Employee Ownership - 12 Months On
By Ian Harragan, Director at i-confidential
Time certainly marches on. It must be because there is a lot of exciting and challenging activity underway!
In July last year, I joined i-confidential’s other directors, Colin Fraser and Simon Lawrence, in putting pen to paper to create an employee-owned business. A core driver for this was to start early succession planning and develop a strategy for long-term success. 12 months on, it feels like we have come a long way. There is a heightened focus on growing our people’s capabilities and making big strides forward in how we manage the company.
i-confidential is currently one of only 111 known employee-owned businesses operating in Scotland - a small, but growing band. Looking at our decision in hindsight, however, it still feels very much like the right one.
As a small business, governance was always something that felt quite different from working in a large corporation – usually for the better in my view, but there is always room to improve. With the employee trust now owning a 55% stake in the company, we recognised the need to do more to ensure everyone had a voice. This has led to much greater transparency in our decision-making and a strong sense of commitment from everyone, which is so vital to the success of smaller organisations in particular.
We have also started to market the business more than ever before, as we seek to expand our client base and the sectors we work in. With new offerings and a renewed sense of direction, I believe we will have a company that looks and feels different again in another year’s time. It will be here before I know it!