 Susan Lipp fills some big shoes at Wisconsin’s Full Compass, but she does it with an even bigger heart. Every aspect of Lipp’s professional life is born out of love—love for her staff, love for her industry, love for her community, and love for her husband, Jonathan Lipp. In fact, 30 years later Lipp still gushes about first meeting her husband, who had just started Full Compass and also owned a recording studio.
“When I met Jonathan I was working for the Madison Reparatory Theatre [and] we needed radio commercials done,” recalled Lipp. “I went down to pick up the radio commercial one day, and walked out having forgotten the tape. So I called the guy I knew, Rick, one of [Jonathan’s] partners, and I asked him if there was anybody coming to the west side because I needed it for the next day. So he said, ‘Well my partner will be there tonight. He can bring it to you.’ I said, ‘Which one is your partner?’ and he said, ‘The guy who was engineering all the stuff you were playing with.’ I said, ‘Oh, the cute one with the mustache.’
“So Rick told Jonathan I thought he was cute,” she continued. “Jonathan got dressed up in his only decent outfit and came to the theater that night and asked me out…six months later we were married. Thirty years later, we’re not only together but we share an office. We’re attached at the hip.”
Higher and Hire
“I am a nurturer [and] I’m able to nurture a lot more kids now—the 160 of them who work for me,” said Lipp of her staff, many of whom give her the same loyalty back. “We’ve got a very long lifespan on our salespeople. The longest one we have is 27 years. Not bad for a 31-year-old company,” Lipp added. “I think the average length of tenure is about 11 years.”
How she keeps her staff current is with constant sales training, even for long-term employees, and how she keeps them happy is by rewarding their hard work—a lesson she learned during her own selling days.
“Over the last 30 years we’ve taken a lot of dealer trips, and I realized in 1981 when we went on our first trip with Electro-Voice that it was about the coolest thing in the absolute world that ever happened to me,” Lipp recalled. So she decided to offer the same opportunity to her staff. Anybody who did over $3 million in sales and grew their sales by five percent got a four-day trip for two to New York City. “The people who did $2 million got a trip to Chicago for three days. It was mostly the younger staff,” said Lipp, who chaperoned both trips, taking her staff to the theater, fancy restaurants, and other sightseeing locations.
Even though Full Compass deals in a mostly male industry—by Lipp’s own admission, most of the company’s clientele are men—Lipp hires many women for sales positions. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I can tell you exactly what it is [that makes women better salespeople]: they ask directions. They ask questions. I mean, there’s no posturing with women,” said Lipp. “In this business, you have to know exactly what it is people want. We have a very low return rate because of that.”
Taking Care of Business
Lipp’s role at Full Compass has grown and changed over the years, in part to an unfortunate incident almost 10 years ago.
“We had a very bad accountant who worked for us. We thought we were making a fortune and we were actually losing a huge amount of money. I had to give up my customers to the rest of the salespeople and just work on re-growing the business” Lipp recalled. “I had 150 employees at the time and we couldn’t let them just go out on the street. I needed to keep their families alive.”
The company did, of course, recover, and is actually in the midst of an expansion. “Think about what we’re doing,” said Lipp. “We’re building a building when we’re in the beginning of a recession.”
The new building, which had a groundbreaking ceremony on Aug. 4, is Lipp’s new pet project, a natural fit given she went to art school as a painting major with minors in both print making and sculpture. “I’m doing all the interior design [for] the new store, which is a huge undertaking,” she said. “It’s going to be about 140,000 square feet; at least that’s what we’re at right now, with the potential of doubling the space. We’re [erecting] an 80,000-sq.-ft. warehouse. That’s exactly double what I have right now.”
Lipp’s other pet project is charity. “I work for one reason—to give it all away,” said Lipp, who sits on 10 boards, including the University of Wisconsin School of Music, and does NAMM’s fly-in to Washington D.C. every year. “I want to be able to leave my city, state, and country a way better place.”
Most recently, Lipp joined the board of the Partnership for Wisconsin’s Economic Success, which focuses on early childhood education. “The earlier the kids learn, the earlier the kids are able to have opportunities,” said Lipp. “If they learn music and art and keep it nurtured all the way through school, they will be smarter. They will learn to learn, and they’ll probably all graduate from high school.”
Lipp remains committed to her family, her job, and her charity work, and expects to do so for many years to come. “I’ve told people I will never retire. I will die at my desk, and it’s true. I can’t even consider retiring,” she said with a chuckle. “I couldn’t possibly think of not working. I think I’d go out of my mind.”
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