Vicki Perry was stepping onto a sinking ship. She was brought in by Sagamore Health Network Inc. to save its health maintenance organization and if she couldn’t do it, the failing health plan would be left to die.
“The business owners had poured millions into it and it had been unprofitable since day one,” Perry says. “What I had to do was take a failing product and a handful of teams and create an energetic, market-responsive health plan in a very short period of time, a time when provider-owned health plans weren’t doing well and nobody else was starting new ones.”
If Perry was to succeed in rescuing this failing organization, which would eventually become ADVANTAGE Health Solutions Inc., she needed a team of people who could manage a project and accept that the line from Point A to Point B was not always a straight and smooth one.
“The first thing you have to do is look to your leadership team, and if you don’t have a defined leadership team, figure out within the organization who has the sphere of influence,” says Perry, the founder, president and CEO of ADVANTAGE. “You have to address the issue with that individual or team and get a consensus. Once there is that consensus, you have to make sure it is pushed from the top throughout the organization and that you are constantly recognizing when the plan needs to be executed differently or needs to be changed.”
It’s that ability to accept change and to be ready to make a right turn when you had planned to turn left that has confounded many business leaders.
“One of the biggest dangers when you are going through challenges is to say, ‘This is what we’ve decided, and we’re going to stick to it,’” Perry says.
“You stick to it instead of being more fluid and flexible and having those metrics and milestones to meld into your change plan so you can figure out when you need to adapt.”
Perry’s flexibility has paid off. She has helped ADVANTAGE reach many of its goals, the biggest one being the fact that it still exists. Perry says the key to turning success into failure is realizing that even as the leader, you’re just one piece in the process. An important piece, but just one piece nonetheless.
Her company is now a successful and independent health plan that has no debt and reached $375 million in 2009 revenue. It has been accredited by the National Committee for Quality Assurance and is now preparing to deal with new health care reforms in the coming years.
Here are some of the other lessons she learned while taking ADVANTAGE from dying to thriving.
