Last year, AMN Healthcare CEO Susan Salka moved herself from the company’s traditional headquarters in San Diego (where it employs 1,100 people) to Dallas-Fort Worth, setting up camp at the company’s 700-employee Cypress Waters hub. Although PR types will argue with you over this sort of thing, a company’s HQ is generally considered to be where its CEO sits. AMN didn’t wait for those questions to surface. Instead, it took a page from the Amazon playbook and deemed Dallas its second headquarters.
Business verbiage aside, Salka is a relatively knew-to-the-region CEO heading a $2 billion-plus (revenue) company. AMN does healthcare staffing, a particularly hot topic given the physician and nursing shortages. So, for our August issue of D CEO, I profiled Salka for our monthly “You Need To Know..” feature. The story went online today.
Salka started at what was then called American Mobile Nursing in 1990, joining a company that had just 18 employees at the time. She became CEO in 2005. Since then, she’s earned the respect of her peers such that they talk about her as a visionary of the industry. Prominent DFW investor Doug Wheat calls her “by far the best CEO I’ve ever worked with.”
Salka also told me about her early days in business, about surpassing the expectations of her small-town Nebraska roots, and about how a short stint at a VC firm became disproportionately profitable. All that available right here.
