Q1 2017 GSS BUSINESS REVIEW
With a quarter of the year now passed, I thought it would be a good idea to provide an update on how we are progressing, what we’ve been working on over the past three months and what we hope is to come over the next nine.
We started the year with some key objectives; recruitment, strategic partnerships and innovation. We know that if we can succeed in these three areas, we will achieve our overall targets.
As we continue to grow, we need to ensure that we at least match our recruitment levels to our client’s expectations and maintain the work/life balance of our existing staff. Ideally our recruitment drive will exceed the needs of operations so that we can ensure the highest level of quality and compliance from our team and provide resilience to clients. Our key recruitment drive has been focussed on our training dept., ensuring that there’s a throughput of staff who are trained to the Company’s standards and understand its values. This for me is the best form of recruitment for GSS. To date this year, we have seen 14 recruits come through the courses. Should this continue, we are confident this recruitment initiative can help meet our growth targets.
It was also nice to see a number of bonus payments made to staff this month for new staff referrals.
The New Year brought with it a new marketing initiative, headed by Kevin Wootton. Kevin has engaged a digital marketing partner to ensure that we become more visible online. Thus far, we have relied on word of mouth and reputation to bolster our growth however we cannot ignore the power of the World Wide Web and the importance of being more visible to those who have not yet heard about us!.
Critically, we measure our success by a few metrics, including Key Performance Indicators, adherence to the company’s values and of course growth. We must be able to measure and trend our KPI’s – internally and with customers – to have a true indication of how we are performing.
I am delighted to see our KPI scores improving and of special note are the KPI’s with our clients. On average, our client KPI scores are running at 95.7% for the year. Clients are recognising the investment we’ve made in the operations team (headed by Gary Malloy) team and the efforts to ensure the quality of the service we are delivering (led by Leigh Gillon).
An often overused word in this industry is ‘innovation’, used to describe a variety of initiatives but rarely truly innovative at all. Innovation must of course, be balanced with practicality and value. GSS have long invested heavily in R&D, developing new ideas around the use of K9’s for detection, technology to keep up with the ever-changing risks and even the use of new video techniques to highlight the work we do.
At the start of 2017, we began working with a team of programmers in the UK to develop a truly innovative piece of software to inform and guide our team’s efforts. The software will be used to support our lone workers, report live to clients and harbor intelligence (from internal, client and social media sources) to allow a seamless conduit for our clients and staff. We will be rolling this out in Q2 of this year and will communicate this through its various phases to clients and staff alike.
Our 2020 vision is to stabilise our core client base to ten, providing each of them a tailored service that truly meets their needs – a potential cliché but one that those ten clients will really understand. The efforts made in 2016 have begun to reap benefits in Q1 of 2017, seeing two new core clients added. This, coupled with the clients KPI scores, stands us really good stead to achieve our goals.
It goes without saying that without the support of the whole team, none of the aforesaid would have been possible. If we keep up the momentum we’ve created in 2017 thus far, I am confident we can outperform both our own and our client’s expectations.
Daniel Mailly – Managing Director
