AllSearch Recruiting Celebrates 20 Years in Business – Five Business Lessons Learned from the Journey!
That it has been 20+ years since Brian, Mike and I sat down and started planning our dream is CRAZY! It is also crazy to think that 3 guys in their mid-20’s, who in hindsight had NO CLUE what they were starting, have made it this long! That said, a huge THANK YOU to so many other smart, talented, and driven people that have helped us along the way.
I think the most recent stats will tell you that 18% of private sector businesses in the U.S. fail within the first year. After five years, 50% have failed, and after ten years, 65% of businesses have failed. Navigating our business through the last 20 years, I can certainly see why the failure rate is so high. So many things must go right…but honestly, you also just need to get a little bit lucky sometimes! Through a global financial market meltdown and the deep recession that followed, through a worldwide pandemic that all but put the working world on pause…thanks to hard work and a dedicated team of professionals…we have not only made it to our 20-year anniversary, but we are thriving and having our best ever year as a company!
While some of these may be cliché, these are the biggest takeaways I can give you from starting and running my own business for all these years:
#1 – The time is never right. You wait for the perfect time…you will never start.
So true. And so true of AllSearch and our beginnings. Mike, Brian and I had the idea to start our company at the same time we also all had really good jobs with bright futures attached to each. Through the endless months of planning our venture, there were endless reasons to wait “just a little” longer to open the doors. An upcoming bonus, a pending raise, the birth of my first child months before opening, another wife finding out she was pregnant late in the planning stages…during our process, there was always a reason to pause. But we finished our planning, knew we were ready, and went for it.
“Perfect is the enemy of good”, as they say. Don’t wait until everything is perfect. Why? Because it will never be! And you will never start. If you have passion about your idea, if you believe you have prepared, if you think it can work…go for it!
#2 – Don’t have a Plan B. Having a plan B is planning to lose.
One of the worst pieces of cliché advice that we give to young people is, “Always have a Plan B!” Seriously, we hear a lot of clichés and “timeless” advice over the course of our lives. A lot of times, these repeating messages become ingrained in our head, we don’t even question it, and we assume it is true, and of course, we then recite it to others as fact.
Attacking a path to a lifelong dream with all your passion, with a built in “fall back” plan already in your mind, is a sure-fire way to give up on the difficult path to your dream. How hard will you work if you have no safety net? How much more likely will you be to ignore all the naysayers if you are singularly focused on achieving that dream?
Fun fact…when we opened AllSearch, we NEVER had a Plan B. Not in our planning, not on day one, and not today. The three of us NEVER talked about a “what-if” scenario. We just attacked our dream, understanding that no matter what challenges we faced, we would work through them to achieve our dream.
And that doesn’t mean you won’t fall down on the path to success. But when you fall down, you get right back at it, figuring out another way or a better way to succeed in your mission or goal. Don’t build in a Plan B. Don’t assume failure before it happens. Instead, attack your Plan A with an unstoppable passion.
#3 – Hire great people and then get the heck out of the way.
This is a simple one. But another lesson learned the hard way. When you are in your mid 20’s and your open your own business, you think you know everything. And you want to be part of everything. So you try to do too much, you micromanage, you are too demanding, and you ultimately get the worst, instead of the best, out of the very people you hired to help grow the company.
As they are here at AllSearch, your people are the lifeblood of your company! If you want them to do their best work, and to serve your clients in the best way possible, you must make sure they love what they do. You need to support them both professionally and personally, you need to trust them, you need to listen to their ideas and implement change when it makes sense, you need to build a positive culture around your people.
As a leader, the moment I made that change in my personal management style is the moment AllSearch really started growing. As an entrepreneur it is tough and scary to let go, because in the beginning, it is your baby, your vision, your idea. But to truly grow your company, that vision needs to become a collective vision of the full team.
As a leader, if your team is growing smarter and more talented than you could ever be, you are doing things RIGHT!
#4 – Don’t be afraid to fail. Over and over again.
This is like the most cliché line ever. You hear this all the time, that you learn so much from failure. And speaking from a place of 20 years of growth and development…this is 100% true. Sure, no one wants to fail. But you will. On almost any meaningful journey you ever embark on, business or other, you will fail before you succeed. And it is truly in those failures that you get stronger…if you take a second to analyze what went wrong.
Almost every time we failed at AllSearch over the years, and some of those failures were HUGE, we grew significantly stronger by applying those lessons to the next phase of growth. I would argue that it is because of those real world lessons that we learned in our failures, that we are as successful as we are today.
#5 – Choose optimism and positivity.
This is my last point, and probably the most important part. In any long journey, you are going to have your ups and downs. We certainly have! Things will go wrong. People will make mistakes. You will make mistakes. Clients will be lost, deals fall apart. Nothing you will ever do in business will prevent this. But what is 100% in your control is how you respond to challenges. It is your choice to get angry, to blame others, to create a toxic world around you. But it is also your choice to be calm, reflect, find the positive, come from a place of optimism.
The choice of positivity, or optimism…is certainly not usually the easy choice. But if you can master that response, use the power of positivity to your benefit…you can change the entire world around you for the better. And the positive results will follow!
Founded in 2002, AllSearch is a privately held direct hire recruiting firm. AllSearch recruits and places skilled professionals on a direct hire basis in the fields of Manufacturing, Building Products & Construction, HVAC Sales & Mechanical Services and Industrial Sales & Management. AllSearch has a national reach, recruiting and placing skilled professionals in nearly every state and major market in the US, as well as internationally including Canada.
Contact: Jason E. Connors, Principal
Phone: 888-427-2977 x106
Website: www.AllSearchinc.com