Staffing Industry Spotlight: Ron Bardach and Tony Davies, Directors of Recruitment Entrepreneur

Francis Larson:

Who is Ron Bardach?

Ron Bardach:

I'm the investment director for Recruitment Entrepreneur, which we fondly refer to as "RE", because as you can see, saying "Recruitment Entrepreneur" several times in a row can be a tongue twister. I have been with RE for over a year and in the business for many years.  In short, we are a global private equity company that invests solely in recruiting startups and, to some extent, scale-ups in the UK and elsewhere. In the US, we're pretty much focused on pure startups and people who have always entertained the thought of going out on their own but haven’t had the wherewithal in terms of expertise, financially or otherwise, to create a true business of value and sustainability.  We provide operational advisory, strategic support, and, of course, investment. We create joint ventures, where we partner with respective entrepreneurs to launch their own businesses. Our model is predicated on taking these businesses, typically on a five to six-year journey to an exit event.  We're very much interested in getting people who are both experienced and have that entrepreneurial gene, the will, and the motivation to grow a business quickly and get it off the ground.  And we also provide a lot of experience and expertise on the exit side of the business, typically about four or five years in.

Francis Larson:

So, Recruitment Entrepreneur started in the UK. When you launched in the US, was it taking that same model from James Caan that worked in the UK and applying it here?

Ron Bardach:

Yes, RE began in the U.S. back in 2013 and, for the first 7-plus years, was operational only in the UK.  However, in 2021, James and the rest of the team made the commitment to take the RE model to other countries, initially beginning in neighboring European Countries and then into Asia, the Middle East, and to the U.S. and Canada about 2 ½ years ago.  And yes, James essentially took the same model to these other countries.

Ron Bardach:

I was tipped off on this opportunity a little over a year ago by a friend of mine, the former President of Tech Serve Alliance, Scott Aicher.  Scott, at the time, had recently left Belcan and had worked with our current U.S. Managing Director, Tony Davies, during his time at Belcan. Tony was head of the international division in Europe with Belcan before leaving and going to work with James and RE.  It was really through Scott and Tony that I ended up looking at this opportunity and ultimately making the decision to work at RE.  Tony and James Caan were instrumental in the interview process and in making the decision to bring me on board.

Ron Bardach:

I had several meetings and interviews with Tony and James Caan, and I think they liked my overall background within the industry - I’ve had some recruitment experience in my career on the Perm side, but not a lot, but I also have a comprehensive knowledge of this industry.  At TechServe Alliance, I recruited staffing execs and owners to join TechServe, and we provided them with a lot of resources and information to help them grow and scale their businesses.   So, in a sense, I kind of came at it more from a consulting membership side.  During my tenure at TechServe, I was also in charge of selling their trade show to the vendor community and became very familiar with many of the suppliers in the staffing and recruitment space.  I have this kind of unique combination of knowing the vendor side of the business, as well as knowing several hundred staffing owners and exes from the industry – especially on the IT and Engineering side.

Francis Larson:

So, RE knew about your network and knew that you would be in the ecosystem from day one because TechServe Alliance was serving hundreds of staffing companies.

Ron Bardach:

Yes, exactly. I had great contacts in the industry. When I left TechServe about three and a half years ago, I was hired as the business director for a company called Oorwin Labs. It was a global SaaS company in the ATS/CRM space, heavily focused on AI, matching candidates and jobs, and automation.

Francis Larson:

You were the Sales Director?

Ron Bardach:

More like the Business Development Director for them in the US.  I was able to go very deep into the space and a cross-pollination of companies and industries beyond just IT, which I had focused on at TechServe. We sold into several sectors within the industry, whether it was legal, pharma, IT, Accounting, light industrial, healthcare, etc.  The ATS space was and is very competitive and crowded.  As you know, there are literally scores and scores of companies offering an ATS/CRM product.

Francis Larson:

If you can make it there, you can kind of make it anywhere.

Ron Bardach:

It's super, super crowded. I gave it a good whirl, honestly. I realized in time that it was probably going to be a very uphill climb for them, even though I achieved some very good results, both here and internationally.  This opportunity with RE came along, and I really was fascinated by the model of what James Caan had started many, many years ago with Alexander Mann Solutions, which he had grown and evolved over time to what it is today.  The early rendition of RE was called Startup Loans, and in 2013, Recruitment Entrepreneur formed the company that it is today, though in the early years, it was just in the UK.  Around 3 plus years years ago the company made the decision to go internationally. We are in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America now, but now starting to focus more on the U.S. and India markets.

Francis Larson:

So, Recruitment Entrepreneur is really going for very new firms, almost pre-incorporation sometimes. So, you're finding the people who are at big companies in staffing, they're maybe a successful salesperson, and they’re wanting to start their own firm.

Ron Bardach:

Exactly. So, what we find is typical, there's kind of a sweet spot for the people that we're looking for. They are people who have enough experience, typically eight to ten years.  There's no set number, but it’s rare to launch people without a certain amount of experience and qualities. We just recently launched a business in the Netherlands where the founder had five years, but this person is very dynamic with sufficient experience to make this work.

Francis Larson:

Was their experience heavily on the sales side of the business?

Ron Bardach:

Well, I would say most of the people that we end up launching come from the recruitment side, but in a lot of cases, they're 360 recruiters, too. If they're too experienced and we're talking to senior VPs from major staffing companies, the likelihood that they've been there, done it, and already know how to do it, or they think they do.  But that's the big issue. A lot of people think they may know everything about running their own company, but it's much different when it becomes your own company. When you're becoming a CEO of a company that you're going to grow and scale from, say, one or two people up to 20, or 25 or 30 people, there’s much more to learn, and it’s a lot harder than working for an established company where everything is in place. There are a lot of elements to that.

Francis Larson:

You don't have the infrastructure that you might have had at a thousand-recruiter staffing firm.

Ron Bardach:

You don't have the brand, the name recognition, the infrastructure, the marketing, etc.  That's all stuff that you've got to learn to do yourself. And we provide a tremendous amount of that input and the resources to do that. Now, our model on the support side is also predicated on Local Partners in each country.

Francis Larson:

What are those?

Ron Bardach:

The Local Partners are typically very well-known and experienced staffing or recruitment firms in the countries where we operate that also have the opportunity to invest alongside us in the ventures we launch.  Local Partners provide a lot of that operational support, whether it's HR, financial, legal, or contracts. And the reason that we do these in different countries, quite candidly, is the time zones.  I mean, we can't operate everything out of the UK if we're doing something in the US and we're five hours or eight hours behind; or if we're in the Middle East or in India. So, what we're essentially trying to do is operate independently from our HQ in London.

Francis Larson:

In a way, RE is actually more like a private equity firm in that way, allowing other firms to help with operations. These partners are staffing operators, and they can get into the details of the business, whereas RE is more like an investor.

Ron Bardach:

Yes, exactly, though we also support our JVs through our London HQ. My Managing Director Tony Davies often says that at RE, we're a private equity firm with a twist. The twist is that even though we're not a recruitment firm—we are a PE company—we’re still comprised of a diversified portfolio of recruiting organizations that we support and work alongside to ultimately exit for a significant return.

Francis Larson:

So, you have some institutional knowledge.

Ron Bardach:

We have huge institutional knowledge. Most of the people, including our managing director, Tony, have all started, scaled, and exited their own companies. So there's well over a hundred years of institutional knowledge from all of us within the company. The private equity arm is really part of our sister company, Hamilton Bradshaw, out of the UK, which provides the financing for it. The rest of the people within the organization are all recruitment industry experts and people who have been there.  We provide operational, advisory/strategic support and the ability to help consult and grow the respective businesses. That's really my perspective on it.  Tony Davies, who's with me here today, was the first person hired by James Caan, to lead the international group for Recruitment Entrepreneur and has been instrumental in helping to develop and grow this company – particularly in the U.S.  I'm now going to hand over the microphone to Tony to continue this conversation.

Tony Davies:

Thanks Ron.

Francis Larson:

I'd love to hear your perspective as the first hire for Recruitment Entrepreneur. We were talking about what makes Recruitment Entrepreneur different than just a staffing-focused private equity firm. There's a little bit of staffing knowledge, and there are the local partners. But from your standpoint, what do you think makes RE different from a staffing industry roll-up vehicle?

Tony Davies:

Yeah. I mean, look, I can only look at this from my own lived experience. I think that's the best way to look at anything. So my background is that I went to university and did a degree in electronic engineering and then worked for some big technology companies. I worked for Marconi and Ericsson, amongst others, and I sort of fell into recruitment by mistake, which is how most people fall into this, right? A friend of mine had worked for a recruitment company for four or five years as a director. He'd made a little bit of money when they exited, not as much as he thought he was going to make. So he was a little bit disgruntled, I must admit. It was the early 2000s as the tech bubble was bursting. And he said to me, why don't you take your redundancy and come and do this recruitment business with me?

I was like, why not? I'll do that for a couple of years. And that was 23 years ago. So, obviously, it worked out quite well.

We set up a small recruitment company in the north of England and in year one we did about 1.2 million in revenue, made a little bit of profit. By the time we got to year four, we'd made an absolute stack of errors and mistakes, but we'd actually got to the point where we had a good profitable business when we met somebody by pure fluke, and we were able to create an exit event and did quite well out of it. And so fast forward through a number of different iterations in my career, including stints, working for an Italian engineering company, setting up their international recruitment function, recruitment teams, if you like, for their internal organization. And then I came back to the UK, got headhunted and worked for Belcan, which is a big American staffing organization.

So, I ran their international team for them for a number of years and turned that around from a bit of a loss-making sort of outpost, if you like, for the American company into something that, by the time COVID had finished, was actually making as good money as the engineering side of the business. And then we parted ways for strategic reasons, diversion of strategic requirements. I think from their point of view, I wanted to continue building the international recruitment business. They wanted me to do something different, more internally focused. And then I fell into this with James. And really when I started talking to James about what they'd been doing at Recruitment Entrepreneur in the UK and what his vision was to roll that out internationally, it resonated with me as an entrepreneur myself. And having lived through that experience of starting a company with really, when I look back, minimal knowledge, though we were successful, it was probably just work that helped us get off the ground.

When I sat and listened to James explain what they did at Recruitment Entrepreneur, I just thought, wow, this is groundbreaking. This is life-changing for people. If you look at the industry, typically, most people get into recruitment because they are successful billers, and they think, I want to do something myself. I'm going to make something that is going to change my life materially from a wealth perspective. It's very easy to kick a business off. Most people will tell you, oh, you just need a laptop and a phone, right? That's great, but that doesn't get you to a point where you can create something of value that you can exit. So, being able to access the depth of knowledge and experience that Recruitment Entrepreneur has across all the people that are involved has obviously grown significantly since I first joined because it was originally just me, James, and the UK team. And now we are probably, I don't know, with all of our partners, we are maybe 30/40 people around the world, all with diverse backgrounds from the recruitment industry. So, unlike pretty much every other PE firm you'll ever come across, we don't do anything else. That's all we do. Everybody that our potential investments or founders speak to is a recruitment expert. When you come and talk to Recruitment Entrepreneur, and you speak to our legal people, they have spent 15 years working in recruitment as legal people, so they understand the concepts and the language that you are talking. Same with finance, at RE we are specialists in recruitment finance, not engineering finance or something else.

So, when our founders start talking to us, they get this sense of almost like feeling at home. They're inside an organization that understands them and what they're trying to do, but they are their own boss. They are the leader of their own business, not just running a desk for someone else. And that's a unique position to be in. And I think for me, that was why I wanted to get involved. I thought if I'd had that when I was setting up my own company, it would've been so much easier. We would've been so much more successful, and I would've made so much more money.

Francis Larson:

You had to learn on your own the hard way. Whereas RE is like a trusted advisor from day one.

Tony Davies:

Absolutely.

Francis Larson:

We see this, too; young firms often know nothing. They make the same mistakes. Sometimes mistakes can add two years to their journey.

Tony Davies:

Or worse. Because what tends to happen, when you look at the statistical analysis of the recruitment market, there's zero barrier to entry. So anybody can set up a recruitment business; however, most people are unable to scale above 6-10 people, they also don’t have much in the way of other commercial experience, so they have to start dealing with Marketing, Branding, Talent attraction to their own small start-up, client attraction, insurance, office leases, computer, and IT support etc. etc.

All this impacts their available billing time, and when their earnings drop they realise that their ability to bill 2-400K when at their previous branded company was significantly helped by the fact that these things were done by the company, so now they are running at a lower billing rate and the job that they now have is more stressful because they also typically bought their best friends with them. So they're now responsible for not only their own mortgage and feeding their own kids but their best friends’ mortgage. So you have really changed from being an employee with all of the stresses that gave you to being a founder of a not very successful recruitment business with equally the same amount of stress. So if you can get around that problem of not having enough knowledge, experience, support, financial support, and know-how to be able to make it work, then you then get into the stage where your business is actually making, and you are able to accelerate the growth.

Francis Larson:

You're not just treading water.

Tony Davies:

The reality is that moving from managing 10 people to managing 50 people, that's a significant change. So most people get to anywhere between six and ten people. That's where most people stay, and they become what we call a lifestyle business. So, they're making good money, nothing wrong with that, but it's not exitable. You can't sell it because if you take you out of the equation, there is no value.

Francis Larson:

It's just you and some helpers.

Tony Davies:

We help you build something that from day one that is built institutionally, we are reverse engineering this, we look at this from the perspective of a private equity company, because we know what we are looking for when we want to buy something. So when we build a company with a founder, we reverse engineer it. And try to help them we build it the way we want to see it if we were the acquiring company.

Francis Larson:

You’re starting at the exit and solving backward for how to get there.

Tony Davies:

Yes and if you do that, then you've got a much better chance of making an exit.

Francis Larson:

Have you found that investing in US recruitment agencies is different from investing in UK recruitment agencies? Is there anything different about the culture, about the types of firms that you're finding, perhaps the stage that they're at? Or is it pretty much just repeating something that works in different locations?

Tony Davies:

If you ask that question to James, he will tell you that in his 40 years in recruitment, and remember James built Alexander Mann Solutions and also built Humana, which was 130 odd offices in 40 odd countries. He also spent the best part of six or seven years wandering around the world, talking to recruitment people in different countries. And what James always says to me is that they are all the same type of people with the same sorts of issues

Francis Larson:

People. They're all human beings.

Tony Davies:

They're all human beings. They're recruiters. So, they are driven by success. They want to make a good living, they want to be wealthy, they want to be successful, and they're competitive. And that's what we look for. The best recruitment entrepreneurs are the same; they have the same characteristics.

Francis Larson:

How do you find out those characteristics? Is it through interviewing? Is it through references?

Tony Davies:

Yeah. I mean, listen, look at what Ron does. Ron and I will speak to probably hundreds of people in a year, but we'll maybe invest in 10. This is not a volume play for us.

Francis Larson:

Well, you're sifting. You're sifting through a lot of people.

Tony Davies:

And our model is such that if you want to set up a company in recruitment and you want some form of financial backing, you can approach a private equity house, a business angel, even a bank, or you can lend it off your family.

Francis Larson:

Yeah, mortgage your house.

Tony Davies:

But pretty much everybody is going to take some sort of security off you. So when I set my business up, both of us had houses at the time. This is way back in the early two thousands. So we went to the bank with a business plan, and they said, okay, well, how much is your house worth? It's 250,000 pounds. What's that? About $300,000 dollars. So we had two of those, right? They gave us $30,000, and they took $600,000 of security.

And if we failed, we would've lost our house. Recruitment Entrepreneur doesn't do that. So, our sifting process is much more stringent because if you fail, we fail. If you lose your money, we lose our money. So we want to make sure that the people we're investing in are absolutely the right people. So we spend a lot of time talking to people, and in some cases, we are pushing back. We are saying, do you really want to do this? Do you really understand what it is that you're going to do and what's required of you? Because this is not the easy option. Building a recruitment business takes guts, determination, it takes real tenacity. And not everybody has that ability. That's why not everybody succeeds. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it, right?

Francis Larson:

So, I know RE requires that the entrepreneurs invest some of the resources. Is it a fixed amount that they always must invest?

Tony Davies:

What we always say to people is, look, if we start a company today as partners, we are not just giving you money. We are partners. So we'll put in our share of the finances, we'll put in our share of the knowledge. Well, we'll put in a lot of the knowledge and expertise, but as the founder, you want to be able to own the biggest stake you can afford at the beginning because it is ultimately a business. It's a private equity fund. So, if you buy 10% of the equity at the beginning, is it going to be enough to motivate you?

Francis Larson:

You are really betting against yourself at that point.

Tony Davies:

Remember, like all share dealings, If you put in a small amount of capital in the beginning when the shares have little or no real value and then want to buy more later on,  when the business is established and making money the share price would be higher right? , If we said the same thing, if we said to someone, okay, we'll put 10% in today, but when you are a bit bigger and, we are a bit more confident, we, we'll take some more shares, but we'll give you the same price as what we are putting in today. You'd go, quite rightly, no thank you. So what we're always trying to encourage people to do is to put in as much as they can afford and as much as is meaningful to them. And what's meaningful to you or to me may be different to somebody else. So we have founders that have put in as little as $30,000, $40,000. We also have people who put in over a hundred, $150,000. So it depends on the individual and depends on what their situation is and what is a meaningful amount to them. And equally, if you compare some of the recent investments, we've done in Pakistan and India and other places where the economies are different, where somebody putting in a $10/20K stake can be massively significant to them.

So, it's really a bespoke number. We don't stipulate, what we say is that it needs to be meaningful to motivate you to be able to stick with it. Because if it's not meaningful and you can afford to lose $10,000 when it gets hard, which I guarantee you it will, then you'll walk away when it gets tough,

Francis Larson:

Right? And if you don't put enough to succeed, you might not give yourself a chance.

Ron Bardach:

Well, we always say you have to have skin in the game. To Tony’s point, we go about that through a fairly stringent process to assess the candidates and ultimately decide on an appropriate investment in the venture.

Francis Larson:

The underwriting process.

Ron Bardach:

The underwriting process eventually leads to a business plan. From that business plan, we determine the total investment.

Francis Larson:

Is that the business plan that they come up with before you invest?

Ron Bardach:

Yes. We help them and work very closely with them to formulate the plan.  And out of that comes the total investment, what we call the lowest cash position, that we determine is going to be necessary to grow that company properly.  From that number, both the amount the founder will invest, and their equity are determined.

Tony Davies:

Look, we are talking about the nuts and bolts of this, and it is a business. So, every business has to have a plan and idea. It has to have an objective, it has to have a clearly mapped out business plan that you're going to try and work to. We all know that the best business plans will need to be revamped by the end of the first year without a doubt because you're working off numbers that are not factual numbers in the first instance, but once you've got a bit of history, you can change your business plan. But fundamentally, this is about people. This is a people business.

Francis Larson:

Speaking of people though, so you find somebody that's leaving a big firm, perhaps they were a top biller at a big firm, how are you finding out that they're really good? Is it just the fact that they're at a big firm? Are you relying on--maybe this is giving away some of the secret sauce-- references? Is it just behavioral? When you talk to somebody enough, you can identify that they're really good at sales. I mean, is there some secret there, or is it just effort and time?

Tony Davies:

I think, yeah, of course. There are lots of different things you can do to check somebody's track record in terms of how they built what they said they built. I mean, in the UK for example, we have a very useful little document that the government gives you every year called the P60, which is your taxable earnings.

Francis Larson:

So you're looking at their earnings. It's like, “Hey, if you're a good biller, it's going to come across in your commission.”

Tony Davies:

Suppose someone says they’ve earned $150,000 this year in the UK. I just say, great, show me your P60

Francis Larson:

Here, it’s the W2. It's like, show me your W2. Prove it.

Tony Davies:

Yeah, it is very easy, isn't it? And if you're genuine, then what have you got to hide? If you get offended by that question, then why are you offended by that question? I'm just asking you; can you show me that you've been as successful as you say.

Francis Larson:

In some ways, the fact that recruitment has commission and there's GP, and these are trackable numbers, and companies do track them, recruiters and the billers are going to know. And maybe that's some way that enables this whole model to work. It's like these people were good, had good stats, like a baseball or football. As an entrepreneur, they can capture the real value of their ability as opposed to their previous company.

Tony Davies:

But I think more importantly, those statistical checks are important obviously, because we need to make sure that people can do what they're saying they want to do because it is a little bit like X factor, I suppose. Some of those contestants, maybe their parents, should have been honest with them. And that's what we try to do. We try to be honest with people.

Francis Larson:

Because you don't gain anything if they're not good, because you're putting money at risk. I talked to James about this a little bit when we met in New York. I was asking him to explain to me how this is different than a franchise. In a franchise, somebody's paying a fee. Does the Franchisor really care if it works? Not really.

Tony Davies:

Absolutely. And that is the difference. If I'm running a franchise, I'm making a fee. Whether you make money or not, you pay me a fee because there's the franchise fee, and then there's the commission fee for every placement you make. Whereas this is different. If you don't make any money, we're not making any money.

Francis Larson:

You want them to exit. You don't want them to stay forever.

Tony Davies:

The whole concept of what we do is not to make money while they're going through the process. The concept is to make money when they are profitable. As a shareholder, we always encourage all of our founders when they are profitable and they've repaid any loans that they've taken against the company, which is how we finance these companies, that they declare a dividend. Why do we do that? Because you should enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Tony Davies:

Share it. Get out there, use it.

Francis Larson:

Buy the Ferrari…

Tony Davies:

Yeah, why not? Because what does that do? Well, it basically motivates the founder to continue to keep doing it. They say to themselves, well, actually, I see the return of what I'm doing here. It motivates their team because their team is saying, Hey, look, my boss is doing really well, and actually, I've just got a really good bonus, and I'm benefiting from this and being involved in this company. And obviously as shareholders, we then get our little bit as well. So, we've always encouraged people to use the wealth that they're creating.

Francis Larson:

Interests are really aligned. You want to make money only when they make money. Unlike a franchise, you want to get them to an exit. You're not wanting to keep them just a royalty payer absolutely forever. It’s all about that exit.

Tony Davies:

We want to create that event. A franchise wants to keep you as long as possible doing the same thing. We want you to get to the point where you are making massive profits as quickly as we possibly can so that we can move you on to the next stage in your career. Because fundamentally, you probably know this as well as a recruitment company, selling your company and walking away into the sunset is not normally the way this works, typically, you have some form of lock-in post exit where either you have some sort of fixed term or earn-out, or you have a new role within the acquiring company, which still entails some form of equity stake. We have founders who could potentially be exiting twice within a 10-year period because they're getting a second bite through their new owners/shareholders, which may well be another bigger PE.

So it's in our interest to try and promote that. But fundamentally for me, how do we select them? Going back to the original question, it'ss a lot about the person. And we have a very precise process that we go through. And a lot of that process is us giving information to people. What we are doing while we are giving that information is assessing how they're absorbing that information. We're assessing how they respond to that information. We're assessing how they then come back to us and question us. We're assessing how much time they are investing to really learn about the information.

Francis Larson:

Some cues along the way that are signaling, are they serious? Are they for real? A little bit of prodding.

Ron Bardach:

In a way, we are like talent scouts. It's difficult to ultimately get to the investment committee and be approved. It's a very stringent process. And there are also the intangibles to what Tony was saying with the candidates. It's not just any one thing, and there's that emotional intelligence that becomes important as well.

Tony Davies:

And we want to keep it exclusive because we want the very, very best people in the portfolio it's like joining an exclusive club. Where you're going to get access to all of our knowledge and experience, and we want the best people that we can get in the portfolio.

Francis Larson:

You're incentivized to find only the best, as opposed to just collecting fees.

Tony Davies:

Absolutely. Actually, because we select the very best people, the top 1-2%, I would say, of recruiters that want to start a business, we'll try and find that top 1 or 2%. That has a massive impact because they all benefit vicariously from being part of the portfolio. Because when one is successful, it reflects onto all of the others. And equally, if one is unsuccessful and does something terrible, that also reflects. So we were very, very wary of who we allow into the portfolio. We want to make sure we've got the very best people so that they are all working correctly and in the most effective way possible. They all benefit from that. And also because of what we do and the way we do it, we create an ecosystem of recruitment founders. you'll know yourself. The recruitment industry is not renowned for its warm and cuddly approach to each other. I mean, it's difficult to get information and share.

Francis Larson:

This creates a community.

Tony Davies:

Absolutely! They're all doing the same thing at the same time. So they've got shared experience and they're able to connect and to cooperate. We have lots of companies that approach projects together, that pass things over to other companies in the portfolio because it's not in their specialism, but it's something that they know someone else does, and they've got a relationship with them. So there's lots of sharing and cooperation that goes on between the founders because we've created this environment where they're comfortable and have developed trust with each other.

Francis Larson:

This is something that makes sense to me. As an entrepreneur, having started my last two companies out of startup accelerators that invest in startups at the earliest stages, I can see the value of RE. My current company, Ascen, a back-office platform for staffing companies, came out of Y Combinator, arguably the top seed accelerator for tech startups in the world, and being a part of that has been immensely valuable. So it's incredible what Recruitment Entrepreneur is doing for the recruitment industry. This is the model that's going to replace franchising. It's going to replace a lot of other types of investors. We’re excited about the USA expansion and looking forward to seeing RE grow.

Tony Davies:

You're very welcome. Thanks so much for having us.

Francis Larson:

Thanks guys.

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