By Katie Ottaggio, Engagement Operations Manager, CSP
Each month the College Success Program (CSP) hosts a webinar on a topic of interest to high school and college students who are blind or have low vision, their parents, and the professionals who work with them. On January 10, 2022, the CSP hosted a webinar called “A CSP Sit Down with Envision’s CEO Michael Monteferrante”. CSP Mentor, Glenn Dausch, sat down with Michael to discuss his path to CEO and what drives him in this industry, Envision’s acquisition of the CSP and its goals for the future, employment for those who are blind or visually impaired, and opportunities and advice for college students.
In case you missed it, below is a recap of this enlightening discussion. You can also access this webinar in its entirety by visiting the CSP YouTube channel.
A CSP Sit Down with Envision’s CEO Michael Monteferrante
Michael is the president and CEO of Envision, located in Wichita, Kansas. Prior to joining Envision, Michael was president and CEO of Future Food Brands, an American Capital-owned company that produces various food brands. Earlier, he was president and CEO of Occidental Management, a Wichita-based real estate development firm and has extensive experience in transportation, technology, engineering and construction industries. Michael has served on the board of directors for Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce, National Industries for the Blind, The National Association for the Employment of People Who Are Blind, Visit Wichita Convention and Visitors Bureau, Future Food Brands, Vintage Bank, Kansas Red Cross, Kansas Humane Society, and Park City Convention and Tourism. He has a BBA in business management from Boise State University and was recognized as a Distinguished Alumni in 2014.
Glenn Dausch, CSP Mentor: Can you tell us a bit about how you came to be the president and CEO of Envision, your background and how you got started in this field?
Michael Monteferrante, president and CEO of Envision: Absolutely, Glenn. In addition to my bio above, I spent a lot of time in New York City and was very involved with rebuilding the entire MTA system, so I’m a big NYCTA/MTA/Long Island Railroad/PATH/NJT/SEPTA person, and so I was a transit guy through and through before I embarked on some of the things in my bio.
I’ve been in Wichita since 2003 and in 2005, the then CEO of Envision and the chairperson of the board met with me for lunch and said, “You know, we’re really a manufacturing organization with a mission-based service enterprise, and we don’t have any manufacturing people on our board of directors, and we think it’s really important as we continue to progress to recruit someone from a manufacturing background.” At the time I was the CEO of Optima Bus, and my background was in the manufacturing of locomotives, subway cars, and buses. I said, “Okay, I don’t know anything about Envision, I don’t know anything about the blind and visually impaired, but I know a little bit about manufacturing.” So, they said, “Okay, well, come and do a tour of our organization and our manufacturing plant.” I came for a 1-hour tour of Envision’s Water Street manufacturing facility and within the first minute I raise my hand and say, “Wait a minute, I was expecting to be in a manufacturing facility with blind and visually impaired workers.” They replied, “You are. Ninety of the people that you see making these 3 million plastic bags a day and 2.5 million business cards a year are blind and visually impaired.” I paused. People were rocking and rolling. I said, “I don’t know what we’re going to do for the next 59 minutes of the tour but I’m in!”
With that, my love affair with Envision started 16 years ago. I came onto the board and worked for 3 years at Envision Dallas but left to work for Future Food Brands. I was recruited back to be the CEO in 2013 and just started my 10th year.
I don’t have anyone who is blind or visually impaired in my family but have connected with many who are in my tenure here at Envision. Ever since I started, I’ve been excited and continue to tirelessly work on behalf of individuals who are blind and visually impaired to progress their life and to progress their careers in any which way we possibly can.
Glenn: As a CEO, what would you say is the most important thing that you want students to take away from your journey? What is most important for students to know about Michael Monteferrante?
Michael: That they have a passionate friend that’s ready to work on their behalf and progress their life and career to the best of our ability. That’s why I come to work every day.
Glenn: Excellent. You spoke about Envision and your path to Envision, but as we mentioned earlier, Envision recently acquired the College Success Program. In your position as the CEO, can you talk a bit about your vision for how the CSP integrates within Envision?
Michael: Absolutely. It’s a deep story, you know, to get here it took a host of sequential steps. One, to realize the importance of this merger and then two, to understand some of the barriers on why we weren’t aware of it to begin with. But, at the end of the day what’s really important about this program and why we are so excited about it is that Envision, through discovery focused on our Workforce Innovation Center initiatives, clearly understood that while we were doing a great job with youth education and assistive technology, and were doing a decent job of training, placing, and educating potential employers, we were missing that segment from high school to successful completion of college. We were just kind of assuming everything, that once they got into college, they’d be rolling right through it and so forth, without a ton of adversity. We were waiting for them to come out of college so we could work with them and help get them trained and placed into a job with a meaningful employer that would be a successful match. We found we were saying, “Well, where are they? How come they’re not graduating? What’s happening?”
We then discovered why, and we understood there was a solution, and it was the College Success Program at Learning Ally. We felt this was a huge missing segment in terms of our universe and of what we needed to do. The College Success Program provided an accelerant for us as it would have taken us years to reproduce the system that Learning Ally and the College Success Program had created and so we felt it was a perfect match.
Glenn: Can you talk a little bit about the partnership between Envision and students? How do you see Envision partnering with students to improve that rate of success for those students?
Michael: Great question. One of the things that’s going to be very important is that we continue to promote the CSP program. Younger individuals that are coming up through the education system from grade school to middle school to high school need to have an understanding and awareness that there’s opportunities coming up for them as they approach college and that we are a well-fortified organization committed to continuing to help accelerate their success through college and then the workplace. It’s important that we attach as early as possible to teenagers and even younger folks and then when they get to that point, even if they haven’t had an exposure to Envision, to invite them into the family to understand what the organization is all about both on a mission based service side and a margin-based opportunity to where they can kind of understand the ecosystem and the depth of the organization that they, one, could potentially for or two, can help facilitate them working for someone else. We’re in it for the long run and are well fortified to do so.
When it comes to the opportunity for the College Success Program in its current format, we are committed and dedicated. We meet on it every single day as a corporation in terms of what more can we do, what aren’t we doing that students need, and how can we scale accordingly to the continuing needs of blind and visually impaired students in college.
Glenn: I’m really glad to hear that. I see your vision of grabbing students on the front end and bringing them into the program but also following through the program and coming out to the workforce. Seems like there’s a lot of synergy there.
So, I’m wondering, if we can step back to Envision as an organization. In previous interviews that you’ve done you’ve discussed how the business side of Envision has informed the mission side and how the mission side has influenced your business. I’m wondering, if you could talk a little bit about how the business and the service side have impacted each other and made Envision a stronger organization?
Michael: Great question, Glenn and a fairly easy question to answer. So, how we’ve set the organization up is for long-term success and strength from a financial standpoint, so when unexpected scenarios happen in our lives like a pandemic and so forth, we continue to swim through it accordingly. We don’t stop, we don’t reverse, we don’t say “oh no”, we say “okay”. It’s a branch of adversity. We keep moving on which is just a good mindset for anyone to have, right? Even when you’re going through college blind or visually impaired, you’re going to deal with all kinds of barriers and adversity. Forge ahead. Don’t give up. And so, with that our margin side of the business is where 90% of our direct labor employees are blind or visually impaired. We are 550 people strong in 16 locations in 10 states, primarily in Wichita, Kansas and in Dallas, Texas. We build a host of products that we make. I mentioned plastic bags, business cards. We have a textile division where we do a host of sewing for the United States military, DOD, government, private enterprise. We make a host of folders, binders, we make those from scratch, eyeglass cases, we have injection molding machines making plastic products, and so forth. Magic markers and highlighters that we make for the United States government. And so, with those profits what we do is we mobilize those into service-based enterprises that give us the opportunity to serve thousands of people.
We employ hundreds of people, we serve thousands, and when I say we serve thousands, we do that through things like an early child development center for ages 0 to 4 1/2 that integrates typically sighted children and blind and visually impaired children. It improves and progresses the lives of all children, as well as other people and parents, by having this great experience of this coalescence. We do that through a rehabilitation center where we serve people that are suffering with various forms of macular degeneration regardless of their ability to pay because of that mission-based margin enterprise that I just talked about. We have an Envision Research Institute where we’re not solving blindness, but we do have a practicum where we’re doing the applied science of research in regard to various forms of visual impairment. And then we have 21 different programs that we have within our team, everything from music to golf to assistive technology and adventure camps and a whole lot of other programs. We have our Workforce Innovation Center, which is completely dedicated to training, placing, and educating both employees and employers.
When you have that kind of an ecosystem that’s been created here, that has both a margin component and a services component, they feed off each other. That margin side gives us the ability to have an incredibly robust, in fact it’s unparalleled in the country, in terms of what Envision does from a services standpoint. You will not find another organization in the country, in North America, and some experts say, in the world, that has the complement of services and opportunities that Envision offers. So then, when you have that opportunity in terms of offering those services, how it complements the margin side of the business, you’re opening yourself up to hundreds and hundreds of different companies that want to work with you, that we would never have had the exposure to unless we had that service side of the organization. So, it’s a fascinating mixture of an ecosystem that feeds off one another to where at the end of the day, you become not only a sustainable enterprise but a viable enterprise for the long term.
Glenn: So, I’m wondering if we could touch a little bit more on the development. How do you see students and Mentors furthering that development and developing a strategic vision to continue that long-term growth?
Michael: The students are the future, right? So, you know, we could have an entire hour on just the future of employment and employees but it’s all about the students, educated students, that are ready to progress and make an impact in this world. So, first of all, the key component is the students themselves. And, when you’ve got Mentors which, just, you know, it’s a goosebump experience when you think about the Mentors that have gone through that process of education, through hundreds of different colleges throughout the world, right? And advanced degrees on top of bachelor’s degrees and so forth, and they’ve gone on to do great things and are excited to help other students get through a, I’d call it a tough journey, right? Let’s not mince words here, this is a tough journey of anybody getting through college…wow…they need support. They need the opportunity to have someone make an impact in their lives and so this combination of these students and the Mentors are huge because what they’re going to do together is, they’re going to dramatically improve more highly educated, blind and visually impaired people to continue to make a differences in the world and that’s huge. Without the Mentors, many college students may never get there and so that ecosystem of the mentorship program with college students will equate to a higher productivity in the workforce with the impact of blind and visually impaired employees.
Glenn: Well said. So, many college students today are taking part in diversity, equity and inclusion programs and for some of those students they may see the term ‘inspiration’ in Envision’s mission statement as particularly ableist or harmful to persons with disabilities while at the same time as you spoke about earlier, people who are losing their vision later in life are looking for inspiration, looking for ways to continue to thrive and continue the life that they’ve had and find ways to adapt as a leader. How do you meld these two very valid representations of disability and weave that path together to allow both halves of the organization to be successful?
Michael: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m taking in, you know, the thought and the focus on that word ‘inspiration’, which is obviously in our mission statement and reflecting on the question, right? So, to me as the leader of the organization…diversity, equity and inclusion…
You mentioned earlier my engagement with the Chamber of Commerce. I was actually the chairperson of the Chamber of Commerce in Wichita. Eighteen-hundred companies. My platform, my entire platform was based on differently abled people in the workforce, not just individuals who are blind and visually impaired. And diversity and inclusion are obviously a lot more than just ethnicity and gender. My point and my platform are that for the most part across America, it’s so much more than that. And so, when we tie that into inspiration being a part of Envision’s mission statement, to me it absolutely doesn’t matter whether you can see, or you can’t see. Everyone can be inspired, and I know this for a fact because I’ve not only had dozens of people, but hundreds of blind individuals visit our organization, go through it, understand what we’re doing, and they are incredibly inspired. They’re inspired by what they’re seeing there but they’re also inspired about what we are doing for individuals to continue to progress their lives and their careers, and they leave here inspired. So, we embrace the word ‘inspired’ here at Envision. We don’t more toward that side to where someone maybe has to take being an inspiration. We don’t view it that way, we don’t feel it that way, and we don’t live it that way. We talk from the experience of what blind and visually impaired people have said to us once they’ve gotten to know us and so, yeah, we’re proud of the word ‘inspiration’ and being ‘inspired’ in regard to Envision, whether you’re typically sighted or blind or visually impaired.
Glenn: Thank you. So, let’s move over to employment. What do you see as the CEO of Envision, as the largest barrier to employment for blind and visually impaired people and how is Envision preparing to tackle that barrier?
Michael: In all transparency, ignorance. That’s my one-word answer to your question. The barrier is plain ignorance. Starting with me 16 years ago without really understanding and knowing the technology, the passion, the work ethic, the commitment and the loyalty of people who are blind and visually impaired. So, it’s education to the employer that’s going to make the difference. We all know or most of the people on this webinar today understand the technology that’s out there. They understand the hard work of what it’s going to take to get to that level of employment that they all seek. Our job is to continue to educate the employers about those principles that I’ve shared, those principles that make outstanding employees for the long run. Once they understand, we’ve seen doors fly open, we’ve seen industries embrace individuals who are blind or visually impaired. We’ve seen the United States Air Force come to us…”Bring us your blind and visually impaired, educated individuals, we want to put them in a job in the United States Air Force. We want them to make six figure incomes and we want them to have a robust retirement. Help us recruit them.”
So, it’s a big deal. The Air Force, they’re educated, and they were inspired by what they saw here at Envision. It’s a really cool program and it’s been a blast having our employees progress their career and move into wonderful jobs with the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the United States government, in addition to a bunch of other private companies and not-for-profit companies.
It’s fantastic in terms of what it can do and it’s a matter of education. We need to get out there. Even Envision continues to need to do a better job of educating employers about the level of expertise both college educated, and in some cases non-college educated, individuals and the impact that they can have in your organization. It’s unbelievable.
Glenn: Let’s move to a bit of that education piece because let’s be frank about it, the last two years have been an education for all of us and how to do things differently. The last two years really have been a lesson in transforming work. Where it was once standard practice that you showed up to your job at a physical location, in order to keep processes moving during the course of the pandemic, everything had to turn to remote on a dime. There were many lessons that were taken from that process, including that it could be more accessible for persons who are blind or visually impaired because transportation is no longer a barrier.
So, how has Envision seen this process play out over the last two years and what lessons do you think employers can take moving forward from the processes that they undertook over the past two years?
Michael: Great question, Glenn. We have an executive staff meeting at Envision every Monday and it usually lasts about 90 minutes, and we go through the various divisions within the company and the various issues. We start every meeting with a Covid update, and I’ve been doing it for almost two years, and we are now embarking on a series of internal HR initiatives that are dealing with exactly that. We’ve actually been operating in some different forms and different situations based on if it’s manufacturing or service oriented, whether it’s first shift or second shift. You know, there’s a Rubik’s cube of scenarios that play out here in an organization like ours when you’re an essential workplace. We are an essential workplace because we supply products and services to the United States government and specifically the Department of Defense, and so we have learned to continue to evolve and have a full and comprehensive understanding of exactly what that, in some ways vague, question can really mean.
With that being said, we continue to evolve as an organization to understand what it’s going to take to attract qualified employees, what it’s going to take to retain those qualified employees, and what it’s going to take to compensate those qualified employees. So, it’s a three-pronged situation. All of them are important and in our strategic plan. One of the baselines that we have in our strategic plan is exactly that – we must, at a very high level, attract and retain the most qualified people we can possibly bring into the company. With that there must and will be a degree of flexibility and understanding in terms of how that happens. Is it clear as a bell today? No. But, is there a commitment within the executive team and the board of directors of Envision that this is the path forward? Yes. Are there action plans in place as we speak in order to continue to educate us on the best path forward? Yes.
Glenn: Excellent! Well, we still have a number of questions to get through and we are running a bit short on time, so I think we’re going to call this the Round Robin of One Minute Questions. So, what involvement do you see Envision having in making mainstream employment technology accessible? For example, human resources or payment processing software.
Michael: The evolution of the human resources approach and the collaboration of the executive team is imperative. Our customer service department is 100% blind and visually impaired. 50% of our employees are blind and visually impaired across the organization and so it’s important for them to have accessible information on how to do their jobs. We have a blind or visually impaired individual in every one of our departments. We ensure that each of the departments within the organization has a command and a mastery of what some of the obstacles are and what are some of the areas that we need to continue to improve to make our organization the most accessible possible. It will be an internal quest to continue to improve that.
Glenn: Thank you. How do you see Envision addressing equitable access for persons with multiple disabilities, not just blindness or visual impairment? I’m thinking about someone that may be deaf-blind or have a blindness co-occurring with another disability such as cerebral palsy or other access needs.
Michael: We have individuals that are in our child development center that are also deaf in addition to being visually impaired and we’ve got differently abled people on our workshop floor, differently abled people in our services side, wheelchair bound, and so forth. We have an entire organization here called PRIDE where we have a combination of different types of individuals and a combination of different situations. We help train our employees to produce the products that they’re working on. We have individual coaching to allow those employees to continue to advance themselves, for them to be able to earn a paycheck where in some cases they may not be able to do that. Envision has a full facilitation where right now, I believe we have over 43 employees in a segment of our organization where we continue to promote their ability to work, build products, and get paid a good wage.
Glenn: Thank you. Noting your background in public transportation, have you used, or do you intend to use this experience to improve the access to public transportation, especially seeing as public transportation often poses a significant barrier to blind and visually impaired persons getting to work locations?
Michael: Good question on transportation, obviously dear to my heart. I was on the Wichita Transit board of advisors at one time for four years. I was very involved with the American Public Transit Association (APTA) where I was on their board of governors for 18 years during part of my career. So, when I came to Envision, this was one of the top things on my mind – how can we help improve the system in general. In Wichita, the system was broken, for lack of a better word. They were investigating spoken hub type situations, how the buses would run and make it more convenient for folds who are blind and visually impaired to use the system more effectively.
What we did, when we started the Envision Research Institute, we collaborated on a real cool technology. You know we’ve got GPS opportunities on our phone that can get us to certain places but then it loses its granularity to really, what I would call, assist a person who is blind or visually impaired the closer they get to that target. The GPS is too broad so we created beacon technology and built the program to where when GPS falls off, the beacon technology at bus stops would take over. We populated every single bus stop in Wichita, Kansas with beacons inside the bus stops and then created an app on your phone that you could go right to the bus stop if you are walking or however you’re getting to the bus stop and you’re in the vicinity of that bus stop. The beacon takes over and pings you all the way to the bus stop. We then outfitted the drivers with technology to notify them as they’re driving towards a bus stop that someone is using that app, so then the bus driver knew that there was going to be someone at that bus stop who is blind or visually impaired. The app would also, once you get on the bus and you program where you want to get off, start giving you an indicator that your bus stop is coming up. We went to the APTA shows nationally in Washington DC and started approaching the bus manufacturers and the transit authorities in terms of the benefits of this app.
So yeah, we’ve done some great initiatives in terms of improving or bringing new concepts to the market.
Glenn: In regard to that, what sort of uptake did you see when you took that to transit conferences? Do you see other cities adopting this technology?
Michael: It was tough. We had buy-in of the OEMS (Original Equipment Manufacturers) because they get a certain amount of funds from the federal government that apply to ADA type requirements, so the bus manufacturers had no problem adopting it. We struggled with the transit authorities in terms of a revenue model that would work for both them and us. So, there’s still work to be done. It wasn’t a big hit like we thought it would be right off the bat and the business modeling has not been perfected yet but it still, you know, works. It’s there but it’s all about how do you get that done in mass cities? A place like Wichita, Kansas, we could get it done. You go to a place like New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Washington DC, it becomes much more complex just because of the number of buses and the number of stops.
Glenn: Absolutely. Well, I look forward to future developments. We have two quick questions left. Let’s flip this around a little bit. We’ve gone through a lot of questions for you but what are your top three questions for college students? In no particular order, what are the things you want to know from college students today?
Michael: Thank you for that opportunity. What we want to know from college students, which is really important to us, is, what do you feel from your perspective you need to be successful? We can think all day about what we think you need and what we’re here to help solve based on our own strategies and initiatives in terms of what we’re seeing in the marketplace but right now we need more feedback from them. We need more engagement. This is something we’re putting a big push on. One of the things we’re bringing to the table, to the College Success Program is, we are willing to make whatever financial commitments we can. Whatever personal commitments we can. But we’re going to bring engagement to an entire new level, and you can expect a lot from us, but we’re going to expect a lot from you. So, we’re looking for engagement from the Mentors and the college students of what they think we still need to do as a society to help elevate the five or six things that the CSP is all about.
Glenn: All right. So, Michael, one quick last question for you. We’ve given a lot of advice to college students but what is the best advice that was ever given to you? What is something someone shared with you that you would say your life would be completely different without hearing? And did you take that advice?
Michael: Check your ego at the door.
Glenn: Great advice.
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WEBINAR – A CSP Sit Down with Envision’s CEO Michael Monteferrante
Envision’s College Success Program (CSP), a part of the William L. Hudson BVI Workforce Innovation Center, is committed to serving college and transitioning high school students who are blind or low vision. The CSP is a virtual program that provides a holistic support system and engages students through online resources, events, mentorship, and more, all at no cost to them. Contact the CSP at csp@envisionus.com.