Brightview Senior Living CEO Marilynn Duker is stepping back from her role and President Doug Dollenberg is taking the reins under a leadership transition years in the making.
With the move, Duker is moving into a co-chairperson role. She will work along with Arnie Richman, who led the original effort to found Brightview Senior Living with sister company Shelter Group nearly three decades ago.
“I will still have ownership in the company, still be on our investment committee and participate in major decisions for the business, “ Duker told Senior Housing News. “But Doug will be leading the business day-to-day.”
For Duker, the leadership transition caps off a 40-year career with the company — one where she has seen Brightview “evolve and change a lot over the years.”
“It’s been an amazing ride, and far exceeded any expectations I could possibly have had,” she said.
Baltimore-based Brightview’s leadership change is the culmination of years of planning. When Dollenberg joined the company in 2017, he did so with the expectation that he would one day succeed Duker in leading the company.
The overall goal of years of planning was to ensure a seamless transition for not only the operator, but also its investors, lenders and equity partners, Dollenberg said.
He takes the role as the company looks to build on its momentum coming out of the darkest days of the pandemic. Occupancy for the company’s stabilized communities is currently nearing pre-pandemic levels at 90%, and Dollenberg said net operating income (NOI) is about halfway back to where it was before the pandemic.
With that momentum behind him, Dollenberg said the end of the company’s full recovery from the pandemic is “absolutely in sight.”
“We’ve made tremendous progress as we have pulled the key levers on net operating income — occupancy, pushing rate, peeling back concessions and managing expenses,” Dollenberg said.
New leadership, five-year strategy
With a new leader in the wings, Brightview’s management team is currently developing a strategy plan for the coming five years.
As he looks ahead, Dollenberg sees four big priorities to tackle: Maintaining the company’s award-winning workplace culture, finding new ways to elevate the resident experience, continuing its calculated growth and keeping Brightview’s capital structure strong.
Regarding the company’s culture, Dollenberg is arriving in the new role with the wind at his back. The company has topped Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Aging Services list four years in a row in part thanks to a culture of transparency, accountability and honest feedback.
More specifically, the company’s leadership is seeking to balance the need for standardization and rules with empowering local leaders to make their own informed decisions. And that is a key ingredient to the company’s success with its workforce, according to Duker.
“We can hire a better, higher-caliber, different kind of department director and executive director if they know that they’re going to have some degree of freedom, flexibility, creativity and entrepreneurship in running their department or their community,” Duker said.
Brightview also offers benefits such as a wellness manager for associates, and pays 75% to 80% of health care costs under its self-insured health insurance plan.
“We’ve only added benefits, not reduced benefits, during a 10-year period, and our associate premiums on average have only gone up an average of 2% [in that time],” Duker said.
“It’s quite remarkable performance given what’s happened to health care costs in the country at large,” she said. “But we’re not just focused on associate wellness, because it keeps our costs down, it’s just good for people to be healthier.”
Having a content workforce also flows into the resident experience — or as Dollenberg puts it, “a great place to work creates a great place to live.”
As he steps into the CEO role, Dollenberg is also focused on managing the company’s growth beyond its current 46-property portfolio. But growing is not the hard part. To Dollenberg, the real challenge is maintaining the company’s culture and level of employee satisfaction as it grows.
That said, the company does have some projects underway to help propel it past the 50-community mark in the coming years. Among them are a forthcoming community in the D.C.-adjacent Northern Virginia market and in New Jersey, and a community set to rise on land purchased from Notre Dame University of Maryland.
Paving the way for more growth is the fact that Brightview is slated to later this fall launch its eighth high-net-worth equity fund. Harrison Street is also an institutional partner on half of Brightview’s portfolio.
“We have a great, robust pipeline from Virginia to Massachusetts,” Dollenberg said. “And we’re excited to keep developing there.”
Duker looks back
Duker’s move to co-chairman comes after decades of working with the company. She first joined Brightview’s sister company, The Shelter Group, in 1982. A little over a decade later, she helped found Brightview, bringing to it extensive experience in development.
As she looks back on her decades with Brightview, Duker said she is proudest of the fact that the senior living company has built and maintained a strong culture over the years — and that is “no small feat” given the fact that it now has more than 5,000 associates, she added.
“We certainly could have grown more rapidly, but we just didn’t think we could do so and maintain the culture,” Duker said.
She is also proud that the company’s leaders have largely achieved the associate-first culture they sought to build when founding the company in 1995.
Examples of that success can be found in communities all across the company’s portfolio. For instance, Duker can recall speaking with a new director a few years ago for a Brightview community in Boston.
“She said, ‘The thing I cannot get over is, at my old company all I heard about were occupancy and financials — here, all I hear about are associates and residents,” Duker said. “We hear those kinds of things frequently from new directors that have been managers elsewhere
She added it’s not uncommon for workers to have started with Brightview in high school before later working their way up to executive director or other leadership positions.
Sometimes, the company’s culture even transcends generations. For instance, Duker said she knows of a recently retired dining director whose son is also now a dining director with the company.
“These generations of families who have chosen to make their careers at Brightview, it’s those kinds of things that really make me the most proud,” she said.
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