Fast growth businesses are increasingly deploying a secret weapon to help them scale – flexible workers.
Among them is Proper, the healthy snacking brand favoured by celebrities including Tottenham manager Jose Mourinho.
Proper was established in 2011 and has grown to now employ over 45 people. But to take advantage of opportunities across the whole of the UK, it deploys additional flexible workers.
The London company has been working with flexible working community Redwigwam for over a year.
Ben Till, Commercial Manager at Proper, said: “Our founder (Cassandra Stavrou) has always championed flexibility and it is in our culture. Once you hit 2 years, you get unlimited holidays and we also have equal maternity and paternity cover.
“Being a young scale-up business, we are naturally quite light on the ground and don’t have a traditional field sales resource.
“A lot of our work is governed by seasonal activations, maybe 3-6-week promotions. This requires a flexible workforce that can be switched on and off.
“The increase in demand during Covid was incredible both online and in-store. The challenge was to meet that demand and to ensure stock was landing in-store. Having the Redwigwam resource really helps us.
“We’ve used them a huge amount of times with jobs ranging from ensuring physical stock is set up correctly to ad hoc store visits and ensuring products are presented in the best possible way. Jobs are always turned around quickly and provide the insight we need as a business. We have switched on jobs and had them completed in less than 48 hours.
“Redwigwam is an additional arm to the business. Having the right tech is vital for a business like ours and Redwigwam’s is both quick and responsive. Their flexible workers are our eyes and ears on the street.
“For a scale-up business, they have the reach to get into retailers and give us national visibility.
“We will be using flexible workers more and more. They allow us to have tactical activation wherever and whenever we need it across the whole of the UK. We have always been a forward-thinking business and flexibility is key within this.”
Lorna Davidson, CEO of Redwigwam, said: “Redwigwam allows businesses to dial up and down their worker requirements to meet their real-time needs.
“While we work with larger organisations such as Coca-Cola, Tesco, Morrison’s and Burton’s Biscuits, we are also seeing increasing demand from ambitious scale-ups such as Proper.”
Redwigwam has seen a huge rise in the number of workers and businesses using its AI-powered online platform since the coronavirus lockdown began in March. In addition to the 130,000 workers registered on the platform, over 3,500 businesses have signed up to tap into the company’s talent pool of quality workers.
Redwigwam’s payroll system gives its workers the power to choose whether they want to be paid daily, weekly or monthly.
