Why Most Recruitment Companies Fail to Scale: The Hard Truths From Marc & Graeme

Mark Graham, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks, mate.

Really cool to be doing this in person, as we're just saying. Uh, we spent a bit of time with each other remotely, but cool to be sitting down with you both. And we've set out a real clear goal for this episode, which is we really want to try and provide as much value insight as possible for founders, recruitment leaders, maybe aspiring recruitment leaders, to go from that journey of like 10, 15, whatever the headcount mark is, but to go on that growth journey. Yeah, again, it doesn't always have to be anchored to headcount, but on that growth journey where you're growing the business, revenue, profit, and really want to try and give people insights on how they can do that more effectively, sustainably, with the things that you guys have learned the hard way, and also with what you're seeing in the conversations that, uh, you guys are having with other founders as well. So to give everyone a bit of context, let me know if I get any of this wrong. Firstly, for the people that may or may not be aware with both of your entrepreneurial journeys, you both started a business called Consult Partners. Started that in 2016.

2008.

2008.

Damn it.

Let me know if I get this wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

So obviously you guys started that then, specialist tech recruitment firm, scaled that globally, focused on UK, Europe, Dubai, and US, right? So initially you had a sort of two-part event, right? So in 2016, which is the date that I've got in front of me, you sold initially 65% of that business. And then later on, you fully exited that business in early 2020 for an 8.6 multiple of the business. So in terms of what that business looked like, 2016, you had about 130 people in the business, had around 300 contractors. 2019, then the second part, had 100 people in the business, around 350 contractors. And then this might have looked slightly different at the different points, but to give everyone a bit of flavour, 40% US, 40% Europe, 20% UK in terms of where that revenue split was.

Yeah.

And then I think fair to say that typically your business, uh, has always lent a bit more towards contracts, a 60% contract, 40% perm. And it's something that we're going to get into, but a big part of your strategy was being in like future markets, which we're going to talk about.

Okay, one interesting element, we were able to double EBIT in 2016. We made our exit, we've doubled the EBIT when we then made the second exit in 2019. So that's something we're proud of because we reduced some of the headcount, but increase sales and increase the profit.

Awesome. And then, then the further bit of context to add, which is why I wanted to make sure that we tried to do this and give something really valuable for people— that happened, but then since then, between you, you've probably both spoke to 100 founders. Yeah, yeah, more between you. Um, Mark, you personally invested in 3 recruitment companies.

Yeah.

Uh, been a strategic advisor for around 15 to 20. Over the last couple of years. Yeah, Graham, yourself, you've invested in, in 3 recruitment companies and then, uh, being a sort of strategic advisor for 12, 13 companies.

Yes.

So this is why, uh, we wanted to do this, because one, we've got this lived experience, and then two, you've now come out of that console bubble spending really time in the weeds with other founders on the journey. You're investing, uh, in recruitment founders and you're also advising. So today we're going to talk from that perspective, right? Lived experience and all of that. So where we wanted to—

Hishem, there's a number 3 as well, the reason we're doing this. We're together in the same room.

Nice.

Which obviously Mark lives in LA, I now live in Dubai. So you've got the benefit of us doing this in person and not remote.

Absolutely. So I did a bit of research before this with AI and I think it's really interesting now. I think things have evolved a lot and this is why I want to get both your perspectives from what you're seeing. But like in terms of the percentage of recruitment agencies that actually achieve some sort of exit, it's like below 1%.

Yeah.

It really is like such small numbers. And if you were to— again, it will vary what you see online, but for the most part, from what you'll find, 75-80% of the UK recruitment industry are deemed micro businesses. They're companies that are under like 10 heads, is typically how they do it. So what we wanted to do was, I speak to so many founders, recruitment leaders that are in that headcount, just an easy marker, but you know, it isn't always the most important one, but typically a business around like 10 to 15 heads they have ambitions to grow, or at least that's what they say, and they just find themselves really finding it hard to sort of break free from that. Or maybe I had a conversation with them 12 months ago, I want to be 25, 30 heads. I have a conversation with them 12 months later and they're still in the same position having the same problems. So where we wanted to start was, from what you guys have seen, what have been the most typical constraints that you found hold businesses back that say they want to grow, that have ambitions to grow, that are at that stage that you find is holding them back. And the first thing that we really pointed out that you've seen time and time again is no clear vision, values, philosophy. So Mark, I'll come to you first on this one, but talk to us a bit about why do we feel like this is the most common. Are you surprised? Talk to us a bit about why this is at the top of our list.

Yeah, so for us, everything that we do starts with philosophy. Philosophy in life, drives your behaviours. And in business, if we have a philosophy, it's going to drive every decision we make based on that philosophy. So one of the things that we felt is very important is take a step back and really detail what that philosophy looks like. What does it mean? What does your business want to be known for? How are you going to go to market? Um, all of these different elements around the philosophy, then start to put that into a vision. Now you've got philosophy on how you want to operate. What does that mean in the business context? What sort of company? For example, is the vision enterprise-led company? Is it going to be contract, perm, high margin, et cetera? And then the values, how you're gonna operate, what you're gonna do. But the biggest thing when I start is that people often are saying, hey, look, I've got good business, great, but what's the philosophy? What do you believe in? What's your angle? And they don't really have a detailed understanding. So probably the biggest gap is creating that and starting with that as a foundation. That's something actually we were talking about this earlier, Graham and I. We were really focused. One of the reasons why we're still close, very close to this day, is that we had a mutual philosophy on recruitment. So when we started talking about all the different scenarios, our philosophy was the same, and that meant we'd, we would approach innovation and challenges, etc., with the same outlook. And that guided us not for year one but the entire journey.

And then just on this quickly, just because I want to make sure when we use words like philosophy, like, what, what do we actually mean by that? Do you know what I mean? Like, how would we maybe define that? What if you would say, yeah, this recruitment leader has a philosophy? What is that? Is that the beliefs that I have? Is that what I stand for? I don't know, like how it is, how recruitment should be done.

So I look at my own philosophy, our philosophy, and he would say, let's say a lot of the guys that works for us would say this would clearly be a Mark and Graham type of philosophy. So our philosophy— and Jake, great, jump in if I missed anything— we started off by saying future markets. So what's going to be big? We focus on the future. We start are recruiting that now. Ultra, ultra, ultra niche beyond sort of the level of niche that sometimes people, people recognize. High value, high margin fees, large-scale projects. And what that then means is, is that if anything then tries to take us away from that. So for example, some sectors, let's say construction, education, very different model to tech. We didn't want that. We had our belief in the model that we were looking at. If anyone says do Java, which was a very ubiquitous enterprise technology. We wouldn't bother doing that. We wanted the niche next big technology, um, projects, retainers. I think, what percentage? We were somewhere over 65%.

Yeah, 65% of our perm business was retained.

Retained. So this is like creating the client commitment, the relationship. So this pervaded everything that we did. All our marketing material, every interaction would have been on that foundation of philosophy. So business philosophy about how you believe recruitment should be run. And it's personal to each individual and each individual business.

Nice.

And we were lucky that Mark said we were always on the same page. And part of that being specialist niche future markets was primarily because we wanted to drive high-value, high-quality client engagements, knowing that, you know, you see it now, Mark will talk more about it in the US market, big fees. A lot of companies attracted to the US for big fees. And we were always in our careers as billers focused on high-value, big fees. So That was one of the big reasons sits behind that philosophy.

And then from your perspective then, Graham, like, why, why is this part so important? Because I said to you guys, like, that's definitely something that I've seen where— why is it so important to, like, have this nailed? Like, from a recruitment founder perspective, you may be listening and going, you know what, I actually probably haven't got that nailed. Some of it maybe I'm clear on, but I definitely know my team wouldn't be able to answer that question or be clear on it. Like, why is this so crucial?

I think if you look at a lot of Founders start companies, get to 15 people. They do it because they leave their job and start billing. I can do this for myself. And that's a motivation for some people. I'm working in the company for X number of years. I can do really well. I've got a great client base. I can start at home or in a serviced office and start billing. I'm going to take control of my own destiny. For us, what happened was we knew that when we started the company, wanted to exit it. So we wrote it in our original first draft business plan. What that gave us was a very clear purpose and a sense of direction of what we wanted to achieve. And all the decisions that we made were focused on driving that vision, philosophy, mission that we had, which was ingrained on every decision that we made.

So really what I'm hearing then, and it's what come into my mind when you're talking about this, Mark, is one, we've got a clear direction. I think if we don't have a clear philosophy, vision, then we don't have that. And that's hard when you're in the weeds, when you're in this part of this journey. You may feel like, I can't get my head above water. Like, we just had a good month, okay, let's do it again. But then I don't— like, you have no clear direction of then what decision I need to make today that's going to get me closer there. But then also what you said is, if I have that clear philosophy, I'm then going to be a lot more comfortable and confident saying no to stuff. And that is it.

We've built the business off that philosophy. There's even— there's a tipping point, I remember really early in our business, and Graham and I went out, so I'll tell you the scenario. Two key billers left Consul in like the third year, two top performers. And it was like, oh my God, we're still a small business. Christ, the real issue. We went out, we got advice and the advice was you need to cut costs and it's going to be an issue for your business. And me and Graham sat there and said, we don't, this doesn't feel right. And I remember that being a real tipping point.

I think at that point we'd stopped billing as well.

Yeah, we'd stopped billing.

We'd stopped billing at that point just to give some context to that as well.

We had like 25, 30 people. I know something obviously we'll talk about the stages as we go through, but we felt just doesn't feel right. It doesn't sit with us. And I looked at Graham and said, we developed our philosophy. If this business is gonna succeed or fail, I want it to be through our decisions based on our philosophy, what we mapped out, not based on other people giving us advice that didn't quite resonate with us. They get this great advice in their world, but not what we believed in. So we pivoted and said, no, no. Graham and I got back on the phone, started making calls. The business had a monster year. But what it showed us is that there was a couple of times where we, should we flex our philosophy? And we refused. And each time we came out far ahead.

Yeah.

And I think also on that is, you know, touching on there, there are peaks and troughs in the journey, aren't there? And especially as a founder and a startup and you have a great period, whatever it is, months, quarters, years, and there might be a dip. And if you've got that direction, that philosophy, it's really easy to make sure you consistently make the right decisions to stay on the course.

Yeah.

And we had that.

And it's hard to do that when you're not clear on what you're working backwards from.

Correct.

I think the other thing as well, when I spend a lot of time with founders at this stage, comparison as well. Like, that can really be a struggle for people when, again, they don't feel clear on where they're going, what they're saying no to. It's like, hang on a minute, Mark's over there and we start at the same time and he's doing really well, why aren't I? And again, because if you don't have that clarity, you can fall into that trap. I don't know.

That's a really good question. We were the opposite.

We never had that.

In a really good way. We believe, we're so into our philosophy, we had such a good, we are so believed in our vision, rightly or wrongly, obviously it worked out, right? We believed in that vision that whenever there was outside noise, I remember Ben Wallin, oh no, Coxie, who's now at Edison Search, I think you guys have had on, came and switched to oil and gas. No, we've got, we're doing this, we've got our vision. And it enabled us to cancel out the noise, which is so important.

Yeah, I'm just thinking, look, you guys again are working with founders now, but in today's world, there's never been more distraction.

Correct.

Do you know what I mean?

So that's what I mean as well.

Like, whatever that may be, tools, different things, which is why this is so important to start here. Um, and just a final point on this, obviously from what I'm hearing it sounds like it was really, you know, set in stone what you wanted. But I guess, Mark, any thoughts on like this philosophy, vision, can it evolve? Because I think sometimes I can relate to that where sometimes it can be really hard to like really commit to something set in stone. I can see how valuable it is to have that en vision But then also, could it evolve along the way? I don't know.

So philosophy is a deeper thing, right? It's about who the business is, what they identify with. Strategy and tactics change all the time. So us wanting to achieve high margin, retained ultra niche business, but we can change our markets.

Yeah.

We can change our GTM, whether that be through email focus or community-led things. There's different ways that we could do that. And I think you have to constantly assess it. So yes, I'm glad you said that. No, it's not a thing that's set in stone. You've got to constantly adapt. But we start, we had a starting point. And most time when I talk to a lot of founders, I think you found the same. There isn't a clear starting point. I.e., they're flexible. There's something shiny over here. I'll go there. Then I'll go here. And they're getting distracted by the noise as opposed to saying, I'm on this path. And if something is so good, it takes me off it. Love it.

I'll give you an example. Just, we talked a lot about high value fees, high quality work. When we started saying, well, at the very beginning we said we wouldn't write any business under 18% perm, I think. We never, you know, there had to be a really like a project perhaps.

It was 20%, by the way. We rarely did it.

Rarely did it. I think I'm probably thinking contract. And as we started scaling, contracts, as we started scaling and bringing more people in and experienced people in who were trying to win big peer sales of the big global vendors, and we'd say no, it's not us, we're not writing that business. So that allowed us that moment of clarity in those tough situations where someone's going, yeah, but I've got this massive client opportunity, we can get 50 runners out, or whatever it is.

And what, what's also really powerful in that as well is I think a lot of— and you would have met these people— but there's a lot of recruitment leaders, just founders of businesses, who say this is what their philosophy, what their vision is, but the quickest way to erode that is when their actions don't match up, right? So that's what's also great about that is having that discipline, even though they'll go, come on, Graham, these things, right? It's actually in those moments staying true to that because they're like, you know what, fair play, they said that's what we're about and we're sticking to it. And I'm sure you've seen it, that's one of the quickest ways where you can disappoint people, or people were on the journey and go, hang on a minute, Mark, yeah, that doesn't match up. And people notice that, don't they?

Yeah.

And it also comes exit.

Absolutely. Yep.

Here's your philosophy, documented that right from day one, you lived, breathed it, executed it, it seems like that's an aligned business. So that's something that we actually did, went way back, showed them our business plan from day's dot, you know.

But, and then to be able to have the fruits of that hard work and that labour and that philosophy where high margin business at the point of exit to a public company. And this is what we said we're doing, here's what we've done.

Exactly.

Really, really credible.

So just to round this out then, Mark, I'll come to you on this, like just to keep it practical. If I'm listening to this right now, and I'm thinking, you know what, yeah, I haven't got this nailed, or it's a bit wishy-washy, where to start? Is it, you know, I did this recently for myself, like, get out of your typical environment, give yourself some good reflective questions to think about, and really write this stuff down? Like, what is just a good first step?

So step 1, you've got to think about what works. Genuinely look at what works in your whole career, what you believe that works in future. Number 2, what doesn't work. you know, be mature about it. And likewise, what do you enjoy doing, not enjoy doing? And start to really brainstorm around these things and start to gravitate towards a strategy that can actually work. Then you gotta, then you gotta stress test that. I was fortunate, I lived it. I was, we'll talk about billings. Graham and I were both big billers in the back previously. I billed big in America, Graham in the UK and Europe. So we were able to stress test it with each other. So find someone that you can interact with, can help build it out. So it's really starting on what works, what doesn't work, what you believe in. And then allowing somebody to stress test that and challenge you.

And then, Graham, I'm going to come to you on this because I think we spoke about this when we prepared for this as a final point. Again, sounds great that you guys are both aligned, but you guys would have met people, and I've met plenty of people, where that alignment doesn't stay true, right? And again, that's why this is also important.

Yeah.

Where if you don't have this, this is when you can have a lot of friction with people that you started a business with.

Yeah.

So anything that you feel like on reflection that you and Mark did well besides having a clear vision and, uh, philosophy? Is there anything you did intentionally? Like, did you, uh, always plan to have conversations to get— I don't know, like, what did you do to really make sure that you guys actually shared the same goals? Because I've met a lot of people where that does change and they don't have the hard conversations, and then there's a lot of pain and there's fallout and things don't work out. So how did we keep this aligned?

We didn't have to work hard on it.

Okay.

So we're very, very lucky. And I wish I could say to you, oh, we did this and it all worked out, but we were very lucky, I think. And the one thing that I would say is we, it was trust comes to my mind. We just trusted each other implicitly to the extent that we had, there was probably one agreement we had, which was, and it was only this that was ever kind of in our relationship, which was if one of us, when Liverpool scored in 1966. Let's not go there. If one of us felt strongly about something, the other one would say, you feel strong about it? I'd say, Mark, you feel strong about this? I'll back you. Let's go with it. And that never ever come up. I don't think.

That's what we did, Matt. We had an advisor and it was quite funny because whenever we argued, let's call up the advisor. We say, is it scenario A or scenario B? And he's got, well, it's obviously scenario B. Yes. And one was like, all right, two of you that I respect are thinking the same thing. I probably need to change my position.

We said after we exited the company and we had we're both tired and we had some time out. Mark was in America, I was in the UK. You know, we'd spend time on the phone. We still speak a lot, you know, and we have done since we worked so closely together. And we'd say, right, how do we get this success? And we spent a long time talking about it, probably over the course of 12 months. What was it? Was it markets? Was it philosophy? Was it strategy? Was it L&D? Was it our people development plan? And we just kept— every time we came with, other companies done that. It was the strength of our relationship.

It's foundational.

But you did ask something that was a really fair question you asked. What happens if the founders— I spoke to 3 founders, this was last year, and they found— and they were asking me to engage with them. And I spoke to them about, okay, cool, what's the vision? What's the exit piece? One says the vision is £100 million, we're going to build it to £100 million business, etc. And the other guy says, oh no, I'm actually quite happy just to jump out with a few million in my pocket. The other guy was in between. I recently caught up with them because I couldn't engage with them because the vision was so different. It would have been really hard. I put my I recently caught up with one of them and he said, yeah, we realised on that call we're not aligned at all. And it was like, we came off the call and so we need to have a proper conversation. Unfortunately for them, that meant that they had to go do their own thing. So it's really important to take a step back. I would say you need a mature conversation, get on the same page, be big boys and girls about it. And if that, if you can't get on the same page and you've got some tough decisions to make, it's like any marriage.

I think particularly when you've got you know, we're talking about the scenario of getting to 15, 20 people, and maybe it was set up as a, let's go and let 3 friends in X company's gonna build for ourselves, and then you get this tipping point of where are we, where do we want to go, what is our future direction. Started off as just we want to build together and hang out, and now it becomes something different. You have to be aligned.

I think again, this is why this first point is so crucial. It really is foundational. I think, I don't know if you want to add anything to this, but I've had a lot of conversation recently with people where it didn't quite work out. And I think in our industry, it can be really common for people to almost be a bit naive around who they're going business with.

Yes.

I think that's just something that I've been sort of sharing more, where really don't take that decision lightly. Just because your mates, you get on great when you go down to the pub, you build good, they're top billers, doesn't mean they're gonna be great business partners. So again, there's almost a— there's a bit when you're on the journey where it's like, let's get aligned, are we all on the same, are we all in agreement here? But actually, before we even get there don't take that decision lightly. I think it's more important than who you decide to marry, personally. I really do believe that.

It's up there.

It's up there.

It's equally as your business marriage.

So like, really take that seriously. Do the due diligence, all these things. Have those hard conversations up front, and it might just save a bit of pain.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely, who you choose to marry— just in case my wife's watching— this is much more important than she—

She's not gonna watch it.

She's not gonna watch it.

No, she's absolutely not gonna watch it. But just in case, I mean, yeah.

Another final point and then we'll get into some other bits. Mark, I'm gonna come to you on this. So another thing that you guys have seen in terms of constraints, I've got here building for today versus hiring for the future. Just talk to us a bit about this in terms of what you've seen and common reasons why maybe companies are struggling or founders are struggling at this stage. Like what do we mean by that? Obviously you said about future markets, just talk to us a bit about this.

Are we talking about future markets or in—

Yes, we've got here one of the other common pieces is like they're maybe very much focused on today, their markets, their strategy, versus thinking about 12 months, 24 months from now.

So there's two different elements to that. So one, in terms of the markets that you work, I'm a bit of a futurist. Graham and I built our success on Consol. I'm thinking, what's big in the future? A bit like investments, you know, finding the thing that's going to be big, the stock that's going to be big in a few years, and invest in that now. Same for markets. So we worked in that. So, you know, work in the trend markets. You've missed the trick. That's on trend is everyone's crowded that market. AI, which is the one we did AI in 2015. We started doing AI 2015, like it's 10 years ago. So somebody telling me now AI is the one. No, we, I love AI in terms of the, as a sector, but there's so many nuances around it. So knowing the trends, then there's the other thing about internally as a business, you have to be myopically focused on sales. 0 to 15 people, you've got to crush your numbers. You have to have every month needs to be a solid month. You're under pressure, cash flow issues. And then there's that dichotomy. How do I hire and build a business future? How do I scale and actually put those heads in place that aren't gonna offer me any value this year but are gonna be critical to me moving forward? Those sort of tipping points are hard. And, and that's where continuing from the philosophy thing, there's that 3-year vision. And once you start to realise, hey, where you want to get, so I just went through this, one of my clients, really good business, really ambitious. Where they want to get to in 3 years' time, then they realize we need to start hiring now, we need the growth now, the structure now. So twofold, future tech and future markets within your own sectors are fundamental, and then there's that piece of internally having a similar mantra.

How do we fit— like, obviously you're not saying there that that future market piece is like a silver bullet, but like, again, that comes down to your strategy. So you're just saying be smart with the markets that you choose to commit to. Is that sort of, or at least have an eye on this?

Yeah. So I look at this, if you think about any company, let's just take a look at any big company, Facebook, Google, they're not caring about 2025. Their focus, Facebook, all its investment is AI actually. Similar for Google is much more what's going to happen in a few years' time. So if we could operate in a similar way and start to predict where your industry is going, whatever industry that is, whatever it means for that industry, and then start to recruit get ahead of that and recruit that trend now, you start to build a brand, a sector, a specialism in that future trend. So for example, healthcare. Healthcare is going through a 200-year evolution with the introduction of AI, which has the potential to cure cancer, by the way. And you start making those sort of bold statements and you realize healthcare's going through a massive change. Well, what's going to be big and how can I get ahead and get into that? One of my clients 5 years ago started focusing on robotic surgeries and they recruited robotic surgeons and that's their core specialism. So there's massive opportunities if you can get it right.

And that will then come back full circle when you think about for us, which was high value, high quality and high margin fees.

I thought you were going to say exit.

Well, I think it all, it all aligns, doesn't it?

Suddenly you've got all this sexy stuff. We were doing AI, we were doing crypto, we were doing all these sort of blockchain. That was all that sexy stuff. And people realise you've been doing it for years now. Yeah, we've predicted the future and got it right. Come exit, a company's going to want to buy in that knowledge and that intelligence rather than somebody who's just doing what they've always done.

Yeah.

And then, like, just out of interest then, I guess Mark will come back to you on it. Like, if I'm in the trenches right now and I've set up a business where I've just done the market that I've always done, I have a network in, how much time should be allocated to what you're talking about here? Because that might not even be part of my strategy, but it sounds like this has been pretty crucial. Is something that you guys talk to people about. Is this like every week I should be keeping an eye on? I don't know. Do you know what I mean? Like, because—

So there's an excellent question. I'd almost ask that founder, let's pretend in this situation, is that founder making good money from their current market? If they are, then guess what? Carry on doing that. And this becomes a diversification question. As you expand, how are you going to bolt on and add more to your current market? Where's the future of that? And then so you can start to bolt on and add and expand. And as you start to scale up to 100 people and you're starting at 15, Well, suddenly you're like, ah, I really need to add more markets, geographies, different specialisms, et cetera. And that's where the future piece might come in. It's actually amazing if you're making good money right now, cause you've got something that you can move into. Broadly, what I've seen in the market is people say, my business is failing, I'm struggling to pick up new clients. And I talk about, well, now's the time to make a bit more of a pivot. And there's a reluctance to do so, but you're not billing, you're not losing anything. So the easy solution is with your new BD, start to do that new BDNs future markets. Take a step back. I read every day. I still do. I'm still on it all the time. I had 30 minutes. I dunno, we've never really overly spoken, Graham and I. I had 30 minutes a day where just nothing, blank piece of paper. I'm gonna surf, whatever that means with that new technology, a new idea, innovation. And suddenly that would take me, that took me down the AI rabbit hole. 2012, 2013, I went down that AI rabbit hole. 2014, I say to Graham, I think we should pivot the business. 2015, everyone's pivoted. But it started with a trickle. So one of the things I urge all founders to do is every day just start reading, build out knowledge, come up with ideas, whatever that means. I'm allowing that to be quite a broad subject.

Graeme, any bets that we took on markets that didn't play out? On your, on the console journey or no?

No, because we didn't take bets on markets that might not play out.

Fair.

And when we, you know, people came to us and wanted to do different markets to what we were doing and it wasn't part of our our philosophy, so we wouldn't do them.

So there's, uh, there's— we started, Graham, I, I'd moved from the US, I was doing video game recruitment in the US, we came here and I had to reinvent myself. Yeah, I mapped out the market, it was mobile content, 2008 mobile. To your point though, I went there and it was pretty saturated. Oh my God, I thought it was a future market, it's pretty saturated. And then carried on in that market, let me just, just dig around. We got into streaming, mobile streaming. Then we realized, oh, it's a streaming world. So accidentally we stumbled into streaming. We built off of that for 10, 15 years.

So let— I just wanna—

because, but it wasn't, for example, SAP. When we were doing our markets, you know, we weren't going to pivot into something because there's a lot of money being made in SAP as an example. We didn't suddenly say, oh, we've got to be in that market because it didn't relate to what we did.

Just to focus on that for a second, because I think that that's where there might be a bit of an insight here. When you say It was saturated. Like, what do you mean? Because I'm looking— I'm— what I think would be helpful here is like signals, is markers of like— so I mean, because people might be going, actually, you know what, I've gone down this path. Because then you get to a point where you start investing time into it and you're like, have I done enough to warrant a decision of like, do I carry on or not? Do you know what I mean? So tell us, when you say it's saturated, what, what made you come to that conclusion?

You say— I mean, no, it's so— well, I remember it well. I was just talking to companies, they had roles, they would work with us They wanted lower fees, i.e., 15%, and they were already working with agencies, had PSLs in place. Yeah, and I was like, oh my, I thought I was way ahead. Compare that to AI. So we mapped out the AI market, we mapped out in 2014 robotics, computer vision, um, machine learning, deep learning. So map that out. And then it was the guys started doing recruitment in computer vision. Andrew Mannion picks up a role at BMW in Germany, an AI role on computer vision. So autonomous driving now. He then contacts the guys in the USA. I picked up an autonomous. They're like, all right, fine. They start calling the car companies. They don't believe that that's what we're doing. And they're trying to say, go to my LinkedIn, look at what we're doing. And then it was almost so early, they hadn't even thought, oh, you really are recruiting in this space. Yeah, we are. We just got every role retained. Like, you're so early. Now, don't get me wrong, that's a good example. AI worked out big. But the example is when you're doing your BD, are you getting bites or not? If you're not getting bites, you're probably not in an in-demand market right now.

And I know it's nuance, but I know people might be thinking of it like, what have you found? Because you've also, you could maybe also pull on your experience of going into international markets. What's like a fair time period where it's like, you know what, we've given it like a good amount of time we're going to pivot this way or we're going to stop. Do you know what I mean? I know there isn't going to be a silver bullet answer there.

The thing with us, right, one of the things that Consul had a culture of was BD.

Okay.

We had a culture of BD. BD was done every single day. I don't see that nowadays in with the companies I work with or the companies we engage with. And we were constantly, our teams had to do BD every day and it just came natural to everybody. And so there might be an individual, let's say that was developing a desk in Germany and they were doing X technology in Germany or in a city and it wasn't working and they might have to pivot. They might have to pivot again. They might have to pivot again. And then they'd find the right one, either a tech play that we could do or we had a candidate pool or a city or a location. 'Cause we worked global markets, the constant BD, you end up finding your way. And so there was a process to it. We had a structured process around BD and new markets and finding and clients and candidates.

And then they start getting into data ratios, efficiency. What does that mean? That means like the amount of vacancies and new clients are bringing in, the subs to interview ratios, and you start to see all those, that quality-driven piece increase. Then you start to think this could be a market for us, and then we can double down on it and get multiple people in that.

And that's something we didn't really talk about previously, but we were always very data-driven, and the insights piece was really important to us around objectives and ratios. Lots of companies I talk to don't have that.

No, because they think sales management, they think KPIs, or we're looking at that board level data. It's fundamental.

Or don't have a CRM ATS that reports in the right way, but they've got 25, 15, 25 people, can't get the reporting out. We always went back to data.

Well, let's just talk about that for a sec then. So Mark, if I'm turning up to a board meeting with you and Graham, I'm part of Consul Partners, board, what data— and I run like one of the, I don't know, one of the divisions— what data am I expected to bring to that then from a performance pipeline?

Everything at a senior level is, is almost group or divisional data. So I don't care about any individuals. We don't want to be talking about 100 individuals here, different conversation. Okay. So it's about grouping up that data and seeing on a group level the, the vacancies and submissions, the interviews, the ratios of that. Are they dipping? Are they increasing? Client spend quarter on quarter is increasing, decreasing with some clients. So it's just about looking at as many ratio points as possible, data points as possible. However, round bigly, I love data. Data asks a question. So data might say your biggest client, your spend has now dipped with them 3 quarters in a row. It raises the question, why? That's all it does. And it makes us aware of the gaps that are coming. I sat with a client not that long ago who had a good period and they had a really bad month. And why do we have the bad month? Wasn't data. We went back, they had a massive drop-off in interviews 6 weeks prior. Guess what? That's where the hit is. Instead of reacting to that at the time, 6 weeks later they reacted to the fact they lacked the sales placements. Whereas what we could have done is had a sprint to say, why are we lacking the interviews? We need to play catch-up.

And that tracks towards actual performance versus budget or forecast. Because ultimately as leaders in the business, what we're really focused on is how are we tracking versus our budget, coming back to our 3-year plan and then our forecast. And then the data supports where are we in that journey to achieve those results.

Okay.

So, so you notice it comes back to the 3-year plan and our vision consistently. We were coming back to that. That wasn't something that we wrote and then didn't look at for a year. Every single month we were looking at where are we versus the vision.

So the founders, they should be 90 to 110% within of their budget. And if they're not—

I can't see that happening a lot.

They need to be. We were always with a 9 to 1, 10 to 1 budget. It's just the budget planning. It's your ability to actually assess your business, forecast it correctly. I'm working with my clients now and some of them are really getting good at it and they understand the value of like, okay, the forecast is low, now we can react to that.

What made you say that? Because you were really surprised by that. You were like, I just can't see that happening.

Because I think this is bringing me on to the next point on like what have, what are founders doing well, what have they got right at this sort of stage? And it's like they've really committed to having structure and they're starting to think about process and systems. And part of that is data and what they're measuring. Like, I speak to a lot of founders at this stage where then they're not measuring a whole lot, right? So that's why I sort of reacted like that, is I can't imagine many recruitment founders who say at the beginning of the year— and this is something I'm definitely trying to get better at as well— is like in January at the end of December we're going to be here. How many actually end up 90%, 90 to 100%, uh, accurate on that? I, I just can't see that because of lack of measurement.

But that's, that's the, the, a zero, 15-person business, founder-led, um, and they're able to drive the sales, etc. And I think that's absolutely fine. They can get away with that. And they probably know everything to do with every individual within their business. The truth is, as you scale and you're going to get to a larger business, where you're not in control of every individual and you're going to want to be checking the business, helping the business, supporting in any way possible, that's where the data comes in. So you could argue, is it a 15-person business? Yes, they could probably get away without a budget. Who cares? It's their own business. They know when they're in good period or not. But as they're going to forecast budget, cash flow, hiring, expansion, etc., that becomes really, really important. And your ability to correctly forecast just means that you can then forecast how much you want to spend.

Yeah. And also they're likely to either probably outsource their back office or their finance piece, likely, which we started doing and then we brought it in-house very quickly. We hired our first finance person, um, 6 months. So because we knew we had this purpose and we knew we were, we needed insights, we needed the detail, we needed the data, we needed strong accounts that we needed to be able to spot trends and we were still billing at that time. So we brought the expertise in very early.

So just, just to like bring that together then, so just quickly, just so we're all on the same page. So Graham, if you're like advising me, I'm a founder.

Yeah.

And you know, you're committed to work with me because of the, you know, I've been clear with what I want to achieve, my goals. Uh, every month we have a meeting, I'm expected to bring my performance results. Like, what, what are you expecting to bring there? Is it like number of interviews? Like, just, just really simply, what would be on that list of metrics you'd expect?

Well, it would start with probably looking at your profit and loss statement, just to see where are you tracking versus your plan, which you likely to got in place if we're working together now. And then what is supporting that in terms of sales metrics behind that? So it will be sales performance versus target for the team, likely, not necessarily you. And then an overview of your objectives, your KPIs, and what your ratios are.

Average deal size, average deal percentage, For contract, en-perms, really focus on, on that increasing amount of retained business, um, client spends. Then you've obviously got your standard ratios, vacancy, subs, interviews. I would tell, for me personally, there was one number that I looked at. The biggest number in recruitment is interviews. Everything comes within— you're gonna— if somebody has a high amount of interviews, I promise you they're going to have a big year in terms of placements. Likewise, when there's low amount, they're unlikely to. Shots on goal. Yeah, that's ultimately what it is.

For you, is it— because obviously in perm, multiple interviews, first interviews for me.

Yeah, first interviews. Yeah. But you can start to see, if I see a business increasing interviews or dipping interviews, yeah, that says so much. The other ratios are all going into the interviews.

And then just on this, because this is probably one of the— on reflection, as we're talking about this, is probably one of the most common questions that I've had from like small business owners. And you may have both had it, which is, Mark, when, when is the right time to hire with the amount of money that I have? Like, that's probably one of the most common ones. So let's just jump into that quick because that probably ties quite nicely into this. When I've spoken to people, to give you some of the things that I normally say to people, I think firstly, risk appetite is a personal thing. I feel like, obviously, we— they may not have a budget is the first thing, which spoken about But I think Graham may be like, you know what, I'm really comfortable having 3 months in the bank and adding headcount. Some people may want more than that. I think that there is a personal risk appetite, but I'll let you share that because that is honestly by far one of the biggest questions that always comes up. So I think there's maybe some lessons there, like actually, is part of the problem that I don't have a forecast, I don't have a budget, I don't have predictability, I'm not even measuring much. So of course I'm not going to feel confident to add more headcount, add more cost. But what have you typically answered to that when I say, Mark, when should I hire? When is enough money in the bank to hire? What's the trigger?

Can I just start by saying, in our instance, we didn't earn any money for 2 years.

Okay.

I put that on a LinkedIn post and we got panned for it. Somebody just said, you guys obviously came from money because you obviously had loads in the bank because you can— Yeah, I came from money. I was billing a million a year. But growing up, we came from no money, both of us. It was quite unusual.

So just on this, you know when you say you didn't You didn't pay yourself anything for the first 2 years? What do you actually mean? So like, were you paying yourself?

Yeah, because zero dividends, no nothing.

For me, I had 2 kids at the time.

Okay.

I made sure I saved a lot of money, right, in my bank account from my previous companies. I saved money and I lived off that.

What are we talking then?

What, how much did I have in the bank? I had over £100,000, something like that in the bank, and I had to live off that.

So I've met varied people.

For me, it was a little bit more difficult because I had the kids then. I'd go to um, Broadbean and say, I might need some money. And Mark would always be, yeah, whatever.

No, I wouldn't. Of course, of course, of course, have some money.

And, uh, but we were so focused on investing in the company and reinvesting everything that, you know, it was suddenly I was a little bit conflicted sometimes. I'm getting to year 2 and etc. So, but yeah, we— so when you talk about your original question, appetite for risk, when should I start hiring, we were all in.

Yeah, we were all in. We're building this business, we're going to exit it. So like literally didn't really enter our head that we weren't. It's only afterwards I realised that was quite rare and almost a hard thing to do. You mentioned the 1%. I was not. We were, that 1% to us was 100%. Clearly we're going to. But you asked the question, I'm going to give you a really, I'm sorry to give a boring answer, but I can't help it. Timescales, hiring appetite, 3-year plan. Let's look at cash flow. Let's look at your forecasting. Let's look at this. Let's look at money in the bank. What do you need in your personal life? Have you got a kid on the way and you're gonna need to say, are you moving? If there's, and these are all factors that play in and then like, then it's about an in personal individual. So when you sort of factor, I said I did a 3-year plan with one of my clients recently and they're very ambitious and they're hungry for growth and they're not thinking about their personal income and stuff like that. So they're able to see, right, we need to grow relentlessly and it really helps them focus on that piece and it helps them understand cash flow. Now, If they have a really good period, maybe they can accelerate some of those timescales. If they have a really bad period, guess what? We have to rejig the whole plan. You didn't have the cash flow, we have to change something. So any plan is going to be assessed every quarter anyway, how we're tracking to the 3-year plan.

But again, this is why that was the first point on our list so much.

Yeah, it's kind of—

it comes back to it, doesn't it?

It is. And you're like, oh, I can see why they said that now.

Yeah, because it is, it is. That is probably one of the— and you guys have seen it, right? It is so hard to make any sort of decision if you haven't got clarity on where you want to end up at the end of the year, 3 years from now.

I dunno about you, Marco, but no one told us to do that. We just did that. When we came up with the concept of we're gonna start this company, we're gonna do this together, we just wrote a business plan and did our financial forecast.

Yeah, I think that's—

Nobody sat down and said to us, you must do this.

But there was that piece of thinking like the company that's gonna acquire you. Yeah. So here's one of the advices we're gonna give you. Imagine Hays are gonna come and buy you one day. Sorry, but a big end sprite, and they're going to look and think, what's your behaviour? Where's your business plan? Where was your forecast? What did you do around XYZ? The only reason they want to do that is, yes, these guys set up the business the way we would've set it up. Easy investment. If you're like, got tax schemes on the side, dodgy payments here, loads going on, fly by night, even if you hit good numbers, it's not quite the philosophy that we would've set up a business in, innit? And it creates a little bit of stress around that. So yeah, I think that's a really—

I think that's a really good point. We didn't do anything like that. We didn't put cars, nothing through the company.

It was so clean because they're skeletons. You know, you're creating future skeletons.

None of that, nothing.

Just like, uh, Graham, I'll come to you on this. Like, like we've said, a lot of people end up on this entrepreneurial journey, they're with good friends, being good performers. And a lot of the people that I— it's one of my pieces of advice for people that do have aspirations to start businesses, like ask it to get exposed to stuff like commercially, business-wise, because not sometimes companies like gatekeep that, uh, and they just want their people to stay on the just the sales metrics versus the P&L.

Yeah.

How, how did you got like the way that you're talking? You're talking as if like you have a lot of this just business knowledge. A lot of people I sit down with, they were great recruiters, not great operators.

I—

so how did you educate yourself?

I started, I was minority shareholder and founder of a first company called NP Group when I was 21.

Okay.

So I was pretty young when I started that and I became really close with the finance director. We used to get the tube from Finchley into the West End every day. He lived in Finchley, I did. And you know, he was much older than me and I just had this appetite to learn and want to understand what invoice discounting was. How does the profit and loss statement work? Why is there a balance sheet? So I was just really hungry for that knowledge and I knew that one day I think I was a bit of pain in the ass to Ellie as well, because I'd be saying, ah, invoice discounting, what is that and how does that work? And, you know, why do we draw down 90% on contract and 80% on perm? One day that was going to come back and help me. And so I had an interest in it quite early on.

Just be curious about it. And I think now with technology, I think you've got no excuse.

No excuse. Zero excuse.

I went down, I had a slightly different thing, and Graham will know about this. I was billing a million a year in the US and I'd never, ever, ever had sales training. So my hand up, I want to go for that. They laughed like, what do you mean you're going to sales training? I want to go to sales, I want to just go to a basic sales training course. So I went. Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie is the largest sales training company in the world, and they offered me to become a leadership trainer. They basically said, hey, look, we don't have young, like, trainers in our business. Great to have a young— I was 25 at the time— a young leader in our business. So they trained me to become a trainer, and that was massive because it sent me down a different route instead of focusing on recruitment, I was focusing on psychology, influencing people, delivering training, presentations, um, all of this stuff. So actually at quite a young age, accidentally, just a real passion. And we set up Consul, it was clear Graham was like, I had all the L&D programs written, we're gonna, we're gonna only teach it. We had an issue, uh, we struggled to get outside trainers because we had our own philosophy and our training was all exuding our own philosophy. And therefore I don't want outsider coming in because our philosophy. Um, so I think that that was— that's— that for me was a personal interest. One thing I always talk to, uh, companies and founders about, get into human psychology. How to influence people is such a key skill.

Yeah, I think what you just highlighted there is something that I think is one of the coolest parts about this entrepreneurial journey, where it is, I think, the ultimate personal development journey. And what you just both give as examples, that we're being curious, you wanted to learn, and that doesn't stop.

It never ends. Never, never, never.

It shouldn't.

So like, is it the sort of thing— and like, we used to go to some of these leadership meetings and they say, give yourself a mark out of 10. I remember being there, I said 5 out of 10. Business doubled, flying, we're absolutely crushing with— why? Because if ever I think I'm more than that, I might stop learning. And I want to constantly feel like— that you had the same—

this course— I was always a 6 out of 10.

Yeah, so you were, you were. You're right, I just read that.

I think, yeah, that's what I'd also take from this is like, if you feel like actually, yeah, that scenario, I don't well, yeah, don't have the humility to go, actually, I need to learn about that. And that's something you have to do.

Absolutely.

So before we get into some more practical examples, and if people are listening and they're maybe in a similar scenario, what I just wanted to round this part out with, Mark, and I'll come to you first. You, you both have been investing in not just recruitment companies, technology companies, or that's been part of your investing strategy. It's drastically changed this market, hasn't it? So like, what I just want to tie this together with is You know, you're, you're kind of sharing with those your hard-earned lessons as well as what you're seeing, what you're doing with companies. But, you know, if you're— the game's changed in terms of like, what's, what are some of the things that come to mind now where we, we would have probably done this differently at Console if AI was as readily available as it is now? I think it's a fair question. I think it's something maybe we should talk about, because how, how would you maybe think about growing your business, growing your headcount, achieving your philosophy, vision, if we had some of the things available to us now? And this is in 2025, we don't even know what it's going to be like in another 12 months' time. I just want to make sure we talked about that because I think that's a fair thing for us to talk about. And you guys are in it, you're looking at companies, you're looking at— you're with your clients, they're talking about their tech stack, you talk to them about it. So anything that springs to mind there where actually this probably would have looked quite different?

I think the starting point is being very open to be able to do things differently and not do things because that's the way we've always done it. And I think we were, you know, we were very open on that. Mark always had a focus on new technology, what's coming next. You know, 10 years ago, sequencing, or in 2012 we started doing sequencing.

2012, 12-month sequencing.

I remember about 5 years ago, maybe 5 years ago, Marco called me up and says, this thing called Source Mile. And Mark was like, everyone's going crazy about Source Mile. We were doing this in 2012. Now I was looking at that, you know, but so it's difficult to answer your question, what would we have done differently? We were very open to it. Mark was very open to the inside.

Don't romanticize about what got you here. Like, again, vulnerability, like humility, is thinking about these things.

And also not getting stuck in, oh, we do it this way because we've always done it this way. This is our process. We're not going to be able to we're not going to be able to, you know, embrace AI or sourcing or whatever it might be because how does that fit into our process? You've got to change your business process to embrace some of this stuff.

You ask the question, what would we do differently? We're on the path around automation. I would automate so much. Yeah, I would have an absolutely heavily automated business. And the reason being is that, as we know, so much of what we do is either going to be laborious, administrative. There's so many areas that we can automate. And that allowed us to be a lot more strategic. So for example, if I can send one email and have the entire stack automated after that, I can then spend my time focusing on future markets, on whatever the next big thing is, and being more efficient use of time. So would the whole process and philosophy have changed? I don't know. The philosophy certainly wouldn't have changed, but the application of the tools might have helped us accelerate our time with our clients and that side of things. That being said, there is also a big challenge in today's market. That we were lucky in that we had a really strong BD focus and when we were automating, others weren't, so we could stand out a little bit. Today everyone's doing it and it becomes really hard and I'm not going to patronize anyone and say, oh, just set up automations. Every company is getting so many emails, so much going on, so much even LinkedIn content. You're seeing it as sales where I'm seeing half the replies on my thread are just AI replies. So it is tough to get right. We're not going to pretend that. I think it's a hard tricky one for now, but it's just about layering in that stuff now, I think. Automation.

Do we think— because I do think there's a bit of a narrative around this depending on like who you follow, what content you see online, but I do think there's a bit of a narrative in recruitment world now where it's like the days of like scaling through headcount are like gone almost, or like just— I'm not sure that's the right path. Obviously we haven't even spoken about— I don't know if you had like an offshore team, but like that is massive now as well. I know it's always been big, but I think most founders listening to this would have had some sort of email outreach pitch around, yeah, the national insurance has gone up, we don't need to hire people from the UK or hire them in South Africa, Philippines. So I don't know, I don't know if you guys, if that's come into your sort of ecosystem. I do think there's a bit of a narrative around that. I personally think it comes back down to, again, what your vision is. It's like, do you want to go on that scaling journey? If you do, then there are decisions that you make. Yeah, I think a lot of people that moan about I do. I want to add headcount, it's more headache. It's like, actually, is that actually what you wanted? And you just did that because you thought that's what you wanted, did you know what I mean?

Dead right, exactly that.

So I don't know if you guys have your thoughts on that, but I, I do think there's a bit of a narrative around that.

I think, I, I think headcount used to be a vanity metric, didn't it? And I don't think it is anymore, you know. I think people would say, I've grown my company to X number of heads. I think we all know that that's not an important metric. I think everybody in the world today knows it's an important metric. So it is more challenging, I think. And I think the big thing is efficiency has to be the number one. It comes back to Marco's point around automation.

Productivity per head. That's a massive metric. So just to touch on that, because I do get some founders say, what do you mean around that? The way that we would assess a business very quickly is the productivity per head. That means how much billings you averaging, take the total number of billings divide that across every member of staff. Yes, every member. Don't like just only my salespeople. Every member of staff. And they'll give you a number. And I'll say, for a business that's heavily reinvesting, £100,000 to £120,000 a year, that's okay. Probably, you'll probably make a bit of profit off of that and you're heavily reinvesting. If you're not, maybe you'll get closer to £150,000. We took that number from £120,000 when we were heavily reinvesting. In the US, it got really high. But as a blended 180 to over £200,000.

Yeah.

You know, after, after the exit, because we stopped hiring, we focused purely on driving profit, productivity. So there's different metrics around that, but that's a really good metric to look at if you want to assess a business.

Yeah. Whenever I sat down with people that have gone through what you've gone through, that is something that, again, externally people want to know as well. Productivity per head and efficiency. As you said, it becomes all about that. So I guess that's something that people really want to be laser focused on. And then just on that point, Mark, as you said, what, just because you gave us some averages there again, just from your experience, cost per head as well, what we're saying on that, because that might be useful. Like, I know it's really varied though.

I don't know right now.

What does a good cost per head look like?

Well, if you look at one of our metrics was fee and remuneration. So sales, headcount, salaries, taxes, and commission. You know, what should fee and remuneration be? Ours was always just sub-50%, but we had a very good commission structure. And we had CFOs come in and say, your fee and remuneration is too high.

It should be 40%.

It should be less.

What percentage is that? Sorry.

So sales cost, sales staff cost versus total sales.

Right, got you.

So you do £10 million total sales, then £4 million of that should go to the staff. For us, it's a little bit close to £5 million, but there's ratios like that as well.

Okay, so maybe to think about.

But one of the things that we didn't do ever was when You know, somebody might say CFO came in and said Fiona remuneration's too high. Well, the obvious way to reduce that is to reduce your commission structure, which we said was a big no-no for us. Changing the commission structure, we never did.

We did once in the US sometime.

Yes, we moved it to quarterly.

Yeah. We actually increased it though.

Yeah.

Funny.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, and that's because someone said actually maybe—

So in the US, so we touch on this, which is, here's a good example of something. Advice I found is you've got to adapt your business models geographically and you've got to adapt your business models as you're going through that stage. So one of the things that we started doing is, so our average deal size in the US come exit was $46,000. It's a lot, average deal size. So with that 46, what we realized is some people might have somebody move from start date from one month to the next. So they go zero, $90,000. That just doesn't work. And they're stressing out over it, are blanked. Whereas in a quarter, the movements can happen. It doesn't matter as much. So we just felt it was a little bit more exec search on a quarterly basis. I think that's much fairer for everyone. And then the ratchet, the scheme got up really high on a quarterly basis.

But it wasn't a commission cut. Yeah, we weren't reducing commission. It was a—

just made it quarterly.

Yeah.

And then just because you touched on it, Mark, what is— because we're just getting into like things that you're saying here, which I think is helpful. Your life's in the US. I'm sure you've seen it. I've spoken quite a bit about it online, but the way that I— I have a lot of people that are just focusing all their effort on the US. Like, I'm meeting more and more people that are UK-based that just do the US. Obviously, there's never a silver bullet. The way that I say it to people simply is it's just as hard, but the financial return could be like at least 3, maybe 5x. There's also nuances, but what are you seeing? Like, I think a lot of people are looking at the US. You've just said that it's really important to at least think about Again, vision, philosophy, how diversified are you, yeah, market-wise, but then also where you're actually doing business. I think that is one of the amazing things about our world today, like you can do business anywhere, you know what I mean? Like you really can, there's no barriers there. But what are you seeing there? Because I'm definitely seeing, I'd say it's probably been at least 50/50 this year on I meet a recruitment founder and I learn about their business, 50% of them are just doing the US market or are like 80/20, 70/30 US versus maybe UK.

So I built my personal career in the US. At 24, I moved to the US and was recruiting out there. So I think I mentioned to you, I spent 18 of the last 24 years in America. I'm broadly American now, really, as I say that out loud. Shocking. But anyway, so the element that, yeah, I'm always biased. I always, I personally found the UK market has higher level of competition, has a lower average fee. So you're having absolute market suppression. And lower base salaries, which all leads to a significantly lower fee. So average fee in the UK on a perm base was £14,000, so about $18,000. Let's be generous and say in those days, $20,000. We're doing $46,000, more than 2.5 times. We'd have— I'll give you an example of someone like Sam Marsh. Sam Marsh runs Adapt, excellent company. He was a great performer for us. Sam was billing £200,000 or so every year in the UK, comes to America, starts billing $700,000 straight away, immediately. And you just, we did see that sort of jump. But again, I know there's stories around that, some amazing UK business doing well in the UK. I'm biased on the US. I mean, I guess Dubai's got similar right now. There's a big influx in Dubai.

The Middle East, Saudi Arabia is really where it's at. I think it's once in a generation opportunity with the investment that's happening there. For example, they're only just putting in a post office network in Saudi Arabia. Can you imagine that? So can you imagine the IT project around that? And so there is the barriers to entry for the Middle East that are much tougher, but there's so much happening in the Middle East generally, in the UAE and Saudi Arabia particularly.

I just think again, this sort of, we can put this under this header, heading of like like future thinking, you know what I mean? Like, I think now again, if you think about, you know, when you guys are building your business, uh, not saying it was in the Dark Ages by any means, but like, it's never been more easier to do— yep, to transact, do business globally. Yeah, it really has.

Well, when we were doing, wasn't difficult. It's a mindset. We used to interview UK recruiters and say, oh, we operate in 50 countries, and they're like, what? And work in London? And, uh, working to a PSL at sub-15% fees. And we would say, why are you doing that?

We had contracts in Nigeria. Yeah, one of my best stories is Zav went away and he's like, I gave the contractor your number so you call if there's any issues. Like, all right, fine, whatever. First day he calls me, he's from the airport, I'm in Nigeria. Yeah, I need an armed guard. What do you mean an armed guard? What are you talking about? I'm in Nigeria, dude. What? So I quickly Google, oh shit, needs an armed guard. Get an armed guard. So get an armed guard. And then he's like, take him to the hotel. We booked him a normal hotel. No, I need a hotel with an armed guard. Like it's a whole setup. You're in Nigeria. I'm a white guy in Nigeria. This is not an easy place to be. So then it was us learning very quickly. Yeah, we made placements everywhere. And I think that's a good outlook to have. But the truth is you got to go, you got to strategize, hey, where's the money going to be? What was the opportunity there? If somebody said they found a nuanced market in a different location, love it. That's what it's about. We went to California and there was no one in California. We did that consciously. Yeah. We didn't want to be in New York. We wanted to go where no one else was. And we went to Austin in 2015. There was only one UK recruitment company there at the time.

Yeah, I mean, that's a huge spot now, isn't it?

Yeah, now everyone's there.

That's where you go.

And that, by the way, that's the something. One of our philosophies would be go to the untrodden path. So now when my clients often say to me, hey, should I go set up in Austin? Love Austin. I know it well. It's a great place, but maybe you want to do something different because everyone's doing that.

And then just because, just to get clear on like the benefit, the like what's downstream from taking it on, um, non-trodden path, because you mentioned it in markets as well, is what I'm getting is if you go down that path, you're ultimately going to be at the bottom of this wave. And then when it's at the top, when you're at the top, you're well positioned to be like, exactly, no, we're, we're the agency.

Like, we're exactly that.

It's that, isn't it? It's just like capitalising it on the web, but then you are well positioned and actually your competitors are coming in when you're at the top. That's the idea, basically.

Exactly. So if you look at, let's say, that some AI piece, I spoke to Kieran, one of the guys used to work for me. He still builds a million a year in AI. He doesn't do BD. So in this current market, he's building a million a year without doing any BD. He left BD ages ago and all those companies are still rapidly hiring and I'm the key guy. So yes, exactly that. He's now riding that wave and can ride that wave for years. By the way, there comes a logical thing that somebody says, well, wait a second, what happens when that wave ends? Well, we pivoted away from streaming. I mentioned we're doing content delivery, streaming, communication technology, and then into AI. So we were always thinking about the AI journey is going to end, what would be next? So you've always got to think about riding that wave. There's another wave coming. Where is it? How do we get onto that wave?

Just to touch on that and just to reinforce something that comes back to, we had Our teams did BD every single day. And so, you know, that pivot, the next thing, because we're doing BD every single day, it's easier to make the transition. What I've found over the last couple of years with many companies after the COVID bounce and then the market turned, many companies built delivery machines and weren't doing BD every single day. And then they realised, oh, the customers aren't hiring, they need to start doing BD. But BD is this rusty old tap that need to turn back on and takes a long time for the water to start flowing. Just didn't have a sales mindset. We even, we had high growth, significant big customer wins, teams were still doing BD. It was really important because of that very point that Mark makes, which is what's the future?

But we pushed this. This is, if you could digress for one second, uh, I'm, I always struggle where founders aren't leading the BD. Now I'm not talking about leading it on the phone, but almost like, oh, the recruiter, they're setting their own markets, they're setting their own strategy. I struggled with that.

Yeah.

It was a fair, like we were fortunate our relationship evolved is to then I could start literally sitting out doing the innovation, doing the research, mapping out all the future markets. There's a computer vision, there's this machine learning, deep learning. So we'd almost have all the seats ready if you looked at a business plan, like in our mind. Now clearly we had to do the deals first and hopefully it works out that way. But I always believe a business should be leading and hiring. And then that way when we interviewed somebody, we'd say, Shem, I think you're brilliant. You've been outstanding in your career so far and you've been working in a saturated market. This is the opportunity we see. We've laid this out. These are the people doing it, the success they're having, and this is the impact that you could have in this business. So much more powerful for the individual as well, saying, I want a platform, I want a place to use my skills that I've learned, and I just need you to give me the guidance to say, this is how I work within your system, and then they'll go. But if you— it's unfair sometimes to say to people, you figure out your strategy. What market do you want to work? We've got to lead that as well.

I think that's a great insight. You really think that should be under the leader's purview?

That's part of the philosophy, the GCM. How are you going to, what are you doing around that?

Has to be.

Yeah.

That leads me quite nicely on some of the things that we wanted to talk through was if I was a founder with like 11 headcount, I was the top biller in that organization, like just from a very typical perspective, I think there's a lot of things we've already talked about that's going to help that type of persona, that type of person. I think what, what would be good just to, to touch on, I've written down here, if I was, you know, a solo founder, 11 people in the business, that's including me, um, you know, we've done 1.75 million between us. I was the, the top biller in that. And I do say to you guys, you know, the first question you might say to me if I'm speaking to you guys about being an advisor, you might go, Hishem, what do you want? And I'm talking about you know, next 3 years I want to get to 5 million, I want to get, you know, a million EBITDA profit, these types of things. We can jump into where you might want to take that conversation, but I think with what you just said, Graham, I'll maybe come to you, but I think a real common bottleneck for someone like that is how do I become less reliant on, and how do I go from a biller to a builder? I don't know how you want to frame it. Yeah, so maybe let's just start there because I do think that it may not be at the top of the constraints, but I do think with what you're talking about there is interesting. We're leading with the strategy. I think a lot of people in those shoes find it so hard to get in that mindset when they're so reliant on, on the business and it working. So I don't know what you've found yourself telling people there, or—

There's a couple of things. The first point is you got to get out of the mindset of this whole thing's reliant on me. And with that team of 7 around you, is really in terms of your own personal client relationships, start handing those out to people that you trust that you can still have a little bit of insight and control over. But handing that out to create some capacity for yourself.

Mm-hmm.

Because you're gonna need to focus on getting back inside the business to achieve the growth and scale. So that's the first step. How do we get you away from being, driving all the revenue and sharing the revenue amongst the team to help them to come up and you to focus some of your time on other things such as hiring.

Mm-hmm.

Um, what's your staffing plan? You want to get to 25 people or 30 people? How are you gonna do that? Are you gonna drive internal recruitment yourself? Are you gonna hire someone to do that? Once you have got people in, what are you doing around learning and development? How are you progressing your teams? And so by handing out your clients, you're going to create some capacity for yourself to focus back on the business, to focus on some of the scaling things that you need to do around building infrastructure, etc. First step, you got to just kind of almost leave the ego at the front door and say, I'm going to now make sure I share this around and then we can scale it.

And what I was just going to, I was just going to say like what What have you typically run into if, you know, if I was to say like, but I'm scared that they're going to ruin that relationship with that client, or that client always comes back to me? I don't know, like, I feel like that can be quite easy, that could quite easily come up. I don't know if they're limiting beliefs, or it's easy to stay where you're comfortable, right? I've got purpose if I'm the person that's dealing with the client and these things.

Well, it comes back to what, what do you want to achieve in your 3-year plan? Because you can stay there focused on those, your own personal client relationships, but you're never going to scale it. And so it comes back to what is your philosophy and your vision and your values to get to where you want to get to. So having some mechanisms, I'm not saying I'll just give it all away. You gotta have some mechanisms to be able to hand over clients or vacancies or processes, but still have some insight. But you're gonna be doing that anyway through your sales management on a weekly, biweekly basis.

The truth is they're not gonna replicate what you can do. It's unlikely they're gonna replicate what you can do. In theory, you're found, you've got really good experience in theory. Certainly some builders will outperform the leaders, but they're not. So it's fine, you can accept that. But if I can win, instead of me working 3 companies, if I can win 10 companies, now the question is, having brought these 10 clients in, can those 10 clients surpass what we were getting from the 3? It's likely they can. Then the second part of that is you said, hey, they might not be as capable. And I think it's a really fair point. Well, then it's my job to upskill them, my job to work with them hand in hand, whatever that is, or get an L&D person, whatever it is. That's my job. Yeah, that's what I have to do. I'm the boss, I'm going to earn the money out of this. So I'd be a fool not to say, let me sit down with Hishem, work with him day by day, and really hand it over. I look at, so for example, we had Akamai was our biggest customer. I won Akamai, it took me so long to win Akamai, a year to win that customer, uh, spoke to 32 hiring managers, etc. We finally get in there, we make some placements, and my instant thing was Ben Wallin, who you know, runs Eddiston, my right-hand man. Right, you're gonna now work it. We're gonna work it together every day, every day. And basically then, as soon as possible, I'm gonna start. It took him probably over a year.

Over a year, yeah.

Before he got the client as his. Well over a year. And I said, the only time you're gonna get that, when they stop calling me, that's yours. And, uh, but I want to set it up that way. I wasn't earning commission. Yeah. Although it's another one, touch on founders earning commission. I find it hard.

I struggle with it. What do you mean? Well, if I'm paying myself commission, you don't like that?

As a set commission, yeah. Because I'll tell you why. This then suddenly hits your income. If it's, you're still earning—

Incentives don't match up.

And I now say, now distribute that across your team. It's like, wait a second, that's my income. I would hope you're making your income from dividends or something. That's 3-year plan. Let's go through your P&L. Come back to that point. But that's an example there where sometimes some, I have seen some founders pay themselves obviously just straight commission. It's just straight billers within their own business. And they don't want their billings to dip. Don't care. We, I said that to you.

I think that creates those limiting beliefs.

Yeah.

It's another thing that will create limiting beliefs of, oh, got to earn commission, or, oh, I need to keep billing because my customers might go away. And you know, the mindset shift isn't there for the individual that says, well, I'm really worried about whether or not we can sustain our billings.

And ultimately we looked at, you've got to do it.

You have to.

No question. It's not really a question. You have to do that. Have you ever seen a, a 100-person business CEO just sitting there just billing every day? No, clearly you haven't. And therefore, if you have those aspirations, you have to do something around that. But this is where that sanity check comes in. This is what we do every day, where leaders will call us, is this right? And we talk to them about this. And these are things that you can do. We understand there's a fear and risk there. Let's just monitor it day by day. But you have to do it. And that's part of our job is to give people that sanity check, that advice to say it's the right thing at the right time. We've planned for this. We've thought about this.

I think sometimes what can hold people back on this, if I'm in these shoes— Graham, you just said it there, but I want to build on it— is, okay, if I do a good job of that, then it's like, what the hell do I spend my time on? Do you know what I mean? It's like, that's what I was finding.

I don't worry, you've got loads to spend your time.

So you spend your time on doing BD if you have any spare time. We were really focused on BD still, and even in 2014, my favorite year in the whole business, Why? Because the first year in the US, I had a big company backing behind me, just cranked out calls, doing BD, BD, winning customers. We're on a Verizon project, $2 million Verizon project. We're on all these different things. So the truth is it enables me, us, to do more BD, hand it over to the team if we have time. There comes a point where your business gets bigger. And then the other element is world-class training, actually proper training. What does that mean? Forget the bullshit of, ah, there's this idea an individual has a challenge, has a gap in their business, there's a sales cycle and there's a break in that cycle. We have to identify what that break is and fill that break. Again, as a leader, it's so valuable if you can just plug those holes in your team and watch them build and let them thrive.

So time on— so if I'm getting that time back, I've handed out clients, I should be filling up my diary with getting in front of prospects. BD, then be thinking about actually how can I make my team better, spend time coaching.

Yes.

And then the next wave of talent that's going to come in around hiring. Those are really key ingredients.

And then there's also stuff like we spoke about, where are you at in your exit journey? What's your exit knowledge? Do you need to start researching exits? One of the things that we had to do midway through is, um, I pivoted to become, uh, added a little bit more social aspect. I get out and meet other founders, get out and meet founders of big companies. Build relationships, get the console name out there. And that became a thing, right? There's actually something to make effort to go and do because we knew come exit, if you've sort of got those relationships, you know how to walk the walk, talk the talk, it's more likely to get the exit. And again, that part, if you have time, yeah, there's enough to do.

There's a really funny story that Jost tells, who was the CEO of Empresaria that bought us. He was coming to meet us. For the first time to hear about our journey. And he'd had lunch with Kevin Green from REC, who we always got on really well with. Kevin, he was at the time the CEO, chairman of REC. And Joost had said to him, I'm going to meet these guys, Mark and Graham, next. And Kevin turned around and said, they're brilliant. Because we'd spent years in that, for 4 years before, making sure we're in the right place with the right people. And Kevin said, if you meet those 2 guys, they're a company you gotta buy.

And from like From the conversation that you guys are having, Michael, come to you first maybe on this. Like, with what you're talking about there, how— I don't know what the percentages has always been for recruitment companies successfully achieving an exit. It's probably always been fairly—

really low.

Yeah, always.

Yeah.

So is that a good goal? I don't know, do you know what I mean?

This is an excellent—

is that a good goal?

Yeah, it's an excellent point. And I don't mean that thing— there's a piece here where there wasn't, because of technology since 2008, because the cloud technology has changed a lot. You can set up, get a database for whatever, $20, $50, $100 a month, right? You can get all these tools and just pay per month. So your point of entry, your cost of entry is so significantly low. It was very different. We had to buy servers to buy infrastructure, et cetera. That then pot committed us because we were spending money and building our business to build the business and exit it. I now see a dilemma that some founders have, 15 people, and they're actually making a million a year. That can happen. And then it becomes really hard because in this case, should you exit? Do you want to give that up? It's a deeper question. Yeah, it's a bigger, deeper existential, what are you going to do with your time? Some people have identity challenges, as I know, post-exit. That's a really think about purpose, what that means, all these things. And some people never get away from the fact they want to do it, they want to work, they they gave up a CEO role that they wanted. Graham and I never had that vision. We felt we wanted to build something special and exit it. So it was always on our mind. But the truth, it comes back down to the individual. And that's why as advisors, it's interesting to a certain extent, our opinion only matters within your framework and your world. So I have to understand you. It's not my life, my business.

I think that's really important when I, I'm sure Marco is the same. When I start working with a new company, my starting point is, What's your vision as the shareholders or the majority shareholder?

What do you want?

Because the company is your vehicle for your own life. Really, it's Hishem Azzouz Limited that I want to help on an individual basis, but your vehicle to achieve your goal, lifestyle, exit, whatever it is, is the company that you've got. And so therefore, I really need to be aligned to what you want to achieve.

And it is back to that foundational piece again, isn't it? It, I mean, it's just so important.

Well, yeah. So let's look at recently added Stu Mitchell. Somebody you know, Stu, somebody that I've known for a while. I said, I don't want to engage advisors. I'm not looking to scale an exit. I'm not scaling an exit. I was like, fine, but it's about you and about what you want and you getting advice for your business. What do you want? I want to build a world-class business, an elite group of people making big money, big profit. Great. We can still do that. Doesn't have to just be about scale and exit. And then it was, came him and I brainstorming around support. And I'd like to think he's found it really useful. So it isn't just about the scale and exit. It's easy for us to preach that as to be something that we've done. It's actually just about offering advice to individuals saying, what are you trying to achieve and can we add value to that journey?

I think that's really important. Not every company I work with wants to exit.

Yeah.

The ones that turn and say, like your guy Stu there, actually it's not about exit. I want to build a world-class business. It's much more credible than you know, the amount of people that say, I want to sell my company.

Because I do— like, we were talking about it outside when you said to me, like, oh, like, how's business going, what do you want? And I do think, like you just said there, there really is that path now for people, which is why I think sometimes people can feel really confused, maybe unsure of, like, what do I want? Am I doing this because— like, should I want an exit or whatever? But actually, there really is that that path now, what we have available to almost like earn that exit, or like whatever that is to you, like earning good money, that this is your vehicle. Like, do you want to be showing— do you want to build a business where you enjoy working on it most of the time, working in it most of the time, and you're earning good money?

If that's your goal, like, yeah, I mean, if your people are getting fulfillment, they're getting that satisfaction, etc. There's so many dynamics. Wait till you have your kid in a year's time, literally have the exact same conversation. And a child could easily change that. Graham always talks about this. Went to exit a year after I had my first child. That wasn't a coincidence. There was a market timing and there was a piece there. I ignored all Graham's friends when he had his kids. It was just a thing between us and we was like, okay, now's the time. So it does change things. Yeah. Having a child might change your viewpoint of where you want to spend your time. But if you're enjoying work, milk that while you can. You're earning good money. It's a great life.

I mean, and that's okay. But again, I know we've come back to it a lot, but hopefully this is one of the big takeaways for people where it is a, it is a deep personal question on like what you want.

Yeah, yeah. And what are you going to do? What are you going to do with your life? You can do around now.

Yeah, like it's an important question.

Yeah, it's a fundamental question.

Yeah, it really is because it, it's going to form so many decisions that you make, and most importantly, it could be the reason why you end up really hating what you're doing because you've ended up making decisions around stuff actually truly not what you wanted.

Yeah, exactly that. And there are some founders I know, for example, one of my closest friends. And, um, yeah, I mean, clearly, clearly want out 100%, like have done for many, many years, and are sort of finding themselves a little bit stuck because they can't get out that vehicle. Maybe I should have done it 10 years ago. So it's really into deep, deep thing, almost similar conversation with your partner, and say, okay, what do we want? What does that mean for us, etc.?

Yeah.

So to, to round this out then, Graham, I can come to you, like, how You know, I think there's— I may have mentioned it to you guys, but there's a lot of founders out there that I do think have a great mindset, have the humility to want to ask for help. I think a lot of people, I'll be honest, probably haven't had the best experiences with advisors and external support. It's been a real mixed bag from when I do speak to people.

Has it? I'm really interested.

I've never heard that before.

Really?

Yeah.

When this stops rolling, I'm going to genuinely get some feedback.

I've never heard that.

I guess— I guess I think we're quite insular though.

I don't— I'm quite insular. I talk to companies that want help, so I've only got one kind of—

often hear just like one of those things. Like, I'll be honest, yeah, I think how I've had more people go, it was okay, it was average, it was helpful, but versus they were absolutely critical to our business journey at that point. Like, I don't hear that as much.

So we can say it's a nice easy one for us.

I was going to say, how can you guys help people?

We had two advisors. We had at Consul two advisors every single year. One of them was a startup advisor, had equity in the business, and we added advisors all the way through. And I'd say every one of those was absolutely essential to our journey. We couldn't have done it without them. You know, you know, it was about that being intrigued, the amount of questions that we had asked, constant barrage of questions, barrage of interaction all the way then to Paul Beaker, who was critical in our exit, and it went to somebody key that we could talk to across the board. So we lived it, and that's probably why we really have a—

well, I think it's got, it's got to be a joint responsibility, right? I'm sure there's a lot— if we were to, if we were flying the wall, does that, did that, was that person really committed? Did they know what they wanted? But I think, um, why I'm always an advocate of great people in our industry that can help other people is I do think there aren't loads of great options. That, that's just my opinion from the conversations that I've had. But whenever I do speak to someone that has worked with someone externally and it's been great, they're like, yeah, like, they've been absolutely invaluable. So I think Um, yeah, whenever I can speak to people and advocate people that I think can have a real impact, uh, with people, then I'm, I'm all for that. But I was just going to say, what are you guys up to now? How, you know, for people listening that might have enjoyed your philosophy, what you're about, uh, I know you're not going to be able to work with everyone, but like, just talk to us a bit about how you can— how you're now working with founders. What's, what's the plan, either of you?

So, um, one thing is good. So we've been working separately advising companies, et cetera, for a few years now. But we talk all the time. And one thing is we've always said, we should start doing the consulting thing together. But now with Graham moving to Dubai, there's something that we're going to start to do, which is, and part of the reason we're here, we're talking about this now, is mapping out. We want to get on probably 2 or 3 clients that are looking to globalize their business, maybe a focus in the US, Dubai, where we can then start to offer value together, interact with them, help different parts of division. Um, so, so yeah, I think that's something we're going to be offering, looking at exact frameworks, details of how we do it. So there's a lot. I think we've got a big few months ahead of us and how we consult. Um, I sort of want to rejig some of the consulting game.

I need to define what that means a bit, but I know there's an opportunity.

Yeah, I know to your point, doesn't work for some people. It's not working well for some people, and I really want to understand why and try and think about how we can be more sophisticated around what we deliver. but most importantly, we can do it together. The truth is, guess what? I want an advisor. I don't have to pay for an advisor if I got great. And likewise. So therefore we can go together and create body work together and help each other.

Probably a bit more fun together as well. Yeah.

And also I think we can build, we've got so much knowledge, we can build out the right content, shared content. We can make that available. You know, some of the things that we've talked about now in terms of programs and structures and frameworks, as Mark said, that I think will be really invaluable as companies try and scale or achieve whatever their goals are. We're both doing it, and so we just kind of had a lightbulb moment and said, we need to do a little bit more of this together, and we think it could be valuable for companies and individuals.

So I'm happy, you're happy, people reach out. I guess on LinkedIn would be the best thing, direct message on LinkedIn, love to interact, help in any way. But the way that we operate is we're very direct, no bullshit. We only want to help if we can help.

Yeah.

And I talk about the advice, the biggest thing that I look for, that I advise them to look for, is a personal connection. Because if you don't like the person, you're not going to listen to them. That's the truth of it. And likewise, if we don't gel, it's hard for me to get on a call and want to interact. Whereas if we gel, everything's a lot more different, symbiotic, easier for us to deal with, especially looking at critical decisions.

I think the other thing to say to people that are watching this that have maybe had a bad experience is one of the things that I always say to my companies is there has to be value in this. If I'm not adding any value, let's not do it. Yeah, there's no point. There's no point. I don't want to be doing it if I'm not adding value, and you shouldn't be paying me if I'm not adding value. And so that has to be the essence of engaging with an external advisor is, is there value being created and being delivered?

And you search, and the biggest question that we get asked is, how do I get to the next stage? So from 50, how do I get to 30? 30, how do I get to 60? 60, how do I get to 100? All the frameworks you have to put in place, the structure around that. And it's a brilliant question to ask, which is saying, hey, I'm planning, mapping out my vision for the future, and I want a partner to help me with that.

Love it. Graham, Mark, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you. Thanks, Hishem. Thank you, mate. Appreciate it.

Really enjoyed it.