Sticking with Sullivan

Sticking with Sullivan

Leadership by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

A Gulf Coast executive running a company that recruits other executives shares success secrets: Start with eliminating mean employees.

Last summer, Brian Sullivan, the chairman and CEO of a thriving New York City-based executive search firm, faced 50 of his top performers in a London conference room. Sure, things were going great - revenues were up 200% in two years, from $25 million to $75 million.

So, Sullivan asked, what could blow it all up?

Another terrorist attack, answered one person. Continued gas price spikes, said another. Sullivan, who runs the firm, Christian & Timbers, from its six global offices as well as his Casey Key home, waved his hand in dismissal.

"There's 50 people in the world that can screw this thing up," Sullivan told the troops. "And they're all in this room."

It's not that Sullivan didn't have confidence in his people. He did. He just wanted to drive home the point that the company's future growth and success would hinge on everyone sticking to their mission, philosophy and goals, no matter what outside forces come its way. For Sullivan, that meant the same laser-like focus on matching the right executives with the right firms, not just padding fee totals.

It's a work theory Sullivan has practiced throughout a 20-year career as a top executive in the executive search industry. His setbacks and triumphs represent several lessons for other business leaders and senior executives looking to get more out of their employees.

What's more, Sullivan's expertise in the executive search industry can serve as a road-map for Gulf Coast-based business leaders searching for the key to the area's current tight employment market: Employee retention.

"Brian has a real sense of how to read people," says Tom Testwuide, who sits on the board of Bradenton-based First Priority Bank with Sullivan. "Both the negative and the positive."

No pitas allowed

Sullivan's management style can be summed up with pitas - and not the eating kind. Sullivan fine-tuned a personal rule of running a business when he was hired to run Christian & Timbers, something he'd been mulling for many previous years: Eliminate all employees who are a "pain in the ass," or a pita.

"We will not tolerate bad behavior," Sullivan says, from simple elevator grumpiness to boorish boardroom antics.

And a "please" and a "thank you" is to be the norm, not the exception.

Some at Christian & Timbers thought Sullivan was joking about his anti-pita provision. He wasn't: Soon after taking the top post in September 2004, Sullivan fired five partners who weren't able to adapt to the new culture ground rules, despite those employee's stellar revenue-producing track record.

Sullivan's straight-shooter approach to managing was partially culled from his childhood in a suburban blue-collar Boston neighborhood. It was the kind of town, Sullivan says, that when you told your buddies you wanted to go to college in Pennsylvania, they asked how you how would get home for weekends. Not many people left it.

Sullivan did get out though, ultimately earning a bachelors' degree from Lehigh University and an MBA from the University of Denver in 1976. A pair of high-finance jobs, one on each coast, followed the degrees. He worked for brokerage firm Kidder, Peabody & Co. in San Francisco, and then took a job with New York-based Revlon, in the makeup company's treasury department.

A corporate buyout at Revlon left Sullivan without a job. Some of his friends worked in the corporate recruiting business. Sullivan gave it a shot, opening his own firm, Sullivan & Co., in 1988.

Sullivan's modesty in how he built up his firm belies its success. By 1999, when the executive search firm industry was broken into a Big Five and a bunch of smaller periphery players, Sullivan & Co. had cracked the top 15 worldwide. Sullivan sold his firm to Heidrick & Struggles, then the one of the biggest of the Big Five.

While profitable for Sullivan, the sale of his own company to an industry behemoth became a textbook example of an entrepreneur-big-business culture clash. "It was fun for a while," Sullivan says. "I went from being a tip of the spear to the kind of guy having 110 partners around the world."

When his philosophy on how to run a search company butted with Heidrick & Struggles' approach, Sullivan became the kind of guy looking for work. He left the firm in 2002, and soon after moved with his family to the Gulf Coast, first in a Longboat Key condo and later to his current Casey Key home.

Stick it out

Sullivan did the "the obligatory real estate thing" when he moved full time to Florida; with some partners, he bought property in Sarasota's Southside Village, including the building now occupied by Sam Snead's Tavern. Sullivan also joined the board of First Priority bank.

Still, he was restless. So when Sullivan's non-compete contract with Heidrick & Struggles expired, he started looking for work. He found his match at Christian & Timbers, a growing firm that was looking to grow even more without giving up either its entrepreneurial spirit or its devotion to meeting clients' needs.

The latter struck Sullivan has more than a company motto. One of his problems with Heidrick & Struggles, as well as with the industry in general, was that he felt the firm was only judging itself based on how many executives it placed in jobs and fees it brought in, as opposed to whether those executives stuck with the job and the clients were satisfied.

"You should measure yourselves by metrics your clients care about," he says, "not the metrics your shareholders care about."

But the executive search industry, which has been in around since about the end of World War II, wasn't built that way, Sullivan says. Instead, it was fast and loose, with no set judging criteria. He and the other executives at Christian & Timbers set out to change that, first by publicly monitoring something called a stick rate - how long an executive stays at a job, not just that he was placed.

Christian & Timbers has also begun monitoring the number of days it takes to make a match and the overall results of its recruitment efforts. The firm had its numbers audited by an outside firm and publicly released the statistics last year.

"Increased transparency is needed in our industry to empower clients to make informed decisions when choosing a search firm," Sullivan says in a recent company statement promoting the new measurement systems. "Hopefully, highlighting placement results will move the entire industry forward, which will increase the overall use of executive search as a strategic consulting service."

But Sullivan was hired to run, and grow, Christian & Timbers, not just facilitate industry change. His first step was to dump the pitas. He then went on a global listening tour, to figure out what his top employees and partners needed to do better.

In the first few months, Sullivan's goal was to build up the staff's confidence and promote an atmosphere of not being afraid to fail - a key, Sullivan says, in any work environment where an executive is looking to empower employees to make decisions.

Sullivan predicts the firm's annual revenues will still grow rapidly in the next few years, to about $150 million. There are other markets he'd like to have more success in too, including Chicago and Asia.

Keys to running a company

Brian Sullivan has made a living out of running companies that match executives with other companies. As such, he's well-equipped to know that a CEO's most important task is to find, and then retain, the best people for the best positions. Here, adapted from an article he wrote for his firm, are some of his tips on retaining talented employees:

• Be the number one cheerleader and supporter of your top executives successes and triumphs. Go to their big sales meetings or pitches.

• Find ways to "abandon hierarchical management" setups and become directly involved with key client relationships.

• Balance key performers' need for independence with the company's need for continuity of thought and behavior. Recognize the difference between employees who disrupt and disagree to promote positive change and those who disrupt negatively for selfish reasons.

• Figure out creative and meaningful ways to compensate your best employees, both financially and in other ways.

Review summary

Executive. Brian Sullivan, chairman and CEO, Christian & Timbers

Business. Executive recruitment and search firm

Key. Any business can succeed and grow by eliminating difficult employees and empowering the top performers to make key decisions.