Geoff Shepherd reveals how he built the famous Yorkshire Mafia LinkedIn group - and what's he planning for the future

“The first call to set the tone was always to the White House to ask for the incoming president – absolutely seriously.”

While such ambitious approaches ultimately never paid off, the events did attract a host of senior figures from major global companies such as Facebook and Google, as well as the likes of Jacqueline Gold, Nigel Farage and Alastair Campbell.

The conferences, which had collective audiences of over 250,000 people and brought tens of millions of pounds into the Leeds economy, were an unanticipated side-effect of the Yorkshire Mafia LinkedIn group that Shepherd had set up in 2008 in the hope it would help drive some business towards the tech recruitment company he had established with his business partner, Satvinder Mann.

It did manage to achieve that aim – but the Yorkshire Mafia element snowballed to the point that by 2018, its annual Buy Yorkshire conference was being held at the First Direct Arena in Leeds to cope with demand and a speaker line-up including the CEO of British Airways. But without any fanfare or direct publicity, Shepherd decided the time was right to call a halt.

“I just thought ‘kill it’. It was instinct, I just thought where else will we go? We didn’t want to be repeating everything,” he says. “There’s other things I wanted to do in life. Planning for those events was ridiculous. Six months out, I would know everything down to the security arrangements and the walkie-talkie frequencies.”

Building things up to the point of walking away from the events programme had taken years.

Shepherd and Mann jointly set up iSource Group as a Leeds-based tech recruitment business in 2008 (with Mann leaving in 2016).

Shepherd says he felt uncomfortable at traditional networking events and decided to have a go at making the most of LinkedIn, which had been set up five years earlier but at that point had tens of millions of members rather than the 900 million registered today.

He says that, while he is “not sure” he would call the group the Yorkshire Mafia now, the name undoubtedly struck a chord. “The name plays really well to Yorkshire. But the reason why it worked was because it was steadfast in its determination to do as much social good as it did business good.”

Progress was initially steady but relatively slow – Shepherd says it gained 800 members in its first year after he spent his evenings after work sending out literally thousands of personal invitations asking people to join.

“I sent over 22,000 personal invitations whilst running a start-up business. I’d do the day job, say hello to the kids and when they were in bed do the Yorkshire Mafia job.”

Things started to accelerate after Shepherd arranged its first in-person event – a Christmas night out in 2009.

“Sixty-odd people turned up – I was expecting about three. That night I got home about 3am and there were lots of people still out with one another. I thought we have got something here. The next one we did, 250 people came to and the one after, about 450 people came.”

As word of mouth grew, so did the popularity of the LinkedIn group, and Shepherd switched from sending on mass invitations to screening those looking to join. It also substantially enhanced his own profile in the business world and at one point, he was the number one recommended recruiter on LinkedIn in the world.

The rules of the group included no selling or overt self-promotion, although people looking for suppliers and specific purchases could make requests. “In the early days, we used to remove people from events for selling. It is a bit counterintuitive but it is about putting the relationship first.”

Shepherd says that over the years he has turned down around 110,000 people wanting to join the group.

While it now has almost 28,000 members, he adds that he has set no upper limit on numbers but is looking for quality over quantity.

“Even now there are probably at least 1,000 in the queue to join. When things start to take off like that, the first thing that happens is every single recruiter on the planet tries to join and then every single lawyer, every single consultant. A lot of them are kind of negative contributors who are not going to bring much.

“Most of the moderation was about [stopping] over-representation and it was done mostly on a gut feeling basis. I had a very good feeling for it.

“I used to make everyone write to me and tell me why they wanted to join. We wanted to have some quality control.

“Ideally someone would offer great content, be a positive decision-maker and have some career trajectory and achievements. That’s it but there are some nuances to that. If we are not asking for money to join, I can reserve the right.”

The growth of the group coincided with the decision to start putting on business events, with the first Buy Yorkshire conference held in 2011.

The event attracted more than 1,000 attendees but after outsourcing decisions on speakers to another party, Shepherd felt improvements could be made and decided to take greater control of bookings.

“What I took away from that and everything implemented since was quality, quality, quality. We decided to go for people at the top of their profession – either people doing exceptional content or C-suite people from exceptional brands."

In 2013, the Buy Yorkshire event hit the headlines after inviting then-HS2 chief executive Alison Munro to speak. Dozens of campaigners concerned about HS2 running through their communities turned up outside to protest - accompanied by a white elephant prop.

In 2016, there was further controversy as Nigel Farage was invited to attend a debate about the pros and cons of Brexit in the run-up to the referendum.

Shepherd says: “Nigel Farage was great but we kind of got slated for that. We put him on a balanced panel with a Remain campaigner and four business people split between Remain and Leave.

“It got quite a backlash. I used to get asked The Yorkshire Mafia’s opinion on things a lot and I never used to give it because I can’t speak for 28,000 people - that would be ludicrous.”

He adds: “I’ve made an awful lot of lifelong friends through the Yorkshire Mafia. People would queue to talk to me, which was a bit disconcerting. At one point, I actually signed autographs, which was ridiculous.

“We used to get some massive hitters at the conference. We bought Channel 4 to Leeds for the first time, Google, Facebook, the guy who ran LinkedIn in North America. For that to happen for free on a Yorkshire stage when anybody could get a ticket, was kind of crazy.

“It was an incredible brand showcase of companies that had not set foot in Yorkshire before at an executive level.”

But after being relieved to step away and a break of five years – partly enforced by the pandemic – Shepherd has moved back into the events world with new venture, tech networking platform Silicon Yorkshire.

In April, it hosted a business expo in Leeds headlined by former Twitter vice president Bruce Daisley, while plans are in the works for a major awards night in February called the Silicons.

The event is due to be held at the Royal Armouries and Shepherd promises it will have a high-quality judging panel but be “more Met Gala than stuffy awards” on the night.

Unlike the broader sweep of the Yorkshire Mafia business group, Silicon Yorkshire is focused on the region’s tech community, and Shepherd hopes the connections it is building could eventually result in helping to support and potentially fund promising new local tech businesses.

“It has got a number of aims - one is to be bigger and do things that haven’t necessarily been done before. On the surface at the minute it looks like we are a website and an events platform and that is not untrue.

“But the goal is probably more to originate and curate emerging technology businesses and possibly raise funds alongside that.”

While the Yorkshire Mafia group is still active on LinkedIn and has a one-off Yorkshire Day social event planned for August 1, Shepherd says: “To a degree, I think Yorkshire Mafia has served its purpose. I wouldn’t want to bring it back in earnest unless we are going to do something ambitious, quality-driven and large.”

He adds that, while he is partly driven by “fear of failure”, another big motivator is “excellence and standards”.

“It is like running a restaurant – why accept an eight out of 10 when the people around you are perfectly capable of a ten? Lots of people have that ‘It’ll do mentality’ and I don’t.”

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