Novum Personnel’s Tom Simpson tells Sam Hawcroft why he’d rather have happier staff than lots of money…
Tom Simpson describes himself as “probably more left-wing than Jeremy Corbyn” – which is a bit unusual for the business world, it’s fair to say.
It’s these “socialist” values that have informed his journey into business, where his company revolves around people whose development motivates him far more than the money ever will.
Considering himself “not very academic”, nevertheless he went to university and studied commercial law. “I loved it because I love people,” says Tom, “and I knew that where there’s academia, there’s people – but I didn’t like the exams so much.”
He began his career in retail, managing to get “some quite big gigs” setting up new stores and recruiting staff for major nationals such as Primark. “I’m quite good at lateral thinking. I always think I’ve got ADHD, but completely undiagnosed – I am quite heavily focused, yet I can be quite flitty. I’ll probably get a day’s work done in about an hour-and-a-half, but the rest of the day I’m useless! I was in retail in my late 20s but I found myself thinking, I don’t know if this will be here in 20 years.”
Some of those he’d worked within retail had gone on to recruitment, which Tom acknowledges is never really top of the list of dream careers when you leave school, but he enjoyed many successful years in the sector. “It’s just one of those things that you end up doing because it can be all right,” he says, “because you can earn a lot of money in recruitment – but when I started I was on, say, 20% commission, and I thought, maybe I’d like to earn the 80% and give someone else the 20%!”
He set up his own business with some other people who were already established in the education sector – but, very early on, he knew he’d made a mistake. “I realised that we just didn’t align. I’m always the only socialist in the room at networking meetings and people find it really strange that I’ve no desire to earn lots of money. My desire is to be able to have as much freedom as possible. Within days of setting up that business, I hated it. I just became really disengaged and it was a bad period in my life as I was splitting up with my wife.”
For some years, family came first for Tom, as he moved back to Beverley to be closer to his mother, and he decided to train to be a teacher – which he admits was “strange” given his aversion to academia. But then a friend who had set up a recruitment firm in Teesside asked him to do some consultancy for him – and the short version is… Tom ended up joining the business, the pandemic hit, and he got back together with his wife.
At the point Tom came on board, the business – Novum Personnel – had only turned over £16,000 in six months. In the first year, they turned over £1.1 million, then £2 million, £2.5 million last year, and Tom hopes to hit £5 million this year.
How did he achieve that impressive growth?
Firstly, by keeping it simple. “People tend to overcomplicate things,” he says. “Take Primark. There are only two aspects to its business – the stock for people to buy, and the facility for them to buy it. That’s why they have about 200 tills! They need people to be able to buy quickly. Novum was originally a permanent recruitment business, but when Covid hit, there was no market for that. No one was going to take on someone who might be furloughed tomorrow.”
So, while Tom was out walking the dog – doing his allotted one-hour’s daily outdoor exercise – he started thinking. What was still working? There were the big supermarkets, but he figured that would be a non-starter. Construction, though – that remained largely unaffected by the restrictions. “I had a builder living one side of me and a kitchen fitter on the other, and both were still working, so I thought, why don’t we get into construction and engineering recruitment?”
They followed that path until Tom began to see an opening in education recruitment. “It’s probably the socialist aspect again, but I’m really supportive of the idea of free childcare for parents so they can get to work. And I thought, with children not really starting school until they’re six, people don’t go back to work full time until then. I also wasn’t sure there was the political will to close schools again, so started looking at education and grew from there.”
Again, he kept things simple. He didn’t have anyone in his team who was experienced in education – but that didn’t matter. The same principles apply whatever the sector – the client wants to know what you can provide, when you can provide it, and how much you’ll charge, and the candidate wants to know what they’ll be paid, where they’re working, and when.
Tom now has 20 people working across Novum’s three offices in Hull, Middlesbrough and Newcastle – and it’s their passions that excite him more than the business. “I’d rather my 20 people be really happy and me make less money,” he says. “So I started looking at what fires up the people who work for me, and one of them had an idea for an app. This had actually stopped him getting a job because nobody wanted to employ anybody who ideally wanted to follow their dreams and leave.”
Tom invested in the Goald app, which was the brainchild of Matthew McKay and aims to create a global community where anyone can challenge anyone, any time, to do any activity, whether it be sport, fitness, dance, baking, you name it. “I brought in an eight-figure investor I knew through another business and it’s gone really well,” says Tom. “We’ve got staff in America, Finland and England, and we’ve attracted some of the world’s biggest TikTokers on to it. I always remind Matt that even if we never make any money, he should be really proud that he had an idea. We put the teams together, we built it, and got it out there.”
Among his team is the former Hull FC star Danny Washbrook, who came on board as director in September. Rugby league is close to Tom’s heart – in 2021 Novum Personnel began a new partnership with Hull KR, and Tom has helped numerous other former stars forge their next steps after the end of their playing days.
“Sportsmen have got really good transferable skills,” says Tom, “but it’s a bit like coming out of the Army – they’re 35, but they’ve spent the last 25 years being told where to go, what to wear, what to eat, when to be there, when to be off.”
The concept of the CV – central to recruitment – is another thing that Tom wants to revolutionise. “No one says on a CV, ‘I’m really hardworking, I’m really good in a team, but if you put me by myself I’ll spend all day playing Football Manager.’ So, I thought, why do we take people’s words as gospel? People say they ‘love socialising with friends and music’. Does that involve playing the cello in the London Philharmonic and having a picnic on Beverley Westwood? Or does it mean getting peeled off your face at God’s Kitchen and DJing at Greenfields? Because both are socialising with friends and music.”
So, Tom came up with StartingPoint, which is a “dynamic evidence-based” careers and guidance app that has just been launched after being three years in development and aims to connect school leavers with job opportunities. Instead of just writing on your CV that you’re “hard-working” – you can demonstrate this by uploading media such as pictures, videos, audio clips and verified references. It’s a “complex” system that homes in on a person’s character and ensures a better match for both prospective employer and employee. “When we showed this to businesses, they all said, ‘That’s amazing! Why hasn’t this been invented before?’”
If there is a benefit to Brexit (and Tom is, as you might expect, not a fan), then it’s that it’s a workers’ market, he says. “Instead of you feeling like you’re conforming to the expectations of your potential employer, what I’ve been seeing over the past two or three years is employers are having to conform to their staff. People now have more choice employment-wise, because we don’t have enough people.”
The culture in the workplace is also shifting, too – younger companies are allowing greater flexible working and treating their staff like humans, and not numbers. Tom’s offices have dartboards, snooker tables, and even beer in the fridge, and as long as the job is getting done, then Tom isn’t bothered if you fancy a cold one at 9am on a Monday. It’s all about trust, and if you treat people with respect and compassion, then they’ll respond and repay that trust.
“To put into perspective how motivated they are,” says Tom, “we’re moving offices, the phones have gone in, and I’ve just shifted a car’s worth of stuff. I rang them and said, right, I’m just on my way back to the office, does anyone have anything to bring in? They were all like – we’re all at the new office, completely moved, mate! We did it all in our cars. They moved everything of their own volition.”
He also supported one member of staff through illness before she went on maternity leave twice – Tom says that, in three years of employing her, she only worked in the office for a year. “People said she was taking the mick – but she wasn’t. What she’s done is she’s put two kids and her family before us. As I would have expected her to. She’s doing what’s best for her. Yes, there was a moment where I sat there and said, am I the idiot? I know I sound like David Brent, but I’d absolutely love the idea of people looking back and thinking, do you know what, it was all right working for him.”
Tom’s “weird superpower” is being unable to be offended or embarrassed, and he admits his directness and penchant for swearing isn’t for everyone, but this water-off-a-duck’s-back resilience is enviable. And he’s proud to have been blocked by Sir Alan Sugar on Twitter for calling him out on the hypocrisy of demanding people come back into offices when “he owns a load of offices” and he made his money in personal computers that facilitated home-working. “Then he said, ‘Can you address me as Lord Sugar, please?’ So I said, ‘Anytime you want, Alan.’ And he blocked me!”
He also tells of the time he went for a business meeting in London dressed in a hoodie and jeans. “The guy was a really wealthy, successful businessman, and he said, ‘Why are you dressed like that, son?’ I told him it didn’t affect my work, and it blew his mind that I didn’t need to impress him – my work would do that. We have since developed a really good business relationship.”
With Tom, what you see is definitely what you get.
