Running a desk while growing and managing a team can be extremely challenging. Someone who has managed to pull it off is Allan Fisher, founder of Premier Financial Search.
Allan’s got an amazing track record of personally billing over a million dollars for ten years straight. Then during Covid, Allan decided to turn a threat into an opportunity and grow his practice from a small, office-based team of 4 people to a remote team of 15 people based across the country.
According to Allan, the secret to his success involves excellent an operational support team, robust systems and processes, leveraging automation technology and commit to ongoing staff training & development.
In his long recruiting career, Allan has faced his share of adversity. As a recruiter and recruitment business owner, he went through the 9/11, the dot com bubble, the 2008/9 great recession, COVID and now the economic uncertainty and slowdown of 2023.
However, Allan believes that after every recession, prosperity follows.
Some of the key highlights that you will hear in this episode are:
- The importance of consistent Quality output regardless of market condition
- The value of hiring an integrator in your team to focus on the operational aspect of your business
- How to build your business by putting up a remote team
- How to create a great training and team culture in a remote setup
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [01:30] How Allan became a recruiter; the value of his Pinnacle Society peer group.
- [06:43] Allan candidly reveals his career lowlights that many recruiters can relate to.
- [12:30] Three learnings from coming out of economic recessions.
- [20:40] How to prep your team to face challenging periods.
- [24:08] Allan shares his career highlights and accomplishments.
- [30:10] As a recruitment business owner, how critical is it to find someone to help you who is operationally focused?
- [38:04] How Allan scaled his business from 4 to 15 team members remotely.
- [42:17] Creating a great culture in a remote environment.
- [48:10] The value of tracking performance and metrics.
- [50:08] How Allan manages his internal recruitment just like any other successful search process.
- [58:50] How Allan manages his time to be a top producer and recruitment business owner at the same time.
Insulating Your Team During Downturns
“If we are consistent with what we do, if we never change the quality that we present, we are really trying to make ourselves the firm of choice in any market. So it is not gonna make us recession-proof, but it will insulate us.” This is how Allan summarized how they have dealt with economic downturns and recessions since he started his recruitment business.
Allan started his recruitment business just around 2001, prior to the 9/11 attack. However, he had been a recruiter since 1988. So you can just imagine how many downturns Allan had undergone as a recruiter and business owner – the dot com bubble, the 9/11 attack, the real-estate bubble leading to the 2008 recession, and COVID. Now that we are all facing a similar uncertainty it is invaluable to hear Allan’s thought process and insight, and below are the takeaways:
- Coming out of a recession, the market usually rebounds in a dramatic way and this period usually brings prosperity. You will only lose out if you quit.
- When the market changes for the better, clients will have more choices and they will revert to QUALITY. Be consistent with what you do and never change the quality that you present in any market.
- Never stop doing business development. When things are doing well, it may be easy to get clients but never stop doing business development.
Why Having an “Integrator” is Key to Operational Success
Being a successful business owner is not the same as being a successful recruiter. On the other hand, the best recruiters are not necessarily always the best business owners. The best business owners are actually the ones who are good at marketing, sales, and leadership. Hence, if you are a successful recruiter transitioning to becoming a business owner, hiring someone complementary to your technical skills is a key to success.
This is the case with Allan, and he shared his journey of discovering this logical approach with his team. By finding his and his team’s strengths, he was able to find the best role for his members. From within his team, he was able to find an integrator who is very effective in operational execution.
As a recruitment business owner, things you may need to ask yourself: Do you have an integrator to help in the operational aspects of your business? Are you able to set up your team for success by having them work primarily on their strengths?
Growing Your Business by Building a Team in a Remote Working Environment
A key highlight when growing Allan’s business is when they started to grow the team from 4 to 15 members in a couple of years by hiring people remotely. “A couple of years ago when we realize that location was not really a factor for our clients. Then I realized, maybe it should not be a factor for us,” he recalled. So Allan started to work on building his team, by first running a search. He looked for candidates that have been doing what they do for 3-4 years and ran a national search. He was able to find rockstar team members in doing so. Given that this is a remote setup, Allan also revealed how they adjusted their training methodology in order to accommodate their new team members. Lastly, Allan also shared how he works on the team’s dynamics and culture despite the differences in proximity.
