Define, expand, maintain......

Hello again! It’s now 4 months since my first blog so I thought it was time to lend my thoughts to another one. Thanks to Marie, Louise and Helen for their contributions in the interim.
So, what’s new for Fingerpost Consulting? It’s been a whirlwind few months spent supporting projects and redefining the business. We’ve made some huge changes to adapt our offering from me as a lone freeancer, to a team offering freelance/contract support specifically for market access consultancies. Here is a quick round up in case you missed our various social media posts:

Defining our culture – As a team, we took some time in the first week of January to define our culture as a company. We agreed that work-life balance is really important to all of us, whether that is achieved through working from home whenever needed, bringing your dog(s) to work, or working flexible hours to meet family needs. To allow for this flexibility, productivity comes first; our goals are defined through timely, quality deliverables, not how many hours are spent sitting at a desk in the office! This doesn’t mean we don’t work long hours, but that time is taken back when the work is less intense.

Expanding our reach – Now that there are more of us, we have greater capacity for the number of consultancies we can support. Since ISPOR last year, we have been talking to a number of new consultancies to let them know who we are and how we can help. I am a big fan of face to face meetings and have had a few trips already to get to know our new clients in person. We’ve also had a number of visitors to the office as we continue to expand our pool of freelancers and experts.

Maintaining relationships – As well as meeting new clients, we are very keen to maintain the relationships with our current clients. Whether we’ve worked together once before or on a regular basis, I believe it’s important to get together every so often to discuss any feedback and how we can continue to offer valuable support. The same goes for the freelancers we work with.

Building our offering – And of course, we have continued to review and develop our services. Our most recent development has been the training capability, focusing on some of the softer skills such as client/project management and team management. Louise leads our training capability based on years of experience working with both consultancy and industry teams.  More about this in next month's blog so watch this space!

Increasing our efficiency – As we continue to grow we have identified a need to implement some more structured systems to help us manage the accounting and finance tasks.  After talking to our clients and peers in the field to understand how they manage these tasks, we have also scouted out what software solutions are on the market.  After all that research I am very excited to share we have decided to purchase CMAP software. We’ve been talking to the fab team at J-Media for a few months now and it’s clear that CMAP will not only make us much more efficient at managing our financial processes, but we will also gain a lot more business insights and therefore enable us to do more of the fun things: talk to clients and deliver work.   If you are interested in CMAP for your business check them out here: https://www.cmap-software.com/
 
Of course, none of this would have been possible without Marie supporting with project delivery, Louise driving the operations end of the business, and Kaz managing (and delivering!) the marketing and design end of the business. I’d also like to congratulate Kaz who gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, Percy, on 4th January. Kaz will be back again soon for 1 day a week, so fear not if you have any design requests!

The past 4 months have been very exciting and the pace doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Marie, Louise and I will be in London from 19th-21st March to attend the World Pharma Pricing and Market Access conference. We are looking forward to a jam-packed agenda of catching up with clients, experts and friends, as well as the opportunity to expand our learning through some of the sessions. It would be great to meet up to discuss any opportunities for support and collaboration, so please do get in touch if you are planning to attend.
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I hope you all have a good March…despite the cold weather heading our way, by the time we publish our next blog, spring should be well and truly on its way!
All the best for a productive and successful month,
Cath Bacon

 

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