EVER since the age of 19, when I came to within a week of purchasing the lease of a restaurant in Belfast, I have had an entrepreneurial bug in me.
After the sale of the restaurant fell through, I forced the entrepreneurial bug away, moved to Scotland and started a career in recruitment.
I worked with an agency in Inverness and then another when I moved to Aberdeen.
I moved to Aberdeen in the middle of an oil boom and when the rest of the UK was still feeling the effects of the recession.
It seemed like a great opportunity and I got stuck in.
After a while, I had developed a very successful desk with consistent revenue, but something wasn't quite right.
I had my most successful month and at the end looked back at the revenue I had taken in, the people I had placed and the effort it had taken.
I suddenly realised that this was not value for money, it could be done in a better way, and it wasn't a sustainable business.
Sure, I could have continued making the revenue, but when you realise that your service is not cost-efficient, and it can be done better, then you realise your days are numbered.
It might not happen tomorrow or the next year but at some stage, someone will arrive with a significantly better service model or companies will bring their recruitment function in-house to save money.
After this realisation, I joined Wood Group as part of the in-house recruitment function.
Shortly after I joined, I was involved in boosting their social media presence and planning for how we would bring the recruitment function in-house, removing the need for third party agency suppliers.
Over the course of the next year, we created the strategy, delivered a training campaign to our recruitment team globally, improved the efficiency of the function by over 60% and made significant cost savings.
A while later I felt the entrepreneurial bug rise again.
I found myself thinking that the service model we had created could be the new way of delivering recruitment services I had considered when working in an agency.
After all, the model had delivered significant benefit to the large corporate FTSE100 business but also had big advantages for the smaller independent brands who are provided a recruitment function bespoke to their needs.
Now I am running People Traction.
My aim is to reinvent the way companies recruit and to deliver a sustainable service.
To me, sustainability in recruitment means having talent pools engaged with the employers brand ready when you need to hire, a cost base that clients feel comfortable with for the long term and a service which is focused on being ready for the future, whether that means growth or otherwise.
Although times are tough in Aberdeen at the moment, this is a time where local businesses can build world class teams and can prepare for what the future brings.