He had to be successful, yeah. And so he had some decent clients. And I ended up recruiting people and placing people, and I really liked it. So I got into recruitment, kind of by accident, and then I went from his small sole proprietorship into what was at the time, the country’s largest public relations Corporate Communications executive search run called the Goldman group. So again, despite barging into the Goldman group without an appointment, trying to get an interview with the CEO. And despite asking if Mr Goldman was there and being told Elaine Goldman is out and you don’t have an appointment, no, and offending people in, you know, in places that I shouldn’t have. I was hired, ultimately there, and spent five years learning how to walk down the long haul in a corporation. I’m talking at the time, Chase, Manhattan, city, core.
You know, these were all the initial conditions of what we now know of. I was in Dow Chemical like helping source candidates for crisis work, if this is right after Bo Paul, you know, and doing a lot of work for the agencies, the PR agencies, the crisis firms that supported these corporations. It was, it was, I basically got an MBA working in this firm that was just doing all this high profile work. The second week of work, my boss said to me, come on, we’re going shopping. I’m like, for what she said, Well, I gotta get you some suits and you need glasses. And I was like, Elaine, my eyes are like, the only perfect thing on my body. She said, You look like you’re 25 years old. I need you to look like you’re 40. It’s not going to happen. But so, you know, I just got dressed up and just learned how to do it.
John Corcoran 13:34
Yeah. And so what led you then to go west? Did you? Did you because you end up starting your company actually, in, I believe, in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, which, you know, that’s no easy thing to do when you have your network in New York to then go and start a new company on the other side of the country.
Barry Shulman 13:54
Well, that’s the beauty of being 29 years old and naive. So, you know, I’d spend about five years in New York City and the first couple of years in New York. I thought that everyone in the world should have to live in New York City, because how else are you going to learn how to get along with people and understand compromise and such? But by the fifth year, beginning of the fifth year, I realized for me, it was a pretty unhealthy place to live, and I needed to get out. And I asked the CEO if she was interested in starting what would be Goldman West, and she’s standing there looking at a successful but yet young, 29 year old, and kind of took a pass.
And so it was probably the best thing that ever happened for me, because with less than 10 grand, I moved out here, rented a room. I had a couple of clients that I had already started working with from New York who were here, and they gave me an assignment here or there, and they introduced me and. And everyone said, Don’t be in San Francisco. Go to Silicon Valley. Go to Palo Alto, at the time, that was before San Jose, what it is, what it is now. And I found the tallest building in Palo Alto, which was at Calper University and started on the top floor, knocking on doors, looking for an office.
And by the time I got down to the fifth floor, there was a law firm that had an office and a very kind office manager, Betty Schneider, I’ll never forget her, basically bought me in. Said, here’s an office. Well, you can use our conference room. I’ll answer the phones for you, and it’ll cost you, like, $500 a month.
John Corcoran 15:45
That was February 1990 and then you just go from there. What was your plan for getting clients?
Barry Shulman 15:50
Well, I did work seven days a week for almost a year, just networking and cold calling and Well, unbeknownst to me, there was no one in the valley doing corporate communications and public relations executive search. It was mind blowing to me. They were all coming to New York, which is, of course, how I got my West Coast clients. You know, I remember taking some clients from here on subways for the first time in New York. You know they, you know, they just, but they were coming to us for the search services. So I got some really big clients early on. And then once you start to get big clients like Apple or Oracle, Levi Strauss General Motors started to work with me, just because of the network and people. It just snowballed.
John Corcoran 16:47
And, um, it probably helped that there wasn’t much competition at that was not, yeah, I mean, it was nascent.
Barry Shulman 16:53
I mean, I didn’t know what a database was when I moved to California, quite honestly, um, and the software that I bought to manage my contacts was garbage, yeah, but everything just kind of fell into place.
John Corcoran 17:08
Did there a sense, or was there any sort of feeling at this period of time that you are on the precipice of becoming a major behemoth, you know, Silicon Valley, over the course of the next 2030 years, becomes a huge force worldwide.
Barry Shulman 17:28
You know, yes, but not in a believable way. I mean, to me, it seemed like it was, it was just being held up by rubber bands. I mean, it just didn’t seem like it had legs, because it was so amorphous. And people were talking about doing things that were just so ridiculous, yet they were scaling, you know, all of a sudden. Yeah, I remember dealing with a candidate, um, who had just left a big high tech PR firm, and they were working out of their house, and I was trying to recruit them into a company. And I’m talking to this candidate, and I just said to this candidate, you know, why are you even getting a job.
Why don’t you start your own agency? And they were like, well, I don’t know. I don’t know. Well, can I just tell you that? You know, seven years later, that person, maybe eight, started a PR agency. I helped her hire at least 15 or 20 people more, probably, I don’t know. And she sold that agency for many, many millions of dollars. And that is not an isolated story, yeah. So it was, it was, it was and it was hard. You could not know that it was going to be like it, like it became. And it did become a house of cards, right?
John Corcoran 19:07
The.com bust was, you know, what I kind of thought would happen, and was your business just going gangbusters before the.com bust? What was that totally, what was that like for you?
Barry Shulman 19:12
It was a horror show. I made the classic mistake of becoming tech oriented. Um, you know, I had signed a $22,000 a month lease on an office. That was no problem. I mean, I was, I was clearly able to pay that, you know, and have several recruiters working for me. And it was great. And then all of a sudden, in a matter of 10 days, I lost every client, every dollar of income, and I was sitting on a million dollar lease, wow, yeah, wow.
John Corcoran 19:47
So it was pretty, pretty brutal. How long did it take after that to recover?
Barry Shulman 19:54
Uh, it took me about five years to get back up to a. Be a place of profitability and comfort and ease, you know, to build the client base back up again. I mean, the people remain, but everyone was skittish, right? I mean, you can’t live through that and not be but, you know, talk about the gold and the molasses. I mean, you learn a lot. I mean, I always say that Silicon Valley years were like dog years. You’ve been in Silicon Valley for 10 years. You look like you’re 100.
John Corcoran 20:41
And so after that happened, did you diversify then? Because tech Oh yeah, have all your eggs and.
Barry Shulman 20:49
oh yes, yes, yeah. You know, that’s when the management consulting really kicked in, because it became clear to me that most of the people who were in positions of power in terms of managing people. Had no idea how to do that now. Had no idea how to structure teams. Everyone was kind of just guessing and feeling along. And some organizations had best practices. Some organizations got it done. Did it better than others, but there were always people who had their pie in the sky eye, who were willing to forgo certain processes and and and systems that you just can’t and when, especially you’re hiring people and organizing teams and putting structure in place, right?
John Corcoran 21:40
And imagine that’s attention a lot of times the clients you’re working with, you know, because a lot of times what got them to become the success that they are, whether it’s, you know, Google or Facebook or Apple and any of these companies, a lot of times they they were scrappy kids in a garage, literally or figuratively, doing things differently. And then eventually they grow up. And so that is a challenge. Sometimes to try and get them to formalize their operations is a challenge to get them to be more grown up, you know, in terms of their hiring.
Barry Shulman 22:14
What I found was quite simply saying to anybody in the C suite or any executive look, if you do it this way, you can either this is going to happen or this is going to happen, but if you try doing it this way, then these are the things that can happen. And that was it, just almost like a cafeteria style myth, like just telling people, you know, this is what I’ve seen happen, and this is how it’s going to go. Now, if you try putting these systems and programs in place, then you’ll see for yourself. And that was kind of it. It was, yeah, everybody’s light goes, the light bulb goes off. It’s like, wow, I don’t want that to happen, or I need this to happen.
John Corcoran 23:00
So I know now, in terms of the work that you do now, there’s a number of different things you do, and you also have talked about, kind of what keeps a business owner up at night, some of the top talent issues that they’re concerned about, everything from recruiting to interviewing, onboarding, you know, things like that. Let’s talk about that, especially, you know now, as we record this in mid 2024 what are some of the different areas in which companies are most concerned with right now, right?
Barry Shulman 23:35
So, you know, you make a good point about 2024. The technology now is so amazing. I mean, it’s 2024 like we’re in the precipice of AI taking over all over all. So in the past few years, the technology around assessing people and workplaces has been a total game changer for hundreds of 1000s of companies globally, and you know, every imaginable industry and language. So several years ago, I was recruited by what are the countries, if not the world’s largest and most widely used workplace assessment tool. It’s called Predictive index, and so I hadn’t heard of it before. Most people have not, even though they have a huge install base, like I said, globally, and the science is such that we can, in a matter of minutes, measure a person’s natural drives as well as determine what the behavioral and cognitive drives are required for them.
Any kind of role, uniquely, not off the shelf. Like all CEOs, all CFOs have to have a pattern that looks like this. And all operations people have, they’re all different. And once I you know, once I came to understand through practical application that the perfect resume can be a nightmare if their drives, their behavioral and cognitive drives, are not in alignment with the rest of the teams or the goals for the role. Once I learned how true that was, and that there was actually a way to assess these things. Everything just kind of fell into place for me in terms of being able to avoid mistakes. You know, when I’m training people, I say to them all the time, if you’re sitting in the parking lot and you look over to the left of the strip mall and you see somebody opening the door to walk into Starbucks, what do you think they’re doing?
I mean, John, what’s your what’s your gut? Tell you they’re going to get a latte, right? They’re going in to get a beverage of some sort. But in reality, that person is lost and they’re going in for directions, or they’re going in to use the bathroom, or they’re going in to use the internet, or they’re going in to meet a blind date or to get a newspaper or get a sandwich. You see companies, managers, owners, companies are constantly guessing. If I tell you how many times I have people say to me, Oh, I read people really well. Oh, I can tell them somebody’s BS ing me, they’re going to be a fit. I just know it, or my gut is telling me, you know, statistically, we get a break somewhere between 60 and 40% of the time. And I know that’s true, because, look, I had to do replacements when I spend hours with a candidate. Used to spend hours with a candidate before I would even introduce them to the client, but you see, we’re all guessing, and now we don’t have to guess anymore.
John Corcoran 27:04
And I’ve done that predictive index, and it’s remarkable. I recommend everyone to try it out. It’s almost uncanny, I think because, you know, it doesn’t take that long to fill out. You answer some questions and pick some words, if I remember correctly, and then it spits out a response that’s uncanny, like it’s really amazing.
Barry Shulman 27:32
What I’m saying, it’s 2024 the science is unbelievable, and it actually gets better every year. So interesting. You know, you do not, I tell, I tell companies all the time, just you don’t have to be guessing anymore.
John Corcoran 27:48
Yeah, and so when you discovered this, what was that reaction like for you? You must have been like, oh my god, I can’t believe what I found here, right?
Barry Shulman 27:55
Well, it was a game changer, not only for me. It made me love my work again. Because I don’t know what the average lifespan of a retained executive recruiter is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not 30 years. And I was 30 years old at the time, I was really ready to kind of up the game a bit and do more interesting consulting. And so now, you know, I’ve got clients who do a little bit of everything, and so it’s so much more interesting now. And I, you know, I was at the EOS retreat this past weekend, and I met people who do all kinds of different things, and the problems are the same. It’s the problem with, you know, the COO or the CFO or the operations person or the salesperson, and these two don’t get along, and I don’t understand why we haven’t moved the bar in X amount of time. What would have I mean, it’s the same thing. Everybody’s saying the same thing, but now we’re literally able to figure out what’s happening.
John Corcoran 28:58
And so it, I imagine it’s kind of like becoming mandatory for you, like we will use this tool, or else I’m not helping you.
Barry Shulman 29:06
Well, it’s like everything else, right? Exactly. So I’m not interested in doing searches for any companies that are not using data and analytics, but it’s in my life now, it’s not fair to the candidate to bring them into a dysfunctional organization, if it is organization where people are not known to each other, and like anything else, you know, there are there, there are people out there who and there are lots of assessment tools, believe me, who have different types of backgrounds. My background just happens to have been growing up in New York and in Silicon Valley, and I saw certain things happen, so that informs how I do what I do. But there are other people that just do sales or just do finance.
John Corcoran 29:58
This is a tool that’s not correct for me. If I’m wrong, it’s not just for recruiting new hires to an organization Correct.
Barry Shulman 30:06
Oh yeah. This tool is how to manage them, coach them, retain them, how you inspire them to grow and and, you know, you kind of set it at the top of the call, how it helps you optimize your talent.
John Corcoran 30:22
Yeah, yeah, really cool. What do you look forward to in the future now? Barry, what? What gets you out of bed? What? What are you most excited for right now?
Barry Shulman 30:34
Well, I have to say, when clients say to me, and I hear it, if not weekly, certainly monthly and usually more than once. This has really been a game changer for us, the work that you’re doing with us, the aha moments that we’re having when you’re talking about why things are happening, why people are behaving the way they are, why this group is doing so well, and another isn’t that’s very motivating to me. I mean, I love that. I mean, you know, I’ve always liked telling people what to do, and I’m always very nice about it, but at the end of the day, to have people listen and come back and say, you know, this is going to double my income or or more is, is, um, it’s pretty rewarding,
John Corcoran 31:24
yeah, and to see teams form and gel and then create amazing things that no one could predict before got to be amazing as well. Right?
Barry Shulman 31:35
I’ve gotten to the point right now where I also know that not all business is good business, like everyone can’t be a client, and it does take a certain degree of enlightenment, if you will, to say, Oh, I might not know. I might not have all the answers, or I might need to dismantle everything that I’ve built in the past year and redo it right. Like, not everybody’s willing to do that, yeah, you have to be willing to accept that.
John Corcoran 32:05
Well, Barry, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you and learn about your business?
Barry Shulman 32:12
Yeah, so www.ShulmanAssoc.com or [email protected] S, H, U, L, M, A, N, A, S, S, O, c.com. I would love to talk about anybody’s problems and how we might go about tackling them.
John Corcoran 32:35
Well, Barry, it was great hanging out with you at the recent EO San Francisco retreat. Thank you. We appreciate you being a strategic alliance partner for the chapter, and thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom and your ideas here today.
Barry Shulman 32:48
Thank you for having me, John,
Outro 32:53
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