By: Helen Graves

It's difficult to decide where to start Mia Wenjen's story. There's so much to tell and it's all, as she says, so cool.

Maybe begin early in the Aquent co-founder and vice president of business development's career. Not the well-known very beginning story, when Wenjen and two other Harvard juniors worked out of their dorm to start what quickly developed into the Macintosh-based temp agency, MacTemps, and later into the creative and IT staffing company, Aquent.

Instead, fast-forward from that 1986 beginning to October, 1988. After graduation, Wenjen worked the prescribed one year at a "regular job" in her California home state before saying to herself, "I gotta get out of here."

By then, the expansion plans for Boston-based MacTemps were ready. Wenjen, who kept in touch with friends/co-founders John Chuang and Steve Kapner and also served on the company's board, offered to take on the West Coast.

Why start here? To show Wenjen's belief in possibility, her notion of empowerment and her ease with running a rapidly growing, always evolving business.

"In the early days, we would hire a kid just graduating from college," Wenjen, now 37, says. "I'd go interview for a day, hand a key to a kid and say, 'You're opening our San Diego market. You're going to come up and stay in my apartment for a week. Do whatever you want. I'm just showing you how I do things. You're going to be getting a budget - OBN - one big number of money to spend. Spend it how you see fit, but be smart about it. Spend on things that grow the business. Grow the business as best as you can. Call me if you need help. Otherwise, good luck.'"

The culture theme could be a good start, because maintaining that early entrepreneurial spirit is a constant worry for the company that expects to earn $400 million this year and now employs 650 people and places 3,000 consultants or talent each week through 70 offices in the U.S. and around the world.

But then, maybe it's important to start at the very beginning and talk about the ongoing, underlying business premise: the competitive edge.

It all began with the efficiency of the then-new Macintosh computer vs. the typewriter. "We were all working on the Harvard Political Review and getting our typesetting done at the Harvard Crimson," Wenjen explains. "We learned how to use the Macintosh 128K and PageMaker 1.0, and found that production costs went from $2,000 to $20. John, the visionary of the company, realized that this was a pivotal moment in technology and a business opportunity.

From pivotal moment and a semester of "serious grade point average tankage and serious parent freakage," the three went on to secure a loan (parents' signatures required) on their $5,000 profit to buy a used laser printer and run a bare-bones office in Harvard Square. They set up shop as two businesses: a self-service one that supplied a computer and a printer for customers to use themselves and the service-oriented business of doing the publishing work for the customer. Price and great customer service comprised their competitive edge, in order to make themselves the business of choice.

"We charged 50 cents for only the pages you took with you, and $6 an hour and
free customer support. There were some other similar businesses nearby, but they charged by the page and more per hour, and charged $60 an hour for customer support," Wenjen says.

The mix of freelancers coming in to do their own work and the small business of having their work done led to the next idea: the temp agency. A tiny ad in the Boston Macintosh Users Group magazine set the phones ringing off the hook.

At the time, staffing companies were focusing on the word-processing DOS PC rather than the publishing-friendly Macintosh, so again, the co-founders were
developing a business - now their third - on competitive edge.

MacTemps took off - "it did $1 million in business that first year, and we thought we were doing great at $130,000 in typesetting" - and became the springboard for further business development.

"It was a lesson that we took to heart," Wenjen says. "We'd try other things and we'd see the opportunity and take what works the best and blow that out. When we tried things that didn't have a competitive advantage, while we did learn a lot and it was great for improving our business in general and increasing our knowledge, we'd let them go."

Which leads to another staring point for Wenjen's story: her willingness to take on risk and either build on her success or rebound from her mistakes. She left what was still MacTemps and got her MBA at UCLA in 1993. When she subsequently started her own women's golf apparel business in California with a business school classmate, the chemistry this time wasn't the same as her first business venture's.

Wenjen left to do consulting and after several years, still on the MacTemps board and attending the twice-a-year gatherings of all employees, she became intrigued with the possibilities of MacTemp's new independent professional offerings.

"I moved back about four years ago and pretty much work on something different ever year," she says.

Around that time, the co-founders rebranded the company and named it Aquent, meaning "not a follower." The company was no longer just Macintosh and temp placement, but instead the largest front-end Web design and development company in the U.S. and the largest creative talent agency in the world.

The unconventional approach is always testing the waters rather than waiting and scrambling to follow the innovators. The company motto, Wenjen notes, is "fail often, fail fast, fail cheaply."

Wenjen readily admits to her own two recent failures: AquentDirect, a recruiting/hiring online model for accountants that flew in the face of the time it takes to make the right placement, and the independent professional-targeted Webzine, 1099, and its paper counterpart, 1099 Magazine, that garnered accolades but didn't have the quick-hit competitive edge.

'I think what's so great about the culture here is we view new attempts as a learning opportunity, and we take what we learn and make it an ongoing, evolutionary process," Wenjen says. "You have a lot of things in the hopper and you know not everything is going to work. The whole point is to find the nugget of the things that do work, take the lessons from the things that don't work, and that's how you stay ahead."

There are, of course, obvious successes, including the country's first graphic design placement service, Portfolio, established in 1995; WebStaff, the first Web placement service, in 1998; and, in 1999, Aquent Fast Cash, the invoicing service that, for a small fee, pays freelancers up front and collects on their billings.

Last December, Aquent acquired the larger Waltham-based Renaissance Worldwide and took the public company private to add back-end IT capabilities to its front-end Web expertise.

The acquisition brings Wenjen and the Aquent story back to a new beginning of sorts, to the new start of a series of new iterations that will lead to the next gems.

"Were excited about this additional IT capability. It's like we're in a broader field now and we'll be thinking about competitive edge in this new space," Wenjen says, "about how we can come at it, about how do we take our creative and now our IT capabilities and slice and dice that for the competitive advantage in what our clients are facing."

As enthusiastic as Wenjen is about running with Aquent's next steps, she's just as mindful of keeping her feet firmly on the ground.

"You know you're only as good as your last placement, and you have to remember that," Wenjen says. "It's all about getting better, because there is no time to rest on your laurels in the service business.