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By Jay Blotcher Photograph Courtesy The Ascher Group
Whether guiding a start-up or maintaining an established business, many CEOs tend to agonize over how to find a balance between their work and home lives. But not Susan P. Ascher, president and CEO of the award-winning executive search firm, The Ascher Group, Inc.
“I don’t have a delineation, really,” says Ascher, who established the Roseland-headquartered firm in 1981. “Whatever I am doing, we get around to talking about jobs.” To show how deftly she mixes business with pleasure, consider this: Ascher spoke to New Jersey & Company from her getaway home in Colorado, where she had gone for some late winter skiing and snowshoeing. A single mother, she had also just thrown a birthday party for her daughter, who attends University of Colorado, Boulder. At the celebration, Ascher met the mother of one her daughter’s friends, a mortgage banker. By conversation’s end, Ascher had added the woman to her business contacts. And to top off her vacation week, Ascher participated in a panel addressing Colorado businesspeople, many with national profiles.
And yet, conversely, Ascher is quick to fault colleagues for allowing work to dominate their lives. “People have to get off those BlackBerrys on vacation,” she says. “It’s very sad in this country that people are not on vacation to recharge.” At the same time, she explains, socializing can yield unexpected business advantages. “There are times when you are out to dinner or with friends, and you can learn something you can take back to the office that could be enlightening.”
This strategy has ensured The Ascher Group’s ability to survive and thrive during the booms and busts of the past three decades. It has also brought her shelves of awards from Ernst & Young, Inc., as well as the designation New Jersey’s Small Business Person of the Year, and most recently, a nomination for Garden State Woman of the Year.
Ascher believes her success comes from being the child of German immigrants and having been raised in Livingston with an Old World work ethic. “I thank my father for always saying ‘no’ to me,” she says, “because I have a resiliency.”
Her career includes many female firsts: she graduated from Lehigh College in the first class of women, and was among the first women to enter the executive search business.
When Ascher’s Teutonic father wanted his daughter to become a teacher or an accountant, she defied him and enrolled in an executive training program at Bamberger’s department store. It was not a proper fit. Poring through classified ads while riding the bus home from work one day, Ascher was asked by a job consultant who happened to sit down next to her about her career goals. The young woman was forthright: “I want to be my own boss, and I want to make a lot of money.”
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