The Kforce Story: 50 Plus Years of Great People Delivering Great Results

With Bob Trotter as his mentor, John was promoted to manager of the Kansas City branch, which was now independent of the St. Louis office. John changed the office to a bullpen environment with private offices reserved for conducting interviews to enhance the training experience. “They could hear everything that you did,” said John. “It was a sharing environment.” The Kansas City branch grew and John was promoted to regional manager in 1982. Phil Bank, current senior market manager for Kforce’s New York office, started at Source Finance in 1983. Phil was with one of the Big Eight accounting firms when an ad in the New York Times caught his attention. “It was a block ad,” Phil recalled, “that said, ‘CPA Entrepreneurs. If you’re a CPA and want to work more with people than numbers, if you want to earn what you’re worth and not what other people think you’re worth, if you want an exciting career—contact us today.’” Though it was a blind ad, Phil was intrigued. He was hired and mentored by Jack Causa who was tasked with building the New York market. Phil recalled he and his wife helped wallpaper the office the first week after he was hired. Continuing Source’s practice of hiring only professionals within the industry contributed greatly to their success. “We were like the Xerox of staffing firms—we had a great reputation; everybody knew the brand,” said Phil. In those days, the staffing industry consisted of a large number of small agencies. “Most of our competitors were mom-and-pop shops,” Phil recalled, with no more than five people. The majority of their marketing was done by direct mail, a process that required a large support staff and was very labor and time intensive. Said Phil, “The place was rampant with copy machines and files. It was very paper driven.” They hired troupes of young people to go to the CPA exam sites and hand out business cards and #2 pencils that read, “Good luck on your exam. Source Finance—Call Us Today.” New York’s urban setting was ideal for messengers who delivered resumes to clients, hopefully ahead of the competitors. Then in the mid-1980s, Phil became aware they were losing out to some of their local competitors who were using these new- fangled devices called fax machines. “Companies were investing large amounts of money on fax machines and resumes were taking two minutes to send and they’d still beat our submittals, even the ones sent by messenger.” He got resistance at first, but Phil finally managed to convince their CFO that fax machines could spare them the $500 per month per office messenger bills.

Bob Bond got his start at IBM; John Zevitas was with a Big Eight accounting firm.

17 Kforce’s Roots