Only cool, like-minded, open and honest people need apply

Entrepreneurial spirit, motivation and drive are all qualities one associates with privateers of legend.
Wed, 24 June 2015

FROM JULY 2015'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE

Entrepreneurial spirit, motivation and drive are all qualities one associates with privateers of legend. But these traits alone would not be enough to join the crew of recruitment industry pirates Dean Kelly and Gary Goldsmith’s ‘member ship’. Warning: recruiters are advised to leave their egos at the door.

In case you’ve spent the last year on a deserted island with no phone, tablet or other communications tool, one of the hottest topics in the UK recruitment industry since last summer has been the Recruitment Directors Lunch Club (RDLC), typically referred to by its more colourful nickname, the Pirates.  

Formed by Goldsmith and Kelly, recruiters who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to build their careers, the RDLC is an exclusive peer-to-peer recruitment agency leaders’ club that facilitates the sharing of knowledge and experience by founders, owners and senior shareholders of recruitment businesses who want to grow said businesses.

The RDLC meets six to nine times a year for lunch. Members pay a £200 monthly fee to participate, access an exclusive members’ buying club and enjoy the bonhomie and expertise of other ambitious recruiters. But it’s not for everyone.

“Aharrr!” Goldsmith booms jokingly in pirate-speak as the three-way conversation with himself, Kelly and Recruiter gets underway. “It’s a very elite group at the moment, and we’re certainly not going to let everybody in. The recruitment world has a reputation — and, for the main part, fairly — of being quite arrogant. Those people wouldn’t really fit well into our group. If people are going to walk in and say how brilliant they are, there are plenty of other groups for them to go to.”

Kelly adds, offering a parallel with the cult film and novel Fight Club: “We don’t lobby. We’re not out to accredit. It’s a Chatham House rules forum, so the first rule of lunch club is that you don’t talk about lunch club. 

“There’s no kind of cartel. There’s no sharing of clients or anything like that. The rules are you have to give, you have to speak, you have to provide information — your thoughts, what you’re looking to achieve and what you’re looking to do, your aims your goals, your values. So I would say it is the most open, sharing environment in recruitment outside of a cartel where you’re doing it for progressive purposes.”

Those who have joined “wanted a sense check”, he says. “[They want to know] ‘Am I doing good? Is the market good, is the market bad?’ We wanted a group of people that wasn’t together because they just wanted to listen to speakers; it was a networking group.”

But a networking group with a difference, Kelly continues: “So everything was for the betterment of recruitment. Nothing was to tarnish recruitment as a brand.”

As colourful themselves as the nickname of the group they created, founders Kelly and Goldsmith have paid their dues with hard graft and reaped most of the rewards successful careers in recruitment have to offer. 

Reflecting their success are the palatial surroundings of Home House, the London private members’ club that Goldsmith refers to as his “home away from home” and where Recruiter meets up with the duo to talk about  the Pirates. And the nickname, Kelly and Goldsmith are happy to reveal, comes from Apple founder Steve Jobs’ philosophy for creating what became a world-changing company.  

Kelly has been CEO of education recruiter Synarbor since 2007, and also is an investor and non-executive director. Goldsmith, currently a non-executive director, investor and consultant, made his name in recruitment as the builder of SThree’s contract business and was managing director of SThree’s Computer Futures for 13 years. The pair actually forged their relationship at Computer Futures, which Kelly joined for his first job in recruitment. 

To understand the duo’s vision for the RDLC, it is important to understand their individual rises to the top of the recruitment tree. 

Kelly had left a role as a commercial negotiator, dropping his salary by a third to join Computer Futures. This willingness to take a hefty pay cut to take on a new career spoke to Goldsmith’s drive and determination. “We used to call them PHDs — poor, hungry and driven,” Goldsmith recalled of Kelly and others who joined the company demonstrating motivation and potential for success. “Dean was a definite PHD from back in the day, prepared to sacrifice his income to join the industry, loved the work and worked very, very hard.”

To pay his mortgage at the time, Kelly supplemented his Computer Futures pay with jobs cleaning his boxing and football clubs, and labouring at weekends. As his labours took their toll, he was summoned to a meeting with Goldsmith. “He said, ‘I heard you’ve been moonlighting — but we’ve never seen anyone work as hard as you’,” Kelly recalls. “I am going to give you a guarantee for three months, taking you up to the equivalent of £30k, but I want you to stop everything else you are doing and show us what you can do.’

“Literally, within two weeks, my numbers went through the roof. I broke into DHL, One2One — massive accounts within three months.” 

Goldsmith earned his own rewards by building his career from the ground up. The man who is renowned for setting up SThree’s contract business was sacked from his first job in recruitment.

“I was working for a company called Grayson. It was above a Methodist church right opposite Madame Tussauds — ironically around the corner from where I can afford to live these days. I was so poor I used to come into work in my Fiat Uno from Maidenhead and put the parking ticket on one day and turn it over the next day to see if I got away with it because I was so skint.

“Every bit of commission I earned just went towards paying my parking fines. It was horrific.”

He explains he didn’t fit in at this family-run firm and was fired. However, he had already secured a job at another agency. “I also worked for VNG [IT recruiter Victor Norman Groves]. I wrote them a business plan based on a formula I’d found which was based on multi-level marketing, which I then went on and investigated … I presented the plan to them and it was never acknowledged,” he says.

VNG’s loss was SThree’s gain and resulted in SThree’s out-earning his previous employer, Goldsmith says. 

Goldsmith regards the setting up of the contracts business as his finest achievement in recruitment. It was successful, he says, because of hiring people with potential who bought into a culture and who were innovative around how they sourced candidates and won new clients.

“I always employed the best tool kit I could find and recruited people with personality and smarts. In the business there was an open door, and people got rewarded — people that brought ideas to the table,” Goldsmith says. “There was no such thing as a bad idea — just people with no ideas. 

“So it was cool to be good, cool to be great and cool to want to be a boss, and if you added to the pot you got more — and had more fun.”

That philosophy is not far from that governing Goldsmith and Kelly’s Pirates today. Take the scurvy sea dogs who fall foul of the founders’ discerning requirements of sharing and contributing to the lunchtime discussions, for instance. Kelly says he and Goldsmith are not averse to making them walk the plank.

“We’ve kicked people out,” Kelly admits. “You have to be put forward [for membership], and you have to be seconded and agreed by pretty much every member. You could be kicked out for not contributing, for just sitting there, listening and taking in information without contributing.”

“You must wear it on your sleeve,” Goldsmith adds of the expected contributions from members.

While the effusive Goldsmith and the more reserved Kelly clearly enjoy a yin-yang relationship, they share a vision and aspiration of what the Pirates should be. And the dedication to building and operating great recruitment businesses is also aligned with a fervent belief in enjoying oneself.  

Take Goldsmith’s recent birthday celebrations, for example. “It’s turned into a birthday year to be fair — my 50th year,” he says of his April birthday. “It became something of a Hindu festival where it just never stopped. I had my last birthday lunch last week [in May] and I’ve still got two more to go. We’ve had a party for 100 friends, lunches, golf in the pouring rain.

“I have a lot of fun,” the tennis-mad Goldsmith concedes. “I liked my title back at SThree as ‘the king of fun’. I realised also that happy people make you money, so I always found ways to make fun and games at work.” 

Treats and rewards were used to drive consultants on to better performance month-on-month.

“I enjoyed work massively so I did it as much as I could, and tried to get better at it. If you’re not having a good time, just don’t do it. I think my personality is borne out in the RDLC.”

Goldsmith had recently taken five years off “doing absolutely nothing, and then came back to recruitment because I missed the people and the buzz. I think what we’re doing with the whole Pirates thing is quite magnanimous and is giving back”.

Kelly, meanwhile, is an amateur boxer whose approach to work and life reflect his presence in the ring. “I punch above my weight,” he says. “I always fight. I can box but if I need to go toe-to-toe, I do it.

“I get up at 4.25am every morning to go to work and I still work 12-14 hours day every single day because I love it,” he says.

Taking the point further, he continues: “I think recruitment is an art. They call boxing the sweet science. We’re not playing by numbers. Animal spirits drive our market, drive our recruitment processes, they drive our recessions. To be an artist is an emotive way of engaging with people.

“If I can tap into your emotions about how you feel about an individual, a process, a working environment, whatever you’re doing, then you’re more likely to excel within what suits you and what you’re about and what you want to do.

“It’s about creating an environment where everybody can excel and you can be different — but it’s about having the artistic values to apply that to people’s emotions.”

Within the sanctity of Pirates meetings, the toughest issue raised to date is “almost everything surrounding opportunity costs”, Goldsmith says. “The market has changed, and changed up a gear. There is an opportunity cost if you’re not shaping your business in the right way, if you’ve not got the right number of people, if you aren’t considered to be a specialist and  considered to be a generalist, if your margins are being eroded.

“So there are a few people who are dying through a thousand cuts with lots of little things going wrong — but there are also an awful lot of people in the room with things going brilliantly. It’s about making sure they’re doing the right thing in terms of turning the volume up,” he says.

Also, he adds, “there are a few businesses that have invested quite heavily in teams of people that have basically depleted them of cash. So they’ve invested in people that haven’t had returns on that investment. That’s quite heavy”.

And what does the future hold for the Pirates? 

The ultimate aim is to help their members work better, work faster and do it more consistently, Goldsmith says. “We are here to help the founders of recruitment enterprises, and make sure they are rewarded for their bravery as an entrepreneur — be it EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation] or value in an exit.”

Also, he adds, he and Kelly have had conversations with “sources” about creating a fund to invest in businesses. “Obviously, given our background and experience, the conversations about mergers and exits are being explored.”

Get on board now — this Pirates’ ship is clearly headed for the high

WHO ARE THEY?

Gary Goldsmith

January 2013 to present, Non-executive director, investor, consultant, various

February 2012 to January 2013, Chief operating officer, InterQuest Group

2010 to February 2012, Shareholder, non-executive, management consultant, business angel, investor, various

2004 to 2006, Chairman CFS channel, SThree

December 1993 to August 2006, Managing director, Computer Futures Solutions (SThree)

Dean Kelly    

April 2007 – present, Chief executive, Synarbor

September 2006 to April 2007, Chief executive/managing director, Public Recruitment Group (Synarbor)

October 2002 to August 2006, Chief executive/founder/owner, Kellis Group

September 2000 to July 2002, Group operations & sales manager, Dream (Servoca)

August 1999 to October 2000, Team leader, Paragon IT

August 1998 to September 1999, Senior consultant, Computer Futures Solutions (SThree)

GRAHAM SIMONS

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