Exclusive Interview: Corporate Brokers Co-CEO Quinn Salamandra Talks on the Remarkable Growth of His Company

Corporate Brokers, LLC., is among the fastest growing staffing companies in the United States. It has four main business lines: Temporary Placement Services, Permanent Placement Services, Retained Search, and Retention and Payroll Services.

Temporary staffing accounts for approximately 90 percent of Corporate Brokers’ operations, and the company was founded in 2003 by Quinn Salamandra and Shane Ireland, both of whom were roommates at Western Maryland College.

They started up by working for a large Baltimore-based staffing company where they learned about the industry. In 2002, they started discussing plans to create Corporate Brokers.

“I knew Shane for many years, I trusted him and I knew that he would be an excellent business partner to start this venture with,” Salamandra told Ib’s Blog.

“We knew we wanted to do something more, we knew we wanted to go into business together.”

Corporate Brokers in 2008 generated revenue of $7.6 million and in 2009 ranked number 287 by INC 500 as one of the fastest growing-privately owned companies in the United States.

In January 2010, SmartCEO honored the company with its Future 50 Award as one of the 50 fastest growing companies in the Greater Baltimore region.

Mr. Salamandra attributes much of the company’s success to its people.

“The main thing is our people,” Salamandra said.

“Our internal people are our first key competitive advantage. We hire people who fit our culture and have a desire to succeed and win.”

Salamandra said that he and Ireland created an opportunity for employees to be free thinkers and entrepreneurs, providing them with an ownership mentality in environment that breeds successful people, and this comes along with amazing unlimited potentials.

“When they walk in through the door they already have the ownership mentality to realize that every deal is a make-or-break for us,” Salamandra said.

“We work better, harder, and simply faster to provide the top talent in the market in a timely manner.”

Salamandra said with temporary staffing, key elements that makes the company successful are, first, Quality: being able to provide the best resource out there to do a job; second, Speed to Execution: not only having to find the best talent, but to do it in a timely manner because it is a very competitive market place; and third, retaining that talent.

“We have several different processes in place which helps us retain the best talent, offering our consultants with paid time off,” Salamandra said. “We do reviews with our consultants—as employers, we do quarterly reviews with our clients; lunches, and several things that truly make them feel part of the team.”

With an unemployment rate of more than nine percent in the U.S., Salamandra said individuals looking for jobs are not the only ones posed with challenges, but companies as well. He said the last year came along with a lot of supply and demand issues with a very large supply of talent and not too much demand.

“Our core focus was to continue to provide what we felt were the best people for the positions and that meant simply that we just had to interview harder.

“We had to go out there and truly find people that were right for the positions, not people that were willing to do the job because they didn’t have a job, but provide our clients with simply who we felt were the most skilled professionals for these positions,” Salamandra said.

Salamandra said there has been a major increase in temporary staffing following the latest recession, adding that the economy in general is recovering to the point where employers are looking to increase staff.

“They are spending money again and there is work to be done,” Salamandra said.

“It comes down to what we feel is we are in the right place at the right time. Companies are hiring again; companies are going to hire temporary employees because they need people to come in and get the job done quickly.

“There are definitely some bright spots here and what we’ve seen since about October [2009] time frame, we’ve seen a major pickup in requirements, major pickup in requisitions for employees, and at the same time companies are still being cautious.”

Salamandra said companies are interviewing three to four times for a contract employee instead of conducting just one interview in order to ensure they are getting the best talent.

And while the economy is getting better (or at least that is our hope and prayer), Corporate Brokers continue to thrive, building on their successful achievements in the last three years, especially.

“Corporate Brokers, as an INC 500 company, we’ve experienced tremendous growth since we started the business,” Salamandra said.

“We have grown this business about 807 percent in three years from 2006 to 2009. Our core business is based off of excellent customer service and great relationships.”

Aside from not just hiring “future leaders,” and hoping “to see them progress through our process nicely into a leadership role down the road,” Salamandra said Corporate Brokers has ten core principles which they “pretty much live and die by.”

These principles are: High Touch, Consultant Focused, Flexibility, Partnership, Work Ethic, Selectivity, Ethics, People, Premier Service Partner, and Ownership.

“One of our key principles is that we are flexible and we really are, as our mission statement says. We build a recruiting solution around our clients’ needs so we don’t try to force our process on any one,” Salamandra said.

“We try to work with companies that understand and respect what we do but also, every client is different, every client’s needs are different. So in general what we like to do is build a process that works for our clients’ specific needs and that is a huge part of why we’ve been so successful.”

Some of the determinants of Corporate Brokers’ success in the next three to five years, said Salamandra, are, “We are going to grow based upon our clients’ needs. We are going to continue to not lose sight of what got us here and got us this far, which are our ability to be flexible, our ability to be easy to work with, and our ability to provide a great service and not compromise those values.”

Corporate Brokers currently has offices in Annapolis, Maryland; Yardley, Pennsylvania; Florham Park, New Jersey; San Diego, California; and Fort Myers, Florida.

Salamandra said they hope to open up new markets and offices in different geographic locations, possibly including in North Carolina, Chicago, and Massachusetts.

For more information, visit Corporate Brokers’ official website by Clicking Here.

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