Some of us deconstruct every single part of what we do every day and reconstruct how we should think about this business.
Recruiting has changed dramatically over the last three decades, yet many recruiting firms remain the same — the same structure, pay plan, and workflow, for the most part. Owners still have the same processes that run through their organization. Paying out commissions and legacy payroll or a pay rate that’s not leaving enough money in order to build a business instead of a search firm.
If you had to start over today, would everything remain the same? What is stopping you from building your business further today?
Where the Liability Lies
Approaching today’s challenges as a recruiting office, rather than as a business that happens to be in search, can hamstring your company and team. We, as recruiting experts, can become incredibly narrow-minded, so full of the skills that we have as headhunters, that our business can actually get worse with experience.
Thinking like a recruiter is not wrong. Thinking only like a recruiter is where the liability lies. I still look at everything like a recruiter. I still work a desk. But I want us to start looking at things like a business person.
Realizing $1M per Desk with The Big 8
The Big 8 is where we want to start building a business that happens to be a search firm. We want to pull ourselves out of a search firm that’s trying to be a business.
Instead, there are eight points that we can run all of our decisions through, major and minor. These are The Big 8. They all impact each other. You just need to give yourself a chance to figure out how they are all connected.
With The Big 8, our run rate at The Mullings Group is over $1 million PDA per desk. My people are not any smarter than your people. I am not any smarter than you. What we’ve done is we’ve decided to apply business principles across the organization and empowered our billers. We’ve allowed our billers to bill, our leaders to lead, and our managers to manage assets, not people. The Big 8 was developed as a holistic approach to building a business in the 2021 and beyond. Historically search firms were a series of “desks” stringed together that added up the billings of each desk for the year and that characterized our business. The search business as it was developed from the 1950’s to nearly present day did not get too deep into marketing, media, business intelligence, or personal development pathways for employees. A career in search has historically been a place of employment that one ended up from being unemployed, in transition, or at a crossroads in life. It was never a determined destination. Now it is a place to start and build a career, as we build businesses that happen to be search firms.
Optimize & Grow Your Business with The Big 8
The Big 8 helps you to make decisions, create efficiencies, and scale your business at three, six, nine, and twelve or more desks. Stepping outside the recruiter mindset and examining problems from the perspective of a desk or business that happens to be in search, you can create innovative solutions to old and new problems that have been wreaking havoc on your organization.
All of The Big 8 components are directly related and compound the efforts to build a scalable and sustainable business. In the next chapter in our series, we will run through each of the individual components, how they fit together, and how you can begin applying them. For more transformative ideas and training, contact us today.
