know your company corporate ladders actually earned a bronze award by the new jersey law journal for your services and we want to congratulate you on that thank you very much yes very impressive and so we want to hear about your services what exactly is corporate ladders what corporate ladders is a consulting training and coaching company working with clients of all sizes today we focus primarily with professional services firms such as accountants attorneys other consultants and helping them to grow their businesses so give me an idea of why your company named corporate leaders really come from is interesting initial foray into business for ourselves was thinking that we would be much more in the lines of a corporate recruiter so the idea was let's see if we could help to climb the corporate ladder and that was our original business plan when we started the corporate ladder and you know through good faith over time things changed for us and business sort of evolved to you know where today instead of doing head on thing which is what would you call it is now much more in the area of helping companies grow their top line revenues open for opportunity when you have a business and when you set out on a path to grow your business very often we don't know exactly which direction things are going to go we have a journal idea but we learn along the way we need various people we discuss different business opportunities and as the market changes as business changes hopefully you're able to adapt to that and change your business as well so for us in starting out initially looking to help companies grow  and place people we started the technology world and many of the technology companies that we worked with were names that you know eight hundred eighty m c i some of the wireless business and some were in the telecommunications sort of more general space when working with those companies and you know we saw such a tremendous amount of growth when we started the business in those areas those companies really needed a lot of help to grow their top line revenues to teach their sales people to help their general managers to add people in doing so we have a lot of opportunity to find individuals that would fit those roles nicely and would marry up you know correctly with the type of position that our clients need it but over time what we found was that more and more the clients didn't just have problems with finding the right people but had more difficulties in trying to get the people that they had to be more productive and to be better at what they did so some of our companies sort of began to evolve toward helping those companies better utilize the people that they had and not just going out to find new ones  and that's sort of how we started that was where the origins of getting the business going but as i mentioned you know going through the twists and turns of how businesses evolve we're working with one of our technology clients who it's sort of an interesting funny story we like to tell that he called us one day and he said you know i need your help and we said ok what do you need he said i'd like you to call my mom said wow that's interesting how can we help you by calling your mom he said well my mom works for a law firm and the law firm really needs some help and i said well that's interesting what's the connection because most of what we've been doing is working with technology companies he said well what the connection is when she asked me if we knew someone who we thought was a very good person to speak with about helping to develop their law business first person we thought it was you you know and maybe you could give her a call and just discuss what their needs were and see how you could help them which we did  it's interesting also that in that conversation when we said you know traditionally we've worked mostly with technology companies telecom companies helping them grow her answer was well that was perfect that's exactly what we want someone who doesn't come from our  field which made us think about that and say yeah that's quite interesting if you bring someone in with fresh eyes different ideas coming from a different perspective sometimes you see things that maybe hadn't seen before and that was sort of the way we started working in the professional services area that was our first project the interesting i think if you like to us you know outside of your world it's interesting to think of an attorney practice actually and how they operate and really what they do you need it services because everybody kind of gets intimidated and think that they've got it so covered when they write and i can explain a little bit about what you were talking about earlier about foundations and about like when you go into attorney's office a law firm or any of the other industries will hear a little bit about those as well what you do when you're helping them kind of big picture like your well professional services businesses i mentioned attorneys accountants would fall into that other consulting companies commercial bankers for example all have very similar type pedigrees most have very good educations of course have had to pass licensing exams bar exam c p a exams many of our consulting clients have multiple engineering degrees forensic accounting degrees and certificates so they're very well educated and know their profession deeply the challenge though is that you could have a really very good educational background and know your field very very well however if you can't find clients or clients don't come to you how do you get the opportunity to leverage that education that experience your professional abilities and actually build your business in a living that's a challenge so very often the challenge is that when we look back and see traditionally what's happened in those professions there hasn't been any training in how to build your business or how to grow a business and many of those firms have grown just because of good networking  having done some good work and have an opportunity for referral one referral leads to another and today if you look at many of the largest firms very often it's a named person it's named after someone and usually the person it's named after is the one who of those firms in professional services are beginning to go through a transitional period and some of the more senior leaders of the firm are beginning to think about retirement where my going to be what's my next step for for the future and the first thing they think about is well if i leave what happens to this business will continue to thrive and in some cases the answer is unfortunately you know without that leadership and without that person has the rainmaker so the first thing we look for is do you have a group of able bodied underlings who are able to come in and help you and very often we find that's not the case so the way we help is we begin to work with those that are not necessarily  or helping these very good very qualified professionals well educated know exactly what to do when they're practicing their skill right to help them to figure out how to find clients that they can help what should they be doing what are the right techniques how do they go about finding a client and very often what we work on is what we call our five and five group in the five and five group is an attorney or an accountant or consultant five years before they'd be considered for partnership in their firm and then five years after they've made partner because in that critical ten year period is when business development is so important for them when they need to learn how to build their business how to build what they call the book a book of business and that book gives them tremendous empowerment because no matter what the clients that they work with always think of them first so for some reason they decide that the grass maybe is greener in another firm they can always take that book with them because they size requirement and we don't have a size restriction either sometimes we work with very small firms who are very progressive and are looking for opportunities to grow their their firm because not everyone starts as a big firm some start very small sir so if we're able to come in and help them very often it's more because as i mentioned earlier we do consulting as well so sometimes when we go into a firm initial visit with them is to conduct an initial business review and during the initial business review we look at that come any sort of a holistic viewpoint so we look at their sales we look at their marketing we look at the way they service their clients and how they service their clients we look at their manpower we look at their financials and we try to determine are they doing the things that they should be doing to grow their business and what are their their real interest and growth we also look at something that we call audacious goals so where would you like be a buzzword for i really do like to be you know with your business ten years from now you know what do you see for yourself as the future so if you were dreaming what would you dream about you know and it's interesting you know we met a technology company years ago and they were very interested in you know what they could what they could do in their business and they named their company jesco and i said to him how did you get that invesco and he said well we went through a b hag's process and we talked about that and i said ok i'm still trying to understand he said would you ask oh my goals were a jet and a software company so that's how i came up with jessica so it's interesting that you know those are the kinds of things that people talk about because very often someone who goes off and says and sets out to build a business has a dream has an interest something that they want to do and that's the type of thing that we like to get involved in early on during that initial business review process and it's interesting to me because like we as a business owner right we kind of get ourselves box into what we do without thinking about having someone come in and lead us you know remind us like you said remind bring out you know the best of all the people in the company and that kind of set that up for sustainability in a way what about your company is a national company you don't service just a particular region of new jersey or thing else correct yes fortunately we've been able to conduct busy not just regionally here in new jersey but we do a lot in new york tri state area we work domestically some of our clients are located in texas and california and we also work internationally as well so we have clients we're we've conducted some of our programs for some of our international consulting companies for example we've delivered programs to south africa the new the u k so yeah we we spend a great deal of time in making sure that whatever program we deliver is right for the market and right for the individual so for example genie if we were going to deliver a program here in the u s then we would use in some cases some colloquialisms that we would be comfortable with using in the u s but knowing full well that that doesn't always translate before we would go to the u or to the e u for example we would switch over quickly and use the queen's english and make sure that everything was was delivered in that way and examples would also match up that way so i think that's important because if you are going to position your business and yourself as that that must be some rewarding to have your son coming in and understanding what you guys do it after all these years being you know they're watching in the heart of how that feels well it's a really good feeling and it's it's  tremendously rewarding for a number of reasons the first reason is that very often when you reach a certain stage of your career you start to think about what is my next step so for me you know what am i thinking about doing you know for retirement when his retirement when is right for retirement for me i love what i do i enjoy working with my clients and i've got a few more years i think to be able to help them but then what happens with all this work with corporate ladders how do i take corporate ladders then and move to the next step for me but continue to be able to help our clients in the things that they've become accustomed to calling us for so you have a couple of strategies one strategy is you could think about merging up with another f m another strategy might be to determine that you want to do an acquisition have someone purchase your your firm and blended into their business but you know while those are interesting to me they're not quite as rewarding to sort of leverage all the work that i've done so you know i have i'm fortunate enough to have a son who's interested in business and very early on when he graduated college i said to him you know i think really think it's important that before you come to work with me and for me you go out on your own and learn from other people learn some different techniques different ideas from them so he did spend a number of years working on wall street on the stock exchange working in other media companies and learning a lot about business not from me and then when the time was right he came to me and so i think i'm ready can i join you and i said sure i'd love to have you join me and you know initially it's all challenging to have your son working for you and learning from you but that was easy you know when we look back over that and he's just finished for your four years with me for years already yeah and you know if we were to sit down we do every once in awhile sit down talk about and i say don't are you learning enough  in my teaching of the things that you need to know and he said you know i've had more than an advanced degree more than an m b a and more than anyone could ever expect because i'm with you all day and i get the benefit of you know your experience for almost forty years and i think advantage of that every minute of the day but yeah the opportunity to learn first and from you and and see you know how you do things and how you think and that's a great thing to be able to pass on to to your son who are reading your material and what are your favorite accomplishments well i like to write because i think what that does for our business is it positions us as a thought leader when we work with a client they see that because they're engaged with us but not everyone is engaged with us unfortunately i like them all being with us but they're not all engaged with us so some of what we do for writing is to sort of put our positions out there to begin to show others who might be casually reading  accounting today or reading the new jersey law journal or consulting magazine we've been published and all of those different ideas different concepts that we have you know one couple of the concepts i think that are universal would  be an article that i wrote several years ago called mind your own business and you know it's sort of striking as a title and i meant it to be provocative and essentially what it talks about in that article is when you are a professional and you know for example for you genie and public relations and what you do or you happen to be someone who's in a an accounting profession or someone who's building a law firm very often what we find is that the person who's running the business is deeply engaged in the business they're doing the work very often and they spend so much of their time doing the work that they're working what we call in the business and they're not spending enough time working on the business and what we mean by that is in my advertising correctly am i doing the right kinds of marketing has the market changed should i be doing some other things am i aware that maybe the technology business has changed and there's a better opportunity if i work in professional services or you aware of those kinds of things so there you are working on the business you're looking at your business from sort of you know higher viewpoint you know call it twenty thousand feet looking hey you know i see things i see things  before so from that i see the opportunity that i had missed or maybe i see the business changing direction but if i spend all of my time working in the business i never get the opportunity to take a look up and see what's happened what's changed and unfortunately people who do that and spend all their time working in the business very often find that the business did change and it's passed them by right and things are gone and you know we've seen many many businesses that just didn't make it and i think you know the good news is for us is that you know once you've passed that first five years in a business that you're sort of like over that an initial scare point that you're going to five is a little scary and if you get past that ok well my chance would begin to improve that i can sustain as well not to say that others you know don't fail later on but that first one to five years is a very high rate of failure so a great accomplishment for us and for others is to be able to get past that five years always keep your eyes open and be looking for different opportunities so that's why i think that you know minding your own business was such a good article and why it's pertinent to just bet any other business well to me it's interesting too because what you say as your services are when you talk about being in the business and  something else that we that we're that we don't know and my answer to them is often well not necessarily be it when we work with professional services firms we find that the way their businesses have  evolved they were fairly stayed business for a long time they weren't a dynamic business for you know for decades i would say we are is coming from the world of technology where i came from the the concepts the changes were happening daily you know today that you don't handle your t v the way you handled your t v even a couple of years ago we're changing mobile phone so quickly everything is happening very very quickly in the  the technology world so when we look at that we see that to keep up with the changes we needed to think about different ways to develop our people you know can we develop our people with a different training program could we given different ideas can we approach clients in a different way we're always looking for different ways coming from the thick knowledge world to be more effective so we had a very broad talk it that we could we could bring forward and when i started to work with accounting firms and law firms and they asked me that question he said well there aren't a lot of new tools out there but there are newer tools do you things that you haven't seen before and the example i could give you genie is this let's say for example someone was going to build a house i have you know so covered a comes up in the he pulls up with a whole big torch us full of tools to build this house so the tools haven't changed but the person using the tools changed and the application for those tools are changed so what we try to do is we try to help an attorney an accountant a consultant or any of the other business leaders that we work with to choose the right tools for the job and be effective with the tools that we've had this such a great analogy because i have every body out there i'm sure can relate to the thought of having someone who's come in and done a fantastic job with the tools and somebody who's come in and not so great job or didn't have the tools such a different leaders well firstly is always an open mind we don't know what tomorrow brings in terms of opportunity so there isn't an opportunity that we won't review if we see that the business is changing opportunities change within the business we undertake them as i mentioned earlier one of the things that we work on mostly is professional services firms but we also work today with some food services clients really and we're hoping today an international food oils business with learning in development for their their firm nationally so if a client comes to us and says that they need help in particular area or they've heard about us will meet with them will discuss their needs and if it's something that we can help them with we'd be happy to engage if it's something that we can't do for them or not you know within our scope of services we're very fortunate to have a very good network of other professionals that we work with other projects and we bring them into the project to help us so we like to always think of ourselves as call us first and if we can help you we will if we can't directly will help you indirectly by putting in touch with the right kinds of person very kinds of people can help you  it's very important then to keep your mind open think about different opportunities for your business and be focused on growth you know always growing your business is growing staying the same means you're you're falling behind can you talk about n event and i say what are you going to do there why i'm going to see if i can scare up some business and i said well ok that sounds interesting but i suspect your point i can do very well why do you say that i said what have you done well in the past they said well no i haven't i said well the approach to  networking needs to be different and approach to networking means that you should go there looking to help others if you go there and meet someone jeannie how are you nice to meet you tell me about your business and first thing i would ask you right now have you tell me about your business then i would ask you to tell me about your ideal client who might be a good point for you what are you looking for in your business and then i'd be thinking about how i might be able to help you and from there i would hope you would ask me reciprocate and maybe there's an opportunity there