The problems with 100% transparency

The most obvious first item in this list is that by documenting our growth, I’m now giving new competitors everything they need to know about how to launch a business like this.

So far, we’ve found some good examples of recruitment agencies who are openly showing that they pay their staff well above the entry rate for recruiters (shoutout TalentShed) and great examples of recruiters who do not ghost you (shoutout Tom Rees at Innoforge) but we have yet to find a recruiter doing exactly what we’re doing, whereby we split what we’re paid with you.

So that’s problem number 1 - we’re operating in a way which is essentially free R&D for our upcoming competition.

Problem number 2 - and this is one of my biggest weaknesses - I sometimes trust what comes out of my brain too much and because we’re 100% transparent, those thoughts go straight into words, messages and marketing that gets sent out. For example, I messaged someone on LinkedIn this morning and what sounded like a pretty harmless and relevant poke at some news coverage they had, could actually be interpreted as me having a dig at their business.

One of my managers was on to this back in 2021, and so was I - he asked me in a performance review what I thought my weaknesses were and I openly admitted this was one of them, he agreed, and that was the end of the performance review. It was very quick.

Monzo started, from my perspective, with the purest of intentions and then continued to grow faster than I have ever experienced a company growing before. I remember when the decision was made to remove the ‘Chat to a human’ button because we couldn’t handle the inbound traffic. Now, a lot of the customer service support is outsourced. So the friction to get help has only increased, and good people on the inside continue to work to decrease that friction wherever possible.

So now the fine art will be how do we stick to our values but also keep growing, because if we don’t keep growing we can’t help more people. It’s all well and good being comfortable with slow growth, I’m in this for the long haul, but it is also slightly demoralising pushing on when it sometimes feels like shouting into the void. This industry is struggling, nobody is trying something new, and candidates, agencies and people are suffering people of it. My English teacher from school subscribes to this newsletter and I can hear him shouting at me for my grammar from Devon.

There are two items on this list and we’re in Week 4 now. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got to 10 by Week 8.