November 28th, 2018

Michelle Botia

HR Manager, This is Milk

Hi there! I'm Michelle, I help small, growing companies with anything people related.

Three years ago I had just returned from living in Mexico, having spent a couple of fantastic years there with my family, where I managed to learn Spanish, meet some lifelong friends and generally embraced such a wonderful opportunity.

A change in my husband's career brought us back to Scotland, where, with my kids almost all grown up, and ‘flying the nest’ I suddenly had time on my hands. Spotting a gap in the market, I decided to set up my own HR business to support SMEs and new tech start-ups, and I must say that I am really loving the buzz, enthusiasm and willingness to learn from entrepreneurs in this space.

I met Angela six months ago; she was friendly, outgoing, sincere and capable, and I liked her immediately.

She was inspirational, had big ideas and most importantly realised that like-minded, able people would be key to bringing her business ideas to life. It soon became apparent that we were on the same page about lots of things, not least our passion for doing things better and simpler in business.

We had a similar approach and values, which was important to me, we both:

• consider ourselves to be approachable
• care about doing a great job
• listen to our customers and colleagues
• use the full capabilities of teams to help businesses perform better.

We decided that we could help each other by combining our skills and expertise in our respective areas of experience - well in small business collaboration is key after all!

I also identified with Angela, having raised my family and balanced their needs while working. I knew exactly how hard that was!

So I agreed to work as part of her team and together we gave ourselves the challenge of creating a company where people felt valued, needed, wanted and rewarded – we would listen to what employees really craved from work and try to make that happen.

All the simple things that sound like common sense but, like so many common sense things, seem to get lost or diluted along the way.

As a result, I’m now This is Milk’s ‘HR wingwoman’ and we will continue to work hard during 2016 to make our ideas a reality!

In creating This is Milk Angela recognised, like me, that it's not always easy to manage competing priorities and demands in the workplace, or to manage these smoothly so that the benefits are realised by all. I think that there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between personal life and business life. Lessons can always be learned from things that have worked well and things that haven't. I look forward to sharing some of these in my next blog posts.

Thanks for reading my first ever post! 

Michelle

Blog first published 18/02/2016)