I Started On The Desk. Just Like You.
I'm not a marketing consultant who wandered into recruiting and learned the lingo. I started cold-calling in 1997. Moved into executive search by 2000. Opened my own firm in 2004.
I've built desks, closed retained searches, and felt that specific kind of sick that hits when a placement falls through the day before the start date.
Everything I teach, I learned with my own money on the line.
Then I Lost All Of It.
When the Great Recession hit, my firm didn't survive it. I sat my best people down, the ones who didn't deserve it, and told them today was their last day. Then I locked my office door and cried.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars, gone. By the time the dust settled, I'd lost the business, my marriage, and my house.
That was the first day of the worst two years of my life. It was also the most important thing that ever happened to me.
Great Recruiter, Fragile Business.
I was a great recruiter with a fragile business. Built on one niche, a handful of relationships, and the hope that the phone would keep ringing. In a good market, hustle hides that. In a bad one, it buries you.
Sales and marketing is the weakest part of almost every recruiting business. Mine included, back then.
So I made myself a promise. When the market turned again, I'd never show up to a gunfight with a banana. Ever again.
So I Became The Marketer The Down Market Demanded.
I stopped waiting on referrals and learned to manufacture demand. Omnipresence. Relevancy. Systems that run whether I'm at my desk or not. That is what brought my own practice back after the fall.
Once it was working, I built a second career out of it. I put the whole system into one framework, released it in 2018, and started teaching other recruiters to run it themselves. I called it the Lighthouse Method.
It saved my own firm first. Now it does the same for everyone else's.
What I Built Is What 600+ Firms Run On.
I'm not a "goo-roo" who read a book about recruiting. I'm a recruiter who got humbled, paid for the education in full, and came back with a system that actually holds when the market turns.
The receipts are real. The names are verifiable. And every recruiter I work with gets the version of me that learned all of this the hard way, so they don't have to.
