If you’re looking for one single way to talk about Judith M. von Seldeneck — wildly successful entrepreneur / frequent board member / civic leader — you could do worse than to take heed of a theme she comes back to, time and again, in her conversation and in her life:
“We’re here to help each other as women.”
To von Seldeneck, that help looks like this:
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- Her first job in Philadelphia, in the 1970s, was helping women find job-share work so they could raise their families and have careers of their own. Called Disstaffers, the company didn’t make money — so von Seldeneck bought out her partners and started her own diversity-focused executive placement firm. It eventually became Diversified Search, now the largest woman-owned business of its kind in the world.
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- In the 1980s, von Seldeneck formed the “Ya Yas” with a group of other powerful Philadelphia women — Judge Midge Rendell, bank execs Rosemarie Greco and Emma Chappell, Pew’s Rebecca Rimel, Kimmel Center President Stephanie Naidoff, among them — to serve as support for each other and to influence the male-dominated civic life in our city. Recently, the group set about recruiting the next generation of women leaders.
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- As Diversified Search approached its 50th anniversary last year, von Seldeneck donated $2 million of her own money to launch the JVS Philadelphia Fund, which has so far distributed over $1.5 million to women business owners who, she says, must demonstrate two things: They have to help other women, and they have to be involved in the community.
And that brings us full circle to what makes von Seldeneck such a superstar Philadelphian.
“I think of Judee as being a quadruple threat,” says Susan Jacobson, media exec and founder of Jacobson Strategic Communications. “She’s built a successful business. She’s concerned about women. She has no problems speaking truth to power. And she cares deeply about Philadelphia.”
For her staggering business and civic contributions to Philadelphia, The Citizen is proud to honor von Seldeneck as one of two Edward G. Rendell Lifetime Achievement Award winners at our annual Citizen of the Year Awards dinner celebration on February 25 at The Fitler Club Ballroom. (See the other winners and buy tickets here.)
“I’ve had a lot of fun along the way.”
Born in North Carolina, von Seldeneck moved to Philadelphia when she married her husband Clay in the early 1970s after serving 10 years as then-Senator Walter Mondale’s executive assistant. (They would remain friends for Mondale’s whole life.)
She couldn’t imagine working for any other politician, and stumbled on the executive search business when she was introduced to the women who had started Disstaffers. In 1974, when she bought the company, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was pushing companies to meet requirements around including minorities, including women, in their workforce.
“I was just nice and friendly. I was trying to make it hard for men to have any reason to be negative about me and they really weren’t.” — Judee von Seldeneck
So von Seldeneck reached out to local companies that did business with the government and offered her services — for free. In its first several years, women she placed in jobs paid von Seldeneck her placement commission — 10 percent of their first-year salary over three years. (All paid it back except for one woman, who still owes $33.33 on her 45-year-old tab.)
At the time, women were even more of a rarity in the C-suite than they are now. Waiting for the train from Chestnut Hill to Center City in the mornings, von Seldeneck was often the only woman at the station, in her short skirts, toting a little red briefcase. “These men, they would look at me, and I knew what they were thinking: Poor Clay. How did he ever end up with her? What is she doing here?” von Seldeneck recalls.
But not only was von Seldeneck unfazed by their reactions, she used them to her advantage. As her business grew, von Seldeneck became the “token” woman on several corporate boards, giving her access to halls of power and business. (She has served on 10 publicly-traded company boards.) She took up golf — and got good at it — and played with male clients and other Philadelphia leaders. She leaned on her Southern drawl and gentility to bluntly state her positions in meetings without ruffling feathers. She was a feminist — but not one who burned her bras.
“There were men just looking to find excuses to brand women as troublemakers and that kind of behavior made it easy for them to be able to do it,” she says. “I was just nice and friendly. I don’t mind using humor, and I don’t mind doing silly, outrageous things sometimes that are, I hope, classy and appropriate. I was trying to make it hard for them to have any reason to be negative about me and they really weren’t.”
In 1998, von Seldeneck sold Diversified — now a full-service firm that focuses on C-suite hires — to a Florida-based national staffing company, as a way to expand the business across the country. Six years later, fed up with reporting to someone who didn’t know the business as well as she did, she bought it back, for about $7 million.
Then, in 2019, von Seldeneck got another offer, from a Minnesota-based private equity firm. (She declined to say for how much.) This time, the money went not just to von Seldeneck, who still owns a majority of the business, but to many of her staff, who hold the other shares — some of whom have been with her for 40 years.
“I’ve always felt like it’s the people that work here that make us successful, not just one person — it really does take a village, as that woman who should have been president said,” she says. “From the very beginning, I always wanted our people to make more here than anywhere else. We did this together, as a family. So when we did this transaction, and a lot of people made meaningful money, it just thrilled me.”
In 2016, Diversified formed an alliance with a global organization, Alto Partners, which has given it a foothold in 305 countries and 59 cities worldwide; since 2019, it has acquired several smaller firms, giving it specialties in healthcare, nonprofit social impact, biotech, the financial sector and education. Diversified has also helped to staff government offices for Philadelphia mayors, Pennsylvania governors and the Clinton and Obama administrations. (“Only Democrats,” von Seldeneck notes.)
“She’s built a successful business. She’s concerned about women. She has no problems speaking truth to power. And she cares deeply about Philadelphia.” — Sue Jacobson
In October, Diversified celebrated its 50th anniversary with a local celebrity-studded, 300-person gala at Four Seasons Philadelphia — Mayors Parker, Nutter and Rendell were there, as was Governor Shapiro and “everyone” whom von Seldeneck has worked with in the business community over the decades.
“It’s great that we built this business, but I also wanted to give our thanks to the city of Philadelphia,” she says. “This is where it happened. And I’ve had a lot of fun along the way.”
Ya Yas
The list of von Seldeneck’s awards is long, including: The Chamber of Commerce of Greater Philadelphia’s prestigious William Penn Award in 2015; Drexel’s LeBow Business Leader of the Year Award; and, in 2022, one of Forbes’ 50 Over 50: Entrepreneurs list.
As her business grew, so did von Seldeneck’s influence in Philly. Eight years after former Corestates Bank President / CEO Rosemarie Greco held the position, von Seldeneck, in 2001, became the second woman to chair the board of the Chamber of Commerce. (The third was Jacobson, in 2020 — whose leadership von Seldeneck championed.)
Her tenure at The Chamber was most notable for the “briefcase brigade”: a march of several hundred local business leaders to City Hall to protest then-Mayor John Street’s veto of a City Council bill to lower the city’s wage tax. It was successful; City Councilmembers voted to overturn the veto, and the tax came down slightly. (That fight continues, with von Seldeneck still speaking out in favor of lowering the wage tax even further.)
Meanwhile, von Seldeneck had become friends with many of the women who, like her, were in rare positions of leadership. Greco and Emma Chappell led banks; Midge Rendell, former first lady of Philadelphia, was a judge; Stephanie Naidoff was the founding president of the Kimmel Center; Rebecca Rimel was head of Pew. At first, they met privately in von Seldeneck’s office, as a sort of sisterhood of support. But they sought a larger public role in 1999, during the mayoral race between Mayor Street and Republican Sam Katz.
At the time — as now — most campaign funding came from wealthy men, who wielded a significant amount of civic influence as a result. The Ya Yas wanted a piece of that action and invited each candidate to meet with them so they could decide how they would spend their own campaign donation money.
“They came into the room, and they saw this group of women and they gasped,” von Seldeneck says. “I said, We’re going to write checks. Why should you be mayor? We were trying to exert power the right way.”
That group of powerful Philadelphia women evolved over time; von Seldeneck says it has included Mayor Cherelle Parker, former Councilmember Maria Quiñones Sánchez (a good friend), CHOP CEO Madeline Bell, Morgan Lewis CEO Jami McCkeon, Jacobson and others. Now she is leading the drive to recruit younger Philadelphia leaders like Visit Philly’s Angela Val (a Citizen board member), Wharton Dean Erika James and Philly 3.0’s Ali Perelman. The work to promote women in leadership here is not only incomplete; in many ways, von Seldeneck says, she feels it has stagnated.
Von Seldeneck is doing her part to change that. A couple years ago, she stepped down as CEO of Diversified, and passed the torch to a new CEO, Aileen K. Alexander. (The two women have since written a book together, Deliberately Different: Fifty Years. Two Generations. Leading in a Changing World, offering leadership lessons they have gleaned throughout their careers.) And it’s why, along with Ben Franklin Technology Partners and several of her friends and colleagues, she has spent the last two years giving $50,000 in grants and support to women entrepreneurs who have shown a profit for two years and promise to pay it forward. The JVS Philadelphia Fund for Women just closed its third round of applications.
Beyond money, JVS offers social capital, mining the experience and influence of von Seldeneck and other women leaders to help them grow their businesses and make a civic impact. “We’re here to help each other as women, have influence in the community, add value, and have a seat at the table,” von Seldeneck says.
Along the way, she has been a mentor to countless Philadelphia women, like Jacobson, who says she heard of von Seldeneck long before meeting her. “If you’re a woman who wants to be involved and make an impact, you know about Judee. She is a remarkable presence,” says Jacobson. “With Judee’s support, I was given the chance to make an impact in the city and help lift others. I think there’s some responsibility to keep that going, and I’m doing my best to do what Judee taught me to do for others.”
