What It Takes To Win in 2025 | Live Podcast Episode

Is that okay? Or no? Too loud? Yeah? Okay, awesome. Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for being here. There's a few of you I feel like I've spoken to where this might be your first event. I don't know if you don't mind putting your hand up.

Is this—

whose first event is this? Okay, wow. Okay, that excites me. Hopefully I can deliver some good content tonight. That's the goal. Um, but I do always find it interesting to speak to people that are at a live podcast event and they've never listened to the podcast before. So I want to give you a bit of a run-through of what we're going to go through tonight, how this is going to work. So we'll do, uh, just a bit of an introduction on how this is going to work for this evening. So in terms of what we're going to try and achieve here, I'm all about the how content. So the big goal here is that you all leave with at least something, one thing that you could take to your recruitment desk tomorrow, or you could take to your recruitment business. Um, so how are we going to look to do that? Is we're going to talk about what we feel are the core pillars of a recruitment business. So you've got 3 different recruitment leaders at very different stages, have different goals, and we're going to be talking about what their goals are and what the strategies they're looking to execute that they feel like is going to help them achieve their goals. We're going to be also talking about their go-to-market strategy. So we're going to be talking about how do they believe they're going to win the clients in their market, how do they believe they're going to get clients to spend more money with them, We're going to talk about marketing, branding, and how they think about that. We're also going to talk about people and culture. How do they think about driving performance standards? And then we'll get on to operations and tech. So yes, we will speak about AI at some point, I'm sure. So we'll talk about efficiency, how can we get more out of people, and really go into that good stuff as well. Now, all of this would not be possible, firstly, to say without our amazing partners. So Sourcewell, for those of you that don't know, We've been working with them for nearly 3 years. So any of you that are trying to drive BD performance or get more out of your team, then Sourcewell is something that you should absolutely be looking at. And we've been working together for 3 years now. And then partnered with Raise this year. So if any of you that are in the trenches or building a contract book or looking to start a contract book, then they're a great financial partner to do that with. So if we could all put our hands together for the panel and we'll get stuck in.

You go after you.

You go, I want to go in the middle.

Okay.

Oh, fuck, he's stealing the fans.

We were going to go— Just so you know, I think the mic's— make sure your mic's on, we can just check that.

Do you want the middle?

I want the middle.

I've got asked to sit here, so I'll go on the end. Yeah, awesome. All good? Should we just do a quick— Nick, can you give us a quick check, one, two?

Hello, can you hear me?

Is that all good? Yeah, you can hear us all at the back? Yeah. Okay, awesome. Um, let's get into it. I'm looking forward to this. I'm going to do a bit of an introduction so we can all get, I guess, on the same page. So we're all prepared for this. So I'm going to go into some of the things about their businesses, and then we're going to sort of start from there. So, Ollie, I'm going to start with you. So let me know if I get any of this wrong. Feel free to to correct me. So, um, you run a business called Unknown. You're the CEO of that business. Um, you operate in the creative industry. Uh, I think you're now 50/50 UK and US in terms of the business that you do. Majority of your work is retained. Current team structure right now, an org chart around 17 people. You're the CEO. You actually brought in an MD. You've got a head of people. I think soon to have marketing maybe as well. And then you've got, uh, managing partners, directors, and talent partners. That sit under those people. And then last year's performance, with you being a heavily perm business, we fell just short of the £2 million target, £1.95 million net fee income. Big goals for Ollie and his business. The things that we spoke about is we're really striving for this £1 million profit number, is a big goal for you. And also something you really want to, hopefully if we were to speak this time next year, you're going to say to me that you've got a lot more multi-six-figure accounts that work with you. Awesome. Jess, let me know if I again get anything wrong, but started your— started your business in 2022 with your business partner Ian. Your world is financial crime and regulatory compliance recruitment, and you do a lot of the perm stuff, he does contracts, but you help each other. Uh, current team: yourself, your co-founder, you have a senior recruiter, and you recently hired a candidate experience manager, stroke EA. Last year's performance between you, you billed just over £1 million, and your big goal and priorities for this year is £1.5 million. You really want to consistently be hitting £165 grand quarters. And for you, which I think you're going to find interesting with Nicholas and Ollie, is you're really thinking about winning more committed work, more retainers, and also just start your own podcast. Yeah, so talk a bit about that. Awesome. So that's a bit of context there. And then finally, Nicholas, over to you. So started your entrepreneurial journey in October 2023.

Yes.

All part really 95%, but I know you're looking to change that. Civil engineering across US and Scandinavia. Again, most of your work is retained or multi-hire solutions. First full financial year in business. I know it pains you to hear this, but 978K. Not quite the million, which would have sounded good. Team structure, let me know if I'm getting this wrong. We've got 4 full-time in the UK. We have an office in Stockholm, 3 full-time, 2 part-time. And I know you're soon to be announcing someone senior who's going to be running that office as well. Big goals, big goals for Nicholas's business and priorities for you. You're really gunning for achieving 1.8 million as a target, as a team of around 14 people is how you envision that. You really hoping to have the Stockholm office functioning independently? And looking like a lot of recruitment companies launching in the US, guess where? Austin, baby. Looking to launch there as well at some point, right? Yeah. Awesome. We wanted to give you all a bit of context. I think then we can just—

Can we just give you a round of applause? That was fantastic.

This man listened. Thank you. So we wanted to start with a question actually. Rather than getting straight into the detail. But we want to start with a bit of a question that actually came from one of you. I thought it was a great question. The question is, with the discussion tonight being around what it takes to win, we wanted you guys to share what would be your definition of winning in your recruitment business. Jess, I'm going to come to you first. You said straight away you had a great answer for that. So I'm going to pass you that question first, and then we'll hear what that means for Nicholas and Ollie.

I think as a recruitment business, we can talk about numbers, we can talk about placements and billings and things, but I think ultimately you need to decide on your market penetration. So how many people when they're saying for our industry, financial program recruiter, oh, go to Jess and Ian at Think Select. That for me is a really defining factor of how successful we are, is how well known we are, how mentioned we are. And the key metric that we've got and we measure against it each quarter is how many referred candidates, jobs, and clients we get. And it's a really powerful tool because you can see it's the one true way to judge your ROI on marketing and branding that you're putting out there as a business. So that for me is like a key, key metric.

How many people in the market are saying, need to speak to Jess, need to work with?

100%. And the way up of how our jobs are coming in, like we've got 90% incoming work at the moment with no BD. And that for me, if I can stabilize that and keep that consistent, it just shows that all the work we're doing with like podcasting and marketing and LinkedIn, you know, the black hole of LinkedIn posting, it is working.

Yeah, love that. Nicholas, winning. In your context?

So when I, when I was a recruiter or biller, it's pretty straightforward, like winning was being top biller.

Okay.

But now shifting to owning a company, like for me to win would be to have a business where I could take someone in and have a company that could teach them a skill set that they can then use to like change their whole life, to make more money than they know what to do with, like have a long-term career and have a business that can create and be the platform for people to do that.

I love that. Ollie?

Yeah, we used to have quite a hippie answer for this one. Okay, I'll give you the hippie one. Yeah, yeah. Shocked. We used to say, well, I used to say I want to build a company of, and wait for it, healthy, happy, high-earning, high-performing humans. We dropped the happy.

Okay.

Is the good news because you can't control people's happiness is what we discovered 3 years ago. But I think the more, the more we think about this really is how do we build a business like you were saying, Nick, that teaches people to go on and do something with their lives and hopefully create happy lives. And the callous part is how can you get briefs in your sleep and how can you build a business that without even having to do anything, clients are knocking at the door and saying, can we work with your business? And in, I guess, more of a pragmatic sense, how can we turn them into being $6 to $7 million clients versus the hellhole of projects, spot perm business? That's winning.

Love that. So I asked, uh, uh, the, the panelists, like, what are the strategies, what are the things that they believe are going to help them get to their goals? And they all sort of said a similar thing in their own words. And I think this is definitely coming a lot with up with a lot of recruitment leaders that I'm speaking with. So this is where we're going to start, and that's around really thinking about actually, rather than thinking we're going to get to our target by working with clients that don't even know us yet and really thinking about how many new clients can we win each month, they all sort of shared in their own words, how can we get more out of the relationships that we already have and how can we really maximise the relationships that we have? And there's a few different sort of ideas around this. So we're going to start here. I guess, Ollie, I'm going to come to you first. So for you, the way that you framed this was you want to be able to have more 6-figure client accounts. How you sort of thought that you're going to get there was in your words, developing the journeys product.

Yeah.

So do you want to tell us a bit about— because I think there's some crossover here with how Nicholas is thinking about this. So you sort of talked to us about how do you view, uh, what's this journeys product, and talk to us a bit about that and why you think that will result in clients spending more money with you.

Yeah, I'm going to try out an analogy that I, uh, wrote out this morning. So if this goes badly, just throw rotten fruit at me. Um, I think a lot of recruitment companies get compared to an estate agent.

Right?

We go, we transact, we sell the house, then we move on to the next one. And it's great, but it's lumpy and really unpredictable. And I think anyone here that runs a recruitment business that's mainly permanent, it's so unpredictable, particularly when you get to the million, million pound mark, which you're going to do this year. It is. You're like, how the hell? Like, how can I even predict forecasting? Permanent recruitment is nearly impossible. So that was the selfish reasons to why I wanted to develop a product that would be a subscription-based product, but I couldn't go to my clients and say, hey, you spend $120,000 with us, why don't you pay us $10,000 a month? And that'll be really, really good for us and kind of annoying for you. So that was the exam question. How can we convince clients that are always going to spend, you know, $100,000, $200,000 with us to commit to saying we'll pay that across the course of 12 months. So we used, I mean, it's quite classic, the consultancy. So before you come to us through the front door of I need to hire someone, don't say you need to hire someone. We're not looking for a brief here. We want the business problem. What is the commercial objective that you're trying to achieve by making that hire? And so we started to say that as consultants to our clients. And then after a few conversations, the clients will start to say, oh shit, you know, can I swear, by the way?

Yeah.

Okay. You know quite a lot about our business. Do you offer anything else? And so we thought, If we had our own workshop where we really went deep into these clients' problems, they're going to spend 2, 2.5 hours with us. Having given us all of this information, they're much more invested and likely to say, you know what, I'd rather have this company that we spent all this time with commit to them throughout the year. Yes, they're going to get us talent and the best people in the market. But more than that, they're going to help us onboard people. They're going to help us with our interview prep and who's doing what in the interviews. You can attach more consultancy services onto your clients by offering them more than just talent. Because I think recruiters and recruitment businesses have a bad name in, you know, you're here one day, you're gone the next. This is about going on a journey with your business. And we're aligned. The key thing is we're not talking about headcounts, numbers of employees or anything like that. We're committing to your commercial goals, which could be We want to win ourselves a $20 million client. We want to get a 35% profit margin. We're talking about achievements that they're trying to make, not we need to hire a senior architect for X, Y, and Z. So it's more about elevating the conversation and getting your mind into their problems as much as possible. And then they'll come to you to solve it. And sometimes it will be the person, it will be the talent that you're putting into the business, but they'll trust you because you're not just trying to jam a candidate down their neck. Because you're all tied into their commercial objectives. So yeah, that's the, that's the product.

Two things just on that.

So don't swear again.

No, no, no. So, uh, firstly, like, how, like, I feel like you can arrive at that being a business owner a bit more easily, like understanding the commercial objectives, where they want to get to.

Yeah.

How have you found instilling that perspective and educating that perspective to actual consultants? Because there'll be consultants out there that have their managers saying, how many jobs have you got this week? And I just really laser-focused on, well, like, this is the job I need to fill it. Do you get what I mean? So like, how have you found that journey in terms of educating your team and your consultants to go, hang on a minute, yes, I know I'm a recruiter and we can talk about this person that you need. Yeah, to actually have that commercial thinking, because I do think as business owners you can find that a bit more easier to get into that. 100%.

And that is like And that has been the biggest problem that we've had in the last year and a half. I have an idea and I just expect everyone to go to our clients and elevate their conversations the way that we made it more exciting for the consultants, because at the moment they're going, fuck that, that sounds so long. I'd rather just put the candidate in the job.

Yeah.

So we had to get our consultants to fall in love with the future. So we'd say, imagine you know who you're working with. Imagine if I said to you, you're going to get a $200 grand a year client. You'd love that, wouldn't you? Not this 20 grand here, 40 grand here. What if you could have a client that went, yeah, Sam, I'll work with you, I'll give you 200 grand upfront. The consultant suddenly goes, oh shit, okay, yeah, that is, that is quite an exciting prospect. Okay, great. The way that you need to do that is elevate your conversation with your client. So number one, when you meet the client, we've learned a thing called anchoring. How you anchor the first thing you do when you go into a meeting is you meet them peer to peer. And it's hard, right? You're a senior consultant meeting someone that's much more senior than you. How do you get them to believe and buy into you? You have to think about them deeply. Think about what their problems are, what are they going through right now? I'm going to start this meeting with a question that anchors them and makes them think, oh wow, I can trust this person with my business. It's harder. And the wrong way to go around it, which is what I tried originally, was to give the consultants consultative questions to ask. Because it's too much CEO to CEO. I can say, you know, what's your top line revenue looking like? What are your commercial objectives? And they'll share that with me because we're in the same game. If my consultant goes up to the person and says, what's your top line? Who the fuck are you? I don't trust you. So they need to win the trust and they need to come across as if they are a peer. And the best way that you can do that is by building trust, by anchoring in the early stages of the conversation and giving and adding value and sharing insights. Getting that person to see you not as a recruiter, but as a consultant that cares about their business. So that's— I can go on a lot more about what we've done, but—

But it's like twofold really, in terms of one, actually position it in a way where the recruit— the team's like, yeah, that makes complete sense. Yeah, they're incentivized to do that. And then two, it sounds like equip them with like some good quality questions and things that they can use, and then they'll figure that out themselves.

In a sentence, get them to understand business problems and not briefs. If they hear a brief, tell them to stop briefing. Don't brief me. Let's work out if that's really what you need to do. It's— clients will enjoy that because nobody wants to hire, you know. People's lives aren't— recruitment is 5% of their jobs. This is the last, you know, it's the last thing they want to do. So get them out of that mindset for a moment and ask them really, what is the point of this hire? If you bring in this person in a year's time, what impact do you want that person to have on your business? Oh, this? Great. Well, let's talk about that for a moment. You see, you're pulling them away from the brief. Get out of the brief. And the more you give a shit— sorry— about what they care about, the higher they'll resonate with you.

And then just my final point, because I feel like, Nicholas, you're also going to talk about this word problems. Like, let's just give us a bit of an example. I know it can be nuanced in your industry, but I just want to make sure we're all on the same page here. When you're saying don't just focus on the brief, talk about problems, give us an example of a problem that you might, that we might hear in one of those meetings?

Okay, my industry is quite weird. So this, okay, somebody will come to us and say, we want to hire a head of design, head of position. And we'll say, the tempting thing will be like, oh my God, I know loads of head of design. And you go straight into the execution of the people that they should meet and you drive FOMO. Rather than say, okay, which kind of head of design do you want? You say, why are you hiring that head of design? And then they say, well, because we want to do X. And then you ask why again. And then you ask why again. It's the 5 whys. Every consultant at Accenture or PwC will tell you it's not hard. Just ask why 5 times and then you'll travel up to the real truth, which is it started off with we want to win more accounts, da da da da. And then you finally hear it and it goes, well, the founder wants to sell the business in 5 years. Okay, right.

Right. So, yeah.

You ask why enough, you'll get to the truth.

Nice, love that. Nicholas, there's some similarities here, right? In terms of, I think the way that you positioned it, which I thought was quite interesting, was basically converting spec work into larger partnerships. That was one of the angles, right? But the way that you sort of positioned it, if let's say we might start the relationship by you talking about a candidate or some of the skillset, the way that you really try to drill into your team is, 'Look, that needs to be positioned as that's 10% of our capability as a business. That's just a very small part of what we can do. That's great that this is a candidate or this is a person that you feel like can add value to your business, type of person that you need.' Um, but then it's sort of then getting into these types of conversations, right? So what, what's your sort of perspective there?

What's—

how have you— how do you feel about this? Because you shared similar things.

Yeah, well, so I'm sure we all do specs, start selling candidates, all these kind of things. We actually use your, uh, sponsor, Sourcewell, so I'll give them a shout out.

Nice.

But the way that we would position it, say we get a bite on a spec and we get an interview from a spec, typically like your consultant's going to want to be like buzzing, buzzing, I've got an interview, amazing, great, I'm going to hit my fucking interview target this week. But how we, well, how I teach them to do it is then it's not like that's the end goal with a customer. The conversation that we would then have with the customers about, okay, cool, look, I'm I'm super excited you like the candidate, means that I'm doing correct marketing. However, that is about 5-10% of what we can offer you as a business. And present it in like a logical way where, look, you like 5 or 10% of what we can do. If I could sit down and talk to you with what 70, 80, maybe even 100% looks like, would that not be something of interest to you? But then it's also important that you understand what is that journey that you want you take the customer on, because no one's customer journey is to send the spec, get an interview request, sell it in, do a placement, walk off happy days, we made for life, like you've done one fee. Like, that's not the goal. So it's important that you understand what is that journey that you're taking the customer on. For us, the journey to the end is to have an RPO solution where we're doing a multi-hire agreement, but it's important to understand the steps along the way that you need to get there But having the approach of, cool, that's 10% of what we can do will help you lead to that end goal.

So how have you found, building on what Ollie said, how have you found drilling that and getting your team bought into that and that perspective? How have you found that? I don't know if, have you run into similar challenges in like?

I don't know if it's a good thing to say, but our company's a bit like a cult.

Is that the pitch?

Yeah, no, there's nothing we won't do to see to see each other succeed.

Okay.

So like everyone there, if we can see the value in doing something, we will all drive on that together. But that's kind of the important part. Like if you are going to take an approach on something where you want to get to these RPOs, you're going to take that approach, you do need everyone to be singing off the same hymn sheet and buying all into the same thing.

Okay. Jess, how do you feel about this? Because the way that you was thinking about, because you've you sort of sharing with me that again, you're thinking about retained, having more of your relationships tied up in that type of relationship, or just having more watertight client relationships. I think you again think about how can we make sure that we're positioned as a business, not just as a recruitment partner, but other things that we can do. How are you sort of, um, talk to us a bit about how you're thinking about this, because I know you're thinking about similar things.

Yeah, like, and I have empathy because there's, uh, people here that don't own their recruitment business that can't drive these kind of strategies, and there's some really quick changes that I've made because essentially I run a desk, right? Like I own the business and I run a desk. I don't have a team underneath me. I do all of our own billing. And it's small things like I now get clients to sign up to one-year exclusivity agreements. So they'll just use us for financial crime and reg compliance. And that I know that they're building. I know that they've got stuff going on. And it's just about suggesting it to your clients as a consultant. That's something you guys sign terms, right? It's just adding that extra question in. You're not trying to change a whole company culture and things like that. We've got two arms of our business essentially. So there's Ian over there, he's hiding. So he does, I do permanent, he does temp and a lot of the builds that we do in banks are whole team builds. So he'll place 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 people into a bank on a temp project. So very much like your old school temp desks and I might do a whole team build. So listening to the problem. So I might get a call up about a head of role and I say, Why? Why has this rule come about? What's happening down the line? What agencies do you use? How have you found them? It's the really, for me, it's, I still run a desk and it's always about upskilling. Like I'm doing, I'm myself, I'm going to do a trainer training tomorrow because it's a craft. Recruitment's a craft and it's just like any other skill. Hairdressers continue to learn new techniques and I think complacency is the death of a business. Um, so it's that kind of stuff for us.

Love that. And then just to sort of, um, build on this, because I think this might give people some ideas— I was speaking to a company today that recruits in, um, FMCG, so, and really get behind like new challenger brands in certain spaces. And they're saying, you know, a lot of our clients, a lot of the times why they don't hit their goals is because they don't get the funding. What if we could try and, you know, introduce our clients into VCs or be part of that. And I think that's the types of things that you can end up talking about if you're asking these whys and what are the big problems. And this brings me on to you, Ollie, on like the way that— what I found interesting about you was when you think about your business, you think you've got 3 revenue streams. So you've got, uh, just because you hate to call it recruitment, talent consultancy, uh, recruitment, uh, I'll explain why not. Okay. And then we've got, uh, then obviously in your, like, specific to your space, a lot of emerging acquisitions happen, right? So you're speaking to people in this space and you may obviously catch wind or have a conversation like, hang on a minute, that could be a good introduction to make so-and-so and do that. And then something more recent, I feel like, that you feel like there's going to be more of a need is an organizational design consultancy. Yeah, it's becoming— so talk to us a bit about this because I think this is then, you know, for the businesses here, it's like, again, if we think— if we're having more of these commercial conversations and all of a sudden there's different ways that we can be generating revenue and working with our clients and adding value versus just getting that person in C. Yeah.

And it's not just me that's having these conversations. You know, I've got 5 managing partners that are now having these conversations too. So if we, if we use like M&A as one revenue stream, which by the way, if, if we make money doing that, it's the easiest money you could ever make because we don't do any due diligence or any of the work an M&A firm would do. We've done a partnership with an M&A firm that is in our space. The sell to the M&A firm was this. We— because they didn't want to work with recruiters. And I was like, look, I'm recruitment scum, would you mind working? And so they were like, look, what's the pitch? And I said, well, we have 10 at this time, 10 recruiters. 10 recruiters have 5 conversations a day. My math isn't great, but that's 500 a week. Whatever the sums are, it's 2,000 data points a month, right? If I'm hearing from 2,000 people every single month, That's a lot of territory that we're covering. That will be disgruntled humans, that will be founders that want to sell their businesses. That will be a whole heap of information. And we're doing nothing with that information. Originally, we thought we'll just use that for marketing and we built our brand based on that information. But how much stuff could we tell you, Mr. or Mrs. M&A firm, that is going on in the market that could be really valuable? So I pitched that to the M&A firm and they said, look, yeah, we'll do a deal. Every deal that we do that you refer in, we'll give you 20% of the fee that we make. If a company sells for $100 million, M&A charges between 3% and 5%, so they make $5 million and we'll make $1 million from making an introduction to a founder that might want to sell their company. That is money for old boots. So for us, we thought this makes sense. We're not doubling down our workload. We're meeting people and just literally using that information. We're not even changing the people that we're meeting.

Yeah.

Meeting the same people and just making use of those introductions and that knowledge. So that was one thing I thought, how can I create a revenue stream which doesn't mean more work? Because I think that we look at it as recruiters and think, oh yeah, we can bolt on this onboarding thing. I mean, fricking onboarding is so dull. Or we can bolt on this thing and it's more work. How can we create more revenue without making more work for us? That was the question with M&A. Organizational design. Okay, that is more work. But if you're coming in at the level of organizational design, that means that you're coming in at the highest level possible. Where they're considering completely deleting a department and replacing it with AI, or they want to, you know, fire a whole bunch of people and replace them with execs, whatever. If we can get up the ladder and sell, we don't just do talent acquisition, we don't just do M&A. We also have organizational conversations and design conversations with you. Suddenly we're in the room as soon as they're making decisions rather than when they've made one and then they've gone through a consultant to then brief you. So look, we're not— again, the way that I'm going to do that is I've approached an organizational design lady. There's a theme here. Go to a specialist that does what you want to do and agree a year partnership with them and say, I'm going to be a referrals business. I'm just going to refer you in clients. The deal is you give me 20% back and I get to be in the room when you're doing these things. Because like you're saying, I want to learn. If recruitment suddenly goes— they won't— but if it does, what what could we upskill as human beings? We're consultants. Everyone in this room is a consultant. We should act like one. And we can. We're with people that are making business decisions by hiring people. So if we can put ourselves in partnerships with people that do do that stuff for a living, we can then create different revenue streams for our business. So that was the thinking. And yeah, we've done our first two so far. So I can't say that we're like— but if the goal is to make those two things 7-figure, um, bolt-ons to the business as we then grow.

And Jess, how is this— have you ended up thinking about these types of things in your world? I don't know. So I know it can be sort of nuanced to the market, but I speak to recruiters that a lot of the clients they work with, um, get PE investment and then they, you know, build relationships with the VC firms and then they get introduced into the companies they invest in. I don't know how it works in your world, but is anything like that across your path, like, hang on a minute, we could actually really maximise our relationships, introduce people, and that could be another way, like you said, where we're more than just a talent partner, recruitment partner.

Yeah. And so Ian and I were talking about it just this week. We seem to get pulled in Series B. So when a bank or like, you know, like Monzo or like Revolut, like these companies that you kind of know, they have to get a banking licence. And that usually comes at a certain period of funding and they need to hire financial crime and regulatory compliance people. And we're having a conversation just this week saying, shit, like we're right at the coalface of when these people need funding or they're about to explode and why are we not doing more with this? So it's definitely a conversation for us to be having, but it's learning, introducing. We know M&A companies, we know due diligence companies, like it's something we can look into, but we haven't done it yet, no.

Nicholas, how does that play out in civil engineering?

Well, I suppose the point is multiple revenue streams, but I'm a bit more Well, I'm young, but I suppose I'm old-fashioned, but in the way that I see multiple revenue streams coming from having multiple physical offices in multiple locations around the globe and being a true specialist in trust recruitment, that being RPO, contract, perm, retain, executive search, but growing multiple revenue streams through having multiple international locations.

Yeah, on— sorry, on contract, because that is That to me, I would deem as a passive income if you get that right. So if you sold— it's a convent, right? That's an RPO solution where, you know, Nike, for example, will— they won't want to put on record that they've hired these people, but they would hire it through a vessel. And so if you— not Nike, but that would be my industry. If we went to Nike and said, okay, look, you want to hire these guys, you just put a 30% income retainer on top of that. So they pay you the salary, you're taking the risk. Because you hire the talent that's in at Nike, but you don't have to unless they get poached. You haven't got to replace them. So there is a way of creating a revenue stream that is passive and not doing extra work if you're willing to take the risk and finance it. I guess the difference is, do you want to take the risk of financing these types?

Yeah, I was going to say, with what we do, like they're building bridges, and if the bridge collapses, we're liable.

Yeah, fair. We're just selling trainers over here.

I'd be applying for trainee jobs again, or back in the grunge band.

Just to round this out then, because this is like a really core theme in terms of like maximising this relationship, Nicholas, like if we were sitting down in like 12 months from now, um, what do you think would be the reason why you haven't got more clients at that RPO stage? Like what do you think would be the main reason why you wouldn't be? What would be the main challenge, you think?

Um, if I look at a company now, it's not having enough people trained like you say, commercially, to be able to spot the opportunity to upsell customers onto larger solutions. Because it isn't like you can't just do 5 deals, 10 deals, someone say, buy an RPO, give me half a million quid or whatever it is. You need to be able to spot these commercial opportunities, identifying mainly pains where your RPA solution isn't just a hiring thing. It's a real solution targeted on the pains of the customer that provides the result that they want. So to answer your question, it'd be not having enough people commercially trained to spot the opportunities to upsell these RPIs.

What about you, Ollie? Obviously, like, this has been— what do you think would be the reason why you weren't able to get as many six-figure accounts?

Just want to shout out Naz, by the way, because Naz does sales training, so he could fill that form for you. So just a little plug there for you, brother. Where to find the 5.9? Yeah, sorry. What would stop us from getting— What was the question?

Sorry.

One of your big goals around having more 6-figure accounts. What do you think would be the reason why?

Literally the same thing that you just said. I mean, yeah, it's, it's— we did a whole thing today about client experience. Like we went through on a little flip chart the user experience of our clients and our candidates. And I think the— that we need to get that right before we like get to this scale moment, we need to make sure that the quality of the experience is as good as we're selling it to be. So I'm almost like, yeah, we want to train everyone to be as commercially great as I'm saying they are, but not until the candidate and the client experiences are like where it needs to be.

One thing, point on that as well, which is a different approach we're potentially looking to take, is actually looking at the individual and thinking, right, what is their strengths, what is their skill set? And then focusing more on having them work with the things that they're best at. Because one of the realities, which I don't know how many have a company or want to start a company, but you can't have everyone have all the same skills as yourself or all the same skills as the person sat next to them. And if you're running a good company, you should have people that are better than you at certain aspects of the job, because that's like the name of the game. But you can also take the approach of instead of like trying to get everyone's able to do this, having a select few that that's their function and you build out functions around it.

Yeah, great.

Let's talk about marketing. Jess, I'm going to come to you first on this. Again, a big part of our go-to-market strategy. I'm a huge believer in that. I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table if you don't invest marketing or at least have a bit of a plan. Jess, talk to me about your journey in this. Obviously, this is a big part of your game. I mean, you know, resulting in There's loads of things, but like you said, 90% of your business comes inbound. But I've got here turning recruiters into— oh no, that was all this, sorry, I take that back. Brand building and marketing. So like, how do you think about that? Because like, you're— you've been really committed to that for a long time, haven't you? Even when you was employed for the larger companies, or even has that gone to the new level since you started your entrepreneurial journey, do you think?

Oh, definitely. And I think that's the seismic shift from being a top biller to owning your own company. Is you think less about like just LinkedIn content and stuff. And I thought really deeply about what's our tone of voice? What do we want to be known for? I want Think Select, our company, to be thought of as a personality. Like, oh, that's a Think Select post without even seeing our branding on it and the type of way that we engage with our audience. Me and Ian sit and have made a really intentional marketing strategy of sitting deeply within our industry. So we sit beside you and alongside you, not externally. So we speak on a lot of panels, like industry panels. We go to a lot of events. We are recommended across the market and consultancies. So the management consultancy that you speak to, they go into their clients when the problem is and they name us as the sole supplier to banks and problems. Like that is, you can't pay for it. And that's come from the tone of voice. Like we, our company motto is we want to prove that recruitment can be done with kindness and care and a passion for results because we don't want to be seen as asshole recruiters. And if you're thinking about starting your own company, some people are thinking about it, think about who you are and authentically interacting with that candidate one-on-one. How would they describe you to someone? And that's your tone of voice. Because if you try and, if I try to be like a posh English person or something, it just, people wouldn't buy it. And it's the, authenticity in our brand that has been our success, I think.

How do you think, how much was you like investing in your own brand when you worked like Investigo, for example, like in the big brand? Was you doing much?

Because I almost got fired for it.

Oh, really? So you're doing it?

I was like too, like, I love my job, I love fin crime recruitment, all this kind of stuff. And they were like pulling it back being like, no, you went from Investigo. And I'm like, shut up. And like, because you have, and I'm sure you guys have your hands tied aside a little bit. You must use your company. You know, when you're posting ads on LinkedIn, they've got those stock standard pictures. You must write on your job ads, and that's the way you frame it. And I'd make mine pink, or I'd like— because I'm like, I want to stand out in the crowd. So I, I knew it and intrinsically believed it, um, but it wasn't something I could deeply invest in at the time.

My question was going to be like, for the leaders here, how can they— how do you feel like they can get their team more bought into it and doing it more? Because I do think that can be a bit of a challenge, like you just said.

Super easy ways to workshop it. Like you get your team in a room and describe the good traits of how candidates would describe them. And that's their positioning on LinkedIn. That's how you want them to interact with their clients and their candidates and everything. You know, you've got the really detailed orientated person who is really deep into the knowledge and the tech skill of what they do. Lean into that in your branding and your marketing and your posting and Posting on LinkedIn, you very, very rarely see me posting anything about my personal life. I know a lot of people post like, I took my dog for a walk today and as I was walking, the sun came up and I thought about how much I love financial crime. It's not for me, but that's because my audience just would not tolerate it. So I try and make it relevant and it's always about adding a value. To your audience. So thinking about the pain points for your audience, I truly believe marketing should be less about what you want to tell people and about what they want to hear. And you weave in the knowledge there. So I'll write a screenshot. You know, like the LinkedIn recruiter dropdowns and stuff. I screenshotted that and I said, I don't think anyone even sees how we search for you. This is how we search. This is how to optimize if you are looking at these things and it blew up. So it's not always about you as a person, personal branding. A lot of people think about that. It's more about the tone of voice and positioning of the messaging, I think.

Yeah, I think I've got on my notes written down like with for my content ideas, like be the best resource for your ideal client. I think that's a good way to frame it. Like, I want to be a go-to resource.

Yeah, like you're talking about, Ollie was talking about consultant. Like, I truly believe I'm a consultant. Like, I am an expert I'm not an expert in recruitment, but I'm an expert in what good financial crime and regulatory compliance looks like. And we get, I build financial crime teams. Like they come and ask us about organizational structures and stuff because of that credibility. But that comes from adding value that isn't just a, here's a CV.

Just final thing. Sorry, just about this.

I've got a really good how-to. Like just the most basic thing. Because you said this is about how, right? I'd say this is like, out of all of the things I would have liked to speak about, it probably is marketing, recruitment. God, I shouldn't have teed myself up like that.

But drum roll.

The easiest, like, the easiest way to write content that's going to resonate with your audience is— anyone read the book 100 True Fans? 100 True Fans? Okay, great. No one.

Raven fans, you mean?

No, no, no, no, no. Oh, it's different. That's football. So the 100 True Fans philosophy is you would rather have 100 true fans than 100,000 random people following you because you talk about your dog. How do you get 100 people reacting, engaging, loving, and seeing value in what you've created? You spend some time in a room or whatever literally imagining the ideal person that you want to write to, your ideal client profile, and you don't stop writing about them and their problems until you run out. So like, list problem up— what are they experiencing? What's their hell right now? Like, what challenges in their life are they going through? Get so into the human being that you want to write to. And what we started to teach the team at Unknown was like, literally write, dear head of design, I know how you're feeling right now. You're stuck at this place. Your boss is at the— you have no autonomy. You have no clearness in your role. You list all these things they're going through. And people were messaging us going, this is about me. This is exactly how I'm feeling. And if you have specialists in markets and different disciplines, their 100 true fans will be slightly different to the other 100. So it won't just be generic things that are flying out the whole time. It will be targeted to the humans that are going through exactly because you know them and you know their problems because you're speaking to 20 of them a week. So by just having those deeper conversations with them and writing out whatever their problems are, their problems are your marketing because you're just back— it's like a perfect wheel. Problem here, a problem right about here, a problem right about it. And the the audience that you're creating becomes more and more real and authentic, and it's true, rather than generic shit that nobody wants to read. So I would just focus on the problem.

Yes, again, training. I think all I was going to ask you just before we moved on was, sometimes I'll speak to recruiters where they do want to get involved in the industry, they do want to go to events, but then they're just very aware that if they were to go to an event, how would they be perceived? I'm a recruiter, can I be really embedded in my industry? I know sometimes people have that challenge. I've said to so many people now, in today's world, I think it's become such a competitive advantage to go out there, attend things, meet people face to face. I don't know if you ever run into that when, you know, with people in your team or whatever, but like, how would you talk to people about that where maybe they're a bit conscious of, I'm a recruiter, like, I don't know, sometimes people do struggle with that.

Yeah, and it's your perception's reality, right? Like, I don't I don't really go to events truthfully. I see events as brand development, not BD. Don't go on BD because you'll be a dick. No one will want to talk to you. They'll run away from you. And if you just go in with an open mind, like whenever me and Ian go to events, we genuinely want to learn about the topic. So we go as an attendee and we have conversations with people and we follow up with people. If you're perhaps a little more junior or you know, you don't, necessarily know people going to the event, go and message people you've placed and say, I'm going to this event, I've got a ticket, do you want to come with me? Get yourself a buddy, like pay for a buddy, pay for a friend because they'll know people in the industry and suddenly you've got that credibility by association. And if people ask why you're here, just say, I'm just here to learn. I'm really keen to learn. I have an interest in what you're doing and I really want to be alongside you. And it's incredibly flattering to people. That you want to learn about their day-to-day job and the challenges that they're facing. I think that's just my sales style though. I'm very soft and very relationship-led. I'm sure it would be a lot more powerful. The ROI short-term would be really high if I went and just BD and got a stall, but we've never got a stall. We think they're stupid.

I want to get onto people and culture, but Nicola, how do you feel about, I feel like we didn't, I don't know, I didn't feel like we had like a really strong we've done this on the marketing side. I don't know, I feel like you've been a lot more like, we're going to be sales-focused, we're going to be having that approach. You might disagree.

Yeah, like 10 people have already asked me about cold calling through Microsoft Teams. Exactly. So yeah, I think everyone knows our kind of approach.

But, but how do you feel about marketing? You know, you're a business owner, you're building a business. How do you feel about your relationship with marketing? Obviously, it, it—

I'll be honest, like, it's, it's It's not my skill set.

Yeah.

So my approach in a minute is to hire someone that can do marketing and can do it well for us. Like throughout running the company, like my whole philosophy of it is if I'm in a room in my own business and like I'm not intelligent, I'm not incredibly intelligent. I mean, I've got a degree and I do all right in recruitment, but if I'm the most intelligent person in that room or the best on one certain subject, something's going wrong. So for me, it's all about getting people in that are better than me, that know more than me, and that can do that for me. But to answer your question with the marketing, like, we're aggressive sales. So that's our focus.

Love that.

I'm not Spanish.

No, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, but that's what I wanted to hear your perspective.

Everyone's a bit against it for some reason nowadays, but we're still 300 dials a day, cold call people through text. I mean, I'd send a carrier pigeon if it were.

Oh my God. But what's your first line? What do you say?

What's your first line? Well, it's, it's fine. When, when you're, um, cold calling like that, you've got to think like you've got 10 seconds, yeah, if that, to give them a reason to talk to you. Most people will call up and say like, hi, my name's Nick, I work at Ever Hire, I am the best I've got, they couldn't care. The way that I view it is if you get to the end of that sale call and you're booking a meeting with them and they're saying, hold on, so what's your name and what company do you work at? You've done something right because you haven't then gone onto that call talking about yourself. You've immediately given them a reason to speak with you. And it's pretty easy to do that if you spend 30 seconds or a minute like looking at this person's profile or, having a little look at their business to have an actual genuine reason to be calling them.

So it's about them.

But it is also about volume. Don't get me wrong, we still get told to fuck off 50 times.

But I think the thing is, like, what Ollie's saying about marketing is like, you're making about them your problems. That's like your approach, right? Yeah. I understand what you're saying. It's like, I'm going to bring someone in who's an expert at that. That isn't— okay. I'm going to come back to you, Nicholas, on this. We'll move this on to like people and culture. Part of that is performance standards. Now, this is what I found interesting about our prep. We're going to be honest here, Nick. So you shared with me that you're shifting— I have shifted to an outcome-focused approach to management.

Yeah, but rather than shifting, I'm shitting myself.

But like, talk to us about— so basically, when I interviewed Nick, I think it was fair to say, like you just said, like you owned what you were. Driving sales, and with that, like you said, inputs, right? But when we caught up and we caught up and prepared for this, you literally said, I'm moving from an input focus to outcome focus managing. So now you're tracking more outcomes. Yeah, like, why? Talk to me about this.

I kind of want to ask you guys something just so I can, like, give the correct answers here. Just hands up, like, who owns a company?

Yeah.

And then who wants to start a company? Name? No one?

You might be here with their employee.

But yeah, so, well, where we started, like, we started with zero investment, started in my spare bedroom. It was crazy at the time because I was having my house renovated, so they'd be like knocking through the walls. And because we did construction, we're like, oh, we're just on building site. But where we started in that environment, like, it's 3 of us, very similar to me. Okay. And we did not know aligned about being driven on sales, pushing each other, that we were happy to do that, you know, like whatever the hours, just sell, sell, sell, sell, get revenue in, grow the company. But then where we've now grown, especially where we're now integrating different cultures, like FYI, Sweden, completely different to UK. I don't know if you guys know this, but in Sweden you can't sack someone. That to me was mad at first. Once they're past their probation, you're not legally allowed to sack them unless there's like a lack of work or some crazy stuff. So where we've now grown, like that culture was great when it was 3 of us in a bedroom, but if you actually want to have a company where you're producing like autonomous, free-thinking consultants that understand what recruitment is, you can't drive on that. Because if you just drive on like the inputs effectively, so, you know, like dials, number of calls, all of this, you train the consultants to think that that is what doing recruitment is. They don't actually understand that, okay, I'm doing this because I'm looking to get this outcome. So I can't tell you if it's worked yet because I've only done it for 3 weeks now. But the idea is to have a shift in mindset rather than thinking, cool, I'm a great recruiter because I can do 20 sales calls a day. No, you're a great recruiter if you can do 20 sales calls and convert that into 20 meetings.

But obviously you are still measuring these things, right? But how you're driving performance, what you're really trying to hold people accountable to is more the outcome of the conversion.

I've stopped measuring it.

Oh really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I'm shitting myself.

Okay. But wow. Like, if we can be honest here, so the decision around that was that like your team was saying like, this is too much, or you just going, actually, you know what? I don't think I can keep growing the business and take it to the next step with this same startup.

Well, it was over the Christmas break, the first period that I'd had like where I wasn't working and I had time to reflect. Now I was like, right, I'm going to spend all of Christmas writing this new plan for the company. Wrote the plan, it basically come away with me saying, I'm going to drive this company harder than I've ever driven it in my whole life. We're going to do £50 million, it's going to be amazing. But then in reality, like, people I found didn't appreciate being driven like that. And understandably, because like when you start to grow a company, like, not everyone has shares in the company. People have their own lives. There's things that they want to be doing outside of work. So seeing that, okay, all right, that works when there's 3 of us in a bedroom. It doesn't quite work when we've got people who are mothers or people with dogs or or whatever it is they've got outside of work. So then it was really taking that shift to make it a more enjoyable workplace for everyone. But the important bit is so that they understand what it means to be a recruiter, and it is to get those important outcomes. And you're probably wondering, what are the important outcomes that I would consider? It's either meetings, like, to win work with customers, winning jobs, upselling from retain RPO, interviews is one we still track, but none of the inputs. Okay.

Ollie, what's been your journey with this? Because I feel like—

Oh, this has been really fun to listen to.

Okay.

Because I can tell you that I can see why you put us on. I did the complete opposite, like to the point where it went wrong. So I'm going to tell you what the future goes if it doesn't.

Yeah.

So I think I went on your podcast. I went on a recruitment podcast and I proudly said I didn't do KPIs. What a knob. So I think because I came from a James Caan-owned business and I was smile and dial, you know, 50 calls, it was so KPI-driven and they started to do outcome versus input at the end. But I remember that and I remember leaving that business being like, I never want to work in a place where I'm not trusted because I knew I was good at what I did, but I'm still having to call 50 people. Who didn't want me to call them. So I agree with the direction you're going in. My problem was I went the other way. And so first 5 hires, it was brilliant. We were profitable. I didn't need to set them on any targets because they got the game. It was learning by osmosis. It was wicked. Next 5 hires come in. Well, how do I do my job? Just copy us. Don't worry, we trust you. We love you. You do your job. You don't recruit. Yeah, you'll be fine. Before you know it, we've got 15 people in the business. 10 of them have no idea how to do recruitment. Because we don't do KPIs. That's the old way. And they're like, what's the new way? I don't know. What rulebook are we ripping up? I never even read the rulebook. So we were like, this is a bit of a problem. Once you've done it and once you said we don't do KPIs and we will slag off KPIs, as soon as we try to bring them into the business, they're like, not the KPIs, they're terrifying. So we ended up having to lose a lot of those people in the end, but we learned the hard way. And again, like on the I think I was speaking to Max recently about this. We were generous. We were probably too generous with the culture and the people and what we put out into the world about our culture. And that ended up creating, in a way, these kind of beasts of entitlement where you're not tracking what they are doing. You're not even telling them how to do their jobs and wondering why they're not billing. So we did. The good news is we completely scrapped that. We agreed what our values were. Not the 5 that I said on your podcast. We took away 2 and we figured out, right, if we hire purely based on accountability, grit, which is a key, key word, it's not just work really hard, it's work really hard if you're passionate about it. The definition of grit is really interesting. It's not just fucking keep on going and going. It's keep on doing that and be passionate. And then the third one, accountability, grit, and then curiosity. So if we hire those kind of people, And then we set them really, really clear what good looks like. Then we've done our job. And I love this idea. If you're building a culture, if you're hiring people, having a two-sided job spec, like 9 things that we expect from you and you flip it over and you go, here are the 9 things you can expect from the business. You will be given a phone. You can leave and go walk your dog, whatever it is that you want to set as the cultural norm. And you can do this in a recruitment team. I almost think that'd be quite— if you're a sales manager, and this is what I did when I was a sales manager at James Caan's business, we ditched the KPIs, but then we swapped them with outcomes and we celebrated the outcomes. And then we shared how the outcome happened because it wasn't always a call that it could have been a weird meeting in a pub where someone met somebody else and we'd share these stories of success. And I love the saying culture eats strategy for breakfast because you can have all you can have all these plans. What you should really be doing is sharing the tiny moments and the tiny behaviors that led up to that big thing. And it is always, you know, there is structure, but it can be random. And so I think like by celebrating the things that we do differently in this business, could be, oh yeah, Gary called 120 people the other day, he got 50 grand over the last 100. So long as you're pointing to the input and then you're celebrating the outcome, that will But that's what will build the culture in the end. And then before you know it, your team will be telling you the inputs that they choose with their own lives.

Love that. Did you want to— I feel like it might be a good moment. Do you want to talk about this SCAR framework? Oh, it's time about— because I thought this might be interesting for people. Do you remember what?

Yeah, I remember this. Okay, I've got this.

All right, go on. So it's about engagement of employees, right? Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Healthy, happy, high-earning, high-performing humans. And you said to me, how do you know if they're happy? Or how are you measuring if your team are any of those things? And we had this neuroscientist that came into our business when we were doing value setting. When I went on your podcast and I forgot my values and that was a sign, I was like, shit, we've got too many. And that's true, by the way. When you are a company, you know what happens? You get into a room and you all go, right, what are our values? And everyone goes, compassion, accountability, love, appreciation. It's like it's this word salad. And we put them on the wall and we go, yeah, that's us. And no one gives a shit. That isn't how you get to your values. You have to pick a value over another value. So I remember when I went on your podcast, I said it was ambition, accountability, grit, and kindness and curiosity. We took those 5 values, we went into a room and we went, do we, will we put kindness above ambition. It's like, oh, let's play that out. If we're in a meeting and someone's like just desperate to get this thing over the line, it's more important to do that than be kind. No, actually, kindness doesn't matter. Actually, we can't say we're kind because the ambition matters more than that. And then we say, well, okay, does ambition matter more than accountability? No, actually, accountability kind of overrides all of that because if you're accountable, you are kind. So where I'm going is we figured out the values of the business. SCARF. The reason we got to SCARF was this neuroscientist said every human being needs 5 things, 5 things to feel like they belong in a business. And it spells out the word SCARF. So you have status, you know, who— what am I called? What's my title? Do I feel proud to tell my, my, you know, my friends that I'm in this business? The C is clarity. Am I clear on what we're trying to achieve as a business? Do I Do I know what we're doing, what we're trying to achieve, and what good looks like? Am I clear on what my job is? Do I know what the 9 things that are expected from me and the 9 things I can expect from my company? The A is autonomy. Do you trust me? Right? You'll lose a load of people if you just kick them with KPIs. They're like, I don't fucking need these KPIs. I'm trusted. If I'm trusted to do what I do. So autonomy is super important. Relatedness. Do I feel in group? These new Swedish employees that you've got coming in. Do they feel like they belong in the business or are they like this sort of bolt-on to the rest? How do you make them feel like they're related to the rest of the company? And then F is for fairness. Are we paid fairly? Are we treated fairly? You know, classic. I use this, by the way, because if you're a recruiter and you're meeting any candidate that wants to leave their job, you can use SCARF back to them. And I guarantee you every time you're like, oh right, autonomy, because I hate my boss. He doesn't trust me. Oh, Tommy, you know, when you start to use scarf as a way to figure out how do you get humans to feel like they belong, it kind of makes everything a lot easier. I would say scarf. Scarf. Thank you.

Just want to bring you in here. You had your own journey in your business partner, right, where you started to grow. I feel like this is around the time where you had your second child, right? Around that time. Yeah. And then I don't know if it was exactly when you got back But I think you and your business partner had an honest chat and was like, is this actually really what we want? And I speak to a lot of founders where I think when you do have a business, sometimes you can— I don't know where this pressure comes from, but it's like, I should be growing and I should be hiring. But I think the most important thing is you've got clarity on what type of business that you want and what success looks like. So do you want to talk to me a bit more about how you and your business partner are a lot more clear on like, it's me, my business We have a senior person in the team. We just brought on someone else and we want to earn good money. We want to create a business that enables us to be there for our family. And like, you've got clarity on that and you're making decisions around that versus adding more humans in the mix, which you didn't actually end up enjoying.

Father hate managing people. But you said— So just to paint a really quick picture. So we started, thanks to my select in 2022 and I'd just, I'd come from being top biller, like Lone Ranger, just billing million pounds at my old company, having a lovely life. Then I got pregnant and Ian called me and was like, do you want to go start on our own? And I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. And then, so we had hypergrowth in that first year. So we were profitable from month one, I think in our first year we did just over 1.2 million. So it was crazy busy. So we're like, we need help. And I got pregnant 3 months into starting Fink Select. So I'm like, and I'm pregnant. So I'm like going, oh my shit, like what are we doing? And it is the natural human instinct to say, we need help. I need to deliver on these accounts. I don't want to let my clients down. And that help looked like to us, we had actually had recruiters from our sector saying, hey, I love you guys. We want to come work for you. Ego's there going, yeah, that's super flattering. Like, let's hire them. And it was all sweet and good when I was there funneling work into them, as it always is. We didn't focus enough on KPIs and inputs. And so they thought they were successful because they're really good recruiters. We're paying them bomb commission 'cause they're doing $100K quarters as like 23-year-olds. And it's, I came, went away from mat leave and I took 9 months out, which by the way, is a success in itself. Like, our business wasn't even 2 years old.

Wow.

Thank you, Ian, for letting me do that. And then I came back and we were looking at how the staff had performed and how the business had performed. And we still had an amazing year again, but we were looking at the staff and the attitudes and the entitlement. And they thought they were here and we knew they were here. And we thought, I personally think when you manage a team, it's a 24-hour job. Like if they call you at 9 o'clock at night, you need to say, yes, I'm here. I care about your development. We're very family first in our business, very task orientated, not time orientated. Like I really don't care if Leticia who works with us finishes at 3 o'clock as long as she's billing. I couldn't give a shit. And on top of that, in my journey, I have two toddlers. I don't want to be working all hours. I work 9 till 5. And then like it's very hard to get at me like past 5 o'clock. And I love that life. Like when billing, it has to be said, you know, it's a wonderful life. We're billing million pound. We've got a million pound business and I work 9 to 5. Why the hell would I want to hire? Like it's a lovely life. And I think we have this conversation and I'm sitting here truthfully, there's a bit of imposter syndrome sitting between you two because you've got these dreams and ambitions and I'm like, fuck that. No, I love that.

That's important.

I'm like, fuck that. Like, I, you know, success, I, you know, success looks very different to different people. And at this stage of my life, this is what success looks like. I have a business mentor and I had this conversation with her this week. She's like, don't do that. Don't say this is the stagnation of your company. And I said, no, like I'm deepening the relationships and I'm growing myself retainers and I'm upskilling ourself and Ian's winning these insanely big, like don't think the company is stagnating. I just don't have the time, the will, or the want to give my mental energy into running a team. And the net profit has to be considered. When you're just paying me and Letitia on a million pounds, fab. Paying 4 people, 5 people, 6 people, ultimately the profit goes down. And I think when you're growing a team, personally, I see it as a 5-year plan because year 1, they're getting up to speed. Year 2, they're making money. Year 3, they're a flight risk. Year 4, you're investing in them. Nah.

I love that. That's, by the way, I like, I wish more people thought like that.

But I think it's a really candid conversation and I'm going to play the girl angle here, but like being a woman in recruitment, I had to take 9 months out to have a child. I didn't have to take 9 months maternity leave, but I wanted to. And running that first year of the business, I was pregnant and guys, it's tiring being pregnant. Like you're not running at full speed. And I think, A lot of recruiters, the average age for starting a recruitment company I read somewhere is early 30s. And by that time, a lot of us are thinking about having children. You need to think about how the business you're creating is going to shape and fit into the life you want outside of work as well. Like, I didn't want to set a business up that would take me away from my children or my family or anything. I wanted a business that would facilitate the life that I want outside of work.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well done.

Does sound good, man.

I'll get rid of everyone.

You see Nick in Stockholm, like, yeah, you're right, these saunas are wicked.

You're not gonna have to get rid of Avenue.

I love that, I love that.

Uh, so let's— the sort of final pillar that we had here, and then we can bring in questions from people, was, uh, operations, tech. I think one of the things I found interesting with yourself, Ollie, was when we spoke about this, you were very specific about we implemented this weekly structure that you think has been really impactful. Obviously under operations we put systems, processes. Obviously an important part of that is setting your team up correctly, holding people accountable. So talk to us a bit about, because you've viewed that as actually that's had a big impact. You've got here implemented structured weekly calls, enhancing management meeting format, like some of that system stuff you found have a big impact. If you want to share some bits on that.

Yeah, I'm worried that this is going to sound really basic because like This is someone that was coming from a very unstructured situation where we get on calls and speak about our cats and stuff. Like, it wasn't—

Like one-on-ones and like—

Yeah, we had like, we tried to do the, okay, prep for the call and we'll do this like, you know, agenda and whatever else. And like, we probably changed that agenda for the Monday and the Friday call, I reckon 15 times. Like genuinely, because I mean, I used to be such an idiot with, I'd write like, What are you proud of? What are you excited to get done this week? And then like, what noise does a giraffe make? Genuinely. And I remember I'd sit on a Monday sometimes after a big weekend being like, what's the funny question gonna be today? So like, it was a bit of a joke 'cause I didn't really see the point of it. As we then went on and I hired a head of people and then, you know, she was doing operations, she was like, what is the point of this conversation? Like, people don't, you think it's funny and you think it's culture that people are making giraffe noises, but like actually, they don't want to be on a call on a Monday for tech. Like, how can you make this as structured as possible? So we did, we bookended them. And, you know, the Friday one's more of a reflection. I'm sure everyone does this. I'm not sure if I'm saying anything new here. The Monday is all about setting it up and going and like being very granular with, okay, what will I be saying on a Friday that I will have achieved by the end of this week? We make pledges and our MD makes the notes on the pledges and we put names against everyone's pledges for of the week. It's very granular. It's probably quite outcome-focused, but some input there as well. Then on the Friday, it's what am I really proud of getting done? What gossip have we picked up in the industry? And the third question, which is the one that I love the most, and this could tempt you into getting a team again. This is when I feel the warmest. You don't have to run a company. You can be a team manager for this. It always brings the best vibes at the end of Friday. You ready? It's what noise does a giraffe make? No, it's what have you admired about somebody else this week? And I promise you the answers you get, you're like, wow, these people love each other. And you see someone that doesn't really care, people that don't even interact. And you'll see someone in one side going, I actually saw Ellie do this incredible thing. And I've got to give a shout out to Ellie. And it sounds so basic, but I don't think we as British people praise people enough. We're kind of, we're very, you know, insular with that. So I'm not the operations or the tech guy, but that's been the biggest impact. Yeah, I would say.

I know you said we've all heard it, but I think we can, we can all resonate with like we can do those things well and do those things really badly. Yeah, like definitely. Just talk to us a bit about, because I'm a huge advocate, particularly as business owners. I think one of the constraints you'll have as a business owner at any point really is like getting the most out of your time, prioritizing the right things. So talk to us a bit about this recent journey that you went on, on hiring Obviously they're called a candidate experience manager, but also going to pick up some EA pieces. But I think this came from actually me and my business partner, are we spending time on the right things? Talk to us a bit about this because I'm a huge advocate of thinking about how can I get time back and there's different ways that you can do that.

Well, it came by mistake. So Ian went on his honeymoon to South Africa and I had to pick up his temp desk. And as a perm recruiter, you're like, holy hell on wheels, this is fast. There's a lot of admin to do here. And unbeknownst to me, Ian is a bit of a workaholic and he would be doing paperwork until 9 o'clock at night. He's placing 20 people. So he's got 20 candidate contracts, 20 client contracts. And I was like, fuck this. Like, so I booked an interview for an EA by the time he got back. I was like, you are, your time. He's laughing 'cause he's like, well, he just lets me, sometimes I come, I'm crocked from ideas and he just says yes. But so we'd booked in the interviews And it was more of a like, oh, how are we gonna use this person? And the role kind of developed, but she's, I called her candidate experience manager, mostly because if she had to book in an interview or call a candidate for me, I didn't want them to feel unimportant to me. I didn't want them to think that my, Jess's PA's calling me, she can't even be bothered picking up the phone. Candidate experience manager, now that's jazzy.

Oh yeah.

It's like, and she's just taken a lot of the bullshit Like she does all of our CRM management. So, you know, like tracking on your system. I'm like every other top biller. It's a pain in the ass and I forget to do it. So she, as soon as I book an interview, I forward it to her, track it on the system. I get her to put everything on the portals. You know those old team support roles that we used to have in recruitment and it was someone on the desk that did it for the whole team formatting CVs. But she does other things like when I place someone into a role, she puts it in my diary, start date, 1 week, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year catch-ups because I forget to do them. She's called through all of Ian's attempts to introduce herself and taken that catch-up point off her. I'm making her a list to call through every single person that we've placed. Wow. Because they're so open to someone, she calls them with that, I just really want to learn about what you do. Oh, so how big is your team? It's a very curious conversation and it's been a game changer. And she's based in South Africa. She costs £1,000 a month and she is scary and South African. She's an old, like, she's, I think she's a little bit of an older woman. She doesn't take our shit. Like it, for me, that was the game changer. The other thing too is initially straight away we got an accountant. We didn't pretend we knew how to do that. And we got a wealth manager. We didn't pretend we needed to know that. And we've tasked that wealth manager with educating us on like, I think the other thing that founders, recruiters miss a skill gap. And if you didn't grow up with money, you grew up like just a normal person. I actually didn't know about investments. I didn't know about SIPPs. I didn't know about dividends. I didn't know about corporate corporation tax. And that's been a massive learning journey. And it's not something to do when you need to do it. It's do it on the journey. And also we've got an accounts payable assistant to chase our invoices. But she's extended.

And then on the kind of experience manager, like normally the advice is if you end up looking at that is Did you audit your time and you're like, what are we spending time on? That's normally step one. Or did it just happen organically? It's like, hang on a minute, I know I'm spending loads of time on this, we can get her to do that. Or did you, 'cause normally the advice would be have a timer for every hour and write down what you did for an hour for a week and you'll be very surprised where you allocate your time. And it's like, right, what can I hand over?

If you're a super methodical person.

Okay.

That would really work. But I mean, my day motto is how am I gonna make money today? What's the one thing that I, and like there was a lot of my day filled up with like today Yesterday we went and looked at office spaces and I got her to do that whole research and booking for me.

Nice.

Yeah, I don't think personally you can hire these people on a contract. So try them and you'd be really surprised how much value you can get.

I do think with my own journey, like when you then have someone like that, then your mind's just ticking, isn't it?

It's like, I'm so free to do much, so much stuff.

Yeah, but with that office thing, if maybe didn't have that person in your team, you might have ended up doing it. But now she's in the team and she's picking up stuff like, yeah, that's another thing. Yeah, you get one in.

Yeah, I would have kicked it down there. And like you said earlier, I've started a podcast, which instead of doing it half-assed and just doing it when I have time, I've got the time because I'm not doing all of the other admin stuff.

It's also what happens to your mind. Like you do, you think of new ideas. Yeah. When we hired the people operations partner, I wrote all the things I hated doing. We made a job out of it. But literally we wrote down, oh God, the people management and the operational stuff. And as soon as she came in, It was like the second part of my brain and all the ideas come back.

Yeah.

I don't think you can have like, yeah, that's another thing.

And I think that when you get busy and you're making loads of placements, which is a blessing and like you're all super grateful for that, you don't have the time to be a good recruiter. You do not have a time to do the, or the brain space to think, shit, I need to call those people. And you put it, I'll do it on Friday afternoon. And then Friday afternoon comes, you kind of need office manager, like someone on your back, accountability. Because as a founder, you don't have accountability. Ian probably would never say to me, Jess, have you called the candidates you've placed last month? He's probably looking like he's scared. But you know, and creating that own framework for yourself is sometimes a gift.

Nick, before we bring people in for questions, how are you thinking about your growing team? Some of the things shared here, how are you thinking about I think that it's fair to say that a lot of people are thinking about how can we make sure that the team that we do have are not spending time on the admin, on, you know, it's why we're always hearing about note takers and like, how are you thinking about that as a business owner, making sure that if you are growing this team, you're adding headcount, that they're spending time upselling, they're in front of people. I know you're big on getting people to go out and meet people, but how are you thinking about that from your perspective? Because there's a lot of noise out there and we can sort of get lost in that.

Yeah, so we do use a lot of softwares. There's one at the minute, so good, called Granola.

I don't know if you've used it.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's the best.

Yeah, Nick told me about it.

Yeah, oh my God. So like you said, no one likes taking notes while they're on the phone really, and it's long putting it on the system, but you can get this one called Granola and it's like free at the minute, or you've got a discount code for that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Plug.

Little plug.

But you can set it up so it will record any audio on your computer, or if you're in a face-to-face meeting, you can just turn it on, whether it's like for your soft phone, whether it's on Teams, whether it's on Google Meet, like whatever. And it will take all the notes, and then you can also have all of these templates that you've coded. And not like, it's not hard to do, like to write in the notes that you want. Then for each type of call you do, it's going to automatically generate the whole thing. So interview feedback, candidate qualification, sales call, prep call, feedback call, whatever. So that's a really good one.

And it doesn't tell them either.

What doesn't tell them?

That's the biggest difference. It doesn't— I'm sure a lot of you joining me, it doesn't join the meeting.

It's very Trumpy, that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's quite scary.

So, so I use it all the time now. I've been using it.

So yeah, so you're thinking about that. So you are thinking about about that? Like, I don't want my team to spend loads of time writing notes.

Yeah, this honestly isn't a plug because they're up there, but Sourcefile as well, we use them every single day. You can imagine what we're like, we've got 25-step processes until we get a result. But no, not 25, but that's really good. But for me, the whole thing with it, like, how do you get time back from the team? It comes more into like a learning and development thing. Are you getting these people into the company and teaching them the right way to like manage their day, how to prioritise tasks, how to do all of this? And if you're setting the fundamentals right with them through that onboarding, learning and development process, it's a lot easier then to not have to worry about these problems. They're not spending their day doing a load of pointless shit.

How are you thinking about, just to round out and we'll bring in questions there, how are you thinking about getting more out?

We—

you told me about, and I do think a lot of people are thinking about this in terms of, I want to grow my recruitment business, do I need X amount of people, or can I have half the people and can we plug in the right tools and get more out of people? I think this is really top of mind for people. You're thinking about, do I need to keep growing, or actually can I get more out of my existing people? Yeah, with AI, with the right tools, with the right processes.

There's something coming, like there's something that I am like, if this is actually real I don't want to hire any more humans. Does anyone know what agentic AI is? Yeah. Wow.

Yeah.

This is like, it's AI. If AI has an IQ of 500, this has an IQ of 5,000. And the idea is that you program different agents to do things for you. And I'm working with our CRM guy from Recruitlee. And I said, what if this thing could source talent like a resourcer? And he was like, yeah, that'd be really easy. And he showed me like, 5 different sequences, this thing goes and it speaks to your other agent, which is your client. You give it like the persona of your client, and the agent goes out for you like a resource would do, and it doesn't stop. It doesn't sleep. It just goes and goes and goes and goes and goes. And then it kind of— and it asks questions like, are these right? Are these right? Are these right? To all of your other agents. I sound fucking mental. Imagine this is 10 years ago, you'd be like, you're a weirdo. But this, this could replace so much time from scrolling on LinkedIn, sourcing for talent. And apparently they're designing this agentic AI resourcing tool, which I want to be the first pilot to use it because that will change everything.

But it is insane. ChatGPT, I'm sure we always say, I just was playing around with the other day and I dropped a job description in it and I said, tell me the perfect LinkedIn search for it. And I've been doing 12 years of this. It gave me candidates I've never found before.

Wow.

And you can copy and paste the search string and it says you need to use this, this and this. If you're not finding it, refine it like this. And is it listening to us?

Do you still want that card today?

But it was terrifying because my initial thought was we, you know, in our lower level jobs that my clients currently can't be bothered to recruit because it's too much volume. They're going to be bothered soon. So I think, you know, we need to learn how to master it before our clients do, basically.

Yeah. I think it came up in one of my groups I'm in, one of our communities today, where a recruiter put in a job description from a competitor, and then it was like, can you figure out who, what company they're talking about? And it was able to like—

that's a good one.

So yeah, sneaky.

It's so animalistic. It's like cannibalistic.

But so, but like, just to run out, so is it making you— I don't know, maybe Nick and Ollie, you're thinking about growing, you think about headcount— is it making you think, hang on a minute, that actually maybe we could do this with 3 more people versus 6 more people. It is getting you thinking like that.

Yeah, definitely. Okay.

Yeah.

And just, and upskilling them and making their lives like, at the end of the day, you want them doing the things they love. The way I look at it is I know that there's still 50% time wasted. Like you're saying, you're still like doing the stupid stuff, doing invoices. That our jobs as business owners or managers should be, how can I get you doing the thing that you're great at 95, 99% of your job. And until we reach that, then we'll either have to hire somebody else in or replace it with tech. I think that's the goal, is to get recruiters being good at recruitment, speaking to people. So, yeah.

I'm the opposite, to be honest. I want the big exit, like, I want multiple offices across the world with hundreds of consultants. So I would rather use AI to support them in their role rather than to get rid of them.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's do some questions if that's okay with all of you. We can sort of open the floor up before we finish. I mean, you guys are going to be honest, aren't you? So we can sort of go anywhere really.

Anywhere.

Yeah.

I don't know if I haven't got a microphone actually. I'll unclip this and then we can use this. But is anyone, does anyone want to kick us off? We could probably hear you to be fair.

We have one.

So I actually let the other guys just have to hold this. I know you're used to holding my—

very intimate.

Yeah, just whisper into my ear.

Um, it's mainly a question for Nicholas really, because you speak a lot about you having a real sales culture in a recruitment company. I'm an external coach and I get asked all the time, how can we get the sales culture back within the business? Most companies I go into, and I was speaking to people earlier on, it's nothing more crippling as a coach than sitting around and all you can hear is the keyboards clacking and no phones going. So what advice have you got for other founders that are struggling to build a sales culture right now? Uh, well, it might sound fairly obvious, but get everyone back in the office. Uh, it's very hard to build a sales culture if everyone's working from home, mainly because someone might have a bad call and then they're just on their own. They're going to sit there, dwell about it. They don't have that camaraderie team spirit around them to pick them up. We also do some basic stuff. This isn't revolutionary or groundbreaking. It's very simple recruitment stuff, but where we have dedicated parts of the day, not the old school power hours, standing up. They do have standing desks. They can stand if they want, but where we're dedicating times of the day to certain tasks. In our business, it's known the morning is sales. Like, if you're doing anything other than sales in the morning, like, effectively we don't think you're doing the right thing in your job. And also, like, you've got to drive sales through, like, rewarding the consultants. So even for, like, little things, if they've had a good call and got a win, like, as the leader, you should be the one shouting them out about that and getting them buzzing. But then on the flip of that as well, one thing that can really give them, you know, like, a bit of bit of a boost and make sure that they're feeling heard is rather than you shouting them out about it, asking them, look, I think this is great what you've done here, do you mind like just spending 10 minutes telling the rest of the company about what you've done so that they could have an opportunity to learn from you? It's all these kind of little things that will help with it, but I mean, I still shout at people if they're tapping away on the keyboard in the morning as well.

Love that. Anyone else wanna—

I love that.

Any question? Did you put your hand up? No, you didn't. Sorry. Anyone else have a question or—

Comprehensive, huh?

We're done. Yeah, no other questions. Fine, if not, no one hit us up with a question. No, we don't need to force it. Um, awesome. Well, look, I think obviously the goal here was we wanted all of you to walk away with some, you know, real tangibles. I think there's some really cool things covered there from, you know, how we're going to develop accounts, thinking about culture, driving standards. So I don't know, just a big thank you really for all of you being here and a big round of applause for the panel.