VF&Co
VF&CO 1995
After working for one of the world's largest human capital management firms, Valerie Frederickson founds Valerie Frederickson & Company after selling her first startup venture, Career Campaigns, Inc. Valerie's decision to blaze her own trail came as a reaction to the practices of her former employer, which, as a cost-saving measure, had asked her to "graduate" outplacement candidates while they still needed career transition support. As a young, licensed career counselor, Valerie felt that it was unethical to stop providing services to individuals who still needed them, and thought there must be a way for outplacement firms to make money while balancing two competing goals: helping corporate clients reduce the costs and risks associated with having to terminate employees, and doing whatever it takes to help the terminated employees land new jobs.
The fledgling consulting firm quickly takes on marquee clients including EFI (Electronics For Imaging), Genentech, Exponent, and Balazs Analytical Labs (now Aire Liquide). Valerie builds a team of the best career counselors and HR consultants available, most of who stay with her for a decade or more.
VF&CO 1996
Because Valerie is targeting her business development efforts toward HR executives, who are responsible for selecting and partnering with outplacement firms, she gets to know dozens of them, and then hundreds, and then thousands. Executive search firms start calling her, asking for access to these "up and coming" HR professionals. Valerie eventually gets tired of doing all the legwork for these search firms, and realizes that she could do a better job herself. Hmmm.
VF&CO 1997
At the request of VF&Co's clients, the firm develops an executive coaching practice and a team assessment practice. Dr. Carolyn Carder, a former DEC executive, helps to develop the executive coaching processes that VF&Co still uses today.
Valerie meets Cole Hamlin, MS, CMF, former President of SHRM, and hires him and other high profile consultants to perform HR, OD, and career pathing projects for major clients including Baan, Raychem, ATP, and Adecco.
VF&CO 1998
One of Valerie's earliest "full service" outplacement candidates, whom Valerie had helped to forge a new career path via networking opportunities and resume-boosting contract assignments, ultimately lands a job as HR Manager for a global, publicly held consulting firm. This leads to the company hiring VF&Co to conduct their search for a new CEO, even though VF&Co is not yet a player in the executive search field. Valerie puts together a recruiting team and nails the assignment, which leads to five more successfully completed searches for the company at the VP and Director levels.
Dr. Carder becomes VPHR for Philips Electronics and hires VF&Co to assist with employee communications. VF&Co ends up handling more than 35 projects for Philips, including placing a CFO and VPs of Engineering, Product Management, and Human Resources.
VF&CO 1999
During the dotcom boom, VF&Co becomes a rapid-growth HR services and executive search firm, placing dozens upon dozens of candidates in roles ranging from CEOs and Board Members to Vice Presidents and Directors of Engineering, Marketing, Operations, and Sales. Valerie meets James Fred Holland, a well respected HR executive just finishing an 11-year stint in Asia, and hires him as a consultant.
VF&Co develops specialty practices in such areas as Compensation, Benefits, HR Compliance, Staffing, Global Mobility, and Leadership Development, and assists more than 75 different corporations with a wide variety of HR needs.
VF&CO 2001
Valerie places James Holland at Philips as an international HR consultant and "lets" them convert him to full-time employment. At Philips, James takes an ever-expanding role and ends up running Shared Services for Philips' Silicon Valley Center while supporting the executive team of Philips Components. VF&Co, meanwhile, takes on new clients including Compaq, RMS, Guidant, HG Makelin, and many others.
Valerie joins Vistage, the world's largest professional development organization for CEOs, and becomes an active member. Over the next nine years she will attend more than 100 full-day executive learning sessions, nine retreats, two Milken Global Institute gatherings, and numerous other events. She eventually realizes that, regardless of the size of their organization, almost all the major issues that bedevil CEOs can be broken down into one of four categories: funding problems, people problems, execution problems, or authority problems.
In the month of April alone, VF&Co sees more than a dozen search assignments get cancelled. As boom turns to bust, VF&Co begins taking on huge outplacement projects like global plant closings. Large clients stop paying bills and start filing for Chapter 11 protection. By the end of September, Valerie reduces her core staff to a skeleton crew of fabulous multi-taskers, refocuses the strategic plan, and keeps the company moving forward during what she thinks (mistakenly) will be the worst economic period her company will ever face.
VF&CO 2002
Thanks to VF&Co's recession-proof offering of HR consulting, executive search, executive coaching, and outplacement, the company turns a healthy profit in spite of the economy's continuing descent into hell. James's daughter, Melanie, serves as a flower girl in Valerie's wedding. VF&Co takes on new clients who are smaller and yet more global, such as MontaVista Software, U4ea, and Cambridge Antibody, and increases its ability to do outplacement and HR consulting across the globe. VF&Co takes on quite a bit of work in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
VF&CO 2003
VF&Co comes out of the recession positioned as an HR-only executive search and consulting firm. High-level HR executives from around the world trek to our offices for courtesy interviews, and companies from around the world call us to conduct HR searches. Our HR consulting practice continues, plus outplacement and executive coaching. We start graphing the correlation between the economy and our various consulting practices.
James is offered a new HR position at Philips headquarters in the Netherlands. He turns it down to join VF&Co full-time as HR Consulting Practice Leader, and soon becomes Valerie's business partner. As he grows the consulting and contracting practices, VF&Co opens up another headquarters office in Plano, Texas, to serve numerous tech clients.
VF&CO 2005
The Boom Years are back, and VF&Co takes on multiple HR executive searches and HR consulting projects for clients including Flextronics, Virage Logic, Caliper LifeSciences, Avenex, Atmel, Novellus, AMD. Genentech, one of our first consulting clients back in 1995, hires us to hunt for HR executives, as does Applied Biosystems and other biotech firms. The former head of DEC's and Compaq's world-famous research labs, Dr. Bob Iannucci, hires us again to help him find HR executives for Nokia in Finland. Our very first outplacement client, Jan Smith from EFI, is now the SVPHR at Eclipsys and hires us again, this time for HR search.
VF&CO 2008
The recession hits, and in February our search practice starts a long, unhealthy slide, dropping 81% over the next 12 months. Our HR consulting practice, similarly, drops 50%. Meanwhile, our outplacement practice sees a five-fold increase. As the ranks of the unemployed grows and the job market gets ever more competitive, we start a successful companywide initiative to become the only outplacement firm in the country whose consultants (in 40 U.S. cities) have all attained ICCI certification.
VF&CO 2009
We focus on meeting our clients' needs and exceeding their expectations as the economy continues to implode. We successfully compete against major search firms to win the HR search business for leading global clients including Genencor. We are hired by multiple large clients to perform outplacement services after they review their utilization rates with their current providers and compare them to our 95+% utilization rate. One of the world's largest law firms selects us for outplacement, as do the top GPS provider and a leading semiconductor company.
Valerie and her husband finally manage to have children and, to make up for lost time, are rewarded with fraternal twins. James adds the title of Godfather to his resume.
VF&CO 2010
VF&Co uses the downturn to reinvent itself again. It moves its Silicon Valley HQ into a green building owned by Valerie (and B of A) in downtown Menlo Park, and converts to a global/mobile work environment for all employees, providing a cloud-computing infrastructure and flexible loft-style space at headquarters while encouraging as much offsite work as possible. As the economy bumps and lurches its way toward recovery, the business once again becomes a healthy mix of HR search, HR consulting, executive coaching, and outplacement.
VF&CO 2011
The HR search practice explodes in a good way, with a huge pent-up demand from CEO's wanting to upgrade their HR talent now that they've had to time to focus on something other than write-offs and restructurings. The average amount of searches VF&Co conducts scales up to 1999 levels. VF&Co actively counsels their clients to follow Blue Ocean tactics and hire great candidates before competitors can.