How We Made 27 Millionaires: Inside Phaidon International's Success with Oliver Cooke

Ollie, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks. Welcome to Texas.

Absolutely. I guess I should say welcome back because we sat down remotely 3 years ago.

Was it exactly 3 years ago? I wasn't sure.

It just says on YouTube 3 years.

Okay, so we'll go—

we'll go with 3. It's good to be back.

Yeah, no, really cool. Obviously first time I've actually met you in person.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, and we've got a lot to talk about here. I'm, I'm really looking forward to this because when we last sat down I think we really dug into Ollie's perspective on like leadership, getting the most out of people. But today we want to make it a bit more focused on, from your perspective, how Faden have been able to achieve what they've achieved. I'm going to do that in, in a few different ways. We've sort of mapped out some of the pillars that you feel like Faden have done really well that has resulted in a number of financial events, um, and we're also going to talk about some of the things that clearly you guys have done really well in terms of like hiring young people, promoting from within, and then also talk about what the big goal is now moving forward and how you think you're going to get there. But I guess why don't we just start with obviously more— very recently you've gone into this new role within Faden. So why don't you tell us a bit about that and then we can sort of work backwards from like where, you know, the timeline of the journey that you've been on with Faden. But why don't you tell us a bit about this, this new role that you now have in Faden?

Yeah, so, so really excited to be given the opportunity to, to step up and, uh, become co-head of our North American offices.

Mhm.

Um, so my role now is leading, uh, I'm based in Dallas, uh, so continuing to lead Dallas, but alongside that, helping to, to lead and scale our offices across Tampa, Charlotte, Chicago, and Boston alongside that. Uh, and then Kareem, who you've had on the, the pod as well in the past, he's head of our New York office. He's also going to be helping to scale our LA office. So the two of us sort of coheading the offices across the US. And yeah, super exciting opportunity. Been with the business 13 years and yeah, looking forward to taking it to the next level.

Love it. So why don't you take us back then? We may have touched this on our previous episode, but like, like you said, 13 years. I think this is the really cool thing about industry that genuinely, if you're in the right environment, the right business, you can be taken on not only like a career-changing journey, but a life-changing journey, right? Like so much has changed in your life from, you now live in the US, you have a family. So like, where, like, give us a timeline of like leading up to this point and the different like milestones.

Yeah. So to start at the beginning, I mean, fairly typical recruitment story, kind of stumbled into it. And I remember interviewing for Faden back in 2011. Still at university at the time, looking for my first job out of uni. And I remember walking into this basement office in Mayfair in London. Office should have been for 30 people, but there were 50 people kind of crammed in there. And I knew what I was looking for was a business that could kind of match or exceed my own ambitions, where I could progress really fast based on how hard I worked, where I could frankly earn a lot of money really quickly, and I could do it around a culture where people shared the same views and had a like-minded mindset. And so, and I just felt that like every person I spoke to, it ticked all those boxes. And at the time, they talked about these big grand plans to scale globally and replicate what they're doing in London elsewhere, and the opportunities that would come with that, and that was super exciting for me. And frustratingly, I feel very fortunate to even be here today because the next day they called me and told me no after about 8 hours and 10 different interviews. So I was kind of devastated by that, and I asked the recruiter at the time, I said, look, can you get some feedback? And she said, look, I don't have all the feedback, but I'll get back to you. Tomorrow. She sent me an email basically saying, look, could tell you're really excited about the role, could tell you, you know, really wanted to be part of it, but we weren't sure if you had the resilience to be successful in this industry. Um, and I, uh, sent them a polite sort of consultative email back. I guess they must have saw a recruiter in there somewhere, uh, didn't, didn't take the first no for an answer, and, and told them why they were wrong politely, and they called me back the next day and offered me the job. So like I said, frankly feel like very lucky that I'm even part of the business today. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have even joined. And yeah, started in the London office in 2011 and, you know, really, you know, did well in my first year or two in the role. 18 months in, we were starting New York and as Harry Yutan, who eventually became our CEO, was going out there to run it. He was my original manager, asked me to come with him at 23 years old, and, you know, haven't really looked back since.

So to start in New York, and then when— what was the next, like, milestone? When did you get—

so I think, I think, you know, again, this point around, like, young, ambitious, hard-working people in our industry, and I think Faden's, like, a pretty shining light of that. Like, we have always given young, ambitious, hardworking people an opportunity. And I'm an example of that. But that story extends to so many other people who've been part of our business and our journey over the years. So firstly, in New York, there was 6 or 7 of us that went out alongside Harry. Harry only had, I think, 5 years of experience at the time, and the rest of us had less than 2 years of experience. So again, that's just one example again of like how, you know, this company gives pretty junior people a chance to go to the other side of the world and make something of it. Um, so went out to New York, um, and this is a story I told recently a few times getting around to a few of our offices, but I remember Harry showing me the business plan, uh, for the next few years ahead, and it had us getting to 50 people at year 2. And at the time, being like relatively junior, 6 of us in a room sort of making calls, trying to win some clients, that felt a bit ambitious to me, if I'm honest. And I'm not sure if I fully believed it. And lo and behold, by the end of year 2, we were at 60 in New York. And I remember very vividly, that was the moment where I was like, this is real. Like, this is, this is going to be special. Um, so yeah, New York, I was there for 7 years. Uh, my main role I played there was building our Selby Jennings brand, which is our financial services brand across the US. So I sort of grew that to about 150 people across the US, about $30 million net fee income annually. And then around 4 years ago was, uh, tasked with, um, helping some of our regional growth across the US and all the brands that sit within those offices. There's 6 brands that are part of Faden, for anyone that doesn't know. And was involved with helping Dallas from afar, helped set up our Charlotte office, helped put plans in place for our West Coast operations and help out on the West Coast as well. And the opportunity to come down to Dallas came up because we'd been here for a couple of years and it'd gone okay, but it hadn't quite taken off by our standards. And we just saw a huge opportunity for ourselves in Texas. The, obviously, the amount of people moving here, the growth of the region as a whole, the amount of clients asking for our help. So yeah, got on a plane again and took the risk to come down to Texas. I think if you told me 10 years ago I'd be living in Dallas, I probably would have laughed at you. But, um, yeah, got here 4 years ago into Dallas. At the time we were about 15 people, and fast forward to today, we're about 125 people in Dallas, and we'll do close to $20 million in net fee income this year, um, across around 500 placements. So Dallas has gone exceptionally well. And then obviously, uh, the new role that I'm in now. I think one other example I'd point to in terms of like where we're at now, I mean, firstly, like Kareem and I getting the chance to step up into these new roles. We've also promoted Alyssa, who's been on your pod in the past, into a head of brand role for us. And I can come back to what that role is all about, uh, later. And we've also promoted our head of finance into a head of performance role. So we're sort of the 4 leadership team kind of making decisions for the US. Alongside that, we have a US board, which is basically all of our brand heads for the US and all of our office heads. So it's about 13 people, and every single one of those individuals that I've talked about started as a trainee in Faden, and the average tenure of those people is about 10 years.

That's really cool.

So again, like Just another example of a truly organic growth model and how that's worked well for us.

Right, so that's the timeline. So that's really helpful. I guess just to make it really clear then on context, so now responsible for Dallas, Tampa, Charlotte, Boston, Chicago yourself, that works out to be around 400 people that you are leading. And also we'll get into this, but then also the other bit to add here is today around 95% of your business is perm. Um, 90% of that business is typically worked on like a contingent exclusive basis, and then another 10% can fall into like retained or like embedded recruitment, which is another thing. So that hopefully will paint a bit of a picture as to like where the business is today, right, for on the, on the American side. But what— why don't we just start because you're just talking about it there, like 13 of the US board started as trainees. Like, what— why don't we start firstly with what do you feel like is the main positives, the main benefits that you get from really doubling down and committing to this strategy of giving young ambitious people an opportunity? Because there's, there's loads of recruitment companies out there that hire people without experience, and there's some companies that do that terribly, there's some companies that do that well. So just, yeah, tell me about like what, what do you see to be the main benefits that either you've obviously you've told them that how you personally benefited from it, but how have you seen this play out for Faden as a whole and as a company strategy?

Yeah, so I think there's a few areas where it's been super helpful for us. Firstly, in regards to how investible we are as a business. We have a true track record of building and developing talent, right? That is our platform. And like, ultimately, we sort of see ourselves as a learning and development organization as a whole. Like, that is our main role, to teach, train, and develop our people. Um, and so from an investor's perspective, one of the reasons why we think we've achieved what we have in the last 8 years in terms of events and investment in our businesses, that proven track record of developing people not just into proven billers but also leaders and beyond in our business. So that's number one. Number two, I would say, uh, it creates a true golden thread in a number of ways throughout our organization, and that, that's in terms of our culture. Like, you can walk into virtually any of the 14 Faden offices around the world, and generally it feels the same. There's going to be nuances based on Asia or London or the US, right? But generally, like, we talk about the same things, we drive the same things, people care about a lot of the same things, and the culture and the vibe of every office you walk into feels very similar. Um, and what that's helped us with is particularly our land and expand business model. Where some firms make a mistake is they, they want to enter a new market and they'll go and hire a couple of experienced guys that are local to that market and, um, build it from there. But then they end up just franchising their business a little bit because the way they do things might be totally different to the way you've done things in your most successful office or where you've scaled elsewhere. And so whenever we go to a new location or we start a new brand or we start a new vertical or we, we do anything new, the first place we'll always look is internally to, to look at what talent do we have available, what talent we have internally, and who could go and go out and go do it. And, you know, my own journey is an example of that. Many, many others throughout Faden are great examples of that. So those are kind of the key areas of success that I've seen. There's obviously some pitfalls. To that model, right? And happy to talk about—

yeah, let's go. Like, what, what do you feel like have been the, the biggest challenges along the way of it? Like, has been— like, has attrition been a challenge? Has, like, getting actually really good at understanding, like, what are the things that we have to look for in people? You tell me, what have been some of the biggest challenges that you've had to just get better at over time?

I think the first thing is we are very insular as a business, And that's a strength because we tend to only focus on ourselves and what we do well and trying to be better every day and trying to improve what we do. But sometimes we miss out on perhaps sharing or collaborating or thinking of ideas of how other people are doing it.

Right.

And there's probably an element of groupthink that comes with that as well, of like being in a bit of an echo chamber where everyone thinks the same way. Sometimes you're not always as open to a new idea or a new way of doing things. And we're definitely looking at that. And that's one of the reasons why we're trying to bring in, sprinkle in selective experienced hires in key places to, to, to combat that. So I think that's, that, that's probably like one of the main challenges. Look, obviously where we give young, inexperienced people a chance to do something, it doesn't always work. And that's a reality. And we've made mistakes around that over the years. And, you know, we've seen huge successes from it, but we've also had times where we failed. And that's a reality of giving people a shot and giving people a chance. We are now getting a lot more thoughtful about how we do that going forward, around how we grow, where we grow, where we add headcount, under which managers, how we develop our leadership team. So it's as de-layered as possible. There's a number of things we can dive into around that, but Those are the main challenges I think we've seen.

So what I think would be helpful for people, because there's a lot of people listening to this that will hire young, ambitious people, what does the— it may differ, but what have you found to be the best interview process for inexperienced people?

So our interview process is pretty simple. We have what we call our CAP assessment, which is essentially a personality test. That everyone gets before they even talk to somebody. So we get about 50,000 applicants a year. So we get a lot. And so that just weeds out firstly the people just because there's some friction and you have to do something. Yeah, exactly. So that's number one. Number two, they'll have an interview with our talent acquisition team, which is a basic screening call covering some standard things that we look for in an individual. Uh, third one is typically a hiring manager or an office head or brand head will do a first round, which is a longer interview, probably half an hour to an hour. Um, and then from there we invite them in to do our work sample day. And our work sample day consists typically of, uh, two things. One of them is Actually seeing them on calls. So we do some mock phone calls with them. So we can, you know, we'll do any one example call and we'll get them to 2 or 3 calls where we see how they react in real time to a true test of how they operate. Are they coachable? Do they take on feedback? You know, how do they react in that real-world type situation? And the third part is a bit of a exercise around identifying candidates and sending that candidate back to, uh, us, um, on the same day, on the same day for the role that they're interviewing for. So they, they have to look at candidates for a recruitment consultant role and then identify who would be good for it. And that just helps us understand, like, do they understand the role? Do they understand what they're applying for? Do they understand why their resume would be good for this or not? And also, again, sees them in action. They do a writing sample, like a pretend email to see how their kind of writing and grammar is and things like that. And then lastly, they might have like a final round interview with a senior person, but typically we make a decision pretty after that. After that. So, and a lot. Yeah, it probably sounds like a lot, but we can run a process like that in a week.

Okay.

Right. So it does move pretty fast. I mean, obviously the amount of people we hire, which is in the US about 300 or 400 a year, We've got that process pretty slick now. The 3 things we look for in terms of buckets of individuals that we hire. The first one is somebody with a demonstrated track record of working hard, right? And everyone's hardworking in an interview. It's like, what have you actually done? So, it could be, have you had jobs throughout your school or university life, and did you excel at them? Have you— were you an athlete to a high level? You know, do you have amazing academics, you know, or all of the above? Or did you do an internship at a really cool place and excel there? Just various things like that that we look for. Number 2 is, uh, do they have both an ability and an enthusiasm to learn? And for us, it has to be both, right? You can have an ability to learn, but if you're not curious and you're not going out there and acquiring the knowledge, you're not going above and beyond to work hard to get the knowledge that it doesn't work. And it can be vice versa as well. You can be really enthusiastic to learn, but if you can't retain any information, if you don't have a good memory— I think memory is actually a really underrated skill of a good recruiter— then that can be challenging. So it's both. And again, it's examples of that. So have you played multiple sports throughout your life? Like, did you again have great academics? Did you play a musical instrument to a super high level or play multiple musical instruments? All those things are examples and little data points that this person can learn and can learn to a high level and can learn fast. And the final point, which is a little bit harder to measure, is more around their personality. And it's some of the standard stuff that I'm sure most recruitment firms look for: ambition, dependability, do they care, do they— are they going to provide an amazing service to their candidates and clients? Uh, your charisma, all of that type of stuff, communication skills. That's a little harder to measure, but we'll gather that throughout the interview process.

No, that's, that's a really good breakdown. I think just a couple of things on this end, because I think it'll be interesting for people. How do you— because you've obviously done this effectively now because you've done it so many times with so many people— how do you sell the work sample day? Because I'm sure a lot of people I don't know, if you were like down, uh, you know, in a bar or a pub with a friend and like, I'm interviewing this company, they want me to come in and work for free. I'm sure some people say that, like, how have you got good at— because yeah, like, that, that won't be in your process if not enough people do it.

Yeah, yeah.

So like, how, how have you effectively sold that out of interest? Like, how do you, how do you frame that to people to go, yeah, that may— that makes sense to do that? Or— because there'll be— there's got to be something that's in it for them besides just doing the job, surely.

That's a good question. So firstly, we'll interview people from elsewhere in the US too, because people go to university all over the US, right? And then they might want to go to a certain city afterwards or go back home to their city or whatever. So the first thing we say is, look, like, we really want to make sure we're right for you as well as you're right for us. So a great way for us to do that is for you to come in, see the office environment, see the culture we have, meet a bunch of people, and then you can get a really good idea of who we are and how we operate. The second thing we say is, say, look, like, we— you don't have any experience of what we do, so we are going to put you through some real-life kind of tests that give us a really good idea for how you're going to react on our platform and on our model with the type of training we have. And again, that's a great opportunity for you to understand if this is right for you, as well as We being right, uh, you being right for us, sorry. Um, and yeah, I mean, most people are like, that makes sense.

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And then I'm assuming what you've had to get better at is making sure everyone that does do that, they get some sort of feedback if it's a yes or no. Yeah, because that would be a very quick way for people to go. Because that's why I feel like you get those assessment days get like a really bad rep, because I think there's always a story out there where you went to one and you invested all that time, really got out of your comfort zone, then you heard nothing back, which I think, I do think is unfair and a rubbish experience. Okay, that's really interesting. Then what about, there must be a real intentional reason why you do that first, like what are the main things you're uncovering in that very first assessment? Because there must be a very important reason why you do that at the very beginning stage, like what we look at. The CAP assessment.

Yeah, so that just basically gives us a broad overview of their personality. We do get a score, but there's no like pass or fail. And actually some people who do particularly well, we found, are not actually as suited to people who have, say, a middle score of a 60 or 70%. So that's actually our sweet spot that we look for on that. So you don't want somebody who's got like strengths to an extreme, for example, like You want competitive people, but you don't want somebody who's like, dog eat dog. I'll kill someone for a deal. Like, as an example of that. So we look for that optimal kind of personality score. And then actually what it feeds back to the interviewer as well is some example questions on the report based on their strengths and weaknesses that you should ask them. And we found that's been quite useful for interviewers as well to go, Okay, I have at least a baseline of what this person's like. And these— here are some example questions that I can dive into.

Was that like a free assessment or is that a paid?

No, it's, it's, it's— we partnered with CAP, right? And we built this out over several years.

Okay, cool. Got you.

Yeah.

Final question on this then is, if I'm listening to this right now and maybe I don't feel like I've quite got the infrastructure to do all of those things, What would you feel like would be, uh, how would I say, just like a— don't want to say like a basic interview process, but like if you were to have as a minimum an interview process that involved a work sample or these types of things, but maybe it was less steps because I'm a solo founder, I'm time poor, like what would you, what would you think would be a min— as a minimum would really help people actually bring people in the business that have a higher chance of actually succeeding with them? Because Yeah, like, tell us that. What do you think should be like the minimum out of all of that that people should maybe consider incorporating?

Look, if you're not going to have the TA team and the personality tests and all that, you're just not going to have the infrastructure for that. But I, I am, and we are certainly believers in that real-world example, see someone in action, right? And this isn't unique to recruitment, right? Like, you have a coding test when you apply for a software engineering to be, right? So, you know, this is becoming more prevalent in many different industries and, and roles. And like, again, if you're hiring somebody with zero experience, you've always— I'm sure there are people listening— you've had somebody that talked the best game ever in the interview, face to face, sold you the dream, and then in practice they just weren't who they said they were. And so we really put a lot of weight on that. Work sample piece to seeing people and assessing people through tasks, because that's how we train people. We're very practical in how we train people. I think most of the industry is, to be honest. So you want to see somebody in action, like how coachable are they, how, how well do they take feedback, you know? Did, did you give them feedback after the first call and they actually applied it on the second call? And then, you know, if somebody's done that, you can actually work with that person. Tons of examples of people who maybe actually didn't interview that well, but were super coachable and worked really hard and had a great attitude and then ended up being top billers for us. And that's, you know, it's not foolproof. We don't always get it right. But what we aim for is getting it right sort of 8 or 9 times out of 10 out of all the people we hire.

And then final one on this, I think I'm putting you on the spot here, but what if I was to say like, what are the like drop-off rates? Because I feel like this is also part of the equation, is like, particularly at when we're talking about hiring in this talent pool, what you're also doing in that process is like, over time there will be people going, nah, I'm not, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to come to the office and do that. And that's probably someone that you're not going to give an opportunity, um, you'd want to hire anyway, but they might have just shown up for the interview and done it. So what, what do you reckon the drop-off rates are at each stage, do you reckon, roughly?

I don't have, I don't have that data.

Okay.

I can tell you how many interviews to a hire it takes for us, uh, from our side, but I don't have that data. But like, we'll typically interview 4 people at that sort of hiring manager stage to every hire, right? And we'll typically hire 1 in every 2 work samples we do.

1 in 2. Okay, interesting. Fair. Yeah, because I think, yeah, I think if I'm listening to this, I'll be, how can I incorporate some of these things, because I mean, you're like, your company is a good company to look at and learn from. Like, you've hired so many people that are in this talent pool, and I just know there's so many companies out there that they, they just accept the fact that they'll hire 5 grads or people that don't have experience, and if like 1 or 2 people make it, that's fine. Yeah, but you can prevent a lot of that time and wasted, um, money by actually just maybe being a bit more committed to interview process.

Yeah, for sure. And you've got to make it as consistent as possible. And look, I think we made mistakes in the past where certain offices or certain brands have done it completely differently or tried different things, and it hasn't always worked as well. And we're trying to standardize and systematize as much as we do, as much as possible across the entire business, not just when we're talking about talent acquisition. So that's a big part of the future for us.

We're talking about it here, but let's get into what you feel like are these sort of pillars to Faden that have really enabled the, the success over the last 8 years. Um, because as I said at the beginning of this, Faden have experienced, um, you know, financial events that a lot of recruitment companies talk about aiming to achieve but oftentimes never do. So such a small percentage of staffing firms, recruitment organizations, actually get to the point where they get external investment or they are bought out or there is a big financial event. And you've had 4 of those, which we'll go into. But let's just talk about what we believe are some of the core pillars, because we're just talking about it there, really, because the first thing we put down is this scalable, repeatable model. And we put here organic growth piece, and that is what we're talking about there, which I think is a really good example, is you, you've taken your hiring of this talent pool really seriously. You've got that interview process dialed, you have so much data on that as well, and that, that's where it is. But what else do you think feeds into this repeatable model, um, that you feel like has really enabled the, the success over the last 8 years? What else have you done really well, do you think, besides the interview process where a lot of it starts really. You have to get that right, otherwise out the other end you don't get great people that then succeed. So what are the other bits on under this pillar, do we think?

Yeah, so I mean, look, I've touched on this already, but that model of when we launch something new, always going with people internally who've been with us already, understand who we are, how we operate, and bringing that to the new location or new brand or new vertical that we operate in. So that's a big part of kind of how we've always landed and expanded. And then once we get there, we might sprinkle in experienced hires that have that local knowledge or understand how that region works or that client base or whatever. So that's kind of number one. I think secondly is just a little bit more around operating model that that brings, right? Like every business, every brand, every office that we operate under looks at the same metrics, looks at the same measurements as to how we manage a business, how we judge success, what does good look like. And we talk about the same things all the time. And so again, that, that just makes it super scalable. You don't have to explain to somebody on the other side of the world what, you know, a certain terminology means, because we all use the same language. And that's really important as you scale to operate like that. I think the third piece is, I think some people might view us, we're 1,600 people globally now, 14 offices, some people might look at us and say, look, they're a bit sort of bums on seats and they just hire lots of grads and churn and burn and things like that. And look, there are definitely things we could do a lot better. However, we are actually a bit more thoughtful about the markets we operate in than probably people give us credit for. And that comes back to a number of things that I can talk about is the multi-brand model and how that really works. It's the verticals or the sub-verticals that we operate within a brand or a market, and they've got to have certain factors that, that are there for us, for us to even go into that market. In any way whatsoever. And we don't seek to be all things to all people. We want to be the best at what we do and the areas we operate in. And I'm happy to dive in.

Yeah, so let's— on that, I think let's— so we're touching a bit on like market strategy there. So I guess on the scalable, repeatable, repeatable model, I think what would be good for you to like explain to us is tell us a bit more about like, what would you be saying to me if I was a potential investor around like, look, we can, we can, uh, we've got really good understanding how long it normally takes for people to become profitable, what profitable, what profitability looks like? Because I think that is part of it, because you're going to have a stack of evidence to be like, we can hire, um, X amount of people from this talent pool, and more often than not, whatever the, the numbers are, the way that you talk about is we can take Ollie, who hasn't worked in recruitment before, and in 9 months he's doing this and contributing to the business. Because that, that will be part of it. You'll have a stack of evidence where you've been able to showcase that. Because then surely from an outside perspective, they're going, okay, they've literally done this for 10 years, and there's a very good chance that every year there's going to be a new talent pool of graduates or whatever. And Faden have shown that they can turn that person that has no recruitment experience into someone that's contributing to the business. So tell us a bit about that, 'cause like you would've got that sort of really figured out as well. What are the numbers there?

So in the past, I think we looked quite closely at monetization of a consultant when they start with us, which is really time to like first deal or time to 2 deals. And whilst that is still important for sure, and the goal for that for us is about 11 weeks, and that's actually the average across our US business of, somebody starting with no experience of what we do to getting them to do their first deal, the average is like 11.4 weeks, I believe. Um, but actually what we look more closely at now is actually time to 6 deals.

Time to 6 deals.

Time to 6 deals, yeah. So our average deal size, we know that once somebody gets to 6 deals, to your point, they are profitable, they've shown some consistency, and they are, you know, they have a skill set that is relatively well-rounded and we can actually then build around that and grow further. So yeah, the goal for that for us is within the first 9 to 12 months, somebody to get to 6 deals. And, you know, we've shown again, to your point, track record of being able to achieve that. Beyond that, then it's then taking them to the next level. Right. And we provide a lot of training and infrastructure. And this is one of the things that I think some other businesses drop the ball on is they focus a lot on that. First 6 months in the business, and then the training sort of drops off after that. And we've spent a bit more time over the last few years perfecting what we call our sales stream learning and development team. So we have our onboarding team that covers everyone, so basically 0 to 6 deals in the business. Once they hit 6 deals, they move to our sales stream, and then that's about how you actually develop clients into multiple placements, how you really become an expert in your market, how you increase your ratios to a level of working at a super high quality, things like that. And so at that point, we're looking at how do you become somebody that does a deal a month or more and eventually hopefully become a top biller sort of level performance. And as a result of that We now have average earnings in our US business in year 3 from entry level is actually $195,000. So that's from entry level to year 3, end of year 3, $195,000. That puts you in the top 20% of top 20 occupations in the US. It's more than an investment banker actually earns in their year 3, which I think is pretty impressive. Not for sure. People have the opportunity to do that with zero training or zero background in what we do, so.

Love that. So important metrics there then is that, so you previously maybe spent a lot of time on that time to first deal.

Yeah.

11 weeks, but really the number that you think is more important is, like you said, that time to 6 deals. Yeah. That's really good to, how long has that taken in your business? How can we reduce that? And then what about— you just mentioned there the from starting to 3 years, your earnings. What about what are some of the numbers? Because this will tie into this, that maybe investors would look at Faden and go, wow, that, that's great. Or they're looking to improve that around like the average productivity per head. I don't know, that's another— that'll be another interesting one to hear your take on how you think about that.

Yeah, so we, we look at productivity in a, in a couple of different ways. So the first one is participation of a team. So that's how much of a team participates in doing a deal in a single month or over a year. And the goal that we aim for of that is 50% plus with any of our businesses.

Wait, so what? I don't understand.

So that's 50% of a team participating in doing a deal in a month.

So, right. So what you're always working towards, that minimum standard is 50% of the team have done a deal.

Correct.

That's 50% not.

Correct. The other thing we look at is deals per person, and that could be on a monthly or annual basis. So for example, you might have a team that has a low participation but high deals per person because you've got a couple of top performers doing 2 or 3 deals each a month, right? So then you can look at what levers you're going to pull around that team. Maybe you need to invest in training for the rest of the team. or you need to get those top performers sharing that knowledge of what they're doing with the rest of the team, for example. The last thing we look at is, which is pretty standard across the industry, is sort of NFI per person for a team on a monthly basis. And the goal we look for for that is kind of $25,000 per person per month. And that tells us that that team's in a pretty good spot. It's profitable, it's making money, and it's probably a place where we should invest. And so those are kind of the 3 things we look at when we think about like, productivity of a team in terms of results. Obviously we go a level deeper than that when we look at like the KPIs, the ratios, and things like that. But those are the 3 primary things that we look at, we talk to investors about as well.

I love that. That's, that's really good for people listening because I feel like this is going to be even more of your world now when you're responsible for that many people. You're gonna— you're on— you would have had to fit— you're gonna have to fill it down to the numbers that matter, right? And those important metrics, that dashboard. Yeah, these, I'm assuming, are going to be some of those metrics that make up that, that your dashboard, Ollie's like dashboard view of your offices, is looking at the teams. So we've got how much of X team is participating. Yeah, um, each month that's got to be at least 50%, otherwise there's probably going to be rooms for improvement or things we need to look into. Then it's deals per head, per person as well, on average each month. Yeah, um, and then you said, yeah, if each person is averaging $25,000 a month, then yeah, like, that's, that's probably— that's in a really good healthy position as well. Yeah, love that. Let's just finish that off then, because I think this will be interesting.

One thing I'll just add to that point, one of the other roles we've created as part of this leadership structure is, um, there's, uh, somebody that works for us called Nicole Ware. She's amazing. She's been with us for 10+ years, started as like an intern in our finance team and has progressed, um, incredibly well in our business to the point where she was our head of finance for the US. Um, but now she's moving to roles performance. And that's quite a unique role that I don't think probably many recruitment businesses have. And it's all about this stuff. It's like, how can we make really thoughtful decisions around where we grow headcount, where we deploy teams, where we deploy brands, how we manage our business? How can we be more proactive around problems before they're real, real, real problems? How can we spot that using the financial data? So she's actually you know, moving into this role, she's going to be responsible for that, and she will consult with all of our leadership and their various businesses and looking at all those metrics. To your point about dashboards, we have a dashboard now which has every single bit of that data plus a bunch of other things that I haven't even talked about that give us a really clear view for where a business is at, and that's going to help us make better decisions going forwards.

Yeah, and I think if you're listening to this and you're on the growth journey whatever that looks like, you have to work towards having some sort of dashboard so we're making scientific, non-emotional decisions.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, I was just going to say, just to finish this off, I think, I think people will be interested. So you've spoken about the productivity piece, um, like what, like what would be one step below that then? Because there'll just be some important metrics, don't have to go into like all the input stuff, but what would then be the next layer for you? Are you looking at that would make you go, right, that team's in good shape? So is it number of interviews that team's doing? Are you looking at ratios? Just tell us that, because I think that— because then people can use this to maybe think of their own dashboard.

Yeah. So we, we try and look at everything on a per-person, per-head basis. And it's again, we, we try not to overcomplicate it. So it's typically jobs, CVs or resumes sent applications per person, and interviews per person. Okay. Those are the 3 core things that every business is run on. Obviously, there's a layer beneath that, which is more of the controllable inputs and things like that. But those 3 things give us a really good view for—

And there'll be nuances, but what would make you feel like that's— they're like, it's good? What does good— I know it will vary, but what does good look like?

It varies from brand to brand because there are nuances with certain brands that are maybe more candidate-driven or certain brands that are more client-driven. Okay. Um, but as a general idea, typically, you know, 2 to 3 jobs per person. Um, CVs or resumes per week is typically 15 or so, um, to live jobs. And that's not individual candidates, that could be one candidate sent to 5 clients, could count as 5 resumes, uh, just to clarify that. And then interviews is anywhere from 5 to 10 depending on the team and the brand and the nuances of that space.

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Because again, this is really interesting because I don't— obviously we may not know exactly what the numbers were like when you had these financial events, but like if you're working towards that, there's a reason why you feel like that's good, right? And you've had this track record of getting this external investment and these things, so that they would have been happy with that as well as part of this, right? So it's interesting for people to learn and understand. You're touching on it a bit, but a big part of— we feel like Faden's success as well is the market strategy. So you're touching on it then. So let's go through what maybe, uh, you would define as that could be another potential brand for Faden, right? So the sort of checklist you'd look at. So you can tell us a bit more about this, but we put down a true supply and demand imbalance. Salaries need to be a certain level, which normally are no more than under $100K as a starting point. $100K, that is. Yeah. So that filters into like what your average deal size, which you can tell us about. Then the other thing that you mentioned is, because you've now got these different brands, if you were to launch another brand, we'd want to make sure that there are genuine cross-sell opportunities. And can this new brand also give us opportunities for our other brands to generate revenue from this new brand? Then you've put growth market, getting investment. We can see that there's, um, science or whatever that you look at around that this is a particular industry that should keep getting investment in. So maybe a good example that would be like the renewables industry, that's an area that a lot of people are looking at. Um, so tell us a bit about that because I do think this, this would have been absolutely fundamental to Faden's success is, is picking the right markets. Like, that's such a big part of it. So tell us a bit more, um, about some of these— the, the sort of checklist almost. Yeah.

So like I said, we, we have been very deliberate about the markets and brands that we've chosen to operate in. They're all closely connected but not directly competing.

And what are the brands? Maybe that'd be helpful actually.

So we have, uh, Selby Jennings, our financial services brand. EPM Scientific is our life sciences brand. LVI Associates is our engineering and infrastructure brand. Glowcomms is our tech brand. Larsen Maddox is our legal brand, and DSJ Global is our end-to-end supply chain brand.

Okay.

So, um, like I said, all of those brands are closely connected but not directly competing. So some of those are industry agnostic, some of those are industry specific, and what that enables is a lot of cross-selling ability between the brands. So I'll give you an example of that. So Larsson Maddox is our latest brand. We launched, launched 3 years ago. Actually, last week was our 3-year anniversary. This year it will do, you know, I think 400 or 500 placements globally this year and, you know, $20 million plus of fees generated, which is pretty good from nothing 3 years ago. We did that that space, which is basically in-house legal talent as part of SelbyGenics. So we did it into our banks, our hedge funds, our trading firms, fintechs that we work with. But what we realized pretty quickly is all of our other clients for our other brands were asking for in-house legal talent as well. And so we started having our Selby team serve a tech client or a renewables client or an engineering firm. And then we were like, well, hold on, this could be a brand. In and of itself that is seen as a true specialist within the legal world, but operates with all of our clients. And there's a ton of cross-selling that, that has gone on there with that. So that's a great example of it. The second point is the talent needs to be in super high demand and in short supply, right? We work in markets where candidates are hard to find. We have to burn a haystack to find that needle that no one else can find. And that's why our clients will pay us outsized fees and rates in order to find that talent. We typically look for markets as well that are under-broke.

And what does that mean?

So just less competitive. So there are less people operating in that space. Honestly, like, tech is a big part of what we do and how we operate, but technology is probably the biggest recruitment market on the planet. How we've always found it challenging to scale in tech because it's just so competitive. Right. We've done a good job of that in the end over the years. But like, we found it much easier in markets where there just is no— there are very few other people operating the way we do in that space. So that's kind of the supply-demand imbalance of talent. Salaries is important to us because obviously we want to maintain a certain fee size. As if you look at some of the other large corporate firms as they scale, their average fee size tends to drop because they end up signing large, you know, high volume, high volume campaigns with big corporate clients and they drop their fees to do it and so on. And don't get me wrong, we've done some of that. However, we all— we're okay saying no if fees are below a certain percentage. We're okay saying no if they're— if it's below a certain salary. And the salary spread and delta that we operate within is really large in the markets we operate in. So for example, we might operate in the quantitative research space in finance where starting salaries are $120K, but we'll go all the way up to $3, $4, $5 million at the top end. And so although our average fee size might be $40,000, $50,000 in that space, we'll get the odd deal that's $300,000, $400,000, even our— I think our biggest deal ever was in that market, was a $900,000 deal for placing one person. And so that gives us the opportunity to drop in these exec search level sizes of fees that then really take our kind of fees to the next level.

Um, what was the third point? So we've mentioned— so we've got average deal sizes is at a good level, which she was talking about, and then also key that there's— you feel like there's a genuine opportunity that they can cross-sell?

Yeah. So yeah, there needs to be some benefit to other parts of the business, typically within a market that we operate in. And so, you know, again, an example of that might be there's one of the biggest hedge funds in the world that we were trying to get in. Selby Jennings, our finance brand, was trying to get in with working with eventually our DSJ Global brand that does supply chain and procurement. Filled their head of procurement role, and then we signed terms as Faden, and now they're one of Faden's and Selby Jennings' biggest clients. And Selby does dozens of placements a year with them. And again, this is the advantage of sort of being part of a larger firm where you sort of all win together, right? When you're part of a small firm, you don't get that type of reach. You don't get that type of access to clients that you would never even had access to because someone on the other side of the world signed terms with one of the biggest firms in your space. Now you have access to them as well. And that, like, I really truly believe that's a really unique thing that, that we offer.

Yeah. So that's market strategy. So that, that's been key. And what rough idea, what has been like the typical timeline of like launching a new, a new brand out of Interest? So there's 6, right?

There's 6 brands. Um, like I said, the last new brand we launched was, was in the legal space, Lars Maddox, 3 years ago.

Okay.

Um, The last brand prior to that was LVI Associates, which was about 8 years ago. So it's not like a common thing—

that's what I mean—

yeah, where we're always launching a new brand every year. And we don't necessarily want to be that business that has 25 different brands because it just becomes quite complex to explain it to a client and to explain it to candidates and to investors and things like that as well. So we are looking at new markets and new brands. We do believe there are a number of different markets that we either touch in some way but could be a brand in and of itself. And we may look to do that down the line. It is something that our head of North America, our current head of North America, is moving out of the role. Kieran, he is essentially second employee ever in the business. He's moving into a role focused around global growth strategy. And that's going to be a key, key component of his role is like increasing our TAM, which is our total addressable market. We know we can get to our goals, what we want to achieve next few years with our current TAM. But some of our biggest value drivers over the last 8 years has been our 2 latest brand launches, right? So maybe if we could find 2 more of those in the next few years, that could just accelerate us to where we want to get to.

So to be clear, then in 2022, when That was the most recent biggest event that Faded and you had 6 brands, right? But in the past, when the first one happened— well, the first 2 happened 2016, 2018— you would have had— you wouldn't have had 6 brands?

No, I think 2016, going back some way now. Sorry, I'd have to— I'd have to pull that.

But that's fine. But like, I guess that's just— you probably have to know.

Yeah, we've probably had 3 or 4 back in 2016 and And again, we've launched brands in the past that haven't worked, right? So we launched an HR brand. It just didn't work for a variety of different reasons. I think that's one of the good things we've done over the years as well, is when we've tried new things or tried something different, we're continually looking at, is it working? Is this going to take us where we want to get to? And actually, if it's not getting us there, we'll give everything a fair chance. But if the metrics aren't showing up and it's, it's providing no benefit to the wider business, like, we'll move on from it. And to the point about us being more thoughtful with our decisions, we're being more thoughtful than ever about that.

Why don't you just share that with us just quickly in terms of not the metric, because you've covered that, but like from your experience, what you've seen, the rooms that you've been in, what— again, it'll be nuanced, but like what does a typical fair chance timeline look like? Is it 6 months? Is it 9 months? Is it longer? Do you know what I mean? I know it'll vary, but your rough thoughts on that, because again, that'd be really helpful for people.

I think it totally depends on the context.

Okay.

It's really tough to give like a An average, you know, we launched and shut down a San Francisco office that was in existence for 4 or 5 years, right, before we eventually decided it's not really working for us in this location. You know, we've tried to do iterations of a contract business. This is something not a lot of people know about us. We are 95% permanent recruitment in the US and It's never really worked again for a variety of reasons. And just this year we decided to completely stop housing any consultants in that space that are based in the US. We serve the US market a little bit from our London office, but we've just, you know, that took many years to get to that decision. There may be a new vertical that we try and launch within a brand and we do it for 6 months and go, actually, there's no jobs. The clients don't really want to work for us. The fees aren't high enough. We're not gonna, we're not gonna do it. So the context is important and it's really case by case.

But I guess be willing to make those difficult decisions. Okay. Yeah. And then final thing on this, because I think it'd be interesting for people to understand the intention behind it, talk us through why you've been intentional about these brands, because the way they all had different names, right? So just tell us about the, in the intention around that, rather than it being Fade in Life Science, Fade in Procurement because some companies go down that route. Like, what, what's the intention around they're all separate brands? Like, just tell us a bit about thought process there.

So there's pros and cons to both approaches, and ours is not perfect, let me just say that. Um, the pros are, like I've kind of alluded to already, within that space, the go-to-market strategy to clients and candidates you are seen as a true specialist. They go on your website as a legal professional and say, right, Larsen Maddox, all they do is legal, right? I want to work with those guys, right? And you don't want the message to be diluted. I think some of these firms that do become very large as one brand, it becomes quite tough to know what they're actually good at. If you go on their website, they sort of do a bit of everything. Um, and that goes for when you're negotiating terms with the client, for example. Like, you can push for higher percentage terms if you are you can say, look, we're Larsen Maddox. All we do is legal recruitment. That's it. That's what we live and breathe every day. And that's why we want to work at 35%, because we're not like a generalist firm that does a bit of everything. And then once you're in and signed terms with the firm, we always sign terms as Faden, always. So then we go and sell the multi-brand solution. And as an example of that, our biggest client this year, which is a major, major global tech company, um, 5 of our brands have actually placed for that company, and we've done, I think, close to $4 million with them this year. Um, and that's, yeah, that's been a, yeah, really useful part of that multi-brand strategy is going in as a specialist and then selling a multi-brand, you know, multi end-to-end solution to a client, um, and then building from there.

Yeah, that, yeah, that does make a lot of sense. I think this all leads quite nicely then on our next pillar, really, in terms of the operating model, right? Because tell us a bit about this, because you wouldn't be able to do that if you haven't got things in like the strategic key accounts team, um, and also your operating model is people in your, in Faden 360 recruiters, which I think is, is interesting as well. So tell us a bit about that because this is something also that you feel like has been key to the, the success.

Yeah, so everyone's trained as a 360 recruiter from day one. Everyone does business development as part of their day-to-day. The, the ratio of business development to delivery does vary depending on which brand or which vertical you're in because certain brands or verticals have a better job platform than others, or a more consistent job platform than others, or maybe are more candidate-driven than others, for example. Um, so, um, what we did many years ago now is we realized really quickly, being a permanent-focused recruiter, we, in order to gain a really strong valuation from investors and show annual recurring revenue, which 'cause we don't have a contract book, was to show that we can develop key accounts and take them on a journey from a handful of placements to 20, 30, 40, 50, even 100+ placements in some cases, and increase that year on year on year so they're not just fair weather clients, they're also foul weather clients. You know, even when the market's not good, we're their first call when they do start recruiting and using agencies again. And that has been really powerful for us to tell that story to investors over the years and show that annual recurring revenue. So we do have this what we call a strategic account management team. They are responsible for about 30% of global revenue and our top sort of 50 accounts. And we're at a point now where we have probably 25, 30 accounts that are in the kind of $1 million spend range. And that's something we're really proud of. And we've had some accounts that in some good years have gotten up to $5 million plus spend alone. And that's been a key part of the strategy for like how we— when we drop headcount into a team, in almost every team, if it— as long as it's not like a startup team or startup office or whatever, they've got jobs on day one that they can go after. So although everyone's 360, they're always going to have access to jobs and accounts on the platform, um, even if they're entry level. Um, and that's a great thing even for experienced hires. Like, I, I've spoken to experienced hires that we've brought on in recent years, and I've asked them, like, they've done really well in some cases. I've said, look, can you, can you articulate, like, the platform? Because sometimes I find it hard to articulate, like, how good the access to candidates and clients is and how you can really take your billing and performance to a whole nother level on the platform we've created. And like, some of them are literally like, I can't, I can't explain it. I can't explain how much better this platform is than what I've had previously. Um, and so, you know, again, that's, that's why that, that model's worked really well for us.

And then just on that quickly, so they're entirely incentivized to increase existing clients spend. Is that in a nutshell? And like, their job starts when a 360 consultant signs terms as Faden with a brand?

No. So that— so that team is only working with our like top 50 accounts, right?

Okay, sorry. So they're not out there winning new business?

No, they, they are purely relationship management for our, for our best accounts, right? There are some elements of that team that will work on bringing accounts from maybe a handful of placements to like 10 placements or 15 placements. Where we're actually working on going forwards is, and we might be, this might be jumping ahead a little bit, but a big part of our strategy going forwards is in the past to get to a higher seniority in Faden, to, you know, increase your title, increase your salary, all get more equity, all of that stuff has been, has been you need to go into leadership, right? And that's been great for some people. Unfortunately, it sometimes means people who don't want to be leaders or even should be leaders end up in leadership roles, which is probably a pretty common thing that, you know, our competitors or people listening encounter. And We put a lot of work into redefining new career paths for people. One of those is the Strategic Account Management team, which might be more involved in developing relationships at a high level with big global accounts. Another one is our Market Specialist or Professional track. Now on that track, there's typically 3 types of people. There is the leave me in the corner, don't speak to me until once a month when we have our monthly review and I'm just going to bill like 2 deals a month, like, There is a place for people like that in our business, right? And that's fine. There are going to be people who want that structure. The second one is individuals who will bill but also add value internally, right? So these people are typically our most knowledgeable about their space. They're subject matter experts. They know our clients better than anyone. They know recruitment better than anyone because they're typically top billers, million-dollar billers. and so on. And we want them sharing that knowledge across our business. So we might be judging their performance on billing, but also on mentoring others, on doing training sessions, on coaching other people without doing some of the maybe more time-intensive management stuff, which is like hiring and interviewing and MBRs and monthly reviews and, you know, performance management and all of that stuff. The third part, which brings me back to my point, is again, these people are most knowledgeable. They are best with clients. They should be talking to clients all the time. And we're going to look at those individuals where they'll bill again for maybe 60, 70, 80% of the time, but another 20 to 40% of their time will be spent on client development. And that's really bringing a client on that journey from one or two placements to 10 placements or 15 placements and making sure that journey is as special and they get that white glove service and they have the best people talking to them and managing that account. And we're going to use our kind of individual contributors to do that. It's probably not like a revolutionary concept, but like, I definitely think that it's something that recruitment firms struggle with as they scale, is to like get that structure right. And honestly, now we've started to roll this out, I wish we'd done this 5 years ago, like before. Yeah, um, it would have— I think we would have gone further quicker if we'd really redefined that structure.

But fair to say the commitment to building, growing 360 Recruiters coupled with this strategic key accounts team has been like imperative to— yeah, increasing client spend, all that stuff. I do think you highlight a really good point in terms of genuinely giving people a platform in the sense of like, if I join your business, there's a genuine like a flow of good quality committed clients I can start working with. A lot of people sell that, but how true is it, right? So I think, um, that makes sense. And then I think the other thing you just mentioned, which I feel like you've touched on but I want to make sure that we just underline as well, is that like you've also really committed to making sure that there's a golden thread in terms of like how you operate the process. Yeah. So if I walk into your you know, shoot, um, Boston office or your Dallas office, and I start speaking to people about, talk me through your process from working with a client to working on a job, um, you're going to be very surprised if they're entirely different. So like, you've— that, that's also what you've really committed to. Absolutely. I guess the final thing on this, we've spoken about the scalable, repeatable model, market strategy, operating model, is then obviously the, the culture people strategy. We're just talking about it there in terms of making sure that you've got all of those clear progression pathways. But then why don't you just touch on, um, the, the bits around how you have coupled high performance with then creating a collaborative place to work, fun place to work? Yeah, because I do feel like a lot of companies struggle with this. You hire a lot of young talent and bring other talent in, so you, you must think about this a lot in terms of how can we couple, high performance, expecting high standards, expecting a lot of our people, and then also making it a fun place to work, whatever that looks like in today's world. I do think you've— like, you— that all starts with your interview process, which you've covered, because if you're not doing a good job there and you just end up with people that, uh, don't hit the things that you feel like they need to succeed in your environment, then it's always going to be a struggle, right? So I think we— like, that— let's just put aside that as if you know you've done the work on that, but how do you think about this coupling it? Because I do think a lot of companies struggle with this today.

And let me say firstly, like, we're not perfect, right? We definitely haven't got it 100% right. But I do think some of our success can be attributed to the culture and how we built it. I think the first point around high performance is we— I think we manage expectations really well, both to your point in the interview process, but also in the onboarding process in their first few weeks and months in the role of like what is expected, what are the benchmarks for high performance, and being really clear about that from the outset so that people aren't surprised if they're given feedback that they're underperforming later down the line. And it all starts with that expectation management at the front end. And then I think along the way, you know, performance management is a controversial subject in our industry. And in many industries because a lot of companies are looking pretty closely at this. And we definitely haven't got it right everywhere. But I think in some cases we've made performance management pretty ingrained in the organisation. So I'll give you an example. In Dallas now, I'll literally have consultants that come up to me and they go, I want to get put on a PDP or a PIP. They'll ask to be put on it proactively.

Why do they do that?

Because because I think they recognise they're underperforming. They know they're maybe going to blank or not do a deal that month and they want to be proactive and get back to performing again. The other thing that we've done quite well is publicise when people have been on performance management programmes but then been successful off the back of it.

Interesting.

So as an example, like—

sorry, sorry to bite in, but so when you say, yeah, performance management, you're talking about professionals, about PIPs and stuff?

Yeah. Exactly.

So like just be really transparent.

Yeah. On that, on when people go on them, when they go on them, what it involves, why you're on there.

Right. Okay.

How—

sometimes it can be a bit like, oh, it's an exit strategy, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. Right. Okay.

And, and look, like, again, we haven't got this right everywhere, but I can just talk certainly locally in Dallas. So the one thing we've done really well is this piece. So as an example of that, in April of this year, you know, we had a challenging few months, right? And we had 25 people out of 90 consultants on some form of performance management, either PDPs or PIPs. PDPs is like the less severe one and PIPs is a more serious situation for us. And so we had 25 people on performance management. The following month, 19 out of those 25 did a deal. And then of the remaining sort of 4 or 5, frankly, one or two weren't with the business anymore, and two or three did a deal the following month. The ones that didn't do a deal that month I was talking about. So I think— and then we talked about that a lot in our month reviews. We're like, look, look at all these people who are on performance plans, look at how well they've done. We, we talk about how consistently people have built beyond that. Like, I think when you start talking about the positives of actually giving people some structure and a plan and some direction and more coaching and more support, then they go, oh, I want that. Like, I don't know, just want to be left in the corner to underperform and no one talks to me. I want more attention. I want more of a microscope on me because then I'm going to get more training and then ultimately I'm going to become good again, um, or hit my goals. And so just back, it kind of got off track a little bit on there, but like, I think we've done a good job of marrying that high performance sort of performance management culture with also making it like a fun culture to be in, right? Like the way I describe it is competitive but collaborative. To my point, like we don't want people that are too competitive that end up being toxic in any way. Like we want people to help each other. Like we share candidates, we share clients. You know, if you're, if you're in a space right now because we operate in a fairly micro-specialized market, you know, let's take our financial technology team, we have 50 consultants across the US that operate within that space. If we get a job, we'll typically post in our Teams group, hey, I've got this VP of software engineering job in this location. Does anyone know any candidates? And that one person will get 15 candidates just sent to them that we're working with in some combination across the US, and they'll have 5 candidates to that job within the day. And that's again like an advantage, I think, of being part of that bigger platform where you can lean on other people for help and collaboration and support. And whether it's candidates or it's clients or it's training or advice or mentorship, but you don't get that in a firm where there's only 10 people, or it's rare that you get it, or it's harder to get it.

Yeah, I really take the, the setting expectations, being really clear on that, and then the performance management culture. I think that's a really great insight. Um, so let's just make sure people are aware of this because again, I think this is one of the really cool things about this failing journey. So when we say there's been 4 events in the last 8 years, so a bit of a timeline on that, and then I'll let you just add any more context to what's on here. But 2016 was, was the first event, which was, which was a debt deal. What does that mean?

So, um, we took out some, uh, a debt against the business, essentially a loan from a private investment company, but they took some equity with that as well. Okay, um, so it was a minority investment, um, but just gave us a bit more capital to kind of take things to the next level over the next few years.

And, um, yeah, and then 2018 was the first equity buyout, which, which led to like the original founder leaving the firm. So there's a third party that brought out the founder, basically?

Correct. Yeah, so that was our first major private equity deal that we did in 2018.

And in 2021, refinance, private equity deal. What does that mean?

So that's essentially, we wanted a bit more capital again to power some of our growth. And it's, it's a bit like if you bought a house and the market had gone up significantly over the last 5 years, so you refinance or remortgage your house to release some equity.

Um, so you get your house valued again.

Yeah, so you get it valued again, you, you you, you get some equity and some cash out either to reinvest in the business. Again, that was a bit of a liquidity event for some of the people in the equity program, um, and then that took us on to the, to our latest transaction in '22.

Yeah, so then 2022, which was the most recent, like, big event, which was in layman's terms, the— there was a third-party equity partner that brought out the, um, the third party that was involved in the 2018 deal. Essentially, right?

Yeah. So we partnered with a new private equity firm.

Yeah.

And our previous partners exited the firm with a big return on their investment. And now we've got our latest partners, Further Global.

And then the big thing for you was there was multiple opportunities that you could have gone down in terms of offers or whatever. But the big thing for you guys was not just cash, but also advice to continue on the journey.

Correct.

Something that also is important to understand here is even though, um, that deal's happened, 50% of the business is still owned by the employees. And in that transaction, which I think is always one of the coolest parts of these types of recruitment stories, is in 2022 it left around 27 people millionaires across the world, which is— I love stuff like that, that's so cool. Um, so the cool thing here is even though you've had that significant investment, there's another third party involved, is that you and the leadership team in the boardrooms, etc., are still very much driving the business, driving the strategy, um, versus being told what to do by this third party, which is often can be the perception, can't it?

Yeah.

Um, so I know the big goal now is like, how can you and the people in the business now that you said at the beginning of this conversation, how can we keep driving this business forward where over the next 4 to 5 years we get a multi-billion dollar evaluation?

What—

why don't you just share with us like why? Because I think this will tie in quite nicely. We've covered a lot in terms of the, the pillars and stuff, but what do you think, just as like, just as headings versus getting into it, what do you think if we were to list the biggest contributors to the multiple, what would you list what, what would the list be, do you think, to the multiples?

Yeah, like previous transactions.

Yeah, because we've covered a lot, haven't we? Yeah, like, you know, we've covered hiring young people, though, that data that you can prove, the, the increase of placements with clients, all of that. Like, from your perspective, where you sit, because you'll be thinking about this now, like, what are the things that you think— because I said to you when we met before this, the sort of The story that's often told is that you need to have a really strong contract book to get really good multiples. Yeah, right. But, you know, there's a few different times that you've had these events. You have had contracts, but that wouldn't have been the main reason why they got involved, right? Because you've always been very heavy perm, correct? So it sort of goes against that story, really. So you will be getting multiples on, um, on the EBITDA, on other things. So like, what would you see as the checklist or things that you think really contributed to a strong multiple?

So number one, we're global. We've truly done it on a global basis across three continents. Again, not many firms have actually done that. I think a lot of firms look at like sort of just the US and Europe. We've got a really strong presence in Asia and have been there for 10 years. So that's number one. Number two, it's that scalability on a global basis. Like every location, barring a couple of failures here and there that I mentioned, like we've gone in And we've landed and expanded and we've scaled and we've shown and replicated our model successfully with that consistent golden thread running through the organization. Number 3, certainly the key accounts program and developing true relationships that have lasted a long time and we've increased revenue significantly over that time. And fourthly, like it is that organic growth model. It is that piece of developing people and developing leaders and, you know, developing them into people that run offices and brands and, and beyond and truly, you know, showing that that works.

That's nice. That's a good breakdown because I think that that is often where a lot of people struggle is like you've said, all of those, the 13 people, etc., they all started in the business, they're all leading teams like, like yourself. There isn't like the founder still that's like telling you what to do, do you know what I mean? Like, they've clearly got out the way, and that's continued to happen. And then that's such a huge part, isn't it, in terms of like, can this company run with the great people, um, in it who are employed versus like it's still the founder that sort of got their hands in everything, or the founders.

And look, like, this, this was always something that sold me on the business was even our founder, Adam, you know, sold that this would be an employee ownership model right from the outset. And we've continued that DNA throughout the organization even to today. So on the last transaction, a big— you know, we were lucky enough throughout that process where we went out to the market and we spoke to, you know, dozens of potential investors. We were lucky enough to have a number of offers for the business, and that's rare in and of itself, but enabled us just to choose the right option for us and the right partners for us. And part of us choosing our current partners was us being able to expand the employee ownership model. So we now have 50% of the business is still owned by the employees. To your point around how we make decisions and the control of the business, or relative control of the business that we still have. Um, on top of that, we still have a chunk of equity that is unallocated, um, quite a big chunk. And everyone beyond 2 years tenure in our business gets access to our Fading Units program, which is our equity program. So we're now in a situation where over the next 4 or 5 years as we progress to that next goal, that next exit, um, pretty much everyone in the business is going to be very invested in that goal. And again, singing from the same hymn sheet, collaborating, because everyone's invested in us getting there. Um, and likewise, to you, to your point, you said the last one there was 27 million es made around the world. The next one, you know, we're hopeful that there's going to be hundreds that are made around the world. And that's a big part of what Faden is and what we've been as a business is like a true wealth creation vehicle for lots and lots of people that help us get to where we want to go. It's not just a handful of people at the top who are going to walk off into the sunset.

Yeah. And I just think it's like what I think is unique about you guys is the fact that that is often a carrot that's dangled in front of so many people that will listen to this, and they would have had that conversation where you're going to get shares in the business, whatever that scheme looks like, whether it's, you know, fading units and EMI scheme or whatever. And how often has that actually materialized? A lot of the time it doesn't, right? So I think that that is what it generally—

I call it make-believe equity.

But yeah, so it's just like, that happens a lot, right? But I think what you can't deny is that you've got a clear structure. You've just said the fading units piece, so like there's still, um, equity that isn't completely allocated, which means more and more people can own part of that equity. But you can clearly point at your business and go, we've already experienced this, we, we know what it looks like to go to market, we, we've had to learn the hard way what we thought made our business really valuable versus not. There's so many things you would have learned that a lot of people will dangle the carrot and then they wouldn't have had any experience that, and then often it doesn't happen. But So I think that is the unique thing.

The other thing I'll say on this is it's still the same team, right? On the last, uh, transaction we had, one person at a very senior level exited. Everyone else stuck and went again. Yeah, right. And that guy was essentially a co-founder of the business, second, third employee ever, been with us for 20 years, and it was just time. He wanted to do something else. And had done incredibly well out of those 20 years. Everyone else at a senior level went again. Everyone else is still with the firm. And to your point, that note that shows when we go to the next one, it's that continued story arc of the same people driving the business forward, but also all the learnings we've gathered along the way that will help us get there either faster or better or better valuation and things like that.

No, for sure. So how do you now plan then? Because I know the big goal is— I think I saw your post where Fade In the US were like the 6th, uh, staffing firm, or how is it ranked on like the amount of direct hires basically? So like permanent recruiter?

Yeah, so it's SIA, uh, largest permanent or direct hire recruiters in the US. So from where we were 11 years ago with 6, 7 of us in a room. We're now number 6 on that list in terms of revenue or NFI and market share, which we're pretty proud of. But our goal over the next 5 years is to be number 1.

So what are the big things you're doubling down on, focusing on?

So we think that's very achievable in a few ways. Number 1, obviously, we've always been a business that is about headcount growth, right? We are going to grow. Every office, every location, you know, to a level that we think is sustainable and profitable and makes sense. Um, I mentioned this before, but, you know, we are looking at ways we can increase our TAM. So are there markets or brands or locations even that we should be in that will help us accelerate that and go there faster? Sorry, we're always going to believe in the organic growth model, as we've talked about a lot in this last hour and a half. But like, at the same time, we also recognize there are some downsides to that model, like I talked about as well. And so we are going to sprinkle in experienced hires here and there, whether at a leadership level or, you know, people who just want to come in and take advantage of that individual contributor track and platform we have and want to take their careers to the next level and want to be part of an equity story and investment story and things like that. We are going to sprinkle those in. The fourth point is one of the advantages of being a bigger firm with a bit more infrastructure is the implementation of technology and tools for efficiency and productivity gains. So we already have a bunch of AI tools that have been implemented into our CRM, a bunch of, uh, productivity tools that are making every consultant more productive, more time efficient. And we've kind of got the infrastructure to do that quite quickly. And then lastly, like, ultimately is investing in our people, right? That's always what's gotten us to the next, next thing. And we're going to double down on investing in our people in every way we can, like training, infrastructure and everything. And you look like if I keep saying if I want to change that to when we go and achieve it, like when we go and achieve what we want to achieve in the next 5 years, like that is a bit of a career-defining moment for everyone involved in that story. Like being a multi-billion-dollar recruitment exit or valuation, like it's fairly unheard of in our industry and it's not going to be easy. It's gonna be a lot of hard work in between now and then, but we think we have all the things we need to have to make it happen.

I get that. Love it. What a journey. Like, I think I do, I do like just love learning about stories like this because I think this is like what can be sold in our industry, sometimes oversold, right? But I think this is what makes our industry so cool and unique is that when you do find yourself in the right environment, the right company where you can be taken on that journey, you can be supported, you can genuinely change your life forever, really. I know that sounds sort of cliché, but it, it genuinely can.

I've been the benefit of that. And like, if I look at my life on a personal level now to where it was 10 years ago, like, I, I genuinely pinch myself, like, regularly. And the bit that— the most motivating thing for me as a leader and leading this business going forwards is creating those moments for other people.

Other people, yeah.

And like, that, that fundamentally gets me out of bed in the morning. That gets me so excited. It's genuinely the reason why I love coming to work every day, is like seeing people achieve things they never thought were possible in a really short period of time, and living a life that they never thought was possible in a really short period of time, and doing things they never thought they would do. And like that, that special.

Well, thanks so much for joining me again on the pod. Thanks for sharing and being really transparent around really the, the pillars and the things that have really contributed to Faden's success. So thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks, mate. Appreciate it.