Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Lee.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I graduated from SMU in 2005 and worked in finance for seven years but never found a particular segment or niche of finance that really moved and intrigued me. And as the years went by that become really bothersome – I had studied Finance and Economics but didn’t feel like it was a good fit. I had exhausted most career channels in finance – from operations to back office corporate finance to wealth management and banking and private equity.
At my last career stop at a distressed asset management firm, I spent most weeks eating lunch with a friend of mine who worked at large telecommunications firm. We would chat over lunch about our career paths and one day he mentioned that he thought there was a decent opportunity to make money becoming a vendor for his company. He worked in corporate finance and he had seen the numbers they were paying out to their vendors. While it was something he wanted to passively do, the more days I spent lying in bed thinking about it, the more I wanted to pursue.
Eventually in July 2011, I setup MDMartin LLC as a consulting and staffing firm here in Dallas. Looking back I was extremely naïve because I jumped ship from my last corporate job to pursue this venture in entrepreneurship thinking I could very easily sign up and become a vendor for the large telecom company. Even with a friend “on the inside” the company glanced at me and rejected my proposal. We were too young and new for a large company to even consider.
The months after that, I spent more and more time wondering if this was a massive mistake and miscalculation on my part for leaving corporate. It was a grind – oftentimes more stressful than exciting. But every day, every week, I would sit in front of my TV in my living room and shoot off emails and put together pitch books and materials. I turned a few Starbucks locations into my office. And by summer of 2012 I got my first contract. We staffed, at peak, about 40 employees to do their packaging and distribution. And from there we just bootstrapped and organically grew the company with mostly outside sales.
In 2012, we did about 80k in gross revenue. In 2016, we did 25M in gross revenue. We are still a small company and like any company we’ve had our fair share of growing pains. And we’re still learning and continuing to mold and change.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It most definitely has not been smooth.
We’ve had plenty of struggles – from figuring out how to do sales (inside and outside), how to recruit, how to efficiently recruit, how to do payroll and most importantly how to scale with minimal setbacks.
We’ve had moments where we scaled too quickly and could not provide the personnel requested in a timely manner and had our contract terminated.
We’ve had moments where we hired internally too fast but didn’t have enough work and clients for our internal staff.
We’ve made payroll tax mistakes.
And we still continue to work and try time and time again to figure out the right blend of scaling our business vs internal growth so that we can grow at a smoother pace.
Please tell us about MDMartin.
MDMartin is a consulting and staffing company. We do not operate like a typical staffing company who provides personnel and payroll services. We like to differentiate ourselves and really approach our clients as almost an external HR partner. We want to not only provide the personnel required/requested, but also come on-site and manage the workflow and workforce and get to know the process so as to help mitigate some risks in operations for our clients. Ideally, we would offer our clients the workforce required to get the job done, the payroll services required for the personnel we bring on and provide site management for the worksite – whether that’s making sure the site is up and running and clean via janitorial services or making sure our workforce is comfortable at the jobsite via vending machines and water systems and worksite supplies. We like to provide our clients with these needs so that they can focus on what’s really important to them – and that’s production and revenue growth.
I am most proud of having grown the company relatively fast the last couple years. We were named Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies for 2016 and landed on the list at 775 as the fastest growing HR company – although we classify ourselves as more consulting and staffing.
We also provide our clients with annual or quarterly operational consulting analyses if they ask. Because we are mindful that no matter what business you do, analytics and data are king. We try to compile data in such a way to provide some in depth analyses on our end for our clients to review and use to potentially track better growth rates and analyses, seasonality effects in business and also help mitigate risks.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I grew up loving being outside. I spent most of my waking days running around outside, playing baseball, football, street hockey and basketball. I grew up extremely active and still try to be relatively active today at 36 years of age.
One of my favorite memories is one afternoon I was about to step outside our apartment with a baseball glove and a tennis ball to play catch against the wall of our building, when I noticed my dad’s golf clubs. Mind you, at that age I never really had any interest in golf. It looked stupid. But that day I decided to take a club (I believe it was his 8 iron) and a few golf balls and take it outside and try to hit it.
I’ve always been coordinated and much like everything else, I picked up the swing and ball striking with ease. The ball never sliced or hooked and seemed for the most part to always go straight. It was exciting. As a 10 year old, seeing yourself hit the ball high and relatively far, felt great.
After messing around for 30-45 mins I decided to go back home. As I got to the front door, I decided to hit a few more chip shots towards a tall tree in the neighborhood. On the first swing, I hit the ball so flush and perfect that it sailed farther than any shot I had hit that day. It kept going and going and the next thing I knew it went over the chain linked fence out into the street. I immediately heard a thud followed by the sound of tires screeching. I had shattered the front windshield of a pickup truck and the gentleman was furious. He came into the apt complex and tracked me down and dragged me to my house where my mother furiously apologized.
I did get in trouble that day but about a week later when that gentleman came to pick up a check for his new windshield, he had a Byron Nelson polo shirt on and said he worked for the golf tournament and said I had a good swing and offered to give me free lessons.
We never took him up on his offer but it’s become a reminder that sometimes accidents are blessings in disguise.
Contact Info:
- Website: mdmartinstaffing.com
- Phone: 2149915026
- Email: mark@mdmartinstaffing.com
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