Make the Customer Happy

Dan Rodriguez and his partners at Tampa-based Veredus Corp. could not have launched their tech staffing firm at a worse moment: January 2001. Within months, the 9/11 terrorists attacks sent the economy into a tailspin.

“We were all wondering, gosh, was this really a good idea?” he says. He and his partners had left executive positions at Kforce Professional Staffing to feed their entrepreneurial spirits, but the very moment they began, the industry all but disappeared.

“Nobody was hiring. A lot of people were out of work,” he says, looking out over Interstate 275 from his Westshore office.