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This episode is presented by Atlas. The CRMx that captures every call, meeting, message, and email you touch, ranks your candidates, builds your BD shortlist, and plugs into your Claude and ChatGPT stack. Customers report 50% higher response rates, 35% more clients won, 15 hours back a week, and billings up 85%. See it: https://recruitwithatlas.com/
$11,250. That is what Bodie Nowak billed for the entire year in 2009. Wife at home, kid in kindergarten, on a draw. He turned down a guaranteed $50,000 job because the cap would lock his upside forever.
Sixteen years later he and his partner Daniel bill just under $2 million a year as a 2-person firm.
This is the story he does not tell on stage.
Bodie Nowak has been in recruiting for 18 years. He and Daniel run Blackwood Partners, a Dallas construction and AEC search firm. Just the two of them and Bodie's niece Zoe. Not a 20-person firm. Not a scaled team. Two people and an admin.
In this conversation Bodie tells Benjamin what does not make it into a Pinnacle Society speech. The Coca-Cola interview he almost took. The 8 months in jail he chose over 2 years of probation because control mattered more than comfort. The letter he wrote to the warden every day for a month. The wife who trusted him when he could not trust himself. And the reason he refuses to scale even though a 15-person firm would love to hit the numbers his 2-person shop hits.
He also gets tactical. Bodie walks through his contingency BD system, how he lays contracts across an entire market, why he calls the hiring manager the same hour he learns they interviewed a candidate, and the one trait he hires for above everything else.
Chapters:
0:00 - The $11,250 year
5:00 - Why he refused to quit
9:30 - Meet Bodie and Blackwood Partners
12:45 - The 8 months in jail he chose
17:25 - Control over comfort
21:00 - Inside the 2009 grind
26:30 - The pivot to oil and gas
30:30 - The $800K year and the OPEC crash
35:00 - Walking away from everything
38:00 - Why motivation is garbage
44:00 - Lay paper all over the town
47:00 - The immediate-callback BD move
49:44 - Why he refuses to scale
53:00 - The 50/50 partnership with Daniel
57:53 - Bodie at 60
1:02:29 - What Danny Cahill taught him
1:07:00 - The question nobody asks
What You'll Learn:
How to build $1.9 million a year with a 2-person team
Bodie's contingency BD system and why it beats retained
The exact move he uses when he learns a candidate is interviewing elsewhere
Why control over comfort is behind every hard decision Bodie has made
The one trait he hires for over every other
Connect with Bodie Nowak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bodienowak/
Blackwood Partners: https://blackwoodpartnersllc.com/
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