Interview with Storm2: The Growing Pains of a FinTech Recruitment Agency

Knight Frank’s Flexible Office Solutions team matches businesses of all shapes and sizes to their perfect office spaces. In doing so, they meet some of London’s most exciting startups. In this series, Growing Pains, we interview the founders and CEOs of businesses that are starting out or scaling up. In the first of this series, we speak to James Brown, founder of Storm2, about the growing pains of starting a FinTech recruitment agency.

The first thing I did was seek out two co-founders in George and Jamie, who would be critical in building and scaling the business. By the end of July, there were three of us in a coffee shop working up a plan, but we wanted to hire a ton of people, so we needed office space. As great an idea as we have in our heads, interviewing people at the back of a Starbucks isn’t the best set up.

We had a quick call with Knight Frank’s Flexible Office Solutions team, who then arranged a shortlist of viewings. The sixth office – the one we’re sitting in now – was the right one. We secured it really quickly in a day and a half. Once we moved in a few days later, we did 146 interviews in 10 days and found our team of 20. In our first 90 days, we signed up 40 clients. We’re quite confident in our offering.

As the world of work evolves, how can you stay competitive?

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in founding Storm2?

The whole thing has been terrifying. The scariest bit is hiring a load of people based on an idea in your head. They’ve pinned their career hopes and their income on something that has no proof of concept. That keeps me awake at night.

One thing that no one prepares you for is just the sheer depth and height of the volatility in your emotions. Some days, you go home and think, 'This was a silly idea. What am I doing?' and the very next day, you'll go home and think, 'We're going to take over the world.’

How do you overcome those challenges?

There are ways you can manage them. I'm very lucky to have two exceptional senior people with me; they truly are the engine of the operation. We talk about the business, our dreams and our worries very openly. It’s only as lonely as you make it.

Another thing that helps is reading every single book I can possibly read about the people that have done this journey before. Even if it’s a story about an unsuccessful startup, they still went through the same journey. 

While it’s been scary, it’s not been stressful. Luckily, in the past 12 years I’ve spent a lot of time launching offices, so I’ve done this before to an extent. When you know what you’re doing, it’s a lot of pressure, but you can get it done. But when you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s stressful.

What advice would you give to other people wanting to start their own business?

I would suggest walking into it expecting to feel like it’s going to fail. It’s just part of the journey. It’s like when people move away from home for the first time. You’re told by your parents that you’re going to feel homesick even if you think you won’t. And when you do, you think, ‘Okay, they did tell me this would happen.’

People also worry about perfecting things like the website. The website, in reality, is just your shop window. Very few people walk into a shop because the shop window is nice. They walk in because you're selling a product that they need and it fits, and it solves a problem that exists. Focus on the minimum viable product at all times.

I’d also say, don’t let perfection be the enemy of done. There’s a book called Move Fast and Break Things, which is all about how Amazon, Facebook and Google focus on getting a lot of stuff done very quickly and moving onto the next thing, just assuming that some of it will work.

What’s been your biggest success to date?

I mean, I don't feel like we've achieved anything so far. The fact that the lights are still on is a good thing. No, joking aside, I think we've hired some great people and won some incredible clients, all of whom believe in our mission. The people that have really executed this plan are the people that we've hired so far. They just got behind the idea and sucked up the pressure of a startup. I just take the credit!

If you could go for dinner with anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be?

I would love to sit down with Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore. People have built amazing companies, but the guy turned a fishing village into one of the most powerful economies in the world in 30 years. That would be an incredibly interesting conversation.

What makes Storm2 different from all the other recruitment companies out there?

The recruitment sector for technology is historically very generalist. The plan with all of this is to provide a one-stop specialist shop for a fast-growing FinTech company. We are very focused on regularly providing valuable intelligence on the FinTech talent market to our clients – salary levels, employer branding, interview processes and staff retention initiatives. 

The investment we took is among the very largest amounts of seed funding taken in the recruitment sector in the last 20 years. What we're doing is unprecedented, really, especially in our sector. What we have that our competitors don't is the investors, scale and infrastructure to help us keep up with companies as they grow.

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