Photo courtesy of Way To Go Staffing / Facebook.
A staffing agency’s main purpose is to provide event venues with the manpower needed to carry out certain aspects of their events, such as bartending or serving food. Venues differ in the amount of staff that they need, where some venues only need to outsource some trained staff for events, while others have no manpower and will entirely depend on staffing agencies to provide the venue with trained staff.
No matter how many people are needed, this is where Omar Elgarhi and Way To Go Staffing come in to help.
Omar Elgarhi, Director of Operations of Way To Go Staffing, founded the Bayonne-based staffing agency back in 2016 with his father, Atef, and his brother, Islam, out of their own home. Elgarhi was hesitant in starting the business, but his father gave him the push needed to begin.
“It was really him that kind of started this,” Elgarhi told Slice of Culture.
Way To Go Staffing prides itself on its rigorously-trained staff and their consistently reliable service to their clients. Because of the reputation that Way To Go Staffing has gained and the loyalty shown to them by their clients, Elgarhi prioritizes the service that they provide to them.
“We want to work with our clients on a regular basis,” Elgarhi said. “We want to provide them with good staff for all their events, and that’s how we operate.”
The first few months for the business were tough, with Elgarhi spending every day at a local cafe calling venues trying to get business. With hard work and consistency came a payoff — business was arriving.
They opened their first office along John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Bayonne.
Atef had business experience prior to Way To Go Staffing, with his very own transportation business called “Way To Go Car & Limo Service,” which served as the inspiration for the name of the new staffing agency. Between owning his own transportation service and founding a staffing agency, Atef still manages to be involved with certain events as well as the accounting and finances of Way To Go Staffing.
Every year since its founding, the business grew, up until 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, shutting down business for Way To Go Staffing for nearly six months.
“After COVID, the demand for staff grew,” Elgarhi said. “Companies depended more on the agencies than they did before.”
When restrictions were lifted after COVID cases began to decline, Way To Go Staffing was faced with more problems due to a lack of employees returning, with the business losing roughly half of their workforce.
“It was hard to bring people back into the workforce because people were on unemployment. It was one of the toughest times for our company…We were getting calls from so many different venues and we had to turn away business because we didn’t have the manpower to supply for these different venues.”
After recovering from the months of lost business in 2020, Way To Go Staffing was back on its feet, and facing a new problem: their office was too small to handle all their new business. So the search for a new office began, with plans to repurpose their original office.
After finding their second office along Broadway in Bayonne, Way To Go Staffing was operating out of a new office in January 2021.
“That office was getting too small for the amount of people coming in and out,” Elgarhi said. “That’s why we looked to open a second space…This second office now is our main office and then we use our previous office, which was our original, as the training facility.”
After seven years in business, Elgarhi directs one of the top staffing agencies in the tri-state area, with many notable events under his belt, including an Amazon holiday party, concerts, weddings and even events for Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Through all of these events and countless hours providing his clients with professional-level service, Omar still greatly enjoys the time that he spends with his staff and helping his clients.
“I wouldn’t choose anything else other than this right here,” Omar said.
