Supporting Little & Loud to grow with confidence
How proactive HR helped a small business owner to stop winging it and start leading with confidence.
The challenge
Lizi Guest founded Little & Loud as a sole trader and grew it into a team-based business, with “absolutely no business management experience”. Her background was in marketing, communications, and customer service. People management was an entirely new territory.
Lizi has been lucky with her team but as an employer there is inevitably a time where you need to know how to manage people. Lizi realised that winging it or Googling her way through HR, hoping for the best, wasn’t a long-term strategy and wasn’t doing her team justice.
“It’s a real ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ situation. I had experience in marketing, communications, and customer service, but no idea how to manage staff.”
Lizi realised that she needed proper support and that’s where RYHR came in and our relationship started.
The solution
Having RYHR in her corner means that Lizi doesn’t have to be an expert in HR anymore.
“Working with RYHR means that I am building up my own knowledge and resources, but I know they're there for the hard questions and I don’t have to be the expert.”
One of the things Lizi values most about working with RYHR is that the support never feels too heavy. “The advice often is to simply ‘start with a conversation’, and some support about how to frame that conversation.”
As a small business owner, Lizi says the advice feels measured, balancing legislation and good faith with people-focused conversations.
Over time, RYHR’s involvement has become more proactive for Lizi and her team, “it’s opened my eyes to where HR actually lives in a business”. We have worked together on recruitment, performance, team dynamics, having sensitive conversations, restructures done properly and even how to talk to staff about putting a business up for sale.
The learning
Lizi says that having HR support has enabled her to feel more confident recruiting and adding people to the team. There was a period where she said that she was too scared to grow.
The biggest concern for Lizi used to mirror many SME owners - does the cost of getting HR wrong outweigh the bringing in specialised HR support?
“I was coming at HR completely wrong. In my head it was the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, but in reality, it’s about setting me, my team and my business up for success. Even just from a mental load perspective, the return on investment is huge. I have someone to call when I am unsure or things go wrong, and I’m not winging it anymore”.
Lizi’s tip for fellow owners / managers
“Have conversations as they come up, rather than waiting for things to become problems. Having a solid HR advisor in your corner makes it a lot easier to do that in a holistic way, which works better for everybody.”