Paperclip has recently submitted its entry to be considered for Business of the Year at the East Midlands Chamber Business Awards 2022. The winner will be announced later this year.
This blog contains the core elements of the submission, although confidential data provided for the benefit of the judges have been removed. The questions are those set by the Awards panel. There is a degree of duplication due to the similarity of some of the questions.
Description of Paperclip, the services you supply, your customers and markets in which you operate.
In 2023, Paperclip celebrates its 15th anniversary. It has grown from a home-based admin support business to a telephone answering, telephone appointments and telephone e-commerce support specialist employing 16 people.
Paperclip has clients in almost every sector, both public and private. Core client groups include law firms, estate agents, medical therapists and IT support companies. Clients are located across the UK.
During Covid, Paperclip helped local businesses adapt to the new realities of home and hybrid working. For existing clients, Paperclip implemented changes to calling instructions free of charge. To ease the financial pressure on clients, Paperclip removed the monthly maintenance fee. For those in particular hardship, Paperclip allowed clients to temporarily suspend their accounts.
For the wider business community, Paperclip,in partnership with one of its clients, Greenfrog Computing, ran a free telephone support hotline to answer telephony and IT support questions.
Over the past eighteen months, Paperclip has invested in new telephone infrastructure and refurbished its call-handling centre. This has enabled it to double its call-handling capacity.
Paperclip has a strategy in place to double its turnover over the next four years.
Describe Paperclip’s achievements since it was established and how you accomplished these.
Paperclip was founded by Anne Batty in 2008. Anne remains Managing Director.
Paperclip’s early days were turbulent. Anne kept the company going through the financial crisis of the late noughties; divorce leading to her becoming a single mother to two young children; and the diagnosis of, and treatment for, breast cancer. The survival resilience built up during these early years proved invaluable during the pandemic.
Initially providing what would today be called virtual PA services, Paperclip was asked by an increasing number of clients to answer calls on their behalf. This was achieved by employing a bank of mobile phones, each phone representing an individual client. This service was delivered from a converted domestic garage!
Demand for telephone answering grew and Paperclip moved into its first commercial premises in Wards Yard, Dronfield. This remains its base to this day.
The move to Wards Yard in 2014 effectively marked the transformation of Paperclip into a professional business. New skills, particularly financial management and marketing, had to be mastered, and recruitment and training became, and remains, central to Paperclip’s ability to provide a quality service. Paperclip also invested in phone technology and management software developed specifically for call-handling centres.
Paperclip has always followed a strategic philosophy of ‘sticking to the knitting’ i.e. concentrating on doing what it knows best: the delivery of exceptional telephone answering and associated services. The core Paperclip leadership team is supported by a portfolio of local business specialists, including:
- JRB Accountancy (finance)
- Riber HR (HR consultancy)
- Voteq (website and digital)
- Peak District SEO (Digital Marketing Company),
- Techware One (software development)
- Bluejohn Marketing (Marketing)
- Quad Computer Services (IT Support).
This approach has allowed Paperclip to maintain a relatively low, fixed-cost base which has helped it ride out the cyclical troughs of the economic cycle.
In recent years, Paperclip’s most significant achievement has been to both survive and, eventually, thrive over the COVID pandemic. With the advent of the first lockdown, Paperclip researched and invested in the software and hardware to enable a core team of call handlers to operate from home. Initially, turnover was greatly reduced and, financially, Paperclip traded at break-even over a period of six months.
From a customer relations perspective, during COVID, Paperclip resolved to provide as much support as possible, both to its own clients and to the wider business community. It created, in Partnership with Greenfrog Computing, a free helpline for organisations struggling to adapt their telephone and IT systems to home and hybrid work.
To accommodate current and projected growth, in 2021 Paperclip invested in both new telephone and digital infrastructure and the redesign and refurbishment of its call handling centre. A huge amount of preparation and planning was required for the switch over to the new system. The system was installed, tested and commissioned over a Saturday evening and Sunday to ensure continuity of service to clients. It went live on Monday with minimal teething problems.
What challenges have Paperclip faced as a business and how have you overcome these challenges?
Challenges and achievements (see the previous question) often go hand in hand. For the purposes of this question, we have focused on the challenges faced from the first lockdown in March 2020 to the current day.
The primary challenge initially presented by the lockdown was business survival. After rapidly researching and deploying the necessary technology, Paperclip temporarily closed its call handling centre in Dronfield and switched to a core team operating from home. Whilst some members of the Paperclip team were initially furloughed, there were no redundancies.
As business confidence started to recover, Paperclip undertook the necessary health and safety modifications to enable its call handling centre to reopen. Paperclip’s decision to support existing clients with flexible commercial terms and help them establish effective home and hybrid working models helped Paperclip to grow its turnover by 65%. Paperclip also established a free helpline to give the wider business community access to its specialist telephony expertise.
This level of growth would not have been possible, however, without a substantial strategic investment in new telephony infrastructure, data cabling, and the refurbishment of the Paperclip call handling centre to increase the number of seats from 12 to 24. In total, Paperclip invested £60,000 in implementing these changes.
In today’s business environment, recruitment is a challenge for all businesses. This is particularly true for companies like Paperclip seeking to grow. To address this challenge, Paperclip has significantly increased the range of channels it uses to recruit new call handlers, including regular advertising in the local free press, placing recruitment on the home page of the Paperclip website and engaging with a team of recruitment agencies local to Chesterfield, Dronfield and Sheffield. Paperclip will shortly be engaging its second apprentice.
What is Paperclip currently doing to grow the services that it offers, grow its market share, or launch a new services?
Paperclip is planning to double its output over the next four years.
It was recognised that this goal could not be achieved with ‘business as usual. Consequently, new services have been added to the Paperclip roster; the Paperclip management team has been strengthened; a new approach to marketing has been adopted; investment has been made in new phone systems and office refurbishment to provide the technical and physical capacity needed for growth; and, Paperclip has joined East Midlands Chamber.
Louise Bellwood joined Paperclip in December as Senior Commercial Manager. Paperclip engaged the services of a national recruitment agency, Pratap Recruitment, to ensure the widest field of candidates was considered. Louise is working with Founder and Managing Director, Anne Batty, to implement agreed strategic growth plans. The Leadership team has been further strengthened by the appointment of Ian Rowland as Team Leader.
Paperclip has restructured its service offer to include ‘telephone e-commerce support’, particularly for businesses offering high-ticket items online through their websites. Paperclip identified that, where products are complex, requiring prospects to make choices and where the prospect is aged sixty and above, there was often a reluctance to commit to a digital transaction. Paperclip talks callers through the onsite purchase process and, where authorised, is able to take orders and payments over the phone.
With many clients, Paperclip has direct access to their management software systems. This enables it, for example, to book, cancel and rearrange appointments for medical therapists such as physios, osteopaths and podiatrists. To raise our profile in this sector, Paperclip has become an advocate for Cliniko, one of the most popular software packages used. A similar approach has been adopted in the trades sector with ServiceM8.
Joining East Midlands Chamber is just one element of Paperclip’s investment in sales and marketing. Already a founder member of BNI Enterprize, Paperclip is committed to making the most of the networking opportunities offered by the Chamber. Paperclip is in the process of implementing the marketing principles expounded in the book ‘They Ask. You Answer.’ (Marcus Sheridan): ‘They Ask You Answer (TAYA) is defined as…the willingness to be so focussed on and obsessed with consumer questions, wants, desires and needs that you’re willing to change and evolve your business model around these elements’. TAYA will require Paperclip to refocus its website and adapt its approach to social media and blog content. It provides an integrated approach that brings together Paperclip’s culture, values and operations. The goal is to be the education destination for any organisation considering using telephone answering services or looking to make the most from their current telephone answering arrangements.
In Summary…
It’s amazing how much has happened already since we submitted our Awards entry two weeks ago: new clients, new leads and new email signatures!
Regardless of whether we win the award, I am extremely proud of the collective effort of the whole Paperclip team and the trust placed in us by our clients.
You may also like:
- East Midlands Chamber – Members Offer
- Call Answering For Sheffield Businesses
- The challenges facing SMEs in 2026
- Telephone Answering in Nottinghamshire
Hi, I’m Anne Batty, Managing Director of Paperclip. I am passionate about customer service. I believe enduring relationships are built on being open, transparent and trustworthy.
I love questions. So, if you have a question relating to telephone answering – pricing, technical, scope and more – I would love to hear from you at anne@paperclip.co.uk or 01246 418181.
Paperclip’s clients enjoy working with us. I know you will too.