In 2022, EVONA had eighty staff, a Manchester office, a six-hundred-thousand-pound monthly cost base, and had just spent three hundred thousand pounds flying the whole company to Monaco. Tom Kelly calls it the moment four first-time founders lost perspective.
What followed was one of the more honest rebuilds you will hear in recruitment. Contract team gone. Marketing team gone. Management team restructured. Tom moved to the US, took the wheel as sole decision-maker, and rebuilt around two metrics: twenty-five interviews per person per rolling four weeks, and a thirty-day close on every job.
Three years on, EVONA is projecting ten million pounds net fee income this year. Three and a half million EBITDA. Thirty-five people. Two inbound client enquiries arrive every single day.
Tom Kelly has been in the space sector since 2018. He has never taken outside investment. And last month was the largest in the company's history.
On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Tom breaks down exactly how they got there.
EVONA is now the dominant name in space sector recruitment. Ninety-five percent US clients. No cold outreach. No single client above nine percent of revenue. A thirty-two day average time to fill on roles that take competitors sixty.
Tom Kelly is thirty-nine. He does not have a rigid three-year exit plan, but he does think there is a short window, and he does believe AGI changes the calculus for anyone thinking about an acquisition in this space. What he is building now is the version of the business that is worth something, the lean, high-output, brand-trusted version that took cutting fifty people to find.
If you have ever wondered what it actually looks like to rebuild a recruitment business properly after it nearly breaks, this episode has the blueprint.
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