From top biller to agency owner
When you’ve hit the top, where next?
For the top billers who reach the career ceiling the next step usually points in one direction. Become a director at the agency or start your own. As a top biller you won’t be one for settling. It’s not part of your makeup. You will likely have an over-riding desire to succeed and an unrelenting approach to get there.
Running your own agency puts you in the driving seat of that success. It’s a difficult opportunity to pass up for those with a “sky’s the limit” mentality. However, the transition from making an agency money to an agency that earns for you are two entirely different things.
Working for the agency
Top billers can have a reputation for being mavericks. Rising through the ranks smashing records – and sometimes rules – in the process. When you’re responsible for yourself, and yourself alone, you can afford to be one.
Running a team within an agency gives you the added responsibility of steering others to earn for you. At the end of the day you’re still there to make money for yourself. When you’re running your own agency you can’t afford to be a maverick and it’s bigger than just your team. The agency has to make money for you to make money. You have to think about how the agency functions as a whole and how it’s affected. You have to consider how one person’s actions could affect the productivity of the company as a whole.
Changing the way you work
As a top biller you’re driven – often by sticks and carrots – to push deals over the line.
Who else is involved in driving that deal across the line? In contract recruitment, a placement only accounts for half the workload. Everything that might have fallen to a different department now falls under your responsibility.
This means:
- Credit checking clients
- Supplying contracts
- Overseeing timesheets
- Invoicing
- Credit control
- Payroll
- Insurance
- Marketing
- Accounting
- Tax & compliance
If you haven’t got the infrastructure in place to accommodate growth it can pose a real risk.
Recruiters would have once struggled to wear many hats to run an agency, or had to employ enough back-office staff to help manage their growth. Technology and cloud platforms changed that. By consolidating the running of an agency into an online platform that automates the majority of the work and displays it through a simple interface. They’ve made running an agency easier than ever before.
An agency’s entire back-office operates in the background so that owners can focus on creating their own top billers.