After years managing businesses for others who didn't value employees, Diane Kelly started LL Solutions with a simple plan. To test if a company built entirely on kindness could work.
Six months later she was inundated. Five years later, she had over 40 staff. Her crew came mainly from self-employed backgrounds, who valued security without micromanagement, Diane’s exceptionally high retention rate and zero cold-calling.
Today, as Ireland's only fully female-led property maintenance company of this scale Diane shares her story.
THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
- Nobody here is a number: knowing staff stories enables understanding bad days
- Non-credit company paying as you go eliminates surprise bills devastating cash flow
- Seventy percent crew came from self-employed backgrounds valuing security without micromanagement
- Recruitment changed: no interviews, just coffee conversations, mostly recommendations from current staff
- Home to Hope documentary fixing five severely sad homes before Christmas nationwide
GUEST DETAILS
Diane Kelly is co-founder of LL Solutions, Ireland's only fully female-led property maintenance and refurbishment company operating at their scale. Diane leads with fairness and hands-on involvement, giving full trust from day one.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/diane-kelly-0bb56921
ABOUT KINORE
Kinore is an award winning and innovative online Chartered Accountancy service that takes away the worry and headache of running your own finance and related business services functions. Kinore’s services include:
Accountancy Services
Annual Compliance & Year-End
Online Bookkeeping Services
VAT Returns
Payroll Services
Management Accounting
Xero Conversion & Training
Company Secretarial Services
Company Formation Ireland
Company Secretarial
Virtual Office
Bond for Non-EEA resident Directors
Registration Of Beneficial Ownership
ABOUT YOUR HOST
The host of this podcast is Larissa Feeney, CEO and Founder of Kinore, an award-winning online accountancy and business services firm based in Ireland.
Lasissa’s journey is notable, starting in hospitality before transitioning to accounting, where she qualified as a Chartered Accountant.
Driven by a vision to challenge traditional accountancy and leverage technology, Larissa founded Kinore in 2015, establishing Ireland's first online, remote-first Finance and Business Services company. |
Under her leadership, Kinore has received numerous accolades, and Larissa herself has been recognised with awards like 'Accountant of the Year'.
QUOTES
We try to hold value in every person that we deal with every day. From a staff perspective, for us, kindness is knowing all of their stories so that when one of them has a bad day, we may understand why. Nobody here is a number. - Diane Kelly
About 70% of our crew have all come from self employed backgrounds. We offer them security. We pay them well. We treat them like grown adults. We don't ring them every five minutes asking where they are or why they pulled in for 10 minutes. We let them do their jobs, and it's working brilliantly. - Diane Kelly
At the end of every single health and safety meeting, I stand up and I always say: don't confuse our kindness for stupidity, or don't confuse it for weakness. - Diane Kelly
Signing up with yourselves was taking maybe 30% of the budget that we had, which was still great value—our budget was just really low. But for me, it was non negotiable. - Diane Kelly
Keywords: #kindnessInBusiness #nonCreditCompany #HomeToHope #propertyMaintenance #femaleLeadership
What is Real Business Conversations with Kinore?
Dive in for the gritty truth from the trenches of business.
No unicorns, no brands. Just hard-working people who built their business from the ground up. They share real life stories, challenges and solutions, plus the risks they've taken and how they stepped outside their comfort zone to find success.
If you're running a business, join Larissa Feeney and get the inside track from others who have been down the road already.
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Real Business Conversations is produced by DustPod.io for Kinore Finance and Business Services.