When Francy Lucido helped found her Warren, Mich.-based recruitment, staffing and placement firm, Michigan Staffing some 25 years ago, she had the same hopes and dreams for success every entrepreneur takes into business with them.
And Lucido, the co-founder and president of Michigan Staffing, has realized the kinds of dreams business owners hope for. Michigan Staffing, a Best and Brightest Companies to Work For winner, has reached the $20 million level in sales.
And, while she called the trip to success an “up-and-down” journey, she knows it sounds cliché, but she said it all came down to the firm’s ability to establish and maintain relationships.
“It certainly is not linear by any stretch of the imagination,” said Lucido, who earned bachelor’s and masters degrees from Michigan State University. “In terms of how we got to this point, it really … was keeping our eyes on relationships. It really sounds so basic, but whether it was our clients or whether it was our contractors on assignment, our team internally, and putting that first and foremost and developing that over time, keeping our clients’ long-term retention of clients because we were focused on relationships … is one of the things that really made the difference.
“The other thing is this, I think honestly, resilience,” she added. “Yeah, in being able to ride the ups and downs and still believe in your vision and know that your words, your hard work and your commitment to your values will eventually pay off.”
Lucido sat down to talk about business issues during the most recent episode of “CEO Thought Leadership Series on LinkedIn Live,” the discussion series hosted by the National Association of Business Resources.
Produced in conjunction with the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For and Corp! Magazine, the series is hosted by NABR CEO Jennifer Kluge and features business leaders from around the country.
Jennifer Kluge: CEOs have been through a lot with the Great Recession, the pandemic ups and downs, with talent wars, etc. How do you define that resilience in making success?
Francy Lucido: I think it’s a mindset. It’s honestly like an inside-out job, managing your own emotions, finding ways to maintain and gain continued strength, diving in and leading by example, rolling up your sleeves yourself. Everyone can see that you’re committed at every level within the organization and just maintaining that belief system and reminding yourself over and over because it really takes so much work to stay in the right mindset, to be there for your people.”
Kluge: There’s a lot going on in your industry. Some companies are aggressively hiring others have softened their hiring. What are the greatest obstacles related to talent?
Lucido: We have employees working from unskilled to C-Suite. On the professional side, the biggest challenge we hear from our clients is not being able to offer 100% remote work. They have talent they want to bring in, but the demands on the candidate side are pretty steadfast. They’ll walk away from offers without remote work; we’ve had it happen time and time again.
On the unskilled side … the challenge is people not continuing to work. They’ll work for a period of time and then disappear. Retention of employees is their issue. I think it breaks down to problem-solving … the issue becomes how do we teach that employee how to problem-solve? A lot of the time they don’t come back because they don’t know how to problem-solve through the issues they’re having. They see something they don’t like … instead of talking about it and working through it, it’s “I’ll just try someplace else.”
Kluge: There is a huge skill gap. Some people call it the great divide.
Lucido: I think as it relates to skill and salary or skill and hourly pay, the design of the compensation needs to be evaluated. There are demands for higher pay. In many cases it’s hard to get around it. The increases have to be to a certain extent within the bandwidth of the organization. But it doesn’t always have to be the base pay. It can be tied to learning new skills (for instance). It’s that overhead that companies are challenged with at the higher pay, and everyone’s looking at, ‘How do we keep that control but still incentivize growth within the skill sets we need within our organization?’
Kluge: What are your expectations of your team? What makes an exceptional team leader?
Lucido: Fundamentally, they have to start with wanting to make a difference. That has to be innate in the person we bring onto the team. In terms of being an exceptional employee, they need to create an experience for the customer. It’s not that we’re providing just a service, they have to be able to look at the full experience they’re providing that goes beyond what we’re doing but also how we’re making the client feel and how we’re going above and beyond to do things the client doesn’t expect from us that are value-add and let them know we have their back.
Our exceptional team members are those who look for those opportunities, find those opportunities and then deliver on that.
Kluge: What is your definition of hard work?
Lucido: It has certainly changed over time (laughing). I think it was sweat equity in the beginning. Now I think hard work is finding ways to be creative and exhausting all options, and always looking to give that extra 1%. A lot of it is commitment to where they’re going and where they’re trying to impact, the various communities that we touch.
Kluge: You are also a life and leadership coach. Why are you doing that?
Lucido: It’s been a passion all along. In owning a business, in running a business, at the end of the day I act as a coach. It involved working with your team professionally, but it also means working with them in terms of their personal development. We have a very family like culture and people feel pretty comfortable to look to open up to conversations about just how to grow.
And so now I’m at a point in my career, in my life where I want to do more of that because that’s what lights me up most. And I want to get back because I want other people’s paths to be easier and also for people to feel fulfilled. A lot of people feel stuck, they want to get someplace but they don’t know how to get there.
Kluge: You specifically mentor women. What advice, what are some “ah-ha!” moments in coaching women that you can give to other women CEOs?
Lucido: I think you need to really know who you are. I think you need to know how you want to feel about what you’re doing. And I think that you have to sort of begin with the end in mind. I think that as a leader you are creating that experience for the people around you and so you need to know what it is you want other people to say at the end of the day and what you want to be proud of, and then build from there.
Kluge: What advice would you give to others to stay ahead in a very cutthroat industry?
Lucido: Communicate heavily with your clients because they actually have the answers to where it is that you need to go. So are you engaging with your customer? Are you listening to your customer? Are you asking the right questions to learn where the pain points are, what’s happening in their industry, and then how can you problem-solve through that to provide the solutions that will set you apart and also to get a seat at the table?
Because, you know, when we’re working with our clients, we want to be a partner to them. So when you have that kind of communication, you have a greater opportunity to really be in it with them instead of on the outside looking in. And it gives you the advantage of knowing what your next step should be and how to be proactive in the marketplace to support them.
Kluge: Some big markets need people to come back. What advice would you give to those CEOs who want to bring people back? And you’re seeing the talent that wants to be remote. What advice would you give them?
Lucido: When you’re redesigning your workplace, it needs to be collaborative in creating the culture and creating the design of work that’s happening. I think I didn’t want to and remote to my organization, especially the work we do. You know, we were here even during COVID in person, but if I didn’t listen to my people and at least try to find a way to give them some of what they wanted, I would lose I would lose talent. There has to be some flexibility or I think that you miss out.
