Emily Audibert billed $1.29 million in 2025. She did it while eight and a half months pregnant with her third child, living in a 750-square-foot cottage for six months during a home renovation with her husband, two young boys, and a 70-pound dog.
Emily is the founder of EA Associates, a search firm specializing in go-to-market roles. In February 2025, she attended the Recruitment Coach Live Summit. She came home determined to make some changes. She fired the wrong client, then worked with Amanda to overhaul their processes and technology. By spring, they had landed a major new contract. 2025 became the biggest year of her career. The year before, she’d billed $800K. She knew she was capable of billing seven figures, but a bad RPO client was quietly eating the difference. “We’re easily a million dollar company,” she says. “We just had bad clients.” That same year, she was inducted into the Pinnacle Society, one of the industry’s most selective peer groups.
Today, Emily is off the phone by 4:30 most afternoons to be with her kids. In this conversation, she breaks down the decisions, habits, and support system that helped her bill $1.29 million without giving up the rest of her life.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [02:26] Life with three kids under five and why “figuring it out” is the job
- [08:13] How 2025 became her breakthrough year after a rough 2024
- [09:01] The RPO client she fired, and what she learned from it
- [11:13] Why half her growth came from one contract, and half from everything else
- [14:41] Failing the CPA exam five times before finding recruitment
- [21:54] From $80K in year one to nearly $390K in year two
- [26:46] Finding her own voice and why a softer approach wins more often
- [30:48] The daily habits that keep her calm, focused, and steady
- [46:04] “Find an Amanda”: why the right support changed her business
- [52:43] How to spot a bad RPO before it drains you
- [59:01] Why the bad RPO made her question her own skills
- [1:03:51] The message Emily wants every recruiter to hear
The RPO Red Flag Most Recruiters Miss
Emily didn’t fall into RPO work by accident. She’d run a great one before: 14 months, a target of 28 hires, and she delivered 42. It felt seamless. She knew the product, knew the team, and they treated her like part of the company.
Then she ran a bad one with the same structure. Same $7,500 monthly retainer, same 18% of base salary, same guarantee on the hire. She knew the people. She liked the product. But the role itself was hard to fill, and no amount of effort changed that.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s an RPO if they’re still difficult to hire for,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re internal, it doesn’t matter if you’re external. That factor never goes away.”
She kept working it because it produced just enough wins to feel worth staying. Enough placements to think, we did that, we did that. Not enough to actually hit her real target. Going into Mark’s February 2025 conference, she was carrying the weight of it without fully naming what it was costing her.
Once she fired the client, a new contract came in that spring and accounted for roughly half her revenue that year. The rest, just under half, came from the same contingent work she’d always done, at the same pace. Firing the client didn’t just clear space for one big win. It let everything else she was already doing work again.
Sometimes the biggest growth decision isn’t winning another client. It’s walking away from the wrong one.
Find Your Amanda
For years, Emily was a full desk recruiter doing everything herself: sales, delivery, operations, tech, the lot. Then her sister Amanda, who’d run her own yoga studio before COVID pushed her online, came on for a summer to help.
Amanda never left. Today, she runs the operations side of EA Associates entirely: the tech stack, the finance, the workflow, the email automation, the campaigns. Emily calls herself the visionary and Amanda the integrator, borrowing the language from Rocket Fuel. They’re also working through Traction, and it’s shaped how clearly they’ve split their roles.
“Find an Amanda,” Emily says. “That’s what the title should be. It is a complete game changer to our business.”
Today, Emily spends almost her entire working day on the phone with clients and candidates. Almost everything else happens without her touching it. That’s where she creates the most value, so she built the business around that fact.
How She Went From $80K to a Million-Dollar Desk
Emily didn’t start out in recruiting. She triple-majored in accounting, finance, and entrepreneurial studies, failed the CPA exam five times on the same test, and got laid off from her first sales job after three months. Recruiters kept trying to recruit her into recruiting. Eventually she listened.
Her mom, Gail Audibert, made the introduction to Danny Cahill at Hobson Associates. It took Emily six months to make her first placement, double the usual runway, and she billed just $80K her first full year. Year two, she jumped to roughly $390K.
She points to three things that made the difference: good habits, built on raw call volume and talk time. Knowing what to say, from absorbing Danny’s training on repeat. And then making it her own. “I didn’t have my own voice,” she says. “Once I leaned into being honestly more feminine and softer in myself, everything started to click into place.”
Technical recruiting skills mattered. Finding a style that felt authentic mattered even more.
If you want to bill more without sacrificing the life you’re building outside work, this one’s for you.
