The person behind Syun Consulting

Day to day, I was managing a team of sales consultants. That meant pitching to clients myself, identifying businesses we wanted to work with, and helping the consultants build proper pipelines rather than just reacting to whatever came in. I was more of a 180 consultant, geared towards the sales and client side rather than delivery.

The thing that worked best for us operationally was our referral network. We built it up properly, and it meant we were finding candidates who genuinely weren't on other agencies' radar. That gave us an edge a lot of competitors didn't have.

Where we actually did well was turning CRM data into decisions, and we were doing that back in 2011, long before AI made it straightforward. My background at Hermes was building fairly advanced spreadsheets with VBA, and I brought that same instinct into the agency: proper reporting off the CRM, used to work out where sales effort should actually go rather than guessing. Some of it was more complex than we needed at the time, in hindsight, but the underlying approach was right.

That's exactly the shift I now help agencies make. What used to take a lot of manual spreadsheet work can now be done far faster with AI, but only if the data behind it is accurate and trustworthy. That's the part most agencies skip, and it's a big part of what I focus on with clients today.

If I'm honest about what I'd change, it's that I'd have pushed the sales side even harder. My role was bringing in new business and building client relationships, which is exactly what the agency needed to grow, and it's where I put my energy. Looking back, doubling up into more of a 360 role, staying closer to delivery as well as sales, would have given me an even sharper view of what clients actually needed. That's the one adjustment I'd make.

When we started, we didn't really have a database, calling it that would be generous. Once we had some cash behind us, that was the first thing we invested in, a CRM that was popular at the time. Our choices were limited, and it did the job for a while, but we outgrew it.

In 2011 we went back to market properly, did real due diligence on what was out there, worked out where the actual value would be, and I implemented it myself. That was a genuine shift, operationally, in productivity, and in reporting. It was the light bulb moment for me, and it's directly what led to what I do now.

Separately, one of the things I'm proudest of from that period was being an early adopter of Google AdWords, well before the bigger players like Reed, Monster and CV Library were doing anything similar. We pioneered it within multilingual recruitment specifically, targeting both candidates and clients with very specific keywords. By the time we sold the business, around 25% of our revenue was coming directly through that channel. It was cost effective and genuinely moved the needle.

I led that 2011 CRM migration myself. It's part of why I do what I do now, it was the stepping stone into this career.

The hard lesson came from a system failure, not the migration itself. We had the CRM running on a server, with an IT support company who were meant to have downtime alerts set up. A hard drive blew over a weekend, and it took about three days to get everything back up. No CRM for three days. We got through it, but it taught me not to assume "we have support in place" means you're actually covered until you've tested it.