Iain Round, Beever and Struthers
As a business we pride ourselves on being agile and flexible for all our clients, and we’ve had to do that even more than in the past. We have clients who are happy for us to be out on site and some who don’t want us to be there.
Across our offices we don’t have enough capacity for everybody to be in at the same time, so we’ve just got to be unbelievably flexible around that. The majority of our staff are working at home.
We’re also making the move from the centre of Blackburn where we’ve been for over 100 years to a hub at The Beehive and that is partly because of Covid. We needed an office that fitted better with what our staff wanted, somewhere they can call into rather than be based five days a week.
It is so important to have a peer network around you. I act as a sounding board for a lot of clients who are running businesses and I realised that I need my own sounding board.
I’ve got a great network across Lancashire of leaders of professional firms that I can talk to and I know the discussion will remain confidential.
They include competitors, people at fellow accountancy firms across the North West. It is so important to have that network.
Simon Iredale Simon Iredale, Motionlab
I’d made the decision that I needed to take a bit of distance from my business, Motionlab, and Covid was the pinnacle of something that had been coming for a while. After 16 years I knew I wanted to do something else.
An offer from an investment house in Portugal came at just the right time, with big visions and plans for the business. Taking the earnout deal felt like the right move, plus I get to stay in the business for as long as I want to.
But it has freed me up to do something else and over the last two or three months I’ve been investigating all sorts of opportunities and possibilities.
At the end of the day a leader is just a human being with responsibility, we’re no different to a junior in the business. There is one difference in that the leader sits at the top and doesn’t have someone next to him to go to for answers.
I had a business partner for 10 years, but then when I didn’t, it became a lonely place up there. You’re expected to know everything and everyone comes to you for the answers. You’re in isolation on top of the mountain.
Iain Round
I found great learning from being part of a peer-to-peer network. It was a good opportunity just to bounce ideas off people.
Steve Fogg, Lancashire Enterprise Partnership
Peer-to-peer groups are great, leaders getting together and talking round the table. However, peers are also people that work for you, not just people at your level, and we often miss that. You need a mix of networks.
You need a network at your level where you can talk to other business leaders, other innovators. You also need those ‘vertical slices’ through the organisation at multiple levels, where you can get people to sit round a table and talk.
Each of us has been successful through our individual ability up to a certain point but once you get past that point you do nothing on your own, you deliver nothing as an individual, you only deliver it through other people.
If you become a leader that naturally makes all the big decisions, because that’s what you’re good at, when you get to a crisis and you look behind you and everybody else has forgotten how to make decisions, guess what? That’s a really difficult place to be in.
If you only change when the drama happens, you’re in big trouble. You have to keep continually changing all the time, even when you’re performing out of your socks.
The human touch is important. Don’t leave the human being at the gate, you need to bring that into the office or to the shop floor, because it makes you an authentic leader.
Steve Fogg
LANCASHIREBUSINESSVIEW.CO.UK
17
DEBATE
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