Step outside your 'comfort zone'

Terry Healy-Lemke has been a successful recruiter with Celerity Staffing Solutions of Middleton for 14 years.

She's exceptionally good at what she does, as she loves helping other people accomplish their goals.

As a former recruiter myself, I have tremendous respect for the creativity, energy and diligence that it takes to succeed in this exceedingly competitive environment.

So I particularly enjoyed a conversation I had with Healy-Lemke a few weeks ago, when she called me to discuss a volunteer activity in which we're both engaged.

She told me that by end of June 2007 she had billed more business than in the whole of 2006. "Wow!" was the first word out of my mouth … it was also the second word!

Then the sales coach in me took over and I asked her "How did you do that?"

She told me that in conversations last year she learned from many of her clients that they were using large national recruiting firms, primarily from out of state, to recruit their upper management and executive positions.

Being the great sales person that she is, Healy-Lemke asked a lot of questions about those decisions. She asked about her client's expectations of those recruiters, and the client's experiences with those recruiters.

Healy-Lemke decided she should develop a strategy to enter the executive recruitment market.

Through her work and volunteering experiences, Healy-Lemke has developed an enviable list of contacts in managerial and executive positions, so she let them know that she was now committing 30 percent of her time to handling appointments at those levels.

Because her contacts already knew and trusted her, they quickly began to share their job orders with her. Some of them introduced her to job seekers.

Has Healy-Lemke's new strategy been successful? Absolutely. Thirty percent of her activities have translated into eighty percent of her revenues, and even more exciting, into her best sales year ever.

Accomplished, successful and respected, Healy-Lemke could have continued on the same path that she had been on for the past 14 years.

Instead, she set herself a new challenge. And she worked hard to learn how to succeed in managerial and executive recruitment, as it requires a different approach to her traditional business.

As a result, Healy-Lemke has developed some new skills and Celerity Staffing Solutions has opened up a new stream of revenue.

Healy-Lemke's genuine interest in her clients compelled her to ask questions that enabled her to learn about their work with national recruiters. Because she listened to and explored their comments in detail, she learned of a valuable opportunity.

She then looked inside herself for the courage to step outside of her comfort zone and went after the business. And she won.

And Dane County and Wisconsin won too. Money that would have been spent with out-of-state companies stayed right here in our community … and so did the talented staff that Healy-Lemke introduced to her local clients.

Jacqui Sakowski is president of Sakowski Consulting, a Middleton-based sales coaching, training and consulting company.