The recruitment industry, by design, reflects the economic conditions. However, despite challenging times disrupting most businesses in the past few years with the aftermath of the Brexit referendum and the pandemic, many recruitment businesses have been able to make the most of an unexpected boom in vacancies to help them keep moving. That said, with a possible recession around the corner, the road to growth for recruitment businesses may become less straightforward in months to come, which calls for strategic cashflow planning to ensure ambitions can still be met.
Asset-based lending that helps keep recruitment businesses moving
At Ultimate Finance we have over 20 years’ experience in helping businesses with flexible and tailored funding solutions designed to help the unique needs of a recruitment business. Our relationship-based approach means that we take the time to understand a business and get to know the team behind it so that we can best serve their interest with the right solution for them.
Senior Regional Director Matthew Speed recently supported two recruitment businesses with bespoke Invoice Finance facilities that focused on their particular challenges. He explains, “Asset-based lending offers so much more flexibility than traditional funding such as business loans or overdrafts because it allows for targeted support – the kind of assistance that can help make the difference between a struggling business and a successful one. Even when challenges seem similar, the outcome and the way a given business deals with it will always vary, and that’s where Ultimate Finance differs thanks to the importance we place on building relationships with our clients and introducers”.
A funding partner that stays in your corner
The first of the two businesses Matthew worked with was struggling to achieve the same levels of turnover they had been accustomed to prior to the pandemic and saw their current lender suddenly withdraw their support. Matthew recalls, “This business provides temporary and permanent IT staff to companies, and was actually a previous client of Ultimate Finance, and they reached out to us again when they were told by their existing lender that their business was deemed too small to continue to access their funding – at a time when they needed it the most to make up for the bumpy few years they had gone through due to the pandemic”.
Matthew met with the directors so that he could understand more about the journey they had been on since 2015 when they were last a client of Ultimate Finance, and the impact that the pandemic had had on their multi-million turnover. He adds, “The pandemic, especially in its early stages, had a devastating impact on the temporary market, and although our client kept on trading through it all their turnover suffered greatly from it. Their plan was to first consolidate with the market returning to a more favourable state, to then increase their temporary book considerably within six months to enter the business’s next phase of growth”.
To support their ambitions, Matthew designed a £200k Invoice Finance solution that allows the business to access the cash tied up in their unpaid invoices so that they can take on additional contracts without facing major cashflow issues, which will enable them to unlock their full growth potential over the coming months.
Expanding to new territories with Invoice Finance
The second recruitment business he supported had different ambitions: expanding their temporary recruitment for the engineering sector oversees into the EU market. Matthew explains, “This business had a very defined goal, and despite having an existing lender, their growth aspirations were limited because the funder was unable to support them in growing into the EU.”
Having been a long-standing client of independent commercial finance broker, Hilton-Baird Financial Solutions, the business trusted their expertise and knowledge of the market and, given the set of circumstances, Hilton-Baird identified that the business and Ultimate were a good fit for one-another.
After the business was introduced to Ultimate Finance, Matthew tailored a £300k Invoice Finance solution that would allow for full funding of their export debtors packaged with Debtor Protection to provide a robust cashflow strategy that will support their growth ambitions both at home and in the EU markets.
Matthew concludes, “Just as two businesses are never completely the same, nor are their challenges and ambitions. Being able to become our clients’ funding partner of choice provides us with the opportunity to get to know and support incredible companies across the UK, developing long-lasting relationships with the people that run them”.
