When Joseph D. Sansone founded Pediatric Services of America Inc., he faced the challenge of taking a children’s health care organization
public. But by showing Wall Street the value that PSA had and the return that it could garner, he succeeded. Now, as chairman and CEO
of Pediatria HealthCare for Kids, which specializes in treating medically fragile children, he and his 50 employees don’t have to answer to
Wall Street anymore, but he says even if you’re not running a public company, you always have to answer to someone. Smart Business
spoke with Sansone about why a successful company never crosses the goal line and how to create a value-driven culture.
Involve others in decisions. Get everybody’s
buy-in — let’s hash it out and make sure
we’ve looked at every side and angle of
what the issue is, and if the decision has to
be made, I’ll make it.
Sometimes it’s not with 100 percent consensus, but that’s what you do. At least you
get people’s input.
Autocrats, you can get lucky a lot of the
times and your personal gut feeling, and
some of these guys, it can carry them a long
way, and it often does. But as you grow and
get more complex as a company, your need
for input from various segments becomes
more and more important, and making a
decision on your own without including all
these people is a real danger to an organization.
If you’re running a small corner grocery
store, you could get away with it, but if
you’re running Whole Foods, I don’t think
you can.
Use process for making changes. Decide
which segment of the plan is effective and
who had the responsibility for that the first
time around, and decide whether or not
that person needs help or needs replacing
or is unaware of the changes. And then you
address that piece of it.
If you look at what affects a company, it’s
not generally something that hits at the top.
It’s all the way down. Sometimes it hits at
the base and creeps its way up, so you’ve
got to look at the people who have accepted responsibility for the management of
those issues and make sure they’re completing their tasks.
Help employees improve skills. Talk it through
and ask them to lay out a business plan of
their own for their particular task. If you
look at every segment of management and
every segment of operations in an organization, each one needs to be planned out,
and the person that’s doing it needs to
come up with the how, why, when and
where of how the task is going to be
accomplished.
Sit and evaluate that with them. What
decisions have been made? Was it a wrong
turn people took? How do you get them
back on track? It’s a matter of evaluating
the plans of action and refining them to
meet whatever new challenges come up.
Keep moving forward. Sometimes you’ve
crossed the finish line or you’ve made it to
the top, but that sounds like you’ve reached
the end of the line. Success is, ‘Have we
stayed on vision, and have we accomplished
those tasks for the near-term that we’ve set
out for ourselves, and are we on the track to
achieve those longer-term goals?’
We’ve never particularly crossed the goal
line because the goal line keeps being further and further out there. You just continue
to revise and refine your business to meet
the new challenges and stay a living entity.
Embrace change. Gather all the information you
can as an individual, and then gather all the
information you can as a senior management
team, and lay it on the table. It becomes part
of the strategic planning.
Use strategic planning as a living document
— it’s constantly being reshaped. Stay involved in your industry. Stay on top of the
changes. Bring in people that are visionary to
work with you.
You want people who are able to do the
task and are committed, dedicated and
they’ve got that spirit behind them that permeates the company. It’s a combination of
knowledge and people.
Having those blend together, you’re able to
determine which way to go.
Gauge people by actions, not resumes. Until
you start working with them and seeing the
results of their work, you don’t know, but
you can quickly figure it out in the first few
months, an understanding of how they
completed their tasks. It’s a matter of maintaining an interaction with them.
Don’t just hand them a task, stick them in
a cubicle and say, ‘See me next year.’ You’re
constantly working with them and making
sure they’re accomplishing what you expected them to accomplish.
Create a value-driven culture. You create a culture
no matter what happens.
Culture is decor and a feeling of how this
company really works. It is a reflection of
senior management’s attitudes, enthusiasms
and specific goals. When you meet the top
people in an organization, you can tell the
value of the organization by how they treat
their people and view their company.
If our decision was to run this company to
make as much cash as we can, and we didn’t
care about the quality of the health care —
we cared about how can we do it the most
profitable — that’s the kind of culture you’d
have, and you’d have a culture that said,
‘We’re going to make this a money machine’
versus a culture that says, ‘Hey, I’m going to
hire the best clinicians and top nurses and
best therapists, and we’re going to have great
care, and by giving great care, people will
want us, and we’ll make money that way.’
That’s a different culture altogether. It’s a
decision that top management has in setting
up the basic goals of the company. Your culture is a reflection of how you achieve those
goals and what the importance of goals are.
Balance values and Wall Street. That’s hard, and
these days, it’s harder. At the end of the day,
you always have bosses.
If it’s not Wall Street, then it’s venture capitalists. If not venture capitalists, then it’s the
bank. Somebody holds the purse strings for
you.
The balance is it’s a constant communication with your owners [about] where
you’re going with the business, how it’s
doing, have you met projections, have you
met your budgets. That’s what a businessman does.
HOW TO REACH: Pediatria HealthCare for Kids, (770) 414-0055 or www.pediatriakids.com