Q: Tell us about your journey to WinSource and how WinSource started?
I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit since I was a little kid. I've just always been money driven, coin operated, and so I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur that took a 20-year corporate break. I basically fell into staffing. I had my own business doing landscape construction at the time, and I approached staffing because I heard about this phenomenon where you could just get people to help you grow your business. So, I pursued a job in staffing and held every imaginable role in sales over the course of 20 years. I felt like I was gifted a Harvard education in sales and business. But I felt like I needed to figure out what I was going to do next. In 2017, I sat down and wrote out all the parts of my job that I loved, and that became the business plan for WinSource. I'm like, ok, I'm going to see if I can start a company that does that. Today, 90% of our training, coaching and consulting is for staffing companies.
Q: How has marketing helped drive the success of your company?
From day one, we've used marketing. First off, part of what I loved about my job was the blending of sales and marketing together. Part of the origin of this company comes from the blending of sales and marketing—good usage of both—because I believe that depending on where you are in the economic cycle, either marketing leads sales or sales leads marketing. When we started this company, marketing was a heavy component. We did the branding basics. We set up a website, we did some emails, we did a lot of trade shows and speaking events, all supported through good marketing and good partners. We knew what our limitations were, and we weren't afraid to reach out to marketing partners when we needed support (TerraFirma built our website). But over time, the marketing you're doing has to change. It must evolve based on your business, based on the market, and based on the ideal customers you're chasing.
Q: What has surprised you about the staffing industry?
I'll give you both sides of that coin. The “surprise and delight” side is I am always blown away at the things we're involved in. We get so many cool jobs—business lines that I never knew existed out there. Some company that makes a little widget that's part of a gadget, that's part of something bigger, and they're making millions of dollars, and we are helping their success. That's the “surprise and delight,” and that's part of what keeps me interested in staffing. The other thing that surprises me is how inconsistent some of the sales approaches are, and yet how much money is still made out there. I'll cut to the chase: there are people out there who have not done sales well and are still succeeding. And I can only think to myself, man, if they could just get their arms around sales and marketing strategy, how much further could they go? How much bigger could they be?
Q: What are the most overlooked areas of opportunity for staffing firms to improve their sales and sales performance?
One is to stop trying to be all things to all people. The fear of missing out is a huge distraction. Staffing companies are afraid to give pricing. They're afraid to commit to a vertical. They're afraid to commit to a specialty because they're afraid they're going to miss some other deal that hasn't reared its head yet. Stop being afraid of that! Just commit. Get narrow and focus. That's a huge opportunity that may limit your ultimate prospect pool, but you'll get better prospects who will close faster. The second is consistency. Be consistent. Do one thing for a period of time before you stop doing it and say it didn’t work. Just go do something consistently, go sell consistently, go shake hands consistently, go visit customers consistently. It's easy in staffing to shift your focus and go from one thing to the next, and then to the next, and then feel super productive, but that doesn't always produce the best results. So, figure out what those few things are that drive business results that you can do consistently and commit to making those the start of every day.
Q: What new things are on the horizon for WinSource?
We're going to remain strong in the coaching, consulting and training business, but we also want to focus on helping people find the right sales team—sales leadership specifically. So, WinSource Staffing started about a year and a half ago, and we're going to put some energy behind that. If I were developing a sales organization, I would heavily invest in my sales leadership team. I would rather have a strong sales leader and average salespeople than have really strong salespeople and no sales leader. If we can help people find the strength in sales leadership to help them build teams and scale, I think that'd be fun. I want to be part of that! It will be a good way to help clients get their sales engines humming.
Q: What was your first job?
The first time I made money, I was in fifth or sixth grade. I would return cans and bottles for 5 cents a pop. I would go to all the neighbors, collect and return their cans and bottles to the store, and we had a 50/50 split, so I'd give them half, I'd keep half. Then, I would use that money to go to the grocery store and buy things, like packages of Pop-Tarts and bubble gum, and I would bring those to school, mark them up and sell them. That was all under the table. The government doesn't know about that—I paid no taxes! Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out on that. The first “legit” job I had was a paper route. And I worked at Burger King after school, and on the weekends, I worked at a gas station.
Q: Anything else you’d like to share?
In terms of people who might be reading this, what's likely top-of-mind for them is how can I succeed? How can I get a leg up? What's the magic bullet? What do I do to be successful? And I would say, I think the thing to do is go visit a customer. Just go visit a customer or prospective customer. Don't tweak your website, don't write blogs, don't create lists. Just go visit a customer and have some things to say. Go sit with them, shake hands, ask them about their business, and amazing things will happen if you do that. If you do that over and over again, you could grow a business just from that one activity. So go visit a customer or a prospect. It'll help you validate your value proposition. It will give you insight into what they're looking for, what they'll pay for, how much they'll pay, and who they're looking for. And then everything else falls in line.