Building a US Recruitment Business: Q&A with CEO of InterEx Group
About InterEx Group
InterEx group is a recruitment business that specialises in roles across cloud, data, Microsoft and security.
Founded in 2016 by Group CEO Jamie Fraser, at the age of 23, the business has seen phenomenal growth and is set to exceed £48 million in revenue this year. Since starting the business six years ago, Jamie has grown his internal headcount from 1 to over 120 by the end of this year which has resulted in the company outgrowing five offices in London.
Earlier this year, Jamie relocated to Miami, Florida to cement the company’s presence in the states after finding huge success by starting his US business from the UK. As InterEx’s employer of record for onboarding, payrolling, and ensuring W2 compliance of their contract workers in the US, we sat down with Jamie to hear his story. You can watch the video above for the full audio interview or keep reading.
Jamie, what were your ambitions when founded the business at age 23?
“My ultimate goal was to be the best in the market”
Before founding InterEx, I worked for a global organization that had a lot of investment and grew aggressively. My reasoning for leaving was more due to the lack of recognition and reward at that company. I had done some very successful things as probably the youngest member of the company. A huge driver for me at InterEx is the systems we have in place for recognition, reward and investment that we give people within the business.
I left that company at 22 but wanted to carry on in the recruitment industry. I never knew my business was going to grow to be what InterEx is today! My ultimate goal was to be the best in the market, and I think that’s ultimately why the business continued to grow. It’s been an exciting journey!
Why did you decide to enter the US market?
I want a big company. I want to increase our headcount and I want more people involved in the business. I want our brand presence to be bigger, and to earn more money. I want to scale quicker. Simply put, in my opinion, the US is the only market you can do that in.
Your business mainly focuses on contract recruitment. Why is that?
I'm a contract recruiter. I love contracts, it’s something we’ve been able to scale. We have just hired a Permanent Recruitment Director in the US and hired a Permanent Recruitment Director in London so we’re growing our permanent recruitment team.
We are still to this day a 95% contract recruitment business and people think I'm mad and say, “How did you do that?”
It's not been easy to be honest with you. From a cashflow perspective, it's hard to get cashflow in. We took zero investment from day one, meaning that cash was key, and cash wasn't just so readily available because we were doing contracts but now we’ve got such a great contract book and are reaping the rewards.
Contract recruitment is a big backbone in terms of what we do, and now it's about adding that permanent recruitment side and watching that bottom line increase.
What was the biggest challenge of starting a US business from the UK?
Time zone
I think naturally the challenge was the time zone difference and getting people to commit to hours.
I was fortunate to have a very committed and hardworking team that worked from the UK. My team in the UK sometimes didn’t finish until the early hours of the morning. This is not something that was enforced. Their hours were 11.30am-9.30pm, but even starting at 11:30am meant the team could not be overly productive because they couldn’t be on the phone with US clients until the afternoon due to the time difference.
So working from the UK and adapting to the US environment, culture, and time zone was such a big challenge for us.
Naturally, I had people coming in tired and lethargic some days. On Fridays I couldn’t have expected them to work until the same sort of time. I agreed to let them finish early on Friday to account for the late evening finishes through the week.
I wasn’t always able to work those late hours every day so I felt I couldn’t drive my team in the right way. I like driving my team with the right behaviours, the right standards and just being there in general to support them.
As a recruiter, I believe if you want to be the best, you work harder than the rest and, in my opinion, we couldn’t do that from the UK. Some companies can be successful operating solely from the UK but I think for us, in the way that we work and what we're trying to achieve, it couldn’t be done in the UK.
How did you approach carrying out business development remotely from the UK?
I'm going to be honest here, and some people will probably disagree with me!
I don't think you need to meet a client face-to-face to grow the relationship. I didn't meet any clients face-to-face when expanding and that includes some of the biggest companies in the world.
However, we are now starting to drive more face-to-face client meetings. I'm not saying I disagree with the method completely, but this job can be done at a high level with tools such as Teams, by having the right conversations, by doing the right cold calling, etc.
That's what my team are trained on; how to grow a desk quickly and effectively.
What instigated the need for a physical presence in the US?
To be honest with you, I didn’t feel it was expanding quickly enough. It wasn’t exciting enough for me!
Doing business from the UK offered us a solid foundation. We were doing that for just about shy of a year. We built up a good contract book but I felt we weren’t able to reach our full potential. The numbers that we’ve done since coming from the UK have just skyrocketed and although the foundations were built from the UK, we have accelerated aggressively since creating a physical presence in the US.
Why choose Miami to set up your business?
From my research and analysis, there was no recognized staffing business in Miami dominating the market.
My goal for InterEx in the next year is to be the number one staffing company in Miami. This is where we want to first have a massive impact. I want to be known as the recruitment company that have come from the UK to dominate the US market, starting in Miami then building on that name to go to other locations.
What were the challenges of moving to Miami?
“We had our difficulties at the start but now I’m loving it”
When I moved to Miami, it was difficult to get housing sorted so I ended up staying in a hotel for the first while. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.
And, to be honest, it's not easy to get things like that sorted in the US. It's not easy to get Social Security numbers. It’s not easy to get banking sorted. There's so many things that are difficult and slow, but in the end it’s very rewarding.
I think for us, the lesson learned is to have a lot more in-depth research into what we do but we've learned from that now. We've dealt with it.
My advice to anyone that will be coming to the US is make sure you go through all of the processes from both a personal and work perspective before you come, because it's not easy, it's not quick, and you need to know what you're doing. We had our difficulties at the start but now I’m loving it. I'm committed to being here and it's exciting.
Did you grow through the expatriation of UK staff or employment of US nationals?
I brought over five UK consultants to Miami. I also hired a US consultant and brought him over to London for two months initially. I paid for his relocation because I wanted him to understand our culture and our processes.
I am a big believer of the UK recruitment culture, and that's what's going to make us different to other companies in the US. A lot of companies talk about ‘needing to adapt to the US culture’. But one of the biggest things that I have learned is that I shouldn’t listen to too many people of what they say always works. People told me I couldn't build my team on the philosophies that I have. I have done that and now I'm doing the same in the US.
People in the US have told me it's a breath of fresh air what we are trying to do in this market, but we need to be bringing over the UK culture because I believe the UK recruitment world is a lot further ahead than in the US.
What do you think are the differences between the UK & US markets?
There are a number of differences. The technology we use, the processes we have, the training we carry out, the culture we cultivate, and the general way of working.
Speed
We’re dominating the US market because we're quicker. I think the reason why we are that bit quicker is because the UK market is a lot more intense as a culture. I think the UK recruitment world is a lot more fast-paced than the US.
I'm involved in business development at InterEx. I lead a lot of our client engagement across the business and I hear that other companies just can't deliver, they’re not quick, etc. At InterEx, we have a non-negotiable commitment to all of our clients to deliver within 48 hours. And clients love that you know, they crave this sort of speed.
Talent
In the UK, we can hire an 18-year-old and get them billing pretty quickly. I had an 18-year-old recruiter bill £100k in one month and he had only been with us for six months! He had zero experience in sales but it goes to show that with the right intensity, you can drive young UK recruiters to be great.
It's a little bit different here in the US however. We have a strategy here to spend a bit more money and to hire more experienced salespeople who are always quicker and have that bit more maturity. They know that we are going to have an expectation of them because we are a sales business.
Culture
It's hard to drive the exact same culture as the UK office. We've had to adapt slightly, however, we will not change who we are as a brand. We will not change our DNA, our culture.
We’re still trying to drive the same things over in our US office. We're still at the same expectations. I’m here so the expectation is high because I'm determined to make this such a success.
What successes have you found since moving to the US?
We are creating something seriously special. We've already outgrown this office in Miami. By November, we're about to sign another lease, allowing us to scale to 100 people.
There's just so much going on that I'm excited about and I'll be honest with you, this is all come with the people that I brought into the business. I’ve got a great team.
There's so many exciting things that we're doing and the reason why we're able to do that is because we’re executing what we're saying.
We've done two training academies. We've got two more about to happen. We've created a brand presence, an attraction; internal attraction and client attraction. That’s allowing us to hire quickly and allowing us to get the right people. And people want to be part of this journey.
What advice would you give to any aspiring founders?
Believe in your plan and execute it
I took advice from different people that had not really scaled a business and I think that that was my worst and biggest bottleneck. I think if you want to scale a business aggressively, you need to tell people what to expect from you. That’s something I do with everyone I speak to, trainees right through to directors.
I will be the hardest working person they’ve ever met; that's my one commitment to them.
Be committed
If you're not committed to your business and you're not looking to go the extra mile more than anyone else would do in your company, then you're not going to scale it to the point of how you want.
I want to have 200-250 people at InterEx next year. We want to be a £100 million business in the next 3 to 4 years. It can't happen with me working at 50%. I’m here in the office early and I leave late. I lead from the front. I work six days a week. That's what it takes for hyper success in my eyes.
Have clear processes
This is one thing which I know that we're known for. I work with a very experienced trainer who said to me, “Your process is probably one of the best I've ever worked with.”
In all of our training, we call it ‘the InterEx way’. We expect everyone at every level to learn the InterEx way. The way I look at things, if my director and manager are away, I can have trainees train and coach people.
We have a process of finding candidates. We have a process on a winning business. We have a process for mapping out clients. There is a process for everything.
That's one of the biggest things that made us successful and now I can replicate that, and globalize our culture, DNA, and processes and scale it.
Invest in the right people
You cannot scale a business at the start focusing on salary bandings, because you need the right people. I'm not saying you offer them ridiculous money, but I believe we pay above industry standard on incentives and give it back to the team and what we do.
You cannot scale a start-up business in the US by focusing on, “Oh, you're 10K a bit too much.” If they're worth the money and they can show you they're worth the money, then pay them the money!
The key thing at the start is creating a structure. Then you can focus on who you want to bring in at different levels. Like I said, for our US trainees, we target experienced salespeople and naturally it's more of an expensive approach, but I’m hoping the ROI is going to be ten-fold.
What lies in store for InterEx’s future?
This year we're going to have a really strong management structure. I’ve got a new Group CFO joining. We've got a Contract Director joining. We’ve got a People Director in the UK. We've got an Operations Director joining. We've got many US nationals joining that believe in what we're trying to do.
Following that, we want to get to 45-50 heads in Miami. Overall, we had predicted to forecast 100 heads but by the end of this year, we'll probably finish up on 120.
We’re way on target. We have stopped our training academies in the UK and we're focusing on scaling up the US now. Next year, we want 200+ headsand we will want two more offices.. I’m in discussion with my Chairman right now and once our CFO starts then there’s going to be lots of planning around that.
Like I said, the goal is to get to £100 million valuation, which I believe is possible in the next 3 or 4 years. I'm putting 100% effort into it and I've got the same backing from all of my management team. We're all part of the journey. We all want to drive this and have the same goal.
InterEx Group has experienced huge success in the US by partnering with PGC to support their placement of workers in the US.
If you are interested in seeing what opportunities exist in the US for you, find out how we can help get you started in the largest staffing market in the world!