Friday 1st June 2007, 09:37Legal ServicesA key challenge for entrepreneurial, organic growth is having really long term business opportunities, coupled with a vision, tenacity and passion for finding a way to make them come alive, without being a slave to the idea and ignoring other options - or worse, failing to make your business work in the meantime. The older I get, the more I realise it is quite rare. So, it’s quite nice when one of these things comes off.
One of my bad habits is that I tend to keep things on my White Board for a few years. I do this to remind me of those long term, seemingly unreachable objectives and markets. I need this to prompt me into action. One of the areas on my list was Legal Aid and Legal Services.
I wrote this up about 4 years ago and I didn’t wipe it off because it was bugging me that we hadn’t done anything about it. It was an issue that many of the people using A4e’s services needed support on. There were gaps in the market, challenges to deliver and an opportunity to join up services to create a better offer for the customer.
One of the nice things about my job is working with tenacious people who bring alive crazy ideas for business. Another is working with partner organisations who share that vision. And so, working with Howells solicitors, we successfully bid for Community Legal Service Direct. This is a new programme aimed at providing telephone support for people who need legal advice and support – you can find more details about it here.
I was delighted to be asked to attend the formal launch for our staff with Howells and also the Legal Services Commission. It’s great to see new initiaitives and innovative approaches to new services getting off the ground. The team are great and doing a fantastic job building up the service.
Another reason why this is nice for me is that my Dad was a solicitor. He believed in the professional values he saw in the legal profession when he started. He also believed in equality of service to all – and specifically the importance of ensuring that private fee paying clients and state aided clients got exactly the same high quality services. He left his practice as I finished school, to an extent disillusioned with what he saw as the commercialisation of the law, a lowering of professional standards and – in the case of legal aid – an increasing tension around suggestions that perhaps services should be curtailed or differentially provided according to the amount of state funding on legal aid. He thought it was wrong, unfair and penalised those in dire need.
What struck me as a kid was that he took his value set from the street. He left school at 12 with no qualifications because he had to go out, earn and look after his brothers and Mother as the eldest in the family. In his spare time when he wasn’t out doing odd jobs to put food on the table he argued with Communists and other political speakers in the streets of Manchester in the days when ‘speaker’s corners’ allowed free flowing debate without prejudice and violence.
A stroke of luck one day saw him working as an odd job lad in a solicitor’s office. One of the partners noticed a spark in the lad and offered to support him in paying for correspondence courses. I saw the papers he got back – they were brutal. The professional body didn’t make it easy for people without qualifications to enter the profession. Years of slog followed and he qualified in the top 6 lawyers in Manchester by correspondence course – unheard of.
As you grow up you don’t necessarily notice what drives your own value set. In growing a business I enjoy nurturing talent, taking a risk on people and enabling individuals to realise potential that maybe they haven’t realised they’ve got. Consistency and equality of service – striving to ensure it every day – underpin the approach I have to business. I believe in high quality, well delivered public services, accessible to those who need them. Work ethic, determination in the face of adversity and willingness to tackle insurmountable obstacles and do things differently have all been at the heart of my approach to business and the services we engage in.
Anyway, another nice thing about my job is launching new services with new people and being asked to come to those events. And never having had a chance to link what I do to my Dad’s passion, it was nice to reflect that we are hopefully involved in tackling an issue he rallied for 30 years ago.
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