Fresh Air. Fresh Air Production.
Hi, and welcome to Fresh Ears. I'm Neil Cowling, the founder of Fresh Air, the UK's leading producer of podcasts for brands and businesses. In this series, we look at case studies of the shows we've made and chat them through with the clients and the producer to see what we can learn and what might be useful to know for others who are thinking of making a podcast for
their brand. Kleinwort Hambros is a private bank headquartered in London with a 200- year history. We started working for them back in the pre- pandemic years, remember them, and launched The Wealth Chat, a series giving advice on current trends in wealth management. Then during lockdown, we switched to short pocket- sized updates before going back to longer form
work. More recently, we launched a second series, The Entrepreneurs’ Chat aimed at owners of small businesses and startups with less market style insights and more general conversation, hosted by James Hurley, the enterprise editor at The Times. Here's what it sounds like.
We just have to get the recruitment right and we have to invest. I think where we have been smart is that myself and (inaudible) and David and any of our other backers that we've had over the years, no one has really taken any money out of this business. We've always, if we've had some cash in the bank, we've gone, " Right. Let's hire this amazing person. Let's invest
in these offices. Let's grow. Let's just put the money back in." So I think the first thing is I would want everyone to take away from this conversation that every business is a recruitment business.
Why would a private bank have a podcast? What are they trying to achieve and why are they expanding their portfolio of shows? We're going to talk this through with Karolina Diebra, head of marketing at Kleinwort Hambros and Anouszka Tate, our senior producer here at Fresh Air. Karolina, welcome to Fresh Ears. For those who don't know, perhaps we could just start with you explaining who Kleinwort Hambros are and what
you do, please. That'd be great.
Hi, Neil. Thank you for having me. Kleinwort Hambros provides private banking, investment expertise, and wealth management services to individuals, families, entrepreneurs, IFAs, and external asset managers in the UK, Channel Islands, and Gibraltar. We are part of Société Générale Group.
We've been working together now probably about two and a half years and you were quite an early client to Fresh Air. What brought you into podcasting? Was there a particular thing that you saw or a particular reason why you decided that podcast was something you wanted to start doing?
Yeah. A couple of years ago, we were doing a review of our content strategy and marketing strategy and looking at different channels, different types of content we are producing to engage with our audiences. We realized that a lot
of it was very traditional, written pieces. When we started to think about how lifestyles of our clients and other audiences are evolving and people are becoming more busy and have less time to spend reading articles, reading lengthy papers, we realized that we wanted to diversify that content. We wanted to use a format that fits better into that
lifestyles. Then the idea of the podcast came about and we thought, well, this would fit really well because whether someone on their commute to work or during a daily run or even just preparing dinner for the family, a podcast is a really right format to fit into that busy lifestyle and engage with a content and with a story that's behind it.
We used the phrase thought leadership quite a lot for what people want to achieve. Is that a fair summary of what your ambition was with this, to set yourselves up with a specific thought leadership channel?
Yes, absolutely. It was part of that. What we really wanted to do is for a podcast to reflect our purpose and our purpose is to simplify life's financial challenges. A lot of the content that we cover in our podcast is around investment management, wealth management, philanthropy, retirement planning. We wanted to bring those topics closer to our audiences.
We wanted to shed a bit of light and educate around some of those challenges that people are facing on their journey, on their financial journey.
So for the listeners, we now have two podcasts running with you guys. We have The Wealth Chat, which was the original series, and we have The Entrepreneurs’ Chat, which is just launched in the last few months. If we talk about The Wealth Chat for a moment, because they're quite a different format, that's presented by an internal speaker who
was a really early choice. That's Fahad. Just tell us a bit about Fahad and why he was a good choice to be the presenter for the podcast.
Yes. Fahad is our chief investment officer at Kleinwort Hambros. Fahad obviously is running our investment strategy and is very close to the clients as well, but also in his role, he has quite a broad media presence. He's a very engaging speaker. He's a very engaging host of the podcast. We wanted to talk about topics that are really on the minds of our clients or potential clients and educate
and inspire and really bring those topics to life. And Fahad was just really right person to do that.
How do you choose what is a good topic? Is it something that you are talking about in other communications? Is it just a sense of what your audience are looking for? Is there a science behind choosing the topic that you're going to talk about next?
So we try to make it as diverse as possible. As a private bank, we focus both on investment management, wealth planning, philanthropy, succession planning. We have a really wide range of expertise. Some of those topics would be coming from discussions we have with our experts and with our client- facing teams to understand really what's on our client's minds and what is that they speak about, what are concerns
they may be having or what challenges they're facing. These are the topics really what we wanted to bring to life most in the podcast. Then we also look at more strategically around with our ambition, what we're trying to achieve. That's where some of the topics around responsibility, responsible investing, philanthropy, some of the work with our charity partners that we're doing that also we're introduced into The Wealth Chat.
Anouszka, bringing you in as producer, Fahad obviously came with some media experience and well, significant media experience and is a great talker. What do you have to do to take that kind of raw material and turn him into a great podcast presenter?
Well, I think the really interesting thing about Fahad is that, obviously, he's often the one who's being the expert speaker on TV, on the radio. He's the one who's bringing the knowledge, whereas actually, that makes him a great speaker, but he's now having to be on the other side being the one who's anchoring a conversation and guiding a
conversation. So it's more that side of things that I can bring a little bit more expertise and just coach him through, just knowing how to read the guest actually, and knowing when to allow them maybe a little bit more silence before jumping in with the next question because that might be when the great answers are going to come through, because he's an incredibly eager, enthusiastic presenter, which
is exactly what you want energy wise, but just learning the pace and rhythm of an interview as opposed to being the one who's there to just spill out all this wonderful knowledge, I think was the main thing that we worked on with him.
Yeah. That's an interesting one, isn't it? Because we always talk about the presenter having the ear of the listener, thinking about what the listener wants to ask and getting the answers out that the listener is already wanting to know. But actually, when you've got such an expert presenter, it must be very difficult for him not to want to jump in and give answers himself and almost overshadow the guest.
Yeah. He's been brilliant in that actually that just comes across as this really lovely, exciting conversation. It's more almost bringing it back to a boring, technical point of view from my side as a producer and going, leave a beat before you do your exciting jumping in, because I can pull that back together in the edit to make the pace feel up to speed, but it just makes my life a little bit easier in the edit if
I'm not having to work with different tracks. It's very boring technical things like that that I've just had to teach him, which are things that he, of course, hasn't had to deal with before.
Has he improved as you've gone through? Has he learned that as you've-
Absolutely, yeah, I think. I think we've got a little bit of telepathy now maybe. I can see him starting to catch himself when he knows that I might have a little word afterwards about, oh, maybe you jumped in a little bit too soon there. But I would always much rather it be that way around than someone who is underconfident and therefore, the energy of the delivery is that much
lower. It's so much easier to teach someone to take a breath before asking a question than to get them to be enthusiastic about what they're there to talk about. It's all brilliant, really.
Great. Karolina, we'll come on to talk about the second series in a moment, but obviously, during that first set of The Wealth Chat, we had lockdown where we pulled it back a bit and The Wealth Chat became a very short- form, reactive piece of work during the lockdown. Then it came back to being much more long- form once we had more to talk about, I suppose, and the
world felt like it had settled down a bit. You have become more and more committed to podcast as we've gone through. What was the driver behind you guys deciding that this was a long- term strand for you rather than just a short- term pilot?
That internal engagement is really, really important, and that support we get internally from our colleagues, our staff. I have
to say, it build up over time. I think as people see how the content is very relatable and the content that they can actually use to engage with the clients and use it as well in their daily work, I think they felt this is something that they want to really are behind and also share with their networks.
We've actually seen that engagement increase. It's fantastic to see how currently when we post some of our podcasts on social media, there's that engagement and our colleagues are sharing it with their networks on their social media platforms. We've seen that trend and that support behind the content we're producing. More recently, actually, we've been having suggestions of what
guests we should be inviting to the podcast. Particularly with The Entrepreneurs’ Chat, where we're telling stories of people behind the businesses, I think that's where that engagement increase even more. We had some great suggestions and great potential guests being proposed to us for the second series. So yeah, we're really excited to see that also coming through.
Magic. So yeah, let's talk about that. The Entrepreneurs’ Chat is the offshoot or the second series that you are creating. Can you just summarize the format for that and why it's different from The Wealth Chat?
The Entrepreneurs’ Chat tells the stories of six entrepreneurs at different stages of their journey. We talk about the challenges that they face, but also some of the lessons that they've learned along the way that they are sharing with others through the podcast. The series is quite different from The Wealth Chat. We wanted to work with an external host for this podcast. We wanted to work someone who
has experience of writing, speaking to entrepreneurs. We are really delighted when James Hurley, the enterprise editor at The Times agreed to host the series for us. It's been a great experience because he obviously has that knowledge of entrepreneurs, the challenges they face as they grow and scale their business in
the UK. He had that extra insight and he could bring that expertise into the conversations, which I think was a great driver to make those conversations more engaging and more interesting for our audiences. So that's the big difference. And also, I think they're very much more story- driven
than The Wealth Chat. The Wealth Chat is expertise, some of the topics around investment, wealth planning, succession planning, so much more closer to our core business and what we
do, whereas The Entrepreneurs’ Chat is about stories. Obviously, entrepreneurs is one of the segments or one of the types of clients we serve, so we thought that bringing those stories through the podcast will help other entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs really to learn something and be valuable for them as they go on that journey themselves.
It's really interesting, that contrast between the two series, because the first one is really about what you do, isn't it? It's about the core service of the business. It's about the issues that you talk about every day and therefore, it's very central to your everyday relationship with the listenership.
Whereas the second one is saying, we want to attract this target audience of entrepreneurs, but not by talking about what we do, but creating content that those people will like to listen to, and therefore, you get a halo effect from the content for Kleinwort Hambros without it having to be all about you.
Absolutely. You will see, we don't really talk about us in that podcast. Kleinwort Hambros is we research the guests. We decide who we would like to invite and we work with on the scripts and with questions, how we want those conversations to evolve, but we didn't really want to make it about us. We really want to make it about the guests and their stories. I think that's what makes it
really engaging as well. Internally, we've seen great support and great feedback about the series. So yeah, we're really excited to continue and launch another series.
I think as well, real credit to you guys for being brave on that hard sell front or lack thereof, more specifically on this one, because actually, what we've created is a genuinely fascinating series about the individuals, as you say, that their stories behind these businesses as opposed to
a series about Kleinwort Hambros. But the brave part is that listeners will come away having a wonderful feeling towards you guys as the people who facilitated this lovely half hour of their day and engaged listeners are much more likely to become engaged with your wider work, which I appreciate for someone within your work is maybe it's harder
to quantify. I don't know. Did that feel like more of a risk from your side in terms of how you then measure that direct success?
I think it could be perceived as a missed opportunity if someone is just thinking about, " Oh, every piece of content has to be brand stamped. Then we need to really have our name out there through every piece of content that we produce." I think if you look at it from that perspective, some people may think, oh, we are missing an opportunity here to promote your services or to
promote who we are. But I think content is so much more than that. I think it's about building trust and building loyalty towards your brand. We don't expect that someone who's listening to the podcast will suddenly necessarily directly come to us because they need our services, but maybe they will at some point in the future. I think that's what we are trying to do with this podcast, building that trust over time.
The association with the guests as well is really important, isn't it? Look at someone like Jake Humphrey, who has a huge following, is very big in podcasting, is definitely somebody with this high- performance podcast that entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs will listen to. By association, you are building an affiliation with that talent that those people will already respect and
already lap up their content. It's a way of being associated with someone who you might not otherwise have been drawn to or that potential audience may not have otherwise been drawn to you as a result.
Absolutely. I think we were really privileged and lucky to have some really fascinating guests on the podcast in this six- episode series so far. We're hoping that it will continue that way so that people will see you had some great, fascinating, inspiring speakers, and it will attract audience, but also, it hopefully will help us to engage more entrepreneurs and involve more entrepreneurs to wanting to be part of the
podcast and be our guests on the podcast. So yes, we were absolutely. I think having someone like Jake, like Giles, or Cécile, who have built successful businesses and have really fascinating stories to share with other entrepreneurs is going to help us to, like you say, build that association as well through the podcast.
I think that's a really interesting point as well around the potential longevity of a podcast like this. We've done
six episodes. Don't get too ahead of ourselves, but the idea that you create a space that people want to come into to tell their stories, I think is really, really interesting, that we can start to set ourselves up and James will play a massive part of that of actually, we've just been through something awful in our business, but I really want to talk about it on a human level and this is the kind of conversation I
want to be having about it. I know that James and The Entrepreneurs’ Chat is the space that I want to do that in. I do think there's potential for us to start doing that longer term, which is a very exciting thing because that's when you become the thought leaders and that's the brand recognition when everyone's coming into you and you are not having to pitch out anymore. That's the dream.
Definitely. No, absolutely. We have that aspiration for Entrepreneurs' Chat to become the go- to podcast for entrepreneurs. I think sharing those really fascinating, inspiring stories and people feeling comfortable really just having that, those honest conversations with us. Because I think what was really amazing about the podcast we've recorded so far, they've been all really honest and really
open conversations. I think that that's what other entrepreneurs will really find inspiring as well.
I love your sentiment, Karolina, about long- term payback of content and the content is a long- form strategy. We always talk about that all the time when we're talking about podcasts, but you must have some pressure on you to show that there's a return on investment or that there's a measure of success. How are you judging with The Entrepreneurs’ Chat because it is slightly tangential from your normal
content? How are you being able to judge whether that is a success or not?
We would look at sets of KPIs for every series we have, but we would look both at the hard measures and the soft measures. Obviously, we can look at number of downloads and a number of people who listen to the podcast, but I think it's equally important to look at engagement and how people engage with your content, how engaging
they find it. If we see that the podcast is getting a lot of likes and shares and a lot of people coming to us just giving us that direct feedback, qualitative feedback, I think that's equally important because sometimes, it's as important to reach the right audiences that engage with your content than just reaching any audience and as wide as possible. I think there's a bit of a fine
balance there. Of course, we do want reach as many people as possible, but equally, we want to reach the right audiences and someone who's really going to find it valuable and will come back for more and to listen more. I think it's both looking at obviously, some of the hard KPIs, hard measures, but also, I think, that qualitative feedback as well is also important.
Anouszka, we've talked about Fahad earlier. He's the presenter for Wealth Chat. James comes from more of a media background, but he's a print journalist. What's the challenge in taking a print journalist and turning them into a podcast presenter?
I think it's mostly about empowering them to bring themselves to the conversation. He can ask brilliant questions that elicit the right answers from people, but of course, when you put that in print, you take your own questions out and you just make it about the person or the business that you're talking about. It's actually about allowing him to insert himself back into that conversation. He has been completely brilliant.
As Karolina said, so many of the guests have given really deeply personal insights into yes, okay, this awful thing happened in the business, but this is how it affected
me mentally or in my personal life or whatever. I think that's real testament to James being able to just give little anecdotes from his own life or to connect on a human level with the guests, because you can't expect someone else to give that much of themselves if the host isn't giving that back as well. There's already that kind of rapport and connection because he is so
immersed in these world. Yeah, he's just been an absolute joy to work with.
In terms of the content as well, it's a different type of storytelling. It's a different type of content. As you say, actually on The Wealth Chat, as a producer, you can't be expected to know lots of detail about what a private bank does all day long, but perhaps The Entrepreneurs’ Chat plays more into your role as a producer because you are thinking about storytelling on a more general level.
How is that different and what role do you play?
Yeah. I think there's an interesting point here about how we've all worked together collaboratively, because we are all coming at the same project from very different angles. I think that's particularly clear in the way that we've worked through the
scripting on this particular series. It starts with Karolina and her team and they put in the core messaging, the stuff that is maybe more of the hard facts that they know that we need to get out throughout the story. It then goes on to James and he can
really add his personality to it. He can add some of his own questions from his own experience, just change wording around so that he feels more comfortable delivering it. Then it can come onto me and I zoom out a bit and look at the entire narrative of the whole episode from start to finish. I think it's a good lesson, A, in having it in writing from the beginning what everyone's role is and not having too many
cooks in each of those roles as well. It works that we're quite a small team and everyone's very clear what they bring to it, which keeps the quality consistent and keeps that workflow efficient.
That's been important to you, I presume, as well, Karolina, to have clear roles and responsibilities in that process.
Yes, it has. It has been really helpful actually to make this process as efficient, effective as possible, but I think equally, it's so important as well that working with Anouszka, she knows
what we're trying to achieve. She understand the whole concept as well of the whole series, so it's not just from the producer perspective, but just understanding what we're trying to do, what we're trying to achieve, working really well both with James and our guests, recording with different types
of guests. Living in different parts of the world sometimes can be a bit of a challenge, so I think always being there to put them at ease as well and guide them through the process. I think that's been hugely, hugely helpful as well. I think it is great that we have that great team that gets together and adds value from different perspectives into the process.
On the storytelling side as well, just a quick one
in terms of how we've produced the series. With The Wealth Chat, we do it episode by episode, start to finish, end to end each episode, but with The Entrepreneurs’ Chat, we've been working on the series as a whole, batch recording everything, which means that we then have the flexibility to choose what release order we want to have so that again, it's the zooming out and going how
is this story working across the entire series, not just within each episode, which is really lovely flexibility to have because it really means we're on a journey with the listener throughout and something like this works really well because there are so many different stages of a business's life that we're going through. Some of them are more at the startup stage and then we are literally through the
series working to when someone ultimately leaves the business. So that's worked really well for this series, I think.
I think this has been such a different experience from The Wealth Chat. I think exactly for that reason that we had the concept for the whole series. Obviously, it can be shorter, longer, six guests or more, but I think the idea of having guests that are at different stages of their business journey and having slightly different story to tell, I think that was what made it really
so exciting and so interesting. They complement each other as well. We really wanted to make sure that there's that good diversity of voices and diversity of stories and different types of entrepreneurs being part of this podcast.
Karolina, you've been podcasting now for two and a half years as a business. We are starting to think about the next stage and how these series will evolve and Entrepreneurs' Chat will move into series two. What have you learned along the way? How have you made the best of podcasting within the business?
I think the most important lesson was to, I think really for us, evolve this podcast into much more of a storytelling. I think that just made it so much more engaging for our audiences. I think planning is a
quite important part of it. I think with The Wealth Chat, obviously, we had the challenge of the pandemic and we had to change the format to be a bit more reactive to where our clients were when we had some, obviously, market uncertainty. So we adapted and changed the format of it.
I think that adaptability was quite important part of it as well to make sure that it actually still works and it's still the right format, the right content for that time. If you see that some things are working better than others, just go in that direction. Some of
the analytics and the KPIs will play a role there. If you look back at your podcast and you see that particular topic has done really well or your audiences are particularly interested in wealth planning versus investing or investing versus, I don't know, philanthropy, I think you can also use that to your advantage and use that to adapt your content as you go along.
Excellent. So that flexibility and just willingness to evolve it and use the data to inform the evolution of the podcast is really crucial. Brilliant. Thank you so much, both of you, for taking part.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
So there we go. That's The Wealth Chat and The Entrepreneurs’ Chat from Kleinwort Hambros. Thanks to Karolina Diebra, head of marketing for Kleinwort Hambros, and Anouszka Tate, our senior producer here at Fresh Air. If you'd like to find out more about Fresh Air and how you can make a podcast for your brand or business, you can find us at freshairproduction. co. uk. In the meantime, I've been
Neil Cowling. Thanks very much for listening and goodbye.
Fresh Air.