This is the warning from Simplicity, the specialist provider of recruitment finance and outsourced administration solutions.
David Thornhill, managing director at Simplicity, said:
“Being the best biller in your last role before starting your own recruitment business is great, but only in the sense that you know you will always be able to generate income. The challenge is knowing how to grow your business and to do so at a rate that suits you best.
“When you worked for ‘the man’ there was always someone else who would sort out the invoicing, do the payroll and all manner of other everyday tasks. Now you have to do it yourself and before long you will find yourself transformed as a veritable Jack-of-all-Trades, taking on the roles not just of chief biller in your new business but also the accountant, credit controller, administrator, compliance officer, marketer, IT helpdesk…the list goes on.”
He warns that getting bogged down trying to master all the skills required to effectively run a recruitment back office function detract recruitment business owners from doing what they do best – selling.
He said: “Recruitment is a highly competitive industry and that is why it is imperative to the success of any recruitment business to play to your strengths. That means partnering with an organisation who can take over the responsibility of managing those multiple back office roles at a consistently high standard; thereby, freeing you to focus all your time and energies on fee-generating activities.
“Think of it like this: When you add the total amount of time spent each week raising invoices, chasing outstanding payments, paying your workers, dealing with HMRC queries, verifying terms of business and collating timesheets, how much time do you have left to pitch new clients? How many new clients could you have spoken to in the time it took to perform some of the duties above?”
Mr Thornhill goes on to say that time, spent the wrong way that is, really does cost you and your business money. The number one reason why recruitment agencies don’t grow as fast or as big as their founders had hoped is because the people running them try to be the Jack-of-all-Trades.
Great recruitment agency owners will always find new ways of doing things faster, smarter and more efficiently. They will recognise where their strengths lie and the importance of handing the tasks that hold them back to someone else. In doing do, they are the ones who will grow at the pace they know they can and steal the march on their competition.
