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

He packed up his four-wheel-drive pickup truck with all his earthly belongings and Blitzen, the mutt he called his best friend, and moved to Florida. Looking back on the entire process, Dave admits with a grin that his father out-negotiated him. “I took a cut in pay; I got no bonuses, no moving expenses.” Sixty days into the process, Dave still hadn’t closed any business and was living on peanut butter sandwiches. The office was on the eighth floor of an old building that had been condemned and was slated for demolition. The windows were painted shut and the Romac office was one of only a few tenants. On one particularly hot day, Dave decided to try and pry the windows open to at least bring some fresh air into the stifling office. “Right at that moment,” Dave said, “my father called and my assistant, Pat Lee, answered the phone. Just then I got the window unstuck and it went flying open and she cried, ‘Oh, my God, I think he’s gonna’ jump!’ She came running over and asked, ‘Are you going to jump?’ and I said, ‘No! It’s hot in here!’” Dave wasn’t concerned that his dad might have been alarmed. “My father knew I was too much of a wimp to off myself,” he said. To make matters worse, the country had gone into a period of “stagflation” in the wake of the 1979 energy crisis, followed by a recession. “I had no idea,” Dave recalled. “It never occurred to me that I had opened up a placement business in the middle of a recession. I just thought it was that hard.” He pulled it together, though, and won Rookie of the Year in 1981. One of Dave’s few contacts in the Tampa area was Jerry Dingle, one of his father’s contacts at Price Waterhouse. Dave contacted Jerry who put him in touch with John Kercher whose job it was to staff the expanding Price Waterhouse Computer Management Consulting Practice in Tampa. Frustrated with the service he’d received from other staffing firms, John decided to give Dave a shot. “I told him, ‘I want somebody who knows what I’m doing, knows what I want, thinks like me and will bring me qualified candidates at a pace where I’m not spinning my wheels,’” John said. A few years later when Pete Alonso joined the firm, Dave focused on filling the accounting positions and assigned Pete to take over the servicing for their IT professional requirements. “Of the recruits they sent me,” John recalled, “we probably hired 95%. They understood my needs and they understood the Price Waterhouse culture.” Eventually things started coming together and Dave began the process of recruiting his good friend, Rich Cocchiaro. In an uncanny parallel to Dave’s own experience, Rich was working at home on a Friday night performing an audit for a major Boston bank. ANew England blizzard was raging outside his window and it was nearly midnight when Rich’s phone rang with Dave on the other end. “He was telling me how great it was to be in Florida this time of year and how he’d just come off a softball diamond,” Rich recalled. “He was appealing to my competitive side.” Over the next few months, the conversation continued. In the end, Rich made the decision to join the Romac team on the strength of his relationship with Dave and a measure of what he calls “divine intervention.” “There I was, going to help Dave start the business,” he recently recalled, a bit incredulous after all these years. That was in the spring of 1981. Like Dave, the recession and its impact never crossed his mind.

Newspaper ads were used to recruit clients and candidates during the pre-Internet days.

Bob Bond accepts an award from Ralph Struzziero.

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