Zeth Couceiro & Shaun Potts - Lessons and failures that come with scaling

Yes, it's all crypto now. I think because we got in so early, it was a really, really not particularly competitive market. So it was just us. The market was tiny and we always thought this market's going to go somewhere.

Welcome back to another episode of the Recruitment Mentors podcast. I'm your host, Hishem Azzouz, and on this week's episode, I was joined by the founders of Plexus, Sean and Zeth.

Crypto is kind of mature. There's little pockets of interest a lot of the time.

It has cycles in the same way that traditional markets have cycles. Except the cycles are infinitely more aggressive.

There's now just over 30 of them. They've broken the £4 million mark, and we really sat down and discussed how they've gone about that. What have been the 3 biggest mistakes you guys have made?

I think, um—

How they've cultivated their culture, how they've built their leadership team, and what the plans are for the future.

I think the short-term goal is to, like, grow and grow in crypto.

I think for anyone that has aspirations to scale their recruitment business, most of the people that we have in for interviews are like pretty excited about the space. They're pretty interested in it, like some more so than others.

For anyone that finds themselves always leveling out at 10 heads, 15 heads, 20 heads, this is going to be really insightful for you if you really want to break past that barrier and get to 30+. Enjoy the episode. Sean Zeff, welcome back to the podcast.

Yes, hello.

Bit different.

It is, this is high level. You've upped your game big time.

Obviously, same— obviously why I wanted to sit down with you guys, there's a few people that, yeah, really, uh, hopefully at some point we'll be able to get— sit back down with. I think people are always curious about hearing people's stories, uh, on the podcast and then them talking about where they want to go and then finding out if they actually got there. Yeah, I'm gonna put you guys in that category. So obviously when we sat down, uh, it was in your old Waterloo office. Uh, I think you said like a meeting room, didn't we?

Yeah, it was a bad office.

Yeah, no, it wasn't that bad.

It was all right, it was all right, it was all right.

Obviously you're now in, uh, I've been to your obviously office in London Bridge, which I think is mega. Yeah, I know you're looking at another office now.

We are.

Um, so yeah, just really excited to ultimately unpack the last 3 years. So just to frame it up for everyone and Sean, if I get anything wrong, tell me, okay? You can correct people. So when we last sat down, which was April 2020, um, there was 13 of you in the business. Um, I think it was coming towards the end of your third year in business, and, and the main goal that you had was to break the million GP mark, which you did. You did 1.05, which we're just talking about before this, in your third year of business. And then, uh, the financial year just gone, you ended on 4.6 million GP. So obviously over the last 3 years, that's what we've got up to, and there's just over 30 of you in the business now. And then again, correct me if I'm wrong, obviously the year just gone you did around 90% perm, 10% contract. Is that fair?

Yep.

And then when I was listening back to the podcast, you did way more contract before, right? Yeah. What was the split then when we last sat down, do you think? Because it was many contracts, I felt like.

Yeah, it was, it was, it was probably about 60/40 to contract.

Really? Okay, cool. Right, so let— we'll, we'll talk about that. So purpose of this, and for everyone listening, we're going to talk about this journey which you've gone on. A lot of recruitment companies that I speak to struggle to break the, the ceilings of 15, 20 people, get past that. It's a really difficult period, and you've been in the thick of this, and I know that you're trying to push this on, uh, again now. So that's what we're gonna break down. But I guess just to kickstart this, Sean, I'm gonna come to you first. Would love just to hear your take because this might have changed or evolved just with how the market's been, the different people that we have in the industry now or entering the industry. Like, what do you believe are the common characteristics and traits that, uh, successful recruiters, uh, possess in today's market or have to possess in today's market?

Yeah, so I think, um, when we spoke last time, I think I mentioned that I think resilience is, is always one of the most important things like good recruiters can have. I think that's evolved a little bit. I think these days, like, it's a combination of skill set and mindset, really. And, you know, you can, you can try and train and develop both, but I guess mindset is probably more like inherent to somebody's personality a little bit. Um, I think that's the two most important things. If you— especially for us, like, we try to combine that with market knowledge. That's a big thing for us. Um, I think if you can put those three things together, then you, you should be a pretty successful recruiter.

Love that.

Therefore, what we're saying, uh, similar to Sean, I'd probably say like Uh, like likability. I think, you know, you're in sales. I think as a salesperson, I always say good salespeople don't sound like they're selling, and half of that I think is being likable and trustworthy. I think like the resilience and the work ethic, I think goes without saying, but I think if you're likable and engaging and, and you'll come across as more trustworthy, and generally I think you'll probably do better.

Yeah, fair. So I think what would also be useful for people then— so, uh, we were just talking a bit about what both of you, in terms of what you've ended up focusing on, what your responsibilities have been between you. I think that'll just be useful framing for people. So again, if I get anything wrong, let me know. But put down— so Zef, you found yourself over the— I don't know what period this is, maybe the last 12 months, last 6 months, I don't know— but for you, you'll find yourself more managing, like being in more of like a sales manager, managing the 360 function, and very much more on the sales floor, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, it's fair.

Yeah, I'm sure there's other things you're doing, but yeah. And then Sean, you, you're the ops guy, mate.

Not by choice.

No, reluctant ops guy.

Yeah, uh, ops guy. So, so let's just first, like, who you— either of you can share with me, but fair to say you guys committed to the crypto space. Have you continued to commit to over the last 3 years? Because when I was listening back to the podcast I think, Zef, you were saying like, yeah, we've always done this, but we like the idea of having different pillars, if that's cloud, if it's architecture, whatever. So, but I feel like outside looking in, when I think of you guys, I think you guys as one of the sort of early people that really committed to that blockchain crypto space. And as I'm sure you guys would be more aware than me, I think more and more people have popped up, right, to focus on that. But over the last 3 years, fair to say that most of your business or all of your business, you just focused on that being your niche?

Yes, it's all crypto now. Like, I think we realized that because we got in so early, it was a really, really, like, not particularly competitive market. So it was just us. The market was tiny, and we always thought this market's going to go somewhere, but it's— it has cycles in the same way that traditional markets have cycles, except the cycles are, like, infinitely more aggressive. And I think when we spoke to you last, like, we were still in, like, a pretty heavy bear market, and there was, like, a lot less than this bear market. So I think if you look at maybe market caps of crypto, I back then it was maybe 3, maybe 200-300 billion. Now in the pit of a bear market, it's 1.4 trillion. So it's a huge market. It's probably at the point where it's— I don't want to curse and stuff, but probably too big to fail now. And so it doesn't make sense for us to like spread ourselves so thin. Like we go all in on crypto, everyone does crypto, and then we can dominate the market or have a larger market share because we have so many people focusing on the same goal and the same market and stuff. So we're all crypto. I think longer term, do we look at maybe other brands? Possibly. I think the, the short-term goal is to like grow and grow in crypto.

And what— how would you describe the market currently then?

The markets, the markets— I mean, our crypto bear market or downturn started way before like the traditional economy got hit. And so it's been, uh, probably Last May was probably when it started to drop and drop pretty aggressively. When it drops, like, clients panic.

And what does that actually look like in the recruitment sense? Is that, Seth, we planned on hiring, no, not doing any of that anymore?

Yeah, yeah.

What does that actually look like?

It looks like an absolutely rammed jobs board, just like, just etching off one after the other. I mean, this, like, I mean, don't get me wrong, there's still plenty out there. I say to a lot of our guys, I think the crypto market is when it was crazy, it was super crazy. And I think when it's, when it's like in a bear market like this, there's still jobs. You just have to like work harder to find them. Like, it's— there's still very much a market, and then the guys still do like quite a bit of business and stuff. So, you know, I think a lot of people compare it to traditional tech markets, but most of our guys, because they're graduates, have only ever worked in a crypto recruitment job, so they don't know what it's like working in other markets.

And what's the current story then that we're telling the people? Like, oh, like, keep working through this and it just goes through cycles, or—

like, there are still success stories in a bear market. I mean, it's no different from like a traditional, like, tech company. Like, there'll be people who are doing really, really well in the bear market. Some of my best years before Plexus were in bear markets or bad markets in tech. And so you can just apply that same logic to crypto. It's just more aggressive.

Okay.

I think what we found last time was like 2018, '19, like that sort of bear market period, it was like, it was dead. It was pretty dead. Whereas now there's like, within, because crypto's kind of matured, there's little pockets of interest a lot of the time. So whilst overall it might be like the market might have softened a little bit, there's little sort of pockets of interest around like different layer 2s that are popping up or maybe like NFTs are hot for a period or stuff like that. So if you are good, then you're still able to find like little opportunities within that even in like quite a, maybe a slightly quieter market than it was before.

And then either of you chip in on this, but what— just because I think it'd be relevant, like how I think it could be really easy for anyone in your business and anyone that maybe you potentially interview just to be really sucked into like all the negativity, like online, the news, because I do feel like that's on like steroids with crypto. I feel like almost just because I I don't know, there's just so much to it in terms of how many sort of like, whatever you want to call it, the old guard traditional infrastructure are all still very much against it. Or like, there's just so much more to it. Whereas I think if you're in a typical market right now, whether that be a tech market or just different markets, there's still some negativity. But it's probably a bit more easier to just focus on the things that you can control and not let all of that infiltrate like your mindset. How, how have you gone about protecting that for the guys or helping people with that? Because I feel like it could— yeah, they could just be full of negativity all the time and just say, yeah, crypto's tanked, it's done. I don't know, because I feel like it's way more intense.

Those people generally don't apply to work for us, I guess. Like, most of the people that we have in for interviews are like pretty excited about the space, they're pretty interested in it, like some more so than others.

Um, but you guys must be more on it though in terms— because I feel like I was, I was— I always like to look at when I interview people, what they've been posting online and stuff like that, if there's things that I can get them to talk about. But I think, like, Sean, when I was looking at your content, like, you're always talking about just market commentary. So I feel like with your space, you, you've probably had to continue to be probably an extra 25-30% more doing that with your team than maybe if he was in like a typical engineering market. I just feel— I don't know, I might be wrong. I don't know if you've— how you've communicated to the team, like this is what we're hearing, this is what's going on. You've had to really over-communicate that because they could all very easily go, yeah, we're done.

I think, yeah, it's— I don't know, it's not really a challenge we've had.

Yeah, it is. I mean, so like, I— that because people invest in crypto and you can make money, there's a lot of people who are interested in it. And so naturally it gets a lot of clicks when you post about it. So there just is more news about it. Like, there isn't mainstream news about, I know, you know, the new version of Python or something like that. Like, people just aren't that interested, whereas if you've invested in something, you're interested. So there's a constant, like, cycle of stuff that's coming through. And so when you work in an office and there's like 30 people and we're all working in the same sector, generally people talk about it anyway. And so it's not like you're in, like, just this media echo chamber where everything's amazing and then, oh my God, everything's tanking, it's the worst and stuff. It's more just a you know, it's just, it's just a market and we're all talking about it and it just continues to, to roll on irrespective of like really, really great news or really, really bad.

Yeah. So, okay, nice. So Sean, let me come to you on this then. I want to know, let's just start with what have been the 3 biggest mistakes you guys have made since over the last 3 years, business-wise, whatever. Like, talk to us, what's been the 3 biggest mistakes?

I think, um, God, uh, it's probably so many.

It's just so many.

There's so many mistakes.

I think, um, and it's kind of annoying because we kind of saw it happening through the, through the period. There's a period, and, and this is not just crypto, this is like the wider tech recruitment in general. I think like over the last couple of years, uh, maybe up to sort of 6, 9 months ago, like the market was super, super buoyant and recruitment companies doing really, really well. Everybody's making lots of money, um, I think our standards were slipping in that period. And it's really hard when you like look at a sales team, you know, you've got people who have only ever known one market. So they've only ever known good times and they come into that and it's like, great, really easy to pull jobs. Like there's loads of interest in the space, easy to fill them, great fees. Like this is easy. Like no problem, you know, rock up, you know, to work at 9 o'clock in the morning, chip off at sort of half 5, 6 and just, you know, and just, and have a laugh and great, happy days. The recruitment that we knew as trainees was like, you're in early, you're on the tools, it's hard, you get a lot of rejection, you're working late, and not everybody kind of makes it. But when it was as good as it was, it breeds complacency. And we knew for a, we were like, this is going to end. This is not going to last forever. At some point the market's going to turn. We've already lived through one crypto bear market. We knew it was going to impact the hiring and stuff. But it's so hard to communicate that to people that they just, a lot of the time they have to live it themselves. Um, so I think like, yeah, it's just trying to like get people out of that sort of complacency period, you know. And yeah, that was probably tough.

Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing that with so many people that I'm speaking to.

Yeah, I wouldn't surprise me. I think it's so, it's so difficult to try and enforce, um, certain standards when everyone's doing deals and everyone's doing well. And it's like, you know, why are you on my back about this? And it's just, I think me and him knew, and we knew probably for maybe 6, 9 months, they're like, it— like, the standard just wasn't there. The quality stuff we're doing just wasn't there. But it was just really hard to like create change when everyone was doing deals and everyone's making really good money and stuff like that. But it doesn't surprise me here that other people—

yeah, definitely. So anything, obviously, with, with these types of things, there's always learnings. I guess you won't know until you're in it, but like, because, yeah, I think it'd be helpful for people would you change how you tried to approach getting on people's backs, or could you have communicated it in a different way? I don't know. Is there anything that you thought about that? Because I'm sure you'd be like, right, we want to make sure that we address this different next time.

That's difficult. We did try to address it.

Yeah, we did. We really did.

So how did you—

they're all just like, guys, like, shut up, man, everything's fine.

Really? Yeah. So you tried to attempt it to be like, hey guys, been in the game long enough, we know this isn't gonna last. Yeah. If we, we need to make sure that we keep the quality up. I know you're smashing deals, you're hitting your targets, but we need to really focus on quality and what they're going— well, we're doing that. I'm hitting my target.

So I think, I think probably one thing, like, we were pushing on performance, right? And I think we generally always been pretty good in terms of like having a bit of an attitude of like, this is good but we can do better. I think maybe a little bit more around like wider perception of like how our customers perceive us, as opposed to like just internal performance.

Like, that's a good insight.

Yeah. And like, maybe like we, we have like an SLA with our clients where we have a 2-week turnaround. So we basically try and promote that we will box your job off in 5 working days. And we say to you, if we'll commit that to you, you commit to doing all your interviews in 5 working days. And so we could, like I say to the guys, almost have like a conveyor belt mentality— job in, boxed job off, and then you just manage like that, that interview process. I think towards the end that slipped because there was so much demand for talent and such a short supply of talent that clients were just jumping at like candidates that weren't that great. And so people were effectively being given a pass on people who probably were not as good as we should be sending. And so I think in hindsight, maybe leaning more around how the clients and customers perceive us, and likewise the candidates as well.

Other than what Zef and Sean— yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good insight. I think that's something that recruiters should be doing more of, getting actual feedback from their customers. What, what comes to mind, Zef? Anything for you then? Second biggest mistake.

Second biggest mistake. Um, that's a tough one. Uh, I like— I think, I mean, this is an obvious one, but you know, we— you go through phases where you, where you start hiring a lot of people and you you get into a viewpoint in terms of the sort of things that you're looking for. And those people maybe are good for recruitment, but they're not good for recruitment at Plexus. And I think knowing who you are as a company, what it is you're going to be asking people to come in and do, hiring based on your values and your culture rather than just can they do the job, like, are they, are they good for the job type stuff— I think that's probably a mistake that we made. But maybe that wasn't more recent, that was quite a while back, but That was something we used to get.

As part of the 3 years?

Yeah.

You're looking at the last 3 years?

Yeah.

I think we perhaps underestimated the lead time and the planning around some of the non-sales hires. I think when it comes to hiring salespeople, we've been doing it for quite a while, a long time. And we know what we're looking for. We know what works and what doesn't work. And we don't always get it right. But I guess from a percentage point of view, we're relatively good at it. All the hiring of non-salespeople, so marketing, and talent, and operations, and those sorts of things, it just takes— like so much longer to find the, the quality of people that we want. And I think that's probably been a bit of a learning.

Why do you think that is? And is it because you're not sure exactly entirely on what you want or what good looks like?

I think knowing what good looks like a lot of the time is, yeah, um, is difficult. Like, we like— and, you know, we brought in, um, an interim CMO to help us out with the marketing stuff. And like, and his view on like what, what good looks like from marketing is often, you know, like different from from ours. Obviously he's right, we're wrong, right? He's the expert.

Yeah, yeah.

So, um, yeah, yeah.

So it's those types of things that can often take a longer time, or you end up massively— maybe, yeah, more often getting it wrong in line with what Zef was saying. Maybe they don't add to the culture in line with that. So let's talk about, um, what a recruitment business looks like when it's double the size, it's generating, um, Yeah, a lot more, uh, revenue. Sean, what does the actual infrastructure look like, or like, what are you aiming for it to look like? Because I know there's still people that you're hiring for on these things. So, because I know obviously you guys have aspirations to continue to scale and grow, so it'd be good just to hear your take on like how you sort of visualize that, how it currently looks. So what I'm asking is, yeah, what does the leadership layer look like? How many managers have you got compared to salespeople? When you say the non-salespeople, we're talking ops, we're talking marketing, internal Talk to us a bit about how you're trying to set up Plexus or what it looks like today, and then also some of the seats that you think are really important to get to the next stage.

Yeah, so like where we were, um, maybe like a year or, or yeah, a year or two ago is that hierarchy's super flat. Me and Seth still on the tools, like still managing day to day, still individually training people and managing salespeople. Um, I'm sort of individually managing the sort of ops and finance and legal and all that sort of stuff as well, and Um, it's— I think when we, we kind of had this like period, I guess, like sort of last summer, last sort of summer, last autumn time, it was like, right, we actually need more of a hierarchy, we need more structure here. Like, we can't individually manage— we can just about individually manage a business of about like 25, 30 people, but beyond that it's going to be crazy trying to do that with like 50 or 60 people. So we've had to like implement like loads more structure around, uh, around management. For sales and non-sales. Like, our job now is, I guess, manage, or trying to manage, probably like 7 or 8, 9 people, something like that. I, you know, we don't want to be individually like managing every single trainee. And I guess our view now is like, how can we build to really scale like really aggressively over the next year or so? How can we go from the current sort of 30-odd people that we are to 60 next year, to 100 the year after that? Or we have to put the structure in place to do that now.

So what does that look like? What does that structure look like? How are you currently thinking about it?

It's difficult to say from a numbers point of view because we've always, especially for like for salespeople, we really, really want to hire. We've hired a few seniors over the years, but we really want to hire organically and train people up and get people in the grads, grad level and then and let them develop organically into management because it gives the people, the best opportunity to progress in the business. So, but because of that, there's obviously a lead time on how quickly people can—

exactly, right?

Because you just need a bit of, you need a bit of experience. Um, and we've got people that have been doing it sort of, you know, 2 or 3 years getting into that now. Um, for non-sales, we've always been in the view that we want to hire really, really high-quality people. We don't want an enormous kind of back office team or anything like that. So I, I think we probably want I guess, um, 5 or 6 sort of really, really high quality sort of senior people who are non-sales based. Um, and that includes sort of L&D and talent.

Operations person?

Yeah, so like heads of operation, heads of marketing, um, heads of talent, heads of L&D, things like that.

Yeah, so that'd be like the non-sales.

Yeah.

And then how— obviously you said you implemented a hierarchy. Hierarchy, what does that actually look like? So I think you said to me what you've got at the moment? You've got what, 3, 360 managers and then 1 delivery manager? Is that how it is?

Yeah, that's how it is at the moment.

Um, how are you thinking about that? Are you thinking— have you thought about, right, we're only going to aim to have 5 to 6 people to 1 manager? Or I don't know, how are you thinking about the hierarchy of the actual sales team?

We're thinking that we're going to hire a lot of grads, um, over the summer, and there is a hell of a lot of work for those guys to do, quite honestly. Like, they're gonna— they're gonna be given a lot of opportunity. And they're great guys and they're gonna rise to that, hopefully. I'm sure they will. Um, and hopefully the people that are in that kind of what we would call a kind of senior level, so like sort of 18 months, 2 years, hopefully those guys over the next year or so will progress to a point where we can sort of start looking at them for sort of junior management roles. I think like that, that billing management phase is, is probably one of the hardest things you can do in recruitment. Like, I know certainly in my sort of first probably like you know, year or so at that level, years and years ago, like, I definitely struggled. It's really, really hard. So we really want to support those guys as much as possible. Not like, you know, completely wrap them in cotton wool, but like, it's like give them enough sort of support and help and stuff so, you know, they can, they can develop and get better without it being completely overwhelming for them. I think you can probably sales manage up to, I guess, directly maybe sort of 8, 10 people. I think beyond that, it's going to be, it's going to be like pretty challenging and you're going to struggle to do your own business on top of that. So.

And what's top of mind to— obviously these people are clearly absolutely fundamental and important to, uh, growing your business and getting to the scale you want to. I've lost count of the amount of recruitment owners that I've spoken to that know who those people are, uh, but oftentimes leave. So what have we— yeah, what— how are we thinking about making sure those people that are clearly fundamental to your plans How are we thinking about retaining them, making sure that they don't end up in a position where they've got more stress, they're earning less money? But how are you thinking about that? Because that's probably just as important.

Yeah, I mean, I think just communication with them, like, just find out, like, regularly checking in with them, like, where are you at, how are you finding things, and making sure that they have a route to earning more money year on year if money's like the key driver for them. For a lot of them, it might be like opportunities like going and opening another office, but making sure that roadmap's clear to them. And if they're unhappy, I think Sean and I are generally pretty good at like saying to people, just tell us what you're thinking. Like, if there's an issue, I'm not guaranteeing I can solve it, but it's better that you communicate it so at least we both know sort of where we stand with stuff. So I think as long as people feel like they're heard and they can affect change, I think that's a frustration for a lot of people. It's earnings, but it's also, am I able to affect change in my own environment? And if they can't, they're like, well, I'll just go to a new environment.

That's interesting. So what do you What do you think were some of the— like, as I said to you at the start of this, a lot of people struggle to get to where you guys are now. What were some of the biggest barriers or things that you've already mentioned that getting some of the non-sales people took longer than you anticipated? Was there any other barriers that you found just took a bit longer to get over than you anticipated, and maybe on the sales side, or I don't know, was there anything else?

I'll tell you one thing I think that And this maybe goes back to a mistake actually that we made. I don't think, or I think it took us too long to empower other people in the company to step up into these roles that they're now assuming. And a lot of the time they would wait for like guidance for us rather than us empowering them to make the calls on stuff that they probably already knew how we would react to stuff. And so that was probably something that we didn't do that we're now super hot on in terms of making sure that these people feel comfortable owning certain components of like the job, whether it be like a culture or standards or doing some training and stuff like that. I think we're much better now at empowering people to do that.

And was that because it was just a very flat and you had just become accustomed to doing things and saying, yeah, we do this or we do that, that's how we do that?

I, I think it's like on us, as like with a lot of these sort of things, I think we didn't communicate it to them, and so they just assumed that it wasn't, you know, for them to do that. I didn't maybe want to like, go above their, their station or anything like that. So when Sean was talking about it, it was a less of a flat structure. So it was basically just Sean and I managing loads of people. We're now trying to empower more people to sort of step up, and those people who are in those management roles are now in a position where they're starting to get people that are hopefully progressing into management. So they will effectively be moving into managing managers at some point. And so that's how you can make it a bit more scalable. So when Sean said you can, you know, effectively manage 10 people, you can manage more people but not directly, because then you'll have seniors, principals, stuff within your team that are then taking ownership of other members of that effective cost center.

Yeah. And was it difficult? Because I speak to a lot of, uh, recruitment companies who are at that stage, and they'd probably describe themselves like you did in terms of, we're on the tools or in the business, we're doing all that. How did— like, was that a difficult period for either of you? Obviously, Zef, it sounds like you're a bit more still in leading by the front, you're managing managers or helping inspire leaders, these things. But did either of you find it difficult to stop being that, the, the person who's on the tools, who's doing deals? Like, was that a difficult period, or did you find that hard to do?

Um, I think we all, when, when we set up, we always wanted to like try and lead from the front a little bit to set standards. Um, and I, I think that there's there's definitely a lot of recruitment managers I've seen over the years who have probably got off the tools a little bit too early. There's probably an equal share of people that have been on the tools too long. So finding that, like, that sort of sweet spot is quite tricky. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, does anyone ever nail it? I don't know.

How did you approach it? Was you like, right, did you like, did you just start handing over clients?

Did you just slowly, but yeah, how did you actually I think over time, like, and most clients will, I get sometimes you'll have clients for years and years and years and years and years and you hope so, but like over time some clients will sort of fade out. So I guess it's just around like the levels of BD that we do. I mean, me and Zeph haven't done any BD for years, like 2 or 3 years. Like a lot of it is just sort of existing relationships and stuff. But I guess now we're starting to pass newer stuff over or even some of the existing stuff over as well, just because from a time management perspective, we just don't have the capacity to kind of do it. I think we've set a bar of standards, which is like hopefully quite good and hopefully something for people to aspire to. I think that's enough. I don't think you need to do it absolutely every single year. And I think actually if we were to continue to try and do it every single year, it would probably detract from what else we were doing. You know, we spent, especially when the market was good, like we spent a lot of time just working in the business, you know, The delivery guys were working quite heavily for us, and there was a lot of business to be done. That was great. But the flip side of that is, how much time did we think about what's going on in people's heads? Speaking to other managers, working on the business, how are people really feeling? Is everyone happy because they're just doing loads of deals, or are there frustrations? Is there stuff under the surface? And there were that we probably missed a little bit because we were in it too much.

I think, and I think just in terms of like the mechanics, because I think I would have liked to have understood this better if I was 3 years ago. I think basically the way that we did it, and we made like errors along the way, was to sort of phase it. So like at the start it was obviously when we were doing the billing management role effectively, we were doing BD, we were sourcing our own candidates. We then started moving to a point where we only did like the BD and managing the client relationships, right? And then to the point where we just didn't do BD and we just worked with, with clients we already had. And that way it was sort of like, it was a phased, like, a phased, like, lifting of responsibilities, and that slowly fed more time into being on the business than in the business.

Yeah, that's helpful. And did you, like, communicate to people that's what you were doing?

Yeah, yeah. Like, I, I was, I was pretty early on in terms of, like, working with delivery guys and then trying to upskill them in terms of rather than just doing, uh, sourcing the candidates and managing the candidate profile, doing some like account management and stuff. And like, they would come to me with, oh, I don't know what to do with this. I'm like, ask, go back, speak to the client, this is how you would frame it. And then they would do it, and then they get more comfortable doing it, and then they're able to help upskill other people. And so they can do a true 270 role then.

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Yeah, super important. Like I've always said, it's like our— like the engine room, as in like the, the— when, when the delivery team's firing, it frees up the 360 guys just to sort of focus on their own marketing. So all the other stuff that they're generating on the side should get picked up by delivery. And I think the upskilling of a delivery team makes an enormous difference to the quality of service you're able to give your clients because you're able to like stick to that 5-day turnaround on CVs and there are multiple points of contact for clients. So if someone's on holiday, they already— or they're already dealing with the delivery consultant. So there's two points of contact and stuff for someone to reach out to. So I think it's super important.

Sounds quite key. Let's break this down a bit because I think this would be helpful for people, because like, I don't know how you're thinking about it. It's clearly been part of your business plan like throughout, um, the majority of the time, but I think particularly for recruitment companies that are smaller, when I've spoken to them over the last like 3 to 6 months, the idea of having people in the business that aren't capable of winning their own clients is just something that they don't feel overly great about. And I think every person I spoke to recently recruiter-wise who maybe has been, I don't know, let go, or if I'm speaking to rec to rec and I'm saying how are you finding the market, most recruitment owners are going, yeah, we want people who have 360 experience. French. So like, it'd be good just to— because you've, you've done it for a lot of time, clearly learned a lot. So just firstly, so what is the actual split in your company right now in terms of like the, um, the 360 team to delivery team? Like, what— how many people in the 360 team compared to the delivery team?

It's probably a third, about, about a third of delivery.

This is something we battle with on a weekly basis.

What's up?

This— the ratio of like how many delivery people you have to how many 360.

So what's the current ratio then?

It's about third delivery, two-thirds 360.

Yeah, so out of your entire like consultant sales, um, force, whatever you call it, to one third of them is delivery?

About that, yeah.

And then how— so just— and then how have you set it up? And then I want to ask you questions on like maybe if you were to start a delivery function tomorrow, how you'd approach it. But like, so how do they support the entire team? Yeah, the other two-thirds?

Yeah, they do. So like a lot of the— or the majority of the volume used to come from Sean and I and a couple of the senior guys, whereas now it's thrown open to like pretty much any of the guys. So the delivery manager would effectively do a delivery meet with his team just to sort of check in, where are you at with your, your boxing off of this job and that job. And, uh, he would then speak to— previously would have been Sean and I, right, around like coordinating what, what the next wave of jobs looks like. But these days Sean and I've tried to step back from that and said reach out to the individual managers of the 360 guys directly and find out, you know, what's the job flow like on their team. So it now runs autonomously without us. Okay, we were super involved in it.

So let's just talk about, uh, this for a second then. So, um, like, I guess let me just start, like, if, like, knowing what you know now, if you were to, uh, start a delivery function from scratch tomorrow, what would the first 90 days look like?

Okay, so like, are you a similar business model to us in terms of hiring just trainees?

Just like, yeah, like, just because I think, uh, this is something I think often grown recruitment companies think about, but then they're worried about, are we going to have these people on quite high bases that aren't capable of winning business? I don't know. Yeah, I think there's things that a lot of people are concerned or worried about.

Okay, so I, I would get somebody who was your strongest person at delivering roles, right? So if you evaluate your whole business, who's the person that you know does a great job of like account managing and runs a super tight ship, like super tight process in terms of delivering against jobs? That person could in theory effectively head up that function.

Okay.

When you're hiring grads, those grads would then go into that function and this person would teach them the process. But that process needs to be tight. Like, we used to have— people used to absolutely rinse me all the time because I used to have like sheets for everything. I'm like, look, this is, this is the process, follow this process, make it simple, like, so that people can follow when they're new to the job. That person would effectively upskill.

So this sort of— sorry, just put a cut in there. Sorry. So this is as in the process for when I give you a job, this is what you do. Yeah, post it on LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah, do this. All right, the actual process of step by step what you do to source for it.

Yeah, yeah.

So like, and ideally you don't even have to get through, like, you get the job covered off without having to go through like looking at GitHub forks or—

right, yeah, yeah, shit like that. It's like, go on the database. Yeah, search for this. Okay, cool.

Yeah, so they would effectively follow that process. That person would be effectively the manager of that function and would teach new people, effectively trainees, whether it be grads or whatever. And generally these people, I, it's not always the case, but the people who we've always found have done really well at, um, delivery are those people who, who take pride in like attention to detail and have a nice process, and they're like, they like structure and stuff like that. And generally those sort of people do quite well. So when you're hiring and stuff, we would often start interviewing and saying, I think that person is really well suited to delivery because they seem to have that more sort of delivery mindset. So I would try and start thinking about that When those people then join, they obviously join that, that delivery manager. That manager would basically be making sure that they were working at the same sort of standard as, as you were, and just start drip feeding jobs in, right, over time. Particularly if you've got like a sales guy who's like super, super good at like generating jobs, you know, you have that, that, that salesperson who just hates doing delivery, they hate sourcing profiles, if— but they're really good at generating jobs, we'll just let them do that and get some like delivery people just to start working those jobs in the background. It then just becomes scalable from there because the more people that understand the process, the easier— the easier other people will learn it just through osmosis, proximity learning, just being around those people.

Okay, cool. Right, a couple questions then. Firstly, like, uh, I know it will evolve over time, but how involved are they in the process? So do they source it, qualify the candidate, then hand it over? Do they do the qualification, interview prep? Like, what does that look like?

Yeah, so I think like when they first start, it's very much just a 90-degree. Yeah, so you basically just maybe source candidates and stuff. Those candidates would then go over to 360 person. That's 360 person would probably still qualify that candidate and then manage that process. When they probably get to consultant, um, now they're doing a full 180 job. So in theory, no one talks to like— or they're 360 person, we'll talk to the candidates, and they will still be involved in some of the client stuff, but maybe not the more difficult stuff. When they go to like senior principal level, they're probably at the level there where they can take specs and like effectively run a whole process outside of the initial generation.

They join agreed terms. Yeah, yeah, they wouldn't get a client on. Yeah, they would take an intake call, do all that, and then close candidates. Yeah, all of that. Okay, cool. And then what does a— what does a good look like? What are some of the key metrics that you measure people against quite early on as they're going? Are you looking at, I don't know, um, CV to interview ratios? Like, what are the sort of key metrics?

So we push delivery on 10 CVs to clients, like, per week. So the CVs will go to the 360 consultant. They will either say, yeah, they're good, or no, they're not. But I think we push them on 10 CVs per week. The thought process behind that is if they're doing 10 CVs per week, they're working 2 jobs per week. The SLA says 5 days, but we try and target the guys to do it in 2 and a half, or they know that maybe it rolls on, they work 2 at the same time. Morning and afternoon to break it up a bit. And that would be 40 CVs per month. In theory, they work 8 jobs. If they work 8 jobs, they're probably going to be placing about 3 to 4 of them per month.

Okay, uh, talk to me about— and then I know what people will think— oh wait, I think you've broken that down really well. Thank you for sharing that. Commission, what are we saying? How have you structured that? It might have evolved over time. How have you— because typically I've found that when I speak to people, the 360 commission is better than the delivery commission. How have you done that? Because they're not bringing on the client. And how have you approached that?

So it's very topical, actually.

Yeah, it is actually. We just— we've not changed it. We're just not unchanged. I'll let Sean go through that if you want.

Um, so we originally, we had a sort of flat fee structure which wrapped— so when Seth's talking about like the consultant, senior consultant, principal consultant thing, like basically the more responsibility they have in as a delivery person, the higher commission they get per placement. Um, we had a lot of feedback over, um, I guess like last summer and stuff around like some of the, um, delivery people who are maybe, um, a bit unhappy. And it's a bit of a weird one because actually like, you know, these are people that have probably been in recruitment for like a year or two or something like that, and they're earning reasonable money, you know, they're earning sort of like 40, 50, 60K sometimes, stuff like that. And, you know, which at the time they came in for interview, they probably would have been pretty happy with. But the problem is that there was a huge discrepancy between the delivery guys and the 360 guys. And, you know, we had 360 guys who were, you know, a handful of, or a fair few of them who had only been recruitment for, you know, like a couple of years, 2, 3 years, earning sort of, you know, £150,000, £200,000 a year. And because there's such a difference between the two teams, that was basically just like just pissing them off a little bit, quite frankly. So, so we did a big like deep dive into it and, um, and, and changed the model a little bit to bring the two commissions, um, a bit more in line, basically split the value of the deals. What we found, our deal values, average deal values have gone up just consistently really over the years. And you know, when we originally designed the initial commission structure, you know, it was pretty good, it was pretty fair to the delivery guys.

But it was a flat fee.

Yeah. But, and you could, you know, you can roughly work out as a percentage, but it was with an annual bonus as well.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. I remember you saying that. Yeah.

Yeah. But what we've seen is that the guys have we've been able to do some really, really good high-value business, which is great. But obviously with flat fee commission, then the delivery guys weren't seeing the upside on those deals. So it had to change.

So have you changed it to a percentage?

Yeah, I changed it to a percentage.

I'm not asking the exact percentage, but like, so what is it? Have you done it so then what they get an agreed percentage of the overall annual salary, basically? Yeah.

So you just split the fee. So say the fee is like, you know, £30,000 or whatever, then, you know, maybe you know, 20-30%, whatever, something like that might go to the delivery person, and then the rest of it will be allocated towards a 360 person, and then that goes through our commission scheme.

Right, okay. Yeah, so like, I get what you mean. So there's basically, you've just split the pot, basically.

Exactly.

Yeah. So based on the fee, some percentage goes delivery, the rest go to sort of 360.

And on the average deal sizes, it's probably about the same as what it was before, but for the larger deals, they get actually, they get the upside, plus they'll get the upside on the multiple deals as well, so that the overperformance performers, the overachievers, will be more heavily rewarded, just like they would be on 360, because that wasn't really happening quite as much.

They're also incentivized as well, and the same with the 360 guys are too, um, like bundle starters. So like to, to encourage like consistency, obviously the more stars you can have in a month, the higher up the commission banding.

Yes, you have that banding, whereas before it was just flat.

So it doesn't make any difference whether they had like an absolute knockout quarter and then did nothing.

Yeah. How fundamental is the delivery function going to be to you getting to 60 heads?

Yeah, I think as important as it's always been. I think the split of, you know, at our peak a couple of years ago, we were 50/50 delivery and 360, which I think, you know, and for most people now, most directors have probably listened to that and be like, and think that's probably super high, but at the time it was operating like really, really well. Um, but when, especially when you get people that are— what, for that to work, you need people to pull a lot of jobs, obviously, right? So, but as me and Zeth have sort of come away from the tools a little bit and, and the market sort of softened a little bit, then, you know, that balance has to probably be redressed a little bit. So, which we've already done. Um, it will still be a crucial component to the business, but I guess like, yeah, developing— like most people you said you were talking to, they only want people that can, that can bring fees in. I think for us, we, we probably want most people to be able to do that. But there's still a place for people who aren't always— well, that's not naturally going to suit them as well. I think this is one of the reasons why it's been successful is that there's a home for those people. You know, maybe they don't want to go out there and do like the proper sort of hardcore BD stuff and everything else. Some people love that, some people don't. But for the people that don't, then, okay, like, is there still a role for them? Can they still be successful at Plexus and have a good career and stuff? And like, yeah, they can, you know.

So, you know, that's the upside, isn't it? Because if you don't have something like that, and you're like, I absolutely hate BD, or I'm shit at it. Yeah, you then, you, yeah, you're a failure, or there's nowhere else for you to go.

It works the other way around as well, right? Because you get you, and like I said, you need people that are BD machines for sure. And, and probably the best recruiters do fall into that category, the best 360 recruiters. So, and you want to be able to support that because probably those guys, they don't really want to do loads and loads and loads of delivery, and actually it's going to like eat their time loads. You know, they go and pull 10 jobs and they're like, oh God, those jobs.

So let's just talk about that then, because again, clearly this is fundamental to you guys scaling and how you've got to this point. And let's— on the flip side then, when we say 360, obviously typically people would perceive that, that they manage the whole process, right? But what it sounds like is they're mainly focused on just pulling jobs, sales side. So what, what are the expectations of these people who have a massive powerful resource in this delivery team? What are your expectations of them? Is it just, are they mainly just focusing on, yeah, market mapping, building their patch, bringing on A jobs, whatever? Like, what are the expectations of the people that aren't in the delivery function then? Because you're calling them 360, but it doesn't sound like they are.

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, 360 should be able to do 360, obviously, like, as the name implies. But yeah, I guess the reality is that certainly for the people that are higher up that, so we want the, I guess some of the most important people that we want to support at the moment is that kind of middle management team, right? So if you're an early stage, like, billing manager, been in a job for like 2, 3, 4 years, you're learning the ropes, you're probably managing like 2, 3, 4 people or something like that. What you're going to find is that your biggest challenge is time management.

Yeah.

So to be able to support that, then we try and give those guys the, the more experienced delivery people and the most access to those delivery people to free up their time a little bit. So those guys probably are, I guess they, they'll probably fall more into that like BD camp. They'll probably be offloading a higher percentage of their jobs. The more, the more trainee 360 people will probably be working more of those jobs themselves. And certainly with the jobs within their own patch. We don't like super strictly lock people into sort of certain patches, but we do suggest and ask them to focus on sort of certain areas. So some people might do like front end or they might do UX or whatever. And really for jobs in their patch, they should definitely, definitely be working their own jobs really on 360 up to, you know, sort of management level stuff outside of their patch. Maybe there's more of an argument to pass those jobs over to delivery so that it doesn't detract from you know, they're going off and speaking to different types of people and that's sort of soaking up their time.

That's really interesting actually, that makes sense because they're absolutely fundamental for you guys to grow. They're often the people that are the most time poor as you're putting more people underneath them. So obviously one of the— so if I'm in that seat obviously, and I speak to these people all the time, the highest leverage, one of the highest leverage activities they can do besides coaching their team and helping their team is winning and business. And that could be for their team to work on a lot of the time, but what you're doing is, uh, helping these people, um, yeah, by giving them— make sure they've got a really good resource and support from the delivery function so they can still do that. And then there's a very high chance that they're still going to be able to be making the money that they were because they've got that resource.

Yeah. And like when you talked earlier on about like how are we supporting people who are in that position, because like I guess most recruitment directors fear is that at a point they're going to lose all their top performers and their top players and all that sort of stuff. But I suppose for us, why I'm not as concerned with that is because they've got an amazing opportunity, super supported by the delivery team, they're supported by us and everything else.

And they're spending time on like the sales side, and then they've got more time then to coach, to support the team, because they're leveraging the delivery team.

Yeah, exactly.

That's super interesting, to be fair. So what's like— is there anything else then that's top of mind going into this next phase then? Because I'm sure you're thinking about it a lot. We've spoken a lot about— I think you've done a really good job of sharing some of the things you double down on, uh, to get to this point. The delivery function, have you approached growing the team? What, what's really top of mind? We've spoken about the non— the non-billing stuff and those seats, but what else for you guys now is really top of mind to get to this, this next phase?

So I think it's creating the infrastructure and the support structure for the business that we have in 5 years. So that is a lot of the stuff around like the training, internal hiring, marketing, operations, but also sales management. And so while we, we know that we're going to keep on hiring, and we are super conscious of the amount of people that our sales managers are going to have to try and manage and stuff, and so how do we, how do we go about supporting them? Is it that I don't think it's necessarily a solution that Sean and I go back to individually managing sales managers, but do we start going to market to try and find other managers to try and support so that isn't a big, uh, such a big time sponge for these people? Also, I think like looking at the second wave of people that we have in the business and, and how we can accelerate their route to management as well. The back office stuff, the marketing stuff, and the talent stuff, I think are stuff that we maybe traditionally neglected, or we've done it but we haven't done it early enough. And so basically building all of that stuff so that when we are X number of people in the future, we have all of the, the, the function ready to support that.

Obviously this is all stuff that you wouldn't have a fucking clue about doing recruitment, do you know what I mean?

Still don't.

Yeah, so like, how, how are you approaching that? Because like a lot of those things that you just very much like I know, learning as you go, asking for help, because, yeah, you know, you guys were top performers, great recruiters. Obviously, let's be honest, up until a certain point it was pretty much that, but then leading the team, leading by the front, managing, a lot of the stuff that you've probably become comfortable with. Obviously, Sean, I feel like you've got a bit more of the short straw doing things, maybe more of the things out of your comfort zone on the ops side compared to Zef. But all those things you just said there, it's like proper business stuff, isn't it? It's not fucking doing deals and all that anymore, is it? So how, how are you approaching that? Because there's a lot of things that you'll you're, you're not going to be good at to start with.

I tell you what it is, right? This is like, I, I think we're generally both quite good at just discussing this sort of stuff and thinking, does that make sense? I don't think it makes sense, don't do it. Or yeah, it makes sense, we'll do it. I think like, I think we're not— the amount of times like we've interviewed people that work in these other areas, particularly if I'm interviewing an ops person, I'm sort of just going in there like cool, I'm gonna ask this person. I don't really know, I don't really know what to ask him. Or likewise, like, how do you interview a marketing person when you're not a marketer? Like, you can ask them, like, you know, what are your blind spots? What do you think you're really good at? What do you think you're really bad at? But like, is that a good answer? Like, I don't know. I think like you have to just lean on other people. So like, I think both of us speak to a lot of external people, like mates of ours, and ask them what they think and how they're doing it. Like Sean said, we brought in an interim CMO because we knew we needed to get marketing right because we want to try and like, because our market is global, we need a global reach. And while you can have people like reaching out over the phone, it's not going to be as strong as it is digitally. But, you know, we just don't know what good looks like in a marketing person. Yeah, they seem sound, they seem like a cultural fit, but are they a good marketer? So I think just reaching out to people and just leaning on, uh, maybe experts in other fields and just being like, yo, help me out, I've got no idea what I'm doing with this, what do you think?

Have you not considered, uh, like an NED or strategic advisor at this stage?

Yeah, we have, we have.

What's been the vibes? Not really enjoying who you're speaking to?

No, no, no, no, we've spoken to some like some super smart people, like, and they, they've sort of shared some, some really, really good advice. I think it's like really hard to try and find the right sort of NED at the right time for you and understand it— what does this person's value right now versus in 3 years? Or what, what are the problems we're dealing with right now and who solves those problems right now? Because I think if you speak to any NED, they'll obviously say to you, yeah, I can help you right now, but actually they're probably of more value 2 years ago, or they're of more value 3 years from now. So just trying to sort of find the right NED for you for the problems that you think you have. But I'm sure they probably would tell you, you know, you have sort of other problems problems that you don't know about.

So yeah, I'm being convinced.

Yeah, no, it's not, it's not. We spoke to some great people, and I'm sure at some point we will start to— I mean, this, the, the person that we have as an interim CMO is effectively an advisor, basically. Yeah, I think that, I think likelihood is we probably look at something like that for finance as well.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And he's not a recruiter as well.

That's probably a good thing.

Yeah, it's just different perspective, isn't it?

So how, how are you both thinking about, uh, remaining I haven't— continuing to have a competitive advantage in this, in this marketplace, then I'm sure it's something that you think about. Like, I can only imagine, although obviously it sounds like it's a real difficult period and it has been for a while, but more and more recruitment companies are going to be, you know, entering the space. How do we feel about continuing to have a competitive advantage or remaining to have a competitive advantage? How are you thinking about that?

I think, I think, um, we talk about it a lot. We do talk about it a lot. I think one of the things with crypto, right, is that naturally it attracts people who are like, you know, pretty skeptical, pretty cynical. You know, it's like the whole don't trust, verify thing, like part of the technology. People kind of take that approach to, to kind of who they work with as well. So I think the advantage that we've got is because we were, you know, one of the first people in the space and we've been around for quite a while, I guess we've got a decent-ish moat because of that. Um, you know, it's not just like— obviously the candidate network and stuff like that is obviously, is obviously helpful. Um, but I think, I think the brand is, is pretty strong. I think that, that helps a lot. I think that there's a lot of tech recruiters out there who have like tried to do a little bit of crypto, and, you know, I'm sure they'll like pick up a few jobs and stuff like that. But I think if you, you know, the only way to do the space is to immerse yourself in it. You gotta like live and breathe it every single day. Otherwise, the people just a bit— they'll probably just be a bit skeptical of you.

So I'm going to ask you where we want to be then before we finish, in another 3 to 5 years' time, whatever time horizon you've been thinking about. But I guess let's just end on, as we said in preparing for this, someone who's listening to this right now who is, yeah, at that 15-head mark, really is ambitious to get to that 30-head mark, but it's finding it difficult, maybe yo-yoing from 20 back to 18, back to 15, whatever. Sean, I'll come to you first. What, what's like the, yeah, the one bit of advice or the two bits of advice that's top of mind for you to help that founder entrepreneur who's just really struggling to scale past that 15 to 20 head mark?

Um, you gotta think longer term than you're perhaps thinking. I think a lot of the time, especially when you're setting a business up, people are just going to want to try and deal with the problems in front of their face a lot of the time, and they're probably thinking about, you know, like, how are we going to do deals next month and what's our pipeline like for the next 3 months and stuff like that. Actually, you've got to think where do I want to be in like maybe 2-ish years, something like that. People talk about 5-year plans and I think like that's— most of those are just bullshit, just dreams basically. Like if you're talking about an actual strategy, an actual plan, you know, try and forecast forward maybe a year or two or something like that. Think about— and then think about what you need to get there now and build, build the infrastructure for that now.

Yeah, nice. So take a step back and expand the— try and do your best to expand how far ahead you're looking. Nice. Yeah, Seth, what you got for us, mate?

I think like, be comfortable with who you are and like have a vision for what you want to be and make sure people feel part of that. So it's not a 'this is what I want to do,' 'this is what we want to do,' and 'this is why I think we should do it.' And, and I think I would also say, probably just because it's an error that we made, like get comfortable with empowering people in your business, because the more you empower people, the more they will be loyal, because they feel like they are more part of it than just, uh, another person in that company. Probably those two things. Nice.

I think what you're saying about like be proud of like doing it in a certain way, that's been absolutely massive for us. Like there's a million different ways to do recruitment, there's lots of different types of companies and different areas of, you know, like criminal, whatever, and they do things in different ways and they have different structures and they're set up in different ways and whatever. Like, for us, it was like, this is how we do it, it works really well. If you don't like it, that's cool, don't worry about it, we're not going to change. We're going to stick our flag in this hill and it kind of works for us. And actually, and that just— that internal kind of branding has worked really, really effectively for us. So I would say do that, find out who you are and just like stick to it, basically.

So next 3 years then, where are we going to be? Let's end on that. Let's go.

3 years.

This is where you come out with outrageous statements.

Next 3 years, it's gonna be— what's the GP goal next 3 years?

Oh God, roughly, I'd like to get to 8 figures. I think that's definitely achievable. We're moving into this office in the summer which will hold maybe 90, maybe 100 people or something like that, which is, you know, pretty cool, stroke terrifying at the same time. We really want to do the US. It's been on the sort of long-term radar for a while, and, and got the visas and stuff to do that. And hopefully next year we'll get that off the ground. So I think if we can do that, then make that work and make the UK operation tick over like it has, then yeah, I think definitely like 8 figures GP is on the table for sure.

Let's go.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think, I think like we, like, I, I think like the the, the stuff in the States, we have to do it. Like, we've got like a visa, we're ready to go, I think. And I think maybe not even just the States, I'd maybe like to at least be starting to plan maybe other places, other locations. So it's dictated by the people we've got. Like, if someone says to me, yeah, I want to go and do this, and this is what I want to do it, then we start building a plan for that.

Boy, it's been a pleasure.

Yeah, see you in 3 years, mate.