Seb Sharpe built a $4 million recruiting firm in seven years. Profitable every quarter. 100% permanent fees. Retained and exclusive from day one. Then he stepped away from the playbook.
Not because it stopped working. Because he and his co-founder, Charlie Rollings, could see where the industry is heading and decided to build for that future before it arrived.
Seb is the co-founder of Inventure, a specialist renewable energy search firm based in Los Angeles. He launched it in 2018 with Charlie, a childhood friend, with no clients, no track record, and an office above a subway line in a WeWork. First year: $1 million. Second year: $2 million. Every quarter in the black.
About nine months ago, they launched Generate, a platform designed for what they believe is the next era of recruiting: more entrepreneurial, more autonomous, and built around the individual, not the agency.
“Instead of building an agency for volume, let’s build the infrastructure for the next era of recruiting. Instead of America having 26,000 agencies in five years, it’s going to be more like 100,000.”
Seb breaks down the KPI that drove Inventure’s growth, how to qualify vacancies so clients actually stay accountable, and why he believes the recruiting industry is overdue for the same kind of shift that transformed real estate.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [2:38] First year: $1M. Second year: $2M. Profitable every quarter — here’s how
- [9:33] Why Inventure pivoted to renewable energy — and why that decision set everything up
- [13:34] The imposter syndrome every agency owner faces when managing experienced recruiters
- [15:05] The academy model: why training grads from scratch solved the problem
- [22:44] How to land a $30,000 retainer on day one with no brand and no track record
- [31:29] The single KPI Seb tracks above everything else — and the formula behind it
- [33:51] How to calculate the value of your first-time interview and use it to coach individuals
- [36:27] Why vacancy qualification starts on the discovery call — and what most recruiters miss
- [44:06] Why Seb and Charlie launched Generate and what they’re building next
- [53:26] The EXP Realty story — and why recruiting could follow the same path
- [58:27] Millie: the AI tool designed to help recruiters close more of what they already have
- [1:09:57] Mark’s top two takeaways
The KPI That Builds Consistent Revenue
Most recruitment businesses track billings. Or activity.
Seb focuses on one number that connects everything: the first-time interview.
“I think of my business in two halves. Before I understood that, and after.”
The formula is simple. Take your total revenue over six months. Divide it by the number of first-time interviews in that same period. That gives you the value of each interview. Once you know it, you can forecast revenue before deals close, set targets that actually mean something, spot bottlenecks early, and coach individuals with precision.
“If your team lands 25 first-time interviews and you know your first-time interview is valued at $3,500, you can celebrate that. Because you know the revenue’s coming.”
It also works as an early warning system. If interviews are going up but revenue isn’t, something’s off, usually the quality of the vacancies feeding those interviews. Seb’s rule: build to a shortlist of four or five candidates maximum. Any more than that usually means the role isn’t properly qualified or the client isn’t committed.
Where this really becomes powerful is at the individual level. If one recruiter’s interviews are worth $5,000 and another’s are worth $1,500, that’s not a volume issue. That’s a coaching conversation, and now you know exactly where to start.
Qualify the Pain Before You Work the Search
The fastest way to waste a month is to work a role the client isn’t serious about.
Seb’s view is that most recruiters lose control of searches before they even start. Not because of candidates, but because of what wasn’t established on the intake call.
“If you call them and say, ‘What happens if you don’t make this hire?’ and they say, ‘Well… nothing specific,’ the alarm bells should start ringing.”
You need to quantify the cost of the vacancy. Not vaguely. Specifically: what happens if this role stays open for 30, 60, 90 days, what projects are delayed, what revenue is impacted, and what it means for the hiring manager personally.
That does two things. First, it tells you whether the search is real. Second, it gives you something to come back to when the client slows down — and they will.
“You told me if this role isn’t filled by April 1st, you lose market share. I’ve just spoken to our lead candidate. Do you have five minutes?”
There’s another layer Seb raises that’s worth sitting with. What does the client feel when your name comes up on their phone? Do they think: this is worth taking. Or: here comes the pressure again.
That answer traces back to how well you qualified the role in the first place.
The Shift: From Agency to Platform
Inventure is still running. Still performing. Still doing exactly what it was built to do.
Generate is something different.
About nine months ago, Seb and Charlie stopped asking how to scale the agency further. They started asking where the industry was going. Their conclusion: recruitment hasn’t structurally changed in decades, AI is already removing the low-value transactional work, and more people are choosing independence over employment. One number stood out to Seb: 52% of Americans now consider themselves at least partly self-employed, roughly double what it was four or five years ago.
The parallel he draws is with EXP Realty, a business that went from zero to the largest real estate agency in the world within a decade by building a platform for individuals rather than a traditional corporate structure.
“Instead of being under a big corporate banner with dense overhead, it’s lean and agile.”
Generate is built on that idea: a platform that handles the admin and legal side of going independent, provides tools and infrastructure, and creates a community of high-performing recruiters. Most importantly, it puts the individual at the centre. Because that’s already how clients think. They remember the recruiter. Not the logo.
Where AI Actually Fits
Seb’s take on AI is grounded. Sourcing, matching, and scheduling will largely be handled by automation. But that’s not where most recruiters are losing.
The real problem is conversion. Most agencies fill one in four roles. That means 75% of effort goes nowhere. And Seb’s argument is that flooding the top of the funnel with more AI-generated outreach makes that worse, not better.
So instead of focusing on generating more leads, he built Millie, an AI tool designed to improve what happens after the first conversation. It sits inside the CRM, analyses calls, emails, and pipeline activity against a corpus of recruitment best practice, and gives real-time guidance on what to say, what to do, and where the risk is on each deal.
“Instead of one learning moment a day, you get 30. Because it’s constantly showing you what to do.”
It’s a different use of AI. Less noise at the top. More control in the middle.
