Distinction

Distinction has partnered with fintech startup Obu to build and launch the first-of-its-kind UK angel investment platform that’s been designed to empower women, tackle inequality and close the gender investment gap, for good.

Obu is on a mission to close the investment gap at scale; disrupting the financial services sector by launching an investment platform specifically designed to bring together women founders, women angels and innovative allies – and make investment happen.

This is the story of building and launching their MVP and the beginning of creating an equitable startup ecosystem that’s worth £250bn to the UK economy.

The Mission

When Obu approached Distinction to build a fintech platform, “a bit like Bumble”, to match women founders with women and ally angel investors and create a fairer investment culture, they sat up and listened.

Today in the UK, there’s a staggering inequality between men and women when it comes to raising and making investment. Women founders get just 2% of funding, Black women founders get just 0.02% of funding, and women make up just 14% of angel investors.

Not only is this broken system a huge barrier to equality which Obu is determined to break down, it’s also prohibiting the UK reaching its economic growth and sustainability potential.

And, at a macro level, the Obu angel investment platform will play a part in achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals, as what we’re seeing in the UK is replicated globally. Because when it comes to ensuring economic growth and sustainability, equality is the main driver, and empowering women to build businesses at the same rate as men is worth £250bn to the UK economy.

The Obu angel investment platform is the first of its kind and just the sort of innovative and groundbreaking project Distinction gets excited about – disrupting the status quo and serving an underserved market. This is the kind of digital product that will beat giants and make monsters.

The Goal

It was when entrepreneurs and cofounders, Sarah King and Claire Dunn, sought their first round of funding through the government’s SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) during pandemic lockdowns and the home-schooling/work struggle that they realised just how underserved women are in the UK’s male-dominated investment landscape.

And so the #OverBeingUnderFunded campaign was born which saw Obu (then named We are Radikl) successfully lobby Parliament to extend the SEIS business age limit from two to three years, which came into force in April 2023. These real-life experiences were a watershed moment for Sarah and Claire as they saw a gaping hole in the market which led them to pivot to purpose-led fintech founders.

The team’s hypothesis was that adopting an inclusive design approach would enable them to deliver what this underserved audience needed, driving their participation in financial services. They wanted to create a first-to-market, inclusively designed fintech platform that would empower women to come together, invest and be invested in.

Distinction’s mission? To get the platform to market before any competitors which meant an MVP launch date in Q2 2023, backed up by a product release roadmap adaptable to improvements and iterations learned from users’ data and insights.

Distinction’s Approach

Obu needed a trusted technical partner that could not only bring their concept to life but get their product to market quickly and then support them throughout the first 18-24 months if its lifecycle. This allowed them time to grow their business whilst considering whether to bring a product design and development team inhouse or not.

Just as Distinction had bought into their mission of closing the gender investment gap and making the startup ecosystem fairer for women, Obu bought into Distinction’s beliefs and their agile approach to digital product development.

Discovery

Aligned in their values from the get-go, Distinction and Obu started with a period of discovery in the form of three workshops to make sure requirements gathering, user and technical research and platform architecture were covered.

Distinction kicked off discovery with setting the scene with Obu’s brand vision, mission and value proposition to align the whole project team behind one north star goal. Doing so cements purpose and underpins Distinction’s belief that the project team must go all in to achieve a successful outcome.

Then it was time to look at the business’ process flow maps which were separated into the angel and entrepreneur journeys for registration and login, and the raise lifecycle.

Distinction brought all these into one end-to-end userflow diagram to bring clarity for the whole team and help map the user journey. Now it was clear what was done on and off-platform, where third party integrations were involved and what messaging via which channel the user would experience.

This in turn allowed Distinction to write the epics and user stories to prioritise and estimate what was in scope for the MVP, what could go in the backlog, and validate (or adjust) the technical recommendations given previously.

At the end of discovery, Distinction and Obu agreed the MVP scope and the must-haves for release one.

Agile and Design Thinking Approach

Moving into the build phase, Distinction adopted a phased approach that would deliver maximum value for both angels and entrepreneurs – and Obu itself. Breaking the project down into releases, starting with an MVP, means getting to market quickly with a product that meets users’ needs from the off. It also avoids a big upfront investment in features and functionality that aren’t actually needed, plus getting the product quickly in users’ hands means the product team learns directly from their feedback which influences future phases.

Distinction progressed quickly through each phase, using a customer-centric, agile development process underpinned by design thinking methodology.

Design Requirements

Right from the start, Obu knew that a product aimed at bringing equality to a manmade system needs to be designed inclusively for the women it serves.

In the UK, 86% of angel investors are men. 84% of financial advisers are men. And 94% of financial services CEOs are men. In sectors like financial services where there is a dominant male narrative, other customer groups can get overlooked.
It’s lazy design to assume products will serve women, without a genuine understanding of how their needs are different. Determined to disrupt this single-mindedness and the inequality of financial products, Obu wanted to design their platform with empathy for the women it serves.

As CEO and Cofounder, Sarah King, says,

At Obu, we flip the design question. Instead of asking ‘how might we help you fit an existing product?’, we ask ‘how might we design our product for you?’. Inclusive design means understanding an audience’s life experience, aspirations and needs. We know a woman’s experience of money and wealth is very different to a man’s – and that difference presents an exciting opportunity to serve her better.

In fact, during the first round of UAT, it became clear to Obu that parts of the onboarding experience were clunky for angels – there were too many on and off-platform handovers. Designing with women in mind is core to the angel and founder experience on this platform and not to be compromised, even when it meant pushing back the MVP launch date a little.

The original MVP scope was desktop-friendly only as that was where Obu’s audience would likely be when creating a raise as a founder or applying to be an angel investor. But as the UAT was underway and with Obu talking to more founders and angels in their community, it became apparent that the messaging function was likely to be used on mobile. It was a change that made absolute sense to accommodate so Distinction moved quickly to design a mobile-friendly UX that would be part of the MVP when it launched.

Technical & Data Capture Requirements

For the build, Distinction took a microservices (sometimes known as a composable) approach to the tech stack underpinned by a cloud architecture to support the product roadmap. Each microservice addresses a single concern such as a data search, log in function or content management function. This approach increases flexibility, makes it easier to scale up or down, makes the code base straightforward to understand, allows updates to be released independently and increases the scope for isolated testing and innovation.

A huge driver in effecting change is gathering the data to evidence the need for that change – and to understand the progress being made. Data and insights are one of the key catalysts to innovation, because knowledge brings the power to disrupt the status quo – which is exactly what trailblazing is all about.

As well as being designed to fit the needs of women, the Obu investment platform (and the collective that sits alongside it) is designed to continually collect data and insights to support its evolution and keep improving the landscape for women entrepreneurs.

Obu are signatories of the Investing in Women Code (IIWC) – which stemmed from the first Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, published in 2019 by Alison Rose, now CEO of NatWest, who’d been commissioned by the Treasury to look at the barriers to entrepreneurship that women face, and how to overcome them.

In signing the code, Obu is committed to increasing transparency in their own data on the support provided to women entrepreneurs.

The Challenges

The startup journey is a fast-paced and changeable with stretched but passionate founders hellbent on their mission for equality in the investment and entrepreneurial landscape. That passion and entrepreneurial spirit is infectious and one of the reasons why the Distinction team loves working in the startup space.

But every project has its challenges, especially in a regulated environment, and the journey to releasing an FCA-regulated investment platform isn’t a smooth one. Compliance is there to protect customers but it doesn’t always match the speed and agility needed in the startup world. Distinction and Obu learnt quickly that it was a god idea to keep a contingency budget for necessary changes to scope due to FCA regulation that were not negotiable.

Obu was also going through a complete rebrand (including name) and their original prototype was in their old name – We are Radikl – and branding. Although it wasn’t in scope for discovery, Distinction brought their prototype on brand and added new pages to reflect the userflow as it stood now. Obu would be using their prototype as part of their go-to-market strategy by showing it to founders and angels in their distribution network to drum up interest in the product. Distinction is invested in the success of Obu’s mission just as much as they are, and it felt like the right thing to do to go the extra mile.

Third party integrations can cause headaches as you’re at the mercy of vendor product roadmaps and development. When it became clear that the community tool selected was still in beta version and its messaging functionality wouldn’t work for the Obu platform, Distinction quickly put together a proof of concept for an alternative messaging service. A 48-hour turnaround time from identifying the problem to providing an alternative solution to client sign-off and implementation.

The Outcome

The journey to releasing the MVP for a ground-breaking, regulated fintech product was a bumpy one at times. Distinction was learning about the sector and customers Obu serves, and Obu were learning about software testing, epics, user stories, design systems and prototypes, there were difficult conversations to be had. But Distinction and Obu didn’t shy away from them, and together they’ve learned the best way to work together in terms of cadence and method.

The magic truly happens when both parties are aligned behind one purpose, everything is done with positive, respectful intent and true collaboration and transparency prevails.

The MVP launched on 21 June 2023, meeting its Q2 target, and with that the Obu angel investment platform is live! Challenging expectations, blazing a trail and well on the way to creating meaningful change in a gender-imbalanced sector.

The Obu x Distinction team is now working on Release Two of the platform so watch this space!

Distinction has supported Pentland Brands’ innovation team with the empowered design thinking process turning their idea into reality. They built a successful digital product and designed an exceptional experience that delights and converts.

Pentland Brands is a global fashion retailer building a family of brands for the world to love, generation after generation.

Counting household names like Speedo, Berghaus, Mitre, and Ellesse in their portfolio, Pentland’s innovation hub is constantly looking at ways to improve the consumer experience for each brand and its unique identities.

The Idea

Pentland’s innovation team was looking at new direct-to-consumer (D2C) propositions for their sportswear brands and the different ways they could service customers looking to kit out their sports teams.

The Pentland team thought that one particular idea had legs, namely a build-your-own sports kit for rugby, football, swimming, and cycling teams.

They’d identified that this needed to be a player-led design proposition – a digital platform where consumers could put together their own team’s sports kit.

They came to Distinction for external expert help in proving their concept so the Distinction design team worked in-house with Pentland’s innovation hub to make their dream a reality.

Proof of Concept

Distinction joined the innovation team to kick off the ideation phase, where the online kit-building idea – ‘Made By You’ – was explored in depth.

There were two questions to answer:

• Would a design-your-own-kit digital product be desirable for the target consumer groups?
• And would it be technically and economically viable?

To build a digital product that consumers actually want you to need a consistently user-centric approach to UX and UI which is where design thinking comes in.

More on that later as proving a digital product concept starts with asking people what they really need and think.

User Research & Insights

Gaining insights, along with deploying quantitative and qualitative research, is essential to building a successful digital product and designing an exceptional experience that delights and converts.

So, together with the Pentland innovation team, Distinction ran a number of discovery workshops with stakeholders and target user groups – the team player and the kit buyer.

Creating personas for these audiences allowed Distinction to compare the feasibility and desirability of a D2C model with a B2B (business to business) model. It also helped test the Made By You proposition in key markets for football, rugby, swimming, and cycling.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a process of creative problem-solving.

Employing design thinking means you’re combining what humans like and need with what technology can deliver in a way that makes economic sense. All digital products should be built using design thinking as it mitigates the risk of failure.

For Made By You, Distinction used a lot of tools and techniques from the design thinking toolbox:

• Design jams
• Empathy mapping
• Card sorting
• MoSCoW matrices
• Storyboarding
• Customer journey mapping
• Low fidelity wireframing
• Prototyping

The project culminated in a mid-fidelity prototype that helped Distinction and Pentland rapidly validate and refine product concepts and designs with stakeholders and user test groups.

Outcome

Employing design thinking to solve Pentland’s challenge allowed Distinction to look at how best to implement the Made By You proposition which was part of a larger program of innovation.

Their approach influenced and helped define the program’s direction for the current and future phases.

As part of an expansive business transformation, the Society & College of Radiographers (SCoR) approached Distinction with their vision to improve their members’ experience, starting with both the Society and the College’s digital presence.

SCoR is the trade union/professional body and registered charity respectively for radiographers and all non-medical members of the workforce in diagnostic imaging and radiotherapy in the UK.

It is responsible for their professional, educational, public, and workplace interests. Founded in 1920, SCoR is one of the oldest and most experienced radiography organizations in the world.

The Brief

The first phase of the organization’s digital transformation focused on its web presence which needed to match the high, professional, and modern standards they expect the sector to follow. The current website was dated and very text-heavy, challenging to navigate with the inconsistent layout and a huge number of subpages, and experienced a high bounce rate as users couldn’t find what they were looking for.

Summary

The discovery phase revealed the need for two separate websites – one for the Society and one for the College – where the content was personalized according to the user and members could use one set of login credentials to access everything their membership offered.

The project included migrating their CMS from Drupal to Kentico Xperience, developing integration with their CRM (Stratum by APT), and implementing a single sign-on (SSO) so they could integrate with their other third party platforms, i.e. extranet, events platform, shop, and e-learning.

User-Centric Discovery

Distinction starts every project with a discovery phase to really get to the heart of what users want and need. For SCoR, this involved workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather qualitative insights. Surveys were followed to gather quantitative data.

Discovery workshops were held with each team that represented the main areas of SCoR: education, practitioner, a membership success team, and sales and marketing.

Understanding their needs and internal processes allowed Distinction to map out the customer journey with a cross-departmental user flow that included every on and offline touchpoint to inform UX design.

Aligning Fragmented Stakeholders

Distinction knew from experience that aligning stakeholders is key to a project’s success, especially a complex digital transformation program for an organization that has c30,000 members, from a large national base, and across multiple medical disciplines.

In addition, the Society and College had separate identities and leadership teams so getting feedback and ensuring there was equal representation within the design and user journey was challenging. But in the end, Distinction and their client had a joined-up leadership team with a clear project outcome that helped towards SCoR’s ultimate goal of total digital transformation.

CMS migration

SCoR’s legacy CMS – Drupal – needed to be migrated to Kentico Xperience (DXP). Not only does Xperience give the SCoR marketing team a superior content editing experience, but it also has an extensive marketing functionality with features such as content personalization, email marketing, and analytics. This meant SCoR’s digital marketing strategy could be implemented and managed from one place by a distributed workforce and content governance was easy to control.

Self-Serve User Experience

The old site had limited self-service for visitors to apply for membership and for members to manage their membership online so making sure the new sites had this functionality was a big part of the vision to transform members’ digital experience.

The new site has a vastly improved interface, information architecture, navigation, and search function, so relevant content is served up consistently with members able to easily find the guidance and support they’re looking for.

Now members no longer have to log into multiple platforms (CRM, CPD, event software, payment gateway, and website) – everything they need for their profession and studies is accessible through a single sign-on.

Multiple Integrations

Giving members a seamless user experience meant a number of third-party integrations needed to be made.

Distinction’s discovery phase identified all the data points and mapped every user journey. It was time to pull everything together to give SCoR’s members the exceptional experience they deserved.

Firstly, they integrated with SCoR’s CRM so that member data could be pushed to the CRM and replicated back into the CMS via a two-way sync so members could update their accounts online and be prompted when their membership was up for renewal. As precision medicine advances, integrating technologies like clinical NGS (Next-Generation Sequencing) can further enhance diagnostics and patient care, making data accessibility even more crucial.

The claims-based authentication tool, Auth0, was integrated to give members an SSO, allowing them to access the website, CPD portal, extranet, and event management system from one set of login credentials.

For the sections of the site that needed a more customized approach than the existing Kentico Azure Search integration would allow, Distinction built a bespoke Azure search integration. And integrating World Pay as a payment gateway was required to take payments for events.

UX & UI Design

During the design research process, creation of the design concepts, and working with the branding to identify a unique visual identifier for SCoR, Distinction’s UX/UI designer was inspired to design a circle graphic.

The idea came from looking at one picture, in particular, that of a MIR machine, in which circles were identified within the machine. After playing around with this idea, a circle graphic was created that is now featured throughout the site.

Circles appear a lot throughout radiography – in the machines and scanners themselves when carrying out certain procedures (focal spots on X-rays and radiography treatment), and the joining up of governance and clinical practice is a circular approach rather than a linear one.

This cemented the circle idea and in turn, created the circle theme that you’ll see throughout the site’s UI in terms of backgrounds and icons.

Outcome

The rebuild of the SCoR sites has given the Society and College the opportunity to showcase their updated branding and modernised the look and feel of a 100-year-old institution.

With the simplified structure, users can find content more easily which has reduced bounce rates on the site.

Comparing the first half of the site launch (June-August 2021) with the second half (August-October 2021), SCoR enjoyed:

• 615.02% increase in new membership registrations
• 482.46% increase in conversion rates
• Almost parallel conversion rates on mobile (1.4%) and desktop (1.61%) devices, meaning the site’s well optimized for both
• 31.17% increase in overall website visitors
• 53.17% increase in mobile visitors
• 74.18% increase in organic search traffic (finding the site more easily)

Phase one of the digital transformation met its goal of improving member experience and Distinction continues to work with SCoR to deliver their change program.

The Building Societies Association (BSA) approached Distinction with three overriding business goals: member engagement, member retention, and cost reduction.

As the voice of all 43 UK building societies and a number of credit unions, BSA provides bespoke information to support their members in running their business to the best of their ability and in line with current regulatory guidelines.

As mutual organizations, building societies are owned by their customers, which means they operate in the interests of their members and their local communities, rather than being driven by the pressure of external stakeholders.

The Brief

With a 200-year-old legacy of looking after savings and providing mortgages, building societies consistently put the needs of their customers first and it’s a mission that BSA helps their members fiercely protect.

Working on behalf of a wide range of audiences including the UK Government, UK and EU parliaments, regulators, the media, and the general public, BSA’s website is their most valuable resource.

They approached Distinction with their business objectives: to improve communication with their members, create an authoritative information source, create an excellent CMS author experience, and promote the sector.

The Strategy

Using their active strategy approach, Distinction quickly identified stakeholder needs and those of the end-users. Using this insight, they created an industry-leading digital presence for BSA to better engage with members, provide additional value, reduce ongoing service costs, and provide a roadmap for continual digital innovation.

The Action
Distinction’s early work with BSA focused on its key business goals.

Member Engagement: Making it easier to register, log in, and use the website was paramount. Giving BSA the ability to communicate more effectively via integrated email marketing and role-based personalization that pulled members to the website on a regular basis.

Member Retention: Adding beneficial and effective resources to the website – that members actually wanted – was vital in adding value to the member experience and key to BSA’s retention rates.

Cost Reduction: Replacing BSA’s previous out-of-date website, which was costly to maintain and difficult to use, meant efficiencies in both time and technology budget.

Outcome

There were many incremental improvements to the website that have led to bigger changes for BSA, the most notable of which were: 9.5% increase in session duration, 47% increase in event registration, 12% increase in page speed, 7.5% increase in registered online users.

Distinction is creating a new, dynamic and immersive website that would delight both children and adults alike took a voyage of discovery on how 3 to 8 year-olds engage with stories, games, even technology itself.

Improving the CX didn’t just delight the site visitors, it also produced brilliant results too, including an increase of over 35,000 average monthly visitors, with over 70% of new visits from over 160 countries.

Happily Lost in the Deep Dark Woods

A global brand like ‘The Gruffalo’ and its series of books has many owners. First and foremost, there’s its visionary creator, author Julia Donaldson. Then there’s the books’ illustrator, Axel Scheffler, who has brought a captivating cast of characters to magical life. Then there’s the books’ publishers – Pan Macmillan – the people who approached Distinction with a simple goal: to provide an engaging global online presence for the Gruffalo ahead of the book’s 15th anniversary.

Addressing the Core Audience

But the truth is, more than anything, that the Gruffalo belongs to its readers, the children whose imaginations continue to be fired and who remain enduringly attracted to the enchanting woodland beast.

So while Pan Macmillan’s challenge was clear – in recognizing the existing website was lagging behind every other aspect of merchandise, from toys to TV to pop-up events –the solution was equally clear to Distinction. This was to turn to the children and learn what they wanted from a new Gruffalo website.

Finding the Right Path

So Distinction put themselves in front of the primary target audience – 3 to 8 year-olds – and sat back and learned, and learned, and learned.

They discovered that given the right stimulus, they could lose themselves in a fantasy world. Interestingly, they found children to be much more capable of playing on digital devices than even their parents knew. Most of all, they learned that even young children could be pretty autonomous, and capable of occupying themselves for ten minutes or more, absorbed in stimulating activity.

Creating an Immersive World

To answer the children’s wishes, Distinction created a beautifully immersive world called ‘The Deep Dark Wood’. Here, children were free to explore, play, and do anything they wanted. Filling the screen, and rich with child-friendly games and activities, here their aim of giving children plenty to do, plenty to read, plenty to learn, plenty to enjoy was brought to vivid life.

Beautifully illustrated by their friends at Aardman Animation, this mobile-first online experience also featured stories and singalongs with author Julia Donaldson.

Answering the Secondary Audience

Of course, whereas children are looking for fun, the adult’s agenda is slightly different. This meant including teaching materials, opportunities to buy Gruffalo books, toys, and merchandise, and clear signals for activities that would be sure to keep kids busy and happy.

Without disrupting the immersive world, the children are busily enjoying, Distinction included a host of downloadable activity sheets, pictures to color, and stories to read. And because they always aimed to promote deeper engagement, they made certain that a two-way path made it easy and fun to enter competitions, win prizes, share photos, and upload content.

Straddling Many Different Fences

Naturally, there were obstacles along the way. With so many different stakeholders having investment in the Gruffalo brand it meant meeting all kinds of different agendas. Not having easy or regular access to the author and illustrator meant the decision line was principally through the publisher.

But, as Distinction has experienced time and again, by earning trust as the impartial and independent project leader, and by evidencing the need to put the audience first, the Distinction team was freed to act quickly and decisively on delivering a website that to this day remains a user-centric joy.

Delighting in Unexpected Ways

It’s a source of great pride to them that they were able to delight the children and the parents and, ultimately, Julia Donaldson, who was thrilled with the results when they first revealed the new website.

In doing so, Distinction revealed a few extra tricks up their sleeves. Another delight was in the Easter eggs they dotted through the site. Keeping quiet about the hidden events they’d secretly built into the site, they revealed themselves as they should…to the unexpected pleasure of unsuspecting witnesses. The ant crawling across the screen mid-meeting is just one example.

Delivering an Engaging World, Across the World

Distinction built the site using HTML5 and JavaScript to ensure it works across all major platforms and devices. The site is also easy to edit and update with new events, activities, and content. And it’s hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud to make sure it can cope with spikes in traffic following a series of successful marketing and TV campaigns.

First created in 2008, it’s rewarding to see that despite regular updates, the website today remains the same as the one they first launched. It’s testimony to the quality of their initial hard work and pleasing for Pan Macmillan who have not had to invest majorly in the site since its arrival on the world stage.

Outcome

The results were as gratifying as they were impressive. The site received an increase of over 35,000 average monthly users and 70% of new visits were from over 160 countries. An average page load time of fewer than two seconds was achieved. With 10% of traffic spending over 10 minutes on the site each time visitors visited.

As Distinction had already improved its website, the world’s largest independent wholesale audiobook retailer, Recorded Books, asked them to recruit, onboard, and upskill its own internal team to optimize the new platform.

Having this new dedicated in-house team not only saved money but also gave the retailer constant access to the complete technical resource required to continue selling books across the world.

Upskilling Internal Teams to Create an Autonomous Resource

The adage goes:

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.

For Recorded Books, it’s an entirely relevant way to describe Distinction’s role in the creation of its own internal digital team.

As the largest independent wholesale audiobook retailer in the world, Recorded Books sells a vast range of audiobooks, eBooks, eMagazines, movies, learning programs, and more into libraries, military bases, private libraries across the world, as well as to leading B2C retailers such as Audible and audiobooks.com.

Reducing Costs, Increasing Access

Being a retailer, reducing costs wherever possible has a massive impact on Recorded Books’ bottom-line. And being a largely online business means Recorded Books’ technology platforms need to be constantly managed, maintained, and optimized.

The problem was twofold. First, paying digital agencies for ongoing technical support was simply costing too much. The second was the issue of availability. The feeling was that a skilled internal digital team would provide the constant, readily available, and agile technical support the business really needed, minute by minute, hour by hour.

Replacing Themselves with Something Sustainable

It was a little odd to be handed this brief because Distinction was essentially being charged with replacing themselves. But you can never do too much for a good client, so they began by establishing a structure for the new internal team, developing the new processes and training programs that would deliver the knowledge and skills to maintain and improve the Recorded Books platform in the future.

Recruiting, Onboarding and Training

From the outset, it was a challenge working across different time zones from the UK to the US. A few well-timed trips across the Atlantic and lots of carefully planned online workshops enabled them to engage with prospects and new recruits in a natural and easy manner. But this was no quick and easy fix. Recruiting, onboarding and upskilling the internal digital team proved to be a two-year-long process. And during all that time, at the back of their minds was the fact that this was essentially a long goodbye.

Engaging Everyone All the Time

Distinction learned valuable lessons along the way. Recognizing the value of sharing the more exciting tasks required in maintaining the platform – focusing on the intellectual aspects like R&D and strategy, rather than just the donkey work – they engaged people early. By sharing all the tasks across the new internal team, both dull and interesting, Distinction helped improve work satisfaction and reduced staff turnover.

Saying Goodbye Happily

Distinction found that rather than struggling to stay motivated, they found a strange sort of pride instead. Seeing the increasing number of individuals successfully bedding into the new internal team was a source of great satisfaction. A valuable lesson they took from this project is one of trust. It’s never good when one business relies too much on another and they discovered it’s natural to say goodbye sometimes.

Building Trust for the Future

Where most client/agency relationships end in what amounts to a divorce, this particular relationship ended when both parties were still happy and successfully working together. And the outcome of this lesson? Distinction provides consultancy services to Recorded Books. Thanks to the trust they built in their approach to what was essentially replacing themselves with something that would work better for Recorded Books, we’re still in the frame for future big projects. It became very much a case of “Thanks for all your hard work, goodbye, we’ll speak again soon.”

Delivering Lasting Benefits

As well as a positive future with Recorded Books, the people they onboarded, upskilled, and nurtured will inevitably move on someday and, Distinction hope, think favorably of them as a supplier in their new venture. Because more than anything, seeing Recorded Books’ internal digital team thrive was a source of great satisfaction and pride at a job well done. They felt like their team in so many ways, and it was hugely rewarding to see them succeed and continue to succeed to this day.

So while there is no such thing as a client for life anymore, they like to think that by delivering on their promise, and by doing the right thing in giving Recorded Books and its new internal digital team a long and sustainable life, the future looks brighter for everyone involved.

Outcome

The impact of creating a self-sufficient client by helping them recruit, onboard, and train their in-house team was as huge for them as it was for Recorded Books, resulting in a mutually beneficial and long-lasting relationship.