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

Romac International’s New Headquarters Also in 1998, Romac International announced its plans to build a new 133,000 square-foot headquarters in Tampa’s historic Ybor City district, a site selected over Orlando. The $28 million, multi-story facility was designed to house a large high-tech workforce and the more than five hundred associates then dispersed in four Tampa-area office locations. Construction began in December 1999 and moving day occurred on September 14, 2001.

Reaching Maturity The concerns about Romac International’s ability to handle the transition from being a $300 million a year company to an $800 million a year staffing giant were not entirely unfounded. Because of the rapid growth, many of the corporate departments were over-populated with temporary staff. Most importantly, while the sales end of the business had, for many years, been operating under strict processes and procedures, the “back office” end of the business was in serious need of standardization and centralization.

The year 2000 saw a general business downturn and in a classic example of a boom-and-bust cycle, the dot-com bubble burst. “The early indicators (in 2000) showed signs of the economy slowing,” Dave Dunkel said. “We eventually went from revenue of $800 million to $490 million.” It was a painful time in Kforce’s history, one that required a lot of difficult decisions. As Dave and most of Kforce’s leadership team tell it, “That’s when Bill Sanders arrived.” At the time he joined the firm in April of 1999, Bill Sanders was with a large insurance company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a client of Romac. “I had to hire about eighty people,” Bill recalled, “and most of them came from Romac. When I got done with that, Romac decided to recruit me to come down and be CFO of Romac International.” With his vast experience as chief financial officer to several banking institutions, and a partnership with Deloitte and Touche, Bill brought an impressive resume to the table. He visited the Romac offices in the Hyde Park building, meeting both the leadership team and the board of directors. What he found was a company in the throes of growing pains, but “with a lot of potential.” Bill accepted the challenge, bringing to bear the full force of his more than twenty years of experience in leadership of major financial institutions. Taking it step by step, he first brought in three accounting firms to assess the steps needed

The groundbreaking for kforce.com’s new corporate headquarters in Ybor City took place on February 4, 2000.

to take Romac from a sales-driven, growth-focused organization to a mature business operation. As Ralph Struzziero admitted, “We were all sales guys; Bill was a process guy.” “We challenged every aspect of the firm and went through these exhaustive meetings every week for close to six months—three day meetings, fifteen hour days,” said Joe Liberatore. The first order of business was to begin replacing the temporary hires with permanent associates. “We had to do that in about four levels over three years,” Bill said. An early need identified was for an in-house legal resource. Bill Josey, a Tampa attorney who had represented Romac in a number of matters over the years, joined the firm as general counsel in 1999. Though the job initially represented a reduction in compensation, it was an opportunity

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