Since his days running an illicit bar out of his dorm room, Mike Winterfield’s entrepreneurial streak has propelled his career.
Despite early plans to launch his own business, a summer job got Winterfield got hooked on a different kind of performance-driven milieu: the recruitment industry.
“What I saw was people who were kind of running their own business within a business,” he said. “I loved the fact that if I could work harder, if I could do anything to outperform – then I would get recognized for that.”
Outperform he did, landing 14 job promotions in the space of 16 years with the same company – now Randstad Canada Group. Winterfield has risen to president of Randstad Professionals, one of the company’s four divisions.
To climb as fast as he did, Winterfield said he constantly kept his eye on the next goal.
“I would go to my manager and say, ‘This is what I would like to do next, what do I have to do to earn that?’ And then I would do it.”
But with every step up the ladder came new challenges – notably a 2009 job that involved merging three engineering recruitment companies into one.
That merger, Winterfield said, shifted every element of employees’ lives – from the physical office in which they worked, to IT systems to compensation structures.
“I was so completely naĂŻve to how complicated that would be,” he said. “My greatest fear at some points, quite honestly, was that virtually everybody was going to quit.”
But Winterfield rose to the challenge, creating a new merged company that was greater than the sum of its parts. Winterfield said that while shifting roles so often has kept him on his toes, he enjoys each new twist.
“I do get bored easily, so I don’t like maintaining,” he sad. “I like growing.” •
