Next up in our Behind the Scenes series, we’re chatting to marketing director Shanice Daeche.
Shanice came to Florence having worked at her previous company for almost ten years! Read on to find out about why she made the leap into the healthcare industry.
1. Who are you and what do you do at Florence?
I’m Shanice and the marketing director at Florence. I look after all things growth, marketing, brand and reputation.
2. What made you want to join Florence?
I joined Florence because I worked at my old company for almost ten years, when I joined there it was probably a similar size to what Florence is now. My old company was very much about testing, growing, trying new things, it was very experimental, we were a disruptor brand and I had an amazing opportunity to grow professionally, grow a team and go international.
Then it got to a point where I wasn’t challenged or learning anymore. I was missing that opportunity to grow something, and the fact that Charles and Dan both really wanted to go international and try different markets is something that I bring to the team that not a lot of other people here have so I saw that I could add value.
The idea of building a team from scratch is my favourite thing to do.
I love finding the right people in the right roles and also I'm a massive fan of operational efficiency so a tech company really appealed to me because I think we can do a lot in terms of making the business run smarter, less manual processes and things like that outside of marketing.
I care about what Florence does, who doesn’t? Whenever I talk about Florence, everyone’s like “oh yeah care, that relates somehow to me, my family or something”.
It’s important to me to work at a company with purpose.
3. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
I think one was definitely to make yourself indispensable.
My mum said that, and she said teach yourself, make yourself really useful, not just in your own job but also wherever else you can add value.
I’m always thinking about what I can do to make my job better and what I can do to make my team’s jobs better.
I think that's something that’s got me quite far because I'm not usually someone who’s just a marketer, I like to get involved in processes, sales, onboarding, leadership.
No matter what it is, I want to get involved in it. That’s the way my brain works, I'm not very good at staying in my lane!
4. What’s your favourite thing about working at Florence?
My favourite thing about working at Florence has been learning new things again.
I think because I'd spent so long at an organisation where I knew everything, I'm still today learning something new about the business and about the industry everyday and that keeps me really motivated.
I think being able to build a team from scratch, a blank piece of paper, I wasn’t given any direction, it was very much like “what should we do?”.
I love being able to sketch that out and think about what it looks like now and what it might look like in the future.
The people are also so wonderful, everyone is so nice. You could have all the other aspects and if the people didn’t make the cut it would be a bit of a rubbish job.
The people make such a big difference.
5. What’s the biggest challenge Florence is facing at the moment?
There’s a couple, one is that we’re growing fast and it’s about maintaining that growth and turning it into long repeatable growth, not just riding what’s happening in the market and what’s happening in the healthcare space.
I think products like Rota and Academy are great because we’re finding ways to stay relevant in the market.
I think the other challenge is scaling. When you go from a startup that’s quite grassroots and everyone gets their hands dirty, how do you then turn that into a business that’s 5, 10, 15 times as much?
Not everybody wants to grow with that and I think that’s always a challenge to figure out where people go and how you can allow them to grow and how you can make them feel safe whilst growing.
You have to find people who are willing to change, grow, evolve, adapt. It’s so much about finding the right person where you’re like, you’re great where you are but actually I hired you because you’re going to be great when we’re ten times as big.
6. What’s a fun fact about you that might surprise us?
I used to be in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) when I was younger. We had the option of doing things like the traditional Duke of Edinburgh, doing sports or joining the CCF where you got a taste of the military.
I did that for four years and if you asked anyone now they’d be surprised because I’m not very outdoorsy!
At the time I loved it, I learnt how to shoot, teamwork, camping trips and visited Sandhurst. It actually taught me quite a lot about discipline as I was never really into team sports but I liked that this was about solving problems together as a team.
We had really good mentors and stuff but I will say that afterwards I definitely didn’t want to go into the military!
7. What piece of advice would you give to someone thinking about joining Florence?
I would say if you are looking for somewhere to grow and have ideas this is a great place to be. I think my advice would be that this is the place where you can come in and ruffle feathers a little bit and do things that haven’t been done before.
There’s a big appetite for change and for thinking differently and we’re in a space that is not always the most disruptive in the healthcare industry.
I think my best piece of advice would be to come in whilst you’re new and say “why do we do that?” or “I want to do it this way”, have some confidence to do something different.
If you get it wrong and fail, at least you tried and we’ve learnt from it. One of my mottos is “fail often”- if you don’t fail often, it means you’re not experimenting enough and this is the company to do it at.
8. Where do you see Florence in five years?
I see Florence dominating the healthcare sector in terms of not just staff but also software.
I also see us being a company that other startups can look up to in the way that we’re building a team and the way that we’re going about thinking about it more commercially and thinking about how things are done outside of the industry. I think that’s quite unusual.
I think that’s how big brands get really well respected, like Monzo for example. Other people look up to Monzo at how they came into the industry; and I think outside of our industry in healthcare people will look up to Florence and what they’ve done as a company in terms of how they’ve scaled, how they’ve hired and how they chose what direction to go in.
Of course, we’ll also be international!
If you want to join our rapidly-growing team you can check out our job vacancies here.
