In August Melber Flinn was 10 years old! Happy birthday to us, Ive been reflecting a lot recently on what has been an incredible and eventful journey, not least because we also happened to embark on a period of change, which might see Melber Flinn becoming a different business than I originally planned it to be. More on that later….
The origin story of Melber Flinn is a fairly common one of the recruitment industry. I had started at another interim recruitment company in 2010, taking on their healthcare desk, the NHS interim market was quiet in that period, it coincided with a new coalition government coming to power and George Osbourne’s infamous austerity budget, Rachel Reeves will no doubt soon be telling George to hold her beer… Public Spending was curtailed and interim usage in the NHs was weak, but this proved to be helpful for me when I started, it was tough but I hadn’t known any different. Before long the market recovered, and I went onto to be one of the top performers for the company. Inevitably along the way you start to wonder whether you could do all of this yourself, and hopefully build your own house rather than help someone else construct theirs.
I finally resigned in April 2015, and Melber Flinn was incorporated in August 2015.
The initial timeline for me was 5 years. It felt like an appropriate unit of time in my head as I had stayed at my previous company for exactly 5 years and during that period had rebuilt the health desk to become one of the company’s strongest market sectors. It made sense that I adopt a similar timescale to build my own business. I wanted to work hard, see what would happen and then re evaluate in 5 years. I remember having the distant hope that I would have built a successful company, one which might be of a size for others to help run it, which would allow me to step back and explore different professional interests. In the beginning I had the head start of knowing the NHS market and having built a sizeable network, but I had the learning curve of starting and running a business, incorporating everything from selecting a CRM to paying VAT bills.
I must confess there wasn’t much of a plan per se. No detailed strategy, and no annual reviews or equivalent of planning rounds. It was more a case of heading my head down and doing what I had previously done and hoping success would follow. Fortunately we grew quickly and confidently and it wasn’t long before I could hire Kathryn to help with everything operational and administrative, Mel to work as our candidate lead and Rachel to work alongside me as a consultant. When Covid hit and demand grew we also hired Jenna, another former colleague who I had wanted t work with again, and the team felt complete.
And so how did those first 5 years go? Pretty well, if I am honest it felt fairly effortless, we had a great team, market conditions were strong and we focused on delivering a straight forward and honest service which helped build the Melber Flinn brand. I was vaguely aware that companies in different industries could go through cycles of growth and contraction and experience real peaks and troughs, but we seemed impervious to such conditions, in fact we had 4 consecutive years 2018-2021 where turnover and gross profit figures for each year were in a 10% range. ONS figures state that only 39.4% of businesses born around 2018 make it to 5 years, we were on the right side of that statistic and had every right to feel proud! At the 5 year point Covid had just hit so it was certainly a period of uncertainty, I had hoped I would re evaluate at this point and possible explore different professional interests, but to be honest, I didn’t have any that felt stronger than recruitment, and because business had gone well, the strategy for the next 5 years was broadly “more of the same”, we would keep going and see where we could get to.
If the first 5 years were a scenic 2 hour drive on a quiet motorway, the next 5 was a cross country dash dealing with roadworks and vehicle changes. Its been eventful! We have had the Covid years where spending was unconstrained and demand was strong, followed by a hard 180 in spending and an prolonged weakening of the interim market. The uncertainty has prompted us to diversify and 2025 (our tenth year) has seen Melber Flinn taking on permanent recruitment campaigns in other areas of healthcare. In 2015 I was so ingrained in the NHS interim market, I did not really consider diversification into other markets, I just wanted to be great in one little niche, and for so long that specialism served us well, but I’ve learned you have to adapt, pragmatism has to outweigh emotional attachment.
But making it to ten years is a great achievement in its own right, apparently only 30% of business get to this point so we need to feel pride in our accomplishment. And most importantly it has been a fantastic ride along the way. We have had the pleasure of dealing with some great clients, who have appreciated our style and approach and have rewarded us with loyalty and plenty of repeat business and I speak for the whole team in saying we genuinely love our candidate community, and we have had the pleasure of placing many very talented candidates who make a real difference to the organisations and services that they support. Many of them have become good friends along the way and honestly speaking with them on a regular basis feels more like a friendly catch up call than work
So what about the next 5 years? With so much talk recently of other long term plans, perhaps I ought to take inspiration and produce something detailed, with key milestones and deliverables. But the last 5 years have not turned out as I expected and so I am cautious about making predictions or plans for a marketplace that may again change around us. That said I am comfortable about setting some themes and guidelines, which I know if we adhere to, should give us a strong chance of success, and they are as follows:
- Focus on delivering a high quality and straightforward service, to build brand, trust and loyalty.
- Embrace and adopt technology and AI
- Been adaptable and open to change.
- If opportunities come out of left field, take them, you never know where they might lead!
- Have fun, its only work.
We look forward to hopefully working with you at some point in the not too distant future!
