Why Have A Lifestyle Recruitment Business?

Several recruitment business owners come to me tired, frustrated and asking how I have managed to build a growing business, whilst working less hours and still win new clients. The simple answer is strategy; I have created a unique strategy that has allowed me to develop a lifestyle that suits my needs within my recruitment business. This blog post will share with you a couple of tips and tricks into how I have achieved this.

One of the key pieces of information  I really valued when starting up my business was a concept from Michael Gerber, who discusses building your business like a McDonalds franchise. He believes you should document and systemise each and every process within your business to make it as automated as possible. I did this when I built my lifestyle recruitment business and recorded everything from day one. So, any task that has been done more than once by yourself, make sure you create a step-by-step formula that you can hand over to someone else. Not only will this free up your time in the long run, but it will create a seamless and coherent training package for any new member to your team.

So, the first part is documenting your processes, the second part is building a team who can action those processes. Before I set up my business I knew that one of my key motivators was to be able to remote work; this is why I built a virtual team. Now I’m able to work from anywhere in the world, be it on the kitchen table at home, in Starbucks or even beside a pool in Marbella. I’m only able to have this freedom because I have a remote team. At this point you’re probably questioning the ease of this and wondering about the difficulties, but in fact there are several really great tools and cloud-based systems that allow myself and the team to be connected 24/7. I think it’s really important as a business owner to escape the traditional model of a 9-5 week, working in a big corporate office, constrained by suits and ties. I went the opposite direction with my business, so yes, we have a cool office space, but we also have the flexibility to work from home when we want.

A key quote I always remember to remind myself of my end goals is “you can always make another pound but you will never be able to make another minute back.”  This quote also links in with my previous point, seeing how I can save my time by handing tasks over to my virtual team. Breaking down every individual task that I have done, and outsourcing as many things has possible has freed me up so I can spend more time focusing on the ‘money tasks’. This has allowed me to dilute my hours from the business, so it becomes self-reliant. Another key tip to remember here is to build a business that is dependent on itself, not on you. Having a virtual team working with automated systems and processes that function without you is the key to absolute freedom within your business. This concept came from a guy named Felix Dennis who wrote the book ‘How To Get Rich’ – it’s a really fantastic book that I would 100% recommend reading. It discusses how he realised that there was more to life than just money, and how important it is to ensure you maintain a work-life balance.