WorkMarket.com Update: More Customers, More Capital

Nearly a year after former OnForce CEO Jeff Leventhal founded WorkMarket.com, things are starting to pick up speed. The service, which pairs VARs with available temporary service personnel and manages the entire workforce soup to nuts, is gaining real traction among the resale community. While the offering, which Leventhal terms “the world’s first Labor Resource Platform,” still is invitation-only, it’s managed to fill out its customer and worker ranks at a steady pace. Read on for the details…

Work Market takes a pragmatic approach to dealing with the needs of smaller VARs. “Companies want to scale up, and they need people to do [the job], but they’re not going to hire full-time resources for a short period of time,” Leventhal said. But instead of having one HR app to manage permanent employees and another to manage temps,  Work Market combines a CRM system and an ERP system provide a single resource for staffing management.

“My DNA is in the VAR channel,” he said, “[but] the traditional model of payroll of service people is an old notion. On-demand labor when you need it [is the future].”

Work Market is a fledgling company, announced in June 2010 and launched in December 2010. Leventhal today is just as confident about his latest endeavor as he was then, pointing out the features that set Work Market apart from its competitors.

“Our platform is profile-agnostic. Our system learns how to set up profiles based on skills entered. We can accommodate any kind of skill set and therefore attract much higher talent and … much more significant engagements. Other platforms’ architecture does not allow for this,” he said. “Our platform allows you to run recruiting campaigns to attract people outside of our ecosystem. No one else can do this in a single app.”

Work Market is growing internally, as well. “We started with just 11 people from [my] previous company, and grew to 25 people. We got $25 million in venture capital and spent seven months building it out. We have 80 clients in our pipeline; lots of them are large VARs. Some are smaller,” said Leventhal, who noted the Work Market system currently has a database of 4,000 people.

Although the company has yet to turn a profit — Leventhal said it’s too soon — Leventhal expects to sign up 16 customers a month between now and August 2011. “We’ve built a faster, better, cheaper mousetrap,” he said.

“We will be cash flow-positive by end of summer [2011],” Leventhal continued. “We are more focused on building a world-class product and recruiting the best team amd that’s why we raise venture capital. If you build the best product, the cash flow follows. We have an ‘A’ team and a huge sales pipeline committed to using Work Market.”

So when will Work Market be open to the general public?

“Not sure,” Leventhal responded. “I like it invite-only, [but] … any user with an account can send an invitation.”

But as we’ve previously noted, even though Work Market is free to use, keeping it invitation-only could limit its success. With competition such as the OpenAir Cloud PSA system looming, Leventhal may want to consider opening up Work Market sooner rather than later.

As always, we’ll continue to keep close tabs on WorkMarket.com as it evolves and grows out for the channel, and hopefully, opens to the public.

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