Scaling Your Recruiting & Staffing Firm: How Jon Davis Grew to $300M and Sold, Plus Lessons on Contracts, Relationships, and the Blueprint to Exit

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Are you still trying to grow your recruiting desk or business on your own? Join the Elite Recruiter Community and connect with recruiters who know your challenges. Members get unlimited access to replays from the AI Recruiting Summit, Finish the year strong and all our past events plus biweekly roundtables where we dive into sourcing business development and mindset. You'll also tap into our Billers Club for accountability and a split space to partner on roles. Join the number one growth environment for recruiters. For just $49 per month, you'll be part of a tight knit group that pushes you to grow and you can cancel anytime. Visit the link in the show notes and click Join now to get started and start mastering your craft today. Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast I think it's all.

Jon Davis [00:00:40]:
About relationships even today, and I know we leverage technology to accelerate the connection points with people and that's great. And my encouragement is to use technology as it's intended. Technology is a tool to facilitate better outcomes and what's cool about what I'm doing today is I'm a geek for staffing. I absolutely love it. I love talking about it, I love meeting people that are in it because there's so many commonalities, but there are so many different ways you can still do staffing and be successful.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:11]:
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. Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track resumes and calls, it remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now it's entering a whole new era.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:46]:
With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With MagicSearch, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply looking for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever with opportunities you can track, manage and grow client relationships. Powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow need insights, Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. No admin, no silos, no lost info, nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:24]:
Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Ms. The future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruit with atlas.com I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast because here's the thing. When you are looking at growing your recruiting firm, you have probably thought about every single thing you could possibly do. Try this, try that, maybe use this technique, maybe bring in this team. Nearshore offshore. There are so many ways to grow a business.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:54]:
And here's the cool thing. My guest today helped grow his recruiting firm to $300 million in revenue. And here's the thing. They tried every single thing that you've thought about trying. They actually tried it. They went and implemented it. Maybe this worked, maybe this didn't work. Do we need a pivot again? Do we need to pivot again? But he's going to talk about how he helped grow this company to $300 million in revenue before it got sold.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:21]:
And what you can do yourself for your company, whether you're at the desk or whether you're the owner, you can help your company grow. And we are going to talk about how you can position yourself to be in the same place that they did. So, John, welcome to the podcast.

Jon Davis [00:03:37]:
Great. Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity to be here today.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:41]:
All right, so real quick, before we start doing a deep dive, quick self introduction.

Jon Davis [00:03:45]:
Yeah, you bet. I've been in the recruiting space for 32 years. It's hard to believe it's been that long. Grew up, got out of college and was in politics and working, helping someone get elected for a state seat and my candidate lost the race. And so I was out of a job trying to figure out what I would do next. And I had a buddy from college, a fraternity brother, call me and say, what are you doing now? And I said, I have no idea. He said, you need to come down to Dallas and try out this doctor recruiting thing. I went to work for a physician recruiting firm and I, I think you'd be good at it.

Jon Davis [00:04:19]:
So that's all it took. Mattress on top of the car, drove down to Dallas and got into physician recruiting in 1993 and never looked back. Fell in love with the art and the science of recruiting and just the impact it has on people's careers and livelihoods. But how it also impacts organizations. Fell into it and absolutely love it.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:40]:
Wait, how far away was Dallas from where you lived?

Jon Davis [00:04:43]:
It was a three hour drive. I grew up in Oklahoma City, went to the school at the University of Oklahoma, and out of three hour drive to get down to Dallas. And I was one of many that used Oklahoma as a great launching pad. Some people called it a flyover state, but it was a great launching pad to grow up, get a wonderful education, and then come down to the hustle and bustle of the DFW metroplex in the 90s. And things were just growing. So it was really.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:10]:
Just. Let me take a step back. One of the dirty secrets about politics. And that's the joy of, like, living in the D.C. metro for so long.

Jon Davis [00:05:15]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:16]:
That you have a great job and then all of a sudden it's over.

Jon Davis [00:05:19]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:19]:
If your candidate.

Jon Davis [00:05:21]:
You don't have a job. If your candidate wins too. Because if they win, you have a different job. Right. And so they're going into office. And so I finally had this realization after the second candidate I was working with. Win or lose, my job is over. It's changing.

Jon Davis [00:05:35]:
And I may go work for the candidate in their office, their elected office, or if they lose, I'm on the street looking for the next gig. I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. Got to meet a lot of interesting people throughout the process, learn more about the political process itself. But just realized it wasn't for me. I was dating my now wife and realized I needed to have a more stable job. At least that's what she told me.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:00]:
Yeah, I was gonna say maybe one that worked less hours, but you never know in recruiting.

Jon Davis [00:06:05]:
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, I don't know about that. That's a good, good point.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:09]:
All right, so it's your. Your first month at this doctor recruiting job. Like, how was this introduction into this crazy world of recruiting?

Jon Davis [00:06:19]:
There's a telephone, there's a book of hospitals for you to call. Good luck. Let us know how it goes. Maybe it was a little bit more developed than that, but the job I had initially was to talk to hospital administrators in rural communities across America that needed family practice and internal medicine physicians, and sell them on our service, our ability to go find those doctors that would move to those rural communities. And what's interesting about physician recruiting is you're generally involving a geographic move from one place to another, and that involves not only the physician, but the family. And so all the dynamics, the psychology and the drama that go with moving and it's tentacles. For example, kids that are in soccer or daughters that are in dance classes, they need to go find new activities in the new home state that they're moving to as well. So finding the doctor, finding the fit, making that work was only part of the problem.

Jon Davis [00:07:17]:
The other problem was making sure that the family had a successful move to the new location. And we always said it never was a done deal until the moving van left the new city and the doctor had been there for six months. That's when we knew it was a really successful placement.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:33]:
When did you go from like, just banging out cold calls to doctors and hospitals to realizing that part of the sales process is that family unit behind the scenes pretty quick.

Jon Davis [00:07:45]:
Learned it pretty quick. And what we learned early on was if you were working with a physician and they told you that they were ready to take this new opportunity and move halfway across the country, if you had not been on the phone with their spouse, they're probably not going to go take the job. So you need to be able to speak to the spouse as well. And generally speaking, we were talking to male physicians and we needed to talk to their wife. So we finally got smart and called the home during the day and just said, hey, are you excited about moving to Terre Haute, Indiana? And wouldn't be. It wouldn't be unlikely for the spouse to say, huh, I don't know anything about Terre Haute, Indiana. And then other times we did, they didn't know what was going on. So, you know, you just, you learn by doing.

Jon Davis [00:08:28]:
You fall into that. And whether you're placing a physician for a million dollars into a new practice or a help desk person, the psychology of job change is still the same.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:40]:
And so you spent a few years there. Like, what finally spurred you on looking for the next opportunity?

Jon Davis [00:08:47]:
I was traveling all the time, so we serve these rural communities all across America. So I would jump on a plane every Monday and then drive after I got to the city airport, drive to the rural communities and go meet with these hospital administrators. And so it was a lot of heavy travel. And I'd get back on Friday night and rinse and repeat and do it again. And after a couple of years, I was beat. Travel for work is, is fun for the first six months, and then for those of us that have done it, you realize it really is a grind. And I was newly married now to that, that same girl. And she said to me one Saturday morning, I feel like you know people at the airport more than you know me.

Jon Davis [00:09:26]:
Maybe we should look for a different job for you. Now, all kidding aside, we've been married 33 years, so we're all good. But she always gave me the good career advice and just said, I think you ought to look for something that's a little bit less travel intensive. This was now mid-90s timeframe, and technology was just starting to just explode. And I had a same thing. I had a friend that, that moved from physician recruiting over to technology recruiting, and he said, you ought to come over and check this out. In a good year, you could place, say, 15 to 20 physicians. That was a really good year because of the time it took to unplug from a community and get someone moved over.

Jon Davis [00:10:04]:
In a good year, you could play 75 technology professionals. So the velocity of the search was much greater, and quite frankly, the financial. The economics for earning was much greater in the technology. So I thought, let me give this a shot. This could be really fun. And I stayed there for 28 years and had a ball.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:22]:
Okay, was it the same friend that got you into recruiting that also got you into tech recruiting?

Jon Davis [00:10:27]:
No, different friend. Yeah, different friend circle. But it does go back to that Kevin Bacon, six degrees of separation. Right. You know, when you look at most of the job changes that all of us have, they usually tie to a contact and somebody that says, you ought to go look at ABC or have you thought about working over here with me? Those connections really do have an impact on your career. And as I saw this play out with people that I placed throughout the years, it was a pretty common theme, and I fell right into that same DNA.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:57]:
Okay, so you made this jump into tech recruiting. You saw the economics look better at the time, you saw the numbers that your friend was doing, and then also, like, maybe it's a little less work.

Jon Davis [00:11:07]:
Yeah, that's what I thought. Well, it was, it was definitely. It was definitely less travel. And so that, that was an appealing aspect to it for me. The speed, speed of a search, and it was so much more rapid. And again, this is the mid-1990s. Technology and the Internet are just becoming a thing, and people were literally hiring technologists before the next company could hire them. They didn't even have a job for them.

Jon Davis [00:11:31]:
But the scarcity of talent was so great that companies were just coming to us to hire people before the next company could and just get them on their payroll. So the speed and the urgency that existed really from the mid-90s to the mid-2010s was just out of control. Just a rocket ship that was taking off. And it was a lot of fun to be part of that.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:52]:
Okay, so I want to kind of like, we're going to walk through this evolution of all the different crazy things that you guys have tried. What did the company look like when you joined them? And like, what did you guys focus on? Was it all direct placement. Like what did the sales strategy versus the recruiting strategy look like?

Jon Davis [00:12:08]:
Yeah, great question. When I started we were primarily a direct placement firm, mostly doing full time placement. And we had two locations, one in Atlanta, Georgia and one in Dallas, Texas. Headquarters was in Atlanta and I was in Dallas. And we were looking to grow the company. And what we found was over a period of about a year and a half, we moved over about 30 recruiters that were in healthcare recruiting and move them over to our company and technology recruiting. And our company just started to take off because we had this work ethic, we had this drive, we had this camaraderie, we all worked together previously and we just got really right place, right time, lucky and were able to just go and expand both the Dallas and Atlanta markets and then very quickly opened up Phoenix and Houston and found out that gosh, there's a lot of opportunity out here in technology. And a lot of our clients at the time were asking us to do contract placements and temporaries placements and that was not really in our our wheelhouse.

Jon Davis [00:13:08]:
We weren't focused on that by accident. We would bump into that from time to time. But we weren't really seeking a direct sales focus to go find contract staffing. It just seemed different. And at the time the talent was not really interested in being a contractor. Most of the talent out there was a full time person and you really had two buckets of people, those that were full time employees or those that were what we called gunslingers, contractors that would go in, bring their skills, their expertise into a company and do their magic for six months and then take up their toys and go on to the next gig. And we were starting to figure that out and we thought there's something to this here we should because it's a recurring revenue stream, keeps coming back to you. We called it the placement that keeps on giving, right? You make that placement and then they stay there for six or 12 months.

Jon Davis [00:13:57]:
You're getting paid for every hour that they work. And that was a really cool experience for us to learn. So we started saying let's go ahead and segment some of our salesforce. Some of us just focus on selling staffing for contract and some of us focus just on selling staffing for direct hire.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:13]:
So initially like were you guys turning down quote unquote staffing and contracting from your clients?

Jon Davis [00:14:19]:
Well, I'd say we, some we did turn down, but some we just didn't work. We took on the jobs, but we were so busy with these full time jobs that Were keeping us growing. We just didn't put enough time and attention on the contract jobs. And finally, in the late 90s, early 2000s, we realized we've got. If we really want to grow this, we need to put a dedicated effort and strategy in place so that we could grow and fill these contract jobs that were coming our way. Because we looked at our fill rates on the contract side and they were just super low. They were like 10% of the jobs we took on, we filled. And we realized our clients, they gave us these jobs for a reason.

Jon Davis [00:14:55]:
We need to fill those jobs. So we need to follow through and build a delivery mechanism to do that. And over the course of a couple of years, we built a dedicated delivery team that just focused on recruiting for those contract jobs.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:09]:
And so when you and just kind of fast forward and then we're gonna take a step back. When you guys ended up selling or when you guys hit that $300 million in revenue, how much of that it was contract and staffing versus how much of that was direct placement?

Jon Davis [00:15:23]:
Yeah, it's interesting. When we sold and we were just a little under 300 million, it was about 250 million in contract revenue and about 35 in direct hire revenue. So we had really flipped the script to be much more focused on the contract revenue because we knew at the end of the day that recurring revenue was going to make our firm more valuable to the owners. And when it came time to sell, the sale price was going to be much greater because we were more sticky with our customers. Right. We had placements that were out there. We literally had 1800 contractors that were out there working every day for our clients, solving their technology problems. And when we sold the company, whoever was going to buy us was buying those ongoing contracts, those ongoing revenue streams with those contract consultants.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:06]:
Were you guys, at the very beginning when you started, was the vision to get to a place where it could be sold or was that a vision that changed over time?

Jon Davis [00:16:13]:
Changed over time. And I didn't own the company. I was in a small group of three people that ran the company when it came time to sell. And for about 25 years, we were just in growth mode. We weren't even thinking about selling. It was just we were having a ball. Every year, things kept getting more and more large. We kept growing the teams.

Jon Davis [00:16:32]:
We opened up, I think at our, at our max. We had 17 cities in North America and we had offshore facility in Monterey, Mexico. We had one in Hyderabad, India. We were just doing all kinds of fun growth oriented things. And we weren't even thinking about selling, we were just thinking about growing.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:50]:
Okay, so let's take this back again. I just wanted kind of people to see like the end. So you guys just started picking up contract labor or contract this side of the house. You kind of like started specializing or having XYZ team sell this. Let's look at your recruiters and then look at your salespeople. The recruiters that you had, did you have them work on both or did you have like these direct placement recruiters and over here, the staffing recruiters?

Jon Davis [00:17:12]:
Yeah, we tried everything and we failed at everything. And then we tried it again because at the end of the day, there really is no secret formula that we found anyway to do this because you had to, you had to make it work for you and your people. So what we found initially was we had two different teams. One team that focused on direct hire, selling and filling those jobs, and one team that focused on finding and delivering contract jobs. Those two teams were independent of one another. But what happened, which was really interesting in the mid 2000s was this whole contract to hire or the try before you buy, where clients were saying, you know what, I could take the person direct or I could take them contract to hire. We're open either way. So then we had two salespeople calling on the same account and we were putting the client in the awkward position of having to decide who did they want to work with.

Jon Davis [00:18:02]:
Right. They want to work with Ben or they want to work with John. Because in the end we were both really solving the same problem, getting a full time person. One was doing that off the bat full time and one was doing it trial before you buy. And so we realized there pretty quickly, maybe we should morph yet again and have one salesforce that sells everything we do and one delivery team that delivers everything we do. And when we did that, when we made that conscious decision, things really started to gel and we started to take off. And from a sales perspective, for us, our mantra was to always just go solve problems for the customers. If we can solve more problems in the next firm, we're going to grow.

Jon Davis [00:18:43]:
And that mantra, that mindset, led us to creating a recruitment process, outsourcing organization, a statement of work, deliverable based consulting division, and agile consulting division as well. It also led us to deliver in Monterrey, Mexico in a near shore capacity for our clients and helped us build an offshore facility and India where we partnered with clients to build up delivery centers in other parts of the world. So solving those customer problems led us down a Bunch of different paths that were really good for our customer, and most of them were really good for us.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:17]:
So often we hear, like, solve a customer problem or help them solve a problem. But how do you, like, help them? You sound like you guys kind of started diverging into different markets and doing different things and expanding like we're doing. Did that ever take away from, like, the core focus of the business? Or did, like, am I chasing squirrels or am I focusing on the overall big goal? Like, how do you manage that?

Jon Davis [00:19:40]:
Yeah, great question. We asked ourselves that so many times, and we found ourselves in alignment and out of alignment from time, and we had to come back in alignment. But I'll give you one example that was really interesting. In the mid 2000, we had one client that was, again, just trying to hire as fast as they could. They were doing a big technology transition from one technology stat to another, and they were hiring literally probably 20 people a week from us. And they couldn't keep up with space. They didn't have enough space for these people to work, and they didn't have enough computers for them to work on. So that started slowing down the recruiting process.

Jon Davis [00:20:15]:
And so when we really dug in and asked the right questions from our clients, we realized that the reason we were slowing down wasn't because we couldn't find the candidates. It's because they didn't have the laptops and they didn't have the space. So we got creative, and we started renting out our office to our client to have literally their development teams work on site with us. And then we used our IT department to go buy machines, ghost image them to their requirements, and we would sell the laptops to our clients. So we're not a hardware company. We're not a real estate company. But because of the things that our client needed to get the job done, we got creative and made that happen. I drove my CFO crazy at the time because he was like, we are not in the laptop business.

Jon Davis [00:20:58]:
We're in the staffing business. And I said, no, we're in the customer business. We need to solve problems for the customers. And you turn around, and we had those laptops paid for in about six months. And we made a lot of money off the real estate that we leased to our client to come over and use those facilities when they needed them. So finding that pain, finding that problem with your client and solving that many times can look different in terms of outcome than what you think it is on the onset.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:26]:
What was one of the biggest challenges that you guys ran into? Or maybe that you ran into in this, this growth mode, this like this exponential curve that you guys started like running on.

Jon Davis [00:21:38]:
I think, you know, when the market's hot, you know, you can almost do nothing wrong and you can lull yourself into a false sense of how great you think you are and how great you think your people are. The reality was a lot of the times we were just super lucky in the right place at the right time. And so really being diligent to follow up on the basics of the business. Were we doing the foundational things correctly? And when things are going extremely well and moving really quickly, sometimes you take your eye off the ball as it relates to quality relationship and really building those trusting relationships for long term. So when we saw that start to not be front and center on some of the things we did, we took a very intentional slow down to speed up approach. Let's slow back down. Let's make sure we're staying true to the values that brought us to this game in the first place. That's building relationships, solving problems, and doing so in a transparent way that really advances the careers of technologists and helps solve the problems for our clients.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:38]:
And when you guys got to the point of like starting to think about selling, when did that thought process start versus when did that sell actually happen? Like, how many years was that?

Jon Davis [00:22:47]:
Less than two years. And it was right during COVID of all times. And so it was really wild because we had, I think at the time, about 230 internal employees spread across the US all working remotely. And, you know, we couldn't announce to the company that we were in the midst of selling the company. That would have made people very anxious and nervous about what does that mean for me? What's the next step in that process? So we operated kind of in secrecy there for about a year and really looked at at all of our assets and we looked at our company. We started to package it up and then take it to market. Just like when you sell a house and go out and showcase the company and meet with prospective buyers. It was a conscious shift from a living, breathing heartbeat company of people that were just the best on the planet.

Jon Davis [00:23:33]:
If we just had the best team, we just happened to be doing staffing. But I'm convinced if we would have been in the software business, we would have been a great software sales company because we just had a great team that operated together who just happened to do it staffing. But it shifted from this heartbeat of a company to an asset, a cold, hard asset that's up on the blocks to be sold. And that was a really significant change for me because I realized that it is more than just a heartbeat. It is something that somebody's going to buy and that we've got to make sure that it's something that's attractive to the buyer, and we need to make sure that it's a good experience for all of our people through that transition. And thankfully, it turned out to be just fabulous.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:14]:
So when you guys started thinking about this, like, hey, this we're looking at the idea of selling, was there a lot of things that you guys had to fix? Was there a lot of things that you guys had to think about? Was there a lot of shifts that you guys had to do with, like, how the business was structured and how the business was set up?

Jon Davis [00:24:29]:
Yeah, there was a lot of documentation that was lacking about how we did certain things and processes because we had people that had been with us 20, 25 years, and so we didn't need to write a lot of things down. We just knew what to do and we knew what our teammates did, and it worked. And when it came time to sell, we had to be able to demonstrate to a prospective buyer that we had processes and procedures in place that enabled us to be able to grow the company even more, even faster. And as you bring in two companies now together, when you sell, how do you document your processes so that you can repeat them and grow them? So it took us about six to nine months to really slow down, document the processes that made us successful, and build them in a way, in a workflow way that could be replicated. When we eventually ended up selling, did.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:18]:
You guys have to, like, start increasing, like the focus on the contracting side of the house, or was those numbers already good enough?

Jon Davis [00:25:25]:
We were already focused on that. We were also building a consulting arm inside the company as well that did agile consulting for clients. And we started to shift a little bit more of our focus to the contract and the consulting because we knew that would be stickier, it would be more sticky with our clients, it would be more valuable to a prospective buyer. So we shifted a little bit more of our time and attention to focus on that contract side of the house.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:49]:
And how did it feel when you guys actually did sell?

Jon Davis [00:25:51]:
It was like this 13 month marathon that we'd been on, going through this whole process. And it was emotional roller coaster, right? It's. It was like we were going on multiple blind dates, meeting, you know, somebody on the other side of the equation that was looking at us and we were looking at them. And when it finally came time to announce the sale and let our team know, it was just kind of this really surreal, kind of hazy moment of, oh, my gosh, we're actually here. This is happening. And then now you're faced with the challenge of integrating two companies together that had different styles, different philosophies, different approaches. And I was really fortunate enough to stay on and help bring those two sales teams together. That was my job.

Jon Davis [00:26:32]:
And I worked with my peer on the acquiring company, and we did that over about 18 months and really had a great experience. We didn't lose anybody through that process. Everybody stayed. It was really cool.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:43]:
Oh, I love that. You see so many times during, like, a merger or a sale, like, teams being cut and all this stuff. And if everybody's staying on, that's just. That's a testament to the team.

Jon Davis [00:26:54]:
We were just really lucky. The way it played out from a geographic standpoint, we were in the cities they weren't in. We were in the Southeast and the West. They were in the Northeast and the Midwest. And so when you looked at how we fit together, all of a sudden we went from, I don't remember, like, 16 or 17 locations to maybe 40 locations. And we had, like, maybe out of those locations, three that had overlap. And it was real easy. We just put those teams together in the cities where we had overlap.

Jon Davis [00:27:22]:
And together we. We basically tripled the size of our company when we got together with the new acquiring partner.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:28]:
So one of the things I want to talk about next for the listeners is, like, some of the things that you could start doing to set yourself up to be valuable in somebody else's eyes, and one of those ways is actually to have a contracting side of the house. My early days at a large staffing company that starts with an A, it ends in a K. Like, when I started there and when I left, I thought staffing was so hard. Like, I couldn't do this. Like, it's not possible. And if you want a good laugh. And I know a few people have heard this one already, but when we started our own company, I actually had a client reach out and was like, hey, could we hire some contractors for you or from you?

Jon Davis [00:28:06]:
I was like, yeah, hold on.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:08]:
Give me one second. And then I looked at my bank account. I'm like, I can't afford six contractors making, like, 150k a year on the books and everything else. And, you know, at that point in time, you don't. You don't know what you don't know. I just Saw this gigantic monolith behind me. But there are options that you can get started off literally tomorrow as a small team able to implement and add contract labor to your staff. So back to you, John.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:34]:
So take a step back. If you're looking at growing your company to sell, what is one of the biggest things that you need to start thinking about now?

Jon Davis [00:28:42]:
Yeah, I think, like Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind. And I think it's important to do that. Most people fall into recruiting and most people who start their own firms, they either do that because they're not. They're upset with their boss, they think and know that they can do it a better way and they want to just go out on their own. They're entrepreneurial in their spirit, and they want to go out and blaze a new trail. And when they do that, they're not necessarily at the time thinking about selling that asset. It's a lifestyle business. It's their DNA, it's their imprint in that business.

Jon Davis [00:29:13]:
And so it's pretty typical to not be focused on the end in mind when you're first starting, because it takes every ounce of your energy and every minute of your hours to be focused on getting that, that firm up and running. But once you get it up and running, you know the, the ability to have somebody else outsource do some of the back office services for you that are required to do that contract staffing. And that includes being the employer, providing the back office resources, and yes, to your point, providing the funding to help you get those contractors paid, because they get paid every week or two. You don't get paid for every 60 to 90 days. So there's that float that you've got to work with. And so what was really interesting to me, after spending 32 years in staffing, I didn't know that these organizations existed that helped companies, staffing firms get financially fed to be able to grow their business. And that's when I fell into this employer of record and payroll funding organization that I'm with today. Had I known about this probably 15 years ago, I bet you there'd be a high likelihood I would have broken out on my own and done just that, started my own firm.

Jon Davis [00:30:21]:
I really, I'm really serious about that. I had no idea that this existed. And what's cool about what I'm doing today is I'm a geek for staffing. I absolutely love it. I love talking about it. I love meeting people that are in it because there's so many commonalities, but there are so many different ways you can still do staffing and be successful. So it's kind of like jazz. We're all playing music, but you might be riffing one way and I might be doing it a little bit differently.

Jon Davis [00:30:47]:
And each week now I get to talk to literally dozens of staffing firm owners all across the country and hear their story and find out what, what are their problems, what are they trying to solve and figuring out how we can help them solve those problems so they can grow. And you know, your question was about end in mind selling at the end. And I would just encourage to say first build something that's really unique and special and great and then figure out how that might be something that you could sell. And so I think if you, if you treat it too antiseptically as just an asset without a heartbeat, I think you're going to be missing the ride. That is all about building something that's uniquely special. And yes, from a selling standpoint, it's much more valuable to sell a firm that has at least 50% of the revenues coming in from contract revenue. That's going to make it much more attractive to a potential buyer because it's again, it's recurring revenue. It's those replacements that keep on generating margin every week that they go to work as opposed to buying a firm that's all direct hire, that each month that starts, they're starting back at zero because they've got to start and make more perm placements.

Jon Davis [00:31:55]:
So it's not one or the other. It's not just contract or just direct hire. It's finding that mix that really works for you to mix those two things together. Does that make sense?

Benjamin Mena [00:32:04]:
That makes perfect sense. And because you've been around the M and A space and I know that, you know, you've talked to a lot of firm owners now that have also sold. Is it possible to sell just 100% direct placement business?

Jon Davis [00:32:15]:
Sure it is. You know what they call the multiple? The multiple you'll get on that type of sale is, you know, maybe 1 to 2x your earnings where if you have contract revenue flowing through that firm, it's anywhere between 5 and 10x. So you go from 1 to 2x direct hire to 5 to 10x if you can, pulling contract. So it's, it's life changing the amount of value that your firm will reap on the marketplace. If you can work in contract business into your portfolio. And I think for many they start off on the direct hire because it place, because it's easy, it's easy to get started, right? You need an Internet connection, a telephone, and the gumption to go start the firm. And then you can go sell people into jobs, send an invoice, collect a fee, and move on to the next one. It's pretty straightforward and pretty simple to get into the contract space.

Jon Davis [00:33:06]:
There's so many more nuances that you've got to do because you're the employer, you're paying the talent, you're providing the tax payments for that talent, you're providing insurance and professional insurances to run those consulting assignments as well. So there's just a lot that goes with that, and that can be overwhelming. And so what our industry does and what our firm does today is try to take all those tasks off the plate of the recruiter. Consider us like the guy that mows your yard. You could mow your own yard, but you might want to use your time better spent to go focus on your day job or enjoy your life. Let us take care of those tasks that are really, quite frankly, not needle movers. They're things that need to get done. And we give these staffing firm owners the ability to focus on what they want to do.

Jon Davis [00:33:50]:
Go find new clients, go find talent, build their company, go hire people and let somebody else take care of the back office. Let somebody else fund the operations so that they can get up and running.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:01]:
So I'm listening to this. I've listened to a few other podcast episodes. I hear the people talk about staffing. I've been direct placement for years. How do I even start that conversation with a client, with the existing client? And then like, how do you start that conversation with a new client? Here's my new offer.

Jon Davis [00:34:19]:
I think you start small. I think starting small with the trusted clients that you already have is the way to start. Because you've already got a relationship, you already know how they buy, they already know you. And the odds are very good. They're already hiring contractors. They're just not doing it from you. So just starting small and going to your trusted relationships and saying, hey, I want to add contract staffing to my offerings for you. Tell me what kind of contractors you hire today.

Jon Davis [00:34:46]:
Because the odds are they're probably hiring from your competitor. And the more they hire from your competitor, you run the risk of that competitor now coming into your world on the direct hire piece because they're filling all the contract jobs, they'll start to go the other way and start to fill perm jobs at your account as well. So it's a both an offensive and a defensive strategy for you to offer that up. So I think my advice is always start small. Go to your best customers, go to your best relationships and find out how they use contract labor, because the odds are they do. And for example, if you look at any IT shop, at any organization, about 20% of the labor pool inside of an IT shop is a contractor. So if they have a hundred people inside of an IT organization, 20 of those are going to be contractors. So you might as well get into that, that realm and make that service available because your client that already likes you, knows you, trust you, they're going to be the ones that can help you get started to build that contract offering.

Jon Davis [00:35:45]:
That's how you get started in IT with your current customers.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:48]:
So it's also one of those things, like you're starting off in staffing. There's staffing is hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Like you're going against the big boys, you're going against Goliath. How can you be David with your little company and knock this gigantic staffing company out and you get the business?

Jon Davis [00:36:07]:
You don't have to. It's a $200 billion industry in 2025, so there's plenty of opportunity to go around. There are 21,000 search firms in the United States going after $200 billion in opportunity. And most of those 21,000 search firms are single shingle or small one to three person firms. There's still an imbalance of available talent, skilled talent to fill these skilled positions. And so you don't need to go knock off the firms with the that start with A and ending K. You don't have to knock them out. There's plenty of room down in the mid market below there to make a meaningful living, a great living today, and build a firm that you can be proud of.

Jon Davis [00:36:50]:
And then eventually, if you want to, you don't always have to sell it. You can gift it to your employees, you can have it go to your family. You can create an employee stock ownership program. There's a lot of different ways you can build an exit strategy for you, for your firm. But you don't have to worry about beating the big guys. Just go out and be your best. And there's plenty of opportunity out there to swim and go find your own results.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:12]:
The Recruiter Sales and business development summit is coming back. It is kicking off January 26, 2026. It is going to be the best, biggest, most focused conference for recruiters to help them grow with business development and sales. Remember, with all the Summits, the live stream sessions are free. If you want to go for the replays, you got two options. You can go VIP on the summit platform, or you can join the community and have access to all the summits. But this is a summit that you do not want to miss. If you want 2026 to be the absolute best year possible, be there, be ready to learn, and be ready to crush it.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:47]:
I'll see you there. Do you talk to your clients? You reach out? Is there other ways that you can really, like, start getting deeper into clients and selling your staffing services?

Jon Davis [00:37:57]:
I think it's all about relationships even today. And I know we leverage technology to accelerate the connection points with people and that's great. And my encouragement is to use technology as it's intended. Technology is a tool to facilitate better outcomes. And if you can use technology to build better relationships, that trust can be then created. You're going to be able to build your business over time. That's just going to continue to stack on top of each other. So using the tools and the technologies that are out there to build better relationships, deliver better value really positions you in a spot where you can thrive today.

Jon Davis [00:38:35]:
And then start to keep an eye on what my firm might look like when it comes time to have an eventual sale, an exit. And you know, generally speaking, that can be where you're selling to another staffing firm that's larger, that wants to buy up the book of business you have, or it could be to a financial buyer that just really likes the business model and wants to grow your business and wants to invest in it and help you expand it. And I've seen it done both ways and they both work really, really well.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:00]:
Explain the second one a little more.

Jon Davis [00:39:03]:
Yeah, so you've got private equity groups that look at a staffing firm and say, wow, these guys have built something special. They're solving a niche problem. Maybe they're cybersecurity experts and they solve and staff in that cyber security realm. And they're really good. And they go against all the big companies because they're so niched in their marketplace. They're market masters. They know that space so well that clients lean on their expertise because they know they're finding the right talent. And a private equity group would look at that type of search firm and say, this is something special.

Jon Davis [00:39:36]:
It's niched out. What if we could expand that? What if we could take that thing 10x and take those relationships and go beyond just cyber and go to infrastructure and application development and really scale that company into something special. That's what's going on left and right. Their private equity groups see these small staffing companies and realize they built something here that really is unique and valuable. Let's take the secret sauce and let's expand it, let's grow it, and let's invest in there and help them mushroom that company to something bigger. Because then what they're trying to do, of course, is build three to four to five of those together, bundle all those together, and create a powerhouse firm that eventually goes and buys more firms or ends up selling to a much even larger firm. And if you just look back at the history of staffing, that's the way it's been going for the last 30 years.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:25]:
Okay, super dumb question. Can you sell your staffing recruiting company if you're using an employer of record?

Jon Davis [00:40:32]:
Yeah, great question. I get that all the time. Absolutely, you can. In fact, it was one of the things I asked before I joined, because where does the revenue reside? Is it the revenue of the employer of record or is it the revenue of the staffing firm? And it's really the revenue of the staffing firm. It happens to be housed and represented through the employer of record or the factoring company or the bank. But that revenue would not have been generated without that staffing firm making it happen. So the acquiring entities, they understand that space. And if you think about it, they're not buying the recruiting firm for their back office.

Jon Davis [00:41:06]:
They're buying the recruiting firm for their front office, for their clients, for their candidates, for their relationships. So they look at if the back office is outsourced, they actually look at that as a plus because they're not wanting to buy that back office anyway. They don't need that. So it might be bad news for me running the back office, but for the staffing firm owner, no, it's a really good thing because the acquiring partner knows that the back office is buttoned up well, that the details are handled, and that when it comes time to sell, they don't have to worry about synergizing or laying off back office people because there's none to lay off.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:39]:
So what is one of the hardest challenges that you've seen people deal with trying to move into this staffing side when they've been doing direct placements for so long?

Jon Davis [00:41:48]:
I think it's fear of the unknown and just making. It's like. It's like going to the gym. If you think about, I gotta go find my shoes, I gotta get everything on, I gotta get in the car, I gotta get to the gym. It just seems daunting as opposed to realizing, okay, what are the basic steps I need to get into contract staffing? And like I mentioned earlier, just go to those relationships that you already have because the odds are they're already buying contract staffing from someone. Talk to them about your interest to support them in contract staffing and then just, just start, just get started now without, you know, selling pitch to what I do in our industry. Use someone like us to help take off those burdens so you can focus on the front office of, of what you do and leverage, leverage the resources that are out there to help take care of the back office. You don't have to do it all.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:38]:
Okay, this is going to be a chicken or the egg question. I feel like, should I be set up with an EOR first or should I just go have the conversations and if I hear a yes, then go find an EOR to work with?

Jon Davis [00:42:49]:
You can do it either way, you know, and I, I've seen it work either way. What typically happens is the confidence that you have once you engage with an E to be able to actually go sell and deliver contract staffing is greater if you've already engaged with an EOR because you understand the back office that's truly there to support you. So that, that might be the argument to go ahead and get started with an EOR first. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can move very, very quickly within the matter of days to get someone set up and running in all 50 states and all labor categories so that they can be ready to bring on a new staffing business. So either way works from a confidence standpoint. You might consider going first and building your alliances, your team, your posse, so you know who's behind you as you go out to go sell the service.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:35]:
So when I start selling the service, does my contracts with the companies, like, look different? Do I have to go design my own? Is there something I could steal from you guys? Because I know it's completely different.

Jon Davis [00:43:45]:
Yeah, it is different. And a lot of times you're using the end clients MSA anyway. You're using their paper, if you will. And we've got templates that we provide, we've got contracts that we provide that are very boilerplate in nature and they work great. You will have to make some changes to the contracts, but any good EOR is going to have sample contracts that they'll give you and that you can help put to work. And most of your larger customers have their own contracts anyway. That you'll be signing. And then you'll just have to introduce your back office, your EOR as your partner.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:15]:
And how do I start negotiating? Most of the time it runs a percentage or like a spread, like a gross margin and everything. Do you ever see challenges of like direct placement recruiters running into issues, negotiating the proper spread?

Jon Davis [00:44:27]:
Yeah, always. You know, and that's just like, just think about it. It's just like negotiating a fee agreement on a direct hire or it's negotiating the salary. The difference is you negotiate a fee agreement really one time with your client, right? You negotiate that 20 or 30% fee one time, and then you go to work making placements. You're negotiating the margin on every deal, and you're negotiating it two different ways, what the bill rate is to the end customer and what the pay rate is to the talent. So you're negotiating twice each time. And so your negotiation skills are going to get honed and tested much more on the contract side because you're just doing it at a minimum, you're doing it twice for every placement that you do where in the, in the direct hire world, you're doing it once on the client side to get the fee agreement done. And then you're doing it for each salary that gets set for the place talent.

Jon Davis [00:45:18]:
You're doing it at least twice as often on the contract side. So you gotta, you gotta be comfortable in your negotiation and presentation skills. In terms of rates, what else should.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:29]:
I be thinking about but I'm not thinking about as I'm making this move into contracting.

Jon Davis [00:45:34]:
It's not as big as you think it is. Start small. Don't overthink it. Get a mentor. Get somebody that's already been there, done that. Reach out to someone like, like our organization that can help you, but also find some mentors in the business that will kind of help guide you through that path. And then just get started. Like Nike.

Jon Davis [00:45:53]:
Just do it. It's really, it's not as big of a leap as you think it is. It's going to be harder at the beginning for you to start because it's new, it's different. It might even feel very scary and awkward. Just get started. And once you go through the turnstile five to ten times and you start to make those placements, you realize it's really not as hard as you made it out to be. And if you've either taken on the tasks yourself for the back office to do, or you've outsourced those by the time you get that kind of figured out and settled, you'll realize, oh, my gosh, why did I not do this sooner? That's typically what I hear from firm owners. Once I talk to them six or 12 months later, what I hear out of them is, I wish I would have started earlier.

Jon Davis [00:46:33]:
So don't wait.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:35]:
You've called yourself multiple times in our pregame, and now you're a staffing geek.

Jon Davis [00:46:39]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:40]:
What is the most exciting thing that you've learned about staffing?

Jon Davis [00:46:43]:
It's that intersection of personal happiness for an employee. Like where they get most of their satisfaction occurs during the day at work, or dissatisfaction during their work ties back to their boss. It ties back to the work they do, their meaningfulness. And most people need to go out there and work to earn a living for their family. So this is very important stuff. Right. We're tinkering with the very core aspects of an individual's life, their work. And if you go beyond work and you treat it like a career or a profession, you know, and you really elevate the work that's being done, you're really having a handprint in the DNA of someone's life.

Jon Davis [00:47:23]:
And I don't mean to oversell what we do, but if you think about it, we go to work to feed our families, create a story for ourselves, to make an impact on the world, and to make a living for ourselves. And then on the other side of the equation, you've got companies that are all comprised of people, and those people make the company run. And typically speaking, they need help finding the people that are a fit, culturally, technically, and that can come in and do that job. And when you hit the nail on the head, when you get that great placement and you see and you hear the feedback about the impact an individual is making on a company, it's such a fulfilling thing to hear about. And when you talk to somebody you placed two years ago and they tell you what a great placement it is, how they flourished in their career, how they've grown in their career, and how they've been able to be meaningfully impactful to the companies they work at, that's just a great feeling. And, you know, I also think about it, if I were selling software or hardware or automobiles, those products you sell, they don't talk back to you. I'm selling a product that talks back to me. And so it's a very dynamic process.

Jon Davis [00:48:33]:
And I love having two dynamics at play at one time. The client and the candidate, both having their own motivations, they're both interests and desires. And aligning those and bringing those two together to a successful deal.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:47]:
So you fell into recruiting because you had a buddy that hit you up and you took the mattress on top of your car, rode down to Dallas, and probably in the middle of the heat, down the driveway, down the freeway, almost every single person that I feel like you've probably met, except for a few, fell into recruiting, right?

Jon Davis [00:49:06]:
Yes.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:07]:
I've seen this DNA with people that.

Jon Davis [00:49:11]:
I don't want to say use word.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:12]:
Love recruiting, but they love recruiting. And that turn when they hit that love their career does this. When did that happen for you?

Jon Davis [00:49:22]:
It happened many times. This is the best job in the world, and it's the worst job in the world, like, in the same day. I mean, recruiting can be very schizophrenic. Let's be honest. Right. You're only as good as your last placement. Sometimes you only feel as valuable as your last placement. You can get the 9 nos until you finally get that.

Jon Davis [00:49:39]:
Yes. And you ride that emotional roller coaster. But for me, I went through this evolving maturity process and getting up to speed in recruiting. I think the first step is, can you do it? Can you just do the mechanics of recruiting? Can you understand the dynamics of finding a job, finding a candidate, and putting those two together? That's kind of like level one. Can you do it? And let's be honest, it's not that hard. It's very simple. It's just not easy to do and execute over time for a long time. So level one is just, can you do the job? Level two is do you like the job? Because I've worked with plenty of recruiters that frankly just didn't like it.

Jon Davis [00:50:17]:
They were pretty good, but they didn't like the job. And they have found new work over time because it just didn't fulfill them. And that's cool. I mean, it's not for everybody. So I think the first step is, can you do it? The second step is, do you like doing it? And then this third step is, can you sustain that performance over time in terms of the ups and downs that occur in the economy, the ups and downs that occur in your own life? Getting married, getting divorced, having people come into your life, go out of your life. How do you manage your personal life and your recruiting life together so that you can sustain over time? And that's where I really enjoy talking to people that have been there, done that. If they've been in the industry more than five years, they've been in it long enough to have an upper and a down year and an up. And a down market where they realize that, am I in the right job? Am I doing the right thing? Should I, am I any good at this? They question themselves, right? People that have been through those processes, I really enjoy getting a chance to, to speak with them because they've been there, done that, got the T shirt, and they've been through the other side and they've lived it.

Jon Davis [00:51:19]:
So again, three layers. One, can you do the job? Do you like the job? And can you sustain in that job over an extended period of time?

Benjamin Mena [00:51:28]:
I think you hit the number three. Just can you sustain? Because we've all seen the, like the recruiter that had that or the salesperson that had that rocket year. We've seen the recruiter that, in the salesperson that just. Nothing fucking works.

Jon Davis [00:51:40]:
Yes. I mean, I had a guy tell me early on, look, two things. Keep your head down when the numbers are up and keep your head up when the numbers are down. And I thought, wow, that's pretty good advice. And he's the same guy that told me, look, you're never as good or bad as you think you are. Just keep doing what you're doing. Put one foot in front of the other and don't take yourself too seriously and focus on the most powerful word you have in recruiting. Next.

Jon Davis [00:52:08]:
What's next? Win or lose, what's next? Don't get too obsessed about what you can't control. Focus on those things you can control and use that four letter word of next and just keep advancing. Because that's really how it works. It's a whole lot of singles. For folks that have been in the business for a while, they know once you get out of those really hot flashes like you talked about earlier, those hot streaks, you find those that have really lived the tale of the slow times and they stuck with it. Those are the ones that really impress me because I think recruiters, I don't know if this is going to be a popular statement or not, but I think recruiters are overpaid when things are good and they're underpaid when things are bad. And I think just that realization alone, having that, not taking yourself too seriously and focusing on one foot in front of the other and whatever is next is next is what really is the DNA that helps people succeed like yourself over the long haul.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:07]:
Before we jump over to the quick fire questions, I do want to go back to like one thing that you've kind of highlighted multiple times. This is a relationship business, like recruiting. What really is relationships 101? How have you Done such a good job with keeping those relationships so well and also profitable as recruiting firm.

Jon Davis [00:53:26]:
I think, you know, to be in, in sales or be in recruiting, you have to have a lot of transactions that occur, a lot of conversations, a lot of transactions. And those transactions are tied to people. But the reality is nobody wants to feel like a transaction. You know, nobody wants to feel like it's just a check the box transaction. They want to have a relationship. They really do. And now the dynamics of those relationships have changed. With technology, how we get into those relationships has changed.

Jon Davis [00:53:55]:
But to be able to transact and have the person that I'm working with not feel like it's a transaction to where I, I authentically care about their well being. I authentically care about advancing their career. I authentically care about finding the right fit for that company. If you take that approach over long haul, you can't help but be successful. It's a formula that has always worked and stood the test of time.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:19]:
Before we jump over the quick fire questions, is there anything that you want to go deeper on that we spoke about?

Jon Davis [00:54:24]:
Gosh, no. I think building your tribe is such an overused phrase, but it's true in recruiting and I think we all, for the most part fall into this space of recruiting. But building your own mini board of directors that you can call on to say, man, help me, I'm stuck. I don't know what I'm doing wrong here. Everything I'm doing just sucks. Am I just that bad of a recruiter? And build those relationships with people that can help you get better. Iron sharpens iron. And get the kind of people around you that can make you evolve, that can make you be honest about where you really are and that can give you candid feedback about what you need to do to maybe move things forward.

Jon Davis [00:55:00]:
Forward. And also they can support you when things suck because they're going to suck. It's going to happen, right? Guaranteed.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:06]:
Awesome. So jumping over the quickfire questions, they don't need to be quick answers. But you talk to, you know, you go to all these functions, you go to all these conferences. I first met you at a conference. There's a lot of new recruiters that show up at these things and these are people that are probably just like looking around. Like these people have been in this business for so long, like, what the hell is wrong with that? But the curiosity is there to stay, stay in the industry for so long. There has to be success. And so just imagine this.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:35]:
They meet you over the glass of wine at the Happy hour, but with everything that you know and all the people that you talk to, like what advice brand new recruiter me would you give to have a successful career?

Jon Davis [00:55:45]:
Yeah, I say focus on the process, don't focus on the outcome. And by that I mean there are some mechanics that are required to be in any job and there are mechanics to recruiting. Right? Focusing on an area that you want to be good at. Pick your niche and be good at that. Educate yourself about that niche, educate yourself about recruiting wherever you are, Understand the rules of the road and leverage technology to your benefit. So focus on the mechanics of it and focus on that process and get the very best training you can get. And that doesn't mean the training is going to be from your current employer. Go read, go to conferences, get on webinars, go find you subscribe to your podcast and feed your brain.

Jon Davis [00:56:29]:
Treat it as a craft, not as a job. So you can constantly be looking for ways to improve. And then again, don't get too high and don't get too low, don't get too wrapped up in the good month or the bad month and just keep focusing on advancing things forward and you'll stay more sane, you'll have more success and, and you'll be more impactful for those people you serve, the candidates and the clients that you serve.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:52]:
You get a chance to talk to a lot of, you know, recruiting firms, recruiting firm owners, recruiters, salespeople. You see like the back office and how things work in all that. And you've talked to me many times about how technology is like the speeding of things up, especially with communication. Do you have a favorite tech tool that you love?

Jon Davis [00:57:10]:
Honestly, right now it's texting, and I know that's not a new one, but you know, the art of being able to be insightfully communicative in a text and that that level of intimacy you have in a text exchange versus an email exchange or heaven forbid, a phone call that still exists today. But being able to leverage texting in a way that you can read the other side of those bubbles, I can know what's on the other side of that text exchange and really use that text as a prompt to take something forward or do something to check in a little bit. And there's a lot of tech tools out there that are great and I'm an advocate of trying as many of them as I can. They do cause a lot of distraction and false sense of security for some recruiters. It's not just a volume gain, it's not just a numbers game. And so for those that get too enamored with the latest tech, I think if they allow themselves to get too enamored with that and lose sight of the very basics, people buy from who they know and trust. They always have and they always will. And so how do you use those tools to accelerate that? Being aware, being known in your space and today, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a white paper, whether it's a seminar, being known in this space is important.

Jon Davis [00:58:29]:
And how you become known today is changing. So leveraging technology like you do in your practice really does make a difference. So, yeah, I'd go old school. And texting is my favorite tool right now. Still is.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:40]:
You've mentioned reading twice. Is there a book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Jon Davis [00:58:45]:
Gosh, there's so many. One that kind of made me take a left turn was Tim Ferriss's the Four Hour Work Week. And what I loved about his book was the title, like Four Hour Work Week, how's that even impossible? But really, he deconstructs work in a way that challenges you to look at what's an efficient use of your time and how do you look at your 168 hours in a week, how do you look at those hours and break them down to where they're most effective and efficient for you, for all aspects of your life, work and personal. And that four Hour work week really challenged me to look at everything I do, where I spend my time and be judicious about when I veer off path. Time is that it's such an important commodity, you can't buy back. Once it's gone, it's gone. And so just being aware of that, the four Hour Work Week really helped me understand to have a higher degree of awareness from where I spend my time.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:40]:
You said you've been in this wonderful world of misfit toys, recruiting and staffing for. Was it 28 years or was it 32?

Jon Davis [00:59:47]:
Like 32.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:48]:
Yeah, 32. Okay. What's one of the biggest challenges that you've got personally had to work through?

Jon Davis [00:59:52]:
Gosh, probably relatively early on in my career. Not taking shortcuts. Because when the market is good, you can get away with taking shortcuts. You can get away with not doing a thorough job. When the market is good, a lot of B candidates can get placed in a good market. A lot of lack of follow up and follow through can be overseen in a good market because it's a good market and there's more demand than there is supply and so being submissive to a process was hard for me. I felt like I would just. I would just because of my sales skills or my verbal skills or my ability to shine, I didn't have to do some of the grunt work.

Jon Davis [01:00:32]:
And I. I really learned, and I really early on in my career that, no, I do have to do those things. Those things matter, and those things impact me, whether that's now or later. And so that lesson of just, you know what, I'm not as good as I think I am. I need to focus on the basics. And then all of a sudden, the results just started happening in ways that I never could have imagined when I just made myself submissive to the process. What are the basic things that I have to do that will yield the results I want and then submit myself to those. And don't worry about the scoreboard.

Jon Davis [01:01:03]:
Let it take care of itself with.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:05]:
Everything that you know now, the ups, the downs, relationships, the conversations you've had. If you can go back in time this first few months at Matrix, what would you tell yourself?

Jon Davis [01:01:17]:
Wow. Soak up all the training and the knowledge you can that they give you and then go find additional training and knowledge that they don't give you. Sharpen the saw, as they say, every way that you can, and then do that. I mentioned this earlier, but slow down to speed up, slow down at a regular cadence, whether it's weekly or monthly. Slow down to look back at where you spent your time. What did you do? What were the outputs from that time? And make some judgment calls to say, what adjustments do I now want to make? Now that I've inspected what I've done over the last one week or one month? What changes do I want to make in the next week and the next month that will yield better outcomes or maybe just give me a better quality of life? Where am I spending time that doesn't seem to be yielding the right result? Where am I spending time that's really working for me and how do I double down, triple down in that time? And then I think also, just again, not taking yourself too seriously. Don't live and die by the next placement or the next great month. You're going to have good months and you're going to have crappy months.

Jon Davis [01:02:20]:
It's inevitable. Focus on that process and don't get too wrapped up in the result. Nobody does this alone. You know, Tom Brady was a great quarterback, but somebody had to catch the ball. Somebody had to be on the other end of that transaction. And so build your team, build your tribe. And don't expect perfection, but build people around you that can be part of your tribe for a long time. And that could be whether you stay at the same company or you stay in the same industry.

Jon Davis [01:02:48]:
But build people that are of like mind of you, that are going to make you better, keep you honest and challenge you to continue to go forward. And I think networking is such an overused word, but I think if you're a networker and you're always consuming from other people, you're not adding value. I think you're really doing a disservice to yourself and certainly to the people you're networking with. But I, I hit a point in my career where I realized I need to network and provide value to other people. It's not about me, it's about what I can do to help further their cause. Because I know if I help enough people get what they want and I help enough people achieve their goals, I'm going to have an opportunity to do what I need to do and what I want to do. But if I take that focus off self and take that focus on other and really deliver and over deliver value to them again, the results will happen, my satisfaction will rise and I'll be in a better spot because of it.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:44]:
I love that same question though. But you know, we're fast forwarding in your career, we're fast forwarding in your life. Like you're at a completely different place. You've gone through different things. I'm sure when you started at Signature, like you had this idea in the back of your head of how things were going to go, the vision of how it was going to take, and then now with everything that you've gone through, what would you tell yourself at that point in time when you got started?

Jon Davis [01:04:08]:
God, just slow down. You don't have to be in such a rush. Slow down, take everything in, ask more questions, make less assumptions, be inquisitive and build relationships. Early on, I came in as my first CEO job. I came in as the CEO and so it's a weird place to start, right? And I'm the new guy and I know nothing. And there are people around me that know everything. Yet I'm the one that has been dubbed the leader. And so I've tried to pride myself in a servant leadership manner in everything that I do.

Jon Davis [01:04:42]:
But it's hard when you first come in because you're trying to prove yourself. You have that certain sense of, am I the right guy? Am I really the right guy? Am I in the right spot? Is this the right team? Invest in the people, invest in the relationships, and then just put one foot in front of the other and don't take yourself too seriously. That really helps me stay more sane and stay more balanced.

Benjamin Mena [01:05:02]:
I love that. This is the last question before I let you go. Okay. I have seen you at conferences. I've seen you on podcasts, I've seen you share on social media. I've seen you doing lots of things, interacting with tons of recruiters, tons of firm owners. And in this, I'm sure you get questions, of course, like, how do you set up your contract staffing side of the house? How do you sell contract staffing? All those fun things, but they're all, like, tactical. They're all, like, surface level.

Benjamin Mena [01:05:30]:
They're all, like the things that you could probably answered 50,000 times, but you're happy to answer again. Is there a question that you wish people would ask you, but they just haven't or they don't that often?

Jon Davis [01:05:42]:
And what would be the answer if somebody were to really authentically and openly ask the question of what would you be doing differently? If you were me, what would you do differently? And be truly open to hearing and then taking that advice? Because I think there's others that I've worked with that just come in with a preconceived idea of what success looks like or what they need to do, and they may ask the question at a topical level, hey, if you were me, what would you do? They don't really listen or heed that advice. But if folks would just really be vulnerable enough to ask some of those questions about, hey, what would you be doing differently? Here's what I'm doing here. Give me some feedback on that and be truly open and willing to embrace that feedback. And then go try it. Because again, you know, it's no good just to embrace the feedback and tell them, thank you. If you don't go, put it to use. Yeah, I wish they'd be more open and vulnerable to ask those types of questions.

Benjamin Mena [01:06:39]:
All right, if somebody wants to follow you, how do they go about doing that?

Jon Davis [01:06:42]:
Yeah, LinkedIn's the best way. Just find me on LinkedIn J O N Davis, and check me out there. I'm not on X. I'm not on some of the other cool stuff that's out there, LinkedIn or email. But if you go to our website, signaturebackoffice.com if you look me up on LinkedIn, I'd love to connect with you and get to know you. There's anything I can do to help you in your career. Certainly do my best to do it. Obviously, if there's a way I can help you professionally.

Jon Davis [01:07:06]:
If, if you need help in your back office or you get yourself stuck in a situation on a contract placement, you want some help, let me be another set of eyes and ears that might help you and advance your cause. Happy to do it. But I say LinkedIn or just shoot me an email. JDavis Signature back office.com awesome.

Benjamin Mena [01:07:23]:
And is there anything else you would.

Jon Davis [01:07:25]:
Love to share before I let you go now? I just, I am so thankful to spend time with you and I see the impact you have. And for your listeners and your watchers, recruiting really is a noble profession. It's a profession and treat it as a profession. Look for ways to constantly get better in your profession so you can impact more people and you can make a better career for yourself because it truly is one of the most unique special careers out there. And don't lose sight of that even when things are tough. Treat it as a cloak of a profession and you'll always, you'll always have a great place to, to reside and a great place to. To be your landing spot for wherever you want to go next.

Benjamin Mena [01:08:04]:
Well, John, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on Sherry today. It's like kind of like I mentioned early on when I had that opportunity to get some contracting work, I ran away from it because I couldn't understand. I was afraid of it. I didn't know what you know. You don't know what you don't know. You even said that you were in the business for so many years without knowing that yours were not option.

Jon Davis [01:08:23]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [01:08:23]:
And it's just the way technology has changed the availability of what we can do. I truly believe the future of recruiting is with the boutique agencies.

Jon Davis [01:08:31]:
I really.

Benjamin Mena [01:08:31]:
There's enough business out there for us to really chase these big dogs. See like these, these gli. We could take them down together.

Jon Davis [01:08:37]:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Benjamin Mena [01:08:39]:
But here's also the thing. If your vision, your dream is to sell, you are building this thing for the next decade of your life to sell it. There are things that you could do now and stuff that you can learn from John, to set yourself up for success because there's other people have done it, which means there's a blueprint of how it could be done and what it means, you can go chase your dreams. So John, I just want to say thank you for sharing and for the listeners also. I forgot to say this at the very beginning of the podcast the Sales and Business development summit starting January 26th.

Jon Davis [01:09:09]:
I think it is.

Benjamin Mena [01:09:10]:
You are actually going to be one of the featured speakers that week.

Jon Davis [01:09:12]:
Can't wait.

Benjamin Mena [01:09:13]:
The goal is it to be one of the best sales and business development conferences for recruiters out there. Like all my summits, they are free. For the live sessions you don't have to pay a dime. If you want to go vip, you got the option of a small fee for all the replays or join the community. But the goal is to get the information in your hands. The goal is to be able to change your life. The goal is to help you become a better recruiter. So go out there and crush it.

Benjamin Mena [01:09:36]:
I know we have a little bit time left through the rest of the year, but whatever you do now, set yourself up for success to have the best, best 20, 26 and the best year you've ever had. Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas. The AI first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. Doesn't only track resumes and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available.

Benjamin Mena [01:10:01]:
And now it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers with magic search. You speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply looking for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships. Powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow need insights. Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline.

Benjamin Mena [01:10:26]:
And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. No admin, no silos, no lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires, and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruit with atlas.com.