Confessions of a Recruiter
The show is hosted by Blake Thompson and Declan Kluver who respectively own Vendito Consulting and Blended Employment. Both have been in Sales & Marketing Recruitment for over 5 years. The podcast is about opening the door to the recruitment world and creating a community of recruiters who can share funny stories, educate and have honest conversations about the industry and their experience. All episodes are powered by xrecruiter.
Confessions of a Recruiter
Joe Butler - Hyre | Confessions of a Recruiter #109
Ever wondered how a DJ enthusiast transitioned from spinning tracks to becoming a co-founder of a successful recruitment company? We were thrilled to welcome Joe from Hyre, who took us on his fascinating journey from organizing dance parties to launching a promotions company, and eventually stepping into the high-pressure world of recruitment in New Zealand. Joe's story is a testament to resilience and passion for business, revealing how each step, from the vibrant nightlife to the tech-driven recruitment industry, shaped his entrepreneurial spirit and led to his success across different cities and industries.
Throughout our conversation with Joe, we explored the evolution of recruitment strategies, particularly during challenging times, and how personalized company presentations became a game-changer. Joe shared valuable insights from his time with Ashdown and Vendito, emphasizing the importance of brand consistency and the pivotal role recruiters play in shaping a company’s reputation. We also took a deep dive into the investment strategies that fueled business growth, from initial property purchases to ventures into shares and cryptocurrencies. Joe's candid reflections on both the wins and losses offer a comprehensive view of the importance of smart investments and leveraging supportive networks in tech.
Our discussion also ventured into the dynamics of co-founding a business with a close friend, exploring the complexities and the necessity of communication and support. Joe’s journey through economic downturns highlighted the challenges of maintaining sustainability and the need for strategic planning and adaptability. We wrapped up with insights into recruitment industry strategies, including the value of diverse experiences and the benefits of a boutique agency setting, all aiming towards a future of growth, maturity, and continued innovation in the business landscape.
· Our Website is: xrecruiter.io
Hey guys, I'm Joe. I'm one of the co-founders of Hire. We've just been on the podcast today with Blake and Deac talking through my journey everything from promoting dance parties and DJing through to starting an agency and everything in between. It's been a lot of fun. Give it a listen.
Speaker 2:We have Joe from Hire on Confessions of a Recruiter podcast. How's it going? Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming on Pleasure. I've never done one of these before, so I'm pretty excited. I love that.
Speaker 2:So we're excited to have you on because your background is interesting, super interesting. You've done a lot more than just the average punter in recruitment and we'll get into that in a moment, but from a high level. Maybe for people listening, let's just give them some context on who you are. So you've been running your own agency for almost eight years. You invest in a lot of businesses and we'll probably dive into that a little bit more. But do you just want to share kind of where you've just for a couple of minutes, where you've come from and what you're getting up to at the moment? Where you've come from and what you're getting up to at the moment.
Speaker 1:Sure, I'll go a little bit back. Sort of ties in my entrepreneurial journey started in my early 20s as a DJ enthusiast. I wanted to play house music and dubstep in nightclubs. I quickly figured out to do that you had to sell a lot of tickets for the promoters. So I was in a sales job at the time but I was sort of also just cruising around selling tickets and I very quickly figured out I would rather be the person that has some other people sell some tickets for me and launched a promotions company and threw massive parties and it was a great time, pretty wild. We could do a separate podcast about that.
Speaker 1:But what I realized sort of after like a year or so is it was the business that really excited me more than the whole like music and DJing scene. I was really into it. I also knew I wasn't going to be kicking around nightclubs at 4am for the rest of my life. So that was sort of a light bulb moment for me where I knew I wanted to be a business owner of some shape or form in the future. But I had no idea what that was going to be. Just through like a family handout. Essentially after the end of my party phase I fell into software testing, which I did for about a year and a half, and so that sort of landed me in the center of the the tech space in New Zealand, in Auckland. I was the world's worst software tester, like how do you test software?
Speaker 1:well, just try and use it yeah, basically there'd be like a bunch of does it do this, if you do that, you know, if you don't put an email address in.
Speaker 2:Does it give you a warning?
Speaker 1:See I'm struggling to explain it now it's how bad I was at this Really bad at it, but really enjoyed tech. I was interested in that. So now I know I like tech. I want to start a business one day and I'm sort of kicking around thinking like, what am I going to do next? I'm talking to various recruiters and an agency says, like why don't you do recruitment? Like have you thought about that as a profession? I'm sure every guest you've ever had fell into the job.
Speaker 1:It's not something you sign up for in high school, but I sort of looked at recruitment there and then for a few different lenses I could see that the bird's eye view you're going to have into a lot of different companies and economy would be a powerful thing. And I could see that I was going to be selling a service that was reliant on me myself and I, as opposed to selling, say, salesforce, oracle or SAP, and my sales figures are only going to be as good as the product updates. So that was really appealing to me as well. So I joined what could only be described as a super boiler room agency in Auckland. You can check my link. I'm not going to yell names on the podcast, but you can have a look at my LinkedIn. But yeah, they're like a global business 480 offices thrown straight into the fire pit and yeah, it was brutal the KPIs and stuff like they just but it's the best breeding group. It was amazing. It was amazing.
Speaker 3:Sucks at the time, but it was brutal yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I thrived in it. To be honest, I actually really enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy the leadership in that. So I think those environments can be good to lot of toxic leaders in that space and I certainly had one. She used to make people cry on a regular basis and so me and her had a bit of friction pretty quickly and I wasn't going to be bullied and basically caused chaos in the office and got fired from that job. So that was my first experience with recruitment. But then the second agency was everything you would want a recruitment agency to be. It was fast-paced, you know, had about 30 people, highly, highly successful, you know, worked with multiple million-dollar billers, but they were super cool, just human, down-to-earth, like we don't need to be dicks about this kind of people. And that's where I really sort of hit my straps and sort of found my place in the industry, so to speak, and did really well in that in my first year and was loving life as a 25-year-old in Auckland driving around in a little Audi and earning reasonable money, and it felt like a huge success. But I very quickly had no friends because they were all moving to Sydney. So I came over and visited them all one New Year's and could see exactly why they'd moved to Sydney and decided I was going to make that move pretty quickly myself. So I moved here 2013.
Speaker 1:I joined a really small agency, which you know. It was a great little shop but probably a slight disadvantage to someone that didn't know the market very well. So I was there for maybe a year and then I joined a much bigger agency and really learned Sydney in that moment or in that sort of two years again, working around lots of really really good people, learned lots. You've got a floor of 60 recruiters, you're going to hear a lot about what's going on pretty quickly and we're all young, we're single, we're out having drinks, you're living, breathing, eating this culture. So I feel like I like learned quite quickly.
Speaker 1:The thing about those big agencies is, once you feel like you know enough, you then start realizing, oh, the 10% commission difference is paying for these. You know like conferences away or the marble credenzas on the 51st floor, and I knew I was getting underpaid and I knew I probably could go to a smaller agency and get a better commission rate at that stage and look, maybe I should have stayed longer. Maybe I shouldn't have, but that was a decision I made at the time. So I joined another agency. It was a bit more like mid-size but they were really trying to like grow and build something new. That was like a cool thing be a part of.
Speaker 1:But it was also super cool to be around the founders of that business, cause by this point I was well and truly in my head like I am starting a recruitment business. I don't know when I will know when the right time comes, but I'm doing it. So that also appealed to me to get that. You know day-to-day interaction, seeing what's going on, how's the business operating. And I did really well there. You know smaller business but became the top biller within a year and a half, won some really big clients. And Was that talent? That was Ashdown.
Speaker 3:Ashdown yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I had a really good time there. It was cool. So at this time I'm living with my best mate. Well, I say we're brothers because we fight more like brothers than best mates. He's an internal recruiter for a finance company from London. He's been doing it for about 15 years and we're sort of having conversations with each other about starting a business and the timing all just lined up.
Speaker 1:We were very sort of free in terms of responsibilities. I had a good bunch of clients that I knew were going to come with me from Ashdown and I approached it in a really respectful way with those founders, as opposed to just leaving and taking the clients. That sort of sat them down and was like, look, I'm going to leave, I'm going to start my own company, I'm your top performer, like from a PR perspective, like let's make this look like a success to everyone else. And if you allow me to continue working with my clients that are x, y and z without any interruption, I will make a big effort to embed whoever you want from ash down into the, into the client as well, and we can compete head to head, because there are clients I want.
Speaker 1:No one in the business actually knew them and so they were like sweet, like that seems, that seems pretty cool. So we left on really good terms and, uh, jay and I went about launching hire, which was April 2017, on the balcony of our Bondi flat. Um and um, it's been a wild journey, like from. I remember the first day, like it was yesterday it took me three hours to figure out how to make an email signature, so that took me to about 12 PM in the afternoon. The afternoon, by 2 pm in the afternoon, we had eight jobs on and we're off, and yeah, it's been a wild ride since.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. That's a really encouraging story because not many people go through those transitions, especially on the way you ended your previous employment to go start your own agency like nine times out of 10.
Speaker 1:You've got to give respect to get it.
Speaker 2:I think yeah.
Speaker 1:And you've got to be comfortable having uncomfortable conversations Like that was an uncomfortable conversation. To sit two founders down and be like I'm leaving, I'm starting my own business, I'm wanting to take my clients with me Was there?
Speaker 2:any awkwardness.
Speaker 1:I mean I felt uncomfortable but I felt the two guys were incredibly understanding and supportive. So, no, I don't think there was any awkwardness, because I think it was approached in a really respectful way and up until my time of departure I worked so hard to get them the best results I could and go out on a good note, Whereas I think most people would be like, right, I'm going to avoid that tricky conversation because it's going to be tricky.
Speaker 3:I'm just going to book a holiday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Go and find myself Totally. And then, oh, I found I want to be an agency director when I get back.
Speaker 1:Exactly. They're going to do the whole thing. Old mate A and B over here are going to feel absolutely slighted of problems. So, while uncomfortable initially, it felt like the right thing to do.
Speaker 2:So what does Hire recruit? Tell us about Hire? Is it perm contracts?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we are predominantly a perm house. I would say we're working on changing that, but that is our sort of natural happy space has been over the years Our core area within tech. We specialize across infrastructure or cloud infrastructure, data and software engineering. We'll go outside those lines occasionally in certain scenarios, like we have had scenarios where we've been building full teams in like a hybrid RPO capacity and that might include a product manager or UX person or whatever. We'll recruit those. I think when you've been doing it long enough you can figure it out. But those are our predominant verticals and the areas that we play in.
Speaker 1:In terms of client base, we do have customers at each end of the scale, right from the one-person startup that's just secured their first sort of seed round through to the country's largest retail bank, the country's largest supermarket, country's largest telco retail being the country's largest supermarket, country's largest telco.
Speaker 1:But our sort of main market that we end up working with the most is probably like mid-sized product-focused companies, and we like working with companies that we think are really really cool but not a lot of people know about them, because our sort of unique approach to recruitment from a higher perspective really is not focused around knowing 100 candidates from this vertical or this, that and the other. We present ourselves as a marketing arm of your business, so I want to come in and understand everything about your company, start to finish, right from the founders through to the funding, through to the socials. What does the office look like everything? Compare that against the 20 other companies I know that are similar. Figure out where you're outperforming them and be able to craft a narrative that is going to get people excited. Like. Our job is to bring people you want, who don't know who you are, to the table for a conversation. So the audience that best fits that, sorry, is generally companies that are growing but aren't that well-known yet and need a good pitch behind them.
Speaker 2:All right, so I want to pause there. Yep, you've just articulated that beautifully, thank you. Now, when did you learn that that was your positioning?
Speaker 1:Was that at Ashdown? Yeah, it started at Ashdown because one of my major clients was a consulting firm and traditionally in tech, people don't love working for consulting firms. They want to work directly for the company, and so it was really hard to get people interested in this and we're talking 2017, right. So back then people were just flicking out a Word PD and hoping for the best. So I started putting, like Google, pictures of the Macquarie Bank office on emails and like just doing little things. That outliered it up a bit and I was getting a good response from that and so I just built on that really, and that turned into like full sort of over time. You know, canva decks on companies that we'll build ourselves Followed a similar path.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like from a sales pitch perspective back in the day, like obviously starting a brand new company, we're pretty conscious of ad spend so we didn't want to do too much of that. But when we were talking to companies and sort of trying to, you know, give us a crack, give us a go, my conversation would have very little to do with recruitment and be more about okay, get all the information first and then give me a day to go away, I will come back and pitch your own company to you. This is what I think is really exciting about what you guys are doing. And then I think you should call your existing recruiters who have placed many people that they're successful and just ask them to pitch the company back to you. They should have more practice than me. See what it sounds like side by side and that worked surprisingly.
Speaker 3:You blew your competition out of the water.
Speaker 1:Well, like I definitely got on the panels.
Speaker 1:I don't know about blowing the competition out of the water, but I got on the panels and you know we really sort of grabbed onto that concept as we because we believed in it. That's just how we were sort of naturally doing the job. But then to sort of stand back and be like this is actually a little different. There's a whole conversation here. Yeah, it became a really, really big thing for us over time and it sort of you know, I've got mates in advertising and stuff and like recruitment's a bit weird in a sense, especially when you have companies working with multiple agencies.
Speaker 1:Like coca-cola is never allowing three advertising agencies to run rogue with different advertising campaigns that they've created on their own right. Like brand consistency. Um, there's a small pond we're all fishing in like send the wrong person in with the wrong bait, and it's a problem. And I think back then especially, it's not so much the case now because a lot of tech companies have invested in really capable people, teams who invest in this stuff. But back then it definitely was not as much of a thought about what recruiters were saying to talent in the market about their business and we were in a talent short space, like engineering in particular, really talent, short space. So yeah, that was our like.
Speaker 2:Just, we sort of fell into it and then defined it more over time. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. I kind of almost would do the similar thing when I was, you know, recruiting at Vendito and I love how humble and raw you need to be for that approach to work Totally, because unless you're super grounded and confident with your ability and confident with feedback, and if you butcher it you butcher it and ultimately if you aren't the best person for the job, then you're not going to get the job Totally. Yeah. And so I used to do something similar where I would probably in a bit more of a negative spin. I would probably in a bit more of a negative spin.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'd go, I would get the brief, I would tell them everything about, like, who are you as a person? I want to really be able to pump you up and make sure that people are excited to work for you as a leader. Tell me about you and just try and get on different avenues. And then I would plant the seed and go so what are these other recruiters? What are they actually saying about you guys? Like, if you're just giving your job out to someone, what if they like butcher it and say to someone how like good you are, but in a really surface level they don't, they're not interested. And then I come in and then do a really good job. They don't even want to speak to me anymore because they've already spoken to another recruiter and they've ruined the opportunity for that candidate. What do you do there to stop that from happening? Yeah, and half the time they're like okay.
Speaker 1:I didn't think about that. It's a massive, massive issue. Yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:And as well. Then you'll have sometimes a scenario where you've managed to go and save the candidate essentially repurchase, get them excited, it's all happened and they've, they've got a, they've got the role and then original agency is trying to send the invoice. Yeah, I've encountered that a few times, um, but I think I think it's a, it's the most important thing. And, like, when I think about my own business and if you know, if we engage rector x to ever recruit for us, like I want to know what you're saying about us, yeah, um, I don't know if I could trust a Rector Rack to ever recruit for us anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, have you used Rector Racks? Yeah, yeah, it's a real super mixed bag. There's one in particular who is incredibly amazing. Who Barton Mills Mark?
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard of him.
Speaker 1:He's incredible. Not only has he placed me in Ashdown, but he's recruited easily, over the course of the last eight years, our most successful staff, and his level of meticulous care and the clear sort of pride he takes in his work just shines, so I would give him a big recommendation.
Speaker 2:Nice, I find with RectorX I struggle to get them interested.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's a big problem. That's the problem I've had. Yeah, yeah, so you're a four-man agency.
Speaker 2:Why would I send anyone to you? I've got my clients that they'll pay me a higher fee for. Yeah, exactly, had the same conversation.
Speaker 1:That's a real soul-destroying, like absolute dick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I've said to them I'll pay you full fee, I don't really care, they just go. Yeah, but like why would I send you a good person? I've got someone else that I work with, so I'll just send them to them for full fee. I'm like, well, how can I win here? Yeah, it's really weird.
Speaker 3:What if you told that to a client. They'd tell you to fuck off. Don't worry about recruiting the role.
Speaker 1:Totally, yeah. Yeah, I've encountered that level of arrogance before. I've been pretty amazed by it because it wouldn't fly in our world for a second. Like I've definitely sat customers down in our business in the past and been like look, for whatever reason, whether it's on your side or our side, and there's many variables in that equation this isn't going to work. Like I think you should look at different partners and here's why but only in the most like respectful and polite possible way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you've drowned everything out, not in the first conversation of the time.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, trying to get a job brief and they just brush up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, no, yeah. These conversations are happening way down the line. We've absolutely flogged it by that point.
Speaker 2:So tell us about your team. What size team have you got?
Speaker 1:So at the moment we're four, probably a little bit smaller than usual. Natural scale points, probably six or seven. At our biggest we were 10. Last 18 months pretty brutal in tech. So yeah, there's a whole story around that, but we basically needed to make the team a bit smaller through that time. So you've got four billing consultants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a solid team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know you kind of prefaced it with it's smaller than you'd like, but when I say team Jay and I are two of them, that's fine, yeah, but we're billing consultants ourselves, we're in the weeds, we're doing deals yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:I love that, like I was comparing numbers from 2018 to 2021. 2018, there was four of us again sitting in a WeWork. 2021, which was a boom year, there were 10 of us bougie office, all the rest. The revenue was massive over here, but the profitability was exactly the same in both years and there was a lot less hassle in 2018. So definitely, I think, as a you know, I don't think you necessarily know what you want to be when you're starting a recruitment business.
Speaker 1:We just sort of rode away, just naturally, organically, got bigger, like for us it was a race. For the first six years, we had two months in that whole period of time that were not profitable and we just sort of hired people as it made sense to hire people. And just you know, without trying to sound like arrogant, my memory of it is it was like pretty easy. But then the last sort of 18 months, that's been a different story. And so now we have those two sort of viewpoints, which is really allowing us to look at the two sides of the coin and figure out, you know, what's good for us and approach that sort of future problem with a lot more kind of knowledge.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I think where you get unstuck is depends who you hang around as an agency owner. But, like, you think stuff matters like vanity, metrics or ego measurements, caring about how many square meters your office is, whether you own your own office, what your headcount is, and those things look impressive when you explain to people, but when you get your investor sheets you don't give a shit about that stuff. You care about the profitability and the run rate of the cash injection and the ROI of your investment. Yet when we're new business owners, we care so much because, like, say, you go to your parents and neither of my parents were in business but you go, oh, mate, we've got X headcount. They'll be like whoa, you must be killing it. And you're like no, mate, I'm actually making way less money than I ever thought and I'm more stressed. But yeah, thanks mum.
Speaker 1:It's such a phenomenal point because any time and any social interaction, you know what do you do Like I'm in a tech recruitment business. First question how many people do you have?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like the measure of success, yeah, but you know, definitely like it's different for everyone, right? Like I'll be honest, like at 10, I actually really didn't enjoy my job too much. Like I had turned into a full-time people manager. I'm looking at spreadsheets all day, I'm doing operations, I'm figuring out the money, stuff Like that for me. I went from being the striker to the football manager and I didn't know that I wouldn't like that until I was sort of in that position. So you know, if we ever grew that big again I'm sure we will I'll be hiring a manager to be my boss. Like I want to be be in the trenches.
Speaker 3:Did you ever get coaching or advisory throughout your business journey?
Speaker 1:No, and I think that was probably an oversight on my part. So, yeah, I want to be, and I say this now for any future business owner out there we spent no time, from the very beginning, really focusing on our business. We spent 100%, 110%, yeah, none.
Speaker 2:We were too focused on everybody else's business the very beginning, really focusing on our business.
Speaker 1:We spent a hundred percent, yeah. No, yeah, we were too focused on everybody else's business. So did we put effort into a website? No. Did we make salary surveys and you know tech papers and stuff like that? No, um, did we focus heavily on um contracting, which we found a little bit boring? No, did we get coaching? No, like we didn't do any of this stuff. We do all that stuff now, but it didn't kind of seem to matter at the time. In hindsight it's a beautiful thing, but at the time it was just going well and so we just sort of ran with it. We were just too busy for it all.
Speaker 1:Where do you think you would be if you did do that from day one? It's a really interesting question because you've got some big world events that took place in that mix, like COVID and essentially a recession over the last 21 months. But if I had all that hindsight, I think we'd be in a similar position. I think that we would probably have a bigger contract book. I think we'd have maybe one or two more staff. But yeah, actually, yeah, that's the answer. I think we'd have one or two more staff and I think we'd have maybe one or two more staff. But yeah, actually, yeah, that's the answer. I think we'd have one or two more staff and I think we'd have a bigger contract book. I think that would be the difference.
Speaker 3:That means you'd be 25% to 50%. Better, yes, better off, yeah, we'd be good.
Speaker 2:And so, okay, you'd be running your business for eight years. You did mention before around your first correct me here if I'm wrong but maybe the first half of your business journey you really focused on yourselves and maybe investing outside of your business and just using your agency as a vehicle to get more income to do the things that you're passionate about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally, that's super true. So happy to chat about that. So I think, like everybody has a why when they get into business, I think for both Jay and I. Jay's my business partner. I want to make sure I give him more airtime on this because he really should be sitting here with me. He's in the office doing recruitment.
Speaker 1:Jay's got the short end of the stick. He's got the short end of the stick, he's got the short end of the deal, but he's very aligned with me on all these things. But you know, we were having big conversations and, you know, keeping in mind, we're best mates as well, so you're having pretty real chats. Our kind of vision for life was, you know, we want to one day have a nice family home, we want to have freedom, we want to have freedom, we want to kind of do things on our terms, right. And so for the first leg of our business, you know we never sat there. I should go back. We never sat there and said let's build a 50-person powerhouse agency, like that kind of wasn't what we were after. You know, maybe we'll decide to do that later in our career, who knows?
Speaker 1:But yeah, the beginning was we were really interested in using a business as a vehicle for investment and it was interesting. Like throughout my career I kind of got introduced to these different things, like in my last business before hire, where I was working with a startup. They were planning a listing, they were going to go public and the CTO was like well, look, if you can get X amount together amongst all your friends, you can buy some of the pre-IPO shares. I think it's going to go well, and so I did and we did, and it did go really well, and so that was like a first taste in investing and it was pretty cool. We were really excited by it. It was this whole new world.
Speaker 1:And then when we started our business, we were in a WeWork. You're sitting around, you're networking with different people and the guy that we ended up sitting next to the most was a property buyer. He focused on buying properties in Brisbane like a strategy really focused on land value, old houses, up and coming suburbs, and we sat with him for, you know, this is probably like the better part of two years before we could actually do this.
Speaker 1:You know like we were a small business and like figuring out life. But by the time we got to the point where we could make that decision and do it Buy a property.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like we knew so much about it. We sit next to Old Mate every day and so all that stuff just really excited us. You know, like it could be argued too much at times and maybe at times took our focus away from what we were meant to be doing. But I think that's like a shiny toy phase anyone goes through with anything. But, yeah, we really enjoyed that phase of the business.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, when the business was doing well and we would get to the end of the quarter and be like, right well, there's X profits, we could increase headcount, we could do this, we could do that. There's there's x profits, we could increase headcount, we could do this, we could do that. Or we could invest in property we can invest in shares, we can invest in crypto. We did all of that stuff at various times over over the last few years and it was a lot of fun. There were some great wins, there was a couple of losses, but we're, you know, pretty educated about it now. But you're, probably the most meaningful stuff that we've done in that space, directly related to our industry, is sort of private investments into different companies that are growing in Australia. So we're investing in like 11 different tech companies.
Speaker 3:Is there a minimum, like do you have to minimum amount you have to put forward, or how does it work?
Speaker 1:No. So I mean, it depends who you're doing it through. So, like some of the times, we've known the founders directly and they've had clear minimums. But sometimes you know, when companies are doing investment rounds, it's not just about getting money to the table, it's about getting expertise with shared interests. So there were times where we were like, oh, we want to put in X, and they would come back and be like, no, no, it has to be less than that. We want you to put in Y because we want to let this other person in as well. So that happens quite a lot. Actually, the main thing that I experienced throughout that is yeah, your allocation is actually getting pushed back because they would want more people in who are going to be able to bring more Smart money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:But no, like you don't need large amounts of money, like some of them could be as little as $5,000, but some of them could be a minimum of $50,000. It just sort of depends on the situation. And we joined a network called 1013, a headquartered out of Brisbane.
Speaker 3:Is that old mate who runs that? Steve Baxter, the Shark Tank guy?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's pretty cool. It's like he's basically out there. It's a syndicate yeah, it's a syndicate investing where they're out bidding for portions of VC rounds and they get some pretty cool companies like Mr Yum, go1, chipper would be like just three off the top of my head that we've been involved in anyway, and so these are really cool companies that Jay and I already knew about from a recruitment standpoint and understood how amazing the talent in these businesses were, and so it seemed like an exciting thing to get involved with. But I think as well, more broadly, outside of that, we felt it was a statement as directors of our business to the tech space saying like you guys have been very accommodating of us and supported our business, like we want to support the industry that we're a part of, so there's that element to it as well.
Speaker 2:Okay, so there's a recruiter out there who's listening to this. They're getting jacked up, getting excited, they're going. I want to do that. So you started your agency. Initially, it was to essentially create a vehicle where you could earn more money and then reinvest in things you're excited about, and so you've been able to now invest into 11 different companies. Is there a kind of a blueprint, a method to that? I'm going to put away 20% of the business profits to invest in X companies.
Speaker 1:Is it gut? Feel like, what actually is the process to do? Yeah, it's a really good question because, um, like, we probably started with no structure with that and now we have quite a quite a structure. Um got a sort of when we started and just to like, paint, paint some context, and this is not to pick, but this is just to help create context. Our first full year we did pretty close to $2 million, and again we're in a WeWork, so it's costing us nothing.
Speaker 1:The profits are quite big, but we also didn't really understand what's the tax component here, what's coming up? So it took a really long time to understand what was actually going to be ours out of that and so, out of caution, we just didn't touch it. So by the time we really started this, we're kind of two or three years into our business and, you know, a reasonable amount of money had sort of piled up, allowing us to do things in a not overly analytical fashion. Whereas, fast forward to now, where we are thinking about right, what's our headcount, what's our burn rate per month? Based on, like I work out my metrics like this, I'd be like, what is the worst quarter we've ever had in our lifespan as a business and I want to know that I've got.
Speaker 2:From an OPEX standpoint or revenue.
Speaker 1:From a like I'm real simple with finance, like win, lose, like what's the? What's the biggest loss we've ever taken in a quarter. So I don't know, let's say, just making up imaginary numbers, let's say it was 50K I would want to know that I have enough in the bank to survive for a year, a year and a half running, consistently at that worst performance rate and anything outside of that. Once you've had the growth conversation. So you're at the end of the quarter. Right, we've got the runway here. We're secured for a year and a half, based on X and Y. You know what are the growth things that we want to do.
Speaker 1:Do we want to hire staff? Do we want to invest more in marketing? Do we want to invest in AI? Do we want to invest in our website? Is there anything? Yes, no, yes, no. Okay, well, based on based on the quarter. There's x here. We can take y, so it's kind of how we do it now. Like to start with, I'd be honest, it was a bit just like hands in the cookie jar when you felt like it, which is I do not recommend right literally every agency owner does that right I would, literally I'd be saying to you like the two most important things of starting a business is pick your partner really wisely.
Speaker 1:You know, like me and Jay are best of mates but we also fight like brothers. But if I've got a flat tire at four in the morning, he's showing up and vice versa. What's?
Speaker 3:it like you said, he was a 15-year internal finance recruiter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so sorry, not quite 15 years internal. He was internal for seven years, Jay, he was internal for seven years. Jay's a bit older than me but he was, so he was internal for seven years. But prior to that I think he'd worked five years in agencies in London all in tech Gotcha and then he came out here to build the Lab 49 office in Australia, which he did really successfully and was just kind of he was always an agency recruiter at heart.
Speaker 2:Jay, I'm thinking, geez, you're partnering. He was always an agency recruiter at heart. Yeah, that's just the situation. I'm thinking, geez, you're partnering up with an internal. What are you?
Speaker 1:doing. Internal recruiter for a consulting business, I think is a bit different. Okay, internal recruiter for, maybe, a product business, but like Jay, like he loves delivery and recruitment, like he's flipping amazing at it. So you know he was like, yeah, glove foot back into agency land, no worries there.
Speaker 2:Did you have any moments as business partners? Because getting into business with someone is actually really challenging. We see recruiters getting into business with each other all the time. We see other business owners obviously not part of our network constantly fight, dissolve the business, start a new one. It's probably one of the most common reasons why companies fail because the two business leaders fight. They go separate ways, one half of the business goes that way, the other half goes that way and it's a massive mess. So have you had any moments for you two where you've thought I'm going to punt this guy out the door and I'm going to go this other way.
Speaker 1:Oh no, it's weekly basis. Sometimes I know he'll laugh when he hears this. No, I'm super real about that. Like I would say the first three years of our business, if you said what was the biggest challenge, it was me and Jay navigating our relationship as co-founders and figuring out who does what and how things should be done. And because when you're mates before you know, like quite often the scenario you describe is two colleagues meeting each other at work and you know professionally knowing each other and deciding to go out and start a recruitment business where we're mates Like I've seen him throw up after too much alcohol.
Speaker 1:Like you know you're close, so your lines of professionalism aren't really there. So you're always going to say what you think, which is a good thing.
Speaker 2:Okay, I was about to say is that a disadvantage or an advantage?
Speaker 1:It's an advantage for us, because when we have had arguments it's like a storm in a teacup because we couldn't escape each other. We have the same friends, we're at the same barbecue. So you can have a mad argument on a Friday and then on Saturday he's at the barbecue. You're like oh hey, bro, you want a beer. You know what I mean. So that was really really common with us super. You know, sporadically throughout, but funnily enough, anytime that we've experienced challenges whether it be COVID, personal challenges, you know the last 18 months of the tech space there's no fighting. It's like this dream team that comes together. It's really weird, um, because you know when.
Speaker 1:That's when you have to support each other totally it's super easy to ride the bike down the hill and you've probably got lots of time to focus on little things and get pissy about it and have an argument. But when you're focused on going up the hill and like all your energy just needs to go on a straight line, yeah, we don't have time for it. Um, but I think the strength of our relationship has been a big part of the success of our company, because clients can see like we have a pattern between us Partners and talent. They know we're mates. It's kind of like a package deal and you know like Jay is everything, I'm not, and vice versa from a business perspective. So it works really well. But yeah, we definitely have had arguments and we've had some like real sp at each other and like I guess my only advice to anyone like dealing with anything like that, uh, give it time, because it's just like any other relationship, like it will just inevitably get better. You'll just get used to each other's quirks, um. But also, like in those scenarios it's good to have a mediator. So we've, we've.
Speaker 1:There was three of us that lived in this infamous flat. The third one actually owned a recruitment company at the time. He was kind of like our mentor from afar. We're all really good mates. He's gone on to start a fintech business now but he would know when Jay and I were fighting he would almost sit us down and have a chat to us, a bit like dad, and that was always really helpful. So yeah, bringing a third party in, I think like can sometimes just create perspective. Like you find over nothing. It's stupid.
Speaker 2:How did you? Was there something that happened after that third year in business where you kind of got over those little fights? And I guess, just to add to that, how did you figure out who's responsible for what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a really good question. So I think after three years our jobs naturally started to change and take shape because the business was getting bigger. You know, to start with, when you're two-man band, you're sitting there both billing like, oh, like, how many interviews have you booked, how many client meetings have you booked? And like you're doing the same thing. Whereas as you're getting bigger you just naturally assume different roles.
Speaker 1:Jay sort of probably gravitated more toward the hands-on recruitment, hands-on winning loads of business, being out there, networking, being social.
Speaker 1:He's probably a more like free-spirited big picture kind of guy and I sort of gravitated more towards, like the operations, the finance, looking after the staff, you know, being really clear about who's doing what and why, because I'm a little bit more detail orientated.
Speaker 1:That's not to say that each of us didn't play some of those roles occasionally, but that's sort of how the partnership started to form and over time we just respected the fact that that's how it worked and we were kind of grateful for it, because I know that he didn't want to be talking to accountants or looking at spreadsheets or doing people management and you know I wasn't buzzing about going out to 100 events all the time. So you know we were picking up the slack for each other and operating as a team, but, yeah, it did just sort of take its natural path because we both took turns at those other jobs, um, but that's, you know, when things are. That's when our head count was a little bigger, whereas, like at the moment, we're probably doing the exact same job again. But I feel like we're both really enjoying it, like being back in the saddle and just you know, after two years, a kind of being kind of in the background a bit, now being really hands-on, the buzz is just that we're having fun with it.
Speaker 3:Nice, yeah, you spoke about the tech sort of downfall over the last 18 months. Yeah, how bad was it.
Speaker 1:I'd say pretty bad man and like, especially if you're not a big contract house and especially if you didn't work with lots of corporates. But then again, like anyone I talked to in techs, had it pretty bad. We noticed that August 22, we were like, oh, that's a bit weird, we had a pretty bad month there. Like seems odd, no worries, it will be fine. And yeah, it sort of kind of trended like that until the end of 22. And then 23 just kind of continued. I think we were as an industry in a bit of denial, probably till mid-23. And yeah, it was going down and down and down. It was completely driven.
Speaker 1:So the tech industry is, I think, very led by investment and liquidity right. So when you have a once-in-30-year global event where you know the whole world tightens up interest rates and in a serious, serious way, so you track it back, Like we started April 22 in America, they start lifting interest rates aggressively. You can see the tech companies laying off people in droves Didn't get to Australia until like August and then the trend continued and, like you will know, you know it's nothing, we hear nothing. We constantly hear about it in the news.
Speaker 1:You know we've had like 13 interest rate increases in Australia over the last little while and the you know cash rate's highest it's been in 30 years and the GDP last year is 0.8%. It's the worst GDP recorded in 30 years and it's, you know, reflective of the 1991 recession. And we've been in a household recession for seven consecutive quarters and the only thing that's really kept it up is government spending and immigration. So all those things combined back to the tech space, there's no VC money going in. There's companies that already have their VC money, but that Series B you were going to get that. We said like 12 months you'll be able to get the Series B hit these milestones. No, that has to last two years now. So that, just running down the chain, everything tightened up and so, yeah, like naturally, recruitment like dried up along with that.
Speaker 2:So are we talking like a 50% drop? Are we talking?
Speaker 1:10%. I think in our business at its worst we're, yes, 50, sometimes 60%, Like it depends on what you want to compare it against. You want to compare it against your?
Speaker 2:best month or a?
Speaker 1:normal year. And then there's the variability of size. You know you're a 10 there but you're an 8 here, so it's hard to like pinpoint it down. But I think like 50% is a fair guess, maybe more.
Speaker 3:It was even rougher for some people Like Matt was one of the guys at work. Matt, he's 20 years in the tech space and he coaches a lot of recruiters and he was saying that some of his mates that are good for a million dollars year in year out were just getting over 300K.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds super accurate and I think that the tough thing about that situation for most people was like our business model when we employed people and they came into the business. Right, you're a consultant, you're going to go in business and bring in clients and it's going to grow the whole shebang. That really never happened. Like Jay and I won all the business and here you have the jobs and fill them. That's sort of the 90% of like how our agency worked and so you know we have to take some responsibility for that.
Speaker 1:We should have pushed the narrative more of doing do more BD. It will benefit you in the long run or help build your brand, your business. But we had so much work on again so it was just like it's all going well people are billing, people are happy, people getting paid bonuses, just let it be type thing. But those same people sadly had to start trying to build this network and and like a down climate, like the only people answering calls for me were like people I'd known for for years and years and you've got that personal relationship with them and they're going to want to help you because you know you've done business for years together. The greatest recruiter in the world is not going to be able to create those relationships and, essentially, a recession. The doors just get locked and that's basically what we experienced.
Speaker 2:So what did you do there? Because I'm sure that it would be pretty daunting. August 2022 hits and you go geez, we were doing 150, 200, 250k months and now we've just done an 80K month and we've broken even, and now we're starting to go a little bit backwards. Were you thinking do I need to let people go? Did you let people go change to make sure that your business could withstand, as you put it, 50k a quarter or whatever? It was your worst quarter, or I can't remember exactly the number? But how do you withstand consecutive bad quarters if this continues longer than you expect?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it was pretty similar to how people approach the COVID thing. You did have to start getting cost conscious real quick. We weren't in a situation of sitting everyone down and being like, right, we're going to have to make X amount redundant, which was a blessed position for us at the time. But with hindsight don't really know if that was a pro or a con. But essentially, yeah, like we cut operational expense everywhere we could and this is coming off the bougiest time you know. 21 and 22 were, you know Best ever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you get a super yacht at Christmas Mate you would trip over a deal. Yeah yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:It's through rocks and you're making placements Like it was very easy back then and I'm sure that will happen again at some point. But what we really had to sit down and be honest about with all of our staff who had been hired into consulting consultant positions was guys like you know and I had said this loads and loads of times to the team before like the sun's not staying out forever, like you know, put some effort into making your own networks and stuff. Again, I'd, like I mentioned earlier I didn't push it that hard, but it was always a a conversation. But yeah, we had to and it was probably not till really like I don't know. I'm gonna say like jan 23, where we were jan, or feb 23, where we're like no, this isn't a bad quarter, this is something much bigger.
Speaker 1:This is real 23 or 24, 23 yeah, yeah, yeah, so we've, we've experienced some like bit of like bumpiness in 22. We've come into the new year but like, ah, to be grand, like we had such a hot period, and then it's definitely not. So we've really recognized at that point like it's not like a light on or off switch. It takes time to really sort of realize what's going on. You're seeing all around you media, etc. But yeah, we had to sit down, have difficult conversations with with our staff and basically say we're not going to be able to provide all the work that we have been providing for you guys to fill. Um, if we get it, we'll give it to you, obviously, but you need to be independent here. Like you have to basically go out and win business and we'll support you as much as we can with that, but you ultimately have to make that happen.
Speaker 1:Um, and yeah, it didn't go down that well. People self-elect. They weren't buzzing. They weren't buzzing about about that. No one was excited about the 2023 let's Go meeting Mate. No one actually left, because, I mean, we do have a really nice culture and a really nice team and so, you know, anyone listening to this there was a part of that. They're all phenomenal people, and you know, have landed on their feet well, and you know some are in the industry and some of them are out in the industry and wish them nothing but the best. But the facts were it was like we're not a huge contract house, we've got a little book. It's not going to pay for the wages of what was it? Nine people at that time in an office. You have to win business and that's actually how recruitment has been for the Forever Forever.
Speaker 1:So, it almost kind of pissed me off a little bit when I was getting the sort of shock and all Like, what do you mean? We've got to win business. It's like, come on, like you've created monsters yeah, created monsters, um. And so we we fought like hard, um, throughout that year through to all October to make that happen. Look, I'm just going to be real, like we didn't really win that much business. It just it was not the environment to to really do it.
Speaker 1:So we had to make some tough decisions in terms of reducing the business headcount. We did that as respectfully as we possibly could and we'd happily have a beer with any of them in the street or happy to bump into any of them. So I think it was on the best terms it possibly could be and just get really smart about operational expenditure. But also we did use that time as a bit of an investment period. You know, like I mentioned earlier, we weren't really too focused on doing the, on the business stuff, because we're so busy that whole time. So we use that time to do the full brand facelift. Last year we did the website, we started the salary guides and tech papers. We retooled the whole business with different stuff that allows us to do all this new cool stuff more. What's the word I'm looking for? No, it's gone, but it's good. It helps us be more efficient.
Speaker 2:You know what? I resonate with that a lot. I went through a similar scenario during COVID. Yeah, you know, vendito's a perm agency, right, I think we had maybe 12 consultants at the time and COVID happened. It was the first month ever in Vendito history. I think we brought in six grand a month. Yeah, and I had 12 consultants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think we've gone backwards like 120 grand a month. Yeah, and I sat there and you know I speak to my mum about this a lot. She's, you know, a bit of a mentor kind of someone that I bounce ideas off. Yeah, and I was almost a little bit heroic at the time. I'm like, yeah, mum, it's all good. You know I'm not letting anyone go. We've got a bit of cash in the bank, We'll just keep it going. Mom turns around, turns around and goes you'll be fucking broken three months, mate. Yeah, and I was like I love that. She's like you need to fuck everyone off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not performing and I was like oh okay and then had to just go out and just go. Hey guys, look, this is the lay of land. No one's winning business right now. All our pipelines dried up and I think that was the first moment that I ever thought maybe running a recruitment agency is not for me. That was the first moment ever I thought I might not actually be a recruiter, like, I don't know what my career is going to be now in the next six months if like this continues.
Speaker 1:Thankfully, it was like absolute gravy, you know you just have to hold on for three months, and then the moon comes and you can go Plus millions in government stimulus, yeah, yeah, Plus millions in government stimulus, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so when I look back on that and the reason why your story reminded me of that is I was very bougie back then too. Great office, nice car, hands in the cookie jar. And it wasn't until that happened where I became a much more wiser, wiser business owner to go that's fat Don't buy that, don't put that in. We don't need this software. I started cutting up my business card every three months to stop all the subscriptions coming up my account.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've done that. I'm getting a new account.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so it's interesting that you share that, because at the time it's not great but in hindsight, just like the boiler room that you mentioned in Auckland those are the things that actually make you like wiser, smarter, more robust business people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you going through that can empathize exactly with how we're feeling in that scenario and like COVID for us similar, but we wouldn't have had as many consultants. In COVID it was yeah, it was three months and you know it boomed after it and so it was long. And then the government stimulus right, whereas this it was like, well, there's no government stimulus, the expenses are way higher because, you know, having mentioned in this equation throughout this whole period, you've got inflation. Like you know, having mentioned in this equation throughout this whole period, you've got inflation. Like you know, linkedin's more expensive Job ad is more expensive, so you're getting pushed on both ends. And then your clients are getting pushed as well, so they're like, look, you know, I know we used to work at 15%, but can you do 8%? You're like what we never agreed to? 8% To the full audience.
Speaker 1:But you know, everybody's experiencing the same thing and that absolutely, um, yeah, it was a really tough, stressful time, I think, if I you know, it's funny you mentioned your mom because my dad, he literally said the same thing to me and probably like halfway through 23, it was like you just need to make some tough decisions and let these people go, but we, empathically, as humans, did not want to do that. It's quite a serious responsibility, I think, when you're an employer and you know that you're responsible for paying this person's rent for their life. I don't know if people think about that too often, but I took that pretty seriously and so I didn't want to just be like sorry guys, the party's over, you have to all leave now. I wanted to give it a decent run.
Speaker 2:When someone says that to you for the first time, you go holy shit really. Like when my mum said to me you've got to get rid of half of these people tomorrow and I sat there and I thought, no, that's a bit dramatic, mum. What are you talking about? I'm not doing that. I sat on it for like a week. Mum's reminded me again. You're going to have to let these people go, blake, it's either you let them go and at least half of them survive, and so do you, or you sit there and try and float everyone's 12 people's salaries, not making any money, and all of you don't have a job.
Speaker 1:So which one is it? Yeah, it's so, so, so tough and, like you know, it's not what you want, it's completely out of your control and yeah, it's just. You know it's the most uncomfortable position to be in, I think, as a business owner. But again, it's. You know, it's almost similar to the conversation I explained when I was leaving Ashdown with the founders. Once you actually have the chat, it's almost like a sigh of relief for them because you know they end up finding something better.
Speaker 3:They're better off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and like they've been disenhardened, like through no fault of your own, but like they're not able to be successful in your business right now. Yeah, it doesn't matter whether it's the economy's fault, your fault, their fault, who cares? Their fault, who cares Like they're not successful? It's your business, that's what's in their head. So yeah, it is. I did find almost every time it was like a bit of a sigh of relief. They landed on their feet, it was all fine, and so if I had hindsight, I probably would have made some of those decisions faster. But again, when you're in it, you just don't know. And then we were, you know, super blessed.
Speaker 1:From about July last year, things just started to tick back up again. Blessed from about July last year, things just started to tick back up again, and it's certainly looking really promising for this year. Why is that? What happened? It's a great question. I think that. Okay.
Speaker 1:So a lot of money started flowing back into the market. So I would like to think that smart investors are six months ahead of the curve, right? So America made their first interest rate cut in September. It was pretty clear that was going to come, and so we're starting to see things go good from July. So I'm making assumptions that investment is starting to happen, because I feel like that was the bottom and I feel like people who were really in the know with that stuff were investing and it felt like there was liquidity flowing back into the space. But I also think we encountered a lot of scenarios where people in their roles were under-resourced, they were getting burnt out. The companies are putting off hiring more people to help because of this sort of cost concern.
Speaker 1:The July term would have been a new financial year budget. There would have been some kind of budget, so a bit of that as well and I think towards the back end of the year, inflation figures started to look better. There's more chatter about there will be a rate cut rather than a rate increase and, like general sense of like, I think it's kind of getting better. But I'm still being a bit careful. You know that. And our small size at that stage was enough to shake enough work out of the tree where we could be quite successful, and was enough to shake enough work out of the tree where we could be quite successful. And we won an exclusive company that got like an $8 million funding round and, yeah, we had some really, really positive partnership with them throughout last year, which was great, and then, yeah, this year it seems like the optimism's definitely there. So, like I'm not saying it would be back to like before 2022, but it's definitely on the road to recovery, as far as I can see.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the actual business sentiment is way more positive than any time last year.
Speaker 1:I think it could be any company. It doesn't have to be tech. There's only so long you can sit still before you're irrelevant. One thing we've learned running our agency, and I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but you know, when I look at the clients that we worked with in 2017, we're not working with them now, or maybe like one of them, and that's not because we had any type of fallout. Those businesses have changed, the people have changed. Our service isn't relevant to them, for whatever reason. They've grown to a point where they have a large internal talent team, et cetera, et cetera. So kind of, if you're not like growing, you're dying, and so I don't think companies can sit still for too long, like we sort of saw last year.
Speaker 3:And, like you mentioned before about the source of information most recruiters get, where do you get your source of information, like your industry intel and?
Speaker 1:finding stuff out. So it's a really good point to raise, because I think this is a game changer for recruiters, depending on how much they want to invest in and it depends on how interested they are as well. Like you have to have a genuine interest. So you know, I referenced the bird's eye view of the market at the start. It's your choice how big that bird's eye view is. If it's just on what's going on within the software engineering space in banks in Sydney, then that's totally fine. But you're going to be able to have super powerful conversations if you understand what's going on domestically in the economy, if you understand who's getting money and why. You'll be able to have even more powerful conversations if you understand globally what's going on, if you understand what GDP is doing, gdp is doing like what immigration's doing, like all these different things that like contribute to our economy that we then recruit in um. So I spent a lot of time on the afr um.
Speaker 2:I've spent a lot of time. Any, any businesses that have come up recently that um you may recognize.
Speaker 1:You recognize on the afr, none that like are jumping out immediately. Yeah, why were you guys looking at that? You may recognize, you recognize On the AFR. None that like are jumping out immediately.
Speaker 2:Why were you guys in the AFR, were you guys in the AFR.
Speaker 1:Oh God, the egg on the face.
Speaker 2:I think we were yeah, yeah number one.
Speaker 1:actually Am I getting ejected now? That's a huge achievement. Congrats, guys. It's amazing. Yeah, clearly I need to read a little closer.
Speaker 2:You don't look at top 10. You look at like 20 to 50. They're going to be easy to get into.
Speaker 1:I definitely could read a little closer, but it's a great source of information. Smart companies, really good website. Just, I don't know like. I follow loads of people on LinkedIn, loads of people on EX or Twitter or whatever it's called now, loads and loads of podcasts on YouTube or Spotify, but it has to be stuff you're generally interested in, and so I've got a mortgage. So over the last two years I've been pretty interested in understanding what this whole interest rate thing's all about, and I've now learned a lot about it and understand how it ties into business and la, la, la, la la, whereas you know, two years ago I wouldn't have known much about it or cared.
Speaker 2:So your consultants at the moment, do you have like a bit of a game plan, a bit of a 101 of how to educate yourself to have more powerful conversations with clients?
Speaker 1:Not massively, to be honest, because it's not everyone's style. So not massively, to be honest, because it's not everyone's style. So you know the different personalities we have operate different ways. And one thing I learned really early on and people maybe not early on, but I've learned in people leadership over the last few years is like in my early days of people leadership I'd be trying to clone myself. Um, you know, get interested in this, that and the other, all the stuff we just mentioned. But what I realized really quickly is like that's actually like no one else is going to be me and I'm not going to be you and everybody's different and everyone has their own vibe and so I think I'm more focused on bringing out that vibe in each person, no matter what that is individually Like. Some people are just like the most lovable social butterflies professionally and just kick around the place and people just want to work with them but might not know that much about any of the stuff, but still get the job done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, true, good point.
Speaker 1:Fair play to them. They do a great job, they get results. Like I'm not going to sit that person down and tell them to start studying economics, yeah, so no, I try not to be too overbearing in that sense Like I set the expectations as simply as possible, because another thing I've kind of learned over time is too many expectations and too many different things and too many different metrics just create like cloud in your brain. So, like I'd just be saying to everyone just do two placements a month, that's it, we're all having a good life. If you do two a month and then if they're like all right, well, how do you? I'm stuck here, how shall I do this? Or I'm not getting wins here, why Then you peel the onion back and be like okay, this has worked for me or let's look at this or let's look at that.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think I predominantly pissed people off in the past doing like one-on-ones. I mean like how many of this have you done this week? How many of that? And that's how I was trained. But it's just like while it's important, it wasn't popular. So if people are being successful, I'm not going to really ask too many questions about all that stuff. If they're not, then yeah, we do.
Speaker 3:But I kind of want people just to be themselves and I sort of tend to hire based on people's individualism.
Speaker 1:Do you hire recruiters or do you hire outside and train them up? Just thinking back over the years of stuff and what's worked better. All recruiters so far of some experience level, some definitely more junior than others. I'll be real I've had the worst success with the most senior people I've hired.
Speaker 2:Oh, me too. Yeah, it's always the worst.
Speaker 1:I've had multiple people in almost 200K, yeah, and it was a disaster. What I really think works well. So like one of our biggest success stories. He's actually, you know, he was amazing but he actually chose to leave the industry, become a builder because he's very passionate about it. But he started as a personal trainer and then got into recruitment and that background. You know it's similar to me in the dj promoting days like you have to walk around the gym every day, you have to hustle new clients, you have to be able to pitch while you're different to the other 50 personal trainers standing there at fitness first. Like I look at that experience and and hold quite a bit of value in it. So if I ever see anything like, yeah, personal trainer, anything to do with like sports or athleticism, where it's like quite a lot of discipline involved, even door-to-door sales, like ideally a bit further back in your career, but like these things, they lay foundations that allow you to not be phased by no.
Speaker 3:Or feedback in general, like if you can be on the fly, someone say, say or does something on the phone, you can be like, hey, look really like this, let's fix that.
Speaker 1:and they're like, yep, sweet yeah, totally yeah, um, yeah, team sports as well, just that like collaboration piece. But yeah, that type of experience I value really really highly. I've had the worst success with hiring super senior people or as bad as it sounds super educated people. You know, I don't know why, but it just hasn't worked. So, yeah, but the type of agency we are been really boutique, been really specialized, quite often working really closely with founders and C-suite stuff, I don't really have the capacity or the room to probably have someone super, super, super junior, because there's like it's not like when you work with um, you know big insurance company or something and you know the roles come in and then I can just throw them down the trough to old mate down there who's just gonna like find some cvs and come back.
Speaker 1:It's just sort of not how it works. Like you are going to need to engage with them directly if you're involved, because we're small like that. So somewhere in that like middle ground is like I'd be looking for me after my first agency, like finding people out of a big agency maybe on something a little interesting sales related in the past who are just hungry. That's a good fit for us. But also I think that we probably offer a pretty good level of work-life balance and freedom. Like we only do two days a week in the office. You know Jade's got a one-year-old daughter, like I've got a little dog. Like we've all got stuff going on. If you work with us, like we trust that you're not a child and can figure it out, like obviously always there to help. But I think that's sort of the appeal of working for a smaller, more boutique business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. So what's next then? What's next for hire? Like what are your goals? Have you done your 2025 goals? Yeah, you knew me. Like what do?
Speaker 1:you hope to achieve this year. They're like they don't exciting, uh, when you say them out loud, but like, really, for us it's just about um continuing doing what we're what we're doing because it is going really well. Um, you know, we we had a a wildly successful period, sort of call it 2017 through to the end of 22. We learned a lot in that period. We did some things really well. We also made some stupid mistakes.
Speaker 1:I feel like this period of downtime, we've really refined what that looks like and I think you know, like Jay said to me at the meeting, it's the quote I keep teasing him about it the quote in our sort of beginning of year meeting or whatever he was like it's time for us to grow up, and so you know that's a mantra that we're taking on. So it's sort of slow and steady is going to win the race. For us, a much bigger investment into the contract side of our business is going to be a big part of it. But also this year, I think this year is just probably see how things continue to move. It's too early to say because we're in January, right, like we've had so many times where we sit and make these grand plans, but it's like planning a sailing trip without knowing which way the wind's going to fly, like it's just there's no point. So I think by like March we'll start to have a way better feel.
Speaker 1:If it feels like things are like back, yeah, we would definitely increase headcount a little bit. We'd be really focused on contract. We'll make a much bigger effort to proactively market ourselves, moving forward. Again, back to that, like always on other people's businesses, not our own. We never really did much of that. We have started doing that. We're really seeing value from it, so want to build on that. See what, see what that can do. But I think, um, after the last 18 months and I reckon most agency owners will feel the same like we'd just be happy to just to like have a good year, not be stressed out about anything. Work with some cool partners, work with some cool talent. Um, you know it doesn't need to be zigzag constantly. You can have some calm in there, um, so it's a very like nondescript answer, that's awesome, and so how would anyone get in contact with you if they did?
Speaker 2:if they're listening to this podcast and they go jeez, I like the vibe of this guy two days in the office, sign me, yeah. How do they get in contact with you?
Speaker 1:uh, linkedin or um joe at hirecomau, I'm always super happy to chat to anyone in the industry about about anything. Um, you know, I think recruitment's such a great space, um, where you can do a lot of different things. I don't know if, like, people appreciate that as much. Like recruitment is not recruitment. The options are pretty broad in terms of what you can get into and I think you know, if I look at every other professional service like law consulting, accountants, whatever, like they have all these industry bodies where they all catch up and they have lunches together and we don't really have that in recruitment. You're kind of trained that your agency, you know competitor like fight them if you see them at the pub, whereas I really feel like Do you?
Speaker 3:reckon we need that no. No.
Speaker 2:Definitely not. You don't punch on with anyone at the pub, do you reckon we need the?
Speaker 3:industry body. Yeah, just a punch on at the pub. You actually need a bit more punch on at the pub.
Speaker 1:I don't know necessarily about an industry body, but I think it would be cool to have a lot more collaboration with people in the same space, because you've got a lot in common, a lot to talk about. You know, I think most people who I've met that are any good are always happy to share. There's always going to be the next generation coming through. If you are taking pride in what you do and it's your craft, of course you want to talk to other people that do the same thing. So, yeah, I think it would be good. And I see the internal recruiters. They do it amazingly. We go to the internal recruiter one. They have a meetup like every three months. They all show. So, yeah, I think the agency world does need it. There has been some good ones over the years, but they haven't lasted too long. So, yeah, I'm always keen to network and chat. If anyone has any questions, you're welcome to get in touch. Awesome, mate.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for coming on and providing the value to this. No, it was fun, guys.
Speaker 1:Thanks for the invite. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Awesome Cheers brother with Blake and Declan. We hope you enjoyed and got a lot of value and insights out of this episode. If you do have any questions or you would like to recommend someone to come on the Confessions podcast, we would love any introductions and remember the rule of the podcast like share and recommend it to a friend. Until next time.