The 2024 Business Plan for a 7 Figure "New Era" Recruitment Firm

Hello everybody. James Blackwell here. I'm the owner of a seven figure recruitment agency over the UK and what I do is I help recruitment business owners grow, automate and scale their own agency to seven figures and beyond. Now what I thought would be good to start 2022 is actually to share a seven figure agency roadmap plan. And what I've noticed when you actually plan this out visually, as you can see here, you can see how simple the business can be in order to get to seven figures. So when we break it down, I always talk around this in a lot of my YouTube videos around your business is really dependent on the amount of systems that you have in order to scale without you. So to create a self managing agency, it's very important that you have systems. So the first thing that you want to do in 2022 if you want to get to a million pounds in revenue and beyond, and that's like GP. So like our business is like a perm, a permanent placement recruitment agency. So all of the figures here are based on that. Now the first thing that we need to fix is making sure that we have systems. Now when we break it down into fundamentals, we've got clients and candidates. So when we break it down to first principles, we need to have the right type of ways of creating systems in order to get both clients inbound and candidates inbound. So the easiest way to break that down in the seven figure agencies to have a consistent way to get clients. So that's what I would call the client acquisition system. Now the client acquisition system consists of a way of how you map and define your micro niche and how you engage with those client prospects to turn them into leads and have a lead funnel where the leads come inbound. And then you need to have a consistent way, we call it the signature sales system and inside there's a signature sales pitch deck is to have a way of how you're going to actually onboard them, either exclusive and retained. Now this system I would say is probably the most important part of your agency and that's what help me be a millionaire and create the agency that I have today. I'm very lucky and blessed to have some great employees, some great clients and great candidates that we've helped place in the market. But that was all down to making sure we had a consistent way to get clients. Because still even in all of these markets where it's very kind of a short, as we know, I know that myself because we specialize in technology recruitment mainly around software engineers. So but we still need the right clients. So you need to make sure that in 2022, if you haven't already, you need to nail down a consistent way of how you're going to get clients instead of just this hamster wheel of running to get a client. Then all of a sudden work the job and rinse and repeat. Then all of a sudden you think, okay, next we need to hire a 360 recruiter. And we all know down the path that that goes back to the traditional agency. We teach a lot in my mastermind and we could accelerate around building what I call the new era agency, a hy model, which I'm going to dive into in today's video. Then the next thing is having candidates. So having a clear defined candidate source and machine is very important as well. So how we do that is a range of different pieces and components that we break that down. So we need to know what the candidate market is, how we break down that niche, how we get to them. So where we get the data from, whether it's on our CRM or ATS system or LinkedIn and a way that we can automate some of the process to outreach to them. And then in between that candidate sourcing machine, we have marketing source and ninjas and virtual source and assistance. So a bit of a hybrid model where we use a lot of different components in order to engage with the candidates. Because we focus on and most of you should, if not already in your agency, you probably focus on passive talent. So you probably heard me say this, this before, and you've heard this in the market many times. Is a good candidate is a candidate that's not actively looking to move on from his position, his or her position. So the only way to get passive talent is by constantly engaging with them. And as humans, the traditional 360 recruiter model. Recruiters don't have the time and can always make mistakes. They're not going to always follow up with candidates every single week. And it's a lot of the passive talent is around timing. So they need to know like and trust your agency in the market. Which is one of our goals that we come onto here is building down the brand. But also we need a consistent way, like actually putting this into a system, a machine where we can constantly engage with the candidate audience. So the second system is like having a candidate sourcing machine. Then I've already touched on the signature sales pitch deck, but this is a signature sales system that I developed quite early on in our agency, Ronald James, to create unfair advantages compared to our competitors. In the market. And this is a consistent way of how when you get a client lead inbound, you want to make sure you wow them and you want to show them, walk them through an experience that's slightly different to every other agency. Because if you're just getting on the phone with them and walk them through their requirements, what the challenges are, and then all of a sudden just pitching in with the standard rates, 20%, 25% or 15%, then they're not going to be wowed and they just think you're just another agency. So the way to define that, like I talk around this in our mastermind of like how when you really drill down into a micro niche, how you create a moat around your business. So you want to make sure that it's hard for other recruitment agencies to get into these clients once you nail them down and deliver. And the only way you're really going to do that is to create unfair advantages in the market that that client knows that you're going to deliver above and beyond the competition. So when they come knocking on the door and say they've got this great candidate, they're going to ignore them. And the only way you're going to do that is walking them through a visual presentation and a way of how you're going to deliver that experience to them. So we build this together. So you want to build out a signature sales pitch deck that's consistent, that walks that client through the pain points, the type of value adds that you can bring into their business and create true, what I call recruitment partnerships with these clients. And then the fourth system is having inbound automation. So you'll see like from there's a range of tools out there that you can use automation. Now you can't automate everything in recruitment. You're never going to take away the human element being able to influence and persuade a candidate to take a job. And that's the same with the client to work with you. But there's ways you can systemize and automate some of the initial outreach and some of the engagement. So we walk you through step by step how to do that in the program. But mainly you want to make sure that you can create some automation to give you more leverage. Because you as a founder, business owner of a small boutique agency, you're not going to have the time to do all of these things manually or depend on your recruiters to do it. And then the final piece is operational excellence. So this is like your SOPs and your systems in the business that make everything going so whether it's a template to scripts, the format, how you onboard your delivery consultants, or your virtual assistants and marketing sources, how you manage them, how you retain them, how you reach out to clients, how you deliver, all of these need to be put into systems. So you probably heard me talk around the E Myth Revisited, great book by Michael Gerber. And he talks around systemizing the business just like McDonald's did. Every step of the process is a system and you have that in an operational excellence manual. Not an old school manual, but something that's hybrid, that's online. And so each part of the segment of your agency is systemized and there'll always be things that go wrong, but you've got this in a way that you've delegated a lot of the work. So those are the systems in the business now in terms of projections. So I would say like to get a seven figure agency, lean and agile and with the least amount of employees that you need in order to get there. Yes, there's plenty of million dollar and million pounds a year billers that are just solopreneurs and that's great. But you don't really have a business, you just have a high paying job. So to move you away from actually doing it, doing it, doing it and having to do delivery yourself, to actually creating a team that's going to do the delivery and get you to that million, 2 million or 3 million, you're going to have to not just have systems but you're going to have to have a team. So I broke this down. Really, really simple in a format and it's similar to my agency. I mean we've got six delivery consultants and our goals are a little bit higher than these projections but I share that inside our mastermind. But this gives you a good format to, to go off. So your delivery consultants, if you can have four, these are, these are like 180 consultants that are just going to do, they're going to work the live and open roles that you're going to bring in with the client acquisition system. So you as a founder, as the main person that's going to be driving the business, being the face and brand of the business and NETworking with other CEOs, founders, directors of other companies within your niche that they want to work with and you're going to build long term partnerships with where you can fill 5, 10, 15 roles a year with because you only need a small amount of clients to do that. And then you're going to hand this off to what I would call you a Player recruiters and they're the ones that are going to deliver on the roles. So there's always going to be a superstar, there's always going to be someone that's going to outbuild the rest. So I would say like when you break it down into quarters, your top delivery consultant would do roundabout 350k. Yeah. You'd have two doing roundabout 250k. Yeah. And one coming up at 150,000. And that breaks it down in terms of your quarters. Obviously naturally the last quarter and the last two quarters of the year and traditionally normally a lot better depending on what market you in. But traditionally that's how it normally works and then you've got your costs. So if you work on a margin and I think really from analyzing a lot of seven figure agencies that are at the million to 1.5 million, 2 million threshold, you cost around about 40 or 50%. So if we take that into the equation and we were just being saved 50% profit margins, you should make £500,000 a year net profit from your business with four delivery consultants. And this isn't, this is like you not billing at all. So there's some people that might be watching this that might make more profit than that. And that's great. But you want to ask yourself how much work are you having to put into that business in order to achieve that? Now how the team will be structured. So this is an idea of like how I build like the hybrid agency model would be once you get to around 6 or 7. Now this is dependent if you're in the office or not. So we have an office and fantastic office and culture. And so we need a PA or office manager. So the PA like reports to, would report to yourself, office manager and the rest of the team and that'll take you away from a lot of the day to day admin and management duties. You'd have two marketing sources and I haven't got time to go in depth in this training but basically these marketing sources are going to be the gurus that are going to be doing a lot of the outreach and sourcing for candidates for your delivery consultants here. So these are going to be very, very integral to your business and they can create a lot of revenue for your agency. Now then you've got your four delivery consultants and then under there we've got one general VA that does a lot of the admin work and oversees the other two virtual assistants that you would have in the business and they do a range of tasks. Again like I Haven't got time in this video to go through it. But step by step we walk you through how you build on a successful virtual assistant sourcing team. And then you can have a freelance accountant bookkeeper and you can have a really lean team doing this. And that'll get you to over a million pounds a year. So the goals of these businesses are really just to generate 80k per month in terms of billings consistently, I would say growing a candidate webinar. So having like a. Building a brand around your agency in microniche and creating a candidate audience with that, winning more retainers or exclusive. So it doesn't have to be retainers. But I talk a lot around like with the client acquisition system and the signature sales system, you're going to be able to be in a position where you can win more repeat business. Always keeping expenses low. It's very, very important that you want to have a highly profitable agency. Don't overspend. We've all made those mistakes. Especially if you've got an office or remote, you're going to end up spending a lot of things because you're going to have 2, 3, 4, £500,000, sometimes £1,000,000 plus in your business bank account. So you think all of these subscriptions and all of these costs, but they all eat into your profit at the end of the day. So you always want to be trimming and keeping these expenses low. Quick tip that I would always do, like every six months I would cancel our expense card like one of our company cards. So that forced a lot of the subscriptions not to be new and all these costs that we've got going on and you'd be surprised like how much money you've spent on things that you didn't even know you had. So that's always a trick that I would do every six months to try and keep the expenses low. And then next is like building a strong team culture. So when you're having a small boutique team, the progression plan is slightly different for them as opposed to a bigger agency. So we walk around like a profit share scheme that we give to our employees that wrap them in. And you want to make sure you're doing a lot of team events every month in order to keep the authenticity and the vibrancy in the agency in the business. So it's very important to build a strong culture and always working on more inbound candidates. So there's a range of techniques that we go through in the program around, like how we get more candidates inbound in your niche and Then finally the tool stack. So I haven't put all of the tools that we use in ad agency but if I was to do this again and just have a simple million pounds a year recruitment agency, these were the tools that like you would need. Slack streak, CRM LinkedIn recruiter a solid ATS. You want to have an email automation outreach tool, a candidate nurture tool G suite for business video outreach the way to send across your proposals and pitch deck and zapier like quite a cool automation tool which which we dive into further in the mastermind around like how we can basically automate and systemize pretty much everything. Then you have you need an accountancy tool like we use Xero VoIP access so like your delivery consultants can call through the mobile or take calls when it looks like an office line. Hubstaff is to manage your virtual sourcing assistants some job boards just because you always want to keep building to your database so you can have your VA stripping job boards all the time and lead pages and landing pages so you can create some quite cool client type of websites for career sites that you can give as an unfair advantage in your delivery. So yeah so that's pretty much a simple 20, 227 figure recruitment agency sort of blueprint. And as long as you're what I would recommend is go away and build this yourself and sort of set the precedent of like how you want to shape your agency. So if you're like a recruitment business owner that's like either a solopreneur that wants to scale and automate and is stuck doing it doing it, doing it or you are a small business agency owner but you're doing things what I call the old school way. Then feel free to book in a call with myself and my team and we can walk you through if and how we can help you with one of our programs. And if you did like this video, please like and subscribe. Really appreciate your input and I'll catch you next time. Thank you.