What It Takes To Win In 2025 - Live Podcast in Manchester

Evening everyone, if I could have your attention please. If we could, awesome. Thank you so much for coming. Just a few things, just because I learned this the hard way doing a few events in Manchester, but the bar is closed when we're doing this event, so you won't be able to get a drink because I learned the hard way. Rude people like to get a drink whilst we're doing the podcast. It's not very helpful. So I'm going to do a bit of an introduction before we get started, but very quickly, how many of you is it your first event tonight, if you could put your hands up quickly. Okay, yeah, nice. So I'll, um, just do a bit of an explanation on how this is gonna go. But, um, really the, the goal, which is around the podcast, is I want all of you to walk away with hopefully at least one strategy, one technique, um, that you could consider taking to your business, your recruitment desk tomorrow. So I'm all about the how content. So how we're going to try and achieve that tonight, we've got 3 different recruitment founders, leaders who are all at very different stages, have different ambitions, different goals. And we're really gonna cover the sort of pillars of a recruitment business. So we're gonna talk about their go-to-market strategy. So how do they believe they're gonna reach their targets this year by acquiring new clients? How are they gonna reach their goals by getting their existing clients to spend more money with them? And how they're thinking about marketing. We're definitely gonna be talking about people and culture. So how are they feeling and approaching, attracting talent, retaining talent? How are they driving standards? Should they be using KPIs? Should they not? And we're also then going to be talking about operations and tech. So this definitely isn't going to be a 60-minute conversation around AI. I think we're all quite sick of that already, but we will definitely be talking about how are we approaching leveraging technology? How are we thinking about getting more out of our teams? And these types of things. And the goal there really is hopefully there's a couple of things, but at least one thing that you can all take away into your businesses and into your desk tomorrow. So without further ado, if you could put your hands together, welcome the panelists and we'll get stuck in. I have to turn these bad boys on. So that's on.

It is.

It should be. What we do, a little mic test.

You got yours on?

Turn it on. Yeah, turn that red button. Test that bad boy.

Hello, mate.

Is that okay?

Hello. All good?

How is yours? All good?

Hello.

Hello.

Yeah, nice. Okay. You can hear us at the back? All sweet? Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Yeah, be careful. These are a bit slippy. We don't want any— okay. Awesome. I want to make sure I'm settled. Settled?

Yeah?

Nice. Okay. It is quite tight up here, innit? Fucking hell, really?

It's pretty snug.

Right, okay. It works, doesn't it? Okay. So as We all prepared for this. We know obviously what we want, hopefully people here to leave with. There's a couple of things that we're going to be talking about, but to give everyone some immediate context, when we did prepare for this, what they've all kind of shared with me is basically like where they are on their journey. How did their businesses perform last year? What are their big goals for this year? So I'm going to give you all a bit of a bit of context. I'll start with Elliot's business, Hubscale. And then we'll sort of get into it. But then we can sort of all talk about things being on the same page. So Elliot, let me know if I get any of this wrong, okay? If any of these, this information is wrong. So your business, US and Europe, mainly in terms of where you do business, but your world is cybersecurity. Within your business, you also have an executive search arm to the business. Team structure right now, you've got 14 people in the company, one in ops, soon to have someone join from a marketing standpoint. And you've also had along the journey a strategic advisor that's been really pivotal Lars, your performance with you guys being a perm business, net fee income of $1.6 million. Big goals, big priorities this year is you have a big target of achieving over $5 million in revenue this year with the team that you have. And big, big focus is how can we get more of our customers to spend with us across the different verticals that you guys have built, which we're going to get into. Is that right?

Indeed.

Okay, nice. Cool. Abby, your business is and your world is hospitality. All perm. You've got 3 different revenue streams in the business. Uh, 78% of that is recruitment. Within that, 25% of the business that you're doing is retained, or you have a subscription service, uh, that you offer clients and work with them. And then the rest, 75%, is contingent. You then have a training part of the business, which is around 18% of your revenue. And then also you've got consultancy part of the business now, which is around 2%, um, as well. So you've got 3 different revenue streams there. Team structure today, you've got 20 people in the organization. 2 at director level, 4 recruitment leaders, 1 in leading the training side. I've got 8 recruiters, 2 trainers, and then 3 in central support, marketing, finance, head of BD. Is that right? Let's go. Okay. Last year's performance, 1.9 million as a business. Big goals this year, break the 2 million mark, 2.1 million. Don't currently see that you're going to have to grow headcount to do that. You're looking to really maximize the existing team and improve the performance per head. And again, big goal priority for you this year is how can we get more of our customers spending in those 3 different buckets and spending across the 3 different products and services. Yeah.

Okay.

Last but not least, John obviously ran— I got— I put ran Finley James for 20+ years. Is that right? I was going to say—

okay.

So ran Finley James for 20+ years before that went out of business. You then launched It's Just You 7 months ago. Um, you are now specialising in HR, finance, and marketing as a business, all Northwest, perm and contract, team of 3, uh, currently, and revenue to date since the business has, uh, been inception is 85 grand. Is that right?

That's right.

Yeah. Okay, cool. And then big goals, priorities for you this year in your world is, um, wanna, uh, go into year 2 with some solid profit, solid foundations where you can start then really focusing on growth again. And eventually hopefully have start, uh, people in the business that have an opportunity to own part of the business in the future.

Yeah, that's correct. Yeah.

Okay, cool. Hopefully we're now on the same page. So this is, this is sort of— I think what's really important with these panels is I want to try and get people at different stages, have different goals, because success looks different for a lot of people. So I think it's really important when I do these things that hopefully there's different people that can relate to different people, and you can see different stories and different aspects. So where we wanted to start, this is actually a question that come up at our London event. I thought it was a cool place to start, but Obviously, we've titled this How to Win in 2025. So, John, I'm going to come to you first and just sort of ask the question on if we're thinking about winning, what would be your definition of winning in your business? Like, how do you think about if you were to win this year, what does that look like to you? How would you define winning in your business context?

I think for me, winning is, is not losing. That is a really good starting point for 2025. So The market is very, very different. So I've been involved in recruitment now for 30 years, and in many respects, it's the— this is kind of a more difficult market than 2000. It's a more difficult market than 2008, and there's more change and more disruption going on that at any time than, than I ever remember. So I think the important thing is when I categorise winning, it's winning on a daily basis and it's winning on an hourly basis. So I work on the premise I never have a bad day because I basically put my day into 8 little mini buckets and 8 hours and I set myself a target of what am I going to achieve in each of those separate hours. And so long as I've done that, whether deals happen, whether they don't happen, whether somebody gets fired, somebody doesn't pay me, so long as I've controlled the controllables, I've won that day. So, and I find if you win on an hourly basis and then you win on a daily basis and you win on a weekly basis, you end up basically as a result winning. And I think when I then kind of discuss that with my team, it's all about controlling the controllables and not being upset about, you know, what, you know, the orange guy in America does tomorrow. Or, you know, we already there.

Fuck me.

Yeah, sorry, guys.

All right, no, I, I, I had to go first. Okay, fair.

Uh, so, you know, we, we can't control basically somebody, you know, giving you 10 jobs and then, you know, pulling 8 of them tomorrow. We can't control any of that, but we can control our mindset. So For me, winning is having a healthy body, healthy mind, you know, an optimistic view of the world that you're going to get through this. Because I think if you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you can't. And it's all about mindset. But breaking your day into little kind of buckets and basically winning every one of those hours, you tend to end up being in a positive place.

Nice.

Love that.

Elliot, I'm going to come to you next. How would you define winning? If you win this year, how do you think about that?

I just think it's very simple. It's just being number one at literally everything that you do on a day-to-day basis. So super relevant what you're doing, just being number one at it. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to take it any longer than that, but that's literally the same principle.

Abby, winning for you, how do you think about this?

It's definitely about wanting to get up and go to work every day, like having fun, like, you know, for everybody, not just me, the whole team that feels really important. I want to make sure that we are perceived to be the best at what we do. Like, that's not necessarily about revenue, that's about genuinely offering a service that's better, doing it in a values-driven way. You know, I'd love the idea of being perceived in our sector as the, you know, the go-to place, and that's really important. And, you know, creating a really great place to work, I think it probably starts there.

Nice. Love that. So when we all prepared for this and this came out of our London event as well, so we're going to start here. But when I was speaking to all of the panelists around how do they think they're going to have the best chance of achieving their goals this year, where we sort of ended up going to was one of the core ways was having more of their existing clients or existing relationships ultimately spend more money with them versus what new clients, new brands we're not working with yet that have nothing, that don't know anything about us. Who are going to spend money with us and then we're going to reach our target. So actually where we wanted to start was some of the things that all of these 3 people are thinking about when it comes to increasing the client spend and how they're going about that. So Elliot, I'm going to come to you first on this. Why don't you start by sharing that story? Because this has actually come up a few times around. I'll let you tell it, but a client that you thought was in the bag, you've got a really good relationship, they spend a lot of money with you, but then you had some learnings and then we can sort of build on it from there.

Yes.

So basically about, I think it was about 3.5 years ago, we thought we was the best and only sole recruiter for this one client. Got to the end of the year with about $350,000 with them. We was like, oh my God, we are the dogs bollocks, right? Got to the end of the year. We had a kind of review call with the team and they go, oh, how much you spend with us? Oh, $350,000. Brilliant, brilliant. And then they go, we spent $4 million on recruitment this year. $4 million. So When you actually break that down, you've got so much more opportunity in the stuff. And you'll see this in the podcast today about how and why we built Hubscale in the way that we have. We've got so many different business units going after one market, therefore being able to attract more talent and more customers, sorry, in a better way as well.

So do you want to just, because I think it builds on this, talk to us a bit about, because I think we've all heard at some point going niche or people saying it's important to be niche. Do you want to just talk to us a bit about how in your world, cybersecurity, you've got Is it 5 verticals, 5 different business units that then maps to different ways that maybe one client could, you know, work with you? Talk to us a bit about that because I think that's interesting.

Yeah, perfect. So we did some data last year. So there's 4,000 security vendors in, in the market and we work with 25 last year. So that's about 0.4% market share in the market that we have. And we did $1.6 million in revenue. We've not even maximized the amount of customers and the stuff that we're doing with the same customers. And that's just on the vendor piece. So if you break it up again, you've got consultancies and end user tech. So the amount of stuff you can do in one market is absolutely crazy. So breaking that down and where are we going to hire people for the next maybe few years and where we already have now. So startups, growth team, product and tech, enterprise security. We've got two offices now in Austin as well. So it's all just about figuring out where you can make more money in the same market and really, really focusing on one thing because that comes down to marketing, branding, identity, everything along those lines as well, right? So you've got to have, in my opinion personally, if you just do one thing and do the best, become the best in the world at that one thing, then it's a lot easier to attract talent and customers and people and expand into different accounts and stuff like that as well.

Nice. And then was that always the plan or did that sort of happen when you saw it?

Always the plan. So I did it in my previous business. So I learned how to do everything in my previous business. Saw where the gaps were in terms of where teams weren't working. But everything that we are building now always all works together as a team and simultaneously as well. So one team can pass candidates and clients to the other team and et cetera and vice versa. And everybody gets paid for that sort of stuff as well, splits-wise, et cetera, all that kind of stuff. So everything works kind of cohesively, if that makes sense as well.

Mm-hmm.

But that also comes with its challenges, right? You, you got kind of on top of each other. But as I explained before, The market is really big and it's about picking the one market that you can actually do stuff like that in. Not really, really small, really niche market where cyber looks niche on the outside surface, but you break it down, it's actually huge. So it's having that opportunity as well in the right market to do that.

And then just because this is then comes on to Abby, how you're approaching this in your business, but tell us a bit about, because I think firstly, if we, I speak to recruitment leaders a lot where a priority might be we want people to cross-sell more or make the most out of the relationships that we have. You know, a big part of that is have we got the incentives? Incentives set up correctly. So talk to us a bit about that, because that might be interesting to people in terms of how you do that revenue sharing model, in terms of someone brings on the client, but then, you know, people in the business are then doing placements with them. Talk to us a bit about how that works.

So I also think it, I think it starts before having the splits and things like that in place. I think it's the culture. So how people act and all that stuff comes back to the culture of the business. And if we didn't do it from the very, very beginning and we let things slide and this didn't happen this way, or whatever it was, or I didn't act that way, or the other Elliot didn't act that There's two Elliotts in the business, by the way. Super confusing. But effectively, that runs from the culture from the very beginning. And you've got to have that instilled with everybody who comes in the door that this is the way that we operate. If you don't have that, it's never going to work. But on the flip side of that, having the splits in there is super important as well. So 50/50, anything passed across from product and tech to go to market, for example, after a certain period of time. So after 3 deals, once the relationship should have been passed away, then it goes down to 25/75. So the BD person who brought on the client is always getting paid, always. And then as the relationship passed and they become less involved in that relationship, then more incentive becomes for the, for the people on the other side of it as well. So we're early, right? We're 14 people. Is that going to work for the rest of the time? No idea. But that is what we're kind of— and that was what— that's what we're having in place. And it's working in principle and in practice at the moment.

Nice.

Abby, let's sort of talk about how you're approaching this in your business, because one of the things that you pointed out in terms of if we're going to get our clients to spend more money with us, you've got 3 different ways potentially they could work with you. You sort of felt like one of the things that maybe you need to really focus on or make sure the team are doing more effectively is just really understanding what the client's problems are. Because I guess if they actually understand those things, then depending on what they learn, discover, they can go, well, actually, we've got the training part of the business that could actually really help you solve that. So talk to us a bit about that, because I do think that also goes hand in hand. If we're effective at discovery, asking good quality questions versus just chasing the job, then we're gonna have a better chance of actually educating and consulting and going, hang on a minute, this is actually how we could help you beyond the recruitment, which is why we ended up speaking in the first place.

Yeah, sure. So we have 3 divisions, or 3 kind of elements to the business. One is domestic recruitment, which we kind of split into north and south, Manchester and London. And we've got a training division that does leadership training within the sector. And then we've got an international division that relocates, in the main relocates um, international workers into the UK. Hospitality has got a kind of real skills gap, um, and we think, you know, at that discovery phase, it just feels really crucial to be able to understand exactly what somebody's problem is and asking, you know, the right questions. I think you've got to, to build trust and to, um, like, really get to the— to be able to sell anything or to really get to the bottom of what someone's pain point is. And that's different for different roles within the employer that you're talking to, of course. But, and I don't actually think we've mastered it, by the way. I think we've done some analysis recently, and in terms of clients that we're selling all three of our divisions to, we're actually, we've got a long way to go. But by analyzing it and seeing what it looks like, we know that we've got, you know, we can solve problems, and I think that's why we set up the training division in the first place. You know, to go to— we were finding to go to our clients and to talk about recruitment, it felt much easier, better, more credible to go to clients and talk about people strategy and retention and things that you can kind of much beyond finding somebody, you know, filling a vacancy. So now our challenge is really to, you know, to be talking to the decision maker, of course, and talking to the right person. But then if you get to the right level of person, then we've got the ability to sell the different divisions within the organization. Just in terms of solving problems, one of the problems that we faced in hospitality— everybody knows hospitality is quite a challenging sector to work in— was cost. You know, whatever, however great our candidates were, however great our service was, cost was still a huge factor for people. And our fill rate at the time when we started thinking about this was probably around 40%, which was, you know, okay for a mainly contingent agency. But it was really fucking pissing me off that we weren't filling 60% of the roles, and it was annoying everybody, you know. The well-being of the team was, you know, they talk about the recruitment roller coaster. We really wanted— Charlotte and I really wanted to kind of flatten that out. So we started talking to Paul, who works with us from All Star, and I said, I really want to kind of create something that is a lower cost. And he's like, you're crazy, that's not what happens. And we started talking more and more about it, and we started talking about subscriptions and how that would work. And we kind of got to the thinking that if we can increase our fill rate to whether that's 60%, 80%, 100%, actually we can bring our fee down. So not only the cross-selling element, but we were able to create 3 different ways of working. So going to our clients and talking about a subscription model, a committed way of working, which is an amount upfront, and then a standard way, just really opened up a different level of conversation and allowed us to solve different problems. And it felt as though we were genuinely consultants.

And then just on that, because this has come up quite a bit, and if any of you dive into sales content or want to get better, you're going to hear that word problems pretty quickly. Focus on problems, provide solutions. But when I do speak to managers, leaders, founders, that can be a bit of a mindset shift or like something that they can find challenging to, you know, communicate to a recruiter that no, don't go straight into the job and where you're, you know, where you can see you're gonna make that placement, make the money. It does potentially require a different sort of mindset, different approach. So how have you found that with your team when maybe they've been used to going straight into the job brief and the skills?

Yeah, I think we've got work to do on it, but I think if you go into, we do two types of call with a client, a discovery call, which is a bit more strategic and talking about, right, what are their challenges? What are their greatest pain points? What kind of service would they want from somebody? And then once we do have vacancies, obviously we go into a role brief scenario and start the completely two different, often two different people, two different types of conversation. One of the challenges we were facing is that once a consultant was in that role brief mode, that was talking about process and a role to fill, and it was quite difficult for them then to come back out of it and then having a higher level of conversation and talking more strategically. And I think that's about confidence. I think that's about training. And certainly I would say 30 or 40% of my role I see as developing confidence and developing skills in people's ability to have a different level of conversation. It just shuts it down. It's so transactional talking about a vacancy, whereas you start talking about, you know, the layer up of, you know, how can we help in a different way? What are your problems? It just feels a lot nicer conversation.

Jordan, how are you thinking about this? Because one of the things that you shared with me was you're very much thinking with the stage that your business is at is fewer clients, more targeted clients, way more face-to-face meetings with the people that you're already working with. With the stage that you're at, how are you thinking about having your existing clients that you've won already spend more money with you and doubling down on that way? Is it the face-to-face piece and really doubling down on that? How are you approaching that in your world?

Yeah, I think the way we look at it is I've gone from working in a, like, a global tech sales recruitment company where we were placing people all over the world. And then when things changed and we then set up the new business, it was, right, we're going to concentrate on filling roles within 50 miles of Manchester. And so we looked at kind of what's our USP? And our USP is that the personality of the people who work for me. So I looked at if I can get these people in front of people, they will prefer to deal with them than some of the other big recruitment companies who place finance people and HR people. So our USP is face to face. So every client we've worked with thus far, so we've, we've placed with 3/4 of the clients we've worked with and we've met them all. Now, I was placing people for years where we had never met the candidate, never met the client. And, and that was just the, the norm for us. So it's kind of looking at what you've got in your business. And if you've got people who are great relationship builders, they've got lovely personalities and people will like them. They're wasted on a telephone call. They are amazing face to face. So I basically said, well, I don't really want to go outside. I don't want to go as far as Birmingham. I don't want to go much further than Leeds. I want to go across to Liverpool and Sheffield, maybe that's it, that's where our client base is. But there's enough companies taking on finance, HR, and marketing people within 50 miles of this building. So it's— we then target all those clients who would physically hire and, and basically go and meet them. And that's the same with the candidates. So my guys would have a weekly target to meet candidates face to face. And, you know, half the people in this room today may well be recruiters. How many of you have met a candidate face to face in the last week?

Is that a question?

That is, that is a question. And we've got one. Well, we've got a few more. We've got a few more. So we've got a few more and then a few like, well, what I would say is how many people have met a candidate this week compared to how many people who've made an AI model of themselves I would, and I know there's more AI models out there than, uh, than candidates being met. So it's, it's working with what you've got. But, you know, I've gone from running a, an 80-person recruitment company with a £400,000 a month overhead to basically working with what I've got. And, uh, basically I, I'm now at a point whereby If face-to-face, super efficient, super productive, and then basically cross-selling within a small number of accounts can get it done, that's what I'll do.

Nice. I do. I was saying it to a few of you. I don't think in today's world, do you have to meet people face-to-face to do business? Absolutely not. But I think from a lot of the conversations I've had, I don't know how you all feel about this, but meeting people face-to-face, getting in front of people, picking up the phone has 100% become a competitive advantage. From the conversations I'm having, there's a lot of people that aren't going out to meet people, aren't willing to pick up the phone. So I do understand that, particularly if you're local, then you can use that to your advantage. We're going to move this on to a bit more of a new client acquisition focus. But before I do, Elliot, we had this question from someone in the audience. I think it's the right time to ask it. But the question is, because some other people might be thinking about this, we're looking to drive up our average deal size. We do the odd VP, C-level placement here and there, but we really want to be doing more work on this sort of exec search level, more senior level. What advice would you give someone that wants to do more of those searches, maybe wants to go up higher on anything that comes to mind there? How did you guys approach it? Because that's obviously a separate part of your separate arm of your business.

I think, um, great question, by the way. And I think honestly everybody's going to get sick of me just saying one market because that's literally my whole thing. But there's two things. Do one market, number one, become more of an expert in that, then you can go further upstream. Um, but the second piece of it is just reach out to bigger people. Like, I remember when I was in, um, I was 24 years old in my first job in Stratford, and I pulled on a C-level role in a publicly traded company just by e-shotting the CEO. But most people wouldn't do that. It was complete naivety, and I probably shouldn't have done it at the end of the day. But at the same time, it still happened. But I think people get a little bit worried because they started doing lower-level positions in the career but they don't just go for the big one. There's a book called Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek. We talked about getting people on the podcast and he's emailing like Jeff Bezos and people like that. That's obviously— don't do that maybe, but the level of thing that you need to be thinking about is just take it to the next level. So my complete advice would be to narrow down exactly what you're doing in terms of the markets, whether that's cyber, whether that's something else, whatever it is, narrow that down, become more of a specialist in one thing, create a candidate pool, at that senior level. So do opens to work searches, etc. at that senior level within your niche market, build up really good credibility in that space and then go out there and take them people back to market. But people give up after 2 months of doing that. It takes years. It takes genuinely years of doing it constantly for a long period of time and doing the right things to actually build something in executive search. You're going against Korn Ferry, Heidrick Struggles, the biggest search firms in the whole world. It doesn't happen overnight. You might get lucky like I did, right? And this is one of them things, but— or you might not, and you might continuously do that for a long period of time. So one market, keep doing it consistently, build good credibility with really, really senior people, take them out to, to kind of take them out to companies that you probably wouldn't even think about before, and then go from there. But that would be my advice on that question. So good question. It could be like, yeah, just some elements of limiting beliefs there, maybe in terms of limiting beliefs, but also you've got to narrow the market that you're doing, in my opinion, and create a real your candidate pool in that, because what— what you can do that with anything. You— what is recruitment? You're providing a service to a client, right? And that client is a candidate, a person. So what do you need to then get? You need to get the best people in the market. So how do you do that? By really understanding what the candidates need, what the clients need about the candidate side. So it's just really understanding that thing that you're doing. Um, a lot of people just do SaaS, it's huge, or medical devices or whatever that is. Like, I don't know how big medical devices is, but you've got to just find a little part of the niche. It might be a part of or a very small part of something else that you're doing, but become known in that world. And that'd be one thing that would I say, and that works for me because that's all I've ever done and it works. So other people might have different opinions to that, but that's, that's the thing that I would say.

So you don't need to go to that senior part of the market with fake jobs?

No, that's the worst thing you can do.

I've heard people do that.

Literally the worst thing you could do because then you're just damaging your reputation, right?

Yeah.

Let's move this on. As I said, to the new business piece, I'm going to come to you. This is what I've always respected about Abby is you've always, I feel like, done things true to your values. Customer experience. I know you've always doubled down on that, which is why I've always enjoyed our conversations. And I think this is very testament when you basically position candidate speccing in a very Abby way. Do you want to tell us about that? Because you literally said to me, we don't really do much candidate speccing. So why don't you tell us a bit about why that is, and then you can talk to us a bit about how you're now approaching something that many people will do in this room and is a consistent channel for people.

Um, it's called goating.

Yeah, I know, I thought that was something else.

Yeah, why don't you explain what that is then?

Because it's greatest of all time. Okay, and then there's one brand, and then laser goating. Um, so, um, my historical views about candidates backing— because I was an in-house, uh, I looked after recruitment, um, for a big bars group that you might know, Revolution Vodka Bars, many years ago. Um, and people used to send me really shit CVs, and I hated this process. And, you know, then kind of have arguments with these really young recruiters about ownership of candidates, and it was just a total shit show. Um, and so I was really anti it, and I, um, really didn't like it. And then I think, um, a friend of mine once told me that something like 30% of her revenue came from sending candidates. I was like, oh, fuck. Um, so we kind of created a strategy, um, uh, we called it Goating.

It's an—

it has been in the main an internal term. Um, sorry, there's the odd person that, you know, likes to be called the greatest of all time. They're mainly men. Um, but they, um, so our process has been setting really clear criteria for a start. So, um, there's about 10 criteria around a CV that you have to have in order to be a GOAT. Um, I'm hearing myself say it and I'm slightly worrying about the response here, but, um, yeah, the criteria for us has to be things like certain time in role and promotion within a role. Um, it has to just be, you know, a highly valuable kind of candidate basically. The process is we redact a CV and we send it, and then, and I'm sure that this might roll some eyes, but we then ask permission whether we can send the CV. So I know that—

To who?

To our clients. So we would say, look, this is a, you know, a stripped-back version of a CV. Are you happy for us to send the full version? Laser-goating is about sending to an existing client, or even better, laser-goating existing client with a job that you might not have on. And we've had some really great success with it. We've had a lot of fun with it, as you can imagine. And it's been for us, I think, as long as we've— I'm really conscious about being selfless, and I think being selfless makes us better at recruitment. And I think the moment you start to become selfish and make it about you, to me, we failed. I think this is about how we can offer great talent to our clients and in hospitality sector, and how we can offer a great role and a great experience to our candidates. So it's always got to be about them. So So I think if we've got that at the core, then we can't get it wrong. We've had some really good success with it.

Nice. Goating.

Goating. Anybody's welcome to use that term. I've not like trademarked it or anything like that.

John, you had some thoughts on this and some things you've been— I mean, you— I found this quite interesting, to be fair. You may— I don't know if it's because it's the local market. I have no idea. You tell me. But you sort of shared with me that from a new business standpoint, what you found to be not as effective was actually trying to speak to clients about their problems and their challenges and actually just, you know, being super direct and being like, I've got this person, they might be able to add value to, you know, you fill in the blanks. But you told me that actually where you found the most success is just really trying to, you know, take that person to market and do the things that Abby is talking about there.

Yeah, I suppose we wouldn't call it Go team, but you're missing out. Yeah, we might change. So for us, that is one, one-off thing. And so whether it's with the guys who work at It's Just You or any of the advisory people that I'm helping right now, I would basically suggest an hour a day should be taking candidates to market. So for example, if you register 2 candidates in a morning and they were good enough to register, then you owe it to yourself and you owe it to them to actually go to market. But I'm not talking about sending CVs and this is actually getting on the phone and talking to people about specific candidates you've met and interviewed that day. So I— one of the people who works for me is an amazing salesperson, is absolutely fantastic on the telephone. Is really engaging. And 10 years ago when it was all about getting past the gatekeeper, she would have been phenomenal. As far as I'm concerned, the market at the moment is, isn't so much about making relationships. It's that they need jobs filling, so to speak. So what Elliot's doing in his market, in a very niche specific market, I applaud. I think it's fantastic. It's amazing. People who want a finance person in situ next Monday aren't interested in talking about their problems and their pains and their plan for the next 6, 9, 12 months. They're interested in having somebody in a seat on Monday. So we physically look to take people to market. But this happens on a daily basis that, you know, I work on the premise that If one of my consultants or one of my advisory guys is registering 10 candidates a week, you should be taking— you should be making 40 calls out to the market about that particular person. And some of those calls might be where they want to work or, you know, whether you feel they've got a really good match. And yeah, you'd never talk to clients about them if they didn't want to go for that job. But it's, it's proactively taking them to market. In an intentional way and then letting the candidate know how you're getting on and what kind of feedback you're getting and what help can you give me. So I'm not interested. So my, you know, there's a lot of talk in the market about make more calls. I hear about and see and spot and watch loads of consultants making loads of aimless calls. And I'll be honest, they haven't got a script of any description whatsoever. They're having a bit of a chat and they're trying to basically set up another call in a week's time that the person doesn't end up actually attending anyway. So I, I want to go, if I've got, basically if I'm making a call into the market, it's about, you know, a, a particular candidate. Or the other thing I talked to you about was when I first got into the game 30 years ago, it was all about, you know, getting leads and acquiring leads and going to market and actually executing and turning those leads into job specs. That seems to be a thing of the past. So once again, you know, the guys at my place will be basically spending an hour a day actually getting leads. And so when we are talking to clients, we're talking to clients who we either know are looking or alternatively We're going in with a specific candidate who we think could solve a problem for them. We're not ringing up having a chat about how, how are you finding the market? That just doesn't work for me and doesn't work for them.

And then just curious, it may not be important, but how do you— if that, if that's what's working for you, if that's the approach, how do we avoid just simply being a transactional relationship? Do you care about that? Because if we're only speaking when you have something, how do we— does that not then have a knock-on effect on your fill rates and wasting time? Do you know what I mean? How— what— like, there's always a cost, right? So yeah, I'm curious. Or do you not care? Do you not care?

It's, it's not so much that I don't care. It's what I've got to look at is if I was setting up a business— so I set up a business at 32, at the age of 32, and, and, you know, I grew that business to of, you know, a number of people over a 20-year period. I'm now at 55. I know you probably can't believe it, but in a bit of a rush. So I haven't got time to develop kind of mid to long-term relationships over the next 5, 10, 15 years. I've got 5 years to make some cash and kind of get out of LinkedIn.

And you fucking love LinkedIn. There's no way you're getting off that. No, no, you love it, mate.

I'm one of the few people here who hasn't created one of those models, so I don't like it that much.

Okay, fair. Elio, I want to come to you on the new business side. When we spoke about this, feel free to add what you want, but really your sort of mantra was we do everything. It's about do it like everything works. It's about doing what we do consistently, good quality basics, focus on consistency. That was sort of the message that you gave me really, and what you're sort of championing with the team.

Yeah, 100%. And because the business is so different that you're doing now, John, like we operate in a complete different way because ours is so relationship heavy and we will— I'll spend— genuinely one of the biggest clients I ever pulled took me 2 years, 2 years of working that person, going to meet them, going out to a conference, spending time with them, etc. 2 years. And then they become the biggest client that we've ever pulled on. So I think it's that the long-term mindset when you're in something like what I'm doing is a lot different. But then the actual specifics about how we do business development, again, it goes back to just doing one thing, right? Because when you bring you break down cyber, you've got different markets, and everybody has their own little market that they're playing in, so they can become an expert in that market. So what do they do? They know all the clients, candidates, people. They do podcasts, outreach, all the personalization stuff and stuff like that. Cold calls, yes, but not a heavily cold call business. E-shots, yes, but again, super, super targeted. Do that over a long period of time and you're going to be successful. But the beautiful thing about doing one thing when you're building a business and you're trying to be an entrepreneur and a founder it becomes a lot easier to make other people successful very quickly. So people come into the business now and they score very quick. You can get them up and running because the relationships that you've had for a long period of time. And that comes back to when talking about being a founder and what you're doing, you should always be doing the most. But I'm sure we'll probably go into that in a different topic. But business development-wise, again, niching down, focusing on exactly what you can do, making sure that you guys that you're bringing into the business, they can be very successful quickly because you've built the relationship. You can help them because you've got the knowledge. About that market, whereas you just did loads of things in every different area. You can't help people to do that, so you can't get them up and running and you can't add a lot of value to them as a person as well. Put them into the market, they go out there, you have a plan around how you're going to go after the executive search stuff. So building relationships, podcasts, etc., going out to the events. Like we've got 6 of us, 6 of us down here who are flying across to San Francisco in 2 weeks. It's going to be one of the biggest conferences. Um, so it's all that stuff. But I think what people miss sometimes is do the KPI to hit the target this week. But it's not always about that. It's do the— so we do OKRs. It's a different framework. It's literally flipping it on its head, but it's more about doing the long— being in the game for a long time and creating genuine results. That's why when you get a quick win, you just do one deal and you're scuttling around for the next client. You have to go to the next thing. But the way that we're building the business is that you can get a client, expand into that client. When they're not hiring on your role anymore, you can pass them on to another business unit because they're going to be hiring in that business unit now. So you're keeping the client along all the different iterations that they're going through, which is the most important thing in my eyes anyway. Um, so that's building long-term value with clients. Spend a lot, a lot of time with people and the customers. And then when you— I can go into this all day, as you can probably tell, I get super, super passionate about it. Um, but it all comes down to that one thing again, um, is doing, doing a thing and provide a lot of value to the people that you bring into the business.

And I think that that's also like that, that's the thing, there's never like one way of doing things right. And that's also part of why I was really intentional about, you know, having you guys on this because you're at different parts of your journey and doing different things, different goals, which is, I think, is important to have those different perspectives. But Ellie, you just mentioned it there. Abby, I wrote down here one of your biggest lessons. I don't know if it was last year or one of the things that really stood out for you was maybe stepped too far away from the client interactions. Obviously, for those of you that have your own business, you know, start consuming business content, reading, whatever. You're going to hear work on your business, not in the business, right? So talk to us a bit about that, because Elliot just shared there, and that's something that we discussed in our podcast, where obviously where they're on their stage, and maybe in terms of headcount-wise, not quite where you are. I don't know, we'll see how it goes over the next stage. But for you, you found like a bit of a lesson was actually, I was probably, probably took a bit of a step back on the client side a bit too early and you saw the, the impact of that.

Yeah, I think, um, when I started the business, it was— there were— I held all the relationships initially, um, and maybe for the first, I don't know, 2 years, something like that. Um, and then as you grow and you have more people to manage and you have more kind of marketing, you know, systems there's leaders to develop. You— I certainly, um, stepped back from some of those relationships, but, but also because you wanted to— other people to develop them. Um, and I think as in the last kind of, I don't know, 6 months, we've realized that, um, in some instances we've stepped back a little bit too much and actually come in— clients want that connection. They want— it's not necessarily saying that they need you to deliver it, but they want that connection. And I think, um, I've kind of maybe not necessarily had an epiphany, but when I go and meet clients that maybe I've not met for a while, I'm like, God, I really enjoy this, this is really fun, and this is what I should be doing. Um, and you know, Charlotte's the same. And I think we've, we've, um, grown so much and, and changed so much about the organization that I think this year now is about, right, okay, how do go maybe back to our roots and just spending more time with people, um, you know, solving more problems, having, you know, going to more events and, and getting into— spent— you've only got a finite amount of time, right? And I think, um, we may be a small oversight on where that time has been spent. And I think now it's about, um, just readdressing that slightly and going back to having more time with face-to-face with clients. Come out of meetings and I'm like, wow, I bloody loved that. And I can really have an impact and I can come out with knowledge and opportunities that we didn't have before. So yeah, that's, that's a big lesson.

Nice.

So I'm going to switch this up a bit. We're going to talk about people and culture. You know, a big part of us having a successful recruitment business is going to involve to some capacity having amazing people, whether that be in the business or people that you work with, that you work with as a freelance basis, whatever. Elliot, you're big on this. I'm going to come to you on, on this, but the sort of question that I want to kick this off with, which someone submitted, was what have you found— what have you actually found works when it comes to hiring and retaining top recruiters? Like, where does your mind go there? What have you found so far in terms of actually, yeah, getting great people on the journey and then actually retaining great people in the business?

Yeah, I know we, uh, we talk quite a lot about this in the podcast, don't we, which is, um, kind of just regurgitating it, but I think it's, it's super important, right? So Last year we was very intentional about the people that we brought into the business and all sat down here today, which everybody's amazing. There's 10 of them down there, which is awesome. But 2 of the people in terms of bringing in, which was super key in terms of Callum and Jake, who were senior leaders within the market to come in and build their respective teams. So bringing in a leader into the business and then also Aaliyah on the operations side to really come and help build and literally scale. I don't even know what we'd do without her, but I think when you actually break that down, it's being super intentional about the people that you're bringing in before, before you start scaling. For example, now we're 14 people with 5 leaders, soon to be, soon to be 6 leaders on operations. But so we've got 6 leaders in the business where we can each plug people into and then therefore it's easier to scale. So for example, when you've only got a couple of leaders in the business and you're trying to hire consultants and graduates into this model, there's nobody there to really level them up, or you can spend a little bit too much time away from them and they don't come, and then they leave, for example. So the model is, when you, when you hire in very early into the business, be very, very intentional about it. Again, how do you attract them people? It all comes down to the vision. And do they believe in you as a person? Because back then we was only 5, 4 people looking to go out there and scale a business and saying we're going to go take over the world with no real actionable points behind it, right? So it's all about the vision and you— do they believe in you? And we had a PowerPoint presentation with a 2027 vision on it. And that's what basically, basically got the guys. But it's all about that very, very intentional about what you're going to do because now that set us up for this year where we can go out and scale this business because we've got the leaders in place and that comes down to again, getting the right people there. But the hiring stuff, I'm obsessed with it and everybody is in, is in with Hubscale as well about bringing in the right people.

And what about actually, okay, great if we get those people in the journey, but how are you then thinking about keeping them, right? Because you're not, you're not going to get to that 2027 vision if half of them are left.

Yeah, so again, comes back to culture. Um, I think it's a massive, massive part of it. Um, people want to be around A players, want to be around A players, and it's as simple as that. So if you, if you don't keep that standard very high on when you're bringing in people in, or when the people are in the business, then people are just going to leave eventually. I've seen it happen before and etc. So that's one thing. The second part is having a long-term plan for people. Like, you've got to fit people's dream into your dream. So the leaders that have come into the business, why would they come join us if they want to go out and build a 10-person team and we only want to get to 20 people, but they're going to be responsible for half of it? It doesn't make sense. So we've got 5 leaders in the business because we've got this crazy vision over the next 2 to 3 years, and that's getting their dreams into ours. So then we can go out there and scale the business as well. But that comes with a lot of things like LTIs and things like that.

What does— not everyone might know what that is.

So long-term incentives. So when people build business units, they get rewarded, etc. I won't go into all the details today, but I think there's a lot of attraction piece. You can actually go out there and attract the right people. But usually people hire a senior person and go, I go on, can you go and build me a 10-person business unit? And you might get something at the end of the rainbow type thing. But realistically, you've got to have things in place. And I'm happy to spend time with people after to talk about what that could be. But that's a— it's a big thing. To have that. But that only comes in again with getting the right people in the door and again believing into your vision and stuff like that as well.

John, lessons from retaining people on the FJ journey? I think that was— there's a few things we write down, wasn't there, in terms of some of the things that in hindsight, how do we think about retaining people?

Yeah, I think it's an interesting one. So I look back over, I suppose, the Finlay James journey and we, over a period of 20 years, we we hired, uh, 300 people.

Thought it was getting a bit dark. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, I thought it was getting a bit dark. I was like, yeah, sorry, I mentioned 300 people and the lights came on.

Uh, maybe they're all here. Uh, so over a period of time, yeah, we, we hired 300 people. And what's interesting, and I, I'm, I'm fascinated by Elliot's journey because I think it's kind of really exciting and, you know, it's something I want to watch and kind of see develop over a period of time because because one of the difficulties— and we've got some of the guys from Strativ here tonight— running a tech sales recruitment company in some respects is more difficult than any other market because my tech sales recruiters, of those 320 of them set up recruitment companies, 100 of them have become tech salespeople. And 50 of them have become talent acquisition and they, you know, they doubled their money overnight. So growing and developing and scaling a tech sales recruitment company when sometimes people are placing tech salespeople who they think aren't as good as them, but they're on double the money, is quite difficult. So I think we over a period of time, you know, had people in our business for you know, 10 years, 15 years, 12 years, 8 years. Uh, we had, I think, 15 or 16 people boomeranged back to Finlay James over a period of time. And our culture and what we developed was we worked on the premise that everybody else in Manchester or in London or in San Francisco or in Chicago were looking at hiring what we call gloss, and we hired Matt. And what I mean by that is we didn't go for the shiny people who had 2, 3, 5, 10 years recruitment experience. We went for raw talent that we grew and developed. So my top biller, who I think did about $1.1 million in 2023, was working for Man United doing hospitality at 21 years of age. And he came and spent 12 years with Finlay James. Now, in his best year, he earned half a million quid as a 29-year-old. So the journey that these 300 people created— and I talked about it on Hishem's podcast— but, you know, 98% of the people who joined Finlay James and spent some time with of us ended up in a better spot than when they started. So we created these amazing careers. But I think what's difficult, and I mentioned this to Hishem, is we had a bunch of people on a journey with EMI shares. So the idea was that if we got to an event one day, they would make a chunk of cash. But EMI shares weren't enough to keep people from going into tech sales or setting up their own recruitment company or doubling their money in a good market and turning a 40K base into an 80K base doing talent acquisition. We also had probably 15 of our people actually go to our clients. Now thankfully we got paid on maybe 10 of them. So I think the interesting thing, and I'm going to come back to the A players because You, you, Christian Hughes, uh, My People.

Do you know him? Not sure.

Yeah, so basically there's a guy, uh, who set up a company called My People, and, uh, he's a psychologist, he's a doctor, he's a really, really smart guy. And, uh, he set up a business related to psychology, and he helped, uh, the Lions rugby team, uh, some of the cyclist teams, some of the football clubs, and some of the professional golfers. And it was all about psychology and He talked about— it's going to go a bit weird, this one. So sorry, Hishem, but he talked about A-players and he talked about this test that was done with chickens. So what happened, basically, there was, let's say there was 20 chickens in a coop and there were the super layers and then the not so good layers. And they kind of thought, right, okay, let's do a study, let's, let's basically separate the super layers from the average layers and see what happens. And what was quite interesting is the 10 average layers ended up doing better, so they improved. What do we think happened to the 10 super layers? Any ideas? Sorry? Yeah, pecked each other to death.

Yeah, so we're not chickens.

Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. But, but the issue is, if you think about— I mean, there'll be, there'll be football supporters in the room tonight. If you've got an environment where you've got, you know, think of Real Madrid, the Galácticos, all that kind of stuff, you know, a proper team, as far as I'm concerned, hasn't got 10 amazing people? Because what the question I'd be asking is, if these guys are all so good, are they gonna not—

can I just come back? Because, yeah, it's a good point and I completely understand it, but I think, I think thinking about that in a different frame of mind. So instead of having your A players or your whatever that means in terms of a scenario with 10 plus 3 years, 5 years, whatever experience that is, It's a blend of the experience that actually works very well. So having people with 1.5 years and 2 years of experience who still need that coaching by the A players who are already there, and the people who are already the A players who've been in the industry for a very long time, everybody's still on that mission together. So instead of looking at a football field and going, we need really good people here and we can actually mold a couple of terrible people there and that's okay. Why don't we look at that in a different frame of mind and go, we've got the Ronaldos, the Messis and everything along those lines who've been in the world for a for a very long time. But then we've also got them people who are up and coming fresh out of academy who are stepping into, onto that field maybe for the first or second year that you can really, really develop. So I think it's a blend of that too, rather than looking at it as, oh, it's okay to have a couple of bad eggs.

But my only thoughts on that, and I, I know exactly where Elliot's coming from, is there's— I see adverts now whereby, look, we only hire A players. Now that academy guy who's got 12 months, 18 months, so my top biller, who you know, you know, working at Man United selling pies, he wasn't an A player. We, we turned him into an A player over a period of time. So what, what I'm getting at in terms of what I would consider kind of full-on scaling of a recruitment company to get to a mass of 50, 60, 70, 80 people, I think taking individuals and turning them into A players, uh, on the premise that not everybody's going to be an A player and not everybody wants to be an A player. And if I look at, you know, teams in sport or in other environments, I think the idea of having, uh, a group of people who are all on a mission, who all feel that they contribute, who are all at a different level— I totally get what Elliot's getting at, whereby if you've got people who can learn from people who've got more experience, I think that works really well. But I think the point is when we're actually bringing these people in, if you've only got very, very senior people and very experienced people and people at the top of the, the tree, as quick as you're going to be bringing those people in, they're going to be basically going off setting up other things. So So what I would suggest is, you know, I, I would imagine looking at your profile, you, you would have been an A player at your first recruitment company and your second recruitment company, uh, but you went and set up on your own. So if you were an A player and you set up on your own, what's stopping the other A players who work for you setting up on their own one? That is the kind of—

yeah, no, I completely understand that. Maybe we could bracket them as maybe future A players.

Yes, right, there you go. We'll agree on that.

I think just watching you two discuss that, I think the thing— we'll sort of leave it there, but I do think it'd be interesting. Obviously, when I spoke to Elliot about where he's taking the business and stuff, I think the thing that stood out to me was really trying to be intentional about this is where the business is going and like that people's vision fitting in that. I don't know what that looked like at FJ and if that was like a big intentional thing, but that would be something that you may have reflected on it, I'm not sure. But did people see actually where's my future going at FJ? Was that something that's clearly communicated? Is that hard when you've got 300 people? I don't know. That would be the—

I think the— I mean, the most we got to was 80, and we had— of those 80 people, we would have had 12 to 15 on an EMI scheme. And, you know, 2 years ago we were looking at basically selling to PE and all this kind of thing, and Everybody was going to get paid. But the issue was the longer you go, you've got to navigate kind of this kind of feast or famine where there are kind of changes in the market and one minute you're doing well and then the idea is that certainly for a perm recruitment company, you need kind of scale. And without that contract book, to get value on a future sale, you need enough bodies because they're always worried that, you know, a group of people can leave and their acquisition doesn't actually work out for the PE firm or the venture capitalists or whoever it may well be. So I think what one of the things I said to Hishem is I wish that instead of giving people EMI shares, I wish that over a period of time I was giving them full-on shares and it would have been less diff— well, it would have been easier for them to stay than leave because in a great market, you know, we from '21 to '23 coming out of COVID we went from 2.7 million to 4.2 million to 5.8 million. Everybody was doing great, everybody was earning good money, everybody was on a you know, a good, uh, positive momentum and a nice journey. However, when the market changed, instead of people kind of hanging on because they actually owned proper full-on equity, it was, well, I'm off. And it was quite quitting. And it's, I'll go into talent acquisition, or I'll go into tech sales. That's nothing, no disrespect to talent acquisition. Whoops. But the idea was, you know, I've done— I've had a couple of good years, I've earned some good money, and I can now still double my basic to go and do something else. There wasn't enough to kind of hang on for to actually build that back up to get their return on a sale that might be 3, 4, 5 years. So we had people who had been in the business 10, 12, 15 years And it was like, well, it's just taken too long.

I'm out.

Whereas if they would have earned 10% of the business, 15% of the business, and myself and my wife Sarah would have diluted some of our shares, they would have stayed. But it was basically, it's time to get out of here. And, you know, 45 people turned to 5 in 6 months. So it's kind of more of a warning that You know, if you're doing well and you're growing a business, whether you go down the, you know, what they call those schemes, you know, where you give total ownership to the staff or actually give them proper full-on equity, because I don't think there's probably many people here today who've actually ever had any proper full-on cash out of an EMI scheme. So, you know, law firms make money out of them, but the people who actually turn it into proper cash is very, very limited. And that's what I would have changed.

I'm going to move it on a bit, I think.

Go for it. I've got a sad story.

No, I appreciate being transparent. I know people appreciate being transparent. I think obviously we're— we want to try and get the lessons around things that we can hear about. I want to bring in people to ask questions in a sec, but before I do, Abby, I'm going to come to you on this because I'll be honest with you, when you told me about this, I haven't heard recruitment companies do this for a while. I'm not going to lie, which is—

Not my goats, don't worry.

You've implemented a 4-day working week.

We have, yes.

Tell us about it. Why? What's working?

So we're really proud to be a Sunday Times Best Company to Work For. We got that in 2024. And when you were talking about what it takes to retain staff, look, we've got to create an environment that is better than anywhere else and that people want to stay in and that there's no other recruitment company that's better. And that, of course, is about values and behaviors and culture. It's about great benefits. It's about being rewarded effectively. It's about great leadership. But it has to be about well-being. And we started researching the 4-day week. This, by the way, is not something that you can suddenly put in and go, let's start this next week. This has been a 6-month research project. We have done this not top-down. This is a collaborative piece of work that every single person in the organization has had a significant hand in. It's about analyzing every system, every process, every call time. Um, it's not done easily. We are 6 weeks in. Our productivity has increased, so we are doing more now in 4 days than we did in 5.

And then how— talk about how you define that.

We define it differently for different roles, but for the main recruiter, that is defined as roles on— we have a new business team, so they— the recruiters are 270 recruiters, and the metrics, the key metrics, we measure— we're analyzing data constantly, as you can imagine, but The two key metrics that we chart up at 4 o'clock every Thursday are number of CVs sent and number of new roles on from existing clients. Um, and they're really simple for people to get, and so far so good. I would hate to be in a position to take it away. Um, and some people might think we're crazy, but the well-being benefits of having 3 days and the day that we chose— and it wasn't an easy decision, it's not automatically a Friday, but we have chosen a Friday. It's their Friday night right now, could you tell?

Yeah, I'm so interested to see how this plays out, I'm not gonna lie.

They're getting raucous.

Yeah, so just quickly, you said your team weren't productive on Friday.

No, did I say that?

You did say that. You said that was their least productive day. Sorry, that was their least productive day. So what did that mean?

The hardest day to get in touch with clients, the hardest day to get in touch with candidates. And when we looked at all the other options of mixing days and different people on different days, it just felt like the best day. And certainly from a wellbeing perspective on myself, just speaking personally, it's a total game changer. I've never known anything like it and I really don't want it to end. I'll do anything, and I'm sure every single member of the team wants to protect that.

Yeah.

It's a gift that we've kind of been given. It's not contractual, it's a gift. And yeah, we'll see.

Yeah. And I'm, I'm super curious to see how that plays out for sure.

I think all the Rexorack guys are just hovering just in case you did change it and they're gonna mop them up over there.

Well, nobody's left so far.

Just on that, just quickly though, do you've like, I know you mentioned the wellbeing there, 100%, there's gonna be benefits that can see that.

Yeah.

I think from the companies that I spoke to, a big part of that play was to attract people. Do you see— is that a big part of the— and you said you don't want to grow headcount this year, so are you not thinking about how this can help you attract talent, stand out? It's competitive. Was that part of the decision or no?

Of course. I mean, initially it was a retention piece, and I'm not saying we won't grow headcount. I think we've just got a lot of development within our existing headcount to— for their benefit, you know, that we want them to them not leave, and that's about them making financially enough money to want to stay. And so that's not just about an ego metric of let's get more heads, that's about making everybody fucking brilliant and making as much commission as they can.

Nice. I want to bring all of you in, in a sec. Before I do, because I've got a number of good questions on here, but I'd love to hear any questions that any of you have for the small growing recruitment businesses in the room. Elliot, I'm going to come to you really quickly and then I'll come to maybe a question in the audience, but talk to us a bit about the operation manager's manager hire, how crucial that was, just because I think this can sometimes be missed when you think about growing a recruitment business. We end up hiring more salespeople. I'm always curious about when a company does successfully grow or is on that trajectory, what people did they hire that weren't recruiters that had a big impact? So you hired your ops person at 5 people, 5 people. So just talk to us a bit about that, because I think that there could be some lessons here, because that doesn't necessarily mean have to be a full-time employee. It could be someone that, you know, works in a different country, supports me. I think it's an important mindset if we're thinking about getting more of our time back as a founder. So talk to us a bit about that, and then we can get some questions from the audience.

First of all, she's right there. She's absolutely amazing. She's just been promoted as well, by the way.

Nice.

Absolutely amazing. Um, but we hired, we hired Ali really, really 1 million. It's like 5 people, but it's because we knew we were going to grow quite fast. And the impact that not only Ollie has had into the business but to everybody else as well, it's just been absolutely amazing, right? Because she does everything that nobody else wants to do, but also all the operations, the marketing, the finance, absolutely everything. Works till 10 PM at night sometimes, even on a Friday, unfortunately. But on a serious level, it's like it was the biggest game changer because I was spending most of my time doing finances.

This, you said 40% of your role was probably on ops when you dissected it.

I'm a guy who needs a little bit of focus here and there, and if I don't, I'm off. So if I'm not doing a task and I'm moving on something, ask anybody in the office, I'm doing this thing, next thing, or the other thing in the whole world. So when I was doing all the finance and things behind that as well in the morning, I was a nightmare. But so getting, getting to do business development or spending time with clients or spending time with the guys or whatever that is, it just freed up everything I need as to do, which was amazing. And the other early as well, which is, which is great. And then moving across to the US, Austin setup, we wouldn't have been able to do it without all the other people there. We've also got an advisor, which again, super early, 5 people, and we just hired everybody. So it was about 8 people when Stuart came on, but he helped grow a couple of businesses in the past from zero to like 100 people in recruitment. He was a CEO of a billion-pound recruitment business. And when you're attracting people, it goes back to that again. It's like, Why have you got that guy on your board? You're 5 people. Like, what are you doing type thing? But it shows intent about where we're going to go as well, which is again another super important thing. But again, those two roles super early in the business, but without them we wouldn't be where we are today.

So anything just quickly practical on— I'm listening. I haven't got something like that in my business. You know, if I was to do sort of audit of my time, I'm spending a lot of time on finance, marketing here and there, taking me away from getting in front of clients. What, like, I don't know, what would your advice be to other founders that's considering it? How do we do it right?

So James Dean, a new guy.

Yeah, nice.

Just joined us. Awesome guy as well. Um, he talks about filling like a bucket situation. So when you're, when you're building a business and you're spending too much time on certain things, it might be finance, marketing, operations, whatever it is, do that and during a week period, and then you figure out where you're actually spending a lot of your time. Okay, go and hire that person. Um, but with those, it was like, we need somebody to do everything. Because we've no idea what we're doing type thing. And we was again quite naive in that situation. But I think as well, just if you feel like you need it, just go and do it. And especially if you're going to scale, like just go and try to hire, get somebody in and give, give them, give them the journey that you want to go on as well. So that would be the, that would be the main thing. But it also depends on where you want to get to as well. Like we wanted to scale quickly over the, over the next 12, 2 years. So having that in place was so important because then it would release other things where people could go do other stuff as well. But if you feel in that and do that thing in a week where you can map out how often you spend and how many hours you spend per day on a certain task, and if it's marketing, you're spending 2 hours a day on that, probably hire somebody in marketing because then that will free up your time to do other things as well. Don't just take the morning off, take 2 hours off in a day.

Yes.

And using that time that you get back, that time and reinvest that time back into to the stuff that you're doing.

So yeah, right. I want to bring you in. I'm going to kick us off with one of the questions that one of you asked because we haven't talked about it yet. Abby, I'm going to come to you and then if any of you have questions, put your hand up and then I'll come over the mic. But Abby, question to you and then anyone feel free to jump in. But how are you actually using AI right now? What's the hype? What's actually helpful? Let's just sort of kick off there. How are you using AI? Are you using it?

Um, how are we using AI? How have you come to me with that question? I'm like, I work in hospitality. Um, I think we've got a long way to go when it comes to, you know, I feel as though the business is, um, probably on the very beginning of its journey with AI, so I'm probably not the best person to ask about it.

So answer is we're not using it.

Um, is that true?

Which is fine.

You said everyone was bored of talking about it, did you?

Well, We've only just started to talk about it. So, okay, Charlotte.

I don't— well, it's not Charlotte, head of operations. How do I use it?

All right. Elliot, how are you thinking about AI? Are you using it? Are you, you know, anything that's actually helpful? You know, I think we can all log into LinkedIn right now and someone's going to be talking about AI. You know, it can be a bit of a rabbit hole for people, noise. What— how are you thinking about your business?

Yeah, I think I think we need to use it with the stuff that we're doing. So for example, ChatGPT, how easy is it now to go find something out or create?

Yeah, that's AI. Yeah, we use that loads. Sorry.

It's like using them things. Me and Ben at Sourcewell over there, we're talking about AI and what those guys are going to be doing. Okay. So it's about, it's about you. The recruiters who utilize AI the most will do more with that. So it's like you might get 10% extra out of the guys in the team that's working with it. But without that, you're still going to do relatively okay unless something crazy comes up. There's actually a company called Moonhub who's doing like engineering recruitment for AI engineering recruitment. We had like a demo with them. They're so far away from doing like the executive search and stuff like that piece of it. But again, it's like having a, having a conversation and a demo with them just to figure out, is that actually going to work or are we like way behind?

So what is it they do? Sorry, at a high level, it's basically They source candidates for you. Okay.

They do it on very basic roles and non— yeah, just very basic roles. So like location specific and blah blah blah. But that, that sort of stuff, like if you see, hear about something, just go and speak to somebody about it because it might be worthwhile doing it. But at the same time, like, chat with ChatGPT, marketing is going to be getting easier, stuff like that, and the roles. But I don't think it's going to replace anybody or anything like that anytime soon anyway.

I've thought of another really good way that we're using it too. Sorry.

Go on.

We've started using this thing called Real Talk, which is about developing interviewing skills in our employ— in our— the operators that we work with and started practicing AI. A lot of hospitality interviewers, the skill level is fairly poor. So we've found a tool because of the training business that we can use an avatar that learns and you can practice interview skills. Okay. It's called Real Talk. Yeah, it's really cool.

Real talk.

I thought of something. Yes, nice.

Let's, let's do questions. Anyone want to kick us off? I'll, I'll come to you with the mic. Anyone that— nice.

Let me—

uh, hey Elliot, um, you talked earlier about, um, keeping clients as a priority and passing them throughout different verticals in the business and making sure you keep hold of them, basically. And I'm keen on everyone's opinion on this, but But something that I've always struggled with is like being so focused on net new that I win a client, run a great search for an AE, place that AE, and then I'm focused on getting the new next new customer and I'm leaving money on the table with that client that I've just done a great service for. So I'm conscious like what are you and your team doing throughout that initial process and then after that first placement to keep that customer and expand that customer into multiple roles?

Perfect. Don't go telling the cyber team at Stripe this. But no, effectively, when you might work in a VP of Sales role, head of marketing, call it, and you place somebody in the marketing team, do you know the VP of Sales, the VP of Customer Success, the CEO, the VP of Sales Engineering? Do you know all them over hiring managers as well? Because you've got a small window when you place somebody to be able to get introduced to them or go reach out to them. So you've got like a month period where you can go and build relationships with all the other people. You can get them on a podcast. You get somebody else on the team in a podcast, the CEO, whatever that is. The podcast is an example, but you've got to really embed yourself in that company. And for example, if that VP of sales that you work with, you place the person, they leave, you are now lost out of that account. So it's about building relationships within that account and literally land and expand as they talk about in SaaS sales, right? You've got to land and expand in these accounts as well. So you get that account. How can you get on to the next person, the next person, the next person, the next person? And before you know it, in 3 months time, you've got 4, 5, 6 decision makers, um, on with you as well. So there's simple kind of basics, but that's what I did.

Uh, I'll chime in a bit. I suppose what we do— I mean, one of the reasons I hired, uh, the two people I've got now is they basically worked together at a previous company, and one focused on HR, one focused on finance. And the idea would be one would go in win some HR business, give them some proof of concept, and then bring in their colleague to actually then do the finance roles and vice versa. So they kind of came as a pair. And then we also kind of dabble in marketing as well. But the whole idea was to go in and offer some proof of concept in a certain function within their business and then start to kind of land, expand, spread out into other areas of the business. And that was kind of intentional with our hiring strategy from the get-go.

One thing that we've done which has been really useful, we've actually set up kind of like a side hustle of benchmarking data. And so we've created a people data business. So we've basically, it gives us a reason to talk to people, it adds credibility to what we say. It doesn't mean that we're just talking about recruitment. And so we're able to offer benchmark data around employee turnover, They're all people metrics, so we're in our lane around internal progression metrics. And, you know, it's just when we're calling our clients, they're so interested in that data. In our sector, they've never had it before, so it's a really brilliant way to add insight and to be able to talk to people in such a kind of different level of going, right, we've got this data that you can't get anywhere else, has been a bit of a game changer for our conversations. Questions?

Thank you.

Hishem? We're gonna have a new comp person.

Who else had a— I think just on that, one of the most common things that I've always heard, you may already do this, but just think about the aftercare piece. You said you normally go into the next job role, but most recruiters I interview, they, they're thinking about the aftercare piece. Have they got a call back to that person in their first week, end of the first month? I don't know, maybe just try and incentivize that for yourself. How many aftercare meetings have I booked in? Not sure. There's no silver bullet though, is there? It's always loads of little things. Who else had a question?

Ethan, they're good, mate.

Yeah, just very quick question. I suppose if you were to reflect over the last 12 months, um, a lot of businesses obviously had a lot of struggles, a lot of businesses did really well. But if you were to go back 12 months ago, what would be the one learning that you would, or what would be the key learning that you've taken from that 12 months?

Hire great people.

Fair.

People literally solve all problems if you get the right people in the business.

I think what I'd say to that is, you know, if I think back to 12 months ago, uh, we were still a 25-person business at Finlay James, and, uh, I guess I was, uh, I'm not going to say I'm an optimist, but I'm a possibilist. So I worked on the premise that, you know, we still had enough cash to hang in there, uh, and we could turn it around. So I've used the analogy with my children where I said I felt— I don't know whether people remember the Mike Tyson— not the Mike Tyson fight, but the Who's the Irish guy? The Gypsy King. What's his name?

Tyson Fury.

Tyson Fury. Yeah.

Yeah.

Sorry about that. So I worked on the premise that, you know, I was going to get up at 9 and I got up at 11 and everybody had left the building. So I was kind of too, too optimistic that I could turn it around because I always had done so. 30 years in recruitment and whether it was 2000, whether it was 2008, basically my will could actually turn a situation round. And basically, however dark it looked, we could kind of come out the other side of this. But at 25 people, I could have basically thought, right, we're done here, and kind of get out here with us still with a few quid in the bank. And I basically probably waited too long. Now, it was great for my recruiters because they all got jobs and got off the boat. But when you're in a 60-person office in Didsbury and you're on your own, that is a lonely place. So I should have got out earlier.

Well done though, by the way. £5.8 million business. Not many people can do that. So well done.

No, no, thank you.

I think mine would be to use kind of third-party support. We've started working with North Star, and I think having a voice that isn't in your organization is really useful to challenge you and push back and, you know, kind of make you think, fuck, is that, you know, is that the right thing? So yeah, thanks.

Thank you.

Right, let's wrap it up there. I just want to say thank you so much to all of you for coming. I think nothing short of transparent, you know, honest, authentic, which I really appreciate. So if we could put our hands together for these guys, then thank you.