Gillian Grozier calls it her “defining experience.” It was, of all things, her participation in a boarding school production of Oliver Goldsmith”™s “She Stoops to Conquer” when she was 18. Grozier had been attending British boarding schools since she was 11, one of the perks of belonging to England”™s privileged class. Her father was a physician, and “I was born into a professional, comfortable family” that had ties to aristocracy. “My mother came from a titled family,” she said, and that put the family in a class of “unbelievable privilege, like money, obviously, and the possibility to live comfortably in the right neighborhoods and going to the right schools and educating their children to duplicate their social positions.”
“You were born into a certain rank and privilege,” she said of the British social structure that endures, “and the expectation is that you will spend your whole life defending it and resisting change.” But the play was a combined production of girls from the boarding school and boys from a state school, “which would mean public education in the United States.” The encounter with lower-class boys “changed my perception of the world,” Grozier said. The change was so profound that several years later she all but renounced her privileged position and began looking for a country without class distinctions.
The shock may seem strange to the American mind ”“ although bigotry and prejudice is not unheard of in this country ”“ but Grozier discovered that those lower-class boys “were more intelligent, more talented and better prepared for life than I was,” she said. “Before, I was totally protected; I never had mixed with them. British society is very socially structured, and you simply did not mix.” But “my experience in that play made me rethink the whole issue of privilege. I believe it had to be earned, not inherited.”
After boarding school Grozier attended Queens College in London, and in 1963 received “a very unusual degree, an associate”™s degree in English, French and history,” she said. “It is a rare degree that is seldom awarded.” In fact, she was the 136th person to receive the degree at the 110-year-old college ”“ in part, she said, because the college “never caught up with the rest of the world.”
But the rest of the world beckoned Grozier, who joined a British conglomerate in its human resources department. “Ultimately, I was asked to found a company union, which I did,” she said. “At the time, Ford was negotiating contracts with 22 different unions, and my senior management wanted to establish a company union to avoid that situation. I represented the engineering staff, so these were members of the electricians unions and the engineering unions, blue-collar workers. I wasn”™t what they were expecting. They were expecting a tough man; what they had was a young woman” in her 20s who was able to make friends on the shop floor despite her privileged social standing.
Still, “it”™s difficult to throw off 25 years of privileged living,” she said. “I had to begin over in another culture.” The United States “was the only country that would have me” because “I didn”™t have a skill set that was translatable” or acceptable by other countries, she said. But “the United States at that time wanted secretaries with a British accent.”
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Aspiration and hope
Grozier immigrated to the U.S. in 1971, traveling from England by boat “in steerage” and experiencing that remarkable first sight of the Statue of Liberty. “It was breathtaking,” she said. “It meant the opportunity to start over.”
She joined the all-boys Kent School in Litchfield County to do public relations and fundraising for the new all-girls school the boarding school had launched. She wasn”™t there long. “I bought a battered old Volkswagen for $250 and traveled around the country during vacation. I totally fell in love with the United States. The sheer size and opportunity was overwhelming.”
The next year she moved to Manhattan and worked for the Conference Board, then married and “retired from the business world and raised three children,” moving to Westchester County in 1978, where she completed her undergraduate degree at Pace University in Pleasantville. By then she was a single mom, and began developing a new career. She became a reporter for a small weekly in Westchester County, then a stringer with the Gannett newspapers in Westchester and Rockland counties, transferred to the Sunday magazine and then moved to Hudson Valley Magazine as a contributing editor. “I was also writing for major magazines such as House Beautiful and Better Homes and Gardens.” One day she interviewed the president of a White Plains architectural firm when he asked whether she took on private clients. “I do now,” she said.
The result was her first public relations and marketing company, which she called Sarum Group ”“ “an ancient spelling for the town of Salisbury in England,” she said. “There”™s a wonderful cathedral there, and there was a great deal of aspiration and hope with which I started the company.” Grozier “had had a very rough time financially with being a single parent with three children, and I was determined to be financially independent.” She had remarried in 1985, but five years later the recession mortally damaged her business and her husband contracted terminal cancer. “I lost a marriage, a business and a house, and I was ready to start over.”
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Prosper and thrive
Grozier worked for a New York advertising agency for several years, then joined a Stamford management consulting firm, Peppers and Rodgers Group, moving from Westchester to Norwalk, then New Fairfield. “The company went through some dramatic changes and, in 2002, I determined to once again start my own marketing firm, incorporating the wonderful qualities inherent in the Peppers and Rodgers Group culture of mutual respect, hiring the brightest and the best, and making a real contribution to clients,” she said. “And that was the foundation of NetSage Marketing” ”“ Net for the Internet, Sage for wisdom and experience, she said.
Grozier has carved out a regional market stretching between New York City and Boston, and concentrates on major industries in that region. “NetSage is defined by being extraordinarily innovated, insightful and adaptable, so we work well with clients that are similar,” she said. “We look for clients with business growth potential.”
Today her marketing firm has four independent contractors and two salaried employees, and she works closely with two printers, a mail house and a call center.
“There are some consistent drivers in my life,” she said. “The first is to create something where nothing existed before. That”™s a lifelong passion and it”™s magic. The second is that I really enjoy making things work for other people. For my clients, it means identifying a business objective and deploying our resources to reach that objective.
“There is a third one that”™s come along in the last few years,” she said, “which is to create a culture in which people can prosper and thrive.” In a sense, it”™s the opposite of the life she led back in England, where she was expected to live within the bubble of privilege. But she has burst that bubble, forging for herself a life and business based on performance, not privilege. “I”™d like to think I”™ve done that with NetSage Marketing,” she said.
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