The connector Sally Glick, the ultimate networker, selected for Lifetime Achievement Award by NJBIZ

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When you need to meet someone in New Jersey, you call Sally Glick. She knows everyone.

That’s why, when asked to discuss this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award for the NJBIZ Best 50 Women in Business awards program, Glick was prepared with a list of potential candidates.

“I had a very comprehensive list of wonderful women who would be deserving,” she said.

The selection, however, had already been made:

After more than three decades of building a career by acknowledging and promoting others and their accomplishments, Glick herself would be this year’s recipient.

Glick will be honored, along with this year’s class of Best 50 Women in Business, on March 21 at The Palace at Somerset Park.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled,” she said.

As the first woman principal and chief growth strategist at Sobel & Co., a certified public accounting and consulting firm in Livingston, Glick has handled marketing communications and business development since 2005.

“What I do is unique to Sobel & Co. because of the way they’ve embraced my skills,” Glick said. “My firm has afforded me the freedom to create a career around my ability to network while making friends and building relationships that benefits the firm as well as me personally.”

A nontraditional partner, Glick — an NJBIZ Best 50 Women in Business honoree in 2008 — has amassed multiple awards over her years in the world of accounting.

From 2004 to 2006, she was named to the Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting by Accounting Today; in 2007, she was named to the Association of Accounting Marketing’s hall of fame; and in 2014 and 2015, she was named one of the Most Powerful Women in Public Accounting by CPA Practice Advisor.

“I always try to figure out, how can I help someone today?” Glick said. “What can I do for them, regardless of whether it works well for my firm or me as a person? Where or when might someone say, ‘I need your help,’ or, ‘Can you make an introduction?’ or ask for my advice?”

It is Glick’s empathetic nature that has allowed to her network so effectively within the industry in New Jersey that people often believe she’s from here.

She is, in fact, a proud third-generation Chicagoan.

After graduating from Northwestern University and The Lake Forest Graduate School of Business Management, Glick believed she would go on to work in communications.

“But my father, a sole practitioner CPA, said, ‘I can serve the clients, but I just do not have time to find more. I’ve reached a point where I really need help with that, and I’d like you to do it,’” she said.

The job was a no-brainer for Glick after having worked in and around the firm, Harold Leftwich & Associates, during her schooling.

“I stayed for two decades helping him to build that practice to great success,” she said. “I was very lucky in that I not only started my career with my father, who afforded me a great deal of freedom, flexibility and the opportunity to be an influence in his organization at a very young age, but also I’m able now to continue leveraging that in my current career.”

In 2002, Glick moved from Illinois to New Jersey to work as the chief marketing officer with The Videre Group, the firm now known as CohnReznick.

“The managing partner, David Talesnick, gave me a list of 10 people I’d need to know in order to succeed,” she said. “From that group of 10 people has come every single relationship that I still have today.”

Such relationships not only led her to Sobel & Co., but also to her serving as president of the Association for Corporate Growth in New Jersey and on boards such as the Fairleigh Dickinson University Center for Excellence for Nonprofits and the Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey.

Not to mention her dedication to the mentorship of young women at the start of their career.

“As I’ve listened to other women — particularly when I’ve moderated the Commerce and Industry Association’s Women of Influence panel for many years — I’ve heard common threads running through everyone’s success stories,” Glick said.

“Confidence — women who have the confidence to do better — is certainly part of it,” Glick said. “The ability and willingness to take risks by stepping outside of your comfort zone and trying something new is, too.

“And lastly, being able to recognize great opportunities and saying, ‘This is one I can’t let pass by.’ ”

Glick has made it her personal mission this year to be more mindful and present — a characteristic, she says, which lends itself to success.

“Occasionally, when I was coming up in my career, I often was impatient to get to the next level. I was raising three children as a single parent and I had a lot of responsibilities,” she said. “Today, I am much more aware of the importance of being present and mindful without always anticipating what’s next — just doing your best at what you’re currently doing.”

Despite all she has accomplished in her career, above all, Glick said, she is proud to be a mother.

“I love being a mother and now also a grandmother,” she said. “I look at my kids as adults and think how lucky I am that these wonderful people are my children.”

She credits her own mother with helping to make her the success that she is today.

“My mother worked early on in her marriage so my father could go to school on the G.I. Bill and do his thing as an attorney and then a CPA,” Glick said. “Between the ages of 20 and 33, she lost her father, her grandmother and her own daughter, my sister, who at the time was 8.

“She persevered. She believed wholeheartedly that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. She taught me optimism and that there is always a brighter future ahead.”

It is this mantra that Glick has carried with her throughout her career.

“Whatever I’m doing, I try very hard to think about what I would want if I was on the other side of that table,” she said. “If I were a prospect, how would I want to be spoken to? If I were a client, how would I want to be treated? As a friend, what do I want from my friends?

“I am fulfilled by being able to be a resource for someone. When I’m giving back to or helping someone, I truly believe I get more out of it than they do.”

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