Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Meet the Company

LW: Brian, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, what your company is about and the business model?

Brian: Okay! My name is Brian Hattaway, and I'm the principal and owner of a company called ProCore Resource Group. The company was founded about 4 years ago as a consulting company. I was formerly with a Big 4 consulting company, but during the last economic downturn at the beginning of 2000-2001, I was let go from that position. I think that was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me because it really let me go into an entrepreneurial role where I could take all of the skills that I'd learned in the consulting space and continue to extend those. But I could do it in a way that I thought was going to give better client results than some of the things I'd experienced with the firm. So it was a great opportunity for me.

I'd had 13 years of experience in that realm, and have continued forward now for the last 5 or 6 years doing independent consulting and then starting my own consulting company. We started off initially as just a staff augmentation company, just bringing in additional resources to help with staffing needs for our various clients. And we found that model was at some points easy, because you're able to make a profit on all the resources you've placed. It's also very difficult, and much more difficult than we anticipated, because while we all know that we can do consulting much better than most, our clients don't necessarily have that appreciation. And when you compare our marketing messages with any of our competitors' marketing messages, you know, we can say we have smart people and others say they have smart people and there's really not a differentiation factor. So in order to get our resources placed was actually something we considered to be much more difficult than we thought.

So at this point, we're trying to differentiate and trying to make our consulting services based on more asset and knowledge capital type things so we actually can make a differentiation in the marketplace versus just having smart people which everybody says they've got.

Go back Next: The Big Idea