Leading the Way: Celia Crossley
Jeremy Holden
Daily Reporter Staff Writer

By focusing on her goals and expectations, local career strategist Celia Crossley has built a practice around introducing the right client to the right career and helping to craft a marketing plan for those skills and goals.

Crossley emerged from the fast food industry in 1981 to establish a career counseling practice in Columbus. Prior to that, she had worked for eight years in the human resources department at Rax Restaurants.

"I had a personal plan that by the time I was in my mid-30s I wanted to be on my own,"
she said.

Crossley had worked for Rax at the time when the fast food company was transitioning to
a franchise, she said, enabling Crossley to help develop jobs for the franchise structure.

"I never had two days alike. In eight years, I had 20 years worth of experience," she said.

But Crossley was focused on her goal of self-employment and decided in 1981 to leave
the corporate world for the world of the startup, she said.

Aided in part by the added financial security of her husband's recent promotion, Crossley
established Celia D. Crossley & Associates and went to work creating a client base.

And one of the benefits to recruiting employment-seeking customers in Columbus has
always been the constant stream of educated employees coming out of the many
universities in the area.

"It's good, because we always have a highly-educated workforce, so a majority of my
clients are at a professional level," she said.

Born in Cleveland, Crossley attended The Ohio State University, where she received a
bachelor's degree in communications and a husband, Jim, whom she met in one of the
least likely of places.

While studying at OSU and presiding over her sorority, Alpha Chi Omega, Crossley
established her most important contact at one of the university's grand bastions of
networking, the campus bar.

Early in her professional practice, Crossley said, she was quick to accept any work that
came her way, later taking on a more selective approach as she discovered certain aspects
of her practice that she preferred over others.

"When you first get started, you're hungrier so you take all kinds of assignments," she
said.

So her career counseling practice began down two avenues simultaneously, developing
career goals for individuals and providing human resource needs for area companies.

But soon into her practice, juggling career counseling with responsibilities as an
outsourced human resources department for various local companies, Crossley decided to
focus solely on the career strategy portion of her practice.

Indeed when the two roads converged, she chose the one that was more enjoyable.

"If I had to write one more employee handbook I was going to scream - or one more
compensation plan. I found the things I didn't enjoy doing were wearing on me," she said.

In addition to sifting through the less desirable aspects of her practice, Crossley also
discovered that certain aspects to working at home were sub par, encouraging her, in the
early 1990s, to establish an office.

"I wanted to be able to work with individuals on a one-on-one basis," she said. "Doing so
at home is not a very professional environment with the dog barking, the kids screaming
and the phone ringing."

But prior to making the decision to revamp her practice and move to a private office,
Crossley convened a panel of consultants and friends to assess her career goals,
essentially putting herself through many of the steps through which she regularly walks
clients.

"I had a meeting with consultants who knew me. I put myself through the Birkman
method and found that I was building a practice around my own needs," she said.

The Birkman method is the career assessment test of choice for Celia D. Crossley and
Associates, she added.

And while there are a number of career assessment tools available over the Internet,
Crossley said that free tests are such for a reason, unlikely to pose a threat to her
business.

"Anything you can get over the Web for free, you get what you pay for," she said. "The
Birkman is not a Cosmo quiz."

And, the Birkman method represents but a portion of the career assessment clients should
expect from Crossley.

Essentially, Crossly tries to establish a client's career goals and skills, benchmarking each
against the client's current role.

”(I) look at the things they do well, pull out their skill sets and benchmark them against
what they would like to do," she said.

And she said that the personal benefits come when clients are able to successfully
market the career goals Crossley has helped to develop, translating the abstract into a
satisfying career.

Though Crossley is satisfied with the narrower focus her practice has found in the past
decade, she said her success owes much to the human resources work she did for sundry
companies in the formative years.

"I couldn't be as effective without that knowledge," she said.

With more than 20 years experience in career counseling, Crossley has unique insight
into the local employment market, having worked with many of the major sectors of the
local economy including banking, insurance, technology and government.

"With that great variety, I've been able to see how other businesses operated. But one
similarity is that they all work with people," she said.

And that experience with the corporate side has helped her help clients make the leap
from establishing career goals and a marketing plan to finding companies that would be a
good fit.

"Because I've worked in the community for 20 years and had so many clients, I have a
unique feel for organizations and how they operate. Often I can suggest, 'Try here. It
might be a good fit,'" she said.

Crossley has a plan for smart and steady client growth in the future and hopes to offer
insight to her husband, who recently started a business venture, Electric Payments
Solutions. However, she said that Jim Crossley is more interested in financial support
than anything.

"Mostly he's looking to me for capital," she said good naturedly.

The best advice she would give to budding entrepreneurs is to remain focused, both in
life and on career goals.

"The best advice I got was from the focus group. They said, 'Take your passion and go
open the office.' That was the best advice I received.

"If you stay focused you'll be more effective," she said.

Crossley recently concluded a term as president of the Ohio Hunger Task Force, but she
does not intend to utilize her spare time just for relaxation. She will join the Women
President's Organization local chapter and the Upper Arlington Rotary Club. In addition,
she sits on the national board for the YWCA and presides over the Upper Arlington Civil
Service Commission.

"I don't have a lot of free time," she said.

But that free time largely goes to her husband and their two daughters, both of whom will
be tested this week.

Suzanne is pursuing her MBA at Ohio State, while younger daughter Catherine recently
turned 16 and anxiously awaits her driver's test.

For the past 20 years, Crossley has built a practice around helping individuals craft their
career goals around their interests and skill sets, a practice that uniquely matches her own
interests and skills.

”When I worked on the corporate side, recruiting and designing jobs, it became clear that
if you find the right person for the right job, it is a success," she said.

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