Where do I start. I was there well over a decade and watched the place go from a confident business to one that, as far as I could tell, had no real strategy left at all. My honest view is the CEO is out of his depth. The market got harder and the response was nothing. Lots of talk, no plan I ever saw, and no pivot when one was obviously needed.
The bit that really got me was the owners. He’s been allowed to run the business with what looked to me like total impunity. No scrutiny, no accountability, nobody asking the hard questions.
Their call I suppose, but from where I was sitting it’ll cost them.
And the cost is already showing. A lot of genuinely high calibre people have walked out the door or been shown it. By my maths, exiting at the very top instead, the CEO and his top table for a start, would have saved somewhere in the region of £500-600k, enough to have kept several key salespeople in their seats.
Recruitment is a sales business. You grow it with people who can sell, not by blowing hot air about transformation or trying to run a multi million pound business off the back of AI chatbots.
That’s not a strategy, it’s an excuse for not having one.
In my opinion this is a good business being slowly run into the ground while the people who own it watch.