This Ex-Recruiter made £10 Million growing and selling recruitment businesses

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 the legend himself, Rhys Jones. Rhys is an ex-recruiter who has successfully scaled and sold multiple recruitment companies. Along the way, he's racked up a whopping £10 million of profit. It's fair to say that Rhys is an absolute expert in creating businesses that run like clockwork and that are appealing to investors. He now dedicates his life to helping other recruiters create that fine balance of happiness and making extremely profitable businesses. On this episode, we talk about the basics, the fundamentals, what to start thinking about if you want to create a business that's appealing to investors. And we also delve into Reece's journey, the highs and lows, what it was like scaling multiple recruitment businesses and making a ton of money in the process. So So grab a cuppa or a glass of wine depending on when you're listening to this, and let's get into it, shall we? Hello, Rhys, how are you, my friend?

I'm all the better for seeing your smiley face. Thank you, mate. I'm gonna pop up now, which means I can't see your smiley face. I'm going to turn that off. There we go. Ah, in all your glory, I can see you now.

Thank you for joining us, mate, on the 10th episode, 10th episode of Top Billers Toolkit. Me and Ben have been watching your content for a long time. We know how experienced you are, so thanks for coming on. We always start the podcast with this question: what's the most important tool in your toolkit, would you say? Whether it be a software, a strategy, or a mindset. Rhys?

Wow, I didn't see that question coming, actually. What I would say, experience and fucking up a lot, because pain is a far better teacher than pleasure. When I set up my first recruiting business in 2000. I grew it up till 2005 by literally just self-teaching. And as you can imagine, with no non-exec, no coach, self-teaching, there was a lot of mistakes. So I had a tremendous education about how to do things wrong. But one of the attitudes I always have, which is if something doesn't go right, is you look at it and go, okay, how could I have done that better? Even if it went well, how could I do it better? So not wishing to use the cheesy, you either win or you learn, But it was a bit like that. So I went through the, the old school of hard knocks. And I think, I think it's that, it's that unbending desire to be the best I can be. But I've got 22 years of experience now of building my own businesses from the ground up to sale. And I've had 12 years of working with recruiters growing their businesses. And all I do now is help recruiters build their businesses. So unlike somebody who maybe does that part-time or something else, all I do now is I'm a specialist in growing businesses for other people.

What fascinates me about what you just said, Reece, and I've heard this so much, it seems to be one of the key ingredients to any form of success, especially at a high level, is the willingness to accept failure and look at failure in a different way. For instance, there are some people that, you know, they have one failure, it knocks them back, but they might continue. Second failure, they're nearly dropped out. Third failure, okay, I'm done. What stops— what made you keep going after failure, failure, failure, failure? What was it?

Being dead honest, if my first business had failed, I might have jacked it in because for me there was no option other than to succeed. There was no option. So my failures weren't necessarily failures as such. They were fuck-ups along the way. And yes, there was a lot of bumps. Yes, I had to demonstrate a tremendous amount of bounce-back ability. We traded through the construction crash, the economic crash, the banking crash, the whole lot. That there was a lot of setbacks in a business perspective. But it's that, it's just, it's the way I'm built. I think a lot of recruiters are, it's just that bounce-back ability, it's that tenacity, it's that never say die that's built into you. Because if you haven't got that in recruitment, you're going to struggle because there's no recruiters never go through a barren patch. You know, I said in a post today of Alex Elliott's, and I joked and said if there's a nuclear war, there'd be cockroaches and recruitment consultants, that's all that'd be left. Because recruitment consultants are hard as fuck, you know. You've got to be made of some stern stuff. But I think it's next level when you set up your own business. That's when you really get into the big league, because there's no business that doesn't go seamlessly without some major situation going on. And I've had some major situations while I've been going on, and it's just— there's no other option than to succeed and run your own business. You can't get a job again once you've been running your own business. The idea of getting a job is just like I can't do that, it's defeat. So I think it's, I've always had that, that metal, but I think it's, what's the word, nature and nurture, you know, and I had it in my nature when I became a recruitment consultant, but bloody hell, during the 10 years of being a recruitment consultant, I got kicked in the nuts so many times, you know, people not turning up for jobs and, you know, going through a barren spell for 2 or 3 months, you know, you go through the school of hard knocks and you just get used to it. I suppose it's a bit like with you, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you get used to getting thumped. At first it hurts, but after a while you just get used to getting thumped. You just get on with it.

Oh, it's really interesting. I think, um, I definitely would agree with you 100% after working with recruiters as well. There's a lot of resilient recruiters, but there's very few recruiters— correct me if I'm wrong, uh, Rhys— that actually end up building, scaling a business, being able to sell it, or even just being able to step back. So I know this is what a lot of our listeners are going to be thinking. You have done this successfully multiple times. If I'm a recruiter, if I'm a one-man band, if I have a small team and I'm thinking about selling or scaling my business, where the hell do you even start? Like, it seems like a minefield. It almost seems quite impossible when you think about it if you're staring at it at the face on the early stages. So where would you start?

Is that setting up the business or scaling it, or both?

Scaling it.

Scaling it. Um, again, it's a tough question. With scaling, you've got to accept that you will need certain processes, and recruiters hate the term process, but you've got to have repeatability. So what you can't do is just hire a room full of recruiters and go, off you pop, everything will be all right. That won't scale. You'll get to a finite limit. So you have to have processes. You have to have a process for how you attract people to work for your business. That's a strategy. What's your selection process to getting the right people? How do you manage— how do your managers manage people? Um, other parts of the business, like how people use the CRM, that you've got to have repeatable processes. Because with scaling, once you've got to, let's say, 20, 30 staff, you should really have all your processes lined up. And all you've got to do is do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again. So getting to the 20 to 30 is the hardest bit. But once you get to that sort of level, some people can wing it and get away with it. But if you've got your processes in place, it takes years to get your processes in place. Once you've got your processes in place, it then becomes dead easy. And that then fast forwards that if you do want to sell it, because it's repeatable, because it's got its processes, it doesn't need you to run it because it then becomes a machine. And that's how you scale a business, is by turning into a machine and make it mechanized to a degree and not reliant on the people in it. Now, the people in it are critical because recruitment is a people business, obviously, but you want it to be as removed as possible from the skills of the people within it that you've got a repeatable process. So you have a proven process for attracting people to work for you, a proven process for the selection of people, a proven process for the induction, a proven process for the management and the coaching and the development. And you've got all these various things that you have to put in place. And it's that realisation that you can't do is go, I'm just going to keep hiring people and everything will be all right. It will to a level, but then you'll hit a ceiling. And it's that out-of-the-box thinking. It's that because recruiters are taught to go fast, time, skill, deals. So you'll shortcut everything. You're a recruiter, you will shortcut things, but you can't. You know, for each part of your strategy, whether it's client, so staff attraction or the vetting of the staff, where it might be, you've got to slow down and stop and work on a proper process. For example, if you're looking for staff, okay, so you're looking at hiring 2 people a month. To get those 2 people, how many people do you have to interview? So let's say you've got to interview 6 people, well, you've got to find 12 good people to interview. Where are you going to get your 12 from? So then that's your first challenge. And then when you've got these people, what's your strategy for winning the battle for talent? Over the other recruitment companies? What's your process for, for, for, for, from offer to acceptance? Uh, there's one of the businesses that we work with, um, and we got it down to something super light. 2 out of 3 offers got accepted, which is brilliant in recruitment. But it's working on those specific things because the beauty is once you do it once, you've done it. So you've got your strategy for, for employee attraction. Yeah, you'll finesse it and you polish it as it goes along, but once you've done it That's your first building block. And it's just like building a wall. You go chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. And all those are foundations to grow. It's like you can't build a building on sand. It's got to go on a concrete foundation. So as I do with the businesses I work with, you build that foundation. If you— so if you do want to grow, you can grow easily and it becomes seamless and it becomes quite frankly a piece of piss then. But the hard work is putting those things in place. And that's the sea change where you've got to change your mindset. Which is not a natural mindset for a recruiter, which is where it can be helpful if you've got somebody in your business that is more of an operational style of person, operational thinker, because most recruiting business owners are recruitment consultants. So they have recruiting consultants' foibles, which is shiny new, you know, don't follow things through. There's no complete finisher. It's always want something different, attention to detail crap, you know. So if you've got somebody that helps you with that, even if it's a a non-exec that's going to give you the peer pressure to do those things. It's, it's how to make your life easier rather than just trying to make everything hard. So thinking smart, if you've got a good non-exec, I'll say, right, this month the only thing we're going to do is work on the strategy for attracting people to work for your business, and we'll spend 2 or 3 hours together, we'll brainstorm it, we'll put together some bullet points, and then that's done. So, and then next month you could do something else. As long as you do one thing but doing it right and doing it properly, and it's in place, then you're on the right road.

That's pretty interesting. I'm guessing there's a number— you kind of mentioned a few of them there, Reece— a number of different processes to scale up to, say, 30 people when it gets a little bit easier. If you were to kind of select or pick, cherry-pick the most important processes that you tend to start with, ones that are just absolutely integral, could you categorize them in terms of where you would start with most business owners?

There you are. I feel like being interviewed. Good job. These questions are really good. Um, the biggest barrier to growth for any recruitment is staff attraction and retention.

It's ironic, isn't it?

Yeah, which is— but yeah, nail on head. It's like we're a fucking recruitment company, I'd say. So it's attracting the right staff, it's getting them to join the business, and then it's retaining them. So those are, those are the cornerstones. You know, I've got an obsession with marketing, which we share, because obviously you're brilliant at marketing. If you make your environment an easy place to make money, it kind of helps the other two, because people want to come and work for you if it's an easy place to make money, and they don't want to leave because it's easy to make money. So that then is a separate bit, which isn't just marketing, there's other things too. But if you, if you make it as easy as possible for the recruiters to make money then it's a win-win. They'll make more money, people want to join you, and they're not going to leave. So the core of it is going to be how do you make it easy for people to make money? Not just go, there's a CRM, there's your LinkedIn, off you pop. It's like, how can we constantly make it easier for them and easy for them and easy for them? And things in that will include culture, you know. It's not just here's a new tech gadget, whatever it might be, but it's making it easy for them to make money. But then, like I say, you've got to have a good employee attraction strategy, and you've got to have a good selection strategy that you're not just taking people on because the success— a failed recruiter is really expensive— cash, time, and effect on the office culture. So you constantly, every time somebody works, joins your business, they don't work out, you've got to look in the mirror and go, right, what did I do wrong there? Because ultimately it's my fault. I hired them and I, I bedded them into the business and they didn't work out. So was my selection shit? You know, was my coaching shit? Was what? There was something there that was wrong. Fair if they weren't right for us, but you can't blame them because you bloody chose them. It's constantly reassessing what you can do better. And going back to what you said, what's in my armouries is that I'm never satisfied that something's good enough. You know, we've always done it that way. It's good enough. Bollocks. Nothing's ever good enough. No, you can always do better. But yeah, those, those are the 3 aspects: is the staff attraction, retention, and making your environment ease make money. Because growing recruiting businesses isn't rocket science, we'll leave that to the rocket scientists. But it's easy to fuck it up. But it's having that humility, I think, to reach out to people who've got more experience than you to help you, rather than trying to self-teach yourself. Because I did that for 5 years and it did all right. Then I had this moment when I went to Cranfield University and it was like, fucking hell, I can learn to be a businessman. And then I just got a massive hard-on for going out and peer-to-peer learning, personal development, got a non-exec coach-like thing. It's like rather than me trying to work everything out, Christ, get somebody who's got more experience than me to teach me. That's the easiest way to do it, innit? You employ somebody more experienced and smarter than you. That makes you the smartest person in effect, isn't it? If you're the smartest person in the room in your company, then you're doing it wrong.

Yeah, I love that, Rhys. I was gonna— you just mentioned it's easy to fuck up. Have you seen any scenarios, Rhys, where they're like halfway through and they've done something that's just fucked it all up? Is there like one thing that recruiters or business owners fall into the trap of, of like they're on the way, they're halfway there, but they fucked it up doing X? Is there anything that you've seen that crops up time and time again?

Lots. Overconfidence.

Overconfidence.

Yeah, it's self-belief, but there's overconfidence where you have a run, say you take half a dozen people, they all work out, and you think, piece of piss, I'll take another 6. You just think it's going to work. So overconfidence is a killer. And taking your eye off the ball with cash. Okay. You're looking at placements on the board, but what you're not doing is necessarily seeing the cash that's coming in. You're spending too quickly. It's understanding that you use money to make money. But a business without money is like a car without petrol. So spinning those plates, it's cash management is essential. Not being overconfident. Yeah, I think that those are the two big ones, really. Making rash decisions and trying to grow too fast or overconfidence or becoming complacent. That's another big one, is once you start making money, you become complacent, complacent rather, and you take your foot off the gas in managing the coaching, the people. You take your foot off the gas and you start lowering the bar for people who join your business. You know, you become a bit sloppy with the cash management. It's that kind of thing, which is why, again, it's helpful to have an external coach on, an exec or peer, to keep you honest. Yeah, because I, I did that. I did that after Oh, I forget what it was now. I think it's maybe I've come out, I can't remember that. But I remember it was my, as I call it, fat and lazy period. Because I was shitting cash. So because I was shitting cash, I didn't care. So that meant I was just getting overconfident and everything was getting sloppy, but I didn't see it because we were still making loads of money. But underneath it, things were starting to get a bit sloppy. And it's that diligence.

What were the telltale signs, Rhys, that those things were starting to crack? I'm really fascinated. You're shitting cash, as you say, but things start peeling away. What were the little signs you looked for that were— or what were the little signs that stuff was starting to bend?

We started losing people that I thought were good, but realized they weren't. They were shit. Isn't that a good feeling? It's as I was saying, I got complacent with staffing up and I got complacent with management. So they weren't necessarily the best people, but they also weren't being managed properly. So gradually we were losing people that were a bit crap, and that unnerves the office. But because when you start to lose people, it unnerves the office if you don't manage it properly. So the cracks are when I thought everybody was great, and then it's like, oh, hang on a minute, because numbers don't lie. You start looking at numbers and going I've had my head in the sand too long. These numbers are shit. So rather— no, not the placement numbers. You should be looking at your underlying numbers. You know, the basics like number of interviews, number of candidates, all your KPI stuff. And I was just getting a little bit sloppy with making sure people were hitting the numbers because the big number, the cash number, was great. But it's these numbers that tell you 3, 4 months, whatever, before it affects the cash that things aren't going right.

I'm really fascinated, Rhys. Um, you're obviously an expert in scaling businesses. You've done it very successfully, made up to $10 million, I think it was, a crazy amount. Um, I want to give people a bit more of a reality check of what it takes to scale a business, because I'm— let's just imagine I'm a solo recruiter, I've got a small team, it's ticking over nicely, it's profitable. Now I need to make it into something that is appealing to an investor, how much do I need to change as a person? Is it a lot more work? Do I need to shift my mindset? Is it a completely different ball game doing that, or is it something that's close to what they've been doing already? Can you give people just a bit of a reality check of what it's going to take to do that?

Well, there's scaling and growing a business, but there's growing a business for sale, and the two are kind of linked because if you build a business with a sale in mind, you'll have very strong key constituents in your business strategy that will be buyer will want to see, like low staff attrition, great marketing, great cost, that kind of thing. So it's having those in. But if you are really going to scale to sell, I think it's being smart enough to know your limitations and knowing what you're good at. Because I remember speaking to an MD once and he was feckless, rubbish complete finisher, always late for meetings. I said, how on earth do you make so much money? And he just said, well, I employ people to do the stuff I'm shit at. I have a great idea and I give it to somebody else. And it's knowing what you're good at and focusing on what you're good at and then hiring the right people and hiring the right— if you're going to take a business to a serious level, hiring the right people at the right time and a big dollop of luck makes a massive difference. But it's also talking to somebody about what would be buying, what I see in your business to make sure that you grow that into business as you go on. You can't retrofit it. We had a crap CRM system and I wasn't necessarily taking the business, but I realized that that was an issue. To retrofit people putting the candidates on attributes and properties, a bloody nightmare. So it's understanding what a would-be buyer would want to see and making sure that you sort of follow that blueprint, because that's the blueprints we do with businesses that we set up and grow, is follow that blueprint. So if they do want to sell a business, they're going to get the best money for it. And it's having those things in it as you go along. But as a business leader, it's maybe knowing when the time is right to get people in that are going to take full ownership of parts of the business that they'll take off you. And a phrase that I was told by my previous MD is you've got to let somebody else play with your train set. Because I had this train set I built myself, I had these people coming along and he was saying, the problem is you don't like them playing with your train set. It's like you've got to let them play with it. You know, it's not yours anymore. If you really want this to grow, you've got to move away and trust people and empower them and give them responsibility because they'll rise to it. And you can't do it all on your own. And it's removing that I'm the center of the world, I'm important to the business. Because if you're going to sell the business, then the business needs to be able to survive without you. Otherwise, someone wouldn't buy it. Because when it was to buy a business, they're buying it off you. If you're not there, it's not working, it's not worth anything. So you've got to have almost semi-exit, that the business runs without you, which from an ego point of view, sometimes it's difficult for people because they want to be the hero all the time. And it's learning that and accepting that to be a really smart business people, you hire people smarter than yourself and you give them the control to make decisions that you won't agree with. And accepting the fact that they know more than you or allow them to make the decisions And occasionally they'll fail, but it's better than making decisions and getting something wrong than being paralyzed to not make the decisions because you're making all the decisions and then you become the blockage. Because if you make all the decisions, eventually you haven't got time to make decisions. So it's understanding how your role will change, but working with what you are good at in that role. Because it may be, you think, oh, I want to be a great strategist, but you may not be the great strategist. Maybe somebody else is better than that, or I'm great at the commercials, where it might be. It's understanding what you're good at and hiring the right people at the right time. And there's a big dollop of luck.

That's really fascinating. Can we go a bit more into your story as well, Rhys? Because I found that fascinating, especially at the point where you sold your company and there was that weird period of like, And then you went to Thailand. We had a chat before this, so I kind of know it, but would you mind just explaining a bit of that story? Because I think there's a lot of lessons in that for other people as well.

But I found— I got to the stage where I fell out of love with running my businesses because I was just running a business and I wasn't doing the things I enjoyed anymore. And I was striving to achieve something, but the problem is once I'd achieved it, the motivation was gone. I felt like I'd achieved, so I was ready to go. So we were looking at selling the business, but it's getting more and more stressful. It's getting to the point where I said to the business partner, if it's not sold by the time I go to Thailand, hey, that's it, I'm out. You can fuck— I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. Unfortunately, by this stage I'd removed myself from the business. So if the sale went through, I could walk out the door. And literally the deal went through the day I went to Thailand. So I signed the deals, went to the office, got my cardboard box, got my Porsche model, you know, the pictures and that kind of shit, and got in the box, went home. Sat there going, fuck, this is weird. Went out to town and got twatted for 2 weeks, came back and I thought, this is great. So then 2, 3 weeks, I don't have to do anything. I could do whatever I want. I'm the old man, blah, blah, blah. And then suddenly hit me like a sledgehammer after 3 weeks. I had no reason for being. And Monday was like Sunday was like Saturday and there was nothing to do all day. And I was used to being popular. I was used to making decisions. I used to have the self-esteem of running a business. And then I became, it sounds dramatic, like a bit of a nobody because I was just me. And I went into really bad depression for about 3 months because I used to be 100 miles an hour. I went and stopped dead and I couldn't adjust to it. And it was Steve Peters, The Chimp Paradox, that I was reading that said that human beings need a reason for being. They need a vocation. They need some, you know, they need something in life. And I realized that was my problem. I didn't have any vocation. I didn't have anything. And that's when I came back to the Davidson Gray idea of helping other business owners grow their own businesses. But what I learned from that is if you are going to sell a business, don't have this romantic idea that you'll sell it, lock the door, go off and live in a vineyard. Because if you're that driven and that hungry to grow a business to that level, do you really think you're going to stop being driven and stop being hungry? You're still gonna be the same person. So if you're gonna do it, slow down for starters. Remove— you start to remove yourself from the business day to day. So doing less and less hours, you're involved less and less in the office, and sort of almost wean yourself off it. But you'd be surprised how many business owners sell their recruiting businesses and within 12 months they're doing it again. Because it's— be careful what you wish for, you know. I've got— you guys are too young, but You know, when people used to work hard for retirement, you know, get 65 and you retire. The amount of people got 65, retired and were dead within a year because they weren't the nuts off. And then they stop and go, I'm not, I'm not, who am I now? I haven't got an identity. I'm just an OAP sat at home. You know, I'm not, I'm not anybody anymore. And it's amazing how that changed, which is why I don't necessarily advocate selling businesses. I advocate getting to the point you can sell them should you want to. But then fall into a sort of a CEO-style situation where you're involved in the business but people run it for you, but you still got the decision-making, you know, you still got the flow of cash because you only get between 4 and 8 times profit if you sell your business. But if you've got an earnout where you need to be in for 2 years, you're not getting that much. But if you tie people in, it's your pension, but it also kind of keeps you occupied while you find other things that you want to spend your money on, your time in, or whatever it might be. And I've heard so many stories of people that have built really successful recruiting businesses, sold them, and then had either a worse depressive situation than I had or a very, very similar one but lasted longer. Well, I, I, I don't know any recruitment business owners that have sold businesses, then suddenly just twaddled about and just go on holiday all the time. There's a guy outside recruitment I know that does that. He's like full-time on holidays, the only person I know that does that, and he's happy doing it. Everybody else I know, they want to go back to doing something, whether it's non-exec or investing in new businesses. They need to use their brain. You've got to be driven and it's slowing down at a pace that you can handle because it's hugely stressful selling your business. So you're going to work your tits off to get to the point you can sell it. Then when you're selling it, that's really, really hard work. So that's even more hard work. And then suddenly pop and it's gone. And it's not easy for people. It's one of those that you think, surely it can't. It's like, you know, the same people who win the lottery aren't happy or win the pools. Well, the vast majority are, and that's because it's true. You can't imagine why that would be, can you? You know, you suddenly don't have to work anymore, you've got loads and loads of money, you don't have to go to work. Why wouldn't you be happy? Well, it's just that's the way you're built if you're a business owner. Yeah, it's not always the case, you know, but my advice to anybody that's going to sell the business is what I said, which is try and move yourself out of the business that you're not involved with it. So you're kind of getting used to slowing down and not necessarily being involved, and better still, probably not necessarily sell it.

Interesting. What, what size do you think you can do that step away and still have a good income? I know that's relative to how much you want to earn, but like, do you think stepping away at like 30, Matt, 30 heads is you know, you could live off that for years to come. What's your opinion in terms of profitability, um, Rhys?

Well, I think, well, one thing is a very pertinent point is how much you want to earn, because, you know, there's, there's people I know that are involved in businesses, earn quarter of a million pounds a year, they're happy with that. Um, you, you do need a critical mass because let's say, for example, you've got 10 people in the business and you're removed from it If you lose 3 or 4, you're down to 6. That's precarious. But there is a critical mass size. The smart thing to do is if you've got some real key people in the business, tie them in with some shares so they don't want to leave because they've got, they've got involvement in the business. They don't want to leave. So that's a very smart idea. Um, but to what? Yeah, it's difficult to say. I mean, it depends You, well, you've got to have multi-level management to a degree. You have managers of teams and then you've got to have above it managers of the managers. So you'll need that for starters. Um, so if you're looking at maths on that, you're probably looking about 20 people, something like that. Um, and that's a similar level if you want to sell the business because you can't— you can get an 8W trade acquisition of, say, a 5-person business because they want to move into a certain market they can't get into. So it's, it's cheaper to buy a business Um, but if you go into market, which we did, and you go into corporate financier and they're taking a business to market, the critical mass tends to be a lot bigger. So unless there's somebody really fancies your business, then you've got to go out to people looking to acquire businesses in general. Looking to acquire businesses in general, they're looking for businesses that they know aren't going to fall apart and also can be scaled. And, um, that's a nice safe bet because if you're buying a business then, you know, if you're spending— because you're not going to sell a business late unless you get above a million for it, there's no point doing it. They're going to spend that much. What they don't want to do is have it in 2 years falling apart. So it's got to have a critical mass, it's got to have all the stuff lined up that you want, low staff attrition, so on and so forth, and maybe be in a market that they want. Because it's not as easy to sell business as you might think. You don't just— corporate finance is the people that sell it. Go to corporate finance and they go, yeah, I've got loads of people. It's not as easy as that. It's actually a lot harder.

If you were to start your bit, your recruitment business all over again— I know that's a big question, Reece— if you were to start from scratch, how would you do it differently in terms of scaling it and selling it on? Is there any key things that you're like, shit, I would have done that differently, I would have done that differently, that would have made my life easier? And does anything come to mind?

Yeah. Without a shadow of a doubt, it would be getting somebody experienced involved in the business very, very early. Very early. I mean, what Davis and Gray do is we, we set up recruiters in business and we have a support structure. We have an operations team, we have a finance team, we have marketing, all the things that you need to make it as easy as possible to grow businesses. But if you don't go that route, it's still getting somebody involved that could be a peer or mentor or coach to help you. It's not trying to be, it's not trying to prove to the world you can do it on your own. That's a mistake I made because I am an alpha, not as much as I used to be, I've calmed down a lot, but I wanted to prove, I had this chip on my shoulder because I left school at 16 without any education and I wanted to prove to people that I was smarter because dyslexia held me back a bit as well. I just had this chip on my shoulder, I wanted to prove to people I could do it on my own and that wasn't the clever way to do it. I learned a lot, but I would have made twice as much money twice as fast with a fraction of stress if I'd had somebody alongside me to talk to and I'd have the humility to listen. Because it's not just having the person, you've got to listen to them, you've got to take on board some of their advice. Rather than what really pisses me off is when somebody asks you their advice and then they do it their way anyway. What's the point asking the question? You know, that's what I would have done without a shadow of a doubt is if I could have toned down my drive to prove I could do it on my own, reached out to people and listened to how to do it the smart way rather than doing it through sweat. Because I'm a very hard worker and, you know, I'll put the hours in and I'm very, very driven and you can be successful that way. But clearly if you've got that engine but then you're working smarter, it's just gonna go so much faster and easier. And that, without a shadow of a doubt, that's the one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb. It took me 5 years to work that out.

Well, great bit of advice though. We're coming to the end of the pod, Rhys. Thank you so much so far. Lots of golden nuggets in there. We always end the podcast with this question. Cold calling in today's recruitment market? Is there a place for that? Is it a yes? Is it a hard no? What's your opinion?

Yes and no. Um, I used to do a training course, um, on warm sales calls, because rather than going, hi, I'm a recruitment consultant, I'm a specialist, have you got any vacancies? That's the last call you want to make. If you get a load of recruits into a room, say, right, let's all come up with all the warm calls. And by warm calls, I mean things like you've got a lead from a candidate, you speak to hiring managers, say, is anybody else in your business recruiting? You know, it's looking for all the reasons to ring. Some reference checks, brilliant new business calls. You ring somebody up and you reference check really hard, and they get to the end of it, they're exhausted. That was hard. You know, that's how thorough we are, and the candidates we represent can ask you, how do you recruit? You know, so it's coming up with lots of reasons to ring people. So it's new business, but it's not cold. It should never be ice cold. There should always be the reason why I'm ringing you today is, you know, there's got to be some sort of hinge, got to be some sort of warm introduction, and it makes it more pleasurable. But also, clearly, the conversion of the number of calls to a success is much higher. It can even be you just ringing with a really, really good candidate, because that could be a good reason. But if you get your team in a room, we got up to about 35 reasons, and 35 is a lot of reasons. So by the end of it, right guys, all you've got to do is do 5 sales calls every day and you'll never have a problem getting vacancies. Here's 35 reasons to ring people. All you've got to do is find 5 out of 35. How hard is that going to be? And make sure you have the calls prepared the night before. So don't assume you're going to get through to the 5. So get your 20 or whatever it might be, and then straight away, if you don't like doing new business, do the call straight away. So you're eating the frog, go over and do them at the start of the day, do 5 sales calls, then you can get on with the other parts of the job that maybe you prefer. But providing you're doing those 5 calls that will be relatively warm, you'll get used to it, you'll create a habit, and you'll get that warm feeling because you'll get success. And if you create a habit and you get a warm feeling, then it's an then it's easy to keep the habit. Again, it's the chimp paradox that if you're doing something and it gives you a bad experience, it programs your brain, you don't want to do it. So if your boss, whenever they say, can I have a word? And every time they bollock you, when they say, can I have a word? You go, oh, I'm not gonna. So it's experience teaches the brain how to react to circumstances. That decides whether you enjoy something, look forward to it or not. If you're doing these nice warm calls on a regular basis, at first you don't think you're gonna like them. But you're doing these calls and you're getting an extra 3 or 4 vacancies a week, and obviously your buildings are going up because of that, then it's no longer a task you don't like. You can look forward to it.

Great pearl of wisdom, Reece.

Mate, thank you so much for coming on. So much wisdom in there. You're a lovely bloke as well. It's lovely to get to know you, and just thanks again for coming on.

We've spoken quite a bit on LinkedIn before we spoke, and then when I spoke to you, whatever, 2 days ago, we had a proper laugh, didn't we?

Yeah, we did, mate.

Yeah, now a lot of it is not broadcastable, so if you've got any of those soundbites, you want to play out a blue version, then you can use those.

Thanks, Reece. Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and Spotify. Tune in for another episode next week, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. Peace and love.