We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lori Zuker Briller. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lori below.
Lori , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.
When we started the Grapevine Agency we were a tiny but mighty team with a big vision of reinventing the entertainment staffing industry. There were some old school staffing agencies around at that time, but we were the first of it’s kind where we used all of our personal relationships from our many years of working in the entertainment industry, and created our now famously known JOB BLASTS! We gathered together lists of all of our industry contacts from years as being assistants as well as any executives and industry professionals that we had relationships with. From this list we created our database and decided to blast out any and all jobs that we got in, to our network of people. This list has grown considerably over the past 18 year and we feel it is why we are now known as the agency with the best talent out there. This list still goes out to folks all over the country twice a week and gets forwarded on and on to people looking for work. It’s something we are really proud of creating because it made us stand out for our competitors. Back in 2005 when we launched The Grapevine there were no apps, very few places to go online and find work and this was our way to really connect and bring our job openings to the people directly.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Lori Zuker Briller and Rachel Zaslansky Sheer co founded and co own The Grapevine Agency which is a boutique staffing agency based here in Los Angeles, CA. We launched in 2005, and we specialize in placing staff in households and offices all over the US. We staff mostly support staff including Personal Assistants, Executive Assistants, Nannies, Chefs, House Managers, Estate Managers and Housekeepers etc. We are a very small teal of all women who are also moms. We are constantly trying to balance it all at work, and at home. We love what we do and see ourselves as more like job MatchMakers than anything else. We are really known for our tremendous candidate pool and personal attention to each and every client and candidate. We have so many long term relationships on both ends!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
We had to pivot a few times over our 18 years in this industry. One time that stands out the most, and was most recent was during Covid. So many things changed so quickly that we had to pivot and focus on what was right in front of us which was different than our typical business. People went from working at offices to being at home for such a long time. A lot of our client’s needs really changed because of this. They realized that their in home staff was more important than ever, especially since they would be spending so much time together. A lot of our clients completely re-worked their household staff and structure of their home which provided a great deal of work for us. Also, since the kids were now home schooling, we quickly saw the needs for “Pod Teachers” which we put up on our job list and immediately started meeting teachers and Nannies who were out of work and created a whole new division based on our client’s brand new needs.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
This is actually a funny story. I was working as a Recruiter for high level entertainment folks at the time and heard from some of my network that a brand new Agency was about to start called The Grapevine. They had let me know that someone by the name of Rachel Zaslansky Sheer was heading it up and it was going to be the newest sort of fresh way to do recruiting for entertainment jobs and households in town. I immediately used my resources and found someone who knew her that shared her phone number with me. I reached out to Rachel and told her I wanted to be her Partner which she was a bit taken aback by, but agreed to meet me anyway. We met for coffee at the old coffee bean on south Beverly drive and it was love at first sight! Before our coffee’s were empty we shook hands and agreed to be business partners! That was 18 years ago. Just goes to show you if you want something, you can make it happen with a little hustle, using your resources and being persistent! Best decision I ever made! We are such a great team..
Contact Info:
- Website: thegrapevineagency.com
- Instagram: @GrapevineAgency
- Facebook: Facebook: The Grapevine Agency
- Linkedin: LinkedIn.com/company/thegrapevineagency
- Twitter: Twitter: Twitter.com/GrapevineGal
Image Credits
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