Interview: Eloise Leeson-Smith: "There's no better meritocracy than being self-employed."
In the latest FS interview, Eloise Leeson-Smith talks about going from low-paying agency work to a business of financial serenity, how what we think we say is often not what's heard, and lots more.
This is the latest in a regular series of in longform, in-depth, Q&A-style interviews on Fee Sheet. If this is your first time here, check out this post about what this publication aims to do, and this one about pricing. All interviews are posted on a 50/50 system. The first half — often several thousand words — will be available for free. The rest, and most other content, is for paying subscribers.
Now, on with the interview!
Eloise Leeson-Smith is the founder of Olim, a linguistics-based brand and communications consultancy based in Edinburgh, Scotland which uses the power of language to provide linguistics-driven strategic services that can transform an organization’s communications efforts.
Olim has worked with a range of notable clients which include the UN, the RSA, the Scottish Government, Capgemini America Inc, Experian, SCIAF, Henderson Loggie, and more.
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In this wide-ranging interview, you will learn:
How Eloise started her business “out of desperation” during the pandemic
How she went from low-paid agency staffer to buying her own home
What she learned about sales from decades of parental mentoring
How thinking about raspberries might help you raise your prices
How financial independence is actually financial serenity
The difference between time spent and value created
Why numbers can never measure intangible things
And lots more
Shane Breslin:
I’m sure we’re going to be talking a lot about words, and the importance of the right words, so let’s start with the name of your business, Olim Communications. Why “Olim”?
Eloise Leeson-Smith:
Olim is a Latin word that means, amongst other things, "once". They used to use it in the Roman Praetorium when they were about to say something of particular importance. Kind of a Latin way of saying, “Shut up and listen!”
On a slightly twee level, my idea with the business is that I only want you to do your branding once. Because I want you and your business to be listened to in such a way that you’re properly heard, that you’re seen for who you really are, and you're encouraged for who you really are. So do it well, and do it once.
SB:
Love that. Okay, so where did the business come from? I’m not sure anyone just lands in a successful business with clients who love them without going through a journey. So tell me a little about the journey.
ELS:
Well, it was first born out of desperation! Probably the same origin story as a lot of businesses. I was living in Toronto. I’d followed a shitty ex-boyfriend out there on a sabbatical in 2019. My background had been in food and drink PR. I’d worked as a publicist, successfully selling press releases and creating great stories, doing all sorts of cool campaigns for the likes of Edinburgh Gin, the Scottish Government, BrewDog. When I headed off to Toronto, in my shocking levels of naivety, I thought, ‘I’ll just be a food and drink journalist!’ Oh how wrong she was! I discovered that pitching other people's stories is easy. Pitching your own is kind of like taking out your insides and offering them to someone else who might reject them. I quickly realized I didn't have the grit that journalists need.
So I had to find another way. Before I left for Canada, I’d started volunteering for What? Why? Children in Hospital, which was a fantastic charity but really hard to pitch over the phone — “what? why?” “No, that’s the name of the charity!”
It creates videos for kids about to undergo hospital procedures. The founder's daughter had to go in for an MRI for headaches she was having, and there was no resource to explain the process to her. So, she made an MRI machine out of cardboard for her daughter’s teddy to show how it would work. She’d set up the charity, applied for lots of funding , and five years later they’d made over 60 videos with NHS funding, showing real procedures with real children.
I was serving as the communications lead. So while I was in Toronto, we were working on a video about a nasogastric feeding tube, which is quite an invasive and uncomfortable procedure. And I thought to myself, ‘This charity does so much good. We should try to promote it more widely.’ We’d just done videos in Arabic and Polish — Scotland took 25% of the Syrian refugee allocation to Britain, and we’ve had great Polish connections in Scotland for a very long time. So I cold-emailed all the MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament), explaining what we do and asking if they had any resources or guidelines or knowledge they could share with us to help us be more recognized and serve more people.
Within a week of me sending the cold email I had something silly like a 67-70% response rate to a cold email — from people who don't typically like responding to cold emails — and there was also a parliamentary motion that was passed!
So I remember sitting there thinking, “well, that's a bit good. I wonder if there's something in this that could work as a commercial service?”
So really, starting from there, with this knowledge and with a linguistics background, and taking a very data-driven and analytical approach to communications — without making it boring! — I thought I could help businesses and organizations create engagement and inspire action. And that is really where the business was born.
SB:
Okay, so linguistics. There’s a phrase on your website — “linguistics driven strategic services”. Break that down for me. What part does linguistics play in communications?
ELS:
So for a lot of folks, often being a linguist is speaking lots of languages. But I look more at the application of language, working with language from a Data Science perspective. As in, how do I know that what I'm saying makes the same sense in your head as it does in mine? How should I adapt and alter my language to engage with non-native speakers of English? Well, I should avoid idioms, because the idioms I would use will be very different to the ones that are natural to them in their own mother tongue. When you then look at that, and use things like corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, you might start to see a really high prevalence of a specific set of words.
“I've always fought quite passionately for finding value in skills that can't be conveniently quantified. The experience, the nuance, the sensitivity that comes from that are all really valuable. It's important to resist the idea that we have to become transactional in our nature.”
A lot of businesses have a misperception about how they think they present themselves. A company might go, “We're a luxury brand. We're really high end. We're really exclusive.” And then I will look at the language they’re using, on their website for example, and see that the lexicon they’ve got actually means mass market or easily available. You know, always on sale, or 10% off for your first purchase — things that don’t engender loyalty. So either you want to be a luxury brand but don't believe you're worthy of it, or someone has been brought in to write copy and hasn’t fully understood what you’re trying to do.
SB:
I want to hear about how you packaged this into a service, but first, where did this interest in linguistics, or strategic linguistics, come from in the first place?
ELS:
In terms of identity, I’m Scottish. I went to school in Scotland. I’ve lived in Scotland almost all my life. But my parents moved from England to Scotland when I was five. I don’t feel English at all, but I sound very English. So I remember the kids at school made fun of me for my very English accent. And I was five years old, so I didn't know that for a lot of Scots, they can be fairly anti-English in sentiment, for a variety of political and historical reasons.
So I became acutely aware, at a very early age, how much of an outsider I was. It's not good to be motivated by spite when you're five years old! But I do remember thinking very clearly, I'm not going to change how I sound. This is how my parents sound. This is how my family sounds. I'm not going to change the way I talk.
Part of that was me just being stubborn, but linguistically, children will either assimilate and sound more like their peers, or they won't and will sound like their parents. When I got to university, because my mum speaks very RP (Received Pronunciation) English, and my granny was a school mistress who spoke very RP English, and despite being profoundly lower middle class as a family in terms of income and social status, it was, ‘Oh, you’re posh, because you speak with an RP accent, and you clearly went to private school.’ The school you went to can be very important in Edinburgh, but I went to a state school, I didn't go anywhere fancy or anywhere special.
What came out of that is this acute awareness of how different languages or different approaches to language can affect your experiences in all sorts of social situations. And during the pandemic, talking to people worldwide became easier. Being hyper-aware of language helped me relate to others better. You can either become manipulative or more empathetic with this awareness. Linguistics can be used for good or ill. Neuro-Linguistic Programming gets a bad rap because there are people out there who will abuse the power of that, and will use language to hurt and undermine and be really quite sinister with what goes on.
For me it just all boils down to awareness. Once you have it, I don't think it can be taken away. It's like that idea that once a mind is stretched by an idea, it can never return to its old dimensions.
SB:
With this knowledge then, and your agency background, and your writing skills, you’ve been able to package it into a service that clients understand and really see the value in?
ELS:
So the service as it stands is brand refinement or development. If a company is hoping to rebrand from a language perspective, that’s where I come in. And yes, there are a few steps. First, I go through what my client is saying in their messaging and tell them, looking at it critically, this is what you're saying about yourself. Whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not, this is how you're presenting yourself.
Then, if you’ll let me, I will go and talk to your best customers and the kind of customers you’d like to have more of, and I’ll ask them why they bought from you. I’ll ask them about the exact moment they realized they needed this particular service. I’ll look at the words that they used, so we can mirror that in Comms going forward. As business-owners we often downplay our value and downplay the impact we have on people, and it isn't until we go and ask people, ‘what did we actually do for you?’ that we begin to learn about that. It’s a vital thing to know … but it can be excruciating to get there! I think pitching stories to editors is vulnerable? Asking someone that paid you money if you've done a good job, that’s the worst thing ever! So I come in and take the pain away from my customers, and ask their clients on their behalf.
“My value is meaningful on its own, but it takes on a different and additional meaning when I am employing what I do in service of a company who needs it.”
The next part is I ask my clients what they actually value. Why do you do what you do? Why did you start this business in the first place? What made you excited about it? How do you show up to work each day? What's your company culture really about? And I will ask the whole team — the leadership team, your sales function, your marketing function, your customer success function, admin, HR, the people in the call center, you name it. It gets very interesting as you build this non-siloed picture of what's going on inside an organization. Often the barriers to communication are that none of the team believe it. Or they believe something different. Or they’re saying all our guns are pointed in the wrong direction. So it's about creating more unity and harmony, especially in a larger organization, and helping them to be proud of what they do want to talk about instead.
So we come to this overlap between what you’re saying about your business, and what your customers are saying they needed. We build a picture. On the one hand, what the people within the organization are really proud of. On the other, what our customers are telling us is really valuable. So now we have this sweet spot in the middle, which is: let's talk about what we do in the way our customers talk about the value they receive.
SB:
How did this service come to be defined as a service? The motivation for the question is that, with everything on Fee Sheet, I really want to help readers and subscribers think about these things — about how services take shape, how they’re rolled out for clients, how the value is communicated and the offer is made and sales conversations happen, so that they can go out and do these things for themselves in their own work and businesses too. So this service of linguistics-backed brand communications, did it evolve organically, or did you have a well-constructed idea that was clearly mapped out in advance?
ELS:
I started with small pilot workshops — charging very little! — and I was gradually able to refine the process. It started out actually as writing projects, helping clients rewrite the copy on their website during the pandemic to reflect the changes in how they were going about their business with everything that was going on in the world.
When I started those website copy and writing projects, what I found was I couldn't write for them as a copywriter unless I knew their business inside out. So part of my process was to do, like, a two-and-a-half hour scoping workshop, where I got to know as much as I possibly could about their business and their customers. The branding work evolved from there, because the feedback I got from my customers was along the lines of, ‘You haven’t just done my website copy — you've actually put language to something I've been trying to articulate for five years’.
Getting that feedback felt amazing. So of course, you want more of that!
I’d seen brand workshops run by brand agencies, and I wanted to create something more effective than those. Agencies often focus on making themselves look great in workshops, creating big ideas that might not actually be very practical. My approach is different. I ask clients just to talk about serving their customers. This reveals natural values that might not emerge from a traditional workshop.
For example, one accountancy client I had, lots of the people within the business naturally gravitated towards the value of “prosperity”. They wanted to bring prosperity to people in their community. If I’d just given them a sheet with a list of words and asked them to pick out the ones that were important to them, would they have picked prosperity? Probably not.
SB:
People often struggle to get started with business ideas. Or, they get started, but meet resistance when it comes to putting what they do in front of people. How did you go about that? How did you get your first clients?
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