Britt Massing realized that his company needed to get creative if it was going to weather the turbulent economy in 2009.
“We could see that a lot of clients, instead of having four or five or maybe 10 orders a month, were going to one, two or three orders a month and constantly saying, ‘We might be having layoffs,’ or, ‘We’re trying to maintain our costs and cut costs etc. at this point in time,’” says Massing, president of The Staffing Resource Group Inc., which employs 93 contractors and a staff of 11. “That’s what we had to deal with.”
Today, the staffing company is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the Tampa Bay area. Smart Business spoke with Massing about how to use economic uncertainty as an opportunity to grow your business by better serving your clients’ needs.
What is the first step when you realize that your clients are struggling?
I think that a lot of companies didn’t react quickly enough to making changes. They thought maybe that renegotiating might not be the best thing for them. A lot of them also didn’t think about going back to as grassroots as taking a look at the income and the profit and loss report and thinking look at all the vendors and going back and talking with them.
The first thing we knew was that a lot of our competitors were going to be going out of business, and for us, it was if we make it through this, we’re going to be good. So what we did was we renegotiated with a lot of our clients our terms, and we also then renegotiated with almost all of our vendors.
We did one-year contracts where we’ve reduced our rates some. We were flexible when other companies were not flexible. We’ve listened to what our clients needed and if it worked for us from a business standpoint, we renegotiated until the turnaround started to happen for us. That was a big part of how we survived when a lot of other companies did not.
How do you stay aware of how to meet your clients’ needs?
We were asking our clients what they needed. Some clients, because of the technical aspect of our business, weren’t hurt as much as other clients, but the ones that were having some difficulties and asked us about flexibility, we decided what made good business sense and we ran with it.
Outside of that kind of strategic aspect, instead of not calling clients when they didn’t have needs at that time, we’ve maintained our relationships with everyone throughout that period. People would be like ‘You know you don’t need to stop by and say hello to us right now. We don’t have anything for you.’ Our response always was, ‘Well, we know you will in the future and when you do, we want you to remember us.’ We wanted them to know that we treat all of our clients like it’s a relationship and it’s a partnership. So we spent a lot of time staying in front of them. We’re in direct contact either via phone, e-mail, in person, breakfast, lunch, dinner etc., with our clients every week. We have a very grassroots effort to make sure that we’re constantly in touch and in front of all of our clients.
As the contracts had ended and then needed to be renegotiated, depending on how the companies were doing, we had opportunities to renegotiate our prices back to where they were or above where they were before; we’ve been able to do that as each contract has come up. A lot of them were experiencing the same thing that they had to do for their businesses as well. Many of the people that understood and partnered with us were going through it themselves, and for the most part, were very appreciative of what we did to help people get through those times.
What advice would have in employing this kind of strategy?
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. … We [the owners] are always constantly in communication and talking and bouncing ideas off of each other and taking that to the team. When the team is involved in any policy changes or any changes with the company, it gives them ownership of it and they take pride in seeing it through and making it happen.
We knew that we had to maintain the relationships because we work with what we feel is a great book of business and when we got with our team, we told them, ‘Every customer that we have will continue to get the same amount of service as they’ve gotten before and that’s what will happen in 2010 and beyond after we get through 2009.’
How to reach: The Staffing Resource Group Inc., www.srg-us.com or (877) 774-7742
