• July 6, 2017

    Meet Phil Fogg Jr., CEO and President of Marquis Companies, based in Milwaukie, Oregon. As a fourth-generation senior living operator, Fogg started in the business when he was just 12 years old, working for his family’s company. At 25, he branched out to start his own company, and today runs a portfolio of 26 communities across Oregon, California and Nevada. Fogg’s brother, Steve (pictured in slideshow below), is CFO for Marquis, which has been an early adopter of technology solutions for senior housing and care, and also the company’s other business channels including pharmacy, rehab and home care.

    Spotlight on Technology

    How would you describe your approach to technology? There has been a lot of change since your start in the industry.

    We’ve tried to be an early adopter, which has been a stress on our organization, but yet I’m glad we’ve been early adopters.

    I think the first thing we did that was really right on, and I have to give my Ops person the credit, was we deployed the PointClickCare EMR solution. We went fully electronic, fully paperless in our facilities. That was not only the right move, but it opened the door to be able to interface and integrate with a number of other solutions.

    You mention being an early adopter has paid off, but at times has put some stress on the organization. What were some of the pain points? How did you work through them?

    Like everything related to adapting and evolving with this current marketplace, you’re having to come up with new solutions for the first time. That includes deployment of technology. It’s not like I grew up in an organization where I can say, “I know how to do that already.” I didn’t. It’s been one of the fun parts to me, being able to innovate and change and figure out new ways of doing things, whether it’s deployment of technology or tracking hospital readmissions. It sounds like an easy thing; it’s not. It’s a challenging thing to get everybody to work together and really identify what the core causes or root causes are and how to be really effective. It’s like thought pain. Your brain sometimes hurts from having to innovate or solve problems. The data analytics on its own was a huge challenge.

    We sat down with Phil to learn about how he found his passion for senior housing at a young age, where he sees the industry going with respect to growth and technology, and what he does to unwind in his free time (hint: one of his pastimes involves a fast car and a racetrack).

    What was it like to grow up as a fourth-generation senior living provider? Did you always know that was your path?

    I started working at facilities during summers when I was 12. I was one of the rare people who knew exactly what I wanted to do. I actually started my [administrator-in-training] process when I was in college. I got licensed immediately after. I just always had a passion for it. I have two sons who are licensed administrators, fifth generation. I sit on the board of the American Healthcare Association, and I actually asked them to try and find another fifth-generation family. I can’t find it. If they’re out there, I’d be interested to know. It’s a rare thing to see families sustain a business through that many generations.

    I worked with my dad until I was 25, then I started Marquis Companies on my own in 1989.

    What was it that you liked so much?

    There were two things. One, really enjoying the interaction with the residents. Two, the ability to lead and manage an entire business unit like that, where you’re basically managing every component of a business. You could just tell it was very challenging, lots of leadership challenges, putting together teams — it was something I was always intrigued by.

    How did your family grow the business? What did you learn from them?

    My father aggregated a bunch of family facilities. There were four different sides of our family. He brought their buildings together and did an acquisition. He started off primarily in Oregon and Washington facilities. Oregon was the first state that had community-based care, so we saw occupancies go from 100% to 80% overnight. Because all the assisted living and foster care homes took it, at that same time the Medicaid payment system got very poor. It was a very, very challenging time.

    That was early ’80s?

    That was mid-’80s. Then it continued into the mid-’90s, and it’s one of the reasons a 25-year-old kid could go start his own company. At that time, people were literally handing their keys over because there were so many challenges. We’d go in and do lease agreements with purchase options, and I had the fortune of a name, and I had relationships with a number of suppliers and insurance groups and a number of things that enabled me to go out and do things that other folks didn’t.

    When you were out of college and started working for the family company, what role did you have?

    I was an administrator. Then I quickly moved to area management.

    How big was the company?

    Around 30 facilities.

    Who else in the family was involved besides you and your father?

    My dad had cousins that were heavily involved. I was the only one from the next generation.

    Was your goal always to strike out on your own?

    I think so. My first facility was a building that I had done the due diligence on for an acquisition by Prestige, which was my dad’s company. The board had decided not do it because of all the other challenges I [mentioned]. I asked them then: Do you mind if I do this acquisition? They said, “No problem.” I think they thought I’d just come back and bring that building back one day. It just started a process of slow growth.

    Was it a difficult conversation?

    My dad knew it was the right thing. I think in his heart he knew I needed to be out on my own, that it was going to be hard for me to fulfill what I needed within that company.

    My dad was one of my best mentors, a great guy. We still live right next to each other.

    Did you think it was a risk? Did you have a plan?

    The biggest advantage I had was I got to acquire facilities after the negative market changes, so I was acquiring them at a lower cost, where a lot of these organizations — like my dad’s company — were saddled with higher lease or debt payments. I immediately had the added advantage of lower debt service, which was a big deal. I also had the advantage of getting to grow up and be around a company that was much bigger, so I could kind of begin with the end in mind and understand what systems and processes needed to be in place even though I only had one building — a 102-bed skilled nursing property in west Portland. I came from an environment where I had a lot to build on, had a lot of experience to understand what I needed to do and where I needed to go.

    Can you take us inside your mindset on that first day you were coming in?

    I had just finished my MBA. I was 25. I had not a dollar to my name, and those were the days when you had a lot of private pay still and you could collect the receivables on the private pays in advance and that would fund any of your cash flow needs during that first month. You could ‘cash flow’ things right out of the gate, but you had to manage cash every single day. At that time, managing, controlling your expenses was really the key. You just had to be on everything. There was no tolerance for mistakes or cost overruns or anything because we had the forced Medicaid system.

    Was there any skepticism you encountered from residents or their families given your age?

    Yeah! I looked like I was 12. I was pretty conscious of it and I’d actually intentionally hire maybe a little maturity around me to not make people think they were in a daycare center instead of a facility.

    Did you know what kind of leader you wanted to be at that point?

    I had the advantage of having a father who’s a great leader. I had the other advantage of getting to watch [my family’s business] work through very challenging times, which was a real education. Anybody can go through good times, it’s getting through bad times that are challenging. I watched them navigate through an environment where the financial situation was quite stressed, but yet they didn’t lose the sense or the meaning of purpose in what they did every day. They kept the focus on the residents and patients they served. It was a real gift to me to watch, specifically my dad, do that. It took an amazing amount of energy on his part. When I got to start, I was able to take all of those philosophies and build and build on them. I was also fortunate that my second facility was owned by Bill Colson. He’s passed away now, but he founded Holiday Retirement. I got a call on a Friday saying, “I’ve got this troubled building, it’s one of my last SNFs. Would you come and partner with me? I’ll give you half the ownership of this building.” I said sure. Bill Colson became my second mentor.

    I had the advantage of getting to watch [my family’s business] work through very challenging times, which was a real education. …I watched them navigate through an environment where the financial situation was quite stressed, but yet they didn’t lose the sense or the meaning of purpose in what they did every day.

    Bill was a really dynamic guy. He was a real handshake guy; you could totally trust him and, frankly, at the time because of my youth I didn’t understand the lack of legal documentation I had of our relationship. At the end of the day, he came through with every single thing. Every relationship he had was based on trust. He wouldn’t do any agreement if he didn’t trust somebody. He was a really interesting guy.

    Phil Fogg, President and CEO, Marquis Companies

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    That was your second acquisition?

    We started doing turnarounds. We acquired a lot of facilities that were operationally challenged. Facilities starting growing the company. In 1994, I acquired a home health care company, both certified Medicare home health and home care. I did that because watching community-based care growth, I thought the obvious extension of that would be home care and private duty home care, which it did become. In 1996, I acquired a rehab company, physical, speech and occupational therapy company. We had six contracts and we started growing that organization. At the same time we then started developing out, since I had finally built enough capital to be able to start out development so we got into that side of the business. In 2004 we got into the pharmacy business. We diversified at that time, primarily because of the uncertainty over Medicaid and Medicare and revenue sources, and it just was better to have some diversification of revenues. Well then, 2008 hits, Democrats control the House, Senate, and Presidency and the ACA law is passed. Now all of a sudden, being able to manage populations in episodes of care becomes critical.

    I always define our populations as short-term, post-acute care episodes in the long-term living populations. Having all those services together in addition to developing data analytics, and then we started our Medicare Advantage I-SNP program last year. All of those things have now enabled us to develop kind of a network of services to manage these populations. We take those services, and underneath those we’ve built a big analytics solution. All of those groups work together on best practices, clinical practices, and I think culturally we’ve aligned all those groups not only from a leadership standpoint but why we do what we do. I aligned all those folks around the idea that people in post-acute care come to us at maybe one of the most formidable times of their lives, one of the most challenging times. We’re there to help people not only heal but to make choices in how they live the best rest of their lives, because you often find what people want may not necessarily be the right thing for them in terms of how they live successfully from this point. We’ve really focused on trying to do that, and it’s been a good thing. We get the entire organization on.

    Can you talk about how you survey the landscape and decide on what the next move is?

    Scale was important. Throughout all those years I talked about the different services we’re in, but we kind of just kept growing everything. That scale is important. I think it’s especially important now because for providers to be successful, I think they have to invest in a lot of capabilities they didn’t have eight years ago. If you don’t have some scale, you won’t have the ability to make those investments. Data analytics is an example. We started our data analytics journey in probably 2009 or 2010. Nobody in our profession was even thinking about data analytics, but I started realizing: We’re going to need to know our hospital readmissions real-time. We’re going to need to know our clinical outcomes real-time, we’re going to need to know utilization numbers real-time. So we started manually gathering information, it was ridiculous. Then we slowly built a platform that we utilize and take to the marketplace through a SharePoint solution. It’s been a really cool thing for us. We actually take that solution and we deliver reports to providers, managed care organizations, and hospital health systems.

    Do you attribute any of your mindset to coming up in or during that challenged time?

    Absolutely. I think that being a provider in Oregon and the western United States has been a real advantage because it has enabled us to get a sense for the future and understand where trends are going. Community-based care hit us first, so we were able to see that lower occupancies are a major outcome of that. We saw managed care growth. We’re 63% managed care in Oregon now in our short-term population. How you deal with those organizations and the challenges that are somewhat unique. It’s really interesting when you’re a western kind of regional provider, to talk to somebody on the east coast. They’re not dealing with the challenges we are dealing with, and I find that providers don’t react often until they’re being hit by something. Things don’t make sense to them even until they’re actually experiencing it. It’s been kind of frustrating at times as well because we’ve tried to say: “Hey, you need data analytics, you need to be able to integrate more into your clinical systems and start doing best practices in how you manage episodes of post-acute care.” We get blank stares.

    Do you think if the new health care law passes, this ability to forecast will help?

    Yes. I think providers need to make investments in these capabilities without sinking their ship. Doing nothing is not an option anymore. There are so many threats in the marketplace that I think people get overwhelmed by those. You can have an understanding of what all those issues are. It makes it difficult to sleep sometimes at night when you understand them all, and there are just certain things that you as a provider can focus on that you can control. We can’t control the fact that CMMI introduced BPCI and bundled care payments. We can’t control the fact that the hospital readmission penalties start in 2018. All you can do is the things to manage those risk factors.

    On the regulatory side, you mention a lot of different potential threats. Supply is another thing we’re hearing a lot about as putting pressure on providers. Is that something you’re concerned about?

    We have developed new facilities over the last five years, but we’ve not acquired any new product over the last five years for a couple reasons. I think the market is overpriced right now. I think you’re going to see a re-pricing of skilled facilities specifically. We’ve just developed new buildings as well. I think new supply scares the people that are sitting with the old facilities not located near a hospital. The boomer consumer is not going to want the 1960s-1970s physical plant. It’s just not the product they want. I think that one of the good things about a strong Medicare payment system, and some stability that we had prior to the ACA, was that you were starting to see a lot of development and a lot of good things happen; the environment changing and providing unpredictability is going to stop that. Unless we get certainty again I think you’re going to see that slow. I think over the next five years, all of these threats and uncertainty of some of these threats will become certain. That and demographics I think is going to make it, five years from now — I think it’s going to be a positive time.

    What about the affordability factor? Do you think it’s going to take more widespread waivers and things like that to bring more reimbursement into the assisted living space or more affordable product for the middle class consumer?

    It starts with which populations get to get served. The private market, private pay market, always migrates first to the community-based care. It’ll go to the new product generally. Then states based their policy with Medicaid funding, can expand that service to that Medicaid population, which clearly drives how much need and capacity is needed. I think the key to assisted living is trying to match supply with demand. It’s such a situational thing to every state based on their policies and what’s going on. California is an interesting environment because they don’t really have Medicaid for assisted living. Land acquisition cost is really high, and you’ve not seen the growth or penetration you’ve seen in some of the other states, and so consequently you see very high occupancy levels in the skilled market.

    TECHNOLOGY

    What are some of the technology solutions you have implemented in addition to adopting an EHR solution?

    In our pharmacy environment we’ve been an early adopter on EMAR, or Electronic Medication Administration Record management. We’re submitting pharmacy orders back and forth bi-directionally between the facility and the pharmacy. We’re doing e-scripts. We’ve done data analytics, we’ve deployed point-of-care iPads in the facilities. In operating systems, everything is about technology. In 1998, we had one IT person because we had no mandatory workflows. The only thing I can remember is the accounting system. If the accounting system went down it wasn’t a big crisis. Well now, we’ve got five different systems that if one drops or goes offline, we’re in crisis. It’s just incredible. We’ve done successful trials in the facilities with remote care management and telemedicine through a couple partners with hospital systems. That’s gone well. What’s been more challenging is the telemonitoring solutions in home care. We had a lot of hope that we can send people home with an iPad, a few peripherals which would help us manage their biometrics, and help us stop hospital readmissions at home. What we’ve found was, it’s an interesting dynamic. Most of the people that come into our facilities have three to six chronic diseases. So anyway, we have not gotten the success out of the telemonitoring technology.

    Are you personally an early adopter of technology, and do you think that’s why you drove the organization that way, or was it really something that you just saw as a business need?

    I’m kind of an early adopter, but this was more because we wanted to lead. I think people have three options: They can be the leader, and that’s constant thought pain. You can be the one in the back and not make any change until you have to, or you can be in the middle and progress somewhere in the middle. We wanted to be the leader. I think the people in the back are probably going to have challenges in the future, and the middle ones depending on how fast they can catch up.

    I think people have three options: They can be the leaders, and that’s constant thought pain. You can be the one in the back and not make any change until you have to, or you can be in the middle and progress somewhere in the middle. We wanted to be the leader.

    Do you think the industry is moving fast enough on technology? What are some of the worries you have for the industry with respect to being adaptable?

    Regionally, people get affected by the driving forces that are driving this need for change. That’s bundles, future post-acute care payments, episodic payments, managed care, some of the regulatory, value-based payments, alternative payment models — those are the forces that are driving this need to change. Different regions, states, and areas are getting hit by those things at different paces. Yet everybody should be adaptive to it or getting prepared for it. That’s where I’d say you’re seeing some varied pace of change, and many people don’t take action or see the need before it’s either too late or right when they have to.

    Do you think the pace of technology adoption is too slow?

    I think we’re slow in that we’re behind other sectors in health care. I think we’ll be one of the last sectors in health care to really embrace technology. Having said that, in our profession’s defense, we were not recipients of the federal dollars to pay for EMR solutions. Hospitals and physician clinics had funding support to get that. Somehow we got left out. If we had been included in that, I think you would’ve seen adoption much faster. I think the two barriers to technology adoption are the financial funding, and that there are just so many things in a provider’s sphere. Sometimes doing technology just seems unmanageable.

    How do you, from a financial and operational perspective, do without the subsidies coming from the federal government? How did you make it work to be an early adopter?

    That was just one of those risks we took. It’s one of the main costs in investing in those capabilities. The first cost was deploying EMR. Every time you make a deployment, it’s not only the cost of the deployment, but the ongoing support of that solution. Almost everything that we’ve done has driven cost. The big question is: Will we have a revenue model that supports it? And will we be able to differentiate ourselves in a manner that will capture more market share than our competition? Those are really the two strategic imperatives from our perspective: stable revenue models, and how do you capture market share.

    Of those two challenges, is capturing market share something you have more control over? The revenue model is partially dependent on the government payers.

    Providers have not done a fantastic job of making sure managed care organizations are paying a fair and sustainable payment. It becomes especially important as the percentage of your short-term care population becomes more managed care. They’ve got to be funding their portion of the cost. I think a lot of providers are willing to just take whatever they’re offered because they’re petrified to lose that census. I’ve seen markets where there’s a race to the bottom, and that’s not sustainable.

    What about on the private-pay side? You’ve said assisted living is a little behind the curve on technology adoption, but you’ve seen the need to put things in place like Electronic Medical Records. Do you still feel the same way?

    I do. Especially as the population acuity increases and ages in place. I think they’re going to need Electronic Medical Records, they’re going to need some of the same things the SNFs had. If that’s where the majority of long-term living is going to go, and a part of that population is going to have higher needs, I think they are going to have to embrace that type of technology. If only in that they are going to have to demonstrate to managed care, or whoever’s insuring that population, how they’re managing the health of the population. I think it’s going to be critical for an ALF to say, “We have a hospital admission rate of our population at X per thousand.”

    You brought up the hiring you’ve done to beef up the personnel support around technology. Can you talk about some of the other strategies you’ve employed to be successful in hiring right or things you’ve done in terms of choosing vendors?

    We’ve tried to lead and stay ahead of all of the capabilities we need to manage the pay-for-performance areas. I think we’ve been able to get our quality measures because we’ve deployed and have excellent clinical systems and practices. I think one of the unique things to our organization is we have a large group of people who work together. We’ve been in the business now for 28 years, and I think my shortest-term leader has been with us around 15 years. So you’ve got a team of people who’ve worked together for a long time. They trust each other and they collaborate very effectively. We’ve been able to solve problems across all of the different entities very quickly and effectively. I’ll also tell you that if you come to our offices, we’ve talked a lot about technology, we’ve talked about the economics, but at the end of the day, you’re going to find that we’ve invested a lot of money in culture.

    We define culture as the accumulation of choices you make every day. We make choices to really focus on keeping the meaning and purpose in the lives of our residents, and keeping the meaning and purpose in the work that our staff do. We do that through programs like the New Chapters program, which is basically Make-A-Wish for our residents. We fund that entirely and we support any new chapter, we’ve done thousands of them — balloon rides, Harley rides, trips to Disneyland — and it enables our staff to focus on really making a difference in the lives of people they’re serving and not forget that’s why we’re here, not just the compliance side of what we do. We’ve done it through a foundation that we have that contributes money to charities like Ronald McDonald House, Meals on Wheels, Alzheimer’s Association — groups that enable our residents or clients to go and volunteer and keep the meaning and purpose in their lives, because they’re making a difference in somebody else’s life.

    The leadership team that we’ve had is an unbelievable team that focuses on, again, treating people right and doing the right thing. We’ve been able to maintain a strong team and workforce that has enabled us to be successful.

    LEADERSHIP

    How do you define leadership?

    Any organization is going to be a reflection of their leaders. Good or bad. When we’re training administrators, we try to explain how critical their choices are. If you walk by a piece of paper on the floor and you don’t bend down and pick it up, you’ve made a choice that that’s OK. If you see a resident who needs help and you don’t stop and help, you’ve made a choice that’s setting the culture and somebody else is going to say, “Well, that’s okay because he or she didn’t do it.” If we’ve made a promise to somebody and we don’t fulfill it, that’s a choice that says something about you and the organization. We have gotten results and we’re very proud of those, whether they’re quality results or whether they’re financial results. I think at the end of the day, the thing I’m most proud of from a leadership perspective is our team and the culture of our organization. I think if you talk to people, you’ll notice that’s the unique thing about us. From a leadership perspective, one of the things I saw early in my career was this is a tough profession. It tends to burn people out. It’s emotionally draining, emotionally taxing. You’re taking care of people at a very vulnerable time, a very emotional time with complex family issues. You’re doing that with a workforce who has its own challenges. We’re a labor-driven profession. It’s emotionally taxing. We have to make sure that people understand the importance of what they do and keep it dynamic, energetic, and fun — to the extent that it can be fun.

    Any organization is going to be a reflection of their leaders. Good or bad. When we’re training administrators, we try to explain how critical their choices are. If you walk by a piece of paper on the floor and you don’t bend down and pick it up, you’ve made a choice that that’s OK.

    We’ve been very disciplined from a leadership perspective on strategic planning. We do four-to five-year future scans all the time. We create scenarios of what the future could look like based on what the driving forces are and try to plan around those. I do see a lot of organizations that don’t do that effectively and they’re reactive and they don’t think about the future.

    With Bill Colson and your father as two big mentors, how does your leadership style compare to that of your influencers?

    They didn’t influence me on the strategic side, they influenced me on treating people with respect and dignity and focusing on culture, being a good leader, doing the right thing. That was their biggest influence. The strategic side, that was more my own, but it’s a product of this environment that we’re in. We see ourselves as long-term players; we’ve been here for 28 years, we’re going to continue to be here. We are enjoying it, as crazy as it is. I do think that providers that survive — you look at the past 40 to 50 years, we seem to have transformative federal funding changes about every 10 to 20 years. So if we’re going through that transformative time now, sometime in the next five years, it’s going to probably get solidified. I think if you can survive during these next five years, I think you’re here for another 15 to 20. Because you’ll get through the uncertainties, you’ll figure it out, you’ll adapt, and that will enable you to go be a big player, and you’ll be here for another 15 to 20 years until the next thing. By that time it’ll somebody else — I probably won’t be here.

    If there were an actual or hypothetical CEO dashboard you’re looking at every day or week or month, what are the data points you would want to see on that dashboard?

    What I call the “pay for performances”: How are my hospital readmissions doing, what are my volume measures doing, what are my functional improvement scores doing, and what’s my customer experience and customer satisfaction scores? Those would be the four things. I’d want to know my census and market share data. What are my buildings doing relative to my competition in terms of what we’re capturing out of a hospital and/or what we’re capturing out of a payer? I always want to know labor hours, and how we’re managing our labor hours per patient pay relative to our occupancy. Then I’d want to know my workforce statistics. I’d want to know my turnover. Those and any other satisfaction measures I can have. Those would be the things that I think would be most important.

    We’re seeing a lot of interest in getting more into ancillary services like home care and therapy. What is the opportunity in terms of ancillary services?

    We try to not make them ancillary services to our customers. Our pharmacy serves over 20,000 people and I only have 2,200 residents, so we’re one-tenth of our overall pharmacy. The ancillary question is a bit of a complex question, because somebody has to decide if they’re going to get into that space, why are they doing it? If it’s just to drive margin, they’re going to have to have a discussion around how are they going to differentiate themselves from the competition and get the scale necessary to be sustainable. At the same time, they have to ask: Are we going to be able to do it better than the competition, at a lower cost than the competition? One of the things about owning ancillaries is it gets us to look at things and say: Hey, this is going to be a cost center versus a revenue center. It gives you that freedom and flexibility — for me, controlling it expedites the speed of change. I can get change through pharmacy, rehab, any of the groups so much faster by controlling it than if I had to work through another organization who may or may not want to do what I’m asking. That’s one of the most important things. For me, change could be them getting my ancillary business aligned with us and our objectives, or us and our culture. I think we really have to take a hard look at why they’re doing it. I was honest with you — I did originally diversify [to get new revenue streams]. Well, again, different times. I think today if somebody’s going to do it, they better have some other reasons than just creating a different revenue stream.

    Given all of those challenges and stresses you’re under, curious what you do to blow off steam or take your mind off that?

    Oh, I’m a good one for this question — I race cars.

    You race cars?!

    I raced professionally up until two years ago and I started having grandchildren. I didn’t stop because of grandchildren, but just the time more than anything else. I raced in the Brother World Challenger Series and before that I raced the Stone Haas Series, and I’ve done Daytona’s 24-hour race twice.

    What?!

    Yeah! So now I’m racing in this little western endurance series. Typically they’re three- to six-hour races. Most people have two drivers, I’m doing them all by myself. I just did one in California that’s a three-hour race. I love to snow ski, water skiing are my two passions. I blow off steam well. I like to scuba dive.

    You don’t like to just sit in a hammock.

    No, no, no.

    How did you start racing cars?

    My dad and I used to do a new thing every year, and one year he said: “Let’s go to racing school down in Arizona.” I said sure! So we get down, and he’s my age today, at that time. I’m 20 years younger and I said great, so we come back and he says, “We’ve got to go racing!” I said “Dad, I’ve got young kids, I don’t have time. I’m building a business.” He goes oh, no we can do it. So he found a starter series and we started in it and we did it together for many years. He finally got to the point where he kind of aged out a little bit but then I just kept going. My dad raced airplanes — in fact one in Reno three years ago in the jet class so, it’s been kind of in our blood, our family racing. Steve races too.

    Given the long tenure of the leadership at Marquis, looking forward, do you have things in place to develop the next generation of leaders?

    That’s the best question. For me personally, I have no desire to retire. I enjoy working. I watched my dad retire early when he sold his company in 2001 and it went badly. I just don’t have that desire, but that’s to the extent that I have that next generation. We do all of our training internally with leadership, and it’s a big investment, but I will tell you, even right now, the labor market has gotten so rough that we’re on that critical edge. We had a huge bench from 2008 to 2013, we had four to five administrators ready to go. Now we’re down to one. We’re trying, but yes, in every business unit I have we have succession plans. I’ve got it all covered but the skilled side. That’s the biggest job.

     

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