Hiring the right people has been essential for our business. Paying for IT, PR, accountancy and legal support allows us to save time for highly-leveraged activities like sales and coaching.

Our best hire was a communications consultant called Clair to help us with our message. PR is central to our marketing strategy because we our story is very attractive to the media. We help Londoners find love by encouraging them to just go and speak to people they find attractive – no chat up lines, no gimmicks, no need for online dating or noisy nightclubs. We offer coaching to men and women and media outlets are often keen to ‘pick-up’ the story.

We knew we needed to get the initial press release right, and Clair taught us how to talk to our customers through the copy. Before talking to her, our press release had been professional, but rather cold and formal. Clair got us reading our prose out loud to make sure it sounded approachable and natural.

Clair also helped us with the copy on our website and sales literature. Her advice changed the tone of everything that we write. Since using her, we’ve had good success with our PR campaign and our sales have increased.

We were so close to what we doing that we didn’t step back to think about how we were coming across to the media and our clients. Our new friendly and approachable persona has helped us a lot. It’s often really useful to get a second opinion on things like message and brand from a professional. How we thought we came across, and how we actually came across, were very different; had we not worked with Clair it could have been a prolonged and expensive mistake.

It’s not just professionals who have given us useful advice. A close friend from university is always a good sounding board. He spotted (months before we did) that our site wasn’t differentiated enough. We eventually addressed this almost a year after his suggestion, and I am sure not listening to him cost us thousands of pounds.

So our best business decision has been to find good people, and to hold onto them. And to keep asking their opinion.

More on Best Business Decisions:

• Learning when to pivot – Giles Palmer
• Starting up a business in a recession – Richard Britton
• Relocating the company HQ – Alex Rahaman