You’ve built the business. I can help you accelerate what comes next.

I work with staffing, recruitment and search founders and CEOs to accelerate growth: winning work, hiring great people, building leaders, improving performance and creating a business with lasting value.

Why work with me?

There are plenty of people who advise recruitment founders. Far fewer have joined a team of eight, helped build it into a talent solutions group of around 300 people, led it as CEO for more than a decade, and helped shape the strategy behind a nine-figure valuation.

That was my journey at La Fosse. We grew from a specialist recruitment startup into a business spanning executive search, direct hire, staffing and consulting. We also built an academy that trained technology talent and deployed them into client teams. Along the way, I helped take the business from founder-led to leadership-led, and from startup through to an employee buyout.

The growth was substantial. During my time as MD and CEO, net fee income rose from $5.4m to $58.5m and EBITDA from $1.3m to $11.5m. Those results came from years of decisions about what to focus on, who to hire, when to put managers in place, where to expand, what to stop doing, and how to keep performance and culture strong as the business grew.

Since leaving La Fosse, I’ve worked alongside founders of startups, small firms and growing businesses, each facing a different version of the same question: what needs to change for the next stage to work?

The work is practical

These are the kinds of decisions I help founders and CEOs make:

• Hiring and team productivity. I believe we were in the recruiter business first and the recruitment business second. We built a graduate-to-director progression system and invested in training, hiring and culture as we grew. La Fosse went on to be named among the UK’s best companies to work for for more than ten consecutive years. Who should you hire next? How will you assess them, develop them and get them productive without building cost ahead of the business?

• Sales and new business. La Fosse averaged 30% annual revenue growth over more than a decade, twice placing in the top 20 fastest growing companies in the country. That took more than asking consultants to make more calls. We opened new specialist practices, built new service lines, improved how teams sold together and tackled underperformance. Where will your next wave of work come from? Is the constraint your market, proposition, activity, leadership or team structure?

• Managers and leaders. As the business grew, we had to develop managers, add leadership capacity and form a board. When does a strong biller need a manager? Who has the potential to lead? What should you expect from a sales leader, and how will you know whether they’re delivering?

• Founder dependency. Which client, hiring and performance decisions still run through you? I’ve helped build the roles, management structure and decision-making rhythm needed for a company to grow beyond its founder.

• Growth and business value. Which markets, services and investments are worth pursuing? Our academy grew by 500% in its first two years, adding longer-term client work alongside recruitment. We made deliberate choices about how the service lines and supporting TA, L&D, Marketing and Tech worked together to drive both results and lasting value.

These aren’t academic questions to me. I’ve had to make these decisions through the best and the worst trading conditions, with people’s jobs, client relationships and company money on the line.

What's got you here won't get you there

A ten person firm, a fifty person firm and a business approaching 150 people need different things from their founders and CEOs. What worked brilliantly to get you here may need to change to get you further.

Whether you’re growing from one to ten, building towards 50, 150, or toward 300, I bring the experience of someone who has built through those stages and a clear view of the business you’re running today.

Let’s talk about what comes next.