Holly Tomlin knows an employment agency is literally only as good as the people it sends out to work, and she is far more conscious of that than most because she has her surname stamped on the company.

The owner and president of Tomlin Staffing, who established the firm from her own pockets a little more than 20 years ago, stresses the importance of quickly fitting the right people with job openings while at the same time making sure those personnel don’t have checkered pasts that will reflect badly on her clients — or herself.

“When I go to a cocktail party in town, I don’t want to be embarrassed,” said Tomlin, one of six women from the local human resource industry named as finalists for the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s 2006 Business Woman of the Year awards.

Tomlin was named overall winner.

Despite being faced with intense competition from national staffing services with local operations, Tomlin said she has successfully managed to remain profitable while operating strictly within the Tampa Bay area. She emphasized that her firm serves two markets: client companies and candidates who are recruited, pre-qualified and placed in employment opportunities.

“We take their trust in us seriously and pledge to them that we will do things right or not at all,” she said. “Our reputation has been built on the consistent effort to always exceed the expectations of our clients and associates.”

Among the core values set by Tomlin Staffing are: treating clients and associates with honesty, fairness and respect; appreciating diversity of skills, talent and cultures of clients and workers; and fostering an environment of continuous learning that is also professional, friendly and fun.

“We’re more concerned with making good placements, not as much about the bottom line,” said Tomlin, who launched her company in December 1985 with $25,000 in personal savings at age 25. She originally split her time between marketing the firm’s services in the morning while filling job order assignments in the afternoon and plowed profit back into the company through its first seven years.

She later secured a $30,000 credit line to meet payroll for a growing number of employees, enabling her to market services to larger, more established companies. That led to an even bigger $200,000 credit line, based on her firm’s financial stability as well as her plan to remain selective with client companies and job candidates.

Tomlin Staffing endured the recessionary times of the late 1980s and early ’90s, when layoffs occurred more frequently. Tomlin said her focus on selling services paid off during the mid-1990s as the company broadened its client base and expanded its east Tampa office.

The firm opened an additional office in Clearwater that was later moved to Tampa’s Westshore business district and expanded its geographic reach with a Jacksonville office. When it became more difficult to remain profitable, Tomlin decided to reduce her company’s exposure and closed the Jacksonville and Westshore offices in 2001.

“Adversity has only sharpened my focus,” she said, adding that the experience taught her when to expand and retrench in more recent years.

Tomlin said she is especially proud that her company hasn’t wavered from its corporate philosophy and promise of quality through challenging times. She plans to continue running the company for another 20 years, hopefully turning it over to her three children, ages 18, 15 and 12.

Although she has received buyout offers from larger staffing firms, “I’m not even interested and won’t ever be,” she said.