Atlas Staffing Inc., a Spokane Valley-based employment staffing agency, has started a subsidiary intended to help other businesses develop their internal cultures more formally, says Atlas owner and President Joshua McKee.

Culturra Business Advisors Inc. recently was created as a consulting firm to help clients implement management systems, meet business goals, and develop their own business culture, he says.

“Office culture is more than blue jeans Friday and putting in a ping pong table,” says McKee.

Culturra is relying on the expertise of McKee’s father-in-law, Brian Templin, who serves as the company’s vice president.

Templin previously served as vice president of marketing and customer service and vice president of operations for airline food company Caterair International for seven years. He also spent a decade employed in the loss control department at Marriott International.

Caterair frequently posted annual revenues exceeding $350 million during his tenure, Templin says.

“I have the experience and the passion to help businesses in the area of process improvement,” Templin says. “It’s about how to drive and align productivity and profit and how to tie that into people.”

McKee says he’s frequently leaned on Templin for advice and expertise and credits him with helping Atlas Staffing to continue to expand in the seven years since McKee founded the company.

Atlas Staffing is headquartered at 920 N. Argonne Road and has space on the first and third floors of that building. Culturra’s offices also are located there. 

Other Atlas Staffing offices are in Beaverton, Ore.; Boise, Idaho; and Yakima, Wash.

McKee purchased the Yakima office in 2015. He says shortly after that purchase, he was starting to feel engulfed in a relatively short period of time says operating the business as a whole.

“The complexities were getting beyond me, and I knew I needed help,” McKee says. That’s when McKee asked Templin to serve in the capacity of a consultant to Atlas Staffing.

Today, Atlas Staffing has a total of 24 permanent employees, 11 of whom are based here, and McKee says he anticipates the business will grow by another half-a-dozen workers by the middle of this year.

Including Templin, three employees so far have committed to help launch Culturra, McKee says.