Help I'm Losing My Team!
Two down and two to go, office restructuring caused by Squirrel's departure at the end of February and Teapot's a couple of weeks later means that I have lost both Magoo and Laura as they have been shoe-horned into the vacancies created.
This should be a nightmare scenario but at the moment things are strangely quiet on the work front, things usually build-up from the end of February but they haven't so far. We tendered for, and got, a very large payroll preparation job, that was good and bad news. Good news because it was despite us pitching the fee so high we thought we wouldn't get it and also because it was a credit to my presentation skills, Bad News because it means losing one accounting staff member for one day a week - that might not sound much but given up 20% of your week to one client is a lot of time.
Of course the solution is to get more staff but there's a shortage of the 'right people' out there at the moment. Some of the CV's that we've been receiving make you wonder whether people actually read what they type, or what the agencies type, or the CV writing software. We've had two separate instances of people stating that when they last moved employers they took clients with them - I mean would you employ somebody who boasted they did that? We had one from a young lady who claimed that within two years of starting in the profession she had a portfolio of two hundred clients - and she was still doing her training!
Finding the right person in a small practice is very important, not for getting on with the other staff (although that helps) but for your attitude to the clients. We pick up a lot of work from the 'bigger' firms because clients feel they are not receiving the personal touch, that they are just another name on a client list and that when they phone their accountant they sense there is a clock ticking in the background like a cabby's meter. Clients of smaller practices want to see the same faces for a few years, some don't want to deal with anybody else in the office, so if you do pass them on to your colleagues the client must always see you as the 'front'.
I was at a clients the other day and he made the observation that Angela and myself pretty much had an easy life running this office. I admitted that compared to somebody who works in London or even Southampton it is less stressful, simply because of the lack of travelling to and from work involved. It takes me twenty minutes to drive to work through the New Forest and fifteen minutes to drive home, my salary might be a couple of thousand pounds less than if I worked in Southampton but I'd spend that on petrol or train fares and I'd have the hassle of an hour and a half's travel everyday - quality of life wins for me every time.
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