Most recruitment advice comes from people who’ve never built an agency
I’ve read a lot of advice about how to run a recruitment business. Most of it is written by people who have never run one.
Consultants who’ve never met a payroll. Coaches who’ve never signed a lease, carried a team through a downturn, or watched a big client walk two weeks before super is due. It sounds good. It’s clean. It’s theory. And theory is expensive when you’re the one who has to make the call.
I started my first agency in 2003. I doubled revenue every year through the GFC and eventually sold it. Since then I’ve started, scaled and exited eight recruitment businesses across the UK and Australia — through the GFC, through COVID, through the market cycles most advisors only describe from the outside. That’s not a highlight reel. It’s the reason I’m allergic to advice that’s never been tested.
Here’s what building — not observing — actually teaches you.
The problems that kill agencies aren’t on the whiteboard
Strategy decks love the big, visible questions: which sectors, which markets, which brand. Those matter. But they’re almost never what takes an agency down.
What takes it down is quieter. It’s cashflow timing — the gap between paying your contractors weekly and being paid by your clients in sixty days. It’s a comp plan that quietly rewards the wrong behaviour. It’s the co-founder agreement you never papered properly, which is fine right up until it isn’t. It’s the margin you gave away in year one to win logos you’re still underpricing in year three.
Growth hides mistakes. Scale exposes them.
At a million in revenue, hustle covers a multitude of structural sins. You can out-work a bad process, a fuzzy pricing model, a vague org chart. It feels like it’s working, because it is — for now.
At ten million, every one of those sins has a price tag, and the price compounds. The loose process is now loose across thirty people. The fuzzy pricing is baked into a hundred contracts. The thing you got away with at five people is the thing that stalls you at fifty.
Most founders don’t get punished for their mistakes when they make them. They get punished years later, at scale, when the mistake is structural and expensive to unwind. The advisor who’s never scaled can’t warn you about that — because they’ve never paid the bill.
The hard calls never make the LinkedIn post
There’s an entire genre of recruitment content about celebrating placements, culture, and the wins. It’s fine. It’s also the easy 20% of the job.
The actual job is the restructure you delayed too long. The client you had to resign because they were unprofitable and abusive. The good biller you had to move on because they were quietly poisoning the team. The month three deals fell through and payroll didn’t care how you felt about it. Nobody posts that. But that’s the work — and it’s the work you most need advice on, from someone who’s actually done it. If you’d rather make those calls alongside someone who has, that’s what a discovery call is for.
So weight the advice
I’m not telling you to ignore everyone who hasn’t built an agency. Plenty of smart people have useful things to say about marketing, tech, or finance. I’m telling you to weight it — to know the difference between information and judgement.
Before you take a big call on the strength of someone’s advice, ask them one question:
If they have, listen hard. If they haven’t, enjoy the theory — then make your own call. Because you’re the one who lives with it.
Want the calls that matter made with someone who’s made them?
I advise recruitment founders 1:1 — lived experience, not theory. Eight ventures started, scaled and exited across the UK and Australia. Book a discovery call and get a straight read on what’s actually holding your agency back.
Book a Discovery Call- Most advice is theory, written by people who’ve never run a recruitment business.
- The killers are hidden: cashflow timing, comp plans, co-founder agreements, underpriced logos.
- Growth hides mistakes; scale exposes them — with a price tag that compounds.
- The hard calls never make the LinkedIn post — but they are the actual job.
- Ask one question of any advisor: have you actually done this, with your own name on the line?
