No Strategy When He Joined, Still Took Them to $1.6B - Scott Staples - First Advantage - EP #120

Scott Staples asked one question when he became CEO of First Advantage: can someone show me the strategy document? The answer was no. There wasn't one. The company was 15 years old, doing $400 million in revenue, and had just lost some of its biggest customers. Ten years later, revenue is at $1.6 billion. Four times the revenue, same company, same industry. Scott is the CEO of First Advantage, a background screening company that runs more than 200 million screens a year for over 80,000 customers worldwide, including roughly two thirds of the Fortune 100, across 200 countries and territories. He inherited First Advantage in 2017, when it was losing revenue and clients, and turned it into the fastest growing player in the industry within a year. Here were my biggest takeaways. Fix the culture before anything else. When Scott arrived, the real problem wasn't go to market or product. It was silos. Finance doing its own thing, sales doing its own thing, nobody talking to each other. He rebuilt the culture around teamwork first. As he put it, when you're trying to turn a ship in an ocean, you need teamwork. Find the core problem first. Scott asked for the company's strategy document on day one. There wasn't one. Instead of guessing at fixes, he got every leader in a room and diagnosed the real issue from zero. Show up, even without the answers. Scott personally visited 20 to 30 of the company's biggest customers in his first weeks. Over and over he heard the same thing: no one's been here in over a year. Match your pitch to your buyer. First Advantage had one sales rep calling on a bank in the morning, a retailer at lunch, and a hospital network in the afternoon, same pitch, three completely different buyers. Scott did a massive reorg of the company around verticals instead. The next fraud fight is AI versus AI. Candidates are using AI to fake resumes, credentials, and now entire job interviews. Scott says about 300 US companies have already reported that they inadvertently hired North Korean agents. Quote of the Show: "When you're trying to change a company, when you're trying to turn a ship in an ocean, you need teamwork. So I think the biggest thing that I focused on, which is the most important thing, was addressing culture and fixing culture." Scott Staples, CEO, First Advantage. Guests Featured in this episode: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdavidstaples/ First Advantage: https://fadv.com/ We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, with the exact playbook Scott used to fix the culture and rebuild the strategy from scratch, we're building out a full library of playbooks and lessons from every episode on Substack. Sources: ClearanceJobs (May 17, 2024) – “U.S. Companies Tricked by North Korean IT Workers: DOJ Unveils Complex Fraud Network” https://news.clearancejobs.com/2024/05/17/doj-reveals-u-s-companies-unwittingly-hired-north-korean-it-workers/ Gartner (July 31, 2025) – “Gartner Survey Shows Just 26% of Job Applicants Trust AI Will Fairly Evaluate Them” https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-07-31-gartner-survey-shows-just-26-percent-of-job-applicants-trust-ai-will-fairly-evaluate-them Chapters: 00:00 - Trailer 01:05 - Intro 02:22 - Fixing Culture First: The One Thing He'd Do Again 04:53 - Finding the Core Problem 08:14 - The Listening Tour: Buying Time with Customers 22:59 - Matching the Pitch to the Buyer 33:28 - The Bad AI Epidemic in Hiring 47:17 - The Biggest Challenge Faced as CEO 54:10 - Where First Advantage Will Be in 3 Years 57:05 - Advice to His Younger Self