5 SMART ways to grow your recruitment business

This is a smashing guest post from Paul Marsden who provides Recruitment sector payroll services via the Payplus bureau

Times are tough right now and standing out from the crowd so you can grow your business can seem like a real uphill struggle. Here are 5 SMART ways to grow your recruitment business:

1. Work SMART. When most of us reach the weekend, we’re 100% certain that we’ve worked hard, but sometimes it’s hard to put our hand on our heart to say confidently that we’ve worked SMART. Working smart is about making sure that you focus your energy on profit-making activities. Choosing to do first the jobs that provide the shortest route to profit is an extremely smart way to work. Although it’s not always possible, it’s well worth working out what you could do differently. The only way to determine if there’s scope for you to work smarter is to objectively analyse what you do with every minute of every day. This isn’t a particularly easy or pleasant task, but it’s one that’ll have your business in good shape for growth quicker than you dare imagine.

2. Make sure you balance your books. Keeping a weather eye on your ‘takings’ might seem obvious, but particularly when times are tough or you find yourself short of hours in the day, looking at exactly what comes in and what goes out of your bank account every day can seem a step too far. This is a real no brainer and sits at the foundation of any successful business. By keeping close tabs on your income and outgoings in this way means you’ll be nimble footed enough to survive an unexpected expense or be right on top of an unpaid invoice.

3. Promote for profit. Marketing and promotion are at the top of most business owners “bucket” list when it comes to cutting costs. While critically analyzing your Return On Investment (ROI) on these activities makes complete sense, stopping them all together could mean business suicide. What’s more, there are so many low and no cost opportunities to promote your business these days (the social media for example), there really is no excuse to let these activities slip. 

4. Nurture your little goldmine (your existing clients or customers). Your existing clients or customers are one of your business’ biggest assets, yet we’re often so focused on finding new customers or clients that they get left out in the cold. On the basis that it takes significantly more effort and investment to win a new client than develop an existing one, this makes no sense whatsoever. Today’s the day to analyse your existing customer base to see where you can cross sell or up sell your services to people who know and trust you already.

5. Keep your team onside. The chances are that your team is one of your biggest costs, but they are often not considered by business owners to be one of their biggest assets. You need to make sure that you get ROI ‘to the max’ from your team. Do this by motivating them, by incentivising them and by making sure they have the tools they need to do the job. If you think you need to give more in order to get more, do it!

About the author:  By qualification Paul is a Tax Accountant, but these days does little in the way of tax accounting. In his role as accountant he has worked with small and medium sized businesses for over 25 years; a period that has seen many changes, particularly regarding the accessibility and implementation of technology.  Paul has an exceptionally strong personal and professional interest in technology and gets a real buzz from helping business owners use technology to become more efficient so they have more time to focus on business growth. He’s spent the last 5 years running an outsourcing business that provides bookkeeping, payroll and accounting software services to SMBs. Paul is a member of the IAAITC (International Association of Accountants Innovation and Technology Consultants), a group of UK accountants who combine to promote forward thinking in IT across the accountancy profession. Currently the IAAITC is developing a framework for SMB’s to deal effectively with Information Security.