A Tech Startup Bought a 47-Year-Old Staffing Firm. Then Cut Its Costs by 70 Percent.

Faber Connect's acquisition of Edmonton's Prime Staffing is a small deal by dollar value, but it is one of the clearest examples yet of what happens when a software-first challenger absorbs a legacy staffing operation — and what incumbents should take from the result.

Prime Staffing had been placing tradespeople in Alberta since 1978, long enough to become, by its own account, the province's top staffing partner for skilled trades, with more than 12,000 workers placed over its history. In June 2025, it was acquired by Faber Connect, a Vancouver-based technology company founded in 2018 that had built its business connecting tradespeople directly to construction firms through an app.

The acquisition itself was modest in scope — a single regional firm changing hands. What makes it worth a closer look is what happened next: according to Faber, Prime Staffing's operating costs fell 70 percent following the integration, without the firm's core placement business disappearing. That is not typical of a staffing acquisition, where cost synergies more often run in the 10-to-20 percent range from back-office consolidation alone.

What actually got cut

Faber has not published a line-item breakdown of where the savings came from, but the shape of the deal points to the obvious answer: Faber didn't buy Prime Staffing to keep running it the old way. It bought the relationships, the candidate pool, and the brand recognition, then routed the actual work of matching and scheduling through its own software.

"By combining our innovative platform with Prime Staffing's market expertise, this acquisition not only proves that our model works — it also showcases how our software can power the entirety of an established, existing business at a fraction of the opex," said Sebastian Jacob, Faber's chief executive and co-founder, when the deal was announced.

Matthias Friedel, Prime Staffing's former general manager and now Faber's market manager for Edmonton, framed the change from the operator's side: joining Faber, he said, let the business modernize its approach while still bringing value to the same client base it had always served.

Why this deal matters more than its size suggests

Traditional staffing acquisitions tend to follow a familiar script: a larger firm buys a smaller one for its book of business, folds the back office into shared services, and keeps the front-line placement model largely intact. The Faber-Prime Staffing deal inverts that. The value Faber paid for was almost entirely the human relationships and market position that four decades in Edmonton's trades market had built — the kind of asset that's genuinely hard to replicate with software alone. What Faber replaced was everything downstream of that: the operational machinery of running a staffing desk.