“Staying here keeps us connected to the values and people who made us what we are today.”

 

With more than 300 employees, clients in five states, and an 85,000-square-foot headquarters in Midtown Cleveland, the MinuteMen Family of Companies comprises one of the largest staffing and HR service providers in the Midwest. Founded as a day labor staffing agency by Sam Lucarelli in 1967, the continually growing business is today run by Sam’s sons, Jay, president and CEO; and J.R., vice-president.

J.R. recently took time to sit down with GCP at the company’s fabulous new HQ on Carnegie Avenue to share his thoughts on the company’s growth, future and commitment to Cleveland.

Minutemen is a household name in Cleveland; can you share more about your origin story?

My maternal grandfather worked for a large staffing company in Chicago and was offered the first franchise for them to expand to Cleveland. So he relocated his family and opened up a staffing office, but the franchise agreement didn’t work out.

At the same time my dad had recently graduated high school and had gotten a job driving for beverage distributors, restocking vending machines in factories and warehouses around Cleveland.  He was a very charismatic guy and got to know a lot of the foremen and workers.  He saw first-hand the staffing challenges that businesses encountered every day.

So, my dad and grandfather teamed up to start their own staffing agency.  My mom came up with the name “Minutemen”.  It was both patriotic and evocative of how the company would be quick to respond to client needs.

How did it evolve?

For the first couple of years of the business, my dad kept his beverage delivery route but would bring a change of clothes with him on the truck.

He’d do his route wearing his delivery jumpsuit then change into his suit and tie and make sales calls on the owners running the warehouses and factories he had just delivered to.

My grandfather would stay back at the office, taking the orders that came in and recruiting workers to fill them.

About a year into the partnership my grandfather passed away, but by then my dad had learned enough of the business to take the reins.  And his father – my paternal grandfather – and my uncle joined him, and the family business really took off.  That was around 1969.  

 

What were some of the early growth milestones?

Our first location was at East 18^th and Prospect. In 1986, we moved into the former Sealtest dairy plant built in the 1920s. It’s a distinctive building that’s served us well, but we’ve run out of space.  So, we just built a modern new addition, doubling our footprint in Midtown.

Even as we grew our headquarters in Cleveland, my dad began expanding to the suburbs and to other cities in Ohio.  That was the key to our early growth – opening offices in Solon and Brunswick, in Cincinnati and Columbus.  And then from there into nearby states.

How has the staffing industry evolved?

Fifty years ago, an employer would call and within a half hour we’d send someone out to work.  We’d pay that employee at the end of the day. It was a really fast process.

As our clients’ needs and the hiring process in general became more complex, our model evolved alongside. Today we're very much a traditional staffing provider.  The majority of our clients are in logistics or light industry.  They’re looking to fill more long-term needs.  We do a lot of temp-to-perm and direct hire fulfilment these days.

We hear from so many businesses about the challenges of staffing post-COVID. How has that affected you?

Before the pandemic we were filling virtually all of our orders.  When COVID hit for the first time in the history of the company we had trouble filling orders.  Many people had left the workforce, and wages were rapidly inflating.  So we had a lot of open orders from clients we couldn’t fill. This was true across the board in the staffing industry – it was a tough time for everyone.

Thankfully over the last year we’ve seen things begin returning to normal.  We’re back to having a strong applicant flow.  If we conduct a job fair, we get 50 or 60 people.  We’re filling our orders again and that’s a great feeling.

How did you expand from staffing?

When you’re operating a staffing company at our scale you develop a number of related core competencies, including payroll and workers’ comp.

Back in the old days we were cutting and delivering payroll as paper checks on a daily or weekly basis for tens of thousands of employees.  Today it’s mostly electronic, but the principle is the same.  You have to do it fast, and do it right.

And workers’ comp is also something you’ve got to get right.  From a cost management perspective, it’s one of the biggest variables in staffing. The better we manage our workers’ comp, the more competitive we can be with our pricing, saving money for our clients.

We became extremely competent at managing these things for ourselves. And then we started knocking on the doors of our staffing clients to say, “Hey, you know, we've been doing a great job with our own payroll and workers’ comp. We bet we can save you time and money if we handled yours as well.” And from there the payroll and workers’ comp business took off. 

We work with businesses of all sizes and types across Ohio – you don’t have be one of our staffing clients to benefit from our other service offerings.

You recently invested in this fabulous new 45,000-square foot expansion on Carnegie Avenue. Can you tell us a little more about your new space?

We’d grown too large for our existing building, the old dairy plant. We said, “let’s take a holistic approach – do we want to build something new or find something we can repurpose?” But our guiding light during that reconnaissance mission was that we are staying in Cleveland and we're staying in Midtown.

 

Why Midtown? 

So much of our candidate flow lives in the neighborhoods in and around Midtown, and we've built up this amazing labor force of people we know and who know our jobs well.  We’ve been part of this community so long that we’ve hired multiple generations of families who live here.

From a client perspective, we do a lot of work with the Guardians and the Browns and other downtown organizations, so being near them was important.

And finally, there's a real sense here of family history here. My dad first walked onto this lot on Carnegie when it housed nothing but an abandoned dairy plant and had a vision for what it could be.  And look at it now!  Staying here keeps us connected to the values and people who made us what we are today.

What elements were important in the construction?

Open spaces and lots of glass walls were key because we have an open-door policy with our teams and leadership. And larger conference spaces were also important so we can host meetings and put on training and software demos.  The old building is beautiful in so many ways, but there wasn’t much emphasis on open spaces in the 1920s.

With the new addition we have a number of great environments we can use for various purposes, whether it’s a large training seminar in a modern presentation space or a casual one-on-one meeting on the third-floor patio overlooking downtown.

What is the secret to Minutemen’s success?

My dad taught us that the staffing business is an industry where you need to win your clients on a daily basis.  You can never get complacent. There’s a lot of competition out there, and from a distant view we’re all offering similar services.  But what makes us different is our commitment to earn a client’s ongoing business by listening to their needs, providing great service, and responding quickly to any challenges that come up.

We’re a large company now and continuing to grow quickly. But we haven’t lost that sense of start-up scrappiness and underdog ingenuity that my dad had with him back when he was changing into a suit and tie on his delivery routes to win his first clients.  That’s our secret, and I know he’d be proud to see how things are turning out.

Greater Cleveland Partnership’s All In vision for a Great Region on a Great Lake has five key priorities: Dynamic Business, Abundant Talent, Inclusive Opportunity, Appealing Community and Business Confidence. All of our work ties back to these values. This story relates to Dynamic Business and Business Confidence.