My name is George Stanley and I formed yB to put my ideas about how to run an organization into practice.
I've been in leadership roles in a family business environment, the non profit sector and for a large publicly traded firm. I've made decisions to open companies, to restructure them and to close them. I've hired alot, fired enough and stood in front of folks to tell them we're closing and their jobs were gone. I've experienced success and failure.
I believe running a successful and sustainable organization involves having a clear direction, assuring all activity is focussed on that direction and assessing honestly whether outcomes are meeting expectations. From leadership success is plural; failure singular. Data inform decisions. Decisions are made. Talent is developed and individuals are held accountable.
In my early years I had family business experience that included firing the former owner and ultimately facilitating a bankruptcy filing. Nothing teaches better the impact of bad decision-making on people than standing in front of folks, thanking them for their work but letting them know their jobs were gone and they wouldn't be paid for the work they had already performed. On Valentine's Day. I was 20.
After graduating from college I was fortunate to land sales jobs with a couple of Fortune 500s before moving in to the health care world as a sales rep for a local HMO that was owned by a local hospital and managed under contract by a remote management firm. Although technically the sales guy I was able to get involved in everything from selling to provider services to network contracting to revewing financial statements. I attended and presented at Board meetings and folded and stuffed envelopes for mass open enrollment mailings. And after we tripled the membership and the owner hospital suddenly understood the extent of financial risk involved in owning an insurance company and sold the HMO, I wrote the check transferring the funds received in the transaction back to the owner.
Less than two years later, I was named President and CEO of local network of non profit hospitals. While I didn't know it, I was hired to be a bit of a yes man, put a good PR face on the organization and to not be a threat to any of the hospital adminstrators. Over the next several years I got the equivelant of a Ph.D. in governance and organizational behavior, physician relations, fraud and abuse and anti-trust law and government affairs all the while engaging in hospital managed care contracting, developing and operating a home nursing, DME and IV therapy venture, negotiating and executing multiple joint purchasing agreements and adding new member hospitals. We took the plunge and attempted to transition the loose confederation of hospitals into an integrated delivery system. When we failed and the network member hospitals began to divorce, we repurposed the organization by unlocking a primary care IPA from a local HMO. We developed an MSO and executed a management agreement to operate the IPA. We negotiated an exclusive agremeent with one of the largest payors in the state for the IPA. Under new ownership, we assumed control of a physician billing company, selected, negotiated and implemented an enterprise physician practice management system and EMR product and initiated the development of a platform for supporting electronic referrals. We developed a web strategy to connect physicians, provide shared services and link those physicians to each other, other providers, payors and their patients.
From that organization I moved to the largest for profit publicly traded long term care company in the country. While I had a portfolio of a number of items during my tenure I primarily was responsible for restrucuring a medical services strategy. We took two separate physician practices with separate management structures and consolidated administrative activities into an MSO. We created a clinical model that deployed Nurse Practitioners into facilities throughout the company and focussed that activity on providing medical services to SNF ressidents that was the largest in the industry. We targeted that activity to focus on risk factors of our patient population and measured the impact of that activity on patient outcomes and key facility quality indicators. We rebranded the initiative, developed our own performance management process, developed individual level and roll-up daily perfromance dashboards, identified, negotiated and implemented a practice management system and devised and implemented a product design that allowed for balancing medical service billing with NP services provided in support of SNF operations. And most if it we did by going rogue and acting outside of much of the imbedded corporate structure. Had to. The corporate structure was built to support the core business. It had built in biases and priorities that were inconsistent with our initiative.
After leaving the SNF I formed yB as a management firm to fulfill a contract to develop and operate a rehabilitation services company. yB successfully engineered the start-up of the firm in order to service patients in twenty-three Skilled Nursing Facilities in just forty days and ultimately grew the firm to over $25M in revenue with average growth in operating margins in in excess of 19%, an average interest coverage ratio in excess of 50:1 for the founding shareholder and, after an acquisition, over 6:1 for the successor shareholder. We built a therapy staff of over 400 therapists with less than 15% turnover without paying sign-on or referral bonuses with compensation levels at the 64th percentile. We developed proprietary tools to predict and monitor patient service demand, provide an integrated approach to perfromance management, and a mechanism for assessing current and future organizational health that linked the strategic plan to current operating activity. We leveraged Sharepoint to support communication across a geographically diverse enterprise.
But yB didn't own the therapy company.
After eight years of operation,we negotiated an exit to that management agreement.
And I took a break - a long one.
And now I’m contemplating a return. I've chosen to continue the use of the yB name because I like it and it accurately represents the brand I believe in. And I still have coffee mugs.
If you've read this far and wonder what yB will do, it'll look to consult, provide interim management and consider opportunities for investment, acquisition or management agreements. As in the past, we'll look at an opportunity, find a direction and get to work applying what we've learned and what we believe.
GS