Consider how most recruitment businesses begin. You become a strong biller, build a successful desk, earn good money and eventually think, I could do this myself.
So, you do, and suddenly you're not just a recruiter anymore. You're a leader, a manager, a salesperson, finance director, HR, marketing, operations and occasionally therapist.
Nobody taught you how to have a difficult conversation with someone who's underperforming, read a P&L properly, hire your first manager or work out why the culture suddenly feels different when you go from five people to fifteen.
You learn it by doing, usually with your own money on the line.
That's what makes the accidental leader problem in recruitment slightly different.
Being good at recruitment isn't the same as being good at running a recruitment business
The research behind that 82% figure matters because poor management isn't just unpleasant for the people being managed. It affects productivity, engagement and ultimately performance – and recruitment businesses are incredibly exposed to all three.
You can buy a better CRM, introduce AI, change your commission scheme or hire another salesperson. But if the person running the business isn't getting better at running the business, eventually you hit a ceiling.
I've seen it plenty of times. The skills that get an agency to £1m aren't necessarily the skills that get it to £3m, and the person you needed to be when there were three of you isn't necessarily the person you need to be when there are thirty.
That's the uncomfortable bit: you must grow at least as quickly as the business does.
And if you're doing it on your own?
It gets even harder. There's no leadership programme coming from HR, nobody assigns you a mentor and there's rarely someone sitting above you saying, I've made this mistake before. Don't do what I did.
So, you piece it together – a podcast here, a LinkedIn post there, a conversation with another owner and, quite often, a lesson learned after getting something completely wrong.
Which is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in community. Not because agency owners need another course or another badge, but because they need other people around them who understand what it's like to run one of these businesses.
People who've made some of the mistakes already, who you can ask the stupid question you don't particularly want to ask publicly, and who can occasionally just say: Yep. Been there. Here's what I did.
Sometimes that's worth more than any management course.
Sources: CMI/YouGov, Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc Needs Better Managers (2023); Gallup, State of the Global Workplace (2024); CMI, Management and the UK 2030 (2024). 2030 (2024).
