Today is a special day here at Featherbank Selection. Its 5 years to the day that I sat at a computer in the spare room of our house and wondered what the heck I was doing. I sat there in trepidation, without any sort of strategy and wondered why I had given up my job, my regular income and my sanity to start a business without any sort of business/marketing plan with my partner, now wife, now the mother of my children, Roxie Matthews.

My dad thought I was mad and I remember him saying "if you don't have a business plan that a bank manager will sign off, it's for a very good reason, it won't work". So I thought I'd just leave the business plan out then, and that would deal with that little problem, (ignorance is bliss after all). The only issue with that, however, was that I was going in blind. How hard can it be, after all, I'm a good recruiter and so is Roxie, who will be joining me after her maternity leave. Yep, well the thing with that, is that it doesn't make you a good business owner. I'll admit we were lucky to start with. We had some capital that helped start the business and gave us a buffer for a few months and my good friend James Parkinson helped us out operationally for our first bit of business. Without this, who knows where we would be.

The business has grown, but I won't bullshit people with the "it's amazing, the best thing. I wish I'd have done it sooner" rubbish that you commonly hear. Yes, it has its benefits and advantages, but what you don't often hear is that it's ridiculously hard to grow a business and keep your sanity. Roxie is more chilled than me and more level-headed, but I suffer every Monday morning from imposter syndrome, worry about money, worry about where we are at with roles, worry about invoices being paid, worry about new tech products, pretty much anything to worry about...I'm your man.

As the pandemic hit, a couple of years ago we were almost down and out. We had a minimal amount in the bank and our pipeline had all been pulled. Roxie managed to convince me to spend our last bit of money on a course, which was for recruitment business owners like us who needed motivating, strategy and generally guiding in the right direction. This was single-handedly the best thing to happen to us. I won't go into too much detail but Nicky Coffin and Katy Green are rock stars, as well as the other recruitment business owners who we networked with on the course. Since then, we've smashed every record... average fee, best quarter, best year...etc.

The best bit of advice that I had from Nicky and Katy is, if you don't like what you're doing and you are not "in flow", then don't do it, outsource it. So we did.....and then some. Granted our expenses are probably higher than they should be, but it's worth it so that Roxie and I can do what we love, helping people find their perfect job. We don't want to be doing tax returns or spending too much time on admin and marketing. We like speaking to people (clients, candidates, our team). That's what we do best.

In the last 5 years, we've had a number of offices, some of which were in bedrooms. We've brought in two excellent people into the business who epitomise the culture we want to set, and we've grown in so many ways. We've rebranded, got a fantastic tech stack, doubled in size, got our perfect office (in the process of doing it up) in our perfect location, grown financially, the list goes on. There's still plenty to do and plenty to achieve and we cant wait to see what's in store for Featherbank Selection in the next 5 years. This year we're celebrating in a building site, where will be for our 10 year anniversary?! Who knows, but is very exciting.