History
Innovation is in Our DNA
What started with a college student selling advertising to local businesses in student planners and later demonstrating IBM PCs on college campuses has grown to a leader in outsourced managed sales solutions, meeting the needs of Fortune 1000 clients in retail and B2B.
Our entrepreneurial roots infused the MarketSource culture with a spirit of innovation. The evolving needs of our clients required agility to adapt and evolve with them. Our growing roster of well-known national consumer and B2B brands allowed us to anticipate changing consumer and market behavior and design solutions to meet future needs. Today, these remain important hallmarks of the MarketSource culture.
Relationships Fuel Our Success
MarketSource was built on personal relationships. To this day, every single relationship is as important to us as it was to our founder in 1975, and we continue to live the corporate values that endeared him to his early clients and brought him together with the Allegis Group founders.
1975 ON CAMPUS WITH BLUE CHIP CLIENTS
Not long after Marty Levin started a college sales and marketing firm in 1975 to give local businesses visibility on his college campus, he reasoned that he could do the same for others. He built relationships with major manufacturers like Hershey, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, and Warner-Lambert, and created kitted care packages that he shipped to colleges across the country. That quickly expanded to conducting product demonstrations and samplings at college bookstores and elsewhere on campuses for companies such as Ford, Gatorade, and Coca-Cola. It wasn’t long before Marty’s company, MarketSource, was conducting on-campus demonstrations of IBM’s new personal computer, emerging as one of the largest, most successful event marketing companies in the U.S.
From the beginning, MarketSource was built upon driving results through an innovative experiential model that was highly engaging, imprinted a positive and lasting brand impression, and set the stage for future sales.
1994 EVOLVING TO MEET CLIENT NEEDS
IBM saw that Marty was onto something and hired MarketSource to take its PC to consumers nationwide.
When clients like IBM ask you to do more for them, you know that you’re on to something. So, when our clients began requesting additional services and consultations in the retail and reseller space, we took notice. By 1994, MarketSource had evolved well beyond on-campus sales and marketing with a burgeoning new division serving IBM and a growing number of national brands that recognized the value of its sales services.
The business environment was highly performance-driven, employees were held to the highest standards, teams competed to achieve their goals, and scorecards were prominently displayed for encouragement. The rapid growth of the company required that employees move beyond their comfort zone and deliver for the expanding list of clients.
The work ethic was always evident. The team was willing to take on any challenge. They even asked their clients to give them their most difficult assignments—and would not stop working until they achieved the goal. They did whatever it took to get the job done and to ensure every client received the same level of care and attention. This work ethic earned them the respect of their client partners. They knew that the team was invested in their partners’ business. It was palpable.
Above all else, personal relationships were the key to Marty’s success and the success of MarketSource. In the early years, Marty recruited friends and family—people he knew he could count on and trust. He made personal investments in people—clients and employees alike. It was the kind of business in which people knew one another. Trusted and respected one another. And to this day, MarketSource has not lost the focus on relationships that Marty established.
2004 ACQUISITION FUELS GROWTH
MarketSource experienced remarkable growth over the ensuing years. The company’s commitment to continually evolving to meet changing market and client needs continued to draw big name brands that saw 3rd party sales, training, and advocacy as an essential complement to their existing channels. Tech firms such as HP, Cisco, ADM, and Avaya, resellers and channel partners, and companies in automotive, home improvement, home electronics and more built successful partnerships with MarketSource.
At the same time, Allegis Group had been doing a lot of innovating and growing of its own. Born out of an opportunity to deliver highly specialized staffing in areas that would not take share from traditional staffing firms, Allegis’ footprint continued to expand making it one of the largest human capital companies in the world. Marty Levine thought it might be time to step back from the company and in some early conversations with Allegis founders saw that their origin stories and corporate cultures, built on relationships and trust, were so very similar.
Sadly, Marty passed away before the discussions with Allegis went much further. But over the months that followed it became clear that a partnership between the two companies would bring additional opportunities and value to their clients and employees. And in late 2004, the deal was finalized. MarketSource, Inc. was acquired as an independent operating company of Allegis Group.
TODAY GLOBAL STRENGTH AND REMAINING TRUE TO OUR VALUES
Today, MarketSource is an independent operating company of Allegis Group, the largest privately held staffing company in the United States and the fourth largest in the world. A $14 billion human capital management services firm with more than 4,000 clients worldwide, Allegis has global field offices and employs more than 8,000 internal and 120K contract employees.
As a member of the Allegis Group family of companies, MarketSource clients receive the value of our parent company’s significant resources—financial strength, a vast international footprint, unparalleled recruiting resources, and more.
And while we deliver the strength of a global organization, we never lose sight of where we came from and the value of our individual relationships. It’s evident in our core values: Relationships. Open Communications. Work Ethic. Serving Others. We live these values every day. They’re built into how we recruit, how we manage our business, and the ways in which we interact with one another and our clients.
We’re tremendously proud of our history and show our gratitude for it today in everything we do. Would you like to make history together? If so,