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FOR KIP HOLLISTER, RELATIONSHIP COMES FIRST, SALE SECOND November 27, 2007

“What goes around comes around,” or so it goes at full-service staffing firm Hollister, where founder and CEO Kip Hollister has aligned business strategy with humanitarian values. For clients and job candidates, care for the greater good translates into honesty, authenticity and strategic relationships. For Hollister herself, it means just the kind of company she set out to create. “I had the desire to build a better brand,” she says of starting out on her own 19 years ago. “I planned to build an organization that would compete with the best in our industry, and I was driven by my own value system.” That value system is creating the relationship first and the sale second. “I believe in the philosophy, ‘if you build it, they will come.’ When I opened, it was never about the money,” Hollister says. “It was not about the transaction but rather doing the right thing for the client and the candidate, and then the sales would follow.” Today, relationship-building has made Hollister a $20 million company with 75 employees in two offices, one in Boston and the other in Burlington. Being an entrepreneur, however, was not Hollister’s lifelong dream. A psychology-social studies major, she had no idea what she’d do right out of college. But the woman who interviewed her at a Boston staffing firm did. She hired Hollister as a staffing consultant, recognizing her talents and strengths. She remains a mentor to this day. “What I found early in life was that I loved the human interaction of business, and that’s what this career, for me, is all about,” Hollister says. Hollister founded her company in 1988 after working for three different staffing companies. By then, she knew the business in and out and excelled at it, and there was that better brand desire. She set up an office in Boston, hired her first employees and began forming relationships. “I had my business plan on a paper napkin,” Hollister says. “I acquired space and hired my first few people. I was 100 percent on it and in it, a hands-on player-coach. We built the relationships and got companies to align with my strategy – to be about the relationship rather than the transaction.” Beginning as a secretarial placement company, Hollister evolved into other services at clients’ requests: creative, human resources, IT, accounting and finance, and administrative. The company, to succeed, is not just about one person leading the charge and, to that end, Hollister has ensured the infusion of her relationship strategy throughout the company. More recently, her role has become more focused on developing leaders within the firm as the strategic implementer who encourages others to rise in the company, enabling them to do whatever necessary to exceed client and candidate expectations. “My people are driven by three core values, which they decided on as a team – integrity, passion and open communication,” she says. Hollister feels just as obligated to leverage the company’s success into impacting the community’s greater good. Personally, she lives her philosophy by serving on the boards of YMCA Training Inc., North Cambridge Catholic High School and Everybody Wins Metro Boston. Within the company, giving back has evolved into two goals, aligning philanthropic efforts with work force development and engaging employees to volunteer out in the community. “I realized that to grow a company, you need to have the values transfer to those whom you hire, and to do this well you need to have a strategy and leaders who will continuously live by and drive the Hollister legacy,” Hollister says. Hollister’s commitment to internalizing values shows up in the company’s internal process, starting with hiring. The result, she says, is attracting a different caliber of employee who is all about making a difference and building relationships first, which will propel long-term value and profitability. The other piece to Hollister’s philanthropic bent is employees’ community involvement. A formal philanthropy committee drives employee engagement, which in turn underscores the culture and the internal sense of responsibility. Here again, Hollister has taken the unusual route in supporting a nonprofit. It was one of her employees, she says, who brought the nonprofit Everybody Wins to their attention. The one-on-one reading program had lost its donated office space, and so the firm invited the group into its Boston office. Today, 22 of Hollister employees are involved in the Power Lunch reading sessions in local elementary schools with the purpose of increasing children’s prospects for success in school. Still others have chosen their own philanthropic outreach. The intense focus on building relationship with clients and candidates has seen Hollister through two recessions. The key to surviving both downturns – the first was soon after she opened her doors and the second was the dot-com bubble bursting in 2001 – has been an overemphasis on company values, Hollister says. “The recessions have made me a stronger leader and I’m thankful for the many lessons learned,” she says. “I had to get back to the basics, get back in it and on it. I had to drive the vision for the organization and build the brand. That took a lot of over communicating to my internal staff and external community.” All of the good feelings that Hollister generates, however, do not mean that she isn’t tough when she needs to be. Ask her about advice to others, and she includes, “Don’t let the naysayers get in your way. “I, in my company, call it ‘swamp,’ and it’s my job as CEO to make sure that anyone who’s in the swamp is managed out of it and into a more proactive realm. I am uncompromising with that commitment to myself and the company.” Hollister is also uncompromising about her expectations for the company going forward. She did, after all, found Hollister to compete with the best, if not be the best, in the industry. “What’s exciting is that our clients are ever changing,” Hollister says “We take this very seriously and it is our priority to continuously evolve alongside them while providing them with the heart and soul of their business – their people.”

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