Spotlights: C-Suite
“As CEO, and as any leader, if you’re going to be effective, you need to understand how to hear from all sides.”
light to the world around them. As we saw the mass layoffs during the pandemic, our people said, “We’re a staffing company. While that certainly hurts us too, we can do something about that. We can work really hard to stay in business, to help put other people to work and to be the light for them.” Around the same time, we started thinking to ourselves, “We’re doing really well from a business standpoint, so how can we do more for others?” We’re involved with a lot of charities here locally, but one of the things that we wanted to do was to try to help beyond the U.S. and Canada. There’s an organization called One World Health, and they build sustainable healthcare clinics, hospitals, in places like Uganda and Nicaragua. I say sustainable in that they can build the actual hospital, hire and train local health care professionals, and get them running those clinics. After about two years, they are self-sustaining. We just love the hiring and develop- ing from within, which is what they do with healthcare workers in these impoverished countries, so we made the commitment to invest the money to build a few of these clinics in early 2020. Last year, the first one opened in Uganda. We’ll do $4 billion in revenue this year. Is anybody going to care if we do a few million less in earnings from that revenue to build a few more
hospitals? No. So let’s get really, really good as a business at growing in revenue so we can turn around and do more things like building more clinics, helping more people locally in this country, and just being the light to the world around us. HM: How did your time at Auburn prepare you for this success? What advice would BB: As CEO, and as any leader, if you’re going to be effective, you need to understand how to hear from all sides. It’s not to say you can’t be rooted in certain principles, but you certainly need to have an ability to listen and understand the other side. With the people I was around at Auburn, the groups I was involved in, the College of Business where I studied, I found that I was always surrounded by people who some- times thought differently than I did, who sometimes believed different things than I did. It helped me to not graduate thinking with such a one-track mind, and it helped me to be a lot more open to things. Wheth- er it’s feedback I receive on how to grow in my own career, or whether it’s approaches I need to listen to, or feedback I needed to hear to become a better leader, I think Auburn really prepared me for that. you give current Auburn students who will soon be entering the workforce?
I crave a diversity of thought, and that’s really helped me as a leader, especially in this company. I can abso- lutely say that I learned that diversity of thought in my time at Auburn. HM: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you began your career? BB: That it’s going to be all right, that it’s going to be OK. I graduated and I was so ready to get into the workforce, I was so amped up and I was so ready to take on the world that I think I put a lot of unnecessary pressure on my- self, as probably a lot of college grads do. Much easier said than done, but I wish I would have just known that I’m going to be fine. I’ve got a great work ethic, I’ve got a strong belief system, I want to be successful here. This is a marathon, it’s not going to be a sprint in terms of a career. I probably would’ve enjoyed the ride a little bit more in some of those early years and not been so stressed out about trying to launch my career. HM
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