The 5 BEST decisions we've made since starting the charity.

The way Scotty's Little Soldiers has grown organically through an understanding of what bereaved Forces families 'need', meant that we didn't have a clear road map when we started out. We didn't even expect the charity to employ team members when we kicked off our mission to support the children of our fallen heroes back in 2010. Because of that, we've learnt the hard way. We've made decisions based on what felt right for Scotty's rather than because it's the way things have always been done.

Some of those decisions haven't worked out and we've (hopefully) learnt from them. Some of them have been a big success. Here are my top 5 decisions we made during the first 10 years of starting a charity. Whether you're in the third sector, running a private business or working within a team, let me know what you think your best decision over the past 10 years was.

1. Getting started.  Let's begin with the biggest and most important decision, the decision to start in the first place.  This was driven by Nikki's personal vision to help bereaved young people like her own children.  We did a little research, but not much.  We also had very little charitable experience, so advice from people like Emma Parry and Mark Elliot at Help for Heroes was valuable - seek out as much guidance as you can, but then make your own decisions.  Back in 2010 there was talk of there being too many military charities and that Nikki was 'another grieving widow looking for an outlet'.  Some of that might actually have been true to a certain extent, but had she not persisted Scotty's would not be playing such a vital role in the support of our bereaved Forces families today.

Nikki & I handing out flyers to raise awareness back in 2010.

2. Investing in Digital Technology early doors.  We were only a couple of years into our journey when we invested in Salesforce.  It was not long after the charity decided it needed to employ a few members of staff, to help provide a more sustainable level of support for the fast increasing number of beneficiaries.  Utilising Salesforce's non-profit scheme we were able to procure 10 licenses for free, and scale our processes up efficiently as the charity grew.  In those early years Salesforce probably saved the charity 3 or 4 members of staff.  We also benefited from the Microsoft non-profit offer for 365 at an early stage, and we were comfortable using Teams long before anyone had ever muttered the words COVID and 19.

3. Understanding our culture, and then not compromising on it.  Our culture grew organically and it was only maybe 5 years in when we began to try and articulate what being a part of the Scotty's Team was.  The more we understand that (and it's a continuous process) the better we work on a day to day basis.  We've also had to make some tough calls and a handful of really nice and good people have left the team over the years because we realised the fit wasn't right.  In every instance that change has resulted in a positive effect on the team when we might have expected a hit on morale when a friend leaves us.  It has shown me that whilst we can build strong friendships within the team, we still need to be able to differentiate what is right for the charity from how we feel personally. We've also turned down potentially lucrative commercial deals because they didn't align with our values.

4. Recruiting creative people in-house when the time was right.  We have used (and continue to do so) many external agencies to help us.  From IT, to accounting, PR to HR.  One thing we've learnt is that when you make the jump to bringing someone in-house, the step forward is huge.  To have that team member embedded within our team and fully immersed in the culture makes a huge difference to us.  We have partners we've used for years who still don't quite 'get' the tone or feel of how we do things.  I battled with this for a long time.  One of the daft, but very real, reasons I avoided bringing people on to the team was head count.  A charity, quite rightly, has to show it's expenditure on wages and the number of people employed, in it's annual report.  So if we engage an external agency to do all of our social media and marketing, it's a cost which doesn't show on the wage bill.  It's something members of the general public benchmark charities on, but it isn't a sign of efficiency or quality.

5. Trusting our gut and staying true to ourselves.    This is more general than one specific decision, but whenever we've made a choice and known that we were staying true to our beliefs and our values, it's always been the right call.  We've still made mistakes, but we've learnt from them. Over the years there have been times when we've listened to the advice of others which didn't perhaps feel true to our ethos and in most cases that turned out to be a mistake.  If Nikki had listened to the whispers in those very early days there wouldn't be a Scotty's Little Soldiers today. 

Whether we make the right or wrong decisions, it's all a learning process, and I'd love you to share the best work decisions you've made and what the outcome was.

Perhaps even more importantly I'll follow up this blog with the 5 worst decision we've made!

Thanks, as ever, for the support.

Stuart