Introducing PE Partners Founder - The beginning.
Buckle in friends & family (assuming that's all we have on board so far, if not, welcome to our new friends!) for a tale you may or may not be familiar with.
Sitting down (or more accurately, lying down) to write my first monthly PEPletter (I reserve the right to ditch this name at any time) with The Proposal on in the background and my husband at the other end of the couch mid-deep-dive into U2's residency at The Sphere (IYKYK), I consider where to begin. Between intermittent bursts of Bono and picking up my phone to research a side-quest every 2 minutes, I realise the first newsletter can only be on one topic. Me.
Who am I? Why should you have me in your inbox? What makes me qualified to offer advice? To be fair, maybe you shouldn't and maybe I'm not. But what I'll aim for regardless, is to provide you with thoughts, ideas, options and alternatives to what I would call 'traditional' leadership, people management styles and HR. But first, let's rewind back to 1988, when it all began.
Not really. We'll do the abridged version of how I came to open People Experience Partners in late 2023…
I grew up in regional Victoria, in a white middle class family with parents who, to this day, are truly legends. This is important to know up front, as the privilege with which I was raised has shaped my life and afforded the ease with which I've moved through the world. I have worked hard, but there have been very few barriers to overcome, for which I am grateful and acknowledge my privilege.
I moved to Melbourne at the end of high school and undertook a social science degree with the hope of going on to a career as a Psychologist. Alas, Uni really wasn't for me at that time. I've since learnt more about myself and why I might have found Uni so challenging back then. From the structure of high school to the absolute autonomy of university, I struggled (the neurodivergent in the room will understand why). Against the advice of my public servant parents, I left Uni after 2 years and entered the public service.
After undertaking a workplace traineeship and many, many failed applications, I was promoted to a team leader position. And wowee, nothing in my career prior had prepared me for managing a team. Let alone a team that were my peers, just the day before! It was a real sink or swim scenario, it took a load of trial and error and eventually I found my voice as a manager.
Over the coming years I progressed through the public service ranks in my chosen field and became an Operations Manager of what felt at the time to be a very large team (it was probably only a team of 25 at that point, but later grew). This is where I really discovered my love for the challenge of people management and leadership. Because let me tell you, us public servants can be a MIXED BAG. Some of the greatest friendships of my life so far were founded in those PS roles. Those years have honed my people management skills and I've gained so much from the colleagues I've had over the years, the wonderful and the less so. And the clients. My career to date has been dedicated to serving the community in some way or another. Making sure every person I encounter, either on my team or in client engagement, gets what they need from our interaction. And ensuring that my team meet those same expectations.
In the past 5 years I've grown two pretty awesome humans, now aged 4 and nearly 2 and I am ready for something completely new. I've watched countless friends and family navigate the small business landscape and heard their stories of moving from sole trader, doer of all things, to bringing on staff and the absolute delight and whirlwind that can follow. When the realisation strikes of the sheer amount of work it takes to bring on people to support you in your business. When it's meant to free up your time but it seems to be having the opposite effect, it's very easy to become overwhelmed. And my first hot tip for you - Success lies in your onboarding process. Which starts before you start recruiting and ends several months after your employee has commenced. And you bet I'll be tap, tap, tapping away at that newsletter really soon, but for now we're still on me.
At the beginning of 2023 it struck me, I had some pretty huge regrets at leaving behind my Psychology dreams. And realised I had actually been applying a lot of the psychology principles I had learnt in those early years of study to my various roles since. With a new sense of direction and after a really formative lunch break with a colleague (turned great friend) who had been doing the study/work juggle for a while, I went home to my husband and declared I wanted to head back to school. With his terrified support, 3 days later I had been accepted to a Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) at Deakin University and I was starting in 3 weeks.
Fast forward to later in the year with a semester of study under my belt which was the confirmation that I needed that this was the right path for me (I was loving it), I was considering how I could begin to incorporate my organisational psychology major into my work life. And the answer was very simple and very obvious. I wanted to use my knowledge, experience and love for psychology to support people starting out on their leadership journey. I could see that there were loads of awesome leadership courses, recruitment agencies and HR consultants out there. But what I couldn't see much of, were these important services targeted at and tailored to supporting micro-businesses, which is generally where the small business owners leadership journey starts, right?
Generally, by the time you can afford to bring in the consultants to help you with your team leadership and recruiting strategies, you're already neck deep! You're up to your eyeballs in employee dynamics, trying to discover the right leadership style for you, trying to reverse engineer HR policies and you've maybe already made a few missteps.
So, I want to bridge that gap. I want to bring affordable employee experience and leadership practice to micro-businesses. After spending years training new managers leading their first teams, going on their peer to manager journeys, undertaking countless recruitment processes, endless performance management discussions, I am happy to report that I am still very passionate about developing leadership skills early. Finding your voice and understanding that the most important 'resource' in your business (maybe aside from yourself) is your people.
If you have employees that are client facing, they are the difference between sales, returning customers and your customer experience, which is why people experience is my passion.
And so, People Experience Partners was born. Our flagship will be our membership. Bringing leadership support to micro-business owners who want to get off on the right foot, who want to be good, fair, supportive managers but need a hand finding the right place to start. And by providing group services, it's affordable and accessible. It will be a place to learn about different leadership styles, find what suits your personality, practice employee/manager conversations and generally build your leadership toolkit. With a healthy dose of HR tools on the side to support your growth in building a healthy, consistent workplace.
And more than that, I want to bring you a community. I think one of the things I struggled with most in my early days as a senior manager was loneliness. As a team leader, you often have to make decisions for a number of people, that not everyone will be happy about or understand. You probably aren't happy about them half the time either. Sometimes the decisions you need to make and the conversations you have to have are so deeply uncomfortable and challenging, and the downside of being a small business people manager is you don't have peers! No one to vent to following a tricky employee conversation. No one to bounce ideas off if you are worried you're being unreasonable or unfair. And that will be a key part of our offering. Providing a community of practice, where people can share stories, ideas, policies, conversation techniques, that work for them. A community of peers to share your people management challenges and triumphs with.
And to back it all up - DIY HR support. Because a really important factor of having a team and being a good leader is having robust policies in place so that everyone knows where they stand and what is expected of them. So you all have that clarity if something goes awry. You don't need to spend thousands on consultants (though once you reach a certain size, you should), I'm going to teach you to be your own HR on the micro-business level, with compassion, fairness and consistency.
You'll come for the knowledge, but it is my hope that you'll stay for the community, support, and ongoing professional development.
If our PEP Club membership sounds like something you'd be interested in, pop on over to our Contact Us page and let me know you want to be on the waitlist for our first launch. Our first enrolment will be a very special, once off, founders membership. It will be drastically discounted (for life - or until you opt-out) and limited in numbers to help us hone and test the offering to make sure it is EXACTLY what you need. This phase will include a lot of template and policy development, with input from the group, so it's not to be missed. You can expect fortnightly Q&As of real questions from members, community discussion board, exclusive Facebook group and a monthly theme and webinar, all monitored and delivered by your PEP specialists. We'll be launching PEP Club in early 2024 (not January because we're going to Vegas to see U2 play at The Sphere, obviously), so keep your eyes & ears peeled for updates. The best way to stay across the PEP happenings is to follow along on socials here & sign up to our newsletter here.
And what's next from here?
"Same thing we do every night Pinky, TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD"
(If you don't get this reference, I'm not sorry).
Talk Soon.
