Tom Kelly scaled EVONA from four bootstrapped founders in a tiny Bristol office to eighty recruiters in three years. Then he made the call most agency owners never make. He cut the team back to thirty. And in doing it, per-head revenue doubled.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation that pulls apart exactly how that happened.

Brought to you by Atlas. The AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation automatically. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.

Tom came up on the inside track at one of the biggest STEM recruiters on the FTSE. He spotted space as a high-growth vertical before almost anyone, pitched it internally, got shut down, and walked. He linked up with three other recruiters in the same office — Jack, Rich, and Ryan. They sketched the company out on a whiteboard at Tom's place: no KPIs, no fixed working hours, no fixed location, brand-first, give back to STEM. Eight years and over $40 million in fees later, they've stuck to every line of it.

Their first placement was a chef in a Bristol restaurant for £2,000. Hire number two was a head of marketing — a decision every advisor said was crazy. By Tom's read, recruitment and marketing are the same thing. Brand pull beats spam. That bet became the operating philosophy of the entire company.

Then COVID hit and the space industry — recession-proof, Tom argues, because satellites don't get sick — tripled their revenue and headcount. They paid LinkedIn a fortune ahead of a planned scale to three hundred people. They flew the whole company and their partners to Monaco after a million-dollar month. Tom calls that trip the moment the wheels were about to come off.

By 2021 the cracks were showing. Five account managers, thirty fillers, two RPO teams, a full operations and finance bench. Tom describes the peak as a hot mess. So the four founders sat down and made the hardest call of their careers. Contract team first — running $20K a week with no real strategy. Then perm cuts. Then operations. Then the advisors. Tom and the other three didn't pay themselves for six months. He moved his family to the US in the middle of it.

The episode ends on the moment the four founders agreed one of them had to lead, and that person would be Tom. Without ego. The single reason, Tom says, the business is still standing.

Part 2 drops Wednesday — the 25-interview rule that defines elite recruiters at EVONA, and the segmentation that explains why most agency owners are quietly losing 60% of their team.

What You'll Learn:

- Why scaling to 80 recruiters nearly broke the business, and the moment the four founders knew they had to cut to 30

- The pre-COVID hire every advisor told Tom was crazy, and why it became the engine of the company

- How EVONA tripled in COVID while most agencies were frozen

- The £300,000 company trip Tom now calls a warning sign

- What it actually costs to let 50 people go — emotionally, financially, culturally

- Why the four founders agreed one person had to take the wheel, and how they made the call without breaking the partnership

Connect with Tom Kelly:

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evonatom/

EVONA — https://evona.com

🎙️ Resources:

Atlas — recruitwithatlas.com

Elite Recruiter Community — https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

AI Recruiting Summit 2026 — https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

Newsletter — https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Most recruiters think AI is coming for someone else's desk. Riece Keck isn't so sure. Two years ago he said AI wouldn't replace great recruiters, but it would replace the mediocre ones sooner than anyone wanted to admit. He still stands by it, and he thinks we're a lot closer now than we were then.

He's also taking the stage at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026 to go even deeper on this, so if today's episode lands, that's where you see it built live: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

This conversation is the proof. Riece built a tech recruiting agency to a $1.2M year, then watched it nearly die twice before it folded into a merger for a token amount. He stepped away during a brutal personal stretch, then cold-started the whole thing again in early 2025, and billed roughly $800K in his first year back without leaning on his old client list. The difference the second time wasn't more hustle. It was systems.

Riece walks Benjamin through the no-code BD engine he built end to end: scraping job boards on a daily auto-run, identifying the right hiring managers, enriching the contacts, drafting the outreach, and dripping it out, all while he sleeps. He breaks down how he uses funding signals, new-hire signals, and backfill signals to reach companies at the exact moment they're hurting, and how he's now rebuilding the entire stack inside Claude Code with MCP connections so an agent runs his ATS and his sourcing for him.

But this isn't a go-all-in-on-tech sermon. Riece is just as direct about the other lane: if your zone of genius is relationships, build the offline communities that pull you out of the LinkedIn noise everyone else is drowning in. The one move he says gets you crushed in 2026 is staying in the middle, the undifferentiated recruiter who takes a job order, fires off templated outreach, and hopes.

You'll also hear how he turned strategic referral partnerships into a steady deal source, why persona-based messaging quietly outperforms everything else in the inbox, and what he'd tell a recruiter trying to go from average to elite right now.

If you've ever watched your desk go to zero and wondered if there's another side to it, this one is for you. There is. The recruiters who reinvent now are the ones crushing it in 2028.

This episode is powered by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate the admin that eats your day. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. Ask it who mentioned wanting a four-day week or who's open to relocating next year, and Magic Search pulls the answer from your entire database instantly. No keyword guessing, no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after switching. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.

Also brought to you by Millee, the AI deal strategist that turns the gut feel of big billers into real-time guidance on every live process. Millee preps you before every call and drafts your high-caliber follow-ups so you lead from the first minute. Try it free at millee.ai.

🎤 See Riece speak at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🔗 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

👤 Connect with Riece Keck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riecekeck/

Most recruiters treat their client list like a closed account. You made the perm placement, the fee hit, and now you wait six months until they need you again. Dawson Henis looked at that same client list and saw six figures of recurring revenue nobody was collecting, so he picked up the phone.

In this episode, Dawson, the founder of the Atlanta-based Henis Group, walks Benjamin Mena through what happened in the four weeks after he bolted a staffing division onto the perm search firm he started at 24. Seven contractors. Two existing clients. Roughly ten thousand dollars a month in gross profit, built entirely off relationships he already had. His first two orders filled in 48 hours, a pace he would never touch on the perm side.

But the contractors are only half the story. Dawson hasn't made a cold call in two years. He breaks down the lead-gen system that replaced it, the ICP work, the messaging that doesn't sound like creepy automation, and the exact stack he runs, and why he fired three lead-gen agencies charging him thousands a month before building the whole thing himself. If you have ever paid an outside firm to book your meetings and gotten nothing back, this part will sting in a useful way.

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and get answers instantly across your whole database, with no keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com

He is also honest about what it cost him along the way: the hires that didn't fit, what recruiters get wrong when they hire for their own shop, and the four-question screen from coach Diane Prince that finally fixed it. And he goes deep on the why, how he lost it chasing other people's playbooks and how he got it back.

Whether you are a perm firm owner sitting on contract revenue you haven't tapped, a newer recruiter wondering if you can really do this on your own, or someone who just needs the reminder that the opportunity is already in your book, this one delivers.

Connect with Dawson Henis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawson-henis/

Resources and links:

🎟️ AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

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

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

⚡ Try Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com

🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/7-contractors-in-4-weeks-from-clients-you-already-have/id1547241660?i=1000770612272

🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NyWT1BHcrylFY5889lqoj?si=zsIPR4CWSemHivwpuTMP-Q

▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oxmW2Epm1ok

Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B.

Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form

This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation and turns it into searchable intelligence. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and 80%+ increases in monthly billings. Get started at recruitwithatlas.com.

Also brought to you by Millee — AI deal strategy built from the encoded intuition of elite recruiters. Sharper call prep, high-caliber emails drafted for you, real-time guidance on every live process. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try it free at millee.ai.

Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B.

Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form.

Steve and his co-founders rebuilt the company in 48 hours. No clients, only partners. No vendor relationships, no race to the bottom, no "send us reqs and we'll send you names." It cost them roughly $3.5M in walked-away deals in year one. It also got them in a room with one of the largest healthcare organizations in the country, where they built the first physician healthcare recruitment team in the ACO space — on a $400 website, an ATS they didn't own, and a phone they hadn't bought yet.

Year one: $1.1M off six months of real building. Year two: $3.7M. Year three, closing January 2027, on track for $19.4M. 53 partners, 84% close rate, only two partners lost in two years. A private equity deal closed December 2025 that changed what's possible from here.

This episode is the operator's playbook behind that arc. Why "partners, not clients" isn't marketing — it's a P&L decision. What broke in Q1 of year two when the credit card bills came due. What Steve learned in-house at a company that saved his life five months after a heart attack he didn't see coming. And the line his older brother gave him that reshaped how he thinks about time: "I have lived longer than I have left to live."

If you've been waiting for the right moment to bet on yourself, this is the one to listen to twice.

What You'll Learn:

• Why "partners, not clients" is the model that scaled Optigy from zero to a $19.4M run-rate
• The exact moment Year 1 broke — and the leadership shift that fixed it
• How to walk into a 2,200-location healthcare org with no website and no ATS
• What in-house recruiting teaches you that no agency seat ever can
• The five-part call structure and where 90% of recruiters fall apart on the transition
• Why "work works" is the only input that matters early — and what replaces it as you scale
• The diligence questions that protect founders from the wrong PE partner

📌 Connect with Steve Anderson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sgandersonlmg/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fo9ioNrWsM0

🎤 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

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

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

🤝 Sponsors:

Atlas — recruitwithatlas.com

Millee — millee.ai

She launched her firm on January 12th. Six weeks later she'd billed $120,000 — working off an Excel spreadsheet, a phone, and zero AI. While most of the industry is convinced the next placement is one shiny tool away, Lauren Lehman quietly proved the opposite, and this conversation breaks down exactly how she did it.

Before we get into it — this episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. The resume never tells the full story, and Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically so nothing gets buried in your notes. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and pull the answer from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.

Lauren spent nearly a decade recruiting in healthcare and then accounting and finance before walking away from a comfortable, high-billing seat to start Manta Search. In this episode she's honest about the part nobody posts about: the fear of failing, the costs people underestimate, and the reality that you become marketing, payroll, admin, and AR the day you go out on your own. Her advice is to have the lawyer and accountant in place before you jump — then jump anyway. As she puts it, you build the parachute on the way down.

The engine behind the $120K is less glamorous than the number suggests, and that's the point. Lauren treats business development as the circle of life for a desk — two to three hours every single day, calendar blocked, phone off, hitting 50 companies a block through calls, texts, voice notes, and LinkedIn. She walks Benjamin through her actual MPC scripts, why she leads with a candidate instead of begging for a job order, and why texting CFOs outperforms email every time. Spoiler: they text back, because they're people on their phones just like the rest of us.

Then there's mushrooming — Lauren's term for turning one filled role into an entire account. She breaks down precisely how she asks a hiring manager for the introduction into legal, engineering, or IT without sounding opportunistic, when to make the ask, and how she follows up on open roles without ever becoming a resume pusher. This is the relationship game that replaced the transactional, burnout-driven headhunter mentality she ran during the pandemic gold rush, and the shift to a white-glove approach — including learning to say no to the wrong searches — is what made the model durable.

And on the question every recruiter is wrestling with: Lauren thinks AI isn't good enough to replace the human part yet, and that leaning on it too early is quietly making recruiters lazy. She uses it where it helps on the back end, but the relationships, the follow-up, and the discipline are still hers.

If you've been waiting for the perfect moment to go all in, this is the episode. Draw the line in the sand and start your six weeks now — because 2026 is your year.

Connect with Lauren Lehman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurentaylorlehman/

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

🤖 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

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

🚀 Powered by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com

What separates the recruiters billing seven figures from the ones who plateau year after year? According to Scott Love, only one out of a hundred recruiters will ever reach their full potential. The other ninety-nine are stuck in the same loop — relying on the most placeable candidate call, avoiding real business development, and confusing activity with progress. In this episode, Scott breaks down exactly why 99% of recruiters fail at BD and what the 1% are doing differently going into 2026.

Scott Love is one of the most recognized names in the recruiting industry. He runs partner-level legal recruiting for global law firms, hosts The Rainmaking Podcast (a top 2% show globally with 300+ episodes), serves as editor-in-chief of The Rainmaking Magazine, and has coached 4,500 recruiting firms across 36 countries. He's a Naval Academy graduate, a former card-counting blackjack player mentored by alumni of the MIT blackjack team, and one of the sharpest strategic minds in the search business.

In this conversation, Scott shares why most recruiters never escape transactional BD, the three traits that define the top 1%, why niching down is non-negotiable, and how to build thought leadership that pulls clients toward you instead of chasing them. He explains why "they need you more than you need them" is the posture shift behind every seven-figure desk, when to stop thanking your clients, how game theory applies to deal management and emotional recovery, and what every recruiter should do in the first hour of the day.

This episode is brought to you by Atlas. Atlas is the AI-first recruitment platform built for agency recruiters and search firms who want to source faster, manage pipeline smarter, and bill more without adding headcount. If you're stitching together five tools to run your desk, Atlas was built for you. Try it free at https://recruitwithatlas.com

This episode is also brought to you by Millee. Millee analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need — powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition, the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real-time guidance for every single process. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days at https://millee.ai

Scott also gets into the trends he's tracking for 2026, including his prediction that LinkedIn will lose its grip as the dominant sourcing channel within two years, the dirty-secret play that built his thought leadership in legal, and the journaling discipline he's used since 2017 to track his greatest achievements, his mistakes, and the patterns underneath both. If you want to bill more in 2026, this is the conversation.

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

🎟️ AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

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

⚡ Sponsor — Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com

🎯 Sponsor — Millee (30-day free trial): https://millee.ai

🎙️ The Rainmaking Podcast: https://therainmakingpodcast.com

🔗 Connect with Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotttlove/

YouTube: https://youtu.be/GyrM_muEqPM

Tony O'Neill surfs 200 days a year, runs an executive search firm from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and lives a life most agency owners assume they have to retire before earning. Here's the part no one talks about: it didn't come from selling the business or stepping back from the desk. He's still billing, still in Pinnacle Society conversations, and still committed to another fifteen years in the seat. The life came from a decision he made fifteen years ago to reverse-engineer everything and to build a brand, not a search firm.

This conversation is the playbook. Tony walks through the brick wall he hit in year one, the consultants who saved his business, and why he chose an outdoor sporting goods niche his mentors told him was too small. He explains why he switched from contingent to retained in year three, why he refuses contingent work today even with the perfect candidate already in his inbox, and why owning the client relationship is the non-negotiable that separates high-performance firms from everyone else.

Then he breaks down the 2024 pivot that added over six figures to his revenue. When his niche got hit, he called every past client to ask how he could improve, and got certified in DISC and Predictive Index. He built behavioral assessments into his proposals with an extended warranty, priced them higher than felt comfortable, and turned them into a recurring revenue line. His framing for clients: two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad hires, and the assessment moves the customer from a .333 batting average to .500.

MILLEE — The judgment that separates big billers the reframe that regains control of a stalling process, the move when a candidate goes quiet — usually takes years on the desk. Millee analyzes every live deal and builds the exact strategy you need, powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition. Before every call you get sharp contextual preparation. In your inbox, high-caliber emails are already drafted. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/

ATLAS — The resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters in conversations: motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that ends up buried in notes. Atlas captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch, you can ask "who talked about wanting a four-day week" or "who's open to relocating next year" and pull answers from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Unlock your exclusive listener offer: https://recruitwithatlas.com

What You'll Learn:

• Why Tony refuses contingent work, even when the perfect candidate is already in his inbox
• The brick wall every new search firm owner hits in year one and the consultants who break it
• How he chose a "too small" niche and built a brand recruiters confuse for a sporting goods company
• The 2024 pivot that added six figures: DISC, Predictive Index, and extended warranties built into the proposal
• Why two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad and how to get your client to bat .500
• Tony's daily operating system: 10am-3:30pm prime selling time, sauna, cold plunge, algorithm starvation
• The two books behind the business: Million Dollar Consulting and The Four Agreements
• Why "freedom requires discipline" is the principle every search firm owner has to internalize first

Connect with Tony O'Neill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/outdoorindustryrecruiter/

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

🚀 Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

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

▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube: