Patrick Green, Director of Healthcare Recruiting at Adilstone Group, is a longtime friend of our president, Brandon Christensen. He has over 30 years of experience in Healthcare Administration and an incredible story of going from a dietary host to the CEO of a hospital in Georgia. I had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick recently and learning about his life and career journey, as well as the wisdom he accumulated along the way. It all began 33 years ago, after Patrick had just been married and was looking to start his first career.
“I got my start in healthcare, newly married, as a dietary host handing out menus and food trays. I had grown up with my dad being in the restaurant industry, and I'm like, ‘where can I take all this stuff I've been doing in restaurants and maybe get into something else?’,” said Patrick. “So hospitals and hotels were on my list, and the hospital job came up first. And that's how I got started, I became a dietary supervisor at Gwinnett Medical Center here in Atlanta.”
From the dietary supervisor position, Patrick then moved on to a central supply job at a new hospital while also going back to school for his MBA. Over the next eight years he climbed the ladder and took on many different roles, from revenue cycle management to patient account manager to director of business operations and many more, all while attending school on nights and weekends.
After finally receiving his MBA, Patrick was given a very unique and unexpected offer. A rural hospital in Georgia was in need of a new CEO, and they wanted Patrick to take the job. After much consideration, he accepted.
“I am proud of what we were able to do there...I’m proud of the legacy I left.”
“I am proud of what we were able to do there. Over the course of the six years I was there we embarked on a new strategy built around skilled nursing and rehab therapies and expansion of imaging modalities, which created a good year-round base of revenue and made the place sustainable...so I’m proud of the legacy I left,” said Patrick. Though he hasn’t worked at that hospital since 2002, he was pleased to find that they are still implementing his strategies today, and that by doing so they were able to build a new hospital in 2020. Patrick ended up leaving his role of CEO when he realized that he was better suited to working at larger hospitals in bigger communities.
“I wanted to get back to the big city and the large hospitals, and I was able to do that. I developed a relationship with the CEO at the hospital where I had been the dietary host. We had served on the board of the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals together,” Patrick recounted. After the board’s first meeting, he approached the CEO and immediately they formed a connection. When the CEO found out that Patrick had gotten his start as the dietary host at his own hospital years before, he was impressed by how far the young man had come and decided to take him under his wing. He was the one who helped Patrick find his next role at a much larger hospital, overseeing imaging and cardiovascular services. Patrick flourished in this position for the next seventeen years, eventually ending up at Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest hospital in the state of Georgia.
Patrick loved his position at Grady, and deeply connected with the nonprofit’s mission and values. “I would probably still be working there today, honestly, except for two factors,” Patrick shared. “The first was that I was commuting three and a half hours a day back and forth to work in my car in Atlanta traffic. Four years into my five year tenure I was looking for a way out of that commute, and that's when I got a call from factor number two; this guy by the name of Brandon Christensen.”
Brandon and Patrick had met in the early 2000s when Brandon was working as a General Electric salesman. Patrick was working in imaging and cardiovascular services at the time, and he ended up buying fifteen ultrasound units from him. “I helped make him GE ultrasound salesman of the year that year,” joked Patrick, smiling.
The next year, Brandon came in with the man he was training to be his replacement. Patrick was surprised that he was planning to leave GE after accomplishing so much. When he asked Brandon about it, he told Patrick that his family was planning to move to Guatemala for a few years to help at an orphanage there. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, but he knew that working at GE wasn’t right for him anymore.
It wasn’t until over a decade later that Patrick heard from Brandon again. Over a very interesting phone call, Brandon informed Patrick of what he had experienced over the past years and of a new company he was starting called Adilstone Group. Brandon wanted him on his team, knowing how beneficial Patrick’s years of experience and knowledge in the healthcare industry would be to his startup. At first Patrick was hesitant. He loved his job and everything he had accomplished at Grady, and this new position would take him outside his comfort zone and push him to his limit. On the other hand, it might be an incredible opportunity to grow and travel and discover what he was capable of. It wasn’t until over a year later that he decided to take Brandon up on his offer.
“I started in the spring in 2019. The first thing I did was take my first ever international business trip into the Arabian Peninsula; I got to visit seven of our client hospitals in five different cities over 11 days. I had a great experience and the ride since then has been a roller coaster for sure, but I wouldn't trade it for anything,” Patrick said.
It’s no surprise that Patrick’s 30 plus years of experience in healthcare also comes with a whole lot of insight and wisdom. With a success story like his, climbing the ladder from dietary host to CEO, I wanted to ask Patrick what sort of qualities are needed to build a successful career.
“I think a lot of it is just working hard; being on time or ahead of time, showing up, doing your work and doing it with excellence, and then treating everybody around you with respect,” he told me. “If you work hard and show people respect, you're ahead of about 95% of the other people in the workforce.”
Along with those things, Patrick advised building strong relationships with coworkers and being servant-minded; in other words, looking for opportunities to serve and help out those around you. Patrick told me about a time when he was working at a psych hospital and didn’t have work to do, so he went down to the business office to see if they needed help with anything. They showed him to a big stack of papers that needed to be sorted into the filing cabinets, and he tackled the job with diligence. About every day for the next three months he went to the office during his lunch hour and sorted the papers, connecting with the people in the office whenever he went. In the future those connections opened the door for new job opportunities.
Patrick also offered a lot of advice on job seeking. “My biggest advice to anybody who's seeking a job, whether it's healthcare or not, is to really know what it is that you want to accomplish; what's going to make you feel fulfilled in your career, and then build your search around finding that,” he said. Patrick stressed how important it is to reflect on who you are—your motivations, passions, dreams—and to craft your job search around those things. Be open to new experiences and opportunities, but don’t compromise your goals.
“Nothing happens as quickly as you think it should in your twenties,” concluded Patrick. “I think especially for younger people, I would say patience is a virtue when it comes to your career. Rome wasn't built in a day, and if it takes you two, three, four years to get that next break that you're looking for, in a 40 year career that's not going to look like that much.”
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