Don Hairston doesn’t claim to know what the future holds. But he plans for the possibilities.
“Contingency planning is very important for people to realize that if there is a major change in the environment or in the regulatory atmosphere or whatever, they are prepared to change direction a little bit … and to still accomplish the overall goal,” says Hairston, the president of Molina Healthcare of Texas Inc.
As the first president of Molina Healthcare of Florida, Hairston grew the state-managed care plan to 43,000 members in a little more than a year. The organization, which provides health care to individuals through government-sponsored programs, tapped his start-up savvy and brought him to Texas in May 2009 to lead 158 employees through several expansion projects.
Since then, the Texas plan has grown from providing services in seven counties to more than 180. At the end of 2009, it reported about 40,000 members and premium revenue of $134.9 million.
Smart Business spoke to Hairston about building a flexible company around contingency planning.
Hire for flexibility. The most important thing to keep in mind during the early days of a start-up company relates to your early hiring decisions. It’s critically important to hire people that have the ability to grow with the company.
Asking questions about what they would do in certain situations gives you a good indication of how they would react. The questions that you would ask would have to do with certain contingencies because flexibility is very important. You ask a question, ‘If you were planning to do this and this happened, how would you react?’ so that you see their ability to react under pressure and to be flexible in what they do.
Plan for what-ifs. [Another] critical thing about start-ups is to do a lot of contingency planning. If everything goes like you expect, then your job is a lot easier — but that doesn’t very often happen. So the ability to anticipate what might go wrong and preplan for a way to resolve the issue can often make the difference between success and failure.
Part of that is a planning project management process where we put together in detail how something is going to be rolled out: This is what we want to accomplish. This is how we want to accomplish, and we have milestones as we go along. We have time frames and we monitor and manage the dates that things need to be done. Not only, in the project plan, do we have the deliverable dates, we have the person who’s responsible so we know exactly what various people are doing.
When we put something like that together, we spend a lot of time saying, ‘OK, here, we’re assuming that this is going to happen at this particular point. If it doesn’t, what if this happens? Then how would you work around the process?’ so that we get a lot of discussion about the future as we go along. When you have group discussions, people are very creative and they can think of a lot more possibilities than any single person could think of. So it’s a matter of discussing and not just one time, but discussing as you go along.
