Movemeon employer spotlights are a series of articles highlighting our clients. They detail the internal company culture, employee experience and outline their ideal candidate.
Here, we speak to Mark, the Commercial Talent Specialist for Comply Advantage.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and your role within Comply Advantage
My title is Commercial Talent Specialist – I lead recruitment for everything outside of tech and product, e.g. sales, marketing, customer success, project management, ops, finance, legal… on a global basis. I’m the only person in the business who does commercial recruitment right now, so I’m really busy!
What is Comply Advantage’s plan for the next 5 years, and what makes it a unique company to join?
5 years is actually a long time-frame for us — the business is only 6 years old, and we couldn’t have imagined 6 years ago that we’d be where we are now. The sky’s the limit in 5 years’ time!
For now, we are heavily investing in bringing in senior talent to upweight our leadership team. This brings a lot of potential growth, and we are doing this because we are starting to target bigger clients. We want to become the go-to name in our niche, but to do that we really need to get our name out there and increase our revenue. We’ve set ourselves some really ambitious targets – we are hoping to double our revenue from this year to next. In the long-term, we don’t know yet.
In summary, this is a really exciting time to join – we raised $50m of funding back in July, and we are investing that really heavily in the people and the product.
Do you have any typical career paths within the company that consultants might take?
There are lots of opportunities because we are growing, but historically we haven’t had very set career paths. What I can say, we’ve had a couple of people who joined from a consultancy background who then moved into strategy and more senior strategy roles, and into the product team. What we always say is that we’ll always do our best to retain talent – if people have an interest in branching out into different areas, we’ll do our best to facilitate that.
How do you approach diversity at Comply Advantage?
It’s something that’s really important to us – I actually sit on the diversity committee. But the structure and action plan has only really started to come together recently as we’ve been in a planning phase for the last 12 months or so.
As a start, we’ve done several initiatives in recruitment specifically – we’ve tried to remove bias from job adverts, hiring managers completed bias training and we have a D&I team which in itself is a diverse group. We also did some fundraising for Black Lives Matter, and the amount raised was matched by our COO. We are not somewhere where we have a framework in place, but our senior leadership are really bought into the importance of D&I and it’s clear to see it’s something really important to the wider business.
Do you have any tips for other people recruiting around being objective or any other helpful tips?
I did a lot of research into hiring bias and I really pushed that out towards hiring managers. I highly recommend looking into that – there’s so much out there on the internet; you just have to look for it. Additionally, the main thing is to understand that diversity is crucial, but you won’t be able to change the world overnight – just do the best you can do.
Which teams at Comply Advantage like to hire consultants?
When we started out we were quite consultant-heavy, with a lot of people from consulting or strategy backgrounds. It’s something we’ve moved away from a little bit, but there’s still a place for consultants, particularly within ops and programme or project management. That’s probably where consultants are most relevant right now. Additionally, revenue ops, where there’s a clear strategy focus, would also work.
What was your impression of the candidate pool on Movemeon?
For a long time, we weren’t sure what we were looking for, so we interviewed a lot of strong candidates who nevertheless ended up not being right for what we wanted in the end. But otherwise, I’d say really strong.
And what was your impression of Movemeon and the support you received?
At first, I felt like I was getting too many CVs, but we had a few configuration calls and after that it was amazing. I really valued getting a small shortlist and being in touch constantly, but without pushiness, which is a real pet peeve of mine. There was enough soft chasing to remind me if I’d missed something, which was really good.
What makes Movemeon stand out from other agencies?
Movemeon genuinely seems like a specialist in bringing consultants and ex-consultants to companies. You don’t pretend to be anything you are not, which is great. I also like that you have your own platform where consultants can go, so they also know that you are a specialist and you are in touch with employers.
What is the best piece of hiring advice you’ve ever received?
This is important for people moving from agency to in-house – you are looking for the best person for the business now, whereas before you were looking for someone that could do the job just to get the job done. That was the biggest adjustment for me when I started in-house.
And what is the best piece of career advice?
Don’t always chase the money! It changed my work-life happiness when I took that advice a few years ago.
Movemeon employer spotlights are a series of articles highlighting our clients. They detail the internal company culture, employee experience and outline their ideal candidate.
Here, we speak to Oliver, Chief of staff at My Tutor.
You started as a teacher before joining Bain, then moving to industry. It’s an unusual story – please tell us a bit more.
I’ve been working now for over 10 years. I started off joining Teach First, just after the financial crisis. As I was making my decision, coming up to the end of my second year at university, I’d originally had consulting in mind.
My original plan was to stay for 2 years and then move on to something else, but I ended up staying for 5 years because I really loved the impact and the development opportunities. It was a very difficult career, especially the first couple of years, but I also learnt a lot. I improved my resilience, and my communication and leadership skills – from engaging a class of disengaged students for hours every day to getting a leadership position fairly early on: I was head of year within 2 years, and then became head of department after 3 years (at a new school). You probably wouldn’t get these sorts of early opportunities in management consulting or banking.
I felt that I was having a lot of impact too, but after 3 years of teaching, I wanted to take that next step. Ultimately, I was back to consulting as the ideal step as it would build out my business skills and give me greater insight into a range of industries. After researching a number of firms and interviewing for a few, I got through to the final round at Bain but wasn’t given an offer. I really liked Bain so I decided to hang on and reapply in a year or so, using the extra experience.
In 2015, I eventually joined Bain as an Associate Consultant, looking forward to the on-the-job training, e.g. complex financial modelling. I enjoyed my time at Bain – there are great learning opportunities, you meet really intelligent people, and you deal with really interesting problems that are also in the media (the kind of things I was using as case studies in Business classes, interestingly). I stayed for almost 3 years, but eventually, I realised I wanted to try something beyond consultancy; something more operational within a business. I ultimately didn’t want to be advising businesses forever, I wanted to be involved in running them.
Once I decided to leave Bain, I felt it was best to leave soon so I could progress quickly in my new career. When I was looking, I was approached by a few recruiters and I also saw a role on Movemeon at Ocado (International Commercial Project Manager). I ultimately got in through another channel, but I applied because I was really interested in the industry. I’d done some cases in both retail and grocery, and I liked working with tangible products. I was also really interested in the tech side — I liked the combination of an industry everyone is familiar with, but one that is at the same time going through a really significant shift. Ocado was really at the forefront of that shift. I also wasn’t sure whether I wanted to work for a corporate or a startup, but this opportunity presented the best of both worlds: I was joining a team within Ocado Solutions, which was a relatively new part of the broader organisation, and when I joined there were c. 30 people there. It felt like a startup within something bigger.
I had a great time at Ocado – I joined in 2018, and a month later the CEO of Ocado signed a major deal with the CEO of Kroeger, which increased the share price of Ocado by >2x and propelled it into the FTSE100. It was a really exciting time to be a part of Ocado, and as we got more publicity and more funding, we were able to secure more deals too. It was a really interesting time to be in the commercial team, and I actually worked on the Kroeger partnership itself.
I spent just over a year there, when I was approached about a role at ViaVan. I had been thinking about moving into something more operational and strategic, and the new role offered just that. I also liked the fact that it was a startup, and a step up in seniority. Due to my 5 years in teaching, I felt that I was a bit behind some of my peers so the chance to catch up appealed to me. Finally, the role was based in Amsterdam, a city I fell in love with during a Bain project, so when I was offered the role, it was a no-brainer.
At ViaVan, my main focus was on user growth. I took ownership of acquiring new users, increasing engagement, and forming new partnerships with other startups. For example, I formed a partnership with Deliveroo where if someone took a late-night ride with ViaVan, we could send them push notifications for money off Deliveroo. It was a really great organisation and environment, but not a good move in terms of timing. ViaVan’s product is shared taxi rides, which did not go well with COVID. Not only did it really reduce transport, it also really put people off sharing taxis. When the crisis hit in February/March, we spent about a month fighting fires. We tried to cut costs and really make the business break even. We managed to get there, and it was a really valuable experience navigating the business through the difficult period. Nevertheless, because of the broader environment the board took the decision to shut down a number of its consumer operations and mainly focus on B2B software. They eventually shut down the Amsterdam office in May, which was just a month before my first child was born.
While at first a very difficult time, in retrospect there were benefits to the timing – I took 3 months of paternity leave while I was still employed by ViaVan. I continued to keep an eye on the job market, but I mainly focused on looking after my wife and son. Once that paternity leave came to an end in September, I took a couple of freelance jobs, and I’m starting a permanent job in January. I wanted to take freelance roles so I wasn’t rushed into a decision about a permanent position – I could continue to be paid and gain experience while also being able to think about my next move.
While still freelancing, I was offered a role at Ahold Delhaize, a multinational retailer based in the Netherlands, where I’m going to be Director of Digital Strategy & Ecommerce. It’s an exciting role that’s going to combine my experience in the grocery industry, passion for tech, strategic experience at Bain and operational experience after that.
How useful did you find your teaching experience compared to your consulting experience, as you’ve progressed through your career?
Incredibly useful, but its usefulness has come as I’ve progressed through my career – e.g. for stakeholder management, for presenting dry information in an engaging way. This was less useful for me when I was in consulting, where my role was much more analytics focused. But it’s been really helpful as I’ve had to do management, presentations and stakeholder management since then.
You mentioned wanting to progress in seniority fairly fast. How did you present your experience to prospective employers to help you achieve this?
As an example, for this most recent job I framed my story as 10 years of experience across commercial, strategic and operational functions with management positions since my second year after university. I frame my experience in a way that allows me to explain teaching more easily, and it is more coherent as a leadership journey across multiple industries. Having the credibility of, say, a Bain on your CV also helps.
I should also say that once you are through the initial screening process, employers usually focus on your relevant experience. With Ahold Delhaize, I was able to rely on the retail and grocery cases I did at Bain, and the Ocado experience, to talk convincingly about my view of the industry, and what you need to do to be successful.
Freelancing can be quite a big decision; can you talk a bit about the pros and cons?
In the position I found myself in, there was no disadvantage in some ways. I knew I would have no permanent job in a few months’ time, so my options were a permanent one, but possibly not the right one for the medium-to-long-term, or freelancing. I wanted to be very careful about my next permanent job because I’d spent relatively short times at Ocado and ViaVan. So freelancing felt like a good option to continue paying the bills while I looked for a permanent role.
If my personal situation was different, I may have stuck with freelancing for longer. But we’ve recently bought a house in Amsterdam, and my young child is starting daycare here. So the stability of a permanent job was a big draw for me- one of the big cons of freelance is that you are living project to project. Otherwise, the bigger concern to me with freelance is the question of progression. If I were to do 3 years of freelance work and then wanted to go permanent, would I be able to move into as senior a position as I would have done had I spent the last 3 years working my way up in a permanent position?
You’ve worked for both larger and smaller organisations. What do you see as the pros and cons there?
I still don’t know what my preferred size of organisation would be – I think much of it is down to the culture and size of your team. What I’ve generally found is that the smaller an organisation, the more entrepreneurial and flexible it can be. For example, I’ve really enjoyed that lack of bureaucracy during my time at ViaVan: the fast pace, the fact that my role changed at least twice… The smaller the organisation, the more likely you are to see quite significant changes to what you are doing. However, the lack of stability and uncertainty during crises is a big factor to consider.
There’s a lot more stability in larger organisations. That can bring downsides too – there are a lot more meetings in larger organisations, to gain alignment. And generally, there are a lot more layers to go through to make decisions. However, larger organisations with the right culture can offer you much greater reach and impact, as well as flexibility to progress within the organisation. So I think the organisation itself is more important than the size.
Do you have any advice for people looking for jobs during COVID?
Short-term, my advice is to stay positive. It can be very easy to get depressed about your prospects, especially if your job’s at risk. But particularly those with a consulting background have skills and experience that will always be in demand.
Long-term, it’s good to also think about where the growth will be over the next 2-5 years – not necessarily COVID itself, but how businesses are going to change because of it. It you are thinking about change, try to move somewhere that will be transferable further down the line too by developing expertise in future growth areas.
“You learn so much more at a start-up. I learnt a lot at BCG, but here the learning curve has been much steeper and much more satisfying. You have so much more responsibility, and you learn from that much faster – you have to make decisions fast.”
Freddy, Wild Cosmetics
We speak to Freddy, co-founder and CEO of Wild Cosmetics, and Jocelyn, Head of Operations, who Freddy hired on Movemeon.
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Freddy, it would be great to understand a bit about your journey to starting Wild Cosmetics.
I was at HelloFresh for 6 years; I joined as the first marketing employee. There was a team of 5 of us and over the 6 years we built a team of 20 people and grew the business to £100m in revenue. I learnt a lot – made a lot of mistakes too, but it was a super exciting journey in a very competitive space.
I left HelloFresh close to 2 years ago. I wanted to start my own business and was interested in the sustainability space – I saw a lot of opportunities there for startups to disrupt. At the same time, a friend of mine – co-founder Charlie – had already been playing around in that space; he had a reusable coffee cup business. We looked at a few areas and saw the bathroom as ripe for innovation – lots of plastic there! So that’s why we started Wild. It’s been a super exciting journey so far.
Wild soft-launched last year and then properly launched at the heart of COVID. We’ve been growing really fast and have just raised another £2m from JamJar and a couple more investors.
Freddy & Jocelyn, could you both talk a bit about the process of hiring / being hired into a fast-growing startup during a pandemic?
Freddy: Jocelyn was our 5th hire [she joined Wild as Head of Operations]. We needed someone who had a broad skill set, and who was up for a big challenge and a steep learning curve.
Jocelyn: I interviewed remotely, during May when we were actually at the highest-level restrictions. I didn’t mind interviewing in that format, but it is an unusual way to get hired! I’ve recently hired an Ops Intern on video calls – so on the other side of the process. It’s certainly strange, but totally doable!
When I started, restrictions had lifted, so I could come in to meet Freddy and Charlie, and through the summer I could also be in and we had a few weeks when everything was relatively normal, with everyone in.
I’d never worked in a startup before Wild so that was actually a bigger change for me, compounded by the startup in COVID scenario. I’m really looking forward to when we can be back together, all in the same office.
Freddy, what was it like launching during a pandemic?
We are very lucky to be a digital-first business, but we are also going into a purely offline category. We benefited from the demand side, but the supply side was challenging – which is why we had to hire someone nearly immediately to help with the operations.
Culturally, it is very difficult – creating a good startup culture when you are working from home, over Zoom, is very difficult. This continues to be a big challenge because I see it as one of the most important parts of launching a new business. I’m really excited for when we can go back to working from the same office – I’m a really big believer in office space culture for an early-stage business. It really helps to make decision-making quicker and to get across to any new hires what you are trying to do as a new company.
Jocelyn, could you talk a bit about joining a growing startup, during a pandemic, from a new hire’s point of view?
I feel like I’ve got fully stuck in. Although I’ve been working from home, I feel completely part of the team, and really involved in all things operations. I think this is probably true of a startup at any time – there’s so much to do, you can’t hide from the work. Even in my second week, we were looking to raise our second seed round, so I was involved in building the business plan and the investment model. You are straight in the deep end, COVID or no COVID.
You learn so much more at a startup. I learnt a lot at BCG, but here the learning curve has been much steeper and much more satisfying. You have so much more responsibility, and you learn from that much faster – you have to make decisions fast. As a management consultant, you don’t do, you advise, and you can hide behind your slides. I’ve learnt so much more in 6 months here than in 18 months at BCG! It’s also been extremely satisfying to own things more – every week, you achieve something at a startup.
If you were to give any hiring managers, or startups in general, hiring advice, what would it be?
Freddy: You always want to be really busy before you hire. A lot of startups hire a bit too early without learning things themselves. As managers, you have to understand the problems of the business, so you have to do the work for a bit first – that way you’ll understand what the new hire will experience.
Of course, the challenge then is that you are busy so you want to hire someone quickly – but that’s exactly when you want to take your time. You want to find the right person, and you want to really test them on the skills they are going to execute. Stepping further back, you also want to have at least a couple of good candidates you are choosing from. If we had a process where we had just one good candidate, we’d probably reset and try again to make sure we get a few candidates to compare.
You can learn a lot about hiring by reading about it, but really you have to just try it, and you probably have to make a few mistakes. Interviewing is particularly difficult because it’s easy for it to not be an accurate reflection of what people will be like in the role. So you have to figure out ways to test whether candidates will also thrive in a startup environment, which takes time.
It’s also important to be really aware of what startups at different stages need – then find ways to test for people’s attitudes and abilities along these needs.
Jocelyn: I think it’s also important to test people’s attitudes – you don’t want someone that’s just attracted by the cool co-working space or the role in name. You need to make sure you really want the exact role.
This is also my advice for anyone hoping for a startup role without previous startup experience – do a lot of research and preparation; show that you really want the role and that you really believe in the company and the product.
Freddy, how did you find hiring the consulting skill set? How do consultants fit into a startup?
Consultants are really bright people; they’ve had a lot of exposure to different businesses, and they have a lot of structure and process. This is just what startups need in certain areas – so you just need to balance that with enough entrepreneurial spirit to move things quickly. (That spirit can also be developed over time.)
How did you find using Movemeon?
Freddy: From the recruitment side, Movemeon is really good. We had 50 applications and 5 really good applicants. We were able to run the whole process in 2-3 weeks — that speed and process, combined with the quality pool, was really important to making the right decision and finding out who we wanted to hire.
Jocelyn: Movemeon was recommended to me by people who’d exited consulting. My search moved really quickly; I had really clear comms from the Movemeon team too.
Jocelyn, do you have any advice for consultants hoping to make an exit?
Do it!
I read a book I found really helpful, and a lot of other consultants would enjoy it too – it’s called Designing Your Life, written by Stanford professors Dave Evans & William Burnett. It was how I honed in on small startups, so it’s definitely been really helpful.
Movemeon employer spotlights are a series of articles highlighting our clients. They detail the internal company culture, employee experience and outline their ideal candidate.
Here, we speak to Craig, the Commercial Director for Welbeck Health Partners.
In your own words, please tell us a bit about Welbeck Health Partners.
We are a company that runs private outpatient and day-patient multi-speciality medical centres. We were founded about 5 years ago, and we opened our first centre, OneWelbeck, in Central London in June 2019.
What have you liked about working with Movemeon and what makes us distinctive/stand out from others?
Sabah and the team were very keen to understand us as a company; who we are and what we are looking for. You offered almost a recruitment consulting service. You also have a very talented pool of candidates. I’ve used different channels before; different recruitment consultants and direct approaches through LinkedIn.
On a very consistent basis, you had a higher quality of candidates, and I wasn’t surprised that the successful candidate, Holly, came from you in the end.
Additionally, of all the companies we’ve worked with, you were the most understanding of changing requirements. As a startup, our company is developing quickly, so what we were looking for also changed. As a fellow startup, you were most understanding not just of how we could change the job advert, but also of the fact that startup needs change. Some of the more traditional recruitment consultancies found that frustrating, but you were more aware of the needs of a small company.
What was your impression of the quality & relevance of candidates?
We got some very good candidates from you! If anything, I think we were actually at the junior end of where you typically recruit. Holly had about 4 years of experience. Many of your candidates are higher up the chain, even one below C-suite and director level. We had some candidates from that level – it was flattering that they chose to apply, but they were a bit overqualified for what we were looking for.
Would you recommend Movemeon?
Definitely, and I would happily use you again too. You were cheaper than the recruitment consultants as well, which was definitely a great thing for us!
Much of our recruitment is at the junior levels at the moment, so we would just need to make sure that the job is pitched at the right level on your platform.
What is the best piece of hiring advice you’ve ever received?
Recruit A+ players, and always people that are better than yourself. This is something that I’ve tried to stick to, and I can already tell Holly will be further ahead on the career ladder in 10 years’ time than me!
What is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
My old manager always used to draw a circle on a piece of paper to represent the world, and a small dot to represent you – to illustrate the point that whatever is going in is just a tiny piece of the puzzle. There’s more to life out there; don’t take yourself too seriously!
Please tell us a bit about your background and career.
It’s quite a funny story actually. Like a lot of my peers at university, I didn’t have a very clear direction or thought process on a strategic direction for my career, but from a very young age, I was always told that I’d make a good lawyer. I didn’t really know what a lawyer actually did, and I don’t think the people telling me knew either… But I still decided to go in that direction.
In the UK, law firms try to get you while you are young, so you have recruitment fairs in the second year of university. So in my second year I signed up for vacation schemes at a number of big law firms in London, and one of them offered me a scheme that took the whole summer (because they didn’t want you to go to another firm!) – half of it was in London, and for the second half they shipped me off to New York, so I lived in New York for a number of weeks. At the end of it, I got a job offer, so here I was, at the age of 20, with 2 more years of university still to go (I was doing a 4-year degree), and a job lined up that was even going to pay for law school. For a 20-year-old, it was just great!
I didn’t really think about whether I’d like the nuts and bolts of it, but once I was doing it, I could tell I didn’t want to be a lawyer long-term. A lot of my friends were going into other professional services though, so I felt that law was just as good a background skill to have. In retrospect, I was actually quite lucky. I graduated right at the start of GFC, so all the finance jobs disappeared overnight! A lot of my friends who would have gone into finance ended up going into graduate schemes or corporates.
Anyway, I knew that the advisory work I did as a lawyer was interesting and challenging, but I wanted to operate a business. I wanted to be the decision-maker, and to build a business — but I didn’t really want to build a law firm, I wanted to build a business where I wasn’t the product.
To help with moving to a more general business career, I made sure my legal specialisms were as relevant as possible: I did corporate and commercial legal work with a focus on M&A. That was a really transferable skill set, and the business contacts I made were also relevant to my future that way. So tailoring my career to my plans for the future was great, but then there was this scary moment where I realised I’d done law for 5 years! In law, in the UK you get pigeonholed very easily, while in the US it’s very easy to have a business career after being a lawyer. That was very different from my friends who’d done, for example, accountancy, and were gradually moving over into operational roles. This was a bit concerning for me, so I started to think more consciously about how to navigate the change.
The few options I came up with included: moving over to business/management consultancy; doing an MBA, which basically washes your slate clean; or starting my own business. I spoke to a lot of my friends at the time, including Rich [Movemeon co-Founder and one of Rob’s university friends]. Rich was always very clear, he’d basically say to just get a job and figure it out as you go. I’d also spoken to a few management consultant friends. I remember one of them particularly, who was at Bain, said I’d be crazy to go from law to management consultancy as I’d end up with the same problem — after 5 years, I’d have (another) great brand on my CV, but I still wouldn’t have any operational experience. So I narrowed it down to trying to run my own business or doing an MBA. The latter was knocked off the list based on cost.
I had some medic friends and we decided to try and set up a telemedicine business. But what really helped me make the leap was that Rich took a bet on me at the same time. He asked me to join him and Nick at Movemeon; he gave me an entry-level job doing growth. I was working with them in the very early days of Movemeon, helping to grow out both sides of the platform, and helping them with their website redesign. Doing this really helped me to get in and do sales / prospecting work – it’s the kind of thing everyone hates, but it’s actually really important to do. I worked with them for 6 months, and at the same time, we launched the telemedicine business. At the same time, I also knew I wouldn’t be working with Rich forever, so I also joined two other lawyers setting up a firm helping early-stage companies exclusively.
The telemedicine business did OK, but it was never enough of a success to pay the bills. The law firm was wildly successful, but I was again becoming a lawyer, and I did not want to be one. However, through the firm, I met the guys starting Techspace. With Techspace, I learnt more about the business model. Rich and I had worked in a number of shared working spaces and business lounges, including Regus [now IWG], WeWork and Workspace, and I thought this market was really interesting. It was fast-growing, with a fairly simple business model (albeit with some risk attached). I also liked the focus of going after scaling technology companies as your customer base, as it was a really robust and growing market — growing markets are so much more forgiving than mature or stable ones!
When I met the Techspace guys, I thought this was a really interesting opportunity. They were just growing their team, and I helped them raise a round of financing – their series A – and after that stayed involved as their financial and legal advisor. Over the following year, I got more and more involved, and eventually, they asked me to come on full-time. I initially joined in a strategy / commercial role, and just under 2 years ago there were some changes in the management team, and the shareholders at the time asked me to take over as MD. I helped run the business and raised some more capital, and then hired a new CEO. I thought he was going to bring his own executive team, but we got on really well so he asked me to stay on as his COO — I took over formally in April. (It was definitely a crazy time to start as official COO, with a lot of challenges brought by COVID.)
What is your day-to-day like at Techspace now, especially in light of COVID?
For a start, it’s not as organised as I’d like it to be! I like to be organised about the way I stay on top of operational and commercial responsibilities, but we are quite reactive at the moment. Guidance is changing a lot, so operating approaches need to change in response.
Broadly speaking, my operational objectives right now are to keep our sites operational and safe for any of their members who do want to or need to work from their offices. It’s simple once you get the hang of it, but it does require understanding who is coming in and out of our buildings, and making sure our cleaning regimes are up to scratch.
My next set of responsibilities include thinking c. 6 months down the track, and trying to decide what our buildings are going to look like as demand increases for them. Before we’ve sold the COVID crisis, this also means thinking about how we solve operating constraints while utilisation of our buildings increases.
Looking back, when I took over in April, the single biggest issue was thinking about how we reduce all of our variable costs. That was a massive re-forecasting exercise with tons of conversations with our suppliers and partners — some of these were very difficult, but broadly speaking it’s been a very supportive environment. We are very lucky about that.
Looking beyond the next 4-6 months, it’s going to be a lot about retraining our team (unfortunately we had to lose some team members), and updating our SOPs to be as efficient as possible while delivering good member service. We also want to make sure we have good learnings from all of our sites, since we operate in both London and Berlin. It’s my responsibility to make sure we learn from each other.
Day-to-day, fundraising and working with our shareholders is also in my portfolio. It’s pretty varied – we are still fairly small, so you have to do lots.
As someone with a lot of insight into co-working space use, what are your predictions for the ‘future normal’ when it comes to work?
I think where we’ll ultimately end up – and this will take a while – is a kind of blended approach, with some remote working and some co-working space use. The latter will mean that people can still have a community and a social network; for most people working really from home is not actually a nice idea. Having no one else around works for a small segment of society, but the majority will probably want local hubs. But I can also see companies wanting to have a base where they can get the team together, to have central meetings and socialise. But this change will take at least 10 years, with local hubs and housing outside of London needing to be built.
Do you have any advice for others hoping to move from professional services to startups, or hoping to change career in general?
Talk to lots of people. Consultants and lawyers are ‘solutionisers’ – we feel nervous when we don’t have the answer. But most people are more than happy to answer questions, so it’s OK to be vulnerable. Pick career role models, and talk to them.
It’s also important to give yourself the chance to have an idea about the direction you are taking, but it’s OK to have to course-correct over time. Be deliberate about the people you are working with – your team will have much more of an impact on you than your company.
Get used to living within your means, especially if you are hoping to move to a startup. Coming from professional services, you won’t be paid as much as you are used to in a startup, and if you are not living within your means you’ll never have the confidence to make the change.
Once you are in the right industry/company, it’s also just as important to put the time in to regularly reflect on whether your trajectory still meets your needs. People’s circumstances change, so it’s key to keep coming back to what’s important to you.
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