Breaking the $100M Value Barrier - Part 2 || Season 1 Episode 5

What are critical steps necessary to scale a staffing business to the elusive $100 million revenue mark?

In part two, the team continues to dive into the topic and emphasizes the importance of customer-first sales approaches.  

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Music.

Scott Montminy: 0:13

Welcome to Now Hiring! A podcast about staffing, recruiting and talent. I'm Scott Montminy, and with me, as always, is our host, Sameer Penakalapati, as well as our friend Andy Weiss. And we've been having this ongoing conversation, and that, really, Samir has been driving this conversation in this industry for a long time now, I would say, at least, not bring years to it. Okay, we don't know numbers. No numbers. I don't want to we won't get into that, but we will dig just a little further. We thought. We thought, you know, I guess that was my hubris, that we could get that topic done in just a few episodes. No, no. When you're trying to build $100 million or a high value staffing company, let alone 100 million, cross that 100 million dollar barrier, you might need a few more episodes before you get everything that you need. And Andy, when last episode and you can follow these sequentially, I encourage you to go and dig back to some of the gems that Sameer had for you in terms of growing a staffing business. But Andy, we left another cliffhanger. You had a question for Sameer that we didn't even have enough time to get

Andy Weiss: 1:22

to, yeah. So so my question, Sameer, you were gave us a bunch of great insights on this journey to 100 million, but the initial insight that you gave us when we were starting was to focus on a particular niche, but then as you're driving towards 100 million, how do you know when to add another vertical, add another category to the mix, because I have to, you know, unless you, unless you land on kind of, you know, the sweet spot, category or or niche, it's going to be hard to just ride that, that one, all the way to 100 million. So what? How do you know we

Scott Montminy: 1:59

want the paint by numbers, right? Andy, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Sameer Penakalapati: 2:02

I you know. And I think it's tough to pick up numbers, but I think I would just generally, my experience, would say, if you stay maybe three or four, or maybe two, three sectors, maybe one or two, you know technical specialties, numbers to focus on, because when you pick, when you pick a number, like when you pick these industries, you want to make sure you're not picking for sake of A number you're picking because you have an expertise in those spaces, like you know, whether your team, who has built an expertise, or if you yourself, has an expertise in the space, you understood those customers and markets and segments you know stuff. So I'm hesitant to put any number to it, but I think it's two to three sectors, one or two. Okay, technicalities.

Andy Weiss: 3:05

So does the but my assumption then is you, you have to have that automation and act in place in order to be able to absorb those additional chemicals. Otherwise, it's just going to be chaos,

Sameer Penakalapati: 3:18

right? So if you look at it right, the first layer is really about creating a niche, creating a clients, creating like, your name for yourself. Second you as a CT, ACD is actually weighing you like, putting you like it's really carrying you to the clients and your the whole business. The ACD is the base, right? Once you have the ACD, and then you build a third layer is basically building a culture around that, like, you know, how can you how you deal with customers, how we deal with consultants, how we deal with your back office teams. And this is really building a culture around of growth oriented mindset and and it doesn't come just like that, like, you know, the way you incentivize your teams, the way you would, you would encourage your you know, teams like you know you you need to have a marketing teams, your sales teams, you you have your delivery teams. You know all of that stuff needs to be properly incentivized, set in a good place. So all of that requires build a culture around for the growth. So if you build a culture and the growth you ACPs becomes your foundation, and then you build the business on top of that. Once you're in the wrong ACP foundation, you just keep at those industries where you have an expertise or knowledge.

Scott Montminy: 4:31

So imagine culture is one of the the things that changes as you scale, right? So yeah, it has to constantly evolve as well.

Sameer Penakalapati: 4:39

Yeah, culture is your binder of all these things. And

Andy Weiss: 4:44

does that? Does the culture then help you decide what industries that you're having?

Sameer Penakalapati: 4:49

No, the culture is about like, whatever you you know, you said, some policies. You set some guidelines and vision, how you run the business, how you treat your employees, how treat your car. Customers, you know, all of how to treat your suppliers, all of that is a culture of the business. That's that then you have AC T is really, you know your foundation, like your foundation for your home, like, you know, your foundation for the business. On on top of that, you build these, you know, industry verticals really depends on, like, your your expertise, whether you may have a teams that have not knowledgeable enough on this specific industry, like for talking about utilities business, energy business, right, somebody who worked in the space and who understood the the needs of the business, cyclicality of the business, and the expansion plans of the business, and and how much is the industry is going over a time, you know, I would say Kaggle, right? Like, you know, all of the stuff you need to understand that. Okay, you because you're going to invest your time and money in growing that sectors, you want to make sure you are knowledgeable enough, you're well prepared for it, and you have a team who can take you to the next level. So it's, it's a, it's a, really, a science, really, you have to go. And then when you add, you are adding based on these kind of things. If we do that methodically and with a proper planning, you could go north of 100 plus million revenue. And you might, you know, go 100 million enterprise value of the business. Awesome. Much beyond

Andy Weiss: 6:18

That's awesome. Well, Scott, I think we've got some fodder for some other future episodes kind of coming out of of this content. Maybe that's some questions we get from some folks. So what are your What are your thoughts?

Scott Montminy: 6:30

I mean, one of my takeaways was that, you know, Sameer was saying in one of the episodes on this topic that, you know, it's as he can talk about it casually, as someone who's done this before. Hey, it's not easy, but it is simple, if you stay disciplined and true to the framework that Sameer is laying out here, it's simple, but it doesn't mean that it's just going to happen automatically. It's going to take a lot of discipline, I imagine, and a lot of wash, rinse and repeat, I'm sure, not every day feels like that high five moment that Sameer had when they crossed that 100 million dollar line as a team and crossed that threshold and barrier into a different kind of business and well. And

Andy Weiss: 7:10

knowing Sameer, and also from his LinkedIn, it seems like he gets a lot of inspiration from from some books and other other sources. So yes, maybe we can catch that in another episode.

Scott Montminy: 7:22

I like that idea. In fact, we talked about one of them in particular while we were creating this podcast, and which is Sameer instructed us to stop overthinking things. So we're going to talk about that in another episode that you can find just sort through them. In fact, I think it might even be sequentially after this one, or before it'll be somewhere in the middle, anyway, by the time we actually dropped these episodes. I'm excited, and I want to thank you both for the time, and I want to encourage everyone that if you still have more time to click one of the other episodes, and until you do, we are Now Hiring!