Emotional Rescue: Dan Rossi And The Merger That Made Too Much Sense NOT To Do
In just about any for-profit business, nothing stokes the burning desire to succeed greater than a little healthy competition. Pushing you and your team to dig deeper, work harder, and overcome any obstacles that lay in the path.
It’s perfectly natural. Innate, even.
But what if the end game of your company is something bigger, to serve the greater good? And what if the steps you and your business alone are taking to achieve this purpose aren’t quite enough?
This was a dilemma that both the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society and the Animal Rescue League faced on their own for years.
As open-door animal shelters that welcome all manner of animals with all manner of backgrounds and individual situations, both organizations served the same purpose in Western Pennsylvania for decades.
And it was a simple purpose, geared to improving the lives of animals and humans alike: give these animals a home.
But with the perpetual problem of animal population growth occurring at a higher rate than the ability to manage it, the efforts of both the WPHS and the ARL on their own weren’t quite enough to effectively tackle the issue.
So in a merger that took years of negotiation, but only months of execution, both groups finally merged in early 2017, combining everything from the top down, all the way down to their logo and new name, Humane Animal Rescue, led by former ARL Executive Director Dan Rossi as its CEO. Their new facility, a $15 million, 35,000 square-foot facility, is a state of the art venue that not only serves the group’s current needs in a way that would not have been possible pre-merger, but is designed in a way that also allows for substantial expansion in the decades to come.
On this edition of The Raja Show, Raja welcomes Dan Rossi onto the show to discuss the mission of HAR, how the merger came to be, and the challenges and opportunities facing organizations like HAR, relative to those of for-profit companies
