The Contract Recruiter’s Comeback: How Nick Chambers Rebuilt His Desk & Doubled His Weekly GP

[Music] Nick, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. I think this is what second-first time lucky. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think having a baby gotten away a little bit. We planned it out and I think in reflection, organizing to have a podcast when my wife was about eight months pregnant was probably not going to do. No, I don't. So today there's a couple of like core things that we really want to go through together. You're through and through contract recruitment. So there's really two sort of pillars that we want to cover in this conversation. One, printable strategies that you've consistently used over the years to build a contract book when we cover some of those. And then two, you went on the typical journey that a lot of people go on, which is you perform well. Maybe you aspire to go down the management route. Maybe the company's like, "Nit, you should go down the management route." But you ended up being in that typical sort of billing leading by the front, then managing people. But then whilst that was happening, it was hard to maintain your contract book. And then we had a few realizations. And then since being in the this year, you've gone then back to being an individual contributor and just focusing on building back your contract book and just being responsible for your performance. So we're going to talk about some of the lessons there because I think that'd be really interesting for people. So to give everyone some insight on your journey, let me not forget any of this wrong. So yeah, you've exclusively been doing contract recruitment since 2017. Always focus on the UK market. Started your career G2 and then ended up you actually did do palm initially didn't you and then went into contract. With G2, that was just pure contract doing the Benlux market. And then you moved on to red. Then I just like pure temp kind of high volume market. Yes, I got that complete. That's right. And then for the past four years, you've been a method resourcing. So I know Tom started that business and then again, specialised in niche contract recruitment in the UK and you've specifically been focused on the data market and data niche. Now you was because we're going to talk about this. Their first contract hire, although Tom has a background in contract but built the business initially through palm revenue. Like a lot of people do. So I think when you joined, I've got here the business had around up 13 contractors out and then you was the first fully focused contract hire. So by late 22, you was leading a team of five, two people covering public sector, three private sector at the peak. You had around 76 contractors out 16 K weekly GP. And then this is then throughout that journey. I think more so last year, you was like managing, billing, but mainly spending a lot of your time coaching, driving performance of the team, which then meant your contract book by the time you went back to this individual contributor role, your book was back down to five and a half K. So we're going to go into that. So then over the past three, four months, you've really been building that backup, although you've been focused on that since Jan, now back up to eight and a half week, you GP 20 contracts across nine clients and really feel like building momentum again, which we're going to get into. So I think that just gives everyone a bit of insight. So why don't we just initially talk about what is talking about it, outside before we started, when you're in contract recruitment, there's just way more for you to consider when leaving the recruitment company that you work for. There's just a lot more to leave on the table, especially if you worked really hard, got your contract book to X, to then walk away from that knowing guaranteed revenue, guaranteed money is hard. But I think there will be a lot of people out there that who are good get opportunities where it's like Nick, you can join our recruitment business. You'll be the first contract hire. We want to build contract. We've got a track record in perm. This is a great opportunity for either the people you can cross sell into, etc, etc. If we're in that position and we're getting those types of opportunities, I just wanted to ask you what are maybe some of the things that people can really consider and to be intentional about when considering these opportunities. If they've worked really hard, good contract recruiter may be considering going to another one organization. They've got this opportunity in front of them. What would you tell them to be like, I would really make sure you ask this or you find this out that would hopefully help them have a better chance of making the right decision versus getting down a slight, this is a load of shit. There's not a platform here. There's not much for me to go out here to on the literally starting from ground zero. Yeah. I think from my personal experience, it came down to understanding what the background of the other leaders in the organization was. For example, Tom and Brent's method, although they've gone more into the permanent side of things since starting pushing forward with method resourcing, they were both contract recruiters at heart. I knew that there was some spot business that was coming in through the organizations that they'd been doing permanent recruitment with. I knew that the questions had been asked throughout. I knew that there was some form of baseline because you can have all the organizations that you work with in the world. There are organizations out there that just don't want to use or have strict guidelines around not using contractors. I guess recruitment companies could be out there saying, "Yeah, we've got 30, 40 different brands, 100 different brands. They could all just be looking for permanent people, not doing project based kind of work." When I went into method, I knew that there was a couple of organizations that they were already having appetite for contract. It wasn't like a starting from scratch. I made the Haywire Sonshine when I came in and I put myself in a pretty precarious situation of coming in. There was a couple of roles where they said, "Straight away, "we've got something that's come in. You're our contract guy now. Feel your boots." Then I just boosted bolted from that and then started introducing myself to other areas of the business that you would also hire a contract because the other areas of the organization did. Some form of baseline know that the people that you're surrounded with have some form of contract background as well. If you're coming in and you're just completely surrounded by permanent people, they're just two different animals of recruitment. I think at the time I probably didn't have a load of experience. I was about three and a half years into my career. To go in where there was just permanent recruiters, there wasn't any contractors whatsoever. Probably would have been pretty balls of me, I think. I made sure that I had some form of baseline by asking a few more questions of other people in the business who've done contract before. Can I learn from them? Yes. Other organizations that they're working with currently, although it might have only been a couple, like ones or twos in terms of contract hires, but there is appetite and they're not against it. Yes. Fantastic. They were the key kind of things that made me realise, "Okay, this is the place where I can start a foundation and then scale from there." You weren't surprised to hear this, but also a lot of founders that have just three and three palm background and they want to grow, they want to scale, they want to make their business more valuable. At some point, we'll have a conversation about I need to launch contract. If I put an opportunity in front of you where our organisation is three and three palm, there's no one in the business that has done contract. I've maybe done some of the grunt work and legwork of like, "I've got the infrastructure. I can maybe talk a good game when I'm interview a new saying like, we've got this in place. We're ready to go. I've got the infrastructure. Maybe I've done the legwork of being like, I know I'll talk 20% of customers that spend the X with us on perm. They've told me directly that they are also contract hires and they do that. If it is just a frown for you palm, because that'll come up a lot. Is it anything else that maybe you'd really try and understand or do you do diligence on or really be intentional around before you go, you know what? Let's get this opportunity to go." Yeah. I think you need to find an individual that's built a market from scratch then. It's going to cost it. Naturally, because like you said, it's hard for a contract recruiter to walk away from a book and I guess the security of that sometimes. And so, yeah, I think realistically you need to find someone who, because since I joined method, I went crazy on making sure I could just jump on any contract hiring that I could. Then I put myself in a position then a year later, I'm like, "Shit, this isn't scalable." Okay, now I need to build a market from scratch and then I started kind of niching down into data and then built it out from there, from the ground up. And so, having someone who knows how to go about that and what they did, how they did it, whether it be running events, whether it was doing it literally kind of day.recruitment, speaking to your contractors, building, you know, your top 30 contractors that you know will go places, they'll take you with them. If you build enough of a rapport, start tracking where the bigger projects are happening, who is making the biggest transformations. Okay, who are the consultancies that are working with them? Do they use recruitment companies? And once you get that idea of does this person actually know what they're talking about? Do they know how to build it from scratch and are they up for the challenge? That's when it's worth taking a bunch. Love that. Because it's also, if they understand that they know how hard it is, they know how long it might take. So, it's also that, isn't it? Because we want to make sure, if you are considering that, you've got that opportunity that you've really pressed them on what their expectations are because if they're expecting, they've never done contract before. I'm joining that environment and we're going to get up to 20k a week, could you pee within six months? Maybe possible, I don't know, but it's also that, isn't it? Like you said, so if they understand all that, they should also understand what actually are realistic expectations. Yeah, I think I said to you downstairs, I think recruitment is a three-year investment. To get the kind of return that people all talk about, it can take that period of time. Yes, if you, if you talk to enough people and we working God knows how many hours in the day, yeah, you'll probably be able to do it sooner. Will you have any form of life? I don't know. But that first 18 months, you're figuring out how you go about recruitment, what you're doing, and why you're doing it. Once you figure out the why, and then you figure out how you've gone about those first 18 months, where you're gonna do kind of a few different deals, and you probably won't know how you did it. And then the second 18 months is then like, okay, that's the recipe, that's the method that's working. Now how do I scale that? By that point, usually the contractors that you've obviously placed in those first 18 months of finishing, and so you've gotta then keep on growing and growing and growing and growing. And so yeah, I think realistically, I mean, maybe say that in an interview that, yeah, I think we'll get there in three years. But I do think that people need to make sure that they're not naive in that in the first six to 12 months, you're gonna start making X amount figures. I think OT used one me up a little bit. I've been working in sales for God knows how long, and whenever organizations come to me saying there's an OT X within experience of time, that's completely up to the individual, and how hard they work. And I know that there's probably things that you can measure on, but yeah, I think it's too ambiguous and too many different things that could play into that. - So let's get into some of these strategies then, because we've pulled these strategies from really, or last like four or so years, right? So these have consistently worked, we've used them now, have used them for the last few years. I guess what I wanted to ask you before we diled into some of these, because you mentioned it earlier, you may or may not see this in the seat year, and I'm not sure, but I think more and more people that I speak to would describe the UK market as extremely challenging, extremely saturated, really hard. There's plenty of people who are making, who are achieving a lot of success in the UK market. But I don't know if you see this, but I think a lot of people like, we just do the US for these reasons. Like nothing's a silver bullet, but the reason I'm bringing this up is, I'm super curious just before we start, just to hear your take on, if we're going to be successful in UK contract, how important is it to have a niche? How niche is niche? Like let's just talk a bit about that at the market piece, because you've ended up building an ecosystem in data recruitment. Did you start somewhere else, and then you got to that point, like just talked to a bit about how important it is to have this niche, have this focus, particularly in the UK market, which a lot of people would say is extremely saturated, margin of being more squeezed and ever, just talked to a bit about that to start. Yeah. When I joined method, I was almost just like, 'cause I was the contract guy, I had to be almost take agnostic across all of our different areas, because if it was one of our clients came in and said, "Yeah, we need a solution architect." Okay, I'll go and figure out what the hell the solution architect is, at the start of it, and then go from there, and it was varied quite a bit, and I think the first year, 2021, was obviously quite fruitful, going in there and just filling my boots with whatever I could, understanding as I went and learning, I think that helped a lot in terms of helping me understand tech again, coming back into it from G2 back into method. So I think that it was really, really good for the initial stage, but it's not scalable. Like I was not a specialist, I was a jack of all tradesmaster of none, and when I got to a couple of years in, and it was still, you know, I've got my key clients who probably comes to me with things that are slightly different to data. I can never hand on heart say to them, "Yeah, I'd probably know a couple of guys," or "Girls." So it's not a situation where I can pull people off the top of my head, where as, when I started honing in on data, it started to become a lot clearer that, if I focus time in one area, run events based around that area, understand who the best contractors are in that market, understand which clients are doing what transformations of migrations or optimizations, anything like that. That's when I can hand on heart speak to a client and actually speak high level, because I'm recruitment at the end of the day, high level, their language. And there's been a few conversations I've had now where senior level contractors or managers are usually a little bit undertaken back of, "Okay, this person actually understands what I actually need to deliver." And they've been able to do it before, and it's all about, I think, these days, about actually bringing together live case studies of what you've done before and so you can replicate it and show these clients what you're doing. And I think if you end up niching cost technology, it's too big of an area. Even just doing data for me sometimes is too big of an area. And so then I hone in on more data engineering and architecture instead. So then I think it is more important than ever to niche down specifically on a market. And with the way that the UK market is, last year was tougher than usual. I think this year it seems tough, but I think it's because we, a lot of people, fall into the trap of probably thinking it's what it used to be in 2021, but that was an anomaly. And so it's not necessarily that the market's harder. You just need to work harder. I think that's probably the easiest way of putting it to be honest. And when you know you mentioned it, it wasn't scalable, just to understand that. Is that you saying that it wasn't scalable because every time a hiring manager would say, "Nik need your help, need a solutions architect, or need a project manager," you potentially would be starting from scratch or starting from like 0.5 or 0 every time. And also then you couldn't scale the information that you were gathering every time, which you could then use on the next. Is that that? We'll get back to the episode in just a second. But first, a quick word about something that's helping agencies solve one of recruitment's biggest problems, productivity. Every week, recruiters lose over eight hours to admin, updating CRMs, chasing follow-ups, writing notes, switching tools. That's one day every working week. And it all adds up to missed revenue. That's where SourceWell comes in. 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You end up spending probably double the amount of time. Like because I've been working in recruitment for such a long time, usually you kind of throw me a contract role and I can feel it quite quickly. But if I get a data engineering role in, that is a particular cloud platform, you know, implementing a specific data warehouse. I can literally find, I will know four people who are no-ro available in five minutes, be able to have a quick conversation with them and double check that then nothing has changed since two days. Go probably when I spoke to them. And then I've finished that job and I can then crack on probably doing more business development. Whereas if it ends up being outside of that niche, you end up spending potentially one, two more hours, then you would have, if you stayed within your niche. And it's all about time management. If I'm then coming up against Nick who just does solution architects in that, then actually they're probably going to be able to be able to do it. And then you said data, that seemed quite broad. So I was going to ask you like how, maybe you thought about that. So if I was to say to you, yeah, I do data in the UK, that maybe isn't neat. I'll get this fairly niche, I guess. But then what you were saying was actually, is that I do data in Bristol for ex-tops of companies. I don't know like how have you thought about that then, because it sounds like that's evolved. Yeah, we originally went in things like a rig. So role industry geography. So sometimes you can hone in that much in terms of what the role is. So data engineering industry might be retail, geography, London. So mine isn't necessarily the industry focused as much. However, the way that I've gone about it is much more data engineering and architecture in the London market. That's predominantly where my soul focuses. So I think it's stuck within that kind of space, because when you go into, it's like anything with like developments, not usually my forte as much. And everyone knows I'll put my hand on that one. I know where my strengths are. But there's specific recruits that will go specifically just, go length, for example, as like a language. And that is like a niche within a niche. So I do think that we have to, although be a little bit fluid, otherwise you'll just miss out on opportunities. And I think that there is a balance. You do have to hone in specifically on to an extent job titles, but what the actual projects are. So most of mine end up being either migrations or optimizations. And stick within that kind of alley, I think. And then just final piece on this. From what I'm hearing then, if you listen to this podcast, probably heard this before. But I think it's always good just to really have people explain their fault process when we hear overused words like niche and stuff like that. So I think that's why it's helpful for people. But from what I'm hearing then, the main benefit, particularly in the UK market, for you to operate in this sort of niche focus way, is it's a lot more scalable because every time you're maybe working on a particular assignment, you're building a. that you can reuse time and time again. And then every single time that you're having conversations with people, you're building your sort of information, knowledge bank of what you're understanding, what's going on, who the best people they've worked with are. And again, it's just like being able to reuse all of the information is that the main thing basically. And then if you do a good job of that, like you just said, you should be able to get to a point where hiring managers says, "I've got this problem, I need these people." And if you've done it in this way, you can go, I know three people that could probably do that, that I spoke to this week. Is that the main benefit, basically? - Yeah, I think knowledge is key. And the way that you speak to managers these day, you have to be credible. Like, no one wants to be sold to. I don't know if that's true. I think no one wants to be sold to badly. And so if you're already able to actually kind of articulate, okay, to be fair, I've actually got three people. One of them has completed this exact project for me, working with X Company, implementing this, doing this, this, and this using these tools. Does that probably sound like someone that you'd be looking for? You know the answer to that. So that can be so much more powerful than, no worries, I should be able to get that sorted by the end of the day. I'll just have a chat with a few different people. Like, straight away it sounds like you know what you're talking about, because you actually do. And I think that will make a massive difference. And I find that a lot of the conversations I'm having now with data leaders, they're now recommending me to other managers, outside of their business to say, oh Nick actually did this for me. He might be able to help you with your optimization with his network. And that's where I'm starting to get kind of referrals across different people now, now that I'm getting back into gear, figuring out how to do, they don't recruit me again. Well, let's start with one of the strategies which it sounded like has been definitely impactful in this particular segment of your career, where when from managing, coaching, other people, that being a big chunk of your time to now just being focused on yourself. So let's talk about this like embracing the community approach, because I don't know what everyone would think, but I do think if we were to say run industry events, round table was maybe now pull cast different things, there'll be people out there that think, oh they've already been done, they're not effective, they don't work. So I'm just curious to talk about this. So I've got here, stay connected, use WhatsApp groups, run virtual events. Like talk to a bit about this place, maybe firstly just to talk to people, like if we do this effectively, like what are the net benefits from, just from a recruit perspective? Like what would you say those net benefits are? Is it that if I do this over whatever time period, when they need contract support, they're gonna call me and it results in that? Is it actually enables you to open up doors with people that maybe you'd find it really hard to, when you're just speaking to them about contract opportunities or are they contract horrors? I don't know, you'd tell us like, what are the actual main benefits of your experience from a recruit perspective in this play? - Yeah, it's definitely a proactive approach and it's never gonna get quick wins. I get genuine enjoyment out of it. I think bringing together like-minded leaders in the same room to be able to talk about what's happening in the market, talk about the same pains that all the leaders are going through at the same time. I think one of my previous round table co-founders said that the higher up you get the longer it can become. And so I think finding these different communities that you can build yourself to bring people together, I think that's a massive value. And if you can do it authentically, it becomes a very non-salesy approach to be able to build your credibility. It isn't a quick win where suddenly, the next day after the event, Nick, I need 10 contractors, that'd be fantastic. But it's very rare that that does happen, but it's another opportunity for you to build a relationship with a hiring manager. And in this market at the moment, it's less likely, I won't say it's completely unlikely, that you call a manager up out of the blue, never spoken to them before. And they say, "Yep, I am hiring. I need a contractor. When can you get on someone to me?" They end up going to people that they know and trust now. And that takes time building that trust that you're not just there to literally just put a bum on seat, you're showing interest in the, I guess the like respect about the Ford Vanneesh that you're working in. And you're giving back and giving people a space to be able to kind of express themselves, talk about the challenges that they're going through. And you're adding genuine value. That's when people will buy from you. And I think some situations it's taken three, four, five months later, that client to come back to me and say, "You know what, Nick, yeah, yeah, I actually doing this something has popped up." Usually my conversations are continuous over that period of time. I stay in touch with people. That's probably one of the things that I am quite consistent in and that makes a hell of a difference. So that's when start of things to start have a ripple effect. But I think the net outcome of it really is, if you can run four events a year, so one-edge quarter, 'cause it does take time, usually trying to do it like six weeks in advance. For the first year, it will be about building a community of people, the ones that you know. Are these people going to be adding value to the events that I bring them to? Do they like me? It does actually make a difference. And are they seeing the value that's coming out of it? And that's usually, you get that kind of vibe from them afterwards when you ask for their feedback. Every single time, I speak to every single person who comes to my event and say, "Can you give me some feedback constructive?" Whatever it is, 'cause I want to be able to kind of grow this. And I think that authentic side of things again, just makes it a bit more human and people buy from people. And so that first 12 months, you'll probably end up, winning maybe about three pieces of business off the back of it, but then it just starts to kind of build and grow and grow. And as long as you don't see it, just as a pure business development kind of approach. And you see it as, you know, what this is another thing that I can actually genuinely enjoy doing about my job, bringing these people together. That's, I think, what will make the big difference anyway. Now I know a higher manager can be someone that you work with and you're helping them push forward their career. But if I'm listened to this and I do like the idea of this, it's something I've wanted to do. Would you say that from your experience, the best play, if you were to invest time into it, do those four events in the year for it to be really targeted on those hiring managers and those people in those decision positions versus contract, like the world class contractors that are doing the quite and quite job. How do you think about that? Or is there, would there be just as much benefit doing it, you know, bottom up or top down? Yeah, mine's always been based around the leaders, the actual hiring managers themselves, mainly because I had a baseline to be able to actually build off it. And so I found that they were more open to the idea of events, like yeah, it's definitely been and done for, and I usually open it up by saying that if I'm introducing it for the first time, I'm like, look, I know that every recruiters and their dog are doing events at the moment. This is something that I've been doing for a good few years. Now I love bringing people together. I know I harder it is as leaders. And even if you're from completely different industries, it seems to be the same challenges. This is the event that's coming up. Would this be of interest? Or what kind of events do you actually like to go to? And once I kind of have that conversation start opening in that sense, that's when it starts kind of rolling. But the, I find that the hiring managers seem to go to these events a lot more and to be honest, that's only based on my own personal experience, because that's where I run the events. I think there's also events that we're getting involved that is more for, I guess, contractors who are going into these as well. But I just haven't kind of gone down that route to be fair. So yeah, okay. Have you experimented a lot with, like, event style? Like have you done round tables? Have you done, I guess the typical one would be show up? We're going to have, like, food and drinks, bit of networking, sit down. There's going to be some subject matter expertise talking about relevant topics right now. There's going to be two or three torts, Q&A, then networking after. I'd say that's a very typical style of an event that anyone could run in a playbook for that. But have you approached those? Because, like you said, a lot of people, again, I do think it's maybe the wrong assumption. And I think I don't know who wouldn't find it useful, despite it being done already a lot, who isn't going to find it helpful if you're a leader. And you feel like the channels that you have and problems you have are personal to you, but you get to speak to, like, Nick in a different industry, different company. And you learn he's solved some of these issues that I'm having. I always think that's going to be useful for people, despite people assuming that events have been done. I don't even have a recruitment event, but actually I just think it's about the people attending. And will they find it useful? I'd say for the most part, if you do a good job of getting the right people in the room, it only takes you meeting one person in that room to go, Nick, it was an excellent event. I managed to meet Pete over here, who's doing something exactly what we're doing, and that's been a great connect for me. How have you found experimenting with the event star? I don't know if you've experimented with that. What does that look like? We'll get back to the episode in just a second, but today I'm excited to talk to you about one of our partners, Rayz, who are hands down the best way to fund and manage your contract book. I've had countless people on the podcast over the years singing their praises. Ray's supported hundreds of UK and US agencies, large and small in managing their runners. 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You can click the link in the show notes or you can go directly to www.RaysTech.io/RMP. That's www.RaysTech.io/RMP to get access to that offer and check out Rays. Yeah, I've tried a few different things. I think the one that I've ended up probably leaning more towards, instead of doing a big meetup where there's kind of, you know, 40, 50, 60 odd people, I find that if I can get anywhere between 20, 25, where it's a bit more of an intimate kind of environment, everyone gets to have a say, everyone gets to probably meet each other and that's what's being able to gain a bit more interest from people. That is kind of where I've honed in on a little bit more is there's usually I have kind of one or two speakers that will come to the events and then kind of talk about a specific matter. So the last time I had the CDO of Aliens, I'm speaking my vein, which is really cool. And so the topics will be based usually around then who are going to be in the room. I try and keep relatively broad and so you can get a mixture of people, but then sometimes I'll then the way that I experiment necessarily isn't based around kind of the structure of the event, but on the audience that is coming and who the speaker is going to be. The first couple that I did was probably more of a round table where pretty much everyone in the room, there was only about 10 people, but everyone spoke. And so I just did an introduction and then just said, let's discuss this in a bit more detail. And it really just started kind of building this conversation, which was really, really powerful. And I think that's what motivated me about these kind of like I'm literally sitting at a table with a bunch of C suite individuals who have been in these industries for god knows how long. And I'm learning so much about my specific area of expertise that I can now bring to other people that I'm talking to as well and then get them involved in this too. So once I figured out, okay, this is what works for me personally. I don't think like we said before, there's no silver bullet of event. A lot of people find that big meetups work really, really well. We can get a lot of people in the same room. Does look really good as well. For me, the more intimate 15, 20, 25 people, everyone gets to actually have a conversation with each other and really understand how people have gone about, I guess, their day to day of these challenges. That's what ended up working for me. And then just a bit tactical, but like do you charge for these events? Sort of. Yeah. No, no, I find that it is just a pure value out of what method are doing. And usually it's the clients that I work with that offer their spaces up for me as well. So yeah, being able to kind of go into a place, not having to pay, I mean, it costs enough to travel in London to get to these events. And so everything's completely free for people to come along to, but everyone is flack of a better word, vetted, who comes along. So I won't just literally send out an invite and say, come along to this event. Every single person I will talk to, I'll do either video call or meeting person to make sure it's going to be relevant for them and make sure that it's the right thing for me to bring them to as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be all about who's in the room for people to go. That was a really good event. Yeah. Just to round this out, then, where does the WhatsApp group piece come in? Is that more on the contract side of your network? Or is it if anyone attends these events who we started to say to people like, would it be a bad idea for me to add you to our CDO WhatsApp group? I don't know. Like, how are you leveraging the WhatsApp piece? Pretty much the latter. Sometimes we take everything way too seriously. Everything's via email. Or we have to have a conversation. We have to meet in person when we're in a suit that's gone. Those days are kind of, I've changed quite dramatically. I think for my area anyway. So, I think making things in a casual but professional way is going to get through to people a lot better. So, yeah, everyone that comes to my events, I say, look, I've got WhatsApp group where I provide insights into what's happening in the market. So we'll do all of our quarterly insights into what the salary bandings are for a lot of the roles within data. What is actually happening in the market, who are the big hitters, where are people going? What areas of the UK are they going to as well? Also, keep them up with events and it's just a much quicker way of being able to communicate. I haven't had anyone say, no, I don't want to be a part of that WhatsApp group yet. So people are seeing the benefit of it. Anything that's easily accessible these days makes life easier. So if I can make it convenient for them and it's also convenient for me to be able to reach out to people in a less, easiest way to put it, less professional environment, where everything is just so rigid and just keep it a bit more calm and casual while still keeping a professional has made a massive difference in how I'm being able to communicate effectively. Yeah, I love that. A lot of you've mentioned and I definitely agree this should be part of the things that we're speaking about here. If that's been really effective for you, you can understand and see why, but that should be part of a wider strategy. Yeah. So let's just talk about, I know we've got different things here. We've got, have a really organised mindset, focus on quality relationships, a few different things here. Talk to us a bit about how, if I get really good at contract recruitment, I've maybe got this as part of my plan, bringing people together a lot we just spoke about. What are the other things that you've had to be really disciplined with? Is it the chasing leads? Is it, you tell us what are the other things then that we need to combine this with that should net result in meaning that we've already got, we've always got a good strong, healthy part of the line or at least healthy bits of information to go. I know I've heard about this project. I'm really going for them. You tell me it can't be just this strategy, can it? No. There's some people that we'll just base it purely on that. And it's like I said, it's a proactive approach, but I think that is going to be one part of a multi-facet approach to business development in general. I think the way that I approach every single day is I still do a day plan to this day. It's not as old school as when I first started the method where, you know, divided my book as Tom taught me into four different squares of kind of saying like what my day is, what kind of leads, I'm chasing after at the moment one of my callbacks and running through that process. But it is understanding we work in sprints. So okay, I'm going to start my day off, speaking with all my contractors and understanding how things are going with, you know, whether they're in the contracts for myself or whether they're, I know that they are just good contractors in my market, in my network and understanding, okay, you know, if I spoke into a contractor for the last year, haven't been able to quite work with them yet, but they know me, they've got my numbers saved in their phone, they're going to probably tell me, yeah, one of the other data engineers just got, got let go or they've had a massive restructure in the organization. There's been quite a lot of change on their permanent side of things. So straight away for me, that's understanding, okay, there's project information here, their projects can't just stop. That means that realistically they're most likely going to need contractors to come on board. So it's being a little bit intuitive on that. But if you can get, I guess, to start the day off, speaking to your contractors, understanding what's happening, that'll set your rest of your day up in terms of your business development. I always do half, half of speaking to candidates in my network, building and finding new candidates because I will never know every single good data engineer in architect in the world or in the UK at least. Then in the afternoon, it's then about, okay, how do I approach it from speaking with the leaders in my network that I know, for example, are looking for work and checking in and seeing how they're doing, seeing if there's any opportunities within my office that I could help them out with. So obviously I've got a permanent counterpart, Joe, who does exactly what I do, but on the permanent side. So we work really, really closely to make sure that if he, you know, one of his clients, they haven't quite been able to find the right permanent person, but they need him like yesterday. And everyone's on three month notices. Then he will go, Nick, are they going to do a contract list jump in and call with them? And equally, there's a lot of situations where constantly, no, we're not looking for contractors, but we are looking for a permanent person. Fantastic. I'll pass you over to Joe here. I'll go right with that. And having that person to work collaboratively with makes a massive difference. And you'll end up making each other money, simply put. Yeah, just really, I always hear this. It just really sounds so like just information led connecting dots. All of that, isn't it? It really does sound like that. And then the better you get, the smarter you get going, Nick just told me this, which means I'm going to be speaking to that person, along the speed to that person and connecting those dots. And I guess again, this comes down to the mark at the niche. I should become more and more second nature of like, I've just heard that this organization is going to be implementing this new data infrastructure. I need to get all over that. Do you know what I mean? And it's then you'll get better at really understanding what information you prioritize. Yeah. curious thing because I know one of the things that you said to me when I'm prepared for this, I always ask people like, what would your colleagues say, your exceptional at and you said around like sort of being able to build relationships out of like nothing? And we hear this word, "relationship" a lot. I'm just curious, someone asked me this the other day, if I'm in your team and I'm going like, what is a good relationship? Like how do we build a good relationship? I don't know how you think about that. It's a great question. It's probably why I moved away from management into being an IC again because I couldn't quite figure out how to train someone in this. And being able to articulate it is really, really difficult. But I think when you get to a stage where the first conversation you have with a user hiring manager as an example, because that's usually where I've kind of used my, I would say that that's the USP is being able to build that relationship with a hiring manager out of thin air. It's what we spoke about before, asking a question and then shutting up a little bit. It's about making sure that you've got a flow of conversation and you're not sitting there being robotic trying to get an outcome. I think when I started listening back to some of my team's calls over the years, it ended up being a situation where they had a number of questions in their head and instead of thinking about what the answers were, they were just thinking about how they're going to be able to get in their next question. And that ended up fogging their brain of actually listening and hearing those little kind of golden nuggets of information to them be like, oh, he actually just said, you know, they're looking to scale within six months, X amount of people. But instead I'm thinking about, oh, I heard you went on holiday. It's like shit. I've been completely missed the opportunity here. So if you're able to actually genuinely listen, like we hear active listening before recruitment, I worked in customer service. And so there's like active listening and understanding exactly what someone's saying and really hearing them and then responding specifically to what they've spoken about. It's like having a conversation in the pub with a friend. You need to be able to actually just have a genuine conversation as opposed to having ulterior motive constantly. And so if you can then nail that art of a genuine conversation, which sounds really dumb, because it seems like it's such an easy thing. But as soon as you jump on a call with a manager, it's like that master slave mentality. Suddenly you just like freeze up a little bit. You can change that mindset and start having authentic conversations and really listen and then organize a follow up based on a reason. And then you actually do follow up. That's what will make the difference. And then that person will be like, when you pick up on reference exactly what you spoke about, then they'll know that you listened, you acknowledge it. And then you just keep on having that conversation against that building, that trust building those, you know, I remember a really random situation. A hire manager said, I think I was talking about my little one and we were talking about something along the M4. And he said, oh, instead of going to, you know, this service station go to this one. I was like, he's like, the kids absolutely love it. I'm like, okay, write that down as a note. And then next time we had a catch up, I'm like, having no chance to go to that service station yet. But I will. And straight away, it just completely took off any barriers that he was like, this guy's calling me back again. So it is just that human approach and being able to smile through the phone makes a hell of a difference, having a positive and optimistic kind of mindset and having a bit of energy about you instead of coming through and just being like, you know, feeling like the day is quite a monotonous day. You're talking very just monotone. No one's going to respond or start to enjoy a conversation with you. If you're going into that call and you sound like the life is drained out of you. Here you talk about that. Can totally see, it is a hard thing to really put that in a scientific way, isn't that, to other people. The way that I think about what I take from there that might be useful for people is be interested versus being interesting. And what I mean by that is the way that you're talking about there is if we do a good job of those things, we're listening, we're repeating about what they said, we're generally listening, we're not just thinking about right now, I need to ask this next question. And then you do the things that you're going to say, you just downstream of those things over time, you're going to be able to relate to people. Yep. The way that I put it when someone asked me about it, it's almost, and you sort of explained it there, really, it's like all these little small steps that happen that you just keep building and building and building and then at some point you might be able to say, me and that, me and Nick have a fairly good relationship. But it's like all these little, in the small moments where he told you about a service station, wrote that down, you reference it and go, oh, thanks for that, really appreciate it. And then, do you know, I mean, it's all those little things that add up. Yeah. So it's hard, isn't it? The thing that I wanted to ask you because I always hear this one, I sit down with contract recruiters is, what makes a average contractor to a great one? A real quick one from me and we'll get straight back into the conversation. Some of you may or may not be aware that I am also the founder of a business called Hector. Hector is an all-in-one training platform for recruitment founders to maximize team performance. The reason why I'm sharing this with you is because if you are someone that is enjoying this podcast week after week, you might even share this podcast with your colleagues, then I'd love to connect with you. Our training platform is powered by top performers delivering practical training for today's market. We believe training a lot of the time in the recruitment industry is dated, is stale, is delivered by people that did it five, ten, fifteen years ago. And we are completely going against that. So a lot of the people that you're able to learn on this podcast, you're able to learn even more from Hector. So if you'd love to find out more about how we could potentially help you get more out of your people, ramp up their performance more quickly, then please connect with me on LinkedIn or click the link in the show notes where you'll be able to book a call with us. Let's get straight back into the episode. If they're going to articulate what they're actually doing layman's terms, then usually that's going to make a big difference. If you end up getting on the call with the contractor and they end up listing off all the technologies that they use, but they don't end up actually telling you, what was the outcome of that? I find the best contractors that I've ever worked with, they can say they implemented this. This is what the outcome was. They reduced real-time data down by 30%. They saved the company X amount of money. They can put something tangible behind what they've done in projects. And if they can articulate that in a way that actually I understand as someone who's not technical, I can't code or anything like that, but I understood. Then I can actually articulate that to a manager. Usually that ends up being the better people. There's usually other things like you're standard people who are continuously extended in their contracts as opposed to people who are just going three months, three months, three months, six months, three months. A lot of the time, if a contract is good, an organization will find the way of extending them. It's very rare that even if someone goes in three months and they've absolutely smashed it, the organization will find the way of being able to extend. I've heard that before what you said, that's definitely like an insight. I've done the line that if you're in contract recruitment, if you've got people that can effectively communicate what the outcome is or what the benefit is to the project, then they're also going to be able to communicate that to organizations that get in front of. This also comes on the recruiter right because then this is your market expertise where you're not just asking questions to Nick who's a great contractor about his skills and the experience you're going the extra layer and going, you know you told me you did this, what was then the result of that? Because it comes in that as well, it comes in a qualification, doesn't it? Because there'll be a lot of recruiters that don't, they just want to know, have you got experience in using this? Have you got these skills? Okay, cool yet. You could probably do this job versus going on extra layer and go, okay, tell me about what that then meant to the project or you was brought on to do this. Did you complete that? How come? Do you not? I mean, it's that it's on both sides, isn't that? Yeah, you have to be inquisitive. You have to ask the extra questions and really genuinely care. I think if I constantly just went into every single call and said, are you available at the moment? Yes. Okay, what's the situation in contract? We were about to finish on literally finishing this Friday. Okay, fantastic. This is the project. Can you do it? Yes. Fantastic. I didn't find anything about them, apart from their finishing on Friday. It was literally hit. So you need to be able to, I know that we have to work at pace. However, I think having the conversation and learning a little bit more about probably the last three contracts that they've done if they're specific to what you're hiring for, but even if they're not, I think just actually gaining a bit more knowledge of, you know, that particular type of tool or, you know, system that they used can then start triggering. Actually, I spoke to a manager who was looking to implement that in about three months time. I'm going to write that down. I'm going to put a reminder of my counterpart. I talked to them in a few months time. And it's just about like, it comes down to that organization piece. You have to remember a lot in recruitment in general. But in contract recruitment, I can only speak in my own personal experience is you have to keep track of everything. I used one note quite a bit. I used my emails constantly. I used tasks in our CRM system to pop up. Everything is organized. And so then I've got reminders consistently to make sure I stay on top of those little bits of information. Don't make a difference to one, two, three, four, five placements each year. Love it. So if me and you sat down two years ago or three years ago, I don't know exactly what time period. And I said, how do you see your sort of recruitment career going? What you sort of aiming for, what you're sparring for, would you have said to me, want to do really well, but really want to get into management? Is that where you would have told me? As soon as I started the method, I literally said to Tom, I want to be a contractor. I didn't even know what that meant necessarily. Just sounded good. It just sounded good. I was a little bit, I probably was a little bit on like job, job, job, job, job, job. I always fancy the I'm quite a dear of management because I am quite a people person. However, when I started kind of building my own book over the first and initial two years, I really started to earn better than I had before. Really started to kind of build something that I was proud of. I then started then kind of bringing people in and I liked the idea of being able to manage people and be able to motivate them and, you know, get them through some tough times and be that kind of extra person, that shoulder. I mean, it's hard sometimes to find the balance between making it like trying to be their mate, but also their manager. I think I saw the idea of it being fantastic in terms of, you know, scaling a team, my mentor was speaking to me about like, you can be a high performer, but the next level is being able to build and create high performers and that's a skill in itself. I think it was absolute right. That is probably the next level. Like, it's completely up to you and whether you can build yourself into becoming a high performer, but to be able to then start replicating that with other people is really quite tough. We were bringing people in who didn't really have any experience and they were building them kind of a market from scratch themselves as well. And I was trying to, you know, pass on some roles that I, similar to when I started, you know, a little bit of roles that, you know, house accounts that I could, you know, have this one, you've got, you know, a couple days to fill it. You can do it, really push them and then they would and they've got like a couple contractors running because I know how hard it is when you first start out. But then I just over the, probably the next couple years, I saw usually what you would see is your book would slightly go down, but their books would slightly go up. And so it almost like does balance out a little bit, but it didn't quite happen. So I was like, my book's going down and I can't, I'm not seeing the return on investment that I was hoping for. There is a level of me that's really enjoying management, but I'm literally about to have a kid. And I'm like financially need to get myself in a really good position. And suddenly I'm earning like a quarter of what I was earning before and I'm like, shit. What do I do? And it took a long time for me to kind of make it make a decision to kind of move in it in a different direction for that. But how, how come it to you? Well, just because what you didn't want to seem like a failure or you felt like you could do that. Yeah. Sure of both, I think for a while, I kept on telling myself, I want to do management because I can't be asked doing day dot recruitment again. And I'd lost a bit of the love of finding the beauty and monotony, which is what I had to do when I first started doing contract recruitment because it is quite monotonous. You know, you speak to your contractors, you try and understand, you know, what you're going to be chasing, you speak to higher managers, you get told to piss off every second call, every call sometimes. And it is like a genuine grind until you start kind of getting a bit of momentum. And I was like, well, if I do management, I don't have to do that. So that's great. But coming to maybe midway through must have been last year, I was kind of like, this is really taking it out of me. And I don't have the time and capacity to be able to keep on managing and trying to get my book back up because I was always a billing manager. So there was always, there was always me wanting to be able to win as much business as possible. But if suddenly the guys were doing well, then my billings would just kind of go down. But then the guys would start having a couple tough months. And it was so hard to build the momentum back up for myself. So it wasn't the case where we were kind of fluctuating between the two. My mom would go down, they would then go down a little bit and I didn't know how to help them because I was still trying to figure out how to be able to replicate what I did myself. So I was stuck in between a rock and a half legs a little bit. Do you think, did you maybe think that your contract but relationships were more established than maybe they were before you started adding more people in? Yeah, I think that I had probably about two or three clients that are continuously giving me work. And that would be enough to be able to maintain or slightly grow. And that was a wrong assumption. Yeah, I think I stayed above 10k for about three years straight, which is quite tough to do and whilst they're managing as well. But then when it got to a stage where one of those three clients just didn't end up kind of coming through with as many roles as I'd usually would kind of get from them, I still maintain the relationship. But it's just the case that sometimes you know, they have peaks and troughs just like you, just like we do. So as soon as that happened, I was like, I actually need more organizations that I need to work with that aren't multi contract hiring organizations. Okay. So I go and find them something enough to go and do data recruitment. Balancing everything was just, it just became really, really tough. Now I appreciate being transparent because I know that people can relate to that. And then was there like a specific moment or was it accumulation of these things happening and then you being having the courage to go, you know what Tom, I don't actually think I'm enjoying this. I think I want to sort of pivot and I want to just focus on this. These are the reasons why I think it was probably in the back of my mind, but Tom Ed's body senses probably about the top sign because I think there was must have been some form of language that I used. And he said, what do you mean by that? And I was like, I don't actually know what I mean by that. And he's like, let's have it, let's have a chat. What's going on in your head? What are you thinking? And I just kind of just said, I'm like, I'm finding that it's, my book is going down and it's really making it quite tricky. I'm about to go on paternity and finding that balance is, I don't know, finally, I'm going on and enjoying it as much as I did before. And there probably was a level of me that I didn't want to disappoint him because it was always in our plan. Like I was one of the, you know, I was the first person to come into contract. It was a pretty clear career plan and progression for me to go in the direction that I was and year on year I was kind of moving in that direction. And so to come in and then say to him, yeah, I don't really want to do that anymore. I was shit myself a little bit. And so when I did decide and say, you know what, if I can come into the new year and it is just me up to me to be able to do what I need to do, it's complete within my control. There was a level of relief that came off my back. When we said that, I allowed them to. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of people then end up falling into management based on the success that I've had as an IC. And that's kind of what happened with me. Like it was great. I built a fantastic kind of foundation, a really good book, really good network and some really good connections. Then it made sense, okay, cool. We just go into management then. And I didn't even picture that there was a different ulterior career path that Tom kind of spoke about. Okay, this is what it could look like then. And that kind of just gave me a really clear sense of understanding of, okay, I can see where my career is going now. And that kind of was that. And I just went cracking on from January really. I just think that's just such a great insight for people. I really respect that, yeah, you work for a business, work with Tom where they were able to like, at least show you that there's another path here because as I'm sure you appreciate there'll be a lot of people that would have been in that spot that you was in and there'd be the reason why they left. But I think great leadership is seeing that, understanding it, not only being willing to have the conversation and try and have those hard conversations to go actually. Are you actually enjoying this anymore? Is it sort of what you expected? But then to have the foresight to go actually, that doesn't mean your career stopped actually. You can go down this path and this is what your future looks like because I think if you're going to keep your best people, they've always got to feel like they're on that journey right or what's next or they've got a destination that they're aiming for. So I think that's really cool that they're able to do that because, like I said, as I'm sure, I'm sure you've interviewed people where I've gone, I've ended up in management and I hate it. I just want to crack on, I'm going to learn from some people. So that's great that they've ended up carving that. And I think that's a great lesson for any leader business to consider that. The other thing that I loved about this was then when you went into this, I don't know if it was Tom that asked you, but was it him that goes, right, what do you need from me then? Yeah. Right. And then I just love the transparent, I love this honesty. All right, Damra, it's like, stay on top of me and make sure I don't get complacent. Just tell us about that. Why was it that you needed that from someone? I think that would be a quite cool lesson from people. Why is it that you said to your, to Tom? You're clearly capable. You've been doing it for a long time. You could hold yourself accountable. You're holding on for people accountable. Why is it that you said to Tom? I just want you all over me, mate. I want to avoid complacency at all costs. Why is it that you asked him to do that? Yeah, when I first started the method, that's exactly how I wanted him to approach it. I don't need sugar coating. I need someone to just be like, if I said, this is my plan for the day, I just need them to be like, no, that's pretty shit. So if I don't get someone to push me to actually be genuinely better, I don't need a yes person. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. All right, crack on. That's not going to elevate me to my next level, and especially coming in back into being in IC, if I didn't have someone doing that, I'd probably fall into the trap of calling the same managers over and over again, hoping for a good outcome when it probably wouldn't happen if I don't start kind of opening back out the expanding the space that I'm working in and talking to new people, building new connections. So whenever I just said to him, I'm just like, yeah, just be really, really blunt. If I come to you and say, this is my thoughts on my plans, just say no, just stick to this. I guess he wanted to go through the process because since going into management, he was kind of letting me crack on. So he just wanted to almost remind himself of how he managed me before as well and what I needed from him. And that's exactly what he did. He kind of just stayed on me where I needed it to be, checked me just to be like, okay, we did, you know, we do a daily stand-up. What's the plan for today? This, this, and this. Cool. Go and do it. Don't say things for the sake of it. Actually, go and do it. If you're going to go and speak to X amount of managers and be able to build, you know, X amount of relationships and booking that many meetings, just go and do it. We'll catch up at the end of the day. If you haven't done it, what do you need to do differently for the next day? - Nice. - And just stay on top of that. And that wasn't every day. That was literally for the first kind of couple months. I just needed him to kick me back into gear a little bit because it was just me learning recruitment a little bit of what am I going to do with all this time again? - Well, it also sounded like from what you shared. Also really falling back in love with it as well. - Yeah. - And just accepting, like, I'm getting back to the grind. Obviously you're doing it in ways that you enjoy and I'm assuming spending more and more time with people in the industry in the space that you're curious about that you enjoy and work with people. But it almost sounds like that as well. You really had to just, 'cause you've been doing it a good amount of time now, right? But you've had to fall back in love with the process. - Yeah, I definitely have. It took a while because it was a bit of damage control 'cause I did have a pretty significant dip. And even though when I started getting back into it in the first couple months, I was placing contractors back in. But just as fast as I was doing three, four deals, I was a month, I had three, four finishes. And so I was literally just constantly just battling with myself now. And finding, like I said before, the beauty and monotony, finding my rhythm again, did take a bit of time. But once you, all it takes is like a few different wins and a few different really good solid conversations. And suddenly you just start to kind of get on a bit of a role. And I think having that optimistic kind of mindset and just actually coming in with a bit of energy, even if you are like a little bit of a facade sometimes, most of it you have to be obviously authentic. If you have to put like 10% of it of a little bit of a facade of like, okay, this has been a shit wig, but I'm gonna go acid. I'm gonna make a massive difference. Then that can sometimes make or break the month. - Do you think that is one of the hardest things about contract recruitment, the how painful it can be when you weren't able to like replenish those finishes and you go from X number to 30% less or you have that big client go, Nick, we don't have to actually pull these contractors out, projects come to a close or whatever, is that the hardest thing? - Yeah. - Not letting that. I guess it is just not dwelling on it too much where then it just affected the impact of it is just longer. - Yeah, I don't think it's the actual act of it happening. I think it is all in your head. How you respond to it will make the hell of difference. So I always think about my status not with finishes. If I am continuously thinking, okay, how many people am I, if I got starting this month and when are they starting as opposed to dwelling on, God, I've got three Ks worth of finishes literally in the next month and a half, where am I gonna get that from? If I get in my head with that and I constantly look, I've got an exosperature that I've created from day one, that I still use to today, that literally has all my contractors names, what they're doing, their rates, and then obviously what we're kind of building from them. And I'm looking at my book thinking, "Oh, I've got this many contracts finishing." I'm just gonna get stuck in my own head. Instead, I've started to kind of, I think it was after March, when I started to get on a bit of a roll again. That's when I started only opening that exosperature up when I was adding someone onto it. - Ooh, okay. So just thinking about it in the inverse of like starting not finishes. - Yep. - 'Cause then I think the other challenging part, you tell me is you've got that and then the other really challenging part is the reverse, where you've got to that 16K weekly GP, you're feeling good, you're complacent. - Yes, then that's the hard part, right? - Yeah, it's a long way to forward and complete complacency. - Yeah, I think you're most vulnerable when you're at your highest is so true. And you think like you know what you're untouchable when you start to kind of just get a little bit complacent because you're sitting on these four or five accounts that are continuously giving you work. And then suddenly a few of them start dropping because one reason or another, and you know, and you haven't done anything from a PD perspective in like a month and a half and you're like, I, it takes six weeks to be able to kind of build up some form of pipeline again, I think, realistically. If you're literally like, if I come back from holiday, sometimes I know I'm like, okay, I've got nothing really to kind of come back on. What do I need to do? Okay, it's gonna take me extra amount of time to be able to actually start building a bit of a pipeline again, where do I start and then go go from there. And Brent actually sets me one. So I mean, he said, he's just like, what's your limit? What are you aiming for? Everyone's got a name. And I was probably only about, I think I must have been like five, six K on the board at this point, it was like kind of late 2021. And I said something like, I don't know, 15 K, 10 K or something like that. And he's like, whenever someone gets to that level, that's when they start to get complacent. And it's hard to be able to maintain that and get past that. But once you get past that, that's when things start really flying. And he was bloody right. Because I think that my mind was more, not necessarily based on complacency, it was probably more time management and going more into management. Yeah, it's in some other boxes, yeah, being performing all areas. Trying to do too much. Yeah. Yeah. I know a lot of people have been able to balance it really, really well. I just couldn't. Yeah, simply put. Now look, I really appreciate like you've been super transparent, super honest and that's what these conversations are all about. Because I think what I love about your journey is, obviously you had this sort of big build art comedy, did really well, building a team. I'm sure you really helped those people, but then you really had the vulnerability and encouraged a bit actually. I don't know where I'm at right now in my life. Is this actually what I want? I think being willing to do that versus starting interviewing in all these different places and going, "Hey, a method." Like I'm in management, like, do you know what I mean? I really rate that because that's just personal responsibility. I know it sound like maybe Tom had to get out of you a bit, but again, that's like good leadership rights. But then he was willing to own that. I mean, I just love the fact that you've then gone on this journey this year, where, like we've said, you've really had to then just get back to the grind, back in the trenches. And it really sounds like I'm sure we're having tough days, but for the most part, we've really got back to enjoying the journey again. Yeah. And when you're enjoying that journey, it just makes everything else more easy, all the knockbacks, the hardship. But that's what I really like about this story. So just massively appreciate it coming on and sharing it. No, thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. I hope there were plenty of golden nuggets for you to take away. As you know, I'm your host here of the Recruitment Mentals podcast, but I'm also the founder of Recruitment Mentals. We're a online subscription based learning and education platform. We're on a mission to help thousands of recruiters achieve their professional goals and successfully progress their careers through modern and engaging online learning. So if you're a recruitment business owner listening to this is a good chance that you value self development, personal development. You're trying to develop a culture of continuous improvement. But we've partnered with a number of grown recruitment companies who were struggling to understand how they can invest more in their people, how they can upskill them more quickly, without spending more time, without having to spend thousands of pounds of external trainers. And we've ended up being a really great fit, modern fit for recruitment teams. We can ultimately help you get more out of your teams by giving your people access to modern and engaging online learning, which they can access on the mark. The thing that's really cool about what we're doing at Recruitment Mentals is that all of the people that your teams are able to learn from and the people that are delivering the learning content are people that are in roll right now. They're billing. They're actively facing the challenges that your teams are and a lot of the time they're amongst the top performers within their companies, which means your teams are going to be way more confident to learn and spend on their learning when they know they're learning from people that are doing it right now, have been there and done it. There's nothing worse than feeling like training is not relevant and not current. 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