So, when I look back to my first conversation with Mike Terry in late 2013 (at just 23 years old!) where we planned our vision for Thompson & Terry Recruitment, it seems crazy to me that in many ways our business today is exactly how we envisaged.

We had the vision that we would set up a recruitment agency where we wouldn’t register candidates hoping we might be able to place them one day. The only KPI we would measure would be the success rate from CV to placement, and we would only send a candidate to our client if we would personally employ them ourselves.

10 years later, I feel we can say it’s worked just as well as we envisaged all those years ago.

I would be lying if I said there hadn’t been lows among the highs. Buying Mike’s shares in 2018 certainly wasn’t planned, a global pandemic in 2020 even less so but launching our graduate programme, which we have already rolled out 100 times across our clients, has certainly been an added excitement. 

The Planning

A phrase I LOVE and believe couldn’t be truer is having no plan, is a plan to fail and reflecting, Mike deserves a huge amount of the credit here. Those who knew me back then (and maybe now!) will know I was chomping at the bit to open the business and working at 100 miles an hour but Mike insisted on spending the time (c. 9 months) to make sure we had a strong foundation and a business plan that left no stone unturned.

As much as you plan, there are always some factors that you can’t control! I had never worked in recruitment before and then aged 24 didn’t have the gravitas I’d have liked. I remember being stumped when asked in my first potential client meeting if we had hired a similar position before (I hadn’t hired for any position before, well until that one – we were instructed!) and at my first networking event being asked to do a 60-second pitch to the room which I was totally unprepared for. With that being said, age really is just a number and actually, I am glad to have had no experience, as we didn’t want to just be another recruitment agency and the journey enabled us to build something we feel is special in line with our values and vision.

The Mistakes

It would be impossible for me to list every mistake I’ve ever made in business! But, in reality, that’s the learning and if I look back, the biggest growth periods have always been after a major mistake.

I can probably identify two major mistakes.

Firstly, after buying Mike’s shares in 2018, in all honesty, I’ve never felt so much pressure in my life. I felt I needed to instantly put my stamp on the business and during that time, did a terrible job. I went against my values for the first and last time whilst really trying to scale the business and by doing so tripled my costs. Being new to solo business ownership, I followed lots of advice from experts, who claimed they would get us from X – Y, and don’t get me wrong there were definitely positives (launching our graduate programme for a start) but this was certainly a period of time where I lost touch of our mission and why we set up.

I think secondly, whilst my biggest advice has always been to keep learning and listen to as much advice as possible, it’s so vitally important to keep reflecting too as a business owner in order to ensure that you are working towards your ultimate goal.

Many will know that I co-owned and then owned The Oxford Business Community Network for a few years and whilst I enjoy networking, and many of our long-standing clients have come as a result, running the business wasn’t getting me towards my goal. Those who know me will know my ambition has always been to retire early, but whilst 50% of my time was spent on OBCN and 50% on T&T, over 95% of my income was coming from T&T and moreover most of that OBCN time was early morning and evenings, which doesn’t quite fit with my goal of being a good father to 7-month-old Olivia.

It feels bad calling it a ‘mistake’ as I learned a lot from owning OBCN and have so many friends I met through OBCN, which is worth its weight in gold, but business is always about reflecting and using a phrase from the pandemic “knowing when to pivot”.

The Success

This section is so easy to write, and without a doubt as a result of the people.

If I look at Aoife and Cara in our current team, who both joined our graduate programme and are now rounded business people with several promotions, I can see that they will undoubtedly have incredibly successful careers and sit completely aligned with our values and mission statement. Equally looking at each of our previous employees, I can see how much they grew as professionals during their time with us, leaving as great friends of the firm and all have gone on to really shine in their next chapters.

If we continue on the note of people, we’ve made c. 750 placements over the past decade, all of which I honestly believe are great people and have gone to work with over 100 employers from those on the FTSE 100 to tiny owner-managed businesses looking for their first hire.

Yes, we’ve been recognised in awards, loved all of the charity work we have done and feel we have a really well-run business but for me, the real success is the people we employ and absolutely working together to live and breathe our mission statement every single day. 

The Future

As a team, we are so excited about what the future holds and have an 11-year plan in place (no, this is not a typo!), broken down into monthly chunks, to help continue to grow the business in line with our mission statement. The certainty is that we will not move from our values, but are very close to a big announcement, which will increase our capacity, enable us to do more in the community around us and heighten the ceiling for our current team too!

Thank you so much to my team, our clients, our candidates and the wonderful community around us, who have given us so much support over the last 10 years.