How a staffing firm grew past founder-led sales

What was stuck

When we started in mid-2023, the founder did all the selling. There was no sales team, no structured outreach and no written description of the ideal customer. Workers and customers were tracked in separate, disconnected lists. Worker intake was manual and no-shows were common. Payroll went out every week, while clients paid in 30 to 60 days.

What we found

Nearly every new lead came from Google search. It was the one channel that worked without the founder in the room. The constraint wasn’t demand. The founder owned too much of the business, and too little of it was written down.

What we built, step by step

1. July. Defined the ideal customer: regional construction firms with ongoing projects and labour shortages. Wrote the first sales playbook, with email templates and follow-up cadences in the CRM. Started merging the worker lists into one database, tagged by region and skill.
2. August and September. Cold calling underperformed, so outreach moved to email first. Contract sales hires were paused. Worker campaigns moved into Airtable, with SMS automation.
3. October. Ran an in-person client event as a sales push: a hand-picked invite list, direct outreach, RSVP tracking and follow-up emails. Cleared unqualified deals out of the pipeline, and agreed what counts as a close: a signed services agreement plus a card authorisation on file.
4. November. Weekly pipeline reviews began. The outsourced sales contractors weren’t working, so roles changed: the founder took over recruiting, and field reps started carrying the agreement and card forms so they could close on site.
5. December. Built the investor materials: a financial model, a data room and the story that ties them together.

What changed

By December 2023, revenue was about six times the year before, and open roles were filling in two to three days on average. Selling no longer depended on one person, and the sales process was written down.

What we’d still call unfinished: the follow-up after the client event converted poorly, and nothing yet checked the systems against each other. On the Agentic Ascent, the firm reached level 1, Connected: one worker database and one shared definition of a closed deal.