A Profile of the Smile Train founder

Freakonomics Blog, August 26, 2009 @ 9:56amby Steven D. Levitt

 

I’m always eager to spread the word about the Smile Train.

This month’s Harvard magazine has a nice piece on the founder of the Smile Train, Brian Mullaney.

I love the way he runs his organization and the way he tells it like it is.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the article:

Most charities don’t see themselves as a business. … [They] can be terribly managed, pay people poorly, and yet never go out of business. They’re almost like churches; people say, “ I know this person isn’t very good at his or her job, but that’s O.K., because their heart is in the right place.” At Smile Train, we pay people market-rate salaries and if they do their job – we give them a bonus. If they don’t do their job, they leave and go work for some other charity. Our manage-a-charity-like-a-business strategy is why Smile Train has been able to deliver unprecedented, record-breaking, quarter-over-quarter growth for almost 10 years as we scaled up from 2,000 surgeries a year to 120,000 surgeries a year.