As one of the original founders of SullivanCotter, Jim Rohan is Faculty in the Chicago office and is the firm’s Chairman of the Board. For more than 30 years, he has worked with a wide variety of health care organizations, helping their boards and senior leadership think through talent issues related to recruiting, rewarding, engaging and retaining top executives and physician leaders.

Jim brings rich experience and the deep resources of the firm to advise large health systems on how to address current and emerging trends in the industry—rising costs of health care, pressure on operating margins, new at-risk reimbursement models, consumerism, market disruptors and generational changes in market demands.

His experience includes:

• Working with boards and senior leaders to develop governance structures and total reward programs that link to the organizations’ mission, vision, values, culture, and strategic imperatives.
• Providing boards and senior leaders with education and insight on industry best practices, current, and emerging trends and regulatory compliance related to executive and physician total compensation to ensure they make informed decisions within the context of a transforming industry.
• Linking organizations’ talent strategies to their executive and physician compensation strategies and reward programs to build flexibility into their programs recognizing evolving talent markets within and outside the traditional health care industry.
• Designing compensation philosophy and strategy for executives and physicians, short- and long-term incentive programs, executive benefit plans to maximize the ROI on compensation expenditures.
• Working with organizations to examine and rethink how to establish incentive goals using custom peer groups and databases ensuring performance benchmarking result in both achievable and stretch goals.
• Developing CEO employment agreements, performance evaluation and succession planning to ensure leadership continuity and stability in an unstable environment.
• Advising organizations going through mergers and acquisitions with a special emphasis on executive retention and severance agreements.

As an esteemed leader in the business community in Chicago and as a national executive compensation expert, Jim’s board service has included the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Advisory Committee on Agriculture, Labor and Small Business; the Chicago Compensation Association; and the Advisory Board for DePaul University’s Master of Science in human resources program.

Jim was presented Lifetime Achievement Awards by WorldatWork and the Chicago Compensation Association.

Jim earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science and government, as well as a Master of Labor and Industrial Relations from Loyola University of Chicago.