Insiders View of Rapid Growth

Profusion Group began in January 2005 after recognizing the need to create a new style of boutique recruitment agency. Profusion Group illustrate an outstanding success story growing from 4 founding staff to 25 in less than 2 years. The owners of Profusion offer a quick snapshot of the factors driving their business success.

Q1. Profusion has become a successful business over the last 2 years, what have been the key factors in achieving this?

• Spending money to establish a strong framework for our business to grow
• Establishing a culture that supports our values – Integrity, Accountability and Passion
• Thorough staff selection process to ensure people are consistent with the culture we wanted to create
• We focus on staff retention strategies to keep the strongest teams
• We realize the strong influence that our management have on the culture of their teams
• Growth through joint ventures.  We underwent a joint venture with Iscope in June 2006.

Q2. Small businesses often encounter initial problems, strategy rethinks, business plan changes etc. How have Profusion tackled and overcome these along the way to achieve the growth they have seen?

Initial Problems we encountered –

• Underestimating the extent of the complexity of detail in setting up a small business
• Having to choose between a serviced office or ‘bite the bullet’ and commit to 5 year lease.  We ‘bit the bullet’!
• Lack of understanding of the extent of the amount of and importance of administration – leases, documentation, partnership agreements

How were these problems tackled?

• Proper planning
• Not cutting corners on important elements; partnership agreement, business planning, we invested in professional legal and accounting advice.
• We established a very solid framework

Q3. Creating a brand and sustaining your market presence is often hard for small businesses, how have Profusion addressed this critical aspect of building the business?

Brand Effectiveness –

• Reputation through performance
• Worked really hard at establishing key accounts
• Pursued high profile key accounts and won them, which then created a viral effect of other potentials

Sustaining Market Presence –

• Intentionally defined banking and wealth management market niche
• Profusion will always specialise in this area
• Keeping an alignment with key accounts
• Regular program of client contact at both individual and industry level
• Involvement in industry conferences and events
• Differentiate ourselves from competitors because of focus on client retention

Q4. What are the business goals for Profusion in the next few years?

• Steady growth via increased activity levels in each of the existing teams
• We are looking to open an office in Asia. 

Q5. Any other advice for growing a small business?

• 1st – Get the culture right
• 2nd – Focus on staff growth
• Importance of having the right staff
• Profile people to desired culture

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