How to increase your candidate response rate by 25-30% (Whats app messaging system)

Hey guys, welcome back to yet another episode of Top Billers Toolkit, where me and my twin brother interview top billers from all around the globe to unlock the secrets to their success. Today's guest is James Rowe. James has probably one of the most unconventional recruitment stories we've ever heard. Before starting his own recruitment business, James had been fired from probably about 30 different employers. Now he helps other recruitment business owners go self-employed and think like business owners and not employees. In today's episode, James is gonna be sharing with us his revolutionary WhatsApp system that he uses to skyrocket his candidate response rate. He's going to be sharing his exact MPC strategy and how he goes about constructing emails that get high response rates. And finally, James is gonna be going more into his journey, why he was fired from 30+ jobs, and why running his own business and being his most authentic self has made him the happiest he's ever been. Guys, this was a really insightful episode. James is a lovely bloke and he's got some golden nuggets to share with you. As usual, grab a cuppa or a glass of wine depending on when you're listening to this, and let's get into it, shall we? Wait a second, guys, quick question for you. If you could land a new client on LinkedIn in the next couple of weeks, how much would that be worth to you? 20, 30, maybe 40K? Well, we have a pretty crazy offer on right now. If you are a recruitment business owner, then we will work with you for free and write you 2 posts at absolutely no cost. And here's the cool part: other recruiters that have come through this free trial have managed to win new clients. They've racked up hundreds of thousands of impressions and started conversations with top-tier candidates. It's completely risk-free, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you're interested, the link's in the description below. If not, no worries. We hope you enjoy the podcast. See you later. James, thank you so much for joining us today, my friend. How you doing?

Very well, thank you. Very well. How are you?

Yeah, really good, thanks, man. I'm really excited about this episode, um, because I feel like you're definitely a unique guest given the fact that you run a recruitment business, but you also have a business that helps recruiters to earn more money and to basically get to the next stage of their career, which is really interesting. Um, so I'll start with the first question as always, which is what's the number one tool in your toolkit, whether it be a mindset strategy or software?

Yeah, I like the mindset strategies mostly because they go through everything that you do. So, you know, BD, they go through your candidate experience, they go through your own business every day. And I personally set one, one a year to focus on. So 25 for me was be the most authentic, raw person that I can. And authenticity was the main aim of what I was doing. And that was for Originally it was to attract more recruiters like, like myself or like, you know, like you guys, for example, and to bring people in. But then it started flowing not only through the culture business, but also through how we do BD, how we talk to candidates. And all of a sudden everyone kind of picked that authenticity side up and all of a sudden they started translating through the business. And I'll give you another one. 2026, our thing is value first. Everything that we do, trying to add value first before we do anything else. Because if you can add value to everything that you do before you ask for anything, people will feel, you know, more obliged to do it. They'll, they'll like you more, they'll understand your preference, they'll understand your mindset before you even go into anything because you're giving that value side. So they're my two over the, the last two years. So it's, um, that's really interesting.

I've never heard of anyone who picks like a a goal in the way that you have and say, I want to be more authentic, and then you focus your actions around that. I love the authenticity one. That really resonates. Why did you choose that? Like, what was your thinking around that? I think you've kind of already said a little bit about it, but—

oh, hello.

Hello. You know, that reminds me of— do you see that famous clip about the viral one, about the kid?

We're lucky I still work from home. I mean, that's probably a good segue. My, my story come in a really weird way, which was I probably should have never been allowed to run a recruitment company. And I went from an extremely good earner to all of a sudden changing the way that things were done because I come from that recruitment side of it. I've brought it all back. The whole pivot point was that little thing that just ran in the room, which was my son was born. And when he was born, I was like, I need to make a change. And originally, like, I've been on podcasts and I've talked about this before, but I've been fired from like 20-odd jobs. It's been insane, uh, because I just— I could never fit in. I could never do that thing that I wanted to do because I even got very good at a job and got bored, or because I just never had any interest in it in the first place. And all of a sudden I've become embarrassed about my own story, and I was actually not hiding it, um, but as a recruiter that's had 20 jobs, you know, it doesn't— it doesn't look the best. But actually all of them experiences led me to a certain point, and actually when I started talking about that whole thing, the mindset for the whole business changed. Because it went through and all of a sudden the guys were being their more authentic selves, which led to them doing more businesses. And if you— I found if you have too many things, you lose focus on the main thing. And our whole thing is we help guys go self-employed, we help them build their own businesses, but we also help them build their own brand. And if they can't be authentic, it's not real brands. They're just being another slave to the 9 to 5 or whatever you want to call it. So for us, it was Right, what's the most important thing? The most important thing for us is be yourselves, be natural, have a place to— you'll find your place to fit in if you allow yourself to be open to that kind of audience, and you'll work with the clients you want to work with, you'll get the fees that you want to get, and you'll get the most out of what you put in. So I started with it because it was the easiest thing for me to do, and therefore that then translated through to the business because it all starts from top down, doesn't it? So it is a bit of a strange way of doing it, but I found that it's the most effective to make sure that people You know, rather than just bringing in recruiters and then just doing a job, all of a sudden you form a union, you form a culture that's, uh, pretty unparalleled.

So it's really interesting, and I'm really fascinated, Jen. So you, you, you said you've been fired from like 20 jobs and now you started your company. Like, what's the biggest thing that shifted? I know you mentioned being yourself and surrounding yourself with a brilliant culture. That must be part of it. Is there anything else that you've built in your environment purposely now that makes you a lot more fulfilled compared to the previous jobs where something wasn't going right, whether it's culture or environment or whatever?

Yeah, I think when I, when I started, I was in it for the money, um, as most recruiters are, they're in it for the money. And you, you start to take a lot of introspective view on yourself when you have a kid. So I had Sterling, um, and he— I never thought I was going to have kids. I hate children. I Um, but it's different when it's your own kid, kind of. Um, and the big thing for me was I want to build something that I'm really proud of, and I want to be able to help people. And that, that was almost overnight, it almost clicked in my brain. And when you stop chasing the money and you start chasing what you want to do— because money is a side effect of you doing something well, isn't it? You know, if you're a good recruiter, the money will come. If you treat your candidates and your clients extremely well, the money will be there. And there's that you can do to lean up your process and take more profit and all these things, but ultimately it all stems from, you know, you trying to do a really, really good job. And so the mindset change for me was going from money to actually helping people. And originally it all started with— I, I started recruitment. I was— I landed in it like most people and went, I don't know what I'm doing. Kind of took to it really well because of all of my previous experiences doing kind of bad jobs, I suppose, uh, you know, whether that's doing a bad job myself, whether that's the business had a poor culture, whether it was the wrong kind of style for me, whatever it was. I took all of that with me when I went self-employed, but I wasn't being treated as if I was self-employed. I was treated as if I was still a staff member, uh, you know, had to be in an office, had to be there 9 to 5, had to use their clients, like, had limitations on the fees I could charge. There was no thinking outside the box. And that kind of made me want to start a business that was not polar opposite to that, but build on the foundation of what they'd kind of offered, which was, you know, allowing people to do that self-employed thing and show them that you can break away from the 9 to 5. I, I wake up every day and I start work whenever I want to start work. And don't get me wrong, most of the time I'll start before most people even wake up. But at the same time, that's my choice whether I do that or not. And I think that's a big mind shift for most people because it takes a long time for you to actually understand that your diary is your own. And most people go one way or another. They either take too much time off or they work too hard, and It's about finding the middle ground. It's about, you know, we've all seen recruiters burn out well too quickly because they're either going at it too hard, too fast, and they don't understand that there has to be a part of longevity in that. It's all right when you first start and you need to grind it out, but you need to find that level of work and income that works for you long term without, you know, so you can enjoy all of the money you've been making to enjoy your life. I think a lot of people get wrapped up in this grind culture and all of a sudden they forget that the reason you're doing the grind culture is for an, you know, an come in the end, uh, making sure that you can actually enjoy your life.

Yeah, so true. I'd love to ask about just, just one more question around the authenticity piece because I think it's really important. Um, I don't know what you're seeing from the market and from recruiters, but they're— from a portion of probably more, probably 60 to 70% of the people that I speak to, there's this fear of being authentic. I think authentic, you know, that the word is thrown around so much now, it's probably like people's perception of it has changed a little bit. Yeah, but I think like people truly just being comfortable in their own skin, I think that is the key to work. Like, for me, authenticity is like being comfortable and confident with your values, your beliefs, and your opinions, and being open to sharing them. I think a lot of recruiters are really fearful of that. Like, I speak to so many recruiters about personal branding and I get, I get a lot of pushback from, from normal staff. What have you found the same with your recruiters? Have you found a way to get people more comfortable in their own skin? Like, what's your experience with, with authenticity and the people you're working with?

It's really hard. And I talk to the guys and some of them see the value. A lot of them see the value, but they say, oh, but I could do this. You know, it's that instant gratification part of it, which is, yeah, but will it make money for me in the next 3 months? And actually, one of the ways that I've found to help people long term is to build out their long-term goal. So what is their long— what's the end game? I don't think any businesses talk about what's your end game. When I interview people, I say, what's your end game? And they say, I don't know. I say, cool, let's build it. Because once you've got the end game, you can start reverse engineering that. And you say, right, if you want a sustainable business that, you know, does X amount per month, you're going to need to talk to this many people, you're going to need this many clients. You can reverse engineer pretty much everything. And so you can say, what do you want to do? Do you want to be specing these people? Do you want to be cold calling businesses, or do you want people to come to you? The answer is always come to you. Okay, so this is, this is how we should lay it out. You're going to want to get your feet in the door, you're going to want to build something up, and then over time we're going to want to start building your brand. And so actually giving them the end goal so they know what they're working towards is a really good step in that. I think the other part of it is just people are scared of what, what they may think of you, and unless you can just let go of that, it's really hard. I used to hate being on camera, used to hate the sound of my voice. The way my face looks. I'm like trying to like edit it out, make myself look beautiful. I'm like, that doesn't look like me anymore. You know, I've got to the point where I just don't care. And if people want to listen to me and they've got something that if I connect with them on a values point of view and they'll listen and if they don't, they won't. And you kind of need to let go of that. You know, I think people are starting to wake up to the idea of Instagram isn't real. You know, the life on Instagram is a snapshot of what you want people to see, and they need to understand that that's not people's lives. You know, I'm, I'm not out here, you know, in Spain every week and then Portugal and doing all these things. I'm sat behind my desk usually looking like a mess trying to fix a problem that I broke in the first place. It's not perfect, but it's actually that imperfection that makes you relatable, and your, your deepest and darkest pains are usually the reason why people connect with you. I hope she doesn't mind me in the story, but we did have a recruiter and she unfortunately lost her mum. And I said, talk about it. And she was like, I can't. I was like, you can. And she'd gone from posting jobs, and she was posting jobs, one or two likes. She was posting crap, basically one or two likes. Posted something personal, something meaningful to her, something that she felt passionately about, hundreds of likes. And she was like, I felt like I used my mum. I said, no. I said, you're explaining your story because that makes part of your big story. When you lose a parent, that forms a big part of you. You need people to understand who you are, not the jobs that you have. Value first. And so usually it's really hard to do this unless you really know somebody, but once you start to get to know them and you start finding out what makes them tick, you can usually pull out the things and say, this is what you need to post about. One of our recruiters, his personal brand is that he cares about candidates. And I was like, you've got the biggest problem in the world, mate, because every business, every recruiter says they care. But he literally cried— like, he's cried before because he hasn't been able to get someone the job that they deserved. He's literally fought tooth and nail. He's He's made videos 10, 15 minutes long talking about this candidate journey, the candidate that should never have got a job but rose to the challenge. Like, he really cares. So I said, you, like, you need to do something completely different. You can't just release a 60-second— you need to make half an hour videos on this stuff talking about— because that's the way that people understand. And it kind of almost goes against the algorithm. It was 10, 15 minutes of him just talking, headshots, and saying ridiculous things. But the insane response that he got from that, because it connected with the audience— it doesn't matter what the algorithm done. It had to pick it up. It didn't have a choice. So I think understanding the end goal, understanding what your brand is going to be— everyone has a slightly different brand— and the last part of that equation is just make sure that you're— it, it's not— I refer to it as hero weekends, you know, where like the guys go out and they do a 7-hour run over the weekend, but they don't do anything and eat like crap all week. It's not that. It's a consistent little nudge every day, and it doesn't take a lot. It takes a post, it takes a couple of likes, takes interactions, and all sudden you're playing the long game. You have to play the long game. I worked out the other day, and we were literally talking about personal branding, and that is if you only get 200 views per post that you've done, but you've done it for 5 days a week and you only got a minimum of 200 impressions, that's almost 80,000 impressions over a year. 80,000 people looking at you. I literally wrote a post last night. It was probably the last tangent I'll go on. Stop thinking about impressions or about a number on a screen and think about them if there were people in a room that you were talking to. 200 people seems like a lot all of and you go, oh, that's a lot of people, I don't like this. And so imagine when you're getting 8,000, 10,000 people, you're reaching an insane amount of people. You're undercutting what you feel like you, you should be getting based on other people's standards, not your own. And it's not the quality, it's not how many impressions you get, it's the quality of the impressions. If you're reaching— I, I've done podcasts before and they've only had a couple hundred views, but the feedback that I got because the audience was targeted and there was cultivated towards a certain thing was, how can I work with you in the future? How can we do this? Together? How can we do this? How can we do that? It doesn't take a lot, it takes the quality. And I think a lot of people get caught up in the 'I want to go viral.' You don't, trust me, it's not worth the hassle on the back end anyway.

Love that. And yeah, I mean, I resonate with a lot of your responses, but especially setting a goal, because I think you're right, the mindset is like, oh, it's not going to make me money in 2 months, 3 months, but it's like, oh cool. But if your end goal is this, it's perfectly aligned with the end goal, so you should do it because of that reason. So I really like that, it's a great idea. I'm going to pivot a little bit from the questions James, just because my intuition is taking me to something else, which is the person that you mentioned just before we press record, the chap that's gone from working in, in estate agency to now— you said 15K a month. I think that's amazing. And I think that— I think we can probably unpack how he got there and give value through his story. So I'd love to go into that in a little bit more detail, if you're willing. Like, what— can you just tell us, uh, his scenario? Like, what— where was he before he met you? What was he doing? And can you tell us a little bit about the journey from, from where he was to where he is now?

Yeah, so he started with us 4 or 5 months ago. Um, he comes from a background of estate agency. He's got about 10 years experience in it, no recruitment experience, but it works. He'd run his own business. He done— he does, uh, he's bought some houses for, for kind of HMO stuff and all these kind of different things. And so he, he had a business acumen with estate agency experience but no recruitment experience, which, um, as we mentioned before, I look for 2 out of 3. So he had 2 out So had a really good chat with him. He started and we kind of laid out the blueprint for him. And for me, when you first start, it's just do the basics extremely well. And so, you know, he spent a long time building out his connections. He spent a long time, you know, getting the data on board, getting it clean, making sure that he had a usable database. He utilized and reinvested it into himself. So he paid for tools that were recommendations and forked out a little bit of money on his own side as well to maximize his platform. So whether that was you know, a VA that we've got access to. He paid for her to do some data work for him. Uh, you know, he done, uh, LinkedIn, you know, and he paid for the Upscale course on that. And he basically just reinvested as if he was treating it as if it was his own business and we were an extension of that, which is what we do. What we found was that month 1, nothing happened. Month 2, 1 deal. Month 3, all of a sudden just came out of the gate, done 10, 12 grand. It was a build of a few different things. Number 1, his approach started paying off. He was, uh, value first. So he basically said, I'm not going to target these people first time around. I'm gonna like them, I'm gonna talk to them, I'm going to talk to them about the market, I'm going to talk about how they're getting on, how they're finding it. And what we were finding is that not only was he not even necessarily getting these business— he, like, some of these guys he's talking to weren't the decision makers, but they appreciated the talk so much that they forwarded it and said, look, this is the person you need to speak to, I want you guys to recruit from them, like, we need some people in the business. So not only was he not even talking to the right people— and I consider being new as a superpower because you don't know anything. And like, some of the biggest clients that we've ever got from new people because they've just walked in and said, oh, by the way, I've just signed this massive— like, one of the— so they signed Carter Jonas, which are huge in the UK, and oh yeah, I signed that contract. I'm like, how? And they're like, oh, I just asked them. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. Um, but you gotta think about it like this, which is I think people build up a thing of what's good and what's bad, and when you get rid of that, all of a sudden doors unlock and you go, yeah, I'm stupid, but it's actually— I was still saying I I was new in recruitment for like a year and I was like, oh yeah, sorry, I'm new. And they're like, you're on LinkedIn, it says you've been there 2 years. I'm like, don't know what you're talking about. But it is a superpower and not knowing is a great thing. There is a cross period where that obviously you kind of want to go from absolute newbie to expert in almost like a couple of days because once you don't want to be in that middle portion when you kind of know what you're talking about but not really because you don't have any scapegoat then. You either, you even know everything or you don't. And whether you do or don't is irrelevant to the perception of the candidate and client. So how he built his process was really reaching out to people, speaking to people, worming his way in. He had some industry knowledge from his EA experience, which allowed him to be an expert from almost day one. He just didn't. And he was coming to me, so how do I close the deal? And I'm like, how did you get the client on? He's like, I just spoke to them. And I'm like, okay, so you kind of know what you're doing. You're just missing some aspects. So we just sprinkled in some recruitment knowledge for him. And all of a sudden, month 1, building out a really solid foundation of connections. Number 2, started reaching out to people in month 2, started really signing contracts by that point. And then by the time he got to phase 3 in month 3, ironically, was that he had, he had a fairly decent database. He was able to reach out to people en masse and have really good conversations and pivoted very, very well. He had a lot of people reach out about a certain job, for example, but he didn't necessarily put them always to that job. And he would pivot and say, actually, I think that you're better for this business. Let me go talk to them. And he took a very, very personal approach rather than volume out, volume out, volume out. To this day, I don't think he knows how to send a spec because he just never does it. It was personalized outreach for everything. Now, I must admit, he does work London, so it's very, very dense. So there's a lot of candidates, but the competition is high. In London. There's some extremely good recruitment businesses that operate within our space alone. And so he's fighting against them. So he was very, very fast, but he's very methodical and he takes a statistical point of view. I refer to him as a robot because he— nothing seems to bother him. He just— I could tell him, oh, I'm about to jump out of a window.

But cool.

I was like, okay, cool, fine.

Probably what makes him probably good, good at the job as well is that ability to control his emotions.

Um, yeah, and some great advice I had is don't let other people control your emotions, only you control them. And once you do start thinking about it as a business owner and change that— even if you're not a business owner, think about it as if you're a business owner. Does this make financial sense? If it doesn't, don't do it. Like, yeah, is it worth your time? And he treats his time very, very well, and the perception of his time is very interesting because the other recruiters say, how is he doing this? And I said, he texts me at 5 AM on Saturday. How's he doing it? He's putting in the graft, but he's also using his numbers to his advantage. He's looking at the conversion rates, he's looking at who's leaving businesses and who's joining. He's looking at the scores and he's leading with value. So of course he's going to do well because he's got all of them key points down. It's actually more of a question of why wouldn't you use him if he cares about your outcome and he really is genuine and he takes a calculated approach? It's a no-brainer for most businesses because that's how other businesses should be thinking anyway.

Yeah, yeah, brilliant. I've got so many questions. Sam, do you want to jump in? Because I'm sure— yeah, I want to go straight to the, to the speccing, um, because I'm fascinated in how— I mean, there's always similarities with when we speak to top billers or recruiters in general who are successfully speccing, especially through email. But I would love to go into your process in a bit more detail, James. Um, you mentioned that you spent 2 years refining your process and now you have a really good response rate. Um, can can you walk us through what your response rate is? Firstly, like, what you deem is a good response rate, and also like your journey from what didn't work to what you changed and now what is working, if that's okay?

Yeah, so we've got two different— two or three different versions of speccing that we— well, I class as speccing. So obviously we've got a bit what I refer to as business to candidate. So that is you've got a job spec and you send that out, um, and then you've got a business spec, so candidate to business. And so obviously you'll send out your candidate in hopes to land a to your client or to get an interview. So, and then the third one is, uh, I'll run into that. It kind of splits off from C to B. So the, the candidate to business is kind of a bit chunky. So actually, I'll probably start the other way around. So if you've just got a landed on a job, WhatsApp automation is just— I know if you don't have WhatsApp automation, you're literally— there's no point in you even sending it. I can't even remember the last time I checked my personal email. Email. It's a waste of time. Uh, it's just fluff in there. You're going to get bombarded with emails. It's just a waste. There's so many businesses that allow you to do this now, and it's not particularly complicated. We, from one simple change, from taking it from email, which we had less than 5% reply rate, to WhatsApp, which is like a 20 to 30% reply rate. Even if— and that's 25 to 30%, some of them just said, I'm not interested. And we called them and said, you're not interested? Are you interested in anything else? And they said, yeah, actually I would be. It's just that's not quite right. Uh, so we actually added a third button. Uh, so when you get a message from us, it comes from a TRE-linked account, so it's a Meta-verified account, and so it looks legit rather than, oh, who's this messaging me? And it drops through and it says, hey, we've got a role in X location, want to see if you'd be interested, here's the salary and here's the details, click here if you want to see the full link. And then below it we have 3 buttons, and that is yes, I'm interested, no, I'm not interested, I'm not interested in this job but something else would be great. And what we found was our open rate is about 95%. 90 to 95%. Who doesn't check their WhatsApps?

Yeah, it's the same.

Who does?

So clever.

Go where the audience is. Don't try and force your audience to go where you want them to. And it's so simple that when we've done it, I was like, oh well, we've just broken recruitment. We've got it. It's easy. Like, so actually, from the candidate side, it's really not that hard. There is a bunch of integration stuff that you need to do with that. And my job as the MD of TRE is to make it tools really, really usable. So all the guys have got to do is click two buttons and they can send mass mails out, you know, hundreds of people at the same time. And that is a really, really easy way of doing it. And that all stemmed from one of the recruiters coming to me and saying, James, I'm sending out emails, I've got great jobs, and I'm getting ignored. We need to do this a different way. I mean, it was that thread I just started pulling on and said, right, it's not working, let's really look at it.

Yeah, so it's so interesting because not one, uh, because I know WhatsApp isn't very big in the States, but they obviously have an equivalent. I don't know what it is, but not one British recruit— I think not many recruiters have mentioned WhatsApp. And it's just interesting that you pivoted to there. What's the, uh, regulations around sending to phone numbers and stuff? Is there any like rules, or is it— what's the— do you know any rules around, around that in the UK?

Or not particularly many, uh, is the answer. Um, it's, it's not particularly easy is the answer to your So the problem is, is that it's owned by Meta, isn't it? WhatsApp. And so you have to have a verified Meta account to be able to do it. So that means you need a Facebook account and you could get banned tomorrow. We've got banned recently and we've had to reinstate it and fight with Meta. So it doesn't come without its aggro. The setup process for someone that's fairly technical is fairly easy and it's technically classed as data usage. So most, most candidates will, you know, should be signing some form of kind of cookies or something at the minimum. And so therefore that data is then usable and it's still within system. So it's classed as a part of that. So in terms of regulations, as long as you're not sending out rubbish messages that are getting marked as spam, Meta don't care. And they actively let you guys do this. You know, there's third-party companies that you guys can work with that will do all of the setup for you. And then you have to pay a small top to Meta every, I don't know, couple of weeks or whatever. It's like 20-odd quid and then pay for the platform that actually provides it. Um, and there's integrations into pretty much every CRM system. Like, I think that that's absolutely mad that nobody's using it because crazy if you think about it. Like, even some companies you can send texts, like, that's, that's okay. I, if someone texts me, I don't read it for about 3 weeks because I still don't realize it's there. And yeah, and so if it's via WhatsApp, I'll read it instantly.

Yeah.

And it, it's crazy. I mean, and you know, we look at other markets as well. One of the key indicators for me was I looked at the Indian market, um, they don't send emails, they don't use emails anymore. Everything— candidate specs, um, CV, center— all done via WhatsApp. They don't use anything else.

Interesting.

They don't use emails anymore.

Wow, that's so cool.

Yeah, so I thought, well, okay, typically the UK is a little bit behind on pretty much everything that we do in life. Ironically, it's so true. Let's get ahead. Um, let's do WhatsApp. And so yeah, I mean, it's worked tremendously well. I can't—

it's amazing. That's epic, mate. So that's a little tip. So that's candid— that's, um, that's business to candidate. What about the— what about— is it a business? Sorry, candidate to business. What about if you're speccing candidates to businesses, James? How— what's your process with that? Has that changed from email? Is that still a bit of a slog? What's your— what's your opinion on that?

So our candidate emails, um, are are really, really good. Um, you know, uh, we still send them via email, but there is occasions where we'll hit them via WhatsApp. But business owners will check their emails, and so, yeah, because it's part of their business, the first thing they do is they log on in the morning, and it's less intrusive. Candidates always want to hear about the best role if it's 6 o'clock at night, or, yeah, and sometimes, sometimes the candidates message us at like 3 in the morning. Um, and literally had that happen like 2 days ago. I don't know what— can't make the interview today, it's 3 o'clock in the morning. He sent a really sarcastic message back as well, and he was like, yeah, let me just crawl out of my bed, make sure I don't wake up my kids, turn on my laptop and get a coffee, and I'll email him right now. And she didn't get sarcasm. Um, but so we still send them via email. There are occasions where we'll do small messages with a really tight group that maybe we know, or maybe that we really want to get with in terms of, you know, and hitting them. But most of the time it's sent via email, and the structure of them is fairly— it's fairly simple. And actually what we found was we started with these beautiful emails with the candidate profiles attached and all these things, and then we started stripping stuff and stripping out stuff, and we've basically been left with a bare-bones spec, a kind of email template that works the best. Um, and there's, there's one simple reason: we don't attach candidate profiles anymore to specs. One reason, even if you've got the perfect candidate and even if you block out everything and you hide all the name, they might see something that they don't like in that CV and you can't provide context. Because it's interesting. So the less you send and the more of a hook you dangle, they're going to come back to you and say, hey, I'm interested, can you send the full CV? And that's when you go, cool, let me have a call with you, let me, let me talk about terms, let me do this, let me do that. Because the problem is the more you put in there, the more chance you, you have of number one, them not reading it, and number two, saying something stupid, and they all of a sudden go, ah, I don't like that. And so for me, we We usually have a couple of things, so it's fairly short and fairly— not vague, but vague enough that one, they wouldn't be able to tell who it was. So every email starts with a subject line, and subject lines are, in my eyes, the most important thing, because if they never open the email, the rest of the email is irrelevant. And so, you know, you're gonna want to— we use the standard one, uh, which is requested candidate, because it makes it sound— they go, what candidates are off? What can I request? And then they go click on the email and they go, ah, okay, you got me. Um, The guys use all sorts, you know, role advertised on Indeed, seen this, might be of use, something like that. Something that makes them go, what is that? When are you going to send me my money for this? It was one of them. That's brilliant. And so, you know, all of these kind of little taglines to make sure it gets opened. And then it just needs to be the Goldilocks is somewhere like the actual words on the page should be somewhere between 5 and 6 lines max. And that's including your spec, which is insane. So it's, hey, working with candidate at the moment based in this location, here's the, here's the details of them they've got, and then it'll be salary, OTE expected, location, and years of experience. And say, look, need anything, or if you are looking for any other candidates, we have a database of X amount in this area. So, you know, one of the big advantages that we've found— one thing on the bottom of that as well is we always tell people the database size of their area area. I mean, we, we have accidentally become a very, very good data company, which is we've— within 2 years we've built out 25,000 candidates, um, which isn't, isn't bad. It's not bad.

It's really good.

And they're all industry-specific. And so actually we have a very, very heavy database. And so when people say— see that, we actually use this as part of our spec, which is, do you think it would be unreasonable to say that we've got 10,000 candidates within your area that work within a state agency and are actively looking, um, do you think it would be unreasonable to say that one of them might be interested?

That's a great— love that picture. That's so good. I'm gonna jump in. I've got so many questions, James, but that was an absolute, um, value golden nugget you just shared there. It's brilliant. Um, what I'm curious about, because so hook really important, I'm guessing a huge part of— for me, I don't know, just as, as someone who's spoken to quite a few billers now and talked about specs. The 3 things in my mind of like what makes a successful spec, of course with everything that you said, but also relevancy, uh, demand— is the candidate actually in demand? And then actually, and the copywriting itself, like how you're presenting it. Is, is there anything in there that you would add, or is there anything in there that you would focus on more so in order to increase— if someone was listening to this, like, this is— these are the 2 things you should focus on to get the highest likelihood of responding and, and to get Paul, what's your feeling?

Yeah, I've got a really rubbish saying, but I'm, uh, in the business, which is think donkeys, not zebras, um, which I think is a medical term, um, but it essentially— what I mean by that is go for what I refer to as bread and butter candidates. The amount of times that I see new recruiters go, ah, I've just got a guy and he lives in Scotland but he wants 70K because he's moving down to London, and he— but he can't work for the next 6 months, and he needs this, and he needs that, and he— but he's a great candidate. I'm like, no one cares though, you've lost me, you lost me. Um, think easy, like what, what, what are your 5 core roles within your business? If you have 5, if you've got less, even better. And focus on them with your specs. I've got candidates that are absolutely incredible, but I actually purposely don't spec them. And the simple reason why is because they're not attractive on a spec. The complicated candidates are for when you have calls because you need to provide context, and context is basically 90% of your job. All you do is provide context to everything that you do constantly. And so without that, a candidate can be the best candidate in the world, but they're unattractive from a face value point of view. What I typically focus on is if I was sending out— if I was going to start my business today and let's say I was to start in estate agency because that's my niche, I would focus on the lowest level that I can find because they are usually the most applicable to most businesses. So in that case, might be sales negs, legs negs. That's kind of our entry-level positions, uh, that someone would still pay for, by the way, as well, because no one wants to pay for a trainee neg that doesn't have any experience, that's not going to be able to do— like, there's no point. So you want to find that target audience where they will pay for it, and there's a lot of them. And the reason you want to focus on that side of it is because you're going to get the most bang for your buck. You're going to hit the most people, and the most people are going to go, actually, I could do with an egg. I mean, they turn over— I think the attrition rate is something like 50% in the first year. So is insane. So if you're hitting them businesses, and then it's also price point— believe it or not, clients care more about price point than they do experience on face value. So actually, you're better off finding someone that's cheap. Uh, I'll pull a business out, and not taking them out at all, but, um, Countrywide, for example, is a large corporate business that pays fairly poorly, but they'll take new-to-industry people. Love to get people from Countrywide because they're well trained, they're underpaid, and they usually turn over within their first year. So if I see someone with a year's experience at Countrywide, I'm going and sending them a message and saying, I can get you a lot more money now because you've got your foot in. And so we'll grab them and we'll flip them over. They care less that 6 months in the industry is enough for our personal industry, but every industry has a slightly different thing. It's like mortgage advisors in financial services, one of our industries. Like, no one wants a trainee mortgage advisor, but if you can find a mortgage advisor from a corporate business this, or from someone that maybe doesn't have a high OTE, or whatever, whatever the catch is, and you can take them and put them to businesses. Essentially what you're looking for is cheap, applicable, and after that, the kind of rest of it is irrelevant. Mostly we see specs as door openers, um, you know, because the thing is, if you get into a conversation with these people, uh, you'll then be able to hook them in with slightly more expensive candidates that are better and have more experience experience. And there's been times where businesses have rung me and said, I want this candidate, you know, uh, to talk to me about them. And after I've got to know their business, I've gone, this isn't a good idea, they're not right for you, they're not a culture fit. Even though you want them, I'm telling you it's not a right fit, here's why. And I'll explain to them, and that they appreciate the fact that I, I could literally book an interview, they might even do the deal, but long-term success is not gonna, not gonna prove well for that candidate. And actually what we do is we flip it and we say, look, let me go find you someone instead, or look, I've actually got another candidate that would be better suited, and here's why. And that's the big part of it, is specs don't do anything. They're just door openers. That's all they are at the end of the day. And, uh, for the— anyone that's starting a new business, anyone that's in recruitment right now who needs to generate fast cash, they are the best bang for buck that you can get. Because in theory, you should be able to sign new clients from it and book an interview all in one sweep. You know, there's not much more that you can get from that, but your, your you're playing with fire when you spec because your game is to send out enough specs that people come back to you without pissing off your audience and like ruining your database. You don't want dead data. And so you have to play that line of if you send really good quality, they're happy to receive loads of emails. As soon as you send something shit, piss off, unsubscribe, whatever, and then they'll try and chop you. So you have to make sure that your candidates are super tight when you are doing it. Um, one last note on that as well is multi-specs don't particularly work as well as single-specs. Don't know the methodology behind it. I would assume that people, because the email is longer, people would just see it and just can't be asked to read it. And also you're better off actually sending it over 2 emails over a couple of days instead of trying to do it all over one, because a couple of days can make a difference. Um, and actually, you know, something could have happened and someone just been fired or someone's handed in the notice in the last couple of days. You're always off, better off actually breaking them rather than sending out massive lists of candidates.

Makes sense. Love that. Thanks, that's really helpful, James. I love that. And so, so I'm getting a feeling that it's, it's you're going after the lowest hanging fruit for the spec. Like the— and I'm right in saying that negs and the negs are the most in demand? Am I right in saying that they're most in demand position?

Yeah, for our industries specifically, I'd say negs, property managers, that kind of thing.

So you're basically just figuring out what's in demand and how can I— am I right in saying that? Is there any other thinking around the demand piece that I'm missing.

So I mean, I will note this, um, we do that, uh, to get the initial people that join to do, uh, that kind of stuff. And we are learning to do this, and actually our process changes once you've become more experienced. Uh, it does slightly shift to a more targeted approach. Um, but what we find is that when people join, they don't know what a good and bad client looks like.

And interesting.

They kind of need to work with some bad clients to realize what they don't want from a client. And every person is different. And so the aim is to work with as many people as you can to find out what you like and what you don't like. I, I appreciate speed over feedback, and that's my personal preference. I would rather be able to pick up the phone to a client and say, hey, I've got someone that's a cool bookman tomorrow. Don't have to ask questions, just get it done. Now, if they take ages to come back to me on feedback, like if a client doesn't come back to you in 3 days on a candidate day, it's very unlikely they're going to get the job. And you're going to say, look, I'm really sorry, they haven't come back to me. Basically, this is what this means. And so you're giving them the feedback and say, look, it's a no-go. Let me do— what else can I do for you? Now, other clients, you know, other recruiters will prefer feedback over that. They will prefer the speed, they prefer how they email, they prefer whatever, the culture fit, the how they recruit for that business. All of these things kind of, uh, usually make up what I refer to as dream clients. And dream clients are made up of 5 things. and that is frequency of the roles that they've got, the fee that they're going to pay for them roles, how desirable them roles actually are, how flexible are they in terms of, you know, what they offer, and do people want to work there. And if you get these— you're never going to get all 5, it's just like, if you do, well done. Um, but if you can get 3 out of the 4, uh, 3 out of the 5, or 2 out of the 5, or you pick your you, you're poison really. Then all of a sudden you'll notice, uh, recruiters skyrocket in earnings because they, they've clicked. That's when they, they'll say, oh, I've clicked into a business. And so yes, the specs do work, and yes, they're door openers, uh, but really it's not a long-term strategy. It's just a quick fix. You're patching a problem, and the problem usually is a money problem, which is I need to get this candidate out and I don't have the resources to be able to go to my clients individually because I don't have a client base. So therefore I need to do this to patch that problem for the time being. So don't rely on specs your whole life. If you're doing specs after 2 years in your business, you probably need to rethink your business model.

So what, what do you do now? So the specs is like entry level, James. What, what is the more— what's the approach you would use who, if you're more experienced, or a more experienced recruiter would use now if you're not using specs? I'm curious.

So the, the end game for our most of the guys that work for us is that they should be able to get a— any, within any area that they cover. So they all pick a target area, any area that they cover, they should be able to have 2 or 3 clients to put that. So let's say we'd take, uh, let's say, let's take Birmingham because I know Birmingham better. Within Birmingham, it's broken into different parts in my mind. And so like you might have Sully Hall and Harborne, and then you might have the top regions, and then you'll have Central, for example. And so any candidate that you get within an area, you're going to look at what they're good at and what they want, and then what their culture fit is. And then you're going to go, right, I've got these businesses that would fit, I'm going to go around and see who's got roles. And so you would just say, hey, I've got a candidate, 'Are you looking for anyone at the moment?' 'Yeah.' 'Cool.' And the idea is that you should be able to put them into 2 or 3 businesses at one time. Uh, it's candidate-led market in most industries at the moment, which is why a lot of recruiters are saying it's hard, and it's like, it's not, it's just a different market. And so if you've got a decent client base, you put them into 2 or 3, uh, kind of different jobs, you're very likely to close out that candidate because you've got all of the offers, and the candidate will pick what's best for them. Now you can lean that decision, and you can make sure that they choose the right thing by, by you, because you know the businesses better than they do. You know, they only get a snapshot of what a business looks like, and any business can look good on interview stage. So you'll obviously try and guide them, and that's part of you being an expert. You'll say, look, I recommend this, but do whatever you want. And so the idea is that the end game for most people is to have most businesses signed. And if they're able to get any cans a day, they pick their dream clients from every single area and they just put them to dream clients constantly. And then the clients are happy because they're constantly getting a fee are really good quality.

Yeah, cool. So the, the next stage, instead of speccing candidates to like brand new clients and trying to get them on that, you already know these clients, and then when you speak to a candidate, it's just about placing them in the best company possible, correct? Yeah, cool. That's really interesting. Cool, mate, lots of value there. Um, I wanted to jump— I know we, we haven't got too much longer left, but I wanted just to speak about tools again, James, because you're one of the, if the, if not the only recruiter using WhatsApp on a candidate level. I'm just, I'm just curious if there's any other tools in your business that have been game changers. WhatsApp sounds like it was one of them. Is there anything else you're using that makes life a lot easier and a lot and a lot? Yeah, just a lot quicker, easier.

Yeah. So there's a bunch of different ones that we use. Casper's another good one if you ever want to pull mobile numbers and emails. I think it's unlimited B2B emails. Um, I'm just going to rattle off a ton that you guys can use. Um, Dripify, so that's a LinkedIn automation tool. Sorry LinkedIn, I didn't use it, I promise. Um, so it's a really good LinkedIn automation tool, but it's only as good as what you put into it, a bit like anything. Um, obviously the crown jewel of any recruitment business at the moment is ChatGPT, but you can take that even further if you're a business owner. Um, and let's say that you're running a recruitment business right now and you're fed up of your recruiters asking you make ChatGPT bots that replicate the way that you speak. So I get a lot of— I get a lot of recruiters join us and they say, how, how do you get responses from yours? So I just built a bot basically that replies like I do. And so you say, write me an email for this person, and then it will give them an example of what I send. And you, you can take that even further. So we've got, um, a bunch of different businesses, uh, that kind of have like franchises all over the UK for both FS, construction, all that kind of stuff. Now Now most businesses aren't smart enough to do this because they follow the same email structure. So although you only have one franchise in London, you can get all of them in the UK. And so what I've done is I've programmed all of the franchises that we work with, and it's an email generator. So basically what you do is you say, I found a job and it's for this business in Manchester, what's the email? And then it'll pull the email from that using ChatGPT, so it doesn't cost anything. Um, if you can wrap your head around Clay, that is a really, really good tool for pulling lots and lots of data. Um, and it's a bit finicky. Uh, we, we set up a backfilling process that works really well, but the problem is, is it's really high maintenance for— and it constantly breaks because ChatGPT. Uh, so we, we had it where it would find essentially jobs jobs, and then jobs that were going out were, you know, let's say that, let's say that I open up a job and then I fill it, it'll go back to that business that it just lost that person from and send them an email automatically generated by ChatGPT based on the parameters. But as we all know, ChatGPT can get a bit wild sometimes, and so we had to kind of sense check it and do a lot of testing with it. But that worked extremely well at the start, but as we started backfilling more and more jobs, it started running drier and drier and eventually ground to a bit of a halt because we're kind of nailed all of the businesses that we needed to. So that was overall a win. You can use LinkedIn Recruiter as a big one, obviously. I actually prefer the data insights point to LinkedIn Recruiter. Obviously the emails are great and stuff like that, but personally I believe that LinkedIn is a job board by all accounts, and it's a slowly, slowly, slowly dying job board. It's turning the way of other job boards, Reed and Indeed. Feed, and it's because of high-volume frequency messages that are just crap, and that's what's killing it. A bit like everything else in life, uh, we actually have found fairly good success with things like Instagram. You know, no one is using Instagram, and if your audience is there, go there. Uh, I think it's crazy when if all your audience is on Facebook, you know, whip out your Facebook. Uh, you know, it's, it seems crazy that we're only going via LinkedIn or we're only going by job boards. It's such a limiting cool. And actually, you'll take people off guard. I think Facebook's probably a little bit less prominent, but Instagram's a really good place to do business development as well. Uh, it's really easy way of following. Um, there is another tool as well that I use, which I'll quickly find for you guys. Um, but there's been a few over the last couple of months that we've kind of— I probably do an uncomfortable amount of demos on stuff, and the simple reason why is because there's a lot of AI tech coming out out, but we're actually deciding to build ours in-house because they're just becoming so inflated in price. So there's things like, uh, I think it's Alfie, which is an AI recruiter. All the stuff is getting there. I would avoid all of it if you can, just because it's really, really expensive and doesn't actually solve a lot of core problems, which is if your recruiters can't fill roles, uh, it's probably down to training, it's probably down to resources. The last tool that we use is ZoomInfo, which if anyone has ever used it, is a bit mental. It's very, very, very expensive. However, it's got something which has proved the biggest BD insight for us, and I'm sure there's probably a way of doing it yourself. Oh, there's a tool called HeyYou, and it's a LinkedIn integration. And what it will do is when you're on a— like if I was to go on Ben's profile right now and basically click the button, it will basically— every post that you push, it will like it automatically for me. Really good for a little business development tool. I think you get like 100 for free per month, and if you're looking to get on a business and you want to stay on top of their socials, it's a really good way of just dropping in. And then when you see it, you can then just drop and drop a message and drop an interaction, but it makes sure that you're covering all your bases. Um, so it's just a nice little add. And then yeah, ZoomInfo has something called, uh, I forgot what the official name is, but its buyer intent. Essentially, this is where technology is at, and it's actually terrifying. So it can go on to essentially, uh, the IP addresses. So it will basically message you and say, hey, I've noticed that this business in Birmingham that you set up an alert for has been Googling these different terms: how much is the cost of Indeed, how much is the cost of Reed, how much does recruiters cost, property recruitment company, companies, because what it does is every time you search that, it will link it back to your IP address, and then it will send it into the cloud, and then it will match it with Google Maps. And then that Google Maps will then ping you a notification, say, this, this is the business, and this is the things that they're Googling. And so you're actually getting to companies before they've even launched their own job ads, before they've even hired them. And you say, I've got candidates, I don't know if you'd be interested. They go, that's such good timing, how did you know? I'm not tracking your internet.

But this is all from ZoomInfo, James, the stuff that you're getting for the intent-based, the buyer intent.

Yeah. Again, it's a very expensive tool and there are probably different— we're looking into different versions that can do it, of course, or even if we can build our own. I think if you're a business owner that's not potentially looking at building your own sales funnels at the moment, you're going to have big problems in the future because recruitment on scale doesn't work if you're, if you're blowing all your money on AI rubbish. But At the same time, you kind of need some AI to be able to have, you know, lift the load. And then just VAs. VAs are God's gift to us. We've got like 3 different ones in the business that all run in the background. We've— some of the guys have got assistants that run with them, that use them, and they've, they've been incredibly good. And you know, they're— you can base it on commission and stuff like that, so they're motivated and they want to get out and do it all and stuff like that. And, you know, changes their life. Uh, you know, we've got a guy in South Africa and our job is to try and make him a millionaire in Rand because he's based in South Africa. Uh, and it's not surprisingly that difficult. And so, you know, that'll be our next post, I'm sure. We made someone a millionaire.

Um, I love that. That is awesome.

Millionaire in Rand.

James, oh sorry, go ahead, mate. No, I was going to say, out of all those softwares you mentioned— Casper, Dripify, ChatGPT, Clay, Recruiter, Instagram, ZoomInfo, HeyYou— if you had to choose one in terms of the most impact it's had on your business or money or revenue or bottom line or ease, what would it be? Which one would it be, do you think?

I'll say LinkedIn. Uh, I'm really upset by that. Uh, they're really money-grabbing bastards, but it's Probably. Let's think about it from a market point of view, uh, and it's— the stat says something like 80% of people will consider a new job, but only 10% are in the market. So that's 70% of the market that you can't access unless you've got either a massive database of people or you've got some form of tool that can get to these people. You need to be targeting— get rid of— like, I would rather cut a job board than cut LinkedIn because you can access market that people don't have. You're getting candidates that other clients haven't seen before, and And if you're all fishing from the same pond, it's whoever's the fastest. And unfortunately, sometimes you have to sleep, and so it's not a fun game to play. Um, so yeah, I would say, um, I'd rather not have any of them. I'd rather just do, do your basics really well, guys. Just, just, just be a good recruiter to start with. Stop relying on AI tools to fix your issues.

Yeah, 100%, I agree. I agree with that, mate. Cool, that's really interesting. Probably wrapping up soon. I just want to see, is there anything— because you have a unique perspective, James, where you're training, or you're maybe not completely from the ground up, you're taking recruiters with experience and you're making them better. Um, you probably noticed from the example that you gave us with the chap that's now on $15K per month, if there was like one skill, one or two skills that you teach or encourage these recruiters to learn that really makes the biggest difference in their success as a recruiter and their revenue, what are those skills? What is that skill or those skills, do you think?

Number one is plan ahead. Biggest— yeah, it's the biggest problem in recruitment. Um, we're all like, where are my deals? Where are my deals? And there's a train coming for them in the future and they just can't see it because they're too busy looking down. Um, if you actually plan for the future and think about your, your career as a business, you think about about your proposition as a business. You think about everything as a business, and then you plan accordingly. Even if you're a recruiter right now, um, you know, if you cover an area, what kind of database are you working with? What's the end goal for you? It's really hard to feel achievement if you don't actually have any goals. Uh, and money is a goal, and it is a— it can be a really powerful goal. Um, but, you know, the get-rich-die-trying kind of mentality will only get you so are. And then the other one is, it's kind of, it's kind of combined one, but find your why. Why, why do you enjoy this job? Why are you doing it? Why? Like, if you would have told me how hard it was to get TRE Launch, I wouldn't have launched it. It's been an absolute nightmare, and there's been so many problems, and I've, I've sat on this floor crying, uh, you know, thinking I can't do it. I've had the worst case of FOMO in my life. But the reason why I dragged through, uh, and I think that for a lot of people, they need to understand that it's okay not to be okay. This is a really, really hard job, and you know, you don't have to do it alone. And if you're in a place where you feel like you are, get out straight away, because this job is hard enough not only to do this on your own, but if you've got no one to talk to, it's impossible. Which kind of leads me into my last point, which is just let go. No one cares about about what you look like. No one cares about what you're— you know, people care about your opinions, but they don't care about the little things. They don't care if one of your hairs out of line. They don't care about, you know, what you're doing tomorrow. They care about who you are. They care about you as a person, and they care about how you can benefit them. Ultimately, people are selfish by nature, and you're going to use that to your big advantage. You're going to flip that on its head, and you're going to make them love you, and you're going to give them all the— shower them with the attention. The only way you can do that is by letting go of all your baggage. There's so many recruiters that have preconceived confections about everything that they do. You can't do this because this doesn't work. You can't do that. If you just forget it all and almost consider yourself an idiot— trust me, I'm an idiot, and it's worked incredibly well for me. Um, it's gone well into my advantage. Um, I can't, I can't barely read or write, but I'm running a business because people believe in my mission statement. People believe in who I am, and because I'm truthful and because I'm honest and because I give them off authenticity. And that, that only comes from letting go of all of my, you know, like saying to people, I can't read or write. Like, I'm dyslexic, by the way. I'm not, I'm not, uh, that dumb. I'm just a little bit, um, but, you know, rather than shying away from it, I owned it. I just let go of the baggage against it and say, like, you know, I'll get emails from people and they'll be like, what? And I'm like, you know, you know the game. I can't spell. Um, and they're like, fair enough. And, and people just don't care if you own it. No one cares. It's when people get nitty-gritty about So if you plan for everything that you want to achieve for that year— even 5 years is great if you can do 5 years, but it gets a bit murky after 5 years. No more above that. A year's minimum, absolute minimum, what you want to achieve. And this perfect timing, guys, you know, 2026, what do you want to achieve with that? And, you know, and then make sure that you build out a plan against that. It's not only good to have goals, but you need to set foundational things in there if you want earn 20 grand a month, how many clients is that going to require you to do? And all you do is you follow your algorithm. Well, I'm making 10 right now, so I'd need to double my output. How do I get there? Yeah, it's not rocket science. There's no one does it. I don't know why.

Yeah, it's so funny. I was expecting you to say like speccing, cold calling. I don't expect you to go into all these like these nitty-gritty skills, but it's really interesting. Planning ahead, finding your why, letting go.

I love that.

I think that's, uh, and I really think I'm really, I'm really glad you said goal setting because just from a personal experience with me and Sam, it's been such a game changer. And there was points where we just literally didn't set goals, and we're— and then as soon as we started setting goals, we're like, what the hell have we been doing our whole lives? Like, how has this not been part— how has this not been like the first thing? Yeah, it is. Yeah.

And you're looking at everyone else going, why aren't you doing it? But then when I was recruited, I didn't do it. And then as a business owner, I learned, and I was like, oh yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Awesome. James, thank you so much, mate. This has been— I know we haven't covered like 50% of the questions, but it's been a great pod regardless. Um, so thank you so much for coming on, mate. I have a very strong feeling there's a lot more knowledge for you to share and just a lot more tips and tricks. So I would love to get you on a second round in the future if you're up for it. But thank you so much for coming on today, mate. I really enjoyed it and you just gave a ton of value to our audience. Thank you so much.

Yeah, really enjoyed it.

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