1 Million Cups Preview: Christie Ison With ARFoodJobs.com

On Wednesday, April 1, Christie Ison with ARFoodJobs.com will be the guest speaker at Little Rock’s 1 Million Cups.

The programming starts at 9 a.m. at the Arkansas Venture Center, located at 107 E. Markham in downtown Little Rock catty-corner from the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce, where the events have been held in the past. It’s easy to participate: just show up, drink coffee, ask questions and network for an hour.

Ison’s business helps connect hospitality and restaurant employers with qualified food job candidates. You can find a job, post a job, or post your resume on the statewide web site.

Talk Business & Politics caught up with Ison to talk about ARFoodJobs.com’s start and growth.

TB&P: What made you start arfoodjobs.com and what have you learned since you launched?

Christie Ison: When I talk about starting arfoodjobs.com, I think of an animated movie I have watched with my kids called Robots. In the movie, one of the characters is an inventor, and his theme is “See a need, fill a need.” That’s exactly what happened with arfoodjobs.com.

Shortly after graduating from Pulaski Tech’s Culinary Arts & Hospitality Management Institute, they placed me on their advisory board. (My original capacity was to advise as a recent graduate, but they’ve let me stick around.) At one meeting, there was quite a bit of conversation about placing our students. We needed an organized way to do so, and the college staff could only do so much with their current resources.

At a later meeting, I spoke about the topic with Montine McNulty, executive director of the Arkansas Hospitality Association. Our consensus was that a third party could come about to work with all of them and help make connections. And now, that’s exactly what arfoodjobs.com does. We’re not just a job board, we’re matchmakers, connectors.

Since we launched, I’ve learned lots of things. I had some outside coaches from the beginning, all of them out-of-state connections. From them, I learned mindset and growth, actually believing this was possible, as well as the day-to-day tactics of starting and running a scalable business.

But one big thing I learned rather late was the need to get involved with the local startup community. Now that I’m in the PreFlight program at the Arkansas Venture Center, I’ve got loads of support and they’re helping me take things to the next level.

TB&P: Are you making money and do your plans for growth have scale?

Ison: Yes, I can say that we are making money; we have “traction,” to use a phrase from the entrepreneurial playbook. There is definitely interest in the restaurant and hospitality world to get some help in building amazing teams.

Our affiliations with the Arkansas Hospitality Association and Pulaski Tech’s CAHMI, as well as the other culinary and hospitality programs across the state, create the opportunity for scale across Arkansas. But we’re going bigger than that. Later this year, we plan to be in Charleston and New Orleans. The first step will be to bring the job board portion of the business there.

Soon after that, we’ll start having our social networking and educational events there and add our concierge recruiting services to those markets. The five-year plan is to be in every major food and hospitality market in the southeast.

TB&P: You will have some visitors with you on Wednesday. Can you give us a tease of who they are and, in general, what you may have in mind?

Ison: On Wednesday, the audience will include representatives from the Arkansas Hospitality Association and Pulaski Tech’s CAHMI. We have affiliate agreements with both of them, basically reciprocal marketing and cooperation in various areas. We are working together to place great people in the industry, which is, of course, what arfoodjobs’ business model is about.

But even more than that, our collective goal is to make people think differently about the hospitality industry. It’s not just low-paying, low-skill jobs. It’s not just teenagers, although they do gain some great life skills working in the industry. It’s a huge part of our state’s growth, a huge part of the state’s small business story. Upward mobility is rapid for those who work hard and demonstrate the soft skills that we’re promoting. And I get to see them make that first step, get that first placement that might make all the difference.