Tom Gimble, The CEO and founder of LaSalle Network
When I first arrived at 200 North LaSalle Street on a weekday, I had to check in twice. Once on the first floor, and second 20 or so floors up, with a sliding door and two receptionists at the front desk. “You’re here for an interview?” asked one of the receptionists. She was mistaken. “It’s not that kind of interview,” I said, trying to clarify things.
But her mistake was justified: LaSalle Network is in the business of job interviews.
Or, more specifically, the business of staffing, recruiting, and human resources consulting. And business has never been better.
The CEO and founder of LaSalle Network, Tom Gimbel conducts a tour of the office. A distant relation to the owners of the Gimbel Brothers department store (made famous by the classic 1947 Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street) Tom Gimbel looks as if he could play power forward or offensive line. And yet in the office, Gimbel is all Peyton Manning, cracking jokes and directing the action, sometimes just by his presence alone.
This February, LaSalle Network — the business that was named one of the 2014 “Best Companies to Work For” in Chicago by Crain’s Chicago Business and Inc.’s Fastest Growing Private Companies in America list eight years running — expanded. That meant adding 25% more space, adding more leg room, both figuratively and literally, for their growing agency of 140 people.
This fall they plan to add even more space — straight up, actually. Knock, knock, knocking on the floor above.
For an industry notorious for high turn over, LaSalle Network has very little. This year, they were named one of the nation’s six most psychologically healthy companies by the American Psychological Association. Competitors are dumbfounded. Clients want to know their secret.
“And I always say: that’s because we acknowledge that we’re crazy,” jokes Gimbel. “Most people try to act normal. We’re like, ‘we’re not!’”
The secret, however, might be the big man himself. A client recently asked him could he retain the same successful culture that was established by a core group of 10 people now that they’ve expanded to more than 50. Gimbel’s candid answer: “You’re fighting to keep a culture that’s long since gone.”
He might as well have said wax on, wax off, young grasshopper.
LaSalle Network has also needed to evolve: in the past two years they’ve gone from employing 65 people to 140; and doubling in revenue no less than every four years. The office guru needed to heed his own advice.
The answer to Gimbel’s success might lie in the past, on a quote etched in stone. At the University of Colorado, the Norlin Library was named in honor of George Norlin, a former president of the University. And above that library’s pillared entrance, is a quote attributed to Norlin himself: “Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.”
As a young man attending that school to the present, the quote resonates with Gimbel.
For Gimbel, his managerial interpretation of that quote means listening and understanding office culture. Being present—physically and mentally—as much as possible. It also means instituting sunrise yoga instead of just office happy hours, so that each generation of employees has something they can relate to, can feel inspired by. In that way, Gimbel hopes to avoid a collective state of ennui.
This refreshing of the company’s culture button—keeping things fresh, buoyant, and modern—is not without its own accolades. Gimbel has been honored on Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40 and was inducted in the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame. He’s also been featured on The Today Show, Fox and Friends, and Fox Business; and in 2008 and 2009, he was nominated for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.
And yet being an entrepreneur wasn’t always what he aspired to be.
Says Gimbel, “I was never one of those guys that said, ‘I need to work for myself.’ I was never that guy.”
Three jobs ago, Gimbel was convinced he was going to be a stock broker or a “portfolio guy.” He interned with Merrill Lynch. When he graduated from Colorado in 1994, it was into the choppy, layoff strewn waters of the early nineties recession. He quickly realized he couldn’t find a job.
He eventually—and somewhat ironically—found employment with Lakeshore, a staffing agency in its earliest stages of infancy. Gimbel was one of a handful of employees who watched the company go from around $1 million to $20 million in less than two years. But he also watched something else happen: the culture changed.
As Gimbel tells it: “it felt increasingly like you were working for people versus [being] a part of something.”
When he founded LaSalle Network in August of 1998, he was adamant about not letting that feeling hijack his own success. He learned from others what not to do. He learned to follow his own instincts.
“I have the unique insight of interviewing people the majority of my time when I’m in Chicago,” says Gimbel. “I hear why people leave: from people whose salaries are $500,000 to $30,000. I take that and try not to make the same mistakes their bosses are making.”
Gimbel acknowledges that his employees, each have a line in the sand. A line that they will cross for the right incentive: a raise, a promotion, a unique perk. Each one will take a job elsewhere, will cross that line, but for one simple fact: Gimbel is in the business of job interviews, and he knows his people.
“I want to push that line in the sand as far out as I can.”
Throughout Chicagoland, LaSalle Network places professionals in the areas of accounting, finance, office services, human resources, technology, and call center departments. In the next four years, they plan on exceeding revenue of $100 million just in Chicago alone (the company has three other offices around the country). Gimbel surely has mastered a formula for success.