Guest CEO Blog: What are you famous for? by James Baker, Managing Director, Harvey Nash Germany
What are you famous for?
This is a question I love to ask people in the staffing business as I believe it gives a good indication of how confident someone is about what they are selling. “I’m the best at ………” is a statement that oozes belief, self-confidence and that little bit of healthy arrogance that top salespeople possess.
I joined Harvey Nash at the start of May as the Managing Director of Germany and have found it fascinating getting to know the business – people, clients and the unique culture.
I come from a niche staffing background, starting in London with SThree in 2004, before taking the opportunity to move to Germany to set up the Real Staffing brand, then co-founding a company focused on staffing purely in the AI and ServiceNow markets in 2018.
What surprised me most when I joined Harvey Nash was the enviable portfolio of customers that have been won and, most importantly, retained over many years. The fact that Andy Heyes, Managing Director of Harvey Nash UK & Europe, still passes over jobs from his long-standing customer relationships is testament to the client culture that is at the forefront of what we do. This is something to be proud of; there aren’t many staffing companies that operate like this and boast the portfolio of logos that we do.
An area I will be focusing on with the German business is helping our consultants find their answer to that question, “What am I famous for?”. It was a question people struggled to answer when I first caught up with them. I loved reading the Blog by Jeroen Fries talking about Cookie Crunchers adapting to the market to deliver COBOL training for the Hire Train Deploy model. Genius. It doesn’t need to be shiny and new, just something that solves customer problems and that will make us famous!
I have always worked in niche markets, and, outside of key accounts consultants in the businesses I have run, mostly worked in vertical market specializations. Whether that was a niche tech market (Data/AI is a good example, even this was broken down further into NLP, Computer Vision, data engineering etc), or Quality Assurance within the Pharmaceutical market This was the way that consultants could put themselves at the centre of the ecosystem and dominate the market; “Control the best candidates and you control the market”. Jobs could be delivered in 24 hours with A-Player candidates, and we could put up the fences and dominate a customer’s time.
Think of the hedgehog, be brilliant at a single thing – the hedgehog rolls up into a ball to protect itself, that’s it’s single specialist play. Be strong at saying “no”, move away from distractions, pass non-core jobs to colleagues better placed to fill them so that you can focus on becoming famous in your patch. Have the confidence to tell customers what you are the best at and back it up with data – selling “a network of 324 qualified, reference checked niche specialists” is far more compelling than selling “a database with 50,000 candidates”.
If you don’t work in a niche market, what else do you do to make yourself famous? It could be the specific service levels you commit to, the speed you deliver to your jobs, meeting all of your candidates or your unrivalled contractor post-placement service. In a more challenging market, we must be famous and give customers a reason to work with us.
So, what will I be famous for? My goal is for Germany to be famous for having the best onboarding for our new colleagues in the industry as well as the most effective sales training. We will create a business running parallel to our Key Accounts that focuses on 2-3 niche markets that we become synonymous with in the German market, we will talk about it on the website, on social media, through podcasts and at meetups. Everyone will know exactly what we do! And finally, we will be famous for developing our own talent to Think Big, Dream Bigger, Be Bold and build exceptional careers with Harvey Nash.