James Baker, CEO of Buchanan Law on how to deliver efficiency across multiple time zones.
For many successful businesses in the UK, the question eventually arises: ‘Can we break in the USA as well?’. In the case of Buchanan Law – a specialist legal recruitment agency which I founded in 2013 – we had already developed a US operation based in London as part of our substantial growth. There is a large community of top US law firms in London and extensive overlaps between the two jurisdictions, so it developed naturally. But if we were to maximise its potential we felt that to be fully successful in our American practice we needed an office there.
The difficulties that UK businesses face in the US are, however, well-known. We realised that to make it work we needed to have a strong ‘London’ presence to bring our way of doing things and shape the company culture in the US. As CEO, I have personally invested a lot of time being across the pond, spending three weeks out of four in Miami and coming back to London about once a month for a week. Also critical was having an experienced London colleague, Thomas Hanlon, to head the Miami office. In addition, London-based employees now regularly go on short placements to work in the US for a week at a time to simulate the cohesive culture of the firm. Keeping a close relationship between London and Miami is absolutely vital.
Challenges, success and co-ordination
From the start, we were confident that the successful formula we had created in the UK would work just as well in the US – although we would have to contend with much higher costs and adapt to a rather different culture not least because of the Miami area’s distinct lifestyle.
Operations ran smoothly and the business took off quickly, thanks to the excellent team we were able to recruit. While very few British start-ups in the US make a profit from Year One, we were able to achieve this primarily by following the same tried and tested standards as we had in the UK. In terms of how we manage our clients, how and where we apply pressure on performance, how we then collate data, Miami operates in the same way as London.
That said, we keep a tight but separate focus on what is happening in Miami and what is happening in London. Although the common unit financially is the pound sterling, we monitor earnings separately for each of the offices. From a technology perspective the two offices work as a single body but from a reporting standpoint the Miami office is treated as a distinct entity. This means that it is straightforward for Tom in Miami to compare his business against London-US and US-US budgets. It also means there are ready answers to the questions ‘What has London done in its own right?’ and ‘What has Miami done in its own right?’
Obviously, one is not comparing like-with-like given that Miami is less than one year old, and it is important to judge offices on their context and on a ‘per head’ basis rather than purely one against the other. Nonetheless, with an office consisting primarily of new hires – and certainly fresh to the Buchanan culture – billings of more than $1 million were achieved in the first seven months of operations. It confirmed that we had a good formula which was not restricted to working only in a British environment.
The hybrid approach to recruitment
A lot of this was about our style of attracting candidates and matching them to vacancies. We have what we call a hybrid approach to recruitment: there is a collaborative team with some of our people finding candidates, others who manage the relationship with the clients and then a third key group who orchestrate the process of matching individuals to jobs.
One of the key factors that make this effective is having a clear idea of what ‘good’ looks like within each individual role in the business. The answer might not be immediately obvious, and we spent many months examining this in some detail. But it was time well spent. As a result, we are able to develop a detailed model of what is required in each role and how individual performance measures up to that. A close examination of data is critical to the way we manage, and we invest in breaking down defined metrics of performance.
For this to work, however, it requires a sound induction period. We operate a two-to-three month initial ‘sprint’ period to support new recruits and see whether they can match our requirements. By the end of that period they should be in a good position to deliver the kind of service which embodies our values.
Appreciating differences
While the basic principles upon which we operate in Miami are the same as in London, that does not mean we are blind to cultural and social differences. As is often remarked, although Americans and Brits speak the same language, we speak it in a different way and sensitivity to those differences and the local assumptions is critical to the way we do business. The true focus of our approach is seeing what kind of potential people have. The big challenge for management is to identify, tap into and release the potential of each individual based on the cultural context in which they are working.
By concentrating on inputs rather than outputs, we have achieved performance well above the sector average in our US operations.
