In Your Shoes - Brian Creegan

Monday - Life's a Beach

I am Brian, I am the Founding Director of Creegan Talent and the Commercial Director of Creegan Communications.

The week kicks off with an early morning walk for our dog Molly along Montrose beach. I am not one of these prescriptive people who advocates getting up at 4:30am and following a routine before starting your day.

This week looks different to most weeks as I won’t be leaving Angus at all unless for any unforeseen reasons – which is great when my blog this week was to help showcase Creegan Talent as a Montrose business.

After a walk and a swim for Molly I come back to work, to action anything that came in over the weekend - especially any candidate applications or emails, because as a business we have set a SLA of 72 hours to get back to all candidates.

My main goal today is to get interviews arranged in the Midlands and Manchester for a construction company that we support as their talent acquisition team. On face value this seems easy until you are working with multiple senior people who have busy diaries. I like to make sure that I am still involved with as many clients as possible from an operations perspective.

Lunchtime involved a trip to the dentist – would you believe that I dodged going to the dentist for over 20 years due to an irrational fear of dentists, and dental torcher. These days it is a regular routine check-up, and everything is fine.

Tuesday - Know when to fold 'em

Tuesday – Know when to fold ‘em!

We kick off each Tuesday with an operations meeting. I think a Tuesday works better for a business like ours as there is a lot of candidate and client interaction on a Monday, so we let the team focus on that. A Tuesday is still early enough in the week to plan and achieve anything that we set out to do.

After the meeting my day is split for two main actions; putting together a proposal to a new client up in Fraserburgh about our whole people offering that includes talent acquisition, HR and training. This takes up longer than planned as it is very much tailored to their needs. I am not a fan of a cookie-cutter approach, so our proposals differ quite a bit depending on the client.

Later in the afternoon I deliver a recruitment health check report on a Teams call with a client based in Aberdeen. This report's findings are based upon our research into their people, processes and experiences, and delivering objective findings on what they are doing well and what needs improvement. The report goes down well with the senior leadership team, and we can go about making a few changes in the forthcoming weeks and months with them.

I like a Tuesday as at 6:30pm, as it’s my weekly poker night at the Montrose Playhouse - which is also a venue we use for our quarterly meetings. This week our best player isn’t there as he is in Las Vegas representing the club at the Redtooth tournament, so this should give me a chance of a well-placed finish. UPDATE: 9:45pm – finished about 12th. Pah!

Wednesday - Wearing two hats

My colleague Annie and I are due to be meeting a fellow DACC member, but unfortunately, they have to postpone, so we also postponed meeting up ourselves until next week.

This unexpected time allows me to put on my Creegan Communications hat and manage our social media whilst the boss was at Decom Week up in Aberdeen.

It also gives me time to start working on our Recruitment & Retention guide as well as making updates to our LinkedIn guide due to new changes on the platform and significant shifts in their algorithm. We give these guides to clients, so the content need to be correct for our clients to maximise their LinkedIn presence from both a sales and employer branding perspective.

Molly and I also get time for a long lunchtime walk on the 5th oldest golf course in the world at Montrose. As a history graduate, historical things like this still really interest me, wondering as who else has walked the 18 holes of the championship course over the past 500 years.

Thursday - Making customers, not sales

When you are pulled into a lot operationally, it sometimes means that your eye is off of the prize in relation to new opportunities. I put this day in my diary weeks ago, solely for BD activities.

Today is about touching base with SME leaders - some of who I know, and some I’m connected to on LinkedIn - who may think our offering will help them. It’s been a good day with three meetings arranged with some very interesting companies who may require our services.

We get some great news later in the afternoon about an existing Dundee client and DACC member who has been awarded a grant which means significant growth to their business, meaning that we are going to be pretty busy, day and night throughout the summer. Our planning starts immediately with a couple of calls to the team.

Friday - Something for the weekend

Friday morning sees me go into Commercial Director mode for Creegan Talent and Communications. The first few hours of most Fridays are spent looking at financials, making sure we have paid our suppliers and associates, and generally tidying up anything financially related.

This is all done before our fortnightly commercial call with the team to discuss our clients and what we are doing to get in front of companies who may see us as a solution to their people needs.

This was a great call, and it is great to see and hear the team get excited and contributing ideas about future opportunities and how much they buy-in to what we do.

What is apparent more than ever is that the cross selling-opportunities between our PR/Comms and talent businesses are plentiful, as most SMEs and start-ups need visibility for growth and success.

I finished the week off 30 minutes early as I had a tennis match scheduled at Montrose Tennis Club. It is a great club and very picturesque too. I was happy with my two-set win after not having played for three months.

We also have a big weekend ahead with the Montrose Music Festival and the town will be busier than usual with festival goers dotted around the town listening to more than 100 artists playing at 20 venues.