Career near death? Accept change, conquer your fears

Last month I introduced my old boss, Cindy Cottman, an executive recruiter at Korn/Ferry International who overcame a "career near-death experience" in the last recession. To keep her job, she had to build a new client base from scratch in a weak economy. But how did she do it?

The firm's other search consultants had laid claim to all the best client companies and industry niches in the financial services practice. So Cindy's first challenge was to find a niche everyone else was ignoring, where she could find clients who needed help hiring senior executives.

In late 2001 and early 2002, the top business news stories were the fall of Enron, the dot-com bubble crash, and the investigation of conflicts of interest at Wall Street investment banks. Cindy saw a theme: failures of risk management and regulation. She got a hunch that banks' risk management departments and the regulatory agencies — long seen as unglamorous backwaters of the financial services world — were poised to grow.

She made what she now calls "a smart lucky survival move" and redefined her specialty as helping banks and regulators hire risk managers and other top compliance executives.

Cindy's next challenge was selling. "For years I had been a farmer, not a hunter. In London, I built a very successful executive search practice serving three global banks that generated most of my business." Now in New York, she had to find clients the hard way, making cold calls.

First thing each morning, she read the Wall Street Journal for stories featuring financial risk managers and regulators. Whenever she found one, she picked up the phone, introduced herself, and pitched her services.

It wasn't easy. Looking back, Cindy said, "I have to tell you, there is a terror point in the beginning. You can't sleep, you have diarrhea, and your hands are sweating. You have to grin and bear it, and it gets a little easier every day."

It worked, because Cindy was persistent and she had guessed right: Financial risk management and regulation was a new growth sector. It started with the regulatory agencies, which were under pressure to expand quickly. Officials there were accustomed to getting calls from recruiters inviting them to interview for private-sector jobs but not from recruiters offering to help them with their own hiring. Cindy gained as clients the Securities & Exchange Commission, the U.S. Treasury Department and the National Association of Securities Dealers. "Government work was not the most lucrative business, but it ... opened the door to more clients."

Cindy's lessons: "If the market turns hard, you can't just stay where you are. You need to accept that the party is over, it's not coming back, and you need to change. You need to reinvent yourself - don't change industries, but change your thinking. Find the flip side of what you were doing before. If people are dying, think funeral parlors. Look at what's happened in housing and mortgages. Mortgage finance was huge and it has crashed. What do all those employees do for work now? Well, there are two new growth areas, where their skills apply: foreclosures and mortgage workouts."

Cindy did it. First she found a countercyclical business niche that was growing in a down economy. Then by forcing herself to make cold calls, she went from sweaty palms to self-confidence. Last fall, she left Korn/Ferry on her own terms to start her own executive search firm, and with the national focus on reforming our financial system, she'll likely be very busy.