Chris Monticolombi - Building a business from scratch and adding value with every interaction

Welcome back to another episode of the Recruitment Mentors Podcast. I'm your host, Hishem Azzouz, and on this week's episode, I was joined by Christopher Monty Colombi, who is one of the founders of WeShape, which he started just under 4 years ago with his business partner Jack. WeShape is a really interesting business as they are not your typical recruitment business. They're a technology consultancy. So where they are today, they have 20 full-time employees within the business, 70 people in total, as half of their team is made up of tech consultants and half of them are made up of tech recruiters. For any of you that are massively interested in how to evolve your offering as a recruitment business and really get into the solution-focused selling, you're going to absolutely love this episode. Chris really knows his stuff and really delivered, in my view, a masterclass on evolving your offering, maximizing existing relationships, and really becoming a true partner with the businesses that recruitment businesses are there to help and support. Enjoy the episode. Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Looking forward— I look forward to every episode, but I think when I learn about your business, I think a lot of people would be really interested in it and I think there's going to be plenty of things that I know you've learned along the way and continue to, but I think there'll be a lot of things that the listeners will be really interested in and, yeah, have the chance to learn from your journey. But I guess before I ask you the million-pound question, I want to sort of just frame up for people listening in terms of like where you are today and sort of where you're on your journey. So as we were just saying, been in the industry for 8 years, joined recruitment when you said you were 21.

Correct. Yeah.

So, and then where you are as a business, WeShape, which you founded with your business partner Jack.

Jack Moore, yes.

Where you are is you've been going for 4 years and you've been on this journey of building a technology consultancy, or hybrid you like to call it. So it's made up of half tech consultants and tech recruiters, have 20 full-time staff at the moment, but altogether in terms of the subcontractors and the people you have involved in the business, you'd have 70.

Yeah, yeah, that's across UK and Europe.

Yeah, so I guess what I'm really keen to really dig into today is definitely like this sort of last 3.5, 4 years journey of WeShape, but I guess let's just, we'll talk a bit about the beginning first, but before we do, I'd love to just sort of hear your take on how this evolved, you probably thought about this a lot at WeShape, but what do you really believe makes up a sort of successful recruiter today, the characteristics and traits do you think?

Yeah, no, it's a good question, so Obviously my time in recruitment was with Lafosse Associates, so probably about 4 years ago now. I guess Lafosse had a lot of high performers in their business, but if I was looking at a common theme, you got the resilience piece, you got the drive, you got the motivation. The top performers were overly consistent, so they turn up every day and they don't change that kind of attitude to work. So when you get complacent in recruitment, there's always someone else who wants to come along and take your market share or your position. I think the other kind of mindset is their communication. So the way they influence and persuade people, and that's both ways, is if you look at like external facing, so a client's had you win over a new client and tap into a new market opportunity, but also internally is if you get the right people on your side from operations to finance to maybe different work streams, so permanent contingent recruitment or contractor side, and you build that team and you kind of go to market together, Often those people become the best performers because they work strategically, they work smart, and as a collective they win the best opportunities.

That's a really interesting insight, probably the first person to pick up on that, like you said, like influence internally and externally. Yeah, I really like that. So I guess let's just go straight into it. So help me out with a bit of context, but from what I understood when we spoke, when you worked at La Force, you ended up sort of being part of a team and building a team where basically what you shared with me was, yeah, La Force had a big number of clients, circa 400, 300, whatever, and you ended up building this team to look at all of these companies that they're working with and to maximize the relationships and get the most out of the accounts, put more resource on the accounts that needed it or had the growth opportunities. So did you, was you always in that sort of role? Did you start as like a contract consultant? I don't know, just, just give me a, just help me out with a bit of context. But that's not, I know where you ended up, isn't that?

Yeah, so I actually joined, so under Dave Roberts. So Dave Roberts is now the director of Futureproof and Digital Outcomes, which is their consulting unit. At the time, Dave was heading up cloud and infrastructure, and I was a resourcer for him. So he was very much 360 delivery consultant overlooking quite a sizable team. I kind of fell into DevOps at a time when it became mainstream. So I was a DevOps contract recruiter. Jack, who's my business partner now, was actually a competitor of mine. So he worked for Prism Digital at the time. So essentially just built out the DevOps recruitment desk when it became mainstream and was quite profitable in terms of building that desk. Jack ended up joining La Fosse at the time and he was my successor. And I wanted to look at, because recruitment for me became, I say quite binary, I wanted to look at the broader landscape and I thought La Fosse were on such a high growth, an exponential growth within the market. They had so many clients they were engaging with, but they just weren't maximising the revenue stream. So you might have 300 clients, but you're making one deal in each placement in each of those clients. Is how do you grow and grow your account relationships and a proper structure behind that. So I took on the key client partnership role. This was a newly formed kind of unit and it was about how do you build strategic partnerships with our key high net worth opportunities. So when an NFI reaches a certain amount per year or they've got a certain amount of consultants deployed, it's putting a single point of contact, an account management team behind it, making sure you deal with escalation perspectives and essentially just building market share in those accounts. So from that I built a whole delivery team, worked with different units within La Fosse it was the contract side, the contingent executive search. And you're basically putting the best expertise together to work on your most strategic clients. Now these might be the A clients for the business, but if you lose, they can impact your revenue and possibilities in organisation. I think the key learning for me at the time was when you build a business that's very high performing and everyone works in, I don't know, 360 role, they've got incentivised by commission and sales. What we've done at WeShape is we've split the mechanism. So our account managers are remunerated by bonuses. And our sales team remunerate by commission. So actually they work together in a cohesive way because they're not actually trying to fight against who gets the deal, who gets the— So you're actually working in the customer's best interest, you're delivering the right solution. And that was the methodology we were trying to change at La Fosse. And I think since today the team's still there and they're still growing pretty well.

So I'm gonna definitely ask you more about that. But just quickly, I wanted to ask you, really well put together by the way. So just two things on Arshin and we'll get into WeShape. So firstly, what would you say, you mentioned some of them, but what would you say then are some of the key principles that you think can lead to successful account development and successful sort of maximisation of relationships and accounts, you think? What are some of the maybe 1 to 3 key principles behind that, do you think?

Yeah, I think you need to get the right person in account management. It's a very different type of business relationship where you're actually kind of puppeteering an account and making sure you're strengthening the relationship, you're not going for quick wins. It's not about a transactional relationship of like who can get the quickest deal. It's about building organic relationships where it becomes kind of self-perpetuating. And by that I mean revenue starts coming in and when they move to, if a key stakeholder moves elsewhere, who are they gonna call up? They're gonna call yourself. So that's building authentic relationships. Second part is about adding incremental value beyond just the services you're providing. So are you doing events? Are you actually bringing stuff to them and learning their kind of business agenda? Are they having challenges trying to find I know junior software engineers, or is there a talent skills gap? Is it diversity and inclusion? And what you're starting to do there is you're actually saying, look, actually we have a good perspective of the market. We can bring other stuff to you which benefits you in the longer term. We're not just here for business. So I think that's the second area. And I think the other one is, and most people miss, is the social element. Since COVID so many people I feel stay at home and they don't actually interact with their customers. They stay and use Zoom calls and stuff, which is great and it's good for remote working, but you still need to speed relationships. So we often take our customers out for client drinks. We try and meet other people, and it's a great opportunity to introduce new work streams. So if you put those 3 components together, why would they go to anyone else, right? Obviously, as soon as you start being complacent, that's when you start to lose that relationship or you dilute your service.

Yeah, some great insights there. I've spoken to someone about this recently because we've got some stuff, some live learning sessions on this recently at Recruitment Mentors, and yeah, he called it sort of bridging the gap, that social gap. And yeah, it's a good way of putting it, and you just mentioned it there. Love that. So the thing that— the other thing I wanted to ask, you said you joined the force when you're 21.

Yeah.

The way that you're talking, right, like you're just making it sound like, I don't know, just really simple, easy to understand, straightforward. Where, where did Chris cultivate this mindset? I don't know, I feel like clearly you learned quickly, do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know, I just feel like, was there some challenges on getting to that? Did you find yourself thinking, fucking, I'm really out of my depth here? Or like, I don't know, how did you make sure Chris adapted and you— and you— I don't know, I feel like you could be you put yourself in situations where you could be like, I have no fucking clue what's going on there.

Yeah, 100%. And that's pretty much how I run my life. I'm very spontaneous in that. Look, if I go back to before I went into recruitment, I retook A-levels and I didn't go to university. So I grew up in Kent, moved down to London at 19, and at that time everyone went to university and I had to make something of myself, right? So you throw yourself into the deep end because a lot of people are doubting where you want to get to. I was very competitive in sport at the time and I wanted to be a trader. So current affairs, marketing, like anything about the market, I was trying to absorb, I was trying to be a bit of a hustler at the time. But what you learn when you're young is your business savviness or your knowledge about commercial strategy is minute, but you're very arrogant and you're very confident at that young age. And that's what helped me develop my career because of the confidence I had in my own ability. But I learnt from some of the best people. I had mentors who supported me. I owe a lot of respect to Dave Roberts who took me under his wing at Lafosse and really developed me and was quite challenging on me. So when I thought I was doing things right, he was actually, look, Chris, take your time and develop this properly. My first job, but I was quite fortunate, it was an A-level commercial development programme at Tesco. So I was a buyer.

Oh wow.

So I used to buy alcohol for the UK, which is an awesome job at like 20 years old. The funny story behind it was, When I used to go to house, because I didn't go to the freshers and stuff, but when I used to get invited to house parties, but I had to bring loads of alcohol with me. And then when I left that job, I didn't get as many invites. So, but all those things is they sent me on like commercial negotiation training. So that was very advantageous when I went into recruitment. I didn't necessarily have the degree and I don't know, the business degree and whatnot. I had actual real life experience. I was buying like 15 million pounds worth of stock for Tesco. And when you sit in that seat, you have to learn quickly, right? Because then all that skill set's very transferable. And then the other thing is I just learn by doing. So there's some people who learn academically through, they'll sit in a lesson, someone teach them something and they absorb it. I don't really learn that way. Mine is, if you put me into a scenario, over time I'll make a mistake, but I'll learn very quickly not to make that same mistake again. And that's what's helped me kind of get to where I am now.

No, I love that. So let's go into WeShape then. Let's unpack this journey because I know, I know there's been plenty of highs and lows, right? So I guess why don't we just start with like, a lot of people when they start a recruitment business, and I'm sure you have plenty of friends within this as well, and you might have heard them say at one point like, I want to do it differently, like I want to have a unique difference in the market. Which I think obviously you guys generally have. So just, I guess, explain for us, to keep it really simple, when you say you're a hybrid of tech consultancy and recruitment business, like, let's just start there. Like, how would you describe WeShape?

Yeah, so just from a kind of high level, so WeShape is a technology consultancy. We specialise in DevOps software, data, and cloud solutions, and that's anywhere from advisory, so whether it's organisational or technical advisory, implementation, so technical squads that go in to do product delivery, or on-demand consultants. So say its client needs a software engineer, we can service that through individuals. And then the last stream is kind of coaching and training. So around, especially around the DevOps processes, there's a lot of tooling, there's a lot of modernisation, there's a lot of kind of different frameworks that businesses want to retain their existing talent, or they want to upskill and not become reliant on consultancy. So we coach them through that journey. The reason we're a hybrid is back during La Fosse, and anyone who kind of does contract recruitment, there's a legislation called IR35, and it was impacting the way that you customers could engage contract subcontracted resource in the market. Impacted the public sector initially and then moved into the private sector. And at the time, Jack and I, and to be fair, I give a lot of credit to Jack, is Jack identified is if we were to blend our technical consultancy expertise So best-in-class engineers in the market who could validate, design, and architect solutions with our skill set of augmenting teams. Those two skill sets complement each other very nicely. The second thing is, as a recruiter, you're going direct to market, so you can be commercially very effective because you're not having incremental margins where some of the large management consultancies might subcontract to a recruiter, then it goes direct.

Yeah.

Now you've got two problems. You've got a commercial challenge. The second one you've got is you've got a quality assurance challenge because there's multiple people in the process. So we can mitigate that on our side. And the other one is we do everything. So we do statement of work. I need the technical consultants to help me identify and work my customers to scope out what that technical requirements are, but also the deliverables. Because when you do do a statement of work, you underwrite risk, which is very different to recruitment. Recruitment's very vanilla in terms of like you're placing a personnel and they deliver a solution, but there's no real accountability on delivery. Doing, whereas in statement of work you're underwriting the output and the time you deliver that. Yeah, like the outcome of what's planned for.

Yeah, the outcome of what's planned for.

Yeah, so you need the right technical consultants who can scope that out and trust that they can scope it out adequately.

And then you can augment the teams and the skill set that they need. So that explains then why obviously, as I said at the beginning, yeah, a chunk of your business is full-time employees that I think you described as operations and how else can you describe it?

Yeah, so you've got operations, marketing, which is all our kind of brand because we've got a number of events we run. But also just to make sure that people understand what WeShape does as a business. I've got a pretty strong talent team, a very strong talent team, who are all ex-industry tech recruiters. I've got a sales team, so we do cold business development, and then we've got an account management team. And then obviously I've got our operations team, which look after like timesheets, our B Corp. So we recently became B Corp certified, which is a huge achievement. ISO certified, which is all about kind of our cybersecurity and measures we put in place to assure our customers we're doing things in the right Governance.

But then that's why, obviously, you'll explain why you have a number of people that subcontracted their consultants within that, right? Okay, so a couple of things here. There's loads that we can go into, like really keen to go into your journey in selling these types of solutions and all of that, but I guess let's just focus first on like the actual business journey. So this is the idea, this is the concept you said Jack wanted to, so started the business in 2019. Year before, that being a year before COVID right? So talk to me, a lot of people think about starting their own recruitment business, never actually take the leap for a number of reasons. I think a lot of people don't just quite have the confidence to back themselves to take that leap. Describe me that first year, mate, what went down in that first year? Because I know it was difficult, there was some highs and lows.

There was a lot of highs, lows.

What was the game plan for year one?

So we wanted to I think the first 6 months is we had an idea of we were very good at recruitment and contract recruitment, but we could take it to another level, which was this consultancy model. What you often find is when you do go to set up on your own, you think, even though I'm an A player and I'm doing very well, the brand doesn't always follow suit and your clients don't always follow suit. And obviously you've got non-competes in place, so you're, you're pretty much starting from ground zero. So what we did is we went out to market. The first thing we had to get right was that shift away from recruitment. So when you're speaking to customers who typically knew you as recruiters, you've now got to tell them that you're no longer working on a margin, you're working on a rate card, these are the engagement models, you're turning down business when you actually need business because of cash flow. And Jack and I pretty much self-invested all our money to build WeShape, so we didn't have any external funding at the time. Jack had just had a 1-year-old at the time, so he had far more responsibilities than me, who was just kind of roaming around London trying to make this work.

How much runway did you give yourself then?

We gave ourselves about a year, which goes very quickly, right? So I think we didn't, obviously no one knew or expected COVID to happen, and obviously the duration of how long lockdown happened. But one of the key notable things was WeShape used to be called Shape. Obviously when you're building your business, you're focusing so much on business development and trying to generate new new opportunities. The funny story was, it wasn't funny at the time, but there's an organisation from America who was building a presence in London, they're a security consultant, and we didn't know this at the time. Anyway, they come around to view offices and we're based in Tower Bridge, and out of every office they could view in London and every room they could view in this shared office, they came to ours. And they've asked us what we've done, and obviously as young, kind of hungry Salespeople, we sell technology consultancy services. And we asked them what they did and they told us they were security consultancy called Shape as well. And obviously me looking at the kind of intellectual property and our trademarks and stuff, they were like a billion pound company and we got a trademark infringement.

Wow.

About 8 months into the business.

So what does that actually mean?

Yeah, you get a letter, you've got to change your whole name, your whole brand and everything. Whilst you're trying to build a business and you've got limited capital to run with. So obviously we spoke to legal representatives and that was actually the shift to WeShape, which funny enough, we were called WeShape.io as our website, but we were always going out to market as Shape. And so it's probably a blessing in disguise that we had all that set up. So it was a quick shift across. But these are the challenges you're facing and they're unprecedented, right? So you have those challenges, you've got cash flow where maybe clients don't pay you in time. And you're chasing, I remember a scenario where we did actually secure a project and then you're doing credit checks and stuff on the client and your finance provider, 'cause you obviously borrow cash to be able to run your contractor book, just weren't able to lend the money against it. So you're trying to identify all these different bottlenecks and as a biller, we had an operations team to look for us, we had finance teams at that and you actually don't, it's only now that I appreciate how much work those guys do to cover your back. Where at the time you're like, all you get to see is your commission check coming through, whereas now you're responsible for everything. Those are the things that open my eyes up. And if anyone wants to go into it, I always say like, we're always open to share advice. I've got a lot of friends who have now gone on and set up their organisations, and we share tips between each other because I respect anyone who goes out to build a business because it's not easy. But there are, once you've done this multiple times, there's contacts, there's networks, And there's formulas that you can use to really kind of expedite that process. But it's usually not the sales side that's the problem, it's the back office and the operations and the stuff that you don't even think about which can implode your business.

How long did it take you to sort of secure and sell your first, like, project then in this sort of different, like you said, the way that you wanted to be perceived, the way that you wanted to—

Do you know, the first ever project we won was a call-in, which has never happened in my career, right? Yeah, we got a call-in there, Tina, seen an advert we'd shared and it was a CTO. And I thought it was a joke at the time 'cause I've never had someone call my desk phone and I barely knew the number to the phone. It was about 2 months in, it was an advisory piece of work. And so we kicked off with that engagement. And then once you get that first piece of work, your emotional side goes like, we can do this, he's gonna make loads of money. And then about 3 months later we've got nothing, right? So we've gone from like high to low and then you start doubting yourself, right? You're like, well, I was a high performer before, I was doing all this really well. 'Why is it not coming through?' Everyone in the market has a perception that you're smashing it, right? No one I know ever shares the bad side of any business. They're always, 'cause you're trying to paint this image of, 'Look, we're moving forward.' But this is the hardest part. It's about being mentally strong and having a team around you that support that growth. So I always say have a close circle of friends. Keep your business very close at that earlier stages because you need people who can really motivate you be that support because it's pretty tough. And then about a year in, we're very close to the end of our runway, we secured a project. So we knew we could do it and we turned that project around rapidly. I think we turned it around in 2 days, delivered it, and that was the kind of pivotal— Yeah, catalyst to it.

So came what? Came where you was like, just came very close to being like, fucking hell, Jerry, I'm gonna have to get employed.

It was, I don't know how that close, but no, it was close. Yeah, I didn't have much money left in the savings.

Yeah, let's just say that much.

Because you're— yeah, I told him I've got— and I was trying to make it work. Yeah, but my ego was getting the better of me, but I had to succeed. And that's, to be honest, where me and Jack work best. Um, all respect to Jack, is we are— when it gets hard, is we do look at each other and we make sure we're supporting each other. We know each other very well in that, in that way. So, um, it's about driving each other forward, knowing when someone is feeling the pressure And instead of kind of consoling that, it's about, right, we've got to turn this around because we owe a lot of people. And obviously a lot of people are looking up to us now. And you've got to have that mindset if you want to succeed because it's too easy to give up sometimes. But necessarily, not necessarily, is you also have to have that fail fast mentality. If something is not working, you need to cut it quickly because you can waste a lot of time, and time's the most important part. Like money can come in, you can get more money, right? But if you're wasting time on something and chasing that kind of golden ticket and it's not providing a return on investment, you need to pivot quickly.

Do you think you could have survived that first year without Jack?

No, no. I think, well, the thing is, is we've already looked at each other, is we complement each other really well. Well, I'm very focused on like strategy and building business. Jack is amazing at sales, networking. He's built some very successful event brands. Right? I'm one of the most likable people you'll meet, right? So between us, you put us in a room, we go crazy at each other at times. When you're in like a, in a small room, you want to kill each other. But even if you do have arguments and stuff, we'll go and have a beer, we'll settle it. And it's only in the best interest. We're very passionate about what we're building, right? And especially now as we've built a very successful team and a team that we think are all on the same page. We're doing this in the best interest of the team and our customers and stuff like that. For us, is we enjoy the process. And that side, as you move away from, I'm just chasing money, I'm just trying to chase that kind of, that dream life, which you enjoy what we do as a job. And that's why we, why we're doing it.

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Yeah, so I was having to do a lot of the operations, and my operations is Pat's level of operations. So when you say doing the operations, like, so like, you'd be like, it'd be like credit chasing, chasing down debt, or it could be writing invoices or VAT submissions or reconciliations. Because you don't, you're learning, and it's a really good trick because a lot of people outsource that right away. The best thing we did is we tried to really understand our business, because once you've got that knowledge and intel, you sit in like an observer seat as your business grows, but you can when you sit in a finance meeting, you actually understand how things are pulled together and how your business operates. And if any business leader doesn't have that visibility, you are at risk at things going wrong and you can only hold yourself accountable for that. So yeah, Pat joined us during COVID big risk again. I used to work with Pat and Pat was also ex-Le Fosse, but that guy's phenomenal.

So what is he, just again painting a picture, like, so what, why has he been really important, really good at the hiring?

Why?

Yeah, like, so what is he now responsible for and why has that been really important to the growth of the business?

So he's head of operations for WeShape now, started operations lead and has progressed rapidly for the organisation. Simple, bringing in CRM systems, doing the right due diligence and tender process behind that. So we work off Vincere at present and it suits the kind of model we, and the services we sell. Looking at stuff like B Corp, So really instigating a business for purpose. It's a 2-year kind of waiting list now to get onto that, and it's about, I mean, it's been about 12 months trying to build all the frameworks and the right credentials behind it to make sure we show for the position to be awarded it. It's also about just the, when you're working with gig economy consultants, it's all about onboarding. How quick are you at onboarding? How quick can you get contracts out? Because anytime you make mistakes around payroll, onboarding, You set a precedent and a perspective to market. So if someone's not getting paid on time, why would they work with you again when they can go to many other providers who will? When you're inputting data, how do you make sure that your customers and your consultants make sure you have right GDPR process in place, stuff like that? All that stuff matters because when you scale the business, if you don't have those measures in place, you're constantly having to retrospectively go back and change everything. And that's where I feel some businesses invest a lot in their sales mechanism because they want to make more revenue, their back office isn't built to the scale they need to get to, and that's where they have challenges. Whereas we took the risk of investing in the back office operations, the marketing, the talent team, and me and Jack were focusing on the outbound business development side. And fortunately we secured some large and fairly profitable deals, which allowed us to then accelerate the sales side, And now the back office can, we could accommodate our back office now, probably up to about 250 consultants at the level we are now, because of how much investment we've made.

So you're way ahead.

Yeah.

So what did the business look like at the end of year 2 then?

So year 2, it was about 4 of us. It was myself, Jack, Pat, and Glenn. So Glenn was an ex-recruiter, Third Republic at the time, brought him across as a young lad who was, and he was awesome at the start. So really, he was a single, like, Essentially me and Jack would sell the solution, Glen would source the expertise. We had our own network anyway, so it wasn't a challenge and obviously Jack and I could do the delivery if need be. But Glen was instrumental in sourcing the right expertise. And it was quite, me and Jack sometimes miss the days where it was just kind of 3 and 4 of us in a room. Where it's just like every deal you're high-fiving and clapping, whereas now we still do celebrate each deal.

Of course.

But it's very much around strategic mindset, trying to grow the business, what territory we're going to look into. Obviously we're moving to New York next year, next year to build out our US presence. So a lot of it's kind of blue sky thinking, what's the next 3-year plan look like, as opposed to every deal means so much for our business because it allowed us to hire new personnel, make sure we can pay everyone's salaries.

So I guess what people would love to, I guess, hear from you then is like, with all of this sort of experience and nuance you have now, like, in with the sort of benefit of hindsight, like, if you was to start with Jack again, like, how would you approach the conversations and the winning business differently? Or do you think you had the right approach? It was more of like it just took a bit of time to build that credibility, get more used to having the right conversations with the right people. I don't know, is there anything that you think you would do differently that you think would enable you to have that catalyst moment earlier and win a bigger project earlier?

Yeah, I think it's a really good question to look at because One in hindsight is we could have won contractor augmentation work early on, which is kind of like recruitment delivery. We turned it down because we wanted to be seen as a consultancy. Now, when we were running close to the wire on money, I was like, shit, maybe I've made the wrong decision, right? And Jack's going, I told you. And that was just more of me thinking, no, we want to keep this, this brand of We Shape Tech Consultancy. We're going to live to that name. And funny enough, one of my friends actually was in a very similar position. I advised them, just get revenue into the business whilst you're building up. You don't need to market it as your contractor augmentation, but if you get an opportunity, don't necessarily be, look, we don't need to take that business, uh, when we actually probably did. But when you go to solution selling, it's a different type of sales. So the semantics behind it are the terminology you use. One is you're, you're still selling to the same kind of clients, um, and probably seniority, But you're having to— instead of a client saying to you, we need X amount of people and this is what they're going to do, the conversation changes. Is we have this problem, we need you to help us solve it. They now trust that you've got the right personnel who can help validate a solution or design what the end goal should look like. So you've got to change that mindset of I'm not going in there just trying to find business, I'm there trying to identify problems that our business can solve. Right? And once you change that perspective, now you're entering a consultancy solution-based, um, sale, as opposed to that binary transactional that we're just finding you individuals. Um, so that was the mindset you've got to share. The next thing is you've got to shift your whole brand, your how people perceive you. And that takes time, because when you're calling up saying, look, it's Chris calling from WeShape, no one knew us. It was like we thought we were a fitness brand or a personal training. Um, so, but over time, that's now become a bit more prevalent. We won Best DevOps Consulting Firm, so The noise is getting out there, hopefully in the right way. But it's a lot easier to get on the phone because people know who we are now. At the start, it was back to the old school days of cold calling until people were sick of me.

Let's talk about this solution selling thing. I think people will be really interested in this. I've had people on the show already talking about this, and I think, I know you said the first point there on the terminology, I think that's really evident in this conversation. You're talking about people augmentation advisory, do you know what I mean?

Buzzwords.

Yeah, but it's clearly evident, do you know what I mean? So I think, like you were saying, that the mindset is different, and you said you're trying to understand what the problem is, and then you're then talking about solutions or trying to validate that problem and where it can go. I guess for me, in my own sort of sales journey, the best way that you can get better at having that mindset, or at least have more of those conversations you're trying to have, it comes through questions.

Yes.

So I think, I guess the question I have for you to maybe unpack some of those could be What questions do you think, um, how do I word this? So like, what questions would maybe a consultative seller say or ask compared to a recruiter that's trying to get 5 contractor jobs? Do you know what I mean? What are some of the different questions that you find yourself asking that you think, you know what, if Chris the 360 Contractor Biller, he probably wouldn't be asking this, that, that, do you know what I mean?

Yeah, and don't get me wrong, right, any contract and 360 biller And some of the people I worked with would be amazing at consultative sales because you still need to have that proactive approach. If you look at the consultancy market, a lot of it's built off partnership mechanisms. So they might be partners with X cloud provider, and so they get referrals introduced to say, look, enter this RFP, but then it's quite competitive. So it's probably similar as going against on like an RPO type model, and you've got multitude of different agencies trying to compete for the same work. The difference in terms of what sort of questions you ask, first and foremost, you need to understand what that business does from a technology perspective and what is their kind of key kind of priorities for the year. So whether it's expansion into new territories, whether it's we're going for a cloud in my markets, whether they're going for a cloud migration, data migration, have they used vendor partners before, right? And maybe been burnt by consultancies that haven't delivered against solutions that they promised, right? So you're trying to unpick different areas and we commercially scorecard organisations in a way that we're trying to identify, is there an opportunity there and can WeShape really add value? Because if I can't add value, then it's better placed that someone else can support them. And that comes down to what's their budget look like? Are they looking to work with UK-based personnel or onshore resource? Or are they used to using system integrators? System integrators, your large tier consultancy, maybe using offshore resources. The next one is, is it quality that they're looking for? Is it around speed of deployment? So look, if they don't deliver X solution by this time, it becomes a real business problem, right? So we're trying to identify those different criteria. And once you've got that, you can bring the right expertise onto the call. So I have individual consultants in our team who are very kind of business-facing but have that technical competency to be able to articulate to a senior stakeholder, if you deliver this tech, it will allow to solve this business problem, right? So I need to get the right skill set on the call, and I give them an overview or a holistic overview of, look, this is what they're trying to solve, and then I let them do the technical dialogue to secure the business. And that might be like referencing case studies we've done elsewhere, it might be leveraging things we do in the market. So sort of questions I would go back to asking a customer would be What's your biggest business priorities this year? How do you look to engage your consultancies? If you have got a— I know they might have suppliers in place at the moment. If they're not delivering at the moment, when does it become a problem? And this is when we talk about business critical selling, right? And how do you leverage your assets that you've got to secure that? Because at the end of the day, they have so many people calling them saying they've got the best CRM, they've got the best expertise in the market, they've got the best meetups, right? That's very Everyone's doing that in the market at the moment. It's more about what do you offer that no one else can, right? And that could be speed of deployment, right? That could be like, we've done work at X, Y, and Z, which is a financial services, very similar, and we can come in and educate your team, right? It could be that they want to build a permanent team in a longer term, so we're going to deploy an interim solution, but we have an academy that can help you build your permanent team and we can solve that. So you've got to look at how do you add incremental services beyond just the vanilla product.

That's, yeah, I think people, that's going to be interesting for a lot of people.

Yeah. And then look, there's so many good people, and I'm gonna plug Recruitment Mentor, but I, I've watched some, and everyone's got their different approach, right? I've got ways that have worked for us, um, and we're constantly learning. As I said, is as soon as you become complacent, you think you've got all the answers, you'll get beaten, right? Back in the day, meetups used to be the go-to thing. Now it's podcasts. Now a lot of people are entering into the podcast, um, And some are really good and got huge audiences, but they're not, and some aren't consistent. So you see one or two and they just don't continue them. Now people are entering into kind of leadership, like we've got London Tech Leaders and people are entering that 'cause you've got the right decision makers there. Now people are setting up academies and tech pathways, similar to us, because it's about the skills, diversity, inclusion, and focusing on that kind of mandate for a business. So you've always got to be looking at the market and how do you build a competitive edge? And as soon as you stop doing that, then you'll be beaten.

Yeah, so let— you just mentioned it there, obviously. I think that's when I, like, if I'm honest, my first perception of you guys was like clearly, yeah, forward thinking, doing things differently. So like the event videos, I think I remember seeing your like website just dedicated to like your community, and I thought, oh wow, this is really fucking cool. Like, I guess, like, what are your thoughts on— with all those experiences that you've had, what do you think of the fundamentals and principles of like building a successful meetup community or doing good events?

I need Jack in the room.

Oh really? Is that his bag? But like, I don't know, what's your take on it? Like, you might not be the person, but like, if you think— if Jack's been really fundamental, like, what do you think Jack's done well?

Or—

because like you said, again, I think the events piece is something a lot of people may be listening to this and going, you know what, they've already been done, like, there's no point doing that. Yeah. Or they've been— but for me, my personal view always is I think that's the wrong way to look at things. Like, people ask me that now about podcasts, oh, am I too late? But like, for me, it's about knowing, like, for you guys, you said what you're sort of experts in and what your niches are. If you start up a meetup, which everyone does, but it's just specific for your people, then that's still really valuable and still worth doing, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So I don't know, anything on there to share? Because I think that'd be useful for people.

100%. And to be honest, you've probably got just as much expertise in this field as we do. We've got quite a number of successful events, and the key thing that made them successful is I feel like a lot of people say, oh, I want to go and do the next shiny thing, which a meetup group or a podcast, and they put together a generic formula, which is we'll get some speakers that have been speaking to— they'll get a venue and they'll bring in attendees. What they fail to do is they don't ask the market what they want to hear, right? So they always— people go into the perspective is, oh, I think this is the right thing, I will do it. What we do is we, we go out and we say, look, we've got a cybersecurity event at London Techies in November, and the way we built that theme and agenda behind it was we went out to the leadership, we said, look, What do you want to see in the market and what is the biggest priority for you right now? And what comes up, cybersecurity. So we steer our conversation towards that because now you've got demand, right? Then you start to ask, right, who would you love to hear from? So instead of you just finding a speaker that you think is good, right? Because some organi— or you might go for the bigger brand names, but they might not necessarily be the most technically advanced. They might be very good organisations and businesses, but from a technology perspective, does the person, individual there bring that kind of visibility of what others can learn from, right? Have they been through those kind of war stories? And that's what we try and look for, is engaging speakers, people who are very good and are willing to share. Because the other thing is, is some organizations can't share too much intel, right? But when you hear about news stories of, I don't know, we had Rodrigo from Facebook, or Meta at the moment, talking about when Facebook and WhatsApp and the whole ecosystem and supply chain went down.

Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah, we talked about the incident management side and what was going on in the world of Facebook at that time. And when you hear stories like that, that's engaging because everyone wants to know, big brand name. And so we try and look at those areas. So one is, is go out to your market, especially if you're an SME in a respective vertical. So if you will look after infrastructure, if you look after mobile, if you look after data, find a company that is willing to get behind what you're doing, get speakers that you feel are engaging. Don't always necessarily leverage it for business, Right, it's always a good tool for business because you're bringing, um, the right consultants and you're saying, look, this is my network and this is what we're building. We're a brand, um, I'm an SME in my brand and I know what I'm doing, um, and this is how I build, build, build that kind of ecosystem. Um, but get the right speakers engaging, be consistent. If you want to run an event, make sure you run multiple events, right? So every 2 months do a separate one. It doesn't need to be monthly. In fact, I would probably do it bi-monthly because That's how you get different audiences. People actually feel they want to come to the next one because it's not every month and they can turn away. And then once you build it, don't expect it to be 100 people at the first event either, right? That's another thing people do I've seen in the market is people want to win every time they do something, right? And if it's 20 people turn up, they think it's a failure. These take time. We've— London DevOps Chat's been running for about 8, 9 years now. That's why it gets the audience sizes you see. London Tech Leaders went from like 100 people at our first event, which is quite fortunate, but we really pushed it, pushed it hard. Then during COVID it went down to like 20 to 30, and it's now started to pick back up, right? We could have easily given up at that time, being like, is it working? But we stuck to it because we knew it was the right thing to do and we saw what we were building. And then as you said, we turned it into a content-led business. So we didn't just run the events, we built LondonTechLeaders.io. We then went out to market and got contributing authors. So people who wanted to share blogs in their LinkedIn stream, most recruiters I know have like 20,000 connections now. So you've got a huge tool, but if you can then share and repost what they're doing, suddenly you're given a platform. That's what other people can't offer. So when you build up your thing, look at the bigger picture. How do you get contributing authors? How do you get people sharing blogs and articles? Because then you can redirect your clients and say, look, we've got this, I've got this channel that's generating all this intel. It's free resources for my market. 'And this is why we're the best at what we do.' But yeah, so much insight in there.

Thank you.

Yeah, sorry, have I been away all my tricks?

No, no, not at all. Like, look, I think you can say all these things, it's a whole different story, people taking action and actually doing it.

That's the big thing.

That's the thing.

So 100% go and do it.

Yeah, I think, yeah, like so many great insights in there. So I guess I wanted to just, as we come to the end then, like I just wanted to, I think this would be something that would be interesting to people. You mentioned earlier around like, in like, just working out the best way to incentivize people around the account management, sales. Like, what I've definitely picked up on is it doesn't— it's not exactly the same in terms of like the consultancy and the work and the solutions that you're selling, but there are definitely a lot more recruitment businesses now structured in a way where they do have dedicated sales and BD teams, and then they do have maybe even account management teams, and then they do have like delivery teams, right?

Yeah.

And I— that is a quite common question on like— it's very easy, right? If you're a 360 recruitment consultant and someone helps you get the candidates, a 50/50 split, done. Do you know what I mean? In terms of like how you incentivize people. But like, yeah, just tell us a bit more. You don't have to go into the exact like granular stuff, but how do you, how have you worked out to make sure like, yeah, everyone is incentivized to go into the same direction and like the account management team are just as motivated as the salespeople and they're all sort of working together? Like how does that work exactly?

So I'm actually gonna, another plug, is, um, we didn't get this quite right.

Okay.

Right. As much as I'd like to say we're very good at what we've done, we've built a successful business. We brought in a sales coach to help advise Jack and I about the strategy. And, and it's about 2 and a half years in, um, Impel Dynamic, a guy called Nima and his colleague Richard came in to advise us and work with our teams. And he actually picked up on something, which was when you're incentivizing your quarterly targets, your incentive points, because if we do an incentive, we do it across the group. It's not like the sales team gets to go to lunch club or an incentive. It's everyone contributes together and we're working towards that big hairy audacious goal or whatever it could be. And it was about, our one was about how do we increase our budget and drive revenue? And so everyone in marketing had to be steered towards, when we do SEO and SEA marketing, it's driving leads to the sales team. When you're in operations, right? And I learned this when I was at La Farge, we used to do 8 AM stand-up, people would get market intel, we'd all stand up and try and get the market leads. So our operations team the night before will gather market leads that we could think beneficial. So X company is growing their tech team or they just raised X amount of funding and they share that through to our sales team. So now they've got different lead generation tools. The talent team is sending through consultants who we think could be very advantageous to projects we're delivering. So when we're talking to clients, we're always ahead of the game. And our sales team, so everyone is driving towards that revenue goal and NFI. In the most streamlined way. To do that, you need to make sure that the targets you're setting your team are all focused and aligned to the same way. What we had done is we had said, look, quarterly goals, marketing, these are the marketing targets, these are your operational targets. But everyone's going off that and then we're setting a goal and we're saying, right, we want to increase budget. What do you go for? Do you go for your target to hit your bonus or do you go for the goal to hit the incentive? And once we'd looked at, and this is where I talk about, it's always worth getting someone to look at, validate, 'Cause we think we know best, but we're very one-dimensional. You're blinkered by the business you're looking at and what you've been doing day to day. Just having that outside perspective and going, actually what you're doing is you're going, you've got some very good people, but they're going in different directions. Bring them all together to that goal. It's been hugely valuable for us in organisation to grow that revenue. And now everyone's on the same page, they're all working towards the same goal and they're trying to collaborate together. And the biggest other learning I'd say is, what this team also looks at was the psychology. So one of my biggest challenges was around empathy when I was younger, was I was like, why is not everyone working the same, mate? Or it'd be tolerance. Tolerance is probably a better way to look at it, is some people might go home early and I'd be like, well, I'm working till 7 o'clock. And okay, did the great things in my career, but I was always like, if I work less, everyone else got to. Failing to recognize what not everyone's as motivated or has the same motivations as I did. And the way they positioned to me is, is Improdynamic was like, you want to operate the Premier League, right? You want to operate at the top of your game. And some of these people are coming through, aren't— haven't worked that intensity, they haven't worked at that pace. So give them time, right? Secondly is get to know your team and be empathetic that some of them might have family priorities, some of them might not want to work in the office every day of the week and such. And as soon as I adopted that mentality of being empathetic and being more tolerant of what thing and getting to know my team I've built. And you start to empower your team this way. You start to build an authentic relationship where they trust you. And once you've got that team, people want to work hard and you start to see the results come through. And that was one of the biggest learnings I did, which is changing that mindset to be not all about me and being that— and it's good to be selfish sometimes, but as soon as you start to look at the bigger picture and get people on board, that's when we started to succeed.

Yeah, I love that. And kudos to you, mate, on having The humility to get to that point, you know, it's not easy, right?

There's a lot of people shouting at me.

Yeah, do you know what I mean? So like, I rate that. So look, as we come to the end here then, talk to me about what are you guys excited for? Like, clearly, like, you've been on this journey on really establishing product market fit. You'll continue to go on this continuous learning journey, which I absolutely love. Clearly reinvesting in the business, reinvesting in getting advice and help, and obviously reinvesting in the business and growing the teams and those things. Like, what Like, yeah, like we're obviously still early on in this journey, which is really exciting. So like, what are the sort of short-term to medium and long-term ambitions for WeChat then, and where do you think you can take it?

So yeah, some of the biggest ones is we're going to be announcing we're moving to building our US capability. So I'm moving out to New York.

Really?

Yeah, March for 2 years. So a lot of work's been underway to prep us for this. We think it's a great opportunity for the business to have a global operation. So that's happening quite imminently. The other one is we just launched Tech Pathways. So this is investing in underrepresented areas and individuals. And so we sponsor them through an 8-week intensive bootcamp with Le Wagon and then bring them through. So people don't necessarily get the opportunity in a bit of a passive market. We've seen, and unfortunately it's not a commercial vehicle for us, this is the right thing for us to do, right? We've built a great business And some of the individuals who've come through have been awesome. So one of them, Craig, used to be on School of Rock, so he plays like 8 instruments. We went to some of his gigs and he's quality talent. He wanted a change in career, so he's 30 years old, came and approached us, we sponsored him through it, and that guy is incredible, right? So we're seeing, we've now got Ben coming through who wanted a shift in his career. So these people who might necessarily not have got that opportunity previously, we're building this tech pathway, working with organisations, and it solves multiple different things. One is around the talent skills gap. The second one is, as I mentioned before, diversity and inclusion is a very topical agenda for most organisations and it's how to really solve that because I feel like there's a lot of talk and activity in the market but not a lot of action.

Action, yeah.

Yeah, and so we're trying to really instigate that in whether it's the events we run and vocalise that but actually do it ourselves. So that's a big project for us at the moment. And the other one is just building our capability in the UK, right? So we've got some amazing people come through the organisation. We've just hired another wave of talent to join us. We want to be number one.

You want to be number one?

Number one technology for DevOps, software, data and cloud, right? We're a challenger brand. I feel like we've got a clear pathway in terms of some of our biggest competitors who are awesome at what they do. Some have been acquired recently and it gives us that opportunity. Look, we don't have any external investors into the business so we can set that direction and we can be quite flexible in our approach. So it's an exciting journey.

Do you think you'd be here, like, when you think of that first year? Do you think, did you always think like, this is where we're going to get?

I'd like to say yeah.

But you had some moments where you doubted?

Yeah, there's always going to be, yeah, there's been moments where it's like, this is getting scary, right? But as of late, we're in a fortunate, touch wood, it continues, As I said, it's just not being complacent, it's looking at the bigger picture, getting the right people, giving autonomy to my team. I've got a great team, but if you micromanage, you lose good people.

It sounds like they managed to get you out of the office, mate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris New York.

I just get them new swag, t-shirts in the office, and it keeps them happy.

No, look, Chris, I think, yeah, kudos to you and Jack and like this journey you've been on. Like I'm sure, like you said, there's been plenty, plenty of wobblies, plenty of challenges, but clearly you've had a real commitment to learning, failing forward, reinvesting in yourselves, and like you said, not getting complacent.

I think that's— it's having fun along the way, right? Is going to work is most of your life, right? Or setting up a business, and you sacrifice a lot to do it. But I love what I do. I love the team, and it's fun, right? We're not just work, work, work. We go out, we celebrate, we have drinks, we, we go to Christmas parties and stuff. Um, we fly out to Malaga to meet our clients. So there are elements of like, this is enjoyable, but obviously at the end of the day you do sacrifice a lot to do it. And anyone— and I'll say at the end is if there is anyone who wants advice how to do it or wants to take that leap, just need some word of encouragement, always drop me a message on LinkedIn.

I love that, Chris.

Thank you, mate. Cheers.

Thank you so much for listening to the episode. I hope you enjoyed it and got value from the conversation. If you did enjoy it, Please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe, and we'll see you in the next episode.