Happy Birthday Lisk Associates

This year marks Lisk Associates’ 35th year in business.

How it started: In 1968, Randy started his career as an electrical engineer at IBM. In 1991, IBM spun off it’s printer division into a company called Lexmark. With the re-structuring, Randy was offered a buyout, but, along with the buyout came an opportunity which was role of a trainer for all new Lexmark employees on a program called “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. If he wanted this role, he needed to set up his own company and become a contractor for Lexmark. And so, Lisk Associates was born with 1 client and 1 program….it was a great client and a great program.

The 2nd generation: I was working as a National Sales Representative for Lexmark. I started at Lexmark in 1999. Lexmark was an up and coming fortune 500 company at the time. There was pressure to make sales. In 2006, I made my biggest sale ever when one of our clients bundled a Vivitar camera with a Lexmark photo printer to sell at Big Lots for the holiday season. At the time, it was the single biggest sale our division had ever made. The deal closed 2 days before the end of the quarter. I was relieved more than anything else. The next morning, the Sales Director walked in my office and said, “Hey Lisk, anything you can pull in today for the end of the quarter?” I said, “Besides the $4 million dollar order I closed yesterday? No.” Later that weekend, I was watching Sportscenter and remember Bill Parcells, who was the head of the Dallas Cowboys at the time say, “Yeah, we just won and I can’t even enjoy it. I’m already worried about not losing the next game.” I felt like he was talking directly to me. I decided I was going to hire myself at Lisk Associates.

Here’s how “Poppa Lisk” remembers it…

“In the fall of 2006 Karen and I were vacationing on Marco Island, Florida. I was enjoying a little time away from the business I had started 15 years earlier in 1991 when I left the IBM division that became Lexmark. IBM had been good to me for the 20+ years I was there. I appreciated all the protection offered by “Big Blue.” And yet, once I left, or “went overboard” as we said back then, I found that I really enjoyed working on my own as a “trusted advisor” to a number of clients.  When I first left IBM I wondered if I could make a go of it. After 15 years I thought maybe it would work out.  In fact, lying there on the beach, now in my early 60’s, I was thinking about how to move toward retirement. And then, my cell phone rang.

Karen only heard my side of the conversation, which went something like, “Hi, what’s up. . . Really? . . . Think that is smart? . . . Uh huh. . . What are you going to do?  . . . Really, okay . . . Talk soon, see ya, bye.” Karen said something like, “Who was that? One of your clients?”

“No. It was Ryan.”

“Oh, is everything all right?”

“Well, I’m not sure. He just decided to quit Lexmark.”

“Wow, what is he going to do?”

“He just hired himself at Lisk Associates.”

And so, my thoughts shifted from gliding in for a retirement landing, to making a couple more circles with Lisk Associates, version 2.0. When Ryan first hired himself I thought, “How is this ever going to work?” However, looking back two decades later, those years I got to work with Ryan were gifts from the universe. I’m so glad they happened.”  

So, how is it going: We don’t offer the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People anymore. Our business is good, and as a lifelong entrepreneur, I want it to be doing bigger and better things.

The similarity to day one is that our business strives to make people, teams, and organizations more valuable. I believe what we offer are not products & services, but competitive advantages to our clients such as: Hiring For Fit, RealTime Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, Team-Building, Executive Coaching, and Professional Development.

Over the past 35 years, we have over 350 different organizations as clients, benchmarked over 500 different jobs, run over 35,000 personality assessments, and have helped 1000’s of people, teams, and organizations be more valuable.

Thank you to all of our friends and clients for these first 35 years.