Starfish Partners Discovery Program

Starfish Partners is uniquely positioned to advise firms in this endeavor: we understand the market, we understand the need for a variety of structures and approaches, and we know the ones to avoid. Throughout the course of this 5 – 6 week program, you will speak with the senior advisors of Starfish Partners responsible for multiple successful acquisitions in the past year alone. Throughout the Discovery Program, you will be introduced to the areas of support provided for the 170+ recruiting firms who are part of the Sanford Rose Associates Network.

Timing is everything. A direct acquisition or investment by/with Starfish Partners may emerge, or our professional recommendation may be that joining SRA is most fitting to make your firm investible. It is also possible that neither are appropriate; in such an outcome, the value of this program will dwarf the investment.

With collective revenues of a family of companies exceeding $250 million annually, the combined operational, finance, technology, marketing communications, hiring, training, coaching, and consulting divisions now represent the largest and most tenured team serving the third-party recruiting industry.

• Individual Consulting Calls(all calls approximately 90 mins in duration):

  • Kickoff Consulting Call with Jeff Kaye and Karen Schmidt, Board Members – Starfish Partners: The kickoff call will address the why and the how. Imagine you are presenting your business plan to a group of investors; why would they buy? Diversification of clients and markets served, consistency in revenue and profits, a scalable model and infrastructure are but a few ‘why’s’ when maximizing value creation. With a solid why, the how remains; this exploratory conversation will examine paths varying from access to capital, liquidity, and potential equity possibilities to consider. In short: what needs to happen to get your firm the maximum value. We will provide feedback and recommendations on markets/territories, structure/models, team rules, career paths, compensation plans, diversification strategies and more.
  • Consulting Call with Dan Charney, Board Member: Under Dan’s leadership, DRI’s revenues grew from under $4 million to just over $30 million in a decade. With 25 specialty practice areas and employing almost 100 team members, Dan will provide insights on the systems that created their solid foundation and the leadership required to run a multi-rainmaker model. Dan can also provide insight, factors and considerations in a transaction; his perspective comes from a firm and individual having successfully gone through a merger as well as several subsequent acquisitions.
  • Consulting Call with Greg Doersching, Senior Advisor: The more a firm has a perpetual funnel of both quantity and quality business, the higher the firm’s value. Greg Doersching will share consistent strategies for continuous business development and candidate recruitment, to include methodologies for sequencing tools and deployment of international sourcing capabilities. He will also dig into the people side of your business with an assessment of team members, creating learning tracks for continued education and future career paths, and analyze current programs around hiring, onboarding, new recruiter training and ongoing professional development to maximize success with recruiter identification, attraction, onboarding, and retention.
  • Consulting Call with Mike Gionta, President of RecruiterU: Revenue predictability and performance management are essential within any firm, no matter the size. Mike will facilitate a discussion around your key performance indicators and how to engineer a system to forecast revenue 90 days out, the keys to getting consistent performance from yourself as well as your recruiting team, and the accountability structures for new hires.
  • Consulting Call with Nick Turner, Board Member: The due diligence process for an acquisition is extensive, and can be even more difficult in the highly fragmented sector of recruiting. Nick Turner and his team completed one of the largest all-stock transactions in the mid-to-upper-management recruiting space ever, and this consultation session will introduce you to a methodical and proven process to maximize your opportunities to add value to the investment transaction. It will also give you a variety of approaches to business valuation, tax structures, and monetizing strategies.
  • Wrap-Up Call with Jeff Kaye: Bringing this series together, this call with Jeff Kaye will aggregate all areas needed to build on your foundation to scale your firm. This holistic session will provide broader insight of the comprehensive facets of your search business to maximize your effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, and profitability. The team’s collective feedback will be shared with Jeff prior to the call to ensure Jeff can share realistic viability for capital infusion, acquisition, equity programs, or other monetizing strategies.