Large enterprises are looking for a competitive edge in today's increasingly competitive labor market. Catalant enables top companies to find top talent quickly and cost effectively.

—CRAIG DRISCOLL, HIGHLAND CAPITAL

Mark Cuban was right, of course: at its core, our platform was about connecting businesses to elite talent. Companies expressed the problem in different ways. They would talk about a “talent gap” or express frustrations they felt attracting the right people—the best people—to their company. The workload varied, but their ability to add capacity was rigid. Those in management positions felt enormous stress struggling to meet their goals through maternity and sick leave or a seasonal crunch. Some expressed a frustration that came down to this: their company had tens of thousands of people in their employee base and yet they often didn't have the people they needed to get the basic work done—and that was hurting business. For many, the reality was that specialization was more critical than ever. However, the answer wasn't to add to the head count but to make sure they had access to the right person at the right moment.

No matter how they expressed it, the pain point was always the same: there is something broken in the workplace. Companies were in desperate need of help. Technology had the potential to cause a seismic shift in how business got things done. They could use a platform like ours to locate and engage happier, more focused workers. Now the challenge was to convince business leaders that we were offering a solution to much of what ailed them.

We figured private equity would be open to trying our platform. Historically they have been big buyers of high‐priced consulting talents, and they thought of the world in terms of projects and opportunities. By nature, private equity seeks to squeeze costs and seize on efficiencies when they present themselves. There would be no great need to educate them about the future of work. At the start of 2016, we launched a sales team to pursue large companies in financial, business, and legal services. They would start with private equity and then work at selling our platform to the broader world of finance and also the legal community, which were also large consumers of consulting services.

Our thesis about private equity was borne out. Within six months of launching our new pod, we had more than 80 firms using the platform. Our momentum freed that pod to start knocking on the doors of the big banks and other large financial firms. We were able to gain some traction there, too. Two Boston‐based giants of the investment management world were starting to post projects on our site. But selling into larger financial institutions generally means dealing with more hierarchies and red tape. There's a lot more education involved trying to convince an old‐school established enterprise to give us a try, or as we like to say, to take “the buyer's journey.”

Chris Collins, one of our general managers (GMs), oversees our tech group. One might assume that selling to some of the globe's most innovative companies means Chris has an easier job than the other GMs at our company. But one of life's ironies is that companies that are the most disruptive are also most resistant to the vision we were selling, partially because they typically had far better access to talent than some of our more staid manufacturing clients.

But Chris was a seasoned salesperson whose resume also included stints as a consultant at IBM, MonitorDeloitte, and the Yankee Group (a well‐regarded tech consulting group based in Boston). “You need to find a way to tell a story that is compelling enough that companies want to revisit an area they see as scary,” he said. “You convince a company to post a small project to the site, delight them with the results, and then convince them next time to use us to solve a bigger, more ambitious project.” He used the same lines that all of us used. Only the best people can go into business for themselves and succeed. Do the math: you get quality at considerable savings.

Pat Griffin was the GM in charge of retail and consumer packaged goods, which is basically anything sold in a store. Pat G. would secure a big win shortly after starting in mid‐2015 when he convinced the head of strategy and finance at one of the world's larger restaurant companies to post a project. “I never respond to this kind of outreach,” the woman told him—but she was also tired of spilling millions enlisting consultants to produce a product that left her unsatisfied. We signed the company up for a six‐month, $120,000 project completed by a 28‐year‐old consultant. The client was pleased and would turn to us when looking for a new tech system to improve functionality through the chain. They didn't need to spend $1 million to figure it out. They had a strong internal team. They only needed an outsider to go out and do some due diligence on their behalf. We were really showing our chops.

Yet retail and CPG were also proving a tough sell. People got it. They understood it would save them money. They understood that it gave them access to a wider pool of talent outside of their usual networks. But packaged goods and retail occupied generally cautious corners of the economy. Few want to be pioneers, and they need a lot of assurances. Pat G. was able to assuage the worries of the person he was talking with by stressing the quality of our experts and noting that ours is a twenty‐first‐century way of finding talent. But there's always the question of how much power the people he speaks to actually have. “There's all these off‐stage players that need convincing—procurement, legal, HR—but it's not like you get to have conversations with them,” Pat G. said. Among the phrases he hears a lot: “Let me get back to you.”

Nick Blum would take over health care a few months into 2016. Prior to coming to work for us, Nick headed the San Francisco office for Applied Predictive Technologies, a software company in the data analytics business. Prior to that, Nick worked as a management consultant specifically focused on the life sciences. One challenge of selling into big pharma and the major biotech companies, which are some of the biggest spenders on traditional consulting, is that the upside of a blockbuster drug tends to outweigh price sensitivity around professional services. Moreover, life sciences companies generally tend to be more risk averse, given their stakes in caring for people's lives.

Still, Nick figured out that the generic drug manufacturers and medical device makers both tended to be located in less desirable parts of the country and therefore faced the greatest immediate talent crunch. Nick and his team would make progress among that category of companies, as well as among the pre‐commercial biotech industry. These latter companies were typically businesses being run fairly lean as they awaited favorable FDA trial results—companies invariably with deep scientific rosters but usually thin on commercial talent. Among the companies he had signed up in this category was an innovative medical device maker that had just secured phase three approval. They needed help in almost every part of their commercial organization, from pricing to sales to marketing.

“You get good trial results but it's not like you can just go to the open market and yell, ‘All right marketers, alright sales, let's build out the commercial capability,’” Nick said. “So we serve as the stop‐gap to their ramping up that function. And once we get inside, we help them understand they may not need as big a head count as they thought because we can be a resource to help them when they need it. So much of the work required to commercialize drugs and devices is cyclical, and therefore better suited to on‐demand talent solutions than an army of FTEs.”

Nick would also inherit our budding relationship with a critical life sciences company when he took over the health care vertical. It would take some work, but ultimately we were able to convince the Fortune 50 company that Catalant should be a source of leverage for teams across their organization.

“It's a process gaining the trust of a critical life sciences company but the good part is once you're in, you're in, then they start to realize the value of our model,” Nick said. “We have a tremendous opportunity to replace some of their traditional consulting spend with more targeted and cost‐effective solutions. Given the size of the category, there is significant upside for Catalant.” Another benefit is clearing their lengthy approval process in order to gain a spot on the approved vendor list. It got us in the door and set up a barrier for any competitor who wants to follow behind us. More importantly, it offered the client a one‐stop shop for talent of all types without the hassle of renegotiating terms each time.

We changed the name of the company in 2016. The three of us loved the HourlyNerd moniker, but it was also proving something of an albatross among potential customers, especially as we were moving upmarket and selling to larger companies. Our salespeople would make a call and potential customers would say, “We don't need the Geek Squad.” The name also caused some to question the quality of our experts or, worse, viewed the name as a deal killer. The more honest among our target customers would tell salespeople, “I'm gonna tell my boss that I hired some company called HourlyNerd to solve this problem for me? Screw that.”

We became Catalant Technologies—a combination of catalyst and talent, with a bit of brilliant tossed in. We also added a new tagline: Accomplish More. In the press statement we sent out noting the name change, Pat explained: “We are rapidly defining a new market category, and we need to create a brand identity that speaks to this evolution.” We would keep the HourlyNerd website for small businesses, but now under the name “HourlyNerd powered by Catalant.” Like it or not, we were starting to become grown‐ups.

We also changed our marketing message as we morphed into a company focused more on enterprise customers. The message in 2015 had been around this idea that we were disrupting the consulting world. At that point, we were still focused on the project buyers and the notion they could save money while gaining access to top talent. (“Consulting. On your terms.”) The pain point we were rubbing up against was that they were spending so much for outside help and getting suboptimal results.

The new message focused on the C‐suite and other top decision makers—those our salespeople were having a hard time reaching more directly. This pitch was much broader than the disruption of the consulting business; it played to a worry that the workforce landscape was changing, but their company wasn't evolving. We chose digital ads aimed at those at director level and above, working within specific industries. We also bought billboards and bus shelter ads along routes we knew would be traveled by our target audience. “Stretched too thin?” one asked. Another read, “Too many projects? Too little time?” A third asked: “Need instant leverage?” Each included our logo and offered the same answer. “40,000 Business Experts. On Demand.”

The faster we grew, the more critical it became that we tend to the ecosystem of our marketplace. We didn't have to spend marketing dollars to draw experts to our site because we were adding another 300 to 500 a week. That was causing problems on both the supply and demand side of the equation. We were hearing from people telling us they had put in 5 or 10 years at McKinsey, served as CFO for an established company, or guest lectured at the Harvard Business School—and yet, despite bidding on 15 projects, they had gotten not so much as a single interview. We were hearing as well from people on the demand side who felt overwhelmed by the oversupply of choices.

In the fall of 2015, we hired Andrea Black to serve as director of supply. Andrea, who had earned her MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, had previously served as head of marketing at Joss & Main, the online furniture retailer. We hadn't given Andrea marching orders so much as laid out our problem. We had this invaluable asset called our experts, and basically we needed someone to manage our relationship with them. Her job: do what she could to keep them both busy and happy. Adding to Andrea's challenge was that she would have to make do with a staff of two. Sales was still a higher priority, given our assumption that adding more projects to the site was the single best thing we could do for our experts.

Community would be one watchword under Andrea. Prior to her arrival, we had a short FAQ page for those signing up as experts. That was replaced with a more user‐friendly handbook meant as a quick guide for new experts looking for success on the site: how it works, suggestions for building out your profile, advice for engaging with clients. Already we helped our experts with pesky administrative details like billing and collecting. But Andrea and her team would create content on the site to make Catalant more indispensable to experts—a kind of one‐stop shop for the aspiring independent. We added tools to help people build their own website and offered tips on marketing. We also started arranging partnerships with third parties in the business of helping small businesses. “The idea was that you can come to us and say, ‘Okay, these are the health care companies I use. These are the companies that I can go to and set up a 401(k). These are the invoicing tools and marketing tools I need to be successful.’” Somehow, without spreading ourselves too thin, we were finding ways to appeal to a very wide range of problems experts might encounter, and as a result, we were becoming as valuable to them as they were to us.

“Win with technology” was one of the “pillars” we coined when we asked the staff to articulate the core tenets of the company. Initially, the wannabe expert only needed an email address from a top‐flight business school to sign up for our site. But then we started hearing from people like the HBS alumnus who reached out to tell us that he didn't have an alumni email address because he had graduated in 1976. We had opened up the site to PhDs, MDs, and others with business skills relevant to our clients, but we also needed some kind of screening to measure for quality. So Andrea, working with our tech team, helped develop an algorithm that analyzes resumes first to determine access to the site and then rates business expertise. Consultants are scored on a scale of one to five, which helps identify top tier quality on behalf of customers and also determines which experts receive access to what projects.

Hers was a department of three, but Andrea would add a concierge element to the relationship mix. She created an email address for any expert wanting to reach someone on her team, and a dedicated phone line for those wanting to talk with an actual human. Each week Andrea and the people on her team proactively phoned a sampling of the fours and fives from the ratings scorecards—to get a better sense of who they were and how they found the site. She also wanted to offer her small department up as a resource. Feedback is critical to helping us grow and improve the platform. Among the problems she has been working on with our tech and product groups: the bias in favor of those who have already successfully established themselves on the platform.

“If you're a client looking at a profile, it's easy to say, ‘Well, this person has 15 recommendations and this person hasn't won a project. We know who we're going with.’ We needed to make sure that we're getting new people to start winning more often.” Sometimes we needed to put a finger on the scale and push people with the requisite expertise and experience. In the past, we encouraged someone to bid on a project but then they'd learn via an email they weren't chosen. Under Andrea, we turned that process on its head. Technology calls an expert's attention to a relevant project, but it's one of our people—a human being—who lets them know if they weren't chosen and why. The human touch helps soften the disappointment of losing out on a project and is also meant to encourage them to keep trying.

Newcomers on the supply side often assume a race‐to‐the‐bottom element to the site. Yet relevant experience is the most important thing to our typical customers, not price. We rarely see price as a key driver in the ultimate selection. There's also plenty of upselling once an expert engages with the customer. That's among the most powerful messages Andrea's team delivers. It's amazing how often one of our people will get on the phone to scope an assignment—and based on similar experiences with a dozen prior clients, the $50,000 project becomes one worth $100,000.

These days, we're up over 40,000¹ experts, as well as thousands of boutique firms who've registered to win their work via the site. We consider that one of our strengths, but key to benefitting from that scale is providing a truly curated experience. We do the lion's share of this using technology, but if ever a customer feels overwhelmed by the complexity of too many choices, our client strategy team is there to help. The ultimate aim is a fully automatic system, but that's a long process of continuously working to refine the variable predictive of making the perfect match. That's another challenge we've thrown at our tech team. Working with Andrea and others, they're creating the algorithms that continue to insert machine learning and algorithms based on each user action taken in the application.

“Surprise and delight” is another of our employee‐inspired pillars. A business makes no commitment when it posts a project on the site. There's no obligation to choose any of our experts for whatever the reason. But our job is to make sure they do. Our goal is to ensure that the client is blown away by the quality of consultants they find on our network, and also the speed with which they're able to engage them. And if ever there's a problem (this happens incredibly rarely), we engage Andrea's team, client strategy, and others in a recovery operation. These circumstances actually provide another opportunity to “delight” all involved by making sure that everyone walks away from a negative situation feeling they've been treated fairly.

We were well over 100 employees by the end of 2016 and still expanding. The more we grew, the more important the issue of culture. That seemed especially important to the heavy users of our platform. The less centralized the workforce, the more essential to cultivate a sense of belonging and stress the benefits of working at Catalant.

As in the early days, we expected people to work hard, but we also didn't expect them to live at the office. We give people the day off during every single calendar holiday because we think they need to go hiking, or go furniture shopping, or take their kids outside. Those who deal with clients on weekends can write back if they have an urgent issue. In crunch times, the engineers are probably logging 70 to 80 hours a week. If the site goes down on a Sunday, they're working. Still, people need a chance to recharge, even if we're a start‐up. We largely scale back our activities for the last week of August and over the holidays, when people aren't likely to purchase many consulting projects. Recharging is important.

One thing we all try to do as founders is have a little one‐on‐one time with new employees that we wouldn't otherwise encounter in the office. We have team lunches and a Friday afternoon guacamole party two or three times a month. At the end of each quarter, we collectively host the company at our homes for dinner. We could emulate certain other venture‐backed start‐ups and take everyone out to a pricey restaurant, but the bill would be in the many thousands of dollars, and how intimate can a dinner be if attended by a hundred people? Instead, we play host at our individual homes. We break the company into cross groups, order takeout,² and then all meet afterwards at a central spot. Brian Morgan, our CTO, who has worked for four prior start‐ups, assures us that people see prudence and value as sensible rather than stingy.

To keep the corporate lines of communication open, we created an All‐In Committee populated by volunteers from different parts of the company. They work with our new head of people growth, Michele Spitzer, on places where there seems a real disconnect between where folks think Catalant should be and where it is today. Every Monday morning, we hold our weekly team meeting. Those who can't attend in person call in to listen. Pat usually starts the meeting in his understated way—pounding the table and yelling, “Let's f‐‐‐ go!!!”

Amy Villeneuve, a regular at these meetings since she started as an advisor for the company, initially didn't know what to think. A former vice president at Amazon who had run its automation unit, Kiva Systems (later renamed Amazon Robotics), Amy initially cringed every time Pat dropped an F‐bomb. But eventually she came around, telling us, “It's appropriate. We're in this battle. And we've got to fight to make sure we execute as best we know how.” There's a lot of laughter at these meetings, and yet at the same time it's a chance for people to hear what's going on in other parts of the organization and drive home a message when necessary.

In July of 2016, we hired Brian Kalma as our chief experience officer. Brian had spent eight years in executive roles at Zappos and later Gilt Groupe. Nearly a year passed before Brian even responded to the emails Pat had been sending him—and then, when they finally sat down for coffee, Brian began the conversation by asking, “Why am I even meeting with you?” He gave up a thriving business at a user experience consulting firm to join us, because after an hour with Pat he truly believed we were giving people a different way to engage with the workplace.

Brian would play two general roles inside the company. One was more straightforward. We were imagining our software sitting open on the desktops of managers throughout corporate America—a cockpit view of every project they had in the works—and we were committed to the best possible user experience.

The other role had him thinking about design in a bigger, more holistic way. Since the beginning, our greatest belief was that most workplaces have it wrong: it's not about job retention, but job satisfaction. Brian would imagine ways to foster happier, more productive workers inside Catalant, whether that meant creating stimulating microenvironments within the office or freeing up people to be at their best outside it.

“I had sworn I would never work for first‐time founders again,” Brian declared. “I said I'd never work in enterprise software and I had sworn off working with consultants. But here I saw a real opportunity to impact society and the way people work.” It seemed our message was getting through.