JONRA is named after my three children and me. Here is the rest of it.
I grew up in Lower Sydenham, south-east London. Studied Media Studies with Music Culture at the University of East London, then went straight into recruitment and stayed fourteen years — consultant, manager, senior manager.
Nobody handed me a list of paying clients — I started with a phone and a list of companies we'd tried to win before and failed. So I did the groundwork myself: every team inside those companies, every service they might need, who actually made the decisions — and I even filed a Freedom of Information request to find out exactly how much one client was spending with agencies like ours every year, because that single number told me whether it was worth chasing.
Then price. Every job we filled earned a fee — the gap between what the client paid and what the worker was paid. We were leaving money on the table before I got there, because the people talking to clients were too scared to push back on price. I wasn't. Charging properly for the work meant the same number of people working brought in considerably more money.
I inherited five consultants — talented, and hard to manage. One was put on a formal warning and weekly coaching, and went from earning the business £500 a week to £2,500 a week. Two others were put through disciplinaries in my first month. All while I was still doing my own share of the work, with my own target to hit.
I grew the team to ten consultants across three different specialisms, each one working through six months of training before they were signed off to work alone. In our best single week, the team earned the business £49,000 in fees from placing people into jobs — and in one month that hit £150,000, a company record. What I'm proudest of is that the money was spread across the whole team, not coming from one person like it used to.
I also made everyone meet their candidates face to face, while competitors signed people up over the phone. It cost us time and our conversions were far better for it. Recruitment is a service business — you're serving the client and the candidate at once, and what I got good at was listening properly to both.
That's still the job. Being tenacious, being straight with people, and doing things differently when the standard approach isn't landing — but starting by listening to what you actually need, not what I'd like to sell you.
Where the name comes from
JONRA is Jose, Olivia-Rose, Nalah, Richard and Alphonso — five people, one circle, long before it was ever a company name.
Why people keep me around
Growing up in south-east London wasn't always easy. I won't dress that up into a hardship story — what it gave me was resilience, and that's never left me.
Pressure got normal early. So when a business hits the point where the owner is ready to jump — cash is tight, the job's overrunning, two people have walked out in the same week — it doesn't rattle me. That's the environment I'm most useful in.
Most people, at that point, are deciding it isn't going to work. I'm the one still in it, working the problem, because I've been in enough noise to know it passes if somebody keeps their head.
It's the thing colleagues and clients have commented on for as long as I've been working, and it's still the most honest thing I can tell you about how I operate.
When everyone else is at the point of quitting, I'm the one who stays with it.
