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Four profitable years, £50-60K a month of fixed overheads, and one maternity leave: the month-by-month anatomy of how a London recruitment agency went from £90K in January to liquidation the following February
~£400K in 2022 · ~£550K in 2023 · ~£550K in 2024 · 2025 monthly: Jan £90K, Feb £50K, Mar £65K, Apr £40K, May £56K, Jun £70K, Jul £50K, Sep £18K, Oct £84K, Nov £12K, Dec £50K, Jan £8.5K → creditors' voluntary liquidation on 19 February · ~£100K of personal liabilities remaining
"One of the things burned into my memory is just sitting on an office chair, staring at the board and seeing £8,750 on it." That was January's revenue against £50-60K of monthly overheads.
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Brooke Cooper spent ten years in recruitment — three at one agency where she was the fourth employee, then a year at a larger firm where the top biller did £4 million and several people billed a million. During the pandemic she was not furloughed, kept working exclusive retained campaigns placing finance professionals into the NHS, and did £90K in her last quarter as an employee. She had bought a property, had about £20K in savings, and gave herself a year to make her own thing work. 27 Talent's first year was solo from a kitchen table and did around £200K with almost no overheads. She spent nothing on advertising, used her own mobile phone, and worked her network and referrals. The turning point she describes is emotional rather than financial: she landed an £18K fee, jumped up and down in her kitchen, and had nobody but her dog to tell. So she built a team. First hire Callum in year two, then a deliberate scale-up: 2022 around £400K, 2023 starting with four people and ending with eight at around £550K, 2024 fluctuating between seven and ten heads at around £550K again. Bootstrapped entirely by reinvesting profit. In January 2025 she hard-launched a US desk after a client trip to Austin, promoted Callum to managing director of London, and appointed a non-executive director. Three weeks after Austin she found out she was pregnant. Her daughter was due 12 October and arrived on the day. She started maternity leave in September. September billed £18K — the worst month ever for that headcount. November billed £12K. January billed £8,500. On 29 January she ran payroll, then made almost everyone redundant. On 19 February the company entered creditors' voluntary liquidation.
27 Talent is rec-to-rec, an agency that recruits for recruitment agencies, so the first customers were firms Brooke Cooper had been window-shopping for a decade.
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Data credibility: First-person founder interview, recorded while the liquidation was still in progress — she says repeatedly that the numbers are not finalised and that she is still working with the liquidators. That makes it unusually candid and unusually provisional at the same time. Structure of the evidence: most of the figures are read out by the host from notes prepared with the founder beforehand, and she confirms or corrects each one, which is stronger than unprompted recall but is still self-reported with no documents shown. Annual revenues (~£200K, ~£400K, ~£550K, ~£550K) are given as 'thereabouts'. The 2025 monthly figures (Jan £90K, Feb £50K, Mar £65K, Apr £40K, May £56K, Jun £70K, Jul £50K, Sep £18K, Oct £84K, Nov £12K, Dec £50K, Jan £8.5K) are the most precise data in the interview and she supplied them to the host in advance. Overheads of £50-60K/month, ~£30K of salaries before commission, a £7-12K WeWork, and a £40K annual LinkedIn contract are her own numbers. The ~£100K of personal liabilities is explicitly an estimate — 'the numbers are still being finalised' — and the ~£20K maternity-pay figure is 'about'. Note that the video title says £650K, a figure that does not appear anywhere in the conversation; the highest annual revenue discussed is ~£550K, so treat the title as marketing. She twice flags her own uncertainty on legal and tax specifics ('I don't want to say any misinformation'), particularly around HMRC's treatment of debts in liquidation, so the insolvency mechanics here are a founder's lived account rather than professional advice. Region is United Kingdom on strong evidence: central London office, WeWork, HMRC, Companies House, sterling throughout, NHS placements, and UK statutory maternity rules. Names in the auto-captions are mangled — her previous employers appear as 'rule'/'retire'/'rectore' and 'Adam Lane'/'Alan Lane', and the sector abbreviation rec-to-rec appears as 'retre', 'rectore' and 'retrex'.
The product was a placement, and money only moved when a candidate started. 27 Talent was perm-only and contingent: no retainer, no deposit, nothing billed for the search itself.
The flywheel in rec-to-rec is account depth, not lead volume, and Brooke names it directly: "when you win a client you can continuously deliver to that account if you know the business really well."
The quiet stretch here came before the team, not after it. She left a £90,000 final quarter as an employee, had bought a property, had about £20,000 in savings, and gave herself a year to make it work — a runway counted in months and set before the first call.
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