Recruiter billed 896K working just 4 days a week!

Hey guys, welcome back to yet another episode of Top Billers Toolkit, where me and my brother interview top billers from all around the globe to unlock the secrets to their success. Today's guest is Will McGee. Will is arguably one of those recruiters who's in the top 5 or 10% billing exceptional numbers. For an entire decade, he managed to maintain an average billing rate of $500K per year, and he also managed to bill $900K in one year working just 4 days a week. Will now channels his expertise into helping recruiters enhance their lead generation and sales operations. In today's episode, we're going to be asking Will how the hell he managed to maintain such high billing numbers for such a long period of time. We're going to be talking about the fundamental marketing shifts that Will had throughout his recruitment career that allowed him to improve his results. We'll also discuss how to genuinely understand your target audience so you can create better marketing material that actually gets results. So grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine depending on when you're listening to this, and let's get into it, shall we? Hey, Will, how are you, my friend?

I'm doing good, doing good. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, pleasure to have you here, bro. Uh, thank you very much for joining us. This is the— I always forget how many episodes— I think it's the 12th episode of Top Billers Toolkit. Um, I've seen you around LinkedIn, Will. I've seen a few of the things that you've done. I don't know you that well, but I know how good you are at what you do. So I wanted to have you on the podcast because I know there's gonna be some golden nuggets today. Let's start off with the first question, which we ask every single guest, which is what's the number one tool in your toolkit, whether it be a mindset, a strategy, or a piece of software?

What would you say, mate?

Yeah, so love that we're getting right into it. So, you know, I think when you gave me that question and I wanted to, you know, give you a proper answer, and at the end of the day, I wanted to also just tap into all three of those, right? Software, mindset, And strategy, right? So, you know, as far as software goes, I'm, I'm an Apollo lover. Like I'm, I'm one of their customer advisors and, you know, at the end of the day, it's not the only reason I'm, I'm a big lover of what they do and what they provide. You know, as far as business development goes, it's just such a great tool. I've been, I've been a fan of them for the last 2 years. They're super, you know, customer oriented. They create great solutions. It's actually a full product suite. Like, you know, there's a lot of, you know, stuff out there. I won't name their competitors, but just as an idea, there's like a ton of like of data-driven, you know, LinkedIn scraping type of platforms out there. But they don't just take it to the next level, right? Which is, hey, like, what is this, you know, client intelligence going to actually provide for me? How can I use this to create alerts and plays and automation? And I think like Apollo has really done that, which is something I absolutely love. So my number one—

sorry, well, for all the noobs out there that have no idea what Apollo is, can you just describe, just explain what Apollo is and how you use it?

So it's a full business development suite or a prospecting suite, right? So, you know, like I said, there's a lot, a lot of like cadence software out there. You know, there's tons of things that are out there to allow you to create sequences in your messaging or drip campaigns, as a lot of us know them. And the— there's also on the other side of that is the client intelligence, like finding email addresses and phone numbers and data. And then we also, we have in this, in these situations, like a plethora of different products that are— our tabs are open and different tools that need to talk to each other. Apollo just brings it all into one. And again, I'm a customer advisor. I'm not saying this in a biased sense. They're the only company that I would like, that I have on my list of companies that have asked me to advise that I actually put on my LinkedIn. And that's for good reason. It's because I truly believe in their platform. It's awesome. Uh, check them out. If you want a link, I'll send over a link. Um, but as far as mindset goes, you know, one of the things that, um, has always driven me is finding and creating an adversary. So, um, I thought I was like weird for this when I was younger. I'm sorry, you'll probably hear my daughter right now, she's just waking up. Um, So, uh, there, there was, uh, this idea of like, oh, I have this adversary, I'm creating this, um, you know, this, this, this enemy, if you will. And I always had this chip on my shoulder when I was— especially when I was performing well, like, like it always kind of came from this like, oh, I'm gonna beat you, I'm gonna make you, I'm gonna make you mad that you denied me, for whatever reason. And I thought that was weird, but then I watched like Michael Jordan and Kobe's documentaries and like, they're the same way. And it's just an athlete, an athlete's mindset is like, you need to have somebody you're going against. And so I use, I welcome it now, right? At first I was like, this is bad. Like I'm using the wrong kind of energy. I just love it now. So I'm just a competitive person and it doesn't have to be nasty. It doesn't have to be mean, but you know, Yeah, I just have to think that like I gotta beat them. Like that's, that's one of the big things of mindset. Last one is strategy. Yeah, I guess the strategy is, uh, my strategy is pretty simple. It's like I always try to learn. Um, I'm always a student first. I'm never— I, I, I'm coaching right now. Um, when I was in— when I was up— when I was really running a desk, um, you know, I really made it an effort to learn from every single best person I could possibly learn from in any given correlative industry, whether it be in my own space as a recruiter. I'd, if I was in a new company, I'd go find the top biller and I'd understand what they did. And if, you know, even if it was something I didn't necessarily agree with, um, like there's a lot of spammy billers out there. Um, I still under— I'd still try and take a lesson from it. Which is, you know, in the spammy biller world where you're just like pushing out a bunch of content or push or sorry, pushing out a bunch of emails, a bunch of messages to get high results. My takeaway from that is, you know, volume does matter. It's just you gotta find that right optimal volume and or find ways to reach a larger audience or total addressable market. So, you know, I, and I also tap into things like e-commerce and marketing and, you know, the finance sector, and just like anywhere I can get data from that's going to better my business in some way, I take it and I try and apply it into the world of recruiting as much as I possibly can. So those are my three.

Interesting. Was there one— because me and Salma, like you, were avid learners, always learn. I think you have to be if you're going to be at the top of your game. I think that's a common theme between high achievers. Is there one pivotal lesson or something that really stood out that changed the direction or really made you think about how you, how you do things?

Yeah, I think it came down to understanding that it's not about me. It's not about my service. It's not about, you know, what I can provide for them. None of that matters. Ultimately, it all is about what the client or the, the end user or the person who's going to be receiving my service It's all about them. And once I realized that, I think a lot of things changed because when I looked at stuff and I tried to like put my spin on, you know, recruiting and like, oh, like we could offer this, and I didn't, you know, really understand like my client, um, I, I often would skip steps, right? I'd skip into you know, just going into like this product and service. So one of the things— kind of on a tangent— one of the things I had learned from some of my entrepreneurial friends is like go to market fast, you know, validate the market and iterate, right? And that is true. But one of the things that they didn't tell me was, you know, make sure you do a lot of research before. So and just but don't get stuck in the research, right? So, you know, figure out ways to create better processes around your research and do it fast so that way you can be quick to market. And then validate through that. So that was, that was one of the big things that I learned was just make it all about the customer and understand what their needs are before you try and like create, you know, a solution that you think sounds good, right?

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm so glad you said that as well. And I'm really intrigued that you said research as well, because I think that's something that a lot of people If you look at a lot of these courses and other mentors, not knocking anyone in particular, again, there's lots of good people out there, but very few of them, if any, talk about market research, talk about really going to market, speaking to candidates, speaking to clients. So yes, when I heard that and I saw that in some of your content, I was like, this guy's different, he's doing something different. Um, what have you found the best way? And you know, you don't have to give away all the secrets, give away as much as you want or as little as you want, but what I give away I give away everything, Ben.

So if you, if you want more like specific stuff, you can call me. That's specific to your situation. But like, I literally give away everything. I tell everybody everything.

Well, just for our listeners, what, what would you say has been the most effective way to gather that research?

Yeah, honestly, just using the right tools. We use, like I said, we use Apollo for a lot of it. We use really a stack of Apollo, Sales Navigator. We just started using Clay, which we really like. But, you know, just a variety of different tools to start researching is like kind of where we start our— and using like AI to create like a hypothesis, but not necessarily using it as our, you know, end-all be-all. ChatGPT is a fantastic tool. Clay is a great tool for that. And that's a big part of what we do. First is just validate the market and understand what, what's available and addressing, like, so like I, I'm a different kind of mind than most recruiters because I started in a sales and marketing type of position. My family's very entrepreneurial. So like I have always had this like sense of marketing and understanding what a total addressable market is like that, that term has always been a part of my my business development strategy. So in some way or another, right? So understanding like what's available before I actually go in and go do the research is like, is like my starting point. It's like my, my, um, point zero, if you will.

Interesting. So you're trying to map out any particular sector or market and figure out, okay, how much business is actually available at this point in time? Am I right in saying that?

That's correct. Yeah. And then based on that—

sorry. Yeah.

No, no. What were you going to ask?

I was going to say, I'm guessing based off that, that will adjust your strategy and how you address who you're going to speak to and how you're going to do it.

Yeah. A big thing I really like to focus on when I talk to my clients and who I'm advising is something that I didn't realize early on. Was, and one of the big problems I have with like big agencies or even working for an agency in general is that an agency's gonna set your goal, right? They're gonna say you need to go build this in order for you to be successful. And one of the things I've loved about working for myself and I've learned to do over time is don't let, I don't let anybody else set my goals for me, right? So I start with what my goal is. And what I want to build for the year, what I want to like, what kind of lifestyle I want to live, understanding my why and all that stuff, right? And in doing that, it allows me to kind of go to a market and say, okay, will my goal be achieved in this market? And if I can address, if I can address the needs of this market, can I actually hit that goal? Now, if I can't, but I like the market and it's hot enough, then I might need to have a multitude of markets. I might have like 2 or 3 markets that I'm going to target or tap into, or maybe subsectors or whatever it might be. but you can't do that unless you really actually see what's available, and, and make the analysis proper, properly, right? So, like my goal is always to, to do all of my billing before June or July, I should say. If I can get all, like if I can get all of my billing that's gonna pay my bills, pay, pay everything for my rent, every, or my mortgage, and do, you know, have enough money to go on vacation and then some, some money to save up by July, you know, I'm in a much better position than I'm— than trying to like, you know, beat the market at the latter half of the year. But I can't do that if I'm going to go after a market that's not really hot at the time.

Interesting. That's fascinating. What— sorry, Sam, last question on my side. I just love talking about this stuff. Um, has there been a point where you do the market research, you're like, damn, this is going to be tough? And if so, what are the indicators?

Great question. Uh, yeah. Uh, I did this with one of my clients recently. Uh, they had this like really great candidate, Carnegie Mellon candidate, and they're like, oh, well, I'm going to reverse engineer them. Like, why? And, um, they're like, well, because they're a great candidate and I love what, you know, like they're, they're, they're, they've been at like some really great companies. And I'm like, that's fantastic. But you're not still not telling me why you're gonna market this person. And one of the things that we kind of came to the conclusion of was we looked at, you know, total jobs available in the market. We looked at the companies that would possibly hire this person that would, that would make sense for that person to, to market them. And what we found was there was like 10 jobs open in the entire United States that fit this person's profile.

Wow.

And it was like, okay, well, do you really wanna spend all this effort trying to market this person? And you only have one candidate on top of that, right? So it's not like you have a multitude of candidates to be able to send to these 10 jobs and like, oh, hopefully fill at least one or two of 'em, but you only have one. So like you're really just doing a marketing effort for a candidate, which is basically career coaching. Like you're not a career coach, you're a recruiter. And so, um, so that's like a, a big part of like then figuring out if that's gonna be addressable. And if I don't have that, then you know that you probably shouldn't do it. And if you still wanna do it as a passion project, that's fine. But just realize that that's probably not where your money's gonna— it's not the thing closest to the money. Mm-hmm. So follow, follow the thing that's closest to the money first, and then you can go down the list and go, okay, well I wanna do this passion project for a friend or this really great candidate I met, or whatever it might be. Like, that's okay. Unfortunately, they just come down, they go down the list further and further down, and there's a lot more important things to do to feed your family and feed your kids. And for me, that's exactly what I focus on.

Absolutely. And I'm guessing if someone's in that situation, it's about pivoting to another sector that's, I guess, as similar as possible. I'm guessing sometimes it'll be completely different. Am I right?

Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, If you follow the money, right? If you're following economic indicators, you're following where the funding's going, you're following— you follow the money, follow the money, where is it going? And if you follow the money, you'll find opportunity. Like, I got into a bit of a tiff with somebody on LinkedIn, and they were like pitching all this stuff about process, and you need to find companies that are really dedicated to, you know, creating better hiring processes, and you need to sell on this service and show the case cycle. I'm like, No, no, you don't. If you follow that advice and you solely follow that advice, you should be selling a service, not candidates. You shouldn't be selling, you shouldn't be selling as a recruiter. You are then a consultant and that's okay. And if that's what you want to do, then focus on finding and identifying companies that need that service, right? And that consultation. But if you're a recruiter, Your job is to find candidates for jobs and place them. Like, that's it. And so if you make it as simple as possible, it becomes simple. And the more you convolute it, the more, you know, murky the water gets and the harder it is to get to swim. Right? So I like to think about like a pond. And if you're in a pond and you're, you're doing your laps. The more mud you put in there, the harder it is to swim in that pond. You can't swim fast, you can't swim, you, you, you can't swim at all. You start sinking, like, and then, you know, you're trying to then compete against people who have boats, right? And so like, you know, and these boats are massive investments that they can make those mistakes. They can do those things and they can be like these bigger agencies or have this name and talk about their service because that's what they have to do. They have to generalize. In order to be more effective across the market. They can't focus on one thing. But as an individual or a smaller team, you need to be swimming fast. So swim as fast as possible, clear your water, make sure that you're jumping in the right ponds, and then you can go— then you can do some, some really great things.

Love that, man. Sam, you've been dying to jump in, so go ahead.

No, I just, I just want to go back to— because this comes up so much— towards the beginning of the conversation where you said we do market research because we want to, we want to understand the reasons why, the reasons why, not our reasons. Because when we're speaking to a lot of recruiters, that they, they kind of conjure up these pain points in their head of what they think is going on, when actually when they go out and speak to the market, it's completely different. And I just wanted to touch upon that point a bit more. How, for someone who is just grasping with this concept and they want to go out to market and start understand, they want to start doing market research Can you talk us through your process on a very bird's eye level of how they can go about starting to do market research, maybe using some of your softwares as well?

Yeah, I think the biggest, the biggest influence on that is I learned a concept called the business model canvas. I don't know if you guys have heard of that.

I haven't.

No, I haven't. It's great. It is phenomenal. Um, I have a friend who's Carnegie Mellon, you know, VP of product. Um, he's one of my closest friends and he basically showed me this and he was like, when he had to understand this concept, it changed how he went to market and how he created products. Right. I was like, well, how can we do that in recruiting? And so what I first thought was, oh, like it's service, right? Service, service, service. Like. That's what they're paying for. And I tried creating business model canvases around our service and how we're different in our marketing and like how we attract talent and all this stuff. Nobody cared. Nobody cared. A good friend of mine coined or basically said it perfectly. Nobody cares how the sausage is made, right? They care about eating a great sausage. I love that. That is brilliant. So I was like, that's it. And so I'm not— the idea of like creating products that you think are going— or services that you think are going to benefit your client is not lost on me because I've done it, I've tried it. I've like, I've failed more times than I can count. I've failed more, way more times than I've succeeded, right? Way more times. And so, but I'm really quick to validate and understand if it's a viable situation. And if it's not, again, if I muddy the waters too much, like I need to get out of that pond. So I get out. Um, I think that's one of my superpowers, if you will. Um, so sorry, can you repeat the question? What was— where was I going?

Yeah, you were of course explaining about the Business Model Canvas. I think that's where you're at. You've got some— yeah, you are just on that concept and you were moving forward.

So, so Business Model Canvas, it's a fantastic tool because what it forces you to do, one of the key tenets in it, is don't assume what the market wants. Go to the market and ask them. And if you look at any other business that's in software or product or whatever, that's exactly what they do. They don't assume what the market wants based on, you know, data that they have internally or whatever it is. It is, hey, what is the client asking for? And that's why I love Apollo. This is an exact reason why I love Apollo. So I'm just gonna, you know, pinpoint Apollo all day, but they, um, they have a customer advisory board, which I'm a part of, right? So I'm the recruiting sector of that customer advisory board. I can tell them what we look at when we're prospecting and how we engage. And they use that data then to create better products or better features or whatever it might be. And that's huge, right? So instead of them just assuming like we want, a, we want more phone numbers. It's like, well, are you using those phone numbers? Or are you, if, are you using Zoom more? Or how do you engage your clients? You know? So it's like, like they're not creating solutions that aren't being requested and aren't understand, like that, that's not an understanding of what we do. Now, the other part of that is when I try to do that in service, it didn't really work well because Recruiting is kind of a— recruiting itself is a commodity now. It's so many recruiters out there. There's plenty of people who do it. Everyone wants to put their spin on it. And there's not really a whole lot of different spin outside of tech. And, you know, maybe like how you market, but that's really the only spins you can, you really have. Cause now like candidates are all available. You can find them anywhere, use any sourcing tool you want. It's more about how your kind of your relationships, right, with those candidates and how do you display relationship? How do you showcase that you've got a great relationship with a candidate? It's that you understand the candidate, you understand their needs, and then you understand the client and their needs. So we've kind of like, we've made the candidate the product of our service. Um, and, and it's always been that, but like we really focus on like these are our— this is our product and what kind of inventory do we have of that product? And then if we're not assessing that on a consistent basis, we can now go, okay, like that's our inventory. So our supply is there and is there enough demand? So we look at just straight up like we look at it as an economic indicator, right? Is there enough supply to meet the demand? And if there's enough, is there too much demand for that supply? Then like we might have like a really booming market, but, you know, Is it gonna be hard to actually do what we need to do? Like, are there enough prompt engineers in the world for us to go focus on AI developers? Or during the times of like 2015 when blockchain was coming out, like, was crypto engineers like the thing? And yeah, it was, and they were getting paid like $500,000 a year and they were living all over the place. Is that gonna be something I wanna do? Or can I find a segment within that space that still has that demand, that's still part of that industry, And I can focus on like product managers, for example, in that space. Right. So that's what we did. We focused on product management, marketing, you know, like kind of these tertiary roles that still had a lot of hot, you know, hot plate, uh, hot, uh, uh, positions with, you know, great demand. Um, and good candidates that can jump in from various different industries. And then we understood what our end client needed from that. Like, so if you don't understand your end client, you cannot provide candidates or solutions that will ultimately help them get to a better aspirational state or into their ideal state by hiring that person. So you need to understand what exactly it is that your client is looking to fill or what gap they're trying to fill by hiring somebody. That you're trying to represent. So you can't do that unless you're, you're really understanding your market.

That's fascinating. Well, I have to ask, what are some of the end states that you come up against time and time again, just so we can put it into a bit more perspective for the audience and they understand it?

Okay. So I always like the one that is like easiest to digest is, is the example I had in 2015. And how I kind of stumbled upon this was, and I tell the story a lot, so you'll probably hear this if you hear my podcast or any of my other podcast interviews, but it's the easiest one that I just, because in 2015 there was like this massive influx of advertising tech and it was like a really bloated market. There was thousands of companies in the space. Affiliate advertising was really big. Facebook marketing was really big. E-commerce was really starting to boom up. So there's so many ways to like really tap into it. And one of the things that was coming out was programmatic advertising. And if you don't know what programmatic advertising is, basically like creating a marketplace for advertising space, like you can based on demand, same exact thing that we're talking about based on demand and based on supply, you know, the prices will fluctuate and it's done autonomously through machines, through algorithms, right? So there were probably 5 or 6 big players in that space. And every company that was getting funding, I mean, like the funding rounds were crazy. Like we were getting $20, $30 million funding rounds, 10 per day in the space. So it's like everybody was getting funding, everybody was throwing money at it, and it had a variety of different kinds of sectors, supply side, demand side, all sorts of stuff. So what I did was I looked at how the whole entire market was adjusting and I found any company that didn't have a programmatic platform, that didn't have any sort of positioning in that space, or that was getting funding in that for that specific initiation. And then I targeted, you know, a great candidate pool within like PubMatic or OpenX, which were the two like big programmatic platforms at the time. And then I just marketed them out to those companies. And I didn't really have to do too much craziness on like the messaging because It was something that was what I called, or what everybody knows as FOMO. There was a fear of missing out. So all this money was being put in and like there's a lot of companies in that space that was trying to figure out how to, how to capitalize on it. How do I get this position into my, or get this product into my company? And so I had like a 50% reply rate just due to being able to understand like there was this FOMO piece and we were able to, or I was able to bill something like around $386K or $400K rounding up in 3 months. And it was just, it was bananas. Like it was wild. It was the wild, wild west. So I don't know if I answered your question in that, but that's kind of like how I look at how we position ourselves in that space.

Yeah, absolutely. Very interesting. And it's almost teaching people to, which is what I love about what you're talking about, is to understand the market and the economy and trends and the bigger picture of how businesses are functioning, not just recruiting as a service, which is what I think a lot of people are stuck into. So yeah, really fascinating, really interesting.

So yeah, I remembered your question. What's an afterstate? A FOMO is an afterstate, right? The fear of missing out is an afterstate. Like, oh, like, and right now we're seeing this in AI. AI is— there's a fear of missing out in the AI bandwagon And if you're not adjusting, you are probably gonna fail. And like, there's all this fear and all this stuff. Like, it's just FOMO. So FOMO is, is a perfect example of tapping into a before state and an after state.

One of the most powerful triggers as well, right? One of those powerful psychological triggers. FOMO is incredible.

I've, I've changed industries probably 6 times in my career, 7 times in my career. Interesting. And people go, well, I, and, and so just as an, as a caveat, like I don't change industries very often and I'm not constantly chasing money. Like, so there's this idea of niching that I do appreciate, but I think like if you niche, like you can't super narrowly niche. Like if you just try to focus on, you know, Scala or Golang engineers or whatever it might be like, you come into this situation, I think in that situation, you're going to constantly have to shift because if technology changes, economic trends change, then you're now having to move into a new space. And just because the demand's not there anymore. And so like, I have shifted, but like, I just focus on the shift that allows me to have a bigger TAM and go after, you know, subsidiaries or partner groups or let— and I use a lot of leverage and I can go into that too. That's actually how I was able to build like, like, like what, $896K in 2021 was I used a lot of leverage.

I want to, I want to tap into that a bit more, Will, in a second. I just want to go back to FOMO and put that into just a neat little kind of chunk for people listening and then really understand the power of understanding the deeper level of the decision maker. Because what Will said was, I'm understanding how the decision maker is thinking on a deeper level. And now I can tap into these, to this psychology. So I'm exactly— I'm no longer pitching a candidate for the sake of a candidate. I'm actually using this psychology, putting it in the messaging, and therefore I'm able to get better response rates from these people. And I just want to say that because that's the power of understanding your audiences. You have messages that will outperform your competition hands down once you understand these deeper— these, the, your decision makers and your candidates on a deeper level.

And what I'm getting from this as well is being flexible to shift sectors if you need to. Because it's funny, everyone has this idea that you have to stay in one niche and, you know, niche down. And I get a bit of a bee in my bonnet with people obsessively, marketers obsessively telling people to niche and niche as far as possible. I don't actually think it's always the best. It's not the best strategic decision. So really interesting having the having the flexibility, and I guess in some respects the courage to, to shift sectors, because it's quite scary in some respects. Am I right in saying that, Will, or have you found it?

No, I mean, niching is what got every— is like, there's tons of recruiters right now that are struggling, and then there's still a lot of recruiters who are crushing. And actually, another one of my clients that I, uh, that I'm working on right now, he actually brought this up. He's like, You know, back in, like, we worked together previously at Teema, and, you know, now he runs a really awesome, you know, 20-person recruiting firm, crushing it, um, and doing his thing. And he goes, you know, when we first started working together, I was just getting so mad that you were like kind of like having this FOMO piece of like, you guys, you and, and, uh, and my, one of my mentors was we're building out this tech division and just crushing it. It just seemed like so simple and easy. And so like when I started my, you know, my agency, we focused on tech and it blew up and it grew. And here I am in accounting, you know, uh, or accounting recruiter at Tima, and I'm just like not doing that well, or it's like pulling teeth. And now the market's shifted and now tech is dying and it's like pulling teeth to get business in software engineering roles and all that stuff. Um, versus like accounting is booming. It's like, it's, it is crazy in the US right now. And so, and I was like, yeah, like that's the problem with overly niching. If you overly niche, um, you know, if I just stayed in tech, cause I didn't just do tech, I did transportation. I, I found tech roles within these companies. Like what I love to do is find tech roles or find, you know, FOMO roles within organizations that wouldn't typically have it. Like, so if I were to tap into AI right now, I would look at where can AI be addressed in companies that are like larger organizations that might want to put in some sort of like chatbot implementation or prompt engineering or understanding like how to implement AI into their business. And I would just go find like project or product managers in that space and just help them find the right people for it, right? Or find them a CIO or a VP of engineering that can actually like do that, right? So if If I was gonna stay in tech, like that's how I would do it. But yeah, you have to be adaptable. Like, you have to eat. Like, I don't know what like person who's saying stick to your niche and like, that's what you've gotta do. Just weather the storm. If the storm's gonna last more than 3 months, move fast because you have to eat. Like, there's just, There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And then you can always go back to it. There's no problem. Don't, don't, don't like, uh, abandon it. But you can't— you can adjust and say, okay, well, this sector is not really booming right now. I'll keep a relationship cycle going, tap into it, and then, you know, see what's going on every few weeks and everything like that. But then I'm gonna put my efforts on what's closest to the money. What's the money? And so put your efforts on the money, all the money.

My theory is people would move markets a lot more if they truly understood how to do market research. I think, I think it's such a niche thing to understand how to go out. I say that you can just call your clients and candidates and have conversations with them and people do overcomplicate it. So that, that's actually to caveat what I just said is it can be very simple to do good market research.

People overcomplicate it. People overcomplicate research. Like I had one of my students in the cohort go, well, how do we figure this out? I'm like, pick up the phone, literally just pick up the phone. Well, I can't get ahold of them. I don't have numbers. Okay. Send them a LinkedIn message. Hey, like I'm doing market research in this space. Not gonna pitch you on a role. I just want to get to know what's going on. And in fact, here's $100 for your hour and I'm only gonna take 30 minutes. Of your time. Spend $500, reach out to 5 different people. And you know what, like, again, like, you don't have to do this, right? Obviously you don't have to spend $500 to do it, but like, if you can't get ahold of people and people don't wanna talk to you, yeah, great incentive.

I've thought about this.

Create an incentive. Like, just incentivize them. You know, also find your people within your network, ask for an introduction, like find your best, like there's a, what's the, the, 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game. You ever play that game?

No, I haven't.

Oh, so it's basically the whole idea is like Kevin Bacon is— or back in the '90s and early 2000s, Kevin Bacon was associated with almost every actor in 6 degrees of separation. And the rules, essentially, you're separated to anyone by 6 degrees. So, um, so the whole game was you'd name an actor and then you have to name a movie that that person was in that was associated and just basically get to Kevin Bacon in 6 degrees.

Sounds fun. So it's the same thing.

Like you have that kind of, kind of like ability with your current network, with your best friends, with your family members. So it's like, use that network and then find ways to get to your end user and then talk to 'em, ask 'em questions. What, why, why was this role open when you worked there? Why, why was it so critical for them to hire somebody in this position? What kind of What kind of things did you implement? And ultimately, what kind of effect did that have on your team? What kind of effect did that have on your company? And really, what kind of effect did it have on your hiring manager? Like, what did your manager feel when you were doing successful, when you were really successful there? And then like, now you're starting to understand like the emotional states and talk about things in emotional states, right? Like, what did they feel? How was their day like? You know, what was their status in the company when they didn't have you versus when they did have you? You know, how did you Elevate them? How did you help them get promotions? Like, what was the most important factors for them in their career? Like, you just, you gotta ask the right questions and you'll start being able to get your messaging.

So, Will, we're coming to the end of the podcast. I can't believe how quickly this time has gone. I just wanna touch upon this, this. I know you build $800,000 and pretty much $900,000 in a year with your partner working 5, you said 5 to 6 hours a day in 2021.

No Fridays.

No Fridays. How the hell did you do that? Can you explain to our audience your day plan? Can we understand your day plan? Like, what was your actual day plan on a day-to-day?

Yeah, so one of the big things, um, for us was our setup and marketing and advertising efforts, right? So, you know, we had to really understand that the economy was going down in 2020, right, because of COVID In the pandemic, everyone was getting furloughed. So instead of sitting on our asses about that, we would just like, we just engaged as much as possible with people, had conversations, had real conversations, kind of acted like a psychiatrist or therapist for some of them, and just built out our deeper connections and relationships. And that was huge because we knew it was gonna come back, right? It was just a matter of time. So in doing that, it catapulted us, right? Right when the economy started to shift, around July, June and July, we started getting phone calls and we were able to, you know, really capitalize on that. But a really big part of that was leveraging. So we not only leveraged our relationships with our candidates by being able to position them into a variety of different roles. So this is where niching does help, is that you can go find them a bunch of different positions, um, in a lot of different companies. But we also leveraged our connections with other recruiters that were independent or working at another firm that just needed the help. So we leveraged a lot with relationships, not just on the competition level or on the candidate level or the client level, but on the competition level too. People who had agreements already in place with some— in relationships already in place with some of the companies we wanted to work with, with the same position. So we were able to send our candidates to multiple positions. So in doing so, we didn't have to really do as much business development or as much recruiting effort because we could get 3 to 5 clients or candidates a week and send them out to 6 or 7 positions open. Um, really loved Recruitify for this too, because we did like $100K with Recruitify just alone. Um, and that was— it was just another place for us to send our candidates. Um, and then we, you know, that was, that was a big part of it. Uh, validating the companies that we worked with and the positions we worked with was another big part of it. So We tried to diversify or lower our risk, right, by, you know, making sure that we were getting really good intakes, that we were working with really good clients that actually could use us or use our candidates, I should say, and were ready to hire. So that was a big part of that too. So we didn't really waste a lot of time and effort trying to, trying to fit square pegs in round holes. So the last part of that was we would de-risk hot markets that had a lot of turnover. So, and what I mean by that is we would consider, like, people talk about productizing your business. And one of the things they talk about is like, oh, well, we're gonna create all these benefits to working with us to go retain. That's not necessarily how I look at productizing. Productizing is creating a very unique service offering or product that fits a need or requirement in a very, very specific way for a very specific hiring manager. So in this case, we used— I'll use mortgage industry as an example. A lot of companies, a lot of these no territory companies were focusing on the mortgage space at the time and just blowing up. And it was like people were putting up crazy numbers in mortgage, right? Underwriters, processors, loan officers, right? And there's a high demand because there's the mortgage industry had ballooned, right? And I didn't like that because in that space, I used to be in that space. That space is high turnover. I mean, it's like a revolving door in most companies. Candidates aren't very loyal. Companies aren't necessarily the best ethically. So when you pick up these clients, they might have high billing opportunity, but it does, it means that you actually have a situation where you set yourself up for risk because you're going to constantly be trying to backfill those positions. And the company doesn't like you because these people are not necessarily the most loyal. So they leave in 3 months and they just spent $30,000 on an underwriter. They're like, well, are you going to help me fill this back up? Most companies don't. So we found that as an opportunity to de-risk by creating a service that allowed us to do sourcing and maybe identifying a great candidate, and they can, the company could hire as many of our candidates as they wanted to, and we didn't have to pay, we didn't have a guarantee on them. So it was a monthly service. Um, with our client, we did, I think it was $15K. It was a $15K monthly service. And we'd get between $1,000 and $3,000 for a success fee. And that was the only part that had a guarantee on it. And it was only 30 days. So it was like, if they last for 30 days, we still get the money and we're done. And we did probably about $80 grand just leveraging that kind of productization for that specific client. And so it's not like our time was then just like really resourced really well because we weren't spending a whole lot of time doing a ton of business development and a ton of candidate development. We were just really focusing on like, how do we get better volume? How do we engage with our clients better? And our clients loved us, our recruiting partners loved us, and we were able to really succeed in that way. So that's, that's a big part of it is leverage. Like we just try and find ways to leverage whatever our systems were.

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Peace and love.