A little over a year ago, I started a recruitment company in the City. To keep myself from going crazy, I started a blog to accompany it.

Harbor Recruitment services the Finance, IT, Healthcare and Education industries. I often feel as though I snuck in right before everything went pear shape and people started leaving the City to become things like teachers. We started out doing IT and Finance, which I had spent the last four years in the City doing and making a tidy sum in, and quickly realised that in order to survive my first year I had to branch out.

Healthcare and Education were mapped out and I went in head first. As I had my first client meeting in what appeared to be a broom closet of an East London NHS Trust, it really hit home that everything in the City had changed. I had to wear my City recruiter hat one day (suit and Chanel bag), and the next day I was visiting a mental health charity at the other end of the Square Mile, meeting with social care workers (jeans and label less handbag). It was then that I knew that the business plan I had written four months previous was dead.

My first year as head of Harbor Recruitment has certainly been a ride. It’s been what I call a high-low year, the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows. I am often asked what the biggest lessons I have learned are, starting up a new recruitment company during one of the worst recessions ever, and I am never sure how to answer that. The truth is there are no lessons I can pass on that one wouldn’t have to learn themselves. Also, I doubt anyone in our generation will ever see this drastic of an economic climate again. Starting a company is not the hard part. Getting that company to years two and three is where the real trick lies. From my experience, the only way to get to that elusive year two is to remember why you started it in the first place. I am not going to lie, there were times when I was hanging on by the thinnest of threads and wanted to just curl into a ball and cry. But that is all part of the experience. I am now in year two, still in business, turning a profit, chipping steadily away at the debt to my investors, and have just doubled in size.

Nothing worth doing is ever easy and if it was easy everyone would do it. These clichés give me comfort and after going through the wringer that has been my last 15 months, I realise that it’s worth it. It’s worth the pain, stress-related weight gain (apparently the excess cortisol released by the stress causes women to gain weight), my dog practically forgetting who I am, the inebriated nights where I let off steam, the cost of my bi-monthly massage to manage my stress, and the new lines forming around my face due to my excessive smoking habit. But I love it and it’s worth it, and that’s why I made it to year two and will get to year three.


Click here to read Corre’s weekly blog, The Ride :: The Diary of a Young Entrepreneur.

Here Is The Writer : Corre Myer

Corre Myer is the 29-year old Head of Sales and Marketing at Tbm Glass Inc. She spent her first four years in the City working for a large IT recruitment agency before branching out on her own in July 2008 and starting The Harbor Group. She has since decided to move back to Newport Beach, California to take up a post within her family's long standing business. Corre writes a weekly blog called The Ride :: The Diary of a Young Entrepreneur that details the ups and downs of being a young business woman, and in which she also voices her opinions and experiences in being a ex-pat in London. Corre enjoys vodka sodas with no less than 5 limes, hanging out with her dog and boyfriend, and Jimmy Buffett.

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