First Aide

What Melba J. Duncan knows about being a world-class executive assistant has enabled her to grow a one-of-a-kind business. She may even help you learn what it takes to find a superstar aide-de-camp of your own

One day," Melba J. Duncan recalls, "I woke up, and I knew: this is a business!" That entrepreneurial flash hit in 1984, when she was the virtuosa executive assistant to a high-powered Wall Street CEO. During her ascendant 15-year career, she'd seen people pull every snarky trick in the book to wangle their way past her and into her boss's inner sanctum, maneuvers she deflected with trademark grace and the perfect degree of toughness. Duncan's smarts and style attracted attention; even people she'd bounced thought the world of her. Which explains why people kept coming back, casual-like, to ask for one more little thing: could she help them find a great assistant, pretty please, somebody sharp--with nerves of iron and unshakable poise--somebody just like Duncan herself? Because she's such a complete pro, she'd promise to see what she could do, nothing fancy, and was tickled to death when her "matchmaking," as Duncan quaintly thought of it, clicked. More often than not, it did. Which brings us to Duncan's entrepreneurial epiphany.

A smidgen of background first: In North America today, there are nearly 1,500 retained search firms, companies that recruit high-level executives for their clients on a contract basis. It's a volatile list topped by the so-called Big Five-- Heidrick & Struggles International, Korn/Ferry International, Spencer Stuart and Associates, Russell Reynolds Associates, and LAI Worldwide. "There's a low barrier to entry," says Joseph Daniel McCool, editor of The Executive Recruiter News, an independent monthly newsletter aimed at search executives. "All you need is a phone, a computer, and a list of contacts, that last being the most important."

In 1985, Melba Duncan's company, the New York City-based Duncan Group Inc., made its debut. Fourteen years later hers is still the only retained search firm in the country that deals exclusively in the special world of administrative-support professionals. Duncan gained a competitive foothold from the start by going way beyond phones and contact lists; she invented a whole new species of search practice. Her singular niche and competitive edge took shape around an innovation that melded her exhaustive knowledge of assistantship with her observation that this was an overlooked region of the business landscape, one that hovered beneath the notice of big executive-search firms.

If you're like me, you had no idea that the Duncan Group has been quietly placing cream-of-the-crop executive assistants in topflight positions since Reagan was in the White House. Duncan's placements are people of such caliber that they command salaries starting at $55,000 and climbing to $130,000, not counting bonuses and benefits. By word-of-mouth referral only, Duncan has assembled an equally eye-popping client roster, one that includes such big names as IBM, Home Depot, Bankers Trust, the Boston Consulting Group, and former senator Bill Bradley. Last year the Duncan Group's "matchmaking" racked up close to $1 million in revenues.

Consider, too, that in the hotsy-totsy executive-search business, top candidates leave a contrail of their upward progress from job to job and are, more or less, known commodities in their industries. The executive-assistant market, in stark contrast, is notoriously hush-hush, quasi-Victorian in its corseted restraint. Pre-Duncan Group, if you'd wanted to find a superb assistant, you had to steal one, under deep cover, on the q.t. Duncan has amassed, over the years, an enormous private database of superqualified candidates that is a daunting and powerful barrier that keeps other executive-assistant-recruiter wanna-bes at bay. "The successful executive assistant is not a subordinate," she says, "but a business ally of the first order: you get executive attitude in a support role."

These days Duncan has a coterie of converts to her notion of what an executive assistant can be. One of them, Bill Uhrig, a partner in a boutique investment firm, reports that "Melba recruited my assistant, and I was the only happy person here! Now she does all our placements. She has a knack for matching people up. You don't know what a multiplying effect it has until you've got a really good assistant." For presidential contender Bill Bradley, the essential characteristics were "competence, zest, loyalty, a sense of humor, strong organizational skills, and meticulous attention to detail."

There are a million little ways Melba Duncan can tell if somebody's cut out to be a great assistant--in the all-important details of temperament and maturity, in the way a confident person knows how to work a room or settle an argument, and in mind-blowing organizational skills. That combination evolved for Duncan early in her career, which began in 1968 with an eight-year stretch as assistant to Sanford C. Bernstein, who then headed the eponymous New York investment-research-and-management firm. "I learned from Bernstein that everything you do starts from who you are," Duncan says, "and what's right for you. Knowing yourself. And I knew I really loved business. Businesspeople make such very difficult decisions and go on--I loved that kind of talent. And I loved the sound of the language they used. So I chose business."

Despite blinkered advice from a high school guidance counselor to stuff her ambition and straight-A average and become a nurse's aide ("so I'd have something to fall back on"), it was always Duncan's intention to accomplish things on a larger scale. "Enough was never enough," Duncan says of her upbringing. "My two sisters and I didn't always have to be first, but you know--we'd better be first. That's the attitude that propelled us." Both sibs grew up to become psychiatrists, but Duncan had other plans. "I'm the middle child," she explains. "So I was always independent. I didn't want to be in a career that's all about finding the downside in people and trying to correct it."