Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dave Bacon. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Dave thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
Universally, from large organizations to growing startups, hiring teams struggle to hire the right talent, manage budget, implement flexible work policies, and adhere to the compliance requirements of a diverse and dispersed workforce. Post-pandemic work trends have only exacerbated the toll they take on growing teams. These reasons, among many, are why we spent the last year embarking on a journey to build a more comprehensive, strategic, and streamlined approach to better support our clients’ hiring needs. As a newly established Employer of Record (EOR), our elevated services in staffing deliver unmatched flexibility and opportunity for our clients to hire workers anywhere in the US by proxy, as well as select locations globally. Combining the recruiting machine of BWBacon with the powerful back-office support, we are adapting to today’s talent landscape via a highly specialized approach to technical staffing.
With this, now is the time for staffing partners to bring more to the table in terms of facilitating workforce growth opportunities, and we are leading that charge in the market. Why does it matter? By focusing on service gaps of staffing partners and EOR’s/PEO’s, BWBacon alleviates a long-standing burden of our clients by unifying their workforce management approach under one umbrella, and that distinction is important. As far as we can tell, this model has not been attempted before in the staffing market.
Fusing talent acquisition and compliance at scale, we deliver the best of both worlds, meaning our clients can lean on our partnership for both the search and deployment of skilled tech workers, as well as assuming responsibility for their ongoing employment. With advantages such as streamlined legal compliance, optimized HR administration, access to broad talent pipelines, and enhanced flexibility, we’re redefining what a strategic partnership can look like and empowering companies to grow without the growing pains.
We also understand workers who feel valued exceed expectations. For too long have contract workers had to shoulder too much of the burden when it comes to taking care of basic needs. So, in order to making talent feel supported and appreciated, we put a sharp focus on reducing the amount of time it takes for them to hit the ground running when they in fact do start and offer more benefit options than ever before.
Ultimately, our high-touch approach to growing companies infuses resourcefulness, intentionality, and transparency into every step of the hiring process, while our distinct service offerings tackle onboarding with unwavering attention to detail and urgency. We’re setting the stage for our clients to unlock their full growth potential by leveraging our unique infrastructure. Bridging gaps that a staffing partner or EOR partner could not accomplish alone, BWBacon’s recruitment services deliver unrivaled execution and delivery in support of hiring growth.
Dave, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
BWBacon builds growing tech companies with top talent. Fueling technology innovation and delivering a new level of value in recruiting relevancy, we work to foster a higher degree of trust and increased transparency with our clients and candidates. We specialize in partnering with high-scaling and emerging Tech Companies, (SaaS, Cloud, IoT etc.) here in Colorado and throughout the US, and consider ourselves a technical recruiting partner whose reputation was proudly built one company, one person and one triumph at a time.
At BWB, we cultivate a high-touch approach to recruiting, leaning on resourcefulness and thoughtfulness when it comes to being an extension of our client’s brands and upholding a standard of creativity. Named the Best of Client and Best of Talent Staffing Awards for Clearly Rated from 2019-2021 and the winner of Colorado Business Magazine’s Top Company Awards for Professional Services in 2021, BWB’s presence in the Denver tech scene is sustained by our team’s incredible energy, creative ideas, and a desire to better serve our clients and candidates. We are small, yet mighty.
In terms of how we got started, Dave Bacon, our founder, built a profitable and highly successful practice implementing ERP and supply chain solutions at a well-known consulting firm with a team of fifty consultants, salespeople, recruiters, project managers and coordinators in the late 90s. Back then, one of the only things his team did not do was direct hire recruiting for their clients. He wanted to do both, and felt that’s what his best clients ultimately wanted. Dave aimed to fill a gap in the market for growing tech companies and added, “many of our clients needed to build their own teams, which appealed to me because that need was not only very strong, but it was an opportunity to be part of connecting people in a greater, more intimate way. Recruiting was a strong path towards making those connections and, dare I say, building great teams.” (our motto, ha!) Adding that when his current company was not interested in adopting staffing as part of their business model, he began to consider opening his own firm. In true Bacon fashion, the final catalyst for starting a uniquely positioned staffing agency was found deep in the mountains in the midst of a challenging time for many Americans. After 9/11, the events surrounding the terrorist attacks put things into perspective for many, including Bacon. He shares, “I went up to a little-known mountain range called the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming with my dog, Grizzly. After I spent some time up there reflecting, I decided when I came back, I was going to start something new. That was a period of America’s history where the future was very uncertain, and it just felt like the right time.” If one thing was certain to Bacon then, it was that connecting people was, and still is, undeniably a part of his DNA. So, in the fall of 2001, he officially launched his own recruiting agency. Seeing as ‘Makin’ Bacon’ was already trade-marked, Better With Bacon just felt, well, right!
With over 23 years in business in technical recruiting, we find success is rooted in relationships. This is what sets us apart, the care with which we handle and nurture our relationships, its what makes us unique and has clients and candidates return for our services year after year. Relationships have to be cultivated personally, nurtured, repaired with integrity and accountability, and even let go of with humility and acceptance. Our ability to foster relationships is our competitive advantage because we do it like no one else.
Beyond our unique delivery model, we’re also incredibly proud of our roots and connections to the greater tech community here in Colorado, as we’ve spent over two decades being an integral partner to growing tech companies in this great state and beyond. Our partnerships are a reflection of who we are, and we could not be more proud to be a part of organizations like EO, YPO Colorado Chapter, Denver Startup Week, Battery 621, and countless others that create a mutual circle of partnership and synergy.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Any owner of a services business knows that the ‘services’ industry, period, not matter what segment of services, takes incredible resilience and resolve to manage, grow and build! That is certainly true in recruitment. In that, when I think of a resilient story of my journey, it has to be about the people – especially those who work for our company. When the world shut down with the Covid lockdown, it created so much uncertainty, we were literally living through a period of our world’s history none of us had experienced. I became obsessed, in a way, to rise to the occasion, to keep our morale high, determined to keep us connected, and encouraged us to be vulnerable in ways we never had been before. This brought us together in ways no adversity could have.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
Timely! Frequently in the recruiting world, we have to prove ourselves with the quality of our people before we can get under contract with a client. This takes significant risk and time, and if things don’t work out – we can’t buy that time back. Just recently, in order to get our ‘shot’ with a major, publicly traded company, we needed to find a very specific Program Manager, someone who could stand up a PMO under massive scrutiny and with a LOT at stake for the client. The type of person our client was seeking was extraordinary, and their use of an agencies like ours was by far the exception than it was the norm. We had to help the executives at our client to create the buy in just to justify the position with Finance, and that required us to find this very specific person. The odds were stacked from the beginning, but the upside was high, and so was the opportunity cost. We had very little information to work with, but internally – we trusted each other. We delivered, and from there, the obstacles weren’t over…. In the end, from start to finish, it took six months and hundreds of hours work to take this full circle from the inception of the process to starting the person, and we didn’t have a contract in place until the last two weeks!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bwbacon.com/
- Instagram: bwbacon_group
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BWBaconGroup/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bwbacon
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BWBacon
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC79iwo01p_vEEuscD6SJICg
- Other: https://www.bwbacon.com/deib-resource-guide https://www.bwbacon.com/our-values https://www.bwbacon.com/about-us/bw-giving https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5I1-aYzRIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceM9f81S-n4
Image Credits
Please credit the Public Works for the initial headshot of Dave.