My biggest mistake

I didn't pay enough attention to our human problems

My biggest mistake was to neglect human resources and allow miscommunications to creep in. The one thing my partner Bruno and I realised quickly was that culture was important, and yet we didn't employ a person to take on HR.

My biggest mistake was to neglect human resources and allow miscommunications to creep in. The one thing my partner Bruno and I realised quickly was that culture was important, and yet we didn't employ a person to take on HR.

When we set up last September, we'd go out to the pub with our staff on Friday nights and would organise company lunches. But as we grew from eight to 25 people, and then to 50, it got more difficult. During the refinancing process, Bruno and I were not in the office very much, and the soul of the company was gone. The inspiration, the motivation and explanations were not there.

When we came back, we saw things were different. It was small, miscommunications, people not feeling happy, touchy-feely stuff rather than problems with practical HR, which I was looking after. Raising funds took months. We realised in November what was going on and started to look for somebody to head HR, but we didn't appoint anyone until February. She got feedback straight away. There's a lot of stuff people don't want to tell the founders, but they still want it fed back anonymously. We never realised people might want loans for train tickets, for instance.

Our HR person was then headhunted, so we went two months without anyone to deal with the area. The responsibility came back to me but, because I couldn't spare time, I made the mistake of neglecting the touchy-feely stuff again. I couldn't go around asking every employee if they felt happy, although I felt I was approachable.

My advice would be to get an HR person, as soon as you have five employees. I'm sure a lot of recruiting is delayed because of that. The second thing was that when the responsibility did come back to me, I should have realised that the non-practical elements of HR needed to be given more importance in the scheme of things. Even if I had asked an external person, or an administration assistant to go and ask people for their opinions on things, anything is better than not dealing with something like that.