Doug Leeby is the CEO of Beeline, a global SaaS technology company and solution provider for sourcing and managing the extended workforce. With offices in the US, UK, Australia, and the Philippines, Beeline serves the world’s largest and most respected brands by managing over $40B in contingent workforce spend. Recognized as an industry innovator and customer champion, Doug has led Beeline to become the largest independent provider of solutions for managing all categories of non-fulltime talent, including temporary staff, professional contractors, service workers, consultants, project-based workers, and independent contractors. 

Doug is in his 18th year at Beeline and is based at the company’s headquarters in Jacksonville, FL. He has been included on Staffing Industry Analyst’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in Staffing” every year since 2012. Doug believes strongly in culture and through his servant-minded leadership has created a corporate culture built on trust and diversity. Doug attended Vanderbilt University where he earned his BA in History and his M.Ed. in Human Resources. He enjoys learning, interacting with interesting people, the outdoors, and any and all time with his family.

Episode transcription:

D: Hi, it's Doug Leeby, CEO of beeline.

J: Doug, thanks so much for finding time to join us on the Ivy Podcast today. You are my first episode of 2021. All right, cool. No pressure on you.

D: Yeah, no worries. I’ve got to set the right tone for the new year.

J: Can you tell us a little bit more about your background, where you come from, your career path, and then I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about your current organization.

D: Okay, sure. I've been at Beeline for 20 years, I just celebrated my 20th year with the company a couple of weeks ago. Before that, I got out of school and I went into consumer products, so Pillsbury and then Agora. So I spent 10 years there, and then I made the move over to this industry and have been in there ever since.

J: That's exciting. So tell us a little bit more about Beeline. What problem are you guys solving through products and services?

D: Go back to when I started, which was basically 2000, you'll recall, you may not, you're young, but Y2K was a big problem. And everybody was concerned with the fact that the ball was going to drop and all IT systems were going to crash.

And so what that did is it afforded the staffing companies a great opportunity, because there was such demand and very little supply. So obviously staffing firms made a lot of money in that timeframe. And then Y2K happened in the big nothing, so they had a lot of, let's say disenfranchised procurement departments realizing they paid a lot of money that maybe it was out of market rate.

So enter what we call VMs vendor management software, which in essence leveled the playing field and put job descriptions electronically to a preferred supply base and then made them compete. So in essence, it was a cost savings play. At least it started that way back in the early two thousands. And if you think about an applicant tracking system, which in essence sits at the enterprise or the company level and helps people go find candidates to hire that's in essence, what VMs is vendor management software sits in between the large enterprise and the staffing firms, and basically just relays the requisition over to those staffing firms and they submit those candidates. And it's an opportunity for large companies to, to find talent, always non full-time talent though, whether that be a contractor or a 10 99, or even project based work. So our solution in essence, connects talent with large companies, but that talent is always on a temporary basis.

J: Oh, that's exciting. And I personally, you know, dealt with different, different types of VMs systems.

When I was incorporated, where organizations were actually, you know, we would start a project management office for example, and we would have