42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

Claire Owen felt the recruitment industry was a bit 'iffy' when she first stumbled into it. Now she believes her ethical approach has given her a point of difference from competitors and has helped her build a booming business.

You wouldn't really call Claire Owen a predator. She sees herself as an ethical businessperson and a loyal friend. She takes great pleasure in helping others and celebrates their successes not their failures. So there is a certain irony in the fact that her big break in life arose from the misfortune of close colleagues. To make matters worse, their misfortune propelled her into an industry that she regarded as so grubby that it was years before she would even admit to working in it.

Owen is sole owner and leader of 'vision and values' at The SG Group, a marketing and HR recruitment firm with 140 employees, an annual turnover of £30m and offices in the UK and Australia. SG or Stopgap – so-called because it was the world's first recruitment agency for temporary marketing staff, now has 800 marketers on its books and a blue chip client list that includes BT, Nestlé, Tesco and Barclays Bank.

It is expanding into new areas, having bought HR recruitment business Courtenay in 2006 and opening RightStop for permanent staff and Fitzroy for senior selection.

But a career in recruitment was the last thing Owen was considering when she left Bristol Polytechnic in the 1980s armed with a degree in business studies. She tried running her own business importing baskets from Asia, but she gave that up when she was let down by a supplier.

She also tried her hand at marketing services, working at a number of sales promotion agencies on accounts such as the Air Miles loyalty scheme.

Her entry into the world of recruitment did not come until 1992. And when it did, it was entirely accidental. At the time she was working for a marketing events agency although she was actually on maternity leave having her first child.

Her employers were decent, thoroughly likeable people by all accounts. Sadly, while she was up to her elbows in nappies, her employers were up to their necks in debt and their business folded. It would be hard to imagine a worse time for them to go into receivership. Owen suddenly found herself with no job, a huge mortgage and a four-week-old baby to care for. Her first reaction was to start up her own business, but she just couldn't come up with any ideas she felt had 'legs'.

Then inspiration struck. "Three months after I was made redundant, I suddenly realised that if I was out of a job then the client I had been working for – Xerox – didn't have an agency either," explains Owen. "I was very close to the client and knew that her neck was on the line if she didn't deliver on the project we had been working on. So I said: 'Look, you no longer have an agency, but don't panic. I will continue to provide you with that service'."

The task in question involved taking Xerox's East European dealers to the Barcelona Olympics and, when the job was done, the idea of Stopgap was born.

"I thought that there was some mileage in what we'd just done for Xerox, providing them with a stopgap agency," says Owen. "We could do the same with other clients who, for whatever reason, need a short-term marketing agency. I thought maybe I could find people who want to do temporary marketing work and match them with clients who needed a stopgap solution."

So a new field in marketing recruitment was born. While other professions have long used temporary staff, this was quite new in the marketing sector. Paradoxically the same recession that had made business so hard for her previous employers, helped create the perfect conditions for her new venture. Many companies were putting a freeze on hiring new staff. They had also begun slimming down their marketing departments and outsourcing much of the work. They needed a marketing workforce on a project basis, so having an agency to provide temporary marketers could not have come at a better time.

Owen faced a number of challenges when she launched the business with a friend. The biggest was cash-flow. As she had no money coming in and a child to support, she had to "beg, borrow or steal" everything (metaphorically speaking of course). A friend who ran a design studio lent them desk space in the corner of the office and allowed them to use their printer for leaflets. The design agency's boardroom doubled up as a room to interview candidates.

But she believes this makeshift approach helped the business at first, because it meant clients judged them on what they offered, rather than glossy brochures and flash offices.

Being new to recruitment had other advantages. She was unaware how much commission to charge, so she used the 15 per cent commission rate widely used by marketing services companies. This heavily undercut prevailing industry rates of 25 per cent and above and gave her an immediate competitive edge.

She says: "One of our competitors who realised what we were charging looked up at me, pointed with one finger and said, 'You'll never be a success in this industry.' You have to be very confident about what you're doing, it is easy to be intimidated by the competition. Just because they are doing it one way, that is not the only way to do it."

Meanwhile, the idea of striking a work-life balance was becoming more popular and many people in the marketing world were looking for temporary work so they could take time off to go travelling or spend more time with their children. There was also a growing pool of unemployed marketers looking for employment, even if it was only temporary.

But Owen realised that the reputation of the recruitment industry left a lot to be desired. "It was two years before I would admit I worked in recruitment," she says. "I was embarrassed about the sector I had chosen to go into because it wasn't one that had a particularly brilliant reputation."

She feels recruitment consultancies often fail to see candidates as individuals and are only interested in putting people into jobs to earn a commission. "I believe that every individual has a right to enjoy work as I did when I first started out in marketing," she explains. "If you are playing the role of a matchmaker – which is what the recruitment consultant does – you first need to understand the candidate and what they want. You will ultimately make the client happy if you make sure that the employee is happy as he or she will do a better job. The clients will then come back and give you more briefs."

Owen's chance encounter with the world of recruitment demonstrates that opportunities can arise from the gloomiest of circumstances. Success is often born out of adversity, although in business this may require a little imagination.

David Benady reports.