The Sales System That Guarantees Retained Business In 2024

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Hello ladies and gentlemen, James Blackwell here and in today's video I'm giving you a sneak peek behind our private training session around the sales system for recruitment agency owners. So I'm here in my apartment in Dubai. I haven't really shared a lot on YouTube recently, so recently we just had our private mastermind here in Dubai.

So there's actually going to be a.

Video released on YouTube as well for that. And yeah, in this session you're going to enjoy more around the sales system and how we really scale a seven figure agency.

So I'm going to share with you the exact roadmap that you can use.

And if you're interested in having the free workbook which includes the full roadmap that I show on this video, if you just comment on YouTube like roadmap and basically we'll get one of the team to reach out to you or you can go on our website as well and request to download it. So I hope you enjoy this session and yeah, over the next few weeks.

I'm hopefully going to be trying to.

Post a lot more regularly on YouTube for all you viewers. So I appreciate a like or share on this session and I'll catch you soon.

So yeah, we actually did the most recent event at the Recruitment Expo just a few weeks ago so some of our team was down there and that was really great to see a lot of recruitment agency owners there. So yeah, so over the last decade I've done a lot of things right and this is my recruitment agency here, so you can check it out. It's called Ronald James. So we're the northeast leading digital and tech recruitment agency and I founded that company almost 10 years now. So now yeah, so we've had that agency for over 10 years. Got a great team of around about 11 to 12. And yeah, started my business in recruitment at the age of 28. Started with a 10k credit card and 10k loan and yeah by the age of 31 I've made over a million dollars in perm revenue fees. Now we're over 10 million and now I specialize in helping recruitment owners make over 250k. Yeah all the way up to 2 million a year by building what I call a self managing new era recruitment business. So I don't teach you how to scale all the way to 50, 100 employees. I teach you how to have a good lifestyle financially free, make seven figures and have business and systems and operations so the business can actually scale without you. For those of you that have bought my book, I know A couple of you on this live call have. So thank you very much. We've got Automatic Recruitment Agency which I wrote, basically revealing how I scale My Agency 7 figures by building systems, automation and a virtual sourcing team. So you can pick up a copy on Amazon if you wish for those of you that haven't got a copy and give you a link, special link to a website that'll give you a Discount down to 5.60 if you want to grab it. Price of a Starbucks, so. But also I've done a lot of things wrong. So over that time hopefully you can learn from my mistakes. And after doing this for over a decade, what I discovered was it's very important to have systems automation and a virtual sourcing team because that gives you leverage, it removes you away from doing a lot of the doing stuff without having to hire a ton of employees to increase overheads. And what I would say is we are probably the goats at systemization and automation for recruitment agency owners. So we've helped scale over 700 recruitment agency owners from around the world. Now if you need any inspiration or any more advice on building or scaling a recruitment agency, you can check out my YouTube channel again, it's free content. I've been doing that for free for run about five years now, uploading. So you can just google James Blackwell or put James Blackwell in YouTube and you will get a lot of free content there. So yeah, so that's basically what we do and but today we are going to work on our business, not in the business. So the first thing I'm going to ask you all is drop in the comments percentage wise. So when you're working on the business, this is strategic. So this is like working on systems, working on the automation, working on team structure, growth, that's working on the business. Working in the business is sourcing, being on LinkedIn, providing emails, speaking clients, doing deals, doing placements, doing interview feedback, all of that type of stuff. So normally, traditionally when I do this, it's normally run about 80% working in the business, 20% on the business, sometimes 100% in the business, on the business. What percentage are you working in the business today? So working in the business, doing the do, doing the deals, doing the placements, doing all of the stuff. What percentage from 0 to 100% are you working in the business? Second question I want to ask before we dive in is the seven figure agency roadmap. So this is there's different stages of being a recruitment agency owner. So I've been through them all and some of you might have all been through them all, some of you might be a little bit on the journey. So when you're in starter phase, pretty much where you are just starting out, so you're at pretty much 0 or to 100k a year, so you might be doing 10k a month. Your profitability is very high as a starter recruitment agency owner. But your main problem is getting clients because you pretty much just took whatever job is on there, whatever client is out there. You haven't really put a strategy into place, you're making all of the placements yourself, you're really building the agencies, you're doing your website, you're managing your LinkedIn, you're managing emails, you're doing everything. So you profit tie but your revenue is around about 0 to 100k. So let me know if you're in start affairs, just pop starter in the comments because I'd like to see where everyone's up. Just to give me a gauge as you transcend from starter phase to solopreneur phase, normally in between year one two you go what we call a true recruitment solopreneur or recruiter solopreneur and that's where the revenues run around 250k a year and your profitability is still very high. So it's around about 70%. But your main problem is you've got low fee paying clients, you've hired your first employee, they might have fired them, you might be struggling, they're not really making money for you and you're building the agency but you're building the the old school way. So just what you know. And so like most people like come into building their own recruitment agency, work at another recruitment agency and basically they're trying to plug and play an old outdated model into their business and it just doesn't work. It's very hard for a small solopreneur to scale keep the same blueprint as a 100, 200 man agency. So normally you, you when you're in solopreneur phase, you're still doing it yourself, you're still doing all the placements yourself, you're still speaking all the clients, many doing all the sourcing yourself, but your profitability is high. But you're, you don't have a business, you just have what I would call golden handcuffs. So after solopreneur phase you have a small boutique agency phase. Small boutique agency is where you are pretty much from revenue 300k to run around 750k. Yeah. And that is where your profitability sort of Gets nipped a little bit. It's around about 60% on average. Your employees that might be remote, you might have some in office. You. So traditionally small boutique agencies are pretty much employees between three and seven. The recruitment owner is still pretty much the leader in the business. Still probably doing most 50% of the placements, looking after a lot of the clients. Your main problem is hiring good people, dialing in ops management, productizing your services so actually getting exclusively with clients, starting to get retained business repeatable business with bigger clients. And you're struggling because you're working in the business all the time and not on it because you need more time to free yourself up to work on it so you can grow the business if that makes sense. And then finally you have what we call the seven figure agency phase.

So this is a phase we want to aim for.

Yeah, because seven figure agency phases where my agency's been out easily for the last five years and beyond where it doesn't involve any of my day to day involvement in a business. That's why you're doing a million plus in revenue, perm, fee, GP revenue. Your profitability dips. So it might dip to run around 45, you might get 55%. It's pretty much in between those normally those variables, employee size is around about 8 to 8 to 12. So that is the sweet spot. Like I never advise going past 12 employees. That takes you what I would call into wilderness phase where you need hr, you need laser management, you have a lot of office politics, you have a lot of stress and I would say like to get it from 12 employees all the way to 50. It's another big push. And that's only if you really want to scale and exit the business. And we know the statistics. 9 out of 10 recruitment businesses never sell anyway. So you want to make sure that if you're doing that like keep it to under 12. So those are the phases that we have now obviously some figure agency, that's when you've dialed in the systems and processes. You hiring a manager or player that is going to help run your business day to day. And you're like your biggest, the biggest bottleneck is really letting go most of the time. So that's pretty much the roadmap and basically to dive into what we're going to do today. We are going to do a little bit of work on our business and building a business. One of my old mentors, Michael Gerber from the E Myth Revisited. Great book. If you haven't checked that out, check it out. He Says that regardless of how much you may identify with being an entrepreneur, it's a myth because most businesses are started by them. But our definition entrepreneurs are people who go into business with a vision of a company they want to create that doesn't rely on their own abilities to produce results. This is key. This is one thing I figured out earlier, luckily when I got mentors was I didn't want to be reliant on the business. And most businesses, in fact especially recruitment agencies are started by what we call technicians or what we would call recruiters. So they're the people that are doing the dues. So people who create a place to go to work for themselves and they make that fatal assumption that understanding the technical work or being a recruiter of their business means they're able to successfully build a business that does not do that technical work. And it's an assumption that's not true because it's the only primary cause of failure rate in all of these businesses. So half of all businesses never make it past the fifth anniversary. I'm proud to say our business is still doing seven figures a year in year 10. So we can obviously be doing something right and but it leaves the survivors in survival mode. So many that are going past year five and recruitment business and still in solopreneur, you're just hanging on and others have lost their passion and it's just not fun anymore. And trust me, like being in recruitment for almost 16, 17 years now, it doesn't get exciting all of the time. So if you're a recruitment agency owner, you may be standing at being good at recruitment for another agency, but it does not mean that skill is transferable and you're prepared to create a real recruitment firm that can thrive whether you are there or not and free to live the life that you actually really want. So financial freedom, so building a real company, a business that has systems and a self managing team, it grows, it makes profit and it does not need you day to day. So why remove yourself? Well, so you can actually spend time on what I would call higher value tasks. So working on the business, not in it, have more fun, take holidays when you want, make more money and most importantly, things don't stop when you don't stop. And I call it the new era agency model and I'll walk you through like we want to build, you need to make sure you've got a client, solid client attraction system. So have you got a place where you get client leads coming inbound all the time without you doing the outreach? So it can be automated and a way that you can convert the client. So this is a little bit of this, the sales system that we shared today. And then you need a sourcing system and you need a delivery machine. So those are like the normally the four key areas. I broke it down into a roadmap. So what we do here is we've got attract phase, we've got deliver phase, we've got systemized, we've got skill. And basically I've boiled down over the last 10 years exactly every single thing that you need to build to create a seven figure agency that runs without you. So basically I've broke it down into modules, into different things that you need to install over time, like brick by brick. So you'll see like 0 to 10k. These are the foundations not to get to 10k months, but to get to consistent months without you doing the work. You need client acquisition system installed. You need to start hiring your first VA, you need your LinkedIn candidate automation set up. You need a live lead system installed. You need to upgrade your mindset. All of these things are very, very important for the foundation. And then when you call what I would call like seven figure agency phase and boutique agency phase is when you're dialing in candidate nurture campaigns. The client signature service pitch deck, which is part of the signature sales system which we talk about dialing and all of these things are very, very important. But it's step by step, brick by brick is how we build. So the signature sales system. So I'm going to give you a little bit, this is a sneak peek behind how it works. In our agency blueprint program we help you build out a signature sales system. And in that signature sales system you have your own pitch deck. So, so I, I developed what we call a pitch deck that walks the client through their, recognize their problem, we prescribe them, we give them a solution and we give them options of like how they want to work, exclusive returned and what our unfair advantages are in the market. So our unique selling proposition and unfair advantages in the market is very, very important. So we, we sort of like help you implement that in the business. And it's probably one of the biggest things that's really helped my business. Ronald James this is my office. So we actually have a team in this office in Northumbia House. I actually bought this building around five years ago in the northeast of England. Probably doesn't look as attractive on the outside, but inside it's, it's quite cool. We actually, we renovated all of it inside here as you can see. But to cut a long story short, like Platinum clients was very important to me. So we built a Dream 100 campaign. And these are like the top 100 companies that we wanted to work for, which is tech companies in the northeast. You only need one or two clients to generate, like what I would call platinum clients, exclusive retained. That can take you from being a solopreneur all the way to seven figure agency. And to do that with all of these clients that are one and many more. We did it using the signature sales system. So what is it? So it's a proven, repeatable sales process that helps you close more consistently and helps you engage and retain platinum clients. So it's a system that you can then delegate as an asset in your business. Because now I don't need to present this sales system to potential clients. I've got a team that can present it. And sometimes you, as the agency owner, you're the face and brand of the business. You help grow the business. But at some point, for you to either sell or exit the business or for it to not be reliant on you all of the time, you need to have a repeatable process of like how you onboard clients. And I see this a lot of times with agency owners where they get stuck. Again, they're the one pitching all of the time with the clients, which is fine. But at some point it's going to be a point where one of your employees or your head of department needs to start pitching and they need a proven way and methodology on how to do that. And especially in today's market, especially in 2024, coming into is, we need to make sure that we're offering something totally unique and different to everyone else out there. Because a lot of people are just saying, oh well, I specialize in this niche, or we've got this amount in the database. There's different things of like how you need to pitch with clients to make you stand out. We would promise to deliver a career website. We do social media optimization, we do email marketing for hot shops. We have a tech event that we run ourselves that we could help them be sponsors on webinars. We did video assets, we did progress reports or press coverage. So Tesco bank chose us, my agency over all of the other agencies in the north of England. And we ended up building like I think a team around 70 or 80 employees. This was like one of our tech events that we run called Dev Hub, for example. We did like online webinars. We did awesome stuff. Like we had lots of Engagement like this is probably like higher level stuff like when you win in big, big retainers. But it just shows you the examples of like what you can do from a proven formula and a proven system and like how you can actually win platinum clients. And yeah, this, this account ended up being worth a lot of money to us. And that was all with a signature sales system and process. So it's very important in all of your agencies that you have something like that to implement. So like the first thing that you should start with is making sure like what is your unique selling point and what makes you different. Because you need to have what I would call like inbound marketing, marketing strategies to get candidates inbound that then you can show a potential client how you deliver. You need a consistent database of like what niche candidates that you've got that you can deliver to them straight away. You need a set way of like we, we call it the, the marketing sourcing system. But how we've got video outreach technology that will reach out to candidates and nurture candidates and build relationships with candidates in that niche so they're ready to go. There's tons of ways, like we do events, webinars. Like there's probably a few different components you can install in your signatures, your, your unique signature sales system. So you can put that in a pitch and you can present that to the client. So exclusive and retained. Now a lot of people love the idea of retained. For me personally, like a lot of our business is exclusive. I would say 25% of the business is retained. We did get it up to a point where it was 40%. But for me, like I'm, I am happy with exclusive. The difference between exclusive returned. Yes, you get paid a return upfront. So it's very attractive. You need that mainly on repeat business, I would say. So once you've proven yourself once or twice, I'll walk you through how you would pitch a retained. We call it like a platinum package or a gold package. And then you've got exclusivity. So this is where you would just get the role exclusive. They wouldn't go out to any other recruitment partners at least for three to four weeks to make sure that you can have first go on it to make sure you can deliver effectively. So those are like the two different alternatives that you have. Exclusive returned. Like I said, I like them both. So your delivery method, so your delivery method needs to be aware of like how you can get your talent pipeline funnel installed for the potential clients to fill the jobs. We walk you through how you would build like a candidate pipeline funnel exclusively for each client. So you customize that and they can actually see the pipeline funnel go all the way through from candidate send to interview stage and deal stage. And having a signature sales system is very important. Why? Because it builds a moat around your business. Because the more clients you've got exclusive, retained, the more your business is protected from recessions, from new competitors coming into the market. So for example, a lot of the clients that I showed you on the list where we generated $1.5 million with just those 10 clients in that year, they were all exclusive or retained clients. And what happens when you deliver time and time again with those clients? New agencies that keep starting up to try and get the foot in the door with, with them, they just tell them to go away. Because if you're still delivering, you're building a good relationship with that client and you've locked them into a unique way of how. And you pitched it a unique way in a storytelling way of how you deliver differently, then there's no one that can break down that door to try and get in with those clients. So a competition pushed the bigger agencies away because they couldn't adapt as nimbly as like what I would call my agency, which was a small boutique agency at this time, going to some figure agency stage, we could be more nimble and adapt with a lot of technology and a lot of creative ways of how we get candidates and clients. So that's pretty much like the delivery method, the client signature pitch. Like where I got the idea from was if you've ever read the book Built to Sell, I've got it on my bookshelf there. Great book. If you haven't read it, I would check it out. And he talked about like, if you want to have your business ready to sell, you need to have a unique way of like how you onboard clients and how you win business. And he built sort of similar signature sales system to sort of what I've done in my agency, Ronald James and what we help you do in the agency blueprint program. But that is like, that helps you gear up your recruitment agency yourself because you've got to unique, proven method of like how you can deliver to each client. And one of my favorite quotes from Steve Jobs was like, I like having the idea of like, we are all small giants. So for those of you in solopreneur small boutique agency phase that are still like small and agile, the smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company on the web just because you can leverage technology, you can leverage remote workers that are cheaper, you can leverage a lot of technology that can give you the perception of being a giant. But really you, you're small and those small giants are the best ones that are more agile, more nimble and can be more creative and winning business. So basically what we do in agency blueprint is we, we help you create a pitch deck. So I give you the exact actual selling system that we've used. So inside one of our workshop trainings for example it's 3 hours 40 minutes long. So this is where we really deep dive in to exactly like how you actually going to build onto your own signature sales system. So we walk you through the roadmap, the Canada Trello board, the seven step hiring template and basically the pitch decks. So like the pitch deck that I did for it's worked on over a million pounds in terms of retainers. All of that type of stuff you get in this workshop training here. So that's exactly like how we build it out. So that's the first thing and then the second piece is the community. So yeah, so for those of you that are interested in like how we build it out, we've got a community of almost 300 live recruitment agency owner members from around the world in different niches, all, all joining different times throughout the last few weeks. And basically in there that's where you can go through and ask questions with the like minded recruitment agency owners. We very highly vibrant. You are the average of the five people you hang around with most and then you get a lot of support with different calls. So for instance you get hot seats with this with myself every week. You get cold email campaign mastery by our copywriter Jack. You get calls with our seven figure agency owner Ken and our head of ops Rayhan to dial in things like zapier tools, recruitment automation and that type of stuff. So that's like sort of a little bit sneak peek inside the program for those of you that interested. So piece of art like your client signature piece is you want to create your own style. So one thing that I learned when, when you're going through your presentation is you want to walk them through your process. But as you're going through the pitch you want to make sure you're stopping and asking questions through each phase so you're getting a feel from what the client's needs are and what they need to, to hear from you. Because some people listen through just listening, some people like to see visuals, some people want examples, case studies, et cetera. So that's very important as well. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, well thank you for tuning in. I'm trying to do as many LinkedIn lives as possible. So trying to like do this every couple of weeks or so just to give you guys as much value as possible. So for those of you that are interested, like I said, I popped a link in somewhere in the comments if you, you can have a chat with me or one of the team and basically there's no strings attached with that, like if you need some help, like actually with the, with the program, had any questions at all, wanted to like speak to me or the team, you can book on a call. Basically just a couple of questions on the calendar link. Worst case scenario, if you're not a fit for the program, you leave with an implementable strategy. So on our game plan call, we walk you through the gaps of what you need to fix and then you can go in and fix them yourself. Or best case scenario, we decided to work together and then we can rapidly skill your recruitment agency so there's no risk in actually booking the call. In fact, the only risk is you facing and deciding to ignore everything I just showed you and decided to just go off and keep doing what you're doing. And that's what most people do. That's fine, that's just human nature. But yeah, like if you want to book in a call with me or one of the teams, you can do that on the link. Like I said, there's, there's no downside to that. At least you're going to get some value and you're going to see exactly what you need to do in your own agency to implement it. Good question, Zaid. How much value does someone get who's just starting off? This is a little skill. Both insane value because you're going to, you're going to learn how to make money faster. So I'm going to walk you through how to make placements faster, get better clients, get more retained, systemize your business and put your time up more so you can speak to more qualified candidates so you can make more money. So then you can invest that in a team and then how you build the team. So I'll walk you through how you're going to build a team out so they can generate cash for you. So you're going to get insane in value, whether it's 10x to 20x as a starter phase and looking at skill phase.

So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed that video and the training that we delved a little bit into the sales system. So keep your eyes peeled for for the next one. If you haven't subscribed already, there should be a subscribe link up here just.

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