By Sandra DeStigter, Founder/CEO at HR-Rethought
342 coffees in 3 months is a lot of coffees but that is how HRR started. If you are reading this and you were in this group of coffees: THANK YOU! Without you, we would not be where we are today.
But before we talk more about this let’s time travel together back to 2015….
I loved my corporate job. And I would still be there if we didn’t decide to have kids. But between my travel, my husband’s travel, and not having family in town… it was too much! I remember thinking maybe I could do something on the side but I really had no idea what that would even look like or where to start. So I sent an email to my “network” of my 5 former bosses that pretty much said, “I can’t work in recruiting or HR full time, but love what I do. If you have any projects or know of any small businesses that don’t need a full time person, let me know, I’d love to help them!”
One of them introduced me to my very first client, and for that I will always be so grateful. My client was a software company with 30 employees. I started the following week! From there I was introduced to a few more companies over the next three months and doing HR work (but not in a full-time capacity). I kept telling small business owners, “I will be your HR person but on a part time basis.” Fractional wasn’t a word back in 2015 – or if it was nobody really knew what it meant. At the time, that term was the best I could find. Until 2020 I purposefully kept the business small. I continued getting calls and emails, but had two more babies which meant that I had very limited capacity with three kids under the age of four.
So back to Q4 of 2019! I thought it was a great time to start growing my business. Looking back, it’s really funny to me that I thought the timing was right to start growing my business because my kids were “older”. They were 1, 2.5, and 4.
Getting the Word Out
I was trying to figure out how to get the word out about my small business and knew I had to start somewhere. The easiest “somewhere” was meeting people for coffee. I had 342 coffees in three months. (In case you didn’t catch that… three hundred and forty-two coffees in three months.) My goal was to get another introduction from each coffee that I had.
The coffee meeting plan worked! My little business started growing. I hired my first employee, and continued to grow providing HR and Recruiting solutions for small businesses. This began in Kansas City, and then we started having some out-of-state clients, the industries varied and I actually still love this part of the business today: Each one of our clients is SO different from the others. There is always something to learn and a creative process to put into place.
The setbacks have been hard. The falls have been HARD falls and they continue coming at me. But like every other small business owner, I continue to get up, brush myself off and follow my mission of breaking the “HR police” stigma. The lessons I’ve learned are many and I know I’m not done learning. I am grateful for this business. I am grateful for the people that have come and gone, and I am SO grateful for the people that are here on my team today.
We do HR differently for small businesses. Want to know more? Please give us a call.