The Craft and the Graft: Building a £100K Weekly GP Contract Business with Luke McCluskey

Luke, welcome to the pod. Thank you mate. Good to be on. May the trip from Peterborough. It's a great place. LAUGHTER Gold of this conversation is we want to give people two things, I feel like we've got two core headings. One, the craft, particularly the craft of being a world-class contract recruiter. I really like the way that you break that down when we prepared for this. You got the graft and the craft. You really view your role as a leader, entrepreneur, if people have the graft, it's our job to help people keep building that craft. So we've got some really particular things that we want to go through that's under that. And then secondly, you started your recruitment business with literally 2K in the bank, not a huge amount of experience. And we've built it to the weekly GP that you now have. We've got a few different chapters from, we've got it here, the hustle phase, first raw office, post-COVID growth, the transformation where we're now going from 100K weekly GP with a target of getting to 180K weekly GP. And we're going to really break down what we've learned, the hard way, what we now done down on and things that you're going to be doing that you think is going to help you achieve your goals. But let's start with the craft, because I know how passionate you are about this. You said to me that you found recruitment really hard, or you weren't very good at it, until you found contract recruitment. Tell us about that. I found that interesting. For me, they couldn't be any further apart. They are completely, completely different. The way I like to describe it, palm recruitment is like 11 a.m. football. It slopes from a fodder call, you're probably going to get two or three goals on average, a game, which is fine. And it works for some people, and it works very well for some people. Contract recruitment is like five a site. It's so intense. It's full on. It's a lot more commercial. Every single day you can come in and you can make a difference to your back pocket. And that's why people are in recruitment. For me, I worked for a palm business that you would, let's say you pull a vacancy. It takes four weeks to fill that vacancy. Then on a three month notice, they then got 60 day payment terms, then I get paid. So for me, I couldn't work like that. That just wasn't immediate enough for me. And when I found contracts, it was like, wait, okay, it's our pooled job. I booked in interviews, and they're starting inside a week, and now I'm getting paid for that. So that immediacy really worked for me, and it just really fed like how my brain works. That's me, that's contract, that's why I couldn't really get palm working for me, because it was too slow. I just think this is a really, and I mentioned this to you, such a good lesson for how many people do we think quit recruitment, because it didn't match up with maybe naturally, because that's what I hear there is. You found an environment which just worked more naturally with who you are as a person. Yeah. I think that sometimes people really need to consider with their career and recruitment, is that maybe it's the market you're in, maybe it's the type of recruitment that you do. And it's something that you really want to reflect on, and hopefully pull cars, conversations like this can really give an insight in what the alternative is. Because if you think about when you made that change. I'd have been out of recruitment. Yeah. I think I would have been out of recruitment, because I was, I was shit. Thank my lucky stars, I found that moment, or that moment found me, or whatever. So yeah, I think it's really important for people to look at. Okay, does it actually match who I am? Does it match my personality? And that goes vice versa as well, by the way. There's some people that go into contract that aren't made for contracts. There'd be much better off in home. So I think it's important that you have a look at that. Oh, really? Your leader should look at that and see how you properly matched for that. Do you think if I'm really good at good quality contingent firm that you'd back me to be good at good quality contract recruitment? Like, have you seen that? It depends how good your business development. Really? Is that what you would draw it down to? Absolutely. It would be a really, really good perm recruiter. Contract recruitment, you need to spend 75% of your time, business development, consistently. And 25% nurturing that network and utilizing the candidate. And we'll come onto that, but utilizing the candidate, candidate network into arm your business development. It's the other way round on firm. You need to spend 75% of your time filling roles. Because there's a lot more drawn out process from the candidate side and managing that process. So you don't do as much on business development. So yes, someone can do it, but I need to see that they are shit hot at business development. At business development. Yeah, absolutely. I think that is as well. I don't know how many other recruitment sales flaws that you've worked on, but thinking of the differences that I've worked on, contract sales roles do feel different. Yeah. I really can't get behind this idea that recruitment isn't sales. I know people like saying that, I just can't get involved with that. But like you just said, 75% of your job being business development, building your pipeline sales. I think that's probably why I've experienced that more often than not working on a firm sales role versus a contract one. It is going to feel way more sales in the typical types of things you expect to feel on a sales floor. Because of the pure dynamics of it. When you're doing part, I don't actually speak from experience. Hey, but I can only imagine. I can only imagine you spend a lot of time on links in recruitment and managing the project, doing reach outs, trying to nurture people to come into your world, to then enter a conversation and blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, you've been part of the permitting, right? Yeah, yeah. So that kind of is what it is. Whereas a contract sales floor is electric. It's electric. It's constantly on the phone. If you're not on the phone, especially in circle, because there is no other job than being on the phone as a recruitment consultant. We'll touch on that. Right. Let's get into the craft. So there's a lot of things that you can be doing as a contract recruiter, right? One of the things I wanted to start with is we've got here the 10, 10, 10 framework. Whether this come from why, just give us that because my perspective is particularly in today's day and age, there's so many different tools, so many different things that I could be doing. What can be half of people is to understand what's the right thing to be doing versus other stuff. So I sense that here we want to simplify it. We want to make it very clear and obvious. But you tell us why the 10, 10, 10 framework, where does that come from and then we'll get into what it actually is. Okay. So it really starts with having a basic set of non-negotiables on the sales floor that everyone follows. That drives high performance. 10, 10, 10 is 10 references taken. 10 teams calls booked. 10 teams calls attended. So that's your ultimate baseline of non-negotiables. There's a KPI, right? That drives the right activity in the business. In the, we do as contract recruiters, must them from a candidate call or some kind of intel. So when we go out and do business development, I see so many contract recruiters fail because they just bring up a list of people and they just try and pitch them. When you say list of people, where's the list of high performance? A list of high performance. Yeah, a list of prospects. And they just try and pitch them without any intel in terms of what's going on in that business. So you're already 2-0 down when you pick up the phone, right? So the 10, 10, 10 is enabling those warm calls. So you spend your time speaking to candidates in sprint one and you're out there gaining BD bullets is what I call them. Don't get me wrong, you're out there building friends and building network, but you're asking for information from those candidates to be able to arm your business development sprints with warm intel that you can go to. So you're asking for references, project information, project leads, interview leads, stuff like that. You get those core pieces of information. And then when you're doing your business development, you are then fully armed with warm conversations. So I'll give you an example, right? If you're a contract recruiter and you want to break into Coca-Cola, I don't know why, you got Coca-Cola. If you just pick up the phone to a hiring manager with knowing, tell in terms of what that guy is about his world, his project, anything whatsoever, how confident are you in being able to pitch well? Not that confident. Because you don't have a clue what's going on. I just know that they're hiring with a higher contract to this model. Yeah, that's it, right? If you go into that conversation, knowing that they're currently hiring, knowing that they've got X project on right now, you can really tailor your pitch. And actually, as a contract recruiter, you're going in confident. You're going in confident into that call because far too many recruiters spend their time just picking up the phone to people without any reason. What's defined and used term, what's a business development bullet? Something that you get from a candidate call or a client call that gives you intel to go into a conversation with something. Yeah, absolutely. So it's something like a reference. So I'm flipping a reference. If I'm speaking to a contractor and that contractor gives me John Smith as a reference, well, I know John Smith has contractors. That's a bullet for me. So I'm going to go and flip that reference. That's a beading. I want to make sure that we define it because that might be internal language that you use right, but that's not really helpful. Yeah, yeah. The 1010. So you said they're non-negotiables, but I feel like they're out of my control. 101010. Yeah. So there's going to be non-negotiables that are in my control, like the number of calls that I make, these things. But you're saying what we're aiming for and what a good day looks like is 10 teams calls, 10 references and 10 teams calls of 10 this week. In a week, yeah. Oh, in a week. Sorry, sorry. I was going to say that's a lot for a day. But yeah. Okay, so I just want to make sure we're clear because this is what's useful for people to really define. So if I get to the end of the week and I say look, I've had a good week, you're expecting me to say I've minimum hit those 10. Yeah. Okay. That's effort. But in order to get those 10 on a daily basis, there'll be things that you expect to me that would be non-negotiables. Yeah. 22 conversations. Yeah. So let's talk about that because the way that I view it, because I think it's helpful for people is recruitment leaders may set if you hit these numbers each week, downshin from that as you're going to hit your targets, right? Which is where I'm assuming this 1010 has come from. Yeah. It's more of a science behind. If you keep scoring in these areas consistently, you're going to get your weekly GP to X. Yeah. Okay. So we've identified that we get the majority of our jobs off the back of references and off the back of Teams goals. Right. So if we can control that. that KPI or KIP, then we know that that's going to drive ultimate output of getting a grade jobs in. So I think where a lot of leaders get it wrong is they put non-negotiables in. Well, firstly, they might not have non-negotiables, right? But let's say they've got non-negotiables in of X-matta calls in a day, right? Their KPI is to get a jobs, CVs out, interviews arranged, placements, right? They are the outputs. I think there's a huge disconnect between those two things and one thing that we've put into the business is actually, well, firstly, it's go home proud. How do you go home proud? When you work in recruitment, if you're not in love with the craft and you're not in love with doing the basics brilliantly, you can very, very quickly only get that dopamine hit when you get the ultimate output of, I don't know, a placement, pulling an A job, whatever it might be. So that becomes quite a hard place to live. If that's everything that you're getting out of your day and you're not getting that every day because you can't get that every day, right? Then it's a hard place to live. So working towards commercial outcomes every day is really, really good. So you can look at that at the end of the day and say, I'm leaving my desk in a better place than when I started at eight o'clock this morning driving towards commercial outcomes. Yeah, I really like the go home proud piece because there will be so many days that people have in recruitment where they'll get to the end of it and go, was that a good day? 100% so that's the bit, right? So somebody could have had an absolutely incredible day. But if they're not defining what a good day looks like to start with, they could very easily get a contract to call them up and the project get pulled. And in their eyes, I've had a shit day. I've had a shit day. But actually, you've got five commercial outcomes that's added to your pipeline of opportunities which will then convert into age, jobs and projects. You've had a great day. So define what a good day looks like and I think that is the bit that is missing is what defines what a good day looks like outside of the ultimate output. Yeah. So how would you define, if I got to the end of the day and I work at Serkron, I said, I had a really good day today, what would you expect me to then say that has happened or what I've done, what does a good day look like? Yeah, so five commercial outcomes. Non-negotiable is just a standard. But five commercial outcomes. To define that for us, what's the commercial outcome? Okay, so a commercial outcome is any form of hiring need for a contractor, ABCD. 'Cause we'll always be looking at, okay, how do we upgrade a C to a B, B to an A, right? So we can get a better return on that. An extension, I've just had a contractor extended. I've just booked a team's call with a hiring manager that I know hires contractors. I've got a project leads from a contractor, and I've turned that into a meeting inside the next two weeks. They're the types of commercial outcomes that I'd be looking for. Yeah, nice. So like you said, they're not quote unquote, like they end outcome, but they're all good things that are leading towards that. Absolutely, yeah. And so everyone has got a clear plan. They know what they're working towards because they know that those commercial outcomes builds you a pipeline. If that pipeline gets, the bigger that pipeline gets, the more jobs are going to spit out of that pipeline. And then obviously you're in your flow. Something I've consistently found when we've spoken about this. So it's something that so many contract recruiters must do. So I'm interested to get your take on what does below average look like, good look, like and great look like, which is being so candidate led that forms the information that you get, build the business development, but it's like you said. So a lot of contract recruiters I speak to are always here, what you've just said, which is you're always speaking to people in the market, contractors, candidates, whatever type I want to give them. And if you do that properly, that then gives you information, which you can then go to market with. - Yep, 100%. - How helpful is it to speak about people in our network industry as candidates and clients? I don't feel like that's very helpful if we're trying to just help them have commercial outcomes, connect the dots. Is it not just more helpful to just say you're building your network? And because a lot of, I guess it depends the types of candidates you're speaking to if they're, you go and top down, because these people could also be hiring managers have decision-making power. But how helpful is it? I think that can sometimes hold people back because when I'm then speaking to the candidate, I've just got my candidate head on. - That's a good point. I think you've got to look at what is the size if you talk to a universe. It's within your world. How big is your world right now in terms of hiring managers? And a hiring manager can be a contractor, obviously. And how big is your world in terms of your candidates as well? Splitting out, I think is important because especially we're very much rookie led. So we hire people at entry level and then take them on a journey. So I think it's important that you identify that early. The first thing we do with rookies that are coming into the business is they do a 360 exercise is where they only speak to contractors in the market for four weeks and they've got to come out of that with 360 pieces of information. So hiring managers, project names, interview leads, all of that stuff, reference names, all of that. So when they then come onto business development, they've already built their world. They know where they're going. Do you see what I mean? - That's the important point then is we're defining them as candidates and clients, but when you're speaking to candidates, you're expected to get commercial information. - Yeah. And not in a way where you're doing in a trickery way, just going out and being vulnerable and being honest. Just saying, "Look, it helps me help you." I'm building my network. This is the type of stuff that I'd like to understand. Can you help me with that? If you speak to contractors, they love talking. They'll tell you what's going on. - So how do we do this badly? How do we badly speak to contractors with the aim to get information selfishly from the recruiter? How do we do that? - How do you get bad? How do you get them badly? - How do you get them badly? My manager's told me, "He should, "we need to get 360 bits of information." So every time you have a call, you need to get information made. So when you speak to contractors, get information, that's me taking and getting. How do I do that badly? What would that sound like? - We'll jump back into the episode in just a moment, but first, I want to shine a light on our partners, Raze. Who, in my opinion, are one of the most powerful ways to fund and run your contract book. Raze work with hundreds of agencies across the UK and US from ambitious solar recruiters to fast scaling teams. They ultimately help you unlock cash flow, remove admin headaches, and make sure contractors get paid on time every time. So you can stay focused on doing deals and growing your business. Today, I'm joined by Dan Mills from Hire, who's gonna share how Raze has supported his journey and the impact it's had on his growth. - Just a few words, but Steven, the team at Raze. As a tight Yorkshireman, spending money on anything causes me internal turmoil, but it's one of the few bills I actually don't mind business. But because whenever we watch out, please help at the Cilio Clock and whatever time is usually met with a really quick fix. Our laugh from just genuinely nice people, who want to help. The guys have been instrumental in helping hire build our contract book today, and the generally can't thank them all enough. So as you just heard, Raze aren't just another finance provider. There are genuine growth partner behind some of the most exciting recruitment agencies out there. If you wanna scale your contract book with confidence, keep more of your margin, and give your contractors a first-class experience. I'd really recommend checking them out. You can book a demo with Raze and mention the Recreemental's podcast to get 50% off your first month. Hit the link in the show notes or go straight to raisetech.io/RMP. All right, let's get back into the conversation. - 20% about the contractor, 80% trying to nick stuff. It's just so obvious. Just be honest about it. - Surely contractors are very aware of what's happening and what's going on. - Absolutely. So just be honest. - So what's the wall with that sound like? - Just be honest, look, I'm looking to build my network. I'm looking to build my network. I'm new into this or I might not be new into this. It's very different, right? So we've got to separate the two. So if you've got a network of warm people that you're speaking with, they'll do you favorites, right? They'll do you favorites. They'll tell you where that big project is. They'll tell you that stuff because you built that relationship with them. If you're new into that market or you're new into Recreemental, I say to people, just be vulnerable and be honest. - Just own it, just say what you're out on it. - Yeah, just own it. - Versus trying to pretend that you know everything. - Yeah, 'cause it's so obvious. So a bad version of that is, oh yeah, just wanted to, you know, what you up to at the moment, even contractor at the moment. Oh yeah, who did you report to? (laughing) Right? Just so obvious, just like, right? And you just lost trust immediately. So just be honest, just be honest about it. How do you build trust with your contractor base and candidate base? 'Cause I'll hear it all the time. How the best contract recruit is really now that part. Bill relationships contractors getting information, using that information, connecting the dots. It just really feels like a flywheel. - Yeah, yeah. Just do what you say you're gonna do. It's that simple and stay in touch with them. Don't only call them when you need something. Just make friends with them. - There's a contract recruiter. What do you see as the things that you can give to a contractor? We hear the word value at the time. But how do we make it more of an exchange? If I'm getting something from them, which is information, project intel, whatever, what are the things a good contract recruiter would bring to the table and would fit under the category of looks really good at giving value to his contractors? Like what would that look like? What things can I bring? - I'd always help prep my contractors wherever I had a minute gig or not. Especially if there's somebody with higher empowered who's got an interview lead, who's very much adopt that process, try and give them as much prep as possible, do a little bit of research in terms of what's happening in that organization. So when they go in and they think, okay, who actually helped me get that? Was it their actual agency or was it me? That's who they're gonna think of first when they get to a point of hiring. - How often will your guys meet their contractors as that important in today's world? - Face to face. - Yeah, either or obviously you've got teams. - Yeah, teams. - Is it mainly that that's the FaceTime that you see, I guess helps with build trust, relationships, all that stuff. So you really drive that. - Yeah, on teams, yeah. - Yeah, on teams. - 'Cause like I said, I'm just curious to see how you think about this thing, 'cause your guys and guys are gonna be doing that, right? And I just hear it all the time, this candidate piece. - You've got an outlet. They are your source of everything. You've got an outlet that candidate piece, Ali Dawes, which is why it's the first thing that we teach coming into circuit, it's an outlet in that candidate piece. - 'Cause like you said to me a number of times, if people showing up in your business and you really feel like they're giving you the grass. to hit the non-negotiables, but the conversions aren't quite right. You really view that as your fault, that's your job, as a leadership team, to improve those conversions, right? And that if they're doing these things, that's the craft part. - Yeah. - If maybe I feel, I'm listening to this right now, and I feel like if I'm being honest with myself, I'm hitting the non-negotiables, I'm delivering the graph. What is it that you've consistently found to be the reason why people aren't quite getting it on, going from getting information to building pipeline and just making that leap? What is it that often people need to work on that you've worked on with people that. - Firstly, you need to consistently be looking at people's flow in terms of their ratios. So seeing how that flows through, so be it equal to a grade job, a grade job replacement ratio, CV to interview, any leaders should be able to look at a set of ratios, either use that as, I can see where the bottleneck is in your desk, or if someone has got perfect flow, take it all the way back to the start and say just turn that dial up and you'll go that way. - Right, so you should be able to look at those numbers and really diagnose. Now the art of it is to get them to self-diagnose. If somebody is hitting all of them on the ghostables, given as all of that graphed, we have to look at those numbers and see why it's not converting. - What's the most common bottleneck then? - BD2A job. - BD2A job. - Yeah, yeah, BD2A job. - And what's normally behind that then that you found? - I know, very important. - Okay, so there's only ever two things, right? They're not following the 20k a week Biller playbook, or they're not candidate led. - Okay, interesting. - So in a one to one, we can very quickly say which one is it. Or we can listen to a couple of calls with them, and then you point them in the right direction. I had a one to one this week and I looked at their numbers and I said, let me just ask you one question. What percentage of calls are you making off the back of candidates versus what percentage of calls are you making? - Cold, with no intel. - And it was 80%. - Cold. - Cold. - Oh, that's not good. - Right, so I was like, well, fix that. And then go back to your candidates, go back to your world, build relationships with your candidates, and then use that as ammunition to go into business development. So, A, you're more confident, you know your target is, you'll then like a sniper when you're business developing, you're not like just spraying prey, hitting hope. Because anyone can hit a list of 150 people and at some point pull a job, but that is pure luck. - And timing. - It's pure luck and timing. That's not scalable. - Let's just double click into that for a second. So let's say after our one and one, like you just said, we use that example, I get way better at Candle, let be dirty. So I'm getting information, and then I'm using that information when I'm going to market, like you said, maybe sniping, and just being a lot more intentional and clear with who I'm targeting and why. I just want to make sure I understand what does good look like when I'm using that information. This is also what you will help the guys with, no doubt. We could call it a pitch, maybe not, I don't know, but something that I picked up recently from a really great contract recruiter guy called Elia, he broke it down like this, maybe it's something that you guys use, I don't know. But he said, when it comes to like specing, any good spec will start with, I know I heard I saw. I really like that framework because you're leading with Intel. So the most confident one is I know, you're saying I know that you've just won this project, and this is happening blah, blah, blah. That might be because you've spoke to Candle, and you're very confident that that's happening. I heard might be the second one in that list because you've heard it made from several people, but there might be a few more things for you to be that competent guy. I know that this is happening. And then I saw probably the weakest because you're looking at content online or you have seen different things that has then said, I saw this, so this is why I wanted to call you. That's a bit of a framework. What's your thought was helpful for people? How do people then use the information to get affected? Because that's another part of it, right? I can get the information, but then I need to know how to then say that to Luke for him to go, okay, right, yeah, this contract recruiter knows his stuff, and then you come across credible and relevant. How do people use that information well? Firstly, when you pick up the phone to anyone, you need a permission based opener. Far too many recruiter just pick up the phone as soon as they're just like, boom, they just ram this pitch. They just ram this pitch in this hiring manager's face and it's like, right, so permission based openers. Once you've got a permission based open, I would always go in with a capability and complimentary statement. So a capability statement would be, okay, look, just so you're well, I've just delivered X project with X company, right? So that's proven I'm capable. Complementary statement is a little, while I'm out speaking to my candidate, my client network, your name just keeps coming up for all of the right reasons. Complementary statement. Then you're going with some insight. This all depends, right? If you've got insight in terms of a project then you're always going with, like, I've been made aware that you've got X project on. Then you're going with some kind of insight question, which would be, I've spoken to 30 capital program managers inside the last 30 days and every single one of them are telling me that their biggest challenge to delivering projects is X. How do you feel about that? Now your insight question always leads to a service that you can offer, which is normally, I've got a couple of grade A candidates right in my right hand there. And as soon as he bites, I'm then going to go and sell those contractors to him. Depends what type of call, depends what kind of intel that you've got. We'll kind of depend what. - Depending on how you approach it. That's helpful though. - Yeah. I think it's always helpful. There's no permission based opener. You're just trying to sell, so firstly, how do you do it badly? You don't have a clue why you're calling them. But that's point number one. Point number two is when they do pick up the phone because you don't know why you're calling them, you sound like you don't know why you're calling them and you're just waffling and you just ramming something to tick a box. - I can imagine with the way that you broke it down, which sounds very intentional is, if I've done a good job of getting the information, whatever that may be, doing that badly may also be, just almost coming across like that you know everything about them and you've got this information and it's right versus even though I'm still may have that information, you're leading with being quite curious. - Yeah. - When you broke it down. - If you've got the information that you could use the complimentary statement to say that, look, I've been speaking so much. When I'm out there speaking to my candidate and my client world, like your name just keeps coming up for all of the right reasons, your business just keeps coming up for all the right reasons. So I've dug a little bit deeper and I've identified that you've got X program on, which is really interesting. Do you mind if I ask you a quick question? And you're just constantly just layering that BD called, anyway, you know where I'm going. (laughing) - We wanted to make sure that we cover some of this craft stuff 'cause I know you can tell how passionate you are about it and I know you spend a lot of your time in the leadership role now, coaching others and powering others and you've really had to draw this down, which is why I saw you, which I encourage you to like give to everyone, then I, the 20k weekly GP playbook. - Yeah. - Or like the book that you wrote, I don't know if you could use it, called something like that. - Yeah, I mean, I'm in Pamela. - I know you're passionate about this stuff, so we wanted to talk about that, but you've also had to continually evolve as an entrepreneur. What would you say is the biggest difference in your business circle going into COVID period? 'Cause I've got here going into COVID was around five, six people per man contract, food manufacturing, all UK, around 20k weekly GP. What's the main big differences from where he was there to like where we are today in the business? - I am a recruitment consultant at heart. - Right, I love the craft. So I love helping people to go on that journey and watching those penny drop moments and then getting the success from that. I love that. And I think every leader should love that. I think every leader should still be in love with the actual job that kind of got them to where they are now. What's different is infrastructure. It's size and scale and infrastructure. You can't scale a business without infrastructure. And infrastructure is so important to get the business, to where it needs to be. Otherwise, you're gonna kind of find yourself in a whack-a-mole situation. - Always fighting fires. So you've got to build processes and systems that will support that growth. And ideally, you build those systems up front. In reality, not many do that. They kind of build a system, go to the next level, realize that there's a problem and then build a system. So that problem doesn't occur again. - Yeah. - What was the first building block for you on that infrastructure side? By like salespeople, what was the first building block that you started to bring in? - Building an operations team because I have this mentality that I don't want my recruiters doing anything other than selling and making deals. I don't want them having to chase time sheets. I don't want them having to get involved in invoicing. I don't want them having to get involved in IR35. I don't want to have them get involved in issuing contracts. I don't want any of that. I want as soon as the deal is done, boom. - Every second, go. - Yeah, it goes straight to operations and then there's a process that happens there. So I bought in a COO who looks after both our finance team and our operations team to enable us to be able to do that. Then I can look at a recruit and they're just like, they're going, they're doing all the beautiful things. - Yeah, whenever I sit down with contract recruitment businesses that part tends to be to first building block or so important or when I speak to contract recruiters and maybe sound frustrated is they're having to do more of that stuff than they'd like. Or they've been used to being in a company where they haven't had to do that and then now they're having to do it because they're part of the municipal company as well. - They just don't want to do it. Everything about Circle is, I wanted to set up a business that I would have wanted to work in. So all of the things that would ever have frustrated me, I kind of took all of those problems away or put those things in to ensure that we created the right environment that I would have flourished in. So I don't want to do admin. I'm a recruiter. I want to be on the phone. I want to be making friends. I want to be building my network. I want to be creating opportunities, creating commercial outcomes and making money. That's it. I do not want to be getting bogged down with admin. If I'm building a great contract business, how would you think about perfectly building the best operations to support it? If we felt like we completed it, what would that be? Would have a CEO, then a finance director. How would you think about that design of it? If we've got the best people in C, what would the seats be? I'm interested to hear that. episode in just a moment, but before we do, I want to tell you about our long time partner source well. Something that comes up time and time again when I'm speaking to recruitment founders, recruitment leaders is that most of their teams aren't short on effort. They're short on time. If we're talking about outreach, time on the phone, notes, follow ups and data that sits across multiple tools, workflows slow down and it's hard to get a real clear picture on who to reach out to and exactly when. That's where source work comes in and why so many recruiters love this tool. You might already know them for their outreach and automation, but over the last year they built out something larger, something bigger, including their new CRM module designed specifically for growing agencies that want speed, not spreadsheets. Their idea really is simple. Fewer tools, less switching, better context. Starting from the first touch point to final placement is finally tracked properly. Your team can remain laser focused on relationships and revenue. What I really like about it is that it is modular. That means you don't have to rip out your entire tech stack to get the benefit of some of the great tools that source well has to offer. They have a sourcing module, data validation module, inbox automation, AI note taking, conversation and now also their CRM module. So it all flows back to your CRM or their CRM. If you're really looking to spend less time on admin and more time recruiting this year, I'd absolutely recommend checking out source well because you listen to this show. They'll absolutely look after you. They're also running free trials for different parts of their products and the different modules. You can find out about all of that with the link in the show notes or you can head directly to source well.com to learn more. Let's get back to the show. We're only 28 million. As it stands at the moment, we've got a really good structure. I've got a CEO, I've got an option manager, I've got a finance manager and then underneath that, I've got Ops looks after compliance, Ops looks after IR35, contracts, all of that. Finance does obviously all the finance things. That structure, what? You can grow into that. I think you can grow into that. I think as my COO progresses, I think we'll have an FD and an Ops director under that. We don't need it right now, but I think that's the natural progression of that side of the business. That's a good breakdown. I know that's helpful for people to hear. Which really enables me to focus on what I love and that's sales excellence. One of the things that I found most interesting about your journey, I want to make sure we talk about it before we talk about some of the things that you're doubling down on that you believe is going to take you to 180k weekly GP. You said to me, you got fed up on you saying again, something negative feeling on contract while finding someone for a perm or sickness. I think this was two of the market is end. Your background, let me know if I get this wrong, but in the past, you did like FMCG right, feed manufacturing. 2021 to 2023, we changed markets. You still have some of this in the business, but you wouldn't say your core market is now still. It's 25, we pivoted. We're still servicing feed manufacturing. We still have that original business that we set up and it does well. In order for us to scale to the next level, I couldn't be just in that market. It wasn't project led. It was very much firefighting. We've had an audit, we've failed an audit, we need to bring some people in to help us fix that problem. We've got someone off sick for six months and even interim that can come in and stand in. Very much interim opposed to contract them. It served as well. Like I said, we still got that element of the business. We had exactly the same thing in food manufacturing and in life sciences. Exactly the same thing. It was very much always selling against the negative. You can't really build scale within those businesses because not many businesses are budgeting for their ops director to have left and then left it right for the last minute to find someone or actually they had filled it, but that person now dropped out. Now we need to bring an interim in it. Your sales pitch, it's all quite dirty. It's not overly compelling because it's like, yeah, we don't like intramps. We just don't like them. We don't want them. They are expensive. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We've got some amazing accounts. We've got a great team that still managed that. In order for us to go to the next level, we need to think differently. I still wanted to work with those businesses, but I didn't want to be in that. So then comes the birth of engineering. Engineering was the first diversification doing capital projects. So we could be project leds within food manufacturing pharmaceutical medical device. That was the first diversification 2023. Just quickly as you are. How would you define the difference between what you just said in terms of historically what you've done? And still do now, but didn't see a future in it versus projects led. I just want to make sure we understand the difference because again, when I sit down with contract agrees, I'll hear this word projects. I want to make sure we're on the same page. How are they different? So it's different from a budget in perspective. Firstly, they budget it. They've got this program of work. They've budgeted for it. A large chunk of that budget is going to be towards head count. You're selling against a positive straight away. They've already got the money for it. The second thing is I can be I could get 10 contractors in that with one hiring manager. I can build scale in that account. That's the difference. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure as you as explaining that, that we all understood what that meant because it might mean different things with different people. So that makes sense and as to with the accounts that you have and still have, I'm assuming it was maybe like ones and twos. Yeah, exactly that ones and twos. Yeah. So as you were saying, sorry, so then you then buffed the engineering, I'll let you buy that down. So I was wanting to make sure that we had that defined. Yeah. So then we carved out engineering and built that as its own business. And then back into 2024, we moved into doing digital transformation within food manufacturing, farm, soup, and medical device, although that is taken as everywhere. And to be fair, engineering is taken as everywhere. It's taken us into data centers now. CapEx is CapEx, ERP and digital transformation. It's so agnostic. So if you especially if your candidate led, right, it's just it takes you everywhere. Yeah. So it's very, very quickly evolving away from just being in food, farmer and medical device. It's kind of going everywhere now. And so I'm just emphasizing this is because I think there'll be founders out there that may feel some of the things that you felt when you was looking at your some of those initial core accounts where you did feel like it latched the scalability that you wanted, maybe felt that there was a better top of business that you wanted to be doing. Was there a moment where you felt I want this to change? I want a different focus. This isn't going to get us to where we wanted to. What really enabled you to act? Because there'll be another founder out there who went for exactly what you went from would have just maybe just felt this is what I know. I'm going to stay here and hope it maybe changes or just puts up with it versus goes on this whole different focus and different chapter which has had a huge impact on your business. Yeah. Just a just a you've got to be intentional. Right. You got you can't have any blockers in your way. If you've got a goal that you're trying to get towards and you've got something that's standing in your way, you've got to remove it. You've got to remove it. You've got to be agile, but you're ultimately you've got to be intentional with with what you're doing. Just on the same what was zero to one to go from if me and you met and I said that I tell me about circle and you said we work with FMCG companies with interim roles. Yeah. To get into the point where we work with FMCG clients with digital transformation projects. How do we go from that to that? What was like step one was that you found the led sales opening up doors trying to build traction, then building in people on the journey. Yeah. Just give us a bit of an insight on how you went from that to that but just zero to one. There would have been loads of things. But what would you view as the first few steps to get closer to it? Engineering was a really easy carve out and that was quite natural. Okay. But when I wanted to go into digital transformation, I had a perfect opportunity. So I had a consultant come to me who I have a lot of respect for. He was quite early on in he was probably only with the business for a year. A lot of respect for him. He was the type of person that would come and ask me for advice, immediately implement it, immediately see the results. So just the ultimate student of the game, he came to me one day and he said, I'm really struggling with I build these relationships with these people and they probably hide to interim a year. And I've been waiting for this moment because I've been looking at this digital transformation space for a while and seeing the scale in it and seeing that it's the right opportunity to buy talent. Do I do it internally? What do I do there? So when he came to me that day, I said, you fancy a challenge. And I started talking to him about so it's everything that he was telling me that he was frustrated by. I could tell him that I have a market right here that is so hot that if we get this right and you follow my lead on this, it will be game changing. I can get you scaling accounts. I could do all of that, all of that stuff. So it was the perfect moment. So then we started building the plan together. We started building the plans together and he went out and he went out and launched it. What was the first step of that plan? Just give us that because that's the interesting. Yeah, speak to contractors, go out to the world, understand it. Firstly, I wanted him to do that because I wanted him to really buy into the scale of it, the true scale of it. So yeah, it's the same thing, the 360 exercise. Yeah, I love that. Was you unwilling to just you take that leap? Did you only feel good about doing it? If there's one part that you knew there was someone in the team that you could work with, do it with you. How come you didn't make that leap just yourself? Was you too busy? I had too much on. I couldn't give it what it would have needed. So I needed the perfect dance partner. Somebody that would come for advice that would have that open communication. Somebody that I know that if I give them a strategy or a piece of advice, then nail in it exactly that way. I think And every now and again Lady Lux Brinkles are over. and just gives you that opportunity, but you've got a grasp. It's interesting that that happened by chance. You're not think you could have intentionally created an opportunity for him to share with you challenges, different markets you want to go in. Like I've spoke to a few companies where one of the things that they do consistently is they'll have a future market's meeting with the leadership team and talk about the information what they're hearing. Is this a market that actually we really need to be considering? Yeah. What could have happened is he really hated that part of it and wanted to go to different, creamy business that gave him that right. Yeah, absolutely. If you thought about how you can create an intentional space for people to talk about these things, keep hearing this, is that a market we should look at? Do you know what I mean? Because you don't want that to always be like a good organic thing that happens. You want to ideally be a bit more intentional. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So off the back of that, we've now got anyone can pitch for me a business idea. Love that, yeah. Yeah, anyone can pitch. And off the back of that, we've just launched data centers. So we now have that, I won't go into it now, but there's a 10 point plan. You build a business plan, pitch me. If it's viable, we'll launch it. And you can do that whenever. Any time. Anyone, anytime. So that came off the back of that. Yeah, that came off the back of that. That's a good insight that anyone listening, create a own version of that. Yeah. But I think that's a good thing to be talking about in your business. So I have, it's really interesting one right. So the reason that the data centers thing came about was I've got a guy in the business. He started off as a training in engineering, got all the way to running engineering. Right. But he hadn't set up a market on his own, right. It kind of gone into one market. He's already a shareholder. And he said to me, he said, whilst I love running engineering, when all is said and done and we have sold, I want to have said that I created that. So here's a business plan. Beautiful. Beautiful. It's like, right, let's go. Last point, how did you communicate that? That would be helpful for people. So how did you communicate? This is now something that you can all do. If you have an idea, you have a business plan. Was that just you brought up in one of your means that you have with the entire organization? Like how did you communicate that in time? Yeah, both. We do end of month roundups where we present to the business. Where are we at? Are we on track towards our ultimate vision? So that is cold hard data. And then there's things like that that would be put in there and it'd be followed up in the WhatsApp group chat. Anyone wants to set up a market? Anyone that's identified something, here's 10 point plan, follow this. Yeah. That's really cool to hear that you implemented that after that experience. Yeah. Yeah. Because you got it right. Yeah. So that's really cool for that. But ultimately there will be people in the business that heard something. They might have heard that, but actually it's not in their world. So they kind of just park it because they're just focused on what they're doing. So actually by implementing that people are actually listening out now. It's actually on their radar. But ultimately they might not have felt as confident or comfortable coming to me and saying, "Hey look, I want to pitch you this." So that's important that you create that environment where that can happen. Yeah. I think there's two points there. Create the space for people to have those conversations, have those ideas. I think that's a really cool way to champion our entrepreneurial spirit. I think that's such a cool idea. And then two, if you do it properly, there's got to be some sort of parameters that have to be met because you don't want to be changing focus all the time. We're not going to be able to get to where we want to right, which is why you have the 10 point plan. Yeah. Something that stood out to me when we prepared for this was you said to me, "If you're going to hit one of your North Star metrics at the moment that you're aiming for as a 108K weekly GP, in order for you to get there, you feel that you're going to get there by having more depth with clients versus getting there by signing a whole host of new clients." And that's when I discovered Project Dominate to tell us a bit about this because I think there's some really great insights in there. So firstly, talk me for your project Dominate. What is it? I have a viewpoint that a lot of businesses over the years have been pure 360 or there being 180/180. And I'm sure it works for those businesses that it never works. Well, 360 worked for us. Right. But I think the actual art in gaining scale is you never lose 360 because you can't have contract recruiters that are 180BD because they're not info led. So kind of a led. Insight led. So they have to be 360. And the way a contract recruiters DNA is, the way that their buildup is, and I was exactly that by the way, smash the door down, do a deal on the next. And there was nothing behind me that was picking up the pieces and converting that into something bigger. So then there was the birth of the commercial team. And this was worked incredible for us. We've got a team of 360 consultants that are out there booking meetings, doing open indoors, doing deals. In the background, I've got a commercial team that has sight of every single meeting that's happening in the business, and then they're turning up to those meetings, and they're looking to expand those relationships from one person to two to four. We've got five contractors in that one account. Why haven't we wrapped it up in an SOW and actually given them something a little bit more for their money. That's where that came from. When did you bring that in? So the commercial team started with one person. It's now a team of six, including a small delivery team, and a small delivery consultant that's going to go in as well. That was about 18 months ago. Nice. And then on again, it's the particularly dominate, just because we're covering it. Curious how the commercial directs on the pod not to long ago, where her North Star was very much grow the recurring revenue in the business through embedded hiring projects. Yeah, that's right. So her point of view was if you were to incentivise her job on split details, that wouldn't incentivise on people in the business bringing her on calls, because they'd almost view it as we're far bringing her on the call. That's going to take money out of my pocket. Exactly right. Her incentives very much around agreed with the leadership team, the executives on, your North Star has grown recurring revenue. So whatever percentage we grow that would then mean that you get this and what your incentives are. Yeah, but he said it by so differently. We'll get back to the episode in just a moment. But first, I want to tell you about one of our partners, Atlas, and specifically highlight one of their most anticipated feature drops from their customers today, Magic Search. We all know that the CV only tells half the story. And now Atlas can fill in the rest with Magic Search. It helps you find the right people faster than ever. Every word of candidate shares in an interview, every salary mentioned on a call, every skill or experience tucked away in an email, Atlas captures it, enriches it, and makes it searchable by talking to their platform. Ask Atlas who talked about wanting a short commute, or who shared that they're planning to move abroad next year, and it's instantly going to find you answers and the right people. It basically means no more filters, no clicking around, only clear results from actual conversations. It's going to be the easiest way to uncover the hitting value in your database and turn every past interaction into future placements. But instead of just hearing it from me about the impact of moving over to Atlas, have a listen to Chris who made the move. Since we've been using Atlas since the start of the year, we've had back-to-back record quarters, and our EBIT does over 40% of the moment, which is pretty unheard of in recruitment, especially in UK. That's down to a lot of what Atlas has created. So, yeah, the time back to consultants, the conversations that you can have with your clients now, the detailed feedback of finding information, a click of buttons. Obviously, we've integrated WhatsApp extension as well. So, all of the WhatsApp discussions that we have with candidates and clients go straight into the CRM. That was a big game changer for us. So, you've just heard from another happy Atlas customer who made the switch. If you really don't want to get left behind and ensure you're partnered with the right platform to fuel your entire business, then make sure you do not miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive recruitment mentors podcast listener offer at recruitmentvatelist.com/recruitmentmentmentorspugcast or just hit the link. Did you maybe try splits initially or I don't know how do you. No, I didn't because I've heard so many horror stories of where it doesn't work because what you create is a them and us and the 360 consultants are naturally selfish, which is great. That's exactly how you want them to be. So, if they're thinking that I'm going to have to. If I'm tagging in commercial and I'm going to have to give a split for tagging them in. Even though commercial can turn that from one deal into ten, they're just not wired that way. So, therefore, they start keeping everything to themselves. So, you've got to target them very, very differently. And actually, commercial should be seen as a team that can support them to get that from one to ten. And just renumerated very differently. So, did they just have their own targets? Yeah, completely separate. Completely different. So, if I'm a 360 recruiter and I won the account, I brought on the account that we did a placement with or two placements with. The commercial team then ended up turning that account from two contractors to ten. Do I get a share of any of that because I brought on the account on that? Yeah, yeah, of course. Well, you'd be filling that. Right. You'd be filling it. If it was in your vertical, yeah, you'd be filling it. Or your team would be filling that. But it's the commercial team's job to recognise the opportunities, develop the opportunities and bring on that extra work. Exactly. So, they wouldn't actually be delivering it. The question was if a 360 consultant helps open up an account, they kept tagging commercial one. And then that goes to share on the revenue. The 360 would then go and fill those opportunities that come in, right? But the commercial team, where they had their value is, because they're not thinking selfishly. They're building the other opportunities within that account, where maybe that 360 recruiter would miss. So, if the commercial team is developing the account, and then if they do bring on roles, more projects, whatever, then they would tag in that 360 person again, who would then fill it. Yeah, yeah. So, then that's why the world is scheme would come in. Got you. We spoke about this. I really think this is a great team to be building in a great recruitment business. I think most would agree that great 360 recruiter is our selfish. Yeah. telling them until we blew in the face. - If you look, when you see the opportunity to say this, so then we can bring in that team. But wouldn't it be better if we just had a dedicated team where their sole purpose is to recognize those opportunities and do that and they're incentivized this way and we've got 360 recruits, we're not. - 100% - I get them to do more than they already do it. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. And don't get me wrong. So I'm not saying all contract recruiters don't do it. I've got some amazing guys in there that that is how they're led. They're DNA, they don't want 20 different clients with 20 contractors, right? They want a handful of clients and they want to go deep. But we're appealing to the masses here. Contract recruiters DNA isn't like that. We don't target it like that. We don't create them. We don't train them that way. So you have to have something in the background that can go, that's a big opportunity. - Yeah. - Well, how are we expanding that? Let's just pause a second. How are we expanding that? - Yeah. - So that's when the relay effect comes in. - Yeah, tell us about that. So this came about because you then had this team in, we're recognizing opportunities. I'm assuming when you look at, right, how are we gonna go from this point to the next point to a core part of that is, well, there's definitely more contractors that we can get into. We can develop our accounts that we've already got terms in everything further. - Yeah. - So tell us about, I really liked the way that you brought this down in terms of the relay piece. Tell us about that because I thought that was quite cool. - Okay, so if a consultant does a deal, typically what they'll do is they'll ring the bell and then they go back onto business development. They are then set a task within two weeks. They've then got a book of meeting with that hiring manager that they've just placed with, with their boss. And then they tag in their line manager. When that meeting's happened, their line manager is tasked to go and find the next person's line manager. So you're constantly relaying until you get into the top of the tree and you're selling overall solutions. Any point commercial have, like they have view of every meeting that's going on. So at any point, they're going, I'm going in that. I'm going in that because I've been chasing that person. I know they've got this on or whatever it might be. I'm gonna attend that meeting and I'm gonna sell them an SOW. I'm gonna sell them an embedded service or whatever it might be. - Why did you opt for that being one of the core strategies? What's the idea behind, keep getting introductions to that managers, to that manager, that manager, like what's the why behind that why? - It's so we can do more with less ultimately, but it's a way in which to get the contract and create us to think a little bit differently, to think a bit bigger. They're very much wired a certain way. So if we can build a process in a framework where when that deal is done, they've got something else that they need to do, that something else is gonna ultimately add more revenue, add more GP to their book. Likelihood is that they're going to do it. What's the why from a recruit's perspective to the higher manager? So why would the hiring manager book me and meeting the recruiter with their manager? What's the why there that they position it as like what's in it for them? - Again, it depends who the hiring manager is on what their remit is, but it firstly it'd be association. So it's capability straight away and association. So it's hey, just so you know, I've just placed X in with Y. Firstly, you've then got your capability, okay, right? And it's association, okay, so he's already doing business with us. And then there were picture reason why that, why. - Sorry, I just assumed what you said there was ways that you can get that meeting when the way that you said it to me, I felt that they were just getting introduction but it doesn't always work that way. - No. - Yeah, it doesn't always work that way. But the fundamental goal and toss that you're giving people is if you made a placement with that hiring manager, then you need to find out who their manager is. - Yeah, yeah. - And you need to book a meet with them in the two-week window, get a meeting with them. - Yeah, because otherwise it could go cold. That account can just go, how fragile is an account if you've only got one run of it? - Yeah, it's a little bit dull. - Let's get two, you know? Let's get three, let's get four, let's go. - And how's that going? - It's going well. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, it's going well. It's going well. It's adding a lot of value, it's adding a lot of GP people's books are going through the roofs, which is good. - I do think it's really worth thinking about for people is how can we go? Because I said this recently on a LinkedIn post, I've just seen it time and time again. I know contract can be a bit different. These two examples are permed, but one of them was an out-and-out contract recruited before. But the amount of people that I've met who would say I did this in a year and it was with four clients, five clients. I think it's something that people really need to be honest with themselves about and look at their client spread and go actually, have I generally try to maximize that account? Because I've sat down with a lot of recruiters and if we were to double click into their recruitment desk, contract or permed, I'd say the majority would fall into the camp that they have a handful of really key accounts that they're deep with and then they might have some other accounts that they know that they're going to trans out with, deals with. But if every year you're going into the year looking for 20 new client accounts to hit your target, I think you're doing that wrong. I think the best recruiters that I've met will have that client spread of free to five, maybe a few more, but that cluster of, I'm going to have X number runners in there. That's going to be 80% of my contract, but and then I'm always going to have this 25% of the exactly right deals with. Exactly right. So how all your eggs in one basket? Yeah, you need to have a strategy for this. So I think it's really cool that you're helping the team with that project dominate whatever you want to call it. But going deeper with your clients, not always thinking how many new clients can do business with it? It's not only that as well, where project dominate really works is, we could be absolutely nailing it with Arla on CapEx, right? But we're doing nothing on digital transformation. Right. Why is that? And it's just joining that up, introduce the other team, right? It's making sure that we can get every service that we offer into a client. It's something that people need to be thinking about. Finally, we wanted to talk about was we got NetGain 1, the science of a scaling recruiters. I know again, because you said something you're really passionate about is that sales excellence, helping people get to certain points in their career. You broke it down a bit earlier, but I really liked when you shared with me how you think about taking someone, you said with where you're based, a lot of the people that are on the circle journey have come with no experience. So this is something that you've really had to geek out on, become great at, which is taking Luke, who's never done contract recruitment before, to run in a 15k week GP. But if I join your business tomorrow, I've got no experience. I've got the graft. I've gone through your time acquisition process. I hit all those markers. Month one to two, there's no deals expected. Learn the craft. Yeah. Month free, do a deal to pause probation. After that, grow one contract to every month for the year. And the idea is because you're always feuding proof in your contract book. You shared earlier around the focus on the kind of side of the delivery, free 60 bits of information. How have you got better at taking people through that journey? Tell us a bit about that, because I think that is really great about your business. What you've been able to do, location you are, it does make it harder. There's not loads of different recruitment businesses that you can take people from. So you've really had to turn this into a bit of a fine art and really commit to it. NetGameOne is a great philosophy. I can't steal it. It's not mine. I stole it. It's ultimately getting everybody into a growth mindset. Growing your book every single month. So if you have 10 contractors out and you've got two finishers, get three deals. Grow every month. Do you see what I'm saying? So that's the mindset of it. Never going backwards consistently growing your book. Your first year is both the hardest and the easiest hardest because you're learning something new. But it's the easiest to grow. So to go from zero to 10K is so much easier than going from 10 to 20K. It's about having that mindset that, OK, so if you come in and you do a deal in month three, in month four, I want another deal. That contract is not going to finish. Right? Well, he might finish. But nine times that at 10, it's a six or 12 month contract. I want one deal in the second month. I want one deal in the third month. And as long as they're growing their book, I don't care how many deals that takes you to grow your book, just grow your book. So again, like I say, if you've got 10 contractors out and you're losing two, you've got two finishes that month and you can't extend them, firstly, you're going to try and redeploy those contractors elsewhere. But ultimately, you're thinking, OK, I need three deals this month to be able to grow. And does that really make sure people avoid complacency? Yeah. It's just the right one. Well, I had commissioned structure used to be tied to it, which I can-- we outcrew that quite quickly. But a commissioned structure will be based on whether you grow or whether it stays to or went backwards. We don't have that anymore. I feel like to be fair, a lot of stuff that we've covered really goes into how you're getting people to do that first deal. You just said their first-gen contract recruitment can be the hardest and the easiest. If you're going from zero to one on contract or maybe you're typically a pern business and you're trying to grow a contract side of your business, when I speak to people, I try and remind them from my conversations that it's probably going to take more money than you expect, and it's take longer than you expect it. So you've now got this big foundation platform that people can join. But if me and you were meeting up and I have a pern recruitment business, I was a lot of contract, how long do you think it would take if I get the elements right on going from whatever the weekly GP goal target I have? But just give people a bit of an insight, because I think that'll be helpful for people. How long do you think it would take to really say, I've got a good contract part of my business? That's the million dollar question. So if you're a pan-busier, you're pretty much going to be a pan-founder. I would imagine, I think you've got to buy the expertise first. I think you have to buy someone in the nose contract. How long would you give it to say, I've given that a rule, girl? Let's just assume you've got the right person. Yeah, but I wouldn't launch it with just one person. I buy a leader, I probably buy a billion manager level person with three rooks. That's what I'd do. That's how pretty much how I started it. So I guess I was a billion manager at that time. That's kind of the level I was at. I would buy a billion manager, I would buy a new one, and then I'd put some rooks in a market. How long would you give it to feed to say, again, assuming we've got the right people? How long would you give it to say a good contract? I would also, the trouble is we're doing it that way as well, is you don't want that billion manager trying to pull the wall over your eyes. So I'd probably lay in a non-exact. They can ensure that they've got-- What they say is true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That has that expertise of contracts. Yeah, two years. First thing is you want to get it to break. So understanding desk costs, understanding desk costs, and make sure that you do it, then your first milestone is to get it to break even. So if your desk cost is 10k, you need to get that at two and a half k average, WGP. That's your ultimate temperature check. How quickly can I get it to break even? If I've got one person plus three rookies, how quickly do I want to get that to break even? Well, I've only got to get it to 10k, so I'd want that at 10k inside five months. Okay. That's a really good point. I spoke to someone recently who ex-at the same snorror. They've ended up building a really good contract book but they've never done it before. And they actually ended up hiring someone from in the industry or program manager. Thought it would work really well, but a few things different happened. But it was more because they took what that person said and didn't have maybe that buffering between for someone to say that's not quite right. So that's a really good point that you say that. Because as you'll know, there's a lot of founders out there that want that recurring revenue, how they can get it is through a contract book. I wanted to just underline that. I think that's a good insight for people where if you haven't done contract before and you're bringing it in, it would probably be a smart move to have someone in the middle that can fact check and sense check things versus taking everything that leaked. The contract will grow as fast as gospel and true. Yeah, you can't have the warpool dove your eyes because otherwise in the perfect world it's going to work. You set them a target and I'm sure there'll be some kind of major incentive and they'll tip this in place that if you go out to X amount, we'll make your director of contract or whatever it might be. But we know what the recruitment will look like. It's full of people that can tell you they can deliver something but ultimately they can't. So you're very, if you're not somebody that truly understands contracts, then you're going to need to get that expertise in it with somebody that you trust. There isn't an employee like a non-execl someone like that. I think that's what I would do if I was perm and looking to launch contracts. Something that I know you're really passionate about and proud of is culture that you built a circle. I think when we're prepared for this you said like any business takes time to get it to a point where certain things you're really happy with. You've worked hard to get there but you really feel like you've got a really great balance of high performance and fun. What's taken time there? What do you think is enabled you to get that piece right? What we had to learn the hard way? What do we get wrong maybe early on with high performance and fun? I think it's actually understanding what high performance is firstly. There's a whole ton of things that we've got wrong. But why it's working right now is we've got a vision. We know what we're trying to achieve. We know that the top performance in the business there's 30% carved out in an EMI scheme and everyone knows that to enable us to get to that level there needs to be a baseline of high performance. So what does high performance means? Then you clearly define what high performance means. We're having fun along the way right? My biggest concern with recruits is they're buttoned up to tight. They're buttoned up to tight and they're too robotic and it's like guys like relax, have fun, be in maverick, your contract recruiter just go out there and make friends and make it happen and undo that top button a bit. Don't be buttoned up to tight but then have an environment that enables people to just go out and have fun with it. When I talk about culture I don't talk about the reward trips and trips to Dubai and the lunch clubs and all of that stuff. That's reward for effort. That's a reward for results. A culture for me is the feeling that anybody gets when they walk through the double doors whether that's a visitor or whether that's somebody that works there. I give you an example. So I run a podcast with people in the industry and a CEO walks in of three billion turnover business and they have to walk through the sales floor to get a circle bar which is at the back which is where I do podcasts. Live on a podcast one of my proudest moments he's just like I've never felt anything like it. It's the exact opposite of what I would imagine a recruitment business to feel like. People stand up as people laugh and there's energy. There's people on the phone and you can just get a sense that people are making stuff happen. For me that's culture. Everything else is reward. So I don't know. It's the million dollar question. How do you get that balance right? What I hear there which is probably somebody really had to work through is you started with clarity. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that. Intention. Intention and clarity. I know that can be overused but I mean a lot of founders and a lot of the times that's something they don't have. I don't think you can have high performance or really great describe your culture as a great culture. If you haven't got clarity on what even is high performance things we've spoken about today what are non-negotiable is what the expectations. Everything has to be a golden threat. So there's two types of it. It's the golden thread from the vision. What are all the parts in that that create the vision and make that vision come alive and ensure that we're working towards that vision and then there's a golden thread of leadership. I want every leader in the business to look at things through my eyes or through Steve's eyes or through Kaley's eyes or whatever it might be. We all need to be on the same page. It's ensuring you've got that golden thread across leadership and with the vision and then the rest will take care of itself. Again, that's clarity right. You've got to have clarity on that to then pass it on to them and they've got to have clarity on it. You can create a vision, you can create values and you can stick them on a wall and no one reads them. It's just wallpaper. But that's going to be you've got to now protect this. Yeah, you've got to protect it. So everything has got to be based around it. So every piece of communication that you're going out to the business is led from the vision. Right, let's start there. Where are we at against the vision? What do we need to do to make sure that we can get there a little bit quicker or whatever it might be? So everything has got to be vision led. Yeah, I love that. I think again, this would be something a lot of founders would be thinking about as they're growing as they're scaling. It's how do we really know that culture apart as well as high performance? Because that can be hard as it becomes more and more diluted. There's more people. There's more managers. But if we really pull it down, I don't think you can get anywhere close to achieving that without that clarity piece start with the vision. Whatever it may be for you, but clarity is what I'd be thinking about. Does everyone know what is expected of them? Do we have clean on the go to the balls? Do we say we're high performance? Do we even know what that means? A lot of it boils down to that. And a lot of founders and companies that I meet don't have that, whether that be from does Luke the recruit on the sales will know what a good day looks like? Does Luke the recruit and know how he gets to his next milestone and where the business is going? I think a lot of it boils down to that. But that takes work, right? You would have had to reflect and think about where are we going? What do I want it to be? That is just a ten minute. You've got to really think deeply about that because guess what? Every message, every communication, you've got to believe that. And you've got to communicate it and people've got to buy into it. They've got to buy into it. I think some can get it wrong by not being true to themselves. I'm okay with the fact that in fact, I'm all in okay with it. We are a sales business. We are hungry, sales business, and you feel that when you walk through the door. For me, that's hyperformers. You said about golden threads. For sure, golden thread of the most successful recruitment companies I've met own what you just said and know what they are. And don't try and hide it. That is something that I've seen time and time again. I think companies that have struggled, haven't owned that or maybe changed or panned to what they thought they needed to be or what people don't see. It starts wagging the dog. You can't have that. Be intentional about what you want your business to be. Be intentional about what the vision is. Communicate it within an inch of its life at any given opportunity. Then you've got it. Then you've got to stick to it. That's then when you lose people. If you sell these things, but then you see certain things happening. Yeah, then top it over there in the corner who's been in 50k above and sticking to them on the go to ball. You've got a problem, right? You can't have that. Luke, since getting to know you absolutely love your passion, I think that really comes across. Absolutely. Love it. I think really cool story. From where you were probably considering to quit recruitment, didn't find contract recruitment, got into it. And now this business that you're building, you've really pushed through that stage which so many recruitment entrepreneurs that I meet, struggle, which is that stage of building a leadership team, building an infrastructure to grow and scale. And I also love the fact that clearly willing to make those hard decisions on pivoting, change direction that you feel like is going to help you get closer to the goals versus maybe stay more comfortable. So I think we've really delivered there on some great craft bits in there, which I know we can talk about for ages and you could. But then also some really smart on the business stuff that you've done. We're talking about culture, different strategies that we think is going to help you get to where you want to get to. So appreciate you coming on the pod man. I love that. Thank you very much. That is a wrap for this week's episode. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. And if you've gotten value from this conversation or conversations in the past, we can see in the back end, a lot of you listen, but may not yet be subscribed. Hit the subscribe button. It massively helps the show and you'll be joining a community of recruiters that truly are dedicated to continuous improvement. And one of the ways they do that is by listening to this show every single week. Now you may not know this, but I'm also the founder of a business called Hector. We're an online training platform for growing recruitment businesses. Ultimately we help you get your new hires billing faster. We make your team performance predictable. The cool thing that we're doing at Hector is that all of our training on our platform is delivered by the types of people that you listen to on the show. People that are very much in the trenches today, current top performers, sharing exactly the playbooks and strategies that they're using to succeed in today's market. So your team can take those insights, not have to learn the hard way and apply them to their own desk. So if ever you are reviewing how you're upscaling your team, we are trying to solve the issues and challenges around inconsistent performance. Maybe worth checking us out. You can drop me a DM directly on LinkedIn. We can go over to our website. This is Hector.com. I'm booking a call with me there. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week. (upbeat music)