How To Go From Billing $200k to $700k: Dante Nino’s Blueprint for Scaling Recruitment Teams

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast, when your team is.

Dante Nino [00:00:04]:
Winning, it's because of them. And when your team is losing, it's because of you. Recruitment's hard. It's a tough business to be in. You're going to get punched in the face, kicked while you're down, but at the end of the day, you just have to be very consistent.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:19]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with.

Dante Nino [00:00:22]:
Your host, Benjamin Mena, where we focus.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:25]:
On what it takes to win in the recruiting game.

Dante Nino [00:00:28]:
We cover it all from sales, marketing.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:31]:
Mindset, money, leadership, and placements. I am so excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast. The reason why I'm stoked about this is because Dante's been able to get people. He's got. He's mastered this. Taking people that have been billing 2 to 300k and getting them up to the 500 to 700k range. And Dante's not a coach. Like, I mean, he's an agency or so of course he's a coach to his team, but he's not a coach out there trying to teach something out there.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:01]:
He is actually implementing this with his team members and working with him how to almost, like, sometimes double or triple, like, with their production numbers. And I'm so excited for him to share on the podcast because I top this off, he's also a young agency owner at the age of 30, so out there crushing it. Welcome to the podcast, Dante.

Dante Nino [00:01:18]:
Yeah, that's quite an inference. Thank you for that. Thanks for having me.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:23]:
I've been following you for a while, so I'm excited to finally have this conversation. As you know how we start this episode. How did you end up in this wonderful world of recruiting?

Dante Nino [00:01:32]:
Yeah. Well, before we get started, thank you for having me. And like I was telling you last week, I was with my team, met them in person. They were talking about Elite Recruiter Podcast. I was like, oh, cool, I'm going to be talking to Benjamin on Monday. So here we are now. But, yeah, now you're bringing a lot of value to the recruitment industry, so appreciate you for that. But, yeah, I mean, I got into agency recruiting at a young age, at 22, first job out of college.

Dante Nino [00:01:56]:
I knew a person through an internship. Me and now my business partner were selling insurances, life insurances. And it wasn't that great, to be honest, but it taught us a lot about cold calling and getting out there, being uncomfortable. And two weeks after I graduated, I started my job at Aerotech, one of the biggest staffing companies in the World. And they have an amazing training program. I had some great coaches there, great training, and I did very well the first year. Then I headhunted to go work for a large engineering company to be their corporate recruiter, an internal recruiter for them. And then I did really good with them.

Dante Nino [00:02:31]:
I was saving them half a million or more in fees. And I started to figure out that recruitment fees are high. And I would come up to my roommate Simon, who was now my business partner, and be like, dude, there's a lot of money in the recruitment agency and I'm doing it already for my company. Like, we should start thinking about maybe starting a recruitment company. So we saved enough money for like eight, nine months. After work, we go to the library, go study, see how we start a business. We had no idea. And yeah, we decided to launch a business back in 2019.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:02]:
Well, okay, let me unpack this. So Aerotech, probably some of the best recruiting journey in the world. But I'm guessing that you probably made just as much or probably more money as an internal recruiter making that jump, right?

Dante Nino [00:03:13]:
No, because Aerotech, it's very hard to make a lot of commissions because there's a lot of contract based and I was doing a lot of content hire and I wasn't able to do a lot of direct placements. So, you know, I was making a good base and everything. But once I went internal, they gave me a hefty salary for just a salary with some bonus, which, you know, I didn't like because I know how much money I was saving them, how much value I was providing. I was hungry, I wanted to make more. So I went back into the agency world.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:39]:
Well, that's awesome. Okay, so I think this is an important part that you said that you saved up eight to nine months for you guys to launch the firm. Is that correct?

Dante Nino [00:03:46]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:47]:
When did you finally just pull the trigger and just make that jump? Like, can you kind of walk us through that?

Dante Nino [00:03:53]:
So it took us eight to nine months to save money that we wouldn't need to work a single day for about a year with our living expenses. We were sharing a three bedroom. Our rent was probably three to four hundred dollars a month. It was in Bakersfield, California, which is super cheap. And I had no loans, no student loans or anything either that time because we were college soccer players and we got full rides for scholarship. So we just saved it up money that we could live off for about a year. Then we're like, all right, let's do it. If it's not now, it's not going to be never.

Dante Nino [00:04:24]:
So we had no excuses and we just made it happen. Full of trailer. Once we had enough money in our banks to live up and invest in the company.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:31]:
Okay, so you guys ticko, how did you guys pick up your first few clients? And I wanted to kind of frame this before we start walking into the system that you guys have developed.

Dante Nino [00:04:40]:
Yeah, so it took us a while, to be honest. It took us about eight, nine months to actually land something. Yeah, it was quite some time. And this was during 2018 that we kind of quit our jobs and we were like, all right, let's do this. And then finally 2019, we went in all in on TLO and decided that, you know, we landed our first client late, I think it was earlier 2019, and it was a $9,000 fee at 12%, I think. And we were just trying to get anything we can just to get in the door and we made it happen. So it took us a long time, but after that we got gist of it and we did fairly well the first year.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:16]:
Okay. So it took for a while, you know, during this time where you guys like, you both left like cushy jobs, it took a while to get that first commission check. Did you guys ever doubt yourselves?

Dante Nino [00:05:27]:
No. No. We were hungry. We knew we were going to figure it out. And it's not like we just quit our jobs and kind of started from scratch. When we were saving enough money during those eight, nine months, we were already working in the business trying to figure out the back end of it, you know, sending emails, try to get some business in there. But we knew that it was taking way too much time. I mean, we're working our full time jobs and going to the library or going to Barnes and Noble just because there was better HD there and better wifi.

Dante Nino [00:05:53]:
And we were from there from 6 to 10pm 11pm when they kicked us out. And we were like, we need to go on this full time. So we just decided to pull the trigger. Like, we know we can do it, we can do it. We have nothing to lose.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:05]:
Nothing to lose. You guys like, you know, ground away until you guys figured it out. And once you guys figured it out, it sounds like you guys have created this like blueprint for yourselves that you guys have just duplicated that. Can you talk about that?

Dante Nino [00:06:17]:
It's not really like we figured out overnight, but, you know, once we launched in 2019 and Simon went all in and I went all in, we did very well. We did close to almost half a million. Me and him just alone and you know, we're 24, 25 year olds with that kind of money. It was just like, wow, there's a, there's a lot. But then the following year we hired, we were like, we could keep doing this, but we're working a lot. We're working 80, 90 hours. And it's good. I mean, it's just me and him and we got no kids, we're not married.

Dante Nino [00:06:46]:
So. But this is not sustainable. It's like, so how do we do more with less is by leveraging people. We gotta teach everyone how we're doing it and everything. And we decided to invest in technology. We had enough capital to invest all our money and have a strong cash position to be able to bring in three people the next year. Then you know, second year we went from, you know, half a million to 1.3 million and we're like, dude, this works. How do we bring in more people? But even after that, the second to third year, you know, we grew again.

Dante Nino [00:07:15]:
We were just stuck. It's like we kept hiring people. We lost some people. We were talking to other agency owners and they were doing way better than us and the technology was better. So we were like, we got to kind of step back and figure out how do we keep people around in our company and duplicate the success here.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:32]:
And okay, so that's a great way to look at it. Like, you guys need to figure out the systems on the backend to keep people because, you know, recruiters sometimes can like, you see, sometimes some agency recruiters go from place to place. But you know, one of the things that, like, you know, I know we had a conversation about this before we hit record and turned kind of like our pregame chat. You guys have like this like 500k build game plan that you guys have created.

Dante Nino [00:07:55]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:55]:
And you know, I think like, well, you also talked about really just like finding the right people. But let's talk about how you set up people's desks towards that game plan.

Dante Nino [00:08:05]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it took us, you know, five years to figure this out. Everyone thinks that we just have a game plan to just to arrive. But we had a lot of trial and errors, we had a lot of turnover, we had a lot of bad hires. And at the end of the day, it was just learning experience for us. But I feel like now, especially this year, we've been able to take a step back and kind of realize how to build up people from, you know, someone that's billing 2 to 300k. How do we get them to that 500k, 600k, 700k level. And we realized by talking to a lot of people, there's quite a few things.

Dante Nino [00:08:36]:
And first we got to find people's wives. I think that's very important. Yes. Someone could come in. I want to make a lot of money, but, like, why do you want to make a lot of money? And I feel like once you figure that out as an owner, you're able to motivate them. Not on. Not only the money part, but on the. On their why.

Dante Nino [00:08:51]:
You know, we have some people that want to buy their parents a house. So whenever they're having something go wrong, something go bad. You know, the recruiting industry is like, hey, we're doing this because, you know, you need to make this happen to get your parents a house. And that's the internal motivation that we use for our employees. It's not like, hey, you got to build, you got to do more. After that, we want to look at, you know, depends where they're at. Every recruiter. I used to think that we bring in recruiters and we improve them on their weaknesses, but I realized that we had it wrong.

Dante Nino [00:09:23]:
We got to look at their strengths here. And if someone's good at bd, how do we provide more backend support on the business development side? If someone's good on the recruitment side, how do we provide more support on the business development side for them? And we've been able to kind of take on people from there. And after that, it goes back to kind of what everyone does. It's like, all right, well, you've been doing well, doing 2 to 300k, who's your ICP ideal client? Profu. Who do you want to target? Then after we figure out who the right deal target client, we're going to figure out, okay, who are your best clients right now? Okay, so we need to find more clients like this one that you've been building from and get more out of it. And we're not going to do a shotgun approach and go get anyone. And we can't. That we can, because, yeah, you can, but it's not sustainable.

Dante Nino [00:10:04]:
We want to make sure we get those accounts, you know, your niche, you know, your market, and after that, start nurturing those accounts. Once you start getting more clients, like that is all right. Instead of saying, hey, instead of doubling my placements and, you know, you have to get more business and more success there. Now we're like, okay, well, you have two clients that you're billing five figures from. How do we make Those six figure clients. So that going into the next year you got two to three six figure clients that trust you, like you, you've had success with. And next year we're going to have you get more business that's maybe less than 50% of new business. And nurture those accounts.

Dante Nino [00:10:39]:
How do we nurture those accounts? We make a placement, we go visit them, we go ask them different questions. How can we be a better partner for you? How many placements do you make a year with staffing agencies? And we want to become more of a partner here and a win win. What can we do better to improve our processes and help you grow as a company and so on. And just by talking and interviewing a lot of recruiters, the easiest way to get ahead of 90% of recruiters is by simply getting out there and meeting your clients. So many people don't do it. We had some recruiters that come in and we're like, oh, shoot, I've never visited clients. Like, well that's good. Like now you are.

Dante Nino [00:11:15]:
And once they do, they're like, yeah, I just got a lot more positions. They like me. They invited me to a conference or whatever it is. I'm like, yeah, that's good. We want that because especially during the economic times like we are right now, it's very important. And those clients will come back to you and use you for future references.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:34]:
Okay. That was one of the things that just like really jumped out at me when we did our pre game chat. We were like, oh yeah, like I will fly our recruiters anywhere. I'll fly a video team with them. Like, I was like, wait, that's been one of the common themes of like these top billers that are crushing. It is like, I hate to say this, like seeing people in real life, it's not.

Dante Nino [00:11:54]:
People are not used to it.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:55]:
I think like so many people got safe behind the camera, you know, doing this, the zoom meetings, this and that. I still make the placements. But man, when like, I think people are really jonesing for like an actual real life connection.

Dante Nino [00:12:09]:
Yeah. And sometimes it comes back to the basics. Building relationships here in the recruiting industry, because it's a relationship based industry. And if you're not doing that, you're just working as a job. It's a job for you. If you really want to make it a career, you really have to invest in meeting people, getting out there. And you know, sometimes I even talk to recruitment owners or people that have been in the industry for 20 years and they're not doing much business. Development anymore.

Dante Nino [00:12:34]:
They're doing a lot more account management and that's because they have repetitive business. People trust them and you know, they're scooting by doing 4 or 500k on autopilot now.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:46]:
So you've talked about kind of like how to like raise the standard of a recruiter that joins your team, you know, from that 2 to 300k to that 5 to 700k, but like, you know, doing that takes a lot of work, but also managing a bunch of high performers, how are you doing that? Like, you know, a lot of times like a players. And you now you have a lot of a players on your team.

Dante Nino [00:13:05]:
Yeah. I think as an agency owner, your first 10 hires are very crucial. And within those 10 hires you gotta hire people. We made a mistake of hiring people that we liked. It's like, oh, they'd be good for the job, let's give them a shot. And some of those people just don't work out. I think the first few hires are going to. People are going to be people that intimidate you and that kind of push you to be a better leader as well too.

Dante Nino [00:13:28]:
And those people, you got to not only sell them on your vision, but on your mission. And it becomes less about you, it's more about them. So what can you do to make an impact on their lives and not only on their professional life, financial life, but as a person as well too? Because that's something that we've been pushing people now it's like, hey, yeah, I could bring you in and I can make you into a 500, 700k biller, but you know, you could do that with any other company. So what motivates you and what do you want to do here in the next three to five years? Like, I want to know more about you and how I can help you make that happen. I think owners usually think more about it than numbers, numbers, numbers. And we did too, and it just didn't work out for us because we realized the culture wasn't there. There just wasn't enough motivation. And now we take more of approach of like, well, why do you want to be a 500k builder and where do you want to be in the next five to seven years? You want to be a manager? Okay, we're going to draw out a plan for you to become a manager.

Dante Nino [00:14:25]:
If you want to be a director of business development, hell yeah, I want you to become a director of business development. So this is kind of the game plan and this is where we need to be for you to get there. And you know, right now we have a few people right now as we're growing that one and more in the learning and development. Simon and I just work too much and we were all over the place kind of handling different things. So now we've been kind of giving away more delegation, you know, to managers. We've been able to promote two managers the last two years and they've been taking a lot off our plate, which has been good. And I feel like a lot of owners are usually kind of shy of that and they don't want to give, you know, more away or more delegation because they feel no one else can do it but themselves. And that's something that we've been able to kind of give up.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:08]:
You mentioned earlier that you guys like initially hired because you liked people. When did you guys finally break through that lesson of like, that wasn't the game plan?

Dante Nino [00:15:16]:
Yeah, well, there's. So there's a few specific reasons, you know, one, we like people, we thought they could be good, but they just weren't. I would say we also didn't have the best kind of game plan for them to be successful. There's been many situations where we just hired people just because we like them. And when they come in, we like, yeah, they just weren't it. I think one of the hardest lessons we've learned is that hire people who are motivated, self motivated, because you can't really motivate people that are unmotivated. Even though you like them and that you think they're going to be good. If you think they have potential, that's good.

Dante Nino [00:15:48]:
But in the first few hours you got to have people that are ls, you know, we've had people where they have 10 years of the recruitment industry experience and you know, they come in, we're like, well, they're going to kill it here with us. You know, they have 10 years of experience. But we realized that if someone hasn't progressed in 10 years, there's usually a reason for that. And it happened to us where, yeah, they were just stuck in their old ways. They weren't really motivated anymore in the crew industry. They probably got burned out and we ended up letting them go and we took losses there. And you know, now we don't really hire too many people that are very experienced just because we don't see self motivation there to kind of progress. And if you're a small company going from, you know, 0 to 5, 5 to 10, you got to have people that are motivated to grow and scale here.

Dante Nino [00:16:33]:
With you because you can't hire just people that are experienced. They're not going to want to do anything different.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:40]:
But you also, like, okay, you guys, like. And we're going to talk about content in a bit because I think that's been an important part of your conversation and everything you're doing is content. But you are now, like, having people reach out to you guys to join your team, like, it's completely different ballgame now, like, how do you, like, you initially figure out, like, hey, this is actually going to be an A player or, hey, maybe this is a person that we need to skip on.

Dante Nino [00:17:05]:
Yeah. We realized, especially in the last year, there's been a lot of layoffs in the recruitment industry. And we've hired people who were laid off that were top billers at their old companies. And it's always shot us back in the foot because once they come in, we realized why they got laid off and it was because probably they came in at the period where it was really good for the recruitment industry and they did well. Then after that they just kind of choked. So now the best hires we've made are people that are currently working on staffing companies and people who not necessarily have everything to progress up. Some of the best recruiters we brought in were, hey, you know, I work for a company. I love the company, I do very well.

Dante Nino [00:17:53]:
But as I'm looking to grow or maybe move out, I want to work remotely. And remote is not really an option for me right now. So, you know, there's one good motivation there that we could offer there. You know, for our company. We've had people where, hey, like, I'm working at a company, I'm established, I'm three years in, I've been doing around 300k, but I don't really have the supports or anyone to kind of help me get to that port. 500k, not only on the mentorship side, but I also want to get out there more. I want to do videos. I love the content you guys are doing.

Dante Nino [00:18:23]:
Is there any opportunity there? And those people tend to be the best hires here for us. People who have like one certain thing that they're not getting from the current employer. And we think it's mostly money, but sometimes it's not money. You know, people have something else that they want a reason to make a move from. Because, you know, you could go to any other agency and make a lot of money. I mean, there's certain agencies that I've hired people where their base was like 30,000 and their commissions were like almost 50%. And there's a reason why they left there. It's just there.

Dante Nino [00:18:52]:
Here's how we do it. Go do it. You know, some of those people want to be a part of a team environment. People that are competitively friendly and always competing with each other, that uplift each other and work as a team instead of just a hunter.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:04]:
Oh, I love that you, like, talked about the team environment because, you know, you played, Was it soccer in college?

Dante Nino [00:19:09]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:10]:
And you need every single player on the team to win. But you also hit something called content. And that's actually kind of how I ran across you guys originally.

Dante Nino [00:19:17]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:18]:
Or ran across you originally was just the content that you put out there. Like, first of all, like, why did you decide to turn up the content?

Dante Nino [00:19:25]:
Yeah. Me and my business part, Simon, were always against it. We wanted to be low key. We wanted to be just people that did the work and kind of get it done. Then we spoke to an advisor and early on and they were like, you guys need to get ahead of the game. They told us one fact. It was a couple of years ago. Where did you know that only 1% of LinkedIn users are actually posting on a weekly basis? It was something like that.

Dante Nino [00:19:50]:
I was like, wow. It's like, so if you just post on a weekly basis, you're already in the top 1%. I was like, wow, that's incredible. Like, I like being in the 1%. So me and my business partner, well, let's just stick to posting. And of course, when you start posting, it's writing. You think about what other people think about you, and you get maybe one, like, if you're lucky, from your business partner, which is good. And then we just kind of started from there.

Dante Nino [00:20:15]:
Then, you know, the first six months, we didn't really see much traction. Then we've got an inbound lead. I was like, dude, I got. I got someone that found us and want to use this. I was like, oh, shoot. I was like, well, let's ramp it up and do it even more then. Funny enough, us how our second hire, our company found us. He was a construction professional.

Dante Nino [00:20:33]:
He was a project manager for a company. He was making way over six figures. We would never be able to afford him, but he liked what we were doing. Where, you know, I came from a construction background. Now I'm doing recruiting. I'm helping construction professionals kind of grow within there. And he was sold on the vision and mission that we're doing, and he took a significant pay cut and joined us just because he saw that and now, you know, he's killing it. You know, he did 154,000 in one week in placement fees.

Dante Nino [00:21:01]:
And I'm like, that's incredible, dude. Like, how did like. But it took him time and it took him everything. But he found us through content. And that was early on too. That was probably our second year going into business. And they were like, hey, we need to ramp this up. If we're doing it now, not many people are going to be doing it.

Dante Nino [00:21:17]:
People are going to start doing it later on. And we've seen a big shift over the last few years. People are starting to post more. And now that we bring in our team, we have our team do two posts a week. One either share something about the construction industry, whatever you want, or share a win or something you've learned in the recruitment industry that could kind of benefit you. And trust me, you'll get a lot of inbound business. And it has been, I mean, first for us it was content on the construction industry, get inbound business. Now I've pivoted more way of that.

Dante Nino [00:21:45]:
Now I want to post content to give value to recruiters and I want recruiters to be successful with whatever value I provide them. And then, hey, if you found value and you made a placement that way, come work for us. I could back you up, I could give you more, I could fly out anyone to come see you and, you know, shoot video content. I'll come out and come do some video content with you and I'll be able to promote you and get your book of business even more if that's something that you want to do. And it's been working out so well. I mean, some of the hires we bring in are plug and play. They know how to do the job, they're good and, you know, they'll be profitable recruiters here within our business within 60, 90 days.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:21]:
Wait, so you will literally fly a camera person out to help them film content to help the recruiting.

Dante Nino [00:22:27]:
So we haven't done it yet, but right now we are offering it because some people are still not very comfortable. And what we've been doing mostly is I come out and see them. So last week I was out in la. We have around eight recruiters around Southern California. So we booked an office for a day, we shot content for half a day and I did it with every single person there and anyone that wants to do videos, I create scripts for them and we do an interview style kind of content play. And now we're even thinking about doing on the east coast, because we have some employees on the East Coast. All right, how do we get people for the east coast and maybe to do it once a quarter. So we are definitely, you know, picking up a lot more on that.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:04]:
And you know, especially with the LinkedIn algorithm. Like just this morning when I popped up on LinkedIn, one of your interviews was the first thing that popped up on my feed.

Dante Nino [00:23:11]:
Oh, really? Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:15]:
So like, I love that you guys are kind of like forward motion and thinking about things, but like not afraid to actually invest in your recruiters.

Dante Nino [00:23:22]:
Yeah, I think a lot of business owners and a lot of recruitment owners are scared to invest in not only the technology, which we're very innovative on that way, anything we see, any recruiter that comes in with our company, if you see something, let us know. And we like it, and we see an roi, we'll invest in it. We're not scared to invest in different recruiting platforms, ATS or whatever it is, we'll invest in it too. And not only that, and our recruiters too. One of the biggest selling points for people coming to our business is like, well, I don't think my company will let me go out and visit clients. I don't think they'll pay for it. It's like, well, we will. We'll get you out there.

Dante Nino [00:23:59]:
We'll kind of create a game plan for you. We'll fly you out, take them out to dinner, happy hour, whatever it is. And we'll invest in that just because we know that if you want to make this a career, we have to do those things. It just nurtures the relationships and, you know, that's how we're going to be able to scale from a, you know, multi seven figure business to any figure business by nurturing those relations with current clients. Not always going after new business. New business, new business.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:23]:
I love that. Well, before we jump over to the quick fire questions, which like, I absolutely love that everything that you're doing, but is there anything else that you would love to share on? Two different things. First, to a recruiter that's listening, that wants to take their desk from a 2 to 300 level all the way up to over a half million, what advice would you give to them?

Dante Nino [00:24:40]:
Two things. First, one, I feel like a lot of recruiters undervalued their services. And I think one of the ways that we've been able to, you know, double people's billings is increasing our fees. Our standard fee agreement is 30%. We start at 30%. We know how to sell it, we teach people how to sell it and we'll get some 30%, but even then we'll negotiate down to 27 or even 25. And it's good because a lot of recruiters that come into our business are usually in the 18%, 20%. You know, us taking a 20%, we're second guessing it.

Dante Nino [00:25:15]:
We're like, I don't know, we could take it or not. So that's one way. And by doing that, you got to make sure you deliver a good service. And it starts from the first call, a submission. We've had recruiters kind of show us how they submit candidates to clients. And we're like, no, we have a different standard here. And we want to make sure that it's a good write up, it's a good resume, everything's outlined perfectly. We know exactly why, what the person's looking for, why they're looking to make a move, why they left the last jobs, what their education is, what their salary is, what their vehicle allowances.

Dante Nino [00:25:48]:
We display everything for the client just so, you know, they don't have to go back and forth and make sure that, hey, we're actually talking to these people, getting to know them, interviewing them, letting you know exactly what they're looking for. And clients see that when your submissions are different. We've had recruiters like, wow, this is a lot. I was like, it is a lot. But this is why we justify 30% fees, this is why we go out to clients and so on. So that's one thing, and that's one of the best ways to increase your billings instead of just making more placements, because making more places is just a lot more work. And if you're able to do a better service and increase your fees, have better clients, you're able to, you know, skyrocket your buildings there. And I think the second one that I've touched, you know, many times now is invest in your clients during tough times.

Dante Nino [00:26:30]:
Those good clients will keep you going through economic cycles. I've had clients that in the past where, you know, I've been able to build with them consistently just because when I was out in California, I'd be in their office maybe once a month, once every other week, just stop by, say hi, shake hands, and, you know, they were a good client to me. You know, they kept me going. And I built over probably like 800,000 in the last four years with them. And that's just one single client. But because I was able to do that, build a connection with the president, I placed a president, the CEO, lab So I was just able to get all that business. And once you find those accounts and nurture those accounts, you tend to build a lot more. Where a lot of people say, hey, I'm going to get more clients.

Dante Nino [00:27:11]:
I'm just going to build more. But now sometimes you just have to look at your current business, what you have, see where you can go into different branches or different locations. And that's our recruiters have been able to do. You know, they come in and they're billing with a client out in Boston, Massachusetts, but that client has three other offices. It's like, all right, well, how do we get into those three other offices? How do we ever support those other three offices? And that's how you'll be able to scale your book of business and get more places there.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:36]:
If you have an agency owner that's reaching out to you, what advice would you give to them to, like, almost like scale, kind of like how you guys have been scaling?

Dante Nino [00:27:44]:
Yeah. I would say the first thing is build out your infrastructure. I've talked to a lot of recruitment owners who, you know, they do. Well, they do around 200k a year, 300k in billings, which is good for a sole owner, but you're gonna have to be working a lot. But when I talk to those people, it's all right, well, show me your ats. Oh, you know, I'm using Google sheets right now. I haven't really invested in this. Okay, well, all right, well, how do you source people? Oh, Well, I send LinkedIn connections.

Dante Nino [00:28:10]:
Maybe LinkedIn Recruiter lights or Salesforce. Okay, well, that's good. So what do you use for, you know, getting phone numbers? Oh, well, you know, I usually just message people or figure something out like that. I'm like, well, you got to invest in tools. You got. You got to invest in a good infrastructure because if you bring someone else, usually you blame the people for not getting the job done. But how are you going to blame someone when you. They don't have all the tools there.

Dante Nino [00:28:31]:
So if you're a recruitment agency owner, you want to scale, make sure you have your infrastructure ready, have a good ats. I think that's very important. And invest in a. I mean, LinkedIn recruiter Lite to start off, but I know a lot of people bash LinkedIn recruiter, the professional license. But we honestly love it, and we give it one to every single person in our company. They don't have to share access or anything. And I think it just gets you ahead of the game. I know it's expensive but if you really want to bet on yourself, I would say invest in it, and you're going to see a big ROI it's.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:04]:
One of those things, you know, it's the weirdest thing in the recruiting space, like, how much money we possibly could make, but how little we want to invest.

Dante Nino [00:29:12]:
Yeah, yeah. And it stopped us as an agency owner, too. I mean, you know, Simon and I, yes, we did well in the beginning, but we didn't spend our money. We didn't go out buy new cars. We didn't go buy, you know, anything. Like, we saved most of our money just because we want to reinvest back into the company. I mean, that'd be, you know, the first two years. There'd be points that we didn't pay each other for, you know, a couple of months.

Dante Nino [00:29:34]:
We like, all right, you got 20,000. I'll get 20,000. Okay. I can make this lift for maybe four or five months. All right, well, we'll take out some money once we need it, you know, take out money to pay taxes, of course, which was something new to us. But yeah, I mean, you just kind of have to figure out and you delay gratification there because a lot of agency owners are like, all right, well, I made some money. Now I'm going to go spend it. It's like, no, if you really want to scroll a team, you got to have a lot of capital and cash.

Dante Nino [00:29:56]:
And that's one of the hardest thing, because even now, you know, we got some recruiters that did amazing. And that's another reason why recruiters come to us, is we don't wait until the guarantees over. We don't wait until the invoice is paid. We pay out our recruiters at the end of the quarter, we'll take the head. As owners, you know, we have a strong cash position, and once the invoice is paid, we'll take our cut. But we want to make sure our recruiters are paid first. You know, at the end of the day, they keep everything going. We want to keep them motivated.

Dante Nino [00:30:25]:
We don't want to have them waiting on money for months just because, you know, the invoice hasn't been paid or anything. So we'll take a hit there. And that's why we're like, hey, we got to keep a strong cash position, and we got to think of our employees first, not us, man.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:38]:
Investing in your recruiters, yeah, you would think that's like, an easy thing.

Dante Nino [00:30:44]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:46]:
Well, jumping over to the Quick Fire questions before we jump over, is there anything Else you want to share about any of the things that we covered?

Dante Nino [00:30:53]:
I would say that, I mean, everyone knows, especially new recruiters coming in. Recruitment's hard. It's a tough business to be in. You're going to get punched in the face, kicked while you're down. But at the end of the day, you just have to be very consistent. There's going to be a lot of lows. There's going to be times you feel like this is just not for you. But at the end of the day, if you have good metrics and you have goals to hit, just be consistent no matter what and you'll make it through.

Dante Nino [00:31:20]:
I think the first year, six to 12 months is the hardest. And if you could get past 12 months, I think you'll have start having success after that.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:28]:
Well, I think that's perfect because like, my first question is always like in the quick fire, is somebody just getting into the space? Like, it's hard. What's your best advice? And I think you just like, absolutely just like leveled out the reality of every single new person out there?

Dante Nino [00:31:42]:
Yeah, I would say no, no, of course. I think something that is very undervalued and a lot of new recruiters don't is ask for help. But check out what the top performers are doing. And you know, even with our company, someone comes in and say, hey, if you're struggling in business development, go talk to one of the persons that billed and brought in, you know, five new agreements this quarter. You know, we have our call recordings and everything here, so you could listen to the calls as well too, and go listen to their calls. You know, we'll role play. I think people are afraid to ask for help. People are afraid to kind of copy other people.

Dante Nino [00:32:13]:
But now if you're starting out a recruiter mimic everything a top performer is doing, There's a reason why they're doing it. They may look at it like it's easy, but you'll learn it. You're going to have a lot of no's and it's going to be hard in the beginning. But just mimicking everything that a top performer does, that's the fastest way you scale your book of business.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:31]:
You just mentioned that, like, you can go back. Like you guys have a hundred percent remote company.

Dante Nino [00:32:35]:
Right.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:36]:
But you just said that, like you can easily go back and have people listen into other conversations and listen to the recordings. Is that how you guys bridge that, that divide because you guys are remote?

Dante Nino [00:32:46]:
Yeah. So it was something that some of our employees kind of pushed back in the beginning, just because of, oh, wait, our calls are going to be recorded? I was like, well, yes, but if we were in the office, we'd be listening to your calls all day. So, you know, it kind of makes us there. And this is more for professional development, not to just spy on you. You know, we use a system called Ringcentral, and every call is recorded there. Every outbound call downloads to our ats, and we're able to see all those recordings as well, too. And whenever we sign a new agreement or anyone has a good call with Business Development Prospect, we try to download it and give it to our employees to kind of check it out, or we'll do it over a training and just see how they overcame an objection and how they were to get that agreement. So it's something that we've done, especially going as a fully remote company because we had an office back in California and it was great.

Dante Nino [00:33:41]:
But Covid kind of took a hit, and we're like, well, let's hire people out of state. And it was one of the best decisions, but it was a struggle in the beginning. You know, some people just couldn't work from home. You know, some people just don't have the environment to work from home or just everyone to kind of push them around. I know I did, and I struggled a little bit the beginning, because if I see someone calling, I want to call. I want to make more calls from them. I want to make more places. So we've been able to try to figure that out slowly.

Dante Nino [00:34:06]:
It's still a work in progress.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:08]:
How have you been able to keep, like, that culture of, like, accountability with a fully remote team?

Dante Nino [00:34:14]:
So now we have two meetings. We used to have three, but we realized that too many meetings were not good. So now we do two meetings. One on Mondays, one on Thursdays. Mondays, it's not like, hey, what are you guys doing for this week? It's more about tactile. Hey, this is how many submissions we had as a company. This is how many places we had as a company. We made this many placements last week.

Dante Nino [00:34:35]:
Every person that makes a place, when we go over a love or learn kind of concept. So what did you love about that placement? What did you learn about that placement? And they go over about how they acquire the clients, how they make the placement, how they overcame an objection, and, you know, how they were to make that placement there. And it keeps people engaged. Oh, I didn't know you could do that. Or, oh, you got them through. Indeed. I need to start looking more in Indeed. Or I need to start setting up good alerts and it keeps people engaged there.

Dante Nino [00:35:03]:
Then at the end we go over our interviews for the week and kind of talk about different things and we kind of let them go and it keeps people very engaged there. We also keep people updated in the company how the company is doing on numbers and metrics and everything too. On Thursday we do more of a goal, a win, a challenge. And a goal is pretty quick with everyone and we do that one. But every other Thursday we do a training. It's more professional development. So it could be on business development, it could be on recruiting and sourcing, it could be on LinkedIn Recruiter. LinkedIn Recruiter is always changing and they're updating new things.

Dante Nino [00:35:38]:
So we got to retrain people out of navigate searches, save projects and so on. And one thing that has really helped us besides that is challenges. What I mean by that is like having competitions and challenges within people, certain groups. So you know, we'll have like, okay, you know, the groups of two, groups of three, we'll do a four week challenge. Who has the most submissions or the most placements or not always just placements about different things. Will win a certain price or a cash bonus or anything like that. It keeps us kind of engaged and we divide the groups by west coast people, east coast people, so everyone kind of gets to engage and talk there. And that's been very successful.

Dante Nino [00:36:19]:
If you had a, I mean we were doing it this month. If you had a placement in October, in November you get every other Friday half day off. And like people are like, yeah, I want to get my nails done. So I'm going to make sure that happens and it motivates people and people are engaged.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:33]:
I absolutely love that. Challenges engagement, like the learning lessons. Like I feel like that was a masterclass in keeping a high performing team together right there.

Dante Nino [00:36:42]:
We've learned that over the years. It wasn't always this easy. And just talking to a lot of leaders, we've realized that specialize in remote company. It's much needed.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:50]:
Awesome. Well, has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your own personal career?

Dante Nino [00:36:55]:
Yeah, I actually have a right here Stream ownership. Have you heard of that book? Oh yeah, yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:02]:
Why that book?

Dante Nino [00:37:04]:
I feel like as owners we always blame everyone else. And something that that book has taught me, I think I put it on one of my posts, is that everything's your fault no matter what. If you brought in someone and didn't work out, you probably made the wrong hire. You can't just blame it at the person. Oh, the person's not doing this. It's like it's your fault. What are you going to do about it? And one thing that I've also learned is when your team is winning, it's because of them. And when your team is losing, it's because of you.

Dante Nino [00:37:36]:
So I always kind of think about that. That way, it's all right, well, my team is winning. It's because of them. How do I keep them going? My team's not winning. It's because of me. What can I do better to motivate everyone else? So I just realized that everything you do, especially on your business, it's always your fault. It's never about you. It's always more about people.

Dante Nino [00:37:53]:
So now when I bring in people, or even on my daily conversations every single day, hardly anything's about me. The most things I think about is my employees, my people, how do I make better professional development, more incentives, whatever it is, you know, progress, plans, whatever it is, I always think more about them. And how do we get them to the next level because their success comes back to your success.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:15]:
Oh, on that note, if anybody wants to come work for you, how do they do that?

Dante Nino [00:38:21]:
Well, we are only hiring people in the aec, Architecture, construction, engineering space. But, yeah, just send me a dm.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:31]:
Even if you're not looking at it for a new position, make sure to follow him on LinkedIn. He is always dropping, like, amazing bombs. You know, you've kind of talked about, like, your entry into recruiting at Aerotech. It sounds like you were a great soccer player. Like, looking at your own personal success, is there something that you can really attribute it to?

Dante Nino [00:38:50]:
I feel like sports has always just been good. And, you know, something that I've seen successful, too. Bringing in recruiters that have the competitive mindset, you know, from sports, has always helped me. I was in soccer, I was always, like, a team captain, so I always thought about everyone else. And I felt like after college, I brought that into my work and to work. And I feel like I've always been competitive. I've always been more about how can I help other people, how can I bring up people? And that's been a good thing. That's helped me over the last few years.

Dante Nino [00:39:19]:
And always competitive. I always want more. We're always innovative, trying to learn new things. And I would say sports has definitely been something that helped me, you know, become a better leader and an owner here in the staffing world.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:33]:
And now I'm sure you've had a Lot of like ups and downs. I mean first of all you're in.

Dante Nino [00:39:36]:
Recruiting, so that's a gift then perfect.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:41]:
But what do you think? As you know within the recruitments career, one of the hardest lessons that you had to work through?

Dante Nino [00:39:47]:
Yeah, I think hiring people internally. But there's been so many times that we think we have it right with like, hey, we found the formula in hiring internal people for our company and it's always proven us wrong year after year. That's something that we continue to try to get better at. So you know, we have built out hiring criterias. You know, we want people that have a sales background, either internal self motivation, they come from the construction background and so on. And we've had to change it year after year after we learned from everyone else. But that's been the hardest challenge. You know, being an agency owner trying to scale a company.

Dante Nino [00:40:18]:
It's hiring good people. You just never seem to get it right. And it's a continuous problem and you can only get better. But I think, you know, as you grow, you kind of start figuring out what you want and who the right people will be for your company. And now I realize that even if people are top billers and they could come in and do well for you, if they're not good for your culture or your environment, it's going to be cancerous to your company. And that's something that we've had to refrain from hiring. Now it's like, yeah, can they build? Yes. Are they a team player? No.

Dante Nino [00:40:51]:
Do we see them kind of talking to everyone here? Being a good culture fit? Probably not. So like even though they're going to make us money, we're not going to hire them. And that's been something that we had to learn now.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:02]:
And this almost kind of goes along the same timeline or the same thread because like recruiting is hard. Like it's a two way sales job where the only product that actually has is the mind of its own. How do you get through some of those hard days and those hard months?

Dante Nino [00:41:18]:
Both. That's a, that's a tough one. I feel like I've been taking a lot more hobbies now, trying to get better with that. I feel like we've had so many bad things go wrong. And the beginning you're, you're just like, ah, this happened and you're complaining and whining and after a few years you just realize it's part of the recruiting industry and you just can't be mad about it. And as soon as you start learning that Things are going to be out of your control. You just have to, you know, put it to the ground and kind of move on. It's going to be all right.

Dante Nino [00:41:51]:
Sometimes we overcomplicate things and we think it's the end of the world and we just got to realize it's not the end of the world. We'll get through it. We've been through this again and we just got to get back up and do it. So just realizing that recruitment is going to be hard, you're going to be, you know, lied to. People are going to take that counteroffer. It's going to happen and just know that you gotta keep going at the end of the day, take a walk, walk the dog, whatever you need to. I do take a lot of walks on a daily basis.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:20]:
This next question is gonna be a two way question. It's gonna be first at the very start of your recruiting career, back at the wonderful days of Aerotech, and then the same way, but maybe like a month or two into when you guys launched your own firm. So if you can go back in time, have a cup of coffee with yourself, have a beer with yourself or whatever, you can sit down with yourself. The very beginning of your recruiting career in our tech, what would you tell yourself?

Dante Nino [00:42:44]:
I would tell myself. I mean, first, start educating yourself more. I think podcasts. Your podcast definitely helps out a lot. Just bringing a new idea. So thank you for that. You never stop learning in the recruitment industry and you always got to get ahead of trends. You know, we got a, we got different ats as we got different platforms coming in year after year.

Dante Nino [00:43:04]:
So make sure you're always learning and getting out there. I think second would be don't be afraid to network, don't be afraid to ask other people for help or see how you could provide value so you could get some value out of it. I think in the first few years, me and my business partner were always like, well, we don't want them to know our trade secrets. We don't want them to know how we do stuff. And now we've realized that, you know, some of those people are going through different problems that we could help them with and vice versa, we could help each other. So don't be afraid to get out there and ask other people that are doing more than you how you can improve or how you can provide value for them so you could get value yourself. And I feel like if we would have done that the first few months and put our ego to the side and just ask for help we would have been much more ahead because once we started asking for help, you know, got a few advisors on how do we grow. People that have been in the industry have grown.

Dante Nino [00:43:54]:
Recruitment agencies has helped us kind of build out a better program and scale our agency now.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:00]:
And I want to go back to something you told me earlier, that one of your team members billed 154k in one week. But this is a team member that left a good paying job to join your team based on the vision that you were, I would say, projecting out there. What advice would you give to other leaders out there on like, figuring out how to truly project a vision that attracts other people?

Dante Nino [00:44:28]:
I think a lot of recruitment agency owners kind of just. It always comes back just thinking about themselves. And I think that if you really want to build a good team and build a successful company, you got to have a better thing than just money and better thing that just. Yeah, I just want to build a large, you know, agency, you know, for us, we were able to identify why we were doing this. You know, why are we looking to build a big agency? Why are we looking to scale this thing? And it's because we want to be a recruitment leader in the AEC industry. We want to be known as the top AEC recruitment agency in the nation. You know, when people think about construction jobs, architecture jobs, engineering jobs, we want them to think tl and we have that vision. We want to do it and we want to do it by, you know, bring in people who have that background in the construction industry or sales industry.

Dante Nino [00:45:17]:
I feel like that helped us sell what we're doing and why we're doing it. And a lot of recruitment owners don't really know why they're doing the things that they're doing every single day and how to motivate others to do that. And I feel like a lot of people that come in now, it's like, hey, I want to be an industry expert in this. And now we bring in people. And we had someone just come in. She was doing a roofing. Roofing construction. And you know, I know about roofing, but I never knew that was a successful industry to be in.

Dante Nino [00:45:44]:
And you go to her company page and they're all it, finance and everything else. And she was very successful. Took me about a year and a half to poach her. And I was like, I want to bring you in. I want to grow a roofing industry sector here with us. You know, I want to put you on the map and I want to scale that thing. And we were able to make that happen for her, and she was able to make the move, and now she's like a roofing industry expert now.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:07]:
That is awesome. Well, I got two more questions for you, Dante. Yeah. First of all, if somebody wants to follow you, how do they go about doing that?

Dante Nino [00:46:15]:
Just Dante. Nino. Nino on LinkedIn. You could definitely find me there.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:20]:
Awesome. And before I let you go, is there anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Dante Nino [00:46:25]:
I think for those recruiters who are struggling this year, it's a tough market. It's hard. It's definitely one of those cycles that we go through every three, four years, and I've seen it before. But if you're able to make it through this, hard times right now, 2025, 2026 are going to be amazing years. And that's what I'm telling our team right now. It's hard right now. Before, you should take 30 calls to get one lead. It might take 60 calls now, but that's just simply the work that we have to do right now.

Dante Nino [00:46:53]:
So if you're struggling, just know that everyone else is struggling. You have to work a little bit harder and be more strategic now. But once you go into 2025, 2026, you're going to have a lot more success, and you just got to keep going right now.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:06]:
I love that. Well, Dante, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. Like I said, if you're not following him, make sure to follow him on LinkedIn. He is always dropping value bombs, whether you know about really everything that they're doing behind the scenes on how they're helping their billers grow. But talk about, you know, you being a young agency owner, not being a coach or, I mean, you're a player coach, but you really found a way to build out the blueprint and the framework for taking somebody from 2 to 300k to 5 to 700k and really, absolutely changing their life. So I want to say thank you for coming on, sharing some of your secrets.

Dante Nino [00:47:47]:
For everyone here.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:48]:
And it's people like you that make the entire industry better. So for the listeners go out there, we're in Q4. Crush it. Because whatever you do now in Q4 is setting yourself up for the 2025, which is going to be the year of abundance for yourself. So let's grow together, guys.

Dante Nino [00:48:04]:
Bye.