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of this quiet time and write another post – I have been told that if you wait too long people will lose interest!

I have been keeping a post-it note next to my bed so that if I have ideas about things to write about in the middle of the night I can keep track; one of the items on my list was ‘The Early Days’. For a bit of inspiration I decided to go back through my old emails and try and see if I can remember how I got started way back in 2009 when I arrived at Equal Education.

It has been fun so far, looking through old messages, remembering how things were back then. (I also learnt how to use a function in outlook which allows you to create a search folder! Amazing how you can learn new things every day and even teach them to yourself).

Equal Education started in 2008 so by the time I arrived in January 2009 the organisation was nearly 1. At that stage there were a small number of full time staff – maybe 7 people, all working in the same room out of an office in the Shawco Centre in Khayelitsha. We were together all of the time, if you wanted to have a staff meeting you could basically just stand up from your desk and make an announcement and other people could just turn their heads to face you – times have definitely changed!

My computer was stolen within the first few months of being in Cape Town (Valuable lesson 1: back up your laptop!) so I only have emails dating back to April 2009 but from those messages it is clear that the following were urgent priorities to get set up when I arrived:

1. Contracts: at this point nobody had a letter of appointment, there was no proper payroll or payslips and we also needed to start making deductions for tax and payments to SARS for PAYE and UIF which was not done in 2008.
2. Our finances: There was a file of receipts and invoices from the previous year but a lot of transactions were being done in cash with no paper trail. A set of forms had to be created to use for taxi trips, taxi drivers, food and other petty cash items (essentially there was no petty cash system so it was urgent that a process and some strict controls be put in place.) Processes also needed to be put in place for making payments, signing off on them, working to a budget etc.
3. Policies and Procedures: from the basic stuff like leave, petrol and phone policies to discipline and grievances. It was urgent to produce a policy and start implementing it so that decisions were fair and consistent.

These are basic things to create and implement. These days with the help of the internet which has a million templates to choose from and articles and blogs to review, it is easy enough to get started on your own. Valuable lesson no.2 is that Google is your best friend. Use the search engine to help you answer some of the questions you have when getting started. It is also important to set up some contacts in both the HR and general operations field so that you can bounce your ideas off someone who has a bit of experience. I think with these tools it is fairly easy to put this stuff together yourself in the early stages and then as you grow and develop you can seek more solid legal and financial advice. Using consultants is helpful if you do not have specific HR or financial expertise and for some of the more tricky items but sometimes outsiders do not have a true understanding of the day-to-day operations so my sense is to get as much advice (for free ;)) as you can and then do it yourself.

I really feel like these items listed above are the basic building blocks to your operations for any organisation and are vitally important.

Interestingly enough as I sit here writing this in May 2013, a full 4 years later, these items, in slightly different forms, are still the top 3 things on my to-do-list. They have to be consistently worked at in order to keep up with the growth of your organisation. You cannot set policies in your first year when you have a staff of 7 and expect them to continue to be applicable 4 years later when you have a staff of 70. Likewise with a financial system that is created to manage and process an annual budget of R1 million to one which needs to track and account for R15 million worth of expenditure in a year.

Speaking of to-do-lists it is time for me to get cracking on mine. I need to work on our petty cash policy!

More to come soon… 

by Michelle Adler