How do you take a spark of an idea for changing the face of staffing agencies, and make it a success in six short months? In conversation at our recent “Talking Out Cloud”, Megan Hayward, Founder and CEO of Temporary Assistance Guru (TAG), shared her extraordinary business journey and experience working with an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.
#1 When you founded TAG, where did the idea originate and what was your key objective when you were starting out?
Having worked in the temporary staffing industry for several years, I was seeing the same human resource staffing issues everywhere amongst the staffing agencies. I came up with the idea to create a platform that would handle all those issues for temporary staffing agencies and their clients, not just catering to one side of it but to fix the whole industry and the way it’s done.
My key objective was just to make the process simpler. A lot of it was ‘pen and paper’ and a lot of outdated technology was going into staffing. There just wasn’t an updated way of finding a new staffing temp agency, getting a new contract, placing orders, and trying to receive temps at these venues. I figured that there had to be an easier way but when I looked, I found that nobody had created an easier way. So, I thought why not me because I know the industry really well, I know what companies and temp agencies would want and what would make their lives simpler. Instead of waiting around for someone to develop it, I decided to start the product development process myself and it was literally born out of a need that I saw on both sides of an entire industry that nobody was fulfilling.
#2 How does TAG address the most critical business needs when it comes to the temporary staffing industry?
We’ve enabled companies that need to hire through temporary staffing agencies to have a platform and be able to view multiple staffing agencies. They can place orders with multiple staffing agencies, do it all for one contract, one price point, or just one order, even if they’re receiving their temps from 10 or 15 staffing agencies. So, it’s really about condensing that process.
SourceFuse was the one of the first companies I went to, since I could meet them in their office here in Jacksonville. I had an idea but I’m not a tech person – when I started this, I didn’t even know what SaaS meant, I didn’t know what cloud meant, I didn’t know anything! When I first met with SourceFuse and shared my idea, I really wanted to know “can it be done?”
Kelly Dyer (Co-Founder and Co-CEO at SourceFuse) sat me down and said he felt it was a possibility provided certain processes were put in place. The SourceFuse team walked me through each step from A to Z about what the end result would be. We’ve come a long way from that initial meeting but I’m still a non-technical founder of a tech company; however, SourceFuse definitely made my life a little easier.
#3 When you first approached SourceFuse, what challenges were you specifically looking to address?
When I brought my initial idea to SourceFuse, I had a kind of ‘mock-up’ of what I wanted TAG to eventually be. Besides creating good software, the one thing I think I am most grateful to SourceFuse for is that they told me if I want it to do A, B and C, we’d have to do X, Y and Z in order to get there. And it was stuff that I’d never even thought of. For example, I didn’t even know that we had to connect all these different pages, or that all these things had to function correctly, or what the story was to get the software to do what it needed to do. SourceFuse really walked me through all of those steps.
So, I basically went from having a ‘mock-up’ of a general idea to fully functioning software that has real clients. I’m now onboarding people consistently and I really couldn’t have done it without SourceFuse’s help, everything from the design to telling me what I needed to do to achieve my end goal.
#4 How is your partnership with SourceFuse continuing to evolve?
From where we started, we’ve added extra people on the team. QA has evolved, the staging atmosphere has evolved – I even know what staging is now! We’ve added to the team as we’ve grown and we’ve seen our needs change but to me the coolest thing was to watch the project evolve. When you first have an idea for something, you know the core of what you need it to do, but you don’t always think of the outside pieces.
TAG, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, was developed to address the challenges faced by hiring and staffing companies in managing their temporary staffing needs. The company recognized the need for a streamlined solution that would enable efficient operations and reduce administrative overhead. We sought to modernize staffing companies and transition from traditional paper-based or Excel/Word document systems to a digital platform that would facilitate job contracts, personnel files, and business relationships.
To achieve our goal, TAG partnered with SourceFuse, which proposed a SaaS architecture based solution using the open-source platform ERPNext. This platform provided the necessary CRM features required by TAG, and customizations and new modules was implemented to meet their specific needs. Additionally, the application was hosted on AWS Cloud to ensure scalability and reliability.
So, seeing my original idea evolve into this fully fledged and fleshed out software, that can actually help people, has honestly been incredible. The things that my software is doing right now I didn’t even think about a year ago. Not only have we handled most of the core issues, we’ve actually added to it and now it’s really taking on a life of its own – and that’s pretty incredible to watch.
#5 Your passion is to forge new ways for the temporary staffing industry to conduct business – what can we look forward to in the continuing evolution of TAG?
We definitely have plans for a mobile app, to make the entire process streamline from your phone. We’re consistently adding on to making onboarding temporary employees easier for staffing agencies, and coming up with process automation tactics, even to automate the resume process. What this means is that instead of an employee approaching a company with their resume, we create the resume for them based on the work that they’ve done through TAG.
There’s a lot of good ideas coming and basically making the entire process easy, simple, affordable, and more accessible, especially for the hiring companies. Changing staffing agencies has always been such a pain point, from the contract to the ordering it’s a huge pain. So, I’m trying to make that whole system not fun, exactly, but simple – something that’s not a stressor. I feel like there’s enough stress in the world and this doesn’t have to be one of them, but for a lot of companies temporary staffing is one of the biggest stressors they have and trying to alleviate that is my biggest goal.
