When I started my first healthcare staffing agency over two decades ago, it began in a tiny office with payroll that was funded by my prior company stock options. In our hurry to generate revenue, we were anxious to earn business from anyone that would listen to us, and populate our database with candidates as quickly as possible. Some of the hard lessons I learned was about the “true cost” of revenue.
Competing against well-established medical staffing recruiting firms, our first foray into the market faced two two familiar obstacles. How to attract clients (Demand), and how to attract candidates (Supply) We found that many clients had annual agreements with their staffing firms, and were reluctant to let a newcomer break their contract cycle. Despite this hesitance, we did find some that seemed to be more than happy to open their doors to us.
The second problem was building a database of candidates to provide services. Once again, it was difficult to attract applicants that were comfortable in their environment of known contracts and contact personnel. Again, despite this obstacle, through the law of large numbers, we were able to begin building our database.
Now, for the bad news. Without adequately checking the credit worthiness of the original clients signed, we found that they WERE low hanging fruit because their payment history was ROTTEN! We learned the hard way that some accounts are just not worth the continual exasperation of trying to collect long past due invoices.
This mistake alone was enough to sink a lot of companies, but the reality quickly became worse! Without extreme measures in place to adequately qualify candidates, we found we had our hands full of no-call, no-shows, and DNRs! The candidates we had released to the market had already had their issues with other firms, and we became the last resort!
It was largely the result of those original EXPENSIVE mistakes in 1994 that my partner and I determined to build a healthcare staffing and scheduling application that would automate and investigate everything we were doing , and prevent us from being our own worst enemy. The product has seen more than 40 major revisions since then and we continually challenge our 12 developers and project managers to keep making the software product better and better to help our clients hire the best.
