Staffing agencies
I want to start a staffing company. Currently, my biggest enemy is the telephone.
I’ve been seriously looking into starting a staffing company focused on helping high school and college students get into safe, entry-level work.
On paper, I understand the business model. Find employers with a hiring problem, build a pool of dependable workers, make the match, and earn a margin for solving that problem.
I’ve started calling local businesses just to validate the idea before I dump money into forming the company,
insurance, licensing, software, etc.
I’m trying to figure out whether businesses actually have a problem I could solve before building an entire company around my assumption that they do.
My problem is that I don’t really know how these early conversations should sound.
I don’t want to call and immediately say, “Hi, would you like to use my staffing company?” because I don’t even know what their staffing problems are yet. But when I try to make it conversational, I sometimes get lost halfway through the call.
So, staffing agency owners, recruiters, business owners who use staffing agencies, or anyone who has actually done B2B cold calling:
How did you get your first few clients?
More specifically:
What did you actually say when calling businesses?
Who inside the company did you try to reach?
Did you sell staffing immediately, or start by asking about their hiring problems?
What made employers actually give you the time of day when you had no track record?
How did you validate your niche before fully committing to it?
What did you completely misunderstand about the staffing business when you started?
And if you were starting from zero again, what would you do differently during your first 30 days?
I’m not looking for a “get rich with a staffing agency” blueprint. I’m trying to figure out whether I’m standing at the normal…
Feel free to tell me I’m doing it wrong. That’s partially why I’m posting.