This is not a course. I work in your search firm, with you.

You can’t fully read your own machine from inside it. Nobody can. You built it. Every red box on your scorecard has a story attached: “that’s just my market,” “clients here don’t pay retainers,” “I’ve tried that.” You believe those stories because they’re yours. The recruiter who built the firm is the last one to see the fault. Not because they’re daft. Because they’re too close.

That’s the bit I do. Fifteen years inside more than 2,000 recruitment and executive search firms, reading yours from the outside. And before that, five years on the hiring side at BSkyB, where I was the one choosing which firms got the work, plus the trading floors at Nomura, Société Générale and JP Morgan, where if one part breaks everyone sees the money drain on a screen. I have been the client you are trying to win, and I have coached two thousand firms trying to win them. I read your firm from both chairs.

Six weeks, you and me, fixed fee. Two jobs get done: you take control of your niche, and we go after your fastest fee, the money already on your desk, worked live until retained-style terms are in front of a real client. The one-desk empire, installed.

You know the pains. BD by guesswork. Fees ground down because the client cannot tell you apart. Ghosting. “We don’t pay retainers.” A month that resets to zero while you are the only engine the firm has. Each one of those has a fix, and in six weeks the fixes get installed, not discussed.

Seven installs. The full desk audit. Your market, handed to you as a working data set, thousands of identified companies and decision makers in your lane, with the competitor read. The candidate pool, mapped. Your positioning, pitch deck and weekly positioning plan. The MPC campaigns, live. The conversion system. The rolling 90-day acquisition plans.

How each install is built, the order they run in, and what makes them work on a one-desk firm is the part I keep for owners who apply. The full build sheet arrives with the offer, once I have read your firm. Some things you do not put on a public page where the other four agencies on the brief can read them.

Fixed price. Fixed deliverables, agreed between us before we start. A hard finish line at week six, and if what we agreed is not in your hands, the fee comes back. All of it. The specifics are yours once I have read your firm and sent you the build sheet. Engineers sell sprints with guarantees, not memberships, and this is how you find out I am real before you commit to the room.

And the sprint is the way in. A clean finish line at six weeks, then we both decide, with the results in front of us, whether to move forward into the Boardroom proper. If we do: the room. The Boardroom is where the position gets solidified: you as the niche leader, on a weekly and monthly cadence with real accountability. Your firm on a live dashboard, every part of the business carrying a red, amber or green status, the same read the scan gave you, kept alive and watched. The metrics that matter, reviewed weekly. And the whole engine pointed at one thing: the next quarter. The Sprint installs the machine. The room keeps it winning.