Peters&Co: From Solo Expert to Smashing Business Goals
Key Insights:
Built in 4 weeks from no company, just expertise to a fully operating business.
12-month revenue goal hit in 8 months - running ~33% ahead of schedule, or expected first year run rate.
A full operating backbone (Xero, cashflow forecast, branding, website, and a custom set of AI tools) built and in daily use from day one.
The question Leigh didn’t expect.
Leigh Peters had more than 25 years in recruitment, including senior leadership roles at Lion and 2degrees, before moving into executive search. When the search firm she was working for closed, she had every skill needed to do the work but, fairly, none of the skills needed to run a business around it.
Leigh came to Point16 for advice, not whether to start a business, but on a different question entirely: whether to go back into a corporate role or join another search firm. She'd known the team for years, first as former colleagues from their Lion days and more recently as clients of hers. They were people she trusted to tell her straight.
The conversation started as she assumed it would, full of curiosity. But it ended somewhere she wasn't expecting. We asked her a question that wasn’t being talked about: “what about doing it yourself?”
Going out on her own had crossed Leigh's mind before, but only as an idea. Building a business from nothing looked hard, she'd never done it before and that was scary enough to avoid asking.
“This team is unreal. Smart, curious, action orientated, and they know business inside and out. That first conversation changed the direction of my career in the best possible way.”
— Leigh Peters, Managing Director, Peters&Co*
What Point16 did to help
So we laid out exactly what it would take. Customer value. Brand proposition. Business planning / strategy. Budget. Company registration. Bank accounts. Xero. Then we showed her which parts of that we'd support her in or could take off her hands entirely.
An idea became a plan.
We started with a strategy session: her market proposition, the longer term vision, and the goals Leigh would love to achieve for Peters&Co and herself as a shareholder. They were then broken into prioritised initiatives across brand, operations, and sales. Alongside that, we built her budget and a cashflow forecast, set up the company, sorted the branding and website around the style she wanted to create, and handled all the necessary legal work.
Once that was in place, we built her a set of AI tools that sit behind her process: formatting, drafting, spreadsheets, the back-office work that used to eat her evenings. None of it touches the recruiting. Every search is still run by Leigh and her researchers. Every judgement call on the right candidate is hers. What the tools buy her is time, and that time goes back into the phone calls and the meetings clients are actually paying for.
Leigh is an expert in her craft. She wasn't, at the start, an expert in business. That was the job: closing the gap without asking her to become something she isn't.
How it’s going
Four weeks after that first strategy conversation, Peters&Co went from nothing (no company, no brand, no website, no systems, no revenue) to a fully operating business, fit with actual revenue against a budget and customer demand in growth.
The time that would have gone into Companies Office forms, constitutions, meeting bankers, setting up suppliers, watching website building tutorials, and working out Xero went straight into recruiting instead.
8 months later, Leigh has hit her 12-month revenue target. 4 months ahead of budget.
There’s more. Every fortnight, Leigh and Point16 sit down and check the business for 30 minutes, not just the delivery. Solo owners lose that easily. It's simple to spend every hour on the work in front of you and never an hour on the business underneath it.
"I don’t have to be good at it all, as a business founder there is only one of me so while I know how to recruit a Chief Executive - I had no idea how to register a company, use Xero or run a business. Point16 has supported me throughout this and given guidance on what to focus on, and what is a distraction.
— Leigh Peters, Managing Director, Peters&Co
We are so proud of how Leigh is going about being a business leader and the goals she is smashing. We are honoured to be a front-row witness to the Peters & Co journey.
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