Nobody is building your next desk.
Recruitment firm owners: I build the next desk, your people run it.
15+ years inside 2,000+ recruitment and executive search firms.
What I do
Ken McCarthy £30k to £100k a month. Darren Franks $150k to $600k. Jonathan Spiess $80k to $1.1m.
Recruitment firm owners: I build the next desk, your people run it.
15+ years inside 2,000+ recruitment and executive search firms.
Are you this?
You own an independent specialist firm. Three or four divisions, perm and contract, and a name in your sector.
Is this true?
Your consultants inherited their desks. New business sits with you, with one person, or at best it happens in pockets across the firm, when somebody gets round to it. Your marketing, department or not, has never put a client in front of a consultant. Growth still comes out of the accounts you already have.
Do you want this?
A new desk, or an existing one relaunched, with a real target, on a market somebody has actually counted, and your own people winning the clients on it. And marketing that hands your consultants a client, not a content calendar.
Why the gap is there
Read the four. One of them is yours.
Reason one
Theirs are retained. Yours are contingent. They get paid to run the search. You only get paid if you win it, so you carry all the risk and they carry none.
Reason two
Their desk is narrow. Yours is general. They own one small patch, so clients there call them first. Yours spreads across whatever comes in, which makes you a safe pair of hands, not the obvious choice.
Reason three
They place three times into the same client. You place once. Same client, same work to win them, three times the fee. You bill one role and start again from cold.
Reason four
They have every decision maker in their niche mapped. You work the contacts you already know. So roles get filled in your space that you never even heard were open.
This is what I do
Not a coaching program. Not a library of videos. Not a stack of PDFs to work through on your own.
This is implementation and execution.
I sit in it with you, one step at a time, on your firm. My success is tied to yours. My business runs on referrals, so I only win when you do.
Who this is for
You run a firm of ten to fifty people, and you are good at this. That was never the problem. Fifteen years in, you have been pitched by agencies and coaches who never ran a desk, and you are done with growth talk. What you want is simpler. A firm that runs without you holding it up. Fees nobody argues with. To be the name in your niche, not one of four. And a business worth something the day you decide to step back.
Not for you if you run a solo desk, want a course to work through alone, or want leads with nobody in-house to work them.
The numbers you already run on
You already watch these. Here is what moves each one.
What the firm keeps out of each person after the cost of doing the work. It is the number every owner in this trade judges himself on.
Moves when a desk drops low-value general roles and owns a niche where the fees are higher.
What one deal is worth.
Moves when you win retained and specialist work instead of discounted contingent roles.
What share of the work is paid for before it is delivered (retained), versus only paid if you place it (contingent).
Moves when you own a niche and become the firm clients commit to up front.
How much of this year's income came from a client who already bought last year.
Moves when one good placement turns into the next three roles, not a one off.
What share of your gross profit sits in your top five clients, and how exposed that leaves you if one walks.
Moves when new clients come in steadily, so no single account can sink the year.
Whether the desk is working, or just the person on it.
Moves when the system brings the roles in, so billing does not live or die on one biller.
How many of the roles you take on actually get filled and paid for.
Moves when you only take roles you can win, in a market that already knows you.
For anyone running contract, how many people you have out and what you keep on each one each week.
Moves when you build a real contract book in your niche, not one off cover.
How long a biller stays before the money you spent training them walks out of the door.
Moves when consultants work a desk that is winning, with leads coming in, not grinding cold.
How much of what the firm earns goes back out in wages. The line every owner watches and nobody talks about.
Moves when each head brings in more, so the same team produces more without costing more.
Launching a new desk is not a marketing exercise. It moves these numbers, and you can check afterwards whether it did.
It has been closed before
“£30,000 to £100,000 a month, inside six months. Now scaling past a quarter of a million.”
Ken McCarthy · BlackRock Resources
Ken’s own reported figures, not a forecast for your firm.
“I assessed 50+ companies. Andy was the first and only one who had it all for search firm owners.”
Brandt HandleyROI Recruitment“We hit our one million dollar goal. We blasted it, already at $1.1m.”
JonathanRocket Talent“I 10x’d my revenue in two years. Now the number one authority in my niche by far.”
Darren FranksTalent in the Cloud
One thing to do
You leave knowing which of the four reasons is the one costing you the most, and what it takes to close it.
No pitch if it is not a fit. You keep the diagnosis either way.