Compass Surgical Partners’ newly appointed CEO Mark Langston is stepping into the role with a clear operational focus. After previously serving as the company’s chief development officer, Mr. Langston joined Becker’s to discuss how his top priority is building people, processes and infrastructure ahead of growth.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What’s the first thing you plan to do as CEO that you perhaps couldn’t do as chief development officer? What are your priorities?
Mark Langston: The first thing to know is that even though I was in development before, our leadership team never really siloed work. So I had my hand in a lot of pieces, and we were always working across lanes. But stepping into the CEO role, I’m definitely going to be more involved from an operations perspective.
A lot of people don’t realize that the first half of my career was steeped in operations. I learned healthcare services in the seat of an operator — multi-site — in diagnostic radiology. Then I moved into the surgery center world and never looked back. So I’ve always been a general manager and operator of businesses that turned into the M&A guy. Now I get the opportunity to do both.
I’ve always developed through the lens of an operator, so now I get to be the CEO through the lens of an operator and a development person. It’s a good background that sets me up for success, because in order to be good at anything, you’ve got to have the right foundation of people, process, technology, and tools. That’s what we’re focused on — making sure we have those things and continuing to build them.
As we grow at scale, the enterprise has got to scale ahead of it — not with it, but ahead of it. So my ability to be hands-on from an operational perspective, getting closer to our physician partners, continuing to work deeply with our health system partners in a different way, and understanding how we’re recruiting people and developing talent across our entire enterprise — that’s huge.
Q: Can you tell me what you mean by scaling ahead of it, and what that looks like operationally?
ML: We are going to grow through three themes: adding new physicians to our existing partnerships, adding new facilities through de novo and acquisition with our existing health system partnerships, and adding new health system relationships.
To add a new health system relationship, we will be going into a new geography. We can’t formulate a joint venture and have a void of operating talent behind it. We have to build scale in advance as we complete new joint ventures so we can be ready to hit the ground running when the joint venture is finalized.
We will have a plan for what facilities we are going to align with through partnerships, where we need to build de novo facilities, and where we need to convert HOPDs to ASCs — we’ll have all of that laid out. So having an idea of where we’re going, building the people and infrastructure ahead of time, and scaling internal processes and teams to support continued health system growth and support with a local focus on the system’s specific strategy is paramount.
