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A passion for the mission: Ashley Glover of WebPT

Ashley Glover has a computer science degree from SMU in Texas, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Phoenix Business Journal

Ashley Glover grew up around horses, and is an experienced rider. At any one time, Glover and her husband Dan own more than a dozen horses spread out between their large ranch near Dallas and a boarding facility in Scottsdale.

Little did Glover know that an accident in late 2020, when she fell off her horse and broke six bones, would play into her decision-making process when she took a call in the late summer of 2021 about a CEO job opening at Phoenix software firm WebPT.

“Luckily, the doctors that were overseeing my care said, ‘Let’s wait and see, instead of going straight to surgery.’ And they put me in physical therapy,” Glover recalled. “My therapist was amazing and helped me get through rehab and back to health fairly quickly. I got back on a horse and rode it in April.

“That was amazing to me. Because all of the doctors involved in my care, nobody had ever said, ‘Hey, there’s a way to get there without pills or surgery or anything. You could use physical therapy in this way’.”

Though she had fielded more than 100 calls from headhunters and other executives about a new gig, the one with an executive at Warburg Pincus, WebPT’s biggest financial backer, stuck with Glover, considering the Phoenix company is an industry leader in providing software to physical therapy clinics that streamlines their front- and back-end operations.

“Our industry talks about this all the time. That so many people would be better served going to a physical therapist before they go to their doctor for a pain pill, or their surgeon for whatever,” Glover said. “So what could we do as an industry to raise awareness of this as a low-cost, high-value solution? When I heard that part of the WebPT story, it really resonated with me. It really got me to say, ‘Yes, I will. This is the job I want to take.’ I have a real passion for the mission.”

That call from Warburg Pincus came only a few months after Glover took a buyout as a C-suite executive at RealPage, a Texas-based publicly traded real estate software firm, that was taken private by PE firm Thoma Bravo in April 2021. Buoyed by her passion for WebPT’s mission and her positive experience with her therapist, she joined the company in November of that year.

Glover recently sat down with the Business Journal at the company’s new downtown Phoenix digs at 111 W. Monroe St., to talk about her career path that has taken her across the globe, her vision for the company and her take on the Valley’s prospects as a tech startup hub. Then there was the time she bravely consumed a pungent appetizer at a company gathering in China.

How did you end up focused on computers in college? I took an elective in programming, and I think it was Pascal. And it was fun, and I was pretty good at it. And I had this thought of, “What if I get to my senior year and I don’t want to be a lawyer? I’d need to get a job.” So I flipped my major from poli sci/philosophy over to computer science my sophomore year [at SMU] and got a computer science degree. McKinsey & Co. called me and I worked two years for them from 1995 to ’97. And they had a program where they’d pay for [an MBA] so I went to Harvard and came back to McKinsey for four more years.

After you finished college at SMU, you took a job with Texas consulting firm McKinsey & Co. How did that shape your personal outlook? I love travel. I got to work in Europe, I got to work in Asia and all over the U.S. I wasn’t married so I took full advantage of that at the time. I found out I love just meeting different kinds of people, learning different cultures, working with different kinds of teams. For some people, that can be very intimidating or scary. And for me, I really thrived on it.

And I also learned when I traveled that people had very clear perceptions of Americans, and I loved challenging those. I was running a McKinsey team in China. They were all local Chinese, in Shanghai. They were like, “We don’t know what we’re going to feed you for three months.” I said, “I will make one promise to you. I’ll try anything once. Not going to guarantee I’ll try it twice, but I’ll try anything once.”

They decided to test me, and I tried everything. So we built a really good relationship as a team, because they got really excited about throwing different things at me.

About a month or two later, we wound up in Beijing for a meeting. And it got a little crazy, but a live snake was brought to the table. And somebody cut one part of it, and drained all the blood into a bowl. And cut another part of it, and drained all the bile into another bowl. And it was called snake soup. They mixed the blood with shot glasses of alcohol, and mixed the bile with shot glasses of another alcohol, and everybody got one of each. So, I did it.

I took a lot of lessons from that. I think at the beginning, when I was younger, it would upset me that people had preconceptions of me coming into a team, wherever I was going. Whether it was as an American, or as a younger person, or as a woman.

And then I started realizing, you can’t change people’s perceptions when you’re walking in the door. All you can do is just be the person you are along the way. But I think it taught me not to have perceptions of others. So, it made me very curious. I would always ask a lot of questions. I would always try to get to know the person and the team. And it also made me just a lot more open-minded.

And I think that improved me as a manager, and as a leader. When you’re more curious and more inquisitive, you learn more.

Before you ended up at WebPT you had a lot of success at RealPage, in the real estate software space. I went from running one division to two, and eventually was running their multifamily platform. And that’s what I was doing when we had our IPO in 2010. Eventually I quit at the end of 2013 and started my own investment and consulting business. Then RealPage approached me in 2016. They had crossed over the half-billion mark of revenue. When I first joined them, they were $30 million. They had told [Wall Street]they wanted to be a billion by 2020. And I was asked to come back to be part of that journey. From 2016 to 2021, I was chief revenue officer, then chief operating officer, and then I was president of the company. And we hit that billion-dollar goal at the end of 2019.

In 2020, we were approached by a private equity firm with an offer to take the company private, which obviously, was not my decision. That was the decision of our CEO and our board. We were taken private in a transaction with Thoma Bravo, a pretty big software PE firm in April 2021.

That was an exit for me. And I had told my family I’d take a year off. Because it had been a heck of a five years, from 2016 to 2021, as you can imagine. When I started the first time with them we were at about 300 employees, and we were at 8,000 when I left.

Ten years from now what does WebPT’s business model take you? I don’t think we see a path for us to run clinics. Although, there is a huge opportunity for us to create and to help our clinics network with each other, and help patients access care.

We initially focused on the therapist, the person that’s actually delivering hands-on care. And giving them the best tools to do their job. As the years have progressed, our platform’s gotten broader and broader. So the way we think of it today is, we’re now not just optimizing the workflow around the therapist, we’re actually trying to make that practice run better end-to-end. Everyone from the front office interacting with the patients, to the therapists, to the back office. We are the broadest solution available to the industry in terms of end-to-end.

You also have a different perspective as a CEO considering you live in Texas, and end up commuting to Phoenix. What’s your travel schedule? Most weeks I’m working from home. I’m [in Phoenix] roughly five days a month. When I come out here, I’ll fly out on the earliest flight available out of Dallas on a Monday morning. And I’ll fly home usually, on the latest flight I can get home, on a Thursday night. That way, I’m with my kids Friday through Sunday.

Honestly, if the team wanted to meet more often, I would meet more often. But that meets the needs of our organization. Our organization’s happy to come in for one week a month and have the meetings that we need to have.

Though you mostly work remotely, you recently decided to take some new office space downtown. What went into that decision? We were in the Warehouse District just south of Phoenix on 5th Avenue for several years. It was a great space and our lease was up at the end of December 2022. We did look around but staying in Phoenix was important to me. I think this company’s always identified as a Phoenix company. And Heidi is a huge supporter of the local community, just the ecosystem around Phoenix.

My executive team and I have set up a calendar where we’re here one week a month. During that week, I had the board fly in. We had all-hands meetings. We had several functional groups meet here. In April, we have the whole sales team coming in for a week. We have the tech team coming in for planning sessions. This space is being used as a collaboration space

I love downtown. I’ve been staying in hotels here for a year, and I wanted to be here. There’s great restaurants here; there’s great hotels here. So our move into this neighborhood was specific. Because we all, as executives, have places we love to eat, hotels we love to stay in.

So you must have a favorite downtown Phoenix hotel? The Westin, I like. I’ve liked the Residence Inn, because they have those refrigerators. So I can eat breakfast there.

What do you make of the Arizona tech sector economy? From a technology perspective, just the startup community is very, very healthy. There’s been a lot more VC coming in. Warburg, for example, our sponsor, has somebody who’s been assigned the Phoenix space who flies in here regularly to meet with companies, and keep an eye on it.

And that’s, I think, indicative of what other firms are doing. It’s definitely on the radar of tons of the national firms. The Arizona Commerce Authority, I think, has really worked to ensure that there’s support to that.

It’s not easy to build up a tech ecosystem and nurture startups. What are your thoughts on how Phoenix can do that? My husband and I were in startups for most of our career. From our perspective, it’s always going to be a risky proposition because you’ve got to have that magic mix of funding the right idea, and then the early adopter customers that help you make that idea work. And you can’t force it. At some level, it has to happen on the backs of people who are committed to the mission of their business.

So, whatever we can do to continue to create low-cost spaces for people to get going, and to nurture and grow their business, and create ecosystems for talent to meet and connect and build on each other. That’s, I think, the magic of tech communities.

I’ve seen it happen in Austin. I’ve seen it happen in Dallas. I think the issue with these ecosystems is the more you can keep your current businesses strong and nurturing, it’s going to attract more and more in.

One of the things that really helped this area, and we observed it, was when people did go to remote, it made hiring talent in Arizona easier for companies outside of Arizona. But it also made a lot of tech people want to move to Arizona because they could work remote. So, I think Phoenix has benefited from Covid in that way. 

When you’re hiring, what are you looking for? I have a no-assholes policy. My first criteria is I want us to be able to work together as a team. I want to determine what we need to do to achieve the goal. And I want to ensure that we’re all working together against our objectives.

So from a leadership style, you’ll see me reporting out on, “This is our overall goal. This is how we’re all working together to achieve our goals,” and ensuring that we’re collaborating. And the way I try to bake that into the culture is I try to say that if any one group is not meeting their goal, then we’re all not meeting the goal. We’re either all winning or we’re all losing.”

THE ASHLEY GLOVER FILE

Company: WebPT

Title: CEO

Education: Bachelor’s degree, computer science, Southern Methodist University; MBA, Harvard Business School.

Where do you like to go to eat and close a business deal? There’s a sushi place right around the corner that I love [Harumi Sushi and Sake]. And then I love Blue Hound Kitchen & Cocktails. They have just an amazing bourbon selection.

So what is your go-to bourbon brand, and how do you drink it? Bourbon’s gotten super popular, so my go-to has changed over the last two years. I’m a big fan right now of a relatively young distillery called Bardstown in Kentucky. Bardstown’s new, so they’re kind of going with the tech angle. They had the most advanced technology distillery I’d ever seen. That kind of got my husband and I excited, because we’re both tech people.

I’m rocks. My husband’s neat. You don’t have to drink very much of it to enjoy it. That’s why it’s become our favorite.

For business travel, what do you have to bring? Well, I have to have workout clothes. Now, whether or not I work out might be optional. But it’s always good to know that if I want to put on my tennis shoes and go for a run, or do something, I’ve got that available to me. And then I have to have a book. And if I can make it work, sometimes, believe it or not, I knit.

What are you reading now? I had never heard of Jack Reacher. And then I watched that Amazon show. I loved it, so a friend of mine gave me probably 15 of the Lee Child Jack Reacher books.

WebPT at a glance: Co-founder Heidi Jannenga was at the helm when WebPT launched its rehab therapy software platform in 2008. The company now has 800 employees and five U.S. employment hubs, with two in Texas and one apiece in California, Oregon and Arizona (Phoenix). The company recently opened its first international office, a customer support hub, in Mumbai, India.

 


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