CONKLIN — WyckWyre ended 2011 on a strong note that company officials hope sets the stage for additional growth this year. In the fourth quarter, sales at WyckWyre, a division of Maines Paper & Food Service, Inc. that offers online restaurant job postings and searches, increased 69 percent, says Lisa DiVirgilio, marketing manager. “It was […]
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CONKLIN — WyckWyre ended 2011 on a strong note that company officials hope sets the stage for additional growth this year.
In the fourth quarter, sales at WyckWyre, a division of Maines Paper & Food Service, Inc. that offers online restaurant job postings and searches, increased 69 percent, says Lisa DiVirgilio, marketing manager.
“It was fantastic,” she says of the quarter’s growth. “I’m thrilled and it’s a really great way to start out the new year.”
Much of the growth came from WyckWyre’s “unlimited” system, which allows customers to post an unlimited number of job openings with a fee structure based on the number of restaurant locations participating in the job searches, DiVirgilio says. And one company in particular drove most of that growth during the quarter.
Dublin, Ohio–based The Wendy’s Company (NYSE: WEN) is behind the stellar fourth quarter at WyckWyre, she says.
Maines already had an established relationship with local Wendy’s restaurant locations that led to those locations trying out WyckWyre when they needed to hire new employees.
“With quick-service restaurants, the turnover is extreme,” DiVirgilio notes, so WyckWyre’s streamlined applicant vetting process is perfect for a place like Wendy’s that needs to sift through applicants quickly, find the best candidates, and get them in the door to start work.
Being able to do that all online through WyckWyre (www.wyckwyre.com) beats the old method of sorting through a stack of paper applications, she adds.
“They could log onto our site and, with the same amount of effort, immediately select the most qualified applicants,” she says.
Using WyckWyre, she says, saves Wendy’s between four and six hours of legwork, such as screening and reviewing applications, per hire.
Those statistics made an impression with the higher-ups at Wendy’s, and the result is that WyckWyre now handles the application process for a number of Wendy’s locations around the Northeast as well as one as far west as Montana.
“That’s what really blew it up,” she says of WyckWyre’s fourth-quarter growth.
But Wendy’s isn’t solely responsible for the company’s strong fourth quarter, DiVirgilio says. “We’re working with a few other really awesome franchises on a smaller level, and I’m really excited about them.”
Those brands include Massachusetts–based Dunkin’ Donuts, New Jersey–based Cups Frozen Yogurt, Manhattan-based Energy Kitchen, and Oklahoma–based Sonic Drive-In.
“We’re kind of hoping to build those brands into the flagship we have now with Wendy’s,” DiVirgilio says.
WyckWyre is finding strong success with these regional and national brands because they treat them just like their local customers, she says. The keys are highly individualized customer service coupled with constant monitoring of the WyckWyre site to ensure customers are getting the results they want.
As a small and relatively new company, WyckWyre is flexible enough to tailor its offerings to match what customers are looking for, she adds. That flexibility allows WyckWyre to give the Wendy’s job-posting page a Wendy’s feel, complete with the Wendy’s logo and color scheme.
At the same time, she says, WyckWyre gives just as much attention to the local companies with which it works. Those restaurants, often just a single location or a small group of locations, tend to opt more for WyckWyre’s free posting options or its pay-per-post option, but that customer base is not just holding steady. WyckWyre’s local business, especially in the Scranton, Pa. market, where it made a big marketing push last summer, is also growing, DiVirgilio says.
She declined to release client numbers or revenue totals for the company, but says WyckWyre has already seen “significant” growth so far in January that bodes well for the rest of 2012.
“We’re looking at completely stomping last year’s number,” she says.
With that growth will come some new employment at WyckWyre, she added. Right now, the company has three employees — DiVirgilio, vice president Justin Poet, and customer-success department leader Jessica Miller.
As client numbers continue to grow, WyckWyre will add customer-success specialists, DiVirgilio says. The company will likely play things by ear depending on the number of new accounts added, but it’s not unrealistic that it could add two new employees this year.
WyckWyre, launched in May 2010, is a subsidiary of Maines Paper & Food Service, Inc., a Conklin–based food-service distributor. Maines (www.maines.net) is a privately held company with annual revenue of nearly $3 billion, 2,000 employees, and customers in 33 states.