So firstly, I need to run you back to the start of this year. In early January, we sat down as directors of the company and we strategically mapped out what we want from the company this year.
But before then sitting down with all the team and getting their input on what could stop the plan from happening. And when I see all the team, I really mean all the team, everyone attends, and everybody has a voice. Our plan for this year was to reduce risk. So, we were going to do this through, first of all, having growth of around 50% in terms of revenue, but not for better financial performance, but so that we could actually reduce the risks in the business.
You see at the time we were a fairly small team of seven and we significantly lacked cover for some really key. Our accounts department was one person and no cover. And our bookkeeping and VAT team were just two people, even though that's the majority of our work. And the same was true on our admin side.
One person only no cover and the marketing it's all down to me. So, the plan here was to hire several new team members to grow the team, but they weren't just going to be any old people just to put bums on seats. As you would expect, this is a plan with a recruitment process to test for the right skills, and then only make that offer if there is a good alignment to our values.
So, first of all, we hired a bookkeeper. We trained her into a management accountant and all the way up to our standards that gave us three bookkeepers in total, two of them trained in management accounts and VAT. We then hired a new accountant to double the size of our accounts' preparation team. And this is going to allow us to complete work faster and carry out more early opportunity accounts jobs, statutory reporting is key in accounting terms to remain legally compliant.
However, it's not something that is highly valued or indeed that valuable, but we need to make sure that we are continually setting the bar in terms of the accounts department. At the same time as that recruitment, we also set about hiring a new admin person. Our one-off admin tasks will be becoming a bit much and we need to spread the load.
Also, the admin team offers cover for things like emails and ensures that your work is all distributed correctly when you've got time off. So that would help with our ever-growing team. And we also set about hiring a marketing person. Now this would end up being our single most difficult hire. We don't have experience really in marketing and we've been leaning on outsource professionals to get us through, but we set about a little while back building a really robust process for content creation and how to then share that through various social media channels and really create a robust, common content marketing plan.
Our idea now is we just needed to find somebody that could take that process, improve it and twist it towards their style and then follow it. So, by this time, our strategic plan for the year was working really well. We were up to a team of 11 we've only got one planned higher left this year, and that's a client manager to manage pod three in a ride about September, however, Things didn't quite play out as we planned.
So, our junior accountant is one of our bookkeepers. She's been with us coming up two years now and is about to qualify. There have been some struggles on the college side of the work, and she had happily pointed this out too, but their practical technical work has been really good. Well, just last week she let us know that she would not be staying with us after she completes her qualification.
Which isn't around about six weeks' time now to say we were shocked was an understatement. And not because we don't have regular check-ins or we don't have pathways or there's no one-to-ones or anything like that. It's just because this hadn't come up as a possibility in any of those conversations.
So, it was really easy here to jump to emotional reaction.
All those things start coming through your head.
"She's wasted her time."
"She hasn't lived our open and honest core value."
"Where's her loyalty at she's messed up the plan?"
And so, such a reaction is only natural. So, what did we do to correct that?
Because that's not positive thinking. So where did we go? We practiced what we preach myself and my fellow director Sam. We sat down and we aired out those emotional reactions. Right. We knew we had to get those out and get them out of the way so that we could move forward.
So firstly, let this just dispel all of those emotional reactions I listed, she wasted our time.
Yep. She hasn't clearly, right. If that had been the case, we wouldn't have kept on hiring her and we wouldn't have wanted her to stay. So, it's clearly just emotions at that time. She hasn't lived the open and honest core value. Actually, she did, right. She came to us as soon as she received that offer, she laid out what her intentions were.
She's actually agreed to a longer notice period, due to some leave that we've got planned because she didn't want to disrupt that. And we asked if that would be possible. And she's also explained how she thinks the new role will be a better fit for her. That's open and honest, isn't it really? And then where's her loyalty? It's to herself.
Right. And really that's where it should be. If she's not progressing and being loyal to herself, she can't possibly be loyal to anybody else because she's not showing up as her best person. So actually, we always plan to train any of our team members so they can leave and they can represent us really, really well, but we treat them like they want to stay. And she admitted that she found the college studying hard and I'm sure she could have easily quit at any point, but she didn't possibly out of loyalty to us.
She persevered and she made great progress.
Then what, she messed up the plan. She didn't though, did she?
Firstly, the plans are not messed up. Yeah, it's off course. But it's a plan. It's not a prescription, right? Things change. We can react and we can fix them. So now that we've got things turned around to a bit more logical type thinking, we needed to move on to a bit of an ideas phase.
So, here's what we did myself and Sam took that opportunity and we came up with four potential options and I suppose a fifth thrown in as well.
1. Just hire a direct replacement.
2. We go to offshoring instead.
3. We sell off some of the poorly fit clients that we possibly got. And then we spread out the remaining work amongst the other members of the team.
4. We bring forward the hiring of the client manager that we've got planned for September and five something else.
So, from there, what we did, we split in two directions, right? Sam went off to discuss with the team and see what their feelings were on those various ideas, plus anything else that they may be able to bring to the table. And I spent my time running the numbers on the different options. Here's what we found.
Number one, hire a direct replacement. Now, this is the easy answer. And very rarely is the easy answer, the right one though. Now that doesn't mean we should discard it, maybe actually when we go through all the thinking, and we go through all the pros and cons, we come back to the easy answer, but very rarely is that easy answer the best one.
If we just hire a replacement directly for what we've lost, what opportunities are we missing?
So, number two, we hire offshore instead. So, we've got some pretty good experience with this. Nearly half of our team are not within the UK. We know the recruitment process works really well and that we can have somebody working with us in about two to three weeks.
Okay. That's significantly quicker than what we can establish in the UK. However, again, let's not an easy option blindside us just because that option is quick and it's easy. Doesn't mean that is the best option. And actually, this is one we discounted to not go back to because this role involves a number of phone conversations and, wrongly so, but it's not our prerogative, I suppose to change it. We do our bit, but we can't change it. And that in the UK, we still have some prejudice against those who are not from the UK or maybe they have an accent. And therefore, if we're going to stick this person into multiple phone conversations, we may just end up alienating some clients that we potentially got.
So, this might therefore not work.
Number three is that we sell some of our poorly fit clients, and then we spread out the remaining work. So, scaling back is a good option. We've done it before, actually on multiple occasions and it worked well then. We could probably work on the Pareto principle, and we could probably offload 80% of our issues from only offloading 20% of the clients.
However, we only did this last year and the latest batch of them only moved on in September. Can we do it again? Would it work again right now?
Option four was to bring forward the hiring of the client manager. Now, this looked like a potentially great idea and it was the fourth one. Now we could have easily stopped at one, two or three, but we kept going. Right. What if the client manager came in and they've got some basic level bookkeeping experience, as well as maybe the other areas we're looking for.
And then in the meantime, what we aim to grow that pod up and get some more clients that the client manager can manage. We can also have the client manager actually activating and doing the bookkeeping. That's not a skill that an outgoing person has. They couldn't end up with that client manager position where they could oversee everything and move things in the right direction.
So that could free up some work. That's currently sat with another client manager. Later on, we can then find another bookkeeper to come in and take some of that work away.
So, what about option five is there's something else option. So, from Sam's discussions with the team, there were a few ideas that got bounced around and there was some amalgamation of some of the ideas and some things were confirmed.
Like we could cover the work in the short term by spreading it across the team, but ultimately, we didn't come up with anything else that was high enough value to be fully considered. So now we are down to option three and four (Number three is that we sell some of our poorly fit clients, and then we spread out the remaining work. Option four was to bring forward the hiring of the client manager.)
We decided that these are the ones that we're going to pursue in a bit more detail. We can see how well they work from a logistical perspective, but what about the costs?
So, from my findings, actually the costs on both of these options were actually pretty close. However, the option to sell clients when I was looking at the pros and the cons, the strengths, the weaknesses, any opportunities, maybe in the threats. Actually, the option to sell is somewhat out of our control.
We at least need to find one other interested party, ideally, two or three we've then got to negotiate with them. We've got to carry out any due diligence. And so have they, we've got to sort out the timings of the handovers, the legal, the communications to the clients, the actual handover, the work, there's just loads to sort.
So therefore, actually we decided this is quite a risky area. Because we don't know what the timeline looks like. And sometimes these can happen really quickly. Other times they can take months and months or even years to resolve. So, the decision was made. Let's bring forward the hiring of a client manager.
So, from here, this is where we fly into action. And this is where we really, really work well.
We've made the decision.
We've looked at all the pros and the cons.
We've got the emotional thinking out of the way.
We're onto logical thinking.
We've decided on the best option.
Now let's take action.
And that's the key.
If you make all these sorts of look at all these areas and you don't then take action. What are you going to do? So, in the space of around a week, we've gone from our plan was on track. It's a completely off-track emotional reaction. Oh my God. It's doomsday. It's all over. Back to logical thinking, decision made.
We know who we need to go and hire. Now, what we have to do is actually go and hire the person. And this is where we go back to the key of processes. As you can imagine, we've got a robust recruitment process and here's how it works:
So don't follow the normal process of a boring advert with just a job spec and all those bits. Tell them why they would love to work with you.
So here you go, here are six key areas that you should do for a good job advert.
1. Number one, explain what's in it for them.
The number one ideal thing in our opinion is your advert is there to sell your company and what it's like to work in your company. First thing you do, if you've probably looked at a job advert is you go straight and you scroll straight away and you're looking for the salary, and you're looking for the benefit. Don't make it hard to find, don't stick to it at the end. If you stick it at the end, all they'll do is they'll go to that bit. And then they'll scan back up and read other bits and they won't get a full understanding of what the job role is. Just stick the key information at the top.
2. Right then straight into explaining the role.
What is the role headline information what's involved then about us, it's not all about us. It's about them first. They've got what, the information they want. Now they're intrigued to go, okay. Let me find out about the company and see if that's, if I want to work with them.
So just give a little bit of background. We found some testimonials from the team about why they like working with us. They work really well. It gives a little bit of introduction and actually it's not just us saying we're a great place to work. The team thinks so too. Then we go into what we are looking for.
3. What makes somebody good for this role?
So just because they've then assigned, we are then going actually, if you've got these characteristics and these skills yeah. We think you've got a good possibility. And then we just do a double check and we just go, is this right for you? So actually, here's some other side of looking at:
So, for example, if we are talking an admin-based role, then we might pose a question and go, is organization a struggle for you? If it is, you're probably not going to like an admin role because it's about organization.
4. And then after all of those questions, we simply go back to restate what is in it for them.
So, you said what's in it for them? Both at the start and at the end.
Now in just short of a week, six days, we have got nearly 400 applicants. Okay. 400.
We didn't do anything special with the salary, right? It's a pretty market rate salary, but we were just really clear in terms of what we want. So now, if you follow traditional recruitment steps. Now, you're thinking, "oh my God, 400 CVS to read through boring!" but that's not what we do.
CVS don't really tell us anything. They might give us something about somebody's experience, but they're written from that person's perspective. It's really one-sided and it doesn't give you that fair view. So instead, what we do is we use customized skill tests. There's stuff that we've built in house using various different specialist areas.
So, for the client manager role, they need a development of bookkeeping and VAT. So, we've used our bookkeeping and VAT experts to build those questions. They then need a little bit of accounting knowledge and tax knowledge. So, we used our accounting and tax department to build that part.
And then in the client manager stuff, it's about advice and guidance around business. So, we've used our existing client managers to answer those questions. And then we've amalgamated all of that up into a full skills test. And these specific skills are the type of skills that are needed on a day-to-day basis in the role.
And in our world of accounting, almost everything can be looked up and it doesn't need an answer right now. So that's how the test works. The majority of the questions you can just take your time, you can go and Google some facts, maybe behind the situation. Most of it you're going to need to think, and you're going to need to use experience, but we have guidance in there to go.
Actually, if they are looking up the majority of the questions, you should probably withdraw. Because you really aren't going to like it when you arrive, because these are the typical things that you are likely to have in the day to day of that role. So, from their skills test being done, what we now do is we go and review the answers, the ones with around 80% of plus, correct.
They get to move forward. Now we're not looking for perfection.
We're not looking for a hundred percent. We're just looking the majority is in the ballpark in the right direction because we can train skills.
We do a quick CV review, mainly just to check if they don't move around jobs every five minutes and a few other key bits of information.
And then it's simply an invite to an interview now by this stage, we've ruled out probably 80% of the applicants.
So, with this process, then all the pressure is taken out of the interview. In an interview, nobody's got fear now of things we tell candidates very clearly, you've done your skills tests. This is now a conversation and that's all we do.
We make sure that our questions are conversation starters. We want to see that real person.
How do they align to our values?
What are they like when their guards are let down? And if this is someone, I'd like to spend time with maybe.
Do they understand what we're really about?
We're just setting interviews right now for this role, but with nearly 400 applicants, if only 1% of those are awesome, that gives us four people to choose from who are the best of the best. So, from my point of view, this isn't a boast. It's not a brag. I can promise you.
I personally have made some right balls up when it comes to recruitment in the past.
But don't worry about that. This is to point out that it could have been so easy to be stuck in that emotional reaction stage to be still blaming that staff member when they didn't actually do anything wrong, they were just looking out for themselves. Actually, I'm confident. It's the best decision all around for everyone involved.
What I also know is that this situation could have led to a financial car crash in our business. If we'd stayed stuck in that emotional reaction state, however, it hasn't actually, it has led to a decision that will improve our financial results this year and also into future years. I'd love to continue the conversation.
So come join me on Facebook. Look for the THRIVING BUSINESS COMMUNITY, click to join. And then let me know maybe about a time when you've reacted emotionally, what you did about it, or even maybe a current situation you've got. Now, when you just want to air your thoughts, maybe offload your emotional reactions. See what other people's outside input is to bring it back to logic.
I'd love to hear about them either way. Also, don't forget, you can check out how good your financial systems and processes are using our free financial health checker.
