Palm Beach County, Florida
Founded: 2018
Home to #MartechMax, Sloane Staffing is an award-winning international recruitment firm based in sunny South Florida that specializes in filling Marketing Technology, Digital Marketing, SaaS Sales, and Technology positions. We leverage our extensive network of candidates to fill those hard-to-fill roles. Whether you’re looking to hire top talent for your organization or are seeking a new prime position, we’ve got you covered.
Other Services (except Public Administration)
300% increase from 2018-2021
91% increase from 2018 – 2021
Tell us a bit about yourself. What led you to starting your company?
I’ve been an enterprise software seller my whole career. Most recently I was at a company called Marketo, which is a big email marketing automation software that was eventually acquired by Adobe. I covered the Southeast territory for Marketo, and my target market was companies with a revenue of one billion dollars and above. When I was working at Marketo, I realized that the clients that I was selling to needed to build teams around the software that I sold. My wife and I started this company out of seeing a pure need in the market for a recruiting company that focuses on this area of staffing.
Did you know you always wanted to be an entrepreneur?
I always was happy working in software. I loved it and I thought that would be my only job. Money was great work and the ability to work from home was ideal. Then after I discovered the gap in the market where we could fit, I thought why am I working for someone else? We could do this on our own.
Tell us about your company and the value you bring to your customers.
We are a go-to market recruiting agency recruiting sales and marketing for B2B and B2C companies. The biggest value that we bring our customers is saving hiring managers time. On average, right now in the market, it’s taking anywhere from three to six months to hire somebody. We can hire that same person in under 30 days. The second value we bring is being able to provide a pool of quality candidates versus companies having to rely solely on inbound resumes from job boards, and possibly having to settle on a less-than-ideal candidate that fits within their company.
What is your market like? How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
It’s a small market that we’re in. We focus on marketing and technology recruiting, and there are probably only about four or five other agencies that are in this space. I think the biggest differentiator for us is our expertise in recruiting around very specific marketing technology platforms.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced while growing the company?
COVID and the challenges that followed are still prevalent. The timing of everything was pretty ironic. I quit my job at Adobe in May 2018, my wife and I got married in May 2019 and then we went on a three-month trip around the world. We started our business in September 2019. We were just getting going and had 10 employees with us. Then COVID hit. I had never had to lay anyone off before this and had to let half the company go. We went from working nonstop Monday through Friday to having no one pick up the phone. In those three months, I faced a lot of self-doubts. What did I do? I can’t believe I left my job. Are we going to be able to afford our mortgage? It was pretty scary, but COVID actually helped the recruiting space quite a bit because it allowed companies to recruit from anywhere. The whole idea of needing to be in the city to work at a specific company went away. That piece of it really amplified our business. Now, for instance, we were able to recruit for companies in San Francisco and find talent in Texas.
What are some of the goals you have for your company?
This year was the first year we won the Inc. 500, which was my number one goal when I started the company. We made it and it was so exciting. Currently, we primarily only do permanent placement so there’s no residual revenue. Moving forward, over the next three to five years, we’d like to start a contract division of the business that also serves different verticals. We’d love to go B2B services, even e-commerce, and then find other technologies that we can specialize and recruit in.
How do you like to lead your team? What is your company culture like?
We have a very diverse team. We have about 10 employees, of which more than half are female and it’s a female-run company led by my wife. We actually coined her the ‘culture queen’ and focusing on building and maintaining a strong company culture is one of her main focuses. We offer different benefits to our employees including covering 100% of their health insurance and pet insurance, 15 days PTO, allowing employees to bring their dogs into the office, team lunches every Friday, and a President’s Club trip where everybody in the company brings a plus one and we take a vacation together as a team. This year we’re going to Key Largo and it’s an expense-paid trip for our employees. Additionally, every quarter, we have the entire company take the day off and we either do something for charity or a fun activity like a baseball game or a cooking class. We try to do a lot of things together where it doesn’t always feel like work. We want everyone to feel like family.
Our one-year-old has his own office and he comes into the office a few times per week. My parents come to the office twice a week for lunch, and my wife’s dad is always dropping by, too. It’s a very family-oriented place, that’s at the core. For many of our employees, this is their first job right out of college. I think giving younger folks an environment where it’s not, “How many calls that you make?” but “How was your weekend?” or “How are you feeling?” Flipping the script and asking those specific questions versus asking about work all the time makes a huge difference. You’re only going to get more out of your team that way.
Do you have a proudest moment so far?
My most proud moments are when a customer calls me and tells me how great the people are on my team or at the job that we’re doing. They are representing me and our company. Hearing positive praise from our clients is why we do what we do.
What does it mean to be selected as an Honoree this year?
I think it’s proof that we’ve been working our butts off. We’re coming up on our fourth year, and we’ve already generated over 10 million in revenue. I think it is proof that because of the hard work everybody’s putting in the company is growing. The more it grows, the more fun stuff we can do as a team, the more people we can hire, and the more good that we can do for the community. Giving back to the community is huge for us. Our whole team comes together to put on a golf tournament each year, and this year’s event raised $30,000 for the Children’s Foundation. As we grow, not only does that benefit us and our team, but we’re able to do more good for people in need.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank?
My wife. Work is always on my mind, so sometimes I forget to check in with her. I’m so focused on driving the business forward, but she understands and fully embraces it. She loves the business as much as I do. It’s not easy working every single day with your significant other 20 feet away from you but talk about the ultimate business partner. It’s so rewarding to run a business with your significant other but even better to be able to raise your family in it. With our parents coming weekly and bringing our baby there, it’s our home away from home.
Take the leap. It’s going to be scary. It’s going to be tough. You’re going to be anxious. You’ll probably get anxiety even if you’ve never had anxiety. But, if you have a good idea, why not give it a try? Otherwise, you might go through your whole life wondering what if. Failing at something is way better than never doing something.
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