Take your recruitment business to the next level through partnership.
Transitioning a business from a small start-up to a large, rapidly scaling business is a hard task. At Recruitment Entrepreneur, we've achieved it numerous times before and know how to guide you to grow successfully.
Many of our current portfolio partners started out as small or medium-sized enterprises and came to us after finding it difficult to expand past beyond a small team of people. We provide the guidance and infrastructure to set you up to achieve growth, deliver high equity value and generate personal wealth.
Value created in current businesses
Group portfolio annualised growth
Number of businesses within the wider group to support you in scaling
When a founder comes to us with an existing business we work out the equity split. Watch our CFO, Angus McDowell explain how this works.
Whilst profitability is extremely important, it's only one component of value. To create real equity value a business must have some key characteristics:
Strong management team
When investors look at a business, they're looking for a solid management team, a slick and well-run operation, organised and efficient operations and back-office functions, and most importantly, a business that can clearly demonstrate scale.
Clear strategy
Boutique businesses rarely attract value. A business that attracts a good market multiple needs to be achieving in excess of £1M EBIT, with a clear plan for growth through its market strategy, customer penetration, and international footprint.
Established brand
Small businesses often lack brand awareness and an effective marketing strategy. A strong brand is essential for creating value as it enables clients to quickly compare a business to its competitors.
Leadership development culture
Internal employee development is critical for value creation. Employees must be invested in and mentored to succeed.
Contract/perm mix
A combination of both contract and permanent recruitment is essential to attract a higher multiple. Generally a 65% contract and 35% permanent split is the ideal to create fair value.
Stock option scheme
Investors generally like to see key management (between 3-4 people) incentivised through either equity or options to protect existing and future revenues of the business.
Managing cash flow
Good cash flow is critical when attracting investment; investors typically are looking for average debtor days to be around 30 days.
Operational efficiency
Often, small businesses are sales-led and don't focus enough on corporate governance and high-quality MI, which enables management to make informed decisions on the business.
National and international reach
A good quality business is one where the customer base has a good geographical reach. Investors typically look for businesses capable of expanding both nationally and internationally.
Fees balanced across consultants and clients
Quite often, businesses find themselves in the 80/20 rule, where 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the workforce. In order to build real value, management needs to ensure monthly revenue isn't over-reliant on only a handful of consultants or clients.
Recruitment Entrepreneur has a proven track record of creating value to mitigate these risks and has the knowledge and expertise to build businesses that can maximise future value.
Our investment funding is more than money. We ensure existing entrepreneurs can continue to build their businesses and achieve sustained and strategic growth. James Caan CBE and his investment team agree on the value of your business with you and personally invest, making our investment a true partnership.
All aspects of finance are performed by our team of specialist finance professionals from accounting, to payroll, budget forecasting, and monthly management reporting. The finance team delivers ongoing operational support, as well as coordinating and overseeing the annual audits conducted by BDO.
Mentoring is a critical part of the ongoing development of an entrepreneur. Our partners benefit from leadership advice from James Caan CBE, our senior management team, and other CEOs across the portfolio who have experience in successfully building and scaling their own businesses.
An authentic brand and marketing strategy is critical when expanding your business in a saturated market. We help you develop marketing materials that give you a competitive edge to win more business, as well as creating impactful marketing campaigns to attract great candidates. We also assist with website design and development, providing you with an online and social media strategy, as well as support with advertising, PR, and events.
We have a dedicated HR & operations function to support every aspect of your business and negotiate group deals with key suppliers to reduce your business costs. We implement and constantly keep updated with best-practice strategies, processes, and infrastructure to ensure everything runs efficiently, allowing our partners to focus on running their business.
We assist all our portfolio partners in attracting top talent and have helped them make numerous senior hires. Our management team also uses its extensive network to support you in building both your candidate and employee talent pool, by attracting them through targeted campaigns, networking events, and activities. Having social media reach on LinkedIn alone of over 65,000 followers also helps with generating awareness.
Developing a robust and detailed expansion strategy is fundamental to businesses' sustained growth. Our senior management team works with our portfolio partners to ensure they are focusing their core activity on the right areas to deliver against their forecasted growth targets. The team also helps review plans and provides strategic guidance formally on a monthly basis, as well as always being there for ad hoc advice to keep businesses on track with growth plans.
Our in-house team of legal professionals provides a full suite of services to support our portfolio partners in scaling up their business. They offer advice on a wide range of matters and are able to provide counsel on anything from drafting M&A terms, or reviewing restrictive employment covenants. They are also the first point of contact for any difficult HR matters.
A significant part of achieving growth is through sustained training and development. All consultants within the portfolio businesses receive tailored training from accredited recruitment experts and leadership training is provided for the rising stars. Founding partners attend offsite management days Cass Business School and James Caan CBE, himself, as part of their ongoing development.
We've invested in world-class, fully integrated CRM, HR, and back-office technology platforms to support all recruitment and marketing activities. Each portfolio business is also supported by our IT team who keep things running smoothly, securely, and efficiently, regardless of whether you're working in the office or remotely.
As well as being able to work remotely, we've invested in impressive offices across the UK to showcase our businesses and help our partners attract top talent. Our platform means that businesses can scale quickly, as each company has the ability to easily expand their operation into new locations, by using other portfolio partners offices as remote hubs.
Growing your company to take it to the next level may mean big changes, but you are part of a rapidly expanding group portfolio ultimately preparing for an exit event. We provide the network, infrastructure, influence, and support of a large corporate business whilst maintaining the individuality and creative culture you originally created.
The culture within Recruitment Entrepreneur is focused around both wealth creation and building a strong income stream, most entrepreneurs never really get the opportunity to build real value in their businesses, our platform and philosophy are based around James Caan CBEs personal experience and journey as an entrepreneur.
James is one of the few entrepreneurs in the UK who’s not sold one company, but eight. Each of the recruitment businesses he's sold has been able to achieve a premium value, based on his track record and reputation for building world-class businesses. As part of the Recruitment Entrepreneur portfolio, partners we invest in have the advantage of leveraging all the knowledge, experience, and expertise from James, the senior management team, and the wider group portfolio founders to support them on their journey of wealth creation.
At the point of realisation and exit of the last group of businesses James sold, they had a combined GP of £50m and EBIT of £11.4m. Due to the scale, size, diversity, geographical spread, and quality of earnings we were able to achieve a multiple of 8.6x earnings. Our current strategy in Recruitment Entrepreneur is to replicate the same success achieved here.
The ultimate objective of partnering with Recruitment Entrepreneur is to build a successful business and achieve a profitable exit.
Since the investment, my company has grown from a two-man business to a team of 18, spanning multiple sectors within the property sector.
Grant Kaveney - CEO of GKR London
I was able to leverage the extensive M&A experience on hand to ensure a smooth and efficient transaction of our Euromedica acquisition.
James Absalom - CEO of Walter James
The expert guidance from RE surpasses any financial investment. We're constantly being supported which is driving our business forward.
Michael Beeken - CEO of Beeken Reeves
James Caan CBE and Recruitment Entrepreneur have shown belief in us from day one, which has really helped drive us forward - to the extent that we have now recruited in over 50 cities globally.
Matt Harrison - Co-Founder of Hanami International
As a CEO, I feel I have the ability to make the decision and shape a business in my own vision whilst benefiting from the advice and guidance of the highly experienced financial and strategic advisory teams.
Elaine Tyler - CEO of Venatrix
We look for exceptional recruitment professionals with relentless ambition, who want to build great recruitment brands. Once your application to scale has been received it will be reviewed by our investment team.
We’ll then be in touch to discuss how we grow your business in more detail.