Victoria Goodier has wanted to be a guest on The Recruitment Mentors Podcast for longer than Blue Fox has existed. Fourteen months of quietly willing it into being, by her own count. This week it happened: she and co-founder Jonathan Bochenski sat down with Hishem to talk through year one of the agency they planned while listening to the show. We have been part of the story from the start, and we have been looking forward to this episode almost as much as they have.
The year in numbers
Hishem put the headline figures in his own post about the episode, so we will borrow them: £1.5M of revenue in year one. 26 permanent deals at an average of £14.1k. 29 contract deals. Two founders.
The numbers are the easy bit to repeat. The episode is about the decisions behind them, and most of those decisions were made before Blue Fox had a single client.
What they did differently
They wrote a proper business plan before day one: P&L, hiring plan, values, behaviours and SOPs. Two people, running it like a twenty-person business.
They went perm first, for cash, and asked clients for 14-day terms with invoicing on acceptance. Then they set themselves a rule: contract would only start once there were six months of overheads in the bank and the right funding partner in place. That is where we came in.
And their first hire was not a salesperson. It was a contractor care manager, doing welfare checks with every contractor at least every two weeks. If you have ever wondered what separates agencies whose contractors extend from agencies whose contractors drift, that is a fair place to start.
Where Raise fits
Blue Fox first heard about Raise on this podcast. That is the full-circle part. They came to us as a start-up with a contract desk that did not exist yet, and we set them up on Solo: 100% funding from day one, no set-up fees, and the back office carried by us so two founders could spend their time selling.
A year on, with the book established and the foundations in place, they have moved to Enterprise. We borrow what's needed (with the view of keeping more of their hard earned margin), directly from one of our funding partners, on the same platform, without a re-platform. It is a textbook example of what we built the platform to do: give an agency the funding that fits where it is now, and let it move to the next stage when it is ready rather than when a contract says so.
What we rate most about Victoria and Jon is how practical they have been about funding at every point, whilst never compromising on the end-to-end service they give customers and contractors.
In their words
"We are only successful because of Raise. I mean that with all my heart."
We will take that, and we will say the same back. Agencies like Blue Fox are the reason we do this.
Listen
The full episode is above, and on The Recruitment Mentors Podcast wherever you listen. We are proud partners of the podcast, and this is exactly why.
You can find Blue Fox at bluefoxconsult.com and on LinkedIn.
If you are where Blue Fox were a year ago, planning a contract desk and working out what funding you actually need, price your options or book a conversation. We would love to hear the plan.
