Episode
Season 9 | Ep22 Lucy Robinson: Fired from her job, now running a £650k global search firm
- Published
- Mar 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3790
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Summary
Lucy Robinson: Fired from her job, now running a £650k global search firm Lucy Robinson runs LCR International, a global executive search firm specialising in fresh produce across six continents. Today, the business is doing around £650k in revenue, but the story really started in December 2019 when Lucy was fired from her job for not hitting targets. At the time, she had no savings, a three-year-old at home, and had just spent months trying to build a new desk for an agency she’d previously worked for. Two weeks before she got fired, her husband had said something half-jokingly: "The only way you’ll ever start your own agency is if you get sacked." Two weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. Starting a business at that point didn’t exactly look like the sensible move. Lucy had a young family, no financial buffer, and was launching into a market she already knew was competitive. But she did it anyway. She launched LCR International, working three days a week, just as the world walked into COVID. The first year, she billed £100k and was mostly filling contingent work. She wanted to move into retained search, but it wasn’t really working. In 2023, she decided to change the model completely and invested in proper search training and it changed everything. The business moved to around 90% retained search, margins improved, and growth accelerated. Revenue went from £250k to £500k to £650k across three years. Now the focus isn’t on scaling faster. It’s about building a profitable, sustainable business that works for her family as well as her career. The business currently runs at around 20% net profit, with a small team and clients across the world. And Lucy has no interest in building a huge agency just for the sake of it. Instead, she’s focused on growing the business i…