How a $4M Recruiting Firm Rebuilt After a Brutal Year, with Josh Volinsky

0:00 When you're not making money, when you're not billing, when it's not as easy as it was three, six months ago, the job sucks, right? Like it's not a fun job to do when you're not winning. Let's talk about challenges. Cause I know like you had a phenomenal run in the beginning. You hit some bumps in the road.

0:16 What was the biggest challenge? And then how did you come back stronger? When we started the company, it was one of the best staffing markets you can find. You had to be transactional back then. You had so much business, you had so much going on. When the market got more normalized, the people that grew up in that way of transactional recruiting versus relationship-based recruiting had a really hard time adapting.

0:35 Little things like that, we got sloppy. And when you aren't tracking activity in any way, you can't see it coming. When you're not doing the work hard part of the play hard, it just becomes bad. It drives people to have a little accountability. People that are dogs, they want accountability. They want to be held accountable.

0:52 Is dog good or bad? Dog is great. You've got to bark when you make a placement, Mark. What are the tangible things that you guys have put in place to ensure that as you scale, you retain the culture that's made you successful to begin with? Okay, so this is relevant, because you've kind of adopted this as your whole business model.

1:13 And I because I believe I've heard you say that you hire accountants instead of recruiters. So can you elaborate on that? Why that philosophy and how it's, you know, how it's working out? So we only hire accountants that will ultimately become recruiters, right? For many reasons, it's very difficult to learn recruiting itself.

1:32 And it's hard to sell something you don't know. So when you're talking to a personal accountant on the phone, and it's like, oh, you ever think about doing recruiting? It's a very natural sourcing tool for us to find internal recruiters. But also, there's a major credibility factor when it comes to, I'm talking with a client and I'm talking, One of my colleagues that's on the job order has done that specific job.

1:57 I can't tell you how many times one of our guys, Brian, for example, he grew up in real estate accounting. So we're on a lot of those types of searches, whether it's property management or accounting or... construction. And it's like, yeah, I did that. I did that. I did that here. So it adds a lot of credibility.

2:16 And then the questions that we're able to ask, because we've done it so long, and at such a high level, it allows us to really continue to build that rapport and credibility with the client and make sure we're getting to the bottom of the search and not just throwing darts at the wall. Okay, super interesting.

2:31 So I get the credibility and rapport thing for sure. Like that makes total sense because you're an insider, right? You're not an outsider. You're one of them. So you literally are... so similar to your clients and your candidates. So there's a natural rapport there and you have a deeper understanding of the role and what problems they're trying to solve than perhaps most recruiters would.

3:01 And great point. I guess you're in a position where one of the recruiting firm owners tell me is it's hard to find good people. Ironically, right? Because you can recruit all day long for clients and you're good at that, but finding people for your own firm can be a challenge. And you've kind of solved that because like your talent pool, the people you're talking to every day, you can just make sure everyone in the team is on the lookout for someone who could be good at this and then pitch them on that.

3:35 So that all lines up. What I've noticed, though, I personally think it's easier to take someone who's already good at selling and teach them the terminology and the structure of an accounting firm and all that stuff, than it is the other way around. I would say that most accountants aren't naturally suited to recruiting.

3:58 Do you agree with that? Oh yeah. Yep. It's definitely not for everybody. And I would agree with your point with one. kind of caveat. Whenever we've seen people come in to a new firm or change jobs, there's one of a couple reasons that they're looking to make a move. One, they're down in the year. They're not doing that great.

4:19 And they think that changing firms is going to fix it. So I don't necessarily... We want to hire top producers, A players, people at the best in their game to come in here. And when you bring in A players and people that have a history of achievement throughout their career, where they have a history of, hey, wow, I made this happen, whether it was personal or professional, Now, those are the type of people we're looking for.

4:43 And yes, recruiters are clearly like that, right? But if you're looking to make a change or something wrong, or you're looking for something more than we are willing to do, whether it's huge guarantees or things like that, that we want people to want to be here, right? But more importantly for us, we found that we don't want bad habits coming in the door.

5:03 We want to teach them the way we work, the way we operate, how we do little details, because there's so much noise and not great recruiting going on and being taught. And if people are coming in with bad foundations of recruiting, it's very difficult to change. And then lastly, I'll just say like, When I was at a big box global firm, you would see people who would go from one location to another.

5:31 And they would be out in less than a year from changing up. Because every office has its own nuances. Every office has its culture. So it's not that we wouldn't hire a seasoned recruiter that's had success and have the right situation. I know many people have done that. It's probably more the norm than what we do.

5:52 But we also really like the niche that we've carved out and being able to sell that niche. And it tends to work for us. Fair enough. I can't argue with success. So let's talk about Synergy then because you launched in 2020. I believe, I mean, 2020 was COVID, right? So I'm assuming that was either a factor or a challenge that you had to grapple with.

6:16 Maybe you can tell me which it was. And I've heard you say you wanted to build the right way from day one rather than rushing to revenue. Yeah. But then obviously when you start a business and your family's depending on you, like getting invoices generated quickly is also a real pressure. So talk me through launching Synergy and like your kind of philosophy around building.

6:45 Yeah, for sure. So I think my first year in recruiting back in 2007 was, I had finished that year thinking that I was the man, right? I think it was, I billed like 33,000 a month from day one for that eight months in that 2007 year. And then it just kind of came crashing down as I saw, as everybody saw with the recession, right?

7:05 Right. So it's been a goal of mine to build something special, build a firm for a very long time. And thank God I didn't do it when I did. I didn't have the right people around me. I didn't have, I didn't, didn't know what I was doing and it would have never been successful to the point that we've had it now.

7:24 So when COVID hit, you know, it was another stop go kind of thing, but it was finally time for me and my business partners. We were, you know, we were ready to walk away from our book of business. We weren't afraid of the non-compete. We weren't afraid of, um, leaving commissions on the table when you leave a firm, and who would be picking up the business that you built.

7:47 I don't care about that, and I just wanted to build something special. And I had the right people around me, thank God, and we weren't desperate. Thank God, a couple years before I found Dave Ramsey, who I know is a little controversial, but he kind of helped me prepare financially for being able to take, I think we took like 10 months no income out of the business.

8:09 So all that, it was just the right time. And thank God we hit early, right? We spent August of that year preparing calls all the time, talking to lawyers, building websites. We wanted to be able to, on September 1st, hit the ground running, having a brand, having all that done. And we wanted to build something where it could compete executive presence-wise with the other firms.

8:35 So... And we invested before... We never used this tool in our old place, but we invested $25,000 before we made a dime of revenue in ZoomInfo. And we're like, I think this will help us. And we spent several thousand dollars on a website. And it was very important for us. We got bullhorn early on before we even had anybody put in the database.

9:01 So we wanted to build it the right way from the beginning. And I think that was one of the biggest... things that have helped us. Because once you go, once you start trying to bring in revenue, it is almost impossible to then go in, all right, well, I also got to stop and pivot and make a website. Or I got to build our CRM, which we had no idea.

9:19 I thought it was just turnkey, turn on a bullhorn and it works. But that's not how it works. You have to build it out and customize it for you. So everything we did was just very organic. When we were ready for our first temp, we had no idea how to handle temp placements. So we went through all that whole process thinking we were going to place a temp that prepared us for it.

9:44 And the person ended up coming in second. So we didn't get that job. But a couple months later, we were ready and we just started bringing in a bunch of temps. And we were ready for it because it happened organically. We would hire early on, people on the team, which exponentially took our revenues and continue to help them grow.

10:05 So we weren't afraid to bring on three people on our fifth month, right? People were thinking we were crazy for doing that. And we probably looking back were, right? But it was little things like that that were really, really helpful and very important. And I don't know that I would have left... had it not been for COVID, right?

10:27 Because you go from being in an office, the last thing keeping us where we were was the culture, the people. We really enjoyed that. And then ultimately, when everybody's sitting at their desk by themselves in their home office, it's like, oh, you know, I can do this now. So yeah, hopefully that answers your question.

10:46 It sounds like you built a cushion, a cash cushion first, so that you weren't desperate. You were... operating from, you knew you were going to be able to pay your bills and your mortgage and put food on the table. And so that gave you the, gave you the, the space to build, put all those pieces in place.

11:06 Right. So you mentioned Dave Ramsey, you might, when you say he helped, did you mean his videos or did you actually work with him? I didn't work with him personally. I just, I just learned, okay, well don't, don't do this or, um, You know, it just helped me get my from making several hundred thousand dollars a year living not really paycheck to paycheck, but essentially, you know, I wasn't saving much money.

11:28 Then I was like a sales guy. Lifestyle inflation, as my business partner likes to say. Right. So that kind of got me back in order for that to be able to handle what was to come. OK, so. Yeah. How much, if you don't mind me asking either, how much did you save up or is there formula? Like I need six months of personal expenses saved up and then I don't need to worry about the non-compete.

11:53 Don't need to worry about any of that. Yeah. I mean, everybody's different. I mean, I had, um, at the time, I think I had one, two kids in daycare on the talent of that. We had a mortgage, um, which is cheap as heck now when these, this, this time period. But, um, back then it was, everybody was thinking we were crazy.

12:10 Um, yeah. So, I mean, you definitely want to have, in anything, because in this business, it's all delayed gratification, right? So you start today. You're not getting anything in the door for three or four months. That's if you move quickly. So everything takes some time. I'd say you want at least six to eight months of work living expenses to where if you don't bill anything or have any cash coming in, you'll be okay.

12:38 But you also have to have a foundation family-wise. My wife is one of the most supportive people of what we do. Obviously, it was very scary for her when I said, no, this is happening finally after all the stop-go and not actually coming to fruition. When it became a reality, it was tough. And then she just realized, you know what?

12:57 he'll be successful. It'll be okay. I've got the right people around me. And, you know, it just worked out. Amazing. And then you also needed working capital because it sounds like you've made some big investments straight away. Actually, we should give a, do you want to give a shout out to your business partners?

13:16 Sure. Yeah. Mark Hammond and Gary Palink are the two people that we've done this with. And, Our entire team, I mean, as it's going, we've got people that have been with us since four or five months in. And we really, when we did it, we really wanted to build something because we just, you have to love what you do.

13:35 Whether we're placing you in an accounting job, you have to love that job, right? Especially in recruiting when you're going to get beat up all the time and people are going to, do what people do. You have to just be able to fall in love with this business. And we've gotten so much from it that we wanted to be able to build a vehicle where people can go and have that lifestyle, have that success, have that reward for their work.

13:59 And pay great commissions, take people on trips, do the little things that I think make people want to work in a place beyond just, hey, here's your paycheck and it's great. Okay, I want to circle back. You've mentioned culture a few times, and that's obviously been one of the foundation stones of what you're building.

14:20 Before we dive into that, then, it sounds like you guys from the outset knew you wanted to build a firm. You weren't just going to be a small, you know... three partners, basically. And you gained momentum pretty rapidly. So can you talk me through that? Like, for example, hiring your first three people in month five.

14:41 Yeah. Can you talk me through that trajectory? And I know that it wasn't smooth sailing and there's been some bumps on the road, but that initial run, describe that for me, number one. And number two, how do you think you were able to achieve that? When we set out to do this, we wanted to build something where people were working together in a way where we had come from a place where it was me, me, me.

15:10 Everybody's out for themselves in some respect. And yeah, you do deals with your colleagues. But we wanted to build it to where somebody brand new could come in and very quickly make some money. But the first four months of September, we made our first placement, I think, October 15th. of 2020. And then those first three of December that year, I think we built like $250,000 between the, there were four of us at the time we had, we were fortunate enough to have brought on a young woman, Kara Stevenson, who had had a, about a year or two at our old place and just happened to get caught up in last in first out during the COVID layoffs there.

15:50 And, you know, we, she, she, she was exactly what we needed and an amazing recruiter. We would get off these calls. I'll never forget, we placed somebody at a private equity-backed SaaS company on the controller level. And I think within an hour after we got off that call with the intake, we ended up getting the person over that ultimately got the job.

16:13 And that was all there. So we were very fortunate to have brought on the right people early and our early hires hit. But we were also very big on development of those people. One of the things that's very important is you have... It's not just me, right? When you go out and do this, there's a lot of different ways to do it.

16:33 You can do it by yourself. Obviously, you can do it with other business partners. Right. I would never be able to do all the different things that are needed to be done to both start the business, to take it to this next level, to do what we've done without Mark and Gary and in theory hitting on those early hires and continue to hit on them.

16:53 So getting back to your question, you know, those first five months we did the two 50 and then we brought on three people that January of 2021 and that, February of that 2021, we billed 250 or somewhere around there that just that month. Our one guy hit 60 K in his, in that first month. Obviously we were helping out, but he, it was, you know, he, he did it.

17:19 And it was just a, Oh, wow. Wow. hiring and building it around the right people. That's how we truly get to where we want to get to, which comes as its own challenges, obviously. But for that first full year in business, so from January to December of 2021, I think we did somewhere around 2.5, 2.8. I forget the exact number.

17:40 Wow, that's a phenomenal first year. Yeah, it was great. It was during a great time period for recruiting, for sure. That's true. That's true. Yeah, it was a nice start, for sure. It helped. It helped. You mentioned that you wouldn't be able to do it without Mark and Gary. How do you split it? Since there's three founders, I guess the benefit is you all have slightly different strengths and you can almost divide and conquer.

18:07 How do you guys assign responsibilities between the three founders? This is something that we struggle with constantly and is still an evolution. One of the things that we brought up a lot is last December, we sent out an email that said to the three of us and said, all right, what do you need off your plate?

18:26 What do you love doing? What are things that, hey, listen, everybody's got to do something in their job that they just don't like to do, but it's got to get done, right? What are those things? And we tried to really find ways of... separating duties. For example, we used to be on any interview we had for an internal potential hire, Mark, Gary, and I would all be on that first round interview.

18:47 And it was just a waste of, it's just not a good use of our time. So we've completely revamped the internal hiring process. We changed over and said, okay, we were doing monthly one-on-ones with the team. And you've got three partners taking several hours every day to do that. Part of it was done because you want to have access.

19:10 You want to be involved. You have to build this for them, not for you. But at the same time, you have to maximize... You can't have it get stale, right? So we changed those to quarterly. And we made it a lot more... hey, tell me how you're feeling versus, okay, well, let's actually look at this and see what everything's telling us.

19:32 Kind of putting a mirror up to their face. So delegation has been something that we're consistently trying to fix because, to be honest, I love being an entrepreneur. I love going off and doing demos of software and the new and latest AI tools and technology. developing people and I love billing. There's nothing better than putting up a deal.

19:56 It's still a high. So we took a lot of things off of my plate that were running the business side while still keeping me into it. They said, listen, Fridays are your demo days. Fridays are the days we do one-on-ones. So that's helped tremendously. And then Mark and Gary. So Mark is a very, very good trainer once that first week is passed.

20:22 I do the systems training. He comes in and teaches you how to do recruiting. And then Gary is a godsend back office guy who does our accounting, keeps an eye out, understands the tax stuff and all the implications of all that, keeps an eye on benefits and so forth. And then we've got a sales support person that we've been working with and very fortunate to have, And Rachel for many years now with us, that has been a blessing for us.

20:51 All right. So it sounds like you're still hands-on billing. Mark is taking ownership of training. Gary is taking ownership of back office. Speaking of training, I think that's, from what I understand, one of the keys to your success. Because you have built a stable of really top producers, right? which is like your average, you know, your per desk average is, do you mind sharing what it is?

21:18 Yeah, I think so last quarter, so it's probably somewhere between 30 and 40 per person, per desk. You know, we have people that are doing well over 400K. Is that per month or what? Per month, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. So we have people doing well over 400K And we have people that are doing somewhere around the $200,000 to $300,000 as well.

21:46 Some of our rookies are coming in doing $200,000 to $300,000. Over the last more recent years, we've had people rookie year come in and build $600,000 a couple times. So it's a little more normalized from that perspective, from coming out of the Gates Blink $600,000. But it's certainly a possibility.

22:06 I mean, we've got somebody that started, what was it? In... early May and she's already over 60 K I think for the year so far. So she just started. Fantastic. So you, I've heard you describe this as your blueprint. You have a blueprint for getting new recruiters to 500 K. That's kind of like the, the, the game plan.

22:29 Can you elaborate on like, what does that involve? Yeah. So in our first December of 2020, before we brought on the new, new people, um, We wanted to make kind of like a filing flip, whatever. You go to this specific page and you can take a job order without knowing how to take a job order. So we spent, I went on vacation with my family over Christmas and we just wrote out a blueprint of every single thing that you have to do in this job.

22:56 Mindset, different tasks, how to do a prep call. how to recruit, all that. Counter-offer, so forth. Because those little details are what got us to where we had success in our own personal careers. And we wanted to spread that with a major, major purpose. So beyond the blueprint, we do role plays weekly.

23:20 If you're a rookie under a year, you're here twice a week doing role plays. There have been times where we have a session where the team will lead a topic on something that they're doing well, something that they're struggling with. It got to the point where the first person who did it many years ago, she built a PowerPoint presentation and it kind of just set the bar for everybody who came next in the rotation.

23:42 And you're learning about, all right, this is how I do ad calls. This is how I do marketing. This is how I recruit. This is my process for going through an interview. And it's been very, very... very motivating. So it's little things like that that are... It's just so important for us to be constantly... Our mindset as owners is we're constantly looking for mentorship.

24:03 I'm constantly listening to podcasts like yours and all of them. And when I was at Half, my one business partner, Mark, he flew up to Boston to go see the top producer in the region and and just watch him for a day. That was on his own dime. That was his mindset, right? So I think stuff like that is very important.

24:23 And for us here, I mean, having been in Pinnacle Society, it's given us a huge opening to top producers and various mentors and just trends that when you're in your own little bubble of synergy search, you think things are going well, but you really have no idea comparatively what's going on in the market or all that.

24:42 And to be able to have that group of people has been huge. Okay, amazing. Let me unpack some of that. So first of all, I am a huge believer in role play. So applaud that. You know, a lot of... recruiters say, oh, I don't like role plays. They're unrealistic or they don't, I don't feel comfortable, blah, blah, blah.

25:05 I'm like, just suck it up and do it anyway, because, you know, and look for the owners listening, you don't have to call them role plays because some people have like a negative reaction, even just to the word, call it practice or, hey, we're going to rehearse, you know, the recruiting call, right? Or we're going to practice objection handling.

25:23 You just use a different word from... role play. And so I love that you're doing that twice a week. How does that actually work in your firm? Yeah. So it's actually evolved many times. Sometimes it would be, all right, tell us about something that's happened over the last week that you want to role play or need help with, or we can kind of workshop.

25:39 To recently, the last pinnacle meeting that I went to, we had a breakout session where we did, they had developed these role plays where it was quick hitting, hey, here's the situation. Here's what's going on. Candidate just told you that, you know, or a client just told you that the CEO doesn't want to hire the person, but the CFO really wants to hire the person.

25:59 What's your first move? What do you do? And it's quick. It's like, get in there, get out. And it's a round robin across the whole team. So everybody's got to stay on their feet and everybody's got to pay attention. Because if you're, what we found is if you're not in that role play and... working together at that point, or talking, I should say, you're probably off looking at other things on your computer screen or not really paying attention, not involved.

26:20 And this is keeping people on their toes. And it's been a lot more of a nice refresh for how we've done role plays recently. So we brought that here from that idea. And again, everything gets stale if you do it too often, not value add to people. Some people are going to say, oh, I don't need role plays.

26:39 I'm billing... $800,000. And then when they get off of role plays, they somehow go into a slump. I wonder why. So that's how we do it. Okay. That makes sense. I love that. And then the other thing you said was you get the team involved in taking turns leading a topic, which I think is an awesome idea because, first of all, if you have to teach something, it makes you learn it even better.

27:06 Right. And because you have to, if you're going to present something to a, to a group of your peers, you want to be like, you want to really know your stuff. Right. And secondly, it creates much more engagement. Um, because, um, they're like, sometimes recruiters don't value the training that you're giving them.

27:29 And it's like, oh, here we go again, another MPC workshop or whatever. But because they are each taking a turn, they're more likely to respect it and actually take it seriously. And thirdly, of course, it's also going to save you time so that you don't have the founders doing absolutely everything. So I think that's genius.

27:48 Did you have anything to add to that? Yeah. I'll just say, um, it's also your voice. You could be the biggest biller, the best thing since sliced bread and recruiting. But if you, you're saying the same thing, if you're leading the, the trainings every time, it's going to eventually get stale. So that also saves from that.

28:06 And to your point, like we would kind of get a little stress. It's like, all right, another it's Tuesday. We got role plays coming up. What's our topics going to be guys. And, and, it would be another delegation thing that has really helped. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you kind of went through the blueprint pretty fast.

28:25 So I just had a follow-up question, which was, what's the format of that and how is it delivered? So it's evolved over the years. I mean, yeah. We didn't have ChatGPT when we did it originally, so it's kind of our own just typing out on a Word document that we put in a binder and we separate out with tabs.

28:44 So it's literally like the manual. Yeah, binder. We've put that online now. I've actually added it to a Claude project. So if somebody's, hey, how do I handle this situation or what is the maternity leave policy at Synergy Search or anything, us, people can go and look at that. I love that idea. What's the cloud project called?

29:06 Just blueprint. Pretty sure. Okay. Yeah. And, but it sounds like it's got every, it's like your training manual, but company handbook rolled into one. Sure. Yeah. Okay. That is brilliant. That's a, I love that idea. Yeah. Okay, cool. So I've got the, sorry, go ahead. I was just kidding. Nobody cares about the maternity leave policy until they're pregnant.

29:25 Right. So it's like, Oh, what is it? What are, check it out. Right. Right. What's our employee referral program so forth. By the way, guys, like that is worth the price of admission right there. Just one. I mean, there's lots of gold nuggets here already, Josh, but that's a gem. I know you do accounting and finance, and it's both perm and temp.

29:48 Are we remote or are we in office? Yeah. So that's another big evolution that we've had. So in the beginning, you want to be this entrepreneurial company where you can do what you want, come and go as you please. And when you have a culture that's work hard, play hard, it's okay. And then ultimately when that dies out, it was tough.

30:12 So we also noticed that when you have remote employees, there's not the connection. We're very big on love synergy search. Everybody who works here loves the people that they work with. They love what we're building. It's a There's a lot of things to like. So we noticed that some of the people that were not in the office, it was a little bit more difficult to hang on to.

30:33 So we started off, some people were hybrid, some people came in every day, some people were fully remote. And then it ultimately, I think back in August last year, we said, okay, we're not hiring anybody remote anymore. We are only, we are all coming in the same days, right? So Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, everybody's in the office together.

30:55 So we're working no matter which office you're at. Um, and then we do have one person that's fully remote just by nature of it. Um, You know, where he lives and, you know, we're not going to let somebody go when we change like that. But you mentioned which office have you got. You've got multiple offices.

31:10 Yeah. So that's another tough part for us. I would love nothing more than to have one big office where everybody's working together and everybody's here. But by nature of it, we when we started in 2020, we followed the non-compete. We want to respect that and respect our prior employer. Yeah. So we ended up going down to Nashville, working that market, building that out.

31:30 And when we were hiring, a couple of the first hires were out of Maryland. So those Maryland employees were working the Nashville office. But then we started hiring in Nashville. So we ended up opening an office down in Nashville. I think we've got seven people in there now. And we've got, I think, eight here in Maryland.

31:47 No, seven here in Maryland and then one remote. So one of the frustrating parts about that is that, though, like when we want to get together for a happy hour or Christmas party or things like that, they're not necessarily all together. And the team loves being together. So yeah. We've turned it into a contest thing that has been pretty helpful.

32:11 For example, this summer, we had a really bad summer last year. And we're like, that's not happening anymore. So we put a contest together and said, all right, if we build $1.5 million between, I think it was June, July, and August, we will bring everybody to Nashville for Christmas party in December.

32:28 Right. Everybody knows the days it's happening. And, and it's a, that was a goal based on the head count that we had and where we were at prior. Like that was a stretch and we're hitting it. We're, we're on pace for that, which is amazing. And I want nothing more for that to happen, but even still, you know, if I could do it again, we'd all be in one office altogether.

32:50 Yeah. That's awesome. I love the competition idea. So I didn't realize you guys actually moved to Nashville to start this business. So my business partner, Mark, did. He moved to Nashville. We were working above a liquor store and a Dunkin' Donuts here in Maryland. Calling into Nashville. Okay. So that's the office that we're about to leave here.

33:09 So it's a bittersweet. That's look, I think that's awesome. I've noticed that the number one failure or success point with branch offices is lack of strong local leadership. And so I've told you this story before. a phenomenal company called Amoria Bond. So their headquarters was originally in Manchester in Northern England, but they wanted to open an office in Amsterdam.

33:46 So Nick moved his family, his wife and child to Amsterdam, and he started that office up. And then Gareth wanted to open an office in Singapore, he literally, he and his wife moved to Singapore and they basically were the missionaries who took their culture and their processes and their blueprint and all that stuff to that other location to kind of replicate it there.

34:11 And that way, even though they were, like spread out over different countries even. It really, I mean, there's nuances and differences in different cultures due to the country, right? The culture in that country. But overall, it was definitely, I went to the different offices. I didn't make it to Singapore, unfortunately, when I was working with them.

34:30 But it felt like a Moria Bond no matter where you were. So that was cool. And along those lines, we try to do things together, right? Like our job order call in the morning, even if there are people who are working in different territories, it's all one big job order call. Or Friday morning, we call it TGIF.

34:49 It's pure play, right? Sometimes it's various games. Sometimes it's tell us about yourself. We make it very light to start a Friday, but we're all doing it together to just get to know each other and bond. But yeah, it's... It's a very important thing to do because if you keep things separate, you're going to have two different companies and that's not what you want.

35:10 Okay. So this leads us really nicely back to that issue of culture. So it sounds like that is very important to you. So what have you done intentionally? Because a lot of firms like culture as an accident, you know, it just kind of happens. It's not intentional. It sounds like you guys have engineered the culture that you want.

35:28 So what's gone into that? Yeah. First and foremost, it's success. I mean, if people aren't having success, you can have the best culture you want, but it's not going to work. So bringing on people that you can rely on to do the business the right way, to hustle like you're going to hustle, and have the same, we're building something together mindset, that part of it is quite important, right?

35:55 But you got to make money or it doesn't matter, right? And then I would say... just from the top down, I mean, you have to be able to work where you want to work, right? So I wanted to, even though I own the company, I still want to work in an environment where I can be me, right? Where I can have fun, right?

36:14 And that's the beauty of recruiting. We can be goofing around, listening to music, playing putt-putt golf on the carpet floor or whatnot in one minute, and then the next minute taking a retainer for a CFO search. It's You've sort of described qualitatively like the sort of person you hire. So someone reliable with hustle who's like really wants to build something together.

36:36 You described like people, you know, you want them to be free to express their personality and have fun, but also know when to take it serious. But what are the tangible things that you guys have put in place to ensure that as you scale, you retain the culture that's made you successful to begin with?

36:55 Partly is we do things together. You're on an intake call. It's not just the job order owner that's on that intake call. It's the people that could potentially be recruiting for that job that are helping out with that so that they have a little bit more of an ownership in the job order. They understand it here and directly from the client what they're looking for.

37:11 Yeah. other things that we've done to keep the culture. We've gone a lot more into facts over feelings in a lot of ways in the culture. What does that mean? The person who's got the most job orders is usually the one that's billed the most that month. Or the person who's had the most dials is usually one that has the best billings that month.

37:33 So, like, from a culture showing those guardrails of, hey, listen, you can see things slipping a little bit for a certain person and you can immediately correct it. That will help kind of keep things on track from that perspective. But, you know, from a, if you're asking about more, you know, personality culture and fun culture type stuff?

37:54 If that's... Not exactly. So you gave a couple of examples earlier. One was a competition. The other was the tradition of TGIF, where you do your Friday meeting and you start with like a game or something or something that's just purely for fun. Are there any other traditions or, you know, either special terminology or traditions or myths or like, how do you... Because these are what...

38:21 Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is, I'm so glad you asked this. So one of the things we do is if you bill a hundred K in a month, you get a big steak dinner, right? Okay. And we try to do it. We try to do it quarterly so that anybody who's built a hundred K can do it as a group. We fly down to whoever, whether it's us going to Nashville because there's more people in Nashville that have it or them coming up to us and people love that, right?

38:41 It's, it's, it's our, our, all of our, All of our reward stuff, all of our culture stuff is driven by reward, earned it, right? Like in the beginning- So it's incentives. It's incentive-based. We have a trip every year, right? And it goes in February, we go to Cancun or Dominican or somewhere like that.

39:00 It's one of the best times in the calendar. Is that for everyone or do you need to qualify? Yeah. Yeah, so it's for everybody. It's one of the points that I think is a little bit more difficult among our group of leaders where somebody just started in December, hasn't even... build anything and they're going to go on a free trip to Cancun, it's like, of course, they're going to think that it's a fun culture, but you got to work your ass off to do that.

39:30 So we're constantly struggling with that. But what we did was we added an element of Chairman's Club, President's Club for this past trip where the people who were the top three producers in the year... got an extra night in Cancun, which was where we were this year. We'll pay for the spouse's flight or the person who wins it.

39:51 It's the number one biller. And we did... We took them golfing in this case because it happened to be all guys that won this year. We had a big, fun steak dinner kind of thing where we went out and it was a really cool atmosphere. You know, we ended up... doing a trophy ceremony on the last day of the trip where we rented out a little beach area.

40:12 We had a DJ. We had their spouses send in a video about, hey, I'm really proud of you for winning this and just kind of making it feel right. Our philosophy is if it's earned, we will pay whatever we need to pay to make you feel appreciated and special and whatnot. We'll still do things that are for everybody.

40:33 I just have everybody over to my house for what is my favorite day of the year. We do a summer party where I bring everybody in from out of town and the local people. have them over to my house. We go swimming. We had a DJ the last two years that was playing until, I mean, it was like a 10, 11 hour party.

40:51 It's like everybody out of my house, it's 11 o'clock at night. But we love being around each other. And again, it starts with who we hire. We're very picky on who we bring in. This is great. Thanks, Josh. You describe the goal as you want your recruiters to be able to buy homes, start families, earn beyond what they would make as an accountant, right?

41:14 So it sounds like it's a very achievement-oriented, like there's all these incentives, there's rewards, you're making people appreciate it. How do you build a firm around that without... it becoming like a place that people burn out. Yeah. Yeah. Or that cut for like, yeah, Wolf of Wall Street sort of, sort of deal.

41:33 I mean, first again, it starts with, with who you bring in. You've got to fit in culturally. You, our people want to win, but they don't want to win by stepping on other people's toes. I don't, I can't think of a time that I was pulled into a meeting where it's like, Oh, credit issues, or this person did this to me.

41:53 It's never happened. And we were doing that, I think daily, well, boss, I feel bad for him. He was constantly battling that. So I think some of the way we have our rule book, if you will, is helpful for that. Wait, rule book, what's that? It's just our sales, we call it sales tracking, but it's basically, all right, can you call this person?

42:12 Is it the two-way communication? If there's two-way communication, then you get them for a month. Once you turn that two-way communication into an actual interview where you're representing them, you get them for six months. And then once you make a placement, you get them for a year between communicating and whatnot.

42:28 Obviously, you don't want to go a year without talking to your people, but there's kind of a respect thing. Got it. That's client or candidate contacts? Yeah. So we do full desk recruiting and we have contact ownership. We don't own companies. As frustrating as that may sound for some people that do it that way, what it does is it allows people to build relationships with the people.

42:56 And most of our job orders come from our candidate relationships where we've helped them. We took good care of them. We build relationships with them. We gave them a little bit above and beyond service. We called them back regularly. And then they go and find a job and their company's hiring or they're hiring and they're in a hiring manager position.

43:13 So it allows somebody to come in day one and make a placement, even if it's at my historically my client. And if they become a hiring manager, who's the best person for them to call for giving that job order? I would be the person that they were working with and have a relationship with. So I think that's been very helpful.

43:31 for people billing perspective. That's cool. That all makes sense. So Josh, let's talk about the challenges. Cause I know like you had a phenomenal like run in the beginning, but then you, you know you hit some bumps in the road and then you had to sort of rethink how things were working. Can you describe like, what was the biggest challenge?

43:55 And then how did you come back stronger? So when we started the company, as we've mentioned, it was one of the best staffing markets you can find. So people, you had to be transactional back then. You had to be reactive because you had so much business, you had so much going on, it was so easy to bring that in.

44:13 We would send out email blasts and we would get three or four job orders every week from just that, from MPC email blast. So when the market got more normalized, the people that... grew up in that way of transactional recruiting versus relationship-based recruiting and taking that seriously, had a really hard time adapting.

44:36 Mixed with the email blasting situation, got messed up with Microsoft and Google doing the whole spam thing. I don't know if you're aware of that. So you had to really change the way we were operating the business mixed with you know, when they're, when, when you're not making money, when you're not billing, when it's not as easy as it was three, six months ago, the job sucks, right?

44:58 Like it's not a fun job to do when you're not winning. That's true. I, I, this is either the funnest job or the worst job in the world, right? Correct. Yeah. So mixed with, we had gone on a bad run of hires. Like we had hired a handful of people that really, um, Just didn't make it, didn't cut it, left us for whatever reason.

45:20 We lost people that we didn't want to lose in many cases. And we had built the firm having spent 13, in my case, years in corporate America. We wanted to do everything anti-corporate America. Oh, we're fun. We're cool. We don't have rules. You can come in whenever you want. You can do this and that. We don't have a start time.

45:40 We don't have a dress code. I mean, so... little things like that, we got sloppy. And when you aren't tracking activity in any way, you can't see it coming. When you're not, you know, doing the work hard part of the play hard, it just becomes bad. When you're not bringing in fresh internals, keeping everybody on their toes, driving people, you know, giving me an opportunity to mentor the newer staff, it just gets tough.

46:07 So mixed in with, we had our first hire, Kara, I mentioned earlier, she had billed like 850,000 the year before in 2025, I think. No, 2024 it would have been. Because she's, yeah. So 2024, she bills $850. She's perennially the top producer in the company from a staff perspective. And she died. Like January, she woke up with a headache and she was pregnant.

46:35 And our best recruiter, in theory, just passes away. So you have all this kind of coming together. And it's tough, right? So in... It must have been devastating. Yeah. I don't want to just sort of brush past that because that's like just a tragic situation. How did that affect the team and how did you lead your business through that?

47:04 So it's tough. I mean, I think we took our... hey, we got to make revenue hat off. And we all were pretty human about it, let people do what they needed to do. We brought in somebody connected us with a therapist that we can have the team talk to. Mark, Gary, and I talked to them as well. You know, it is...

47:28 It was not an easy time period by any means, but I'm really proud of how the team battled through it. I would say the first month or two, it was weird. There was a lot of, oh, are we going to make it? We just lost Kara. But... I think it also opened up, you know, sadly to say, like it opened up opportunity for people to step up.

47:51 Like we, we ended up promoting somebody because we had that void in our, in our company because Kara was the first person in the company. She was kind of the go-to for the team to talk to the team, but, you know, still kind of have that outlet and she was a female and whatnot. Um, So it gave promotion opportunities to other people that were deserving of it.

48:11 And it just kind of, we regrouped, I think, it was August of 2025. We had our, our come to Jesus for lack of a better way of saying it, sit down. Hey, what would we do if we could start this business today and not make the mistakes that we made this all this time, what would we do differently? We were at a wedding for my colleague, Brian and Mark and I went to breakfast and we had this conversation and it, that became what we call the reboot.

48:41 And, you know, we rebooted the company. We, like I said, we brought everybody in more consistently. We, um, we have metrics that we track now. So you can see, Hey, you know, It takes eight sendouts to make a placement for me. It takes 10 sendouts for me. It takes, you know, every job order I get is X amount of money.

49:00 So you can really see those things. It's not perfect because unfortunately we're relying on the team to put the, in the system and the data, but it's still pretty powerful tool. I'm glad you mentioned the reboot because let's call this like last part of the conversation, the reboot chapter. Yeah. I see this so often with founders where they leave an environment like Robert Half, where it's very KPI everything.

49:28 Right. And then there's a re there's a reaction against that. So they're like, we're going to do things differently. We're going to treat people like adults. You know, we're going to bring in people who know how to like, who are just, they're outcome driven. We don't need to micromanage them, blah, blah, blah.

49:44 And then, but that I personally have never seen that scale. Yeah. Correct. And so, yeah, When did that kind of realization dawn? And then how did you shift from being a very kind of free-flowing culture to being more professionalized in the business, let's say, with scorecards and KPIs and all that kind of stuff?

50:09 It's still something that we're evolving with. Yeah. you show them why it works. Like I mentioned, I sent out an email. I sent out a monthly email recapping the month. Who's the top producers? Here's the people over 40K. Here's whatever. And that first time we had data, I showed them the data. I was like, all right, here's your send-out-to-placement ratio.

50:30 Here's all these things. And the guy who had like 100, I think it was that first month, we had three people over 100K. Yeah. That was, I think, October of 2025. And the guy who had the top month that month called me up and he's like, I need to get better. What's, what's he doing to get a better send up to placement ratio?

50:50 Like it's, it drives people to have a little accountability. People that are dogs, right? As I call them, they want accountability. They want to be held accountable. And they want good or bad. Dog is great. Dog is great. You gotta bark when you make a placement mark. Okay. You gotta, you gotta Josh Falinski thing or where does that come from?

51:10 No, you got to bark because it's fun when you make placements. You got to feel it. It sounds like literally I'm picturing now. We're barking. Literally barking. We have a CFO we're hopefully about to place today with one of my colleagues who has never placed CFO before. And I'm like, Tori, I need you practicing your bark.

51:30 And she's like, does everyone start barking? Does that set off the whole pound? I mean, I guess. I'm picturing the office, the locker room, but I guess we should call it the pound. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, my gosh. That is funny. So let's just segue. I want to come back to KPIs, but segue here is... How firms celebrate deals, right?

51:53 Because we've got the gong, the bell, right? So the bark, I guess, is... I have to say I've never heard that one before, but that's funny. So one office I was in and it was really cool. So the problem with all those things is if people are on the phone and there's bells ringing, it sounds a bit like a boiler room, right?

52:11 And you're trying to talk to a CFO and there's shenanigans happening around. what they did was people would stomp their feet. And when they were announcing someone won a deal and what was cool is the, I don't know if it's the, I don't know the right term for the audio here, but the, the, the, the pitch of that deeper sound, it wasn't like a bell, which is high pitch and kind of pierces through everything else.

52:42 It just kind of made the room rumble and you could feel it like, cause there's like 20 people stomping their feet and you could feel it kind of vibrate your body. So that was pretty cool, but it didn't interrupt people who were on the phone basically. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard, so for us, we have the, nowadays you've got fancy headsets that can cancel out the noise of, of that type of thing.

53:01 But we, one mentor we were talking to once had said that they have a TV screens throughout the bullpen. And when somebody makes a deal in the system, it plays their walk up song. Yes. Big, like a big celebration. And, Streamers and stuff. Yeah. And another disappointing thing that we can't do just because we're not in the same office together.

53:22 But wait, you guys are all on Bullhorn. So I'm sure you could have – I know there's software that connects with Bullhorn. In fact, Bullhorn bought – there was a British company that did like visual analytics and Bullhorn bought them. I don't remember what they're called, but essentially it's a way of having like score.

53:41 It gamifies the KPIs and you can have like leaderboards and you can show in real time. Like literally it connects to the CRM and the phone system to show real time metrics. And you can bring like Josh Valencia's picture up on the screen and play his deal music and all that stuff. Yeah, that's cool. I can do it.

54:00 Worth checking out. Yeah. So KPIs, what are the most important KPIs that you guys track? Send outs, in my opinion. Everything revolves around send outs. Now, when you say send out, is that an interview? That's a candidate interviewing with a client. Okay. Or a client interviewing. I'm just clarifying that because that's my understanding.

54:18 I learned the word send out from Tony Byrne. I don't know if you know who that is. He was a recruitment trainer from New York, like in the 80s and 90s. And the 90s, he was around in the late 90s when I was coming up. he was really popular in the UK and he had these red suspenders and these huge glasses and a pinstripe suit.

54:37 And he looked like, you know, he walked straight off of wall street or something, but, um, So the point was, in the UK, we never heard this term send out. Like, what is he talking about? And it was a first-time interview, right? A candidate going to meet a client. But then when you hear the word send out, a lot of people think it means sending the CV or the resume to the client.

55:00 And it gets confusing. Yeah, yep. So first-time interviews is what I call them. Yep. That and job orders. I mean, there's a direct delineation in our scorecard for people who consistently bring in job orders and the ones that they're not. Um, you know, while we do full desk, people still gravitate one way or the other.

55:18 And some people just, you know, don't bring in the job orders and they're probably capped out at half the, half the job and they'll maybe make 300 grand and GM. Um, and those that are bringing in job orders consistently are, you know, have a chance for, for a million dollars. Right. Yeah. So it's interesting.

55:36 So, um, job orders send outs. Is there a third one that like, if you, what would be number three? Um, it'd probably be the amount of dials or phone, phone calls. Um, we just started, that was part of the reboot we brought in, we were all on our cell phones, we had no idea how many calls people were making and what people were doing.

55:55 Um. And people were a little resistant to that in the beginning. And now they're like, this is my favorite app that we have because it integrates with Bullhorn. So every call that they have is documented as a note in Bullhorn now. So they don't have to do that themselves. And all the history with that conversation is tracked.

56:12 And now you take it to the next level and you bring it into Claude and you can say, okay, based on this conversation, you know, Exactly. You can give sales coaching based on the transcript, which, by the way, CoRecruit, I don't know what system you use for tracking or for recording calls, but CoRecruit does have a thing that can record cell phone calls, it can record in-person meetings, and of course it records Zoom and Teams because they found that a huge percentage of meetings, in fact, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw the stats, I saw

56:45 the minority are happening on Zoom and Teams, and the majority were happening on people's personal cell phones and that kind of thing. So they wanted to be able to catch that. By the way, Josh, so I'm glad that you said this. You have a fellow Pinnacle member who's a customer of ours, and he's got everyone on their personal cell phones.

57:03 And I keep telling him, you need to get everyone on a phone system with headsets. I think you're talking about the guy I'm taking. We're a very similar firm size-wise. He started a couple of years after me, but he... he's a beast um but yeah i told him the guy i'm only i'm only not saying his name because i'm i'm calling out something that he needs to improve right and so i don't want to like name and shame him but uh it's funny i told him the exact same thing when we were in miami for the last game i was like this has been a game changer you need to do it yeah okay so um final question contingent or engaged retained So we are engaged, I guess you'd call it.

57:44 We don't do retained. There are some people in the firm that do contingent. I have noticed a tremendous success in, even with clients that I've worked with in the past, I say, listen, we've changed our model. We do it engaged. You put a little bit of skin in the game up front. It goes towards the 30%, whatever the percentage would be in the end of the year.

58:06 And the relationships that I have built out with those clients, they're true partnerships. The feedback that I'm getting on an interview are dashboards of things that they did right, they did wrong, how they compared other candidates that they met with. The intake calls go an hour. There's a... There's a different level of search quality hustle from our end.

58:30 I mean, I've got a client that works with everybody in the area and we should probably still help them out because it's a good company in the area and they attract good people. But it's 20%. Everybody's on them and I haven't sent them a single person just because if I had somebody, I'll certainly send them somebody.

58:47 But if they want me to go hunting... Right. It's just a different, different kind of kind of process. So agree. A hundred percent. We, we could, and probably should do a whole session just about that. Um, so I know I said that was my last question, but I did want to ask you about Pinnacle as well. Cause you've joined Pinnacle.

59:08 When did you, when did you become a Pinnacle member? I was the spring 2025 conference in Vegas. Okay, fantastic. Congratulations. It's a big honor to qualify and be invited, right? It's been a game changer for the firm, for sure. For those who don't know, can you explain? You can do a quick pitch on Pinnacle, what it's about.

59:27 So Pinnacle is a group of, I think they cap it out at 80 of the top recruiters in the world, really. We have a couple of people outside of the U.S. And it is the most genuine... group of people that are, as I call them, as we've talked about, dogs, right? And talk about a dog pound. These people have had incredible success, but they're there to get better.

59:51 They're there to give back. They're there to listen to what random Josh Walensky is doing in his firm. And, you know, they were genuinely interested in what we had been building, what we were doing. They gave me a bunch of information. I mean, we... as I said in the beginning, our tech stack from the beginning was very important to us.

1:00:10 We wanted to stay ahead of the curve and then you go for three or four years doing things, right? Um... And you don't realize how out of date your tech stack can become so quickly. And one pinnacle meeting, it's like, oh, wow, I need voice recorders. I need AI note takers. I need, what's this chat GBT thing, right?

1:00:30 Like I didn't use any of that. Now we have set up so much automation to help take a lot of the administrative tasks off our plate. Not to... So then we can be on the phones more. Then we can be thinking better. Then we can be operating faster. So I'm not making write-ups anymore. It does it for me based on the intake call that it has and the resume and the thing we built.

1:00:49 So Pinnacle has been game-changing both from a network of people that I've been introduced to. I sent a message out to a guy that... he's where we want to get to. Right now, we're 15 people. We've been up to 19 people. We've gotten as high as $6 million in revenue. We're probably in the mid-fours, mid-to-upper-fours right now.

1:01:15 And in order for us to grow to where we want to grow to, we need to build a true infrastructure in the company, right? Like I need to, do I need to hire a, a person that understands recruiting mixed with AI so that they can constantly keep us head of the curve when it comes to that building out GPTs for my team, building our cloud cowork, all that.

1:01:35 Do I need to, one guy has a marketing team on, on, on staff, right? What levels of middle management do we need to bring up? What career tracks do we need to bring in? So yeah, Yes, it's successful. This sounds like Matt Walsh. It is Matt Walsh, yes. I didn't know if you'd want me to share it or not.

1:01:53 The only reason I didn't say the other person's name is because I was saying something he's not doing, right? But yeah, Matt is a beast. I mean, so he responded the same day to me, like... And he's going to jump on a call with me and my business partner is just telling us how his evolution of his back office was built.

1:02:10 Right. And it's, I can't wait to talk to him because I know my business partners are going to love hearing that story. So yeah, I'm very grateful to be in the, in the group, if you will. Um, One last thing on Pinnacle. I never really say this, so I don't know how it happened. But my colleague at the summer party that we just had, they all got together and put T-shirts with my business partner's face on it for various things that they do.

1:02:34 Like for me, it was, did you know I'm in Pinnacle, right? And it had me in the Pinnacle conference. So they all walked out of the backyard and had these pictures on their T-shirt or whatnot. So it was kind of hilarious. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, I feel very honored that I've got to hang out with Pinnacle several times at conferences where they've asked me to speak.

1:02:56 And we've got a bunch of Pinnacle members in our program as well. And it's just... such a high quality group of people that so, and of course, including Josh Walensky. So Josh, this was fun. Thank you so much for being on the show. I'm glad we did it. I appreciate you having me on. All right. Awesome.

1:03:19 Talk to you again soon. All right. Bye-bye. What stood out the most for you in this one? Let me know your biggest takeaway on LinkedIn or in the YouTube comments. And more importantly, what are the one or two things that you're going to put in practice this week? If you're getting value from these conversations, do me a favor and hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

1:03:40 I really appreciate you listening. Make it a great day and I'll see you next time.