About George’s role and The Teenage Cancer Trust
George Crockford is the Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the Teenage Cancer Trust – a charity focused on offering unique care and support, designed for and with young people with cancer.
He decided to work with The Indispensary when they needed some support on specific admin tasks, which had no dedicated resource.
www.teenagecancertrust.org
Working with The Indispensary has helped them to scope out how their administration should be managed and to get access to specific skill sets when they have short-term projects – like the Teenage Cancer Trust Gigs at the Royal Albert Hall.
Life Before a VA
“When I started, there was a business manager doing the job of the CEO’S Executive Assistant (EA) and also doing administrative tasks like putting together board agendas and packs. This was just too big a job for one person.
It meant the Chief Exec wasn’t getting all the EA support they needed, because often that person would have to prioritise the business cycle stuff – like getting the performance and risk reports together, and therefore wasn’t staying on top of stuff coming into her inbox, or taking minutes in meetings and distributing them.
The end result was that the outputs slowed down due to people not being clear on decisions that had been made and it slowed down the delivery of some of those decisions and actions. This meant the organisation was not running as smoothly as it should.
We first got in touch with The Indispensary to basically break that role in half. So that someone could focus on the performance and governance side of the business and the EA support would be a separate activity.”
Why Us?
“We decided to work with Joanne and The Indispensary, because she had people with the right expertise, who were knowledgeable about the charity sector and we had the option to scale up and scale down the support as we needed it. As a team, they’re really flexible, and as a charity that’s really important to us because it means we can make sure every penny of our donations goes as far as it can.”
George explained how The Indispensary made the onboarding process really easy
“The process of sorting out admin support could easily end up taking a lot of time and headspace from our senior leadership team, away from the stuff that we should really be focusing on. It made such a difference that I could trust Joanne to sort out the details without having to get too involved.
I trusted Claire and Mel straight away because they were obviously knowledgeable about their work and the charity sector and they always kept me informed and anticipated things before they happened.”
Helping Donations Go Further
“I know I can just pick up the phone to Joanne and ask if there’s someone available to help us, and that person will support us for as long as we want, in whichever way we need. It helps us to make the most of every penny that we have. They’re not only knowledgeable about their roles, they also know the charity sector very well and work in a way which supports this.”