The Full Desk Experience

Aaron Opalewski [00:00:00]:
Our purpose as a company is to help people grow, and growth is uncomfortable. That's one of the things that makes us not a fit for everybody, is that we're going to push people to be better professionals. And also we help better people. And we think those things can coincide. Especially if you're going to be a leader. Like, you have to set good examples with how you operate and the acumen of what you do, but also how you operate as a person and a human and your character.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:25]:
Hi, I'm Kortney Harmon, Director of Industry Relations at Crelate. This is the Industry Spotlight, a series of the Full Desk Experience, a curly original podcast. In this series, we will talk with top leaders and influencers who are shaping the talent industry, shining a light on popular trends, the latest news, and the stories that laid the groundwork for their success. Welcome back to another episode of the Full Desk Experience Industry Spotlight.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:57]:
Welcome to the Full Desk Experience, where we deep dive into the stories of innovative leaders who are reshaping the business landscape in the talent industry. I'm your host, Kortney Harmon, and today we're joined by Aaron Opulouski, a dynamic entrepreneur who is making waves in our industry. Aaron is the CEO and founder of Spark Companies. It's headquartered in Troy, Michigan, and since founding the company in 2013, he's built a remarkable ecosystem of businesses under the Spark umbrella. With over 17 years of experience in staffing and recruiting, Aaron has impacted the growth of hundreds of companies and helped tens of thousands of people find their career paths. So today we're going to explore how Aaron has transformed his business model, achieving remarkable growth, maintained a steadfast commitment and his core mission of creating opportunities for others. He has truly a unique approach to his client relationships and his vision for the future of our industry. So with that being said, Aaron, welcome to the show.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:55]:
I'm so excited to have you on this side of the seat versus you asking the questions. I get to ask you the questions. So thank you for joining us today, Kortney.

Aaron Opalewski [00:02:03]:
Thanks for having me. I. I'm a fan of the podcast and some of our team shares your episodes. I love it back and forth and I didn't sit down on this, but like in our one of our last sales meetings, the homework was to listen to one of your episodes. So I'm a fan and it's fun to be on the show. So thanks for having me.

Kortney Harmon [00:02:19]:
I love it and I love that A there's homework, but B, that the podcast is that. So thank you for our listeners. Obviously you and I have gotten to chat a couple times at this point, tell our listeners a little about Aaron and his journey and the Spark companies. So give us an overview of both of those things.

Aaron Opalewski [00:02:38]:
Yeah, I'll go quick on this, but, you know, I've been in the industry for 17 years. Prior to being in staffing, as is most people's story, I didn't know anything about staffing. You know, I was doing personal training and happened to start training someone that was a director at Aerotech, you know, at the time, and got to know them. And I was still in college, working to put myself through college. And we got to know each other. And ultimately that led to me interviewing there. Took a position with Aerotech in October of 2007 and spent about 18 months there. Loved it there.

Aaron Opalewski [00:03:12]:
Learned a lot, really grateful for everything that I got to be a part of, you know, while I was there. And I left in 2009, they had done some restructuring. Beginning of 09, the auto industry was not doing well as well. Like, just overall that was like the middle of the financial collapse. And auto got hit hard on that and they consolidated. I think it was four or five offices. And I got demoted a couple of weeks before. They laid off about 80 people.

Aaron Opalewski [00:03:41]:
And I wasn't happy. I got demoted and then, you know, it's like, okay, like, makes a little more sense. When they laid off 80 people, like two weeks later. Still wasn't happy about that. A lot of my friends were let go. Completely different perspective on it now. I think the gentleman that had to be responsible for that and making those tough decisions just went with who he knew. They didn't give him enough time to truly evaluate what was going on.

Aaron Opalewski [00:04:04]:
And I'm sure he did his best, you know, being less than two years into the industry and, you know, still in my mid-20s, um, I had a different viewpoint of it then than I do now. But I stayed for about two more months. I worked hard while I was there, but I started to take some interviews elsewhere and ultimately end up leaving in April of 09. Didn't end up getting into another role with a company. You know, I interviewed a couple places. I think a couple people wanted to stay away from me because of my not competing, not solicit at the time. And, you know, after two months of interviewing or so, by May of 09, we started our own industrial staffing company and decided to do that. So did that.

Aaron Opalewski [00:04:43]:
Had a lot of success with that. Was 50, 50 partners for four and a half years in that business had differences of opinions on how to grow it. And we may get into some of this today, we may not, but all of the stuff that I would say are the hot buttons on, like how to set up a partnership properly. Guess what? We did none of that. And that probably didn't help us sustain that partnership for the long term. But still, again, I learned a lot during that time. It was great experience. I'm really grateful for what I was able to learn and do within that business.

Aaron Opalewski [00:05:14]:
And a lot of good things were done. At the beginning of 2013, I wanted to go a different direction. And about nine months later, we got that figured out, I guess 11 months. But we started Spark in November 2013. So from there, it's been a lot of fun, a lot of hard work. We started with one company and it's expanded in the portfolio of seven now. So we could talk about any of that that you want to. But that's a quick synopsis of the background.

Kortney Harmon [00:05:42]:
I love it. I do want to ask one more question because there's going to be people like, as you answer these questions, can you give us an overview of those seven? Just about what industries you serve? For our listeners, as you start answering these questions, I know it's going to be something forefront of their mind.

Aaron Opalewski [00:05:56]:
Yeah. So. Well, when we started out in 2013, I mean, one of the reasons that we. That happened, right, while we started new businesses, because I wanted to do other sectors of staffing. And I also was probably a little bit more aggressive on wanting to promote people. And I think in some aspects, both sides were right because we grew 800% our first full year in 2014, and that was awesome. And we went from a team of five to 20 in that year. And I think we were ready for that.

Aaron Opalewski [00:06:28]:
Once we got to that point, we kind of outgrew our capacity for where we were actually at as professionals, leaders. Like, we just had to grow more ourselves. And we started to struggle with some of that. Like, we still grew 100% the next year, but that's not 800%. Like, so that girl slowed down and we had started to do some things. We just started to make mistakes. Right. But when we started Spark, we wanted to do technical staffing.

Aaron Opalewski [00:06:54]:
We want to do professional staffing as well as our skilled trades and light industrial that we're doing. And we were not niche. And I know a lot of people preach the niches, and I, I think there's context to everything. I would agree with all those people, but I would also disagree. And so when we started it out, we had, by the time we were in our second year, I think we were working in like 10 or 11 different sectors. And if you fast forwarded to 2018, we were in 15 or 16 sectors. Some of that was great. And then some of that was we were too shallow in some of those sectors.

Aaron Opalewski [00:07:25]:
Right. 2019, we were expanding and trying to diversify, you know, so we're heavy in auto being in the Detroit area and that's great. But we. A big part of being in other sectors was to diversify and we did some of that well. But we got up to about nine offices in. It was nine in 2019. And we hadn't nailed that. Like we were doing some okay things, but like we didn't have it all figured out.

Aaron Opalewski [00:07:50]:
And then you get to the Q1 of 2020 and when Covid hit at first there was some real adversity for us on that. So the first couple months of that were tough. We had a lot of these small offices around the country and we were in all these different sectors. Right. And some of that was good cause a couple of them stayed hiring or popped back quicker. But we just had a lot going on and we weren't very far along in some of those areas. So we learned a lot from that. But we ultimately started to let those offices, like we didn't renew the leases.

Aaron Opalewski [00:08:21]:
A lot of them were on short term leases. That's when we started to flip our model from decentralized, where we had offices all over the country, to a centralized model. And so that's really the time where we reflect on what we were doing. I started to talk with some other entrepreneurs in the space and ultimately did some coaching with some people. And the short version of that is it led to our second company, which is Spark Packaging. And so we took over an 18 month period all our agreements that we had in that sector and merged them into this new company. We didn't end up acquiring this company. We, we.

Aaron Opalewski [00:08:57]:
It was doing about 250,000 in revenue, still losing money, but really liked the guys that were running it. And we're getting along well and they were starting to implement some stuff and they were on the track to profitability. And when we got ready to Prepare for their 2021 and did like their vision planning thing, it looked a lot like our first year at talent, like on what we wanted to try. And so we got to know each other pretty well. And long story short is we decided, hey, we're not going to buy this company because there's not really a value on it yet. Even though there was like there was no. Wasn't making money. So we said, hey, let's create a new company.

Aaron Opalewski [00:09:32]:
Let's take all your business and put it into the new company. And then we'll take our 30 agreements in this, you know, area and we'll phase them in. And it took us 18 months to do that, and it's been a big success for us. So I'll pause there. But that's kind of how the process of getting into some of these other companies and then having them specialize in sectors.

Kortney Harmon [00:09:54]:
Mm.

Aaron Opalewski [00:09:54]:
That was the genesis of it.

Kortney Harmon [00:09:56]:
I love it. You talked about that centralized model, and in our previous conversation, you talked about how beneficial that was. You just mentioned a few things. But were there other key drivers behind that strategic shift? I know you talked about. You talked to some other people and the business models. Give me your thought process behind that, because that's a big change that probably can create a lot of angst for someone thinking about that. And I'm sure others are thinking about stuff like that too, today.

Aaron Opalewski [00:10:20]:
Sure. Well, I think timing is a huge aspect and everything. Right. So we. We had what was going on in 2020, and we didn't lay anyone off, but we also weren't hiring. And so in some of those offices that had either one or two people in them, which I don't necessarily recommend doing, a ton of that where we had that going on when we're not hiring. And then there's a lot of uncertainty in the world. What's going to happen.

Aaron Opalewski [00:10:44]:
Well, some people might leave or not work out or we had a lot of people that were doing well and other people that didn't do well, like over a month period in more setup like this where we're communicating this way. But a lot of our team did well. And it's like, man, we can operate like this. We flipped all our daily standup meetings to doing them on. I think it was zoom at the time. Now we use teams, but we started to do more stuff like this. We started to have meetings this way with clients. And as that was happening, we didn't renew some of these leases.

Aaron Opalewski [00:11:13]:
We were seeing that our operational expenses were dropping as well. So that was kind of the start of it. It's like, hey, like, this is working pretty well for us. And we definitely want to have a physical presence, but we really like what we see here. And we ended up even in our main office that we have in the Metro Detroit area, we went from an office that was about 8,100 square feet, and we opted out of the lease. We had an opt out on our lease, opt out of it went down to about 2200 square feet, which is really hard for me. Probably more ego wise than anything. But like we're big on growth and it just wasn't.

Aaron Opalewski [00:11:51]:
Parts of that weren't fun. But it was the right move at the time. And we dropped our rent expense and we had a lot of the team working like this and then we had sections of the team that were working in office and we did that for the back half of 2020, all of 2021. And in 2021 we really started to pick up steam on, on these moves that we're doing. I shared a couple of them. There were a lot more. But at the end of 2021 we bought a building and we were able to then move in in June of 22. And we've now I think we've got about 12,000 square feet.

Aaron Opalewski [00:12:28]:
And we're. I was talking today about our, our next phase of our expansion. We'll add some more because. Cause we're on certain days, we're out of space on certain days. We have it right now.

Kortney Harmon [00:12:38]:
So it's a good problem to have. When you look back at 2020, how many people did you have at the time on your teams?

Aaron Opalewski [00:12:45]:
I don't recall exactly if we were at this number in 2020. Just off the top of my head, I know that our. What I do recall is that at some point in at least 19, we're at 51 people on our team and we had reached record high performance. And 2018, you know, with 51, we held that number into 19. And at one point in 2020, again, we didn't lay anybody off. We just didn't hire. And we were all the way down to 29 people, which was tough. It was really tough for a lot of reasons.

Aaron Opalewski [00:13:16]:
I mean it was tough in the moment, but you're also just kind of moving forward and doing what you got to do every day and you're like kind of in it. But like definitely tough moments about that. Well, by the time we got to the end of 2021, we were doing more gross profit production with 35 people than we did with 51.

Kortney Harmon [00:13:34]:
That's amazing.

Aaron Opalewski [00:13:35]:
And that was eye opening for us and where we really started to. I mean it was happening probably already, but we were really like, hey, we're onto something with how we're operating now and how we are. I think we did a good job of how we qualify orders and how we evaluate business partnerships and structure agreements. But we got better at how we structured specific searches, said no to projects, who was doing what. As we're adding people, the ramp up speed to get them productive and just we're using more data than going off of some data and some just kind of aggressive like let's grow more feelings. So we just got more mature I guess as a business.

Kortney Harmon [00:14:17]:
Yeah.

Aaron Opalewski [00:14:17]:
How we were looking to do that and it was, it was clear in the results.

Kortney Harmon [00:14:21]:
I love that. It sounds like you really focused on your efficiencies and then when you get to that point you move to that centralized approach. It impacted obviously your ability to scale from 29 to. I believe you told me you had 62 internal team members today, is that correct?

Aaron Opalewski [00:14:37]:
Yeah, we're at 62. We just got a sign off on an offer last night, which is awesome. I also think, I mean just. Yeah, thank you. I mean just being real. I. Friday was someone's last day as well. So I believe that.

Aaron Opalewski [00:14:49]:
I'm not a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure that keeps us at 62 for the moment.

Kortney Harmon [00:14:53]:
Fair.

Aaron Opalewski [00:14:54]:
And we're trying to get the right 67 on the team right now. You know, we could probably delta that either way by a couple and we lean towards. I'd rather I say that intentionally. Right. Because it's not about getting to X number of people just to say we're at X number of people. It's got to be the right people. And I would rather roll with less people and roll up our sleeves and go to work than be staffed up with people that don't fit the culture or you know, I think we got that pretty honed in as far as at least like who at least has the potential to fit the culture. It's always a work in progress.

Aaron Opalewski [00:15:26]:
Like people don't just come in a culture fit. You have to teach them about everything within your business. But if they're not a characteristics match, like someone can be a great person, they can embody a lot of our core values well and they might like, hopefully we have a good seat for them, but if we put them in the wrong area, they're going to fail. And so we got to watch that too. Especially as we're trying to, you know, hey, I think where we failed early on, not completely, but was we'd say we need to be at 67 people and we'd run through a wall to get there and bend on. On some of that stuff. Whether we would admit that or not looking back, I think that was some of the reality. And all that did was make it harder to uphold the Values, the standards and the client experience.

Aaron Opalewski [00:16:07]:
Those are three very important things.

Kortney Harmon [00:16:09]:
I love it. I don't even know if you've said it on this call yet, but I know you said it in our previous call. You mentioned gross profit increased by three times since 2020 for your growth. Talk to me about. You obviously mentioned efficiencies. What other strategies, market conditions, efficiencies contributed to that growth, because that's a huge number. So talk to me about that.

Aaron Opalewski [00:16:32]:
Yeah, so I could probably talk about this for like 8 hours and I won't bore you with that stuff, but I think number one was understanding. And we talked about this. I'll say it in a different way, though, like understanding our gross profit per person, very important. Then also taking our ops team. And so one of the things that makes us different as for our portfolio of companies, we create more economies of scale than we normally could at our size because we're able to work with one ops team for all of the entities at this point. And we have people that, you know, that was built out of Spark talent, which is still, by far, you know, the biggest organization at this point, even though we have multiple companies that are growing really well and proud of everybody within the portfolio, but that team was built out of there. So as these other companies are growing or add something in that, hey, this is trending to do $1 million in gross profit or whatever it may be, we're putting people into the mix from an operational standpoint that they're already up to speed with what's going on at that level. And a lot of times we can avoid mistakes that we made.

Aaron Opalewski [00:17:38]:
Maybe early on they become part of what makes what we're doing a great investment for the portfolio companies is that we're taking all this time and things that we've learned and then implementing them earlier into the other businesses, which is helping us produce better profitability, more strategic growth, I would say, and just kind of keep us on track, best practice wise. So that's been a huge thing, was just having that ops team decentralized and really turning it into a revenue center. That was a big. It's not the only thing, but it was a big thing that. Shoot, we're that ops team for us. I don't mind sharing this, though. Probably this year we got it running out of a couple different areas. Probably about 700,000 in gross profit.

Aaron Opalewski [00:18:22]:
You know, out of that ops team, which, I mean, our top performer, I always, I'm going to do something I hate doing. So I hate when people throw out numbers and you got to have the context, especially with our industry. It's like, oh, we run a $800,000 desk or something. Well, okay, wait, I got a couple more questions. Is it 800,000 gross profit and they're doing that all full desk themselves or is there them in recruiters involved? Because I would call that 400. If me and Kortney are doing 800,000 in business, we're at 400. So I just want to be careful. But like our best performers from a raw total.

Aaron Opalewski [00:18:56]:
So like their portion of it. So if you and I were doing the placement, it was 10,000 bucks. We'd each have 5,000 on our raw total.

Kortney Harmon [00:19:03]:
Correct.

Aaron Opalewski [00:19:04]:
Our best performers are going to do between 7, 800 in gross profit, which is awesome. You know, not everybody's doing that, but we have, you know, people that, that are, that are achieving that and we hope to continue to develop more. Well, that ops team is basically performing like as a whole, as another, you know, top performer like that. And they're doing all the things that we need to do operationally anyways to run the business. And it usually is a cash suck, but we've made it a cash flowing part of the business.

Kortney Harmon [00:19:35]:
That's amazing. I love to hear that. And you have such amazing performers. That's wonderful. Another topic that you and I talked about before was your mission. Your company's profitability improvement really connected. How's it connected to your core mission of creating opportunity for others? You've mentioned that twice at some other point in time. I remember that.

Aaron Opalewski [00:19:54]:
Yeah.

Kortney Harmon [00:19:54]:
So talk to me about that.

Aaron Opalewski [00:19:55]:
Well, you know, I think we are big on what I call like a win, win, win scenario. And it goes in this order. You know, it's got to be a win for the person. Like from a placement standpoint. Let's focus on placements. If Kortney calls me about a job and it's not good, good for me, it's not going to be a win for me. And that's going to kind of unravel everything. Right.

Aaron Opalewski [00:20:16]:
Because the clients ultimately, like, if somehow I'm just like, you know what, I need a job or I need a change. So I'm going to take that job and then I'm going to leave in two months when I find something better. Well, I may get hired and there may be like an invoice that goes out initially, but what's going to happen is I'm going to leave. The client's going to be upset. It's probably not going to pass guarantee terms. And even if it does, if you're right on the line of that. I'd advise you to use some nuance with your clients because you know, you want to focus on the lifetime value. And let's say we got a 60 day guarantee and I quit on day 62.

Aaron Opalewski [00:20:48]:
Clients not going to have a great experience if you hold them to that. So I'm not saying don't honor your contracts, but you got to look at some stuff with nuance. Right? So if we do that, if we kind of push someone into something that's not right for them, it's not going to be a win for them. Everything else unravels. Well, then also it could be a win for someone, but it's got to be a win for the client. You know, it's got to be someone that can add value to the client. And only when those two things happen is a win for us. So in the searches we take and how we structure them in who we place where, when and why, we try and do it with that is the focal point.

Aaron Opalewski [00:21:24]:
Knowing that like that's what's going to get us to it's the right thing to do, but it's also going to create repeat business, you know, and hopefully reoccurring revenue.

Kortney Harmon [00:21:33]:
Yeah, we don't want to start from scratch every time. That's not fun. Too much work.

Aaron Opalewski [00:21:37]:
A general answer. That would be it. That's what I would say.

Kortney Harmon [00:21:40]:
Okay. I love it. And you, you really talked about focusing on clients. Now I'm going to connect two things that you've said in this call so far. You talked about your business has moved to opportunities like this, doing stuff virtually, but you talked about being different for your clients. So let's talk about the competitive differentiation. Spark companies prides itself on understanding clients. I believe I saw at some point in time you really talked about face to face interaction.

Kortney Harmon [00:22:05]:
This is an increasingly digital world. AI is here, all the tools are here, all the teams and the zooms and whatever. How does this approach? Are you doing more face to face? How are you handling that and what is that competitive edge that it gives you based on your approach to that?

Aaron Opalewski [00:22:21]:
Yeah. So a couple things here and you can just stop me if I get too long winded, but no, your guy CEO. I listened to podcast with Aaron, your guy's CEO, and he said this in a different way when he was talking about, you know, the use of AI and where you may be late versus like mixing in. I think he was. The example he gave was CDs and vinyl records or something like that. Yes. So different area but think of that, like face to face meeting as an example of that vinyl record. And so we're not going to ignore technology, right? This AI all this different stuff that's going on, we're not going to ignore it.

Aaron Opalewski [00:22:55]:
We want to find a way to use it as a tool to accentuate what we're able to do as a business and then track that data to see if we're actually getting more efficient with the investments that we make. Yeah, so we want to do that. But, you know, relationships are built in the inefficiencies. You know, a lot of times. So is getting on site with a client inefficient? Well, it depends on how you look at it. It can be from a standpoint of we can just do this. There are some efficiencies to this, but you're going to stand out, you're going to build more relationship, you're going to know more about what's going on. A lot of we call it, I don't believe in luck.

Aaron Opalewski [00:23:31]:
I believe in like just doing the right things and good things happen. So a lot of times when you're in a meeting and on site, you could be in one department and you get introduced to two other departments and next thing you know, you walk out with openings from all the departments. Those things don't happen as much on a teams call. And so it's good to be able to do this. And we do a lot of this, but we want to try and get out in front of clients. So where we have business units that are like regional and they're like physically in their area, we want them out in front of those clients, they can do this, but they have physical meeting expectations and things that we're looking at. And then even on our national sales teams, like, yeah, they do even more of this. Right.

Aaron Opalewski [00:24:14]:
But logistically, we like to make investments to get them out in front of clients. You know, we're even looking at how to do that better to where we can kind of get that scenario where we're trying to improve. We already do it a lot, but we're trying to put more data behind, like, what's a rhythm to do this? So maybe if you bring me back in a year, I'll have more thoughts on how we're doing that. But we're working on that right now.

Kortney Harmon [00:24:38]:
It's a date. I'm going to follow up, we're going to talk about it because. And everybody like is questioning, like, what should I do? How should I do it? How do I get faster? How Do I get better? How do I use ChatGPT differently? And in reality, like I was a trainer way back in the day, but I played sports and we always had a word of the year, like, think about just reconnecting your focus. And my conversation for 2024 was the year of engagement. It's really about engaging. And I don't think that's going to change a ton for 2025. Just to be in front, you know, AI is noise. It's a necessity, but it's noise.

Kortney Harmon [00:25:13]:
If it's used the right way, it's great. But I think that's going to continue. It's how do you stand out? How do you differentiate yourself? You're going to come back on in a year.

Aaron Opalewski [00:25:20]:
Yeah. And I just think the more we do stuff like this and the technology gets better and better, it's like we're probably all going to do that or we should, otherwise we're probably going to get swept away.

Kortney Harmon [00:25:29]:
Absolutely.

Aaron Opalewski [00:25:30]:
Stand out, do some inefficient things, do the things that people are becoming scared to do, which is have a face to. Like we're in recruiting, so we are really intentional about pushing our people, specifically our people that are just kind of coming in, getting started and maybe, maybe they had one job before this and they'd never worked in an office environment or they'd never been in a face to face meeting. And like something that like when we started recruiting you'd be like, man, like, I can't even imagine that. Yeah. And now it's a real thing. Our purpose as a company is to help people grow and growth is uncomfortable. That's one of the things that makes us not a fit for everybody, is that we're going to push people to be better professionals. And also we help better people and we think those things can coincide.

Aaron Opalewski [00:26:11]:
Especially if you're going to be a leader. Like, you have to set good examples with how you operate and the acumen of what you do, but also how you operate as a person and a human and your character. And so, you know, if someone's coming in and we're in the people business and they're scared to get in front of a person, well, either we have to, hopefully they're coachable. Right. And we'll. We got to work with them on that. Right. If they just were really resistant to us, then they probably don't match the characteristics or there's probably some real niched in areas that we got to try and use that person in to be a fit on our team.

Aaron Opalewski [00:26:43]:
But we're really trying to get. It's like, yeah, this, we're using all this different stuff, but it's like, yeah, like, but go do this too. Like, go to this customer site and meet with these people, you know, So I love it. That's our approach.

Kortney Harmon [00:26:55]:
We'll talk more in a year. We'll see how it went.

Aaron Opalewski [00:26:57]:
Yes.

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Kortney Harmon [00:28:05]:
I want to look at forward looking strategy. Obviously, the end of the year, it's really when you're assessing what you're doing, your planning sessions. I just got back from one yesterday.

Aaron Opalewski [00:28:15]:
Yeah.

Kortney Harmon [00:28:15]:
So I want you to reflect on your lessons from 2023, 2024. What are the most significant changes that you are implementing in your business model for 2025?

Aaron Opalewski [00:28:25]:
Well, the evolution of our portfolio ever since we've had the companies, they've worked together, but each year we've got them more integrated. Right. And so when we first started, we had different sets of core values. And then the first thing we switched was it's like, man, now we. I think we had four companies at the time. And I'm like, I can't keep track of all the core. Like, they were all. The way we explained at first was like, hey, we have different sets of core values, but these are all principles that we believe in.

Aaron Opalewski [00:28:52]:
And next thing you know, we got four of them. And I'm like, because we. We want to coach, develop, train, hire, fire, everything we do, we want to tie it to a core value. And it's like, man, I'm going to. I'm struggling with this because we got too many. So, you know, we talked about that as a group at the end of 22, and we decided to use the same eight core values throughout the portfolio. And that worked because we all agreed that all of these core values we believed in the principles. We just found that, hey, these eight are the ones that were actually communicating in real life.

Aaron Opalewski [00:29:27]:
Like, they're not just up on the wall, they're in our everyday conversations. They're being explained like, hey, why do we believe in face to face communication? Well, because we're people driven, service focused, and part of being people driven is talking to people in person. So just an example, right? So we do that. And then at the beginning of 24, I think what really helped with our growth this year, where a lot of companies are not growing this year, there are some, and that's awesome. But like, overall as an industry, I was just with one of the big five, a person from the big five, and they're down 12% this year. And that's pretty much right across the board. We're going to be up around 20. You know, we wanted to be up 100.

Aaron Opalewski [00:30:07]:
So we have plenty of areas to improve. But all things considered, in the last two years, where we're up about 40% on our overall in the last two years and most people are down, you know, 20 to 30%, it's like, okay, we're scooping up market share and we got work to do. But I like what we're doing.

Kortney Harmon [00:30:27]:
Yeah.

Aaron Opalewski [00:30:27]:
Well, what we integrated at the beginning of this year is we decided we were going to all, like we did, one team meeting. So we bring everyone together. It's okay. We're, we're working in essentially different business units. Yes, some of them are different LLCs and all this stuff. But we're all working together as a team and we have unique strengths, gifts, specialties that we bring to the table. And so what's worked really well for us is to focus on teamwork and owning our areas and selling our wheel of services. You know, where it's like, hey, like, if we're doing industrial staffing somewhere and they have IT openings, it's not going to be our industrial staffing, you know, team that is going to fill those.

Aaron Opalewski [00:31:06]:
They might have the relationship. Let's make the intro to our IT staffing and search company and let them go do a great job and stuff like that. Where we're getting more integrated and more saturated in the client base is what's really pushed us forward this year. So that's been our theme and our difference maker is that when we go sell or when I'm on a meeting, I'm not the expert. We're going to figure out our business dev teams trying to set a meeting and then we want to get our experts in there to talk with the right people in the right areas and hopefully that's multiple conversations, right. Which leads to multiple opportunities to work with the client. Which you know, we believe is a way that we add value to the client relationship and that's one of our core values is find a way to deliver value. So that's the way we've figured out how to do that.

Kortney Harmon [00:31:52]:
That's amazing. And honestly, you know, it's your way to be everything to everyone by integrating those companies. You're their one stop shop for all things that they need. It seems like.

Aaron Opalewski [00:32:03]:
Well and I think you learn from that on failure because the truth is we can't be everything to everyone.

Kortney Harmon [00:32:07]:
True.

Aaron Opalewski [00:32:07]:
And that's part of my, it's just the truth. But that would be part like hey, here's what makes us different. I basically now sell against what we used to be which is we tried to be everything to everybody.

Kortney Harmon [00:32:17]:
True.

Aaron Opalewski [00:32:18]:
And hey, you know what, it's impossible for us to be good at everything. That's why we have these different niched out areas and teams and the reason we do them as companies is because I'm an entrepreneur. We do it for multiple reasons. It's great for internal recruiting, retention. Like some people I think the stats are like 93% are better entrepreneurs than entrepreneurs, something like that. But there's still that 7% that have that itch. It's a fragmented industry that happens. I want to keep those people.

Aaron Opalewski [00:32:50]:
We a couple of our companies are organic startups that they're people that worked at talent and they've achieved some things and they have that itch. It's on their vision and over time we implemented how they could take that over and either they had equity right out of the gate or they had the ability to earn it through performance and you know, being aligned with the core values over a period of time and it's razor specific on what they have to do. That's worked really well for us. So I can go to that client, say here's our expert, but I don't have an expert that is putting in 30 hours a week. That expert's got skin in the game. You know, now some of the teams are bigger, there's other people on the team too. Not everyone necessarily has equity but that's worked better for me to have the people that are that I'm working with more day to day also have some skin in the game with what they're doing. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs care about what they're doing as well.

Aaron Opalewski [00:33:45]:
And I'm not, not again. I think that's better for most people and a lot of our entrepreneurs make more money than our, some of our entrepreneurs right now because of the size and scope of what they're doing. But when people have skin in the game, it's worked better for us to kind of do that handoff and they own it and they crush it for the client.

Kortney Harmon [00:34:03]:
I love what that does for your internal team and I, I. This is not something you prepared or we talked about, but your internal retention numbers, that has, that has to impact that. I mean our industry in general has huge turnover average I think is a three year. So I'm assuming that has done wonders for your internal retention for your team.

Aaron Opalewski [00:34:23]:
It really has and that's what I think. We'll cross over 4,000 opportunities created this year. Our big mission is to do over 100,000 in a year. So we're going to be 4% of the way there. Like that's great. You know that we've done that. I'm proud of the team and happy that like if we're growing on the tracks towards that, like that's a good thing. But the truth is we've got a long way to go and so we have to build a bigger, better team and we have to all keep getting better as well.

Aaron Opalewski [00:34:51]:
Like we just have to build something bigger and better and that's going to require us to implement great operations tools and technology. But we are going to still bet on great people being a huge part of that.

Kortney Harmon [00:35:04]:
I love it. So you talked scale, we talked what is the future? You're only a percentage of the way. There's talk to me about what your biggest challenges you anticipate in scaling your organization over the next two to three years. What do you think your biggest challenges are going to be?

Aaron Opalewski [00:35:19]:
It's a great question. I got to tell you, I don't know for sure just because of how fast technology is going now. I don't overall view it as a threat, but I'm, I like to have control and have an idea and in that area I think we're all just. If anyone told you they know exactly what that's going to look like in three years, I think they're lying, you know. So absolutely that's just me being honest, that that's an area that like I don't feel that we have this complete control over. I'm not freaking out about it or anything like that, but I think there are going to be huge opportunities within that. Also maybe some challenges to watch out for. I think just trying to be educated and listening to stuff like your podcast or Ben Mina who you just had on and he's got like the AI Summit.

Aaron Opalewski [00:36:03]:
And I mean we literally have a person that watched this whole summit and they've sent me an analysis of this whole thing. And we're kind of like, look, we're, we got a short list of tools that we might test out in 25. So we like to test stuff out, like beta test it before going all in and just seeing do we like it, do we like it. But we can't get a use case. Hey, I think I heard this in the podcast with Aaron, but it's like sometimes something will get brought to us. It's like we already got that over here. Like you guys aren't using it. Like, no.

Aaron Opalewski [00:36:32]:
Use what we have and then we'll evaluate that and if we don't like it, maybe we'll, we'll flip it. There's just stuff with that overall for me, this whole year we had our media company. At the beginning of the year, the year before, we added four, four companies in a six month span. And that was fun. It was crazy, but it was, it was fun to the portfolio. And we didn't do that this year because we were focused now on kind of getting some of these ones that were organic off the ground. The media thing was brand new for us. None of us have ever done it.

Aaron Opalewski [00:37:03]:
We're still learning every day. EJ and Chris are awesome. Like, they're, they know way more about this stuff than I do. But you know, I'm also learning, but they're definitely the experts. But like we've been in a season where we're just trying to improve and put infrastructure behind those seven businesses. When I look out big picture, I believe we're going to have 13 companies within the portfolio that will own some of these other sectors. So we're at 7 right now. So that would mean we'd add another 6.

Aaron Opalewski [00:37:33]:
I'm starting up conversations on that again, moving into 25. We have talked to some people this year, but we, we've probably turned down about a hundred different situations and I think that's good because you got to vet stuff out. I'm hopeful that, that we'll get to the point where we add another one this year. But my, I love my wife. She, she's awesome and she's like, when we did the four in six months. Like that sounds good on the podcast. But she's like, hey, do you think you're making the. The same mistakes that you talk about with going up to nine offices? And I told her why I don't feel that way because of the gross profit production and how those are set up and some of the things that we talked about and the fact that we already have this business inside of some of our client base, but we need the expertise, go after it.

Kortney Harmon [00:38:19]:
Yeah.

Aaron Opalewski [00:38:20]:
And we're not. Same ops team, same centralized. Like, there's reasons why I don't feel that way, but I love for saying that. Right. Because that was a point of evaluation for us at the beginning of this year is like, hey, like, we need to be good stewards to the companies that we have. Some of these are organic. Gotta. We gotta get them moving.

Aaron Opalewski [00:38:40]:
We gotta get them contributing. We gotta get them in front of the client base and get some of the. It's nice to say that actually executing it is something different. Right. So we gotta work on that. But now I'm hopeful, moving in next year, we'll add at least one. I don't think we'll add more because we're still working on some of those things I just said. But we're having a couple conversations and they all kind of lead to one sector.

Aaron Opalewski [00:39:02]:
And I don't know, I just think all in God's time, but he's got something to do with it when all these things start to kind of come together and we'll see what happens. So we're not in a rush, but hopefully in the next year we'll be able to say we have eight and we could talk a little bit more about that.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:19]:
I'll be patiently waiting. I won't make you commit to anything, but I'll be patiently waiting on the side just watching to see what happens.

Aaron Opalewski [00:39:25]:
Yeah, I love it.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:27]:
I'm going to go back to something you talked about. Technology. Now, my question to you is, do you have a team that's evaluating technology and your ops team, are they doing that or. I mean, there is things coming at you left and right. How are you guys evaluating? Do you have a team? Do you have a person? How do you. How do you manage it?

Aaron Opalewski [00:39:43]:
Yeah, so we. We have a champion for different areas. So there's a couple of different people that are evaluating different things, but we always try and have a champion for it because we found when we don't. And we're not perfect on that either. Like, I have an email that went out last week, and we use Monday.com. that's one of the things that our ops team. Not everyone on the team use it, but our ops team does, and they love it. Our vice president of operations is like, I just got this, like, Vibe board, and I put my Monday app up, and she's, like, in my office, like, tinkering around with it and stuff.

Aaron Opalewski [00:40:15]:
So we do a lot of our, like, project management. We do a lot out of there. But for me, like, I look at where we're at on projects, right? So we were looking on this Monday board, and two of our projects that we had didn't have a champion on it. And that's an issue for me because from our, you know, from my experience, what happens when eight people are on it and they're all responsible is things don't get done. So maybe that works for other people, but, like, that's big for us that we have. We have a couple different people doing this because there's so much like that you can look at. But it's important for me that one of our operations managers or our vice president of operations or if it has a financial twist, maybe our controller, like, someone's gotta be the champion on that. That is, like, they're responsible for project deadlines, evaluation, whatever data we need, working with the data analysts to spit out, you know, good information on if we implement something, how it's going.

Kortney Harmon [00:41:10]:
Okay, Amazing. Let's face it, there's no shortage of tools that are coming out. So making sure they talk, they do what we need them to do, and we're keeping our teams as efficient as possible is key. For us.

Aaron Opalewski [00:41:22]:
It can be overwhelming, I think, for all of us.

Kortney Harmon [00:41:26]:
I'm coming to your office to use that Vibe board for Monday. I saw you posted.

Aaron Opalewski [00:41:29]:
I was like, ooh, yeah, yeah, come on out.

Kortney Harmon [00:41:33]:
I love it. I'm gonna ask two more questions, and that'll wrap up our conversation. Let's talk for our listeners that are similar size of you. They're struggling to grow. They don't know what to do. Looking at 2025, what's one piece of advice you would give them? Going into 2025, it's hard to give.

Aaron Opalewski [00:41:51]:
One piece because there's so much contact. But I would say, you know, the first place I would look is that client experience and then lifetime value of a client. So are you making a placement and then never working with the client again, or do you have clients that I guess. Yeah. You've worked with for a long time? Yeah, but like, how. How much repeat business, are you able to get with them? And before you go, I'm not saying don't add new customers, but the first place that I would look is like, are we doing a good job on client experience with our current client base? I think a lot of that comes back to are we getting repeat business or not? Now if you're doing a great job and you're not getting repeat business, then you got more of a prospecting issue on like, are we going after the right target clients for our business? Because if we're, we might take a search that is a one off or something like that. But if there's not reoccurring business, we're having to restart the process, we're slowing down the speed because every new client, like there's context to this. But like in general, a new client versus a repeat client, it's going to take longer to work through the process with a new client.

Aaron Opalewski [00:42:59]:
You're potentially. Then you think about candid experience. You're going to, you're more at risk to have a bad kind experience for the new process than something that you've already done, you know, multiple times. Right. So both from the client side and the candidate side, if I can get reoccurring a repeat business going, I'm set up to get the most efficiency from a business, you know, aspect and kind of control what's going on with the experience from the candidate side because I'm more familiar with it. So that's the first place I would look. The second place, you know, this is just me being me. If I'm niche, I would consider, you know, and I'm, I'm in a down year because my industry's down.

Aaron Opalewski [00:43:41]:
Well, that's not acceptable to me. You got to decide do you want a lifestyle business and your lifestyle is going to go up and down based on how that's going, or do you want to build something sustainable and something that you can find your way to grow regardless of what's going on, you know, across the board? And we're in a $250 billion industry, so does it actually apply that your business is down because the market's down when there's $250 billion of market share? Probably not. I know it doesn't for us. So if we're talking to companies that are about the same size, like, like I, that's not an acceptable answer for someone that's running one of our business units. We gotta figure it out. But so what do we do? Well, you know, we have different sectors, you know, that people work in. Right. But you also have different service lines that you could consider.

Aaron Opalewski [00:44:30]:
So maybe you stay within the niche. Well, what are you doing for the customer? Are you doing all direct placement? Well, that's going to be your first issue with reoccurring or repeat business is that they're not hot on direct hire business. They might love you to death, but there's nothing for you to do. So that's where, you know, within our portfolio, where it makes sense. Not every business, but I think four of them, we do contract staffing as well to get reoccurring going. And then in the ones where we don't do contract staffing, we're doing other reoccurring, you know, forms of sow type work. There's got to be a reoccurring aspect to your business. So if you take anything away and you're in that, you know, boat, you want to stay in one sector, we'll figure out how to put some other service lines in your business.

Aaron Opalewski [00:45:16]:
You know, we provide more value to a customer than just filling the spot. You know a lot about the market, you know a lot about hiring, you know a lot about growing or reducing departments, when to do that. You know, we have a lot of data that we can use and add value to clients on. So I'd recommend thinking about that and getting it implemented in your business.

Kortney Harmon [00:45:36]:
I love it. Great piece of advice. Anything else?

Aaron Opalewski [00:45:39]:
Man, I love what we do. It's awesome. You know, it's been an interesting couple years, but I just, I love it. I would encourage anybody that is doing great to keep focus on being the best version of yourself. Right? We, we can, you know, I think where we can run into the biggest trouble is sometimes when we have success and think we got it all figured out. Right? So I know for us newer recruiters or someone that, you know, the first contest, that's a time where we gotta really put our arm around someone and be a good mentor to them. And, you know, the core values become really important to us because, you know, some people will work hard for a little bit and then think they're, they're smart, they got it all figured out and they can, you know, it's work smarter, not harder. And I think at some level that is actually true.

Aaron Opalewski [00:46:28]:
That's probably like in the billions. So we're more like, hey, you got to do both. It does evolve, but you want to evolve, do new things, push limits. Like, roles may change as you grow, but if you get completely away from the things that brought you to the Dance, you're probably going to run into some issues. And so we really watch that with our, with our top performers is how are they mentally doing, you know, with that stuff? Because in this time of year especially, they could have a great year. Well, you got to kind of gear up and do it again now. It helps if you have reoccurring revenue, but it's just an ongoing thing. So I would encourage people that maybe are going through some challenges, that your opportunities are within those challenges.

Aaron Opalewski [00:47:09]:
And I would challenge the people that are doing well to just keep focused on being the best version of yourself and getting better every day.

Kortney Harmon [00:47:17]:
I love it. I know this is my last question. I promise I could continue to ask you questions all day long. I know you don't have a crystal ball, but if you're looking ahead in the staffing and recruiting industry in the next three to five years, what do you foresee changing in the next three to five? Very, very broad question.

Aaron Opalewski [00:47:34]:
Yeah, you know, I don't know that I'm the most qualified to answer this. And if you ask this to other people, I'll definitely be listening. But, you know, my opinion would be that the tools and how we kind of get to the call or the conversation may look a lot different, you know, five years from now than it does now. I still believe. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But we're going to bet on that, that, that that end point conversation or, you know, interaction is going to be vital. It's going to be at a premium, that it's going to continue to be like, it's really an art form of how to do that. Right.

Aaron Opalewski [00:48:12]:
And the better you are at that, the more that you're going to succeed as long as you don't. If someone's going to think they're going to do that and not use the tools on their belt, I think they'll struggle. But if they use the tools on their belt and they really hone that, that art form, they're going to stand out from the person that wants to just send an, you know, whatever it is at the time, it probably won't be an automated message. It'll be something, something different. But. Or it'll look different than it does now. Yeah, but that's my answer. So it's embracing that stuff and really working on your craft, which is ultimately to be a connector of people.

Kortney Harmon [00:48:47]:
Yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice. This is an ever changing industry that has very foundational blocks that haven't changed over the years. Just the tools in which we get there or the device in which we travel to get there. So I love that. And it's truly about what we've all got into it from the beginning was people to help people. So I love that and I think that's a great piece of advice. And you're right. Three to five years from now, who knows?

Aaron Opalewski [00:49:13]:
I'll share one more thing on that. I think this applies. I guess we'll see. Here's an opportunity. I see you talk about the market share and I mentioned that I was just, you know, in a conversation with someone that's working at the top five. I've actually been a lot of those conversations. Why? Because we want people from those top five that don't want to be at those top five, and we want them here with us to build that out. And there's heavy investments going into these areas, you know, specifically within those companies.

Aaron Opalewski [00:49:41]:
And I think that's probably warranted and we should all take note of that. But also, those companies are so big that the people making those decisions are somewhat disconnected from what's happening on the ground floor. So I think that, you know, it's just my opinion from what I've heard, but an opportunity for a growing recruiting firm is going to be to embrace all that stuff but not be in a spot where they're going to try and overrun what the team. Starbucks CEO has a book. He talks about this. He's like, let the people that use sweep the floors pick the broom. And from what I, what I hear, I don't. I think maybe that's not going on at some of those bigger companies right now.

Aaron Opalewski [00:50:23]:
There's decisions being made at a higher level, and I think they probably make a lot of sense other than maybe they should be listening. Some of the people that are actually that are going to be sweeping the floor, I know we don't sweep the floor like when we're going into a client meeting, but you get my point. So, yeah, you know, for me is trying to embrace that. I think it was Howard Schultz, but it's like, hey, like, let's listen to what is happening out there. We don't want to avoid this stuff, but how do we keep our personal touch? How do we put our arms around our young account recruiting managers and recruiters and teach them the art form of this business along with the tool? So that's what we're going to focus on and we're going to bet heavily on that. And I guess we'll find out who's right.

Kortney Harmon [00:51:08]:
I love it. Aaron, this was such a wonderful conversation. I love all the things that you're doing over at Spark, and I'm excited for us to resume this conversation and a year from now to see how things are going, what has changed and the growth that you're seeing, continuing to see. So thank you so much for your time today. I know that this is amazing for our listeners and the changes that you've made over the last five years. Four years. Four years since 2020, in the 13 years that you've been there. So thank you so much for your time and your wonderful insights and I greatly appreciate it.

Aaron Opalewski [00:51:41]:
Kortney thank you.

Kortney Harmon [00:51:42]:
Kortney Hart, I'm Kortney Harmon with crelate. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Industry Spotlight, a new series from the Full Desk Experience. New episodes will be dropping monthly. Be sure you're subscribed to our podcast so you can catch the next Industry Spotlight episode and all episodes of the Full Desk Experience here or wherever you listen.