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 desk. I had a phone and a list of clients we'd never converted. So I mapped them — every team, every service, every team leader, and an FOI request to see the real agency spend, because that one number tells you whether an account is worth your year.
Then rate. We were losing on price because the people doing business development before me were afraid to have the conversation. I wasn't. Better rate cards lifted our margin across the desk, so the same number of workers out earned considerably more.
I inherited five consultants — talented, and hard to manage. One went on a performance review and weekly coaching, from £500 a week to £2,500. Two others went through disciplinaries in my first month. All while running my own desk and my own target.
We got to ten. Best week £49k, in a month that touched £150k — a company record. And the billings were spread across the team, which is the part I'm actually proud of. Before, most of it came from one person.
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.
The name isn't a brand exercise. It's my three children and me.
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.
