Recruiting Alchemy with Andy Simpson
Moving recruiters from the contingent carousel to repeatable, scalable, productised offerings.
Recruiting Alchemy with Andy Simpson
Recruiting Alchemy Ep. 28 Specialise to Scale with Jim Ryan
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Jim Ryan left Ireland at 17, knocked on doors selling cable TV, and walked into MSB in Bromley in 1997 with no recruitment experience. Eighteen years on from starting ERSG on the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, he runs a staffing group with £185 million in turnover, around £28 million in gross profit and offices from Seattle to Taiwan, and it has stayed independent without private equity.
Andy Simpson sits down with Jim, CEO of ERSG, to talk about how a business plan he now calls naive became the go-to specialist for the offshore wind industry. They get into verticalisation and why ERSG throws jobs away, building a career structure so growth becomes automatic, opening entities across Europe, the US and Asia, the 2022 and 2023 bump that very nearly knocked the business over, and why Jim thinks AI is already changing support roles long before it touches an engineer on a turbine.
Recruiting Alchemy is sponsored by ryvr.ai, the conversational intelligence platform built specifically for recruitment and staffing businesses. Produced by Vertical Drop.
KEY MOMENTS
- 17:22 Starting ERSG on the day Lehman went
- 21:51 Offshore wind projects and the Blackpool private jet
- 38:36 Verticalisation: specialise and throw jobs away
- 45:03 The Jaws on the beach moment
- 49:17 Why ERSG stayed independent
Guest, Jim Ryan: linkedin.com/in/jiryan
Company https://www.ersg-global.com/en-US/
Host, Andy Simpson linkedin.com/in/andyhsimpson
Sponsor, ryvr.ai https://ryvr.ai/
Produced by vertical-drop.com
You know, I had that moment in Joe's on the beach where, well, we're we're in trouble here. We're 185 million turnover, 28 million GP-ish. I mean, there's probably two positions already in in our business. That because of AI have not been hired. Definitely the secret, if you like, to growing a business is verticalization. Specialise, specialise, specialise. And throw jobs away or give them back to the client if you don't think you can fill them. Well, we've grown every single year, even in crisis. I expect us to double in the next three to five. I expect us to manage this geographical expansion and continue doing it.
SPEAKER_02This episode is proudly sponsored by River, the conversational intelligence platform built specifically for recruitment and staffing businesses. Recruitment firms generate huge amounts of valuable information every day through client calls, candidate interviews, vacancy briefings, and business development conversations. The challenge is that most of that information never makes it into systems, processes, or decision making. River captures, transcribes and analyses every conversation automatically, transforming unstructured discussions into actionable intelligence for recruiters, managers, and business leaders. Whether that's improving CRM hygiene, generating candidate and client summaries, identifying commercial opportunities, coaching, or uncovering trends across the business, River helps staffing companies get more from every conversation they have. Unlike generic AI note-taking tools, River is built specifically for the recruitment industry with workflows, automations, and insights designed around the way recruiters actually work. If you'd like to see how leading staffing businesses are using a conversational intelligence to gain a competitive advantage, visit river.ai and book a demo today. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Recruiting Alchemy. Today I am thrilled to be joined by Jim Ryan, CEO of ERSG Group. Holdings. We don't know each other all that well, Jim. Our paths have never crossed, which is after a long time in this space, is unusual. So it's a real pleasure to meet you. You've got a really, really interesting backstory, but most importantly, the business you run today, I think, is the sort of business that many staffing leaders would aspire to. What I mean by that is I think you've clearly evolved your business way beyond simply finding people and you've wrapped around that whole component. And I think I speak to recruitment leaders day in, day out. And in this kind of world, that seems to be where everybody's trying to go. So I think we'd love to get into that if we if we can. Sure. But firstly, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I should say you're back from a two-day trip in Croatia and you look very, very sprightly for a man who's been on the lash for 57 years old.
SPEAKER_00Well, about that, but I had uh I had yesterday off. So recovery.
SPEAKER_02So we start every show with the same thing. Uh the you know, the the two beginnings. So for the benefit of those who who don't know you, tell us, yeah, where does the where does the where does the Jim Ryan story begin?
SPEAKER_00Um I mean if you're looking at origins, I came from Ireland when I was 17. Okay. Didn't know where I was going, didn't know what I was going to do. Tipperary, down the south. Um and I just knew that there wasn't a future for me, or I thought, in Ireland at the time, because Ireland's a very different country now, uh, economically.
SPEAKER_02So this was pre-the-the Emerald the Emerald Tiger, whatever the Emerald Tiger or everything, but the explosion.
SPEAKER_00The Celtic Tiger, yeah. The Celtic Tiger.
SPEAKER_02So so I guess what the economy, not particularly good at the time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I come from a small town. There was very little options. Um and I sort of knew, I don't know why I always knew that I I wouldn't stay there as much as I love the people there and love the town.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um and I just took any work I could when I came over here first. Um got into sales, this is 1986, got into sales in 1993, where I started knocking doors for 9x, cable TV, cable telephone when it came in first. Right. Um started two in the afternoon, finished nine in the evening. I I couldn't believe how easy it was compared to some of the other salespeople that were complaining.
SPEAKER_02Really?
SPEAKER_00With some of the jobs that I'd done. I thought this is you put on a suit and you get paid for um sometimes they actually want the service that you're offering, other times you might have to persuade. Yeah. Um, but I did that for four or five years. Um and then in two no 1997, um, I knew that MSB locally was one of the biggest businesses. They just floated, people were doing really well there. I had some connections there. So um I interviewed.
SPEAKER_02So you were living in Southeast London? Living in Bromley, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Living in Bromley. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So it was because they are, I mean, they were they were properly famous back in the day. I mean, I think the the lake, you know, the the myth, if we want to call it that, still lives on as a real proper sales outfit.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it was. I mean, they floated uh just before I got there, and Mark Goldberg, who was the head of the business, and Peter Florti, who was the the the CEO. Um, and I've still got an awful lot of people with us now that are people I've worked with back there, a number of our division heads um are still with us from from those MSB days.
SPEAKER_02Um so so you you've you did you had no recruitment experience 1997. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And uh it was a very clear picture on how you did well, it was so well organized. I mean, I know there's a lot of uh history and talk about how chaotic the place was. There was fun, um, but you had a very clear vertical, you knew what you had to do, your targets were every quarter, um, you were appraised every quarter, and we've carried that on.
SPEAKER_02Amazing. We're gonna talk about that in a lot of detail. So, but before we do, so you walk through the doors, young man, bit of sales experience or being four years, but no recruitment experience. What do you remember as your first kind of what's your enduring memory of the first period of time in recruitment?
SPEAKER_00First two weeks, I I thought this isn't for me. Really what helped me uh was I looked around and I I saw the people who were at the time 100 grand plus doing very well, and I thought, if he can do it, I can do it. So I I I sort of kept that in my mind um and stuck with it. And then I I did very well after 12 months.
SPEAKER_02Right. And what markets were you working on?
SPEAKER_00Ingress. Ingress.
SPEAKER_02Ingress rolling back the years now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we had Oracle Division, we had an Ingress Division, we had Cybase Contract? Contract only, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Was it all contract at the time?
SPEAKER_00Contract only, you couldn't do anything under three months or anything under 15%.
SPEAKER_02Really?
SPEAKER_00Those were the rules.
SPEAKER_02Right, okay. You didn't do perm?
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_02So what what if you sent a contract you only got a perm offer?
SPEAKER_00You only got paid uh at the lowest level of commission. For that bond space. And and it you just you just didn't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02I remember when we we were at um because it would happen every now and then, right?
SPEAKER_00Occasionally, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And it would, you know, contracts would go in and and they'd offer him a perm job and and you'd be campaigning to get paid on it. And the CEO would be like, look, he's like, if you send contractors in who are even interested in perm jobs, it's your own fault. Yeah. And they would bank for 15 grand and you'd I think you'd get like a five percent.
SPEAKER_00We I think it might I can't remember exactly, but I think it was something like that. Yeah. I mean it it what they were making sure is it didn't reward it. I'm still fascinated by how uh agencies make perm work as well as contract. In in what way? Revenue. Yeah. I mean, we've got perm consultants who do well, and some of them do well, but um perm's about two, three percent of our turnover.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I I mean the the truth is I think if you um if you got into the weeds of it, all the profits in contract. You know, perm's great for vanity and it looks good, but the long-term structural profit is all in contract.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, and it's it's I mean, if you've if you've got a business model where perm works and you've got clients that give you volume, yeah, then you've got no financing. Yeah, you send an invoice, you get paid, and and there is no outlay on it. Yeah, yeah. And your um your your bad debt is automatically going to be lower because you're not putting anything out except time if you don't get paid. Yeah. Um, but apart from that, for scalability, for revenue forecasting, um, and for client partnerships, and also for your relationships with your candidates. Yeah. Um, you put somebody into a permeable and you're successful, you might not talk to them for 10 years.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the relationship is over.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the relationship's kind of over unless they get promoted through and what have you. But um, so there's there's an awful lot of benefits to contract um from that perspective. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So next year will be 30 years at what is now ERSG Holt Group.
SPEAKER_00No, it's 18 years and on the 1st of October. We're 18 years old. Uh prior to that, I'm I'm 30 years in recruitment as of next year. Sorry, yeah, yeah. Yeah, 30 years in in recruitment. Um I mean if you call up, if you call office recruit, recruitment.
SPEAKER_02Well that was that was the chapter I was interested in exploring, right? So um so you you you you do well, you're making money, you've got the golden handcuffs of contract recruitment firmly around you. Tell us about the next chapter of your career.
SPEAKER_00Well, uh what happened was there was a change at MSB, which um I think is a real shame to this day, where there was people came into the business who wanted to take it in a in a different direction, more consultancy. Yeah. And as a result, uh Mark Goldberg left. We had a lot of the senior management leave, including myself. Um, they changed a lot of structures and and to my view, um, ruined the business. Right. Um, so I left in 2000, 2001, um, and I I didn't know what to do, whether it was just going to be another recruitment role somewhere else. And uh I was speaking to a friend of mine when she worked at Office Angels, um, and we were using JobServe to post our jobs, and she commented that Office Angels were just putting in their computers. So I thought, well, there must be a market for a secretarial office support job board if Office Angels are just putting in their computers. Yeah. So uh I was thinking, where am I going to get investment here? So there's a number of people, um, uh three or four of us put 20k in each, but the first person was Peter, Peter Florerty, who's the CEO at MSB. Now I didn't have a lot to do with Peter because he was like three levels above me at MSB. But uh I still remember picking up the phone. I got his number and picking up the phone and making that call. And to be fair to him, I met for lunch. I had the most naive business plan now looking back on it, you'll ever see, but he just had a punt and he invested 40k. When he invested, then two or three others followed, and we we raised about between us 100-150k to start the business and the website, the job board, all the Google advertising, the lump investment to get it off the ground.
SPEAKER_02And this was nothing more than an idea at the time.
SPEAKER_00You had no prototype or you hadn't you had no revenue, you would just No, I knew the market in that it was secretarial agencies were going to be our clients. Um, and I knew you'd have to give it free for a period of time. Yeah uh competing against Reed, who were free.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um who were really quite dominant at that time.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, yeah, Sex in the City was one that got bought by the Daily Mirror. Uh we got bought by the Daily Mail the the three years later, but you had total jobs, job side, there was a variety of job boards.
SPEAKER_02Because I remember I I had just got into recruitment at the time, and it was the end of it was the the sunset of traditional print advertising as all of these titles flipped online, right? So Computer Weekly, Job Serve, Job Um and other job site and it exploded the whole online job community. Young Monster, I think, arrived on the American American, hugely dominant business. So with this idea, were you it was the early days of the internet really, and certainly the early days of internet advertising. Were you did you were you technical in in nature, or did you just think would you just see it as a as an opportunity worth worth a pump worth taking?
SPEAKER_00Um there was 45% coverage uh residentially for the internet at the time. And there was a bit of research that said that I mean America was 95, this is 2001. So I knew we were going to be going that way. Um I looked online and found a uh a company in Tunbridge Wells that built websites and they'd built a job board. Um, so I'm not at all technical, I'm I'm sales. So uh Lucian uh joined me and invested as well, and he is the attention to detail, Google ads, spreadsheets. Right. So you had him doing that. I was going out doing the sales. We hired a really good advertising advertising sales girl called Dina. She previously worked on the London magazines. She was brilliant with her relationships as well. So um we ended up with eight or nine sales staff. Um, I mean, we weren't making money. Um it was it took us three years to be sort of we were break-even, earning a wage, but you know. And we then were getting calls from the mirror group, from Daily Mail Group. So we we had conversations with a number of them. Um, and Jobside just came in and with with the Daily Mail Group and bought us. Wow.
SPEAKER_02Was that an expected kind of outcome?
SPEAKER_00Dunno. Um I I think we we we we were just going with it. Um I knew it was the right direction. Um wasn't entirely the naivety is mad, but I think you need that to be entrepreneurial. You need to not think about what could go wrong. Well, exactly. And just go for it. Um and by going for it, I think the strategy really for Jobsight and for the mirror group is to buy these jobsite in particular was to buy the competition so that they could become completely dominant, which they more or less did. Um LinkedIn is um has sort of uh taken over where jobsight used to be a little bit in recruitment.
SPEAKER_02Um is there still money in job boards?
SPEAKER_00I don't know.
SPEAKER_02I just read a story last year about the guy who owns CV Library taking like a 90 million pound dividend out of it. So I was like, clearly there is still some money.
SPEAKER_00Well they start at the same time as us, C V Library, and I think he stayed independent.
SPEAKER_02So I think I think 25 years later he's still there.
SPEAKER_00It just shows the power of And we're using them. Right. So and we're not spending mad money, but by the same token, you don't need yeah, yeah, yeah. You need just a volume paying £100 a month, and it's a privately owned and and if it's regular long-term revenue flow, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So maybe maybe that's the future for me. Maybe I need to get back into the job boards. Well, I do.
SPEAKER_00I'm not sure job boards are the way forward now because it'll take you a long time to build it up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um so seven years in the world of internet technology, did it and then back to recruitment at that point? Well, it didn't it didn't wet your whistle to become the next Mark Zuckerberg?
SPEAKER_00No, uh not at all. The opposite. Um, what we missed, Lucine and I particularly was the the buzz. I mean, getting a £100 a month subscription is very different to getting a campaign of 30 workers going out and for 12 months. Yeah, yeah. And um the scalability wasn't there. We you had to invest millions to get to scale. We we knew at that point that an exit was the only way of us um monetizing it. It got to the point where there was dominant figures, and if you didn't, yeah, uh you either invested heavily with money you didn't have, yeah, or you sold. Um so Lucy and I both know recruitment. We don't, we're not techies. Yeah. So um there was an article written by Felix Weismann, who was the marketing director at Jobsite about the green economy. So we were looking at what is our next market for recruitment. Um and the green economy was certainly somewhere that that we thought uh strategically there was government money going into. There was commitments made around reducing carbon.
SPEAKER_02So this is 2007, eight, nine?
SPEAKER_00Well, 2005 we sold, we had a three-year earnout, um, which for business our size didn't go well. Um, and in 2008, uh, we started Euros G. Um, we had the idea for months before, and we were sort of researching what the markets would be. Um and it was the same day as Lehman Brothers went.
SPEAKER_02Just about to say, yeah, your timing impeccable.
SPEAKER_00Well, in a way it was good because if you can make a business work when times are that tough, you're almost better as a startup. Yeah. Where your costs are low in a tough environment. Because by the time the economy turns around, you've then you've you've you know you're running a good business if you can survive in that. Yeah, yeah. Um, and we were in it, we were in a market where it was government funded. We we were looking at sustainability, uh, maybe even some environmental and offshore wind were the three sort of areas. We weren't sure which one of those was going to go best. Um, as it happens, it was offshore wind because RWE were building Gwyntymore at the time. Um, and there was enough in that for us to get a foothold with Orsted, Eon, RWE.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, we got a foothold in the market. Um, sustainability was going down a very much a perm route and a more difficult way to get project-based work and to get long-term. Um, so we ended up going down the offshore wind route almost exclusively for the first two or three years.
SPEAKER_02And and just so I'm clear, when you say the off this is in heavy engineering, this is the actual construction of the turbines themselves off the um off the coast.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. So it it it was something where as if you had said to me five years after we started, we would have as many offshore engineers and we'd know what we're doing, I would have been amazed. Yeah. Because there wasn't a particular seam, if you like. It was just pick the phone up. The two of us sat in the office, sort of looked at each other and said, Well, we better pick the phone up. Um, and we followed our nose and just started speaking to candidates. Uh, Lucy in particularly, I can remember the guy's name, I won't mention it because it might embarrass him a bit. But the first CB that Lucien spoke to, and we still we still deal with them now. Yeah. Um, and that was the journey. Um, and we just three years in, I think, we got Chris Pedder in from who was our sales director at MSB. And he's only a couple of days a week, two, three days a week, um, where Lucene and I run the business outside of that. But from a strategic perspective, and how to build um structures that motivate and that also verticalize. So within offshore wind, you've got health and safety, you've got fabrication, you've got the WTG technicians themselves, the guys that go out and fix and and commission. Um, so within that, we broke it all down into desks so that if the offshore wind market did ever fall over, we're working with the health and safety guys. They're gonna have to get jobs somewhere.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The fabrication guys, they don't necessarily always work in offshore wind. So there's a robustness to it that isn't just market dependent.
SPEAKER_02But if just to take a step back, is it it must be incredibly challenging to do a start-up in significant global markets like that where you're not just pulling a lead and placing an ingress developer at some bank or whatever or at some building society? You're you're you're looking for by definition, they're big businesses, right? Because they're involved in multi-billion dollar projects. Were you not a bit nervous about that from start just from a standing start? How do you, you know, is the fear that you consume loads of cash trying to get through the door? And you know, is that not is that not a challenge?
SPEAKER_00The things that you you you have to accept from a startup perspective, like I did with Office Recruit and with this. Um, Lucy and I could have gone to a big recruitment business and got 150, 200 grand salaries, probably. You have to take a pay cut, you have to understand that you're investing in yourself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You also, if you can, find a young market. Offshore wind was embryonic. Right. Um, it came from Denmark. There was two projects, I think, going on, one in uh Orsted project and the RWE project. So, yes, these are huge businesses, but they don't have specialists in offshore wind that they can go to their vanilla recruitment agencies. So we became specialists and go to for that. And we're twice the size probably of our nearest competitor in in offshore wind. Um, and that's from longevity as much as anything else.
SPEAKER_02So a friend, my a friend of mine, he my wife's Swedish, and um and her um her friend is is is Danish and um her husband. Works for a company called Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
SPEAKER_00Not them well. Yeah. CIP, we're there flying for us.
SPEAKER_02Oh, really? Okay, yeah. Mad Scovegaard Anderson, as if you know him. He's a he's a fairly big hitter out there. Anyway. And I said, he said, Oh, where are you from? I said, Oh my, I'm from Stoke on Trenton Ridge, but my parents live in Blackpool. He's like, I've been to Blackpool. I was like, You've been to Blackpool? Why on earth would you go to Blackpool? He's like, Oh, we've got a big offshore wind installation off the in the North, I think the Irish Sea or the North Sea. I was like, Oh, that's crazy. Where did you stay? He's like, I didn't stay. He's like, I just flew in and out in a private jet. I was like, you know, but what I mean is I think these projects they are so big, like mind-bogglingly large. And because, you know, they're often funded by sovereign wealth funds and where the budgets are just on another level altogether, which must be pretty appealing for a services business trading into that. As long as you get the right position in, it must be really appealing to be, at least you're not dealing with a you know, scrimping and saving, you know, small, small, scrappy startups got no money. So I guess that's one thing that's pretty that's pretty appealing, is it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a bad debt very, very low. I mean, we had a period when we drifted into some data center stuff, which would come on to, I'm sure, about the challenges because there have been where you end up working with subcontractors that haven't necessarily got the best credit, and so you can get burned. But with our clients, especially the last three years again, we've got um very good uh bad debt. Um if you get the invoicing right, they will pay on time, but you do have to get the invoicing right. Yeah, yeah. Because if you don't, it gets it jammed and spins its wheels.
SPEAKER_02And you're obviously spending money all the time.
SPEAKER_00All the time, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Okay, great. So you you settle down in this new world of green economy, you get off to a good start, sounds like.
SPEAKER_00We started doing perm at the start because the market was so small. We knew contract was going to come at some point with the engineering projects. So for the first three years, we did a lot of perm. Um Q4 2011, we had 74 interviews and made one placement. So we were there there was been some sticky times. Yeah. Um, but we then started placing contractors with RWE, yeah, and we uh got funding from Barclays on the invoice discounting and grew the business accordingly, and the the facility just grew and grew. Yeah. Um, but we then followed our clients, and by virtue of the market, I mean I I wasn't didn't think we're going to be looking for world domination here, but we ended up just following our clients. And I was in Denmark with a client who I probably better not mention the name, but um, I was with a client that we were working with exclusively, and they asked whether we could help them in the US. And I said yes, and then came out and figured out how to do that. Um, made a call to someone I'd worked with back in the day at MSB, funnily enough. He was in Seattle. I had a meeting in Texas that um him and I went to. He convinced the Americans that uh we could payroll and that we knew what we were doing compliance-wise. And within three months, we had 100 contractors out with them on three different projects. So the American business just took off on the base of that client. And then that client pulled out of onshore wind. But by then we had got a foothold with a variety of clients onshore. So that Seattle office is one of our most profitable offices still. Um and we uh opened, I'll come on to Boston because Boston was strategic, where Seattle was opportunistic to the extent that we didn't deliberately go for Seattle. It was simply that's where the project was. Oh no, it was where the the the our our my my contact was from MSB.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00He was living in Seattle, so that's where we got to open the office. I mean the projects are all across the US. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um so we had But you were you knew you needed a you needed a physical boot, you felt like you needed boots on the ground with you.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely had to. And and Because Because of um compliance, you have to get local candidates. Yeah. Um with no database. Um, but you can't ship people in for the onshore. So this was onshore wind.
SPEAKER_02Um because the theme today is very much people turning away from the UK recruitment market and servicing the US from the UK, right? That that has become a common um, yeah, not always, but you know, in in person. But obviously, I I couldn't agree more that I think eventually if you if you're serious about growth in the US, you need boots on the ground. But you were straight, you were confident from day one that you wanted to to be.
SPEAKER_00Well, we couldn't we couldn't have done it. I mean, it's a it's a different these are blue-collar technicians as well who need hand holding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, we had a certain amount of money had to go out for trucks, vehicles, it was all of that. Um I was very fortunate with the two people, uh, James and Rachel. Rachel's still with us. She's actually our country manager in in Seattle. Um, but they did an amazing job, just the two of them managing a hundred contractors that were high maintenance. Um so I don't know how you do it from here, if I'm honest. Unless you're doing if you're doing technical stuff, I suppose white-collar people that just place and and that's that's fine. Yeah. Um, but uh for our kind of work, engineering, mobilizations, project-based, um, you you do need a presence, I think.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So so you're in Seattle, your Seattle businesses, or your US business from Seattle is going well. How at this stage, how big is the organization?
SPEAKER_00We're about 350 contractors. Um, we had opened the US office and at the same time opened Holland and Germany, again, following the market. Um, some big Dutch projects, some big German projects in Germany. You need an AUG, which we got, although we had it from the UK first. An AUG license allows you to employ locally in Germany, just in case you're nowhere. Um, so all of the infrastructure, the investment to allow us that commercial advantage, which it did and still does. Um, so that was Germany, Holland, and the US in 2016-ish, 2015, 2016. And that's, I sort of think, the step change in the business where you then think, right, how do we manage international offices and get the best out of them and not be UK-centric to the extent that these guys and girls running these offices don't feel isolated. So for the first three or four years we were running them, we were going out every six weeks. One of us would visit the offices to make sure that we were giving them the support they needed to be able to do their jobs properly. And then Orsa particularly had some projects coming up in Taiwan. And I simply got in a plane and sat in a council office in Taiwan with the help of a solicitor and opened the Taiwanese entity. Um I know. And I didn't think no, I didn't think about it.
SPEAKER_02It's a long way from ingress recruitment in Bromley for MSB, right? Yeah. Taiwan and you know, big in big capital projects.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, and I knew we needed that, and we knew as a as a board that we we needed to do that. Um and again, it's a it's a serious investment of time, effort, interviewing a lot of people to find the right person. Um, Lisa, who heads up our Taiwanese office, is a force in nature. She's amazing. Um, that office has now got 17 staff. Um, and it's one of our most successful offices, as well as uh the Seattle office. Um she's done an amazing job. Um again, having that office gave us an edge on competition, and we did it early. Same with Japan, um, where you need a hack-end license to hire white collar, you need a construction license to hire blue collar. Yeah. Um we we have both of those now. Right. Which aren't easy to get. Yeah. And like there's an investment in that. You need to employ people locally uh and on the ground, you need to employ engineers to to um sign off on the business. It's it's quite bureaucratic with that in Japan. But we now have um the the Japanese projects didn't happen as quickly as we thought because Mitsubishi bought them all and then didn't build them. They've now gone back out around again, and and there's a big one starting for us um early next year. Got it. So it's going well from that perspective.
SPEAKER_02So from the outside looking in, you've got a big global and what sounds like pretty complicated business. You've got a lot of moving parts, you're in mobilization as well as just actual staffing. Yeah. Um quite a lot of risk goes with that, I would suspect, from a kind of health and safety point of view. You are you carrying some of that risk?
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_02Um managed by our clients. Right. All managed, yeah. So you can push that onto them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And we're insured. I mean, we spend a whole lot of money on insurance. I would imagine your insurance bill is enormous. It's huge, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And and and is that something that you feel, you know, you feel it's a you know, because things go wrong on these projects, right? People get hurt, people die. That's part of part of life when you're working in the sea. Yep. Um, is that something that that you know, is that, you know, tell me about your relationship with that level of risk. Is that something you feel comfortable with?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, we're we've got a really good legal and compliance team. Um because we've opened up entities everywhere, we've got Norway, Denmark, so we we got Poland, um, where we have entities and local compliance. We are really hot on that because if you're not covered properly with these insurances, as you say, you can you can come a cropper. But we we work with our clients, they take on the management of the people that we send. Yeah. So we defer from an oversight perspective to our clients. Yeah. But we have all of our guys and girls insured uh when that when they go offshore or they're insured through us. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And and so strategically, you are still laser focused on the green economy, or have you broken out into other, you know, other spaces?
SPEAKER_00Well, it depends on if you call the grid upgrade um the green economy, it is to the extent that it's been upgraded in order to facilitate the renewable energy that's been um uh the grid, you talk about the national grid. The national grid. UK, Germany, US, all three of them are um doing a huge amount of work on grid upgrade to uh to be able to manage the renewable energy that's been generated. Yeah, yeah. Um and the clients that we work with within offshore wind, they're also the clients that are involved in the the upgrade. There are some other clients that are exclusively the grid, which we're now working with. But a lot of it is just an offshoot of the same clients saying, can you help us with this?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um you have a co-CEO, your founding partner?
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_02Long time together now.
SPEAKER_00We we worked together at MSB on my first day, uh, and we haven't stopped working together since, I don't think. Maybe there was a six-month gap.
SPEAKER_02How would you describe your part your relationship?
SPEAKER_00Marriage. It is like a marriage. Um, we've changed a lot as individuals since 1997, as you can imagine. Um, and life has calmed down for both of us. But um we know each other so well, and and Lucian is very much the the are you sure you want to do this because this is why it could go wrong? Yeah. Whereas I'm the one that says less, you know, but there's a good balance there. And then Chris sort of uh dilutes that dynamic a little bit as well with uh so there is three-way conversations that always help with decision making.
SPEAKER_02Is that sometimes a a hindrance?
SPEAKER_00No. No?
SPEAKER_02No, I mean I I'm it w you find you find consensus eventually.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And to be where we are now as a business with the size we're at, there's an awful lot of it, mightn't feel like it, but there's a lot of delegation now that's dispersed out. The job has become so much easier than it was eight, nine years ago. So we try and keep our reports to direct reports to uh no more than 16 between us.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And we run the business through one-to-one. But we're just starting to get that size now where we want to do Australia, we want to do Vietnam. And in order to keep running it as we're running it now, that is going to become very difficult to do with the way we're doing it. So as we go forward, there's going to be some consolidation around reporting at some point. Um, and we're just at that size that it becomes impractical for the three of us uh to be doing what we're doing. But we've we've got plans for that and how that how that can evolve out. Yeah. Um yeah, but yeah, Lucien and I've yeah, we're a married couple.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I I'd I'd I wonder what Lucien would say if I asked him the same question.
SPEAKER_00I'd be surprised if he said anything different.
SPEAKER_02Um do you think of yourself as a recruitment company?
SPEAKER_00Yes. You do. Absolutely. Um we provide a recruitment service, um, but what we have done is to give ourselves an advantage around. I mean, if you look at European contracts with some of the bigger companies, they're so scared of employment law that they just want you to sign a consultancy agreement.
SPEAKER_02So that they can just say Exactly.
SPEAKER_00And the difficulty there from us as a recruitment business is is the risk inherent in that. Yeah, we'll never use that clause, but then why is it in there? Type of thing. So what I think is a really big piece for us going forward is SOW and how you can manage project-based work while having the timesheet as being the deliverable. Um, and it just covers the employment law thing in uh particularly in Europe. Yeah. Um yeah, we're we're definitely a recruitment business, yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. In the European Union specifically, legislation has changed an awful lot in the last 15 years, not necessarily to make your life easier.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_02How do you keep up with that?
SPEAKER_00Well, again, again, we have we have local entities, we have local compliance um companies that we use. Yeah. The lawyer bills in Germany and Holland are very expensive to manage this. I only imagine. We have audits every quarter. Um so we don't have to keep up with it. They tell us what we're doing wrong within this. Right. But it's really important to do so. And sometimes with any laws, there's a sledgehammer used to kill a fly with this stuff. Yeah. Where they're trying to stop rogue agencies, and it does hurt um professional agencies like us. Yeah. Because what they they prohibit some of this stuff getting done. Um but we work around it. Um, and the employed solutions can be onerous, um, but we're able to do it, yeah.
SPEAKER_02The essence of this show is is it's called recruiting alchemy, and and and the alchemy component is is you know the the the the raison d'etre, if you want to call it that, is why are some staffing companies, and that's and that's why I was interested to understand whether you've thought of yourself as a recruitment company. Because often people are like, no, no, we're not a recruitment company anymore. We're a talent augmentation specializing, whatever, right? Um and and and really the the essence of the show is about what what is it that makes some companies scale to enterprise level whilst others sort of flounder around in the SMB world? And I said to you earlier, is it market, sector, finance, strategy, people leading? Of course, the answer is it it's all and none of those things at the same time. Reflecting on uh two decades in in this space now, what do you think has helped you to scale to the position you are in today?
SPEAKER_00I I I think uh as a for the position I'm in and the position Lucine's in in the business, to be very conscious of making sure you hire people that are better than you at what you're not good at for a start, and bringing in expertise around you. I think the one thing that that is difficult to manage discipline-wise, but is definitely the secret, if you like, to growing a business is verticalization. Specialize, specialize, specialize. And throw jobs away or give them back to the client if you don't think you can fill them, or even more so if you think there's another agency out there that's gonna that specializes in what you do. For instance, we wouldn't take an IT job because we know if we started working on there's three will kill us. You know, they'll they'll just they'll just know what they're doing. Yeah, yeah. Um, and so we we we are very disciplined in saying you work in fabrication, you just work fabrication jobs. You work in uh health and safety, you just do health and safety jobs. And what it creates is an environment, and within that, then a structure for um allowing people to hire when they hit certain levels, because then the growth becomes automatic. You show them a career structure that says if you achieve this, you get promoted to this. Doesn't matter whether they go for a beer with me or whether they don't, it's completely meritocratic. And if you show that structure, then growth becomes automatic.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Don't make promotions subjective, don't make anything as much as you can possibly make in your decision making subjective.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Have a rule. And if if you haven't got a rule, sit down and thrash one out. So we've spent uh hours and hours around inter-company, you imagine the arguments and fights you have about whose job it is in Taiwan when it's a UK person doing this, or whereas it's less so in America, obviously, it's a bit more ring-fenced, but because it's a global business with global clients, all of that stuff takes hours and hours of uh putting up scenarios. You almost have a constitution in the business where if this happens, this is the rule. Yeah. And that is just over years and years.
SPEAKER_02And you need maybe an independent adjudicator that says, look, you both got a case, but I'm the boss and I've decided.
SPEAKER_00Well, we have to be as neutral, myself and and Lucy and Chris, to and we are neutral. Yeah. Um, and that's what's so important about visiting these offices because we will hear the UK complaining about this and that, and then you'll hear that side, but go and visit the office, and you you you see that there there are two sides. It helps with them to appreciate that there isn't a neutrality. Um and we find it's it's it's been why every business we've opened in every country has been successful.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. To revisit that because I think what you were talking about there is about culture, right? It's about transparency, clarity, a lack of ambiguity, which I think leads to fairness, and and fairness typically leads to to engagement. Um some of those early recruitment days I I don't know MSB well, but but you know they weren't necessarily famous for any of those things. Do you you know maybe they were, I don't know. Would you say that they are did you carry those qualities from MSB? 100%. You did.
SPEAKER_00100%. And and it was bringing in the people like Chris who was involved in the development of those structures. I I I knew, and we knew, or I I did particularly anyway, knew where we needed to get to with verticalization. I hadn't been on that journey, and it takes an amount of discipline to say to somebody, you're not working that job because it's not in your vertical.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And you and if you had it's it's a really tough thing to do in a small business because you're almost chasing every invoice. Um, and I knew Lucine and I, as a team, needed somebody to arbitrate that and to get from position A to position B. Yeah. So that is that journey that we went on. We got to 200 contractors, we had three or four clients. Yeah. We were structured along the lines of a lot of the salespeople couldn't see where their pathway was because Nigel, who's our sales director now and our second hire, was the relationship with these three clients. So, where's the future for for the other salespeople? Yeah, yeah. So we again over time broke broke it down, broke it down, broke it down into the individual sectors. And now we've got Nigel's got eight reports that are divisional directors. Um, one of the divisions has got 300 contractors.
SPEAKER_02And and how big is the organization today?
SPEAKER_00We're 185 million turnover, um I think we're 28 million GP-ish type of thing. Um we had a a real bump in the road 21-22, um, where the business on the front end grew without the support function catching up. We drifted into a consultancy thing with data centers that very nearly uh knocked us over. So there's been tough times, but those tough two or three years that we had, it was the best learning experience. And I know it's a cliche, and people say that failure is the best teacher. But I wouldn't swap that now. Um, I wouldn't want to go back there. But but I wouldn't swap it for the learning experience and how it taught me so much about what good's good looks like from your FD, what good looks like from your credit control team, what good looks like from a customer service perspective in the in the support functions.
SPEAKER_02Would you say on reflection that um you know, because COVID impacted everyone in different ways. Um, and it sounds like you've had a one of your more challenging periods as an organization. Around the time where every recruitment companies were just going crazy. Money was flowing into the economy like we'd never seen most of it generated and stimulated by government, which we're all paying the price for today. Do you look back on that period where it all nearly went wrong? Was that was that COVID-related? Did you bait did you base it get ahead of yourselves? No.
SPEAKER_00I mean that there was a little bit of a car in it, I think. We didn't um suffer from COVID, we actually grew. Um all our engineering projects kept going because they were um regarded as uh essential. So we all were from home and did what everyone else did, I think. Um no, it was coming out of that, where we had a series of things where the softwares, the hardware, everything in our back office just wasn't keeping up with the business. Um we hadn't the right people running it. Um and it just came to a head in 23. Right, 22, 23, um, where you know I had that moment in Jaws on the Beach where, wow, we're we're in trouble here. Yeah, yeah. Um and we got through it. We got through with the support of um a variety of people, and I must say that some of the banks have been very supportive. Um, and we are now as this is we're having a record month this month, we'll have a record month next month. Yeah. So we're through it. Yeah. But uh it wasn't fun at the time, but as I say, uh it it was one of the best learning experiences for how to run a business properly. Yeah. Um, and I think I will be able to advise. Had I not had that experience, yeah, I don't think I'd be able to advise someone coming behind me on on what looking at where the yeah, you know, where things can go wrong. Yeah, where things can go wrong and the wheels can come off. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um do you work with a lot of debt? So you are you constantly, you've obviously got huge um payrolls to deal with. There's a lot of moving parts around cash. How do you manage that from a risk point of view?
SPEAKER_00Well, we have um three facilities uh for for supporting us with our invoices, and that's in the US, Europe, and Taiwan, Japan. Um the Taiwan Japanese facility is very expensive, but the mergers are good, so it's all right. Um we could do with that being a bit better. Um and we run on uh on on an invoice discaned facility and have grown with that throughout. I mean the thing is for for a business that doesn't have private equity investment or uh a lot of if you grow organically, um I don't know how you can grow a business without having these facilities. Yeah, yeah. Um we would have more headroom in the business had we not had the problems we had a couple two or three years ago. But the the it it's it's running beautifully now, as far as we know where our facilities will grow with us. Um we know what our clients are. I have to solve the puzzle, or we have to solve the puzzle of Australia, Vietnam, and how we manage to open these offices and and still have the the bandwidth. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um but that's a nice problem to have, right? But that is definitely a nice problem to have. The growth, growth challenges.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I I just remember that um, you know, when I was employed at F3 many years ago, you know, the the issue was that you know, is that that you know, growing contractors consumes capital. Does it and losing them throws it off, which is bizarre. Yeah, you know, but you you know, you get you know, the as your contractor base shrinks, you get liquidity into the business, which is helpful.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if your margins are above, which we've grown our margins significantly over the last couple of years because we we we just again onto that point, we stopped taking payroll business under 10%. Um, and we only watch time much.
SPEAKER_02Just to clarify what you mean by payroll business?
SPEAKER_00So a client will come to you and say we need we need to payroll somebody at 5% markup.
SPEAKER_02Right. So we've got a guy on a project, we just want you to have a lot of people.
SPEAKER_00I want you to payroll them. Um and we would get quite a lot of those. Um we started turning that down in order to give ourselves breathing space because that becomes a cash problem if you're you're drawing down at 90% and you're paying out 95%. Yeah, yeah. Then it that bites you when when you come to uh before you get the invoice paid. So we we did that for for a while. We've now um recovered ourselves to the extent that that's not a problem, but we also increased our margins uh by incentivizing the sales staff as much as anything else, to be fair. But we also were very and much more picky about the business we were taking, yeah. Um and still continue to grow. Yeah. Um so we're in a much we're uh yeah, the position of the business now is in such a stable uh situation that we're just trading as normally. But if you don't have investment, it's very difficult to to not use these facilities and to manage it like that.
SPEAKER_02And and uh I think it it's quite unusual to get to the size you're at without private equity investment.
SPEAKER_00It is.
SPEAKER_02Typically, you would have been tempted andor pursued by a litany of these of these companies. Has it been a deliberate choice to stay independent and and and self-fund in that way? Or have yeah, tell me about your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_00It is deliberate because um private private equity are fantastic for investment purposes, and if you get the right one, then you're fine. But for instance, had we had private equity before 2020, I don't know that we would be still in the business, if you like, because they would have taken steps potentially that that mightn't have been what we would like to do. I think the independence is really important that we're we're running the business. Um, I'm not suggesting that in the future we might look at it with the right partner um in order to uh to to grow into some of the areas we're talking about. Um, yeah, as I said, Australia, Vietnam, Canada, um all of these places are are likely to be growth areas, and yeah, there is a possibility that we might look at that. Um I think we're at a size now where that sort of stuff starts to come into play. I think.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. And I just want to go back to a second to talk about culture. Um, if I walked into your say office floor today, what do you think? How do you think I would feel as an independent observer? What would I be struck by most most of all?
SPEAKER_00Well, if you if you didn't know recruitment, um you would be, I think, very surprised by the environment. I think a lot of people are. It's 120 salespeople on on a single floor, and we've got a single floor for the back office of about 80. Um It's the energy. I think Jack mentioned it earlier. That there is a I love coming in on a Monday morning when you just you know you've had a quiet weekend or whatever, you come in and the place is just buzzing. Um so I I love that.
SPEAKER_02So it's would you describe it as a sales first culture?
SPEAKER_00100%. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And how have you maintained that over all these years?
SPEAKER_00I I think it's just who who I am and who Lucian is and who Chris is. Um we we've come up through that, and it's really important to have a working environment that people don't dread coming into. Um I I think it's it's like you say, we just come back from Croatia on our conference. We go to um we go skiing in March, where we we took 56 to Croatia this weekend. Fantastic weekend. I think from my perspective, it's really interesting what you get socially that you don't get day to day. So it's a really vital part of our whole culture that that's the target you know to do to get there. Uh, same with skiing. Um, I think the environment is obviously for the nature of it, quite a young environment. Um anything from 19-year-old consultants up to I won't say, well, uh someone who worked with that MSB who's been with us. Well, I'd say John, John Curry, who's uh who was a business manager at MSB back in 1996. Yeah, yeah. So that's the variety, but in between it's a you know, it's a 20-something, 30-something culture in there.
SPEAKER_02Because I I guess my experience in and the is that to have a high performance culture, it you have to be relentlessly you have to be the guardian of it. Right. And and because it's very easy. And we we had um we had Russell Clements on the show some weeks ago, and we talked about the culture S3 in the early days and how they were relentlessly focused on standards. I think the phrase he used was, you know, everything is downstream of culture. And if you get that wrong or you let it slide, and partly that's about standards and discipline, right? It's about turning up on time, it's about looking the part, it's about you know having some social norms around what this is what we do here.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And it's being unafraid to not say, actually, no, that's not that's not that's not part of our culture, you're out. Would you say that's something that you've been good at over the years?
SPEAKER_00Yes. Um, I mean, I think the the S3 early days and the MSB early days, because the we we were real competitors, computer people at the time. So computer people? Computer futures. Futures, yeah, we're the direct competitors. Um so culturally we're very similar. We're not as brutal as that was back then. Yeah. Um, where you would see people getting fired for very little and and just merciless around the target hitting. We have rounded those edges. Um, I think um we don't, we're not higher and fire. I think the people that leave have just accepted that it's not for them. Rather than I can't remember the last time I sat in a room and and had to do it. Yeah. Um, and we do it very, very little. Um, in fact, if anything, we try to keep people who are, we think, doing better than they think they are. They think they are, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um which is a great sign of a high performance culture, right?
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, I mean, I I I I think so. Um and it it is relentless. I work full-time, um, but I love working full-time. It's not like where I'm wishing I could work less.
SPEAKER_02Because you could retire tomorrow if you so wish to, right? You could probably stick a CEO in and you know, and and and move on, right? If you really wanted to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I have no wish to do that. Yeah. I really enjoy the job. Um it it really is such a good atmosphere in there. And why wouldn't I? Travel to Japan, Taiwan, US, Germany, Holland every three months.
SPEAKER_02So in that private jet or yours, Judah.
SPEAKER_00No, it's not a private jet, no. But I don't go economy.
SPEAKER_02You can't, right? You can't you can't do that. Sorry, and uh without labouring the point too much, um one of the themes that we hear a lot on this show is that there was a period of woke, right? Where work from home, dress down, flexible working, all of that stuff that we all got a bit carried away with. And sometimes we felt we had to go with the flow because that was the way the world was going. Did you suffer from any of that?
SPEAKER_00We did for a bit. Um, we have given some concessions on the support function because I think you almost can't hire if you don't do some work from home. Um, and that's we we have ways of uh monitoring the productivity. We have ways of making you talk. Well, we have ways of monitoring the productivity, which you wouldn't have had years ago. From a sales perspective, though, I literally do not understand how you can have, and there's lots of successful businesses, and I take my hat off to them, that can have salespeople working from home. You lose the training that happens on the desk for me, you lose the atmosphere in the office, the camaraderie, the team, uh development, the culture. Um, I I was talking to someone the other day and they were they were talking about what used to be, it was a law firm actually. Um Friday used to be the a real uh good vibe in the office, and you'd go for a beer afterwards and socialise. Totally gone. It's now Thursday night. Yeah. And there's nobody in the office Friday. Yeah. Now God knows what the productivity is like on Friday. If that's so soft, if any show knows why. Absolutely. And and that's fine if it works for you. Yeah. Um, but uh we managed to uh swerve that bullet from a cultural perspective and and uh because many didn't. Yeah, a lot didn't, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I was one of them.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02You know, our business suffered partly through a lack of moral fortitude. You know, we should have stuck to our guns, yeah, but we didn't. We got you know, we we allowed the tail to wag the dog, and you go, and and I said this in our pocket, I was like, Well, yeah, how did I end up with a business like this? This does not reflect the things that the values that I have or or were instilled in me 20 years ago, you know.
SPEAKER_00So I think you know, credit to you for having the strength to I mean I we all uh the because there's three of us, like we were saying earlier, um, where one of us might have got milky on this, the other two were able to say, no, we need to stand firm. So uh which again comes back to having uh a decision-making process in the business that involves the three of us, if you like. It does help because if you can get caught offside, one of you can get caught offside, the others pull you back. Yeah, yeah. And we have a really strong um outward-facing decision making. Yeah. We don't criticize each other's decision making, but we we make a decision and then we back it. Yeah. Um, and that's been one of the ones I've been really fortunate um to have stood firm on, I think.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You stayed in Bromley all the time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we had office groups.
SPEAKER_02We've never been tempted. Oh, you know, if only we were in central London, we'd have a bigger talent pool and we'd get better people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, you say that. But um, we did look at a London office at the very start, Lucy and I. For a start it was twice as expensive. And Lucien particularly doesn't fancy a commute. I would have been up for it. But do you live in Bromley? Yeah, I live in Beckenham, to that's not far. Um, but the the fact that we have developed the business and MSB had 300 staff in Bromley. Right. So it can be done. It can be exactly right. And what happens when you get to scale, we've got two internal talent acquisition that full-time hiring for us, is that you can find people and then you become you get a a level of gravity that attracts people. Yeah. Um, to the extent that Taylor Hopson opened an office in Bromley because we were there at one point.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_00Just to to compete with uh that they've subsequently shut it, but um but uh our biggest competitor um are also in Bromley. Uh so it goes back to MSP.
SPEAKER_02So it's like a local dust, it's like a local dust up.
SPEAKER_00Very much so.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um but there's a home and away pub. They sponsor Bromley Town Football Club. The owner of uh LSP is uh is um the chairman, I think, at Bromley. Right. Um so they're they're there's more than this, but they're you know, a lot of uh our guys, uh some of our ex-staff work there. Yeah. We've got great relationships with them.
SPEAKER_02But we're we're but I I guess the other thing about staying in a place like Bromley as well is if you find somebody local who's good, they're gonna stay with you by by proxy of it being local and not doing the commute because not everybody wants to get on a train every morning to London, right?
SPEAKER_00Sure, and we've got the whole of Kent coming in straight into Bromley South. I mean, it's a one-stop in, so it's quite a hub for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're 15 minutes from Victoria. Um stop. So it's it's not to love.
SPEAKER_02It's not that when you're a global business, it's not like you need to be in central London to visit your clients because if your clients are in Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, Blackpool, yeah, you know, all of these exotic places.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, indeed. And a lot of them are in ports, those the clients that we have. So London isn't a client is a good place for us normally.
SPEAKER_02So as we approach the end, um I guess two questions. Number one is AI, because everybody wants to talk about AI. Um you are in a pretty insulated world, right? Where I can't imagine robots taking over from Windstorm insulation anytime soon. Do you have a view on how the how has your business changed because of AI?
SPEAKER_00I'm starting to get some better reporting. Um, and I've noticed uh a lot of the recruitment consultants, and I don't know enough about it to be critical of this, are using it for things that I'm I'm worried are shortcuts. Um uh so from a sales side, not particularly, I don't think. Um from a support perspective, absolutely. Yeah, we've got some of the tools we've got within legal, for instance, where a person would have had to look at a contract and pull out the salient points. We now have trained um a bit of software to do it so that it knows what we look at and what we look for in a contract. So it it has reduced the number of requirements for for new stuff and the support functions. So I do again, I was talking to these guys at the law firm. You're always gonna need partners at a law firm, you're always gonna need senior people to talk to people, but how do they become senior if they haven't done the grind?
SPEAKER_02The contract review and the yeah.
SPEAKER_00So that that's gonna be interesting here as to how do people get their first job. I mean, there's probably two positions already in in our business that because of AI have not been hired. Yeah. So translate that across the economy. Yeah, yeah. And what does that look like? I'm I would also be a little concerned, and and I might be talking out of turn here, and I don't want to uh to do that, but if you're doing IT recruitment, the people you're recruiting, these programmers, developers, are their jobs going to exist in 10 years. So that's the danger for me within within that the the world is what you're placing is the problem, not the fact that we won't exist.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think depending on your vantage point, you know, to to to go back to recruitment, I uh the my view don't you know for what it's worth is I think if if if you're and this is why I was so interested in what you said earlier about the mobilization piece, because if all you're providing is the here's some candidates, you could see much of that being ripped out by AI. So you've got to offer some more of that wrapper that customers need and want, right? Such as mobilization, payroll, insurance, indemnity, visas, support on hand, the stuff that, you know, especially on a project-based scenario where, you know, if we've got a two-year project in Vietnam, you know, we we don't want to, you know, Dong Energy doesn't want to open an office there to deliver a two-year project and then shut it down. They want to go to somebody like you and partner with you to do that. So that's the the the the vibe I I sometimes get is that that's where the world is headed, and it sounds like you've firmly, firmly in the lead in that space already, which I think is great, because I think there's there's so much defensible moat there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's more luck than judgment. I mean, 18 years ago we didn't know we didn't know where I was coming. Don't believe it for a second. Um I think we are in a in a market that is insulated from it, I think. Um, and I think the level the people we're placing, the the in the even in the white collar arena where they're planners and their contracts managers and and that they're project base, they have to be on the ground. I can't see a bot ever ever managing that sort of stuff. So I think we are lucky, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And interestingly, I remember I can't remember who it was. It wasn't Zach Polansky, but it was somebody from the Green movement. And then what they were saying, I thought it was quite a credible argument. They were saying, look, there are two global mega trends. There's AI and there's renewable energy. Now we've lost the AI race. This is the UK specifically. That's gone. The Americans and the Chinese have got that on lockdown. But the the renewable economy, the Americans aren't interested in that right now under Trump. They might be in the future, but they're certainly not looking at it today. Um this is an opportunity, it's an economic opportunity as well as a moral and ethical one that says, well, actually, over the next 20, 30 years, it could emerge as the greatest economic opportunity available to us, and we should get after it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're a world leader. I mean, the Chinese are on different level. Um, but if you look at a non-Chinese economy, because it's very difficult for us as a UK business to trade and to be successful in China. But outside of China, the UK is the world leader in the skills. So they originally came from Denmark, then UK took over offshore wind project-wise. The skills that we're exporting um to Taiwan, to Japan is a huge economic uh boom for us. And it I don't think it's appreciated enough that we are so far ahead. Um, I mean, we've trained the Germans, the Dutch. Um it has been the biggest growth part of uh, as you say, a market that had Donald Trump not come in, we've gone through Donald Trump's first presidency and got through it. But our Boston office, um, the amount of projects that were lined up, we would have been absolutely flying. Um as it happens, with the American revenues have held up and we're diversifying a little bit over there to get through this presidency. But it will come back. And the expertise that we're exporting there is phenomenal. Um, you've got some of the big players, the OEMs with the the turbines that are all European based. Yeah. Uh Siemens, Vestis, the like. Yeah. Uh so the it it is a I think he's right to an extent, but it has to be grasped.
SPEAKER_02And and I think I I I certainly don't think that we make enough of of that either as a even for the you know, for the um the PR of it that says, you know, we are a world leader in this space, you know, we're an island nation, you know, we've got, you know, got plenty of wind, you know, but we you know, we don't seem we don't seem to be able to make the uh certainly from my point of view, uh to the untrained eye, we don't seem to be able to make enough of it. You know, so maybe that's something that uh, you know, that a future government will make more of.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I th I think in fairness to the coalition government in 2010, Ed Davy particularly, um, pushed this, and that's what got this going. We've now got a very um supportive government from our perspective in in what they want to achieve. So I'm not at all worried from a UK perspective. Um I'm not worried globally in the long term. I think it's inexorable. Yeah. Um I mean, you you know we've experienced this summer. That's that's that's gonna be standard. It's it is um and we have to do something about it even to to manage our needs. Um Trump won't be around forever. Yeah. I think America will uh build these these uh projects, and Canada's just announced six billion of renewables investment last week, Mark Carney. Yeah. So the future is very bright for what we do. Um, and as long as we're able to continue giving customers an extra, that is just straightforward timesheet invoice, and we are able to wrap around all the services, which we do.
SPEAKER_02Well, that sounds like an incredibly positive note to ask you the final question. If we wind the movie forward three years from now, what does your business look like then?
SPEAKER_00Well, we've grown every single year, even in crisis a few years ago. Um I expect us to double in the next three to five. Um I expect us to manage this geographical expansion and continue doing it. Um we're double-digit top line, double-digit GP line growth. I expect that to continue, if not uh improve. We've got a the Q4 this year is by far and away our biggest Q4 we've ever had, and Q1 looks like we're gonna be 30% up on Q1 this year. So all the signs are that we're gonna continue growing. Um we've got a methodology that works, we've got a structure that works, and we've got a way of hiring that works. So now it's about managing this next phase of to to just to start delegating some of this stuff.
SPEAKER_02Well, on that note, I think it's a perfect way to conclude. Um Jim Ryan, thank you very much for coming in. It's been an absolute pleasure. And um maybe you'll come back in a while and tell us how the story how the story unfolds.
SPEAKER_00We'd love to. Thank you. Thank you so much. Cheers.
SPEAKER_02Before we wrap up, a quick thank you to the team behind this episode. This episode was proudly produced by Vertical Drop. At Vertical Drop, we help founders, leaders, and businesses turn conversations into content that builds authority, creates opportunities, and drives growth. From podcast strategy and production to social content, guest management and distribution, we handle everything required to help great voices reach the audiences that matter most. If you're thinking about launching a podcast, elevating an existing show, or building a stronger personal or company brand through content, then we'd love to help. Visit vertical drop.com to learn more. That's vertical drop.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.
