The path to success as an independent agency owner can be a bumpy one.
For all the promise of wealth creation and employment freedom, there are challenges and obstacles to be dodged and overcome.
Plenty of founders looking back at their experience would have done things differently, to lower stress, mitigate risk and accelerate the pace of growth.
Considering your own recruitment venture?
Here are 3 things you should know before you get started…
#1 – Admin will drain your time and eat into your earnings
Founders can lose up to 40% of their time each week to admin tasks that don’t contribute to revenue.
For a start-up recruiter targeting £250k in personal billings, that figure gets brought crashing down to £150k.
For a busy agency owner hoping to spend time on strategy, brand-building, client development, hiring and training, that means losing 80+ hours per month.
The strain of being in charge of every area of operation of a company – from billing, to tax, to invoices, to expenses, to IT, to marketing, to insurance, to development of people, processes and infrastructure is a major workload for one person.
Getting help with key areas of the business that allow founders to focus a higher percentage of their time on growth and revenue generation is typically a decision that pays back in the short and long term.
#2 – You don’t need to manually operate every aspect of your company
It’s not just unnecessary for the founder to be running every aspect of their new agency, it’s downright unproductive.
Business people in all walks of life are usually talented at a handful of key things and channel their energies into that.
Great writers don’t try and get their books on the shelves by building their own distribution networks – they partner with publishers and focus on writing great books.
Sports stars – from Cristiano Ronaldo to Venus Williams – don’t stay up late at night studying the wording of an endorsement contract. They hire agents, and focus their time on getting better at their sport.
For many recruiters, it’s a similar story – enthusiastic, committed recruiters with great market knowledge can find the support they need to power other areas of their companies, while they stay focused on doing what they’re really, really good at – delivering recruitment services and building great teams.
#3 – Even a young business needs processes
Another potential blindspot for new agency owners attempting to scale is the roller-coaster of ups and downs in income.
The key weakness in almost all cases was lack of a tech-enabled, proven process.
With so many distractions involved in keeping a small business afloat without proper support – and lacking the right technology configuration to automate key steps – small agencies are hit hardest when it comes to breaking out of stop-start billing ruts and maturing into consistent revenue-generation engines.
Choosing a technology configuration and support team that can pro-actively add value helps recruiters bring consistency to their billings cycles, enabling them to capture the full potential of their entrepreneurial venture.
