When the Great Recession hit the U.S. economy in 2008, serial entrepreneur Sue Marks assessed the future, gulped and made big changes at Cielo, the Brookfield-based human resources firm she founded in 2005 under the name Pinstripe.
And while she didn’t turn the company upside down, she did invest more than $1 million in a new technology platform, Marks said Wednesday morning in the keynote talk at the 2015 Early Stage Symposium. Organizers said the gathering is expected to draw more than 600 people over its two-day run.
“I started talking to our employees about how we were going to cut fast and deep,” she said. “Many had never seen bad times because we had a lot of young workers. We were a $15 million-in-revenue company then, but because of the things we did, we only dropped to $12 million, which wasn’t as far as our competitors. (Cielo now has $100 million in revenues and 1,300 worldwide employees.) We saw this as a huge opportunity to adjust the business, become more financially sound and have more rigor.”
She said she hired three key executives in 2009 and 2010 and came out of the recession stronger, while other market leaders slumped.
“We reinvented what was basically a people model to a technology-enabled service model,” she said. “We have dedicated (recruiting) teams that operate under the clients’ brand and that is not scalable and it’s expensive. So we powered them with automation and self-service.”
Marks said the company began taking another technological leap when it expanded abroad in recent years and acquired global partners. Cielo now operates in 68 countries and she said her firm needed one global platform, essentially an enterprise resource planning suite of applications that it’s now building.
Marks, who noted she starts most days at 4 a.m., said she still operates Cielo as a startup in many ways. And she continues to have a hands-on presence in hiring, finding what she called “happy, friendly, smart people who walk fast.” That translates, she said, into bright and optimistic problem-solving employees who can handle ambiguity and like to get things done.
She also said she encourages workers to learn from their mistakes, take risks and ask forgiveness when things go wrong instead of first waiting for permission to try something new.
Though Marks exudes confidence, she said she was nearly laid low while running one of her early companies after she found out that her account was not paying payroll taxes.
“This is the worst story of my life,” she told her audience. “We’d grown from $3 million to $8 million and one office to four offices. Because of that experience, I learned that you need to ‘hire higher.’ I fired our law firm, I fired our accounting firm and I got an outside board of directors. All of those things made me a better leader.
“But what was really a kind of head slapper came when a friend said ‘you really need to get your confidence back or you’re going to have the sell the company before you really screw it up. Even today, I have moments when I wonder if I have the skill set to do this. So it’s really important to have people around you with whom you can be open and who can tell when you are not cutting it and what you need to do to change.”
— By Brian E. Clark
For WisBusiness.com
