CEO INNER-VIEW: Fletcher McCusker
By Gary Hirsch, Inside Tucson Business
Published on Friday, September 04, 2009
Fletcher McCusker, chairman and chief executive of Providence Service Corporation recalls: “I was working for Youth Services International, a successful public company that specialized in institutionalizing kids. I made some money and watched the owners make a small fortune. It was a demoralizing environment in which I learned how not to run a business.” Sitting on the beach with his wife he declared, “I hate this job.” His wife challenged him to start his own company. He replied, “You’re right. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
That was December 1996 and within a week he launched Providence Service Corporation. The company had its first contract the next month. Today, Providence employs close to 200 at its Tucson headquarters and 11,000 in 44 states. They could go anyplace to start the business but his wife suggested they “go home” to Tucson.
McCusker was born in El Paso and returned to Tucson less than a year later. He attended Amphitheater High School, the University of Arizona and earned a master’s degree at Arizona State University.
Life wasn’t easy. His father left and his mother married five more times.
“I told myself I wasn’t going to live like this,” McCusker recalls. “My mother moved me to 15 different cities before I graduated from high school.” His mother died two years after he left home. McCusker was 20. He and his two half-sisters remain close.
McCusker recalls, “I didn’t know what was appropriate for me as an adult male.” He found solid role models at YMCA camp and ultimately served that organization as a board member.
“I was fortunate. A counselor I met at Y camp was a recruiter for the Arizona Children’s Home. I started at $2.10 per hour,” McCusker said. “In school I studied rehabilitation and at work I witnessed real rehab taking place.”
In college, he trained as a therapist, graduating with a major in rehabilitation. He worked his way through college as a resident counselor at the children’s home, where he worked for seven years.
Boyd Dover, hired as director of the Pima County Juvenile Court, recruited McCusker to help run the court. At 24, he would serve as the youngest deputy director of juvenile courts in the United States. Their paths would meet again when Dover would later serve as president of the southeastern division for Providence Service Corporation.
After starting his own residential treatment program, McCusker went to work for a company running those same programs. He found he was more entrepreneurial than therapeutic and hungry for knowledge about recruitment, development, finance and management. He also wanted freedom from large bureaucracies.
While he learned a great deal working for others, the big learning came from starting Providence Service Corporation. “We learned by throwing ideas against the wall and we stumbled through all the things startups stumble through.”
The no-show rate of traditional Medicaid clients was about 65 percent. Providence would serve children and families the way nurses provided home health care. “We went to the payers, traditionally governments, and said we could take the services to the clients. They asked when we could start. The phones started ringing and we’re now in 450 cities serving 300,000 clients.”
True to his beliefs, McCusker designed Providence Service Corporation as a decentralized organization. Each state is headed by an entrepreneurial president who has operating autonomy. The corporate level is sparse; operating out of what was Frank Craycroft’s original home. Turnover in the field is less than 15 percent compared to 80 percent in similar organizations. “We have created loyalty to our ideology, by how we treat people and to our mission.”
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