299. “There are 200 people on a waiting list to work here”, with Rachel Harris, StriveX Accountants

0:00Most businesses struggle with recruiting great people. They post jobs on Indeed, they sponsor LinkedIn ads, they cross their fingers. Rachel Harris runs a mid-sized UK accounting firm and she has the opposite problem. At one point, over 200 people were on a waiting list just to be considered for a job there. Rachel didn't get there with a big HR budget or a fancy employer brand agency. She got there by treating recruitment like marketing, winning it every single day, whether she needed people or not. And here's where it gets really interesting. Rachel's employees are now part of the recruitment machine too.

0:34One of her team posted this about her.

0:36Rachel Harris:We implemented something called the employee generated content scheme, which is, yeah, people can be financially rewarded for creating content about what it's like to work here. One of the prizes for the highest engagement ever, the hook of the post was Rachel Harris as the biggest micromanager ever. And this was the person who reports directly to me. She's our content lead at the county. That post wasn't a PR disaster. it was one of the best performing pieces of content the firm has ever produced. Rachel has built a system where her team are financially rewarded for sharing what it's actually like to work there.

1:08No guidelines, no script, no approval process. So today we're asking, what if your biggest recruitment tool isn't a job ad, it's your own people's social media? Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner, and we're here to help you simplify the science of work. Our guest today is Rachel Harris, co-founder of StriveX Accountants, a multi-million pound firm she built with her husband James from her dining room table in five years with no outside investment.

1:49She's also built a cross-platform following of nearly 400 ,000 people, appears regularly on The Spawning and LBC, and has most recently got to put a very direct question to Sir Keir Starmer about small business taxes. Rachel's going to tell us why she recruits 24-7, even if she doesn't have jobs available, how she turned her employees into a best marketing asset, and what most founders get completely wrong about building a team people actually want to join. So after this short break, we'll join Al and Rachel with a masterclass on recruiting. If you've ever done sales for your business, then I bet this is going to be familiar.

2:25Your pipeline looks full, activity looks great, but you're not sure which leads matter, which ones are wasting your week, and which call you should have made three days ago. It can all be very confusing, Al. Very confusing. But luckily, HubSpot's prospecting agent gives you a clear way forward. It shows you who's actually ready, gives the details of the reps you need, and points them towards the conversations worth having. So reps know exactly where to focus and what they're walking into. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

3:02Rachel Harris:So hi, if we've not met before, my name is Rachel Harris and I am a disruptor in the accounting industry. And so I am disrupting what it means to be an accountant, what it feels like to have an accountant and disrupting the concept that you can't rapidly scale a business without losing yourself along the way. So I have done that over the last five years from my dining room table to now owning a multi-million pound accounting firm, a seven-figure personal brand, as well as launching new companies along the way. I do that by creating completely free, accessible, consumable, long and short form content.

3:37Rachel Harris:I am slightly famous for doing lots of TV appearances, very much being a bit of a disruptor in my industry when it comes to press, PR, how to kind of dominate an industry that previously was quite stale, pale and male. And so I do regular appearances on shows like This Morning. I commentate weekly on LBC, BBC Radio, and I'm probably most famous for interrogating and giving Keir Starmer a bit of a shouting at most recently. Do you want to just talk us through sort of how you got from where you were, let's say, what, eight, nine years ago to where you are now? Yeah, I started my career by not going to university, which as a millennial, as you know, I was the first generation of kids in my family that even could have had the opportunity to go to university.

4:22Rachel Harris:And so choosing not to was quite a big deal. I was raised as a young carer. So I am an identical twin and my twin sister has learning difficulties and so have been a young carer for as long as I can, literally as long as I can remember because we were born together. And so, yeah, not going to university to me was actually choosing something that was the most accessible for someone who is and has always been a very young carer with caring responsibilities that I didn't feel like I could leave from home. And so from an accessibility perspective, I was always quite a high performer and high achiever at school, but was very much a free school meal kid and a charity shop clothes kid.

4:59Rachel Harris:And so I took an apprenticeship. I always knew that I loved maths. To me, maths made the whole world make sense. But I really, when I was consuming like wide stream media content, the only people that I could ever really see on TV shows that represented the personality type that I have is probably on shows like Big Bang Theory. And so from the word go of choosing to become an accountant actually just made it my mission to make sure that just because I couldn't see it, that actually everyone that came after me felt like they could be because they could see it. um and so yeah started my career through not going to university taking an apprenticeship just absolutely thrashed through my exams tried to just collect job titles as fast as possible but throughout my career spotted a few things that you know those days where you're sat as an employee at your desk and you think oh I would do that differently to you just really got to the point with my husband James who is also an accountant uh where I just felt like we have both always been so values driven and I just firmly believed that being an accountant was the best job in the world.

6:03Rachel Harris:And from a career perspective, a big change, a big sort of gear shift for me was after I qualified as an accountant, I started doing a master's in business. So it was very lovely. It was quite full circle. I got to go back and close that loop. And even without an undergraduate degree, got to do a master's degree. And, you know, I was competing with people who had gone to university and I hadn't. And so, yeah, started doing a master's degree but through the process of doing an MBA realized that actually I wasn't just an accountant I was an accountant because I absolutely love maths but that attention to detail when it comes to data and analytics can also help me spot things like gaps in the market which I identified when it came to social media for professional services and so yeah just identified a bit of a gap in the market for somebody leading a professional services firm with a very strong focus on personal brand.

6:54Rachel Harris:That was five years ago. We now have a cross-platform following of nearly 400 ,000 people. We want to go into the personal brand a second because I believe that's a fair or a big part of your recruitment strategy. But before we do that, let's just talk about Strivex. So you went from kitchen table, you and James, to I think to 24 employees in what was it? Eight years? How many years was it? Oh no, it's only been five. Yeah, five years. Five years. So you went kitchen table to 24 employees five years talk me through those five years of course and i think specifically within the landscape it's really important to mention that we are 100 owned james and i own 100 of the equity within strivex so we are completely bootstrapped there's been no external investment um you know lots of accounting firms have incredibly impressive growth um through like different funding sources but it's just me and james with a spreadsheet trying to work out like how do we remain profitable how can we like self-scale this because we've always wanted to be very grassroots, very like on payroll, in-house British.

7:54Rachel Harris:Most of our competitors are either private equity or angel investment backed. They're also outsourcing the labour costs to other countries where there's no national insurance contributions, there's no tax contributions, there's no, none of the day one sick pay, which we're about to encounter in the UK. And so we, yeah, from day one, just knew that the marketplace was changing. We were during the pandemic. We knew that we wanted to be personal brand driven. We knew that we, between the two of us, I am an accountant. James is a chartered accountant. I have a master's in business. Between the two of us, we felt like we had the skills.

8:30Rachel Harris:And really, I've always felt like we kind of very much compliment each other. And sometimes when I see founders struggling, I think you're missing your James or you're missing your Rachel. And so we've always just been very like yin yang when it comes to being like visionaries and implementers and integrators. so yeah just started marketing like my life depended on it because it did we had just got a mortgage for the first time and yeah just remember saying to James like I'll do whatever it takes I'll join a BNI networking group like I promise I'll find some clients and started creating content the very same day that I became self-employed and yeah over the last five years we have scaled incredibly organically we're now at the point where last quarter we quoted half a million pounds in new fees into the accounting firm through you know predominantly social media but again we're now at the point where most prospects that come into the firm have at least six different touch points so like they put social media on the form but really it's like oh i saw you on lbc and then i followed you on socials and then someone also mentioned you to me and then by the time i inquired it was six different touch points so let's talk about this growth but in terms of your teams, because I'm sure you've spoken publicly many, many times about how you grew the business in terms of the actual business, but you seem to adore the people who work with you.

9:47So how did you grow and get the right people on board?

9:52Rachel Harris:If you've not encountered any of the work that I do before, I describe my job as helping people who run their businesses very, very confidently with what they do, but they feel like they're running their business blindfolded. And so the reason we've been able to scale the actual firm so quickly whilst being bootstrapped with a personal brand without the wheels falling off and the service level being terrible. So we have over 200 five-star Google reviews. The way we've been able to do that is by systemization. So we have systemized, I kind of describe it as franchising the inside from someone who never plans to franchise and doesn't want to own a franchise.

10:26Rachel Harris:We have franchised everything inside the firm. And one of the first things that we did was franchise the recruitment process. And so the too long didn't read is we recruit constantly. One of the biggest lessons I ever learned in business was that marketing and recruitment are the two things that you need to be doing all of the time. By the time you think you need to do it, it's probably too late. So we are recruiting for every single goal in the practice 24-7. Even if we are fully recruited in that team, we will always be recruiting actively on the outside. We have an employee waiting list. At one point, that reached over 200 people on an employee waiting list waiting to join the firm.

11:01Rachel Harris:So we are consistently interviewing, doing first interviews, second interviews, technical skills tests, then they come in and meet the team. And so we systemize that recruitment process. I found through working with lots of other accounting firms who also struggled to do the same, lots of people struggled to do technical skills tests in the accounting industry. Some people interview incredibly well, but after two weeks you think, oh gosh, I've made a mistake. And so we have systemized how to test for the things that we know work very, very well. But at the center of everything that we do, every single system every single process is our core values um we interview based on those core values from day one every single element that we have within the accounting firm comes back to those core values whether it's a piece of software a piece of rcrm a piece of client data like everything comes back to those core values so we interview based on values at step one once we think they've passed the vibe check of those core values then we move on to technical skill test then we move onto onboarding.

11:57Rachel Harris:That onboarding is done completely on demand. So they do all of their onboarding before they start with us. That means they get to hit the ground running. That means that rather than me and James spending two days inducting people one-to-one, we now get to do it completely hands-free, one-to-many, which means that then we can then reinvest that time budget of James and I as founders, where on someone's first day, we just take them out for the afternoon. We just get to spend time with them as people, as humans. I was just chatting to someone who started a few days ago and she's a really keen crocheter and I was literally just chatting to her about like what she's crocheting and like we just get to build a really personal relationship by reallocating that budget and so rather than our competitors like outsourcing labor costs or trying to outsource or leverage AI to just do like race to the bottom with price we are what I would describe quite boutique when it comes to our pricing but actually we attract a client portfolio base who deeply want to invest their money back into the economy that they are a part of as fellow grassroots British business owners.

12:55I don't understand. You've franchised everything. You've systematised everything. It's brilliant. But how are you getting the time to even do that? Most business owners don't have the time to actually manage the recruiting pipeline they've got, let alone set it all out so it's an autopilot.

13:09Rachel Harris:That's probably one of the most common questions I ever get asked because I'm very aware that the way we've scaled our business is not normal. So during my master's, I became super fascinated with the concept of McDonald's. Again, lots of us choose to go to McDonald's, not because of like the outstanding food quality. We go because we know what we're going to expect. We know that the output is the same every time. I know that if I've had a double cheeseburger in one McDonald's on the side of the M40, I can also go into another McDonald's in my town city centre and the cheeseburger is going to be exactly the same.

13:39Rachel Harris:So I understand that the output will be the same every single time. And therefore, even though the standard maybe isn't desirable, I know that I'm going to achieve it. And so I became really fascinated with like, what if the product was great and it was systemized and it was the same every time? So what if we took the McDonald's business model, but actually was incredibly high quality food? My job would then be writing recipes and then hiring great chefs. And then every single client that comes to me knows that we deliver a mission in star service. And so I became absolutely hyper focus fixated on this during my master's to really deeply understand like, yeah, how can we take a business model that works within a race to the bottom industry?

14:18Rachel Harris:And actually, does it still work in the same way in a boutique style way? The short answer is yes, it does. My biggest pushback on anyone that asks me this question, if they say like that wouldn't work in my business or it wouldn't work in my team, is that I believe actually the systems are cultural. Systems are part of your culture as a business. Your team only ever have to see you be able to defend them once because they have followed a process correctly to then make sure everyone else is like, now I understand why we follow that process. is relatively easy in an accounts perspective because we're very compliance focused people generally understand that if you follow a process and you get a desired output that is compliant it's safe it's secure you're doing the right thing you're getting the best possible outcome for that client but i will always push back on people who say that wouldn't work in my business and i actually say like that's not a systems problem then that's a culture problem you have to get everybody bought in and i just mentioned that we onboard everyone on demand that's a system we ask people to absolutely roast the onboarding onboarding workflow as they're going through it that's the system it's cultural i expect people to turn up on their first day with a list of things that they think i could do improve that's a cultural system where people know that they can look the founder of the business dead in the eye and say like i'm absolutely going to roast your onboarding process but we're going to build a relationship here that's based on like deep mutual respect and understanding for each other and so most of the stuff that we've done we are talking about systems but actually we're talking about culture and so that's where core values literally sit at the center of everything because a process of me talking about how to hold a client's hand through an insolvency process is one thing me having team members that are trained on our values in a way that they can follow that process but still make the client not feel like they're on a conveyor belt of a mcdonald's cheeseburger and actually really feel like a process is being followed to make sure we're compliant but the core values are followed to make sure you really receive like care in what you're doing as well now i've heard in your industry it's kind of tough to find good people so have you systematized your pipeline of getting people into your onboarding at the moment or your recruitment yes absolutely so again it looks like a systems but actually it's a much wider business process where again i said at the beginning i help people who feel like they're running their business blindfolded.

16:41Rachel Harris:Most people don't have the wrong data. They're just looking at the right data in the frequency that they should be doing. For example, if I'm scaling a company that is quoting half a million pounds worth of fee values every quarter, recruitment has to be my top priority because there is no point doing marketing, no point winning the work if I cannot deliver. We are a service-based business, not a SaaS business. I need team in order to be able to deliver. I'm selling the dream of us being a grassroots British business. And so us, you know, being able to fall back on outsourcing, fall back on freelancers is not an option.

17:14Rachel Harris:And so my job really is to curate a dashboard of information that I look at every seven days. And this is not under the bonnet. This is not deep dive financial planning. This is just a dashboard. This is what can I see out of my windscreen? What's in my rear view mirror? What's my temperature gauge? What's my fuel gauge? Do I have enough to get where I need to go. And so every seven days I get data on how many applicants we have in the pipeline for which jobs. I can drill into them if I need to. I can see how much marketing workflow we've got coming in in terms of marketing. And then again, in sales, I can see exactly what's in the pipeline, the likelihood of it being converted.

17:51Rachel Harris:I get all of this information every seven days. So if I know last week was an incredible sales and proposal signing week, but I also know that recruitment was a little bit slow. Here I am straight on my Instagram stories, posting a very intuitive, very casual set of Instagram stories that's me saying, hey guys, it's just been January and you're all accountants and you're all stressed. In my team, we've actually hired someone to put on a black wig and pretend to be Claudia Winkleman and we're out here playing traitors. If you want to be here for the next game of traitors, comment the word team and I'll DM you a link to apply to become a team member within our team.

18:25And so it is hard to do recruitment and to

18:30Rachel Harris:do sales in sprints where you're constantly pushing for one thing, stopping, pushing for the next. If I have a spare five minutes in my day, I know exactly what to post on what platform with what purpose in order to get the desired outcome that will make my business 1 % better tomorrow. I believe that all marketing can serve more than one purpose. For example, if I'm creating content with the primary purpose of being to get clients into my accounting firm, which most of the time it is that's always on it's always working however in the way that i deliver that in the engagement style that i deliver that in the way that i look in the way that i deliver that i can be attracting team members at the same time so the first thing is to remember that you don't have to you've probably if you followed me for two years probably never on my actual grid never seen me create content with the primary focus of attracting a team it's always the secondary focus but it's always there.

19:24Rachel Harris:And so really deeply understanding the primary purpose and secondary purpose of any of the work that you're doing. I think so few people actually treat recruitment as part of marketing. Most people treat recruitment as a separate business function. For me, recruitment is absolutely part of marketing. We are trying to attract a generation of accountants. And I say generation of accountants, it doesn't matter what age they are. But in 2026, 2027 and beyond, we are trying to attract employees who know what they want they know what they prioritize they know what their values are and they are trying to find an employer that matches them and so i know by even mentioning values on my stories there will be people who work at firms who think oh my gosh my firm has words painted on the wall but that's as far as that conversation's ever gone and i've just seen you in two instagram stories display your commitment to your values in a way that i've never seen be done before.

20:19Rachel Harris:And so I mentioned earlier that we kind of have always on approach to marketing. I consider that every single day when I'm creating content, when I'm looking at that data, I for every single week will be trying to work out like, do we want more clients? Yes or no. If we do, who do we want? Do we need more team? Yes or no. I try and do things like objection handling. I try and make sure that we're receiving the right applications, not the wrong applications. Doesn't matter how many times you tell people that you are hybrid, but it is one day in the office, you'll get people with a three hour commute telling you that they'll do it.

20:50Rachel Harris:And you know that their wellbeing will say no after about three weeks. And that just becomes very expensive for everyone. And so we try and do lots of objection handling along the way as well. But I'd say a champagne problem that we have now is that I get that problem, which is that people live way too far away, but are like, I want to work for you. And so in that case, we then just have like secondary waiting lists, which is you are not commutable now, but where could our third office be and so we just try and track data in that way as well so they're all data points we just have to collect them and interpret them possibly in the right way which when i said sheldon cooper i wasn't joking if you're like me and you hate all this workaholic hustle nonsense on the socials and somebody's getting up at 3am to drink butter and here is a brand new podcast that i know if you're like me and you hate all this workaholic hustle nonsense that's all over the socials.

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22:38I think there are some people listening who would scoff a little bit at your idea of recruiting from social media because they might think well those people who are scrolling Instagram stories they're the people who are just sat at home on their arses or they're at work and they can't be bothered doesn't sound like that's the case at all oh absolutely not no I'd say yeah you know

23:01Rachel Harris:specifically if I was recruiting a trainee accountant, for example, the likelihood is unless I had a career changer or return to work, I actually am probably going to be recruiting Gen Z. Gen Z get a really bad rep. And as someone that owns an accounting firm where I not only have a really strong Gen Z team, I also have a very strong Gen Z client base. In my opinion, Gen Zs aren't lazy. They're actually just leveraged. They are leveraged against high interest rates. They are leveraged against a housing market where houses are what 10 times some on salary i think this misconception is quite an easy thing to say about a gen z but in my experience that's absolutely not the case and so i do have to defend all of my gen z employees i obviously don't speak on behalf of all gen z's i am not one myself but um yeah i think from my perspective if you are a business owner and you think that people who scroll on social media are lazy i would challenge you that like actually those the people who are scrolling on socials probably wouldn't want to work for you anyway and so in my perspective in my case specifically i am actually through engaging people and finding people on social media i am actually finding people who want to work for me who love accounting so much they consume that content when even when they're not at work that's who i want to hire is it only that kind of generation or age range that people that apply for your jobs so we are quite a young team short answer uh longer answer is diversity is deeply important to me uh age diversity gender diversity all of the data because i've done my research because it's something that really it is a champagne problem and that we don't struggle to recruit but it is a problem nonetheless that sometimes the demographic of the people who apply for jobs very often reflect the founder.

24:44Rachel Harris:I am a young white woman. And so actually, all of the data says that up to 50 employees in most firms, when you get past 50 employees, that's when the demographic starts to change and more diversity starts to come through. But yeah, the short answer is yes, we do have quite a young workforce. I never know if it's because someone that's older than me might not want to work for me. I never know what the answer to who that is. I know that in terms of, I poll my audience a lot and I know that I have a really diverse following in terms of age. And that actually the most, like the biggest age range that follows me is actually the one above me.

25:21Rachel Harris:So that goes up to 45, but those people aren't the people that are applying for jobs. And so, yeah, it's a really top focus for us and something that I feel like actually there is so much data around where we're at in that weird sort of like, we're past 20 employees but we're not quite 50 and we're definitely not 100 and like where do we sit how do we make sure that we're able to speak to those people because I consume social media in my spare time and I definitely follow people who are like me I follow people who are my age who are going through the same issues like me and my husband would love a family and so I'm following people who have families and like I think it's by nature we follow people who feel like us for me as an employer I never want that to become a problem or something that means that actually as a workplace we are not as diverse as we could be.

26:11So let's just kind of round this off and let's talk about how we actually do recruit because you you said before quite specifically you'll rarely see you going on going hey I'm just looking for some new members of the team if you're interested pop your link down below that seems to me like that's the worst thing you can do so how what's the right way to do this?

26:29Rachel Harris:I don't know if it's the worst way. I think, in my opinion, it's normally, again, I'm a marketer by trade. I used to be an accountant. My full-time job now is being a marketer. I've always found that the soft sell normally performs better rather than the hard sell, especially as you're scaling. I feel like team members might not want to be like, oh, they're hiring again. And so I'll always go for the soft sell. But again, for me, It's the same within the accounting firm. It's the same as an employer. I have the easiest job in the world. My full-time job is to talk about real things that are happening behind the scenes every single day.

27:09Rachel Harris:Whether that is the core values, whether that's we take our team on an all-inclusive, all-expenses-paid holiday to New York every single year, like the content rights itself. We're playing traitors at work and we're having roundtables and calling each other traitors all of the way through to our bring your kids to work day and our return to work for people who just returned from parental leave. I have the easiest job in the world. The content is there. My job is to actually just tell stories. And so I just get to tell stories in that when people start with our firm, the biggest surprising moment for them is that everything is exactly as it seems on socials.

27:46Rachel Harris:My hardest job actually is that as someone that creates content, people who consume content are quite rightly in 2026 a bit suspicious is it ar is it real is it you know does it look like one thing and i'm going to start and everyone's going to be dead behind the eyes and not talking to each other and so actually the most common kind of surprising moment for anyone who starts our firm when we do kind of one month probation reviews is this is better than i ever expected it to be and i had incredibly high expectations so if someone is listening who's like I don't think I can do this you've got any advice for them to actually achieve what you've done but not sit there and go hi my name's Carl and I'm interested you know what I'm talking about people find me on social media and they inquire to become a client because they're like oh this feels good it feels safe it feels warm it feels energetic and the experience that they receive behind the scenes exactly mirrors that I am very confident that probably thousands of times a day someone would land on my profile and think apps are bloody lootly not my question to you if you're listening is my apps are bloody lootly not could be your apps are bloody lootly yes and so just because they're a no to me doesn't mean they're a no to you it could be you know that you have a specialism you have a niche you have experience working with a specific type of person um what is your apps are bloody lootly yes and just mark it to that person um again like to grow an audience of that size you kind of have to be a little bit marmite for me I had always within the accounting industry been told that my personality type was a bit fluffy to be an accountant and so I just leant into that and created this world where it's half Spice Girl half Barbie movie half being an accountant I'm sure there's people every day that are a bit put off by that but actually the louder I turn up the volume on those values the faster it gets rid of people that don't align with them.