Pinnacle Space

Pinnacle Space

icp_2

• Seasonality in Direct to Schools division prevents further scaling (like retailers, they make all profit in six weeks of summer holidays)
• Delivery cost concentrated in project leaders and design team; cannot easily add headcount to meet growth target
• Want to grow to £36 million and improve EBITDA from 8-9% to 12-15% without increasing headcount significantly
• HR is fragmented: Cheyenne handles operational HR admin but lacks HR knowledge; Helen (fractional CPO, 2 days per month) does strategy; managers field ad hoc queries and do recruitment; this creates gaps and duplication
• Recruitment process is clunky and manual: using a cheap recruiter (10% fee), no standardised system, managers coordinate manually with recruiters, interview feedback is manual, Cheyenne then onboards via Ripling
• Payroll is manual: Cheyenne collects data and sends to external payroll bureau, no in-house payroll system
• No clear HR ops person since previous HR consultant (Linda) left; Helen is too expensive to do operational HR work; Cheyenne is over capacity covering the gap
• Managers stretched and doing work that could be optimised (recruitment, interview scheduling, feedback)
• Marketing is seen as over-resourced; needs refocus on lead generation
• Operations department (11 people including 5 project managers) heavily involved in POs, emails, administrative tasks; described as area with least agents currently set up