Unlock Consistent 500K Billings with Dante Nino

Dante, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So I'm doing 5— this would be— you're going to be one of 5 episodes I'm doing in Austin. Okay, you're the only American.

That's a surprise.

Well, the rest, as I was just telling you before we started this, the rest have— are like English people that have moved to the States. So hopefully the next time I'm here it'll be many Americans versus, um, UK people. So I'm excited to dive into this with you. There's a few things that, that we want to cover, a mixture of the lessons and things that you've learned in building TLO, your own business, which you've been building over the last 6 years. But then also specifically, we want to go into some details on how you have been approaching getting the, the best out of your people, because a large chunk of your role now is very much coaching, supporting the team, maximizing performance, and Uh, you do a lot of content around that, so there's a few LinkedIn posts I wanted to break down as well, which I think talks to the sort of strategies and how you think about how we can go from billing $200,000, $300,000 a year to $500k plus, which I know is something that you're really passionate about when it comes to people joining your business, that you can enable them to go to that extra level. So just to give everyone a bit of context in terms of, uh, your journey, let me know if I get any of this wrong, but you worked in agency and corporate, so So corporate being tenant acquisition, so internal. And you started TLO with your business partner Simon in 2019.

Yep.

Right. And your world is all construction engineering. It's mostly— it's all permanent. And then in terms of the way that you approach your business as well, which I find interesting, this might be more common in the US, but it's always been like remote first. As an organization. Um, and then in terms of where you are today, there's 13 of you, um, based all over the, over the US. So obviously you're in Austin, but then you have people in Florida, North Carolina, California. Um, your role now, which is what I said at the beginning, is very much mentoring, developing people, helping people execute, um, their strategies, and ultimately also just maximizing productivity, whether that be for the tools that you use or through the processes and getting involved. And you're on track this year to do $3.7 million this year. And average billings per head is $350K, right? Anything you want to add, or is that about happy with all of that, or anything else I missed? That's about right, yeah.

Yeah?

Yeah. Okay. So why don't we start then, like, let's just start sort of just keeping this fairly open. Like, what have been some of the biggest lessons for you so far in building TLO? Like, just let's just start there and we'll see where we end up. Like, what have been some of the biggest lessons for you in, in building this staffing firm?

Yeah, when you start an agency, it's all about you. Um, you, you're, you're wearing all the hats— accounting, recruiting, sales, just everything— trying to maximize everything. And as you start growing as a, as a company and you're hitting multi-million dollar numbers with 10 heads or more, the business, the business becomes less about you. So now every day my problems are not about me. My problems and what I'm always thinking about is how can I maximize efficiency within every person here in our company, whether it's recruitment, business development, or technology. And that's more of the problems that I focus on more today. Now that I've learned over the last few years, you know, the more you grow, the less it's about you. You know, hiring good people is always the hardest problem. We're really good at hiring people for companies, but when you hire for your company, it's one of the hardest things ever. You think you have it right and you have it wrong. And for agency owners who are looking to scale, one of the things that we made a big mistake on early on was we hired people that had experience. But when you have a recruitment agency and you want hypergrowth, You need people that are good with progression. By that, what I mean by that is we had hired someone who had 12 years of experience, 10 years at the same agency, was always a recruiter, did well. We thought he would come in, kill it, do well with us. But there's a reason why he hasn't progressed in 10 years. When you're a startup or you're going through hypergrowth, you need someone that's young, motivated, or just simply wants to get to the next level. And that pushes everyone to get better. So we, we stop hiring B and C players. We need A players, because if you keep around B and C players too long, your A players are going to come down as well too. Those are some of the toughest things I've learned.

Yeah. So what— how long do you think it's taken? Because I think when I speak to a lot of agency owners, you are right, it's all about you in the sense of like, you gotta make shit happen, right? It's on you to do that. So How long would you say that it was about you, and like, how long was it just focusing on getting revenue in, getting billings on the board? Because that's the sort of first bit that you and Simon have to really get right before we're even looking at hiring. So how long was that journey, do you think, of it just being about you and Simon bringing in revenue? How long did that period go on for?

Yeah, so Simon and I, Simon was my roommate. I was working in corporate agency, a talent acquisition, for about a year. And every day I would come home and tell Simon, hey, I'm saving so much company for this, for this company, and I'm— we're paying out fees, $20,000, $30,000 fees to staffing agencies for some of the key placements that they make with us. So we're just like, hey, why don't we start a recruitment agency? And we saved enough money for almost 9 months and then decided to quit our job, start our agency in 2019. And it took us about a year to get proof of concept, 12, 14, 16-hour days. And we were able to do half a mil in our first year with, you know, 24, 25-year-olds, which was huge.

Nice.

Which was amazing for us. But then we realized that we were just working way too hard. We're working 7 days a week, 6 days a week, 12-hour days. It just wasn't sustainable. So we had to kind of take a step back and decide that we, we need to stop working in the business so much and start bringing in people to kind of help us expand. So about a year, year and a half in, we decided to take a risk and hire our first employee. And our first employee was very successful. Successful because he was motivated, you know. Then we just hired 2 more right after that, and we went from, you know, 500 to 1.3 to the second year. And we had proof of concept, but we were still in the business, we were still recruiting, and there were still a lot of things going wrong. And that's where we had a little hurdle once we hit that second year with that 3, 4 people under our belt.

Yeah, why don't we talk about— because I do think this is interesting and you still might be figuring this out— but what did your interview process for your business look like before you feel like maybe you've got better at recruiting A players? Because a lot of it does come down here, right? I sit down with a lot of people, and oftentimes you can— like, people find themselves hiring people who feel like, yeah, they, they could do it, they've got the track record, but then they bring them in and they're sort of like almost really surprised. Maybe they're nowhere near as good as they thought, they didn't have the skills that they thought they'd come, uh, come with. So oftentimes founders that I speak with just have to get way better at their interview process and just make that a lot more science-based versus like, I think they could do the job, I think that'd be great, right? And I think we all go through that, even though I've done that in my business. But yeah, how have you got better at that interview process? You still might be improving it now, but like, what does that look like in your business today?

The interview process is always improving. Quarter after quarter, hire after hire, we learn something new from every single person that we hire. And no matter what we do as a business owner, you're always going to get something wrong, no matter what. We've always dealt with it, but there's ways to improve on it, and we have. And we built the hiring criteria for us that we look at 4 different things: sales, personality, culture fit, and are they willing to kind of grow within the company, kind of share our core, our values here within the company. And if they meet all those criterias, We do 1 to 10, and if they get an 8 or above, we move on to the next interview process and so on. And the hardest part about that is that we've interviewed some people that are good on paper, you know, $500,000, $600,000 billers. They're just fed up with their managers, just there, they just want something else, maybe even remote, and they want to make a move, but they just didn't meet our criteria on the personality and the culture. Where I was like, are they going to be a team player here within TLO, within our company, especially since we're you know, smaller company, one bad hire, uh, it can cause cancer within the company. So we've been able to make those executive decisions, say no to those people. And that's one of the things that I feel like a lot of owners make a mistake of, where they're more focused on the billings, like, well, this person can bill for me, just bring them in, they can do whatever they want. But we don't need that right now. We need people that are with us and want to help us grow TLO to the next level.

So you've created a bit of a scorecard in those areas. Okay, nice. How have you got better at fishing out if someone genuinely wants to work in a remote environment versus it that just being something that sounds nice and then they're in and like, oh my God, no, like I need to be— I need to like be way more supported or I need to have less autonomy. Because I, I do have found this quite a bit in terms of and I'm sure you've had this— where someone's like, Dante, I'd love to work more remote. And then they're in that position and then they find out that actually, shit, like, I need to be way more closer managed and it's all down to me. And actually, maybe I'm not quite ready for that. I'm sure you've had that.

Yeah.

So like, have you got better at sort of understanding or got better at uncovering, does Dante actually want to work remote? Is he ready for that? And like, have you got better at that? Because I feel like that's got to be key.

It's been— that's a challenge, especially since we had an office and we went fully remote. Some people just couldn't keep up with fully remote, just working at home, being around kids or whatever it is. It's just different. So we kind of have to dial down a bit to our metrics and KPIs and whatever we need to with certain individuals. And every time we ask them, like, you want to work remotely? Great.

Why?

Why do you want to work remotely? Oh, because I want more time for my family, you know, whatever it is. And we kind of take a gamble sometimes and we still get it wrong. I'm not going to be— I'm not going to say, oh, we get it right. No, we still get it wrong all the time. And some people just can't work fully remote. And it has been a big challenge. So right now, people tell us we want to work remote because, you know, want to be able to spend more time with my kids or I want to travel the world to be like, ah, you know, we're not there yet. You can travel the world yet, so we need you to kind of step in and have different metrics. So it's something we're still figuring out. I wish I could say we figured it out, but we haven't. Yeah, it's hard.

Yeah. How— and then how do you feel about— because I do feel like I don't— this isn't a podcast about work from home and remote, but I think what's quite timely— I'm sure you saw it was just all over LinkedIn, the whole like Amazon telling people they're going to be 5 days in the office, these types of things. So just curious, like, how you think about developing a culture, building a high-performance team in like that remote environment? Because I do feel like what's continuing this story that continues to build at the moment, I feel like outside looking in, is that companies feel way more confident they can do that in person and we can drive collab— um, you know, a lot more, um, um, collaboration in the office, all these types of things. So how do you feel about that in a sales recruitment environment? How do you think about that?

Yeah, I love the office. I think the office is great. It definitely drives culture. People are pounding the phones. People are going to want to pound the phones as well too. What we've done recently to help culture and work better on a remote environment is competitions, which is quite interesting, but people will compete to beat other people. and not only by just billing, but submissions, new clients assigned, anything else that involves that. I mean, we even have a competition coming next month about if you make 5 submissions a week and you sign a 1-year agreement, you get Friday off, every other Friday off. And people are jumping to that. They're like, "Alright, well, I'm going to make that." Right now we're running an Olympics competition that's about to end, but it's submissions, hires, a little bit of everything, and we run it into teams too. So people that don't really talk with each other, they get to interact with other people saying, hey, we need to compete, we need to beat them and kind of get there. So that's been helping. But one thing that we have been doing to help with culture is meeting 2 times a year. We had everyone out here in Austin in July. We sat down for 2, 3 days, half-day work, but other days it's just professional development, training, professional development. Talk about some key hires we've made and how we make them, how people are being successful right now. If this person's billing $100K a month, let's go over and do a case study on this person. How did they do that? And we teach that to every single person that's coming in. And now even next year, because of the remotes and seeing more people, we're trying to meet, uh, quarterly.

Nice.

Which, it's a little more of expense for us, but we're willing to do it since we're fully remote right now. And I think it just drives culture and people get to know each other better. And, uh, we're also trying to improve our marketing and media as well too. So anyone that had a great quarter, anyone make some key placements, anyone that wants to make videos or content, we have our photographer come and videographer come and we'll shoot content, we'll do everything like that so they could kind of stand out and do that as well too. So that's something that we're doing. I still think that remote's great because we do have some people that we weren't able to get if we were working just in California. Now we have some rock stars that are in North Carolina and other areas that are billing $500,000, $600,000, $700,000, and they thrive. They thrive in a remote environment. So you do find those individuals that are also good in that way.

Yeah, yeah, I'm hearing that a lot. I think if you're committed to that remote-first culture, then creating those intentional meetings where you all get together and stuff and investing in those is a really good strategy to just help develop that culture and bring people together, um, is a great way to do that. Just curious then, because so much of your role today is coaching, developing performance, with it being remote, what does— like, it may vary, but typically how are you approach— approaching the cadence of like the time that you spend with each individual? Because I think that's also something that you have to be intentional about when it's remote. You can't just hear someone on the phone in the office and go, hey, don't say Next time you run into this, maybe try this. I heard how you handled it. Maybe try this next time. I think it might help, right? That's one of the great things about being in the office, particularly in the sales environment. I know you can do it with technology. You can listen to phone calls and stuff. But just curious, because I'm sure you're figuring this out or have figured it out. Like, are you meeting with each individual daily? Do you have a weekly stand-up, a monthly kick-off, a morning kick-off? Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, I know it's a great question. And You're right. When we're in an office, you just hear people, hey, let's step into the office and role play right now. Let's go through those conversations you just had. It was so much easier. But unfortunately, we don't have that luxury anymore. So one thing that we have done is invested in technology, which RingCentral right now is one of the things that we rely on a lot. And it's recorded every single call here. And every week we have our managers meet with every single recruiter, go through wins, challenges, numbers, where they need improvement and so on. And me and my business partner have access to all that. And at the end of every note, we have a, hey, this person might need help in this type, in recruiting or in business development or cold calling. And that's where I, me, I kind of step up and bring those recruiters, hey, let's go over some of the calls, send me your calls that you feel like you got stuck on. Or that you need help with, and we're going to go over them together. Let's, uh, put a time on my calendar, and we're going to go over it so we make sure that we get better when we approach the next time. And that's how we've been able to track everything. So our recruiting managers meet with our recruiters once a week. Whenever they're having a problem or challenge, they write it on the notes. I have, I have, I have all access to every single recruiter, where they're at and where their challenges are. And I pick a time with every single recruiter. Let's go over that. Let's train, roleplay, and let's do it until you can't get it wrong.

Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I think even if you're listening to this and you're hybrid in the office, one of the most underutilized things that I find when we speak to companies about developing performance, Hector, is that, that, that listening to calls. Like, I think that is one of the quickest ways that you can help someone have better outcomes on the phone, or particularly on this, on the sales side, but even on the candidate side in terms of getting better at uncovering those red flags that that person might miss or that then come on later on to ruin processes. So yeah, I think that's great that you doubled down on that. I'm not surprised. That's key.

And people gave us a few pushback in the beginning too. Oh, you guys are going to record every single call? It's like, hey, if we were in the office, we would hear every single call with you. So come on, it makes sense. This is just for professional development. It's not to be making sure that you're not saying anything bad. It's just we want to make sure that we develop you. So—

Yeah, no, I think once that person that might have gone, oh, that's interesting. Do I like the idea of my calls being listened to? Maybe not. But then that first session where you then help me, like, talk through an objection or whatever, I'd feel like my mindset is going to quickly shift. Because I think you can do such specific coaching when you have calls like that that you could listen to. It's just so much better than a role play.

Yeah.

How about just on the, the performance piece, and then we'll go into some of the, the bits that you think about when it comes to maximizing performance. But I think this is also crucial, and again, you still might be figuring this out, but one of the— also one of the other things that you also lose is just that sort of feeling of being, um, having visibility of like what the team are doing. So you tell me sort of how you think about this at the moment, how you're approaching it, but what does like your dashboards look like for performance? Because I think that's key. Like, you, you must be thinking about— let's say you get to the end of the week or the month and you're thinking, right, how have we done this month as a team? There must be things that you look at, or things that you look at on a weekly, daily basis that make you feel like, right, we're going on the right track, or also help you understand where maybe you need to be a bit more specific on the coaching. What are some of the metrics that you keep really close eye to that you think are most important?

Yeah. Of course, we— our metrics are basic to where you need to be making one placement a month. Okay, that's $240,000. And we break it down like this. First, you need to be able to connect with 50 people on the candidate sites a week, have 50 active conversations with weekend. That's just the basic metric. You need to have 50 connects with clients or new business development as well too. So 50/50. You need to have at least 5 submissions out every single week to Tier 1 recs. Tier 1 recs are active, under 90 days opened, and we have an active agreement and so on. So we need 5 a week. That's the minimum standard that we have. We need at least 3 interviews a week. And with that, we've seen historically that we're able to make 1 placement a month. Right. 50/50, 5 submissions. 3 interviews a week, that equals to 1 placement a month. And, uh, yeah, so we keep it simple. And a lot of people, a lot of people go into KPIs wrong. I know I used to, it's like, oh well, KPIs are just KPIs, like you shouldn't really track them. But the numbers, as a manager, it just shows a lot, and it's easy to read between the lines, especially if someone's just not doing the work. If someone's not getting 5 submissions a week and they're just not, they're not hitting their billing numbers, they're just not simply doing enough. Now, if they're hitting 10 submissions a week and they're still not hitting their numbers, then we got to look at the job orders that they're taking in because the job orders might not be as good as they say they are. And that means that we have to do more business development on the, on that end. So it kind of helps with that, but we keep it very simple, very basic. Now, if you want to make, uh, $500,000, we got to double those metrics there. And we got to make sure that we kind of tailor every single metric to every recruiter as well, because one recruiter might be working on technicians that are $60,000, $80,000 a year, where we got a recruiter doing heavy civil jobs at $130,000, $150,000 jobs. So their metrics are a little bit different.

We'll get back to the episode in just one minute.

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I honestly, like, I have not met a recruiter yet that doesn't want to understand how to be successful. And like, the way that you've broken that down, you've obviously based that off what works in your market, what you've seen work time and time again. So that's just really handy to know when you're looking at your desk and maybe it isn't where you want it to be. It's just really helpful to know, right, if I hit those numbers like you just said, then hopefully at the other side I should start averaging one placement a month, and then I can build on that, right? It just, it just gives you clarity, and it just makes things a lot— feel a lot less like stressful, or it makes you feel what you want to do way more achievable, right, when you break it down. Um, this is something I'm, I'm picking up. I've always interviewed people that, um, operate in the, in the US market over the years, but just something that I'm recently picking up, so you can tell me what you think about this. But when you say submissions, I just want to make sure on the same page here. So you're, you're saying, uh, candidates that, um, are happy to be representing two organizations that your team are putting in front of other companies, correct? Yeah. So that would be deemed as submission.

Yeah.

And you're saying if you can make sure your submissions are sent to tier 1 clients where there's open vacancies less than 90 days, that's, that's what we want to be doing. Yeah. So what, what I'm finding is things— it seems— I know it could— there'll be nuances in markets, but like, it's very candidate-led, it seems. Is that, is that fair to say? Like, is that how a lot of your team typically over the years in your market have opened up doors, got vacancies with clients? Is it typically being submission-led candidate-led versus going for the jobs, going for the clients? Is that, is that how you typically see it play out?

So it's a good question because if you would have asked me that 2, 3 years ago, uh, it would have been different. Really? Now, um, now the market has changed, especially in the US. I'm not sure how, uh, Europe is, but in the US, we— they've made it so easy for technology to send out 50, 100 emails a week to clients offering their services. I'm the best recruiter in construction engineering space, I could help you fill all the roles. You got 5, 6 recruiters doing that a week, you know, right now. But for new client acquisition, the best way to get clients is by providing value first, and it's providing a good candidate to them. And if you have a good candidate, especially in the construction industry where it's so niche and so specific, and we know when we have a good candidate, all right, this candidate is going to open the door for us with 5, with 2 or 3 other clients. But that means that we have to send at least We call it— you guys call it NPCs. Yeah, yeah. Most placeable candidates. We got to send at least, you know, 30 NPCs to, you know, 2 to 3 hiring managers, 15 companies with this candidate, and 1 or 2 will respond. And next we follow with calls. But that's been the best way for us to acquire new business. Even when we bring in recruiters, it's not go call 100 companies. It's like, no, we're going to focus more on the candidates. How can we find good talent, good candidates to help us open up the doors? And it's a warmer conversation with clients as well. Instead of telling them, hey, I'm a recruiter here, I work in your space and I want to see if I could fill your project manager role. It's like, no, we take the opposite. We reverse engineer. Hey, I'm currently working with a project manager with 5 years of roofing experience. I see you guys have an opening and you guys do a lot of work with X, Y, and Z. I also work with other companies in your space. Would like to see if you possibly want to take a look at this resume or, you know, talk to this candidate. He's very interested in your position. And, you know, that works for us.

Yeah, I think what— you can tell me what you think about this, but I think what sometimes I think people miss with this is there's a lot of people online that will say like, that's dead and that doesn't work. But I just continually find this, I think the best mantra that I think people need to adopt when it comes to business development in recruitment. And this comes from a guy called, uh, Jamie that we did something recently, um, with at Hecton. This has really stuck with me and something that I now think about with my own sales approach, which is like basically saying with your team, like, everything that we do works, it just doesn't work every time. Because I think a lot of the time, particularly in the world that we live in today in sales, we're always looking for like the silver bullet. Right? And there often isn't a silver bullet. It's more about can we keep doing the things that we know work, um, and they will pay off, right? And this is one of those things like, you know, people have been doing this for a very long time, but really wanting to think about is like, how are you actually— like, you're just giving us a bit of an example there on the call. It's like, how can we actually improve how we're doing the actual activity? And something that I'm— I've been picking up on recently is that the people that do this really well is they'll use that candidate that you just said in that example to open up the conversation, but, you know, they don't just simply find out that, oh no, actually we're not hiring, and they leave it there. You know, the best people will then do the best that they can to go, okay, Dante, I understand. Now, if, if this was a different situation or budget wasn't an issue, like, what would be the type of skill set that you would be looking for? Or like, they use that as an opportunity to gather information. Because if you do a good job of that, the next candidate you, that you speak to, or you really understand, like, you know what, if budget wasn't an issue, or if we were going to be hiring, it's going to have to be this skill set. Like, this is what we always struggle to find, or whatever. Guess what you're doing? You're, you're building a list of companies that are telling you if you have these types of skill sets, that we'll be having an open conversation, we'll be happy to have a conversation or interview, whatever. And that's what the best recruiters do. They don't just call and then they find out, no, we're not hiring, but like, okay, on to the next one. They'll use that as an opportunity to try and gather information. So they build a list of companies companies that they know that they can approach at some point with those skill sets, with those people. That— I don't know, I know I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I do think it's that, it's that that actually enables to happen. Because if you build that list of companies that you've spoken to, next time it's going to be a bit more warmer. The next time you speak to them, you always talk to them about, look, you know, last time you told me that you need this skill set, I've listened, here is that type of skill set. How do you think— like, do you know what I mean?

Yeah. And the best recruiters, um, do that in a very specific niche, and that's where they're most successful. We've had recruiters come in and their activities off the— I mean, we recently had a recruiter that she's like, yeah, I sent around 2,000 emails a month. I'm like, what? It's like, yeah, like, uh, do you want to talk to her? I was like, no, no, we need to slow down. Pick a market, pick a territory, pick an ideal client profile, pick an ideal candidate profile, then we're going to go target 30 companies around there, 2 to 3 hiring managers, and we're going to go from there. Nothing else right now. You know, we're going to go very specific because the best recruiters we have in our agency are not filling jobs all over the country, all over different— they're very specific. They know their market, they know what they're talking about, and they can talk to that about to clients. And like, just like you said, our first conversations are not to fill their job, is to get more— get more information. Hey, No problem. Who hires for your team? Okay, great. Well, hey, I don't mean to waste too much of your time here, but I know these jobs are very hard to find. I especially estimate— I mean, is there any type of role or any type of candidate that if I came across, you would say, hey, I would take a look at this? And okay, yeah, this person. Great. Next time I have someone like this, I would send them your information or at least, you know, present to see if we can have a conversation. Great. Awesome. Let me get your email, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, exactly. Now we've got a list. We haven't just got a target client. We've got someone that said, if you have this specific skill set, we'd at least be having a conversation, right?

Yeah. And we've seen that it takes probably 3 to 5 touches to talk to someone to actually break the account. And sometimes we think that breaking accounts immediately are the best accounts, but they're not. They're signing up with every single agency. You know, sometimes we're like, hey, it takes us a couple times to get through a good client. And after that, we're in. We got to prove that we're a good industry expert here.

Yeah, so let's get into some of these strategies. And I feel like we're just doing it here, right? Because I know when we prepared for this, something that you want TLO to come and what you're passionate about is how can we take recruiters that are doing that one placement a month to two, three placements a month and becoming 500K+ billers, right? So why don't we do this? We might have touched on it already, but if I join your business, I have all the, the right criteria um, and I've got my niche market that I'm focusing on. And over the last 12, 24 months, I've sometimes— some months and quarters I've averaged like 2 placements a month, but over the year it's ended up being 1 placement a month because I haven't been as consistent, right? Like, talk me through, like, where, where do we start? Where would we start, do you think? So if I'm in your team and I'm like, Dante, you know, the big reason why I wanted to join here is I want to work closely with someone like you I was really convinced that I could join a team that are all high-performing. I want to be a $500K+ biller. That's what I want to average. Where would we start? Where would you start to sort of dissect how I approach things, my desk? Let's just go through that.

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. So if someone comes in with a $200K billing average placement, one a month, it's like $16,000, $17,000 placement fee, average placement fee that they have. First, I want to know, what are you good at? Are you good on the business development side? Are you good on the recruiting side? And after that, I want to be able to provide more support to develop you. If you're good at business development, I want to keep developing that. That never stops. And if you're slacking on the recruiting side, that means that we're going to spend a little more time and help you with either support or any type of training and professional development to get you to be a better recruiter on the recruitment side. Then after that, we're going to dive into your niche. Okay, so your average placement is $16,000, $17,000. You're making one placement a month. There's two ways to increase your billings. One is more volume. Two is cultivating the relationships with your current clients or current partnerships that you have. So when you come in, we want to make sure that if we start building some accounts, how do we cultivate those accounts from making one, two placements a year to making them four or five placements a year and the average billings up? So if your average placement fee you're charging is 20%, how do we get them to 25%? And now we even do, we start at 30% now. So that's one thing that we've done recently is like, how do we up our fees? And that's by providing value. And one thing that we've been very successful with some of the recruiters that have been in our company for the last, you know, 3, 4 years, and now that we're doing it with new recruiters coming in, is something that 90% recruiters don't do is go visit your clients. You know, we have a rule. If you make one placement and they're local, you need to go out and visit them, take them out to lunch. If you make 3 placements or 6 figures with a client, you're flying out. You're meeting them, you're having a happy hour, and you're getting to know them and try to see, you know, one of the questions that we like to ask is, if you made a couple placements with that client, it's like, hey, how many placements have you guys made with other Recruitments throughout the year? Oh, about 20 other placements they've made. It's all right, well, is there any way that, you know, we could cultivate a relationship here and we could help you? It's a win-win situation and get more out of that. Like, we do all these type of roles and so on, and we've been able to get our average billings per client a little bit higher. That's something that most recruiters, that when they come in, they don't do. They're just like, I'll just make a placement, make a placement, new business development, placement, placement. But now we kind of sit down and take a step back. All right, well, we're going to make placements, we're going to up your fees, and We're going to make sure that we niche down and we're going to be— we want you to be a market leader, a leader in that space, and help you ramp up. After that, we got to break down the placement fees and the metrics for you to hit those targets. If, you know, 5 submissions gets you 1 placement a month, then we got to do, you know, 10 submissions a month. That means that we need to bring in an average of 4 clients a month. You know, we've seen that 1 out of 4 clients turn out to be paying clients, and we kind of reverse engineer it that way. But I feel like the biggest thing I've seen from $200K recruiters when they come in is they're good, but they're just— I would say recruiting always comes back to building good relationships. And that's something I feel that has been lost over the last few years. And something that the best recruiters are really good at. And now we've been kind of taking a step back and making sure that we're cultivating those relationships with recruiters. So whenever a $200K recruiter comes in, we got to make sure that we cultivate the relations that they're doing and we set the right metrics for them to be able to hit those by increasing their fees and, you know, average placement that they need to hit a month to be able to hit that.

I'm always curious about this. Because again, I keep finding this particularly— it's definitely the case in the UK, Europe markets, but I continue to hear it on the US side in terms of how relationship-driven it is. It might take a bit more time to crack an account, get in there, but when you do, then, um, there's a great opportunity if you, if you do a really good job. But how do you think about what makes a great— how would you define a great relationship versus like a transactional relationship, do you know what I mean? Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, yeah. Ask a recruiter when's the last time they touched base with a candidate they placed, and ask a recruiter how was the last time they touched base with a client that they had business with. You'll be surprised that most of them do not touch base with them, uh, after a placement in 3 months, 6 months, or so on.

Really? And if it's a great relationship, they'd say what, like, oh, I spoke to him last week, or I spoke to him—

I have touch points in my calendar to touch base with every single client I've made business with. Yeah, at the end of the year, I'm bringing in a basket. I'm sending out a basket, whatever it is. The best recruiters, I feel like, are always doing a good job with follow-ups and touch, touch points with their clients. Where average recruiters, they make a placement, they're on to the next one. They forget about the placement they made quarter one with that client. Yeah, because that client's still hiring. They, you know, but we, we've realized too, and we made it in our company, that at the end of every quarter we're going to touch base with our paying clients. And you'll be surprised how much business we get from that.

Yeah, it's overlooked for sure. Yeah, because oftentimes when you think you're looking at your billings target and you're like, right, how am I going to get the next $200K? You automatically think, right, I need 10 new clients, right? You don't often take a step back like you said and look behind you. Yeah, I mean, taking that into my business and always trying to remind myself that is like, yeah, like, don't forget to look behind you and who you've spoken to in the past, who you spoke to last time when you spoke about that candidate and these things, right?

Yeah.

Or like you said, all, um, companies and organizations that you placed with 12 months ago, right? There was only that one particular need at the time, but when did you last speak to them, and do you understand what their current hiring goals are for the next quarter, the next 6 months? So you are right, and that is often overlooked.

Yeah, yeah. No, and I think it's huge if you want to have a lot of retention between your clients and make sure that you build more. The easiest way to look at it is look at your top clients right now, go visit them, go shake hands, and ask them, hey, I know you— how many placements have you guys made with recruitment agencies this year? Okay, well, they made, you know, 20 placements, let's say. You've only made 3 or 4. It's like, all right, well, how can I do better so I could help you guys grow in other departments and have a win-win? Um, and shoot, even offer them like Like, I could possibly even lower my fee to, you know, work more hand in hand with you, and I could put more attention and more commitment towards you. And you're way better off working with that client than trying to get 2, 3 new clients and start billing again. Because guess what? Next year you already have that client. You don't need tens of thousands of clients. You need a couple good clients that are gonna work with you year after year. And that's where our $500K billers are having a lot of success now. Because they have 2, 3 clients going in the next year that are 6-figure clients. So now it's just, all right, well, how can we get an extra $200K from new clients, right?

You put a lot of content out there, so I'm gonna go through— yeah, one or two posts, right? Because like you do put a lot of stuff out there around really just trying to help other recruiters and also showcase how you think about getting the most out of your recruitment desk and maximizing performance. So I wanna, I wanna just make sure that we understand We might have touched on bits, but this post here around the best recruiters are ruthlessly efficient. Take it from our recruiter who built 120K with 78% sub to interview and 100% offer acceptance. You said, here's how: manage your time well, plan your day the day before, have your ideal day today and follow it, focus on quality over quantity. So this is the bit where you've put around learn to say no, ask the hard questions to both candidates and clients, and build a good tiering system— tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. Um, focusing on activities that drive results. Don't follow the shiny object, stick to your deal box. Let's come back to that because there are other places around this deal box. I want to make sure I understand that. Get people on the phone, always call first. Again, that builds the building relationship piece. And then be super efficient, follow a good candidate interview process, follow a good client intake process. Talk to me about this, like, I, I agree with you, um, in terms of the best recruiters, again, they understand what they need to do day in, day out. Weekly. They don't go searching for the silver bullet, and they remain disciplined with the things that they know they should do, like where you've ended up with a 50 and 50 and the different numbers. So just talk us, talk us through this. What, what do you want to add to this? Because I think this would be interesting, and there'll be things that people can take.

Yeah, so every quarter, or when a recruiter has, uh, something that kind of stands out, I, I want to teach it to our team, but I also want to teach it to people out there on LinkedIn just tell them what it takes to be successful. And sometimes that— things that open up my eyes as well. This specific recruiter had not the highest submissions, but her interview to submission to interview and even her offers— she had 6 offers and 6 acceptances. But the one thing that I learned from her as well too that I didn't really share— I shared it with my team— she doesn't submit people that she's not 110% I'm sure of. She's like, all right, well, this candidate said that he might be interested, but he wants to think about it. People still send— some people still send them over. She will not. And she's like, nope, this person's 110% sure, and they— if they offer $100,000, they're going to take the job. And she does a very good job with that. She doesn't send anyone over, and she has those tough conversations before, and she's very strategic with that. She doesn't waste candidate's time, she doesn't waste clients' time. And now the reason why I post these posts is to help other recruiters. And if they find any value from this, I want them to think back at TLO and us and be like, well, shoot, I'm finding value from Dante's post, from the things that he's posting. How much value would I get if I actually worked at TLO? So that's one of my things that where I'm trying to give more away so people get better and just see what it takes to be successful. Build 100 $100,000+ a quarter and possibly come join us here at TLM.

Whilst we 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.

Tell me about your tiering system, because I do think if you're listening to this and a lot of the time you work your jobs at contingent, exclusive, this is absolutely crucial that you have a system that helps you understand what makes a job, a client, a more of a priority, right? Like, this is absolutely crucial, and again, is often overlooked and isn't common enough when I speak to recruitment teams. So what would make— what would be the main differences, or how do you define a tier 1 client to a tier 3 client? Yeah, I don't know, absolutely.

And this is a big mistake that a lot of recruiters make. They say, I have 10 positions right now. So, all right, well, let's dive into every single position right now. And then we realize, no, you got 2 positions.

Yeah, the pipeline quickly.

Yeah, you got 2 positions. And that's where recruiters go wrong. And they just do so much work. But a tier 1 position for us is a position that has been open under 90 days. There's little to no competition. Maybe you have 1 or 2 agencies working on it. There's human capital. By human capital, we mean that it's a— it's in Austin, Texas. There's people, and it's not in the middle of Wisconsin or whatever it is, right? And there's talent out there. And the last one is, is there a good interview process for that? If their interview process is 5 interviews and I fly out to the job site and everything, it's automatically a Tier 2 job, even if everything else is met there, because we want to make sure that they're fillable role and Essentially, if they meet all the requirements, that means that's a tier 1 job. We're going to put 2 to 3 candidates to that client within 96 hours. And we have another 96-hour rule that, you know, we kind of have internally here. So if they have the human capital, there's people there, if they have a good interview process, if they— if it's been open under 90 days and there's not much competition on it, it's a tier 1 rec. We send 2 to 3 candidates to that company all within 96 hours. Now, if you don't send someone within 96 hours to do 3 submissions, then that means it's not a tier 1 rec. That means that we're not doing our good job or you're not, you're not putting a focus on that. And we've seen that tier 1 recs, we have a 60% fill rate right now with tier 1 recs. There's still times where they fill the role internally or maybe the candidates applied or something like that. So, you know, that's what we kind of put a focus on. But that's where we've been doing a good job, especially with new recruiters coming in. They say, oh, well, I'm working all these recs. All right, well, let's go over your recs. Like, no, you don't have 10 recs, you have 2 positions right now. So now we put a big focus on that.

What would be a tier 3 client then?

Tier 3 clients, we just had one recently. Uh, it's been open for 9 months.

Okay.

Um, they've exhausted the search internally and with other agencies, and, um, the location was in San Francisco, uh, and the pay wasn't there.

Right.

But the client was willing to pay a $5,000 deposit and 30%, and we said, no, you're not taking that. Like, you're going to be running circles on that wreck, and that's a tier 3, tier 3 job. So tell them, yes, we'll, we'll see what we have. Post some jobs, put up some alerts, and if you find something, great. If you don't, move on. That's, that's you. You're not spending time on that.

So you would say to your team, so how— what would be the perspective in your team on tier 3 clients would it be? If I do speak to a candidate and I think it could potentially be a good fit, I'll send them, but I'm not proactively working out or trying to find candidates and people for that job.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we made a placement, uh, last week with a tier 3 client. Um, they're— they work with tons of agencies, um, and they have a really bad interview process as well too. But we signed them up, we made a placement in the past. But we have alerts on candidates and alert came up for a good superintendent in that area. We had the company and we sent them over and he ended up getting hired in 2 weeks. But that's a one-time deal. We probably make one placement with them a year, but we don't prioritize them at all.

And what have you found to be the most effective way to take a tier 2 client to a tier 1 client or tier 3 to tier 1? Because that's also part of the game. How good are you at Yeah, improving the commitment, consulting them on that interview process, because there'll be a lot of recruiters that basically just take it as a tier 2 client and don't do anything to upgrade them or consult them on how they can become a tier 1 client. You get what I mean? Because that's also where the opportunity is, because if you're willing to do that, then you're adding more value. You're consulting the— you're consulting them on the interview process, how they can actually, um, become a lot more marketable in the marketplace, how they can improve their reputation or whatever it may be. How do you think about that? Because that must be part of the strategy as well.

Yeah. If someone wants to focus with a tier 2 client, we— I always tell people, have the hard conversations with the client. And by what I mean by having the hard conversations with the client is saying, hey, if I find you someone that meets all the requirements that you have and I'm able to send them to you within, you know, tomorrow, how soon are you willing to interview? And so on. If you do everything right and they're still messing you around, tossing around, you don't move forward. But if they're actually willing to listen to you and they actually take some action there, then we put more of a focus there. And we've seen that sometimes it's not the clients, it's a recruiter, the way that they step up on bringing in good talent as well too. I feel like a lot of recruiters fault a lot of clients as well too. I know we did. And you know, there's still times that we bash our recruiters on, hey, like you say it's a tier 2 rec, but you sent this candidate that's had 9 jobs in 2 years. Like, right, what's going on here? So sometimes it goes on the recruiting side as well too. So if you want to prioritize and make a tier 2 client into a tier 1, we want to make sure that we ask them the tough conversation, and we do deliver, and, you know, they end up moving forward. All right, how do we cultivate that relationship more? Maybe go in office, maybe ask, see if there was other ways that we could improve our process to better hire people for them too.

Nice. Love that. Right. And then I feel like we've touched on this in different places, but let's just go through this together. So the other post here was to build $100K+ every quarter, you must follow a good system and do the hard work. Build out your recruiter deal box. Let's start there. What's this recruiter deal box?

So recruiter deal box, it's kind of a term that you use in real estate here in the US. Basically in real estate, you get— if you want to buy a single-family home in a corner lot, this much square footage, then you have to stick to that. That's my real estate, that's my buyer box basically.

Right.

So we made that into recruiting. So in recruiting, my recruiter deal box has to be, okay, what is your market, your mapping, your sector, industry, a client, your ideal client profile, and your ideal candidate profile? And that is going to be your recruiter deal box. If you get a rec that's not within your recruiter deal box, don't focus on it, don't even look at it. It has to be within your recruiter deal box.

Right, right, let's just wait. So just so I understand that, so I get what you're saying. Yeah, so it's like This is like the recipe for like what should, yeah, like to get to make deals basically. Like these should be all the things that make up. So what did you say, sorry? Your ideal client. Yeah. Your ideal candidate profile. What was the other two, sorry?

Ideal client profile, ideal candidate profile, the location, market mapping location and sector industry. Every recruiter has a different recruiter deal box.

So that's your niche basically.

Yeah, so basically your niche. Yeah. And you have to focus on that and—

Yeah.

A lot of—

that's why you're saying build your recruiter, but you need to understand that. Yeah, that— no, that is a really good point because again, I see this time and time again in companies when we're talking about driving performance is I say to them, if I was to speak— if I was to speak to 5 of your team and they were to explain to a stranger what their ideal client looks like, how confident would you be? The real answer to that is not very confident. Yeah, right, in the detail that it needs to be, like, like that. That's the thing. So I understand. So that's great. So Yeah, if you're listening to this and you don't truly understand those, those key metrics of like the recipe to be successful in your market, or what makes up your market, your niche, etc., you have to do that. So okay, build out your recruiter deal box, that makes sense. So then find 15-20 companies within your deal box so that tick the things that you just said, right? Find 2-3 hiring managers from each company and then follow a good sales process. You put in brackets 7-step sales process. And then you put one, uh, one, the exact— want access to our exact target sales approach that helps, uh, recruiters build $100K consistently, drop it in the comments. So let's just talk about this. So we're talking about strategy here. So it starts the Recruiter Deal Box, and then let's go through these steps because I think this will be really helpful for people. Yeah, 15, 20 companies, 2, 3 hiring managers, good sales process.

Yeah, so basically it's essentially what we do for our recruiters, just put it out there for everyone. And the 7-step process is a combination of emails, call, email, provide value with an NPC, call, then a follow-up. But it usually takes 3 to 5 to actually hear something back. Sometimes we won't even hear anything from those, but we've seen that if you have a good setup process— I know the first one starts out with an email. After that email, follow up with a call. When you— after you follow up with a call, it's a warmer conversation because you're following up on the email that you just sent. The third one could be providing value on maybe the industry, maybe anything like that that could be resourceful for the client. The fourth one could be another call. The fifth one, an NPC. Then sixth one's another call. Seventh one, hey, where do we go from here? Yeah.

Okay, so what you're— again, this is like really not done enough by people, so like I'm glad you're sharing your take on this. But what you're basically saying to people is, if you're struggling right now, particularly on maybe getting the most out of your desk, you're not billing as much as you'd like to be, or you're maybe struggling on the new business side, this is literally 4 steps that you can follow to change that. So build your recruiter deal book. So actually understand your niche. What is the skill set that you're like laser focused on, always, um, building candidates in that you represent? Do you understand what your target client is? And then you said like location, what you're focusing on. Um, once you've got that, then you need to find companies that fit that. So then that's your target client. Yes. Right, 15 to 20. Then you're going to then further map that out by looking at the people that need to be approaching.

Yeah.

And then simply your 7-step sales process here is— and this is what's often missed— is if I— if we was in the— if you was my manager and I said yeah, I've, I've worked that, um, client. What you've told me is that I've done those 7 steps. But I think what's often missed is when I say, yeah, I've like worked that client, or, um, yeah, I'm trying to get in with that target client, that doesn't really mean anything. There isn't like an agreed— like, what does that mean? Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So like, if I say I've chased a lead, or I've chased one of my clients in my Recruiter Deal Box, if we haven't agreed that 7-step sales process, yeah, that doesn't mean anything. It's like, what have you called them on Tuesday? And then have you sent an email? So what you're saying is you have to have a process that you follow. Once you get to the end of that, are you going to then repeat it or what are you going to do? But I can then say to you, Dante, I've done all of the bits. I just haven't been able to get a hold of them yet. But you've built that 7-step sales process to make sure it's actually got worked properly, right?

Yeah. And after we're done with that process and we didn't hear back from some people, our system tags who replied, who we connected with. Then the companies that we haven't with will go back into another funnel and we start again the 7-step process. So we never give up until we get a no or a maybe or a yes.

Yeah, it's just if you're listening to this and you haven't got, you can't define like how you chase the lead or how you approach the target client, that is what you have to define. It's just agreeing with yourself like what are you going to do that makes you uh, like at peace with, like, I've worked that client. Because if, if it's just like I'm gonna just keep chasing them each week, that isn't a process. Do you get what I mean? Yeah. I think you've got to build, build that. It's absolutely key. Um, all right, cool. What are you— what's top of mind for you then? So what are you really doubling down on, focusing on, that you think is going to keep on making sure that your team are improving, you're getting the most out of you know, this entrepreneurial journey that you're on? Like, what are you really focusing on, doubling down on, that you think is going to pay off in another 6-12 months' time?

Yeah, um, I think as a recruitment agency owner, the hardest part is getting out of the business and focusing on the business. Doesn't mean that I'm going to go golfing on Mondays anymore. It means that, uh, now my time is, all right, well, I've stepped out of the business. I have my role as, uh, in the recruiting side. Simon deals more on the sales side. How do we keep developing people now to become even better recruiters? And when you do that, it takes a hit in your revenue. It does, 'cause if you were billing, you were bringing in money to the business, and it takes a hit, but you have to be willing to take that hit to be able to excel with their business, because we've been stuck at this 11 to 13 heads in recruitment, but we've actually been able to almost to 30-something percent our revenue with the same amount of people. Which is good. Which is really good.

Yeah.

And we were able to step out of the business as well too. So now my priority is how can I keep providing more value on LinkedIn and how can I bring in more recruiters that are experienced and struggling between that $200,000 to $300,000 a year and help them come into our company and provide them all the tools, technology, support, professional development, and our techniques that have been successful to become, for our recruiters to become $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 billers. One thing that we are focusing on this year a lot more is lead generation because we realized that we have a problem right now. Our problem is that our recruiters are spending way too much time putting those lists together. Finding 20, 15 to 20 companies, finding 2 to 3 hiring managers, than following the 7-step process. So now we're building kind of an offshore team that does that process for our recruiters, where our recruiters are more focused on going out to meet—

Doing the 7-step sales process, not doing the bidding and bidding. Yeah, makes sense.

7-step sales process, meeting our clients, and nurturing those relationships with our current companies, where that's where they make the most money, when they're on the phone, when they're meeting with the clients, not building, spending 3, 4 hours a week building these lists. That's one of the biggest problems that we're dealing with right now, and we're trying to overcome. Man, we've been able to figure out, but now we got to build in company-wide. So now every time when I talk to new recruiters, like, hey, like, I'm going to be bringing in leads to you. Like, I want you to cultivate those leads, grow those relationships, and, you know, recruit. Later on, I want to have a delivery team as well too that could be able to support those people that are really good at building those relationships, having those strategic partnerships right now. So those are some of the things that we're planning, we're working on right now. To get to a $5 million business and an 8-figure business here in the next few years.

I love that. Well, look, Dante, thank you so much for sharing, being really open on, you know, the things that you're finding work, the challenges. Really appreciate you joining me on the pod.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's fun.