Page 113 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

three years later I founded Sterling Financial Group, which was named the
number one fastest-growing Hispanic-owned business in the country and
rose to number eight on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing American
companies. With nearly sixty offices in seven countries, we became a success,
and so did I, because I let my passion guide me.
Passion is the spark that fires every winning endeavor, and many of the
White House Fellows I interviewed named it as the driving force behind
their successes too. For example, in Chapter 6 we learned how Michelle
Peluso and Jeff Glueck (WHF 98–99) turned a bright idea from their
Fellowship year into Site59, the wildly successful travel booking Web site
that they sold to Travelocity for $43 million. Site59 sounds like an over-
night success story, but in actuality Peluso, Glueck, and their partners con-
quered major challenges in getting their fledgling business off the ground,
challenges that might have overwhelmed a less passionate team. The biggest
hardship they faced happened on September 11, 2001, when the terrorist
attacks in New York leveled the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, just a
stone’s throw from the Site59 offices.
“That was profoundly challenging because we were cranking along in
acquisition conversations and had money in the bank, and the world
literally caved in—we were only two blocks off the towers,” Peluso recalled.
“It was a horrible day. We couldn’t find an employee. We were seeing hor-
rendous things. We had a customer stranded, we lost our office, and all of
our technology was set up there. Then revenue completely plummeted. We
were selling spontaneous last-minute weekend packages, and of course that
suddenly stopped, so investors were freaking out and we had to call off the
acquisition conversations. I’ve never been in an environment where
revenues went from a big number to almost zero overnight. It was certainly
the most profound professional challenge I’ve ever faced.”

The team faced tough personal and emotional challenges too. Not only did
Peluso and Glueck have to rebuild their business, they had to rebuild their
team and each individual player’s faith. To begin the healing process and
put things in perspective, the Site59 team reached out to a firehouse in their
neighborhood and offered to cook meals every Monday night for the fire-
fighters, a squad of first responders who had lost several of their colleagues
when the towers collapsed. Cooking for the firefighters helped ease the
team members into talking about what they had experienced and made

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