How To Grow A Recruiting Firm From $1M To $25M

🎟️ Tom Kosnik is speaking at the Firm Leaders Summit presented by Crelate, November 16 to 18. Every live session is free: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

🚀 This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every conversation and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

We recorded this conversation with Tom Kosnik in 2024, during one of the longest down stretches the recruiting and staffing industry has seen. We're bringing it back because Tom is joining us at the Firm Leaders Summit, and the questions he raised then are the same ones firm owners are working through right now.

Tom is the founder and president of the Visus Group, a growth strategy and organizational development firm that works only with staffing and recruiting companies. As he tells it, close to 100 C-suite executives sit in his peer roundtables, which means he hears every few months what's working and what isn't inside firms from startup size to billions in revenue. He also got into the industry by an unusual route. He was studying for the Catholic priesthood, realized it wasn't his calling, and ended up building roundtables for staffing executives because it was the only industry left on the table.

The heart of this episode is Tom's stage-by-stage breakdown of what it takes to grow a firm, and how the owner's job changes at every step. From $1M to $5M, the stakes are your next few hires and running out of cash. From $5M to $10M, you need a real sales plan, a recruiting manager who frees you to work on the business, and an owner who keeps selling. From $10M to $25M, it's an operating system, quarterly initiatives, weekly business KPIs, and getting off factoring. Past $25M, your job becomes building and running a management team.

He also makes the case that hiring more salespeople and making more dials no longer grows a firm. Recruiting in places a client can't reach is now table stakes. The firms that are winning bring their clients market data and talk with them about human capital strategy, and that conversation positions them as advisors instead of a source of bodies. He explains why offshore sourcing is about to be automated away, why technology spend that doesn't raise gross profit per person is wasted, and why marketing and personal brands now carry most of the sales load.

Tom also covers the personality traits that predict great recruiters, how to keep A-players from leaving to start their own firms, and the story of an operator with no staffing background who took a firm from $1M to $3.5M in EBITDA in three years, as Tom tells it.

What You'll Learn

• What changes at $1M, $5M, $10M, and $25M
• Why your sales plan matters more than your business plan below $10M
• Why "more dials" is the wrong answer to a slow market
• The traits that separate top billers from friendly extroverts
• How to keep your best producers from going out on their own
• Why every firm owner needs a peer group that tells them what they don't want to hear

Books mentioned: First, Break All the Rules and The Power to See Ourselves.

🔗 Connect with Tom Kosnik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tkosnik/

🌐 Visus Group: https://www.visusgroup.com/

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