Rent-the-Help Rebrands, Young CEO Embraces Today’s Challenges
It is a gap in the labor market that ultimately birthed two businesses, and the young CEO at the helm is embracing the pandemic challenges he now faces.
“One of my favorite parts about being a business owner is being faced with challenges and then formulating different strategies to overcome them,” says Corey Divine, president of Candidate Source and a member of VACEOs. “The past six weeks have presented unique challenges for my employees, clients, and vendors and together we have had to make adjustments. It is important to realize that everyone is dealing with this pandemic and the only way we can survive is to support each other and work together.”
Corey Divine’s initial business, Rent-the-Help, opened in 2012. The business model filled a gap he saw in the residential labor market. It gave homeowners a place to go for help with odd jobs, like cleaning out a shed or helping with yard work.
Says the Charlottesville native: “In the eight years we’ve been in business, we’ve probably helped 5,000 people move or do an odd project, whether it be stacking firewood, setting up for a yard sale, or move to Florida or Texas,” he explains. “But as we got into more staffing and long-term placements in warehouses and administrative settings, the Rent-to-Help name just didn’t fit fully as we grew,” he adds.
Noticing the new niche, Divine developed a business designed to attract quality candidates and clients who were seeking long-term placements. And in 2020, Candidate Source was born.
Divine reports Candidate Source currently employs six different individuals to recruit and market his business.
“I’m really excited about the rebrand and how it positions us. I think that our team, most importantly, is excited about it. They all feel more confident telling people, ‘Hey, we’re with Candidate Source.’ They feel better. And what’s cool is that they’ve all been here, all my senior folks, who’ve been here for five plus years. So they’ve seen the evolution of the company grow and then they can enjoy this change as well,” he explains.
About the new challenges he is facing, he adds, “Since our team spends the majority of their days interviewing candidates, we have had to significantly adjust our operation to ensure we can continue to deliver our clients the people they need. While expanded unemployment benefits have made recruiting more challenging (applications have dropped by 90%), our team has gotten creative and has been able to deliver what our clients need. During these difficult times it is a privilege to continue to service our clients and we look forward to building even stronger relationships with them in the months to come.”
“Having my roundtable has been a blessing throughout the pandemic. The relationships I have built with roundtable #13 over the past few years have proven to be a solid rock during an otherwise unstable time.” – Corey Divine
“A GOOD INVESTMENT” AND “A BLESSING”
Corey Divine joined the Council in 2017, making him a relatively new member. What motivated him to join? “Because I wanted to invest in myself and make my business better by making myself better,” he tells us.
Adding, “I always joke that you might walk into your roundtable meeting or walk into a Quarterly Lunch and you’re just super-stressed or struggling with an issue in your business. And I can’t think of a time where I walked out more stressed than when I walked in. I always feel calmer. And I think that’s just because it provides an education and a confidence as you go about your day. You look at all these folks, at what they are doing and how they are impacting our community in a positive way. I want to do more of that. It breeds a growth mindset, which is really exciting.”
Members within the VA Council of CEOs are placed within confidential and highly-structured peer groups. A safe haven, where members share what is going on in their lives and in their businesses. The Roundtable experience sharing is about addressing the CEO as a whole.
Corey and two of his roundtable members enjoy golf together.
“Having my roundtable has been a blessing throughout the pandemic. The relationships I have built with roundtable #13 over the past few years have proven to be a solid rock during an otherwise unstable time,” says Divine. “We have spent many hours sharing resources, giving feedback, and just having simple conversations. Having fellow CEOs on speed dial who are navigating similar challenges is something that dollars can not buy. It has been great to see what so many VACEOs Members have done for our community and I look forward to continuing to work together in the months to come.“
True to his character, Divine is an active member, showing up at almost every event and even volunteering as chair of the Membership Committee. He’s quick to encourage his fellow members to become active in the VACEOs community as well.
“I encourage members to go to Council events. You won’t regret it,” he says. “The education is great and I feel like the more you invest in the community, the more the community will invest in you, and you will get more value from your membership. And I can speak firsthand because whenever I join organizations, I get in the weeds and try to help improve in any way I can and serve in any way I can. And it’s always benefited me in a positive way. It’s a good investment.”
Ready to invest in yourself? Virginia Council of CEOs has developed a special no-cost membership in response to COVID-19. Visit VACEOs Community Membership page to learn more.
(VIDEO) COREY DIVINE EXPLAINS WHY HE JOINED VA COUNCIL OF CEOs
Virginia CEOs Find Answers and Solace in Peer Groups
Melissa Ball takes a snapshot of her roundtable practicing safe social distancing during recent meeting.
To say that many small and mid-sized Virginia business owners find themselves on an emotional and operational roller coaster today is an understatement.
Connie Hom, CEO, Buckingham Greenery
“We as CEOs have been plummeted into chaos, and the levels of stress for us have accelerated exponentially,” says Connie Hom, CEO of Buckingham Greenery. “We are taking the lead in this crisis, and our teams look to us not only for empathy, but also for guidance and true leadership. This is probably the best test of how we’re leading.”
As the backbone of the U.S. economy, how will small business CEOs manage the COVID-19 crisis? Some, like Hom and Charlie Connell, CEO of PUNCH, are finding a safe haven in confidential (and virtual) peer roundtable meetups. Both Hom and Connell are members of the Virginia Council of CEOs, and Hom says her roundtable group has given her “the opportunity to vent challenges in a very safe place.”
“The feeling is that I’m not in this siloed by myself,” Hom explains. “This has been a fast-paced, changing environment. There are decisions as a CEO in regard to labor, clients and revenue, and the shared experiences have been very helpful. The virtual roundtable has truly been a breath of fresh air, and the Council membership has proven to be, for me, a port in the storm.”
Connell agrees. “My roundtable has always helped me deal with the emotional side of running a business. Now, more than ever, it has helped me navigate the business end of it. Without my roundtable’s support, I would not have been able to sift through all the information we were bombarded with in terms of the Payroll Protection Act and all the other support options that were put in front of business owners. Our experience-sharing has been more influential than any other resource in making the decisions I have made to deal with our current situation.”
(Left) Charlie Connell, CEO, PUNCH with his pups. (Right) Charlie’s roundtable enjoy a retreat together.
SOMETIMES YOU NEED A CRAZY CHECK
The nature of the confidential information shared within VACEOs peer roundtable groups means that trust among members often grows quickly and runs deep.
Melissa Ball of Ball Office Products
Melissa Ball, Managing Member at Ball Office Products, has been a member of VACEOs since 2011. She describes her roundtable as “a good, solid group with a high level of comfort with each other.” Where they once met once a month for several hours, they’re now meeting every week for an hour. She says the format of the meeting now is less structured than before, but it’s been an invaluable outlet for her and other members.
On top of managing her family at home, Ball is also managing new vendors, new customer relationships, new ways of handling freight inventory, and much more. “I’ve never worked harder,” she says. “Sometimes you just need a sanity check, you know what I mean? I’m like, ‘How crazy am I really for thinking this or doing this?’ And then I’ll be like, ‘Okay, it’s not just me.’ It might sound flippant, but it’s real. When you’re able to pose a question to somebody and say, ‘Okay, guys, here’s what I’m thinking,’ it’s helpful to hear what other people are doing, especially as it relates to payroll and HR and emotions.”
“THE MOST CRITICAL TIME IN YOUR BUSINESS TO FIND PEOPLE WHO CAN HELP YOU”
Many of the CEOs we spoke with reported that at times they’ve had almost too much information coming at them from well-meaning organizations and industry groups – and that it sometimes adds to the chaos.
JJ White, CEO of Dale Carnegie Southeast United States
JJ White, CEO of Dale Carnegie Southeast United States, perhaps most concisely expressed how many CEOs are feeling by saying, “Now, more than ever, is the most critical time in your business to find people who can help you get through this, but more than just get through it – actually create something in your business so that you’ll come out of this better than you’ve ever been before.”
Do you run a small or mid-sized business in Virginia? Don’t face these challenging times alone. Virginia Council of CEOs is now offering virtual roundtables across Virginia. Contact VACEOs today to learn more.
(Video) VACEOs CEO Chat Series: featuring Todd Mawyer of TK Promotions
This Member Chat episode was recorded on April 23, 2020.
In this VACEOs CEO Series Chat we meet Todd Mawyer, President of TK Promotions. One of the ways Todd and his team have responded to this crisis is to find ways to help others. His company soon partnered with Trolley House Refreshments to assemble and deliver goody bags to front line health workers at a local hospital. Todd is determined to find the positive and “face the storm like a buffalo.” Listen in as Scot McRoberts, Executive Director of VACEOs, checks in with this CEO.
EDITED TRANSCRIPT
Scot McRoberts:
Well. Hey Scot McRoberts with Virginia Council of CEOs here. I’m back for another CEO chat and today I’m talking with Todd Mawyer. Todd is owner and CEO of TK promotions. Thanks for being with me. Todd. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us what you do for a living?
Todd:
Thanks Scot. Appreciate you having me. TK promotions is a promotional products branding firm based in Innsbrook and we are in the reputation business. There are a lot of ways to brand yourselves as a company and we have chosen the promotional products niche as an advertising medium to focus on and really try to focus on helping clients build their brands and their reputations within the marketplace. We have several segments of business. One is the, the government as well as another segment is a higher end market as well as corporate clients that we work with. Both locally and nationally.
Scot:
Yeah, I’ve seen some of the work you’ve done for JMU, my Alma mater. Always happy to see, see that logo on stuff. And you’ve done some work for Virginia council of CEOs as well. So yeah, I appreciate that. I think it’s pretty critical that you get your brand on a, a lot of stuff and particularly in these days where we’re using a lot of this video and this visual medium I’m going to have to do a better job of getting our logo onto people like you, the CEOs in our community. So I’ll be talking to you about that here. So tough times for most businesses in the marketing space. Is that true?
Todd:
It’s certainly a tough time. I think in general, certainly in the marketing space as typically marketing is one of the first budgets to be cut when revenue drops. There’s a story I heard recently about how to change how, you know, face different storms and it was basically a cow will run away from a storm and it basically elongates the ability for them to face the storm by running away from it as opposed to a buffalo that runs into a storm. It phases it quicker, but it gets through it faster.
And what we’ve chosen to as a company and what we’ve advised our clients on is facing the storm in a way that, that looks at it, but then it gets through it faster by developing marketing strategies some of which might be digital marketing and different things like that, but some of it might be thinking of your clients in a way and touching them to where they, where they are today and that’s at home and interacting with them through a tangible promotional product.
And so we’ve been educating a lot of clients and having lots of conversations on what that looks like for their specific need. And that’s the kind of the approach that we’ve chosen to do as a company. And invest more in marketing during this time, invest in our clients abilities to do that for themselves.
Scot:
Well, that’s certainly what we’re doing, that’s facing the storm as the way to go. A lot of our Members I’ve seen them doing some more additional marketing or different kind of marketing or facing new markets. So I think that that’s brilliant. Now one of the things I saw you did was you use your resources, which is the tangible product, promotional product kind of space to provide some support for our healthcare workers. Can you tell me about that project?
Todd:
Yeah, so I’ve been viewing the critical care employees in the healthcare community just as much as I view soldiers going overseas and being deployed for military service. They’re sacrificing their own lives essentially to care for others.
We work with HCA, which is Chippenham hospital and Johnson Willis Hospital in South side and had thought about how we can provide a positive impact for those on the front lines and devised a goody bag project that we worked with Trolley House Refreshment — Scott Halloran and Cat Carbone at Trolley House — to get a number of their products that they had an inventory some of which might be needed to be moved due to expiration dates and things like that. So we were utilizing some products from them to put in a bag that would give critical care employees, something to kind of keep them moving throughout the day as well as some tangible promotional products. And a thank you message of just a sincere gratitude for their service. And we kitted them all together and took him over there to the hospital and they distributed them to all those folks on the front line and really got some good feedback from them and a lot of appreciation for what we did.
Scot:
That’s a great thing to do and a great example of just partnering with likeminded business owners. That’s fantastic. Thank you for doing that. Yeah. So life is, is really odd right now. I’m in my living room. You happen to be in your office. Are you working out of your office most of the time or what’s going on?
Todd:
The first three and a half weeks I spent at home as we watched all this unfold last week I chose to come into the office for a few days and I’ve done that as well this week. Just for a different change of perspective and it’s allowed me to accomplish the same work with the same amount of isolation, but with a brand new hat on. And it’s it’s allowed me to think more creatively. It’s allowed me to have some, probably some extended conversations with, with folks in my quote unquote normal environment at work. And but also balance out with going home. As you can imagine.
You know, working from home is got its own challenges but working at the office when I’m a wife and three kids are at home by themselves also provides its own challenges. So I’ve tried to balance that as best as I know how. And fortunately I have a very strong wife at home that’s been very good with our children.
Scot:
Awesome. Now how about your staff, your employees? You’re a sales and marketing organization and a lot of what you do is consulting with your clients to help them advance their marketing objectives. What are your people doing? Are they talking to your clients? Are they prospecting or what are they doing?
Todd (07:02):
A lot of what we have been doing the last several weeks Scot, certainly engaging our clients in a new way. Engaging them as human beings and not just engaging them as prospects and clients. And just kind of providing a space that that they can talk openly and just talk with our team about life.
I have had a number of Zoom calls and Microsoft team calls with clients. Just checking in kind of talking about life, their challenges, working from home with kids talking about canceled and or postponed events when they might be happening, if they’re going to be rescheduled. And really just kinda getting a better idea of the landscape of which our clients are faced with now.
Some of them are still unknown. Some of them have become more clear in the last couple of days but really just engaging them and engaging our team. We spend a lot of time devising new marketing strategies internally with, with some accounts. It really tried to clean house as far as clean up the way that we do business, why we do it the way we do and kind of strengthening some of the processes that we’ve been operating under, but making them even more impressive as we go back to market when things turn around and be even better than we work for.
Scot:
Fantastic. Well, Todd, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. I’ve got some takeaways here about, you know, branding yourself and your organization, and particularly, I admire the way you like the Buffalo facing the storm, getting through it faster, probably coming out stronger on the other side. So, good job. Thanks for your time today.
Todd:
Absolutely. It’s good to be with you, Scot.
View all CEO Chat Series videos: (VACEOs YouTube channel)
(Video) Executive Director Addresses Membership During COVID-19 (April 28)
Listen in as Scot McRoberts, Executive Director, VA Council of CEOs, addresses VACEOs Members and Sponsors in this “State of the Union” address.
Says, Scot McRoberts, Executive Director, VA Council of CEOs: “I’ve never been more proud to say I’m the Executive Director of Virginia Council of CEOs.
We’re serving more small and midsize company CEOs than we have ever in our 20- year history. We’ve invited dozens of CEOs who are in our pipeline to join, to come join our community for free and with no commitment. We’ve rolled out 17 programs in the last six weeks. My staff has been scrambling. That’s about seven [times] what we had planned. We’ve converted our Retreat to our virtual event, and we have more coming.
Our Sponsors have stepped up in ways large and small, mostly giving away what they do to help us make it through this.
What I’m seeing is CEOs who are resilient, creative, and determined to make it through this crisis. We have much more coming in May and June — trying to continue to connect our community so they can help each other make it through this.
We look forward to having you with us on that journey. And so here’s my one word close: Forward.”
(Video) A SMB Guide to Managing Priorities During COVID-19 Crisis
Early April, just as the COVID-19 crisis was completely revealing itself in Virginia, VACEOs Executive Director Scot McRoberts spoke with Sam Dibert, the President of Dibert Valve and Fitting Company, about the steps he was taking to manage his priorities and team.
Besides meeting with his VACEOs Roundtable every week, (instead of monthly), Sam finds that his “3-3-3 Tool” is a simple and effective way for business owners to reduce a lot of the static noise and information overload that naturally happens during a crisis. Below is a partial transcript of his conversation. (Find this CEO Chat and others on the VACEOs YouTube channel.)
How are you managing “this new normal”? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.
Open example Excel spread sheet
3-3-3 Method: A SMB Guide to Managing Priorities During COVID-19 Crisis by Sam Dibert (edited transcript)
SCOT: “Tell us about the tool and why you turn to it.”
SAM: “Well, it’s something that I was just thinking about as this began to unfold and things were just changing so fast that I found myself getting overwhelmed with the amount of information coming from so many sources — everybody you knew. I was just feeling overwhelmed. What we thought was if we could take a break and try to look at the future in three distinct segments — three days, three weeks, and three months — and then build our plans and what we need to do around those timeframes, it helped a lot.
So the Three-Day, those are the challenges you see right in front of you. You know, you have to do it. It might be getting your loan in, [or taking care of a] real specific issue with a customer. Maybe somebody gets sick.
Three Weeks are our challenges that are still around the corner. You know, they’re there. You don’t have to deal with them right yet. You know you don’t have to act on them. Maybe you need just be formulating some thinking and some strategies.
And the Three-Month is really about the unknown, and that’s what’s over the horizon. How will we know when we’re kinda hitting the backend of this one? What will be the new normal? So it’s a lot about trying to figure out what kind of information can I count on to help inform me, help me do that. So that’s really the gist of it. And then when people see the tool, there’s just some prompts there [to help them think].
It’s not a project management tool, but it will help you really sort through what you need to do next and help you prioritize things.
I think everybody wants to know what do I do next, what do I do after that, and what to do after that. And you know, when you get to that point, you’ve got enough to do for now.
It helps you sleep at night, helps you do the next thing. But you might also find when you look into this tool, it’ll help you to enlist your leadership team — people in your company who are probably more anxious than you.”
Related COVID-19 video:
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