Agency Owner Rollercoaster | Ephram Stephenson - From backpacker to multi-agency owner, how to scale, exit and use technology to your advantage

On this episode I’m joined by Ephram Stephenson, owner of Kona & Co and former owner and founder of Building Careers Australia. 

Ephram’s story is one that’s incredibly interesting, as he was able to build and scale a business as an expat, with very little recruitment experience initially.

We dive into a lot of topics on this episode, inclusive of hiring, expanding internationally as well as exiting Building Careers Australia and what that was like.

For recruiters who are wanting to learn more about the Australian recruitment market, this one’s for you.

For the junior consultants out there, this is an excellent podcast to learn more about mindset as well as interesting processes to qualify your candidates thoroughly.

You can connect with Ephram on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ephramstephenson/

Timestamps:

How did you get into recruitment? [1:09]

How did you get so much success? [2:48]

What did the Australian recruitment landscape look like? [3:54]

Starting from the beginning… [5:56]

The financial crash [11:55]

Core processes that were put in place by an ops manager [15:52]

Difficulty letting go of the reigns [18:05]

Key things that your ops manager did to make an impact [20:48]

Training and development [21:27]

Implementing technology [23:38]

Why does training impact profit? [27:28]

Incentivising consultants [31:40]

Transforming digitally [34:20]

Exiting the business [35:48]

Private investor [38:43]

How did you phase out? [41:07]

How did you feel? [42:31]

What did you do on your time off? [44:17]

What did you implement in your new business that you’d learnt from the last 15 years? [49:22]

Future of recruitment in Australia [52:34]

Parting words [55:28]

I hope you enjoyed the episode, the best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hishemazzouz/

If you would love me to cover certain topics with future guests please drop me a message. 

Finally, if you have been enjoying the podcast and you have two minutes then it would be greatly appreciated if you could leave a review. 

Simply it will enable me to reach more people with the podcast, you can easily leave a review with the following link - https://ratethispodcast.com/rollercoaster 🙌