How Consult & Co found the perfect solution in Belgrade

Discover how Consult & Co overcame hiring challenges by tapping into the talent pool in Belgrade. With Becky’s support, they found skilled professionals who seamlessly integrated into their team, enabling scalability and enhancing service quality.

May 23, 2022

Post by Emanuela Jovic

Consult&Co is ten years old. They are a very successful company, that successful that it became a challenge for the owners Tomer and Kamiel to find the right people. “We go to great lengths in the services we provide, so our employees need to be up for that.” Kamiel explains how Consult & Co’s team expansion in Belgrade turned out to be the ideal solution.

We are very demanding when hiring people, because we attach great importance to service. We work on a fixed price basis, which includes everything. Customers can call us anytime without receiving an extra invoice. You need a certain type of employee for that; it’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

Immediately convinced

We have been struggling with the shortage on the labour market for a number of years now. We’ve tried everything, unfortunately without success. The recruiter sends us a profile every six months; very often not even the right one. Someone pointed us to the possibility of outsourcing last year, in Ukraine. We were willing to try it, but that particular outsourcing partner was not very forthcoming. While we waited, Sjoerd approached us via LinkedIn. We had a very pleasant conversation and decided to go ahead with it straight away.

“It is also attractive from a financial point of view: it costs us about 80 percent of what an employee would cost here. But the biggest advantage lies in the scalability.”

In the deep end

Within 3 weeks we received a number of profiles and we decided to go ahead with Marko. He immediately started working for us on the 1st of November, as a test. Becky already introduced Marko to the software we use. We immediately threw him in at the deep end: try to figure out what our administration is all about. He picked it up very quickly. Before we started, we translated our manual into English. On a daily basis, you can come across a lot of specific things. We solve these, together with him, as they occur. He started by entering invoices, but now - after only a few months – he manages his own customer portfolio from A to Z.

Ideal solution

We didn’t go to Belgrade first; we simply didn’t have time for that. We have many customers in hospitality and were very busy with Covid support-applications. We wanted to see if it was going to work out with Marko first. We were reassured pretty quickly: he is well-educated, speaks good English and is a quick learner. Before Christmas he came here for a week to get to know us, which was a real success. In recent months we have hired four more employees with Becky. That shows how badly we needed people. For us, working with Becky is the ideal solution.

Moving our customer services

Team Belgrade will take care of our administration for the time being, so that we can focus more on customer relations. Ultimately, we want to move a large part of the data processing there. And because at least forty percent of our customers are English-speaking, we also want to move part of our customer services to Belgrade. If the quality of the Becky people remains as high as we see now, they will also provide account management and consultancy.

Teambuilding in Porto

I have now been to Belgrade and will be back soon. I noticed that I give a lot more instructions there than via Zoom. This is why we are now taking time to train our new recruits there. We go once a month until it appears no longer necessary. We think it’s very important that our new recruits feel part of our team. Once a year we go abroad for a few days as a sort of teambuilding. We recently went to Porto and were delighted to take them with us. It was a great way to bond with their Dutch colleagues.

Scalability

The whole project is also attractive from a financial point of view: it costs us about 80 percent of what an employee would cost here. But the biggest advantage lies in the scalability. That is why I would definitely recommend Becky to other entrepreneurs. They are professional and nice people, who are eager and quick to learn. They have roughly the same standards and values as us; maybe an even slightly better work ethic. They are really happy there to have a job. And they also have a high level of education. We couldn’t be more satisfied with them.