By Carol J. Carroll

Hitting $1,000,000
Our first $1 million in sales took four of us 19 months to achieve, and our sales unit averaged $10.15. We were all very excited, as it is a huge milestone in our industry, validated our company with our financial institutions and proved our overall plan would work long term.

When I started in 1989, my goal was to build a successful business with a reputation for providing consistent and dependable service. I chose the staffing industry because of my experience at United Way, where I was in charge of the Foster Grand Parent program. There I recruited and assigned unpaid volunteers to help children with special needs.

The staffing industry allowed me to take my United Way skills and apply them to a for-profit business. I was confident that companies would be willing to pay for excellent service, even in times of recession.

In fact, Grafton Staffing was started right in the middle of a prolonged recession. I had zero clients, zero reputation and zero income. I simply had an overwhelming desire to succeed, combined with the fact that I could not afford to fail. My business plan consisted of minimal research based on gut instinct, minimal cost of entry and pure desire to be a success. That is definitely not what they teach you in business school! My philosophy was that if our competitors' doors were still open, then we just needed to out-perform them and not quit selling and servicing just because there was a recession. The result is a multi-million dollar staffing company located in Overland Park.

Setting the Goal
The goal was never to make $1 million. The goal was to build a business that would generate $1 million based on the level of service we provide to our clients. I knew that if my clients were happy and the service we provided exceeded their expectations, the opportunity for growth and revenue would follow.

As in many start-ups, the first years were lean, although we did make a profit in our first year. However, as we all know, it takes capital to expand and banks are reluctant to lend to a service-based business with no hard assets. So in order to expand, we simply plowed the profits back into the business to finance our growth. We hired more staff, opened more offices, created new lines of service and by 1991 achieved more than $1 million in revenue.

Did we celebrate when we got to $1 million? Absolutely! In fact, we continue to celebrate in new and fun ways each time we set a new record. It is exciting to meet your goals and see the growth, because you will have times where you stall out or slide backwards. Those are tougher to weather, but fun on the other side as you start growing again.

Second Million and Beyond
Did we set goals? You bet, and they change as the economy and opportunities change.

I am now working on my second multi-million dollar company, called TalentSecure. TalentSecure is an applicant tracking, recruiting and staffing software package that evolved out of our need in the staffing industry to have a software system that was expandable, had easy to fill out applications for candidates (we receive thousands of résumés a year), electronic online timesheets, digital signature for documents and a career portal to eliminate data entry and increase our ability to sell and market our staffing business.

TalentSecure allowed Grafton to continue to grow after the 2001 downturn and save both hard and soft dollar costs. It was important for us to stay competitive by using technology and again be able to provide better service, technology and reports for our clients.

Carol J. Carroll is the CEO of Grafton Staffing and TalentSecure. You can reach her at (913) 451-3733 or