Pink Jelly | LinkedIn
This month our focus is on Lara Kenny, director and lead consultant of Pink Jelly People Consultancy, a specialist HR consultancy.
Hi Lara! Tell us about your business
PJPC is a specialist HR data consultancy which helps businesses to better manage their HR data (e.g. through HR systems or processes), understand issues in their business (e.g. gender diversity, poor recruitment) and report as accurately as possible on their data (e.g. gender pay gap reporting, ESG reporting on HR data).
What particular challenges did you have to overcome in setting up your business, and since then?
The key challenges for us are around finding clients who need us and realise the service exists outside of the big consultancies. As an industry, HR hasn’t quite realised what data is and how important it is which means organisations just don’t recognise that they need help, or that the help they need exists as a specialist skill. In many ways, HR teams think they are doing just fine with data, but in reality, there is so much more they could be doing.
For example, they may well be collecting HR data regularly for MI dashboards, but this summary data doesn’t really add much value to the business. However, with some tweaks to capture external benchmarks or internal targets, the data can be reframed, better understood and add value. So at the moment, we are doing a lot of work to build up our reputation and credibility as an HR data consultancy by talking about what HR data is and how businesses can leverage it to aid their decision making.
How does Pandle fit in?
I first found Pandle when running another business of mine, Love from Lila (luxury sustainable cakes). In fact, I link back to you guys on my supplier page as I’m so grateful for the system and love shouting about it! When I started my consultancy, I knew that I wanted to implement Pandle from the start so that I could capture my finance data as accurately as possible.
Whilst I’m building the business, I don’t have a lot of extra cash to hire bookkeepers or accountants, and Pandle makes my life so incredibly easy. It takes me perhaps 30 minutes a week to update, leaving me to focus on the business. As a data specialist, I can also appreciate how quickly I can pull reports down and dig into my finance data! I wish you guys would make an HR system – there’s a big gap for software that looks great and is easy to use like Pandle!
What do you have planned for your business in the future?
I would love to start building the team and hiring more consultants and support, so that we can deliver work to more clients. That’s going to need a solid financial base, with a steady client flow. So Pandle will be critical to making that happen! It’s a big step and will need a bit of a leap of faith, but is the ultimate dream. I have made little interim goals like, ‘ If I reach £XX revenue, I will hire YY’.
Learn more about how Pandle helps business owners like Lara make bookkeeping work for them. Start your free trial of Pandle Pro – no payment details necessary.
