New Jersey’s Most Successfull Businesspeople

When Carmine Marinaro left Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1982, after earning a B.S. in management on a combination academic/baseball scholarship, he had no idea that his first job would turn out to be the basis of his whole career. Marinaro took a post with an executive-search firm – headhunters in common parlance – and after five years of working for somebody else decided to go into business for himself.

Corporate Information Systems, an executive-search firm specializing in high-tech sales professionals, was born in the basement of Marinaro’s parents’ home in 1987, and by 1989 had moved to an 800-square-foot space in Rutherford.

That space then morphed into CIS’s current 3,000 square feet of office space in Rutherford, where Marinaro, 37, works with his 10 employees. CIS does “well over $1 million in revenue” each year, Marinaro reports, and will be growing bigger in the future. “There is so much business out there that we need to expand,” he says. Those expansion plans involve an eventual move to the technology-laden West Coast, where Marinaro hears the hunting is good.