Start a Recruitment Agency

Agency Launch Checklist

Companion to "Your first ninety days."

Each checkpoint is a fork: hit it and continue, miss it and make a specific change, not a vague effort increase.

Days 1 to 14: build the machine

Form the entity and open the account (lean stack opens for roughly $100 to $600)
Run the state license check from the law lesson
Choose the niche using the written five-question test
Build the two-tab tracker, clients and candidates; set up the professional email (~$6/mo)
Rewrite the LinkedIn profile so it says plainly what you now do (every outreach message links to it)
Build the 100-company target list from job boards and funding announcements
Build the warm-network list: former colleagues who became hiring managers
Draft the two outreach messages (pitch and relationship opener) and the candidate outreach template
Runway check written down from day one: burn and coverage numbers, reviewed every two weeks against reality

Days 15 to 30: start the engines

Client side: weekly outreach batch out, follow-ups scheduled, warm-network conversations booked as calls
Candidate side: daily sourcing searches in thirty-to-forty-five-minute blocks, even with no signed client; build the starter warm pool

Day-30 checkpoint. Entity, bank account, tracker, and email all live; one hundred companies listed, first batch contacted, follow-ups scheduled; at least five warm-network conversations held; first sourcing searches run with a starter warm pool.

Days 31 to 60: first fee agreements, first submissions

Fee agreement model reviewed once by the attorney before the first signature
First fee agreements signed; first submissions going to real clients
Screens run per the thirty-minute screen; write-ups out; tracker filling with stages
Business development continues every week regardless (tripwire one's precondition)

Day-60 tripwire. Zero signed agreements at day sixty does not mean work harder. Replies but no calls means the pitch: rewrite against the templates. Silence across weeks means the target list: re-score the niche test honestly. Change one variable, not both, and run another thirty days.

Days 61 to 90: first processes, first offers

First full search cycles: client interviews, offers, closing disciplines in live repetition
Invoices out the day a candidate starts; first guarantee clocks begin
Friday metrics review now has real trends: response rates by template, client reply rates by niche, submission-to-interview conversion

Day-90 checkpoint (directional, not financial). A signed client, live submissions, and a process that has reached final interviews is a healthy quarter-old agency even with no fee banked yet. Not healthy: no process has reached a final round. That points at submission quality; fix the write-up standard, not the volume.

Fee-generating reality

Fee-generating reality lands between day 90 and month six for most cold starts; runway math, not the calendar, decides the window
Month six without a single fee is the structural review point: niche change, message overhaul, or a decision to stop, taken with numbers behind it