For the Cause

The reasons people decide to go to business school are vast and varied, but most, at the root, are about the art and science of business itself. Some people hope to make themselves more marketable to secure better positions in existing businesses, while others dream of starting businesses of their own. When Janet Samuelson decided she needed an MBA, however, it was not because she hoped for any of that. Rather, it was because of a cause.

Growing up in a service-oriented family, causes were always at the forefront of her mind, with a sense of responsibility and stewardship forming the lens with which she viewed the world and her place in it. As a teenager, she volunteered with the local hospital, and after high school, she went on to receive an undergraduate  degree in rehabilitative services. Given her love of causes and giving back, she felt drawn to the nonprofit world and began walking down that career path, excelling at her first nonprofit sector jobs until she was promoted several times over and quickly rose into a management position.

In spite of her early professional successes, however, Janet turned a critical eye on herself and her ambitions. Without a business education, she could never be the kind of well-rounded executive her organizations—and her causes—needed. “I realized, once I got out and started working in direct services and moving up into management, that the service side of education wasn’t going to be enough for me,” she remembers today. “I realized I really needed to understand business, because in many ways, nonprofits are very complicated businesses—more complex than you would think.” With that, she returned to school to complete an MBA, brought her new talents to bear at a small organization in Florida, and became a CEO at the age of 28. Since then, she’s used her unique blend of business acumen and hands-on service experience to redirect and expand worthwhile programs, doing well while doing good.

Today, Janet is the President and CEO of ServiceSource, a massive non-profit comprised of five separate organizations and serving about 14,000 people each year. With an annual budget of $130 million, their programs operate in nine states and in Washington, D.C. The nature of these programs runs the gamut, but ServiceSource’s main focus is job placement and the employment of people with disabilities. To this end, the company not only finds jobs by connecting employers with employees, but also creates jobs, winning federal contracts and staffing projects. “Because unemployment for people with disabilities is so high, and because many people with disabilities—particularly intellectual and mental health disabilities—often have very structural barriers to employment, we also play a big role in what we call affirmative employment,” Janet explains. “This means we contract, primarily with the federal government and also with commercial businesses, and affirmatively hire people with disabilities.”

Of ServiceSource’s 3,000 employees, nearly 1,600 are individuals with disabilities. Every year the group receives about $100 million in federal contracts to operate and secure mailrooms, provide military dining and food services, manage data, and provide total facility management. Additionally, the group works with injured veterans, runs a long-term rehabilitation program, and provides housing support.

ServiceSource has come a long way since Janet was recruited as President twenty years ago. At that time, it was known as Fairfax Opportunities Unlimited and had not yet acquired the four other organizations under the ServiceSource umbrella today. Its services reached about 700 people, and its annual budget was between $7 and 8 million. Guiding the helm of the company during a period of unprecedented evolution, Janet’s leadership has augmented the company’s natural organic growth through her uncanny knack for expansion, acquisition, and financial and structural analysis. Four additional, similarly-focused organizations have been acquired by ServiceSource since 2000, and the super-structure Janet has created allows the groups to take a more regional approach to their service provision. “In every case, the choice to bring in an organization meant something good added to the mix of our services,” Janet affirms. “So even though the outside organization was going through some sort of struggle that made it interested in becoming part of our bigger pool, the acquisitions were indubitably win/win situations for all the people we serve.”

Janet has become an expert at identifying this sort of mutually beneficial acquisition, and while she has no formal acquisition strategy for the future, she is open to expanding ServiceSource further. The advantages of such consolidation are obvious, as bringing together organizations with similar missions and allowing them to exchange information and resources cuts costs precipitously. “The nonprofit world is very complex,” she affirms. “The regulation, the requirements, and the licensure are just some of the considerations we have to navigate. Our acquisitions have really allowed us to add a lot of depth to our corporate bench without costing a lot. We have an exceptionally low overhead rate for a non-profit organization, and yet we have some of the best corporate support.” Since joining ServiceSource, the individual organizations have been allowed to maintain their management teams and local service design and delivery, while consolidating their service provisions under the ServiceSource umbrella has created economies of scale.

Through the company’s unprecedented growth, Janet has been careful that the group’s large size doesn’t impede the kind of individualized attention each unique case and client needs. In this context, her service background helps her make informed decisions that a run-of-the-mill executive without service training could not. “The model of employment support that we use is a very individualized,” she says. “You can have a model that’s scalable, but services have to be provided one-on-one to a person with very unique needs.” As the CEO of a non-profit, Janet has to walk a line between entrepreneurship and service, and her background has enabled her to do so with a grace few have cultivated.

Janet grew up in Connecticut, where both of her parents encouraged her to engage with and give back to her community. Her mother stayed home while Janet and her two younger sisters were small children and then began a teaching career. Her father earned a law degree at Yale and became an attorney, going on to serve as elected Judge of Probate in their town for 25 years. Though the two met in the Navy, their backgrounds were hardly similar. Her mother’s father was a Congressman, while, in her father’s immigrant family, almost no one went to college. And although her father ultimately did very well for himself, Janet didn’t have a childhood of affluence. Her father stayed in the Navy for ten years, and until his graduation from Yale Law afterward, Janet and her family lived with her paternal grandfather.

In high school, Janet began to explore community service more deeply. She joined the Key Club, an extracurricular group dedicated to service. She volunteered at the local hospital, where she worked in the emergency room and the physical therapy department. During the summers, she volunteered at a camp for people with disabilities, and her experiences there were truly transformative. Although many of the volunteers preferred working with small children, Janet was more interested in engaging the adults. At 16, she was assigned to work one-on-one with a non-verbal middle-aged man. Despite his severe disabilities, Janet worked daily to provide him with a meaningful camp experience by facilitating his participation in the camp activities. “He was the sibling of somebody I was in high school with, so I think that experience was instrumental in my recognition that disability is something that crosses economic strata, race, gender, and any other classification. It gave me a different perspective.”

Although she spent the majority of her childhood in Connecticut, Janet often visited her maternal grandparents in West Virginia. Her grandfather had served on the Board of Trustees at Alderson Broaddus, a small Baptist College near their home. He passed away just as Janet began looking into schools, and it was one of only two, along with University of Connecticut, that she applied to. At the time, Janet planned to study physical therapy, and although she was admitted to U Conn’s 4-year program while Alderson Broadus had no such program, her preference for the small school in West Virginia won out. The decision turned out to be a fateful one, as it was there that she decided to pursue a degree in rehabilitative services.

After college, Janet returned to Connecticut to accept a job as a workplace supervisor at the Adult Rehabilitation Center (ARC) in Hartford. She enjoyed the work, but had trained to be a vocational evaluator, analyzing vocational tests to determine what work people were suited for and setting occupational goals. Her employer had no such program, so after several years there, she was eager to find a position that would better utilize her training and applied to work with a nonprofit in Danbury.

Although she again had an overall positive experience, the job didn’t turn out to be the perfect fit she’d hoped it would be. “I didn’t like vocational evaluation as much as I thought I would,” she recalls. “I really liked the production side of things—the hands-on experiences of connecting the people with the work and the satisfaction that those connections and successes garnered.” Recognizing this inclination, she applied for a promotion and became the Production Manager running the workshop. Not long after that, she was put in charge of both the workshop and operational oversight, and the many roles she took on during this transitional phase in her career have proved to be a great professional asset today. “I started in direct services and really worked my way up, and that’s something that’s been very helpful,” she recounts. “It played a big role in allowing me to understand how businesses tick on all levels.” Because Janet has worked in many of the positions she oversees now, she’s better suited than many executives to manage her team with the thoughtfulness that comes from true empathy and personal experience.

As Janet’s responsibilities broadened, she knew it was time to return to school and pursue an MBA. “I moved into overseeing the work center operations and having more operational responsibilities, and I knew that, if I was going to be good at it, I’d need more than my human services training,” she asserts. “I was responsible for business development, which entailed a lot of things that hadn’t been part of my undergraduate work.” Janet began pursuing her degree at the University of Connecticut but completed it at Florida Tech in 1985. Of the big move from her home state, she recalls, “I went to visit my best friend in Florida in April, and when I came back, and we had a foot of snow. I called her up and said, ‘This is no way to live! I’m moving.’” Although it was somewhat of an impulse decision, the move served her well, both professionally and personally.

With her impressive range of career experience and ongoing education, Janet quickly found a position as the Assistant Executive Director for a small organization. Like ServiceSource, it focused on creating employment opportunities for people with disabilities. She was hired on as the number two under a man, Walter Payne, who was approaching retirement, and she took over as CEO a little over a year later. “Walt became a mentor and a key professional influence,” she remarks. “He remained my friend and mentor until his passing. He introduced me into the professional circles and made a lot of connections for me, and then he continued to offer me advice—sometimes whether I wanted it or not!”

As the years passed Janet married, had two children, and continued to grow her organization. Then, as her children prepared to enter school, she was recruited for a job in Fairfax, Virginia. She had served on the Board of the National Association of Rehabilitation Facilities, in the vocational division, with the outgoing CEO. Impressed by her abilities, he recruited Janet to be interviewed for his position. Northern Virginia, with its well-regarded school systems, was an appealing choice, so she accepted the position and took over what was then Fairfax Opportunities Unlimited, and what would become ServiceSource.

The following years were shaped by growth and expansion. Recently, Janet has been pursuing a bold new path for the business, and once again broadening her professional abilities in the process. Bruce Wardinski, the CEO of Playa Resorts and Hotels and another mentor, first suggested private fundraising as a potentially huge untapped resource. “He was the Chair of our Operating Board and said we should be looking at fundraising because we have this compelling mission, are incredibly well-managed, and have very low overhead costs, so a lot of money goes to programs,” she says. “We’re the kind of organization people want to give money to.”

Janet was eager to pursue the idea and learned everything she needed to know to make it a reality, and she and Bruce set up a supporting charitable foundation. He agreed to Chair the Foundation Board, and they began recruiting people. “Bruce taught us that you don’t fundraise because you have to—that’s the worst reason,” she explains. “You fundraise because it can really enhance the quality of your programs, your outreach, and your support people.” With this in mind, the Foundation has been operating for six years now, and has raised about $4 million in operating money since its inception. Currently, they are kicking off a capital campaign with a goal of $15 million.

By every metric, ServiceSource has blossomed under Janet’s leadership. She’s received both an annual and a five-year Brava award from SmartCEO, as well as leadership awards from Source America among many others. With a collaborative leadership style, she hires around her team’s strengths and weaknesses, seeking out people who can fill the gaps to make the organization the best it can be. Most important of all in her recipe of success, however, is commitment. “If you don’t have the heart for the mission, it doesn’t really matter how good you are technically,” she avows. “Commitment and heart are the underpinnings of everything we do.”

To college graduates entering the workforce today, Janet advises living an ethical life, but warns that the ability to do so often begins with financial responsibility. “When you’re young, you should pay yourself first,” she says. “Early on, you have to set yourself up for a position of financial security so that you never feel that your back is against the wall or that you have to make a decision that compromises your personal ethical standards. Financial pressure is the number one reason that people start down what can be a very slippery slope, so make those decisions early on to set yourself on strong financial footing.”

Finding that balance can bring success at no cost to one’s soul, which Janet holds to be critical. Throughout her career, she has sought out work that aligns with her quest for social justice while attaining success in the business world at the same time, using both goals to augment, refine, and maximize one another. In being willing to become anything her organization needed her to be, Janet’s professional career has been self actualizing in every sense of the word, allowing her to create the kind of world worth living in while building the kind of life she hoped to live.

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