How To Beat Korn Ferry With 4 People And AI.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Do you realize that 2026 is almost over? Do you realize that COVID was almost 7 years ago? Crazy, right? But here's the thing. I truly believe that a short window of time and a short sprint can absolutely change your life. And who cares what has happened so far this year? That is the reason why Finish the Year Strong, the summit kicking off September 28th through October 5th, is going to help you get there. Is going to inspire you. It is going to motivate you. It is going to teach you. Remember, all the live sessions are free. If you want to get the replays, VIP, or join the Elite Recruiter Community, this is your opportunity to draw on the line in the sand.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:40]:
Make sure that you get registered. And we're going to be doing one more thing this year. Something brand new that we have not done before. We're going to do a Firm Leaders Summit on November 16th to 18th. Same thing. Live sessions are free. Make sure you get registered for both of those. And if you guys want a good laugh, I almost thought about doing the Firm Owners Summit.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:01]:
And then I realized so many of us are leaders, no matter where we are in the organization, we are a leader in the firm. So what I switched it up to Firm Leaders Summit. These are the 2 opportunities for you to get educated, get on board, grow, and absolutely crush the rest of the year and set yourself up as a foundation For 2027, I truly believe in you. I'm excited for you. I'm excited that the impact that you're going to have on your desk and other people's lives because of what you're capable of doing. I'll see you there. Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast: Didn't have enough savings.

James Homer [00:01:44]:
I didn't have enough anything. It was a big risk, you know, but I just went all in all the way. And so I feel like. Too many people want to be absolutely sure before they do anything.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:55]:
Nobody's coming to save you. When did you realize that was the truth?

James Homer [00:02:00]:
When we had 4 months of no cash in.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:04]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host, Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership, and placements. Atlas is a CRMx, a CRM that actually understands context. It captures everything you say, hear, read, and write. Every interview, client call, LinkedIn message, email, and WhatsApp automatically. Not because you spent the time entering it. It's because Atlas is always listening. Then it goes one step further and tells you the next action to take.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:41]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:03:14]:
The low-value work that keeps you from billing, Atlas does it for you. Atlas customers right now are saying that they're seeing a 50% higher candidate response rates. A 35% increase in new clients won, 15 hours saved every week, monthly billings jumping 85%, and agencies hitting 150% of their annual revenue target by building their business with Atlas. If you want more information, check out Recruit with Atlas. I am excited about this episode because here's the thing. This guest is on the opposite side of the world of most of the conversations that we have. He is actually based out of Asia and he started— he kicked off his business about a year and a half ago. And has already crushed $1 million in US billings.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:54]:
And to, to top it off, the year has actually gotten even better. He's looking at probably ending the year at about $900K. So we're gonna walk through how he got started, what actually works, and all the things that if you're listening that you could do too. And on top of that, the tech stacks that have really helped him move the needle. So James, excited to have you on the podcast.

James Homer [00:04:16]:
Thank you so much. Yeah, as mentioned, I've not seen many, many interviewees, let's say, or many guests on the podcast from this side of the world. So it's an honor to be part of it.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:28]:
And that's 100% on me. I just had Ryan Shepherd on who's over in Japan. And I know most of the listeners are based in the US, most of the conversations are based in the US, but there's so many awesome things happening across the globe. And the goal is to highlight that a little more. But anyways, let's dive in because you told me something that just absolutely blew my mind during the pregame. Somebody sold you an AI outreach system that costs $10,000 and 3 months you were using it. Like how many meetings did you book?

James Homer [00:04:56]:
Zero, actually. It was precisely zero. It was a $0 ROI, which has to be a record from everything that I've ever bought in the past. I'm trying to think if there's anything ever comparable. Um, and this was, uh, Was, yeah, it was pretty horrendous. Obviously it was sold to us as a dream. It was Claude, like all the buzzwords. It was an outreach agent.

James Homer [00:05:20]:
It had been connected to warmed up mailboxes and all of the great things that you hear online and things like that. My dream was that we would be able to kind of automate some of the original business development work that you would need to do. And then we could just generate meetings. Obviously they said maybe 2 or 3 meetings per week. Which would be dreamland for us. But unfortunately, after 3 months, we, well, they actually ran it for kind of a free month afterwards for 3 to 4 because it was, that was their only point of negotiation. But in reality, I got zero results. And actually I got maybe about 5 or 6 responses asking by name saying, listen, we know who you are and we're really disappointed that you're sending us this many spam emails.

James Homer [00:06:08]:
And it was quite brand damaging. Yep. So that was definitely a lesson and it cost me $10,000.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:16]:
$10,000. And that wasn't the only one, was it? Like, walk me through what else you bought that year.

James Homer [00:06:22]:
So we had an AISDR. I'm not going to mention the company names or anything, but it was one of the originals. I think they were original, like 3 or 4. So you can probably work out which one it was. We ended up signing up for a 12 months, which was really expensive, $800 per month. But we managed to get out of it after 2 or 3 months, quite simply because it didn't work. It broke. It kept on breaking.

James Homer [00:06:49]:
Literally, we were trying to put in a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, the opportunity cost was massive. Sitting in cafes and when I was first, first opened the business and we'd got maybe a couple of deals in. something like that. And I was just trying to find a way that I could concentrate on delivery and basically automate some of the original reachouts for the business development side. Now, obviously I tried to do that. I put everything in. We hear all the time, good data in means good outcomes, right? But there was just no responses at all.

James Homer [00:07:26]:
And it turned out that that was not an isolated incident. And so I managed to ask them for support constantly. They gave me a CSM to come and work with me. We couldn't find out what was going on, why the response rate was literally 0%. And fortunately, they canceled the contract after 2 months and said that they'll go back to the drawing board, create something new, and then come back to me. I'm just convinced that maybe my market maybe doesn't work with these things very well. That's my— optimistic side. But then my pessimistic side, of course, is the fact that maybe AI outreach just isn't the way forward.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:05]:
Well, and I mean, you use the same phrase for these, like it was brand damaging. Like, what does that actually mean? Like, what were the people actually saying back to you?

James Homer [00:08:15]:
Sure. So when you've got a bit of a reputation on the market and you know people, like I've been in Asia for the best part of a decade now, or maybe even more than a decade now, and I've been selling into my usual persona for for the best part of 20 years, really. And so a lot of CROs have kind of come across me in the past, or they know who I am. And when these are all kind of built in, it says outreach, or in the list of outreach, then they will know your name, or they'll understand who you are, et cetera, et cetera. And so when they see your name come through, and then the email outreach has the em dashes, has kind of like spared the— one of the emails that I remember getting was like, I saw you went to X school in the US. It was like Yale or something they went to. And it was like, yeah, I know that the bar on the site at Yale has an amazing atmosphere or something. And the guy replied to me and he said, why are you messaging me this? And I went back to the company and basically sent them across that email.

James Homer [00:09:17]:
And they said, yeah, that's our hyper-specialization. It got you a response, no? I said, yeah, but 0% good response. I just got like, the guy was just like, James, I know you. We worked together 10 years ago and I know that you never went to Yale in the US and you've never been for a bar at this restaurant, went for a beer, sorry, at this bar. And yet you're emailing me saying, how was your nights out there? And he was like, it's like 30 years ago. And obviously that, I hate to think about this. However, I feel that that probably went to 10,000 people or that kind of email went to 10,000 people. And I pray and hope that most of that got flagged as spam and junk and didn't get read.

James Homer [00:10:00]:
But we put a stop to it very, very quickly at that point.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:04]:
Man, brand damaging. Well, here's why I wanted to start there because like we all get those emails like, don't worry, we can do all these meetings for you. Like take everything off the book and trust me, like it sounds like a silver bullet, but like you are not a guy who can't sell. Since you opened your doors, and I know we highlighted this in the beginning, what have you done business-wise?

James Homer [00:10:30]:
In terms of revenue or?

Benjamin Mena [00:10:32]:
In terms of revenue.

James Homer [00:10:32]:
Yeah, for sure.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:33]:
Okay.

James Homer [00:10:33]:
So sure. So since we started up in about 18 months, we've just gone over $1 million US. So that was, I mean, we're middle of this year, so it's just over a year and a half probably to get to that point, including RAM. So we managed to get $360,000, $380,000, something like that in first year. And then we're over $650,000 now for this year, which is obviously great return. And we have pipeline to have another great Q4. So my dream would be to get over $1 million in billings this year. Although I just don't, I can't quite see it unless we get like a, a really cool client on board that can generate us a couple of hundred thousand from somewhere.

James Homer [00:11:14]:
I think we'll end up about $850,000 to $900,000 this year, which is great from a, for a second full year of trading, but obviously, yeah, it could be better. I mean, which is why we wasted so much time at the start on these automation pieces, the silver bullets, right? And just gone the old school way. So yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:34]:
The opportunity cost, as you said earlier.

James Homer [00:11:37]:
Honestly, hours in a cafe. I remember it now, just hours and hours in a cafe, just filling in what my ICP was, putting in all the details. Putting prompts in and all these different things into the setup page. I think I should, I must've done, I must've done 60 or 70 hours to set up different, different searches and different lists and it just came up with nothing. So yes, I could have done way better.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:04]:
Man. Well, anyways, before we start doing a deep dive, like, first of all, who is James? So a quick 30, 60-second self-introduction, and then we'll jump into how you landed in this lane of Misfit Toys. Absolutely.

James Homer [00:12:17]:
So, um, so who am I? My name is James Homam. I've been in recruitment for as long as I kind of remember. It was really my first real job since I was maybe 22 years old. I'm 40 now. So that means about 18 years, something. Wow. I keep telling people it's 15 years, but in reality, it's like, it's longer than that. I was one of those few people that didn't fall into recruitment though.

James Homer [00:12:37]:
My friend won't mind me telling this story, but he doesn't even work in recruitment now, but he had a job in recruitment for about 6 months. And basically I used to see him dressed in in suits when he was 20, 21 years old, going for beers for free, stuff like that. And I just had this idea of, and this halo on the recruitment profession since then, really. And so I was always trying to get into that industry from about 20 onwards. And 22 was when I got my big break, let's say. And so just to kind of step back a little bit on that. So I'm from Birmingham in the UK. So the second city, but yeah, a little bit north from London.

James Homer [00:13:18]:
I was very, very lucky that my first recruitment job was in a place called Venn Group. It was very much totally contract recruitment. Uh, if anybody's done contracts, especially across kind of the, I guess, the entry and lower experience level stuff, it's like the wild, wild west and you learn so much, like literally so much. When I first joined Venn Group, I kind of came in, I was a little bit older than a fresh grad. But I remember I was maybe 22, something 22, and I nearly failed my probation after 3 months. I remember that for sure, which was primarily because I was very defensive and I just didn't take criticism on well. And so that was my first big lesson, I think, and changed my strategy, changed my, I guess, my persona, I suppose, at work, and then became one of the top billers in the office.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:06]:
I gotta ask, I mean, first of all, like it took you 2, you didn't mention this in the pregame, or maybe I missed this, but you wanted to join the recruiting industry for like 2 years. And this is you knocking on doors while you were doing blue collar stuff. Like, hey, this is like an opportunity that I saw. For 2 years you knocked on doors. Like, why didn't you quit?

James Homer [00:14:27]:
Remember what happened 20 years ago?

Benjamin Mena [00:14:33]:
Trying to remember what happened 20 years ago. Like it was September.

James Homer [00:14:35]:
Basically it was the financial crisis.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:38]:
Oh yes. Okay.

James Homer [00:14:39]:
So basically there were all the redundancies. Recruitment agencies took a real beating over a prolonged period of years. And I just so happened to be starting, trying to get into recruitment at that point. And so it was a real challenge. And honestly, I was ready to give up before Venn Group gave me the opportunity. I'll never forget because it was my final kind of interview and I was just going to give up and go for something different, maybe into some other sales side or something along that route. But I remember I didn't even have a shave and that was before beards were in. I came, you know, and I'd just kind of given up everything.

James Homer [00:15:16]:
I just put a shirt on and didn't even put a tie on, put a beard, like just given up and then met some really, really nice people. They were great, gave me some good overviews about the role and then they offered and really the rest is history.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:30]:
And I love that, like, they sat down with you also and are like, hey, we're gonna get rid of you. 'Cause they, they did the same thing to me in my first recruiting job. They're like, you kind of suck at this thing. Like, after that conversation, 'cause I, I feel like that conversation can literally just be a launching point for the rest of your career. Like what, like what did you absolutely change after that conversation that took you from like almost losing the opportunity to becoming one of the top billers in the company? Or the region? Yeah, sure.

James Homer [00:16:00]:
I mean, honestly, it was listening to, it was a strange one because the people that were giving me some of the advice were just colleagues on the team. So I'm not sure whether you've come across Venn Group before, but it was a team-based commission environment when I first joined. So it was very, very interesting. It's not really very salesy, but in reality it was in certain ways, but you shared the commission. commission was across the office and the team. And so that meant that there were a lot of stakeholders in every single deal that you did. So for example, if you were in your first 3 months, you don't really have any clients for yourself. You just work on other people's roles as they came in.

James Homer [00:16:42]:
And so a lot of people were kind of just telling me to do certain things. And back then I used to, as a young 21, 22-year-old, I used to think I knew it all, right? That's how you'd think. And there were other people Sometimes even younger than me telling me to do things. And so I just used to just respond. And I remember my boss back then, a lady called Emma, I remember she took me into a room and she said, so your colleague, and I forget which colleague it was, it was either somebody called Rosie or Amy, but anyway, either one, they said that it's very, very difficult to work with you because you're just so defensive and you just don't listen to things. And so that made me automatically then think that I was going to lose this opportunity if I didn't do it. I enjoyed the whole thing and I felt like I was turning the corner. So what I did then is I decided to just listen to everybody and try and understand everything and just not respond defensively at all.

James Homer [00:17:42]:
And that was actually easier to do than I thought it would be. And actually one of the benefits of that was that One, people help you more, and in a team-based environment, they will give you the best things and the best jobs and best candidates. And then on the other side, it means that you're effectively like a sponge. You just learn everything. And so I still think that, uh, Venn Group was probably the best place in the world to start recruitment because in contract, you get it all. We used to have candidates that used to have, like, I remember this guy had like 6 grandparents that died. Like in, in like a year, obviously it wasn't real because we have the notes, right? I can't remember what we used to use, like Profile or something, one of the old legacy systems, but we'd be able to realize it and they would just like not turn up on certain days. And you used to have to deal with, with the general management of the contractors.

James Homer [00:18:34]:
And so you learn just so much about people and how it works together. And, and so I'll, uh, I'll always be grateful for that opportunity when I was very young.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:43]:
The amount of grandparents that died during the, uh, the start phase of jobs, like, man, we're almost out of grandparents, guys. But okay. Anyway, so let me just jump ahead for those that are listening. Like you, you grew up in Birmingham. How far away is London?

James Homer [00:19:00]:
Uh, I used to do the travel quite a lot actually towards the end. It was basically a, it was a 5:30 AM train from Birmingham and you get into London Euston at 7:00 AM.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:10]:
Okay. So about a 2-hour train ride.

James Homer [00:19:13]:
An hour and a half to 2 hours. All right. Door-to-door, 2 hours actually to London Euston. So it's not a million miles away. You wouldn't want to drive it, for example, but the train's there.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:23]:
So one of those days that you told me that you were in London since 5:00 AM on your way back home, it was dark and cloudy. That one day, what did you decide?

James Homer [00:19:35]:
Sure. I mean, life is about the small decisions you make, right? And I always think that like one small decision or one small fork in the road can just change everything. And it definitely did for me. So I was in London all day. It was gray, raining. I'd got wet constantly. A client had literally spilled coffee on my suit, on my shirt. And I had to go to like 5 more meetings with like coffee all down my white shirt.

James Homer [00:20:02]:
It was just like, I had to kind of like keep my thing on. It wasn't a great day. And it was gray and just cold and I was wet. And then I got warm again and then got wet again and then had to get back on the train. And I remember just not enjoying it at all. Got back to Birmingham New Street and then picked up my car and then drove down the Aston Expressway, if anybody knows the UK. And it was just dark and the sun hadn't come out all day. And I just figured that, you know what, I can't do this anymore.

James Homer [00:20:32]:
And I was like, why, why am I doing this? Like, why don't I look to see whether there's any opportunities to go and like work in Spain or something where the sun's out further? And yeah, I just decided that I had to change it at that point. I just couldn't, I couldn't do it anymore with the, with the gray and whatever. And so that, that decision kind of changed my life a bit.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:52]:
Small decision, right?

James Homer [00:20:55]:
I mean, it gets, it gets worse, honestly, because that small decision turned into me speaking to a couple of retorex. I was at Robert Walters at the time, actually, because I'd spent 2 years or maybe a year and a half at that point, Robert Walters. My mistake with Robert Walters was that the company was far too large. I joined them from like a smaller startup, which was a company called Emerald, who I had a really wonderful time with. Spent some time with RW and it was just too big a business for me. It was very difficult to kind of get off the ground. And obviously I wasn't enjoying that at that point. And then obviously with the, with the FAFSA, just had a terrible day in London from 5:30 in the morning.

James Homer [00:21:33]:
I spoke to rector X and rector X just started obviously pumping my CV around. I had like 5 or 6 of them like send me different things. Like people were coming and traveling to me and stuff. I've got no idea why, but I think maybe back then there wasn't too many people who were open to traveling or at least to moving. Because I remember I got interviews in New York. I got an offer in LA. I got an offer in San Francisco for a recruitment firm. I got an offer in Hong Kong.

James Homer [00:22:01]:
I got an offer in Tokyo. And then obviously I got a couple of opportunities in Singapore. And at that point in time, I genuinely had no idea where Singapore was. Interestingly, I'd placed in Singapore before, but I'd never looked on a map because obviously it's just a LinkedIn Boolean at that point, right? And you have a chat with the candidates and stuff. And a lot of my clients are what you would call pre-IPO companies in the US expanding internationally. So I'd heard of Singapore before. I've got a bit of a candidate network there. And the opportunity to go over there was probably the most compelling of them all.

James Homer [00:22:37]:
And the reason why was because Paul Farrar, who used to run Aspire, who was the company that took me to Singapore, he I was again worn out from all the interviews. I think I worked it out the other day when I was thinking about things for this call, and I'd had 30 interviews in a 4-week period, plus also doing my actual job at the same time. And all these interviews were, the US was like 8:00 PM, 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM. And then obviously Asia was like 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 7:00 AM. And then obviously I was having a whole day of work afterwards. So it was always wonderful fun and I was just exhausted. And the way that I decided to join Aspire was because Paul said, oh, I'm in London today, but why don't I just get a train up to Birmingham with me? He says, you've already done too much traveling and he's CEO and owner, right? So I was like, that took me a bit aback. And we met at a cafe or coffee shop somewhere, I remember.

James Homer [00:23:38]:
And then at 5 PM he said, I think it's beer o'clock, don't you? And I was like, you know what? I'm sold. solved. And the other interesting point is that, um, there was no real testing period. I got my visa for Singapore and I'd never been to Singapore in my entire life until I touched down in 2020, 2016.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:57]:
All right. We're going to get back to that in a second. Uh, you had 30 interviews in 4 weeks while working your job.

James Homer [00:24:04]:
Yeah, it was very difficult. It was every morning at 6 or 7 AM was partitioned for interviews and also every evening, 9 and Well, I want to take a step back just to paint a picture.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:15]:
Like, why were so many recruiting firms fighting over you? Like, what did, at that point in time, like, what did your background look like? Like, like for somebody listening, you're like, oh my God, I'm looking at making a move. Like, how do I look as good where I can get these 30 interviews and looking while I'm looking at making a change?

James Homer [00:24:32]:
Sure. It's because I was always very responsible and accountable for my own business development. That's very simple. And so everything, all my numbers stood up everywhere that I've been. Obviously I've got a bunch of kind of top builder awards, stuff like that. Plus also I have always done my own business development. And what I was going to market with, especially through these at Retorex and speaking to all these other companies, was basically I wanted to set up a business from scratch. And I had multiple examples of where I've done that in the past.

James Homer [00:25:08]:
And so it was fresh revenue from zero. There was no, I didn't need to look for a team or a desk that was already performing that I could go and join. There wasn't, I didn't need fresh clients. I didn't need customer, like I didn't need candidates. I didn't need a database. I basically marketed myself as somebody that could go from zero to X amount with very, very little management support. And there were a lot of that viewed that as a bit of a no-brainer. And I think back then there wasn't too many recruiters looking or exploring internationally in 2016.

James Homer [00:25:43]:
I think nowadays, like if you were looking at going to Dubai or something, if you're, or the US, if you're a British recruiter, I think there's probably quite a few of us that want to go over. But back then, I don't think it was. And I think I was probably some kind of, well, I mean, obviously I had something a bit Rare or a bit more uncommon, I think.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:03]:
And I also just love the owner or the firm leader that took the train to go see you like hour and a half, 2 hours from London, sit down with you and then take that train back home. Because like we, like as owners, founders, leaders, like we know how busy our desk is. Like for a small investment of time, like look at the dividends that that paid. But we'll, we'll, we'll get into that in a bit, but I got to get back to this Singapore thing. So like you sold your house, you took the visa and you landed in a country that you've never visited before.

James Homer [00:26:38]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:38]:
Like what was week 1 look like?

James Homer [00:26:42]:
Week 1 was spent jet lagged in a rented house, uh, in a, in an Airbnb, sorry, because back then Airbnbs were okay again in Singapore. Since then they, they've been kind of ruled out a little bit, but But yeah, we ended up staying in a pretty, basically in just an Airbnb. I was incredibly jet-lagged. I didn't really know what was going on. It was incredibly hot and humid. I'd never really encountered a place like that before. I don't know whether you've ever been to Singapore, but it's incredibly humid and incredibly hot. But the big thing I remember from back then was I'd never really needed aircon before, and I didn't realize just how dry aircon was.

James Homer [00:27:22]:
And so I kept on waking up every morning with just like horrible stuff that nose thinking like, what is going on here? Am I allergic to this city? It's absolutely bizarre. But once I started turning on the eco mode and humidifying, et cetera, obviously it was much easier. But yeah, touching down, the great thing about Singapore is that it is kind of set up for people like me and there is a big setup. So for example, my colleague Alicia, who also ran the Aspire office in Singapore, She gave me a referral to a real estate agent and he picked me up in a car on like, I think the 2nd or 3rd day that I'd landed and basically took me around 8 or 9 different apartments. I chose the one that I really liked, ended up just putting a deposit down and basically moving in in week 2. And it was very simple to deal with and to do. But yeah, I'd Yeah, I'd never, I'd never even been to Asia before.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:22]:
And okay, so getting started like at a recruiting desk there, like not speaking the language, like was that hard or was all your clients speaking English?

James Homer [00:28:34]:
Yeah, everybody speaks English. Like Singapore is, uh, is predominantly, well, it has, it technically has, um, 3 or 4 languages that are official, but English is the predominantly spoken one in Singapore. So Singapore is like Asia lite. I think maybe I would've had a different experience if I would've gone to Thailand or to Indonesia or Hong Kong or China. But everybody spoke English and the government speaks English and everything's in English. So that was quite a simple flow. But yeah, so it's pretty okay. I mean, for anybody who's listening that wants to do some time in Asia, then Singapore is by far the softest landing.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:10]:
And so we're going to kind of jump ahead a little bit because like fast forward into COVID. You guys had a crazy lockdown. You called it the circuit breaker and it's like business went downhill, but you actually helped completely rebuild the entire business back up. And that took time, that took effort, that took years. You got it profitable again at that point in time, or when did you start thinking like, maybe it's time for me to go?

James Homer [00:29:35]:
Yeah, sure. So, uh, I mean, the Aspire journey was a really interesting one because it took me into a new place. It was fantastic. Honestly, I loved every second of it. I think that if COVID hadn't happened, I would probably still be there now, very simply put. Maybe still having dreams of owning my own recruitment business or something, but I would, but I would, I didn't ever have any push factors ever to leave. Obviously there were always interested parties and there were always like, you know, you know how we are as recruiters, grass is always greener, et cetera, you know. But in reality, it's, I probably didn't have any push factors.

James Homer [00:30:13]:
I loved it there and I was earning good money. But basically when the circuit breaker came, my colleague who, so there were kind of 2 leaders of the office, me and one other, and she was on maternity leave at the same time, which obviously wasn't an ideal situation because we basically had the entire office and then the whole of Singapore just went into lockdown. Everything went into lockdown. It was meant to be 2 weeks to flatten the curve. That then turned into longer and longer. And I remember I was talking to one of my colleagues, one of the principal consultants that was working in our team. And I remember we were just sat there and I forget which month it was, but the entire pipeline just died. Just everything just went down.

James Homer [00:30:55]:
It went from having $200,000, $250,000, which would have been a solid month in terms of Singapore dollars for the office. And it went down to like, I think there was one deal that went in and we managed to just squeeze that one in. And then there wasn't really anything for the next few months. And to be fair, obviously Paul and Chris, like the leaders of the business, were back in the UK and we couldn't, we didn't really understand what the effects were going to be. But we ended up having to cut costs. We had to make people redundant. We had to take out an entire function, which was basically like our candidate management function, because we had to switch everybody to business development because we wanted to come out stronger. And then effectively when we finally kind of got out of it and Singapore was back on its feet, we'd managed to build it back to a decent run rate, getting back to profitability.

James Homer [00:31:55]:
We had a much smaller team though, of course. And then I just, I mean, really it was kind of, it was probably as close to traumatic that you can feel in a business sense. Because these were like, these were like people that I'd never had to have problems with before. And it just felt like every day was an argument either with the people that were working with me in the office or whether it was arguing upwards. And I learned a lot about leadership back then because I was trying to appease both sides. So I don't think anybody got what they wanted. The people that were working underneath me definitely didn't get what they wanted. And the people above me definitely didn't get what they wanted either for large periods because I was being told to cut, cut, push KPI from the top.

James Homer [00:32:42]:
And then from the bottom, I was like, they were like, we want to get paid our bonuses. We're still owed this money from here, et cetera, et cetera. Like, why are we having to do this, et cetera? Yeah, I don't want to have to log in and make 50 calls a day. That's not what what I joined the company for. And it was just about balancing that out. And I think if I did it again now, hopefully we never have to go through that ever again. But if that did ever happen again, then obviously I would have to be way more transparent and have to just make the— just follow the leadership, honestly, because it was their business. And when they said cut, instead of trying to keep everybody as happy as I could and trying to keep everybody give everybody their jobs, et cetera.

James Homer [00:33:24]:
I should have just listened to them and just gone, okay, fine. I'm sorry, but this is how it goes. Because I think that we just, uh, everybody, I kept everybody on board for 2, 3 months, even though the leadership were very against that. And when it didn't turn around, uh, I obviously was very difficult at that point. But in the end, we managed to get through it. The world opened back up again, Singapore did, and we started making deals again. Um, and the business came out of it relatively strong and we were, I mean, we were very profitable for the first few years that we were there. So we didn't damage the company, we didn't run out of money and obviously managed to negotiate that difficult time well.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:02]:
2 weeks to flatten the curve. You're like, I can keep everybody around here for 2 weeks, right?

James Homer [00:34:07]:
That was honestly, I was buying time, I think, because everybody was talking about the flatten the curve and then they opened back up again. You were allowed to go out with like 2 people. Honestly, it was crazy. I remember an example when it was opening back up again. I remember an example when we were sitting in Singapore and we were at one of the bars, Boat Quay. And if you've ever been to Singapore, you definitely know what Boat Quay is. And there were like these guys in red t-shirts with rulers, like with, because there was like a distance, like measured, like legally that you had to have between tables. And you weren't even allowed to like touch each other on different tables, otherwise you'd get find.

James Homer [00:34:44]:
And I'll never forget that. That was insane. They were coming with measuring tapes to measure between, and that was how insane everybody got for a while, I think. And so I don't think it's a surprise that it was difficult to negotiate.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:58]:
Let's fast forward to 2024. You're regional director, great salary, 2 young kids. Your wife is now pregnant with your 3rd.

James Homer [00:35:06]:
Correct.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:07]:
And you leave. Walk me through real quick that conversation that you had at home.

James Homer [00:35:13]:
Well, it was my wife that was pushing me, honestly.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:17]:
Awesome.

James Homer [00:35:18]:
Yeah, exactly. Like, uh, my wife is like the least risk-averse on things like that around. So, so basically I've always, I've always wondered and I've always thought like, it was never like a real kind of goal of mine to own my own business, but it was always what I used to tell people. So I always used to tell people, you know what, in 10 years' time, I'll own my own business and, you know, we'll, I'll do this and this because it just felt like the next step because I will never become like a director like Robert Walters or something like that. I'll never run like 150 people's organization. I just wouldn't be able to do it. I don't have that skillset. But it always obviously makes sense to, I guess I've always viewed myself as a bit of a startup guy.

James Homer [00:36:02]:
And so I can kind of build teams from like between like 0 to kind of 20 people, that kind of thing. And so that was always quite interesting, but I really thought to myself that I would always just work for other businesses that had already set themselves up and just do that job for them. And so once that had been built, move on to the next opportunity, do the same thing again and again and basically play it that way. But I mean, in terms of why I went out on my own, the conversation was from my wife saying, well, why don't you just why don't you just do it on your own? Like that was literally a question that she asked me. And I just kind of, I was like, well, we've got 2 young children. We have rent to pay. We have like all of the costs, et cetera. Like we've got a huge amount of risk attached.

James Homer [00:36:51]:
Plus also like I've got a good salary. Like why? And also I've got a great relationship with my management and things like that. Why would I, like I've got a safe, secure job. Why would I go? And I remember she said to me, she just said, But if you don't go now, there'll always be a reason to not go. You'd always make a reason. And so right now the kids are young. It means that obviously they don't, other than financial support, they don't really need too much, uh, in terms of obviously like extensive, like traveling and stuff like that, like activities and everything else with kids, et cetera. Um, so she said, well, there's probably no better time.

James Homer [00:37:28]:
than to get your head down and start things now. And I have to say, I resisted for quite some time. And I remember I'd like, my wife was always lobbying for me to have a conversation with my boss constantly. And I have to say, like, I just avoided it constantly. I was like, again, I was having that annoying thing of being caught in the middle. So I didn't really want to leave. And especially I didn't want to leave like these guys that I'd worked with for so long, right? Like, I mean, they were fantastic. The guys and the build of the business was going down the EOR route, which was quite exciting and everything else.

James Homer [00:38:04]:
And there were loads of interesting upsides, but then obviously my wife also was like, well, but you'll be working for someone forever. Like, you know, do you not want to build like generational wealth at some point? Like that kind of thing. Like how much will you be able to earn if you keep working for other people? Like, et cetera, et cetera. And honestly, it just got to the point where I, I just decided to try it out because my wife said to me, she said, well, why don't you just try it? We've got enough savings for 5, 6 months to deal with it kind of thing. So do that for 3 months. If it just epic fails and the business falls over, then—

Benjamin Mena [00:38:45]:
You can go get another job.

James Homer [00:38:46]:
Another job, basically. Or you can go cap in hand to your managing, your MD and the owner of of Emerald at the time and asked for your job back. And I was like, you know what? Okay, fine. Let's try it. And so I had that difficult conversation with boss and then opened my own company. And honestly, we got the first client on within a month, made the first placement within the first 3 months. And after that first placement comes in, I'll never forget. So this is very telling.

James Homer [00:39:16]:
So I just remembered another story. So I've never been happier in my entire life than when That first placement came, well, the first offer came. It was really small. It was $7,500, something like that, US dollars, but it proved the concept, right? And I remember I was in the gym early morning, like 9 AM. We dropped the kids to school, the 2 at that time. And I was like the happiest guy ever. And then, you know what, the following day, the candidate didn't take the offer. And so I was like, The happiest guy in the world then turned into like the worst guy in the world.

James Homer [00:39:52]:
However, then after, after just thinking that this is the worst mistake in the world, I got a $39K deal offered and accepted. And that $39K straight into the company bank account was like pressure released. Like that's 3 months worth of, uh, of expenses for us, like with the kids schooling plus savings plus everything else, like it. It just, I could then see it and then it just started going and going and going more and more.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:24]:
What were you doing that first month for business development for that, that engine to really start rocking and rolling?

James Homer [00:40:30]:
Every evening I was going on LinkedIn, like the advert bits, the jobs side. And I was just looking through constantly for any new jobs for the last 24 hours in the different sites. So I was going, I had like a account executive setup, like channel manager partnerships or CRO VP, like basically all of these different things. And I was just monitoring and then just kind of creating a new tab for every job ad. And that was kind of before, before I had Atlas, which again will be something I'm sure we discuss in a bit, but I basically would then guess the email address because I hadn't worked with enrichment tools before in the past, not really. So I was just kind of guessing the email or Googling it and seeing what I could find. And basically just reaching out to them in the world's most time, well, least time efficient way ever, because I was writing and typing every single email. But then companies started replying, saying stuff like, um, uh, okay, well, we are actually hiring because I would never tell them that I saw the job ad.

James Homer [00:41:36]:
I was just like, listen, I'm a headhunter. I w— I'm in Singapore. Like, covering Southeast Asia. I've seen, I've heard about the company from X, Y, and then obviously they would then respond and then we would try and close them as a client. And that was what I was doing every single day. And it was, I think if you were going to put time limits on it, maybe 2 hours every night on advert, like harvesting, I suppose. And then the following day was just quite simply just emailing and contacting, connecting and messaging and calling and speaking to every single client at these different companies. And back then we were, we got to a point where we were getting like a 20% response rate.

James Homer [00:42:17]:
And then we were getting like, uh, 80%, I reckon 80% job on, like from meeting ratio. So whenever we got a meeting, we were actually getting the jobs on pretty much. We did super well at that.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:30]:
So you were doing cold outreach and it worked, and then you tried hiring 3 different companies to do it for you and none of those worked. Like, I gotta ask, 'cause you're good at selling, like you're good at closing the deal, you're good at flipping a meeting into a rec into filling a position. What did they say to you that worked?

James Homer [00:42:46]:
Because I thought that what I was doing could be automated. And what I mean by that is I remember literally reaching out to a fintech company that was based in Singapore and I just typed out like the same kind of structure that I always type out. I put down the kind of companies I've worked with. I knew that they were hiring for their GTM team, for example. And then I reached out to the COO, sent that out, and then I got the response. And the response was actually, we're quite interested in this. We're actually hiring multiple guys. This is the guy that's looking after it.

James Homer [00:43:21]:
And then we ended up making a lot of money from that client. And so that client ended up, I think, 7 placements or 6 placements in our first year, maybe about $150K US dollar billing, which was great, by the way. It was our biggest client that year. And I thought, probably incorrectly now, that surely a machine could just do that reach out. Because I wasn't like putting in anything particularly interesting. I was just reaching out. I had the time, I had the signal, and then I just reached out with a really authentic, I mean, I thought very easy, simple message. And that's why I believed that if I had a machine or an automation tool that would basically be able to learn my outreach messages and then be able to just scale them indefinitely across, then who, why wouldn't that work? Because these messages and these cold emails had worked for so long.

James Homer [00:44:14]:
Like, why, why wouldn't that, that work? That, that was my viewpoint. And so I stuck with that viewpoint for about 3 to 4 months and it was very costly.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:23]:
Yeah. I mean, 3 to 4 months of like just losing the momentum, but like, here's the thing for the listeners, like, that are listening, you're not anti-tool. You're not anti-AI. Like, you're building stuff with Claude, you're building stuff with Apollo, you're actually an early adopter for Atlas. It's one of those things, like, you mentioned to me, like, don't be distracted by the shiny objects, but also you've found tech that actually works for you.

James Homer [00:44:46]:
Yeah, correct. So, I mean, for me, I think every salesperson, or most salespeople, are the easiest people to sell to. I really think this is the case, like whether you're buying a car or whether you buy a house, we want to close the deal. I think that that's the case. So we want to close the deal, whether we are on either side, we want to get it done. Whereas people who maybe aren't on the sales side perhaps think things through logically a bit more and maybe can take like a 2-week break to think things through, whereas that's what we've done now. And just get it done so we can start actioning an outcome. So, so that was why I kind of fell down the trap of the AI tools.

James Homer [00:45:26]:
But I think the tool that changed it all for me was Atlas, because Atlas has been probably the biggest ROI that we had as a business for sure. And that kind of reminded me of like why AI should be used as a tool to help and not to automate. So it's a tool to help and not replace, if that makes sense. So Atlas still needs a lot of data from your side. It just helps you do a lot of, a lot of stuff better. And so that's, that's kind of the route that we took. So basically AI should never send anything out without human eyes, in my opinion. I don't think you can replace and you can change it.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:09]:
I mean, you've been a recruiter for 18 years now. You've seen a lot of different, like probably in-house, not in-house, big company built. Like why was Atlas so different than like all the other things that you've seen before?

James Homer [00:46:23]:
Sure. I mean, we got into Atlas very, very early when it was first there, when it was first coming out. I just Googled it and I found on a Reddit thread, like legit, like it was on Reddit and somebody said Atlas, you should take a look at it as well as a couple of other things. And Atlas, I just kind of fell into and, and it was just, uh, I loved the way that it said no more admin at the start. I think that was one of their taglines initially. And again, I'm a salesperson. I hate admin. I've always sucked at that side of the job.

James Homer [00:46:53]:
Like the amount of times where the first time a deal has touched like the CRM of the different CRMs I've used over the years is literally when we're sending the invoice and the candidate was never on the system, stuff like that, because it's just always, there's more, more interesting stuff to do, right? So Atlas, Atlas spoke to me because it just said that it will automatically bring all of the stuff together onto your CRM and record it all itself. And so that was enough for me. And then it just had loads, it just had surprise after surprise, like AI note-taker. Um, it replaced Calendly for us as well with the, with the booking systems. Basically everything you need has as a recruitment company or as a recruiter, like is kind of as part of the standard package of Atlas. And that was why it kind of changed the difference. And so, at a real point of validation, let's say, I think out of the first year, out of maybe the 10 clients we had on in our first year, I think 7 or 8 of them came from sequences that were built in Atlas. And the other 2 or 3 came from personal network.

James Homer [00:48:03]:
in the first year. And I probably paid less. I probably paid $2,000 for Atlas, and I think he probably made us about $250K in the first year.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:15]:
One of the things you also mentioned earlier is like, at least in the pregame, that you were able to beat out some really big firms because of, was it some live tracking?

James Homer [00:48:22]:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So recently we, so this year we kind of moved into more of a focus on exclusive is kind of the lowest we'll go unless we really know the company super well, but we don't really work contingent hiring. So if there's multiple agencies, we don't really touch it. Like we'll walk away from deals if it's contingent. And we've been really pushing for a number of like of retained deals. And so we do a lot of executive search stuff now.

James Homer [00:48:51]:
And a lot of that will be kind of either like a 25% of the fee up front, or we'll do it in like 3 tranches dependent on how it's structured. And obviously clients will expect you to pitch for that, that kind of level, unless you know like the GM or like, you know, like the CRO or, you know, somebody in the HR team, you'll always have a competitive environment to pitch. And so I've always been pretty good at pitching those retainers. It's just that a lot of the time I feel that my decks could be better and just different things. You know, the other companies do better. So for example, if you're coming up against ASK or you're coming up against one of the big firms that I compete with, Korn Ferry, for example, we see in accounts, Egon Zehnder sometimes, that kind of business, as well as obviously places like Michael Page, they have literally people to build a deck for anything like as you can do. So I'm just on my own, so it's very challenging. However, what I've now started doing whenever I pitch for these retain deals is that I actually walk them through what you would call the live link and also the Kanban kind of pipeline links.

James Homer [00:49:56]:
And I send them through over to them, they can open them, and it's like a deal room. And they love it, clients love it. They love to be able to click on them whenever they want. They love the transparency of it all. And I regularly will do things like Loom calls, not Loom calls, sorry. So Loom demo, share the video, video pitches where I actually record over Loom the Atlas screen and just run through the Kanbans of the candidates that we have in the frame. And I'll just go over it literally from a 4 or 5 minute update every 2, 3 days. And everybody just loves it.

James Homer [00:50:33]:
I mean, the amount of comments we've had for the transparency about how new age we are and modern that we get, and all of that's from Atlas. And honestly, it's like just a free add-on that it does. And people just like to see the transparency. And so, um, that, that's really changed the game. And we, the last 3 or 4 retainers that we did this year were, were all kind of brought on, maybe not necessarily because of that, but it really did help, uh, the sense to be able to kind of introduce them to that.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:08]:
Help you guys beat the big guys.

James Homer [00:51:09]:
That's what AI is for, isn't it? I think we're in like the decade of the boutique. Another point is that I had to really, it was very difficult for me because when I first started this business, I thought, well, why don't I just hire 50 or 100 people, especially when things started kicking off and doing really, really well. But then after speaking to clients regularly, they don't want 150 people. They want me on the deal with like my team supporting. That's literally what they're paying for. That's it. Like a lot of the objections and a lot of the challenges or the concerns that they have about Korn Ferry, about the other big businesses are that like a super shiny BD guy or manager or direct sells the project to them and sells the search and sells the deal. But then you get somebody completely different with a completely different level of experience and a completely different persona and different background, et cetera, actually working it for you.

James Homer [00:52:05]:
And so I found that actually, even though I'd love to have a super large like recruitment business and with all the ego things that go with it. I had to kind of check that ego and just think, actually, maybe my clients just want me to stay under 10 people. And, oh well, we're at 3 or 4 now. So, it's very, very smaller for that, but we're outperforming some of the big guys. We beat them all the time. And so, that's why they come to us.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:31]:
I love that, the decade of the boutique. Well, I think we're gonna run with that because you're absolutely right. I'm seeing the boutique teams running circles around some of these big guys. But I want to jump in. Like we were just talking about tech. I want to talk about your, like your network a little bit because recruiters, so often we talk about like your relationships or your network is your value. Year 1, your network didn't follow you, but year 2, it started showing up and like, and I know for recruiters thinking about this, like, you know, you had to go pretty much from scratch, all in brand new stuff for year 1, but year 2, your network started showing up. Like how did it start showing up again?

James Homer [00:53:08]:
Yeah, it was a little bit strange at the start because I was a little bit concerned about obviously covenants. Plus also, I was also very amicable with my former company. I didn't want to just go and start emailing and messaging former clients that were still there, et cetera, et cetera. And I wanted to be as respectful as possible. And so I went out And I started the business up as if I didn't have any network whatsoever. I tried to just go BD from scratch. Like it was advert chasing at the start. It was also like fund round.

James Homer [00:53:46]:
I built myself a funding round checker on Claude back in the day, like, uh, or when I cursor, it was actually where I could, where he could just like find me news articles every day in the mornings. And I would just reach out to the funded companies, but I have to say, I was kind of expecting expecting a bit of my network to reach out at some point and message me. But apart from one guy, and he definitely knows who he is, there was nobody else that reached out in the first year. However, the second year, completely different. I get now randomly people coming back to me that I worked with 5, 6, 7 years ago, asking what I'm doing and where it's going. One big client we worked with this year was literally from network, literally because I was, I was speaking to the GM quite regularly throughout COVID and, and throughout like that time. And she just landed a role at a very, very fast growing technology vendor. And just over the last 2 months, we've made like $150K from them.

James Homer [00:54:41]:
So the network is very great when it comes, but I do think that companies have to, if you're just starting up now, you have to go as if there's no network.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:52]:
And so, like, I mean, it's one of those things like being a good salesperson, being a good relationship person, but also up until recently, you were also horrible with the admin. Like, how are you keeping track of all these people within your network? What does your random Tuesday typically look like?

James Homer [00:55:07]:
Well, I mean, to address the point, um, my admin, I've always been blessed with like a better than average memory, I think, uh, because like things, things will, Yeah, but I think that was probably why I excelled at contract recruitment quite well, because I could remember the candidates when, whenever there's a role that came in, I would suddenly remember like the candidate names of the people that were available and the different locums, because it was back in the day, it was like legal locums. And I would have to remember the people, call them before a competitor would call them and the person who remembered first wins. So I'd always kind of remembered and thought about things that way. But in terms of, I guess, like how Atlas helps with that is that it records every conversation. So as long as you set it up originally, so for example, WhatsApp is how we do so much business out here in Asia. So much. If we lost WhatsApp, it would just be devastating. And I've always been a little bit concerned about like what happens if like randomly Singtel or whoever runs my mobile phone cuts me off and I can never enter WhatsApp.

James Homer [00:56:13]:
However, all of my WhatsApp is backed up through Atlas. So it literally, it has WhatsApp on it. So that helps greatly. And since AI has come out, it's helped me kind of like prompt stuff. It's like, it's, it is like memory itself. So like you can ask the AI, like there was a guy that I spoke to on this day here on this time, like who is it? And it will kind of provide that for us. Uh, that's kind of how I kept it, but in reality, I think The names and stuff like that of like network and people. I think that they keep in touch with me because a lot of them want to use me if they move jobs.

James Homer [00:56:51]:
Plus also, I just, I'm friends with a lot of them, right? Like, so either one of us will just message. And one other point was that whenever I think about a candidate or think about a client and we haven't spoken for a while, then I'll just ping them a message over WhatsApp again. So I just literally just ping them and say, hey, it's been a little while. Um, you know, what's going on? And then that will just keep the relationship and the conversation going. And so it's just about never being afraid to reach out, I think.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:18]:
WhatsApp. I get asked constantly, are you on WhatsApp? And I'm like, I am, but I never check it. Like, what do I do? What do I do with WhatsApp? That's a whole other story for another day.

James Homer [00:57:25]:
My goodness. Like literally everything just, honestly, people close deals on WhatsApp. I've closed deals on WhatsApp before, uh, where candidates have messaged me back and said, um, I can't talk right now because I'm in, I'm in the office. And then I've literally negotiated with them back and forward over WhatsApp and then they've accepted. Like, literally, think about now, it's happened about 5 or 6 times.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:45]:
That's wild.

James Homer [00:57:47]:
Crazy, right?

Benjamin Mena [00:57:47]:
Well, I want to, I want to jump into some boring stuff. So like day one, like, you know how to sell, like that wasn't an issue, but like, you didn't know how to start a company. Like, so what did you do?

James Homer [00:58:00]:
AI helped with that. ChatGPT helped massively. I have to say, uh, again, this is like the decade of the boutique, right? Like, um, it's never been easier. to start your own business? I, I mean, everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. I tried to build a website on GoDaddy, took me like 100 hours going through it and then realized that actually I can go to Upwork and just pay somebody $600 and they'll do it for me on WordPress, like way easier. For like the startup thing, um, I mean, with my side was like, okay, so where do we set the entity up? Like originally we set the entity up in the UK because I'm British. That was way easier because I'm not sure if you know about Singapore and the way a visa works. Basically, you have to be attached to a company and we obviously didn't have one at that point.

James Homer [00:58:48]:
We had to create the entity in the UK first. That was probably a bit of a mistake in terms of tax because I had to pay massive corporation tax, even though there's no deals touching the UK at all. But that was a mistake we made. Like in reality, what I should have done is I should have, we should have opened our entity in Hong Kong, which we've done now. which is much easier because we are in Asia. We only work with Asia and Australia. And so it's much easier to operate on this side of the world. But again, it was the easiest way to open an entity because I had no idea how to do it.

James Homer [00:59:18]:
I just did it online one night, paid £50 or something. And it was like magically I was the owner of a company. I had a certificate of incorporation. It was like magic, right? Obviously you don't think about the other stuff. Actually, we need an accountant. Luckily my brother-in-law is an accountant, so I managed to reach out to him. I got like the info, but, uh, but I'll tell you what, the, the real challenging stuff was around the IT. So for example, I just went out and I was like, yeah, I want the best map.

James Homer [00:59:44]:
I want a MacBook Air. Like I'll get that, like go and get like an email address from GoDaddy, all this other stuff. But then like no one tells you that you have to set up like DKIM and DMARC and all these other kind of like, um, SS— I don't, I don't even know what they are, like the security protocols for email outbound because For the first 2 months that I set up my company, every single email we had went to spam. Every single one, because we weren't set up properly. And I had no idea how to set that up. I used AI to learn how to do that and videos. But yeah, I remember, I have to say about 99% undelivered emails that I was sending. So can you imagine the amount of time for the first 2 months that I was like sending those incredibly like wordy, like I hyper-personalized emails out to clients and they would just go into junk because I hadn't set up my DKIM or DMARC.

James Homer [01:00:35]:
But how would you even know what that was if you hadn't done it before?

Benjamin Mena [01:00:39]:
Yeah, that's like, I mean, I'm just picturing like you're all your evenings, like your kids are in bed, like you're spending the 2 to 3 hours like advert chasing, writing the emails for it, sending it out. And then everything was going to spam.

James Homer [01:00:53]:
Everything. No, literally, because it wasn't showing as, uh, it was showing as like a suspicious mailbox because I just had one mailbox, one domain. And obviously I hadn't set it up properly as I had no idea what was, uh, what was going wrong. I literally had no clue whatsoever. Uh, it was only when I, um, it was only when I asked the AI, like, why am I not getting the responses? And it just said, like, had you looked at your DNS settings? I was like, What's a DNS?

Benjamin Mena [01:01:24]:
Oh, serious?

James Homer [01:01:26]:
I was, I had no idea.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:28]:
DNS, is that like some like rap group or something like that?

James Homer [01:01:30]:
Like, what? So I thought it's a little K-pop group or something like over this side, like absolutely could be. But, uh, genuinely, I, if it wasn't for AI, I would never have been able to do that. And to be honest, it probably, if I would have had to contract an external IT company, I probably wouldn't have bothered opening my own business because it would have just been expensive and just expensive. Wouldn't have been able to do. But I said in the, in the decade of the boutique, it's much easier and there's, there's way lower barrier to entry. I think it's now you just have to make sure that you prompt better than I did because I was just, I was prompting very specifically, not like, right, well, how should I open a recruitment business? Like, and then going into every single thing that I should have done that really. Whereas, uh, it probably would have told me about email deliverability.

Benjamin Mena [01:02:20]:
You know what? I don't think a single place has ever talked about that and getting a recruiting business started. I think somebody mentions it, but I've seen a lot. Nobody has talked about email deliverability, even though it's one of the most important things that we deal with all day long.

James Homer [01:02:35]:
Honestly, it's nuts. And then one of the great things about Atlas as well, to not go back too much on them, but basically there's a Slack account. And on that Slack account, you can ask other recruiters things. And I remember like someone was talking about how they do the outreach and they send out like 500 emails a week. And I'm like, how do you not go to spam? And then I remember she said, oh yeah, I use warmly.io. And I was like, what, what is warmly.io? And now I pay them $80 a month, I think, for like warming up 3 or 4 inboxes for me. And literally it has a dashboard. where like it like rates like the deliverability per like email and I get 99.9% deliverability for $80 a month and you cannot possibly get better ROI.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:22]:
That's amazing. I mean, deals can't go through. So much of our life is in the inbox. It's kind of crazy when you think about that. Well, before we jump over the quickfire questions, is there anything that you want to go deeper on or a question I should have asked you?

James Homer [01:03:36]:
I don't think so. I think we've gone through The majority of, I think we've gone through the majority of what we were planning to do. So yeah, quickfire's good.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:44]:
Cool. And they don't need to be quick answers. So I know you're not that much of a reader outside of Who Moved My Cheese, but you told me that you have 4 quotes that you live by. Like, what are those 4 quotes?

James Homer [01:03:56]:
Yeah, sure. So the quotations, and just to make sure that I get them right, the first one is one that I heard maybe about a year ago or so. It's It's work so hard that it's unreasonable to fail. And the way that I read that is really my mantra, honestly. It literally is how I go through every day because I, of course, as a business owner, plus I have 4 mouths to feed plus my own. So I've got 3 kids, I've got a wife. Obviously my kids don't work, of course. And so obviously all of the bills and things fall on the success of the business.

James Homer [01:04:36]:
And so basically the only way that I can pretty much guarantee that we will be successful is to work so hard that it's unreasonable to be unsuccessful. And so if you were predicting that, oh, this person will be unsuccessful, if he works harder, then obviously he could get through it. But yeah, it's something that I think about often. And on a Tuesday night, if I want to just chill or just want to go to bed early or something, I just have to think, actually, you know what? I need to work a little bit harder because then we'll make the success. And then if, I mean, at the end of the day, it's a lot of people think, or a lot of people view the world as like, maybe it'll go wrong. You can always get another job. Remember earlier on, that was my first thought process. It was just like, if it fails, we can get another job.

James Homer [01:05:27]:
But the key is to work so hard that it's actually unreasonable to expect failure. That's quote number one. And that is one that I live by. I love that. Good. Yes. Um, it really is mine. And then the other, the other 3 are a little bit easier, but not less.

James Homer [01:05:42]:
Uh, the second one is nobody's coming to save you. And that's absolutely the case, especially as a father, uh, of 3 kids. There's no like magical person. There's no government, especially out here in Asia. Like we don't, we're not Singaporeans, right? So we don't, We can't rely on benefits. If we lose our job, we lose our ability to eat. We've got to go and work at McDonald's or something, you know? And so once you get comfortable with that, then that's the worst case scenario. Nothing can be scary to you anymore.

James Homer [01:06:12]:
Literally the scariest thing in the world is that nobody can save you. When I used to work at Emerald, for example, I could go to Mike Jones, like my boss, and just be like, right, I need some help. I'm at my wit's end with this. I can't deal with it. I don't know what to to do. I can't do that anymore. Once you get comfortable with that, then you are comfortable with the worst case and nothing gets worse than that. The other thing was, do not delay until tomorrow something that you can do today.

James Homer [01:06:36]:
That was something that I did. That was a quote that I've only lived by since I opened my own business. I wish I would've lived by that quote when I was working for other companies, as I would be way more successful. But one of the big things that I identified in my personality was that I used to just finish work and then think, oh, you know what? I can push that to tomorrow. And then that was just losing an entire evening worth of pushing and pressure and obviously different things, et cetera. So that was really interesting. Now, in terms of the last one is, and this is absolutely right, and this is something my kids remind me of. Is that you are living the version of you that you wished you were 10 to 15 years ago.

James Homer [01:07:21]:
And if you're not, then why not? And that sobers me up a little bit and pulls me back to the ground because 10, 15 years back, I was obviously in Birmingham working in recruitment. I wasn't particularly happy with anything. I remember I wanted kids and wanted to do all these different things. I wanted to be able to have the money to go and do what I needed to do. I wanted to have the business. I wanted to be able to have the flexibility to do what I wanted to do. And I'm absolutely now in that position now. And sometimes I have to think back that actually I'm living the life now that I was dreaming about 10, 15 years back.

James Homer [01:08:02]:
And that brings me back down to earth.

Benjamin Mena [01:08:05]:
I want to ask a question around your second quote, nobody's coming to save you. When did you realize That was the truth.

James Homer [01:08:14]:
When we had 4 months of no cash in last year. So we had a really, really, really good Q2 last year and a really good start to Q3. But then we had 3 or 4 months where there was just nothing came in. It was just dead. Nothing, nothing I could do to do it was working. Funnily enough, it was actually around the same time as I was exploring all of the automation tools. So that kind of explains it, right? But basically that was when I was trying to push through and not really going back to basics that had been so successful for me. That was when I kind of realized that actually, if I don't make money like next month, the business will close.

James Homer [01:09:04]:
I won't be able to pay my one staff at that time. I won't be able to cover our mortgage. I won't be able to kind of feed the kids. And then what am I going to do? My first thought was like, could I borrow off my parents? Could I borrow off the bank? Could I borrow off something else? I was like, what can I do in this situation? And that actually was where it, it just came into me that actually there's nobody coming to save me. There's nothing. So if I didn't make money at that point, if I didn't get another invoice in, that's it. It's game over. I'd have to go cap in hand to all of my ex-employees or like interview and do 30 interviews a week again.

James Homer [01:09:36]:
Or 13 views a month again, or whatever it was. And it was very challenging. But yeah, that was one of those. And so what I did was I just went back to basics, thought to myself and thought, you know what, I can take control of this myself, accountability. And then we had, we had a massive Q4. And since then, touch wood, we've been very successful every quarter.

Benjamin Mena [01:09:55]:
And maybe this will be like the one of the last questions before I let you go. Just looked up at time, time just flew. And I see this as something more in the UK side of the house than I do in the US side of the house is the ego and the celebration around headcount of a staffing and recruiting company. You made the decision that you were never going to have that 100, 150 person team that you like, you're staying boutique. Were you always fine with that? Or did you have to like reset your ego to be like, no, this is the, this is what we're going to do.

James Homer [01:10:28]:
A very good question. And yeah, I had to reset my ego because I think everybody sees success for a search firm as being really big. If you have 10 partners and 50 employees, then you're kind of okay. If you have 300 people, then, oh my God, you must be making so much revenue. You must be doing so well. You're super successful. And if you've got thousands, imagine, I mean, imagine being that successful. I think the key for me was that I realized that I am terrible at that side of management.

James Homer [01:11:05]:
I'm not very good at all. I think it proved it during the Rock Walters days where I'm not really a corporate personality. I can masquerade in that environment and live in it, of course. But for me, it was, I had to realize that actually I'm probably better On the coalface, let's say. I'm the person better picking up the tools. And even though I kind of dreamed about that, maybe we could do some tech or maybe we could roll it out and scale the business a little bit further. And I still kind of think this sometimes, but I have to remind myself that actually my clients that have been paying the bills and I've been helping them and working with them and they've put their trust in me, what they want and what they're paying for is they're paying for me to deal with the searches. And I feel that if we grew too, too much, then I would be too far away from the business side.

James Homer [01:11:57]:
And I actually think that our revenue, our revenue might increase a bit, but our service level will probably decrease, especially initially. And why? Like, I just need to think like now, actually, you listen to your customers, you listen to your clients, and that's what they And so I provide them that, and that's the way it works.

Benjamin Mena [01:12:18]:
And this will be the last question. You've gotten the chance to hire recruiters. You've gotten the chance to train recruiters. Like you've, you know, now recruited in multiple different time zones. I see you online interacting. I see you're in the Slack groups. I'm sure you get a lot of questions, especially like, what are you doing for BD? What are you doing at Works? How did you move the needle? Like, how are you looking at almost a million dollar a year? your second year in business and you've already crushed all these numbers. All the questions that you probably get are amazing.

Benjamin Mena [01:12:45]:
They're great questions. Do you ever just sit back and just like, man, I wish somebody would ask me this. What would that question be? And like, what would it be that answer?

James Homer [01:12:53]:
And I'm not sure what question could ask this, but maybe they don't know the answer to it. I think my life has been, my life has been defined by making a very, very, I guess, like risky decision and then following it through to the to the death, like literally. And I feel that there's always easy, it's always easier to stay where you are. And it's always easier to kind of like stay doing what you're doing, especially if you're being successful. But obviously, if you think about my story from here onwards, like the way that I got into recruitment was literally because I was pushing for a long, long time. And I knew that I wanted to get into recruitment. And I Kept on going for years to try and get in. One company gave me the opportunity and then I kind of paid them back with significant profits.

James Homer [01:13:43]:
I then knew that I wanted to get out of the UK and wanted to make a change. And so I just went full hardcore into that and basically interviewed literally 30 different companies. I worked it out before the call. It wasn't 30, it was 30 companies. And so some of these had 3 or 4 interview stages. in like a month, month and a half. It was nuts. It was literally every morning I was getting up at 5:00 AM and talking to people in Asia or Australia.

James Homer [01:14:10]:
And then every evening I was going to bed at like 10:00 PM after speaking to people in America. And so it was just going hardcore. Once I got the offer and obviously inspired, the CEO came up from London to meet me, went full hardcore straight in, sold my house, went full in. Used the house profit to basically like fund the first kind of 3, 4 months of my life in Singapore when I was going, and then just literally landed there and then just carried on. The same thing when I obviously resigned from my old job and went full on into my company. There was no, I didn't have enough savings. I didn't have enough anything. It was a big risk, you know, but I just went all in all the way.

James Homer [01:14:48]:
And so I feel like too many people want to be absolutely sure before they do anything. And I think they're the people that, I think that was for me. I'd still be in Birmingham now, probably maybe an associate director, which is a very respectable career for sure. Maybe still in Robert Walters, for example, or maybe some other business around there. But in reality, I now, I'm halfway across the world, got 3 kids in Asia, run my own company, make in an incredibly good tax environment and everything else is doing incredibly well with an amazing track record and an amazing lifestyle out here. And none of that would have been possible if I kind of thought, well, you know what, I'll explore a little bit. If I would have just explored like recruitment and would have stopped after my 5th rejection, never would have started recruitment. If I would have, if I would have like stopped after the first few interviews and exploring things and kind of thought, you know what, actually, maybe, maybe Singapore's too far.

James Homer [01:15:46]:
Maybe I should just try moving to London first, or maybe I should just try moving to an easier location. Maybe Europe or something. I would never have been in Singapore. And then obviously if I would've just tried to build the company up at the same time as leaving my old one or something like that, like, or like done that kind of thing and not just gone full bandaid off and split it and gone, then obviously I would've never have got there. And so I feel whatever question you would have to ask to kind of get that about just making sure that you just follow through the decisions you make. And then that's it. That's the way, that's, I guess, how I would like to articulate it.

Benjamin Mena [01:16:24]:
I do have one more question for you, James. Okay. Sure. If somebody wants to follow you or connect with you, how do they go about doing that?

James Homer [01:16:31]:
LinkedIn is the easiest place, honestly. I don't, I don't use anything else normally. I do follow a whole bunch of things on X or Twitter, but that's normally around my, my football team, which is normally quite depressing, which is Birmingham City. Although we won this weekend, which is a rarity. So anyway, but yeah, all professional network is LinkedIn. Just follow me there. Obviously we have a website. We are redoing that now since it's, since we've had a good year this year and we're kind of moving into a more mature business and a good business.

James Homer [01:17:05]:
I think we should probably invest a bit in the website properly. And so that's happening now in process. But if anybody wants to reach out or kind of ask a few questions about how I found myself here and Especially if people want to move to Asia, particularly for recruitment or into another market, then yeah, please feel free to reach out. Happy to share.

Benjamin Mena [01:17:25]:
James, I just want to say thank you so much. This was awesome. Also, thank you for being part of the Elite Recruiter Community. But man, talk about like just jumping in and going all in into making a decision. If you're listening to this right now and you're just looking at your year and you're just like, Can I go all in? Have I just been thinking about it too much? Where can your life change within the next 18 months? I truly believe it can. So figure out what you need to do. Figure out how to go there. Ask AI, do whatever you need to do.

Benjamin Mena [01:18:02]:
But this is the time to go all in because we are walking into the decade of the boutique. It is, it is our time, whether you're working at a boutique or whether you're starting a boutique, it is your time. 2026 is your year. 2027 is gonna be the year of abundance. Thank you, James. Atlas is a CRMx, a CRM that actually understands context. It captures everything you say, hear, read, and write. Every interview, client call, LinkedIn message, email, and WhatsApp automatically.

Benjamin Mena [01:18:34]:
Not because you spent the time entering it. It's because Atlas is always listening. Then it goes one step further and tells you the next action to take. So when you need to fill a role, People Search ranks the best candidates and tells you why. No digging required. The same memory turns BD into a shortlist of who to chase and why. So you win more clients. Need to see your pipeline? Speak to your dashboards and Atlas builds a view automatically tracking whatever matters to you.

Benjamin Mena [01:18:57]:
Whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both. With a new contract suite that means you never have to chase a timesheet again and live margin visibility on every single placement. And with its new MCP and API, Atlas plugs into your, your LLMs, Claude, ChatGPT, and the rest of your stack. The low-value work that keeps you from billing, Atlas does it for you. Atlas customers right now are saying that they're seeing a 50% higher candidate response rates, a 35% increase in new clients won, 15 hours saved every week. Monthly billings jumping 85% and agencies hitting 150% of their annual revenue target by building their business with Atlas. If you want some more information, check out Recruit with Atlas. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast with Benjamin Mena.

Benjamin Mena [01:19:43]:
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