We’ve just passed the half year mark of 2021. As a business, we spend so much time looking ahead that sometimes we forget to reflect on what we’ve done. It’s always useful to look at what we’ve achieved so far so we can identify what we still want to do before the year is out.
People and positivity
In 2021, we’ve been focusing on people and growth. Our response at the beginning of the pandemic was to take on more team members, and that’s exactly what we’re continuing to do as we emerge from it. At this half year mark, 39 new people have joined Progeny. As the healthy number of applications for our vacancies shows, people want to join us and we are attracting talented team members who can make a real contribution.
The positivity of growth is the ability to recruit great people as our name and reputation resonate and we’ve got a significant number of open positions across the business right now. The prospect of bringing even more talented people into Progeny and helping them develop – with training or through our Adviser Academy – is incredibly exciting.
To support this, we have recently recruited a Head of Training and Competence, who will drive clear, strategic learning and development pathways through the business and support the next generation of professionals within the Academy.
Looking after our team is something we have always taken seriously. This year, we appointed 12 Wellbeing Champions to lead a company-wide commitment to nurturing wellbeing and launched an Employee Assistance Programme that provides a range of services to support our staff in maintaining good mental and physical health.
Clients and culture
We’re growing at a business level too, focusing on our goal to become the most trusted professional advisory firm out there and uniquely bringing together our suite of financial, legal and corporate services. We have a clear philosophy for growth and clients – existing and future – will always be at the heart of this. We are building a business, not buying one.
We have acquired two businesses in 2021 – Watsons Law who specialise in conveyancing, land and property law and Ayrshire-based financial planning firm, Affinity. We’re proud that Affinity and Watsons have chosen to join us. We share similar mindsets when it comes to looking after our clients and understand the importance of company culture.
Data-driven
If you don’t do data, you’re in danger of being left behind, whatever sector you operate in. 2021 has been the year we have truly committed to becoming a data-driven business. Data will help us create a better experience for our clients and add value by allowing us to anticipate their needs more effectively.
It is also incredibly powerful in enabling us to keep continually improving the business as a whole. We are embedding data-gathering deeply into our ways of working so we can refine, interpret and feed it back into our processes so we can keep growing and improving.
Taking responsibility
We are living through a time when we’ve never been more aware of our global environment and the health of our planet and communities. For me, this is about more than just being seen to do the right thing. This is why we have been progressing our application for B-Corp certification – for ‘businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose’ – underlining our commitment to these principles.
We have created a new Positive Impact Champions Group as part of our pledge to become a climate positive workforce with an environmental net-zero strategy. They are a group of 14 volunteers from across the business who are passionate about promoting the B-Corp values around sustainability, the green agenda and doing the right thing in the right way for our communities – internal colleagues, external clients, suppliers and any third party that touches our business.
As we turn our attention to the second half of 2021, I’d like to think that we can be proud of our points of difference and the attributes that set us apart from our peers. Our strengths lie in the excellence of our people, our careful, client-focused decision making and our appetite for using technology, data and innovation to create ever-better client services.
You can read more details on Progeny’s half-year results here.
