Fixing the Future

Dr. David Maloney Hired as UCAN Spay/Neuter Clinic Staff Veterinarian

You can plan all you want, and meet and strategize until the cows come home, but somehow what you’re doing stays just this side of real until certain things happen. Hiring a clinic vet is one of those things.

UCAN is pleased to announce that we have done just that. Starting February 19th, Dr. David Maloney will be the UCAN Spay/Neuter Clinic staff veterinarian.

Dr. Dave comes with a unique and stellar pedigree. He is the son of Faith Maloney, one of the founders of Best Friends Animal Society, and grew up in that special Kanab, UT, environment, working around the Angel Canyon sanctuary and always surrounded by animals.

A graduate of Ross University, Dr. Dave has spent the last two years as a staff veterinarian at Best Friends. Prior to that, he served as clinic manager at the sanctuary and was a registered vet tech.

Dr. Dave views working at the UCAN clinic as an extension of the Best Friends mission of reducing the numbers of unwanted companion animals. Spaying and neutering to prevent pet over-population is UCAN’s mission, and a calling that Dr. Dave is drawn to answer.

When he arrives in Cincinnati later this month, he will be greeted by the sight of construction on the UCAN Spay/Neuter Clinic being nearly finished, with equipment installed or ready to install and key staff positions filled by clinic Executive Director Sarah Skoglund. The UCAN transport van will be ready to roll after a little detailing to promote its sponsors, and plans for a gala March 24-25th clinic open house will be in the final stages of development.

A year ago, we wouldn’t have believed we could have come so far so fast. We couldn’t have believed our good fortune in securing such a skilled and dedicated veterinarian, or in hiring an executive director who brings with her 15+ years of management experience through her work with the League for Animal Welfare.

We had the vision and the passion, the commitment and the dream. What was lacking was the reality. Now, we nearly have that…

(Photo courtesy of Best Friends Animal Society.)

Making the Right Hiring Decisions

One of the biggest challenges faced in the process of opening a low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter clinic is making sure the right people are hired.  It’s not an area in which you can afford to make mistakes.

Recognizing the importance of making the right hiring decisions, UCAN partnered with a local human resources consulting firm, Pathway Guidance Systems, to ensure that this crucial process was done right.

Thanks to Pathway and Tom Hattersley, one of the firm’s partners, the prospect of making hiring decisions based on gut instinct and paper resumes has been replaced with a comprehensive, analytical process that identifies desired behaviors and competencies for the clinic overall, as well as for each of the key clinic positions.

The theory is that once you know what you need to succeed, it’s a lot easier to make sure you hire correctly – skilled and competent people who share the vision and possess individual behaviors compatible with those of the organization as a whole. No underlying square pegs in round holes.

It has been a revealing process, and well worth the effort it has entailed.

Right now, vet interviews are underway and with luck – or more precisely, with the expert help of Pathway Guidance – we expect to be making this most important hiring decision sometime in December.

Stay tuned…

Spreading the Workload

Attacking and winning the battle against pet overpopulation is a lot of work. Opening a clinic to provide effective spay/neuter is a lot of work. Raising money to do all of this is a lot of work. It’s more work than anyone could imagine unless they’ve tried to do it themselves.

So how does it get done?

First, no one gets to own the issue. That’s key. It’s great to have passion for the cause – imperative, in fact – but that will only get you so far. One person, or even two, can’t do it alone. It’s a business that is being developed, and we have found that it’s best to approach everything from that perspective.

This is harder to do with volunteers, of course. It’s hard to fire someone who is giving freely of his or her time. Yet things can change in people’s lives, and someone who once could give lots of time suddenly finds they can give little, leaving the organization in a proverbial lurch. Dealing with that is difficult at best, but it can’t be avoided.

Running a business also means making tough decisions.

In UCAN, we’ve formed a formidable board. The greatest advantage is that it is a board of business people committed to a cause. Comprised of 15 trustees, it has an engaged nucleus of members who have the time to devote to the effort – or who are willing to make it. This core is supported by a board large enough to absorb the ebb and flow of people’s other time commitments – annoying things like family and business obligations. (Just kidding – really!)

So we’ve decided that changing people’s jobs to reflect their abilities, interests AND time availability is the way to go. In other words, we’re flexible. We change titles, positions and responsibilities as needed, recognizing that someone can easily get over-loaded by taking on more than he or she can handle, or by finding that a manageable responsibility suddenly explodes into a lot more.

It’s important to have a viable back-up plan for getting every job done so that not a beat is missed, and without passing judgment on anyone in the process. People must have the ability to step back as necessary – the only requirement being that they first must send up a flare. After all, it’s the mission and the animals that come first.

In our case, because no one person owns the issue, there is very little ego involved in this process. This is a good thing, because as someone once said, “There’s no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.”

Recruiting: The Facility Team

We were fortunate in late February to recruit Sarah Skoglund as the Executive Director of the Clinic. Not only is Sarah extremely qualified (as the former President of the League for Animal Welfare), but she was in the unique position of having enough discretionary time to actually begin leading the Clinic effort immediately, e.g. recruiting, planning, coordinating, etc.

With Sarah firmly in charge, our first order of business in early March was the Clinic facility --- because of the extended timeframes associated with acquisition and build-out. We identified seven tasks on the critical path:

1. Recruit the facility team
2. Define and rank the search criteria
3. Scout available properties
4. Negotiate terms and conditions
5. Design facility improvements
6. Finance to meet cash flow requirements
7. Build to spec

Having identified the tasks, we then set about recruiting the necessary skill sets:

• Legal Advocate. There are only two choices, i.e. use a lawyer a) to PREVENT problems or b) to SOLVE problems.

Our choice was and is the former. A lawyer can help with contracts and deeds, negotiations, and risks and liabilities of all sorts, e.g. volunteers hurt on the job. Add to this the overall benefit of a keen legal mind in a Board meeting that can separate issues from non-issues, valid arguments from mere opinions, and a lawyer is an invaluable member of both the Facilities Team and the Board.

• Financial “Rainmaker”. At a very basic level, a P&L and a Balance Sheet are historical documents, i.e. they tell us what happened. There are many people who can, through skill or sheer determination, keep track of history.

But we were looking for much more than a historian. We were interested in someone who understood the financial dynamics of the business well enough to “make history come out right”, by leading the negotiations with the landlord, the contractor, the bank, etc.

Get a historian if you must; get someone who can “make history” if you can.

• Commercial Architect. A commercial architect will make two primary contributions to a facility:
  
  
  • Saving money, saving time. Making sure that the design comes in at the lowest cost and optimally supports the function and flow of a high-volume spay/neuter clinic.
  
  
  
  • Avoiding those mistakes that can cause work stoppage. Making sure that the design complies with all existing local fire and building codes, e.g. handicap access, ingress, egress, width of hallways, even types of door handles.

While very valuable, a commercial architect is not a requirement, since Karla Brestle will provide design assistance if you are a Humane Alliance clinic and a commercial developer brings a wealth of experience designing spaces.

• Commercial Developer. A commercial real estate agent knows “price”; a commercial developer knows “value”. A commercial developer knows neighborhoods. He’s in tune with the “pulse” of the city. He knows what it will cost to improve a property and what that property will be worth when the improvement is done. A commercial developer is an experienced "buyer", since he's a “buyer” long before he's a “seller”.

If you get the right commercial developer, he can help with all the tasks on the list, either personally or because he knows people in the business, e.g. he can help scout properties, negotiate with the seller or the lessor, design the improvements, secure any financing, and do the construction.

And as we will talk about in the next blog, a commercial developer may even buy the property, improve it, and be the landlord.

• Construction Manager. This is the person who visits the construction site on a regular basis to make sure that what the designer designed and the developer promised are actually being done.

So that’s the nucleus of the Facilities Team. Add a couple of enthusiastic volunteers and you have a group of people who can deliver results.

So is it worth the time and effort it takes to do this kind of recruiting? One answer to that question is a counter question, i.e. “If you can’t recruit people to give of their time and talents, how do you think you’ll ever be able to recruit them to give of their money?”

Another answer is more philosophical. Think of it this way. In the very, very beginning, before there is anything, there is a “cause” --- conceived from a passion, rooted in a deep personal commitment. Then there is a “message” --- meant to inspire and motivate others. But from that point forward, it’s all about "recruiting" --- winning hearts and minds and securing commitments, e.g. volunteers, board members, committee members, staff, donors, foundations, partners, customers, politicians, media.

And so, if the purpose is to build an effective organization that is viable, sustainable, and renewable, then "recruiting" is vital, and should be practiced at any and every opportunity.

-steve-

“Spaying pets. Educating people. Saving lives.”