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

Romac Operating Specialties emerged primarily as a result of consulting with the clients to determine their staffing needs across the spectrum and quickly became the firm’s fastest growing business unit. “We grew it from $6 million to about $220 million over a span of about five years,” said Pete Alonso. Within a short time, Operating Specialties morphed into HLS (Health and Life Sciences) with HIM (Health Information Management) as a significant sector along with KCR (Kforce Clinical Research) and Scientific. “These service offerings complemented our current offerings, while seizing a significant business opportunity in the rapidly emerging biotech industry,” said Pete, “because they were counter-cyclical. In a down economy when companies were laying off people, health and life science had steady growth.” To support all this growth, Romac implemented several technology initiatives to shore up its infrastructure, among them PeopleSoft® and PROS 6.0. Despite the earnestness and seriousness with which Romac was evolving, some things, thankfully, did not change. Randy Marmon recalled the time Dave Dunkel made a visit to the Atlanta office to discuss the development of a National Accounts group for managing the very large and complex clients, an area in which Randy excelled. From Randy’s viewpoint, it was “a bizarre event that turned out to be a blessing.” They went to a nearby mall for lunch only to find the food court was so crowded there were no tables left at which to sit. “That’s when Dave decided to start a National Accounts group—eating a sandwich off the top of a trash can.” Randy did, indeed, develop the National Accounts group, now called Strategic Accounts, along with Paul Winters. As 1997 came to a close, Romac International achieved record net service revenues of $181.4 million, a 93 percent increase over 1996, and a net income of $11.5 million, a 93 percent increase over the previous year.

The 1997 annual conference used the Olympics as its theme.

48