A Letter from the CEO: How We Became Tech-Enabled Without Losing Our Soul

By Adam Morris
CEO, SalesFirst Recruiting

In 2012, I started transitioning away from T-Mobile to build a recruiting firm. I had a desk, a chair, no software budget, and no plan other than to grind. That grind carried us through our first placements, our earliest customers, and our first real office in Tigard, Oregon. We ran on paper systems and a CRM held together with duct tape and chewing gum. But we worked hard. We made placements. And we got good at it.

Around 2014, I read Good to Great by Jim Collins. It had a major impact on me, especially the Hedgehog Concept. The idea is that a great company lives at the intersection of what it can be best in the world at, what it is deeply passionate about, and what drives its economic engine. So, the concept of “finding your HedgeHog” means you have discovered your true identity as a business.

I spent years wondering if we would ever find ours. I was genuinely worried we’d grow without a core. I knew we did good work, and I believed we’d be successful. But privately, I feared we’d lack the kind of identity that could scale.

We spent years building systems, breaking them, rebuilding them again, learning from our mistakes, and looking for that elusive Hedgehog. I also spent ten years in Entrepreneur’s Organization. That experience showed me what maturity looks like inside a company. It taught me how systems either support or limit growth. And it helped me see that being “a team of recruiters” would only get us so far. To grow the right way, we had to become an operating company that runs on robust, repeatable infrastructure.

We did eventually find our Hedgehog, but not the way I always envisioned. The big lightbulb moment didn’t come first. It came much later. I used to imagine it would happen all at once… that I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a clear vision, scribble it down in a notebook, and start forging the path the next morning. That’s not how it went.

The path was slow and incremental. The moment of clarity came long after the work had already begun.

It was in March of 2025 that I realized we had found our HedgeHog. SalesFirst Recruiting had quietly become a tech-enabled recruiting firm. We had built that capability the hard way. We never hired software engineers. We never funded a custom build. But over the years we instead painstakingly mapped every process, defined every critical step, and made sure every tool spoke to the next. We invested in fantastic software. We customized automation between all of our software. And we added AI to all the in-between processes where human involvement wasn’t needed. And more importantly, we protected every touchpoint that requires instinct, empathy, or discretion.

When someone works with SalesFirst, they are working with a person. Every conversation, every recommendation, every insight is real. Every interview is conducted by a trained recruiter. Every email is written by someone who understands the story.

But behind those people is a system we are deeply proud of. It gives us speed. It gives us clarity. It checks our work. It flags risks before they become mistakes. It helps us see alignment, not just keywords. It shows us where to search, where to dig deeper, and where to push back.

Today, we operate with a level of structure and consistency that I once thought we’d never find. Our recruiters still take calculated risks and follow their instincts. But we no longer “guess.” We follow a process that is monitored, refined, and improved. Every search begins with a full operational engine behind it.

That’s our Hedgehog.

We are a recruiting firm that invests in people. We do that through authentic relationships, structured processes, intelligent automation, and a proven, high-performance system. Our recruiters are still at the center, but they are no longer on their own. They are supported by a design that’s been tested, refined, and powered by the full force of our technology partners and AI infrastructure.

And we’re just getting started.

Adam Morris
CEO, SalesFirst Recruiting