By Sue Fagalde Lick
It's early evening. Past the statue of the Virgin Mary and up the curved stairs, the halls of Our Lady of Fatima Villa are dark and quiet, except for one brightly lit room. Behind the door marked "CEO," Preston Wisner is working at a computer.
Behind him, the big desk is buried in papers. By the door sits a cardboard box of paperback books. "Are you a reader? Take some books," he urges. The walls of the office are covered with plaques and pictures, ranging from color photographs of his wife and kids to black-and-white prints of the planes he flew in Vietnam. A soothing mountain scene from New Zealand and a beach scene that looks like Hawaii add to the eclectic decor. Leaning up against the window are an architect's drawings of the new Our Lady of Fatima Villa that Wisner plans to build.
From the looks of things, Wisner, who in an hour is due at a meeting halfway across the valley, ought to be tense. But he leans back in his chair and cracks jokes instead.
Named Businessperson of the Year by the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce, Wisner not only runs Our Lady of Fatima Villa, but also operates Wisner & Associates (a hospital and nursing-home consulting firm with clients throughout the western United States), teaches college courses in finance and statistics, pilots his own plane and gives flying lessons, serves as an officer in Saratoga Rotary, and finds time to be a husband and a father of three children. He recently finished a term as president of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center.
"Other than that, nothing. I'm boring," he says, smiling.
"It looks as if you don't have much time to sleep," a reporter ventures.
"Oh, my family says I don't spend much time at home, but they lie a lot," he replies, a tinge of his native New Jersey still in his speech.
Wisner commutes to Saratoga from San Ramon, a trip that takes an hour on good days. He puts 40,000 miles a year on his car, he says. During the drive, he talks on the telephone, dictates into a miniature tape recorder, listens to books on tape and keeps tabs on the traffic reports on the radio news stations. "I listen to Rush [Limbaugh], but he's a little too liberal for me," he wisecracks.
He's also using tapes to teach himself Spanish because many of his employees at Our Lady of Fatima are Hispanic. In past years, he has hired a teacher to come in and offer free English lessons to his staff. He's thinking about doing it again.
Wisner didn't set out to run Fatima Villa, a Catholic-owned nursing home with 85 residents on Saratoga-Los Gatos Road, just east of Big Basin Way. "I came here as a consultant in '88, only to spend a couple weeks to help put the accounting system in and some other things."
He helped with a search for a chief executive officer, but Catholic Health Corp., which owns Fatima Villa, was dissatisfied with the candidates it interviewed. The board kept asking Wisner to stay a little longer and, after a year, they asked him to be the permanent CEO. Wisner agreed--on the condition that he be allowed to keep operating his consulting firm.
Some of the Fatima Villa staff help him with paperwork for his consulting work on weekends and evening, but he does most of it himself. "It's too much a personal thing. I didn't make a hell of a lot more money with four people working for me, and people were saying, 'We want you to provide the service.' "
Wisner spends about three days a week at Our Lady of Fatima. On a typical day, he says, he sorts through the mail, checks to see what has happened during the night, then goes on rounds, visiting each patient.
"I'm a big hands-on person. I believe with these old people you've got to go around and see them and touch them and hug them. If you can't do that, you're in the wrong business."
Then he gathers the department heads for their weekly meeting. They share information and argue. "We run it kind of like a co-op," Wisner says. "I'm a lousy boss. I don't ride herd on them. I expect to hire good people and leave them alone."
Wisner boasts that his 90 employees seem to be happy where they are. More than 60 percent of the staff have been there five years or longer, he says. He often sponsors his workers in continuing education programs. Some have earned their bachelor's degrees while working for him. Licensed vocational nurses have moved up to registered nurses, and aides have become LVNs.
In a nursing home like Fatima Villa, sickness and death are a part of everyday life. Few of the residents ever go home. Wisner shrugs. "You kind of get used to it," he says.
A bigger challenge is helping the families of residents, many of whom are angry at seeing their loved ones deteriorate. "We spend a lot of time trying to help them work through the anger, which they kind of misplace to us many times, to staff, to me. I usually ask them to send me the really bad ones. They'll usually be less nasty with me than they will with some of the other staff members."
Staff members strive to keep the families involved. They host monthly candlelight dinners for residents and their families, hold big parties for the holidays and organize regular meetings for families and residents.
Fatima Villa offers a full list of activities for the residents, including daily Mass, classes, bingo games, live entertainment, movies and dinners.
The home also hosts various community groups and activities. Friends of the Library, the Red Cross, the Chamber of Commerce, Girl Scouts, Saratoga Education Foundation and other groups have met at Fatima Villa.
Sheila Arthur, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, praises Wisner's hospitality, noting that he always provides refreshments and a comfortable place to meet.
Ray Froess, the chamber member who nominated Wisner as Businessperson of the Year, described Wisner as an informed, decisive and all-around "great guy." Froess cited Wisner's involvement in the community and effectiveness as a leader as reasons for his nomination.
Fatima Villa also serves as a polling place for local elections. "That's a selfish effort on our part," Wisner says.
By having the polling at their facility, the residents can vote in person. "We think that's gaining a little bit of independence that they lost. Now that's a small thing for you and me, but to them that's hot whiskey," Wisner says.
One of the big challenges these days is keeping up with the competitive nursing-home market. To that end, Wisner is planning to build a new facility in Saratoga. It would offer three different levels of care, including independent apartments for seniors who are able to live on their own; assisted living units where residents would have daily visits by a nurse, housekeeping service and meals brought in, and a nursing home for those who need more complete care.
"We think that's where the market's going in the 21st century. And people are becoming more discriminating, especially those in Saratoga with huge equities in their homes," Wisner says.
He hopes to open the new place in the year 2000 somewhere in Saratoga. But, in view of the current political climate, he declines to disclose where the property is. "This is pretty volatile yet. We want to see where the Odd Fellows go with their project."
Fatima Villa and the Odd Fellows have a good working relationship, Wisner says. "There's room for both our projects. We don't see any rivalry. There's plenty of market out there."
With his new facility in mind, he's an outspoken opponent of the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative and a charter member of the committee opposing it. At the Jan. 9 Planning Commission meeting, he spoke in favor of the Odd Fellows expansion project.
Wisner is no stranger to Saratoga politics. In fact, he says people have asked him to run for office. He has to remind them that he lives in San Ramon, not Saratoga. However, he has served as president of the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce, is treasurer-elect of Saratoga Rotary and is a member of the Santa Clara County Health Care Commission.
He continues to live up in the East Bay partially because his wife, Marian, works up there as a home health nurse.
That's also where his plane is. He keeps his Cessna at the Tracy airport and sometimes teaches flying on weekends.
Before his current career, Wisner served 22 years with the U.S. Air Force. He wanted to become an aircraft mechanic, but instead the Air Force made him a surgical technician and later a medical corpsman. Following Officers Candidate School, he was trained as a pilot and flew a C-123K cargo plane in Vietnam. "I used to bring holes back in it every three or four days," he says.
Following the war, he did stints in Hawaii, Alabama and California, earning master's degrees in business administration and hospital administration and retiring in 1975 as a major. After his retirement, he earned his Ph.D. in business administration.
One would think his days were already filled to overflowing with his work and community activities, but Wisner also teaches statistics and accounting through the University of Phoenix extension program.
Statistics seems like a dreary course to most people, but Wisner disagrees. "Oh, it's fun. The first thing I tell them is, 'You can't flunk my course. The worst you can do is a C in my course.' And that takes away all the fear. Then they can concentrate on learning something."
Is there time left for his family, which includes three children--Jamie, 14, and twins Alex and Tony, 7? "I manage to make time," he says. "I try to give them one day a week." On that day, they do something together, sometimes laser shooting or trap shooting, another of his hobbies.
Looking ahead, Wisner says, "I hope to work till I'm 91 years old. I think it's a nice age to retire."
Then he'll have time to become active in the community, he says, turning back to his computer to work a little more before rushing to his meeting.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, Wednesday, January 17, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing Inc. All rights reserved.