10 Jan From Scratch: I Guess We Should Pick Up The Phone Then?

Welcome to part two of my blog series, From Scratch, looking back at the whirlwind journey of starting Alexander Daniels Offshore from, you guessed it, scratch.

It was the summer of 2016 and I took some time off to plan the beginnings of AD Offshore, spend quality time with my girls and, most importantly, relax! During this time, I started building up my network, reaching out to people that I knew to let them know about my career change and got to work creating a LinkedIn profile… whatever that was… I thought to myself!

Andy and I stayed in frequent contact over the summer months as we got busy planning the intricacies of how AD Offshore would run, before settling on a small serviced office suite in Smith Street, which was a cosy 150sqft!

Our next step was starting the search for our first team member, which took no time at all as I had the same person in mind from day one, Sarah Elliott, whom I had known for around 15 years at the time, was Programmes Manager at the GTA. Andy and Sarah had previously met on a training course and we both agreed she was the ideal person for the job! Like myself, Sarah did take some initial convincing to move to a start-up from a long-term career, especially with raising a young family, but after some toing and froing, Sarah was delighted to join me and then there were two.

Summer soon came to an end and so began our adventure at AD Offshore, with the two of us flying up to Alexander Daniel’s UK headquarters in Birmingham for an intense week of training on the ins and outs of recruitment, meeting the team there and finding out all about the company ethos.
By the end of that week we knew 100% we had made the right decision and were ready to shake up the recruitment market back home.

As Sarah and I walked into our new, empty offices, we got busy building our desks, painting walls, putting shelves up and raiding our cupboards at home for stationery. As we sat at our newly built desks, we paused for a moment and looked at each other rather nonplussed as I came to a startling conclusion and said… “I guess we should pick up the phone then?”

And we did just that, in what followed quite an exciting & nerve-wracking couple of months, which you can read about in part three of my blog series…