David Patt With Association Executive Management

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:16] Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have David Patt and he is with us Association Executive Management. Welcome, David.

David Patt: [00:00:27] Thank you, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:29] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about association executive management. How are you serving folks?

David Patt: [00:00:35] Well, I serve as an executive director of associations. They hire me and I manage their events. I do a little bit of association management consulting, too, but it’s primarily the the CEO gigs, places that are looking for a CEO who’s usually works on a part time basis. And so I’ll manage two or three of them at the same time.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] So what’s your back story? How did you get involved in association work?

David Patt: [00:01:03] Well, I was I started when I was very, very young volunteering. And so by the time I started doing this professionally, I had a lot of experience. I had been the board chair, I had served on boards. And so my first job was as an executive director and I managed associations. I seem to have gravitated not intentionally, but toward turnarounds because, you know, you tend to want to fix problems. And I got good at it. And so I tend to get into organizations that have problems that need to be solved. And unfortunately, they don’t always recognize that those are problems. And so that creates a little tension sometimes. But that’s what I do, and I’ve usually worked in small associations, so resources are scarce and you have to be really smart about what you do and what you don’t do. And so a lot of times you just have to set priorities and do what needs to be done.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:53] Now, when you’re defining small, like, how do you define that? Like what is small to you?

David Patt: [00:01:59] Like less eight people or less. And sometimes you’re the only one. And so I’ve been in places where even though I was a CEO, I did a lot of other things. I did some database thing which actually was a very good thing to do and some various other things, because when you’re your executive director, you are also the chief operating officer, you are also the chief financial officer, the marketing director, the personnel director. You basically have your hands on everything and you just hire people to take care of the things that need to be taken care of that aren’t really worth your time. Or if you’re doing a lot of things, like if you do a lot of meetings, you either hire a meeting planner or outsource meeting planning, but a lot of times you set up those yourself too. And so I have a lot of experience dealing with a lot of the issues that associations have to deal with.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:46] Now, you mentioned kind of focusing on the smaller size ones. Those typically, I would imagine, have less resources available for you and to you. What are some of the priorities that a smaller association you think should be on the top of their list and that, you know, should be their kind of true north?

David Patt: [00:03:05] Well, they should do the things not just that are important, but are the absolute most important. And the way to do that ideally is your list, all the things you want to do and prioritize them. And you don’t do number 22 on the list. If you haven’t done number two. And it’s better to do a small number of things really well than to try to do as many things as you can. And that’s where some of them have problems because they feel they’re being limited. But if you really good at some things, you develop a reputation for being really good at them. And but for a lot of them, it’s tough because there are things that they think are important that just don’t rate. And so you have to you have to be very kind of pragmatic about that. So that’s like doing triage.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:46] Well, you’re doing triage, but there’s a lot of constituents that think that their issues are the most pressing. So how do you kind of prioritize that when you come in there to turn something around? Especially there obviously is a challenge happening or else they wouldn’t have brought you in. So there are things that have to be solved urgently. So how do you kind of maybe make those hard choices where the board is saying, hey, fix this and you’re like, well, let me fix this first, then we’ll get to what you think is a priority. And a bit.

David Patt: [00:04:15] Sometimes you can do that and sometimes you can’t. And the difference is partly is if what what sometimes happens is the board members who are a different stage in their lives and their careers than most of the members, they have a different idea of what’s important than the members do. And you’ll always want to put the member needs first. And I think if you can show that the members feel a certain way about something, even recalcitrant board members will go along because they realize that’s really what they’re here for. And then the ones who like just insist, no, we’ve got to do what they really care about. They’re really outvoted. And so one example I worked for a long time and probably my greatest achievement was turning around the Chicago Area Runners Association. Now, when I came in, a lot of the people on the board, they were serious, competitive runners. Some of them thought the marathon is the ultimate, ultimate goal for everybody. Well, the vast majority of runners will never run a marathon. In fact, the majority of runners won’t run any races at all. They just go out and run for health or whatever reason. And so we were able to make them realize that. And we started a lot of other programs that just took off. And and while the marathon was probably our our most profitable one, because the people who run marathons are really committed and they’ll spend money on stuff, but they weren’t the majority of people. So that’s really where you that’s that’s the the real challenge, what happens when you’re appealing to not a majority of your members, but they are, but it is the most profitable activity. But we were able to do a lot of different things and as we grew, we could do more of them and we could expand the programs. So I think everybody was happy.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:03] So are there some things that you’ve learned on how to engage members to kind of elevate themselves to maybe that squeaky wheel where they get more attention because there are more of them, even though they may not necessarily have the ear of the people who make the decisions regarding the direction of the association.

David Patt: [00:06:22] One of the things that’s important in a lot of situations is to make them give them faith in you, because all the data in the world may not convince them. So in some cases, the best thing is to just come in and be an expediter, not a change agent. There’s things that everyone agrees need to be done, get them done and get them done well. And there are probably things that they thought were important that weren’t getting done because nobody knew how to do them or nobody thought they were important enough or they didn’t have enough people doing them, whatever the reason. And once they see that you can get things done, they have more faith in your opinion about things and you can start sort of gently move them in the direction where you think they should be. Now, if things are really horrible mess, they’re more likely to listen to you. And back in the in the Runners Association in the early days, things were not going well and I wasn’t sure the turnaround would work. And board members came up to me at the end of the meeting and they said, You’re doing a great job, David. Hang in there. I realized they have no idea what to do. They’re just hoping, I think of something and you know, and so so I had a lot of political support and the president said to me one time when things weren’t going well, she says, do whatever it takes, just get us out of this. And so I so I knew they would listen to me and we were able to do things. And it turns into a phenomenal turnaround. But it didn’t look like that in the early days.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:48] So now in your work, you mentioned smaller associations. Are they typically kind of in a, B to B, setting a, B to C setting because runners sound like anybody could be a member of that. But in some of your work, it sounds like some of your work is with professional organizations where there’s are kind of business people. Well, are you kind of agnostic when it comes to this?

David Patt: [00:08:08] Well, some of them are business people. Some of them are just professionals in their field. So the really the really good at what they do, although they’re not always savvy about business because some of them don’t work in a business setting. I work for a group of doctors, for example, super people doing really good work, really important work. But. They didn’t always understand how they fit in everywhere in one place. They they wanted to adapt an advocacy program based on what they consider to be the most important issue in the profession. And I don’t doubt that they think that’s the most important issue. That’s what it is. But I told them it’s going to lose because it carried a $25 billion price tag. It required the support of Congress and the insurance industry and manufacturers, and the resources it would take to pull all that stuff together was far more than we had for our whole organization. I advise them to focus on what they identified as the second most important issue. It costs a lot less. There’s allies already identified out there, and some of our members were in positions to make this happen. And I said this one could win. And if you win, it’s important because that other people see that you’re effective and they’ll help you more later on. They just didn’t understand that.

David Patt: [00:09:20] No, they focused on the most important one and it didn’t go anywhere. So you can’t always get that across to people because they just don’t think that way. And that’s that’s probably one of the biggest challenges in a lot of small groups. The culture, people just think of different way. There are some places that people say we should do whatever it takes no matter what it costs. Well, if you do that, you’re going to run out of money and then you can’t do anything. So you have to find ways to get them to realize these things. And then you have to identify the people in these groups who who get it and try to find ways to get them to influence the other people. And sometimes it’s not an easy thing to do, and it really depends on your situation. You know, when you’re the free executive director of a freestanding group, you can pull a lot more levers. But if you’re working for a management company or if you’re managing a small group for a larger group. You. You they didn’t hire you. They hired the larger group or the management company. You were simply assigned to them and they don’t feel that they have to listen to you. So you can’t you can’t press all the right buttons all the time.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:28] Well, it sounds like a leader of an association. You know, they’re juggling a lot of a lot of people are kind of chirping in their ears. Right. You got the political side, the advocacy side. You have just the financial realities of what their situation is today. Juggling all of those priorities, it just seems like a challenge. And you mentioned prioritizing and, you know, prioritizing with some level of pragmatic pragmatism. How did you become so good at all this? Like, is it just because you’ve been doing it for so long, you’ve got a lot of scar tissue and that you’ve kind of just figured out a methodology that makes you an effective leader?

David Patt: [00:11:12] Well, it may be because I was involved in grassroots politics before I did this professionally. So I’m accustomed to dealing with people who do things for a variety of reasons. And in any situation, whether you’re dealing with members or corporate sponsors or the media, anybody, you always have to put yourself in their shoes and see how they view you so that you know how to pitch what you want. And I think that works and it enables you to say to them, for example, this is not going to pass by the legislature. So it just isn’t for whatever reason. In fact, one long time ago I trained the National Association of Social Workers that did a training for them when they were supporting a certification bill in their state. And I said, You’re going to have a problem because the clinical social workers have their own bill and the legislators are going to think that the social work field is divided and they don’t want to get in the middle of that. And they said, Oh, no, these two bills have nothing to do with each other. Well, the legislators aren’t going to understand that.

David Patt: [00:12:16] And so what you really have to do is package the two together. Well, they didn’t do it and they failed. The the licensure bill eventually did pass in a later session, but they just didn’t get it. And so I think one of the things that that’s where it comes back to, if you have a history with a group, you build that faith in you and you have to find ways to tell them how success is going to happen because they all want success and they’re not going to be that far apart on what determines success. But there are things that they have no experience with. The legislature is one of them. Advocate advocacy is another, media is another. They just don’t know how these things work. And those things work often in an illogical way. And so the thing you just have to say is it may not make sense, but this is how it works. And so we’re going to do it this way. And if you’re if you’re able to, you get them to follow you.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:09] So now in your career, what what made you kind of maybe adjust the trajectory instead of kind of being a niche player in where you started, but to serve all these disparate associations, what was kind of the thinking there and becoming, you know, kind of leader agnostic and not not mattering what the association is that you can serve?

David Patt: [00:13:34] Well, at the very beginning I wasn’t like that. I was still I was still passionate about the mission and the causes. But as I learned how to be an executive director, I learned things as I recruited sponsors, as I did fundraising. I realized how things were done and I grew. And fortunately, a lot of the board members that I’ve worked with over time didn’t. So that’s where that gap came in. And I don’t think I sat down one day and thought this through. It was just an evolution. And then I was always drawn to organizational work. And because I can see the power of an organization all by yourself, you can do a lot less than if you are part of a group that can do things and that you have a lot of different talents in the group, a lot of different contacts. And what you need is sort of a captain of the ship to make sure every everybody who’s got something to do does it. And when you hire staff, I feel that every person on the staff should know far more about their area of responsibility than I do, and be able to do a much better job at it than if I had to do it myself. And my challenge is to to combine all of their expertize for and generated toward organizational success. And so I guess I just it just developed in me. There’s one thing that that happens, though, as you as you get through your career that you have to be aware of. That as you go through it, you become a little more deferential to the people who you work for, which is good, but some of them don’t care and they just want to really someone to just charge out there and be a leader and others don’t like that at all. And you got to really know when one works and one the other and be able to switch instantly if you have to.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:16] So do you have any actionable advice for an association leader today that they could be doing, you know, in the next day or so, an action they could take that would make an impact on their association? Is there some low hanging fruit that maybe you attack early on in an engagement or something that you think is just like table stakes, that these people should be paying attention to this metric or this priority on a regular basis?

David Patt: [00:15:43] You have to pay attention to the political dynamics. And that doesn’t mean the partizan politics, but what motivates people to do things? What motivates someone to be on the board, to chair a committee, to volunteer in the organization? What are they looking for? And figure out how to how to blend that into your vision of what you think is necessary to to succeed. And keep in mind, they are the association. You are just a hired gun even. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, how much you care. You could be very knowledgeable about the field. You may even come out of the field, which happens especially in a lot of trade associations. But that’s not your role here. Your role is to be the the neutral captain of the ship. And you take the ship where it needs to go and not try to superimpose your beliefs and your values and your direction. And you don’t want them to be so reliant on that. I was in one organization where we it was time to revisit the strategic plan, and I thought there were two directions we could choose, but I didn’t think that should be my choice. And I went back to the board and said, Here are two directions which one you want to go in? And I could tell some of the people lost a little faith in me when they did that because they just always kind of go, Well, David will take care of things, so you have to find a way to do that in a way that they still have faith in you. But you’re not taking over. You’re not taking the initiative away from them. In some places they won’t let you. They’ll just kick in the teeth to try to do that. So, you know, but every every group is different. That’s the thing. Every industry is different. Every profession is different, every association is different. Every person in every association is different. And so you really have to be good at assessing what they want and and how they’ll act now.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:27] Can you share a success story where you work with the association that had a challenge? Maybe explain what the challenge was when you came aboard and how you were able to help take them to a new level. You don’t have to name the name of the association, but if you could just share a little bit about what that problem was and the solution that you were able to to give them in order to help them.

David Patt: [00:17:47] I came into one association that had it had four executive directors in the previous four years. So there’s like no leadership going on here and board members just didn’t know what was going on. I also found there are some ethical transgressions which I never imagined I would encounter, and I did. And so what I and then the money, oh, there was not a lot of money and there had been a fire in the office and the insurance settlement had.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:18] Been so a literal fire. There was a literal fire.

David Patt: [00:18:21] Fire, somebody said, fired a two places on the block, and this office was one of them. And it had nothing to do with the office. Just.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:28] Just bad luck.

David Patt: [00:18:29] An arsonist. Okay, so the the settlement was budgeted as income. Well, the settlement came in less than was budgeted, and that made a big difference. And the insurance company didn’t have good records. They said, well, our fire occurred between two big disasters and they weren’t keeping good records. So I had no idea what was supposed to be paid and what wasn’t. And so I had to make some judgments about who would be paid and who would. I’d make weight. And in the meantime, it also laid off the whole staff and which the board was relieved. I did that. If I had known they liked it, I would have done it right away. I didn’t want to seem like the guy coming in and just firing everybody, and we slowly built up and turned it around and we focused on the things that that our members cared most about. And all of our programs grew and our membership grew. And we were more successful in advocacy and we brought in more money and everything worked. But I had to overcome the initial problems that, that, that were just sitting there waiting for me. And, you know, in one case, I found this was this is awful. As we were downsizing our office in this debt ridden organization, I found a couple thousand dollars worth of cash checks hidden in various nooks and crannies around the office.

David Patt: [00:19:44] That did not strike me as a positive thing. Wow. So that’s another thing I had to deal with. The attorney said, forget it. It didn’t happen on your watch, so you shouldn’t feel personally responsible. We got bigger problems. Let’s just move forward. So we never pursued that stuff and we move forward and and things eventually fell into place and worked. And and I think you have to be you have to figure out what’s going to work and what isn’t and do the things that are going to work and and that follow conventional wisdom. One of the things we did in a couple of places I did, we stopped doing programs that were typical of our kind of organization. And some people thought we were nuts. Well, because they weren’t working, so why should we do them? We instead did things that did work. So you have to be willing to be different. You don’t follow benchmarks all the time. And it’s nice to know what other people are doing. They don’t just do something because everyone else is doing it. You do it because you think it’s going to work for you. And that’s what we did so well.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:44] Congratulations on all the success. If there’s an association out there that wants to get a hold of you, just maybe have a conversation or a brief consultation to learn to see if you’re the right fit for them. Is there a website?

David Patt: [00:20:58] Yes, it’s a pat dot com.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:03] Am hyphen dot.com. David, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

David Patt: [00:21:12] Well, thank you so much, Leigh.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:13] All right. This is Lee Kantor Willesee all next time on Association Leadership Radio.