Lesson Learned: What would you like to be when you start-up?

Finally, the day arrives. The metaphoric doors opened on not just a new business, but the next chapter of our lives. The past 6 months have been a consistent stream of genuinely important meetings with accountants and lawyers, software providers, website designers and of course, looking around office space. In truth, it has been a longer time in the development; it’s been 10 years in the dreaming.

There never is a right time to strike out on your own. Many discussions, conversations and thoughts have taken place between us, as we jostled to find the moment where we would put ourselves out there in our own right. Despite having gained over 35 years’ of experience collectively in recruitment and running businesses, a grounding that has been essential, it never fully prepares you from the terror, enjoyment and hard work of going it alone. Over the last 6 months we've learned more about ourselves and what we want to achieve than we have in the last 6 years, as we put the business plan through a number of iterations and faced challenges we had not even considered. It’s by no means unique to us; this being a very comforting fact.

In starting out our aim was very simple: We would come together to form a senior financial recruitment business with a difference, where only exceptional consultants would join the team. Above all, where people’s high expectations, the expectations of candidates, of clients and of our employees, can be met - in short, becoming the natural landing place for talent. The lessons we have learnt have been interesting, sometimes surprising, often humbling but always enlightening. Here are some of the key lessons we learned:

1) Use your experience, but forget what you know

Don’t do what you’ve done before, learn from what you’ve done in the past and then try to apply it in a way that focuses on your customers – in our case our clients and our candidates.

2) Know what you want to achieve

What serves your customers in the best way, but what also serves your employees too.  For us it was to develop a business with drive, a competitive edge and one that will challenge convention. Always based around excellence and knowledge with shared interests.  

3) Size really doesn't matter

Quality and service delivery are always key and eclipse size and scale.  We don’t want to be involved in the race for talent, we want to embrace quality talent. 

4) Focus on what your customers want

Even in a highly competitive market, we need to provide a service that people need and want.  A service for which senior finance professionals are crying out.  The service proposition was suddenly simple; knowledge, commitment and experience. 

5) Embrace technology, embrace the human

Technological developments are exciting and can improve efficiencies, access to information and people – but what we do will always be very people focused.  The answer for us is how we can utilise technology to help us communicate better, in a more transparent way and to showcase the work that we do behind the scenes. 

6) Nurture your networks. Always

People are generally supportive of you in a new venture and there is a lot of goodwill out there. Our combined experience comes with a well-developed network with whom we have maintained continuing contact.  It’s helped us as we have established and grown the business, but it also means that we can trade very effectively – Our real-time shortlisting software takes us a clear step closer to this.

7) Make your own luck

Nothing is going to come to you, you have to go out and do it yourself.  Unless you are looking for it you will not find it. 

8) How do we ensure that our employees are reflective of our market and goal?

To attract and retain the right internal talent to our business, we wanted to create a new employment model within our niche. If we want our employees to behave as business professionals, accountable for their own business with a vested-interested in long-term development, they should be treated as such and rewarded as such. We have therefore replaced traditional sales commission with profit share schemes at both the individual level and on the overall business.

9) Is external investment right for you?

To forget what we knew and start realising what we really wanted to create, we made the bold decision to go self-funded. While investment can be vital to certain business to achieve growth, in our case, the freedom from investors is the freedom to experiment and recreate.

So that is what we have learnt so far on our journey of setting up HedgerWay. As we move onto the next part of the journey we are sure that there will be many more lessons learned, many more laughs and a few frustrations. We have established a clear idea of what we stand for from the things we have learned and held on to during the setting up phase. Most importantly, this learning has helped us formulate what the experiences should be for candidates, clients and consultants as we seek to achieve our goal of becoming the natural landing place for talent.