Weinfurter still counts recruiting as his chief priority. Both he and VP Head typically travel at least two days a week, talking to top managerial candidates at the various Parson offices. "Getting on a plane every week gets old," says Weinfurter. "But for now, anyway, it's crucial. One weak link can hurt you in a pretty big way. You'd absolutely better find good people."
To do that, he and other managers like to tout the idea that Parson Group offers an appealing alternative career path. At Big Five firms and large corporations, they note, accountants typically have to wait years before being made a partner or rising up the corporate ladder. At Parson Group, as Weinfurter's pitch goes, accountants and other financial professionals have all kinds of chances to move up quickly in the ranks -- from working on increasingly complex consulting projects to heading up Parson's offices. (And, Weinfurter says, employees also don't have to travel constantly since most of the company's work is local.)
Weinfurter has done everything he can think of to identify potential job candidates in new markets. This year the company even held a raffle as an extra reward for staffers who'd brought in employees. The winner got a Mazda Miata.
Of course, the fact that Parson Group now offers the vast majority of its new employees a full-time salary, instead of hourly rates for projects, as well as equity in the company, also helps with recruiting. And the company can now point to a long list of blue-chip clients, as well as a dazzling growth rate. Indeed, Weinfurter chuckles as he recounts what one recent job candidate in the company's new San Francisco office told him about why she wanted to work there. "She said we were a very well established, stable company," he says.
But to Weinfurter, Parson Group still feels like a start-up.
And in at least one fundamental way, it still is a start-up. After all, the staffing company that was launched only five years ago as Current Assets has since adopted a new strategy and a new name.
The moment of decision came three years ago. It started, in part, with the discovery that a staffing business in California was using the term current assets in its marketing materials. At the same time, Weinfurter and other company execs were looking out on a more crowded accounting-staffing field. With the entry of new players, including staffing giant Robert Half International Inc., and the rise of Internet headhunting sites, the battle for market share was bound to get fiercer.
Weinfurter, among others, concluded that it made no sense to continue investing in a model focused on staffing. "We felt like we should be moving in the opposite direction," recalls Head. By the fall of 1997, the company had decided to step up its efforts to attract higher-end consulting projects. By then Weinfurter had also made up his mind that it wasn't worth battling over the company's name and opted for Parson Group. (Weinfurter says the name, borrowed from the venture capitalists, sounds more like a consulting business anyway.)
Since then, the company has raised a fresh $6-million infusion of capital from Chicago-based Banc One Equity Capital and has been investing heavily in developing higher-end practice areas, including mergers-and-acquisitions integration, risk management, and enterprise resource planning. And though Parson says it's committed to maintaining a healthy staffing business, it's billing itself as a consulting-services company in new markets like Houston and San Francisco.
It's a risky strategy. Overhead, for instance, has shot up, now that the company -- in its bid to build a stable, high-quality consulting force -- is bringing in most new hires as full-time employees. Moreover, it's not entirely certain that all the service areas Parson Group is investing in will match up with customer demand. "It's hard to predict the exact mix of what clients will need," says Weinfurter.
Even so, he insists that the repositioning is actually "a very natural evolution." From the very start, he says, customers had been asking Parson employees to handle more complicated projects. Already about half the company's revenues come from consulting work, according to Weinfurter. And he expects that consulting will account for at least three-quarters of its revenues by the end of 2001.
In the meantime, Weinfurter has been meeting with investment bankers who are hungry to take the company public. That could happen, he assures them -- just not right now. "Lots of firms get hurt by going public too soon," says the man who lived through the IPO at Alternative Resources. "Right now we're not ready. We're not of a size where we think it makes sense."
But it will be, if Weinfurter's projections pan out. By 2001 he's forecasting revenues of more than $100 million; in five years, Parson Group wants to earn as much as $500 million in revenues. All in all, it's shaping up to be a much more massive operation than even Weinfurter envisioned. But as a "type B CEO," he's taking the growth in stride. "You think it's going to work, but you really don't know," he says. "This has worked far better and faster than anyone anticipated."
Susan Hansen is a senior editor at The American Lawyer and a regular contributor to Inc.
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