The RAG Podcast - Recruitment Agency Growth Podcast

Mike Ames built his first recruitment business from scratch in 1989 with six months of industry experience and two partners. One of them died in a car accident after 18 months. He became MD. He had a breakdown. He rebuilt the business entirely around scalability, removed himself from the centre of it, and sold to a NYSE-listed company for £24 million at the age of 38. He thought that would feel li...

At 28, Oliver Paull runs Rec Gen completely alone from his flat in London. £209K in year one at an 81% profit margin. £298K in year two. Past £270K already this year. Close to £800K in under three years, with no staff, no office and no cold client outreach. It did not start that way. In his first recruitment role he was on target to bill £650K and leaving the office to have panic attacks three tim...

Mathew Gollop found Hong Kong in the back of Recruiter magazine. A glossy advert, a Chinese temple, a palm tree. He flew out, signed the contract, and landed in February 2001. The dot-com bubble had just burst. Then 9/11. Then SARS. Within a year the founder wanted out, and Mathew took the business over. It was the only way to keep his job. When the market finally turned, it turned hard. Connected...

Greg Fischer did not plan to spend ten years in recruitment. He joined a solo healthcare practice in LA as employee number one, figured it would pay the bills, and planned to open a gym someday. He never left. Instead he built one of the most profitable staffing businesses in the US. $4.2 million in NFI, $1.4 million net profit. 38 people and a seven-figure equity stake with a $50 million exit on...

Paul Strouts has run a business of four people. His first business, James Harvard, quickly grew beyond 100 people and sold to Hays for approximately £20 million at 32. He then spent a decade running Hays Life Sciences globally. Got headhunted to PE Backed Acacium and quickly made two strategic acquisitions. He now runs: 3 brands. 250 people. 12 countries. Contingent, SOW, RPO and Solutions revenue...

Nathan O'Connell spent nine years as a British military officer. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. He finished on the withdrawal with 16 Air Assault Brigade and left the forces two weeks before his 30th birthday with no sales background, no LinkedIn profile, and no recruitment experience of any kind. He got into rec-to-rec by accident. Spotted an advert on his wife’s Instagram, joined R2R Global, and was...

Emily Angeloni co-founded WOW Recruitment in Sydney at 22. No salary for six months. Just her laptop, working from a building set for demolition. Nine years later: a team of 18 across every major Australian state, New Zealand, and the United States. One of the most respected boutique sales and marketing agencies in the country. The year she became a mother, her co-founder told her he was leaving....

Charlie Saffro started CS Recruiting by accident. Pregnant with her third child, out of a job overnight, doing free matchmaking from the school carpool line in Chicago. Her first placement fee was $1,200 with a year-long guarantee. Sixteen years later, she had built a $5 million logistics and supply chain recruitment firm with 48 employees at its peak. Inc. Best Workplaces honouree. TEDx speaker....

Blaine Daws started in data centres in 2008 with a stack of papers and a wired phone. By 25, he was billing £475k a year as a solo 360 recruiter. At a family Christmas party in December 2019, he met Karl Chatterjee, a man who had already sold two recruitment businesses for multi-millions. Karl said: "Why are you going to line someone else's pockets?" Four weeks later, WNTD was incorporated. Two we...

Andy Strong spent 10 years in retail selling mobile phones. Then 17 years building the biggest delivery team at a SaaS recruitment firm in Dorset. He became one of four divisional directors. His team placed 82% of the company's US hires from Poole. He drove 400% growth in North American placements. And then he went to therapy. Eight sessions later, he ended an eight-year relationship, resigned fro...

Jon Woolley spent nearly a decade at Vantage Consulting. He opened their US arm, built a team of eight, and scaled it to $1.6 million. Then, three weeks before his third child was born, he walked away. No team. No clients. No pipeline. Just £30,000 in savings and a niche most recruiters have never heard of: industrial automation. The people who programme the machines that make the stuff, from phar...

This is not a typical RAG episode. Christian Mather is not a recruiter. He has never filled a role, run a desk, or managed a team. He is a wealth planner. And since niching into recruitment founders about two and a half years ago, he has become one of the most in-demand advisors in the industry. Since January alone, he has had over 100 enquiries and spoken to 60 founders about the same thing: how...

David Bloxham first appeared on The RAG Podcast in March 2020. That episode was recorded the week before the world went into lockdown. He had 130 staff, a fresh MBO behind him, and a business that was growing. Six years later, he is back. Same seat. Very different business. In the years since, David has navigated a pandemic, a post-COVID hiring boom, a brutal tech slump, and the rise of AI. Each t...

Ben Richardson & Mike Bott: Why LHi Group appointed two CEOs For 25 years, LHi Group had one CEO. Founder Tom Glanfield built the business from scratch with Jim Denning taking over in 2020 and leading it it through COVID. A global recruitment group, LHi has 5 brands. 300 people. 9Offices across the US and Europe Ben Richardson and Mike Bott had both spent their careers inside LHi. Both joined...

Lucy Robinson: Fired from her job, now running a £650k global search firm Lucy Robinson runs LCR International, a global executive search firm specialising in fresh produce across six continents. Today, the business is doing around £650k in revenue, but the story really started in December 2019 when Lucy was fired from her job for not hitting targets. At the time, she had no savings, a three-year-...

In June 2023, Jory Humphreys and Sam Hope launched H People with limited capital but an insane energy to work hard. Within 25 months, they'd built a $25 million business. $8.2 million in year one, $15.5 million revenue and $1 million in EBITDA in their second full year. They're now Australia's number two fastest-growing company. But what makes their story different isn't the revenue. It's the mode...

Emma Storey: How 2 part-time working mums billed £500K in their first 2 years! Emma Storey never thought she'd still be in recruitment after having kids. She'd never worked with a mum in the industry. Never had a role model who'd done it. The assumption was always the same: have a baby, and your recruitment career is over. But after successfully juggling recruitment and becoming a mum inside the p...

In 2022, Avetis Antaplyan was absolutely flying... HIRECLOUT, his global recruiting firm with 30 employees across the US, Colombia, Armenia, and India was breaking record after record. Two-time Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Company, his best year ever and he felt everything was working. Then when the market hit hard in 2023-2024 and every other founder was doing layoffs, Avetis refused to cut people....

Peter Kornberg: How a Non-Recruiter Built $1M+ Revenue 15 years in a row (with Just 6 People) Peter Kornberg never worked a day as an agency recruiter. He worked in Advertising and Marketing and became a Chief Digital Officer. He ran a product design agency in New York City. Clients started asking for talent they couldn't afford to engage the agency for. So Peter said: "We can provide you some peo...

At 21 years old, Alex Hashash was managing 15 people and 18,000 hours of temporary nurses every single week. By his early thirties, he had 120 staff. Most of them offshore. But it didn't start with a playbook. It started with 3 am phone calls, traumatic Blackberry ringtones, and weekend rotas that never seemed to end. When his company decided to build an offshore capability, Alex didn't manage it...

Logan Naidu runs Kernel Global-a multi-brand recruitment group with 200 people across London, Hong Kong, Charlotte and New York. We first spoke in April 2021. He had 180 people. The market was about to explode. 2021: £7 million EBITDA. 2022: £10 million EBITDA. Headcount doubled to 300. Then March 2023 hit. Logan closed a second PE deal. Paid out over £30 million to staff. The biggest individual p...

Ryan Gorman: How He Built £250k in Fees Without Making a Single Cold Call Ryan Gorman launched Lofthouse Group in January 2021 with a newborn daughter at home. His wife asked him one question: "What sort of person do you want Isla seeing? Do you want her growing up seeing work as something you love, or just something you do to earn money?" Year one, solo, working part-time around his newborn: £93k...

Stuart Mitchell: How he built $3M in 3 years (then realised he hated his own job) Stuart Mitchell launched Hampton North in September 2022. $1.6 million year one. $2.5 million year two. On track for $3 million plus in year three. Now 10 staff and projects $1m profit for next year. I interviewed him on the show in the middle of 2023, and things were flying. But over the following 18 months, he near...

Pete Watson: 22 years as a solo Rec2Rec in Australia (and why he'd never do it again) Pete Watson is the longest-serving boots-on-the-ground Rec2Rec in Australia. 22 years running Mint R2R. Thousands of placements. A recognisable name across the entire Australian recruitment market. But 18 months ago, he was at the gym when he asked himself one question: "Would I do it all again?" His answer was i...

Michael Green: How he made $700K in year one (after not billing for 6 years) Michael Green spent six years running teams of 100+ recruiters. Building offices. Managing people. Zero placements. When he launched Unico in April 2024, he had to go back to basics. "I had to do role plays to myself. I hadn't qualified a candidate in six years." Day one was brutal. Just him, his house and a dog. But Mich...