Fear and Recruiting on the Start Up Trail........

This week LinkedIn reminded me that it is the first anniversary of starting up RTM’s US business. It got me reflecting, so I thought I’d share some of my experiences of starting up a business during a global pandemic.

By the end of 2019 the agreement was in place that I and my friend and business partner, Craig Gordon, would start up a US business for RTM, part of the Rethink Group. Months of discussions, weeks of finalizing detailed business plans and defining our initial service offerings and pricing models, all of which would go out of the window within a matter of weeks after launching!

In late January we were officially on-board and in early February we spent a week in the UK, meeting all our new colleagues, understanding the business and discussing opportunities where we could extend UK relationships into the US. It was a hectic week which also included negotiating our first project over a late dinner with a client, based in California, then writing our first contract the next day on an early morning train ride to a different office. A really exciting start!

Shortly after we returned to the US in February we had a qualified sales pipeline of around $250k of opportunities and were busy launching our first project, for an online advertising and eCommerce company that needed support hiring across the business as it scaled up. It was initially likely to be 6 months but in March, the whole world turned. This ended up being the only business we closed from the pipeline and by the end of March this client had to put the project on pause as the full scale of the pandemic started to unfold in New York and California.

As the lockdown started I remember naively believing this that this was just for 2-3 weeks. Then when the New York schools shut you realized this was more serious and not going away anytime soon. Adjusting to working from home wasn’t a problem, we’d set RTM up to be a fully remote organization. In fact, towards the end of 2019 I remembered one of the biggest areas of push back we got from the Board in discussing the US launch was the idea of a fully remote business. Some weren’t convinced it would work. The irony is they were only a few months away from running their business remotely and unfortunately, they are back in that situation right now.

Adjusting to a wife also working from home and trying to get a 5-year-old through remote Kindergarten classes was a challenge though. This was a scary time, the fear from the increasing number of cases and the unknown of how this virus was spreading, the shortages in the food stores and starting to hear about family that were hospitalized and sick. With so many businesses shut down, there was also the economic impact and people losing their jobs. Apart from fear, my overriding feeling was one of gratitude. I was grateful that I had a job that could work from home and offered me some flexibility to support my daughter with her schoolwork but also felt the fear that our parent company could easily choose to pull the plug on the US business.

April was emotionally a tough month. We’d realized we had to forget about the business as we’d planned it and pivot hard to simply trying to help people. So many calls with contacts, former colleagues and friends who were now losing their jobs as the layoffs grew. Almost daily, new announcements of hundreds or thousands being let go from some major companies. Add to that the scenes on the news of hospitals being overrun. 

At the end of March we had been engaged for a search with a consumer goods company, ironically for the market at the time, for a Talent Acquisition Leader. It was good to have work but it was also tough talking to so many well qualified candidates who were out of work. It’s been gratifying since seeing so many of these talented candidates get back into the market and find work again as the market eventually picked up.

We focused in April and May in just trying to help people. Connecting people who’d lost their job or under threat of losing their job to potential opportunities or to others who might be able to directly help. Resume reviews, career counseling calls, helping HR contacts switch to remote hiring and on-boarding.

We produced an aggregate of all the “lay-off lists” that circulated and gave this away to companies we knew were still hiring. We built significant talent pools of Engineers, Product people and Business Development talent in the hope we’d be able to connect them to potential employers. All this driven by a feeling of helplessness, wanting to do more but not yet having the client list or network that truly could.

In the early summer, although the numbers from COVID were still high, it felt safer to go outside again and in the good weather you could hang out in the parks and the worst of the downsizing and layoffs seemed to be over. Then the world turned again with the death the of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations.     

For those that don’t know, my stepson and my daughter are mixed race. I’ve always believed in equality in society and diversity in business because that’s how I was raised, but this subject is very personal to me, so I was also angry. Diversity and Inclusion in business suddenly became the main topic and we did some informal advisory work with some contacts we knew. It was heartening to feel that Diversity was finally being taken seriously and working on a subject I am engaged and passionate about, however, unfortunately, my feeling is that nowhere near enough has been achieved yet and the focus has faded. We need to keep this subject front and center and hold companies accountable for ensuring diversity and inclusion in their hiring and employment practices. We're currently engaged on a search in EMEA for a Chief Equity Officer and this client is truly investing to further build on their long term diversity agenda, but this is an exception and it should be the rule.

This was another difficult time emotionally and again, the fear returned. For my sanity I had to make the conscious decision to pry myself away from the 24 hour news or constantly doom scrolling social media. Mental health and wellness became important topics for individuals and therefore for employers too.  Personally I found routines, typically early in the morning, where I would find some quiet time for myself, try to clear my mind and focus on what was important. I leaned on close friends. I was so lucky to have a CEO who seemed to know when to say exactly the right thing and be supportive. Also, Craig and I are a good team. We’re very different in style and bring different strengths to the business but over the last year we also seemed to be in sync. When Craig was low I was positive and able to pick him up. When I was down he was positive and able to bring me out of it.

By now, in the market, we could see companies falling into four separate but distinct groups. Group 1 where the sector was decimated, such as Hospitality, Travel, brick & mortar Retail. Group 2, Financial and Professional Services companies, who were sitting tight and waiting to see what happened. They’d adjusted to remote work and ensured their people were safe but were sitting tight until the end of the summer or Q1 2021.  In Group 2 I would add the VC and Private Equity firms as investment slowed dramatically while they waited to see what would happen. The VC and startup sectors were a major target for us and suddenly our contacts were telling us “not now”.

Group 3 were seeing explosive growth, eCommerce, Logistics & Delivery, Communications. 

Group 4 were, to me, the interesting ones, like Advertising, Consumer Goods, Fitness and Education. The Advertising sector was seeing some traditional markets erode but a steep rise in digital and performance marketing. Consumer Goods companies were looking to convert to a B2C model as soon as possible. A Senior Exec with an eCommerce consulting business told me that they could almost write their own checks to convert static websites to eCommerce sites, the only concern their clients had was how quickly they could do it and whether they had the resource to deliver. The Education and Fitness sectors quickly had to switch to digital delivery of their traditionally in-person services.

As we are seeing now, the pandemic has hastened the speed of digital transformation in several sectors and I was reading this week how the big brand fitness companies don’t believe they will ever go back to the reliance on in-person classes. As they put it, “people have developed new habits now and those are pretty engrained”.

Another change a number of companies embraced was the opportunity that remote working offered. No longer did tech companies have to rely on sourcing talent from the major centers on each coast, they could hire and on-board talent from anywhere in the country.

By June we were really struggling. We were busy trying to help people, but this was emotionally draining and we couldn’t see where our next revenue was coming from. RTM reassured us they believed in us and were supporting us, but the pressure we put on ourselves to deliver was a challenge.

Then, at the end of June we got two lifelines. Our first client came back and was experiencing significant growth and couldn’t wait any longer to keep hiring. We were re-engaged by them to support this growth. Then, our UK business won an RPO with a Global Advertising and Media business. In fact, our UK RPO business had a great year, re-signing all their clients, growing existing clients and signing three new clients during a global pandemic. 

This client, at the last-minute, decided they also needed support with Leadership roles. As had been proved over the previous months, work could be delivered from anywhere, so although this work was mainly in the UK, we supported our UK RPO team with Exec and Leadership hiring.

It felt great to be focused on recruiting again, was exciting to develop this new relationship and really get under the skin of this client, which is always part of my work I enjoy. The typically quiet recruiting month of August was anything but and Q3 was by far our best quarter so far. 

By Q4 there was another interesting development. There had been much discussion over the summer about a V, U and K Shaped recoveries. As far as we could see in the US, it was looking very much like a K Shaped recovery. This is where professional level, highly skilled workers found their way back into the workforce but unemployment numbers were still high, unfortunately mainly for hourly rate employees from sectors like retail, hotels and hospitality that couldn’t find their way back in to work. We were finding that competition for talent was back. Over the summer, companies that had found it easy to source talent that was on the market, were now finding it more challenging. Personally, I believe this is exacerbated by employees who kept their job through the pandemic having a deep emotional connection to their employer and therefore are not looking to move. I know this is true for me after the faith RTM showed in us last year. So, eCommerce, digital and tech talent was becoming hard to find again. 

As an example, this week when I did some quick research for a contact of ours, I looked at the talent pool of 640 Software Engineers we’d built up last year. At the time we created this talent pool in LinkedIn at least 1/3 of them had tagged themselves as “Open to Work” and many more than that were impacted by layoffs. When I looked again this week, only 16 were tagged as “Open to Work” and the vast majority had started a new job in the last 9 months.

In Q4 we saw another client, a disruptive FinTech start up, that we had done a small piece of work for earlier in the year, come back and they are growing dramatically and need several key hires. We also extended a relationship from the UK with an eCommerce Tech company that we’re working with. We ticked over in Q4 and have entered 2021 able to see our revenue for Q1 (we still have to deliver it but we’re confident about our ability to do that), so after living from week to week and month to month, seeing three months of potential review feels like a luxury!

COVID cases have gone up across the country and around the world, which is disturbing. In New York at least, where we’ve lived with restrictions and mask mandates since March, the fear has died down. Everyone is cautious but there’s obvious optimism with the roll out of the vaccines. Life has adjusted, so much so, that trying to get my now 6-year-old daughter to agree which mask would go best with her outfit for school this morning seemed disturbingly normal!

Somehow we made it through the craziest year in history and while by no means feeling comfortable (do you ever?), there is a lot more work to do, and as last year proved, ANYTHING can happen. However, we are starting to think about growth rather than just survival. We have several great, on-going, consistent clients. We’re seeing the VC’s and Private Equity world come back and record-breaking IPO’s. Many employers are embracing virtual work and looking to achieve benefits from it. We’ve proved we can deliver search from anywhere, so, with additional resource in the UK, we’re rolling out our Leadership Search service across EMEA. So I’m cautiously optimistic.

However, still the overriding feeling I have is one of gratitude. There are lots of words to describe the first year: scrappy, agile, crazy, insane, scary but I’m sticking with grateful. I’m so grateful that I and my family have our health and have our jobs. I’m grateful to Craig for everything through the crazy journey of the last year. I’m grateful for the support, opportunity, encouragement and investment from Mark Lee and board of Rethink and the whole team at RTM.

I feel like we’re starting over in starting this business. At least we had the best excuse ever for not hitting our Year 1 revenue targets (which were so ambitious we were never going to hit anyway!!!). But I am conscious not everyone is back in work and in this position and we’re still happy to try to help. As I said earlier, mental health has become an important consideration and people do feel distant and cut-off. I was grateful to my friends and network that I could message or pick up the phone and get some advice, empathy or just joke around for a while to mentally escape from circumstances for a few minutes. 

If anyone out there needs this also, I’m happy to chat. Doesn’t have to be about business, if you just need a chat, feel free to call and say, “I’m just calling for a chat”.

Although 2021 in the US has started off crazier then 2020 did, let’s hope we all recover and 2021 gets us back to a safer and more secure normal……whatever normal turns out to be.