Let’s talk about vulnerability, I have a feeling this could be a long one but a story I need to get down on paper.
The story starts 8 years ago, I have 2 daughters, 3 years and 4 months old. I’m on maternity leave from my job as Head of Global Recruitment at Connect Group (working for Adecco and running this RPO). I’m sitting in my friend’s kitchen and she says “Why don’t we set up our own recruitment business together?” Gemma goes on to list all the reasons why this would be a great idea. Flexibility around our young children, using all of our years of combined experience to create a 1st class recruitment service focused on people, we are both passionate and driven individuals and I can see we would work well together. The conversation keeps coming up after this day and I’m weighing up what it would be like to leave my corporate role and venture out on my own. Do I have the skill set, the knowledge and the network to make this a reality? Will I fail? Would I actually be any good as a leader? Where do I even start? Is this too risky and am I sacrificing the reasonably secure job I have?
Within a couple of weeks I received a call from my boss, Jonny Bourne. I can tell from Jonny’s voice that this is a call he doesn’t want to make. He lets me know that my client, Connect Group, is taking their recruitment function back in house and moving away from the RPO model Pontoon (part of The Adecco Group) provides. I have options, I can TUPE across to directly work for Connect Group or they will look at new opportunities for me in The Adecco Group. I pause to gather my thoughts and then say ‘Look if there is an option for me to take redundancy here, then this may be a good thing for me’ I share some of what I have been considering but I’m clear this is only an option if I had the cushion of a redundancy pay out. At this point I had dedicated 15 years of hard work to the business, I’d been a great employee, always giving more than I needed to and was incredibly loyal. It was a great business to work for, I learnt so much, I was given excellent training, great job opportunities and felt supported. Looking back, yes there were things that weren’t perfect. I returned from my first maternity leave on a 4 day week but still had the same targets as I did working 5 days per week, the budget still needed to be delivered, however as my bonus was a percentage of salary which was now reduced due to the 4 day week, my earning potential reduced. I didn’t challenge it back then. I was grateful to be able to work the 4 days doing a job I loved. The Cathy Knight in 2025 would have looked at this differently but the world has changed significantly in the last 11 years, even though we have loads more work to do.
Anyway I was fortunate that they agreed to this and said the door would always be open if I wanted to return. We set about planning the launch of Isme Recruitment. We spent hours pondering names. Isme finally came to us in July 2017, one evening over a glass of wine. The business back then was very much a lifestyle business to fit around our young children. Isme was a combination of our first born children Esme (Gemma’s daughter) and Ivy (my daughter). In September 2017 we officially launched, the website went live and we started taking on clients. The world was our oyster and we were ready to delight our customers. I’m not going to lie, it was a lot harder than we imagined. Until you own and run your own business, you have a view of what will be hard. Maybe it’s winning business (and yes in a super competitive market that can be tough), maybe it’s managing the team or finding the right people, however the reality tends to be very different. Yes all of those things can be challenging but it’s actually so much more than this that requires real resilience. I’ll come onto a lot of this as this story unfolds.
One month into the launch, I’m out shopping with my mum as a late birthday present. I’m trying clothes on and thinking ‘Everything feels tight, I need to start fitting more exercise into my life’, we eat lunch and I’m aware of the distinctive metallic taste in my mouth and I suddenly think
‘When was my last period?’. Life has been busy, Ivy has started school and Edie just turned 1 the weekend prior. I literally have no idea but suddenly realise it was at least 6 weeks ago. But I am still breastfeeding Edie, she outright refuses to even take pumped milk from a bottle, so I have only just started having periods again and they are possibly a bit all over the place. However it plays on my mind and later that day just to rule it out I buy a really cheap test from B & M. I do the test when I get home and BOOM, the two lines appear almost instantly!! F**k, is all that I can think! I realise the time and rush out of the door to grab Ivy from school. I get home and Tom has arrived back from work and shouts down ‘Is what I am seeing here on the side right??’ I had left it on the side in the bathroom before I rushed out the door. We are both in shock. We struggled to get pregnant with Ivy and after a couple of years of really trying we saw a consultant and I was diagnosed with PCOS. I went on to take metformin and Clomid and was delighted to get pregnant quickly. The second time round it took 6 months of taking medication before we got that positive result and the consultant explained that it would get harder and harder to conceive with each pregnancy. Although I had often imagined myself with 3 children (I have 2 sisters) we had settled on two and I had just started a business and given up the chance of any maternity pay. This was not in the business plan!!
I remember dreading telling Gemma the news, I think I lasted a week without saying anything whilst I got my head around it. Then we sat working in her kitchen (as we often did back in the early days) and I blurted out ‘I’m pregnant!’, she looked surprised and I went on to apologise, worrying about the business we were creating. She stopped me and said ‘Cathy this is the whole point of this, we are creating a business that has flexibility around our children. If anyone can make this work, you will’. The pregnancy whizzed by, I waddled into client meetings towards the end feeling I needed to reassure them that I wasn’t disappearing and was only taking 2 weeks off. Thankfully working from home and having sleepy babies who just seem to nap and feed for the first few months, meant that I was able to continue. I remember Gemma saying to me as I breastfed Alice with the phone under my ear talking to a client, that I would look back on this time and wonder how the hell I did it, it was all a blur to be honest but I have no regrets and felt I still had plenty of time to be mummy as well as run the business.
The hard work was paying off and by the start of 2020 we felt things were in a good place, we had a handful of clients that returned to us time and time again and we were taking on new clients.Then the pandemic hit, we were thrown into home schooling, no pre school or childminder for the little ones. Work seemed impossible. We furloughed ourselves for a few months until towards the end of the summer when a few clients started hiring and we moved to part-time furlough. I’m not going to lie, that time was tough, we felt we lost our sense of purpose, we weren’t achieving. We felt we were terrible teachers to our girls, we felt like the business was going down the pan and life was a bit all over the place. The same story for so many. However the one thing I am good at is dusting myself off, not dwelling on things and seeing the positives in situations when others see negatives. Gemma had another job she had continued whilst we set the business up, doing property searches for solicitors, this work had suddenly gone crazy and with her husband about to have knee surgery and not working for a while (he was self employed) she made the difficult decision to leave the business in late 2020. She is still the one I call each week to update on what is going on and my biggest cheerleader, they say don’t go into business with friends but for us we worked well together.
It was hard but after I digested the news, I realised this now allowed me to really focus on the direction I wanted to take the business in. I pivoted for a while, the government had set up a scheme to help 18-24 year olds back into the workplace called Kickstart. I became aware of this and set about applying to take on some people to work with me at Isme. Whilst completing the application I realised there was a lot required from the employer around developing employability skills, something I have lots of experience in. I realised that many other employers using the scheme wouldn’t be able to offer the same so I set about creating a group training and mentoring programme for Kickstart employees. After discussions with other business owners I realised I could take this further and help clients with the application process, the hiring, onboarding employees (we offered all the HR paperwork and contracts required) and then mentoring the individual for the 6 months they worked in the business. Although in all honesty this didn’t make me much money, it kept things ticking over and allowed me to develop new skills. I also felt it gave me a real sense of purpose and allowed me to give back to these young people who had been really impacted by lockdowns and struggling to gain employment. To this day I still follow the journeys of the 27 individuals I worked with during that time and it literally lights me up to see the promotions and career progression they have had, thinking I played a small part in hopefully inspiring them.
Running this project and speaking with lots of other business owners who were starting to scale their teams made me realise that as a business we could offer so much more than just recruitment services. The name change from Isme Recruitment to Isme People came off the back of this, I wanted to position the business as a people partner for our clients, helping SME’s with so much more, from people strategy, hiring plans, talent mapping, behaviour profiling and general consultancy services for larger organisations. To me it was about ‘How can I solve my clients problems?’, ‘What are their pain points’ and ‘How can we be a true partner to those we work with’. I qualified as a DiSC practitioner and offered this as an additional service to my clients. I worked on a consultancy basis for a few smaller businesses who needed someone to come in and review their current recruitment processes, how their teams were working together and advising on best practice. I led a small team of recruiters who were servicing our clients’ hiring needs. I also discovered B Corp and decided this was something I really wanted the business to become and started the process to gain certification. Things were heading in the right direction, however I had moments when I would stop and just think ‘I can’t do this’ ‘I’m not good enough’ and ‘who am I kidding’. I felt lonely despite surrounding myself with lots of business owners who supported me and I kept thinking I would be better doing this with someone else.
In the spring of 2023 I was approached by an old colleague from Adecco, he had been running a recruitment business for the last 10 years, also focusing on marketing, digital and data. After 10 years in business the two founders felt they would benefit from an additional director joining the business helping them build their brand, their culture and they liked the idea of becoming a B Corp. We had numerous meetings to discuss a plan around merging the 2 businesses and I felt really excited about the future. I went from a team of 3 to a team of 10, quite quickly I could see tweaks that needed to be made to improve the business. I’m not going to lie, there were challenges. I was working with two individuals who had been doing things a certain way for 10 years and asking them to change things. It was uncomfortable for them at times but we were making progress and I was learning constantly. The original B Corp application I submitted was changed to their company name, I revised the application form to apply to the new business we had formed and we were going through the audit stage. We got to the end of 2023 and although the market was tough, with many companies not hiring and lots of redundancies in the sector, things still felt like they were moving in the right direction.
Then things got difficult. 2024 started positively but quite quickly we could see that hiring had really slowed and difficult decisions around the team needed to be made. When times are tough we often see behaviours change and if I’m completely honest whilst remaining respectful, I wasn’t being true to my own values anymore. We also felt top heavy as the majority of the team were being made redundant so it felt like the right decision to remove myself from the business. That was probably one of the hardest moments in business. I had spent the last 8 months putting everything into another business, and although my business was still ‘live’ I had done nothing with it for this period. I felt like I had nothing to return to. I was at a real low point and started to interview with other companies, resurrecting Isme People didn’t even seem like an option to consider at this point as I knew it would take time to build up the revenue and I had bills to pay. However the passion for creating something I was really proud of still remained and I just tried to ignore the voice in my head telling me to ‘re launch Isme’.
In the summer of 2023 I had joined a business mastermind group, we meet every 6 weeks for a full day and it’s been a real opportunity to work ‘on’ the business as well as myself. A chance for self development, learning from others and a huge support. It just so happened that on my last day of employment at Bodhi, I had my day with the Indaba group. We start the meetings by updating the group on how things are going with our business, personal life and wellbeing. I attempted to give an update and for the first time since joining I just broke down and couldn’t continue talking. We all joke that this group does something to you and I have witnessed many men and women cry in this safe space but it had never been me, possibly I hadn’t felt I knew everyone well enough to be so vulnerable until this day. But I felt raw, I had just sent an email around to the team to thank them and say goodbye and in all honesty I had completely lost my confidence. I am so grateful I was surrounded by this wonderful group of humans on that day, it was exactly what I needed. During the afternoon we had a session on coaching and a statement came up that really stuck with me.
High performance = what is possible – what is stopping you.
As I talked to the group about different opportunities that had been presented to me and then talked about Isme People, they noted that my body language changed. When I talked about Isme, I lent forward and became more animated. My passion came through. I was asked the question ‘What is holding you back?’, I was honest and said it was finances and worrying how as a family how we would survive. One of the members turned to me and said ‘You can fix that, you can raise investment or take out a loan’. It felt like I was finally allowing myself to consider resurrecting Isme, I hadn’t really allowed those thoughts to come into my head in recent weeks and had focused on the job hunt. Don’t get me wrong, I give whatever I commit to 110%, I would have gone into any of those roles and added value, I would have no doubt been happy but I think I felt that there were still chapters with the Isme story that needed to be written and work to be done.
I drove back from that meeting with ideas whirling round my head. I got back and my friend had come over for a glass of wine as she knew the day would have been a tough one, she was sat at the kitchen island with her daughter and my husband and they asked how I was and I said ‘I’ve decided I’m going to continue with Isme People, I’m going to make this work and that’s ultimately where my heart is’. Tom looked unsure and a little worried but I talked through my reasons and that I would only do it if I could raise the finance to not put him under too much pressure. I’m persuasive and he knows me well enough after 23 years to let me get on with it and that I will make a success of anything I feel that passionate about.
By the end of that weekend, The B corp application was in (I continued to work through this for Bodhi and got the accreditation for them a few weeks later), I had looked into something called the South West Investment Fund backed by The British Business Bank and I was pulling my business plan together. In June I found out that I was successful in securing a £50k loan and went about recruiting my first team member. Hiring took longer than expected, plus I had planned months earlier two holidays over the summer, one with family and another with friends plus our children, along with a load of building work, so progress over the summer was slow. Ryan joined my team in mid October and I feel I have found someone who can really help shape this business. We are back to hustling and trying to build up a client base, it’s bloody hard work but work I am proud of. B Corp audit has happened and we are waiting for the final verification.
I have many moments when I still think ‘Can I actually do this?’ ‘Am I good enough?’ and ‘Who am I pretending to be?’. Good old imposter syndrome creeps in all the time but I know how to manage it. Plus I’m 45 this year and my hormones play a big part in my confidence levels day to day. However I’m very self aware, I can spot these changes in my mood and I know the people I can call on to lift me up when I feel like this. We are in the early days of building back but I am incredibly excited about the business we are building, a business that puts people at the heart of every decision we make, a business that encourages every employee to give more than they take and a business that adds value to every client we partner with. We help to find our candidates careers that they love and a big goal for 2025 is looking at how we go further with our candidate journey, how we can help those we don’t manage to place into roles and how we can help our clients support people once in the organisation, allowing them to retain top talent in their business.
The sky is the limit for the business, we are evolving to position ourselves as a true partner, offering so much more than transactional recruitment services.Reflecting on what I have learnt over the past 8 years these are the key bits of advice I would give anyone going into business
- Never lose sight of your values
- Remember why you started
- Keep a close eye on your cash flow
- Surround yourself with people who lift you up but also aren’t afraid to challenge you
- Trust your gut, it’s so important to listen to those niggling doubts, they are often right
- Outsource the stuff you aren’t good at
- Understand that we are always all learning, even those you look up to and think have all the answers
- Know your own strengths and employ people who fill the gaps
- Brand and personal brand is so important, enjoy having a voice and speak up about things you are passionate about
- Look for the problems you can help solve
- Reflect on the mistakes, learn from them but quickly move on
- Keep moving forwards
- Share your experiences, good and bad, it may be exactly what someone else needs to hear
- Give back, use your skills to help others, become a mentor or just take the time to listen
If you’ve got to the bottom of this, you’ve done well. I didn’t expect this blog to be quite so long but I think it’s a story I get asked about quite often and the time felt right to tell it. Believe it or not this is very much a condensed version!! Keep being you and believing it’s all possible.
“I have many moments when I still think ‘Can I actually do this?’ ‘Am I good enough?’ and ‘Who am I pretending to be?’. Good old imposter syndrome creeps in all the time but I know how to manage it. Plus I’m 45 this year and my hormones play a big part in my confidence levels day to day. “