Systems That Scale: How To Grow From Solo Practice to Successful Team, with Amanda Brandenburg, Ep #235

The Resilient Recruiter

How do you prep your business to be growth-ready? What are the key factors you must consider when adapting your business model and processes and hiring the right people when building your business? What would be the biggest challenge when scaling your recruitment business?

We had Amanda Brandenburg as a guest three years ago to share her winning formula for growing her firm to $2M in three years. This time, you'll hear a realistic and relatable story of how Amanda has grown her practice from a small team of three to a growing team of six.

Amanda Brandenburg is the Founding Principal at OpusLex Partners, a legal recruiting boutique servicing law firms and corporate legal departments throughout the country. For over a decade, she was a top producer at two of the country’s largest legal staffing firms, where she provided interim solutions and direct-hire placements for law firms and corporations within the continental U.S.

Episode Outline and Highlights

• [02:27] What is new for Amanda and her team in the last three years?

• [08:10] How OpusLex enhanced its business model to align with EOS.

• [16:30] What processes have been working well with Amanda’s team?

• [21:47] The practical applications of E-Myth.

• [27:54] Discussion on things that Amanda and her team are most proud of.

• [34:40] Learning to grow the team and hire the right people.

• [42:22] Effective collaboration tools and tech stack.

• [50:47] Why should working from home be balanced with working together physically?

• [53:07] Amanda shares what could be the biggest challenge when upscaling your team.

Systems and Process for Upscaling Your Recruitment Firm

Since we last had Amanda as a guest, she has doubled her team to six. She has adapted his business model to align with the EOS - Entrepreneurial Operating System for Businesses. She shared some of the highlights and changes in how she runs things differently. To adapt her business to EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), Amanda has been implementing several key changes:

• Formalized Planning and Goal Setting: She’s following EOS's structured annual planning, setting a clear mission, vision, and values, and assigning "rocks" (specific goals) to both the company and individual team members.

• Shift from Traditional to Team-Based Roles: Amanda moved from a traditional "full desk" model (where each person handled all aspects of recruitment) to segmented roles. This structure now includes designated roles for business development, recruiting, sourcing, and administrative support, allowing each team member to specialize and master their area.

• Client Engagement and Differentiated Service: They established a high-touch approach to client relationships by requiring direct conversations with clients before working on any job order, enhancing service depth and client understanding.

• Enhanced Communication and Automation: Amanda addressed the complexity of coordinating multiple specialized roles by setting up communication workflows using tools like Monday.com and integrating them with Slack for task updates and real-time notifications, which minimized the risk of inefficiencies.

• Systematized Processes for Consistency: Amanda implemented process templates in Crelate for both candidate and job intake to ensure consistency and efficiency. This provides essential information gathered upfront, reducing repetitive follow-ups and training time for new hires.

These adjustments reflect Amanda’s commitment to EOS principles, enhancing her team's efficiency, communication, and service consistency as they scale.

Critical Elements When Hiring to Upscale Your Team

When growing your recruitment business, hiring the right person to fill critical roles can be challenging. Do you go for a full 360-degree or 180-degree model? I wanted to pick Amanda’s brain about her learnings as she started to hire and grow her team.

Amanda prioritizes understanding how a potential team member aligns with their values. “I think going back to those core values in terms of some of our core values, intellectual curiosity, earnestness, relationships first. And so really trying to stay quality over quantity, really trying to imbue those values throughout our hiring process.”

Rather than adhering to a rigid “full desk” model, she has implemented a flexible, team-based structure that allows employees to specialize and focus on specific roles, attracting diverse skill sets and reducing turnover by placing people where they can excel. Her model also enables creating specialized, replicable teams that can focus on distinct practice areas or client needs, such as intellectual property law or retained searches, allowing team members to build practices around their interests and expertise. Additionally, Amanda’s focus on transparent, day-to-day communication enhances team alignment, with updates to revenue and compensation models supporting this collaborative framework. She shared the tech stack they use to collaborate effectively and consistently.

What is the Biggest Challenge In Growing Your Recruitment Business?

What will be the biggest challenge if you set your business up for scale? For Amanda, “I think giving new ideas and systems time to work is challenging. And not having. Or you know, and also like giving myself some grace.”

Amanda’s greatest challenge in building her business is balancing the patience to allow new ideas and systems time to prove their effectiveness with the need to make strategic adjustments if things aren't working. She acknowledges that this uncertainty—knowing when to persist and when to pivot—can be especially difficult. To overcome this, we acknowledge the importance of resilience and an unwavering commitment to the long-term goal, alongside the willingness to assess whether issues stem from the process, the people involved, or just the natural time required for new initiatives to take hold. Cultivating patience and maintaining a mindset focused on progress over perfection are key practices she uses to navigate the uncertainty and keep pushing forward.

Amanda Brandenburg Bio and Contact Info

In 2018, Amanda founded OpusLex Partners to bring a hands-on, customized, and personalized approach back to legal recruiting. At OpusLex, which translates to “legal body of work,” our body of work includes finding the very best for every search.

Amanda is passionate about her work and enjoys the challenges and competitive nature of the business. When she’s not sourcing top legal talent for her clients, you can find her spending time with her husband, their three children, and two rescue dogs at home in Atlanta. She is a graduate of the University of Georgia.

• Amanda on LinkedIn

• Opus Lex Partners website link

• Opus Lex on Facebook

• Opus Lex on Instagram

People and Resources Mentioned

• Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business, by Gino Wickman

• Monday.com

• Crelate

• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber

• Asana

• Zapier

• Leopard Solutions

• Ring Central

• Allan Fisher on LinkedIn

Related Podcast You Might Enjoy

• TRR#108 The Winning Formula: How to Grow a Recruiting Firm to $2 Million in 3 Years

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