My name is Sarah and I started this business after more than 12 years experience as an Operations Manager both in a London Corporate and in local professional practice.
My journey to this type of work has been varied, having left school to train to be a Registered General Nurse. After ten years of practice, I left to begin working for a large accountancy firm on their due diligence reports. This work involved working long hours and was highly pressurised but also offered the opportunity to travel.
A couple of job moves later, and I found myself working as the PA for a senior partner in a large accountancy firm, BDO LLP. She was extremely supportive, quickly recognising that I was capable of much more, and it was because of her influence that I found myself promoted to Operations Manager.
This suited me much more and I enjoyed the challenge of a role that changed a lot over the years as the department grew from 75 people to 360 people, and a support team, for which I was responsible, growing from 12 to 40 members.
My experience in large corporate firms gave me the opportunity to work with people in a variety of areas in the business, especially HR, facilities, marketing, IT and Health & Safety and the skills I learnt from working with these people, served me well when I moved to a smaller firm and held the responsibility for managing or carrying out work in a number of these areas.
With this background, I have developed a broad range of skills and experience, which means that I have a lot to bring to my clients.
I started Simply Operations as I enjoy the buzz that comes from knowing I’ve added value to someone’s business, whether it be to save them time with their billing or that I’ve ensured they are compliant for GDPR purposes.
In my spare time, I enjoy walking and photography, as well as drinking coffee (and the odd cheeky glass of wine) or eating out with friends.
Projects
Some examples of previous projects I’ve worked on are:
- Managing an office move of 360 people to new offices. As the new office was a complete refit I was responsible for making sure the layout worked for our needs, that we knew how to adjust the chairs, had enough crates etc. I also ensure all desks and cupboards were packed up, crates were properly labelled. It was a lot of work but very rewarding, especially as it went smoothly. I received an award for this work
- Defining, creating and introducing a support staff career structure and attributes for a large corporate firm. This involved liaising with the other Operations Managers in the firm, outside staff agencies and other accountancy firms. It then was a case of mapping each secretary and administrator to the right job title, and to introduce them, and their line managers to the attributes, which set out what was expected of each level. I also received an award for this work
- Working on managing the Anti-Money Laundry process effectively
- Carrying out a major data clean of our CRM system
- Working with the Finance department on introducing a P2P system, to manage expenses and invoice payments more effectively
- Fine tuning the engagement letter process
- Working with HR to introduce a new software system to manage the HR data for the firm
- Working with the accountants as we moved across to a document management system and the offices started to look to being ‘paperless’
- A number of building projects: roof repair, decorating, clearing of the external storage, emergency light repair, etc.
