Just a few years ago, Victory Personnel Services Inc. was a struggling central-city staffing company that could barely pay its bills. Today, Victory places hundreds of people in temporary and permanent jobs and is expanding to other states thanks to a partnership that may be one of the first of its kind in the state.

Victory, a small, minority-owned staffing company in Milwaukee's downtown, has become a subcontractor to America's largest staffing company, Manpower Inc., on multiple annual multimillion-dollar contracts to provide staffing services in various locations in the United States.

"We get to grow our business and learn from a leader in the industry," says Joseph A. Tucker, Victory's president and chief executive officer.

Meanwhile, Glendale-based Manpower gets the credit for being one of the few companies of its size to really look at creative ways to reach out to minority-owned businesses.

Victory Personnel is a 100-employee staffing company that Tucker launched in 1991 to help the central city's poor and chronically unemployed find jobs. It was one of the first black-owned temporary employment agencies in Milwaukee.

The Victory/Manpower union took years to evolve, starting in 1992 when Victory began working with Manpower as a subcontractor on small-scale staffing jobs.

In the industry, it's common for larger staffing companies such as Manpower to subcontract work to minority suppliers to meet minority participation goals on a contract.

Nevertheless, says Tucker, unlike a lot of major companies that only render lip service to supplier diversity, Manpower has shown real commitment to helping small, minority-owned firms such as Victory succeed.

"A lot of companies come out of the gate and say, we're interested in partnering with this firm, and it's usually fluff," Tucker says.

Timothy Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, said Milwaukee is sorely lacking in examples of minority-owned firms that have a chance to grow nationally as Victory has through its relationship with Manpower.

Victory's 1998 Manpower contract could not have come at a better time. Victory had suffered major financial losses as a result of Tucker's crusade to find jobs for the city's hard-core unemployed.
That had proved a costly mission. Tucker went as far as providing transportation and training out of his own revenue.

"We were faced with the challenges of that labor force. Working with a labor force that's primarily unskilled is difficult. We made a lot of investments that were really socially responsible that we couldn't afford as a young company," Tucker said.

Tucker eventually made the decision to move his company's headquarters to downtown Milwaukee, which better positioned the firm to place highly skilled professionals and develop corporate relationships.

Tucker says his staffing company might not have built the ties with Manpower had it not been for a supplier diversity initiative that enables African-American entrepreneurs to get access to decision-makers in the area's largest companies and build relationships.

The initiative, called the Supplier Diversity Module, is a program of The Business Council, a 54-member organization of mostly black-owned businesses in the Milwaukee area and an affiliate of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. Since the initiative was launched in 2002, council members have obtained more than $1 million in new business from major companies in Milwaukee.
Tucker is projecting a 30% increase in sales this year largely because of the Manpower deal, Victory's biggest contract ever.

Now, Tucker wants to help other small, minority-owned businesses build similar relationships with major companies.

As the council's chairman, Tucker has worked to persuade CEOs of major corporations in Milwaukee to buy into the council's supplier diversity initiative. But he also wants to help minority-owned firms to become better positioned to handle large corporate contracts as more companies come on board.
"It's learning everyday the things you need to do to be better and then working at it everyday. We've been constantly evolving and changing to address what the market demands," he says.

Now, if only more companies in Milwaukee would follow Manpower's example, such partnerships are bound to have a positive, long-term economic impact. It's what is needed in a city where the number of minority-owned firms lag those in many major U.S. cities.