018 Pulling the Plug on a $22 Million Program | Missio Nexus President and CEO Ted Esler

Ted Esler launched a partially self-funded health insurance program for the staff of Missio Nexus member organizations. It grew from zero to $22 million in about 18 months. Then COVID arrived. 

Claims went quiet while people stayed away from the doctor, so the program looked healthy when it was not. The bills landed all at once when they came back, and the losses grew large enough to threaten an association running about $2 million a year. 

His consultants told him to ride it out. He decided to pull the plug. 

Then he laid the full numbers in front of his members, against advice that this was too much transparency, and asked them to help cover the debt. Every one of them agreed, each paying an extra month's premium to keep the group whole.

The conversation opens out from there. Ted has watched many CEOs make these calls up close, and he names the inability to say no as the most vexing problem he sees capable leaders face. 

He talks about strategy as choosing what you will not do, and the pruning season his own team is in right now. He also holds a quieter conviction: a CEO with no life outside the work will not last in it. His standard icebreaker asks leaders to name a hobby, and rules out family and reading, because he wants to know who they are when the job is not in the way.

Ted Esler is President and CEO of Missio Nexus, the trade association for the faith-based mission agency world. The organization is  109 years old and serves 340 member agencies whose staff work across the globe, including active conflict zones. Ted has led Missio Nexus for over 10 years.

Transcript

Introduction to Missio Nexus and Leadership Decisions

Adam Jeske 0:04

Nonprofit CEOs are constantly making consequential decisions, often under pressure or in isolation. I'm Adam Jesky, the nonprofit CEO advisor, and this is the Nonprofit CEO Podcast, where CEOs talk about the decisions they carry. Today our guest is Ted Esler, president of Missionexis. Ted, welcome to the show.

Ted Esler 0:22

Thanks for having me, Adam. I'm looking forward to talking with you.

Adam Jeske 0:26

First off, give us a view of Missio Nexus. What kind of organization is it?

Ted Esler 0:32

Yeah. Well, you know, every industry has a trade association. And basically, we are the trade association for the faith-based nonprofit mission agency world. We have about 340 or so uh mission agency members. And our members are spread out all around the world. A lot of our work is actually with the C-suite because the staff of these organizations is so dispersed globally, many times unreachable, like right now. Uh there's plenty of folks that are working in a couple of the hot war zones you're hearing about on the news. Um so we service them and help them. Uh our mission statement is to catalyze relationships, ideas, and collaboration. And we really stick to that and try our best to make that mission statement come alive.

Adam Jeske 1:26

And in your how long have you been leading there, Ted?

Ted Esler 1:30

About 10 years and about seven or eight months

Consequential Decisions in Leadership

Ted Esler 1:33

now.

Adam Jeske 1:33

Okay. So a good long run. In the course of that decade and change, uh, tell me about a consequential decision you've needed to make uh as the president there at Mr. Nexus.

Ted Esler 1:46

Well, I mean, I would just kind of lead by prefacing this with the both the most consequential decisions have been the people you choose to bring on your team. But I won't talk about that one. Um I've got a couple of great team members, and those were big decisions, but uh probably the the biggest decision, the most the most difficult decision, I would say, is uh for a couple of years we ran a partially self-funded health insurance program for the staff of our member organizations. And we kept hearing from our member organizations that healthcare costs were their biggest struggle. So we contracted with the consulting firm, we developed this program. It went from zero to $22 million in the span of about uh maybe 18 months. And then this little thing walked into our lives called COVID, and health insurance became uh really difficult if you were a new program. Um, you know, health insurance is a scaling game, and we were on target to meet our scaling numbers until COVID hit, and then uh everything kind of went in reverse. And not only that, but during COVID, nobody went to the doctor for a long time. And so in a partially self-funded program, you look at claims and you adjust rates based on claims. We had false information essentially because nobody's going to the doctor. And then everybody started going to the doctor. And so people that had conditions like, let's say you had prostate cancer, you were now in year two or three instead of one or two. And so large flames skyrocketed, and we essentially were heading toward bankruptcy, and that could have taken our association down. And at a certain point in time, we just had to pull the plug and count our losses, and we actually had to go back to the participants and ask them to help us pay out about a million dollar debt that we that was on the books with the program. We're lucky we work in the faith-based sector because 100% of our members agreed to basically spend an entire extra month's premium just to keep us whole altogether in the program. The hard thing there was making that call. When do we pull the plug? You know, we I my consultants were telling us to write it out, but you know, we were basically a whole year's budget. Um, you know, we're a small nonprofit. We're about, this year we'll be about $2 million. We were almost a whole year's budget in the hole. And I couldn't let this one thing take everything down. And so instead of writing it out, we decided let's pull the plug, let's ask our members to help us out here. And nobody thought that was

Navigating Crisis: The Health Insurance Program

Ted Esler 4:35

going to work. And uh that was a tough decision. I spent a lot of days uh walking the street. Uh I work from home, so I'd go out and I'd take a long walk, I'd pray about things, I'd think about things, I would weigh the pros and cons. And I had a lot of sleepless nights. Uh in the long run, looking back, definitely was the right decision to make. Um, but super, super hard.

Adam Jeske 4:58

That's a fascinating uh sort of decision landscape. Give me a sense of the timeline from wait a minute, things aren't going quite right. You know, there's all that craziness of COVID anyway, to uh what are our options to we're taking this one option?

Ted Esler 5:15

So in uh at the beginning of 21, so COVID by that time had been raging for, you know, arguably nine, 10 months. Things were super healthy with the program. You know, we didn't have a lot of claims because people weren't going to the doctor. We thought, yeah, there's probably going to be an uptick. Nobody really knew is what kind of hidden potential claims were there. Now we had stop loss insurance, and our stop loss wasn't even being hit. But then April, May, June, just huge claims started coming in. I think at that point we began to know that I mean April was the first negative month for the program. May was disastrous. June was okay, you know, we have a serious, serious problem here. We tried to find uh somebody that would be willing to give us some tied over money. You know, if we had if we'd have had a million dollars in fusion, um, you know, I would just say one other thing about the process looking back on it is we had a number of very large organizations that, and if we would have had just one of those, and I'm talking when I say very large, in our space, 1,500 and more employees is very large. And we had a couple of them that were actually even involved in the design of the program because it was going to be good for them. But they were slow in joining, and then when COVID came, they really got shy about making changes. And if we'd had probably just one of those large agencies join, we would have had enough scope and scale to ride things out, but we didn't have that. And so um, as we analyzed it, you know, like I said, the consultants were basically saying, you need to keep this thing running. I had a phenomenal board member who had run a partially self-funded program like this in his own organization for many years. And uh he was probably the wisest sage and the most helpful person to me as I went through this. And we were essentially talking every couple of days. And I would just say overall, that wisdom was just worth a lot to me. It was a good example of why you really need to have good

The Role of Team and Board in Decision Making

Ted Esler 7:34

board members that are financially in tune with what your organization is trying to do. And that's who this guy was. So he was huge uh in helping me with that. But it it basically was 90 days of, hey, things are gonna be okay to sheer terror at the end.

Adam Jeske 7:52

Man, so you mentioned that board member, which is a tremendous asset. These consultants, and it sounds like at some point you decided to disregard their recommendation and go a different route. Were there other resources you were tapping into or voices you were able to listen to?

Ted Esler 8:10

Yeah, I would say, you know, my team members, um, so the way we had originally designed to run this program, we were trying not to let it lean on any one of my primary reports. And so that meant that for the first three to five years, I was going to be as a CEO pretty engaged in this. I mean, it was a financial gamble, so it only made sense. Uh, but one team member in particular, I think was very helpful about reminding me that the insurance program was becoming the tail wagging the dog. And that um, as important as it was, it was not our primary emphasis and our primary thing. It was one of many services we were offering to members. And I think his voice in the process was uh a key voice in just making sure we stayed true to our mission statement.

Adam Jeske 9:02

It it sounds like there were a couple of options for how to proceed once you identified that sort of May-June window, like things are not right here. You sort of saw this wave of claims. It sounded like we could try to enrol uh a significantly sized organization, which would provide an infusion of people to sort of spread that cost. Uh, you could have borne it some other way. Uh, maybe the consultants were recommending other things, and then there was this path that you eventually took where we're going to wind this down. We need help from our member organizations. Is that a good summary of the options that you considered, or uh were there others in the mix as well at that time?

Ted Esler 9:44

No, I think that's pretty much it. I think um, you know, I I would guess, so you know, we're 100 and how old are we now? We're almost 109 years old. We've been around a long time. We have some very invested uh members, and we also have some invested donors. I think if it would have gone to, you know, like this is going to bankrupt our association, I have a feeling a couple of donors would have stepped in.

Transparency and Communication with Members

Ted Esler 10:11

That really it really didn't come to that point because of when we pulled the trigger. Technically, the way the documents were written, participants were liable for all costs associated with the program. And so I think you could have made a legal argument that, hey, you've got to pay to make us whole. That just would not have worked. That wouldn't have flown. Uh, we don't have the legal means. And plus, in our community, it would have destroyed the relationships that are really the foundation for any well-functioning association, especially in the faith-based sector. And so fortunately it didn't go to that. I did have one or two organizations that were they basically held out until we got down to, hey, uh, when I said to them, yeah, we got almost 100% participation. It's just you and this other organization. Then they said, okay, okay, we'll we'll we'll help. Um, so they probably felt a little beat up there at the end, yeah.

Adam Jeske 11:08

Yeah. A little example of some positive peer pressure getting it across the line there.

Ted Esler 11:15

That's right, yeah.

Adam Jeske 11:18

Was there information that you uh wish you had had in the midst of that? Oh boy. That you didn't have?

Ted Esler 11:27

Uh I I don't know how anybody could really have predicted what was going to happen with COVID. So interestingly enough, when we first proposed this, we did have insurance regulators concerned about what we were doing. And uh, you know, in retrospect, those regulators, had they stopped us, in one, they would have probably helped us because we wouldn't have gone through all that trauma. The flip side of this is we did give very good coverage at a very reasonable rate for three years for some thousands of people. And those organizations saved a lot of money in that three-year period. I don't think you could say the whole experiment was a failure. Other, I mean, I don't know what other I just don't know how you could have predicted what actually happened there. Particularly when you when you consider that a lot of our members are overseas, and each one of them is in a different, unique insurance environment based on where they live. So it's pretty complicated.

Adam Jeske 12:26

Quite. Speaking personally and sort of the emotional dynamics for you as a leader, was there either a moment where, I mean, you mentioned sleepless nights, going on walks, praying, trying to trying to get your head around this, trying to figure out how to un unravel this snarl. Was there a particular moment where things snapped into focus or the decision dynamics sort of changed phases from one thing to another?

Ted Esler 12:58

Absolutely. There was. I I remember

Lessons Learned from the Health Insurance Experience

Ted Esler 13:02

we were trying to make the decision, pull the plug, not pull the plug. And again, we were getting advice, you you can ride this out, you can ride this out. But then I would see the financials, and I just felt like, yeah, we're not going to ride this out. Um, I created some projection spreadsheets. We were we tried to hold that decision off as late as we absolutely possibly could. So one of the things that we did that was very helpful is we did almost when we started thinking, hey, we got some serious trouble here, we wrote an email that went out to all of our participants and laid out the numbers pretty black and white. Um looking back, I'm really grateful we did that. Um we were getting advice that that was too much transparency, that we can't sell the program if you're and I'm thinking, well, we're not gonna sell the program. We don't want to sell the program. It could hurt other people. And of course, the argument is, well, if we just get more people in, we can probably, and I that whole dynamic was just kind of like bubbling back and forth for four or five days. And then I just said, you know what? We got to take care of these people best by just giving as much information as possible. That I think really saved our bacon when we went to um asking them to participate in an extra month to help make us whole because everybody was kind of brought in early on that this is what the struggles are. And um I just I really am thankful that that happened.

Adam Jeske 14:37

Ted, what was the time frame from deciding to wind it down all the way out through this uh series of interactions with your client organizations, member organizations, and to get to like power off actually on the program itself?

Ted Esler 14:55

Well, I think we sent out the letter July 1st, hey, or that first week of July anyway. It might have been the second week of July. Hey, we're we're definitely gonna wind this down. It took um until January 1st of that year to actually wind it down. Um some crazy things happened even after the fact that really kind of blew us away in terms of the vendor that we were working with, they shut down the domestic part of the program. They failed to shut down the international side of the program. We actually had uh about $70,000 in claims that had come in that they hadn't told us about. And because of staff changes on their end, that went almost 13 months.

Vexing Decisions for Nonprofit CEOs

Ted Esler 15:46

But here's one of the shocking things that we learned in this process. COVID created this huge kind of like traffic jam of insurance between insurance companies and hospitals. And when the insurance companies started settling out their bills, there was almost $70,000 in uncharged claims that hospitals, I'm sorry, in overcharged claims that hospitals had to send back. So, you know, here we were, the program was shut down. Nobody was using it for 13, 14 months. We get this news that we owe them 70 grand. And then the insurance company says, Well, wait a second here. We also know that there's some going to be some unmet, oh, and by the way, you overpaid us this much. By the time it all landed, we were like within $1,000.

Adam Jeske 16:34

Oh, amazing.

Ted Esler 16:35

Finalization of the problem. So it it actually lasted way longer than I would have anticipated. But again, that that backlog happened for um not just us, uh, but many, many um hospital organizations and insurance companies.

Adam Jeske 16:52

You have a unique perspective leading this association of member institutions, 340 or so. Widen out from your own personal leadership and that one decision. Thinking about what you've seen inside all of these organizations through your tenure at Messio Nexus, what are the areas of the CEO role that produce the most vexing decisions for those leaders?

Ted Esler 17:19

Well, um most vexing. Uh I would probably point toward mission creep. Um you know, issues of not saying no. You know, strategy, you've probably heard this. It it comes from a couple of different master strategists in the business sector, but strategy is choosing what you're gonna say no to. And a lot of leaders are visionary leaders. Uh they want growth, they want, you know, new things. I'm kind of like this. I have a hard time saying no to new projects. I actually just said no to something yesterday that is killing me to say no to. But I met with my staff, we talked it over. They are not on board, they think it's a bad idea. I think they're probably right. And um, I would just say the ability to say no or the inability to say no is the vexing problem. For those people that are really good at being super focused on the mission, it's not an issue, but very few of us are built that way. And I would say, you know, in the sector I work in, there's a lot of legacy organizations. There's a lot of uh innovators' dilemma going on where organizations were built for one thing, but the current context calls for something else. Um so I would also say that that's a huge shadow that's cast over the faith-based nonprofit sector uh in a serious way.

Navigating Mission Creep and Strategic Focus

Adam Jeske 18:54

I've definitely seen that in my conversations with lots of CEOs, and particularly, I think, in the faith-based part of the nonprofit sector. How do you think about or or talk to others about making decisions that include best practice from the business world, strategists who say you need to say no to things, prioritization, and a discernment? A lot of these leaders are high vision people, like you point out. How do you navigate personally or recommend people navigate that that dynamic?

Ted Esler 19:28

Well, I don't know if you've uh heard of the book Rocket Fuel. Uh it basically outlines, you know, that basically the argument is that every organization needs the big idea, visionary person, but they also need the implementer, the person who's good to process that kind of a thing. And I would just say um I have been very lucky to experience that personally with uh my second in command. Um and he and I I'm sure he I'm sure I'm I'm hard to work with. I'm sure I just I just know that that's true. But he and I have been able to develop a rapport and a um, I mean, I can share anything with him. Like this decision I just mentioned that uh I gotta turn something down that I don't really want to turn down. It's that discussion with those team members and the trust that's developed through the years, they're not going to. I I never feel like it's personal between us. Even though the conversations sometimes get pretty personal. Um, I've I've had people sometimes overhear us talk to each other about things and they're like, wow, are you guys okay? But we've got so much mileage um under the tires already that, yeah, we're okay. And so I would I would just say that the team that you put together, uh whether they're board members, you know, I would also say this. I've had different board, I've had I've served 10 years, over 10 years now under three different board chairs. Each one has brought a different personality and a different influence into how our organization operates and runs. And seeing how those have come into play at the right times when we needed something, to me is just again, it's I work on a faith base, so to me it's miraculous

Personal Leadership Style and Team Dynamics

Ted Esler 21:31

because we'll get the right person at the right time. And I just like, wow, you know, thank you, Lord, because I needed to hear that, we needed to hear that. So that's been pretty, pretty good for me is just making sure that I'm letting others into the decision-making world that my head can easily isolate. Uh super, super important for us.

Adam Jeske 21:53

So you mentioned that you can be hard to work with and you smirked a little bit. What what ways might it be difficult for someone to work with you?

Ted Esler 22:04

Well, it's probably mostly centered around that ability to say no. Um, I'm an idea generator. And I just I know myself well enough to know that I generate a ton of um stuff that has to be pulled along. We create programs that I'm great at creating stuff. I'm not so great at the follow-through and the evaluation later on. So I'd say that that generates barnacles that slows the ship down over time. We're actually in a season right now of pruning. We have a team meeting coming up in a week or two. So we're completely remote. So when we get together face to face, we are pretty intense. And we're doing a pruning session in which we're going through all sorts of things that we're doing. Uh we have a very long list. We're gonna go one by one, and we're gonna say, what can we cut here? What can we get rid of? What is not being effective? And uh I'll tell you one helpful thing that way is uh new people on the team. Uh we have a newer, so we're we're blessed because we have high-level leaders that join our team because we're kind of broad spectrum influencers. I have a former CEO that's running a series of programs for us that are focused on people that are out in the field. And he's, you know, he could do my job better than I could do it, probably. And I'm not being modest here. He's created an organization that grew to 700 people. I mean, he's a good leader. And he's been super about just saying, why are we doing that? You know, why are we doing this? What's the payoff been for this? And I think it's just easy to get into the groove and do these things without stepping back and taking a look. And so having some new eyeballs has been good um over time too.

Adam Jeske 23:52

So yeah, that seems really valuable. I read a book called Subtract. I believe the author is uh Lighty Klotz, and it's about that sort of editing, kind of like essentialism by Greg McEwan as well. Uh there's something about institutional life that just takes you in, and barnacles is a really nice picture of it, a seafaring metaphor. But yeah, it's just this is how we do it. I've got this mental framework. This time of year we're doing that event, then we're doing this

Trends in the Nonprofit Sector and Innovation

Adam Jeske 24:24

program. No, how would we not do that? That's that person's job. Well, that that person could do other more important work if we ask the question. Yeah. Uh let's go to some lightning round questions, some quick response things. So you mentioned earlier the book Rocket Fuel. Are there other books that you think are uh formational for your leadership or that you'd recommend to other CEOs?

Ted Esler 24:46

Well, kind of a weird book that I like to recommend people read is Black Like Me. It's an old book, uh, you know, talks about a gentleman who is white that takes a drug that turns his skin dark and goes into deep south, I think it's late 50s, early 60s, and experiences what it's like to live the world through somebody else's eyes. And I do think that that's one of the hardest things for us as leaders to do is to understand um, you know, we'll call them customers, how the customers are sensing what we're doing institutionally. And that book is a great reset on um empathy. It's why we love the TV show, uh, The Undercover Boss. And um, I think that's an important for me is to remember to take a step back and try to see things through the people that were served, see through the eyes of the people that we're trying to serve.

Adam Jeske 25:39

What's something you wish you had been told before you started as president at MSU Nexus?

Ted Esler 25:47

Um how much I dislike fundraising. I'm not a good fundraiser. Um I've raised a lot of money for other people. I actually sit on two foundation boards, so I've been a part of giving away hundreds of millions of dollars. I just really struggle with presenting what we're doing in a way that's it it feels like lying sometimes to make it out better than it is when I deal with donors. And I really struggle with the fundraising process.

Adam Jeske 26:16

I think that a lot of people struggle with that as top leaders in the nonprofit sector.

Ted Esler 26:22

Yeah.

Adam Jeske 26:22

Um and I certainly think that there's coming from the communications and marketing background and having done a bunch of development work as well, there really is a temptation to put a little bit more shine and veneer on things. And sometimes we have anecdotes, but we don't actually have the metrics and uh the outcome data. We just hope that all of these lead indicators actually do lead to the lag indicators, the outcomes we hope for.

Ted Esler 26:51

Yeah.

Adam Jeske 26:53

Is there something about your leadership that other people would say is unconventional?

Ted Esler 26:59

Probably the most unconventional thing when I speak to leaders, so I do a lot of leadership sessions, I speak to leaders a lot. I always focus on their life outside of the job. Um There's a book called The CEO Next Door. It's a great little read. One of the stories in that book is about a guy who's a McKinsey consultant, shows up in Singapore, they're gonna have a meeting with the Singapore, I think it's the finance minister of the entire country.

Sustaining Longevity in Leadership Roles

Ted Esler 27:27

And one guy's kind of buttoned down through rebinders, the other guy shows up on a Hawaiian shirt, and they have a confrontation about their presentation because of how the Hawaiian shirt guy is dressed and whatnot. And the Hawaiian shirt guy says that, hey, you know, since you joined our firm, it's robbed you of your identity. You've become a boring person. And, you know, he lists a bunch of things he does that are interesting. And he says, you don't do any of those things. You used to do them, but the job has eaten you. And I do think that um, you know, I if I'm in a room of CEOs and all they can do is talk about the job and the work, uh, that's a fail. And we won we want to be whole people. So I would say that's been one of my over the 10 years of I as I've spoken to leaders, I really pushed them. My icebreakers typically tell us about a hobby. It can't be spending time with family, and it can't be reading. Um give us something interesting. Tell us what you do that other people would think is unique that you're doing.

Adam Jeske 28:29

So that's it. Thinking about your longevity in the sector, what are some things that have changed as far as trends from year one and two leading at Missionxis and year nine and ten?

Ted Esler 28:43

Well, our sector's changed substantially. So in the space of global missions, the the big story has been that the global South Church is grown and exploded, while the Western church in the US, you know, Canada, the Western countries have struggled. And so when I came into this role, I think there was quite a bit of dispirited organizations. Uh, we used to get asked a lot of times who's really setting the world on fire, who's being innovative, et cetera. That led us to have an innovation push. So I published a book in 2020 called The Innovation Crisis about the lack of innovation among ministry leaders and what can be done about it. I would say we've that whole dynamic has really shifted in a real positive way. Um, I mean, 2020, I don't think anybody was doing much innovation stuff in the ministry space. Today, there's probably a dozen, 15 innovation labs out there. Uh, we ran an innovation fund, gave away a million dollars for innovation projects last year. Um, I would just say that that has been a big shift in a real positive way. And part of that has been forced on us by this Western versus global south shift in what's happening out there globally. I was at a meeting last week. 70 organizational leaders, all focused on resourcing the global south church. That's a huge shift. And it was a really great conversation. And, you know, one of the unique things about our association, so if you're a trade association, let's say you're the real estate association, your members are competitors. That's not how it is with us. We're all cooperators, we're all working for the same thing. I think that idea has also blossomed that people understand that they're out there working together with their organizational peers, and there's a lot of generous sharing going on that's quite exciting and positive.

Adam Jeske 30:33

In your own personal leadership, Ted, or as you think about the CEOs and executive directors within Messionexis, what are some practices and habits that seem to be particularly helpful in sustaining longevity in the role?

Building a Strong Leadership Team

Ted Esler 30:50

Yeah. Well, that's a good question. Uh well, I I mean, I think good organizations, uh, they have a team approach so that the CEO is not shouldering everything all the time. So I would say, you know, you heard me say this earlier. It's really having the people around you that are going to make the organization successful. And that that actually is a little bit um just even that statement. We talk a lot about, like in the in the missions world, we talk about attrition, missionaries leaving. We rarely talk about the work in attrition. In other words, when you go somewhere to do whatever your work is there, it's not just you being long, you know, long-lived, it's the work that you're doing there living past your contribution. I would say that that's a helpful thing in this space of longevity is

Fostering Organizational Longevity

Ted Esler 31:44

not being so focused on your own personal longevity, but what's how are you building the organization for the future? And what that will do is it'll give you longevity as a leader. If I felt like actually just I wanted a sabbatical uh 18 months ago, and part of that sabbatical was to ask the question, you know, how many years do I really want to push in this kind of a leadership role? And when I came back after that sabbatical, being really honest about how excited I was, you know, could I treat this like a day one leadership appointment? One observation I would make is that when there's leadership transition, that's the greatest opportunity for significant organizational change. If you're a board member listening to this, you want significant organizational change almost all the time. Our context is changing so fast. And so I would just say leaders need to continuously think of improving their serve and improving who they are. One of the habits that I have that I encourage others to have, it kind of goes along with this emphasis on hobbies earlier. I do learning sprints. They're typically about 90 days long. They'll be topical. And it may, it may seem like it has little application to what I do day-to-day, but the idea of continuous learning for the leader, um, I think that's key. I was just at this event I was at last week, I did meet a leader there, and I thought to myself, he would be doing himself and the organization a big favor by suggesting a transition. I do think there are leaders that stay in their role too long. I'd never want to be that person. I'd like to leave, and then they're thinking, man, I wish he would have stayed enlisted a little longer.

The Importance of Continuous Learning

Adam Jeske 33:29

Ted Essler, president at Missionexis. What do you love about your work?

Passion for Global Engagement

Ted Esler 33:34

The best thing about my work is I travel globally. Um, I'm out a couple of times a year meeting with people on the front lines of what we're doing, what our organizational members are doing, and just seeing the work firsthand. Um, you know, I'm a travel junkie, so that really helps. But I'd say past that, the encouragement I get from seeing life's transformed by the work that field missionaries are doing out there is awesome. So that's definitely the most encouraging thing.

Adam Jeske 34:06

Ted, thanks for joining us on the Nonprofit CEO podcast.

Ted Esler 34:10

Thanks for having me. Thanks, Adam. Appreciate it.

Adam Jeske 34:13

If you know a nonprofit CEO who's carrying something significant, send them the show. And if you want more of the patterns I'm seeing across hundreds of CEO conversations, you need the Nonprofit CEO briefing delivered weekly at nonprofit CEO.com. I'm Adam Jeski, the Nonprofit CEO Advisor. Thank you for what you're leading.