"How Mike Walmsley's Training made us £500,000".
By Abigail Stevens, Managing Director, Think Global Recruitment.

Before you read my story, and there are 500,000 good reasons why it’s worth reading, I’d like to ask you to put yourself in my shoes. Imagine you're the experienced MD of a well run, fast-growing recruitment company. You employ very competent, well trained former big billers from some of the UK’s best known recruitment firms, but apart from working harder and employing more good recruiters there doesn’t appear to be too much else you can do to take market share more quickly than you are at present.

Now imagine how you would react if a salesperson approached you with a claim that their product or service would add many thousands of pounds of extra profit to your bottom-line in the next twelve months. The word 'cynical' probably springs to mind? I was too, but upon taking a closer look at Mike Walmsley’s training I thought that it might be able to take the performance of my experienced recruiters to new levels.

It did, to a new level I'd never have believed. Regular use of Mike’s training sessions will soon have led to over £500,000 being added to my company's bottom line. That's £500,000 worth of business that we would not have got without Mike Walmsley's training. We have already made an extra £250,000 in the first twelve months, and we have another £250,000 of extra business in the pipeline for Year 2. More importantly, it has enabled me to lay firm foundations for massive, sustained growth in the coming years.

So why am I sharing my story with you, even though there’s a risk that you could be one of my competitors?

The answer is easy. Not only do I believe that our industry should be forward looking in its approach to sharing knowledge, but I’d actually be genuinely surprised if most recruiters in the UK aren’t using these training sessions in the very near future. In my opinion they’d be mad not to because when used correctly, Mike Walmsley’s training is a licence to print money – ethically & easily.

So what did I do to enable my experienced staff to benefit so spectacularly?

It started very simply. The whole company – and I do mean the whole company - including my administration team, watched each of the 30 to 40 minute sessions. We could see straight away that this wasn’t a typical training course to be “attended” just once, but rather an opportunity to re-engineer our sales processes. When you look closely at Mike's methods, you’ll see that he doesn’t just re-enforce best practice – he gives you the tools to do the same job but to a much, much higher level.

We began an interactive development programme based around Mike's training. On some days we re-watched an entire session before completing the accompanying workbooks - an interesting experience that re-enforced how much better we could become and how essential it was to watch the sessions over and over again.

On other days, we watched part of a session before discussing how the ideas could be adapted into our own style. The key word here is "discuss". All good managers know that if you can stimulate staff to work things out for themselves they take ownership and another great thing about Mike Walmsley's training is that it provides the inspiration for this type of discussion – which in turn leads to very positive results.

I’ve seen the sessions many times, and I could give you many more examples of how we’ve used the subtlety of Mike’s ideas and powerful business winning phrases to our advantage, including how we won one huge new client via a combination of more effective verbal referencing and referrals. However, we involve our staff in everything we do at Think Global Recruitment, so I’d rather that some of them shared their own success stories with you:

So I hope you’ve found my story useful. In a nutshell, by regularly watching and working with Mike’s training sessions, my staff now have much better control over every aspect of their jobs. They’re billing more, finding more candidates for free, winning more business and negotiating better rates – and perhaps most importantly of all, our clients are receiving better service.

In fact, I’ve even set up a new London office as a result of two top recruiters applying to me directly from a competitor as a result of hearing about these enhanced service levels from common clients.

If, after reading about my experiences you’re still pondering where to spend your training budget, my advice would be don’t hesitate – it could be the best investment you ever make.

Abigail Stevens, Managing Director, Think Global Recruitment.
See another Mike Walmsley Case Study.