It stands to reason that a company founded by disillusioned tech temps would strive toward building a work-life balance.

"This company was essentially built on the foundation of providing a refuge for employees," says Liz Molitor, the director of marketing at Allyis. "Everything this organization has done has centered on that."

Kirkland-based Allyis (pronounced "uh-LIE-us") has been a regular near the top of Washington CEO Magazine's Best Companies to Work For lists for the past two years, and this year, the company has earned top honors as the best medium-size company to work for. It's also gotten more than its share of attention from other media outlets -- including two appearances on the Seattle Times' lists of top companies to work for, and four consecutive appearances on the Puget Sound Business Journal's annual lists of fastest-growing private companies in the region, thanks to average annual revenue growth of around 40 percent since 2003.

In addition, two of its founders have been named to the Puget Sound Business Journal's annual "Forty Under 40" lists, and CEO Richard Law was named "Best Executive" by the American Business Awards in 2006.

Not bad for a couple of guys who started out as graduate assistants teaching English 101 at Western Washington University. That's what Law, Ethan Yarbrough and Ken Efta were doing back in 1993, when they first met. They all graduated with master's degrees in English, but instead of writing great American novels, they got sucked into the '90s tech boom and went to work as contractors at Microsoft.

We all remember the velvet sweatshop tales of those years, as Microsoft and its permatemp contractors rushed to get Windows 95 ready for release. For Law, Yarbrough and Efta, they found themselves working very long hours, feeling cut off from the company that employed them and "kind of on our own sitting out here," Molitor says.

So when their contracts ended in 1996, they decided to form their own subcontracting firm, pooling a hundred bucks to buy their first fax machine and some coffee. They started by working out of their homes, and didn't get their first office space until 2004.

Allyis specializes in software for online services, helping companies and government agencies develop internal and external websites and manage and create the information that appears on them. Along with the technical support, it also offers management, marketing and consulting services for its clients with "essentially anything touching the Web or Internet," Molitor says.

Microsoft and its various offshoots -- including MSN and msnbc.com -- are major clients, but the list includes varied customers such as Dell, video game maker Electronic Arts, InfoSpace, Paramount Pictures, the Washington Department of Licensing and Everest College (formerly Ashmead College).

The founders' goal at the start was simply to create a better place to work for themselves. The competitive advantage was almost a byproduct.

Providing temporary personnel in the technology sector is a pretty cutthroat business. If your people are good, your clients will try to steal them, leaving you to recruit and train a replacement.

But by providing people with a better working environment, Allyis takes away much of their incentive to leave. That lowers Allyis' overall costs -- and raises the quality of service that its clients receive. Molitor says a company or state agency that gets Allyis consultants can be sure that the people it's brought in to help are focused on the task at hand, not on shopping their résumés around, and will be with the company through the end of the project.