Bill Sherertz wanted people to linger. Near the Columbia River in Washougal, Washington, he was planning a restaurant with room for dinner, conversation and a view. The project had a name, Black Pearl on the Columbia, and a building taking shape. For an executive whose working life concerned the obligations of employment, it was a pleasing change of subject. The evening could run late. Nobody needed a payroll report with dessert.
Construction began in 2010. Sherertz died in January 2011, before the restaurant opened. His wife, Kim, and their children eventually found another use for the space. In 2018, Black Pearl launched as an event venue. The original wish survived in a different business: people would still come together by the river.
That unfinished project belongs beside the company for which he was known. William W. Sherertz led Barrett Business Services, Inc., or BBSI, as chief executive from 1980 until 2011. He became president in March 1993 and also served as chairman. His career occupied the practical end of American business, where hiring someone is the beginning of a relationship with considerable paperwork attached.
Thirteen years before the ticker
The order of those dates matters. BBSI’s initial public offering came in June 1993. Sherertz had already been CEO for thirteen years. The stock market met an executive with a substantial stretch of management behind him. A listing supplies a neat anniversary; running a company supplies rather fewer neat days.
The business itself had been incorporated in Maryland in 1965. Under Sherertz, its services expanded beyond supplying staff. In 1990, BBSI began offering professional employer organization services to customers in Oregon. The phrase requires a little unpacking. A PEO becomes a co-employer of a client’s existing workforce, taking responsibility for agreed employment functions while the client continues to direct the daily work.
This made the relationship more involved than sending someone to fill a temporary vacancy. Payroll, employment taxes and personnel administration became recurring responsibilities. A client could hand over some of the machinery of being an employer while continuing to run its own operation. BBSI’s opportunity lay in making that division of labor useful enough to keep.
The two sides of the company could serve different moments in a customer’s life. Staffing addressed the need for people. Co-employment addressed the work that followed having them. BBSI also offered direct placement and other administrative services. The common thread was a set of tasks that small and medium-sized businesses needed done, whether or not their owners had entered business with any enthusiasm for doing them.
The branch office had a say
One revealing detail of the organization Sherertz led is its stated preference for decentralized management. Experienced managers were hired to oversee local branches, develop business and solve customers’ problems. The branch was expected to do more than pass messages to headquarters. It had work to win and relationships to maintain.
That approach gave expansion a particular shape. By the end of 2009, BBSI operated 44 branch offices in ten states. Its clients had employees in 24 states and the District of Columbia. These were two different maps: the places where the company maintained offices, and the wider territory in which its clients worked.
The customers were varied too. They included manufacturers, transportation businesses, food processors, contractors and professional services firms. An employer moving goods had different daily concerns from a professional office, even when both needed payroll processed. The local manager’s job was to make a broad company service fit an actual business.
Compensation reinforced the branch’s importance. Employees at that level could earn quarterly profit sharing after the office reached specified profitability standards. This was an organizational choice with ordinary, tangible consequences: the performance of the place where someone worked could affect what they earned. The local office appeared in both the customer relationship and the employee’s incentives.
Growth also came through acquisitions. By its annual report for 2009, BBSI counted 26 completed acquisitions since the IPO. Recent additions had brought offices in Utah, Colorado and Arizona. Each acquisition added another practical management problem: a public company could buy a business on a closing date, but its customers would still judge it through the people answering their questions afterward.
The scale behind a familiar name
At the end of 2009, BBSI served approximately 1,600 PEO clients, covering roughly 26,600 employees under those contracts. It had also provided staffing services to about 1,800 customers during the year. Those figures describe distinct parts of the operation. They should not be bundled into a single headcount or treated as the number of people at headquarters.
For Sherertz, the business had become an organization with many local points of contact. Its headquarters were in Vancouver, Washington, across the river from Portland. His own home city was Battle Ground. Washougal, where the Black Pearl project stood, belonged to the same southwest Washington geography. His corporate life and his waterfront ambition were geographically close, though their daily requirements were rather different.
The attraction of BBSI’s work was repetition. Payroll comes around again. A customer who needs help administering employment generally needs that help beyond one afternoon. The difficulty was repetition too: dependable service must remain dependable on the next cycle. The company’s structure placed much of that continuing obligation with branches and their managers.
“Just a small town Bandon boy.”
Bill Sherertz, on his Bandon roots
He had grown up in Bandon, on the Oregon coast, after being born in Upland, California. He attended Willamette and Oregon State universities. Away from business, his interests included golf, fishing and hunting. These are modest details beside a public-company title, but they give the calendar some texture: there were other ways he liked to spend a day.
Two numbers, one company
Understanding the size of Sherertz’s final full year at BBSI requires reading the labels beside the numbers. In its initial release of 2010 results, the company reported approximately $1.237 billion in non-GAAP gross revenues. GAAP net revenues were $273.1 million. The company presented both, with a reconciliation explaining the treatment of its PEO business.
The distinction is useful. Gross activity included payroll amounts that did not remain in the net revenue figure. A billion-dollar description could capture the volume passing through the operation, while giving a reader the wrong impression if presented as ordinary reported revenue. BBSI’s business involved handling substantial employment flows; the accounting separated that activity from the net presentation.
As initially reported in February 2011. The measures use different revenue presentations; the gap is not profit.
That is the sort of detail easily lost when a long career is compressed into a large number. Sherertz’s work concerned a specific mechanism: supplying workers and administering employment for other businesses. Its scale makes more sense when the reader can see what was being counted.
A table by the river
The Black Pearl project offered a more immediately legible ambition. Sherertz wanted a restaurant at the former Parker House site. It was planned with a bar, meeting and banquet space, patio dining and a substantial wine cellar. One could understand the proposition without a reconciliation table. There would be something to eat, something to drink and a reason to stay.
The restaurant was expected to open in spring 2011. After his death that January, the project paused. By 2017, Kim was discussing turning the roughly 12,000-square-foot building into a place for weddings, meetings, retreats and other events. The concrete, steel and glass structure had waited through years in which a plan and a finished business remained different things.
Her decision allowed the project to change. The family could honor his intention without taking on precisely the restaurant operation he had wanted. In that choice, they became the authors of its next chapter. A building designed around hospitality could accommodate occasions that called for a different kind of hosting.
The room his family finished
When Sherertz died on January 20, 2011, BBSI appointed Michael Elich interim president and CEO, and Anthony Meeker chairman. Elich had been with the company for nearly ten years, including five as chief operating officer. The succession drew on people who already knew the organization. Decades at the helm had produced a team as well as a personal record.
At Black Pearl, the continuation took longer and followed a more personal route. The family’s opening in 2018 came seven years after Sherertz’s death. The venue describes itself as dedicated to his memory. Its place in his story rests on both the original ambition and the work others undertook to make the building useful.
A public company and a room by the river leave different traces. One has filings, branches and a ticker. The other has gatherings. Sherertz had a hand in both beginnings, and other people carried both forward. At the Black Pearl, the invitation finally became possible: come in, take your time, stay a little longer.