Twenty years of fixing things

My first job in recruitment, in 2006, was being sent into an onsite operation that was losing money. No plan, no team behind me, just go and sort it out. It took three months to turn round and the site finished the year in profit. That is still the job I do. Everything since has been the same shape, in bigger rooms.

Almost twenty years in recruitment all told, and I held pretty much every role in it. Consultant, account manager, branch manager, regional manager, head of branch operations across sites in the North and the Midlands, then senior leadership and director level. In between, the role that shaped all of this: turnaround and acquisition implementer for an investor group buying recruitment businesses. Walk in, find the problems fast, exit what is not working, hire what is, rebuild the commercial momentum, hand over, move to the next one. Do that enough times and very little surprises you.

I ran my own recruitment business for six years alongside that, which is where you learn what a P&L feels like when it is yours. Then came Head of Business Improvement, and that is the one that tipped the boat. Moving CRM data between systems, rebuilding the process behind it, and suddenly the job was data, process and systems rather than people and desks.

That is where it clicked. I had spent fifteen years watching businesses lose money to problems everybody could see, and now I was underneath the systems causing them. Data in the wrong shape. Tools that did not talk to each other. Somebody doing by hand, every week, a job a script could do in the background. Nobody fixed it because fixing it was always somebody else's job, and it never quite was. Business improvement stopped being a job title and became the actual work.

So I left recruitment and taught myself to build. Not the weekend course version. The build it, ship it, watch it break, fix it version. That work became Staxxd.

We do not sit across the table telling people what they should do. We build the automation, write the code, design the system, and then we run it alongside you until it works. Three hundred clients over twenty years, and nine out of ten come back. That is the whole pitch.