After a fifteen year career in executive search at that point, three years ago this month we started a journey and what a journey it’s been. Having formed the business in a hugely competitive market, it’s interesting to reflect on the values we determined would be the bedrock of the business and how they’ve shaped us moving forward.
Courage
To start any new business requires a level of courage, but sticking to the plan often takes more. When we setup Sherrington Associates we decided we would only work with clients on a retained basis. We did this for one reason. We knew that we’d put blood, sweat and tears into every assignment and we wanted to justify the effort and resource that we’d commit by gaining some commitment from the client up front. It’s proven to be the best decision we’ve made, as we know that as soon as we’re retained it’s safe to plough every ounce of time, effort and resource into delivering for our clients, safe in the knowledge that we’ve both committed to making this work. But walking away from potentially lucrative ‘non-retained’ opportunities takes guts. Over the last three years we’ve stuck to the plan and it’s paid off.
Like any recruiter, our courage is tested on a regular basis as the muck and bullets of the business require difficult conversations, whether it’s letting a candidate have the bad news after a close interview or breaking it to the client that the person they want has got cold feet, there’s a way of going about it tactfully to break the news gently but ultimately these things take courage. We know that having the courage to do the right thing every time has served us well over the last three years and will continue to do so.
Openness
I learned an important lesson in the first year of starting Sherrington. We’d spent a lot of money on designing our first website and we were proud of the result, an all-singing, all-dancing shiny site with a real ‘corporate’ feel to it. Not long after launch date, I was talking to a very successful private equity investor who had grown and sold several major UK search firms throughout his career and I asked him for some feedback on the new site. It shocked me when he came back to explain that he actually thought we were a large company based on the website. I thought about this for ages. We weren’t (still aren’t) a large firm by any stretch and weren’t really aspiring to be one either, so did I really want clients and candidates getting the message we were bigger than we were? Maybe it was true that subliminally when we were putting the brief together for the original site we were trying to puff the chests out a bit too much? In the end I decided that we’d got the messaging completely wrong and it bothered me so much that we decided on a completely new site within a year of launching the first one! The lesson? Be open in absolutely everything, even down to the subliminal messaging behind the website. We’re a small business, very small in fact, but we’re proud of it and clients love it.
Loyalty
When I think back to those first retained search assignments that got us up and running, I remember how in awe I was that clients were willing to invest their trust in me to deliver their recruitment, despite being such a new business. My fears that the youth of the company would detract from their willingness to retain proved unfounded in the end but the fact that someone had trusted me because of who I was rather than going for the big names or the search firms who’d been around longest meant a huge amount to me and there was no way I was going to let these clients down. My loyalty to the clients who invest their trust in Sherrington to deliver is no less now than it was three years ago and I see every new assignment as an opportunity to prove the difference between using the bigger search firms and using a dedicated and committed boutique partner like Sherrington. In the long game, as long as we remain loyal to our clients, then that loyalty will be reciprocated.
Discipline
A while ago I listened to a podcast by US Navy Seals veteran Jocko Willink, a highly decorated veteran of both Iraq wars and now famous leadership coach. The subject was leadership in extreme situations and it doesn’t get more extreme than in the context of war. Fortunately, the risks involved in executive search and for most of us in the commercial world aren’t anything like those attached to armed conflict, but nevertheless Jocko raised a point that seemed salient in the commercial context and could probably be applied to pretty much any area of life. His point was this. Discipline is the root of all good qualities. It underpins everything. For us to be successful in anything in life, it requires discipline. For me that resonated heavily with what we were doing with Sherrington. Whether it was the discipline to carry on relentlessly and make sure we delivered on a real ‘needle in a haystack’ of an assignment (and there have been a few, believe me), or whether it was the discipline to make sure we got back to every candidate in a timely manner following a round of interviews, or whether it was the discipline to avoid the temptation to ‘advise’ rather than ‘coach’ when working with a senior executive on a coaching programme, having the discipline to make the right choices is essential. Without discipline none of these things could have happened and as we enter our fourth year in business, it will be this discipline that ensures we uphold all our other values now and in the future.
Thank you to everyone we've had the pleasure of working with so far. We look forward to working with you for a very long time to come.
Rob McKay - Managing Director
Optimising Leadership
