Stay ahead by recruiting and developing the right staff

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As the winner of ‘Growth Strategy of the Year’ European Business awards, and more recently winner of the Insitute of Directors’ ‘SME Director of the Year’ award, as well as runner-up in ‘Overall Director of the Year’, we were delighted Simon Biltcliffe could join the leaders and business owners who attended the MD2MD LeaderFest conference to share his thoughts on what contributed to his success.

He started his company, Webmart, with £10,000 of his own money.  He now turns over in excess of £30m per annum.  Having grown organically he has never borrowed money or used private investors.

Simon believes to stay ahead you need to recruit and develop the best people.   He gave a really thought provoking insight into how he employs the right staff; by encouraging and incentivising existing staff to recommend potential candidates, and researching social networking sites of all candidates to really find out what they are like.

Very keen for his staff to achieve, Simon implemented the SEXischeme to reward them with generous profit share bonuses on achieving and exceeding targets.  Results for each employee are displayed on a board to create competition and identify those who may need more training or support.  Simon believes the more you give, the more you get back.  However, he confesses he did have a large turnover of staff but those that stay, stay for a long time.

With the need for workable, effective systems being a regular theme amongst the directors at the event, Simon also says “if you can’t describe the process, you don’t know what you are doing”.

Bob Bradley

Bob is a specialist in running high value added service businesses, having run five such businesses as General Manager, Managing Director or Chief Executive. His last employed role was as Chief Executive of a £16M, 200 person family owned business having previously been Chief Executive of an AIM listed company for which he raised £5M funding and which he grew from £4M to £12M in three years through two acquisitions and organic growth, and a corporate PLC subsidiary where he was Managing Director responsible for delivering £10M profit on £45M turnover through 450 staff.

Bob is now following a portfolio career providing entrepreneurial business leaders with mentoring and coaching around business leadership, business growth, merger integration and exit planning.

Core to his portfolio is MD2MD. Having experienced for himself the value of having a strong sounding board of fellow Managing Directors he founded MD2MD in 2004 to provide groups of business leaders with a confidential environment within which they can support and challenge each other to raise their game as leaders and by doing so improve the success of their organisation.

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