Brave Pants a Necessity

We’re currently recruiting for an Operations Manager to join our team at FCSS, making the decision to add this role to our Leadership Team has been tough. We’ve got a great team and I don’t want to unbalance the dynamics or cause anyone in the team any feelings of uncertainty, but we’re growing quickly and I am all out of capacity to add anything more into my role without relinquishing some of the things that currently rest on my shoulders. 

Some of activities involved in our scale plan are new to some of my Leadership Team colleagues and I feel a responsibility to empower them to succeed, yet I know that workload commitments are stopping me from providing the time and support needed…they’re skilled, experienced specialists in their area of the business but some of the accelerated scale we are achieving is throwing up first time experiences and previously untrodden routes that would be better explored with a colleague by their side. 

This organisation feels like my baby, I’ve put in the hard work in building a Board, designing a structure and scoping out our vision. I’ve worked, with my amazing Board, to identify priorities, establish good governance and reshape our inherited management team to create a strong and effective leadership team. Together with that team we’ve looked at culture, values and so much more and we are making fantastic progress. We’ve brought in new people with specific functional roles within the organisation, a fabulous Head of Finance, who joined us just over a year ago and more recently a Business Development Manager, focussed on our software solutions.

We’re now at the point where it feels like we’re moving into a new phase in our evolution and it’s both exciting and scary to consider our next steps. 

Our childcare related, but not direct delivery, work is growing; that’s our software solutions, parent app, training and development services and our national sessional practitioner team. Childcare is VAT exempt, these services (where charges apply) are not so it’s time to think about a more VAT efficient structure.

We already own one large property, we’ve begun discussions about another and we have multiple leases in place…time to consider the most beneficial way of owning and leasing property…that VAT issue raising its head again as we can’t recover any VAT we pay on capital works costs. 

And having exceeded growth expectations in our first year and a half of trading it’s time to revisit the scale plan. Bold thinking, brave actions all the way; with the right people, shared values, a clear vision and the commitment to get the job done there’s no limit to what can be achieved.

Brave pants a necessity, in fact I think I’ll be placing a bulk order!