The Yo-Yo Billings Problem

By a show of hands, who here would like to generate more consistent placements and more predictable revenue?  

Everybody in the room! And that’s not surprising. 

This is one of the biggest challenges faced by recruiters and recruiting firm owners. I know this because

• I’ve been a recruiter myself so I’ve experienced the roller coaster ride of recruiting firsthand.  In fact, it’s the exact same roller coaster when you’re a self-employed consultant and coach like I am.

• Since 2001 I have worked with more than 10,000 recruiters in 34 countries. And I see the same issue over and over again; these peaks and troughs in production. 

So here’s what happens…

You have a lot of jobs on. You get really busy and you fill a bunch of them. You have a fantastic month.  But while you are busy delivering to the existing job orders then you take your foot off the pedal when it comes to business development and your sales pipeline dries up. 

Then once you’ve filled your current jobs you have nothing to work on. So you go back into business development mode and you had to crank everything back up again, which takes time.  That’s why you get this boom/bust cycle of yo-yo billing. 

We’ve all seen it, we’ve all experienced it, and it’s super stressful. The worst part is the uncertainty. One month, you’re making a lot of money and the next month it’s lean times, right?  I’m sure we can all relate. I know personally I’ve been through that. In fact, this has been an issue for me until relatively recently. Over the last two to four years I finally have cracked this and found a solution. 

So we know that yo-yo billings are the symptom; with all that stress and the cash flow crunch.  The cause is this…

 It is incredibly difficult to balance service delivery and business development. 

I’m here to tell you that if you’re experiencing this, it is not your fault.  The reason I say it’s not your fault is that the traditional approaches that we’ve been taught as an industry to try and address this issue just don’t work sustainably in the long run. 

So how are we taught to prevent yo-yo billings?  Well, it’s all about hustle.

• We were taught that you need to be constantly doing business development all the time even when you’re super busy with existing jobs. That you need to spend some time every day doing your business development.
• We were taught that you need to improve your planning and time management. You need to be more structured and more disciplined. You need to have great habits and maximize your productivity; get the most you can out of every single day, every week, every month, every quarter.  

 Now, this is absolutely right. We should be striving for that. I’m not saying that advice is wrong – just that it’s difficult to maintain.   We’re human beings, not machines.  

 I know myself that I am so easily distracted. I get off course. I start every week with good intentions and every day with a plan. But it’s so easy for me to get off track. I’ll have a really good run where I’m disciplined, organized, doing lots of business development. But it’s so easy to slip out of those routines.  

Now as I said, it’s not your fault.  But it is your responsibility to do something about it – there is a difference between fault and responsibility.  The most effective recruiters – and people in general – take full responsibility for their results. 

If you’re not happy with the results you’re currently producing, then it’s up to you to do something about it, wouldn’t you agree? 

 So what is the solution?