Latest Interviews
Gill Hunt – “What Animal Are You?”
Posted: Tuesday 19th Jun 2007
As anyone who attended last month’s Wired Wessex event will tell you, Gill Hunt [pictured] has some interesting ideas. As managing director of Skillfair, she’s also used to being the middleman between those that need help and those that can give it. Being so helpful, she was also very happy to give the following interview…
But first, an introduction from Gill herself. “I used to be an IT consultant and set up as an on my own in 1999. I set up Skillfair [in 2002] because I realised that people in the independent market could do with a helping hand and needed opportunities.”
What this means in practice is allowing people to meet, well, other people. “What Skillfair does is provide an online marketplace for clients and consultants to meet each other in a whole range of disciplines, and across all businesses from PR and marketing to management consultancy, IT and the rest of it. Our aim is to help consultants get in touch with customers and help them market themselves.”
And it can be tough being a self-employed consultant with no contacts, hence the need for the site in the first place. “It needed doing, really. It’s very hard working independently and being self-employed, and you just need that little bit extra help. I knew from experience that middle managers in particular quite often need help with projects and can’t find the right people for projects. In regards to specialist help, agencies can’t help you and they only work on long term projects. HR groups aren’t very helpful either, as they’re only really interested in recruiting permanent people. We found a gap and people in management need this kind of help, but don’t know where to find it. So that gap was crying out to be filled.”
The reception, so far has been good. “It’s grown organically. We’ve not spent lots of money on marketing but our customers… Well, we always call consultancies when they join and when they renew and they always say we’re doing a good job, that we always find what they want and that we provide a really good service. So, it’s been well received and people who come to us and try to find a consultancy are impressed by the quality and range of people we get, and the new contacts they get to make too.”
As for the future, Gill sees big things. “We want to become, eventually, the place self-employed people go to when they go independent. We want people to say ‘look, you really should register with Skillfair’, and we’re going to achieve that by growing our own brand and providing our services to professional bodies and trade associations in different areas. Because, a lot of these bodies need to provide similar services to their consultant members. And we think that’s a way to reach more people and help more people too.”
Anyway, Gill also has a novel way of seeing yourself and your customers, as she demonstrated in May. It’s all down to embracing one’s inner beast… “What we talked about was that as a self-employed person, you need an ‘eco-system’ around you, just as an animal does. You need security and safety, you need rest, you need food… Oh, and company. You also need training and development and I liken each of those things to the sort of things that animals need, and so I try to get people to see themselves as ‘animals’ and to also think of their clients in terms of animals.”
I saw myself as an angry badger, and everyone else at the event found themselves turning into a veritable menagerie of exotic animals. And of course, picking the wrong species can cause problems. “What you quite often find is a mismatch between people’s perception of themselves and their perceptions of their clients. So, for example, it’s no good being a ‘fluffy little pussy cat’ if you want to chase a ‘tiger’. And as a consultant, you have to adapt – you can change, but your clients can’t, so if you decided to go after a tiger, you’re going to have to equip yourself to ‘catch’ one. It’s no good sitting in your basket as a pussycat thinking the tiger will come to you. In other words, you have to think about what your client wants, needs and what their imperatives are before you set out to catch them.”
It sounds like a predator-prey relationship… Laughing, Gill points out there is more to it. “It should really be more of a mutually beneficial relationship. But the predator-prey thing just helps people to imagine it in their minds in a slightly different way, and so come up with slightly more creative solutions. If you talk about companies as they are, you quickly get bogged down in the ‘ah, but we can’t do that because…’ scenario. But if you think about it in terms of animals, that enables you to think about it differently and so deal with it differently.”
Anyway, what beast are you? “When I draw Skillfair, I always draw an octopus. Because what we do is snag things out of the air and pull them in. But we don’t actually eat them – we pass them on instead, so that makes us a little bit peculiar from that point of view. But we try to snag things out of all different kinds of places and pull them in for people. And that’s what Skillfair is.”
And any last words? “Not really – just how nice it was to be in Winchester!”