Alex Hutchings and Wesley Taupin
‘It still blows me away that a lot of really good, solid billers don’t have the confidence in their own ability to do it on their own, or who don’t know about RecruitHub’
Co-founders Alex Hutchings and Wesley Taupin launched Dataworks in the early summer of 2021, with extensive backgrounds as specialist recruiters including internationally. As managers who have led others and built out functions, it was time they did it for themselves.
MAIN DRIVERS:
Flexibility and ensuring our business supported what we wanted to do in life. We didn’t want to regret not trying.
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KEY QUOTES:
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We had an explosive start, day 2 we were working positions – the business exceeded expected forecasts in initial trading months, and we started hiring rapidly and placing candidates across Europe, the USA and South America.
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The RecruitHub platform has given us all the tools and technologies so that we could plug in and start billing. We also didn’t want to align ourselves with lots of contracts and work with vendors and suppliers and negotiate rates. We just wanted to come in and turn things on and just crack on.
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We had our own capital but we didn’t want to put our entire life savings into it and leverage ourselves against our houses –it was quite daunting and scary, with a family and a wife to look after.
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We secured investment purely with the objective of growth – we got a couple of offers from investors and the equity deals were horrendous – we would do all the heavy lifting but our percentage share of the equity was not worth doing, especially when we’re the ones taking all the risk.
FOUNDERS' ADVICE:
“If you’re billing any figure north of £100-150k for your current employer, I guarantee you’re going to make more money for yourself.” I’d say “Do it, 100% do it!”
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