This week, Rod Hore and I ran a live webinar with a group of recruitment agency owners — all navigating that tricky zone of 15 to 30 staff. We covered a lot of ground, and the conversation was incredibly honest. I wanted to capture the key insights here so you can take them into your own business.
If you've ever grown fast and then watched things quietly fall apart, or if you're sitting at 18 people wondering what's coming next — this one's for you.
The growth trap
Rod Hore has spent over 25 years looking inside recruitment agencies from a mergers, acquisitions, and valuation lens. One pattern he sees again and again: the skills that got you to 15 people are not the skills that will take you past 20.
At 1–5 staff, you do everything. At 5–20, you're still heavily in control — business development, hiring, systems, everything sits on your desk. But around 20, that span of control starts to crack. Functions that used to live in your head need to become specialist roles. Marketing, finance, people management, HR — they each need someone responsible. And that's when most founders hit a wall.
When I was running Morgan at 18 staff, I was across every single person — their outputs, systems, marketing, hiring. We added six consultants, opened a new office, got to 30 quickly. And everything fell apart. We had no HR processes. I couldn't manage the marketing. I didn't know what was happening with individuals in the team. It took a solid year of things going backwards before we built the right structure to grow again.
The mindset shift
Rod's biggest point from the session: the structural changes are obvious in hindsight. What's harder is the attitude shift the founder needs to make. At 15 people, your instinct is "this is my business, I make the decisions." But at 25, that mindset destroys the leadership team you're trying to build.
As Rod put it: "LinkedIn has become the new pub talk. Take it with a pinch of salt." Nine times out of ten, when I ask agency owners why they grew, they say the market was booming or a competitor was adding heads. Very few made a deliberate decision. That lack of intention shows up downstream.
What to let go of
We asked the group: what are the most common things founders keep control of when they absolutely should be delegating?
Business development
At 5–10 staff, the founder's relationships keep the lights on. By 20, that bottleneck starves the team and creates reactive, panicked BD across the board.
Problem solving on the floor
Founders who are great at fixing things keep jumping in. But doing so undermines the manager you just appointed and signals you don't trust them.
Decision making in a founders' club
In multi-founder businesses, no decision gets made unless the founders all agree. No one else can ever be truly part of the leadership team in that environment.
Role clarity — the three hats
You started as shareholder, legal director, and executive team all at once. At 20+ staff, those hats need to come apart. If they don't, no one else can step into genuine leadership.
The profit picture
Rod shared data from industry analyst Nigel Haas: profitability per head peaks at around 12–15 staff, where everything is simple and waste is minimal. As you grow past 20, specialist roles eat into that efficiency — a marketing function, a finance upgrade, a proper HR process. All of these cost money before they pay back.
The key insight: overall company profit should still grow. The dip in per-head profitability is a sign you're investing properly in infrastructure. If profitability per head doesn't dip at all in this phase, you're probably not building the structure you'll need later.
Valuations haven't changed in 20 years — what changes is the business. A company at 25 staff with a real leadership team, forecastable revenue, and documented processes is worth significantly more than a 25-person shop where everything still runs through the founder. Below 20 people, you're largely buying the founder — who's about to leave.
Building for value
Rod outlined four key drivers. There are about 20 in total, but these are the ones that move the needle most:
A business that runs without you is worth far more than one that doesn't. Full stop.
Temp, retained search, RPO, payroll services — anything that means Monday morning doesn't start at zero.
Consistent and growing. Managed well through the 20–40 infrastructure-building phase.
Repeatable processes, documented systems, a client base that isn't dependent on one person's relationships.
And one honest note from Rod: most people who come to him wanting to sell, he talks out of it. Having a bad month, losing your best consultant, or feeling burnt out is not the right reason to sell. The decision should come from a position of strength — and ideally a five-year plan.
Early decisions that bite you later
Some of the most common issues we see in 20–30 person agencies trace directly back to decisions made in the first two years. These are the three Rod and I keep coming back to:
One thing to take away
Rod's closing thought was this: make conscious decisions about your business. Too many agency owners find themselves at 25 staff having drifted there — through opportunistic hiring, reactive growth, and structures that just accumulated. Stop at least once a year and genuinely ask: how did I get here, and is this where I want to be going?
Mine was simpler: look hard at your leadership team. Are they actually leading — coaching consultants, reading the commercial data, having honest conversations? Or are they senior consultants with a title? Because if it's the latter, growth will keep breaking down at 20 every time you try.
Book a call with Ez and the Hume Scope team to talk through your growth stage and where to focus.
Always happy to have a chat,
Ez Khan
