This is how i went from Solopreneur to $100,000 a month in my Agency

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, in today's video, I'm going to take you behind the scenes in one of my most recent elite masterminds, where I talk around the 2024 agency model, the difference between being a solopreneur recruiter and actually having a real boutique recruitment agency. So hope you enjoy and I'll catch you soon. I want to just get hands in the room. I did ask this on the questionnaire, but who is pretty much just by themselves in their business. You might have a va, but what I mean is solopreneur, you don't really have another biller, so you don't have another recruiter in your business doing deals, just you. So there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Okay, so Solopreneur business, like you can build it up to maybe 320k a year in, I mean maximum deals, you really are going to do two to four deals a month. You would have yourself as a founder, you'd have maybe a general va, you might have a couple of sources, remote ops, and that's pretty much your business. Yeah, and it's nice. Like look, you can make 160 to 320k a year in your solopreneur business, but really like the whole point of getting the business to be an asset, it's very dependent on you as we know. So you're just doing deals all of the time. So even the best, best case scenario in a solopreneur world would be you might make 250k profit a year, you might pay yourself $150,000 or pounds. And yes, so say like you keep 100k in the business, you, you have net cash reserves of 300k in 3 years time. And the plus points are no hassle from employees, which a lot of you talk about simplicity, but it's not sellable and you cannot buy back your time because you're doing everything. So most important thing, and I've seen this time and time again, we've had over 1,000 agency owners come through the program over the last five years. So it's fair to say I know a little bit about what goes wrong with recruitment agency owners. And most of them just stay where they are. In five years time, I can predict they're going to be in the same place, same scenario, peaks and troughs. They won some clients, they lost some clients and they're in the same position and you get increased workload and stress and it's very isolating and lonely. So I think definitely for solopreneurs it's very, very lonely because you have no one else to hold yourself accountable. You've got no employees where you have to go out and win clients. You have to push the business, you have to drive the business because they're not going to stay with you. So the whole point of hiring a team is it holds you accountable to be more successful. And it's 50, 60 hours a week minimum to get to 300k a year. As a solopreneur, you're working hard, hard hours and yeah. So that brings us on to the 2024 agency model. Now, this is one of the books that I recommend to read. Who has read Build to Sell? Yeah, not enough people in the room, guys, I don't understand why no one's read that book. It's one of the books that I've heard. Highly recommended. You can read it on a nighttime. And John talks around how to. It's basically a story around an agency owner. He was a creative agency owner. He had a big client that was depending on him, a bank. And so 70% of his revenue was all dependent on that. He was stressed, he was burnt out and he didn't want to come into the office every day. Cash flow was always an issue. He'd been doing it for 10 years and the business wasn't worth anything. So he approached a mentor and said, how can I get this business ready to exit? And then they started talking about building systems so having a repeatable sales process. So the first thing they did was just drill down into a niche and started building logos for companies. And that was exactly what they did. And to make it repeatable, they created a signature sales pitch deck, like what we teach in a program. Does everyone use the pitch deck? Like hands up, who's actually physically using it and converting it with clients? Okay, again, half the room. So once he'd done that three years on, he had this vision of selling the business for 10 million. And he realized at the end of it, once he got the business running like clockwork with right type of systems, the right type of team specializing in one area, he didn't actually want to sell the business in the end. And that's probably the same with a lot of you. When you get it to that level as a recruitment agency, you want to be in a position where you could sell it if you want to, but you don't need to. That's where my business is at. Ronald James. We've been going 10 years now. I just don't need to sell the business. I could, but there's just no point because I don't have to do anything in the business now and it's running like clockwork. Yes, now and again we might have challenges, one employee might leave, so we need to go and hire someone else and everything else, or sometimes clients might not be hiring and these type of things. But overall, the business pretty much runs itself. And most important thing about an agency, the agency model with a team is it can make money while you sleep. So there's no better feeling. When I check my Slack channel and I see deals coming in 10k, 15k, it's a different, sweeter feeling than you doing and closing the 10,000, £15,000 deal. It's totally different having someone else generate income for you than you having to be the income generator is such a different feeling. And it runs whilst taking vacations. So I've always said throughout my journey, I have six holidays every single year and the business is always there to serve me. The most important thing is you need to build valuable assets. So one thing you learn from the book and build to sell is you build valuable assets. So what we mean by that is which we'll discuss over the next couple of days. Marketing sourcing team in a system that's one asset. A client acquisition system is another asset. Your signature sales pitch deck is another asset your operations integrate. And all of your tech and your automations and now clay AI and the stuff that we're going to be talking about, again, it's other assets in your business that's not relying just on people. Yeah. So most agencies are just hiring more people. They're doing everything in the task. Like more we can systemize the business. The more assets you have in the business, it's less reliant on just that one superstar employee. Most overall, you make more money and you can build a bigger moat around your niche. So everything that we try and build and we teach in the program and in a mastermind is I do it for a reason. So then one people in your company can't go off and set on their own because you're not relying on 360 recruiters anymore. They're just doing one task, which is delivery. So they can't figure out how to build a sourcing team, they can't figure out how to pitch and win the clients because you're winning the clients, et cetera. And it's more consistent and predictable and most importantly, less dependent on you. You get bigger client retention as well with an agency with actual employees because they're less reliant on you and it gives you passive income and you can sell it. So Dee's going to come on and talk around how you can actually sell that business. So for some of you that haven't actually seen this diagram, does everyone have. I know Ken's going to come onto this later on around, like, where he built his plan and roadmap, but all of the time, I was always visually seeing how the agency would work in terms of the structure. So does everyone have, like, a roadmap and plan of, like, where the agency wants to go and they know how many heads they're going to have and how the team looks, or is pretty much everyone starting from scratch? You have that Sandro I got it from? Okay, yeah, yeah. Cool. So there's maybe a couple of you, but that's very, very important. And we're going to talk on goal setting as well and putting our plan together. But you need to at least have a visual of where you need this agency to look and what is the perfect business model for you. And I would say this is pretty much what you should take as a template. You might tweak it a little bit, but even just to replace yourself as the main biller, you. You're gonna need at least two to three delivery consultants to replace yourself as being the biller in the company. So that's one thing you're never gonna replace yourself, like, for. Like, it's impossible. Yeah. So to do that, you need a marketing sourcing team. So the whole idea of the marketing sourcing team, obviously to buy back your time, but the whole idea is to attract a delivery consultant and a good recruiter. You need marketing sources to say, well, if you're doing two deals in one agency, you can do four deals in mine because we've got leverage. So I can give you three times the amount of calls and candidates because we've got a full team sourcing for you. So it removes pretty much 50% of what you would do per day, and you can twice double or triple your efforts. Remote Ops integrator and then General VA and apa. This is pretty much the holy grail model to get to a million plus in your agency. Okay, Is there any questions on that? Anyone at this level or close to repeat, the.

The USP that you sell delivery consultants on so you can do more deals with us. Just said it. So the things that you can. Like how you can attract 363 consultants who work the traditional model and how the benefits of them working for you.

Yeah, the benefits of them. They do more deals and they can work less because the whole idea of a good recruiter is normally working 56 hours a week. Technically, they don't need to do that in this job because they've got jobs coming in. So you're providing them either exclusive or retained clients with repeat business. You're managing the client anyway for them. At the start, you've got marketing sources and you've got automation, so you've already got a good pipeline of candidates. So all they should be doing, like, the ideal scenario is they're just speaking to highly qualified candidates every single day, sending CVs, getting interview feedback and closing deals. That's what they're good at and that's what they're here to do. Yeah. And they should be able to do three to four deals a month on average. Yeah.

So the pitch, Sandro, is if you have a real recruiter, they want to make money.

Right.

They're very money motivated and it's like we're taking away all the bullshit, all the admin, all that, you know, it's like, watch your calendar, fill up and execute on the calls and communicate well with candidates and clients. That's your job. Maybe a little bit of sourcing here and there when we need it, but that's it.

Thanks. So how much should you pay delivery consultants? Could they be commission only? Well, our recruiters are in the office in Newcastle and I think a couple work remote, but on average around about a 30,000 pound salary we would pay on average. Which is what, 40?

Yeah, that are on that one. So they've all got market sources that feed up into them. Their training is around candidate management and understanding CVs and roles. And then they're basically just doing like doing calls all day. The time they spend searching is probably two hours a day max. And then they've each got like feeder market sources, but we lay the salary low and then the commission is slightly higher. But we're in the Southwest, so 23 there is pretty how much commission you win, it tears up monthly depending on how much they build. So with our margins, like, we want to do two deals a month, so we base it off our average fee, where we make like a lot of the money in the first deal and then on the second deal, typically they can get up to like 40%, but it's still staggered up, so they've got to do really two deals a month to get to that marker. And even then it's not across the whole billing, it's tipped. So they can earn a lot of money like we in Our business do pretty well, but our downside is always covered and then the market sources. Obviously it's a different model where it doesn't have too much of an impact on, you know, the outbound of the commission.

And then over season I'll dive into it more. But we're doing a fifteen hundred dollar month base, so eighteen USD a year, thousand dollars per placement. Generally it might swing up her Dow fees.

Yeah, Ken's going to dive into that layer which is the full evolution of the marketing sourcer is they can turn into delivery consultants and recruiters. So we've had. Ken's had amazing success and a few of them in the mastermind as well where they've graduated into being full time recruiters. And Lucy's had that experience as well with herself. So that's the whole idea of building this model. Eventually we're going to not need to have what we call superstar360billers because they're just full of egos. You probably overpay them and they're going to probably cause problems in your business. Nine times out of 10, I've done that many times and hired them and fired them within weeks. In this model it's founder just doing client pitches all day. Yeah. And I've always said this to everyone. This was the last thing I ever delegated. I was always still doing clients. It's the last thing you should ever delegate in your business. There's some of you hide behind if like trying to think, oh, I'm going to get a sourcer to do video outreach on one client. So I'm going to hire a BD person again, try to fill. It just doesn't work. Yeah. The whole idea of you being an entrepreneur in your business is you're the most passionate person in your business. Okay. So you need to be the one that's leading from the front and winning the client because people buy from people. Okay. So you need to have that charisma, the drive, the entrepreneurialism and even Thibaut. You could probably talk around how you wouldn't like your first clients. You, you just did exactly the playbook I told you to do. Do you want to actually maybe talk that to the group? Tebow came as a guest by the way. He's awesome in accelerator. He came yesterday and just I loved his energy and me and Ken both said look, we'd love to just have him in the room for the day because it's great to have other young entrepreneurs coming in that are just fresh and they just learn and they implement yeah. So do you want to talk just maybe for a couple of minutes around your experience of how you won the first couple of clients?

Thanks for the introduction. So my name is. The way I got in touch with James is actually via book. So I've never thought by myself that I would ever buy a course by just reading a book. Yet I did. So I was reading the book and I started to watch more videos. And as I did, I just really got sucked into all the things of the recruiter accelerator. And, yeah, I was a newbie. So seven months ago, I was still on the construction site doing electricity. And I always had a dream. I was always working in the basements of the houses. It was always dark because obviously the electricity is set up. And when I was going to my van and the sun was shining, I was thinking by myself, like, damn, people, what are you doing? Why would you even stay here in the basement for the rest of your life? And I always wanted to start a recruitment agency, so I did. I just did it. I started doing what I thought was the right thing. So I started hiring marketing agencies. I got leads, as in candidates, but I had no jobs done. So I just had a lot of leads and I couldn't really place them. And I was struggling with finding clients, and I really wanted to be like the band the Crates recruiter that I actually really wasn't at all. And I was selling myself as a professional, but that didn't work at all. And then I got on a call with James, I mean, on the Q and A call, and he told me, like, thibault, man, just be. You just be needy. Just be a starter, like what you are, a startup guy. And I did it. So I got in touch via loom videos with a cool founder, an IT founder, basically. And it was around my age, and I was so needy, I said, damn, I just need you. I really just want to start working on these jobs so I can actually really get my agency running. And I like, literally drop everything to go and work on those jobs. And that's what I did. And it really works now. So I'm super glad to be here, standing in front of all of you with a cool view as well.

So.

So thank you for that opportunity as well.

Good. Thanks, Thibaut.

So you started with electricity, but now.

You'Re working for it? Yeah, indeed. So it. So I started off with technicians, but technicians are, I mean, for me at least, really hard to communicate with. So you tell them A, and they will hear it as B, and they will do C, So Basically for me, it was really hard to maintain that and I always was interested in sales. I studied sales as well. I went to university for it and. Yeah, I know. And then I got into electricity. Bit weird, I know, but I just want to do sales because it's lovely. There's people, man. I just love sales people, really. They're like extroverted. They're just telling you what it is, they give you advice. So it sales.

It is, yeah.

Belgium. Belgium.

Super close. Cool. Thanks, Tebow. Yeah, so we're going to touch on that like probably later on over the sessions around the business development side because I think a lot of you from the report was still struggling with clients. But even just Tebow being passionate about your business and just asking for the work and going above and beyond. So obviously with that agency model, just I want to get an idea who's actually got a recruiter in their business. At least one, like a real recruiter that's actually doing placements. Okay. Who's got more than one? Yeah. Cool. So obviously the goal over the next couple of days is just to try and cement that belief system that you're going to need more than one and you can't. Those of you that are on one now, you need to hire as soon as humani possible. Okay. Because that person needs to see growth. They don't. No one really wants to work for a small, small business of like two or three employees. They need to see growth. So you don't want to get stuck in that chasms. Like the area where it's like two or three people, then all of a sudden that one person leaves and you start again. It's really, really hard. You need to keep momentum. So let's say, for example, I'm really small numbers. If you had your agency model and you did $500,000 profit a year, but none of these deals were done by you, like actually the team, you still took your own 50k salary. You'd be left with $250,000 a year times 3. So you'd be left at 750k instead of the 300. Now that 500k profit a year on average, 2 to 3 times EBIT multiple on a small agency would be worth 1.5 million. Whereas the solar panel business isn't worth zero if the business is doing deals without you. So even just on a small scale, and obviously we can blow it up, but I just wanted to be realistic. Moving from the Solopreneur model, we've 3 and a K cash reserves in the next 3 years, your business isn't worth anything. You've just got the cash that's in the bank and that's it. And you're still working 60 hours a week. Or you've got an agency model where it's churning out at least 500k profit per year. And I've said the profit's a little bit lower because that means that you're not doing the deals. Okay. You might get it to a million dollars plus profit if you did the deals. But the idea of like having a business that doesn't rely on you to generate income is a lot more better and more sellable. Yeah. So even if you had that business at 1.5 million valuation plus a 750k cash reserve that you'd have in the bank on an exit, so you just pay a couple of gains tax on your business is worth 2.25 million, 7.5 times more than a sole printer in just three years just by hiring two or three delivery consultants, having two or three marketing sources and not doing deals yourself or in three years time you're going to be in the same position. Okay, so yes, since I started Ronald James, it's almost been 10 years now and I haven't been in that business like day to day but real estate four years because I moved to Dubai three years ago, over three years ago now and it's well produced over 12 million in net fee income, gross profit and it's made me easy, over $5 million in profit out of that business alone. And I haven't again, I don't do anything in that business anymore. So the question I'm going to leave you with now is now, which model are you choosing for your future? Are you going to stick with just having a solopreneur business or just one recruiter? Are you actually really wanting to drive this? Because the whole idea of you're all in the mastermind is I know you all want to be successful and you've all got what it takes. It's just like forcing yourself to do that little bit extra to push, take the risks. I was asking in the room yesterday of like who has shares or portfolios or stocks and shares and these type of investments, like out of interest, who has like money in investment portfolios and wealth management and stuff? Yeah, so, so a lot of you, I mean my personal opinion, I've never started doing that until recently. Like a year ago till I had like at least four or five million dollars liquid. I've started to put it in private banking and let them invest some, but before that was always in myself and business. Like you will never like 6, 8, 10% return on some stocks after management fees, you could easily get a 500% ROI on your business and take the risk. Now, I understand everyone's in different positions with family and different ages, so your risk as you get older is less okay. So, which makes it even more important that you need to go out now in the next 12 months and build your agency. Stop messing around in terms of like not taking the risk. And if you've got cash sitting there in an investment portfolio, take that and get it in your business and start investing in team. Because once you get a team that can generate cash, then you're going to get a bigger multiple and a bigger return on your investment.