Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Rupert Younger, Co-Founder of PR firm the Finsbury Group and Founder of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and more, which will be revealed shortly. Co-launching in 1994 the financial communications company, the Finsbury Group, now FGS Global, Rupert advised clients such as BSkyB and Vodafone on building trust and integrity, which are in short measure everywhere, through responsible reputation strategies. Fascinated by how society perceives organisations and how companies can manage their reputations, Rupert launched the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation in 2008, a research centre producing insights and talks with business leaders. And his research led to Rupert co-authoring the book, ‘The Reputation Game: The Art of Changing How People See You’, which I have read and is worth a read. Rupert Younger is my Business Shaper, not one, not two, not three but four businesses later, which I found out only a few moments ago and he’s joined me today which is good because this is a programme about you.
Rupert Younger
Really nice to be here, I think.
Elliot Moss
You think. Ah yes, well we’ll find out.
Rupert Younger
Well we’ll find out.
Elliot Moss
We’ll find out. Now, I have met lots of people over the years and they create things, they’re in the world of manufacturing or they’re in the world of software and they, it’s tangible. Reputations and problems with your reputation and opportunities to grow a reputation, slightly more intangible and that’s the world you chose to go into. Why was that?
Rupert Younger
Well it’s kind of interesting, you start with creating because I think creation lies at the heart of anyone who’s got an entrepreneurial nugget or bone in their body. I’ve always been probably annoyingly curious and I like creating things, some of them work, some of them don’t, the majority probably don’t, definitely don’t in fact but the creation process is incredibly energising, I liken it being plugged into a battery. When you’re sitting doing things and you’re building something new, whether it’s knowledge or whether it’s helping a company achieve something that they otherwise couldn’t reach on their own, is very energising so I think creation is a really nice place to start.
Elliot Moss
And your creations, so obviously for those people in business, a lot of people will know that the Finsbury business itself is the most well-known, the Oxford piece we’ll come to in a moment but before we get to Finsbury, a little dickybird called Rupert Younger has told me that there are a couple more forays, tell me about them and tell me why you were drawn to creating at such a young age.
Rupert Younger
Necessity. I didn’t have any money at university and I said to my father when I got my place at university, I said so fees are covered, those were the days, dinosaur days when you had your fees covered and then you had to pay your halls of residence and that was covered in the sort of fee allowance and then anything else you had to then earn or do, so said…
Elliot Moss
Or get a grant or something, yeh.
Rupert Younger
Yep, or get a grant, exactly, student grants. And I said to my father, who is a wonderful man, absolutely brilliant, straight forward Scot and he said, I said, ‘Where’s the cash’ and he looked at me said, ‘Well, you’ve got to earn it. If you’re going to spend it, you earn it’ and I was eighteen at the time and it was the first time I’d really been told this and I had three weeks to go until the start of university so I thought what on earth do I do in three weeks and I don’t know if you remember that car garages, why I was in a car garage I’ve no idea but those car garages had dates, calendar dates in the middle and adverts for exhausts and tyres and god knows what else round the outside and I thought how about doing that for Stirling University which was my local town, this was pre-digital, pre-internet, pre-anything, so I didn’t have an A1 sheet of paper which was the size I needed so I got lots of A4 pieces of paper and stuck them together with Sellotape, I rang Stirling University to get their term dates and wrote those in pencil with a line for each day and I took this ridiculous looking piece of paper around to advertisers, to businesses in the local community and it still remains probably the most, it’s certainly the event that I’m most proud of probably and I’m also that sort of sends the hairs on the back of my neck sticking up, is when I walked into a couple of businesses and they said no, rubbish, they looked at this crazy piece of paper and thought that’s never going to work and I went into an Indian restaurant, wonderful restaurant, and I said to them, ‘Do you want to be on students’ walls for a year?’ That was my pitch. Simple. And this guy said, ‘Sounds good’. I hadn’t thought through what to say next by this point by the way so I said…
Elliot Moss
What to charge?
Rupert Younger
So he said, there was a silence actually and he said, ‘Okay, so what happens next?’ to me and I said, ‘Well, which one do you want?’ and he said, ‘I’ll have the biggest one, the corner’ so I said, ‘Okay, great’ and he said, ‘How much is that?’ and I thought haven’t thought about that either so I said, ‘Well it’s £100’ and he went ‘Great’, he opened the till, gave me a hundred quid in cash. That still remains the most brilliant, energising moment, when you realise that an idea you’ve come up with actually works and so we then, he gave me a business card and I worked it out, I sold £2,900 worth of advertising in three days, I then had to get it printed, I hadn’t thought about that either so I rang up a local printer and said do you do this and he went actually I can do it on the back of another run, I had no idea if it was going to cost more or less than £2,900 so it cost £300, so I ended up with £2,500 in profit and I was the, I was a wealthy, early student on campus and so I realised very quickly that actually with a bit of enterprise and a bit of determination and realising that being knocked back, the worst thing that can happen is that you’re back where you started, it literally doesn’t matter. So I did this for four years and…
Elliot Moss
And that was called, what was the name of the business of that one?
Rupert Younger
That was called Square Goat Advertising.
Elliot Moss
Put that in your head, Square Goat Advertising, it’s one of the few businesses you haven’t sold, as I understand it. Rupert Young is my Business Shaper talking about his first foray into making a bit of money, about doing stuff and as you said, I like your word, the creating word, that’s the key thing. When you were telling me that, your eyes, you know they don’t, welling up is a big thing but there’s emotion there, Rupert. Talk to me a bit about the emotion that you have connected with the creative process, just for a moment and then we’ll go into the other things you’ve done.
Rupert Younger
No, it’s another great question, thank you and it allows me to talk about something that I think I hope at least that I’ve taken with me through all the different things I’ve done which is, and I learned this from actually this first business, which is the power of ‘yes and’, not the power of ‘yes but’. We suffer in the UK I think from this sort of slight approach to conversation where you go yeah, that’s interesting but how did you get there, but how did you do this, but how did you do that? And there’s something incredibly liberating and powerful about if you turn that around and ask and, and how did you do that, and how did you think about that? It reframes the dialogue, it sets a, sets a sort of a platform where everything is possible, not nothing is possible.
Elliot Moss
And is that the feeling you have when you’ve opened up a possibility? Is that what brings you to life?
Rupert Younger
Yeah I mean, yeah, it certainly, anyone who’s set up businesses and I’m in just one but you speak to way more successful business people than me but I bet you the one consistent thing is that they all think the worst can happen is they fail completely.
Elliot Moss
Where do you?
Rupert Younger
And then you’re just back to where you started so why does that matter?
Elliot Moss
And where did you, and where did you get that from, the what’s the you know, so what, I failed and I carry on because a lot of people don’t have that, a lot of people are conservative, small ‘c’ because they’re fearful of what might go wrong. You’re not, why not?
Rupert Younger
I’m a third child.
Elliot Moss
Ah. You heard it here. Not the first, probably.
Rupert Younger
How deep can we get into family history?
Elliot Moss
Is that where it goes because you’re jostling and you’re saying excuse me, I’m over here.
Rupert Younger
I have a, I have a wonderful brother who’s mentally handicapped, who’s mentally about one and a half years old or so, and that dynamic in a family changed everything growing up because you realise just how lucky you are to have everything that you can do. It’s visible in front of you every day, you can walk, talk, eat, all these things without any particular impairment and when you’re brought up with that, I think it’s hard not to be a yes and person because what can you not fail to appreciate about the fact that you’ve got this opportunity and others don’t. So I think that was a very motivating thing but the specific thing by the way that actually came from that first business, which is I did this Square Goat Advertising for four years, Scot’s university’s four year courses, I did it every summer to make money and by the end of it I was doing around thirty different universities and colleges. I’d employed a couple of people and it was quite a big business and I put it in for this award, which was the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award run by NatWest and Touche Ross, if they still exist these days, well NatWest does but Touche Ross I’m not sure but anyway.
Elliot Moss
I think, I can’t remember if it became Deloitte or something else or there was a merger and I forget who it was because a friend of mine went to work for Touche Ross.
Rupert Younger
Well they were big deals back then and they supported young entrepreneurs and I was one of eight finalists and our prize, this was the yes and point, our prize was to go to California, this was, I couldn’t believe my luck we were being sent off, all expenses paid, to go to something called the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs Conference, only in America could you get something like this and it was called the Ace Programme, even better. So I arrived in this conference hall in San Francisco, being an entrepreneur in the ‘80s in Scotland, you were a sort of rarity probably in the student world, here we walked into a, eight of us walked into this room, 2,000 people like us, all 21, 22 years old and I’ll never forget the first guy I met, he was a guy called Rudy Rupak and I walked into this hall and he thrust out his hand and went, ‘Hi, I’m Rudy, who are you?’ Now, people don’t ask that in the UK, they don’t say who are you, so I said, ‘Well I’m Rupert’ and he said, ‘So what do you do, Rupert?’ and that’s another question people don’t ask in the UK and so I said, ‘Well I do this little advertising thing’ and he said, ‘No, no, no, tell me what you really do’. I was absolutely astonished by this and so I eventually it tumbled out in a particularly British, ridiculous way that we speak and he went, ‘I love it, it’s going to be amazing, I’m doing films, I’m a producer and I’m trying to get into the British market, I’d love to sponsor all thirty odd or whatever it is of your planners’. This was 40 seconds in to walking in and I thought this was extraordinary and brilliant. Now nothing ever happened by the way with Rudy but it didn’t matter because I thought do you know, I love this, this is, this is a world of possibilities, this is the yes and world. I’d found my tribe, I’d found the people I wanted to be around, I found that energy flow, I found that idea that everything’s possible if you just talk to people, find common ground, see where it goes. I sent him an email actually, Rudy. By the way Rudy, if you’re listening, you haven’t responded yet, which is the antithesis of the yes and kind of idea that we’re talking about here but please respond because I looked him up, he’s a very successful film producer now.
Elliot Moss
No, I hope Rudy, I hope Rudy, you are listening and you will respond because you should be because I’m with Rupert Younger, he’s my Business Shaper, he’s been round the merry-go-round four times, we’ve heard about one of them, we’re going to hear about the other three very shortly. He’s coming up in a moment here on Jazz Shapers. Right now though we’re going to hear a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Victoria Pigott talks about ESG, that’s environmental, societal and governance issues and what the resulting long-term benefit is for businesses putting purpose before profit.
You can of course find all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. I think there’s around 500 of them so give yourself some time. My guest today is Rupert Younger, Co-Founder of PR firm, which we haven’t even talked about yet, the Finsbury Group, and Founder of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation which we also haven’t talked about. Now what I love is, the Square Goat Advertising is obviously the light in your eye, the cherry in your whatever it is and I’ll use other metaphors which are wrong, you did another one called Present Planner which we’re just going to gloss over for a moment but you, you created this idea of matching presents with the ages of the kids that might need a present, essentially for god parents and the like, and you sold that business, is that right?
Rupert Younger
Yeah, sold it, sold is a grand word for…
Elliot Moss
Someone bought it.
Rupert Younger
Someone bought it.
Elliot Moss
Someone bought it and that’s good enough.
Rupert Younger
But it was a great idea that actually had a solution at the heart of it and that’s the other I think thing is that you’ve got to have something that people actually need.
Elliot Moss
So then I come onto this big thing, so you created this business called Finsbury with one other key person, Roland.
Rupert Younger
Roland.
Elliot Moss
Roland Rudd, for those some people will have heard of him of course. Big deal and obviously the business itself, PR business reputation business but the thing that’s interesting to me is at a very young age, Rupert, you were you know pretty wealthy. What’s that done to you because the guy who I’ve been talking to so far hasn’t given a hoot about money, he just loves creating and then suddenly, the clown comes along with a big ton of cash and dumps it on your thing, without being, without trying to sound glib but that’s, is that a lifechanging moment or is that a, that’s not important to me moment? From a monetary point of view for a moment, that’s the thing I’m interested in.
Rupert Younger
Money of course is super helpful and useful and wonderful to have and it may sound easy because I now, I’m in a fortunate position because I’ve got it but I’ve always regarded money as an outcome, it’s not an objective and it’s not the glib sort of you do what you love and money follows, if you’re lucky enough something happens where you get monetised and I was just lucky. We had a great business, I mean it was Roland’s idea and he needed someone who knew a bit about the communications industry, he was a journalist at the FT. We met at Four Weddings and a Funeral, at the...
Elliot Moss
At the Premiere.
Rupert Younger
At the Premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Elliot Moss
How did that happen?
Rupert Younger
I was sitting next to him and we were sponsoring it as Brunswick, I was at Brunswick.
Elliot Moss
You were at Brunswick for four years weren’t you.
Rupert Younger
For four years before that. And we got on really well and he then said to me, well actually he rang, he rang Brunswick and I was with my bosses at the time doing some work and the secretary shouted across in front of everyone and it had just been in the papers that Roland was thinking of leaving the FT to set up a communications firm, and she leaned across and shouted across the whole office, she said, ‘Rupert’, she was Irish and apologies to anyone Irish for this terrible Irish accent but she said, ‘Rupert’ she said, ‘I’ve got a Roland Rudd here who wants to talk to you about a new idea’. So, the idea of any form of secrecy at the start of this particular enterprise was blown immediately out of the water but it was a wonderful time and it was a meeting of minds and also of personalities, I mean we’re not very similar in lots of ways but we both share a passion for doing things well. Roland is an extraordinarily well connected, thoughtful individual, he’s got incredible instincts for what makes a story flow and for how organisations should orient themselves around big issues. I brought some of the innovation architecture around how to do things differently, how to create campaigns or think about the world of communications in a more structured way and so it was a very happy marriage and…
Elliot Moss
Can I just ask you on the structure point because this is the craft skill of Rupert Younger in a way because this is you know your platform over here starts to begin which now informs a lot of your life. Where did that, that structure come from, where did that ability for you to structure a story, to structure a campaign, to understand the machinations of a brand, where did you develop that?
Rupert Younger
I mean it’s kind of interesting so my daughter, Honor, who is a marketing kind of assistant, she’s got that same sort of innate idea about how to take something and market it and turn it into something kind of interesting. My son, Alec is much more structured, he’s got this fantastic skill of being able to analyse, put in place and structure something well and I think there’s a, there’s a sort of bit of both of that in me in that I can see how something will take flight and how it will work but I also understand that these things don’t work without structure and then you process it. And when you’ve set up a business that hits you hard in the face, when you don’t have processes and systems, you can suddenly find yourself chasing everything and losing lots and lots of different bits of what you do.
Elliot Moss
And on the continuum, before we go to the wonderful Sade, on the continuum of process, if process is on the left of my x axis, on the right is the creativity piece, where do you sit?
Rupert Younger
Well I get bored easily. I’m probably, I should be more in the middle or more towards process but I’m more to the right, which is why it’s really good to work with people who’ve got process skills with you.
Elliot Moss
You’re also a writer, you also founded the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation back in 2008 as I mentioned. There’s often a distinction between practitioners and between observers and between practitioners and writers and teachers but here we are in 2023 and you’ve kind of done of those things. How? Which bit is the most you or do you just, does it all kind of feed each other?
Rupert Younger
I guess the only way I can really answer that is by talking about what I really believe to my core is needed in business discourse. I noticed that in law for example, you get this really lovely interaction between law professors and law academia, they all co-habit each other, they talk to each other, they swap jobs, they refer to each other, there’s a really nice interaction but in business there seems to be Mars and Venus, there’s academics who write about business and business people generally think academics are doing the wrong things and it’s boring and then you’ve got academics writing about business, who think business people are sell outs and this is a sort of weird world and when I decided to try and leave Finsbury, Roland was very generous and said no please, let’s at least keep some connections which we did right up for many years but I was really interested in trying to understand some of the fundamental drivers around reputation and trust which were becoming huge issues around the turn of the century, broadband, connectivity and then of course the Financial Crash after that so these themes were very big themes in business but there seemed to be very little in the way of proper structured thought and it comes back to your point about process and structure maybe as well and for someone who’s curious like me, I just wasn’t getting any sense of there being a body of knowledge that practitioners could actually draw in. It was instinctive and one of the brilliant things of course about communications is that it’s staffed by people generally, the good ones, who are extraordinarily instinctive and they know what’s right to do and what’s wrong to do and they’ve traded off that very successfully for many years but I felt that you needed that plus something, you needed there to be disciplined thought and hence I wanted to go back into a rigorous, academic environment and do some of that fundamental work on questions that are just so important for society.
Elliot Moss
You were talking before and it struck me that the buzz you get is from creation and the money follows, so the ordering there is creativity and then money is nice, a nice outcome as you said. I’m wondering whether it’s more important to you that you understand the structure and the ideas behind a reputation or that you help other people understand the structure of reputation. Which one gives you the bigger buzz?
Rupert Younger
I think both have to come hand in glove because I certainly need to understand it myself. I’m not someone who likes to whitewash over things and just…
Elliot Moss
No, no but that…
Rupert Younger
It’s important to understand it but knowledge by itself is sort of a bit useless, you’ve got to apply it, you’ve got to find some way of, of, of using knowledge properly and so in that respect you are either working with clients, that’s the Finsbury work, or you’re publishing and then that becomes a public resource and it’s sharing it, so the book that I wrote was really to try and distil down what I’d learned and to try and share that around, mainly as an iterative process, I mean I regarded books as something which I wanted to get feedback on so that I could then think differently about how I, how I conceptualised reputation in this book.
Elliot Moss
I guess, I guess I was wondering whether the writing of it and the actual process of discovery was less interesting to you than the reactions that you might get to it or whether it was more interesting because you know sometimes when you, you crack a problem, as you said this creative process itself is really exciting, something reveals itself and you go that’s good.
Rupert Younger
So I don’t regard it as being one and, one and then the other, I don’t regard these as linear cousins, I regard these things as being very much intertwined and it’s like this conversation, you start a conversation, someone then challenges or and you go oh god that’s interesting and I hadn’t thought about that so you’re forced to reflect a bit, you pivot a little bit, you think about it, you then come back to it, that process of iteration happens during a book writing and I’ve now written three books and that process has remained exactly the same throughout all three of those but the knowledge that you get then builds iteratively from that, so creating, important but then listening, understanding, feedback, absolutely vital to then being better and learning something new.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me to learn something new, to continue to iterate and indeed this is happening right before your eyes. I’m with Rupert Younger, he’s coming up with me for my final chat very shortly and we’ve also got one of my all-time favourites, it’s Jimmy Smith, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
That was Jimmy Smith with Got My Mojo Working. Jimmy Smith was one of the first albums that my late father gave to me many, many years ago, so that one’s for you, Dad. Rupert Younger is my Business Shaper and we’ve been talking about all sorts of things around reputation, around curiosity, around creativity, I mean we’ve covered quite a lot, Rupert in a short period of time, I’m exhausted. There’s a couple of things that you talk about, the sort of two tenants of your reputation theory. One is around capability and one is around character. Just thinking about you and where you are on this in terms of Rupert Younger’s capability, Rupert Younger’s character, what do you think about in terms of what’s important to you and where these things go now because you’ve achieved a hell of a lot and you’re doing the things you want to do.
Rupert Younger
I guess now I see that capability is an entry ticket. If you’re not capable, you don’t get the licence to come into the room, you don’t get the opportunities to so what you want to do so your capability is something that gives you an entry ticket and I’ve got a certain set of skills that I’ve honed over many different iterations, really around social evaluations, around you know what is reputation, how you build, sustain, create, destroy, then rebuild and link things around trust, legitimacy, status, stigma, celebrity. These all fascinate me and I’ve got a modicum of skill in that but that’s my entry ticket. I think the thing that I’ve come to realise is really just so important is character, both individual character and corporate character. As an individual, I’m sort of Presbyterian Scot and so I sort of like direct speaking, I like plain chat, I’m pretty direct myself, often to my detriment but I sort of have a belief that you’ve got work really hard for something and that you’ve got to work doubly hard yourself if you’re going to ask anyone else to work hard and any of those people that I can almost hear the howls of laughter coming from the Finsbury team who’ve all had to work with me over the years, all sort of thinking about the, that sort of drive and that sort of determination but I think your character is really important and underpinning that, you’ve got to believe that you’re doing the right thing and that belief system will spread across everything you do, it's the way you interact so do you thank people, do you write people letters, do you give people time? I’ve recently chaired a committee of a big, very large charity and I learned how to try and orchestrate and listen to people and actually properly let people speak and you know that’s about understanding respect and understanding how to give people space. These are all character traits so I think character, I’ve come to learn that your character shouldn’t be taken for granted, everyone comes with something unique and distinctive and different and understanding what motivates someone and what drives someone is the secret to success.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you and I think that must be right by the way, I think you remember people’s characters rather than you remember what they actually did because that is, that’s the, that’s the last thing that hits you. Thank you so much for your time.
Rupert Younger
What a pleasure, thank you very much.
Elliot Moss
It’s been brilliant. Really, really enjoyed talking to you and it’s been iterative, as we promised. It’s been super iterative and learned lots as well, which is also a rather good thing. Just before I let you disappear to your next venture, you’ll have set something up by 2 o’clock probably, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Rupert Younger
Minnie the Moocher, Cab Calloway. I am of the generation who grew up with the Blues Brothers, it’s just such an epic film and that scene in the Chicago Music Hall when Cab Calloway, the real Cab Calloway comes out, it’s just one of the great movie scenes and he comes with such energy, such poise, such agility and here’s this incredible name, incredible voice on your screens, I loved it and I just love the track.
Elliot Moss
Cab Calloway there with Minnie the Moocher and if you haven’t seen it, go and find it on YouTube, it’s the clip from the Blues Brothers, absolutely worth watching, the song choice of my Business Shaper, Rupert Younger. He talked about being curious, he talked about loving the creative process, the power of yes and as a reframe for life in general. Your character is really important, how true is that, whether you’re a corporate or an individual, a person, and indeed the last thing, you’ve got to believe that you’re doing the right thing. Absolutely great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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