More Than a Job Description | Joy Schunhoff

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Everyday Heroes, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the people who are building our companies from the inside every day, often out of the spotlight.

With this series, we want to pull those heroes out of the shadows. We want to hear their stories, we want to share their stories. We want to understand what drives them, why they do what they do, how they might inspire and support others to become everyday heroes too.

In this episode, we have a unique opportunity to celebrate Joy Schunhoff, the now retired practice administrator at ENT and Allergy of South Georgia. A part of SENTA Partners, Joy casually mentioned the possibility of retirement in our interview as she talked about spending more time with her family. So we share this episode in celebration and appreciation for her years of service.

Joy’s transition from 25 years in human resources in the manufacturing sector into practice administration in the healthcare sector started with a bang with her leading the practice from a paper-based system to a new electronic medical record system.

Aside from the day-to-day of her role on Paper Joy’s, 14 years at ENT and Allergy of South Georgia have stretched the old job description idea of “other duties as assigned.” Joy has helped her practice, her team and the community of Valdosta, where she works and grew up navigate an unheard of three hurricanes in just 13 months and an even more unheard of snowstorm.

Joy attributes, her ability and her success to three key words that get her and her team through whatever gets thrown their way. Intuition, dedication, and ambition. And just at the end of our conversation, Joy snuck in another key to her success, fun!

Joy Schunhoff: I grew up in Valdosta, Georgia and spent my hometown my entire life.

I love to go to the beach. That’s my favorite hobby. I have the ability to go both to the Gulf or the Atlantic where I live in Valdosta, we could go either way, and I have two daughters, of course, a husband and a new grand baby and a son-inlaw.

Anderson Williams: So I have to ask, you can do the Atlantic or the Gulf, which is your favorite?

Joy Schunhoff: The Gulf.

Anderson Williams: Why?

Joy Schunhoff: We have a little place we go to called Mexico Beach, which is southeast of Panama City. It’s a more of a fishing town. Was actually hit by Hurricane Michael seven or eight years ago and destroyed the community. But it’s building back, but it is my favorite place to go.

Anderson Williams: That’s awesome. Are you a feet in the sand or are you a fisherman or are you a water sports person or what?

Joy Schunhoff: I love all the water period, but generally the reason we went there was so my husband could go fishing and I could stay on the sand and not bother him, but as the years went through, he would let me get on the boat. ’cause that meant we caught extra fish. You know, two or three more fish could come in ’cause of the limits.

Anderson Williams: Happy marriage there. That’s the definit, that’s how you.

Joy Schunhoff: And, and still out in the sun.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So will you just tell us a little bit about what you do and where you do it in terms of work?

Joy Schunhoff: Well, I’m a practice administrator at ENT and Allergy of South Georgia have been 14 years. I. Come from a background of human resources for 25 years.

So, uh, practice administration was different from anything I’d done, but I was able to step into it pretty quickly. We have great doctors. They all are very much the type of person that you want to work with, and you will do what you need to do to take care of their practice because they generally love to take care of their patients.

And as a business person, I wanted to take care of their business.

Anderson Williams: Well, I’m curious, it’s a really important insight Joy. After 25 years in human resources management, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot and have a lot of stories that you can’t talk about and some horror stories just because human resources typically deals with those things.

What is it about your doctors and your environment there that’s different? Like if we had to put your finger on what makes that a great place to work and how you found after all those years in human resource management, a new place that you’re inspired to come to work to, what is it?

Joy Schunhoff: Honestly, it’s the team. Everybody works very hard together, takes care of the patients. It’s very satisfying.

Anderson Williams: Like all of the Everyday Heroes before her, Joy is first and fast to attribute her success to her team and the last to take much credit for how she prepares supports and enables them.

So instead of asking what makes her good at what she does I tried to reframe the question to ask her what makes a good operations leader in ENT and Allergy?

Joy Schunhoff: I think you have to have an intuition, dedication to find the answer. Just not push it under the rug, and you have to make sure that you juggle a lot of balls in the air. You’ve got to be sure that you are always looking for the answer. If you don’t have the answer, you’ve got to find the answer.

That’s one of the things that I will always go to the team and ask questions.

What are you having difficulty with? What’s going on? How can I help you?

And then listen to them and then take the information back and then try to do my best to improve the process or improve efficiencies for them.

Anderson Williams: You mentioned another word earlier though that I want to follow back up on, you said intuition. Will you say more about how intuition plays into it?

Joy Schunhoff: Intuition is, I guess, just noticing something that needs to be improved upon or changed. For example, scheduling with your patients, how you set up the schedules, what’s working best for the patients, what’s working best for the doctors, so that the flow works correctly and just anything intuition’s really hard to explain.

Anderson Williams: It is. That’s why I was curious to come back to you.

Joy Schunhoff: Honestly, everybody doesn’t have it. It’s almost like you have a common sense that you see something and you know that it needs to be taken care of. Not everybody has that.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. Well, and I suspect some of it is layered in wisdom and having, you know, worked in different areas and done what you’ve done over your career.

Some of that helps you see some of those patterns in ways that other people can’t.

Joy Schunhoff: Yeah, without mentors that I’ve had in my career, I honestly think that’s what has made me achieve the recognition that I have at this point. I had some great mentors. I worked in manufacturing for 20 years before I went into healthcare.

So then in healthcare I had a great mentor as well. So it does help that people before you can give you that wisdom.

Anderson Williams: And say more about that, because mentorship is a topic that we talk about a lot, and I think different people have different sort of definitions and experiences with that. What was it that those mentors provided you?

Joy Schunhoff: A chance.

They identified the fact that I was bright enough to pick up things and take care of a project or whatever it may be, and see it to the end. I try to recognize that in employees that we have. When I see that somebody can maybe do an Excel spreadsheet that maybe we didn’t think about, possibly using it in a certain way, and I can usually say, well, this person could help us with this and not have to wait for me to have to do it.

So I try to identify strengths of the employee and try to give them praise and also to give them additional duties so that they can learn too.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. It’s setting them up for growth, right?

Joy Schunhoff: Mm-hmm.

Anderson Williams: Just like your mentor sets you up for growth.

Joy Schunhoff: Right.

Anderson Williams: Your Everyday Hero nomination, Joy, mentioned that you had led your practice particularly through some pretty rough times over the last couple of years, given hurricanes, multiple hurricanes, it sounds like, that have disrupted things.

Will you just talk a little bit more about what the last couple years have been like for you and your practice in that regard?

Joy Schunhoff: Yeah, for 13 months, we had three different hurricanes come through Valdosta. Each one of them had significant damage to our community. We had the last one, which was Helene, and probably people know more about Helene from when it went to Asheville, North Carolina and tore up that area as well.

But it messed up our community really bad. We closed our facility for half a week. I can’t remember the exact day it came in, but we had to close our facility because there were pine trees that had been around for 150 years that had fallen all over parking lot. We were fortunate, did not tear up our practice, so it did put us closed for a few days, but thankfully.

The patients had gone through the same thing, so they did understand what we had to do to close the office, but generally that doesn’t happen. And then take it for granted. In January of this year, we had a snow day, which is very uncommon for South Georgia.

Anderson Williams: In his nomination of Joy as an Everyday Hero.

Sent a partners COO, Rob Collins, specifically mentioned Joy’s response and leadership during these difficult times for her team, the business and her community. So I asked him to add some additional insight.

Rob Collins: It’s one thing to be a boss and it’s another to be a leader, especially in pretty dire and drastic circumstances.

So yeah, they had major hurricanes. The eye of, I forget what hurricane it was late last year, came right over Valdosta, Georgia, a small community that the doctors all live in and Joys from. And at that point, it’s kind of all hands on deck leadership, just to give a sense of how bad it was, property damage, trees on houses. Uh, really, really drastic. And still you can drive down there today. There’s still trees on the side of the road.

She was at the clinic the next day. There were trees all over the parking lot. Thankfully nothing hit the clinic but taking pictures, starting to clean up and then reaching out to the staff to make sure that everybody was okay.

Quick to advocate for some SENTA to funds to support if people lost power lost of the food in their refrigerator. God forbid anything else that was worse than that. But in those times of emergencies or circumstances like that, you turn into just a true leader independent of work and and she did that.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. It sounds like she mobilized on multiple fronts, right? Around the business, around the specific individual needs of the team. She just kind of turned it on, is what it sounds like, and got to work and figured it all out.

Rob Collins: Yeah. She stepped up in a time of need for the community and for the practice, and certainly for the patients and our staff, which is exactly what you want in a business leader like her.

Anderson Williams: Aside from what was clearly a remarkable response to an unfortunate situation, Joy has been at the helm for 14 years of a rapidly evolving ENT and allergy practice. So I wanted to hear more about that and how she’s managed to keep ahead of it all and to continue to be the right leader for the changing practice.

Joy Schunhoff: Well, like I said, when I started with ENT and Allergy, they had paper charts, so that was like stepping back in time. But we did, we got through it. We had to be on the EHR by October, that was April, so October we had to be on the EHR.

Anderson Williams: Right when you joined?

Joy Schunhoff: Yes.

Anderson Williams: Oh Welcome.

Joy Schunhoff: So we had, we had only that many months to move to the EHR completely for the government requirements at the time. And we did it. I’m not gonna tell you, we kept all the staff at that time, but we made it. Change is hard sometimes, but we did it.

I think probably four or five years into working for EMT. My greatest accomplishment was helping to build the. ASC, which is right next door. It’s our ambulatory surgery center. So we have had that open since 2000, oh, let’s see, 2016.

And so the physicians are able to go next door to have their surgeries versus going to the hospital, and we’re very proud of it.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. That’s amazing. And I guess the thing that I’m struck by as you talk about this, and you do, so you do it so casually, but you have a day job running this practice and then you have three hurricanes in 13 months, and then you have this version when you just started of an entire EHR integration. And then you have this, you know, little story of a opening, an ambulatory surgery center, like you’re doing a lot more than running a practice.

Joy Schunhoff: Right. That’s why I said there’s a lot of balls in the air at all times.

Anderson Williams: How do you do it, right? I mean, because again, you’re sort of relaxed and casual about it ’cause you’re running a great practice, but you just listed like three major things that like aren’t on the duties that you were hired for.

Joy Schunhoff: Well, I didn’t list the duties of making sure the plumbing’s working or electricity or the landscape is done. I mean, there’s all kinds of changing the light bulbs. It’s all, there’s a lot of things to do when you’re the lead.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, for sure. And I mean, do you have tips or would you have advice for someone who’s managing those multiple sort of additional projects over and above your day to day?

Joy Schunhoff: I don’t know how to explain it. You just have to have the ambition to do it, and some people would say, oh, that’s not my job. But I’ve never used that in my vocabulary, probably to the detriment of me sometimes, but never turn away from anything that needs to be done to take care of the people I work for.

Anderson Williams: Tell me a little bit about, in terms of your journey, you mentioned being in a smaller town and having grown up in Valdosta and that you’ve been fortunate to find good employers, but there’s also not just a whole ton of employers around if. That’s where you want to be. Aside from that, have there been any particular hurdles that you’ve overcome in your career that you’re particularly proud of overcoming?

Joy Schunhoff: Well, I did not graduate from college, so I did go to a technical school at the time and got a business background. So that was my biggest hurdle my entire career was that I did not have a degree, and sometimes that would keep me from getting the better jobs, but once I got into the company I was working with for 25 years, I started administratively and then became a manager and the rest was history.

And then I was very involved in the Chamber of Commerce, several different organizations like United Way. So you know, you meet people and you network with people. I actually was in leadership lounges in 2001 and met Dr. Allen, who is in our practice. Would see him occasionally thereafter, but had no idea I’d be working for him for 14 years.

Anderson Williams: That’s amazing. And so did you go back to technical school to get your degree or?

Joy Schunhoff: I went outta high school and then I went back to technical school at night to earn additional training and we didn’t have computers when I started. That’s how old this lady is. So I did go back to learn computers and Word, Excel, all that stuff.

Anderson Williams: As we think about telling your story, and you’ve mentioned a little bit about your daughter and your grandbaby and your parents, and a bit of your upbringing obviously being rooted in Valdosta, your time in the manufacturing space, and now in ENT. When you think about your story and the most important part of your story, what haven’t I asked Joy that I should have?

Joy Schunhoff: Hmm. I don’t know. I can’t give away all my secrets.

Anderson Williams: Well, now you’ve got me intrigued, Joy.

Joy Schunhoff: No, I can’t tell you all my secrets, but I do like to have fun. I

love Nashville where you are.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. Well, you’ll have to drop in and say hello when you come back up here.

Joy Schunhoff: Yeah. I’m a real, fun, loving person with my friends.

I keep my business and my friendships separate. That’s something that I learned very early on, that you can’t always be friends with the people you work with. But I’ve had long time friends from school high school that we do women trips and we go to wineries in Nashville and the beach. So yeah, that’s the fun part of my life.

Anderson Williams: Joy Schunhoff is an Everyday Hero whose superpower is her dedication. Dedication to her community as a lifelong resident of Valdosta, Georgia. Dedication to her family, dedication to her team, dedication to her patients, and dedication to her practice. Joy’s dedication has helped her grow and evolve as a practice administrator and has enabled her to step up and lead as a colleague and community member when times were particularly rough, as she told me.

If she doesn’t feel she can be a hundred percent dedicated to something, she’s just not gonna do it.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our other Everyday Heroes at www.shorecp.university/podcasts there you will also find episodes from our Microcap Moments, as well as Bigger. Stronger. Faster. series each highlighting the people and stories that make the lower middle market space unique.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the

Andrew Malone Podcast Studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams. Recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Joy Schunhoff and Rob Collins.

This podcast is a the Property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.