A fixed price is a small act of nerve. Promise to finish a complicated software project for an agreed fee, and every unnecessary hour becomes your own problem. Christopher Skinner co-founded a company around that proposition. The work involved finance, human resources and payroll, three subjects with a remarkable ability to make a quiet office suddenly very interested in details.
TopBloc began in Chicago in 2016. In March 2025, ASGN completed its acquisition of the business for $340 million. Between those dates sits the more interesting part of Skinner’s story: a specialist learning how to turn expertise into something that could travel beyond the next consultant’s calendar. The company sold implementations and support. It also developed tools to make parts of that work repeatable.
The acquisition supplies a conspicuous number. Skinner’s earlier credentials supply a less conspicuous explanation. Before becoming the chief executive whose company attracted a public buyer, he was collecting Workday certifications. Payroll interfaces, integration tools and human capital management were on the list. His path to running the business passed through the machinery.
The chief executive had learned the plumbing
Skinner studied at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His education combined finance and psychology, and his LinkedIn profile lists attendance from 2002 to 2005. Those subjects offer an appealing pairing for a future consulting executive: organizations have accounts, and the people responsible for them have opinions. The degree is a biographical fact; any tidy theory that it predetermined his career would be a little too convenient.
His professional preparation is easier to trace. At Meteorix, a Workday services partner, he held roles of increasing responsibility. By June 2012 he had earned Workday’s HCM certification. In 2015 came certifications covering payroll interfaces, CCB and Studio, followed by a product lead credential for Third Party Payroll & Global Payroll Cloud in July.
That sequence matters because a payroll system reaches outside its own borders. Information must move between applications, and the connections need to work. Skinner’s credentials place him in that practical territory before TopBloc’s founding. They establish technical preparation without requiring a romantic tale about a childhood computer or an epiphany over coffee.
In November 2015, IBM completed its acquisition of Meteorix. The deal brought a Workday specialist into a much larger services organization. The following year, Skinner co-founded TopBloc. A decade later, another large services company would buy the firm he helped build. His career has crossed the same industry pattern twice: specialist knowledge becomes useful enough that a larger organization wants it under its own roof.
A deadline with a price attached
The new company’s offer had a clear commercial shape: fixed-time, fixed-price Workday deployments, followed by on-demand support. Workday provided the underlying enterprise software. TopBloc helped customers put it into operation. Its work covered initial implementations, later phases, technical and functional help desk support, and managed payroll services.
There is a useful distinction between buying software and making it reflect an organization. Someone must arrange the data, connect the surrounding systems and translate business processes into configurations. An elegant purchasing decision can still leave an inelegant amount of work. TopBloc offered a defined way through that work, with a date and a fee attached.
The incentive is worth examining. With a fixed fee, completing repetitive work efficiently can improve the provider’s economics as well as the customer’s experience. That is the logic of the model, rather than a guarantee about any individual project. Skinner’s company paired consulting with proprietary technology for extracting and moving data. The tools gave the pricing proposition a practical companion.
By February 2020, BV Investment Partners had made a significant minority investment. TopBloc was four years old. Skinner’s explanation centered on making Workday accessible to more organizations and helping customers complete implementations with less time and expense. The ambition was expressed in the language of the customer’s project, rather than the size of his own office.
“TopBloc is obsessed with innovation and customer satisfaction.”
Christopher Skinner, February 2020
Citizens served as the exclusive financial adviser on that recapitalization. Skinner praised the advisers’ responsiveness and their understanding of the technology services sector and the Workday buyer universe. His comments describe a founder treating capital as a project in its own right: a process to organize, specialists to choose and a milestone to reach.
What the next project gets to keep
Consultancies accumulate experience one engagement at a time. The awkward question is how much of that experience remains available when the people who acquired it are busy elsewhere. TopBloc’s tools offer a concrete answer. SmartBundles package configurations developed through previous Workday projects, with room to tailor them to the next organization.
There is something pleasingly domestic about the name. Enterprise transformation arrives wearing a suit; the reusable setup sounds as though it belongs in a cupboard. Yet the underlying idea is serious. A configuration that has already proved useful can become a starting point, allowing consultants and customers to spend more attention on the differences that actually need discussion.
SmartLoader addresses another recurring job: transforming and validating data. In March 2025, TopBloc described it as being in its eighth year of use. That timing places the tool well before the acquisition announcement. The company’s technology investment had become part of its operating history, rather than an accessory added for a buyer’s presentation.
For Skinner, the significance is organizational. His company could sell expertise while also preserving pieces of it in reusable form. A consultant still needed judgment. A customer still needed a setup that fit. Repetition, however, no longer had to mean starting with an empty page every time. The business had a way for yesterday’s work to help tomorrow’s team.
Five hundred consultants, one larger address book
TopBloc appeared at number 117 on Inc.’s 2024 Midwest regional list. By the acquisition announcement in February 2025, it had more than 500 consultants and had completed more than 300 Workday installations over the preceding five years. Its customers included medium and large enterprises across North America. The specialist had acquired an appreciable amount of scale.
ASGN agreed to buy it for $340 million in cash and equity. The buyer expected approximately $150 million of TopBloc revenue in 2025, representing growth above 20 percent. Those were forecasts made at announcement. The completed transaction arrived on March 4, bringing TopBloc’s team into ASGN’s consulting services.
Skinner’s stated attraction to the deal was access to ASGN’s customer base. That is a practical aspiration for a specialist: more introductions to organizations that may need the thing your team already knows how to do. ASGN, in turn, obtained Workday capabilities it could offer within its existing relationships. The fit depended on the usefulness of TopBloc’s knowledge beyond its original customer circle.
The closing also included restricted stock unit awards for 41 key TopBloc employees, covering approximately 150,000 shares. Their vesting schedule extended across several years. The detail puts a human dimension into the transaction paperwork. Buying a consultancy involves securing the continued contribution of people whose experience cannot be delivered in a folder alongside the contracts.
The founder’s next job begins after the deal
Eight days after the acquisition closed, TopBloc announced that it had received Workday’s 2025 Business Impact Partner of the Year award. The recognition concerned customer outcomes and its implementation work, including the medium enterprise segment. Skinner credited the partnership with Workday and the results achieved by clients. His public emphasis remained on the work delivered through the company.
In October 2025, TopBloc announced Leader rankings in all four categories of ISG’s U.S. Workday study. The categories covered innovation, performance and optimization, transformation, and deployment and integration. Together they describe a relationship that can continue long after a system first goes live. There is always another process to improve, another phase to consider, another operating question to answer.
Skinner also appeared on ASGN’s November 2025 Investor Day agenda alongside chief executive Ted Hanson for a session about value creation through acquisitions. The founder whose business had recently been purchased was now part of the buyer’s explanation of its strategy. His role had widened from leading the specialist to helping explain where that specialist fitted.
In April 2026, ASGN’s corporate name changed to Everforth. TopBloc now operates as Everforth TopBloc, with Skinner continuing as chief executive. The name above the practice has changed; the identifiable thread in his career remains Workday expertise, first learned through delivery and then organized into a business capable of serving many customers.
There is a modest pleasure in this kind of founder story. The objects are ordinary: a payroll interface, a configuration, a support request, a deadline. Skinner helped build a company by treating those objects as work worth improving. The sale gave that work a price. His continuing job is to help the people doing it remain useful to the next customer who has a complicated system and would quite like a straightforward answer.