On this week’s show, Julia and Nick meet Matthew Knight to discuss freelancing, community-building and the shifting economics of self-employed work. Matthew, self-employed since the age of 15, runs several communities supporting freelancers, with particular focus on mental health, strategy professionals and those new to self-employment. The conversation explores how the freelance market has evolved from trust-based networks through commoditised digital platforms and back towards private, trust-based pools, raising questions about inclusion and access along the way.

The discussion turns to pricing and value, touching on research into how women price their work, the limitations of day-rate models, and the case for value-based pricing as alternatives to charging for time. Matthew makes the case that self-employment requires deliberately designing your work rather than following generic guidance, while acknowledging that the freedom to say no to work is a privilege not available to everyone. The episode also covers what makes communities sustainable versus audiences, and the leadership and culture-setting required to hold a community together past its first eighteen months.

Show transcript generated by Squadcast:

Julia: ​Welcome to episode 349 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Julia Bellis, Nick Drage, and our guest this week, Matthew Knight. So Nick, why don’t you kick off by telling us what you’ve been up to in the last week.

Nick: Right, as should be mentioned in the show notes and something I’ll only be discussing briefly the main event from my last week has been attending my father’s funeral with, with all the, all the, all the connotations of that. Definitely not the subject of this podcast, but gives me an excuse to say to remind people out there considering the amount of administration that’s now into my life as beneficiary and executor of the will make a will sort out power of attorney.

Make if you are while you’re making a will, make sure there’s an easily accessible list of all your service providers and their contact details and their names. Like who does the electricity, who does the gas, who provide to the internet, all that kind of thing makes such a difference and is something that thankfully my father did.

That is the end of like the public service announcement for the podcast, but that’s, it’s really made me realise that and it’s a grim subject that people put off. So hopefully listen to this. People will make a note. Yes, I will get round to doing that at some point. But that’s, that’s taken up a lot of my previous week and a lot of my, for want of a better phrase, a lot of my brain space, but moving on to hopefully happier things or this could be like a horrible coincidence.

How about you, Julia? What have you been doing the previous week?

Julia: Well, well, but before we talk about me, I was just gonna say, it sounds like a tough lesson to learn that you’ve got to deal with all of this admin when you are reeling from dealing with death as well. So thank you very much for sharing that.

Nick: Thank you.

Julia: I have, I have had a happier week, actually. It was my company conference from Monday to Wednesday. And when I joined my company, which is coming up to 10 years ago, the annual conference was a sort of large room in a classy pub with a guest speaker and some lightning talks, and now it is a three day extravaganza in county hall. And we had a scavenger hunt, which was the first time ever, which was absolutely brilliant. I haven’t done a scavenger hunt since I was about 25, and I remember really enjoying that one. And the energy levels after the first day, which was quite exhausting, were fairly low. And I, I’d say we all sort of left the venue in our teens. Most people were kind of looking forward to getting to the pub and within 20 minutes we’d all perked up massively and got incredibly competitive and it was really good fun.

And we had a time limit. We had to get to the pub by seven 30 and it was addictive. You just wanted to tick off more challenges. And my team walked into the pub, which was in a maiden lane at 7 28 and the whole ops team was sitting outside the front of the pub and cheered as we came in and totally recommend it. Brilliant.

Nick: that’s wonderful. As regulators will know, I’m an advocate for games in business context especially something like that. So the second public service announcement of this episode, I think is just play more games with your work colleagues. Well, and what a, that’s great. Thank you for sharing that.

Julia: Do you know, that is such a brilliant segue because I think Matthew is brilliant at playing games. But before we talk about that, tell us what you’ve been up to in the last week.

Matthew: You know what? I had to actually look at my calendar because my, my memory these days is shot. So I struggle to remember what I have for breakfast this, this morning. But last week was quite an IRL week. I had a number of coffees and chats with some members of a community, which I run, which was great.

And a couple of face-to-face meetings with some potential clients and also reading a whole load of new laws, which are passing through the House of Lords at the moment, which is has seemed to have become a recent nerdy, I’m not gonna say passion, interest of mine.

Julia: You know, I think this kicks in sometime in the middle of your fourth decade. I’m, I’m very what did I find? The, the house of the people where it shares that have been discussed in Parliament, how it was voted on in Parliament, and then how it was voted on, on this website. And I’ll have to, and it is very interesting actually, to see does Parliament really represent the people, or at least the people who self-select and go onto this website, the nerdy people in their forties who are very interested in this stuff.

Matthew: It is interesting. I think we know relatively little, unless you work in that sort of space, how laws come to pass, how arduous and, and lengthy the process is, and who is ultimately involved in informing how they are written, what they include, what they exclude, who doesn’t get a say and how sometimes brilliant work hidden people in hidden departments and, and rooms in Westminster and otherwise how brilliant and hardworking they are. And it’s only at the last minute that actually some of that work gets thrown out or ripped up and, and how frustrating it must be for many people work in that, that part of things, but I’m finding it. Yeah, I’m I’m very honoured that you said my mid forties. I’m definitely approaching my late forties, but yeah, it has become a recent nerdy interest.

Julia: So I was very interested, Matthew, when you mentioned meeting members of your communities for coffee frequent host of this podcast, Matt Ballantine, is known for his coffee chats and meeting people for coffee. And I just wondered if you could tell us a bit more about that and how that came to be a feature your community.

Matthew: Which part? Coffee community meeting, there’s, there’s lots of things there. I, I run a number of community projects supporting fellow freelancers. I’ve been self-employed since I was 15, which is two or three years now. and for the last 10 years or so, I’ve run a number of projects supporting fellow freelancers.

A large one focuses on the mental health of the self-employed, so our unique experiences, the gaps and challenges in support that we face and the influences on our wellbeing. I run another one, which is primarily for strategy individ individuals, so people who work in marketing, brand and innovation and digital. Another space purely for the self-employed or on a another community for, for those who are just starting out as freelancing. And the majority of these spaces are digital mostly because it’s a lot easier to have conversations with people who are all over the world, you know, distributed across the country if you’re in a Slack channel on a, on a kind of WhatsApp group. But I have made myself a, a commitment this year to get out of the house more often. And.

Julia: about mental health. I think that’s really important, isn’t it?

Matthew: It’s crucial, absolutely crucial. Not just the vitamin D but actually seeing other people as well. And I’ve been actively trying to see at least one person from our various communities a week, and it’s been wonderful.

We had a lovely walk and talk with, with a guy called Rob who runs a another community. And I sat down with another member of our community to chat about the work that he’s doing at the moment. And if nothing else, it is lovely to just have a bit of a nata, which is an, an output. You’re not having to think about what the client needs or, you know, there doesn’t need to be an agenda or there doesn’t need to be kind of an action point. Just have a bit of space where actually you can just be yourself and have an open, rambling, tangential conversation for a little while.

Julia: So I had so many questions from your that first, that first intro. Can you tell us, am I allowed to ask, how did you come to be self-employed at 15 is that even possible now? Can.

Matthew: How did I become self-employed? I taught myself how to code when I was 14, a very, very earliest days of the web. And I started writing letters to EMI records and the BB, C and said, Hey, I’ve learned this thing called the web. Can I do for you? rather leveraging child labour laws.

A number of companies said, yes, of course. So cut my teeth in the earliest days. Building websites for people. And yeah.

Julia: me of that Kaitlyn Moran story. You know, the columnist on the Times she turned up at NME wearing a top hat and a velvet jacket or something,

Matthew: Yep.

Julia: herself a job as a columnist

Matthew: I, I didn’t turn up physically. I faxed them,

Julia: Yeah.

Matthew: which is obviously, you know, I, I wish a fax machine would come back. I do love the tangibility of it. But yeah, back then you could just I, I seem to remember telling people the story. This is probably not at all qualifiable, but I was probably one of only 30 or 40 people in the UK who knew what HTML was at the time. because I would just lock myself in my bedroom and teach myself these things. And I guess the difference was that I just went out there and told people I was better at it than probably I was. But you know, if you can deliver a bit of HTML and it worked and it did. So yeah, from 15 onwards I’ve never really kind of looked back, moved through various different types of roles from technology into innovation, into creativity, into strategy. And it’s probably in my blood. ’cause my dad was a freelance journalist. He worked for the BBC for many years. So growing up I never knew any other way of working. That was, that was his way of working. You know, journalism is still kind of primarily self-employed. but fast forward to today and yeah, have, have been self-employed in lots of different forms and kind of ways. But still doing it for.

Julia: So after that, like portfolio of careers, you know, coding, design strategy, et cetera, it sounded to me like you spend a decent chunk of your time on your communities now.

Matthew: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the thing that really motivates me and, and I keep returning to, I have a very short attention span. I get distracted and bimble off onto other things very, very quickly. But this, this area of work around supporting freelancers in, in identifying and trying to close the gaps in where freelancers have support is something that I’ve, I can’t leave.

I’ve tried a couple of times and I, and I keep coming back to it selfishly because I need a community of people around me. I need that support. You know, I need to understand these things about running a business, and if I can’t find the information, I go and try and find it and then share it with others. But also because we are seeing more and more people step into self-employment now, either through choice or because they’ve been pushed into it or found themselves through things like redundancy, or perhaps they’re a, they’re a carer, or perhaps they’re neurodivergent, you know, lots of reasons why people are in self-employment and in, in lots of ways, I think it’s getting harder and harder to find really good, useful support and resources out there.

Julia: Right. harder and harder to find the resources, and that’s where you step in and fill in that gap. What about the opportunities for freelancers? What’s your take on the trajectory of where they’re going?

Matthew: Very good question. I think it depends on which sector you are in, because to say freelancer is like to say, woman, you know, there’s, there’s no one definition of what this means. It really depends on so many different contexts. It’s a, a best, it’s a diaspora. certain sectors like film and tv for instance, the majority of the workforce is self-employed, freelance, you know, kind of 70% plus. In the creative industries, it’s around 30, 35%, which is kind of two or three times higher than the, the national average of self-employment. And in those sectors where it is a dominant model, then there’s a lot more competition. And more competition means that it has an impact on day rates. Your ability to find the work, I would say lots of it is about who, you know, what not what rather than what, you know.

So it’s a lot of kind of friends introducing and making recommendations. There’s lots of kind of networking that’s, that’s required. So it can be incredibly hard to break into and, and do effectively. And I think in the next couple of years, there’s a, there’s a brilliant theory by this guy called rich who runs Gigged which is a kind of online fluid kind of talent platform. And he has this, this idea that the, the workforce is gonna be 40, 40, 20, 40% perm, fluid, contracting, freelance, whatever you wanna call it, and 20% AgTech. And whatever you think the numbers are going to be, I think the model is absolutely right that we will have these hybrid teams. And in my industry, in the kind of creative sector, we already seeing the numbers of perm headcounts, reducing associates being brought in to build that network. as a result, I think more and more people are being pushed into self-employment and it’s creating a, a, a noisy marketplace. And I don’t think the system has caught up with how you find people, how you bring them in, how you engage and retain them, or how those individuals are supported when it comes to stuff like mental health or pensions or health insurance or education and training.

There’s a whole load of systemic design gaps, which are just haven’t been resolved yet. And I think we really need to move faster on, on that side of things.

Julia: Do you know, this is so interesting because about five years ago I was doing a piece of work and I wish I’d spoken to you then. Looking specifically at film crews and how they worked and they did all their interactions and all their job opportunities came via WhatsApp. So it was in Incre it was pretty much a hundred percent who you knew and who you’d, and we were looking at ways to sort of democratise that and make it more accessible to people knew.

Matthew: I think it’s a really interesting journey that we’ve been on in how you find people to build your team. Let’s go back a hundred years because some industries have been like this. You know, the Hollywood model is over a century old. It was all about trusts. We didn’t have WhatsApp, but it was, it was all about who you knew, who you’d worked with previously, recommendations, word of mouth.

It was all built upon trust. So incredibly hard to get into if you didn’t know somebody, you know, could have been a boys club in a lot of sectors. And, you know, we see the kind of equity gaps still in many industries. As a result of that, came along and I think changed that radically. So if you didn’t know somebody network previously, you would’ve gone to a recruit and they had a network, but it was still that kind of in club. And then platforms like Uno, Juno, and, and online systems where actually they had a marketplace, you know, big volume of freelancers uploaded a profile, and then clients could find those individuals through search and kind of taxonomy as opposed to who they knew. Created arguably the democratisation of that industry that, oh, okay, now I can, I can stand up there.

If I’ve got a good profile, somebody can find me. I think what actually happened was a sort of ification of talent where actually, if you’ve got a thousand people, you can just swipe, swipe, swipe, hire somebody, bring them into the project. You don’t need to look after them well, or treat them fairly because the next time you can just swipe, swipe, swipe, and find the next person again. What we’re seeing now though, is again.

Julia: trust model.

Matthew: to the trust all about speed and commodity. Yeah. And what’s happened now is we’re swinging back to trust again. So rather than these big open platforms, we are shifting back to private pools where an organisation has its trusted people who it knows who it’s worked with before. And again, getting into those pools is incredibly hard. And it yeah, begs lots of questions around things like inclusion and kind of diversity of, of talent and background and things like pay gaps. There’s a whole load of real issues around if you’ve got a small pool, what does that mean? Even things like price, fist think and, and kind of cartels and, you know, those sorts of things are, are issues which some organisations have been slapped with.

Some trade bodies have been told that they can’t give their members pricing guidance because that could be collusion really interesting. But yeah, we’ve, we’ve swung back to trust, which is a good thing, but we haven’t fixed for inclusivity.

Julia: It brings a, a different set of problems, doesn’t it? it’s interesting you talk about wage gaps

because I was, I, my sort of first 10 years of my career I was a PERM employee then I was freelance. I was an associate with EE for six or seven years and always been rubbish as a permie at asking for a pay rise as a freelancer, found it so much easier

Matthew: Did you? That’s interesting.

Julia: about day rates. I felt like I was more distanced from the work or something like that.

Matthew: That is interesting. I think.

Julia: not common or.

Matthew: I think the, the, I think the English are uniquely awkward when it comes to talking about money, right?

Julia: Yeah.

Matthew: and there is a real lack of transparency around things like day rates and how much you should be charging. what is super interesting is there was a piece of research that came out year by the Wilder Collective who looked at women and pricing how they found this theme of internalised misogyny through how they price, and.

Julia: As in they were routinely paying women less than they’re paying men for the same job.

Matthew: No, as in women were routinely undercharging

Julia: Oh.

Matthew: and reducing what they would be charging for others because they felt perhaps they weren’t good enough or that they’re, that this certain level was a certain kind of value or others seemed to be positioned as better themselves. So there were pegging and comparing themselves. So I think the pricing challenge is, is interesting, is in that we hold ourselves back as much as the market does a lot of times. but then you also have kind of supply and demand kind of dynamics. So if there’s a hundred people in a room, there’s a bit of a race to the bottom, and how do you tackle that things?

But interesting that you say that you found it easier when you’re self-employed. A lot of freelancers don’t get an annual performance review don’t have a promotion path. And it falls upon us to say, oh, actually I need to make sure I’m upping my rates next year, or kind of factoring in cost of living allowance.

So there are some really great data sources actually, like major players and Uno, Juno, do annual research in the creative industries on, on what people are charging. Major players did a brilliant piece of work this year to look at pay differences around things like ethnicity and gender. And there is some surprising outcomes there that sometimes it is higher than, than it would be in employment comparatively in terms of the gaps. yeah, I think it’s really variable. There’s no, there’s no kind of one common issue. I think the, the interesting thing at the moment is day rates versus value pricing. And how or whether the, you know, kind of industry starts shifting away from charging for time because what does time mean anymore when you can get AI to do a job for you in, in 30 minutes is time a good proxy for value? So I, I think we’ll start to see even that shifting as well.

Yeah, that’s very interesting, isn’t it? And I can imagine there’s a even greater hurdle in the mind of freelancers to say something like, I can do some work that’s going to increase your profit margins by N 0.3%. Therefore I need to be paid by a percentage of that. I dunno.

Yeah,

Julia: that’s.

Matthew: it’s, there are, there are indices that work like that. You know, kind of sales commission based or kind of uplift based. So I think that’s one of the most exciting things about employment at work at the moment, is that bets are off. You know, the, there is no new wand, new model. In the future, there are gonna be so many different ways of how we work, how we define work, how we define relationships in work, how those contracts have factored, how pricing is factored. and right now I think we’re in a position where you can almost design how you want to work, how you want those engagements to work and go, well, this is, this is our model, this is how we do it and experiment. Because, know, if you’re not experimenting and trying things out right now, there is no better time or necessary time to be trying new things.

Julia: So is that the sort of conversation that you have with one of your freelancers in your community? Because it sounded incredibly empowering actually, to invite someone to set their boundaries and think about the ideal way that they’d like to

Nick: Can I just jump in? Just jump in as a freelancer, especially a, a freelancer who hasn’t marketed or defined himself as well as he should have, so I’m like, what I’m worth depends on context and even what does that, that was what, thankfully this is audio only, but otherwise, you know, I’m like nodding and smiling along to this because on the one hand that’s petrifying as in like, rather than aiming for like a standard day rate or whatever, it’s what could I be worth?

But also there’s so many ideas off the, off the back of that, for example, like charging by time to me doesn’t make sense in all sorts of ways. So like if I, so if I work twice as slowly and take twice as long, you’ll pay me twice as much. And even

Matthew: Yeah.

Nick: even if I won’t ethically do that, like

Matthew: Yeah, it

Nick: yeah, I like I that my sort of mindset will be if I, if I do this quickly, I’m actually giving myself less money and therefore looking maybe like an idiot in front of someone who’s paying me and all the issues around that.

Whereas as you say, things like value-based pricing feels huge, but also just how would you define value between you and a customer? Also going back to your I relate your film industry analogies, but of course the film industry, maybe I have to say allegedly, allegedly is notorious for we will pay actors so many percentage points of the profit that the movie makes and then one half of the company pays the other half of the company, $400 million for marketing and oh, this billion dollar movie didn’t actually technically make a profit, so we won’t give you any extra money.

Do you think that’s something freelance that’s sort of part, not wishing to bring down your great ideas, but is that part of the new exciting world freelancers have got to look forward to is, is contracts being figured out on the fly and an opportunity for their hiring organisations to be more and more deceptive or malicious in the way contracts are formed?

Matthew: I think there’s a difference between experimenting and trying new things out and trying to figure it out on every single project. And this is one of the things which we try and encourage all of the people that I work with, is to look at what your own needs and preferences and motivations are and what your own boundaries are and how you work best sets and baselines.

And that covers things like, you know, what hours do you work as much as how much do you need to make different people might prefer just the idea of you pay for my time, I do eight hours and then I’ll leave and I can switch off. And that’s absolutely fine. Where somebody else might want to be in there for an hour and charge a hundred thousand pounds for it because they’ve got 30 plus years of experience that, you know, the old adage of I know exactly where to hit the hammer. There is no one size that fits everybody. And this is one of the things that I get really frustrated with a lot of guidance from gurus and experts is, is the presenting the model as if this is the only way that it works. This is what you must or should do. And the reality is that we need to take more active design over how we want to

Nick: Yeah.

Matthew: That also has to factor in. The reality is it isn’t just you, you are working with others, you’re working as part of a team or with a client. So it’s always gonna be a bit, a bit of a Nokia negotiation. Where I think it needs to change right now though, is that all of those bets are off. And if you are just using the same model that everybody else does, if you are not open to going into a conversation that does talk about perhaps having some skin in the game or equity or a, a kind of a risk reward model, then you are not gonna be differentiated.

And it is only a kind of commoditized race to the bottom. So I think people who are building businesses that are not just time for cash, but that they are creating value, they’re building those relationships and doing it in a really interesting way that is a, is a kind of peer to peer partnership model as opposed to a kind of supply demand model. I think those are the ones who grow and develop and do it more sustainably. you aren’t just the uber kind of model of is there a ride or not.

Nick: That’s sorry. I mean, just that’s so inspiring from a work design point of view and a life design point of view without, like, there are bits that hap that won’t make the edit or we’ve discussed when there’s not been recording about side paths we won’t discuss in this podcast. And to jump on one of my favourite hobby horses for like 20 seconds is just the as as we discussed before we started recording.

It’s like the, the, we’ve always done it that way, kind of thinking with regard to work and working hours and working relationships. And also I’ve been hearing for years about how everything’s going to change and been waiting. But considering your experience in this area, it really does feel that it is about time where people can redesign the way they earn money rather than either, as you say, slavishly, following a single guru and wondering why it doesn’t work.

Or just doing standard five days a week, nine to five, I pay you for I am paid for spending so much time either thinking about this or appearing to think about this. Whereas there’s, there’s so much more that we’re all capable of.

Matthew: I think what you lose when you step out of employment is structure. And when you’re in employment, you are given that structure, you know, working hours. A team rules, processes that has positives, like it also comes with support and development and regularity of salary. But it comes with constraints as well.

And that’s ultimately the trade off. When you step into self-employment, you have no structure, you have no systems, and you’ve got two routes. You can either step into that and those systems are imposed upon you by your clients. You follow their contracting processes by the market, by following their date rates and systems. you can take consideration and say, well, what do I want to do? How do I want to work and design how you work? Just because you want it to work in a certain way doesn’t mean that that is going to happen. There’s no amount of manifestation that is going to suddenly kind of magically make all of these jobs pop out of the work.

So it is always a negotiation. It is always a kind of overlap between those two things. ultimately we have the ability to say no to those systems which you are not willing to work within. And you can say yes to those ones, which you want to move forward with. able to say no is a massive position of privilege because not everybody can afford to

Nick: Yeah, absolutely.

Matthew: is, that is a reality of work. And I think that is one of my frustrations with the, the narrative around freelancing and freedom because it is only freedom if you have, if you can afford to turn down work until it’s something that you want to do. And that is not true for the majority of people. But even within that, you can set your own boundaries in terms of working practises and habits and what baseline you are not willing to go below and how you engage with those clients and customers.

There’s a huge amount of control and autonomy even within that because the law requires it of you for tax reasons in a lot of instances. And if you don’t do that, that’s when it, that’s when you get into problems. That’s when you have mental health challenges. That’s when kind of your day rates do slip down.

So it is on our plate to do that. And if you don’t grab it and design, then that’s when it falls into being unsustainable leads to things like burnout or your, your day rates slide backwards.

Julia: When I was a freelancer, I liked the clarity of that choice. do I believe in this piece of work enough to think can contribute to its success for whatever the proposed day rate is. And I had a mortgage to pay, you

Matthew: Yeah.

Julia: or, or am I willing to take the risk? And, and that was very helpful and I think that led to good behaviours on my part.

I was very invested in the piece of work a success.

Matthew: Yeah, I think there’s a huge amount of pride in the majority of self-employed folk that I know are not doing it ’cause of the myth of like pulling a fast one from a tax perspective or wanting to work four hours a week from a beach somewhere, income or whatever that means, they work in this way for those who have chosen to do it because they’re really passionate about their craft and they want to focus on their craft. And perhaps they were frustrated in the previous role ’cause of the politics and all the nonsense that went with it and they just want to get back to doing what they’re brilliant at. The irony that you don’t just have one boss anymore. You have five or six bosses because you’ve got all the different clients that you’re working with. So, and actually, you know, you’ve got so many other things that you probably didn’t do before, like dealing with contracts and chasing late payments and all that kind of the, the, the kind of nonsense around the, the kind of core craft. But I, I still believe that that core passion and motivation shines through the majority of people that I know in their work and they want to do a good job. is a, an emotional driver. The commercial driver is that if they don’t do a good job, they’re not gonna get rehired. So they will also put in that work to make sure that it goes into their portfolio, that they get the next gig from that same client, that their reputation is maintained. that causes some tensions a lot of time because people will self-employed would generally put in more hours on average per day than an employee. they’re more effective and productive. But they will take far less time off. They take off less sick time ’cause they work through ’cause we don’t have sick pay. so there are also these risks which come with unsustainably working in that way. I, I think the motivation and the drive to do a good job comes from both the kind of head, heart, and wallet.

Julia: I have been wanting to ask you, Matthew, if you can share some tips on how to build and manage and maintain these communities. ’cause I think it is a very specific skill that needs thought and effort. And I’ve attempted to do things like this, I feel like my tens have been a bit amateur and maybe this is my chance to learn from a pro.

Matthew: Do you think it went wrong, Julia?

Julia: Well, when you talked about online interactions, I think we had insufficient face-to-face meetups and creating space for that. Like you said, nata interactions that are not focused on achieving an outcome,

Matthew: Interesting.

Julia: which I really enjoy, but I think I could be better at creating space for them.

Nick: Can I, I’m gonna rudely jump in before the guest, but just, I’ve done a lot of thinking about communities recently, and I, I realise how rude this is, but as the third public service announcement of the episode is, is communities having a point which is by the way, is a member of, at least a couple of Matthews communities, is that reason to exist rather than you just get people together and you think, well, the magic will happen is that leadership is absolutely key.

I realise, I realise quite how rude that was, and I hope I haven’t stolen your thunder. Give us more detail on that, please, Matthew, on how to do that.

Matthew: not, not rude at all. And actually is a perfect example of what a good community looks like, that it is not the Matthew Knight community. My definition of of communities, because I think it’s an overused and abused word in recent years, and, and for lots of people, they actually mean audience. And an audience is top down.

It’s somebody at the, the top of the pyramid speaking to the masses. Whereas a community is horizontal. It’s about peers supporting each other and that any point anyone can raise their hand and spark an initiative or make a suggestion or start a conversation or respond to others, that doesn’t mean it’s lawless.

And I think that’s where good community care and kind of curation is where those rules are held by the person who found founded it or a kind of small group of people who, who set the behaviours and the tone and the rules of the space. And that when you enter that space, you understand what those rules and morays are and you have social contracting.

And I think to your point, Nick. It is not necessarily about, it has a purpose, but it, you are really clear on what happens in that space and those, that

Nick: Yeah.

Matthew: rules, even if the purpose of that space is to talk about absolutely nothing whatsoever and just bimble on that is fine. Providing that you want to stand, this is the space to do that. And in another community it might be, there is no bin link here. It is only about networking and selling and whatever it might be. the, the communities of, of which I am a member rather than a host, there is always that really understanding of what the rules and the culture of that space is. Those are all established communities I think starting a community is incredibly hard. ’cause you have this spike of excitement when you kind of go, Hey, come over here. So what’s happening? Oid kind of new thing. And people rush in and then maintaining that energy to keep people saying how they’re doing, checking in that organic kind of bottom up engagement that can take 18 months, two years to get to the point where then it’s everybody else leading those conversations as opposed to the person who’s created it. And that is a lot of energy to be holding a space for people to be encouraging, to be supporting, to kind of nudge the energy continually. And I think that’s why a lot of them really struggle after that kind of first, you know, 18, 18 months. Because if the reward isn’t there immediately for the person who wants something out of it, like, oh, but I wanna make some cash out of it, or I want to be seen as a, you know, kind of a thought leader or something, you know, what they’re trying to take out of the community, it doesn’t necessarily work.

Well. I, none of the communities which I’ve started, have ever had a clear purpose when they started. They’ve always been spaces, serendipitous places where I’ve invited people in. what has always been true is within maybe six months of those people being there, I’ve then said, right now I understand why we are here.

The people who have stuck around, the people who are continuing to talk, this is what we want to focus on. And then you can start to establish that kind of culture and it grows. But it, it’s hard work. It’s a full-time job, I think in a, in a lot of instances.

Julia: There. Do you think those rules and morays and culture is something that emerges? It’s not something that you can set.

Matthew: I think that culture is culture. You know, any organisational culture project where they’re like, oh, we, we need to define our culture. You don’t define a culture, you articulate it, then you can set what you want it to be and nudge it in the direction of that. But, but an organisational culture is what it is. when you are managing a community, your role there is, if there are things which are against the culture which you want to have in place, you try and nip the negative behaviours in the bud. You very clearly call them out, say, oh, this is not how we behave here, or This is why we prefer you set habits and cadences and you kind of, you lead by example as much as possible and then others follow. and you will always have people who don’t follow and want to work in a different way. And sometimes you get, get conflicts in that situation and you have to make a decision like, do I wanna shut those other kinds of behaviours down or are we a space that supports subcultures within that space? So it’s a constant kind of navigating that kind of grey line of, of where you do want to draw black and white boundaries and things and where you want to allow others to kind of shape it. And it really varies. Like some communities I know like really, really locked down in terms of what they do want and will accept and others are completely open and they, they’re very different vibes. And I like being in different types of communities for different fields. So I don’t think there’s any one answer. The, the sustainability of a community really though is like whether it passes that tipping point and it isn’t just a single person having to maintain the energy all the time and that the body of people are, are giving as much as they are taking.

Julia: Do you think you’ve got better with practise at holding that space while everyone’s still working out what’s going on?

Matthew: I think I, in some ways, I think I’ve got worse at it because feel like I overthink when I see things now and I can almost extrapolate, well, if this goes in that direction, what does that mean? So maybe sometimes I over of correct for things, especially in those early days. Yeah, exactly. And I think I’m, I’m a big fan of, of just letting things unfold and, and see what happens.

In a lot of ways it’s like being a parent, and I know this is ridiculous analogy, but I think, you know, sometimes you need to let the toddler fall over and and realise that if they pick up the knife and stab the sister, that’s not gonna end well. but you’ve gotta work out where that line is. And, and if you don’t allow some of those kind of messy middle bits to happen then you’re gonna shut down a whole load of amazing things that could happen. but as you know, parenting is a constant state of anxiety and you are never happy and they won’t be happy with you until they leave home and come back in their thirties. so perhaps, yeah, I dunno. Ask me again In another 30 years.

Julia: ​Brilliant lessons shared. Matthew and I will watch this space in 30 years time and find out what you’ve learned in the next 30 years. However, from 30 years in the future to the next seven days in the future. What are you all up to next week? And I’ll start with you, Nick.

Nick: Right. So I, I mean, back to how I started, sort of death administration and working through all that as you, and there’s a may, maybe, maybe there’s an episode in that in some point. So partly working through that, partly having taken a couple of weeks, sort of downtime, get in touch with a lot more people, of course.

And just as I sort of shout out to everyone else who will be going through this annually, ’cause Father’s Day is coming up with those scheduled reminders of people no longer here that affect so many of us going through that. But also, I mean, just getting on with lots of interesting new things. I’ve just been looking at my calendar.

I’ve seen how many people I’m catching up with, how many conversations I’m having. So looking forward to that actually is maybe is my main thing next week as well as, you know, all the admin that needs doing. How about you, Julia?

Matthew: Well, with my work at the moment, I’m doing this sort of round robin of meetings in loads of different offices around London. And recently I was in an office very, very close to Dr. Johnson’s house and that has been on my to-do list to visit ever since I moved to London in the year 2000. and we finished the meeting at four and Dr.

Johnson’s house shut at five. So I zoomed in and had a brilliant hour there. The guy on the desk was telling me how the best experience of his life ever was when they had a string quartet playing in the house and it’s all made of wood. it was like being inside a wooden musical instrument ’cause the sound was reverberating around the wood and I was really

Nick: Wow.

Julia: I had missed this. then internet surfaced this advert to me for baroque string quartet at Dennis Eva’s house, which is the house of a Hugin o weaver in East London, which has also been on my London to-do list forever, and I’ve never got around to it. So I booked tickets for that and we are going to that next weekend. So, I’m really excited about hearing some baroque music inside a wooden box.

Nick: Excellent.

Julia: I think that is my highlight of the week coming up. What about you, Matthew?

Matthew: Well, my daughter starts her mock GCSE exams this week.

Julia: Oh.

Matthew: and that’s about a week and a half, two weeks of, intensity for her. It is definitely reminding me that if you were to sat me down and do A-G-C-S-E of any subject, I would fail it. All things have changed. All maths have changed, all geography has changed.

I dunno what the teaching them now, but I dunno any of it. So I think the next week will mostly be trying to make sure that she is not too intensely revising until two o’clock in the morning, and then celebrating on the Friday once she has finished.

Julia: Less her. That is lovely. Yes. Good luck to all of you and I admire your aims there.