Today we’d like to introduce you to Dawn Sipley.
Hi Dawn, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
I started my HR career through retail, in 2006 after my mother died of an overdose and I gained custody of my baby sister. I had just graduated from college with my business degree and had been a realtor through college, enjoying the surge of the market. I was 23, with custody of one angry 16-year-old sister with a medical condition that forced me out of self-employment. I myself had been emancipated in high school between my sophomore and junior year of high school. Retail is where I found my passion for recruitment. I worked as a corporate recruiter during the recession but finally landed at a local staffing company in 2008. It was a franchised organization with an older owner who was losing money daily through the recession. One day, he came to me and said if I wanted to keep my job, my recruitment job, that I better go out and “sell something” and he handed me a phonebook. So… I did, not from the phone book but I started to read about business development, networking, and relationship-based sales. I did well, the company grew and I hired a team around me and grew our company from losses to over $4 million in revenue. I was dedicated and passionate and that was recognized, I was offered an opportunity to earn “sweat equity” in the company with the plans of a full transition and my business partner’s eventual retirement. Life was good but it came with challenges that I eventually could not overlook and in 2020, I left that organization, deeply betrayed.
It was an advisory board at my local college that opened my eyes to some of the challenges that I had been blissfully ignorant about in our business and with my partner during my 12 years of employment and ownership. It was during this time that I prayed and was given a vision of a plan B that would allow me to honor my non-compete if things went south and still feed my family. I will forever be grateful for His vision and timing, I walked away from what I thought was my “forever job” and started my own business, Sipley the Best, in the midst of a pandemic, with the hopes to just feed my family and do business in the way that I was called to do.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I was not emancipated by the courts at 16 because my life had been easy up to that point. My mother was a single mom, and never married mine or my baby sisters’ fathers. She struggled with her mental health and medicated with drugs and alcohol. Her passing was devastating at 23 but also a great relief of responsibility, caretaking, and midnight calls from an addicted mother in distress.
Starting in a company during a recession had many challenges. To keep things afloat, I worked every angle of that business. Sales, marketing, operation, accounts receivable, and strategic planning, all with a partner that couldn’t have been more different in age, sex, religion, background, and reasons for being in business. The challenges were countless but with handwork, I built that business and was solely responsible for more than 80% of all the revenue. The fact that I had been parentified during my childhood, made me the ideal candidate for this role.
Once I announced the start of my business, people flocked to my door. It was startling, I had hoped for a nice smooth launch, due to the pandemic. I thought I would have time to build my website, create my business plan, and design my package and offerings but that isn’t what happened. Instead, I was thrusted into business. I operated for months with no website, just a Facebook page. I scribbled together contracts as people asked me to serve them in different ways but no one seemed to read them, they just gave me money and I delivered. It was chaos but we were profitable from Day 1.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
With nearly 20 years of recruitment experience, we are an HR Consulting firm that specialized in recruitment support and education. Instead of operating like a staffing company where the fee is 20-30% of each hire’s salary, paid contingently, we work on a flat fee basis, paid upfront, supporting the recruitment efforts of small and medium-sized businesses. This allows them to increase the number of qualified applicants, give them the capacity to onboard well and develop an HR strategy that will ultimately reduce turnover. I adore this unique business model!
How can people work with you, collaborate with you, or support you?
I am always seeking partners who align with my vision and mission to be a blessing to my community by supporting entrepreneurial dreams and guiding job seekers on how to be elite candidates in. If you know anyone struggling to attract candidates or hire well, I would love an introduction. I am also a keynote speaker to audiences of both business owners and employees, speaking on a wide variety of topics from parentification to HR Strategy.
Contact Info:
- Email: Dawn@Sipleythebest.com
- Website: https://www.sipleythebest.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sipleythebest/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SipleyTheBest
- Twitter: @Sipleythebest
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A2hPM5-Ryc&t=2s
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/sipley-the-best-sanford
Image Credits
Gladys Garcia
