PLATFORM - Sunderland - March 2025
Insights Briefing
Paul Lancaster - PLATFORM | UK Startup Week
Paul has been doing these events every month since last January and in Middlesbrough next week and in Edinburgh next month. Platform is supported by British Business Bank, BluSky, Circle Cloud, HR2Day, Mira, NEL, Precursor, Sweeney Miller Law and Wubbleyou. There's a lot of Platform events coming up and UK Startup Week in June and there's also a lot of news on the blog about what's going on in the North East including grants and funding. John from BluSky has a podcast coming up Two Pints of Lager and a Spreadsheet there's also ones to listen to such as Founders about sharing their knowledge and insights.
Nicky Jolley from HR2Day set up their business fourteen years ago and in that time not one of their clients has gone to a tribunal and they take pressure away from entrepreneurs and have mostly retained clients and they draft everything to point of print and do one offs and leadership training and help with any HR problems or questions they can help, changes that are coming are complex and interesting. They will onboard you for a few months and they work for the company and make sure what the company does and mitigate everything as much as possible.
Debbie from North East BIC have a sustainability masterclass with Anne-Marie Soulsby and about running your business in a sustainable manner and give your business an edge and also help save money. Lots of businesses will choose businesses with a sustainability policy and this event is fully funded and free to attend as part of the Growth Lab events in Sunderland.
Stuart Bramley - Founder & CEO, MIRA Marketing
Stuart studied in the United States and came back and founded a company and also worked with other companies and has a marketing agency that help and work with a variety of businesses with a big base of e-commerce. The future of marketing, what's in store for 2025 and what the key trends shaping marketing.
Shaping marketing is that first party data is critical with increasing privacy regulations and AI and machine learning are driving marketing advancements along with consumers expecting more highly personalised experiences. They have a client selling cat food and they were bringing in customers, but the main issue was getting them retained and coming back so people don't want just a blasted email it has to be personalised you need to nurture them and can use AI and your first-party data.
The key to 2025 success is to use your data or lose your edge and the ability to leverage first-party data with AI driven insights and smart segmentation is the only way to stay ahead. Why first-party data matters and this is information you collect directly from your audience with no middleman, no third-party tracking just raw valuable insights - you're not buying that data the customer is providing the information for you.
Why first-party data matters is it is accurate and reliable and is privacy compliant, it fuels hyper-personalisation and powers AI, ads, email segmentation and personalised customer experiences and if you're not using it you're missing out. If doing online ads and not seeing return in investment you need to start passing your data into those platforms as their algorithms will learn from this to allow them to know who to target and how to find them.
Important of data quality in AI, it requires accurate, relevant and unbiased data and this enables AI driven tools to analyse behaviour effectively and least to precise audience segmentation and personalised ad delivery. It also helps with automated bidding strategies and use historical data to predict conversions and adjust bids in real time and reliable data is essential for these systems to optimise return on investment.
Pitfalls in tracking include improper tracking setups lead to inaccurate data or lack of event tracking means valuable customer interactions go unnoticed and poor conversion tracking prevents brands from understanding campaign success. Are you tracking what contact links people are using or if they filled out a form, be more clever with what you do so need to think about it and sometimes they have seen multiple events sending the same information.
You can improve tracking with Google Tag manager for streamlined tag management, implement event tracking for clicks, form submissions and sales data and ensure accurate cross-platform tracking for a unified customer view. Your primary conversion events can be form submission but secondary ones aren't often tracked such as people on landing page views and you can provide the platform more data, track more events and choose your primary and secondary events.
First-party data in action is feeding your data into ad platforms and CRM for smarter targeting and AI can optimise campaigns based on real-time data insights and more precise segmentation leads to increased conversion rates and improved ad spend efficiency. Mira use a platform called Klaviyo where they create flows and trees to create triggers such as from signing up from a popup and can funnel them all the way down and help make them more inclined to use your services, start talking to people like a robotic or even not so professional way as they want to be talked to like a human.
Why this is your secret weapon is more money, and more leads and first-party data enable more personalised and effective ad campaigns and better audience segmentation leads to high conversation rates and reduced wasted spend and first-party data aligns with GDPR and other privacy laws so you are asking them for something, and you can have your T&Cs at the bottom.
Integrate CRM and email lists into marketing efforts and AI-powered email segmentation improves engagement and retention and dynamic customer journey tracking allows for real-time campaign adjustments and consumers in 2025 expect highlight personalised experiences, if you're not using data-driven marketing then you're falling behind.
What's out for 2025 includes sending irrelevant emails and messaging, using paid channels without enhanced data from business, ignoring data tracking, batch-and-blast email campaigns, disjointed customer journeys as customers want seamless interactions, overly polished robotic emails as conversational messaging builds trust and static email segments you need to update based on customer behaviour.
Show & Tell
Mickey Devine - Founder & Creative Director, Mondays Design
Mickey is the founder of Mondays which is a creative agency in Sunderland and work with companies who want to stand out and make a positive impact in the world and they have worked with many of the leading agencies. They have a network of talented individuals and work with depending on the project.
A lot of people don't like Mondays, the weekend isn't long enough, we'd rather do other things but they love Mondays and they love what they do and helping people and having an impact on the world in a positive way. Their brand is different from usual agency and have bold colours and unusual typeface as things are starting to look the same, but if you do something different, you'll be remembered.
How do you stand out, you could make something that is radically different but without deeper meaning it won't last, most important thing of any brand is your audience, so it is important to connect to audience in a deep and meaningful way through purpose. Your purpose is what is unique about you are your brand but discovering this can be a challenge, but they have a process to define, design and deliver and what happens in those phases can be different which can be focus groups, surveys or what makes sense for you.
They worked with Jo Milne to help with their brand and look-and-feel. Usher syndrome is a really rare condition which is sensory loss where you can lose your vision, and it is very rare. He met Jo at an event who has lived with Usher syndrome all her life and at 16 she lost all her hearing and at 29 she was registered blind but she got cochlear implants to allow them to hear again and they had a video when that happened that went viral and got over twelve million views and it all started sky rocketing for her and was on various TV programmes, radio shows and podcasts and someone paid for her to see the seven wonders of the world.
Jo founded a charity Cure Usher Syndrome and has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds, Mickey met them at an event and said they really wanted to work with them, assuming working with the charity but it was running on its own and it is working but she felt it was doing well so wanted to work on her own personal brand to speak at events and do more fundraising. He'd never rebranded a person before, so he would try to find a company's purpose so for a person he met with them and got to know them and talked about stories, things they have done and built up a rapport and get to feel them to create something.
Mickey had an idea to have a blurred typography for Jo Milne personal brand but he felt that meant Usher Syndrome defines her so he thought about what defines her purpose, he read her book and watched the programmes and ended up with empowering change as a purpose as it is not just about Usher Syndrome it is about raising awareness of other rare diseases and get more help and funding and she is about powering change. Mickey thought about all the things she is such as a leader and campaigner along with public speaker, founder, activist, change maker, advocate and came up with the name Power Woman. It is really true, and the brand is simple with a bold typeface that fits with her personality, warmth and nature.
The brand is always in black and white as Jo should be at the forefront of everything they create, and Jo is proud of everything she does and wants to show off her cochlear implant in the photography and Mickey put together the website on Square Space where it is really inspiring and he also provided a toolkit so clients can manage the brand themselves including Slide Deck, images for social media and guide on what they can and can't do and also had an idea of a merch range using the branding and the next phase of the brand will be campaigns and fundraising activities. Jo and others with Usher Syndrome will be climbing in the dark to help raise money and will be talking about this trip. The simplicity of the identity means they can do anything with the brand such as a red and white striped band which could be sold to Sunderland fans too.
James Alan Fildes - Founder & Managing Director, Space North East
James is from Space North East, they decided to get back out there, socialise, network and talk about what they do, you can have your head in your work but can be difficult to describe what you are trying to do. James is an avid Sunderland fan, and football has been their life, social life and community and a real focus of their life. They love Sunderland and grew up there and have spent time in a few other places and it is important to tell who they are rather what they do. It is important is they are relatively happy and it is important to ask that question as for a long time that wasn't the case, but it is amazing to be relatively happy they couldn't ask for more.
James is founding and managing director of Space North East and chair at Washington Mind. Despair - the complete loss or absence of hope. Purpose or experience wasn't something they necessarily have and without them hope fades away. Hope is a journey not a place, things can change, you can change, you can change who you are, you are product of your experience and influence by your environment and you can change them at any time and hope is what you can discover.
What is hope? To start they grew up in Silksworth in Sunderland and at one point it was a huge colliery and formed a huge community, there was six of them in one cosy house and they were a tight knit family and all they knew growing up was safety and community and everything that makes human experience important and powerful. As a young lad they experienced shame for the first time and shaped who they were, they went to Derwent Hill to dance and their first experience of shame, the person made a comment when they were laughing and dancing and they said “you're really enthusiastic you” and this put them down and that feeling happened more and more and their smile started to fade away and feel ashamed of their behaviour and that smile and bubbly behaviour they had started to fade.
They went through school and made a lot of friends and had a fantastic family but when they were sixteen their parents went through a divorce and their world was torn apart and everything felt like it was over, they tried to get on with life as they thought as they intended and in sixth form they felt things weren't right they weren't going to classes. They dropped out of sixth form and joined the Royal Air Force as they felt they needed structure and thought they would see the world but they slipped a disc sneezing and was the end of their career there as were medically discharged. They went to university and thought they went there for education, but it is not that and wasn't helpful or health and the late nights and alcohol and poor behaviour choices when build on foundation of someone who isn't happy resulted in them feeling suicidal.
They thought about all their aspirations but felt unhappy and their experience of life was terrible, they passed their degree but felt had no purpose but decided to move to Canada on their own but spent that time on their own and felt they needed to come home and their brother bought them a ticket and came home, but they didn't get the reception they wanted because no one knew where they were or how they were feeling. They worked in call centre and felt they wanted to take their own life, but they didn't and the thing that stopped them was a wakeup call to make a change and they went to the doctor's and asked for help and felt a weight off their shoulder but said they wanted to help others. All they needed was somewhere to talk who was unbiased and share what helped them and wanted to work with people and help them but didn't know how they could do this as a job or career.
They had purpose and direction wanting to help people, that's where they wanted to go, they got a job with the council, NHS and got promotions and realised they have skills and good things to give to the world. They didn't even realise they weren't thinking about ending their life, they were doing a job, but it wasn't the thing they wanted. They thought about what they could do so they called it Space, it was the antidote to their sadness, so they created it and said this is what they experienced, this is what they are feeling, and this is what they are going to do. Research told them there was thousands of suicides per year just in England and many of those are male, they thought something could have happened to prevent this and the highest rate of suicide was here in the North East.
Space North East, what do they actually do? They create support networks and strengthen communities with space to talk, walk, move and think with over 400 hours of free support delivered, hosting walks, free weekly exercises and movement classes along with events that has been funded so all the support is free. They have talks on overcoming adversity and what inspires them with their sold-out events. They have only ever had one bit of funding, funding is time consuming process, and you're not guaranteed to get it, so the only thing they got was from the BIC to setup their projects the rest has been from commercial projects.
What about work? We spend a third of our working life working, with third sleeping and a third doing what we want so if you're working life isn't great then it isn't a good place to be and employers have a duty of care to their employees and it doesn't come through a screen or an app but you're not going to solve your problems through a screen, Coffee Space come out to work places to generate money and reach more men in the North East, how do you reach people who don't want to be reached by turning up to workplace and sell you a coffee with a non-confrontational way with QR codes on their coffee cups with over a thousand click-throughs. You can have a proper conversation with them or go away and drink a coffee, but it is about planting those seeds that someone is out there who can help.
They also do Coffee Space with keynote and 1-2-1 support where they spend half a day at a workplace with practical support. They are also instigating change at a societal level, the people that need help aren't the ones being reached. People sometimes just need someone to talk to so they talked about the demographic they reach and the work they do and their work has resulted in the council are doing a review of mental health provisions in Sunderland. They are also doing keynotes with the University of Sunderland and working with UCL as a project partner on something called the Grand Challenges and they said they wanted to do some research, so are going to be co-authors on papers on research on mental health.
They are trying to change things on a fundamental level, but so what? What does it mean, it means for them which is a big question, which is why did they start, you only need to reach one person, or one more person to have something enduring, powerful and lasting - it is meaning and purpose, we think happiness is something we can chase, it is transient and doesn't last, but purpose and meaning lasts and it is something a lot of people lack and it is totally subjective, it is your purpose, your trajectory and your meaning. Try and look and evaluate your purpose you need to realise, unearth or create this and you can change at any point, and you always have options.
In Conversation With...
Gary Hunter - Exited Founder & CEO, Redu and co-founder Morton & Hunter Ltd
Gary is co-founder of Redu, it he is an exited founder. They started in 2004 with their first business which was a car leasing broker and went through some pain times in 2008 and went into a car leasing portal and would have dealers on their website so would have to get traffic on their website. In 2011 they worked with Vertu Motors with Robert Forrester but they lost their purpose at that point, but they did seek help and went on to found other businesses and in 2014 co-founded Redu. It is an affiliate marketing company and they sell products that people impulse buy and they used to put brands out to a big audience but they came to them to manage their affiliate programmes and that is what they do now and that is something people don't understand and don't get right so are massive experts in that but they can also do Facebook and Google Ads. They don't work in the business anymore and are semi-retired and have a fantastic team.
They started building marketing around a Facebook page and then bought and invested in that page that has over a million followers, and they were involved for around a year at the start. Affiliate marketing is where people click through you get a small commission but with the rise of mini and big influencers it has become a big business. You have to have a big audience to make money from it so it is there for the brands to make more money but as a single influence the commissions are small from 1-5% so you have to do a lot of sales and is mostly female buyers and they target women with children who buy most of the household items and they have tried male pages but they don't buy the same thing, if you buy a pair of shoes and they still work they won't buy new ones but people will buy for their children.
It can be Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and they work with cashback and employee benefit websites. It is discounts, deals but also could be hard to get product where they have an app called Got Stock that will tell you when a product is back in stock. They are based locally in Peterlee and were based in Seaham and have eighteen staff but did have forty staff at some points.
Experience of starting it was just them and Sam Morton, and it grew really quickly and got featured when Black Friday originally came to the UK and got featured on ITV News and got a n extra 90,000 followers in just a few days and had to scale quickly. From a business perspective it is hard space to work in as are reliant on social media platforms as they change their algorithms. They had a problem with their main page got deleted overnight and there was a crackdown of people selling pharmaceuticals as it was a false positive when advertising to SuperDrug but had a connection with Facebook to get it back working that they met at a networking event.
Growing an audience is difficult on Facebook but it is much easier on TikTok as it is growing, but they built a system early on that monitors every post and word and track billions of rows of data and see what is working and what isn't, such as pitches, videos, competitions but have to be careful what you post on your Facebook pages but analysing pages is key to this and they've never paid for Facebook advertising.
They started managing affiliate projects for other people but when people were coming to them to acquire them, they weren't comfortable with reliance on social media which made them branch out into agency side and don't just want to be on one social media network. Facebook is the most mature and where they get their money from but Tik Tok is growing but doesn't really work for what they do but Instagram has never been great for selling but LinkedIn is great for connections but not so much for marketing, but it is a great way of finding people but it is more difficult to message someone and get a message as there's too many messages coming into people's inboxes.
AI will take over the face of brands, there are videos presenting themselves as a person and is interesting times with AI. Where do people go for business tips and advice and many of them go to Instagram, but people are projecting all the good stuff there. But the best way is to build a business is with a board of people with experience in different areas and the learnings they can share, and they had people who could help them with answers when needed.
Gary's purpose when starting a business was to drive a Ferarri but they haven't done that, but they did ask them if they could design a minibus for them and their kids, that is their purpose is children. The biggest thing is freedom, people think of their business is financial, but freedom is the best thing you can get, be able to do what they want when then want and take their family anywhere they need to.
Redu did take investment and did get a proof-of-concept fund and from North Star and gave them back three times that within a year, investment does run down but they wanted to buy that out and then use their own money to grow although investment can be hard to get but there are smaller rounds to help businesses.
They have had businesses that ran through cash and failed but it can be stressful if you don't get traction but sometimes you just need that cash injection to scale quickly, and debt is the only answer but it can play on your mind when it is other people's money. They have had businesses where they have taken money from people, they know so if taking money then you need to take it from the right people at the right times.
They bought a gift card processing business and turned it around from loss making to profit making and they sold that for twelve times for what they paid for it so are back to seventeen people, building a really good team is key to building a successful business, you can get a lot of people who can talk and say they can but the key is to get people who can really execute.
It was always part of the plan at Redu to exit, they had a five-year plan, but you need to enjoy the journey which is much more fun than the financial reward. They have found that their first few months of being retired was too hard, so they had to find something to do. Part of being a business owner is finding that balance and they were helped by their business partner Sam, who was a lot calmer person who can think of the steps they can do and get that control.
The biggest advice when starting, although you're not likely to have a board, is to get people around you who have been there and done that, get yourself a co-founder that you can speak to about things as being a solopreneur is much harder. Gary was lucky finding a co-founder with Sam who is more into finance, and they are into the ideas and haven't argued but the biggest thing is trust, you have to trust them, and they make decisions same as you do and make those for the same reasons as you.
Most of business is about risk taking and seeing an opportunity and take a risk and see where it goes, and you can take them, and they can fail but they're worth taking and you can work with people you have known for a while and trust and fill those gaps. You need to find someone who has passion for your subject, it has to be someone who believes in that journey and you have to be driving in the same direction as a co-founder and if they don't then they can get into hard times.
Gary achieved what he wanted to do when they sold off part of the business but there's quite a few opportunities for Redu but want to help other companies with advice to get some structure in the business as most of the time as entrepreneurs you are just winging it. Driving things in the business helps with business growth.
Gary has co-founded Morton & Hunter with Sam Morton which is business coaching, going into businesses and see if can help put a better structure in a business, are they happy in their business and give them a plan of where do they want to be and why do they want to be there and ask them why they are doing what they are doing. They often go into a business and ask them how much they would exit for and sometimes that's has been vastly different so co-founders need to be aligned before that situation arises. Gary wants to be involved in businesses they know about such as retail and ecommerce is where they can help the most and give them the advice they need. They have invested in a couple of businesses and want to help businesses and are enjoying life and they appreciate what is around them now.