Family Business Scale-ups: Breaking Barriers to Growth
Insight piece
Key insights
People, culture and talent
college to get trained up. We have a good mix of very long-serving people – culture carriers – and the younger generation with bright ideas.” Alastair Macphie: “There are three universities in Scotland that turn out food graduates, and each year some come to us to do a six-month placement. But compare this to Cork, Ireland, where 120 food graduates go through that university every year. There are capabilities that we as a country, Scotland and the UK are not gearing up: all I’m hearing
now is, ‘we need plumbers and electricians as AI replaces white collar jobs’. Well, we need plumbers and electricians for the food industry, and the oil and gas and offshore renewable industry. But this country hasn’t considered whether graduates are coming out with the qualifications we need in five- or ten-years’ time. We’ve got to think at universities about what skills are in need, what industries need in five years’ time, not what they needed five years ago.”
Family businesses shift as they scale up to mid-market size: management may not continue to know every employee but can maintain a family culture, and they use their family values and ethos and “reliability”, alongside philanthropic work, as hooks to attract and train staff. They also work with schools and universities to bring employees in and showcase the opportunities. But talent progression and leadership development can become a recruitment challenge as family businesses scale up and seek to retain high-flyers or attract the right technical skills. “We have quite a number of students working part- time in our branches as waiters,” says Barnes at Bettys. “We have a good reputation as an employer, so generally have no issues with talent, but sometimes it becomes harder to recruit in specific areas with skills shortages, such as automation and robotics. Sometimes we haven’t had enough technical skills, so we send a lot of our people to
“We need plumbers and electricians as AI replaces white collar jobs”
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