Korn/Ferry has new man of Steele

December 1, 2000
Atlanta Business Chronicle

With a hand as big as a catcher's mitt and a handshake that rattles the brain, Ricky Steele has spent the last two years shaking hands with technology entrepreneurs and introducing them to investors.

Now he is taking his matchmaking skills to the executive search business.

Steele, who has served as a director in the technology sector in Atlanta for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP since January 1999, is joining Korn/Ferry International, Atlanta's largest executive search firm.

In his job with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Steele's job was to recruit new clients, acting as the accounting firm's ambassador to the tech community and helping young tech companies get in the door with angel investors and venture capitalists.

Steele, 48, is known for his early-morning breakfasts at Buckhead's OK Cafe where he sits at table 61, a semicircular booth that faces the entrance to the restaurant. While eating granola and strawberries with prospective clients, Steele woos tech entrepreneurs by introducing them to angel investors and deal-makers that make their way into the 1950s style diner.

"You can make eye contact with everyone coming through the restaurant," Steele said of his regular table. "Nobody can get in that room without me seeing them."

While the 7 a.m. breakfast is his specialty, Steele is also known for his after-hours networking, in which he regularly attends up to three events in a night.

Steele's 6-foot-4-inch, 200-something-pound frame is hard to miss as he works a room of entrepreneurs and deal-makers.

"Simply put, Ricky is one of the best business development people I've seen, especially in the advanced technology industry with entrepreneurs and investors," said Alan S. Neely, the head of Korn/Ferry's technology practice for North America, who hired Steele. "With those contacts, we can teach him about executive search."

Steele will become one of eight principals within Korn/Ferry's Atlanta office, working under the 13 partners in the 80-person office.

Instead of working with companies looking for angel investments or a first round of venture capital, Steele will now focus on technology companies that have already raised $5 million and can afford to pay Korn/Ferry to find a seasoned executive to round out their management team.

Married and father the of three teenagers, Steele was hired by PricewaterhouseCoopers two years ago to implement the accounting firm's program to work with early-stage tech companies.

Steele began using the accounting firm's Shaking the Money Tree quarterly venture capital survey to market the firm. PricewaterhouseCoopers began sponsoring a Shaking the Money Tree gathering to bring angel investors and venture capitalists together with entrepreneurs seeking funding.

In his two years with the accounting firm, Steele directed 30 start-up companies into PricewaterhouseCoopers' "Companies With Extraordinary Potential" program.

In the first few months Steele was working for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Red Herring held its Venture Market South conference in Atlanta, where just one of the 26 presenting Atlanta companies was a PricewaterhouseCoopers client. A year later, at the February 2000 Red Herring conference, 12 of the 28 Atlanta companies presenting were clients of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"If you look at PwC before Ricky and after Ricky, you see a huge difference in the number of young technology companies as clients," said Tom Lynch, CEO of Simtrex, a client of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Lynch called Shaking the Money Tree the "premier" event in Atlanta for entrepreneurs.

"Ricky and the whole business development team exposed PricewaterhouseCoopers' services to a part of the market that was not used to seeing them," said Chuck Johnson of Noro-Moseley Partners.

Dan Giannini, a partner in the technology practice group of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said the firm will continue its Shaking the Money Tree program and search for someone to replace Steele as the firm's "ambassador" to the technology community.

Giannini put a positive spin on Steele's departure. He said Steele focused on helping entrepreneurs find venture capital when the funding markets were still developing. Now that venture capital has grown in Atlanta, Steele is moving on to finding "human capital" and bringing executives to Atlanta.

"It's the next element in the success formula for Atlanta," Giannini said. "We have the money; now we need the people."

Steele said the main reason he is leaving PricewaterhouseCoopers is that because he is not an accountant he could not move beyond sales and marketing with the firm. At Korn/Ferry, he will be delivering on the services he sells.

"It's not like I've always been a sales guy at an accounting firm ... Coming from an entrepreneurial background, I understand the pain of a young company trying to hire the right executive," Steele said.

In 1980, Steele started The Sunbelt Transportation Group with two limousines and himself as a driver. He built the company to 100 limousines and buses with 150 employees and annual revenue of $12 million that included a travel agency and travel magazine.

Steele was named the 1986 Georgia Small Business Person of the Year before he sold the transportation company in 1992. He later went to work with his younger brother, Robert, as chief executive of Quadbase Software Inc., which went bankrupt in 1998.

Steele then conducted private consulting for the Business and Technology Alliance to research the possibilities of forming one large technology nonprofit group in Georgia to promote the state. Steele's work led to the creation of the Technology Association of Georgia in 1999. The group now boasts 5,200 members.

While at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Steele talked a lot about building the technology community in Atlanta, but he also has been involved in the greater Atlanta community. In 1993, he founded Hospitality Helping Hands as a nonprofit organization that takes leftover food from restaurants to food shelters.

This year, Hands On Atlanta honored Steele with a citizen award as an entrepreneur of service.

In his new job with Korn/Ferry, Steele will have to convince executives from other parts of the country to move to the community Steele has helped build over the last 20 years.

His sales experience could help in that area, but some suggest that he ease up on his handshakes.

"Ricky is a high-profile, big guy who makes his presence known in any situation," said John Yates, the lead technology lawyer for Morris, Manning & Martin. Yates once shook hands with Steele while Yates was recovering from a dislocated finger. "With his bear claw hand, Ricky set back my recovery by three months," Yates joked.