Guest post from Skip Contributor Adrienne Burgos, Founder & CEO of CEA Staffing in Chicago, IL

Starting With Nothing But Grit

When I started CEA Staffing, there was no fancy tech, minimal templates, no AI, and definitely no all-in-one platform. There was me, a laptop, a couple hundred dollars, and a lot of figuring it out the hard way.

To put it in perspective, I built my first website on iWeb. Yes, iWeb. I’m not even sure it exists anymore, and honestly?! I definitely will age myself multiple times while I write this but hey, the truth... sometimes ages you! As I mentioned this all started on iWeb, it was revolutionary at the time and I was proud I could at least figure out iWeb and make my business look more legit.

Marketing wise, I didn’t have a budget, I had courage. I put a few hundred dollars into Google Ads and taught myself keywords by trial and error. No agency. No strategy deck. Just watching what worked, what didn’t, and tweaking things late at night after events. If a keyword brought in one decent lead, I felt like a marketing genius.

I also blogged like crazy. Not because I had a content strategy, but because I knew if someone Googled “event staffing agency,” I wanted CEA to exist somewhere on the internet. I wrote about events, staffing challenges, brand activations, and anything that made us look active, knowledgeable, and real. Was it SEO-perfect? Absolutely not. Did it work? Somehow, yes.

Building Professionalism Without Fancy Tools

Making the business look professional was a whole other adventure. Before fancy CRMs and talent portals, I created every single talent profile card one by one. I designed a template in PowerPoint (because it was 1000 years ago obviously) and manually filled in photos, experience, and details for each staff member. Then I saved them into neatly organized folders… by state. Hundreds of files. Zero automation. Looking back at the amount of work that took is actually kinda crazy. But I did it.

Was it efficient? Nope. Did it look good when I emailed them to clients? Yup!

Clients loved it. They looked professional and detailed and that was just what they wanted. That’s the thing people forget, professionalism isn’t about technology, it’s about how the experience feels on the other side.

I also obsessed over details most people didn’t see. Clean proposals. Clear emails. Consistent language. I made sure invoices looked legit, contracts made sense, and communication was tight. I had no experience in any of these areas, but I somehow managed to create things that made my clients trust me.

The Tools Didn’t Exist — But The Hustle Did

A lot of my “marketing” was just showing up everywhere I could including cold emails, follow-ups, referrals, conversations at events and I utilized Linkedin a lot (still do). I didn’t have money to be loud, so I had to be memorable. I answered my phone. I solved problems fast. I made clients’ lives easier. That was the strategy.

Looking back now, it’s honestly wild to think how different it would have been if today’s tools existed back then. If I had access to modern CRMs, AI, ChatGPT, automated onboarding, digital talent portals, analytics, and social media the way it works now. It would have been amazing. I could have grown CEA ten times faster.

But there’s also something powerful about how it was built. It was old-school. Manual. Scrappy. A whole lot of late nights and unpaid hours. Hanging out at home working while my friends were at bars living up there 20’s. Everything was earned. Every client was won, one conversation at a time. Every “professional” touchpoint was created from scratch and research and on a very small budget.

CEA didn’t start with fancy tools. It started with hustle, PowerPoint, Google Ads, and a founder who refused to let a small budget look like a small business.

And honestly? I wouldn’t change a thing. Looking back and knowing I didn’t have a fraction of the tools that I have now, makes me proud as hell!!!

You Don’t Need a Big Budget to Look Big

You don’t need a huge ad budget to grab attention. Back in the day, I built CEA through trial, error, and relentless execution. Today, there are endless tools that can help make your business look amazing, even on a shoestring budget. The principle is the same: experiment, learn, and turn what you have into something clients can’t ignore.