Who are these people? How do you attract them to your business? Susie believed that if you want the best innovators you need to stand out and you need to stand for something. A strong sense of purpose and a strong culture needs to be 100% aligned to strategy, not just platitudes. The best story wins – as long as its authentic. She wanted a strong culture that allowed genuine innovation and celebrated it and most of all was happy with failure but failing quickly. The culture genuinely allowed people to suggest ideas and crucially, then try them out. 

She is a zealous missionary for her ideas but she wanted her employees to be too – she wanted them to buy it and believe it 100 per cent. Susie oozed all that culture in their job ads so the right type of people apply. She didn’t want to ask for qualifications or references. She couldn’t care less what they’d done before – it was their behaviours and attitude, ability to embrace change and make suggestions that she cared about.

Both Brady and Susie wanted to recruit people with a Star Trek mentality i.e. happy to go where no man has gone before. And that is what they tested at interview.

In their view success is about making mistakes. It’s about imagination and freedom. You have to be able to join dots, appreciate outliers, be inquisitive, understand behaviours, look for patterns that are not at first obvious, use qualitative aspects, think in a non-linear way. Susie believes this is only achievable with people who are a bit different and who can spark off other people who are nothing like them. That’s not just about colour or gender, that’s not enough. It’s about that AND age, background, creed etc etc or in modern speak this means a truly diversified workforce. It’s the key to success because it embraces diversity of thinking, innovation, challenge, debate and off the wall contributions. If everyone is an A student (i.e. great at passing exams), white, middle class and been on a gap year travelling, they’re clever but only in one dimension.  

Today, diversity of background and thought is critical to make a company thrive. Susie wanted to start a company first because she wanted to prove she could do it on her own terms, and secondly to get together the right people to generate innovative and creative ideas that could disrupt current thinking and ways of doing things. Susie wanted to allow them to stick their head above the parapet and tell her, the boss, when something felt wrong. That’s the first step. But so too is the ability to change. Change, and changing fast was the Breakthrough key to creating value.

The team has included a British Army sniper fresh from Afghanistan, a zookeeper whose speciality was penguins, an office cleaner, a dental receptionist, a property specialist, a failed call centre worker and a window expert. 

Susie always wanted to be the best corporate citizen possible towards all her staff and she did this by:

• Paying at least the voluntary living wage rate as advocated by The Living Wage Foundation.
• Paying comparable salaries at the top quartile locally.
• Ensuring staff never work unpaid overtime (above 37.5 hours a week).
• Having family friendly flexible working hours way before it became more mainstream.
• Giving 7 days (FTE equivalent) above the statutory annual leave allowance.
• Providing free fruit, soft drinks, beverages and cheese toasties at work.
• Providing comprehensive training for both technical aspects of their work and for personal development for every member of staff no matter what their position (even Tracy the cleaner).
• Providing individual career mentoring from an independent provider (yes, even Tracy the cleaner). 

The team are now quite simply the largest dedicated R&D tax company in the South East of England specifically for SME business owners, and with a 100% success rate.