The Cloud Nine Story
From Humble Beginnings
Cloud Nine Staffing began as a part of Total Administrative Solutions, the brainchild of Ragen Chastain. Ragen had a career in operations consulting and became frustrated that the small businesses she was working with didn’t have access to good administrative support. She began a service that matched highly qualified admins (known as the Admin Angels) who were looking for part-time work with small businesses that needed just a little help, and the idea flourished!
A Perfect Match
Kyeli Smith joined Total Administrative Solutions as one of the Admin Angels in May of 2005. She was an excellent admin and was extremely motivated, so Ragen soon asked her to become manager of this rapidly growing staffing arm of Total Administrative Solutions. Kyeli excelled at pairing clients with Angels, and it became clear that she was a perfect match.
The Ah-ha! Moment
Ragen realized that she was facing burn-out as a consultant and was ready for a grand new adventure. She and Kyeli started seriously discussing their past work experiences. In her days consulting with businesses, one of Ragen’s greatest frustrations was dealing with staffing companies sending admins who always wound up being under-qualified, under-skilled and under-motivated, if they showed up at all! Kyeli, who had moved around quite a bit and spent a lot of time as a temp, chimed in that she was really frustrated by temp agencies treating her like a replaceable cog in the wheel and sending her out on jobs that she had specifically stated that that she didn’t want for pay drastically less than she had stated was acceptable, with no benefits. That was the “ah-ha!” moment.
A Business Model is Born
Kyeli and Ragen decided that together, they could raise the bar in administrative staffing and truly revolutionize the staffing industry. They started by choosing their niche – their expertise was in administrative support. Then, they made two lists. One list was everything Ragen hated about dealing with staffing agencies. The other was everything Kyeli hated about working for staffing agencies. They carefully created their business model by systematically solving each of the problems on those lists. Later, they added Pace Smith as CTO to help them develop their proprietary technology platform, and brought on Megan Elizabeth Morris as their web developer.
An Ongoing Mission
Cloud Nine maintains the desire to help small businesses by offering hour-by-hour assistance, in addition to branching out with temp, temp-to-hire, and direct hire staffing for companies of all sizes. The Cloud Nine team believes that by doing what is radically different, you really can change the world for the better – and that is what they do every day.