KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: There’s all kinds of strategic plans. There’s ones that are very general, that sort of might identify some broad goals. If you’re going to do a new project, I would suggest that there should be a part of your plan that is very, very specific. Especially identifying what your outcomes gonna to be. What you want. If you want to develop an adaptive equipment department or program, I would make sure that that part of your strategic plan is sort of your planning, that you could pull that out and you can show it to people and say, here’s our plan. To create an adaptive equipment program. And that doesn’t happen overnight. A good strategic plan takes time. One of the things that I would really suggest is that how many of you include consumers in your planning process? Yeah. It’s really important that people in your service area get included in that process. You can do it, however, like in Montana. You have to drive a million miles or have people come in to participate. There’s lots of really creative ways you can get consumers to participate in a strategic plan. You can do surveys, you can do focus groups, you can do chat rooms, you can use Twitter, there’s numerous ways that you can get feedback from people about what they think is important. Or if you want to ask questions about, do you think we should start an adaptive equipment program and identify what you would like to see that look like and have people react to that. It’s really important that the consumers and your staff and your board really buy into this. And if it’s part of the planning process, they will. Especially if you can make changes really specific to recommendations that come from that group of people. If you do an internal process, which I consider a more closed staff and board, and we have done that before. We just didn’t have the time and the energy to do that. When we do a thorough one, we also do a community survey. Have any of you done any of those to get feedback from the community? What did you use? Can you tell me what you used to get that input? Can you use the speaker? SPEAKER: Disability awareness day. And at that event, we prepare a survey asking the vendors, we have 40 or 50 vendors and we have like 3 to 400 people come to the event. We have them fill out paperwork, asking us what do they feel is the three or five most priority needs in Las Vegas and then there’s other questions to that, but the priority, the main goal of the survey is to find out what is really needed in Vegas. What’s missing. SPEAKER: Good. That can give you focus in deciding to provide a service, especially if it’s something new. We have done all of those in numerous different times and found out that there’s some really efficient ways. We use SurveyMonkey. You can send that to hundreds of people and get really quick, calculated information back about what people think are priorities. One of the other things is who in the community knows you and what do they know about you or what do they think they know about you. One of the things that came up of our probably third strategic plan is that a lot of people in the community thought they knew us and thought they knew what we did and we found out they thought we were a sheltered workshop. Yeah. Ouch. And we were really concerned about that. So we started asking questions that were also educational. Are you aware that we provide advocacy to anybody around these kinds of issues so as they were answering questions, they were also being educated about who we were. But it’s really important that the community understand who you are. So then you get feedback from an organization if we asked these folks to fill out a survey about us. They would be thinking that we were providing sub-minimum wage to people with disabilities or they would have a day activity center. And that wasn’t the kind of feedback that we wanted as an organization. So we felt we knew we had some work to do. So part of our strategic plan was to change the community’s views and information base about who we were. So when you go to do this, you may find out that you have a whole lot of work ahead of you before you would think about creating a business or you could do that along with educating and doing outreach around this new product or business that you’re going to provide. You also need to utilize other resources that you might have available. I went to my auditor because I was terrified about possibly not catching everything I needed to when I was trying to identify rates, setting rates for what we were selling. Other CILs that do a really good job of fee-for-service and I found a, in a very strange way, I found a non-profit in our region. It was a community action program that we had done. We sent them a shame on you letter because they built an apartment building with federal and state dollars and it was not accessible. And we went over quietly and did a survey and then sent the survey and sent them a shame on you letter. And they were really upset with us. That’s when we realized that we didn’t play very well with other folks in the sand box and we really needed to change the focus of our organization to be better partners. And the director who is still my friend, despite all that, decided we needed a mentor and she sat down with me and we helped figure out how we can clarify our role. And how we could be better collaborators with other folks. If we wanted to change the system, a shame on you letter isn’t going to do it. Being a partner with them and helping them understand why now they need go back and fix the entrance and mark their parking lot and put in an elevator, that they have to do it but they understand why. One of the things that, to develop an agency plan, is to really set priorities. If your priority is to develop a new product, a new business, you need to spend some time flushing that out. You need to identify the contracts and the process for each of those. Any kind of new business needs to have its own process. And you need to keep your staff and your board really well informed. How many of you share your strategic plan with the public? Okay. We print ours in our newsletter. Because we want people to know what we’re doing. And it’s not the entire plan, but we help people understand what our priorities are, so we publish our priorities and if we have something that we think is really fun. For example, if you were going to start a new business, we certainly would put that in there. The last one we did, we decided we need to open another office. That’s been in our strategic plan for ten years. And we are finally going to be able do it. And so we’re doing a little, yahoo, we’re opening an office in Monroe County, yay. And the community picked up on that, put an article in the newspaper, got asked to be on two radio shows, so those kinds of things, sharing who you are and what’s important to you, is something you should be willing to share with other folks. How often do you review your plan with your staff? Anybody? Quarterly? Once a year? Yeah? She’s the strategic planning queen there though. AUDIENCE MEMBER: We have an annual three-day training with all our staff where the agency shuts down for three days and we review everything. And that’s part of it as well as the personnel handbook and everything. SPEAKER: Wow. You do all that in three days? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Okay. That’s a nice practice. AUDIENCE MEMBER: It’s intense. It’s all day. SPEAKER: That’s great. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think if you’re going to spend the time and energy on a strategic plan, you need to keep it somewhere, not in a drawer. The first three we did, we kept in a drawer. Now the board asks me every other month to give them an update and then that update is shared with all our employees. And a lot of times, it’s not me that accomplishes whatever was in there, it’s the staff. And it’s a cool way to let the board know who’s accomplished what within your organization. If it’s the development person, who’s just met her goal already in a year instead of two years, just going to bring in $50,000 of what we call clean money that you can do all sorts of things with, you would identify that and identify it with that person so that there’s a little, we party a lot at our agency. We don’t have a whole lot of money to send you to a national training. Don’t have that kind of money. What we do is celebrate internally. And take pictures of us celebrating internally. And put that in the newsletter. So people know we’re proud of what we accomplished in our organization. If we can go to page four. You also need to identify what kind of contracts. We’re talking about contracts now. Identify what contract success would look like to you. How many of you have a contract that brings in some sort of funds into your organization? Okay. Can some of you yell out what kind of service you sell under your contract? You. What kind of service do you provide. SPEAKER: (Inaudible) SPEAKER: Everybody does that. Yeah. Okay. It’s a good moneymaker. That’s a good basis for that. Anything unusual? SPEAKER: We do employment services with the department of rehab. SPEAKER: Really? SPEAKER: Largest in the state of California. AUDIENCE MEMBER: We provide to all the new taxi drivers, through the whittle C taxi driver or the (inaudible) we provide ADA training to all the new drivers. They have to participate in this training. And we have a fee-for-service with that. And that’s been going on for the last ten years. SPEAKER: Ten years. That’s a different thing. I’ve never heard of that. It’s really a cool idea. SPEAKER: I’m sorry. Okay. AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you’re going to try to identify what success looks like, you need to figure out internally what that means to you. So does it mean that you keep your contract forever? Dennis was talking about how sometimes the market just doesn’t last for a service or the demand is gone. And so we all thought that ADA was going to get old because all these businesses were going to become accessible, right? But the need is still out there. That market has stayed open. The same with the loan program that I was talking about that we go in and do the 504 assessments. And by the way, I need to clarify some of that. It’s the USDA. The U.S. Department of Ag where that loan program is. For us, not having staff turnover, if we’re going to do something new or we have a new contract, because you can have all the experience and all the success head right out the door when a staff person turns over. But I try not to let that happen. I get really paranoid, so I create a lot of depth. I always have a backup person trained. So sometimes you don’t even get that amount of time to do that. So you need to decide in your plan, does this look like success for me that someone stayed a year. Or we’ve had great outcomes for the year or for a quarter or whatever. Whatever is important to you folks. Do you maintain financial stability? Is the funder satisfied with your results? So those are things that are important to us. You need to decide within your organization what’s important to you. Same with fee-for-service. Because we typically think about staff time, how much money we want to have come in each month, how quickly we can collect it, because it really doesn’t matter. How many of you have ever done anything with the Veterans Administration? How quickly do you get paid? Or do you get paid? You do. In Wisconsin, it takes us 120 days to collect. They pay, but it takes 120 days. We did not know that when we started out. And we learned quickly because their process is just, and somebody leaves in their billing department, it can take ten months. So it’s things like that that you need to understand when you decide that you’re going to do a fee-for-service. Consumers have really good outcomes. Again, you’re going to hear that over and over that if consumers aren’t happy, they’re not going to tell the buyer that they should continue to purchase this service. And a lot of times buyers do their own satisfaction surveys. We do them at our agency, but it’s typically not specific to one program. We do all open files, CSRs, all get a satisfaction survey. And we don’t distinguish between fee- for-service and not fee-for-service. This year, we will because we need that information. I think it’s really important that also, if the buyer decides to do a survey that you know that. We had an agency in one of our counties where something happened. We’re not quite sure, but all of a sudden, DVR decided to go in and survey all the customers that they had in that county. And the place that was providing the employment service lost its contract. So we’re not quite sure what went on. So remember that they can do it. They have the right to do it. They’re paying for the service. So they can always ask. I would ask or check to make sure if it’s in your contract. I think it’s also important that you involve staff in generating ideas for change, engaging people in the process is just so important. One day, somebody came to my office and Laurel said, can you just explain something to me? And I said, sure. She said, wWhat is the difference between a contract and fee-for-service? And so, I said, well, do you have some time? And I gave her a really quick answer. And she said I really think you should come to our staff meeting and explain this to people. And then something came up this morning on a sticky notes. What was the question? How do you show staff that fee-for-service isn’t any more important than core services. And that’s come up before in our organization too. So we have discussions, open discussions where people can say, there’s pressure. I feel pressure because you want me to do fee-for-service because it brings in unrestricted funds and how do I know what’s more important? Because we give staff a lot of freedom, to set their own schedules but what we do control is referrals. I wouldn’t give you eight fee-for-service referrals in a row. We would spread it out among 12 people and they get just like this. And same with regular I&Rs that don’t have any funds attached to them. So we try to keep it as fair as possible. So no one feels like they’re getting sort of dumped on. We have some staff hired specifically to do fee-for-service. We have community-based peer specialist skill trainers and benefit specialists. They knew that from the get-go. They weren’t hired as, we call all our IL staff independent living specialists. And then we have community-based skill trainers and we have benefit specialists. So when people feel like, I want to tell a story about our benefits specialist. Ethan’s been around for 14 years. He was part of the contract that we got when we did unemployment. And one day he came to my door and he said, is there a chance I could do a little IL every day? And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, I do benefits all day long. Could I just work with a homeless person or something? I was like, well, sure. So every day, he gets to look at the I&Rs that come in and he gets to pick one. And if he’s too busy, he doesn’t have to take one. But he really misses that general assess to independent living. Even though he practices it every day in his fee-for-service. He misses that core service activity that’s going on. So some of this is different personalities and how you run your organization, but I think it’s really important. He knows how important he is, but it doesn’t go to his head. He billed in March, he billed $17,000 worth of benefits reports. One staff person. 17,000. He had them all almost done. In our state, you have to meet with the DVR counselor and the consumer before we get paid. And so he scheduled 17 meetings. He finished them in two months and then had 17 meetings in the month of March. So we’re able to bill for all of them. He knows how much he generated. He knew he generated $17,000 of income for our agency that month. But he’s a real team player and he really gets embarrassed if you try to draw any attention to him. But it’s a small office. People know that, boy, Ethan just brought $17,000 in. Everybody gets a financial in our agency also. They all get to see our monthly financial reports. Post them on a bulletin board. If they want their own copy, they can make it. So they know, when it says benefits specialists or benefit reports, $17,000, it’s right there. So I think one of the things you have to understand is if you’re going to ask someone to do that that they know that from the get-go, they they’re only going to do fee-for-service and that they’re part of a team. That they’re not any more valuable than someone who is doing core services all day long. When we decided to make some changes, we put a lot of time and energy into involving staff in preparations for the change. And around our place now, committees and work groups are like a dirty word. We used to have, yes? Question? SPEAKER: Thanks. What about pay rates for those folks who are involved in fee-for-service work as opposed to the folks who are paid through your title VII grant? SPEAKER: They’re the same. An independent living specialist starts at the same rate, no matter whether they’re doing fee-for-service or not. Everybody does a little bit of fee-for-service and everybody does a little bit of core service, except for Ethan, our benefit specialist. SPEAKER: Okay. And would that be true of the person that’s doing your benefits also? SPEAKER: Yes. He’s been with us 14 years, so he makes more money than other people. And he’s gotten more raises. But if we would replace him, they would start at the same rate somebody else does. SPEAKER: Yeah. I would just reflect that that’s probably one real valuable thing to do is to maintain equal pay rates. And I know that some centers don’t do that and that may send a very different message to different staff folks. So back to what I was talking about. We were talking about involving staff. We have committees for everything at our organization. And one of our biggies is quality assurance. When we decided to do fee-for-service, we developed a quality assurance committee, we had work groups galore. One group dropped three different job descriptions. One developed, with two other staff, a billing process, we had a search group for ten years looking for office space that we’re finally going to get. We had a search group go out and find cheap or free office space for us. We had a group that worked on IT upgrades. We had a group that worked on policies and procedures. And kept a recruitment team, because we weren’t sure, when we were all done with this, we had to set some guidelines as far as when would we feel we made enough money and felt this was successful enough that we would start to recruit staff. And so we kept a team ready who then had the job description, they developed interview questions and were ready to recruit people. This kept people really busy, really informed and people got really excited about it. I think it’s also important that you decide when things aren’t going well. If you decide what success means, you also need to decide what failure means. When is it time to get out. We’re struggling with that with our personal care program. You call it in different states, different things. This is Medicaid-billed personal care. And we are just about ready to pull the plug. And I’m probably the one that’s pushing it the most, but we have some staff that are really hanging on and some consumers who really do not want to see it end. So we’re going to do one more college try and do some marketing, regroup, and try to see if we can’t save the program. We shall see. But my bottom line, when we’re losing money every month, we’re done. And you have to set that for your own center. We don’t have that much money in the bank yet. So we can’t afford to have a loss every month. And our board is a little squishy on the whole personal care thing. They understand we have probably 70 or 80 consumers that really don’t want to change. They have been with us since the get-go. They want to stay, they like the way we deliver services. So the board, one month is saying, okay, let’s try it again. And then they’re going, oh my God, it lost $3,000 this month. So I think at some point, we have to set some guidelines. And I think if you’re going to go into a new project, you should definitely have those. Some of you have a lot of money in the bank, then you decide, how much money are we willing to lose? And some don’t.