Recruitment Entrepreneurship Masterclass: How to Make £10k - £100K per Month with James Blackwell

Who you are right now isn't who you need to become. I evolved so many times in different versions of James Blackwell, for example, to who I am now. A lot of inner work and mindset work that you need to become. So we talk about creating a version 2.0 of who you need to become.

So James Blackwell, he's been on the show before, and this time we get him to share everything he teaches in his Agency Blueprint program that enables recruitment agency owners to scale 7 figures and beyond. The first principles for consistently acquiring clients.

You need to know what your niche is, so you need to define your niche. So you need to map out that market, so you need to know what is your potential client target, uh, base. And you want to get that at least on a Google Sheet. So you want to have every single client that is in there that you could potentially work with.

How to easily onboard and scale your business with virtual assistants.

You've only got, like I said, 40, 50 units of time per week, and what you end up doing, you get distracted going the full end of the spectrum, forget about the fundamentals of being a recruiter.

How to build a team of sourcers based in South Africa and the system required to make this work like clockwork.

We build them out in, uh, South Africa, and, um, we've got a full service for that where we'll hire, train, and manage them for you. So they're the ones that are going to connect up with the candidate on LinkedIn, they're going to do all of the message follow-ups, uh, the video follow-ups, etc.

Finally, the systems that you need to nail to produce $100K months consistently.

So like, the key thing is once you've got like the good systems in place, a good way to get clients, the sourcing, like once you've got these pieces in, And it's like the biggest shifts are going to be hiring probably 2 or 3 delivery consultants that are going to be good.

And so, so much more. Let's get into this week's episode. James, welcome back to the pod.

Thank you for having me again.

Nice to, uh, do this face to face.

Yeah, for the first time I was saying, uh, off camera, we've known each other for quite a while now but never met in person, so it's a pleasure.

Yes, um, obviously you've, you've got the, the Dubai color, mate. Yeah, you don't spend as much time in the UK now.

Yeah, I chase the sun now, but, um, yeah, I'm back in London and I'm enjoying it. Uh, it's, it's nice to just get normal weather for a change instead of just sunshine all the time.

And obviously you're here for the Recruitment Expo, so we just thought, right, yeah, let's try and make the podcast happen. This is your third time on the, the podcast, so just to give everyone some context, what we're going to do in this conversation, which I think will be really cool, is we're going to basically break down like what people should be doing, um, to go from not to 10K a month consistently at that stage then $10K to $30K a month, and then $30K to, well, $40K to sort of $100K a month, so getting up to that 7-figure stage. So, I know there's, you've, in your business, you've really broken down, you've broken it down into attract, deliver, systemize, scale, and there's a bunch of different things at each stage that you believe if people do effectively, it should enable them to do at what, if they're at that stage, do what they need to be doing consistently, but then also go up, go up to the different revenue points. So, before we go into that, Would you mind just sharing for people that don't know who you are, what you do, if you could give us that context and then let's just get straight into it?

Yeah, sure. For those of you that haven't heard me before, I started my own recruitment agency almost a decade ago. So 2015. Before that, I was working in an S3-style recruitment agency, Nigel Frank, that was very successful. I worked all the way up to manager, then set up my own agency, Ronald James, that is in the northeast of the UK. We specialize in digital and tech recruitment and it's still going to this day. Runs without me. I haven't been in the business for 3, 4 years now, but it still generates 7 figures a year without me. And then I set up an education company called Agency Blueprint, which is the world's leading recruitment training company that helps agency owners scale, systemize, and automate their business. So we basically work with agency owners that are at $10K months, wanting to scale up to $100K months, but really want to do things a different way. So like building systems, automation, and a virtual sourcing team. Uh, so I'm sure we'll dive into that more. And yeah, we've helped, uh, just under 1,000 recruitment agencies that have been through our accelerator program now over the last 5 years.

So what we're going to do in this is break down what goes on with what you help people with, right? I want us to really break in into the, the how. And I, I definitely agree with you with my experience with my education business, which we've recently, over the last couple of months, been given access to Independent Founders. Because they want more ways to upskill, to actually do the job. Because although they have their own business, they're actually— they're recruiters. Like, they have their own business, but they still have— they are the main— they have to generate revenue. They're recruiters, right, that have a business. Um, so one thing that I've seen time and time again, even in the growing agencies that we partner with, one of the things that they really struggle with is the systems piece and the processes. So this is why I'm really excited to delve into each stage what you believe are the right things to be doing that can help people listening to this just get more out of what they're doing, become more efficient, and hopefully just have more of like a stressful, a less stressful journey, right? So let's start with this nought to 10K a month period. So if I'm listening to this and maybe, you know, my goal is to do 10K a month consistently, Something that you referenced quite a lot on the last podcast and where I wanted to start is like the first principles. Like that's something that you say a lot. Would you mind just sort of from your perspective defining first principles? Like why is that important? And then let's go through like what you believe should be the first principles at this stage.

Sure. So from that, that starter phase, so 0 to 10K, you just start a new agency. You need to know what your niche is. So you need to define your niche. So you need to map out that market. So you need to know what is your potential client target. Base. And you want to get that at least on a Google Sheet. So you want to have every single client that is in there that you could potentially work with. You want to know their email address, their LinkedIn profile URL, company page, vacancy page. So at least you know that you can market map that out. You can run that in an instant campaign to like cold email outreach, LinkedIn automation campaign with Dripify to attract clients. And defining your niche. So you want to make sure you can be a specialist in a niche. So some people make a mistake that they want to specialise in all of the UK, for example, or US. I believe you need to be a little bit more location specific. And ideally, I say, break it down into 2 or 3 job titles to get started. So be a real specialist, a niche within a niche. That's like, for mapping out the niche, then you want to leverage yourself because you've only got you, you've got maybe 40 to 50 hours of units of time per week, that you can be a recruiter, but you have to build a business as well. So I think most people starting up spend a lot of time on building a fancy website, brand logo, but really the crux of it is to get some live jobs on, get some candidates over the line and get some placements. So like 0 to 10K is pretty much you being a recruiter but also building a business as well. So really to give yourself more leverage, obviously, like starting with LinkedIn automation, starting with a client map and then some client outreach campaigns that you can do. Whether it's video outreach, whether you're using Loom to do manual one-on-one video outreach or you're automating that. There's some cool tools you can do with AI video automation now, which is, which is getting quite powerful. We're actually working on something which I'll share maybe in a future episode, but that's like 0 to 10K stage. You're pretty much trying to get low-hanging fruit. So another thing is live leads. So you want to be looking who is the clients hiring right now? That you can go and try and get that job on. So everything's a little bit manual at the start, and then you're trying to build out. You're not looking to systemize from day one. You're just looking to get some clients on, like some jobs on that you can work, some CVs sent, some interviews, placements. So you're still being a recruiter in, in startup phase, but then you're just trying to leverage your time back by maybe building some LinkedIn automation and email automation and then video outreach to try and give you a little bit of leverage.

So what I'm getting from that then, first principles at this stage are have a niche and a focus, and then also then it's about, yeah, how can you leverage your time more, basically, is what I'm getting from that.

A lot of it's mindset. We cover a lot on mindset. A lot of recruiters that start their own business, like, who you are right now isn't who you need to become. Like, I evolved so many times in different versions of James Blackwell, for example, to who I am now. And a lot of inner work and mindset work that you need to become. So we talk about creating a version 2.0 of who you need to become. So what is the goal of your business in the next 5 years, 3 years, and 1 year? So some people want a lifestyle business. So a lot of people start an agency because they want more freedom. So they want more time back to spend with family, friends. They want to make more freedom financially so they can pick and choose when they work and what hours they want to work. So a lot of people start initially for lifestyle agency, which is fine. I mean, the majority of agency owners we help. I would say 60% are lifestyle, 40% are I want to create a real 7-figure agency and skill it up. But you want to make sure that you understand from first principles what it is you're looking to build because that's going to shape what you want to do. The number 1 mistake most people make is hire from day 1. You can't hire until you've got some good systems and the foundations in place, which is candidates, a sourcing machine, an attraction machine for clients. You need to build these things on before you even hire your first employee.

So you, you've got it down on your— when I've seen some of your videos and the things that you teach, you put at this stage the biggest issues at this stage, getting clients consistently, more specifically like quality of jobs and clients. So you can find yourself spending time on jobs you don't get paid for, clients that mess you around, making placements consistently, and then like what you're just talking about, then like building an agency, right? So you, you like to break it down into like 4 pillars, it looks like. So like, which you're just mentioning a few of them. So you've got attract under— at this stage you need a client acquisition system, live leads, delegate, LinkedIn chat. You've then got deliver, hire first VA, work, uh, working a job, 10 steps, master the close. Then like you just said, systemize the bits you want to work towards systemizing whilst obviously actually getting wins, generating revenue, is the LinkedIn candidate automation and client map that you're talking about. And then active infantry delegation, I don't know what that means.

Activity. Oh, sorry, activity. So basically it's like every task that you do every hour for the week, you want to account for that and then you want to start delegating. So these are the things you can start delegating those tasks to your VA. So probably 50, 60% of your tasks you can start to sort of outsource.

Yeah, and then as you said, then you've got the scale pillar, which seems a bit more like mindset focus and actually individual, which obviously is such an important factor to this. So you've got boost productivity, mindset, current self to this desired state, as you said. So on, on this stage then, what I just want us to like just delve into a bit, um, just from my experience, is why don't we first talk about like the attract piece? Because like if that's one of the main issues, which I agree with, is when I speak to independent founders at this stage, it is having a consistent opportunity of working with good clients that don't mess them around that pay good fees that they do placements with. So you've got here client acquisition system, live leads, delegate, LinkedIn chat. Let's, let's break these down. Like, what, what's going on here then under these elements?

Sure. So to build your client acquisition system, like, you want to look at it— so firstly, you're going to take your client market map. So, so that's the first thing you build is your client market map. So you know every single client you could potentially work with, uh, whether it's now in the future, you've got. And then once you've got that list, uh, you can start running email campaigns. So the first thing we'll start is email campaigns. Now, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. It depends on your niche and market and what your outreach is. Email is still very strong in terms of cold email outreach. It's very competitive, but it's a thing that you want to have running in the background because it gives you leverage. Once you build it once, you just don't need to touch it again. You're going to get replies and you're going to get warm leads. But so once you start doing that, then you want to build your Dream 100. So we talk about architecting a Dream 100 campaign. So that is like the top 100 clients that eventually you want to work with. These are clients that could give you repeat business, that maybe have 5 or 10 roles of your 3 job titles, for example, that you know you could work with long term. Because that strategy there is going to be different than just cold outreach to the mass market. Then you've got live leads. So live leads are going to be ones which we'll touch on Klai.com because we're working a lot with Klai.com for AI that we can just fully build this out, fully automated now where it will find the client lead. It'll find the client's hiring manager, it'll find the email address, it'll verify the email address, it'll create a customized personalized AI email campaign with follow-up sequence. So full end-to-end. But for live leads, you want to make sure that that's low-hanging fruit. So these are clients that are hiring right now that are looking for potentially an agency to work with them, but they're inundated. So it takes a little different outreach strategy than just an email, for example, because everyone knows that they're hiring. The whole idea of a cold email outreach, you're you're going to the full market and you're looking 1 to 3% of the market is maybe looking to hire right now. So let's say if you've got a list of 1,000, you might have like 30 to 50 potential clients in there that potentially could work with you if you email at the right time with the right type of outreach and/or then we add in video. So video outreach works really well. Free tool you could use is something like loom.com. Like I said, there's some really cool Video outreach tools now that can, once you record something once, they can AI regenerate your voice and customize your first name, the landing page, and change your website, etc. So you would do video outreach to that. Then obviously Dream 100, one of the tactics that we would use would be a letter, for example. Like everyone's went remote, but old school now in terms of like going back to being sent a letter with a gift, which is normally a book, which works really well with a follow-up sequence. That's why it's something we call like giftology. So like giving a gift to a client and saying, look, I read this book, I thought it would be interesting for you. I really like chapter XYZ. I'm going to follow up with you in 2 days on Wednesday around about 2:00. And something like that would work really well. So yeah, so you would do email outreach, then you could do LinkedIn automation outreach. So once you're sending out an email, you can connect in with that hiring manager and start messaging them at the same time and cross-reference the fact that you've emailed them. Letters, gifts, the live jobs. So making sure that you're reaching out to clients that are actively hiring right now. And then most of that time you can, like I said, something with the like of Clay, you can automate a lot of this process now. So that's pretty much some of the client acquisition, but you need to have something that's repeatable. So the email campaigns can run, the LinkedIn campaigns can run, your video outreach can run because once you've got your VA, they're the ones that, once you're recording the video, they can take it from a Google Sheet into an email, into a follow-up sequence. Let's say once you get some leads reply back, then you want to nurture them. So some clients will not be saying yes right now, but it's all about follow-up. So like creating a nurture funnel. So we would use a tool called Streak CRM, which can sit in the Gmail inbox. Any maybe replies that you get, then you can do follow-ups every week. So then you've got like, let's say you go from a list of 1,000, you get 50 maybe replies back. So from those 50, it's like nurturing them a little bit more, having another customized video outreach message to them, connecting with them on LinkedIn, following up there, sending them a salary guide, sending them some value. We do like events for tech in the tech industry, for example, inviting them to something like that, keeping them nurtured so then eventually you could convert them into a client. So those are like pretty much like the fundamental strategies. Then you can go on top like sponsoring events, hosting events, Trying to meet clients in person is obviously the main thing once you generate the lead is we talk around the signature sales pitch deck. So we develop a custom pitch deck that you have as an asset inside your agency that you can do repeatedly. So you're walking that client through their pain, what you know in the market, why you're different, your unique mechanism. So we talk about you need to create a unique mechanism of like why you deliver different to every other agency, what makes you stand out. So for example, we would put in, we put in something like Clay.ai outreach, the way we nurture candidates, the way we track candidates, the way we focus on passive talent, active talent. All of this can be compiled into a customized pitch that then you can start pitching exclusive or retained because you don't want to just have contingency recruitment all the time. You can go exclusive retained, which I think goes more into once you hit like 20, 40K months as opposed to 0 to 10K months, you just want clients. So whether it's 10% you're agreeing or 12% or 15%, don't be stuck on this 15%, 17%. Try and get some clients because then you can get CVs sent. You can get momentum. So one of the things that starter phase people fail with is because they're doing things that aren't really moving the needle. You just need to be a recruiter and get active roles. So whether you're getting them at a lower fee just to start off with, it's good because you've got the cycle of being back, of speaking to candidates, sending CVs, doing interview feedback, and close to doing a deal. Because once you get one placement, then you get another, and you get more confidence, then you can start increasing your fees and getting better clients. And that's normally the better way, as opposed to just trying to stick to try and get the perfect client each time that's going to work with you exclusive retain from day one. They're not going to do that. You need to build the foundations first and just start getting momentum and start getting interviews and making placements so you can consistently get to $10K a month.

So just obviously covers a lot there. So what the only thing that I just want is that I just wanted to focus on for a sec is the, the, the element that you're talking about, the email, right? So the client acquisition piece and that the cold email just keep going out. That's like foundational for you. So look, you clearly are like proper in the trenches here, like helping people with this a lot. You're going to see a lot of different campaigns, but just, just to focus on that for a sec, to make it really straightforward for people listening. Like, what are you often, like, leading with on that side of things? Because I can't imagine it being, like, candidate CVs and these types of things. Like, how are you— yeah, how are you approaching that, right? What's the ask? What are you— are you just trying to get a reply and to say, like, I specialize in this, like, would it be a bad idea to connect? I don't know, like, what is it that you're trying to, you know?

So once you've got the list, you can cold email forever. So, like, it doesn't cost anything to send an email, and I think people run a campaign, say it doesn't work, and then they don't do another one. So what we try to do is batch it each quarter. So every 90 days you run a new Campaign. So the first campaign might be NPC. You never touch a— I mean, the simple things are never put attachment on, don't put a blue hyperlink, don't really put a signature. Like, you want to just have black and white text and just look like it's a— you want to look like it's not a cold email. Yeah, even if it is a cold email, you'll still get replies because it's just all about timing. You're just trying to find the hiring manager that their best employee or whatever dropped out, they've just handed the notice in yesterday, and you suddenly caught them at the top of the inbox and You've presented like you're an agency. Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of times we've won clients over the years that just ignored every single cold email and all of a sudden, year 3, they came back. James, I know you keep pestering me with emails, like, I need your help on this role. So it's just all about timing and just being consistent. So that's just running in the background. Now, obviously, you test different outreach methods, whether it's MPC, you might be a value in terms of a salary survey guide, it might be a video, it might be a tech event, it might be a variety of different like email outreach. Like there's plenty of different ways you can test. But I think it's, you can make marginal gains on researching and testing copy. I mean, for example, we have a full-time copywriter that's in our program that will critique your cold email outreach campaign for your niche. So every niche is slightly different. There might be different keywords that you might use in that email outreach. So obviously we customise every single one. You've got the beauty now of ChatGPT, so you can create all sorts of email copy using ChatGPT. Once you start feeding in, you have like an SOP doc of like how you'd feed in and teach ChatGPT about your industry and what you're doing and other email copies that you've done before. And then you can just keep creating and iterating it. You don't want to just fully depend on cold email. That is just something that is, I would say, is a bonus. It's always running in the background, but it's up to you as a business owner to get a client. So whether that is a LinkedIn outreach message, meeting them at an event, doing a video outreach, sending the letter, you just want to have lots of different funnels, as it were, of like a way of how you would attract a client coming into you.

So it's that— yeah, so okay, so it just sounds like there you are literally leading with like, hey, I do this, like, like, would you be— yeah, would you mind if I send something over? Or like you— because obviously at that stage you're trying to get a reply, right?

You just want to get a reply. Yeah.

Okay, okay, right. So that— because I feel like I just want to make sure that's straightforward for people to— because the reality of it is, how many people listen to this at this stage have that consistently going? Like, the reality of it is a lot of people don't.

Like, they don't because they've either tried it, they say it doesn't work, or they're not consistent with it yet. So, um, again, like, a lot of information is on there for free, but it's, it's implementation, consistent consistency. Um, so you want to just make sure that's set up and built and running. You'd be very surprised as many agencies we have that come in to work with us that have been going 10 years and haven't got that. Oh yeah, I tried that 4 years ago. It didn't work. We still do cold calling or outreach. You just want to make sure that you're trying different touchpoints and different channels. So you want to make sure you've got a cold email channel, a LinkedIn automation channel, a video outreach channel, live leads channel, Dream 100, like all of these different pillars you want to make sure that you've got built in the business, they're systemized, there's a process for them, and they can be handed off to either your virtual team or one team member.

And then the next thing I want us to focus on then, tell me about this working your job 10 steps. What's that?

Yeah, is exactly what it says. So like, again, people are surprised that when you be a recruiter, then you start your agency, you forget a lot of the fundamentals that you did in order to even just to work a job. For example, like we just have a 10-step process of making— it's like pretty much a checklist of like every single thing, like you do when you get a live job in, you want to SOP it. So it's like, have we done a LinkedIn search, job board search? Have we done in-mails? Have we done video outreach? Have we done voice note follow-up? Have the sourcers started doing that? Have we asked for referrals, joined groups, events, like, and then done the advert, done job of the day advert, done the post, done the social post, each step, and then it's rinse and repeat. So once you've done that 10 steps, you can check it off on whether it's the Trello board you use or your sheet. You know that that job's pretty much 70 to 80% worked. 'Cause once you've done the 10 steps, there's not much more you can do. As we all know as good recruiters, yes, you can headhunt, you can keep cold calling, asking for referrals, but there's probably 10 steps, and once you've done them, 80% of that job is covered off. The rest of it, they might come back on an advert, they might come back off an in-mail, they might come back off a video that you've done a week ago, but the majority of the work's done. Now, on most recruitment agencies, people are still doing some of the steps and then redoing them, and they don't know where they are with that. So like, once you get a volume of jobs, you want to be able to manage 10, 15 jobs. The only way you can do that is have a clear checklist of each job and what's been done at each stage. So it's more like systemizing it again, like a McDonald's franchise, as Michael Gerber talks about in the E-Myth Revisited book. We want to have a step-by-step process for that.

Okay, that makes sense. Again, probably something that people know they should do, but they haven't got And like you said, it's— that enables people to walk away from the live job and go, I've worked that, on to the next, right? Because like you said, I could maybe find myself working it for a bit, I get some bites, don't get some bites, and then you go back to it and then you're going over the same ground. So what you're saying there is, yeah, have like a clear step process of like, these are the each steps that you do, once you've done them, on to the next. And like you said, you then might have a system around going through those steps again to make sure everything's covered. So before we move on to the $10K to $30K, then you've got here hire first VA. Like, I speak to a lot of independent founders that don't have a VA, so that seems quite, you know, fundamental when we then go on to like the later stages. So talk like, what should this first VA be doing? Is it elements of, like you said, if over— if I, um, audit my time and activities over like the last month month, or last week, and I'm like, right, okay, I've spent 2 hours putting this LinkedIn job ad up, or I spent 3 hours replying to people on LinkedIn, or whatever. What should this first VA be doing in your view at this stage?

Yeah, good question. It's the first form of leverage. I did this when I first started my business. I had a VA in the Philippines 9 years ago now. It was the best hire I did. And, uh, people's mindset of, uh, being a recruiter or agency owner when you're 0 to 10K is you've only got, like I said, 40, 50 units of time per week. So you're trying to be a recruiter and start your own agency and run a business and do everything. So, and what you end up doing, you get distracted going the full end of the spectrum, forget about the fundamentals of being a recruiter. So you need to buy back 20 hours a week of your time in order to at least scale your business. So to do that, there's low-income generating tasks. So we want to just eliminate them. So whether it's respond to certain emails, your calendar, building your CRM, responding on LinkedIn. Like there's so many things in your activity inventory that you can start to delegate, but you can't do it overnight. It's step by step. Systemize, process. Is there a Loom video about it? Is there a step-by-step Google Doc? Can you hand that off to the VA? And then you'll be surprised, like in your weeks that you spend your time when you allocate of like what you've done every hour of the day, a lot of that time is like $10 to $20 an hour tasks that you should not be doing. There's a great book on this by Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time. Highly recommend it. Some of the fundamentals we've been teaching in our programs for a long time, but Dan covers it very, very well. Even when you're breaking down, say, if you're earning £100K a year, like your first zero to £10K, like your time per hour, like 40 hours a week, everything below, I think it'll work on £30 an hour or whatever. Anything below that, you should be getting a VA to do that because you need to be training your mind as a business owner. You need leverage and you need to be hiring that VA from day one to start buying back your time. And then that goes on when you build out your marketing sourcing team, your delivery team, your executive assistant eventually as well, which will graduate from a VA. It's one of the first hires that you do before you hire a recruiter, which is again the biggest mistake people make is hire a 360 recruiter to come and work for them, get stress burnt out, hire them for $30,000, $40,000 salary and they've got no jobs to give them or anything else. So you don't attract A-players anyway because they're not going to come and work for a startup founder as opposed to an established agency. So the, the main thing to buy back is time, so you can make more placements to get more money, so then buy more systems, buy more people, buy more time back, is a VA for $4 or $5 an hour.

Whilst you take a short break, I wanted to take a moment to chat to you about one of our amazing partners, Sourcewell, the industry-leading recruitment engagement platform. I'm using myself, and I don't know what I would do without it. From building personalized messaging cadences across a variety of channels to automating follow-ups and data tracking straight back into my CRM. It's really made an impact in streamlining my workflow and most importantly, accelerating my sales results. My favorite feature by far is the live feed. By being able to see in real time who's engaging with your campaigns, it enables me to prioritize my outreach with the most engaged prospects, which helps me get way more out of what I put in. So I'm going to be honest, if you haven't got Sourcewell and you're a recruiter, I really believe you're at a disadvantage. To find out more and see the platform in action, make sure you click the link in the show notes and mention the Recruitment Mentors Podcast. Because you listen to this podcast, you're going to be able to get access to an exclusive offer: free 50 phone credits, 50 email credits, which is at the value of circa £500 per user. So make sure you mention the Recruitment Mentors Podcast and click the link in the show notes. So can we just, can we just walk through this really quickly and then we'll move on, just to make this like really easy for people? Because I've I'm a huge advocate for this as well, and I feel like Pete— and I'm sure you've seen this time and time again— people just like overcomplicate it or are like worried about certain things. But like, my experience has been pretty much what you're saying. So like, my experience has been I recognized things that I was doing repeatedly which were low leverage tasks that I shouldn't be doing, which isn't like a good use of my time. Then what I did was then document like what I— like how I did the task. Then I recorded a short video of like me talking through the task, and then I gave that to a VA which I found on Upwork. So just talk me through, just to make it really easy for people, like what you teach here. So if I'm a recruitment founder right now, I don't have a VA, I'm feeling stressed out, I'm doing so many different things, I've done the audit, and let's just say like managing my LinkedIn inbox, let's just say, is the task that I want to delegate and is one of those things that is below like £30 or whatever, just talk me through how I go from there to having someone do that.

Yeah, so the first thing, like especially LinkedIn, uh, you need a little bit more too. So we, we build like a— we call it a candidate response sheet. So that means that in their LinkedIn, let's say 80% is going to be candidate replies, 20% might be client replies. So you need to create a candidate response sheet of if a candidate replies this, we send X back. Now the great thing is with ChatGPT now is a VA in the Philippines can put in what the reply was and a story of like, I'm a recruiter, I specialize in this market, uh, I'm working this job at the moment with this criteria, I've sent this message and this is a reply, what should I reply back? So back when I first started, I would have to explain to the VA like, these are the type of responses that you need to respond in Slack, and then they will put it in a Google Sheet which is a candidate response framework, because pretty much you've got it in 3 buckets. Like, is it a yes reply? It's a maybe reply, I need more information, or no, I'm not interested. So most of the replies on LinkedIn are going to be that. So it's just teaching the VA what to reply when it comes into one of those buckets. So that's the first thing I would do is create an SOP candidate response sheet, and I would tie that to ChatGPT. So we train our VAs on how to use ChatGPT, like it's the first thing that they do, and that's the first thing that you can outsource. I mean, going all the way, like we discuss maybe $40K agencies and above is we place like operations integrator VAs. These are people that are very trained on Zapier, Klaviyo, automation, Stripify, and something that can handle everything all for $1,000 a month. And that's pretty much buying back your time tenfold. Yeah, but yeah, step by step, exactly how you said, documented video, Google Doc, review it with them on a Zoom. And then it just— most agency founders haven't got the time to tell them what to do and get frustrated because they're not clear yet. So you need to be passionate about building systems. It comes back to the first principles, like what is the business you want to create? Because you can create systems and automation and a bit of a virtual team and then obviously have an in-person team, or you might just cut straight to an in-person and office team, but you're going to have big overheads, big risk, and not get as much leverage at the start. So there is going to be a trade-off between, yes, I'm going to invest this 10 hours now training this VA every week for the next 4 weeks, but it's SOP'd and then it's clear, and then I've bought back my time. But you're gonna have to invest more time initially to then get the time back.

And then where do you find this person? Fiverr, Upwork? What's the—

we don't teach— I mean, I wouldn't advise on Upwork or Fiverr because that VA's already gone, as it were. They, they're overpriced in the market because they're used to working with multiple clients and they will charge too much. So we would try and find a VA that is not on Upwork or Fiverr because you want someone that wants to work for you full-time, that is not like into just making extra money in because they'll start to increase the price. So like you don't search for a recruitment VA on Fiverr, Upwork. That's a lot of mistakes people make because—

So how do you find these people?

We would use onlinejobs.ph, for example, like as a Philippine VA one. Something like that, like Filipino job boards works well. We outsource a lot now, more in South Africa market. So I mean, I've got a team of 12 out there.

And how do you find people? There's a job board sort of thing again, or?

Yeah, I mean, we've got a full in-house recruitment team now, so we've got a team that hires more people from there. And yeah, we go through a process, typical hire of how you would like a LinkedIn, like a LinkedIn job an indie job, uh, we have an application funnel that will go through a few questions, uh, they have to do a Loom video, uh, and then they'll go through an interview process with the team, uh, and then we would onboard them with everything.

So, okay, yeah, my— just to share my experience for anyone listening, yeah, would be like my approach always, a bit like what you're saying, is my approach with anyone not working Fiverr. I have a VA who I've had over 2 years now who's actually UK-based. I wanted that personally. I'm paying more for that. Yeah. and I've also got a video editor who does all the podcast stuff. He's in Australia. Again, worked with him for over 2 years, but I met both of them on Upwork and Fiverr. But the intention was I wanted to get them off.

You take them off.

Yeah, yeah. So that, that's just my experience of like, you can also— you might shortcut this to what you just said, you might pay a bit more, but then if you want this consistently, then it's in their interest to get consistent work. So I've then jumped on the Zoom with them, qualified them, and been like, I want someone to work me consistently. So 'How are you going to feel about that? Is that something you want to do?' And then they're more interested. But I get, I get your point. But okay, so like, if you, if you're listening to this, like, you have to do that in my opinion. And all I would add to what you just said is, if you still have ambitions to hire people, the way that I look at about in my business now, because I've done that upfront work— firstly, when you do that upfront work and you've got that system documented, that work's done. So like, then if that VA doesn't work out, you can give that to the next person. Right, the next VA that you try for the other part?

I mean, the ideal scenario, which is what I always recommend, is hire 2. So we would hire— we build on like sources, but I would hire 2 because one's going to work out, one's not. And if 2 work out, double bonus. But at least you're not training them up again. So for the price of your time per hour, it's better to hire 2 people. $5 an hour, that's $10 an hour. It's still way below your hourly rate. And you've got 2 assets, and, um, the likelihood of at least one working out is very, very high. You've still got a likelihood that 2 would work out, and if one doesn't work out, you've saved a lot of time by not having to onboard another one. Because that's what the mistake people make, and they're like, I need to go and hire again.

Okay. And then the bit that I would just add to what you just said, which I found beneficial, is that by doing that, if you then hire full-time employees, they can leverage that person as well. That's the thing as well. So then if you do all these systems you hire someone, it's like, well, actually, all of this, you know, the low activity stuff, you won't be doing because I've got a system for that. So you could— that was actually on the selling point. Yeah, exactly. So that's the other benefit. Okay, so $10K to $30K then. So if I've— so if I've, you know, I've now hired my first VA, I've really understood, I've built out this activity inventory delegation, I've got my client map, I've got my client acquisition system going, got the foundational stuff Why don't we just start, like, what is typically stopping your agency clients consistently hitting 30K months? Like, what is it that they're maybe struggling with? You've put on here on your education stuff, business issues at this stage, hiring employees, hiring ops management, working in, not on the business, productizing services, exclusivity with clients. So what's stopping me from consistently hitting 30K months?

Yeah, so again, like, it's, uh, hiring a good recruiter delivery consultant to replace you. So You, again, you need to decide, is it a lifestyle solopreneur agency that you want to do, which means that you're always going to be the recruiter, which means you're always going to speak to candidates and make placements, or you're actually going to build an agency? So this is the, the, the crossing chasm that a lot of people struggle with, is setting the intention of what they want. There's nothing wrong with keeping it at 30K months and just being a solopreneur, like with a couple of VAs, a couple of sources, you make 300K a year and have some freedom, etc. But then the hard part is hiring a delivery consultant. Now let's go down the other— that's what I'm talking here.

Let's go down the other route. So I feel like a lot of people, yeah, so people that may not want a huge agency, but they want to be doing 7 figures and however you structure that, but yeah, not, not the one that you just said, the other one.

Yeah, I mean, I don't advocate having a huge agency. I always say maximum 12 to 30 employees is always the cutoff. Yeah, so, uh, going from solopreneur to like a boutique agency phase, like 3 to 5 remote employees, um, The first thing you need to do once you've done that is you need a consistent way. If once you've managed to know how to get client leads in and convert them, you need to start getting them exclusive retained. So it's like getting more platinum clients, which means that it's repeat business. So you're not having to go out and win new business all the time. Once you win one client, that could feed you 5 or 10 roles a year. So it could be like a $50,000, $100,000 account because then again, you know, you need 3 or 5 of them for it to be very profitable. And then to attract a delivery consultant, which is what we call like maybe a 180 recruiter, that type of thing. You need a solid sourcing system. So one thing that I advocate on is building out a marketing sourcing team. So these are people that would reach out to candidates on LinkedIn, whether it's like a LinkedIn selfie video, a Loom video outreach, a voice note follow-up, messaging, emails. The sourcer is the one that's going to reach out and do a lot of the legwork of the sourcing. Because when you're trying to buy back your time, you'll realize 20 to 30 hours of your week is trying to find candidates. Once you've got the client, it's just the rest of the time is searching on LinkedIn, job boards, like trying to speak to candidates and get them.

Well, they're sending it from their profile or someone in the team profile?

Their profile. So like, they're going to be, um, yeah, like I said, I mean, we, we build them out in, uh, South Africa and, um, we've got a full service for that where we'll hire, train, and manage them for you. But like, they're the ones that are going to do all the outreach. So they're the ones that are going to connect with the candidate on LinkedIn, they're going to do all of the message follow-ups, uh, the video follow-ups, etc.

And they're getting in them interested in a specific job? You're just building talent pools?

Or both? Like, that's the thing, you create an omnipresence. So I see it as buying paid advertising. So I've spent millions on paid advertising. People are probably annoyed with a lot of my ads, and apologies for that. Sometimes, sometimes they can't stop the algorithm if like shown it so many times. But you want to create an omnipresence in your market, your niche. So for us, like software engineers, every software engineer knew who our agency Ronald James was because our sources are reaching out with them with a nice vibrant video and a personal touch. Because at that point, if they watch our video, that candidate is going to come back at some stage. And which agency are they going to come back with? The one that was like with a highly vibrant video from Lucy, for example, that took the time out of her day to message me. Like, it's not going to be another recruiter that just sent a DM or an email. So imagine all of those touchpoints in your candidate market that you're penetrating over a long period of time. I see that as paid advertising. And if I'm only paying $1,000 or £1,000 a month for that sourcer, or £1,500 a month, that's worth it because I only need one placement every 3 months for that to be still very profitable. And a lot of the sourcers that we get up to speed now can help source an extra 2 or 3 deals per month, which could be an extra £20K.

So how do they help the delivery person? And are you saying like they do a lot of that legwork and then are they getting them to the point where they're like, I'm happy to have a conversation, and then what, they pass it over to—

Yeah, so a bit like what we did in the first stage of buying back the agency owner's time, now we're buying back the recruiter's time. So for you to attract a good delivery consultant, you need to attract them from a recruiter that is— they might be already doing 1 or 2 deals a month, and I'm saying, well, come here, you can do 3 to 4 deals a month, and you're going to get a sourcer and a VA and automation, and I'm going to give you exclusive retained clients. That's going to be a lot better offer for you to attract good talent, not just a recruiter that you know isn't very good and is going to come in, you're going to pay them a big basic and they're not going to do anything. So the whole point of a recruiter, a delivery consultant, is to buy back their time so they can focus on what we call high-income generating tasks for their job, which their skill is, which is very hard to replace, is speaking to a highly qualified candidate, persuading them to go to an interview and persuading them to take a job. We all know in recruitment it's the highest form of sales. Like, it's like the top of the top psychology in terms of like dealing with people's emotions.

How have you typically like SIP'd that then? Is it like, I, what, I book in a Calendly with the delivery consultant? Is it like a jump on a video call?

Yeah.

What's the typical— what, yeah, what's the system there then?

So we run two models. So you can run a hybrid model in the office. So I've got actual sources in the office and I've got sources that are remote. Um, and the same with all the agency owners we help. A lot of them are remote. They, they work with that recruiter, uh, in tangent in Slack. So they're speaking to them every day. They're working jobs with them every day. They're saying, what about John for this role? What about Sarah for this role? Right, I've got Sarah available for 2 o'clock call. Can you take it, Hishem? Type of thing. So that SOP is like, we have a full academy for this where we've trained the sourcer up for 6 months of like how they do video outreach, how they source candidates. And like you're building in that asset where that sourcer can then go into being a full-time marketing expert in your business. They can be a full-time recruiter in the business. We've had many sourcers do that. There's a lot of different ways that they could be a full executive assistant, for example, they could build out the full marketing sourcing team. So buying that time back is again, like from $10K to $30K a month, it's like building a sourcing team. Because if you can start buying back the time for a recruiter to come in, then you can attract a good recruiter and then they can do more deals profitably quicker rather than trying to do everything when they come in from day one.

And like, just quickly on that then, where do people Where, where often like the common pain points around getting this right, then I can imagine, is it challenging to get really good at like briefing like this sourcing team or like the quality of like the candidates are pulling through maybe can take a bit of time, a bit of work. Where's the often like pain where maybe people might give up on really trying to make it work?

Well, one, you need to know how to hire the sources, for example, attract them, get a good pay model in of like how they would, would work. Um, what do you do?

Incentivize them on the number of profiles?

Yeah, so we have like a unique system of like how we pay them, but like it would be a flat base between £800 to £1,000 a month. And then they would get like, uh, you can do it where you would pay per, uh, call booked or CV sent and interview or deal. So you could go all the way up to the spectrum. Um, so let's say for instance they might source 2 deals in a month, they might get paid £2,000, for example. Um, And then, yeah, it's just making sure you as an agency owner is onboarding them correctly and that recruiter is like being their buddy, as it were. I mean, back in the day, many years ago, we used to— I think some of the top billers used to get a resourcer. Yeah, it was a luxury.

Yeah, that still happens.

Yeah. And it should have happened a lot more. I think just a lot of businesses didn't do that. And I mean, looking back over my time, like when I used to be a recruiter many years ago, was if If I'd had like these VAs or sources working for me, I would have built even way more for the business. So it is highly profitable. But yeah, the biggest thing is making sure that you're training them and you're giving them the industry knowledge and you're explaining what is a good candidate, what is not a good candidate, who the top companies are to attract that talent from. All of the type of knowledge you would give someone sitting next to you on a desk shadowing you, you would do via Zoom and Loom and Slack.

Okay, yeah, so over-communicate. Okay, I got that. So, okay, so let's say I'm at this stage, I've really got my marketing sourcing team going. Um, so if I'm, um, in this stage and between 10K and 30K months, as the agency owner, then should I be spending most of my time trying to attract companies in their Stream 100 and, you know, having as many presentations as possible to go through the client service pitch deck. And the main thing that I get from what you're telling me is with the having a pitch deck and a service, the way that you approach it is you're selling how you do it, not what you do, right? So like you just said, you're breaking down like, this is how we work and this is what, this is actually what we would do for you, which is different, right? So you're going through, like we don't just say, James, let's work together, we work to 15%. You're saying, you're going through a whole sales process where you're like, if we were to work together, this is what we would do.

Yeah.

Um, and how we would fill your job, right? Using all these tools, um, using our resources in, etc., etc. So is that what I should be spending most of my time then at that stage to consistently hit 30K months, pitching and taking clients through that journey?

So trying to work more on the business. So I would be obsessed with systems, marketing, automation, uh, and then just dealing with clients. So like, that's the key thing I would be doing from 30K months is, uh, I used to target myself like always doing 3 pitches a week. I knew if I did 3 pitches, 2 out of 3 would convert, or 3 out of 3. One client might give me one job, one client give me 5 jobs, one might give me 7 jobs. So I know I'm feeding the team, and then that's like feeding the cycle. And then all of the 10-step process, the sourcer and recruiter, all there. And then I'm just watching, making sure that we're getting the right amount of interviews and making placements. So that's probably the hardest stage, is going from like the 30K months to then breaking through, is, uh, because you're trying to hire your first 2, 3 employees. And that's why I always think it's built— it's good to start with the sourcing team that you can get maybe 2 or 3 sources and then 1 recruiter. Yeah, because you might still be doing 50% of the placements. Traditionally, what I've seen with hundreds of agencies we work with, they're still doing some— most of the placements, right? Um, at that stage, at that stage, yeah. And then like the whole idea is you need at least probably 2 delivery consultants to at least— so you can start to step away. Right, from doing the recruitment side, because I don't think many agency owners really in their heart wants to just still speak to candidates and send CVs and, and do their own placements. They want to be— because you touch on it before, they're not a business owner. Like, you're not a real business owner, you just got a high-paying job that you've got handcuffed to because it means you can't step away from the business. You know, a business isn't running without you.

So at this stage, for me to break through that 30K mark, I need to be obsessed with what systems do I now have in my business, the marketing sourcing team, like what, yeah, like in terms of systems automation around how can I get to the point where 3 times a week I'm in front of like our ideal client talking about our service, how we can work on an exclusive basis, getting a number of jobs, and then getting to the point where then you're hiring 1 or 2 delivery consultants.

Just you doing clients, that's the last thing I would ever delegate. You don't automate that. You automate the outreach to get to the conversation, but It was the last thing I handed off in my agency after 5 years was I was always still dealing with the client side because I enjoyed that as well. So you need to be the one that's out there meeting clients in person, going to events, going entrepreneur events, going to the networking events, sponsoring the events, hosting events, uh, doing the Dream 100. Key person event, going to stand your priest. Yeah, exactly that. I was, I was that till the end. That's what we need to be doing as a business owner. So the first thing you want to try and hand off is eventually like the, the recruitment side in terms of doing the sourcing. And then once you've done the sourcing, hand off the deal side and bring in a consultant, give them the 15%, 20% commission, 25%, whatever it is that you need. So then you can free your time up so you can just get bigger and better clients that are more exclusive retained.

And then, because I'm sure you've thought about this and seen a lot of this, what does a good financial incentive look like for these delivery consultants? What have you seen work well? What— they're right, because if you're normally people that bring on the clients and like do that element, they often always get paid the most. And that, that's you, the agency owner. But like, how, like, what does the financial incentive look like? Because you've got these sources that have been financially incentivized, so you've got stuff there. Like, what, what have you found work to be effective there? Because we want these delivery consultants to be financially incentivized. What have you found work? Is it like a typical method of like depending on what the fee is, they get a percentage? I don't know, how have you typically done it? Because oftentimes it can be weighted mainly towards James, who's brought on the client, right? You might get 80% of the fee and then the delivery consultant gets 20%, for example. What have you typically found to be effective there on the financial incentive side?

I mean, personally, what works well is we'll do like a 70/30 split, which is 30% goes to house account management. So let's say it's a £10K deal, £10,000 deal. 30% of that goes to management because they brought the client on board and they looked after the clients because because eventually as you scale, you're going to have— if you're replacing yourself, so like my team, there needs to be an account manager that looks after the clients and they're going to need incentivized. Yeah. So you'll come up with a problem if you just suddenly start giving 20% of the recruiter and nothing, then you won't be able to hand off the account management side of the key clients. So you want to have a 70/30 split, which is to say, so it's a £10,000 deal, £3,000 goes to house or the client, whoever's dealing with that client, £7,000 is commission, and then we will give 20% uh, commission on the, uh, £7,000, for example.

Right, got you.

And then we'll still pay the sourcer because the sources are outsourced in a different country. It's low fee, so I don't mind giving away— it's another £200 or £250.

That's a lot to them.

It's a lot to them.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So in terms of like getting to this next stage then, so in terms of what have you found to be— if I'm leaning towards I want to be doing 7 figures for me to break into this $40K to $100K a month, as I'm going into that, what does my— just to wrap that up, what does my team probably look like then? Is it like me, the agency owner, probably 2 delivery consultants, and then like a marketing sourcing team with what, 2, 3 people?

So you want to have an ops integrated VA for sure, because they're the ones handling all the tech. Because like, for you to get as much—

10K, 30K, so to buy in, 10K to 30K, or the next stage?

I would still be having that as 10 to 30K for sure. It's like, it's a thousand.

Oh yeah, you put hiring ops management. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So you want to be having ops here because again, you don't want to be going on your website or fixing a LinkedIn automation or an email campaign or a Zapier link that's broken inside of Slack. Once you start systemizing a 10 to 30K, you want to ops here that runs it. Uh, 2 or 3 marketing sources. Again, like that team of 4 is going to cost you like £3,000. It's like the cost of one salary in the UK.

Yeah.

Then a delivery consultant. And then as you go from 40 to 100, yeah, you can, you can start to build that out. So you were talking about when you get to 40.

Yeah. So like the team then that you just said, sorry, the bit I was missing was it would be agency owner, maybe 1 or 2 delivery consultants, and then like 3 or 4 marketing sources, but then also like an ops VA person.

Yeah.

And if you have that all working really nicely, you'd be confident that you should be consistently doing 30K a month.

Yeah, like, I mean, you can do it with less. Depends on your average fee. Like, I'm basing average fees off the— I would say the industry average from what I've seen is like £10,000, £8,000 to £10,000. So that's like 3 deals. Yeah, so, uh, 3 deals can be done with 1 consultant really, uh, and probably 2 marketing sources you could do that with. I mean, there's definitely people in our program that would do £500K a year with 2 marketing sources, an ops VA, Uh, and then they're doing the deals themselves, right? Or then they might have two delivery consultants.

Okay, fair. Right, cool. Got you. We'll get back to the episode in just one minute, but today I'm excited to talk to you about one of our partners, Firefish, the recruitment CRM that accelerates data-driven growth. The problem with most recruitment CRMs is that they are just a database of records, meaning they become just one of the many tools that recruiters use every day. Like with all systems, the records are only as good as the data being captured. Our sponsors Firefish know that for agencies to win faster, data needs to be at the heart of their business, making your CRM the single source of truth. With over 10,000 records created and updated every day and 85% of placements from existing candidates, Firefish enables recruiters to enrich and engage their data, equipping you with real-time insights needed to win faster. To learn more about Firefish and take advantage of an exclusive Recruitment Mentors Podcast offer, Make sure you click the link in the show notes and mention the Recruitment Mentors podcast when speaking to the Firefish team. So this next stage then, let's break this down. Let's really talk about how do we get to the point where we're doing 100K a month. So why don't we start with like challenges that you've seen and get into this. So you've, you've broken it down into letting go, expanding clients' revenue, hiring a manager, system processes, KPI again, obviously, which is expected. So Talking about here, what are the common stumbling blocks where I've got to that point that you just said, things are working really nicely, but now my ambition, you know, from when I started this business, I wanted to get to a point where yes, I did have more freedom, but also freedom from an earning standpoint. And like, we're doing 7 figures and like, that's really profitable for me. Talk to me about that. What are some of the common issues or stumbling blocks for people getting up to that stage?

People like hiring is, uh, I know we spoke offline, uh, when you're hiring humans, uh, you just can't control everything. So it's very hard to hire good people. Uh, so like the key thing is once you've got like the good systems in place, a good way to get clients, the sourcing— like if you see, I've started to delegate chunks of like the role. So like the delivery consultant doesn't do everything, the source only does one compartment, the client acquisition system can pretty much run most of it, and then you're pitching, so you're keeping control of the client. The ops VAs wouldn't know, wouldn't know all of the tech. You've got your VA or executive assistant here that's helping manage your time back. Once you've got these pieces in, then it's like the biggest shifts are going to be hiring probably 2 or 3 delivery consultants that are going to be good. Again, it depends on type of business that you want. If you want to self-manage an agency, that's going to be 10 to 11 employees, the sweet spot. Then like what worked well for me was a lot of my employees are mums that came back in the recruitment game. That work 3 days a week, they come in the office or they work remote most of the time, but they'll do 2 or 3, 4 or 5 deals in a month. That worked really well for me. I went through the stage of hiring really good recruiters that came from S3 background. I mean, that was always easy. I was trying to hire them that come from that background because I think the training there, the art of recruitment is the best, like how I've been trained of like catching the candidate and the offer close and that type of stuff. It means you don't have to train that. And then obviously, both now with systems, good jobs and sourcing, then like they're always going to do 2 or 3 deals with their eyes closed. But you're going to be in a position where if you're not with a growing agency that wants to go to 50 employees and above, you need a person that I would call not an A-player recruiter, just— and this is no disrespect, like my employees are amazing and lots of people in the programme is. Just someone that wants to come back into recruitment or in recruitment and is happy doing 3, 4 deals a month because they've got a sourcer, they've got jobs given to them, and they've still got a skill, but like recruitment's not their life.

Right.

So when sometimes when I was in recruitment, it's like 60 hours a week, you're suited and booted, like recruitment is everything. Like anything outside of this recruitment agency isn't the real world. No one wants to do that anymore. So like recruiters that just want to work as a recruiter, not set up on their own. Because again, you've got the risk of if you hire someone really good, an entrepreneur-style recruiter, why would they do that for you when they're just going to go and do it for themselves? Yeah. So you want to have the, the middle part where you know that someone's going to be good, loyal, can be good at the job and work for you. So it's making sure that knowing that they're happy with that and they're making good money. So as long as they're making between let's say $50K to $80,000 a year type of thing. Obviously we're more in the north, but a lot of people— or maybe $100K— they're happy with that. And they know that your company is not going to be growing to 40, 50, 60 employees, and you're promising shares and a big exit type of thing. Um, yeah, that's like normally the sweet spot.

Okay, so in terms of like— so is that when you're talking about they're hiring a manager? Are we talking about— you're just saying the types of recruiters you want in the business?

Yeah.

So the manager's really the last, last thing you need to recruit.

Like, so the last thing I handed it off, obviously once you've handed the client piece off, is running the business. But, um, anyone can really— like 10 to 11 employees, it doesn't really need a manager. So if you've got an executive assistant, stroke PA, office manager, um, and then you've got a sourcer with like a head sourcer, so like one gets promoted to head sourcer, um, then you've got 2 or 3 recruiters to manage, that's pretty much it. Like that can be managed pretty much self-managed.

You're doing $100K a month.

Yeah.

You should definitely be doing that.

Because it's 10 deals. It's like 3 deals each recruiter. So it's easily done.

So just break down that team again, sorry, and then we'll just break down how we get to that point. Sorry.

So 3 delivery consultants.

Yeah.

You could have 3 sourcers, to maybe 4, depending if you want to bring an extra one in. Because some of the sourcers can turn into a delivery consultant as well. We've done that many times. An ops VA and a general VA/PA.

Yeah, and then the agency owner.

And the agency owner.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I think I've done that right. So 3, 3, 6. Yeah, so that's like the team of 8 or 9.

Yeah, yeah. So like, okay, so let's break this down then. So like, what, what if I'm, if I'm doing 100K a month and that's what my team looks like, what is it? Because you've got a few other elements here that we need to master. So you've got things like under attract, you've got Candidate Funnel 2.0, inbound marketing, marketing sourcer team, which we've spoken about. So I'm assuming it's just making making those more efficient, um, making like getting even more out of them. You've then got, um, yeah, dial-in sourcing teams, I'm assuming. It's, yeah, just make it like improving them. You've got rock niche events, I'm assuming, talking about your strategy of how you're always being omnipresent and attracting people. You've got systemize, systemize ops, hire PAs, API automation, dial-in metrics. Like, yeah, what, what is it that you found consistently at that stage agency owners have got really fucking good at that has enabled them to do these $100K a month? What are the things that stand out to you? Are those things that you've broken down?

Well, all of them. At some point you need to have pretty much all of them to be consistent with— as long as you know the lifeblood of your business is the clients that are coming in. So as long as you've got good platinum clients that you're looking after, that are giving you repeat business, and then making sure, yeah, things like Zapier, Klaviyo, all the things that you can work on automisation and optimisation so you can make things a little bit more efficient, that's going to increase revenue as well. And then just staying on top of making sure the team's delivering. It's just, yeah, you're just overseeing the business and you're checking core KPIs. So you have a good dashboard, a visual dashboard, a CEO dashboard, I call it, of known metrics.

Let's break that down. Yeah. What does that normally look like?

CEO dashboard? So it'll be client leads, so outreach. So how many have you outreached per week? How many client leads have come in? How many client meetings have you had? How many clients have closed? How many live jobs have you got? What is the value of the live jobs? What's the live job to CV sent ratio? What's the CV to interview ratio? What's the interview to deal ratio? And then obviously you've got your standard ops costs and staffing costs and then your profit margins. So like every month you'll see, okay, I made 72% profit this month. Next month I might make 55% profit. And then so they're all the lifeblood of like knowing, obviously the number one metrics you look at is interviews. So like if I know my interview conversion ratio to deal is 3 to 1 or 4 to 1. I know we've won this amount of interviews. I know we've got this amount of deals coming in this month. As long as you've got that dashboard, um, and then obviously you can go into a lot more detail in terms of like the cash flow side of things as well. But I just know that like the client leads outreach, the client leads coming in, the client, uh, meetings, the conversion, the live jobs is a good metric. So, you know, like the live jobs of like if you've got 85 live jobs, for example, I know we've got a healthy amount of jobs How many have sourced or how many book calls are in, how many, maybe even Loom outreach, how many video outreach, how many book calls, how many CVs sent, how many interviews. I think most agency owners will know those type of metrics.

So if I'm an agency owner at that point, I've got my CEO dashboard, what am I spending a lot of my time on then? Like, what does that typically look like?

I mean, for me, I was always learning, so I'm like, uh, still like, I'm trying to look at refinements of my business of like So we mentioned Candidate Funnel 2.0. So I was building things on how can I nurture these developers in the Northeast? So that would be I create ActiveCampaign sequences where we create touchpoints. So I know every time a candidate's opened an email, they get a point score. Every time they download something, whether it's some value add, every time they're on LinkedIn or responding, there's things you can work on to attract candidates. But yeah, it's like making sure the team's in place.

I hear meeting rhythm. What does that look like?

Every day, like we do a meeting in the mornings, 9:30 AM. So we go through the meeting rhythm, like the 3 wins from yesterday and what they're looking to achieve today. Not every day. Yeah.

What with the delivery, what with everyone or—

Yeah, I mean, that's my team in my education company for the recruitment agency. My business partner, Dan, My brother does that.

Okay, cool. So in like, where— okay, and then like, if I'm— if I've really got this going then, what have you typically seen in terms of like, like, where did the profit margin sit then? Because like, this is a big part of— I feel like what you teach is like, you are building recruitment agencies in a different way. You're leveraging tech, you're leveraging like resource, you're systemizing what you do so you're less reliant on So like, what have you typically found in, you know, the agencies that you work with? Like, if I'm doing, yeah, $100K a month, what does that then typically look like profit-wise?

Yeah, uh, generally 50 to 60%. Really? So yeah, we're at 50, 60%, and, uh, a lot of people that are in our Elite Mastermind that are doing $100K months is around about 50, 60%. The reason why it'll vary, it just depends if the agency owner decides to make some placements. So like, one of the agency owners still makes like because he's got a $20K, $25K average fees, he'll still pull in one or two himself. So he's not paying the 20% or 30% commission he's paying to a recruiter, for example, in his team. So yeah, typically the profit margins, you're looking at 50% or 60%. Some averages, it does depend, but because we outsource a lot with the sourcing ops, like these are low cost as opposed to traditionally what it used to be is like it's all in-office employees. Yeah. Where you're paying salary, national insurance, like pension, all of this type of things and higher salaries. So you can get a higher profit margin. But for me, I would personally then— I mean, the goal after that recruitment agency, everyone's thinking, well, the next level for me was education and now software to get me to 9 figures. But it's like that means you've got a revenue-producing asset business that is spending cash every month once eventually it starts running without you that you can use to invest in property, other ventures. You might go and start software, you might invest in other companies, you might do something else as an entrepreneur. That's like a goal for a lot of recruitment agency owners is like they don't want to be in recruitment forever, especially in the trenches, doing it forever unless you're going for exit. So I don't help— that's not my forte in terms of like if you want to go and exit and go to 40, 50, 100 Employees Plus. I'm sure there's other people out there that are more experienced to help, but most people don't really want to do that. And it's very hard. It's a hard slog to exit the company, a recruitment agency. I think the stats are 95% of businesses don't sell. So the sweet spot is like have it as a revenue-producing asset and then go and invest in other things and keep it operating.

So that's why you put convert profit to wealth.

Yeah.

Why? So what I just want to get your take on then, like, we've broken down a lot. I think there's so many things in there that would be really helpful for, for people to go through each stage. I'm sure, um, may have come across things online, but I feel like people definitely in our industry are really like advocating like AI and the, like, tech element just like not being a good thing in the sense of like, oh, I've 'Like, LinkedIn just wrote this job ad for me. I use the AI function, it was terrible. Just got this outreach message, it was terrible.' So I'm sure this is why you've mentioned, you know, tech, AI, ChatGPT. But then a lot of the things that you've mentioned a lot are things like Loom, Voice Notes, all that. And that's the one-to-one element, right? That, that's going to be— there will be obviously tools at different points where you can put things in and it generates a voice, whatever. But like, how, how are you balancing that? Because I feel like there is a balance there, right?

It.

Um, I think you'd be foolish to really lean against like, I'm not going to use any of this because I just feel like it's going to make everything unauthentic and like impersonal, impersonalized. But a few times you've broken down your systems, it does involve a human being sending a personalized video or whatever. So like, how, how do you talk about that balance with your clients? Because I'm sure that's something that makes people skeptical or a bit like, I'm not sure this is going to work, James, or I don't want this to be the case when people receive things from me.

Yeah, but you mentioned obviously hit the nail on the head, Hishem, with using automation to a point, but you're never going to replace the human element. So everything that we do with the outreach is still going to have a human point of contact. It's just leveraging it to get it there. But also it's using AI in the right way. So the reason why some AI messages just don't hit is because people aren't training the AI in the right way and giving the right descriptions. For it to not sound AI-generated, for example. So I always would use it and leverage it, but not be fully dependent on it. And I think, yeah, it's a balance between not automating AI everything. But for instance, like Clear.com, for example, of how we build out these playbooks, these recruitment playbooks of a live lead, that can be fully automated with the full email outreach. But then you would do the email outreach, but then you would do maybe a customised personalised Loom video or LinkedIn video to outreach with the client. So yeah, it's definitely a balance, but it's definitely like people that take advantage of this early, like, will win for sure. But you don't— you're never going to automate the full process of recruitment. You're always still going to speak to candidates. You're still going to influence a candidate to take a job and you're still going to influence a client to work with you and you're still going to influence a client to make an offer to a candidate. And make the placement. Like, these elements are always like the human contact.

And then I have to ask, because I feel like, again, like, your whole thing is about helping agency owners build like a different type of recruitment business. It's very marketing-led, it's automation-led, it's systems-led. But again, I think in our industry, what, what I feel like personally, if you're in a recruitment agency right now, you don't have your own business one of the quickest ways you can stand out is actually by being willing to pick up the phone. And that you're, you're building a software business. From my, from everything that I've read and learned, um, like a big element of these, um, successful SaaS companies is outbound and actually picking up the phone. So like a lot of the things that you've broken down doesn't really involve— from— you correct me if I'm wrong, but on the agency owner, not really doing you know, cold calling sprints and these types of things. Like, where does this fit in for you? Just said there, obviously there's a personalized element, the human element, but how, how do you, how do you feel about like your agency owners and your clients getting good at selling and, you know, sell it, um, you know, uncovering issues and challenges and using outbound as a tool?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, in my education company, we, we use outbound. Like, we have dialers, I have setters that dial leads But they're warm leads, but they dial. So cold calling, like, it can still be an option. I mean, for me personally, like, and everyone that I've taught in the program, I just had an ethos from day one when I started the agency. I will not make a cold call.

Okay.

Okay. I think this was like 8, 9 years ago. Everyone was like, I think because when you're in an industry where you come in to work when you used to be a recruiter and the first thing was just on the phone all the time, it still works, but it's up to you. Like, it can just be— it's just another channel. Cold outbound is just another channel, like email outbound. LinkedIn, video, voice note, AI follow-ups, like everything's just like a channel. So you can choose to put that in if you want. Like if you're buying back your time with everything else and you've got a 2-hour slot of fire mode where you're going to do cold outbound for 2 hours a day, do it. But to find cold outbound dollars is very hard. Like people don't want to cold call.

Like, where does it fit in your business?

In our education company, we do outbound. Dialing.

But I'm assuming your intention about who they're calling, right? Is it people that have opened X number of emails?

Yeah, it would only ever be if they've wanted to download a workbook or something of value for that that we give them. Then we would give them an outbound dial, right? And if they're interested. But again, the conversions are low. It's a numbers game. So like my outbound dialers are targeted to do 150, 200 dials a day. And from that, they might have 3, 3 good conversations. The connection rate on a cold outbound dial, you're looking at like 1% to like 3% of like where you're going to get a conversation. So you need to like— this is why when you build a business, having dialers is a different business. It's a different culture. It's a different type of person you're hiring, like because not everyone wants to do it. And those people are again high egos or like unbound hyperactive, like wanting to get things done. So you need to be in a high driven company like a grand cardón type sales company. But most people don't want to create that type of business. So the only way that cold outbound would work really for me would be in an office where everyone's like pumped up and everyone's like ready to do dialling and everyone's doing it together. That's the only way it's going to work with the energy. But that's very labour intensive and that would have to come from you as the agency owner to drill everyone to make dials. So you'll get burnt out and you just don't want to do it anymore. So I leave that for maybe the bigger agencies and everything else. Um, or you can outsource it, uh, or you can add it in. It's fine. Like, it's, uh, it's not a big thing. It's not against— I'm against cold outbound. It's, uh, we use it in one of our companies. But, um, again, it's just a channel because that's the thing.

Like, when you think about what, from your perspective, a $100K a month recruitment business looks like, you haven't got like 360 recruiters in there.

No, never would. I just, I just don't believe in it. Yeah, like, it's so flawed, it's beyond Don't. Like everything I've learned to get to 10 million plus now in my life, it's like leverage and keeping things simple and focus on the few, not the many. Get one thing right before you go on to something else. How is a 360 recruiter going to be great at marketing, going to be great at cold email outreach, going to be great at cold dialing, going to be great at getting a client, pitching a client, then sourcing on LinkedIn, then doing outreach on LinkedIn, then messaging on LinkedIn, then managing the diary, Managing their emails, speaking to candidates on the phone, trying to get interview feedback, organizing interviews, trying to close a deal, trying to counteroffer a deal, trying to make sure they're staying in rebate, trying to make sure, like, the client's paying on time, and then going back to Dream 100, then going to pitch them, going to events, going to meet them. Like, it's impossible. Like, it's— that is so outdated, it's beyond belief. And any good 360 recruiter wouldn't need to work for an agency, I don't think. Start on your own. You'll make way more money. Um, they'll come and do my course or someone else's. Like, it's like they wouldn't need to do that unless they're getting shares in the company and equity, which is totally fine. Um, and that's good. So there's some businesses— I used to work for one that would give you share equity, and some people have done very well out of that, but they're few and far between, those type of companies.

Like, I, I agree with you. I mean, my, my business helps those people with those issues. Yeah, right, free training and stuff. But from my point of view, I do feel like— I don't know what you think about this, but a big part of why I feel like it's going to take a long time for that model to change, like in a drastic way, in terms of like more companies don't have that model than do, is where they adopt some of the things that you teach. And so many people, so many agency owners don't. So they come from an ex-Frank Group or whatever, or even just a small agency, and they've seen how it's been done.

Exactly.

And they're like, I'll just build that, maybe I'll just hire a couple of people and then we'll make it work, or whatever. So I, I do feel like a big part of, like, there's so many companies I speak to, that's, that's their model. But a lot of the time they don't have anything like what we've spoke about today in their business.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? And they don't, don't, don't know the other way, that they don't know the alternative.

Yeah. But, but that comes down to not being, uh, like, interested in business. Like, if you're really interested in business and you're looking at the fundamentals of, like, a business, like, you would start to unpack thinking this model is flawed and I'm going to do things slightly different because people like, yeah, look, it doesn't not work, but it's just very, very hard and very manual. And yeah, like you're not really building a moat around your agency because you're building no assets. Like you're just hiring people. It's a people business. And yes, recruitment is a people business, but you can still leverage yourself a little bit more and de-risk it. But yeah, a lot of people go into starting an agency just seeing what they've done before in the previous agency and think it's going to work, which is why I like What, 70, 80% of businesses fail within 5 years.

So yeah, I think if you're listening to this and that is your business, all I would say the smart thing to do would be what things that you shared today can I implement, right, to help me get more out of my 360 recruiters, right? Would that be the marketing sourcing team? Would that be like, you know what I mean? You don't need to change those things.

Yeah, don't change a full model, but there might be one or two things you could implement that gives you a little bit more leverage and increases profit margin. And de-risks things a little bit. So whether it's like having your 360 recruiters, having a sourcer, having a VA, having some automation, um, as if like any one of those elements you could add in. So it doesn't mean you change your model overnight, which is another thing I would never recommend, is like from day one coming in and suddenly changing your model like you're already used to. Like, it'll take time. It might just be 10% element here and there that you're taking, and then you're starting to make a little shift, and you might have a hybrid model between So before, before we round this out then, I wanted to—

and this sort of a nice segue, uh, I wanted to ask a, um, a friend of mine who works in recruitment, been in the agency for 10 years, has an opportunity to have equity exit, all these types of things. He's a 360 recruiter, that's sort of what he's done, really enjoys your stuff. And I was like, look, what, what would you love me to ask him? I think this is the perfect question just to then to get your take on. A lot of recruiters listen to this, they work for a company and they work for a company that isn't as open to having a systemized approach, right? They're doing it because it's always worked a certain way. So like, the question is, what, from your perspective, what could be some of like the low-hanging fruit a consultant could implement to his or her desk that they could see results from that they've learned from this? Because we spoke about from the agency owner, right? A lot of people listen to this, might be championing their manager and owner to like, we need this product, we want to do this, but oftentimes they get shut down. On. So what would your response be to that, or what comes to mind?

Yeah, it is, it is a tough one. I, I feel for people like that, um, because I was in their shoes at some point and got frustrated where I was because the things wouldn't change. Uh, if you're allowed, like, I would leverage my time back. So I would be hiring a VA on the side that is just going to delegate and do a lot of things. So like, do LastPass share? It depends. I don't know what company they're in, but they might have an IP blocker on like some of like their logins for certain things. But I would try to hire a VA to buy back some of my time. Just to organize candidates. I would maybe even still hire a marketing sourcer that's going to do some video outreach and voice mail follow-up for me for candidates and help me source some candidates and pair them so they could pay them out their own wages and hire them freelance for £1,000 a month. And if they get an extra candidate a month, that's an extra deal like that could leverage his time. Yeah, but it is a tricky one. Like I would just be trying to trying to buy back my time so I can double my output. So how can I get 40 hours extra per week? So doing the activity inventory and then hiring a sourcer or a VA, like, would be the first thing. I don't know if you would be allowed to do automation on a LinkedIn account, but something like that, email automation, and then leveraging ChatGPT and maybe leveraging Clay.com, like, research app for some AI piece. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's a tough position he's in, but, um, yeah, I would start with those.

No, I think that's smart. Like, it's not going to cost a whole lot. Yeah, you'd learn a lot actually. I think there's also the net positive of actually learning, of actually doing that, right? Writing your systems down, outsourcing it, getting someone on board to do it. Um, I, I think that's, that's where I'd probably go. Like, could you, could you hire a VA out of your own money? Um, could you even get to the point where you have a, um, market source, as you said, resource that goes out and does some of the legwork? Or even have someone that does your market map and does that, like, you know what I mean? Yeah, awesome. All right, we've covered a lot. That's the journey then. So if we get to that point, um, you know, I think what I just love about— what I love about what you teach is just the systems piece. I think that's what people need to take away. Like, you are helping people avoid having so much chaos in their business. These people start this entrepreneurial journey because they want to do it on their own, they think they can do it better, they want their own business. But a lot of people that I speak to, um, they work in a recruitment business, they don't have a recruitment business. So I think, you know, like for me, if you're listening to this, it's just about what things can I take, how can I challenge maybe the status quo of like how I've been doing things, kind of be open-minded to trying some of the things that I've learned today. And with the simple goal of can you get more of your time back and actually get more freedom back, which is probably some of the things that you thought about when you started that entrepreneurial journey, right? But it hasn't quite planned out, or maybe you've had moments where things have gone well and you feel like you have more freedom, and then it's been challenging. So that's just what I love about this, is like the system and everything that you teach. So hopefully people listen to this can get a ton of value.

Yeah, hopefully. I always be curious, like you should always be wanting to learn and listen. So like, um, people that are successful, like, and I've got many successful friends now in Dubai, everyone's still curious and always learning. So they're always investing in themselves, reading books, get mentors, and always curious about how things are done. Whereas what I've seen in some of the recruitment world, and I was one of them, was like, no, no, it's done this way, and you've got blinkers on. For you to be successful, you need to know and look at different things, how are things done in business, and try and be a little bit more open-minded with different solutions. Try and test and try these things. Yeah, so to sort of be open. But hopefully people have took a couple of things. Like I said, even if it's a 360 model, Is it elements that you can implement that can be systemized or, or a different unique hybrid strategy that you could, you could put into your own agency?

Love it, James. Yeah, thank you.

Thanks for having me, bro.