WHEN I took the decision to start up my own business almost eight years ago it was because I felt I had the experience in recruitment to make a go of it on my own, and because I knew what I liked and didn’t like about the industry and wanted to offer a service the way I thought it should be, not the way someone else thought it should be.
It was nerve racking at first, of course it was. You’re suddenly responsible for the success of the business and the reputation of the business, but also you’re responsible for all the things you didn’t have to think about as an employee.
My advice to someone starting on their own would be to surround yourselves with the right support network of professionals who look after other aspects of the business for you – a good bookkeeper, for instance, or an insurance broker. It takes a lot of the pressure off you.
When I decided to set up my own business, I was lucky that I managed to quickly grow the team so that I had people working with me that I knew and trusted. From a one-man business, PRG Recruit is now a team of five, and we have a very low turnover of staff. Justyna Janczak has been with me for seven years now and she has worked her way up to become branch manager, while Marta Nowakowska has worked with me throughout that same time, on and off, and is now a senior consultant. It’s important within any business that team members feel they have the opportunity for progression. Retaining staff is sometimes an issue within recruitment and my view from the start was that all of the team should have a good all-round knowledge of the business so that we can have one person on call who can handle any query. Too often, consultants have to be on call far too often because they are the only ones able to handle their clients. It’s not a good work-life balance and they become burnt out very quickly.
For the same reasons, to ensure all the team have all the clients’ interests at heart, we don’t pay on a commission basis. There’s no commission for bringing in new clients – it’s as important to spend time looking after existing clients as it is attracting new ones and our consultants are free to do that.
I was also lucky in the loyalty a lot of my clients showed when I was first starting out. Clients won’t stay just out of loyalty, but it means a lot to me that they put their trust in me and I’ve been able to repay that by giving them a good service for over seven years.
But the main piece of advice I would give someone starting out is: get the basics right first. It’s all too easy to think you need things in place that don’t really matter at the beginning – keep your working practices as straightforward as possible, get yourself up and running and then, if you need to or want to, you can start to invest in technology and systems that work for your business. It’s easy to make mistakes when you start up and you can save yourself a lot of time and money by keeping it simple, learning what works for your business and investing to help it grow once you’re ready to do so.