Jobs Well Done: Recruiting expert Sue Burnett built her legacy one career at a time
Some industries lend themselves more easily to creating legacies than others. Handlers of commodities and makers of widgets are appreciated in the moment but are not always given credit for the lasting impact of their work compared to those who work with and directly improve the lives of people. For those individuals, the impact of a job well done can stretch for generations.
Sue Burnett is one such individual. The El Dorado native and founder of Burnett Specialists entered two business halls of fame this year alone, but her legacy had been sealed long before then. Over more than 50 years, she built her Houston-based recruitment firm from five employees into the second-largest employee-owned staffing and recruiting agency in the country, helping untold thousands of clients find work, provide for their families and build careers.
For Burnett, who earlier this year was enshrined in both the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame and the American Staffing Association Leadership Hall of Fame, there is a lot to look back on with pride and more than a few grains of vindication. As she turns 80 this year, what she has built is enough to keep her doing what she loves doing.
“There were a lot of times that I would think, ‘Oh my gosh, I just don’t know if I can do this,’” she said, “but I will tell you honestly, even after all these years, I still like to get up and go to work. I enjoy what I do. I think when you love what you do, it’s not a job. I don’t work for money anymore. I don’t need the money. I work because I want to, and when you work because you want to and not because you have to, it’s a whole different world.”
Burnett’s need to work came immediately after graduating in 1968 from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she majored in journalism, co-edited the college annual and was an officer at her sorority, Chi Omega. Self-sufficiency was a condition understood between herself and her chemical engineer father and her stay-at-home mother.
“I think one of the problems is parents today are making it too easy for their kids, and their kids don’t know how to succeed on their own without someone helping them,” Burnett said. “My parents said to me, ‘We’ve paid for you to go to college. Now you’re on your own. I was an only child, and my daddy told me later it was very hard for them to say that. Even when he knew I was struggling, he did not give me money. That was the way their generation treated my generation, which was a gift.”
Burnett headed to Little Rock to put her journalism degree to use, which landed her a spot at KATV as a dictaphone typist for $2 an hour. She was soon promoted to assistant promotions manager, which gained her another 25 cents per hour. Like a lot of young women of her generation, there were other unwritten job expectations to go with her official duties. One day, those came to a head.
“I had several bosses who were promotion directors while I was there, and after I’d been there about a year, one of them, the last one, was sitting down with his feet on his desk and said, ‘Will you get me coffee?’” Burnett said, a sandy grit working into her butter-smooth tone in the retelling. “I was busy typing the daily log — on a manual typewriter, by the way, with five copies of carbon paper — so I said, ‘I’m really busy. I’ve got to get this log out. Can you get your coffee yourself?’
“The next morning, I came in, and there was a girl on the couch, and she said she was there for an interview for the assistant promotion manager’s job. They told me, ‘Well, you know, you didn’t get coffee yesterday,’ and they fired me. Best thing that could have happened to me.”
Burnett quickly landed a job with Associated Milk Producers, which provided a substantial bump in pay. A year later, after a random call from a former sorority sister, she made a decision that would put her on a path to success she could hardly have imagined.
“She said, ‘My sister-in-law is graduating from Texas Tech, and she needs a roommate in Houston. I wondered if you would like to live with her,’” Burnett said. “I didn’t know her sister-in-law, but I said sure. Two weeks later, I packed up my car with my clothes. I had $500, and I moved to Houston, moving in with a girl I’d never met.”
Hunting for a job, Burnett visited three personnel agencies and, instead of being placed externally, was hired by one of the firms as a personnel consultant. It was a crash-course education in more ways than one.
“I didn’t get a base [salary]. It was straight commission,” she said. “The very first month, I made $600, so I thought, ‘Wow, this is fantastic. I’m going to make a lot of money.’ Then the second month, I didn’t make anything. I was going to quit, but the manager said, ‘No, no, you can’t quit. You’re going to be great.’
“Six months after I was there, she had a baby, and she quit to stay home, and I became manager at the age of 24, running an agency and managing a lot of employees who were much older than I was and more experienced. That was challenging, but I did very well.”
So well, in fact, that just three years later, on her honeymoon, her husband, Rusty, saw career writing on the wall that had eluded her.
“He said, ‘I think you ought to start your own company.’ I said ‘I really don’t have any interest in doing that,’” she said. “I was making great money, and we didn’t have any money. I’d married a guy who had two kids and child support, but then, a few months later, he said, ‘No, I really think you should do this.’”
So it happened that, in mid-1974, she took the biggest gamble of her life, quitting her job to launch Burnett Personnel Services on a $10,000 loan. She remembered putting up her car for collateral, which was ironic considering “in those days, women could not borrow money,” she said. “My husband had to borrow the money because women were not allowed to get bank loans.”
That aside, Burnett remembers her age — she was 27 at the time — and gender were not particular impediments to her owning her own firm.
“Actually, I think being a woman helped me. I was charming and attractive, and quite frankly, male clients were happy to have me come out and visit,” she said. “I was also very persistent. I would go out and see the clients, which was something very unique. People were calling companies on the phone but not going to see them. I was doing a very unique thing, and I think that’s what made me successful.”
Burnett’s initial splash in the industry could not hold back everything that could affect the market, something driven home in a big way during the early 1980s, when a recession gutted the oil business that made up a huge slice of the economy in Houston and Texas as a whole. The situation handed Burnett her first serious challenge as an entrepreneur.
“We were doing really well, and we started adding people and adding offices. Rusty even came into the business with me,” she said. “Then, in 1982, there was a severe recession in Houston, and the big oil companies started laying off thousands of people. In 1986, it was even more serious. We had the worst recessions I’ve ever been through, with unemployment in Houston going to 12.5 percent. Nobody’s hiring. Nobody’s paying fees. Being in the employment business was very tough.”
The company survived through diversification; Burnett formed business units within the company that specialized in professions such as accounting, sales, real estate and engineering. She also said working alongside her husband was a competitive advantage, given their complementary skill sets.
“I was very blessed because my husband was very good at accounting and administrative tasks,” she said. “I was really more the person that hired the staff and managed them and went out and did sales, managed our advertising.”
That said, Burnett does not profess any magical formula for her success in good times or lean, saying what yielded the most results were the tried-and-true elements of hard work, a taste for hustle and sheer refusal to fail.
“I am still very persistent,” she said. “I’m very persistent in sales. I’ll call people over and over, you know? Just because they told me no once doesn’t mean that I’m not going to call them again. I’m also good at sales, and believe me, recruiting is sales. We are selling an applicant to a company, and we are selling that company to the applicant.
“I think people are kind of born with a type of personality for sales. When I was in college and we rushed people for Chi Omega, I was always the person they brought in to close the deal. You know, if she’s trying to decide between us and Tri Delta, I was the one to bring in and say, ‘Here’s why you should pledge with us.’ I think that’s something that you either have or you don’t. I think you’re kind of born with it.”
Burnett broke other ground on her way to the top. Her firm was one of the first in the 1990s to digitize its operations to streamline the matching process between applicants and job openings while still maintaining the human touch.
“The idea is not just to get somebody a job but to match them with a job that they stick with and build a career with,” she said. “A lot of that has to do with personality and motivation and their skill set and everything. It’s more than just, ‘Oh, I think I want to work in law,’ or ‘I think I want to work in manufacturing.’ We take stock of those skill sets and say, ‘OK, where do you really fit in some of these jobs?’ I think that’s always been one of our real strengths, matching an applicant’s wants and skills with what the company was wanting.”
Then, about 15 years ago, she took the extraordinary step of converting the award-winning company, now known as Burnett Specialists, to an employee stock ownership plan.
“We had had an offer for our company in 2009, and I turned it down because I was not ready to retire,” she said. “I had a friend call me and said, ‘You know, you ought to look at an ESOP.’ In our industry, that was unheard of. In fact, I will say that I am one of the few staffing companies that started doing ESOPs, and not that many do it now, to be honest.
“I remember when I called the staff together. I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got some exciting news. You’re all going to be owners of our company.’ They were just stunned. They didn’t know what that even meant. I will tell you, it took a full two years before anybody on my staff really understood what we were doing. Now most of my staff are fully vested owners in the company and have six figures worth of stock, so they all very much understand it.”
As years turned into decades, the woman who once could not get a loan in her own name has garnered her just due of accolades and recognition, more than any other staffing or placement service in Texas. In 2000, she partnered with the Houston Business Journal to found the Best Places to Work awards program, and her firm is a five-time winner of the Better Business Bureau’s Pinnacle Award of Excellence. Burnett Specialists has also been listed by Forbes as one of the top professional recruitment firms and top temporary staffing agencies in the U.S., as well as one of the best staffing firms to work with in North America by Staffing Industry Analysts.
For all of that, Burnett said the recognition by her alma mater’s school of business stands as a pinnacle achievement, capping an amazing career.
“I will say, being honored by the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame was something I never expected,” she said. “It’s really one of the highlights of my life.”
SUE BURNETT ON REALITIES OF BUSINESS OWNERSHIP
“One thing people have wrong is they think by having their own company, they’re going to have all of this flexibility when, in reality, you should be working harder than everyone else. I was always the last to leave. Still to this day, I’ll be walking out into the garage, and I’m the last one here. You can’t approach this thing as if it’s going to be really easy. It’s very hard, and a lot of people aren’t willing to give that much to a job. When I first started in the business years ago, you worked till 8 at night, and you didn’t think anything about it. I’m just being very honest when I say the work ethic today is just not that great.”
SUE BURNETT ON WORKING WITH ONE’S SPOUSE
“First of all, choosing the right spouse is the No. 1 thing. I say that very honestly. I chose a husband who always supported me, believed in me, pushed me. He pushed me to start this business when I did not think I should do it. We’ve been married 52 years, and he still is that exact person who is so proud of me and so supportive.”
SUE BURNETT ON PERSEVERENCE
“You’ve got to approach owning a company and running it as you just simply can’t fail. I don’t care if that’s working till 10 o’clock at night — you’ve got to make it work. Business is like a roller coaster, and you have to have the perseverance and the positive attitude to get through some things. I’ve lost some clients who went bankrupt, and they owed me money, and they were a big part of my business. That’s a real blow. I just said, OK, well, there’s other people out there. We’ll just have to find some more clients. To be honest, failure was never an option. It just never occurred to me to fail.”
SUE BURNETT ON THE VALUE OF AGE
“One thing age does for you is the top people in companies are older, and they identify with you. I can go in and call on presidents of companies, and I have no problem going in and talking to someone, whereas people in their 20s can be very intimidated by their position. I think that’s been a big advantage for me. With age comes wisdom, of course; I learned a lot of stuff along the way the hard way, and I’m not going to make those mistakes again. In fact, after all these years, I’ve had so many different problems and experiences that nothing bothers me as much anymore. ‘We had a bad month? Well, we’ll get through that. We’ll have a better month next month.’ That’s really my attitude about things.”
SUE BURNETT ON FULFILLMENT
“What’s really rewarding to me is helping my staff become owners of the company. That was a huge deal. Seeing these people start out with me at 20 or 21 and work here their entire career is a huge compliment. I would say the bulk of my staff have been with me over 10 years and many over 20, and I have one who has been here for 45 years, started when she was 20. … When I go places, people tell me, ‘You got me my first job 20 years ago,’ or ‘I worked for you as a temporary when I was in college,’ or ‘You helped my company grow.’ It’s so rewarding to meet those people and know you have helped companies grow and helped people’s careers.”
Photo provided by Sue Burnett
