Best Startup
Harvey & Hugo Ltd tells stories to build lovable and memorable brands in a way that’s accessible to all businesses through its three distinct ways of working.
The first is Harvey & Hugo, offering classic retained monthly services.
Second is Pay-as-Hugo, a unique and flexible platform selling contract-free, fixed-fee, snacksize services online – with aspirations to become the Amazon of PR and marketing products.
Third is Hugoversity, a PR and marketing training and recruitment academy.
Together, Harvey & Hugo Ltd offers an approach for any stage of a business and aims to be your PR partner for the full business journey.
Tell us about yourself?
I set up Harvey & Hugo 12 years ago, at the age of 25. I had no money and no contacts – but I had a passion to do things differently.
Since then, I’ve always looked to challenge the normal way of doing things, applying innovative, disruptive ideas to traditional PR and marketing services.
I embraced social media from the off, recognising (correctly) the power it had to transform the world of PR as we know it.
I also like to think a little deeper about why we do things, and always dig deep into the neuroscience behind a campaign.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
There is no substitute for hard work – a lot of people view people who work long hours negatively at the moment, but I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today without that. Not everyone wants to work hard, have stress in their lives and take risks and that’s fine but you can’t expect the same results as those who do.
Stay true to your values and trust your gut – Where I’ve often gone wrong is where I haven’t
What problem does your business solve?
I launched Harvey & Hugo in 2009 with a clear vision – to build lovable and memorable brands.
We believe that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it – they buy stories.
Our goal is to deliver campaigns that reach audience’s hearts and minds, not just building brands, but building relationships.
We do this through offering three core services: PR, social media and content marketing, but it’s the way we offer them that makes us unique.
We offer three distinct ways of working: Harvey & Hugo, for traditional, retained PR services; Pay-as-Hugo, for flexible, contract-free PR and marketing snacks; and Hugoversity, our training and recruitment arm.
Together, we are the ideal partner for our client’s business journeys; when they’re just starting out, Pay-as-Hugo’s flexible, snacksize servings are perfect for fuelling growth.
The retained monthly services of Harvey & Hugo are ideal to build a lovable and memorable brand, acting as an extension of an in-house marketing team, and using PR and marketing techniques backed up by scientific theories.
When a brand is ready to go it alone, Hugoversity offers recruitment and training to develop an in-house team, allowing clients to tell their own story.
PR, as a field, is all about solving the problem of getting a brand talked about. Harvey & Hugo solves the problem of making PR accessible to all.
Many firms, particularly at the start of their journey, are reluctant to tie themselves into a long-term contract or commitment.
Pay-as-Hugo allows them to pay for what they want, when they want it, making PR accessible at every stage of the business life cycle.
However, this accessibility can come at a price; whenever we have lost clients, it has often been because they recognised the value in what we did and recruited their in-house team. Hugoversity was created to capitalise on this, offering strategy, recruitment and training so brands can build their own team to tell their story
Harvey & Hugo offers more than just traditional PR; services include full range of story-telling methods, such as social media, video, animation and design – all under one roof.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I come from a family of entrepreneurs – my grandfather set up a retail business in the 1970s. He died when I was three, and I’ve always wanted to make him proud by running my own business. My parents took over the business and worked incredibly hard running it while raising a family.
I worked in the shops growing up, but retail didn’t appeal; I was more interested in how they sold the products and why someone would visit our shops over others – I was fascinated by the brand.
My first job after university was at a PR agency. During the 2007 recession, businesses weren’t signing up to contracts because of financial uncertainty, so I suggested to my boss that we offer pay-as-you-go services, but she wasn’t keen.
I launched Harvey & Hugo in 2009 with little money and no contacts, but plenty of time, energy and determination.
The business is named after my two border terriers; in fact, I came up with the name Pay-as-Hugo brand while coming round from general anaesthetic after an operation!
I remember feeling quite lost before they came along, but the love I had for them gave me the confidence to launch my own business, with services inspired around them. Pay-as-Hugo reflected Hugo’s flippant personality, whereas Harvey’s personality suited the retained, traditional way of working.
The business was a success; it suited the economic climate and people appreciated the lack of commitment. I won two awards in my first year – the Star Radio Business Person of the Year and the Face of Entrepreneurship from Entrepreneurs’ Forum.
It was hard running a business on a shoestring, and I made plenty of mistakes along the way, but one element I focused on from the beginning was offering digital and visual storytelling tools as traditional media opportunities declined.
I’ve also found it challenging that the lines are blurred between personal and business; in the early days, I was so committed to my business that I had little time for anything else.
I didn’t take a holiday for a year, worked every Saturday and didn’t have much money as I was paying my staff. My partner at the time didn’t understand and we broke up.
I met my now husband shortly after this, which put things in perspective. When I met him, he had a tumour in his head and in the first 18 months of knowing him, he underwent three major surgeries – one leaving him without a forehead for eight months.
While it was still important, I realised that my business was no longer the be-all and end-all and, since then, family always comes first.
What is your magic sauce?
It’s our flexibility in how we work with our clients.
Despite launching with the concept of Pay-as-Hugo in 2009, as the economy improved following the crash of 2009, it was not really a service we focused on. We still offered it, but it was primarily used as a back-up option for clients reluctant to sign up for a long-term contract with Harvey & Hugo.
That all changed when the pandemic hit; we lost a third of our clients in the week lockdown was announced, and I was worried I’d lose the business.
That’s when I decided to reinvigorate and relaunch Pay-as-Hugo – having launched in the last downturn, I realised it would perfectly suit the climate of uncertainty.
The whole team shifted focus and we started to promote the contract-free services, offering them to clients who could no longer commit as well as reaching out to new ones.
And, with e-commerce booming, I decided to tap into the trend by offering a fully-digital Pay-as-Hugo service, whereby clients could purchase PR and marketing services online, wherever and whenever they wanted.
It is aimed predominantly at small businesses and marketing managers who may be looking to fill in the gaps in their teams.
The new e-commerce site was focused around the concept of PR and marketing “snacks”; small servings of all of our services that could be bought individually or in a bespoke package.
The original Pay-as-Hugo services consisted of three PR, four social media and three blogging packages; for the relaunch, I broke it down into individual elements, all falling into three main categories; Create, Share and Report.
From there, each service is broken down to give clients more choice; for example, instead of an end-to-end press release service, the process is separated into writing, distributing to media and reporting, so clients are able to buy the element they need.
Furthermore, we have also added a “Care” option to the services, continuing the charity donation we launched during lockdown, offering 20 per cent of the sale to a charity of client’s choice. www.harveyandhugo.com/supporting-charities-and-marketing-through-covid-19/
From now, five per cent of the profits from all sales through the e-commerce site are donated to foodbank charity The Trussell Trust – continuing the food theme.
The project has not been without its challenges; it has been difficult to productise services, meaning a great deal of thought and effort went into developing and breaking down the packages.
However, the hard work has paid off and the website launched in February 21.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
I’d like to continue growing Harvey & Hugo and spinning out the individual businesses with that.
In terms of Pay-as-Hugo, my goal is to become the Amazon of PR and marketing services, and what we are offering by the way of an e-commerce service is unique.
As the site grows and clients become more accustomed to this way of working, I am looking at developing it further, and phase two is already in the planning.
At the moment, the service still requires an element of team-client interaction, although software is currently being created to allow it to become a fully digital process, with a portal allowing clients to enter whole briefs prompted by questions.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
A big challenge we constantly face is to get the right team on board and balance this with client demand.
With Pay-as-Hugo we are trying to change the way customers traditionally procure PR and marketing services – it’s a constant challenge to get people to change behaviours.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
If you’re interested in any of the Harvey & Hugo services or ways we work, we’d love to tell you more about what we do.
Please arrange a call by emailing info@harveyandhugo.com or visit:
www.harveyandhugo.com
www.pay-as-hugo.com
www.hugoversity.com
