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William Buist is a business strategist, speaker, consultant, the owner of Abelard and founder of the exclusive xTEN Club – an annual programme of strategic activities for small, exclusive groups of business owners. xTEN helps accelerate growth, harness opportunity, build your business and develop ideas. William is also author of two books: ‘At your fingertips’ and ‘The little book of mentoring’. In 2014, he employed Panpathic Communications to do his PR.

What were you hoping to achieve by using a PR service?

“There were two things that I thought were quite important. The first was to create more awareness in a wider sphere and to attract people to come and take a look at what we did and how we did it. But the other thing, that was driving the decision to start with, was that I was changing the focus from the underlying company name, which was Abelard – a name that I had used for quite a long time as a consultant – and moving much more towards using the xTEN brand as the overarching brand under which we did everything. So I needed to make people aware of xTEN and less aware of Abelard. It was a lot about awareness.”

Was this the first time you used a PR company?

“No, I had used a small, independent company about five years earlier and that hadn’t delivered me very much. What I now know is that they didn’t have a significantly well designed process for doing PR, they kind of did what they could but there wasn’t any formality to it, like, I was delivering articles to them when they called for them and that was a bit random. And the sorts of places they were getting my material wasn’t reaching the right audience, so I stopped doing that. A couple of years later I used a fairly large national agency for about four months. It was a bit of an experiment; they had access to exactly the right sort of outlets and they got me into a few of those places but they were horribly expensive. So I came to the conclusion that whilst they were getting to the right target market, the return on the investment would take too long, so I stopped that as well.”

Why did you decide to go with Panpathic Communications?

“Well, my key thing was about changing the brand and getting attention in the market I wanted to venture in and Chantal has got a fairly vigorous process that’s obviously been thought through. So, we’re delivering articles every month, which Chantal pushes out to the network of journalists she knows to get attention for them etc. And that kind of rigour around a regular process, and a regular flow of content, I thought was quite important for what I wanted to achieve. So that was partly what attracted me to working with Panpathic. The other part was that I knew Chantal was working with other people that I’d seen results from and had a very good flavour of what it would be like working with her.”

What were your expectations?

“I was looking for ongoing coverage. I knew that to change the focus of attention to the new brand and to drive new prospects clomid that had never heard of me before was not something that’s going to happen overnight, it was going to take some time. And in my view that would take a minimum of six months, so that’s the expectation I started with. I think it was only about eight or nine months when I started getting a sense from the people that I ran across, that I hadn’t met before, that they were already well aware of me. Some had seen me in the papers, that attracted them to have a look at the website, then they looked at my LinkedIn profile, then they got in touch. And that’s a much more relaxed way of meeting people and what I wanted to achieve, but it took a while. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

What’s the best thing about having the service of Panpathic Communications?

“Well, there are a few things worth mentioning. I think I write reasonably good texts to begin with but Chantal is good at picking out some elements of it, just tweaking a little some of the ways I express things, to give them power and emphasis, which is great. And of course, she gets the material into places that I couldn’t get into, however much I tried. Things like the Financial Times supplements and City A.M. which I was in quite early on. But the highlight is, without question, getting into the Financial Times and doing so regularly; I think I had 11 articles in the FT and supplements last year.”

What would you say were the main benefits of having a good PR service?

“It comes back to the awareness, in the way that when I go on to meet people that I haven’t met before, they already have a flavour of who I am, the way that I think, the ideas and thoughts that I’m having around business – which is why they are getting in touch with me in the first place. So that has taken time out of the sales process, without question. Most of my clients consider the purchase, they spend time thinking about should they or shouldn’t they do the work that I’m suggesting, but the more that they’re already aware of what that would be like, the easier the sales process is. So for me that’s been the biggest benefit. Whether it’s brought more people to my door; that I don’t know. Had I not been using PR, I would still be having meetings with people but I would have sourced them in a different way. But what I know is that those meetings would have been longer and more difficult, and the sales process would have been longer and more difficult, because they wouldn’t have an awareness of me. Doing PR has brought me a lot of prospects, but it’s very difficult to measure. Having someone like Chantal and Panpathic Communications looking over my shoulder also helps with consistency. I’m constantly striving to be consistent in everything I say and do; it’s a never-ending game, but because PR gives you the first level of visibility it has to make sure there’s consistency. So that’s what you get too.”