UHY Cast: Uncovering Employment Law, with Stacey Turner, Founder of CG Professional

Join us as Stacey Turner, Managing Partner and Founder of CG Professional, dives into her journey from an employment lawyer to founding a leading NorthWest commercial law firm.

Uncover the challenges she encountered in starting her own firm and her top three recommendations for employers, all while gaining invaluable advice on cultivating a successful working culture through communication strategies.

Turner also tells all about her future plans, hinting at office expansions and delving into specialised legal domains.

Transcript

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Welcome back to our latest episode of UHY Cast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Stacey Turner, managing partner and founder of CG Professional. Hi Stacey. Hello. How are you doing? I'm good, thank you. Good. Thanks for coming in today. So just for our listeners and viewers, would you be kind, perhaps share a little bit around who you are and your current business that you're involved in? Yes, yes. So I'm Stacy. I'm an employment lawyer by trade. That's my background. And I'm currently a managing partner at cg. So we are a commercial law firm based here in the northwest. And yeah, we service clients nationally and we cover all areas of commercial law from a corporate perspective. Brilliant. And was law always in the blood? I think you went to Lancaster University and studied law. So did you always want to come into the legal framework? Was that the idea? Do you know? It sounds really boring, but I've always known that I wanted to be a lawyer. I can't actually remember not knowing that. And you do, I think as you get a bit older and you look back and you think, oh, why? What was it about that? We have no lawyers in the family. I was the first one, but my dad, he was very, very focused on academics, on education. So me and my sister are very sort of forced down academic route. And I think when you're on that road, you sort of give them some options, aren't you, obviously accountants to be more medicine, which my sister went into in law and I just always fancied it, which is good in a way because if you know what you want to do, I had a very clear roadmap then as to what I needed to do from school, go through my qualifications. So when I reflect back and I look back, I realise I was so lucky to know that so many, when you look and you speak, I mean my oldest now is nearly 15 and it's so hard isn't it, if you don't know what you want to do. Yeah. And I remember those days where you used to do those questionnaires at school where it was trying to tell you what you wanted to be when you're older and it came up with some, right, random. Stuff. Random, yeah, exactly. So are you kind of northwest born and bred? Is that in your blood? Yeah. Bolton, right, okay. Bolton, yeah, so Bolton, so I was born in Sulford, so just down the road. And then we grew up in Bolton and I've, I've spent, I've majority of my life Manchester way my family are here and I love Manchester. So lucky though. It's a great city, isn't it? Yeah. It is. It is. Although it continues to rain and be very, very windy. I know. Yeah. So your first role was that moving to naps as a trainee? Yes, yes. So out of law school I was fortunate enough to get my training contract with napkins who are a regional firm and that was a brilliant experience really. I had excellent training there were brilliant in fact. And I was there nearly I think 10 years at napkins and I really enjoyed it. I loved it. Great for. And where did you kind of end up at napkins? Was that starting to focus into the employment side of things? Yeah. So I specialised in employment law and I think the reason being is I always knew I wanted commercial law, so I always knew that I liked the idea of working with businesses and I liked employment law because it's people based. So you get that interaction, don't you, with it's about people and people are so unpredictable. So every day is different than employment law. There's always something different. So I really like the variety of it. So that was where I ended up specialising and focusing in. And for everybody's benefit. When you refer to employment law, what does that kind of encapsulate? Yeah. So from my perspective, from CGS perspective, so we help employers, so organisations, businesses with any staffing issues. So whether that be putting in place strategies for growth or whether that be making changes, restructures, dealing with litigation, so employment tribunals, so anything that's sort of employee people based from an employment law perspective that sort. And I guess seeing it in our business and obviously having a number of people that we're responsible for. Now, how do you feel that the environment around employment law has changed over the last decade or two? Because it feels to me now there's more red tape than ever. The employee has more protection than ever. And sometimes from a commercial perspective when speaking to clients, it can be quite challenging I think. But from a legal perspective, what's your take on that? Yeah, it is tough because it's very employee focused and I think the origination of that had sort of good roots. You're seen as an employee, aren't you as an underdog. And there is massive value in having employment rights, a hundred percent. The thing with employment lawyers, it's constantly changing. So I ran a seminar on Monday in fact, and we looked ahead at what's coming in 2024 and there's so much change. There's so much change and it is quite a political area as well. So obviously we're going to have a general election at some point soon, aren't we? And the Labour Party have indicated that if they do come to Powers and they will make lots of changes. And one of the things they've looked at is reducing the period of service an employee requires to claim, which is at the moment, two years to claim on unfair dismissal. And if they reduce that to six months, it's a big impact on businesses. It's a bigger risk, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. So it is a constant challenge and there are massive frustrations with it. And the trouble with the law is that it can take time to change and keep up with how the world's changing. So I think that doesn't just apply to employment law employs to the law in general, doesn't it? So it is tough, but it keeps us in a job, so no. Absolutely. I shouldn't. Complain today. Shouldn. No, shouldn't you want it more challenging though? Keep you busy. It. And a lot of the listeners of this podcast are kind of business owners, business leaders in their own, what would be your top three tips from an employment advice perspective or from a staffing perspective that you would give to people to protect their business, to make the best of the current situation? So I think the biggest one, and I'm going to a hundred percent sound like a lawyer here, is get your documentation. The amount of times will come across an issue and you're like, okay, well send us the individual's contract of employment and they dust it off from 18 years ago and it's not up to date, it's not in line with best practise. It doesn't protect the business as it should. So the biggest thing for me is make sure that you've got the right documents in place, make sure they're up to date. And also make sure they're relevant because you might have employed someone 15 years ago as a junior and now they're sort of in a very senior management role and how are you protective if they leave? So around that, I think that's a big one. The second one is make sure you've got a good network of advice. So whether you've got an internal HR team or you have got a source of advice, you've got an employment law team, for example. So cg, that's what we do a lot of. We have to retain support to make sure that the advice is there. And I think the other big point for me, and that's something that's come from me now, viewing it as an employee myself, obviously that's a different perspective that I've got that I'm willing a business now as well is the key for me with people is communication is communication. And it sounds so old school, but if you are expecting your team to operate in a certain way, then tell them and explain why and constantly update that and be transparent about that. I'm glad you said that because kind of running a people business ourselves, it's exactly the same challenges that we've got. So no, really interesting and thanks for that. So flitting back a little bit. So you had 10 years at NAPLANs, then you took the leap, crazy leap into automotive retail, which there might be a turn the link there perhaps, but so you joined Charlie group as in-house, HR and legal. So talk me through going from practise into the rock and roll world of automotive retail. Yeah, it was a bit of a crazy move actually looking back, but I had the opportunity, so we've got the family business motor group and I had the opportunity to go and work house and the business was going through quite a lot of change at the time. And what I saw it for was an opportunity to get some real life commercial experience because as a lawyer we found out of law school and then we're putting these sort of shiny offices and I mean it's very similar Dave, isn't it, to your world. And you're sort of there and you are advising clients on the outside, but you very rarely see that advice actually take place and the impact of that and the change. So I saw it as an opportunity to be part of that sort of real life commercial world. And all I can say is looking back is it was just like a baptism of fire. It was crazy because I come from this world of professional services where trust, integrity are just absolutely, it was a minimum expectation to the automotive world, which is just crazy. It's a different world, isn't it? And the people and the challenges, and it was a real eye opener for me, but what an amazing experience because I came out of that period of time, a completely different lawyer than I was. I completely different person because you've advise on the law and if we have lawyers, we can have that sort of egotistical view of the lawyers. It obviously is so important, but it's just not the be all and end all in a business, a decision when you're making decision. Obviously the law is important, but there's so many of the factors to making that decision. So to be part of that. Was really have that commercial experience. Yeah, completely different. Yeah. And was it always the plan to evolve from that into setting up your own law firm or was that just a byproduct of actually just the experience you got and actually I can do this for more people than just one business? That's it, the latter. It was never the plan. And I think so not only did I sort of recognise the advantages of being more commercials and advisor, but I had the benefit of seeing law from the other side. So I became a client in a lot of ways. If we were buying a piece of land, for example, to build, I was instructing a real estate lawyer or we're buying another business, I'd be working with a corporate lawyer. I became a client and that is an interesting experience in itself. I saw some of the frustrations of dealing and having that relationship and I shared those frustrations my husband in particular. And he said in those states he said, it can be done so much better. He said, I think we could do it so much better. And he's massively entrepreneurial. He's come from an entrepreneurial family, so it's just in his blood to, but for me, I was a bit quite adverse, cautious. So I just started doing a little bit of consultancy work and just sort of. Snowballed. Snowballed from there. And then it was a case of right, if we're going to do it, obviously there's needs to be a real business plan. And it's at that point then that I reached out to a former colleague of mine, Louise, and said, look, do you fancy this crazy idea? And that was 2017? That. Was 2017, yeah. Wow. What an amazing journey since then. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should be so proud. Obviously we've followed, I followed it quite closely. Running people businesses is a challenge in itself. But to see the progress in three offices now. Yes, three offices. So it's really moved forward. So I guess 2017 you found the business formally Louis comes on board, you sit in an office somewhere, no doubt, looking at each other thinking, right, what do we do next? Pretty dark days, no doubt, but probably feels not that long ago. What were the kind of biggest challenges getting it off the ground? And for people out there who perhaps fancy doing something themselves, what would you say were the biggest hurdles that you had to overcome? So setting up a law firm from scratch is tough. It doesn't happen often, really. You see a lot of new firms changing hands or partnership changing. But to actually start a from scratch is unusual. And that's because obviously it's heavily regulated. So it took us nine months to get our licence with our regulatory body. So that was a journey. And we sat down, Louise and I, and we thought, well, what is going to be our biggest challenge? And then our first thought number one was going to how do we attract clients? So how do we persuade our corporate clients to come and work with an unknown brand new entity? And that is what we assume would be our biggest. And do you know what they've getting? The workers never ever been a problem for us. The biggest challenge in fact was getting the right people to do the work with us. And we just didn't want to compromise on the quality of people we wanted the best. And to persuade those lawyers to come from their very safe, very good jobs in cities to come and join a startup was tough. And how did you overcome that? Apart from. Paying. People load? We sold the dream, we sold the dream of a new type of firm and the right people bought into that with us. Which is culture and values and all. That. And focusing really on our biggest focus has always been client service. And that comes from me having that experience as a client and saying, well, we now know what a client wants. We want really commercial, pragmatic advice. They want it quick. There's nothing worse than waiting for your lawyer to ring you back or email you back. You want quick advice. You've got decisions to make. And the other big thing was fees, fee transparency. So one of the biggest decisions we made when we set up was that we were going to scrap the hourly charges that the time recording that we live our lives by these six minute intervals. We scrapped that and what we said is wherever possible, and it is possible in most cases, let's just fix a fee. Let's just scope a job with the client, agree your fee, do the deal, and then get the job done. Focus on getting the job done. And the clients love that they can budget. They're not getting a scary bill at the end of it. They're not scared of picking the phone up and having a conversation. And what that did for us is allowed us to build the best client relationships because our team now, they're not as scared to spend time with clients because they're not thinking, oh, I've got a reporting KPI of all this to report back on. I can just invest my time in my client. And that has been, and that was really refreshing for a lot of the team that joined from the bigger firms where you had a target of X per week of recorded chargeable, X and x to come to a firm where we're not going to do that. We're going to trust you to do the right job for the client and deliver the best service. It's really interesting that it is something that we've the last decade. And I think you're so right. There's this reputation of professional services firms that is the, I pick up the phone, it's going to cost me 300 quid type mentality. And actually you miss out on opportunities. People are lo to do it. And as you say, nine times out of 10, I think you can actually come up with a way of working around it to make it work for everybody. So it's comfort from my perspective when you say that because actually it makes me feel that we're not the only ones trying to push down that route. So you've got between 50 and 60 colleagues now within the. Business? Yeah, we've got three lawyers actually joining next month. Wow. So yeah, we're growing all the time. Yeah, it's gone. It's gone big quite quickly. Yeah. Absolutely. Especially Covid in the middle of that as well. Exactly. And was, it is awful to say, but Covid was a big help for us in a way, Dave, because I think what Covid did was it amplified the fact that you can do the work anywhere from anywhere and it's the same. So you've had some of the best lives in the country doing the work from there, sort of back bedrooms and the clients were like, it's the same. And from a lawyer's perspective, I don't need to be in London. I can do it from anywhere. I could do it from a Visa if I want. And I think what that did was it opened so many doors for us, not only with clients, but with the team and recruitment. And was Covid a period of time where you went crazy busy because people were worried about doing the right thing with employment rights and all of that type of thing? Was that firefighting for you as well? It was because it was obviously Covid was just, and you look back now, it was just what period. And obviously as an employment lawyer, I was grappling with furlough. So you'd get Friday night and Wishy had come on and announce the next phase of whatever. And I'd be speaking to my clients all Friday night, so midnight, and they were business owners like me. He'd be ringing saying, right, states, what are we doing now? What's the plan? And half the time I'd be looking at a website page from Rishi, which wasn't legislation. It was forever changing as well, wasn't. It forever changing? You're trying to interpret it. You knew it was a challenge, but what it allowed us to do is really sort of show our strengths around that. The fact that we were so quick to the door with the advice really commercial, we pinned our tail to the this is what we think it's going to be. Luckily, we're right on every occasion, but also because I think we were running our own business as well, I could say to clients, well, this is what I'm doing. This is what we are doing. And obviously I had the benefit of the motor group that found the business, which I could see from an automotive perspective what was going on. I have that. So a lot of my automotive clients loved the fact that they could ring up and say, right, what Charlie Group do, what do we think about this commissions, et cetera, et cetera. So I had that real experience. And I guess there was an element of practise what you preach there, which gives people additional confide. To as well people's confidence, doesn't it? And I think what it allowed us to do as well is the relationships that we built during Covid will be lifelong. Yeah. Because those calls at 11, 12 at night, Dave, and you'll have been the same. You'll have been having the same conversations. You bonded with those clients forever. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. It created a little community, actually. It was quite strange how it has, I wouldn't fancy doing it again. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. It is funny how these things do have a lasting impact. They. Create opportunity, tough times, create opportunity to set. So. I remember Paul saying to me once, it's never as bad as you think, and that'll resonate with me forever because he was actually right as much as he, but it. Is. But at the. Time, you're think in doomsday scenario, so obviously cg, a prevalent Northwest player now, amazing. As I say before kind of three offices and all the people you've got. So what's next? What's the grand plan? And I'm asking you, not Adam, this question, it'll take you on. The world. They ask him. Oh gosh, if you asked him. Yeah. We've always responded to the client need. So we're listening to clients, what do they want? What does they need? And I think so for our future, that will involve more growth. So we've already got plans for more offices, so expanding our geographical reach and potentially looking at expanding our service lines as well. So going to more niche legal areas just to meet the demands of our ever-growing client base. And I think if we do that, if we listen to clients, if we follow their needs, then that will serve as well. If they're happy, we will be successful. And when you're talking about expanding to different offices, it's something I've really grappled with within this business is how are you managing to influence that culture and keep that CG special feel to it? Because I guess that comes from the topic, it comes from the leadership team, which can only be in one place at one time. You're already three offices, so it's diluted by a third potentially now. So what are you doing as a business to keep that special feel to the. Business? And it's so cliche, isn't it? Because culture is so important and it's hard. I'm not going to lie. It's hard. And I look back to when there were 10 of us, and it was so much easier. And I'm so lucky and privileged that with the management team we've got, so there's Louise, Ben, Adam and I, who sort of sit on the board and we make sure that as far as we can at the moment that we are present, we have a presence across the offices. But it's really tough. It's really tough and you can't know everything and you can't be everywhere. So I think it goes back to the fact that we've recruited right to the people that we've got. I mean, I walk into our offices now, Dave, and they're literally best in class. The people are brilliant. And I think if you've got the people right, you've got the trust, then you've got trust in a sense that the culture will follow, will follow. But it's hard. It's hard. And if we think about, for example, a London office, gosh. Different market, entirely. Different market, it's all of a sudden more of a difficulty to get to and be present at. So yeah, there'll be definite challenges to come, I think. Yeah, especially HS two is not potentially coming this high anymore, is it? So it's even further away. No. But it's just never at all days that day. Again, you'll know this, it's like you think, I think I was always in the early days just striving for a day where I could be like, everything's perfect, everything's sorted that day. I've realised now that day will never come. And actually if it does, there's probably something wrong because you're not moving forward, you're not growing, you're not challenging the status quo. You're not. So you've got to accept it. You might. Be the day that you retire. Maybe if that ever comes, maybe. Yeah. Amazing. No, really interesting and quite inspiring just to hear where you've come from to where you're going and the future. And I guess from our perspective, we wish you all the best of luck with it. So just wrapping up, I always ask my guests three final questions. So the first one, which I think you've probably answered earlier actually, but when you were little at school or wherever you might've been, what did you want to be when you were older and why? Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember wanting to be anything other than a lawyer, but I think even from a really young age, I wanted independence. And I've always had ambition, and it's awful to say it, isn't it? But I like nice things as well. Nothing wrong with that. So I thought I need a career that I can enjoy, most important thing, but will allow me independence and also be financially lucrative. And commercial law was the route I took. But I've loved it and I love it. I love it to this day. Yeah, you can sit. I love it. Yeah, I always have. And I remember being a trainee and thinking, God, I can't believe I get paid to do this. I get paid to come into and really actually enjoy myself, and I know I'm privileged. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Second one, a little bit more controversial, if you could change something in your career, what would it be and why? It's a tough one. That isn't it? Because I do feel that your life takes you in a certain direction because of the experiences that you've had. And I'm lucky. I do feel privileged that I've had the opportunities that I've had. I think the only thing I've not done, which when I speak to colleagues they have, and I think well, that would've been is maybe some international, maybe some travel, go and do a secondment maybe in another jurisdiction and just see how that, so I've got a colleague who spent five or six years working over in Dubai and just to see that different. So that would've been, I think, good, but you never know. CG Dubai, maybe? CG Dubai. Yeah, that'd. Be nice. That's not a problem. I'm on the plane. That'll. Do. Yeah. And last but not least, my favourite question. So you're hosting a dinner party, which I know you're very fond of. You've got three spare seats at your dinner table, and you're allowed to invite three guests from any area, dead or alive. Who would you have and why? Oh gosh. Who would I have and why? Right. First one I would have, so I love Whitney Houston, right. So she could come and sing for us. That'd be good, wouldn't it? Yeah. So Whitney, and I think I'd have maybe Michael McIntyre or Vicky VE or someone like that for the jokes. And then I'd probably have to say my dad. So my dad passed away 10 years ago now, and he hasn't seen sort of the CG journey, and I'd love him to, yeah, it'd be good to be able to tell him about what we've done. So that'd be nice. A. Wild, wild path would be very different emotions. In there. That would be interesting. Yeah. Two dead people and medium. What a, yeah. Oh. Brilliant. Yeah. Well, firstly, thank you very much for coming on. It's been hugely enjoyable, hopefully. Hopefully the listeners and the watchers will enjoy it as well and take a lot of inspiration and advice from what you said. If you have enjoyed this episode, please click the subscribe button. We will be bringing on some more fantastic guests over the coming months. And that's it for us now. Thank you very much.