Harold Mills isn't merely setting the pace as a CEO. He's also changing rules in the race while taking innovation to new lengths.

Harold Mills was sprinting on the corporate America fast track to CEO stardom.

That’s what happens when you jump out of the gates with an MBA from Harvard Business School while accelerating through management training at General Electric and leading expansion of an emerging tech business into 37 states at Ameritech (now AT &T). All as a relative yearling.

Proper grooming in his 20s gave Mills the sort of blue -blood pedigree that makes even the finest executive applicants on CareerBuilder.com look like unclaimed maidens from a backwoods stakes race.

Then Mills took a turn … for the better. He eschewed the tried and true, the traditional, to chart a new course. The youngest executive director at Ameritech — so youthful, in fact, that his boss prohibited him from mentioning his age to anyone — galloped onto a blinding, winding trail. The one called entrepreneurship.

No contest.

Like a Secretariat stretch drive bringing home a Triple Crown in horse racing, Mills, at 39, is leaving the competition in his dust.

How else does one explain 40 percent growth during the ominous times of fiscal 2008 for a company that deals with, of all things, employment? Mills’ ZeroChaos, a global workforce-solutions company headquartered in Orlando, followed that performance in recession-ravaged 2009 with 12 percent more growth last year and a nearly 20 percent upswing in profitability. That occurred while the competition endured a 30 percent decline in revenues and a roughly 80 percent drop in profitability.

Ten years old, ZeroChaos expects annual revenues to hit $900 million this year, give or take a contract worker, and has doubled its revenues three times during the decade. The company, one of the top minority-owned contract labor-acquisition and -management companies nationwide, does business in all 50 states and in 14 other countries, mostly serving corporations with more than 5 ,000 employees.

Such achievement has placed ZeroChaos on Inc. magazine’s 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list, among others, and seated Mills at some pretty prestigious tables. In January, for one, Mills shared insights at a White House forum on modernizing government, participating in a session entitled “Streamlining Operations.” He was joined by nine other CEO  juggernauts from outfits like Whirlpool, Liz Claiborne, Cargill, Staples and PepsiCo.

Heady stuff, for sure, considering that, less than a decade ago, Mills had a mere $1,000 remaining in his corporate bank account. That paltry sum wouldn’t fetch much in a barn auction.

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Setting Sights

The year was 2003. There’s a moment in any race when the difference between winning and losing becomes evident. This was that time.

Mills had arrived in town a few years earlier as an executive vice president for Orlando-based CoAdvantage Resources, in charge of building ZeroChaos, which CoAdvantage owned. In short order, the small provider of human resource services to independent contractors and consultants wasn’t so small, with ZeroChaos’ revenues reaching almost $50 million.

That’s when the entrepreneurial bug hit, leaving Mills’ future in doubt, perhaps for the first time since middle school.

He stepped aside from ZeroChaos and founded Endeavour Business Process Solutions, another HR outsourcer. Endeavour struggled, though, and Mills summoned the fortitude that has long been a family staple. To illustrate: Back in eighth grade, Mills had decided he needed to leave public schools and get a prep school education in hometown, Dayton, Ohio. His low-/middle-income parents — mother a hospital worker, father a foundry worker — couldn’t afford the tuition. Ultimately, Mills talked his way into a partial scholarship while his parents scraped together the rest, doing whatever they could financially. How’s that for spunk?

This time, as his startup teetered on the brink, he turned to his wife with one of life’s defining questions: What next? “I asked, ‘What do you want to do? I can go look for a job tomorrow,’” he recalls. Despite two children in tow (there are now three), she responded with, simply “Let it ride.”

“There was the wall that I think every entrepreneur hits at some point,” Mills says, “where you decide if you jump off the cliff or turn away and go back to the safety net.”

So, he jumped, resurrecting Endeavour and, in 2004, folding it into ZeroChaos, which he had bought, together with a group of investors. ZeroChaos became a launching pad.

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Gaining Speed

Mills had carried the entrepreneurial yearning for some time, even while making the corporate ladder look more like a step stool in the early 1990s. At Ameritech, he once walked into the president’s office and asked to take no salary. Instead, he said, he wanted his compensation based on what he could build. The president acknowledged that the idea was good but against corporate policy; his answer was no. The president’s decision to follow company policy turned out to be a smart decision for the company because Mills would otherwise have won big — he quadrupled sales during the next couple of years.

Mills pushed forward, dutifully surveying the field, before making his move.

“He was too entrepreneurial for some of those big corporate companies,” says Geoff Toffetti, vice president of strategic solutions at ZeroChaos, who has worked with Mills since the company’s earliest days. “He married the high-level management grooming with entrepreneurial free thinking.”

In 2004, when Mills acquired ZeroChaos, he didn’t just want to lead the pack; he sought to change the industry. He had raised a reported $13 million in private equity funds from major investors such as AP Capital Partners, a black-owned private equity firm based in Orlando. And he didn’t intend to be merely part of a $200 billion global marketplace crowded with some 14,000 competitors in the United States alone.

“We wanted to come to the industry and be different. We didn’t want to be 14,001. That’s probably the only thing we knew,” he recounts.

For starters, leaning heavily on a fully automated employment platform, ZeroChaos introduced to the industry Open Book Accounting and e-Contractor, effectively enticing such huge clients as IBM, Nokia, Accenture and GlaxoSmithKline. Open Book Accounting created transparency, with ZeroChaos sharing with clients it methods of determining fees on taxes, wages and other expenses. As a buyer of HR services at Ameritech, Mills had seen suppliers charging high margins and covering up pricing. He believed there was a better way. E-contracting allows individual contractors to create profiles on the Web sites of companies they're interesting in working for, enabling the companies to directly assess a private talent pool. Those companies, in turn, pay ZeroChaos a fee to develop the software and manage the Web site.

“I always had this sort of buzz for the leading-edge stuff,” he offers.

Over the years, ZeroChaos has added a slew of other services — or perhaps more aptly put, a Seattle Slew of services — continually broadening its scope. While the company started as essentially being the employer of record for contractors who were identified by customers, it developed solutions as contractor-labor challenges emerged. Says Toffetti, the person pulling the trigger on much of the innovation: “We are not a payroll company; we’re a solutions company. The company isn’t about status quo; it’s about solutions.

“Our sales pitches are typically more like a seminar.”

The company’s boilerplate tag on press releases to the media: “ZeroChaos helps visionary companies achieve greater management and financial control of their workforce and talent supply chains through innovative private-label solutions and full-disclosure pricing.”

More specifically, focusing on white-collar employment, the company is organized into four lines of business: (1) Professional Payrolling, using proprietary technology and integrated back-office procedures to deliver processing and professional payrolling services, reportedly at a cost of 6 to 10 percent less than the competition; (2) Risk Management, offering  an IRS validation and a Department of Labor risk-management solution for a company’s independent contract workers; (3) Private Label Sourcing, connecting contract workers directly with a corporation’s needs without coemployment or other risks; and (4) Managed Services, providing a combination of solutions.

The overriding emphasis, Mills asserts, is on saving customers money. The company’s Private Label Sourcing, for example, is touted as minimizing a customer’s competition for talent plus saving on related costs by nearly 40 percent. In addition, there aren’t many brick-and-mortar offices, eliminating office overhead, with those savings passed along to customers.

“It [saving money for customers] has been paramount,” he says. “High quality. High service. Low cost.” As such, the beauty of the company's sophistication lies in this simple fact: ZeroChaos has attracted the IBMs and American Expresses of the world because innovations make doing business with it vastly less expensive than the next service provider.

“Absolutely. They’ve saved us money,” comments Sylvester Wilkins, sourcing group manager for corporate services procurement at GlaxoSmithKline, which has been a customer for the past seven years. The pharmaceutical and healthcare giant receives payrolling services and works with subcontractor companies hired through ZeroChaos. While industry markups normally range from 25 to 40 percent, cites Wilkins, ZeroChaos’ are 18 to 20 percent and sometimes less.

At the same time, Mills is, let's just say, budget conscious. He gets ribbed for mandating that the company’s same-gender associates share hotel rooms on business trips. Yet, he doesn’t skimp on investing in the future. Instead of drawing in the reins at the end of 2008 and waiting out the economic storm, Mills went into full development mode. “It turned out well for us,” he says. “Instead of laying people off, we grew our base and invested significantly in technology.”

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Finishing Form

Toffetti labels the move as typical Mills — “swimming upstream seeking innovation.”

“The core of our innovation came with Harold,” he says. “Our reputation of innovation is largely based on his presence here.”

While the company’s dizzying growth has the potential to cause burnout, Toffetti acknowledges, Mills has found a way to invigorate: “He fosters an environment where he channels that energy into ‘We’re going after the industry; we’re changing the industry.’ All that change is driven through innovation.”

When an employee’s spouse, who works as an insurance contract adjuster involved in small business contract labor, brought ZeroChaos a promising nuance for its insurance adjuster segment, Mills gave a thumbs up. The company is now pursuing that idea. Also, last year he invited all employees to submit business plans for new products. Selected winners were given a cash bonus and allowed to develop their products, with the top winner currently working full time on moving her product through development and into the market.

Clearly, Mills builds consensus and believes in his people. Don’t be mistaken, though, adds Toffetti. Mills has bite, too: “When he believes we should be on a path, we’re on that path.”

By many accounts a good guy, Mills isn’t afraid to hurt people’s feelings. Telling self-testimony: “If you’re going to double the company two or three times in its history, you’re bringing lots of new people into the organization. And some of those people simply don’t work out.”

Wilkins describes Mills as personally committed to customer satisfaction, calling him a “customer delight” and someone who is responsive, not hesitant to get involved. “For all the things that this guy does, and all the time that he moves around, I can call him and be guaranteed he’ll call back within the hour, unless he’s somewhere and just cannot do it,” Wilkins says.

That might explain Mills’ recent fascination with social media, where he began a blog last month,  further improving accessibility.

In the mirror, Mills sees a collaborator, with high expectations of himself and others, but also someone who is driven, focused and calculated enough to forecast another 30 percent growth in revenues for fiscal 2010.

Winning races, for sure, doesn’t happen without both grit and guile.

Most notably, Mills uses the word grateful. Growing up in the housing projects of Dayton, he was grateful and “never wanting for much.” Today, he is grateful for what thus far has been a championship run for the roses.

He takes little for granted. With mixed parts of paranoia and perspective, he concludes: “It could all go away the next day.”