Be Your Own PR Machine And Make Your Business Stand Out Online, A Founder’s Story with Rob Barratt

Rob Barratt is the Co-founder of Hong Kong-based The Industry Leaders and is on a mission to help new entrepreneurs and solopreneurs get the attention their work needs, without wasting thousands of dollars on ads. Rob tells us about how he got here and why getting interviewed matters.

Tell us about your childhood and where you grew up

I was born and raised in the beautiful North East of England, working hard at school and spending most of my waking hours outside of the classroom playing football with friends.

How did you get started as an entrepreneur?

I was working in a really well-paid corporate job that took me to Asia – the world’s most incredible continent. I loved my life there but my career didn’t light me up and I knew something had to change. So, with a friend, I created and sold a successful restaurant brand within two years – after that I was hooked and I knew I wanted to create something with massive potential to scale, online. The only problem was, I’d never run an online business before. So when I finally branched out to create one, I spent thousands of dollars advertising online. None of it brought me sales. I didn’t want to fail and go back to my old corporate job, but it was so much harder to get my business off the ground than I thought it would be. I lost confidence in my ability to be successful. It didn’t help that I was constantly seeing success stories on LinkedIn and hearing podcasts about founders who had gone from zero to thousands of sales seemingly instantly. Then I got invited to do an interview through an old contact. I was blown away by the response I got to post a link to my interview on my social channels. People responded in a way they hadn’t to my other online posts. They were genuinely interested in my journey and what I was doing now. So, I learned as much as I could about digital marketing on a budget. At the same time, I was expanding my network by interviewing business leaders in my niche. I never looked back. I went from struggling to get anyone to take notice of me, to speaking to some of the most influential people in business and helping other entrepreneurs get their businesses noticed by people who matter.

What is one business lesson you would tell a startup founder?

You’ve got to be brave enough to talk about your mission from Day 0 – never stop sharing what you know in public. Get the word out about what you’re doing in as many places as possible and make it easy for the people that matter (your potential clients) to find you.