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ASIAN AMERICAN BUSINESS John Chuang turned his tiny college copy shop into a global consulting firm. |
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TITAN OF TEMPS
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he days of using a door as a table to save a few bucks may be long gone, but the experience remains vivid in John Chuang's memory. That was back in 1986 when Chuang was running a tiny print shop above a convenience store in Harvard Square. The Harvard sophomore was in the perfect place to spot his clients' growing need for trained Macintosh operators. That was the seed of Aquent (MacTemps until 1999), which saw sales of over $130 million from over 70 offices around the world. In 2002 Aquent was recognized as one of the world's 50 most respected consulting firms. Not bad for a company that started offering desktop publishing services, then evolved into a temp agency.
John Chuang has warm and vivid recollection of the early days when he bootstrapped the business from a base of zero capital.
"Back then all I knew was I wanted to create a company that would be scaleable and that could be replicated in other cities," says Chuang. "The Mac computer became our niche in the market, because most companies were focused on using PCs. The Mac was still small and not everyone used it." But those customers that Chuang wanted were using the Macintosh.
"We ran a small ad in a computer newsletter that basically asked, 'You don't use any computer. Why use any computer specialist?' recalls Chuang. "The phone rang off the hook."
"We were the only game in town." Within three months there was an office in New York City, and two months after that, Los Angeles. "We [Chuang and two partners] were the staff and the owners, so we were sending ourselves out on jobs as well as trying to run the company." The company developed a training program for new temps and quickly began hiring the best Mac computer operators it could find. In the first year of operation, 5 offices opened across the country. "Sooner or later somebody would have started this company, but we were the first."
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The company began opening offices quickly because they had made a unique marketplace discovery and didn't want to lose the franchise to a spate of imitators. "We were the first," says Chuang, "and now we're the largest." In the early 1990s Chuang expanded internationally, opening offices in London, Paris and Melbourne, Australia, bringing their worldwide total to more than 40 offices by 1995. Annual sales hit $50 million that year and the company found itself on Inc's list of 500 fastest growing private companies two years running. Chuang was named "Entrepreneuer of the Year for Service" in New England by Inc. Magazine/Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch. Chuang also received the "Excellence 2000" award from the United States Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce, the only national award of its kind.
Chuang lived up to the billing.
By 1996 MacTemps had developed two new and thriving units -- Portfolio and 1-800-Network. Portfolio specializes in high-end creative graphic arts personnel, art directors, designers and illustrators. That put the company at number two in the country for graphic arts specialists and Chuang was predicting a number one ranking by the end of the year. Portfolio opened offices in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Detroit, each within a month of each other and the company continues to expand.
The other new unit was a techical support staffing company for Network and LAN systems. It provided personnel for all aspects of network operations, from original design to administration to trouble shooting of Windows, NT and Novell systems. It soon opened eight offices nationwide in Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston. "With each new unit we create," says Chuang, "we examine the marketplace first to see if the market has a need for our service and can sustain it." Once that is completed, the company moves swiftly to capitalize on its opportunities in each new market.
MacTemps also began experimenting with two more units -- Montage, a company which specializes in the rapidly-expanding world of Multimedia, and MacTemps Technical, which, as the name implies, will offer technical support for Mac users on-site as well as by telephone.
By 2001 Chuang had boosted sales to $130 million with operations in 70 offices in 10 countries. Aquent was billing itself as the world's largest talent agency for creative professionals. At any given time it has about 3,000 consultants in the field. The bulk of them are in the creative fields of design, graphics, marketing and advertising. A growing share are networking specialists, with the balance in finance and administration.
Chuang says modestly that his company "performs very well." Over the past decade, the company has enjoyed healthy profits.
John Chuang was born and raised in the Queens district of New York City. He attended Stuyvestant High School before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard University and receive his MBA. "I always knew I would be in some kind of business for myself," says Chuang. "My parents never really pushed me in any one direction or another. My father was in business and my mother was a librarian." PAGE 2
| "We were the staff and the owners, so we were sending ourselves out on jobs as well as trying to run the company." |