SaraNolan

Sarah Nolan, CEO of Move.com

by Peg Townsend

Sarah Nolan has had an impressive career and now heads a cutting edge Internet Company. She says, 'for me it's the journey.'

Sit in Move.com's San Francisco offices and you might be surprised to see a tall woman with short blond hair zip by on a shiny aluminum scooter

You might be even more surprised to know that the woman is Sarah Nolan, the 49-year-old CEO of a company that generated $17 million in revenues last year by providing one-stop online help for people who are changing homes.

"It makes people feel like they can be more creative," explains Nolan of her scooter rides around the cavernous office, past the 360 people she oversees. "It loosens them up to have more options."

That's the way it is for this woman who has never done anything by the book.

Success, she says, doesn't come from a Ph.D. in business, from following the rules or from figuring out how many stock options you'll get.

Instead, she says, it comes when you do exactly what you love.

Sitting in her office on a foggy summer morning, Nolan looks like the antithesis of a corporate strategist.

Rows of bright action figures and shelves of nerf footballs and basketballs make it seem like her office was decorated by F.A.O. Schwartz.

Check out her wardrobe and you'll see she's wearing a red dress with dancing girls on it.

But check out her resume, and it shows a different side of Nolan. There's the American Express insurance division she headed where productivity improved by 80 percent and the web company with annual revenues of $2 million that she helped sell to E*Trade. There are her roles as a business consultant.

That's why she was chosen to head this online company that is a subsidiary of the real estate giant, Cendant, a place where people can go to find things like Realtors, mortgage companies, moving companies, doctors, and home repair specialists when they make a move.

But, says Nolan, she didn't take the normal path to get here.

Born in Meridian, Miss., Nolan was a tomboy who loved to fish and play baseball. She had an intellectual curiosity about life that came from her forester father and a love of people that came from her nurse mother. She studied anthropology and psychology in college and at 21, her life changed.

She married her longtime sweetheart, an anthropologist, and they moved to Manhattan.

"I got a job with McGraw-Hill and I remember walking to the office, which was a 50-story building, and looking up and thinking, 'these people must know everything,'" Nolan says in a way that a listener can feel the awe she must have had.

"The country mouse," she says, "had come to the big city."

But soon Nolan found that this kind of life appealed to her. She loved the fine restaurants, the music and the museums.

And she discovered that the people in those 50-story buildings were just like her.

Soon, she had won a job with the management consulting firm of Booz Allen & Hamilton.

"I think there are three functions in a company," says Nolan, whose voice still carries the flavor of her Mississippi upbringing. "There is the selling of something, the making of something and the adding and subtracting to figure out if it was worth it. I had worked in all three places.

"Now, I wanted to see how people made their decisions."

So that's what she did for her three years at the company.

Lots of people in her position went on to jobs in big-name firms.

"Most of these people wanted to get into a big company as a strategic planner and then hope, over time, they would prove themselves and be given a business to run," she explains.

But not Nolan.

"I went to a third-tier business in a third-tier bank," she says, and was put in charge of a decidedly unpretentious personal trust and investment group with 120 people spread out over seven locations.

A friend at Booz Allen pleaded with her not to take a job that looked about as promising as the dinner special at a rundown cafe. But Nolan knew she would be allowed to make important decisions at a relatively young age and so she accepted the post.

"They were going to let me do whatever it took to fix it," she says simply.

Nolan went to work, doing a complete restructuring of the group by centralizing the investment and trust management for many smaller accounts. Then she refocused the officer time freed by this centralization into sales and new business development.

One year later, she had increased revenues by 45 percent, "and I had learned a ton," Nolan says.

"I just had to do it," Nolan says. "I feel that the jobs you should do are the ones that you would be willing to pay to do."

It's also important to believe in yourself.

"I believed that I could find great solutions to hard problems," Nolan says. "I also believed that I could build great management teams that could harness under-performing assets in a company and produce superior results."

But that doesn't mean you should think you have all the answers, Nolan cautions.

"I also believed that...I needed an open ear and open mind to find out what would work."

She took that same kind of attitude to her next job: an insurance division at American Express, where she oversaw 450 people and improved productivity 80 percent by raising revenues and holding expenses flat.

"The thing about both these jobs is that I had to do them. I knew they were perfect for me, despite advice to the contrary," she says.

If Nolan had taken more traditional, move-up-the-ladder kind of jobs, she believes, she would never have gotten the kind of responsibility that drives her.

She would not have had the same passion.

"The work days are too long and you work with people too closely, so that you should only do things you're passionate about and with people who will make you better," Nolan says.

"If you're counting what your stock options are worth, you're definitely taking your eye off the ball."

For most people, Nolan says, it's the journey's end that's important.

"But for me," she says, "it's the journey."

That's why she took the job with Move.com.

She had already run a small startup that was sold, so the next challenge was to take a company public.

For her, the most important part of getting a company like Move.com up and running was hiring good people. She wanted people who were excited about the company, who brought experience and depth to the firm.

"When you find yourself selling them on the company (during the interview), that's the right person," she says.

And, she says, you can't pick a job just because it might make you wealthy.

"I think your motivation is off-base, if you are doing something just to be rich," says Nolan who doesn't drive fancy cars or live in an ostentatious house. That kind of thinking stifles the creativity needed to made good decisions.

The company had a great team, a good business plan and lots of value, but just as Move.com was poised to go public in February 2000, tech stocks took a dive and everything was put on hold.

Still Nolan isn't discouraged.

"We're still focused on building value in our business and when the time is right, we'll go public," she says.

Ask Nolan what has helped her most in running a business and she'll surprise most people by saying it was her anthropology background.

"It makes you learn about whole systems," she says, sitting behind a desk with a Greyhound bus logo painted on it. "You learn that if you make changes in one part of the company, it's going to change the whole thing."

Nolan's voice grows softer as she talks about the personal side of her life, one marked by tragedy and that same notion that non-traditional routes and team work is what counts.

Three years after she had divorced her husband of 21 years, he was diagnosed with liver cancer.

"There were no symptoms," she says. "He just had a pain in his side." Nolan read the literature and knew that the man she had married at 21 didn't have long to live.

"All that divorce stuff just melted away," Nolan says. "He had been my best friend for a really long time. We grew up together."

They had two children, age 5 and 9, and so Nolan gathered up 10 of her and her husband's closest friends.

They took their two children and their friends to a Presbyterian church where they had a godparent ceremony. Each of their friends pledged that they would love and help guide the couple's children. That they would remember their birthdays, that there would be someone who cared about how they grew up, Nolan says.

A big weight seemed to lift off her ex-husband as he realized Nolan had made sure that their children would always know they were loved.

He died a few months later.

And Nolan and her children, surrounded by friends, continued on.

A FEW MORE MINUTES WITH SARAH NOLAN:

If you could have dinner with any two people, who would they be?

NOLAN: My mom and my dad.

If you were to choose a different profession, what would it be?

NOLAN: Professor of management, a poet or an artist.

What is your definition of success?

NOLAN: Doing what I am passionate about, with people I respect, and accomplishing something great and which surpasses what any of us would have guessed was possible.