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

Dave and Rich worked together on a project and quickly forged a deep and lasting friendship. “We didn’t set out to ingratiate ourselves to the partners at C & L,” Rich recalled. “We just wanted to have fun.” They organized a Coopers and Lybrand softball team, naming themselves Bad Company after an English rock group that rose to popularity in the early 1970s. On one occasion, a softball tournament was part of a company event being held at a country club. Their team won the tournament and, amid fashionably dressed executives and spouses, they arrived poolside wearing t-shirts that said “Bad Company” with “Coopers and Lybrand” below it. “I guess there was a double meaning to that,” said Rich. “We were all dusty and muddy and there were people having cocktails around the pool and we just jumped in. That was how we differentiated ourselves. We were renegades. We were, well…bad company.” Within a few years, despite a challenging workload, Dave was becoming bored in his role as an accountant. In January of 1980, he was working on an auditing assignment for a subsidiary of a large insurance company. Over the span of two months he’d logged nearly 150 hours of overtime and was physically and mentally exhausted. That’s when a simple phone call from his father changed everything. Al Dunkel was thinking about opening a Romac office in Tampa. Expanding into Florida sounded like a good idea, he told his son. All he needed to do was find someone to manage the office. Blurry-eyed from all the overtime and feeling stifled in his work, Dave started thinking about the possibility of making a change. Reflecting on that time, Dave said, “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was more of an entrepreneur” than accountant. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps since, as he said, “I didn’t even know what my father’s footsteps were.”

In the back of his mind, Dave planned to resign his job, move to Seattle, and be a financial analyst. But he was grateful for what his father had done for him, and the possibility that he could make a change and simultaneously help his dad appealed to him. Dave kept thinking about the Tampa office and finally, in February, he called his dad. “What about me for this job in Tampa?” he asked. Hoping for the proverbial heartstring moment, Dave instead got a surprised “You’ve got to be kidding me!” response from his father. He drove down to Rhode Island and the more they talked about it, the more comfortable Al became with the idea. At his father’s request, Dave spent his spare time over the next few weeks working up a business plan. The decision was made—Dave was moving to Tampa to manage the new office, but now he dreaded resigning his job, fearful of disappointing the people who’d given him an opportunity in such a prestigious firm. Once again, Al Dunkel’s sage advice won the day. “If you want to know how much you’re going to be missed,” he told his son, “go put your foot in a bucket of water. The hole that’s left when you pull it out is how much they’ll miss you.” So, in August of 1980, Dave resigned his job at Coopers and Lybrand. When he announced he was leaving, his friends thought he was crazy to trade a respected Big Eight accounting firm for a “headhunting” office in Florida. “Most people say, ‘Someday I will’ or ‘Gee, I wish I had,’” Dave recalled. “I wasn’t going to be one of those people.”

Al Dunkel was a top performer for Romac the same year he laid the groundwork for moving into the Florida market.

19 The Next Generation