Ketan Gajjar: Hi there. Namaste. How are you? This is Ketan Gajjar from the very Apnu Ahmedabad. Welcome to the Recruitment Curry podcast, Mike. Hi, thanks for coming on the Recruitment Curry podcast. It’s an honor to have obviously somebody from the UK, especially when it’s obviously there’s a heat wave and then, it’s raining heavily, it’s monsoon.
So it’s completely different weather, but I think it’s good to have you on the podcast.
Mike Ames: Thank you for inviting me. Pleasure to be here. Oh, I’m sure they don’t really want to know much about me. I’ll in 30 seconds. So I’ve grown and sold two recruitment businesses, one in the nineties and one in the noughties.
First one was 40 million quid when I sold it. The second one was 24 million, but interestingly, they made the EBIT profit at the time. First one was bought by an American company called Modis. Second one was bought by an English company called Harvey Nash. Both of those businesses were built on a factory model, really, so not a 360 model and both of them were successful.
And really, I think the key, certainly to the first one, which I was more involved with than the second one, we really did nail client care. That’s a big thing for us on this machine to win new clients. If you’ve got those two things in place and something to hold onto your staff, you’re not going too far adrift.
So all of my work really is around that building scalable businesses, particularly cash cow lifestyle businesses where you make that the focus is profit, not growth. Obviously the two go hand in hand, but growth is expensive and can burn your profit away, whereas if you go for profit, that’s what you want really, and then a lifestyle alongside it.
So you’re not burning out. Everything that we do, the programs that we run, the coaching that we do, the show that we do, people want to check us out, Thursdays, 1230 Greenwich Mean Time on LinkedIn. There we are. And anyone can connect with me on LinkedIn. I don’t sell to you. Just so you know, we don’t tell to anybody people buy from us, it’s a different approach.
But I think the, my mission, if I had one is for people that own a recruitment business to have the income, the freedom, and ultimately the wealth that they set out to achieve. And not many people do.
Ketan Gajjar: Thank you. So Mike given the weather, obviously there is a lot of discussions around the downturn, the recession, and then you also hear that there’s a lot of demand and then given the situation, what we want to talk about today, or, what we want to, talk from an expert like yourself is, what are the signs that the recruitment agencies should look out for in terms of the recession.
And then two is, what are the best practices they should start follow on, with effect to be prepared in case there’s a downturn so that they don’t have to literally scout for jobs.
Mike Ames: Okay. That’s that’s a lot to cover a lot to unpack there, Keetan. I think let’s talk about the signs.
The obvious sign is you get less requirements but that’s a bit late that comes further down the line when the requirements start to dry up a little bit, there are signs that you can look for before that happens. So one thing is that clients will postpone a piece of work that they were definitely going to do.
And that could be an assignment. To hire someone or it could be a project, which means they’re going to need to hire some people later down the line. And you see it very often. The conversation will be along the lines of yeah, we’re definitely going to do that, but we’re just going to wait for a month or two before we kick that project off.
Or we’re not going to hire someone right now. We’re just going to wait a bit and see how that kind of pans out really. Or talk around, yeah, we’re just looking internally to see if we can reorganize things a little bit. Basically what they’re saying is we’re not confident. And because we’re not confident, we we’re just going to hold fire a little bit.
So that kind of language is something that you’ll see increasingly coming through which means there’s going to be less requirements at some point.
Ketan Gajjar: Of course. And, like you mentioned that, these signs might not be immediate, they come in the near future. Right now there’s a lot of demand.
Mike Ames: We did a survey recently of our clients and I think a third of people were seeing a downturn, not significant, but a downturn. I think it I can’t remember the exact figures, but it’s about a third, I think 30, 35 percent and then there was a contingent, which was about 20 percent who’d said it’s actually gone up and the rest were pretty much plain sailing.
I think if I did that survey again today. That you’d find the number of people that thought the market was slowing down will have gone up because that’s anecdotal. Unlike that was a survey we ran. Now I just talk to people and just the general messages. It’s just slowing down a little bit. There’s less vacancies coming through.
There’s less urgency about the vacancies that are coming through. Urgency tends to equate to growth. I need someone, get me someone now. If it’s not that kind of language, then it probably means that actually they’re not, if you find someone that’s great, or we’ve got some time on this, but I think that’s starting to happen now in the UK, probably in some sectors more than others.
But it certainly is starting to creep in, I think.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. And then, what when we are talking about the signs these signs and this information, comes from various channels. And one of the channels is candidates as well?
Mike Ames: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. If you speak to your candidates, and I’m sure, Your listeners would ask, what else are you being put forward to for all sorts of reasons?
If your candidates are not being put forward to as many roles, then chances are, and again, there’s less out there. I think the signs, once you look for them, if you look, they’re pretty obvious. It’s about activity. It’s about even down to the number of jobs advertised.
Although quite often that’s just a habit. People put stuff on there that’s not really real anyway. So you can’t necessarily equate the number of adverts to the number of real roles that are out there. But certainly conversations and dialogues with your clients and with your candidates are going to give you that indication.
I think interestingly, If you assume that there is going to be a downturn, which is the safe planning thing, what do they say? It’s a hope for the best, but plan for the worst and make the most of whatever you get. And I think right now we’re hoping for the best, excuse me, but we are planning for the worst and the sooner that you start to take action, the better, excuse me.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. Sure. So what actions would you, Recommend, agencies and then especially the ones that are, mid sized they take right now in order to, develop a good pipeline of clients, in the next six
Mike Ames: months. Take it back a step before that, because one of the things that often suffers when the economy is buzzing.
And there’s vacancies all over the place is client care. So client care is really defined as what you do with a client when there’s no work. [00:07:00] So everybody talks to clients when they think there’s going to be some work to get the vacancy or to manage the vacancy or whatever. And that’s obviously natural.
And if you’ve got clients that are constantly giving you vacancies, you’re talking to them all the time. But what happens when there’s no activity? And that’s how you define client care. Now, one of the things when there’s activity everywhere is people don’t spend a lot of time on true client care. We call it apex client care.
It’s the kind of client care that puts you at the top of the tree in the pecking order. When there’s work to be given out, you get it first, right? And so therefore people are getting work and they think everything is fine. But here’s an interesting thing. When there’s a downturn, Very often, clients will drop some of their suppliers because they don’t need them.
When times are buoyant, they need as many, or their perception is that they need as many suppliers as they can get to get the coverage, to get the candidates coming in. So they engage with more suppliers. And what you need to do is to make sure that you’re going to make the cut. So when the clients just stop giving out vacancies to their second tier, let’s call it that doesn’t affect you because you’re in the first tier.
And you, you don’t often know because the vacancies are coming anyway. You can only really find out by engaging with the client right now and asking them the question. If you had to deal with half as many suppliers, half as many agencies, would we be one of those agencies and very rarely will someone say, Oh no.
No, you wouldn’t make the cut at all. Sometimes they do. But very often they’ll hedge their bets a little bit and it’s not a unanimous. Oh yeah. Yeah. You would be definitely in there. If it’s not that, then the chances are you’re not going to make the cut. And it’s a bit late to realize that when the cut has happened, you can’t really recover from it.
And that’s why quite often in downturn, and this is the sixth recession I’ve worked through and the fourth as a recruitment company owner. So quite a few. And you are, you think everything’s going well because you’re getting the vacancies. Excuse me. You think everything’s going well because you’re getting the vacancies, but it isn’t that they’re dealing with you because they have to, they just want the CVs given the choice.
They won’t. So reach out now, give your customers a voice right now, find out what you’re doing. Find out how you could improve, find out whether you’re above the cut. Find out whether you are an apex supplier or even, in that primary list of suppliers that they’d always go to regardless of the state of the market, because if you’re not, you’ve still got time to put that right.
So the question is what could I do to make myself put myself into that position? It’s too late when the downturn comes, you’re not going to recover it then. You can do that now. And I think everyone should. VOTC, voice of the customer, very important.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. So it’s again, not just the service, but also the relationship building part.
And the rapport building takes a big pie of, sustaining the client.
Mike Ames: Yeah because there was a survey done by the Bain group, big American, Survey, right? And they went out, this wasn’t recruitment, but I’ve seen it in recruitment terms as well. They went out to 360 accountants, right?
And they asked the accountants okay, so how many of you provide an exceptional service to your clients? And I think it was like 82 percent or something. He said, yeah, we do. Then they went out to the clients of these. Accountants and ask the same question. Okay. How many of you get an exceptional service?
And I’ll ask you to take a guess on the number of clients that did. Yes, we do. And I’ll give you a clue. It’s got an eight in it. Ketan, I dunno whether you can guess. 50%. Eight, eight, 8%, 8%. And I’ve seen a similar survey with the Rothschild group. Again, it was the same kind of numbers. Now, interestingly, when they went in the same survey, when they reached out to these accountances why do you think people swap from one accountant to another then?
That what they gave as one and two was technical ability and cost. They were [00:11:00] something like seventh and eighth in the list when they went out to the clients. Number one, 67%. The people said there was swap agencies because they weren’t being treated properly. And there’s, again, a lot of data that supports that.
It’s not necessarily how well you do the job. It’s how you make people feel. Is it convenient for them? Is it a pleasure to deal with you? Do they trust you? Do they rely upon you? Is the stuff that you give them good quality stuff? Not just you put a, manage to put a bum on a seat. Despite everything else, you manage to find somebody.
Yeah, if you don’t find people. If you don’t find candidates obviously you’re not going to make the cut. But if you are finding candidates, but the experience for the client isn’t a good one, then there’s a very good chance that they’ll stop dealing with you. Cause that’s the deal. So you have the chance now to go out to the marketplace and just simply have the conversation.
I want to come and see how we’re doing. Basically. I just want to know what you think of us and our ability to help you find people. What the [00:12:00] experience of dealing with us is like, and are we, would we make the cut? If. If you use half as many suppliers, why not? What’s the worst that can happen? And I’ll tell you why people don’t do it.
Because they’re afraid of the answer. They’re afraid that the answer will not be positive. So they’d rather not know. Talk about giving your head into the sand. My goodness, you find out now, and if there’s a problem, fix it. Because then you stand a much better chance of surviving if there’s a downturn.
In all of my businesses, we’ve never really suffered from downturns because we were very hot on client care. You And it makes such a difference.
Ketan Gajjar: Totally. And then, I believe that’s one thing that, that, I’ve learned through my career, working with the recruitment industry in the last 18 years, and then even right now how we manage, our clients relationship is, we have weekly review calls, with our team members, with our clients.
A monthly, discussion on Teams, Zoom, I spend, at least a couple of weeks every quarter meeting, every client, seeing them face to face, talking about, good, bad, ugly, all of it what’s going on, gone in the quarter. And this is precisely to make sure that, we understand what the client wants.
Feels like not just from the service perspective, but also, from the rapport and the dealings perspective that, okay, fine. How are they finding our team members? When they talk to the managers here, how’s the response like? So we are on top of those things over and about just the numbers.
Mike Ames: It’s important to do that. The Americans have a lovely expression. You’ve got to get off the operational highway and onto the relationship rest area because it’s in the rest area where you’re shooting the breeze. You’re not talking about work all the time. They actually grow a relationship and then that’s when people open up.
And begin to tell you what it’s really cause certainly in England and I’m sure people will be listening to this podcast outside of England, but in England, people don’t really like to give bad news. They don’t really like to say you’re rubbish, aren’t you? It’s not a nice thing.
It’s an unpleasant thing. It’s an awkward thing for people to say. So they mask it and hedge it. And what you have to do is force people to criticize you. The OTC is about not only giving [00:14:00] people permission to criticize you, but actively encouraging them to do and as soon as they feel that.
They can actually say what they think, and the smaller the thing that you ask, the better. The smaller the piece of advice, the better. They think to begin with, they’ve got to come up with a really big improvement or something. No. We don’t. We’ll take anything that we can get. But really what we’re looking for is small things that we can just fix.
And I’ll give you a tip on how you do that. So if you said okay, just pick something, right? Okay. Okay. So the quality of the CVs, right? So score the quality of our CVs. From one to 10, one being total rubbish, 10 being exactly what we want, right? You just nail it every single time, right? Give me a score.
Tell you now it’s going to be between six and nine, mostly the vast majority of answers, six and nine. So you say, so they say seven, right? So then you say okay, this is just one thing that we could do, which would make that score a 7. 25. Using the number in that way, 7. 25 or anything with [00:15:00] 25 added on to it, means that they start to refocus on smaller things.
Begin to think about small things. It’s yeah, actually, as a matter of fact, your consultant’s comments, they’re alright, but I just think they’re a bit, they’re not very personal. I’d really like the consultant to really tell me what they think about the candidate. That would give you a 7.
I’m glad you asked that actually, Mike, I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah, actually, I think that could be a bit more personal. You use this questioning to grow an opinion of what you do, which suddenly becomes compelling. And then you can do something about it. Now, we were talking about this off air.
Why wait until it’s raining before you fix a hole in the roof? You should do it now while the sun shining and everybody’s got holes in their roofs because another metaphor is at least a metaphor. I think [00:16:00] we’re analogy, a rising tide floats all boats. So we’ve had a rising tide. So everybody’s doing well.
You don’t speak to anybody now, do you? Ketan says, Oh, I’m not doing so well. Everybody’s doing well. Yeah. Because it’s a big market. Anyone could do well. My mother could do well and she’s 94. But I think when the mark, when the water drops, you know, when the vacancy number reduces, it’s a bit late.
Then you need to do it. Now, because not everybody’s going to make the cut. It’s always the case. It’s always the case that some companies will really suffer because they’ve not taken account of the detail. So my number one recommendation is to do that right now, to start that process today, ring somebody up and start to ask them about different aspects of your business and get a feel for whether you would make that cut.
Because if you do that, you can fix it.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. Sure. And then really good insight on the improvement. Point where you mentioned, seven and, what can I do to, make it 7. 25 bringing out the smaller bits and then [00:17:00] the point you touched on, in terms of the feedback and that’s a part of our culture training as well here when we, take on new people who have not worked with the UK region.
So if the client says it’s okay, it’s not okay, it doesn’t mean it’s good. There’s a room for improvement and then, you’ve got a probe. Just don’t come happily that, yes, my client is happy because they are not.
Mike Ames: Again that numbers thing that I was trained in IT years ago in the eighties.
That was my background. And when we were talking to users, to get someone to give an opinion on something, if you just ask what’s your opinion on this? Or what do you think about this? And that kind of very. A generic way, you’re going to get very mushy answers. The trick is to always ask them to score it.
Okay, how do are we doing okay at the moment? Yeah, you’re doing okay. Score us between one and ten. One being you’re absolutely rubbish, ten being it could not be better. That will change the way in which people respond to you. They’re much more likely to give you an honest answer if you do that, than if you say, yeah, go on, tell me what you really think, because it’s a [00:18:00] weird thing.
They’re just giving you a number. So not criticism in their heads, just number. And then you can take from what you want from that number, if they give you a number of six, that’s like zero. Okay. Cause six to nine, nine means a 10, really six means a zero, right? So that’s how it transposed. If you get less than a five, you are in big trouble, right?
So yeah, man, you need to deal with that. Probably
Ketan Gajjar: the last meeting.
Mike Ames: Yeah, it is the last meeting, right? So you need to understand once you get that number, then you’ve got something to dig away with. Okay, six. That’s, that’s better than five, but clearly that’s not where we want it to be.
And then you can have a real discussion. Can I ask you why that is? Or if I touch on a few points of our service, maybe you could drill down for me on that. It gives you the edge, but you can’t get your account managers to do this. Because you’re asking turkeys to give a judgment on Christmas, really, so you, you have to have a separate function that does it, or somebody within the business that’s not directly related to it because [00:19:00] I, the person you’re speaking to is much more likely to be honest.
They’re not, it’s difficult to say what do you think of my service? It’s rubbish, isn’t it? That’s harsh, right? Whereas someone else says I gather you use, let me have a quick look. Oh yeah, use my games. Can you give me a score out of 10 for him, whatever. So yeah, I can actually, it’s a six.
That’s interesting. Why is that a six, right? So I think it’s really important to get someone else to do it. And the other thing is when you’re doing these things, is you can’t push back. You can’t explain anything. Even if you know they’re wrong, If you know that what you’ve just said is wrong, you cannot push back, you cannot criticize, you can clarify, let me understand that a little bit more, but you can’t push back and say actually that’s not true what you’ve just said, because all that will do is close them down.
You’ve managed to open them up, you’ve opened the doors, this information is starting to come out. And then you slam it shut by basically pushing back too hard. So if they’ve got something they’ve said that you know is wrong, then what you say is okay, that sounds interesting. I’m going to need to look into that.
So can I take that down, look into that and get back to you [00:20:00] on it? And then you can push back later, but not in the call. And if you, so if you get a person who’s not directly related to the delivery of the service, doing it. And if you train them not to push back, if you train them to just absorb information and clarify information and then bring it together and analyze that information, it will tell you everything that you need.
It’s like
Ketan Gajjar: a quality department, isn’t it? Who is not emotionally invested into the service on a day to day basis. But, their job is to, find out, where can they improve, where can the business improve and retain the clients?
Mike Ames: Yeah, it’s true. Any quality department really is made up of two aspects.
One is about efficiency. How well are do? And the other one is quality through the eyes of the client. How well does the client think you’ve done? So I don’t care what the numbers are. You could have hit all your service level agreements. But if the client doesn’t like you, then we’re failing, we are failing.
And so therefore you’ve got those two elements. Now your CRM [00:21:00] system will probably give you all the data that you need about how efficient you are. Probably. Certainly as recruiters, if you use it properly, it’s going to give you. All the KPIs, all the metrics that you need, but what’s lacking is then translating that into how good you’re delivering the service.
And it’s only half the story. You need to go out further and then engage with your clients. You know what it’s like. People are paid by the end of the month. They’re paid by the bums they put on seats. They’re not paid to conduct those kinds of conversations with people. They’re not paid to be in the rest area.
They’re paid to be on the operational highway because that’s where the money comes from. And that is such a short sighted. Decision really my book
Ketan Gajjar: and then because it you know, it’s intangible in a way does not reflect on your balance sheet and then which is why you know, it’s not on top of the priority because you can’t see it, you know until You lose the client or the number comes down, you know from 100 vacancies to let’s say 50 and then all of a sudden you’re wondering that what really happened
Mike Ames: too late then though Sadly, it’s too late, you know do it now.
You’re right. There’s an immediacy. I mean it will [00:22:00] impact your pnl for sure You But not now that’s the thing. And I think too many recruitment companies are organized about the tyranny of the targets, they’ve got this end of month thing and that’s everything. And really successful businesses have a, a relationship management function, calling it what you will account management, cool, whatever you want.
But they have a facility which looks beyond that. The vision is much further out. It’s months, maybe even years out that they want to keep this relationship going and gradually edge out all the other competitors, not only by being good at putting a bum in a seat, but also being a pleasure to deal with until they become the apex supplier.
And when you become the apex supplier. Everything changes.
Ketan Gajjar: Totally. So Mike moving on from contra, client care what about new business development? What tips?
Mike Ames: I think we both know that right now there’s probably not a lot of need to do business development because it’s like falling through the door, isn’t it?
[00:23:00] Really? You having to. Go away. I can’t take any more vacancies. Leave me alone. I know. And I think that that’s probably started to slow down a little bit. I think most people are listening to this are probably recognized. That’s not as prominent as it was. Once again, it’s better to start that process now, it’s, relationships.
It would depend if you’re vacancy scraping. That’s okay because you can just go to the market and scrape vacancies when you need it. I don’t think that’s the way to grow a scalable business, quite frankly. I think it’s about building relationships because the vacancies will come to you from the relationships if you’ve built those relationships.
And that takes time to build rapport and trust and affinity, to build confidence that you can do a good job, that you would work in the way that they want to work. You’ve got shared values, yada, yada, yada, right? So the sooner that you start that now, the better. We’ve started to talk a lot about it on my show and and we started to write about it more and more because I think it’s an important thing just to begin that process of building up [00:24:00] your pipeline of relationships, getting them ready so that at some point in the future, probably when you need them, the vacancies will come.
But if you. It’s really difficult to win new clients in a flat market. We all know that, it’s a bit late. So get that underway right now is my advice. A hundred percent.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. So especially for newbies, who are, so right now, everybody’s. Mostly focused on, delivery and then very shortly, like you mentioned that, companies will have to be prepared to develop new business.
So when they’re putting on, new heads or new, sales professionals to, conduct new business development, what tips would have for them?
Mike Ames: Okay I’m not a big 360 fan. As anybody that’s listened to any of my content will know, I don’t believe in the 360 model at all for various reasons, which I’m not going to go into now, but whoever does new business development, whether that’s their job or whether part of their job, it starts with a clear understanding of what an ideal client profile looks like, which you can do now.[00:25:00]
So define the client itself, the company, the organization, and the decision maker, the entry points, the persona of that person. If you define both of those, which you can do right now, it doesn’t take a lot of time to do it. And you can test it out on your existing clients to make sure it’s right. Make sure you’ve got all the criteria in it that you want.
That means when you do have somebody who’s focused on going out and winning these new clients, they know exactly the type of clients they need to bring in because you’ve told them In that ICP and that ICP persona. I want these people in these organizations. You can even score them. If you’ve got criteria, you can weight the criteria out of 100.
And therefore, every lead that comes in can have a number between 1 and 100. And if it’s below 70, we’re just not touching it. Or, okay, if it’s above 70, we’re really going for it. Between 50 and 70, we will do it. If you’ve got nothing else below 50, we’re not bothered. So if you wanted to, you could go to that degree.
And a lot of people do that because it means that you keep [00:26:00] control of the new business development, even if somebody else is doing it for you because you’ve told them what to target and you’re scoring it. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing you can do, which is very easy to do and you can outsource this.
I’m sure your business could do it for people. If they wanted it to, you can draw up a list of targets. You can do the research, you can map out the market and say okay, so you could get your people to do it themselves or outsource it, as I said. Okay, go and get me a hundred people in companies that look like this.
Okay. Go ahead and do that. And if the ICP is strong enough and well defined enough, you’ll be able to do it and you can produce your list. So now you’ve got the people that you’re targeting. You’ve got a very clear idea of who those people actually are. And then the next thing to do is to start engaging with them.
And that’s where there’s a difference between vacancy scraping, where you’re basically just trying to get a vacancy out of them, not for me, really, unless you really have to, obviously, and then you would do it, but really what you want to do is understand. What people are interested in and then use content to change the [00:27:00] narrative away from give me a vacancy and buy from me to, Hey, I know you’re interested in this subject.
Here’s something that talks about it, whether that’s an event or a podcast like this, or a white paper that you’ve written or a piece of research, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But here’s a thing that’s going to add value to you. That’s how you start a dialogue with these people. And if you do it with a hundred people, if your content, if your assets are strong enough.
Content assets are strong. And if you go to a hundred people, the data seems to suggest about 50 percent of them just not interested in you at all. That’s fine. They’ve deselected themselves about, about five to 7%. of people who want to talk to you and engage right now, and that could lead to a sale. Where the big money is what we call the forgotten 45%.
They’re the people that will talk to you a little bit, engage with you, but it’s not the right time for them. And half of them know when it’s the right time. So don’t ring me now, ring me next January. The other half, just keep in touch. [00:28:00] And quite often in, in three 60s, particularly, cause they’re still driven by making money, the forgotten 45%.
It’s just left. There’s no money there. I’m not interested. I’ll chase down the 5%. I’ll nail them. And then I’ll move on to the next group. Big mistake because potentially there’s nine times as much money. wrapped up in the forgotten 45 percent of people that just aren’t ready to deal with you now as there are in the 5 percent that are, but they’re often forgotten.
So if you build a system, which makes sure that the forgotten 45 percent aren’t forgotten, you then are ready to build relationships, which eventually will turn into streams. of vacancies, so you don’t need to vacancy scrape anymore. Why am I telling people to do that now? Because it takes time to do that.
It’s not something that you can do quickly, it takes time to build, not vast amounts of time, but you need to do it. But once it’s done, it’s like a license to print money. It’s what you know, the no two ways about it. It really does generate the right kind of clients because you’ve specified what the clients are.[00:29:00]
You you know exactly what kind of clients you want and then this machine gets them for you. And I think you should start and build that now. You don’t need it right now, but it,
Ketan Gajjar: it’s process isn’t it? Like you said, it starts with the ICP and then, that’s the sort of. Root of the quality of your vacancies coming through as well especially when times are different than what they are and then do as persuasion and patience, those 45 percent is more about, having a fine balance of, how far you go in terms of following up and then, how long do you wait?
Mike Ames: You use content. If you use content, the frequency doesn’t matter so much. If I had something that you were really interested in now, and I rang you up and said, Hey Keaton, you know the thing you said to me last time? Look, we’re doing this thing. Would you like to come to it? Or we’ve just done some research on the space.
Do you want me to send through the research finding? That’s not offensive. That’s not in your face. I’m doing it for you. I’m not trying to make money out of you. And gradually we call it putting layers on the relationship bridge. When that bridge is strong enough, you can walk across and get [00:30:00] what you want.
Or sometimes the client will walk to you and say okay, I’m glad you’re on mic actually. We’ve got this thing with, would you like to work on it for us? So it’s about using content to add value and not constantly bringing it back to can we have a deal? Can we have a deal? Because you’re making yourself look transactional.
And that’s not a nice thing to be in a flat market. I don’t think it’s particularly attractive in a buoyant market like we have now. But in a flat market, it’s just very tacky. Whereas adding value through content every six, eight weeks, 10 weeks, if you want is not going to be intrusive.
It’s not unpleasant, it’s not awkward. It’s not the same conversation over and over again, got any vacancies for me? It’s not anything like that, but you can sense when it’s time to say, look, we’ve been speaking for some time. You came on that thing that we did. We, you very kindly said some very nice things about this, that and the other.
I’d like an opportunity to talk to you about. Whether the vacancies that you have, we could help with because we’ve got a flavor of recruitment. Not everybody likes it, but maybe you will. So you know when it’s the [00:31:00] right time to have that. We call it a discovery pitch meeting. You know when it’s the right time to have that.
But you’ve been adding content, using content to add value and build that relationship, that trust and confidence, all the way through, so it’s not a weird conversation. And in many cases, the client will We’ll prompt it to the client. We’ll say tell us a bit about what you do. So the forgotten 45 percent is dead easy unless it’s someone who’s very transactional because they want to deal and they’ll push the relationship too much and break it.
So it’s not a good idea, which is why 360 is not a good idea, really. In my humble opinion
Ketan Gajjar: Sure and then mike tell us about obviously your background something that we should have covered earlier, you know in the podcast but if you want to share about your background and you know your consulting business and Because I see your webinars and podcasts or rather, you know Literally going live all the time.
So it’ll help, the listeners understand much more in detail. Sure. And just as one last tip, if you were to give to the agencies right now, especially the ones who are, living a [00:32:00] lifestyle business and then for the ones who want to develop a lifestyle business, what would that be?
Mike Ames: Very simple really. You need to define what you want your business to do for you. The business should work hard for you, not the other way around. Too many people work really hard for their business. A slave to the business really shouldn’t be that way around. And the beginning is what income do you want to earn?
Not oh yeah, I want to earn a million pounds. But wherever you are now, what income would give you the kind of lifestyle that you want? So you could travel where you wanted, have the house that you wanted. How much? There’s a number. Second thing is, what does freedom look like to you? Now freedom is doing what you want, when you want, with whom you want, as long as you want and where you want.
That’s freedom. And that works in terms of what you want to do outside your business. How much time do you want off? To go and do stuff with your family and what you do inside your business. So if you’re just doing the stuff that you like, that you’re good at, and that’s the biggest impact in your business, you’ll be happy.
So what does that look like? Because what you’re doing is beginning to put down a target to [00:33:00] achieve. And then the last thing is wealth. What’s your magic number? How much money do you need? Invested somewhere to be able to say, do you know what I’ve had enough? I don’t care whether I sell the business or not.
I’ve got enough now to retire. You need to know that number. My advice on that is if anybody wants, we’ve got a little magic number generator, which I’ll send to you. If you ask me on LinkedIn, I’ll just, it’s just a PDF. You can work it out, but really what you should do is go to your IFA. your financial advisor and get him or her to do a lifetime cash flow for you.
And that will give you a precise number for the point that you want to retire. And then all you need to do is build it. Now, once you have those three things, you can then design a business to deliver it. It’s not difficult to do. Just scale it up from what you have now, if you’re making 300, 000 pounds now and you’ve got to make 600, double everything, it’s probably not accurate, but it’s better than nothing, and that gives you something to aim at, then you can build a plan to build it, [00:34:00] so it’s not that difficult at all really, in the great scheme of things, but most people are just building the business, I’ll just make it bigger next year, it’s okay, really?
Is that how it works? No. Target first and then go for it.
Ketan Gajjar: Of course. Sure. So Mike, thanks. Thanks very much for your, valuable insights on client care, new business development. And, of course snapshot on the lifestyle business. I will obviously, share this podcast and look forward to golden nuggets from you, from your shows later on as well but thanks for coming on the show.
The recruitment curry.
Mike Ames: It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on Keita. Thanks Mike.
