Tell us a bit about yourselves and your business.
I am Lorna Hamilton, a Statistician and data analyst, and I am Mindy Hadi, an Occupational Psychologist. We set up H&H Research after working together for over 20 years. We’d been talking about setting up our own business for a long time, but it wasn’t until January 2021 that we finally decided to take the plunge, despite being in the middle of the COVID pandemic!
There’s lots of research now that shows that the built environment, where we spend most of our lives, affects our health, well-being and performance in both positive and negative ways. H&H Research is a consultancy that helps our clients to better understand the impact of the built environment on people’s lives and provides them with solutions.
What are some of the things you help clients with when looking at their buildings?
We help our clients optimise their buildings in terms of their impact on the occupants. We do this by looking at environmental, operational and design factors that affect health, well-being and performance. We also engage with the occupants in different ways, eg using surveys and interviews and looking at how people behave and use their buildings.
Once we have completed our assessment, we make recommendations and provide solutions.
What trends do you see in this sector?
Right now, there’s a lot of interest generally in making the built environment better for people, the planet and the economy at the same time. Covid helped with this. This is more important than ever before in workplaces, as people consider returning to work.
You work in quite a unique sector. What sort of clients do you work for?
Actually, our services are pretty versatile, so we can and do work across many sectors and with all sorts of clients from Governments to private companies. Generally, our clients tend to be organisations that want to make their buildings – offices, homes, schools, healthcare buildings – as good as they can be for the people who live and work in them.
How is your business journey going?
We started around the end of January, so we’d say we’re still in the early stages of the business, but we have been working in this area for over 20 years. With that comes good links and contacts, so we’re confident that we can grow our business.
One thing we’ll say, though, and this is a lesson we’d share with anyone else starting up, is that we didn’t appreciate the amount of work we needed to do, just to set up the business. So, getting through that in itself is an achievement for us. We also landed a client very early on, so we were both setting up and dealing with clients at the same time.
How come you decided to start your business?
It’s been an on/off desire for a long time. Different things came up as life went on, but we both reached a point where it finally worked for us. Now is a good time too, given the discussions around healthy buildings, flexible working and the emphasis on well-being. So, there’s a whole host of opportunities.
Can you talk about your experience with Rocket Lawyer?
We found Rocket Lawyer online and it’s really helped us. We used them to create the legal documents we needed such as a Partnership agreement and a Supplier services agreement. We thought the documents were fantastic! We were able to download template documents and change/tweak what we needed to do.
You also used our Ask a lawyer and Bespoke Legal Drafting service. How was your experience using those services?
With the document amendments we had made, we wanted a lawyer to look at what we had done. Rocket Lawyer’s Bespoke legal drafting service supported us with this, which was fantastic.
We had a positive experience, and we’d definitely recommend the service to anyone looking for bespoke documents or 1-to-1 legal advice at a fraction of the cost.
Thanks for your comments! What are your future plans?
We want to formally launch in a more interactive way to our clients and the wider sector as well as raising our profile through our website and social media. We believe in what we do and while we want our business to be successful, at the same time we want to improve life for people – at the end of the day, helping people is our main driving force, and we’re looking forward to getting stuck in!
