CTRL-Shift-Escape - #5

It's Good to Talk!

I spent the day with Permiserv at the 'Little Green Event' in Birmingham. I always enjoy in-person events and this one was especially good because I wasn't speaking, organising anything or meeting anyone. My one and only task was to sit quietly (I failed by very loudly knocking the lid off the coffee pot in the middle of one of the talks) and listen.

Local Authority waste is a bit unusual in that there are 300+ organisations all doing fundamentally the same thing without actually competing with each other. They can share their work, spread some risk and progress together. The event was an example of them doing exactly that, but I was struck by one thing.

It's too late.

Speaker after speaker stood up to share what they had already done. I didn't hear anyone say "We are about to do this - what do you think"? A room full of people who had mostly already implemented their paid garden waste service, speaking to a room full of people who had alread implemented their paid garden waste service. There was so much great experience in the room, talking to itself.

The challenge to the industry, including Bartec, is to get out and speak to the people who are not attending these events, who aren't reading the LinkedIn posts or the industry case studies. Our marketing plans are shifting away from the same old formula which has served us very well for the past decade. There are so many local authorities that we never ever see on 'the circuit'. How do we engage them before they reinvent their own wheels?

The Little Green Book is one way - it's full of wisdom (and some stuff from me too). Contact Permiserv if you want a copy!

Salaries

We've shot past 50 people on our payroll, but I'm glad to say that our staff turnover remains incredibly low. The average tenure across the full team (even after hiring so many new staff) is 7 years. In a very small company, each individual is generally doing multiple job roles. Even the CEO makes coffee and writes a bit of a code!

Now it's flipped and we've got multiple people doing one 'job', and often it's not the job they started out with. One example (of many) is Human Resources (I still hate that phrase), where it's previously been part of 'admin' and now has a dedicated person.

The new HR team (his name is Sam!) has been working to get this straight, and with annual pay reviews upon us, he's been going through the entire roster to review job titles, salary bands and job descriptions so there is consistency and fairness across the board. As well as ensuring that we are paying fair and competitive salaries, we also need to measure ourselves for equality. It's going to take a few weeks to sort through it but annual reviews are the best time to do it.