Since running A2B in the last 6 years, I’ve written 2 long updates. One after 2020, and one towards end of 2024 at the height of the economic downfall.

Both articles were in theme parallel to a fiction book I was reading at the time. I love my fiction. If you’re curious, 2020 was “All the light we cannot see.” Just brilliant! 2024 was “Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine.” Not as brilliant but still very good.

Today marks 6 years in business for me. Coincidently, I’m reading “Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow.” It’s a story that has all the feels – Love, happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, joy. A story of friendship, romance, life long love, loneliness, death, business and gaming!

Random I know.

It’s truly unique and will have you laughing, then 2 pages later maybe crying.

It’s funny…my business in the last 6 years has been similar. Strap in friends: 

Fear:

I started in 2020 with $0 capital and 3 months worth of living expenses. Kids, mortgage etc. “Hire athletes in sales,” I said. Corporate world listened and it worked. Friends told friends and word quickly spread – “This Alex guy has a unique candidate pool, go talk to him.” $300k that first year.

Fast forward to today, for the past 5 years I’ve consistently hit $400-600k p/year with a high profit margin and a very nice salary for myself. Of course, except for that one year I had 5 staff, I was in the red. Big lesson! However, mostly very green. Yet, sometimes, I still feel “this thing is going to implode any second.” My business coach says, “it seems that mindset drives you to succeed.” Maybe he’s right. But, I would like a little more certainty going forward. Things to work on in the next 6 years ey.

Anxiety:

I think good recruiters have a high level of empathy (yes I just referred to myself as a good recruiter). With that, I think our emotions are maybe more heightened. Or it’s just me. I mean, I do start from $0 every month, and I do perm only. So I still ride every deal like I got everything riding on it. Well…I do have a lot riding on it. My emotions and mental wellbeing is often linked to how good my cash flow is. This is the cost of running your own business. I’d like to say that I am level headed and cool, calm and collected but nah! Talking to my wife, friends, peers and other entrepreneurs + my business coach who is a mental resilience coach has been a massive help. And regular exercise, that’s a non-negotiable.

Anger:

Especially a perm only recruitment business – that’s hard to scale. It’s high touch. I’m recruiting salespeople with an athlete mindset, with high EQ, commercial awareness and exceptional communication skills. This requires me to interview a lot of people. It requires a lot of my time and AI is not good enough yet to interview for EQ.

However, the last 6 years have been hustle and grind. This will get you to a certain point, which is where I am….or have been at. To reach that next stage, I know it’s all about ideas! I need to go from hustle and grind guy to ideas guy. Which is where….

Shiny Object come in play:

Most of my ideas have been shiny objects which distract me from my main thing. One thing I’ve learned, you need to make your main the main thing. As an entrepreneur it’s easy to get distracted especially in today’s attention heave world with AI and gadgets and tech and digital stuff and AI agents to work for you whilst you sip cocktails on the beach. Don’t they all make it sound like that? Everyone is “lead gen at your fingertips!” My view – picking up the phone still works! Especially in a game where I need to recruit high EQ people. In saying that, I am grateful I can tinker with shiny objects here and there…one of these days, one of them will scale my biz to 7 figures, but for now I am…

Happy:

Man, cmon! $500k a year is plenty. In a business I love with a genuine mission. Sometime I just want to say “f#ck scale” and “f#ck recurring revenue.” I know what I need to do to generate $400-600k a year, just do it! Enjoy it! I can work from the beach, how cool is that! I don’t have to be a “growth” or “learn new things” mindset. I see a lot of high performing salespeople and recruiters come to me with “I just want to do something new, I want to learn something new.” I get it, and sometimes I feel like this but then I’m like, start a side passion, learn something on weekends, take an online course. Just enjoy the day to day and enjoy this platform which has allowed me to build a nice life for our family. Just….happy!

Love:

I have a genuine WHY deeper then “I want this for my family and kids.” It’s worldly for me. I want every athlete to find their “sport” after sport and that new arena, new sport is sales! I actually spoke to a sales leader the other day. He was an AFL player in his former life. I asked him – “what’s kept you in sales for so long?” He said, “about 5 months into my sales career I realised…yep I found my new sport! It’s a high performance environment and I want to be a part of it!” I love that! I want that for all athletes because I know how hard athletes work and it’s unfair we get chewed up and spat out from the sport system. Sales is that new arena for athletes and they can get rewarded way more than they did in their sport. At the same time, companies capture high performing people.

I know that’s a long why, but that’s my why!!

Overall, I am a salesperson at heart and I enjoy it. Probably why I haven’t scaled, I still operate as an individual contributor, rainmaker! But…6 years later, I’m now really looking forward to continuing to be a salesperson, whilst learning to be a better business owner and ideas man 😉