Most guides on this give you the same four steps: pick a niche, register a company, get insurance, find clients. All true, and none of it explains why agencies with real clients still run out of money — or how you fill the roles once you win them. This course covers the whole thing.
Free course
18 lessons
6 modules, about 120 minutes in total, plus four optional vertical guides. No signup — progress is saved in this browser.
Permanent and contract placement are two businesses. Pick one before you do anything else, then learn how that desk actually runs.
What you keep out of what you bill on each model — how to price and paper a perm fee, and the cash a contract desk has to hold while it waits to be paid.
The administrative layer, ordered by when each item starts blocking a first placement — the client agreement in detail, and the tools that can wait.
A generalist competes with everyone. Choosing a vertical is the decision that makes everything after it easier.
Where the first ones come from, how to find the next ones at the moment they are hiring, and what to actually say.
A won client is a job order you now have to fill. Finding the person, getting them accepted, checking them out, and keeping the placement alive long enough to keep the fee.
Before you start
It refuses to invent numbers. Startup costs, margin ranges, insurance premiums and time-to-profit all depend on your state, your vertical and the job codes your workers sit in. Most guides quote averages anyway, because a number reads better than a caveat. Where a figure genuinely matters here, module two gives you a calculator and you supply your own — and the fee lesson tells you how to find out what your own market pays instead of quoting you an average.
It is ordered by consequence. The decisions that determine your capital requirement come first, before tools, branding or clients — because those are what close agencies, and checklists usually bury them at step seven. Winning clients and filling roles come last, when you know what you are selling.
It tells you where our product does not help. We sell business development software to staffing firms. There is a whole lesson on it in module five, and most of that lesson is about what it does not do and why you should not buy it while you still have warm contacts to call.
The honest part
Almost always someone you already know. A former colleague, a manager you placed for at your last agency, a hiring contact who liked working with you. Nearly every guide skips this, because most are published by companies selling outreach software.
We sell outreach software, and it is still true — so module five starts there rather than with our product, and says plainly when the warm list has run out and cold outreach becomes worth the effort.
After the course
Common questions
It depends almost entirely on whether you place permanent or contract workers, and the gap between the two is large rather than marginal. Permanent placement bills a fee once someone starts, so your outlay is setup and your own living costs until the first invoice is paid. Contract placement means paying your workers every week while waiting on client payment terms, so you need enough capital to carry that gap continuously — and the requirement grows as you place more people, not less. Rather than quote an average that would be wrong for most readers, lesson three works out your own figure with a calculator.
In the United States there is no single federal licence, but several states regulate temporary staffing, employment agencies or both, and some require registration or bonding. Healthcare staffing adds its own layer through credentialing and facility requirements. Check your state and your vertical specifically — this is the area where generic advice is most likely to be wrong for you.
Permanent is easier to start and harder to build. There is no payroll to finance, so the capital requirement is low, but income is lumpy and every month begins at zero. Contract staffing pays a recurring margin for as long as the worker is on assignment, which compounds into predictable revenue, but you are financing payroll to get there. Many agencies start perm to generate cash and add contract once they can fund it.
Long enough that anyone quoting a confident number is guessing. The honest version: your first placement usually comes from someone who already knows you, so the timeline depends more on the strength of your existing network than on anything you build. Beyond that first handful, it becomes a question of how consistently you do business development, which is the part most new owners abandon when they get busy delivering.
For most people it is not finding candidates and it is not finding clients. It is doing business development consistently while also delivering on the placements you already have. The work that fills next quarter is always less urgent than the work that fills this week, which is why new agencies grow in bursts and then stall.
Yes, and there is no signup, email capture or paywall on any lesson. Your progress is stored in your own browser so you can come back to it, and nothing about it is sent to us. We sell business development software to staffing firms, which is why this exists — but it is a tool for an agency that already has clients, not for one that is still choosing an entity type.
StaffingLeads watches hiring, funding, past-client and network signals, finds the decision-maker behind each one, and runs the outreach for you. The wrong tool for month one; the right one once you need clients you do not already know.
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