I'm Ray Hoffman.
When I heard that a CEO that I wasn't at all
familiar with by the name of Harley Lippman is ranked as
one of the top 50 American CEOs by USA Today, putting
him in the same company as Apple's him Cook.
I had to find out about this
man and his company, Genesis Ten, which
provides technology, staffing and domestic outsourcing solutions.
Cheaper, better, quicker, as Harley Lippmann would add.
I went all the way to Miami Beach
in February to find out about this man
and one of Genesis Ten specialties workforce optimization.
Well, we're able to help you figure
out what's the right workforce for you.
Every organization of size has an It Department.
Do you know if it's the
right workforce to get optimal results?
Do you have enough people?
Do you have the right mix?
Do you have the right skill sets?
Is it the right management?
All these questions often are overlooked
or just not paid attention to.
Getting the right people is really what
matters, and that's what we've said.
And we're on the people side.
The people side of technology
is where Harley Lippman operates.
His 21 year old New York based company, Genesis
Ten, supplies It talent to hundreds of corporate clients.
It could be teams, it could
literally be hundreds of people.
It could be ten or 20, or it could be one or two.
It all depends on what's needed.
And it does so on such a high level that
the consultants and employees who have an average 15 plus
years of recruiting experience show a 96% satisfaction rate with
Harley Lippmann himself routinely ranked among the top 50 American
CEOs in USA Today's annual survey.
And if you talk to him for any
length of time, he'll bring you back to
the idea of technology as a people business.
At the end of the day, when people think of
computers and it, they tend not to think of individuals.
But it's still people that put
the data in and decide everything.
Harley Lippman, founder and CEO of Genesis Ten his
company as a kind of B to B supplier
of tech employees, is hardly a household name.
But as CEO of Genesis Ten, Harley Lippmann
ranks in the top 50 on USA Today's
list of the best large company CEOs.
I'm fortunate in that I'm wise enough to know my
limitations and my weaknesses, and good CEOs know what they
are and hire people to compensate for those weaknesses.
I am, in this sense, a
quintessential CEO, big picture guy vision.
The easy part, if you will, right?
But Lipman has been around long enough to
know all about the hard parts, too.
Like when he was a 19 year old student and suddenly
had to collect debts from a list of the people who
owed money to his father who had just died.
We didn't have any money.
My father was borrowing money to build up business.
When he died, we were plunged into poverty.
We didn't just not have any money, we had
debts as well as not having a dime.
What Harley Lippman learned from that experience
is on the next CEO radio.
There were some people who were decent.
Mostly it was tough going.
So it was all about survival.
Harley Lippman, the highly regarded CEO of the It
staffing and solutions firm Genesis Ten, learned a lot
about survival in the weeks after his father suffered
what would be a fatal heart attack.
His father, who had run a business on handshakes
and promises, gave his wife a list of everyone
who owed him money and how much.
And as the oldest sibling, Harley, studying
political science and international relations in College,
became a 19 year old debt collector.
That's why they make good soldiers at 19 years old.
I just went to do battle to collect money
so we could have food on the table.
And especially with my mother, they owe dad the money.
You got to get the money.
We don't have a dime in the bank.
He has all these debts.
It was tough going at times.
I was very determined.
I would just sit in the lobby and not leave.
And the police called on me twice, but I collected
enough money and made us through for a while.
So it all worked out.
My mother was very happy.
Usa Today ranks Harley Lippman as one of the top 50
large company CEOs, in part because of the culture he's helped
create at the It staffing firm Genesis Ten, which in turn
stems from his varied experiences, like in the 70s, when he
was the first American student to study in Poland, when it
was a Marxist Leninist police state.
He was traveling around Eastern Europe right
after the signing of the Helsinki Accords.
That allowed for exchanges never done
before between east and west.
I saw one was political science.
I just went to the American Embassy
and I said, I'm your guy. I'm here.
What was the lasting lesson?
How precious our freedom is.
I was able to teach some classes in English
because there was hardly any Americans there then.
And I remember having one student come to me
and he was crying in tears and he said,
I can't be in your class anymore.
I said, what's the matter? Why is that?
And he said, Well, I shouldn't be telling you this,
but he had a visit from the secret police and
they put a huge amount of pressure on him.
The lesson being, don't ever allow
a police state to happen here.
Good lesson also on what not
to do in building a company.
So what happened when Harley Lippman, after working
for two firms supplying companies with information technology
employees, decided to start one of his own?
What happened is, like most things happen out of fear.
What do you think?
I think fear is a powerful motivator.
But then in starting his first It staffing firm,
Harley Lippman today CEO of Genesis Ten had some
definite ideas about building a better Mousetrap.
Like, there's more than one way to
measure a client's return on investment.
Everybody thinks of monetary, but there's
cultural ROI and there's relevance.
Roi, I think too often we're going in to sell
something and are we really being relevant in coming up
with a solution that makes sense for them?
And then the cultural ROI is every
company has its own unique culture.
It's one of the most overlooked aspects of businesses.
I also wanted to pick people that I
liked, that I thought had good character.
People who are very honest and have good character are
going to reveal that, and clients are going to be
more likely to buy from people like that.
And also, it will keep my company out of trouble.
In 1998, when he sold his first company
supplying information technology workers to corporate clients, Harley
Lippman got a boatload of money selling the
firm for 15 times earnings.
Only he took his big payoff in stock in
shares of the company that had bought his.
And within a year, that stock had gone from
above twenty five dollars to twenty five cents.
The lesson learned, it's all about you can get knocked down
eight times as long as you get up the 9th.
And he got up and started another firm in the
very same field, persuading ten of his former executives and
managers to quit their new jobs, which is why Harley
Lippman named the new company Genesis Ten.
I told everyone the first year, I'm
not taking any compensation from the company.
Leading by example, people took pay
cuts that averaged 40% to 80%.
But I explained to them, I don't have any money.
I said, we're starting over. And they did do that.
And these were young, family aged people.
Yes, they were in their 30s, some late 20s.
They believed in me and what we
were doing, and that's what it's about.
It's about trust.
Genesis Tens, Harley Lippman.
We have very, very low turnover, by the way.
Very, very low single digits, which is unheard of
my industry is really about 20% to 40%.
Want to know something about the culture
at the It staffing firm Genesis Ten?
Take what CEO Harley Lippman just mentioned and add in
the fact that ten of the key people from his
previous firm took big pay cuts to rejoin them when
he started Genesis Ten, which he named after them.
I think there's a caring,
nurturing atmosphere in the company.
At the end of the day, like I tell
them, it's a human being that shows up behind
the desk, being the CEO with flesh and blood
like you, and they feel it's solid, it's reliable.
There won't be any shenanigans, no shenanigans.
But the CEO doesn't seem to
take himself too seriously either.
I've actually never lowered a Commission plan.
The history of the company never lowered one.
I've only taken and increased it.
Now my toughest skeptics will say, well, Harley, that was because
your Commission plan was so bad to begin with can only
go up so people who are cynical may say that that
is not the subset that Harley Lippman belongs to.
Given that his company Genesis Ten is one
of the nation's largest suppliers of information technology
workers you might want to know what Harley
Lippman looks for when he hires someone.
Well, it's the same thing he was looking for
when he started back in the there's a name
for it the term used today is good energy.
I didn't think of it in terms of that word
energy but it jumps out at you when someone comes
in and they give you that big smile.
How you'll feel is largely how the client
will feel don't ever lie on your application.
One guy was a veteran and amputee, as a
matter of fact and we struggled with it internally.
I said this guy is such a good guy I want
to give him a break such an innocent lie my own
team managed up and said, Harley, we have zero tolerance it's
a pushback from my team on me but I knew they
were right so we're not looking for reasons not to hire
people we're looking for reasons to hire but lying? Yes.
If they're lying to us now, we would worry that they
would lie to us or the client in the future.
During the 809 financial crisis, a lot of big
companies eliminated their It training programs and now they're
paying the price for all that cost cutting there's
a shortage now of It professionals.
They may want to hire a junior Java
developer with one year or two years or
just training they can't find those people.
And so two years ago the It staffing firm Genesis
Ten started its own intensive training program Dev tenants called
and only 5% of the candidates who apply get in
but it's expanding the pool of It professionals.
It's one of the reasons why Genesis Ten's,
Harley Lippman is such a highly regarded CEO.
Usa today ranked you as the 44th best CEO.
Just three behind Jeff Bezos and
four ahead head of Tim Cook.
How does that make you feel?
Well, I declined last year I was number 26.
