Buying, rebranding and selling a teacher recruitment business
Run from the UK and Madrid, placing into four countries · 2017–19
I moved to Spain in 2017 for family reasons and wanted to do something different. The chance came up to buy a small teacher recruitment business, so I took it.
It came with a name and a logo that told you nothing about what it did, so rebranding it was the first job. After that it ran as a recruitment business like any other, at a smaller scale and with me doing all of it: advert response, working out who was suitable, and supporting teachers through a move that took them a long way from home.
The clients were schools in China, Vietnam, Thailand and Saudi Arabia, some of them large international brands and some placing one or two people a year. I dealt with them directly, mostly by video call, usually with an HR manager on the other end who had a firm view of what a good teacher looked like.
The difficulty in that market is that a school is hiring someone it has never met, who then moves continent to take the job. I designed and ran an online training course candidates completed before placement, so schools received people who had been prepared rather than only screened.
I also ran the P&L. That was the first time I held full commercial responsibility for a business rather than a recruitment budget inside one.
I sold it when we came back to the UK in 2019.