How Home Grown Uses Beauhurst to Find New Members

Quotes

Using Beauhurst means we’re able to reach out to audiences that we otherwise wouldn't have had access to.

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44 Great Cumberland Place , London , Marylebone W1H 7BS

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Home Grown is the private members’ club that provides entrepreneurial pioneers with unique resources to unlock the true value of their business potential.

Jessica Barwell is Marketing Communications Manager at Home Grown, and is responsible for building and implementing new business campaigns, developing the events calendar and nurturing the Home Grown membership community.

How did Home Grown get started, and what services do you provide?

We opened Home Grown two years ago as part of the Home House collection. We saw that more and more people were using Home House—which was built as a social club—to meet, network and do their work in. And we very much wanted it to return to its purpose as a social space, but there was obviously a growing need for another type of space, with people working longer hours, and increasingly blurred lines between work and social settings.

So we created Home Grown to be a membership club for entrepreneurs to meet through the network, meet investors, and also have a support network through other members here. We put on a programme of events including a scaleup course where people will hear from other entrepreneurs and can discuss their challenges together. And the club is composed of 70% entrepreneurs, 20% investors, and then 10% service providers.

How were you introduced to Beauhurst, and what role has it played at Home Grown?

I first came across Beauhurst when I picked up the Scaleup Index report back in 2018. The insights inside about how these companies were scaling so rapidly were brilliant, and eventually became the basis for our event calendar. There are five key pillars to our events calendar which are each derived from the Scaleup Index:

We do about five events a week, and successfully ran 200 virtually over lockdown, and now we’re doing them on a hybrid model. They’re an essential part of the service we provide here, and Beauhurst is a big part of that. 

And then I looked into the platform and thought “Wow, that’s amazing”. We had a demo with Pravish and signed up to have platform access whilst we were still pre-launch, so Beauhurst has really been with us from the beginning of the Home Grown journey. 

In a nutshell, Beauhurst has been an invaluable tool for enabling us to identify new members that will find Home Grown useful, and allows us to be really specific with our targeting. But it also helps on a couple of other fronts, making it super easy to stay up to date with our members, and a fantastic source of industry news and insights which we like to share with our networks. 

“In a nutshell, Beauhurst has been an invaluable tool for enabling us to identify new members that will find Home Grown useful, and allows us to be really specific with our targeting.”

How do you use beauhurst for your business development function?

The key way we use Beauhurst is to help us to introduce the club to the right sort of people, whether that’s an angel investor or somebody who’s founded a business. 

Once you’ve decided on who you want to target and the structure of the campaign, it’s super quick and easy to pull a list of hyper-relevant contacts from the platform. For example, the last campaign we did was to target high-growth, new business founders that started a business within the last 12 months and were based in London. So I put those criteria into the platform and came up with 160 founders. And often, that smaller number is far more valuable than a list of, say, 5,000 people because we can be really specific and tailored with our outreach. 

We built our messages using the information we found on Beauhurst about each individual and their associated companies, whether that be according to location, sector, or what stage of growth their business is in. It’s also super useful to see any recent news articles that the company has been featured in—that’s always a great hook at the start of an email. 

Then, using verified contact details from the platform, we contacted those founders via both email and Linkedin in order to get multiple touch points. And for this last campaign we had open rates of more than 40%—which is brilliant. 

We’ve been running these campaigns using Beauhurst data since before we opened up in order to establish the right balance of entrepreneurs, investors and service providers (70%, 20% and 10%) that we wanted in the club. Without Beauhurst, we would have really struggled to fill the membership and would probably have gone down the paid advertising route instead. Beauhurst is a far superior way to help us curate an eclectic, non-sector specific membership.

How do people respond to these cold outreach campaigns?

Well, when we first opened we orchestrated a launch campaign, and a lot of people responded to our outreach saying “wow, how did you know that I needed that?”. It really was perfectly timed. Entrepreneurs don’t have time to wander around looking for new clubs to join, they’re incredibly busy people that quite often do need a community, but wouldn’t necessarily consider finding that at a private members club. So overall we’ve had super positive responses. 

The Networks function is also super helpful for outreach. When a new member joins I add them as ‘known to me’ on the Beauhurst platform, and then I can build on their existing contacts. So you know that Joe Bloggs is a member here, and through the Beauhurst platform you can see all the other stakeholders that he’s connected to. And obviously, if Joe’s here every day, then the likelihood is that one of his business partners has also been here and might also be worth reaching out to. The response to that kind of outreach is always great.

“When a new member joins I add them as ‘known to me’ on the Beauhurst platform, and then I can build on their existing contacts”

How do you use Beauhurst for nurturing your membership?

Beauhurst has so much data behind each person, which is great for us. We’re always trying to find out as much as possible about our members, which leads me on to the next reason why we use Beauhurst, and that’s to stay in touch with what our members are doing, which gets increasingly important as our membership grows. 

We’ll use the press mentions that Beauhurst picks up on to give shoutouts to some of our members in our newsletter and across our social channels, which obviously gives them an extra boost as well and enhances that community feeling. And of course, we’ll always reach out to the person and company themselves to congratulate them and show that we’re in the loop with their progress.

Are there any ways that Beauhurst has helped you that were unexpected?

We check the platform each week for new Beauhurst reports and articles and share these with our members so that everyone can stay on top of key trends. We get lots of great feedback about these, so that’s a bit of an added bonus for our community building efforts.

We’ve also used Beauhurst as a way to help our front of house staff understand who our clients are and different industry terms. And that’s happened via training sessions with our account manager Jo, who’s always very keen to support us. The whole client success team has been a tremendous help as well—I can’t fault them at all.

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