Ep21: Scott Ruthfield On Growing a Service Business Over 826% In Just Two Years

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Today we’re talking with Scott Ruthfield of Rooster Park, a Seattle based recruiting and custom software development consultancy. Scott founded Rooster Park in 2009 to satisfy his obsession with building software at a reasonable cost. Soon companies were asking for help recruiting entire engineering teams. Scott realized an untapped market in engineer focused recruiting and answered the call. Today his team carefully recruits developers, testers, designers and more for companies like Amazon, Google, Expedia and others. Before launching Rooster Park, Scott was the VP of Engineering & Technology for WhitePages.com, an over $70 million, 150-person company focused on people search at massive scale.

• Led his team to an Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America listing.
• Grew Rooster Park to a staggering 826% between 2010 and 2012 alone.
• Estimates Rooster Park’s earnings at $1 million every month.

Key Takeaways:

• Hear how Scott went from working at Microsoft, leading teams at Amazon, and working with the biggest technology giants in Seattle to launching a multi-million dollar company.
• Why quitting his job and wandering around networking for three months was one of the best professional decision he ever made.
• How he leveraged consulting gigs into his first paying clients for Rooster Park.
• Shares the personal story behind his unusual company name and his strategic reason for keeping it.
• Why he switched gears from building software and products to a boutique recruiting service company.
• Ramped up his new services by partnering with a company that needed engineers and contractors but didn’t how to do it themselves.
• Explains how he landed lucrative contracts with clients like ESPN, Disney and Moz among other giants.
• How a common cliché is all Scott really uses to continually build his company and add new clients.
• Reasons behind doing little else than great work for customer retention.
• How finding the right clients to begin with leads to success and real customer satisfaction.
• Explains how going against the grain and trying to scale a service business can be lucrative and satisfying.
• Shares methods and techniques for leaping past scaling plateaus.
• Scott’s struggle with productivity hacks and his one simple trick that keeps him organized.
• Why it’s only been in the last few months that Scott finally stopped doing his own bookkeeping, and the importance of delegating more to trusted employees.
• Surprisingly philanthropic yet entrepreneurial reasons behind giving away 10% of Rooster Park’s net income every year to technology startups.

Recommended Resources:

“Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People”

Rooster Park’s Advice on Hiring for Success:

Don’t Lower the Bar, Widen the Net

Creating a synchronous hiring process

The P’s of Onboarding a Recruiter