Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Staying Focused in Uncertain Times: Leadership Lessons from Holly Buckley of McGuireWoods LLP 4-15-25
Tue, 15 Apr 2025
In this episode, Holly Buckley, Chair of Healthcare at McGuireWoods, joins Scott Becker to discuss how leaders can stay grounded and help teams and clients maintain focus amid economic and political turbulence.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests in this episode?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Holly Buckley. Holly's one of the smartest leaders that I know. She works at the intersection of healthcare and private equity. She also manages and leads a department of tons of people. Just does a fantastic job.
She's got a few topics today, and I'm going to ask her a couple questions today as well. Let me tee us up first with one of the questions I have, and then I'll let you get into some of the topics you're bringing today.
Sounds great, Scott.
Chapter 2: How can leaders stay focused amid economic and political noise?
So, Holly, here's the question to start with, and this is a leadership question. There is so much noise going on in the world and in the markets between the tariff discussion, the trying to bring some manufacturing home discussion, the markets going up and down. It seems like there's so much noise. How, as a leader, do you lead people and help them to sort of keep doing what they have to be doing
even when there's so much constant noise around everybody? How do you sort of either stay focused yourself or keep your team and your own teams focused? How do you think about those issues when there's just periodically so much noise in the news?
Thanks, Scott. I mean, I think it's an excellent question. And I certainly have been feeling the impact of the the greater world on my day to day. And I think it's hard both personally and as a leader to kind of put things in a place where you're able to continue to function.
Chapter 3: What strategies help individuals regain control during uncertain times?
But I think I heard some good advice on a podcast and I saw the same advice repeated by my partner, Tim Fry, just last week in an email. And I think the best advice I could give and try and give to my team is to control the things that you can control. And I think a lot of the difficulty with what is happening right now is that everything does feel so crazily out of control and unpredictable.
And I think by taking hold of the things that we can control and within our own orbit, it can make you feel more grounded. So by that, I mean... your day-to-day, how do you execute on the tasks that you have in front of you, sit down, build lists, keep focused, and not let some of the bigger things that are happening just overwhelm.
And I think in terms of the political side of things, for those people who are feeling just very rattled by a lot of the changes that are happening, I think the advice I heard that I really liked is, again, with picking something within your control, Pick a cause, pick a group that's doing things that help the thing that you're most concerned about and take some actual action yourself.
And by doing these things, both in terms of your day-to-day, putting one foot in front of the other, as well as picking causes or groups that are supportive of the things that you care about, you can start to feel like you're regaining some of that control and feel like a normal person who's able to function again.
So that's probably the best I have right now, but it is certainly a very tumultuous time that we're in, and I think a lot of people are really feeling that.
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Chapter 4: How does Holly Buckley maintain personal and team focus?
But to your point, I couldn't agree with that advice more about trying to first center oneself and going back to the core, the basics of what works for you. Whether it's breathing, for me, it's drinking enough water, doing enough steps, doing just basic stuff to keep myself centered. And then how do you translate that to the group that you lead? Because you lead a group of 60, 70 attorneys.
How do you translate that? And how do you translate that into how you communicate with clients who themselves are stressed as funding moves in and out of possibilities? As if you're representing private equity funds, they tend to get softer on doing acquisitions when there's lots of uncertainty.
How do you communicate with your both client base, the private equity funds and healthcare systems, and then with your team of 60, 70 lawyers to keep on plugging along even as things go through peaks and valleys?
I mean, I think it's the same thing, Scott. It's helping people focus on the things they can control. It's giving people some tangible things that they can actually execute on and encouraging them to center themselves. I mean, you don't tell clients how you need to center yourself.
but you can help them with the things that they need help with and help them focus on their long-term business core strategy. Because I think for the most part, the core strategy is going to remain the same if you're in a sector that's not heavily impacted by some of the changes that are happening.
So one of the things I was actually going to chat about with you today is I wanted to get your views on some of the tariff impact on healthcare services, for example, But one take on healthcare services is in some ways it is a better area than others with respect to the tariffs in that it is domestic. There is not a heavy focus on supply chain issues.
A lot of the clients we work with are working on tech enabled platforms, which are less impacted by the tariffs. And so maybe the sector is more resilient and less reliant on some of the global trends that are happening.
And so there's not necessarily a need for a major strategy refocus, whereas other businesses may need more help with a global strategy refocus, but a lot of the businesses we work with don't. So it's continuing to help them focus and hone in on the core business strategy and execution. They have their own problems with workforce and the things that we're dealing with.
A lot of it is just, you know, the big, broad dialogues of helping people hone in on what they need to be doing and what they need to focus on, what does and doesn't need to change, and then just doubling down on execution. So, I mean, the best thing we can do is be great advisors, be a consistent, and help people work through this tumultuous time.
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Chapter 5: How should leaders communicate with clients during market uncertainty?
And then there's everything else that sells into providers or payers or other places, which might be health tech services in all kinds of other services. And on both of those, depending what you're doing, they're not necessarily providers.
directly impacted by the tariff situation, although there's indirect consequences and everything, but really trying to drill down to take some of these sort of news cycle out of every business decision and just be able to focus on does it really have an impact or not?
You know, somebody the other day was on the podcast and said, look, the tariff thing, he's not a fan of it, but he also said of our 28 to 30 trillion dollar economy, two to three trillion is imports. That means 90% of our economy is not necessarily directly affected. And we know it's deeper than that because some of those imports are so, so important.
But his concept was you have to try and ignore some of the news and move through some analysis on it. And again, we're talking about a couple sectors, healthcare services that I broadly divide into provider services versus tech and other kinds of services where you're not a direct provider. The provider side has struggled a lot the last few years, at least the practice roll-up side.
But the other side, the services side that sells into providers is not nearly as much, even though they're customer basis providers. And you sort of have to really dig through the noise as to how affected things are, recognizing that finance challenges affect a lot of things beyond just tariffs and imports and so on and so on. But I think that's exactly right.
The other thing I think that you do a great job of modeling is when there's different levels of duress, the staying calm with your team, with your clients, with others. And I think this is one of your real strengths. I know, for example, each you and Chanel talk to me very often. I've talked to you for 20 years very often and Chanel the last several years all the time.
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Chapter 6: What is the impact of tariffs on healthcare services and private equity?
And I think sometimes I don't model that very well. I know we were on a call last week, right? Something go wrong outside of what we were doing. And you have this great emotional maturity or sense of things to know, Scott, is everything OK? And I think it's fascinating how good some people are at modeling that calm and strength through stress.
And now some of us, namely myself, are not always that great at that, no matter how hard we try and breathe and stay intent on being calm under pressure and not letting outside factors get to us. And I think these concepts of trying to really drill down to what something means, do the tariffs have real impact on the OB-GYN practice that's being rolled up or not?
And there's so many of these news cycle things like the Medicaid cuts. Are those real? How big will they be? Are there really cuts? How much are they going to impact this business? We know it's general news in the wrong direction, but we have to do a whole different level of dive to understand how much impact it really has.
And those that can really do that assessment sometimes have a real advantage.
I think that's right. I mean, I think the Medicaid cuts are another area that is super interesting and we're watching and I think don't fully understand yet. I think the Republicans have passed their budget resolution and They need to cut $880 billion in costs through 2034, and it's got to come from somewhere.
And I think given where they have jurisdiction, we think a lot of it will come from Medicaid. I think we need to wait and see a little bit in terms of where that comes from. But it's interesting because a lot of the areas that could be very impacted by Medicaid cuts are also the areas that still... reflects really good investment opportunities just based on other dynamics.
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Chapter 7: How can advisors support clients through tumultuous economic times?
So I think we just don't know what the areas such as home health, substance abuse, mental health providers. We need to know more before we can really say what the impact is going to be. But thank you for your kind comments too. They are appreciated. And I think some of it is just not looking at the stock market.
Yeah, and not getting too up or too down based on what's going on with it, because day to day could be a whole different story depending on what's going on.
You know, and when you hear anything come out of D.C., there is an immediate reaction, not just by the press, but by many people on the right and left, of course, of concern because it's a change and it's scary and trying to stay as calm as you can.
when these things happen as to what the real impact is going to be and try and breathe and think through it versus overly reacting emotionally to this or that, particularly when it's unclear what's actually going to happen versus what's discussed. And it's, it's, it's really hard to manage through it.
100%. 100%.
We couldn't agree more. Holly, I want to thank you, as always, for joining us on the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. You're one of our top listened guests, and for good reason. Thank you for joining us today on the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast.
Thank you, Scott.
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