Hit Consistent £100K Months While Halving Workload & Stress

Scaling to £100K Months—The Real Story Behind Smart Recruitment Growth

If your recruitment business feels a bit like a never-ending treadmill, you’re not alone. Many owners find themselves chasing more jobs, more placements, and more billings, but the real gains—consistency, profitability, freedom—remain frustratingly out of reach. In this episode, Katy is joined by Colin Pybus of Pybus Recruitment, who shares the honest, practical journey from steady turnover to achieving £100k months in a highly specialised sector, without losing his sanity or burning his team out.

This isn’t another fairytale about overnight success. Instead, you’ll find tested methods, plain language truths, and a roadmap that can help you reassess your own business. It’s about cutting through noise, keeping things simple, and focusing on what actually works—especially when the stakes are high.

Why Chasing More Jobs Doesn’t Always Mean More Revenue

Let’s face it, the go-to advice in recruitment circles is often “find more jobs”. But as Colin discovered, this isn’t always the solution.

When Colin first started his business in Sunderland, his background was steeped in the automotive sector, not recruitment. Over three years, he’d grown his business to a team of six, serving car dealerships and body shops nationwide. The opportunity was there—jobs were flooding in, increasing from 200 to 250 and then 300. On the surface, it all looked promising.

But here’s the rub: “Our turnover’s remaining fairly static. The opportunity is growing, but I just couldn’t connect the dots as to why the return wasn’t improving.”

Instead of celebrating growth, Colin found his marketing costs climbing and his team stretched thin, working on volumes of roles that weren’t moving the needle. The business was getting busier, but not necessarily better.

Katy points out the all-too-familiar catch-22: “When you’ve got lots of opportunity, you’re working a lot harder, but the return isn’t moving.”

For Colin, it was a wakeup call. More jobs didn’t mean more success—it actually meant more frustration. If this feels familiar, you’re likely spreading your resources too thin and rewarding volume over value.

Spotting the Real Problems: When Being Busy Isn’t Productive

If you’re spending your days firefighting and wondering why the effort isn’t paying off, step back and look honestly at what’s driving your busyness.

Colin admitted to plenty of soul-searching at this stage. “I needed to start figuring out what the future looks like. I think I needed help. I was trying to find that potential silver bullet, looking at the business inside out, but I just couldn’t see the answer.”

The problems showed up all over the place. Too many jobs. Marketing spend spiralling. A team running just to stand still. For many, this cycle leads only one way: stress, second-guessing, and the sense that hard work isn’t translating to results.

Turning to outside support wasn’t just about ideas, it was about getting perspective. Colin was honest—he needed a shift but struggled to justify the cost or know which advice was worth listening to.

The breakthrough came when he stopped trying to “work it out alone”, embraced the need for guidance, and, critically, brought his team into the conversation early. “I told everybody what I was going to do, got them on board. I felt there would be a lot of change coming our way.”

The lesson? You can be inundated with opportunity and still stay stuck, unless you’re prepared to question your assumptions, crunch the numbers, and involve your team. Busyness is not the same as productivity—or profitability.

The Boldest Move: Less Is More

Here’s where things get interesting. The first major change Colin made after joining Katy’s programme was also the one that scared him most: they halved the number of jobs they worked.

You read that right—cutting down opportunities, not adding them.

“It’s counterintuitive,” Colin admits. “Taking away half of the opportunity was a big challenge. It took more than one session to convince me that making the car lighter to go faster was the way forward.”

Rather than seeing more jobs as more potential, the team focused only on those most likely to convert—and stopped wasting energy on roles they previously filled less than 1% of the time. “We did an audit. Looking at the data, we realised we were investing time—and money—on jobs that were incredibly unlikely to fill. It was a lightbulb moment.”

Katy sums it up with a nod to Pareto’s law: 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. “It’s making the Ferrari lighter to make it go faster. You need to work smarter, not harder.”

The results speak for themselves. Fewer jobs, better-targeted, and more time to work them properly led to higher fill rates, happier clients, and less stress for the team.

If you’re still believing that more is always better, look at your data and ask—how many of those roles are really giving you a return? Where are you burning time for nothing in return?

Data, Discipline, and the Power of Process

Transforming the way you work isn’t about taking wild risks, it’s about building discipline and trusting the numbers.

Colin took the team right back to basics: “We wrote down everything we were doing, every 15 minutes. Sounds a bit like school, but it showed us where we were investing time—and more often than not, it was in the wrong places.”

This honest audit laid the groundwork for everything that followed. By knowing exactly where time, money, and energy were spent, they could make clear decisions about what to stop, what to automate, and what to focus on.

It didn’t stop at jobs. Colin moved the business to a model where team members invest their own budgets, so they see firsthand where spending makes sense, and where it doesn’t. The team learned that working the “right” jobs, and following process, meant higher success rates, improved morale, and a fairer commission structure.

“We talk about working on data, not drama,” Colin says. “Make decisions on facts, not just how you feel.”

Katy is clear: until you get disciplined about your processes, you’ll keep repeating the same mistakes. It’s not sexy, but it works—mapping your week, tracking your “return on effort”, and systemising what works so anyone in the team can replicate it.

So before you sign another job or bump up your job board spend, pause and review your numbers. Are you tracking fill rates per job type? Can everyone in your business explain what a “goal job” is, and why you’re focusing on it? Are you recording where every hour goes, or just guessing?

Building a Sustainable, Smarter Machine

It’s not all about saying “no”—it’s about systemising what’s working and making sure your business is future-proof.

Just a few months ago, Colin’s business was reliant on advert response and luck. “We were waiting for people to respond to ads—winging it. Now, two-thirds of what we do is within our control.”

How? By creating repeatable, robust systems:

• Referrals: Most recruitment businesses know referrals matter but leave it to chance. Colin’s team built a structured referral scheme, turning it into a key pillar for candidate generation.
• Database: With three years’ worth of data, the team started using it properly, grading jobs, and targeting the best matches with precision.
• Automation: They put workflow on autopilot—using automated ‘attraction machines’ for both client and candidate outreach, freeing time and creating a steady inbound funnel.
• Client Targeting: Rather than take whatever comes, the focus is on ideal clients, particularly smaller businesses, with marketing tailored accordingly.

The result? Fill rates up, costs down, morale high, and the business less dependent on Colin being there minute-to-minute. “We could work from Tenerife and not stress,” he says, showing what real flexibility can look like.

If you shudder at the word “process”, think again. Recruitment may love the “human touch”, but sustainable growth rests on process. As Colin puts it, “We’ve now got a process for a process.”

The Results: Consistency, Profit, and Real Freedom

After seven or eight months of disciplined change, the results for Colin are clear—and they don’t all show up on a spreadsheet.

• Conversions up: The business now converts 15% of vacancies (and continues to improve) rather than spreading effort thinly and hoping for the best.
• Revenue rising: Turnover is up by 62% within six months, with cost base lower than ever before.
• Breaking barriers: The team pushed past £100,000 turnover months (up from a previous high of £65,000), achieving what previously seemed unreachable.
• Stability and confidence: Colin no longer worries about covering overheads. The team feel more confident, consistent, and share in the rewards.

Most importantly? The business isn’t running him ragged—he’s working from Tenerife, the team is happy, and there’s headroom for further automation and sustainable growth.

Ask yourself: if you walked away tomorrow, would your business hold up, or would it fall apart? If your answer is the latter, it’s time to think about what needs to change.