06 Jan From Scratch: 3am Networking and a Leap of Faith
It’s been a little over three and a half years now since I left my successful career in fund management and accounting to set-up the Offshore arm of Alexander Daniels, here in Guernsey. Sitting in our new offices in Lefebvre Street, I’m looking back at the last three years which has seen us grow to become one of Guernsey’s largest and most successful recruitment agencies and what the next few years have in store for us.
Andy Partlow (Director of AD Offshore) and I have been acquainted for almost ten years now, but it all started with a chance meeting at a house party and we really hit it off, something I later discovered neither of us were actually invited to (but that’s another story), when we found ourselves sat around a dining table at 3am talking about life, the universe and whatever else you find yourselves talking about at that time. The two of us stayed in touch over the next few years and naturally, Andy became my go-to recruiter after finding me a couple of great jobs, too!
A few years later, Andy left the island and headed back to life in Birmingham, we didn’t speak for almost a year after this point, to which one day I received a text “ever considered a career in recruitment?” to which, I replied, “No, is that even a job?”. Note; not always the best way to reply to a prospective job offer, but we carried on our conversation nonetheless.
Whilst I wasn’t actively looking for a career change at the time, a project I was working on was looking like it wouldn’t materialise, and it was an opportune moment, Andy waxed lyrical to me about the potential of working in recruitment and how I’d be the perfect fit and that establishing Alexander Daniels Offshore in Guernsey was a real opportunity to create something new, successful and shake-up a stagnant market. It wasn’t an easy sell for Andy though, I had a lot of reservations about choosing this over a “safe” career and all the benefits it came with and I wanted to make sure I could make my own mark on this industry that often gets a bad rap. I’ve been both a candidate looking for a job and a client looking for candidates and I knew where traditional recruitment agencies had fallen short in the past, so I needed to make sure that we could address these issues with the launch of Alexander Daniels Offshore.
Fast forward a few months and I still remember it like it was yesterday, walking down the stairs out of my place of work, humming the tune to “school’s out for summer”. I walked in to the Co-Op and froze, stood there in my nice suit eyeing up a nice-looking bottle of £50 rum. Can I make these flamboyant purchases anymore? Have I done the right thing? Admittedly it was just a fleeting moment and of course, for those that know me, I bought that rum! It was certainly a leap of faith but it wasn’t long before staff member number two joined, which you can read all about in part two of my blog series…