Life was good for Cheryl DeWolf. She had just taken a manager’s job at a national staffing agency in Providence, bought her first house and was raising a young child.
It was December 1990. But things soon began to unravel. Within a month, then-Gov. Bruce G. Sundlun closed 45 Rhode Island credit unions when a state-charter deposit insurance fund failed. By June, the national agency where DeWolf worked announced it was closing its Rhode Island branch.
“They decided that Rhode Island’s economy was more of a challenge than they were prepared to entertain,” DeWolf recalled. “As personally devastated as I was by that announcement, looking back, it was one of the most opportune moments of my career.”
That’s because DeWolf used the closure as an opportunity to launch The Greysmith Cos., a temporary-staffing agency and recruiter that specializes in the accounting and finance sector.
At the time DeWolf started the business, there was only one other temp-staffing agency in Rhode Island handling accounting and finance jobs. She sensed there was enough business to go around, even though she had no experience in entrepreneurship.
The competition has grown stiffer over the years, with bigger national firms moving into the territory. “But we’ve been fortunate, or skillful perhaps, in protecting our market share,” DeWolf said.
Now the agency has 13 employees and handles temporary staffing and “strategic hiring” needs of companies in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. A division of the company, GreysmithAlden, handles the recruiting services.
In the most recent economic downturn, Greysmith has only seen one year of declining revenue, in 2008, and that was because a big contract with Brooks Pharmacy ended after the drugstore chain was purchased by Rite Aid Corp.
In fact, as things grew bleaker in the general economy, Greysmith took a contrarian action and has added to its sales staff, DeWolf said.
DeWolf got her start in the staffing arena even before graduating from college. She worked for a temp agency that had her fill in administrative roles, including conducting low-level interviews.
After graduating in the mid-1980s, she moved to North Carolina with her husband and struggled to find a job in her field of study, health care administration. So she returned to staffing, taking a job at a Fayetteville, N.C., agency that handled administrative and clerical positions.
That came to an end only several months after taking a management job with an accounting- and-financing staffing firm with a Providence branch.
When the bottom dropped out of the economy, the company backed out of the market, leaving DeWolf without a job. She declined to name the firm.
While it was “the first black mark” of her career, DeWolf saw it as a chance to branch out on her own, specifically in the accounting-and-finance staffing industry.
“I had about seven or eight years experience,” she recalled. “With the encouragement of very supportive family members, I used my personal savings to make the leap.”
She made it a point not to put her name on the company – Greysmith is a combination of her mother’s names – for fear that she’d appear to be a one-person operation. “It was important to me early on that I not be perceived as too small a company,” DeWolf said. “And The Greysmith Cos. had anonymity to it.”
One of the first challenges DeWolf faced: Six months after her launch in 1991, another accounting-finance search and staffing firm materialized, this one with four principals who had solid connections to the region.
“At the time, I had to wonder if there was a distinct possibility that they could put me out of business,” DeWolf said.
But she has survived for two decades. Not that there haven’t been cutbacks.
At one point in the early 2000s, the company had about 25 employees at four offices in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In the post-Sept. 11, 2001, downturn, DeWolf made the decision to consolidate the most profitable pieces of the business in Providence.
Greysmith has seen steady growth since. DeWolf credits her senior staff members, who have been undeterred by the most recent downturn.
“They’ve seen it before,” she said. And so has DeWolf. •
COMPANY PROFILE
The Greysmith Cos.
OWNERS: Cheryl DeWolf, president
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Recruiting, contract and temporary-placement firm
LOCATION: 321 South Main St.,
Providence
EMPLOYEES: 13
YEAR FOUNDED: 1991
ANNUAL SALES: WND
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