Ep. 156: Vern Davenport, Partner at QHP & Allison Crumpler, VP of Culture, Engagement & Corporate Communications, Worldwide Clinical Trials

Vern Davenport is a Partner at QHP Capital with 35+ years of experience building and transforming healthcare technology and services businesses. Vern is the author of *Accelerating Growth*, which lays out QHP’s approach to scaling companies through its Management System. Allison Crumpler is Vice President of Culture, Engagement and Corporate Communications at Worldwide Clinical Trials. A Professional Certified Coach with 15+ years in clinical research, Allison focuses on leadership development, organizational culture, and employee engagement. **Topics:** 1. Why Culture Drives Performance 2. Turning Values Into Behaviors 3. How to Kill Watermelon Metrics 4. Scaling Culture Across a Portfolio ...and so much more. **Top Takeaways** 1. **Values become culture through repetition.** Operationalizing values means defining the behaviors behind them, teaching them, and reinforcing them in practice. Allison calls it the “Mr. Miyagi” approach: repeat those behaviors over and over, even when they feel obvious. That repetition is what embeds them into the organization and gives managers and employees a shared language for accountability. <!--THE END--> 1. **Measure culture with leading indicators, not just engagement surveys.** Allison shares a few of the metrics Catalyst used to measure culture beyond traditional engagement and turnover data. They called them “Key Culture Indicators”: employee referrals, town hall attendance and time to hire. Put a target against each indicator, review it alongside operating KPIs, and set a more ambitious target once the current one is consistently achieved. <!--THE END--> 1. **Make the financials visible so everyone knows how they contribute.** An individual contributor in a 1,000-person company can't see how they move EBITDA, so they disengage. Catalyst shared key company metrics across the organization, then helped teams understand how their own work affected sales, customer satisfaction and financial performance. Transparency turned "just doing my job" into "we win or lose together." **About QHP** QHP Capital is a private equity firm focused on middle-market life sciences and pharma services businesses. With $4.5B+ in AUM, QHP combines decades of sector experience with an operator-led approach to investing. Across its portfolio, the firm implements its proprietary Management System to build stronger leadership teams, operating infrastructure and commercial capabilities and support long-term, independent growth. **About Worldwide Clinical Trials** Worldwide Clinical Trials is a global, full-service contract research organization (CRO) that partners with biotechnology and pharma companies across the drug development lifecycle. With 4,000+ professionals across 70+ countries, Worldwide provides clinical development expertise across neuroscience, oncology, rare disease, and internal medicine. **Investors & Operators is brought to you by 51 Labs** 51 Labs is a marketing agency for the lower middle market. We offer full-service digital marketing for PE, portfolio companies, IB, VC, hedge funds. 1. Brand Identity, Marketing Strategy, Marketing & AGM Video, LinkedIn Strategy & Execution, Web Design & Development, CRM Support & more 2. 400+ videos 3. 100+ projects 4. #1 content creator on LinkedIn in the lower middle market