Unfocused owner(s): The owner(s) has either outside interests that take them away from the business or the owner(s) spends too much time bogged down with transacting jobs and other desk-level work rather than working on the business or, when there is more than one shareholder/owner, the shareholders/owners can’t or don’t want to (for whatever reason) continue working together and the partnership dissolves.

Unfocused hiring: Consultants are hired without a thorough recruitment process being undertaken or are hired into a poorly-defined role or a hired to broaden, rather than deepen, an agency’s capability. 

Unfocused consultants: Consultants have a poorly defined target market or are expected to equally build up both temp and perm businesses on the one desk.

Unaccountable and/or unethical culture: Scheduled meetings and meeting times are an approximation rather than a commitment. Expectations with respect to results, activities and behaviour are either not communicated or if they are, the consequences of non-compliance are inconsistently enforced. Any behavior that generates fees is actively encouraged, or not discouraged, regardless of the ethical or legal nature of that behaviour.

Unprofitable consultant remuneration: The agency owner/managers provide increased     selling and support resources and there is no corresponding ‘payment’ of those costs through an amended commission or bonus scheme for consultants. Bonuses or commissions are paid out for performance over a too-short time span leading to cash flow problems or threshold/deficit problems. Consultants are paid commissions or bonuses on performance benchmarks that constitute average performance not high performance.

Unprofitable clients: Clients who take too long to make decisions, take too long to pay their bills or engage too many recruiters to fill their vacancies are all clients that should be educated to change their behavior, or fired.

Unprofitable candidates: Most consultants interview far too many average candidates that are easy to find (ie they apply to online jobs) rather than invest the same time (or less) in sourcing, activating and interviewing high quality candidates that are hard to find (ie the candidates who aren’t applying for any jobs because they are broadly happy where they are).

Unreliable use of technology: Database protocols for every single user that are unclear and not enforced contribute to one of the most significant missed opportunities in building a small agency’s intellectual capital.

Undefined processes: As the mastermind behind the global success of McDonald’s, Ray Kroc understood that a company’s long term growth was underpinned by the consistency of product and service delivery, no matter the person or the location. Almost all small recruitment agency owners lack this focus on process consistency and show little interest in understanding how such process consistency would dramatically improve the prospects of profitable growth.