I’m sure you can tell from that introduction that my days can be varied, so let’s run through a “typical” day and see what I get up to!
Morning
After my early morning porridge and blueberries while checking Slack, there’s nothing better than a stop off at Flat Caps next to Campus North for a coffee while I catch up on some overnight emails. We fully embrace flexible working at Blu Sky, so our clients are aware that emails at any time of day will be responded to within 24 hours! I’ll work through my “quick wins” over a cappuccino and mentally prepare my rough schedule for the day ahead according to anything that’s filtered through overnight.
A big decision to be made is where to grab my lunch from, so that will depend whether I’m on site with clients or travelling around meetings in Newcastle.
The rest of the morning would either be spent meeting clients and business champions to catch-up on progress of their latest business venture and sometimes some internal team meetings too. I’ll generally spend the rest of the morning working with the rest of the team to share knowledge and develop technical skills or review some deliverables to get out to the clients.
Lunch
Lunch is a great time to catch up with the rest of the team and get away from the computer screen for a little while. I’ll also check up on social media to see what the North East tech scene and London scene is up to.
Afternoon
My afternoons are all about the clients! Client meetings about their year end accounts, site visits, calls and producing R&D claims or a cashflow forecast.
Blu Sky’s use of tech really comes into its own while we deal with clients, as we frequently make use of Zoom, Skype and GoToWebinar to name a few. It means that we truly embrace cloud accounting, and a company’s location really doesn’t matter as we can speak to them online at any time.
This also helps us when it comes to being involved in webinars – we love using Zoom and GoToWebinar for the likes of getting involved with Ignite or Seedrs. Real time questions during a webinar really help us demonstrate our expertise and allow us to get to know the companies we’re chatting with.
End of Day
To round a good day off, I’ll check in with the rest of my pod and the wider team and see what we’ve got to look forward to tomorrow. Just before I finish for the day, I would usually review a few sets of accounts so that we can send them out to clients the next day and start on a high! I also like to leave on an empty inbox as I feel it helps focus things for the following day so that’s always a good way to end the day.
Variation
Week to week and even day to day, my tasks vary, as does location! I can honestly go from being in Newcastle or North Shields one day, to London the next, maybe even Sunderland and even Manchester in the same week. Variation keeps it exciting, and the technology that we use means it truly doesn’t matter where I’m based as I can provide the same standard of service to clients and have the same interactions with the team.
The full team will soon have Surface Pro laptops so that needing a fixed desktop screen will soon become redundant, so we can truly embrace being flexible and remote when needed team wide. A good example of this from recently is when The Beast from the East hit – 80% of our workforce stayed home and we kept up the same level of productivity! WE encourage working the hours that you work productively in – if that’s after 7pm, go for it! If you need to work from home to save taking a half day holiday for the boiler repair company to come, also fine. The key is constant honest communication meaning we have no issue with our team working around their needs – a happy workforce means happy clients, after all and that’s the most important thing!
