If We Can, You Can

Author:

Fiona Cruickshank

Business:

The Specials Laboratory

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

Recruiting people who weren’t right for the company was probably the biggest mistake we’ve made. We’ve lost a bit of money here and there with naff decisions, but when we made the wrong decision with regards to employment, it nearly messed the whole thing up.

A number of people in the company thought the corporate way was the right way- there’s ladders to be climbed and people to be stabbed in the back. People who’d worked for us for a long time were pretty annoyed and some were thinking about leaving. We weren’t efficient and therefore we weren’t making as much money as we should have been.

I decided that rather than grab the first candidate that came in that ticked all the boxes for experience, we needed to have the right behaviour as well. Up until two or three years ago we were holding our business back until we got the right people in place.

It was absolutely the right thing to do. We also had the luxury of doing it because we’re an owner managed business. If we’d had investment we wouldn’t have had that luxury and we’d have been forced down the route of recruiting the first people who came in. We would then have got payback for that a couple of years down the line when things would have gone very wrong.

We deliver early stage medicines so I can’t afford to compromise on the people who work for me. So we’ll slow the growth if we have to.