“The KLPR team have been fab to work with including getting me into Virgin, The Telegraph and my partnership with Barclaycard. I can’t write for toffee but I can talk, and we’ve got to the point where I can rant down the phone to one of the KLPR team and know that within a short period of time they’ll come back to me with something that actually made me sound quite smart!”
James Rix, Founder and CEO, StreetPR and Harrix Group
StreetPR is a leading events and staffing agency in the UK. Although we started in the events and hospitality sector, we have now branched out into other industries, providing temporary staff and brand ambassadors for major UK venues, event organisers and increasingly brands, service providers and the public sector.
To drive further growth, we needed to improve our brand awareness across all the sectors we service, so we brought in KLPR in August 2016 to help us raise our recognition factor by distributing news stories and comment/thought leadership pieces, as well as identifying opportunities for me personally to raise my profile.
As soon as we brought them on board, the KLPR team got straight to work, interviewing the company’s management team (myself, my business partner and senior execs) to pull together a list of relevant industry topics to focus on in an initial three month period.
It’s worked brilliantly well. I can’t write for toffee — I’m severely dyslexic — but I can talk, and we’ve got to the point where I can rant down the phone to one of the KLPR team and know that within a short period of time they’ll come back to me with something that actually made me sound quite smart!
KLPR has kept us constantly up to date, flagging up news stories we could comment on as experts, relevant features that we could contribute to, interview and potential speaker opportunities and award schemes we might want to have a go at. They then work with us to generate the actual content for comments, features and award entries.
We’ve got a process in place where we have regular meetings with myself and my team leaders with KLPR, discussing all the projects we’re working with and the possible new business wins we’re chasing, so we can create a schedule of future campaign-based news stories.
They’ve also helped me, advising on speeches and talks I’ve given. Recently, I’ve given a number of talks to Prince’s Trust staff, focusing on how to help young people and the importance of mentoring in developing young entrepreneurs, based on my own personal experience. about my own experience with mentors and as a mentor,
In addition, KLPR has video production facilities in-house which has given us a valuable new comms channel that we plan to develop more in the coming months.
KLPR hit the ground running, and within weeks of starting, we already had our first pieces of coverage in respected trade publications including Promo Marketing, Field Marketing, Stand Out Magazine and Event (now Campaign Experiences).
Beyond our core marketing and event trade press, they also achieved a number of interview and comment opportunities within the business press — Just Entrepreneurs, Virgin Entrepreneur and Small Business, to name just a few — and we even got quoted in The Telegraph business pages!
As our relationship has progressed, we’ve moved the focus more to highlighting my entrepreneurial status and sharing lessons I have learned from working with a number of start-ups, which has seen us featured in publications such as Growth Business, Talk Business, Business Comparison, Real Business and more…
It’s not all been comment and thought leadership pieces, however. We work with a lot of different clients and KLPR has helped us negotiate the often tricky challenge of getting press releases written and agreed with them. That’s not only helped us get coverage, it’s actually raised the profile of many of the companies we’re working with — a double whammy, if you like, delivering added value for them.
Possibly because I speak entrepreneur — because I am one — StreetPR has also ended up working with a huge number of start-up companies, particularly ones which exploit digital platforms to market real world services to consumers. Often, these are relatively small leafleting or sampling campaigns — but KLPR has helped us turn them into real news stories, along the way helping put our clients on the map by telling their story in unique and interesting ways that strike a chord with journalists.
For me, the stand out PR successes in 2017 were being asked to speak at two events organised by the Princes Trust, directly as a result of the way KLPR has helped raise my personal profile, and signing up as a Global Ambassador for Barclaycard, providing content based around my personal experience targeting SMEs and entrepreneurs.
In 2018, we’re expanding our activities further — we’ve now got a bunch of different companies in addition to StreetPR, organised into a holding company called Harrix Group, and it’s time to make all our other brands as famous as StreetPR is, plus raise my profile even further as an entrepreneur through more speaking opportunities.
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