Tom Wells - Life Couriers

Speaker A: Foreignical Global Marketing Podcast. In each episode we go deep with the world's leading international marketers and discuss the ideas and processes that make their global marketing strategies a success. Let's get radical.

Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome back to the latest episode of the Radical Global Marketing Podcast. My name's Stephen, one of your regular co hosts and today's very special guest is Tom Wells. Tom is the global marketing manager at Life Couriers and he's a hugely experienced international marketer, uh, with a fascinating background in logistics. Now Life Couriers is a specialized logistics business focused on being a trusted partner for crucial pharmaceutical and uh, medical products, their market leader for radiopharmaceutical and stem cell logistics, and have built a reputation for working on the most time critical shipments in the world, including gene therapies, lab specimens and transplant organs. Now we'll get into this fascinating sector. Now we'll get into this in more detail with Tom, who can tell these stories much better than I can in just a minute. But first we have a quick message from our sponsor. The Radical Global Marketing Podcast is produced in association with Brandigo China. Brandigo's team of local and international marketing talent has been helping multinational brands achieve marketing success in China for almost two decades. This is founded on their unique, radically relevant China marketing methodology built on insight, creativity and um, flawless execution across multiple China marketing channels. To find out more about branding of China, you can visit their website or find them on their social media and we'll put all of their links in the show notes. Tom, good morning, how are you today?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm good, thank you, Stephen, thanks for having me.

Speaker B: No pleasure. I'm really excited to get into this and I was really pleased when you, when you popped up and said you'd be happy to do it, let's start a little bit. I said good morning because I'm assuming you, that you're in the morning at the moment. Which part of the world are you sat in today?

Speaker A: I am actually. I'm in Portsmouth in England. Ah, this is my hometown. I'm actually home for a little bit of time which is becoming a rarity. So I'm very much, uh, relishing sat here in the, in my, uh, in my home office talking to you.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, it's always good to be another English accent from time to time on these things too. So I want to, I think that the business that you're currently working for, life careers, it's fascinating and doing some really interesting work and some really interesting sectors and I'm sure we're going to get into the, a little bit more detail on that in just a second. But uh, I'd like to kick things off just hearing about your own little journey, uh, and how you got there. So can you tell us a little bit about your, your journey as a marketing professional today?

Speaker A: Yeah, okay, sure. So my journey starts off quite different I would imagine to a lot of the people you have on here. So I actually when I was at college I studied music so I studied how to become a musician at college. I think I'd seen Oasis at Ah, age 13 on the TV and gone that's it. As a working class kid I was like that's what I want to do. I want to be in a band. So I am um, much to the chagrin of some of my teachers I uh, went and studied music because they wanted me to do English and maths which I was good at. And so I did that and then I went to university and I did um, an audio production course at ah, Huddersfield University in England. And I thought that would be great. I'll just be sat, you know, mucking around in a recording studio all day. Uh, much to uh, my disappointment. It was very much a uh, and Science of Sound kind of course very dash into how audio works and how you manipulate it. Very heavy coding involved and so that's how it all started really. And I found a quite enjoyed coding side and part of that course I had an additional module which was in, I um, mean quite high level kind of C coding but also into HTML and CSS and JavaScript and all those kind of web languages for some reason. We're all part of uh, an audio production course which I loved and I really, really enjoyed it. Thought this might come in handy at some point. I will learn that as uh, an addition to what I was doing. And then I graduated in the middle of a recession at uh, where I grew up in Portsmouth on the south coast of England. There isn't a lot of a music scene around it. So I was going straight out into work thinking I need to do, you know, to find a way, I need to kind of make it, make a living. So what I did was set myself up as a website developer. So I'd learned all these web skills over time. I got a passion about that and I was like I can build websites. And this was at a time when it was kind of around the beginnings of WordPress I guess. But, but really it was by we're into code here, Ruby on Rails and all those kind of systems. So I went into that And I set myself up as a freelancer and uh, was building websites and associated digital marketing skills. As you do you go oh I can run your social media and I can do your kind of print design and physical design and signage and all those things. So I'd come from a creative mindset but gone through university and come out with a kind of scientific analyt part of my brain being worked more. So that's very much a theme of how my then my career then goes is that you're balancing out as we do in marketing, a kind of creative and analytical thing. So I, I did that for seven um, or eight years. I was a freelancer, got to work in all sorts of different industries, different companies, a great experience. I was building a lot of these companies were between one and five employees, small businesses, people wearing multiple hats. Um, and they just need, oh, can you help with that? Can you help with, you build this I guess entrepreneurial mindset of saying yes and then working out how you're going to do it later. Go yeah, I could do that. So learning lots of skills, building up lots of experience in all different industries and that's kind of the first half of my career and it builds up to, was probably my biggest mistake, which is the third point and then, and then come out the other side. So my biggest mistake being that I built a reliance on one client. And you're a very familiar story where you go through and you go this, this is my people and they were providing the majority of my income but I was still a freelancer. Uh, and so what happened, you can probably see where this is going overnight, no notice, we're stopping development. It was 2019 so they were affected quite heavy by Brexit and they were worried about that. As it turned out there was a global pandemic just around the corner as well. So nothing on their part at uh, fault at all. They did the right thing. But it left me in a situation where I was you know, sort of Christmas 2019, uh, I had a family and rent to pay and I suddenly went oh, I'm back to square one without what am I going to do next? And so I had a few website projects to finish but I um, thought I just need something to tick me over. So I went to an agency and said I've got you know, administrative skills, whatever it may be, I'll just pick up a few things. And that then led to ah, a company called Vision Logistics. So through an agency they said oh, we need someone for, I think it was a two week period 12 hours a week or something just to come in and sort through some, some filing and some systems with go do that. I was like, yeah, I could do that, no problem. Just keep your ticking over. That'll barred out of Christmas presents. So that's how it changed. And then from that it was what they were doing is they were bringing their HR back in house. They'd outsourced everything, it was all on paper. They were looking to set up a digital version of that, you know, proper HR system in house that they can manage. They may be a little bit overwhelmed with the amount of stuff they have to do. Uh, so I started there and digitizing that system and learning about HR documentation is really how and how the business ran in contracts and gradually that built up and I like the people there and they said, oh, would you like some more hours? And that build up for so, so slowly, uh, until I was full time Vision logistics in the UK running their HR department, uh, for about 110 staff I think. So for a roundabout way of going, okay, this, this is different, I could do this. Not what I was doing previously, but those people skills and business skills that you, you build when you're a freelancer. You very much know working agency work and that kind of thing, they all come in handy eventually. And actually it makes you very able to run different departments. So that was till about 2022 and I'll never forget it. I went uh, on holiday and got a phone call in Edinburgh on the high street and they said, oh, they've sold the business. So I thought, okay, that's probably the end of that. Then they sold it to a company called Life Careers, uh, International Global healthcare life science logistics company. And we're going to be a part of that going forward. Not expecting any changes, but you know, you always kind of fear the worst to go, oh, okay, where's this going? And then that was the big, the big kind of making I guess of my marketing career. What happened next, which is that they put the commercial director, Pete Smith in as managing director at Vision Logistics. He wanted to bring in and start doing a marketing department in house. So they'd never really done any marketing for that company in the past. They kind of flown under the radar. They had a few contracts with the NHS and the healthcare companies delivering at Vision. But now it was a kind of a case of we need to show growth, we need to really, really push this business on. Peter was brilliant in that I ended up setting up the marketing department, moving out of HR and running the uh, UK version of vision. And they kind of left us to it at libraries in the best way. They were like, this is a working, profitable business. Right? So we're not going to touch it, we're just going to let you do it. And then, yeah, we got to a point where I think what we were doing in the UK was more advanced than what they were doing other entities around the world in the Life Careers Group, because you really have any marketing. And we were building this brand name up and envision started winning lots of awards and bringing new customers on and expanding. Unbeknownst to me, Pete, uh, had shared some of my reporting and work with the group to say, this is what we're doing in the uk. And then that's how, uh, in a long story all the way through, they said, oh, can you come and help out on the global side and just do some reporting there? And then as it's becoming a familiar theme of this story, it grew and it built and it's like, oh, can you also do that? Can you do that? Until we find ourselves where we are now. So I now sit as Global Marketing manager, as you said, for Life Careers, for. For the whole group. There's about 10 or 12 companies in the group that we managed to marketing for and we're building this Life Couriers brand and we could talk about it, I'm sure, in a moment, of how I've gone through and gone through absolutely, of all the entities and all sorts of things. So it's a very unusual journey where I've worked in lots of different departments, but fascinating. And ending up in a job I absolutely love. I, uh, love my job.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's. I love that. And you say it's not a typical career journey in marketing, and it definitely isn't. But I don't think I've spoken to anyone on this podcast who has what you would call a typical career journey. And I think that's what made these conversations fascinating. I was really interested to hear you talk about those people skills that you developed as a freelancer, but also then working for all these different micro and small businesses and then having a role in hr, where you're dealing with such a broad range of stakeholders within a company as well. Now, you know, in my day job, I'm a B2B specialist too. And having those people skills and being able to identify people's pain points and solve that problem for them, it sounds to me there is almost the perfect background for you in terms of all of those kind of people skills that you talk about and Identifying those issues and providing the solutions and communicating well, you've kind of amassed, uh, all of that for your background almost naturally anyway. Would that be a fair thing to say to me?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it's such a people job, isn't it Marcus, at the end of the day? And what we do now at Life Couriers, you know, at the end of every delivery is a patient who's waiting for something that's critical or, you know, it could be life saving or life enhancing, a bare minimum. And so it's a very people business as much as, you know, we, we do a lot of analytical work, don't we? We look through statistics and KPIs and all the rest of it. At the end of the day we're selling to people and we're helping people in my role. So yeah, coming from that background of being very people orientated and my HR skills and I think when you work in hr, you get a real feel of how a business runs as well because you're sat in on meetings where, I don't know, there might be uh, a grievance or something going on. But unless you understand both sides of that argument, you can't actually make an informed decision on what's going on. So very. Yeah, you're right. A lot of those people skills and it's a big part of what I do now is people and stakeholder management.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you get a really good feel for the culture of a business as well in hr. And that also is important from a brand point of view. We're going to talk about some of the rebranding work you've done and stuff like, like that as well. But getting an appreciation of what the company really stands for, what the company's really values and how that translates into a good brand strategy that's authentic. You really get a good handle of that from the HDR side of things as well, I think so. It's really, really interesting just going back then to that period at uh, Vision Logistics I'm interested in. You could have brought it in house for a business that hadn't done a lot of marketing previously. Maybe in an industry that hasn't particularly done a lot of marketing up until that um, point is probably more bd, probably more sales, relationship, selling focus. What were some of the challenges? Was it difficult to get buy in from other teams within the business did. What were some of the hurdles I'm interested in, in that kind of how you, how you built that, uh, up.

Speaker A: Yeah. So not so much difficult to get buy in. From other aspects of the business, but more how the business was being run. So, okay, Vision Logistics have been around for about, since about 2005, I think. They started their healthcare contracts. A, uh, part of what they do or a big part of what they do is what we call direct patient logistics. So this is delivering items either into people's homes, across the threshold, into rooms, or it could be to care facilities or into hospitals because of the way they work with, um, their main, or what was their main customer at the time. They. Part of their value add, as it were, was they were delivering products that were quite sensitive. Like you wouldn't want general public seeing the van and going, oh, they're getting a delivery of that, for example. So it might be, for example, an incontinence product. So you go, oh, it's. It's a, uh, Vision Logistics van. It must be something to do in contact. There's a, there's an element of. Want to keep things dignified in those deliveries so that people. They're anonymous, essentially. And so all of the vans in the UK aren't branded, for example, they're just white vans. And that is part of the service that they do is that they're working on behalf of a customer and also keeping the dignity of the patient home. So the issue really is that that's one of the biggest things you think logistics. You think about DHL's vans or UPS's brown vans or whoever. If one of the biggest things you see in logistics are these trucks and vans going around, yet we're unable to brand those. So that's what they've done is Vision Logistics basically had no brand recognition at all. It was known by their customers. It wasn't known by their. By the patients because they were working on behalf of the customer. So what we then had to do is go, but we're building a brand now, this Vision Logistics brand, beyond just saying, yeah, we got a logo and some colors, it's like, no, what does it stand for? Does it mean like, what are we building as a business? So that's where we were at, is that we kind of had nothing. And that is good in a way, because you have control and you are able to make just, you know, really important decisions for the business and work closely with, with the senior leadership team on that. But also you're going in with. With nothing. So you've got no experience of will that work. You're really, you're looking at, as you said, culture is a massive part of that business. It's, you know, we built it on the basis of these sort of dignified deliveries, these kind of the patient care, uh, mentality. When you talk about how they, how they go about those really interesting and how they do it. And that becomes. You start with the why, the classic start with why. That's their why. And we'll build the brand off the back of that. And that's how we started building Vision Logistics. And similarly, actually, um, how Life Careers, uh, brand is building. They've inherited a lot of the things that we set up in Vision Logistics into Life Careers in terms of their why.

Speaker B: Nice. Fantastic. So there was a lot of kind of key learnings then that you could then translate to the new role too. Before we get into a little bit more detail then, on, on Life Careers, it sounds like your commercial director had quite an influence on your career up until this point. It always sounds like. I always think one of the. One of the things that I always tell some young professionals when they're asking for a bit of mentorship and things like that is it's about building allies within an organization. People who are going to go to bat for you, people are going to advocate for what you're trying to do and support your ideas and stuff like that. And it sounds like you very much had that with the commercial director. Would you say that was a big influence on your career? Was there anybody else or anything else that stood out, apart from COVID and a recession, because they've been quite big influences on everybody's career as well?

Speaker A: Uh, of course, no. But you're absolutely right. Uh, Peter Smith, who is still the managing director at, um, the uk, which is now Life Careers uk. I should, I should add, uh, they've gone through the rebrand already, so they are part of the Life Careers group. Uh, Pete had a massive, massive turning point on my career, obviously saw that I was very keen to go back into that marketing world and push that. And the two of us work very closely on building that business together, uh, in terms of the marketing and how we present ourselves to the outside world. So very, very grateful to, to Pete and hopefully he doesn't listen to this. He's going to get really embarrassed.

Speaker B: I was going to say we'll give him a shout out on LinkedIn when we post it, but if it's going to be awkward for it, I'm definitely going to give him a shout about on LinkedIn.

Speaker A: Yeah, he'll love that. Um, yeah, so Pete Smith's absolutely big, big person who is still very much involved in what I do now as well, uh, and the other would be Matt Silverberg who is chief commercial officer at Life Couriers. So he was the person who had seen what I was doing in the UK and then said, you can do this on a, on a global level. Why don't you come and to help us out initially and do that and then obviously that role growing into what it is now. So I have a very similar relationship with Matt that I had when I was growing the vista with Pete. So I'm hugely grateful to both of them for uh, for that opportunity and guidance. And they both have a similar management style of trust over. Kind of like you can do this, you run with it, continuously got problems, but also giving me a lot of freedom to kind of run rather than having to, you know, bounce anything off them all the time. And that has worked really, really well for me. I'm good when I'm left alone with a project. Just get on with it. Yeah, I love that kind of self sufficiency I should say.

Speaker B: That's awesome.

Speaker A: Well, that feels like a nice segue

Speaker B: then to kind of next little section of our conversation. So just tell me a little bit more about Life Careers to begin with. A little bit. I touched on it at the top of the show, but how would you explain what the business does? And then I'm interested in exploring a little bit more about your role specifically within the business and how important marketing is to the current business and the business in the future. So let's just. Can you give us a little bit of an overview to begin with? Because I think it's a fascinating kind of. Absolutely. Logistics is logistics, but the actual niche or the specialisms that you guys have developed I think is something that's quite unique and I'm really interested.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I'm very lucky to work at uh, Life Careers because it is such an interesting thing that has a positive impact on thousands of people's lives across the world, which is fantastic. So, so what Life Careers do, uh, we're one of the largest healthcare and life science logistics companies in the world. It's formed of uh, around 12 entity companies that are all coming together. I sometimes liken it to a bit of a super group of uh, healthcare, uh, logistics companies. You know, they all have their localized um, area of specialism and now they're all coming together and sharing that expertise across the world. So you might have for example an expert in Germany who do stem cell onboard career work now. They can share that expertise across everywhere across the world now. And we're able to take what they've learned and the um, uh, the processes that they've built and start implementing them into different areas. So bring these like life saving deliveries to more people around the world. So as I say, it's very compassionate and rewarding work that they do. That the people who, you know, we rely hugely on our delivery drivers and they do a fantastic job and the guys who are doing all the warehouse picking and all that kind of thing, they uh, have a massive influence on people's lives, which is great in terms of how the business is structured. We have six business lines that everybody feeds into and this uh, stem cell on board which is stem cell transplants that are basically. You have a, when you need a stem cell transplant, you get on a donor, it might be anywhere in the world. And um, they go through the process of giving you blood transplant that is then picked up by a person, a courier who then personally carries that to the person who's waiting for the transport. Could be anywhere in the world. Ah, and make sure that that arrives. And it is very much, it's probably the most extreme in terms of the life saving things that we do. That delivery has to arrive. That is their second chance of life. It has to get there. And there's so many amazing processes that they uh, have in place to make sure things happen, to make sure, you know, all this flight's been delayed. Right. Okay, can we get a helicopter there to get that person across to the other airports? Just so much that they have to think about so many backup plans. It's an incredible feat of logistics that they do in order to save these, give these people another chance of life, which is phenomenal to mostly. So that's that, that's one area that's the most extreme in terms of like critical uh, logistics that we do. Then we have radiopharma, which is nuclear medicine. So this could be what you're doing there is taking a radioisotope, uh, so a nuclear particle, attaching it to a carrier particle and then uh, injecting that into a patient either for the imaging of cancer, uh, to see if that person, you know, see which areas are affected by the cancer that they have, or it could be the treatment is very, very. We're increasingly seeing developments in the treatment side. So what that is is rather than going through chemotherapy, which is like a whole body treatment and it's, you know, it's quite harsh and brutal on the body, this is something that's very, very targeted. The, the radiopharmaceutical is created specifically for that person. And that condition. And so it's very, very targeting, very localized one um, time creation of these things. And so the fascinating thing with that is that you're dealing with radio uh, radioactive elements. So what happens there is obviously that's created and it has a half life. So we liken it to shipping a melting ice sculpture. You know, as soon as it's created it's melting. That data becoming increasingly less uh, less usable. So you've got a very specific window where that needs to life at the patient where it's not too radioactive, that it's going to cause them harm. But it's also it hasn't gone through that process of half life to the point where you can no longer use it. So again very, very time critical. You have to have very good processes in place to, to get that going. There's only a few companies in the world that can do it and we're the American and European uh, leaders in that really, really interesting area that I'm getting more and more into at the moment. Yes, yes, you have that. And then we have direct patient which are taught about with the UK very much service that they specialize in where they are delivering medical devices or it could be treatments into people's homes, hospitals, care facilities. They. The interesting thing about the UK is that they have a 10 minute per uh, drop policy. Now normally in logistics it's how many drops can you do in a day? Your Amazon, knock on the door, run away, leave the parcel. This is the polar opposite where the drivers are instructed, they're allowed up to 10 minutes to make a drop. And what they're doing is they're checking on the welfare of the patient. So that could be delivering it into a certain room in the house. You might have someone who's elderly or less able and unable to carry them parcel in. It could be that that person, um, we've had it in the past where they've turned up and actually they require medical attention. The drivers have had to stop, call an ambulance, wait with the patient, call the family. It might just be stopping for a cup of tea and a chat because that person hasn't seen anyone in weeks because of the condition that they're in. So it's an amazing service. The one they do in the UK and they're starting to push that out across the world. They do some in the US as well. It's very, very human coming back to that and going away from this idea of 60 drops in a day and um, how quickly can we get through them into what if Deliveries and logistics actually served a benefit to that person. And we could improve their, not just their experience, but the way they interact with the world as well. Because the way that we handle that, that's amazing. That's won lots of awards. Direct patient services, you can imagine. And it's great what they do. Then we have pharma freight. So pharma freight would be high. Want to see uh, things like pharmaceuticals, drugs going in. A lot of it's going out from Europe to uh, Middle East, Africa, Asia. So you're making your big trucks on the highway delivering. So that's what the farmer freight stuff is, which is very, very crucial but on a kind of mass scale. Then we have life sciences and life sciences is what I imagine most people think of when they think of uh, healthcare logistics. So it's shipping things like blood embryos to hospitals, uh, for clinical trials, that kind of service.

Speaker B: A lot of cold chain logistics and things like that.

Speaker A: Exactly that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Cold chain temperature control, sometimes cryogenic frozen, that kind of thing. Very, uh, specialist. Lots of processes that you have to go through because you're dealing with obviously very important things for people's well being. So we have to go through a lot of processes for that. Uh, and then I think I'm off to my final one now and I. Yeah. Emergency logistics. Emergency logistics is, is uh, unusual world where I need to get this product, whatever it may be, to a very remote location, say, or I need it to get to the other side of the world within a day. And it could be, I need to get this part to an oil rig. It might not be healthcare necessarily, we do a lot of healthcare, but it could be anything. I need to get a delivery onto, uh, into a war zone, I need to get it into the Ukraine. How do I do that? It's all of these things that are just so difficult logistically and they're urgent. Uh, they need to get there tomorrow. Okay, who do we call? Okay, there's a company in the group called Same Day Logistics, uh, does exactly what it says on the tin can. Get things anywhere within a day. They're amazing at what they do. Um, from hiring helicopters to whatever they need. Uh, that's a fascinating part uh, of the business that we have at our disposal for to support healthcare and life science, but not always in that world. It might be like aircraft on ground situation where they need a part manufacturing, uh, facility and they need that tomorrow. That's really interesting as well. So life careers is like, it's an amalgamation of all of these very Distinct and um, unique business lines that are doing things really, really interestingly for the benefit of patients. It's not nothing against your kind of high scale Amazon logistics and what they do is amazing that this is very much a human thing where you've got a human being, a person at the end who is requiring that delivery and you cannot fail. That's the shifting. It's like zero failure. This has to happen. What we put in place to make

Speaker B: sure that that's really interesting. I love how the most urgent so you kind of get all your common garden delivery companies. I remember being a kid and it was passed before so it sounds all dramatic and then the people who actually do that drama urgent stuff are called same day delivery because there's no mess and there's no fuss. It's just exactly what they do. I love that. Expect it to be almost be the other way around. A bit more Hollywood for the super urgent ones. So I love that. So let's tell me a little bit more then I'm interested. It's a really fascinating industry. Where does marketing now fit in to that strategy? I'm interested in kind of your role within the business but also kind of what the business sees as his marketing function. How your developing the brand, communicating the brand, communicating quite complicated services as well I guess to your end users and potential customers.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So where I sit in the business at the moment, as I say it's a collection of companies that have come together now as a group, all under

Speaker B: the lice co is brand now?

Speaker A: Pretty much, yeah. The time of recording of this I think I've got one more to announce but uh, we're very much in the process of rebranding that so. Exactly. That was the first problem.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If you've got all of these companies who some of them been around nearly 50 years and they have this brand recognition. However we are uh, now life careers and we need to head forward as one integrated business. And the benefits of doing that is obviously you can pour resources together. Um, so operationally um, it's a fantastic thing to be able to have. We have like control towers, one in the, in the Americas and one in Europe and they can oversee all the business lines and tell you exactly where your deliveries are. Real time, provide tracking, provide 24,7 support because we've brought these companies together and we can do that. So that's fantastic in terms of a benefit to the customer. But also there's the thing of dealing with one customer. Right. Rather than going oh I'm now dealing with X company in this region and Y company and the biggest one for that was Radiopharma that we talked about previously, where it's very, very fragmented, particularly in Europe. Once you go across borders to different countries, you're typically working with another logistics company in that region until goes to the next one because you're dealing with nuclear materials. So that company will have the localized government restricted. What we're doing is building a network globally where you go, it doesn't matter if I'm shipping it, picking up in Germany, flying it across the Atlantic, picking up in the US and doing final mile delivery of it. You use live couriers and we have visibility of the entire process and you just contact one person. So that, that is what we're building. And I mentioned the difficulty there of having all of these companies and their own brand recognition. Whereas Lifecurriers is a relatively new brand with the last couple of years that we're building. So it's at the moment what we're doing. And marketing pays. A key part in that is trying to tell this story of all of these companies come together for the benefit of patients. You know, it's for the benefit of customers with benefit of patients too. If it's going out through life careers, there's a trust there and you rely on it happening and that takes a peace of mind away from all sorts of people. So yeah, it's a. Marketing is a very, very key thing. Now my role, it sits with the sales team predominantly as well that obviously we're owned by private equity. There's obviously a use for a need for growth and to show that we're building the business as well. So my role supports the sales team um, and sits with operations as well because of the kind of work that we do. But really it's how can I, um, give them the materials that they need and give them the brand and the platform that they need to go other services. And this is why we've rebranded and this is what we're building and how that benefits you. That storytelling aspect is what I do every day, I would say is trying to build up that and get that name out there. So big. Yeah, a big part of what we do. And I report into uh, Matt. I mentioned Matt Silberg earlier. He sits on the board. So I sit just below the board in terms of reporting, uh, that a lot of my stakeholders are these individual companies and entities in the group and trying to take the elements of what we're building at a global level, but also take the best bits of what we've done at a regional level and piece all those together.

Speaker B: That's fascinating. So in terms of the business, what are the some, what's the short term? What's. Obviously you've mentioned, you know, you've always got to achieve growth. You've talked about how you've got the last kind of the final piece to rebrand is almost there at the time of recording what some of the short term and the long term goals for the business now. And where does your marketing fit into achieving that strategy moving forward?

Speaker A: Yeah, so short term we're still in uh, an integration stage. Right. So the branding is part of it is the rebranding, but it's the unification of all of the systems too. Each company historically had its own tracking system, for example. Now we're building platforms where you go, great, you have one tracking system that serves the world and that's a big part of what we're doing. There's also culturally, you're going back to our HR conversation and all that kind of thing. These companies have come through with different cultures, different parts of the world and how do you build the best of that and build that culture out? And that's when it turns from kind of of it's an internal communication as well as an external communication. It's like this is what we're doing and building systems where I can communicate with, you know, we've got 750 odd employees, I'd say something like that, around the world. Um, can I communicate with them and give everybody the resources they, that they need? Because we've never had that facility previously because we haven't needed to because it's being localized.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: Yeah, so, so that's, that's the key thing of what we're building short this kind of unification of everything. You know, how to deal with how

Speaker B: those come M. Those 750 people are going to be the biggest advocates of your brand. So while you've got this kind of thing, everything under that umbrella, that internal piece of getting them all behind it and aligned with it and positive about it too is only going to make that more successful, I suppose.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And this week on the time of recording this, uh, I think I did a post out about our LinkedIn strategy. For example. We've inherited something like 12 LinkedIn pages that have all gone through rebranding and now suddenly we've got this big network of stuff and you're like, well, how do we un all of that and bring that together and ensure everyone is moving forward together? The answer is we have One page that serves the world and everybody migrates their profile into one page. But in order to do that takes a lot of communication, takes a lot of um, these projects roll on for a long time because there's a lot of people involved and we need to make sure that we're covering everything. So that's the unification bit and probably by the time this goes out, hopefully I'll have fixed all that. And that's, that's one, one more project done.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: They're the short term goals for us and long term we obviously we have ambitions to be the leading healthcare life science logistics company in the world. Probably around the fourth or fifth biggest at the moment. At the time of recording that comes through, obviously building out of these business lines into new regions. It comes with. There's been a lot of M and A activity in what we're doing, so more companies joining the group. I would expect that to continue and possibly in new regions as well. So we're big in Europe and Americas, for example, if we have partners and we can work across the world anywhere. But I would expect to see more activity in sort of Asia and the Middle east kind of way. So that will probably be a long term ambition of ours. Um, going into Africa again, we have partners down there that we can use, but there's interesting logistical challenges down there and opportunities as well. We've got a partnership with Zipline, for example, who make drones and they tested all of their drone work in Africa, where there is less of a road network and rail network to these kinds of places. There's also easier to, easier to handle the airspace problems. Right. Because there's not big cities in the same way that we have New York and you can't just fly a drone over it. So that opens uh, up potential possibilities as well. And we were able to test things in Africa that we're now rolling out in remote parts of the US in terms of drone deliveries. So new territories, new technologies coming in all the time. And um, we, I really feel like we still building and we will keep building. I don't see any reason why not. Um, the service that we're doing is, is very good and it's very, as we've talked about a lot now it's becoming a theme. It's very human what we're doing. There's always a patient focused mindset rather than a, an operational how many can we do in a day? Mindset.

Speaker B: I love that. Now before we kind of bring things to a close and I could have this conversation for hours, um, What I will say is I hope that we can get you on again in 12, 18 months time when some of these things have developed further. Because I think there'd be another follow up piece we could do on this which would be just as interesting. One of the things that I ask everyone that I get to come on the show is just from a, from a marketeer's point of view, is there any kind of big trends or interesting bits of future tech or anything like that that you've got on your radar personally at the moment as a, as a marketing professional?

Speaker A: Yeah. Difficult with bits of tech, isn't it? And the stock answer at the moment is AI. You know, we're all using those tools, we're all seeing what they could possibly achieve. They're fantastic in getting me 90% of the way there on a lot of the work that I have to do, the kind of grunt work. Great, we all have that bit to do. I'm happy for them to do that bit. I think the real skill is who is managing that tool and what do you do in the final 10%. Can you then inject the humanness back into it and tell these fantastic stories? Because obviously AI is only as good as the information that's already out there for us. We're telling human stories so those stories aren't out there. We have to do our own research and speak to these people, which is part of what makes us what we are.

Speaker B: So that, that links back to what you said about the. Sorry, it links back to what you said about the drivers earlier spending about 10 minutes there. So any delivery company can get a van to a front door but not everybody can do that last 10 minute piece to make sure the actual product is where it needs to be within the property and ah, stuff like that too. So same sort of thing, I guess.

Speaker A: It's the same sort of thing. It's exactly. It comes back to the human bit. It comes back to training who is delivering that package and what is the purpose. And that is the same with our utilization of AI, isn't it? It's like what is your natural purpose here though? If it's just to churn out stuff that to me isn't interesting. I know we have to have a regular flow of content but I'm interested in building things that have a, you know, make an impact and have a difference that people enjoy reading as marketers. You know, I want to build life careers as a, as a business of course, but also you want to provide value, you want people say to follow the company on LinkedIn because they'll learn something or they'll be moved by a story or something like that, something that, where we're putting back in and that becomes part of who we are as a brand as well. So yeah, it's taking, it's taking AI and going okay, that, that can get some of the way but it won't get us all the way in what we do. So that would be a key one. I'm always looking at tech and stuff, you know, um, I'm involved heavily in our CMS system for example and we could talk about that for hours. Our kind of salesforce you set up and how we've had to scale that around all the businesses around the world and make that work. But there's loads of developments in that and automations that we can do to make the speaking between departments and countries and entities easier and quicker, more efficient. Um, and we're really in the early stages of that too, of really seeing how we can, we can put that tech involved. So many opportunities, isn't there? It really is a case of someone will have probably built the tool for you already and it's just how much of those tools you pull into your business and whether they work realistically with what you do every day. I'm sure you see the same thing in uh, your kind of agency work too, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Tom, that's been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking the time. It really is an interesting sector, uh, generally. Hope we can do this again in the future. If people want to get in touch, we will put the Life Courier's website links and we will put uh, your social media handles all in the show notes as well. If anybody wants to reach out and get in touch with you, what's the best place to find you?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Uh, so my name's Tom Wells. Uh, Life. What's my email address? I couldn't think of my email address then. That's bad, isn't it?

Speaker B: But yeah, I've had moments when I can't remember my own name. So don't.

Speaker A: I got through that just about. Uh, no, my email address is tom.wellsifecareers.com we also have marketingifecareers.com if you want to reach my team. Um, but yeah, if you visit the lifecareers.com website, but that's the easiest way to find us. You find all the links from there. But yeah, it's been, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I'd love to come back in a year and a half or whatever it may be to show, ah, you, how far we've come and what we've built and the kind of success stories. So, um, yeah, appreciate it a lot. It's been a nice chat. Thanks, Stephen. Good.

Speaker B: Done deal. We'll see you again very soon. Thanks, Tom. Take care. No worries. Still, thanks.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Radical Global Marketing Podcast. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed making it. Join us next time for more insight, best practice, case studies and shared experiences from some of the world's most radical global marketing leaders.