Charlene Garza was born to deaf parents in San Francisco in the late 1970s.
“Sign language is my first language,” Garza told the Business Journal. “As the oldest of four kids, it came with a lot of responsibilities. I grew up fast. It helped prepare me.”
That preparation eventually led to the formation of two staffing companies, Orange-based StaffChex Inc. and Horizon Personnel Services Inc.
Her two firms, which employ 6,630, including 130 internal employees, could generate about $250 million this year.
For her accomplishments, Garza was honored with a Business Journal Women in Business award during an Oct. 28 event at the Irvine Marriott.
“This woman is incredible,” Manishi Parikh, a senior vice president for Wells Fargo’s commercial banking business in Orange County, said when introducing Garza.
“She exemplifies strength. She exemplifies resilience. Her whole life experience is remarkable.”
Garza, when accepting the award, said it was “so unexpected.”
“I feel honored and privileged to be in a room with so many amazing women,” she told the audience of 600.
No College
College wasn’t in the cards for Garza.
“I just wasn’t interested, and I needed to work,” she said. “I wanted to be independent.”
Needing a job at 17, she answered a classified ad in a local paper for a staffing agency in Sacramento.
“It was one person and she taught me everything to know about the industry,” she said.
When she worked at another staffing firm, it closed suddenly, which provided a unique opportunity.
“One of my clients said ‘Why don’t you start your own?’ I laughed and shrugged it off because I didn’t have my own money.”
Nonetheless, she gave it a try by opening her business in Sacramento with her husband, Ruben. She learned to generate revenue through factoring, the selling of invoices.
Immediately, she found business was resonating from Southern California.
“I think it was luck. Another staffing agency had shut down and someone in Southern California heard I opened a staffing agency. They were calling left and right.”
It was “a no-brainer” for the couple to move to Newport Beach that same year.
In the first couple of years, she learned business the hard way “by not having a real CFO.” She ran into problems with the Internal Revenue Service, which said she owed $1.2 million.
“It was scary. Thankfully we were up front with the IRS. They helped us and worked with us and obviously we learned a big lesson.
“It’s crazy cause I know staffing companies with liabilities of $17 million and I don’t know how they’re running.”
Her biggest lesson in business was “to always be a real honest person with my employees, staff. That’s what helped me grow.”
Her husband Ruben died in 2018, of complications from alcoholism.
Comp Solutions
Most of Garza’s staffing work is in food manufacturing, logistics and warehouses that supply large clients like Walmart.
“The problem right now is the supply chain,” she said. “Most of our logistics companies are overworked.”
Her two companies provide “a workers comp solution” where she takes care of the liabilities such as insurance.
“It makes more sense for clients to keep them on my payroll because they have no liabilities,” she said. “Our lifeline of this business is our insurance policy. If we don’t protect that, our rates go extremely high.”
Because insurance rates are so much higher in California than other states, in 2012 she formed Horizon Personnel Services, which now holds all its California offices. Meanwhile her offices in Georgia, Arizona, Missouri and Nevada are in StaffChex.
Currently, she has 21 offices.
Future goals include expansion to another state, which she hasn’t yet determined, and opening a nonprofit to help people on a personal level, particularly children, with clothes, education, basic needs.
Her industry is a bellwether of future economic activity.
“We usually can forecast and see what’s going on based on what our business is doing,” she said. “Most companies, when things start picking up, they hire us.”
