small business

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.