Season 9 | Ep1 Samm Green on rebuilding Few & Far towards £1m EBITDA in 2025, despite serious burnout and two years of losses

The RAG Podcast - Recruitment Agency Growth Podcast

Samm Green, co-founder of Few & Far, recounts his agency's rapid expansion to 49 staff and a £4.6 million acquisition offer before facing a severe market downturn in early 2023 that

Key takeaways

Samm Green lost over £350,000 in actual cash during the Q1 2023 market downturn after peaking at 49 staff and turning down a £4.6m acquisition offer.
Green experienced severe burnout that manifested physically as headaches, vomiting, and brain fog, ultimately requiring an A&E visit before doctors identified stress as the root cause.

Main topics

Recruitment agency profitability vs. headcount scale
Founder burnout and physical health impacts

Notable quotes

"If you're a football player playing every game of the season, you're going to be fucked."

Conclusion

The episode offers a grounded blueprint for agency owners to shift focus from vanity metrics like headcount and

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Welcome to season nine of the RAG podcast, the show where I speak with recruitment founders all over the world who are willing to share the truth behind building and running a profitable recruitment agency. Not just the headline numbers, but the real stories, the wins, the mistakes, the sacrifices, and the lessons that come with growth. So this season is more than just turnover or headcount. It's about profitability and the balance it takes to make a business really work for your life. Every week, an authentic story from a real founder. who's been there and done it and wants to tell you how. So whether Speaker 1 (0:32) you're scaling your agency right now or you're Speaker 2 (0:34) thinking about launching a recruitment company and wondering how you're going to do it, the RAG podcast will give you the insights and the inspiration you need every single week. Sam Green is the co-founder of Few and Far. Few and Far are a product management specialist recruitment business headquartered Speaker 1 (0:50) in Speaker 2 (0:50) the UK, 22 people and an incredible business. Sam was actually the very first RAG podcast guest I ever recorded in early 2019. So it was amazing to have him back on the show. Now, since then, things haven't quite panned out as Sam predicted. At the end of the first episode in 2019, he said he wanted to be 40 staff in five years and grow for a scale and an exit. Some of that did happen. They peaked at 49 people. They had an offer to sell at 4.6 million and they decided to turn it down because they felt like they could capitalize and grow even further. And then the post-COVID boom and drop happened and everything changed. They lost money for two years. In the first three months, they were 900K down on target and over 350,000 in actual cash lost. And they continually lost money for two years before the bleeding stopped and the market has began to turn at the beginning of 2025. In this episode, Sam talks about how... This not only affected the business, but affected him personally, both mentally and actually physically, to the point where he was having sickness, headaches, vomiting. He was taken to A &E and tested, all because the pain and suffering of consistently trying to fix the business led to burnout and physical symptoms. An incredibly open and transparent founder who is now on track in 2025 to do a million in EBITDA profit, which is incredible. But he's learned the hard way and he's got so much to share. So many insights to give to other people who want to make money, want to learn from people who have lost money, who might be feeling pressure, feeling pain, feeling anxiety, feeling physical and mental symptoms. This episode covers it all. Sam, welcome back to the Rack Podcast. Speaker 1 (2:38) Thank you so much. Speaker 2 (2:39) Mate, episode one, 2019. Speaker 1 (2:44) We Speaker 2 (2:44) recorded in 2018, if you remember, just before Christmas. Speaker 1 (2:48) I do. I still get messages from people who must just start a podcast. I Speaker 2 (2:53) think what happens is we get people listening to a latest one and then they're like, oh, I like this. And they go back and they typically will see, you know, you'll be the first one to go to, which is, or one of the first ones, which is nuts. Yeah. But yeah, a lot's changed in life since then, I think. Speaker 1 (3:10) Indeed. Indeed it has. More kids, more spreads, more gray hairs. Speaker 2 (3:15) Oh, mate. I'll just shave them off now, as you can see. I can't get away from the grey. Speaker 1 (3:20) I've gone for the recent buzz cut as well. It just makes life less stressful. Speaker 2 (3:24) I'll be honest, you don't look any older. If anything, you look younger. You've lost a bit of weight. You look fitter. Speaker 1 (3:29) I will take that. It's not true. I look older. I look fatter, but I'll take it. Speaker 2 (3:34) No, I'm not having it. I definitely look older. My hair's gone completely white like Santa Claus. It wasn't quite as bad. It was still grey then, but it weren't that bad. Well, mate, look, we're going to go back and tell the story. I always start with, you know, just give us a, if you can give people who don't know you, not listen to the first episode, give me just a quick synopsis of you today, like business, people, like kind of what do you do? And then we're going to go back to where we are. We'll kind of review on where we were at the end of that episode in 2019. And then we'll do it. We'll talk about what's happened since with, again, with a lens on helping people in this season, all about, you know, maximizing opportunity profit without burning out. Speaker 1 (4:12) Yep. Cool. Okay. So yeah, Sam Green, co-founder of Few and Far. I think we both established that in the first podcast, we may have been called Know It. So we rebranded in 2019. Currently 22 heads service in Europe and the US. We focus on digital products. So any business that's building some kind of digital asset of some sort, that's what we do. And yeah, it's been a hell of a last few years since we spoke. Speaker 2 (4:44) So 22 now, I think you were 25 then. Speaker 2 (4:48) The number was two years old, 25 growth, pretty quick. And all you kept saying to me was in five years, I can't really see beyond that, but 40 people is kind of the number we're going for. And you were looking at like migrating towards more of an embedded talent model as opposed to a pure recruiter, contingency recruiter. Speaker 2 (5:11) I remember you also said that, you know, you and your business partner, you know, the move into leadership was a big thing for you because you've got pillars, but nothing prepared you to be your own founder and your own leader of people. So, I mean, it's a long time ago, but 25 people, 29 team, what happened next? Speaker 2 (5:34) Kobe Speaker 1 (5:34) came. And I think a lot of people in my industry, in terms of our sector, the digital boom happened. And so our story was we capitalized on a C-bills loan to use that as a fairly easy investment to push the business. And within the space of... 14 15 months we were at 49 heads um we grew fast for a business of our size that was that was bootstrapped and predominantly perm you know i would say 95 perm at that time Speaker 1 (6:14) And we were flying, absolutely flying. Everything that I think I told you we would do, we did. Hindsight is a wonderful thing though. And there's a lot of lessons to be had in that. But we achieved it. We moved our model to start to build a recurring revenue because we recognized at the time and we would chat before about, you know, one day we'll exit and everything will be great. contract is valuable as are other recurring revenue streams. So embedded was one of the big ones. Speaker 1 (6:47) Very quickly, we had five people in that team, all on site, all our clients. Started to do really well. We got approached to be bought. Yeah, we got approached to be bought. I mean, to be fair, we get approached quite a bit, I would say. Maybe more than others, I don't know. But we decided to entertain it and we've never shied away from that fact with our team either. We've always been very clear about what our end results we Speaker 2 (7:15) hope are. Speaker 1 (7:18) And we wanted to explore it because we wanted to understand what that journey was like, having been inexperienced in it. Speaker 1 (7:25) At the time, he got offered pretty good money, but it didn't feel like it was the right amount of money. It was, I think it was like 4.6 mil or something along those lines. But the trajectory of where we were felt like we were just getting started with where the market was. So what were you doing numbers wise at this point? Oh God, I knew you'd ask me that. Speaker 1 (7:48) our EBIT was just close to a million quid at the time. And I think that's probably a key number, but clearly you could probably see in that that the multiple wasn't particularly sexy. And I think they were. And what, Speaker 2 (7:59) did you have 50 people-ish to get to a million EBIT? Speaker 1 (8:03) We have... Speaker 1 (8:06) 30, 38 sales heads at that time. The rest were supporting, including myself and my co-founder. We were that number, but 25 % of the business roughly was supporting staff, which again is another story in itself about being too fat there. So we turned down the offer and it was a good move because that business went out of business and actually we would never have got anything from it really. We would have gotten the Speaker 2 (8:32) money. Speaker 1 (8:33) Yeah, we would have. Not got it. Speaker 2 (8:35) But market change. Was that the back end of 22 that the market started to turn? Or was it 23? So Speaker 1 (8:43) Q4 2022, I think good people will always have friends in places, even if they're your frenemies, right? Yeah. So a lot of my peers I'm close with, and they were all saying their Q4 was dreadful. We had probably one of, if not the best Q4 of our life. We were like, nah, we're fine. And then Q1 2023 hit. And our target at the time with that full-size team was... Speaker 1 (9:13) It was like 450, something along those lines. And I think we did about 80 grand. Wow. Per Speaker 2 (9:20) month or per quarter? Per month. Per month, yeah. Speaker 1 (9:23) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:25) And so January was a shocker. okay you know is this a one-off is this something bigger february was slightly better but an equal shocker march was just to say so what would you Speaker 2 (9:41) cost base at that point Speaker 1 (9:43) It was about a quarter of a million pound a month. Speaker 2 (9:47) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:48) It was big. Speaker 2 (9:49) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:50) You know, fine if we're doing the target, but it was punchy. And so I was, I'm a big lover of Japan. I was in Japan in the half, in the March half term. The parents will know it's like the window of good holiday opportunity to go anywhere decent besides the summer. And I was away looking at these figures. Is that Speaker 2 (10:12) the Easter? The Easter break? The end of the quarter. Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:15) Yeah. And my business partner, we overlapped because he went on his honeymoon. Speaker 2 (10:20) Yeah. I Speaker 1 (10:20) got back. I remember that. And. I just had to go on a redundancy spree, basically. It was just like, what are we going to do? We probably should have moved earlier, but we had enough funds to look at this quarter and go, is this an anomaly or is this something bigger? Speaker 2 (10:36) You've lost about, what, 300k or something in terms of capital? Close to that? More. More, yeah. Speaker 1 (10:43) We, top of my head, I can't recall. I don't want to spit out fake numbers, but we should have done north of 1.2 mil. I think we probably did. Speaker 1 (10:53) I think we probably lost eight, 900 grand in that period. Sorry, in terms of what we should have invoiced, we lost. In terms of what we actually lost. Speaker 1 (11:04) Yeah, I'll have to do the math, but it was substantial. You Speaker 2 (11:06) spent about 750 and made about 300 or something. So you probably lost 400 or 500K. It Speaker 1 (11:12) was close to half a million quid, I think. Speaker 2 (11:14) Yeah. How does that hit when you've just come back off holiday, which is great, but as parents, it's not the same as a holiday when you're not a parent. It's stressful. You've got a lot on. You're busy. You're spending money yourself. Speaker 1 (11:26) Yeah. Speaker 2 (11:27) Can you remember? Can you take us back to how that felt? Speaker 1 (11:32) knowing what was going on or when I got back? Speaker 2 (11:35) When you got back, like when you, when you arrive Speaker 1 (11:37) back from the holiday and it's like the realization of we've Speaker 2 (11:41) lost that much money and I'm going to have to now take an action that probably, you know, I wasn't planning for. It's going to impact people. Speaker 1 (11:48) I think what's probably important to say is like, it's my first rodeo of running a business of that size or a team of that size. And so I was inexperienced about that situation. I've learned so much in it, but I knew I was coming back to redundancies. So the voice in my head was like, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a businessman. I can do this, no problem. But actually the quick decisions I had to make, including letting RFD go, you know, which was a big call to make who she was. Speaker 1 (12:18) you know older than me and you know it was it was a big deal at the time for me i remember it sounds so strange i remember the evening i think i let go of eight people in a fairly quick redundancy process that evening it sounds mad to say i remember coming home and i immediately got a fever it was so bizarre but i think that in itself tells a story of what that did to me yeah Speaker 2 (12:44) so physical reaction to it Speaker 1 (12:46) yeah Speaker 2 (12:47) So an emotional event at work. Exactly. Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:51) It was very, very difficult to do. it was the right decision to do i regret not doing it harder to be honest going deeper yeah because you prolong the inevitable if you leave it too long i think had i have had i've had the experience i have now i would have gone deeper and faster what Speaker 2 (13:09) would you have gone down to do you think Speaker 1 (13:13) I think at the time we cut to like... Speaker 1 (13:19) sub 40 at the time. I think it was like 36 or so. You know, some were redundancies, some were still like in their probation. It was like a really stupid thing. So more than eight. I would have probably half the team easily. I would have really like looked to, does everyone have the capability to manage difficult times? We kept people that we shouldn't have kept. Great people, but you know, maybe they couldn't win business or whatever it was at that moment in time. experience tells you in hindsight we should have done it differently how Speaker 2 (13:51) much were you and nick right you know how much were you two like contributing billing at the time were you doing anything you said were you like off the tools like what was your role Speaker 1 (14:02) So our roles are different. So Nick is definitely more client facing than me. We, that's changed. We both are very much client facing now at that time, Nick was leading the sales team. I was driving the business and, uh, the operational side of the company. Um, Speaker 1 (14:20) Definitely both had revenue against our name, no doubt, you know, relationships, community, all those things that we drive to, to win new business for other people. And we'd take a split of it, but we weren't doing the liveries on the stuff. Yeah. Speaker 2 (14:36) So what happened next? Speaker 1 (14:41) A spiral of shit, I think. Speaker 1 (14:44) The market, you know, everyone is obviously working in different industries and some have boomed and some haven't. We saw the absolute rocket ship of digital and what happened in the COVID period. And then we saw it all fall off a cliff. Speaker 1 (15:00) um we were just constantly chasing our towel trying to plug the problems continually Speaker 1 (15:07) Um... The short answer is we lost a load of money, reduced headcount further. I think we got ourselves down to 15 or so. Yeah, 14, 15. Was it Speaker 2 (15:20) like a quarterly round or was it an ongoing thing? How did you keep cutting? Because that's a horrible experience in itself. Speaker 1 (15:27) We did two layoff rounds. Speaker 1 (15:34) and exited other people that could be exited quicker, either with the different methods at our disposal to do it, be it probation or settlement or whatever the situation was that we could use to make that happen. Um... And I think we were losing money pretty continually until the beginning of this year, I would say. And I'm not ashamed to say that. Some things are in my control, some things aren't. It's like there comes a point where you cut so much that you've got nothing left to cut. And I could say, well, you can go back to just your business partner. That's true. But we could have just shut the business and done that anyway. We wanted to have a business. So, yeah, 2023, 2024 are not attractive years for our P &L, not attractive years for the non-P Speaker 2 (16:26) &L. Speaker 1 (16:26) How much Speaker 2 (16:26) do you think you spent balance sheet? How much money did you burn over two years? Speaker 1 (16:32) Ah. Speaker 1 (16:35) I would say in terms of like burnout, in terms of like what we lost. Yeah. That's Speaker 2 (16:41) what Speaker 1 (16:41) I mean. How much Speaker 2 (16:42) did you lose? Speaker 1 (16:44) I don't think it's as crazy as it seems, actually, given the market and what we face. Probably a quarter of a million. We'll probably dumb. Speaker 2 (16:52) But that was in the first quarter you were already down that. I'm referring to that Speaker 1 (16:56) end of year. In terms of what we burnt and lost, it was more, but we had reserves Speaker 2 (17:06) and everything to deal with Speaker 1 (17:07) that. Speaker 2 (17:09) So two years of trimming everything down, of re-evaluating how you're running a business. I didn't go through the period of losing the money, but I did get to January 2023 was a very similar time in terms of I just remember feeling physically like... I got the same feeling in my final year in recruitment, which is why I set up Hoxha. I burnt out. I didn't enjoy my day. I was hiding from things and I felt like it was coming again. So it was January 23. We had 39 employees. We weren't quite as big, but we actually, we weren't making loads of money. We weren't losing money, but we were just like, we were doing so many different things as a business. Speaker 1 (17:52) We had Speaker 2 (17:52) cottage relationships popping up and little Chinese walls and people didn't know each other. me and Amma were like, what are we doing? We didn't enjoy it. And I did not see, I did see the writing on the wall that the market was going to turn. Or I felt like we were going to be, we were staring down the barrel of losing a lot of money. So we did 25 redundancies in 2023. And it was, we got it down to 15 in January 2020 or 14, January 24. Speaker 1 (18:17) So similar. Speaker 2 (18:19) And then the businesses, now we're nine people and it's the best we've ever been. It's the most profitable. It's the happiest. I mean, there's, Still problems. Every company has problems, but... it's been I absolutely love like the team said the other day like we're just it's just such a good little culture we've got and everyone loves working together and it's just like it's mad but Speaker 2 (18:40) The amount of thinking time. The amount of brain power I feel like I've burnt over the last few years, just like playing out every scenario, every possible outcome. Do you ever do that yourself? Speaker 1 (18:52) My God, it's Speaker 2 (18:53) my Speaker 1 (18:53) kidney's heel. Speaker 1 (18:56) It is the thing that, yeah, continually there's something that pops up, something new, an idea. What do I do here? I get it. I think it's an entrepreneurial mindset for sure. Speaker 2 (19:07) And you can't switch that off either. Doesn't matter where you are. I mean, you can have holidays and breaks, but it will come up and up and up and up. Speaker 1 (19:16)