Ep 35: Communicating Engineers, Chris Moore, Price & Myers
Anyone who knows me, knows that I do love engineers and engineering in general, way more than I love architecture truth be none. So, today’s interview is a bit of an engineering marketing fest with Chris Moore who leads the communications team at engineering firm Price and Myers and he is also on the BuildUp! Built environment networking group committee which I also am part of.
In this episode, we look
The importance of brand, tone of voice and writing
How to help a firm with over 40 years of history be cool and brave
And the challenge that engineers face when it comes to communications and communicating in general
Timestamps
00:05: Introduction
01:46: Chris's background
06:50: Starting at Price & Myers
07:25: Lack of face-to-face during lockdown
09:17: The Price & Myers website and how it is portrayed
13:47: Engineers vs architects when it comes to communication
16:26: Price & Myers' approach to marketing
19:09: The PANDA tool
24:59: Becoming more inclusive and diverse
31:04: Encouraging children into engineering
34:43: Remote studio setup
39:22: Advice for those in the business, including business leaders
46:29: Final thoughts
Marketing In Times of Recovery is a built environment hosted by marketing consultant Ayo Abbas from Abbas Marketing. The consultancy bridges the gap between business strategy and tactical marketing for engineers and architects. You can find out more about my latest work at https://www.abbas marketing.com Sign up for my monthly roundup here for the latest built environment marketing news
Help support the show
If you like this show don’t forget that you can help me to spread the work by
Sharing about the show on social
Leaving us a review on Apple or Spotify
Or telling a friend about the show who you think will benefit.
Your support is much appreciated and helps more people to get to hear our interviews
Resources
The Abbas Marketing website
Price and Myers Website
PANDA
Build UP
Transcript.
Ayo Abbas: 00:05 Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Marketing in Times of Recovery; it's the built environment marking podcast, hosted by me, Ayo Abbas from Abbas Marketing. Abbas Marketing is a marketing consultancy that works with engineers and architects to bridge the gap between their business strategy and what they do in terms of marketing on the ground. You can find out more about my work and what I get up to at www.abbasmarketing.com.
Anyone who knows me knows that I do love engineers and engineering in general, actually way more than I actually love architecture, the truth be known. So, today's interview is a bit of an engineering marketing fest with Chris Moore who leads the marketing and communications at Price & Myers. He's also part of the built environment networking group that I'm on the committee on as well, so we also know each other from there. It's an awesome conversation which I hope you're really going to enjoy.
We look at the importance of brand and tone of voice, how to help a firm with over 40 years of history be cool and brave; and also we look at the challenge that engineers face in terms of, I guess, raising their profile and rising up in terms of communications and owning their share of voice on the all big issues that are facing the world at the moment.
Of course, if you do like the show, don't forget that you can help us to spread the word by talking to people that you know about the show, saying what you like about it, sharing stuff on social media. Or, if you really, really want to support us, leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Anyway, so let's go on and hear the conversation with Chris. Enjoy.
Hi, Chris. Thanks so much for coming onto the show. Can you give me a brief intro to you and your role at Price & Myers?
Chris Moore: 01:46: I certainly can, Ayo. Thank you very much for having me. My name is Chris Moore. I have a background in journalism, starting off in Australia, as you might be able to tell from my accent. I started out working for Rupert Murdoch a long time ago covering court and sport and council reporting for local newspapers in Melbourne.
After leaving the world of local reporting, I commenced with a magazine publishing company that included a number of different titles that were available on the newsstands at the time; some of them still are. I started off writing advertorial, written copy that looks like editorial but it's actually paid for; not necessarily the most ethical of things to be doing, but you've got to get a start somewhere, don't you?
Ayo Abbas: 02:28: I was going to say, well, it probably says "ad" somewhere, really small in the corner, or promoted.
Chris Moore: 02:31: Yeah, stuff that was made to look like written copy, like editorial, but was actually you had to say to nice things about the client and nice things about the product. So, that's how I got rolling. Then I left the world of magazine publishing after I wrote some advertorial about things like taps and tables and furniture and windows and things like that, and I didn't really know anything about any of these things. So, I started ringing up architects and saying, "What do you look for in a tap? What do you look for in a window?"
Ayo Abbas: 03:07: There's a lot, isn't there?
Chris Moore: 03:09: There's a lot!
Ayo Abbas: 03:09: It's like, "What do you call a window?" Is it called fenestration? That's the word.
Chris Moore: 03:12: Fenestration, absolutely right. I learnt words like fenestration and clerestory and things like that.
Ayo Abbas: 03:19: Who?!
Chris Moore: 03:19: Clerestory. It's like when the windows are right at the top of the wall that sort of run along the roofline on the top of a wall; that's called clerestory fenestration. So, there you go.
Ayo Abbas: 03:31: I'm not even going to ask how you spell it. I've never heard of that, but there you go. You've outdone me on the window knowledge, well done.
Chris Moore: 03:36: There you go, you can google that afterwards. So, I talked to a lot of architects in that part of my job and then I got to know a lot of them, and then I actually swung over to start working in the editorial department on a number of different titles in Melbourne at Architecture Media.
After working there for probably, I don't know, seven or eight years or something like that, I would talk to a lot of architects and people, and I would to say them, "Well, you need to have better photography" or, "You need an angle" or, "How are you going to pitch this?" Even things like, we were talking about sustainability back in those days even. Eventually, I had one architect say, "Well, look, you tell me what to do all the time, but why don't you come and actually work for my practice and do it for me?" That was how I moved out of publishing and into communications on the practice side with an architect firstly. Then, not too long after that, I transferred to London with my lovely wife, and I got a job working for Max Fordham.
Ayo Abbas: 04:44: Never heard of him!
Chris Moore: 04:47: The rather esteemed environmental engineers. Max passed away at the start of this year, unfortunately, but God bless him, he was not just a lovely man, he was an absolute genius. So, I worked for Max Fordham for a while, for about seven years or so. They did a lot of work with Price & Myers actually. Max and Sam and Rob were all friends back in the day.
Ayo Abbas: 05:13: I was just going to say, there was a whole group of them, wasn't there? There was AKT II, the original AKT, wasn't there; there was Conisbee, Baxters? There was a whole group of engineers from that era, wasn't it, all around the late 1970s?
Chris Moore: 05:26: Absolutely right, yeah. Robert and Sam, actually, they started off working and they met at Arup Associates back in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Robert actually interviewed Sam to give Sam his job, and Sam got the job, obviously, at Arup. Then, they became friends, started working together; they knew Max, Alan Baxter. When Sam and Robert were talking about going out on their own, they bumped into Alan Baxter in Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia and --
Ayo Abbas: 05:56: Which was the home of engineering for a very long time, wasn't it?
Chris Moore: 05:58: Yeah, yeah, absolutely right, it was all down there in Denmark Street and what have you. Alan offered them a little bit of space in his studio and said, "Well, you can work four days for me and two days for yourselves", or something like that. Sam will ring me up after this and say, "No, no, that's not right!" but it was something like that anyway. So that's how Price & Myers got started.
Ayo Abbas: 06:24: That's fantastic.
Chris Moore: 06:25: As I say, I was at Max Fordham for about seven years, I spent a couple of years at Fletcher Priest Architects, and then I was approached to join on at Price & Myers, and here we are.
Ayo Abbas: 06:36: So, you started your role in April 2020? Every time I think of 2020, my whole body goes, "Lockdown! Lockdown one, the scary one!" So, what's it like to start an engineering practice a month after we were in lockdown?
Chris Moore: 06:50: Actually, funnily enough, I actually joined on 18 March, not April. I had one day in the studio, which was a Thursday, and then Sadiq Khan says, "Don't catch the tube tomorrow", the Friday, and then by Monday, we were all working at home. So, I had to get know the practice and all my new colleagues over Zoom and Teams; it was a challenge.
Ayo Abbas: 07:14: I was going to say! What was your priority then? What was the biggest challenge you had at that point? What did you have to do?
Chris Moore: 07:25: Well the biggest challenge, from a marketing point of view, in joining a practice at that time was compensating for the lack of human face-to-face contact, or at least the sporadic nature of it. Businesses like engineering, like architecture, even more in finance, essentially we're brand companies, and you don't go in and just buy something off the rack; you can't try it on for size; you can't take it for a test drive. So, every project we undertake is bespoke, it's a one-off work, it's complex, it requires investment of all different sorts.
The people we work with, our clients, architects, collaborators, they like working with us based on previous experience with us or our reputation. For all the of the websites and the brochures and the social media and all those sorts of things, there's nothing better than the personal relationship; that's both within the practice and without the practice, outside.
So, when I joined on 18 March and then was quickly sent home, it was kind of compensating for the lack of the face-to-face that wins the day. So, the last two years, yeah, I think there's still some reticence to get back in front of people, if I'm honest, from some quarters.
Ayo Abbas: 08:40: I think there is, yeah.
Chris Moore: 08:42: Yeah, definitely.
Ayo Abbas: 08:44: I think it has changed forever. I think it's going to get back, but I think it's going to be slightly different.
Chris Moore: 08:50: I think it is going to be slightly different but at the end of the day, business is a contact sport and we do have to force ourselves off the Zoom and into the room. We've got to get back to the face-to-face stuff wherever we can.
Ayo Abbas: 09:02: Into the room, off the Zoom!
Chris Moore: 09:05: Off the Zoom and into the room! You're going to have that printed on your T-shirt, Ayo, if you'd like to.
Ayo Abbas: 09:08: I might; I might get you one for Christmas! "Off the Zoom and into the room!" There you go. It could be a brand though as well; it works pretty well.
Chris Moore: 09:16: Yeah.
Ayo Abbas: 09:17: So, I'm just going go to your website. So, one of the things you did in lockdown was actually redo your website, and how was that, and where did you start from?
Chris Moore: 09:27: Well, we didn't actually redo the entire website. The team that I mostly still have working with me at the moment, they got it rolling and rolled out the visuals of the website and the brand identity in that sense. But what we did, first of all internally, was to really try and figure out, you've got people that are all a sudden spread to the four corners, they're all working from home, and the business gets a little bit loose. I'm sure we weren't the only ones to go through that, but people feeling a little a bit isolated and a little bit cut off. It gave the partners at Price & Myers the opportunity to say, "Well, who are we? What do we believe in? What makes us different?"
So, that started the internal conversation, and we had lots of conversations with town halls and surveys and things like that about, for want of a better expression, a vision and values kind of project. So, that ended up with us trying to articulate exactly who we are and what does make us different and we think, in many ways, it expresses our competitive advantage as well, but just who we are as a group of people and what values we share.
So, from that came a lot of the copy that ended up on the website. We thought to ourselves, "Well, there are things that we're talking about ourselves to our ourselves, but we're actually really proud of a lot of this and have no reluctance to tell the world". So, we added a page to the website and everyone's free to find out what Price & Myers is about.
Ayo Abbas: 11:06: As I said just before, I did have a good look at your website earlier, and your "About us" page, it's a masterclass in writing. So, as a marketeer, I look at it and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, how have you managed to…" I guess it's normal language as well, it's how people talk. It's like, "This is who we are", and even including the fact that not everybody wants to go through the whole consultation process to get the tone of voice right and things like that; I think those are the challenges we all face as marketeers.
People don't necessarily, "I'm here to here to engineer. Why am I here to participate in a values conversation?" but actually, I guess I always see a tone of voice as being a strategic piece that actually can inform all of your business. Getting that story right will inform your engineers how you communicate with your clients, how you collaborate with people, how you explain what your firm does, how you even convey your engineering, and I think people don't realise that.
Chris Moore: 12:01: I think that's absolutely true, Ayo. I think that people, and particularly engineers actually, in my experience professionally, I think that architects have got an advantage; when they go through university, they do the crits and they'd spend a lot of time talking about their work, and a lot of time explaining their work to people who are sometimes not going to be very kind to them. They really have to justify in front of some stern lecturer or tutor, they have to justify their work.
I think that engineers can go all the way through their education and not necessarily spend a lot of time talking about their work or talking about themselves. They can be a little bit uncomfortable with even the notion of tone of voice. In my experience, a lot of engineers prefer a more academic informational way of writing and speaking.
Ayo Abbas: 12:49: Factual; it's right and it's wrong.
Chris Moore: 12:51: Exactly right.
Ayo Abbas: 12:53: It's like an engineering --
Chris Moore: 12:54: That's it. The switch is on, the switch is off. Things are black and white, they're one or the other and that's that. So, one of things that I always try to encourage, whoever I work with is, if you can arrive at that tone of voice where your audience, and they're reading something as they usually are when you're talking about tone of voice, that they can actually hear that voice coming off the page or out of the website and the quotes or whatever, it just resonates and it's more human and it's more conversational.
That was exactly one of the things that came from this project that we did when I started, was really just about saying, "Yeah, how do we want to sound? This is not how we talk so why don't we write like we talk a little bit more?" That's how that came about, and I'm really quite pleased that you like it; that makes me very happy.
Ayo Abbas: 13:47: Yeah, I do actually invite people on whose stuff I really like and it's not a lie. So, when I'm like, "I really love this!" I really do love it. Also, I think the interesting thing about engineers is that, actually, a lot of them are really down to earth. Personally, I find engineers more down to earth than architects and, if we could get the tone of voice right for engineers, I think it would unlock so much more for the industry.
I know, literally, hundreds and hundreds of amazing engineers, and you just think, actually, if we get the tone of voice right and start talking to people in the normal language, you can really clean up in a completely different way. There are so many challenges that we can solve around society.
Chris Moore: 14:30: That's true, and it comes back to engagement, and I think that, again, with architects, and don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are architects, I've always said that if architects could get the jargon out -- architects sometimes employ jargon to make themselves sound more exclusive.
Again, I've worked at Fletcher Priest, I've worked at Hayball in Melbourne, I've worked with architects over the course of my life in publishing, and just like, "Explain it to me like I'm a nine-year-old", kind of thing, just that strip it back to… There's a movement, I can't remember what they call it now, basic English or understandable English or something like that, and it's just about, "Give us clarity". As communicators, of course, that's what we, you and I and people like us, are always striving for.
I think engineering, as I say, the light has been under the bushel for a long time. They don't tend to write or speak emotionally about their work, and I really, really think they should, and I think now more than ever because we're facing a moral environmental challenge that's bordering on catastrophe and we actually really need to make sure that engineers are heard; it's utterly essential for our future.
Ayo Abbas: 15:41: Well, they're going to be solving a lot of the problems, aren't they?
Chris Moore: 15:43: Yeah.
Ayo Abbas: 15:44: Let's be honest, they're going to be the ones that will be doing that so, yeah, definitely. Then you're right, I've done a lot of a net zero work for WSP actually, and you're right, it's getting those stories and making them so that they resonate with people, and that's got to be the key challenge if you want to get net zero achieved. All of these challenges are not going to happen otherwise. They're massive issues.
Chris Moore: 16:03: Yeah, and none of us could do it on our own. We need to engage with people, everyone from the Prime Minister to Joe Public and everyone in between. Engineers can't solve this problem, business can't solve this problem, the public can't solve this problem; we all need to get on board. I think that good storytelling is central to getting as many people onboard as we can.
Ayo Abbas: 16:26: Fantastic. So, at Price & Myers, how do you approach the marketing for the practice? What do you tend to do overall?
Chris Moore: 16:33: Well, look, I think in essence, even though I'm a trained journalist and that's my background, I am a brand guy really. Anyone who knows me can just listen to me crack on about brand forever. I've always considered brand to be the oxygen for a business, particularly for professional services businesses, like ours. And, the foundations of my approach to marketing is all about storytelling, and it's exactly what we came back to then, just talking about tone of voice and engagement and getting the stories across, and using the brand to support all the other aspects of the business development.
There's a guy called Michael Eisner, I don't know if you know him, but he's an American businessman, he's the former CEO of Disney Corporation and, if you're a football fan, he's also the owner of Portsmouth FC at the moment.
Ayo Abbas: 17:23: Huge club!
Chris Moore: 17:24: Huge club! Well, a club down on their luck, but an important club! I hope there are not too many Portsmouth FC fans listening, but, yes.
Ayo Abbas: 17:34: Hundreds are listening, obviously!
Chris Moore: 17:36: I'm sure it's very popular on the south coast. But Michael Eisner said that brand was made up 1,000 gestures, and that's an approach I subscribe to. Yes, brand is everything. Yes, it's the logo type, of course it is; it's the colour scheme; it's our storytelling; it's the website; it's how you answer the phone; it's what reception looks like when your visitors come to your offices; how you appear in the media; what events you're associated with. It's all those little things, all of those elements of brand that help establish the personal and face-to-face interactions that I was talking about earlier on that was the big challenge for me two years ago.
So, if I can help my team and I can give them a brand that represents them, again, much of what we've been talking about today, that they can believe in and that they can tell the stories and they can get out and advocate for our business, and advocate for our work and our colleagues and our clients and collaborators, then that helps us stay a step ahead of the competition I think.
Once you've got those fundamental foundation stones in place, it's rinse, repeat and record. It's keep track of what you're doing; keep doing the good stuff; learn from what doesn't work; learn from what does work; do less of the former, more of the latter. That's my approach to marketing overall. That's what it centres on, yeah.
Ayo Abbas: 19:03: So, what is working at the moment?
Chris Moore: 19:09: Well, I think one of the things that we were really blessed with, well, I was really blessed with when I began two years ago, was that we'd just finished working with the University of Cambridge to develop the Parametric and Numeric Design Assessment tool. You may know it as PANDA.
Ayo Abbas: 19:27: Snazzy!
Chris Moore: 19:28: It is very snazzy, yeah! We thought long and hard about that. I can't take any credit for the creation of that beautiful acronym, but the engineers did say, "We're thinking of calling it PANDA; what do you reckon?" I'm like, "That's great. That's all I need. Yeah, anything, let's go with that".
Ayo Abbas: 19:43: Rather than the full title that's a million words!
Chris Moore: 19:46: That's exactly right, "Let's just do it! How very convenient". But it really is a bit of game‑changing software. I know there's a fair bit of tech kit out there at the moment, but this is something a little bit different and a step above, and it really has the capacity, at concept design stage, to strip out up to 40% of embodied carbon.
Ayo Abbas: 20:11: That's massive!
Chris Moore: 20:12: Massive, and not just on 2 or 3 design proposals but 1,000 different design options. So, we had this bit of kit, I turned up and they said, "Well, how are we going to market that?" And I said, "Well, software's always a little bit of a challenge because obviously, again, you can't take it out for a test drive, you can't really show to anybody and I must say that --"
Ayo Abbas: 20:35: Free trial!
Chris Moore: 20:37: Yeah, free trial, that sort of thing. PANDA is not the sexist bit of user interface, I will say, as well. So, it's very much about doing a certain job and doing it really, really well. So, we took the view that we would create an animated film to help support the promotion of the software, and I don't know if you want the long story or the short story, but I wrote a script and a storyboard. I got a great friend of mine, Amy Bedford, who works for Pals, which are a communications and brand agency, maybe a competitor of yours, Ayo, so I'm not sure if you want to edit this bit out?
Ayo Abbas: 21:17: No, you're absolutely fine.
Chris Moore: 21:19: Okay. So, Amy got a panel of voice artists and stock music and we worked really hard and we put this -- it's about two minutes to explain PANDA. I think one of things that was interesting for me, from a strategic point of view, was, yes, we wanted this to be on our website, and we wanted it to be on the Vimeo channel and for the people to be able to go on and see the video and watch how PANDA actually works, but we also wanted it to do a job in the boardroom so that when our team are going out and they're presenting the practice and they're talking about PANDA, that they could actually play this in the boardroom.
When I was deciding about, coming back to tone of voice again, that recognition that, even still in this stage of the 21st century, that an overwhelming majority of those boardroom conversations are still middle-aged white men, senior managers, English as a first language, whatever. So, I wanted to bring something that would leap out a little bit more from a tone of voice, brand perspective, and one of the voice artists that we managed to locate, terrific voice artist from Preston, and so she gave the voiceover for us. I've seen it work, you sit there and on comes this -- unfortunately, I don't know the woman's name but --
Ayo Abbas: 22:41: A panda from Preston!
Chris Moore: 22:44: Yeah, this lovely accent; she's very, very good. One person actually, afterwards, who was from Liverpool, and he was like, "Where is she from?" I said, "She's from Preston". You don't hear a lot of non-London accents in these kinds of conversations, so it was really nice to have that leap out.
Ayo Abbas: 23:01: That's a really good idea, yeah.
Chris Moore: 23:05: So, long story short, PANDA's been really good for us in terms of a tool that gets our foot in the door. It's been really good for promoting the software itself, but also from a more face‑to‑face, one-to-one, three-to-three, practice-to-practice presentation style of thing. We can say, "Hey, we've got this amazing bit of software kit that'll help change the world. Can we come and talk to you?" and then that gets our client relationships up and running and further entrenched, which is great.
Ayo Abbas: 23:35: That's amazing that actually you found a way to harness and use that tool, because I think that's the thing, is actually to take it in because you want it to be used, ultimately, don't you?
Chris Moore: 23:43: Yeah.
Ayo Abbas: 23:43: It's showing it to people and getting them enthused and finding an interesting way to show it. I think that's what we're doing to do with a lot of these things to get them to get traction as well, isn't it?
Chris Moore: 23:52: Absolutely, and it's been a really great thing. We've got some case study projects coming up where we say up to 40%, and we can do that in theory, but we have actually got a couple of examples where we've got 31%, 29% savings in embodied carbon. And, PANDA has been so successful, and I don't think I'm talking out of school, I'll have to check this with the partners with I get off this call, but a separate company has been set up and PANDA is going to be licensed through a PANDA, Price & Myers, Cambridge University auxiliary company.
Ayo Abbas: 24:24: Vehicle, yeah.
Chris Moore: 24:25: Yeah, because we want it around the world. It's got so much power to be really, really influential, so we want to get it into the hands of as many people as possible.
Ayo Abbas: 24:35: Wow! It sounds amazing.
Chris Moore: 24:37: Yeah.
Ayo Abbas: 24:37: So, I guess a brand and a company like Price & Myers, how do you think that brand has evolved over the years? It's almost as old as me! Okay, I'm one year older than it!
Chris Moore: 24:50: Now, look, you've given yourself away there!
Ayo Abbas: 24:51: I was looking at it, I was like, "1978!" I was like, "Oh my gosh! I'm one year older than Price & Myers, so obviously, a fine vintage.
Chris Moore: 24:59: Obviously.
Ayo Abbas: 24:59: How has the brand evolved over the years? Do they have an archive? I don't know; it's a question.
Chris Moore: 25:05: We don't have an archive, no. It is a really interesting question, and it's an interesting one for me as well. I'm considerably older than Price & Myers, I'm not just one year older, Ayo, I'm in the decade beforehand, so I'm considerably older. But I think, even in the last two years, it's been really interesting. As you say, it's a 45-year-old practice, it has a well-established and a very, very good reputation.
Sam Price and Robert Myers are no longer involved in the day-to-day and in recent years, you've also seen a cohort of partners retire, that sort of group of people that Sam and Robert hired in the 1980s and 1990s; they've retired and moved on as well. So, there's a changing of the guard to some extent.
One of things that was really evident when I arrived two years ago was that there is still the preponderance of middle-aged white men in senior management, and I understand the irony, being a middle-aged white man myself, so I say these things advisedly; but in the last two years we've made a really concerted effort to better represent the communities that we're working in, the communities that we live in.
We've done things like redact CVs for some roles, limit and remove unconscious bias, redacting names, addresses, even universities and education providers, which I thought was really bold, before those CVs are passed on to the hiring manager. So, that's led, in the first instance, to a broader group of interviewees, obviously, and that has translated into a more diverse intake of new engineers, technicians and business support people.
So, what I think you're seeing is a transformation, gradual though it is at the moment, of a brand that was old-school, the proverbial safe pair of hands, inventive and really interesting, but more representative of a bygone British engineering education system. It's transforming into a more dynamic, more forward-looking and more agile business and as I say, one that better represents the diversity of the cultures and the diversity of thought of the contemporary profession. We're not there yet, of course, we've got a long way to go.
Ayo Abbas: 27:26: But you're working towards it.
Chris Moore: 27:27: We're working towards it, but from a brand point of view, it really does feel like a fulcrum point. We've got, as I say, a practice that can build on an exceptional reputation with an exciting bunch of young engineers, led by a group of partners and associates, and I say "middle‑aged", there are partners younger than me in the partnership, and the associates are a really dynamic bunch of people in their 30s and 40s. We draw strength from that increase in diversity.
So, I think it is an interesting time. I came on board two years ago. The partners gave me a two-word brief when I began, which I loved. They said, "We're looking for cool and brave".
Ayo Abbas: 28:11: Cool?!
Chris Moore: 28:12: Yes, exactly, right?! Me! I don't know, me!
Ayo Abbas: 28:17: Did you not stand there and just go, "Pardon me?!"
Chris Moore: 28:21: No, I kept up a brave face, but all the while I was sitting there thinking, "I have no idea how to do cool! What would I know about cool?!"
Ayo Abbas: 28:29: I've been told by my seven-year-old I'm not cool. He uses words like, "Mum, that was hilar", and I'm like, "What?" He goes, "Well, that means hilarious. That's what me and my friends say".
Chris Moore: 28:40: Wasn't Hilaire Belloc a poet or something like that?
Ayo Abbas: 28:43: I know!
Chris Moore: 28:44: That's how uncool I am.
Ayo Abbas: 28:45: "Hilar!" I'm like, "What? Is this what seven-year-olds say?" But, yeah, I'm an uncool mother, that's for sure.
Chris Moore: 28:56: That's it. We'll never be as cool as a seven-year-old, Ayo; it'll never happen, never again.
Ayo Abbas: 29:01: I know. I was like, "Oh my God!" So, cool and brave? Wow!
Chris Moore: 29:06: Cool and brave, right. That was the two-word brief. I sat down with the partners in the first instance to talk about coming over to Price & Myers and I did, I sat there and thought -- I kept a straight face. Well, in my head, I'm sitting there thinking, "I don't know what cool really is", and the old thing, if you say you're cool, it's the one thing that assures you certainly aren't.
Ayo Abbas: 29:26: You are not.
Chris Moore: 29:28: But I thought we can brave, definitely I can help with a bit of bravery and, again, it comes back to that tone of voice and that way of writing, that way of --
Ayo Abbas: 29:35: Yeah, I think brave I can completely understand. Cool does make me question, because I'm like, "Does that mean I go and buy some Converse?"
Chris Moore: 29:46: Well, what I would say, again, not really knowing what cool is and not being really able to put that into words, but again, I think engineering as a profession suffers from that lack of coolness, and architecture can be seen as being cooler, right?
If we want engineering to be more diverse, and I really do believe that we do, because we can draw a lot of strength from that, we've got to get the kids more excited about engineering when they are younger; when they're thinking about the STEM subjects; when they're overcoming gender stereotypes that occur in schools between boys and girls; when they might be from a minority culture in a part of town where they don't aspire to go to university or to become engineers.
If we can make engineering cooler and we do that on an individual level, on a practice level and then on an industry level, that's actually one of the ways that we're going to be able to tackle some of these bigger questions. I think that's everything from talking about the environment and sustainability and the solutions that we need there to overcoming the preponderance of middle‑aged white men in senior management roles. We can't just automatically turn around right now and say, "Oh okay, right, so it's all a little bit stale and pale, so let's get more folks from different cultures in".
Ayo Abbas: 30:57: "You've all got to leave now!" yeah.
Chris Moore: 31:04: We've got to bring those people through, and the way to do that is to start appealing to them at seven, right, the kids at seven and eight years of age.
Ayo Abbas: 31:11: Completely, yeah, exactly. My son loves rail, trains, engineering.
Chris Moore: 31:16: Yeah, exactly.
Ayo Abbas: 31:17: It's surprising though.
Chris Moore: 31:19: I can remember growing up, as I say, I'm a man now in my mid-50s, and I can remember growing up with Meccano and Lego and kids being encouraged to do that up until a certain point. Then all of a sudden, it was only boys playing with Meccano and girls were off doing what girls in the 1960s and 1970s did with Barbie dolls and all the rest of it. If we can make engineering cooler, then we can tap into that group of younger people that are, I think, the future of the profession.
Ayo Abbas: 31:50: Arup did a video called Engineers are Cool, probably about ten years ago.
Chris Moore: 31:53: There you go.
Ayo Abbas: 31:54: I know.
Chris Moore: 31:55: We'll get there. Did you do it? Was that your video?
Ayo Abbas: 31:58: No, no. I can't say it was mine. I think it was done by Ben Richardson, who is amazing. Yeah, it was very cool at the time, and you were like, "Oh, yeah, they are quite cool", showing all the different diverse areas of engineering and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, that's the message to get out.
Chris Moore: 32:13: It's the absolute key, I think it's essential to it. I'm not for one moment saying that Price & Myers is necessarily the coolest practice on the block yet, but I think we're getting cooler and by the time I'm wrapped up, I'd like to think that Price & Myers --
Ayo Abbas: 32:30: You'll be chilly!
Chris Moore: 32:32: Chilly, like proper sexy! Give it ten years.
Ayo Abbas: 32:38: Okay, I look forward to seeing that.
Chris Moore: 32:41: Wouldn't it be great if you saw an ad for an engineering practice that was like a Nike shoe or a Mercedes Benz car or something like that? I think that we could take brand and just explode it in built environment professions.
Ayo Abbas: 32:54: I think that would be amazing. I think they'd have to have so much foresight to do it. Actually, do you know what, I did work for Ramboll for a while, and one of the interesting things about them was that, when they came to the UK as an unknown when they bought Whitbybird and stuff, what was interesting was Ramboll is a household name in Denmark, so they're one of the top five companies in the whole country, so that's a very different place to be marketing from.
Literally, they've got the huge HQ by the airport. They are a top five company, so they're up there, and you're there going, "That's a whole different ballgame to be marketing from", whereas, in the UK, you're a relative unknown. So, it's very, very different, and that means how you approach stuff is very different. I always found that fascinating.
Chris Moore: 33:44: Exactly. I think too that, if you're a company like Ramboll and you've got that background, and indeed, Arup, I know Ove was born in Newcastle but obviously educated in Denmark significantly for a large part of his life, I'd be drawing on Scandi cool like it was going out of a fashion. I'd be trying to make it look sexy.
Ayo Abbas: 34:04: Is this where I go, "I'm going to Denmark tomorrow on holiday", which I am.
Chris Moore: 34:08: Are you really?
Ayo Abbas: 34:10: Yeah.
Chris Moore: 34:10: Oh, fantastic.
Ayo Abbas: 34:11: Legoland and then Copenhagen.
Chris Moore: 34:14: That's superb.
Ayo Abbas: 34:15: Yes. That's the way to spend the Jubilee! But yeah, I agree, how do you make engineering cool, because actually they are cool. I love engineers; I think they're amazing what they do. That's why I love marketing engineers, and they always seem to find me for some reason.
So, you had a remote studio concept and how are you marketing that? I think I saw that on your website, you're starting to look at setting up a remote studio. What is that?
Chris Moore: 34:43: Right, well the remote studio is actually an idea that's kind of been burbling around for a while and the pandemic made it a logical thing to actually pursue. We have a few clients who deliver us parcels of work, and that can be doing things like structural design for artworks or designing balcony and cladding systems, modular OSB buildings, even rear extensions. And we thought, with the way that work has changed a little bit over the course of the last couple of years, that there was an opportunity for the right people to be able to undertake that work outside the day‑to‑day studio environment.
So, we set up the Price & Myers remote studio. It's kind of a freelance model if you like, where structural engineers with other life demands, whether they be study or family or relocation or return to work situations or anything like that, they can actually take these parcels at their time and speed and place; at the moment it's only in the UK for tax reasons, so they had to be located somewhere in the United Kingdom; and actually knock that work off whenever it fits in with their lives, supported by senior people in our studio in London.
So, we've had a few people take that up already. It's been a fairly light-touch campaign. We just put together a little bit of a short video for our socials and our website talking about, "Work with us from wherever you like in the UK. Work with us any time of day or night so that fits around your kids or your study or whatever. You'd be with a safe pair of hands. You'd have some guidance and quality check from our clients' point of view as well".
We've almost filled all of those places. So, if anyone listening to your show today is interested, please do get in touch with me. But, yeah, it's just a nice light-touch little campaign for an idea that we thought that its time has come and that we could do something that was win/win/win; win for our client, win for us and then win for people that wanted to fit their structural engineering profession in around their situation.
Ayo Abbas: 37:09: What I like is you're just trying it. I think some of this stuff, isn't it, you think, "This is a good idea, let's just try it out and see", and that's the nice thing, isn't it? It's the future, it has to be.
Chris Moore: 37:20: It really is, and it's one of those things where good ideas can come from anywhere, and it comes back to this notion of being brave, "Let's have a crack; let's see how this goes". We think this makes good sense. We think, as I say, it's a win/win/win in this particular situation with the remote studio, but even creating the animated film for the PANDA software, there's an investment to be made in that.
A lot of places that I've worked with wouldn't have done that, they would have balked at that approach, but there is a spirit of bravery that has been encouraged in me, and that I am then trying to reiterate and encourage back to the practice to be, "Yeah, let's try some of these things and see what works and what doesn't". I won't lie, we've tried a couple of things that haven't worked and we won't be pursuing them again next year, but I haven't spent too many thousands of pounds in pursuing things that haven't worked.
Ayo Abbas: 38:17: Yes you have!
Chris Moore: 38:19: Oh, maybe a few thousand pounds!
Ayo Abbas: 38:20: Champagne up the Gherkin, you know! Still have to.
Chris Moore: 28:27: We were actually talking about our London studio the other day, and I made the point, I said, "You know that Facebook does have a 24-hour always-on Prosecco tap in their kitchen, and I think that could go down pretty well, couldn't it, at Price & Myers London?" And they're like, "No, I don't think so".
Ayo Abbas: 38:44: "No, it's not a necessity".
Chris Moore: 38:46: "Cool maybe, but it's probably too brave".
Ayo Abbas: 38:50: And Google, they've got a running track on their building.
Chris Moore: 38:53: Yeah, but if the running track gets overused then that's probably not a bad thing, but if the Prosecco tap gets overused, your productivity levels may go down a little bit I think.
Ayo Abbas: 39:04: Also, I'm not sure about the whole health and safety and design.
Chris Moore:39:08: Oh yeah. You're sitting there and it's 9.45am and they're on their second glass of Prosecco. I'm not convinced of the upside of all of that; but anyway, Facebook, they'll do what they do, right.
Ayo Abbas: 39:22: So, I've got a question for you, it's the careers question which I'm going to ask. So, obviously you've done the rounds as it were, similar to me, engineering firms and architectural firms, so any advice to people looking to get to the top of these types of firms? What should they be doing if I'm a budding junior person, which I'm not anymore, but you know?
Chris Moore: 39:45: No, well, exactly right. But I think, even if you're a senior person, if I've got any advice it's just to never stop listening and to really, really listen. As I said earlier, I think that great ideas can come from anywhere in a business and in fact, too often great ideas are not given the time and the currency that they should do because they might be off the cuff from a junior person in a meeting and that they aren't properly considered, and I think that they should be.
So I think don't stop listening, good ideas come from anywhere, and also uncomfortable feedback. Sometimes I say to my team that, "If you think I've done something wrong or I've missed the mark or I haven't held myself up to the standard that I talk about for all of this, you have every right to give me a smack". I said this even yesterday. I said, "I've been around a long time, doing this for a long time with a lot of really talented people and I've learned a lot of things and I want to impart that knowledge on you all as well, but it's not a one way process".
Ayo Abbas: 40:47: Oh gosh, no, not anymore; it can't be.
Chris Moore: 40:48: No, it can't be, absolutely can't be.
Ayo Abbas: 40:50: There's too much to know now. There's just too much to know, and there are so many changes digitally, how things are done and people just trying new models. It's all changing so fast. You can't do it all on your own.
Chris Moore: 41:03: That's so true. I think the fundamentals of good communications practice remain. They are actually fairly static, the ideas around empathy and compassion and clarity and development of mutually successful relationships; I think that that's true whether you're doing coms in 1972 or 2042.
Ayo Abbas: 41:25: I wasn't born.
Chris Moore: 41:27: Okay, I was three, so I wasn't working in coms.
Ayo Abbas: 41:33: The same.
Chris Moore: 41:33: But the fundamentals are pretty much the same, Ayo. Stick with me on this! But you're absolutely right, what I know about technology and changes in culture and changes in audiences even; you think you know audiences and then you've got some younger person in the coms team or an engineer will come and talk to me about somebody that they met at an event and you think, "Oh, okay, so people maybe don't think like I thought they thought even three years ago".
Ayo Abbas: 42:03: It's changing, and it's changing fast. I think that's it; it's changing fast and that's the thing. It's so hard to keep up that, yeah, you need other people's input.
Chris Moore: 42:15: You've got to listen, not just here, you've got to actively listen to people. So, that's the strength of what I think about how my career has developed, and I'm constantly checking myself just to make sure that I'm still doing the things that I say I should be doing.
Ayo Abbas: 42:30: "Am I still cool?!"
Chris Moore: 42:33: And I give permission to people to pull me up when I need to be, which hopefully isn't too often but occasionally.
Ayo Abbas: 42:41: Okay, so on to my final, final question. So, what one tip would you give to a business leader looking, I guess, to thrive in the rest of 2022?
Chris Moore: 42:50: Love him or hate him, I would like to draw on one of the 21st century's great communicators for inspiration.
Ayo Abbas: 42:57: Donald Trump, no?!
Chris Moore: 42:59: No, although I will also agree he is a great and gifted communicator! But no, not quite as bad as Donald Trump. I'm going to draw on Jeremy Clarkson if you don't mind, if that's okay.
Ayo Abbas: 43:09: Oh, controversial.
Chris Moore: 43:11: Yeah, I know.
Ayo Abbas: 43:12: Why?
Chris Moore: 43:13: Well, I'm going to tell you why. He's a gifted communicator and a very hard-working communicator, and I certainly don't agree with everything that he says and I think he can be a bit of a twat, but he had a couple of catchphrases on Top Gear that I'm actually quite fond of bringing into my work at the moment.
The first of those is, "What could possibly go wrong?" When it comes to growing your business and when it comes to expanding your networks and moving into new markets, the word "pivot" was all the rage about two years ago. I don't know how much pivoting people actually did, but ask yourself, "What could possibly go wrong?" Assess your risks, prioritise them in the order of the likely damage if something does go wrong, and then take some of them.
Risks are a great catalyst for growth, and I think, as we stand here on the doorstep of June 2022, what I do know is there's a recession coming. Now, I don't know when it's going to come but there's always a recession coming. The pandemic may have masked it to some degree already, I don't know, or it might be literally around the corner, but risks are always a great catalyst for growth, and when that inevitable recession does arrive, it can set you up actually for the recovery that comes after it. I know this fits in with the title of your podcast well.
Then the other thing I would say is that Jeremy Clarkson also says, "How hard could it be?"
Ayo Abbas: 44:50: Never have him close!
Chris Moore: 44:52: No, if anyone out there who's listening to this and watches Top Gear, the old Top Gear, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about, because this is Clarkson all the time, "What could possibly go wrong? How hard could it be?"
Ayo Abbas: 45:04: Oh my god, you can almost do the accent.
Chris Moore: 45:09: Doncaster posh!
Ayo Abbas: 45:12: Yeah.
Chris Moore: 45:12: No, definitely not. But I think, over the course of my career, what sometimes appeared to be really difficult or challenging or sometimes even impossible is often not as hard as it looks or as hard as it seems. Sometimes you do it and it is really hard and it is harder than it looks --
Ayo Abbas: 45:30: And you thought, going, "Why did I do this?"
Chris Moore: 45:31: Yeah, "Why did I do this?" But get started and adapt. I was talking to a mutual friend of ours on the weekend, Dominique Staindl, and she was saying about how, when a business challenge confronts her, that she adapts, thinks around that and then is absolutely amazed at what serendipity can offer when she keeps on thinking and keeps on working. I think that's absolutely true. So, yeah, I'd say assess your risks and take some, and then jump in. I think that there is a lot of upside to what we're confronting at the moment.
Ayo Abbas: 46:09: Trying things.
Chris Moore: 46:11: And one of the things that always comes after a recession is a recovery, and you want to be really well placed for that.
Ayo Abbas: 46:18: On that lovely note, thank you so much for being my guest, Chris.
Chris Moore: 46:21: That has been my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on.
Ayo Abbas: 46:29: Thanks so much for listening to the latest episode of Marketing in Times of Recovery, and I'm your host, Ayo Abbas. If you want to find out more about the bi-weekly show, do check out the show notes which will give you more information about who the guests are and all the things we've covered. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on an episode. Until next time, bye.
