At the same time, several events in Hyde's life pushed her in the direction of becoming a portable executive. Her mother, the last remaining member of her family, died, and Hyde herself became ill and bedridden for six months. She kept herself going by envisioning what she wanted to do with her life, and eventually how she could start her own business.
Realizing that she had enough money to survive for two years if she lived very simply, Hyde decided to leave Previews and start thinking about starting her own company. That summer, she met up with someone she'd met before, Janet Jones Parker, who had been a manager at TWA responsible for implementing change and increasing productivity and efficiency for all of their flight attendants, and the two decided to become partners. Jones Parker had a friend with an M.B.A. from Harvard who served as their business advisor. He advised that the two should try to address the needs that recent legislation on hiring women had created for corporations. "What we didn't know at the time," says Hyde, "is that what he was talking about was a female based executive search firm." Starting with $6,000, Hyde and Jones Parker were lucky enough to find inexpensive office space in New York's Plaza Hotel, which as Hyde points out, "was a good way to start, because people don't forget you." Hyde did her own cash flow projections for the business and found at the end of six months that they were only $100 off her original projections. Soon, their business had gained national prominence, and with three consultants and support staff members they moved into the Galleria on East Fifty Seventh Street. As they grew more prosperous, Hyde found herself spending most of her time managing her managers and realized that she'd gotten away from the research work she liked most.
After the first year in business, Hyde realized that if they wanted to play in the upper leagues they'd have to shift from being a contingency operation to being a retainer search firm. Hyde's reasoning was that, as a contingency operation, they only made money when they made a placement, whereas as a retainer search firm, they'd work with senior level executives, and, as a result of the different fee structure, gain the time to do national searches. Soon, Anne Hyde and her partner had carved out an enviable position for themselves as niche players in a market where the demand for their services was tremendous.
Then in 1980, another company offered to acquire them, and Hyde and Jones Parker went along. Soon, however, the two decided it was a disastrous move and decided to buy the company back. They assumed a great deal of debt, and everything they owned was put up to collateralize the loan. Then Jones Parker suddenly became ill with hepatitis, and Anne Hyde was left with sole responsibility for the business. Though terrified, Hyde determined to stick it out. She eventually took on a potential partner, but he didn't work out and Hyde again took sole command of the company. When the chairman of MSL International asked Hyde to join them, she was ready to go back to the organization:
By this time, I was burnt out... totally and completely, I was a moron, a zombie. I was emotionally, physically, and in every other way burnt out. I thought, "How wonderful for somebody to look after me and all to do is work and draw my pay." So I did a very foolish thing, in a way, but in a way it was a very good thing. I joined them. I closed my company down, and I will never ever forget standing in that office waiting to hand the key to the next tenant. For a long time, I couldn't even drive past my old office, because I felt I had failed myself.
For a year and a half, Anne Hyde thrived at MSL, but then the corporate life again became problematic:
I found the bureaucracy more than I could stand, and I drove them crazy. I had become very self sufficient. I was a one man band, and I went out after business and didn't rely on other people to bail me out. I didn't dele gate. That drove the office manager crazy, and he decided that I wasn't a team player. That's true. I didn't like waiting for permission. I didn't like asking if I should.... I saw opportunity, and I said, "For God's sake, let's go after it," but by the time I would get permission, it was gone. So I got chastised a number of times, and in the end I decided it wasn't worth it.
Once again, Hyde went out on her own. She analyzed her cash position and figured out the number of searches she would need to do to cover her projected expenses. This time, Hyde was far more pragmatic about how she went about planning things, because she knew she didn't want the pressure of having to meet a huge quota. "It was very scary," says Hyde, "but my need to control, to develop my own life, was more important to me than the fear that maybe I might fail again."
Today, Anne Hyde runs her new and expanding company, the Hyde Group, from a home based office, and her group of re searchers is retained as and when needed. Her own experience with bureaucracy has resulted in the attitude she now takes with them:
The Hyde Group's business has diversified its services. In what Hyde terms "the flip side of recruiting," she has found another niche market-assisting employees in moving their careers through the maze of reorganizations and restructurings, and redeploying themselves in the workforce. Today, she combines both executive search and leadership coaching. Anne Hyde has managed to operate as a portable executive by adjusting the employment vehicles she chose to use to deliver her services to the market. The career she has built for herself has been modular in nature and as flexible as both she and the market conditions affecting her business needed it to be.
