One Mental Shift that Changed Everything

Read time: 5 minutes

Today at a glance:

• I did my first placement by accident 🫢 

• How one mental shift changed everything 🧠 

• Avoiding mediocrity 🥇 

An Accidental Placement

TopSDRs is a recruiting company now; however, that hasn’t always been the case. Initially when I started the business we were very hands on helping nascent companies build the foundation for their GTM motion under the name Outbound For Founders. We’d sit down with founders, learn the product, the vision, the ICP etc. and then we’d come up with messaging, setup their systems, and even write their sequences. It was really only by accident that I fell into the recruiting world.

One day I received a message from one of our customers “would you be open to me hiring Matt full time?” (not his real name). Hmm… I thought about this for a moment. It wasn’t really something I had seriously considered before. Sure, I wrote non-solicitation clauses into our contracts, but I hadn’t really thought about getting paid to place people at companies full-time, that just wasn’t the business we were in. Like any good entrepreneur though, I decided to keep an open mind and see where it took me. I messaged the founder back telling him that I was open to it for a fee. He agreed and, with that, my first ever placement took shape.

This Mental Shift Changed Everything

Since that first placement 6 months ago a lot has changed about Outbound For Founders including, most obviously, the name. We now operate as TopSDRs and we have done away with all of the GTM strategy work that we used to do. What remains is a business exclusively focused on recruiting top SDR talent into founding SDR and full cycle sales roles. In making this shift one of the most significant lessons I learned along the way was the importance of mindset.

After that initial placement, things didn’t immediately take off. My inbox wasn’t suddenly filled with people asking me to help them with a hire. Reps weren’t banging down my door to find jobs. In fact, it was pretty silent. There were even times where I thought about abandoning the recruiting model altogether and continuing with the OBFF model. However, one key mental shift changed all of that.

What I realized one day was I was a professional recruiter. It sounds silly because that’s pretty obvious now, but you have to recognize that I had never thought of myself as a recruiter before. I had always considered myself to be more of a sales consultant because that’s what Outbound For Founders focused on. Now though, I was a recruiter and a professional one at that.

Why this was important:

So what does this mean and why is it important? For me, it’s what the word professional embodies that matters. If you see yourself as “just having a job” then you will perform at a level commensurate with that belief. You’ll check the boxes, go through the motions, and skate along just fine. However, if you see yourself as a professional you will subconsciously raise the bar for yourself. You’ll begin acting in a way befitting of a professional. You won’t give yourself the same outs you used to. You’ll start trying to get better in your off time. You won’t jump up at 5pm and rush to the door. In short, you will begin taking real accountability for your role.

In my case, I started doing the things that I thought a professional recruiter would do. I began listening to recruiting podcasts, following influencers on LI, reading blogs, and talking with other recruiters in my network. And you know what? Slowly but surely momentum began to build. LOIs started getting signed. Reps started reaching out. Placements began to close more rapidly. In short, things started to click just a little bit more.

Professionals do this… Amateurs don’t

I still have a long ways to go and the business is by no means where I want it to be yet, but the evolution from Outbound For Founders to TopSDRs illustrated for me the importance of mindset. In particular it showed me how important our own assessment of ourselves is in building a successful career

As a final note, one other realization I had throughout all of this is that the opposite of a professional is not an amateur. When I was new to recruiting and got lucky with the first placement I wasn’t sitting around saying “alright now I’m an amateur recruiter”. I wasn’t thinking in those terms at all. Being a professional requires an active mental shift. Being mediocre just requires passiveness.

So, whatever it is you’re doing, remember mindset is everything. To be a professional you have to think of yourself as one.

I’ll be back on Friday with the job opportunities we have available in our network.

-Andrew