Two Years in Business & Alchemy/FITT Meals Corporate Cup

Last week Alchemy Search turned two years old

🤝 Thanks to all our candidates, clients & suppliers who have supported the business up to now. As without your support we simply wouldn't exist.

☀ As the summer months are quieter for us on the recruitment front it gave me some time to reflect on how everything has gone in year 2 compared to year 1.

✍ So I thought it would be worthwhile to share my experiences this year as it may be of help to anyone on a similar journey!

🕊 In the article below I cover the following areas:

1. Invest in the unsung heroes of the back office as they will generate revenue
2. Morph into Logan Roy - start to try and identify potential successors to you
3. Scaling the business - do not expect the revenue to follow quickly
4. No deal is better than a bad deal
5. Make friends with the bank manager or better yet have two separate corporate bank accounts...

⚽ On Friday just gone we co-hosted our inaugural corporate football tournament with FITT Meals for our network.

🔥It was a great evening with just over 50 players and 8 teams.

🤗 Dubai Aerospace Enterprise won the final after a dramatic penalty shoot out!

😁 Given the turnout we had, our resident Ted Lasso (Jeff) will be planning another football tournament in due course. So if you or your business would like to become part of our football community please connect with Jeff.

😎 A final big thank you to Laura Murphy from FITT Meals for providing lovely food & snacks throughout the tournament. PALMFIT for supplying the the jerseys for all the teams. Cathal Turley from McGettigan's for providing the much needed rehydration post the tournament and also prizes for the winning team.

Different challenges from year 2 vs year 1

Two years in on the entrepreneurial journey and unfortunately it doesn't get much easier but definitely having a lot of fun along the way. The mistakes are still a plenty but the learning curve is great to keep you grounded.

 The winners on the night Dubai Aerospace Enterprise team

The challenges I have faced in our second year of business have been very different from what I encountered in the first year but hopefully some of these points will help anyone else who is going on a similar journey.

Invest in the unsung heroes of the back office as they will generate revenue

For anyone who has set up a business, be it a big one or a small one, I would bet my house that they emphasize how important having a strong Office Manger or similar position is. As honestly, without having someone strong in this position you are putting yourself under so much added pressure and stress, as you will spend so much of your time working in the business as opposed to working on the business. Which are two massively different things. Be it invoices, payroll, dealing with suppliers, the list is endless.

 The backbone of the office Tiffany and Bernice

For anyone who has set up a business, be it a big one or a small one, I would bet my house that they emphasize how important having a strong Office Manger or similar position is. As honestly, without having someone strong in this position you are putting yourself under so much added pressure and stress, as you will spend so much of your time working in the business as opposed to working on the business. Which are two massively different things. Be it invoices, payroll, dealing with suppliers, the list is endless.

We have been very fortunate at Alchemy to have the lovely Bernice as part of the journey from the start and I would go on the record as saying she is literally our Office Manager/CFO/HRD/Legal Counsel/Event Manager all in one.

Earlier on in the year I got the sense that Bernice was starting to get a little bored of some of the more mundane tasks of the role and really wanted to try other things within the business.

So the decision was made to hire an assistant and through Bernice's connections we landed a little pocket rocket in Tiffany who was honestly just hired to format CVs and do any admin tasks that were needed in the office.

So in rocks Tiffany and after a few weeks we soon realized that she is incredible with social media tools. What happened next was just unbelievable as she has created all of our social media content through Instagram and more importantly LinkedIn.

The reaction and traction we got from all of this new form of branding has honestly lifted the business to another level. As people genuinely thought we had been using a professional agency to create all of the content but it was our little back office team!

Our podcast will launch next week and again the unsung heroes of the back office Bernice and Tiffany have been integral to this, especially with the savings we have made by not needing to get things professionally edited etc. I will always be eternally grateful to them both and I try my best to make them feel valued in the right way.

Although their names are not on the leaderboard for the billers in our office, there is no doubt in my mind the sometimes thankless tasks that they do help to keep us afloat and they are the heart beat of the business.

My advice would be don't try and cut corners when hiring and growing your back office as if you do I feel you will undertake a lot of unnecessary stress in your life which is the worst form of stress!

Morph into Logan Roy - start to try and identify potential successors to you

A great chat with Dinesh Janqid about launching Uniqus Consultech in DIFC in the past months. Great listen for our ESG and FAAS network!

In your first 12 months of setting up a business it's just a rollercoaster where all you are worried about is survival and nothing else. Cashflow is of paramount importance and you'll have plenty of sleepless nights thinking about when will you get paid from a certain client.

In year 2, hopefully you will have a little bit of cash in the bank. Trying to get it up to a least a 2 month buffer of cash incase the world goes upside down again with another global pandemic. So once you know you can trade for a few months you can then start looking at the future and where you want the business to go.

In recruitment, like most sales jobs, if you are a small business and you lose a big biller it can sometimes lead to the business collapsing as that individual may bring all their clients with them wherever they go (despite covenants being in place).

For me, it's so important to identify who are the rainmakers of the business and making sure you sit down with them to make a clear roadmap of what their career will look like in the next few years if they stick with you. As you can be rest assured they will be constantly getting approached by your competitors on a monthly basis, as one of my team likes to remind when they have had a sherbet or two......

The one massive advantage I have in the industry I work in is every day there is someone reaching out to me who wants to move jobs and naturally you pick up the common themes from candidates on why they want to move:

1. No opportunities to progress in current role
2. I'm underpaid and undervalued
3. My boss takes credit for all the good work I do with the board
4. There is no flexibility or hybrid model to WFH

The list is endless and sometimes I feel like a shrink having to listen to all of the wrong out there as it's very rare we speak with a candidate who says they love where they work!

So with all this knowledge, I try to pre-empt such thoughts going through my team’s heads. To be very clear, as a business we are far from perfect and I'm sure there are plenty of things that could be better but I like to practice the mantra of trust is given as opposed to earnt. Of course, if someone breaks the trust then simply I can show them the gate. Life will go on.

If your staff are ambitious I’m sure they don't want want to be doing the exact same tasks in 12,18 or 24 months time so sit down with them and see how they want their career to evolve. I would be pretty confident if you initiate these chats now they will be likely a lot more likely to say no to approaches from recruiters or companies about opportunities, as they are happy where they are. While if you don’t sit down with them, who knows they could be a future placement for Alchemy!

Time will only tell how long I can keep my team in fully intact but whatever happens I’ll sleep well as I have kept my side of the street clean.

Scaling the business - do not expect the revenue to follow quickly

For anyone who sets up a business it would be safe to say they have a relatively high level of risk appetite. In my case I would say a statement such as “ignorance is bliss" is most fitting. If I had of known what I would have to go through personally from the outset of this journey, I would have walked away but it's funny when you are in the eye of the storm of certain challenges how the mind can adapt and navigate through.

For me this year was all about trying to scale the business so it wasn't reliant on just me or our top biller from year 1. Scaling a business is a pretty big challenge as you will most likely need more office space, more staff, more technology which ultimately means more cost less profit.

In the last 12 months we have went from a 4/5 person business to a 9 person business (soon to become 10 when Queen Pooja returns from her year long sabbatical after having a lovely baby boy). So the the fixed costs of the business have pretty much doubled in all aspects which I have to keep on top of.

This has been a real eye opener for me. As when the business was small and the team are making placements etc. the business is fairly profitable with not too much stress. When you scale that first 6/9 months is a nightmare from a cashflow standpoint as you need a lot more cash in the bank every month to pay staff, rent and suppliers.

When you scale and bring in new hires you need to give them a runway of at least 6 months before you start to see a ROI on their hire. Of course, sometimes you will get a quicker return but I would advise to have 6 months. As unfortunately your revenue will not increase as quick as your fixed costs have. So be prepared to baton the hatches and see out the turbulence.

This was definitely the biggest risk and challenge I undertook in year 2 and with a bit of luck come Q4 I feel we as a business will be a in a pretty stable place. The team that has been assembled are creating great personal brands for themselves in the market and I believe for the business to keep growing sustainability it should not be Conor is Alchemy but more so Conor is part of the Alchemy unit. For example, I want Weam to be known by every finance professional in Abu Dhabi and if they don't know I exist that's fine as Alchemy Abu Dhabi is her baby to nurture.

No deal is better than a bad deal

When you are in your second year of business you should hopefully have a bit more power when it comes to the negotiation table with potential clients based on a good track record and decent brand in the market. Whilst in your first year of business you will take any deal just to keep the company afloat. We were no different to this and by my own admission certain clients took advantage of this and dictated how business would be conducted.

My advice would be if you are not getting respect from a potential client from the initial briefing call just say thank you but no thank you. As I have realized the hard way that there are easier ways of making money than constantly having to battle with clients who don't actually value your service so work with people who do.

That's one of the reasons we try to build our Alchemy community piece so we can build meaningful relationships with our professional network and not to be seen as a transactional recruiter. For the record, we have definitely sometimes not delivered to clients where we were at fault but this is thankfully happening less and less.

Make friends with the bank manager or better yet have two separate corporate bank accounts...

At the risk of repeating myself there is nothing worse than unnecessary stress! Recently we had our bank account frozen for a total of 28 days. To say this was stressful was an understatement. I would have nearly preferred if we had done something illegal but we had simply not updated our annual KYC form which I had missed as it went to my spam folder.

The team

There are a lot of great things about doing business in the UAE but corporate banking can be sometimes a little bit complex. As the amount of time that was wasted trying to get this sorted was madness. Naturally not a great reflection of the business when having to pay staff in cash and explain to suppliers and landlords that you can't transfer them what is owed to them due to the freeze.

Ultimately the buck stops with me and it was my fault it got to that.

If I could do my time over I would do the following:

Build a proper relationship with the Relationship manager in the bank. As this is something I have definitely neglected which is actually so silly as the bank is key for your survival as a business. If I had really built a good relationship with him the reality is he would have went the extra mile to get the bank account unfrozen in a timely manner. The reality is all he had was an angry red faced Irish man rocking up to his desk every second morning fuming as to why nothing had happened. He didn't care which added to my frustration!

 Rehydration time

Safer and better option is have corporate accounts with two separate bank accounts. This is something I genuinely never thought of until I went through our recent debacle. As the life lesson I have went through is that you can't have the future of your business be reliant on one person doing their job efficiently/correctly as people don't see things the way you do. So cover your bases when you can as the stress is not worth the risk.

If you have got down this far, I thank you for reading and hopefully some of my points can help on a potential entrepreneurial journey. To conclude, all of the above is just my opinion and I fully appreciate some people may disagree with my views which is all good.

 Thank you for taking the time to read and lets see how year 3 pans out!