The Knowledge Exchange

My name is James Fenwick. I'm the KTP associate at Leeds Beckett University and working in partnership with Citu. My name is Kevin Gillespie and I'm the sales and marketing director at Citu.

So the course I studied at Leeds Beckett was games design, and it was quite a diverse course in terms of, there was a bit of modelling, there was bits of programming, and all sorts in between, and they were all kind of skills that I've took with me to industry.

If you think of 20 years ago, how you used to buy a property, it used to be people had to go into the estate agents. Fast forward to now and with the digital revolution, they just pull out the phone, go on Rightmove, book the appointment in, and then just turn up.

So my current role at Citu is the virtual reality experience manager, and that means I take the models that the architects provide and then apply some texture work, some programming into something that a customer can come in, they can put a headset on and they can walk around the VR space.

We believe that people can come to a centralised location and then just strap on the headset and go into a world that James has created, and that's led to 30 reservations at CID. A house is one of the biggest things you'll ever buy in your lifetime. To have that faith in what we're doing based on a virtual world, that's massive, so the impact has been huge.

When I started, there was a lot of set-up to be done. It's eventually led into a bit more of a customer-oriented role, especially at events and stuff like that.

The lowest price house at CID on the market is £330,000. Multiply that by 30 and then you can start to quantify the impact that James has had in terms of creating these virtual worlds for us.

As part of the KTP, I was fortunate enough to travel over to Los Angeles for a conference. It was really exciting. That was quite rewarding to go there and see that work that I'm doing is actually quite in line with the rest of the industry.

The collaboration with Leeds Beckett, you get so much more from the monetary benefits to collaboration benefits, to the access. We don't just get James, we pretty much get the whole university.

When I heard about the Knowledge Transfer Partnership, I didn't realise how much was included in it. It was almost like a stepping stone between university and full-time employment. You get the best of both worlds, you get the support of the university, and you get the full support of the company, so I've been fortunate enough to kind of impress Citu enough that they’ve offered me a full-time job.

He's a real asset, not just to the whole sales and marketing team, but Citu as a whole.

We're Eden Agency, and we started in 2008. We build consumer-facing digital products.

At the start of the pandemic, our business kind of flatlined, and we've been used to growing 40% year on year. We came to the programme to learn how to be salesmen, and to learn how to be marketeers.

The cohort that I was put in was probably the best part of the course. Everybody had the same stories, it was really cathartic, a really good support group, and I'm still in contact with most of them now. One of the things that I learnt really early on was that I should be working on the business and not in the business. What I found most useful in the programme was just having a real good honest look at the way we work and the clients, and really just thinking about what makes us happy.

We are really growing exponentially now. We're having lots of really valuable leads. We're focusing on replacing myself and getting somebody dedicated into service, some of that.

I've got a good understanding of what value we give to our customers now, and I'm sort of leveraging and selling our business on those values. We're now led by the ideas and the feelings of the team, and the staff. The programme has given us the tools and the confidence to really drive the business forward, and for the first time in 10 years, we're not growing the team around just fulfilling demand, we're growing it around our conscious plans and our conscious efforts. It's not reactive anymore, we really are looking forward, we're planning, and we have the confidence to do that now.

We've had so many more leads than we would have had with 10 times the marketing budget previously with just that little bit of extra effort and the focus on the people that we want to target, and that's all come from the tools and the material that we've been taught in the course.