16 Jan From Scratch: Sticking With It
Welcome to part three of my blog series, From Scratch, looking back at the whirlwind journey of starting Alexander Daniels Offshore from, you guessed it, scratch.
Following the end of summer 2016, Sarah and I found ourselves sat at our desks in our cosy new offices. After an intense week of recruitment training, it was time to get on with some work! As we were both new to the recruitment scene, we both got busy calling every contact we knew personally to let them know the good gospel that is Alexander Daniels Offshore. Andy came over from Birmingham for a few days to assist with our initial meetings and make introductions.
It was a pretty nerve-wracking couple of months, having to cold-call potential client after client, something neither of us had done before, but we stuck with it and our story of why we started, to do recruitment properly and stay true to our word of being a proper recruitment partner was so well received. We were truly blown away with the positive reception to our passion to shake up the recruitment industry, with the same complaints from almost every meeting we had that clients were constantly bombarded with irrelevant CVs, one that stuck in my mind was, “I was sent a plumber for a compliance role!”. We wanted to make sure we were the filter that hiring managers wanted and before we knew it we had quite a few jobs on!
As time ticked by, we were meeting up to 3 clients in a day and quickly drowning in admin as a result, so then came our third member of staff in November to help with administrative tasks, but as exciting as this all was, it wasn’t without its pitfalls. Now, having a few years of recruitment under my belt, it’s a little less “life on the edge”, but when you’re first starting out, getting a job on, sourcing a candidate, waiting for them to resign, start their new job, pass their probation and then waiting for the bill to be paid, it’s a long and twitchy road to making money in the early days!
In my first couple of months, which wasn’t all that rosy, we managed to get a good number of clients on-boarded, a steady flow of candidates but we kept coming second best in the recruitment process. I knew we were doing and saying all the right things and as much as I enjoyed the process, at one point I honestly felt like giving up. But, eventually, a couple of months in, I got my first placement, it was a difficult one for my first, but we got there and I got the boost of confidence I needed and it came naturally after that point.
Fast forward to the new year and with momentum between Sarah and I steadily building, we welcomed our third consultant, Andréa!
In my fourth and final part of my blog series, I’ll be wrapping up our growth story from our humble beginnings, to how we’re building the island’s most successful agency to last a generation.