business

Holding the buck: Some thoughts about accountability in the modern marketplace

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk to the Institute for Recovery from Childhood Trauma at the House of Lords. I decided it would be too stressful to travel down that morning, so about three weeks in advance I booked an apartment through booking.com. I’ve stayed in apartments and rooms through online sites quite a few times before without incident. Normally they send a code for the door by text or email, or instructions to open a key safe. However, this booking was confirmed with instructions to collect the key from a nearby address by 9pm (I was told if I arrived later there would be a £20 late collection fee). So I caught an earlier train and got a taxi to the pick-up address, which transpired to be an office building, locked up for the night. The security guard on site who came out to see why I was loitering had never heard of this being a collection point for apartment keys. So I spent 45 minutes waiting at the pick-up address and checking the apartment address just down the road, with no ability to check my email or find the phone number of the owner due to the o2 outage. I then found a restaurant which let me use its wifi to contact the apartment owner. He answers the phone as Booking.com and says the pickup address sent to me by email was never given (despite me having it in writing on my screen as I spoke to him) and that I had not confirmed the time. He says he will send a man to meet me with a key. But he isn’t willing to send the man to the restaurant in which I am sitting, I have to go wait across the road outside Patisserie Valerie (which is also closed) for a man in a red jacket.

In about 15 minutes that man arrives. He greets me by name, but does not offer me any apologies or identification. I can’t tell if he is the man I spoke to on the phone or not. He does not provide a key to the apartment, but tells me to follow him and walks off in the opposite direction to the apartment. I ask him where we are going, he says “to the apartment”. I say that it isn’t the right way, and I don’t feel comfortable following a strange man to an unknown address. He is short with me and tells me that he is taking me to an alternative apartment, because a cleaner snapped the key in the apartment door 20 minutes previously. I find this suspicious as a) I’ve been waiting at the apartment and just up the road for 90 minutes and nobody has come or gone from it in this time, and b) why would a cleaner be in an apartment at 10pm that is supposed to have check-in from 3pm to 9pm, and c) why did the man on the phone not notify me of a change of address or email me with a change of booking through the site on which I had booked?

He leads me down less busy streets and alleys across Soho. I start to get anxious that I’m in a part of London that is unfamiliar to me, and have no idea where I am going. I will not be at the address I have booked and nobody will know where I am, its past 11pm and dark, and I’m being led by a total stranger who has shown me no ID. So I call my husband, explain the situation and start reading out street names so he knows where I am. He says that I sound nervous, and that if my gut doesn’t feel like this is safe I should trust it and go somewhere that does.

My mind goes into overdrive. I start worrying I’m being taken to an unknown address, where I might be robbed or attacked or anything. I’m thinking perhaps they gave the fake address as a means to be harder to trace, or perhaps they use the photos of one apartment in a good location to put people in cheaper accommodation in less favourable locations. Perhaps he is nothing to do with Booking.com and is just a confidence trickster. Did he definitely use my name? Was he the man on the phone? I have no way of knowing. I can’t just follow a stranger to an unknown address in the middle of the night with no explanation. I find an open wine bar to run into and hide.

Suddenly, all those feelings are right at the surface and I’m sobbing with fear and hiding behind the counter of the wine bar until the man has gone. Then the man who claims to be from Booking.com (I still can’t tell if he is also the man in the red jacket, or someone different) calls me and asks where I am, and I say “I don’t feel safe dealing with you and being taken to an unknown address, I’m going to find somewhere that feels safe to sleep”. It seems like something I should be able to take for granted, that now seems out of reach.

The staff at the bar are super-nice and patch me up, give me some water and use of their wifi. They offer me wine and fancy olives. I take the latter (and they are the best olives ever, as well as thoroughly nice people, so do check out Antidote if you are ever in Soho). When I calm down a bit, I start searching all the usual websites to find a hotel room. I then find out there is nowhere else to stay. And I mean that literally. Even when I increase my parameters to travel up to an hour from my location, nothing is coming up on any hotel booking site that isn’t fully booked. So I’m sat there in a random wine bar in Soho, 200 miles from home, and there are no longer trains to get back there even if I didn’t have to be in London by 9am the next morning to speak at the House of Lords.

At nearly 11pm I find one, very expensive, hotel with a single room available through LastMinute.com. I book it, pay and then pay £20 to get a taxi there only to find it is overbooked and they’ve already turned away 4 other customers. It is a converted Georgian townhouse with a small number of rooms, so I’m sat in the only chair in a tiny lobby. I’m repeatedly calling LastMinute, and it has gone past midnight so there is no longer even a means to find another hotel (as you can’t search for availability for the previous night), and they tell me they don’t have a room. It takes me four calls and 47 minutes on the line to speak to Last Minute’s customer services, who conclude they can’t find an alternative room for me, and don’t see that as their responsibility. At 1.25am they suggest a room is available at the Taj St James Court hotel and they have reserved it for me. I call them, they have no rooms and have never heard of me. It is now 1.30am, and I am making plans to sleep in the bucket chair I am sitting in, in the hotel lobby, as I have nowhere else to go* and it is raining heavily. Eventually at 2am the hotel say that one guest has not checked in yet, and agree to take the gamble and let me use the room. I get less than four hours sleep for twice-the-price-I’d-normally-set-as-my-upper-limit-for-a-room, before having to head out to speak at the House of Lords.

Having given the talk I decided to complain to both Booking.com and LastMinute.com. The response from the former was “You got a refund for the apartment, so it’s all settled” and the latter offered “€20 as a goodwill gesture due to the 2 hour delay checking in”. No recognition of the fact the experience was traumatic, wasted 5 hours of my evening, cost me 3 extra taxis, and left me 200 miles from home without somewhere safe to sleep. I am faced with the realisation that trauma is subjective, and to many men hearing the tale I might have taken fright for no reason and brought the events that followed upon myself. I am forced to say “imagine if your Mum were in this situation” when explaining it to try to trigger sympathy. But nobody really cares. The apartment owner feels he has done his bit by refunding (and the website has conveniently blocked me from leaving a review). The men in the call centres were in another country, abstracted away from the problem. The customer service teams are seeing the facts in retrospect, not the feelings the experience generated, and are motivated to protect their brand rather than genuinely caring about me as a customer. The night manager of the hotel cared, because he met me in person, and saw I was upset. As a result he tried his best, but he wasn’t in a position that could resolve the problem.

And that’s where I finally reach the point. In a system where you book with a middleman who doesn’t actually provide the product you are paying for, nobody really feels accountable for the service you receive. And, to bring this round to being relevant to a wider point for health and social care, this model is being increasingly replicated in public services, where the NHS or local authority commission the service from another provider, who is assumed to be responsible. That split between online broker and real life provider, or the public sector split between purchaser and provider seems like a good model for each of those parties, as the purchaser delegates responsibility whilst fulfilling their obligations (or making a profit, in the case of online brokerage sites) with much reduced staffing and without having to invest in any tangible assets. The provider gains access to a wider market, rather than becoming obsolete. But somehow inevitably, as in my experience, the recipient of the service misses out in the middle, and finds out there is minimal quality control and an absence of clear lines of accountability when things go wrong or aren’t delivered as planned.

For example, there is a level of risk aversion that has made local authorities anxious about providing residential care placements, because of the prevalence of historic institutional abuse and the increasing awareness of child sexual exploitation and involvement in county lines (and the accompanying risk of compensation lawsuits). The result is a marketplace where private providers (many of them owned by international venture capital groups who pay minimal UK taxes) use unqualified, low-paid staff to care for some of the most complex and vulnerable young people in the UK, and it is hard for recipients or commissioners to distinguish them from provision that has different financial or delivery models. Likewise in health (and public transport) private providers cherry pick off the profitable services, whilst the public purse is left holding the can when they don’t deliver. There is a move to entrench this even further with the push towards Integrated Care Providers, where private organisations can manage the entire health and social care services for a particular region of the UK, in a way that is potentially unaccountable for its decisions and not subject to the rules for public sector organisations (like Freedom of Information requests, public consultation, or being subject to Judicial Enquiries if things go wrong, or even their statutory obligations). I think that might be a recipe for disaster, but then, I’m not a fan of corporations and the super-rich profiting from the suffering of the rest of us.

Update: Booking.com fed me some platitudes and agreed to reimburse my costs in relation to the apartment, but then failed to do so, whilst LastMinute.com have not yet replied, telling me they take 28 working days to respond to customer complaints that don’t accept the initial boilerplate response. I suspect that just like in health and social care, the (explicit or implicit) policy is to respond to those who kick up a fuss and have the potential to create negative publicity if things are not resolved, meaning that those who are devalued most by society have the least redress when things go wrong.

*call me a wuss, but I declined the option of having one bed in a bunk room in a hostel shared with 8-12 strangers

Reaching the summit?

For a long time, I’ve had a metaphor in my mind about how it feels to run a small business aiming to change children’s social care. The image is of me rolling a massive boulder up a hill. Progress is slow, it is hard work and I often find it tiring. Even when I rest I have to do so holding the rock in place. At times I feel like I might be reaching the summit, only to see that there is another climb ahead. I sometimes wonder why I’ve taken on this mammoth task, or whether my goals are even possible, but I am stubbornly determined that now I’m so far up the hill I don’t want to give it up. Maybe that is about sunk cost. But I’ve chipped off the worst of the bumps from the rock and got my rolling technique worked out, so I keep telling myself that if anyone can get this thing to the top of the hill, I can. Over the years of my journey I’ve tried to encourage other people to help me to push, so I am not bearing all the weight, but whilst I’ve had good company at times and plenty of encouragement, it has always seemed like the task is mine alone. That has been reinforced by numerous people telling me how I’m uniquely skilled at rock-rolling, even though I know that I was no better than many other people at the start of my journey. In fact I’m pretty sure anyone with some pretty basic skills who rolled a rock for this long could be standing in my shoes.

Of course, that bypasses the fact that I had to be willing to spend a lot of time on this, be resilient in the face of obstacles, and give up other easier opportunities to stick with it. And the fact I had the intellectual, social and personal characteristics to work out how to do this, choose a viable route and make improvements along the way. And it also omits to mention that had I known the real scope of the task would take me over a decade I might not have taken it on at the beginning. On the other hand, perhaps the fact it was difficult enough for nobody else to take on was why I did it. I think those who know me might point out it isn’t the first time I’ve jumped in at the deep end, and that I don’t do things in half measures. I don’t like taking the easy route in life, and if I set myself a challenge I like doing the task properly. I’ve always thought about what I can do to make the most impact, rather than to have the easiest life or earn the most money. I prefer to cut my own path, than to take one that is already well-trodden, and to find a way to enjoy the challenges of the journey.

So here I am, pushing my boulder and feeling like I’ve come quite a long way over the years. I might be deluding myself, but the gradient appears less steep these days. In fact, it feels tantalisingly close to reaching level ground, and I am starting to imagine what it might be like to roll my boulder down the other side of the hill. I’m trying not to be complacent that I’ve reached a point at which the boulder is stable enough not to roll back the way we came up, but people are starting to talk about how this boulder is not just on the level, but given one more push might gain enough momentum to create a landslide that will divert the river to irrigate the lands the local population need to farm. That would be beyond my wildest dreams. I mean, the motivation behind all this is to improve the lives of people who are having a tough time, but to think that it could have impact on the scale some people are now anticipating is mind-blowing. That would mean my big gamble of investing so much time and effort into this project could pay off in terms of impact. In a way that’s the great thing about indirect interventions – that they can make change that ripples out on a much bigger scale. In my boulder metaphor I’m trying to make change not by trying to teach them new farming skills one by one, but by trying to address some of the systemic barriers that impair their life chances, so that they have the opportunity to find their own ways to thrive.

So this blog is a marker of me standing at what I hope might be the top of the hill, and crossing my fingers the gaining momentum part happens. The mixture of hope and uncertainty is stressful to balance. When it’s a bit more concrete I’ll write a bit more, and hopefully I’ll not need a metaphor to couch my cautious optimism in, and can tell you about the actual project and the steps I’ve taken to progress it.

Runway: A blog about whether being self-employed or starting a business is a viable option financially

If an aircraft runs out of runway before becoming airborne then it will have to stop or it will potentially crash horribly. For this reason, runway is used as a metaphor for the relationship between the money available in a business and its running costs. If the business does not generate enough income to keep the cashflow up to cover costs, then it will either come to a stop or come to a horrible end. But unlike an airport, where sufficient runway already exists for the purposes of launching planes, with a new business you have to find or create the money that will hopefully let the business become self-sustaining. And unlike an airport, at which planes get up into the air uneventfully every few minutes every day for many years, most businesses fail within the first three years, often because of not being able to generate enough income to sustain the business in the longer term.

I think a lot of people in employment have fantasies about being self-employed or starting their own business. For clinicians, the fantasy is often about offering therapy in private practise to insured or well-heeled clients with milder problems. Whilst the hourly rates for private practise might seem attractive compared to a salary divided down into an hourly rate, the figures represent something really different. Salary is paid on leave days, bank holidays and when you are sick. It covers maternity/paternity leave and redundancy if you are no longer needed. You get supervision, CPD, equipment to use and premises to work in. You also have a team of other professionals supporting you in the background from admin to HR, finance, operational management, procurement and maintenance. You don’t have to think beyond providing the clinical and associated psychological services. Salary packages, particularly from the NHS, also contribute to very favourable life insurance and pension schemes. When you are self-employed you need to think about premises, insurance, supervision, CPD costs, DBS checks, accountancy, advertising, tax and how you will generate income if you don’t or can’t work. You may also need equipment from computers and stationary to psychometric tests (which are enormously expensive both to purchase and for record forms).

Remember that the bills need to be paid immediately, but clients may not pay you as promptly – and some may not pay at all. This is particularly true for me when doing expert witness work where the timelines from accepting the work to receiving payment for it are amazingly extended. If I accepted an instruction in principle on 1st January, I would typically receive instructions for it 1-3 weeks later. My appointments would take place 4-8 weeks after that, and my report would be submitted a fortnight later, perhaps in late March. There might then be further instructions or clarifying questions, before the case is heard at the end of May. Any invoices will only be processed when the case closes in June, and then sent to the Legal Aid Authority for scrutiny in July. If there are no queries the LAA then send payment to the solicitors, who eventually send it on to the expert in the August or September, though some will drag their heels for several more months. So I have to wait six to twelve more months to receive payment. And about 8% of the work is never paid, because the solicitors closes after the Legal Aid claim is made, or because the LAA determined that some of the work wasn’t “reasonable” or because there was a problem somewhere in the line of communication and one of the parties doesn’t claim a share of your invoice. Meanwhile the work is taxable in the financial year in which it is completed, and the VAT is payable at the point the invoice is issued. I also have to pay any staff who contributed at the end of the month in which we did the work.

Even as a sole trader working from home in a service industry with relatively low set-up costs, most of us need to earn some money to cover our living expenses, and can’t go for months or years unpaid. That means that unless you have a massive inheritance or lottery win to draw on, it might not be possible to give up salaried work to take the gamble of trying something independent. My rule of thumb is to have a minimum of three months living expenses saved before you consider leaving salaried employment. You might get this from a redundancy or mutually agreed resignation scheme, or by putting money aside whilst you are planning. You should also compare your current and projected earnings. My way of calculating this to calculate your annual salary plus 25% (the approximate value of the pension and protections) divided by 210 (the actual number of days an average NHS employee turns up to work). You can then compare this to what you think you could earn in a day if you had private clients, a contract with a large company to deliver training or services, a calendar full of supervision or consultancy, or whatever you imagine doing. You really need a multiple of three between the first number and the second to make being self-employed pay equivalently after costs, though if you really hate your job or are prepared to take a reduction in income (at least in the short-term) you might consider a multiple of two. I don’t believe it is viable to go below this because in my experience people never properly account for the amount of expenses involved, or the for the amount of non-income generating time required. As well as the fact that not all of your available slots will be filled until you are well established, it is worth bearing in mind that most full-time clinicians spend about 15-18 hours per week on direct clinical work, and the rest on work tasks that would be non-income generating in the private sector, such as screening referrals, setting up appointments, phone calls, email, supervision, meetings/indirect work, writing letters/reports, other admin and CPD.

That said, money isn’t everything. I know some amazing selfless people who have earned less than minimum wage for many years, but followed their heart because they cared passionately about what they were doing, and the impact it could make in the world. I’m not quite that altruistic, perhaps because I am the main earner for our family unit and feel an obligation to sustain our quality of life, but I’ve had to learn to live on a much less regular income. I pay myself minimum wage then supplement this with lump sums when the business is profitable. To make this even more unpredictable, I have often had to loan money into the business in order to pay salaries when others have been slow to pay us for work we’ve done. Overall I’d say my income is lower than when I worked in the NHS and did some court expert witness work on top, but nowadays on balance it probably matches my consultant grade salary. The amount I earn feels sufficient for our needs – and probably stretches a little further as some expenses have been absorbed (eg my mobile phone bill is paid by the company, as is the cost of any CPD I want, the costs of my accountant, and some little things like a sandwich and soft drink when I’m away from the office on business).

There are also some things that money can’t buy. I’ve loved the freedom and flexibility of being self-employed, even though there have been times that have been quite tough financially. Whilst it initially increased my workaholic tendencies to quite alarming proportions (peaking at working 9.30am to 6.30pm in the office and then 10pm until 2am at home most weekdays, and fitting in 5-10 hours of work per weekend), more recently I’ve been able to achieve more of a work-life balance. I’ve stopped doing as much consultancy and training that involved staying away over night, and reduced the court work that created so many high-pressure deadlines. I’ve started to cluster meetings in London once a month, arranging other meetings over videoconferencing where possible. I’ve withdrawn from the committee and policy work that was taking up a big chunk of my time. I’ve also recognised the wise advice of a past supervisor that said I needed to fill up life outside work with commitments that would compete with work, rather than expecting to ever be the kind of person who can ring-fence free time. So I’ve started putting social appointments in my calendar, made a commitment to swimming regularly, I’m doing more adventurous things with the children, and I’ve even been able to sneak out for the afternoon with my husband from time to time. Running my own business has also given me a chance to relocate to an area that I love, where my qualify of life and working environment is much nicer.

When weighing up the options, bear in mind that working as a sole trader can be quite isolating. In the NHS or other organisations we usually work within teams, often with the benefit of colleagues to bounce ideas off, or who can contribute to formulations from other perspectives. Working with others also allows you to collaborate or to delegate work to people with complementary skills or interests. It shares the risk of complex cases, and means you don’t feel solely responsible for the waiting list or the stuck cases. It can allow you to prioritise work and manage your workload. When you are the only one doing the work this becomes much more difficult, and the pressures and sense of responsibility for clients can increase substantially. Even though the waiting list might be shorter, you might feel more guilty if there is a delay in starting work with a new referral, or more responsible for ensuring a good outcome for everyone. When your income literally depends on how much work you do it can be hard not to end up over-working to the detriment of everything else in your life. However, on the flip side you can feel pride in positive outcomes, and a waiting list becomes a marker of success (that people are willing to wait for you) rather than a mark of failure like it is construed in the NHS (where there is pressure to meet targets, and services don’t have enough resources to keep pace with need, and are the only available option for most people).

You also need to realistically appraise your business plan. Most people go into business in the belief that they have found a niche in which they can earn a profit, and hope that demand for their services or product will arrive as soon as potential customers know it is available. However, that can lead people to be overly optimistic about how fast they can gain traction in the market, or the level of profit they can make. Unless the plan is to seek external investment, most small business owners need for the business to become profitable fairly quickly, and few would be willing to pour their life savings into a new business in the hope of a return further down the line. When trying to start up a company or expand a sole trader enterprise into a business that employs others it can often feel like a Catch 22 situation, that you can’t afford the things you need to generate the income that will fund the things you need. But unlike on Dragon’s Den or in Silicon Valley, few people have access to capital investment and most professionals (in the health and social care field at least) are wary about taking on loans before the business has the means to repay them, even if they can access lending.

My point is that even if you have a great business idea and an established reputation getting enough money to start and sustain a business is tough. Cashflow is a make or break issue. Generating sufficient working capital is one of several elements that challenge new start-ups. In fact, of small businesses that fail (based on figures from the USA), 82% attribute this to cashflow issues and 29% say that they ran out of cash, whilst 42% said that the issue was a lack of market need for their products or services, 23% don’t have the right team to deliver the business, and 19% can’t match a competitor.

I guess that makes me a survivor. I launched my small business seven years ago this month, and it is gratifying that we’ve managed to weather the politics of adversity to still be trading. However, making money is still something I find quite challenging. I’ve come out of a career in the NHS in which the financial transactions involved were far removed from my daily life, and the idea of making a profit was quite aversive. But I’ve had to learn to make my business financially viable. Whilst there have been times that have tested me almost to my limits, the business is still functioning and financially we are still on the runway. I view that as a success. However, I feel like we have never quite reached the position of being airborne, where the business is self-sustaining without me personally doing income generating work as a substantial proportion of my time – and that would be an enormous issue if I ever needed time off sick.

My penultimate piece of advice is to speak to people who understand business and finance before you embark upon your journey, and regularly as you go along. I’ve had the benefit of great guidance as I’ve travelled outside of the NHS and into the world of business. As well as my fantastic ongoing mentoring from Impact Hub, which has included some work on the financial elements of the business plan, I recently won a place on a scheme sponsored by Barclays bank to help social purpose businesses to scale up. I’ve been attending Judge Business School at Cambridge University with several other small businesses, where we have had a series of days to explore our options and make a growth plan for the business. Having identified gaps, I’ve then taken actions to rectify them. For example, we’ve built a website for BERRI so that prospective subscribers can see what our tools have to offer, and that has brought in a flurry of new subscribers. I’ve also explored the options to help me scale up more rapidly and increase the impact of what we can deliver. Thankfully we have a strong business case, and I’ve been increasingly able to articulate that as a result of the work I’ve been doing. Over the last month I have spoken to two potential sources of investment. That would give me more runway to play with, but I need to work out whether we are fully aligned in terms of the destination and route to get there before I can be sure that is the right move to make compared to continued slow organic growth.

My final advice is to recognise your own limitations, and to find ways to delegate the tasks you are not good at or not enthused about, and spend time with people who share your passions or the skills you want to grow. For me that means having an administrator who makes up and chases up my invoices, accountants who can deal with payroll, tax, NI, pensions etc and advisors who guide me to apply for the right grants, tax rebates and training schemes. I also meet up regularly with other social entrepreneurs to share our progress and plan collaborative projects. I just appointed an experienced Business Development Lead for the company, who I hope will help me to weigh up the options for investment, and help us to grow quickly but in a way that feels right and prioritises making an positive impact on the lives of vulnerable children over maximising profit. I’m hoping we’ll reach sustainability by the end of the year, but there are still hurdles to overcome, and even when we get into the air I can’t imagine it will be a journey without occasional turbulence.

Pushing upwards

When I was an undergraduate psychology student, I found parts of the course curriculum kind of boring. I was interested in human behaviour and experiences, because I wanted to understand how to alleviate distress and increase wellbeing. Unfortunately I was not so interested in the neurochemistry or neuroanatomy that is the underlying mechanics for those emotions and behaviours. I was interested in behavioural ecology, like the evolutionary/survival value of altruism to vampire bats, and its parallels in human behaviour (eg why we have developed a system of rules and punishments to enforce the social contract). But I wasn’t so interested in animal perception and cognition. I found some of the early psychological experiments on both animals and humans to be really cruel and distressing, though I was aware that they helped to progress our understanding of brain and behaviour, and helped us to recognise the need for the ethical considerations we apply to experiments now.

Because I didn’t love the whole course, during the second year of the course I began to wonder whether I had selected the subject on autopilot, because my Mum is also a clinical psychologist (now retired).  A few other life events compounded this lost feeling by lowering my mood generally* and I developed an increasing existential doubt about whether I was making the right choices in my life.  I also wanted to test out my values and the options available to me, so my focus drifted to my social relationships and activities outside of psychology. I became less motivated and didn’t attend all of my lectures, and (despite having previously been quite successful in educational assessments) I got a 2:2 for one module that I hadn’t enjoyed. It was a mark that fairly reflected my effort/interest level, and in any other context it wouldn’t have been a big deal. However, I was gutted because I felt like the whole course would be pointless if I didn’t excel academically, as I was aware of how competitive the path into clinical psychology was. I considered changing course or dropping out, but I couldn’t think of anything I would rather do.

One of the images that helped pull me through that time, was from the I Ching – an ancient Chinese book of wisdom, also known as the book of changes. The basic gist is that you throw coins to point you to one of 64 readings, which can be generated with various variations and additional comments, and (like a horoscope or cold reading or fortune cookie, but perhaps with a bit more zen wisdom) the resulting text is ambiguous and non-specific enough for you to draw relevance to your life situation. The page that I was sent to was called “pushing upwards” and the hexagram was of wood below the earth. The image it described was of a seed below the surface, using all of its stores of energy to push a shoot upwards in the hope that it would reach the light and conditions in which it could grow and thrive. The text explained that to do this is an effortful process, in which you are gambling that this investment of energy will be worthwhile in reaching a goal that might still be out of sight. It describes the heaping up of small efforts to create the conditions in which future success is possible. The seed takes time to unfold into the tree: Although the results are not immediately visible and gratifying, “that which pushes upwards does not come back”. The reading tells you to put in a sustained effort if you want to achieve great things. It reassures you that if you are driven by a deeper sense of purpose (rather than wealth or glory) and willing to learn from wise people around you, you should not fear the path ahead. It implies that in time favourable conditions will help you along. In this way, it says, a person can rise from obscurity and lowliness to power and influence, provided that you make your efforts in a humble, flexible and authentic way.

This was a good metaphor for needing to put in more effort to achieve my goals, and it also reminded me of my core values and my drive to in some way make the world a better place, by improving the experience of other humans who had been dealt a tougher hand in life. Thankfully, as I entered my third year I got together with my husband (who has continued to be a supportive and stabilising influence for more than two decades since) and entered a much happier phase in my life. I also found the modules in the final year of undergraduate much more relevant to my interests, because they were much more closely tied in to the theory and practice of clinical psychology. As a result I started to put in more effort and get higher marks. I also started to gather work experience, and to seek out advice from qualified CPs. Gradually, those efforts paid dividends – I secured an AP post on a research project straight after graduating** and then worked incredibly hard to do that job, write up papers for publication and complete a masters degree by research at the same time, before gaining wider experience in a more clinical role with a different client group and then securing my place on clinical training.

From the moment I entered that third year with that mindset, I enjoyed the rest of my journey into clinical psychology. No matter what the client group or type of work, I felt like I was doing something worthwhile and I was also constantly learning and being challenged. I had some inspiring supervisors, both as an AP and as a trainee. I didn’t love every placement (they were all good learning experiences, but my enjoyment varied depending on my interest in the client group, the style and context of the work, and the amount of travel involved to get there). Likewise I didn’t click with every supervisor equally, but I did learn a lot from each of them. In my first AP role my supervisor was a role model of the true scientist practitioner, who secured grant funding to push forward the evidence base of the clinical work, and constantly published papers and disseminated findings. She pushed me to participate in that world, and with her support I co-wrote six peer reviewed journal articles during those two years! She is still my role model of embodying the link between research and practice in psychology, and I would love to emulate Esme’s energy and influence in my own field of work. I then worked in a project that trained student social workers, and assisted with expert reports on parenting – something I continue to have an interest in to this day. It gave me a much more practical grounding, and an awareness of social care systems that I have subsequently built on.

As a trainee I gained a basic grounding in brief CBT-based interventions in an adult service, and learnt more about the structure of mental health services and working as part of a multidisciplinary team. I also worked in services for people with intellectual disability, where I learnt about the value of indirect work, and gave more explicit consideration to issues of capacity and consent. I loved my core child and family placement, and the warmth, pragmatism and commitment of my supervisor, Patricia, set the tone for the kind of psychologist I wanted to become. I returned to her for a specialist placement to pick up the cases that were more complex, transgenerational or involved child protection issues that I had avoided the first time around. I was lucky enough during that second specialist placement to also have the opportunity to work one session a week into an NCH Action for Children project for child and young adult survivors of sexual abuse. There I was reminded of the value of human connections over any academic knowledge, as well as having the opportunity to use Cognitive Analytic Therapy for the first time. I also did a specialist placement in a child development service, with some work into a sexual abuse team – including working with children who had survived abuse and co-facilitating a group for mothers whose partners had sexually abused their children. I learnt more about complexity and systems, and some healthy cynicism about organisational change. I still remember the chart for the new tiered model of services pinned up on my supervisor’s wall, with ovals that widened at lower tiers, entitled “the shape of future services” to which he had added a handwritten subtitle “is pear-shaped”.

When I qualified I was torn between a post with the favourite supervisor I had spent two placements with and one that several people warned me was “burnout waiting to happen” working in child protection. After a long discussion with a good friend I concluded I wanted to continue to challenge myself, and also to put myself where I was most needed. I therefore took the latter post, and worked in a split post across CAMHS and child protection. I learnt from a fantastic supervisor how to work in complex systems and services. David also taught me how to be an expert witness for the family court. The balance between being down-to-earth, approachable and yet grounded in knowledge and theory, as well as the clear communication under pressure gave me another role model of the type of psychologist I wanted to become. He taught me to ask the uncomfortable questions, and to balance holding empathy for parents with speaking up for the best interests of the child. Then in my longest standing post, I learnt from another fantastic head of service to think about process in supervision, how to bring fun and creativity into my work, and also to pick my battles! I also did a lot more collaborative work, and got involved in service development and audit, as well as gradually stepping up to greater supervisory and management responsibility. In that post I had the benefit of working with an inspiring social work team manager who had been doing really innovative work to increase access to permanent placements for older and more complex children. I also went out to America for a couple of weeks to train with Dan Hughes, where I learnt about the power of being present in the intersubjective space, and became more willing to show my own vulnerability and emotional reactions.

I have also learnt from less positive experiences – the times where I got it completely wrong, or unintentionally triggered negative responses in others. For example, I remember an AP I supervised feeding back disliking that I had introduced her to colleagues as “my AP”, intending that to be as supportive as I had perceived it being when I had been an AP myself, rather than as indicative of any claim of ownership. I remember crying when criticised in a multi-agency meeting about the autism pathway, and realising too late that it had been a bad decision to come into work that day whilst my house was flooded and I didn’t have enough emotional resources for work. I still cringe looking back on one time I tried to be supportive to a junior colleague who had to give evidence in court, but ended up making myself look stupid and inhibiting her ability to impart her observations in a useful way. I recall the challenges of having to raise concerns about how a colleague’s homophobia might have a negative impact on service users, and how they justified this being part of their cultural and religious identity. I remember the camaraderie, but also the pressure of working within a big system, feeling responsible for protecting more junior colleagues from organisational changes, worrying about waiting lists, and defensively managing referrals.

Most of all, when I think about negative experiences, I remember how gutted I was when my wonderful employing organisation lost the competitive tender for our service, and how horrible the initial meeting with the new service directors and managers at our new employing trust was. It started with a gloating talk from the new clinical director, and him taking digs at our senior staff about how some people in the room might think they know how to run CAMH services, but clearly he new better as they had won the tender. The jokes about how nobody need worry about their job security, except the consultant grade psychologists, as “you are quite expensive and we haven’t figured out what to do with you yet”. And the patronising response of the service director to my questions about whether the plan for my service section in their tender specification was fixed: “If you think you can do better, cheaper, love, knock yourself out”. I remember the pressure to rewrite the service specification and job plans for my team whilst my kids were in neonatal intensive care, and to take on various tasks to compensate for the fact they hadn’t appointed a locum to cover my absence. I remember my team being left out of the accommodation plan entirely whilst I was on maternity leave, and after protesting, returning to an undecorated, unfurnished office without internet or telephone points (or mobile reception) that could only be accessed by swiping out the fire exit across two flights of stairs, then swiping into another wing of the building and going down to the furthest end of the corridor. I remember being told to income generate or face temporary staff on my team being made redundant, and then being told that I was allowed to neither quote nor invoice as I wasn’t a budget holder. I remember being promised time off in lieu for all that I did during my maternity leave, but then being denied this on my return as “we can’t pay you full-time pay for part time work, no matter what you did in the previous financial year”.

I remember the day I walked out of a meeting with an operational manager, out of the building, out of the car park and down the road, and felt like I could keep walking forever and never go back. In the end I walked across town to my previous base and talked to the directorate manager there, who made it feel less personal. Over the following weeks I sought out some personal therapy through Occupational Health, and picked apart what was me and what was the toxic system around me. Then I decided to take a career break and spoke to HR to confirm that I would be able to continue my self-employed activities during a career break without this being considered “taking up alternative employment” and blocking my right to return. I also wanted confirmation that I would return on the same grade to the same client group. I always joke that the HR lady I spoke to should never play poker, because as I told her my reasons for leaving her face gave away too much. I watched her non-verbally say something along the lines of “oh shit, we’re in trouble here, pretend we’re not, pretend we’re not” before casually raising the option of redundancy and a gagging contract***.

So I had to uproot and push upwards into new an unfamiliar soil. Initially I applied for other NHS jobs, but ended up withdrawing before interview for one and declining a job offer for another, because I wasn’t prepared to work in another toxic culture. In the end I used my expert witness work as my parachute, and figured I would work it out as I went along. I changed from being a sole trader to a limited company so that I could employ an AP. I felt like I had been gradually dehydrated by the conditions I had worked in until I was just a husk of myself, and as I started doing my own thing I found some rain I started to find my own shape again. At first I used my own business to try to achieve what I had hoped to in my NHS career independently. As I have said in previous blogs, I helped set up a parenting charity, but felt the political agenda of the founder wasn’t consistent with the clinical goals. I secured funding for, designed, managed and evaluated a service to support people with diabetes, but ultimately it wasn’t commissioned. I set up a psychology service within a social care provider, and trained staff all across the country, but whilst I enjoyed the work I didn’t enjoy spending so much time away from my home and kids.

The challenges have continued, as I have had to foster my entrepreneurial side and learn the skills to run a business, hold a budget and manage staff. I’ve found new ways to disseminate knowledge – through being on committees, doing policy work, and writing for different audiences in my book, practice journals and on social media and this blog. I’ve developed ways to use technology to improve services, and I’ve returned to doing research. I’ve had to be flexible enough to try new things until I’ve been able to find a way to work that feels authentic. This blog documents much of that journey.

Through it all I have never been bored or complacent about my work. I’ve always enjoyed finding new challenges, and new ways to apply psychological knowledge. I have always found that my work provides moments of flow – that sense of deep and satisfying immersion in the present moment to the exclusion of everything else, that you get when you have sufficient agency and skills to meet a challenge, and feel a sense of reward from doing something well or contributing to something worthwhile. By comparison with so many people who do repetitive, boring or physically challenging work, I feel a great deal of gratitude that I earn my living doing something that is so varied, with so much autonomy and opportunity for enjoyment. Thankfully I have always been able to find sufficient challenge and novelty in how I work, along with sufficient freedom to satisfy me. And there have always been new human puzzles that intrigue me, and the varied settings and ways of working that I have experienced each involve looking at what I have to offer afresh and customising what I do for the new context.

 

So here I am, running my small business and trying to establish the use of structured needs assessments and outcome measurements in children’s social care. Once again, those themes of pushing upwards are back, as I have been putting in a big investment of time and effort to nurture this project over many years in the hope that it grows into something productive. Now that I am more established and have a mortgage to pay, plus rent on my office and employee salaries it feels like a bigger gamble than early on in my career where I had little to lose. But I have that same feeling of clarity about where I want to make my impact in the world that I did when I decided clinical psychology was for me after wavering as an undergraduate. I also have the same faith that my cumulative efforts will eventually be repaid with positive outcomes and a move into easier progress. If I go back to the image of the seed growing underground, I’d like to think that the journey through the earth has been completed and the new shoots are now reaching up into the sunlight where they can be replenished by energy from the external elements. I know as a gardener that with good planning and regular nurture the slow growth of seeds sown over winter can quickly turn into the rapid growth of spring and summer. I can only hope that I’ve done enough to establish my new plants and all this effort comes to fruition soon!

*My landlady decided to sell the house I was renting (despite having agreed I could stay on there in my third year), so I had to find an alternative place to live. My Dad was tested for prostate cancer. And I experienced the second incident in this past blog about rape culture in which I felt at risk of rape.
** Before you say “it must have been easier back then” I would note that I got that post against 110 other applicants. So even in 1995 things were pretty competitive, and probably more effortful as we had to find job adverts in the BPS appointments memorandum booklet that was posted out with the Psychologist magazine, phone up for an application pack, and then post in a hand written application, as NHS jobs didn’t exist and internet based application systems had not been invented yet. Which makes me feel very old.
*** A legal “compromise agreement” that included terms saying I would not tell people why I was leaving or speak negatively about the trust from which I departed, and could not take legal action against them – terms I understand are pretty common in that situation, but the government has subsequently outlawed after bad publicity, as they can be seen as an attempt to silence whistle-blowers.

Six degrees of separation

My brother, David Silver, is panning out to be one of the significant players in the world of artificial intelligence. His PhD topic was applying reinforcement learning to the oriental strategy game of Go, and he has gone on to be the lead researcher on AlphaGo at Google DeepMind. That is the program that last year beat the world champion human player and became the best computer player of Go. More recently AlphaZero has taught itself to play Go from scratch (AlphaGo started by learning from thousands of top level human games) and has also taught itself to play chess and shogi, all to unprecedented levels of excellence. It has been very exciting following his progress, and going to the premier of the documentary film about AlphaGo (which is a lovely human drama, even if you don’t know or care much about the technology, so do give it a watch on netflix/prime/google play/itunes if you get the chance).

It is no surprise to me that David has gone on to find a niche that is intellectually impressive, as he has always been a pretty smart guy and done exceptionally well in education (though reassuringly he isn’t all that practical, makes the same silly mistakes as the rest of us, and has remained quite down to earth). I’ve always been glad to be the older sibling, as I think it would have been difficult to follow in his footsteps. As it was, I could be proud of my relative achievements before he came along and beat them all! He has always had a very analytical mind and enjoys solving logical puzzles. I guess I do too in some ways, but I’m much more interested in how people work than complicated mathematical calculations, and how we can reduce suffering and help people recover from trauma, rather than pushing the boundaries of technology. We’ve chosen quite different career directions, but I think we still have quite similar underlying values and ethics.

Although I’m proud of him, I’m not mentioning my brother’s achievements to show off (after all, I can take no credit for them) but because they’ve given me cause for reflection. Firstly, it would be easy to feel inadequate by comparison. After all, he is making headlines and working on the frontiers of technology, whilst I’m just a clinician running a tiny company and have made relatively little impact to date. It would be easy to be jealous of the financial security, publications and plaudits that he has got. He has made the news all around the world, and even has a wikipedia page! But I think I’d find that spotlight uncomfortable, and I suspect I’d find his job pretty stressful, as well as finding all the maths and computing pretty boring and unfulfilling. So whilst there is plenty to admire, I don’t really envy him and wouldn’t want to swap places.

Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly in terms of this blog, it has made me think about what my goals are. Making the best possible AI to play Go is quite a narrow and specific goal, and within that he selected a specific methodology with reinforcement learning, and he has focused on that for the past decade, before looking at what other applications the same system might have. Yet in that same time period I’ve been pulled in many different directions. I’ve been an NHS CAMHS clinician and service manager. I’ve been an at home mum. I’ve helped to found a parenting charity. I’ve set up and evaluated a project to improve outcomes for diabetes patients. I’ve bid for grants. I’ve tried to help recruit psychologists and improve clinical services within a children’s home company. I’ve undertaken specialist assessments of complex cases. I’ve been an expert witness to the family courts. I’ve delivered training. I’ve run a small therapy service. I’ve conducted research. I’ve tried to influence policy, and sat on committees. I’ve written a book about how to care for children affected by poor attachments and trauma. And I’ve developed outcome measures. Most of the time I’ve done several of these things in parallel. It is hard to keep so many plate spinning, and means I have not been able to invest my full energy in the things I most want to do. I’ve also had hesitations about investing in entrepreneurial ideas, because of guilt about saying no to other stuff, or fear that it won’t pay off  that have taken a really long time to shake off.

Greg McKeown says in his brilliant articles for Harvard Business Review about ‘essentialism’, that success can bring on demands that cause you to diversify, and ultimately reduce your focus on your primary goal and cause failure, and that is exactly what I’ve experienced. It reminded me of a reflective exercise I did as a trainee on a workshop about creative methods, where I made an amoeba shape out of clay to represent the pulls I felt in different directions. The amoeba was a resonant image for me as it can’t spread too thin without losing its depth at the centre, and it can’t travel in two directions at once. Finding the right direction of travel and resisting other pulls on my time is something I am still working on 20 years later! It has been a growth curve to learn what to say ‘no’ to so that the company does not become overloaded or incoherent*. There are also other forces that influence what a small business can deliver – we have to do work that we are passionate about, uniquely skilled to deliver and that there is a market for. There is no point offering services that nobody wants to buy, or that other people can provide better, or that you are not enthusiastic about, so we need to stick to things that we can deliver brilliantly and build a positive reputation for. However, with the breadth of clinical psychology there will always be multiple demands and opportunities, and it is necessary to find a focus so that we have a single defined goal** in order to attain the most success.

I’ve taken time to refine my goal from “applying clinical psychology to complicated children and families facing adversity” (which is actually quite a broad remit, and includes a wide range of neurodevelopmental, mental health, physical health and social aspects of adversity, being applied to all sorts of different people) to “applying clinical psychology knowledge to improving services for Looked After and adopted children” to “using outcome measurement tools developed through my knowledge of clinical psychology with placement providers and commissioners to improve outcomes for Looked After and adopted children”. Likewise, it has taken me time to clear space in my head and in my diary, and to be in good enough physical health to give it sufficient time and energy. But I am finally able to dedicate the majority of my working time to making people aware of BERRI, doing the statistical analysis to validate and norm it, and supporting/training those who subscribe to it. I have secured an honorary research fellowship at UCL and some data analyst support, and a trainee from Leicester is making it the subject of her doctoral research, so I very much hope that 2018 will be the year that we publish a validation of the measure and methodology, and can then roll it out more widely. I believe that is my best chance to make a difference in the world – to improve the standards of care for children living outside of their family of origin by encouraging universal psychological screening, regular outcome measurement, and the ability to identify and track needs over time.

Finally, my brother’s achievements have given me pause for thought because him working at Google has made me feel a sense of being somehow distantly connected to silicon valley, and all the technological and entrepreneurial activity that goes on there. Suddenly the people who founded Google, Facebook and Tesla/SpaceX are no longer as abstract as Hollywood actors or international politicians, but are now three steps away in a technology game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It makes the world feel a little smaller and making an impact seem more possible, when your kid brother is connected (however peripherally) to the technology giants who are changing the world.

Alongside this, in my ImpactHub coaching peer group several people have gone on to make successful social businesses that have rapidly scaled and made an impact on the world. Proversity for example, have expanded massively into the digital education space. Old Spike Roastery & Change Please have expanded their coffee businesses that employ homeless people, and School Space have scaled up a project they started at the age of 17 to help their school rent out its premises out of hours into a thriving business that has generated £350,000 of income for participating schools. Code Club have partnered with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to teach children in 10,000 clubs in 125 countries all around the world to program computers. And Party for the People have made a competitor for TicketMaster or SeeTickets where the fees go to a good cause, and have set up arts spaces in old factory buildings.

In this context, it seems possible to dream big, to think that an idea could become a reality that has an impact on the world. So whilst my main vocation remains to bring the process of regular outcome measurement to services for Looked After Children (and that is making some really positive steps at the moment), I’ve started to work out how to make my back-burner project a reality. This one is a proper entrepreneurial idea in the digital space and tied in a little to my previous blog topic of the issue of how the public understand the evidence for different kinds of interventions. I’m hoping I can develop a pilot and then seek some investment, so watch this space as I’ll report back how it goes.

In the meanwhile, I still want to make some changes in my personal life. I’m generally feeling quite upbeat about the future at the moment, and I’ve sorted out the issues I mentioned in a prior blog about disappointment. We’ve also pulled in payment for many of the outstanding invoices, and the business is the best organised it has ever been. But after reviewing how I spend my time and who I interact with the most, I have become much more aware of my various different networks, and to what degree I feel able to express myself authentically within them. I am being a bit more thoughtful about my networks, both in real life (where I want to make greater efforts to meet like-minded people locally) and online, where I need to spend less time. I have realised that I haven’t been choosing the company I keep well enough, so I am trying to connect more  with those who are positive influences on my life, and to pull away from people who are a drain on my emotional resources. I am also choosing to engage more with people in the social entrepreneurial space. As Jim Rohn is much cited as saying “you are the average of the five people you most associate with” and hanging out with inspiring people allows us to be more creative and entrepreneurial ourselves.

So hopefully 2018 will be the year where I make a success of BERRI, complete the validation research and get some publications out. I’d also like to get a pilot of my entrepreneurial idea up and running. And in my personal life I’d like to get back to the gym, to get the planning permissions sorted out for my house, and most importantly to make more real life social connections with people who share my values. If I’m only a few degrees of separation from people who have achieved all of these things, then maybe I can too.

 

*I wrote more about developing my business model and setting up a social enterprise in clinical psychology forum number 273 in Sept 2015

**or failing that, a primary goal, secondary goal and fall-back plan, in ranked order of preference (with an awareness than only exceptional polymaths like Elon Musk can achieve in more than one area at the same time).

Sowing seeds

I was late to plant my vegetable seeds this year. Due to Defra restrictions to prevent avian flu, our chickens were living in our polytunnel until the end of March. It then needed digging over and the raised beds building for this year, as well as some plans for irrigation. We don’t have any staging in there yet, and I don’t have a greenhouse here in which to start my seedlings. And so because it seemed complicated and I didn’t have much energy due to ongoing health irritations, we reached the second weekend in April without any seeds planted. I could have conceded, as I did last year, and bought seedlings to plant out, but that seemed like a lazy option and I knew taking a shortcut makes me feel less proud of the results. Plus I have accumulated a stockpile of seeds that needs to be used, and the kids love planting, so that is what we spent the first weekend of the Easter holidays doing. Thankfully most of them have sprouted quickly and just reached the size where I have started planting them out (though some have not grown at all).

It struck me whilst I was planting out the seedlings and topping up the seed trays that sowing seeds is an act of faith that they will sprout and grow to produce plants, flowers, fruit or vegetables given time and nurture. Whilst generally the freshest largest seeds do the best, that isn’t always the case as weather conditions and wildlife can easily disrupt your plans in the garden. Sometimes the most promising looking seeds don’t lead to viable plants, or the most lush looking plants fail to produce fruit, whilst the least promising looking seeds or most straggly plants can sometimes surprise you with an abundant harvest down the line. Some of the outcome depends on skill, some on diligence and some on factors outside of our control. Each time you have to prepare the soil, sow the seed and water it regularly to see what comes out. It is an investment of resources and energy that will hopefully be repaid in the future. That idea was resonant for me for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I am trying to invest effort in improving my physical health. The motivation for that comes from looking forward into the prospective futures available to me, and how my health and fitness will affect me and my family. It has become much clearer that what I eat today, or the exercise I do or don’t do, has an impact on me that I’ll feel in the future. I’m making an effort to be more active, get enough sleep and to eat more vegetables and less processed food (I’m a big fan of spring greens at the moment – they are so cheap to buy, but are deliciously sweet and tasty, as well as being seasonal and grown in the UK). So far I have lost 10lbs but I have bigger goals, and want this to be the beginning of cumulative changes in my life. I want my kids to have an active, happy Mum who does lots of stuff with them, rather than a perpetually tired Mum who is preoccupied with work stress. There is a famous Reddit post that talks about non-zero days and effort being a gift from past you to future you that I would recommend reading if you haven’t stumbled upon it yet.

Investing energy for the future potential also connects to the wider theme of working in mental health – where we and the client invest time and energy in trying to make the future better for them – and also that of trying to make a career in psychology. As application season passes on the forum, we can see the hope and heartache that this involves. Many people become almost obsessional about checking the forum for news of when courses have short-listed, and when the offer letters come out – so much so that it completely changes the traffic pattern to the forum (which normally has an average visit time of over 10 minutes, in which the typical user views many pages, but has two months per year in which repeat checkers raise the number of visits, but bring the average visit time down to 2 minutes, often just viewing a single page over and over again).

The early years of most psychology’ careers are seen as an investment necessary to pass the career bottleneck of being selected for training. Prior to that, many applicants feel they are gambling their time on a potential future that may never happen. There is a sense of trying to tick boxes, but not knowing exactly what the boxes are, or why they are necessary which I think needs to be explored and challenged. For many people, it seems like those early stages feel pointless in and of themselves. They are not seen as a long term career plan, and are therefore easily dismissed as being worthless except to jump hoops to try to gain a clinical training place, but I think they have merit in their own right. Many people gain great satisfaction from doing these “low level” care jobs, and they are invaluable in the daily lives of many people in their times of greatest need. They are also a fantastic way in which you can gain and apply the basic psychological skills of listening, empathy and compassion to client’s lives, and to experience the ways that the system around them can help or hinder their wellbeing. Being a mindful and reflective frontline care worker (or researcher) is the time at which people engage the most in the lives of clients, and ensures that the advice we give later down the line is grounded in reality. It also lets us experience the hard work and competing pressures of the staff we may end up advising from the lofty perch of being a qualified health professional, so it is a shame to see so many people horizon gazing to the detriment of getting the most out of the moment they are in.

The same theme of investing time and energy to create something for the future is true in setting up a small business. All over the country people are ploughing in their own money and time to set up small ventures, despite the time involved being more than full-time hours and the initial return often being much less than minimum wage. I hadn’t realised when I set out that even when the business has been running for a while, you often end up having to repeat this process over and over again. As staff move on, or contracts change, or the balance of work stops being enjoyable, or you hit hurdles along the way you have to regroup and use the available resources to fulfil your commitments, or even to start over in a new direction. That process can be disheartening, but it can also be an opportunity for growth, and is a good reminder for those running a business to take a step back and look again at the short, middle and long-term goals of the business and the methods used to achieve them. It is hard when a business feels so personal to lose a member of staff, or to have to step away from a long-standing contract or area of work, but it can allow you to invest more energy in trying to plan the business you want to create.

The toughest part of running a business rather than being self-employed is wanting to do the right thing for your employees, whilst also achieving the aims of the business and creating an enjoyable role (and some profit) for yourself. It can be particularly hard to make good financial and business decisions as a caring, empathic, progressive person who wants to do the right thing by everybody else involved, so it is extra important to have good business and financial advice if you are not just responsible for yourself, and your own plans for the future. The owner of the business is always the last to get paid, and feels responsible for the well-being of every other member of staff – even though for them it feels more like a job, and less like a personal mission.

In a social business we are also the ones responsible for deciding how we provide our services, and what the focus will be. There is endless demand for my services as a court expert witness, as a trainer and consultant to the residential and foster care sector, but I know if I get too swept up into delivering services personally I don’t leave enough capacity to steer the business. So I have to pick and choose the activities that best align with my long-term goals. I have to plan the future of my company in a way that has the most impact on recipients and creates a financial reward for me and my employees in the future. That “triple bottom line” of caring about people (employees and service recipients) and the planet (systems and wider issues) as well as profit (earning enough to pay employees and yourself) is part of the joy and challenge of running a socially worthwhile business.

The sheer number of choices and possibilities can be quite overwhelming at times, and each decision feels like it needs knowledge that I don’t have to make it in an informed way. For example, I need to decide whether to formalise the social enterprise structure within which we deliver our outcome measurement tools. If we do it will open doors to sources of investment that might allow us to scale more rapidly and would be closed to a traditional company. However investment always comes with strings attached and can easily change the direction of the company, or reduce the autonomy with which it operates. It feels similar to decide on a new office base. Do I rent a serviced office, commit to a 3 year rental of a unit on a local farm, or get a business loan and purchase a small building? What if we need to grow or shrink so that this choice doesn’t fit the company structure in 12 months time?

It is hard to predict the future impact of seemingly small choices in the present. I can see why anxiety can sometimes make these choices overwhelming, as it is easy to end up with endless background research and tables of pros and cons that are immobilising. I’m sometimes tempted to make them with a coin toss* or a counting rhyme as we did on the playground at primary school. Like sowing seeds, we just have to research and plan the best we can within reasonable time constraints and then follow the instructions and see what grows!

 

*I was once told to toss a coin and then check if your reaction was relief or to want to make it “best of three” and to then follow your gut rather than the result. It seems as good a method of decision making as any other.

Starting over: Selecting offices and staffing

After the stress of my last blog about problems with the offices we were leaving in Milton Keynes*, I was keen to make sure that we set up a base I felt really comfortable with up in Derbyshire, and gather a great team up here. I viewed a lot of potential offices and tried to really get a good gut feeling about where we would belong. The plan is to rent an office or set of offices that has scope to expand if we secure the grant we have applied for, or other external funding that lets us expand more quickly.

The first place I viewed was a serviced office centre. The rooms were pleasant and good value (less than half the price per square foot that I had been paying further south) but the site was quite generic and a looked a bit warehouse-like. More importantly it was on the far side of a market town with quite a lot of traffic, and further from the motorway. I then viewed an office suite in a pretty restored station building on a quiet branch line. Despite this being my favourite option, it turned out only a single room was available there, and the tenants who had the rest of the building were spilling out into all the public areas, which were filled with their storage and materials. Plus the room didn’t have an individual lock – and I’ve learnt to be wary of that!

The next two places advertised were full, despite having road signage, listings on Rightmove and vacancies marked on their websites. The next place was a dilapidated shop with offices above, but transpired to be under offer, and to need a lot more work than would be possible in our timescales. The next a single room retail space, with no sink or loo unless you went into the next door building, that was quite a walk from the nearest parking. A small office building for sale, but cramped in a back street in a town slightly further from my preferred areas. Then a lovely large set of rooms in a very smart building with dedicated parking and reception facilities, that became less attractive as the already high rent then gained a service charge, and charges for the phone/broadband and was then ruled out by access only being permitted when members of staff from the main business were present, and the building being locked up at 3.30pm on a Friday!

Then a small set of offices that were a bit too far away and had a contract with an excessive notice period. Next was a bright but slightly run down set of rooms over a letting agent, at a good value inclusive price, but with slightly dingy rear access. Then we viewed another office building that was for sale, but was too big, over priced and came with only a single parking space. Then another serviced office building in a massive complex that contained function rooms and all sorts of entertainment facilities, but had limited parking and was rather dirty and dated looking. Again there were all sorts of extra charges for phone/internet, insurance and a per person charge per month for furniture. However, some of the rooms were nice, and they did come with two parking spaces right outside. Whilst viewing we also met a potential business advisor and heard about the exciting collaborations within the complex, but somehow it just didn’t feel right.

It is always very interesting when your head and your guts give you different messages. Logically the last place had the most to offer, yet it was the rooms above the letting agent that gave me the best feeling, and the owner talked the least and was the most straightforward. A bit of negotiation later, and he had agreed to redecorate the rooms, provide some furniture and jet-wash the rear access, as well as hanging a door so that we could still access the toilets and kitchen, but other staff and customers could not come up to our offices uninvited. Having learnt my lesson, this time the repairs will be specified on the contract as being completed before rent is due!

I also interviewed for a new assistant psychologist for our Liverpool contract. The project is going to be in collaboration with my peer supervisor, so that feels like an extra benefit to me, as I get to spend more time with him. We even had fun interviewing, in the lovely Quaker building in the town centre, and ate delicious food at Mowglis. When it came to the applicants we interviewed, we were really pleased to be spoilt for choice. We felt that three of the candidates would have been great for the job, and were able to select someone we are really comfortable to add to the team.

I have also put up an advert for a new administrator. Having had both brilliant and awful experience of non-clinical staff in the past, I wanted to make sure we recruit the former. This person will be the hub in the centre of the business, around which the rest of us rotate, and they need a mixture of administrative, financial and interpersonal skill, with the ability to keep me and the business organised! So I put a lot of effort into the job description and person specification. It is the first time I have used online recruitment advertising, so fingers crossed we find the right person. The applications seem to be numerous and impressive, so we are off to a good start.

Also during the summer I met an inspirational potential collaborator, so I am hopeful that I can negotiate a productive way we can work together, whether he joins us as a part time COO, or whether we make a service level agreement between our two organisations. I only hope that I can find a few more clinical psychologists to join the team, as we continue to have more requests for our input than we can fulfil.

Finally, keep your fingers crossed for me, as I will hopefully hear back soon about the DfE grant that I applied for to expand our pilot of outcome measurement and our psychologically informed care pathway!

*Thankfully I have now resolved the issues with Regus, so I have edited the previous blog to reflect this. I don’t normally edit things I have posted, because I prefer to write honestly and leave what I say on the record. However, it was a condition of the resolution that I did so. I thought long and hard about it and concluded that this blog and my social media is not the right place for making an angry noise, and that I could tell the story equally accurately in a slightly less detailed and more dispassionate way.

Reflections on renting an office from Regus

Regus rent serviced office buildings. If you want the short version of this blog it is this: I had a really bad experience and it took far too long for them to resolve it, so I would never use them again. I therefore recommend that you think very hard before you sign up with them, and ensure anyone you know who ever considers renting an office in a serviced office building does likewise.

However, they have now resolved my complaint, thanks to their head of customer service, Suzanne Jackson. So if you aren’t getting anywhere with anyone else, I’d drop her a note instead. Unfortunately it was a condition of the resolution we agreed that I would remove the majority of this blog and my other negative social media comments about them. But I’ve left the gist of the story below.

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At the time of viewing, the room offered to us was being used as a sales area and opened onto the reception with glass doors (transparent, with no lock, and a foot wide gap from floor to ceiling where a glass panel was missing). It was also full of Regus sales materials (they filled the only storage cupboard in the room, and were also in several boxes on the floor and piles on the desks). I explained we needed a room immediately in which to base some of my staff, that was suitable for conducting psychological therapy and specialist parenting assessments for the family courts (ie highly confidential work). I was told that the room would be perfect for this use. We even discussed how my administrator could move out to use the work pods during therapy sessions, so there is no doubt the sales person knew the nature of the work we undertake.

I was told that the room would be properly boxed in and secured and emptied within a fortnight, and then I’d get the first month rent free to settle in, if I signed for a year. All wifi use was included, even during the free period until the office was complete and the “moving in month”. The salesman told us to store our furniture, computers and files in a cupboard in the building from that day, as the office would be available imminently.

Unfortunately it was not. It was left open with no visual or auditory barrier to the reception and no lock. And they started to bill us for rent, and wifi, and late fees even though the work was not done and we were promised free wifi, and had never had prior invoices to make the later ones “late”. So I complained repeatedly. Still, none of the required work was done for the whole of May and the whole of June and most of July.

In total Regus took 11 weeks and 17 complaints from me to put a lock on the door and seal up the gap, but over the whole 16 weeks before we gave up on it and rented rooms elsewhere the office was never made confidential (even by something as simple as opaque sticky-back-plastic on the glass) so my business was unable to deliver an essential component of our work and we had to move out before they completed the promised repairs. They threatened to lock in my notes and materials, and sent threatening letters and emails about unpaid bills, despite the fact that no money was ever due and they had failed to live up to the contract we agreed of the work to be completed before any rent was due.

Over time the lack of access to a suitable office became a critical issue for the company, and as this coincided with me moving to a different area of the UK I was forced to conclude it was no longer viable for my business to continue to work in Milton Keynes and I had to restructure the company. Thankfully I have a trusted colleague to pass therapy cases onto, so no clients will be left without a service, but for the business it has been nothing short of catastrophic.

Regus made it very difficult to leave, and tried to say that we not only owed rent but were bound in contract for 12 months. Invoices were never amended. Complaints were not responded to, or maintained the same unreasonable position. However, after I wrote this blog, became noisy on social media and contacted the head of customer services, things were finally resolved to my satisfaction at the end of September. They accept that the room was not ready for use quickly enough, and have confirmed in writing that I am no longer in contract with them and no rent is outstanding.

There is more to the story (and a whole other story about the first time I rented a room there and was subject to a sophisticated robbery and fraud scam) and I am far from alone in having negative experiences (check their twitter feed and google for reviews). However, although I might be stubborn I try not to hold grudges and at least it has a happy ending now. Hopefully I will never have to deal with them again.

Update: They continued to try to chase “unpaid rent” for several months after we left, despite me referring them back to their own decision that nothing was due. They even referred the matter to a debt collection agency. However, Suzanne Jackson did eventually resolve this, and as of Feb 2017, I think this whole episode has been closed.

Spreading too thin

In general I’m a frugal person. I buy foods that are reduced because they have reached their best before date and most of my clothes and shoes in the sales. I collect coupons and shop around for good offers. I try to waste as little as possible, and to recycle as much as I can. So I can understand wanting to get good value for money.

On the other hand, I like doing things properly. For example, when it comes to a sandwich, I like a thick slice of granary bread, fresh from the oven, with generous amounts of toppings. As it happens I’m not a big fan of butter or margarine, perhaps a symptom of being overweight in the 1980s and 90s when fat was literally seen as a cause of fat, whilst the carbs underneath were seen as relatively healthy. But whether it is soft cheese and cucumber, avocado and salad, cheddar and chutney, hummus and roasted veg, or toasted cheese and banana, the topping needs to cover the bread, with sufficient depth to make the sandwich proportionate. If the cheese has nearly run out, I’ll have half a cheese sandwich that tastes good rather than a mean whole.

So when it comes to services, I can see the motivation to get value for money, and to ensure that resources are being used in the most cost-effective way. I’ve developed pathways, clinics and groups to meet needs more effectively, and I’m happy to delegate less complex work to less experienced or less qualified staff. I can’t see the justification for paying psychiatrist salaries to deliver therapy, when a member of staff with half the hourly rate can be an equally good (if not superior) therapist. I can see the importance of capping the cost of agency staff, so that this money can be invested in increasing the substantive workforce. And when it comes to staff who are not pulling their weight (my record being a member of staff who had spent a whole year with a caseload of four clients, whilst colleagues in the same job had five times that along with other responsibilities) I can see the need for performance management.

However, there comes a point that too much pressure for efficiency actually makes services less effective. I saw this happen gradually over the 16 years I worked in the NHS. If we cut out all the conversations between cases, all the informal supervision, all the CPD opportunities, the time to bond as a team and to reflect and process information between appointments, then clinicians are less able to be empathic and individualised with clients. If you also give people tougher and tougher cases to work on, expecting faster throughput than with the more mixed caseload that preceded it, and couple this with cuts in admin despite there being more and more paperwork to do, you increase burnout and time off sick. Add some pay freezes, lose a proportion of posts, put people in smaller premises and tell them to hot-desk or become mobile workers and they no longer feel valued. Make it a set of competing businesslike trusts rather than one amazing non-profit organisation, tender out services like cleaning and home visiting to allow them to be done on minimum wage without the terms and conditions of the NHS, allow private companies to win contracts, and keep people in a perpetual state of change, then morale falls. Nobody has any loyalty or job security and it no longer chimes with the ethics of the people who work there.

The sandwich has been eroded down to bread and butter, and then to crackers and margarine, and then to a value brand version of the same that is 30% smaller. It might look like costs have been driven down, but the price is a reduction in the quality of services, and in the wellbeing of staff. It reduces the willingness to go above and beyond that has been the backbone of the NHS, and increases presenteeism – the tendency to feel that you need to be at work longer, and look like you are working harder, without this making meaningful impact on the work you get done. The UK has lower productivity than most other developed nations, perhaps because we have longer working hours, and work expands to fit the time available.

All over the public sector at the moment I see services trying to spread their resources thinner and thinner, and I’m acutely aware that this means they can’t do the whole job. Social Services departments have barely the capacity to maintain their statutory role, so supporting families in need goes by the wayside. Some good staff find other jobs. A proportion of the remainder go off long-term sick, leaving an ever bigger burden on those that remain. Teachers are forced to teach to tests that assess primary school pupils on aspects of English grammar that graduates struggle with that have little relevance to daily life, and squash the rest of the curriculum into less time. Children’s centres, youth clubs and leisure facilities are disappearing at a time when it is clear that parenting support and exercise are critical in improving well-being and decreasing long-term health and social care costs. We’ve been feeling the cost of ideological austerity bite, even before the financial shock of the Brexit vote, so I am struggling to see how things can improve in the foreseeable future, let alone once any steps are made to implement the extraction of the UK from the EU.

It is hard in this climate not to feel overwhelmed by pessimism. Staff are not pieces of equipment that can be upgraded or replaced at the click of your fingers. I can make a plan for how to cover a remit that needs 12 staff with 7, but I can’t then tell you how to do it with 5. I can only tell you that if you want the job doing properly it needs 12, and if you go below 7 it won’t be fit for purpose. If I sticky plaster over the cracks, you can pretend that paying for 5 is enough, and that it is the clinicians who are failing, whilst we burn out trying to do twice the amount of work each. But no matter how hard I work, I can’t be in four parts of the country at once, or do recruitment, service development, supervision and provide a clinical service in a part-time job.

Maybe the problem is that I am stubborn. I won’t just toe the line whilst covering my eyes and ears and going lalalalalalala when it comes to everything that isn’t being done. Like my exit point from the NHS, there comes a time where I’d rather leave than do things badly. And where the only efficiency available for me to recommend that fits the prevailing rationale is to pay two cheaper staff instead of my time. I’m teetering on the edge of the plank they’ve made me walk, and I’m increasingly tempted to jump. Maybe in retrospect they’ll recognise how much was getting done with such limited resources.

Seeking collaborator to change the world

LifePsychol Ltd is a company with a clear social purpose – to improve outcomes for people who have experienced adversity through the application of clinical psychology, particularly children who are Looked After in public care after trauma or maltreatment. We deliver effective psychological services for Looked After and adopted children by providing assessments, formulations, therapeutic interventions, consultation, training and outcome measurement tools for placement providers. And we are very much in demand. But at the moment we are clinician led, and we really need a COO with complementary business skills as the company scales up, to ensure that we make the maximum impact going forward.

We are at a very exciting time, with the potential of rapid growth and the first evidence of efficacy for our pathway emerging. We have started the process of applying for DfE Innovation Programme funding, and we have great support from key people (Sir Martin Narey, government advisor who just reviewed the future of children’s homes in the UK, described our pathway and tools as “the missing link for the sector”, Jonathan Stanley at the Independent Children’s Homes Association described them as “the new gold standard for our members”, whilst Lord Listowell said the government should fund part of the cost to ensure there is input from a clinical psychologist in every residential care home). Despite having done no marketing, we have more enquiries about joining our system than we can keep pace with. We are already used in over 100 children’s homes, and we have a growing number of local authorities who wish to roll out our pathway across their entire catchment. We are looking at how we train and license other clinicians to deliver the model both in the UK and internationally.

We have a great clinical team, a graduate project manager/admin, a fantastic professional network and a great product set. What is important to us now is getting the right person to drive the business side forward at this critical time. To do that we really need someone with business skills and experience, combined with a passion for making social change to take on a leadership role on the financial/business side of the company. We are therefore seeking an extraordinary COO who will help us achieve extraordinary things.

Who are we looking for?

You need to genuinely care about making the world a better place, and to share our goal of making a measurable difference to the lives of vulnerable children and young people. As a clinician CEO it is vital for me to have someone I trust to bounce ideas around with, who will ensure that we are on a sound financial footing to enable us to deliver our ambitious plans. You will be familiar with all aspects of the finances for running a business, have a good working knowledge of the UK social care system and be a dynamic manager, but with a willingness to turn your hand to other aspects of the business (from fundraising to recruitment to CRM) until we are large enough to take on a full team. You understand the value of evidence-based practice and you have a good awareness of the financial demands of the social impact sector. You are the kind of person that can nail down complex ideas and grand ambitions into concrete and achievable plans that will make genuine social change.

You will ideally be based in Derbyshire at our new Matlock office and will help to develop a team there, but with some travel to other sites. However, we already have a base in Milton Keynes that I visit fairly regularly, along with existing relationships and use of shared working space in North London (Kings Cross), so if you are the right person then these might be possible alternative locations, provided you are prepared to travel regularly to meet with me in Matlock and are comfortable using video chat in between times.

How to apply

If what we are looking for sounds like you, and you are looking for a new challenge, please get in touch and we can set up a meeting. Or if you know someone that might be the right fit, please pass this information along to them. Email lifepsychol@gmail.com to express an interest. No agencies or recruiters please.

Background information:

LifePsychol currently consists of a small clinical team who provide assessment and therapy services, particularly for children and families, and services commissioned by local authorities to support Looked After Children, adoption or families at the edge of care. Our Clinical Psychologists also provide expert assessments for the family court and to local authorities considering entering proceedings. We provide consultations advice on service development and service evaluations for social enterprise and third sector organisations. Our main specialist area is around attachment, trauma and maltreatment and how this evidence base can inform the care of children who do not live in their family of origin. We therefore provide training for adoptive, foster and residential carers, as well as health, social care and legal professionals, and have a network of associates who provide regular consultation into organisations.

However, our primary goal at present is nothing less than to improve the quality of placements for all Looked After Children in the UK. LAC are a particularly vulnerable group of children and young people because their needs are complex, and often include mental health, developmental difficulties, problems with relationships and behaviour. We hope to achieve this ambitious goal by training carers and implementing a new set of standards for care providers (PRIME) and through regular use of outcome measures (BERRI).

The PRIME standards are about ensuring that strategies carers use are evidence-based, individualised to the background and needs of each child, evolve as the child’s needs change, and are based on a thorough psychological assessment and a multi-faceted formulation of the child’s needs. We believe that having advice from a clinical psychologist to inform the care of all Looked After Children (and other children with complex needs) will both reduce stigma and improve outcomes, whilst helping carers to feel better equipped to meet the children’s needs. We have developed a training program and care pathway as one means to implement these standards for placements.

We have also developed a set of online tools for commissioners and placement providers to use to identify and track the needs of children in their care. The tools are known by the acronym ‘BERRI’ because they explore Behaviour, Emotional well-being, Risk to self and others, Relationships and Indicators of psychiatric or neurodevelopmental conditions that may require further assessment or diagnosis. We want every young person with complex needs to have a service that meets their needs in an effective and evidence-based way. We have therefore developed tools that allow us to gain a more holistic picture of children’s needs, to track how this changes over time and to target particular concerns and monitor the effectiveness of interventions to address them.

Our first data suggests that we can reduce concerns about children significantly within six months of using the pathway and tools we provide, and our services gain exceptional feedback from carers and professionals, but we hold ourselves to tough standards of evidence, and gather data about our effectiveness every step of the way.

Note: The BERRI questionnaire and online tools were developed to improve the outcomes for children Looked After in public care in the UK. However, the system is also applicable to those receiving other forms of intensive or multi-agency input, such as those on the edge of care, attending special schools, placed in inpatient services, secure units or involved with services for young offenders. The system would also be equally applicable in other countries, and could be adapted to other populations (eg adults using mental health inpatient services, people with learning disabilities, or those within the criminal justice system).