How To Get Your First $100k In Your Agency
James built a recruitment agency to $100k in 4-5 months by picking a narrow niche, booking 5 client meetings weekly, and targeting hiring managers at companies with 5-25 employees. He cut fees on early placements to land first clients and leaned on local networking and email to fill his calendar.
Questions this video answers
2015.
About 4–5 months (by the time money came through the door).
About five client meetings per week.
Sweet spot: ~5–25/30 employees; also references targeting companies up to 50–100 employees for decision-maker access.
Contingency basis (you are paid only when a placement is made).
How to get your first hundred thousand in your agency. So today I wanted to give you three tips on how you can scale your agency to six figures. So when I first started my recruitment agency back in 2015 and I the most important thing to me was going out to see clients. So my first tip is to fill your calendar up. So there's a few different ways you can do that, which is something I'm going to show you today. The first thing is reaching out to your client base. So once you've picked out your niche market. So remember, most recruitment businesses are built on inch wide, mile deep. It's very important to me. When I grew my recruitment business we stayed local so it meant I could go out and see my clients face to face. Now that's not always the case and it didn't have to be the case, but it does give you some advantages. So being able to go to network events. So what I did was I signed up for a lot of local business networking events. So I put myself out there, made introductions, made myself known over the first few weeks. The second thing I did was I built an email funnel. So it's very important to go out to clients with an approach that is slightly unique and different. So I made an email autoresponder. So that is something that, where you can email a client 247 that just constantly working in the background to bring in leads for you. So you need to craft a particular email sequence so that might be around your usp, the fact that you're new to the market. For me personally what I did was I opened the email up with stating that I'm a local entrepreneur, just started my own agency, just wanted a chance to meet you for a coffee to see if it could potentially help you in the future. So it's a little bit, it wasn't a forward sell, so you should never sell on that email. It's all around creating a reply, response or conversation. So you want to have as many conversations as possible in your first few weeks in your agency. So that's something that you need to really drill down into is having a unique targeted message to your target audience. So one audience, one message to create multiple conversations with different potential clients. Now for me personally, it was a little bit easier to get into smaller companies first. So I was always looking at eye level. So I was going from CEO to CEO, director to a director, co founder, vice president, whatever it was within that smaller agency or company that we worked with. So I started to drill down into employee size, many up to 50 to 100 employees. Because for me I found it a little bit easier to get into what I call the man or the person that is going to make the hiring decision and also has the money. So that's my next step would be drilling down into your niche and also then drilling down into being able to engage with that person face to face or at the very least like a Zoom or Skype call. So I had as many conversations as possible. So I used to target myself on five meetings a week that would go out to. And it was literally just hustle. So you've got to roll your sleeves up to get your first 100k. Rolling your sleeves up. It's been a little bit flexible to get your foot in the door. So a lot of different people might suggest different things, but for me personally, I would suggest that you would potentially do a reduced rate for the first placement because remember, you're not really known in the market. You need to prove yourself. You're competing against other bigger, better agencies potentially as well. So if you are starting in a new niche or you might be coming from a recruitment agency that you work for and start now on your own, my advice would be be a little bit flexible on your initial terms. Just. Just because you would just want to create chances. Yes. So we're going to get money in the door. You want to get your first 5k fee, your first 10k fee and it'll start spiraling from there. So it's very, very important that when you get that conversation, you going in. And for me, I just went straight to the hiring person or the person with the money and just said, look, could you give me a chance? Just give me a chance. Let me show you what I can do. And remember, a lot of recruitment agencies are still contingent. So really you're going to start your agency on a contingency basis, that is you won't get paid until you do do the placement and you actually find the right candidate for the role. So they don't have much to lose than giving you a chance. But you've got to build rapport, so they've got to like you. So the whole point was for me was building rapport, having a big understand a keen understanding of what that business does. So I did my research beforehand, flatter them a little bit, the fact that they started their own business and they're entrepreneurs themselves so that you wanted to learn from them and hopefully that you could take some golden nuggets away, but also help them in their company find better talent. So that's the Next tip I would give towards your first 100k in your agency. So looking back, when I started my agency, we did our first 100k, I think it was within the first 4 months, maybe 5 months by the time I got the money in through the door. So it was an exciting time because obviously you take a lot of risks setting up your own agency. And the most important thing for me is just focusing on giving value, creating as many conversations as possible, being a little bit flexible on your rate and then the money will follow. Yes, you've still got to do the job, so you've got to get the jobs on, then you've got to find the candidate. So everything that you're used to doing in your search firm or recruitment agency, but everything else will flow from there. Then you'll get referrals, recommendations, and then you'll be more confident in your pitch and. And then you'll be defining your unique sales proposition in terms of what is different for you as an agency compared to everyone else. At the start, it's the fact that you're hungry, you work harder, you work longer, you'll find better candidates because you are green at the start and you should be very hungry to succeed. So remember, you're having to compete against a lot of other agencies. So there's plenty of tools that I can give you and tips. So that would be the main tips that I would give you for getting to your first 100k in your agency. It is achievable to do that within your first four to five months, I would say if it takes slightly longer, don't worry because you might be partnering with the right type of clients that you know you get repeat business with. Which is another tip that I would give is you want to be looking at companies that are fast growing of consistently growing year on year. So you can check that on LinkedIn when you go on their company page. You can see their growth trajectory over the last three to four years. And always used to see the increase in hires, hires as came in. Another tip might be that you might be looking at companies that have their own internal recruitment. So for me, when there's an internal recruiter there, we work very well with internal recruitment teams, but remember, they brought those in because they're scaling or they want to reduce recruitment costs. But there'll always be a need for a specialist agency. So partnering up with that internal recruiter and developing that relationship is still key, but also the sweet spot is the companies that haven't brought in an internal recruiter yet. So Normally you'll find those between a five person company to around about 2530. That's a tipping point where you could focus on to get better results quicker and faster because you're going straight to the co founder, founder, director of the business or managing director and you can get in there and get obviously terms agreed and get a client win from from that angle instead of having to go through the internal recruiter. So that would be another tip that I would give. And yeah, I mean for me it was then from there once we got to 100k then the next target was obviously half a million, then a million and 1.5 million etc. So you grow steadily, don't go too quick, but you can get your first 100k by just yourself or with a business partner of you doing a joint venture. And yeah, it's a ball about putting yourself out there. So if you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to my YouTube channel. So I'm gonna be doing more of these. I'm really keen to listen to your comments. Any questions you've got, pop them down below because I'm gonna be replying to them every every week and if there's a certain video that you want to watch out for and to help grow your agency, please drop the comment below. I am gonna be starting a a small group of 10 agency owners and I'm going to teach them one to one how to grow and scale your agency seven figures and beyond. So keep an eye out for that. If you are interested feel free to drop me a message either below or jamestrepreneurjames.com that's going to be released shortly. It is only going to be limited to a number of 10 and I'm going to do one to one sessions and group coaching with you over an eight week period to get your either agency launch or systems and processes and different tools that you can implement in your business to give you a seven figure agency while still maintaining your lifestyle. So hope you found this video useful and I'll catch you on the next one. Thank you. Hi, thanks for watching today's video. If you like what you've seen, please like and subscribe button with Entrepreneur James so you keep up to date with all of the updated videos. If you've got any questions or comment I'd love to hear from you. So please drop a comment in Entrepreneur James below and we look to answer those on a weekly Q and A video. Keep an eye out for any future videos that we'll be posting. I'll be popping the video in here probably every one to two days. Thank you.
