How I'd build a $100k/mo recruiting business from scratch in 2026

10 years ago I started my own recruitment business and it took me just over three years to hit my first hundred thousand dollar month. And fast forward to today, I still run the business. We have 14 employees. And while that paints the picture of a journey that might even sound easy in some ways, it really wasn't. So if I had to start all over again from complete scratch, then this is what I would do. So for me to talk about what I would do from the beginning if I had to start all again from scratch, I have to reflect on my actual journey and share some of the lessons along the way. And I want to go back to some of the things that I was thinking about when, when I actually considered starting my own business and I let some friends and family know that I was planning on doing this. And yes, I was told all of the same things like do you have enough savings? Have you covered yourself for a few months? And you know, does this not sound risky? You got yourself a good job, why would you do that? And yeah, you're going to get that. And you have to ignore everything that anybody says like that because they don't have the information that you have, they haven't done the journey that you have, they might not even have the same business. And the only people that are going to give you complete and positive encouragement who are people who have literally trodden the exact same steps that you have and you're going to find that which is people who have done the same things as you or the things that you aspire to do, then they will give you encouragement and they'll give you insights into the problems. But anyone who hasn't, they're not going to, they just see it as risky and problematic. I feel the same about businesses and things that I'm not involved in I don't know about. To me they appear risky because I don't know them. So if you don't know about some of the successes that I've had, then you're going to find out about some of them on this channel. And if you are planning on starting or growing a business or doing something that I don't have experience in, then I'm not the person that you should take advice from. But there was a moment in time and it still rings true in my head because I still remember working for a previous employer and there was, there was an incentive for the company like if the, if the group hit, hit a milestone from a revenue perspective and the group, we didn't actually hit it, we only just missed it and it Wasn't really weighted towards certain people who had more experience versus less experience. It was just, here's a group target. If you hit it, we'll take you all out and we'll go on holiday or. I can't remember the exact incentive anyway, the group target. We got really close to it, but there was, there was obviously some outliers, some people who performed really well and some people who didn't. And I was one of the guys who had performed well. In fact, I was the only person in the company that even if you broke my annual target down month by month, I hit every single one for the entire year. And this incentive and prize thing was, was issued and the prize was to go out to Ascot racecourse, which, if you don't know, it's, it's where a load of people get together and they place bets on horse riding. It's just not the environment that I would like to be in as a Muslim, I'm, I'm not gonna go to a place where literally the gambling and alcohol is taking place. So that's not my seat. So I opted out. And I said, look, I can sit out of this one. I'll take care of everything and I'll, I'll man the entire office and all of you guys, all the work that you have on, just give it to me. I will take care of it. I'll be here on my own. And I did. And I went in for the full day, did the full shift, worked on my own, progressed everything as you would do, and my review was approaching as well. So I went into this meeting and I thought I was going to get praises sunk. And I was like, okay, cool. I've. I've hit two targets. Like there was a midterm target and a, and a long term target. I just hit both of them. I got two pay rises within six months. And I thought, I'm just going to get praised. Like, this is going to be one of those meetings where it's like, I'm just getting good news, good news, good news. Anyway, so I walked in really cocky and I had my notepad with me and I sat in my chair and I leaned back and it was the two owners of the company. And I just said, how do you guys think you've been getting on? Don't do that, man, don't do that. So one of them smiled, the other one didn't. Anyway, that meeting was an absolute grilling. It was. I didn't know how to take it. I mean, some of it was constructive, but there was Just too much focus on the negative. And the negative points were, muhammad, we know you are capable of a lot more. You could have done that. There were all these environments and these situations and scenarios which you could have navigated around, and you didn't. Okay, fine, I take on the constructive criticism, but there wasn't a well done or a thank you or we're proud of you or well done on the pay rise and the none of that whatsoever. And at this moment in time, the meeting went on. It was very constructive at the same time, even though it was negative. So I took a lot of notes. It was stuff that helped me in my recruitment career, which I'm grateful for. But at that moment in time, I felt a bit uncomfortable asking the question, but I said it anyway. And I just said, hey, look, you guys took the entire team out for a treat, despite many of the people just not even hitting targets. And I'm the only person who actually did hit target. So what do I get? Considering I took care of the entire office while you guys were all off? And the instant response and the words that came out one of the manager's mouths was, you get. And you can imagine it was a little bit of a shock because I was just like. I didn't say a word, and I just said, okay, cool. So I went out, sat at my desk, and I started to type out my resignation notice. I was a little bit offended, a little bit annoyed, but at the same time, I felt undervalued. It's like, I know what I've done here, and this is not being appreciated whatsoever. Not at all. Not the slightest. And that's when I thought, okay, I need to go look for something. I didn't have an idea of what I was going to do. It's just. I'm just gonna go do something else. So as I'm typing out my notice, my line manager comes up to me and says, hey, Howard, do you mind if we have a conversation? Because I heard you had a pretty tough meeting. And I told him. I was like, look, the meeting was tough. I'm fine with the criticism and how to improve recruitment, but I was the only person who hit my target. I was the only person who did all of this. There's some things that I have stood head and shoulders above all of the team members here, including you, and this was the response. I told him what he said, and he just said, okay, cool, leave that with me. And we got something arranged. They offered to pay for a meal out with my wife at the time, as in at that time, my wife is still my wife today. And I took the fee and obviously I still reside like the, the first nail in the coffin had already come in. But one thing I decided at that moment in time was that if I'm going to start a business, I'm going to make sure that everybody is valued and they are appreciated. Like I had to go through what felt like a horrible experience to be able to build a business that people would appreciate and value. So team culture is, is everything as I see it now today. And if that wasn't enough, there was a moment in time where my grandma at the time passed away while I was working. And if I remember correctly, she passed away either on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. And I told my boss, I go look, I need future a few days off really close to my grandma passed away. And his response was like, well, I'll see you back in the office on Friday. Knowing that I had 150 mile commute to go because I wasn't living with my parents at the time. So all of that happened and that was it. Like there were two like major, major nails in the coffin for my working relationship at that particular company. So I left and went to work for another one and I thought, okay, cool, I'm going to work for a company that does everything in recruitment as in my industry, but doesn't do what I specialize in. So I want to go another job. Anyway, did really well. I didn't quite get the level of support. I took a lot of inspiration from my manager and my boss at the time, but eventually it just didn't make sense. I was like, look, there's just no point me putting in this much work, energy effort, working this long hours to make this amount of money for somebody else. And then I take a small piece of it. So that was it. I wanted to set up on my own. I didn't have much savings, I had a baby on the way and that was it. There wasn't really a lot of thought that went into it. There was no, there was no AI tools available, there was no automation, didn't have much savings. Spent two weeks building out a website, which I ended up getting frustrated with and I just paid somebody else to do it anyway. And when I look at my own journey, especially for those who might be working with me, they can relate to it. There's some advice that I give not because I did exactly the same thing, is because I did the wrong thing and I just don't do that like you're wasting your time So I didn't really think through my niche. I just picked the one that I was most familiar with and it was the one that I'd been working. I didn't read any books, didn't watch any YouTube. Like there were no YouTube videos like this available for me. So I didn't watch any of them. Wasn't really into podcasts. And it was just, I think my biggest motivation at the time was just to get away from the painful experiences that I had working for somebody else. And that was it. Not knowing that building your own business could be an even more painful situation. And that's what I'm going to talk about in the next section. But if you look now, there's a lot of resources that are available online. You guys have my YouTube channel. I didn't have this when I started. And the reality is, is that getting started doesn't mean that you, that you have to have all of the answers. It's just literally taking the first step. Everything else you can figure out along the way, um, I don't recommend everybody do it the same way that I did, but it is what it is. It happened. And I've completed a journey to this moment in time. I'm sorry, I've completed a milestone. The journey is not finished yet. But what you heard there is some of the things that happened and some of the decisions that I made that led up to my first step of setting up a recruitment business. I didn't really think through my niche, didn't really narrow it down. I didn't really follow any of the advice that I actually shared today. And it was through all of those problems that now I'm in a position I can say all of these things don't work. So let me talk about the first phase of the journey which is getting to that either first 10k or that consistent 10k per month. I don't know why this number gets floated around a lot on the Internet, but either way, in, in recruitment, 10k a month is not a big number. It's not even a target. In fact, most recruitment companies, if you're starting with them and you're either an experienced or even a junior recruiter, they're going to target you on 150 to 200k a year in terms of revenue, that's gonna be your target. And for many recruitment companies, anything below 150, 180k a year, that's an underperforming employee that you should be aiming for more than 10k a month. But just keeping in mind the first placement, the first fee, the first 10k is very different to making 10k every single month. They're two completely different things. So for that to come to fruition, and now reflecting on my own journey, for how I would start and make that first milestone, which is the first placement and the first consistent 10k a month, I would revisit my niche in a little bit more detail. When I started my business, I didn't. I just picked the one that I was most comfortable with and I just decided to go with it. But then some things came about. Okay, my niche is very complex to understand. It's a very technical, engineering led niche which almost everybody in the niche is a white collar professional. They're degree qualified and for me to be able to speak the same language as them, I need to know what they do in at least a level of detail that they appreciate and they understand where it gives off the impression that I know what I'm talking about. Which thankfully I don't need to pretend anymore because I've been doing it for 10 years. But I still remember right at the start, it took me the best part of nine or 10 months to get my head around just what the hell I was actually recruiting because I was getting confused. Like, is it electrician, is it a plumber, is it something else? Like I got confused and it took the best part of eight or nine months. Now that doesn't mean that you have to pick a niche that has a high level of difficulty just to get your head around and understand, but it also becomes your competitive edge. So if you do pick a niche where you want less competition, then you have to pick a niche that is really complex to understand because that's the kind of trade off that you get. Because most people don't have the patience to wait 9, 10, even 12 months before they just get their head around the niche, never mind start making placements. And if that's you and you've got that level of patience, then you're already at an edge, you're ahead of your competitors. And those kind of niches, wherever they exist, they take a long time to get to grips with. So it's not a beginner friendly niche. That said, if I were to start all again from scratch, then some of the things that I'm going to say I don't like about my niche. Sorry, that's a bit harsh. Some of the things that I wish were a little bit different. I don't believe the people that I work with, they get paid as much as what they should do. I believe they should get paid more. And that has an impact on my income as a recruiter, as a business owner in a particular niche. Now, if I look at most of my clients, most of them from a revenue perspective, they make somewhere between a million and 10 million a year. That's my niche that I'm serving. The really big companies, they make a lot more, but 1 to 10 million a year is reasonable. So now for me to have the expectation that me recruiting in my niche, I'm going to make 10 million a year, it's, it's going to be really difficult to achieve. Like, there's no way that as a supplier I can make more money than the average of what my clients are making. That's a really, really tall order. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just saying it's a really tall order to, just to go over. So if I were to change one thing, then it's maybe I would pick a niche where the companies had a lot more power, spending power, made more money, and ultimately paid their employees more. And the reason why I give that example is because if you're not a very good recruiter and you're trying to close your first placement and you're just trying to squeeze a deal in and you do a deal for say 15%, then 15% of 100k is 15k. What if you were working in a niche where the salaries are a million a year and then you charge 15%, you're charging, you're making 150k. So a lot of the time when you hear recruitment advice about how much money you make in a given niche, well, the money is like, it depends, like, what niche are you working in? What is the demand? Like, what are the clients? Like, how much are you charging? Like, there's so many variables. And when you hear numbers in recruitment being thrown online, it's like it doesn't really make sense until it becomes relatable to a specific niche. Because when somebody says they're making 100k a month in trades and labor, that's very respectable because it's like, hang on, in that niche, you can make a lot more money. But there's also a challenge with building up that kind of desk. So numbers alone don't really make sense. But then also looking back at my experience, I spent, I spent two weeks just building a website that was just a complete waste of time. I picked the CRM really quickly. My method for contacting clients and candidates was, was the same thing everybody did 10 years ago, I was cold calling, I was emailing. LinkedIn was just about a thing, so you could send 100 connections every single day and nobody was going to say anything. So we sent out a lot of connection requests. Didn't really know at the time how to convert them into meetings, but either way it was 100 connection requests. And then on top of that, cold calling, on top of that, sending C Visa, on top of that, contacting clients, on top of that, two job board licenses as well. I was running this into the ground like it was expensive operation. And now, considering there's an evolution of the industry that has taken place, including the use of AI and automation, I don't believe a solo or an independent recruiter needs to spend over a grand a month. And if you are, then you're probably spending money in the wrong place. But either way, if it's working for you to keep it. But for me, it was just that added more stress and pressure than what it needed to because I didn't really have much money to spend and it wasn't going to last very long either. I didn't really have a proper client acquisition system. It was just brute force. I was just going for it. Cold calling, messaging, contacting people, telling them that I'm the best and you know, I'm going to do all of this for you and I'm going to solve all of your hiring needs for you and basically picture my charges. But there was no real structure that I didn't really know, like what to say when I was on a call with a client or a candidate because I didn't know what to preempt. But that said, I did make money in that phase. I did make a placement within my first week. I don't want to set that as an expectation for everyone, but I knew the kind of candidate that was available looking for work, and I knew exactly which kind of companies would be interested in hiring in because I was familiar with the territory. And I got my first placement done in my first week. The second one took me nearly four months. So that was a testing game. But the first one I got in my first week, okay, it gave me some breathing room, but four months until the next one came through. But as soon as that second one came through, the third and the fourth came through actually on the same day. And this is the nature of the industry, that it actually rewards people who are patient, not just with my industry, but in recruitment in general. So I'm not going to pretend that recruitment is a walk in the park. There are Things that you can do to make your life easier for yourself, but ultimately it rewards the most patient and the people who stay persistent. So the journey to 10k a month is a real grind. It's a bit of a squeeze. It will test your nerves, it will make you feel uncomfortable. But as soon as that first placement lands, things become a little bit easier because now everything makes sense. And now you know what you need to do again to make the same amount of money. You have to become a little bit more efficient and a little bit more proficient. And then you start seeing the money come through consistently. And once you do hit your 10k per month number, and I'm just talking about placements at this stage, by the way, because depending on the niche that you focus in on, you have a capacity for how many placements you can handle in your niche. One placement might be 35k. There's no reason why you can't do a placement a week. That's the target that I would give anybody in recruitment, meaning that you can build a business up to that point. If you feel constrained, it's either because you're unorganized or you don't. You're not operating in an efficient manner, meaning you haven't got any tools at your disposal, you're not using any tech, none of that stuff. Everything is manual. And that becomes the problem in this phase. So for the sake of round numbers, this is somewhere between 10 and 30k. The problem is that you come to realize that the only way that you can make more money is actually doing more work. And if you do more work, then you will win more clients. And if you win more clients, then you have too many clients to actually handle, in which case some of them are going to become unhappy with your work and service. So now if you work more, you run one particular risk, and if you work less, then you just get unhappy clients and you begin to lose them as well. So it's a twofold thing. And this is like the moment where you might have heard the phrase, like, work smarter rather than harder. This is where it becomes a reality, which is how do you get more stuff done without working more and being glued to your desk for longer than what you already are? And this is the moment at which I came across a book called the Four Hour Workweek and it completely reimagined everything that I think about. So I recommend it. If you haven't already read it. I don't go by all of the principles in the book. I don't live by a four hour work week. I definitely work more than four hours. But understanding how to get your business to that point just helps you appreciate what a business actually is. That is one that operates without you and that's what you have to do. I there needs to be a capacity for growth that does not depend on you. That's when your business is ready to grow and you can go beyond 30, 50, even 100k a month. It becomes a lot easier from there onwards. And this is where we looked into automation tools. We looked into LinkedIn automation and email automation and AI tools and then focused on candidate sourcing and then upskilled our CRM and then got a slightly better CRM like, so glad that we left that really famous one with the bowl. And then once all of those things were in place, the next thing we did is we hired our first va, which once you spell out and you give all of your tasks to a VA and the VA begins to do the work that you used to be doing and you find that the VA is now working 40, sometimes 50 hours a week to do the work that you used to be doing. You have to like question your sanity for a minute. Like how the heck was I getting all of my work done? Because I'm still very busy recruiting and now I've hired this full time person, they're taking on all of my workload and they're working full time as well. Doesn't make sense. Your business grows, you do become more efficient, you become more profitable. But nonetheless, at that moment in time you have to give yourself a reality and a sanity check. Like what the heck was I doing? And that is one of my regrets, which is not hiring a VA sooner. And I stand firm by this, that is that the first hire in any recruitment business should not be a recruiter. It should be in a system like, yes, you can use ChatGPT and all of this stuff. Like ChatGPT is a tool to make the entire process a little bit more efficient. It doesn't replace an assistant. So the only people who turn to ChatGPT instead of hiring a PA are the ones who haven't really grown a business. By the way, if you are at any of the levels that I've described and I've mentioned that, you know, using certain tools is some of the best ways. Like there's a lot of AI and automation overwhelm. If you want to just skip that bit and get a full list of all the tools that I use and some of the tactics and strategies that I've shared, then in the link below I've left a link to my school group where I have a community of people that I'm supporting through this journey. It used to be free, but I just used to get a lot of spam in there. So small price tag, you'll get in, you can just skip the journey and you can see everything in a structured way for how I built my business, including all of the tools that I use in my business. So now getting back to it, the journey evolves from here on. You've now applied automation and you've got your first employee in place. Now it's like you're over the 50, 60k month mark and you're experiencing the next level of the journey. And at this moment in time it's kind of a luxury and a comfortable position as well, because technically you're still a solo operator. You haven't got any other recruiters. Yes, you've got one or two employees, but they're not recruiters and they're not held to the same level of standard. They don't require the same level of scrutiny, they definitely don't cause as much grief or stress. Not saying all recruiters do that, but managing recruiters can be challenging, especially if you're a full time recruiter yourself. So now the people that we hired who are VAs, they just took away all the headache and the stress from my day to day work. And it's a luxury position to be in because now all of a sudden you find yourself having like a little bit more free time, you've got breathing space, you know, prospecting is taken care of by all the automation and you've got VA who takes care of a load of your admin work. And there will be moments in your day where you're looking at your client and thinking, gosh, this is a little bit empty, like I should do a little bit more, I should try and generate more leads and yeah, you will because you're going to be able to make more money. But you have to reallocate that resource elsewhere. And there are two places you can go. One is you can focus all of your energy on your now freed up time and focus that into finding more clients and candidates, which will result in more money. Second one would be sweet spot of stability. And the third one is that you put all of your energy into scaling that operation that you have now, which is you have some automation, you have a VA that takes care of the admin work and the job that you're doing is the dream job for any recruiter, which is all of Your admin work is gone. You're not writing out job adverts, you're not chasing invoices. Your clients and candidates are literally being delivered into your inbox and both on LinkedIn and on email. That's a dream job for a lot of recruiters. So that's the opportunity that you can give to somebody else. And now that you've done the first part and you've got all of your systems and processes documented now, you're able to replicate that as many times as you want. We've done it several times and we're going to carry on doing it because it does become a lot more easier after that. And when you do make that shift, what happens is that your primary role changes. It goes from being a recruiter to a manager, a recruiter and a manager of admin people to somebody who is recruiting recruiters in your own business and managing them to make sure that they perform. And that does require a slightly different level of skills to be able to motivate and control and manage those kind of people. Again, it's just something that you have to learn, something that I didn't know right at the beginning. And I believe my first few hires that I made were the wrong hires. In a few cases they were bad hires, and in other cases it was like I wasn't the right manager for them to be working with at that moment in time. So overall, if I look at the entire recruitment journey, is it that the business model and the approach and everything got easier? I was like, I don't think so. It's just I became better because I had more experience. I knew about the problems that didn't work and I knew all of the things where I failed and I went wrong. And it's like, I wish I never did them. So this is how you do it. So back to the journey beyond 60k a month, even heading up to 100 and beyond, this is where the journey becomes really fun. Because 100k a month is a target that many will aspire to do. But there's two routes to it. One is through brute force, you, however many employees you have, even if you're working solo, you work as many hours under the sun and push it all the way up to 100k a month. Everyone's going to be burnt out, everyone's going to need a holiday very frequently, and there's going to be a lot of people calling in sick too. And the other option is that you take it sensibly and you scale the operation. And from this moment Onwards, it depends on how efficient your actual systems are. You could do 100k a month with two recruiters, you could do it with five, you could do it with 10. And the equal and opposite is true is that you could do 500k with one recruiter and then replicate that over and over again. All of the variables that I described right at the beginning, that's what comes into play here, which is what's your niche size, what's your capacity, what about your geographic locations, what are the average salaries, what are you charging? These are very, very base level metrics. There's some others that come into play, but these are the ones that really drive the measurement of how successful your recruitment business is compared to other people who are operating in the same niche as you. And from here on, you start to pay attention to other things. You start to pay attention to client retention, to candidate retention, and satisfaction for both of them as well. And you pay attention to KPI tracking, like what are the measurements that you have in the business that lead to the next result? And you start to sell yourself targets and the company targets and team targets, and you start to build a culture. And now all of a sudden, the people that work for you and work with you, they know what you're about, they know how you behave, they know how you want to be treated. And there's one small thing in here as well. Sometimes when it comes to hiring, it's easy to get blinded by somebody's past performance. And they look at recruiting like, gosh, you make 500 to a million a year and it's like, you must be a good hire. There's a few other things that come into it, because what if that person comes into your business and doesn't perform so well and they bring about some kind of poisonous culture in the team which doesn't sit very well with the rest of the team, then you're going to have other people leave. So building any business with a good culture and a good team is completely different to whatever tactics you have right at the beginning. Because what you sell to your clients, how you sell to your clients, how you approach your clients, this is like the hardest bit right at the beginning and this most nerve wracking bit right at the beginning. Once it becomes repeatable, you're ready to repeat that over and over again. And it doesn't make a difference whether you're doing it or whether somebody else is doing it in your team. And if you can do all of that, then yeah, you will end up with a profitable, successful scalable repeatable recruitment business. One that grows either with you or without you. Without the stress and the headache that comes with a traditional business, and without you or me acting like my old boss. So regardless of what stage you might be at, if you're at that moment in time where you just need another client or replacement to come through more likely the case, if you are in the earlier stages, then go ahead and watch this video where I break down how to get your first recruitment agency client in your first seven days.