🎟️ Tom Kosnik is speaking at the Firm Leaders Summit presented by Crelate, November 16 to 18. Every live session is free: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

🚀 This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every conversation and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

We recorded this conversation with Tom Kosnik in 2024, during one of the longest down stretches the recruiting and staffing industry has seen. We're bringing it back because Tom is joining us at the Firm Leaders Summit, and the questions he raised then are the same ones firm owners are working through right now.

Tom is the founder and president of the Visus Group, a growth strategy and organizational development firm that works only with staffing and recruiting companies. As he tells it, close to 100 C-suite executives sit in his peer roundtables, which means he hears every few months what's working and what isn't inside firms from startup size to billions in revenue. He also got into the industry by an unusual route. He was studying for the Catholic priesthood, realized it wasn't his calling, and ended up building roundtables for staffing executives because it was the only industry left on the table.

The heart of this episode is Tom's stage-by-stage breakdown of what it takes to grow a firm, and how the owner's job changes at every step. From $1M to $5M, the stakes are your next few hires and running out of cash. From $5M to $10M, you need a real sales plan, a recruiting manager who frees you to work on the business, and an owner who keeps selling. From $10M to $25M, it's an operating system, quarterly initiatives, weekly business KPIs, and getting off factoring. Past $25M, your job becomes building and running a management team.

He also makes the case that hiring more salespeople and making more dials no longer grows a firm. Recruiting in places a client can't reach is now table stakes. The firms that are winning bring their clients market data and talk with them about human capital strategy, and that conversation positions them as advisors instead of a source of bodies. He explains why offshore sourcing is about to be automated away, why technology spend that doesn't raise gross profit per person is wasted, and why marketing and personal brands now carry most of the sales load.

Tom also covers the personality traits that predict great recruiters, how to keep A-players from leaving to start their own firms, and the story of an operator with no staffing background who took a firm from $1M to $3.5M in EBITDA in three years, as Tom tells it.

What You'll Learn

• What changes at $1M, $5M, $10M, and $25M
• Why your sales plan matters more than your business plan below $10M
• Why "more dials" is the wrong answer to a slow market
• The traits that separate top billers from friendly extroverts
• How to keep your best producers from going out on their own
• Why every firm owner needs a peer group that tells them what they don't want to hear

Books mentioned: First, Break All the Rules and The Power to See Ourselves.

🔗 Connect with Tom Kosnik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tkosnik/

🌐 Visus Group: https://www.visusgroup.com/

💬 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📩 Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Registration is open for the Firm Leaders Summit, three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders, November 16 to 18. Hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and message automatically and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Most agency owners chase clients every single month. Matthieu "Matt" Beaurain built a $50M a year search group by doing the opposite.

Matt has led Lincoln for 26 years, taking over the firm when it was four people and growing it to roughly 230 people across more than 10 countries and four brands, with about €50M in annual revenue, as he tells it. His model is simple and radical: every consultant is a talent agent. Lincoln follows people, not companies, and the business follows the talent.

In this conversation, Matt breaks news he held back from our pregame. In 2020, Lincoln sold 55% of the firm to join a larger European talent representation project. At the end of July, they bought it all back. Lincoln is 100% independently owned again, and Matt explains what that means for the next chapter.

He also introduces a metric most firm owners have never heard of: Talent Lifetime Value. Lincoln measures each consultant's portfolio of talent over five years, the way a SaaS company measures customer lifetime value. Build it well and you stop starting every month from zero.

Matt shares how he started in recruiting part-time at Robert Half while running a bar with his wife, why he moved his family to Shanghai after visiting a struggling office, and how he built trust in China for six years without speaking Mandarin. He walks through Lincoln's international expansion, from a small acquisition in Belgium right before the 2008 crash to Cooper Fitch in the Middle East, and why one rebrand after an acquisition probably destroyed value. He also explains why he brought in an outside CEO so he could keep doing the work he loves, how Lincoln holds fees at 25 to 28% on a fully retained model, and why the US may finally be on the map.

What You'll Learn:

• How the talent agent model replaces traditional BD
• What Talent Lifetime Value is and how to measure it
• Why Lincoln keeps acquired brands instead of rebranding
• How to defend retained fees when clients push for contingency
• What it takes to hand your firm to an outside CEO
• Why Matt believes AI won't replace the trust you build with talent

Connect with Matthieu Beaurain:

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthieu-beaurain-743609/

🌐 Lincoln: https://lincoln-group.com

🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

⚙️ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🎯 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

David Dickey was a consistent $500K biller for years. This year he is on pace to break $1 million. When asked what changed, his answer was not a new sales script or a bigger client list. It was one hire.

The Firm Leaders Summit is November 16, 17, and 18. Three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders: hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

David is the founder of The Patriot Group, an executive and technical search firm focused on aerospace and defense, with deep work in the unmanned and drone space. Before recruiting, he was a Marine officer who went on to build government contracting companies. When the VP offers started coming in, it was his then girlfriend, now wife, who asked why he did not just go out on his own again. That question started The Patriot Group, which turns 15 this January.

In this conversation, David walks through every pivot. From government consulting to running veteran career fairs, 25 events in four years, to going all in on recruiting. He explains why contract-funded GovCon roles are a race to the bottom on margins, and why he only works headquarters roles that are not tied to a single contract.

Then the big one. David recruited for about 12 years before making his first CEO placement. The fear that held him back is the same one most recruiters carry: if I call myself an executive recruiter, I lose everything else. He shares the referral that opened the door, what he would tell himself five years ago, and why owning your positioning on LinkedIn matters more than waiting for credibility to catch up.

We also get into the hire that changed the year. In the summer of 2024, David brought his youngest stepson into the business from a sales background. He took over the processes, the forms, and training the firm's AI on Claude, which freed David to focus on better clients and sharpen the firm's message.

David also breaks down why he moved away from contingency to an engagement fee model, why the first move for a recruiter stuck at a low average fee is to raise it, and how years of building his LinkedIn network turned simple connection messages into searches.

What You'll Learn:

• Why David only works headquarters roles in GovCon, not contract-funded seats
• The fear that kept him from executive search for 12 years, and what finally tipped it
• How one hire freed up his time and put him on pace for $1M
• How his stepson uses Claude and Loxo to automate submissions and curated resumes
• Why he dropped contingency for an engagement fee model
• How his LinkedIn DM game turns connections into executive searches
• The Marine Corps principle he still applies when a placement does not work out

🔗 Links:

🎖️ Connect with David Dickey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dickeydavid/

🏢 The Patriot Group: https://thepatriotsgrp.com/

🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🤝 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe