If you love what you do and you love where you do it, don't let anything stop you from being successful. There put in the hours, put in the time, put in the work, put in the effort. At twenty one, Justin Messymore had just graduated college and was taking a year off from his education doing odd jobs to earn money for law school, or so he thought. On this edition of On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, we'll learn how Justin Messimore worked himself into
an opportunity he never could have imagined. If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your work force, Express Employment Professionals is for you. Find more information at express prose dot com. Now, independent producer Philip Greitzer tells us the story of Justin Messymore's unexpected journey. In an industrial park on the south side of Hickory, North Carolina, is the headquarters of Gracia USA. Hi,
how are you? That's Justin Messymore. He's wearing jeans, a north faced shirt, and has a tattoo on his right forearm. He looks more like a college student than the CEO and co owner of this midsize manufacturing company. Gracia is one of the few companies in the world that makes steel saw blade blanks that are used in the lumber, aircraft, and oil and gas industries. A saw blade blank is the circular steel part of a saw blade. Manufacturing blanks
is an intricate process. It involves high tech lasers and a good deal of manual labor. We have three lasers that are constantly running and either the sheet or the round. The factory floor is about half the size of a football field, and considering that lots of cutting, hating and hammering is going on, it's incredibly neat. Employees go about their business, drive thing forklift trucks, loading steel blanks on palettes,
operating cutting machines, and hammering the steel blanks. Since the blanks are used for precision cutting, they have to be perfectly flat. Using just a straight edge in a light, A man inspects the blanks. If he finds any irregularities, he puts the blank on an anvil and hammers it out by hand, just like an old fashioned blacksmith. The first time you saw this, messy Moore was impressed. How it's like, Really, it takes that much to make one of these things that I see on the shelf. It
really blew my mind. And everyone has that same response whenever we bring them here for the first time. You would never imagine how much work that it takes to make something so simple as this. All blade back in two thousand eight, when Messymore graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in business accounting. Accounting jobs were hard to find, so he returned home to Taylor's film, North Carolina, moved in with his parents, and took several part time jobs.
He was twenty one and he was saving money to go to law school, and the goal was to save money, so renting an apartment was out of the question. Moving somewhere on my own was not even an option. So I worked with some friends and my parents knew. I painted some high school's. A friend of mine talked to me to selling insurance and annuities and things like that, so I did a lot of little things. A family friend suggested that the Hickory, North Carolina Office of Express
Employment Professionals might help him find work. He completed an application and a few days later he was sent to Grasha for an interview. Gasha was looking for someone with his background. The next day the company called he got the job Messymore started the following Monday as an assistant
to the accounting manager. The company's general manager, Klaus Jensen, really wanted to hire a financial officer, but getting an experienced one would be expensive and right now money was tight, So when accounting assistant would have to do, I thought, okay, let me see if I can get an assistant in first, and and see how he does, and see if he has any potential. If not, he would if I had to go out and hire an experience accountant, at least I would have somebody who already knew something. So so
I called the Chimp Agency. It was express that we had worked with for people out in their plant, and shold them what I needed. Then they send out I believe five or six candidates, and one of them was Justin. Jensen planned for his new employee to handle basic accounting tasks, but the accounting manager had other things in mind. He had stacks of paper on his desk that were at least six inches to to one ft tall, and he knew where everything was, and they really wanted someone to
just combine and help organize his office. And I started out doing that and knocked that out in a relatively quickly manner um. So once that was finished, they asked me to start updating some customer databases. I'm just calling customers finding out, you know, who's in charge of a R, A P. What do you have? New phone numbers, new email addresses, and things like that. A R and AP are accounts receivable and accounts payable money is owed to
and owed by the company. Although these tasks were preparing me Symore to be a lawyer for now, he didn't mind. Yeah, I was a college kid who was taking a gap year. I didn't intend for this to be a career path for me. It was. It was just a paycheck, it really was. So anything they asked me to do as long as the paycheck cashed at the end of the week, I was fine with it. In my mind, my career hadn't started, Yeah, But in reality, it was my career starting.
Perhaps Jensen realized this too, because he asked me Symore to look a little more closely at the customer accounts. I was noticing that, you know, they had a lot of customers who were paying within always paying, you know, thirty days, thirty days thirty days and um, you know, and I was like, I wonder if these guys would be enticed to um pay earlier if you would offer them a discount, you know, get that money a little
bit earlier. And the guys who are constantly paying in say like forty five to sixty days, I wonder if they would be willing to pay in thirty days if you started charging them a finance charge. And then the customers who are like really far past dude, or is anyone calling these people on a regular basis finally out, hey, where's this? Where's our money? Where are you? Where are you not paying? So there was a lot of small things that I noticed whenever I was going through those
things that were easily addressed. Justin had no practical experience working with accounts receivable. I'm you know, I'm straight out of college. So all I really know is is the theory behind accounting. I've never really they've seen any real world practice behind any of it. But you know, in college you learned theories and theories are supposed to work in real world practice. Do I know if they're going
to work or not? Absolutely not? But why do I have to lose by bringing them up or suggesting them. But he summoned up the courage and presented his ideas to the company executives. I really had nothing to lose by mentioning this to anybody. If they fire me, they fired me. I just go back to doing what I was doing before I got here. They implemented me Siemr's plan, and it worked. The company's cash flow improved. Soon Justin was taking on other tasks. I just took over stuff.
It's funny. I took over a lot of the I stuff. I mean, they had a person not working here, but they had an outside consultant. They were paying him somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty thousand dollars a year to to manage their their I T stuff, and they would call him in. It's like, don't call him, I'll do it. So I would go in there, reboot the server and saved them from having to call this guy in. I
looked around. There was a company here in Hickory, contacted them and they would manage our day to day I T services for eight hundred bucks a month instead of the security monitoring service calling company managers. When the alarm went off, Justin told them. He'd take the costs there. There really wasn't anything I wouldn't do, and it's not even things that I was being asked to do. I just did them. I mean that's just the way that
I've always been. If there was something that needed to be done, I would just take the initiative to do it, to do it. Justin was also doing things way outside his job description, pointed with snow um, I would make sure that I would I could. I would come here and open the plant and open the office for everybody. I've got a four wheel driveing Hiclough lived in Boone driving in the snows. Nothing for me. I'll just come in and do it. About the only thing Justin didn't
do was sweep the floors. In the fall of two thousand and eight, as his ninety day temporary employment contract was expired, Missy Moore was offered a permanent job, but he still wasn't sure that working at Grascia was going to be part of his career plan. At that point in time, I still didn't know where this was going to take me. The goal was still to start saving money. I mean, I didn't know. Maybe the gap here turned into two years so still having my eye on the
law school endgame. Stay at home and save as much money as possible. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, Philip Great Sir will bring Justin miss Moore's story up to date. You're listening to on the Job from Express Employment Professionals. One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Sounds like a big number, doesn't it not to Express Employment Professionals seeking a skilled labor position or administrative order.
Maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits supporting. We take pride in connecting the right people with the right company. Express Employment Professionals is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Let us help. We'll open words for you to go to express pros dot com to find a location near you. Now back to the story of the accounting assistant who thought he was taking time off from his career path but found
an unexpected way forward instead. As Justin messymore took on more accounting and administrative duties. Klaus Jensen, the company manager, took note he was he was extremely organized, he was time efficient. We always thought be needed at East a person and a half, he found ways to to do it with just him. Soon Justin had an office all to himself. The two other people in the shared office
had been let go. Justin took over their duties. In two thousand and ten, klass Jensen and a partner purchased Grusha and the company was not in good financial shape and I had to trim some personnel, and Justin Biden had shown me enough that I kind of chook the chance. Said Okay, let's try to do it with Justin on his own. Two years after he started working at Garcia,
Messy Moore was head of the company's accounting unit. They basically told me that they wanted me to to be in charge of the company's finances on a much larger scale. It was like, okay, that's great, But they told me something that started concerning me. That they they knew a guy that they wanted to them to bring in on a more of a consulting basis. So, I mean, at that first point, I thought I was being promoted all the way to the top, but I thought I was
still being kept underneath somebody. The consultant came in two to three days a week, then just every few weeks, and after a few months, the consultant told manager Jensen the company didn't really need his services at all. Messy Moore could do the job on his own. With the consultant no longer looking over his shoulder, Justin decided that working for Garcia would be his career. He started working even harder, eleven hour days, six day work weeks, and
no vacations. Because I was the first person here, last person to leave when it snowed, when nobody else was in the office, I was answering the phone. I mean, I would work, do my accounting stuff. In the front office, I would take orders. I messed up a lot of orders because do you know how to take orders at the time. I'm not a sales guy, but somebody needed to be here to take the orders. He show management that he really cared. He set his sights to be
the company's next CFO, chief financial officer. He was twenty five years old, going that extra mile doing whatever it takes, long hours, hard work. You know, it's a balance of hard work and intelligence. But I think that if you have to weigh the two hard works, going to outweigh intelligence every time. As Justin was gunning for the CFO job. Grass owner Klaus Jensen had plans of his own. He wanted to retire, and he wanted to leave the company
in good hands. He set up an exit plan. First, he hired are a former colleague, Richard Comber, to be gross sales manager. Comber would handle the company's external operations while Missy Moore would manage finances. The two got along grade they were yinnin Yang. Comber was the idea man and Justin was the numbers guy. To Jensen, they look like perfect candidates to take over the company. Jensen began easing himself out of day to day management, leaving Messy
Moore and Comber in charge. In three years, they were ready to buy the company, but they didn't have any money. I had student debt and I just bought a house, so I was you know, I wasn't debt. I mean I had a good income, but being that young, I really hadn't had much time to to save. A bank saw the company as an attractive investment and offered financing to the two to allow them to buy Grussia. Messy Moore was twenty eight, Comber was forty. In two thousand sixteen,
Missy Moore and Comber purchased Grussia. They were fifty fifty partners. Eight years after he started as a temporary employee, Justin Missy Moore was now the chief executive officer and co owner of Garcia USA. When you visit Grasia's factory, the first thing that catches your eye is a huge banner that says everything is important. There's no detail too small. And it's that attention to detail mixed with intelligence, ambition and lots of hard work that got Missy Moore to
the top. They saw this young hotshot accountant who had been working with the company was doing a great job managing the company's finances, was doing things above and beyond what a typical accountant should be doing. Kyles Jensen says, Justin deserved the top job. That's always a little bit of luck involved for all of us whereby and up. Obviously, he was lucky that I called expression and needed an
accountant and and he got the job. But from Lynn on he can take credit for maximizing the situation and showing that he wash ready and having the ambition and the gouts to go for it. At the end of the day, you have to earn it, and he has learned it. Justin Messy Moore has been CEO for two years. He's digitous plans to become a lawyer. Still, when he's watching a Good Lawyer movie, he has day dreams of what it might have been. I feel like I just sit there and like I'd been great at that. I
do feel great. I feel like I've been great at that, And that's the extent of my regret. But sitting where I am now, owning my own company, a living, breathing organism, the freedom that comes along with that, I couldn't be happier. That was independent producer Philip Greitzer with the story of Justin Messy Moore's rise from temporary worker to CEO. And that's all for this edition of On the Job from
Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at Express pros dot com and you can listen to every podcast this season on Express pros dot com slash podcast. This podcast is produced by your host, Steve Mencher for Men's Media, I Heart Radio and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on I Heart Radio and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review that helps other folks find us, and of course you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time. I'm the job