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PeopleReady history
PeopleReady company history timeline
In 1969 he and two business partners had started Northwest Management Corporation, a restaurant holding company that occupied Welstad's attention for the next 15 years.
As he had with Northwest Management, Welstad enlisted the help of two associates to start Labor Ready in 1989, using a $50,000 bankroll to get the company started.
TrueBlue, Inc. began in 1989 as a single Labor Ready, Inc., branch office in Kent, Washington.
Welstad entered the market by signing a contract with Action Temporary Services, but by 1991 the business relationship had turned litigious.
By the end of 1994, there were 51 dispatch offices, including four in Canada, but Welstad had not yet penetrated any markets in the Northeast and the Atlantic, and it maintained only a small presence in the Southeast with one branch office.
Prior to the company’s initial public offering (IPO), it had increased the number of its branch offices to 106 by the end of 1995, a year during which the first Labor Ready office was established in the Northeast.
The logical alternative was an offering of stock to investors, which Labor Ready did in June 1996.
The long-running case began in 1996 after workers in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia tried to unionize with the help of the AFL-CIO’s BCTD, which charged the company with unfair labor practices.
In 1997 a Labor Ready office averaged $27,000 in revenue per week, spurring Welstad to accelerate his expansion plans for the future.
“Tacoma, Wash., Temp Firm Founder Named Entrepreneur of the Year,” Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News, June 26, 1998.
Labor Ready filled more than 4.8 million work orders, issued over 6.5 million paychecks, and processed 533,000 W-2's in 1998.
In 1998 Labor Ready outlets averaged $31,000 in business per week, helping the company to record astounding financial totals for the year.
During the first four months of 1999, the company opened 166 new dispatch offices, nearly reaching its goal of opening 200 offices during the first half of the year.
The fees exacted for making wages available through the machines had added $7.7 million to Labor Ready’s 1999 revenue.
$1 Billion in Revenue by 2000
In the year 2000, however, founder Glenn Welstad suddenly resigned as chairman and CEO over a questionable $3.5 million loan he took from the company without board authorization.
Also during the summer of 2000, a prominent shareholder, the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), sued Labor Ready for misleading statements in its Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and to its investors and for failing to hold its annual shareholders meeting.
Labor Ready won its own lawsuit in October 2001 when a West Virginia court concluded that the AFL-CIO’s BCTD had illegally attempted to disrupt the company’s business relationships.
Yet despite the company’s legal reversals and the AFL-CIO’s campaign against it, Labor Ready reported 51 percent net income growth for 2003.
In April 2004, Labor Ready acquired Spartan Staffing, Inc., a privately owned temporary employee company with annual revenue of about $50 million.
In May 2005, Labor Ready purchased CLP Resources Inc., a private Reno, Nevada, skilled staffing company with 50 locations in 20 states, for approximately $46.2 million in cash.
The acquisition was expected to bolster considerably Labor Ready’s entry into the skilled construction trades sector with the 2005 acquisition of CLP Resources.
In February 2006, Joe Sambataro announced his retirement as CEO and was replaced in May by Steven C. Cooper, who had served in the previous year as president.
In June 2006, Labor Ready announced that it was buying back up to $50 million worth of its common stock on either the open market or in private transactions.
Labor Finders has received top honors in ClearlyRated® Best of Staffing® Client competition for thirteen consecutive years since its inception in 2010 and has secured the exclusive Best of Staffing® Double Diamond Award after achieving ten consecutive wins.
In 2020, TrueBlue put 490,000 people to work and helped 99,000 companies find talent around the world.
"Labor Ready, Inc. ." International Directory of Company Histories. . Retrieved April 15, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/labor-ready-inc-0
Leveraging its game-changing JobStack platform and 600-plus branch offices across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Canada, PeopleReady served approximately 94,000 businesses and put approximately 220,000 people to work in 2021.
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| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Staffmark | 1970 | $85.0M | 75 | 5 |
| Express Employment Indy South | - | $6.5M | 96 | 334 |
| Labor Finders | 1975 | $150.0M | 1,959 | 166 |
| Elwood Staffing | 1980 | $200.0M | 938 | 113 |
| Automation Personnel Services | 1990 | $240.0M | 4,200 | 342 |
| Elite Staffing | 1991 | $8.7M | 90,000 | 63 |
| MDT Personnel | 2010 | $9.4M | 161 | - |
| Allied Forces Temporary Services | 1985 | $8.5M | 150 | - |
| GL Staffing | 2001 | $20.0M | 189 | 10 |
| Integrity Trade Services | 2008 | $14.6M | 302 | 15 |
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PeopleReady may also be known as or be related to Labor Ready, Labor Ready Southeast III, LP, PeopleReady and PeopleReady Inc.