Struggling to scale your consulting business without sacrificing your core values? This episode is for you! Join Michael as he interviews Cathy Gillespie, a consultant who helps companies design and develop effective learning experiences. Cathy shares her secrets for growing a thriving consulting business that prioritizes both profit and purpose.
In this episode with Cathy, you’ll learn how to:
- Grow your firm while maintaining your small, agile, and resourceful essence.
- Utilize mentors to elevate and expand your consulting empire.
- Cultivate a thriving referral system from your existing customer base.
- Utilize an independent accreditation as your secret weapon for securing new clients.
- Strategically remove yourself as the crux of operations.
- Be bold enough to prioritize long-term triumphs over short-term gains, even when it’s a tough pill to swallow.
Book your complimentary growth session call Coaching for Consultants
Visit Like-Minded Learning
Connect with Cathy on LinkedIn
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Joining Michael on the show is Cathy Gillespie, who helps companies by advising and designing learning experiences from start to finish. She works closely with clients to understand their needs on a wide variety of learning-related projects. Her team consists of six full-time employees and a network of skilled contractors. Before we dive into the episode, are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients we work with started as an audience like you. A consistent theme they have shared with us is they wished they had reached out sooner about our clarity coaching program rather than waiting for that perfect time.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants like you, we are offering a free no-pressure growth session call. On the call, we will dive deep into your goals, challenges, and situation, and outline a plan that is tailor-made for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time-consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. Don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session call. Visit ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow to book your free call.
Let me tell you a little bit more about what you’re going to learn in this episode with Cathy. First, how to utilize mentors to elevate and expand your consulting business? How to cultivate a thriving referral system from your existing customer base? How to utilize an independent accreditation as your secret weapon for securing new clients? How to strategically remove yourself from your own company? How to be bold enough to prioritize long-term triumphs over short-term gains, even when it’s a tough pill to swallow? plus so much more here to share with you. Her story and insights, Cathy Gillespie.
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Company Insights
How big is the company team, revenue or number of clients per year? Anything that you can share to help people kinda get a sense of where you are.
The first thing is what we do. That would be helpful. We work with people who need a learning outcome. They might have a concept or an idea I need to get my course out online or in a classroom. We fit in anywhere along that spectrum to help them with learning management systems. My special area is about learning, design, development and creating good learning experiences that aren’t just put it up online, if not online learning. I’ve come from there with a passion for training. I started off as a forensic scientist. It does make sense, my journey because I started to teach there, gone through Microsoft instructing of broaden now to the adult education thinking. I’ve worked in a range of different places. When I came to New Zealand in 2002 while I was having my last child then. It was a bit of a change.
Where did you come from, so everybody knows?
I’m from England. Came here when our oldest was nine. We had about three years to play with and we were living in London. It’s not a good place when you’ve got children to be able to try to do everything. We decided to get on a plane. We had no job, no house, 2 children, and 1 on the way. We just came here to see what it was like. When we came here, I did go for a job even though I was pregnant and said, “I’d love a job, but I need three months off.” They said, “Can you start on Friday?” It’s spectacular for that.
We moved for quality of life because my office was 100 miles away from my house when I was in London, office was in Birmingham with a family. Your perspective changes. We came out here. When I came here. I did get into facilitating and training, but gone more into the course design development. We did some great training back in the UK with what is used to be called the training institute or tap. Those in the UK. We can’t sell that well enough. It’s the course I did something in 1998.
You started like-minded learning in January 2014. Take us back to what you were doing before and then why did you start the business?
I was working in the learning industry. I was doing what I was doing now, but to be honest, there were some things that didn’t align with my core values and needs. We had the opportunity because we’d had the Christchurch earthquake and there was a learning legacy project. I left to manage that for twenty hours a week. That’s never happened. I thought it was ideal to take a step back, but it changed because I wanted to move myself out of a situation that was challenging for me and take more control of it. I went out to be a project manager, but what’s happened is the clients have come to me and it’s like they wanted to work with the business.
I always call myself an accidental business owner. I worked for a year as more as contractor and then someone else who was in a similar position was ready to move as well. We then came together as like-minded learners with the purpose of making sure that the work environment wasn’t one that created the things that I hated previously that looked after people. It came together to do what we loved but do it in a way that we liked. I’d done it for a year in 2014 before my business partner joined me. What he brought was another angle to the business. I’m not technical. He’s brought the technical expertise combined with my educational expertise.
I want to get into the structure with your partner and maybe have some learnings or experiences on that. Before that, I want to rewind and take us back to the question of the size and scope of the business or anything you can share to help us get a sense of where you are.
We are only full-time employees. We have a bank of contractors because of our work being project work goes up and down. We sit at six at the moment. We sat between 6 and 8. We have some strategic plans to increase that double that over the next few years. Neither of us is looking to be some big global takeover of the world. We’re enjoying what we do and we realize that with growth comes different responsibilities. I have to recognize my business partner is very different from me in terms of introvert, extrovert, risk take or not. I have to respect that. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the time we’ve been together for many years now is how to work with somebody who’s very different to me and give them space and time so that they can come on the journey without me railroading it.
I want to ask you about one thing that would be helpful is, six full-time, a bunch of contractors you bring into projects, ebb and flow in terms of business and pipeline, how many clients or how many projects do you typically take on per year?
When working with business partners, use language that brings them along and does not force them to go along with what you want. Click To TweetWe’ve got probably 20 to 25 active clients at the moment. For a small company, the most important thing to realize is we’re hard hitters. New Zealand is a bit different, but we do tertiary. We work with organizations like universities, the industry and training organizations. They’re national for New Zealand. We’ve got a couple of clients over in Australia. We work for think people like Americans because we’ve done the work and it’s on our case studies like Toyota and health board. Often people come in and say, “We’re a huge organization. We’ve got 80 to 100 people.”
My pitch is, “You need three people dedicated to this project who know their stuff inside out. I’m going to give you the best people on the seat and those three people will be dedicated to the project. You don’t need 80 people. Eighty people won’t get this done efficiently.” We tie that very closely into a strong process depending on what we’re doing because we show them who needs to be working on it at what point and why it’s them.
You’re hitting on something there. It’s important that oftentimes earlier stage consultants or very small firms don’t pay enough attention to, which is that being small, being nimble can in fact be a significant advantage in comparison to to larger firms. You need to communicate that. Your example of, “You only need three people. You don’t need 20 or 80. You don’t have to pay for all that overhead. Here’s why. Here’s how we’re going to do it. It’s not about more. It’s about fewer but better, value over volume.”
Quality, not quantity.
Business Partner
Take me to the partnership for a moment. You brought on a partner you said who’s quite different from you and how is he different? Can you talk a little bit more about maybe how you’ve dealt with some of those differences going forward in a bit more detail?
The way I’ve dealt with that is to take on coaching and mentoring for myself. That’s one of the first and most important things because I need to recognize that I need to speak the language that brings him along, not force him along.
Can you offer an example, like maybe how was this showing up beforehand? What would’ve been something that maybe happened that caused a bit of your head’s butting, disagreement or not seeing things the same way? How would that show up in work?
Staffing is a big one that was with us because taking somebody else on. We need somebody else to do this. That’s another overhead. It’s a hard conversation to have, but it’s like you showing him the figures. You’re doing a lot of strategic work for a ten-year plan. The difference is that I’ve been sitting there thinking big picture ten years. I will want to be extricating myself out of being a key person in the business, but he can see to 2 years, not 10. As long as he’s more money-driven my focus is more on the wellbeing. That’s different because he could sometimes misinterpret that as being, not being as interested in the product, but for me it’s different.
The product is I love what I do and I do what I love as it says on my LinkedIn. If I wanted to take on staff, it would be a bigger risk for him and he would hesitate. If I wanted to take on a consultant to help us in an area that we don’t know strategically and I take a mentor, he doesn’t. Those conversations are where we talk about how are we going to become better business people. I’m more ready to pay for people to bring them in and learn, whereas he’s more hesitant with that, partly for the cost. What I’ve done to alleviate that is write out the ten-year plan. Do the calculations on the percentage of chargeable income. People can do pay and overhead estimates and show him that bringing on more people ends up with more profit.
More importantly, because it’s not driven by the money, isn’t it better to go home with a smaller dividend if needs be and a life and your health and not have burnout? We take good income. We have a salary and then we have the dividends. That’s how it works. The idea is to balance out what’s important. I would talk about the fact I now work four days a week because I have my Wednesdays off, which is lovely. It’s hard for him to visualize that at the moment but what I said is, “Would it not be better to go away with $5,000 less but always be able to finish it in a working week?”
We don’t know our staff work 50 to 60 hours a week. That’s one of our core things. What we need is if making a bigger income is reliant on the staff being resourced for 50 to 60 hours a week, that is against our core. I do the calculations based on our stuff working around most of them around about 80% chargeable work and then I could show him some evidence-based.
Does that work for you when you do the forecasting, the calculations? You get your case and sit down. I know you mentioned your ages are different, I believe you said he’s younger than you are by fifteen years, give or take or so.
He’s got children dependent.
In different seasons of life, what I’m wondering is, you’re very, sounds levelheaded, methodical, organized, you’re making the business case of why this is beneficial for us to do X. Does that work? Have you found that that is enough to get you both aligned or have you found that maybe something else is still required? I’m asking because there are probably a lot of people who are either in a partnership or they’re thinking about a partnership and hearing what you’ve experienced could potentially help them to avoid mistakes or to fix something that that needs to be fixed right now.
If you want to grow the different arms of your business, simply focus on delivering what you are good at. Click To TweetMy best advice is it’s working now because I’m bringing in independence. The problem is that sometimes if somebody else says something, even if it’s the same as what I said, it can be heard differently. We have employed a strategic consultant to come in and talk us through because as I said, we’re both accidental business owners. We haven’t gone through that political training. I get training for the women in Leadership Australia and New Zealand and it’s amazing training. I need to find the equivalent for a guy or combined because they will take me. Bringing someone independent in to put that case forward. We’ve had a strategic session. It’s kicked us back in. He is changing the way he works and tried to get himself more out of the business.
In the business, learning that lesson is the most important thing, how do you get there, do you have the skills to do it yourself or do you need someone else to help you? We drive how much or how little they help. We are not saying, “Come in. Tell me how to run my business.” We are saying, “What am I missing? What don’t I know?” It’s coaching, getting coach, we’ve had that session, we’ve got some plans. That’s why we’ve done our ten years and our calculations then we’ll have in February we do a strategic day and this is the first year we are likely to bring a facilitator and we’ve done it ourselves. My point is we do it, but we don’t hold ourselves accountable. Having someone to hold you accountable is the thing. We are going towards an advisor or advisory board and hopefully, that’s the advice.
The fact that you’re not only thinking about this and planning yourself, but you’re open to getting outside counsel, advice, expertise, coaching and support. We say this all the time and we do this ourselves. We run a coaching program for consultants and consulting firms, but we ourselves as founders and entrepreneurs best in our own coaching and mentoring because if you look around you, the most successful people in any walk of life, business arts, on and so forth, there’s always somebody supporting them, if not multiple people. For some people that can be hard because I know early in my career many years ago when I’ve first got started my initial consulting business, the idea was, “No, I’ll try and do as much as I can myself. I need to save some money. I’ll wait to do X or to bring somebody on until we get to that next client.” This next level of revenue kickcan down the road.
Marketing And Lead Generation
Once that clicks, and as an entrepreneur you see the value of getting support from others, learning from those that have already been there and done that, it’s a true accelerant for the business. I want to ask you about the business, it sounds like early on the opportunities came through your network and through your previous job and the work that you had been doing. If we talk about marketing, about lead generation, about how you build a pipeline of business today, what’s working best for your firm?
To be perfectly honest, we’ve been word of mouth for nearly all of that time. We don’t have a marketing person, but it’s on our plan for our org chart to be going the next year to look at marketing, business development, sales and a product owner. That’s a role because what we recognize is if we do want to grow, we have to grow the different arms of our business and we’ve been delivering what we are good at and we are not being visionary about what other mark revenue streams we could do. We are looking to increase that resource because we’ve mostly been word of mouth.
Remember the company set up because of our reputation, which is great, but that makes the company dependent on key personnel. That’s what we are doing. We’ll be looking for a general manager in a few years to make sure that we can fit back and be owners or directors maybe on the board. We put in learning management systems and we have a relationship with a learning management system, which is based on Moodle. It is a learning platform for us.
You have some partnerships in place from those that could refer you to business.
There are two things there. 1) We get a passive income for the people that we have. We get a little touch of that. The most important thing is that they’re looking at us as a company and saying, “Why are these people moving from this vendor to this vendor?” “It’s because their service is better.” It’s because they look after their people. The core things that we’re trying to do to make a difference, the actual things that are bringing in the business, and now that company, if we’re in the South Island most of the time we’ll recommend us if they get an inquiry through their website. We do LinkedIn as well, but not much, not very well.
Gathering Referrals
Mainly through your network, hitting on the partnerships is key. We see a lot of consultants doing that as well. When you talk about referrals, it’s more common for people to say referrals in a passive manner, meaning they do good work. People talk with them, make introductions and get that referral business. Sometimes, and I’d say in many cases it may not be apparent, but there’s something that the company does inside of their process, their system, how they deliver work that is a key factor in getting referrals. I’m wondering, is there anything that you might be doing in terms of asking for referrals, onboarding, your offboarding, events, anything at all that that you might be doing that you feel this, it’s not only about going doing good work that’s a given but there’s something else that we do as part of our process that probably helps us to generate referrals. Does that exist or not really?
We are networking and set to meet people there that’s very productive because we did have a client recently who with interest talked to us. We’ve never quite got over the line with them, but they’ve referred us to another person and they haven’t even worked with us, but they said, “You need to go and talk to them.” In that communication and the way, we are working with a client, encouraging them or showing them that we care about them as a business before we do about the income and the product.
B Corp Directory, I’m not sure how many people know about that. It’s recognizing that doing business for good. We’ve been accredited for that and accreditation is how we sell ourselves when we do a proposal. It’s not what we do, but it’s how we do it. We encourage people is saying look, “If you want to check us, we’ve got an independent accreditation that says, ‘We look after our clients. We make sure they’re right. We look after our workers. We look after the community. We take part in the community and use some of our profits for that. We look after the environment as best we can. We’re not a product we service, but there are still things we can do, then we have open and transparent governance.’”
What we have is an independent accreditation that these guys are doing what they say they’re doing. They’re not just a marketing byline, having that independence because people will look at the B Corp Directory for another B corp company and I’m on the committee, the local for the local thing. I’m meeting local businesses selling from the point of view of we are ethical work with integrity.
Nowadays, you’ll find that people are rating that a lot higher. Have you heard all these things about greenwashing? It’s fine to say you’ve got a tick for this, but going through the B corp accreditation process is not easy, but it’s worth it and I want it to not be easy because it’s valid. If you get it, you know that you’re doing the right thing. What happened to get on that track is we were doing it anyway and then I went to a presentation and said, “This is our framework.” This framework can be used for me to do what I want to do better.
It’s the foundation. I use this analogy like we water the plant. We don’t do anything to the flowers to make them come out. What we’re doing is we’re getting our foundations of how we work and what we do and processes all in place then the work comes. It’s not active to go. At the moment, we are not actively chasing the work, although we do have that in plan to do more of that.
Write down everything you are doing on a daily basis and look at why you are doing it. Click To TweetWorking On Vs Working In
I’m wondering what percentage of your time right now is spent delivering work being directly involved in client engagements as opposed to business development? I know you said not marketing but let’s say networking. what percentage is working in the business versus working on the business right now?
I can give you the exact percentage if I look that up because we manage it. Theoretically, down at the moment, I work only four days a week. I have my Wednesdays to myself. The time that I work, I’m meant to do around about 40% of our money calculations. In practice, I’m probably doing more than 30 because I do currently wear a lot of hats, but I’m getting rid of them. We sent some of those hats off to a jumble sale because my business partner is supposed to be about 50% in the business, but he’s currently not got the hands and he’s high.
We look at that as a problem as well because if he’s doing 80% charge, all that’s not a good thing because 30% that he should be spending to grow the business. For me as things change, you know I do hr, I do some of the invoicing stuff we’ve got plans. A good tip and a hint and I think that somebody gave to me was to write down absolutely everything you do in your business from start to finish. We have everything including watering the plants, buying the toilet paper, doing the bd and then we put who’s the director that’s in charge of that.
We put who’s currently leading it and our task as we change and evolve our organization structure to make sure that the two directors and myself, are not leading it. Somebody else needs to be leading it because somebody else is going to come in. It’s like, “Why is she can’t be there the most? Why are they key personnel?” Learning technologies are led by this person and they have a team of three learning content. The task for me was set by one of my mentors you could write everything that you do on a daily basis down and look at why are you doing it. That’s why I moved in buying toilet paper.
That’s a solid advice. One question that people who are in similar situations are moving towards is whether you as a CoFounder or may start the business and your knowledge and expertise is initially what clients were seeking. What lessons did you learn or what advice would you have for somebody who wants to shift out of doing all the delivery and bringing on others who can start to do the work?
Remember it’s a long-term vision because of training you could buy somebody in who’s got skills but they’re still going to need to learn your way. If it’s about, “How did I get to this position? I’ve morphed into this position. I’ve chosen to be driven.” I’ve driven myself because what frustrates me is when I’m a year down the line and we still haven’t taken on a new person when that person could now have a year of experience. Money as a driver. We have the money in the business. It means that we have to take away less at the end of the day, but if we had started today to build someone up, say the help desk analyst, in 6 or 12 month’s time, they’re going to be operating fully in that role.
There’s less for everyone else to do or even the middle people. We have a technology lead and we have down here the help desk analyst in the middle there are people, if that help desk analyst can take work off the middle people, the middle people will have space to learn to take the work off the higher lead role that’s the cascade. It’s looking at the big picture. It’s not looking at the money and saying, “We haven’t got the money for a help desk family.” What are the other non-money benefits? The point is you can go home at the end of the day after your seven-and-a-half-hour day and watch the TV and go to the football and do whatever.
If you’re going home and picking up the work, something’s still wrong there, which is why I manage the amount of hours people put in. It’s about don’t tough around, don’t wait because if you want someone to be, needs to be trained, the longer you talk about it, the longer before they’ll be productive. If you do the maths, you feel braver about that.
That’s very solid advice. I often share with people the sooner that you start, “If there’s something that you know is going to benefit you, if it’s inside you feel it’s what you need to do most often human our own minds are what hold us back. It’s not external factors, it’s our own internal mindset. The sooner that we’re going to start seeing the results that we want to what you’re saying.”
With patience because it’s not going to happen overnight.
Biggest Challenge
It’s not an overnight get-rich-quick type of business. It’s about relationships and internal external. Usually, good things do take time. The sooner you begin, the sooner you start to see the benefits of that work. I’m wondering, when you think about challenges that you’ve overcome or overcome challenges, maybe even one challenge recently that you as a business owner and a company have dealt with, what stands out for you? What’s been maybe something that was a big challenge, you had to wrestle with it but it was a pretty big deal and you ended up overcoming it?
It’s probably to be a bit more general because it’s about employing the right people. A small company particularly, there’s a big impact on it. We’ve had a reasonable turn of employment law unfortunately is much more in favor of the employee and if we are finding that they’re not quite filling the role or what have you. It’s honestly openness, transparency and setting those expectations for people. We have what we call in New Zealand, we have a WOF which Warrant Of fitness. It’s like an MOT for those in UK. I don’t what you do on your car to check that it’s fit for purpose. I don’t do appraisals where every second month I meet individually one-on-one with people and say, “How’s this relationship between like-minded learning and us?”
I am very much a fan of Tom Rath. He has five areas of health, which is physical, financial, social community, and something else off the top of my head. I ask them questions because when I say like, “Are you in the right place for your career?” you don’t have to be CEO, but are you on a pathway that’s working for you or are you struggling? What part of that did like-minded have a responsibility for? Are we not giving you the right project? If you tell me I want to be a barista, why are you working for a learning company? I need to be able to help you get to the place you want to be in respect of what it means for like-minded. I don’t believe in what I call golden handcuffs at all. I ask them a question financially, “Are you waking up in the middle of the night worrying about money?” It is not a question of like, “We’ll throw more money and pay you.”
It ties in with everything else. If you want your fifth Ferrari, then that’s not a like-minded problem. If we are not paying you the living wage, then that’s our problem. I need to do something about that. it’s about looking at those five areas and say, “It’s well worth reading Tom Rath’s Wellbeing book because it’s been my guiding like almost in my own life. I have to be balanced in all of those things to be in a healthy space. I operate that for my staff appraisal for want of a better word. Ours was that’s been good, but it meant we are very transparent and we are open and you know, conversations. This isn’t suitable for you within the realms of employee-in-law. I remember the biggest win for me was I had a conversation with somebody who wasn’t working in that space and it’s like, look you’ve either got to take it on and decide going to get to this milestone or what’s the outcome.
If you are still picking up work once you get home, you are doing something wrong with your business. Click To TweetWe had a conversation and she decided to resign. As she left the meeting where she decided to resign, she said, you’re still the best boss I’ve ever had. We’ve talked about it and you no have no job, but didn’t affect the relationship because it was done openly. That to me is the authenticity of what I want to be doing with my staff is, “If you don’t want to be here, I don’t want you to have to be here either. I can give you stuff that makes you work better and more productively, which is in my interest. If I can’t achieve that with my business lens on, then I need to help you to move on so I can put someone in on that stage who does work with us” I hate cloud. I hate non-transparency. I like the honesty.
Secret Sauce
When you think about your company in total, your team, systems and processes, what would you say is your secret sauce? What stands out to you as this is what we do that is different or this is what contributes or has the biggest impact and connection to our success as a company in terms of the more specific that you can be? I know sometimes people say like, “It’s our people.” Great. A lot of people say that, but I think you said ethics. Tell me a little bit more about that.
To me, it’s like selling that as a difference because I don’t care what anybody says. There are a lot of businesses out there that don’t run by ethics. The B Corp mantra is balancing profit and purpose that’s exactly it. Our purpose is to do business in a good, healthy, ethical and integral way. That’s what we do. In our proposals, we’ll put being B corp matters to us it will often put, this is how we work with you rather than what. People sometimes struggle because they’re used to being, working with people who are money-driven and profit-driven. When they say, “I want this 10,000 job, please.” We come back and say, “No, you don’t.” We need 3,000 job now. Maybe in three years time they look and they say, “Aren’t you doing yourself out business?”
It’s the same with our capability. We do capability training, we train internal staff to do what we do and people log and think, “You’re doing yourself out of the job.” I said, “We are not, because we are working with them in a transparent way. We understand that money is important to them.” While they’re doing that one, we’re away doing the next newest change in the industry or next thing they’re going to come to us to ask us when they’re ready to upgrade or do something different. It’s about sitting back and realizing that it’s not about locking in every dollar every time. W give our clients all source material. We don’t tie them in. They can close relationships at any time.
Let me ask you that because to me that comes across as embracing a long-term mindset. You’re not looking to maximize short-term revenue or short-term profits. You’re investing in long-term relationships for the benefit. You need to be comfortable knowing that you’re potentially today making less because you’re okay making more over the long term.
I view that differently, but also what I’m wondering is you say that today with six full-time people, a bunch of contractors and you’re established. Is this how you were operating and able to operate in the early days of the business? Oftentimes, people have the concern of like, “I need to generate money and cash flow to grow this thing.” They don’t necessarily have in their mind, the time or the ability to maybe take less now and to get more later on. I’m wondering how you view that because some people might be wrestling with that right now.
That’s a slight difference from where we did the season in life. I like that phrase because I don’t now have a mortgage and the children mostly paid off things. They keep coming back. With a business partner got children going into the high school levels and things like that own bill moving house and still got mortgage. I have to understand that because often my comment is, “How much is how much?” You get a good market-rate salary for the job and we take dividends if the business does. It’s only the dividends that change for us. Someone’s saying, “Everybody else is getting like $200,000, $300,000 or whatever.” It’s like, “How much do you need to feed yourself, close yourself, pay for your house, pay for your car?”
If the driver of a business is purely to make as much money as possible, it will be hard to manage its values and look after everybody on its team. Click To TweetThe problem is if we go away with that amount, if you went away with $10,000, and I don’t and $20,000, we can spend on growing the business or doing something different or investing in something. The first measure is, “What’s my driver? Is my driver earning $3 million a year or is my driver to be happy as a person for me and my family?” A business owner has to question that. If their driver is purely to make as much money as possible, it’s going to be hard for them to manage their ethics and values and look after everybody in the process because we have to share that. We have to share the good fortune of the company, which is why when we do at the end of the day, everyone nearly very rarely with has anybody not had a bonus unless they’ve joined us.
We do pay market rates. We sell that. We don’t pay the highest level that a company can because 1) I don’t believe in buying people if their driver is money. I’d rather you sell me on your passion and I’ll pay you. The hiring process is important to get the people who are going to be committed to doing a good quality job. We don’t pay the highest. We only have a 37.5-hour week. They have 24 days holiday because we give them between Christmas and New Year, is three days from us. I hate it when people give you two weeks and then you have to use that as your annual leave. You have to use it. It’s not a choice.
We don’t have health insurance. We don’t pay that, but we pay them a something small amount every year to go and do something positive toward their health. massage is paying for football, subs, and things like that. There are other benefits of it. If I start to pay my staff more, I have to charge my clients more. Not because that’s what it costs us to produce the job at the core level, but because I have to pay my staff a high level to keep them. It is a juggling act. The thing is what matters most to people say, oh, they’ll expect a car. Someone came to me and they said, “I’ve seen your job advertised. What’s the package? Do I get a car?”
I went back and said, “You don’t need a car for this job.” I know people have some of those things as their essentials, but I’m probably more simplistic than probably 90% of the people. It’s like, “I can pay my bills, I can go away on holiday, I can do nice things, but I have to remember to think of that from someone else who’s got a high mortgage and got children. Where’s that intermediate ground is a $10,000, $100,000 or $300,000 bonus? It’s never been this high, but if it was a $300,000 bonus, if we took $50,000 off him and me, that’s $ 100,000 to pay someone else’s salary, which means every single day of that year we’ll be better off, less pressure, less stress. It’s about measuring what value means to people. If it’s in your salary, I suspect you probably wouldn’t be very like-minded. That’s why we have a deliberate choice of our name.
Closing Words
Two questions before we wrap up. In 1 or 2 sentences, what would you say drives you as a business owner?
My responsibility is to make sure that the generations coming up don’t have the horrible parts of working their way up through a business. I want to make it that’s a good environment for learning. It’s interesting you spend too long at work and not enjoy the day. If you’re dreading Monday, I want people to not dread Monday.
I want people not to dread Monday, helping people, not to dread Monday. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing a bit of your journey and story. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, your company and the work that you all do. Where’s the best place for them to go?
If you connect with us on both LinkedIn, my name and the company name, Cathy Gillespie, feel free to make a connection. It’s like-minded learning. we post every week with case studies and things that we are doing. That’s one way. If people connect through that, that’s probably the easiest way then we can share emails. I don’t know if you might want to do, but I love talking to people and I love growing my network. I invite anyone to the fact with me about what we’ve done and how we’ve done it. We haven’t done it all right. We’ve made mistakes, but I am very happy with where we’re at.
Is, “Chew the fat?” a British or a Kiwi term? Where does that come from?
It’s like sitting around the campfire with your bottle of beer and talking rubbish that’s where we say, “You did it that way. This is my business. Let’s chat about it. Sorry.”
I love it. That’s all good. That’s fantastic. I love learning these new things. Thank you so much for coming. I’d appreciate you coming on.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
Important Links
- Cathy Gillespie – LinkedIn
- ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow
- Wellbeing
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