Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
As Orion Associates and its many branches ballooned over the years—to $103 million in revenue this year, from $5 million when she took over from her mother—so has CEO Rebecca Thomley’s quest to manage a sprawling organization. Her answer lies in an unusual commitment to volunteer service, which she believes connects employees, suppliers and clients alike, and gives all the power to create change.
Rebecca Thomley: My oldest son Nic is a really good businessman in a very different way than I am. For me this is a second career. I was a clinical psychologist, and had no plans to go into business. But he went the traditional way, through business school. There are big differences in the way women in business work and men in business work. I get focused on the vision, and he’s pragmatic in that he’ll say, you may not be able to fund that vision.
My mom, Marya Hage, is an incredible lady. She has a joy for life that you seldom see. She came from the generation of women that didn’t start businesses, but she started Meridian Services in her basement and when my father retired he joined her. They moved out of the basement into the cattle barn.
I started with a doctoral program and went to work with a very similar company to theirs. Later I started up a new venture for this company working one day a week, in exchange for health insurance. I loved being in private practice but my parents both got cancer. My father was terminal, and they had to figure out what to do. I was not interested in being involved but gradually it became apparent to me that we had a role I needed to play.
He passed in 1999 and I took over the business. We had Meridian and we had Zenith, which provides rehab services. Orion Associates, the overall organization, is a management organization. We provide management services to related and unrelated entities. We sell our services to other companies, both financial services and training services, primarily in the social services arena.
Thomley: It was a big stretch. I think it was more a psychological stretch. Running a business, it was more like, OK, I’ve done it for another company. We had 30 employees when I got there and when I left it had grown to 500. It was a whole new place to be. It meant giving up a lot, many years of school and goals. But also I had the recognition that I didn’t want to have a psychological services firm. I have lots of interests, but there is a reality. When I’m 65 do I want to be seeing 35 patients a week?
Thomley: When I took over, since 2000, we did $5 million in revenue that year. This year we’ll do $103 million, and we have 810 employees. Being real familiar with governmental funding, my goal was to diversify, and being on the cutting edge of new services coming out. The other piece is the quality of the services. Quality is important to me. We got CARF certification early on, although we’re not required to be certified.
Thomley: It’s about standards. I would expect that I would want the same level of services applied to my family. An example here, at our offices in Golden Valley, we put a daycare center in our headquarters. I didn’t have to leave my kids when they were young, and I want my staff to have options, too.
When I make decisions I think about what would I want for my own family. Do we achieve it all the time? No, but we strive for it.
Thomley: Orion ISO has been in business for about 10 years. It’s a financial service. We’re the bridge between Medicaid and Medicare families and the government. States are going more and more to self-directed funds but there still needs to be a financial intermediary, and we play that role.
Thomley: I’ve been around enough. Right out of high school I worked within various kinds of social services. When you’re around it, you see services come and go and you see companies fail because they put all their eggs in one basket. Somebody loses a big contract and they’re out of business.
In Minnesota, we’ve been doing self-directed funds for a long time. But not in other states. We’re doing a start-up in Oklahoma, for example, so the states vary. In terms of evolving, we felt very comfortable with what we were providing here and then we were able to branch out and bid on contracts in other states.
But how do you manage employees from afar? These are very difficult expansions because in many ways we are still a small organization. In Tennessee, we took the contract from a company 40 times our size, for example. They chose us because of our quality.
Thomley: Something we did early on as a core group of managers, all of us did master’s in business programs at Concordia. We used that program to develop communication and to give us an awareness of our personalities. We’ve worked hard at communicating to people, if you’re coming here to work at a job that will stay the same, you’re coming to the wrong place.
We have significant longevity and it’s not because we pay much better. We also focus on community. For me, too, this was a big bridge. I’m a long-time volunteer for Red Cross in mental health. Hurricane Katrina happened and I responded with Red Cross and ended up in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. If you don’t know what it is to be poor and a minority in the U.S., you learned it quickly there.
I came back after Hurricane Katrina and felt passionate about continuing the work. I ended up with a bunch of employees and we went back. What happened was a dramatic change for us and the organization. We expanded people’s friends and family.
Another key focus is partnership. Our offices were always in St. Cloud and we were going to move here. We said, whatever contractor would help us in New Orleans, they would get the contract for our building. TDB was the contractor. They sent 10 builders to New Orleans. Dunwoody sent their student electricians. This power of community was built through these activities.
Thomley: I grew up volunteering. I don’t remember a Thanksgiving without other people at the table. I grew up in Duluth and I’d go out with my mother to bad areas. My own children are expected to volunteer. That was an internal family belief.
This company already has a policy to give paid time off to volunteer, up to two days off, and we sponsor four major events and if they volunteer with Headwaters, our foundation, that’s paid as well.
The thing it did for us as a business is, we could send people to endless training on leadership or communication, but put people on a team of different people to help others—we’re all leveling here and being respectful of every contribution—we found we could teach leadership skills in a way you can’t touch in any seminar.
People say it’s so great you support volunteerism, but we receive so much more than we give in. What happens when staffers have the opportunity to volunteer, it connects people up. It creates community among our people.
I’m really blessed. I had unconditional positive support growing up. The idea of trying anything new is not frightening to me. We can always figure it out. There’s a lot of people that can help you if you ask.
Thomley: For me when we started Headwaters Relief Organization, our foundation, I began to own things in a different way. Up until then I ran the organization and I did a good job. But for me it was about community commitment and creating change. With the ability to see the impact on the people we serve and the people who work here, the ability to use your clinical skills as a business owner, brought it full circle.
But there’s a whole other part of it too, social justice, and making young people aware of the needs of people. Who gets services when and how can we make a change? We don’t go anywhere without there being a whole lot of education about where we go.
Thomley: I believe what Headwaters does, it is what binds us together as a community and it is what gives us the strength to do the hard work we do. Because everyone works really hard here.
As an organization I never focus on what an activity will bring to the bottom line. That doesn’t interest me at all. But my focus is, what is the potential impact we can have on the people we serve in the community? What interests me is a change created in someone’s life.
Rebecca Thomley is president and CEO of Orion Associates in Golden Valley, parent company to Meridian Services, Zenith Services, Morning Star Financial Services, Little Stars Kids’ Club, and related social services organizations. www.orionassoc.net
As the name suggests, Owatonna-based Kamp Automation looks for customers with a process they’d like to automate. It could be a small, inconvenient, tiny part that people can’t assemble. It could be a high-volume product so needed that the customer can’t find enough labor to produce it in the necessary quantities. “We’ll work anywhere from medical device companies to the seed industry for corn and soybeans,” says Kent Patterson, co-founder, president and CEO. “We just jump all over wherever there is custom automation.” The company started in his garage. Patterson and his partners built a machine. The company started to grow to the point where now it has 48 employees — and had a bunch of people and stuff in different locations. “We went from a garage to a shop to a shop and just kept moving to new places and signing leases,” he says. “We got to a point where it’s like, OK, this is getting big enough and sustainable — we felt that we wanted to look for our own space.’”
