Business Mentor 🥇 I Scaled & Sold My £25M Recruitment Business🔥Now I Empower Recruitment Leaders To Do The Same ⚡️Leadership Coach 🔥NED🚀Host: Purpose-Led Leadership Podcast🎙️Book Call

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➡️➡️ www.basemindset.com ⬅️⬅️

Ex-global top biller at SThree and £25M Recruitment business owner turned purpose-driven NED and coach.

Almost all business problems are people problems. Because people without a purpose have no centralised reason driving them to perform. 
 
After exiting my last business, I now coach leaders on how to build purpose-led businesses that perform. 
 
🔹Leadership Coaching 
🔹Vision, Mission and Values
🔹Get Fit for sale MBO/MBI/Exit
🔹Career Maps and Pay Packages
🔹Business Development and Account Growth
🔹Talent  Attraction, Retention & Development
🔹Mindset, Pitch, Tone, Rapport Building, Job Qual
🔹Thought Leadership, Branding & Linkedin Content
🔹Retained, RPO, SOW, Exclusive, Job Control & Closing
🔹Day Plans, Week Plans, 90-Day Plans, Team Coaching
🔹Goal and Target Setting,  Personal Dev, Share Schemes
🔹Boards Packs, Board Meetings, Strategy and Execution
🔹Speccing in candidates, email, sequencing,call to action 

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From your vision to your value proposition, from talent attraction to team development, from marketing to messaging — these 10 digital products are designed to give you a crystal-clear commercial edge.

DM me for more info! 

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I’m the proud dad to three incredible boys and am not afraid to tell you how it is. 
 
DM me and let’s start growing! 😃

➡️ www.basemindset.com 

➡️ chris@basemindset.com

Book My 1-2-1 or Group Training
Book My Leadership Development Course 
Book My LinkedIn Content Playbook Strategy
Book My Market Mapping, BD and 90 Day Plan 

I have mentored over 60 recruitment businesses to build & scale. See my recommendations  🚀

🔥Chris is an exceptional coach with extensive knowledge of the recruitment market. 

🔥We engaged with Chris when we were looking to enter a new market, and his expert advice and knowledge helped us gain traction very quickly. 

🔥 Chris has become a trusted advisor and a friend, and I highly recommend Chris to anyone looking for a Coach/Mentor.

______

Listen to my podcast The Purpose-Led Leadership Podcast 🎙 (Spotify and Apple Podcasts) or follow me on Instagram: @chrisoconnellcoach


Can all the non-recruiters stop telling recruiters how to recruit?

You wouldn’t tell your plumber how to plumb.
Your dentist how to dentist.
Your solicitor how to practise law.

Yet recruitment seems to invite opinions from people who:

- Did it once in 1993
- Had one bad experience
- Or have never actually done it at all

LinkedIn is full of “experts” explaining how to recruit, build businesses, and lead teams…

…despite never having billed, built, scaled, hired, fired, or carried real responsibility.

Opinion without experience isn’t insight.

It’s noise.

If you want real insight, listen to people who’ve actually done the job - not just talked about it.

Chris O’Connell🍀

Ex-global top biller at SThree and £25M Recruitment business owner turned purpose-driven NED and coach.

Almost all business problems are people problems. Because people without a purpose have no centralised reason driving them to perform. 
 
After exiting my last business, I now coach leaders on how to build purpose-led businesses that perform. 

The services I provide includes a powerful and comprehensive process for ongoing personal development, transformation, and achievement.
 
I work with leaders in service-based businesses on: 

🔹Leadership Coaching 
🔹Speccing in candidates, email, sequencing,call to action
🔹Vision, Mission and Values
🔹Thought Leadership, Branding & Linkedin Content 
🔹Talent Management, Retention & Development
🔹Robust value propositions and marketing strategies
🔹Retained, RPO, SOW, Exclusive, Job control & closing
🔹Boards Packs, Board Meetings
🔹Strategy and Execution
🔹Get Fit for sale MBO/MBI/Exit
🔹Staffing Solutions - Perm, Interim
🔹Career Maps and Pay Packages
🔹Career and Organisational Development
🔹Business Development and Account Growth
🔹Day Plans, Week Plans, 90-Day Plans, Team Coaching
🔹Mindset, Pitch, Tone, Rapport Building, Job Qualification
🔹Goal and Target Setting,  Personal Dev, Share Schemes 

chris@basemindset.com
www.basemindset.com
Tel: 07796 304469

 
I’m an outspoken advocate of Mental health (MHFA), mindset and self care. 

I’m the proud dad to three incredible boys and am not afraid to tell you how it is. 
 
If you’re a service-based business owner looking for serious growth, DM me to arrange a chat and let’s start growing! 😃

➡️ www.basemindset.com 

➡️ chris@basemindset.com

PS: speak to my clients…! Here’s feedback from one - check my other recommendations too! 🚀👇

🔥Chris is an exceptional coach with extensive knowledge of the recruitment market. 

🔥We engaged with Chris when we were looking to enter a new market, and his expert advice and knowledge helped us gain traction very quickly. 

🔥 Chris has become a trusted advisor and a friend, and I highly recommend Chris to anyone looking for a Coach/Mentor.

________________________________________________

To get to know me a little better, listen to my podcast The Purpose-Led Leadership Podcast 🎙 (Spotify and Apple Podcasts) or follow me on Instagram: @chrisoconnellcoach

https://open.spotify.com/show/72edQlrSeUvLmC2LsqOrQG?si=lPPWojsFTey7BKEyj-8hpg

🥇Scaled & Sold My £25M Recruitment Business | NED 🔥Now I Mentor Recruitment Leaders To Do The Same 🚀Speaker 🎙️ Host: Purpose-Led Leadership Podcast 😃BUY MY NEW PRODUCTS ⬇️

There’s a particular kind of hollowness that follows total loss.

It isn’t just absence, it’s the feeling of being unmoored from yourself, as if someone has stolen your steering wheel and thrown it into the sea.

When the business died, I thought the worst of it would be financial. I was wrong. 

The real devastation was the way it stripped everything clean: the routines, the relationships, the future I’d built my identity around.

The phone stopped. The calendar emptied. Friends kept their distance. 

Then came the small cruelties, landlord notices, polite refusals, people who didn’t know how to look at me anymore. I woke up some mornings with nowhere to go and no one to tell.
I reached for whatever dulled the edges. Drinks that erased an hour. Cigarettes that bought a moment of breath. Gambling that gave me feverish motion without progress; spin, spin, spin - as if noise could replace power.

But it never did. It blurred. It numbed. It leeched.
I carried my life in two bin bags, drifting from sofa to sofa, one Airbnb to the next. There were nights when the future felt smaller than the ceiling above me.

And the heaviest weight of all wasn’t money, or even the collapse of status. It was the ache of losing access to my children. All the other losses were loud. That one was silent and it cut the deepest

I thought I was beyond repair
I was wrong again
Breakdowns are not endings the way we imagine them. They are violent invitations. They rip down the scaffolding and leave you naked with the truth: what you were building on wasn’t a foundation, it was a house of cards.

If you can sit in that rubble without plastering it over, the breakdown becomes something else. It becomes permission to rebuild; honestly, this time.

There’s no clean, linear process. But there is a rhythm. Survival that turns itself into method:

Break: 

Stop resisting. Let the collapse happen. Admit the truth. The unclenching is brutal, but it makes space

Reflect & Ask: 

What is this showing me? Were my choices built from fear or from truth?

Rebuild: 

One brick at a time: a bed, a meal, a borrowed couch. Small anchors become foundations

Rise: 

Slowly. Unevenly. Patiently. The “new you” isn’t a performance. It’s the scarred version that still stands

The park bench, 6am; nowhere to go, watching life go on around me. That was the first time I thought: 

maybe ordinary is worth fighting for…

The gifted sandwich from a stranger. Small kindness that reminded me I wasn’t invisible.

The letter to my kids. Words I wasn’t sure they’d ever read, but writing them broke the dam of shame

None of it was glamorous. But it was scaffolding.

Humility stopped being an idea. It became a practice.


———-

This is an extract from Chapter 12 of my book: 

Becoming The CEO Of Your Life: 
publish date 24th March. 

The Practical Steps That Saved Me: are contained in the comments below - I’d love your feedback 👇

£50,000 nah

Wisdom and emotional intelligence beat money every day of the week

and you’ll make more money in the long run anyway!

Thank for having me on you show Nitin Sharma☝️ this was a proper man to man chinwag!

Would you choose the £50k? 

Full link on YouTube 
and comments

Recruitment companies are terrible at their own recruitment.

And the irony is painful.

Recruitment leaders will say:

“We’ll put an advert out and the right people will come to us.”

Yet they would never say that to a client.

Ever.

No client is told:

“We’ll just post a job ad and wait.”

But that’s exactly how most firms treat hiring their own people.

And then they wonder why they only attract mediocrity.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If you want top recruiters, leaders, and billers…
You have to recruit like a world-class search firm.

Not like an entitled employer.

And I don’t mean writing a JD.
I don’t even mean an advert.

I mean stripping it right back to the start.

Before you speak to a single candidate, you should be crystal clear on:

- Mission
- Vision
- Values
- Who you are
- Where you are going
- Why someone would choose to work with you

Internally and externally.

You need:

- A 3–5 year plan
- A clear organogram
- Career progression plans mapped out
- Incentive structures that actually motivate
- Induction, L&D and Training frameworks
- Market maps
- BD strategy
- Strong brand and proposition
- Success stories
- Warm desks people can step into
- Robust ops, tools, and infrastructure
- A compelling internal and external narrative

In short:

A story worth joining.

Then and only then do you go to market.

- You build a top 30 competitor list.
- You identify the exact people you want.
- You create a structured hiring project plan.
- You don’t “post and pray”.
- You target, approach, follow up, nurture, sell.
- You interview properly.
- You assess properly.
- You hire intentionally.

And after all that work?

You might land one or two real gems.

That’s reality.

Anything less than this is wishful thinking

Most recruitment businesses are running on hope, entitlement, and laziness when it comes to hiring.

People are not sat there thinking:

“I can’t wait for that recruitment company to advertise so I can apply.”

“I cannot wait to join that business that has given me no compelling reasons to do so”

If you wouldn’t advise your client to do it…
Why on earth are you doing it yourself?

This mentality shift is the difference between firms that stall and firms that scale.

If you want exceptional people 
Recruit like it actually matters.

This is what I do for my clients!

Having scaled and sold a 100 person business from scratch - I’ve been there and done it, so I’m well qualified to tell you how 🚀

Let me be very clear - market knowledge is powerful.

The deeper your understanding of a market, the more confidence you have.

The more authority you carry.

The better you pitch, position, and differentiate against named competitors.

I’ve banged on about this for years and I stand by it.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

You can be a technical guru.
You can know every product, process, system, and nuance inside out.

If you can’t sell, hunt, create opportunity, and close?

It doesn’t matter.

So if you forced me to choose between:

- Deep domain knowledge

or

- Sales instinct, commercial judgement, and the ability to hunt

I’d still choose salespersonship every time.

Why?

Because domain knowledge is teachable.
Markets can be learned.
Products can be studied.

Sales instinct isn’t.

You either have:

- Pattern recognition
- Emotional intelligence
- The courage to pick up the phone
- Comfort with rejection and ambiguity
- The ability to create opportunity where none appears to exist

Or you don’t.

The best operators I’ve ever seen don’t hide behind being “technical.”

They:

- Figure markets out fast
- Ask better questions than the experts
- Build trust quickly
- Close without leaning on technical as a crutch

Now for credibility, this matters:

The ceiling is highest when both coexist.

- Knowledge + salespersonship = elite
- Knowledge without salespersonship = theoretical authority
- Salespersonship without learning the market = short-term win, long-term problem

But when hiring?

Back the person who can sell, adapt, and learn - not just the one who knows the most.

Knowledge amplifies sales ability.

But without sales ability, knowledge just sits there.

If you’re serious about building your business, check out my recommendations. DM to secure call. 🚀

Sometimes my phone throws up a memory.

“Two years ago. This day.”

I look at that photo and I don’t judge him 
but I can see it now.

I was a 48-year-old boy.
Certain. Loud. Thought I knew it all.

What I couldn’t see then was the caterpillar phase.

The breakdown.
The unlearning.
The silence.
The uncomfortable, unseen work.

Today, at 49, I’m not louder - I’m truer.
Not shinier - more solid.
Not performing - embodied.

A butterfly isn’t an upgrade.
It’s the result of total surrender to the process.

Growth doesn’t make you impressive.
It makes you authentic.

And authenticity…
is earned, not claimed.

Accountability changes everything.

In this short clip, I speak openly about something I avoided for a long time.

I grew up in abuse.
That left me vulnerable, hungry for validation, and desperate to feel chosen.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

I attracted the wrong people into my life.
I made decisions from wounds, not wisdom.
I sought connection where I should’ve had boundaries.

That included relationships at work that never should’ve happened.

No excuses.
No blame.
Just accountability.

Those choices played a part in the collapse of my business. Not all of it - but enough that I have to own it.

Healing isn’t pretending your past didn’t shape you.
Growth is recognising when it no longer gets to drive.

Accountability isn’t self-punishment.
It’s self-respect.

Because the moment you stop outsourcing responsibility…
is the moment you take your power back 🔥

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