The term may have been hijacked by reality TV in recent years, but here at BW we like to get a sense of someone’s “journey” into business. And it really has been a journey for Lithuanian-born Lana Grisina.
Back when there was such a thing as freedom of movement between EU borders, it was Lana’s grandmother who first made the leap, coming to work for a recycling company in Hull. Lana’s family couldn’t afford to put her through university in Lithuania, so she came over too, initially just for the summer, working a variety of jobs.
She then returned home, but soon decided to come back to Hull for good. Lana first found work in food manufacturing, doing everything from packing pork to checking the quality of Yorkshire puddings, before driving a LLOP truck in a supermarket warehouse and then working for an agriculture business.
Lana had always had ambitions far beyond manual labour, but there was one thing holding her back – she couldn’t speak English. So she enrolled into college and began learning what would be her third non-native language (she also speaks Russian and Polish).
This opened opportunities in the world of recruitment, and over the next decade she kept on picking up new skills and learning as much as possible about the industry.
From very early on, she felt that it was all about quantity, and not enough emphasis was being placed on the quality of recruits. “We kept sending people who didn’t know enough about the employers, and we were just focusing on the numbers,” says Lana. “It didn’t sit well with me.”
There were the glimmerings of a business idea here, but it wasn’t until Lana was made redundant that she realised she had reached a “breaking point”.
This came in March 2020 – right at the beginning of the pandemic – and Lana knew she’d struggle to walk straight into another job, so she got in touch with Dave Kitney, of specialist regional recruitment firm Emmerson Kitney.
A few months before, in December 2019, Lana and Dave had met to discuss opportunities. Dave had previously owned, help set up and subsequently sold in 2019 a local temporary agency called Reach, and at the time was hesitant about going back into this market space. However, she remained in contact with him and told him of her ideas to start her own recruitment venture.
“Dave said to me, if you want a business, you better go and prepare me a business plan. So, I did,” says Lana.
She did her research and, with the help of her partner – an accountant who works in recruitment – came up with a plan and discussed it with Dave.
This led to what Lana, who is now 31, calls “the longest interview going”. “Three months passed,” she says, “during which I met Dave several times and completed various psychometric assessments covering likely work style and behaviour, general intelligence and leadership potential, the lot.”
Dave is a qualified practitioner and Emmerson Kitney uses such assessment religiously to help ensure the right people are recruited, as Lana points out: “Having had previous business partners, Dave wanted to understand me better – what made me tick, and whether our values aligned.”
By July 2020, Smart Temps was born under the Emmerson Kitney group, with Dave as managing director, and Lana working out of his offices. “Obviously Dave was slightly apprehensive about how things were going to work – he had taken a risk and invested cash to prime the business, so he said, you better base yourself here and get going. I had a laptop, and a phone, and the ability to speak to people, which was all I needed.”
Smart Temps does what it says on the tin – it specialises in providing blue collar, temporary to permanent workers, where Emmerson Kitney focuses on more senior permanent positions. The common goal is quality over quantity, and partnership, not a transactional approach.
Lana soon realised she was on the same page as Dave in terms of what she wanted to achieve.
“Smart Temps is not your typical temp recruitment agency where you book 20 people today and cancel 20 tomorrow. Our workers have the opportunity to work 48 weeks a year. They have consistency and opportunity to secure permanent employment. The quality is really the differentiator, and that’s what I was aiming for before I really understood much about Dave’s business and ethos. And that’s where it probably clicked with him because when he saw the business plan, he saw that we were speaking the same language and trying to achieve similar things.”
In August 2020, after only a month, Lana took on her first customer with Smart Temps, and by December they had about 40 workers placed with firms. After a 13-year career in recruitment, she’d got “every man and his dog” on her contacts list, and she used Facebook as one of her main channels to gather workers.
She knew that they would need to recruit, too, if the business was to grow, so she suggested to Dave that they bolster their team, which was also part of the plan. Ewelina Clarke joined as recruitment consultant in February 2021, finance and administration assistant Hannah Hartley followed in June 2021, with Maks Dziadowiec joining as a recruitment consultant a couple of months later. In the first year, trading from a standing start, the business secured several customers and turned over £1.6 million. The plan is to have another 50% increase in revenue for 2022.
It was quite difficult “wearing about seven different hats” in the early days, when Dave was the outright owner of the business, says Lana. “One minute you were a recruiter. Next minute, you were an administrator, the minute after you were a salesperson or the payroll person. It was quite hard, but I am quite goal-orientated, and I like to achieve results. My fear of failure pushed me forward and forward. ‘You can’t fail, you can’t fail,’ I told myself. ‘You have to crack on.’”
Lana later entered an EMI share scheme which meant she bought shares in the business, and she says there is an “exit strategy” for Dave. “He trusted me and helped me out at the beginning by seeing the potential in me and Smart Temps, and he continues to help by guiding me in the right way. My ultimate goal is to be able to buy him out, but we’ve still got some years ahead of us before that happens.
“I think the biggest challenge before that is to find the right people to join us on that journey. One of the challenges when you are a relatively small and new business is that nobody wants to come and join you because they don’t know who you are, or can see it as a risk. They don’t know how stable you are. Now, we’ve got a far more solid base, self-financed – unlike many temporary agencies who invoice-discount or factor for cashflow – and are becoming more established, so more people are approaching us for opportunities, which is nice.”
There’s a fair bit of competition in the Hull recruitment arena, Lana acknowledges. “The number of recruiters in the city is unbelievable,” she says. “Some are really well established, and you have to compete with them. But I do think that we’ve got a slightly different service offering for workers and customers to shout about. We focus quite a bit on customer employer branding and brand promotion. And we treat our people as individuals, giving them the choice and option of where to work. This means our attendance rates on average are above 90%, which, from what we have seen, is way better than our competition.”
In the past 12 months more than 60% of Smart Temps workers have secured permanent contracts with customers, which Lana and Dave are very proud of. “It’s about helping people, and if they can secure long-term permanent employment it’s great for the worker and customer. It does make our life somewhat harder as we have to constantly look at replenishing our worker pool,” says Lana.
Engineering, manufacturing, warehouse and distribution are the company’s “bread and butter”, says Lana, but as the business grows, she aims to bring in business and consultants from other sectors to broaden the scope a bit. And, as many firms struggle to recruit the right staff post-Covid, she agrees that there’s been a marked shift in people’s attitudes towards employment.
“Before, people used to just accept the job and see how it worked out. Now I think people are more cautious, and they ask themselves, how would this fit into my life? How would it work for my family? What is the atmosphere and culture like? So, for you to attract somebody, now you have to know so much about your customers. What is the culture like, what are they like to work for? You really have to sell the jobs now because people have got that many options. And employers are more open-minded about people’s transferable skills.”
Lana admits that she’s thrown herself into the business, and work is the first thing on her mind in the morning and the last thing at night. “I haven’t had a holiday yet, put it that way!” And, having recently moved into newly refurbished permanent offices in Marina Court, Castle Street, Lana says they have “ambitious plans” to have a team of seven by the end of this year. They are actively recruiting now, and will grow to nine by 2024. “This is a strategic plan for growth. We are also about to launch Smart Perms, a new division. We have invested a lot of time and money into systems and processes, and we are ready to push on. I’m also ready to pass some of my duties to somebody else, to be frank!”
Setting up Smart and essentially backing Lana was a gamble, says Dave. “A few people at the time thought I was mad with two other businesses to manage coming out of lockdown,” he adds. “It’s certainly paid off so far and I am sure the business will continue to grow; it’s exciting times ahead for Lana and Smart. She has done a great job. Lana is on an entrepreneurial journey, still learning, and I am really pleased to be part of it and supporting her. We now need more people on the bus to join us on the ride!”
Lana is proud of her adopted city, and laughs when told she’s picked up more than a few local phrases as well as an impressive Hull accent. “My daughter was born in Hull, and she doesn’t even want to learn my language any more! I can’t see myself moving anywhere else. I know the area so well now, and I know all the businesses around here, and I understand the dynamics. Hull’s got massive potential, and there is so much investment coming in.”
And, speaking of close relationships, “We are a family,” Lana says of Smart Temps. “I’m not one of these directors and managers who just comes in and points fingers. I’m quite hands on with everything; I’m passionate and get stuck in. I like it that way because I think true leadership comes from leading from the front.”
