From Struggling Recruiter to Top Biller to Entrepreneur: The Hard Lessons From Liam’s Journey

Liam, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, how's it going?

Glad I managed to catch you whilst in the UK.

Yeah, it's good to be back in the city, to be honest. Like, as much as I love Dubai, being back in London, it's different energy here, to be fair.

But kindly managed to do it when we got tube strikes, but we got here. So I know I was saying to you before this, when people found out I was having you on the pod, there was a lot of people that were looking forward to hearing this story. And clearly you, you've built a great reputation for yourself, which, which is absolutely awesome to, to see, to hear. So our real goal with this conversation is we've got, we've got two chapters really, haven't we? Yeah. And you're very much in this second chapter, but this first chapter was 5 years at a business called Opus where you really built all your experience, your success as a contract recruiter. So we're going to talk about, really just get straight into what we felt like we did really well there.

Yeah.

And then the second part of this chapter that you're still very much in the trenches of now is you're on this entrepreneurial journey. You've moved your life to Dubai, you're building a business there, and that's also then resulted in you doing more and more business in the UAE as well, let alone just having your business there and your life there. I'm going to talk about the realities of that, what's been hard, because it definitely hasn't been all plain sailing, this entrepreneurial journey. So we're going to get stuck into it. So to give everyone a bit of context, for anyone that may not know who you are, your story. But yeah, as I said earlier, 5 years at Opus.

Yep.

Contract recruitment through and through. So your world, your ecosystem was JavaScript inside the M25.

Yeah.

I've got him and we'll talk about it, but first year you, you openly said to me it wasn't like the perfect start. Like, I think after a year in, your weekly GP as a contractor was like just under 2K, uh, and then we did, uh, I did speak to Jack, your old manager, to sort of, um, also confirm this because I know you said it to me. No, I didn't believe you, but I was like, oh Jack, I just spoke to Liam, he said like— because you, you also wasn't sure, was you? Because in terms of you being out of the business, right? Yeah, yeah. But you still very much— you hold the contract still. So your contract book at its peak, June 2021, was 32.5 weekly GP around 50 runners across 15, 16 clients. Um, and then you left that business in June 2023 to start this entrepreneurial journey. You saved 100K, that was your sort of next chapter fund to move to Dubai, start your business. And then we've then got dollars, because when you go to UAE, you're operating in dollars. So first year it's been yourself, but recently brought on your brother. But first year, dollars-wise, 180,000 in your first year, because you've ended up doing a lot more perm basically.

Yeah.

Compared to contract you did in the past. Second year, $380K, and that was also your first year, like, doing a lot more business in the UAE as well, and that being more of a focus. And I know currently we're in year 3, currently averaging between $60K to $70K, $1,000 US dollars per month. So should finish strong this year, but around $500K is the plan. And you brought your— do you say twin brother?

No, no, no, not twin brother. I was looking to see him. He looks completely—

that's what I thought.

Blonde hair, blue eyes.

But brother.

Yeah, yeah, brother.

Okay, cool. And I know now it's around 70% of your business, your revenues coming from the UAE market.

Yeah.

Um, 90% Perm, and then you have 30% UK business as well.

Yeah.

To give everyone some, some context. So let, should we, let's just get straight into this Opus journey. Yeah. So there's a, there's a few things that we want to talk about. I think why don't we just first start with like this first year, like, it wasn't— it just wasn't, uh, like a lot of people's, uh, careers in recruitment. It wasn't just a straight line. It wasn't like start and then you just keep working hard, then it's success, success. But I even got— we'll pull it up on the screen— but, um, I text a few people to be like, right, I'm sitting down with Liam, what have you got to say, what stories have you got? But like, I, um, Nigel from Opus sent me like the first year leaderboard of like contract GP, and you are, you are like You're pretty far down than that.

Yeah, yeah, probably the bottom.

You wasn't the bottom, but you was, you was like down. It was like around the 1800 mark I got in there. So let's just first talk about like if me and you were to, to meet up at the end of that first year. I know you're big into personal development, which we're going to get into. I know that was a game changer for you, but if me and you just met up towards the end of your first year, like, and I said, oh Liam, how's recruitment going? Like, what, how would you have described your experience in that first year? Like, how would you be talking about, what was your mindset then?

I would just say it was so tough. I think it was incredibly tough because obviously I wasn't doing the numbers that I wanted to be doing, but I saw other people doing it. So just to kind of give you some context, when I first walked into that office on our very first day, JP, obviously you've had on the podcast previously, right? He was going to be my line manager, the person that I reported into. And I think I would have been, what, 20, 22, 23. He was just a year older or two years older. And on the board, it had all your billings, your earnings or everything like that. And I basically walked in and saw that he was earning like £100,000, £150,000 a year. And for me, someone that had come from a background where it's like living in Lincolnshire, single parent family, earns like £20 grand a year sort of thing. Like that was insane to me. So I always knew that there was the possibility of earning a lot of money, but after the first year I felt like it just wasn't happening. And I was constantly like calling back to my family, like, I don't know if it's going to work out. Like, I don't know if I can survive. I'm in London. It's so expensive there and all that kind of stuff. So I was super, super stressed, but I just knew that if I worked super hard, that was what the possibility was.

And just out of interest, do you remember like how it was sold to you? Like I'm assuming part of the sell was this is where you can get to.

Yeah.

But was you also sold how hard it'd be?

Probably not as hard as it was. It'd be, so it's like even, even just applying for jobs, right? When I was at uni, I did international business management and I really wanted to be a business consultant. That was kind of like the end goal post uni. Now when I was going through jobs on LinkedIn, sorry, on Indeed, I saw that there was recruitment consultant under the same sort of bracket as business consultancy, but the OTE on those jobs posted was like 70, 80 grand. And that was way higher than what jobs at PwC, for example, was paying in your first year. So I always thought, wow, where are people making so much money? This is crazy. But I never realized how hard it would be for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that hopefully, like, that was my experience getting into recruitment, but I think there's enough stories on here now that people can listen to, to know how hard yeah, how hard it is. But definitely, so fair to say, didn't have the perfect first year. What would you, what would you say, like, any, like, looking back, any, like, real standout lessons or parts of the job that you felt like, you know what, that's what I wasn't quite getting right? Or was it just a matter of you was putting the inputs in, you was doing the volume? Yeah, it was just as you, as you got more and more reps, you, you become better at doing the thing, essentially. I don't know, is there anything on reflection that you felt like, you know, actually it was those sorts of things that I— it just took me a while to, to get the hang of?

I think it was, you know, you can follow the process, which is great, but I don't think I was connecting the dots in between why you was following that process. So the blueprint of whatever the KPIs and targets you had to hit, I understood that, but when you actually connect the process together, I think I lost that connection part. Um, and look, I mean, to be fair, I think in the first year, I'm not going to say, oh God, I was super unlucky, but there was lots of things that didn't work out in your favor that maybe some people it might or whatever. Right. So I think, yeah, it's a difficult one. I think I was just a bit rubbish at connecting the dots in the first few months.

And just, just curious on this, would you rather, like, thinking about your, that your recruitment career at Opus, would you, are you pleased that you had that first year where it didn't go to platinum, or would you have rather had the first year where I'm sure there's people there that had that success early on?

It's honestly so funny you say that because I feel like at the time I hated it and I was, you know, in a nice way jealous of everybody else that started with me. We always used to start in cohorts and everyone was doing a lot, lot better on me and earning a lot, lot more money than me. But I'm so happy that it worked out in that way because I really learned all the hard lessons first, like, you know, the deals that they're going through, the candidates that drop out and the work effort from the start because I think if you sometimes jump into recruitment, and this is what I saw when people joined Opus or other places as well, I think that when you join, maybe you get a few deals over the line very, very quickly. You don't know what it's actually taken to make that happen, and it's a little bit fluky. So I knew how hard it was to make it happen, so I didn't become lazy or whatever, right? I knew how hard it was, and I think that makes a big difference. If you don't have a successful start in recruitment, but you work incredibly hard, you do everything you should do, then I think it will 100% work out in the end.

Yeah, I think it just makes it harder when you're doing the same things that got you the results, but then the second 6 months you're doing the exact same things, you're not getting the results. Yeah, that's just way harder to sort of swallow, overcome, I feel like, versus you're doing the same thing and you still haven't quite got the result. Yeah, but you're after—

I remember when I, when I started, I remember a lot of people said to me, like, look, you're doing the right thing, it's going to take you 12 months. The first year in recruitment is always the hardest. So in my head I was thinking, 12 months, 12 months, as soon as that 12-month period over, then you're going to be all right.

So let's talk about, because basically I feel like anyone that knew you, the success you'd had, if they were thinking about, right, I'm going to be sitting down with you, they're going to want to know like how you was able to achieve some of these things. And yeah, when we prepared for this, we tried to really distill it down into what those hows are. Yeah. So I want to start with what you sort of described as it seemed like really one of your first principles, which was this sort of idea that basically it comes to this, this relationships part, doesn't it? I feel like— so you've got this famous, uh, piece that I think you said that you always said, which was, I wanted people to feel like that they were shopping with friends, not being sold to.

Yeah.

Just tell us a bit about what this— what that meant to you, why you deem that to be important, why that's the sort of principle that I'm sure you live by now.

Yeah.

But why do you feel like that ended up being a real sort of pillar to your success?

Yeah, I think that was a bit of a game changer because I feel like if, especially when you're focusing on one niche, if you know everybody in that niche and you make them your friend, let's say for example, right, we're trying to get, I've got a really good relationship with a client and we've got a number of candidates at interview stage. You're then as a friend giving that client advice on who do you think is the best for that job? You know, we've mapped it, we've, sorry, we've vetted these candidates out. We've had them through the process. And rather than me at the end of the process trying to sell in this candidate again or whatever, It's more of a, look, this is who I think is best for you. You know, and when you go shopping with friends, right, you want to buy a new t-shirt. You say, oh, which one do you prefer? Do you prefer the black one, the white one? You guys, you're going to take your friend's, you know, opinion on that quite, quite seriously. So that's where I really started generating that sort of thing from. And also from a candidate side, if I'm really sort of building deep relationship with candidates in my market, the same contractors place them in roles again and again and again. If I had that candidate forward for a new role and maybe they had another opportunity for another recruiter. They would take my guidance. Not always, you know, whether it was a right or wrong one, they would take my guidance basically because they trusted me as a friend to be able to select the right role for them. So I think that's where that came from.

And then we spoke about this, but I'm always curious because we hear it so much, like how it— obviously if we just use the same analogy, like how, how do we make friends? Yeah, it's not like a one thing, is it? It's like a multitude of experiences, conversations, things that ultimately you do with that other person that then result in you both being able to call each other friends, I guess. But like, I ask you, like, we hear this word relationships, like, how do we— if we were to really think about that, like, how do we build relationships? Like, I don't know how you thought about it. I'm sure you've really had to think about that as you're in this UAE stage because you're like, right, I need to build more relationships. Like, how do you think about that? Like, what would make you go, I have a really good relationship with that person, versus I have an okay surface-level relationship with this other person. What's the difference?

Yeah, I think like, look, in recruitment you've got the surface level of I'll help you find a candidate, or, you know, I'm going to help you find a new job. I think it always starts like that, but naturally I feel like I'm quite almost a nosy person. So constantly asking, what are you up to at the weekends? What are you interested in? Everything that's outside of recruitment, basically. And I think it kind of goes off the back of that. Some people want to use a recruiter as a recruiter and that's it. And that's totally fine. But people that were open to, you know, sharing more information about the relationship, I would really try and capitalize on that. You know, like, remember what they're interested in, remember when their birthdays are, remember their kids' names, things like that, which I know is quite common practice. But as you get deeper, you start to almost act like you're texting your friend, right? So you see a meme that's funny and it relates to something that person previously said, you ping them that meme. Or there's an event that's happening, oh, you know, I know you mentioned you was into this, should we go together? So loads of different things, as you would actually with your friends, and just showing genuine interest about that person's life, about their situation, everything around that. I think that really buys you a lot.

Yeah, it is. It's one thing being curious and, like you said, being nosy about those things, but then it's the other part of, like, then not using that— it's probably not the right word— but then remembering that and being mindful that when you next have conversations, like, oh, you said you was going to this, how was it? Like, how did it go? And then it is just all those just little buildup of experiences and knowledge and that you know about that of a person. So true.

And I think people are shocked because sometimes I wouldn't have actually spoke to that person or met that person even for a few months, for example, and I've mentioned something they've said ages ago that's completely irrelevant to recruitment, and they get a little bit taken aback by it and think, God, this person's really listened and really cared about it. So I think that also helps you stand out as a recruiter if that person remembers those things.

And I know we've been, we've been chatting a lot just on like WhatsApp, but like, was that something you did in Opus or no? Like, because I do think that that's It's a very like particular part of it, but I do think there's something to be said of like when you're WhatsApping someone versus like emailing someone. 100%.

WhatsApp's like another level, isn't it? You've got email and then I try and move everything onto WhatsApp as quick as possible now. Yeah, yeah.

Did you— so what, what did that look like in Opus? That might have been a bit different. Did you— was that— was you like texting people? Was you one for that or not really?

Um, to be honest, I think more so now. Opus, it was more phone calls and you were speaking to people on a regular basis and you would, you'd message them now and then, but Yeah, I think, I think more so now than ever. I don't know if that's maybe just a transition in the market as well. People are constantly on WhatsApp more than they are actually trying to call people and things like that.

But yeah, and then I know you mentioned as well, like, whatever part of this career with Opus, like, how, how often was you going out meeting people?

Multiple times a week for sure.

Yeah, um, because I do think, again, look, I'm sure you have mates that, you know, you're still very much doing the UK market. But again, I think in this sort of technology AI world, that's almost become like a competitive advantage again. Like what me and you are doing now, sitting in front of people.

100%. Like I was doing it a lot then, but even more so now. I think that people will crave that, especially with the AI things nowadays. Like people will crave that personal relationship more than anything else.

So if I was to put you on the spot here, but like if I was to— if you were to say I've had a good month of meetings this month, yeah, how many meetings you reckon you had in like contracts?

But back then, Probably earlier days I was a bit nervous to go out and meet people as much, right? And then there was COVID, so it didn't really happen. But post-COVID it was like, yeah, 4 or 5 meetings a week in person.

Really?

Yeah. Okay. Love that. And I used to, luckily back then, right, I could expense things. So I was often going out for very nice lunches and taking clients and candidates for new experiences. I would actually genuinely pick, because I'm a bit of a foodie, right? I like to go to these nice places. So I'd take these candidates and clients to places they've never been before, which was kind of a bit special for them. So they remembered that experience as well.

Yeah, I love that. Should we talk about— because I know you're big on this, and then we'll get on to mindset. Yeah, trust the process. Let's just talk about this. Like, I've got this— I've got this email sent to me. It's an internal email. May or may not remember it, but it was from the— so I think Opus had to do deal emails.

Deal emails.

Yeah, yeah. This is an internal email from Rory, who's the group MD at the time. And I'll just read it because I think that, and then we can talk about it. But he said, just in case anyone has missed this deal email, Liam has just hit 30K weekly GP a week when, um, a week when starters start. He was celebrating hitting 10K less than a year ago. He does one of the busiest markets in the group, which is full of competition, but he is relentless. For context, it takes him 4 days to chase his timesheets while running 25K. He did 9 deals last month. He then did 4 this week, and last month he somehow found the time to be in the green in the core inputs of CCs, sendouts, specs, and managers added.

Yeah.

So being in the green is a KPI piece, right? Please let that sink in. If you feel there are too many KPIs, the guy who will be earning over 300K this year still believes in them and still overachieves them. And if you don't know Liam, he didn't start very well on the job. And was still smashing his inputs back then and never gave up or made excuses. He knuckled down to get better. Well done, Liam, for raising the bar to dizzying heights, and Neil and JP for working with him so closely since day one. I think that's testament, right? And you, like, when I met you, you straight away like, oh, that was me. Like, I just— yeah, that was— you was more addicted to being at the top of the activity and being in the green. Just talk to us about this, like Because I'm sure you see now, you share a lot of content yourself, there's been so much conversation around KPIs and what is— what we should do, shouldn't do. So like, just talk us a bit about why this was— why this was so fundamental to your journey and the success that you had.

I think, like, just to give you some context, right, so the KPIs that we had at Opus— and I love KPIs, I think it's the best way to measure someone, how they're operating, what they've previously done, and also to predict what they're going to be doing in the future with their deals and process and stuff like that. But we used to do every day you had to get 3 leads, right? So it's following this process that I mentioned. I wasn't very good at connecting the dots with originally, but 3 leads per day. That's people that are having interviews or, you know, very, very good bits of information of people that are hiring or have got projects coming up, right? And then you would add 5 managers around that. So you put 5 new managers on the system from the leads that people are interviewing at. And then you would follow up with CCs, right? So business development calls around that. And then you would follow up with 10 CCs, sorry, 10 CV sends. So if you followed that process, there's no way that you can't not pull jobs. This is, this is what they told me anyway, right? This is what they told me for the first year when I wasn't doing business. But they said, if you do this, it's going to happen eventually. And I think I became so addicted to— I wasn't getting the deals over the line to start off with, but my wins internally was that I was beating everybody else on the KPI. So I knew eventually it was going to happen. So if I then add, you know, an extra lead a day, if I had an extra CC a day, an extra couple of CV sends a day, how quick can I progress in this business? So I became so addicted to that. And even throughout my whole career, because I even got so obsessed with it, even when trainees that came, and I was 4 years into the business and, you know, doing 14 deals a month and things like that. Like, if there was a trainee that came in and was beating me in my own KPIs, it would make me crazy. So I would stay later. I'll stay 9, 10 o'clock in the office just so I could win that next morning send out where everybody's saying who's in the green, who's in the red. I loved it because I knew the return investment from that.

What, what made you— sorry, get the competition element, but is there anything else that made you feel good about fixating on that? Was it, it made you feel like, I'm this, I know I can control this, and if I control this, you've seen enough evidence now where if I do this, I know whether it's now or in 3 months' time, 2 months' time, or longer, the rest will take care of itself?

Well, I think that's it, right? So at the end of every week, you kind of got to review yourself and how you've done that week, and you might not have done a deal, but you might have done everything around it to make sure that the deal went in. So I think if you look back at yourself at the end of the week and you've managed to hit all these KPIs, you know you've done a good job. Even if, you know, recruitment has so many ups and downs and all these things that can happen, so you know you've got that satisfaction yourself that you've done that. So if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. If it does, it does. But you know, if you follow that process long enough, it has to happen.

And then anything to— I think the other— I don't know if you were mindful of this as you started to see a lot more success, but it sounded like you still stayed grounded in doing those inputs that got you there.

Yeah.

But I think then when I've sat down with top performers who then either maybe had a big hit to their contract book or they had all that success and then it started to go the opposite way, was that word complacency.

Yeah.

Is that something that creeped into your mind, or was it again just like, if you, if you just do this process, complacency won't happen? Because you could have easily got complacent. Yeah. And not been at the top of the leaderboards.

Yeah, I think no, because I, I had the fear of not being number one anymore, or I had the fear of that contract book dropping. You know, when it gets to 30K, it's, it's a lot of money coming through, and you like, you always want more, you know, what's next, what's next. So if that was it, if I— that's the way that got me there, I had to keep on doing it, trying to get as far as I possibly could.

Yeah, so it's just that, that fear of like, yeah, okay, won that competition again, and now how much that drove you. But then also, like, if you let your foot off the gas, what that could then mean.

Yeah, and you can really reverse engineer it. We always used to have monthly MOTs basically on your book, and it, it, it, there is months where maybe I didn't hit it, for example, and you can really reverse engineer that, and you can tell that the 6 weeks post that you didn't really have a good time, do you know what I mean? So if you really just follow the process, and if you reverse engineer and you haven't done well, then you know why.

And what have you, what have you got to say about— I don't know if, again, this, this is part of your journey with it, but we've spoken a lot about following the process, doing the reps, inputs. But then did you, did you start to then think about, as you got more and more experienced, like the quality of those inputs? I don't know, because then that, I feel like sometimes that can then result in people being like, I know I had on the come up I had to do all these reps, but now I can send 5 really good sendouts and they're even better than the 10 that I used to send. I don't know, did you think about that, or would you like, did you feel like you could just combine the both?

Yeah, no, 100%. I think naturally as you do, the more reps you get, better. So the quality gets better, the candidates you find are better, and things like that. So just as a natural sort of incline, it does get better itself. Um, but yeah, 100%.

Should we talk about mindset then? So when, when did— because you, you said here that when you really started to get the taste of the success and reaping the rewards of your hard work, you said like you fully got obsessed with work and built your life around recruitment. Yeah, like a sports person. What does that like— tell me, what does that look like? What does that— what do you mean? What did you mean by that?

Probably sounds a bit sad, but I think once I'd got that taste for success and, you know, started to earn a lot of money and was hitting big numbers, I got fully absorbed into it. And I think once you— once I know that my managers and things believed in me, right, the first year, and maybe I didn't believe in myself so much, but once you start seeing the belief yourself and you start seeing the results from it, like, I was doubling down on everything I possibly could. So I literally reverse engineered my life around what could I possibly do to make recruitment better. So I think this is when I fell into personal development and when I fell into Looking at other people in different industries. You mentioned real estate before, but real estate's always been a pretty big one for me. So I found like who the best real estate agents are in sales in the US and things like that, and basically read and understood how did they level up, you know, how did they make their job better? So not just following a recruitment process, it was how can you maximize that time in work? So for me, I ended up doing things like, you know, outsourcing all my meals in the office. I would get delivered to me every day. So I didn't ever have to cook any food because I could spend that extra 45 minutes on each meal on recruitment. So I was doing more recruitment, right? Because I loved it so much. And it was like, you know, how do I recover outside of work? Do I do meditation before inside of work? So, you know, when I get to work, I'm in a better headspace. It was everything I could possibly do outside of work to make sure that I could perform best in it.

And like, what— I'm just curious, like, what, what were your mates like? All right, like, I don't know, do they— I don't know, because I do feel like there's something to be said like when you go on that journey, yeah, doesn't mean your mates are on that journey as well.

Yeah, it's true. And honestly, like, so for example, when I first moved to London, I didn't really have any friends, and my friends were the guys in the office, um, and we had an amazing group of people in there that was at a similar sort of mindset. So everyone's kind of egging each other on, everyone was pushing each other to do more. I think external friends, they kind of just left me to it because they knew I was so embedded into Every time I would catch up with them, all I wanted to speak about was recruitment. So they probably got a bit sick of me, to be honest. But yeah, I don't know. I think I got so embedded into it, they'd let me do that.

Anything that you— obviously it would have been loads of small things, different things, but in that part of the journey, anything that you feel like, I spent X and it gave me the best return on like what you're trying to get, which was like time focused, just like you said, things being optimized around your career, which you mentioned around the mills. I can see that probably being up there, but is there anything else that you feel like you got a really good return on?

I think it's a weird one. It's because it's actually a save that I did do. So I think rather than investing into it, and I think I noticed that if I wasn't going out with the usual crowd that maybe are up and down in recruitment and we're going for beers 3 or 4 nights a week, I noticed if I didn't do that, um, my consistency went through the roof, right? Because I was never coming to the office and looking at the screen and thinking, oh God, I don't want to do this today, you know? So it wasn't necessarily a return investment I got off the back of it, but doing things like that really helped me progress a lot more as well.

And do you think you have to— just curious on this, like, do you— because I really got obsessed with this stuff when I— because I didn't know what I wanted to do, fell into like sales, and then I was just like, I wanna— I wanted to get my hands on anything that I felt like would help me improve, help me succeed in my career.

Yeah.

Do you feel like when I was in that mindset, I sort of found it hard to understand why others wouldn't?

Yeah, so true.

Like, did you, do you feel like people have to arrive there themselves? I don't know, because I'm sure you've, you've got, you know, friends where you're like, they've got potential, they maybe just don't, I don't know, like, do you feel like you have to arrive at that point to go, I really want to just try and invest in myself and be the best version of myself?

I think that's what, what I struggle with a little bit. And again, luckily there was other people in the business that were very much on that, on that type of, you know, mindset. But it's difficult because when I got so invested into all that sort of stuff, I couldn't imagine why somebody wouldn't want to pick up a book or wouldn't want to do that to make themselves better. But some people just don't. Maybe that's like, they'll never change and that's what they'll continuously do. But you kind of get a bit short-fused with your friends that maybe you previously had that aren't doing that. And that's down to me for just not being so understanding of it. But yeah, yeah, completely agree.

So should we talk about his entrepreneurial journey then? So how— so was there any, was there any science behind 100K feels like a good number to start this, and let's just start there. Like, was there a reason behind that, or you just felt like that would give you a really good buffer?

I think, I think there wasn't necessarily like a point where I was like, look, I'll get 100K and then I'll move. It just kind of all happened at once where it seemed to be a pretty round figure I had at the time. I was in limbo of what's next, you know, what's next. Um, and then I've obviously been to Dubai on holiday, and I love London. I never thought that I would actually leave London. Like, it's where You know, it kind of made me in my career the first few years and I had this best time there. But I went to Dubai on holiday, um, realized it's quite similar to Dubai. There's lots of stuff going on and you also have to pay no tax. So that was kind of my thing, right? I had 100 grand and was just like, let's give it a shot.

And was it— look, we can be honest here because I do think I've been speaking about this and I think we— and we'll talk about it. I think what you'll see online is always, it's like anything, right? You'll only see the good parts versus like the actual trade-offs. And there's always trade-offs. But was there a moment that you was on that holiday where you're like, right, this is where I want to be? Or was it actually just more? Because I know when we spoke, right, you know, when you've ended up getting the success that you've had, like we said earlier in that email, earning over 300K. You're gonna be paying a good amount of tax.

Yes.

On that. So was that the main driver for you, do you feel like?

At the time that I went to Dubai the first time round, I think I'd literally just hit under 500 grand that year earnings. And I got 200, 250 actually in the bank. And I was like, obviously that's amazing money. But I remember thinking if anybody hits 100 grand a year, like you can do anything you want in the world. But the reality is you actually probably can't. And I think when I got to that stage, I was like, now you can really do anything you want in the world. And it, the constraints are pretty big when that happens. Um, but there was a moment when I was there, and I just— it sounds so cliché— I was literally at this place called Aura Sky Pool, and it's basically a pool that's on like the 70th floor or something. You get to see the whole of Dubai, the Palm. And I was sat there, and I was like, okay, I have to do this. Whatever I do now, from on— from, from on this point, I have to move to Dubai, and I have to make it work. I remember it so clearly, that sort of sinking in. Nice. Yeah.

So let's talk about it then. So I think we— and let me know if I get any of this wrong— but obviously that we had that $100K saved, that was very much like move to Dubai business money. But you— and I've heard other people say this— but typically in Dubai, you have to pay for rent up front.

Yeah.

So obviously, you know, you're going from a certain lifestyle, but you're like, right, I'll— you know, I'm going to live in the marina. Like, I've worked hard, that's the lifestyle. So What, 45, 50K of that was gone? Yeah, not gone, but like you have to pay up front.

That's the thing. Yeah, I was getting so excited at this point, and obviously I've been living this pretty nice life in London and, and whatever. And then, um, I heard the real estate market moves incredibly quick there, which it does. Like, rentals can go off the market straight away. And I never even viewed this apartment because when I was looking, it was like, look, don't look until you're right. But I didn't really want that. And I'd seen that there's this place up for, for rent, and it had a lovely view over the moon, all this kind of stuff. And the woman was on the phone to me broker and said, look, like, even though you're moving in one week's time, you need to secure this deal today. But she said you have to pay in one check. So that was like a big whack up front. But in my mind, and we'll come on to this, because I think it's a lot of like maybe delusion, naivety from me. I didn't really see that as an issue or even, obviously it's a lot of money, but I thought, look, I can go and build a 10 grand a week contract book in 6 months, no problem. Like 10 grand a week, no tax. That's very, very, very affordable. So Didn't really seem like a big, big thing to do at the time.

And then by this point, just get into the particulars, because I think people will be interested. Had you, what would you, what had you got sorted in terms of like you being able to work their business? Let's just talk about that. We've spoken about how you've approached it financially, the financial runway you wanted to give yourself. Yeah. But what did you have to, because I'm sure you had to learn this, like what did you have to get sorted in terms of being able to actually work there, have a business there?

Yeah, so it was a, I guess a massive learning curve and loads of things that I never had done before. Like I never set up a business before, then all of a sudden I've had to set up a a UK Ltd, and then I've had to set up a business in Dubai. And the way that it works is, is that my visa is attached to the business in Dubai. Sorry. So I got a free zone license, and how you do that is you have to go over, you have to get your blood test, medicals, and all that sort of stuff. So that's how you set it up. Um, and again, like, does that cost—

sorry to jump in— is that—

yeah, so I think it costs about $8,000 for me to set up my business in Dubai attached to my visa, which renews every 2 years. And then in the UK, obviously, like, normal standard cost of setting up. But even little things that I wasn't aware of, for example, was I didn't— obviously I'd always done contract recruitment before, so that's always what I planned to do. And there's no open finance in Dubai, so you can never get credit lines. So I had to always have the UK business set up as well, because if I wanted to use one of the credit businesses to help you pay your contractors, I couldn't do that from Dubai. Right. So there's different things that I had to learn at the time as well.

Okay. But if me and you Did you have a business plan?

Um, not really, to be honest. Like, I wasn't prepped as half as much as I should have been, looking back.

Fair. So if me and you sat down and, you know, I was meeting you up for a coffee before you went to Dubai, what would have been— and I said, oh, like, what's the plan with the business? So it was very much, you had— you've got this unwavering stack of evidence of being a successful contract recruiter.

Yeah.

It was, you have your covenants, there'll be clients that you can go to after that.

Yeah.

But you back yourself, I'm gonna go over to Dubai and build a contract book in the UK market, but I'm gonna be based in Dubai. Was that like the overarching goal? 100%.

Yeah. And I was like, I fully believe in that dream. I was selling it to everybody else, all my family. I was like, look, this is amazing, I can do this. Um, and it would happen very, very quickly. Um, that's what, that's what obviously I assumed to start off with. But that's exactly, that was exactly the plan. I had no— I got obviously like I basically handed in my notice and then moved to Dubai 5 days later, and I just thought I'd be able to crack on straight away, obviously with a sick leave coming up in the middle, but I thought it'd be easy to spin up business quite, quite easily.

So when, when did the feelings of like, oh shit, okay, this might be harder than I thought, when did that start to creep in then?

I think you would have got—

why wouldn't you have gone there with like just on like confidence, just got this entire track record, like you're gonna back yourself 100%, and I guess like To paint the picture, that was exactly what I thought.

So moved over there and I thought, look, I've got 6 months before I can tap into my old network. You know, I've got big accounts where I've got 10, 15, 20 contractors in. That's banked. Like, 6 months' time, I'm going to be flying. It's okay. But for the first 6 months, I'm going to have to tap into new markets, see what I can grab and all that sort of stuff. But I thought, if it doesn't work out amazingly, it's okay. It's always going to be okay after 6 months. Um, and ended up pulling a few jobs which were completely out my usual patch, right? So going against everything about being a specialist in your niche. I'd seen a couple of direct adverts for mobile engineers, which are perm. Managed to get them on the phone like third day in.

And this is the UK?

UK, remotely from Dubai. And it was two permanent jobs, managed to get them exclusively and filled them. So in 3 weeks I put, you know, £25-30K on the board and I was like, wow, like permanent recruitment's easiest, what's going on? Like, why is everyone complaining about it? And then again, massive slap in the face. And I think coming back to the question you asked me earlier, right? Do you think it's sometimes better to not have a good start? 100%, because I thought after that, this is going to be so easy. Like, I'll coast through it, do my usual inputs, but everything after 6 months will be fine. And it didn't work out like that. I think after the first month, I've really, really struggled. I didn't have any of my previous network, which that's all I'd ever done before. Any of my previous clients, um, didn't really know how to do permanent recruitment and didn't really know contractors, N&A, or the market that wasn't JavaScript. So I've really, really struggled for the first 6 months on new business and mapping out that space.

And what is it that you struggled with? Was it just this sort of feeling of like, I'm doing what I've always done and I'm not getting the results?

You know what, I think I'd almost gone against what I'd done previously, which is so silly to do that because I had so much structure and we said before I was so obsessed in the KPIs, but I wasn't doing that. I'd set up the business and I'd been, you know, shown all these amazing AI tools and all these different things, which you think, God, these are going to be the silver bullet for me. This is going to make my life so much easier. So I got really hooked on learning about all these platforms and things like that. And I kind of thought that would replace a lot of the hard work that I put in previously, which is completely not the truth. And I wasn't putting the basics in that I originally did to make myself successful in the first place.

So you do, so what did you end up pulling the trigger? Not particular tools, I'm not bothered about that, but what did you try and, was you trying to automate things and streamline things?

And exactly that, trying to automate things. Um, I was trying to use lots of different email Grabbers, email finders where it would send out, you know, emails of email campaigns and all that sort of stuff.

Um, and what, what, what like drew you to that though? Like, because I, I told you then I speak to a lot of solo founders, small business owners, and it does— I'm a small business owner myself. Yeah, it can grab you, can't it? Is it just the idea of like, oh my God, like if I if I pay this and it solves this problem, that sounds really— yeah, what is it that like grabbed you? Because like you've got this whole track record of like not being, not being, not doing that.

Yeah, I think, I think when I was starting up by myself and I'd reached out to a few different people and said, you know, what CRM are you using? Because we used, even just to start off with CRM, we used something called RDB at Opus, which is super old school and very input heavy. You did everything yourself, no automation at all, which actually was great. Um, and I think I've reached out to other business owners. I know what tech stack you're using, what's, what CRM's best, you know, I want to try something new. So I started researching all these different tools, and obviously they all sell you the dream, right, that they can do X, Y, and Z. Um, and it makes it sound like you can now do recruitment in a real hands-off approach. You'll just, you know, book the client meetings in, pitch the client, and send the candidate. It's going to be okay, sort of thing. So yeah, I think I was like super intrigued because it was a complete new world to me.

Um, so yeah, and it also means that you're then not doing the job.

Yeah, exactly. It's so silly, but I think, you know, you think to yourself when you get hooked on these new business books and stuff, right? It says, you know, as a business owner, you need to be working on the business, working in the business, take a seat back. And it was only me in the business, so there's no one to look after. But I think that was my headset— headspace, sorry.

What— so, and then just to round that out then, what is it like? You have your brother now. Like, what does it look like now in terms of like what tools that you have, because I've met quite a lot of people recently where they end up going on that rabbit hole. Again, there's, there's loads of reasons, there'll be loads of examples when that did really work for people, and there'll be examples where it doesn't. But a lot of the people I've spoken to, they just went too far down that rabbit hole, didn't end up quite getting the results that they were after. And there'd be loads of different reasons for that, but then they've just ended up really scaling it back, and where they've then really ended up getting a lot more wins and actually enjoyed it more is probably back to the stuff they were talking about earlier.

Yeah.

So what does that look like today for you?

So all I will actually use now is BullhornCRM, which is okay, and then Sourcewell. That's it.

That's it. Yeah, just keep it super simple.

Yeah.

Okay, let's talk a bit more about the— this first year then. Like, what did you end up— did you, did you feel like you was trying to— bar the automation technology stuff, is there anything else that you feel like you was doing on reflection really differently, or no?

I think again, like, not having a real niche, and I think that started off with the 6-month period where I couldn't speak to my niche that I previously had. So I was trying different areas, picking up random jobs here and there. So I was, you know, not, not specializing in anything, which definitely affected the process. And then post that 6-month period, they didn't really come back. The market of the contractors that I thought I would have and these clients that I previously had, it never really reappeared because 6 months had come round. I'm calling up all the other contractors and they're like, we've been out of work for months. Like, you know, the clients I spoke to were saying, oh no, you know, we've had to let everybody go and It's a really, really tough time for us. So in that sort of 6-month window, the contract in 2023. Yeah. So I think as people know, and I mean, I'm a big believer you create your own market, but I think that a lot of people had really struggled if they're looking at UK contract market, like it was on the, on its arse. So then I panicked even more really. And then it got to the end of the first year and that's when I was like, wow, I'm nowhere near where I need to be. Everything that I'd learned previously, all the candidates that I'd previously are really struggling as well. What do I do now? Sort of thing.

So that's when you really had to reflect. So what— so how did you feel about that first year? Obviously it wasn't what you thought it'd be, what you wanted it to be, but that, that 180, that, that mainly came from perm deals?

Well, yeah, pretty much all perm. I think I had 2 or 3 contract runners and that was pretty much about it.

Just on that, is there anything that you really— I know you said at the start like you had that sort of early win.

Yeah.

Anything, because you would have spent more time doing it now, and I know you do more of it now, but anything in that first period going from your background that you were surprised by in terms of that was more harder or maybe even easier on the perm side?

Yeah, I think perm stuff, um, it's not too far off when you get used to it, right? It's not too dissimilar. But I think one thing that I also did really struggle with, that's definitely worth mentioning, is that I'd gone from working in this big business and with amazing people around me, amazing management team and stuff like that, and you kind of get used to having that soundboard around you, having that team of support around you. And I'd literally just gone to Dubai, had no friends, no family, no connections, zero, nobody else around me. And I really actually struggled with a lack of people supporting me around me, or even, you know, giving you a, you know, you've had a bad day, don't worry about it, it's fine. Like everything was going through my head, like all the time, doubts dripping through and stuff like that. So I really struggled with that. I didn't really know how to do contracts properly. I didn't know how to do anything else but recruitment because again, back at Opus, they had the team of doing all the back office stuff. So I'd already got into a rabbit hole of The confidence is getting worse. I'm not doing my old, you know, old successful habits. Um, and I really struggled to not have that team around me.

Yeah, because that was going to be the other part that I wanted to make sure that we spoke about, which was like, you started your business there, but you also moved your life there.

Yeah.

So just talk to us about that for a second, because I think this is us talking about the trade-offs here. Like, okay, we can go on LinkedIn and we can see like the exciting— like the exciting part and where you probably felt good about yourself was those early days of like, guys, I've moved to Dubai, starting a business journey. And like, that's all exciting. I'm sure you've got loads of kudos, all of that. But then it might be 2 weeks, it might be 4 weeks, but that just all dies out. Yeah, it's just you in the apartment in the marina being like, right, I've got a— I've got to make some money, I've got to back myself. So just talk to us a bit more about that. So what is it that you struggled with? Was it— obviously, again, I think of my own journey when I started on my own, it really is all you think about.

Yeah.

So I can imagine, and I, I still struggle with it now, like if I ever have days off, you, you feel like you've got time to make art. Yeah. So, so obviously we can talk about the personal side, but what was that Just tell us a bit more about that. Was it that you struggled with— was it that if you wasn't spending time working, especially because you wasn't seeing the success, you felt bad about it? Did you find it hard to put yourself out there, socialize, when you feel like your business wasn't doing as well as you thought?

Yeah, I think that's exactly it, right? It's almost like a vicious— it's a vicious cycle because I was saying, you know, I didn't want to go out and meet new friends because the business wasn't where I was at, where I wanted it to be. So I thought, I have to work harder, I have to work harder. But then when it's not really working out to the extent that you want it to be, even when you do take time off, you feel super paranoid about it. Or, you know, when you try to switch off, all that's going through your brain is work, work, work and things like that. And I think, again, like, I had no one to bounce these ideas off to. So it—

yeah, can you not speak to anyone? Is there no one that you— or that you maybe didn't feel open to be honest with?

I think I'd like— I spoke to my girlfriend at the time and said, look, like, this is going not as well as I wanted, but her knowledge on recruitment is probably not so No, I was like, no, you just got to sort out the counter offers, mate. And he's like, do you know what I mean? And obviously can't really, I feel like I couldn't really reach out to my old staff and things like that because essentially, even though they're friends at that point, it's not, it's competition to a certain extent, right? So I wasn't sure what their appetite for that would be like. But yeah, it was just hard. Just hard. Yeah. I think moving away for the first time is hard for anybody. And then when you're starting to set up a business for the first time in a brand new area, I think that makes it even harder.

And then what, like, just, just keeping it really real, what— and you can talk about your whole time there, you're still living there now— like, what on the, like, like, like your life being there, what would you say are the main, like, trade-offs of being in Dubai? Would you say, like, obviously talking about how hard it's been, and I'm sure, you know, things have evolved. I know you've made more friends and built your sort of network of people.

Yeah.

But what, from your experience so far, what would you say are the main trade-offs in terms of living there from your experience?

Um, trade-offs again, like, as you're not close to your friends or family, um, on the weekends, what do you do apart from work if you've not got anyone to go, you know, hang around with, basically? Especially in the early days. Um, trade-offs apart from that, there's not that many, really. It's a pretty good place to be.

Okay, well, let— I'll, I've been having this conversation, so what about people? A lot of people said to me, obviously weather's great. Yeah. But there's also real periods of the year where it's like unbearable.

Yeah, it's crazy hot. So the past few months it's very, very hot, like 40s, 50s every single day.

Okay.

Um, I like the heat though, so I feel like I cope with it quite well.

Okay.

A lot of people leave Dubai and things like that, but honestly, I feel like if I look back to when I was going to the tube in London in the morning and I'd turn up with wet socks because I've stepped in a puddle, like, I can trade that off.

Um, and then I think The only other things that have been consistent, I would say— obviously you always hear about how safe it is and these types of things, but if we're thinking about trade-offs and keeping it real, do you feel like— like you said earlier then— do you feel like if you were to just— I haven't actually been there, like I need to go, so I'm just talking from what people shared with me— but do you feel like as you're there you can get caught up in like there's always other people doing better than you?

Yeah, 100%.

You can get sort of sucked into that.

Yeah, of course. I feel like Dubai is made from, you know, flashy things and quick wins, and everyone seems like they're doing extremely well on face value. So you always get kind of caught up in that. And I think that's also why some people don't succeed, because they get caught up in that. Maybe they earn a bit of money, then they spend on nice things. And I think that is very much the world of Dubai.

Yeah. And then what, like, you know, you're in London now, and again, I haven't been, this is from conversations, but I think maybe also things we can take for granted here is like the history, and like you can feel that. I don't know, you can tell me, like, is that something that— again, we're talking about trade-offs, just things that, like, do you feel like that sometimes? You can sense that, that it's like this is all like, yeah, not soulless. I don't know, that's what sometimes people would say to me.

You are right, and I feel like it is a complete bubble. So I feel like every so often you do need to leave to kind of get back to reality a little bit. Um, and back to the history stuff completely, like everything there is very flashy, new glass buildings and all that sort of stuff. We're here, you know, we're walking around and it's— there's loads more. I wouldn't say there's no culture because everybody there is from different places, so you get to see other people's cultures and, and live that with them. But yeah, I know what you mean, it is like that a little bit.

The only thing that popped into my head when I asked someone this recently was like somebody who's like, driving there is like chaos.

Driving is chaos there, yeah.

Like, that's just— he was like, nah, like, you just can't drive there, it's horrible. Yeah, because I was off— I asked him, I was like, because he moved his family there, I was like, oh, like what's the main reasons why? And like, what would you say the trade-offs? Because I'm curious. Yeah, that's what I wouldn't understand.

The driving's a weird one. So from my experience, right, so I actually, um, when I was at uni, I passed— just before I got to uni, I passed my driving test, um, and I never got a car at university. Moved straight to London, then never had a car here. So I'd gone through this 8-10 year period of actually never owning a car or driving a car the day after I passed my test, right? So when I got to Dubai, then I got a car, it was crazy. The, the lanes on the motorways are 6, 5 or 6 lines Sorry, 5 or 6 lanes either side, but you've got people, the majority of the cars on there are like very, very heavily populated with taxi drivers. So you've got taxi drivers, sorry, from Pakistan, from India, places like that that maybe not even been on roads with lines on them. So everybody is just like this. You see accidents all the time. Yeah.

Really? So what was, what was mindset going into year 2? Like you felt like clearly things could have gone better.

Yeah.

So I think one of the other lessons— we've spoken about no silver bullet in tech automation, basics win. Spoke about— this is the thing, right? When you start this entrepreneurial journey and it's your business, like, if you're not up there mentally, yeah, then that impacts the business, right? That is one of the hardest things, but it's also the coolest thing because, you know, you can turn things around and you're in control of that. But that isolation, the mindset piece, that, that was, that was harder than you expected. And then needing to stick to a niche instead of maybe just saying yes more than maybe you should and staying focused is where you lost it a bit. So like going into year 2, what, what was the main focus? I know then we want to talk about this UAE market piece because that, that seemed quite important over year 2, but what was the mindset going into year 2? What were the sort of important changes that you wanted to make?

Yeah, so I obviously got to the end of year 1 and thought this isn't really going the way that I wanted it to be. Um, and I always compare myself to previous numbers, right? I feel like it's, you know, the successful point again until you're hitting your previous numbers. I didn't see it happening for me working in the UK from there. Um, so obviously I'm sat in Dubai that seems to be the most active place in the world right now. And I followed different recruitment agencies in the region and they was posting lists of jobs like super high volume. And I thought I need to get my hands on this, but I'd always been a bit worried about it because you hear the scare stories of 'People don't pay their invoices on time in Dubai, you know, the market is very weird, it's like the Wild West,' and it very much is to a certain extent. But I've come to a point where I had to pivot if I wanted to try and, you know, make this business successful. I need to pivot. So end of the first year, I reached out to a guy called Justin McGuire who really like helped me reshape my business and mindset on learning how to do the market in Dubai, which is very different to the UK. Um, so that helped me massively.

Um, and what are some of the things that you would just die to ask him. We've had Justin on. Yes, he's done that market for so long. Yeah, you know, he's had his own business there.

Exactly right. I've seen him on LinkedIn as like the guy that's been in Dubai longest in terms of the recruitment.

So what was the dying questions that you like just really wanted to ask him that might be interesting for you to share?

I think I just wanted to know, is it, is it like the UK, you know? Am I going to get arrested if I don't have a contract correctly and I'm going to get put in Dubai jail? Because you hear these horror stories, it's so strict, right? When it's actually way further away from the truth than that. Um, and I just wanted someone to tell me and give me the confidence that if you've done that in the UK, 100%, you can do that in the UAE. It's not that different. It's different, but it's not— recruitment's recruitment at the end of the day. So I wanted to just ask him, how do I set up? How do I attract clients here? You know, how do I break into the market as quick as I possibly can? Because at this point, it was like starting from ground zero again. How can I excel as fast as I can in that market?

And was you like— did you have any financial pressures, or was you sweet?

Yeah, 100%. So I think It actually got to the point, right, at the end of the first year.

Because I'm assuming you didn't renew your Marina apartment, or maybe you did.

I did, to be fair, it was all right. But that was part of the stress, right? Like, shit, I've got this rent coming up. Luckily, they managed to let me pay it in 3 installments. Oh, nice.

Didn't have to close the deal this time.

But I'd got to the point where it was, I think, looking back at like the big transition, I think I'd been doing the market for 6 months of my covenants period in the UK, then a full year at having a stab at it. So it was like 1 year, 6 months into the business. Maybe a little bit less. And it came to Christmas time, basically. And this is probably one of the, like, the toughest times because I was actually out due a lot of money from UK invoices, like 60 grand. And that was at the time, it was a lot, a lot of money because I was like, moving into the new year, I need, I want to start a new market, you know, I want to invest into different things, I want to hire people, I really want to like push this business on. But I was also owed a lot of money at the same time. So I was thinking, God, like, what am I going to do here? Um, and I was maybe going back to the UK, and I also felt a bit embarrassed to go back to the UK because I'm painting this amazing picture of I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z in Dubai, and it's not really happened just yet. So yeah, I was a bit, a bit frustrated and obviously a bit stressed at that time.

Um, but yeah, it is something that sometimes people overlook, like getting paid. Yeah, it's not something you think about when you're employed by Opus, is it?

No.

And your invoice is paid, you just put the deal up.

100%. Like, and I think I'd got so used to that because as long as that timesheet was approved at Opus, you got paid your commission whether that client had paid or not. So I never understood like the background of the business so much. Um, and even in contract recruitment, you know what you're getting every single month, right? Because you've got that recurring revenue. And I was living in the world of perm where even if you do deals, you might not get paid them for 3 months. If they don't pay for another 3 months, then holy shit, that's a long time.

Literally. So we made this pivot and I think that's a really good lesson for people because Sometimes people are reluctant to do that, or you can just sort of just hope things turn around because it's always worked. But I think where you, you do— the more people I sit down with that have been successful, oftentimes there are these pivots. Yeah, sometimes they're big, sometimes they're smaller, but it is something you have to be mindful of.

Yeah.

Um, so you made this pivot and then really focused on, uh, not just doing business in the UK but really made more of this transition to do more in the UAE.

Yeah.

So give us some, some things then that you've had to learn the hard way. Like what, what was like the plan to start getting clients, starting and getting in with businesses? I think I've got written down here, so you decided to niche down by industry, right? So you started to focus on more fintech and AI. Yeah, makes sense. So I'm assuming that there's loads of investments, uh, going on there. And then again, anyone that I've interviewed that has done this market Same in Australia as well. We start hearing this word even more. It's like relationships-driven, face-to-face, it's who you know. So just talk to us a bit about what was the initial game plan then to start getting more clients based in the UAE that you could actually go and see? What was the initial game plan?

Yeah, so I think game plan was, look, like, how can I get myself in front of the, the best clients in the market in the fintech space and the best candidates in the market in that space? Um, and I guess, yeah, just to give you some context on the market in Dubai, it's not as big as the UK, nowhere near as big as the UK. So say for example, in UK I specialize in JavaScript. In my opinion, if you just focused in JavaScript in the UAE, you wouldn't be able to hit numbers anywhere near it because there's not that many people and the salary is a little bit lower. So you'd have to do crazy volume. So the reason why we'd pick the fintech and AI niche is because that's the most invested sectors in Dubai and they're really sort of pushing that as an economy. So if we niche down in sector, you can kind of win these clients in the fintech or AI space and then build everything from them, like top to bottom. Rather than focusing on that one niche in tech.

Yeah. So you made that your focus. So then how do we start getting in front of these people? Do you want to tell us about this story that you tell me about showing up to an office with dates? Yeah. Tell us about this story.

That was my— there's a client that I kept getting leads for basically. So I was like 5 days into my full transition into the market. So we spoke to a few different businesses and things like that. And I'd signed up that this one client was a consultancy. That put people into digital transformation projects in the government and thinking, you know, government's where all the money is here. Like these are big projects, big, big headcount volume. So I spoke to some of the lead engineers on this project and they basically said, look, we're hiring so much people, but we can't hire quick enough. Everybody else is leaving because they've got such a high work in demand. So they couldn't keep hiring people quick enough. And a lot of things are run through HR there. So I called the head of people and he kind of kept putting the phone down on me and I was trying to pitch and tell him that we could help with that service. Um, and I figured out, I knew there was a great client to have because of these projects they work on. Um, so I figured out where his office was.

Okay.

Um, and it's like a thing in Dubai where if you buy someone these fancy stuffed medjoolat, these things, like, it's like a gift you would give somebody. Um, so I bought a packet of those and I bought him some karak chai, which is basically Indian tea, right? He's an Indian guy. Um, and then I bought him a book, um, Key Person of Influence. It's one of my favorite books, right? And I basically wrote this handwritten letter. And said, look, I've seen you are head of person, head of people at this business. You've been the region at all the top businesses for 15 years. You know, I really see you as a key person of info in this space, blah, blah, blah. So I turned up at his office and said, look, I've got a meeting with, his name is Mukul. I said, look, I've got a meeting with this guy. And she looked at his calendar and said, look, you're not got a meeting booked. Like you've not got this scheduled. I said, oh no, he said, come down and don't worry about it. It's fine sort of thing. And she said, okay, let me speak to him. Take a seat. So I went inside in the reception room for 20, 30 minutes, and then the lady came back on reception and said, look, you're not meant to be here. You're not arranged to see him. So you're going to have to leave. And I left this, this, this, you know, packet of gifts and letters and things like that and said, look, okay, fair enough. But could you please give this gift to him? So yeah, left the office, left it 2 or 3 days later. Didn't hear anything. Like I text him.

How was you feeling about it?

I was nervous. I would have never, by the way, done this in London. I think because I didn't know anybody, I had nothing to lose. I wouldn't know anybody in the office. Whatever happens, happens. Um, and then yeah, got, got a call 3 days later with 15 jobs and I was like, oh my God.

How did that call go? How did it go? Was he like just really friendly straight away?

Super friendly, like laughed at me and was like, thank you so much. Like this is, this is really because I'd left on that note saying, look, I've obviously gone above and beyond here. To try and get you as a client, best believe that I will go above and beyond to find you the right candidates for your business. So he called me off the back of that and said, let's give it a go.

And it's ended up being a client for you.

Yeah.

That's a mega story, that. Talk to us a bit about, because you said something to me which stuck out to me, was you said your experience, and you'll probably get better at this, and I've heard this before, where a lot of people were like time wasters.

Yeah.

Tell us a bit about this. I don't know what that looks like and what you meant by that, but Tell us a bit about that from your experience.

I think Dubai is, like I said before, it's a bit of a wild west. There's people from everywhere. People are trying to set up businesses, and a lot of businesses that look on face value, they've got hundreds of people. They probably only have 3 or 4. It's just kind of like the face file that you see online. So you can constantly speak to a client and they might say, yes, we've got these huge projects going on, and I've been to Saudi and done the same, and they make you sound super excited. Like, we've got these 50, 60 hires we need to do next.

This is in person?

Yeah, they're saying it directly to you, and I fully believe it. But it just, you know, often, often they're not. It kind of whittled down to nothing. Um, a lot of people will interview candidates, window shoppers. They'll sign your terms and everything like that. You'll do everything and you'll get to the final stage, and then they'll just— that's it. Don't hear back from them.

Really?

It's crazy. It's so weird. I don't understand why you would do that, to be honest, but it happens a lot, like, across the industry there.

So how have we got better at preventing that? Or, I don't know, is it just that you become better at picking up on, or do you sort of try and give them some things that they have to do to test the commitment?

I think naturally I've got better at testing commitment. You can kind of see the signs a little bit more now, but also just be a bit more aware of it. But to be honest, I think that's part and parcel of the game there. So we've had to operate a slightly different model of how we work. And just to give you an example, you know, I target myself to pull 20 jobs a month minimum, knowing full well only maybe 6 will get filled. So it's a big volume game and you've just got to bank on 60% of it not actually going in. So I think it's just part and parcel of it. And that's how you've got to—

What would you deem as a pull job? Just because you said that.

Yeah, pull jobs like, you know, fully qualified, interview slots, um, salary, budget, whatever it is, and then, you know, availability. So exactly as you would in the UK and follow the same process, but often than not it, it doesn't work out.

So what, so you just factored like that, those 14 jobs, what are you sort of putting that mainly down to?

It's, I think, okay, so I guess to paint the picture a little bit more, when you normally work with a client, it's very rare they just give you one job, right? A lot of companies that are scaling quite aggressively, or they want to add headcount a lot. So normally when you break into a client, they'll give you 5 jobs off the bat. So maybe you'll fill one or two of them and they say, oh, you know what, forget about the others. But they've had these big audacious hiring plans. So you might fill a few of them, but the rest of them kind of just disappear when it comes to reality of actually doing it. So that's why it is. It's not like, God, if I was working with 20 different clients and only 14 of them— sorry, only 6 of them went in. That seems like a massive time waste. But you are still getting jobs over the line and placements over the line, but just not to the volume that they've told you it's gonna happen.

And then what have we got? Back to basics, or have you had to tweak those? Like, again, you've got to sometimes really understand how your market works. Are we, you know, we doing targeted specs? Is that working? How, like, what, what do the sort of basics look like for you in this market now? I know you're still figuring it out, but what do you feel like is really helping you today?

I would say like the relationships there is super important. I think there's a lot of noise in Dubai and I think that you've got to really go and meet these people. So my KPIs are very driven around personal interaction or, you know, for example, I'll tell you what they are. It's 2 podcasts a month with clients, whether it's people we already have or prospect clients that want to bring on. 4 in-person meetings a week. And then off the back of that would do, I'd aim to do 35 new BD calls, 80 sendouts a week in each market, UK and then UAE. Yeah, and that's the process I normally follow to do that.

How are you finding juggling? Like, is the goal to be 100% UAE, or like, I'm assuming because now we're doing more, like, there's a reason why it's more. Like, do you see there's a good opportunity for you to do really well in this market?

Yeah, it's a very, very good market if you get in with the right clients and you build relationships, because it seems to be when you break into them, then you do a good job, they'll stay with you for a long time. There is a lot of loyalty when it gets to that point. Um, I think as we grow, because of the way we're really trying to build these relationships in person a lot more naturally, I think more will just grow in the UAE because it's harder to do that remotely from the UK. So I think we really capitalize on that market and then would look probably to go elsewhere, like the States or something instead of the UK eventually.

How have you found juggling UAE and the UK market? Obviously, it's the, the time difference isn't absolutely atrocious.

Yeah, it's not atrocious. So at the moment it's 3 hours and sometimes it goes to 4 hours when the daylight savings are on, whatever. But it's actually okay because I can start 3 or 4 hours earlier and do the, the UAE market and then switch on to the UK a little bit later. Most of the UK stuff that I'm doing now, to be honest with you, it's like previous relationships. It's not too much outbound driven. It's, it's what we've been leveraging in the last year.

Because what we're saying about we, we're gonna become an absolutely high-flying contract recruiter again, what we're saying, how are you feeling about that? It's like you've literally Yeah, you're like doing menu planning.

I know, but there's not really a contract market. It's not the same there. Um, it's difficult.

I would love to. I'll kill you a bit.

It really kills me. I, I, I absolutely love it. Like, it was such a different thing. Um, I wish so much we could, and I feel like eventually when we hope to go to the States and things like that, I really want to build that contract back up. But in the UAE, it's very difficult. Again, if we go back to the lines of credit, if you're placing 40, 50 contractors onto site, you're payroll in those contractors, and then the payment terms in UAE might say 14 days, but it might be 6 months if they don't want to pay you on time. That's how it is. You've got a lot of money outstanding there. So, so many businesses will just sink. And in terms of visas, it's very hard to get visas set up on a freelance basis in Dubai. I think they're moving into a better way of doing it, but at the moment, as an employer, you have to pay for everybody's relocation costs a lot of the time if they're in tech or whatever, or pay for their visas, their family visas. Upfront costs. Yeah. So it's a lot of upfront costs if you only want that person for 3, 6 months.

Yeah. That makes sense. So should we get into— we've been super, uh, honest here, but like you just said there, so like, because I asked you like, what are some of the sort of market truths? You said one of them there, no credit checks or open finance.

Yeah.

Must visit offices to assess legitimacy. So if you had any rubbish stories, like I think I've heard that a lot where people don't get paid. Have you unfortunately had that? Yeah, yeah.

Like even the first few placements that I made in that market, it took 6 months to get them paid.

Really?

Yeah. Which is a pain, I think. Um, it actually turns out that the government, you know, bodies and projects are the worst. Um, because, you know, you were a little tap hole in the market basically, and I think they don't really care, but it's better if you're scaling smaller businesses, you've got better relationships with the C-suite in that area, then you can kind of really—

You can then chase them for the invoice.

You can leverage that a bit better.

So what, no major horror stories then? It seems like you've had some rubbish experiences.

Just on payment terms. I mean, there's been some like funny stories. You turn up to an office and you go for a meeting and the guy like rocks up into his office, got amazing view, and then he's just like lights up a cigarette or a cigar in the meeting. It's like, what's going on? That's wild. I remember going back and thinking, what's just happened there? And I said to somebody else, and I was like, yeah, it's just how it is. It's crazy.

And then, okay, so payment terms unpredictable. Anything for people to be mindful of there then? Like, is there anything you now do to try and help prevent that? Are you sending— have you got it in your contract where 'we'll send you an invoice on acceptance of contract,' or I don't know, is there anything that you've now put in place that helps you get paid more quickly?

I always push for that, like paid on acceptance. Um, actually quite hard to get signed off, to be honest with you, but we always offer if you pay on time in that first 2 weeks, we'll give you a 5% discount credit on the next invoice. Nice.

Um, you'd like them to just kind of incentivize it. You're trying to incentivize them to pay on time.

Yeah, exactly.

What about, again, I know this needs to be, this would be a continuous journey we're learning, but I've got here, obviously because we're doing perm, typical, you've said, you said to me, typical fee you, from your experience, when you speak to companies and they've maybe used recruitment agencies, 9.3% or one month of their salary, you said is normally what they will say to you is like, well, we normally pay a percentage of their first, we'll normally pay their first month salary. Talk to us a bit about this.

So that's one of the biggest, I guess, learning curves for me that we had when we first went to the UAE is that it's a bit of an education game when you're having to sell to clients and actually teach them what a good quality process looks like, because the way Dubai is geographically located, right, you've got India and Pakistan very closely. So you've got these agencies that are providing solutions for candidates at 9.3%. So that works out, right, that their one month salary of the year works out as 9.3% fee. So you're often speaking to clients and telling them that, that you're, oh no, we charge 20%. And they're like, absolutely not. We're paying less than half than that at the moment. But I have to say, you know, how good is that process? What does that process look like? How long has it taken to fill that role? So that's one of the biggest pushbacks is cost. It's a big race to the bottom there.

And then typically when you— obviously not always, but typically when you dig into that, it's like it's taken too long, quality of people coming through aren't great. It's those typical things, hiring processes are more tight.

Exactly. And I think that a lot of companies will, you know, Google big recruitment agencies and stuff like that, and they're not actually specialists. It's complete generalists. The same person would be working on a tech role, a finance role, a cleaning role, anything. They're literally just recruiters. It's super generalist.

And then just something, again, I'm, I'm just a massive advocate of when you build a career in recruitment, like, you build so many skills.

Yeah.

And obviously something that you've had to then learn is like you're dealing with so many different cultures.

Yeah.

Aren't you? Right, doing business, which again, I, I think that's a really cool skill to build, right? So yeah, I'm sure, yeah, how you learn how to do business with someone who's Arabic to Egyptian to an expat living there is going to be different.

Yeah, I think that's been one of the most fun learning processes actually, because in London you're probably going to deal with people that are from UK or Europe, etc. Where there it's a completely mixed bag. I don't think I've actually— I don't think we've had one British client or one British hiring manager, really. Yeah.

So what, anything that you had to learn the hard way there that people that really don't like?

Oh, they don't like the— I would say, um, I think especially in the Arabic world, if you're really chasing them up, like sometimes in the UK I probably go a bit OTT, like really hounding them. If you can get hounded, that's it, they'll just ignore you and they'll never ever ever come back. Even if you've got a candidate final stage, if they feel like you're being too pushy or too salesy, that's it, like, yeah, they don't like the whole sales feel.

Yeah. And like, how— like, let's sort of round this out then. Like, obviously brought your brother on.

Yeah.

How we— I'm assuming you wouldn't have done that if you feel like we're on a, on a good trajectory. So what are you really continuing to focus on, double down on, that you think is going to continue to keep helping you go in the right way? Because I think when you have been turning it around and improving ultimately the outcomes that you want Yeah. You know, you've done some interesting things, like I know, because this finance piece that we've spoken about, you invested in having someone in finance support your business.

Yeah.

As like a hire, then gone big on marketing. You mentioned the podcast there, so you launch your own podcast that I know has really been helping. So been investing in getting a marketing person in the business. Then your brother joined this year.

Yeah.

So what, what are we really doubling down on to continue to really feel good about where things are going and also what you think is going to enable you to keep moving the business in the right direction.

Yeah, so I think coming back to what has worked really well in the Dubai market is more of a, for us right now, a bit of a 180 split because as I mentioned before, you have to pull up a lot of jobs to fill jobs, right? So I think you have to have somebody that's very, very BD focused. So 180 models worked really, really well. So bringing in, and the reason why I did this is that I always wanted to be in a position where I could help change people's lives. Like that's what happened to me at Opus. You know, I'd gone from living in Lincolnshire, whatever, and then moved to London and was earning crazy money and I could really like help my family with that. So, and I felt super loyal to them and super like driven because of that. So I really wanted to be able to hire people that are junior recruiters, follow them on a process, put them in a 180 situation where they're delivering to start off with, to get used to that. And then we can help change people's lives as well. That's like been a huge thing for me. So my brother, for example, was like an electrician working on a building site 2 months ago. Um, and now he's in Dubai, work, delivering on projects, like done $70,000 in closed deals in the last 2 months, which is amazing. So I think what we'll do is, but what we will do is, sorry, is scale that up, like add a few more delivery consultants that are junior. Um, you know, haven't had any exposure to recruitment or sales, but just have a really hard drive and want to, you know, do something amazing for themselves. And then as they're then ready to go into 360 Recruitment Consultants, we'll slowly do that, slowly bring them into 360. and then kind of keep that conveyor belt going. We're not really in a race of headcount, but I feel like we've managed to gain a lot of good market share very quickly because of the podcast, because we've niched down so quickly. So we're getting a lot of business in through that. Um, and then eventually obviously scale off the back of that and as these guys turn into leaders and things like that. So we've got this loyal team of hopefully like young hungry people.

So yeah, it does really sound like you just had to learn all these things the hard way. And then from what I've learned here, the good thing is if you keep doing those things, when you do land those relationships that do pay off, It isn't like 1s and 2s, it's like 5s, 10s, 15s.

Exactly that. And they— and exactly that. So people, when you do a break into a client, you've got that trust, they will work with you for a long time. And it is like 15, 20 hires at a time as well.

And then just, just like anything, the more you do something, the better you get. But even more so in this, like if you think about it, you haven't been really focused on that UAE market for that long, really.

Yeah, 12 months pretty much.

It's not long, is it? So think about all the the people that maybe you've had the old conversation with, you learned a bit about, that you're then going to continue to like learn more about, maybe do more with in another 12 months. Like, it should just keep hopefully, uh, snowballing.

Exactly.

You've got to keep doubling down on those things. Love it. Well, genuinely, like, really appreciate your transparency and honesty. I really admire the fact that, like, you could have, you could have very easily been like 'Nah, like, this is not for me.' Like, because you, you've, you've got stuff to look back to and be like, 'I was earning so much more money.' I know it's not just about that, but like, it's just everything with that, the success, what he was achieving. Like, there's— I mean, I'm sure you— that happens, right? But you've made changes, you've, you've stuck with it. Um, you know, even now, even got it to a point where you've got a really cool opportunity to bring your brother on, which I'm sure felt good and gonna continue to feel great the more opportunities that he has and how he So I'm sure there was more moments that you felt like quitting or wanted to, and you haven't. So like, I know you're going to be feeling like there's way more that we need to be doing and need to crack on. That's how I always feel like. But I think, yeah, you should be really proud of how you've continued to crack on, make changes, learn. And I'm sure things are going to continue to go in that direction. You're going to have bumps along the way. Yeah. Hopefully keep getting paid. But like, you've learned so much. So I really appreciate coming on here. Like, you kept it really real and honest. I know so many people will, will learn from not only the, this Opus career that you had, but then also this entrepreneurial journey that you're on. So it's appreciated.

Awesome, absolute pleasure. Thanks.