Rebecca Bray is the president of Epitec, an industry leader in IT engineering and professional staffing with Fortune 100 clients.
As such, Bray has been instrumental in shaping the company’s culture and driving its growth. With a background in sales, she’s also responsible for the strategic direction and culture and driving growth and appetite for the 45-year-old company.
In her ascent to the top, Bray certainly has had some game-changing moments in her professional life. But she says one of the biggest may have come in her personal life: The birth of her children,
“I did not always know I wanted kids,” said Bray, who now has a 10-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son. “At the point in which I met my husband and we got married and decided that, hey, if it happens, that would be great.
“They have made me a better human being, a better person … a better leader,” she added.
Bray has been with Epitec since 1998. She was named president in January 2023 after nearly 12 years as the company’s chief sales officer. She counts strategy, business development, human capital, training, staff augmentation, process mapping, negotiation and account management among her specialties.
She thinks that kind of versatility is what sets her apart.
“When I think about my journey to leading tech, it isn’t any one piece I think that really sets me apart,” Bray said. “What really has set me apart is the fact that I’ve done a little bit of everything. I really started in a support role for that company. I’ve been in sales. I’ve led our employee engagement efforts, I’ve done training and development. I’ve worked directly with managing customer projects. I have a solid understanding and a little bit of academic background with our financials, which is really also very important.
“But … that sales piece, which is really where my passion has been for many years, does give me an advantage to understand our customers’ needs, understand their challenges,” she added. “I’ve built solutions to help them solve those challenges. I’ve consulted with them and I can take best practices we’ve seen throughout the industry and apply them to our own teams.”
Bray took the time to discuss those points and a variety of other issues during her appearance on the most recent episode of “CEO Thought Leadership Series on LinkedIn Live,” the discussion series hosted by the National Association for 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: Let’s talk about sales for a minute.
Rebecca Bray: One of my favorite topics!
Kluge: We’re hearing from lots of individuals how hard it is to get people’s attention, especially in this hybrid world. What are some best practices about really grabbing people’s attention?
Bray: I chuckle because I really think about this daily. We joke in the office because as much as things have changed and there’s been technical progress, you know, at the heart of it … relationships matter, solving problems, bringing value. And I think we’re so used to just moving quick and not hearing. And this is something that I was taught as a young salesperson, understand your clients’ needs.
And I think so many times, we don’t really take the time to understand what the needs are. I think people are busy, they’re distracted, they’re uninterested. We need to slow down a little bit and get back to working on relationships and understanding where the challenges are, where the problems need to be solved. Because I think it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell talent solutions, if you’re trying to match a person to a job, if you’re selling software, if you’re selling TV, if you’re not hitting the need, it doesn’t really matter. So how do we get back to understanding what people’s problems are?
Kluge: Let’s talk a little bit more about your leadership. Everyone has pivotal moments. They could be positive and they could be negative or constructive. These milestones and experiences shape who we are. They shape our leadership. They shape how we come to work each day. As you look back, what were some of those pivotal moments and what did you learn from them?
Bray: I think there’s many moments in time I have been humbled to learn. I don’t know everything and to accept how you know when I need it or sometimes when I don’t even realize I need it. But early on, when I had been with Epitec a few years, I was part of our sales team. I was one of our top producing salespeople. We were really going through some challenges, growing as a company. Our revenue had actually started to come down, so our leadership at the time — I was not part of the leadership team (then) — decided to bring in some consultants. And being in my early career, I thought they don’t know what we do.
What they really worked with us on was mapping our process. And that was a pivotal time once for our change in growth, being able to really springboard in, set some better standards and processing quality in place for us. And it also taught me that I don’t know everything. And it was a game changer for everyone.
Kluge: Could you elaborate on your talent strategy?
Bray: I believe that for myself as a leader that I’m here to help set the direction to guide but to pave the way for all of our individuals on our team to really help shape, mold, develop and carry on our culture. So for us, culture is not something that is anybody’s responsibility. It is everybody’s responsibility. And so even when we look at our hiring practices, we involve several people to help that interview process.
And that’s a two way street. One, it’s not just allowing different team members to contribute to the interview process, but it allows for individuals that are wanting to come work with Epitec to see and feel our culture.
Kluge: Could you give us a feel for your culture? There may be some best practices or company rituals. What cool things are over there that if I was an employee, I’d be like, “Oh yeah, that’s pretty cool.”
Bray: Well, we’ve always said we work hard and we play hard, but we really enjoy being together in connecting with each other, which over the past several years things have changed. But I tell you, as our team grew nationally prior to COVID, we had made the switch to working in a hybrid environment. We made that switch to working hybrid, even for individuals that were by offices because of and I would say inclusion and equity before it was like a key word, but really we wanted to learn to work together and have an environment that whether you’re working in-person or virtual, that we have these tools and mechanisms that everybody feels part of the team because prior to that we did have a situation where people that worked out of our headquarters felt one way because they were in the office five days a week with each other. And then we have other individuals supporting our clients feeling like they’re kind of off on their own before all the wonderful technology was really maximized. We had to really learn to say how even though we’re remote, we want to feel connected.
Kluge: The staffing industry’s pretty unique in being a leading indicator for how industry is doing, how the economy’s doing, what the future looks like. Talent is all over the place lately. What are you seeing out there? What’s your crystal ball for 2024 look like? What are your predictions on what’s going to happen?
Bray: That’s a big question, it’s a great question. You know, we’re really hearing from our our customers that, you know, people are just really kind of holding tight when it comes to staffing levels, investing in growing teams. You know, we have, I’ll call it an anomaly, but we really had some an untypical behavior, right, coming out of COVID where it was like, you know, COVID shut everything down and then coming out of it, it was like gang, you know, like everybody is off the charts.
We’re seeing a little bit of the full time onsite. But what we’re really seeing when I look at … a thousand open positions that we have across the United States, probably 70% are hybrid. We still have a few remote, we still have a few onsite. But that hybrid model and having people in a location close enough that they can come in and some type of cadence.
Kluge: Your industry’s fortunate to be able to make that choice. And do you see candidates saying, ‘OK, I’ll do the hybrid’ but they’d rather be 100% remote? Or are you seeing them itching to get back into an environment? What are you seeing there?
Bray: You know, it’s interesting. We’re actually seeing more and more early career people wanting to go into an office, a hybrid. You know, we’ve actually lost a few great, great team members that were in remote locations because they wanted to go and work in an office, not five days a week. But they want that availability and they want that connection.
I think people are starting to kind of realize that there is something to that. On the other hand, individuals that may be a little later in their career journey, personal obligations like a little bit more flexibility … while there’s a lot of openness and empathy and sensitivity out there around work-life balance, I still don’t promote people heading into an interview saying I really want to work remote so I can put my laundry in in between calls.
Kluge: You take the time to mentor and you talked about mentoring as a key part of your job as president there, but you mentor young ladies in your free time. Tell us more about that to share some some experiences, and then we’ll talk about what advice you’re giving them.
Bray: I do a lot when it comes to young females early in their career and sometimes in school with technology, specifically. So I’m part of technology organizations. One is the Michigan Council of Women in Technology and so from there we want to give more support to young ladies pursuing careers within IT and a lot of times there still is not a heavy female population in their classes at college and or early in their career.
Sometimes people just don’t know where to go for help. Also, when you start a new opportunity or how do you evaluate what’s going to be the best internship for me? What’s going to be the best first job? I had one young lady this past summer who was applying for internships. The internship she had with the company the summer before had basically said, ‘Right, well, I’d love to have you back as an intern,’ but she wanted to take an internship somewhere else for some different exposure. So she asked, ‘How do I tell that? Like, I don’t want to burn this bridge, so how do I say thank you, but no thank you in a manner which will, if I want to go back for the future.’ So that’s some of the types of questions that I get asked.
Kluge: If you had a 22-year-old graduate sitting in front of you and they have all these aspirations for success in the business world, what advice would you give them?
Bray: When I think about what has made me successful is my resilience. And I look back early on in my career, there were many times that I did not agree with my leadership and for whatever reason … I zipped it in and had some trust and faith. Sometimes I think we need to hang in there with the conversation and not shut down and not just be like, I don’t agree so I’m out. I always looked at, what can I learn from this? Because there’s going to be something, even if it goes the way I think it does, there’s going to be something I’m going to be able to take away and learn.
