Quick question: What makes a million dollar Recruitment / Search Business?
What Are Your Metrics?
Now we’ve seen single-person businesses go from one person to five people and one person to ten people. We’ve seen them go from ten thousand dollars a month to a hundred thousand dollars a month. We’ve seen those go from six figures to seven figures and upwards, from a million to two million.
There’s one thing that happens every single time we see this happen. It’s not just taking action. That’s a key requisite of any engagement we move forward with. It’s really talking about what makes a million dollar recruiter.
The result is actually quite simple. I’m not going to give you a set of technical steps or give you some technical strategies, or some really cool automated strategy that we use.
I want to break it down to a set of metrics. Grab a piece of paper and write down what your goal is for the next year. It could be doing a million dollars. It could be doing 500,000. It could be brand-new, you want to get to 200,000. It might be you want to go from one million to two million. What does that actually look like as a set of metrics?
One of the questions I always ask prospective clients is, “Talk to me like a 5-year-old.” A bit like from the film Philadelphia, where Denzel Washington says, “Talk to me like a 5-year-old.”
So let’s break this down into really simple steps. If you want to be doing a million dollars a year, what’s your average placement fee? How many clients typically give you multiple roles? What’s the average? It might be, you get just one role. You might get two roles. You might get three roles. Then we got an idea of how many clients we’ve got and how many we need to have.
You might have existing clients. Say we’re going to be doing a million dollars, and our average placement fee is $20,000. We’ve got 50 roles we need to be bringing on board. On average, we get two placements per client, so we need 25 new clients. What’s the process right now of you bringing on board a new client? I’ve been told, “Well, it ends with the client telling me a yes or a no.” Is that face to face? Is it on the phone? Is it online? How does it actually work? You need to break down your client process into a set of steps.
What you’re going to find is this: it might be one out of two face-to-face appointments generally close. It might be that you have four conversations to get the two face-to-faces. Those four conversations might be, you have ten incoming leads clients booking to your diary. It could be you have ten referrals, it could be a hundred referrals.
Whatever metrics you get, at the top end of that funnel, you’ve now got a figure. The figure might be you need to get a thousand leads, or it might be you need to get two hundred leads, or it might be you need to get 20,000 leads to equal your figure.
Know The Strategies You Need
Once you’ve got that view of the world, then you know what type of strategy you need. Do you need a volume strategy whereby you need to go out and create a client database of 20,000 prospective clients? Do you have a marketplace?
I thought about one of my clients, Johnny, in London, he works in the flats services market, and his environment is only 1,400 clients. Just this week we were talking about redesigning his website. The design of his website would be completely different from someone else designing the website in a volume environment. Why? Because if we’ve got a volume business, we want to be using your website as a funnel. That means you should be getting clients booking inquiries or requesting your services. They come to your website. If it’s set up in the correct way, with a lead generation funnel, they’ll actually be requesting an inquiry from you or asking you to hire for them.
Again in Johnny’s environment, he’s only got 1,400 clients. They’ll be using his website more as a tool to demonstrate he walks the walk.
You will still create a funnel around it, but it will be a different outcome. Depending on what your outcome is, a million dollars, reverse engineer the steps. How many leads do you need upfront? Do the same for candidates. How many candidates do you need upfront? Now you’ve got a picture of what you need. Do you need a volume model? Do you need to create a database from scratch? Have we got a database we can leverage now? So do we have any position in the marketplace? Can we use an automated strategy like RRRR strategy straight away? (RRRR is a strategy which automates the process of engagement and ends with you only speaking to those who actually come to you and say yes, I want to hire or yes, I’m looking to move).
What Your Action Plan Should Be
Take your figure, your million dollars, reverse engineer the steps, right to the top of the funnel. Now you’ve got a conceptual view of the metrics we need to be hitting based on your current conversion rates.
Here’s the thing: when you start applying positioning strategies and automated strategies, it becomes a lot easier to convert. What will actually happen is you’ll get clients coming to you which completely changes the dynamic. Right now, if you’re doing a million dollars – 500,000 or 2,000,000 this year, lay out your metrics start to finish. Or rather, reverse engineer the metrics from finish to start. That’s what you need to be hitting, based on your current process.
If you did $20,000 last year and you want to be doing $1,000,000 this year if you keep doing things exactly the same, can you find extra business? Can you find five times more the hours in the day? Probably not. You need to think about implementing the strategy along the way.
Get your metrics down, then look at that and identify, how do I make that happen? What’s the strategy to make that happen? You should have one of two strategies, and you might have a dovetail in between – either a volume strategy or a positioning strategy. That’s just the way with digital strategies nowadays, whether you’re approaching 1 or approaching 100,000. The same principles can follow.
To conclude that, lay out your metrics and identify what strategy you need!
