2nd June 2015

AE in a Box, Rainy Sundays and how frustration creates ideas

About 18 months ago, on a rainy Sunday night, I was sitting at home feeling uneasy.

I was trying to read but found myself constantly distracted by a thought which wouldn’t go away.

The thought was about a particularly annoying challenge I faced within my business which I’d been struggling to get my head around for a couple of weeks.

You see, at that stage we were helping a number of relatively large employers with the process of auto enrolment.

A fair share of my time consisted of sitting down with these employers and guiding them through the process of auto enrolment.

Whilst some of this work was related to their pension there was also an element of project management when working with these employers and helping them change some of their business processes to ensure they were able to comply with auto enrolment regulation.

However my sense of unease, on that rainy Sunday night, wasn’t related to the employers who we were helping at that time but the hundreds of thousands of employers who needed to comply between 2015 and 2017.

You see the issue was that for a couple of weeks I realised one thing….

Sitting down with every employer and guiding them through the process of auto enrolment, whilst relatively successful in the large and medium sized business market, didn’t work when it came to small businesses.

You see many smaller businesses need as much help, guidance and support with auto enrolment as larger business.

However the issue with our existing model, where we sit down and guide employers through the auto enrolment business, didn’t work for most smaller employers. This is for two reasons….

First, the capacity to pay for a consultancy solution for many smaller businesses was less.

and

Even if all of the smaller business wanted a consultancy solution the reality is that the market didn’t have enough experts in auto enrolment to help small businesses.

Sitting there on that rainy Sunday, and for the two weeks prior, I’d been thinking about this problem….

How could I help as many small businesses as I could and what did I need to do to do it?

….and then it hit me. I had to build a solution which guided smaller businesses through auto enrolment step by step.

Which made auto enrolment as easy as possible by breaking it down into bite size chunks.

Which provided an online platform which took our knowledge and processes and minimised the challenges smaller employers faced with auto enrolment by guiding them in the most appropriate way possible.

I had to build AE in a Box…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bABIcUXRJLU

That’s how the Idea of AE in a Box was born and based on this seed of an idea we’re now helping both professionals and employers make auto enrolment easy and our way of helping these employers is being used more and more each and every day.

That’s why when I look back to that rainy Sunday night I’m glad I decided to try something I hadn’t done before and develop an idea into a living breathing solution which genuinely helped.

I haven’t had a Sunday night revelation since! I’m just hoping that when it comes It’ll be as good as AE in a Box!

For more information on AE in a Box please contact us by emailing info@aeinabox.co.uk or visit www.aeinabox.co.uk

Auto-Enrolment, Pension Reforms, Pensions