‘Winning is a Mindset,’ Staffing Expert Says

Jennifer Dean

Jennifer Dean loves football.

She’s a Houston Texans fan – “They have a lot of things they could do and do better, but the mindset is they want to win and that matters,” Dean said – and loves the Kansas City Chiefs because she’s a huge Patrick Mahomes fan.

The other thing about football is that Dean, the founder and president of Houston-based Dean’s Professional Services, which provides staffing, staff development and consulting in the healthcare industry, likens the business world to the football field.

To succeed you need a good coach, including special teams coaches, you have to work with a team, and that team needs to execute the play the way the coach calls it to succeed.

“There’s a good business mind, too, being out there with all these people and the only reason you’re there is to win and learn from your losses, I would hope,” said Dean, who owns bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Houston. “I think about that with business. I think I have a Super Bowl team … We win some, we lose some but, like I told them recently, we finished strong.

“Winning is a real mindset,” she added. “It’s something you have to put in your mind and say, ‘I’m capable.’ And then you have to demonstrate that. So we are finishing strong.”

Dean has been in the staffing and staff development industry for more than 30 years. Dean’s Professional Services, which has been in business for 32 years, now has more than 1,000 employees in 23 states throughout the U.S.

It’s a staffing, staff development and consulting service providing a customzied solution for staffing and onsite project management for staffing, in Revenue Cycle, Hospitality, Healthcare, Event Services and Ambulatory Services.

Dean has been a national speaker and a national customer service coach for the past 25 years. She has authored a couple of books — “An Energy Drink for the Soul the 1st Sip” and “Energy Drink for the Soul 30-day Journal”  — and has written 20 training workbooks for Training.

She sat down with Corp! Magazine to talk about her company, her career and a variety of other issues.

Corp! Magazine: You said 2024 has been a tough year. Why?
Jennifer Dean: I think there are many reasons. We came out of Covid and money wasn’t there. A lot of people were laying off and layoffs. That’s not good for us necessarily. Also because it was an ugly political year. It was not a good year at all. It’s probably my worst year.

But I told my team, this is the fourth quarter, and I often tell them we were down like 28 points in the fourth quarter, and they still won because they still thought they could.

Corp!: You’re in Houston, and you’re from Texas. Why are you a Chiefs fan?
Dean: I like the Chiefs because they look like they’re having fun when they go on the field. Win or lose, they look like it. And perception is reality. And when you can look like you’re having fun, people want to watch you. When you look like you’re miserable because you don’t think you’re going to win. no one wants to watch you. But I really enjoy the fact that they come up with things, and that’s what you have to do in business. There are things that (the Chiefs) do that I think businesses should do. Change is good. Businesses can’t stay the same forever.

Corp!: Are you doing what you’ve always wanted to do? You never wanted to be a doctor, an astronaut, a superhero, race car driver, anything?
Dean: I wanted to be a surgeon. No superhero. What happened to the surgeon? I have good hands, but that takes too long and I have  no patience, so that wouldn’t work. But I think that I have a talent for cooking and I enjoy it. So I’d like to train someone in a restaurant setting to be able to do that. I think people feel good when they eat. They don’t feel good when they eat too much, but most people enjoy good food.

Corp!: What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this?
Dean: Probably that, but I have to say I’m living my purpose and my purpose is not about me. It is my purpose. This was my chosen purpose. I have a great deal of passion for it, and I’m at peace. So if I never do anything else, I have lived my purpose.

This is my purpose. I would’ve never chosen it for me, but it shows me, in my opinion, God chose it for me. He knew more than I did, but this is my purpose. I am not complaining. I come to work with energy every day because I am living in my purpose. I have so much passion for it. People think it’s just the most unusual thing ever, but it’s because I have peace, knowing I am where I am, I’m in my season and I feel good about it. And when God sees fit to change my season, I feel comfortable with that because I have lived my purpose.

Corp!: Talk about Dean’s Professional Services. What do you do, how long you’ve been doing it, etc.
Dean: We provide staffing, staff development and consulting in healthcare. We provide customized partnerships for our clients. So we go in and we put together a plan that would assist them with their staffing, saving time, money, a lot of energy, trying to figure it out. That’s our job, and then we go wherever they go, so we just follow them around. We’ve been doing that for 32 years, so we are in 23 states, and we’re there only by nature of the client requesting, we don’t go there to solicit business, per se.

I don’t do brick and mortar anymore. I am no longer going to have offices. We don’t necessarily need them. We fly in, we do all the orientation. We make sure everything is set up accordingly. We have places that do all the compliance for us, such as immunizations and drug screens and all of that. We have a project manager that will run the project and they will go there to meet with the client, meet with the employees, whatever’s needed. And home base is Houston, Texas.

Corp!: Why healthcare? What drew you to that industry?
Dean: Well, that’s a great question, and I don’t know. I was in healthcare prior to this business 32 years ago, and healthcare is an interesting business, which I enjoy quite a bit. My family’s in healthcare, so I guess I was just attracted to healthcare. It’s a very difficult business to get in today because it’s very expensive.

Corp!: What did you do in the healthcare industry?
Dean: I was a practice administrator. I did consulting for physicians, just running their practices. We do mostly outpatient, and so that’s my niche. I don’t do a lot of hospital staffing. I’m not interested in putting nurses on the floor. I don’t do travel or anything like that because we’re not an agency in that regard. Our employees can work for us forever if that’s what they choose to do.

Corp!: How did you get into the staff development industry? What was the driving force driving you into that area?
Dean: Well, I was in college and I needed to finish, and I didn’t finish until I was 26. So I worked for a company out of Arizona that did staffing, just medical staffing, and I enjoyed it, but I thought there were quite a few things they could do differently. And when I graduated, I called and asked, and they said, well, there’s a lot of fish in the sea. So I decided to jump in the sea. So I then decided I’d like to try it and trying it became doing it, doing it became being an expert at it. So after 32 years, if you’re not an expert, something’s wrong.

Corp!: What are the biggest challenges to that kind of work these days?
Dean: These days? Probably, well, starting with just people, it’s a little more difficult after Covid to find people with really good work ethics that tend to care, our younger generation up to 40, give or take. But our younger generation, they tend to be very entitled and they work to live not to make a living. So it’s a little more, that’s very challenging because you want to find the best people to go to work for you so that your liabilities are lower and you’re not just putting anybody out there to work.

Today, I have no issue finding people. We probably get 1,200 applications a day. So I don’t have any issues finding people, which is what the issue is for most companies. That’s not my issue. Weeding through them takes a while, but I have a good marketing team, so they weed through pretty good.

And it can get very expensive depending on where they work. And because everything’s customized, we have to do exactly what the client would do because 83% of them will be hired, and that’s not the expense they want to incur.

Corp!: Is it tougher to find people to staff a healthcare or a medical company or office or facility than it would be for other industries because of the compliance?
Dean: Yes. I think so. Plus there are certain backgrounds that you can’t have in a medical facility. There’s a lot of legal and liable things that you just can’t do. So you have to be careful about who you hire. And just because you’re a doctor doesn’t mean you’re a good one.

Corp!: Experts have said the work ethic issue is particularly true among younger workers because they don’t want the same things out of a career that you and I might’ve wanted when we were their age. How big a problem is that for you?
Dean: I think first it’s an issue for me personally because I have a really difficult time with people who feel entitled and haven’t done anything to earn it. I am from the country, and once we gave our word, we worked hard. We didn’t show up 15 minutes late. We weren’t walking out if we still had work to do. You don’t want to manage that type of behavior because you tend to spend more of your time managing the behavior than you do growing your business.

Corp!: Is it tough these days to provide staffing services with so many places using remote and hybrid work schedules?
Dean: Medical doesn’t do that very much. You might get those that are in the insurance business, like member services. When you call Blue Cross BlueShield and you’re trying to get your deduction, they may work from home. And I have people who work from home doing that. But you’re not going to work from home and draw blood. You’re not going to work from home and be a nurse in a doctor’s office. You’re not going to work from home and be an EEG tech. It’s just not how it works.

Corp!:  You mentioned Covid. Are there any challenges remaining from Covid?
Dean: It’s actually  on a high right now. It’s going up. The numbers are pretty high right now.  

Corp!: What was the impact of Covid on your business, and are you still feeling any effects of that?
Dean: Well, at the beginning of Covid, yes, it impacted. We laid everybody off except my executive team, and a week later, we brought everybody back except two. It was really busy, particularly in medical, so we did quite well those three years. And then our medical facilities ran out of federal money, so they had to cut back. The problem was they paid a great deal of money for people to be in the hospitals and screenings and all of that. The people got used to making a great deal more than the market bore prior to Covid.

And now you have people who simply have a lifestyle and they just can’t make less. But then the companies can’t afford to have enough staff because they can’t afford to pay them all that amount of money. So it has presented a problem. The companies and the facilities are still feeling the effects of Covid because the money was there prior and now they have to look at it a lot differently.