That success has brought Mitchell and his wife and business partner to the brink of turning their local start-up into a national business. The journey has taken Mitchell through a remarkably varied career.

He followed up his A&T degree in business administration and finance with a job at Northern Telecom, then one of the global giants of telecom equipment. He went back to school for an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which led to three years with GE Capital.

He started out in the company’s two-year management development program, which consisted of six-month stints in a variety of positions around the country. In addition to exposure to different types of work, that experience provided an opportunity to network in multiple cities.

Law school at American University in Washington was next. At graduation, Mitchell received multiple job offers, including some from Phoenix, one of the cities where GE Capital had sent him.

“I had really planned on staying in Washington and working there, but I was just kind of drawn to Phoenix and came here with the thought that I’d try it out for a few years and in the worst case I’d come back to the East Coast to New York or D.C.,” he says.

No back-up plan was needed. Mitchell spent a few years practicing corporate law in Phoenix, got married and had the opportunity to settle into a long legal career. But as a lawyer, he was still a step away from the right job.

“I looked at that career horizon and thought, ‘I don’t know if I ever see myself being a partner at a law firm.’ With my business background, I’m really more of an entrepreneur at heart.”

That realization led to another. Mitchell’s wife, Sherri, worked for a major national staffing firm. “We started looking at the business she was in and said, ‘This is a really great business,’” he recalls. Overcoming her initial reluctance to take on the risks of a start-up, they spent about a year planning. Then they quit their jobs and launched their own staffing and recruiting firm, All About People, in August 2002. It’s an end-to-end business, providing everything from temps to executive searches and related services like payroll and vendor management.

It didn’t take long to see that the Mitchells had found the right direction. In their first year, they did $3 million in business. By the third year, they were up to $17 million. Soon they were on Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest growing companies in the country.

The business has prospered all through its first 13 years. When the recession hit, half of the companies in the staffing and recruiting industry went out of business, Mitchell says. All About People had some lean years but didn’t lay off a single employee.

With that success came a typical fork in the road for growing start-ups: Expand into other markets or merge with another company.

As a former mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, Mitchell knew he didn’t want a merger. Integrating company cultures is difficult, and the culture the Mitchells have created is a key to both their success and their happiness.

“We want to provide quality service not only to our clients, obviously, the ones who pay us,” he says, “but we also want to create an experience for our candidates, an experience that brings dignity and hope as well as opportunity to that job-search process.”

That sense of purpose above and beyond the transactional process of staffing has taken hold strongly in the company, Mitchell says. “We have a team of people who all believe in the vision and in the way we do the work, and that just makes anything possible.”

The possibility the Mitchells have chosen for expansion is franchising. It’s not a new idea in the industry, so they have models they can adapt to All About People’s particular philosophy. A year into the process, franchises are now open in Cleveland, Denver and Tucson. Houston is next.

Beyond that, the company has just started working with one of the biggest franchise development firms in the country. Their expectation is for All About People to be operating 100 to 200 offices within five years.

“A lot of aspirations for growth, a lot of aspirations for creating impact in communities. I think that’s a large part of what we want to do,” Mitchell says. “We feel like we’ve been able to do that here in Phoenix and we’re starting to do that in some of the other communities where we are right now.

“I think we can create a business model around those local entrepreneurs who want to have an impact on their communities, to help people relative to opportunities, relative to jobs and then help employers find great talent.”

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