Blair West recently celebrated its fifth anniversary and the fact that this occurred over the festive period allowed a little time for reflection.

At the same time I was asked to speak with a friend-of-a-friend who is thinking of starting a recruitment business and wanted to pick my brain about challenges and pitfalls and the key lessons I’ve learned…cue further reflection.

Simon and I are very proud of the business we have built with the help of a brilliant team which is now 23 strong. My natural inclination (unfortunately) is to dwell, however, on what we might have got wrong over our five years and could have done better. It took some effort to force myself to identify why we have survived and scaled in what has been an immensely choppy five years of market conditions. But, rallied by the Christmas cheer, I settled on some key learnings about our journey and growth to date.

 

Choose your partner carefully

 

Simon and I didn’t actually know each other prior to starting a business together which surprises a lot of people, including myself, whenever I say it out loud. We did however establish alignment on some fundamentals over several coffees in late 2018 that gave us confidence that our work-marriage would be successful. And it has been. 

Those coffee prenup discussions included a shared vision to create an exceptionally positive environment for the Blair West team, providing access to equity ownership for high performers, a shared interest in disruptive scale-up businesses and an almost pathological need to be liked and respected by our clients, candidates and associates. That last point can be debilitating (especially when drafting blogs) and is incredibly hard to achieve (some would say impossible) in recruitment where life-changing decisions are being made on a daily basis and emotions frequently run high. 

That phobia of being ill-thought of, though, can also be very useful. I would like to think we have been able to hire in that image and set a standard for the team. We train our team with the mantra that if any client or candidate has, rightly or wrongly, perceived us to be sharp, duplicitous, sloppy, unresponsive, uncaring, inauthentic or overtly salesy, our skin should be crawling and sleep interrupted.

A genuine alignment of core values, together with shared goals and complementary skill sets, has stood us in enormously good stead. Even on the rare occasions where we disagree on how to get there, we are always aligned on where we want to be and why.

 

Right funding, right investors, right advisors

 

We raised investment from two high net-worth individuals early in our first year, believing that we would spend other people’s money faster than we would our own. And we were right. It enabled us to hire a brilliant team of people almost straight off the bat and the vast majority of that team is still driving the business forward today.

The investors we secured also joined our board, where they remain and have been invaluable across those five years. Each a partner in a different Private Equity firm, they have offered insight into our target market, been a conduit for client introductions and offered us the benefit of their experience gained from having sat on the boards of many scaling businesses. 

Most importantly, they have been immensely supportive when required. I recall them being the first calls I received at the outset of Covid, offering financial assistance if required. They have both been consistent voices urging Simon and me to think big. 

I would encourage anyone starting a business to consider raising seed capital to accelerate and to ensure they have the right advice around the boardroom table. I have no doubt that had we not done, so our growth would have been far slower.

Their advice has been supplemented by that from executive coaches; mentors at the Entrepreneurs’ Forum; a North-East leadership peer group, “The Lighthouse Club”; and countless wise people within our networks, not least our respective other halves. The old adage that you cannot have too much advice is not true in my experience as it can get in the way of getting stuff done; but, some of our best actions have come from those trusted sources, so being open to input from people around us has certainly been beneficial.

 

Get the right people on the bus

 

We were lucky that our first few hires were known to us. We knew exactly what we were hiring, and what we were not. Most importantly, we knew that we were hiring people who would behave like proprietors, who would make decisions and take actions in the best interests of Blair West, sometimes ahead of their own interests. They continue to do that and we continue to appreciate it.

Beyond that initial group of hires, we were into the same lottery our clients play, of hiring people unknown to us. However, we were taking the same steps we take on our clients’ behalf to rig that lottery in our favour. I had run a recruitment business prior to Blair West where I can only generously claim that 50% of hires were successful so I have learnt the hard way that excellent staff are hard to come by.

We were determined to improve upon that hit rate at Blair West, knowing the level of time and energy drain it can be to manage people unsuited to their role. It has not been perfect, but we have hired 36 people in total and 23 remain with us today. Many of the dearly departed have left to pursue other exciting career opportunities and I would say that our hiring success-rate overall has been above 85%. We’re pleased with that and I would put it down to a few key things.

• We defined our values early and designed a hiring profile and interview process based on that.
• That interview process includes a diverse panel and we always ensure that potential new joiners meet as many of the team as possible.
• We also put a lot of thought into how to make Blair West an attractive place for good hires. We have a strong offer and excellent package, but it boils down to ensuring that people feel valued, supported and heard. 
• We’ve hired at our pace when we’ve met good quality people and (largely) resisted the urge to hire to meet an arbitrary headcount plan or to rush decisions when urged to do so by keen rec-to-rec recruiters.
• Latterly, we have divested responsibility for managing our internal hires to a brilliant internal talent professional, making the process slicker and avoiding Simon and myself hiring too many people in our image. 

Where we have made mistakes is invariably where we have compromised on some of the principles above, but the team we have today is our biggest source of pride. They live our value of being stronger together, and in five years we have not had the slightest hint of territorial behaviour or fee squabbling which we are assured is rare relative to where many of our colleagues have worked in the past.

More than that, we now have a balanced team of old-timers and recent-joiners who are proactive, innovative and constantly striving to make Blair West a better business.

 

Look after your supporters

 

Any new start-up is dependent initially, to a greater or lesser extent, on their key supporters and advocates – be they friends, family or prior colleagues. We certainly were and the support of those individuals who gave us opportunities when they, no doubt, had a queue of established recruiters outside their office door are enormously appreciated by us. 

My advice to any start-up would be to understand who those people are, look after them and do not take them for granted. Give them stellar service and make them top of your client-entertaining list. Ours remain some of our biggest clients to this day.

 

Act like you’re bigger than you are

 

From Day One, we have intentionally behaved like a more established, professionally scaled business than we actually were. This was a principle we embedded across data collection and reporting, board meetings, governance, hiring policies, process documentation, project management, steer groups, and many other areas. To an extent, this approach came naturally, born out of experiences at our respective larger employers in the past. 

Some might say we had ideas above our station, but it was a tangible way to stick to our aim of scaling and building infrastructure for where we wanted to be rather than where we were. That approach no doubt removed a little bit of agility early on, but we are feeling the benefit of it now and continue to take that approach having just invested in a new CRM data and reporting dashboard which should help us maintain our advance on world domination.

 

Be brave with delegation

 

This is an area which I think we have, by and large, struggled with, and I would advise any new start-up to be braver than we have been. When you start a two-person business you inevitably divide all of the tasks, from marketing to finance; insurance to internal hiring; banking to arranging the Xmas party between the two of you. Looking back over the five years, we should have been faster in bringing in discipline experts who would oversee performance in those areas of the business whilst simultaneously freeing Simon and myself to prioritise client-facing work.

We reached 18 heads without having a single non-client delivery member of staff and it took a newly appointed Executive Coach to look at me with utter bewilderment to realise how unsustainable that was. We promptly brought on a full-time Head of Marketing and a Head of Internal talent and immediately wished we’d done it several years earlier as business performance improved drastically in those areas. We’ve still got a long way to go, but at least we now understand the toll it takes on two people to wear an infinite number of hats. We’ve never hired an Executive Assistant despite being urged to do so by many wiser parties, and I still do a lot of finance tasks myself. New Year’s resolution for 2024…

More broadly on delegation, we have always been awash with good ideas on how to improve the business, predominantly from the wider team, and for three of the five years, we held onto too many business improvement projects, acting as a very effective bottleneck on action which would inevitably grind to a halt. We did this in the belief that we were not overburdening the team, but having established OKR groups in 2022 for each of our strategic and operational pillars, we had volunteers from across the business wanting to get involved. Projects which had been idle for months were completed in no time. Not only did things move forward and the business improve, but the reward people felt in taking ownership of aspects of improvement was demonstrable. Also, whisper it, but it turns out that a room full of tech-savvy 20-somethings had far better ideas than Simon and I on a whole range of topics from automation, to AI, to engaging marketing content. 

 

 

Overall, the past five years have been a lot of fun. We’re proud of what we have achieved and excited about what might be in store in the next five years as we actively explore organic and acquisitive means of accelerating our growth. 

Our key piece of advice for any start-up would be that growth is unlikely to be linear if our experience is anything to go by. Having the right partner, right team, right advisors and some strong advocates in your client base make it a lot easier to ride out the inevitable challenging times. Staying true to the core values which made you want to take your career into your own hands in the first place is a great principle to hold on to. Certainly one that we remind ourselves of as we look backwards and proceed ahead.