How To Build A Contract Desk From Scratch: Complete Blueprint with Jake Appleton

Jake, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. How you doing?

Really good. Joining me from sunny Wales.

Yeah, not so sunny Wales, unfortunately. It lives up to the stigma.

So we're gonna do what I think hopefully that people listening to this are gonna find an interesting episode, an interesting conversation, but we're gonna try and unpack everything that you've learned over the last 3 and a half years, uh, into one episode.

Yeah, I'll try and keep— try and keep it short then. No worries.

Um, obviously you've recently launched your own recruitment business, which we'll sort of touch on here. But before that, to give everyone a bit of context and why we're going to focus on the last sort of 3 and a half or so years of your career— and if I get any of this wrong, let me know. No props, uh, in terms of like the, the key bits of information. So she joined a business called, uh, Yoke, a multi-division, um, recruitment business. So they do multiple different sectors.

Yeah.

Um, and you joined them in, in 2021 to set up the contract piece.

Yeah.

Right. And if there's anyone listening to this episode that, um, recruits in contract, I'm sure at some point someone has tried to sell you the dream of setting up a contract division because they have so many clients that they do business with on the permanent side. Um, like you gave me some really cool stats. So Yoka, really known in, in Wales, they did over the last 15 years, they've worked with, done placements with like 1,000 different businesses. Yeah. Um, so the idea here is like, surely we can, you know, we've got all these great relationships, got these great clients, surely we can start providing contract solutions for them, right? Is— was, was the proposition.

Yeah, exactly.

So you build out over the last 3 and a half years, um, before you then recently, uh, launched your own brand called Meritus. Um, so by the time we got to the sort of end point of that, um, we got to— you was leading a team of 10. Yeah, 3 of those were dedicated to a contract. 6 was perm. Um, and the contract piece, this is where I just want to let you know if I get any of this wrong, but that, that team function that he was running, you got over 2 million, so 1.25 million. Um, and then end of 2023, you got the weekly GP to 12.5K.

Yep. Yeah.

And this was across 4 clients. Um, you was— we're gonna go into this, but yeah, you, you opted for the strategy um, of more high volume, right? Yeah, sustainable, sustainable, uh, more protected, uh, less one and two contractors in sites and more, uh, a lot— yeah, a lot more contractors in, in lesser clients essentially. Uh, so in— and, and there was periods where you was very much on the tools in the trenches building this, then you, uh, then transitioned to non-billing managers, so then you was in the seat of helping people with their strategy and, you know, executing through people in your team, um, with the things you want to do on the contract side, um, and the business. Yeah, so we thought it'd be a really cool idea to in this episode break down essentially if he was going to set up a contract division, a contract book from scratch in a business that has never done contract before, but we're going to assume they have a reputation, a good one, on the perm side, they might, um, you might be building contract for them in the niche that they've done, or at least there's relationships there that you can leverage.

Yeah.

And we're going to go through, um, a couple of things that we've broken it down when we prepared for this. So we're going to start with, uh, from Jack's perspective, you have to first understand the supply chain and why compliance is absolutely crucial when it comes to contract. It may not be the sexiest thing, but it's the absolute foundation of, you know, successful contract solutions. We've then got mapping the employers, the biggest contract users in your industry. How can we figure out who those are? And once we've figured those out, what we're doing, which is our next bit, industry knowledge-led sales and pitching contract solutions. Um, and then we've got follow-up and persistence, keep showing up, uh, and then a few other bits as well that we want to cover. So that's what we're going to break down in this conversation. So should we get into it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So why don't you just— why don't we just start with like, why, why is compliance important? Like, just give us the, the piece there when it comes to contracts. If you're listening to this, you have your own business, you like the idea of recurring revenue, uh, more consistent months once we have contractors or whatever. But even for contract recruiters, listen to this, when sometimes maybe you're in that employee mindset, these might not be the things that you think about, right? You, you're going to have to think about this because you're setting this up. Right? And I'm sure some of the business did some of the legwork as well. But you, you tell us, why, why did we— why do we start here when we're prepared for this? Why is compliance crucial?

I mean, compliance is, is crucial regardless of what your vocation within recruitment is anyway. But, um, in contracting, contracting in the UK in particular, there's never been more legislation, there's never been more regulations in place, and thus there's never been more barriers to success. And obviously everybody knows about what happened with IR35 within the, within the UK if you're within the contract market, and how that affected how the UK's contract market ran in tandem to the rest of the world and the different regulations we brought into place. And so a big part of your sell is, is based on compliance, is knowledge of that, and being able to educate those who might be interested in taking on interim resource. And you have to be the master in that sense. So you can't really have a particularly efficient offering if you're having to chase payments all the time because your back office function isn't working particularly well, if you're having to explain to clients why they can and can't use an interim resource in a particular way, and without having to be caught into big sort of scrum meetings or whatever it might be as to how they might want to use this individual. And so yeah, compliance is incredibly important because it's a great sales pitch, so you can use it to your advantage to make tangible outcomes. It manages a massive workflow in the future. If you've got 30, 40, 50 contractors working under your belt, you obviously want to be spending as little time trying to fight fires or anything like that as possible in order to keep expanding and keep growing and leveling up your contract base. And also there's a lot in there to do with, I guess, the consciousness side of things. When you're putting a contractor into a work placement, there's a lot you need to think about. They are in a far less stable vocation, in a far less stable way of working. They might have mortgages, they might have families, they might have all sorts of different sort of pieces there which they have to think about. And you become their custodian at that point. So you make sure that they are constantly compliant and they're able to carry out a stable piece of work, that there's no volatility there, there's nothing that might catch them out of guard. So, yeah, there's lots of things to think about. If you get that right early on, then it obviously makes life much easier thereafter.

And the other thing I thought was really interesting about this when you framed this was, because I, being truthful, I think I told you, when I worked in recruitment, it was all perm, so I'm definitely going to act as someone that may not know everything here in this conversation, but you said to me, like quite passionate, you've got to really first understand the supply chain. Yeah, like just explain that to me, like why, why is it that that's important? Like what, what do you mean by that, the contract recruiters? And when we're setting this up from scratch, we need to understand the supply chain. What do you mean by that?

So recruitment, um, you typically talk when you start, you know, who you sell to, who manages pieces, who manages the idea of hiring and all that sort of stuff. And whereas realistically, contract recruitment works in a far different way. So there's a supply chain involved because you're either working with a business and supplying that business into another business, and it's a business-to-business transaction. You're not just supplying a candidate or a contractor, or you might be supplying them via an umbrella. So there's a supply chain already built up there, which is the contractor moving into an umbrella company, moving into an agency, moving into the client who could then be moving into their end customer. So there's already a supply chain built up, and you have to kind of know every cog within that as to if any issues come up, you know, payments are missed or somebody's missing on a day, whatever it might be, what part part of that supply chain went wrong. And it's also incredibly important when you're selling too, because you are no longer selling a talent or anything like that, but you're selling a resource. So you're selling a business or a consultancy or a service, realistically. So you have to be speaking to people who might be involved in procurement and supply chain on their side of the business, especially larger businesses, because they will be the ones in touch with what is budget allocation, you know, what resources can we spend in certain areas, and that we are labor short in, for example. And what the risks attached to that? What are the risks attached to not having this person versus spending out this amount of money for this person? Because the other thing that you're obviously selling is a resource which is incredibly expensive. And so yeah, the supply chain is two meanings. There's a supply chain which is your candidate through to your end customer and what that looks like, and then there is pitching to a supply chain as well, and to understand how they procure goods and services.

So Just explain, just help me understand then, in the world that you then ended up building this contract book, what ended up being like the typical supply chain? Just to paint as a picture there, like what would be the typical supply chain?

So from a candidate side, um, or from a recruitment delivery side, we would find a candidate who would likely have to join up with an umbrella company, and we would then have a contract in place with that umbrella company. That umbrella company would have a contract in place with the candidate. We would then have a contract in place with our customer, so our clients, so agency to client. The client would likely have an end customer on their side, which might be a government department, an authority, whatever it might be, and they might have a contract between those two. So realistically, it is, yeah, candidate to umbrella, umbrella to agency, agency to customer or client, and then client to whoever their end customer is on their side as well. So that's that supply chain. And then the type of supply chain that I would be pitching to from a procuring of goods point of view or procuring of services point of view is largely me to what could be an RPO, and which could also be a level of this supply chain even for the candidate. And the RPO could then be facing their customer, customer to their client, so on and so forth. So there's certain, you know, variables within that, but realistically the shortest supply chain you're going to have is probably 4 or 5 people involved within that, but it can be as high as 7, 8 customers who are involved in the transaction or service.

So then why have I got written down here, so to procurement? Like, why did, why did that play out? Why was that the area or part of the supply chain that you ended— yeah, ended up having to put a lot of your time, energy into in terms of selling to— selling your resource, selling the service?

Well, large businesses tend to hold their recruitment in one or two places. It's either HR or it's in procurement. And obviously there's— you can go to hiring managers and such like that, but they either report to one or the other. And for me, what is more relevant for contract is procurement because it's the procurement people who will be understanding what their agency spend is, what their wallet share is, all that sort of piece. And then also what the spend is on goods and services. So say for example they're delivering a technology project and they are going out to market to outsource, you know, the development of the project, and then they may be also getting agency staff in to support them on the maintenance of that project, whatever it might be. They've got the whole cost allocation for that. So realistically what I would then do is go into to whoever that procurement manager is or head of procurement is and say, look, what's the spend that you've currently got on the goods and services within that? Kind of pitch a little bit like you're a project manager, and this is relevant to pretty much every sector in how you procure contract. And you'd adjust the base based off of that spend. If you think the spend is ludicrously high, you can kind of come in and say, look, I can match that spend, but I can give you a better quality of staff. You can have more accountability. I can bring in my compliance protocols, so on and so forth, to safeguard your process and acquiring of that talent. And also, like we said, we're selling to procurement. It is a completely different type of pitch. You're not selling talent or a candidate or anything like that. You're selling— you are selling a service. You're selling a business-to-business transaction, which is, I am going to find you the right outsourcing platform. And that is, you know, potentially a contractor, it could be 10 contractors, it could be 100 contractors. And you have all this cost allocation already. Does this fit your budget? So that's where, where the sell is quite different.

Yeah, I'm going to get into that. Um, but it sounds like then basically, look, I might be wrong here, but did you sort of have to learn the hard way that maybe sometimes you would have conversations or get your hopes up about a potential project that you might be involved in, but you wasn't speaking to procurement, but then learned that they really had the final decision because they had the budget max? Is that part of the reason here that you sort of learn that actually if I could try and— that's like the root source of like the— I'm sure there's a few people, a few different stakeholders involved, but like if I have no clue or I'm not speaking to anyone that influences the, the actual budget for these types of projects, which is procurement, I'm not really going to get anywhere near actually getting contractors or being involved.

Am I—

I don't know, is that part of it?

Or yeah, so Effectively, there'd be a series of sales that I would do, which I'd be passed over from stakeholder to stakeholder to try and find somebody who has the right accountability. And then by the end of it, I would find the right person who was able to sign me off and go through signing a terms of business and all the rest of it. And I would note down what their title would be. And what I noticed after a couple of FTSE 100, FTSE 250 style businesses, really large sort of enterprise businesses that we were bringing on for contract, the end client or the person who was signing off the terms for me was always a category manager. A resource manager, a director of procurement. So it ended up being that really, if I could cut out all this goop that I managed to find on my adventure through and just go straight to the person who obviously has the end accountability anyway, then adjust my pitch based on that.

Yeah, okay, sure, that makes sense. Right, so let's get on to the next piece then, something that everyone will be familiar with, which is mapping out the employers, mapping out the potential organizations that you could offer this service to, support, provide, uh, solutions for. So we've put here biggest contract users in your industry. How do I— how do I go about doing that? Like, you know, we're talking about building a contract but from scratch. So we've spoken a bit about the supply chain, understanding that, some education around who you might end up having to actually always aim to sell your solution to. So we've understood that, we've got a bit of a grasp of like who's typically involved, um, in, um, working this way. Like, where, where do we start with mapping out the biggest contract users? Are we going to start with— did you start with the existing, uh, clients that, the, um, that Yoko's been working with? Or like, you know, where, where do we start here?

There's two prongs. I mean, if you're going into a business which already has, you know, a strong level of sort of permanent terms of business, which they already have, then you can discover what type of projects they work on. So you'd be taking a look at those businesses and taking a look at their case studies, who they end up working for, the stuff they want to shout about, and then you could start to put together how they manage to create that business and succeed on that business. So there is a certain part which is creating some MI to start with. It's all about market intelligence to start with. So if you're in a business which has clients in terms of business, it is an easier sell, because you can wade into these companies and ask them whether they've ever used interim resource or whether they might have made a hire of which didn't work 9 months down the line and they'd been aced out of a rebate because it was too late, or it didn't work 3 or 4 months down the line and similar situation happened, and whether I could supply them a resource of which was interim and they could cut within a week if they weren't happy, and that they could keep me updated with, and that I'd be checking in with this person every week as well to assure that everybody's aligned. So there is that side of things which you could get started. However, if you're going completely from scratch and you know nothing about your market or anything like that, again, you can start with market intelligence, but that can come from a couple of different places. That can come from candidate side first. So say, for example, you're a certain technology recruiter, um, a software language recruiter, you would type in on the job board everybody, you know, the Boolean which brings up the type of candidates you want to work with and contract, and then you call through each person and treat— see whether you can start mapping out whether there's whether they're constant users or contractors, whether they're single-use contractors, anything like that. So you start to build up some names within your technology as to who's hired previously, because that's a good way to start. And once you get that MI, you could obviously take that to market. You can start speaking to your clients and who they're doing projects for. So say, for example, you're speaking to an agency that you want to supply a contractor into, a digital agency or a marketing agency or something like that. And they say that they're doing a project for a big bank. Then you would note down who that big bank is, and then you'd also ask them whether they'd had difficulties with this and whether they had to use a marketing agency or a digital agency before. And so you're basically building out what is again a supply chain of people and based on MI. So, so my way of mapping and starting from scratch is, right, once I've got an idea of who the big target businesses are within my verticals from, you know, doing a bit of research online, doing a bit of candidate work, I would pick that one big prime authority customer. So that big big prime account which has, you know, 10,000 headcount or 100,000 headcount globally. And then I would work backwards. So I'd understand, alright, so who, who supplies the IT services into the, into that business? Like, where do they outsource that to? And who does the marketing within that business? Where do they outsource that to? Who does the IT support for the marketing company that they outsource that stuff to? And then just keep working all the way down. And you'd be surprised that with these, these huge entity businesses that you could, you could build sort of spider legs of, of 10, 15, 20 businesses that the, the ultimate end customer is the prime that you want to deal with. And it's a really easy sell on the way down because if you win any of those businesses across that supply chain, you sell up and down. So you sell upwards into the businesses to say, look, I work with your outsourced businesses, and you sell below to say, look, I work with a customer that you're already looking to work with in a higher capacity. How about we help each other and have a better service that way? So it can seem complicated, but all you need is that big prime business to start start with, and then you just got to start mapping out the companies that they use.

Give— just define like big, big prime business for me.

So for me, it's going to be that business which you can make volume hires with. And so you, you might have, you know, and big prime businesses doesn't necessarily mean a 10,000, 100,000 headcount business, but it means a business in your vertical in which you could you could place 50 people with. And so if you're a— if that's a development company, a software house, and they have 50, 60 developers but they're only 100 tall, then that might be a prime business. And however, if it's a business that has multiple divisions and one of their divisions just happens to be somewhere where you could place that many people, then that could be your business. So it can be differing sizes, but it has to be relevant to your vertical.

We'll get back to the episode in just one minute, but today I'm excited to talk to you about one of our partners Firefish, the recruitment CRM that accelerates data-driven growth. The problem with most recruitment CRMs is that they are just a database of records, meaning they become just one of the many tools that recruiters use every day. Like all systems, the records are only as good as the data being captured. Our sponsors Firefish know that for agencies to win faster, data needs to be at the heart of their business, making your CRM the single source of truth. With over 10,000 records created and updated every day and 85% replacements from existing candidates, Firefish enables recruiters to enrich and engage their data, equipping you with real-time insights needed to win faster. To learn more about Firefish and take advantage of an exclusive Recruitment Mentors Podcast offer, make sure you click the link in the show notes and mention the Recruitment Mentors Podcast when to the Firefish team. And what, like, what have you found from your experiences to be the sort of pros and cons of working more on, like, the small-medium business market? Because I know that obviously you had that period, and then we've got large enterprise, which is what you're talking about here. Like, what would you say are the main, like, pros and cons of the SMB side and the large enterprise side, which is where you ended up?

So the small businesses, it's more about care and again accountability on your side. And also there's a scare, especially in the UK market, there's a lot of people who are quite scared of the result of a bad contract hire. Obviously there's a lot of cost attached to it if it goes poorly. And there's also with IR35 regulations, if that person misses tax now, it's that business that has to fork up the bill and no longer the contractor that has to fork up the bill. So there's the additional cost and risk attached there. So small businesses They're more nimble. They can hire quicker. They can get somebody started much quicker. There's less compliance in the backend, sort of, you know, certain checks which you may have to do in order to comply with the rest of the wider organization. So that's, you know, that's a big plus. But it is a lot more of sort of safeguarding and making sure that you're protecting that business throughout that piece. So that can be stressful. And there could be a lot of people who, you know, one day they wake up and they say, actually, this risk is way too much. You know, I've taken a look at the books, and if this goes wrong, then we go under. And so the accountability can be massive on those small businesses, but also they can be very lucrative as well. And because you can define your margin, you can define the budget with them, which means you can earn more out of those smaller businesses in tandem. With the larger businesses, they've got more governance in place. So that's a good thing because you know exactly what you're working to. Everybody's on a level playing field, and you're supplying candidates in which you already know how, how the process is going to go. The process is identical regardless of the position you're placing there. You're interfacing with the same people. They've got a reputation. It's easier to source candidates for those big businesses as well because there's a name value there. But governance can also create, you know, time-consuming, you know, parts of the process. So if you're working with a business that says you have to credit check every candidate, you have to DBS check every candidate, and on top of all the registration you already have to do with candidates and the right-to-work piece that you already have to do with them, suddenly instead of just placing somebody and they can start on Monday, you place somebody and they can start in November. Um, so that, that's, that's the difference there, is that it can be more time-consuming with the larger entities.

And then what's been your experience of— because I think you, like, on your journey, you had a period where you had contractors where it was like one or two contractors in one, like, across like different clients, right? So I feel like your, your part, your like strategy in this as well, is that that you feel like your contract book is potentially more protected. Yeah, if you have potentially less clients, but because these, these enterprise companies are more robust, or like, yeah, like I guess more protected in that way. Do you want to just explain a bit about that, or like your experience with that? Yes, quite intentional, isn't it?

Yeah, it absolutely is. And I, I, you know, usually recommend to anybody starting their contract book that the small, the small businesses are, are the easier to turn around, that The procurement process in terms of getting terms signed is much quicker. You don't have to wait 6 months to go through certain parts of the supply chain to get certain signs off from different directors before you can even get your first contract job. And that you define the budget, which means you can define higher margins quite early on. And you can also like, you know, you change every day, you sell every day, you learn much quicker if you're in an environment in which you're selling every day as well. And it forces you to do that if you're just going into businesses selling ones and twos each time. And so that first year you can get up to, what is always the golden piece in the UK, which is like a £5,000 weekly GP, and within a year or a year and a half, and by specs, by selling to those small businesses. But where I had to bob, and the reason I did so, and it was always part of the strategy to do so, once you've built up a decent platform of fairly lucrative contractors, is when the economy stumbles. And so in the UK, in a lot of Western Europe, there's been a lot of economical issues, which are continuing, high interest rates, which really affect businesses. And then in my market at that time, which was technology, there was the tech bubble burst. So 40,000 people get made redundant in London in the space of 2 weeks. And, you know, you see tens of thousands of people being made redundant all over the UK and in certain technology vocations. And that just meant to me that when I was speaking to these hiring managers, now everybody was being very risk-averse. They didn't want to be part of those people who had to make redundancies, and certainly didn't want to make redundancies because they'd brought on a contractor via me. So instead, I was looking for those businesses that that, yeah, were very stable through difficult economical times. Like, their shares never dropped during these periods. And they are not seasonal businesses either. And there's definitely such thing as that, and it's growing ever more so, these seasonal businesses who go through seasonal hiring waves, but rather these sort of everlasting greenfield-type businesses in which the strategy is constantly expansion, expansion. And even if they went through periods of where they lose projects, and they have these massive bidding and tendering teams in which they were going to be using you anyway to help with these bids and tenders to get the first contractors in elsewhere. So my move away is that I saw that tech bubble burst, I saw a lot of my contractors get made redundant, I saw a lot of my clients go through really difficult times, and I felt, look, I don't really want to be going from zero every single year to build up to this point once again. And instead, let's concentrate on something which is uber sustainable. You know, the volume will have to be there to match it, but something in which I could achieve and predict the same wallet share every single year without fail.

So just to wrap this piece up then, if I was in your team and I was building out my, um, contract desk, and I'd say to you, Jake, I've sort of mapped out the big prime businesses, the supply chain, etc., what would you expect to see as like a minimum from me? Like, what would you expect to see on that? If it— I don't know, maybe a document or something that I'd be like, just so we understand that, like, what what does at least minimum standard look like on mapping out these types of entities and, and companies in MySpace?

I, I think it's worth putting milestones down, and I think that there should always be a 3, 6, and 12-month milestone for contract. And mostly because your first 3 months, like, it's so heavy sales-based and it can take a little while to get contractors started anyway. And with the compliance you have to put in place, that realistically I'm not expecting a tangible sort of fee-based outcome from somebody within their first 3 months. And what I'm expecting is, yeah, you've got this big authority customer, this big prime business that you want to eventually get into. You've mapped out their supply chain downwards, and you've then built up a contact base of 5 to 10 people in each business. And maybe half of them are in HR and in sort of C-suite positions. The other half of them are in procurement and supply chain or something along those lines. And then you've written up a couple of really good sort of email pitches, virtual pitches with a presentation, and you've got an idea of where each one of these contacts are based geographically. So really like in-depth in-depth detailed stuff within the first 2 or 3 months that then arms you to say, right, in the next 3 months after that, going into 6 months, I want to land a couple terms of business. And I'm going to highlight all of these people every single week. They're getting an email, a call, a follow-up, so on and so forth. Keep it, and then create an email supply, an email chain that you could keep forwarding on, you know, keep yourself known, keep responding to, keep the communication live, even if they keep trying to shut it down. And then really, that back 6 months, that backend 6 months, which is where you'd expect to start to see the fees being achieved, because contract can domino effect really quickly because you've got single-stage interview processes, and you've got 24-hour feedback on things. And once you've got all your back-office function in place, you could start them next week. So realistically, you have 2 or 3 good contract weeks, you could get up to 10 runners, and actually much, much faster than anything else you've done up to that point. So yeah, that would be the thing which I'd expect in the first year.

Yeah, yes, that's a really good breakdown. So let you— touching on it there, but the next piece that we had was with that market intelligence, with that plan, we then, like you said, need to effectively, consistently, persistently, like, sell, pitch, you know, to the, the problems that we believe we can fix with the resource and, and the people that, um, we work with. So So talk to me a bit about this then. So I think I've got here, people are scared to use contracts in the UK. I don't know, do you want to start there, Ben, and we can get into the pitch and sort of how you figured this out?

Yeah, I mean, the first thing you need to understand is somebody's stance on interim resource and whether they've ever used it before. And because there's two reasons why somebody can be scared, and it's either they've never used it before, so they don't know the outcome, or they've used it before and they've been burnt. So that's the first thing that you have to define is how that person feels. If they've been burnt before, it's a case of trying to kind of buy back good grace, really. So it's a case of, I'm different. The reason I'm different is because of this. This is how I experience that. This is my knowledge within this sphere. This is what I can guarantee you in terms of short notice periods. This is a quality that I can guarantee you. We can set up a process together. I can be extensively involved in the vetting of that person. I can show you project examples, whatever it might be. We will get into in place for you so that you make the most informed decision if you're going to bring on interim resource. And, you know, I'm not the type of customer to just disappear when things go wrong, and I would confront it head-on, and I'd be able to support you thereafter if we need a replacement or whatever that might look like. So that would be the person who's been burnt, is trying to address why they were burnt previously and how you would approach it differently and what sort of processes, practices you've got in place to make sure that something like that never happens again. And then you'll have the person who's never used contract resource before. So they would have heard, oh, £500 a day, £600 a day, £1,000 a day for this resource. That seems like it's going to break the bank, but they don't realize necessarily how much they're spending on their own permanent resource. And that when salaries are deducted, bonuses are deducted, pensions and packages, so on and so forth, how they might be comparable in year 1, and you might only need that resource for 1 year anyway. So there's a pricing piece which they might be worried about that they've never had to think about before. And then there's also how do you manage somebody who's not part of the business, not part of the culture, doesn't understand the politics, anything like that within the business. And then that's a case of actually you can find that that's quite freeing, and that you are using this service purely for its outcome, and that this person or this business that is looking to support you does not care about any changes you might be implementing to extend the hours of the day because you're going through some difficult bit, difficult times, and, or, you know, you've maybe had a wave of people leave to a competitor most recently, and what culture that creates. Does that create an environment that everybody's a bit nervous about? These people, these contractors, will not care about that. They will come in independently with the idea of execution, and, and it's really playing on that as a sales piece, and that they're just, they're, they're a completely different form of workforce to, to your, your permanent contingent.

Very, really good breakdown there. So we've got here, you have to get your pitch right. We've got virtual, face-to-face, email. Yeah, let's go through these. So let's start, let's start with email, I guess. Yeah, like, what, what, from you, from your experience, from what you've helped people, why don't we start with like, where do a lot of people go wrong when it comes to pitching the contract solution? Or, you know, trying to get in front of these people, where have you found typically people gone I find that a lot of markets are constantly on a knife's edge as to whether they're candidate-led or client-led.

So a lot of people, especially within the contract sphere, they pick up a candidate and they look to spec out, and they look to make sure they put that in front of the hiring managers that they want to be a part of, and that's their only sell. But realistically, unless that business that you're selling to themselves are, you know, shotguns for hire or anything like that, they don't necessarily care about the one candidate that you're showing to them right now, but they care rather about what the service is that you're going to be providing. So I'm not really I'm not really a candidate-led person. A lot of that is down to the markets that I work within. I appreciate that there's other markets out there which that's far more relevant to. But to me, it's a case of understanding where they are as a business at the moment, and what part of their business is disappointing, whatever they bring up their meetings, and what issues that I know that they have in terms of, you know, if I'm seeing profiles from their business on the the job boards or whatever it might be, or people who have fled during redundancies and such like that, and what went wrong there, and why there are issues along those pieces. And then my email cell will largely be like, look, this is who I am within the industry. These are a couple of people that I work with, if you want to, if name value gives you some clout and that gives you some assurance. I'll then move on to here's my service lines, here's the vertical markets that we specialize in, as a multifaceted business as you are. Here's a case study attached as to a grouping of hires I've made before. Here's some free MI that you could use whether you want it or not, which are really deep dive salary surveys or market surveys or trends, anything like that. And look, I'm not expecting anything immediately off the back of this email, but I appreciate you've got a really comprehensive service piece there, of which when you look back in your emails and you say, God, I really wish I had this thing right now, and you keyword search your emails, I will likely be at the top of it every time because I've covered every keyword you'd imagine.

And is this— so you're trying to get that all across in one email?

Yes, yes. So I try and be informative. I mean, it depends who you're selling to. So I have a strong feeling towards that you sell differently to different generations, and a lot of people might see that as slightly unusual, but we all consume data very differently. So I find if I'm selling to a more traditional business, a big robust a large trust business that has people, you know, I'm selling to somebody very senior within that business who's probably had to work their way up, you know, 10 years to get to the point that they're in, then I will be sending a very detailed overview as to who we are. Because if I hook them in the first line, they want to know data, they want to consume all that, you know, all that written information. They don't care for colloquialisms or using certain jargon. They appreciate that, you know, they appreciate that you've been part of the sector because you speak in that way. And they will pick up on a lot of the lingo within that as well. If I'm selling to somebody who's younger, and you see a lot of internal talent teams now, and as internal talent is still a relatively new function in a lot of businesses, and they have a lot of young people, they consume data slightly differently. So it would be a much shorter email, probably trying to build rapport a little bit more quickly, and about, you know, some of the posts I've seen on their LinkedIn, maybe linking in a video which I thought might be relevant to them, and based off of what I've seen, what they've been posting, just to give them a bit of information because people like, certainly younger people like consuming videos and everything that you do, for example. So I maybe link that to them, and then we can build the more heavy stuff later in the email chain. So I do modify it depending on the person, but largely because I'm selling to those larger businesses, I will probably send an absolute thesaurus of words over to them.

[Speaker:TYRONE] Yeah, fair. What's important on the virtual pitch then? So we put that— so when you say that, do you mean like how you introduce yourself on Zoom calls and how you explain your services? Is that what we're talking about here?

Yeah. And there's also a confidence. So virtual pitching and Teams call pitching is obviously very different to what we would have done back in the day, you know, going on to site or anything like that. And so it's an art form that people are kind of just getting to grips to now because it's difficult. Like even you and I speaking over, over a podcast, like you sort of build out each other when people are loosening up or whatever it might be. And it's similar when you're pitching to a client in recruitment over Teams or over whatever. So for me, I enter quite, I guess it's just my own attitude or personality. I'll go in quite casual and I'll talk, the usual British thing, talk a bit about the weather, talk about what you've been up to over the weekend, make a bit of a jibe at it, all that sort of stuff. Try and take away from the killing points which come thereafter because that can seem so serious and not particularly relationship-built. So I try to build an atmosphere which is a little bit more jovial, a little bit more comfortable for everybody involved. And if anything they could take away from that call, that they didn't waste half an hour. So start with that, and then my virtual pitch will kind of get into, and I would have studied a lot of this sort of stuff before I go into a pitch. Everything will be off the top of the head. I'm not reading from notes. I'm not, as they're talking, noting down as well. I'm not a big person who's just a note-taker whenever somebody's talking back to them about their requirements, I try and hit it face-on, because you can record meetings. Most people should be recording meetings and asking about it. You can look back for notes thereafter, but you want to be making eye contact, and you want to be speaking to somebody as if you're having a dialogue about something, and not just somebody who's there to administer some details that you want, writing down the job description for you.

So you shared some of those bits there, like what have you helped people get better at, out of interest, like in your team, like on the, if maybe I was in your team and my conversion was quite low from like Teams call to terms signed or, you know, progressing things forward, like what, yeah, what have you ended up helping people with or where are sort of some of the improvement areas maybe?

I think talk about things which are both personal to that business and personal to the person that you're talking to within that business. So there's a lot of things that you can find out about, about any large company, especially online. You could talk about the numerative amount of money that they've just won off of a project with the public sector, for example, and what that looks like, and how that impacts that business, and congratulations on winning that. Were you involved in any of the tendering of that? Were you involved in any of the bids? How's that going to affect your job? All that sort of stuff. I like opening up with phone calls as to, how's the experience been like for you working at the business? Doesn't matter whether they've been there 20 years or not, but what's it like waking up every day to go into the business? How do you feel? What's the commute like? that sort of piece, which is again much more softer and more personal. There's other pieces as well which can be sort of flattery. So, en, you know, there's countless awards out there for in-house recruitment functions, in-house HR functions, in-house procurement functions. You could probably find that the majority of these businesses one year or another were nominated for one of these awards, and you could talk about that and whether they were involved in that and whether they went on that night out, and you can sort of brag a little bit as to whether you went on one one of those nights out yourself beforehand. So I try to teach people to, one, do their research, like understand what is important to those businesses and make sure that's off the top of your head. Talk about the real detail as to what that business has won, why they're excited about it, why they want to hire for it, and why that's important. And then, you know, just start picking up some personality pieces as to, all right, what's important to this person and their job at the moment, which is giving them passion to speak to me and, you know, create some good within their own business? Like, what's, what's, what's energizing them to even talk to me about these hires? You know, why do they care about it? So, um, yeah, I guess, I guess it's too, too sprung in that way.

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I, I, I think I— it's all based on, on longevity as well. So for me, um, I have very, very rarely won somebody from, you know, first pitch. Everybody will tell you that, that it's So, you know, there'll be posts out there on LinkedIn on, on it takes 12 touchpoints or 18 touchpoints, whatever it might be. And for me, there's a couple of things you want to create. You create the email chain to start with. That's your first initial pitch that you send over. And I have had instances in my career, one of our biggest permanent accounts in our business, and took 2.5 years to win, of which I was just re-pitching on that same email chain. You could see the original email from back in 20, end of 2021, early 2022. And they came aboard about 3 or 4 months ago, and it was just re-pitching over and over again. Here's free MI. Oh, I've seen this happen with your business. Amazing. Are you interested in this? I've been shut down a load of times in that chain, but I'll still keep coming back to it and say, look, spare wheel, if you need anything like that, here's another piece that we're working on. Here's an event that we're going to. Are you going to that? You might have a ton of those pitches before maybe a year in or something, they could say, right, let's jump on a Teams call. I can see you're persistent. I'll give you the time of day. Even if it's just to get you off my back. What I tend to find, one virtual pitch can seal the deal at that point, because they've already known you for a year. So by the time you actually do the virtual pitch and you get everything out, and suddenly they're like, actually, you know, you are legitimate about what you talk about, I'm glad I spent my time with you, let's get you on board. So I tend to find that I could send, I don't know, 100 email pitches out, follow up all 100, maybe land 10, 15, 15 virtual calls thereafter, then maybe pick up 12, 13 of those businesses after that, and across both what might be permanent and contingency. And so yeah, it's a lot, it's a lot upfront, and for those big, big businesses, as you can imagine. But actually, if you get into a cycle of doing that, then you'll find every month one of them's biting, one of them's bringing you on board, and each one is a massive business. Volume hires on each business. So you sort of get into into a cyclical piece of every month, the business that you've been targeting for the last 2 years decides to break and go for you. So yeah, it takes a bit of a pound of flesh upfront, but it's definitely worth it thereafter.

[Speaker:JAMES] Well, yeah, I think this is the bit you're talking about, right? Following up, persistence, keep showing up 3 to 6 months down the line, but most importantly, use that initial upfront work of the planning, the strategy on the organizations that you want be aiming to work with over the 2-year period or whatever, and be doing what we're just talking about here with 3, 4, 5, 10, 15 of those organizations at the same time. Yeah, is, is the, is the key.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I'm never just putting on my— I mean, nor should any recruitment recruiter put their, their full, you know, ambition onto one client. Like, absolutely there'll be tons of clients out there on which you're— you believe that you are going to work with someday. And that's how I, I basically ended energize this entire process is that some of these clients that end up biting 2, 3 years down the line, I've always had that ambition that I will work with you, and it will be— it's not a case of if, it will be a when. I've just got to keep my energy up, keep my positivity up, and keep going again and again. And so for me, like, that, that, that's, that's my follow-up culture. Like, follow-up culture is way more important than your first touch point. Your first touch point could be quite bad. Like, you could, you could send over a sloppy email, you could, you could make a jarring and awkward phone call, but it's just to open up the dialogue. It, like, no friend that you've ever met, you have an immediate free-flowing conversation, so it's not the same in sales either. So you have to build up to that, that, and you certainly do build up to it when you've been shut down 6 or 7 times beforehand and you can have a bit of a laugh about it.

Mm, no, yeah, it's, it's, it's so true. And then, like you said, if it's taken us 6 months, 8 months to get that virtual meeting, we get the wheels really in motion, we get things agreed, then it really is over to you to back up with— back up what you've said and the things that you've said with action, right? I think this can't be, you know, talk a lot on here around getting clients, new business sales, um, but then what we can't overlook is that when you do get that opportunity are you going to walk the walk, really? Um, and that's, that's obviously even— obviously, yeah, like, like on the perm side, just as important on, on the contract side if we want to be someone that's supplying multiple contractors in 6-12 months' time with that organization.

Yeah, so, so for me, you, you— if you, if it's taken about a year to win a client, you should have in that time come up with a bit of a strategy as to how you would source them if you brought them on board. Like, don't get me wrong, there's some fool's luck out there, which is this has landed quicker than I thought it was going to? Are we prepared to really take on a business like this? But more often than not, it's never going to take, you know, your first touchpoint, your second touchpoint. It's going to take 15, 16 touchpoints. If that's weeks per year, then you're already looking at, you know, a third of the year going, or whatever it might be. So it's incredibly important because these businesses, they are just as easy to lose as they are to, you know, easy to ignore you upfront. So, you know, should you sell this big dream over the space of a year or two, and you come on, and even from your early days, you're a bit of a damp squib, you're not communicating very well, and you were just using them as a bit of an accolade to get into other businesses, whatever it might be, you'll be found out really quickly because you're never usually joining, you know, you're never usually working with these large enterprises on such a scale without them having prior history or track record of when delivery's gone well for them, or whether they've used other agencies who have been strong. So oftentimes you might, and we'll obviously talk about this in a moment, but talk about like tiering of clients. And you might join these businesses after selling to them for 2 years in their tier 3, and as somebody who gets a job way after everybody else, and they still expect you to have delivery up there with the people who are right at the top, these big recruitment businesses with maybe a team of people sat on this one account, and you're just one person working on this account. So again, you have to have the independence there to, to understand where you come in within their supply chain in a way that you support talent, and, and how you individualize yourself. So So, if you do get into one of these big businesses and they do have a large PSL and say they've got 15 agencies working on this massive body of work and those 15 agencies all have 3 to 5 people working on the same body of work, you're coming up against 60, 70, 80 contractors, 80 recruiters to work on these contract roles. So, how are you going to stick out as that 1 in 80 as to how they're going to keep using you and you keep succeeding and you keep winning? So, yeah, it does run in 2 parts. You definitely have to deliver very quickly if you manage to get over that line.

So you mentioned something there that was interesting that we didn't write down. So like, as this is all going on, you're saying that you need to really ensure you're putting just as much energy into building the contractor network and these bits?

Yeah, yeah. So you, you, you can't really go in without that black book. Like, it's, it's traditional as that is in, is in recruitment. Your biggest asset is what you know and other people don't. And so you need to keep building on that. You keep need to get involved within those communities as well. Say, for example, you're a, you're an engineering recruiter and you're about to be brought on to a major manufacturing site in which they need 100 people to work on their production line or whatever it might be. You need to understand, well, which universities are these people getting their qualifications from? Which colleges are they getting their apprenticeships from? And is there any similarities there? Are there any other businesses locally in which look like good, you know, leaping boards or stepping boards into this business? And you build up a community there. Are you're after, because you want to start building like a referral list as well. So it's not just about the candidates who are live right now, but the candidates who are big parts of their culture in their current businesses, that if they left to join your target client, are people in their previous businesses going to join with them? Do they miss that person? Do they band around what that person does with their career and want to emulate them? So you have to really ingrain yourself within communities too.

How long does it take to build up a black book?

Uh, depends what market you're working, I guess. It's much easier if you're working a market of which there's 10 people who are qualified to do the bloody thing in the country. And if you're working in something incredibly broad, and it can be very difficult. Like, it— for me, like, I, as a, as a recruiter who's not necessarily bound by geography, there's all sorts of weird and wonderful places even in the UK that I've recruited into that I've never visited to, and they're in certain suburbs suburbs, of which have a completely different culture. That's, that's sort of the beauty of a lot of the UK, is that, that we have so many different regions and such, which all work so different, and we're so proud about it. And so you might be speaking to, um, a couple of, couple of people who work for local businesses there, and they have a particular way of doing things. They, they start, you know, they have similar shifts, and, you know, maybe there's, uh, there's more of a, a concentration on earning in those places. Maybe there's more of a concentration on family life and whatever it might be. Maybe they're from more affluent places, so they have, you know, they're used to that sort of income and they're expected of that sort of income. Or maybe you sell differently because they're not from those sort of places. So, you know, there's, there's certain communities, and, and like, learning those communities can be very difficult. And because the only way you're going to understand, you know, which colleges everybody comes from and the type of friends they would have made at those colleges, and understanding whether maybe your contractor over here actually went to school with your contractor over there, but they don't even know that they're working with you, you know, both separately, uh, is if you call everybody and if you see every CV and if you're constantly like perusing the market all the time.

So what else do we have to really get right then if we want to build a successful contract desk? Then like, is there anything else that we want to add here or emphasize before we wrap this up?

You've got to be really in front of your clients all the time, and it's really easy to forget about the contract recruiter that supplied you that one guy for 3 months months. And it's not the same as being a permanent recruiter that you fall back on, you know, once or twice a year to help you with a little bit of labor shortage, which you always go through, like expected retention issues or whatever it might be. And for me, the contract recruiter like has to be front and center constantly, just forcing opportunity, like forcing errors, forcing opportunities for themselves. And so by doing so, they need to constantly have their calendar full, and every contract recruiter shouldn't really be able to move for 15 minutes in the day without having another call booked in with a candidate or a client, or being in front of somebody, or even just— even I've got 5-minute intervals booked in my calendar just to send a follow-up to a client. So I can be quite methodical in that approach, but what it does mean is that my brand is everywhere, and, you know, my individualism within the market, who I am and what I do, is in front of 500 to 1,000 people every day or two. And that's, that's, that's really important. Like, when you start to build these communities and such, and you're looking for ratios of people that come back to you, it's much easier to land, and, you know, 1 in 10, 1 in 20 people to 1 in 1,000 people. And, but you certainly give yourself far more opportunities. And so, yeah, Yeah, but I guess my final thing would be just be in front of everyone. Push your brand out there all the time and make sure that people can't forget you.

And what are you really doubling down on now with the new business that you think should enable you to achieve the things that you want to with that?

We've got quite a unique proposition now as somebody who have never been ashamed of this is the way that we do things, and that we only really concentrate on volume, sort of mass-scale businesses. And with that, it's, it's, it's that, that puts us into a unique space where there's only a few of us in the UK that they can use anyway. And we're the newest people on the block. So people want to test us and see whether we do things differently. So we're in, we're in the game right now, even though we are inundated, we are full of roles that we're delivering on. And we're, you know, we're working really hard to get across things. Now's an excellent time to sell. And because we've got a new practice that's, that's right at the peak of its, of its, you know, first stage of development. And we've got excellent case studies, which are now in the, you know, hundreds of people that we've supplied into a single business. And, and that could be, you know, remarkable for an entity of our size and comparatively to the big names of the market. So where we're at at the moment is looking to double down within this space and keep growing. We've got now clients that we've worked with for a couple of years in this capacity. They're not going anywhere as long as we keep our delivery really, really strong, and that I'm very confident in. And so it's about adding ones and twos news in terms of clients, you know, every 2 or 3 months and seeing how we can grow teams around these offerings.

Love it. I mean, that was a pretty intensive breakdown.

Well, yeah, you should ask the rest of the team what I think.

No, but look, I know we went in a few different areas there, but hopefully for everyone listening, you know, there's, you know, got quite technical, but hopefully this this is, uh, the type of thing that can help people get even more out of, you know, what they're trying to achieve. Uh, I think whenever I speak to people like you, I think like you said, um, as part of the journey, like, contract recruitment can be really thankless for a long time before you start really seeing the rewards of your, your hard work, right?

Yeah.

Um, but then at the same time, like you said, which I thought was quite cool to hear, was things can change really quickly as well. Like, if you've kept up and you've kept giving yourself the, the opportunity to be given an opportunity by these employers, um, and these organizations, very quickly things can change for you in a positive way. But it's just making sure that you're working hard, obviously, but also that you're working hard and applying energy to the right strategy, mapping out the organizations, being smart about the supply chain, working downwards as you said you're always making sure that you're speaking to your network, your niche, you're building that black book because that's absolutely key. And then just really getting smarter with how you're pitching, who you're pitching to, and making sure that you'll keep showing up, right? And then when you do get the opportunity, that like you take that shit seriously and you really do everything that you can. So then you can really start building the track record, the case study, So I really respect anyone that— because I know I'd find it really hard whenever I hear people, um, meet people or speak to people that like, on the recruitment sense, get big enterprise clients on, or speak to people that work in sales that do like enterprise and they do like 1 to 4 deals a year or whatever. I do find that fascinating because there's just so much patience, so much patience required and strategic things happening. So I find it really interesting and also really respect it a lot because I know I know there's a lot of things that, yeah, like there's a lot of patience baked into it, right? So I think it's really cool that what you've ended up building for them and now obviously what you're going to be building with your own brand.

Yeah. And I guess it's like an epilogue which sort of tags on to what you've just said there is not to compare yourself to other people. There are so many different ways of doing this and they all work in their certain capacity. Some works better for other people. Some takes a little bit longer, whatever it might be, but patience is really important. Patience, a strong process, stick to the plan, and don't deviate. And it doesn't matter whether you are the person who only has to place 4 people a year and they live pretty happy, or whether you're the person who has to place 100 people in a year to hit your targets. It all works. There's validity of it everywhere, and everybody wishes for the stuff that they don't have. So yeah, absolutely not to compare yourself to one another.

Love it. Jake, thanks so much for joining me on the pod. Thanks very much.

Cheers.