John Howell brought a wealth of private-sector experience to his job as chief executive officer of Easter Seals of Hawaii, a position he has held for 15 years.

Q. Is fundraising more difficult now with the economy softening?

A. There certainly is more competition. If you're a nonprofit, or even if you're a for-profit, if you're making decisions now on how to run your business because times are difficult, you're probably too late. When times are good, that's when you're working really hard to take care of things when times are not going to be so good. Everything in business goes in cycles. We as an organization very much discipline ourselves to make the right decisions, not to spend money we don't have. We're always looking at not necessarily ways to cut money, but the way to do things more efficiently, more productively. We have balanced our revenue so that we don't count solely on one contract or one source of income. ... Everything we do we do with the intent of being sustainable, not for a year, but for several years.

Q. The popular Taste of Honolulu ended under your tenure. Was that a difficult decision to make?

A. The event had happened two years before I got here and in that two years the event had lost over $200,000. When I joined the organization in 1993 I made a business assessment that having lost money the two previous years we weren't ready. We could not staff or manage or have everything in place to have a successful event and I actually did not do it in 1993. What we did was we created a business model. We came up with a plan to make a certain amount of money and we figured, "Here's how we're going to do it." We staged the event in 1994, the first year that we did it under our new management team, and we netted over a quarter-of-a-million dollars. That obviously helped us financially and put us on the road to success. We did the event for 13 more years and the last year we did it was the most successful event we ever had.

Q. What kinds of considerations went into your decision?

A. Like a businesses, we measured a number of metrics associated with the event. We took a look at what the average participant spent, where they spent their money, what the cost of entertainment was. We measured probably a hundred different metrics and before going into the event we had five or six criteria that we agreed that we needed to meet or we wouldn't continue the event, and we didn't meet several of those major criteria. So as unpopular as it was to a lot of people, we saw what the shelf life of Taste of Honolulu was and we were at the end of it. It was a very difficult decision, but I can tell you it was the absolute right decision because the event had gotten very successful, but it was taking more and more time on staff and management to plan it. But the biggest concern we had was the liability. In the last year that we ran the event, we found that far more people were spending money on alcoholic beverages than they were on food and to me that was the turning point because that increased the liability of the event and that wasn't something that we wanted to accept.

Q. Where were you before the Easter Seals?

A. I was with Xerox for about 10 years and I spent some time with Wang Laboratories. I spent seven years with Hawaiian Telephone Co. as the director of sales and then I came to Easter Seals.

Q. You've worked at for-profits and nonprofits. Do you have a preference?

A. I learned a great deal in my for-profit experience, which was well over 20 years with several very good companies. But my work in nonprofit — I came here for one year and 15 years later I'm still doing it — I prefer this environment simply because you get daily gratification and feedback that you are making an impact on the community. That's very important.

Q. Why did you think you'd be there for just a year?

A. I was fairly successful in the jobs that I had been working in, what I would call the "Bishop Street" for-profit businesses. But I wanted to give something back. I made a commitment to my wife that I would do it for one year and then return back to getting a "regular paycheck." But in the first couple of months I was absolutely energized at the impact that our employees had on families and the things that you have to do to make a nonprofit successful. In those first couple of years, Easter Seals was digging its way out of some major problems, but that was fun for me, to get involved in bringing the finances back to a respectable level and taking care of employee issues and legal issues. After that we haven't been looking back. We have year-on-year success for the past 14 years and it's been very exhilarating.

Q. Were you recruited for the job?

A. I did this probably the wrongest way in the world. I decided I was going to leave my job and I was going to work at a nonprofit before there was an opportunity. A couple of friends of mine from O'ahu Country Club said, "If you're going to look at helping a nonprofit, why don't you help us at Easter Seals? We're going through some tough times and we could really use some business leadership?" There were a number of issues at that time, but we fixed them pretty quickly.

Q. Was one of the problems at Easter Seals that it wasn't run like a business?

A. Easter Seals 15 years ago, like many nonprofits, ran into a situation of wanting to keep adding on programs and services and not understanding or not figuring out that they needed to be sustainable. All of a sudden you find out that you have more staff and more vehicles and more rental expenses, and contract money or fee money might disappear, then you have a dilemma on your hands. That's one of the things that I learned a long time ago with the businesses that I was at and that is sustainability. Make sure that you build a business model for everything you do, whether it's a program, or special event, or fundraising event, or whether it's for the entire organization. That's what has allowed us to grow year-on-year since that time 15 years ago.

Q. How many programs does Easter Seals offer?

A. We have 23 programs on six islands. We have 430 employees, which is a surprise to a lot of people.