How Matt Farrah Saved £200K/Year on Paid Traffic. And Built a Job Board Empire

Introduction

What does it take to build a million-visitor job board brand without spending a penny on ads—or writing a single line of code? Matt Farrah has the answer.

As the co-founder of nurses.co.uk and several niche healthcare job boards, Matt turned a content-first strategy into a powerful platform that attracts over 1 million users annually. In this candid conversation, he shares how he navigated SEO blackouts, industry disruption, and the pitfalls of tech investment to build something that lasts.

Watch the Full Interview Here:

5 Key Takeaways for Job Board Founders

1. Niche Focus Wins

Matt didn't try to take on Indeed. He chose one niche—nursing—and went deep. By becoming the go-to source for content, jobs, and insight in that vertical, he created long-term loyalty and defensibility.

2. Paid Ads ≠ Sustainable Growth

At one point, Matt’s sites were spending £200,000 a year on paid traffic. When Google penalized his domain and traffic crashed, he had to rebuild. The solution? Evergreen content and SEO. Today, his job boards run fully organically—no ads, no reliance on big platforms.

3. Content Is Your Competitive Advantage

From blog posts and employer branding videos to salary guides and SEO landing pages, content became the engine behind Matt’s growth. He recommends founders invest in value-rich content before thinking about sales outreach.

4. You Don’t Need Custom Tech (At First)

Matt started with a custom platform, but now he's switching to a white-label solution. Why? Lower maintenance, faster updates, and better UX for job seekers and employers. Tech should enable—not slow down—growth.

5. Keep Your Focus

Matt’s biggest regret? Chasing too many side projects early on. His advice for new founders: Pick a lane, master it, and don’t dilute your brand with distractions.

Full Interview Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:01.507)

Matt Farah, welcome to the show.

Matt Farrah (00:03.874)

Martin.

Martyn Redstone (00:05.945)

Thank you very much for joining me today. So let's jump into it. Matt, would you like to give us a brief professional background and what led you to get into the world of job boards?

Matt Farrah (00:20.302)

just by chance. There's nothing intentional behind it at all. I thought my career after publishing and I was still quite young, I thought no, what I want to do is work in windsurfing. So I took a job in a windsurfing shop. And then immediately my partner, it's now been together for 30 years, felt pregnant and I thought I need a serious job. So asked a friend, he was traveling, going away traveling.

Martyn Redstone (00:25.463)

always the way.

Matt Farrah (00:50.446)

He'd been working for a friend of his, got me a job and that was aviation job search, which had just launched. It was around the time of 9 11. So challenging time in the aviation world and helped them. I was first in the door, helped them build it up and they exited a few years later. And by that time I was fully immersed in job boardland and

I didn't want to work at a large company, which is the company that bought it. So after a year, decided I'd try and go it alone. And very soon after that launched nurses.co.uk. Well, it wasn't nurses.co.uk then, but it was a nursing job board. And I just thought there was one player in the market, staffnurse.com. I thought, well, it's a big enough market. We only need a small slice of that pie.

make it work. And thought that makes that makes sense growing up you know it's aging population people always need health care so makes sense. Then we bought the domain name nurses.co.uk a few months later which has really helped.

Martyn Redstone (02:06.093)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And how long ago was that app?

Matt Farrah (02:09.998)

17 years now, 2008, I know.

Martyn Redstone (02:12.429)

Goodness me. And I suppose the good thing about healthcare, know, much from the, if we think about the recruitment side of it as well in terms of, you know, healthcare and nursing recruitment agencies is that very recession proof, I suppose as well.

Matt Farrah (02:31.426)

Yeah, it's changed a lot actually the industry since we joined it.

It was all about agency nursing back then. And it's not anymore. But what it allowed us to do is get a foothold in the market, like you say, in the healthcare market. we purchased actually, we've got four job boards now. And the second thing we did, we purchased the Irish jobs board, healthcarejobs.ie, which was a couple of years old at the time. It was such a good decision.

opened our eyes to not just nursing. So we then launched our two other sites. This is quite early on, socialcare.co.uk and healthjobs.co.uk. But for a long time, those other two UK sites, just, they didn't really mean that much to us. It was all about nursing. Agency nursing in the UK was absolutely massive.

so much money was being made and so many agencies out there fighting for

Martyn Redstone (03:37.827)

Hmm.

Matt Farrah (03:46.584)

fighting for NHS contracts. And when they won them, they'd come to us and advertise. Those were the golden years.

Martyn Redstone (03:55.503)

It's actually my background. So I originally started in the recruitment world in healthcare and nursing agencies. So it's very nostalgic to talk about it. And it was absolutely the glory days of fighting for NHS spend, whether that be on framework or off framework, but that's a whole different conversation. So yeah, so talk to me. obviously, back in those days, it was all about agency.

Matt Farrah (03:59.14)

is it? Okay.

Matt Farrah (04:09.261)

Yeah.

Matt Farrah (04:16.726)

Mm.

Martyn Redstone (04:25.135)

And I know that over the previous, you know, decade or so, if not more, there's been a huge shift in how the UK NHS tries to allocate spenders, tries to remove agency as much as possible. Have you seen that replicated in your client base, in your business?

Matt Farrah (04:45.422)

boy. Massive. Yeah, it's, it's been seismic. The change. I think if it hadn't been for COVID, we would have been where we are now. You know, a couple of three years ago. But um, you know, I remember the the in around 2015 headlines, Daily Mail, other newspapers, it was about, you know, these fat

rich owners of agencies, not fat physically, getting fat off the cash. Making too much money out of the NHS. You know, I think those pictures of their houses, you six-bedroom houses, and just saying this is ridiculous. Doctors are getting paid, you know, X pounds per hour. Nurses getting paid twice. You know what they would be getting paid as a substantive employed nurse. I knew at the time that this was not going to go on forever. And actually, morally, you know, I knew it was wrong.

In fact, I spoke out about it. And so George Osborne started to make noises about cutting back on agency spend, reducing the amount of agencies on the framework, reducing edicts about the number of agencies that trusts could use, and also capping the hourly spend rate for an agency nurse. So it's had a massive effect.

You know, over 80 % of our client base was nursing agencies. It's less than 50 now. So, go on.

Martyn Redstone (06:20.303)

And how did you, sorry Matt, this is really quite interesting and maybe we'll talk offline a little bit more about the headlines. what I find really interesting is obviously from your perspective, you had to build, probably build relationships with entirely new people and entirely new organizations. How did you navigate that?

Matt Farrah (06:46.658)

I guess, it's my background. When I started work at Aviation Job Search, I was an editor. And Aviation Job Search, it was about sales. It was pick up, it was Flight International, it the magazine, and I would go through it on a Monday morning and phone everyone.

And when I started my own business, it was the same. just got a book of organizations in the industry I was in, and I literally went down it. I gave myself a goal of 50 actual conversations every day.

So when I had to pivot away from agencies, know, the winds are clearly, winds of change are clearly all about direct employers now, internal talent acquisition teams. So it was about reaching out to them and growing that market. And it's got harder now, sales is much harder now because people don't pick up the phone and people don't reply to emails.

Martyn Redstone (07:51.535)

So how would you, so, and actually it was gonna be my next question, which is exactly that. If you were having to start from, not from scratch, but had to kind of ramp up your sales activity nowadays based on some other change happening in your industry, how would you deal with that sales process nowadays?

Matt Farrah (07:51.861)

Matt Farrah (08:14.294)

It is really hard. You know, we rely on incoming inquiries now quite a lot. But even those, you know, a reply. I get probably 10 % of the people I inquire and I reply to them by email, and about 10 % ever get back to me. I would do my recommendation is to do kind of what you're doing and what I've done, which is you have to build

You have to build content and an identity around what it is that you do. And you have to work hard at growing that profile online, just like we're doing now, know, talking about what we do. So so the organizations out there can build trust in you. Is it is really hard, the bar to entry is so high now. Because the

The amount of money you need to do what we do as a job board is much greater now than it used to be. So to be seen to be a trusted, mature brand is difficult. You have to invest a lot. You have to offer a service that's equivalent in terms of a frictionless user experience equivalent to Indeed and Read and CV Library. But you're doing it on a fraction of the revenue. So you have to do it slightly differently. You have to be an industry

specialist and expert in what it is that whatever field that you're specializing in. So, know, job board owners now, smaller ones are always going to be niche and specialist, you know, you wouldn't be crazy to try and launch journalists. So if you're a specialist, hone in on what it is that you do and differentiate yourself and show knowledge in your specific area. So it's not easily achieved. But get out there, talk to people.

promote what you do, what you know, go to events, network a lot.

Martyn Redstone (10:18.703)

Absolutely. There's a couple of points there actually mentioned about, um, you know, having to make significant investments, um, in order to, in order to create, you know, a successful business. Where would you say those investments have to be?

Matt Farrah (10:34.84)

tech.

It used to be, I sort of see it, I mean, it's always been a tech industry, I guess, because it's online. But when I started, it was a sales-based industry. You know, I felt that it was an industry people buy ex-recruiters. People working at job boards were salespeople and run by salespeople. Now, it's...

Martyn Redstone (10:37.848)

Okay.

Martyn Redstone (10:56.782)

Mm.

Matt Farrah (11:01.58)

You know, if you're, if you're going to say you're going to launch a job board and you've got some serious ambitions and you've got some money, you probably want to get a CTO involved straight away. You need to be a technologist. You have to understand the technology. And I actually think the technology is great. The technology available now allows us to level the playing field. So what I mean by that is like, for instance, you know, I think ATS integrations for job boards are really important.

and you can now do that. don't have to have an army of developers in-house doing that because you can buy third party systems to do it for you.

So, and you no longer need room full of salespeople on the phone. mean, what are they going to be doing? Literally some organizations, I know some organizations in healthcare, the recruitment team do not have phones. They literally don't have phones in their offices. So it's a challenge on how you win those customers. So I think you need sort of an agile.

sales team that has half a foot in the marketing world as well. But yeah, it's tech.

Martyn Redstone (12:12.471)

Interesting. Yeah, interesting. Okay, so let's focus in on the tech a little bit. So obviously, the last kind of almost two decades in the industry, you've obviously seen a real evolution of technology. You mentioned there just about, you know, even ATS integrations, you 20 years ago, people weren't really talking about ATSs, they were still recruiting on spreadsheets and what have you. So let's talk about technology evolution, you know.

Matt Farrah (12:39.63)

Thank

Martyn Redstone (12:42.773)

what did technology look like when you first started? How did you first kind of build out the job board and what's been that evolution from there until now? And I know that you're planning on what's next as well from a technology perspective. Let's talk about what that evolution looked like.

Matt Farrah (13:04.686)

So make sure I do answer your question But I suppose my business life has been shaped by the problems that I've had to face You continue merrily along complacently until the shit hits the fan In fact, I've learned now to Don't wait until the shit hits the fan, but the shit really hit the fan for

Martyn Redstone (13:09.551)

I will.

Martyn Redstone (13:30.402)

You

Matt Farrah (13:34.57)

us for me in 2011. So I'd been working in job board industry for 10 years by that point. And I hadn't really ever had to think about SEO. I hadn't even thought about marketing, not really. If you were first to market with a job board,

You know, you'll get organic traffic, enough organic traffic. That's why there's so many job boards have really rushed to the market because it was relatively easy. The shit hit the fan for us in 2011 when I looked at Google one day and I'd often probably do it once a day, you know, just check that we're ranking on Google where we are. If we're not number three, you know, ranking number three, I get pissed off. So we weren't ranking number three. We weren't even on

Martyn Redstone (14:18.447)

You

Matt Farrah (14:22.094)

page one, we weren't on page two, we were not on Google. And I did a domain name site search as well. We had disappeared off the face of Google. And that was where we got all of our traffic. I didn't pay for any traffic. I would send a newsletter out once a month to our subscribers, that's all I did. And I just did not know what to do. I didn't know what had gone wrong. So ran around like a

rabbit caught in the headlights eventually got this guy in New York I won't say his full name his name was Bob and ended up calling him Guru Bob. First thing he said you've been hit by an update a Google update didn't know those were explained that he said you've been hit by it because you've got thousands and thousands of

links from betting and porn sites pointing to nurses.co.uk.

Matt Farrah (15:26.061)

And like all of this was, didn't know what to say to any of this. Turns out we'd paid this guy in Miami. We'd gone to a show there. He said he specializes in getting pages and websites ranked well. So just paid him some money. And all he did was pay all these shitty sites to point their links to us. It was our fault. We didn't ask him what he was doing. And that...

And so I learned a lot in a very short space of time. I learned a lot about how to get out of a sandbox, what SEO meant, and that's what got me into content marketing, my publishing background. That was lot to me. So that's a really long way of answering a question. I don't know what the questions, but it's something about learning about tech.

Martyn Redstone (16:08.493)

Yeah, so we were talking about the evolution of tech and it sounds very much like, you you had the basic job board. Did you, I presume somebody built that for you originally?

Matt Farrah (16:22.016)

Yeah, so it's all proprietary, built in-house, and we instantly got to work on SEO, on-site, off-page SEO, and started to build. Basically, nurses.kdk became a publication, which suited me down to the ground, because that was my background. And I did what I'd done before at the publication I'd worked for, at Future Publishing, which was started a community.

and it was the community that I got to create content for us. So had a little publishing factory go and it was great. It's great. I love it. It's been really enjoyable as well. So SEO marketing, I pivoted to SEO marketing basically. We did start paying Indeed because we had to because we disappeared off Google. So we started paying Indeed and we've drunk too much of that Kool-Aid like everybody else.

And when they pulled the rug in 2018, was, I knew that we were getting too much traffic for them. So actually about two years before they pulled the rug, I'd really started to invest a lot, even more into, into content marketing. Good thing was by the time indeed pulled the rug, had enough organic traffic back and more. was great. And, when they pulled the rug, I just thought I it. I'm just, I'm done with having these paid traffic providers dictate to me where my audience is going to come from.

I want to own my own audience. That's my biggest tip to anyone out there. Own your own audience. Don't rely on paid traffic. Sure, you can top it up with the cream on top. So by that time, I ended up cutting all paid traffic for 2019, something like that. By that stage, we're getting four times the amount of traffic organic than we had been getting paid traffic. And with Indeed and the others, you know, we're paying a ton of money. But

By the time I cut all the paid traffic, and we're just doing internal publishing, probably saving ourselves 200 grand a year on paid traffic. So yeah, look after your own, think about what it is you do, and grow your own audience. Top tip. Google loves it as well. Google absolutely loves that authentic content. So I enjoy it, Google likes it, win-win.

Martyn Redstone (18:33.455)

Yeah, love that.

Martyn Redstone (18:39.727)

Yeah. And you mentioned about building that community and getting that community to generate content as well. Is that your candidate set? What does that look like?

Matt Farrah (18:55.426)

So it's informational content. It's everything from career pathways, quite a bit on DE and I, which is good, well-being, how to look after yourself in the workplace. So it's informational, but I did actually take it over to the client side as well, because it's so interlinked with employer branding. You know, what are employers doing to help candidates choose them? Why should you go and work for...

that care home when the other one is talking about how well they'll look after their staff. I've been last, we actually built a new part of the site for customers to really promote their employer brand, go real deep dive. So they can write blogs, advertorials about it. They can have facility pages about it. So think it's really important for people to, candidates to have their eyes wide open when they're

going to work somewhere. It has to be more than just a job ad. So we want to create a place, platform on our site where organizations can really shout about what it is they do, what it is like to work there. So we have videos, one yesterday actually, interviewed a podiatrist in Ireland, a bit like this, so that she can talk about her job, why she loves her job, also why she likes working for her employer.

and then we'll publish that on our site and we'll promote it. And so, yes, it's informational, but I hope that people read that and a few of them then will funnel marketing, will funnel through to apply for a job.

Martyn Redstone (20:28.536)

And do you?

Martyn Redstone (20:35.841)

Mm-hmm. And the employer side of things, so the employer branding opportunities, do you commercialize that? Do you monetize that?

Matt Farrah (20:45.006)

Be nice, that was the idea. Honestly, that was the idea. And no one wants to pay for it. The recruitment world is still very transactional and it's very much based around applications. So.

Martyn Redstone (20:48.271)

hahahaha

Martyn Redstone (20:54.445)

Interesting.

Martyn Redstone (21:01.391)

So is that still your main monetization process is the jobs?

Matt Farrah (21:06.092)

Yeah, yeah, it's not for want of trying but yes, honestly, I've gone down so I've I've launched probably too many things The best thing I the best thing that didn't work that I had launched which I did with Nikki good hue few years ago As part of nurses.co.uk. We had this idea of how to how organizations actually retain their staff

Martyn Redstone (21:29.721)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Farrah (21:33.294)

which sounds a bit like shooting yourself in the foot for a jobs board. Nikki is really big on wellbeing and coaching, using coaching techniques. And we launched this idea where we would help organizations. And we did do it with the NHS and Bupa as well. And Nikki would go in and we hired some others. They're all nurses. And they would sit with nurses in these organizations, half an hour each week, helping them understand why they've

feel challenged in their job and seeing if we, through coaching techniques, could help them navigate their way through those challenges. And if not, what other career pathways were there available in those organizations? So the idea of the NHS is that rather than completely lose that talent, they retire or they decide they want to go and work in another industry or in private healthcare. Why not?

Martyn Redstone (22:17.753)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Farrah (22:33.208)

flag up their challenges and show them other pathways internally. So it worked really well. It was really nice. We had great feedback. It was such positive feedback. But there's no money in organizations for retention. There's no pot mark retention and there's no pot marked employer branding either. Not for outside organizations. And I understand that money is so tight at the moment. It's all about bums on seats.

And that's why the conversations I have with other job board leaders is the future around paper hire, paper application.

you know, duration based advertising is still the winner in the UK, certainly for specialist job boards. And we've tried performance based marketing, but there's no appetite for it. But yeah, but that's where, you know, it's all the, the money is still in recruitment and paying for applications or paying for candidates, whether it's paying per interview or per application or per hire.

Martyn Redstone (23:29.103)

interesting.

Matt Farrah (23:45.518)

That's just moving the same chairs around, but it's all about recruitment spend.

Martyn Redstone (23:49.315)

Yeah, but ultimately from from your perspective and from your job boards, you know duration based is still the winner when it comes to monetizing Interesting. Okay, that's that's good to know really good to know. So So what does the business look like now then? You know share with me some some metrics, you know, team size, you know, you know number of number of clients number of candidates

Matt Farrah (23:57.9)

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (24:16.591)

you know, kind of annual revenue, if you're willing to share that, you know, and, you know, what does it look like now?

Matt Farrah (24:22.926)

So I won't share my annual revenue. Number of clients. So we have 74 clients paying clients at the moment. We don't have any free clients. I don't do that. don't see the point. nurses.co.uk has just over a million visitors each year. Not all of those active job seekers. So we have a lot of content on there that people are looking at.

Matt Farrah (24:56.25)

We have around 500, 600 applications a day. I like to see about 100 new CV registrants each day. Nearly all of our traffic, nearly all of our traffic, nearly all of our applications is organic. I do pay a little bit, programmatic job marketing.

Matt Farrah (25:24.738)

But yeah, it's mostly organic.

Martyn Redstone (25:27.855)

Okay, fantastic, fantastic. And what does the future look like? I know we kind of talked about, you know, what's happened over the previous journey of, since you found it. But, you know, one of the interesting things that I noted was that you're looking to shift your your technology strategy as well. So, you know, what was the what was the thought process behind that? How did you make that decision?

Matt Farrah (25:49.134)

.

Matt Farrah (25:59.658)

I don't think we would still be here in five years time if we don't do something with the tech that we're on. It's to make, to take advantage of all the opportunities in technology out there. And I'm really, suppose I'm talking about AI and what AI can bring, but also the other things like the ATS integrations and accurate matching and that sort of stuff. To take advantage of that requires more developers.

I think you need more, a bigger development developer team now than you did 10 years ago. The cost of that for a small business is, it's, it's beyond our means. You know, we, you can get by with a few developers doing what we used to do, but we wouldn't even be treading water if we, if we stay on that route.

because the, you know, the generalists, you know, they're, they're quite rightly looking at how AI can help them. They're looking at matching technologies, which is a big thing we should talk about, but it might be another conversation. And it was, it's just obvious to me that that's what we need to do. So the benefit of moving to a white label product is that that white label product does have a lot of developers developing that product.

So you're suddenly enjoying the economies of scale that a generalist has always been able to enjoy. You know, I compete against generalists for clients, but that generalist has, you know, they might turn over 30 to 40 million a year. I indeed. I mean, look at the number, the amount of dollars that indeed is making. I'm competing against them. It's nuts.

Martyn Redstone (27:54.745)

Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Farrah (27:57.334)

So it brings economies of scale in terms of development.

So let's talk about AI. We're matching first of all, so matching, think.

No one knows, but I think we have lived through the era of search. So you put in a search, you're searching for something and you get a whole bunch of options. And with Google, it tries to float to the surface the most relevant options for your search. And it's really good at doing that. But you're still searching, you know, you still got load of options. Match is where you give that something a bunch of data about you. And it will surface things that most accurately.

match that data.

So in job board land, data is candidate data and job data. And being able to mine that data to surface correct matches, one to the other, jobs to candidates, candidates to jobs, requires tech. Whether that's AI tech or great algorithms, and that tech requires developers. But that's where I see the future is matching technologies. And I find that quite exciting.

Matt Farrah (29:11.378)

the opportunities that gives us and the user experience, the job seeking user experience, using matching technologies. How can it make that user experience better? mean, it's those sorts of things really excite me. Now, Amazon won the game because it made the user experience absolutely frictionless. know, were absolute masters of it years ago. And I just think that the platforms that and I do think indeed is good at it.

Martyn Redstone (29:24.451)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (29:34.381)

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Matt Farrah (29:41.346)

Damn them. But they make it really, you know, they really hone in on the user experience, the client customer experience and the user experience. Those things fascinate me and how we can harness and embrace tech to do that excites me.

Martyn Redstone (29:42.587)

Hahaha

Martyn Redstone (29:51.245)

Yeah, so.

Martyn Redstone (29:59.001)

So it's about bringing that kind of that Amazon grade, that consumer grade experience into the job board experience that, you know, and I completely agree. think that that's, you know, that will be the future, you know, where, you know, proactively job boards have to surface good matches to their users because nobody's going to want to sift through tons of results that might not be as relevant as they could be. I totally agree.

Matt Farrah (30:12.941)

Yeah.

Matt Farrah (30:18.115)

Yeah.

Matt Farrah (30:25.228)

Yeah. And you know what? I think actually, if you've worked on the internet long enough...

Coming up with a good user experience is actually quite simple. If you treat it simply and don't get bogged down in the detail, it's like looking at the webpage or your phone, just think, why is that piece of text there? Why is that signpost there? Get rid of that, get rid it. It's the Apple approach, just simplify shit. And I do think Indeed are good at that.

Martyn Redstone (30:37.145)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (30:56.687)

Yeah. So take some kind of motivation from the way that Indeed does things, because they're really good at building the experience, but replicate that in.

Matt Farrah (31:07.084)

Yeah.

And bring differentiation. If you're a specialist, how are you different to them? Differentiate yourself and build great relationships with your customers because, you know, indeed is a inhuman platform.

Martyn Redstone (31:14.701)

Yeah. Yes.

Martyn Redstone (31:26.285)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's it's so big. It's it's it feels quite transactional rather than relationship based. Absolutely. So

Matt Farrah (31:33.366)

Yeah, and they'll make mistakes. They've made mistakes and they'll continue to make mistakes.

Martyn Redstone (31:40.739)

Yeah, absolutely. know, they're people, you know, they have people have a love hate relationship with indeed, I think it's, it's one of those things that is just never going to go away because it's so big and so popular, but there's absolute mistakes that that they've made, and relationships that they've soured because of those mistakes as well. So, so finishing up the conversation, one of the questions I like to ask everybody is, if you could go back

to when you first started up your job board or job boards ultimately. What would you do differently? What would you tell your past self to do differently?

Matt Farrah (32:12.258)

Yeah.

Matt Farrah (32:23.562)

set up a job board and call it all the jobs or something and I'll just get everybody else's jobs and list them on mine.

Martyn Redstone (32:30.703)

So basically create an Indeed.

Matt Farrah (32:34.442)

Exactly, then a few years later. I'd say thanks for all the content But actually we're now going to close the door on you and go alone and go into competition with you No, I would I would probably focus more. I've tried to do too many things Yeah, I've you know some crazy ideas Other job boards, you know, I've tried to launch other job boards in completely other industries

Martyn Redstone (32:42.831)

Hahaha

Matt Farrah (33:02.324)

And it just it's a huge distraction So I would recommend to anyone if you you know If you've got money coming in and you've got clients build on that try and hard not to get distracted Like I say, you know the retention the coaching stuff that did with nicky it taught me so much And i've learned I learned so much from that and it probably took me on the path I combine that with the content we're doing to do employer branding. I've got really interested in that

So sometimes it helps, but you know, try not to get distracted. And I'd also focus on your PNLs, mostly your Ls, how much money you're spending. You know, I will stop something if I'm kind of not using it, but it's only cost me eight quid a month, I will stop it. Amazing how quickly those eight quid a month add up to quite a of money.

And ultimately we're only doing this to pay the mortgage. So you can have a shit ton of money coming in, but if you're spending a shit ton of money going out, what's the point? Cut back on stuff and be prepared to make some really hard decisions and make them extremely quickly. I think that's the key in a small business. Look at what you're spending, make decisions quickly and you're gonna have to make some really hard decisions quickly.

know, for people that you enjoy working with, can have to let them go at some point, that is going to happen. And these are people that you work with in the same office day in, day out, and get to know really well.

Martyn Redstone (34:41.593)

Yeah, yeah, the challenges of owning and running a small business summed up there quite nicely, I think. But on that note, Matt, thank you very, very much for your time today. It's been delightful to talk to you and to learn so much more about your journey as well. But in the meantime, where can people find you if they want to connect with you?

Matt Farrah (35:07.456)

linked in, I think it's slash Matt Farah. But I do I love meeting people as well. So learning from others.

Martyn Redstone (35:11.375)

Well, we'll make sure that's.

Martyn Redstone (35:17.551)

So conferences, upcoming conferences and exhibitions and.

Matt Farrah (35:21.41)

Just yes, the job board connect was just a couple of weeks ago. It's another one in October. I find them invaluable. I have a monthly job board leaders round table, Steven Rothberg, get in touch if you'd like, if you work at a job board, you'd like to be or supply job boards, you'd like to be involved with that. That's really good actually. We pick a subject, Steven picks a subject. He's a great chair. And we...

Martyn Redstone (35:27.609)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Farrah (35:50.744)

chat it through.

Martyn Redstone (35:52.609)

Excellent, well, we'll definitely make sure that's linked to as part of the description for this video because those kind of resources are invaluable for other job board builders as well. But on that note, Matt, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you speaking to us today.

Matt Farrah (36:06.382)

Thank you. Nice one. That was great. Thanks, Martin. Nice to meet you too. All the best. Bye.

Martyn Redstone (36:11.225)

Cheers.