The owners of NewFound Recruiting haven’t wasted any time.
© Photo by Cole Burston. Steve Stanley (left) and Todd LeSage of NewFound Recruiting.
Slightly more than three years after it launched, the professional staffing and recruiting firm now has clients from coast to coast and rapidly growing annual revenues.
“It’s beyond my wildest expectations what we’ve done,” says Steve Stanley, one of NewFound’s managing partners.
“I’d worked for a couple of other companies. A lot of my clients gave me the idea. They said, ‘Have you thought of doing this on your own?’ It scared the crap out of me, but I thought, ‘Let’s go for it.’ One thing led to another and there were two of us in my house. A third partner joined us a while later. And then at one point, there were five of us in my house and I was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get out of my house,’” laughs Mr. Stanley.
He attributes NewFound’s success to its razor-sharp focus on the private sector.
“We do very little government work. We didn’t focus just on Ottawa. We do work right from St. John’s out to Victoria,” he adds.
NewFound does a lot of work in the oil and gas sector in Newfoundland and in Alberta. The market, says Mr. Stanley, is “very, very hot.”
How did the company stand out from the crowd? “We don’t have clients; we look at them more as partners. We don’t look at this as a one-time thing when we sign an agreement with a company. We want to put this agreement in place so we focus on multiple roles and we can work with you down the road.”
And having the right staff to reach out to clients is crucial, he says.
“We’ve hired the right people. You can call it luck, you can call it good fortune, or you can call it good hiring, but we’ve got the right people.”
Part of this stems from an internship program NewFound runs with Algonquin College. “We’ve been very successful recruiting out of the Algonquin program. So, not only do we hire recruiters, but we hire recruiters who have HR backgrounds. They have a better understanding of the whole process,” he says.
Now that NewFound has grown to 23 people in a very short time, Mr. Stanley’s goal over the next year is to mentor and train them. “We want a culture where people want to be here long-term,” he says.
FOUNDED: 2010
LOCAL HEAD COUNT: 18
MARKETS: High tech, oil and gas, engineering
PRODUCT/SERVICE: Recruitment services
THREE-YEAR REVENUE GROWTH: 587.48%
Alexia Naidoo 