Episode #9. This episode is about you the marketer and embracing your personal values to have the most fulfilling marketing career and life. Taking the time to understand your values, how they affect the type of company/brand you want to work for and your leadership style can be a valuable exercise; one that host Abby has personally benefitted from. Abby is joined by entrepreneur Alex Hirst, who shares his story of how his values inspired a new ‘workstyle’ concept of flexible freelance working with his business as co-founder of The Hoxby Collective
Resources/brands mentioned in this podcast:
Sponsored by Labyrinth Marketing
FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)
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This podcast is brought to you by Labyrinth marketing. So hello and welcome to the Whole Marketer podcast
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On today’s podcast. We’re going to be discussing an area of personal development using your values but with a focus in the workplace. Today’s guest is Alex Hirst from the Hoxby Collective. And before I introduce Alex just a few thoughts on why I think this is so important. So first of all let me explain what values are. Values are what makes your soul come alive. It’s not what you do but why you do something. When you combine your personality with your values that’s where the magic happens.
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Identifying my values to me was absolutely life changing it’s allowed to use them as guiding principles in all my decision making for the what I work on projects I undertake both personally professionally. It has also allow me to improve my personal understanding of what situations make my soul come to life and whilst others drain it. For me, having this deep level of understanding of what drives your soul is also important in the workplace. From choosing the organization that aligns with your values or to share amongst your teams for them to get a deeper understanding about what makes you you and what drives you.
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Today’s guest is Alex Hirst CEO and co-founder of Hoxby a global community over a thousand freelance members who work across marketing creative PR innovation admin and HR united by belief that work should fit around your life and not the other way round. Prior to founding Hoxby Alex held a variety of agency side roles serving numerous clients across marketing and events before rising from account manager all the way to CEO at Future Proof and then starting Hoxby with co-founder Lizzie penning.
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He is father to two young children and he is passionate about changing the way we work.
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Alex welcomes the Whole Marketer podcast. Hi thanks for having me. Pleasure. So before we jump in to talking about values it be great if you could tell us more about the Hoxby collective dream or where it came from and why.
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Yeah sure. So Hoxby was starting in 2015 with a vision to really fundamentally refresh the way that work gets done. So my co-founder and I have our personal stories for why we wanted to do this.
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For me personally it was reaching burnout in this sort of traditional employment model. I validated my contribution actually as time so I would say OK I have done a 50 or 60 hour week I can’t do anymore. That’s as much as I can do and that must mean I’m doing a good job. I did that. For a fairly sustained amount of time until eventually I kind of lost touch with what I was doing why I was doing it. I felt disconnected from my work isolated from my other half and I actually reached a pretty low point to the point where I then had a conversation with Lizzie about the way I was working and why it was making me feel low and that I’d reach this point of burnout and came to the conclusion that really what I wanted to do was not necessarily validate my performance by time but validate it more by contribution by output and for when and where I work to be immaterial.
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Because I was doing sort of an hour hour and a half commute each way each day and doing as a 10 hour day in the office as well. So I was away from home for sort of 14 hours of the day. And that really didn’t work for me. Lizzie concurrently was trying to start a family. She was trying to be an entrepreneur and also a mother and wanted something similar. You know she didn’t want to be judged for the fact that she wanted to spend more time at home.
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She wanted to be judged on the quality of her work. So both of us kind of unified around this principle and said Okay so what’s the idea behind this. What’s the thing that unifies us in the way that we work and that we want to change. And essentially what we realized is that we’re stuck in an industrial age nine to five Monday to Friday work system and yet we we live our life system is one where we have technology has just unleashed a huge amount of choice of information and freedom and flexibility that that work system simply doesn’t fit with.
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So what we wanted to do was create a work system that’s fit for the digital age we live in and we came up with therefore the word work style to fit around lifestyle. So if you could have a work style that fits around your lifestyle then you would be able to be at your best bring your whole self to work and deliver fantastic work for the people you’re working for and with, so work style was born out of that. It means freedom to choose when and where you work and to have that freedom of choice entirely to yourself. And we found that it gives a really great language to talk around flexible working or working in an atypical way that doesn’t open you up to the same stigmas and critiques that perhaps flexible working has suffered over the years 50 odd years that it’s been in existence.
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So work styles the idea and we decided to build a business with work style at its core and Hoxby was born and it is a community now of more than a thousand members around 40 countries globally. And we come together in the delivery of work for our clients across services such as marketing, creative, PR, innovation, HR and admin. So we provide teams to those clients and our clients include Unilever, Merck, Amazon Web Services and Warner media to name a few and what they get from Hoxby is access to a talent pool that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.
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This is a group of people who are globally distributed who are working on their own terms who wouldn’t take a traditional 9 to 5 employment job. And what we’re doing is bringing those people together into diverse teams. It’s a really diverse workforce. We’re bringing together diverse teams to answer client briefs and those diverse teams and different perspectives provide really new thinking and what we call refreshing work for our clients. So that’s kind of the journey that we went on and where we are and we also recently launched a foundation which is designed to make the principle of work style available to people outside of Hoxby as well as to everybody who’s within it.
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So we’re taking everything that we’ve learned about working this way to build a more inclusive and digital age working system that extends outside Hoxby and into other businesses too.
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That’s amazing. And I think you know I really resonate with your with your story of kind of burn outs or having a moment of realization that this isn’t what I want. I think often when I’m coaching clients they say I don’t know what I do want and I say well what don’t you want. And the list is long and and you know flexibility in the workplace coming to work is one of the key drivers whether that’s to care for children. There’s a kind of a side hustle though looking to go after or dream unfulfilled. And actually you know Hoxby provides they’re the perfect solution for them to work in a way that suits them.
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And also you know around the rather as you say they have aspects of their lives they can bring their whole self to work.
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Absolutely. And I think the concept of a job for life is you know outdated and even the idea of having one employer is becoming increasingly rare. You know portfolio careers are in the ascendancy and I think people want variety in the way that they stretch themselves and challenge themselves at work and that’s that’s never been more possible than it is right now which is exciting.
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And also explain to me about your clients. You mentioned Unilever there. I suppose in my imagination maybe it’s the best word they’re working 9 to 5 in their office, approaching marketing in a brand first way. How does Hoxby fits in with that client-side marketeers roles.
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Yeah. So I would say firstly that as an organizational entity yes they do organize themselves around the sort of traditional working day. But they are very forward thinking and they do have a great deal of flexibility, people that work there are very open minded and very able to work in a in a flexible way themselves. But in terms of how we interface with them. So we use tools like Slack and Goose Suite and all the cloud enabled tools to work in partnership so alongside them so we don’t tend to exchange e-mails we tend to exchange slack messages and conversations in a slack environment where there’s greater visibility and ease of kind of keeping on top of conversations.
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So we’ll sort of interface with them in that way. But I think the important thing is we are able to give them access to a talent pool that is globally distributed that is highly talented. So if you take one of the projects that we do for them which is they have a website called cleanipedia.com. What we do with cleanipedia is we organize this strategic thinking with a central team. But then we actually execute the creation of content and implementation of content into 10 markets globally by using teams that are local to the market.
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In each case. So what that means is that we’re able to have the benefit of a centralized strategy and SEO strategy
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but also the benefit of localized authentic content. So rather than simply translating a piece into the language and pushing it live we’re originating the piece in the native tongue and that’s much better for SEO. It’s also much better for the brand and in its ability to create authentic tone of voice. So that’s just an example of how we work but also why Unilever chose us to work on that project.
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That’s fantastic. And what would you say the most common requests of support from your clients, what are they looking for from your Hoxby collective?
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I think for the most part it’s a bit like with cleanipedia content delivery but not only just not just content. I think I think what we’re seeing is an ability for Hoxby to deliver authentic content I was just describing and to do it in a really agile way. So Hoxby is able to evolve itself very quickly. So if this strategy needs to change or if the markets need to change we can adapt overnight to those changes because of the fluidity of our workforce. So everybody at Hoxby is freelance and what we will do is change the focus change the people and evolve the workload to meet the need of the brand.
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So as the brand is going through changes or its consumer base is evolving so we can evolve alongside that. So it’s highly agile content delivery that I would say we’re increasingly being asked to deliver.
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That’s great.
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So just to go back for a second and talking about values I know the after you’ve got your own personal values which are you know be lovely if you’d like to share. But how did knowing what your values are help you and Lizzie when building the Hoxby collective? Thats a really great question and I think for a founder a really important one.
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I think when you’re building a business you want to build a business that you would want to work in. I think that just comes naturally. And so as a result you tend to build values into that business that are your own. And I’m very fortunate that Lizzie and I had worked together for a while before we started Hoxby and we knew each other well and we knew we had similar values which is fantastic in terms of being able to build a culture and to build a business together in our own image. So for me personally I didn’t really think about my values until actually the year before I started Hoxby.
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So it is entirely relevant here. I actually got married in 2014 and I was writing my wedding speech and I was writing down all of the things I love about my wife and I was trying to kind of bring that together into a speech construct that would make sense to people. And the thing that I realized is that the areas that I loved most about my wife were the things that I value most. And it became really clear to me that actually those were my values integrity, positivity, humour, endeavour, vision and so what I guess I took from that was a real understanding of okay.
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This is probably why I’m not loving what I’m doing right now. And actually I’d like to build a business more in the image of this. And so that kind of helped in the conversations with Lizzie in terms of evolving the type of people that we wanted surround ourselves with the type of people who would really work well in this operating model and who would be inspired by it. You know that really shaped I think a lot of what we have now in Hoxby as a culture you know highly inclusive very diverse group of people who are all kind of driven towards a greater purpose of changing the world of work to be more inclusive.
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So we’re all about a happier more fulfilled society. And we think we can get there if we can create a world of work without bias. And everybody buys into that everybody is aligned by it. And we have and we see our own values manifest in the behaviours of the Hoxby as every day which is really exciting very rewarding.
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I love your story about how you identified your values, thats so powerful and actually really important lesson or story for others to kind of absorb it wasn’t. Here’s my sets of values at work and here’s my sets of values in life. We bring our whole selves to work. So it is almost like this is what I’m looking for in a life partner. And this is also what I’m looking for, for me when it comes to the workplace as well and what you built with Lizzie.
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Yes. Yeah absolutely.
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And what is it that you’re looking for in those freelance marketeers that you bring in to the Hoxby collective.
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The most important thing is an ability to evolve. Too often brands and individuals do things a certain way because that’s what they’ve always done it’s very comfortable and it feels safe. I would most challenge people to break themselves out of that to challenge yourself to evolve. And for brands to evolve as well because consumers are changing and the working landscape is changing at pace. So the way we work the way we view ourselves and where we operate our brands has to has to evolve with that change.
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And that changes is as I say happening at pace now. So being comfortable with change is probably the biggest skill. I would suggest that freelance marketers need to have their awesome softer skills like trust in other people operating in our way of working requires a huge amount of trust to be passed between individuals you have to assume positive intent from everybody that you’re working with in order to make it for a very positive and collaborative work environment and communication you know again is is a very specific skill for working the way that we work and where a lot of what we do is on slack and a lot of it is written but also because we’re working asynchronously and with trying to be as productive with our time as possible.
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It’s really important for people marketers particularly to be considered in their communication considered with every word they use and highly authentic in the way that they communicate because it makes for authenticity makes a great trust. It can be great communication makes for a really clear understanding and as marketers we should be great communicators we should be pressing ourselves to be great communicators and for our brands to do the same. So I think those things are important for freelance marketers that we bring into Hoxby as well as being a great communicator and obviously being able.
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I like the point you made around that kind of every written word counts almost the same principles as you would if you’re putting out a piece of communication into the marketplace. Every word counts. We talked about why clients would knock on the Hoxby collective door if there are marketers sat here listening and this sounds like something I would be interested in what what is the most common reason marketers maybe in the more traditional sense come and knock at the Hoxby door?
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I think we touched on this at the start and I think this is about being able to bring your whole self to your work. So the way that Hoxby works and using work style at its core really is giving a marketer the freedom and flexibility to choose when and where they work which means working when they’re in their best mood when they’re in a location that brings out the best in them when they’re when there aren’t distractions and when they can bring their best version of themselves to work.
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So that’s the thing that the Hoxby work environment should enable. And it’s the thing that people need to think about because we haven’t had to think about this before and that’s why we ask people to think about it as part of their selection and onboarding process into Hoxby is. Okay so now you’re not being told when and where to work. How do you want to work? Where do you want to be at what time.? Why? And really thinking about that can unlock real insight into what’s important to an individual and introspection can help you to really see where you perhaps haven’t been as effective as you could have been you those times when perhaps you have you haven’t delivered your best work and it may be that it’s the circumstances around which that work has been done that have led you to that.
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So it’s not only when and where you work I guess but also what you’re working on. So we talked about values and aligning yourself to brands that share similar values is a really exciting opportunity that Hoxby presents. What we’re trying to do is bring people onto projects who are passionate about the brands that we’re working with so not only can you be your best in terms of when and where you work but you can also be most committed and most excited engaged in your work because the brands that you’re working on are the ones that are aligned to your values.
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So there’s a introspection there that’s required to understand your values understand the types of brands you want to work on. Define that for yourself. I think the future of work is something that we talk about quite a lot. But I think as things move to more independent working freelance working and that shape and nature of work changes I think it’s increasingly important for marketers to be clear about what they love working on the brands they want to work on why they want to work on them how they aligns are values and being clear on that and taking that approach I think helps you as a marketer to interview or praise the brands you want to work on rather than thinking about taking on whatever kind of marketing job is available at the time being more selective being more independent in your choices.
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And I think not enough people do that to be honest, Alex, I think you know there in a current role. I had tons of phones. They consider it they might go for it. They get it. I don’t think enough people sit there and go Okay so who am I what am I like to be around what am I doing when I’m not my best. How do I want to work as you’ve just said you know what’s my kind of best optimum working scenario? And then looking at okay what are my values. What organizations or sectors do I want to work in? What values do I have that that organization also needs to hold?
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And then also kind of maybe taking a step back and go and how does this role fit in my wider sphere of what I’m trying to achieve in my life. What’s my wider goal or sole goal or purpose that I’m working towards? And I think that they have to work in harmony work and life in order for you to have fulfilled life.
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And I think often people are clear on something they want to do but they don’t actually actualize it because they don’t choose a job or a role or kind of have that clarity about what they need to allow them to work in harmony.
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I completely agree. Isn’t that the the great shame of it. And I would say that up until starting Hoxby I was kind of guilty of that and I think awareness of it is really important as a life lesson for everyone right now. I think it’s fantastic the way you describe it.
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Thank you. And you know just talking back to I think Episode 3 are the hallmarks of a podcast. Emma Hale who’s now Lucky Saint. She was talking with such clarity. She’s right. I’m no longer working for Graze have handed my notice in. And she almost sat with her list of what she was looking for. So the business had to be at this level stage of investment or level of growth had to work in this sector. It had to have these values. It had to allow me to do this. And she discussed about the brands I was interviewing not the other way round.
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They were interviewing her. She was interviewing them. And I think more people need to take the time to think about holistically what they want and how work fits within that and therefore what are they looking for when it comes to their job their career their role.
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I completely agree. I just think that’s fantastic advice and it’s one of the things that we do at Hoxby in terms of helping Hoxby’s to apply for the opportunities that are coming in is to say think about whether this is right for you before applying for it does it fit with where you’re going because that’s the benefit of this way of work is the choice to opt in to do that. And if you do make that conscious choice and you know why you’re doing it you’re going to deliver much better work which is what we’re hoping to do.
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Wonderful. What is the most common reason people decide to go into freelance or come to the Hoxby?
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Mostly people want autonomy control flexibility and independence for themselves in the way that they manage their career. They want to do other things. And I guess they see that traditional working has its limitations and is actually anchored in industrial age principles and that actually if we’re going to solve the world’s biggest problems, we need to change the way we work.
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And I bet there’s hundreds of marketers that are listening to this going where do I sign up?
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HOXBY dot com. There’s your answer. Okay so next question. Obviously, we talked about how you rose all the way from account manager to CEO before co-founding HOXBY with Lizzie. What were your career highlights and lowlights?
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It’s really interesting. So you know the thing that comes into my head when you say highlights is recognition. Funnily enough like we won an award in our second year or Hoxby which was a fantastic achievement in a former life when I worked in the events industry. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the Queen for some of the work that I’d done for the royal household which was again an amazing highlight and a memory. But those things don’t necessarily I wouldn’t necessarily say they are my highlights because I think when I actually reflect on my career starting Hoxby the early days of starting it and knowing that I was building a business in my in my own image and that could be everything I wanted it to be and was free of all limitations.
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Was so exciting. I mean it was terrifying in equal measure, but it was so exciting to spend every day just thinking about that and working on that. So, for me that is that would be my career highlight I think just starting
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Hoxby and with limitless potential. The emotion of excitement there with Hoxby being built in at the in in the early days is that linked to your values or linked to kind of the goal that you had and seeing actually is what drove the excitement?
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I am a creator naturally in terms of the type of work that I do that gives me a buzz is that type of work. So when I can originate something so conceive of it from the start and build it from nothing into something tangible and that wasn’t there before. That’s what I really love doing in terms of the the the actual work that I do. Solving problems actually I guess it’s why I did a degree in product design and you know that that is the thing that I am most skilled at.
00:24:15:19 – 00:24:34:09
I would say I think the fact that obviously the business was being built in my image with with Lizzie you know and to have the values and everything that we stand for at its center was was obviously hugely a great big part of that. As well. So it’s kind of both of those things coming together really that made it such a highlight.
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Okay.
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And any low lights? Now there was this one time when I was very young still at university I think I was going to start a summer job and I couldn’t go on the first day because I had to go to Buckingham Palace for funny enough, it was actually for a presentation thing Duke of Edinburgh thing.
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And so I have to say that I won’t be able to be in on that day or come in the following day and start. So I started on the following morning but before I even started they said that I obviously wasn’t taking it seriously enough and I could just pack up and go home that day was probably as worthless as I felt when it comes to being able to contribute in a meaningful way through work. And it totally shaped the way I treat people now.
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Because you know on reflection, I just think it was probably a blessing in disguise because I clearly think that the way that the organization was run and the individual in particular clearly wasn’t a great leader nor manager nor developer of people. And it’s definitely helped to your point earlier. To
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To understand why I definitely don’t want to be as a as a leader and as a member of the workforce. That’s a really great story and I think it quite it’s not for you but it’s a quite telling story of probably the time when you started work and almost the power that the employer had over the job description if you will. I think I’d like to think that things are changing that people are thinking about the person as a whole the person behind the brand or business who they are what motivates them how are they going to keep them aligned and driven to delivering the business goals and objectives.
00:26:17:14 – 00:26:39:05
And that’s not going to come from not listening to who they are and what’s important to them and not dissimilar in its not marketing story. But I do remember many years ago chatting with an engineer that I used to work with and I asked him why he left, he was telling me about this amazing job that he had and he said because I’d spent three years designing and commissioning this bridge on the day of the unveiling of the bridge
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They didn’t let me go and he said that’s why I left. And that story always stuck with me. Funnily enough not dissimilar to your story. You know people need to see the person behind the brand or business and you know treat them like a human. You know I’ve actually written that in my book like be human. I couldn’t agree more with that.
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Yeah with people we’re human and I think the days of business getting in the way of being human.
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I think those days are numbered I believe.
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I think so especially you know Covid has forced people to think about the people behind the job title it’s forced them to think about who they are what their life status is who they’ve got at home to think about their children how they work where they work. It’s been a game changer and it shouldn’t have had to take a pandemic for this to happen but it’s definitely force a lot of people to consider who and what’s important to that person they’ve employed.
00:27:32:12 – 00:27:45:12
Yeah absolutely I mean we’ve been campaigning for it for five years and our campaigning has taken us so far. But yeah the pandemic has certainly achieved what we hoped to achieve in the first five years of campaigning.
00:27:45:16 – 00:27:54:16
Yeah and there’s so many people have gone look I can prove now that I can work remotely and flexibly in here and different hours and hopefully things will change and I really think they will.
00:27:54:19 – 00:28:00:11
It might take a bit of a bit more of a push but you know it should have taken a pandemic for this to happen. Absolutely not.
00:28:01:00 – 00:28:07:25
So as a closing note as we wrap up. Yeah. What’s your one top tip that you would give marketeers today?
00:28:09:03 – 00:28:25:15
I think is relevant for marketers but but also to everyone really, it’s the quote from Herclitus, which is ‘the only constant is change’ and it’s a quote that I find myself saying quite a lot in Hoxby one of our values is within the organization is always improving.
00:28:25:17 – 00:28:41:23
And I think for marketers and the modern workforce as I said before their ability to evolve yourself and to evolve your brand is absolutely key. Resting on what you’ve done before won’t take you into the future. You
00:28:41:25 – 00:28:50:04
You have to continually evolve yourself and evolve what you’re doing as a marketer with your brand as well. So that would be my doctor.
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Thank you Alex, and thank you so much for joining the whole market here this morning. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
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Thanks thank you for tuning in to the Whole Marketer podcast. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode please do click follow below for more weekly podcasts. Thank you
