Spotlighton Kevin Robinson

Kevin Robinson is the head honcho; the big cheese if you like, at 13 Media, and Your-Copywriter.com. He has two brands, the 13 Media brand, which is general kind of media production products, video, and so on. And then the new one, which is Your

Copywriter, copy-based and focused on helping businesses with their copywriting, the messaging, anything that has words!

What led to you eventually setting up 13 Media?

That’s a long story, I’ll try and cut it short. I was for many, many years, in senior sales and marketing roles in international products, the electronics industry. I looked after southern Europe and did a bit of travelling around. A couple of things happened, the market changed very dramatically. This meant that marketing people like me were making less money to be frank. The industry itself was working in very low margins. One morning I thought I don't actually want to do this. I drove into the office and resigned with the intention of retraining and becoming a sound engineer, which I did. I also came out the other end as a video producer and screenwriter. I then went into teaching and I taught for well over a decade.

My interest is in how stories are told; the narratology, and how we understand language in terms of story and things like that. That was my specialism and in fact, I have a master's degree in screenwriting. So, in 2013, hence the name 13 Media, I left the university where I was teaching for redundancy reasons; primarily department reshuffles. I took the opportunity, because I was a little bit disheartened with education. I started13 Media, with the intention of helping SMEs and small businesses have access to a level of video production, audio production, and so on, that they wouldn't normally have access to at that level. To start with, we had a video studio and a recording studio.

But then, as time developed, what happened was people started to get to know me and what my background was and they started to say things like“you couldn’t have a word with our graphic designer, could you? About how this is presented itself?” And, “can you look at the words on the website?”So, eventually by 2017, because of various problems with the premises, we’d given up the studio. I was full-time dealing with people’s messaging and marketing, which is where we are now and the new brand, YourCopywriter is really the penultimate development in that range of services.

Why did you pull that out as a separate entity and create a new brand for it?

We were building to a stage where I had too many products under one banner and the 13 Media brand was cluttered - there was too much going on under it. I spoke to various people, including my business coach, who were very helpful and said, you’ve got too many brands, you’ve got too much going on, people are confused, nobody knows what to do anymore. I then had a decision, we looked at bundling products together and saying we do these packages. We looked at for a while but this didn’t quite work, we couldn’t get them to work because you need a range of expertise you can’t fully have in-house. Or we could split a brand off and the requirements for copy was so high at that point that we felt that was the important thing. We decided that was the way to go. The more I talked about it to people, the more I thought about it, I realised that it was time to split it off.

What’s the future of videography going forward?

To be honest, I think at the bottom end of the video production side in terms of cost and the cost effectiveness of businesses - people can do their own. They can do it reasonably well. We live in a world whereby you can learn the basics of most things very easily on YouTube within a few hours. Whether you then choose to do it or not, whether it’s worth carrying on doing it, is another matter.

Nowadays we are selling the creativity, our expertise and our time. I don’t think anyone is selling specialist equipment or specialist knowledge, because it has reached the stage where with 20-something years of video production, I’m not altogether sure 100% of the time, whether it’s been shot on the phone. That’s a massive change, 10 years ago we were turning up with £15-20,000 of video equipment and a three-man crew. These days, we’re doing video with a quarter that in cost of equipment, and I shoot now on my own quite frequently. It’s kind of reached the stage that photography went through, whereby there is a layer above, which is the professional stuff, and there’s a layer beneath where you can do an adequate job yourself. I think it’s probably a market that is collapsing into a very low margin marketplace. So sensibly, as a business owner, I’ve got to say, that can’t be the sole focus of our business anymore. Emotionally as a video producer, we still do video as a main part of our business, but I think in the long run, people are doing it themselves.

What would you say is your “why”?

I think is as clichéd as it sounds, that 20 years of working in education and helping people develop is actually part of the of the why I do this. The truth of the matter is a lot of business owners, I’ve got experience in a range of areas, and I could probably go and get a reasonably well-paid job.

We’re currently doing a project for somebody, who we’re doing a rebuild on a website, and we’re doing the copy and I’m working with other people. And when it’s done, not only is it going to help them in their business but their products will help people? I think to provide something to help people, and get paid along the way for doing it, is a pretty good job right?

With the advent of technology and the ease of creating video content, is there still going to be a place for the good old-fashioned written blog post?

Yes. In fact, there’s more of a place for it. What you have to remember is that when you put a blog up on your website, you do more than just putting words up. People get tied up with Google and worrying about the algorithms and all the technicalities. But what you have to remember is that the blog is there to inform your customers, or your potential ones - whoever you’re targeting. And you have to combine that wisdom with a very simple statement: Google answers questions. So if you’re writing a blog that answers a question for somebody, there’s always going to be elements that are never gonna go away. Google looks at words. Your blog: it’s your brand, it’s your voice, it’s your usefulness to people, it informs and educates. So blogs are here to stay.

What would you say has been your biggest challenge to date?

Like most businesses, we had a period where we had a very hard time commercially. Back in 2016ish, we made a mistake with some premises

very early on. Everybody says don't have premises if you can avoid it. But the mistake I made wasn’t necessarily the premises, it was the way we went about it. We ended up with a white elephant for about eight months of our business life that we couldn’t get rid of or use. I said to myself, right now I’ll never do it again. To make the mistake of allowing one thing like that to make a big change, and that's the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced. We wanted to walk away from it. It became 14 hours a day of battling. Wrangling with people who really didn't care about my business, and it felt very much like the world was trying to try and stop me working.

What would your top tip be?

A lesson that I think I’ve learned over the last eight years of being in business and I embraced it when we started the Your Copywriter brand, as a separate entity it gave me a chance to think about how I thought about the business. Because of that, I changed my whole thinking. It's a lesson I would say to anybody if you're in business, think of yourself as a shareholder. Think of yourself as a shareholder in the business, not an employee, and focus then on having enough money to pay yourself.

It changes the way you look at your business. You start to become very ruthless about costs, and very ruthless about what you spend and very ruthless about how you price and how you're going into the marketplace. It's really important that you treat your business as a business, as a concern. I know people say “it’s my baby”, and it’s got to do with an emotional investment. Walking away from that emotional part, just looking at it purely as if you were a shareholder -asking whether that business is viable in its current form with any spending is a really good exercise to do. I think it's a good view to adopt permanently with a business.