Gentry Professional Services

When he started his business, Bradley Gentry briefly thought it was an engineering staffing company.

“But you look to a staffing company when you need to find 200 people to fill 200 jobs, and that’s not us,” said Gentry, whose business has nine full-time consultants and 15 part-timers.

“We’re the people you call when you have one or two seats to fill, and you can’t just fill them because there’s only two people in the country who have the expertise either because of their experience or education or just the knowledge they have acquired.”

So when these key people look to retire or gain flexibility, they retire and go to work for Gentry, which takes on their employers as clients and assigns the expert — usually an engineer — back to the client as a consultant.

Since 2013, Gentry has provided top-tier experts to aerospace, defense, systems engineering and other industries. And in recent years, the Little Rock company’s growth has exploded. After all, it has its niche pretty much to itself. “It took us seven years to get to 10x [a 10 times increase in business], and this year has been our best year; we’re projected to have a 50% increase from 2021,” said Gentry, a Benton native, describing 2022.

“This past year, we grew into two more states, California and Alabama.” The company previously operated in Arkansas, California, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The company plan is to grow by a factor of 10 again in the next four years. The biggest challenge, the CEO said, is working through stringent government regulations to secure client contracts. That often involves specialized security clearances, but the company has developed “knowledge and insight into clearances and process,” and “can work through this obstacle,” Gentry said.

Gentry emphasizes that his company makes sure clients understand that their returning retirees will be working on what they want, when they want, and only for how long they want, or they will simply stay retired.

“We become an advocate for the employee and either find a solution that works for everyone or just shake hands and part ways.”