The allure of home working combined with post-pandemic societal and tech back-up, has prompted many recruitment professionals to reconsider priorities, lifestyle and future working practices. Growing and building your own business within this high-growth industry sector has become an increasingly attractive option and Recruitment Entrepreneur International has noted a significant rise in the number of experienced and successful recruitment professionals seeking to do exactly this.
One of the main challenges new business owners within our industry face is transforming their mindset from successful biller to successful CEO. Having only had experience in developing a strong track record of billings and earnings within a larger firm, they often lack the experience and knowledge in the other areas that are needed to set-up a business that can be scaled. This lack of experience can hinder them from building real value for their company, (which doesn’t equate solely to income and profit, but extends into a multitude of areas within their business).
There are key principles when seeking to create value within a recruitment business, which is important to recognise if the end goal is to sell the business when it matures. The constitutions of business value intertwine with each other and set the foundation for any comprehensively built, well-governed and successful recruitment business.
1. Hand-pick exceptional people for your management team
Strategic development and growth of your management team is a priority - and an industry coach or mentor can assist with these pivotal hiring decisions. Developing key people on this team with delegated managerial and operational responsibilities gives you headspace to focus on developing, executing and reviewing your strategy and growth plans.
2. Co-create a comprehensive talent attraction strategy
Your business needs a clear and comprehensive talent attraction strategy, with input from all your management team. Together with a clear narrative of your business vision this helps you generate the messaging that will be used in your talent attraction collateral. For internal hiring activities, you will often need to bring in a specialist who is solely focused on the talent attraction strategy for the business.
3. Develop your brand within the marketplace
Developing your brand within your industry or specialism/niche requires strong strategy and project management experience, to help build and develop your identity, website and ongoing marketing activities. It’s also important is to ensure that your team act as ambassadors of your brand both online and in-person. Having a dedicated marketing specialist or communications support team can help to ensure your brand is developing as your business grows.
4. Embed compliance and governance into your infrastructure
Developing your business with clear corporate governance means ensuring that robust systems, processes and procedures are fundamentally built into your infrastructure. Corporate governance procedures should be distributed among among senior management, who are charged with the responsibility and oversight to ensure the business infrastructure can deliver long-term success. Having a specialist solely dedicated to improving and implementing management and operational processes can be advantageous.
5. Create a strategic business development plan
A clear business development strategy and a plan to execute it is important. As your business grows, diversified revenue creates more stability in profit and cashflow, ensuring a more predictable performance in the months and years to come. Many businesses seek the advice of an industry expert or business development coach to assist with market development strategy.
6. Prevent Income Concentration
There is a significant risk of income concentration when business revenue is overdependent on your top five clients and/or your top three consultants. The risk is the potential exposure to your income if one or two of your top clients or consultants leave. The strategy lies in reducing the income concentration (by spreading it over a higher number of clients and consultants) as well as reducing the likelihood of a client leaving (through quality of service) or consultant leaving (through employee incentives). Experienced coaches within the industry can help guide owners on preventing this risk.
7. Implement standardised management reports
Having a clear management reporting system and regular review of your business’ monthly performance is important when considering key decisions for your business both now and the future and lets you make decisions based on accurate data. Working with financial experts, you should set realistic and appropriate targets for income and expenditure while managing business performance drivers.
The ability to be on top of costs, both in terms of consultant remuneration, operating costs and any other business costs is fundamental and will help in the long-term development and growth of the business.
8. Create room for more growth; consider future plans for global expansion
This may not be top of mind as you set-up your recruitment business, but the potential opportunity to expand your brand presence into new markets should be an area of focus as the business develops. Having future plans to expand to new regions can be a good target as part of the pathway for scaling your business.
Seeking the expertise of a business expert with relevant experience in national and international expansion can help you understand the key things to consider.
About Recruitment Entrepreneur International
Recruitment Entrepreneur International is a private equity firm with 30+ recruitment companies in its portfolio, covering numerous recruitment sectors, at various stages of growth. Founded by international businessman, James Caan CBE, it provides talented individuals with funding, best-in-class operational infrastructure, coaching and management advice. Its success lies in its ability to provide the knowledge and hands-on know-how to help start-ups and scale-ups grow, scale, and materially increase profit - ensuring that its portfolio partners can achieve a high equity value on exit.
We look for exceptional recruitment professionals with relentless ambition. We partner with people around the globe and across all sectors.
Once your application has been received it will be reviewed by our investment team. If successful, we’ll contact you to discuss launching or scaling your business in more detail.