In the days before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, industrial laundries could be hellish places. Prison-hardened individuals were often hired to run the large commercial machines in hot and wet environments, and in a plant in Toledo, Ohio, at 22 years old, John Supplee was tasked with overseeing them. “It was a real eye-opener for a young middle-class kid,” he remembers today. “I broke up fights, administered first aid to people as they died, and lived through an explosion. I learned a lot through making every conceivable mistake an inexperienced supervisor can make.”
There, amidst the grit and grime, John had an epiphany that would change the course of the rest of his life. “I realized that everything gets done through people,” he says. “Everything from industrial laundry, to financial services, to restaurants, to IT consulting—it all gets done through people. It was this ‘aha’ moment when the light bulb in my head went on.” Working his way through college at the time, he promptly switched his major from ministry to human resources, the line of work to which he has since dedicated fifty years of his life.
It was several years later, while working on his master’s thesis, when John came across a quote that distilled his ideas perfectly. “All the activities of any enterprise are initiated and determined by the persons who make up that institution,” he says, quoting behavioral scientist Rensis Likert. “Of all the tasks of management, managing the human component is the central and most important task, because all else depends on how well it is done.” Now the founder and Managing Director of The Supplee Group, LLC, a human resource consulting firm, John has mastered the art of managing the human component, so that all else undertaken by his clients can be done with excellence.
John founded The Supplee Group in 1999 when his employing company was sold and he confronted the question, “What do I do now?” While on vacation the following week, he pulled out his laptop and wrote a few case studies around a methodology he had been working on for several years, ART—Attracting and Retaining Talent. “Operating on the idea that attracting and retaining talent is an ART, it took me ten days to form the company,” he reflects. “I drew on my experience at some of the nation’s top consulting firms to draft my business plan, and I’ve never looked back.”
Employing a model used at other premier consulting firms, The Supplee Group carries virtually no overhead because its team is 1099 subcontractors that get paid when they’re billable. This organizational design allows them to provide expert, senior-level expertise to solve the problems of their clients, which typically don’t require that expertise every working hour of every working day. “Our clients, big and small, tell me that the model is perfect—a cost-effective solution that provides them access to top talent they wouldn’t otherwise have,” John says. “I’ve crafted a company whose business is driven by HR expertise to help our clients find the right people with the right skills at the right time, where most other HR consulting organizations are compliance or personnel policy police. My goal is for our people to use their specialized knowledge to drive the business of our clients and populate their business plans.”
The Supplee Group has grown into the practice segments of training and development, compensation and benefits, executive search, HR strategy, recruiting, and outsourced HR services. Its team serves client companies as small as fifteen employees, and as large as 65,000 employees. And though their work spans the globe, the company’s location in the DC area has attracted clients primarily in the technology, professional services, defense, intelligence, and international economic development consulting sectors. “At their core, the people issues of a federal contractor servicing the CIA are no different from the people issues of an IT contractor implementing a system for Marriott,” John points out. “Some of the metrics and rules are different, but the people issues are the same. And across all these different clients, truly excellent HR is more of an ART than a science. There’s an art to designing compensation structures, just like there’s an art to senior level recruitment, and The Supplee Group is a team of artists.”
John has come a long way from the rust belt town of Toledo, where his father was a foreman and his mother was a secretary. His older sister was born before World War II, and by the time John was born thirteen years later, their father had undergone the trauma of combat in high-impact battles like Guadalcanal. His younger sister was born two years later. “My parents weren’t very involved when it came to raising us,” John remembers. “They were afflicted by alcoholism, which made things hard. But looking back on it now, I think they did the best they could.”
He came of age in a simpler time, when children played outside until the street lights came on or spent Saturdays at the local movie theater, where admission was 20 cents and a popcorn cost 15 cents. He remembers playing backyard football and baseball, drinking straight from the hose, and watching TV back when the town had only one channel. His parents both worked hard, instilling in him the value of a strong work ethic and a resourceful nature. “I got the sense that I needed to be tough in life,” he recounts. “I learned to be self-reliant.”
In high school, John wasn’t big enough to make the football team or tall enough to make the basketball team, so he tried out for wrestling. When he got cut from the team, however, he didn’t take no for an answer, and instead continued coming to practice until he had earned himself a place on the roster. By the end of the season, he had wrestled his way onto the varsity team as a starter—a testament not only to his skill, but also to his spirit. “I attended an event with my former coach about nine years ago, and even though I hadn’t seen him in over forty years, he remembered what I had done in continuing to come to practice,” John recounts. “The tortures and rigors of those practices were akin to a Marine Corps boot camp, and he saw that I had a lot of heart to put myself through that. It taught me that having heart makes a difference, and that you don’t just give up or quit when something stands in your way. Surrender isn’t an option.”
John enjoyed the academic aspects of school and graduated an average student, but by the end of his first semester at Adrian College, he made the dean’s list. “My father had studied chemical engineering, and it was important to him that I got an education,” he recounts. “And once I got away from home and leaned into my self-reliance a bit more, I really excelled academically.”
When he was nineteen, John transferred from Adrian to Eastern Michigan University, where his high school sweetheart went to school. The two married and quickly had a child, so John got a job in a factory in Toledo, bending tailpipe and driving forklifts. He made the forty-mile commute to school for several years, managing to make the Dean’s List while balancing work and family. He ultimately transferred to the University of Toledo to cut down on travel time, and was encouraged to finish his education by his fellow factory workers. “They’d see me studying on my lunch breaks,” John recalls. “They told me to keep studying so I wasn’t stuck there in the factory for the rest of my life.”
After he almost lost a hand in a bending press, John went to an employment agency in search of more challenging work. Thanks to his experience working summers in a purchasing department, he was hired at the commercial laundry. “We did work uniforms, coveralls, gloves, and shop towels used in factories, and we had garments that could be rented out,” John recounts. “They brought me on as their stock room supervisor, and two years later, I was running the plant.”
At the plant of 160 employees, John had taken over as the superintendant in charge of running operations and production. Then, when the sales and service manager got fired, he took over that portfolio of responsibilities including the service orders and change requests. Then, when an explosion rocked the dry cleaning plant, the maintenance foreman died as John was giving him first aid. He took over those duties as well. “A month or so later, I found myself sitting in the office late at night, working on service order requests and planning out the next day’s production,” he remembers. “I must have had thirty messages I still needed to respond to, and I was ready to tear my hair out.”
Desperate, John snapped and yelled at Sol Schwartz, the owner of the company, that he simply couldn’t get it all done. But to his surprise, Sol was proud of him. “I’ve been watching you struggle for a month, and I wanted you to learn from this that you can’t do everything yourself,” Sol told him. It was a nugget of wisdom John would never forget, teaching him the incalculable value of surrounding yourself with talented people to learn from and succeed with. It also lent important nuance to his epiphany that he could most maximize his impact on organizations through human resource management—one of many management and life lessons he learned from this remarkable man Sol.
Around that time, John’s wife left him, and for the next several years, he raised their three-year-old daughter as a single father. Against all odds, he succeeded in graduating from the University of Toledo, and shortly thereafter, he was introduced to a young woman named Carol on a blind date. “She thought I was a jerk at first, but we were married four months to the day after we met, and we recently celebrated our 43-year anniversary,” he says. “After my first marriage fell apart, I was afraid of commitment and unsure of my own judgment. But with Carol, everything fell into place so quickly. Without question, she became a mother figure for my daughter Michelle, and we went on to have two children together. Carol is the glue that keeps our family together, and the rock that grounds me. I’m so blessed to have met her. If not for her, I might still be a supervisor at a commercial laundry plant in Toledo.”
After four years working at the plant, and with Carol’s support, John was asked to interview for a job at a plant owned by Lehn & Fink, the makers of the Lysol product line. He immediately clicked with the Toledo plant manager and spent the next several years working there, responsible for the longest period without a lost time accident in the history of the corporation, worldwide. He was promoted to a bigger HR job overseeing the field personnel for four sales and marketing divisions, relocating to the company’s corporate headquarters in Montvale, New Jersey. Two years later, they wanted to promote him to Head of Industrial Relations, but he resigned to accept a position with PepsiCo. “I had met with their Vice President of HR, Ed Walsh,” John recounts. “I passed the Fast Eddy test, and I liked the company’s reputation for hiring excellent people and challenging the heck out of them. They put me to work as their number two guy in worldwide HR for North American Van Lines, their most profitable business.”
Now living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, John traveled internationally to work on the HR issues in three major divisions of household goods, high value products, and industrial goods. After five great years there, he responded to an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal by Western Auto, the company he had gotten his bikes from when he was a kid. “At that time, Western Auto was a billion-dollar company with 9,000 employees, and I came on as their VP of HR,” John remembers. “At 36 years old, it was a defining time of my career where I could apply my previous experience in a leadership role.”
John was there for just over two years when its parent company, Beneficial Finance, decided to sell it. Thirty-three of the executives tried to purchase Western Auto in a leveraged buyout, with John leading the charge to harvest $40 million for the effort from its over-funded defined benefit pension plan. But the scrappy effort was no match for the deep pockets of a venture capital fund with ties to a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, a Silicon Valley tycoon, and an oil prince from Kuwait.
After the hostile leveraged buyout, the VPs were asked to stay on and run the company until its valuable regional distribution centers, 1,200 stores, and inventory were broken up. “We were given retention bonuses, and I came up with the idea of using the cash more aggressively by putting together a deferred compensation plan,” John explains. “Overall, I had a very good experience there and got to do things that people in HR don’t often get to do. In addition to terminating a defined benefit pension plan and orchestrating a deferred executive compensation plan, I helped take a company private and then took the company public, with all the associated lockout periods. I had one of the best bosses I ever had—Joe Garraty, a former Command Master Sergeant in the Marine Corps who had served in Korea. He was a brilliant guy, and I learned so much from him.”
After rejecting several job offers from other retailers, he was asked to come on as VP of the new mortgage banking division for Citicorp. It was an ill-conceived move for the company, and John spent his last six months there working to wind the division down before taking a job as the top HR professional with Booz Allen Hamilton in Bethesda. John and Carol moved to Fairfax, Virginia, and he spent the next several years managing the HR needs of the firm’s 300 partners worldwide. While there, he implemented the largest executive deferred compensation program ever done in the U.S., and possibly worldwide. He also savored the dynamic spirit of the company culture, so different from the more regulated atmosphere of Citicorp. “When I first got there, I thought everyone was nuts because they were doing business plans on the backs of cocktail napkins,” he recounts. “But then I realized it was exactly where I belonged. It was a fast-paced, stimulating atmosphere full of the electricity of solving problems. It cultivated the kind of think-on-your-feet ability that made me into a good consultant.”
John then took a job as VP of HR for the consulting groups at Computer Sciences Corporation. After five years there, he was one of four VPs to leave for a startup at SRA, a local federal contractor. “The plan was to set up a commercial business within SRA before taking the company public, since the associated marketplace multipliers would be significantly higher than those on the federal business,” he explains. “But SRA’s board ultimately wasn’t comfortable with the commercial business and decided to sell it, so our positions were eliminated and I was laid off. I was free to really think about what I wanted to do next, and that’s when I took the idea of ART and started running with it.”
Today, John and Carol support St. Jude’s Hospital for Children, and are grateful that their eight grandchildren are healthy and happy. They also support the Wounded Warrior Project, and John volunteers to serve on Transition Assistance Program panels at Andrews Air Force Base to help colonels, generals, and chief master sergeants prepare for success in civilian life. “They’ve never known any other job outside the military, so the transition can be traumatic,” John explains. “I use my HR expertise to help them craft their resumes, write cover letters, deal with recruiters, and prepare for interviews. I give them the insider perspective for how it all works, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see them succeed.”
In advising young people entering the working world today, John underscores the importance of pursuing work that resonates with you. “If you do something that makes you happy, you’ll be stimulated to do the very best job you can,” he says. “Life is too short to do something you’re unhappy with.” He also highlights the importance of being an agile thinker and striving to learn from everyone around you. “You’ll never know 100 percent of everything, so believe in your ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome,” he says. “Never give up, have faith in yourself, learn from others, and don’t forget to reach back to help the next guy over the wall.”
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