Fueled by demand, RuffaloCODY adding more than 60 employees

CEDAR RAPIDS -- With demand growing for its higher education fundraising and enrollment management services, RuffaloCODY on Tuesday announced plans to add more than 60 professional and technical positions to its staff.

The company also is studying space options, including a new building to handle its projected growth.

Al Ruffalo, chairman and chief executive officer of the Cedar Rapids-based company, said it will begin its search for qualified candidates immediately, offering an average salary of $45,000.

"Of the 60 full-time positions, more than half will be located in Cedar Rapids," Ruffalo said. "It bridges all positions from project managers to writers. A good number of them will be information technology technical folks.

"We continue to grow at a 17 percent to 20 percent annual growth rate. Our average annual growth rate since we bought the company back 10 years ago has been 17.2 percent."

Ruffalo said the company, which has about 360 full-time employees with more than half located in Iowa, employs more than  4,600 internationally. The majority are part-time employees working at call centers on college and university campuses in the United States, Canada and Australia.

"We're expecting to grow about 19 percent and our preliminary goal for 2013 is to hit $100 million in revenue," he said. "We just signed our first Australian contract and we're going to be doing some work for the University of Sydney next month. We have an employee stationed in Australia and we will begin managing the university's call center next month.

"We will decide over the next six months whether we will continue to market there and if so, how big we plan to get."

Ruffalo said the additional employees in Cedar Rapids has the company exploring its future space options, a situation that has occurred several times since he and several colleagues started the company.

"We have this building on the Kirkwood campus at 27,000 square feet and we lease about 20,000 square feet in a building on Capital Drive SW," he said. "We lease another 6,000 or 7,000 square feet in a building on Beverly Road off Edgewood Road SW for our mailroom.

"We're trying to determine our next steps, which may be a multilevel building on or near the Kirkwood campus. We really want to bring everything back under one roof."

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