A recruitment agency founder launched in July 2019 and hit isolation working alone at a kitchen table within months. She hired her first employee, Sophia, after securing six months of runway, but Sophia's start date slipped to July 2020 when the UK locked down. The founder had to persuade her to stay despite the chaos.
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We set up in July 2019, just before COVID so we had 9 months before the pandemic hit. Yeah, so obviously we know that the pandemic, if you're in your first year of business, that really, really wasn't ideal. So obviously that was challenging, but let's not talk about that. So that, that 9 months in the kind of run-up to the pandemic, the most difficult thing honestly that I would say was the isolation of I was literally just working at my kitchen table. I'm a sociable person, I have to be around people. I can't be alone with my own brain for too long because before I know it, I'm overthinking why my gardener's not turned up today, and I'm like, what? Like, what's wrong with me? So for my motivation, and I realised quite early on, I always thought I'd be this one-woman band, but quite early on I'm thinking, I need, I need staff, I need a team, I need people around me, or I need to go and work with other people because I can't be on my own all day. It's no, it's no fun, it's boring. So that's what, that's what really I found tough. And I met Sophia. So Sophia was my first member of staff, and I met her when the business was only 4 months old. But I wanted to make sure that I had at least 6 months of her salary, runway, in the bank, so that if anything did happen, I, you know, I'd give her time to get up and running. She didn't have any experience. I didn't know how well I would bring somebody on. Um, so I said to her, as soon as I've got this amount of money in the bank, the job's yours. She was working for the, um, for a local college, so she was in this dead stable job. And then obviously we'd said April would be a good time for it to start, and then obviously she hands a notice in, the day after we go into lockdown, and I rang her and I was like, uh, about that notice, uh, do you reckon you can like retract it and just kind of like stay? Because I was just thinking the risk. We— all my jobs had literally just been cancelled, and I'm like, oh, you don't know how things are going to play out. Honestly, it was like bonkers, the way the timings were, she handed a notice in and the next day the country's locked down. So she was— I honestly don't know what it was that made her stick with it because we've been having these conversations since October before. She started the following July.
Wow.
So, but she was just determined. She really wanted to be a part of it.
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