Episode 34 – Part 2 – Surveyors UK – what’s in it for you and the industry?, with Nina Young from Surveyors UK

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally: For  part two of this week’s episode, we’re speaking to Nina from Surveyors UK. And in this particular part, we’re going to discuss what actually is Surveyors UK. So I suppose over to you, do you want to let us know where it’s come from and what it’s going to do? 

Nina Young: Yeah, sure, Matt. I think, I’ve been asked this question a lot, and hopefully I’ll get it across quite concisely.

But SurveysUK is really addressing a number of challenges in the surveying profession. Basically, the profession is very siloed. I think there’s not enough awareness, even from early careers, as we’ve talked about in earlier about what a surveyor is, what they do. And I think there are so many things going on.

It’s a massive area. It’s a massive profession. It spans across industries, so you’ve got all these different areas with construction, state agency, architects, everyone comes into touch with surveyors. But nobody’s thought to bring it into one place and bring in and showcase the best of what the surveying profession has to offer, and that’s by working with professional bodies and Universities, firms, organizations, everyone that works within and across the profession and go, Look, here it is.

This is surveying. And these are the professional bodies. These are the course providers. These are the thought leaders. And so I thought felt like where if you wanted to learn about something, where would you go? And you obviously you can find things, but it’s. Spread everywhere. So I hope that kind of gives a feel for what it is.

Matt Nally: Yeah, it does. And you touched on it earlier. Obviously you have the student group and that’s really good resource for students specifically. And then there’s these, there’s other groups as well. But you’re right. There isn’t a central hub where you can go to then drill down and find what you need to having to constantly search so that I understand the concept I suppose why are you launching it, what, why what drove you to want to do it, I suppose 

Nina Young: it was one of the, I had one of those moments and it was I think it was very much inspired by the student group.

I think when I realized how much that was helping, the students, whether even finding a job through there or finding a mentor or just getting support and advice. And I thought, how about if we had something like this, but where we could help and benefit Thousands of people. So thousands of students and surveyors and help provide a resource and a place to go to ask questions, to connect to network.

And it was a thought and it was a bit of a light bulb moment. I’m like, this needs somewhere, literally a central place. So we can connect. It is all about, I always come back to connections. It is connecting the industry together, whether that be a student looking for a job or a mentor, whether that be a surveying firm that is looking to work on a project with another surveying firm so they can connect together, whether it’s thought leadership and industry level issues that can be discussed because we facilitate that through the site.

So there’s lots of different things going on and I think we needed somewhere to bring it together and for people to collaborate because. A lot of things are going on that I see across the board and I see them all doing it separate. And I’m like, let’s come together. 

Matt Nally: Yeah. And if you stop the duplication of effort, we can then put more effort into actually progressing rather than repeating the same processes over.

Yeah, 

Nina Young: exactly that. Yeah. 

Matt Nally: Yeah. How will it work? So if you’re a severe or student or anyone else going on To the site, you mentioned one thing earlier, I think around what’s that groups and yeah, 200 people involved and yeah, it’s pinging away and before you’ve lost track of what’s happened.

How will surveyors UK address sort of those types of issues where you’re, you’ve become part of a group and you want to be able to. Learned about something, ask a question and track it more easily. You having discussion areas and 

Nina Young: yeah. We’ve got some community groups at the moment before the full rollout, we’ve got two groups that you can join a general student group and surveying group, but with the full rollout membership.

Which students can join for free as well, it’s important. And then you can sign up to pay a monthly subscription, like 12 a month, it’s meant to be really affordable. Because the idea is we want thousands of surveyors and students on there, because they’ll benefit each other. But once you get inside that paid membership, we’re going to have specialists.

communities. So for example, in one of the areas prop tech software AI, a lot of surveyors gone. I don’t know where to go to ask questions about what’s out there. What’s happening in AI. So we’re basically facilitating communities within the site. And that is just one element of surveys UK, but that’s quite a central and important area.

Matt Nally: Yeah, I think those discussions could be quite valuable actually, because it’s that knowledge share then. But yeah, hopefully it as you say, it develops in a way where people ask the question without feeling it’s public or, someone going to, yeah, for putting their hand up and stuff like that.

Nina Young: Yeah, I’ve brought from my doing social media marketing for years I’ve brought. to this. It’s the best things of social media, but it’s off social media. So it’s not going to be dictated to by algorithms. So you’re not going to post something. LinkedIn’s brilliant. I love LinkedIn, but you’ll post something and it’s gone.

You’ll post an event, you’ll share a an opportunity or you’ll post for mentoring or something and it disappears. And so we’re facilitating something that, There’ll be discussion groups, you can post up a discussion topic, you can directly instant message someone else, you can do all the things, you can tag people in, it’s all the things you can do at the moment really on LinkedIn and Facebook.

But with the student group for example I, one of the things I came across was at least one in four people would say to me, I’d love to join your group, but I’m not on Facebook or I’ll have people that are on Facebook and they don’t want to post because it’s their personal profile. It’s their kind of family, personal things.

And then you have it where lots of it is do not want to post on LinkedIn because it’s public because it is, you have no control. Whereas with Intervej UK, we’re going to moderate it. So everyone that joins, you would moderate it like you would with a group or community. But they have the ability to post things, and it’s not a fear of, yeah. And carry on the ethos of the student group where it’s a great community. We’ve barely had any issues. Because it’s all about who you allow to join, and making sure that everyone’s fair and supports each other. There’s no bullying and things like that. We’ve got group rules set up within the platform.

And if people aren’t, then. They’ll have to leave. Yeah. Cause we’re very strict on that. 

Matt Nally: Yeah. I think that’s important because you have to be able to have a, an open culture of discussion and yeah, without fear of being knocked down for asking questions, it’s good to have that.

Nina Young: Yeah. It’s having the opinion, but not supportive. Everyone has, is entitled to opinions and you want, we want debate, we want discussion, but we want it done in a fair way, and I think that’s the thing and it’s But yeah, there’s so there’s lots of communities and long term with the growth of the site, what we do want to do is roll out regional groups, because one of the things that is really needed is if you’re a student or a surveyor in a region and you want to network online in the community, even with your local estate agent can join a conveyance so people can discuss things and.

Discuss projects that are down the road or local topics. So that is the, the end game is to have regional groups and get events on there as well. As part of it. 

Matt Nally: Oh, no, that’s really good. Actually. So you mentioned the sort of discussion, but it’s a one, one aspect of it what are the other.

Areas you’re trying to, or looking to help with in terms of the sort of the. Yeah, lots of different 

Nina Young: areas. So one of the areas we’ve done with collated and we’re just literally that’s that area is just being worked on at the moment is we’re pulling all the podcasts, so all the podcasts from across surveying, and there’s a lot of overlap.

So there’s some like in construction that are relevant. We’re going to have a dedicated news area. We’re going to have blogs. So we’re, interested in hearing from guest writers, people who already write their own blogs, or want to write some content with their expertise. We publish them on the big areas of events.

So we are working with conference providers. For example the RICS matrix events, get matrix events on there. Even local meetups. We know lots of A’s do meetups. local meetups. You can even put that on there. So events is another one. Job board. So I’ll have a job board in the platform.

So that will be open for anyone just to, obviously search jobs and and link through to opportunities. We’re going to have a big area, which is probably one of the key areas. that sort of really suggested this was needed was around CPD and training. So we’re talking to lots of CPD providers, training companies to provide CPD, whether it’s online, whether it’s pre recorded whether it’s face to face, that’s another area.

because when you sign up as a member, you will have your own professional dashboard. You will be able to literally save things into that and watch it at your leisure. That’s quite an important area. I think, especially within the surveyors side, when they’ve got their CPD requirements, cause we’re going to also, we’ve collated lots of free CPD.

It’s not just paid stuff. The other big area that has been had a lot of interest is we are partnering with a lot of anyone that provides a product or service to the surveying profession. So we are talking to insurance companies. Equipment providers security companies that want to provide penetration tests for our members, lots of different, so anyone that wants to get in front of surveyors.

And what we’re doing with them is we’re partnering up they’re providing discounts to members, free trials, that kind of thing. Software is a big one. Software, 

That’s a big area and so what can we provide as value and not just necessarily just a discount to sign up to the software, but we’ve got people that are going to do videos for us content, and just share that within the community.

Matt Nally: Yeah, no, I think that sounds really good. It’s say, you don’t want to spend all your time just trying to find resources that you need specific things. So if you can get on with it, I think the CPD one sounds really good. Cause when you have to submit what you’ve been doing all year, trying to go back and find what it was, if you haven’t kept a log, it’s nice to log in and go that’s everything I’ve done.

This is what it adds up to. Fantastic. But yeah I agree. I think it’s to find all the different things you need quickly. So you can then focus on actually analyzing stuff rather than trying to find it in the first place, which is, something we’ve talked about before with AI and what, the benefits of what that can do.

But that’s another topic 

Nina Young: altogether. 

Matt Nally: What’s been the initial response? Cause you’ve had some people logging in, obviously already on, on soft launch. So what’s been the initial feedback? Oh, incredible. 

Nina Young: Incredible. I think we had three registered members. I think when I looked last week, when we first, was it last week?

I’ve lost track of time at the moment, but when we first went live, we had 93 registrants in two days, literally, we had over 650 people that have registered on the early bird landing page, but the feedback has Incredible. And this is from across the board. So with regards to the professional bodies that we’re talking to, we’re talking to the RICS, the CAOB the TSA the Expert Witness Institute.

There are so many to have them on board because there’ll be an area just for professional bodies. I have their own directory. And then universities it’s been extremely positive because universities can have their own profile page and get involved. But we’ve just had a lot of interest from people that want to get involved with things at an industry level.

Because what we can facilitate over time is like closed working groups. So rather than a WhatsApp, we’ve got the software where you could, as long as you’re on a member on there, we can facilitate a closed working group that where people can discuss things and exchange things off social media. We’re, yeah, it’s been extremely positive, very positive.

We’ve been nominated for two awards now, shortlisted for two awards. So one was before with the first stage go live. And we just got to know about one last week. The great British entrepreneur awards was shortlisted for that. 

Matt Nally: awesome. Congratulations on that. Great. I think the feedback and stuff like that shows that there’s obviously a an appetite for what you’re doing.

So 

Nina Young: yeah we literally I almost every day I have someone that, that will thank us for it. They’re literally going, this is brilliant, this is what we need people are very interested in getting involved, just supporting what we’re doing, I’ve had so many people say, I’d love to get involved Nina, just tell me, what can we do?

And people that just happy to spread the word have been asked about having Saves UK, names of our logo on their websites and people just want to, when we realized that. What we’re trying to do is we’re not, we don’t compete with anyone. We’re literally bringing together everybody in a, in an impartial way and an independent way and saying, look, this is what’s out there.

And it’s that sharing. That’s just collaborate, work together, because I think, I’ve got a motto. It’s not just what you know, it’s who, that’s something that’s a real motto for me. And. People will benefit so much just from knowing other people, whether it be ask a question, or whether it be, I don’t know, get some advice, or learn about marketing tips, there are so many different things.

That people will benefit from those connections from a business level as well, from owning your own business, 

Matt Nally: I completely agree with that. Our philosophy at Surveybook has always been collaborate rather than, we’re not here to step on toes, we’re here to help connect people, all the different bit systems people use so they can operate more efficiently, more effectively.

So we’re not there to step on anyone’s toes. We’re there to help build a better environment and. And make the pie bigger then more, more, more useful. So exactly the same philosophy you’ve got, which is make it better. 

Nina Young: Yeah, make it better. That’s exactly it. And as there was so much change going on out there in the world, especially in the area of technology.

It’s phenomenal, but I think it is that sharing, and I think there’s enough out there for everyone. I really do. I really do believe that. And I think there’s just incredible things happening. It’s a very, there’s a lot of change. It’s a very interesting time in surveying. It really is.

And I think it’s an exciting time. 

Matt Nally: Oh, definitely. That’s an interesting time in the world. I think it’s yeah, but I suppose just to wrap up this particular topic if people want to get involved how do they register or start getting involved with things? 

Nina Young: Yeah, sure. There’s all different ways, but obviously you can go straight to the website, which you can see up there, www.

surveyorsuk. com, or on social media. So we’re on we’re on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram and obviously Twitter. Just Google us, you can find us now. I think we’re literally, so after going live, you can find us on page one of Google. We’re on the, probably halfway up the page, which is great.

Or if anyone’s really interested in, wanting to know more, get involved, or, working with us or partnering with us, just get in touch with me, which is nina at surveyorsuk. com. Just drop me an email. 

Matt Nally: Perfect. I think the only thing I’d add is I think for it to be a useful resource for everyone it’s going to be as good as what you put into it.

Not as a new, but as an, as a user on the site. Don’t hide in the background, ask the questions, get involved in conversations. And then that’s where the value will come from. 

Nina Young: That’s it, please. Yeah. And it’s providing that area for people to do that as, a safe place where people can speak up and add their views.

Matt Nally: Definitely. Good luck with the sort of next phases of growth. And hopefully we can catch up again on this particular topic a bit later and see how it’s going. Tune in for topic three, where we’re going to be discussing improving marketing in the surveying industry, which ties back into a couple of things we’ve touched on already.