adminA Midlands technology company has reached record levels of turnover and won a prestigious regional award, thanks to the hard work and unity of its people.
The Emerald Group in Leamington Spa has hit £950,000 turnover in the last year and was recently named Best Team in the Warwickshire Employee of the Year Awards. The company puts its success down to the strength and unity of its 15-strong workforce, which has gone through a journey of change over the last 18 months after embarking on a team building initiative with local Organisational Development Specialist Jav Mohammed.
The business, which is dedicated to helping SMEs leverage technology as a force for good in their business, has been focused on motivating and inspiring its team over the last year and a half, bringing its people together towards achieving the common goal of business growth. And the results speak for themselves with the company reaching almost a million pounds in turnover and revealing that over 95% of its customers are so satisfied they will refer the business to their own networks.
CEO of the Emerald Group, Sarah Windrum, has likened the company’s journey to when England won the Rugby World Cup final in 2003. Although it was Johnny Wilkinson who kicked the drop goal that sealed success, it would not have been possible without the team and support behind him.
Sarah Windrum commented: “We recognised 18 months ago that if we really wanted to achieve our growth ambitions, we needed to make sure that everybody in the team was motivated towards the same goal. That’s why we brought in Jav Mohammed to engage and motivate the team and ensure that everyone realises how important their role in the business is. It’s easy to hire and develop great individuals but it’s far more effective to develop a great team. That’s been the key to our success over the last year and a half.
“It’s the same in any sports team. It’s easy to identify talented rugby players like Johnny Wilkinson but more difficult to build the World Cup winning team that was around him.”
Working closely with Jav Mohammed, The Emerald Group has held a series of group activities and workshops aimed towards inspiring and empowering the team to perform to their full potential. The company is a keen advocate of training and development having invested over £15,000 in training for its team over the past year alone. This investment has been repaid in the company’s development of its own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, which was developed, masterminded, and implemented by the wider team.
The project saw everyone in the business work together to develop a bespoke CRM solution based upon Microsoft Dynamics, which is unique to the individual demands and processes of the business. It has resulted in significant productivity gains for the company and enabled it to replace a previous manual ticketing system for support services with a fully automated solution enabling the business to run regular reports on call statistics, faults and other information to improve customer service levels and identify areas for further training for its team. The time saving efficiencies alone from this project have been a key contributing factor in Emerald’s recent growth.
Jav Mohammed, Managing Director of Arhine Solutions, who has partnered with Emerald and played a key role in developing Warwickshire’s Team of the Year commented: “A lot of businesses, and particularly SMEs, need to take a more focused approach when developing their staff in order to truly help their people realise their potential and improve overall business performance. It’s been really rewarding watching Emerald transform from a business that has lots of individual talent, into an award winning team that is working together to help grow the business, its reputation and its finances.
“Just like the great 2003 England Rugby Team, everybody in Emerald is motivated to achieve the same goals and this has been carried across by the leaders in the business through the culture of the company. Emerald’s achievements over the last 18 months are only the start of the company’s growth journey, as it continues to develop and motivate its dedicated team.”
