Don Stallard looks around his company and sees familiar faces among his growing work force.
His senior vice president of new business ventures has been with him since he founded The Reserves Network in 1984. Stallard’s senior vice president of business development has been with the company for more than 12 years. The director of quality assurance has served on the board for 11 years. Several other key management team members have been part of the Reserves team for nearly 10 years.
That, Stallard claims, has helped Reserves sustain annual growth of more than 35 percent, while the temporary staffing industry as a whole has grown only at a 15 percent clip.
“Our infrastructure drives our success,” explains Stallard, founder and president of the Fairview Park-based staffing agency. “The long-term retention rate we’ve achieved is extremely unusual for a 15-year-old company, never mind the fact that we’re a temporary staffing agency.”
But those same keys to success could have been detrimental to the company’s growth, Stallard admits.
“If you retain long-term management teams, they grow with the company,” he says. “You’ve got to encourage them to keep growing with the company or it will grow up around them.”
One way he’s done that is to encourage the team to always be on the lookout for services that complement Reserves without losing its focus.
“We want to take advantage of the economies of scale and synergies and try to expand our range of services and protect ourselves against any potential downturn,” Stallard says. “But, at the same time, we need to be able to continue to provide our clients with all the services they’ve come to expect.”
Among the offerings Reserves has expanded into in recent years are work force training centers, e-business strategy units, HR support groups and an executive search division.
Stallard’s early success made him an Entrepreneur Of The Year winner in 1994, and his continued growth led to him being chosen as a finalist this year. But accolades aside, Stallard is focused on leading Reserves into the future.
With that commitment in mind, flexibility and adaptability have become watchwords at Reserves, says Stallard, who’s led his company’s expansion to five states and more than 40 offices through strategic acquisitions and pure office expansion.
“We’ve been able to find out what our clients need, then go out and design services that fill those needs,” he says. “It’s a fluid industry, and it continues to grow.”
How to reach: The Reserves Network, (440) 779-1400
Dustin Klein ([email protected]) is editor of SBN Cleveland.
