and it was also I needed a rest. I needed to stop with the grind, and with the needing to be somewhere at certain times, I just needed to be in my own space and deliver do the job I knew I could do but in a way that could do it to the best of my ability.
Mike: Right, so, when did you start the business?
Amy: I started as a freelancer six and a half years ago. We started employing people in the middle of Covid, so it was it was never meant to happen that way, I was never meant to employ people, it just kind of happened by accident.
Mike: What’s your business journey been like today?
Amy: Bit of a roller coaster. We started with freelancers, and myself being a freelancer, then we started employing freelancers on like a consultant basis, and then as things grew we employed them. It’s been a lot to do with family and children as well. Most of the people that work with me have had one or two children in the time they’ve worked with us. I’m about to go off on maternity leave with my second, and this happened in the same kind of six and a half years, as well as a global pandemic and lots of social economic political changes in the background – as well as funding and budget changes. It has been interesting.
Mike: So what does the future look like? What are the challenges going ahead, that may present opportunity as well?
Amy: We are in a process or in a period of change at the moment. I’m about to go off on maternity leave, so we’re having different members of the team step into different positions and different sense of responsibility, but from a from a growth perspective this year is a challenging year, and it has been for the last six months. We’ve got lots of changes politically in the background. We work with a lot of sectors that have like kind of government influence, so, like the rail industry, transport industry, manufacturing and construction, that get funding from elsewhere. We also work with innovation companies and technology startups, and they’re waiting for the that next stage gate or that next investment. Very recently, over the last three or four months, that period has been quite difficult for them, and we’re obviously get the knock-on effect of that as we go through, and I don’t think that’ll settle for at least another 9 to 12 months really.
Mike: So a few challenges to navigate, how do you plan for something like that?
Amy: With great difficulty. We have really good relationships with the people we do work with and obviously trying to do more of what we tell everybody else to do. I suppose we’re very quiet in the background, we’re trying to step out of our own comfort zones and get our own marketing and comms and new business strategies up and running – but also just looking at what we can do for people we work a lot with is enabling. We’re trying to enable companies to be able to do things for themselves or not need us in a way, so one of our biggest successes is getting somebody to the point they don’t need us – which sounds a bit counterintuitive – but it really helps because then they’ll pass it on to somebody else, and it means that we’ve done we’ve done a good job for them that we’ve helped them be more accessible and more engaging and reach their audiences, and that helps us further on. That kind of referral effect, and it’s the silent referrals that you forget about. It’s that silent pipeline so we get calls from people that like four years ago we might have known, or we’ve done something with previously, or 10 years ago. My communications managed and I still get calls from the team in London as well that we used to work with – it’s a really good silent pipeline in the background.
Mike: What would you say is your biggest lesson to date if there’s one that you can pick out?
Amy: Be joined, or have people join you, that have a similar ethos – so you need to find the right people. Ours was all through opportunity. People became available through redundancy elsewhere, but they have the same ethics and they have the same kind of work culture … and we’re all aiming at the same thing. So, that’s where in a lot of ways a flexible working environment could fall flat on its face: if you’ve got somebody who’s only wanting to do the hours once, the clock in clock out, they’re not really available chip-in on everything else. But if you’ve got someone that believes in what they’re doing, and they’re really skilled but they just haven’t got the opportunity elsewhere because of whatever situation they’re in – it means that they they’re going to put more into what you’re doing as well. It’s just having a shared ethos across what we do.
Mike: If you were to give some advice to someone just starting out in business what would that be?
Amy: The first thing that I was ever told was get an accountant, which I would swear by. Things like that scare the living daylights out of me, so I would always say get an accountant, because they know what they’re doing. For us personally, obviously we’re a communications business, we help people find their message, so figure out what your business is, and what you’re trying to say, would be my be my second one, and that’s obviously one that’s really close to our hearts. But then third, the third thing that that I always think, and you forget about it, and when you first go into business you know nothing about it – is connect with your local council, because they’ve got business support managers and things available: they’ve got funding available, they’ve got opportunities, they’ve got communities. It took me nine months to realize that the council could help me, and actually it’s a bit of a game changer because you’ve got somebody there that you can ask questions to straight away, and when you first start out you don’t have the funds to ask anybody else.
Mike: What inspires you to do what you do, Amy, what’s the reason you think you sort of get out of bed every the morning and do what you do again?
Amy: There’s two different two different reasons: one, is we’re providing an environment for people who wouldn’t necessarily have the opportunity to continue their careers in the same way. I don’t really like highlighting new mums, but it kind of lends itself to a new mum, because it’s flexible it’s part mostly part-time, and it fits around your life. I mean we’d more than welcome men to do the same thing, but we find that we get applications from women more than more than men, so it’s really kind of I’m providing something that maybe doesn’t exist elsewhere for those people, and they’re really skilled and expert people, and they should be able to continue those careers. From a business perspective, what Hey Me does, like we really truly believe in storytelling and finding the message for businesses and being that translator, so not everybody can speak plain English, not everybody gets caught up in their own little language that their business or their sector speaks, and we like finding out what the what the story is in the background and letting people know what that is.
Mike: Where can the people watching find out a little bit more about what you do.
Amy: On our website, we’ve got a couple of online courses that make it really accessible for small businesses, or micro businesses or sole traders, and they all start at about £75 so that’s really worth getting having a look at – and you can also get some kind of power hours with our team as well so if you need a little bit of advice, but you’re not really sure. You can get in touch and they’ll have a good chat with you, because it’s comms, it’s one of those things that’s not really that accessible to kind of sole traders and the kind of micro SMEs, so we’ve tried to make that end available as well.
Mike: Thanks Amy, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you and thank you for being so open with all that you’ve shared, I wish you all the best for the future success of the business.
Amy: Thanks Mike.
