Small Business: Diversifying - Mark Fisher, Eighty4 Recruitment

Mark Fisher, founder of Eighty4Recruitment.

This week, Small Business editor Caitlin Sykes talks to business owners about diversifying into new markets.

Mark Fisher founded Auckland-based Eighty4 Recruitment two years ago, and the company now has seven staff.

What services did you originally start with in your business?

It was pretty simple. We just offered permanent recruitment services for the engineering and construction sectors, and for those services we charged a one-off fee based on a percentage of the successful candidate's annual salary.

What services has the business diversified into since?

We've kept our focus on the same industries, but we've widened the scope of our services, diversifying into executive-level search, flexible on-demand contractors and HR consulting.

What have been the motivating factors for diversifying into those areas?

For each of those it wasn't so much about us trying to capitalise on new markets but more about us learning about the pain points of our clients and trying to solve them. So for example, some of our clients were telling us they needed help around senior level recruitment services for executives, so we added it to our list. Others would tell us they had issues with staff leaving, that they struggled with performance management plans, leadership development and feedback analysis, as well as the nitty-gritty of restructures and redundancies. When more than one company started sharing those problems, we knew it was an area we could help them with so we launched our HR consulting division.

Listening to what clients say has given us a lot of internal knowledge about their businesses and that's really what's led to our diversification.

What results have you seen in the business from your efforts to diversify?

I think offering a suite of services has helped us build relationships with clients that are more like partnerships, rather than purely transactional. Because of that we've seen an increase in new business through referrals and word of mouth. And obviously diversifying has also created new revenue streams, which is important for our growth strategy.

What's the biggest challenge that diversification has presented for you as a business owner?

Now we offer more than just permanent recruitment, we need to let our clients know what else we can help them with, but it's bit of a challenge constantly cross selling and marketing all our services. One way we've tried to address that is by adding new services slowly, so we can make sure we have the time and resources to be able to bed them in and communicate what we're doing properly.

Are you looking to diversify further in future?

There are a few ideas in the pipeline, including continuing to expand our HR consultancy offerings and introducing more niche recruitment consultants that will specialise in new market segments.