Why 70% of Recruitment Founders Are Stuck as “Chief of Everything” (And the Exact Exit Strategy)

Building your own recruitment business always starts with high hopes. Most likely, you started out with the intention of enjoying more freedom, doing work you love, earning well, and making a difference in the industry. Yet, for many recruitment business owners, reality soon looks quite different. Katy and Jane’s lively exchange on episode 51 gets to the heart of this: you become the “chief of frigging everything.” It’s a familiar feeling – constantly firefighting, working late nights, drinking too much coffee, and wondering why the dream has ended up becoming a trap.

If you feel like your calendar is rammed with urgent but unimportant tasks, or you’re not enjoying your business anymore, this article walks you through why that happens and how to completely redesign the way your business runs. Drawing directly from the conversations Katy and Jane had, we’ll look at the common pitfalls for agency owners, what to do when you’ve outgrown your original business model, and the simple frameworks that let you reclaim your freedom without sacrificing profit or performance.

The Chief of Everything Trap: How You Get Stuck

You probably know this story already. As Katy described, most recruitment founders start out hoping to combine good earnings with real personal meaning and a sense of making a difference. In the beginning, you wear every hat out of necessity – winning business, billing, admin, helping your team, fixing tech, and occasionally changing the toner or picking up the milk on your way in. Over time, however, you become the glue that holds everything together, but the price is paid in your time, health, and enjoyment.

Jane likens this journey to the stages of growing up – you start as a solopreneur, then turn into a business owner, but somewhere along the road you become trapped in a new job with more roles than you ever wanted. The danger is that the business stops being a business and becomes something that only runs because you’re holding every thread together. If you ever step aside, you worry it’ll collapse. This is the reality for many founders; you end up being the problem and the bottleneck, even if you got there by accident.

Why does this happen? Katy explains it’s not about capability or hard work. The issue is structural – the business has been built around you, often by default and without enough clarity about what you truly want. Unless you honestly admit what you want, the boundaries you need, and your strengths, you risk creating something that ends up driven by your ego, old industry models, or a vision of ‘big is better’ – even if that’s not what you wanted in the first place. So you chase big clients, big teams, and turnover numbers, but end up with less joy and less freedom.

Why Brutal Honesty Must Come First

There’s a deeper struggle under all this: it’s hard to be brutally honest with yourself about what you truly want. According to Katy, most business owners rarely stop to reconsider their actual ideal life or business structure. Often you simply default to what you see around you, copying large agency models or aiming for endless growth because that’s perceived as success. But when you’re honest, you may find your real aim is quite different – perhaps you want a solid, high-standard of life with a business that lets you travel, go paddleboarding on Fridays, and runs itself, bringing in steady income rather than just running faster on the revenue treadmill.

Jane recounted conversations with clients who think they want “loads” of clients and end up setting arbitrary goals like 200 clients, only to realise they cannot actually service them, nor do they really want that scale. Does your heart actually want a business that means spending four nights a week away from your family, managing a huge team, and never switching off? Or is it about enjoying your life while making good, predictable money with less stress?

Katy makes the point that you must get very clear on two things: the life you want to lead, and the business that will deliver it. Too often, you design the opposite – a business that controls you, rather than the other way round. Without clarity, you’ll be easily distracted by others’ definitions of success, new tech tools, and shiny ideas, all pulling you away from what actually works for you.

The Five Machines: Designing a Business for Ease, Profit, and Joy

Katy and Jane break down the practical side of escaping the “chief of everything” role by introducing four key business ‘machines’ (with a fifth following automatically once the others are in place). This is a simple operating model designed to make more revenue by doing less, not more. The aim is not to simply make your business bigger, but to make it solid, repeatable, and tailored around your strengths and vision.

1. The Optimise Machine

This is all about structuring your business so that you spend most of your time in your own zone of genius – the work that gives you energy, enjoyment, and delivers most value. It’s your superpower zone. You need to build everything around this, not fall into the trap of doing everything just because you can. When you focus on your strengths, you build a business that brings in energy instead of draining it.

2. The Attraction Machine

Forget the distracting parade of new tech, ads, and complex funnels. Your attraction machine is nothing more than a repeatable, simple process that consistently brings in clients and candidates. If business development is not your thing, Jane suggests you should outsource this to a salesperson (a real one, not just a bit of tech). The key is identifying the marketing method that actually works for your niche, systemising it, and documenting it so it’s scalable and teachable. Whether your method is warm outreach to your network, referrals, reference checks, or simple touchpoints – stick with what works for you.

Importantly, Katy reminds you not to chase every shiny new idea or tool just because others claim it worked for them. Just because an ad says a fully-automated funnel can win a million-pound project, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for your business or audience. Instead, look at your history – what has worked before? That’s your attraction machine. Make it repeatable, write it down, and make sure others can run it without everything depending on you.

3. The Conversion Machine

This machine is your sales process, and it must be process-mapped and rock solid. If you’re excellent at converting candidates or clients, then get that expertise out of your head and documented so your team can replicate it. It’s about being ruthlessly clear about what business you want and what you won’t take on. Work smarter, not harder. Jane is clear – a huge part of burnout is spending 70–80% of your time on things that never convert. Know the kind of jobs and clients you take, and have benchmarks for what qualifies as worth your time.

Instead of working on hope, build a process that ensures you’re only spending time on what has a high chance of returning profit. Katy adds that you should be aiming for conversion rates well above 50%, and ideally closer to 85%, especially if you’re working contingent. This isn’t just about feeling busy – it’s about making sure every hour you and your team invest brings a return.

4. The Delivery Machine

This is your client journey, or as Katy calls it, your unique bridge from the client’s current issues to the desired outcome. It’s surprising how much of this is already in your business but is hidden and not packaged. Your delivery machine is what makes your service repeatable and unique, sets you apart from internal recruiters, and creates lasting client relationships. Given that many internal recruitment teams are former agency recruiters themselves, you have to offer more than just CVs or basic resourcing. Your delivery process needs to stand out, solve problems they can’t, and make your value obvious.

Systemise this so the quality remains high without your daily involvement. This is the way to build retention, reputation, and recurring revenue.

5. The Economic Machine

While Katy only briefly touches on the fifth machine, the point is simple – if you get the first four right, the economics (profit, sustainable margin, robust business model) will follow almost automatically. It’s about structuring for profit, not just revenue, so you actually keep more of what you bill and have a real business, not just a job.

Tech, Tools, and the Lure of Shiny Distractions

It’s easy to get swallowed up by all the new recruitment technology, marketing automation, and flashy business solutions promising fast growth. Katy and Jane share clients’ experiences of spending heavily on new tools without questioning the ROI, only to discover that real growth happens by sticking to basics: your network, a phone, and simple, low-cost methods that actually work in your market.

If you’re spending more than you should “at your size,” Jane’s advice is classic Yorkshire: don’t spend out of habit or out of fear that you’ll fall behind. Always ask what each tool gives back, what measure you’ll use to know if it’s working, and commit only for clear testing periods. Unless a specific tech adds measurable value, stick to methods you know are proven for your business and clients.

Katy brings this back to the bigger message: it’s not about piling on the extras trying to be everything to everyone. If your attraction or delivery method works, simplify, systemise it, and make it scalable.

Building Around Your Strengths: Who You Need (and Who You Don’t)

Escaping the “chief of everything” role requires you to be firm about your own role and to commit to building smart support around you. When you know your genius zone, you also know exactly which areas to delegate or outsource. Jane’s direct advice: stop doing anything that doesn’t give you joy or isn’t the best use of your time. If you’re a natural salesperson, there’s no sense pouring three days into end-of-quarter accounts. Pay an accountant and go win business. Apply this mantra everywhere: if you weren’t doing X, what would you be doing? Force yourself to step back so at least 70% of your time is spent on what you’re best at.

It’s tempting to think you need more of you – more clones. In truth, you need to find people whose strengths complement yours, not duplicate them. Maybe you’re brilliant at winning business but exhausted by candidate delivery or process. Imagine structuring things so you only bring in clients, whilst others manage the fulfilment or admin. Or perhaps you’re the delivery specialist, in which case you need someone who loves outbound sales. Jane’s analogy is a personal one: at her happiest, she was “the blackbird” – flying out to win jobs, dropping them back for fulfilment, and then hitting the streets again.

A critical lightbulb moment, she shares, was realising she was handwriting hundreds of letters on a bank holiday, listening to her daughter say, “she always does this, we’re not going anywhere.” Hiring a virtual assistant was a hundred pounds well spent, giving her back both profit and family time. As soon as Jane stopped trying to be the hero or martyr of her own business, and started focusing only on selling and delivering, everything improved: income, time, and enjoyment.