Pay your people Friday.
Get paid in sixty days.

A staffing agency is a machine that converts working capital into revenue on a fixed delay. You place a worker on Monday. You pay that worker on Friday, along with the payroll taxes, workers' compensation premium, and any benefits attached. You invoice the client at the end of the period and then wait 30 to 60 days — sometimes longer if the client is a large health system or a national manufacturer with a slow accounts payable department. Every dollar of gross margin you earn is preceded by several dollars of payroll you already funded.

The consequence is the defining feature of the industry: growth consumes cash. An agency doubling its placements does not double its bank balance — it doubles the size of the hole between payroll out and invoices in. Owners hit this wall not when business is bad but precisely when business is good, and it forces them to turn down orders they have already won. This is the working capital wall, and it ends more staffing agencies than any competitive pressure does.

Banks are structurally unsuited to it. A staffing agency has almost no hard collateral — no real estate, no inventory, no equipment worth lending against. Its entire balance sheet is receivables and the obligation to make payroll. Traditional underwriting sees a business with high revenue, thin margins, no assets, and an owner who has often already drained personal credit funding the last growth ramp. Legion underwrites the receivables and the billing record, because in staffing those are the business.

What we fund inside a staffing agency

Weekly and biweekly payroll through the client payment gap, including payroll taxes and the workers' compensation premium that scales with headcount. Growth ramps when a client expands an order and the placements have to be paid for weeks before the larger invoice is even issued. New client onboarding, particularly large accounts that demand headcount on day one and pay on their own terms. Recruiter hiring and the ramp period before a new recruiter's desk produces. Job-board, sourcing, and applicant-tracking costs. Compliance and credentialing — background checks, drug screening, licensure verification, and the clinical credentialing that per-diem healthcare placement requires. Insurance and bonding required by client master service agreements. Seasonal surges in light-industrial and retail staffing where Q4 volume can triple payroll requirements for a quarter. Bridging a slow-paying or disputed invoice without missing a payroll run.

What we don't ask for

We don't run hard credit pulls to check pricing. We don't ask for two years of tax returns. We don't require hard collateral, which an agency does not have anyway. We don't require you to change payroll providers or move your banking relationship. We underwrite billings, payroll-to-billings ratio, client credit quality, and deposit consistency.

A generic underwriting engine misreads a healthy staffing agency badly. The enormous weekly payroll outflow against modest bank balances reads as a business running on fumes. Revenue growth accompanied by a shrinking cash position reads as deterioration when it is in fact the arithmetic signature of a company scaling correctly. Thin net margins on high revenue read as fragility rather than as the normal economics of a pass-through labor business. Our underwriters know the difference. They look for billings trending up across trailing twelve months, a payroll-to-billings ratio consistent with the service line's gross margin, client payment behavior that repeats reliably, and NSF counts that stay controlled through the heaviest payroll weeks.

We also calibrate to your vertical, because the economics diverge sharply. Per-diem healthcare and travel nursing agencies bill hospitals and health systems — excellent credit, slow payment, higher margins — and are a natural fit for AR-anchored funding sized to the aging. Light-industrial and warehouse staffing runs high volume, thin margins, faster client turns, and more churn, favoring flexible working capital sized to weekly payroll. Professional and IT staffing places fewer people at higher bill rates with longer assignments, producing a more predictable and more concentrated book. Direct-hire and executive search is fee-based rather than payroll-based and has a completely different cash cycle. We structure each on its own terms.

Staffing segments we fund every week

Light-industrial, warehouse, and manufacturing staffing. Per-diem nursing, allied health, and travel healthcare agencies. Home care and caregiver placement agencies. IT and technical contract staffing. Professional, accounting, and administrative staffing. Skilled-trades and construction labor agencies. Hospitality, event, and food-service staffing. Driver and logistics staffing, including CDL placement. Security guard staffing companies. Janitorial and facilities labor providers. Agricultural and seasonal labor contractors. Education and substitute-teacher staffing. Direct-hire and executive search firms carrying placement costs ahead of fees. Employer-of-record and PEO-adjacent service providers.

Common staffing funding scenarios

A client expands an order from twenty temps to sixty with a start date two weeks out. Payroll triples immediately; the larger invoice will not be paid for two months. We fund the ramp so the order is accepted rather than declined. A hospital system pays reliably but on net 60, and three payroll runs land inside every payment cycle. We advance against the submitted invoices so payroll is never the constraint. A large client disputes a single invoice line and freezes the whole payment while sixty workers still expect their checks. We bridge it without the workers ever knowing there was an issue. Q4 arrives and a retail-logistics client needs seasonal headcount that triples payroll for ten weeks. We fund the surge and the position winds down with the season. A new recruiter is hired and takes four months to produce against a full salary from week one. We fund the ramp. An agency stacked advances covering payroll during a growth year and now the daily debits collide with the payroll calendar every single week. We consolidate into a weekly structure that sits around payroll rather than against it.

The pattern is consistent across all of it. In staffing the payroll always comes first and the invoice always comes later, and the agencies that break through the wall are the ones that stop letting cash timing decide which orders they can accept.