Today we’d like to introduce you to Sean Clark.
Hi Sean, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
I was an infant during the first official St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Salt Lake City put on by the Hibernian Society of Utah. I and my family have attended each and every year and look forward to the event, the holiday, and the time we celebrate together.
I have lived in Salt Lake City my whole life. I attended JE Cosgriff for Elementary School, Judge Memorial Catholic High School, and onto the University of Utah where I received Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Business Management and a Master’s in Business Administration. I spent my career with VISTA Staffing Solutions in Salt Lake, placing physicians in temporary positions. I am married to a beautiful, intelligent, amazing woman, Brooke Clark. We have two wonderful children, Connor (Age 14) played his first piano recital on a float during a blizzard in front of a few thousand St. Patrick’s Day die-hards! And Vivian (Age 8) hates when I sing (because it is so cringy) unless it is the Parting Glass which is her favorite.
I became involved with the Hibernian Society of Utah after the parade in 2009. I was approached by the great John Welsh, one of the founders of the organization and a long-time friend of my grandfather because of their shared passion for everything Irish. I had also known John from my time at Cosgriff and Judge where he sent his 10 children! I also had a connection to John because he was the football announcer at Judge and I had told him as an elementary school kid that one day he would introduce me as the quarterback. He reminded me of that a few times, but the day he did, we had a moment where I heard him say my name and I looked up at him in the booth. He gave me a nod as if to say, you told me this day would come!!
Well on that parade day in 2009, he told me that I did a great job organizing our family entry and that my grandfather would have been proud. He met my eye and leaned in and said, “We need you.” I quizzically replied, “What do you mean?” he looked around and he shrugged, and said…..”all this doesn’t happen without people to do it”……I and all the others putting this whole thing on are getting too old!!” It took me a few years and a bit more encouragement but eventually, I went to the Hibernian Society Business meeting and volunteered to help with some fundraising. Then I got to help with some of the permitting. By then John had stepped down and his daughter, Meghan Welsh Gibson, was acting President and doing a great job of carrying on this tradition that was so important to both our families and to our collective community. She expressed an interest to step into a Trustee role in the organization and I volunteered to fill the role of President.
I have really had two objectives since taking on the role. One, I wanted to make Hibernian Society more inclusive. It began and relied on dues-paying membership. We decided to make being a member free so that more people would sign up to join. Signing up basically ensures you stay abreast of what we are doing. To date, our membership has increased about eightfold since we made that change.
The other major drive was to make the Hibernian Society more fiscally stable. One thing that I noticed in volunteering was how close we were each year to barely raising enough money to pay for the parade…..and the parade and the logistics and insurance expenses were increasing fast. With my recruiting background, I envisioned a huge volunteer staff to keep the profits generated from alcohol sales controlled by the Hibernian Society. In 2023 we had 150 volunteers! And have enough in our accounts to sustain a year when maybe the weather doesn’t go our way….but the sun has smiled down upon us the last couple of years and we hope we can keep that going!!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
In 2020, Meghan Gibson and I were scheduled to go on TV with ABC4 Good Things Utah just a few days before the parade. We ended up using the segment to communicate the cancellation of the event because of the pandemic. In fact, GTU got interrupted with “Breaking News” and the governor issued a Stay Home, Stay Safe directive…..so it would have been really awkward if we followed that with a come down to the “St. Patrick’s Day Parade” message!
I became the President a few months later. Running an organization that puts on events was super challenging….but we did arrange a virtual poetry reading and it was beautiful. There was a lot going on in our world with the pandemic and needed attention on the Black Lives Matter movement. We centered our poetry night on “Justice” and “Longing” and the Irish poets (and our amazing readers) rose to that challenge and delivered words of truth, words of suffering….but also words of inspiration.
In 2020, we kept looking at pushing back a potential celebration…..but kept having to push it again or cancel it again. through some conversations with the Irish Consulate and other regional Irish cultural organization leaders, we decided to copy what Phoenix was doing and we hosted a Virtual St. Patrick’s Day celebration. With a ton of help from Patrick Lambert, the Principal at Judge Memorial, and his team, we were able to film at Judge and provide basically the full lineup of entertainment with 5 dance companies and 5 musical acts. It was streamed to more than 1000 individual computers.
We planned in entirety a Halfway to St Patrick’s Day in 2021 but canceled again because of a surge of Covid cases and feedback from members and normal participants that they would forego attending.
But finally, in 2022, we went all in. Because of Covid, we had done a lot of research into expanding the footprint of our Siamsa (traditional Irish party) that we typically held after the parade in a separate location. In 2022, we determined that we could hire enough security to comply with Utah alcohol rules that would allow us to use the ENTIRE Gateway Mall as our event area which would allow the sale of alcohol ALONG THE PARADE ROUTE for the first time in the history of our 46 year event.
The sun came out….and so did the crowds….so eager to celebrate after enduring the pandemic. People stayed longer and enjoyed it more. And it was the most successful event we have ever had. We were able to make a donation of $3017 to the Ukranian Association of Utah to help them provide aid to their war-torn country.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I spent 18 years with the same company. I started with VISTA Staffing Solutions immediately after completing a one-year MBA program at the University of Utah designed for people completing their undergraduate studies but with a desire to obtain an MBA in one intensive year.
I found out about VISTA from my friend, Lourdes Cooke, who had hired me as a math tutor for her two children. She was in charge of HR and when I didn’t know what was next, she suggested that I interview with VISTA.
I began as a Recruiter in Radiology and I made 100 phone calls a day. Basically, you rub a phone and a computer together until they make money!! I had no idea doctors could even do temporary jobs but learned a lot about the Locum Tenens industry (Locum Tenens is Latin for “holding one’s place” and is the physician staffing industry’s description of temporary positions for physicians).
I was promoted to Scheduling Director and I oversaw the placements of providers with our established clients (Hospitals or clinics Physician Groups or even Sole Proprietors). After a few years of that, I became a Division Manager. Eventually, I became Vice President of Operations and at one time oversaw 55 people who produced $93 Million in Revenue with phones, computers, and building relationships.
Working in recruitment taught me that the number one asset of any recruitment company is the people who work for it. I was fortunate to work with so many talented, amazing, super cool people and I am 100% indebted to them for any success that was attributed to me……mostly I just encouraged them to be the awesome people that they are and helped them navigate the sometimes tumultuous waters of the locum tenens industry.
The thing in my career that I am most proud of was “Fantasy VISTA.” Sales organizations often create sales contests to motivate performance. I had been playing and loving fantasy football for a few years before I devised a way to use the concepts in Fantasy Football and apply them to a sales contest at VISTA. I will never forget explaining it to Mark Browse, one of our founders and CEO, and he had a belly laugh at the thought of picking teams like at recess! The best part of the contest is that locums companies have a ton of people behind the scenes, our licensing and credentialing team, our travel team, our IT team, our accounting team, our HR team, and our marketing team all played pivotal roles in making the placements come together that our sales team put together…..each functional unit formed an “owner” and then drafted all the salespeople in the company.
Then they had to set a starting lineup and matched up against each other for a season. The salespeople scored points for making sales or achieving other metrics…..it was awesome because you’d have someone from accounting talking to the salespeople about what they had in their pipeline and if it was a good week to start them! None of it could have happened without the genius of Lewis Knorr who handled creating a dynamic scoreboard that calculated points based on reporting from our CRM.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
The best thing for me about Salt Lake is the people in it!! I am tied to so many wonderful people that living somewhere else is always sad for me to think out.
Our proximity to mountains and nature is great. The airport is close and as a Delta hub has direct flights too so many great destinations but maybe most importantly…..we have one of the best St. Patrick’s Day Parades in the country!! Salt Lake transformed into this amazing international city on that day…..but really over the last 10 years, I think Salt Lake is becoming a cool, more social, bigger city environment.
The only thing I hate about Sale Lake is the air quality. I hope collectively we can push to make changes that will fix this problem for us.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.irishinutah.com
- Instagram: @irishinutah
- Facebook: Hibernian Society of Utah
