Introducing new members of the team

Met up with our first Regional Manager, Sharon, yesterday for a ‘training’ session. The Regional Manager’s are going to be responsible for entering the ‘local’ content to do with Days Out & Places to Go.

We have an ideal candidate in Sharon, as she is a registered childminder and mum herself to a (nearly) four year old daughter. Sharon is responsible for Greater Manchester, and she lives in North Manchester herself. In our business plan we set out the role of regional managers as follows:

Excerpts from the company’s business plan:

Regional managers live in the region for which they are responsible. Their roles are to be the ‘eyes & ears on the ground’. In particular they must:

· continually research, input & update the local activities in their area;

· assist in developing the referral network (including planning & promoting the launch party for their region); and

· be available to provide interviews/photo opportunities for their local media

The personal attributes of the regional managers are all likely to be as follows:

· Enthusiastic & upbeat
· Confident & considerate
· Witty & sociable
· Ambitious, self-motivated & organised

They are likely to be parents themselves, and have probably held professional roles in a previous employment.

All regional managers will be compensated for their time by being gifted a shareholding in the company. This decision has been made because it is likely that the quality of the personnel the directors wish to attract, will not be motivated by a low hourly rate, akin to the minimum wage. As the company’s cashflow is restrictive, it would not be able to compensate them with a paid salary, at the levels they are likely to be used to.

You’ve got come up with ingenious ways of getting the best people when you can’t afford to pay them!

Sharon was always going to be involved because I’ve known her for years, and have worked with her before when she was (an excellent) office manager.

In a fit of enthusiasm, I’d already emailed to Sharon (& to Jen, our RM for Greater London) tons and tons of information about us, including our full business plan. In hindsight I’ve realised that I’ve completely overwhelmed them, because they just haven’t time to digest the information, and the really important stuff just gets lost amongst the interesting, but less important, stuff. All of our RMs are going to be busy people themselves, as they will all be parents, and are probably also doing some other employment or self-employment.

So before yesterday’s meeting, I drew up an ‘Information Pack’ which just contained the following information:

Mission statement, first year objectives & USPs (total 1 page)
Regional rollout programme (1 page + 2 pages detailing regions)
RM’s role (1 page)
Local content categories & sources of information (2 pages)
Instructions to create new resource/delete/edit (1 page)
PR activities – successes & planned (1 page)

I printed it all off and put it all together in a folder. This gives them enough information about the business, what they are going to do, and how well we are already doing, and is hopefully sufficient information to get them excited about working with us. It seems to have worked with Sharon.

I’m meeting Jen on 22 November, so if she hasn’t ploughed through the emails by then, I’ll give her one of these packs instead, and she can bin the emails!

Yesterday’s training threw up some interesting things. First of all, we couldn’t logon to the site (either back end admin database, or front end) on Sharon’s computer. It turns out it’s probably something to do with the firewall that NTL have, as she is on NTL. Accsys are looking at a way around it. But that kind of threw our plans for entering some content. Luckily Ross lives about 2 miles away, so we packed everything up, including Sharon’s daughter, and hotfooted it over to Ross’s computer!

She came up with some ideas to make entering content a bit easier (and therefore quicker), and just some things from a user’s point of view. She takes no prisoners when it comes to using websites! If she can’t see what she wants within about 3 seconds, she moves on! Phew! What a great way for us to test the site though! She also gave me a real insight into the childminding market, and ways we may be able to attract them.

So I’ve now got a list of things that I need to speak to Accsys about, to see how difficult, time consuming (& therefore costly) it will be to incorporate the changes she’s suggested.

Unfortunately my other lives seem to be getting in the way again at the moment. I’ve got my VAT return to do this weekend (for my training/consulting business) and I’ve got a full set of course notes to write for early next week too. So priorities may have to shift for the next few days.