David Dickey was a consistent $500K biller for years. This year he is on pace to break $1 million. When asked what changed, his answer was not a new sales script or a bigger client list. It was one hire.

The Firm Leaders Summit is November 16, 17, and 18. Three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders: hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

David is the founder of The Patriot Group, an executive and technical search firm focused on aerospace and defense, with deep work in the unmanned and drone space. Before recruiting, he was a Marine officer who went on to build government contracting companies. When the VP offers started coming in, it was his then girlfriend, now wife, who asked why he did not just go out on his own again. That question started The Patriot Group, which turns 15 this January.

In this conversation, David walks through every pivot. From government consulting to running veteran career fairs, 25 events in four years, to going all in on recruiting. He explains why contract-funded GovCon roles are a race to the bottom on margins, and why he only works headquarters roles that are not tied to a single contract.

Then the big one. David recruited for about 12 years before making his first CEO placement. The fear that held him back is the same one most recruiters carry: if I call myself an executive recruiter, I lose everything else. He shares the referral that opened the door, what he would tell himself five years ago, and why owning your positioning on LinkedIn matters more than waiting for credibility to catch up.

We also get into the hire that changed the year. In the summer of 2024, David brought his youngest stepson into the business from a sales background. He took over the processes, the forms, and training the firm's AI on Claude, which freed David to focus on better clients and sharpen the firm's message.

David also breaks down why he moved away from contingency to an engagement fee model, why the first move for a recruiter stuck at a low average fee is to raise it, and how years of building his LinkedIn network turned simple connection messages into searches.

What You'll Learn:

• Why David only works headquarters roles in GovCon, not contract-funded seats
• The fear that kept him from executive search for 12 years, and what finally tipped it
• How one hire freed up his time and put him on pace for $1M
• How his stepson uses Claude and Loxo to automate submissions and curated resumes
• Why he dropped contingency for an engagement fee model
• How his LinkedIn DM game turns connections into executive searches
• The Marine Corps principle he still applies when a placement does not work out

🔗 Links:

🎖️ Connect with David Dickey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dickeydavid/

🏢 The Patriot Group: https://thepatriotsgrp.com/

🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🤝 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Your desk goes quiet. The calls slow down, the interviews dry up, and you start wondering what changed. John Ruffini has an answer, and it usually starts with what is sitting in your pipeline.

The Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 to 18, three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders on hiring, training, BD, and growth: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

Money Makers 2.0 is on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover: https://amzn.to/4AYuOqu

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every interview, call, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take, now with a contract suite and live margin visibility on every placement: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

John has spent 30 years in recruiting, starting on a direct hire desk and spending the last 10 to 15 years training, mentoring, and developing recruiters across accounting, IT, and healthcare. Ten years after his first book, he sat down with Benjamin Mena for the release of Money Makers 2.0, a full rewrite of the original for the way recruiters work today.

He opens with the question he uses when a passive candidate tries to shut the call down, and its twin for the hiring manager who says they just posted the job. Then he walks through his forecasting rule. By his math, only about 30% of an active pipeline closes, and a resume submission does not count until the client agrees to interview. A recruiter who wants to bill $30K a month, as he tells it, needs roughly $100K of interview-stage deals in motion. He is clear that seasoned billers who know their clients can close far more, but for a quiet or growing desk, the math is the wake-up call.

From there it gets practical. Why he calls active candidates every week even when he cannot place them, what one active and one passive interview a day does for a desk, how he tracks the companies where competitors are placing and he is not, and why he never blocks more than 45 minutes of calls at a time. He shares the story of a recruiter who trusted the plan through six slow months and went on to have 80 nurses working for her, and a friend who left voicemails for a niche clinician for six months until she called back because he was the only one who kept calling.

What You'll Learn:

• The Million-Dollar Recruiting Question for passive candidates
• The marketing version that gets hiring managers talking
• How to ask for referrals that produce real names
• The pipeline math behind a consistent month
• How to find your own send-out to placement ratio
• The call block plan that separates busy from productive
• Why most deals fall apart, and the steps recruiters skip

Money Makers 2.0 is on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover: https://amzn.to/4AYuOqu

🎙️ Connect with John Ruffini on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnruffini/

📱 John on Instagram and TikTok: @beabetterrecruiter

🏢 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

👥 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

⚡ Try Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🔗 Connect with Benjamin Mena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/

Firm owners, the Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 to 18. Save your seat: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that actually understands context. It captures every interview, client call, LinkedIn message, email, and WhatsApp automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Brooke Weinert and her husband Tommy had a plan: one of them would keep the paycheck while the other built a recruiting firm. Then their entire team at a 2,000-person government contractor was let go, and both of them were out at once. Within 48 hours they were at the dining room table with a spiral notebook, writing the business plan for what became Mount Indie, a cleared recruiting firm built for government contracting.

Eight years later, Brooke is founder and CEO, and the firm runs a second line of business most owners would be afraid to touch. Shadow Labs, their cleared recruiter training platform, trains in-house recruiting teams, often at the same companies Mount Indie recruits for. A mentor warned them it would cannibalize the firm. As Brooke tells it, the opposite happened: training clients keep coming back for surge support and their hardest-to-fill roles.

Brooke and Benjamin get into how a discounted favor for people they knew turned into a product, why she built a Client Readiness Framework after reading The Pumpkin Plan, and how a dashboard tracking every step from first submittal to offer tells her team which clients deserve their time. She breaks down Evergreen, the retainer model they built by listening to GovCon clients, including the client who went in-house, came back, and grew from 50 to 150 employees with Mount Indie embedded in their hiring. They also cover why Mount Indie has never hired an in-house salesperson, how a quarterly newsletter and LinkedIn content turn into clients over years, what EOS forced them to start doing, and why they earned a facility clearance but have no interest in becoming a prime.

If you have ever wondered what else your firm could sell without putting your recruiting business at risk, this one is for you.

What You'll Learn

• Why training your clients' recruiters can bring in more recruiting work, not less
• How a Client Readiness Framework shows which clients are worth your team's time
• How to structure a retainer for clients whose hiring swings with contract awards
• Why protecting your brand and your recruiters' bandwidth can be worth slower growth
• What EOS changes for recruiters who never planned on running a business
• How to test a new revenue line by talking to your clients first

Links

🔗 Connect with Brooke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brooke-weinert-6632752b/

🏔️ Mount Indie: https://mountindie.com/

🧪 Shadow Labs: https://shadow-labs.io/

🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

⚙️ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🤝 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe