Taking Control...
A New Home and a New System
The house we bought was a decent sized 3 bedroomed Victorian terrace in a “nice and quiet” area (well it was for the first 5 or so years!). The area was well served with amenities, shops, bars and that all-important Fish and Chip shop lol.
It had recently had a makeover by the property company that sold it, although done cheaply, of course, it was a clean slate and a good starting point. Plus the number of bedrooms meant the boys could each have their own!
My wife remained at “Frasers” and I started to dig into life as Operations Manager for the security company.
Defining my job role, well, just about anything you could think of: recruitment, training of staff, managing wage payments, allocation of officers to jobs (all be it limited sites at the beginning), assisting Dave in drumming up new business and often having to pull a shift on a new site until we managed to get an officer on site or recruit one lol.
It very quickly became almost a 24/7 role but I was buzzing about it and found I had an aptitude for keeping both the officers and clients “on side”.
The company grew quickly due to our focus and that we were very competitive on our rates…sometimes it seemed too competitive but Dave and the main holding company seemed happy with it.
We picked up a job to cover security with a major chain of 7-11s around Hull which put us on the map having been traditionally allocated to one of the local long-standing security companies.
This was great but difficult to manage as generally the hours were just 4 or 6 hr slots in the evenings which naturally didn’t offer officers a living wage. However, as I mentioned in a previous edition, our offices at that time were located within just half a mile of Hull University…
… lots of students looking for part-time work!
This was in the days before SIA Licencing had come in, something that would, to some extent, bite us in the butt in years to come…but meant recruitment and training was a little easier to start with.
The timescale of taking on this assignment was very short and whilst some of the existing officers from the outgoing company came over to us, there were quite a few empty spaces to fill. At the time I was interviewing 8 to 10 potential officers per day just about every day. And then giving them training for the jobs…
…but we got there!
It was at this time we started to see computer-based management systems and it became a necessity to buy into one and create a 24/7 control room. So, I quickly became conversant with the system, taught the control people how to use it and then set up all the jobs and manpower details into it.
The beauty of the system was not just the allocation of staff but also a means of tracking all of the hours people worked for payroll.
Part of my management role was to oversee this system in tangent with the controllers.
So, in the mix of our original sites and the temporary ones we picked up we had an ever-shifting requirement to cover the 7-11’s…and yes we had a cache of willing students…well, most of the time. Sickness and social life often took down several of the short-hour covers but I knew all of the staff having recruited and trained them. So even when I got “the call” from the control that a site was “down” and without the computerised system in front of me I could pretty much suggest replacement officers, people always willing to take on another shift here and there.
However, I also had to keep an eye on whether man hours were evenly distributed and that no one was being either missed for a decent amount of work or indeed doing too much…
…checking the manpower system, I noticed one officer, who I shall call Officer S, who had been recruited for part-time hours on the 7-11’s (a student) was clocking up 60 to 80 hours a week!
Talking to the controllers, they said Officer S was always willing to help out, any time of day or night and that he often pulled double shifts on vacant sites as well as the retail short hours. At this time the 48-hour maximum work hours was not really a “thing”, but naturally this guy was doing an excessive amount, so I called him in for a chat.
Officer S was, as I said, studying at the University, but it turned out most of it was not class-based and what he needed to do was mostly just a few hours a week to get through his course.
I pointed out that the level of hours he was doing probably wasn’t good for him and that he needed “downtime” and some degree of social life.
He disagreed with me and told me that his motivation was to stay in the UK studying and working so he didn’t go back home to India for as long as he could avoid it…
…he was the eldest son of the owner of a well-known brewery in India and was due to take over the company, once he returned and met his obligation of an arranged marriage…the latter was his biggest concern as he didn’t really subscribe to an arranged marriage, but knew one day it would happen.
The money was not something he needed, the commitment to work and fill his waking hours was.
We spoke for some time and I made an agreement with him that we would need to at least limit him to around 60 hours a week as much from a Health & Safety point of view as anything.
Briefing the Controllers and putting a time limit in the computer management system to reflect this was the next step…but I soon found the controllers had found a way around that in emergencies.
More of that another time perhaps.
Ironically my life had become my work and I was probably doing 70 to 80 hours a week and also managing from home in my downtime. But I accepted it, we were building a business, “Needs must as the Devil drives” as the saying goes.
Until Next Time
Some more of my FREE Newsletters:
