Dear Partners, Staff, and Clients,
Wow, what a first five months of the year. I’m not really sure where to begin, so I will review our four corners to start with.
Safety- We have had a stronger year in 2017 with protecting our team members. We have still had some claims that give me concern on how we are screening our team members and customers. However, we have been able to avoid many accidents into turning into lost time. As everyone knows a lost time accident is what will drive our, and my individual Area Reps cost up. We have also been able to close out some really bad claims from the past year or so that will also help us going forward. So continue to stay focused on safety, for all the sales in the world won’t help if you have claims, and more important than money is the health and well being of our team members!
Sales- We are currently on budget company wide; with some offices blowing their budget out of the water and others not so much, but like safety, having multiple offices allows for the collective whole to cover some of the offices that are struggling. This does not give a pass to those not carrying their weight, but it does give a strong player some cover for a blip on the radar. We have had more offices over 100k per week, and even had two offices hit over 200k in the same week; Dallas and Jacksonville. As I write this letter, we are coming off of a holiday billing week, but still billed over 1.35 million. Congratulations to everyone for your hard work and dedication to our mission and philosophy.
Profit- Many of you took to heart the need to raise rates in 2017, and now some of you have hit your SUTA max for your regular team members; thus your margins are higher and driving more profit to the bottom line. Because of this, we had our largest distribution to our Area Reps last April than we have had in our short history of this program. Unlike other sales driven programs where ownership tries to figure out how to pay out less when people are doing so well, I’m celebrating the success of this program and how many lives we are changing. We are also seeing team members make more now than in my 28-year history in the staffing industry.
Collections- It was not long ago that I was going crazy over collections. We were running over 6% AR above 90 days; that kills both cash flow and heightens the likelihood of bad debt. However, as of last week, our over 90 days AR was under 2% with our total AR being over 9 million dollars. Customer selection is critical, and you are all doing a great job with this currently; keep up the great work.
In my last letter I spoke of us opening new locations, and at this point, we have KS and Austin both up and running. Expansion only makes sense if we can drive both top and bottom line safe dollars. Both of these offices are well on their way. We have also just launched our new IT/Professional Perm Staffing Division; the web site will be up and running by mid-June and the data base of team members has been developed. This division is headed by Robin Kalinowski and is called QRS- Quality Recruiting Services.
Also since my last letter, we had our annual Contractors Cup; this year we raised a record $52,000 with almost 43k netting directly to the charity after our cost. QLM donated well over 12k this year to help make this an outstanding event. Thanks to Kelley and Michelle for running this and all of my staff for their support to make this an outstanding day.
Another hot topic for 2017 was the new Navision update; this was finally rolled out in April and was actually the smoothest software update I have gone through; thus the reason we had to wait until April. This, like all systems, is never complete, but the improvements have been very well received. As with any system, if you don’t have accurate information put in the information kicked out will be faulty, and since we have multiple companies we run for workers’ compensation reasons, it is critical to have the correct person in the correct company. We actually have three companies we staff through-QLM, QSS, and Cat/QLM; so it is critical to load the correct company and team member.
Speaking of companies, we are in the process of getting Cat/QLM officially switched over to QLM; we will still have multiple companies so we can take advantage of both WC programs, but we will have QLM and QLM-C; getting our common branding of QLM is critical at all levels. We are seeing more and more opportunities throughout the country based on our expanded footprint, so it is critical that we are seen as one company.
Lastly, I’m excited about this July’s annual meeting. We have much to cover and have many breakout sessions designed to get input from the field at all levels.
As always, I am blessed to be apart of such a wonderful organization. We are truly living our mission and philosophy, and it shows in the results we are seeing.
God Bless,
Mark Sr.
