Reinventing Family Business

LEAPJob's story of entrepreneurship

By Jeremy Miller & Marcus Miller

2009 is a monumental year for LEAPJob. Our business turns 20, we are growing, profitable and to top it all off we are having a blast building our company. The past twenty years have been an amazing ride for our company and our family.

LEAPJob is a sales and marketing recruiting company, but we haven't always been this way. The business was originally founded by Donna and Marcus Miller as Miller & Associates, an IT recruiting agency.

Donna and Marcus opened for business during a difficult time – very similar to the economic woes we are facing today. The recession of the early 1990's was looming, unemployment levels were rapidly increasing. We slugged it out, and positioned our business for the IT sector. This proved ideal, and we are rode the Y2K and dotcom booms through the 90's and early 2000's.

Every family business faces a significant business challenge at some point, and Miller & Associates was no different. After the Y2K decline and then the dotcom bubble burst, our business significantly declined. It was time to reinvent ourselves again. In 2004 Jeremy, our eldest son, joined the business with a goal to change the status quo. It was timely, and we were ready to listen. Together we created a new business.

The changes were fast and furious. We changed everything: a new name, a new brand, a new service offering, a new company. We didn't want just evolutionary change, we wanted revolutionary change. We were reinventing our brand and our business with the goal to rule a specific segment of the recruiting industry – we just didn't know which one yet.

The first thing we changed was our identity:

As you can see: Revolutionary Change. The LEAPJob identity was built directly for the web. This meant our name had to fulfill several criteria:

• We must have the .com domain name. As you can imagine, finding a memorable .com name is very challenging.
• It had to fulfill a customer experience. A career is very much like a journey. You can be moving forward or backwards, stuck or taking a leap forward. LEAPJob reflects the journey metaphor as we help people leap their career forward.
• It had to be short and memorable. The word play on leapfrog has been a very sticky element for our name. It’s easy to remember, it's easy to refer, and we are the first call when people are looking to change careers.

With our new identity and commitment to growth, we did a lot of soul searching. We had spent so much time in IT, the question became what else could we focus our business on that played to our strengths and passions.

New ideas come from the most unexpected places. In our situation, we found our passion at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Some families talk about sports or politics at a family event. Not ours. We talk about sales. We have a family culture that loves the sport of building business, the hunt of finding customers and the competition of winning sales. It's what we talk about at work; it's what we talk about at home. This passion was not overtly obvious to us, but when we realized this was what we thought about, talked about and worked on most often it was only natural to focus LEAPJob on sales.

In less than two years, our family built LEAPJob into Toronto's premier sales recruiting agency. We are the first call when sales people are looking for the next step in their career, and we are the first call when companies want to hire exceptional sales people.

Achieving a first call advantage doesn't just happen. It's more than a new name, logo and strategic focus. We achieved our position by being innovative marketers. LEAPJob's marketing platform is multi-faceted, and the source of our competitive advantage. We clearly know that talented people don't change jobs every day. At any given time only 3% of the workforce is looking for jobs. This is a small group of people, especially when you consider how competitive it is to hire great people.

Traditionally, marketing programs simply focus on the here and now. A job ad only speaks to people looking for jobs right now. At LEAPJob, we changed our mindset to engage sales people three years before they are considering changing jobs. The challenge is what to talk about in your marketing programs when you aren't selling anything. We chose to share our expertise. We created email newsletters, blogs and PR campaigns to share insights into what is happening in the sales community.

Every year our reach has grown. Today, we connect with over 10,000 sales professionals in the GTA monthly. We share our insights and our expertise freely, and we use this as an opportunity to build a trusted relationship with our market.

The strategy is paying off. Our business is up significantly year-over-year, which is striking when you consider the current economic conditions. At the same time we have cut our advertising costs, increased our reach and we are sitting in a wonderful position when this economy returns to a growth mode.

We know from our history that we cannot rest on our laurels, and we will continue to innovate for our future success. We are continuing to evolve our business, our services and our reach with a clear goal: help our customers drive sales. With this vision in mind, we are excited to see how we can grow even further for our next ten year anniversary.



Marcus Miller is the President of LEAPJob, and Jeremy Miller is a Partner in the firm. LEAPJob is a sales and marketing recruiting firm in Toronto, Canada. You can reach Jeremy at Jeremy.Miller@LEAPJob.com or 905.281.3090, Ext. 22. For more information on LEAPJob please visit http://www.LEAPJob.com.