Many companies prefer to promote from within. But when you’re growing as fast as Ten Lifestyle Management is, that can be a difficult proposition.
Ten was founded by Alex Cheatle and Andrew Long in 1998. The company provides lifestyle management services to corporate and personal clients. Turnover has grown almost 90 per cent during the past four years to £12m.
Cheatle says the biggest challenge to future growth is growing the company's management team. “We need to continue to recruit great people and develop them. But we are growing so quickly that we can’t grow all the talent we need at the top by bringing them up through the ranks. We need to hire people from managing director level and board level into all our businesses,” he says.
“Our standards are really high, and we also need people who can operate in a corporate culture that’s quite different to most companies. We need highly-talented servant-leaders. They’re very rare.”
So where does one find such people? Cheatle suggests the Real Business readership. “We would be delighted if some of your readers gave us a call.”
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