36 minute read
ON THE TABLE
from D CEO December
by DCEO
ON THE TABLE
Mark Masinter Has an Eye for Innovation
The retail and real estate guru behind one of the region’s largest new projects explains why brick-and-mortar is here to stay.
story by KELSEY J. VANDERSCHOOT
illustration by JAKE MEYERS
mark masinter begins our conversation at Sixty Vines in Uptown by telling me he’ll probably opt for a “semi-healthy” lunch. “On the weekends, I don’t do semi-healthy,” he laughs, ordering the shareable hummus trio to start and the Asian Chicken Chop salad as his main. “It’s a good go-to here,” he says.
Masinter helped develop Legacy West and a retail concept that features rotating brands through pop-up displays, alongside Matt Alexander, who fleshed out its business plan and dubbed it Neighborhood Goods. “We’ve gone from an idea to three stores, and we’re going to open two more stores in the next six months,” he says. The new Neighborhood Goods locations will be in California, though Masinter is planning to expand nationwide.
Henderson Avenue is also on his mind. When Masinter first moved to Dallas in the ’80s to study political science at Southern Methodist University, he felt something was missing in the city’s retail scene. “It was very commercial,” he says. “It didn’t feel like it had a soul.”
He formed his own company for emerging retail and restaurant brands during the real estate crash in 1986, and caught his big break with an upstart out of Eureka, California—Restoration Hardware—where he became responsible for creating the real estate strategy for the brand and securing all its brick-and-mortar locations. Masinter’s firm landed a similar role with Apple in 1999, when the tech giant was looking to develop a retail presence. “It really informed me on everything else I did after that,” Masinter says.
“Everything else” included gigs with J-Crew, Madewell, Tesla, Warby Parker, and more. Now an industry veteran, Masinter is on a path to give Dallas retail the personality needed to attract consumers and new brands to an underutilized area on Henderson Avenue.
The area has struggled to find its place—especially with its Knox Street counterpart recently separating itself from the off-U.S. 75 neighborhood. Masinter envisions transforming nearly 4 acres into a shopping mecca with its own vibe, much like the Marina in San Francisco or Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach. He says the shift toward innovative retail brands was already underway in the area: It just needed a maestro.
Masinter has come up with plans for a development between McMillan Avenue and Glencoe Street that mixes housing, office, restaurant, and retail spaces. Dallas’ city council approved the plans in 2018, but construction has been delayed due to the pandemic and a capital partner, CIM, monetizing its investment. Masinter hopes to have new financing by the end of 2021 or early 2022, break ground in the last half of 2022, and complete construction 20 months thereafter.
Looking ahead, brick-and-mortar, the retail prophet says, will still be essential to brands, despite increasing reliance on e-commerce. Masinter says successful players will focus on creating authentic and engaging connections with customers. He already sees this consumer shift to unique brands with intriguing appeal happening in Lakewood, Bishop Arts, and Lovers Lane. “Dallas is getting a soul,” he says.
ASK THE EXPERT
Managing Employees with High-Functioning Anxiety
AMANDA MANCHACK, GROUP EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LCSW-S, CONNECTIONS WELLNESS
What should CEOs be aware of when it comes to employees with high-functioning anxiety? It is important to distinguish the diffrence between a generalized anxiety disorder and a high- functioning anxiety disorder. As with most mental health diagnoses, generalized anxiety disorder requires symptoms to interfere with one’s activities of daily living for a prolonged period of time. With high-functioning anxiety, one symptom is the inability to let anxiety affectdaily living--to the point of feeling the need to do everything perfectly all the time. Does high-functioning anxiety make someone less capable of performing at a high level? Absolutely not! Some employees with high-functioning anxiety will excel at high-level tasks and projects due to their tendency to be perfectionists and a desire to go beyond the expectations set before them. Most individuals with high-functioning anxiety present as outgoing and detail-oriented, and they can foresee potential issues others may easily overlook because of their inclination to over-plan and think through all potential outcomes. What are some management techniques or recommendations you can share? The best manager for an employee with high-functioning anxiety is one who shows appreciation for the work they doing, while also recognizing early on when they are putting more pressure on themselves than necessary or healthy. Individuals with high-functioning anxiety can be prone to burnout by overanalyzing relatively simple instructions or allowing their anxiety and planning to get in the way of actually completing tasks. Should managing someone with highunctioning anxiety impact confidene in their ability to lead a team and/or deliver high-quality work? With attentive managers, clear expectations, and an organizational focus on self-care, an individual with high-functioning anxiety can thrive at work and be an amazing supervisor. For a supervisory role, it is important to clearly outline expectations and to make them aware that they cannot expect everyone to meet the same high standards they put on themselves. The supervisor with high-functioning anxiety needs a competent team who can deliver high-quality work but, more importantly, can help them focus on slowing down and appreciating successes as they occur. What are some resources for managing high-functioning anxiety? There are many things someone with high-functioning anxiety can do to manage their symptoms, including allowing themselves time to stop and appreciate their accomplishments, diffrentiating anxious thoughts from expectations, and committing to regular self-care. Some other external options include talking with an individual clinician to better understand where their anxiety stems from, how to set healthy work boundaries, or joining an outpatient program in a group setting that focuses on managing anxiety.
AMANDA MANCHACK
is a licensed clinical social
worker who has a passion for
advocating for the under-
served, underrepresented,
and overall misunderstood.
With a decade of experience
serving patients in the mental
health field, she has also held
numerous supervisory roles
where she trains and mentors
fellow social workers and
mental health professionals.
Connections Wellness
Group is a nationally accred-
ited healthcare practice able
to care for any need, from
the acute depression to the
common cold to everything
in between.
Connections Wellness
Group has received more
than 29 best-in-class awards,
including local, state, na-
tional recognition for clinical
outcomes. Connections Well-
ness Group has successfully
opened 10 locations this past
year and is on trajectory to
double this number in 2022.
CONNECTING YOU BACK TO WHAT MATTERS MOST
JASON McCANN REVOLUTIONIZED OFFICE FURNITURE.
story by MATT GOODMAN
portraits by SEAN BERRY
NOW, HE HAS HIS EYE ON COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE.
MAYBE IT’S BEST TO START WITH DAN FLAHERTY’S BACK. THE IDEA TO CREATE A STANDING DESK—THE VARIDESK—STARTED WITH THE BURNING PAIN THAT SHOT UP FROM THE ENTREPRENEUR’S HIP WHENEVER HE SAT DOWN AT HIS DESK. RESPITE CAME ONLY AFTER STANDING TO WORK, WITH HIS COMPUTER SITTING ATOP A CARDBOARD BOX.
Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to start with Vari CEO Jason McCann growing up in Galveston in the late 1970s, sweeping hair at his mother’s salons and spending evenings talking about appointments around the dinner table. Business was an essential part of life, as normal as telling his folks about his school day. Homework meant class assignments but also riding his bike to the bank before it closed to deposit a green bag of cash.
With those sorts of lessons and behaviors coming at such a young age, they became part of McCann, so much so that decades later, when something novel comes along—like a standing desk that takes minutes to assemble—he could quickly see its potential.
Both Flaherty’s back and McCann’s business upbringing are foundational to Vari. But foundations are meant to be built upon, to sustain whatever vision the people in charge have for the structure. And so, what started as a desktop converter that allowed employees to stand while they worked has now morphed into something much bigger: a customer base comprising the entirety of the Fortune500 list, a full suite of offic furniture, real estate holdings, partnerships with brokers and landlords, investments in co-working, and an ambition to transform office space on a and scale.
For his innovations and success at building Vari into a global force, D CEO has selected McCann as its CEO of the Year for 2021. To understand his story, it may be best to start in the margins. That’s where McCann keeps spotting things that few others see.
BUT FIRST, LET’S get back to Flaherty’s back. He and McCann co-founded Vari, partly because of how ridiculous Flaherty looked working with his laptop perched on a box. Flaherty was McCann’s boss at Coppell-based Gemmy, which manufactures and distributes holiday lights and infltables and other such ephemera to some of the largest retail chains in America. (Gemmy’s most popular item over the years is the singing Big Mouth Billy Bass, all the rage in the late 1990s.) McCann, now a cherub-faced 52-year-old, was the company’s president at the time.
Flaherty had taken up cycling and, during a 60-mile ride, the cyclist in front of him slammed on her brakes. Flaherty couldn’t unclip from his pedals in time, which sent him
tumbling. His seat broke off. He spent the next 35 miles riding with no seat and spent the next few years paying for it. It hurt to sit for long periods. Workdays could be excruciating—until he stood up.
The few standing desks that were available at the time were hulking and took hours to assemble. Flaherty, as he often does, saw an opportunity to innovate. What if he could design a product that would rest on an existing desk and be put together in minutes? Flaherty couldn’t find aything like it on the market.
Surely, he wasn’t alone, he thought. Others must want—or need—relief from sitting while working. Doctors told Flaherty his pain likely was related to the sciatic nerve and piriformis muscle, which looks like a squash blossom near the pelvis and serves as one of the hip’s rotators. Standing, he discovered, made the pain go away. Beyond that, it added health benefitsfor those who didn’t have that pain. “The key to living longer is movement and activity,” McCann says. “We started to encourage it and started to provide the tools.”
At firt, the duo tried selling their innovative VariDesk like a traditional piece of offi furniture, getting it to distributors for resale to other companies. McCann and Flaherty took the concept to folks like Steelcase and Herman Miller, but nobody seemed to know what to do with it. Flaherty remembers one distributor incentivizing salespeople with donuts and small bonuses. “Jason and I looked at each other like, ‘OK, this officfurniture industry is so antiquated,’” Flaherty recalls.
Instead of slinking away, McCann asked what has become a guiding principle for Vari: “How can we do this better?” And so, they zagged, reaching out directly to consumers through e-commerce and cutting out the middlemen that govern the vast majority of this country’s office furniture dtribution.
Around this time, in 2012, the two men were on a flightwhen they saw a Wall Street Journal article on the negative health and life-expectancy impact of sitting for long periods. Sitting was called “the new smoking.” McCann and Flaherty passed the newspaper back and forth, their eyes growing wider at each new fact, realizing how their new product could help.
They couldn’t have picked a better time to create a standing desk. Nothing like it existed—at least nothing so easy to configure and store and use—and now studies were preaching the gospel of verticality. Shortly thereafter, Gemmy spun offVariDesk into its own company with McCann at the helm.
THE DIRECT-to-consumer model created a new community that began informing an expansion in VariDesk’s portfolio of products. First came a floormat to stand on, chairs that would raise or depress, and full-on standing desks that could be used as conference or worktables. Then it released an electric version of its original product, which still lived on the desk employers provided.
This is where Flaherty and McCann diverged. Flaherty considers himself an idea man, more entrepreneur than CEO—even though he literally is still CEO of Gemmy— who “sees a problem and knows there’s an easy solution.” Officfurniture is a notoriously difficult business segment to break into, partly because of the entrenched relationships between distributors and purchasers. VariDesk delivered something that was missing from the market, but would the same appetite exist for a full suite of officfurniture? Soft seating for lounge areas? Lights? Partitions?
“We could have taken it two ways,” McCann says. “We could have said, ‘Oh, we’re done,’ or we could challenge ourselves to grow. We’ve got VariDesk; we’re now pushing into what Vari is. Could we innovate entire workspaces?”
In 2014, the company began branching out into other segments based on the idea that businesses wanted more versatility in their office It expanded its B2C approach to include B2B. McCann believed there was an appetite for flxing, that a tenant with a 10-year lease might need something differentin terms of furniture about halfway through. Why did they have to tear out walls as staffing vels changed?
By 2017, about 2 million people worldwide were using some sort of VariDesk product. Businesses were pushing McCann’s design teams to do more and help them transform their office with the company’s products. They proved McCann’s hunch; they were buying walls that could be moved around and full-sized standing desks. VariDesk was selling lounge seating, lighting, and more. The “desk” part of the company’s name was beginning to feel self-limiting and quite inaccurate. So, McCann engaged Landor Associates, the
OUTFITTING The Office
Vari has moved beyond its original desktop converter to build a portfolio of more than 300 products. Here are a few of the mainstays:
1 2
3 4
5 6
1: (2013) Original VariDesk hits the consumer market. Today’s best-selling converter is the VariDesk Pro Plus 36, designed for dual-monitor setups or larger workstations.
2: (2017) Standing conference table makes its debut. Available in four finishes, it accommodates up to eight people; tall chairs are optional. Comes on roll-and-lock casters.
3: (2018) Electric standing desk is launched. It’s replaced with a 2.0 model in 2020 that comes in three sizes and fie finishes. djusts in height from 25 to 50.5 inches.
4: (2018) QuickFlex Walls are introduced. Made of tempered glass and heavy-duty aluminum, they feature optional wall and ceiling anchors; whiteboard finishes vailable.
5: (2019) Privacy booth is added. It features a fied-height shelf and built-in charging outlets, ventilation openings, an automatic fan, and sound-dampening felt lining.
6: (2019) Soft seating is launched, including sofas, lounge chairs, coffee tables, ottomans, side tables, and more. Comes in fie collections: modular, lounge, casual meeting, and quiet.
firmresponsible for the rebrand of FedEx, to give it a refresh. With the direct-to-consumer approach, people knew the VariDesk brand. McCann likens it to the Kleenex of offic furniture. “If you ask someone what desk they use, they’ll say, ‘I don’t know,’” McCann says. “But they know a VariDesk.” Landor Associates built on that awareness, and the modifiedVari brand was born. By this time, McCann already had his eye on another industry to disrupt— commercial real estate.
THE FORMER Zales Corp. headquarters in Las Colinas was a real time-warp of a building, so specificallydesigned for its jewelry tenant that most prospective buyers balked at the substantial retrofitthat would be needed. There was a secure vault in the basement for jewelry deliveries, and the rows upon rows of wavy glass bricks placed it squarely in the 1980s. Its centerpiece was an escalator.
The property near State Highway 114 sat empty for fiveor six years before Vari bought the distressed asset in 2018. McCann saw an opportunity that was grounded in his past— an ambitious proof of concept. Back when he was at Gemmy, representatives from the company’s large retail partners—think Home Depot, Walmart—would often travel to China and Hong Kong to view the manufacturer’s new offeringsfor upcoming holiday seasons. McCann had the idea to make the showrooms luxurious with the kind of amenities you’d findat a nice hotel. Its competitors didn’t provide an experience like that. Visits to Gemmy calmed buyers after long flightsand the stressful navigation of dense city streets. It gave them something to look forward to instead of something to have to do.
By 2020, VariDesk was Vari and had a full catalog of officfurniture and other products. It also had gotten into the education market by acquiring a company called Stand2Learn. The Las Colinas building was close enough to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to make day trips doable to pretty much any market in the country. Potential clients could come to see how flxible the space was and look at the company’s furniture in action. Conference rooms could collapse or expand in less than an hour; pods could be recalibrated to accommodate new project teams; an R&D lab could expand or contract.
When a guest walked into the revamped building, there was now an enormous, beautiful staircase where the escalator had been, right behind the reception desk, which was also a coffee shop. Eyeing the beautiful space, McCann had a thought: Why not start renting it out?
And, so, Vari became a landlord, offeringtenants fully furnished spaces with shorter leases, usually three to fiveyears. McCann called the new platform VariSpace. It filleda hole in commercial real estate. Traditionally, landlords want longer-term commitments from their tenants to make the cost of redesigning their space worth it. VariSpace didn’t need to take down walls. It could redesign its open floorpla in tandem with the tenant, using its own furniture that it would keep once users left.
Flaherty had for years been a passive investor in commercial real estate and was aware of how costly tenant improvements could be. Before he sold offhis investments, one of his buildings leased to a large insurance company for three years with no finish-outwhile the business waited to move into a new corporate headquarters that was being built. Another tenant moved in right afterward. McCann had another epiphany, like Flaherty standing in front of a cardboard box on his desk. “If you talk to CEOs, they’ll say, ‘I don’t know what my real estate needs are going to be fiveor 10 years from now,’” McCann says. “Business goes up and down, ebbs and flows”
Space in the Las Colinas building got snapped up by RumbleOn, Akili, and Verizon, which took 200,000 square feet. McCann replicated his success with VariSpace Southlake, leasing 82,000 square feet to Microsoft during the pandemic. He then made his most ambitious bet yet: doing ground-up development of a new offic building in Coppell, one that wouldn’t require the major rehab the others did. Just a few years ago, the company just had a desktop converter; today, it is leasing nearly 1 million square feet of commercial real estate.
VARI HIRED Dallas-based Corgan to design the interiors of the three buildings. These weren’t typical jobs, says Lindsay Wilson, one of the architecture fir ’s two presidents and head of its interiors practice. “It was so fun for our team because it made us ask, ‘Maybe it’s not a problem?’” she says. “The conventional
REINVENTING Real Estate
Vari hopes to do for commercial space what its VariDesk has done for office furniture through a new platform called VariSpace. Its holdings include:
VARISPACE LAS COLINAS
SIZE: 305,000 square feet STATUS: Fully leased TOP TENANTS: Verizon, RumbleOn, and Akili ACQUIRED: November 2018
VARISPACE SOUTHLAKE
SIZE: 380,000 square feet STATUS: 52 percent leased TOP TENANTS: Microsoft, Solo Stove ACQUIRED: August 2019
VARISPACE COPPELL
SIZE: 180,000 square feet STATUS: Under construction TOP TENANTS: New global HQ for Vari LAND ACQUIRED: December 2020
wisdom of real estate is you market it to what tenants are looking for. No one had really disrupted it this way. People use the word ‘disruptor’ so flagantly … but Jason was constantly saying, ‘Why does it have to be that way? Why can’t we do it better?’”
Wilson says VariSpace dared to provide Class A amenities—a lounge, a café, a gym, places to work outside (which would prove prescient)— to smaller companies that likely wouldn’t be able to affordit otherwise. Larger companies looking for interim space also didn’t have to slum it in an outdated cubicle farm. McCann bent a bit on his insistence that everything be flxible. “They had clients saying, ‘We love 98 percent of this, but we have to have an enclosed conference room for private meetings and confidentialiy,’” Wilson says.
But in March of 2020, Vari, like the rest of the world, had to send everyone home. The company had been experiencing such momentum. It had closed on the Southlake property, hired about 50 new salespeople, and had plans to open showrooms in a dozen other cities. McCann went into “over-communication mode,” sending daily emails to the McCann adopted whole company, holding an all-black wardrobe to weekly Zooms that shared eliminate at least one daily decision. updates but also offere meditation and yoga classes. He leaned on what a friend told him when SARS and H1N1 threatened Gemmy’s Asian operations a decade before: “We’ve got to keep rowing until the wind catches our sails,” McCann says. “That became our mantra.”
And so, he zagged again. He opened a new distribution center in Atlanta, getting the products closer to more companies in the middle of the country. Sales reps began coordinating with business clients to get Vari products to their employees at home. Before March 2020, about 70 percent of the company’s products went to corporate officesand 30 percent went to residences. After the pandemic hit, online sales skyrocketed, and Vari was shipping about 90 percent to homes.
McCann won’t reveal annual revenue numbers or financialsfor the private company. He’ll only allow that Vari has done about $2 billion in total sales since it was launched in 2013. The dozen showrooms have opened, from Phoenix to Washington, D.C. And, as the country emerges from the pandemic, Vari, which beyond its own innovative real estate maneuvers took a stake in co-working company Common Desk in 2019, has found a very interesting offi market. According to Cushman & Wakefield,the availability of sublease space is up 76 percent year over year and 99 percent since the start of 2020. That’s about 147 million square feet of offic space sitting empty across the country.
McCann is betting that landlords will be looking for a way to reconfigurethat space to appeal to tenants that are still trying to figur out their space needs. He’s betting that the three VariSpace locations are proof that, as tenants grapple with work-from-home and in-offic strategies, they need flxible lease terms and spaces. The CEO—who’s so focused on growth that years ago he switched to an allblack wardrobe to eliminate at least that daily decision—is betting that this is the next iteration of Vari, where its products give companies the tools they need to innovate and operate in a way no other furniture company has.
He’s betting that, just as Dan Flaherty believed when putting his laptop on that cardboard box, there has to be a better way.
Quality is measured by thread counts and finishe for The Pampered, whether unwinding at home or jet-setting across the globe.
1. The Laundress, Le Labo Detergent, $45/ The Laundress. 2. Peacock Alley, Spa Bathrobe, White, $190/ Peacock Alley. 3. Byredo, Hand Wash and Lotion, Suede, $65 (hand wash) $70 (lotion)/ Forty Five Ten. 4. Diptyque, Feu de Bois Candle, $68/ Forty Five Ten. 5. VitaJuwel, Glass Water Bottle, $120/ Neiman Marcus, Four Seasons Las Colinas. 6. Joanna Czech, Dry Massage Body Brush, $39/ Joanna Czech. 7. Dr. Barbara Sturm, Sun Drops SPF 50, $145/ Forty Five Ten. 8. Tekla, Pinstripe Poplin Sleepwear, $310/ Tekla. 9. Joanna Czech, Facial Massager, $189/ Joanna Czech. 10. NuFace, Fix Line Smoothing Device, $149/ Joanna Czech.
EXECUTIVE GIFT GUIDE
Curated collections of holiday gift ideas for business leaders of every personality.
by BIANCA R. MONTES, HAMILTON HEDRICK, AND JAMIE LYONS
photograpby by KELSEY FOSTER
The Professional is all about paying attention to details; accessories are purposeful, understated yet elegant, and made of exceptional materials.
1. Celine, 16 Bag, Light Burgundy, $2,950/ Forty Five Ten. 2. Molekule, Air Mini+, $499/ Molekule. 3. Sonos, One, $219/ Sonos. 4. Baccarat, Be@rbrick, $370/ Neiman Marcus. 5. Cire Trudon, Dada Candle, $125/ Grange Hall. 6. Casarialto, Cotisso Totem, Amber, $810/ Forty Five Ten. 7. Leatherology, iPad Portfolio, Signature, Camel, $190/ Leatherology. 8. L’Objet, Haas Simon Leg Table Lamp, $1,100/ Forty Five Ten.
1. Leatherology, Nested Travel Organizer Trio, Black Onyx, $260/Leatherology. 2. The Pillow Bar, Globetrotter Travel Set, White, $199/ The Pillow Bar. 3. Away. The Carry-On: Aluminum Edition, Silver, $545-$565/ Away. 4. Aesop, Departure Kit, $53/ Aesop. 5.Cereal City Guide: Paris, $24.99/ Barnes & Noble. 6. Native Union, Leather AirPods Pro Case, Brown, $40/ Neiman Marcus. 7. Steamery, Pilo Fabric Shaver, Grey, $50/ The Container Store. 8. 111Skin, The Antioxidizing Bag, $190/ Neiman Marcus.
Although functionality is a must, The Traveler blends a passion for technology with sophistication and style.
The Foodie has an adventurous palate and is all about indulging in flvors, experience, and the latest kitchen gadgets.
1. Gran Centenario, Leyenda, $219/ Total Wine & More. 2. Acetaia Giusti, Aceto Balsamico di Modena IGP 12+ Year, $139/ Eataly Dallas. 3. Marcato, Atlas 150 Pasta Machine, $85/ Eataly Dallas. 4. Our Place, Always Pan, Spice, $145/ Nordstrom. 5. Lobmeyr, Carafe and Tumblers, $270 (carafe), $120 (tumblers)/ Grange Hall. 6. Menu, Norm Architect Bottle Grinders, Carbon and Ash, $80/ Design Within Reach. 7. Feast For The Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography, $37/ Amazon. 8. Murano Glasses, $120 and $98/ Forty Five Ten. 9. Ooni, Koda 12 Pizza Oven, $399/ Crate & Barrel. 10. Fabbri Amarena, Panettone, $19-$38/ Eataly Dallas. 11. Defined Dish, $15/ Interabang Books. 12. Tartine Bread, $40/ Crate & Barrel.
The perfect watch or a chic pair of shoes embody The Stylish, and unexpected wardrobe decisions separate them from the pack.
1. Juergen Teller Handbags, $125/ Artbook.com. 2. Balenciaga, Tote Bag, Black, $1,650/ Neiman Marcus. 3. Celine, $440/ Forty Five Ten. 4. Prada: The Complete Connection (Catwalk), $75/ Getty Museum Shop. 5. Celine, $850/ Forty Five Ten. 6. Shinola, $900/ Neiman Marcus. 7. Title of Work, Wool Tie with Brass Figures, $500/ Grange Hall. 8. Jay Shree Dalal, Gold Paperclip Necklace, $4,225/ Grange Hall. 9. Fernando Jorge, Gold Flame Ring, $2,950/ Grange Hall. 10. Jill Sander, $590/ Forty Five Ten. 11. Jill Sander, $1,290/ Forty Five Ten.
From backyard campfies to off-the-beten-path weekend getways, The Adventurer is always ready for anything.
1. Pendelton, Takima Camp Blanket, Mineral Umber, $169/ REI. 2. Menu, Modern Brass and Steel Rechargeable LED Lantern, Olive, $180/ Food52. 3. The Kinfolk Garden, $40/ Anthropologie. 4. Shinola, Leather Wrapped Boxed Flask, $140/ Neiman Marcus. 5. Tom Ford, $440/ Neiman Marcus. 6. Bala, Bala Bangles, 2-Pound, Sand, $65/ Bala. 7. Therabody, Theragun Elite, $399/ Therabody. 8. Oura, Smart Ring, $299-399/ Oura. 9. Solo Stove, Bonfire, $349/ Solo Stove.
2021 EXCE L L E NCE IN HEA LT H
The C A R E AWARDS Mission to Save story by WILL MADDOX photography by DAN
SAELINGER
Dallas’ Children
Children’s Health’s innovative partnerships are helping it have an impact where it’s needed most.
THE HAWKING SHELL of what used to be RedBird Mall in southern Dallas is a place in transition. A new, free-standing Starbucks on the outskirts of the sprawling parking lot contrasts with a closed and vacant Golden Corral bufft. Across Camp Wisdom Road, there are multiple to-go daiquiri locations interspersed between fast-food restaurants and payday lenders.
Surrounding the mall, construction fences make traversing the retail space difficult, but they signal that change is on the way. Retail space is transforming into healthcare. The area is one of hope juxtaposed with neglect—healthcare with unhealthy options.
This corner of Dallas will soon be an outpost of Children’s Health, joining affil ted organizations Parkland and UT Southwestern in the former mall. But it will be more than just a place to see a pediatrician or specialist. It will be a symbol of a greater mission, a manifestation of the desire to serve the underserved and be an educational home for providers in the region. The southern Dallas development may be unconventional for a healthcare facility, but Children’s Health is no stranger to unconvential beginnings. In 1913, a group of nurses organized the Dallas Baby Camp, an outdoor clinic on the lawn of the old Parkland Hospital. It was part of the growing recognition that children were not just small adults in mind or body and needed their own hospital to serve their unique needs.
More than 100 years later, the health system is the only hospital in the region ranked in 10 out of 10 specialties by U.S. News & World Report and is the eighth-largest pediatric healthcare provider in the nation. In the 1990s, Children’s Health took over the safety net care for children of Dallas County from Parkland Hospital. But what makes the system stand out this year is how it is reaching out to the community to expand access to patients and serve as an educational outlet for area providers. For those reasons and more, Children’s Health has been named the Health System of the Year in D CEO’s 2021 Excellence in Healthcare Awards.
MINDING THE GAP
Dallas is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. An Urban Institute study recently ranked Dallas 272 out of 274 cities in the country for opportunity for all residents, especially underserved populations, to benefitfrom and contribute to economic prosperity. By any number of measures, Dallas is split between the haves and have-nots, and that lack of economic integration plays out in racial division, too. In a UT Southwestern measure of life expectancy in diffe ent Dallas ZIP codes, crossing a highway from a low-income neighborhood to a higher-income neighborhood can mean an increase of more than 20 years.
In Dallas, Interstate 30 is often the line of demarcation. Opportunity, resources, and, yes, healthcare are concentrated on the north side of town. While hospitals, clinics, and provider officeare Mental Health Hub
Children’s Health is the regional base of a state program called the Child Psychiatric Access Network, which allows pediatricians to register and have access to pediatric mental health experts. Many primary care physicians do not feel adequately trained to address mental health issues, even though as many as one-third of all cases involve mental health concerns. The Texas Legislature funded the program to give pediatricians across the state free access to child psychiatrists at Children’s Health. The primary care providers can discuss patients and situations with experts to allow them to grow in their own practice and treat low-level mental health conditions without referring the patient to a psychiatrist. Because of a shortage of pediatric mental health providers, scheduling a visit can often take weeks or months to schedule. Children are more likely to get in to see their pediatrician than a mental health specialist, and consulting via CPAN can help providers manage symptoms before they become an emergency.
ubiquitous in North Dallas, southern Dallas experiences a dearth of healthcare options. That distance can be a hurdle for the residents of the city’s southside, meaning they may not be able to get the care they need for themselves and their children.
Students in Dallas Independent School District, which is 94 percent students of color, experience asthma at more than a percentage point higher than the national average. Half of children in Dallas County are either obese or in danger of becoming obese as adults. These health gaps mean more missed class, growing the educational gaps that already exist between low-income students of color and their wealthier, White counterparts.
It is into this segregated environment that Children’s Health is planting, but their patients were already coming from communities like this. Seven of 10 Children’s Health patients have Medicaid or CHIP, half are Latino, and one-fith are Black.
Partnering with UT Southwestern via a joint pediatric enterprise, the new development will anchor the Reimagine RedBird development and include around 68,000 square feet of space dedicated to pediatric service lines. The services will be anchored in primary care and include specialists such as cardiologists, pulmonologists, urology, and others. Co-locating primary care with these specialties will add convenience for patients who may not be able to make several appointments at different places “We as a system want to be able to go out to the community irrespective of their payer mix,” says Dr. Dai Chung, the chief medical officeof Children’s Health System and UT Southwestern’s Joint Pediatric Enterprise. “We truly believe in our mission, and we want to provide the best care for the kids in southern Dallas. That’s the foundation and why we have a strong presence there.” The facility will be a pediatric resource closer to home for underserved in southern Dallas. The system is also making a push to have a clinic in RedBird that will focus on training pediatricians in the area to diagnose and treat mental health issues. It will have child psychiatrists who can help improve the area’s pediatric network to be able to identify and treat the lower-level behavioral healthcare matters in their practices. Initiatives such as this have a multiplying effet on the community, as pediatricians are better equipped and educated. “Care is always a better idea closer to home,” says Chris Durovich, CEO of Children’s Health. “This is a holistic endeavor to keep the child physically and mentally well. Our effots are a natural extension of who we are and what we do. We are working with community providers to be a resource of primary care, specialty care, and mental health for the growing community in southern Dallas.”
THE OTHER PANDEMIC
While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every aspect of society, the isolation and cancelation of life threw gasoline on the flamesof an already burning pediatric mental health crisis. A study of more than 80,0000 children from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 12.9 percent of children experienced depression, and 11.6 percent felt anxiety before the pandemic. The August 2021 study found that depression was present in 25.2 percent of children, while 20.5 percent had anxiety. The conditions of the pandemic caused prior levels to double. At times during the pandemic in North Texas, there weren’t enough inpatient psychiatric beds; Children’s Health would house patients in other areas or the emergency department while staffmade contact with other facilities across the region to finda bed in another facility. But help was on the way. Given an influxof children with mental health conditions into the health system’s emergency departments, Children’s Health created an innovative partnership with Perimeter Health, a relatively recent arrival to the North Texas region. Its Perimeter Behavioral Hospital of Dallas began accepting patients in the early days of the pandemic, and has quickly grown. The Georgia-based health system provides School Telehealth behavioral health services for children and adults; its quality and ability to expand caught the eye of Children’s Health. The systems began sharing best practices and quality data, and soon a small Healthcare innova- partnership grew in a big way.tors are always trying to lower the bars Perimeter has two pediatric behavioral health hospitals in North to access care, and Texas; the partnership allows patients who come into Children’s Children’s Health has Medical Center needing psychiatric hospitalization to be transplayed a massive role ferred to Perimeter, where it had reserved in connecting children to providers through and staffed40 beds explicitly for use by paDallas-Fort Worth. The tients arriving from Children’s Health. Pehealth system’s school- rimeter remodeled its space to add the cabased telehealth program allows children pacity, and now provides 10 intensive care to see a provider and unit beds for children with more intense be diagnosed while at behavioral health needs. school or learning from “It’s a unique relationship, says Philip home, avoiding the scheduling, extra trip Willcoxon, regional CEO at Perimeter. “It to the pediatrician, and will be interesting to see how it works. So missed work that often far, it has worked very well. But it’s a case follows a sick child. The study to say, ‘Does this work here? Can it appointment can also lead to a prescription work in other markets?’ At the end of the that can be delivered day, it goes back to the patient getting the to the home or picked appropriate level of care. These relationup at a local pharmacy. ships are important, not just for our needs Whether it is asthma, flu, pink ye, earaches, or Children’s Health’s needs, but the needs or other conditions, of the patient and their family.” the program connects The partnership gets children out of a students and their hectic emergency room quicker, helping parents at more than two dozen school them receive the treatment they need in a districts and more than timely manner. The timing couldn’t have 200 schools via their been better. “I can’t even imagine what it school’s nurse with would be like if they had not opened up a Children’s Health physician or nurse at that time,” says Sue Schell, Children’s practitioner. Health vice president and clinical director
of behavioral health. “Prior to that, there were very few patients that could be hospitalized. That’s frightening when you think about it and look at the impact on the pandemic.”
A COMMUNITY EFFORT
The United States has some of the best hospitals in the world, and if patients need top-notch pediatric care, they can’t do much better than Children’s Health. But if barriers prevent those patients from receiving the excellent care offeredby the system, it might as well not exist. Both the partnership with Perimeter Health and the RedBird expansion are part of a larger trend in healthcare of improving access for patients. And in a year where a lingering pandemic has made regular medical care and a connection to an integrated system even more critical, Children’s Health is satisfying a growing need for kids and their families in North Texas and around the country.
Part of Children’s Health’s mission is to provide the right care, at the right place, at the right time. With the tide of mental health needs threatening to overwhelm providers and more than one in fivechildren in Dallas County living in poverty, that mission needs to be fulfilled now more than ver.
“As we are able to reach into communities and provide primary care with our partners, it helps us steward our resources and enables us to continue in our mission,” Durovich says. “Kids from Highland Park and South Dallas are all coming through here, and we are going to continue to provide care where they live and go to school. It’s a community effot.”
Bedside telehealth gives providers and patients in need access to specialists.
ORGANIZATIONS
INDIVIDUALS
2021 Excellence in Healthcare
Winners and Finalists
ACHIEVEMENT IN COMMUNITY OUTREACH
National Association of Hispanic Nurses, Dallas Chapter
FINALISTS: Baylor Scott & White Health and Wellness Center; Taylor Counseling Group; Texas Health Resources
ACHIEVEMENT IN INNOVATION
TimelyMD
FINALISTS: BlockitNow; Children’s Health; IntelliCentrics
ACHIEVEMENT IN MEDICAL RESEARCH
UT Southwestern Medical Center and Texas Health Resources
FINALISTS: Baylor Scott & White Health; Prism Health North Texas
OUTSTANDING WELLNESS PROGRAM
Baylor Scott & White Health
FINALISTS: Choice Health at Home; Methodist Health System; Whitley Penn
OUTSTANDING HEALTH SYSTEM
Children’s Health
FINALISTS: Baylor Scott & White Health; Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council; Medical City Healthcare; Methodist Health System; Texas Health Resources
OUTSTANDING HEALTHCARE COLLABORATION
Nexus Recovery Center and Parkland Health & Hospital System
FINALISTS: Baylor Scott & White Health, Texas A&M University, and Baylor College of Medicine; Children’s Health and Perimeter Health; Methodist Health System and Dallas County
OUTSTANDING MEDICAL REAL ESTATE PROJECT
Texas Health Resources
FINALISTS: Baylor Scott & White Health and American Cancer Society; Children’s Health; UT Southwestern Medical Center
OUTSTANDING MERGER OR ACQUISITION
Steward Health Care
FINALISTS: AMN Healthcare; MB2 Dental; StratiFi Health
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN HEALTHCARE
Dr. William C. Roberts, Baylor Scott & White Health
OUTSTANDING HEALTHCARE ADVOCATE Robert Ferguson, Texas Health Resources
FINALISTS: Karla Alvarado, Baylor Scott & White Health; Dr. John Carlo, Prism Health North Texas; Diana Driscoll, POTS Care
OUTSTANDING HOSPITAL EXECUTIVE
James (Jim) Scoggin Jr., Methodist Health System
FINALISTS: Dr. Dai Chung, Children’s Health; Kirk King, Texas Health Resources; Zach Mueller, Medical City Healthcare; Janice Walker and Dr. Alejandro Cristobal Arroliga, Baylor Scott & White Health
OUTSTANDING HEALTHCARE EXECUTIVE
Stuart Archer, Oceans Healthcare
FINALISTS: Dr. Christopher Crow, Catalyst Health Network; Awstin Gregg, Connections Wellness Group; Clayton Walberg, Aspen RxHealth; Dr. Andrew Ziskind, Southwestern Health Resources
OUTSTANDING HEALTHCARE INNOVATOR
Vicki Nolen, Christus Health
FINALISTS: Nick Reddy, Baylor Scott & White Health; Kirsten Tulchin-Francis, Scottish Rite for Children; Danielle Wesley, Children’s Health
OUTSTANDING HEALTHCARE PRACTITIONER Dr. Jeffey Zsohar, Baylor Scott & White Health
FINALISTS: Dr. Anthony F. Boyer, Methodist Richardson Medical Center; Dr. Dawn Denise Johnson, Children’s Health; Dr. Allison Liddell, Texas Health Dallas
OUTSTANDING HEALTHCARE VOLUNTEER
Kristen Baidy, Children’s Health
FINALISTS: Tim Davis, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Denton; Marjorie Jackson, Methodist Health System; Raymond Ornelaz, Baylor Scott & White Health
Imagine. Empower. Impact.
The Real Estate Council (TREC) would like to thank our greatest resource, our members, for a successful 2021. As we work to serve the Dallas community and beyond, the power of the commercial real estate community is undeniable and our members’ collective expertise, and dedication provides unlimited potential for creating a positive, transformative impact on our city.
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