Xero, the online platform for small businesses and their advisors, has appointed Fourteen Forty as its new stakeholder relations consultancy in the UK.
The agency will work alongside Xero’s media relations agency, The Academy, to help build relationships with a wider group of critical audiences. These include professional intermediaries and potential commercial partners, representative bodies, policy makers and government.
Xero has been operating in the UK for ten years, and now has more than three hundred thousand small business customers. As such, it has a keen understanding of the issues that the UK’s small businesses and entrepreneurs face and is well placed to stick up for them.
Fourteen Forty’s role will be to help position Xero as a firm which can help policy-makers, large enterprises and commentators make better informed decisions on small businesses, by tapping into its insights on the market.
It will also help further establish Xero as a trusted technology innovator, providing a platform for UK businesses to access a range of accountancy and professional services.
The appointment follows a successful project to launch Xero’s Small Business Insights earlier in the year.
Gary Turner, MD of Xero UK, said: “we were impressed from the outset at how quickly Fourteen Forty got to grips not just with our business, but also the issues small businesses face and how to frame them to influential audiences”.
James Boyd-Wallis, director at Fourteen Forty, said: “Xero is a fantastic business which plays to our strengths, working with senior management to tell an effective business story, and shine a light on the great work Xero does to support the UK small business economy”.