Getting better at getting better
Fleet manager for a trucking firm. Investment advisor. Physician practice operations manager. Competitor in the Frostbite Series boat race off Lake Michigan … in November!
Take experiences such as these, and add an underlying belief in the power of teamwork, and one starts to get a pretty accurate picture of the professional development of John Kropf, national account manager for Henry Schein.
Raised in suburban Chicago for most of his growing-up years, Kropf graduated with a finance degree from the University of Iowa in 2005. He moved back to Chicago in 2006, got a master’s of business administration from DePaul University in 2013, and joined Henry Schein in 2014. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife, Kate, and two sons – Will and Ben.
Racing Penguins
His father, Gary, ended his working career as the vice president of sales and marketing for Allied Machine & Engineering in Dover, Ohio. His mother, Joanne, was a teacher at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio (LeBron James’ alma mater, Kropf points out). She was nominated in 2010 as a “Top Private High School Teacher in the State of Ohio.” Both are retired and live in Florida. (His sister, Karen is a management consultant with Boston Consulting Group.)
“My dad was always fixing and racing something when I was a kid,” he recalls. “Before I was born, it was motorcycles (on ice!), then it was sailboats, which is when I started to get involved.” By age eight, he was on Lake Michigan helping his dad as he raced a 28-foot sailboat. By age 11, he and his father were racing Penguins (11-foot long, two-man boats) in Burnham Harbor in what was called the Frostbite Series in October-November.
From about 1997 until 2015, Kropf’s father raced a 1959 Austin-Healey Sprite (called a “bugeye” because of the placement of its headlights) with the Vintage Sports Car Drivers Association. (He is still involved in the Race Committee.)
“Around 2012, as a Christmas present, he gave me the opportunity to go to drivers school,” recalls Kropf. “I had my racing license for three years, and we got to share a couple ‘Enduros,’ where you each drive 30 minutes as a team. It was an awesome experience to be on a track with such pieces of art and history, including Lotus Super Sevens, Corvettes, Porsches. But it was an even cooler experience to be able to share my dad’s passion with him and see what it was all about.”
At the University of Iowa, he began studying engineering, which speaks to a love of math. But after taking Thermodynamics and C++ Computer Programming in his sophomore year, he changed his mind and transferred into finance, with a minor in journalism.
Fleet manager
His first job out of school was as a fleet manager for CRST, a trucking firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was responsible for managing a fleet of about 45 to 50 independently contracted trucks, doing everything from load-planning logistics, to time off and payroll, to fulfilling safety requirements, to training students, to improving efficiency.
“I mention the independently owned and contracted part, because I think the concepts around owning your own business were my biggest takeaway from my time at CRST,” he says.
“These drivers owned their own trucks, and they had the right to say ‘no’ and refuse loads – which is much different than your standard ‘per mile’ employed driver. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is when I first started selling.
“A large part of that role was getting the fleet on board with the company’s objectives or load requests, which weren’t always aligned, to say the least. (Think Denver in the winter/snow.) I learned a ton about how these folks operated their businesses, managed expenses, found entrepreneurial opportunities, took care of their employees (co-drivers/students), etc.
“I was watching and helping 45 people run 45 small businesses.
“Additionally, I learned – without knowing it – about the power of relationships in negotiations. The better I got along with certain drivers and the longer I worked with them, the more likely I was to get them on board with my ideas and strategies. It wasn’t just a mathematical formula to get from point A to point B efficiently; it was trust on a personal level – both ways – that really drove success in that role.”
Investment advisor
In 2006 Kropf moved back to Chicago and took a position as a portfolio administrator (unlicensed) for Mesirow Financial. He worked on a team of six people that had over $1.3 billion in assets under managements in financial portfolios for individual families and 401(k) plans for small and large businesses.
After passing exams to receive his securities licenses, he became the analyst for the team, executing trades, including mutual funds, bonds, CDs, options and more. He also had responsibility for running 401(k) enrollment meetings for corporate clients, and he maintained rate-of-return reports for customers as well as the firm’s internal due diligence files on certain funds, including ETFs, or exchange-traded funds.
“The most fun – and the most I learned – was finally having my own clients,” he says. He grew his own book of business, which included some NBA players. “We dealt with agents, marketing partners, family members, cash flow issues, etc. Every day was different.”
Perhaps the most important takeaway for Kropf was learning “the customer service aspect of managing a business, and the value to the client of taking things off their plate,” he says.
“It was extremely important not to get caught up in how to make our own lives easy, but how to be ‘easy to do business with’ from the client’s viewpoint. In my opinion, what really separated the good advisors from the great ones was the level of service and personal touch that each customer received.
“Having people trust you with their money is a responsibility very different from most careers, and it is literally impossible without the trust of your clients.”
Teamwork
Getting the MBA from DePaul opened his eyes to the power of working with a team of people to analyze and improve the operations of an organization.
“While at DePaul, I met a professor, Kenneth Thompson, who really had an impact on me. I think his class was called ‘Performance Improvement,’ but it was basically ‘how to get better at getting better,’ as he put it.” Through Thompson’s involvement as a lead examiner for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, Kropf became a member of the Illinois Performance Excellence Board of Examiners in 2014.
“We had the opportunity to analyze the operations of an elementary school, and provide feedback,” he says. “This experience really opened my eyes to the value of learning and applying strategies across industries. We had healthcare practice operations people, Six Sigma black belts from manufacturing, a nurse, a CEO, and others on our team – all providing input to an elementary school. It was fascinating, and the end result/assessment provided tremendous value to the school district.”
Additionally at DePaul, Kropf was placed on a team of five people that provided pro-bono management consulting services to administrative leaders at a Chicago Public Charter School. “We helped them deploy software and processes that assisted the school with managing the coordination of activities/documentation around certain educational programs and requirements. It was eye-opening to become submerged in some of the challenges and obstacles this school system was facing, and the dedication they had to delivering for the kids they were educating.”
Practice operations management
DePaul’s MBA program had an internship work/class credit component, designed to partner students with companies with short-term needs and perhaps permanent roles for applicants with the skills developed during the internship. With the help of contacts at what was then called Adventist Health Partners (now AMITA Health), Kropf secured an internship helping the organization revamp its budget process (from a volume/encounter -based system to an RVU-based system). “With my financial background and interest in process improvement, this seemed like an awesome opportunity,” he says. When an operations manager role opened up, he was offered the position. “This was operationally facilitating their growth (50 to 60 providers per year) and managing their ambulatory supply chain.”
After becoming associate director of operations in 2014, and following the creation of AMITA Health (a joint operating company formed by Adventist Midwest Health and Alexian Brothers Health System in Arlington Heights, Illinois), Kropf became more involved in business development.
For example, as a strategy to increase patient referral compliance and keep patients in the network, he helped transform a small call center into a Referral Coordination Center. “Our staff would follow the patient from the time a referral to a specialist was made, to obtaining any necessary insurance pre-authorization, to reaching out to the patient to schedule directly into the specialist’s calendar, to ensuring that all necessary referral paperwork was completed in the EHR.”
The system called for behavior changes at many different points.
“We were asking the practices to enter referrals into the EHR differently,” he explains. “We were asking the EHR system itself to be set up in new ways to do new things. And we were asking our specialists to give us access to their calendars – maybe the hardest sell of all.
“We were becoming a remote extension of some of our practices,” he says. “We moved the needle within the medical group on generating new specialty revenue, increasing our Meaningful Use 2 (now part of MACRA/MIPS) and Patient Center Medical Home key metrics, increasing health system ‘keepage’ (that is, reducing leakage), and, most important, providing a valuable service to the patients by helping them navigate a sometimes confusing referral process.”
A good fit
In 2016, Henry Schein had an opening for a field sales consultant calling on independent practices in Chicago. “When I spoke with Lisa Keenan – zone general manager at Schein – about the role, she said Henry Schein was looking for team members who could help across the entire spectrum of practice management, not just the supply chain. Henry Schein’s Solutions Portfolio really appealed to me, and I thought it aligned with my skillset very well.”
Even with his experience with AMITA, Kropf had plenty to learn about the non-acute-care world. “What surprised me was how difficult it was to change behaviors or purchasing patterns, even if it made perfect financial, clinical, or operational sense,” he says. “As a rep calling on independent small practices, you need to make the financial piece make sense, but you also have to make it easy for them to do business with you.”
And the rep has to rely on a team of people to make that happen, he says. “You cannot earn new business without each piece of the puzzle fitting together – pricing, shipping, website, accounts payable, data, credit, customer service.
“I had to lean on my internal partners and teammates to identify opportunities, to locate the necessary data, and to develop a strategy for those opportunities. I was very lucky to have a capital equipment specialist to assist with CHC expansions; fantastic sales support to open new accounts; GPO and contract specialists to help me find and access new/best-cost basis; a business intelligence team to run, sort, and present data in ways that spoke to our customers; and regional and zone sales managers to open doors for me.”
Today, as a national account manager, Kropf has responsibility for three large Midwestern IDNs. “This role [is] a tremendous opportunity to see how providers in different markets and specialties are tackling challenges, and then to [share] some of these concepts with our other customers. I’m talking about things like acquisition implementation, formulary/catalog development, contract compliance, supporting value-based-care reimbursement and vaccine standardization. These are challenges all of our customers are addressing in some way or another. Who better to learn from than other customers?”
The future is bright for reps who can identify their customers’ pain points and help them solve their problems quickly and efficiently, says Kropf. “If we can use our resources to help our customers hit their financial goals in creative ways, they are going to continue to involve us in their decision-making processes.”