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John Hernandez lives life in a way that can make you envious just hearing him talk about his weekend. At work, Hernandez is the director of information technology at Leisure Care, a retirement community operator focused on the long-term journey of its residents and facilities.
On the weekends, Hernandez may be sitting behind the drums in myriad musical projects. He’s currently working on a one-to-one scale replica of the Millenium Falcon from Star Wars. He’s a 3D-printer enthusiast, a committed gamer, and after years of Windows devotion, the tech leader just switched over to Linux in his fifties. He also just lost eighty-five pounds by switching to a carnivore diet. In all things, Hernandez is a tinkerer: a curious mind in search of optimization, but more so about the journey than the destination.
Just four years ago, the IT leader wasn’t feeling nearly as refreshed and excited as he sounds today. He was working sixteen-hour days in healthcare IT.
“I was heading toward a brick wall at 200 miles an hour,” Hernandez sums up. “I could feel the burnout coming.”
It’s what prompted Hernandez to examine a job listing from Leisure Care, even though the job title seemed like it might be a demotion of sorts. There was a phrase that kept attracting his attention. “The three-thirds lifestyle.” That is family, community, and work. Hernandez would learn that Leisure Care owner Dan Madsen championed a work culture where family and community come before the job, and a priority is placed on ensuring balance for employees to live their lives.
Hernandez would learn about this quickly, because a half-hour after he responded to the job posting, he got a call from the VP of IT who was interested in hiring him. His healthcare IT experience and HIPAA certifications made him a valuable commodity, and there appeared to be room for him to grow into a leadership role in the organization.
The in-person job interview was unlike anything Hernandez had ever experienced. Wine and cheese, IT strategy, and a discussion of Rush’s merits as the greatest rock band of all time. This time it was fifteen minutes after the interview that he got a call with the job offer.
And while the culture fit is perfect, it’s not all wine and cheese. Leisure Care manages, staffs, and programs more than fifty senior living communities across sixteen states, resembling small towns with their own robust infrastructures that include hospitality, travel, fitness, wellness, and even a Leisure Care-owned coffee company called Tru-Cup.
Within his first week, Hernandez had to learn the intricacies of offboarding and onboarding communities when ownership groups changed, a complicated process that involved remote-wiping devices, transitioning networks, and resetting every layer from firewalls to Office 365 accounts.
“Usually when you come into a new role, you’re basically managing what’s there,” the director says. “There are things you don’t need to learn until it’s time for a big change. Well, in this case, the big change was happening immediately, so I needed to learn a lot in a very short period of time.”
To further complicate matters, a systems administrator had just given his notice, and Hernandez had to immediately engage in a “brain dump” before the institutional knowledge was lost.
The post-COVID-19 environment also proved challenging. When one venture capitalist group sold off the bulk of its portfolio, Hernandez coached his team through an uncertain time.
“The sale happened over the Christmas holidays, and we just lost a bunch of our portfolio,” the director remembers. “I led with transparency. We didn’t know if we were going to have to let people go. We had just hired two new people. I let my people know that I would fight for them, but if they needed to move on, I would champion their next role.”
That transparency and support is a cornerstone of Hernandez’s leadership. Business at Leisure Care is currently booming. Hernandez is now in a position to provide growth opportunities for his people. He’s flying out to Florida to onboard three of Leisure Care’s new communities, and he’s bringing four of his people with him.
“I just believe in being an open book,” Hernandez says. “I want people who work with me to have the resources and skills to move into new roles and challenges. That may not be here, but while they are here, I’m going to do everything I can to help them grow.”
In the near future, Hernandez says he’s tasked himself with turning IT into a profit center, no small goal. He believes IT service can be transitioned into a service that can drive value for the organization. Developing a retirement-center focused managed service provision within the Leisure Care brand is a big move, but if you know John Hernandez, you know the man loves a big project.
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Acting as John’s guide to improve the cumbersome process of benchmarking, researching, evaluating, selecting, and implementing vendors and technology for Leisure Care’s infrastructure we helped align technology initiatives and priorities yielding vendor engagements for technology procurement for Network and Telephony services at lower than Market Rate prices for each of their properties across the US, ensured new network services were installed correctly and on time to match new location grand opening dates, and lastly helped manage contract language that aligned technical requirements with Leisure Care business strategies, especially as their merger and acquisition pace increased.
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