Mark Bracknall - The power of an internal recruitment process as well as putting culture first

Welcome to the Recruitment Rollercoaster Podcast. My name is Hishem Azzouz. Today I'm joined by Mark Bracknell, who is the co-founder of Theo James Recruitment. They are a manufacturing engineering recruitment agency based in County Durham. There's 8 people in the business and they've been going for coming up to 5 years. Mark, thanks for joining me from your conservatory in County Durham.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, appreciate it.

Obviously, we've been speaking for a little while, exchanged messages over the last couple of years, so definitely excited to uncover your journey so far. Obviously, we're going to really focus on you being a recruitment business owner and your journey in leading your own recruitment business, but let's— where I always like to start is how you got into recruitment. Let's start there.

Yeah, well, you'll be pleased to know that I didn't actually fall into it like most people. So I was one of the rare few that proactively tried to get into recruitment. So, so not your normal story, to be told. So I'm originally from Sheffield, went to University of Sunderland to do a TV and radio production degree.

Oh wow.

Like all your top entrepreneurs. So did that. I kind of did that because I didn't really at that time know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go to university just for the experience of living away, doing that, and did the course. Thought about what I didn't want to do against media. Really, really didn't enjoy that as a sort of career. I knew that was going to be the case. Applied for a few recruitment roles. I mean, thinking back, it's probably because in my year out before university, I worked in offices, but I worked through a recruitment firm. I forgot which one it was at the time, but I remember sitting in there a couple occasions, obviously registering, and just quite enjoying the atmosphere, the environment. It was professional, but it was, it was buzzy, and people seemed to be sort of working hard but having fun, and that really sort of resonated with me. So I applied for numerous roles for zero return, no interviews, no feedback, anything at all. Did what most students do and panic and look back at sort of how can I stay at uni. So I found a course which was a qualification in careers guidance, which was a 1-year postgrad course, and one of the offshoots of that was actually recruitment. So did that for a year and absolutely loved it. I learned more in that year than I probably did in 3 years previously, and it was mainly focused around helping sort of 16 to 18-year-olds get into education or employment. I was doing interview tips, I was learning to deal with people, I guess. I did a 3-month stint at a youth offending prison, and I loved that.

Oh, wow.

It was really good. It was challenging. It was obviously— saw some gritty stuff, but I loved it. And I think there was a time where I thought about getting into youth offending, but there's no money in it. The funding literally fell out of it, and I sort of went back and forth, right, okay, let's start applying for recruitment. So pretty much the first job I applied for, got an interview for. It was a firm called Trent Pearce, and they were a spin-off of— I think they're called Jambo now, but it was JJ Fox, the group. And basically it was a group of companies all in competition with one another, but all owned by ex-S3 people. So they were, to me, even a northern lad, they were all sort of millionaire Cockney wide boys, and I had a, I think about 3 or 3.5 hour interview with all of them. Really, really intense and got the job and it was brilliant. It was a real sort of work hard, play hard atmosphere, like your stereotypical recruitment Wall Street sort of stuff and it was just brilliant. I couldn't have started out, I don't think, at a better company, man.

Where was that based?

So originally they were based in Newcastle, so obviously it was easy for me to do so. They were based city centre Newcastle, Literally a stone's throw from the big market, pubs everywhere, great, great place to be in that type of environment. Later, they actually closed their office down in about 2010, I think it was, and I moved with them to Manchester and I worked in a year there in Manchester and that was a great office. But yeah, I actually joined recruitment in 2008, so recession hit, so it was—

What sector did you go into?

So I started off in further education, so I had a— my niche was looking at health and social care lecturers for FE colleges across the UK. So really niche. But this was 2008, and I started off and there was no issues. Literally no issues. It felt quite easy looking back. You never discussed rates. Now it's your first question. It just wasn't on the agenda. It was just about the people you had and what you said. But the funding just fell out of it. You know, the recession hit hard. They pretty much crashed out of FE and adapted really, really quickly. I think they saw that I had a real passion for being on the phone and selling. I quite— I have always enjoyed almost taking the rejection and the cat and mouse game of sales. So they asked me to build up a— it was like a training function, basically. So it was still within health and social care. Basically, they were private organisations for like assessors and tutors. So it was different. There was nothing on the system. There was not one bit of— there was not one company at all. So we started from scratch, literally for 3 months, just call, call, call. And I think looking back, that was the best thing that could have happened to me because it was all I knew. I was taking rejection all day long, and I kind of learned to take the small wins. That might even be an email address, do you know what I mean? The stuff that when we started the firm, you know, that, you know, you can resonate with. So that was brilliant for me, and that I built it up to a really good level. I think later there was about 3 or 4 people that worked just on that patch. So yeah, it was a really, really—

It's a really, really good grounding because obviously you worked at that company for just over 3 years. Yeah, yeah, really good grounding. That's really interesting. So then obviously, and then obviously you worked at 2 other companies before you started Theo James.

Yeah.

And then I guess if we were to talk about the sort of role before you started Theo James, that was a core people, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So Just quickly, what was your journey there? Was it join as a, obviously, a more experienced consultant then, or was you a leader straight away? Where, by the time that you left there, what was your role and what was you doing?

I think I had a nice transition in recruitment because the first firm was obviously work hard, play hard, but gratifying. They were 12, 13-hour days, it was incentive holidays, you were abroad 4 or 5 times a year, didn't have any responsibilities, no children, no partner, it was just all-encompassing work basically. I loved it. Then obviously I joined, I think, supply desk. In all honesty, that was a stopgap. It was very, very different. It was to get back into the Northeast for a girl. So met—

still with her now?

She's my wife now. Yeah, so yeah, had a night out back in the Northeast. I think I probably lied and said I was moving back to the Northeast at some stage just to get a number, and then pretty much had to come through with that lie. So here I am. So took a massive pay cut to come come back, and it was a good firm, but for me, it just wasn't for me. It was almost like glorified admin. It was teaching supply recruitment, so you come in at half 7, Mrs. White is off sick, you put Mrs. Green in. It wasn't really the sort of entrepreneurial side and sales side I enjoyed. So Core People was a good step for me because I came in as a senior recruitment consultant, wasn't managing anyone, but I was obviously, I was a senior member of staff, straight into manufacturing, so no experience on on that patch. But good firm to work for because they gave you quite a bit of autonomy. You know, there's no one really screaming down your neck. I kind of, I'd already had quite a lot of training and I kind of already knew what I needed to do. So I quite, I did enjoy my time there and it was a good journey because it was a desk, it was a desk that I had, well, pretty much until very recently. It was essentially working with maintenance engineers across northeast, so really, really niche, and had that for 3 years there and obviously through Theo James. So good firm to work for, definitely.

So by the time you left, how do you manage people?

Yeah, so I worked my way up to a managing consultant. So I was working with a couple of people, still, I guess, like a billing manager, if you like. When I did leave, I was a manager. So I'll probably talk in depth about it, how we started the business, but I'd actually moved over to construction and was managing a team there for a short period of time until me and Gary started start the business. So yeah, I didn't have years, I've not had years and years of management experience. My journey through Theo James has been, it's been quite a big one with my own personal development and learning how to manage people from the mistakes, I guess.

Because what, so what gave you, and so obviously, so you started Theo James with you, obviously Gary, your business partner, and then also, you also shared with me that there's someone else involved as well. So what gave you the confidence to start your own recruitment business? Let's start there, because a lot of people, that's what people are most worried about, right? Taking that leap, taking that initial plunge. So what gave you the confidence?

I think I'd always thought, right, I want to own my own business. Right from the start, when I kind of saw what the owners of the first business I worked for had, I kind of thought, I want that. But it kind of been on the back burner. So this, in all honesty, was more of an opportunity I had to take up. So at the time, Gary managed the manufacturing division. If you like, I was his assistant manager, if you like. So we sort of oversaw a team of 7 or 8. It was a profitable part of the business, but we were 20-25% of the business. The rest of it was construction, so that's what they've always been famous for, for 30 years. We were asked to move over to construction. He wanted basically to become 100% a construction firm and focus on that and drive and grow that. Which made sense, and sold it to us. And obviously it was a promotion for us to go over there and manage big teams. But it was soul-destroying because firstly, it was— I didn't feel that passionate about construction. I don't know why, but I just, I didn't resonate with it. Gary is an ex-ops manager of Saint-Gobain, a big manufacturing French firm. So manufacturing is in his blood. And about 2 months in, you know, we were still getting clients call us saying, can you work a maintenance engineer job for us? Can you work a buyer for us? And we were saying, really sorry, we can't, we don't work here. And it was so disheartening. These are relationships that we brought up from the last sort of 3, 4 years.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So I literally looked at numbers, numbers what I built and, you know, what the team had built. I thought, this is madness, you know, this is crazy. So I did some maths. I think I spoke to my dad first. He's an accountant, very, very sensible head. And even he said, look, you know, you could be onto something. Spoke to my brother-in-law, his financial advisor, and again, you know, he backed it. Took Gaz to the pub and said, Gaz, I said, look, look what we've built in the last 12 months, right? Even if we build half of that, you know, we had a rough estimate of overheads, we have an idea really, because you don't, there's not that much information, there's not as much as there 'Well, shall we do it?' You know, we— and we knew—

what did you do in that year? What— what— give us a bit of context.

Personally, um, £150,000, £160,000. Yeah. You know, these were sort of £3 grand average fees, do you know what I mean? Which is—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean?

So that's just good for context.

Okay, so it's not, not, not too bad, but not, not amazing, do you know what I mean? But good enough to, to Eastern, right, you know what, if we end— it's half of that and our overs are £20 grand, we'll be all right. We've got some freedom. So took Gary to the pub. I said, look, what do you think? And he sort of moved it over, didn't say much like he normally doesn't, said, leave it with me. So he went oldie for 2 weeks, didn't speak to him for the whole time. Unbeknownst to me, he was sat on a deck chair, ruining his oldie, thinking about nothing else basically. And his motivation is very different because he's, you know, Gaz is older than me. His motivation was retiring early, whereas mine was obviously building something.

What was the age gap?

So Gaz is 55, I'm 35.

So, okay, interesting.

Decent age gap, decent age gap. So, but I really wanted Gary to be involved, really wanted, because I knew how good he was. He's a tremendous manager and he brings to the business what I can never bring because clients just resonate with him straight away because he's one of them, you know.

Yeah, yeah, it's a great story and he understands.

Yeah, massively. So really keen to get him on board. In that 2 weeks, I spoke to my best pal Carl, who is an entrepreneur, essentially owns sort of tech businesses. He was keen to get involved. He couldn't get involved day-to-day, obviously, because obviously of his work he does and he has no experience in recruitment, but he wanted to help us start up, and so he's a co-founder of the business. So, Gas came back, said let's do it, and it all happened really quickly. So, Within the space of a few days, really, we registered the company.

Where'd the name come from?

Yeah, that's a terrible story. So I wish I could give you some perfect example, but so as it happened very quickly, my wife was pregnant, due very, very, very shortly. And we thought we're having a boy and the boy was going to be called Theo James. So Gaz wasn't really bothered. He said, yeah, 'Crack on, it sounds like a good name to me.' We didn't really think about it that much at all and called it Theo James. Had a girl, so called Ella. So I mean, I have now since had a little boy who isn't called Theo because, you know, we thought that had been done now. But yeah, so the name is nothing basically. So it's— okay, no, no, sorry, go on. It's also not ideal because obviously Theo James is an actor, so if you Google Theo James, we're nowhere near the top. It all happened pretty quickly.

So yeah, fair enough.

First couple of weeks, you know, trying to, you know, hand notice in, which was obviously a tough thing to do, but you understood. You know, we left on really good terms. We had luxury because we didn't have the covenants that most people would do because they weren't in the space anymore. They weren't—

Yeah, because you went into— Yeah, that makes sense. Which was part of the catalyst as to why you considered starting your own business, right?

100%. Yeah.

So I guess what I really like about that is Clearly, intentionally or not, basically what you did there is you got people involved who had skill sets that weren't your strongest skill set, right? So you got Gaz, as you said, has got a great story, really understands the industry that we're going to be recruiting for, so can add loads of, heaps of value there. Great manager, operations person. And as you said, that isn't something that you're an expert in or had loads of experience in. And then also got the other chap involved because he's been involved in scaling, growing businesses, right? So I actually love that in terms of like putting together a bit of a dream team really and got people together that adds value in their own way. So I guess always, always keen to hear about it because again, it's probably the year that people were most worried about is that first year. So things will happen quite quickly. Yeah. What did that first year look like? What was the— well, I guess, was the plan, right, we need to get back on the phones to people that keep calling us, start there and then go from there? What happened in that first year?

Yeah, 100% it was. I mean, again, we— the plan for us was to pick up where we left off 2 months ago. Literally, that was it. We didn't really think anything of that. And we never put a label on it. I think looking back, we probably thought it was going to be a lifestyle business. We thought, right, we might have 5, 6 staff, we can we can earn a decent living. We never said about this is going to be a lifestyle business, but at the time I think it probably was going to be.

So the biggest challenge initially was the database, you know, you never, you know, well, because you didn't have, because you had no one on a database, no, a database.

So, you know, we were very, very lean. So I think we used ChameleonEye. I Googled free database, ChameleonEye popped up, used that. It was, we had one free account, one was £25. It was absolutely fine for what we needed. It was a recruitment-specific database.

Yeah, that's the one I used.

Great, do you know what I mean? Like, it was ideal for us. So it's part of our startup. So the first challenge was literally grafting every hour God sent to try and get CVs, companies, contacts, everything we can on the system. Yeah, massively. And LinkedIn wasn't what it was even then, so that was a big challenge. But, you know, we pulled 2 or 3 jobs on the first day. So we literally just gone, right, okay, let's just sit, who are our top 100 clients, who have we done business with, called them, picked up 2, 3, and, you know, we made— at the end of week 1, we made 3 placements.

Really?

Yeah, we had, uh, we had— so we had a dream start. I think we had 4 placements in week 2. So we built about £20,000 to £25,000, and it was, I— it was, um, I— it was my contacts, the maintenance engineers, built them straight away. And I thought— we went in the pub, um, I thought, you know, we're gonna be millionaires here next week, guys.

We've done it, this is it.

Yeah, this is it, this is it. And then, um, I remember A week later, because they were all quite immediate starters, a week later I was driving into work and I literally, I checked my phone and every one of them was either dropping out or looked like he was going to drop out. We had someone who's count Rothbard, someone, believe it or not, had been arrested. Unbelievable. It was a mate, had been arrested for stealing some copper wire. This was like a 7-gram. Another one had started but said he didn't like it. And I was driving and going, 'Oh, what have we done?' You know, 20 grand is often 2 grand when you're a recruiter, but 20 grand was 20 grand then. And, you know, we had no salary, and I was driving and going, you know, I've just had a baby born, I've just moved into a new house, wife on maternity leave, what have I done? And it was, that was probably one of the toughest days we've ever had, but I'm so pleased we went through it because it helped us, it helped us be a lot tougher moving forward. So It was our first year, looking back, was probably easier than some. We just kind of got our heads down. I guess it's a bit like thinking back when you don't have kids, when you have kids, you look back and you had no responsibilities, it was free, it was easier, and it was fun. But you wouldn't swap it to what you've got now because despite the fact it's harder, you're in a better place right now. So I think for us, our year one was difficult. We didn't do anything crazy billing-wise. We weren't working ridiculous hours. We probably did, I think we did about £250, £260 all perm. So it was all right, do you know what I mean? It was at the time.

Yeah, and obviously with you and Gaz, and obviously the other chap as well, that was what you had in your mind, right? It's like, right, let's see if we can do this ourselves. And yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's really interesting then. So basically the mindset in that first year was, right, let's just get money on the board. Let's just actually see if we can do this.

We took on there, the plan wasn't to take anyone on the first year, we actually did, we actually took on Gary's son, just to complicate matters even more. So I mean, Ross is a friend of mine, he worked with Core People, not in recruitment, a different type of role, he'd been made redundant there, so Gaz picked me up in the morning, pretty sort of red-faced and said, look, can I ask you a big favour, you know, can we I know this isn't the plan, but can we look at taking Ross on? Can we bring him on? And obviously I said absolutely yes. So Ross was with us probably just under a year. Ultimately didn't work out, but he still played a real big part in our sort of first year and our growth there. So yeah, that was high number one, basically.

So what happened in that first year that you didn't expect?

I think Probably personally, to care so much. I think the personal journey, it engulfed me. And I think obviously I had a hell of a lot going on at home, you know. I had a brand new baby. My wife actually at the time wasn't very well. She had a hemorrhage after the first child. So, you know, play to Gaz, he held the fort for a couple of weeks whilst I was just literally had to look after everyone at home. So I think You know, looking back, it was just how much I would care personally, how much it would take over my life. I think I learned as time went on to make sure I try and switch off in the process. So it took, probably, it took a hell of a lot out of me personally that first year just to get up and running. But that being said, I loved every second of it.

How did it affect your relationship then with your partner? Because I think that's, because that's always, that's again, definitely going to be something really common that people don't expect that it, you will wake up thinking about Theo James and you will be going to sleep thinking about Theo James, the child you never had, but it was the child in the form of your recruitment business, right? So like, obviously, clearly someone that was going to support your partner through really difficult times. But how did that relationship turn out if it was just you so engulfed with it? Was that hard?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, she keeps me in check. But no, I mean, she's been superb and incredibly supportive. You know, this was, this was never her dream. This was my dream, you know.

Yeah.

You know, she was with me when I didn't own a business. So it's not as though this is our dream. It's mine. It's for them and them are why. But, you know, incredibly supportive, without doubt. But, you know, at the same time, we'll keep in check and make sure that I am trying to balance out as much as I possibly can.

Yeah.

You know, she's not scared to tell me that. A non-negotiable for us has always been I'm at home at 6 o'clock to help bath the kids. That's something that's very important to me. Obviously, if I go on a course or etc., it's fine. But, you know, 9 times out of 10, I will never be at work at 6 o'clock. I'll always be at home. I went for a journey of not switching off at that time. I think there was a long period of time I would be there, but I wasn't there in mind.

Yeah, yeah, you wasn't present.

No, not at all. So I think, you know, but she's been a massive part of our journey. Through me, from just making sure that I'm focused and, you know, I've not hollered any night feeds and all the mad stuff that, do you know what I mean? So she's been amazing.

So you had some non-negotiables that you was always there for, and I think for me, my journey with it so far, because I've found that quite hard, like switching off, and it's all-encompassing, right? Is just over-communicating. I think sort of sometimes I've been susceptible to just making the assumption that my girlfriend understands why sometimes I've got to work late or like, I don't know, sometimes you can just assume that they understand why you've got to do things, but they don't. You have to communicate and have to say, well, look, this is why, this is, remember, this is why I'm doing this and this is the sort of mission that I'm on. You are a big reason as to why I'm putting in this work right now. And I think just don't assume that they understand why I have to work late and all these types of things. I think it's just really important to Your drivers and why you're doing things and stuff like that. That's what I've had to do.

Yeah, no, definitely, completely. I completely agree. I think you've got to keep yourself in check. You burn out as a recruiter, but you can burn out even easier as an owner because there's always— you can always be doing something, you know, you can always be doing—

that's the thing, it is that. It's just that, it's exactly what you just said. There's always something that you could be doing.

Yeah, yeah, massively. It is, and I think you've And I've got— I'm not fantastic at it. And sometimes I feel like I'm burning out and I'll go, right, okay, I want to make some rules for myself. I've got to switch my phone off between 6 and 7. I'll then go switch my phone up to 9 o'clock because everything can wait. There's nothing— nothing— everything can wait. Nothing can happen at 10 PM at night which can't wait until the morning. And it's important. I've learned that, but it's taken me some time to really learn that. I've learned that the hard way, I guess, of really getting quite stressed out, stressed, I would say.

Okay, so going into the, so obviously second year then, obviously as you said, managed to generate circa £250K revenue, just you and Gaz basically. What was the mindset going into year 2 then? Was it like, right, let's see if we can double that, or I don't know, what was the mindset going into year 2?

Yeah, I think, so one thing that Karl's always been very, very good at, and literally this is from month 1, is we have board meetings every month. And at first I was like, board meeting? There's only 2 of us. But no, but you know, there's only 3 of us in the business. So we have a board meeting every month and we go through things. And now they're obviously extremely crucial, but even then, you know, working on the business when you're not in it is important. So I think—

So what was the typical, just out of interest really quickly, what was it, what was a typical agenda?

So, typical agenda now is very different, but at the time I think it was what went wrong, what could we do, what could we do better. It was more day-to-day, I would say, at the time. It was more sort of how, what situations we managed. Now it's all about growth and it's all about scaling, etc. So I think in early days it was just taking ourselves out the business, going for a meal, same Italian we've been to every single month since day one, and just taking some time out to analyse things. The greatest thing as well is, as a 3, we We rarely agree initially. We've all got 3 very, very different opinions. They're always quite heated to some extent. I'll come away mentally exhausted from board meetings, but we always agree on some form of decision. It's the right one. Yeah, definitely. But I think year 2, we— probably the catalyst, I would say, was we thought, right, you know what, I wouldn't say growth is a word, but let's try and add a couple of heads. And we advertise a role Vicky, who's with us now, applied. Well, she actually, she called me up and said, I've seen you've applied for, you're applying for a consultant, would you consider me? And Vicky is, she's, you know, at the time she was just 10 years of recruitment experience, you know, we work closely, she's the best I've ever worked with, you know, the most professional recruiter you'll ever meet, massive cube of the business, and it was a bit like, Jesus, you know, someone like her would want to work for us.

And did you think, why would she want to work for us?

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

I mean, that's so common.

Yeah, massively. And I think, you know, leaving a business that she'd been for, for so long, doing extremely well. You know, she was, she was a manager, she was billing. You know, this was definitely going to be an initial step back for her. So to join us was just like, wow, you know what I mean? So I said, you know, you don't have to apply, come, come to the pub now, we'll talk about it. So she was hired after 5 minutes.

So that was, uh, what was your sell? Obviously she was obviously motivated, but obviously, because I think it's come up a couple of times on the podcast, when you're a smaller growing business, which the majority of the UK recruitment market is, you do have those self-doubts as to why would this person want to work for us? And sometimes that can lead to bad hiring decisions, right? And like, so I guess like when you had that moment with Vicky, who's obviously still with you now, which is amazing, what was the sell from your point then? Was you honest? How did you communicate what Theo James could be for her?

100%, I think we were very, very honest. I think the big sell was probably the culture, and we've always been big on culture. We probably talked more about culture than profit and growth than anything else, and I think we talked about the environment we want to build and her to be part of it. We've always been very, very open, honest about Gary's journey. You know, Gary at some stage plans to retire, really, and, you know, even then I communicate with Vikki. To have her on board at that stage was massive for me because I want her to be part of that journey and hopefully be and, you know, be by my side when we grow that. So I think she obviously saw some long-term growth for her there to be part of something, which is still very, very much the plan. So she was excited about it. I think she was probably ready for a change. I didn't realize that that was the case, you know, but I kept in touch just about personal stuff, but I didn't realize that she was going through a bit of a journey there where I think she'd probably been there for 10 years and thought, you know what, maybe I'm ready for something different. So I think for her it came at a perfect time. She had opportunities to join businesses which were much bigger than ours and much more stable than ours. You know, we were, you know, we were a small business which, you know, 3 months, 3 bad months could have killed us. And actually, in fact, in year 2, we went through probably the hardest challenge we've ever had. I think we got through a stage where, looking back, we got too comfortable. There was 4 of us, and we were 4 friends, and I think we just enjoyed coming to work and working hard, and then for whatever reason we went through a sticky patch, which you can do, any consultant can go through a sticky patch, and we happened to go through it all together. And looking back, I think we didn't have process in place, we didn't have any KPIs.

Well, you didn't bill for a certain period.

Yeah, yeah, we were massively in the target for about 3 months, and then we were suddenly looking, suddenly we've got, you know, we've got staff, we've got headcount, we've got overheads, and that's the first time I was really, really stressed. And when you've got other people you're responsible for, One thing thinking, right, I'll start again or get a new job. It's another thing thinking, right, I've actually taken people out of a job now. I've got responsibility to people. That's always sort of been quite heavy on my shoulders. And I took it upon myself, to be told, to just go, right, you know what, I need to get us out this shit. So I got my head down and just went back to basics completely. Grafted, grafted, grafted. And I built really, really well. I built— I can't remember what it was, but a decent amount of money in 3, 4 months and just pulled it out of us. I think I probably led from the front there, and from that we started to analyse what works. And I think we analysed the numbers, and that's where Carl was very crucial. Okay, right, so why were you successful? How many CVs? How many calls did you make? Stuff that I'd never really sort of looked at before. I just knew what I did worked. So we looked at that, and then we looked at how we can analyse and scale the business and start to put some, some process in place. So it was probably the end of year 2 where we were then successful after a tough period of time. I think we built about 400 perm, we added maybe 150 temp. So we did okay, not as much as we should have done, but we did okay. But it gave us the confidence to go, actually, we could be a business here. We could be a decent business and we can grow. So I think that's the stage where we thought, right, let's— we went from a lifestyle business to maybe a slow growth business to some extent.

How? Because I think a lot of people can fall into that. I think it's quite common, isn't it, that sort of when you're a smaller growing business, obviously you, you end up taking people that you do end up having a really good sort of friendly relationship with, and it sort of really overlaps that sort of friend and professional relationship.

Yeah.

How did you communicate that? Because I feel like obviously that will be things that people go for even just as a billing manager or as an actual business owner, how did you communicate that, hey guys, we need to fucking up our game here? Like, how did you communicate that, out of interest?

I don't know if I said the words. I think it was— I've never been good at hiding stuff, and I think I was visibly stressed out. Do you know what I mean? I think I was visibly stressed, and the way I deal with things at the time is just to go, right, okay, I'm just going to graft. And I think people saw how hard I was working, and then they tried to replicate that and did, and worked very hard.

So you just led by example?

Yeah, I think that's it. I've always found it easier My journey is I've learned to manage, but I've always found it easier to do as I do, not as I say. I'm better at that now, and I think I am better at training people and helping them, assisting them. But I've always found it easier just to lead from the front than tell them and communicate what to do. So I think, yeah, it was literally just get me head down and grafting, to be told.

So it was less of, hey guys, put them in the meeting room and be like, right guys, we need to fuck it up here, got complacent. It was more of, right, I've noticed this has been going on, I need to turn this around because I've got other people's livelihoods here that I'm now responsible for. And just led by example, that then also ended up influencing their actions and output. Okay, so going into year 3 then, what processes did you start to implement? You've mentioned that word a couple of times, and I think, I think I've had a done a couple of podcasts recently where this word's come up a lot, and I think it's really important because I think it's what you've spoken about. Huge number of recruitment businesses are small growing businesses or have sub-10 staff, and I think a big part of that as to why, a big reason as to why businesses don't grow or scale is that they typically have the mindset of we'll do that when we get to this point, or we'll put that process in when we've hit this certain milestone. And it's just come up a lot recently where the last interview I did with someone, they were a 5-person business, but they were implementing processes that a 20-person business would have. And then when they got to 20 people, they implemented what a 50-person business would have. Do you get what I mean? So I guess what processes did you start implementing or how did you start thinking about your business differently going into that year 3? Because that's obviously the moment that you had there, right? And what you started to Yeah, definitely.

I think year 3 for me is when we actually started being a business. I think looking back, we— I wouldn't say we wasted 2 years because, you know, it was part of our journey and, you know, you learn more from your failures. The 2 businesses I worked for weren't big on process, they weren't big on that side, they weren't big on analyzing what works, to be fair. So we didn't— you only know what you know, right? So it was probably more— it was probably an issue more Carl that said like, let's get some process in place, some scalable process and document those processes. And let's look at what's worked for us in the past. And that's when we looked at my desk. I was probably billing a third of the company billings. Let's look at it. We analysed it and we tried to scale that out. We brought on, we brought in Cube19. Oh, wow. Which was great. Yeah, we haven't, we've swapped that now to 1UP because we changed the culture of our business. But Cube19 was great for us at the time because—

So why did you, just out of interest, why did you choose to invest in that? So what was you hoping it could do for you?

It was basically the analytics for one. So we can, you know, we were spreadsheets, we're all spreadsheets and numbers. We designed some brilliant spreadsheets and, you know, we had graphs, all sorts, but the Kuban team was just, we demoed it and we said, this is it. This is where we can see what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong.

So enable you to visualize the sort of the things that Mark was doing on a day-to-day, week, month-by-month basis that would mean that if we could get more people doing that, then there's a good chance that, yeah, okay.

Yeah, exactly that. In hindsight, We probably went too KPI heavy. I think we went from nothing to everything, you know, we threw the kitchen sink at it and said, right, okay, CV sends, calls, references, meetings, everything. And we went hard on that, but we brought in Cube19, we brought in Odrow, which probably changed the face of our business, I would say, more than anything. It changed the culture of our business, using video to portray us and what we're about was, I think, just changed the face of Theo James, honestly. We also joined the RDLC, which is probably the biggest catalyst for our change moving forward because it was the first time we were allowed to see what other businesses were doing. Because if you're in a bubble as a recruiter, you can't see it. And, you know, you don't go to networking events if you're not part of this type of thing. Plus, I think going, you know, these were— majority of them were tech businesses in London and it opened my eyes massively because I think they were probably ahead of the times to most of our type agencies.

Yeah.

Enabled us to, I think, to be the first movers in our marketplace to do things like using certain technologies, like using video to get messages across, etc., and using video for interviews. So that was the first sign for us that I think we start becoming a business. We got bullhorned, do you mean? Everything seems to sort of go, right, okay, we're a professional business now, we can scale, and we can and we can grow. And it's the first time I think we're all comfortable and confident as a 3 that we could actually bring people into this environment and they could be successful, I would say.

So you really started— so it seems like you really started— part of that process was you invested in the tools, you invested in basically getting the foundations and being able to be really confident with the platform that you could offer new employees into Theo James.

Yeah, definitely, because you've got— and you've all— you've got to compete, you know, when you've got to sell the business at the same time, you know, anyone interviewing for for you, you know, you've got to sell the vision, you've got to sell the company and how they're going to work. So I think we brought on, at the end of year 3, we were up to 6 staff. I think we had maybe 4 or 5 that failed, but not a bad churn rate, you know, we had sort of 1 in 2, which isn't too bad, and we brought some really good staff on, the bulk of those are still with us now, so I think our year 3 was probably, in a way, our most important year, I would say. 'Cause, you know, year 4 was difficult in terms of recruitment-wise, but year 3, you know, we put maybe about £600K on the board, £600K, then probably £300K, £400K. I think we got up to sort of a million quid turnover the first time.

So I was gonna— that was gonna be my next question. How did you invest in these tools and networks then sort of correlate with the actual performance of the business? So that obviously increased.

Yeah, it definitely increased. We saw an increase. Obviously overheads increased. And it's the first time, you know what I mean, you have a sleepless night over that. But yeah, it definitely had a positive effect on the revenue, without a doubt.

And how, just quickly then, before we go into year 4, thinking about year 2 and year 3, how did Mark's day change? Like, what did you end up spending more time on training? Or I don't know, how did your day change from, if you think about you're going, right, right, we've got a pretty good business here, let's really invest in things to take us to the next level. How did your role change and what did your day look like?

So I think one of the most important things again in year 3 was taking me off a desk, you know, it was a big bold move because my desk was still there, I was still the top biller, I still had, you know, I'd still probably third the billings in the company, it was a desk I'd had for 7 or 8 years, so, you know, it was easier for me I guess to build better. So It was the first year that I was working on the business, not in the business, if that makes sense. So, what's it—

so it's about the very beginning of year 3, you kind of, you sort of relinquished your desk?

Yeah, probably, probably, yeah, it was the end of quarter 1, I think it was. And that was a big decision, you know, that was a tough board meeting, you know, to decide that, you know, to take away my billings and go, right, okay, let's just hire into it, which we did. That was a big decision. But that's what we did. And my plan was basically, because we decided to go from a lifestyle business to a growth business at the time, we agreed that the only way to do that was for me to come off a desk because I've still got a passion for sales and passion for the training. So I came off a desk. I attended, you know, lots of things with the RDLC, tried to develop myself, went on various courses personally. You know, it was the first time we started getting external trainers on board. We started investing in our staff, and my day changed, I guess, just by being involved a lot more in their activity and what they're doing, looking more at the numbers and seeing what was working, see what wasn't working. So it was the first time in my career that I'd ever done anything like that. So it was without doubt the biggest challenge, and it didn't, didn't come naturally to me, I would say. You know, my favorite part of recruitment is recruitment, still is. I love the buzz of it, I love the highs and lows. So I've had to learn to sort of take a step back from that, and I still find that hard.

So I think this, what you're talking about, I absolutely love the fact that you did that. I think that's such a bold move. I think particularly where you was in your business journey as well, to sort of really sort of have the balls to go, you know what, I shouldn't be the top biller if this is a business that we want to grow and turn it into a quote-unquote real business. Um, so let's just talk about that for a second because Look, you'll obviously, being part of the RDLC, you'll speak to numerous recruitment business owners, but I think that's one of the biggest challenges they have, right? In actually going through that transition. So I guess knowing what you know now, obviously soaking up everything from the RDLC and learning what you learn, how would you go about transitioning that differently? Or how would you do it? Would you do it differently? How would you go about it now if you, if you today was like, right, Hishem, I need to get off the tools, I'm the top biller, like, how would you go about doing that?

Well, in terms of if I came, right, so if they came off a desk and how would you—

Yeah, so like, because obviously now you've got obviously the hindsight, the learnings from what you learned, the self-development, I guess, like, yeah, how would you go from, right, I'm a business owner and I need to go from not just being a top biller and being in the business I now need to sort of transition to on the business, right? So how would you go, would you do that? How would you go about doing that? And would you do it differently?

I think you've got to be careful not to throw the baby out the bathwater. I think to completely leave your desk and go, right, okay, you crack on with it, would have been a mistake. I think you've always got to have one eye on it. And I've always had it, I've always had one eye on that desk still because these relationships I've had for 7 or 8 years. So I would still do quite a lot of the sales side to it. I might have not done the actual recruitment, but I knew pretty much, and I still do, every maintenance engineer in the Northeast. So if, you know, if I saw someone said, what about this guy? I'd say, right, okay, send to speak to so-and-so. So I still had one eye on the game a little bit. So I think I still influenced and helped influence the person who was billing on that desk quite a bit. But I guess you've got to look at what you're good at, and for me, that was probably the sales side to it, to, you know, speaking to people. And so that's the bit I went hell for leather for. So listen to sales calls, getting them to listen back to them, giving them feedback on that, what could have been better, what they could do differently. So, and you've got to play to your strengths. So for me, that was still speaking to clients, being on the phone. I would have hated to have stepped away from that completely. I think it's always important still to be the face of the business for as long as you possibly can do. You've got to make your consultants famous. Totally, people buy from people, but I still think at this stage you need to be a prominent face for the business so people still trust you. These were mining gas relationships, you know.

Because yeah, so how did you communicate externally then, out of interest? Because so I get that, mate. So basically, so if you're listening right now and you're in the position where Mark was in year 3 and you want to sort of start thinking, well, look, I want to be on the business, I don't want to be on just on the tools all the time, I shouldn't be the top biller.

Yeah.

So okay, I need to have— I definitely— this isn't like, right, tomorrow I'm stopping, then you don't do anything. It's, right, I need to keep an eye on 'Firstly, what parts of my desk am I the best at? Well, actually, it's cultivating relationships, it's clients, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to make sure that I still make sure that goes on and have an eye on it.' But how— so obviously, I think that'd be quite common. So I guess, how did you communicate that externally when people have been used to dealing with Mark?

I probably on purpose didn't. I think I tried to have that a bit of a soft transition. So I think initially when they would call and speak to me, I would say I would still speak to them and I would bring along the consultant, we'd have a meeting together. So I tried to hold the hand a little bit, so I tried to make that as soft as possible until they trusted that I was still there to help out with any issues, and then the consultant board would do a good job. So it wasn't a big hurrah, I'm leaving this as a person, because I think that would have been too big a risk. My sales calls probably went up because I was probably in a bubble of speaking to maintenance managers. I was then speaking to all our clients, I was doing more account management, you know, a new client on board, I had the time to introduce myself now and look, I'm, you know, thank you very much for working with Vicky, I'm the director, if you need issues come speak to me. So I found myself with more time to do things like that and nurture and grow the business whilst also getting more involved with the day-to-day, never on a micromanaged level but just in terms of what people are doing. We've worked on, this is something that Trevor Pinders helps us out with a lot, We've always worked in 2-hour sprints. I think it's a perfect way to manage people. So every 2 hours, it's a very, very quick 5 minutes. What's the plan for these next 2 hours? Great, okay, I'm gonna try and sell so-and-so around. What do you want out of it? And, you know, 4 or 5 key objectives. We'll touch base after 2 hours. How do you get on? Why did you fail? Why did you succeed? And then you go again. So it's a really easy and quick way to manage and keeps people focused. Because it's so easy to be busy for recruitment. You can have a day, you know, a full day thinking I've grafted me in, and then you think, what have I done?

What do I do?

But I think if you have those sprints, you can clearly go back and see, right, okay, these are my non-negotiables, these are my sprints, and this is what I've got out of the day. So for us, that's been really key.

I love that. And then just final thing before we talk a bit about sort of the fourth year. So what did sort of you going through that transition enable you to spend time on that you didn't have time to do historically? So when you say more on the business, so you've mentioned that enabled you to focus on training, sales calls, helping people maximise the opportunities that they were getting. What else did it enable you to do that obviously, I guess, you felt really positive about and it was great to be able to do?

I would say culture. Culture's always been really important to us and the people we bring in the business, we hire on culture more than we do how much money they're going to make us, you know, when we're open to them on interview about that. Culture is really important for us, so it enabled me to have a bit of time to take a step back and look at the environment we've got, and that goes from the office, you know, and I think it was probably about in the year 3 we moved into a big office space which you could comfortably fit probably 30 people in there, so it's a big space, and for me it was important to give people an environment where It's a stressful environment, but to try and de-stress as much as we possibly can do. So once they've built, we have a Bushido board, which is like a hierarchy within the company. So it's a bit of fun and incentivize people. So as they grow in the business, as they build, basically as they go up, you get, you might get a mobile phone, you get a wireless headset, you might get a computer, your commission scheme goes up. But one of the things is, as soon as you build £12,000, you get a wireless headset, which is the It's the biggest thing when people start. They see people walking around on the phone playing darts, kicking a football about, and just, you know, motion creates emotion, all that. So that's a big one for me. I wanted to create an office environment where people wanted to come in and work and they weren't cramped around a small desk, you know, around people. So enable me to spend more time with things like that. We have something called Office Vibe, which is free. It's a free tool. It's brilliant. Basically, it's a— I think it goes out every Wednesday to the guys, it's emailed to them, and you can either have random questions about the business, or you can actually select and choose your questions, and you get anonymous answers about your business and how you can improve. Brilliant. And I stress to people, just be as honest as you possibly can do. And we've learned a lot from that, of what works and what doesn't. And, you know, we ask them to give us ideas, and a lot of what we've implemented in the company come from the staff and co-event from the staff. Yeah, then you get much more buy-in if someone thinks, right, that's my idea, you know. You know, what's that called?

OfficeVibe.

OfficeVibe, yeah, it's free, it's brilliant. Um, it's a free tool. I think you can get the premium for other add-ons, but what we need— you get your business gets a rating out of 10 for sort of health and well-being, for professional, all sorts of stuff. You can see which areas you might need to work on for your business. Um, it's almost like a psychometric test for your company, and it's It's brilliant. It's helped us to get a culture for us which means people want to come into work. And we wanted to create an almost like a work hard, balanced life hard environment. You know, we haven't got the play hard, you know, we have lunch clubs, etc. We have incentives, but nothing like the business that I started off in. It's much more, I guess, autonomous and relaxed. But we want people to come in and get their head down and graft. But yeah, short answer would be to sort of spend time on the culture.

I love that because I think that that's a big part again, that can get left on the wayside if you're still staying on the tools and you're a small growing business. So I actually love sort of what you just shared there, because I think it's obviously you always read about culture and business. And again, that could, for you in the position where you was as a business at that point, you may deem that as not as important because you are worried about that when there's a few more of us, whatever. Right. And so I actually love that. I think that's great. So why was year 4 challenging?

So year 4 was challenging, it was definitely the most challenging year regarding— it was the year we thought, right, this is it, lads, we're going to go for it. So we thought we had the process in place regarding, you know, the KPIs and when the people are working the business, but we didn't really think about the process regarding interviewing. We just thought we could hire good people because—

so internal interviewing?

Internal recruitment massively. I think Looking back, we probably got lucky with the people in year 3 because year 4 was a disaster. I think we ended year 4 with the same 6 that we ended year 3 with.

And this will be so common. You're not being alone.

Yeah, so I think we had about 10 or 11 who failed miserably. And I think we didn't fire them quick enough. You know, we weren't really used to firing people, so we didn't fire them quick enough. We let people go. We probably hired, we hired on gut. It was subjective. We didn't have a clear interview strategy, interview structure.

What was it? Let's just share that. Like, what was the Theo James interview process at that point?

At the time, it was, I think it was two-stage, but it was pretty much a meet and greet on the first stage. And the second time it was probably more of an extensive meet and greet. It was more of a, we chat about the business, we chat about them. And then probably if someone said to us, at the time, yeah, I've worked with this company, this is how much I've built. We probably just got excited and thought, right, yeah, great, they can make lots of money, we'll bring them in. And if they were nice people, our onboarding process was probably non-existent. We probably expected people to do better, and we brought people in the business who were either, in hindsight, not salesy enough, because we're still quite salesy. I think they're probably too account manager-esque. We brought people in business who ex-car salesmen who sort of talked a good game, but as soon as they got on the phone, they just crumbled. And just the wrong motivation. So it was a real disaster. I think we probably knocked a bit of stuffing out of us that year because we probably lost a bit of confidence in our own ability to recruit. But it made us go back to basics and create a structure for this, for the year 5, which has been great so far. For hiring and literally just putting a real set structure for interviewing, onboarding, and so forth. And, you know, everyone brought in the business so far has been a success since that, and I'm really confident that—

Well done, that's amazing. Again, that's one of those things which you could very easily put in the bucket of, I'll sort out our onboarding process when we get to 15 people or whatever. Do you get what I mean, right? Yeah, massively. 'Cause some people just accept or put up with the, we tried to, we got to 11 staff and we're now back to 7. Okay, well next year, do you get what I mean? So I love the fact that you had the humility to be like, right, what have we done here? We should have hired faster and we hired the wrong people, blah, blah, blah. So there's definitely an element there you've got to take responsibility, right? So I guess let's just talk about what that looks like now. 'Cause I think again, this is something that a lot of people can get value from. How did you change your interview process firstly?

So more structured, so our first stage now, anyone applies, anyone at all applies from the website, however we advertise, they get sent a solo interview, so we use Oddrow for that. So they basically get sent an email that says thank you very much for applying for the role, this is a bit about the company, this is a bit about the culture, they get sent some slides about us and what we do, try and get them excited about it, The first step for us is a solo interview, so they basically click play and they're interviewed themselves. We're not there. I think there's 6 questions they must ask, so essentially it's like a selfie mode video, and they're quite tough questions. Some of them are standard ones, you know, why would you get into recruitment, what are your motivations. There's a horrible question that asks if you were a kitchen utensil, what would you be and why, which is awful, but it throws everyone.

If you was a kitchen utensil, what Oh my God.

And you can see the panic in people, but you learn the people who have a laugh with it because it's sales. You don't know what people are going to say to you.

Yeah.

The people who stiffen up and don't know what to do, you think, are they? And the people just either have an answer off the bat.

You must have got some funny answers from that.

Some great ones. Yeah, some people go off on a tangent. You can see them thinking, what am I saying here? But it's great. But the big one for us is we get a lot from that because you can get a lot about the the personality and what they're about. But we probably only get about 75%—

about 75% don't send one back, and that's fine because cancel them out straight away.

Cancel them out, done. You know, we haven't wasted any time there. You know, before we'd be on the phone talking to them and, you know, we'd waste hours basically. And we didn't hire an office manager until year 5, so this was all us. That was a mistake we made, and this was— I took way too much on. So We, um, so that's the first, first stage of process. Um, anyone comes through that gets, um, face-to-face, which is typically me, Vicky, or Gary and the consultant. And we stress to the person applying is this is your opportunity to ask us anything. So ask us anything about the business, about your job, anything you want. We'll be open, honest. And typically we try and get them to ask the consultant about that because we like to get them involved. And also, who better to answer than someone who's working in the business. So that's the first stage. Second stage is, um, it's two of us, so it has to be for— it's, it's an owner, um, so me and Gary or Vicky, um, plus again another consultant. And it's more structured, so they have to— it's a presentation, 3 slides. Uh, first is, um, I think 3 things about them. Second slide is what your expectations of the first 12 weeks of working Theo James will be like. And then third is, why should we hire you? After that, yeah, after that is a, it's competency-based questions, so scenario-based questions essentially. And then the one I love is they have to, on speakerphone, they have to sell a CV, a candidate, to someone downstairs who's pretending to be a client with us watching. And it's the most daunting one for them, and they know it's coming up because we tell them.

Oh yeah, I did that. For one, so before I got into recruitment, I was an insurance broker and I had to sell a policy to my— that was going to be my new hiring manager, that was going to be my new manager. Yeah, that is daunting, but what a great exercise.

Great, it is great. And because it's a very— selling is different and face-to-face is very different to selling on the phone, and 90% of recruitment selling is still on the phone, so you need to know what they're like in that medium. And So that's the big one for us. We've caught a few people out doing that. And because they know they're doing it, we've had people that aren't prepared to do that second stage, and that's, again, that's fine. Don't waste any time. We make a decision from there, and then our onboarding process, which Trevor Pinder has helped us massively with, we make their world very small for probably 3 or 4 weeks. It's candidate-driven. Essentially, it's finding key pieces of information from candidates. It's understanding market, it's finding the good companies to work for, the opinion of the candidate, the bad companies to work for, it's getting leads, and it's also gaining, very importantly, sort of testimonials, reference names, more testimonials from candidates of their ex-managers. So they're essentially building a business development sheet for them for when they come off. So you can imagine if people are successful for that, they've then got a business development sheet to go, spoken to Bill Brown, He said, you're the best manager he's ever worked with.

I just love that.

It's great. And it just starts the conversation off on a great foot. So for us, we see the good consultants, the hungry consultants, from the not so hungry ones there, because we're very competitive. We're a competitive bunch. That's something we try and hire on, which is why obviously we have leaderboards everywhere and it's all over the TVs. But you see the people want to break the records. They know they can't make any commission, they can't make a sale or a sales call until they've finished these projects. We call it a darts challenge. So they've got 180 points basically. So they can't finish that project until they've got 180 points. And the people in the business, the year 5, have just— the shift is completely different because you can— there are different caliber of ones you've had before.

Well, that's honestly, that's so— I love how you've improved that so much because I'm assuming what it looked like before that was like, I don't know, not just get on the phones and do this, but it was like, here's the database, do a bit of that. Get on the phone, speak to a couple candidates, here's a job you're working on, and that's so precise, it's outcomes-driven, there's a real structure to it, you've created competition, I love that, that's amazing.

I think the people we look for are different as well, we've seen a pattern of the people we've hired who are successful, we class them as second jobbies basically, so we don't actually look for, we've got, you know, we've got Vicky, we've got Becky, who are two of the or two, you know, the two brilliant consultants we've got who are obviously ex-recruitment, but apart from that, none of them have recruitment experience. Now, we've seen a pattern of people who have held a job previously for a couple of years in some form of a professional sales role. We've had 3 or 4 people from enterprise cars rental who have been sort of branch managers, so essentially they've actually come to us with a drop in salary and also a drop in position because they've been sold on the vision that, you know, as a business now we're ready to grow and, you know, we've now got our level of our management team and they know they're part of that. So I think that the people we've hired are just that step above as well. So they've taken the onboarding structure we've got and just smashed it to pieces, basically. So that's been a big step up, definitely.

I love that. That's awesome, mate. I think you've, honestly, real great work on that, on really taking action and getting that sorted. So let's bring us to today then before we finish.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Obviously, what— obviously you're sitting in your conservatory right now, work from home.

Yeah, rain falling down. Yeah.

Well, how has it been for you as a— obviously clearly did loads of work on getting the hiring right for your business in year 5. Now obviously in the midst of COVID what have been some of the biggest challenges for you over the last 8 to 12 weeks?

So I think, I mean, generally year 5 has had bigger challenges in regards to the market conditions since we've ever had. Brexit was a big challenge, you know, whether just a scaremongering regarding Brexit and the fear factor and people, companies not making decisions, people not making decisions, that's had an impact on the market conditions. And we've seen that and we've had to adapt our business and we've changed our business, we've had to productise and that's I think year 5 is again how we've changed as a business to try and adapt to the market. Obviously, we've now had COVID, which has been a massive challenge for every business. I think we— I'm really pleased where we're at at the moment, and I think we could have been in a hell of a lot worse position. The sort of day it happened, the day sort of all the COVID stuff struck, it was a really rough day. It was before all the government schemes came out, I think we had about 140 live jobs and every single one of them just went. We'd made a decision for the business about 6-7 months ago to try and dramatically improve our average fees, and we took people off desks which were working and gave them brand new desks, more geographically, so looking at bigger fees, more senior roles, more senior positions, which was a big bold move. And that was slowly but surely starting to work. And the week it happened, I think we had 3 of those desks all had sort of £8,000 or £10,000 offers on the table. We had about £60,000 of offers basically all canned, done in 2 weeks. And we had that. Our biggest contract is worth, contract-wise, worth about £20,000 profit for us a month. And it's, and that went. They were classed as, they basically, they do a specialist coating on the on the Prince of Wales ship. A big team we recruit there. It's obviously worth a lot of money for us. And that, they called up and said, because of COVID-19, that's got to go. Me and Gaz went home and thought, wow, we've got big overheads here. Like, we're looking at zero for the next 3 months. Like, we're looking at cash, you know, we're looking at decisions, big decisions we might have to make in the business. You know, it was the grimmest time I've probably had. Really 2 sleepless nights where I was a nightmare at home. And A couple of days after that, the world seemed to sort of put itself back together. The contract book, they were classed as key workers, so that came back. Some of our offers went through, some of the deals seemed to come back. I got the team together, obviously government schemes came out and that gave us decisions we can make so we, you know, we could confidently keep staff in the business. And I got the team together the day we decided to work from home and said, look, It's going to be grim. We've got to make hay while we can here. No one knows what's going to happen because this, you know, no one knows. It's the complete unknown. This could be a 12-month thing, could be a 3-month thing. We've got to work hard and stick together. You know, obviously, in days to come, we furloughed bulk of the staff and we kept a couple. I told them we weren't in the worst market here. We're in a market that deals with pharmaceutical, food, medical. You know, there's essential supplies here that some of our clients are going to need us. Thankfully, that has been the case. You know, we've obviously used the government schemes with fellow staff. We've got a loan if we need it. I don't think we will, but hopefully it's going to be there. And we've had 2, 3, or 4 clients who thankfully have been busier than ever to deal with the demands of COVID-19. So I think we've got one company where I think we've placed maybe 20, 25 engineers within the last 2 months. So we've done all right.

There's been pockets of opportunity for you guys.

Yeah, it's been a successful time for us. So it's actually been less stressful than we ever imagined. But I think we've learned a lot about the business. It's, you know, me and Gaz have got back on the tools.

I was going to say, have you got back on the tools?

Yeah, yeah.

How's that been?

It's been great. It's been fun. It's been stressful because—

I'm back at the top of the leaderboard or you're sitting at the bottom, mate?

Well, you know, it was— I was— no, I'm not. Not too good. Becky's absolutely flown, so she's had a superb time, basically. Gaz was beating me and he let me know about it every hour. So, you know, it's been great to get back to that back to almost day one Conrari and remember what it's about. So although it's been a stressful situation and no one wants any business to go through it, I think we'll learn a lot more about the business moving forward. And we're incredibly confident that we will come out of this extremely well. And we've got zero doubts about it. For the first time ever, we've got zero doubts about any of our staff, and we've got some really big plans for the future now. So it's the best I've ever felt about the business, I would say.

And before we finish then, just thinking of the time we're recording this, there'll be a lot of people sort of starting to form their game plan on returning back to normal or back to the office or whatever. So what's sort of been your mindset and share with us a bit of a game plan as to how, what the next sort of immediate couple of weeks look like for you and your team?

We've tried as much as ever to stick to business as usual. We have pledges every morning of what we're going to get out of the day, so we've kept up sort of on video. We have 3 very quick meetings a day, so we've kept that up. And so we've tried to keep the normal process as we possibly can do, and that's what we'll continue trying to do. Our conversion rate has gone from 25% contingency to sort of 70% over the last 3 months. And I think that's, for me, given me a bit of an indicator of, you know what, we don't have to work everything. You know, we already do, we productize, so we work a certain amount of of roles exclusive, and I think that's where we need to be more now. So I think we need to work with less clients on a more exclusive basis, a retained basis. I think as the market comes back, I think it will change things, and I think companies will work with companies more— I think they'll work very closely, be more selective, and they'll look after their cash a lot better, a lot more important on that side. So you need to look now of how you can productise and give value for the service you're giving. So I think that for us is how we will change the face of the business moving forward, definitely.

And what, and then are you planning on getting people back in over the next couple of weeks?

So end of the month we plan to open the office, which I think we will do with no issues, and touch wood, we're already 8% staff back on furlough, so I think by then we'll be 100% back. So I'm just opening with business as usual. Because we're on a market where we can adapt, we can change to where the work is, that's what we'll do. You know, automotive has always been quite a big area for us, that's struggling at the moment, so it doesn't make any sense to put a lot of effort into that. We can work with the clients and the candidates there to try and help them, which is exactly what we'll do, because you've always got to support your best clients, and we've got some tremendous clients in automotive, but it wouldn't make sense to keep calling those people, keep calling those people, so we've got to help them, but ultimately we've got to now look at the markets that are moving and run with that, and I think when you're a sub-10 company, that's easier, I think you're a 100, 200-man band, it's difficult, do you know what I mean? So we have the luxury where we can be agile and adapt quite easily to that.

So, but you've— and you're making it sort of optional and voluntary for people to come back in the office, but from the next couple of weeks it's like, right guys, doors are open. Yeah, you've still got, as you said, the sort of the daily pledges, you've got the things in place, and people can do that from in the office or obviously from home.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it'll be, it'll be trial and error. I mean, we've never been a work from home. We've always had the capabilities, we've all been cloud-based, but because I guess we've worked so hard in the culture of being in the office, and I want people to learn from people in the office on the phone, we've never spoken about you can work from home. We're flexible with it, and someone says, look, I've got some tradesmen coming around, fine, you know, come, come in when you can. But this will be the first time where we've ever had that option But I expect people, I think the general consensus is people can't wait to get back and think, you know, people have missed it, I guess. So, so yeah, looking forward.

I love that. And look, before I ask you the, the final question then, Mark, what are you, what are you most excited about, like, just right now or just post-COVID, professional or personal? What are you most excited about?

I think for the first time ever, I felt we have the strongest team I could possibly imagine. But also a team where I can see them all very, very quickly be billing managers. And I think as soon as you've got that base, that's when you can get to 20, 30, 40, 50, and so on.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So that's the plan for us, to grow internally, to grow their teams out. And also, you know, before all this happened, you know, we had Gary Goldsmith, he comes twice a year, he was brilliant for us. And we were looking at different markets, we were looking at Germany, looking at the US, so looking at how we can grow doing what we do in our niche. So So yeah, we've got some really exciting plans and yeah, so I just can't wait to get back to normal now so we can get everyone moving and get everyone booming. So yeah, looking forward to it.

Well, look, final question. You can answer this question with a phrase, a word, a sentence, whatever comes up for you. And if Mark Bracknell could communicate to every single recruiter out there or business owner, they'd listen to your advice, they'd take it on, they'd implement it tomorrow. What would you say to the people?

To the— so I'd say initially mindset. Look after your mindset because that's number one, and it's so important to keep checking yourself and keep positive. And also, I guess, as a business owner or as a recruiter, make sure you stand out from what is now extreme crowded marketplace. So utilise the platforms and tips you have at your fingertips. So share your opinion online, utilise that, and then make sure you be yourself because people still buy from people.

Mark, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Thanks, Hishem.