Going it alone? How I did it

Patrick Goodwin

Entrepreneur Patrick Goodwin has 20 years recruitment experience and has set up two specialist insurance recruitment companies, High Finance and Edenbrook Partners. Here he shares his advice about setting up on your own.

Big agencies are a great training ground
I worked for Badenoch and Clark for three years, where I set up their insurance division. Working there instilled in me the core things that I needed to be able to be confident that I could make a career in recruitment. Some of the most important lessons included perseverance and the belief that recruitment is after all a numbers game – however the better you get and the stronger your knowledge and understanding the easier things become.

When you’re ready, find the right team
I set up High Finance in 2000. I ran it by myself for two years until I started to think about recruiting other people. I identified five or six other recruiters in a similar market who I believed to be strongest in terms of a network and understanding and had conversations with all of them about joining me. At the beginning it is really important to have strong core team. We decided to grow our business by recruiting bright graduates and putting them through a detailed and intensive six-month training programme before promoting them to consultants. In my view, too many consultancies promote their juniors too early.

Understand your market
Back when I started out it was all about having a strong relationship with a hiring manager who would be able to make decisions on the agency he used and who he hired, over the past five or so years recruitment has changed massively. Everything is now understandably driven by procurement and cost. The important relationship now is with the RPO provider, HR or internal recruiter.

I decided I was going to find a market and stick to it. If I gave any advice now, it would be to become a specialist. More and more companies are now using specialist agencies. Clients are now looking for much more than just a CV, it’s having an understanding of the market, the regulatory changes, the hot topics and most importantly what are their competitors doing and how do they gain the competitive advantage when trying to hire the most sought after candidates. Your network is still important as passive candidates won’t return phone calls unless they know that person will help them, so having knowledge about your market can really make a difference.

Be a specialist, but offer different disciplines
In the current market most clients are using specialists but at the same time they want to use a select few so it is also important that you are able to offer not only finance or admin staff, but also as many different disciplines as possible without losing your integrity. There is no point in telling you can hire a particular type of candidate when you know you can’t. We recently missed out on a tender because the client decided that they were only going to consider an agent if it could cover all parts of their business. Consequently we are looking at individual specialists in those markets, such as IT.

Think about private equity backing
When I set up High Finance, we grew organically, taking someone on as and when we could afford it. In contrast when setting up Edenbrook I decided to try and speed up the speed at which I could hire experienced consultants and thus be in a position to compete with the larger agencies sooner. I sought investment pretty much immediately, because I knew it was tougher now than 10 years ago. With such a focus on cost and move to in-house recruitment, having that backing is important. I believe strongly now that if you want to build a business that is not just a lifestyle one that investment and having outside professional advisers is really important.

We have two investors, and new people wanting to join the business see that their input adds security and an added professionalism to our offering.

Recruiters make the best leaders
I think that one of the biggest mistakes in my last business was not recruiting an operations person. I’m a recruitment consultant at heart. I enjoy the deals and enjoy the chase. I got too wrapped up on admin and getting distracted away from the things I enjoyed – the networking, the deals and most importantly the time to help and coach the team. Now I have an operations manager to help me do a lot of the stuff that I don’t enjoy.

The person at the top should be a biller. You’ve got to be able to lead by example. It shouldn’t be a case of ‘You tell us to do it this way but we’ve never seen you do it.’ It’s really important that you’re seen to be going out to clients, helping the junior consultants in building their confidence. The best way for you to teach them is by showing them, rather than telling them what to do.

Learn to let go
One of the hardest things to do as your business gets bigger is relinquish control. Things like calling it ‘my company’ rather than ‘our company’ can be a really hard thing to do. At High Finance we split the business into three divisions, each with their own manager, of which I was one, and create a competitive environment. Every month we had an awards evening and everyone appeared to enjoy building up a team spirit and this definitely helped with developing the teams as it became clear early on that all in the team should assist each other.

Stay positive
The best advice someone ever gave me was to keep positive and persevere.Recruitment can be a very tough business but the identity of a business is nearly always directed by the people at the top. I try to keep positive no matter how hard it is, because someone in the business will be having a good day and remember to openly praise your team members no matter how small an achievement that you might feel they have accomplished.

Working for yourself is scary, but rewarding
The main advantages of setting up your own business are the rewards , both financial and personal and the flexibility. Yes, it can be scary when you’ve got all your business and personal expenses to cover, but the rewards if you do grow your business are immense. I’m really proud of the fact that people I recruited as graduates at High Finance are now running successful recruitment businesses in their own right. To see candidates coming back to you time and time again and to see your employees achieving their dreams through something that you have created is incredibly rewarding.

Patrick Goodwin is Director of Edenbrook Partners