Talking Points: Steven C. Cooper, President & CEO, TrueBlue Inc.

Under Steve Cooper, Tacoma-based TrueBlue has expanded beyond its Labor Ready franchise, which has long provided day labor to construction companies, into a family of enterprises that find employment for a range of blue-collar workersfrom carpenters to aviation mechanicsin a variety of industries. The new businesses helped TrueBlue weather the recession. It now has 2,500 employees nationwide and expects to double revenues to $2 billion in two to three years.

CHILDHOOD: I grew up in a small town in southeast Idaho as the youngest of five boys. [He also has a younger sister.] We all grew up doing blue-collar jobs. At 10, I laid irrigation pipes on farms. At 12, I did planting. By 14, I was driving the potato truck from the field to the warehouse. I had to stand up to get enough weight on the clutch to shift gears.

EDUCATION: My brothers all ended up in professions. Ones a doctor, ones a dentist, ones an engineer and ones an attorney. I struggled when I tried to do what they did. But when I moved into finance, I found the classes came easily. I went to work for Deloitte in the big city, Boise. I missed my family like crazy.

CAREER: At Deloitte, I had great mentors who taught me the real business world. Then I joined Albertsons, a large client, to learn the operations side. The skill set of listening and collaborating and getting the most out of a team is a skill set that I saw as a differentiator. It comes down to leaders knowing how to encourage individuals to set aside their personal agendas for the betterment of the team.

LABOR READY: I moved to Arthur Andersen, where I got the opportunity to build a business in the risk-control world, teaching companies to understand what might go wrong. Thats how I found Labor Ready. They were a client. I went to a branch office one afternoon [in 1999] and was amazed to see 100 people who had been out all day doing tough jobs and were really happy to get paid in cash. I returned the next morning at 5:30 and saw the staff busily matching people to customer orders coming in by phone. By 7:30, they had put another 100 people to work. I stood there with my jaw open in amazement. Right then, I knew that was the company where I wanted to work. I started in the accounting group, became CFO the next year and president in 2005. Six months later, in the spring of 2006, I became CEO.

BUILDING THE BUSINESS: There wasnt a big transition because Joe Sambataro [the previous CEO] was my mentor and we worked closely together. But what we worked on as an organization changed. We had built up Labor Ready from 300 to 900 branches in three years, but in 2002, with the recession, we had to close several hundred offices. We took advantage of the slowdown to increase the quality of our recruiting, and put in place leadership and sales training.

DIVERSIFICATION: We realized Labor Ready couldnt be the growth engine anymore, so in 2004 we bought CLP Resources, a Reno-based company that provided skilled workers like carpenters, electricians or plumbers to the same construction companies we were already serving. They would say to a worker, Do you have the tools? Can you bring them in and show me? They would check references and certification so customers could be assured of the workers skill set. In 2005, we bought Spartan Staffing, which had nine branches in Florida serving manufacturers of food products and distributors with seasonal workers. At Labor Ready, we would spend 10 minutes teaching each worker about safety. At Spartan, they screened workers to make sure they could run a piece of equipment or drive a forklift. We added new offices across the country, building a $150 million business in five years.

AS CEO: When I became CEO in 2006, I appointed three presidentsone for each business. Then [in 2007] we added a company, PlaneTechs, that placed aviation mechanics required for repairing, maintaining and overhauling [Boeing] 737s. Every 30,000 times a plane lands and departs, it has to be stripped down and rebuilt. The companys job was to locate aviation mechanics around the country and send them to one of 10 locations where the work was being done. We bought the company to learn how to recruit and dispatch skilled workers nationally. At the time, Boeing was struggling to get the 787 flying. They were having trouble finding the right people and asked us to find 50 aviation mechanics. From 2008 to 2010, Boeing became a $100 million customer.

DRIVERS: Another growth area is in the truck-driving business. We bought a small company [TLC] in Southern California that was the compliance leader in finding and supplying commercially licensed truck drivers and doing all the right reporting to the Department of Transportation. We rebranded it Centerline and took it nationwide. It used to be about finding temporary truck drivers for seasonal situations or when someone was on vacation. But some companies dont like to manage truck drivers because they dont want to deal with regulations and compliance issues. Now, we have taken over the management of all truck drivers at many companies. Thats quickly becoming half of our truck-driving business.

THE FUTURE: In 2008, we changed our corporate name from Labor Ready to TrueBlue so that all our employees feel part of the family. Right now, we are well on our way to $1.2 billion in sales with tracks laid for $2 billion in revenues in the next two or three years. What will take us to a $5 billion company? Were making small investments to see if we can find another business to take nationwide. One thing we havent done well is serving industrial skills. Welders and pipe fitters, for example, are needed when oil refineries or manufacturers overhaul. With what we learned placing aviation mechanics, we could find and place industrial workers wherever they are needed.

A TEMPS BOOM: In the boom years, temporary work was 2 percent of the workforce [nationwide]. That dropped to 1.3 percent in the recession. Now its about 1.7 percent. I believe it will go to 3 or 4 percent. In some places in Europe, its in the double digits. When you experience the kind of downsizing there has been recently, you decide it makes sense to keep more of your workers as temporary staff to serve as shock absorbers. They are let go first and then hired first when demand spikes. Another factor is that as regulation and legislation increase, a lot of employers have trouble dealing with that, particularly small and midsize companies. We have a legal team that captures all the new regulations on the compliance side and has gotten Department of Labor awards. We demand that regulations are met. Even larger employers are migrating to us because of this.

HEALTH-CARE REFORM: Health-care reform was scary at first, but [the federal government] wants to make it work, so were pleased about that. Requiring everyone to get health care makes it easier for us to offer health care to our workers. Our concern was that we be treated fairly. It doesnt make sense for a temporary worker to sign up for a new health plan every time they take a job. But that person might show up at a clinic sometime, so it makes sense that we would pay something for that. Maybe we can pay fees [to cover health care for temporary workers] on an hourly basis.