Season 7 | Ep16 - Anthony Kelly on growing his own recruitment brand DeepRec.ai to 5 heads in 5 months inside the wider Trinnovo Group

On this week's show, I was super excited to be joined by Anthony Kelly, the founder of DeepRec.ai which is a niche AI recruitment agency, part of the wider Trinnovo group. 

He joined the Trinnovo group three and a half years ago, as part of the Trust in Soda brand. 

After seeing early success, he left Ireland, moving to the UK and it was here that he realised he wanted to be an entrepreneur.

At the start of 2023, Anthony decided that it was this year that he wanted to launch his agency and that he wanted to do it in Bishop's Stortford, to be close to his partner and newborn baby. 

A little negotiation with the founders of Trinnovo, and they agreed that he could launch his own business within the portfolio, as long as he wanted to build something of scale.

They discussed building a business of circa 50 people in headcount with a 2 million EBITDA as a target focus. Anthony said, “yes, but I want to do it my way in an office five days a week in Bishops Stortford. We're not going to be in London.”

They all agreed and got it off the ground.

So he's now a team of five, five months in. He's got a plan to be 18 in 12 months. They're profitable and they're making significant waves from a placement perspective. 

In this show, I discuss:

• The strategy behind his business
• His approach to building something locally outside of London
• How he's going to build that scale and what that will mean for him and the team in the future

If you're wanting to speak to or learn from someone who's right in the thick of the first six months of growth of being a new founder, but with a vision of scale and exit and all the things that most people in our industry want, then this is an episode for you to listen to.

Anthony is a charismatic, open, friendly Irish guy. I love talking to him. I'm sure you will too. 

Hoxo Message

Are you spending hours on LinkedIn and cold outreach and want more business coming to you over your competition? 

Well, if you're the founder or leader of a recruitment agency, here's what we can do for you at Hoxo.

We will give you the training, support, and resources to take you from what I call “an offline recruiter”, reliant on posting jobs and sending in emails to open up new customers, ultimately looking like every other recruiter on LinkedIn - to “an online recruiter”, being seen by over 25,000 relevant people driving a 200% minimum increase in engagement on your profile and seeing daily lead lists from LinkedIn that you can follow up within six weeks time.

And if you don't perform, you don't pay. 

How can we make such a bold, results-driven promise like this? Two reasons:

1) While I've been building The RAG Podcast, we've actually done what we say we’ll do for our clients. In less than two years, we built a business generating from zero to over 1 million views per month on LinkedIn leading to multimillion-pound revenues with a sales team of me plus two people without making a single outbound call.

2) Our track record - not only have we done it ourselves, but we've helped over 350 agencies and over 4,700 consultants do it as well, all in the last three years. 

Now, if that sounds interesting to you, make sure you fill in our contact form and we’ll tell you how we can help: https://bit.ly/3jpuEWa

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Episode Sponsor: RecruitHub

Our trusted partner RecruitHub helps new founders launch their own recruitment businesses in the UK, US & UAE. The community is growing rapidly, with over 70 founders on the RecruitHub platform.

Everything you need to launch your own recruitment business with ease.

- Receive 100% of the fees you bill

- Own full commercial control of your business and increase its value

- Cutting-edge tech stack, from ATS to sales automation

- No admin - we handle everything from company registration to contracts, to finance and support

- No setup costs on the platform, no recurring fixed costs, and no surprise fees

If you're thinking of taking the next step in your career and want to discuss your business idea, please book a confidential chat with RecruitHub's team or learn more here: https://www.recruit-hub.com/uk-awareness/

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Episode Sponsor: Untapped

Safe to say it’s been a tricky year for the recruitment sector globally. Many have had to operate through uncertain times, making tough calls and streamlining where possible.

However, accessing lower-cost resources internationally has proven to be the 2023 cheat code for business performance. But anyone who has tried it knows it’s not easy to get right. That’s where Untapped comes in. 

Untapped is one of the hottest companies in the market right now, helping agencies in the UK, US, Middle East and Australia transition to the new world, leverage elite remote individuals and even build whole offshore sourcing and recruiting teams. 

They source from the most exciting talent pools on the planet for recruitment staff and embed elite talent into your company to improve diversity, productivity and the cost of your teams. Your UK team will also love the help with some of the repetitive, time-consuming work that lands on their desk, improving their job satisfaction. 

They put around 3000 candidates per month through an intense 4-stage interview and online testing process to find the top 1% and secure these people roles in UK agencies doing research, marketing, finance, sourcing, end-to-end recruiting, coordination and account management. 

All candidates are benchmarked against UK competency frameworks and are tested for the highest level of communication and language skills.  

It’s a simple process: You pay a deposit to kick off the search, they provide a candidates shortlist in 14 days.  You can also put people through your own process and then hire perm or on a freelance basis, depending on your needs. They are totally transparent with salaries. Typically your global talent will earn 30% more than their local benchmark giving you high levels of motivation and work ethic, but you’ll still pay 70% less than a UK equivalent support. It’s a no-brainer to complement existing teams to handle surplus demand or to ease cost pressures. 

If you’re not using this time to rip up your business model and rebuild it with global resources, you are going to fall behind those that do. Due to demand and capacity restraints, they are operating a waiting list at the moment, so be quick to get in touch: www.tryuntapped.com