In times of crisis, most businesses retreat. They cut costs, reduce staff, and focus inward. But what if the path forward isn’t found within your company walls but rather in the place you’d least expect to look – toward your competitors?
This counterintuitive insight lies at the heart of my recent conversation with Blake Thompson and Declan Kluver on The Wisdom Of… Show, co-founders of XRecruiter – a company that has achieved the seemingly impossible: 1540% growth in a single year, expanding from $975,000 to $16 million in revenue, with projections to hit $55 million this year.
What makes their journey particularly fascinating isn’t just the numbers, but the origin story. Two childhood friends who became industry competitors discovered that their combined wisdom was exponentially more valuable than their individual knowledge. This revelation, born in the darkest days of COVID, has profound implications for how we think about competition, collaboration, and exponential growth.
The Myth of Isolation in Business
When COVID hit, both Blake and Declan were running separate recruitment agencies. Revenue had plummeted to near zero. In desperation, they reached out to each other – breaking the unwritten rule of their industry.
“The industry typically is a very skeptical and fierce industry where you never talk to your competitor,” Blake explained. “When COVID happened, I got a call from Declan… I’m glad we’re experiencing the same thing.”
What followed reveals a critical truth about business growth: isolation breeds limitation.
As they began sharing knowledge – from supplier negotiations to debt collection strategies – they realized they had been operating “100 meters apart” despite facing identical challenges. The wisdom they each possessed, when combined, created an entirely new level of business acumen.
This raises a profound question for leaders:
What critical insights are you missing because you’ve drawn boundaries around who you consider worthy of collaboration?
Complementary Aptitudes: The Hidden Key to Partnership
What struck me most in our conversation was not the complementary skills Blake and Declan brought to the table, but their complementary aptitudes – those innate qualities that can’t be taught or purchased.
Declan describes Blake as having “a poised, sensible outlook,” while he self-identifies as “looser” and more direct. This difference in temperament created a powerful alchemy in their business approach.
“One plus one equals three when you have a business partner,” Declan noted. This mathematical impossibility makes perfect sense in human terms – the right partnership creates something greater than the sum of its parts.
Yet making this work requires a fundamental agreement often overlooked by business partners. As Declan put it: “We both have one big duty to each other. And that’s just to be the best business partner.”
This commitment to being the best for each other – rather than focusing solely on what each could get from the partnership – creates the foundation for sustainable growth.
The Mathematics and Psychology of Rapid Scale
XRecruiter’s expansion isn’t merely impressive – it’s instructive. When I asked about their approach to scaling so rapidly, Blake revealed it wasn’t initially deliberate. Their original goal was modest: help 10 recruiters start their own agencies.
But Blake articulated a principle I’ve observed in numerous successful ventures: “Business is 50% maths and 50% psychology.”
The mathematics were compelling: solving a genuine problem for recruiters in a way that created automatic compounding. Each new partner they added not only contributed to immediate revenue but would potentially grow their own team, multiplying XRecruiter’s long-term impact.
On the psychology side, they identified a critical barrier: how to market to recruiters without signaling to employers that their staff might be considering leaving. Their solution – creating Australia’s #1 recruitment podcast that provided immense value without direct selling – allowed potential partners to engage without risk.
“Sometimes we’ll get an inquiry and they’ll say, they’ll talk about what school we went to… I’m sitting there racking your brain like, how do you know all this stuff? And it’s just ’cause they listen to the podcast,” Blake explained.
The Courage to Simplify
Perhaps the most powerful insight from Blake and Declan’s journey is the courage to focus exclusively on sales in the early days, even when losing money.
Declan shared a critical mistake many entrepreneurs make: “Anytime I would go through growth in my agency, I get to the end of a quarter and think, ‘I’m gonna spend more money on something, or I’m gonna actually try and save money on posting cheaper job ads or cutting a subscription.’ But that’s wrong – you’ve just gotta run really hard, really fast, outsource as much as you can, so you can just be solely focused on sales.”
This principle – that scaling sales solves nearly all other business problems – is one I’ve seen validated repeatedly across industries. “Cost reduction is a zero-sum game,” as I noted during our conversation. “Eventually, there’s no money being spent, but you’re still not driving sales.”
The Wisdom for Your Journey
As you consider your own business growth, I encourage you to examine where you might be creating artificial limitations through isolation or conventional thinking about competition. The barriers between you and exponential growth may well be psychological rather than practical.
Blake and Declan’s journey demonstrates that the most powerful business transformations often begin with a willingness to challenge industry norms and reach beyond comfortable boundaries.
Whether you’re navigating a crisis, contemplating a partnership, or simply seeking new avenues for growth, remember: the wisdom you need might be closer than you think – perhaps in the mind of someone you’ve considered a competitor until now.
