Going to the back to make a comeback

December 24, 2009

Erik Vonk, a banking and staffing industry executive who has been credited with both saving and nearly wrecking the same Gulf Coast human resources firm, is back in the business.

Only now Vonk is in it for himself — and for other like-minded people who work for themselves.

Vonk’s vehicle is a new firm he co-founded called BOTH, or Back of the House. The St. Petersburg-based company does pretty much what its name says: Provide services from billing and collections to health plan consultation and banking to anyone working for themselves with no other employees.

“It’s everything someone would enjoy if they worked for a big company,” Vonk tells Coffee Talk. “We allow these freelancers to be surrounded by Fortune 500 support.”

Vonk and BOTH’s co-founder, A.D. Frazier, have deep pockets and even deeper dreams for where they want to take this company.
Frazier, the former chief operating officer of the Atlanta Committee of the Olympic Games and Vonk spent more than $500,000 of their own money to launch BOTH. “It’s fairly complicated to offer something like this,” says Vonk, “but this could be a substantial business over time.”

The company officially launched late this past summer and has nine employees, all of which work on a freelance basis. Still, the timing of starting a new business like this during a recession is risky, something Vonk acknowledges. “In some cases,” says Vonk, the recession has meant that “income and projects [for freelancers] are harder to come by.”

Indeed, that makes paying BOTH’s $399 monthly fee a tough call for some.The upside, says Vonk, is that the unemployment rate has forced more people into working for themselves, which increases BOTH’s potential market.

Vonk thought about the idea for a business such as BOTH as far back as the early 1990s, but he didn’t think the freelance workers movement was ripe enough yet for it.

Later in the decade, Vonk, a Dutch native, retired from the staffing industry to work for himself the traditional way — running a farm in Georgia.

In 2002, the board of directors at Gevity asked Vonk to take over the struggling firm. Vonk succeed in driving up profits at Gevity and perhaps resurrecting the firm.

By the fall of 2007 however, the company was on shaky ground after multiple unsuccessful strategy transformations. Vonk resigned Oct. 19 that year, in a parting both sides say was amicable. Gevity was bought in March by TriNet, a subsidiary of equity firm General Atlantic.