HR outsourcing is a great way of keeping your team running smoothly and strengthening the relationships between business leaders, middle management and staff. With outsourced support, your business will benefit from a fresh pair of eyes and an independent perspective – two valuable assets when it comes to personnel management.

We caught up with HR expert Louise who shares her knowledge about the benefits of HR outsourcing and how it works in practice. 

Why are employee relations so important?

Louise: People are your most important asset. It’s easy to think running a business is all about the bottom line, but the reality is that your business won’t grow without good management to bring out the best in your personnel. 

Many employers are struggling to recruit at the moment, which makes employee retention more important than ever. Fortunately, with good communication between management and staff, you can hold onto your employees. A long-term employee offers better value than a newbie, and a happy, well-managed staff means higher productivity and savings right across your business. 

How can outsourced HR support help employers?

Louise: All too often, people are promoted to management because of length of service rather than because they have the right experience. It’s a shame to see managers with great potential and business knowledge fail to manage their teams well simply because the manager hasn’t received the right training to bring everyone together. 

However, HR outsourcing can help you to get the basics of management in place, like a solid employee handbook and up-to-date policies. With these for reference, you should be able to handle day-to-day issues. A good employee handbook also forms a great foundation for further training. For example, I recently trained managers in inclusivity and awareness – this has helped them meet the diverse needs of their teams and make everyone feel included. And a happy team is a productive team, so it’s a win for the business too. 

How do you work alongside an in-house HR team?

Louise: Many businesses I’ve supported have excellent in-house HR managers. However, most HR issues only arise once in a while, meaning that for small and medium-sized businesses, it doesn’t make financial sense to employ a full-time HR team. Instead, HR managers outsource general and specific HR support as the need arises. This is usually better value and also brings a fresh perspective. 

For example, I’ve recently carried out an investigation on behalf of a client – the situation needed someone from outside the business to ask the right questions and give an objective view. 

HR outsourcing from Get Ahead

Louise is just one of our amazing virtual experts ready to share their skills and experience with business owners like you. To find out more about what HR services we offer, explore our HR pages or scroll down for more blogs about business support. 

Business administration support from Get Ahead always works well, but it works even better with strong teamwork. 

One of our administration experts, Lisa shared her experiences of working as part of a team for our UK/US-based client Elevated. In this blog, we look at how this situation came about, the advantages of teamwork for the client, and what that teamwork looks like in a regular working week. 

Developing the client relationship

Elevated is a UK/American business consultancy offering a wide variety of support to its international clients. Get Ahead has been supporting their client team who provide medical training in neuro-critical care. In November 2022, Andrew at Elevated approached Emma, regional director in our East Midlands office (who had provided him support with a previous business), looking for business administration support. He needed help covering email management, customer service, reporting, minute taking, event support, client liaison and ad-hoc project management. Emma immediately matched him with three possible specialists who could deliver all the work remotely from their UK-based home offices.

Although the initial plan was for Andrew and his US business partner to select one or two VA specialists to deliver the requirements, after an introduction meeting, they ended up engaging all three. This was because they were so impressed with the breadth of knowledge and experience of all three candidates…and it turned out to be a very wise decision. 

Why? Because in March 2023, Elevated upgraded all its tech systems. And like many tech refresh projects, this one has had its share of teething troubles, including a sizeable email backlog. Fortunately, the three-person Get Ahead team has the right skills and experience to clear these emails and help Elevated offer the service it prides itself upon. 

What does Get Ahead teamwork look like? 

Lisa, Ruth and Jessica were chosen by Emma because she thought they’d work well together, and because she thought they’d be a good fit for Elevated. She was right! The three VAs quickly found effective ways to work together. As remote workers in a different time zone from their client, they’ve had to do their own team leadership, with support from regional director Emma. 

A weekly Thursday meeting gives them a regular time slot to share information and updates, but also find time for emergency meetings. They have a WhatsApp group for quick questions and are always at the end of the phone and ready to support each other.  

What are the advantages of Get Ahead teamwork for the client?

Elevated are delighted with Lisa, Ruth and Jessica’s work – so we are delighted too! Because there are three people in the team, they can cover each other’s holidays and sick leave. This means continuity for the client – there is always someone to keep on top of the work and ensure that Elevated provides a great service to its own clients. 

This also means more flexibility for Elevated – they can make business decisions without being restricted by the availability of their business support experts. 

Because the three VAs are all part of Get Ahead, it’s easy for them to manage themselves and their own team. They communicate between themselves instead of needing Elevated to act as a conduit. This releases the internal team to address other priorities instead of having to add team leadership to their list. 

Business administration support from Get Ahead

We love putting together teams to deliver great results for our clients. To find out more about how we hand pick the right team for your business, check out our infographic here. 

As we prepare for the shutdown of Universal Analytics at the end of June 2023, it’s important that business owners are ready for the new analytics programme, Google Analytics 4. Our new Google Analytics 4 migration services are here to help, but it’s useful to have your own understanding too. 

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s analytics software. If you have a retail business, you probably use Google Analytics already. It’s a data collection tool that with monitoring, visualisation, reporting and interpretation features. These help users to track their customers, look at trends and decide where to focus their energies. 

GA4 comes with a variety of new features. For example, its developers have improved the display to make big data more user-friendly. They’ve enhanced the online privacy to make it compliant with current laws and best practice. They’ve developed additional user groups so you can track customer behaviour more accurately. And they’ve created the capability to combine data from your apps and websites in once place, so you can see a more complete picture. Fantastic. 

Why does GA4 matter?

The first thing to say is that the current Analytics platform, Universal Analytics, will disappear at the end of June and be replaced by GA4. If you haven’t migrated by then, your analytics data will be lost. 

But the change in Analytics platforms is also an opportunity. If you haven’t used Google Analytics seriously yet, the advent of GA4 is a good time to start. Savvy business owners look at their web data regularly and build up a picture of their online performance. They can feed this information into their broader strategy to maximise their chances of success. This is a great habit to get into – one which can really help you grow your business. 

Unfortunately, it’s not always as simple as just opening up GA4 and seeing everything you need to know. The new platform is there to help you, but you need to understand its capabilities before you start. With good understanding, you can review and interpret the data it gives you, and use your findings to good effect.

Google Analytics 4 migration services from Get Ahead

There is a lot of responsibility when you’re running a business. We know that there are many fantastic businesses out there who are so busy providing their core services that they don’t have time to look analyse data. Data analysis is not everyone’s strength – we’re always meeting business owners who know they should be looking at it but keep returning to the tasks they’re good at instead. 

If the arrival of GA4 is the catalyst you need to start reviewing web data and acting on the results, Get Ahead are here to help. Our data experts love helping business owners get more from their websites. We’ve put together three packages so you can choose the right level of support for your needs. These packages range from migration and compliance checking to detailed training and improved SEO. 

To find out more about our packages, check out our summary here.

To find out more about our data experts and web developers, visit our team page here.

What to look for when you’re choosing a franchise? You might well be making a sideways or even forward step on your career. Perhaps you’ve worked your way up in the corporate world and now you’d like to work for yourself (not by yourself!) and gain more flexibility. Maybe you see a franchise as an opportunity to extend your management and leadership skills. 

At Get Ahead, we value the input of all our franchisees and do what we can to help them grow. Buying a franchise should be a positive career step and we want to help you move forward. Let’s take a closer look.

Why is it important to invest in our franchisees? 

Franchisor Rebecca Newenham is a self-confessed people person. She loves meeting new people and learning what makes them tick. This translates into a great generosity of spirit that’s been the driving force behind Get Ahead from its foundation more than a decade ago.

But there’s solid business acumen behind this approach too. Rebecca knows that investing in her franchisees means that they can do a better job. As franchisees grow as people and managers, they bring in more business and enhance the Get Ahead brand and its reputation. 

What does “investment in potential” look like at Get Ahead? 

Rebecca is a great champion of all the franchisees. She firmly believes that flexible working is an opportunity, not a compromise, and is keen to open this up to others. 

Franchisees start by receiving a full induction, tailored to their needs and experience. For example, if you come from a marketing background but feel less confident about finance, you’ll receive finance training but we won’t make you sit through (!) marketing basics. 

Once you’re up and running, you’ll benefit from regular monthly calls with the other franchisees, whom we call regional directors. This is a great way to celebrate successes, raise issues, share best practice and offload if you need to. You’ll also have a regular check-in with Rebecca – a two-way meeting where you can both discuss progress and ask questions. 

Get Ahead’s model allows you to run your regional office the way you want to. Our established franchisees have a variety of approaches, often starting with the methods they know best before branching out and trying something new. 

This flexible, tailored approach is possible because we genuinely believe in the power of people. Unlike other franchises, we don’t have targets.

Before she franchised her business, Rebecca worked as the Get Ahead regional director for Surrey (now part of our South East super-hub). This means that she knows exactly what’s involved in being a regional director. She knows what it is to be in that role and to further her career – a benefit she’d love to pass on to you too.

What to look for when you’re choosing a franchise?

If you think buying a Get Ahead franchise could be your next career move, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us today to book a no-obligation call with Rebecca Newenham.