Smart Business Magazine, Dec 2012

Chris Sutton was willing to take a chance to revitalize Clover Global Solutions LP to be in an optimum position for a comeback of the oil and gas industry after the 2007 09 recession He and his wife Carolyn were partners in Clover the 11th company they had owned throughout the years so taking action to secure a companys future wasnt a new experience Business had really flat lined Sutton says There were no new job orders coming in and we didnt want to lay anybody off So we huddled down and had a survival meeting for a couple of days and turned inward We made two commitments that year One was that we were going to try to reinvent how sourcing up occurs The second was that we were going to understand and exploit social media For the first goal Sutton had a good handle on the problem He and his wife had owned Clover since 2000 after coming out of early retirement to help out at the company He quickly discovered where the bottleneck was in hiring after reading thousands of resumes and trying various technologies to match them to opportunities in the industry He knew he needed a tool that would optimize the process Second he wanted the company to get on board with social media a vehicle he didnt understand at the time but one that he could see had great potential Heres how he put it all together and grew the companys revenue from 1 million in 2000 to 60 million largely since 2009 Going high tech HOW CHRIS SUTTON TOOK THE BITS AND BYTES ROUTE SO CLOVER GLOBAL SOLUTIONS COULD REBOUND FROM THE RECESSION BY DENNIS SEEDS dseeds@ sbnonline com December 2012 Smart Business Houston 11