If you lived in Richardson, Texas, in the 1980s, you might have noticed a teenage girl balancing overflowing baskets and a duffle bag on her bicycle after school as she tossed rolled-up newspapers toward the front porches on her route.
Or if you were up early enough on the weekends, you might have seen that same girl flinging those papers out of the back of a blue station wagon driven by her mother, who had enough pity on her to give her a ride.
“That was a tough job,” Jennifer “Jenny” Hanlon ’89 recalled. “I had to take three trips back to my house to complete my route.”
Throwing papers in the rain. Getting chased by dogs. Having doors slammed in her face as she tried to collect what was owed her. The lessons she learned about perseverance and the value of hard work stayed with her.
So did the importance of customer service.
Hanlon particularly remembers an elderly man who struggled to get the paper when it didn’t reach his doorstep. Much to his appreciation, she would dismount her bike and walk the paper to his door. Occasionally, he tipped her a dime.
As a paper carrier during her childhood, Jenny Hanlon ’89 learned early lessons about customer service and taking control of her future. (Photo by Jason Kindig)
“I learned about wanting to be in control of my own destiny, whether that involved success or failure,” Hanlon recalled. “So, I call it my first entrepreneurial job.”
Record-Setting Ventures
Suffice it to say, Hanlon’s entrepreneurial efforts have expanded since her paper route days.
If you’re a college football fan, you might be familiar with the StaffDNA Cure Bowl in Orlando, Florida, which raises money for cancer research.
StaffDNA is Hanlon’s company — one she shares with business partner Sheldon Arora.
In Aggieland, you might have noticed the LiquidAgents Healthcare name on the top prize at Aggie PITCH, a business startup competition at Texas A&M University.
LiquidAgents is also a Hanlon and Arora venture.
Both innovative staffing companies match health care professionals with medical facilities that need their help. LiquidAgents accomplishes this through recruiters, while StaffDNA offers a similar service via an app.
While the groundbreaking success of both companies is well documented, nowhere was it more evident than at the 2023 Aggie 100 ceremony, which recognized the fastest-growing Aggie-owned companies from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. For the first time in the competition’s history, two companies owned by one Aggie appeared on the prestigious list.
In 2023, Jenny Hanlon ’89 topped the Aggie 100 awards with StaffDNA, becoming the first person to make the list for two different companies. (Photo courtesy McFerrin Center for Entrepreneurship)
And one of those companies — StaffDNA — recorded an astounding revenue growth rate of 735%. This not only placed it in the top spot but also shattered the previous Aggie 100 record by almost 200 percentage points.
It was a feat foreshadowed by Fast Company two years earlier, when the renowned business magazine awarded StaffDNA an honorable mention in the app category of its annual World Changing Ideas Awards.
Entrepreneurial Roots
Growing up in the Dallas suburbs, Hanlon’s parents, Jeff and Penny Churchill, always supported her competitive, independent spirit. Her penchant to try new things and take risks were traits she learned from her father, who was constantly creating ways to supplement the family income. These frequently involved all-hands-on-deck efforts.
One such business endeavor involved packaging nuts and bolts. Hanlon remembers the tedious work of making the boxes and sorting and counting the small pieces of hardware to put into each. In hindsight, she realizes it was while working in the family garage that she learned early lessons about quality control, a strong work ethic and the drive to succeed.
“My dad inspired my entrepreneurial ambitions,” she explained. “He went through several different iterations of companies he’d started, so he taught me both how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and the benefits of it.”
While Hanlon now counts numerous Aggies among her relatives, that was not the case when, as a Berkner High School student, she began looking at potential colleges. But like many other high school visitors to Texas A&M, as soon as she stepped on campus, she knew it was the place for her. When she didn’t gain admittance as a freshman, she began her college experience undeterred at another Texas A&M University System school and transferred to College Station as a sophomore finance major in 1986.
Her brother, John Churchill ’91, followed a couple years later. (Their sister, Jill, graduated from a rival university, but Hanlon said they try not to talk about that.)
Hanlon milked her Texas A&M years for all they were worth.
She said she’ll forever cherish experiences that provided her a sense of belonging and camaraderie: waiting in 100-plus-degree weather for football ticket pull, tossing cotton upon the announcement of Texas A&M’s 1988 Cotton Bowl appearance and dunking her Aggie Ring in a pitcher of beer.
Texas A&M taught us how to work hard. Anytime you tell someone that you graduated from Texas A&M, they know you have a great education. And I know that’s somebody I want to add to my team.
But amidst all the fun Aggie traditions were rigorous academics that readied her for the business world. Her involvement in Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity further enhanced her professional preparedness.
Hanlon knew she wanted to start her own business. After graduating from Texas A&M, though, it would be more than a decade before she was in a position to do so. In the meantime, she learned everything she could about running a company. Working in Dallas at a small light industrial manufacturing and wholesale distribution company allowed her to wear many hats. Later on, while working on acquisitions for the much larger Vartec Telecom, she made a point of picking up skills outside of her own job responsibilities.
“If it was during accounting close, I’d go over and ask the accountants if they’d teach me how to do a journal entry,” she said. “When they got bored with me, I’d go down to marketing, where they taught me how to run queries in a database.”
Her quest to master a wide variety of business skills didn’t stop there. Close to a decade after she’d received her Texas A&M bachelor’s degree, she enrolled in Southern Methodist University’s Executive Master of Business Administration program. There, she met fellow student David Kelly, a vice president at a new startup company in Richardson, E-Soft Solutions, that specialized in project-based software solutions and staffing services for large companies.
Kelly told Hanlon the company was in desperate need of a chief financial officer; she took the job.
Founded in 1997, E-Soft Solutions took off like gangbusters, ranking 52 among the nation’s fastest-growing private companies in 2001-02 by Inc. magazine.
Within a year, it had shuttered its doors, a victim of the tech boom bust.
But for Hanlon, all was not lost. She and Arora, CEO of E-Soft Solutions, licked their wounds, then got to work figuring out their next venture. Leveraging their skills in staffing services, they concentrated on finding a field that needed their help. Arora recalled visiting with his brother-in-law, a physician, about the ever-present shortage of nurses in health care facilities. The LiquidAgents concept was born.
Holding On
LiquidAgents is a full-service placement firm that pairs nursing and allied health professionals with their own recruiters. These recruiters search for ideal travel, staff, local or per diem positions; present candidates with full job and pay transparency up front; and take care of complexities like licensing and compliance issues that differ from state to state. The service also provides health care facilities with a large pool of qualified candidates.
“Our population is aging,” Hanlon explained. “A lot of nurses and health care workers are aging out of the system as well, and trying to get a new influx of health care workers into the system has been a tremendous effort. We help support hospitals while also helping health care workers find jobs and get the pay they deserve.”
Jenny Hanlon ’89 and her partners built LiquidAgents into a national health care staffing firm after years of uncertainty, then later added an app component with StaffDNA. (Photo by Jason Kindig)
Hanlon laughed when asked if LiquidAgents was an immediate success.
“It took us six or seven years to be profitable enough to pay back all our debts after launching,” she said. “We borrowed from friends and family, factored our receivables and did everything possible while paying ourselves next to nothing.”
Hanlon said that once the company became debt-free, she waited a couple of months before telling Arora just to make sure that the situation was going to “stick.” It was not until that point that she felt they had really achieved something special.
About 15 years later, Hanlon and Arora decided they wanted to add a technology component to the LiquidAgents model. They landed on the concept of StaffDNA, an app that takes the recruiter component out of the staffing process, enabling health care professionals to find, book and manage jobs on their own.
When StaffDNA was launched in March 2020, Hanlon and Arora hoped for slow, steady growth; instead, they got the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking at revenue growth from 2020 until 2023, a casual observer might see nothing but tremendous success for the two companies: LiquidAgents’ revenues grew from $70 million to more than $200 million, while StaffDNA’s revenues went from $2 million to a whopping $150 million.
What the revenue numbers don’t show is the rollercoaster ride experienced by the staffing companies, whose very existence depended on their ability to fill an unprecedented number of health care position openings. Had the two companies not worked as a team, Hanlon said, they likely wouldn’t have made it.
In times of lower nursing demand — such as when operating rooms were shut down — idle LiquidAgents employees focused on StaffDNA development. And when the demand for health care staffing faced another surge, StaffDNA employees helped LiquidAgents manage health care worker compliance requirements.
“The thing I am proudest of over my entire career is that we all pulled together as a team and managed to survive this time period,” Hanlon said.
In terms of the fledgling StaffDNA, Hanlon said she was sure of one thing: “If we can make this model work during all the demands of a pandemic, then this will be successful.”
Not only did StaffDNA endure, but its more than 2 million downloads make it the most downloaded health care career app in the nation.
Jenny’s support has been instrumental in getting more Aggie nurses into a workforce where they’re desperately needed. She sees the big picture and is doing her part to improve health care in Texas, the nation and beyond.
Company Culture
At 2 p.m. each weekday, the smell of popping corn kernels permeates the headquarters of LiquidAgents and StaffDNA. Emanating from the top floor of an eight-story office tower in Plano, Texas, the popcorn aroma drifts past the slushie machine and the ping pong and shuffleboard tables to the offices a floor below, finally stopping at the sixth-floor gaming room and yoga studio. The employees occupying these three stories take their motto to heart: “Work hard, play hard.”
Hanlon and Arora are proponents of a hands-off approach to managing, giving their employees plenty of space for creativity, out-of-the-box thinking and risk-taking while simultaneously removing roadblocks — such as an unyielding corporate culture — that can impede that innovative spirit.
“Allowing people the freedom to be creative within their job creates a sense of ownership in their role and an entrepreneurial spirit within their department,” Hanlon said.
Their employees seem to appreciate their efforts: LiquidAgents and StaffDNA make frequent appearances on both local and national “best places to work” lists.
Photos lining the walls on the sixth floor point to another key part of the companies’ culture. On display are pictures of employees attending fundraising events and volunteering at local charities. Hanlon and Arora frequently schedule team volunteer outings during business hours, and their employees have connected them with several of the nonprofits they now support.
While the majority of the volunteer-focused photos feature Dallas-area locales, Hanlon and her employees are also shown volunteering three hours away at Texas A&M’s McFerrin Center for Entrepreneurship and at Texas A&M’s College of Nursing.
An Honorary Aggie Nurse
Hanlon enjoys guiding young people as they attempt to take a business from concept to reality. Nowhere does this play out more than at the McFerrin Center, which hosts the annual Aggie PITCH competition. Through a $20,000 gift to the center’s excellence fund, Hanlon’s companies have, for the past two years, provided funding for the competition’s top winners.
Jenny Hanlon ’89 is supporting the next generation of Aggie entrepreneurs through initiatives like the Aggie PITCH competition. (Photo courtesy McFerrin Center for Entrepreneurship)
But Hanlon’s generosity to her alma mater reaches even further.
In 2019, her $35,000 gift to the Texas A&M Foundation established the endowed LiquidAgents Healthcare Scholarship to support nursing students. Gifts since then have brought the endowment total to $261,000.
Supporting nursing students who could not otherwise afford a Texas A&M education is particularly satisfying for Hanlon. This is evident in another section of the company headquarters’ sixth-floor wall: photos of each nursing graduate who has benefited from a LiquidAgents scholarship.
Number six went up last summer. Hanlon attended her graduation.
“After the ceremony, I went to shake her hand, and she looked at me like, ‘What are you doing?’ And she just bear-hugged me,” Hanlon recalled of her scholarship recipient. “She was the first person in her family to get a college degree, and she’ll have a career forever.”
Dr. Leann Horsley, dean of Texas A&M’s nursing college, calls Hanlon an “honorary Aggie nurse.” She pointed not only to Hanlon’s financial support but also to the intimate knowledge of health care operations and businesses that she passes on to the school’s students, faculty and staff.
“Jenny’s support has been instrumental in getting more Aggie nurses into a workforce where they’re desperately needed,” Horsley said. “She sees the big picture and is doing her part to improve health care in Texas, the nation and beyond.”
About Us
In the “About Us” sections of both the LiquidAgents and StaffDNA websites is a section entitled “Our Values.” It is prominently featured even before each company’s awards.
“It’s like the Aggie Code of Honor,” Hanlon explained. “It’s what drives our decisions, guides us in making better decisions and motivates us to come together to build a certain culture within our companies.”
Hanlon is unabashed about her penchant to hire Aggies as employees. “With a Texas A&M graduate, I’m going to get someone with whom I share the same values and work ethic,” she said. “Texas A&M taught us confidence. Texas A&M taught us how to work hard. Anytime you tell someone that you graduated from Texas A&M, they know you have a great education. And I know that’s somebody I want to add to my team.”
After decades of building companies, Jenny Hanlon ’89 is beginning to plan her next chapter while staying engaged with Texas A&M and the community she now calls home. (Photo by Jason Kindig)
Far from the starting line of her entrepreneurial career, Hanlon is now looking forward to the finish line. She and her partner, Daryle Kuecker ’91, love to travel (she’s been to more than 70 countries on six continents). Her parents relocated to College Station, and she and Kuecker followed suit two years ago. Her daughter, Lexi, is 22 and is studying robotics at the graduate level in Colorado. And although she still splits her time between College Station and Plano, Hanlon is enjoying her proximity to all things Aggie.
From the time she was a paper girl, the “what’s next” question has been a driving force in her life. These days, that same question comes with very different answers — ones that include immersing herself in her new community and volunteering at Texas A&M and local charities. Over the next few years, she plans to take a smaller role in her companies as she creates a succession plan.
But Hanlon’s not quite ready to completely cut ties with the companies she and Arora painstakingly grew.
From surviving the failure of E-Soft Solutions and struggling through years of debt with LiquidAgents to launching StaffDNA during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, she is the first to admit that the life of an entrepreneur is far from easy. Along with the sleepless nights and stressful days, though, is the satisfaction of seeing your business succeed. “It’s been a difficult job,” she said. “But it’s been a lot of fun.”
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