£110k of pipeline hiding in data they already owned

GRS Global is a freight-forwarding recruitment firm in London. Like most agencies, they assumed growth meant more: more consultants, more outreach, a bigger data list. The audit showed the fastest revenue was already theirs.

The challenge

The team was busy and the pipeline felt tight, so the plan was to hire. But the day-to-day was full of admin that had nothing to do with what recruiters are good at: talking to people and placing them. CV formatting alone was eating five hours a week. Outreach was 80 to 120 messages sent by hand. Placements and commission were worked out on a spreadsheet. And a CRM of around 180 candidates sat cold, most not contacted in over a year.

Across the week, 30 to 40% of the team's time was going on work a machine could do. GRS was also about to hire someone on a £40,000 salary, closer to £50,000 once you add National Insurance and onboarding, to do a job we could see was mostly automatable.

What we found: a live AI audit

Rather than pitch, we ran a live audit on the data GRS already owned: their LinkedIn network, their inbox and their CRM. One workflow, their own data, no new leads.

When we pointed AI at the founder's LinkedIn network with a clear picture of their ideal client, it read the whole thing and surfaced the commercial opportunities sitting inside it. The estimate came back at around £110,000 of pipeline they'd forgotten they were sitting on.

One thing we're precise about: that £110k is identified pipeline, not money in the bank. It's a projection off their own network, opportunities the data surfaced and the team has started working, not a receipt. It's also the cheapest pipeline they'll ever generate, because every one of those relationships already exists.

What we built

The audit was the start. We then built GRS a custom system to work the opportunities instead of just naming them, connected to the tools they already use so nothing had to be ripped out.

It scores and matches the cold candidate database against each new vacancy automatically, turns CV formatting into a paste-in, get-a-clean-copy-back step, runs structured outreach in the background, and pulls placements and commission straight from the CRM into a daily summary. The ~80% of that £40k admin role we could automate now runs for under £400 a month in software.

The results

GRS didn't need a bigger network or another salaried body. They needed to look properly at what was already theirs and let AI do the reading. £110k of pipeline was surfaced from their own data, roughly 180 cold candidates became a scored, matchable asset, and the admin hire they were about to make was no longer necessary.

The full method, including how to run the same pass on your own business, is in the live AI opportunity audit write-up.