How To Find Apex Clients with Mike Ames

Benjamin Mena [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter podcast with your host, Benjamin Menna, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership and placements. A few quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, Gap selling is the book of the month for the month of June. Secondly, the recruiting growth summit. Finish the year strong. Registration is live. Hop into the show notes of this episode.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:34]:
Make sure you register. Registration is free, like I said. Once again, it is free to register. But if you want access to the live plays, make sure to sign up for vip. But it is going to be epic. It is bigger, it is better, and it is setting you up so that way you can finish the year strong. All right, let's dive in. I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:56]:
One of the reasons is, as for a successful recruiting firm, a small number of clients sometimes bring the most amount of the work. My guest calls them the apex clients. He sometimes calls them the 20 percenters because sometimes 20% of your clients will bring 80% of your revenue. But here's the question, though. How do you find these big whales? How do you find them? So I am so excited. I have a returning guest, Mike Ames, with me to talk about how to find these awesome apex clients. So welcome to the podcast, Mike.

Mike Ames [00:01:30]:
Thank you very much, Benjamin. Absolute pleasure to be here. I'm really excited about covering this subject, too.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:37]:
So real quick for the listeners, we're not going to do a super deep dive into Mike's background. If you want to find out more about that, check out episode 80, where we did a deep dive on how Mike ended up in recruiting. His entire story, how he exited his firm, and now, like everything else that he's doing, so ready to jump past it.

Mike Ames [00:01:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to hear all that all over again, do you really? I suppose I should say, like most people, I didn't plan to be in recruitment. I just ended up there, I think, and made the most of my opportunity. I think I could say that fairly safely. And 36 years later, I'm still in recruitment.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:17]:
And definitely go back to the episode, because Mike talks about some of the pivotal moments where building the firm. Unfortunately, a tragedy happened and Mike was left with the decision of, what am I going to do with this career? What am I going to do with this business? Like it was, you know, he go, like, you can go listen to the story. It was a very, very hard time for a very long time. But they grew their company, like, massively exited and he's been, you know, in the space ever since.

Mike Ames [00:02:50]:
Yeah, we did it again. Then we started another business a year later, and the first business was sold to an american company based in Jacksonville in Florida, although you would know that, obviously being american. But the second business was slightly smaller, but made the same amount of profit. And we sold that to a UK listed company called Harvey Nash, 2017 of my last recruitment company. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:15]:
So let's just dive right in. Okay, so first of all, what is a 20% or what is an apex coin?

Mike Ames [00:03:21]:
Okay, so in most reasonably sized recruitment firms, that is not tiny ones, you'll find that a small number of your clients do deliver a large amount of your revenue. So it's the old Pareto law of 2080. So 20% of your clients give you 80% of your revenue. So the idea is that you win more of the 20 percenters because it has a disproportionate effect on your growth. Whereas if you're winning small businesses, small clients, I mean, you're going to grow, of course, but not to the same rate. And I think the difference in my first business, im going to try and translate these into dollars because you wont know what pounds are. And this was 30 years ago, but it took us five years to go from naught to about $7.5 million. And then it took another five years to go from $7.5 million to about $50 million.

Mike Ames [00:04:20]:
The difference was we targeted high value clients and when we got them, we kept them. Massive difference. Can't even tell you what difference it was. It was enormous.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:31]:
Well, okay, so the first five years, were you guys just chasing, like, any client, any business possible?

Mike Ames [00:04:38]:
Yeah, we did. There was no structure to it, really. We did what most recruiters do. We did what's called tactical business development. And tactical BD is chasing adverts, cold calling, trying to spec in. I don't know whether that translates into America trying to take a candidate that you've got and sell them in to a client.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:58]:
MPC, most placebo candidate.

Mike Ames [00:05:00]:
Yeah. Yes. Specking those candidates in, maybe taking candidate intelligence, like, hey, I've just been for an interview. This, that the other place. Okay, follow that and try and see if you can get the vacancy. What? So what we were after was vacancies and what we switched over to doing was chasing clients. It doesn't sound like there's a big difference. You might argue they're the same, but they are so not the same.

Mike Ames [00:05:25]:
And I think in a second, to try and illustrate that point, what we have to do is differentiate between tactical business development and really specify that, because then we can go on to talk about strategic business development, which is where the money is.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:39]:
So you went from chasing openings to actually chasing clients. How is that conversational wise? I get it when, you know, for the listeners, I get it if like, hey, you have this opening or I have this candidate, I want to NPc it plus chat versus I just want to be a partner.

Mike Ames [00:05:59]:
Okay, well, it's not quite like that really, but okay, let's, let's look at tactical BD first, because I think everybody listening to this podcast will understand that. So tactical BD used to be called back in the day, transactional BD, for some reason it's changed its name now. But transactional bds about getting a transaction. So a number of things have to happen at once. If you're chasing a transaction, you have to be able to get to the person who's got a transaction. They have to be looking for candidates right now. They have to have open openings or vacancies, as we would say. They have to be not satisfied with their existing suppliers and they have to be prepared to trust a complete stranger, someone they've never met perhaps, or spoken to before with that vacancy.

Mike Ames [00:06:46]:
Right. That's a lot of ifs to happen. And so because it's not likely, you have to make a lot of calls and emails, we always say you have to kiss a lot of prospect frogs to get a client prints. Right. So it's just the nature of the beast. And a lot of people fill their day with vacancy, chasing with transactional BD. So the key approach to that, if I can summarize it, and then I'm going to move over to chasing apex clients. The narrative there, if I can simplify it, is give us a vacancy.

Mike Ames [00:07:21]:
Maybe that's it. I want to make some money right now. Give us a vacancy. You want to make some money right now. So it could be a specking candidate in or it could be. But the bottom line is you want to make some money right now. The downside with that is, as I said, it's very unlikely statistically that you'll get all of those boxes ticked. So you'll have to make a lot of activity around it.

Mike Ames [00:07:41]:
It's also very unlikely that you'll get really good quality vacancies because the chances are other agencies have had them for a while, which is why they're giving them to you now, really. And it could be they're very difficult. And the chance of getting that as an exclusive or retained piece of work is pretty slim, really, as well. And also, one last thing, which is a really important point, I think, when the market is flatter as it is now, when it's not as buoyant, good quality clients don't tend to go outside of their established supplier base. Why would they? There's no need, because they've got. The suppliers have got less vacancies to work on, so they put more effort in. There are more candidates swilling around and so they want to bury the opportunities that they get. So you're probably not going to win high value clients.

Mike Ames [00:08:28]:
You know, if you do you really want a client that gives everybody that rings them a vacancy? Do you really want those kind of clients? Because I don't. So basically, it's all stacked against you, which is one of the reasons, in the UK at least, the average number of employees in the recruitment company is seven, because they chase vacancies. Now, let's compare that with strategic BD, or what it used to be called back in the day, relationship selling. I prefer relationship selling, but nonetheless, let's go with the model. Modern phrase, so strategic BD, the narrative. There isn't. Can I make some money out of you right now? The narrative is we've developed a flavor of recruitment over the years, listening to our clients and refining what we do over and over again. Some people like it and some people don't.

Mike Ames [00:09:18]:
What I want to do is explain to you what it is. If you don't like it, we'll just go our separate ways. It's absolutely fine and I wish you well. If you do like it, then we'll just wait. And we tested this next little phrase. Right? So will it take three weeks, three months or three years? It doesn't matter. We'll keep adding value, we'll keep in touch until the opportunity comes our way. And then when it comes our way, you'll know exactly what you're going to get because I've outlined the solution.

Mike Ames [00:09:43]:
It's a completely different narrative, because if you ring in as a tactical business developer, if you get the timing wrong, that's pretty much the end of the call. You've got any vacancies? No. Oh, okay then. Well, I'll call back in three months, then. Whereas I often used to say, when people say, have you got any vacancies? To say, well, I don't really want any to monish right now, but in fact, I usually find they get in the way. What we want to do is fully understand whether our flavor of recruitment matches your tastes. That's what I want to do. And you've got to be able to see in your scene.

Mike Ames [00:10:16]:
I'm going to go through these four steps, which makeup, strategic video. I'm going to explain what they are for people. But you'll see that it's very important that we are able to articulate our flavour of recruitment in a way that makes it distinctive, in a way that makes it stand out. And it's not that difficult to do that, quite frankly. So now you can see. So on the one hand, you've got somebody who's doing a lot of calls and a lot of emails, or one of those frightful auto emails, sending AI generated emails. Absolutely. Load them to test.

Mike Ames [00:10:45]:
They're whacking them out all over the place. They're not pulling in the really high value clients. It's taking a lot of time and in many cases they're just getting a spot deal. So they just get one deal and then they have to go and repeat all that effort to get another deal. What we want is high value clients generate a stream of vacancies. That's what we want, because that makes us uber efficient. And so I'm going to talk about all of those things with you in a minute because I think it's important I get a level of detail, but you see the kind of difference between the two, a different narrative, a different approach between those two.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:17]:
Yeah, no, there's a. I definitely see that. And, you know, I'd say that I almost like want to jump in and just start asking questions, but let's go for it.

Mike Ames [00:11:25]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:26]:
So what's a basic for the listeners? What's it like? How do you. Is your outreach different from the transactional versus the strategic?

Mike Ames [00:11:37]:
Yeah, well, there can be crossover. I'm going to go through that in a minute because it. Four steps and the second one is outreach. And I have to explain how that works because these days it's very different to what it's been in the past. The modern, the very latest thinking around this is very different to what people have been trained and done in the past. So it's very important that I explain that so that people understand what it is. All right, so we're chasing high value clients. And one more thing I'll say before I just launch into this, why it's important to do this if you want to make a lot of profit, and it's all about profit.

Mike Ames [00:12:16]:
It's not about revenues, it's not about number of staff, it's not about number of offices or any of those things, it's profit. That's what counts, right? If you want to make a lot of profit, the way you do that is you figure out ways to lift your revenues without lifting your costs. That's it. That's the big thing. And there are ten different ways that you can do that, but one of them is get higher value or better quality clients. And there's a definition for a high value client as well, which I'm happy to talk about a bit later if we have time, because the clearer your definition of the 20% are, the more likely you are to be able to win them. Do you know, I don't know whether you're familiar with this. Sounds a bit lateral, but I've got to go with it.

Mike Ames [00:12:57]:
So in Europe and in Australia and Asia, I don't think in America in the same way, but we have cave paintings which are 30 or 40,000 years old, and they're usually of animals. They're the kind of animals that our ancestors would hunt, and nobody really knows why they did that, but one stream of thinking is, because a lot of these animals are animals that you would eat, is that people were representing their prey in a way that they could get closer to them and be more successful when they were hunting. It's kind of like that, except don't need to get paint on your fingers. The closer that you can identify and properly visualize those clients, the more likely you are to win them. And that's true. So you can cope paint if you like your bag, but you don't need to. But you have to have a clear definition of what it is. Shall I go through the four steps with you now?

Benjamin Mena [00:13:48]:
So pause on that. Like talking about a clear definition. Are you talking about like a visualization of this, or are you talking about sitting down and actually building out that, that client avatar that you really want?

Mike Ames [00:14:01]:
The latter. It's definitely looking at it well, I can tell you. So all high value clients have certain things in common. So they have a steady stream of vacancies, openings that you know you can fill. So it's no good winning a client that has a vacancy every blue moon, or they're so difficult that they're really, really hard to fill. You need ones that they come out and you can fill them. The second thing is they pay you what you think you're worth. That's kind of important, really.

Mike Ames [00:14:30]:
The third one is you can deal directly with the hiring manager. You don't have to go through a Ta group or a HR group or anything. The fourth thing is the hiring manager has to treat you with respect, makes it easy for you to get vacancies and actually manage them. You know the thing where some managers, you send the CV's, you send the resumes and they sit on for three or four weeks. So by the time they get back to you, half the candidates have gone. So you've got to start again. I don't mean that, I mean someone that works with you and understands the more they do, the more you can do. So that's a generic hiring manager because ICPs ideal client profiles are actually at hiring manager level.

Mike Ames [00:15:11]:
Weirdly, because you can have two companies, you can have one company with two different hiring managers in one is really good because they do all of these things, the other one isn't. So you kind of have to measure at that level. Now at a corporate level, at a company level, you're thinking of things like size, ownership, is it a private company, is it listed companies, it owned by a PE company, whatever, you're looking at their location, perhaps their sector, those kind of things which you can get from your existing 20 percenters, you kind of know what that is, you know what they look like, you know how they operate. So you just lift that and that's a good enough start. That is good enough to start. Okay, now you can get real fancy with this and I'm not going to do it today because it would burn up too much time and it would be overly detailed. But you can actually score the ICP. You can get a number between one and 100.

Mike Ames [00:16:02]:
And if it's 70 and rub with you, go for it between 50 and 70. If you've got nothing else then okay, I'll work it below 50. Not interested. Not doing it. So you can get real fancy with it. But I don't think it's worth it. I just think, well, you know, roughly what they look like. I'm really interested in the hiring managers because it's.

Mike Ames [00:16:19]:
The hiring managers make a big difference as to how successful and how efficient you are to putting bums on seats. So step one, really, it's not one of the four, but step one has to be you identify what an ideal client looked like. Okay, so the real step one is you have to have the hot 100. So 100 targets people's people, this 100 people, decision makers or hiring managers. Hopefully they're the same thing, but they don't have to be 100. Could be anywhere between 71 hundred companies. So you might have two hiring managers for the same company. It doesn't matter, you've got 100 names of people, and you've always got 100 names.

Mike Ames [00:16:58]:
So if you start talking to one of them, you realize they're not going to make a good client. Then you take them off, you replace them with somebody else. If you convert one of them into a client, awesome. They become a client. So you put them in your client estate, you replace them with another one. So there's always 100 going on there, right? That's step number one. Now, you can outsource that. People do that offshore, you can map that market, or you can do it yourself, or you can get junior members to get a list of names and sit there and go through it all.

Mike Ames [00:17:27]:
It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't matter. It just has to be roughly right. Because when you start to talk to them, you'll figure out whether they're the kind of companies that you want or not. So don't let perfect get in the way of progress on this. Do your best.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:42]:
So we always, I hear about the Dream 100, the top 100, all that stuff. But I love what you just said, that this, this list of your hundred, you need to actually, like, the second you take it off, you know, take, you know, comes off like, you fill it back up. It's not like this document, it's 100 and that's it. It's a living 100 that keeps on evolving.

Mike Ames [00:18:03]:
It's in a spreadsheet. I mean, I recommend that people start, if they're doing strategic business development to start with, because I don't know any of the CRM systems out there that do this, that manage this. Well, I mean, they kind of do it after a fashion, just get a spreadsheet. We have a spreadsheet that we give our clients, which has got all the data on it. It's easy, it's easy to manage. It's easy for the manager of the business development function to see what's going on. There's a thing called sales flow, which is the pace, the rate at which these prospects are moved towards being a client. So it's very easy for the managers to see the sales flow.

Mike Ames [00:18:36]:
It's just a great management tool anyway, so in they go, and you put all the details in that you want. You put their mobile, their cell number, they put their LinkedIn URL. The usual sort of stuff goes in. Great. Okay. So that, I think, is, is easy. I don't think that's that hard to do that, really. One of the things that we used to do before the Internet existed and before LinkedIn, we just used to go through people's resumes and look to see where they'd worked.

Mike Ames [00:19:03]:
And then if we saw a company that we didn't recognize, we would ring up the candidate and talk to them about that company, even if it was two or three years ago, they were there to try and understand whether they were the kind of company that we wanted because we didn't have all the modern research functions. There is a million ways that you can assemble your hot 100. Okay, so shall we put a tick next to that one? Has been easy. Okay, next one. Not so easy because you've got to start a conversation on the telephone with somebody who doesn't really want to speak to you. They think that they don't need you. They assume you're going to be something that you're not because recruitment agencies, particularly in Europe, particularly in the UK, not so much in the states, I think, are not as professional as they could be. And so clients aren't really that interested in talking to them.

Mike Ames [00:19:52]:
Plus the fact they're busy. You know, how many, how many agents, how many agencies can you talk to in a week when you're trying to do your job? So you've got this big challenge. And like I said, if you get through to them, if they don't have a vacancy, as far as they're concerned, well, that's the end of the story. Then we can all move on. And it's like, oh, no, no, no. That's not, that's not what I'm ringing for. That's not the deal here. Right? That's just transactional.

Mike Ames [00:20:17]:
That's not what we want. What we want to make sure is the way in which we do things totally matches your tastes, because then we will do great things together. And if it doesn't, then we must tip our cap and we must go in separate directions. So what we need here are things called conversation starters. And what we want these conversation starters to do to give us that first telephone call. We don't do cold call if we don't live in the 1990s anymore. Right. We do warm calls now.

Mike Ames [00:20:45]:
We do calls, hopefully with people who are expecting the call. And I'm going to tell you how that works in a second. And so basically, what this is going to pan out to is about an average eight minute telephone pitch. We call it the soft pitch on the telephone. Almost always you're not going to get a teams call or a Zoom call on the first one. It's almost certainly going to be a telephone call that you're going to do and you have, on average, eight minutes to either convince that person to give you an opportunity at some point now or in the future, or go on to the next stage, which is called a soft pitch. Sorry, a full pitch, which I'll be talking about in a minute. Okay.

Mike Ames [00:21:25]:
So these conversation starters, as you can imagine, they're quite crucial because if you don't, if you don't have something that starts the conversation, the best you can do is cold call. And as I said, not really. I think we can do better than that. So a conversation starter can be. There are three basic ones. The first one and easily the most important, and the one that's most effective, but not the one that's most voluminous. It doesn't happen that much is an introduction. If you've got 100 people in a spreadsheet, you can either do it yourself or we outsource ours to India.

Mike Ames [00:22:00]:
But somebody can say, who is second connected to this person on LinkedIn? Because if they're second connected, it's possible that we could ring up that second connection and say, how well do you know old so and so the target that we're going for? And if they say, yeah, really well, and you say, would you mind doing an email introduction for me? They'll either say yes or they'll say no. Fairly straightforward. If they say yes, all you say is, I don't need you to recommend me, I just need you to say that the way in which we work and the way in which they work, there's probably something to talk about. And then CC mean to the email, job done, conversation started. Right. Well, at least you stand a greater chance. Of course, of those hundred, it's very unlikely that you're going to find a lot of them where you've got a second connection prepared to do an introduction, but it's worth a go. So that's always step one.

Mike Ames [00:22:47]:
Always. Step two is that you can use some of the tactical BD methods. I'm not a big fan of this, but people do it. So does reference flipping translate into american? So you would, you would ring somebody up to take a reference. I've got a candidate who's worked for you venture, and I'm going to ring you up and say, got this candidate, Fred Bloggs, and I want to dig in to see whether they're suitable for a role. They've got. I do a really good job on the reference, but really good job. And at the end of it, sometimes the client will say, actually, I'm really interested.

Mike Ames [00:23:20]:
We've got a role. Could you tell me a little bit about you that's more transactional. But ordinarily what we would say at the end is, look, I don't want to do this now because I think it's inappropriate. The purpose was to ring up and take a reference. But what I would really like to do at some point is to explain our flavor of recruitment, which has been developed. They use the same words every time. You'll hear them cropping up overnight again, because we've tested them and they work right. So we develop this flavor of recruitment over many years of listening to our clients and refining what we do little bit by little bit.

Mike Ames [00:23:52]:
And you'll either like it or you won't. Would it be okay at some point to explain that to you? And they'll say, yes. They'll say no, but sometimes they say, yeah, do it now then, and you've got your conversation starter. So reference flipping is a. Is a good one sometimes.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:08]:
Let me just jump in real quick. You know, when it comes to, like, even a reference check, how many recruiters do a good job of that?

Mike Ames [00:24:14]:
Just shows that you're dreadful, awful good. Because I tell you that the big thing with me, I was trained to look for a reason not to put somebody forward, not to put a candidate forward. So as soon as I saw something that made me feel uneasy, that candidate was out. I think these days there's more of a desire to put people forward. Yeah, they look okay. Yeah, stick them forward. So when I took references, I was genuinely looking for reasons not to send this candidate forward. That's how we were trained.

Mike Ames [00:24:44]:
So if you do that with a client, they pick that up, they know that. They know you've done a good job, and they're thinking, well, if he's doing this job for his other clients, I'd really like him to do this job for me. Which is why very often it switches. We have a client in England that's their main conversation starter. That's the one that they use the most. And even if they don't have a vacancy or an opening, they'll take a reference on somebody and say, which is true, that they're building a talent pool. So they're building a pool of people who aren't necessarily looking for a job, but they want to make sure that they're good people so that if a job crops up in the future, they've already done the reference check, you know, time mapping in this true sense. So if you do a really good job, and if you just do an average job, and if they detect that you're using it to start a conversation, then the chances are it's not really, to be honest, but do a really good job.

Mike Ames [00:25:36]:
It is one way, so that's the second way. But what I want to get to the third way, because the third way is my favourite. There's, I don't know whether you've heard of an approach called Ada. It's actually, if you were pronouncing it, it's like the opera. No. Is it opera? No. Yeah, opera. Aida a I D A.

Mike Ames [00:25:56]:
Have you heard of that?

Benjamin Mena [00:25:58]:
I've heard of it because we actually spoke about it on the phone probably about a month or two ago, but prior to. I actually have.

Mike Ames [00:26:03]:
When you would have heard it then. Okay, well, let me shortcut this. So it was invented in America, in fact, in 1913. Yes, I said 1913. It was very old. And you use it without knowing it. So everybody uses it, they just don't know it stands for attention, interest, desire and action. So if you do a cold call, you've got to get their attention real early on.

Mike Ames [00:26:29]:
And then if you get their attention, you might get seven or 8 seconds to get their interest. Okay. So that's the next thing. The eye, the interest. If you get their interest, then you get a bit longer to create desire for whatever it is that you want at the end of the telephone call. Give me a vacancy, let me come and see you, whatever it is. Right. You can do it in pitches, you can do it when you're asking your boss for a new job.

Mike Ames [00:26:53]:
You can use it in a presentation. It's brilliant because you grab attention. Okay, yeah, you got me. You got me. Then you get a time to build some interesting. Yeah, okay. I'm really, I'm interested. I'll keep going, keep going.

Mike Ames [00:27:03]:
Then you get desire when you kind of lay out the thing and then the call to action at the end, if you've done the other stuff properly, should be easy. It's what's called a passive call to action. There's nothing particularly big for them. It's just easy to say, yeah, oh, yeah. Okay, I'll do that. Right. So Ada is magical. It is absolutely magical.

Mike Ames [00:27:21]:
I love it. I absolutely adore it. So. And you can use it in so many different ways. If anybody would like to know more about Ada, we have a video on our YouTube channel, which, it's a 45 minutes video, I think, which explains it in a lot more detail than I've done now. Anyway, what we want is ADA, conversation starters. We want pre designed, pre tested, pre built things, number of steps, now that we can do that will make it easy even for an average business developer to get results. So we're going to develop this centrally, then we're going to let other people use it.

Mike Ames [00:27:55]:
It's a tool. All tools simplify, speed up and standardize. And that's exactly what an ADA conversation started us. I'm going to give you an example of one. We've got loads of these preset, pre done, millions of them. I love them. So supposing them, we were connected, you and I, but you'd resisted speaking to me connected on LinkedIn. Right? So you'd resisted speaking to me and I'd sent some emails which you'd ignored.

Mike Ames [00:28:19]:
A lesson, some messages on your cell, you'd ignore those as well. So now I'll send you an audio message on LinkedIn. I don't know whether that's very popular in the United States, but it's popular here. You send an audio message, right? Yeah. You're familiar with that? Right? So for those that aren't, you send it from your phone, your app on the phone, you don't send it from, from the laptop. It doesn't work. So go on the app and you can send an audio message. And the audio message just basically says, look, I'm sending you this because I've got something which I think would be interesting to you, and I wanted you to realize that this wasn't an AI generated or some kind of code generated message.

Mike Ames [00:28:56]:
I'm recording this for you, Benjamin. Right. I'm going to send you an email and I'd like you to look at it. You'll know it's from me because the subject line will be following my LinkedIn voice message. You'll know it's for me because of that. And you'll know in the first two sentences whether the rest of that email is relevant. It'll take you about 10 seconds to figure it out. Please take the email and have a look and see what you think, because I think it's going to be relevant.

Mike Ames [00:29:21]:
Right. So what you've done is created attention and started to build some interest. Obviously. It's like, okay, I wonder what that's all about. So it dramatically increases the chance that your email will be opened. So you do that. I'm going to just run the times by you as well. So you'd send that 07:00 in the morning, it's less than a minute, it's about 30 seconds.

Mike Ames [00:29:41]:
The actual message, send them all. Send ten early on. Right. And so people are going to listen to that whilst they're having their cup of tea or cup of coffee in the morning, about 11:00 in the morning, you then send the email between ten and eleven, right? So the email says, the subject line is, you know, following my LinkedIn voice message and it says at the beginning the conditions that apply for this email. So if this applies to you, if you're frustrated with your current recruitment company because they just don't listen, if you're disappointed that you don't get the service levels that you thought, and sometimes if you get a little cross because they just don't listen, then I'd like to share with you our flavor of recruitment. Then you hit him with the top three USP's unique selling points that you have now. Interestingly, we did some research on this some years ago, but I don't think it's changed since then. The top three things that hiring managers want from agencies, excluding a good deal, put that to one side because they all want, number one, they want to get candidate resumes that other agencies aren't.

Mike Ames [00:30:48]:
So they want you to search wider. Number two, they want these resumes and then people who come for the interview to be absolutely spot on for the vacancy. So you understood the vacancy and you've properly qualified them to make sure they match. And number three, you make the process of recruitment easy, convenient and quick. Those three things, right? So the closer that you can get your USP's to those three things, the better it is. And then at the end you say, look, I'm going to give you a call just to explain this in more detail. Okay, very short call. If you don't want me to, then please just reply to this email.

Mike Ames [00:31:26]:
And of course I won't all the way along. One of the important sub messages is I'm not desperate. I'm not desperate. If you don't want to work with me, well that's just peachy because I don't want to work with you then. Not that you would ever say that, but that's a subtext, right? And then you give them a call and you do the soft pitch. Now we get some fantastic conversions on that and there's many different versions of it. Another one is mentioning competitor in the audio. So we just did a piece of work for XYZ.

Mike Ames [00:31:56]:
We know that they're going to know we recruited a so and so and so and so for them. What I'd like to do is send a little email with some of the details in. So keep an eye out for it. It's going to have the competitor name in the subject line, the email comes in, they're going to read it, right? And then you say, of course. Well, I'm not going to sacrifice confidences, but this is what we did. This is the approach that we took. What I'd like to do is give you a call to go through this in more detail. Right.

Mike Ames [00:32:19]:
So there's loads of those. And the data tells us that if you use six, one after the other, every two months, you try a different one, and they're creative and innovative. At the end of it, it's a bit like Charlie Sheen in. What's the one with Michael Douglas? That movie. Come on now. Right? Charlie Sheen's trying to get to speak to Michael Douglas. Can't get to speak to him, just keeps trying different things. And in the end, it's like, who is this guy? Who is this guy that keeps doing these things and will not give up? Yes.

Mike Ames [00:32:52]:
Okay. What have you got to say? So we have one AdA campaign, which is seven different interactions, one each week, some electronic, some through social media, some through the telephone, and some sending things through the mail. At the end of it, you're almost certainly going to get to speak to them. So you have to assume if you're not bounded by your lack of creativity, you're going to get an ADA campaign that's going to start a conversation. When you get that soft pitch, you have to be able to articulate why you're different and what your flavor of recruitment is, because if you can do that, you're much more likely to then go to the next stage, which obviously is a full pitch. So, so far, are we okay? Is that the two stages? You've got that. So draw up the list, use the conversation starters that you pre tested, and, you know, they work a percentage of the time to start a conversation. So far, so good.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:43]:
And real quick, how many people are you talking, talking about doing this on a daily basis?

Mike Ames [00:33:49]:
Well, this is the ironic thing about strategic BD. It wins bigger clients, but it takes a fraction of the time. So the first business we had, which was 40 million quid, so about $50 million, I guess, in the nineties. So now 80 or $90 million, I suppose we had four. Four strategic business developers. That was it. They fed that business because it's very efficient. We always say you need an hour a day to do strategic BD.

Mike Ames [00:34:19]:
Really? An hour a day on average, because you're not going to every day, are you? But that's what we aim for. So you do these in batches, so you would do a batch of, say, ten. And you're going to process all those hundred. You're going to try and try a conversation started with each of those 100 every two months. You can leave it a bit longer if you want. It's just an arbitrary number. Two, three months. Right.

Mike Ames [00:34:43]:
And then you start again with the next conversation starter. And then you start again with the next conversation starter. So you're just getting through 100 every three months there or thereabouts. But it's so easy. I mean, when we ran the last ones for us in the UK, we don't run them anymore because we get a lot of inbound leads now. But when we ran them, my pa, my personal assistant, who's not a marketer at all, she ran it, she did all the steps. All I did was ring in at the end and make the call, which is relatively simple to those people that didn't say, don't ring me, which no one said, right? So this isn't a particularly time consuming thing. It's about creativity, it's about innovation, about being distinctive in yourself and being persistent.

Mike Ames [00:35:25]:
100%.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:26]:
It's almost like slowing down to speed up.

Mike Ames [00:35:30]:
Yes, it is. Yeah. It's a bit like golf I just played this morning, trying to hit a real, like, real big shot. Goes nowhere. You slow it down, it goes for bloody miles, right? And it's the same here. Slow it down. Stop kissing frogs, right? Because if you hire a b deer, you push them out the door and say, off you go. Off you go.

Mike Ames [00:35:50]:
Go get me some work. God only knows who they're targeting. In this particular case, you're saying to your business developers, you can still do your tactical stuff, that's absolutely fine. But you need to process these hundred every single month and every single month, on average. These numbers are average. They do vary wildly. On average, 5% of them you should have a conversation with, on average. So over a year, in theory, you should speak to 60 of them in theory, right.

Mike Ames [00:36:15]:
Can be more than that, can be less than that. But what we're talking about is if we don't give up. I think it was, oh, I want to say Theodore Roosevelt, actually, that had that saying, persistence is omnipotent. Have you seen that quote?

Benjamin Mena [00:36:28]:
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Mike Ames [00:36:30]:
My absolute favorite quote of, in the world, persistent is omnipotent. Everything falls before it, 100%. And that's what we're doing here. I am going to speak to these clients, these prospects, I'm going to speak to them. I don't care how long it takes or what I have to do. But I'm going to speak to them.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:47]:
I'm sure, just to clarify for the listeners, like, if you have BD people, let them keep on doing their tactical stuff. But this, this top 100, it's over a course of one year of doing Ada campaigns. If you talk to 60% of it, that's a successful strategic apex.

Mike Ames [00:37:06]:
You can convert a good percentage of those if you've got a strong product, because you're selling the solution. Now what recruiters mainly do is sell themselves. Hey, look, give me a chance, because you get me and I've got all this experience and I've done all this stuff and I'm an expert in blah, blah blah. Look at my nice suit and everything. I don't know, whatever, then they do. You're not selling that, you're saying, I'm selling a solution. This is what you buy from us so a less senior person who doesn't have the same chutzpah can still sell it because they're selling a solution. Just like if you were selling vacuum cleaners.

Mike Ames [00:37:35]:
You don't need to know about vacuum cleaners. You just need to know the features and benefits of the vacuum cleaner and the effect that has on the people that use them. It's the same deal. You're selling a solution.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:44]:
Well, and this goes into the question I have on this is like, you know, it's so often, you know, you're at a firm or you're working for a firm or you own a firm and it's like, go, go, go, go, attack, attack, attack. How do you switch this mentality to do, like, hey, we need to do this strategic, but at the same time, like, I need to do something. Really?

Mike Ames [00:38:06]:
That's a very good question. I think for starters, you have to have someone who does strategic BD. So, I mean, a small company, it's normally the owner because they're pretty good at BD anyway, right? So they're pretty good at it, right? So they take themselves out of the hurly burly of tactical BD. Leave that to everyone else. You do all that. What I'm going to do, get 100 clients, I'm going to think of these Ada campaigns, or I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and I'm going to get through all of them over and over and again. And then when I get to speak to them, I'm going to describe what we do our solution in such a way that it's compelling. The opposite is it doesn't pass the so what test it's like, that's interesting that.

Mike Ames [00:38:45]:
So what, you know, it's the opposite to that. So, wow, that's really interesting. So that brings me, this isn't one of the steps, but this is really important. This is a precursor. You have to have a strong product or solution. Now, back in the day, when you productized a recruitment solution, you would have good, better and best. So you'd say, well, okay, we've got three ways you can deal with this. We've got this, which is, which is good.

Mike Ames [00:39:09]:
This is contingent. Yada, yada, yada. This is better. And this is like exclusive. And we do this at this and we've got best, which is retained. Right. So, and you describe it in such a way that they, they buy exclusive or retained. Right.

Mike Ames [00:39:20]:
Everyone does that. We've all moved on from that. Now, that's so passe, right. Because everybody knows about it and it's, it's a bit cheesy. I think what we're doing now is what they call a flavor of recruitment. So that means certainly, I'll tell you the important things. You need to be able to pigeonhole yourself. So who do you trade with most? What do they look for? What kind of people do you provide and which location? Which territory? If you bounded by territory, do you operate it? So they're the key things everybody wants to know.

Mike Ames [00:39:51]:
Next thing is, well, okay, why are you different? That's really important. And the way in which you find that out, it couldn't be simpler. You just talk to your existing clients and you ask them, you could use anybody, Ben. You could use anybody, right? Why do you use me? What is it that's so special about me and my agency that you continually use us? And they will tell you, and if you collect enough of that data, your USP's will pop out because of this reason. So that's good enough. But the closer that you can get them to, well, we find candidates that other agencies don't, we qualify them to an extra depth. We're not only looking for people who are suitable, we're looking for people who are serious about the role. Right.

Mike Ames [00:40:33]:
And then we make the process so easy for you that it's almost a pleasure to deal with us. And then you need proof of what you've just said. Right. Those are the key areas. You can put other things in there like values and your quality processes and, you know, your client care facility, all that sort of stuff, really. But those are the things they really want to know. And then you need to be able to go to the next level of detail. So when they say, well, okay, tell me how you find these people that nobody else finds, you've got to have a credible answer to that, which isn't that difficult, quite frankly.

Mike Ames [00:41:04]:
So if you do it in this way, you're drawing them in. It's like, yeah, I really like the sound of this. But here's the thing. When you do this full pitch, when you're explaining the detail of your flavor of recruitment, right, you may be using what they call a two dimensional pitching deck. You come across one of those. 2d pitching deck. Yeah. So using two dimensional pitching deck, which means you have a spine of probably six or seven screens, PowerPoint screens, and then you have hyperlinks to different places.

Mike Ames [00:41:33]:
So as you're going through, if they're interested in something, you hyperlink, look at a few screens and come back to the one you came from. So you can bespoke every single pitch that you make. But they're standardized because they're using standard screens. It's very cool. But as you're doing this, back in the old days, what people would do is do a pitch, whether they use PowerPoint or whatever, and at the end of it, so I can prove all of that, because, like, here's some case studies, or here's some testimonials, or would you like to speak to any of our clients will vouch for us, right? We don't do that now. What we do now is when we make a claim, like, we find candidates that other agencies don't, we prove it. We instantly prove it, either through data or a specific testimonial. So we go over now, and here's a testimonial from Alice Springs, and Alice says, well, I use Mike Ames.

Mike Ames [00:42:21]:
And the thing I really like about him, he just gets CV's that nobody else. Yes. I don't know how he does it, but he does it over and over again. So it's the testimonial which proves the things that you've just said. And as you pitch, you bring in these testimonials. So at the end of it, they believe everything that you've just said. There's this kind of mountain of credibility that you've created for yourself. That's.

Mike Ames [00:42:40]:
That's a full pitch. That's how a full pitch works, right? So at the end of that, what's going to happen is one of three outcomes. Outcome number one, they're not interested. That's not what we do.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:50]:
No.

Mike Ames [00:42:51]:
Fair enough. Okay, so you have to think, will I try them again in the future or not. If so, you can put them in the B list, bring them back in in a year or two years time. If not, off to the russian front, let them go, and you replace them, obviously, with someone else. In number two is they say yes. That sounds really interesting. We have got some vacancies coming up, or we will put you onto the preferred supply list, or we need to take this to the next stage or whatever it is. Great.

Mike Ames [00:43:16]:
So we're. And you know what to do then, obviously, number three, and this is the interesting thing that transactional business developers miss off number three is what we call the forgotten 45%, because on average, it's 45% of the people that you pitch to is, well, it's not a yes, but it's not a no. Ah. So you can imagine transactional business developers aren't interested in them because there's no money now. So. But for us, we love them because that's nine times as many people who've said yes are saying, well, it's not a yes, but it's not a no. So what we do is we put them into what's called a three tier cultivation regime. Don't think I've got time to talk that through.

Mike Ames [00:43:55]:
Maybe another time, actually, we have a video on that as well, weirdly. But you're basically going to cultivate people using the same cultivation techniques. Pretty much that Joe Girard. Don't know whether you've heard of him. The greatest salesman in the world for ten years, Ronnie is american. He sold cars for Chrysler. I think the same technique that he used. He basically keeps in touch and adds value.

Mike Ames [00:44:15]:
That's basically what he does in a very structured way, over three tiers. And what you expect to do is every now and again another one drops in because they're not using you now for one of two reasons. Predominantly, they're not entirely sure about you yet, and they need more proof and more convincing, or the timing just isn't right. They're just not in the headspace isn't right or whatever. So keeping in touch, adding value, going to see people basically building up rapport and affinity and trust at the same time as waiting until an opportunity comes up. In theory, you should convert about half of the 45%. So of the hundred that you set off with, really, you should be trading with 20% to 30% of them, really within. Within a year to 18 months.

Mike Ames [00:45:03]:
That's kind of how the numbers play out. We can imagine the effect that that is going to be on your business is enormous. Really. It's enormous. So those are the steps. Let me quickly summarize. There's a pretty cursor that you've got your ICP, so you know what a good 20% will look like for you. There's a precursor that you've put your product reproductive what you offer into a solution.

Mike Ames [00:45:24]:
So you've done that. The rest of it's easy. You assemble your hot 100, you get conversations started, you test them until they work, then you basically do them in batches and you apply the different conversation starters over and over again till someone speaks to you. They don't speak to you now, then you can put them into the forgotten 45% three tier conversion ratio until they do convert. That are easy. There you go.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:49]:
It's a complex easy, but it also requires a mentality, focus, of slowing down.

Mike Ames [00:45:58]:
That is the biggest thing. It's a mentality. Most recruiters are trying to get the business. So you say to them, I see it, I watch them sometimes I do training sessions. So I see them and say, right, Kate, let's go through it. So they video it for me and it's like doing all this. Yeah, well, you know, we're not interested. We're interested in.

Mike Ames [00:46:11]:
We're out flavouring any of you. And at the end of it. Oh, by the way, they've got any vacancies? No, no, no, no. You've just undone all the great work. No, no. They're programmed. It's programmed into them to do it. So you don't need too many strategic business developers in an organization, because it's an hour or maybe an hour or two a day.

Mike Ames [00:46:33]:
That's all it is. They can have another job. They can be an account manager, perhaps, or they can be a team leader, perhaps if you've gone down the pod system, they would be the pod leader that did it. And they can still do tactical BD, if you like, but what you notice is, as time goes on. So at the end of both of my businesses, particularly the first one, which I was involved with, more, the more strategic BD that you do, the less tactical BD that you need to do. So at the end, I don't think we were doing any at all, really. We weren't the big clients and then we looked after the clients. We used client care to make sure they got the vacancies and we were first choice.

Mike Ames [00:47:08]:
It's only complex, really, Benjamin, in the sense that there are a lot of moving parts, but none of the moving parts are difficult. None of them. There isn't a single thing that I've said to you today, which is difficult when you get down to the level of detail that we need to to make this work, it's not difficult to do. Putting it all together is kind of difficult. I accept that. But once you understand it and break it down, what do they say? How do you eat an elephant? A mouthful at a time. It's the same thing. It's not difficult.

Mike Ames [00:47:37]:
Really?

Benjamin Mena [00:47:38]:
Oh, wow. That's awesome. I took a ton of notes already during this interview, personally. Well, we're going to jump over to the quickfire questions, okay?

Mike Ames [00:47:48]:
What?

Benjamin Mena [00:47:49]:
Because this is awesome. And I feel like just like every time we'd always talk, Mike, like, time just flies.

Mike Ames [00:47:55]:
Amazing, isn't it?

Benjamin Mena [00:47:57]:
What advice would you give to a brand new recruiter that's just starting out to become successful?

Mike Ames [00:48:02]:
Focus, focus, focus your time, focus your attention. Eventually get to the stage where you, where you've got a niche and then a micro niche, because that's the thing. Will get your own supplier list, you'll make more money, you'll charge bigger rates for what you do, bigger fees for what you do, and after a while, you'll attract people because you're known as the go to guy or the go to girl for something. Focus, focus, focus.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:29]:
And same question, but for experienced recruiters, what advice would you give to them.

Mike Ames [00:48:33]:
To learn to write authentic content? I'm not a huge AI kind of fan, really, although I am and I'm not, but when it comes to content, I'm very definitely not. It's just anodized. It's horrible, really. Learn to write, learn to be able to put your voice into words and post regularly, build your personality, add value, publish things that are interesting, interact. That's the way that you set yourself apart online these days, and you kind of have to do that. Definitely.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:04]:
So when AI first came out, I was actually using a lot more AI posts and stuff like that, but now you, everybody can just see it that's read by AI.

Mike Ames [00:49:12]:
I mean, miles, really? Really? Are you gonna send me that?

Benjamin Mena [00:49:17]:
I feel like the word game changer has been, like, overused.

Mike Ames [00:49:20]:
Well, I've been in it since got computing since 1978. I took a degree in computer science. So what happens is always the same. A new product comes along and everybody says, this is going to change everything. This is the new, this is going to change everything. And everyone becomes terribly disappointed that it's nowhere near. And by the time the technology has caught up and overtaken people's expectations, it's too late. Only a few people are interested in, and that's going to happen with AI, for sure.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:45]:
So what advice would you give to recruitment firm owners that are looking to attract and keep their own talent?

Mike Ames [00:49:52]:
Well, that starts with an EVP, an employee value proposition, which I don't think is a big thing in America as it is in Europe. Essentially, the research tells us that 75% of candidates, particularly Gen zs and millennials, are as interested or even more interested in the company that they're going to join as they are the job. So it's very important to represent the important things that they look for in companies in a way that they can understand and assimilate. And it's called an EVP, an employee value proposition. So if you want to attract people for yourself, then you must write your own EVP and you sell that first. Before we sell the job, we sell the company. Come and join me. Who was it? It was Steve Jobs.

Mike Ames [00:50:35]:
Oh, crikey. I can't think of the guy's name now. He ran, he was the CEO of Pepsi, and Steve Jobs was trying to get him to work for Apple, and he basically said to him, look, are you going to make sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come and join me and change the world? He didn't talk about the job. He talked about the mission. Right. The values, what we're trying to do here. And it's kind of that first, and then when you get them hooked, then you can talk about the job, and then all you need to do is deliver what you promise and people will stay. Our attrition rates are about less than 3% every year on annual attrition rates of staff.

Mike Ames [00:51:08]:
And that's because we've got a really strong mission and a really strong culture. We listen to them, we treat them well, and we deliver what we promise. Who would want to leave that kind of business? Who would want to leave that cool?

Benjamin Mena [00:51:19]:
I mean, I feel like recruiting, like people jump into recruiting and jump out of it so quickly.

Mike Ames [00:51:24]:
They do? Yeah. Yeah, they do. I think that's why it's important to try and hire people who see recruitment as a profession, as a way forward, and want to do it properly. You know, Steve Martin said once, when he was asked, how do you get on in show business? He said, you've got to be so good, they can't ignore you. And that's the secret to success in recruitment, really. You've got to be so good, they can't ignore you. You're really so obsessed with quality and service levels and improvement in the way in which you find people and qualify them so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, forget all the marketing schmiesl if you can do that, you will be successful.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:02]:
Love that. Has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Mike Ames [00:52:07]:
I read all the time. There's lots of them. I'll tell you the one I'm reading at the moment. It's called deep work by Cal Newport. Don't know whether you've come across that one. Looks like you have. It's brilliant. I love it.

Mike Ames [00:52:18]:
Just love it, really. And it's about focus, really, strangely enough, and about concentration. So I suppose that works. But that's a really good book. If you feel overwhelmed and you feel you don't have enough time to do everything, get that book and see what it tells you.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:33]:
That book kind of woke me up on the idea of how busy I was versus productive.

Mike Ames [00:52:39]:
Oh, busy doesn't necessarily mean productive, does it? Apparently not at all. I think it's a really good idea to go through that. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:48]:
What's been like, you know, you've sold two businesses, like, what's been a huge driver of your own personal success?

Mike Ames [00:52:54]:
Well, I like to be busy. I like to have a struggle. I like to have something that's a challenge in my life, something that's not easy. I like something that if it fails, it's going to hurt me in some way. I like to be on a journey. I like to have come from somewhere, be somewhere and going somewhere, and can see the journey. I love to work with people who are passionate and committed and want to do great work. They want to do great work.

Mike Ames [00:53:20]:
They're not satisfied with average. They want to do great work. I love that. And I love it until the day I die. So important.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:27]:
And this is my favorite question, and I know I probably asked this on episode 80, but I want to hear your answer again. You've sold two businesses. You've grown two businesses. You've dealt with a lot of heartache with all that. There is a ton of up and downs when you are a firm owner. If you got a chance to go back and sit down with yourself early in your career, everything that you know now, what advice would you give yourself?

Mike Ames [00:53:57]:
Oh, spend more quality time with your family. Oh, if I'd got. If I knew doctor who and I could get in his time machine and go back, that's the thing. I would tell myself, look, you idiot, you don't need to sacrifice everything to be successful. Don't do that. Don't do that. Thing when you go on vacation and sneak off to do your emails or look at your phone when you're at dinner to do something. No, no, no, no.

Mike Ames [00:54:18]:
When you're with them, you're with them, 100% with them. Leave your phone at home. Don't turn your computer on. They know. They know this. Give them the time that they want, because believe you me, that time passes so quickly, and then they're gone. They don't need you anymore. So 100% that would be.

Mike Ames [00:54:34]:
I said that the last time as.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:35]:
Well, and I'm just out thinking about going out to dinner with my wife later. I'm like, you know what? I just need to leave my phone at home.

Mike Ames [00:54:43]:
Yeah, well, I've got a second phone, which is just an old fashioned flip phone. It's about pound 50 or something it costs me. And all it does is make phone calls and sends SMS text messages. That's all it does. And I'll take that. So if anybody needs me, they can get me, but I can't do anything else on it. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:00]:
Well, for the listeners, how can they follow you?

Mike Ames [00:55:03]:
Well, we run a show every two weeks called the Mike Ames recruitment show. You can find that just through LinkedIn because it's live streamed through LinkedIn and YouTube. We have a YouTube channel where they all go. We have a podcast where the audio go. If you're a podcast person, or you could just connect with me on LinkedIn. We also produce one off webinars, so we've got the next webinar. I don't know when this goes out, so it's hard to say, but we're producing a webinar, which is an hour a quarter on the detailed breakdown of strategic bd. We do things like that, so we do a lot of content, free content for people.

Mike Ames [00:55:34]:
Connect with me on LinkedIn. You'll see to my posts.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:37]:
Awesome. Well, before I let you go, is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners?

Mike Ames [00:55:43]:
I think I'll tell you just one thing. Just one thing. Years ago, I hired a coach. Her name was Ann Marie. And I was in trouble because it had just after I had the breakdown, and I needed someone to help me. And one of the things that she taught me to do was I was a recruiter, but I was running a 5 million, so six or $7 million business, but my mentality was still a recruiter, and I was running this business. And what she taught me was to take on or absorb a business owner's mentality, which is at the opposite end to a recruiter. Whereas recruiters, everything's immediate.

Mike Ames [00:56:23]:
Make money immediately. Everything's got to turn into a deal. A business owner isn't like that. A business owner will invest for the long term. They plan for the long term. They're prepared to do things without an immediate return to it. And she helped me to switch from being a recruiter that owned a business to be a business owner that ran a recruitment firm. There is a world of difference.

Mike Ames [00:56:44]:
And I would urge everybody to look at yourselves and think, which are you? Because to be successful and to have a good life, you need to be a business owner who runs a recruitment firm.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:55]:
Mike, thank you so much for once again coming on. One of the challenges with bringing you on, Mike, and every time we talk is like time just magically flies. I look down and I'm like, I got a few more questions I want to ask. But I'm like, wow, the time just flew.

Mike Ames [00:57:13]:
I'll come back next year. I'll come back next year and do another one. We'll be fine. But I love it. You're very good. I did say this on the post. You are a very good interviewer. You know how to get the best out of people.

Mike Ames [00:57:22]:
You're a very good listener, and I love coming on this show. I'm so looking forward to today, I have to say. So thank you for having me on, and I hope all the people listening to this have got something from it. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:32]:
Well, I absolutely believe that they did, like, slow down to speed up. I hope you took a ton of notes. And for the listeners, I want 2024 to be your best year yet. Let's crush it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the elite recruiter podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed, hit subscribe and leave a rating.