How I Helped This Recruitment Agency Skyrocket Their Business

The new era agency model is they need to be highly profitable and self managing and lean teams. So very lean but it makes high profit. Hello ladies and gentlemen. In today's video I'm going to walk you through a clip that I was helping a recruitment agency owner that was really hitting a glass ceiling inside his recruitment agency. So he, he came to me on a call and basically in his early years he was pretty much breaking even inside his recruitment agency and a lot of the mistakes traditionally most recruitment agency owners make which is pretty much overhiring. So thinking right, okay, once I've got to a certain revenue per month, 10, 20k a month, the next person I need to hire is another 360 recruiter. And basically what I did is I unpack his challenges and I walk him through how to basically do more with less. So actually how I would structure a lean and agile team and help them scale up to 1500k months. So I hope you enjoy this video inside and as always if you enjoyed the video, please give me a like or smash that subscription button and I'll catch you soon.

Hi James, thanks again. Just picking up on that. Your original initial note about the kind of virtual teams I'm keen to understand how you would structure. So we're a small business, we've got, there's five of us and we're very much in that place where we're automating as much as we can, we're investing more in that but we're still struggling with the kind of manual delivery side of things. So you talked a lot around your kind of virtual teams, that sort of stuff. Good to understand what you'd recommend and how you've got, how you go from a small team of like four or five people to kind of, you know, to scale in the business. We're in that cycle where we're, you know, we're, we're profitable and everything's going quite well. We almost can't take on more clients because we can't deliver anything, anything else. And I'm reluctant to recruit people internally because I don't want the exposure. I'd rather keep our team quite, you know, quite lean.

Yeah, good question. So can you give me an idea where you're at right now? So what's the revenue like on a monthly basis right now?

Yeah, so we are going to get to about 350,000 last quarter UK so it was reasonable.

Is that home revenue or contract?

Well, it's an RPO model that's all perm and it's, you know, I do this year we're gunning for about probably 1.7, 1.8 if we get there. But to be honest, the immediate challenges, they're really good starts of the year and we're already behind. It's not behind. But you know, we're going to struggle to keep the momentum with new business because we've got contracts we've got to deliver on. There's the whole balance of, you know, I don't, I don't want no higher five people because once those clients works and delivered, I've then got to pay for them on payroll. I don't want that. It's that whole piece of balancing. So I'm just curious how you know from what I understand from your businesses is very much around. You've also made a lot of it. I know you've got a team as well, but I wondered how you kind of justify at what point you kind of scale and that sort of thing.

Yeah, so like, I mean my model would be like with each recruiter that we have, they do four to five deals per month. So the old model would be one or two deals per month, which is the old S3 type of model, bums on seats and scale it up. So I would rather have less people but get them doing four or five deals a month. The only way you're going to do that is by giving them booked in calls consistently in their diary every single day so that they're removed from a lot of the sourcing. So they shouldn't do the sourcing manually like scrolling through LinkedIn, sending individual messages, cold calling, that type of stuff. You want to have a marketing sourcing team. So normally we help you develop a marketing sourcing team which is a mix between actual English speaking video outreach type of sourcing team and then a virtual, virtual sourcing team which is your bas in the Philippines. We help you build on that team. So there's two teams there that are going to be a mix between voice and video. So you've got voice and video and then text and chat. And these two teams here are going to be the ones that you invest the most in because they're the most highly profitable, easy to manage, don't cost much money and then you would, you can do more with less because really you could do, realistically you could, you should be able to do 10 placements a month with two delivery consultants. And then you could have, we normally build out like these two teams here that's going to source and get the candidate flowing, mixed with your automation funnel to engage with engage with the candidates.

Thanks. I know it's not, I know it's a big question to ask to answer in 30 seconds. Thank you for giving that explanation. Thanks, James.

Yeah, you're welcome. It sounds like you're, you're in a good shape so just challenge with.

Obviously I want to grow, but we had, I had a bigger team of, you know, consultants last year that, you know, restructured and raised some redundancies because they just weren't performing. So obviously I'm reluctant to kind of to grow that again because it's just up and down over the year. They did make, they break even over the year, but it's just too stressful having people on payroll. You know, I sort of, you know, sales director paying them a lot of money and obviously, you know, course of the quarter it was just very hit and miss. So what appealed to me about, you know, your model is, you know, how the whole outsourcing piece and like reducing the exposure and obviously your whole idea about turning the tap off as well makes a lot of sense because that's what we're experiencing. I mean we don't want to turn it off ultimately, but it's almost worse to have clients and deliver a bad service. That's more damaging than having a tool ultimately, I find anyway.

Yeah, for sure. I mean the one thing that with the new era agency model is it needs to be highly profitable and self managing and lean teams. So very lean. But it makes high profit and you let the systems and the remote team do all of the legwork and the leverage. So it frees you up because it's great doing big numbers in revenue. But how much are you taking on profit wise? How, how many hours a week are you working? How stressed are you as well? And is it scalable and does the business run without you? These are all factors that we need to weigh up when we're building the business. Yeah, because I mean I had a call with someone that's in just right now, Elite Mastermind and they've been in recruitment for nine years and up and down all of the time doing around 250k a year, 20k a month with 3 other staff and he's only earning probably 50, 60,000 a year. Take home after 9 years, still working 60 hours a week. Whereas on the flip side we've got other people in the mastermind. Daniela, for example, she did $107,000 last month with herself and three Martin sources virtually and she just came back on holiday. So the difference is huge. If you get the model Right. But you've got to build from first principles and you've got to be strict with the model that you're building because mistake most recruitment agencies owners do and this took me a while to figure out when I first started was you only know, you only do what you've always done. So like how we've all been brought into recruitment in the old school way was the traditional way of doing everything manually and scaling with humans employees. So we still need to have the human element but we can minimize that to a point until we have highly qualified conversations on the phone send CVS interview feedback deals. That's all a delivery consulting recruiters should be doing. Should be no360 recruiters.

Sorry, last question because I know obviously you're not a fan of Bullhorn. Everything that we use is integrated with that. So what what would you recommend in your experience is a good platform to start from. So we use a number of various kind of AI powered platforms. It's all feed into that central Bullhorn point. I've always used Vaughn for my entire career so I'm very much a convert but I've only ever used Ballhorn. So you know, you don't know. So I'm curious to know what you think would be what you think, what you rate higher than that really and what's the know better and also why I'm just just curious as to what your negative think fair on it and why.

So our tool stack like we've I've reviewed and hundreds of tools and what is good, what is bad in terms of ATS systems automation less is more. So we don't pilot with tools but the ones that we recommend are inside our program and we have is a special deal with our ATS supplier that is built the way I build it with the new era system. So because we give you the plug and play systems and then the ATS on the back end is the one that will do the email follow up to the nurtures the recipes.

Oh, sorry. So your program includes you provide access to that whole back office essentially.

So we help you build it out and then we've got our ATS supplier that will do you a special discount. So it's like I think it's $69 a month per user but you don't need many users. You should Only max up 2 or 3 because you can repeat the logins for all of your VAs or your sourcing team. So it should be very lean. But the problem with Bullhorn, it's more for corporate now and it's very expensive when you're adding on all of the other tools that you've probably done with bullhorn. And we're about a lot of it.

50 grand a year back office cost, fixed cost for all the automation that we have.

Yeah, like, I'd be able to cut that by easy. 40 grand.

Thank you, James.

Yeah, you're welcome, Adam.