Founder Story
I Didn't Set Out to Be a Recruiter.
Cord Sachs, founder of FireSeeds, on the one thing he watched happen three times before he ever built a company.
I'll be honest with you. If you had told me years ago that I'd start an executive search firm, I would have told you that you were crazy. I loved business, but recruiting was never the plan. The plan, if I even had one, was simpler than that. I wanted to spend my life investing in people and watching it multiply.
That started with my dad.
He was the hero in my life, and I lost him way too early. He was a true renaissance man, an adventurer, an entrepreneur who never met a mountain he didn't think he could climb. He started a lot of companies over his career. But the part of his story that marked me wasn't the success. It was a season in the early eighties when interest rates ran up over twenty percent and he lost almost everything. The companies fell apart. He was about as broke as a man can be.
And right in the middle of that, his lawyer sat him down. Not to talk about the legal procedures that would keep him from bankruptcy, although he did help with that too. He sat my dad down and told him the most important thing he could do was reorder his whole life around a deeper purpose. God changed my dad's life that day, and it never changed back.
We sold the furniture in our house and moved across the country to live with my mom's parents. My dad started over, literally out of the back of his truck. But this time it was different. He had decided that his real job was to use his influence in business as a platform to invest in the people around him. He ran a construction company, and I cannot remember a single time I walked into his office when he wasn't sitting with a plumber or a brick mason or another builder, pouring into them. He just happened to use his business to do it. He modeled, before I had any words for it, what it looked like to create a multiplying movement of multiplying leaders everywhere you go.
That marked me.
I went to Samford University as a business major, and early on, an older mentor began to invest in me. The only condition was that someday I'd go find my own guys and pass it on. So I did. After I graduated, I went on staff with a campus ministry and spent seven years working with athletes, the football team, and the baseball team mostly. I found two hungry young leaders, Justin and Jim, and started pouring into them. They found two or three more. Those guys found two or three more. Four years later there were over seventy football players involved. I had watched it happen again, this time on a college campus. A multiplying movement of multiplying leaders.
I loved that work. But I knew I was being pulled toward business, and I'd spent seven years telling graduates to go make an impact wherever they landed in the marketplace. At some point I realized I had never actually done that myself. If it couldn't be done, then I had run a bait and switch on a lot of people I cared about. So I went to find out.
A buddy and I started a company called Booster. It was an elementary school fundraising company, of all things. A fitness-based fun run that helped schools raise money without selling anything. I told my partner Chris from day one that I'd only do it if we built the culture around developing leaders holistically, investing in our people in every area of their lives, not just their jobs. And sure enough, that's what drew talent in. People came to work at an elementary school fundraising company because they knew they'd be invested in and given the chance to invest in others. We went from a two hundred thousand dollar business in year one to twenty million, across seventeen cities, in about seven years. Today, they have raised over a billion dollars for schools across the country. And I watched it happen a third time. A multiplying movement of multiplying leaders, now in the for-profit world.
Everyone has a moment in life that changes their trajectory forever. The moment that put a flag in the ground for me came near the end of my run with Booster. We'd been trying to land Chick-fil-A as a sponsor, and in our third meeting, we found out Dan Cathy himself would be there. We thought we had it in the bag. He told us no. Very kindly, but no. And then he said something I didn't expect. He said he'd love to spend time with us.
When a leader like that says he wants to spend time with you, you say yes and figure out the details later. It turned out Dan used all of his time in the air to mentor people. He handed us his itinerary, told us to pick some trips and bring our laptops, and said the time we were on the ground was ours to work but the time in the air belonged to learning together.
I'll never forget my first flight. After he'd personally served everyone on the plane, he stood up in the aisle and reminded all of us exactly why we were flying to South Beach, Florida. It wasn't just about the restaurants and chicken sandwiches. It was about using the business as a platform to have a real impact on his people and their families.
I sat there and thought, this is what I want to give my life to. I want to help other purpose-driven companies build multiplying movements of multiplying leaders inside their culture, on purpose.
That was all I had. A conviction and no business model.
Then I met a man named John Lankford. Everybody had been telling me we were cut from the same cloth, two entrepreneurs who thought about business the same way. We had breakfast at Edgar's Bakery, and he started describing his world, which was executive search. He explained how the work positioned him right alongside an executive team as a trusted advisor, and how much he got to speak into the way those leaders built their culture and led their people. And it clicked. That was the model. All my life, I had found multiplying leaders and recruited them to my business. Could I find the leaders who multiply and place them inside other purpose-driven companies built to put them to work?
So I went home, walked up to my whiteboard, and wrote it down. Why we'd exist. What we'd do. The values we'd hold. And FireSeeds was born.
I won't pretend I have all of this figured out. I'm still learning, still failing forward, still working on the last ten percent. But the vision I wrote on that whiteboard hasn't changed in over fifteen years. We find multiplying leaders for purpose-driven companies who don't want to choose between incredible talent and an absolute fit to culture and values. This creates a multiplying movement of multiplying leaders.
If that resonates with you, we'd love to talk.
Beyond FireSeeds
More From Cord
Cord co-hosts the Culture For Breakfast podcast, conversations on how to hire, train, and retain top talent. He writes regularly on LinkedIn about leadership, culture, and building companies that outlast their founders.